Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian
This blandly named "Polish Dance" was published by expatriate English dancing master William George Wells in The danciad, or companion to the modern ball room in Montreal in 1832. I have my doubts about whether there is anything authentically Polish about it, but the dance itself is…interesting. Let me start with a transcription.
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POLISH DANCE
To be danced by an unlimited number of couples, and placed exactly in the same situation as for the Original Gallopade.
Continuing on with figures two and three of Chivers' Troidrilles…
Figure Two (Tune: Eté) 8b + 24bx4
8b Introduction (not repeated)
2b First head trio forward (en avant) and stop
2b Opposite trio forward (en avant) and stop
4b All retire to places, turning round to the right twice
8b Four head ladies right hands across (moulinet) and left hands back
8b Set (pas de basque) in trios (4b) and hands three round (4b)
Repeat three more times, other couples leading in turn
This is another straightforward reconstruction. The figure is done four times as in standard quadrille practice: twice by the head couples (first couple leading, then opposite couple leading) then twice by the side couples, led first by the couple to the right of the first head couple.
I adore dances that are for trios rather than couples. There are so many interesting things one can do when there are three dancers in the mix rather than just two! And, of course, it helps the address the problem that historical dance tends to be imbalanced in gender, with many more women than men interested, but many of them desiring to dance in historical gender roles…though those were not always as rigid as people believe. Figures for one gentleman and two ladies go some way toward addressing this at balls.
I've written previously about G. M. S. Chivers' "Swedish" dances, trio country dances that were not actually Swedish, and the Scottish Sixdrilles, a reworking of the French quadrille to be danced by four trios rather than four couples. The Troidrilles are more in the spirit of the latter (though the name is more harmonious): a miniature "quadrille" of only three figures for four trios published in Chivers' The Dancing Master in Miniature (London, 1825). The figures are original, though very Chivers in style.
Whatever the Original Gallopade published by dancing master W. G. Wells ("late of London") in The danciad, or companion to the modern ball room (Montreal, 1832) may be, it's certainly not the "original", in the sense of being the first version, since it's clearly a variation of the Original Gallopade published in Companion to La Terpsichore Moderne (Second Edition) by J. S. Pollock (London, c1830).
The introductory material is also blatantly plagiarized from either Pollock or some common source, so it can hardly be called "original" in the creative sense either, and it is unlikely to be exactly what was originally introduced in 1829 and referenced in the introduction to the dance, which I will append in full at the bottom of this post. I think that introduction is more about gallopade-as-a-dance-in-general rather than this specific gallopade. But in any case, it's virtually identical to the introduction in Pollock, and they can't both be the original.
The final post in my series on The Nahant Quadrilles: figure five and some thoughts on the quadrille as a whole!
The original wording:
1st two cross over give right hand. And back give left hand. Form a line. Balancez. Half Promenade. Forward 4. Half right & left to places
This one should look familiar to anyone who has danced the French quadrille: it’s a slightly shortened version of the third figure, La Poule. This makes it quite easy to reconstruct, but it does present a problem with the music. The shortened figure is twenty-four bars, while the music has four strains with no indications of any repeat structure. Conveniently, however, the fourth strain is a transposed and elaborated version of the A strain, so for a twenty-four bar figure one could play A + BCA’x4 or perhaps save the A’ strain for the last time through and play A + BCAx3 + BCA’. The Spare Parts recording ignores the A’ strain and just plays A + BCAx4, which works fine for dancing my reconstruction.
And now we come to figure four, the biggest mess in the entire quadrille! Problems with the figures, problems with the music, problems correlating the two…I believe in my conclusions, but I can't deny that there's a lot of guesswork involved in any reconstruction of this figure.
First, the music. Take a look at Figure 4's tune, "Georgette", here. There are three eight bar strains marked with a Da Capo al segno, to which my first response was, what segno? There is no segno! There's a Fine, oddly located at the end of the B strain, so presumably it was meant to be Da Capo al Fine. But quadrille music usually ends on the A strain, and while the length of the figure is the next problem to consider, it's difficult to come up with a reasonable repeat structure that has AB at the end. In thirty-two bars, A + BCAB repeated, perhaps, but in twenty-four bars, it's just impossible.
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 1st 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.
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.
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.
It’s October, and time once again to devote some attention to masquerade and fancy dress balls and other excuses to wear unusual costumes in historical ballrooms!
On January 3, 1828, The New York Mirror: A Weekly Gazette of Literature and the Fine Arts, published a description of what was supposedly the first fancy-dress ball ever held in New England, held at Norfolk House in Roxbury, Massachusetts, on “Wednesday last”.
A recent mailing list discussion centered on how to quickly teach people to do a "waltz-around", the style of country dance progression in which two couples waltz around each other once and a half times. This is most famously part of the mid- to late-nineteenth-century Spanish Dance, as well as other American waltz contra dances (such as the German Waltz and Bohemian Waltz). It dates back at least as far as the late 1810s to early 1820s in England, when Spanish dances were an entire genre of country dances in waltz time, and both they and ordinary waltz country dances featured this figure, sometimes under the names "poussette" or "waltze". I expect it goes even further back on the European continent, but I haven't yet pursued that line of research.
