Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian
This blandly named "Polish Dance" was published by expatriate English dancing master William George Wells in The danciad, or companion to the modern ball room in Montreal in 1832. I have my doubts about whether there is anything authentically Polish about it, but the dance itself is…interesting. Let me start with a transcription.
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POLISH DANCE
To be danced by an unlimited number of couples, and placed exactly in the same situation as for the Original Gallopade.
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.
Working my way through the waltz variations in Round Dancing (M. B. Gilbert, Portland, Maine, 1890) and La Danse (G. W. Lopp, Paris, 1903), here’s one that can fairly confidently be classified as a step rather than a sequence written for a particular piece of music. It’s actually quite interesting, though less for the step than for the fact that though at first glance it looks like a two-part sequence, it’s actually not. Gilbert specifically (and ungrammatically) wrote:
Repeat ad lib, commencing at the second part. At the termination of the side movement. Waltz at pleasure, introducing the second part at will.
In other words, waltz (the first part) for as long as you like, then do the second part (a set of sideways movements akin to a racket) for as long as you like. In short, use the second part as a variation in your waltzing. That’s in line with how I suspect many of these variations were actually used, but it’s unusual to see it stated so explicitly.
The Eugénie, or Eugenie-Trot, is yet another of the many variations published in M. B. Gilbert’s book of couple dances, Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) and later, in translation to French, in G. W. Lopp’s La Danse (Paris, 1903). It was attributed by both authors to St. Louis dancing master Jacob Mahler, as is confirmed by the cover of the sheet music shown at left (click to enlarge). I would not regard it as a particularly important or significant variation; it warrants a reconstruction only as part of my overall progress through every dance in those two books.
The Eugénie begins in the “military” position (described at length, with a photo, here) with the dancers opened up side by side, the gentleman’s right arm around the lady’s waist and her left hand resting on his shoulder or upper arm, depending on their relative heights. The gentleman starts with the left foot and the lady with the right. The gentleman’s steps are given; the lady dances opposite.
“Humming Bird Dance” is a hesitation waltz sequence which appeared in the first and second editions of F. Leslie Clendenen’s compilation Dance Mad (St. Louis; both editions 1914). It is attributed to “Mr. Menancon”, who appears in the list of credits at the end of the second edition as “Elmond Menancon, 909 Elm Street, Manchester, N[ew] H[ampshire]”. I believe the first name ought to be “Edmond”, since a dancing master of that name is listed in Manchester city directories from 1906 and 1918. In the 1906 Manchester Directory, Edmond Menancon is listed separately as an artist, dancing master, and, interestingly, the sexton of a church. Here’s Menancon’s advertisement from page 819 of the 1906 directory:
The sexton position seems a somewhat odd fit for an artist-photographer-dance teacher; the triple career doesn’t seem to leave much time for a day job. Perhaps it was his father?
The Western Normal Newport was named after the Western Association Normal School Masters of Dancing, a professional organization for dancing masters in western North America. “Normal school” sounds odd to modern ears, but historically, it didn’t mean what we’d imagine today. A normal school was a teacher-training school, where the “norms” of teaching and subject material were taught; more information on normal schools in general may be found here. The Western Association Normal School was founded in 1894 under Canadian dancing master John Freeman Davis, its first president.
My only source for the Western Normal Newport is George Washington Lopp’s La Danse (Paris, 1903). Lopp was from the northwestern USA and may have been a member of the Normal School or at least aware of it. The variation’s name, as given in French by Lopp, was Le Western Normal Newport, attributed to l’Association de l’École normale des Maîtres de danse de l’Ouest.
Given that the school was founded in 1894, the Western Normal Newport was obviously created too late to appear in M. B. Gilbert’s Round Dancing, published in Portland, Maine, in 1890, from which Lopp cribbed so much of his own book.
