Capering & Kickery

Balls at Portsmouth, 1865

Late in the summer of 1865, the French and British navies exchanged formal visits, with a British fleet visit to Cherbourg followed by a reciprocal French visit to Portsmouth.  In the latter town, two balls were held, both documented in engravings and written coverage by, among others, the Illustrated London News.  The image at left (click to enlarge) illustrates the ball held on Thursday, August 31st, 1865, in a "grand pavilion erected for the entertainments on Governor’s Green."  ("Illustrations of the Naval Festival at Portsmouth." Illustrated London News (London, England), Issue 1333, Saturday, September 9, 1865).  More detailed coverage a week later explained that the ball was held in

one of Edgington’s tents, 138 ft. long and 36 ft. wide, floored over, and lined with crimson and white cloth, also decorated with flags and coloured lamps.  At the upper end, behind the Mayor’s chair, was a bust of the Emperor Napoleon, above a shield bearing the arms of the town of Portsmouth, with the Mayor’s chain and badge.  On his right hand were the Royal arms of Great Britain, supported by the standards of France, with the Imperial and British crowns.  On his left hand were the arms of France, supported by the Royal standards of England and of the Prince of Wales.  At the opposite end of the room were an exquisitely-designed waterfall, fountain, and cascade, intermixed with choice ferns and evergreens — the rockwork before formed of blocks of coal, gilt...The company numbered about 2000 ladies and gentlemen, and the great majority of the latter wore naval or military uniforms, while the ladies, of course, were very richly and gaily dressed.  They presented, while dancing, a splendid as well as a lively and animated sight.
    -- "Illustrations of the Anglo-French Naval Festival at Portsmouth."  Illustrated London News (London, England), Issue 1334, Saturday, September 16, 1865.

Dance Program: Elmer Fife's Grand Ball, 1886

I don't actually own this dance card; it escaped me on ebay some time ago.  But I managed to grab the helpfully-posted images before they vanished.  It is not a very prepossessing card; it appears to be a simple folded piece of cardstock with black and white printing inside and out.  The inside of the card is at left.  The outside, below, features a simple but attractive front cover design of geometric shapes surrounding a bird in a lightly-sketched landscape.

What makes this card interesting to me is that it is not really a dance card for use at an actual ball.  Notice how there are no spaces to fill in partners' names?  Enlarge the inside of the card and in the fine print you'll see "We respectfully solicit your company for the above occasion", said occasion being a "Grand Ball!" to be given by Elmer Fife at Moore's Hall on Wednesday, January 27th, 1886.  The card is actually an invitation, or possibly an advertisement, depending on how it was distributed.  The final line on the left, "None but respected parties will be admitted to the ball" hints to me that it was not a very exclusive list.  And I am amused by the larger-font assurance that there will be "GOOD MUSIC".  Overall, this card reminds me most of the 1917 Ocean View Amusement Park card I posted several years ago.

Le Moulinet du Pas-de-Quatre

Like the Quadrille du Pas de Quatre, le Moulinet du Pas de Quatre is an experiment by French dancing master and author Eugène Giraudet in adapting the standard Pas de Quatre (a version of the schottische popular in Europe in the late nineteenth century) for small sets of dancers.

The Moulinet is a simple sequence dance, alternating between a short figure for two couples (done to schottische music) and waltzing. It involves only half of the standard Pas de Quatre step-sequence, which makes it a gentle and accessible introduction to the schottische for those new to the dance.

Unusually, we know not only the originator of the Moulinet but precisely when it was created: on March 10, 1897.  Giraudet wrote in a later edition of his Traité de la danse (Paris, c1900) that it was

Créée le 10 mars 1897, pendant une récréation de leçon, avec le concours de MM. et Mlles Mourets, ses élèves, qui ont aidé le maître, par leur gracieux dévouement et leur lumière élégante, ce qui a fait de cette danse la plus belle création du siècle et du maître.

My translation:

Created on 10 March, 1897, during a break in a lesson, with the cooperation of the Monsieurs and Mademoiselles Mourets, his pupils, who have helped the master by their graceful devotion and their elegant light, which have made of this dance the most beautiful creation of the century and of the master.

Giraudet also offered his "sincères hommages" to these pupils, from which I would construe that he had as much interest in the family’s continued patronage as in the quality of the dance.  "The most beautiful creation of the century and of the master" is a vast, vast exaggeration.

Was it actually danced after that one lesson?
It’s hard to say how popular any dance like the Moulinet became outside its creator’s own studio, but Giraudet certainly made an effort to promote it over the years. In the July of 1903, the Société internationale des maîtres choréographes held a congress in Westphalie. Giraudet, as president of the Société, was heavily involved, and when the dancing masters had finished making speeches bashing the “grotesque et ridicule” cakewalk and generally lamenting the state of the modern ballroom, they settled on seven more respectable dances to accept for the 1903 season. Fourth of these was the Moulinet. This backward-looking decree was reported with varying degrees of sarcasm in Parisian journals such as Le Temps and Figaro.

Nonetheless, the Moulinet seems to have achieved enough fame, at least in some circles, to be mentioned in a series of jokes about dance in late 1905:

Le Moulinet du Pas de Quatre aura pour prélude le Pas de Trois; celle-ci, sera dit-on, réservée aux mathématiciens.

My translation:

The Moulinet du Pas de Quatre [four] will have for its prelude the Pas de Trois [three]; this one, it will be said, reserved for mathematicians.

And in early 1907, the Moulinet appeared in a list of dances “en vogue” in les salons (as opposed to among “la société c’est-à-dire (la bourgeoisie) et le peuple”).

On to the practical details.

