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

November 12, 2015

A ball in Milwaukee, 1847

One of the weirder books I’ve ended up flipping through lately is Milwaukee Under the Charter, From 1847 to 1853, Inclusive, by James S. Buck. This is the third volume of a series on the Pioneer History of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which amasses a bizarre collection of historical trivia about life in Milwaukee in the early to mid-nineteenth century. Buck is not exactly a scintillating author, and he jumps around somewhat randomly from events to people to what seems like the history of every building in the city. You get chapter summaries like this one for the year 1847:

Opening Address—Democratic Policy and its Effects—War on the Constitution—Meeting of January 30th, at the Council Room—L. P. Crary—S. P. Coon—Job Haskall—Ordinance Passed—Business Directory—Sketch of J. F. Birchard and of Edward Emery—R. W. Pierce—Graffenburg Pills—Bridges—Sketch of Hon. J. H. VanDyke—McGregor Female Seminary—August Greulich—Badger Supper—An Old Settler—David Bonham—Political—Noonan vs. King—The Earthquake—Steamers—April Election—Retirement of Solomon Juneau—Reliance Works of Decker & Saville—Sketch-New Board—Jonathan Taylor—Torch Light Procession—Report of School Commissioner—John B.Smith—Incidental—Council Proceedings—Tavern Inspectors—Leonard Kennedy, Sketch of—Report of Finance Committee—Brick Sidewalks—Painting a Painter—The Empire Mill—Assessments—Legislative—Fall Election—William Shew’s Speech—Exports and Imports.

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October 29, 2015

Mysteries of the Manitou

I keep saying that I don’t think there’s much need to memorize all the variations in sources like Melvin Ballou Gilbert’s Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) in order to accurately reenact the social dance of late nineteenth-century America. But I keep reconstructing and posting them anyway, since I find there’s often something to learn by examining how they’re constructed. The dance published as the “Maniton”, which I am fairly sure is a typo for “Manitou”, has two elements that caught my interest: a major change between sources and an unusual use of the “new waltz”, the late nineteenth-century version of the box step that I’ve been thinking and writing about recently.

First, the name. In Gilbert, both the index and the title within the text are “Maniton”. As far as I can tell, that just isn’t a word. In the other source for the dance, George Washington Lopp’s La Danse (Paris, 1903), much of which is merely a French translation of Gilbert, it is “Maniton” in the text but “Manitou” in the index. I think the latter is the actual name of the dance and/or its intended music. Switching “n” for “u” is a typesetting error I’ve encountered elsewhere.

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October 21, 2015

The Trio

Since I frequently have to deal with an imbalance in numbers between the ladies and the gentlemen at nineteenth century balls, I’m always interested in dances that use a trio formation. This can be one gentleman with two ladies or vice-versa, though the former is the more common situation.

This dance, simply called “The Trio”, appears in at least two editions of Elias Howe’s American dancing master, and ball-room prompter (Boston, 1862 and 1866). Howe’s instructions are a bit vague and neglect to mention the actual timing of the figures, but a little experimentation convinced me that the following reconstruction is workable and fun. This is an extremely easy dance, good for groups of beginners.

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October 15, 2015

Respect the box step

I’ve been thinking a lot over the last few years about the underlying skills needed for various forms of social dance. A critical one is the ability to shift steps between time signatures, as I discussed a couple of months ago. And one of the best examples of that is what happened with the much-maligned “box step” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

The box step doesn’t get a lot of respect among historical dancers in America because it is strongly associated with modern ballroom dance studio practices. That’s unfortunate, because I’m increasingly convinced that its historical incarnation, the “new waltz” (in contrast to the older valse à trois temps with its pirouette), is extremely important to know for anyone studying American social dancing of the 1880s-1910s. Despite this, it often gets pushed aside in favor of the older style, which is usually taught first and thus becomes the default social waltz in modern reenactment. That’s not wrong, exactly; it’s not like the older waltz vanished in favor of the new. But I think that we ought to be spending a lot more time on the new waltz, because it appears to be one of the fundamental building blocks of the social dance of the entire late Victorian/Edwardian/ragtime era.

Let’s look at how the box step got used historically:

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September 28, 2015

Trips to Paris

This post is for Allison, Graham, and Alan, who know and care.

