Jane and more Jane! I have finally succumbed to the Jane Austen 250th hoopla and will be doing two Jane Austen events in Connecticut this month: a lecture with a bit of dancing and a dance-centered evening. In between I’ll be up in Hartford for waltz and down in New Jersey for Civil War era dancing. And then at the end of the month, more disco line dancing!

A full list of events further into the future may be found on my overall gig calendar.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Saturday, December 6th ~ Weston, Connecticut
Jane Austen’s 250th Birthday Celebration (Facebook event)
Weston Library, 56 Norfield Road, Weston, CT
2:00-4:00pm. Enjoy a lighthearted lecture about dance in Jane Austen’s life and works followed by a bit of beginner-friendly dancing! Tea and cupcakes provided. This event is FREE but space is limited and pre-registration at the Weston Library website is required.

Sunday, December 7th ~ Wethersfield, Connecticut
Mostly Waltz Hartford (Facebook group) (Facebook event)
2:30-5:30pm. Social dancing, 2/3 waltz and 1/3 other, to live music by Peregrine Road (Rachel Bell and Karen Axelrod). I will be teaching a beginner-friendly lesson from 2:30-3:00 on tips and tricks for waltzing to very fast music as well as a mini-lesson on the same theme during the band break. $15 admission, cash at the door.

Saturday-Sunday, December 13-14th ~ Morristown, NJ
Jolly Old Christmas at Historic Speedwell, 333 Speedwell Ave., Morristown, NJ
10:00am-3:00pm daily.  Informal 1860s dancing to live music as part of a larger Christmas celebration at this historical site.  Other attractions include a winter Civil War encampment, blacksmithing and hearth cooking, historic house tours, seasonal crafts, and Santa Claus! $5 per person, at the gate or in advance. Tickets at the Morris Parks website.

Tuesday, December 16th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Jane Austen 250th Birthday Tea & Dance Party (Facebook event)
at Vinnie’s Jump & Jive, 635 Main Street, Middletown, CT
7:00-9:00pm. Come dance like Jane Austen! Join me at Vinnie’s in Middletown to celebrate Jane Austen’s 250th birthday in style with tea and cake and music and DANCING! No experience is needed and no partner is needed. Regency costume much encouraged but not required! Please bring clean indoor shoes to preserve the beautiful dance floor. Flat, leather-soled shoes recommended – high heels are not compatible with this kind of dancing! $15.00 / per person in advance (Paypal) or cash at the door.

Saturday, December 27th ~ ONLINE (Connecticut-based)
Online country dance reconstruction class (private event)
6:00pm-??? Inquire by email if you would like to study dance reconstruction online with me!

Sunday, December 28th ~ Middletown, Connecticut
Disco Line Dancing! (Facebook event)
at Vinnie’s Jump & Jive, 635 Main Street, Middletown, CT
2:00-4:00pm.  Let’s party like it’s 1978! Come learn the great line dances of the disco era and dance to fabulous disco music! Learn the Bus Stop, the New Yorker, Hot Chocolate, and of course the Saturday Night Fever Dance! Great fun and great exercise. No previous experience needed and no partner required.  Hilarious 1970s clothing encouraged! $10/person cash at the door.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I am available to travel for in-person dance teaching, lecturing, and ball precepting.  I am also still available for private or group online lessons and talks via Zoom or your videoconferencing software of choice.  Please email me directly if you would like to schedule an event, workshop, or talk!

Coming in January: a trip to Boston to DJ, another Bridgerton class, and a week in Atlanta!

One ball down, one to go! The big event this month is my annual trip to Gettysburg for Remembrance Day Weekend, this year with only one ball. I’ll also squeeze in a quick trip to Boston and a three-week series of disco line dance classes before retreating home to more-or-less hibernate for a couple of weeks and work on writing and blog restoration before things pick up again in the first half of December.

A full list of events further into the future may be found on my overall gig calendar.

(more…)

This was always intended to be an at-home month as I teach my local classes and work on promoting two, count’em, TWO balls which, in a fit of insanity, I scheduled only three weeks apart. Life is now complicated by the ongoing project of restoring my blog on a new platform and developing a website around it. The fact that this post exists is evidence of (slow) progress!

