Capering & Kickery

Jenny Lind Polka - German Polka (American contra dances)

I'm going to jointly cover the two contra dances prolific nineteenth century musician-caller-author-publisher Elias Howe published under the titles Jenny Lind Polka and German Polka because they share the same unusual eight-bar sequence of figures as well as an additional sixteen of the thirty-two bars total of each dance.  They're more variations on a theme than separate dances.

Their names refer to pieces of music.  "Jenny Lind Polka" was, of course, named for the famous "Swedish nightingale", shown at left, who toured the United States in 1850-1852.  It is still regularly played and recorded.  "German Polka" is more obscure.

Both dances were published with consistent wording for each in Howe's Complete ball-room handbook (1858), American dancing master, and ball-room prompter (1862 and 1866), and New American Dancing Master (1882 and 1892).  I think it extremely likely that the figures were arranged by Howe himself.  One or both dances also appeared in two works that were highly derivative of Howe: both of them in John M. Schell's Prompting, How To Do It. (New York/Boston/Chicago, 1890), and the Jenny Lind Polka alone, with a difference that was probably an error, in the anonymous Gems of the Ball Room Call Book. (Chicago, 1896).

Regency Oddities: Roger de Coverley

Wrapping up my little series on extended-Regency-era oddities, let's talk about an unusual version of the English finishing dance, Sir Roger de Coverley!  This is one of the rare dances where tune and dance are so tightly associated that it's reasonable to give the dance the tune name.

I discussed a typical Regency-era version of the classic Sir Roger de Coverley figure long, long ago.  Since then, I've accumulated a number of other versions of the figure with the same characteristic elements: opening figures performed on the long diagonals followed by whole-set figures that end with the original top couple progressed to the bottom.  I've written up a couple of later nineteenth century versions here and here.

Now, this is not to say that there were never any other, more typical, country dance figures set to the "Roger de Coverley" tune.  In its earliest appearance with dance figures in the ninth edition of Playford's The Dancing Master, published in 1695, it is printed with a normal progressive figure, completely unrelated to the later dance.  One hundred and thirty years after that, a different figure, very generic-Regency, was published with it in Analysis of the London Ball-Room (printed for Thomas Tegg, London, 1825).  Never underestimate the willingness of music publishers and dancers, to recycle a tune.

But there's one set of figures I've found printed with "Sir Roger de Coverley" which is a real oddity:

Regency Oddities: Heys for Four

When I add new extended-Regency-era country dance tune books to my collection of photos and scans, one of the things I do is quickly skim through the figures looking for anything out of the ordinary.  And while heys (or reels) are quite common figures for country dances in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (indeed, all the way back to the seventeenth century!), in this period, they are almost always heys for three.  Figures like "hey your own sides", "hey contrary sides and hey your own sides", "hey top and bottom" (where one dancer in a couple goes up and one goes down the set), and the corner-formation heys where the lady heys with two gentlemen and the gentleman with two ladies are all very common.  But these are all heys for three dancers.  A "right and left" quite round is technically a circular hey for four, but a classic, Scotch reel-style hey for four dancers in a line is not listed as a standard figure and doesn't really turn up.  

Until, of course, it does. 

A shorter Victorian "Sir Roger de Coverley"

Over the twelve years I've been writing Kickery, I've twice discussed versions of Sir Roger de Coverley, the English "finishing dance" that was the direct ancestor of America's Virginia Reel: a Regency-era version from Thomas Wilson and a Victorian-era version probably originated by Mrs. Nicholas Henderson.  The latter version of the dance, which shortened the figures and added an introductory figure for all the dancers, appeared in several English sources from around 1850 to 1870.  But it was not the only version in mid-nineteenth century England; at least two variations of a full version more like the Regency one continued to appear in dance manuals, and a fourth version, shortened even further, turned up occasionally as well. 

 

The dance being strongly associated with Christmas due to its appearance at Mr. Fezziwig's ball in Charles Dickens' 1843 novel, A Christmas Carol, Christmas Eve seems an appropriate time to discuss this extremely short version.

Over the twelve years I've been writing Kickery, I've twice discussed versions of Sir Roger de Coverley, the English "finishing dance" that was the direct ancestor of America's Virginia Reel: a Regency-era version from Thomas Wilson and a Victorian-era version probably originated by Mrs. Nicholas Henderson.  The latter version of the dance, which shortened the figures and added an introductory figure for all the dancers, appeared in several English sources from around 1850 to 1870.  But it was not the only version in mid-nineteenth century England; at least two variations of a full version more like the Regency one continued to appear in dance manuals, and a fourth version, shortened even further, turned up occasionally as well. 

 

The dance being strongly associated with Christmas due to its appearance at Mr. Fezziwig's ball in Charles Dickens' 1843 novel, A Christmas Carol, Christmas Eve seems an appropriate time to discuss this extremely short version.

Wilson's "Maze" figure

Stating that Regency-era dancing master Thomas Wilson's personally created new figure, "The Maze", appeared in published country dance figures is a bit of an exaggeration: I've found it exactly twice, once in Thompson's 24 Country Dances For the Year 1814 and once in L'Assemblée, the latter being a book of forty-eight country dance tunes with figures by Wilson which was published in 1819.  (The Thompson book also noted prominently on its cover that its figures were by Wilson.) 

I can't rule out other appearances of the figure, but after skimming through most of my Wilson sources with no further luck, I'd say that The Maze, like True Lover's Knot (but unlike Double Triangle) qualifies as a genuine rarity.  That means that it's not a typical Regency dance figure, the odds of anyone other than Wilson's own students knowing it were fairly low, and one shouldn't call it today unless certain one's set already knows it or prepared to explain or teach it.  I'll provide a simple explanation below.

Like Wilson's other new figures, The Maze appeared in at least three of in Wilson's country dance figure books, the earliest of which I've found it in is the 1811 third edition of An Analysis of Country Dancing.  It also appears in the fourth edition of Analysis (1822) and in  The Complete System of English Country Dancing (c1820).  Happily, the diagram shown at left (click to enlarge) is the same in all three sources and the description varies only in the location of the line breaks.  This particular image is taken from Complete System.

Wilson's "Double Triangle" figure

Like the True Lover's Knot, the Double Triangle is another of Regency-era dancing master Thomas Wilson's personally-created country dance figures, used, as far as I can tell, exclusively by Wilson himself.  Since it is not a standard Regency figure, it is of limited utility.  I myself would use it only if, for some reason, I were doing a very Wilson-focused workshop or event.  In general country dancing, a lady calling "double triangle" will simply create confusion, since no one but a serious scholar of Wilson's work is likely to have the slightest idea what it is.  

One reason to look at it in a bit more detail, however, is that Wilson himself seems to have been fond of it.  It appears over and over in Wilson's own country dance figures.  While I haven't made an exhaustive survey, it would not surprise me if he used it more than any other of his new figures.  It appeared in numerous figures in Wilson's enormous compilation of country dance tunes, A Companion to the Ball Room (London, c1820) and in L'Assemblée (London, 1819), a book of forty-eight country dance tunes with accompanying figures.  But it also turned up in figures Wilson did for books published by others.  There are several occurrences of it in, for example, Thompson's 24 Country Dances For the Year 1813 and Thompson's 24 Country Dances For the Year 1817, both of which are advertised on their covers as including figures by Wilson. 

