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 13, 2020

The Nahant Quadrilles (2 of 4)

Onward we go, with figures two and three of The Nahant Quadrilles!

For figure two, the music (available here) has two strains with a Da Capo, which works without any tweaking. The Spare Parts recording matches my reconstruction.

The original language for the figures:

Four ladies grand chain. Forward & back 1^st two. Back to back. Repeat 4 times.

This is a very short figure, only sixteen bars. The second half is very straightforward: the first pair (first lady and opposite gentleman) go forward and back then perform a dos-à-dos. As in the first figure, each time through this is a different pair.

The first half, however, presents an interesting choice.

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August 10, 2020

The Nahant Quadrilles (1 of 4)

At left is the cover of The Nahant Quadrilles, published in Philadelphia in 1836 but named after the resort town of Nahant, located on a peninsula near Boston and seen in the background of the cover image (click to enlarge). For many years, Nahant has been the home of a summer 1860s ball hosted by Nahant resident and Vintage Victorian proprietor Katy Bishop and her late husband Ben. The Nahant Quadrilles were first worked on for these balls by the Bishops and my own late mentor, Patri Pugliese, in a style befitting the 1860s milieu in which they were used. Patri was a stickler in his approach to dance reconstruction and dubbed his version a “choreography” because of the degree of adaptation.

I’ve long had my own reconstruction of this set tucked away, and since the Nahant ball (lately expanded to a full weekend) is canceled due to Covid, this seems an opportune moment to publish it and compare the different approaches.

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June 22, 2020

Early Foxtrot: The Minuet Turn

Keeping with the foxtrot theme, here's one more little sequence for foxtrot or one-step from Edna Stuart Lee's Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916). Despite its overt simplicity, it actually manages to present a minor reconstruction issue! As for the name…well, to be perfectly honest, I see absolutely no connection here to the minuet, any more than I do with Newman's Minuet Tango. There seems to have been some concept of "minuet" in the 1910s which I have completely failed to grasp.

The gentleman's steps are given; the lady dances opposite. The dancers begin in normal ballroom hold, the gentleman facing forward along line of dance and the lady backward.

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June 18, 2020

Early Foxtrot: The Pavlowa Extension

For no reason other than habit, June is always foxtrot month for me, and despite the general shutdown of dance classes, I’m lucky enough to have a convenient partner at hand for experimentation with new variations. So let’s look at yet another of the many step-sequences described in Edna Stuart Lee’s Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916)!

The Pavlowa Extension was, of course, named for the famous ballerina Anna Pavlowa (Pavlova), who toured America in the mid-1910s and dipped into social dance choreography with a music-composition contest resulting in a trio of dances published in The Ladies’ Home Journal in early 1915. She (or her ghostwriter) and (supposedly) members of her troupe also offered opinions and suggestions about dancing the one-step, Boston, and foxtrot. This variation, however, is not among those even indirectly associated with Pavlova. It probably was merely named in her honor, or perhaps was inspired by a characteristic movement in her dancing.

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February 20, 2020

A Leap Year Ball, Providence, 1892

Moving from the American frontier back to the east coast and into increasingly amusing descriptions of leap year events, here’s a very upscale event held in Providence, Rhode Island, on Monday, February 29, 1892, and reported in The Providence News on Tuesday, March 1. This was a much more glittering affair than the frontier balls in Montana and Wyoming. According to the article, subscriptions to the ball cost $25 for eight invitations, and the German (cotillion) favors cost an estimated $900. In today’s terms, that is around $700 for the tickets and an eye-popping $25,000 for the favors, which were always an opportunity for conspicuous consumption among upper-class society.

The ball was held at the brand-new Trocadero (1891), which, according to Providence’s inventory in 1980 for the National Register of Historic Places, was a restaurant and dancing parlor owned by local businessman Lloyd Tillinghast, who also provided the ball supper, served on “small and beautifully decked tables” by waiters brought in from Boston and New York. The Trocadero no longer stands, alas. Two bands were engaged: Reeves’ Band and the “Hungarian band of New York”, who alternated playing.