Keep reading for the list of this month’s classes and ball. A full list of events further into the future may be found on my overall gig calendar.

continue reading ->

Rescuing all my data from the Typepad shutdown was not what I had been planning to do this month!  I’m going to have to spend a significant chunk of time this month downloading data and teaching myself WordPress so I can bring it all back on a new platform. This is not going to be fun.

And yes, through all of this website crisis, I will still have to travel and teach.  September is not insanely busy, but if I’d known I’d have to move my entire site this month, I would have planned even fewer events.  I’ll have quick trips to Boston and New York (Long Island) and classes in Connecticut, including a weekly series on basic nightclub two-step!

As always, events and workshops past the present month may be found on my overall gig calendar.

(more…)

Summer is winding down!  This month's big trip is to Seattle for a cluster of dance workshops and two balls at the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon).  Before that, a couple of small classes.  After that, a final two quiet weeks at home before things get rolling for autumn.

As always, events and workshops past the present month may be found on my overall gig calendar.

(more…)

Summer has come in, and my main work now is writing and catching up on my personal life.  I’ll be in and out of New York City, New Jersey, and Boston, for research, rehearsal, dancing, and DJing, but otherwise more-or-less invisible!

As always, events and workshops past the present month may be found on my overall gig calendar.

(more…)

The big trip this month is right at the end: the annual Dance Studies Association conference in Washington, D. C.  This will be the first time I have attended in many years, and I have a paper to present!  Other than that, I'll be sticking fairly close to home, or at least to the tri-state area, this month as things start to calm down for the summer.  

(more…)

Another month of compare-and-contrast events, this time with relatively minimal travel involved!  It'll be nice to sleep in my own bed for most of the month.

I start off out on Long Island with comparative workshops in Bridgerton dance and actual Regency dance, DJ blues in the Boston area and retro-twentieth-century music in Connecticut, and then flip over to 1910s for a short lecture at the opening of a small local case exhibit for which I am lending materials from my own collection!

Whee!!!

(more…)

This month is going to feature some mental whiplash: two classes of fantasy-Regency (meaning, totally bogus from a historical perspective) Bridgerton dance classes, then haring off to England to immerse myself in serious academic dance history at Oxford University!  Plus sneaking in some research time and exciting extra excursions while I'm in the neighborhood…

(more…)

March is weird.  Two weeks of absolutely nothing, then eight days of gigs in two weeks.  Whee!  Technically, that is four teaching days (including a three-day weekend), one evening of DJing, one morning and one evening of calling, and an academic conference, with trips to Boston and New York as well as two other parts of Connecticut.  Plus at least one day of library research.  The time periods jump from the Renaissance to the early 19th century to the present; it's almost as insane a mix as February.  I love it, but I wish things could be spread out a little bit more evenly…

(more…)

Busy, busy: that's February for me.  Two weekends in California followed by an eclectic set of sessions at The Flurry Festival, then a relatively light last weekend with another Dances of Bridgerton class!

(more…)

Happy new year!  After completely failing to have a restful holiday break in December, I am more-or-less doing that in January before everything gets crrrrrrazy in February.

(more…)

December is usually a quiet month for me, but this year it's hopping!  I'll be off to New Jersey twice, Boston once, and then at the end of the month Florida for an entire weekend of dance and fun that is FREE for attendees!

(more…)

My November has two main events: a weekend of waltzing in which I travel up and down I-91 from Connecticut to Massachusetts and back, and the big Remembrance Day Balls in Gettysburg.  In between, another Bridgerton class.  Afterward, rest and catching up on life!

(more…)

I’m going to be bouncing around geographically in October, both physically and virtually: first, a quick trip to Boston to do research and DJ for Bluesy Tuesy and a virtual appearance at an Oregon event focused around the composer Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges.  Then I’m off to Scotland once more (wasn’t I just there?) for the European Association for Dance History’s annual conference, complete with a workshop on the double quadrille by the not-nearly-notable-enough Mrs. Nicholas Henderson.  The workshop is free, if anyone happens to be in Scotland!

