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

October 27, 2016

Boarding House

Final cotillion figure for the month! Boarding House straddles the line between comedy and horror, making it perfect for Halloween. Along with being probably the single weirdest cotillion figure I’ve ever seen, which is saying a lot, it’s also the most elaborate, requiring the construction of a special trick table along with props and costumes for some of the dancers. The figure is taken from St. Louis dancing master Jacob Mahler’s 1900 compilation Original Cotillion Figures, in which it was attributed to Brooklyn dancing master William Pitt Rivers. After reading through this figure, I’m not sure I’d have wanted to have him as my dancing master!

I’ll include the full original description below, but since it is rather lengthy, I’ll start with the requirements and process for the figure.

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October 24, 2016

Red Ear Party, 1919

The description of the Red Ear Party, or Harvest Home Party, appears in Emily Rose Burt’s Entertaining Made Easy (New York, 1919). It was not a full-scale fancy dress ball, but an autumn/harvest-themed ball put on by, according to the book, a group of high school seniors as the opening event of their final year. Along with normal dancing of the era, it featured a series of novelty dances which were effectively low-key cotillions. Did the event really take place or was it imagined by Ms. Burt just for the book? Hard to say. But I’m impressed with the imagination and industry either displayed by the actual students or expected by Ms. Burt to be achievable by high school kids. I wish my teenage school dances had been like this!

The red ear of the title was not a body part but an ear of corn. The significance is said to go back to a colonial tradition in which whoever found the red ear at a corn husking party would get to kiss the girl of his choice. (You can see an example of one red ear among a lot of normal ones here.) In this case, finding the (faked) red ear was used to select a “queen” for the party.

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October 20, 2016

Prince Leopold’s Birthday Ball, 1859

One of the most charming descriptions of a fancy dress ball in my collection is that of the event held at Buckingham Palace in honor of the sixth birthday of Queen Victoria's youngest son, Prince Leopold, on April 7, 1859. This was a juvenile, or children's, ball, but, as we know from descriptions of the dancing lessons given to Victoria's children, the level of dancing skill even at young ages was considerably higher than one would expect from children today. That said, it's not clear to me whether the youngest children really danced all the dances or whether that was left to the older ones, or perhaps the parents.

The description I have was printed in The Albion, A Journal of News, Politics and Literature, on April 30, 1859. The Albion was a weekly New York newspaper that covered British matters extensively and was read by expatriates. The description was probably copied directly from a London newspaper.

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October 17, 2016

Marching Medications

Coming back to cotillion figures, and sliding even further down the weirdness scale, here’s a figure that combines playing doctor and still more wacky costumes! The source, once again, is the ever-delightful Twentieth Century Cotillion Figures by H. Layton Walker (Two Step Publishing Company, Buffalo, New York, 1912).

Like the Garden Figure and Stocking Auction figures, Sanitarium is a partner-choosing mixer, but with a much more elaborate setup. Here’s Walker’s description:

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October 13, 2016

A Masked Ball in Heidelberg, 1840s

A lengthy, lively description of a masquerade in Heidelberg may be found in Meister Karl’s Sketch-book, by the American humorist, journalist, and folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland, who described the book in his Memoirs as

…an odd mélange, which had appeared in chapters in the Knickerbocker Magazine. It was titled Meister Karl’s Sketch-Book. It had no great success beyond attaining to a second edition long after; yet Washington Irving praised it to everybody, and wrote to me that he liked it so much that he kept it by him to nibble ever and anon, like a Stilton cheese or a paté de foie gras; and here and there I have known men, like the late Nicolas Trübner or E. L. Bulwer, who found a strange attraction in it, but it was emphatically caviare to the general reader. It had at least a style of its own, which found a few imitators. It ranks, I think, about pari passu with Coryatt’s “Crudities,” or lower. (p. 206)

The Sketch-Book (1855) was a fictionalized travel journal based on Leland’s experiences studying and traveling in Europe as a young man. In the preface, he explained that it had been written primarily between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, which would have been from 1840 to 1849. Leland spent three years during this period studying in Heidelberg, Munich, and Paris. He mentioned the various masked balls in Heidelberg in his Memoirs:
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October 6, 2016

Fruit and Stockings

Moving on from fancy dress balls, here are a pair of cotillion figures which actually involve some degree of costuming, at least for loose definitions of the concept. Both figures are taken from H. Layton Walker’s Twentieth Century Cotillion Figures (Two Step Publishing Company, Buffalo, New York, 1912), source of an endless supply of delightfully weird figures. There are actually Halloween-themed figures in Walker’s book, but they’re quite dull by comparison with these two!

