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

December 23, 2013

The Twinkle Hesitation Waltz

Like the similarly-named Twinkle Hesitation and the Mistletoe Hesitation, the Twinkle Hesitation Waltz is a sixteen-bar hesitation waltz sequence found in F. Leslie Clendenen’s compilation Dance Mad (St. Louis, 1914) that uses the quick step-change-step known as a “twinkle”. Clendenen attributes it to T. MacDougall. It can be used as a sequence dance to any fast 1910s waltz music, or the two parts can be used together or separately as variations in a regular hesitation waltz.

The dancers start in a normal ballroom hold, opened out to side by side facing line of dance. Steps below are given for the gentleman; the lady dances opposite.

The waltz step used would be the box-shaped “new waltz” of the era rather than the fast-spinning rotary waltz of the nineteenth century.

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December 19, 2013

The Hesitation Undercut

The hesitation undercut is so short that it seems more a variation for the hesitation waltz than a distinct dance. F. Leslie Clendenen, in his 1914 collection Dance Mad, attributes it to S. Wallace Cortissoz, who was also credited in Dance Mad with a sixteen-bar sequence called the Twinkle Hesitation.

The eight-bar sequence is begun with the dancers in normal waltz position, the gentleman facing the wall and the lady the center of the room. Steps are given below for the gentleman; the lady dances opposite.

The waltz step used would have been the "new" waltz step, with a pattern of step-side-close, much like today's box step, rather than the older rotary-style waltz of the nineteenth century.

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December 12, 2013

Three “Scottish” Setting Sequences for Regency-Era Quadrilles

(This continues a very occasional series of posts on setting steps for quadrilles, with the previous posts including eight easy sequences and two French sequences.)

Calling these three sequences “Scottish” is really a bit of a misnomer, since the sources are Alexander Strathy’s Elements of the Art of Dancing (Edinburgh, 1822), which is in large part a translation of a French manual by J. H. Goudoux, and an anonymous Scottish manuscript entitled Contre Danses à Paris 1818. All three sequences are certainly French in their steps and style and quite possibly in origin. They probably would not have caused anyone in Paris in that era to bat an eyelash. But technically, they are documented to Scotland, not France, in the late 1810s-early 1820s.

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December 9, 2013

Two French Setting Sequences for Regency-era Quadrilles

Several years ago I posted eight easy setting sequences for Regency-era French quadrilles and said in the comments I’d try to post more “soon”. That has now stretched to more than five years, but, better late than never, here are a couple of others, this time directly from a trio of French manuals by J. H. Gourdoux (or Gourdoux-Daux):

Principes et Notions Élémentaires sur l’Art de la Danse Pour la Ville (2nd edition, 1811)
Recueil d’un Genre Nouveau de Contredanses et Walses (1819)
De l’Art de la Danse (1823)

Once again, these are easy sequences, but a bit more interesting than the previous set.

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December 5, 2013

Sorority Glide

Most of the steps in Dance Mad (St. Louis, 1914) were collected by “author” F. Leslie Clendenen from other dancing masters, but he gives himself credit for the Sorority Glide, a sixteen-bar one-step sequence that he recommends be danced to “Too Much Mustard” or “any One Step music of a similar swing. It’s a fun little sequence with a very “Castles” feel to it and room for some personal style. It works as an independent dance or can be plugged into a regular one-step as a variation.

The dancers begin in a ballroom hold, turned out slightly so both face line of dance. The dancers need to be far enough apart to make a cross step without crowding. Weight should be shifted onto the forward (outside) foot, the gentleman’s left and the lady’s right, since the dance starts on the inside foot.

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October 28, 2013

Double Scotch Reel

Double Scotch Reel does not seem to be Scotch and, as I reconstruct it, does not actually include any reels (heys). It is a trio contra (three facing three in long lines own the room) which I have found only in one source: the Gems of the Ball Room Call Book published by E. T. Root & Sons in Chicago in 1896. The Gems call book appears to have been published specifically as dance calls for quadrilles and contra dances to go with the tunes in a series of music books called Gems of the Ball Room also published by Root.

