Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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Category: Schottische

  • Highland Mazourka

    Let’s get the important part out of the way first:

    The Highland Mazourka is not a mazurka.  

    It is, however, a delightful example of the nineteenth-century tendency to transpose dances from one time signature to another.  In this case, typical polka mazurka sequences have been transposed from 3/4 time to 4/4 time with a bit of extra hopping added to fill out the music, which should be of the Scottish strathspey style.  The polka mazurka itself consisted partly of polka (2/4) steps transposed to 3/4 time.  Confused by all these shifting time signatures?  Fear not; all will be made clear below!

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  • Wayside Gavotte

    Just to be thorough, here's a quick reconstruction of the Wayside Gavotte I mentioned in my previous post on the Stephanie Gavotte.  This is another short couple dance sequence, but unlike M. B. Gilbert's Stephanie Gavotte, it moves normally along line of dance throughout and loosely follows a "doubled" schottische pattern with four bars of forward travel and four bars (more-or-less) of turning.  Though it is meant to be danced to "Stéphanie-Gavotte", there is no reason it can't be danced to other schottische music.

    Per Gilbert Dances, Vol. II (1913, Susan Hoffman Gilman, ed.), the Wayside Gavotte was choreographed by Helen C. Way, whom I presume to have been a student of Gilbert's.  It is undated, and since, according to the biography in Gilbert Dances, Vol. I, Gilbert was teaching until his death, it could be from as late as the beginning of 1910.  The use of the waltz-galop step feels to me more reminiscent of the schottische sequences of the 1880s-1890s, however, so I suspect it is from closer to 1900.

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  • Schottische Gavotte

    I suppose this could be considered the next post in a very stretched-out series covering American “gavotte” variations for the late nineteenth century schottische; my first post on the topic appeared almost ten years ago.  I’m glad I put this one off a bit, however, since my experience since then with reconstructing, dancing, and teaching rackets has given me a better appreciation for how this “gavotte” variation works.  Essentially, it’s two halves: a slow schottische turn and a racket.  It’s kind of beautiful.

    The Schottische Gavotte, like so many other variations, is found in M. B. Gilbert’s book of couple dances, Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) and in G. W. Lopp’s La Danse (Paris, 1903).  Gilbert does not attribute it.  Lopp attributes it to Gilbert.  Lopp also lists it as 3/4, but since it is under schottische, notated like a schottische (in 4), and has a given metronome speed of 76 beats per minute in schottische time, I think that 3/4 is an error and it is intended to be in 4/4.  Other than that, the two descriptions agree nicely and the reconstruction is quite simple and straightforward.  The gentleman starts with the left foot, the lady with the right.

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  • La Lyonnaise

    Third in my impromptu mini-series of late-nineteenth century French dances based on the schottische or pas-de-quatre is La Lyonnaise, which appears to me to be unimportant in and of itself but somewhat interesting as an example of typical variations and a source for variations to use in improvisation.  Despite having been published in 1890, it does not appear in the seventh edition of Eugène Giraudet’s Traité de la danse, published in the early 1890s.  It does turn up by the 58th edition (c1900), which informs us (via the extensive dance glossary in volume II) that Giraudet choreographed it himself.  I don’t think it does him any particular credit; it’s just a mishmash of steps.

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  • Exeter Caprice

    The Exeter Caprice is one of a small number of schottisches and schottische-like dances included in the second edition of F. Leslie Clendenen’s 1914 compilation, Dance Mad, for which Clendenen solicited dances from dancing masters across the United States and in Europe and South America.  One of those who responded was George F. Walters.  The Dance Mad index of dancing masters lists him as based in Waltham, Massachusetts, about sixty miles south of Exeter, New Hampshire, and the famous Phillips Exeter Academy, more commonly known just as “Exeter”.  I suspect that Walters’ Exeter Caprice and Exeter Waltz might be named for the school, either because he taught dance there or because he hoped to.