A Fancy Dress Ball, Saratoga, 1847

Another costume-heavy description of a fancy dress ball was published in The New York Herald on August 17, 1847, in the social column "The Watering Places" on page two.  The ball was held at Congress Hall of the United States Hotel in the summer resort town of Saratoga Springs, New York, on August 14, 1847.

Sadly, no information is given about the dancing, though the writer does mention the generous size of the hall, one hundred and fifty by fifty feet, and the beautiful decorations, featuring flowers and greenery plus "miniature flags of every nation which supports a navy" hanging "just above the heads" of the dancers.

The ball was popular, but some who had recently arrived in Saratoga were unable to attend because they could not get costumes ready in time:

Among the company at Saratoga, which is the best in America, there seemed to be a general interest in this event; there were few who, if time could have been had to make suitable preparations, would not have attended that ball.  Many persons who have lately arrived did not know that such a ball was to be given until it was too late for them to prepare for it.

The "resident visitors", presumably meaning those who spent the entire summer in Saratoga, had more warning and were able to spend considerable sums on costumes:

But there were no impediments to the ardor with which the resident visitors looked forward to this carnival, as something which would be more brilliant and extraordinary than any previous party; sums which some could not lose without becoming a beggar, were expended for jewels and dresses to be worn upon this occasion, and in procuring these articles, there was all that furor and agitation and hubbub which is characteristic of the American exclusives.

The writer of the column listed quite a few costumes, though he or she noted that there were "hundreds of characters" that he or she did not include.  Most of those listed are men's outfits; for any gentlemen looking for fancy dress ideas, this is a great list:

Harvard Caprice

The Harvard Caprice was created by dancing master Melvin Ballou (M. B.) Gilbert of Portland, Maine, matching the music of the same name by Albert L. Ryser.  I don't know whether the dance was created for the music or the music commissioned to match the dance, but the earliest publication of the sheet music that I have (cover shown at left; click to enlarge) is part of a series specifically for Gilbert's dances.  This was not the only Harvard-themed dance created by Gilbert; two years later, he went on to create the Harvard Dip.

The Harvard Caprice can be dated precisely both by the sheet music (1896) and its being mentioned in newspaper articles late in 1896 as one of the dances for the upcoming season: "Five new dances will be introduced this fall and winter.  They are the Landler, Harvard Caprice, the waltz two-step, La Zarina, and a modification of the old Varsouviana...The Harvard Caprice is also danced to four-four time, and is slightly akin to the old-fashioned schottische."  ("Saturday Social Review", Indianapolis News. Indianapolis, Indiana. September 19, 1896. p. 5.)

The sheet music advertises the dance as adopted by the American Society of Professors of Dancing, New York, as was reported with some cynicism by the Los Angeles Herald on November 15, 1896, under a series of subtitles including "ORIGINALITY A SCARCITY", "Why New Creations in the Art Generally Fail", and "The American Association of Professors Convened and Added Many Tributes to Terpsichore":

NEW YORK, Oct. 30. — Every year a number of agile and graceful gentlemen composing the American Association of Professors of Dancing come together, and, after deep thought and considerable wrangling, of course, in a most polite way, decide what the fashionable dances will be for the coming year.  Each of these gentlemen is an inventor of the terpsichorean order, and he attends the conclave with elaborately drawn diagrams of the dance with which he expects to convulse society later on.

In nine cases out of ten this dance is never heard of again, although it may receive the richest possible indorsement [sic] of the American Association of the Professors of Dancing.  The fault is not with the Association.  The members certainly recognize a graceful dance wen they see it; the trouble lies with the public.

The association has just had its annual meeting for 1896 and some terpsichorean wonders are ready to be thrust upon the dancing public.  The official titles of these wonders are: The Harvard Caprice, the X-ray Lanciers, the Hanover Quadrille, the Esprit d’Amerique, the Waltz Two-Step, and La Czarina.  It will be a matter of interest for those who pay attention to such things to memorize these titles and then observe how popular they become during the approaching winter season.  

Cross Step Polka

Here's an intriguing little polka variation from late nineteenth century America: the cross step polka, which is found in both M. B. Gilbert's Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) and William B. DeGarmo's The Dance of Society, Fifth Edition, Revised and Enlarged (New York, 1892).  It's quite easy to do and is particularly interesting because the partners dance different steps at the same time while in a close ballroom hold, which is quite unusual in late-nineteenth century couple dancing.  

Some earlier examples of this kind of mismatched footwork include the slow French waltz and sauteuse described by Thomas Wilson in 1816, the old valse à trois temps, and Cellarius' valse à cinq temps of the 1840s.  But in all of those cases, the mismatched steps are the basic steps of the dance rather than a variation.  That suggests an unusual problem: how does one lead one's partner into different footwork for a variation when one is not doing the same footwork oneself?

Pretty easily, it turns out!  

A L'Avenir

The five-step schottische was not E. Woodworth Masters' only choreographic effort.  

Interestingly, considering its American origin, I first ran across A L'Avenir in the pages of Dancing, a London periodical similar to The Director, Galop, The Two-Step, and other efforts by dancing masters to establish dance journals.  In the December, 1892, issue, the editor notes that the November issue of their "transatlantic contemporary" included the editor's version of the "Waltz Menuet" and that (therefore?) they include in this issue instructions for a new American dance, "L'Avenir", by "Mr. W. Masters, of Boston, United States".  The editor in question was probably R. M. Crompton, creator of one of several late nineteenth-century "waltz minuets".  

I located the sheet music (left; click to enlarge) in the online collection of Goucher College.  It does not have the dance instructions, but it includes some useful background information:

• The music seems also to have been composed by Masters; no one else is credited.
• A L'Avenir (the full name) was adopted by the American National Association of Teachers of Dancing at their convention in Washington, D.C., held from June 10-13, 1890.
• The sheet music is copyright 1891.

