Capering & Kickery

A Dream Ball, 1885

And now for something a little bit different: not quite a ghost story, but a story of a dream of ghosts dancing  "The Dream Ball" was published in Aunt Judy's Magazine (London), Volume IV, Issue III, in 1885, the last year of its run.  The author was S. D. Spicer, about whom I know absolutely nothing.

"The Dream Ball" tells the story of the highly imaginative "Duchess" Paulet, a thirteen-year-old history buff who, on a birthday excursion, finds herself alone in the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum), where she eventually falls asleep leaning against a plaster replica of the Apprentice Pillar from Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland.  In her dream, the carriages in the museum come to life and collect people from the paintings to take them to a ball held outside of time, where people from different centuries meet and dance together.  The author bragged in a note at the end that all the paintings and objets referenced in the story could be found in the museum, and, indeed, the descriptions of some of them are detailed enough that it's possible to identify the specific works.  I'm not going to attempt to do all of them, but I'll give a few quick examples.

A Grand Fancy Dress Ball in Liverpool, 1844

A lengthy description of a Grand Fancy Ball in aid of the Public Charities held on Monday, March 25th, 1844 was published in a Supplement to the Liverpool Mercury on March 29th, 1844.  When I say lengthy, I mean that it started out with around 1500 words of self-congratulation and description of the charities involved in rather purplish prose along these lines:

Liverpool has for a long period been famed for the multiplicity of its noble public institutions, having for their object the amelioration of the condition of its poorer inhabitants, the relief and cure of their bodily ailments, and the supplying of their temporal wants, without regard to party, creed, or colour.  The benevolence which suggested and the generosity which has hitherto supported asylums wherein the sick, the maimed, the blind, the houseless, the stranger, and the starving could find temporary care, succour, and shelter, cannot be too much commended; and we feel persuaded the exertions thus made by those who "have enough and to spare," have been amply repaid, not only in their secret consciousness of having performed a Christian duty, but in the earnest and heartfelt aspirations of those who have, by their kindly aid, been snatched from the jaws of death,--of those whose fevered brows have been gently fanned by the refreshing breath of charity,--of those whose prostrate limbs have found strength and activity in places founded by benevolent hands, and of those who, devoid of the common necessaries of life, have had their most pressing wants supplied.

For those not counting, that paragraph consists of exactly two sentences, the latter of which contains over 140 words.  To make an extremely long story short, the ball was in aid of the Liverpool Infirmary, the Northern and Southern Hospitals, the Dispensaries, and the District Provident Society, all very worthy institutions.  I'll be quoting and paraphrasing extensively from the Mercury article, but I will be skipping over the rest of the charity descriptions in favor of information about the ball itself.

Fashioned by Sargent: Fancy Dress Costumes at the MFA in Boston

I have a special treat this month that I've been saving for almost a year.  Last December, I was able to attend the astonishing exhibit Fashioned by Sargent at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.  The exhibit paired paintings by John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) with actual clothing of the period for comparison, including many of the actual items worn in the paintings.  This was heaven for a costume person like me!  The clothing and artwork were each astonishing individually.  But being able to compare clothing side by side with Sargent's paintings of it made it obvious how much Sargent tweaked the look of things and how cautious one should be using paintings as a source to reconstruct costumes.  I spent several hours in the exhibit just staring intently at everything.  And to add dance historian rapture to costume rapture and art rapture, two of the costume/painting pairs were of fancy dress costumes!

I took extensive photos, but I am not the world's best photographer, nor is my camera all that special.  And the lighting in the exhibit was kept low to protect the paintings and textiles, with lots of little sparkly indirect lights that twinkled oddly off the protective cases in which the costumes were displayed.  All of this adds up to photos which are not the greatest quality, but which I hope will communicate the beauty of the garments and the excitement of comparing them to the original paintings.  There are much better lit photos of some of the paintings and clothing on the exhibit website, a couple of which I have borrowed for this post.

