Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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Category: 1910s

  • Two Easy Mixer Games, 1912

    I recently had a request to teach 1910s-era dance games, so I went digging through early twentieth-century books of cotillion (or “German”) figures looking for some easy mixers that could be explained in a few sentences.  I found two that fit the bill in Twentieth Century Cotillion Figures, by H. Layton Walker (Two Step Publishing Company, Buffalo, New York, 1912).  That book is one of my favorite sources for the silliest and most extreme figures, but it has plenty of simpler ones as well.

    Neither of these figures require any props or preparation, and they can be taught in moments on the dance floor, a practice actually recommended in the description of the second.

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  • Early Foxtrot: Catch Steps

    I spent a lot of time teaching foxtrot this spring, and after going through my usual repertoire of easy foxtrot variations with several different groups, I feel I need to add a few new steps.  Nothing complicated, just something to spice up my standard set.  Both of these steps are taken from Edna Stuart Lee's Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916).

    The basic catch step is just a simple way to change the lead foot, either because it's needed for a variation or just for fun.  It's so easy I can explain it without a little numbered chart: 

    Gentleman starts left forward.  Walk for awhile.  When you want to change lead foot, make a single two-step.  Keep walking with the lead (odd count; the strong beat of the music) on the other foot.  The lady does the same thing, but backward and starting on the right foot.

    More formally:

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  • Early foxtrot: the drag step

    It’s been quite some time since I’ve written up any early foxtrot variations, so here’s a simple but stylish one from 1914 to add to your repertoire!

    Dancer Joan Sawyer, owner of the Persian Gardens nightclub in New York City, called this the “drag step”, but unlike the drag or draw steps found in other dances of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the feet are not just closed heel to heel.  Instead, the closing foot is tucked behind (his) or in front of (hers) the other.  Here’s Sawyer’s description of the drag step and the following “trot”, with the accompanying illustration at left:

    The gentleman slides the left foot out to his left as though he were going to walk sideways.  He then drags his right foot over back of the heel of the left foot, coming up slightly on the toes at the end of the movement, and breaks into a forward “trot” of four steps, gentleman starting the first trot step with is left foot…The lady you see slides her right foot out to her right, she then points the toe of her left foot over in front of her right foot, throwing her weight on to the left foot, then trots backward four steps, sliding the right foot back first.

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  • A Valentine Cotillion

    I return once more, in honor of Valentine’s Day, to H. Layton Walker’s delightful Twentieth Century Cotillion Figures (Two Step Publishing Company, Buffalo, New York, 1912), which is always guaranteed to provide me some interesting figures for imaginative dancers.  Christmas was a bit disappointing, as holiday cotillion themes go.  Valentine’s Day seems much more promising, since both cotillions and valentines have the goal of matching up people and thus ought to combine nicely!

    Starting from the top of an evening’s program, Walker does provide a couple of useful suggestions for the grand march.  I noted a few years ago that good leaders could get their marching dancers into formations such as the letters of the alphabet, or other geometric figures.  Hearts, for example, lend themselves easily to being both created and escaped from by lines of dancers.  Walker provided the diagrams at left for what he called a “Heart March Cotillion”, though the shape is so basic that one hardly needs the help.

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  • A St. Louis Hesitation Waltz (1914)

    The generically named One Step Hesitation is a short hesitation waltz sequence that appeared in the second edition of the collection Dance Mad, or the dances of the day, compiled by F. Leslie Clendenen and published in St. Louis in late 1914.  It is subtitled “As Recommended by St. Louis Association Dancing Masters”, and with no author listed, may have come from the hand of Clendenen himself.

    Since the One Step Hesitation is almost entirely in the slowest possible type of hesitation (one step per bar of music), it calls for very fast waltz music or it will drag badly.  I prefer 180 beats per minute and up for this type of hesitation waltz.

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  • Seasonal Cotillions

    Once more, some cotillions, this time to wrap up the year with midwinter cheer!  As with the North Pole figures, these are taken from H. Layton Walker’s Twentieth Century Cotillion Figures (Buffalo, New York, 1912).  This trio of figures is pure fun, however, with no special historical significance.  Three figures aren’t enough to comprise an entire party on their own, but mixed with standard, non-winter-themed figures, they add a nice seasonal touch.

    But first, let’s let’s decorate the ballroom with a winter theme…

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  • Seeking the North Pole…

    In honor of the freezing cold winter weather, I’m returning to H. Layton Walker’s Twentieth Century Cotillion Figures (Two Step Publishing Company, Buffalo, New York, 1912) for a pair of cotillion figures themed around the then-current news of the attempts by explorers Robert Peary and Frederick Cook to be the first to reach the North Pole in 1908-1909.  At the time Walker’s book was written, there was a lively conflict going on between the two men as to who could claim the polar laurels.  Since then, both accounts have been discredited to varying degrees, but it seems to still be something of an ongoing debate among scholars.  There’s an interesting account of the two expeditions and the contemporary debate at the Smithsonian Magazine website, which I recommend for anyone wanting more historical perspective.

