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 4, 2017

CD Review: Ragtime Dance Party

Ragtime Dance Party is the one and only album released by the Crown Syncopators, a San Francisco-based trio that performs at ragtime music festivals on the West Coast. I’ve never had the pleasure of dancing to their music in person, which this album makes me very much regret. Per the title, every single tune is danceable as well as a joy to listen to. I highly recommend it for anyone who enjoys American music and dance of the 1890-1920 era.

The Crown Syncopators consist of Frederick Hodges (piano), Victoria Tichenor (drums), and Marty Eggers (tuba). They don’t seem to have a website. ~~but their appearances are listed on Hodges’ event schedule here.~~ (Updated 12/30/25 because the schedule no longer exists.)

The CD comes with ten pages of liner notes that contain the background on each piece and reproductions of the original sheet music covers. Along with familiar favorites like Scott Joplin, James Reese Europe, and James Scott, I was especially pleased to see in the mix a couple of less-familiar female composers, Grace Marie Bolen and Adeline (or Adaline) Shepherd, both of whose careers were cut short by marriage.

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August 28, 2017

CD Review: The Robert E. Lee

The Robert E. Lee (1997) is a neat little album of solo piano played by the famous musician Bob Milne, who is not only a top-notch ragtime pianist, music historian, and “national treasure” who performed at The Library of Congress in 2004, but also has the astonishing ability to “play” multiple tunes at once in his head, meaning that he can do incredible tricks like playing music in 3/4, 4/4, and 5/4 simultaneously. There’s a fascinating article about his abilities at Mlive.com.

The CD title and the famous tune “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee” both refer to the famous steamship which won a race from New Orleans to St. Louis in 1870.

I have had The Robert E. Lee sitting around for over a decade but only ever used one track, “Trouble in Mind”, regularly, as an interesting change of style for when I DJ for modern blues dancers. Until I started teaching ragtime more often than usual this year I hadn’t really gone through the rest of the album carefully. The CD wasn’t recorded specifically for dancing, so some of the pieces don’t have the regular rhythm one would desire, but about half of them are quite good for dancing, a few others are workable, and the piano playing is invariably a joy to listen to even for the less danceable tunes.

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August 21, 2017

Two Easy Mixer Games, 1912

I recently had a request to teach 1910s-era dance games, so I went digging through early twentieth-century books of cotillion (or “German”) figures looking for some easy mixers that could be explained in a few sentences. I found two that fit the bill in Twentieth Century Cotillion Figures, by H. Layton Walker (Two Step Publishing Company, Buffalo, New York, 1912). That book is one of my favorite sources for the silliest and most extreme figures, but it has plenty of simpler ones as well.

Neither of these figures require any props or preparation, and they can be taught in moments on the dance floor, a practice actually recommended in the description of the second.

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July 20, 2017

Reminiscences, 1865

I have what seems like an endless collection of works of nineteenth-century women’s fiction that I plow through for the dance references whenever I have the chance. Most of them are overly sentimental and laden with heavy-handed moral messages. “Reminiscences”, which was serialized in the American women’s periodical Godey’s Lady’s Book from February to June, 1865, was no exception to this, alas, but at least it was relatively short.

The background of the piece is a bit of a mystery. The author is the same “Ethelstone” credited with “Dancing the Schottische” (Godey’s, July 1862), which I discussed a few years ago. I’ve never been able to locate any information about this author. And “Reminiscences” adds a new element of confusion because it is written in first person and purports to be the story of one Ethel Stone. Was “Ethelstone” actually a woman named Ethel Stone? Is this fiction masquerading as memoir? Or part of an actual memoir of a life that oh-so-conveniently included the elements of a mid-nineteenth-century morality tale? That seems unlikely, so I assume that it’s fiction. But I may never know for certain.

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July 3, 2017

Professor Sheldon’s Presidential Polka Quadrille

Professor Sheldon’s Presidential Polka Quadrille was created by Washington, D. C., dancing master George T. Sheldon, who had a lengthy career as a dancing master to both children and adults and was the author of at least a couple of other quadrilles. In May, 1898, Sheldon was discussed briefly in M. B. Gilbert’s dance journal, The Director, in which it was said that he was then 72 and had been teaching for 57 years. His most famous pupil was probably Nellie Grant, daughter of President Ulysses S. Grant. This quadrille was said in several sources to be dedicated to her.