Cozy Corners

The turn-of-the-twentieth-century etiquette book Twentieth Century Culture and Deportment, or The Lady and Gentleman at Home and Abroad by Maude C. Cooke (Philadelphia: National Publishing Company, 1899) devoted part of a chapter on artistic home decorations to the "cozy corner".  The construction and decoration was described in some detail:

Have your carpenter make a double right-angle bench, with a high, straight back. The seat must be two and a half feet wide, and the top of the back five feet from the floor. This now looks like an ungainly three-sided square, or rather oblong, for it is better to have one side somewhat longer than the others. The wood should be stained cherry or oak, to match the other furniture in the room, and oiled and polished so as to be smooth and of rich appearance; or, use hard wood, black walnut, ebony, mahogany.

The seat and inside back may be thickly and prettily upholstered, and then piled high with pillows, or, the wood having been nicely finished, the upholstery may cover the seat only. Be sure and have the seat made low, otherwise the Cozy Corner will be uncomfortable, its name will be belied, and no one will hie to what might have been the favorite seat in the room...

...The seats should be piled with sofa pillows, and in the inclosure a few hassocks would not be found amiss.

The purpose of the cozy corner?

The word cozy suggests warmth and pleasantry, as well as comfort. Therefore, this corner is always by the fire, and those occupying it are presumably cheery and happy.

It is just the place to rest in, just the place to read in, just the place for you and your dearest friend to chat in, just the place to play a game in, as bags, balls, etc., could easily be tossed from one seat to the other; just the place to lay plans in, for you are in no hurry to move, and so your plans, not being hurriedly completed, would be more apt to prove satisfactory; just the place to nap in, just the place to frolic in. Indeed, just the place to add to our already comfortable homes if we would have them one remove nearer the ideal home than they now are.

(quotes from pp. 479-80; the entire book may be found online at Project Gutenberg)

This being a dance history blog and not a nineteenth century home decor blog, one might wonder why exactly I find cozy corners worthy of attention.  Oddly enough, at least in early twentieth century Maine, they seem to have sometimes formed part of the decorations at college dances! 

Highland Mazourka

Let's get the important part out of the way first:

The Highland Mazourka is not a mazurka.  

It is, however, a delightful example of the nineteenth-century tendency to transpose dances from one time signature to another.  In this case, typical polka mazurka sequences have been transposed from 3/4 time to 4/4 time with a bit of extra hopping added to fill out the music, which should be of the Scottish strathspey style.  The polka mazurka itself consisted partly of polka (2/4) steps transposed to 3/4 time.  Confused by all these shifting time signatures?  Fear not; all will be made clear below!

Revisiting La Russe

Twelve years ago, I wrote a brief post explaining how to dance "La Russe", a redowa/mazurka variation I found, like so many others, in M. B. Gilbert's Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) and [George] Washington Lopp's La Danse (Paris, 1903).  I remain confident in my reconstruction, but in the intervening years I've discovered the official music for it, which clarifies that it was intended as an independent dance rather than merely a variation, and a bit of background.  So it's time to revisit La Russe!

First, I'd suggest going back and reading my original post on La Russe, since I am not going to go back through the details of how to perform it.

The choreographer of La Russe remains unknown, but apparently that was intentional: La Russe was created and promoted by the American Society of Professors of Dancing, which had a policy of not crediting the choreographer(s) for the dances they published as their own.  La Russe was established among them by early 1882, as their proceedings record that at their thirty-eight meeting, on April 2, 1882, they voted to publish original music for the dance by George W. Allen and noted that the step would be practiced at their next meeting.

Leap Year figure, Washington, D. C., 1892

Not having any more convenient descriptions of cotillion (dance party game) figures with leap year themes in books of such figures, I have to take them where I find them -- in this case, in a description of a society leap year ball attended by no fewer than seven foreign ministers of different nations held in Washington, D. C., on March 24, 1892.  The ball was described briefly in The New York Times on March 25, 1892.  The majority of the short article is taken up by lengthy lists of all the important people who organized and attended the event, but in between, there is a description of a cotillion figure.  Interestingly, it was led by two couples simultaneously, from "opposite ends of the hall". 

Dancing was general until 9:30 o’clock, when the cotillion began, led from opposite ends of the hall by Miss Richardson with Mr. William Slack and Miss Stout with Mr. Clifford Richardson.  In the selection of the favors the greatest ingenuity had been exercised, and the laughter-provoking devices were highly satisfactory.  