Since this makes it a figure which dancers looking for country dance figures might come across and be puzzled by, and, I suppose, slightly more likely than most of Wilson's new figures to have filtered out into the world beyond his studio, it seems useful to talk a little about how to dance it and how to explain and teach it efficiently.

At left is the diagram of the Double Triangle as it appeared in the third (1811) and fourth (1822) editions of Wilson's An Analysis of Country Dancing.  The 1811 edition is the earliest source I have for the figure.

This particular image (click to enlarge) is taken from the fourth edition.  Calling the dancers' paths triangles involves a bit of artistic license, given the loops on the corners, but the connection between name and figure is clear. 

Wilson's text, unfortunately, is not only completely dependent on the diagram, it's also confusing in referring to the active gentleman in two different ways:

Diary of a Journey to England, 1761-1762

On November 22, 1902, The New York Times announced the discovery, translation, and publication of the travel journal kept by Count Frederick Kielmansegge on his visit to England in 1761-1762 for the coronation of George III.  The diary was discovered and translated by his great-granddaughter-in-law Philippa, then-Countess Kielmansegg (the spelling of the family name varied over the years).  The opening paragraph of the article may be seen at left; click to enlarge.  The complete article may be found online in The New York Times Archives.

Friedrich Graf von Kielmansegge (1728-1800), a lawyer and administrative official, and his brother Karl Rudolf August von Kielmansegge (1731-1810) were part of a prominent Hanoverian family (the Holstein/Hannover Kielmansegges) and second cousins once removed of George III through their grandmother, who was the illegitimate half-sister of George I, the first Hanoverian king of England.  Their family name variously spelled as Kielmansegg, Kielmansegge, and Kielmannsegge, but since the diary was published in English using the spelling "Kielmansegge", I'll keep to that version here.

The coronation was the brothers' excuse to travel, but Kielmansegge was an enthusiastic tourist and roamed all over England taking in the sights, which he described at great length.  He also socialized extensively and attended balls given by royalty and nobility in London as well as in other towns he visited.  The diary is a fascinating document in general, well worth reading, but the major attraction for the dance historian is that it contains useful information about the practice of dance in England in the mid-eighteenth century.  I have not read the original, which does not seem to be available to the public; I am dependent upon the English translation.  But I see no reason for the Countess to have edited or bowdlerized the dance information and therefore regard it as reasonably reliable.

Album Review: A Midsummer Regency Romp

Well, it's only taken me three years to get around to reviewing this digital-only album from the top-notch UK dance band Green Ginger!  A Midsummer Regency Romp came out in the summer of 2016, and I've been happily using tunes from it off and on ever since.

The short version of the review: buy the album from Bandcamp here!  But be aware that (1) the time range is rather wide for "Regency", (2) only eleven out of fourteen have suitable repeats (six) for historical style dancing, and (3) one of those is...problematic.  Contact Green Ginger directly for extended (twelve-repeat) tracks.  And be wary of the dance reconstructions in the accompanying booklet.

Dancing to "The Bishop"

I recently attended a modern English country dance evening and happened to dance what in modern tradition is known "The Bishop", done to the tune "Miss Dolland's Delight".  As can be deduced from the title of this post, I would phrase that differently, but I'll get to that later on.

I play a little private game at modern dance events of trying to guess the decade of those dances that are based on historical sources and then figure out what (if anything) has been done to modernize them beyond removing the historical steps in favor of walking.  "The Bishop" was easy to guess as 1770s (it turns out to be from 1778).  It was also very easy for me to spot the three biggest modifications to it. 

Ready to play?

Here are the directions for the modern dance:

A1    1st Man cast to middle place, set to & turn 3rd Woman with 2 hands, finishing in middle place
A2    1st Woman the same with 3rd Man
B1    1st Couple gate up through 2nd Couple as 3rd Couple gypsy clockwise, then circle hands 6 L half way round
B2    1st Couple gate up through 3rd Couple as 2nd Couple gypsy clockwise, then circle hands 6 L half way round

It may be easier to visualize these figures with the help of a video.  Here's one that's well-made and shows the modern figures clearly.  The music is "Miss Dolland's Delight".

Can you pick out the three big modernizations aside from everyone just walking through it?

It's easy, right?

Dancing to "Mr. Chivers' Whim"

I recently had a request in email for anything I had on the Regency-era dance tune "Mr. Chivers' Whim" from a questioner who had some mismatched figures (twenty-four bars) and music (thirty-two bars) but no original sources.  A little back-and-forth established that he wanted the most historical answer, which is presumably why the question came to me and not whoever popularized what they're doing under that name in eastern Europe.  This isn't the first time I've had this topic come up in conversation!

So, what's going on with "Mr. Chivers' Whim"?  Well, at some point in the last decade or two, the name became firmly attached to a twenty-four bar "Swedish dance", meaning a trio country dance.  People in Russia are mostly dancing it to the tune "Mrs. Chivers' Favorite Waltz", which is of course a different tune, and a waltz, not a reel.  Switching tunes is not inappropriate to do in a historical context, but it's incorrect to call it "Mr. Chivers' Whim" when they're dancing to "Mrs. Chivers' Favorite Waltz".  The name goes with the tune, not the figures.

To compound the problem, they're often using the Spare Parts recording of "Mrs. Chivers' Favorite Waltz" from the CD The Regency Ballroom, on which it is played with a forty-eight bar repeat structure, which means that the figures cross the music oddly; it's alternately danced to AAB and BC strains (the C strain is sixteen bars long).  That is actually wrong, from a historical perspective.  Take a look at this video and you can see/hear the problem clearly, though I am not singling out that group in particular; there are several similar videos from different groups in different cities.  That one just happened to come up first in my search results. 

I'm not sure where the thirty-two bar music comes in, but there's certainly a problem here.

The Mid-Twentieth-Century Virginia Reel

"The chief trouble, as I said, with the Virginia Reel is the monotonous repetition and waiting for your turn on the corners. This can be obviated by a new form of the dance which is gradually growing in favor. In this form, instead of having corners bow, turn, etc., each gentleman, and all at once, crosses directly over and does all the moves with his own partner. Done carelessly, this leads to wild confusion (but fun). However, if the line of men all advance as a straight line, the ladies the same, and all return to places in straight lines it can be very effective. And everyone is active all the time up to the point when the head couple reels the set."
        -- Lloyd Shaw, in Cowboy Dances: A Collection of Western Square Dances (1939)

It's unclear among whom, exactly, this version was "gradually growing in favor", since one page earlier Shaw had also noted that he had "never seen it with the country folk.  It has strangely survived in schools and in society groups..."  Shaw's mention is the earliest reference I have to this "all-active" (for the opening figures, anyway) version of the Virginia Reel.  The earliest descriptions I have are from somewhat later, though I wouldn't want to make any promises about these being the earliest; my collection of mid-twentieth century dance books is fairly thin.  But by the 1950s, this style of dancing the Virginia Reel seems to have become well-established. 

