Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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Category: Victorian

  • Mysteries of the Manitou

    I keep saying that I don’t think there’s much need to memorize all the variations in sources like Melvin Ballou Gilbert’s Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) in order to accurately reenact the social dance of late nineteenth-century America. But I keep reconstructing and posting them anyway, since I find there’s often something to learn by examining how they’re constructed.  The dance published as the “Maniton”, which I am fairly sure is a typo for “Manitou”,  has two elements that caught my interest: a major change between sources and an unusual use of the “new waltz”, the late nineteenth-century version of the box step that I’ve been thinking and writing about recently.

    First, the name.  In Gilbert, both the index and the title within the text are “Maniton”.  As far as I can tell, that just isn’t a word.  In the other source for the dance, George Washington Lopp’s La Danse (Paris, 1903), much of which is merely a French translation of Gilbert, it is “Maniton” in the text but “Manitou” in the index.  I think the latter is the actual name of the dance and/or its intended music.  Switching “n” for “u” is a typesetting error I’ve encountered elsewhere.

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  • The Trio

    Since I frequently have to deal with an imbalance in numbers between the ladies and the gentlemen at nineteenth century balls, I’m always interested in dances that use a trio formation.  This can be one gentleman with two ladies or vice-versa, though the former is the more common situation.

    This dance, simply called “The Trio”, appears in at least two editions of Elias Howe’s American dancing master, and ball-room prompter (Boston, 1862 and 1866).  Howe’s instructions are a bit vague and neglect to mention the actual timing of the figures, but a little experimentation convinced me that the following reconstruction is workable and fun.  This is an extremely easy dance, good for groups of beginners.

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  • Respect the box step

    I’ve been thinking a lot over the last few years about the underlying skills needed for various forms of social dance.  A critical one is the ability to shift steps between time signatures, as I discussed a couple of months ago.  And one of the best examples of that is what happened with the much-maligned “box step” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

    The box step doesn’t get a lot of respect among historical dancers in America because it is strongly associated with modern ballroom dance studio practices.  That’s unfortunate, because I’m increasingly convinced that its historical incarnation, the “new waltz” (in contrast to the older valse à trois temps with its pirouette), is extremely important to know for anyone studying American social dancing of the 1880s-1910s.  Despite this, it often gets pushed aside in favor of the older style, which is usually taught first and thus becomes the default social waltz in modern reenactment.  That’s not wrong, exactly; it’s not like the older waltz vanished in favor of the new. But I think that we ought to be spending a lot more time on the new waltz, because it appears to be one of the fundamental building blocks of the social dance of the entire late Victorian/Edwardian/ragtime era.

    Let’s look at how the box step got used historically:

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  • Thoughts on teaching polka and polka redowa

    I recently had the opportunity to watch another teacher do a general introduction to the standard mid-nineteenth century couple dances.  That’s a rarer event than you’d imagine.  Historical dance teachers aren’t that thick on the ground, and even at multi-teacher festivals, either there aren’t any introductory classes or I’m busy teaching my own classes during them.

    Watching this class reminded me of something I’ve been meaning to write up for months about altering how we teach this repertoire.  This doesn’t apply to the one-night-stand sort of teaching gig, but I think it’s something other teachers with ongoing classes may find useful.

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  • Snowball fight!

    In honor of tonight’s incoming blizzard, and because I’ve been thinking lately about cotillion figures that scale up well for large groups, let’s talk about Les Boules de Neige.  For those who don’t speak French, that would be…The Snowballs!

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  • “agoing to dance the spanish dance”

    “…George Cowls says tell Nancy he is right in his glory to day and when he comes home he is agoing to dance the spanish dance with you and he says tell Abby he is agoing through ceders swamp with her…”
               — Pvt. Jairus Hammond to Nancy Titus, December 8, 1862

    Here’s rare documentation of a specific dance: a mention in a letter from a Union soldier during the American Civil War to his sister, dated one hundred and fifty-two years ago today, that another man plans to dance the Spanish Dance (previously described here) with her when he returns.  There has been no real doubt that the Spanish Dance was actually danced and was as popular as its frequent appearance in dance manuals suggests.  I have found it listed on dozens of dance cards.  But this is another little piece of documentation demonstrating that its popularity extended well down the social scale.

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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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  • Battle Confetti

    One hundred and sixteen years ago today, the magazine Harper’s Bazaar published a brief blurb predicting fashionable dances for the winter would be of “military tone”, no doubt influenced by the burst of patriotic fervor occasioned by the brief Spanish-American War, which by the autumn of 1898 had moved into peace negotiations.  The article gives a quick peek at what dances interested Americans (or, at least, American dancing masters) in the second-to-last winter of the nineteenth century.

    Unsurprisingly, the writer acknowledges the “extraordinary popularity” of the two-step.  The five-step schottische is called a “new” schottische, which is inaccurate, since it had been around since at least 1890, when it was included in M. B. Gilbert’s Round Dancing, and possibly as early as 1871 under a different name.  The dance may have been receiving a fresh push from the assembled masters of The American Society of Professors of Dancing, whose meeting seems to have spurred this little notice.  No other couple dances are mentioned.

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  • Ending a Grand March

    In almost seven years of writing Kickery (has it really been that long?) I think I’ve only once said anything at all detailed about the Grand March, which was generally performed as the opening dance at American balls in the latter part of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, though occasionally it appears later on the program.  Clearly an overview is overdue!

    This isn’t it.

    While working recently on the ball program for a pair of Civil War-era balls to be held in Gettysburg in November, I started wondering idly how many ways there were to end a Grand March.  So I made a little list.  I won’t be using most of these, alas; the Gettysburg balls are insanely crowded and thus do not lend themselves to really interesting Marches.  But I thought it might be fun to share some of the possibilities.

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  • The Five Step York

    The Five Step York, created by Indianapolis dancing master D. B. Brenneke, is yet another of the myriad variations for the York, one of the more durable and popular redowa/mazurka waltz variations of the late nineteenth century.  It builds directly on Brenneke’s own New York sequence.  While it is not a regular part of my “York set”, the Five Step York is an easy little variation to add to one’s York repertoire.

    I am aware of only two published descriptions of the Five Step York: in English, in M. B. Gilbert’s Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890), and in French, in [George] Washington Lopp’s La Danse (Paris, 1903), where it is listed as “Le York à 5 Pas”.  Gilbert puts it under redowa/mazurka variations, and Lopp lists it as a mazurka.  Much of Lopp is simply a translation of Gilbert, but he differs just enough to add either clarity or confusion to some of the descriptions.  In this case, I believe that both Gilbert and Lopp have flaws in their descriptions, but I can make two reasonable guesses as to what the actual sequence should be.

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Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

Email Susan

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