A L'Avenir is described as "A New Round Dance, Combination of Dance Movements".  It certainly is that.  The name means "for the future" or "henceforth", which raises the terrifying possibility that this is what Masters thought dancing would or should look like in the future.  The hodgepodge of movements he created is interesting, at least: a twenty-four-bar sequence in schottische (4/4) time.  Twenty-four bars is an unusual length for a sequence dance, but a quick check of the music reveals that it consists of twelve eight-bar strains, with the first, fourth, seventh, and tenth all being the same.  So the dance done four times through would match the sheet music nicely.

Here's how to do it:

Ripple, Ripple, Jersey

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.

Please see my original posts for a little more information about the waltz-galop (here) and the Newport (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!

Susan's Sociables

When I first wrote about the quadrille figure called the Sociable almost seven years ago, I noted that some sources offered slightly different sets of figures, and at least two suggested that the choice of figures was up to the caller:

"No positive rule as to what figure shall be called in the Quadrille Sociable.  The choice is left entirely to the prompter."  (Brookes, L. De G.  Brookes on Modern Dancing.  New York, 1867)

"Prompters often call figures in the 'Sociable' to suit their fancy, introducing the 'Star Figure,' 'Grand Chain,' etc."  (De Garmo, William.  The Dance of Society.  New York, 1875)

I rarely exercise the option to call variant figures; my habit has been to do the most common four-figure sequence twice over, once for the ladies to progress and once for the gentlemen, with an eight-bar "All chassez" and honors coda at the end.  Including introductory honors, this calls for a structure of 8b + 32bx8 + 8b.  Working with live musicians, I can have music played to fit this pattern exactly.  Or, if I am using the Sociable as the final figure of a quadrille, the short version with the progressive figures done only once (ladies progressing) is plenty, and since 8b + 32bx4 + 8b is a common finale structure, if necessary, it is easy to find a recording with that pattern.

But recently, I've been faced with the dual problems of calling the Sociable as a freestanding figure, meaning I prefer to call a longer figure to balance the time spent forming sets, and using recorded music, which is rarely to be found in the simplest long-Sociable pattern of 8b + 32bx8 + 8b.  This means either spending time editing a recording to fit the dance or changing my calling to fit the recording.  Editing music is a pain, so, since I have the option, historically speaking, of changing the figures, that is the approach I prefer.

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!

Ladies leading, 1898

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?

Apparently, it was not a problem in the anonymous author's school:

We have taught the ladies to retreat with the waltz step ad lib., for ten years or more, yet its excessive use is seldom ever seen in our establishment.  In all our experience, we have yet to find a lady who objects to dancing backward or a change.  They even ask for the practice.  

I've certainly seen it considered impolite for a gentleman to force a lady to go backward for any length of time, and the article does support that etiquette tip:

We are not advocating the fad of rushing the lady half way, or completely across, or around the hall in a backward position.  We know that this is done in some places and is entirely wrong.  All things become wrong when carried to excess.

But done in moderation, it should be quite acceptable:

Would it be an unpardonable breach of etiquette for the gentleman to occasionally allow his partner to make two or three retreating movements?  We hardly think so.

A fuss over ladies dancing backward would be generally amusing as a nineteenth-century tempest in a teapot, but it's the author's other argument for ladies learning to dance backward that really makes this essay noteworthy:

Prince Leopold's Birthday Ball, 1859

One of the most charming descriptions of a fancy dress ball in my collection is that of the event held at Buckingham Palace in honor of the sixth birthday of Queen Victoria's youngest son, Prince Leopold, on April 7, 1859.  This was a juvenile, or children's, ball, but, as we know from descriptions of the dancing lessons given to Victoria's children, the level of dancing skill even at young ages was considerably higher than one would expect from children today.  That said, it's not clear to me whether the youngest children really danced all the dances or whether that was left to the older ones, or perhaps the parents.

The description I have was printed in The Albion, A Journal of News, Politics and Literature, on April 30, 1859.  The Albion was a weekly New York newspaper that covered British matters extensively and was read by expatriates.  The description was probably copied directly from a London newspaper.

Tiptoeing through the terminology: an asymmetrical double glide waltz

When I discussed the Double Glide Waltz found in Melvin B. Gilbert's Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) a few years ago, I noted that there were other step sequences also called the Double Glide waltz.  One of those was a strange little sequence that I at first took for a badly-written description of a Metropole-like alternation of draw steps (slide...close) and waltz steps.  But on taking a closer look, it's a bit more complicated than that.  

I've found this particular Double Glide Waltz only the late nineteenth-century American collections Cartier's practical illustrated waltz instructor, ball room guide, and call book (New York, 1882) and Prof. M. J. Koncen's quadrille call book and ball room guide (St. Louis, 1883).  As a waltz variation, it is nice but not a particularly critical part of the repertoire of the period.  I suspect both descriptions were copied from some common source -- another manual, or perhaps a description on some sheet music -- with some modest editorial brushing-up.  What is interesting to me about these two descriptions is how they demonstrate just how much of a muddle dance terminology even relatively recent dance terminology can be, especially in late nineteenth-century compilation manuals like these that collect from a variety of sources and do not have the advantage of hindsight to divine what we nowadays consider to be standard usage.  

An Alternate Star Cotillion

Way back in the early days of Kickery, one of my first few posts was on the Star figure found in Thomas Wilson's Royal Scotch Quadrilles (published in footnotes of The Danciad, 1824) and described, minimally, in his Quadrille and Cotillion Panorama (1816), and how I found an echo of it in an American cotillion figure more than fifty years later.  I later published a practical description of how to use it as a cotillion (German) figure.  

At the time, influenced by my reconstruction of the Star figure in the Royal Scotch Quadrilles, I interpreted the cotillion figure as a different way of describing the same figure.  But I recently came across the same late Star figure again in a 1912 cotillion manual, and looking at it, I realized there was another way to interpret it.