Aurora Waltz / Hungarian Waltz - Contra Dance

It's been quite some time since I've added a nineteenth-century American contra dance to Kickery.  Here's a waltz contra from the ever-useful Elias Howe that, with only a few bars of turning waltz, is an easy dance for beginners.  The set of figures appears in near-identical form in at least four of Howe's numerous dance manuals: the Complete ball-room handbook (1858), The pocket ball-room prompter (1858), and the American dancing master, and ball-room prompter (1862 and 1866). 

The original text:

First couple balance, cross over and go down outside below two couples — first couple balance again and waltz up to place — down the centre, back and cast off — swing six

In the two 1858 manuals, the figures appear under the name "Aurora Waltz", and in the 1862 and 1866 books, they appear under "Hungarian Waltz".  I think that as with earlier country dances, the names actually belong to tunes, rather than the dance figures, and I have no special preference as to which tune and name should be used.  Very similar figures (minus the waltz up the center and with a right and left instead of the swing six) appear at least as far back as the 1850s as non-waltz contra dance figures (under several different names) in Howe's and other manuals.  It looks to me like Howe just made minor tweaks to a common set of figures to take advantage of the waltz music.

Fessenden's "The Rustick Revel", 1806

Reading onward in Thomas Fessenden's Original Poems (1806), what should turn up but another poem about dance, even lengthier and more detailed than "Horace Surpassed"!  "The Rustick Revel" is less impressive as a poem, being made up entirely of rhyming couplets of utterly regular rhythm, but it's even thicker with dance references.  As Nathaniel Hawthorne said in his biographical sketch of Fessenden:

He had caught the rare art of sketching familiar manners, and of throwing into verse the very spirit of society as it existed around him; and he had imbued each line with a peculiar yet perfectly natural and homely humor.

Hawthorne was referring to a different poem, but it could easily serve for this one as well.  Among the highlights are the very calculated invitation list, the squire calling a dance, people messing up the figures, and trying to get out of paying the bill.

Once again, I'll give the entire poem in bold with my own commentary interspersed in italics.  Fessenden's own footnotes have been moved to the end.

Fessenden on New England country dancing, 1806

"Horace Surpassed" (lengthily subtitled "or, a beautiful description of a New England Country-Dance") was published by the American author Thomas Green Fessenden (left) in his 1806 collection, Original Poems.  Fessenden (1771-1837) was, according to the biographical notes here, a lawyer, poet, farmer, journalist, newspaper editor, and member of the Massachusetts legislature.  He was born in Massachusetts, educated at Dartmouth, and spent most of his life in New England.  His original fame as a poet grew from the 1803 work "Terrible Tractoration", a satire about physicians who refused to adopt a quack medical device.  (Yes, really!)

In his spare time, Fessenden evidently liked country (contra) dancing, and his poem is a cheerful look at the characters of rural New England society: agile Willy Wagnimble, clumsy Charles Clumfoot, graceful Angelina, etc.  The "New England Country-Dance" in the subtitle should be understood as referring to a social evening, not to an actual country-dance.

A rather catty review quoted the poem at length

not because it is superiour to the rest, but as a fair specimen of the work, and it describes an amusement which is "all the rage."
        --- The Monthly anthology, and Boston review. (July, 1806)                     

Fessenden topped his poem with a quote from Horace's Odes.  "Iam satis terris nivis atque dirae" ("Enough of snow and hail at last") is the opening line of "To Augustus, The Deliverer and Hope of the State" (1.2).  This particular Ode concerns the disastrous overflowing of the Tiber, possibly as a punishment of the gods for the ill deeds of Rome (notably, the assassination of Julius Caesar), with Augustus as its hoped-for saviour. An 1882 translation of the Ode may be found here.  I must confess that I cannot detect any thematic connection between it and Fessenden's poem, so I'll chalk it up to Fessenden's ego and desire to be recognized as a poet.  

The full original text with my best approximation of the formatting is in bold below, with a few comments of my own interspersed in italics.  In the absence of page breaks, the footnotes have been moved to the end.  

Green Mountain Volunteers

Green Mountain Volunteers is currently fourth on my list of go-to contra dances for the 1910s, after the Circle; Hull's Victory; and Lady of the Lake.  It really ought to be sixth, after Boston Fancy and Portland Fancy as well, but the former is too much like Lady of the Lake, and the latter I'm still thinking about. 

Unlike the five dances listed above, which appear on a pair of Maine dance cards from 1918-1919, I do not have dance card evidence for this one.  The only pre-1937 source for it, in fact, is Elizabeth Burchenal's American Country-Dances, Volume I (New York & Boston, 1918), in which she lists it among the dances "half-forgotten or less used" by the late 1910s:

Some of the most widely used of the contra-dances to-day in New England are The Circle, Lady of the Lake, Boston Fancy, Portland Fancy, Hull's Victory, Soldier's Joy, and Old Zip Coon (or, the Morning Star); while among the half-forgotten or less used ones are Chorus Jig, Green Mountain Volunteers, and Fisher's Hornpipe.

This is a category distinct from dances which are "obsolete" and which she reconstructed herself from old books.  I don't consider those latter ones to be sufficiently documented for my taste.

But, frankly, I include Green Mountain Volunteers in my repertoire for 1910s primarily because it's a neat dance by virtue of its unusual figures.  Contra dances, then and now, can get somewhat monotonous, so I appreciate the ones that stand out.

Green Mountain Volunteers is unusual among 1910s contra dances in having no obvious nineteenth-century pedigree.  The only potential connection, suggested by Ricky Holden in The Contra Dance Book (1956), lies in its loose resemblance to figures listed under "Beaux of Oak Hill" in some mid-nineteenth century manuals.  I'm not entirely convinced by the association, however, and the differences are substantial enough that "Beaux" warrants a separate post. 

Megunticook Reel

Megunticook Reel is a mid-nineteenth century American contra dance that first appears in at least two editions of The ball-room manual of contra dances and social cotillons: the second edition, published in 1856, and the "Vest Pocket Edition" copyright 1862 and published 1863, which is available online here.  The original introduction was signed by "W. H. Q.", presumed to be one William Henry Quimby (1831-1857).  The posthumous Vest Pocket Edition has additional unsigned introductory material.  It is likely that the dance appeared in the first edition as well, but I don't have a copy of that one to check.

There appears to be no tune by the name "Megunticook Reel", so the name presumably belongs to the dance.  Maine is home to Mount Megunticook, Megunticook Lake, and the Megunticook River, from one or all of which the dance takes its name.  The photo at left, from SummitPost.Org, shows a view of Megunticook Lake from an overlook on Mount Megunticook.

There are three other sources for the dance, all from New England.  Eben's Order Book of Dancing (New Hampshire, 1877) is cited by Ralph Page as his source for the figures.  Page's outline of the dance was published in 1951 in Northern Junket, Vol. 8, No. 3.  I don't have a copy of Eben's either, but judging from Page's writeup, I doubt that it differs substantially from the Quimby one.  

