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

August 10, 2010

Late Victorian Waltz Variations: Gavotte Glide

This is the second in my short series on some of the more useful waltz variations published by M.B. Gilbert in his 1890 manual, Round Dancing. The first post in the series may be found here.

Of all of the variations in Gilbert, this simple mix of sliding steps and waltz turns is probably the easiest and the one I use most frequently in teaching new dancers. Gilbert attributes it to “Constantine Carpenter, Son, and Charles C. Martel.”

As with the Diagonal Waltz, this variation will work either leaping or simply gliding, though its gliding feel makes me lean toward the latter for smoother transitions within the variation.

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August 6, 2010

Late Victorian Waltz Variations: Diagonal Waltz

By the end of the nineteenth century, American dancing masters such as M.B. Gilbert were coming up with long lists of little waltz variations of dubious utility and doubtful popularity. Many of these are minor variations on a few simple themes, often interpolating sideways slides and chassé steps between measures of waltz. I’m going to do a short series on some of the more useful and leadable of these variations this month, all taken from the pages of Gilbert’s immense manual, Round Dancing, published in Maine in 1890 and incorporating many variations from the 1870s and 1880s. Calling them “Victorian” is a bit of misnomer, since these are essentially American variations.

The Diagonal Waltz does not actually involve anything other than the normal step of the “new” waltz (step-side-close pattern) of the late nineteenth century. It is really just a sequence incorporating natural and reverse turns in such a way as to never make a complete turn in either direction. This is so basic a waltz skill that similar sequences are incorporated into most twentieth century versions of the box-step or Viennese waltz as well.

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July 17, 2010

Half & Half Variations: The Scroll

Winding up this month's little half and half miniseries, here's another variation from the Castle Assistants, as published in Dance Mad in 1914. This one even has a name, the scroll, as well as a number ("Step 2"). It's essentially a slow-motion grapevine step changing once per bar rather than on every beat, very similar in conception to the 1930s "about face waltz" described here, which has the pattern of one bar of traveling followed by one bar to change the direction each dancer is facing, with the lady and gentleman always facing opposite directions.

The scroll uses the basic half and half step sequence (stepping on the first, fourth, and fifth beats of each bar) done in promenade position, as described in my half and half overview here, with the dancers facing opposite directions and traveling for two bars before pivoting. The change of direction occupies only a partial bar rather than the full bar of the about face waltz.

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July 9, 2010

Five Steps in the Half and Half
- Era: 1910s
Among the variations listed for the half and half in the 1914 collection Dance Mad is an interesting waltz which, unusually for the half and half, involves stepping on all five beats of the bar rather than on the usual first, fourth, and fifth beats. It doesn't have a name; the description is simply labeled "Sixth Figure" and is one of eight figures credited to "Quinlan Twins." For lack of any better name, I refer to it as the five-step variation.

Background information and basic traveling steps for the half and half may be found in my previous post here.

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July 5, 2010

The Invention of the York?

A couple of months ago I described the late 19th-century waltz-time move known as the York, which incorporated mazurka-style heel-clicks and was considered a variation of the polka mazurka. At the time, the earliest source I had located was M.B. Gilbert’s Round Dancing, published in 1890, where the dance was included “by permission of E.W. Masters,” possibly its creator. An interesting article from The New York Times, dated September 9, 1885, both brings the date of the dance back a few years and provides an amusing anecdote about the dance’s possible origin.

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May 7, 2010

The York
- Era: 1890s-very early 1900s
(Edited 6/3/24 to add: more information about the somewhat earlier (c1885) origin of the York may be found at my articles “The Invention of the York” and “Revisiting La Russe“)

The York is a waltz dance in the redowa/mazurka family which appeared in several American dance manuals in the last decade of the 19th century. The earliest reference I have located is in Melvin Gilbert’s Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890), where he includes it “by permission of E.W. Masters,” possibly the creator. George Washington Lopp, who reprinted much of Gilbert in La Danse (Paris, 1903) directly attributes it to Masters. (The underlined part of the first sentence of this paragraph added 12/22/2023 to make it clear at the start that this is a redowa/mazurka, not a waltz, and a distinct dance, not just a variation.)

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February 7, 2010

A 1920s Medley Paul Jones

Most Paul Jones-style mixers are similar to the one found in the manual Dancing Made Easy (New York, c1919-1922): the dancers form a circle of couples, or possibly two concentric circles, each operating separately, if the numbers are too great. They perform a grand right and left, then at the leader’s signal dance a one-step with the next person in the chain. The 1903 Round Two-Step (described here) is quite similar, except that the dance of choice is a two-step.

But in the mid-1920s English manual Foulsham’s Modern Dancing, by Maxwell Stewart, a more elaborate version is described.

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February 2, 2010

Schottische à Pas Sauté

By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as the standard Victorian couple dances were becoming somewhat stale, there was a flurry of innovation among dancing masters attempting to come up with new variations, most of which do not appear to have caught on widely. In M.B. Gilbert’s 1890 tome, Round Dancing, he describes a variation, the Schottische à Pas Sauté, which resembles the old “doubling” of the schottische parts (as described in my review of the early schottische) in consisting only of “step-hops” but employs the recently stylish “military position”, as described in my previous post, “À la Militaire“, rather than using the closed position of the earlier era throughout. Gilbert footnotes this variation as the Hop Waltz, harking back to the jeté waltz of the Regency era.

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January 15, 2010

New York Bus Stop

I always end up reconstructing line dances when I have a relevant gig coming up. This time it's the Dance Flurry, where I will be teaching an entire session of disco line dances a month or so from now.

This is another short line dance, only twenty-four beats long. There are many, many dances called some version of "Bus Stop" — it seems every city or perhaps every club had its own special one. This is not the only dance I have found that's called the New York Bus Stop!

The source for this particular version is Let's Disco, no author given, published in 1978 by K-tel International, Inc. It's slightly unusual in that the quarter-turns at the end of each iteration are to the right rather than to the left and occur in mid-dance rather than at the end.

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January 2, 2010

A Promiscuous Figure: Flirtation
- Era: circa 1905
A while back I published a couple of posts on so-called “promiscuous figures,” which may be substituted into the first set of quadrilles for variety. The Flirtation figure is another of these, taken from English dancing master William Lamb’s How and What to Dance (London, 1903), an undated New York edition of which was published in the first decade of the 20th century.

The figure is probably intended as a finale figure, replacing the usual fifth figure, since it is entirely full-set moves and finishes with a galopade, typically included in finale figures.

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