Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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Category: Waltz

  • Late Victorian Waltz Variations: Le Metropole

    Returning once again to my short series on some of the more useful waltz variations published by M.B. Gilbert in his 1890 manual, Round Dancing, here’s a third simple variation for the late nineteenth century waltz.  The first and second posts in the series may be found here and here.

    Le Metropole uses the same simple sliding and waltzing steps of the Gavotte Glide but mixes them in a different way.  Gilbert attributes it to H. Fletcher Rivers.

    Like the Gavotte Glide, this variation will work either leaping or simply gliding.  And as with the Gavotte Glide, its gliding feel makes me lean toward the latter for the sake of smoother transitions.

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  • Late Victorian Waltz Variations: Gavotte Glide

    This is the second in my short series on some of the more useful waltz variations published by M.B. Gilbert in his 1890 manual, Round Dancing. The first post in the series may be found here.

    Of all of the variations in Gilbert, this simple mix of sliding steps and waltz turns is probably the easiest and the one I use most frequently in teaching new dancers.  Gilbert attributes it to “Constantine Carpenter, Son, and Charles C. Martel.”

    As with the Diagonal Waltz, this variation will work either leaping or simply gliding, though its gliding feel makes me lean toward the latter for smoother transitions within the variation.

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  • Late Victorian Waltz Variations: Diagonal Waltz

    By the end of the nineteenth century, American dancing masters such as M.B. Gilbert were coming up with long lists of little waltz variations of dubious utility and doubtful popularity.  Many of these are minor variations on a few simple themes, often interpolating sideways slides and chassé steps between measures of waltz.  I’m going to do a short series on some of the more useful and leadable of these variations this month, all taken from the pages of Gilbert’s immense manual, Round Dancing, published in Maine in 1890 and incorporating many variations from the 1870s and 1880s.  Calling them “Victorian” is a bit of misnomer, since these are essentially American variations.

    The Diagonal Waltz does not actually involve anything other than the normal step of the “new” waltz (step-side-close pattern) of the late nineteenth century.  It is really just a sequence incorporating natural and reverse turns in such a way as to never make a complete turn in either direction.  This is so basic a waltz skill that similar sequences are incorporated into most twentieth century versions of the box-step or Viennese waltz as well.

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  • Half & Half Variations: The Scroll

    Winding up this month's little half and half miniseries, here's another variation from the Castle Assistants, as published in Dance Mad in 1914.  This one even has a name, the scroll, as well as a number ("Step 2").  It's essentially a slow-motion grapevine step changing once per bar rather than on every beat, very similar in conception to the 1930s "about face waltz" described here, which has the pattern of one bar of traveling followed by one bar to change the direction each dancer is facing, with the lady and gentleman always facing opposite directions.

    The scroll uses the basic half and half step sequence (stepping on the first, fourth, and fifth beats of each bar) done in promenade position, as described in my half and half overview here, with the dancers facing opposite directions and traveling for two bars before pivoting.  The change of direction occupies only a partial bar rather than the full bar of the about face waltz.

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  • Five Steps in the Half and Half

    • Era: 1910s

    Among the variations listed for the half and half in the 1914 collection Dance Mad is an interesting waltz which, unusually for the half and half, involves stepping on all five beats of the bar rather than on the usual first, fourth, and fifth beats.  It doesn't have a name; the description is simply labeled "Sixth Figure" and is one of eight figures credited to "Quinlan Twins."  For lack of any better name, I refer to it as the five-step variation.

    Background information and basic traveling steps for the half and half may be found in my previous post here.

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  • The Invention of the York?

    A couple of months ago I described the late 19th-century waltz-time move known as the York, which incorporated mazurka-style heel-clicks and was considered a variation of the polka mazurka.  At the time, the earliest source I had located was M.B. Gilbert’s Round Dancing, published in 1890, where the dance was included “by permission of E.W. Masters,” possibly its creator.  An interesting article from The New York Times, dated September 9, 1885, both brings the date of the dance back a few years and provides an amusing anecdote about the dance’s possible origin.

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  • The Two-Slide Racket

    • Era: 1880s into very early 1900s

    I’m going to wrap up the year at Kickery with a different kind of racket waltz, the two-slide racket.  This variant appears in at least two major and two minor sources in late nineteenth-century America, as listed at the bottom of this post.  In the minor sources, the Cartier and Wehman books, which are compilations of dances from other sources, it is labeled “The Racquet”.

    Both the two major sources, Dodworth and Gilbert, list the two-slide racket as a redowa- or mazurka-time dance, implying a different accent in the 3/4 music than in a regular waltz.

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  • The Racket Waltz, or The Society

    • Era: 1880s into very early 1900s

    The simplest description of the racket waltz is that it is the step of the one-slide racket converted to waltz time, with the extra beat of music per measure added to the initial slide.  Edna Witherspoon, in The Perfect Art of Modern Dancing (1894), gives it the alternate title “The Society” and notes that “if thoughtlessly executed, it is a most ungraceful and unattractive dance.”  Allen Dodworth, in Dancing and its Relation to Education and Social Life (1885), adds that “The racket, in this accent, is that unfortunate dance known as the “Society,” and is the medium through which not a few show an entire absence of good taste in motion.”  Honestly, it’s not that bad!  It does not seem to have been quite as popular or well-known as the galop–time rackets I described earlier this summer, but it is an easy dance that works well to brisk waltz music.

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  • The Three-Step Boston or English Boston

    Concluding a trio of posts on easy hesitation waltzes, here is the simplest hesitation at all: a normal waltz sequence stretched over two bars of music.  Albert Newman succinctly described the dance in his 1914 manual, Dances of To-Day:

    In reality it is our Standard Waltz, but instead of taking two measures this Boston takes four measures.

    What this works out to in practice is that the first step (forward or backward) of each half-turn is held for an entire bar (three counts) and the step to the side and close are done on the first and third counts of the second bar of music, with the overall rhythm being ONE-two-three-FOUR-five-SIX.  The three steps taken over two measures give the variation one of its names; I see nothing especially English about this that would account for the other.

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  • The Pompadour Waltz

    The Pompadour Waltz is a minor but interesting variation on the five-step Boston or five-step waltz described by Albert Newman in 1914 (and by me here).  I have found it only in the collection Dance Mad, or the dances of the day, compiled by F. Leslie Clendenen and published in St. Louis in 1914.

    To perform the Pompadour, the dancers alternate brief hesitating grapevine sequences with the five-step Boston in an eight-bar sequence as described below.  The steps given are for the gentleman; the lady dances opposite.

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Capering & Kickery

Susan de Guardiola, Social Dance Historian

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