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.

Revisiting the Flirtation Figure

Almost six and a half years ago, I reconstructed and briefly discussed the Flirtation Figure, which appeared in William Lamb's How and What to Dance (London, 1903 or 1904) as a separate figure after the usual five figures of the first set of quadrilles.  My slightly revised reconstruction of Lamb's figure:

Flirtation Figure (8 bars + 32 bars x4 + 8 bars)
8b     Introduction (not repeated)
4b     Grand Circle: all take hands and forward and back
4b     All turn partners two hands
4b     All four ladies forward and back
4b     All four gentlemen forward, turn, and bow to lady at their left (their corner lady)
4b     Facing corners, all balance by stepping right, close left behind, step right, touch toe of left in front (1, 2, 3, 4); repeat to left
4b     Turn corners two hands, ending in gentleman's original place and taking closed hold
8b     All galopade around the set (four-slide galop to each position, alternating over hands/over elbows)
Repeat previous thirty-two bars three more times. After last repetition:
8b     Grand Circle and turn partners two hands

I recently noticed that versions of the Flirtation Figure appear as the fifth figure in a number of "old time dance" manuals published in England during the 1940s, including:

• Francis & Day's Ball Room Guide of Old Time Favourite and Modern Dances (London, c1940)
  
  
• Cecil Taylor, Old Time and Novelty Dances (London, 1944)
  
  
• Victor Sylvester, Old Time Dancing (London, c1949; 4th impression 1951)

Taylor and the Francis & Day book referred to it as the "Grand Circle" and danced it with a galop at the end of each figure, as in Lamb.  Sylvester gaves it no special title and had the couples promenade instead.  All three had the ladies curtsey in the center before retiring to places and gave very precise instructions that the gentlemen should advance, bow first to each other, then step back on the right foot, turn to the left, and bow to the corner lady.

Francis & Day also gave an adapted version of the figure in the "present day" version of the quadrille, which replaces turns and promenades with waltzing.  But I more interested in the history of the figure and how at least some writers in the 1940s considered it not an alternative figure but actually the standard Finale figure for the first quadrille.

The Red Domino Dance, 1898

An exciting fancy dress ball from the other side of the Atlantic was the "red domino dance" that took place in New York City on January 28, 1898, at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Heber Bishop.

Heber Bishop (1840-1902) made himself a substantial fortune in Cuba, and the Bishops were well-known philanthropists and art collectors.  They also held some unusually-themed fancy dress balls which, as was typical at the time, made the society columns of various newspapers, both in New York City and elsewhere.  The column header at left is taken from the January 29, 1898, issue of The New York Times.  Happily, the paper of record devoted several column-inches to details of the red domino dance, which must have been visually stunning.  Unless otherwise noted, all quotes below are taken from the Times column, which may be found in PDF format in The New York Times online archive.

I have a general interest in fancy dress balls, but aside from my enjoyment of the colorful details of costumes and decorations, descriptions like this also offer bits of useful information about the organization of such a ball, which in this case included dancing, a late-night supper, and, in the small hours of the morning, a cotillion.

An 1880s Reel of Nine

I've been teaching various versions of the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century reel for nine called the Country Bumpkin for a number of years.  Jumping forward to the late nineteenth century, this reel for nine is clearly akin to the Bumpkin, though it's simply called "Reel of Nine" in David Anderson's The New, Enlarged, and Complete Ball-Room Guide, which was published in Dundee, Scotland, in the mid-1880s.  This is the only source I have for the dance.

The nine dancers required should have a two-thirds majority of either ladies or gentlemen; three of one and six of the other.  Anderson considered three gentlemen and six ladies to be the "more suitable" combination.  The formation is the "tic-tac-toe" formation of three rows of three dancers each, the odd gender in the center.  For purposes of this description, I'm going to default to the three gents/six ladies arrangement.  Here's what the set will look like:

L    G    L
L    G    L
L    G    L

The instructions are deceptively simple: reel for three across the set, set and turn both partners, reel at the corners while the other six dancers hands three around and back, set and turn both partners, and repeat all this "around the square", followed by a final hands eight around to the left while the center dancer sets.  All of this takes eight bars of music played seventeen times.  

Easy, right?

Actually, no.  While the individual figures are easy, making the whole thing work in practice is kind of tricky and turned out to require plenty of extrapolation and interpretation.

The Comus Waltz

Having brought up the Comus Waltz in the context of Tom Willson's 1888 dance card, and since it also appears on my own 1894 dance card, an interesting question is how exactly one dances it.

I have only two sets of instructions for it.  The earlier ones are found on the 1882 sheet music "Comus Waltz" by G. F. Dyke, and are attributed to Professor J. Patoille.  A second set is found in George Washington Lopp's book La Danse, which was published in Paris in 1903.  Lopp himself was an American expatriate who made a name for himself as a dance teacher in France before becoming embroiled in a messy scandal.  Lopp gives the author's name as Patrille, but Lopp makes a lot of minor errors like that.

The 1882 instructions are a bit of a mess.  Here's the text:

Slide left foot back to 4th position and place right foot in 2d position and draw to 3d position and repeat draw step.  Slide right foot to 4th position place left in 2d position draw to 3d position and repeat draw step. (2) then left foot back to 4th position and Waltz two steps. (2) then slide left foot to 4th position slide right foot to 2d position bringing left foot to 3d position same as Society step and repeat the Society with left foot. (2)

Ugh!  What to make of that?  

