Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

Email Susan

Category: Regency/Jane Austen

  • Chassé-Croisé Sequences for Regency-Era Quadrilles (1 of 3)

    By far the most common sequence variations to be found in quadrille manuals of the early nineteenth century are those for setting, forward and back, chassez-dechassez, and crossing over.  But a few manuals give sequences for more elaborate figures such as chassé-croisé, in which two dancers, side by side, change places and back.  There are quite a few ways to perform the figure, but the most common is probably that danced with one’s partner in eight bars as follows:

    2b    Change places, gentlemen passing behind ladies
    2b    Set
    2b    Change back, gentlemen again passing behind ladies
    2b    Set

    This can be performed just by two couples (heads or sides) or by all four at once, as in the classic Finale figure of the first set of French quadrilles.

    (more…)

  • Simonet’s Parisian Quadrilles, Third Set, c1820

    There are many, many sets of early nineteenth-century quadrilles, most of which are simply new music for the First Set or include only minor variations on the standard figures.  While I don’t normally publish reconstructions of the figures for random sets of quadrille music, this set is of particular interest because a high-quality recording of it is available on The Regency Ballroom CD by Spare Parts.

    The music is from the first series of T. Simonet’s Fashionable Parisian Quadrilles, Performed by the Bands of Messrs. Michau, Musard and Collinet, with their appropriate Figures as danced at Almack’s, the Argyll Rooms and at the Bath & Cheltenham Assemblies.  The manual is undated, but in February, 1823, the fashionable magazine La Belle Assemblée reported the publication of “Nos. 42 and 43” of the series, commenting positively:

    This is really an elegant little work both in its contents and its typography.  We recognize many of the quadrilles as being great favorites in the French metropolis, and the whole of them are composed in a very characteristic and original style.

    (more…)

  • Thoughts on stepping the Grand Chain in Regency quadrilles

    It’s not unusual for new sources to turn up that make me go back and reconsider a reconstruction.  It’s a little irritating for it to happen less than a month after I finally get around to publishing one here on Kickery, and doubly irritating for it to be not a new source but old sources I simply hadn’t looked at recently.  Fortunately, this is less a change in my reconstruction than further background and options.

    In reconstructing the fourth figure of the Mid-Lothians, an early 1820s quadrille, I wrote in my reconstruction notes that “I’ve never found any description of what step sequence to use for this figure,” referring to the grand chain.  Actually, I had come across such, many years ago, and they had simply slipped my mind.  But I was looking through quadrille sources for a different project and found them again, so here is a little more information about performance options for the grand chain.

    (more…)

  • Right & left: hands or not?

    By the mid-nineteenth century, the only American dance manuals that contain large quantities of contradances are those from the New England area.  Others may have a few here and there, but not the pages and pages of them, or entire manuals of nothing but contras.  And, alas for reconstructors looking back 150 years later, the authors simply don’t bother to explain how to do specific figures.  Presumably, everyone knew.

    For most figures this isn’t a particular problem; they’re self-evident from the name or unchanged from earlier eras.  But there is one figure that is especially ambiguous to dance historians, and that is “right and left” or “rights and lefts”.  The major reason for the ambiguity is good old Thomas Wilson, a dancing master in early nineteenth-century London and a prolific author.  Wilson wrote some of the most useful books on English country dance in all of dance history, with explanations, diagrams, and occasionally even steps for each figure.  But he had a somewhat unusual take on right and left.

    (more…)

  • Go Figure!

    At our recent Regency Assembly, one of the dancers challenged my call of a “half figure eight” in a country dance, asking why it wasn’t called a “figure four”.  Casey, being an experienced dancer, knew exactly why, but he has excellent comic timing, and the comment broke up the room for a moment.

    A geekier question would be why I was using the term “half figure eight” rather than the more typical plain “half figure”.  That was for added clarity for modern dancers, who may not be as familiar with the nuances of Regency terminology, in which a sentence like “The figure of the dance is a double figure made up of five figures, the first being the figure” makes perfect sense.  Since it doesn’t for everyone, let’s figure out all those different usages of “figure”!

    Although every Country Dance is composed of a number of individual Figures, which may consist of “set and change sides,” “whole Figure at top,” “lead down the middle, up again,” “allemande,” “lead through the bottom,” “right and left at top,” &c. yet the whole movement united is called the Figure of the Dance.
    — Thomas Wilson, in The Complete System of English Country Dancing, London, c1815.

    (more…)

  • What Did Jane Austen Dance?

    Since early 19th century (“Regency”) dance is one of my particular specialties, I get many questions that boil down to either “what did Jane Austen dance?” or “did Jane Austen dance _____?”  So let’s see what I can do for a general answer.

    I can divide things loosely into three categories: what we know she danced, what she might have danced, and what she didn’t dance.

    (more…)

  • A Regency “Sir Roger de Coverley”

    In honor of the season…

    In his Complete System of English Country Dancing, published circa 1815, Regency-era dancing master Thomas Wilson proclaimed of the dance “Sir Roger De Coverley” that it was

    composed expressly for a finishing Country Dance, about 100 years ago, and derived its name from Addison’s Sir Roger De Coverley; so frequently mentioned by him in his popular Essays in the Spectator, and is the only whole Dance given in this System. The Figures of which it is composed being permanent and unalterable, and thereby differing in its construction from all other Country Dances.

    and explained its use as the final dance of the evening (or early morning, given the length of balls of the era):

    At all Balls properly regulated, this Dance should be the finishing one, as it is calculated from the sociality of its construction, to promote the good humour of the company, and causing them to separate in evincing a pleasing satisfaction with each other.

    (more…)

  • 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.

    (more…)

  • Crossing Over Sequences for Regency-Era French Quadrilles

    As with setting, there are a number of different step sequences available for dancers to use in the Regency-era quadrille figure Traversez (cross over), in which a lady and the gentleman opposite her exchange places.  Traversez appears most notably in L’Été, the second figure of the first set of French quadrilles, and in the many versions of the Finale figure which incorporate L’Été.  Below I will give a sample of five of the easier step sequences that may be used to dance Traversez.  This is not an exhaustive list of all the period sequences I have for this move, but it should suffice for most dancers.

    (more…)

  • 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!

    (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.