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

May 23, 2016

Teaching the hey for three

I didn’t realize my way of teaching heys for three was particularly unusual until one of my regular musicians, who is himself a contra dance caller, commented on it, impressed by how quickly I was able to get a roomful of dancers at a public ball (meaning dancers of wildly mixed ability and experience) doing heys in unison. Since heys of one sort or another are especially popular in early nineteenth century dance, I teach them frequently and prefer not to take too much time about it, especially when calling at a ball.

My little trick for teaching a hey for three is to start by teaching it from an L-shaped formation, as a “corner hey”, rather than in a straight line. I find that it can be difficult for dancers, especially beginners, to visualize the figure-eight path of the hey when they all start in a straight line, and that it is not intuitively obvious in which direction the second and third dancers move when everyone starts at once (as they should!) rather than one dancer moving and the other two waiting out a measure or two before starting.

Doing a corner hey simplifies things.

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April 18, 2016

Starting the Waltz, Cellarius Style

Several years ago I wrote about starting the “new waltz” of the late nineteenth century in the way recommended by Allen Dodworth, who suggested a preparatory measure of music in which the dancers move from the usual starting orientation for couple dances, gentleman facing the wall/lady facing the center of the room, to one in which the gentleman’s back is to line of dance, making it easier for him to accomplish a clean leap backward on the first step of the waltz, while the lady faces forward and can easily perform her forward leap. I’d thought at the time to make that post part of a series addressing different ways recommended for starting various forms of waltz over the course of the nineteenth century, but for one reason or another never got back to the topic.

Here’s another short installment in what is now a very drawn-out series.

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April 13, 2016

The Rag-Time Crawl

I semi-jokingly call the Rag-Time Crawl “the dance for when I get tired of the Castle Schottische”. It basically fulfills the same function: easy to dance, accessible to beginners, and comforting to people who are not up to leading and following and enjoy the Macarena-like effect of everyone moving all together in the same pattern.

My source for the dance is Frank H. Norman’s Complete Dance Instructor (Ottawa, 1914). The author is J. B. McEwen of Glasgow, Scotland. I don’t know a lot about either of these gentlemen, but I can offer a few bits of trivia:

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March 18, 2016

The Sixdrilles (3 of 3)

Wrapping up my mini-series on the Sixdrilles, here are the final two figures and some overall thoughts. The earlier figures can be found in my first and second posts in the series.

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March 16, 2016

The Sixdrilles (2 of 3)

Moving right along from my first post in the Sixdrilles series, here are the reconstructions of the next two figures:

Figure Two: L’Été (8b introduction + 24bx4)
4b First gentleman and two opposite ladies en avant and en arrière.
4b Same three chassez-dechassez (à droite et à gauche)
4b Same three traversez, gentleman crossing between the two ladies
4b Same three chassez-dechassez
4b Same three traversez/balancez [see note below] while partners balancez
4b Same three rond de trois

The figure is then repeated by the second gentleman and the two opposite ladies, the third gentlemen and two opposite ladies, and the fourth gentleman and two opposite ladies.

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March 14, 2016

The Sixdrilles (1 of 3)

The Sixdrilles are a clever reworking of the figures French Quadrille (or First Set) for a group of twelve dancers in the form of a square of trios, each consisting of a gentleman and two ladies. I have two Scottish sources for them, which match fairly closely:

The Ball-Room, by Monsieur J. P. Boulogne (Glasgow, 1827).

Lowe's Ball-Conductor and Assembly Guide…Third Edition, by the Messrs. Lowe (Edinburgh, c1830)

Monsieur Boulogne is billed as French, but I know no more about him. The Messrs. Lowe were a group of four brothers, all dance teachers, one of whom eventually became famous as dancing master at Balmoral for the family of Queen Victoria. Their book is difficult to date, especially since it is a third edition. A reference to the Sixdrilles being created around the time of the coronation of Charles X puts it at 1824 or later, and a late reference to the opera Guillaume Tell (Paris, 1829) at the very end of the book suggests 1830 onward. The last half-dozen pages look like a later attachment, however, and may have been added for the second or third edition. The Sixdrilles appear much earlier and are integrated into the overall work.

