Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

Email Susan

Category: Regency/Jane Austen

  • Mrs. Walker’s Masqued Ball, 1804

    Jumping from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth century:

    I first came across a description of Mrs. Walker's Masqued Ball as it was published in a Philadelphia journal, The Port-Folio, on January 19, 1805, with a credit to the The Morning Post, a noted London newspaper which famously covered the social activities of the upper classes in Regency England. 

    For several years, I had the article filed under the date 1805, but with a suspicious note attached because the outdoor party described (with a hostess concerned about the possibility of the heat being "oppressive") didn't sound likely to have occurred in January, even in England.  I still haven't found the original Morning Post article, but I did turn up a shorter version of the same description (minus all the costume information) that was published in The Lancaster Gazette (of Lancaster, England, not Lancaster, Pennsylvania) on Saturday, July 14, 1804, with one critical word present:

    on Wednesday se'nnight         [emphasis mine]

    (more…)

  • Paine’s Quadrilles, Twelfth Set, 1819 (4 of 4)

    (This is fourth in a series of four posts covering Paine’s Twelfth Set.  The introductory post in the series may be found here, figures one and two here, and figures three and four here.)

    Concluding my series on Paine’s Twelfth Set, the final figure!

    No. 5, tune “La Nouvelle Fantasia“
    Figure.
    Chassez croisez huit, les quatre Cavaliers en avant 4 mes, les quatre dames de meme, balancez tour de mains, la Cavalier seul en avant et en arriere 8 mes, la dame seul de meme.
    La Grand Promenade.

    All 8 chassez across and back again, the 4 Gent: advance and retire 4 bars, the 4 Ladies the same, balancez and turn your partners, one Gent: advance and retire twice 8 bars, the opposite Lady do the same.  
    Promenade all 8.

    (more…)

  • Paine’s Quadrilles, Twelfth Set, 1819 (3 of 4)

    (This is third in a series of four posts covering Paine’s Twelfth Set.  The introductory post in the series may be found here and figures one and two here.)

    Continuing on with Paine’s Twelfth Set, the next two figures…

    No. 3, tune “L’Aimable“
    Figure de La Poule. — or
    Le 4 dames font le moulinet pendant que les 4 Cavaliers font la grand Promenade a droite, ils donnent les mins a leurs dames et balancez tour de mains pour se remettre a sa place, les tiroirs a quatre et restez à la place opposee, de meme les 4 autres demie Promenade tous les 8, Jusqua [sic] votre place et tour de mains en place.
    Contre Partie.

    The 4 Ladies moulinet while the 4 Gent: do grand Promenade to the right, the 4 Gents: give their hands to their partners, balancez and turn them round to their places, the tiroirs 4 and stop at the opposite place the other 4 the same, half Promenade all 8 to your places, and turn your partner round to your place.  
    The same again.

    (more…)

  • Paine’s Quadrilles, Twelfth Set, 1819 (2 of 4)

    (This is second in a series of four posts covering Paine’s Twelfth Set.  The introductory post in the series may be found here.)

    All right, let’s move on to the actual figures!  In my transcriptions below of the French and English instructions, the capitalization, spelling, punctuation, and lack of accents over the French vowels are all as printed in the original.

    No. 1, tune “La Belle Flamand”
    Figure de la Pantalon — or
    Quatre demie chaine Anglaise, les 4 autres demie chaine Anglaise, demie Promenade tous les 8, et tour de mains a votre place, chaine des dames celles qui ont commencez [sic], balancez 8 et tour de mains. 
    Contre Partie.

    Four half right and left, the other four the same, half Promanade [sic] all 8 to your place and turn your partners round, Ladies chain by those who began the dance, balance 8 and turn your partners round. 
    The same again the other 4.

    (more…)

  • Paine’s Quadrilles, Twelfth Set, 1819 (1 of 4)

    As with my earlier reconstructions of Howe’s figures for “Les Rats” and the third set of Simonet’s Parisian Quadrilles, I was primarily motivated to reconstruct Paine’s Twelfth Set of Quadrilles by the existence of a high-quality recording of the music.  I’m not sure what prompted Green Ginger to choose this quadrille, out of more than a dozen of Paine’s other sets of quadrille music (besides his most-famous and oft-recorded first) to include on their CD of Regency-era dance music, Music for Quadrilles, but it’s an excellent set of tunes played beautifully.