Perhaps, sensible of the number of people attending, they were actually running two cotillions in parallel?

A Leap Year Ball, Massachusetts, 1896

An elaborate upper-class leap year ball was held in Fall River, Massachusetts, on Friday, February 21, 1896, as reported at great length in the Fall River Daily Evening News the following Monday.  Fall River is quite close to Providence, Rhode Island, and this ball had a number of similarities to the leap year ball held in Providence four years before, though it does not seem to have featured an enormous cotillion.

On the organizational side, the committee was entirely female, as were the eleven "active and efficient" floor managers.  As in Providence, the receiving line consisted entirely of male patrons, each holding "a bunch of beautiful roses" and "a small fan".  There was no mention of them curtsying, alas, only smiling.

While not emphasized in the writeup the way it was for the Providence ball, gentlemen other than the patrons had been gifted with flowers as well:

Most of the men had been provided by their escorts with boutonnieres, and many of them carried also bunches of flowers and fans.  Corsage boquets [sic] were not infrequent adornments of shirt fronts.

This may have been expensive for some of the ladies:

Every one of them brought at least one man, and one or two brought half a dozen. 

 

Female Callers at Leap Year Balls, 1896

Despite the role reversal mandate at leap year balls, it's still difficult to find examples where the role reversal extended into actually calling or otherwise leading the dancing.  While I have several mentions of female floor managers, it's not clear whether they were leading the dancing or just assisting a male caller or prompter.  One of the few clear examples I'd found previously was two ladies leading a cotillion, at a leap year ball held in Providence in 1892.  So I was beyond delighted to find two mentions of female callers in short blurbs about leap year balls held in Idaho and Kansas in 1896. 

"The Leap Year Ball": a poem, 1896

Before getting back to detailed newspaper descriptions of leap year balls, here's a less detailed but still useful description of one in the form of a very mediocre poem.  It was published on page three of the Oakdale Leader, in Oakdale, California, on Friday, February 14th, 1896.  

The leap year elements mentioned specifically in the poem are:

• the ladies "managing" things and taking the author into the ballroom
• the "beaux" sitting in a row waiting for partners and the ladies rushing to find one, making sure no one was left out
• Fannie and Julia as some sort of ball organizers or floor managers, wearing badges and making sure things went smoothly
• a lady acting as treasurer and, by implication, asking the author to dance

I admit to cynically feeling that the ladies being concerned that none of the "gints" were slighted was showing more care for their feelings than many gentlemen showed for those of ladies when in conventional roles -- the ladies were perhaps deliberately setting an example for the gentlemen of how they wished to be treated.

A Valentine Party, 1891

The fourth in a very occasional series of short descriptions of specialty dance events from the pages of the 1890-1891 volume of Demorest's Family Magazine.  Like the tidbit about the thé dansante, this short description of a party-opening cotillion (in the dance party game sense) is drawn from the "Chat" column of the February, 1891, issue.  The theme, of course, is Valentine's Day!

The original text from Demorest's:

A Valentine Party, for which invitations are already out, promises to be a unique affair.  There are but twenty persons invited, ten ladies and ten gentlemen, all well acquainted, and each has been requested to bring an original valentine, which must be included in the envelope furnished by the hostess and already superscribed "To my Valentine."  On arriving, the guests will find in each dressing-room a bunch of ribbons of different colors, also a heart-shaped bag.  A ribbon is to be tied around each valentine, which is then to be deposited in the bag, through a slit at the top.  After all are assembled, two children, dressed as Cupids, will act as postmen, delivering the valentines from the gentlemen's bag to the ladies, and from the ladies' bag to the gentlemen.  The valentines are then to be read aloud by the person receiving them (being considered as written expressly for them), and a vote taken to decide on the two best (one by a lady and one by a gentleman) from a literary point of view, the two wittiest, and the two most sentimental, and prizes given to the writer of each.  The prizes are to be silver-mounted cushions, photograph frames, and mirrors for the ladies, and scarf-pins, pocket-cushions, and silver-mounted penwipers for the gentlemen, all heart-shaped.  The refreshments are to be served at small heart-shaped tables, and afterward there will be dancing, those having matching ribbons to be partners for the first dance.

