Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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Category: 1910s

  • 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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Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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