Dance Card: A Leap Year Ball, 1888

Continuing with my leap year theme, here's a dance card from an event held on Tuesday, January 2nd, 1888, by the Fedora Leap Year Club.  The scans of this card were sent to me by California dancer Tom Willson, who had a question about a couple of the dances on the program.  I couldn't give him a definite answer, but the card itself turned out to be surprisingly interesting.  Click the image at left of the outside of the card to enlarge it and take a close look at the text.

The event was the "First Grand Quadrille Social", though the dance mix is not particularly quadrille-heavy for the era -- seven out of the twenty dances, with the rest being a typical mix of other dances, which I will discuss below.  I haven't been able to trace the origin of the card; unfortunately, there are a number of Russell Halls in the United States, and with no city listed, I can't pick out which one.  Nor have I had any luck with the Fedora Leap Year Club.  Digging around on genealogy sites, here are some hints from some of the names of the organizers (Lizzie Spooner, Maggie Breazeale) that they might have been from somewhere in the south, but I can't say for certain where the ball occurred.  

But those names are the start of what is so interesting about this card: they're all female.  That's not that out of the ordinary for an organizing committee, but to have the floor managers be female?  That's pretty unusual.  As evidenced by the name of the club, this was in fact a leap year ball, run along the lines of the fictional ladies' ball described in the 1835 story I just discussed.  What a bizarre coincidence to have this card turn up just as I was preparing to write that post!

A Ballroom Repentance, 1882

Annie Edwardes' two-volume novel, A Ballroom Repentance (London: Richard Bentley & Sons. 1882), was apparently a somewhat racy novel by Victorian standards.  By today's, it falls into that dreary research category of deservedly-obscure novels that I plow through for the dance scenes.

Edwardes (c1830-1896) was an English author successful enough to publish twenty-one novels between 1858 and 1899, the last published posthumously.  Three were adapted for theatre.  I haven't read any of her other books, but the title of this one attracted me, since it promised a ballroom scene which might have include some useful tidbits of dance information.  The ballroom scene comes very near the end, but to be thorough, I read all seven hundred or so pages of what it would be fair to call Victorian soap opera.  It's a quick read with fewer words per page than a modern novel, so that wasn't quite as tedious as it sounds, but I can see why Edwardes has not come down to us as a major writer.  

A pithy contemporary review:

There is not much to be said of a Ball-Room Repentance; indeed, it would be almost enough to say that it is written in the present tense. When that monstrosity was committed because authors knew no better there was some excuse for it; but now that they have had fair warning, the repetition is simply contumacious. A Lake Leman boardinghouse, an American grass widow, a vulgar family of Continent haunters, a refined ditto, a weak-minded young Oxonian, an older person who is deluded by a brazen married woman with a conniving husband, Monte Carlo, Rome, &c, &c. —these are the well-worn ingredients of the book. That they are not mixed up without a certain cleverness is as much as saying that Mrs. Edwardes is the author; but the book makes us deplore more than ever that a narrative faculty so considerable should not have been able to associate with itself better taste, fresher materials, and more conscientious workmanship. There are touches, too, of occasional grandiloquence in this book with which Mrs. Edwardes has not always been chargeable. Here is a wonderful specimen: "The process of degeneration makes itself visible by no outward or visible sign in Roger Tryan. The poppy retains its surface-whiteness, the man approaches our ruined cousins the Ascidians by steps as yet imperceptible." Mrs. Edwardes might have abstained from reminding us so soon after Mr. Darwin's death of the sufferings which a great man sometimes unwittingly brings upon humanity by making persons who are not great talk nonsense.
                -- Saintsbury, George. “New Novels.” The Academy 532 (1882): 44.

On evening parties with dancing, 1860

The most fashionable as well as pleasant way in the present day to entertain guests is to invite them to evening parties, which vary in size from the "company," "sociable," "soiree," to the party, par excellence, which is but one step from the ball.

The entertainment upon such occasions may vary with the taste of the hostess or the caprice of her guests.  Some prefer dancing, some music, some conversations.  Small parties, called together for dramatical or poetical readings, are now fashionable, and very delightful.
        --- The Ladies' Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness

I first came across Florence Hartley's The Ladies' Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness (G. G. Evans: Philadelphia, 1860) via the July, 1861, issue of Godey's Lady's Book, which excerpted the section on the etiquette for a lady hosting an evening party.  There is a matching section for the (female) guests at an evening party as well as sections for ladies hosting or attending balls.  I have spent a great deal of time over the years reading about mid-nineteenth century ballroom etiquette, but considerably less on that for more informal events.  I thus found Mrs. Hartley's thoughts on the subject quite interesting.  It would be fun to host smaller events such as these, if one had both the sizable rooms and the servants that Mrs. Hartley assumes will be available or hired for the night.

Since the book is available online (see below), I am not going to review all of Mrs. Hartley's general advice on the conduct of evening parties.  She discusses everything from the wording of invitations to the arrangement of dressing rooms to why one should take one's leave in the parlor rather than the hall.  Here, I'd like to look more narrowly at the useful tidbits of information she provides about dancing at such small and informal (by mid-nineteenth-century standards) events.  Most quotations below are drawn from "Etiquette for the Hostess" section, with those from "Etiquette for the Guest" marked as such.

The Russia

Russia has been much on my mind this week as I assembled a short presentation on on the influence of Russia -- or ideas or images of Russia -- on dance in France and England in the nineteenth century.  I didn't touch on America, but at the end of the century dancing master M. B. Gilbert, in his Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890), included some dances with Russia-related names.  One of these was called, simply enough, the Russia.  Gilbert attributed it to Pittsburgh dancing master J. S. Christy.  The Russia was also included in George Washington Lopp's La Danse (Paris, 1903), which was in large part a French translation of Gilbert, under the literally-translated title "La Russie" and attributed to "S-A Christy".

