In honor of tonight’s incoming blizzard, and because I’ve been thinking lately about cotillion figures that scale up well for large groups, let’s talk about Les Boules de Neige. For those who don’t speak French, that would be…The Snowballs!
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!
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Dancing Mormons
I come across little tidbits of information about dance history in the oddest places.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, better known as the Mormon church, places a premium on genealogical research for theological reasons. This has inspired one Mormon family, the Blakes, to create a website about their immediate ancestors.
Among the reminiscences on their site is an interesting excerpt from the book In Search of Zion: King, Youngberg and Allied Families by Richard K. Hart, which apparently features the recollections of one James King, a friend of Blake ancestor Walter Frank Blake (1880-1965).
According to the information on the Blake family site, Walter Blake was born in England and immigrated to Utah with his parents at the age of two. His mother converted to the Mormon faith in the 1880s and Walter and his siblings followed suit. The King family, already Mormons, were neighbors and friends. James King recounted his memories of life in turn-of-the-century Utah farm country to his wife in 1959. Though the stereotype of Mormons is rather stuffy, apparently social dancing was (and is) allowed and even encouraged, provided that it doesn’t get too intimate or suggestive.
King’s stories of life near Utah’s Great Salt Lake include a wonderful glimpse of rural dancing around 1900:
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A dancing master’s epitaph
From a book of “select and remarkable” epitaphs published in 1757:
On Mr. Maddox, a Dancing-Master, and his Wife.
They were lovely and pleasant in their Lives, and in
their Deaths they were not divided.
Hail happy Pair! predestin’d long to prove
The chastest Raptures of connubial Love!
Who took no Step thro’ Life’s perplexed Dance,
But what would well your mutual Bliss advance!
Who figur’d not a Plan but what was meant,
Again to join your Hands with fresh Content.
Tho’ ceremonious–yet with Ease still fraught;
The very Image of the Art you taught !
Polite in all Life’s mazy Measures try’d,
As the gay Partner to his destin’d Bride.
Twice thirty Years in gentle Wedlock past,
The first was not so happy as the last !
Still each to each so complaisantly gay,
As raptur’d Lovers on their Nuptial Day !
All wing’d with Down their Years advancing roll,
And still improve this Unison of Soul!
Unvarying–courtly to his latest Breath,
He gave his Spouse Precedence e’en in Death.
The truest Honours to each other given,
He just surviv’d, then led her up to Heaven. -
Irving’s Christmas Sketches, 1820
For Christmas Day, let’s return to Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., looking this time at the fifth number, published in America on January 1, 1820, and covering the English celebration of the Christmas holidays. The description of the old-fashioned English Christmas at the fictional Bracebridge Hall was based on Irving’s personal experience at Aston Hall in the late 1810s and, as is well-known to scholars and obvious even to the casual reader, was a major influence on Charles Dickens when he came to write A Christmas Carol.
Four of the five sketches in the fifth number contained dance references. I’ll take them one by one, skipping over the first sketch (“Christmas”) which merely provides an overview of the excitement of celebrating the Christmas holyday [sic] in England. Page numbers reference the London second edition of 1820.
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Fox Trot Hats
I’ve been looking for something amusing to wind up the centennial year of the foxtrot, and I found it in the November 17, 1914, issue of The Richmond Times-Dispatch: some fashion advice for the foxtrotting ladies in the store advertisement shown at left:
Fox-Trotting Without a Fox Trot Hat
is like joy riding on a steam roller.How do I follow up a line like that? I can only suggest reading the rest of the ad (click to enlarge) for more delightfully fulsome language.
