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

March 28, 2017

Mr. Layland’s Polka Contre Danse

There are at least five different dances in the second half of the nineteenth century whose name is some variation on the generic “polka country dance”. The one I’m looking at here was published as both “Polka Contre Danse” and just “Polka Contre”. Unusually, it is attributed to a particular dancing master, Mr. Layland, who was active in London in the mid-19th century. I’ve mentioned him before in the context of his mescolanzes. That makes it very much an English dance, despite its appearance in a couple of American dance manuals.

My first English source for the Polka Contre Danse, The Victoria Danse du Monde and Quadrille Preceptor, dates to the early 1870s, but I suspect that it actually dates back to the 1850s. It actually appears earlier in two of the manuals of Boston musician/dance caller/publisher Elias Howe, the earlier of which is from 1862. Howe was a collector and tended to throw dances from every book he collected into his own works, so I suspect there is an earlier English source somewhere, possibly by Layland himself. Maybe someday I’ll find it.

Until then, on with Polka Contre Danse!

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March 20, 2017

Susan’s Sociables

When I first wrote about the quadrille figure called the Sociable almost seven years ago, I noted that some sources offered slightly different sets of figures, and at least two suggested that the choice of figures was up to the caller:

“No positive rule as to what figure shall be called in the Quadrille Sociable. The choice is left entirely to the prompter.” (Brookes, L. De G. Brookes on Modern Dancing. New York, 1867)

“Prompters often call figures in the ‘Sociable’ to suit their fancy, introducing the ‘Star Figure,’ ‘Grand Chain,’ etc.” (De Garmo, William. The Dance of Society. New York, 1875)

I rarely exercise the option to call variant figures; my habit has been to do the most common four-figure sequence twice over, once for the ladies to progress and once for the gentlemen, with an eight-bar “All chassez” and honors coda at the end. Including introductory honors, this calls for a structure of 8b + 32bx8 + 8b. Working with live musicians, I can have music played to fit this pattern exactly. Or, if I am using the Sociable as the final figure of a quadrille, the short version with the progressive figures done only once (ladies progressing) is plenty, and since 8b + 32bx4 + 8b is a common finale structure, if necessary, it is easy to find a recording with that pattern.

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February 18, 2017

Early foxtrot: the drag step

It’s been quite some time since I’ve written up any early foxtrot variations, so here’s a simple but stylish one from 1914 to add to your repertoire!

Dancer Joan Sawyer, owner of the Persian Gardens nightclub in New York City, called this the “drag step”, but unlike the drag or draw steps found in other dances of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the feet are not just closed heel to heel. Instead, the closing foot is tucked behind (his) or in front of (hers) the other. Here’s Sawyer’s description of the drag step and the following “trot”, with the accompanying illustration at left:

The gentleman slides the left foot out to his left as though he were going to walk sideways. He then drags his right foot over back of the heel of the left foot, coming up slightly on the toes at the end of the movement, and breaks into a forward “trot” of four steps, gentleman starting the first trot step with is left foot…The lady you see slides her right foot out to her right, she then points the toe of her left foot over in front of her right foot, throwing her weight on to the left foot, then trots backward four steps, sliding the right foot back first.

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February 5, 2017

A St. Louis Hesitation Waltz (1914)

The generically named One Step Hesitation is a short hesitation waltz sequence that appeared in the second edition of the collection Dance Mad, or the dances of the day, compiled by F. Leslie Clendenen and published in St. Louis in late 1914. It is subtitled “As Recommended by St. Louis Association Dancing Masters”, and with no author listed, may have come from the hand of Clendenen himself.

Since the One Step Hesitation is almost entirely in the slowest possible type of hesitation (one step per bar of music), it calls for very fast waltz music or it will drag badly. I prefer 180 beats per minute and up for this type of hesitation waltz.

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January 12, 2017

Waltzing Around

A recent mailing list discussion centered on how to quickly teach people to do a "waltz-around", the style of country dance progression in which two couples waltz around each other once and a half times. This is most famously part of the mid- to late-nineteenth-century Spanish Dance, as well as other American waltz contra dances (such as the German Waltz and Bohemian Waltz). It dates back at least as far as the late 1810s to early 1820s in England, when Spanish dances were an entire genre of country dances in waltz time, and both they and ordinary waltz country dances featured this figure, sometimes under the names "poussette" or "waltze". I expect it goes even further back on the European continent, but I haven't yet pursued that line of research.