The dance also turns up in Howe's New American Dancing Master (Boston, 1882 and 1892) with text identical to the Quimby one other than punctuaton.  The 1892 edition has only minor changes from the 1882 one.  It's interesting that, as far as I can tell, the dance does not appear in any earlier books by Elias Howe.  California Reel has the same publication history (Quimby and late Howe), though I don't know whether or not it appears in Eben's.

Flower Girl's Dance

Flower Girl's Dance is an American Civil War-era contra dance that I remember dancing way back in the early 1990s when I first started doing mid-nineteenth-century dance.  But the version we did does not actually match that found in any source I've ever seen.  And it's easy to see why: the versions given in the sources don't actually work very well.  And now that I've reconstructed the California Reel, I have a little theory about why that is.

The earliest sources I have for Flower Girl's Dance are Elias Howe's two 1858 books, the Pocket Ball-Room Prompter and the Complete Ball-Room Handbook.  I strongly suspect that all the later sources were copying to some degree from Howe.  So let's look at Howe's instructions:

FLOWER GIRL'S DANCE.
(Music: Girl I left behind me.)
Form as for Spanish Dance. All chassa to the right, half balance--chassa back, swing four half round--swing four half round and back--half promenade, half right and left--forward and back all, forward and pass to next couple (as in the Haymakers).

There are some minor differences of spelling and punctuation, but the wording is essentially the same across almost forty years of Howe publications.  Taken at face value with the hash marks setting off eight-bar musical strains, this yields a 40-bar dance:

8b    All chassé to the right, half balance
8b    Chassé back, swing four half round
8b    Swing four half round and back
8b    Half promenade, half right and left
8b    Forward and back, forward and pass through

40 bars is an unusual length, but not unheard of.  But there are worse problems here:

Mr. Layland's Polka Contre Danse

There are at least five different dances in the second half of the nineteenth century whose name is some variation on the generic "polka country dance".  The one I'm looking at here was published as both "Polka Contre Danse" and just "Polka Contre".  Unusually, it is attributed to a particular dancing master, Mr. Layland, who was active in London in the mid-19th century.  I've mentioned him before in the context of his mescolanzes.  That makes it very much an English dance, despite its appearance in a couple of American dance manuals.

My first English source for the Polka Contre Danse, The Victoria Danse du Monde and Quadrille Preceptor, dates to the early 1870s, but I suspect that it actually dates back to the 1850s.  It actually appears earlier in two of the manuals of Boston musician/dance caller/publisher Elias Howe, the earlier of which is from 1862.  Howe was a collector and tended to throw dances from every book he collected into his own works, so I suspect there is an earlier English source somewhere, possibly by Layland himself.  Maybe someday I'll find it.

Until then, on with Polka Contre Danse!

Waltzing Around

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!

Down and up, differently

This is turning into a miniseries of posts on technique for 1910s American contra dances, as helpfully described by Elizabeth Burchenal in American Country-Dances, Volume I (New York & Boston, 1918). 

In general, Burchenal is a treasure.  But her instructions aren't always perfectly correct or clear, and there's one figure where I've got some real problems with Burchenal's descriptions: "Down the Center and Back".

Here's how Burchenal describes it in her glossary of figures:

Down the Centre and Back
In ordinary position (or sometimes with crossed hands joined) a couple go eight steps down the centre of the set toward the foot; then swing half around (or when crossed hands are joined, they face about without releasing hands and without swinging around) so as to face up the set, and return eight steps toward the head of the set (8 measures).

That's a very clear description, but there are a couple of problems with it. 

One problem is that when the dancers turn as a couple rather than individually: if you go eight steps (four measures) down the set, then try to turn as a couple and come back up to the top in the same eight steps, you have to turn really fast and make some big steps coming back (or perhaps make tiny steps going down, which no one ever does).  It can be done, but it's awkward, even though it's facilitated by having the dancers go down the center in "ordinary position", meaning ballroom hold, which at least lets the man help the woman swing around quickly.  It's rushed and ungraceful and I don't like it.

But the bigger problem is that in her actual dance instructions down the center and back is used in five different ways by Burchenal, and she gives the same timing (eight steps) for the "down the centre" segment in every single one of them:

• down with crossed hands, turn individually, up to original places
• down with crossed hands, turn individually, up to second place
• down with crossed hands, turn individually, up, cast off
• down in ordinary position, turn as a couple, up to second place
• down in ordinary position, turn as a couple, up, cast off

So in four measures (eight steps), one is variously supposed to:

• return to original places
• return to second place
• return to original places and cast off
• turn as a couple and return to second place
• turn as a couple, return to original places, and cast off

I'm particularly unenthused by that last one.  Even assuming that one can turn as a couple in two steps (whee!), that gives the couple only six steps to travel the distance they just covered in eight steps and cast off.  And Burchenal does not mention the common modern trick of having the second couple catch the active couple around the waist as they come back up and swing them around to help them cast.  The cast is unassisted.  

At least they're not wearing hoop skirts.

No really, no hands!

Along with the development of the buzz swing, another mystery I've wondered about in the evolution of modern contra dancing is just when the figure "right and left" acquired one of its twentieth-century forms, in which two couples (or two men facing two women) cross over, passing right shoulders rather than taking hands, followed by the person on the left walking backward, not in a "courtesy turn", but simply shoulder to shoulder with the person on the right as they turn halfway to change places.  Ricky Holden gave the following description of right and left in The Contra Dance Book (Newark, New Jersey, 1956):

All move forward to opposite place, passing right shoulders with opposite person; keeping side by side as though inside hands were joined, pivot half around as a couple and reface the center of the set.  The one on the left of each pair pivots backwards around while the one on the right moves forward.

It can be clearly seen in, e.g., this video of the modern contra version of Money Musk, starting at about :23.  

This isn't the only way to do a right and left nowadays.  I believe the standard modern version involves either passing right shoulders or taking right hands and then taking left hands with a courtesy turn (see, for example, the lists of figures here and here; search for "right and left").  The no-hands version with the shoulder-to-shoulder pivot seems to be regarded as "old-fashioned" or "chestnut style", which tells you something about how much contra has evolved since the 1950s! 

I've been told with great assurance that the no-hands version is the "nineteenth-century style" of right and left.  But I've seen no evidence that it predates the twentieth century, and it's certainly not the original way of doing right and left, either in country dances or squares (quadrilles).  I don't believe it's nineteenth century at all.  But when did it become popular?

A miscellany of mescolanzes

I don't often get asked to write about particular topics on Kickery, but I recently received, via the comments here, a request from a teacher at Mrs. Bennet's Ballroom, a historical dance group in London, UK, for a few of my favorite figures for mescolanzes, the four-facing-four country dance format I surveyed earlier this year.  Since the focus of the group seems to be the Regency era, I'll stick with figures from manuals by London dancing master G. M. S. Chivers, which are from the very tail end of the official Regency period (1811-1820) and a few years after.

As I discussed in my earlier survey, Chivers seems to have really liked the mescolanze format, and a few other dancing masters and authors picked it up, but other than the special case of La Tempête, I can't really say with confidence that mescolanzes were a popular or even common dance form in nineteenth-century England.  But the format appears across enough different sources that I'm comfortable with using it sparingly to add variety for the late Regency and immediate post-Regency era.  I don't ever do more than one mescolanze at a ball, however.

