Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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Category: Regency/Jane Austen

  • Irving’s Christmas Sketches, 1820

    For Christmas Day, let’s return to Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., looking this time at the fifth number, published in America on January 1, 1820, and covering the English celebration of the Christmas holidays. The description of the old-fashioned English Christmas at the fictional Bracebridge Hall was based on Irving’s personal experience at Aston Hall in the late 1810s and, as is well-known to scholars and obvious even to the casual reader, was a major influence on Charles Dickens when he came to write A Christmas Carol.

    Four of the five sketches in the fifth number contained dance references. I’ll take them one by one, skipping over the first sketch (“Christmas”) which merely provides an overview of the excitement of celebrating the Christmas holyday [sic] in England. Page numbers reference the London second edition of 1820.

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  • CD Review: Dance and Danceability

    Getting useable music for Regency-era dancing is a chronically frustrating problem, and there are very few albums I can recommend wholeheartedly.  Many of the recordings advertised as “Regency” or “Jane Austen” suffer from a weirdly expansive idea of “Regency era” that goes back to the 17th century or forward to the 20th.  Almost all have an incorrect number of repeats of the music for period dancing, which matches repeats to set length in a specific way that does not accord with modern recording habits.

    Dance and Danceability is an Austen-themed album of country dance tunes from the Scottish dance band The Assembly Players (Nicolas Broadbridge, Aidan Broadbridge, and Brian Prentice).  Aidan Broadbridge is a name that may be especially recognizable to Austen enthusiasts — he was the fiddler for the 2005 film adaptation of Pride & Prejudice (paid link) as well as the fictionalized pseudo-biopic Becoming Jane (2007) (paid link).

    Sadly, this is one of the frustrating CDs.

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  • Three “Scottish” Setting Sequences for Regency-Era Quadrilles

    (This continues a very occasional series of posts on setting steps for quadrilles, with the previous posts including eight easy sequences and two French sequences.)

    Calling these three sequences “Scottish” is really a bit of a misnomer, since the sources are Alexander Strathy’s Elements of the Art of Dancing (Edinburgh, 1822), which is in large part a translation of a French manual by J. H. Goudoux, and an anonymous Scottish manuscript entitled Contre Danses à Paris 1818.  All three sequences are certainly French in their steps and style and quite possibly in origin.  They probably would not have caused anyone in Paris in that era to bat an eyelash.  But technically, they are documented to Scotland, not France, in the late 1810s-early 1820s.

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  • Two French Setting Sequences for Regency-era Quadrilles

    Several years ago I posted eight easy setting sequences for Regency-era French quadrilles and said in the comments I’d try to post more “soon”.  That has now stretched to more than five years, but, better late than never, here are a couple of others, this time directly from a trio of French manuals by J. H. Gourdoux (or Gourdoux-Daux):

    Principes et Notions Élémentaires sur l’Art de la Danse Pour la Ville (2nd edition, 1811)
    Recueil d’un Genre Nouveau de Contredanses et Walses (1819)
    De l’Art de la Danse (1823)

    Once again, these are easy sequences, but a bit more interesting than the previous set.

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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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  • 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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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • Chassé-Croisé Sequences for Regency-Era Quadrilles (3 of 3)

    (This is the third and final post in a mini-series covering Regency-era step-sequences for the quadrille figure chassé-croisé.  Previous posts are here (with a general introduction) and here.)

    My third and (so far) final sequence for an eight-bar chassé-croisé comes from Elements and Principles of the Art of Dancing, a translation of J. H. Gourdoux published by Victor Guillou in Philadelphia in 1817.  The translation, presumably of the 1811 Principes et Notions Élémentaires sur l’Art de la Danse Pour la Ville, is inconsistent in how closely it hews to Gourdoux’s original.  This step sequence for chassé-croisé does not appear in the 1811 manual at all and may have originated with Guillou himself.

    Even more than Gourdoux’s own sequence, this one features different footwork for the gentlemen and the ladies.

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  • Chassé-Croisé Sequences for Regency-Era Quadrilles (2 of 3)

    (This is the second post in a mini-series covering Regency-era step-sequences for the quadrille figure chassé-croisé.  See the first post for a general introduction to the figure.)

    My second sequence for chassé-croisé actually comes from a French source, the second edition of Principes et Notions Élémentaires sur l’Art de la Danse Pour la Ville (Paris, 1811) by J. H. Gourdoux.  The same sequence reappears in his later manual, De l’Art de la Danse (Paris, 1823).  It is similar to the Strathy sequence described in my previous post, but the differences are quite intriguing.

    I won't cover steps in this post, since I just summarized them in the previous one and no additional ones are required for Gourdoux's sequence.

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Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

Email Susan

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