Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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Category: 1820s/1830s

  • A miscellany of mescolanzes

    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.

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  • A cautionary tale, 1837

    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

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  • The Sixdrilles (3 of 3)

    Wrapping up my mini-series on the Sixdrilles, here are the final two figures and some overall thoughts.  The earlier figures can be found in my first and second posts in the series.

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  • The Sixdrilles (2 of 3)

    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.

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  • The Sixdrilles (1 of 3)

    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.

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  • The Ladies’ Ball, 1835

    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.

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  • On the Exclusive in Dancing, 1834

    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.

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  • Three “Scottish” Setting Sequences for Regency-Era Quadrilles

    (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.

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  • Two French Setting Sequences for Regency-era Quadrilles

    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.

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  • Another Country Dance Gallopade

    • Era: 1830s, England

    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.

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Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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