The Ripple Galop and the Jersey are two galop variations found in both M. B. Gilbert’s Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) and George Washington Lopp’s La Danse (Paris, 1903), a French translation of Gilbert with some additions and changes. Both variations use the late nineteenth-century American waltz-galop technique of a leap along the line of dance followed by a side step and a cut (or close of the feet) in the rhythm “1&2” rather than the slide-chassé of the galop, extending it into the “Newport” pattern of a leap along the line of dance followed by a series of side-closes, stretching the basic step-unit from one to two measures. The key difference is where the side steps and closes fall relative to the strong beats of the music:
galop: 1 (side) & (close) 2 (side)
waltz-galop: 1 (back/forward) & (side) 2 (cut/close)
The galop pattern ends in an open position. The waltz-galop normally does as well, but it can also be ended elegantly at the end of the music by a close of the feet rather than a cut. This alteration of the relationship of movements to music in dances of the “new waltz” family is what makes these variations interesting to me.
The generically named One Step Hesitation is a short hesitation waltz sequence that appeared in the second edition of the collection Dance Mad, or the dances of the day, compiled by F. Leslie Clendenen and published in St. Louis in late 1914. It is subtitled “As Recommended by St. Louis Association Dancing Masters”, and with no author listed, may have come from the hand of Clendenen himself.
Since the One Step Hesitation is almost entirely in the slowest possible type of hesitation (one step per bar of music), it calls for very fast waltz music or it will drag badly. I prefer 180 beats per minute and up for this type of hesitation waltz.
A recent mailing list discussion centered on how to quickly teach people to do a "waltz-around", the style of country dance progression in which two couples waltz around each other once and a half times. This is most famously part of the mid- to late-nineteenth-century Spanish Dance, as well as other American waltz contra dances (such as the German Waltz and Bohemian Waltz). It dates back at least as far as the late 1810s to early 1820s in England, when Spanish dances were an entire genre of country dances in waltz time, and both they and ordinary waltz country dances featured this figure, sometimes under the names "poussette" or "waltze". I expect it goes even further back on the European continent, but I haven't yet pursued that line of research.
As a dancer, the waltz-around has always been one of those figures that I just…do. I'd observed that it's difficult for beginners to master the tight curvature of the circle and making one and a half circles in only eight measures, but as an experienced waltzer, I've long been able to do it instinctively. And I'd never broken down precisely what I did or worked out how to explain it to others.
So I suppose it's about time!
Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about some of the tidbits of evidence of ladies or gentlemen dancing in same-gender couples in Regency-era ballrooms. I’m returning to the topic of same-gender dancing with an interesting article I discovered in an issue of a late-nineteenth-century American dance magazine, The Two Step, published at the time by dancing master and author H. N. Grant, out of Buffalo, New York.
The June, 1898, issue (Vol. 5, No. 47) includes a short essay on an important topic: “May a Lady Dance Backward.” It opens with a strong statement in favor:
Should a lady be taught to use the backward step in the waltz?
Yes we say, most emphatically yes.
That opens up all sorts of interesting questions, doesn’t it? Were ladies not generally even taught to waltz backward? Was that actually controversial?
(more…)
The short story “Lyddy!”, by Thomas Egerton Wilks, was published in a London journal, The Young Lady’s Magazine, in 1837, its first year of publication, the works from which were collected in a single volume published in 1838.
Though its title is similar to that of other ladies’ magazines of the era, The Young Lady’s Magazine actually had much loftier ambitions:
…to concentrate every energy in the production, not only of such matter as may amuse the fancy, but at the same time tend to expand the mind, elevate the morals, refine the intellect, and awaken, — not the morbid sensibilities, too often produced by ill-selected fictions — but those pure, unhacknied feelings of the youthful heart, which are in themselves a mine of inexhaustible treasures, and which, by their development, shed a halo of enchantment around.
— Preface, p. iii
Several years ago I wrote about starting the “new waltz” of the late nineteenth century in the way recommended by Allen Dodworth, who suggested a preparatory measure of music in which the dancers move from the usual starting orientation for couple dances, gentleman facing the wall/lady facing the center of the room, to one in which the gentleman’s back is to line of dance, making it easier for him to accomplish a clean leap backward on the first step of the waltz, while the lady faces forward and can easily perform her forward leap. I’d thought at the time to make that post part of a series addressing different ways recommended for starting various forms of waltz over the course of the nineteenth century, but for one reason or another never got back to the topic.