Despite the name, I don't see any actual connection between the dance and the country.  The Russia is a classic back-and-forth-then-turning sequence dance intended for mazurka music.  It features two mid-dance bows, as pictured at left in an illustration from Gilbert (click to enlarge).  The steps include the polka redowa, the Newport, skipping, and walking steps.  All of these elements could plausibly exist in a Russian dance, but there's nothing about them that is particularly unique to Russia in this era.  My best guess is that the name is nothing more than a tribute to Russia, or to some idea of Russia.

The dance, however, is rather fun, and it's interesting to have a sequence dance of this pattern to use with mazurka music.  

Mysteries of the Manitou

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

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

Charge of the Light Brigade

A year ago I wrote about Battle Confetti, a figure for the "German cotillion", a form of dance party game popular during the nineteenth century.  Other figures mentioned in the 1898 article that spurred that post included the Dewey figure, which I wrote about earlier this year, and Charge of the Light Brigade, which I'll discuss here, a hundred and sixty-one years after the event that inspired it.

I originally noticed two sources for this figure:

• the April, 1898, issue of The Director, a dance magazine edited by Maine dancing master, author, and enthusiastic professional organizer M. B. Gilbert.  Gilbert is best known today as the author of the 1890 tome Round Dancing, but for a few months he also managed to publish The Director.  It didn't last.  I suspect he wrote most of its contents himself.

• the 1899 edition of the Fashionable Quadrille Call Book and Guide to Etiquette by B. Coanacher, an earlier edition of which is online at the Library of Congress.  This edition has a cover proclaiming it Clendenen's Quadrille Book and Guide to Etiquette.

Here's the original language of the figure as it appears in each:

Charge of the Light Brigade
Music: --- Two-Step
--- Couples Up.  Sig.  Each lady select another lady.  Each gentlemen [sic] select another gentleman.  The ladies form a circle in the centre of the room; the gentlemen form a circle outside the ladies.  The gentlemen raise their hands, the ladies stepping back underneath the up-raised hands which should be lowered, forming what is known as the basket.  The basket thus formed should be divided in halves, each half retiring one to the head and the other to the foot of the room.
Sig.  Gentlemen raise their hands, ladies pass from under and rush to the opposite side of the room, taking as partners the gentlemen opposite them.
        -- M. B. Gilbert, editor. The Director, Vol. 1, No. 5., April 1898 (Portland, Maine).

Charge of the Light Brigade
Couples up; signal, each lady selects another lady each gentleman selects another gentleman; the ladies form circle in centre of the room, the gentlemen form circle outside the ladies, the gentlemen raise their hands, the ladies stepping back under the upraised hands which should be lowered, forming what is known as a basket; the basket thus formed should be divided in halves, each half retiring; one to the head and the other to the foot of the room, taking as partners the gentleman opposite them.
        -- B. Coanacher.  Clendenen's Quadrille Book and Guide to Etiquette / Fashionable Quadrille Call Book and Guide to Etiquette (Chicago, 1899)

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.  

Respect the box step

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

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

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

Kate Crosby's Polka Party

One of my ongoing projects is looking at mentions of dance in nineteenth-century books and periodicals in order to get an idea of what people other than dancing masters thought and wrote about dancing.  "Kate Crosby's Polka Party" appeared in The Anglo American, a Journal of Literature, News, Politics, the Drama, Fine Arts, Etc.,Vol. 3, No. 26, published in New York on October 19th, 1844, at the height of the first burst of polka's popularity.

Let me state first that this story does not describe an actual polka party.  This is a fictional morality tale using a hot dance trend as to draw attention.  Nonetheless, there is very interesting information within about both the polka's popularity in the fall of 1844 and the practicalities of putting on a small working-class ball, which would have to be realistic enough to be unremarkable to the journal's readers.

The Octagon Lancers, Figures 4 & 5

Winding up the Octagon Lancers, here are the last two figures:

The Octagon Lancers, Figures 1-3

Several years ago, I described the Royal Lancers (a.k.a. Horse Guards), one of the ways in which the famous Lancers Quadrille was adapted for a group of sixteen dancers.  I mentioned then that this was only one of several different Lancers adaptations for larger sets.  The Octagon Lancers is another take on the same idea, written about twenty years later by New York dancing master C. H. Rivers and published in his book A Full Description of Modern Dances.  The linked copy is not dated, but there's another copy of the book with a different cover but precisely the same contents which is dated 1885.  Rivers seems to have liked the octagon format; a few years later he created a non-Lancers octagon quadrille.

With the exception of the fourth figure, the Royal Lancers doesn't really take advantage of the larger formation.  The Octagon Lancers does a much better job of this, though its fourth figure is not quite as good.

The formation, in case it was not perfectly clear, is an enlarged square, with two couples on each side, as shown in Rivers' diagram at left.

Unlike the Royal Lancers, which has the "first couples" (and each other matching-numbered couple) as a facing pair, Rivers has the two first couples as neighbors on the side of the set.  He secondarily labels the two couples on each side the left couple and the right couple.  The first and second pairs of couples are considered the head couples, the third and fourth, the side couples.  Corner couples are, for example, the right couple of the first couples and the left couple of the third couples.

The first three figures of the Octagon Lancers are fairly simple adaptations, which I will cover below.  The fourth and fifth figures will get a separate post.

The Octagon Lancers is deliberately choreographed to fit the standard Lancers repeat structure, so any recording of the Lancers can be used.  A good one in mid-nineteenth century style is available on the Spare Parts CD Dancing by the Shore.

Thoughts on teaching polka and polka redowa

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

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

Dance on a Royal Progress, 1842

In the summer of 1842, twenty-three-year-old Queen Victoria, depicted at left in that year by the German painter Franz Xaver Winterhalter, made a Royal Progress to Scotland, the first of many trips to the north and the beginning of her lifelong love of this part of her realm.  She was two years married to Prince Albert and already the mother of two children, whom she left behind on this trip.  Her third child would be born almost exactly nine months later.