(more…)

This month is going to mostly be personal time for me: a family visit and an Actual Vacation^tm.  I’ll be squeezing a few days of library research (three different sites) in around these, but mostly I’ll be quietly traveling around doing non-dance things. 

Then, at the very end of the month, something new: Bridgerton dance!  This is specifically dance from the television series which — news flash! — is not intended to be historically accurate.  I regard the show as speculative fiction (alternate history) and the dances as fantastical, not historical.  You can read some of my thoughts about this here.  I taught a couple of these dances in Scotland last month, but this will be the first time teaching them in the USA.

(more…)

I'll be starting out August with a couple of weeks in Scotland.  The first weekend, I'll be teaching a dance workshop and leading a tea dance in Edinburgh, both with a general theme of Scottish dances influenced by or connected to those of Continental Europe and Continental dances that appeared in Scottish sources.  The second weekend, I'll be having a very eclectic time at the World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, which for me will include giving a popularly-oriented paper, leading a masquerade ball for which I've been reconstructing some truly terrifying dances from video, and DJ'ing a blues dance.  In between: library time and perhaps a bit of tourism!

Later in the month I'm looking forward to a reunion with a group of my most dedicated online students from pandemic times.

(more…)

I was expecting to spend July quietly at home, but it looks like I'll be making a quick DJing-and-research trip to Boston before returning home to prepare for my trip to Scotland in August!

(more…)

Summer is a-coming in, and it's likely to be hot.  I want to spend my time in nice, cool libraries doing research instead of hot, sweaty dance spaces with no air conditioning!  I'll be DJ'ing in the Boston area early this month and spending at least five days reading in various libraries.  And doing yardwork.  Lots and lots of yardwork.  Sigh.  Stay cool!

continue reading ->

I'm going to start off May with a long trip to England to teach and call at a folk festival and then do some research in London, where the British Library is finally semi-functional again after last autumn's cyberattack.  I have a lengthy "shopping list" of sources to look at and a list of museum exhibitions to visit while they are paging them!

After that, and April's travel insanity, I'm going to spend the rest of the month at home recovering and hopefully catching up on processing and cataloguing my research photos all the way back to February…

(more…)

April is going to be fun!  I'll be heading to Chicago to run dance workshops and a ball for a Regency-themed LARP and an evening of 18th and 19th century French dance, to Massachusetts for the New England Folk Festival (NEFFA), and then down to Staten Island (NYC) for an 1824 Lafayette Ball.  I don't put library days on my schedule, but I'll have time this month at both the New York Public Library and the Newberry.  In between I'll try to keep catching up on cataloguing material from previous library trips!

(more…)

March is…Massachusetts month!  Two trips to Boston (well, Cambridge and Concord) for DJing, researching, and teaching a weekend of waltz and more, plus an online lecture for a Lowell group.  Woo hoo!

(more…)

The end of winter is in (distant) sight. and I am slowly ramping up travel again as we hopefully pass out of peak-respiratory-illness season.  But I still expect to spend most of February quietly at home muttering over translations from several languages.

(more…)

Happy new year!

Since I didn't really get a holiday break in December, and I'm traveling overseas again the first week in January for a conference, the rest of January will be my Official Post-Holiday Break — the first time in several months I won't be preparing a gig, preparing a paper, preparing to travel, or recovering from some/all of the above.

(more…)

It feels like November is going to stretch for two more days as I wind up an intense trip to the UK that has so far involved two days of teaching and visits to three different libraries and archives in three different cities/towns.  Today and tomorrow will be library #4 in yet another town.  On Saturday I fly home and have one entire day there before turning around and heading to Boston for my last public event of the year: DJing once more for Bluesy Tuesy!  I'll be sneaking in some research there, too.  Weather permitting, this may include a cemetery stroll…

Edited 12/20/23 to add:
Okay, one more public event: I will be teaching some Lancers (quadrille) at Yiddish New York 2023!  It's a long story….

(more…)