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  • Boarding House

    Final cotillion figure for the month!  Boarding House straddles the line between comedy and horror, making it perfect for Halloween.  Along with being probably the single weirdest cotillion figure I’ve ever seen, which is saying a lot, it’s also the most elaborate, requiring the construction of a special trick table along with props and costumes for some of the dancers.  The figure is taken from St. Louis dancing master Jacob Mahler’s 1900 compilation Original Cotillion Figures, in which it was attributed to Brooklyn dancing master William Pitt Rivers.  After reading through this figure, I’m not sure I’d have wanted to have him as my dancing master!

    I’ll include the full original description below, but since it is rather lengthy, I’ll start with the requirements and process for the figure.

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  • Red Ear Party, 1919

    The description of the Red Ear Party, or Harvest Home Party, appears in Emily Rose Burt’s Entertaining Made Easy (New York, 1919).  It was not a full-scale fancy dress ball, but an autumn/harvest-themed ball put on by, according to the book, a group of high school seniors as the opening event of their final year.  Along with normal dancing of the era, it featured a series of novelty dances which were effectively low-key cotillions.  Did the event really take place or was it imagined by Ms. Burt just for the book?  Hard to say.  But I’m impressed with the imagination and industry either displayed by the actual students or expected by Ms. Burt to be achievable by high school kids.  I wish my teenage school dances had been like this!

    The red ear of the title was not a body part but an ear of corn.  The significance is said to go back to a colonial tradition in which whoever found the red ear at a corn husking party would get to kiss the girl of his choice.  (You can see an example of one red ear among a lot of normal ones here.)  In this case, finding the (faked) red ear was used to select a “queen” for the party.

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  • Marching Medications

    Coming back to cotillion figures, and sliding even further down the weirdness scale, here’s a figure that combines playing doctor and still more wacky costumes!  The source, once again, is the ever-delightful Twentieth Century Cotillion Figures by H. Layton Walker (Two Step Publishing Company, Buffalo, New York, 1912).

    Like the Garden Figure and Stocking Auction figures, Sanitarium is a partner-choosing mixer, but with a much more elaborate setup.  Here’s Walker’s description:

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  • Fruit and Stockings

    Moving on from fancy dress balls, here are a pair of cotillion figures which actually involve some degree of costuming, at least for loose definitions of the concept.  Both figures are taken from H. Layton Walker’s Twentieth Century Cotillion Figures (Two Step Publishing Company, Buffalo, New York, 1912), source of an endless supply of delightfully weird figures.  There are actually Halloween-themed figures in Walker’s book, but they’re quite dull by comparison with these two!

    Both figures are simple mixers, with either the ladies or the gentlemen selecting partners from a group of opposite-sex dancers.  Dozens of figures of this sort were published over the years, but these two take the concept to a whole new level by having the dancers put on some sort of silly costume during the ball itself, presumably right over their normal evening dress.

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  • The Rag-Time Crawl

    I semi-jokingly call the Rag-Time Crawl “the dance for when I get tired of the Castle Schottische”.  It basically fulfills the same function: easy to dance, accessible to beginners, and comforting to people who are not up to leading and following and enjoy the Macarena-like effect of everyone moving all together in the same pattern.

    My source for the dance is Frank H. Norman’s Complete Dance Instructor (Ottawa, 1914).  The author is J. B. McEwen of Glasgow, Scotland.  I don’t know a lot about either of these gentlemen, but I can offer a few bits of trivia:

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  • Respect the box step

    I’ve been thinking a lot over the last few years about the underlying skills needed for various forms of social dance.  A critical one is the ability to shift steps between time signatures, as I discussed a couple of months ago.  And one of the best examples of that is what happened with the much-maligned “box step” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

    The box step doesn’t get a lot of respect among historical dancers in America because it is strongly associated with modern ballroom dance studio practices.  That’s unfortunate, because I’m increasingly convinced that its historical incarnation, the “new waltz” (in contrast to the older valse à trois temps with its pirouette), is extremely important to know for anyone studying American social dancing of the 1880s-1910s.  Despite this, it often gets pushed aside in favor of the older style, which is usually taught first and thus becomes the default social waltz in modern reenactment.  That’s not wrong, exactly; it’s not like the older waltz vanished in favor of the new. But I think that we ought to be spending a lot more time on the new waltz, because it appears to be one of the fundamental building blocks of the social dance of the entire late Victorian/Edwardian/ragtime era.