Mescolanze figures are derived from country dances and quadrilles, with some figures from the latter descending from much older French contredanse (cotillon) figures.  A characteristic figure, of course, is the famous chassé-by-couples featured prominently in La Tempête.  Since the group already has that dance in its repertoire, I'll not include any others with the same figure.

On Old Fashioned Dances, 1926

On January 21, 1926, a column unfavorably comparing modern dancing to that of earlier eras was published in the Lewiston Evening Journal, published in Lewiston, Maine.  "On 'Old-Fashioned Dances' " appeared under the column title "Just Talks On Common Themes" and the byline of A. G. S.  The initials are those of  Arthur Gray Staples (1861-1940), a Maine writer who was the editor-in-chief of the Lewiston Evening Journal (later just the Lewiston Journal) from 1919-1940.  "Just Talks On Common Themes" was his daily column.  Staples described these columns many years later in an inscription of one of his books to the Maine State Library:

The only claim for these things is their spontaneity.  They write themselves — “after hours,” chiefly.  In their day and generation many good folk seemed to like some of them and many did not.

A collection of the columns was published in 1919 or 1920 and may now be found online at archive.org.  Later collections were issued in 1921 and 1924, but  a 1926 column was obviously not included in any of them.  Fortunately, it is now online in its original newspaper publication.

Kentucky Reel

Earlier this month I saw and greatly enjoyed Love and Friendship, the adaptation of Jane Austen's short epistolatory novel Lady Susan.  There's not actually a dance scene in the original story, but they squeezed a brief one into the film.  I'll defer full commentary on the scene until I can get the DVD and watch it a couple more times, but the brief version is that it was an odd and, as far as I know, ahistorical variation of Sir Roger de Coverley in which partners stood alternately proper and improper, resulting in lines that alternated gentlemen and ladies and diagonals that involved two people of the same gender.  You can see it for about a second at 1:26 in the trailer here.  

While I'm waiting for the DVD release, I'll free-associate to another country, era, and dance.  I promise, this does have some connection to Love and Friendship!

The Tempest

The first thing to know about "The Tempest" is that, despite the name, it is not a version of "La Tempête".  The latter is a different dance with different music and a much longer and more exotic pedigree.

"Tempest" is a mid-nineteenth-century American contra dance with a delightfully unusual formation, as shown at left in a (relatively) modern illustration from Ricky Holden's The Contra Dance Book (1956).  The squares represent gentlemen and the circles, ladies.  There are earlier illustrations, but this is the only one I've found that shows the dance in action.

Descriptions of the formation are very clear that the dancers line up couple facing couple, widely spaced, with the frequent suggestion of six to eight couples on each side, though there's no reason beyond the length of dancing time that there can't be more.  

The dance is started off by the two couples at the head of each line peeling inward and going down the middle four abreast, as can be seen in the diagram.  As those two couples progress down the set, each pair of couples reaches the top, waits out once, and then turns into the line of four to begin the dance in turn.  This is the standard early progression style for country dances, as described in detail here.  By the mid-nineteenth century, however, it was not unheard of for multiple couples to start simultaneously in a country dance.  Boston musician-caller-author Elias Howe, whose books are, collectively, one of the major sources for "Tempest", was quite explicit about this.  So it would not be unreasonable to start multiple lines of four simultaneously.  The dance would continue until all couples have had a chance to rise to the top of a set, dance down it, and return to their original places.

Tracking the Mescolanzes

The topic of mescolanzes, four-facing-four country dances, and whether the famous dance La Tempête was the only surviving member of the genre by the mid- to late nineteenth century, came up in an email exchange recently.  Mescolanzes are one of those dance genres for which I have spent years slowly accumulating examples, so I thought I'd talk a little bit about the format and where dances called mescolanzes appeared over the course of the nineteenth century.

I'm going to limit this quick survey to more-or-less anglophone countries -- England, America, Scotland, Canada, and Australia -- since I've not yet collated all the information I have from other countries.  I'm also not going to discuss La Tempête specifically, since that is an enormous topic all on its own.  Here and now, I will only survey dances appearing under the name or classification "mescolanze" and its several (mis)spellings.

Twin Sisters (2 of 2)

As I noted in my previous post on Twin Sisters, which should be read before this one, I had no luck finding a tune called "Twin Sisters".  But there are two other names regularly associated with Twin Sisters: Land of Sweet Erin and The Merry Dance.  Searching for those produced some interesting results.

The Traditional Tune Archive states that "Land of Sweet Erin" is an old Irish jig with a variety of different titles, with the name "Land of Sweet Erin" unique to Elias Howe's books.  That is incorrect; the music was printed under that title in A Collection of Country Dances and Cotillions arranged for the pianoforte (Boston: G. Graupner, c1808-1811).  It includes a set of contra dance figures completely different from the Twin Sisters ones.  Per the extremely useful database Dance Figures Index: American Country Dances, 1710-1830 (DFIA index), another set of figures, only slightly different from the Graupner ones, appear under that title in a c1800 manuscript of dance figures.  And the equally useful Early American Secular Music and Its 
European Sources, 1589–1839: An Index (EASMES) gives three New England music manuscript cites for the tune under that name, with the earliest being a 1795 manuscript from Connecticut.

Howe may have picked up both tune and title from the Graupner publication or, since the tune was apparently circulating under that name in New England, gotten them from another fiddler in his youth.  His first publication of "Land of Sweet Erin", with no dance figures attached, seems to have been in a trio of 1843 music instruction books (School for the Flute, School for the Clarionet, and School for the Violin).  It is included in the 1851 reprint of School for the Clarionet, again without figures, and in a music book published by Oliver Ditson & Company, The Home Circle (Boston, 1859) with a different set of contra dance figures.  The same figures reappear under the "Land of Sweet Erin" title (without music) in Schell's Prompting: How to do it (Boston, 1890).  And the tune turns up outside New England as well; in The Welcome Guest (New York, 1863), it is used, as "Land of Sweet Erin", for a quadrille figure.  I have not even tried to trace it under all its other possible names.

It is clear that "Land of Sweet Erin" was not exclusively attached to the Twin Sisters contra figures.  So how did they come to be linked together?  That seems somewhat more likely to have been Howe's doing.

Twin Sisters (1 of 2)

"Country dances are usually known by the name of the music to which the figures are set."
       --Thomas Hillgrove, A complete practical guide to the art of dancing (New York, 1863)

As country (contra) dancing faded from its former domination of the most fashionable ballrooms in favor of quadrilles and couple dances, Hillgrove's statement reflected the transition in progress from the interchangeability of country dance figures and tunes earlier in the century to more fixed pairings of music and dance as the repertoire shrank to a small set.  Many of these survivors would become today's "chestnuts".  

But in this particular case, I think Hillgrove may be incorrect.  I've found no tune called "Twin Sisters", and since the dance has a history under a different name, I would speculate that it acquired its popular title because of its opening figure. in which two ladies take hands and dance together.

