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

December 22, 2011

Bricklayer’s Hornpipe
- Era: 1850s-1890s, America (New England)
Here’s an easy American contra dance of the Civil War era found in three Boston sources. Two are manuals by Elias Howe: Howe’s Complete Ballroom Handbook (Boston, 1858), and American Dancing Master and Ball-Room Prompter (Boston, 1862); the third is Professor L.H. Elmwell’s Prompter’s Pocket Instruction Book (Boston, 1892).

The figures for the dance, as given by Elmwell:

First couple cross over inside below second couple (4); Up on the outside and turn partners to places (4); First couple down the centre, back and cast off (8); First lady swing second gent (4); First gent swing second lady (4); Right and left (8).

The earlier instructions from the two manuals by Howe are virtually identical except that he describes the second move as “up on the outside swing partner to place”, a distinction I will address below, and the swings of the first lady/second gentleman and first gentleman/second lady as “quite round”.

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November 24, 2011

Harvest Home
- Era: American, late 1850s-early 1860s
In commemoration of the American Thanksgiving holiday, here’s a seasonally appropriate dance from the American Civil War era, a country dance for a set of six couples.

While I have not done a comprehensive search, I appear to have instructions for “Harvest Home” only in a pair of dance manuals by Elias Howe: Howe’s Complete Ballroom Handbook (Boston, 1858) and American Dancing Master and Ball-Room Prompter (Boston, 1862), which include far more country dances than is typical of other dance manuals of the time period. New England to this day retains a stronger country dance tradition, in the form of modern contra dance, than most other parts of the United States.
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November 17, 2011

Right & left: hands or not?

By the mid-nineteenth century, the only American dance manuals that contain large quantities of contradances are those from the New England area. Others may have a few here and there, but not the pages and pages of them, or entire manuals of nothing but contras. And, alas for reconstructors looking back 150 years later, the authors simply don’t bother to explain how to do specific figures. Presumably, everyone knew.

For most figures this isn’t a particular problem; they’re self-evident from the name or unchanged from earlier eras. But there is one figure that is especially ambiguous to dance historians, and that is “right and left” or “rights and lefts”. The major reason for the ambiguity is good old Thomas Wilson, a dancing master in early nineteenth-century London and a prolific author. Wilson wrote some of the most useful books on English country dance in all of dance history, with explanations, diagrams, and occasionally even steps for each figure. But he had a somewhat unusual take on right and left.

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November 10, 2011

Gothic Ancestry: A Country Dance Gallopade
- Era: 1830s, England
A year or so ago I published a discussion and reconstruction of the 1862 country dance gallopade known as The Gothic Dance and mentioned that there was a very similar dance in London dancing master J. S. Pollock’s c1830 manual, A Companion to La Terpsichore Moderne (Second Edition). I’ve taught this dance at the few 1830s events I’ve had an opportunity to run, but have not previously published a reconstruction.

The original instructions for the dance, one of a pair of country dance gallopades with numbers but no titles, are as follows:

No. 2. (4 parts)

All advance, retire, and cross over, changing places with partners — advance, retire, and cross over back again — first and second couples right and left — first couple gallopade down the middle to the bottom of the dance, and remain at the bottom.

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July 20, 2011

Star Schottische

One of the myriad minor schottische variations described in M.B. Gilbert’s Round Dancing (1890), is notable as the earliest appearance I’ve noticed of what has become the standard style for the first part of modern folk schottische: three running steps forward in “military position” (as described in my previous post, “À la Militaire“) rather than the step-close-step of the nineteenth century dance.

Gilbert attributes the Star Schottische to W.F. Mittman.

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December 30, 2010

The Original Gallopade

Like the Royal Gallopade, which I discussed here, the Original Gallopade was published in the Companion to La Terpsichore Moderne (Second Edition) by J. S. Pollock (London, c1830) and is a specific choreography that combines galop round the room, short quadrille-like figures, and a final sauteuse waltz. I’m not sure about the original part; I suspect that the original form of gallopade was nothing but galop. But that’s the title Pollock published it under.