If I expect to get anything done in my life, I cannot spend my time wandering around the net getting irritated by the dance history errors. But I do pay attention when they arrive by email. So I noticed when a mailing list query about how best to dance “A Trip to Paris” at a Jane Austen ball appeared in my inbox. Happily, I was neither the first nor the last list member to jump in with some version of “That dance is from Walsh, from 1711, and does not belong at a Jane Austen ball!” (Jane Austen lived from 1775-1817, and her dancing days would have started in the early 1790s.)

I did get intrigued by one comment in the ensuing discussion: that the dance had been “republished by Thomas Cahusac in 24 Country Dances for 1794” and therefore might have been danced by Jane Austen. That’s a terrifically specific citation — hurray! — but I instantly doubted it, since (1) very few dances or tunes of the earlier style were reprinted that late (young people, then and now, not being particularly into dancing their great-grandparents’ dances), and (2) I already knew there were other tunes called “A Trip to Paris” and other dance figures printed with them. As another list member pointed out, it’s a very generic sort of title.

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September 21, 2015

A ballroom brawl, 1804

Going beyond simple rudeness in the ballroom, here’s a wonderful account of a French-American culture clash turned violent at a ball in New Orleans on January 23, 1804. Aside from showing what people of that era would fight over and how hair-trigger tempers were in New Orleans in particular at that time, it also usefully documents some ballroom dance practices of the era. Slowly piecing together such tidbits eventually allows me to draw larger conclusions.

I’m not going to explain the whole background of the Louisiana Purchase, which transferred an enormous swathe of North America from French to American control in 1803, but it is worth noting that the formal transfer of New Orleans itself took place on December 20, 1803, only a month or so before the incident described. There is a suggestion earlier in the article that feelings were running high among the French in the wake of (perceived?) American disrespect during the replacement of the French flag with the American one. There had already been a “slight misunderstanding” at a previous assembly on January 6th. The fight on the 23rd is a small example of the sort of cultural conflicts that would be a problem in New Orleans society for decades afterward.

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September 18, 2015

Tired of the company, 1789

I’ve recently been reminded by some discussions on a mailing list that there are plenty of people who don’t really have much grasp of the social context of dance in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century or that a ball could be a much more complicated and socially perilous event than just a bunch of folks getting together and having a nice time dancing.

Here’s an interesting example of rudeness on the dance floor wielded as a social weapon.

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August 27, 2015

Thoughts on teaching polka and polka redowa

I recently had the opportunity to watch another teacher do a general introduction to the standard mid-nineteenth century couple dances. That’s a rarer event than you’d imagine. Historical dance teachers aren’t that thick on the ground, and even at multi-teacher festivals, either there aren’t any introductory classes or I’m busy teaching my own classes during them.

Watching this class reminded me of something I’ve been meaning to write up for months about altering how we teach this repertoire. This doesn’t apply to the one-night-stand sort of teaching gig, but I think it’s something other teachers with ongoing classes may find useful.

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August 6, 2015

The Dip Schottische

The Dip Schottische is one of the minor schottische sequences created by dancing masters in the early 1910s. In this case, the author was one I. C. Sampson, of Lynn, Massachusetts, and the dance was published in both the first and second editions of F. Leslie Clendenen’s compilation Dance Mad (St. Louis, 1914). Unfortunately, the dance instructions have one major ambiguity that makes it very difficult to come to a definitive reconstruction: what, exactly, does “turn” mean? Here’s the original language for one move in the dance:

“One Step” turn (pivot, four steps, two measures)

The problem is that there is no single “one step turn”. There are at least two very plausible candidates: the spin and the traveling turn, better known today as pivots. If I had to guess which would be the “one step turn”, I’d guess the spin, but there are some problems with that in regard to this particular sequence. But there are problems with the traveling turn as well. Here’s some of what I considered when trying to choose between them:

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July 27, 2015

Early Foxtrot: The Castle Favorite

Along with the standard early variations that come up repeatedly in the 1910s, there are also numerous little foxtrot variants that turn up only once and were probably not generally popular. Despite the name, the "Castle Favorite", presumably a reference to the famous ballroom dancers and teachers Vernon and Irene Castle, does not turn up in any source I have that is actually by the Castles. Instead, it appears in Edna Stuart Lee's Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916), a wonderful little source for unusual early foxtrot variations. I don't necessarily rule out a connection with the Castles, but given how creative Lee was with variation-names, I am not taking it as a given without some actual proof.

Lee calls this a "rather difficult step, requiring considerable practice and possibly not adapted to ordinary social dancing". That seems an exaggerated level of concern to me; it's not difficult to dance or to lead, and I see no reason not to include it in social dancing other than it being too uncommon to bother learning.

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