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  • Imperial Gavotte

    The Imperial Gavotte is one of the many schottische variations included in M. B. Gilbert’s book of couple dances, Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) and in G. W. Lopp’s La Danse (Paris, 1903).  It is attributed to Professor A. T. Graves of Albany, New York, and noted by Gilbert to have been accepted by the American Society of Professors of Dancing in New York on September 4, 1889.  The Society endorsement gave it enough exposure for it to turn up outside Graves’ own studio: in the October 26, 1890, issue of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri), it is listed as one of the new dances to be taught by John Mahler.

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  • American Gavotte / Polka Américaine

    The American Gavotte is another of the variations published by dancing master M. B. Gilbert in his manual of couple dances, Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) and republished by G. W. Lopp in La Danse (Paris, 1903).  It was attributed by Gilbert to James P. Brooks of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (and by Lopp to “J.-D. Brooks”).  Gilbert also noted that it was adopted by the American Society of Professors of Dancing, New York — this would have been in 1886, from contemporary writeups of the event — and published by permission of White Smith Music Publishing Co.  Lopp listed it as “Polka Américaine (American Gavotte)”

    I’ve discussed a couple of other American “gavotte” variations before, but both of those were for the schottische.  The American Gavotte is listed as a polka, though it actually works perfectly well to schottische music and there is some confusion surround how it is notated that suggests that it might have originally been meant as a schottische; see the music note below.  It certainly has some choreographic kinship with the schottische gavottes in that it also uses the rhythm pattern “1&2&3,4” stepped as “slide, chassé, chassé, close” or “slide-close-slide-close-slide, close”.  This is one measure of schottische as usually counted, but two measures of polka.  Because of the pattern of the following four beats of music, I actually prefer to break the first four up into two bars, polka style, as follows, with dancers starting on their first foot (his left, her right):

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  • The Dip Schottische

    The Dip Schottische is one of the minor schottische sequences created by dancing masters in the early 1910s.  In this case, the author was one I. C. Sampson, of Lynn, Massachusetts, and the dance was published in both the first and second editions of F. Leslie Clendenen’s compilation Dance Mad (St. Louis, 1914).  Unfortunately, the dance instructions have one major ambiguity that makes it very difficult to come to a definitive reconstruction: what, exactly, does “turn” mean?  Here’s the original language for one move in the dance:

    “One Step” turn (pivot, four steps, two measures)

    The problem is that there is no single “one step turn”.  There are at least two very plausible candidates: the spin and the traveling turn, better known today as pivots.  If I had to guess which would be the “one step turn”, I’d guess the spin, but there are some problems with that in regard to this particular sequence.  But there are problems with the traveling turn as well.  Here’s some of what I considered when trying to choose between them:

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  • The Yale Schottische, 1895

    As previously noted, I always have an eye out for dances named after Yale University and Yale-related dance ephemera.  Walking through the campus earlier today on my way to a meeting reminded me that I had another Yale-themed dance to discuss: the Yale Schottische, which was published with the eponymous sheet music in 1895 and dedicated to the Yale University Football Association.  Yale has one of the oldest football programs in the world and was a regular national title winner in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.  Some of the players pictured at left (click to enlarge) are probably among the several Yalies of the 1890s chosen as All-Americans or inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.  (More details about Yale’s place in football history may be found here.)

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  • A Montréal Gavotte, 1918

    The classic schottische of the mid-nineteenth century and its later incarnation, the Barn Dance (a.k.a. the Military Schottische and the Pas de Quatre) had mostly faded from fashionable ballrooms by the late 1910s.  But a few very simple schottisches or schottische-like sequences turn up now and then in dance manuals and on sheet music of the 1910s, often under the name “gavotte”, a musical form with the same 4/4 meter characteristic of the schottische.

    La Gavotte is a short sequence taken from Professor A. Lacasse’s La Danse apprise chez soi, published in Montréal in 1918.  There were many dances called “gavotte” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not all of them in 4/4 time, so while this particular gavotte may have been locally popular in Montréal, it should not be considered any sort of definitive gavotte for the 1910s or any other era.

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Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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