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

April 19, 2017

California Reel
There’s the famous Virginia Reel. There’s a Kentucky Reel. Why not a California Reel?

Unlike those other two reels, which are full-set dances, the California Reel is a normal progressive contra dance in the “Spanish Dance” format: couple facing couple, either down a longways set or in a circle. For this particular dance, a line of couples will work better.

I have five sources for California Reel, though two of them are simply later editions of other sources:
- The ball-room manual, containing a complete description of contra dances, with remarks on cotillions, quadrilles, and Spanish dance, revised edition, presumed to be by William Henry Quimby (Belfast, Maine, 1856; introduction signed W. H. Q)
- The ball room guide : a description of the most popular contra dances of the day, (Laconia, New Hampshire, 1858)
- The ball-room manual of contra dances and social cotillons, with remarks on quadrilles and Spanish dance, vest pocket edition, presumed to be by William Henry Quimby (Belfast, Maine, and Boston, 1863) (later edition of first source above, again signed W. H. Q.)
- Howe’s New American Dancing Master by Elias Howe (Boston, 1882)
- Howe’s New American Dancing Master by Elias Howe (Boston, 1892)
All of them have the same language in the description, varying only in punctuation and spelling. I am reasonably sure that the text in most of these sources was copied from either the 1856 source or some earlier source.

(more…)
April 17, 2017

The Western Normal Newport

The Western Normal Newport was named after the Western Association Normal School Masters of Dancing, a professional organization for dancing masters in western North America. “Normal school” sounds odd to modern ears, but historically, it didn’t mean what we’d imagine today. A normal school was a teacher-training school, where the “norms” of teaching and subject material were taught; more information on normal schools in general may be found here. The Western Association Normal School was founded in 1894 under Canadian dancing master John Freeman Davis, its first president.

My only source for the Western Normal Newport is George Washington Lopp’s La Danse (Paris, 1903). Lopp was from the northwestern USA and may have been a member of the Normal School or at least aware of it. The variation’s name, as given in French by Lopp, was Le Western Normal Newport, attributed to l’Association de l’École normale des Maîtres de danse de l’Ouest.

Given that the school was founded in 1894, the Western Normal Newport was obviously created too late to appear in M. B. Gilbert’s Round Dancing, published in Portland, Maine, in 1890, from which Lopp cribbed so much of his own book.

(more…)
April 10, 2017

Ripple, Ripple, Jersey

The Ripple Galop and the Jersey are two galop variations found in both M. B. Gilbert’s Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) and George Washington Lopp’s La Danse (Paris, 1903), a French translation of Gilbert with some additions and changes. Both variations use the late nineteenth-century American waltz-galop technique of a leap along the line of dance followed by a side step and a cut (or close of the feet) in the rhythm “1&2” rather than the slide-chassé of the galop, extending it into the “Newport” pattern of a leap along the line of dance followed by a series of side-closes, stretching the basic step-unit from one to two measures. The key difference is where the side steps and closes fall relative to the strong beats of the music:

galop: 1 (side) & (close) 2 (side)
waltz-galop: 1 (back/forward) & (side) 2 (cut/close)

The galop pattern ends in an open position. The waltz-galop normally does as well, but it can also be ended elegantly at the end of the music by a close of the feet rather than a cut. This alteration of the relationship of movements to music in dances of the “new waltz” family is what makes these variations interesting to me.

(more…)
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!

(more…)
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.

(more…)
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.

(more…)
February 14, 2017

A Valentine Cotillion

I return once more, in honor of Valentine’s Day, to H. Layton Walker’s delightful Twentieth Century Cotillion Figures (Two Step Publishing Company, Buffalo, New York, 1912), which is always guaranteed to provide me some interesting figures for imaginative dancers. Christmas was a bit disappointing, as holiday cotillion themes go. Valentine’s Day seems much more promising, since both cotillions and valentines have the goal of matching up people and thus ought to combine nicely!

Starting from the top of an evening’s program, Walker does provide a couple of useful suggestions for the grand march. I noted a few years ago that good leaders could get their marching dancers into formations such as the letters of the alphabet, or other geometric figures. Hearts, for example, lend themselves easily to being both created and escaped from by lines of dancers. Walker provided the diagrams at left for what he called a “Heart March Cotillion”, though the shape is so basic that one hardly needs the help.

(more…)
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.

(more…)
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!

(more…)
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…

(more…)