Both figures are simple mixers, with either the ladies or the gentlemen selecting partners from a group of opposite-sex dancers. Dozens of figures of this sort were published over the years, but these two take the concept to a whole new level by having the dancers put on some sort of silly costume during the ball itself, presumably right over their normal evening dress.

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October 1, 2016

Newport Fancy Dress Ball, 1850

The final fancy dress of the Newport summer season of 1850 occurred on Wednesday, September 4th. It was covered by The Boston Herald on September 5th (“Grand Fancy Ball at Newport”, p. 4) and more extensively by The New York Herald on September 6th (“The Grand Fancy Dress Ball at Newport”, p. 1). The bulk of the coverage was devoted to lists of attendees and their costumes, as is typical for fancy dress balls, but there are some other tidbits of useful information as well. The New York Herald article is extremely lengthy, so I have not transcribed all of it. The article from The Boston Herald is quite short, but not nearly as interesting.

The ball was held at the rebuilt Ocean House, the original of which had opened in 1844, burned down, and been rebuilt. This Ocean House was not the same as the modern Ocean House in Newport. A different hotel by the same name opened in 1868, was demolished in 2005, and then rebuilt again in 2010.

At the RhodeTour website, Dr. Brian Knoth writes about the first two Ocean Houses, with specific mention of the 1850 Fancy Dress Ball:

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September 27, 2016

A cautionary tale, 1837

The short story “Lyddy!”, by Thomas Egerton Wilks, was published in a London journal, The Young Lady’s Magazine, in 1837, its first year of publication, the works from which were collected in a single volume published in 1838.

Though its title is similar to that of other ladies’ magazines of the era, The Young Lady’s Magazine actually had much loftier ambitions:

…to concentrate every energy in the production, not only of such matter as may amuse the fancy, but at the same time tend to expand the mind, elevate the morals, refine the intellect, and awaken, — not the morbid sensibilities, too often produced by ill-selected fictions — but those pure, unhacknied feelings of the youthful heart, which are in themselves a mine of inexhaustible treasures, and which, by their development, shed a halo of enchantment around.
— Preface, p. iii

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September 21, 2016

On Old Fashioned Dances, 1926

On January 21, 1926, a column unfavorably comparing modern dancing to that of earlier eras was published in the Lewiston Evening Journal, published in Lewiston, Maine. “On ‘Old-Fashioned Dances’ ” appeared under the column title “Just Talks On Common Themes” and the byline of A. G. S. The initials are those of Arthur Gray Staples (1861-1940), a Maine writer who was the editor-in-chief of the Lewiston Evening Journal (later just the Lewiston Journal) from 1919-1940. “Just Talks On Common Themes” was his daily column. Staples described these columns many years later in an inscription of one of his books to the Maine State Library:

The only claim for these things is their spontaneity. They write themselves — “after hours,” chiefly. In their day and generation many good folk seemed to like some of them and many did not.

A collection of the columns was published in 1919 or 1920 and may now be found online at archive.org. Later collections were issued in 1921 and 1924, but a 1926 column was obviously not included in any of them. Fortunately, it is now online in its original newspaper publication.

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June 16, 2016

Tracking the Mescolanzes

The topic of mescolanzes, four-facing-four country dances, and whether the famous dance La Tempête was the only surviving member of the genre by the mid- to late nineteenth century, came up in an email exchange recently. Mescolanzes are one of those dance genres for which I have spent years slowly accumulating examples, so I thought I’d talk a little bit about the format and where dances called mescolanzes appeared over the course of the nineteenth century.

I’m going to limit this quick survey to more-or-less anglophone countries — England, America, Scotland, Canada, and Australia — since I’ve not yet collated all the information I have from other countries. I’m also not going to discuss La Tempête specifically, since that is an enormous topic all on its own. Here and now, I will only survey dances appearing under the name or classification “mescolanze” and its several (mis)spellings.

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