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

January 25, 2018

Paine’s Quadrilles, Twelfth Set, 1819 (4 of 4)

(This is fourth in a series of four posts covering Paine’s Twelfth Set. The introductory post in the series may be found here, figures one and two here, and figures three and four here.)

Concluding my series on Paine’s Twelfth Set, the final figure!

No. 5, tune “La Nouvelle Fantasia“
Figure.
Chassez croisez huit, les quatre Cavaliers en avant 4 mes, les quatre dames de meme, balancez tour de mains, la Cavalier seul en avant et en arriere 8 mes, la dame seul de meme.
La Grand Promenade.

All 8 chassez across and back again, the 4 Gent: advance and retire 4 bars, the 4 Ladies the same, balancez and turn your partners, one Gent: advance and retire twice 8 bars, the opposite Lady do the same.
Promenade all 8.

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January 22, 2018

Paine’s Quadrilles, Twelfth Set, 1819 (3 of 4)

(This is third in a series of four posts covering Paine’s Twelfth Set. The introductory post in the series may be found here and figures one and two here.)

Continuing on with Paine’s Twelfth Set, the next two figures…

No. 3, tune “L’Aimable“
Figure de La Poule. — or
Le 4 dames font le moulinet pendant que les 4 Cavaliers font la grand Promenade a droite, ils donnent les mins a leurs dames et balancez tour de mains pour se remettre a sa place, les tiroirs a quatre et restez à la place opposee, de meme les 4 autres demie Promenade tous les 8, Jusqua [sic] votre place et tour de mains en place.
Contre Partie.

The 4 Ladies moulinet while the 4 Gent: do grand Promenade to the right, the 4 Gents: give their hands to their partners, balancez and turn them round to their places, the tiroirs 4 and stop at the opposite place the other 4 the same, half Promenade all 8 to your places, and turn your partner round to your place.
The same again.

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January 18, 2018

Paine’s Quadrilles, Twelfth Set, 1819 (2 of 4)

(This is second in a series of four posts covering Paine’s Twelfth Set. The introductory post in the series may be found here.)

All right, let’s move on to the actual figures! In my transcriptions below of the French and English instructions, the capitalization, spelling, punctuation, and lack of accents over the French vowels are all as printed in the original.

No. 1, tune “La Belle Flamand”
Figure de la Pantalon — or
Quatre demie chaine Anglaise, les 4 autres demie chaine Anglaise, demie Promenade tous les 8, et tour de mains a votre place, chaine des dames celles qui ont commencez [sic], balancez 8 et tour de mains.
Contre Partie.

Four half right and left, the other four the same, half Promanade [sic] all 8 to your place and turn your partners round, Ladies chain by those who began the dance, balance 8 and turn your partners round.
The same again the other 4.

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January 15, 2018

Paine’s Quadrilles, Twelfth Set, 1819 (1 of 4)

As with my earlier reconstructions of Howe’s figures for “Les Rats” and the third set of Simonet’s Parisian Quadrilles, I was primarily motivated to reconstruct Paine’s Twelfth Set of Quadrilles by the existence of a high-quality recording of the music. I’m not sure what prompted Green Ginger to choose this quadrille, out of more than a dozen of Paine’s other sets of quadrille music (besides his most-famous and oft-recorded first) to include on their CD of Regency-era dance music, Music for Quadrilles, but it’s an excellent set of tunes played beautifully.

I’ve used these recordings in the past as variant music for the standard quadrille figures, which they were structured to fit. But Paine’s original sheet music also included new figures for those who didn’t want to dance the usual ones, and they turned out to have some unusual figures which I quite like.

The booklet of liner notes for Music for Quadrilles includes instructions for each dance; the quadrille ones are clearly Ellis Rogers’ work. I mostly agree with those reconstructions, but they are bare-bones figure lists with no steps or details of performance. I have a few minor quibbles with figure interpretations and some of the musical repeats, and I think there are reconstruction issues with the fifth figure that are worth pointing out.
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January 1, 2018

Ten Years

At midnight on January 1, 2008, after a couple of weeks of fussing with a name and site design, I nervously clicked "Post" and officially launched Capering & Kickery with a discussion of how many times one needed to play a country dance to dance in historical style and a plan to slowly write out everything I knew about historical dance.

It's hard to believe it's been ten years.

Back when I started Kickery, I was warned that most individually-written blogs lasted only a year, maybe two at most, before folding. I've personally had a couple of others that have dropped by the wayside, slain by obsolescence or by my own lack of time. And nowadays blogs are quite out of fashion, displaced by social media platforms. But, somehow, Kickery has endured, and from that first short article it has grown a collection of hundreds covering a potpourri of historical dance topics from the sixteenth century to 1970s disco, though with a primary focus on my current interests in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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December 11, 2017

Half & Half: Seven Steps

“Seven steps” is actually something of a misnomer for this variation, which actually involves eight steps taken over two measures of half and half (5/4) time. Its original source, Frank H. Norman’s Complete Dance Instructor (Ottawa, 1914) lists it only as step “No. 2” (out of two) for the half and half. The Half and Half section of Norman’s book is credited to George E Rutherford.

