Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

Welcome to the original-format Capering & Kickery blog! Due to the Typepad shutdown in September and the resultant move to WordPress, the entire post archive is not yet available, as each post must be individually edited (formatting, images, music, videos, links, etc.) and indexed before it is restored. Please check back regularly over the next few months to see the progress in rejuvenating the blog!

Note: in the restored posts below, most of the internal links (to other Kickery posts) will remain down until the linked post is also restored. If you have a request to prioritize a particular post or set of posts, please contact me at the email above!

Post Archive

September 21, 2009

Famous Last Words

On the lighter side of dance research…

There’s plenty of silliness in historical dance manuals, ranging from mythological origins of dancing in general to apocryphal stories about the origins of particular dances. But none of that makes me laugh quite so much as a couple of lines in Foulsham’s Modern Dancing, by Maxwell Stewart, published in London around 1925 and ambitiously subtitled “A guide to everything the dancer old and young, skilled and unskilled, wants to know.” That was rather optimistic of Stewart; this particular dancer wishes he had included a lot more detail about some of the moves he described. But the following has got to be one of the most risible lines I’ve ever found in a dance manual.

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August 24, 2009

The Racket Waltz, or The Society
- Era: 1880s into very early 1900s
The simplest description of the racket waltz is that it is the step of the one-slide racket converted to waltz time, with the extra beat of music per measure added to the initial slide. Edna Witherspoon, in The Perfect Art of Modern Dancing (1894), gives it the alternate title “The Society” and notes that “if thoughtlessly executed, it is a most ungraceful and unattractive dance.” Allen Dodworth, in Dancing and its Relation to Education and Social Life (1885), adds that “The racket, in this accent, is that unfortunate dance known as the “Society,” and is the medium through which not a few show an entire absence of good taste in motion.” Honestly, it’s not that bad! It does not seem to have been quite as popular or well-known as the galop–time rackets I described earlier this summer, but it is an easy dance that works well to brisk waltz music.
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August 14, 2009

The Line Hustle

Line dances don’t really get all that difficult, but there are a few longer ones with more complicated and less repetitive step sequences. One of these is the Line Hustle. These instructions are taken from Carter Lovisone’s The Disco Hustle (1979) and claim to be “the original form used as the basis for all variations of the Line Hustle.” I would take this claim with a grain of salt, since Lovisone’s book came out several years after the dance’s first wave of popularity in the mid-1970s.

This version of the Line Hustle is a fifty-two beat dance. My favorite music for it is Van McCoy’s 1975 hit, “The Hustle,” a snippet of which is included below:

The song is available on several different compilations, including The Hustle & The Best Of Van McCoy (paid link). I like to wait out the intro and start at the “do the hustle!” verbal cue. But as usual with line dances, the Line Hustle will also work to just about any disco tune.

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August 8, 2009

Foxes in Boxes

Among the moves described by Vernon and Irene Castle in their Victor Records for Dancing mini-manual (1914) are a trio of moves that are essentially box steps or fragments thereof: a so-called cortez (a.k.a. sentado or syncopated step), a double cortez, and a left-turning waltz. The rhythm is specified as QQS: three steps and hold. These make a nice set of variations to throw into basic walking-trotting sequences and two-step sequences when dancing a 1910s-style foxtrot.

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August 4, 2009

Sliding Along in the Foxtrot

Over a year ago I discussed some of the earliest walking and trotting patterns found in the earliest sources describing the foxtrot. Among other moves, I touched on the gliding series of chassé steps given in the two sequences in F. L. Clendenen’s Dance Mad (St. Louis, 1914). The sideways glides were done in quick-quick rhythm for each slide-close. The two sequences were:

1. SS-SS-QQQQ-QQQQ twice, followed by four glides (step-closes) QQQQ-QQQQ

2. SS-QQQQ, followed by four glides QQQQ-QQQQ.

The man turns his left side toward the line of dance and the dancers execute a series of four sideways “step-closes” (QQ) along the line of dance. No turn is involved; the first part of the sequence (walking and trotting) restarts on the first foot moving along the line of dance as usual.