The progress was thoroughly documented, at Victoria's request, by a Scottish baronet and author, Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, who was the author of both novels and nonfiction about travel in Scotland.  His work, Memorial of the royal progress in Scotland, was published in 1843 in Edinburgh, London, and Dublin.

Lauder must have had exceptional access to the royal party during the journey.  He made a point of documenting every detail he could, including the weather, the guests at each dinner, the gowns worn by the queen and other important women, every attractive corner of the landscape that Victoria paused to survey, lyrics to songs sung to her in both English and Gaelic, and what seemed like every single change of carriage horses during the trip.  

Lauder's prose is ornate:

Reclining on her couch, on the deck of a gallant vessel, borne rapidly over those waves, the bulwarks of her island empire, graciously condescending to give her presence in friendly guise to her brave and hardy defenders, whose sinewy forms, and bold and weather-beaten countenances, were pledges for the peacefulness of her shores, whilst their light-hearted jollity, and laughing eyes, bespoke their felicity under the reign of a Sovereign who could thus sympathize with them in their harmless sports, Her Majesty was the very personification of Britannia, riding triumphantly over the ocean, surrounded by the guardian spirits of the waves.  (p. 42)

Since the book includes nearly five hundred pages in this style, plus an introduction and a thirty-five page index that gives a diagram of her yacht and a list of every building mentioned, it is quite a chore to plow through.  Happily, no one else will need to suffer through it for the sake of dance references!

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.

An 1840s Galopade Quadrille

I was looking for something new to do with galopade for my upcoming classes in Voronezh, Russia when I came across the same set of galopade quadrille figures in several different dance manuals from the 1840s.  That seemed to be a sign, and the quadrille turned out to be a fun little set.  (Edited 3/21/2015 to add: and the dancers in Voronezh liked it too!)

The quadrille instructions are quite straightforward.  There are six verses, each bracketed by the four couples performing a galopade around the set, turning at each position, and a "balance and turn" figure in which they chassez right and left and then turn partners by two hands, ending in close hold to prepare for the galopade at the beginning of the next verse. 

The "Dewey" Figure, 1899

A few months back I discussed a short piece from Harper's Bazaar naming popular dances for the winter of 1898-1899.  In that piece, the "Dewey" cotillion figure, named after the famous admiral, was mentioned.  At the time I had no source for this figure and instead described a similar confetti-throwing figure.  Since then, I've unexpectedly come across a description in the 1899 edition of the Fashionable Quadrille Call Book and Guide to Etiquette by B. Coanacher.  (An earlier edition is online at the Library of Congress.) The 1899 edition has a new cover proclaiming it Clendenen's Quadrille Book and Guide to Etiquette.

F. Leslie Clendenen was a St. Louis-based dancing master and author of at least one actual dance manual, but he is most remembered today as the editor of the 1914 compilation Dance Mad.  It's not clear to me whether he actually wrote or edited any of this book or whether the publisher just slapped on a cover with a prominent name to improve sales.  The Clendenen cover also appears on a 1917 edition which adds still more dances and some sheet music as well.

Here's the description:

The "Dewey" Figure

will be very popular, the theme is the Bombardment of Manila, and naturally calls for quite a display of patriotic colors.  The dancers are arranged in parallel columns and at a signal march, moving in lines executing a strategic play at battle.  Finally they line up in two imposing columns, the women on one side, men on the other.  On the floor is the stock of ammunition, consisting of red, white and blue paper hearts.  At the signal, the bombardment begins, and the combatants seize the hearts and hurl them at their adversaries.  The fun increases as the battle waxes hot and the colored hearts burst and the colored paper contents are sent fluttering about.  In the end, there is a complete capitulation and the partners waltz off together.

Once again we're back to the patriotic fervor engendered by the Spanish-American War, as discussed in my earlier post.  The props used are more along the lines of those used in the French figure Les Boules de Neige (Snowballs), with paper hearts full of confetti made to burst on impact.  It is somewhat more practical than Battle Confetti in not having the dancers end in a circle and not requiring mysterious strings crossing the ballroom.  As with other confetti figures, it's best done when there is a quiet cleanup crew on hand with brooms!

The "parallel columns" and "strategic play" are vague enough for some fun to be had if the columns (two, women and men? or more?) are provided with imaginative "generals".  It's not really clear whether the bombardment is meant, as in Snowballs, to select partners by whom one hits or whether each is bombarding the person who is directly across in the opposing column and thus destined to become their partner.  Or possibly the dancers just have a grand old time randomly covering each other in confetti before finding their original partners.  Though the waltz is specified for the final dance, there's no reason a polka or two-step could not be used instead, unless the entire cotillion is waltz-only.

"Dewey" is also like Snowballs (and Battle Confetti) in that it is usable by large numbers of dancers.  Indeed, the description suggests that it might be a "general figure" meant for all the participants in the cotillion. 

Snowball fight!

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

A Late Victorian Galopade Country Dance

Galopade country dances turn up most frequently in the early-mid-nineteenth-century (1830s & 1840s), but they're not unknown later on.  A "Galopede" (under a wide variety of spellings) is still found in folk and traditional dance communities in Britain and former colonies such as Australia.

I have two sources for this particular galopade, both only vagely dated: Rudolph Radestock's The Royal Ball-Room Guide (London & Otley, c1877) and The People's Ball Room Guide, edited by James Scott Skinner (Dundee & London, c1905).  Both of these books were at least in part compiled (or plagiarized) from other dance manuals.  I suspect there is an earlier common source for this galopade -- there is nothing about it that would make it inappropriate as early as the 1840s.  If anything, it's rather old-fashioned for the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.  I'd also call it more typical for England or Scotland than America, where galopades don't seem to have been as common or had the same staying power.