For historical dancers, this is a reminder that during the 1910s, dancing in a hat at an afternoon thé dansant was perfectly proper, though judging by the advertisement, either not everyone agreed or not everyone succeeded in finding a suitable hat:
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“agoing to dance the spanish dance”
“…George Cowls says tell Nancy he is right in his glory to day and when he comes home he is agoing to dance the spanish dance with you and he says tell Abby he is agoing through ceders swamp with her…”
— Pvt. Jairus Hammond to Nancy Titus, December 8, 1862Here’s rare documentation of a specific dance: a mention in a letter from a Union soldier during the American Civil War to his sister, dated one hundred and fifty-two years ago today, that another man plans to dance the Spanish Dance (previously described here) with her when he returns. There has been no real doubt that the Spanish Dance was actually danced and was as popular as its frequent appearance in dance manuals suggests. I have found it listed on dozens of dance cards. But this is another little piece of documentation demonstrating that its popularity extended well down the social scale.
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The Yale Schottische, 1895
As previously noted, I always have an eye out for dances named after Yale University and Yale-related dance ephemera. Walking through the campus earlier today on my way to a meeting reminded me that I had another Yale-themed dance to discuss: the Yale Schottische, which was published with the eponymous sheet music in 1895 and dedicated to the Yale University Football Association. Yale has one of the oldest football programs in the world and was a regular national title winner in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Some of the players pictured at left (click to enlarge) are probably among the several Yalies of the 1890s chosen as All-Americans or inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame. (More details about Yale’s place in football history may be found here.) -
A Montréal Gavotte, 1918
The classic schottische of the mid-nineteenth century and its later incarnation, the Barn Dance (a.k.a. the Military Schottische and the Pas de Quatre) had mostly faded from fashionable ballrooms by the late 1910s. But a few very simple schottisches or schottische-like sequences turn up now and then in dance manuals and on sheet music of the 1910s, often under the name “gavotte”, a musical form with the same 4/4 meter characteristic of the schottische.
La Gavotte is a short sequence taken from Professor A. Lacasse’s La Danse apprise chez soi, published in Montréal in 1918. There were many dances called “gavotte” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not all of them in 4/4 time, so while this particular gavotte may have been locally popular in Montréal, it should not be considered any sort of definitive gavotte for the 1910s or any other era.
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A 3/4-time grapevine sequence, 1914
I’ve had sequence dances on my mind recently after some discussion earlier this week, which reminded me of this little sequence from the the second edition of F. Leslie Clendenen’s 1914 compilation Dance Mad. It appears there under the name “American Grapevine Dance” by Anthony J. Giaconia of Springfield, Massachusetts. I know nothing about Mr. Giaconia except that on June 24, 1912, he was quoted on the front page of The Indianapolis News as one of a convention of dancing masters appalled by dances like the Grizzly Bear and Bunny Hug. He found some dancing in a park there so disgraceful that it ought to be stopped “for the sake of decency”.
The Grapevine Dance is so short (only eight bars) that it doesn’t feel long enough to be a sequence dance all on its own, but the two measures in which the dancers move directly into the center of the room and back make it mildly risky to use simply as a variation; moving abruptly back and forth across the line of dance can cause problems for dancers coming up behind. Doing this from an “inside lane” near the center of the room will be more polite if it is not being done in unison as a sequence dance.
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Battle Confetti
One hundred and sixteen years ago today, the magazine Harper’s Bazaar published a brief blurb predicting fashionable dances for the winter would be of “military tone”, no doubt influenced by the burst of patriotic fervor occasioned by the brief Spanish-American War, which by the autumn of 1898 had moved into peace negotiations. The article gives a quick peek at what dances interested Americans (or, at least, American dancing masters) in the second-to-last winter of the nineteenth century.
Unsurprisingly, the writer acknowledges the “extraordinary popularity” of the two-step. The five-step schottische is called a “new” schottische, which is inaccurate, since it had been around since at least 1890, when it was included in M. B. Gilbert’s Round Dancing, and possibly as early as 1871 under a different name. The dance may have been receiving a fresh push from the assembled masters of The American Society of Professors of Dancing, whose meeting seems to have spurred this little notice. No other couple dances are mentioned.