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

October 23, 2014

A 3/4-time grapevine sequence, 1914

I’ve had sequence dances on my mind recently after some discussion earlier this week, which reminded me of this little sequence from the the second edition of F. Leslie Clendenen’s 1914 compilation Dance Mad. It appears there under the name “American Grapevine Dance” by Anthony J. Giaconia of Springfield, Massachusetts. I know nothing about Mr. Giaconia except that on June 24, 1912, he was quoted on the front page of The Indianapolis News as one of a convention of dancing masters appalled by dances like the Grizzly Bear and Bunny Hug. He found some dancing in a park there so disgraceful that it ought to be stopped “for the sake of decency”.

The Grapevine Dance is so short (only eight bars) that it doesn’t feel long enough to be a sequence dance all on its own, but the two measures in which the dancers move directly into the center of the room and back make it mildly risky to use simply as a variation; moving abruptly back and forth across the line of dance can cause problems for dancers coming up behind. Doing this from an “inside lane” near the center of the room will be more polite if it is not being done in unison as a sequence dance.

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October 15, 2014

Battle Confetti

One hundred and sixteen years ago today, the magazine Harper’s Bazaar published a brief blurb predicting fashionable dances for the winter would be of “military tone”, no doubt influenced by the burst of patriotic fervor occasioned by the brief Spanish-American War, which by the autumn of 1898 had moved into peace negotiations. The article gives a quick peek at what dances interested Americans (or, at least, American dancing masters) in the second-to-last winter of the nineteenth century.

Unsurprisingly, the writer acknowledges the “extraordinary popularity” of the two-step. The five-step schottische is called a “new” schottische, which is inaccurate, since it had been around since at least 1890, when it was included in M. B. Gilbert’s Round Dancing, and possibly as early as 1871 under a different name. The dance may have been receiving a fresh push from the assembled masters of The American Society of Professors of Dancing, whose meeting seems to have spurred this little notice. No other couple dances are mentioned.

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October 13, 2014

Ending a Grand March

In almost seven years of writing Kickery (has it really been that long?) I think I’ve only once said anything at all detailed about the Grand March, which was generally performed as the opening dance at American balls in the latter part of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, though occasionally it appears later on the program. Clearly an overview is overdue!

This isn’t it.

While working recently on the ball program for a pair of Civil War-era balls to be held in Gettysburg in November, I started wondering idly how many ways there were to end a Grand March. So I made a little list. I won’t be using most of these, alas; the Gettysburg balls are insanely crowded and thus do not lend themselves to really interesting Marches. But I thought it might be fun to share some of the possibilities.

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October 9, 2014

Basic Foxtrots from Edna Lee

Earlier this year I talked about nine different variations from the handy little booklet Edna Stuart Lee's Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916) in two mini-series, starting here (three posts) and here (two posts). My choice of sequences may have given the impression that Lee's collection was mostly odd little variations with (often) even odder names (Chaplin Trot, anyone?) That's because I was skipping over the simplest sequences given by Lee, since I have encountered them elsewhere and written about them, or similar sequences, in earlier posts.

Here, I'm going to give a quick rundown of eight very basic sequences that Lee included among her more unusual and/or unique ones so that it is clear that there was a certain basic repertoire overlapping what is found in many other sources.

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July 28, 2014

The Five Step York

The Five Step York, created by Indianapolis dancing master D. B. Brenneke, is yet another of the myriad variations for the York, one of the more durable and popular redowa/mazurka waltz variations of the late nineteenth century. It builds directly on Brenneke’s own New York sequence. While it is not a regular part of my “York set”, the Five Step York is an easy little variation to add to one’s York repertoire.

I am aware of only two published descriptions of the Five Step York: in English, in M. B. Gilbert’s Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890), and in French, in [George] Washington Lopp’s La Danse (Paris, 1903), where it is listed as “Le York à 5 Pas”. Gilbert puts it under redowa/mazurka variations, and Lopp lists it as a mazurka. Much of Lopp is simply a translation of Gilbert, but he differs just enough to add either clarity or confusion to some of the descriptions. In this case, I believe that both Gilbert and Lopp have flaws in their descriptions, but I can make two reasonable guesses as to what the actual sequence should be.

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July 21, 2014

Hop, hop, foxtrotters!

Concluding my exten ded cele bra tion of the foxtrot‘s centennial year: more about the hop-turn!

A few years ago, I considered hopping in the 1910s foxtrot to be a relatively obscure practice — I’d only ever found one sequence with a hop in it and had only a brief mention in a newspaper article to reassure me that it was not just a one-couple oddity. But looking through Edna Stuart Lee’s Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916), there are actually several sequences that include hops, including two that are strikingly similar to the previously described Bassett/Elliott hop-turn.

Here are two more ways to, in the words of the newspaper article, “make our turn with a quick, fast hop” while foxtrotting.

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July 10, 2014

Thinking in Fives

I spent a lot of time thinking about quintuple-meter (5/4 or 5/8 time) dances earlier this year, though not much of it showed up on Kickery at the time. Since historical dance description and terminology are not standardized, there’s an important distinction to keep in mind for all dances with some association with the number five:

Five steps (or movements) in a dance do not necessarily imply 5/4 or 5/8 time.
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July 7, 2014

On the Exclusive in Dancing, 1834

The English and French seem never to have been shy about taking sly little pokes at each other. In 1834 a New York newspaper reprinted from an unnamed London paper an article, “On the Exclusive in Dancing”, which took aim at French ballroom etiquette. Apparently the French were questioning the propriety of the country dance:

[The French] appear to be growing fastidious in their amusements, and have learned to be English enough to question certain minor points of propriety and etiquette in their public balls; as, for instance, whether it be proper for a gentleman to resign the hand of his partner to contact with strangers for the mere preservation of a figure in a country dance,

and had in fact discarded country dances completely, in favor of

some more conjugal kind of movement, either waltzes, mazurkas, or galopes, that rivet a couple together for a whole evening till (we would fain hope) they were sick of one another and themselves.

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June 26, 2014

End-of-fellowship thoughts

I wrapped up my New England Regional Fellowship at the end of May, and other than a few loose research ends that I will be making more library trips this summer and fall to wind up, I've mostly completed the initial stage of my cotillon project: gathering lots and lots of cotillons so that I have enough of them to make some meaningful analysis of the genre.

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June 16, 2014

The Castles’ Paul Jones

In 1914, Victor Records made a celebrity-endorsement deal with Vernon and Irene Castle, “the greatest exponents of Modern Dancing who supervise the making of Victor Dance Records”. The company put out a little booklet, Victor Records for Dancing, which included short instructions for various couple dances (including the brand-new foxtrot) plus an enthusiastic note from Vernon Castle about the superiority of Victor records and the indispensibility of the Victrola in teaching classes.

The instructions for each dance were accompanied by a convenient list of suitable Victor recordings. Tucked at the end of the book were instructions for a country dance and a Paul Jones circle mixer “as taught at the Castle School of Dancing, New York City”.

In the past, I’ve discussed a very simple 1903 two-step circle mixer and a more complex English Paul Jones from the 1920s. The Castles’ version is quite similar to the 1903 one, but it’s physically rather livelier while mentally less taxing; the dancers don’t have to count.

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