     -- Demorest's Family Magazine, Volume XXVII, No. 4, February, 1891, p. 245

 

A Leap Year Ball, Dundee, Scotland, 1892

I didn't look for a description of a Scottish leap year ball, but I came across one anyway while rummaging through newspaper archives.  This was an actual Leap Day ball, held on "that carnival of female freedom", February 29, 1892, in Dundee.  It was described the next day in the Evening Telegraph. 

The ball was hosted by the ladies of the Physical Recreation Society, presumably a branch of the National Physical Recreation Society founded by Herbert Gladstone in 1885 or 1886.  According to the website of The John Hulley Memorial Fund, the NPRS was the successor of the National Olympian Association (1865-1883) and a founder organization of the British Olympic Association (1905).  While not an Olympic sport, dancing was certainly physical recreation, as the author of the article noted:

It goes without saying that it was full of “go,” for gymnastics—or, shall we say, physical culture?—means health, and health means high spirits, and high spirits spell enjoyment and fresh pleasure. 

Large sections of the article were devoted to describing the dresses and the decor.  But there is also substantial information about the dance program, which is interesting not just as a leap year ball but as an example of an 1890s Scottish ball in general, and about the ladies in charge.  In true leap year tradition, 

Seven ladies of the Society formed the Committee, and managed everything, including their men friends who ventured to criticise the arrangements. 

Along with organizing the ball, they wore badges and acted as the reception committee and floor managers at the ball itself:

They were all distinguished last night by a tiny bow of red and black striped ribbon, carrying a five-pointed star, on which were inscribed the initials of the Society.  Their functions were to act as a Reception Committee, to introduce strangers, give the signal for the music to strike up, and so on,

...though occasionally they became distracted by the pleasures of the dance:

all of which pleasant duties were duly performed—excepting when a gadding member floated off in a fascinating waltz, oblivious of the obligations imposed by her badge, and other quite excusable lapses of that nature.  “Oh, I’m dancing the first waltz!  I forgot all about this!” said one fair lady, as she looked ruefully at her star.

A Leap Year Ball, Utah, 1896

Off to the land of the Mormons for a leap year ball in the exciting community of Roweville, a town in northern Utah so small it barely exists even now, when it has been renamed Bothwell.  In 1896, it was a small farming community founded only two years before. 

The ball was held on Friday, January 17, 1896, but coverage of the ball appeared in the Brigham City Bugler two weeks later, apparently submitted by a local correspondent who signed herself

The Duchess.
Roweville, Utah, Jan. 24, 1896.

I'd like to know the story behind that title!

The "Grand Ball" was proclaimed the first leap year party ever held in Roweville, which of course had not even existed four years before.  It was held in the schoolhouse with "a part of the Bear River Orchestra" to provide the music for dancing under the guidance of an experienced floor manager, Mr. August Nichols, Jr., and was said to be well-attended.  The dance program was not given in the article, but the company danced until one in the morning, ate supper until two, then continued dancing until five.  I admire their endurance.

A Leap Year Ball, Oklahoma, 1896

It's leap year, it's leap month, and it's time to look at more descriptions of leap year balls!

First up, a ball held in Enid, Oklahoma, on Friday, January 17, 1896.  Note that leap year balls, while concentrated in the beginning of the year because it was the middle of the social season and leap year was a new and exciting element to play with, were not necessarily held on Leap Day, or even in February.

Enid had only been founded a few years earlier, in 1893, during a "Land Run" in which former Cherokee land was opened to settler claims.  It grew rapidly, supposedly reaching over four thousand people within a year.  These details and more about its history may be found here.

This was a classic leap year ball:

When once in four years the flight of time gives one more day to the month that withesseth the birth of G. Washington, Esq., it brings with it a custom long established of awarding to the ladies the rights and prerogatives that at all other times belong exclusively to the gentlemen.

Four Tiny Polka Redowa Variations

Believe it or not, even I get a little bit tired of going through the seemingly endless list of insignificant couple dance variations published in M. B. Gilbert's Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) and reprinted in French in G. W. Lopp's La Danse (Paris, 1903).  Studying all of them is important for my overall project of analyzing late nineteenth century American couple dance variations, but a lot of them are just trivial as individual dances, though still useful as data points and material for improvisation. 