Here’s another short installment in what is now a very drawn-out series.
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.
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:
This hesitation waltz sequence by Seattle dance teacher George G. Faurot (c1879-1954) was published in both editions of F. Leslie Clendenen’s compilation Dance Mad (St. Louis, 1914). Faurot himself was a native of Lima, Ohio, where his uncle Ben discovered oil and his brother Lee eventually became mayor. Faurot Park in Lima was donated by Ben and is named for him.
According to George’s obituary, he fought in the Spanish-American War and then had a career in the oil industry before moving to Seattle, where he ran the Faurot Studio of Dancing with his wife, Nellie, for thirty years. The Faurots’ residence in the late 1930s is now a historical site in Seattle. The building that housed their dance studio, the Oddfellows Building, still stands and is still home to a dance studio, Century Ballroom, though the Faurot Ballroom itself seems to have been in the first-floor space which is now the Oddfellows Cafe.
Interestingly, Lee, before becoming mayor, also seems to have dabbled in dance teaching before ending up in the insurance business and politics. A family passion?
I’ve had sequence dances on my mind recently after some discussion earlier this week, which reminded me of this little sequence from the the second edition of F. Leslie Clendenen’s 1914 compilation Dance Mad. It appears there under the name “American Grapevine Dance” by Anthony J. Giaconia of Springfield, Massachusetts. I know nothing about Mr. Giaconia except that on June 24, 1912, he was quoted on the front page of The Indianapolis News as one of a convention of dancing masters appalled by dances like the Grizzly Bear and Bunny Hug. He found some dancing in a park there so disgraceful that it ought to be stopped “for the sake of decency”.
The Grapevine Dance is so short (only eight bars) that it doesn’t feel long enough to be a sequence dance all on its own, but the two measures in which the dancers move directly into the center of the room and back make it mildly risky to use simply as a variation; moving abruptly back and forth across the line of dance can cause problems for dancers coming up behind. Doing this from an “inside lane” near the center of the room will be more polite if it is not being done in unison as a sequence dance.
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.
In 1914, Victor Records made a celebrity-endorsement deal with Vernon and Irene Castle, “the greatest exponents of Modern Dancing who supervise the making of Victor Dance Records”. The company put out a little booklet, Victor Records for Dancing, which included short instructions for various couple dances (including the brand-new foxtrot) plus an enthusiastic note from Vernon Castle about the superiority of Victor records and the indispensibility of the Victrola in teaching classes.
The instructions for each dance were accompanied by a convenient list of suitable Victor recordings. Tucked at the end of the book were instructions for a country dance and a Paul Jones circle mixer “as taught at the Castle School of Dancing, New York City”.
In the past, I’ve discussed a very simple 1903 two-step circle mixer and a more complex English Paul Jones from the 1920s. The Castles’ version is quite similar to the 1903 one, but it’s physically rather livelier while mentally less taxing; the dancers don’t have to count.
2014 marks one hundred years since the foxtrot made its first big splash, so it’s very timely for me to have come across a copy of Edna Stuart Lee’s Thirty Fox Trot Steps (New York, 1916). This is by far the largest single collection of 1910 foxtrot step sequences I’ve ever found in one place, and many of them are completely new to me.
Lee’s sequences were billed as “suitable for the ballroom, gymnasium, or playground, as well as for private exercise at home, either with or without a partner.” While several of them match foxtrot variations that I’ve previously discussed, they’re given a poetic new set of names. Can anyone guess which common sequences Lee endows with names like the Meditation Glide, Barcarolle, and Viola Dana?
Like the similarly-named Twinkle Hesitation and the Mistletoe Hesitation, the Twinkle Hesitation Waltz is a sixteen-bar hesitation waltz sequence found in F. Leslie Clendenen’s compilation Dance Mad (St. Louis, 1914) that uses the quick step-change-step known as a “twinkle”. Clendenen attributes it to T. MacDougall. It can be used as a sequence dance to any fast 1910s waltz music, or the two parts can be used together or separately as variations in a regular hesitation waltz.