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January 24, 2016

The Ladies’ Ball, 1835

2016 being a leap year, some folks have been chatting about leap year balls or leap day dances, including the idea of such balls being a traditional occasion for ladies to ask gentlemen to dance, rather than the standard vice-versa. I’m not sure how far back that tradition actually goes, but it reminded me of an amusing story published in Atkinson’s Saturday Evening Post & Bulletin in 1835, entitled “The Ladies’ Ball”.

Atkinson’s Saturday Evening Post & Bulletin was a Philadelphia newspaper published under various names from 1800; Samuel Atkinson was the publisher from 1831-1839. Along with domestic and foreign news, Atkinson also included essays, fiction, poetry, household hints, etc. Its descendant survives to this day as the bimonthly Saturday Evening Post, famous in the mid-twentieth century for its Norman Rockwell covers.

“The Ladies’ Ball” tells the story of a social crisis: the gentleman of a certain nameless city, distracted by the study of mnemonics and other sciences, had forgotten to organize the traditional Christmas ball.

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November 24, 2015

On evening parties with dancing, 1860

The most fashionable as well as pleasant way in the present day to entertain guests is to invite them to evening parties, which vary in size from the “company,” “sociable,” “soiree,” to the party, par excellence, which is but one step from the ball.

The entertainment upon such occasions may vary with the taste of the hostess or the caprice of her guests. Some prefer dancing, some music, some conversations. Small parties, called together for dramatical or poetical readings, are now fashionable, and very delightful.
— The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness

I first came across Florence Hartley’s The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness (G. G. Evans: Philadelphia, 1860) via the July, 1861, issue of Godey’s Lady’s Book, which excerpted the section on the etiquette for a lady hosting an evening party. There is a matching section for the (female) guests at an evening party as well as sections for ladies hosting or attending balls. I have spent a great deal of time over the years reading about mid-nineteenth century ballroom etiquette, but considerably less on that for more informal events. I thus found Mrs. Hartley’s thoughts on the subject quite interesting. It would be fun to host smaller events such as these, if one had both the sizable rooms and the servants that Mrs. Hartley assumes will be available or hired for the night.

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October 21, 2015

The Trio

Since I frequently have to deal with an imbalance in numbers between the ladies and the gentlemen at nineteenth century balls, I’m always interested in dances that use a trio formation. This can be one gentleman with two ladies or vice-versa, though the former is the more common situation.

This dance, simply called “The Trio”, appears in at least two editions of Elias Howe’s American dancing master, and ball-room prompter (Boston, 1862 and 1866). Howe’s instructions are a bit vague and neglect to mention the actual timing of the figures, but a little experimentation convinced me that the following reconstruction is workable and fun. This is an extremely easy dance, good for groups of beginners.

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October 15, 2015

Respect the box step

I’ve been thinking a lot over the last few years about the underlying skills needed for various forms of social dance. A critical one is the ability to shift steps between time signatures, as I discussed a couple of months ago. And one of the best examples of that is what happened with the much-maligned “box step” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

The box step doesn’t get a lot of respect among historical dancers in America because it is strongly associated with modern ballroom dance studio practices. That’s unfortunate, because I’m increasingly convinced that its historical incarnation, the “new waltz” (in contrast to the older valse à trois temps with its pirouette), is extremely important to know for anyone studying American social dancing of the 1880s-1910s. Despite this, it often gets pushed aside in favor of the older style, which is usually taught first and thus becomes the default social waltz in modern reenactment. That’s not wrong, exactly; it’s not like the older waltz vanished in favor of the new. But I think that we ought to be spending a lot more time on the new waltz, because it appears to be one of the fundamental building blocks of the social dance of the entire late Victorian/Edwardian/ragtime era.

Let’s look at how the box step got used historically:

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