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

February 21, 2013

Chassé-Croisé Sequences for Regency-Era Quadrilles (2 of 3)

(This is the second post in a mini-series covering Regency-era step-sequences for the quadrille figure chassé-croisé. See the first post for a general introduction to the figure.)

My second sequence for chassé-croisé actually comes from a French source, the second edition of Principes et Notions Élémentaires sur l’Art de la Danse Pour la Ville (Paris, 1811) by J. H. Gourdoux. The same sequence reappears in his later manual, De l’Art de la Danse (Paris, 1823). It is similar to the Strathy sequence described in my previous post, but the differences are quite intriguing.

I won't cover steps in this post, since I just summarized them in the previous one and no additional ones are required for Gourdoux's sequence.

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February 18, 2013

Chassé-Croisé Sequences for Regency-Era Quadrilles (1 of 3)

By far the most common sequence variations to be found in quadrille manuals of the early nineteenth century are those for setting, forward and back, chassez-dechassez, and crossing over. But a few manuals give sequences for more elaborate figures such as chassé-croisé, in which two dancers, side by side, change places and back. There are quite a few ways to perform the figure, but the most common is probably that danced with one’s partner in eight bars as follows:

2b    Change places, gentlemen passing behind ladies
2b    Set
2b    Change back, gentlemen again passing behind ladies
2b    Set

This can be performed just by two couples (heads or sides) or by all four at once, as in the classic Finale figure of the first set of French quadrilles.

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February 14, 2013

Hollywood Line Hustle

It’s been quite some time since I did any disco line dances, but here’s one for the folks who love these session at the Dance Flurry. Sadly, I’m not teaching there this year, but you can do this one on your own!

Unusually for one of these dances, I actually have it in two different sources: The Complete Book on Disco and Ballroom Dancing (1979) (paid link) by Ann T. Kilbride and A. Algoso, and The Complete Guide to Disco Dancing (1978) (paid link) by Karen Lustgarten. The sequence is almost exactly the same in both books. Kilbride and Algoso mention alternate names: the L.A. Line Dance or L.A. Line Hustle and note that it was popular in a particular area of the country, presumably southern Califoria. Lustgarten calls it “one of the most popular line dances” and suggests disco hits to dance it to: Boz Skaggs’ “Lowdown” (paid link) for a slow version, and Vickie Sue Robinson’s “Turn The Beat Around” (paid link) for a faster one.

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February 11, 2013

Alternating racket waltz patterns
- Era: 1880s into very early 1900s
The last of the racket waltz patterns appears only in Allen Dodworth’s Dancing and its Relation to Education and Social Life (New York, 1885, reprinted 1900) and is thus saddled with his prosaic yet unwieldy title, “Alternating One Slide and Three Slide to Waltz.” That’s more a description of the technique a name, but it’s what we’ve got.

Unlike “Alternating the One Slide and Three Slide to Galop,” more usually known simply as the racket, the waltz-time version does not just combine the two existing racket waltzes (one-slide and two-slide) in a short/short/long short/short/long pattern. That works in waltz time since both the “short” and “long” patterns take only one measure apiece. Instead, this racket actually uses a three-slide racket, as in galop time, stretched in an irregular way from four beats to six, similarly to how the one-slide racket in galop is stretched from two beats to three in waltz time…but more complicated.

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February 7, 2013

Run, run…a redowa!
To be perfectly specific, that’s a polka redowa, a polka step in slow waltz time. This variation for it, called The Run, was, as far as I can tell, unique to the fifth edition (1892) of William B. De Garmo’s The Dance of Society.

The sequence is simplicity itself:
1. In normal closed position, dance polka redowa, turning (six measures)
2. Release hands and open up into “military” position, side by side (as described and shown here).
3. Run forward six steps (two measures)
4. Join hands again to repeat from the start
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January 10, 2013

Mr. Scott’s Two-Step

The two-step of the 1890s and early 1900s was so simple to dance, and so aggressively condemned by many dancing masters, that it’s actually fairly unusual to find a good description of it in a dance manual, though minor variations and sequences of dubious originality and debatable utility abound. English dancing master Edward Scott, in How to dance and guide to the ball-room (London, c1902), provides a rare overview of the basic dance as performed in Edwardian England.

Steps and timing
Scott specifies that the music for the two-step should be in 6/8, and explains that it is “practically our old friend the galop performed with figures, in regulated sequences, and to a different rhythm,” though Americans, he claims, apply the name two-step to “any dance founded on the chassé movement, or that in which one foot appears to be chasing the other.”

