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.
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!
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Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian
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