The dancers start in a normal ballroom hold, opened out to side by side facing line of dance. Steps below are given for the gentleman; the lady dances opposite.
The waltz step used would be the box-shaped “new waltz” of the era rather than the fast-spinning rotary waltz of the nineteenth century.
The hesitation undercut is so short that it seems more a variation for the hesitation waltz than a distinct dance. F. Leslie Clendenen, in his 1914 collection Dance Mad, attributes it to S. Wallace Cortissoz, who was also credited in Dance Mad with a sixteen-bar sequence called the Twinkle Hesitation.
The eight-bar sequence is begun with the dancers in normal waltz position, the gentleman facing the wall and the lady the center of the room. Steps are given below for the gentleman; the lady dances opposite.
The waltz step used would have been the "new" waltz step, with a pattern of step-side-close, much like today's box step, rather than the older rotary-style waltz of the nineteenth century.
The Polka Dot Waltz was either a sequence dance or waltz variant described by Melvin B. Gilbert in Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) and later by [George] Washington Lopp in his translation-plus of Gilbert’s book, La Danse (Paris, 1903), in which it is listed as Polka Dot (Valse). Both Gilbert and Lopp credit it to Herman Strassburg, presumably the same dancing master who was the author of the Call Book of Modern Quadrilles (Detroit, 1889).
The pattern of the Polka Dot, its imaginative name, and the way Lopp formats the title make me suspect that this was not a variation for normal waltzing but instead was intended as a choreographed sequence dance matched to a particular piece of music. I’ve only been able to find one piece of sheet music by that title, “The Polka Dot Waltz”, by Edward A. Abell, (San Francisco, 1873), which is archived on the Library of Congress website. It does not include dance instructions. It is possible that Strassburg wrote this as choreography to go with it, or with a different waltz by the same name, but in the absence of proof one way or the other, it is also possible to dance it to any waltz music with even eight-bar phrases, either by the entire room dancing it in unison or by individual couples using it (carefully!) as a variation.
The Double Glide Waltz, as described by Melvin B. Gilbert in his compendium Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890), is an elaboration on the alternating measures of sliding and waltzing found in variations like the Metropole. In La Danse, by [George] Washington Lopp, published in Paris in 1903, it is called La Double Boston and credited to Lopp himself. Much of La Danse is a direct French translation of Gilbert, so Lopp’s addition of the credit to himself is notable.
Like other late variations such as the Bowdoin and Fascination, the Double Glide Waltz alters the sliding steps, in this case to include in each sideways measure two “slide-closes”, one slow and one fast. The pattern here is “one, two-and-three” or “slow, quick-quick-slow”. It also reverses the Metropole pattern from slide/waltz/slide/waltz to waltz/slide/waltz/slide, a distinction which is not particularly significant when actually dancing.
The New York is another of the myriad “redowa and mazurka” variations given in M. B. Gilbert’s Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890). Along with the Fascination, it is one of only a few variations credited to Indianapolis dancing master D. B. Brenneke. It reappears among the material translated directly from Gilbert in [George] Washington Lopp’s La Danse (Paris, 1903), where it is listed as a mazurka and again credited to Brenneke.
Gilbert gives both this “New York” and another dance called “The New York”, making it unclear whether the name refers to the city or whether it is simply a new version of the York. Lopp lists it as La New York, along with two different dances called La Nouvelle York. Lopp’s translations suggest that the reference is to the city as much as to the popular dance. That might make it something of a pun, since the New York does include the characteristic sliding sequence found in the first measure of the York.
The Independent York is an interesting variation on the original York, albeit one that was probably rarely danced outside a studio context. I have found it in only two sources. The earlier is Melvin Gilbert’s Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890), where it is uncredited, suggesting that Gilbert himself created it. The later source is La Danse, by [George] Washington Lopp, published in Paris in 1903, much of which is simply a French translation of Gilbert. It appears there as L’Indépendant York and is credited to Gilbert. The sequence is identical in both sources. Gilbert classifies it, as he does the York, under “redowa and mazurka”; Lopp lists it as a mazurka.
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Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian
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