Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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Category: Country Dance

  • The Trio

    Since I frequently have to deal with an imbalance in numbers between the ladies and the gentlemen at nineteenth century balls, I’m always interested in dances that use a trio formation.  This can be one gentleman with two ladies or vice-versa, though the former is the more common situation.

    This dance, simply called “The Trio”, appears in at least two editions of Elias Howe’s American dancing master, and ball-room prompter (Boston, 1862 and 1866).  Howe’s instructions are a bit vague and neglect to mention the actual timing of the figures, but a little experimentation convinced me that the following reconstruction is workable and fun.  This is an extremely easy dance, good for groups of beginners.

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  • Trips to Paris

    This post is for Allison, Graham, and Alan, who know and care.  

    If I expect to get anything done in my life, I cannot spend my time wandering around the net getting irritated by the dance history errors.  But I do pay attention when they arrive by email.  So I noticed when a mailing list query about how best to dance “A Trip to Paris” at a Jane Austen ball appeared in my inbox.  Happily, I was neither the first nor the last list member to jump in with some version of “That dance is from Walsh, from 1711, and does not belong at a Jane Austen ball!”  (Jane Austen lived from 1775-1817, and her dancing days would have started in the early 1790s.)

    I did get intrigued by one comment in the ensuing discussion: that the dance had been “republished by Thomas Cahusac in 24 Country Dances for 1794” and therefore might have been danced by Jane Austen.  That’s a terrifically specific citation — hurray! — but I instantly doubted it, since (1) very few dances or tunes of the earlier style were reprinted that late (young people, then and now, not being particularly into dancing their great-grandparents’ dances), and (2) I already knew there were other tunes called “A Trip to Paris” and other dance figures printed with them.  As another list member pointed out, it’s a very generic sort of title.

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  • A ballroom brawl, 1804

    Going beyond simple rudeness in the ballroom, here’s a wonderful account of a French-American culture clash turned violent at a ball in New Orleans on January 23, 1804.  Aside from showing what people of that era would fight over and how hair-trigger tempers were in New Orleans in particular at that time, it also usefully documents some ballroom dance practices of the era.  Slowly piecing together such tidbits eventually allows me to draw larger conclusions.

    I’m not going to explain the whole background of the Louisiana Purchase, which transferred an enormous swathe of North America from French to American control in 1803, but it is worth noting that the formal transfer of New Orleans itself took place on December 20, 1803, only a month or so before the incident described.  There is a suggestion earlier in the article that feelings were running high among the French in the wake of (perceived?) American disrespect during the replacement of the French flag with the American one.  There had already been a “slight misunderstanding” at a previous assembly on January 6th.  The fight on the 23rd is a small example of the sort of cultural conflicts that would be a problem in New Orleans society for decades afterward.

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  • Tired of the company, 1789

    I’ve recently been reminded by some discussions on a mailing list that there are plenty of people who don’t really have much grasp of the social context of dance in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century or that a ball could be a much more complicated and socially perilous event than just a bunch of folks getting together and having a nice time dancing.

    Here’s an interesting example of rudeness on the dance floor wielded as a social weapon.

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  • “agoing to dance the spanish dance”

    “…George Cowls says tell Nancy he is right in his glory to day and when he comes home he is agoing to dance the spanish dance with you and he says tell Abby he is agoing through ceders swamp with her…”
               — Pvt. Jairus Hammond to Nancy Titus, December 8, 1862

    Here’s rare documentation of a specific dance: a mention in a letter from a Union soldier during the American Civil War to his sister, dated one hundred and fifty-two years ago today, that another man plans to dance the Spanish Dance (previously described here) with her when he returns.  There has been no real doubt that the Spanish Dance was actually danced and was as popular as its frequent appearance in dance manuals suggests.  I have found it listed on dozens of dance cards.  But this is another little piece of documentation demonstrating that its popularity extended well down the social scale.

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  • Double Scotch Reel

    Double Scotch Reel does not seem to be Scotch and, as I reconstruct it, does not actually include any reels (heys).  It is a trio contra (three facing three in long lines own the room) which I have found only in one source: the Gems of the Ball Room Call Book published by E. T. Root & Sons in Chicago in 1896.  The Gems call book appears to have been published specifically as dance calls for quadrilles and contra dances to go with the tunes in a series of music books called Gems of the Ball Room also published by Root.

    The contra dance figures in Gems have some noticeable variations from those found in New England manuals such as those of Elias Howe, which might indicate regional variations between the northeast and midwest or might be simple carelessness on the part of the editor.  The language and format of the different figures makes it obvious that they were pulled from different sources, so I suspect that somewhere there is another source for Double Scotch Reel, and that the collator of dances for Gems copied it exactly.

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  • Figure Four?

    In a post a while back on the Regency “figure eight” and the many meanings of the term “figure” in that era, I mentioned a joking suggestion made by a guest at one of my Regency balls that a half figure eight should be called a “figure four”.  Much to my astonishment, while pursuing some research on American country dance of this era, I actually found a figure four!

    The figure is in an American manual published in 1808 in upstate New York, in the figure given for the tune “Flowers of Glasgow”:

    Flowers of Glasgow
    First couple figure four with second couple, cast down two couple, back again, cross over, down one couple, balance, lead up, hands round with third couple, and right and left at top.
        — A Select Collection of the Newest and Most Favorite Country Dances, Otsego, NY, 1808.

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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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  • Setting a higher standard

    Moving on from what ought to be the rock-bottom minimal standard for anything calling itself a “Jane Austen ball”, even in the modern English country dance community, let me talk a little about higher standards, and what you’d want to do if you were interested in actually approaching as close as is practical to period practice.  I’ve made two lists, one of what I consider to be important and one of elements that I do not consider as critical.  Some items are characteristics of the dancing itself, and some have to do with ball format, because the latter is just as important as the former in establishing a period atmosphere and breaking people out of the modern mindset.

    Modern English country dance groups are unlikely to want to try most (or any!) of this, but I hope it’s interesting to see how different an experience a ball would have been two hundred years ago.  Some people have the bizarre idea that by suggesting that using “dances” (in the modern sense) from Jane Austen’s lifetime for something called a “Jane Austen ball”, I am somehow trying to impose actual historical practices on them.  No, really, not!

    For simplicity’s sake, I’ve limited this to just things pertaining to country dancing, rather than trying to cover the entire range of possible dance forms for either Austen herself or the actual decade of the Regency.

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  • Harvest Home

    • Era: American, late 1850s-early 1860s

    In commemoration of the American Thanksgiving holiday, here’s a seasonally appropriate dance from the American Civil War era, a country dance for a set of six couples.

    While I have not done a comprehensive search, I appear to have instructions for “Harvest Home” only in a pair of dance manuals by Elias Howe: Howe’s Complete Ballroom Handbook (Boston, 1858) and American Dancing Master and Ball-Room Prompter (Boston, 1862), which include far more country dances than is typical of other dance manuals of the time period.  New England to this day retains a stronger country dance tradition, in the form of modern contra dance, than most other parts of the United States.

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Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

Email Susan

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