As a dancer, the waltz-around has always been one of those figures that I just…do. I'd observed that it's difficult for beginners to master the tight curvature of the circle and making one and a half circles in only eight measures, but as an experienced waltzer, I've long been able to do it instinctively. And I'd never broken down precisely what I did or worked out how to explain it to others.

So I suppose it's about time!

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December 26, 2016

Seasonal Cotillions

Once more, some cotillions, this time to wrap up the year with midwinter cheer! As with the North Pole figures, these are taken from H. Layton Walker’s Twentieth Century Cotillion Figures (Buffalo, New York, 1912). This trio of figures is pure fun, however, with no special historical significance. Three figures aren’t enough to comprise an entire party on their own, but mixed with standard, non-winter-themed figures, they add a nice seasonal touch.

But first, let’s let’s decorate the ballroom with a winter theme…

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December 15, 2016

Seeking the North Pole…

In honor of the freezing cold winter weather, I’m returning to H. Layton Walker’s Twentieth Century Cotillion Figures (Two Step Publishing Company, Buffalo, New York, 1912) for a pair of cotillion figures themed around the then-current news of the attempts by explorers Robert Peary and Frederick Cook to be the first to reach the North Pole in 1908-1909. At the time Walker’s book was written, there was a lively conflict going on between the two men as to who could claim the polar laurels. Since then, both accounts have been discredited to varying degrees, but it seems to still be something of an ongoing debate among scholars. There’s an interesting account of the two expeditions and the contemporary debate at the Smithsonian Magazine website, which I recommend for anyone wanting more historical perspective.

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December 5, 2016

Ladies leading, 1898

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about some of the tidbits of evidence of ladies or gentlemen dancing in same-gender couples in Regency-era ballrooms. I’m returning to the topic of same-gender dancing with an interesting article I discovered in an issue of a late-nineteenth-century American dance magazine, The Two Step, published at the time by dancing master and author H. N. Grant, out of Buffalo, New York.

The June, 1898, issue (Vol. 5, No. 47) includes a short essay on an important topic: “May a Lady Dance Backward.” It opens with a strong statement in favor:

Should a lady be taught to use the backward step in the waltz?

Yes we say, most emphatically yes.

That opens up all sorts of interesting questions, doesn’t it? Were ladies not generally even taught to waltz backward? Was that actually controversial?
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November 28, 2016

A miscellany of mescolanzes

I don’t often get asked to write about particular topics on Kickery, but I recently received, via the comments here, a request from a teacher at Mrs. Bennet’s Ballroom, a historical dance group in London, UK, for a few of my favorite figures for mescolanzes, the four-facing-four country dance format I surveyed earlier this year. Since the focus of the group seems to be the Regency era, I’ll stick with figures from manuals by London dancing master G. M. S. Chivers, which are from the very tail end of the official Regency period (1811-1820) and a few years after.

As I discussed in my earlier survey, Chivers seems to have really liked the mescolanze format, and a few other dancing masters and authors picked it up, but other than the special case of La Tempête, I can’t really say with confidence that mescolanzes were a popular or even common dance form in nineteenth-century England. But the format appears across enough different sources that I’m comfortable with using it sparingly to add variety for the late Regency and immediate post-Regency era. I don’t ever do more than one mescolanze at a ball, however.

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November 24, 2016

Giving thanks!

It's that time of year again…the start of the (American) winter holiday season, and the culturally-ordained time to give thanks!

This year a big thank-you goes to my wonderful Patrons, whose financial support of this blog through Patreon keeps me researching and writing as well as providing a level of emotional support that's really helpful for a freelancer during those times when I'm curled up alone trying to work and wondering if anyone actually values what I write or appreciates the enormous effort that it takes to blog for nearly nine years and well over a quarter-million words. Your support says that you do, and that's valuable far beyond the money involved.

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