Professor Sheldon’s Presidential Polka Quadrille seems to have first been published around 1893, possibly by H. N. Grant, and thereafter turns up in a number of midwestern dance manuals running through the early years of the new century. It is referred to variously by its full name, by the shorter Sheldon’s Presidential Polka Quadrille or Sheldon’s Polka Quadrille, and, in one manual, as Williams’ Presidential Polka Quadrille. I have no idea who Williams was or why he was credited with a quadrille well documented as having been authored by Sheldon.

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June 27, 2017

Political Dance Jokes: The Italian Quadrille, 1859

The humor piece at left, “The Italian Quadrille” (click to enlarge), appeared in the June 4, 1859, issue of the famous British humor magazine, Punch. It’s obvious from the timing that it’s satirizing the brief Franco-Austrian War of 1859, also known as the Second Italian War of Independence. I love it when dance terms get used this way. This one isn’t as clever overall as the near-contemporaneous Quadrille Nautically Described (1856), but what it lacks in clever figures it makes up for in real-world meaning.

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June 8, 2017

Early Foxtrot: Catch Steps

I spent a lot of time teaching foxtrot this spring, and after going through my usual repertoire of easy foxtrot variations with several different groups, I feel I need to add a few new steps. Nothing complicated, just something to spice up my standard set. Both of these steps are taken from Edna Stuart Lee's Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916).

The basic catch step is just a simple way to change the lead foot, either because it's needed for a variation or just for fun. It's so easy I can explain it without a little numbered chart:

Gentleman starts left forward. Walk for awhile. When you want to change lead foot, make a single two-step. Keep walking with the lead (odd count; the strong beat of the music) on the other foot. The lady does the same thing, but backward and starting on the right foot.

More formally:

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May 1, 2017

Imperial Gavotte

The Imperial Gavotte is one of the many schottische variations included in M. B. Gilbert’s book of couple dances, Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) and in G. W. Lopp’s La Danse (Paris, 1903). It is attributed to Professor A. T. Graves of Albany, New York, and noted by Gilbert to have been accepted by the American Society of Professors of Dancing in New York on September 4, 1889. The Society endorsement gave it enough exposure for it to turn up outside Graves’ own studio: in the October 26, 1890, issue of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), it is listed as one of the new dances to be taught by John Mahler.

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April 27, 2017

American Gavotte / Polka Américaine

The American Gavotte is another of the variations published by dancing master M. B. Gilbert in his manual of couple dances, Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) and republished by G. W. Lopp in La Danse (Paris, 1903). It was attributed by Gilbert to James P. Brooks of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (and by Lopp to “J.-D. Brooks”). Gilbert also noted that it was adopted by the American Society of Professors of Dancing, New York — this would have been in 1886, from contemporary writeups of the event — and published by permission of White Smith Music Publishing Co. Lopp listed it as “Polka Américaine (American Gavotte)”

I’ve discussed a couple of other American “gavotte” variations before, but both of those were for the schottische. The American Gavotte is listed as a polka, though it actually works perfectly well to schottische music and there is some confusion surround how it is notated that suggests that it might have originally been meant as a schottische; see the music note below. It certainly has some choreographic kinship with the schottische gavottes in that it also uses the rhythm pattern “1&2&3,4” stepped as “slide, chassé, chassé, close” or “slide-close-slide-close-slide, close”. This is one measure of schottische as usually counted, but two measures of polka. Because of the pattern of the following four beats of music, I actually prefer to break the first four up into two bars, polka style, as follows, with dancers starting on their first foot (his left, her right):

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April 22, 2017

Flower Girl’s Dance

Flower Girl’s Dance is an American Civil War-era contra dance that I remember dancing way back in the early 1990s when I first started doing mid-nineteenth-century dance. But the version we did does not actually match that found in any source I’ve ever seen. And it’s easy to see why: the versions given in the sources don’t actually work very well. And now that I’ve reconstructed the California Reel, I have a little theory about why that is.

The earliest sources I have for Flower Girl’s Dance are Elias Howe’s two 1858 books, the Pocket Ball-Room Prompter and the Complete Ball-Room Handbook. I strongly suspect that all the later sources were copying to some degree from Howe. So let’s look at Howe’s instructions:

FLOWER GIRL’S DANCE.
(Music: Girl I left behind me.)
Form as for Spanish Dance. All chassa to the right, half balance–chassa back, swing four half round–swing four half round and back–half promenade, half right and left–forward and back all, forward and pass to next couple (as in the Haymakers).

There are some minor differences of spelling and punctuation, but the wording is essentially the same across almost forty years of Howe publications. Taken at face value with the hash marks setting off eight-bar musical strains, this yields a 40-bar dance:

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