As a dancer, the waltz-around has always been one of those figures that I just…do. I'd observed that it's difficult for beginners to master the tight curvature of the circle and making one and a half circles in only eight measures, but as an experienced waltzer, I've long been able to do it instinctively. And I'd never broken down precisely what I did or worked out how to explain it to others.
So I suppose it's about time!
I don’t often get asked to write about particular topics on Kickery, but I recently received, via the comments here, a request from a teacher at Mrs. Bennet’s Ballroom, a historical dance group in London, UK, for a few of my favorite figures for mescolanzes, the four-facing-four country dance format I surveyed earlier this year. Since the focus of the group seems to be the Regency era, I’ll stick with figures from manuals by London dancing master G. M. S. Chivers, which are from the very tail end of the official Regency period (1811-1820) and a few years after.
As I discussed in my earlier survey, Chivers seems to have really liked the mescolanze format, and a few other dancing masters and authors picked it up, but other than the special case of La Tempête, I can’t really say with confidence that mescolanzes were a popular or even common dance form in nineteenth-century England. But the format appears across enough different sources that I’m comfortable with using it sparingly to add variety for the late Regency and immediate post-Regency era. I don’t ever do more than one mescolanze at a ball, however.
The short story “Lyddy!”, by Thomas Egerton Wilks, was published in a London journal, The Young Lady’s Magazine, in 1837, its first year of publication, the works from which were collected in a single volume published in 1838.
Though its title is similar to that of other ladies’ magazines of the era, The Young Lady’s Magazine actually had much loftier ambitions:
…to concentrate every energy in the production, not only of such matter as may amuse the fancy, but at the same time tend to expand the mind, elevate the morals, refine the intellect, and awaken, — not the morbid sensibilities, too often produced by ill-selected fictions — but those pure, unhacknied feelings of the youthful heart, which are in themselves a mine of inexhaustible treasures, and which, by their development, shed a halo of enchantment around.
— Preface, p. iii
Moving right along from my first post in the Sixdrilles series, here are the reconstructions of the next two figures:
Figure Two: L’Été (8b introduction + 24bx4)
4b First gentleman and two opposite ladies en avant and en arrière.
4b Same three chassez-dechassez (à droite et à gauche)
4b Same three traversez, gentleman crossing between the two ladies
4b Same three chassez-dechassez
4b Same three traversez/balancez [see note below] while partners balancez
4b Same three rond de trois
The figure is then repeated by the second gentleman and the two opposite ladies, the third gentlemen and two opposite ladies, and the fourth gentleman and two opposite ladies.
The Sixdrilles are a clever reworking of the figures French Quadrille (or First Set) for a group of twelve dancers in the form of a square of trios, each consisting of a gentleman and two ladies. I have two Scottish sources for them, which match fairly closely:
The Ball-Room, by Monsieur J. P. Boulogne (Glasgow, 1827).
Lowe's Ball-Conductor and Assembly Guide…Third Edition, by the Messrs. Lowe (Edinburgh, c1830)
Monsieur Boulogne is billed as French, but I know no more about him. The Messrs. Lowe were a group of four brothers, all dance teachers, one of whom eventually became famous as dancing master at Balmoral for the family of Queen Victoria. Their book is difficult to date, especially since it is a third edition. A reference to the Sixdrilles being created around the time of the coronation of Charles X puts it at 1824 or later, and a late reference to the opera Guillaume Tell (Paris, 1829) at the very end of the book suggests 1830 onward. The last half-dozen pages look like a later attachment, however, and may have been added for the second or third edition. The Sixdrilles appear much earlier and are integrated into the overall work.
2016 being a leap year, some folks have been chatting about leap year balls or leap day dances, including the idea of such balls being a traditional occasion for ladies to ask gentlemen to dance, rather than the standard vice-versa. I’m not sure how far back that tradition actually goes, but it reminded me of an amusing story published in Atkinson’s Saturday Evening Post & Bulletin in 1835, entitled “The Ladies’ Ball”.
Atkinson’s Saturday Evening Post & Bulletin was a Philadelphia newspaper published under various names from 1800; Samuel Atkinson was the publisher from 1831-1839. Along with domestic and foreign news, Atkinson also included essays, fiction, poetry, household hints, etc. Its descendant survives to this day as the bimonthly Saturday Evening Post, famous in the mid-twentieth century for its Norman Rockwell covers.
“The Ladies’ Ball” tells the story of a social crisis: the gentleman of a certain nameless city, distracted by the study of mnemonics and other sciences, had forgotten to organize the traditional Christmas ball.