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December 27, 2012

Simonet’s Parisian Quadrilles, Third Set, c1820

There are many, many sets of early nineteenth-century quadrilles, most of which are simply new music for the First Set or include only minor variations on the standard figures. While I don’t normally publish reconstructions of the figures for random sets of quadrille music, this set is of particular interest because a high-quality recording of it is available on The Regency Ballroom CD by Spare Parts.

The music is from the first series of T. Simonet’s Fashionable Parisian Quadrilles, Performed by the Bands of Messrs. Michau, Musard and Collinet, with their appropriate Figures as danced at Almack’s, the Argyll Rooms and at the Bath & Cheltenham Assemblies. The manual is undated, but in February, 1823, the fashionable magazine La Belle Assemblée reported the publication of “Nos. 42 and 43” of the series, commenting positively:

This is really an elegant little work both in its contents and its typography. We recognize many of the quadrilles as being great favorites in the French metropolis, and the whole of them are composed in a very characteristic and original style.

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December 24, 2012

Mr. Fezziwig’s Ball

“In came a fiddler with a music-book, and went up to the lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty stomach-aches.”

So begins the famous description of Mr. Fezziwig’s Christmas Eve ball in Charles Dickens’ 1843 novel, A Christmas Carol, the full text of which with the original illustrations, including the one shown at left (click to enlarge), may be found at Project Gutenberg.

This is a fun example of, at least, a Victorian writer’s conception of a late 18th century ball which, though given by a successful businessman, is very much of the middle and lower classes rather than of the nobility. Given that Dickens’ family was not wealthy (at one point they ended up in a debtors’ prison), he may have been writing more from personal experience in London in the 1830s than, say, careful research about ballroom practices several decades earlier. So while this is a useful historical document for dance history, which period it is useful for is not entirely clear.

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November 5, 2012

Late 19th Century Jig-Time Dances: The Pasadena

The Pasadena, a would-be replacement for the two-step, appears in the 1900 reprint of New York dancing master Allen Dodworth’s 1885 tome, Dancing and its relations to education and social life, but can be dated back to at least 1898. It appears to have been created as a dancing school dance, as Dodworth’s nephew, T. George Dodworth, discussed in his introduction to the new edition of his uncle’s manual:

In order to bring the work up to date, I have been requested
to write an introduction which will include a list of dances that have come into fashion since my uncle’s book was originally published.

As a matter of fact, however, society dances have decreased, rather than increased, during this interval. When this work first appeared most of the round dances described in its pages were fashionable. But Dame Fashion is fickle, and, owing to some unaccountable change in taste, we now have only the Two Step, the Waltz, occasionally a Saratoga Lancers, and the Cotillion. In the dancing-schools the old dances are still taught, but with numerous new combinations, which are composed to improve the pupil and keep alive the interest. From these combinations we have the Tuxedo Lancers, the Amsterdam, Gavotte der Kaiserin, Minuet de la Cour (for four persons), and the Pasedena.

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October 8, 2012

Galop à Trois Pas (Three-Slide Galop)

Known variously as the three-slide galop, three step galop, galop à trois pas, or galop à trois temps, this late-nineteenth-century variation is simply the standard galop step migrated into waltz time. I’ve previously discussed the galop in 2/4 time in detail; the three-slide version is the same kind of series of slides and “chasing” steps:

1b Slide-close-slide-close-slide = 1 & 2 & 3
2b Slide-close-slide-close-slide = 1 & 2 & 3

This could also be described as slide-chassé-chassé, with each chassé being a “close-slide”.

As is standard for galop, the first half is performed leading with the first foot (gentleman’s left, lady’s right) with the second foot then closing behind in order to again slide with the first foot. The second half is then performed by sliding with the second foot and closing with the first. As with the 2/4-time galop, no hop is mentioned.

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Capering & Kickery

Chassé-Croisé Sequences for Regency-Era Quadrilles (2 of 3)

Chassé-Croisé Sequences for Regency-Era Quadrilles (1 of 3)

Hollywood Line Hustle

Alternating racket waltz patterns

Run, run…a redowa!

Mr. Scott’s Two-Step

Simonet’s Parisian Quadrilles, Third Set, c1820

Mr. Fezziwig’s Ball

Late 19th Century Jig-Time Dances: The Pasadena

Galop à Trois Pas (Three-Slide Galop)

Capering & Kickery