Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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Category: Regency/Jane Austen

  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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!

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  • A miscellany of mescolanzes

    I don’t often get asked to write about particular topics on Kickery, but I recently received, via the comments here, a request from a teacher at Mrs. Bennet’s Ballroom, a historical dance group in London, UK, for a few of my favorite figures for mescolanzes, the four-facing-four country dance format I surveyed earlier this year.  Since the focus of the group seems to be the Regency era, I’ll stick with figures from manuals by London dancing master G. M. S. Chivers, which are from the very tail end of the official Regency period (1811-1820) and a few years after.

    As I discussed in my earlier survey, Chivers seems to have really liked the mescolanze format, and a few other dancing masters and authors picked it up, but other than the special case of La Tempête, I can’t really say with confidence that mescolanzes were a popular or even common dance form in nineteenth-century England.  But the format appears across enough different sources that I’m comfortable with using it sparingly to add variety for the late Regency and immediate post-Regency era.  I don’t ever do more than one mescolanze at a ball, however.

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  • Tracking the Mescolanzes

    The topic of mescolanzes, four-facing-four country dances, and whether the famous dance La Tempête was the only surviving member of the genre by the mid- to late nineteenth century, came up in an email exchange recently.  Mescolanzes are one of those dance genres for which I have spent years slowly accumulating examples, so I thought I’d talk a little bit about the format and where dances called mescolanzes appeared over the course of the nineteenth century.

    I’m going to limit this quick survey to more-or-less anglophone countries — England, America, Scotland, Canada, and Australia — since I’ve not yet collated all the information I have from other countries.  I’m also not going to discuss La Tempête specifically, since that is an enormous topic all on its own.  Here and now, I will only survey dances appearing under the name or classification “mescolanze” and its several (mis)spellings.

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  • The Sixdrilles (3 of 3)

    Wrapping up my mini-series on the Sixdrilles, here are the final two figures and some overall thoughts.  The earlier figures can be found in my first and second posts in the series.

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  • The Sixdrilles (2 of 3)

    Moving right along from my first post in the Sixdrilles series, here are the reconstructions of the next two figures:

    Figure Two: L’Été (8b introduction + 24bx4)
    4b    First gentleman and two opposite ladies en avant and en arrière.
    4b    Same three chassez-dechassez (à droite et à gauche)
    4b    Same three traversez, gentleman crossing between the two ladies
    4b    Same three chassez-dechassez
    4b    Same three traversez/balancez [see note below] while partners balancez
    4b    Same three rond de trois

    The figure is then repeated by the second gentleman and the two opposite ladies, the third gentlemen and two opposite ladies, and the fourth gentleman and two opposite ladies.

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  • Same-Gender Couples in the Regency Ballroom

    One of the critical elements of serious dance history is cross-checking what the dancing masters says in dance manuals against the evidence we have — if any — of what people actually did.  Those two things aren’t always the same.  Dancing masters generally explain what people ought to be doing, sometimes interspersed with lengthy complaints about what people are doing instead.  Both rules and complaints are useful guides, depending on whether one wants to strive to dance well and politely by period standards, or dance badly and rudely, as no doubt happened plenty in practice.

    But the very best evidence comes from the letters and diaries of people who actually lived in the relevant era.  Here’s a great example of how a letter supports something that dancing masters wrote about in the Regency era: people of the same gender dancing together.

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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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Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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