Skinner classifies this galopade as a children's dance: "To Follow the March in a Children's Ball", presumably after ending a Grand March in platoons and flipping alternate lines of dancers around to create the couple-facing couple lines shown at left in a diagram from The People's Ball Room Guide.  Radestock doesn't specify an age group, and adults certainly did galopades -- and much sillier things -- in ballrooms during the nineteenth century.  It's a nice, easy dance that would be good for a ballroom full of beginners.

The Yale Schottische, 1895

As previously noted, I always have an eye out for dances named after Yale University and Yale-related dance ephemera.  Walking through the campus earlier today on my way to a meeting reminded me that I had another Yale-themed dance to discuss: the Yale Schottische, which was published with the eponymous sheet music in 1895 and dedicated to the Yale University Football Association.  Yale has one of the oldest football programs in the world and was a regular national title winner in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.  Some of the players pictured at left (click to enlarge) are probably among the several Yalies of the 1890s chosen as All-Americans or inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame.  (More details about Yale's place in football history may be found here.)

The music for the Yale Schottische was composed by J. Edward Geary, but the dance was choreographed by a local  dancing master, C. Francis Malone, who regularly taught Yale students, probably including some of the football players in the photograph!  An article about Malone from 1896 notes that the Yale Schottische has been "danced onstage at Daly's Theater, New York, and in the greater part of the United States."

The Yale Schottische is actually a double-length schottische sequence -- eight measures instead of four.  The general pattern of the dance is quite straightforward, but several details are left unspecified.  I have used my best guesses on those and included both options where there is no way to make a definitive choice.

Battle Confetti

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

Ending a Grand March

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

This isn't it.

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

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.

How to Become a Belle, 1888

More from my archive of dance articles!  Here's a trenchant little commentary on ballroom etiquette and society manners, thinly disguised as an "overheard conversation" between two young women, a first-year debutante (Mamie) and her more experienced mentor (Clara).  It was published in the Boston Daily Globe on December 23, 1888. 

While Clara is genuinely trying to be helpful with her advice on how to become popular, the author's disapproval of the entire system is quite apparent in the "provoking" questions asked by innocent-but-observant Mamie.

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Clara wants Mamie to dance less with the interesting and courteous Frank Harrington and more with the inspid "beau" Arthur Jones:

"But there's something to Frank Harrington, while Arthur Jones is insipid.  He doesn't know anything but the inane society gossip."

"But he's one of the beaux, Mamie; you must remember that."

"Why, he's not entertaining, is he?"

"No-o; I can't say that I ever found him so.  But he always dances with the swellest girls.  You never saw him with a wall-flower, did you?"

Ballroom Heroes, 1897

I'm in the midst of a particularly stuporous jet-lagged stupor, so here's a very serious article from 1897 to entertain everyone until my wits return.  Oh, those manly Boston dandies!

A few equally serious editorial comments are interpolated in italics.

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Dancing with the Wine Clerks, 1888

I'm trying this summer to share some of my eclectic collection of descriptions of dancing, specific dances, and balls from various periodicals.  These mini-sources provide useful context for the descriptions and recommendations given in dance manuals. 

The report from the Boston Daily Globe of the first ball of the East Boston Wine Clerks in 1888 adds nothing to my knowledge of specific dances, but it does provide a bit of information about the ball in general, including the very spectacular decorations.  Apparently wine clerks really know how to throw a party.  Who'd have guessed?

The Five Step York

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

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

Programming a Ball, 1896

The American periodical Harper's Bazaar was started in 1867 by the company Harper & Brothers as a weekly fashion magazine.  It is well-known to those interested in nineteenth-century costume for its beautiful, highly detailed fashion plates and still exists today as a glossy monthly magazine.

On February 22, 1896, Harper's Bazaar published a short article entitled "Fashionable Dances of the Day" that gave advice to anyone constructing a program for a ball, based on what was fashionable in New York City at the time:

those [dances] which are the most popular here in New York, for instance, are universally recognized as the dances correct for any entertainment which may be given elsewhere

New York attitudes appear not to have changed in the slightest in the last century.

Walking Around

[T]he musicians are to engage in conversation, say half a minute or less...meanwhile, the dancers are meditating what is next

I'm never quite sure whether Elias Howe had a sense of humor, but to my twenty-first-century eyes, the above is the second-funniest bit of dance instructions he wrote or published.  Just visualize it: the dancers are standing around looking confused meditating what is next while the musicians stop playing and engage in conversation? 

Seriously???

A Polka Redowa Quadrille

My copy of Trifet's Acme of Dances (Boston, c1900) is a bit of a puzzle to date.  It's at least a second edition; an earlier (1886) version advertised 114 dances, while mine has 214.  It has a copyright date of 1893, but advertises the June, 1900, issue of Trifet's Monthly Budget of Music on the cover.  My best guess is that it is a c1900 reprint of an 1893 edition.

Inside, it is a bizarre mashup of several different sources, as evidenced by the changing fonts and formatting of the music.  The first forty-eight pages are easily recognizable to anyone who works with nineteenth-century dance music from the Boston area as having been printed from Elias Howe's plates; his font and his dance instructions are unmistakeable.  So is his tendency to set figured dances to any piece of music he could lay his hands on.

Dancing the Bon Ton Gavotte

Having decided that the Bon Ton Gavotte was popular enough to perhaps be worth doing, how does one actually do it?

Let me start by noting that as reconstruction projects go, the Bon Ton Gavotte is a mess: two sources are ambiguous and the other two contradict each other.  Since they cannot all be reconciled, I cannot produce any really definitive reconstruction.  Instead, I'll go through the sources one by one and give my thoughts about the various options.