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

March 3, 2008

Hesitate, Hesitate, Hesitate!
- Era: 1910s
- Dance: One-Step
In his 1914 manual, Dances of To-day, Philadelphia dancing master Albert W. Newman describes three different hesitations suitable for the one-step or Castle walk. In one description he notes that a hesitation is

…most practical, especially when one finds himself in a decidedly congested position, surrounded on all sides by merry dancers…it is the same as marking the time of the music, as the dancers execute the movement sur la place (on the spot).

Because of this practicality, hesitations are one of the first things I teach new dancers of the one-step. Here are Newman’s three hesitations for your dancing pleasure!

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February 24, 2008

Bits of Bijou: The Missing Middle of Durang’s 1848 Manual

Research on social dance history does not always involve direct work on specific dances, and occasionally I get diverted to detective work on related historical mysteries in different fields – music, language, biography, etiquette, publishing history, and more. Over the last few weeks, I have pursued a successful quest for some pages missing from an 1840s work by Charles Durang. The process of locating these pages illustrates some of the frustrations of working with 19th century sources and the care needed in studying them.

In her delightful overview of 19th-century dance and etiquette, From the Ballroom to Hell (paid link), Elizabeth Aldrich states that Durang (1796-1870) was a dancer at the Bowery Theatre who later taught dance in Philadelphia with his daughter Caroline and published at least four dance manuals. I started looking for a copy of Durang’s The Ball-Room Bijou and Art of Dancing as part of the research for a particular set of quadrilles and rapidly found myself in the midst of a publication puzzle.

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February 10, 2008

How to Dance the Early Schottische
- Era: 1850s-1870s
A short, performance-oriented summary for those who want to skip the background and just go out and schottische. This is intended as a summary for those already generally familiar with couple dancing, not as a way for new dancers to learn from scratch; a live teacher is always to be preferred to a written description.

A fuller discussion of and list of sources for the schottische may be found in The Early Schottische.

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January 22, 2008

The New Yorker

Another guilty-pleasure disco-era line dance! This is one I’ve actually used regularly as an easy cool-down dance at the end of my own practices for the last couple of years. The source is The Official Guide to Disco Dance Steps by Jack Villari & Kathleen Sims Villari, 1978. There’s no special music for this or any other line dance, but I often use either Wild Cherry’s "Play That Funky Music, White Boy" or Donna Summers’ "Bad Girls". The only thing even mildly unusual about the dance itself is that instead of quarter-turns after each repetition there are half-turns.

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January 14, 2008

Corte Mad
- Era: 1910s
- Dance: tango
In the interest of not losing my mind, I’m going to be writing more
short posts interspersed with the longer articles that cover entire
dances. Today, a lovely little move for your 1910s tango.

Many teachers labor under the impression that the “Argentine” consists of one dance only, which is not true, it is a dance of great variety of movements…The Argentine of today embraces about as many varieties as there are dancers, owing perhaps, to the natural desire of our American dancers to be “inventors.”
— F. Leslie Clendenen, Dance Mad, or the dances of the day, St. Louis, Missouri, 1914

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January 11, 2008

Hot Chocolate

I try to remember that history (dance or otherwise) didn't actually stop sometime before I was born, so today I'm flashing back to 1978 and the era of disco line dances and, happily, a flood of disco dance manuals. I still find disco music very danceable, so ever so often I play around with reconstructing a few line dances to use as warmups or cool-downs at my own dance practices.

Here's a simple one: Hot Chocolate. It's only sixteen beats long, which is a very short repeat for a line dance. This may not be the easiest line dance ever, but it's got to be high on the list! The dance might have been inspired by the group of the same name, probably best known for the mid-'70s hit song "You Sexy Thing." The source is Let's Disco, no author given, published in 1978 by K-tel International, Inc.

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January 3, 2008

The Overlooked Eight Step
- Era: 1910s
- Dances: one-step, tango, half & half, hesitation waltz
Why, in fifteen-plus years of dancing ragtime socially, had I never done the eight step? It’s not an obscure step; it’s the first variation world-famous dance couple Vernon and Irene Castle give for the one-step and is also mentioned by them in their descriptions of the tango, half and half, and hesitation waltz. And yet somehow I’d neither danced it nor reconstructed it until late 2007 when I was looking for interesting one-step moves for some new dance students.

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January 1, 2008

How Many Times Do We Play That Tune?

One of those questions I get asked all the time by musicians and others is “how many times through the tune for this dance?” The reference is to progressive longways country dances, which were the dominant social dance form in Europe and America from the mid-17th century through the early 19th century and are still enjoying widespread popularity in various living tradition and revival forms.

Modern English country dance and contra practice is for all couples to start the dance simultaneously, and the modern answer to the repeats question would be as many times as needed for everyone to enjoy the dance and fewer times than it would take for people to get bored. Modern Scottish (RSCDS) practice differs in that their dances are generally performed in short sets and have a fixed number of repeats. But if you truly wish to perform country dances in the historical style, it’s a bit more complex!

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Capering & Kickery

Hesitate, Hesitate, Hesitate!

Bits of Bijou: The Missing Middle of Durang’s 1848 Manual

How to Dance the Early Schottische

The New Yorker

Corte Mad

Hot Chocolate

The Overlooked Eight Step

How Many Times Do We Play That Tune?

Capering & Kickery