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 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)

(more…)
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?

(more…)
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.

(more…)
November 1, 2009

What Did Jane Austen Dance?

Since early 19th century (“Regency”) dance is one of my particular specialties, I get many questions that boil down to either “what did Jane Austen dance?” or “did Jane Austen dance _____?” So let’s see what I can do for a general answer.

I can divide things loosely into three categories: what we know she danced, what she might have danced, and what she didn’t dance.

(more…)
October 26, 2009

Rock ‘n’ Cha

Ever so often I come across the oddest little novelties. The Rock’n’Cha is a conga-line type dance which was discussed in the January, 1958 issue of Dance Magazine. The cha-cha was first introduced in the 1950s, and it seems to have spawned some weird group variants (Cha-Cha Choo-Choo Caboose, anyone?) The notes for this dance were sent to the magazine by Chicago resident Louise Ege, who attributed them to Grace Hansen, Dance Coordinator and Professional Consultant for the Chicago YMCA and head of the ballroom committee of the Chicago National Associate of Dance Masters. Mrs. Ege claimed that Chicago teens loved the dance, with it even having “replaced the Bunny Hop in their affections.” I’m not sure what this says about either the taste of Chicago teens in early 1958 or the accuracy of Mrs. Ege’s observations of contemporary teen culture.

(more…)
September 26, 2009

Ballroom Marsupials

The most popular “animal dances” of the early 1900s appear to have been the Turkey Trot and Grizzly Bear. But the F. Leslie Clendenen’s compilation manual Dance Mad (St. Louis, 1914) offers a pair of one-step variations attributed to London dance teacher Walter Humphrey, who apparently found inspiration in the hopping of Australian marsupials. I’ve never found these variations in any other source, so it’s not clear to me how widespread they ever were. I would also have placed them a bit earlier, maybe 1908-1910, as by 1914 the animal dance fad was already well past and the smoother, more elegant style of Vernon and Irene Castle was making the one-step acceptable in respectable ballrooms. It’s possible that Mr. Humphrey and/or English dancers in general had not quite caught up with the latest American dance fads, or that Clendenen was not as fussy in compiling his book as its subtitle, “The Dances of the Day,” suggests.

For both variations, the dancers both face line of dance. It’s not clear whether they should retain joined hands in front or open up fully. I find the latter more graceful, but how much of a priority grace should be while hopping around a ballroom imitating a marsupial is debatable. Those wishing to study wallaby technique in detail may consult ~~this National Geographic video~~ this video of a wallaby hopping across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. (Edited 11/19/2025 to replace vanished video with a new one.)

(more…)
September 21, 2009

Famous Last Words

On the lighter side of dance research…

There’s plenty of silliness in historical dance manuals, ranging from mythological origins of dancing in general to apocryphal stories about the origins of particular dances. But none of that makes me laugh quite so much as a couple of lines in Foulsham’s Modern Dancing, by Maxwell Stewart, published in London around 1925 and ambitiously subtitled “A guide to everything the dancer old and young, skilled and unskilled, wants to know.” That was rather optimistic of Stewart; this particular dancer wishes he had included a lot more detail about some of the moves he described. But the following has got to be one of the most risible lines I’ve ever found in a dance manual.

(more…)
August 24, 2009

The Racket Waltz, or The Society
- Era: 1880s into very early 1900s
The simplest description of the racket waltz is that it is the step of the one-slide racket converted to waltz time, with the extra beat of music per measure added to the initial slide. Edna Witherspoon, in The Perfect Art of Modern Dancing (1894), gives it the alternate title “The Society” and notes that “if thoughtlessly executed, it is a most ungraceful and unattractive dance.” Allen Dodworth, in Dancing and its Relation to Education and Social Life (1885), adds that “The racket, in this accent, is that unfortunate dance known as the “Society,” and is the medium through which not a few show an entire absence of good taste in motion.” Honestly, it’s not that bad! It does not seem to have been quite as popular or well-known as the galop–time rackets I described earlier this summer, but it is an easy dance that works well to brisk waltz music.
(more…)
August 14, 2009

The Line Hustle

Line dances don’t really get all that difficult, but there are a few longer ones with more complicated and less repetitive step sequences. One of these is the Line Hustle. These instructions are taken from Carter Lovisone’s The Disco Hustle (1979) and claim to be “the original form used as the basis for all variations of the Line Hustle.” I would take this claim with a grain of salt, since Lovisone’s book came out several years after the dance’s first wave of popularity in the mid-1970s.

This version of the Line Hustle is a fifty-two beat dance. My favorite music for it is Van McCoy’s 1975 hit, “The Hustle,” a snippet of which is included below:

The song is available on several different compilations, including The Hustle & The Best Of Van McCoy (paid link). I like to wait out the intro and start at the “do the hustle!” verbal cue. But as usual with line dances, the Line Hustle will also work to just about any disco tune.

(more…)
August 8, 2009

Foxes in Boxes

Among the moves described by Vernon and Irene Castle in their Victor Records for Dancing mini-manual (1914) are a trio of moves that are essentially box steps or fragments thereof: a so-called cortez (a.k.a. sentado or syncopated step), a double cortez, and a left-turning waltz. The rhythm is specified as QQS: three steps and hold. These make a nice set of variations to throw into basic walking-trotting sequences and two-step sequences when dancing a 1910s-style foxtrot.

(more…)