The basic principle of the step is to take a single slow hesitating step, lasting three counts as usual (1-2-3), and then take seven quick steps on the last two beats of the first measure and all five beats of the second (4-5-1-2-3-4-5). Like the five-step variation, this is a very “busy” step that is best done to a very gentle tempo of half and half music.

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December 7, 2017

Half & Half: Pivot Turns

“If you wish to spin you must do so on the slow step, continuing forward on the last two counts.” — from Modern Dancing by Vernon & Irene Castle, 1914

One of the basic half and half steps which I did not cover in my long-ago post on basic traveling steps for the dance was the pivot turn, as distinct from turning waltz in half and half time. There aren’t all that many sources for half and half, so it’s mildly (very mildly) significant that this step is mentioned three different times. There’s the Castles’ succinct description quoted above. There’s a mention of it in a list of steps, or possibly a choreography, where it is given without any detail as “No. 3. pivot turn, right and left, 8 measures.” (from “Half and Half” by J. E. Miles, in Dance Mad or the Dances of the Day, 2nd edition, F. Leslie Clendenen (editor), 1914.) And there’s a full description as part of a mini-sequence which doesn’t actually work. Here’s the relevant part:

THE PIVOT TURN is made by stepping L. to side. C. 1.
Pivot 1/2 on ball of L. C. 2. 3. Walk forward. 4. 5.

(from “Half and Half” as taught by Castle Assistants, in Dance Mad or the Dances of the Day, 2nd edition, F. Leslie Clendenen (editor), 1914.)

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November 16, 2017

Double Grand Chain (a march or cotillion figure)

I first came across Double Grand Chain when flipping through Twentieth Century Cotillion Figures, by H. Layton Walker (Two Step Publishing Company, Buffalo, New York, 1912) for interesting cotillion (dance party game) figures. Like Winthrope, Double Grand Chain is not terribly game-like beyond the basic cotillion setup of dancing with one person and then finding a new partner, but it would make an interesting addition to a grand march for a group of reasonably skilled dancers.

Double Grand Chain was not original to Walker; it also appeared in all the editions of Allen Dodworth’s Dancing and its relations to education and social life running from 1885 to 1913 (the link is to the 1900 edition), which puts it firmly in the “late Victorian” category. Since it did reappear in 1912 separately from the Dodworth reprints, I’d still consider it legitimate for a ragtime-era event, and it is sufficiently innocuous in style that I wouldn’t be bothered by its use at a mid-nineteenth-century event either.

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November 2, 2017

Aladdin Quadrille

Like the New Scotia Quadrille, the Aladdin Quadrille is one of several single-figure quadrilles found in the “New, Enlarged, & Complete Edition” of D. (David) Anderson’s Ball-Room Guide (Dundee, this edition undated but probably c1886). This is a simple, fun figure that would fit easily into a Scottish-themed ball.

Despite there being various quadrille sets called the Aladdin Quadrilles, Anderson doesn’t seem to have had any specific music in mind. He notes only that it can be danced in 2/4 or 6/8.

Aladdin Quadrille (8 bars introduction + 64 bars x4)
8b Introduction/honors (not repeated)
8b All promenade round
4b Ladies advance to the center and retire
4b Gentlemen advance to the center and retire
8b All set to partners and turn by the right hand
8b Head couples advance and retire, then half right and left
8b Side couples advance and retire, then half right and left
8b Grand chain half round to places
16b All waltz (in duple time) around (see performance notes below)

The figure is danced four times, with the head couples leading on the first and third iterations and the side couples leading on the second and fourth.

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October 16, 2017

Un jeu d’échecs (a game of chess), 1810

Another themed quadrille described by Laure Junot, the Duchess of Abrantès, was the “game of chess” danced, or at least presented, at a masked ball in Paris in the February of 1810. The quadrille was also described in her Memoires de Madame la duchesse d’Abrantes, which were published and republished in multiple volumes in a variety of editions. The French text below was taken from an 1837 fourth edition published in Brussels, which may be found online here. A contemporary (1833) English translation is online here, but it is not a close enough translation and omits some lines, so I’ve done my own, with reference to it.

Junot spent more time in her memoirs complaining about the costumes and rehearsal time required for this quadrille than she did on the actual performance, but from her description, it seems like very few of the pieces (dancers) actually got to do much, unless perhaps they danced as they entered the board. But what little she describes does mention steps, and the costume descriptions give us a fairly good idea of how the dancers must have appeared: vaguely Egyptian pawns with tightly-wrapped skirts and sleeves like mummies and sphinx-like hairstyles, knights like centaurs with horse rumps made from wicker, rooks wearing wicker towers, and fools (bishops) in caps with bells.

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