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July 4, 2009

Le Klondike Two Step

Reading this morning’s headlines about events in Alaska, it seems the moment to post this little French sequence dance, which can also be used to vary an early twentieth-century two-step. I’ve found this sequence in only one source: La Danse, by [George] Washington Lopp, published in Paris in 1903 as part of a two-book compendium. The smaller part (forty-five pages to the two hundred-plus of La Danse) of the compendium is a brief manual of etiquette and costume written by J. Chéron.

Mr. Lopp seems to have been an interesting character, an American expatriate and former Chicago dancing master whose partnership in a Parisian musical conservatory went extremely sour, resulting in lawsuits, lockouts, and a “very tempestuous scene” with one of the patronesses of the conservatory, who insisted on performing a concerto she had composed. Apparently the piece was so dreadful that the audience

was unable…to endure the entire infliction, and most of those present incontinently left after the first movement had been half finished.

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June 20, 2009

Alternating the One- and Three-Slide Rackets
- Era: 1880s into very early 1900s
Combining the one-slide rackets and three-slide rackets previously described creates an interestingly varied dance which is referred to by the prominent late-nineteenth-century dancing master Melvin B. Gilbert simply as the Racket, with no further descriptor. The unadorned term is used by other writers to refer to several different variations in both 2/4 and 3/4 time, however, leaving us with unwieldy labels such as Allen Dodworth’s “Alternating the One Slide and Three Slide to Galop.”

Whatever one may call it, the sequence is not difficult once both the one-slide and three-slide rackets have been mastered. Conceptually, one simply alternates two bars of one with two bars of the other to build an eight-bar sequence. For the one-slide racket, two bars will be moving to the left and right (in whichever order); for the three-slide racket, two bars means moving either to the left or to the right. So sequences may be built as follows:

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June 17, 2009

The Three-Slide Racket
- Era: 1880s into very early 1900s
The three-slide racket extends the two-bar repeat pattern of the one-slide racket previously described into a four-bar pattern which has a more galop-like feel and is somewhat easier to initiate. It is described in the major dance late-nineteenth-century dance manuals of M.B. Gilbert and Allen Dodworth and in two minor compilation manuals, one of which (Cartier’s Practical Illustrated Waltz Instructor) names it “The Wave.”

The instructions below are for the gentleman; the lady dances opposite. The dancers start in a normal late-nineteenth-century ballroom hold with joined hands angled forward at a diagonal along the line of dance. Like the one-slide racket, the three-slide racket follows a zig-zag track along the line of dance; there is no turning involved.

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June 14, 2009

The Galop Racket or One-Slide Racket
- Era: 1880s into very early 1900s
The galop racket or one-slide racket is the simplest of the various rackets and is described under both names in different sources. In one Parisian manual it is simply “La Raquette,” though most other sources agree that “the” racket is a compound sequence mixing two different racket rhythms. Prominent New England dancing master M.B. Gilbert explained it simply as “Pas de Basque sidewise” in 2/4 time.

The instructions below are for the gentleman; the lady dances opposite. The dancers start in a normal late-nineteenth-century ballroom hold with joined hands angled forward at a diagonal along the line of dance. The dance follows a zig-zag track along the line of dance; there is no turning involved.

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June 11, 2009

Introducing the racket

The racket, or racquet, is one of the major new couple dances that began appearing in American dance manuals in the early 1880s and lingered into the beginning of the twentieth century. It spread to France in the mid- to late 1890s. I have found no information on its origins or reference to any creator.

The racket is a lively dance that combines sideways slides and quick cuts of the feet back and forth. It can be danced in both galop (2/4) and waltz (3/4) time, though galop time appears to be the default. It was one of the few of the myriad couple dance variations of the last quarter of the nineteenth century to make it into manuals like Allen Dodworth’s Dancing and its Relation to Education and Social Life (New York, 1885, reprinted 1900), which for the most part included only the most commonly-found couple dances. (He did include one of his own invention, the Knickerbocker, and the up-and-coming Boston.)

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