Twin Sisters was well-known enough in the mid-nineteenth century to appear on a list of a "portion of the country dances still in vogue" included by name only, without figures, by Lawrence De Garmo Brookes in his Brookes on Modern Dancing (New York, 1867):

HULL'S VICTORY.
DEVIL'S DREAM.
LADIES' TRIUMPH.
HEWITT'S FANCY.
PORTLAND FANCY.
TWIN SISTERS.
CIRCASSIAN CIRCLE.
CAMPTOWN HORNPIPE.
ETC., ETC., ETC.

The figures are not particularly complicated, but its appearance in such a short list makes it worth some attention.

More from Green Ginger!

A few months ago I noted that the UK dance band Green Ginger had begun making extended tracks of some of their country dance tunes so that they would have a repeat structure useful for historical sets and progressions, which require specific numbers of repeats for specific lengths of sets, as described in detail here.  Most notably, six or twelve repeats are useful for three- or four-couple sets.  Seven repeats, which I gather are frequently used for modern-style country dancing, are not useful for much of anything, historically speaking.  

Since I generally teach to recordings and therefore have a bottomless appetite for new music that I do not have to wrestle with music editing software to make useful, I am delighted to discover that they have continued the project, and have recently made some new tracks available.

I do not plan to make a habit of posting every time Green Ginger puts out something new, but I will create a "mothership" post here for their country dance tracks and update it as new music comes out.  

Teaching the hey for three

I didn't realize my way of teaching heys for three was particularly unusual until one of my regular musicians, who is himself a contra dance caller, commented on it, impressed by how quickly I was able to get a roomful of dancers at a public ball (meaning dancers of wildly mixed ability and experience) doing heys in unison.  Since heys of one sort or another are especially popular in early nineteenth century dance, I teach them frequently and prefer not to take too much time about it, especially when calling at a ball. 

My little trick for teaching a hey for three is to start by teaching it from an L-shaped formation, as a "corner hey", rather than in a straight line.  I find that it can be difficult for dancers, especially beginners, to visualize the figure-eight path of the hey when they all start in a straight line, and that it is not intuitively obvious in which direction the second and third dancers move when everyone starts at once (as they should!) rather than one dancer moving and the other two waiting out a measure or two before starting.  

Doing a corner hey simplifies things.

Moving toward more historically accurate Regency dancing

There seems to be a mistaken impression that because setting your own figures is permitted in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century ("Regency") English country dancing, it must be required, and people who want to dance authentically need to stop using their favorite tunes and give up all their favorite figures in favor of learning to make them up on the spot.

That's not actually true.  Assuming you have good reconstructions, which admittedly is a rather large assumption given how many dreadful (in a historical sense) ones are floating around, it's perfectly possible to keep right on doing the same figures to the same tunes forever and be historically correct.  It's boring, and it's not displaying high-level ballroom skills for a dancer of the era (if you can consider "able to choose a different tune now and then" a suitable bar to clear to have "high-level ballroom skills"; it seems like a pretty low bar to me), but not incorrect.

What has to change is not what you do, but how you do it and how you think about it.

Incorrect:  "This dance is called [name].  Its figures are [figures]"

Correct:    "Here are the figures: [figures].  We're going to dance them to the tune [name]."

See what I did there?  You can do exactly the same figures to exactly the same tune.  Just...say it differently.  Think about it differently.  Understand the difference between a tune (music; the thing with a name) and dance figures (a selection from a limited repertoire of "glossary figures" put together in mostly-predictable ways).  

And when you internalize that mindset rather than the modern one, the varied world of historical Regency dancing opens up to you.

Christmas Hornpipe

After my last experience with hornpipes, it's nice to have a contra recommended for tunes called hornpipes without having to hunt down or worry unduly about the music!  

"Christmas Hornpipe" is the name of the tune in the image below, taken from Elias Howe's Improved Edition of the Musician's Omnibus (Boston, 1861).  Click to enlarge.

Whether to call the figures "Christmas Hornpipe" is a more ambiguous question, since they appear with other tunes as well (more on this below), reused in the same way figures were in the extended Regency era, from at least 1858 through the mid-1890s.

Same-Gender Couples in the Regency Ballroom

One of the critical elements of serious dance history is cross-checking what the dancing masters says in dance manuals against the evidence we have -- if any -- of what people actually did.  Those two things aren't always the same.  Dancing masters generally explain what people ought to be doing, sometimes interspersed with lengthy complaints about what people are doing instead.  Both rules and complaints are useful guides, depending on whether one wants to strive to dance well and politely by period standards, or dance badly and rudely, as no doubt happened plenty in practice.  

But the very best evidence comes from the letters and diaries of people who actually lived in the relevant era.  Here's a great example of how a letter supports something that dancing masters wrote about in the Regency era: people of the same gender dancing together.

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.  

Trips to Paris

This post is for Allison, Graham, and Alan, who know and care.  

If I expect to get anything done in my life, I cannot spend my time wandering around the net getting irritated by the dance history errors.  But I do pay attention when they arrive by email.  So I noticed when a mailing list query about how best to dance "A Trip to Paris" at a Jane Austen ball appeared in my inbox.  Happily, I was neither the first nor the last list member to jump in with some version of "That dance is from Walsh, from 1711, and does not belong at a Jane Austen ball!"  (Jane Austen lived from 1775-1817, and her dancing days would have started in the early 1790s.)

I did get intrigued by one comment in the ensuing discussion: that the dance had been "republished by Thomas Cahusac in 24 Country Dances for 1794" and therefore might have been danced by Jane Austen.  That's a terrifically specific citation -- hurray! -- but I instantly doubted it, since (1) very few dances or tunes of the earlier style were reprinted that late (young people, then and now, not being particularly into dancing their great-grandparents' dances), and (2) I already knew there were other tunes called "A Trip to Paris" and other dance figures printed with them.  As another list member pointed out, it's a very generic sort of title.

My immediate thought was that the 1794 publication would be a different tune and different figures and that the person who threw that comment in hadn't actually seen Cahusac and was being tripped up by the modern concept that dances and tunes are specific combinations with a unique name.  (Applying modern concepts backward in time is a great way to produce bad history.)  I'd have bet money on it, but it's hard to find anyone who'll bet against me on a dance history question.

Still, me being me, it was worth looking into.  I've been wrong before.  And in the process I made an interesting discovery: we were all wrong!

Come with me on a little research odyssey to see how!

A ballroom brawl, 1804

Going beyond simple rudeness in the ballroom, here's a wonderful account of a French-American culture clash turned violent at a ball in New Orleans on January 23, 1804.  Aside from showing what people of that era would fight over and how hair-trigger tempers were in New Orleans in particular at that time, it also usefully documents some ballroom dance practices of the era.  Slowly piecing together such tidbits eventually allows me to draw larger conclusions.

I'm not going to explain the whole background of the Louisiana Purchase, which transferred an enormous swathe of North America from French to American control in 1803, but it is worth noting that the formal transfer of New Orleans itself took place on December 20, 1803, only a month or so before the incident described.  There is a suggestion earlier in the article that feelings were running high among the French in the wake of (perceived?) American disrespect during the replacement of the French flag with the American one.  There had already been a "slight misunderstanding" at a previous assembly on January 6th.  The fight on the 23rd is a small example of the sort of cultural conflicts that would be a problem in New Orleans society for decades afterward.