As with my trio of tiny galop variations a few years ago, here are four dances that fall in the mazurka/redowa classification that just don't have enough to them to warrant individual posts.

What these four have in common:

• They are all based around the polka redowa (polka in 3/4 time): (hop) slide-cut-leap, counted &123.  While three of the four are called mazurkas, they have very little obvious mazurka in them and a great deal of polka redowa; hence my post title.  All four will work to redowa and mazurka music in general.  Gilbert and Lopp both specify a tempo of 144 beats per minute for that entire genre of music.
  
  
• They almost certainly all have matching sheet music, their names being the names of the tune they were originally attached to.  But the music hasn't emerged in my searches so far, the dances are regular enough in pattern that specific music isn't critical, and they just aren't interesting enough for me to devote a lot of time to continued searching.  If the music turns up, it turns up.  If not, these make easy variations for improvisation.
  
  
• They all appear in both Gilbert and Lopp, and the descriptions match with only insignificant exceptions.
  
  
• They present no reconstruction issues.
  
  

So, in the interest of efficiency, here are the four dances, with brief notes about each.

So, in the interest of efficiency, here are the four dances, with brief notes about each.

The Sage Maidens Dance, 1891

An entertaining article somewhat misleadingly titled "Sage Maidens of Cornell University" appeared in Demorest's Family Magazine in January, 1891.  Cornell was one of the first universities to become coeducational (in 1870) and the campus life of female students was of general interest.  Cornell's class of 1890, with about a dozen female students, is pictured at left; click to enlarge.

The article, written from a fairly feminist (for the nineteenth century) perspective, makes it clear that while "Sage maidens" is a pretty turn of phrase, not all of the female students at Cornell lived in Sage Hall (completed in 1875), and that in any case, neither building nor female students were isolated from the campus as a whole.  The building contained classroom space as well, and male and female coeds (the article makes a point of using the term for men as well!) studied together and socialized together rather extensively.  Including, of course, dancing!

Brain Fever, 1840

Ah, sweet October, which I generally devote to discussion of fancy dress and masquerade balls, weird cotillion figures, and similar frivolity!

I have two words to start off the month in the proper spirit:

headless quadrille

Specifically: 

The first couple is Anne Boleyn and Louis XVI.  They are facing Lady Jane Grey and Marino Faliero (a 14th century Venetian Doge).  Marie Antoinette and Charles I make up the first side couple, facing the Earl of Essex, dancing alone. 

In case anyone missed the connection, all of these people were beheaded.  

Themed quadrilles from history or literature were very common at fancy dress balls in the nineteenth century, but this really has got to be the Best Theme Ever.  I just about died laughing when I realized the joke. 

The Woodland Yorke

The Woodland Yorke was introduced by Maine conductor and dancing master Horace M. Pullen at the Seventeenth Annual Convention of the American Society of Professors of Dancing, held in New York City on September 4th-7th, 1894, and published in the proceedings of the convention.  Specifically, it was introduced on Tuesday, September 4th, 1894, as one of a list of eleven "works" placed in the hands of the Directors.  The convention then promptly adjoined to practice them.

The original text, as published in the convention proceedings:

"WOODLAND YORKE."
By Horace M. Pullen.

First Part. -- Slide left forward to fourth position (1); close right to left, and at same time slide left forward chassé (2);close right foot chassé to left (3).  1 bar.  Hop on right and slide left forward (1); close right to left (2); leap forward on left (3).  Repeat all the above with right foot.  4 bars.

Second Part. -- Face partners; make three slides with left foot (1 bar); change, make three slides with right foot.  Repeat the above.  4 bars in all.

Pose for first part.  Both facing same direction; join hands, gent's right, ladies' left.

 

The Detroit, 1886

The Detroit, published in 1886, was a very simple sequence dance which in theory uses a polka variant, though the 6/8 music feels more like a two-step.  The dance was choreographed by Herman A. Strassburg Jr. to music by John E. Fancher.  The cover of the sheet music, courtesy of the Detroit Historical Society, is shown at left (click to enlarge). 

The dance instructions were published with the sheet music as well as by M. B. Gilbert in his compilation Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) and by G. W. Lopp in La Danse (Paris, 1903).  Both attributed it to Strassburg. 