    Let’s look at how the box step got used historically:

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  • The Dip Schottische

    The Dip Schottische is one of the minor schottische sequences created by dancing masters in the early 1910s.  In this case, the author was one I. C. Sampson, of Lynn, Massachusetts, and the dance was published in both the first and second editions of F. Leslie Clendenen’s compilation Dance Mad (St. Louis, 1914).  Unfortunately, the dance instructions have one major ambiguity that makes it very difficult to come to a definitive reconstruction: what, exactly, does “turn” mean?  Here’s the original language for one move in the dance:

    “One Step” turn (pivot, four steps, two measures)

    The problem is that there is no single “one step turn”.  There are at least two very plausible candidates: the spin and the traveling turn, better known today as pivots.  If I had to guess which would be the “one step turn”, I’d guess the spin, but there are some problems with that in regard to this particular sequence.  But there are problems with the traveling turn as well.  Here’s some of what I considered when trying to choose between them:

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  • Early Foxtrot: The Castle Favorite

    Along with the standard early variations that come up repeatedly in the 1910s, there are also numerous little foxtrot variants that turn up only once and were probably not generally popular.  Despite the name, the "Castle Favorite", presumably a reference to the famous ballroom dancers and teachers Vernon and Irene Castle, does not turn up in any source I have that is actually by the Castles.  Instead, it appears in Edna Stuart Lee's Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916), a wonderful little source for unusual early foxtrot variations.  I don't necessarily rule out a connection with the Castles, but given how creative Lee was with variation-names, I am not taking it as a given without some actual proof.

    Lee calls this a "rather difficult step, requiring considerable practice and possibly not adapted to ordinary social dancing".  That seems an exaggerated level of concern to me; it's not difficult to dance or to lead, and I see no reason not to include it in social dancing other than it being too uncommon to bother learning.

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  • Mr. Faurot’s Hesitation Waltz

    This hesitation waltz sequence by Seattle dance teacher George G. Faurot (c1879-1954) was published in both editions of F. Leslie Clendenen’s compilation Dance Mad (St. Louis, 1914).  Faurot himself was a native of Lima, Ohio, where his uncle Ben discovered oil and his brother Lee eventually became mayor.  Faurot Park in Lima was donated by Ben and is named for him.

    According to George’s obituary, he fought in the Spanish-American War and then had a career in the oil industry before moving to Seattle, where he ran the Faurot Studio of Dancing with his wife, Nellie, for thirty years.  The Faurots’ residence in the late 1930s is now a historical site in Seattle.  The building that housed their dance studio, the Oddfellows Building, still stands and is still home to a dance studio, Century Ballroom, though the Faurot Ballroom itself seems to have been in the first-floor space which is now the Oddfellows Cafe.

    Interestingly, Lee, before becoming mayor, also seems to have dabbled in dance teaching before ending up in the insurance business and politics.  A family passion?

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  • One for the ponies!

    I've been waiting for most of my life for another horse to win the Triple Crown, and, much to my chagrin, when it finally happened I was working and therefore missed seeing it live even on television, let alone indulging my secret hope to one day see such a thing in person.  Arrgh!

    I will console myself by free-associating to a foxtrot variation: the Cavalry Charge!

    The first thing to be aware of is that Edna Stuart Lee, in her Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916), calls the following sequence "The Pony Trot" and claims that it was the original foxtrot step:

    1234    Four walking steps
    1&2&  Four trots

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  • Fox Trot Hats

    I’ve been looking for something amusing to wind up the centennial year of the foxtrot, and I found it in the November 17, 1914, issue of The Richmond Times-Dispatch: some fashion advice for the foxtrotting ladies in the store advertisement shown at left:

    Fox-Trotting Without a Fox Trot Hat
    is like joy riding on a steam roller.

    How do I follow up a line like that?  I can only suggest reading the rest of the ad (click to enlarge) for more delightfully fulsome language.

    For historical dancers, this is a reminder that during the 1910s, dancing in a hat at an afternoon thé dansant was perfectly proper, though judging by the advertisement, either not everyone agreed or not everyone succeeded in finding a suitable hat:

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  • A Montréal Gavotte, 1918

    The classic schottische of the mid-nineteenth century and its later incarnation, the Barn Dance (a.k.a. the Military Schottische and the Pas de Quatre) had mostly faded from fashionable ballrooms by the late 1910s.  But a few very simple schottisches or schottische-like sequences turn up now and then in dance manuals and on sheet music of the 1910s, often under the name “gavotte”, a musical form with the same 4/4 meter characteristic of the schottische.

    La Gavotte is a short sequence taken from Professor A. Lacasse’s La Danse apprise chez soi, published in Montréal in 1918.  There were many dances called “gavotte” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not all of them in 4/4 time, so while this particular gavotte may have been locally popular in Montréal, it should not be considered any sort of definitive gavotte for the 1910s or any other era.

