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

May 15, 2014

Two Easy Foxtrot Hesitations

Continuing my little foxtrot miniseries, here are two more very easy hesitation variations from Edna Stuart Lee’s Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916).

The “Rock-a-Bye” is a single hesitation, as described for the one-step by Albert Newman in Dances of To-day (Philadelphia, 1914), but done twice at double speed with four walking steps as a preface. What that actually means in practice:

1234    Four walking steps (starting left)
1&       Step forward left, rock back onto right foot
2&       Rock forward onto left, rock back onto right

These are the gentleman’s steps; the lady starts on the right foot and moves backward along line of dance.

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May 12, 2014

Twinkle, Twinkle: Fast and Slow
Era: 1910s

Dances: Foxtrot, One-Step, Hesitation Waltz
2014 marks one hundred years since the foxtrot made its first big splash, so it’s very timely for me to have come across a copy of Edna Stuart Lee’s Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916). This is by far the largest single collection of 1910 foxtrot step sequences I’ve ever found in one place, and many of them are completely new to me.

Lee’s sequences were billed as “suitable for the ballroom, gymnasium, or playground, as well as for private exercise at home, either with or without a partner.” While several of them match foxtrot variations that I’ve previously discussed, they’re given a poetic new set of names. Can anyone guess which common sequences Lee endows with names like the Meditation Glide, Barcarolle, and Viola Dana?

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April 28, 2014

Two-Stepping en français

As previously noted, European descriptions of American dances like the late nineteenth-century two-step are sometimes more helpful than American ones. Having spent more time than expected this past weekend speaking French in Toronto (with a bunch of folks from Montréal), I’m inspired today to point out a couple of American-influenced descriptions of the two-step from Paris around 1900.

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April 10, 2014

CD Review: Grandview Victorian Orchestra

I ordered the Grandview Victorian Orchestra‘s CD Elegant Music from Times Gone By in the wake of a pleasant email exchange with musical director John Reading about quadrille music last autumn. The album is a mix of country (contra) dance medleys of various sorts mixed with a few other tunes and played on an interesting instrumental mix of piano, fiddle, hammered dulcimer, bodhran, shaker, banjo, and acoustic bass. I’m not sure about the acoustic bass, but the other instruments are legitimate for late nineteenth-century America and provide a more “rural” sound than most of the music I use, very appropriate for country dance tunes.

The music mix is definitely from “times gone by”, though not all of those times are actually Victorian and will need to be considered on a case-by-case basis for historical events. The arrangements are really lovely, though, and it makes a great listening CD even if not every track is strictly correct and/or usable for historical dancing.

My comments on the individual tracks follow.

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March 20, 2014

Half & Half Variations: A Complex Hesitation

Wrapping up my little half & half miniseries, here's a wacky little sequence that throws in everything but the kitchen sink: a hesitation, travel, turning, and a change of lead foot. This is from the Quinlan Twins description of the half & half in the 1914 compilation Dance Mad, second edition. The only name given it is the deceptively bland "Seventh Figure".

The sequence is unusual in two other ways as well: odd and even measures have different rhythm patterns, and it appears that both measure have no step on the fifth count, an unusual departure from the standard 1…4,5 half & half rhythm pattern. All of this makes it not particularly beginner-friendly.

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March 17, 2014

Half & Half Variations: The Scissors

Here’s a nifty little variation for the half & half, as offered by the Castle Assistants in 1914: the scissors.

To quickly recap: the half & half is danced in 5/4 time, with the dancers taking three steps (on beats 1, 4, and 5) to each measure of music. There is a lengthy hesitation on the second and third beats. A more detailed description may be found in my earlier post on basic traveling steps for the half & half.

Dancing the scissors
The scissors begin with the gentleman’s back to line of dance, his right foot free. He crosses right behind (1), hesitates in the usual half & half style (23), then makes two more steps along the same diagonal toward the wall, left-right (45), turning 90 degrees at the end to prepare for the repeat. On the next measure, he crosses left behind and travels toward the center. The lady dances on the opposite feet and always crosses in front on the first beat of a measure. The dancers should meander gently along the line of dance as they cross back and forth.

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March 13, 2014

Half & Half: Switching the Lead Foot

I touched briefly in a previous post on half & half variations on how to easily change the lead foot in this dance, but since the technique applies to other variations as well (and to other dances, for that matter), I thought I would break it out into its own little post.

The two classic ways to switch the lead foot are to either add a step or subtract one. Subtraction works especially beautifully with the gentle sway of the half & half, and in the 1914 Quinlan Twins description of the dance, it is explicitly recommended:

On counts 4 and 5 of 8th measure, take one step with left foot and pose, leaving right pointed in 2nd position.

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March 10, 2014

Half & Half: Varying the Promenade

An easy way to liven up the half & half, the 5/4 waltz of the mid-1910s, is to vary the promenade.

In the basic half & half promenade (previously described here), the dancers take ballroom hold and both face line of dance, gliding forward side by side with half & half step patterns (1…4-5, 1…4-5).

The second edition of the 1914 compilation Dance Mad offer two easy ways to vary this promenade:

In the Quinlan Twins' description of the half & half, the eighth figure is a more elaborate promenade that alternates dips and foot lifts:

123    Step forward (gent's left/lady's right) and dip to the floor
45      Walk forward two steps
123    Step forward (gent's right/lady's left) and raise free foot to 4th position forward
45    Walk forward two steps

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December 25, 2013

A Victorian “Sir Roger de Coverley”

Several years ago I wrote up a description of a version of Sir Roger de Coverley from the early nineteenth century and talked a little about the background of the tune and the association of the dance with Charles Dickens’ famous novel, A Christmas Carol.

Over time, Sir Roger de Coverley mutated in various ways, and I promised back then to describe some of them. Better five years late than never, here’s another version, a “modernized” English one from the mid-nineteenth century which moves along much more briskly than the earlier version, even with a fairly lengthy set. According to Mrs. Nicholas Henderson, who seems to have been the first to publish this version, the country dance was generally in decline in the English ballroom by the early 1850s, but Sir Roger de Coverley was an exception:

To make amends for the fashionable dereliction and banishment of the old favourites of “Merrie Englande,” it is usual to conclude the evening’s festivities with one particular species of Country Dance, called “Sir Roger de Coverley.” It has of late enjoyed considerable vogue, and is patronised by her Majesty, at her own entertainments. We give it as at present danced at the Palace, somewhat modernised and adapted to the prevailing taste.

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December 23, 2013

The Twinkle Hesitation Waltz

Like the similarly-named Twinkle Hesitation and the Mistletoe Hesitation, the Twinkle Hesitation Waltz is a sixteen-bar hesitation waltz sequence found in F. Leslie Clendenen’s compilation Dance Mad (St. Louis, 1914) that uses the quick step-change-step known as a “twinkle”. Clendenen attributes it to T. MacDougall. It can be used as a sequence dance to any fast 1910s waltz music, or the two parts can be used together or separately as variations in a regular hesitation waltz.

The dancers start in a normal ballroom hold, opened out to side by side facing line of dance. Steps below are given for the gentleman; the lady dances opposite.

The waltz step used would be the box-shaped “new waltz” of the era rather than the fast-spinning rotary waltz of the nineteenth century.

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