The dance instructions are essentially the same in all three sources, though the internal reference to polka variant is given by Strassburg as the Rush Polka, by Gilbert as the Glide Polka, and by Lopp as the polka coquette.  According to Gilbert, and discussed here, all three are different names for the same variation.  It's possible they are regional terms.

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).

The Klondike Two-Step...Take Two!

Dance history research, at least if done well, is often not so much a matter of coming up with definitive solutions as a continual cycling back through old material in the light of new sources or new understanding and correcting and refining one's work.  I'm still in the middle of that process for the Klondike Two-Step, but as my region is currently undergoing an Arctic blast of cold air with a temperature similar to the average in the Klondike in January, it seems like a suitable moment to revisit the dance and check in on new developments.  When I first discussed it here thirteen-plus years ago, I was mainly concerned with the basic reconstruction of the dance, and since the single description I had for it was a bit of a mess, I had plenty to say about that and neither the desire nor the resources to delve more deeply. 

It would probably be helpful to go read my earlier post before going on.

So, what have I learned since I wrote it?

The Bonnie Brae, 1895

In honor of Burns night, here's a simple (and completely American) Scottish-themed "society" dance by Chicago dancing master Robert Alexander Campbell: The Bonnie Brae.  Campbell, also the creator of The Vassar, was credited as both the choreographer of the dance and the composer of the music, though the latter was "harmonized" by Robert Heiss and on the sheet music the dance was co-credited to a Miss Josephine E. Rice.

Interestingly, this time Campbell labeled himself a member of the Western Association Normal School Masters of Dancing rather than the leader of Campbell's Solo Orchestra and apparently no longer felt the need to note that he was the pupil of C. A. Carr.  Also of note: the cover gave not only a Chicago publisher but a London one as well.  Apparently Campbell was moving up in the world!  Though one notes that he did not state on the music that the dance had actually been accepted by the Western Association Normal School, which I discussed briefly here.

"Bonnie Brae" is Gaelic for "pleasant hill", according to this useful article about a street with that name in Los Angeles.  Given his surname, perhaps Campbell came by the Gaelic honestly, or perhaps he just thought the phrase sounded suitably Scottish, a nice match for the tartan-clad dancers on the cover, which may be seen at left (click to enlarge).  The lady at center might be Miss Rice.

The Thé Dansante, 1891

Dropping back to the late nineteenth century, here's another short blurb from the pages of Demorest's Family Magazine, following the Thanksgiving Pumpkin Party I described last year.  This little tidbit appeared in the "Chat" column of the February, 1891, issue, along with a description of a Valentine's party and comments on the overuse of floral decorations.  The anonymous author described the fashion that season of using a thé dansante (tea dance) held at the "usual hours" for a reception, four o'clock to seven o'clock in the late afternoon, for the purpose of introducing debutantes to the fashionable world. The thé dansante could stand on its own as an event or might be the lead-in to a dinner.

One might assume that this reception-with-dancing (and, presumably, afternoon tea) was less work than giving a full-scale ball, but lest the name give you the idea this was an intimate event, be aware that the Demorest's description claimed that five hundred non-dancing "friends" (meaning a large chunk of upper-class society) were said to attend such an event just as a reception, while the debutantes and their partners danced with a "delightful informality".  The potential following dinner would be a much smaller affair.

There's not much to the description -- no details of the dancing -- and what there is is mostly concerned with a set of coordinated outfits, but here is the original text in full:

General Fleury's Bal d'enfants travesti, 1867

On Tuesday, April 23, 1867, a children's fancy dress ball, or bal travesti, was held at the home of General Émile Félix Fleury, a prominent senator and equerry of the Emperor Napoleon III. The event was covered in the pages of Le Monde Illustré on May 4, 1867, with the illustration below (click to enlarge) and a brief description of the event.

Bal d’enfants travesti, donné le 23 avril, chez le général Fleury,
grand écuyer de S. M. L’Empereur — Le galop final.

Children's fancy dress ball, given the 23rd of April at the home of Général Fleury,
Grand Equerry of His Majesty the Emperor — The final galop.

A full transcription of the original article with my translation is given at the end of this post.

