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

September 23, 2013

New Scotia Quadrille

A while back I discussed the wonderful dance CD Music for Quadrilles, by the English band Green Ginger (with Kevin Smith). At the time, I skimmed over the tracks for five modern Scottish (RSCDS) dances, since I didn’t have any way to check the ones with historical sources against the originals. Since then, I’ve come across a copy of one of the editions of D. (David) Anderson’s Ball-Room Guide, a “New, Enlarged, & Complete Edition”, which the liner notes of Music for Quadrilles cite as the source for one of the historical dances, New Scotia Quadrille.

According to J. P. (Joan) and T. M. Flett in Traditional Dancing in Scotland, David Anderson taught in Dundee and in a number of other towns from c1850-1911. His Ball-Room Guide seems to have gone through at least five editions, with the “New, Enlarged” versions appearing between the mid-1880s and late 1890s. Since the one I examined is not dated, and I have no others to compare it to, I cannot date it precisely.

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February 14, 2013

Hollywood Line Hustle

It’s been quite some time since I did any disco line dances, but here’s one for the folks who love these session at the Dance Flurry. Sadly, I’m not teaching there this year, but you can do this one on your own!

Unusually for one of these dances, I actually have it in two different sources: The Complete Book on Disco and Ballroom Dancing (1979) by Ann T. Kilbride and A. Algoso, and The Complete Guide to Disco Dancing (1978) by Karen Lustgarten. The sequence is almost exactly the same in both books. Kilbride and Algoso mention alternate names: the L.A. Line Dance or L.A. Line Hustle and note that it was popular in a particular area of the country, presumably southern Califoria. Lustgarten calls it “one of the most popular line dances” and suggests disco hits to dance it to: Boz Skaggs’ “Lowdown” for a slow version, and Vickie Sue Robinson’s “Turn The Beat Around” for a faster one.

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November 5, 2012

Late 19th Century Jig-Time Dances: The Pasadena

The Pasadena, a would-be replacement for the two-step, appears in the 1900 reprint of New York dancing master Allen Dodworth’s 1885 tome, Dancing and its relations to education and social life, but can be dated back to at least 1898. It appears to have been created as a dancing school dance, as Dodworth’s nephew, T. George Dodworth, discussed in his introduction to the new edition of his uncle’s manual:

In order to bring the work up to date, I have been requested
to write an introduction which will include a list of dances that have come into fashion since my uncle’s book was originally published.

As a matter of fact, however, society dances have decreased, rather than increased, during this interval. When this work first appeared most of the round dances described in its pages were fashionable. But Dame Fashion is fickle, and, owing to some unaccountable change in taste, we now have only the Two Step, the Waltz, occasionally a Saratoga Lancers, and the Cotillion. In the dancing-schools the old dances are still taught, but with numerous new combinations, which are composed to improve the pupil and keep alive the interest. From these combinations we have the Tuxedo Lancers, the Amsterdam, Gavotte der Kaiserin, Minuet de la Cour (for four persons), and the Pasedena.

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May 14, 2012

La Russe

(Note 6/3/24: I’ve written a follow-up to this post; the link is at the end. My reconstruction stands.)

I picked La Russe out some time ago while looking for easy late nineteenth century waltz-time variations. The name means “the Russian woman”, and I recently had the pleasure of teaching it in Moscow to a very talented group of Russian dancers.

No specific choreographer is known for La Russe, but we can date it with unusual precision to just over 130 years ago. Dancing master M. B. Gilbert, in his Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890), noted that it was “introduced by the American Society of Professors of Dancing, New York, May 1st, 1882,” and it turns up in a couple of other American dance manuals of the 1880s. All the descriptions are quite consistent, though the terminology used varies.

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November 24, 2011

Harvest Home
- Era: American, late 1850s-early 1860s
In commemoration of the American Thanksgiving holiday, here’s a seasonally appropriate dance from the American Civil War era, a country dance for a set of six couples.

While I have not done a comprehensive search, I appear to have instructions for “Harvest Home” only in a pair of dance manuals by Elias Howe: Howe’s Complete Ballroom Handbook (Boston, 1858) and American Dancing Master and Ball-Room Prompter (Boston, 1862), which include far more country dances than is typical of other dance manuals of the time period. New England to this day retains a stronger country dance tradition, in the form of modern contra dance, than most other parts of the United States.
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October 6, 2010

The Newport

A new waltz or redowa variation pops up in a few of the manuals of the very late nineteenth century. Presumably named after the wealthy resort town, the Newport appears in slightly different versions in different manuals, but the common element appears to be a series of quick sliding steps.

Apparently the Newport was too new to be included in New York dancing master Allen Dodworth’s Dancing and its relations to education and social life (New York, 1885). The earliest and clearest description I have found is in M. B. Gilbert’s Round Dancing, published in Portland, Maine, in 1890. His version, included “by permission of Russ B. Walker,” is essentially an ornamented version of the standard waltz of the late nineteenth century, with two rapid slides to the side rather than one in each bar for a “step-side-close-side-close” sequence rather than the usual “step, side, close.” A half-turn is made on each bar, just as in the regular late nineteenth-century waltz, with a complete turn every two bars.

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September 20, 2010

Le Triangle

Subtitled Nouveau Quadrille, Le Triangle is not actually a quadrille in the literal sense of a dance involving facing couples. It was composed by F. Paul and published in his manual, Le Cotillon, in Paris in 1877 and is danced by three couples rather than four, arranged in the form of a triangle. Paul composed it to address the difficulty of finding four couples for the quadrille croisé of the time. He adds modestly that he does not intend to impose it upon dancers, but gives the description only as a proposal. I have never seen Le Triangle in any other source; it may never have been danced outside of Paul’s immediate circles.

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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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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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August 14, 2009

The Line Hustle

Line dances don’t really get all that difficult, but there are a few longer ones with more complicated and less repetitive step sequences. One of these is the Line Hustle. These instructions are taken from Carter Lovisone’s The Disco Hustle (1979) and claim to be “the original form used as the basis for all variations of the Line Hustle.” I would take this claim with a grain of salt, since Lovisone’s book came out several years after the dance’s first wave of popularity in the mid-1970s.

This version of the Line Hustle is a fifty-two beat dance. My favorite music for it is Van McCoy’s 1975 hit, “The Hustle,” a snippet of which is included below:

The song is available on several different compilations, including The Hustle & The Best Of Van McCoy. I like to wait out the intro and start at the “do the hustle!” verbal cue. But as usual with line dances, the Line Hustle will also work to just about any disco tune.

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