Tired of the company, 1789

I've recently been reminded by some discussions on a mailing list that there are plenty of people who don't really have much grasp of the social context of dance in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century or that a ball could be a much more complicated and socially perilous event than just a bunch of folks getting together and having a nice time dancing.  

Here's an interesting example of rudeness on the dance floor wielded as a social weapon.

Jackson, Otis, a Huntsman, and the Girls of Belfast

I could justify calling this dance, and by extension this post, any of the following:

• Jackson at New Orleans
• Huntsman's Hornpipe
• Girls of Belfast
• Otis's Quickstep

Obviously, I punted.

The dance in question appears attached to all these names in various mid-19th century sources.  Elias Howe was partial to the first two, which are the tunes under which the figures appeared in his Improved Edition of the Musician’s Omnibus (Boston, 1861).  They reappeared without music, again under both names, in Howe's American dancing master, and ball-room prompter (Boston 1862).  In H. G.O. Washburn's The ball-room manual of contra dances and social cotillons (Belfast, Maine, and Boston, 1863), by contrast, the same figures turned up under the name "Girls of Belfast" for the tune "Otis's Quickstep".

I feel more and more suspicious of the whole idea of naming contra dance figures in mid-nineteenth-century America.  At a minimum, one certainly has some options in naming this dance and choosing a tune, and I am coming to the conclusion that in New England in the mid-nineteenth century one could attach any figures to any suitable tune, as in earlier eras.  Howe certainly seems to have done so with abandon.

But for whatever it's worth, here are the two pieces from Howe, with the figures:

 "Otis's Quickstep" is available online at the University of Tennessee's Sheet Music Collection.  Neither I nor the library have been able to date that music very precisely, but it must be from after 1835, when the Boston Brass Band was founded, and is probably from 1864 or earlier, since that's when Baltimore publisher F. D. Benteen (better known for publishing some of Stephen Foster's works) died.  

Misery in perspective, 1806

It's always helpful to put one's problems in perspective.  It's downright amusing to watch a writer of 1806 put the minor woes of people of early-nineteenth-century England in perspective. 

James Bereford devotes an entire book to this theme in The Miseries of Human Life, a satirical work that still holds up rather well today. 

To quote the review which appeared in the Supplement to La Belle Assemblée, or, Bell's Court and Fashionable Magazine, for the Year 1806:

It is a raillery of those minor miseries, those petty disappointments, those minute obstructions of comfort which constitute the character of life, and occasion many to imagine themselves as superlatively miserable as those who are suffering under objects of more dignity and magnitude.

Perspective.  Right.

The Swedish Dances, Part Ten: A Quebec Connection

I'm always keeping an eye out for more references to Regency-era or later Swedish dances, which I described in a series of posts a couple of years ago.  The newest source I've turned up adds nothing to my understanding of the dances, but does provide a dandy demonstration of more nineteenth century plagiarism and evidence of their having crossed the Atlantic long before they appeared in America.

Dancing master William George Wells, Professor of Dancing "late of London", published The danciad, or companion to the modern ball room in Montreal in 1832.  In his effort to introduce "new dances, as used in Europe" to the British colony, he appears to have lifted large parts of his dance manual directly from London dancing master J. S. Pollock, as seen in the second edition of Pollock's Companion to La Terpsichore Moderne (London, c1830).

(diagram from Pollock, c1830)

The Swedish section is one of those parts.  The introductory text is copied word-for-word from Pollock, right down to the abbreviations.  The three figures I described in my post on Pollock's Swedish dances are identical, and given with identical wording.  Even the irregular spacing of the first two lines in the diagram, which can be seen at left, is the same.  The only major difference is spelling out "four" rather than using the numeral in notating how many parts each dance has.

Apparently the enterprising immigrant carried a copy of Pollock's work across the Atlantic with him, though I suppose there's some small possibility that Wells had previously published his work in England and that Pollock copied from him.  In the absence of any earlier Wells manual, it seems most likely that Wells was the plagiarist here.

It's hard to say whether the Swedish dances were actually done in Quebec in this era.  Wells published under the patronage of Lord and Lady Aylmer, the former being the fifth Baron Aylmer, appointed Lieutenant Governor of Lower Canada from 1830-1835.  Aylmer's tenure seems not to have been terribly successful, and he was apparently notable for favoring the English-speaking community over the French.  Supporting (perhaps even importing) an English dancing master would fit with this, but one doubts that it would have made Wells popular among the francophones.  But Wells seems to have been the first to bring the Swedish dances across the Atlantic, and with their appearance in his manual, at least the possibility of their having been danced in Canada in this era exists.

Downfall of Paris (American contra)

The first thing to know about the tune "Downfall of Paris" is that, contrary to some references, it is not the same tune as that which goes with the song "Ça Ira".  It is rhythmically similar at the beginning -- hence the confusion -- and there's a vague thematic connection, but it's not quite the same piece of music.  Regency dancing master Thomas Wilson explained this succinctly in his Companion to the Ballroom (London, c1816):

To account for the unusual length of this tune — it was originally composed for a Quick March, in opposition & partly taken from the French National Air of Ça Ira, it has since become a favorite dance particularly with good dancers, as it requires a very long figure not easily performed by Tyros in the Art…

Note that when Wilson says a "favorite dance" he means a "favorite tune for dancing".  Good dancers apparently liked long tunes so that they could show off by setting lengthy combinations of figures to them.  And, indeed, various figure combinations were set to arrangements of it during the early nineteenth century in both England and America.  

A much longer explanation of the tune's history and association with "Ça Ira", may be found on the blog of the noted percussionist Robin Engelman, who has tracked down many musical manuscript sources and done such a thorough job explaining it all that I will simply refer you to his article, which helpfully includes a number of sound clips.

Its use as a dance tune (and that of "Ça Ira") during the Regency era might be an interesting topic, but it's not what I'm discussing today.

"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.

German Waltz (American contra dance)

This simple and attractive waltz contra dance figure appears under the name German Waltz in at least two of the mid-nineteenth-century dance manuals of Boston musician, caller, and author Elias Howe, as well as under the name Narragansett Waltz in at least one other.  I first encountered it under the German Waltz name, so that is the one I habitually use, though the association with the tune(s) "Narragansett Waltz" actually came a few years earlier and both names seem to belong belong to the tunes rather than the dance figures.  

My interest in reconstructing this dance arose from a desire for a mid-century waltz country dance that could satisfy dancers the same way the Spanish Dance does and thus occasionally replace it at balls.  I love the Spanish Dance, but after more than two decades of dancing and calling it, a little variety is pleasant!

Along with being a nice change of pace socially, the German Waltz also makes an excellent performance piece.  Most longways country dances are not particularly good performance pieces, since the nature of the longways formation means that the dancers spend a lot of time with their backs to the audience.  In the German Waltz, the dancers spend most of their time either facing up and down the set or waltzing in a circle.  This makes it a much more audience-friendly dance.

Getting Savage!