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  • A 3/4-time grapevine sequence, 1914

    I’ve had sequence dances on my mind recently after some discussion earlier this week, which reminded me of this little sequence from the the second edition of F. Leslie Clendenen’s 1914 compilation Dance Mad.  It appears there under the name “American Grapevine Dance” by Anthony J. Giaconia of Springfield, Massachusetts.  I know nothing about Mr. Giaconia except that on June 24, 1912, he was quoted on the front page of The Indianapolis News as one of a convention of dancing masters appalled by dances like the Grizzly Bear and Bunny Hug.  He found some dancing in a park there so disgraceful that it ought to be stopped “for the sake of decency”.

    The Grapevine Dance is so short (only eight bars) that it doesn’t feel long enough to be a sequence dance all on its own, but the two measures in which the dancers move directly into the center of the room and back make it mildly risky to use simply as a variation; moving abruptly back and forth across the line of dance can cause problems for dancers coming up behind.  Doing this from an “inside lane” near the center of the room will be more polite if it is not being done in unison as a sequence dance.

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  • Basic Foxtrots from Edna Lee

    Earlier this year I talked about nine different variations from the handy little booklet Edna Stuart Lee's Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916) in two mini-series, starting here (three posts) and here (two posts).  My choice of sequences may have given the impression that Lee's collection was mostly odd little variations with (often) even odder names (Chaplin Trot, anyone?)  That's because I was skipping over the simplest sequences given by Lee, since I have encountered them elsewhere and written about them, or similar sequences, in earlier posts. 

    Here, I'm going to give a quick rundown of eight very basic sequences that Lee included among her more unusual and/or unique ones so that it is clear that there was a certain basic repertoire overlapping what is found in many other sources.

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  • Hop, hop, foxtrotters!

    Concluding my extended celebration of the foxtrot‘s centennial year: more about the hop-turn!

    A few years ago, I considered hopping in the 1910s foxtrot to be a relatively obscure practice — I’d only ever found one sequence with a hop in it and had only a brief mention in a newspaper article to reassure me that it was not just a one-couple oddity.  But looking through Edna Stuart Lee’s Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916), there are actually several sequences that include hops, including two that are strikingly similar to the previously described Bassett/Elliott hop-turn.

    Here are two more ways to, in the words of the newspaper article, “make our turn with a quick, fast hop” while foxtrotting.

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  • The Castles’ Paul Jones

    In 1914, Victor Records made a celebrity-endorsement deal with Vernon and Irene Castle, “the greatest exponents of Modern Dancing who supervise the making of Victor Dance Records”.  The company put out a little booklet, Victor Records for Dancing, which included short instructions for various couple dances (including the brand-new foxtrot) plus an enthusiastic note from Vernon Castle about the superiority of Victor records and the indispensibility of the Victrola in teaching classes.

    The instructions for each dance were accompanied by a convenient list of suitable Victor recordings.  Tucked at the end of the book were instructions for a country dance and a Paul Jones circle mixer “as taught at the Castle School of Dancing, New York City”.

    In the past, I’ve discussed a very simple 1903 two-step circle mixer and a more complex English Paul Jones from the 1920s.  The Castles’ version is quite similar to the 1903 one, but it’s physically rather livelier while mentally less taxing; the dancers don’t have to count.

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  • Early Foxtrot: The Newburgh

    The Newburgh is a longer and more complicated foxtrot sequence taken from Edna Stuart Lee’s Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916).  Like her Left Glide, it changes the lead foot against the music, with same opportunities and issues previously discussed for that move.

    As is typical, the gentleman starts on the left foot, moving forward, and the lady on the right foot, moving backward.  The steps below are the gentleman’s steps; reverse everything for the lady.  The numbers are beats, not measures.

    The Newburgh
    12345    five walking steps (left, right, left, right)
    6            cross right over left (lady crosses left behind right)
    7&8       two-step (left-right-left)

    1            cross right over left
 (lady crosses left behind right)
    2&3       two-step (left-right-left)
    4            cross right over left (lady crosses left behind right)
    5&6       two-step (left-right-left)
    7            step side right

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  • Early Foxtrot: Slides & Glides, 1916

    Continuing on with my little celebration of the centennial year of the foxtrot:

    I’ve discussed before how the two-step and sliding sequences similar to the four-slide galop of the nineteenth century were incorporated into the foxtrot in its earliest years.  Other than one 1919 variation from Charles Coll, the two-step sequences described were generally symmetrical, with even numbers of two-steps either in sequence or broken up by walking steps.  Slides were generally done in sets of four.

    Here’s another pair of simple “glides” from Edna Stuart Lee’s Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916) that break that pattern with single two-steps and a set of three slides.  The “Right Glide” and “Left Glide” are very accessible variations for foxtrot beginners.

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Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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