The contra dance figures in Gems have some noticeable variations from those found in New England manuals such as those of Elias Howe, which might indicate regional variations between the northeast and midwest or might be simple carelessness on the part of the editor. The language and format of the different figures makes it obvious that they were pulled from different sources, so I suspect that somewhere there is another source for Double Scotch Reel, and that the collator of dances for Gems copied it exactly.

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October 17, 2013

Late Victorian Waltz Variations: Polka Dot Waltz

The Polka Dot Waltz was either a sequence dance or waltz variant described by Melvin B. Gilbert in Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) and later by [George] Washington Lopp in his translation-plus of Gilbert’s book, La Danse (Paris, 1903), in which it is listed as Polka Dot (Valse). Both Gilbert and Lopp credit it to Herman Strassburg, presumably the same dancing master who was the author of the Call Book of Modern Quadrilles (Detroit, 1889).

The pattern of the Polka Dot, its imaginative name, and the way Lopp formats the title make me suspect that this was not a variation for normal waltzing but instead was intended as a choreographed sequence dance matched to a particular piece of music. I’ve only been able to find one piece of sheet music by that title, “The Polka Dot Waltz”, by Edward A. Abell, (San Francisco, 1873), which is archived on the Library of Congress website. It does not include dance instructions. It is possible that Strassburg wrote this as choreography to go with it, or with a different waltz by the same name, but in the absence of proof one way or the other, it is also possible to dance it to any waltz music with even eight-bar phrases, either by the entire room dancing it in unison or by individual couples using it (carefully!) as a variation.

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October 14, 2013

Late Victorian Waltz Variations: Double Glide Waltz

The Double Glide Waltz, as described by Melvin B. Gilbert in his compendium Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890), is an elaboration on the alternating measures of sliding and waltzing found in variations like the Metropole. In La Danse, by [George] Washington Lopp, published in Paris in 1903, it is called La Double Boston and credited to Lopp himself. Much of La Danse is a direct French translation of Gilbert, so Lopp’s addition of the credit to himself is notable.

Like other late variations such as the Bowdoin and Fascination, the Double Glide Waltz alters the sliding steps, in this case to include in each sideways measure two “slide-closes”, one slow and one fast. The pattern here is “one, two-and-three” or “slow, quick-quick-slow”. It also reverses the Metropole pattern from slide/waltz/slide/waltz to waltz/slide/waltz/slide, a distinction which is not particularly significant when actually dancing.

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October 7, 2013

Figure Four?

In a post a while back on the Regency “figure eight” and the many meanings of the term “figure” in that era, I mentioned a joking suggestion made by a guest at one of my Regency balls that a half figure eight should be called a “figure four”. Much to my astonishment, while pursuing some research on American country dance of this era, I actually found a figure four!

The figure is in an American manual published in 1808 in upstate New York, in the figure given for the tune “Flowers of Glasgow”:

Flowers of Glasgow
First couple figure four with second couple, cast down two couple, back again, cross over, down one couple, balance, lead up, hands round with third couple, and right and left at top.
— A Select Collection of the Newest and Most Favorite Country Dances, Otsego, NY, 1808.

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September 23, 2013

New Scotia Quadrille

A while back I discussed the wonderful dance CD Music for Quadrilles, by the English band Green Ginger (with Kevin Smith). At the time, I skimmed over the tracks for five modern Scottish (RSCDS) dances, since I didn’t have any way to check the ones with historical sources against the originals. Since then, I’ve come across a copy of one of the editions of D. (David) Anderson’s Ball-Room Guide, a “New, Enlarged, & Complete Edition”, which the liner notes of Music for Quadrilles cite as the source for one of the historical dances, New Scotia Quadrille.

According to J. P. (Joan) and T. M. Flett in Traditional Dancing in Scotland (paid link), David Anderson taught in Dundee and in a number of other towns from c1850-1911. His Ball-Room Guide seems to have gone through at least five editions, with the “New, Enlarged” versions appearing between the mid-1880s and late 1890s. Since the one I examined is not dated, and I have no others to compare it to, I cannot date it precisely.

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