When I watched the BBC's general excellent documentary Pride & Prejudice: Having a Ball last year, one of the things that caught my negative attention was this rather astonishing assertion at about the 1:07 mark:

"The Savage Dance was a craze back in 1813, taken from a song-and-dance routine in a musical based on Robinson Crusoe."

Um...really?

Let me note first that this assertion was not made by the documentary's dancing master, but by a narrator.  That's a good thing, because I can give the narrator a pass on the assumption that she doesn't actually know anything about early nineteenth century dance.  It's a shame the BBC let this statement slide in, though, since as far as I can tell it is, shall we say, completely unsupported by any actual evidence.  I expect BBC documentaries to have higher standards than Hollywood movies.

Let's take that statement apart.

CD Review: Dance and Danceability

Getting useable music for Regency-era dancing is a chronically frustrating problem, and there are very few albums I can recommend wholeheartedly.  Many of the recordings advertised as "Regency" or "Jane Austen" suffer from a weirdly expansive idea of "Regency era" that goes back to the 17th century or forward to the 20th.  Almost all have an incorrect number of repeats of the music for period dancing, which matches repeats to set length in a specific way that does not accord with modern recording habits.

Dance and Danceability is an Austen-themed album of country dance tunes from the Scottish dance band The Assembly Players (Nicolas Broadbridge, Aidan Broadbridge, and Brian Prentice).  Aidan Broadbridge is a name that may be especially recognizable to Austen enthusiasts -- he was the fiddler for the 2005 film adaptation of Pride & Prejudice as well as the fictionalized pseudo-biopic Becoming Jane (2007).

Sadly, this is one of the frustrating CDs.

Frolicking at Frogmore, 1800

Frogmore House, Windsor Great Park
© Copyright Gill Hicks and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

Mentions of dance in men's magazines are somewhat rarer than in women's, but in 1800, The Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Chronicle twice briefly mentioned country dancing by the royal family at Frogmore, a royal country estate in Berkshire that is best known today as the burial place of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.  Frogmore House (left; click to enlarge) was built in the late seventeenth century and purchased by (or for) the queen in 1792.  It was updated by the architect James Wyatt during the early 1790s; among his improvements was the front Colonnade, which in 1800 was open to the gardens.

In 1800 the royal family consisted of George III, Queen Charlotte, and their thirteen surviving children, most of whom were unmarried and still lived with their notoriously strict parents.  Their oldest son, the future George IV, would become best known to history as the Prince Regent from 1810-1820.  Their second son, Prince Frederick, and his wife, Princess Frederica, held the titles of Duke and Duchess of York. 

Among their guests was the exiled William V, Prince of Orange, Stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, and a refugee from the spillover of the French Revolution.

Their third-oldest daughter, the Princess Elizabeth (right, in 1797), who would turn thirty in the May of 1800, seems to have served as organizer and hostess for her parents in the events at Frogmore.  While there is no detailed description of the dancing, there are some intriguing tidbits of information in the description of the first event and appearances by noted performers of the era in the entertainment preceding the ball in the second.

CD Review: Grandview Victorian Orchestra

I ordered the Grandview Victorian Orchestra's CD Elegant Music from Times Gone By in the wake of a pleasant email exchange with musical director John Reading about quadrille music last autumn.  The album is a mix of country (contra) dance medleys of various sorts mixed with a few other tunes and played on an interesting instrumental mix of piano, fiddle, hammered dulcimer, bodhran, shaker, banjo, and acoustic bass.  I'm not sure about the acoustic bass, but the other instruments are legitimate for late nineteenth-century America and provide a more "rural" sound than most of the music I use, very appropriate for country dance tunes. 

The music mix is definitely from "times gone by", though not all of those times are actually Victorian and will need to be considered on a case-by-case basis for historical events.  The arrangements are really lovely, though, and it makes a great listening CD even if not every track is strictly correct and/or usable for historical dancing.

My comments on the individual tracks follow.

True Lovers Knot

Sometime between first edition of An Analysis of Country Dancing in 1808 and the third edition in 1811, London dancing master Thomas Wilson started creating his own original country dance figures.  Not sequences of figures, which anyone could do, but actual new floor patterns:

As novelty in Dancing as in every other amusement, is the author and promoter of an enlivening vivacity...it is equally irksome for good Dancers to be always using the same Figures, as for a professed musician to be continually playing the tunes of “God Save the King,” and “Foot’s Minuet;” and from the repeated suggestions of several good Dancers, and at the particular request of a great number of the author’s Friends and Pupils; and in order to answer the purposes of novelty and variety...The author has been induced to compose and arrange a variety of New Figures...

I wouldn’t take the “particular request” part too seriously; almost every nineteenth-century dancing master who comes up with something new modestly attributes its publication to requests by his students.  I suspect Wilson himself was the one finding it “irksome” to use the same figures over and over again.

Most of Wilson’s new figures are not terribly exciting.  Overwhelmingly, they involve only the active couple making increasingly elaborate loops and circles around the other couples, leaving four dancers with nothing to do for eight or even sixteen bars.  There are only a few which I’ve found worth bothering with over the years.  The latest of these is the True Lovers Knot, shown at left (click to enlarge).  

Let me be perfectly clear: this is not a typical Regency-era country dance figure.  It is very specific to one dance teacher and his students and customers.  Wilson himself rarely used it in his published works, and I have never seen it used by any other author or publisher.

That said, it’s a really lovely figure.  So I finally decided to work out how to dance it.

A Victorian "Sir Roger de Coverley"

Several years ago I wrote up a description of a version of Sir Roger de Coverley from the early nineteenth century and talked a little about the background of the tune and the association of the dance with Charles Dickens' famous novel, A Christmas Carol.

 

Over time, Sir Roger de Coverley mutated in various ways, and I promised back then to describe some of them.  Better five years late than never, here's another version, a "modernized" English one from the mid-nineteenth century which moves along much more briskly than the earlier version, even with a fairly lengthy set.  According to Mrs. Nicholas Henderson, who seems to have been the first to publish this version, the country dance was generally in decline in the English ballroom by the early 1850s, but Sir Roger de Coverley was an exception:

 

To make amends for the fashionable dereliction and banishment of the old favourites of "Merrie Englande," it is usual to conclude the evening's festivities with one particular species of Country Dance, called "Sir Roger de Coverley."  It has of late enjoyed considerable vogue, and is patronised by her Majesty, at her own entertainments.  We give it as at present danced at the Palace, somewhat modernised and adapted to the prevailing taste.

 

Dancing to "Wakefield Hunt"

Continuing my mini-series of Regency(ish)-era figure reconstruction...

The figures that appeared with "Mutual Love" (and a couple of other tunes) are a good example of tune/figure interchangeability -- specifically, of figures being reused with multiple pieces of music.  The other half of that interchangeability is tunes being recycled for different figures.  For that, I'm going to move on to the figures that appeared with "Wakefield Hunt'.  And the other figures that appeared with "Wakefield Hunt".  Yes, two figures, both alike in dignity (but completely different otherwise), in the fair 1770s and 1780s, where we lay our scene.  Two is actually a very small number; very popular tunes didn't go out of style and might be found with a dozen or more different figures over the years.