Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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Category: Quadrilles

  • A Promiscuous Figure: Flirtation

    • Era: circa 1905

    A while back I published a couple of posts on so-called “promiscuous figures,” which may be substituted into the first set of quadrilles for variety.  The Flirtation figure is another of these, taken from English dancing master William Lamb’s How and What to Dance (London, 1903), an undated New York edition of which was published in the first decade of the 20th century.

    The figure is probably intended as a finale figure, replacing the usual fifth figure, since it is entirely full-set moves and finishes with a galopade, typically included in finale figures.

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  • The Royal Gallopade

    The Royal Gallopade is an interesting mix of popular 1830s dances, with elements borrowed from country dances, galopades, and quadrilles, plus a concluding sauteuse waltz.  My only source for it is the Companion to La Terpsichore Moderne (Second Edition) by J. S. Pollock, London (see update at end of post).  It is undated, but the mix of dances and a textual reference to an 1829 event suggests the early 1830s.  Pollock claims that gallopades “appear” to be of Russian origin.  Among those he credits with their introduction is the sixth Duke of Devonshire, who was a close friend of both the Prince Regent (later George IV) and Czar Nicholas I and had traveled to the Russian court.

    Pollock depicts the original gallopade as a choreographed sequence dance for a circle of couples with gallop interspersed with short dance figures and gives not only this original but gallopades in country dance and quadrille form.  Fittingly, the Royal Gallopade is given a separate section of its own between the quadrille and country dance gallopades.

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  • A Polka Quadrille (1893)

    By the end of the 19th century,  many quadrilles were being published that didn’t follow the earlier form of having multiple separate figures.  Although this short dance does have two distinct parts, they are treated as one long figure.  The source of the dance is The Prompter’s Handbook by J.A. French, published in Boston in 1893.  The original instructions may be seen here.  There are significant similarities in the figures to the Waltz Quadrille from the same source, which I described in an earlier post, as well a a generic similarity to other one-figure quadrilles of the late 19th century, which typically involve a mix of very simple figures interspersed with the entire set dancing in couples (waltz, polka, galop, etc., depending on the type of quadrille).

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  • Advancing & Retiring Sequences for Regency-Era French Quadilles

    For the fourth in my series of posts (previously: setting, crossing over, and chassez-dechassez) on the step-sequences usable for various Regency-era French quadrille figures, I’ve pulled together three easy sequences which may be used for the figure En avant et en arrière (advance and retire or, more colloquially, forward and back), in which some number of dancers move forward to the halfway point of the quadrille set and then backward to places.  It is an extremely common figure; in the first set alone, it appears in multiple figures: L’Été, La Poule, La Trenise, La Pastourelle, and the many versions of the Finale figure which incorporate L’Été.  The move is sometimes written simply as En avant deux (trois, quatre, etc.); the return backwards is implied unless otherwise specified.

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  • Eight Easy Setting Sequences for Regency-Era French Quadrilles

    I rarely have the opportunity to teach a wide range of Regency-era setting sequences, but there are dozens of them extant and suitable for use in French quadrilles such as the first set.  Using variant setting sequences when setting to one’s partner is one of three ways to jazz up the oft-danced first set (the other two being using more exotic sequences for the other figures and changing the figures themselves) as well as in other French quadrilles for the setting part of the omnipresent “Balancez et un tour de mains” (set and turn your partners) figure.

    The following selection of eight four-bar setting sequences is drawn from two sources in particular: the Scottish manuscript Contre Danses à Paris 1818 and the useful Elements of the Art of Dancing by Alexander Strathy (Edinburgh, 1822).  Curiously, the best sources for quadrille steps other than the actual French manuals come from Scotland — the Auld Alliance revived in dance!

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  • Wrestling with Belle Brandon

    (Note: since this post was written, I’ve expanded my research on this figure and written a follow-up post, Revisiting Chassé Out, which discusses further sources and slightly alters my conclusion about the performance of the chassé out figure.)

    Recently my English friend and fellow dance teacher/reconstructor Colin Hume asked on the English Country Dance mailing list for help on some American dances he plans to teach later this month at a festival.  He posted his notes (the final version is now up here) and asked for advice, since he’s not a specialist on historical American dance.  I do a lot with quadrilles (French, American, English, Spanish, etc.) so I pounced on the challenge of the 1858 set he proposed to use, the Belle Brandon Set.  This five-figure quadrille is drawn from Howe’s Ball-Room Handbook (Boston, 1858) by Massachusetts dancing master and music publisher Elias Howe.

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  • A Waltz Quadrille (1893)

    By the end of the 19th century, quite a number of quadrilles were being published that didn’t follow the earlier form of having multiple separate figures.  Although this dance does have two distinct dance parts, the original instructions (which may be seen here) are clear that they should be treated as one long figure:

    Play an ordinary waltz and do not stop between the numbers.

    The source of the dance is The Prompter’s Handbook by J.A. French, published in Boston in 1893.  I haven’t looked for any other sources for this particular set of figures – it’s a trivial little quadrille which I reconstructed in order to have a late-evening set dance that was easy and provided an excuse for plenty of waltzing.

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Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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