Here is the general description of the dance, as given by Pollock:

La Gallopade may be danced with an unlimited number of persons, standing circularly in couples, following each other round the room. In the first figure, the gent. passes his right arm round the waist of the lady, and with his left hand takes hold of the lady’s right, the lady’s left hand resting on the gent’s. right shoulder — the whole of the couples being thus placed, the ladies are all on the outside of the circle. At the end of the first four bars, the lady crosses to the left of the gent. resting her right hand on the gent’s. left shoulder and holding hands in front as before, which brings the ladies to the inside of the circle. This figure is performed four times over, and occupies sixteen bar of the tune. At the fourth time, the whole of the party fall back in a circle, the ladies all standing on the right hand of their partners, ready to commence the figures as they occur. This dance is performed with a particular and characteristic step, of which it is impossible to give such a description, as would enable any one to dance it, without personal instruction.

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December 20, 2010

The English Liked to Waltz

A telegraph from London updates Americans on the early twentieth-century dance scene in London:

Waltz Popular in London

London, Jan. 2. — The lancers, quadrille, polka, and mazurka, once popular dances, have now almost disappeared from the ball programmes of fashionable London. The American two-step to some extent has taken the place of the polka, but the dance most in favor is the waltz, which, according to an Italian expert, the English people seem to dance like persons in a dream, so slowly is the time usually taken.

— The New York Times, January 3, 1909

English dance teachers felt that this state of affairs called for high-level assistance, as a later article alerts New Yorkers:

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December 13, 2010

Lowe’s Gallopade Quadrille

Here’s an easy and interesting quadrille taken from Lowe’s Ball-Conductor and Assembly Guide, Third Edition, published in Edinburgh by the “Messers. Lowe.” The manual is not dated, but internal references and the type of dances included suggest that it is from the late 1820s or early 1830s. Given the era, I would expect to dance the figures with early nineteenth century quadrille steps, but the steps and sequences required are few and easy.

The Gallopade Quadrille, or Quadrille Galope, is for the usual four couples in a square and consists of three figures, each with three parts. The format of each figure is:

16b    Galopade
16b    Various quadrille figures
16b    Sauteuse

This gives a length of 48bx3. Following the third figure, the dancers continue to sauteuse until the end of the music.

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November 5, 2010

Go Figure!

At our recent Regency Assembly, one of the dancers challenged my call of a “half figure eight” in a country dance, asking why it wasn’t called a “figure four”. Casey, being an experienced dancer, knew exactly why, but he has excellent comic timing, and the comment broke up the room for a moment.

A geekier question would be why I was using the term “half figure eight” rather than the more typical plain “half figure”. That was for added clarity for modern dancers, who may not be as familiar with the nuances of Regency terminology, in which a sentence like “The figure of the dance is a double figure made up of five figures, the first being the figure” makes perfect sense. Since it doesn’t for everyone, let’s figure out all those different usages of “figure”!

Although every Country Dance is composed of a number of individual Figures, which may consist of “set and change sides,” “whole Figure at top,” “lead down the middle, up again,” “allemande,” “lead through the bottom,” “right and left at top,” &c. yet the whole movement united is called the Figure of the Dance.
— Thomas Wilson, in The Complete System of English Country Dancing, London, c1815.

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October 24, 2010

Fixing Fandango

There’s a popular dance in the modern English country dance community which I often cite as a dance that has a Regency “feel” to it, albeit with some quibbles about the details. That doesn’t make it a Regency-era dance (it’s decades too early), but it’s an earlier version of the same style popular in the Regency and uses some figures that remained popular into the first quarter of the nineteenth century. That makes it a reasonable dance to use for a Regency/Jane Austen event in the absence of dancers and/or a caller who can handle dancing in actual period style. But it doesn’t make the modern dance a good historical reconstruction even for its own era (leaving aside how close that is or isn’t to the Regency era) without some major fixing up.

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