The English and French seem never to have been shy about taking sly little pokes at each other. In 1834 a New York newspaper reprinted from an unnamed London paper an article, “On the Exclusive in Dancing”, which took aim at French ballroom etiquette. Apparently the French were questioning the propriety of the country dance:
[The French] appear to be growing fastidious in their amusements, and have learned to be English enough to question certain minor points of propriety and etiquette in their public balls; as, for instance, whether it be proper for a gentleman to resign the hand of his partner to contact with strangers for the mere preservation of a figure in a country dance,
and had in fact discarded country dances completely, in favor of
some more conjugal kind of movement, either waltzes, mazurkas, or galopes, that rivet a couple together for a whole evening till (we would fain hope) they were sick of one another and themselves.
(This continues a very occasional series of posts on setting steps for quadrilles, with the previous posts including eight easy sequences and two French sequences.)
Calling these three sequences “Scottish” is really a bit of a misnomer, since the sources are Alexander Strathy’s Elements of the Art of Dancing (Edinburgh, 1822), which is in large part a translation of a French manual by J. H. Goudoux, and an anonymous Scottish manuscript entitled Contre Danses à Paris 1818. All three sequences are certainly French in their steps and style and quite possibly in origin. They probably would not have caused anyone in Paris in that era to bat an eyelash. But technically, they are documented to Scotland, not France, in the late 1810s-early 1820s.
Several years ago I posted eight easy setting sequences for Regency-era French quadrilles and said in the comments I’d try to post more “soon”. That has now stretched to more than five years, but, better late than never, here are a couple of others, this time directly from a trio of French manuals by J. H. Gourdoux (or Gourdoux-Daux):
Principes et Notions Élémentaires sur l’Art de la Danse Pour la Ville (2nd edition, 1811)
Recueil d’un Genre Nouveau de Contredanses et Walses (1819)
De l’Art de la Danse (1823)
Once again, these are easy sequences, but a bit more interesting than the previous set.
This dance is one of a pair of country dance gallopades published in London dancing master J. S. Pollock's c1830 manual, A Companion to La Terpsichore Moderne (Second Edition). They have no names or specific music, just numbers. I've previously discussed the second one; now here's the first. It's a very straightforward reconstruction.
Here are the original instructions:
No. 1. (4 parts)
The whole of the party arranged in the same way as for a country dance stand facing the top of the room, and chassez croise all with partners — then facing your partners, all advance, retire, and back to back — first and second couples hands across and back again — first lady pass outside the ladies to the bottom of the dance, the first gent. at the same time going down outside of the gents. and turn partner with both hands, remaining at bottom.
(This is the second post in a mini-series covering Regency-era step-sequences for the quadrille figure chassé-croisé. See the first post for a general introduction to the figure.)
My second sequence for chassé-croisé actually comes from a French source, the second edition of Principes et Notions Élémentaires sur l’Art de la Danse Pour la Ville (Paris, 1811) by J. H. Gourdoux. The same sequence reappears in his later manual, De l’Art de la Danse (Paris, 1823). It is similar to the Strathy sequence described in my previous post, but the differences are quite intriguing.
I won't cover steps in this post, since I just summarized them in the previous one and no additional ones are required for Gourdoux's sequence.
By far the most common sequence variations to be found in quadrille manuals of the early nineteenth century are those for setting, forward and back, chassez-dechassez, and crossing over. But a few manuals give sequences for more elaborate figures such as chassé-croisé, in which two dancers, side by side, change places and back. There are quite a few ways to perform the figure, but the most common is probably that danced with one’s partner in eight bars as follows:
2b Change places, gentlemen passing behind ladies
2b Set
2b Change back, gentlemen again passing behind ladies
2b Set
This can be performed just by two couples (heads or sides) or by all four at once, as in the classic Finale figure of the first set of French quadrilles.
It’s not unusual for new sources to turn up that make me go back and reconsider a reconstruction. It’s a little irritating for it to happen less than a month after I finally get around to publishing one here on Kickery, and doubly irritating for it to be not a new source but old sources I simply hadn’t looked at recently. Fortunately, this is less a change in my reconstruction than further background and options.
In reconstructing the fourth figure of the Mid-Lothians, an early 1820s quadrille, I wrote in my reconstruction notes that “I’ve never found any description of what step sequence to use for this figure,” referring to the grand chain. Actually, I had come across such, many years ago, and they had simply slipped my mind. But I was looking through quadrille sources for a different project and found them again, so here is a little more information about performance options for the grand chain.
A year or so ago I published a discussion and reconstruction of the 1862 country dance gallopade known as The Gothic Dance and mentioned that there was a very similar dance in London dancing master J. S. Pollock’s c1830 manual, A Companion to La Terpsichore Moderne (Second Edition). I’ve taught this dance at the few 1830s events I’ve had an opportunity to run, but have not previously published a reconstruction.
The original instructions for the dance, one of a pair of country dance gallopades with numbers but no titles, are as follows:
No. 2. (4 parts)
All advance, retire, and cross over, changing places with partners — advance, retire, and cross over back again — first and second couples right and left — first couple gallopade down the middle to the bottom of the dance, and remain at the bottom.
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Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian
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