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February 17, 2020

A Leap Year Ball, Wyoming, 1888

Continuing to roam around the late nineteenth century American frontier, where a surprising number of newspaper descriptions of leap year balls originate, here are some excerpts from a burbling account of a ball in the small town of Douglas, Wyoming. Like Sun River, it was founded in 1867 and was probably extremely small. The 1890 Wyoming census recorded only 2,988 people in all of Converse County. The ball was described on page five of Bill Barlow’s Budget on Wednesday, February 8, 1888, as having taken place the previous Friday evening. The newspaper title is interesting; more about the paper and its colorful founder, Merris C. Barrow, may be found at the Wyoming Historical Society’s Wyohistory site.

The ball was held at the Douglas opera house and was described as “the most successful and enjoyable affair of its kind in the history of Douglas.” Balls are generally described in newspapers as successful unless some sort of disaster occurs, but in a town whose history stretched back only two decades, it might actually have been true.

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October 31, 2019

A Ballroom Basilisk, 1897

I'm just going to leave this story here without any commentary.

Happy Halloween!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

GONE WITH A BASILISK.

A LURID SHORT STORY.

BY G. L. Calderon

Reginald passed his hand wearily over his aching brow, and glided languishing between the purple portières. Within was a chaos of whirling muslin and hungry faces swimming on a sea of passionate, throbbing music. There was a mist before his eyes; grinning heads floated restlessly by, gibbering in the shell-like ears of painted women. Amid the fevered maelstrom, one figure loomed large and close upon his attention. It was the hostess. A hot wet hand pressed his. “Law! what a squash!” he murmured in her ear, then plunged into the stream, and was borne away to the other side of the room.

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October 10, 2019

Mr. Palmer comes of age, Yarmouth, 1831

Moving a bit forward in time, the coming of age ball of Mr. Samuel Palmer, junior, on Tuesday, March 1st, 1831, was accorded detailed coverage the following Saturday, March 5th, in The Norfolk Chronicle and Norwich Gazette. The family seems to have been a prominent one, since they convinced then-Mayor Edmund Preston to lend them a hall and the whole town to deck itself out in celebration of their son's birthday. And, of course, they were wealthy enough to throw a ball for several hundred guests. Piecing together public records, I am reasonably certain that the birthday boy's full name was Samuel Thurtell Palmer (c1810-1850), whose parents were probably Samuel and Susanna (Thurtell?) Palmer.

Most of the article was, as usual, devoted to lengthy lists of guests and their costumes, but there were some interesting tidbits here and there. The transcriptions below include all of the article with the exception of the lists that just named the attendees and their outfits.

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June 10, 2019

Early Foxtrot: Quick Dips

Ah, June, when one turns one's thoughts (and feet) to…weird little foxtrot variations!

This time around, let's look at a pair of steps, or rather step-sequences, from Edna Stuart Lee's Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916) that both involve quick dips. These are actually ever-so-slightly harder to do than the usually run of walks, trots, glides, and two-steps that make up a great deal of the 1910s foxtrot repertoire. Lee noted that the first of these, The Coney Island Dip, is "very exhilarating and excellent exercise for the lungs."

The gentleman's steps are given; the lady dances opposite.

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May 16, 2019

The Latest York

Years ago, when I was working intensely on the “York set” of variations (see here, here, here, here, and here), I somehow skipped The Latest York, possibly because, unlike all those other “Yorks”, it does not feature the characteristic York step sequence of slide-close-slide-cut/close in “1&23” rhythm.

M. B. Gilbert published The Latest York in his Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) “by permission of Constantine Carpenter, Son, and Charles C. Martel”. This style of credit generally refers to the choreographer of the sequence and/or composer of the music. The same pair are also credited with the Gavotte Glide. Carpenter is listed in Gilbert’s directory of dancing masters as living in Philadelphia. Martel is not in Gilbert’s directory, but his name appears in Philadelphia newspapers (The Times, October 21, 1894, e.g.) during the 1890s offering parties and lessons.

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