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 4, 2010

Royale gyneska with me, madam?

Sometimes while doing dance research, I come across something so amusing I have to share it. This time it’s a blurb from The New York Times on October 5, 1924 about an international conclave of dancing masters held in Paris which voted on the supposed dance of the year. This was a matter of sufficient import to warrant delivery of the results to the Times by special cable:

[The five-step], which received thirty-eight approving votes, is a mixture of the waltz and one-step and, as can be judged, somewhat involved. The huppa-huppa, on the other hand, is neo-Chilian, being a backward glide which brings the partners in close contact.

The winner of the third place was the royale gyneska…

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February 22, 2010

The Polish Galop
- Era: 1880s-early 1900s, New England & Paris
The so-called Polish Galop, which is neither Polish nor necessarily a galop, is one of those odd little variations that was the creation of a single dancing master and was not generally taken up by others. It is not Polish in origin; the name comes from the heel-clicking move it incorporates, which is typical of Polish dances such as the mazurka. Its creator, Maine dancing master and author M.B. Gilbert, explains in Round Dancing, published in 1890, that

The movements of this dance were arranged by me for special use in children’s classes, and I found the combination a pleasant innovation.

I also found it pleasant; it’s actually slightly less “busy” than a regular galop. And its ambiguity on where the turn (if any) happens is interestingly similar to that of the racket.

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February 7, 2010

A 1920s Medley Paul Jones

Most Paul Jones-style mixers are similar to the one found in the manual Dancing Made Easy (New York, c1919-1922): the dancers form a circle of couples, or possibly two concentric circles, each operating separately, if the numbers are too great. They perform a grand right and left, then at the leader’s signal dance a one-step with the next person in the chain. The 1903 Round Two-Step (described here) is quite similar, except that the dance of choice is a two-step.

But in the mid-1920s English manual Foulsham’s Modern Dancing, by Maxwell Stewart, a more elaborate version is described.

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February 2, 2010

Schottische à Pas Sauté

By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as the standard Victorian couple dances were becoming somewhat stale, there was a flurry of innovation among dancing masters attempting to come up with new variations, most of which do not appear to have caught on widely. In M.B. Gilbert’s 1890 tome, Round Dancing, he describes a variation, the Schottische à Pas Sauté, which resembles the old “doubling” of the schottische parts (as described in my review of the early schottische) in consisting only of “step-hops” but employs the recently stylish “military position”, as described in my previous post, “À la Militaire“, rather than using the closed position of the earlier era throughout. Gilbert footnotes this variation as the Hop Waltz, harking back to the jeté waltz of the Regency era.

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January 15, 2010

New York Bus Stop

I always end up reconstructing line dances when I have a relevant gig coming up. This time it's the Dance Flurry, where I will be teaching an entire session of disco line dances a month or so from now.

This is another short line dance, only twenty-four beats long. There are many, many dances called some version of "Bus Stop" — it seems every city or perhaps every club had its own special one. This is not the only dance I have found that's called the New York Bus Stop!

The source for this particular version is Let's Disco, no author given, published in 1978 by K-tel International, Inc. It's slightly unusual in that the quarter-turns at the end of each iteration are to the right rather than to the left and occur in mid-dance rather than at the end.

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January 2, 2010

A Promiscuous Figure: Flirtation
- Era: circa 1905
A while back I published a couple of posts on so-called “promiscuous figures,” which may be substituted into the first set of quadrilles for variety. The Flirtation figure is another of these, taken from English dancing master William Lamb’s How and What to Dance (London, 1903), an undated New York edition of which was published in the first decade of the 20th century.

The figure is probably intended as a finale figure, replacing the usual fifth figure, since it is entirely full-set moves and finishes with a galopade, typically included in finale figures.

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December 30, 2009

The Two-Slide Racket
- Era: 1880s into very early 1900s
I’m going to wrap up the year at Kickery with a different kind of racket waltz, the two-slide racket. This variant appears in at least two major and two minor sources in late nineteenth-century America, as listed at the bottom of this post. In the minor sources, the Cartier and Wehman books, which are compilations of dances from other sources, it is labeled “The Racquet”.

Both the two major sources, Dodworth and Gilbert, list the two-slide racket as a redowa- or mazurka-time dance, implying a different accent in the 3/4 music than in a regular waltz.

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December 20, 2009

An 1830s Galop Pattern
- Era: 1830s England
This new and fashionable dance, which it appears is of Russian origin, was first introduced into this country at His Majesty’s ball, St. James Palace, on the 11th June, 1829, when the Princess Esterhazy, the Earl of Clanwilliam, the Duke of Devonshire, and some of the foreign ministers exerted themselves in teachings its novel movements to the company, and was danced alternately with Quadrilles and Waltzing during the whole of the evening.

— J.S. Pollock, Companion to La Terpsichore Moderne (2nd ed), London, c1830

In an earlier post, I described the basic galop of the mid- to late 19th century as a series of slides and “chasing” steps with half-turns interspersed, commonly found in the pattern of four-slide galops, performed as follows:

2b Slide-close-slide-close-slide-close-slide (half-turn) (count: 1 & 2 & 3 & turn)
2b Slide-close-slide-close-slide-close-slide (half-turn) (count: 1 & 2 & 3 & turn)

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December 5, 2009

CD Review: The Regency Ballroom

The very short version of this review is: historical dance band Spare Parts‘ The Regency Ballroom is one of the very best and most diverse recordings available for Regency-era dance music, and everyone should go out and get their own copy to support the making of such recordings.

The longer version follows.

But first, a disclaimer: the musicians of Spare Parts are personal friends, the band has played for my Regency Assemblies for the past several years, the selection of dances on this CD parallels the program of those Assemblies, and I served as one of the dance consultants for the recording and thus received a copy of it for free. Unsurprisingly, I am very pleased with it. I do not, however, receive any financial benefit from its sales or anything like that.

So what’s on the CD?

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November 14, 2009

The Royal Gallopade

The Royal Gallopade is an interesting mix of popular 1830s dances, with elements borrowed from country dances, galopades, and quadrilles, plus a concluding sauteuse waltz. My only source for it is the Companion to La Terpsichore Moderne (Second Edition) by J. S. Pollock, London (see update at end of post). It is undated, but the mix of dances and a textual reference to an 1829 event suggests the early 1830s. Pollock claims that gallopades “appear” to be of Russian origin. Among those he credits with their introduction is the sixth Duke of Devonshire, who was a close friend of both the Prince Regent (later George IV) and Czar Nicholas I and had traveled to the Russian court.

Pollock depicts the original gallopade as a choreographed sequence dance for a circle of couples with gallop interspersed with short dance figures and gives not only this original but gallopades in country dance and quadrille form. Fittingly, the Royal Gallopade is given a separate section of its own between the quadrille and country dance gallopades.

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