    I’ve used these recordings in the past as variant music for the standard quadrille figures, which they were structured to fit.  But Paine’s original sheet music also included new figures for those who didn’t want to dance the usual ones, and they turned out to have some unusual figures which I quite like.

    The booklet of liner notes for Music for Quadrilles includes instructions for each dance; the quadrille ones are clearly Ellis Rogers’ work.  I mostly agree with those reconstructions, but they are bare-bones figure lists with no steps or details of performance.  I have a few minor quibbles with figure interpretations and some of the musical repeats, and I think there are reconstruction issues with the fifth figure that are worth pointing out.

    (more…)

  • Un jeu d’échecs (a game of chess), 1810

    Another themed quadrille described by Laure Junot, the Duchess of Abrantès, was the “game of chess” danced, or at least presented, at a masked ball in Paris in the February of 1810.  The quadrille was also described in her Memoires de Madame la duchesse d’Abrantes, which were published and republished in multiple volumes in a variety of editions.  The French text below was taken from an 1837 fourth edition published in Brussels, which may be found online here.  A contemporary (1833) English translation is online here, but it is not a close enough translation and omits some lines, so I’ve done my own, with reference to it.

    Junot spent more time in her memoirs complaining about the costumes and rehearsal time required for this quadrille than she did on the actual performance, but from her description, it seems like very few of the pieces (dancers) actually got to do much, unless perhaps they danced as they entered the board.  But what little she describes does mention steps, and the costume descriptions give us a fairly good idea of how the dancers must have appeared: vaguely Egyptian pawns with tightly-wrapped skirts and sleeves like mummies and sphinx-like hairstyles, knights like centaurs with horse rumps made from wicker, rooks wearing wicker towers, and fools (bishops) in caps with bells.

    (more…)

  • Waltzing Around

    A recent mailing list discussion centered on how to quickly teach people to do a "waltz-around", the style of country dance progression in which two couples waltz around each other once and a half times.  This is most famously part of the mid- to late-nineteenth-century Spanish Dance, as well as other American waltz contra dances (such as the German Waltz and Bohemian Waltz).  It dates back at least as far as the late 1810s to early 1820s in England, when Spanish dances were an entire genre of country dances in waltz time, and both they and ordinary waltz country dances featured this figure, sometimes under the names "poussette" or "waltze".  I expect it goes even further back on the European continent, but I haven't yet pursued that line of research.

    As a dancer, the waltz-around has always been one of those figures that I just…do.  I'd observed that it's difficult for beginners to master the tight curvature of the circle and making one and a half circles in only eight measures, but as an experienced waltzer, I've long been able to do it instinctively.  And I'd never broken down precisely what I did or worked out how to explain it to others.  

    So I suppose it's about time!

    (more…)

  • 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.

    (more…)

  • Jane Austen balls for dummies

    First off, let me note that the title of this post is not a comment on anyone’s intellect.  It’s a riff on the titles of the popular series of “For Dummies” books, which are intended simply as accessible how-to guides for people who are not familiar with a topic.  I have a couple of them myself.  Neither I nor this post have any actual connection with these books, and no copyright infringement is intended.

    It’s been pointed out to me that negative critiques of historically ludicrous “Regency” ball programs, however justified, are not actually helpful for people who are not dance scholars and whose audience is not interested in serious study of historical dance, but who would like to do a decent job programming such a ball, or at least avoid making obvious idiots of themselves by calling seventeenth-century dances at a Regency- or Jane Austen-themed event.

    That’s a reasonable complaint.  It’s always easier to criticize than to be constructive.  And most of Kickery delves too deeply into the details for a modern country dance caller who just wants to do their gig.

    (more…)

  • They ought to be ashamed of themselves

    A while back, a friend sent me a flyer and the dance program for a “Regency ball” (the organizers’ term, not mine) in their area.  I’m not going to tell you where, or when, or who the caller was, because there are plenty of similar events going on all over (at least) the English-speaking world.  But I am going to tell you one thing:

    This program is utter bullshit.

    (more…)

PLEASE NOTE: as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases made via the links at this site.

Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

Email Susan

© Susan de Guardiola and Capering & Kickery, 2008-2025. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Susan de Guardiola and Capering & Kickery with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.