Dropping back to the late nineteenth century, here's another short blurb from the pages of Demorest's Family Magazine, following the Thanksgiving Pumpkin Party I described last year. This little tidbit appeared in the "Chat" column of the February, 1891, issue, along with a description of a Valentine's party and comments on the overuse of floral decorations. The anonymous author described the fashion that season of using a thé dansante (tea dance) held at the "usual hours" for a reception, four o'clock to seven o'clock in the late afternoon, for the purpose of introducing debutantes to the fashionable world. The thé dansante could stand on its own as an event or might be the lead-in to a dinner.
Category: Victorian
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The America
In honor of America’s birthday, here’s an appropriately-named variation by C. A. Carr (creator of the Highland Glide) which is long enough with enough dancing in place that it should probably be classified as a sequence dance and danced by all dancers in unison, as it would be quite the annoyance to other couples if done in the midst of a normal dance. In M. B. Gilbert’s Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) it is listed in the redowa/mazurka section and in George Washington Lopp’s La Danse (Paris, 1903) under “Les mazurkas”. If forced to a decision, I’d call it a polka mazurka and note that it features a stealthy bit of York hidden inside it.
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A Louisville Masquerade, 1843
Here’s a lively account of a jolly and slightly drunken masquerade held in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1843. This account has a little of everything: costumes, bad puns, a bit about the dances, and the effects of alcohol on the revelers. It’s too long a report to comment on every bit of it, but the entire thing is transcribed at the bottom of this post.
The report starts out with a lot of philosophy about the joys of masquerades, but the first really useful bit is that as in A Few Friends, the unmasking is done at supper-time, which was probably around midnight:
The unmasking at the supper table is often a great source of laughter and surprise, when it discovers the faces of numerous acquaintances who have been playing off their wit and raillery against each other all the evening, under their various disguises.
All sorts of people attended masquerades, which is part of what made them scandalous. In Kentucky, at least, this mixing was not to be feared, though I suspect the upper classes might have differed on this point:
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Professor Webster’s Masquerade Party, 1876
On March 18, 1876, the Morning Herald of Wilmington, Delaware, published a short blurb covering a recent “masquerade party” given by one Professor Webster at the Dancing Academy Hall. Unusually, the newspaper coverage says nothing about the costumes other than that there were enough of them to “have exhausted a first class costumer’s establishment, and have taxed the ingenuity of an artist.” Instead, we get an actual dance program, consisting entirely of quadrilles, Lanciers, and glide waltzes, and accompanied by names which might be masquerade costumes, though I’m not certain of that.
Professor Webster was a long-time Wilmington dancing master – he was still teaching as late as June 4, 1899, when the Sunday Morning Star reported on the closing reception of his current series of dance classes (see about two-thirds of the way down the first column here.)
Here’s the list of dances, in order.
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A Fancy Dress Party (from A Few Friends), 1864
A Few Friends, by Korman Lynn, was serialized in nine parts in Godey's Lady's Book during the year 1864. The serial doesn't have a lot of plot; it describes eight evenings of a group of friends gathering together to, for the most part, play parlor games. It's great for anyone who wants to research mid-nineteenth century parlor games, which are described in elaborate detail, but the only section of any real interest to me is the final one, in which the friends gather for a fancy dress party.
To pick up the story at this point, it is only necessary to know that the kind and generous Ben Stykes has been quietly pursuing the lively Mary Gliddon from the beginning of the story, though a certain Mr. Hedges, a young man from Liverpool, is also interested in her.
Even a single part of the story is too long for me to transcribe here, but I'll quote the costume descriptions, some of which are detailed and unusual, and the resolution of the romance.
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A Leap Year Ball, Providence, 1892
Moving from the American frontier back to the east coast and into increasingly amusing descriptions of leap year events, here’s a very upscale event held in Providence, Rhode Island, on Monday, February 29, 1892, and reported in The Providence News on Tuesday, March 1. This was a much more glittering affair than the frontier balls in Montana and Wyoming. According to the article, subscriptions to the ball cost $25 for eight invitations, and the German (cotillion) favors cost an estimated $900. In today’s terms, that is around $700 for the tickets and an eye-popping $25,000 for the favors, which were always an opportunity for conspicuous consumption among upper-class society.
The ball was held at the brand-new Trocadero (1891), which, according to Providence’s inventory in 1980 for the National Register of Historic Places, was a restaurant and dancing parlor owned by local businessman Lloyd Tillinghast, who also provided the ball supper, served on “small and beautifully decked tables” by waiters brought in from Boston and New York. The Trocadero no longer stands, alas. Two bands were engaged: Reeves’ Band and the “Hungarian band of New York”, who alternated playing.
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A Leap Year Ball, Wyoming, 1888
Continuing to roam around the late nineteenth century American frontier, where a surprising number of newspaper descriptions of leap year balls originate, here are some excerpts from a burbling account of a ball in the small town of Douglas, Wyoming. Like Sun River, it was founded in 1867 and was probably extremely small. The 1890 Wyoming census recorded only 2,988 people in all of Converse County. The ball was described on page five of Bill Barlow’s Budget on Wednesday, February 8, 1888, as having taken place the previous Friday evening. The newspaper title is interesting; more about the paper and its colorful founder, Merris C. Barrow, may be found at the Wyoming Historical Society’s Wyohistory site.
The ball was held at the Douglas opera house and was described as “the most successful and enjoyable affair of its kind in the history of Douglas.” Balls are generally described in newspapers as successful unless some sort of disaster occurs, but in a town whose history stretched back only two decades, it might actually have been true.
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A Ballroom Basilisk, 1897
I'm just going to leave this story here without any commentary.
Happy Halloween!
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GONE WITH A BASILISK.
A LURID SHORT STORY.
Reginald passed his hand wearily over his aching brow, and glided languishing between the purple portières. Within was a chaos of whirling muslin and hungry faces swimming on a sea of passionate, throbbing music. There was a mist before his eyes; grinning heads floated restlessly by, gibbering in the shell-like ears of painted women. Amid the fevered maelstrom, one figure loomed large and close upon his attention. It was the hostess. A hot wet hand pressed his. “Law! what a squash!” he murmured in her ear, then plunged into the stream, and was borne away to the other side of the room.
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The Latest York
Years ago, when I was working intensely on the “York set” of variations (see here, here, here, here, and here), I somehow skipped The Latest York, possibly because, unlike all those other “Yorks”, it does not feature the characteristic York step sequence of slide-close-slide-cut/close in “1&23” rhythm.
M. B. Gilbert published The Latest York in his Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) “by permission of Constantine Carpenter, Son, and Charles C. Martel”. This style of credit generally refers to the choreographer of the sequence and/or composer of the music. The same pair are also credited with the Gavotte Glide. Carpenter is listed in Gilbert’s directory of dancing masters as living in Philadelphia. Martel is not in Gilbert’s directory, but his name appears in Philadelphia newspapers (The Times, October 21, 1894, e.g.) during the 1890s offering parties and lessons.
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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.
