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

July 15, 2015

We have a problem here…

Written on the Trans-Siberian Railroad somewhere between Novosibirsk and Moscow. Just had to mention that!

At left is a page from a dance manual published in Philadelphia in 1904: Dancing Without an Instructor, by one Professor Wilkinson. This is one of the challenges I gave to the students in my just-completed reconstruction class in Novosibirsk. Could they reconstruct this version of the racket?

If you want to test yourself with it, click the image to enlarge it, but before diving into the technical details of the dance, take a step back mentally and read through the instructions as a whole. Notice anything weird?

You should.

Don’t click through to the rest of the post until you think you’ve got it.

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June 15, 2015

Mr. Faurot’s Hesitation Waltz

This hesitation waltz sequence by Seattle dance teacher George G. Faurot (c1879-1954) was published in both editions of F. Leslie Clendenen’s compilation Dance Mad (St. Louis, 1914). Faurot himself was a native of Lima, Ohio, where his uncle Ben discovered oil and his brother Lee eventually became mayor. Faurot Park in Lima was donated by Ben and is named for him.

According to George’s obituary, he fought in the Spanish-American War and then had a career in the oil industry before moving to Seattle, where he ran the Faurot Studio of Dancing with his wife, Nellie, for thirty years. The Faurots’ residence in the late 1930s is now a historical site in Seattle. The building that housed their dance studio, the Oddfellows Building, still stands and is still home to a dance studio, Century Ballroom, though the Faurot Ballroom itself seems to have been in the first-floor space which is now the Oddfellows Cafe.

Interestingly, Lee, before becoming mayor, also seems to have dabbled in dance teaching before ending up in the insurance business and politics. A family passion?

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June 8, 2015

One for the ponies!

I've been waiting for most of my life for another horse to win the Triple Crown, and, much to my chagrin, when it finally happened I was working and therefore missed seeing it live even on television, let alone indulging my secret hope to one day see such a thing in person. Arrgh!

I will console myself by free-associating to a foxtrot variation: the Cavalry Charge!

The first thing to be aware of is that Edna Stuart Lee, in her Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916), calls the following sequence "The Pony Trot" and claims that it was the original foxtrot step:

1234 Four walking steps
1&2& Four trots

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January 26, 2015

Snowball fight!

In honor of tonight’s incoming blizzard, and because I’ve been thinking lately about cotillion figures that scale up well for large groups, let’s talk about Les Boules de Neige. For those who don’t speak French, that would be…The Snowballs!

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January 8, 2015

Dancing Mormons

I come across little tidbits of information about dance history in the oddest places.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, better known as the Mormon church, places a premium on genealogical research for theological reasons. This has inspired one Mormon family, the Blakes, to create a website about their immediate ancestors.

Among the reminiscences on their site is an interesting excerpt from the book In Search of Zion: King, Youngberg and Allied Families by Richard K. Hart, which apparently features the recollections of one James King, a friend of Blake ancestor Walter Frank Blake (1880-1965).

According to the information on the Blake family site, Walter Blake was born in England and immigrated to Utah with his parents at the age of two. His mother converted to the Mormon faith in the 1880s and Walter and his siblings followed suit. The King family, already Mormons, were neighbors and friends. James King recounted his memories of life in turn-of-the-century Utah farm country to his wife in 1959. Though the stereotype of Mormons is rather stuffy, apparently social dancing was (and is) allowed and even encouraged, provided that it doesn’t get too intimate or suggestive.

King’s stories of life near Utah’s Great Salt Lake include a wonderful glimpse of rural dancing around 1900:

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December 29, 2014

A dancing master’s epitaph

From a book of “select and remarkable” epitaphs published in 1757:

On Mr. Maddox, a Dancing-Master, and his Wife.
They were lovely and pleasant in their Lives, and in
their Deaths they were not divided.
Hail happy Pair! predestin’d long to prove
The chastest Raptures of connubial Love!
Who took no Step thro’ Life’s perplexed Dance,
But what would well your mutual Bliss advance!
Who figur’d not a Plan but what was meant,
Again to join your Hands with fresh Content.
Tho’ ceremonious–yet with Ease still fraught;
The very Image of the Art you taught !
Polite in all Life’s mazy Measures try’d,
As the gay Partner to his destin’d Bride.
Twice thirty Years in gentle Wedlock past,
The first was not so happy as the last !
Still each to each so complaisantly gay,
As raptur’d Lovers on their Nuptial Day !
All wing’d with Down their Years advancing roll,
And still improve this Unison of Soul!
Unvarying–courtly to his latest Breath,
He gave his Spouse Precedence e’en in Death.
The truest Honours to each other given,
He just surviv’d, then led her up to Heaven.

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December 11, 2014

Fox Trot Hats

I’ve been looking for something amusing to wind up the centennial year of the foxtrot, and I found it in the November 17, 1914, issue of The Richmond Times-Dispatch: some fashion advice for the foxtrotting ladies in the store advertisement shown at left:

Fox-Trotting Without a Fox Trot Hat
is like joy riding on a steam roller.

How do I follow up a line like that? I can only suggest reading the rest of the ad (click to enlarge) for more delightfully fulsome language.

For historical dancers, this is a reminder that during the 1910s, dancing in a hat at an afternoon thé dansant was perfectly proper, though judging by the advertisement, either not everyone agreed or not everyone succeeded in finding a suitable hat:
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December 8, 2014

“agoing to dance the spanish dance”

“…George Cowls says tell Nancy he is right in his glory to day and when he comes home he is agoing to dance the spanish dance with you and he says tell Abby he is agoing through ceders swamp with her…”
— Pvt. Jairus Hammond to Nancy Titus, December 8, 1862

Here’s rare documentation of a specific dance: a mention in a letter from a Union soldier during the American Civil War to his sister, dated one hundred and fifty-two years ago today, that another man plans to dance the Spanish Dance (previously described here) with her when he returns. There has been no real doubt that the Spanish Dance was actually danced and was as popular as its frequent appearance in dance manuals suggests. I have found it listed on dozens of dance cards. But this is another little piece of documentation demonstrating that its popularity extended well down the social scale.

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December 4, 2014

The Yale Schottische, 1895

As previously noted, I always have an eye out for dances named after Yale University and Yale-related dance ephemera. Walking through the campus earlier today on my way to a meeting reminded me that I had another Yale-themed dance to discuss: the Yale Schottische, which was published with the eponymous sheet music in 1895 and dedicated to the Yale University Football Association. Yale has one of the oldest football programs in the world and was a regular national title winner in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Some of the players pictured at left (click to enlarge) are probably among the several Yalies of the 1890s chosen as All-Americans or inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame. (More details about Yale’s place in football history may be found here.)

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November 3, 2014

A Montréal Gavotte, 1918

The classic schottische of the mid-nineteenth century and its later incarnation, the Barn Dance (a.k.a. the Military Schottische and the Pas de Quatre) had mostly faded from fashionable ballrooms by the late 1910s. But a few very simple schottisches or schottische-like sequences turn up now and then in dance manuals and on sheet music of the 1910s, often under the name “gavotte”, a musical form with the same 4/4 meter characteristic of the schottische.

La Gavotte is a short sequence taken from Professor A. Lacasse’s La Danse apprise chez soi, published in Montréal in 1918. There were many dances called “gavotte” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not all of them in 4/4 time, so while this particular gavotte may have been locally popular in Montréal, it should not be considered any sort of definitive gavotte for the 1910s or any other era.

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