A Masquerade in Montana, 1899

And...it's back to masquerades, fancy dress balls, crazy cotillion figures, and other fun for the month of October!  First up: a Christmas masquerade ball in Montana in 1899.

The Degree of Honor masquerade ball was held on Christmas night at the Hefferlin Opera House in Livingston, Montana, the elaborate building at right in the postcard photo at left; click to enlarge.  At this time, the Degree of Honor was the ladies' auxiliary of the Ancient Order of United Workmen, a post-Civil War "fraternal" mutual benefit society providing insurance, burial policies, etc, to working-class men.  In the late 1890s, the Degree of Honor was said to have had 40,000 members nationally.  It later spun off into a separate organization and existed independently until 2017.

Livingston itself was tiny at the time, having been founded as a cluster of tents at a future railroad stop in 1882.  Even today, its population is under ten thousand people (per the 2020 census); at the time of the ball, it was probably only around a thousand.  This puts into perspective its description as "largely attended" in the coverage of the ball in the social column of The Anaconda Standard on Sunday, December 31, 1889: seventy-five couples following the leaders of the march.  For a town of that size, that is actually quite impressive, and the coverage noted that the event succeeded both socially and financially.

For the Queen's Jubilee

Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee Portrait

This being the beginning of Queen Elizabeth II of England's official Platinum Jubilee celebration, it seems appropriate to look back almost 125 years to the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, for which English dancing master Walter Humphrey composed a sequence called, logically enough, The Victorian:

This dance was arranged as a novelty for the ball-room, to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Her Majesty the Queen in 1897, and, as it can be danced to Two-step music or Washington Post, makes a pleasant variety.

The sequence itself is short and the reconstruction ought to be straightforward, but, unfortunately, Humphrey's instructions complicate matters.  I'll present my reconstruction first then talk about the problems.

Russian Militaire

"For children there have been accepted La Veta and the Russian Militaire, the latter a semi-drill and march step, combining simple and graceful poses for the little ones."

-- Marie Petravsky, "New Fads in Dances", The Sunday Morning Call (Lincoln, Nebraska). Sunday, October 25, 1896, p. 5.

The accepting organization referred to was The Western Association and Normal School of Masters of Dancing, which also accepted a number of dances for adults that year.  The newspaper article was timed to the start of the new dancing season in New York, but on the sheet music it is noted that the dance was adopted on June 11, 1896, in Toledo, Ohio.  It is also claimed, apparently inaccurately, that "This Dance was the only Dance adopted out of ten others presented." 

The choreographer of the dance was John A. Mahler, brother of the much better-known St. Louis dancing master Jacob Mahler.  Both brothers taught children; another of John Mahler's dances, the Two and a Half Step, was inscribed to "the Young Ladies of the Mary Institute and Hosmer Hall", two St. Louis schools.  There is no indication on the sheet music that it was meant for children, which makes one wonder how many of the other simple sequence dances of the period might also have been meant for the younger set!

The National Park Quadrille (3 of 3)

(See the first and second posts in this series for the structure of the quadrille, the "chorus" figure, and the introductions to each figure.)

Completing the National Park Quadrille, here are the third and fourth figures!

Figure 3     (4b intro, A=8b, B=8b; played 4b + AABBx4)
4b    Introduction (not repeated): gentlemen step to the center and turns to face partners, all quickly bow/courtesy, and the gentlemen return to places

4b    Head trios forward and back
4b    Head trios turn opposites by two hands
4b    All twelve join hands, forward and back
4b    All twelve take hands three in trios and circle round to places
16b  "Chorus" figure (described in detail here)

Repeat three more times (heads, sides, sides).

The National Park Quadrille (2 of 3)

(See the previous post in this series for the structure of the quadrille and the "chorus" figure.)

Going on with the actual figures of the National Park Quadrille!

Note that the first figure does not open with eight bars for the standard honors to partners and corners or opposites.  There is a specific kind of honors for the four-bar introduction to each figure.

Figure 1     (4b intro, A=8b, B=16b; played 4b + AABx4)
4b    Introduction (not repeated): gentlemen step to the center and turns to face partners, all quickly bow/courtesy, and the gentlemen return to places

4b    Head gentlemen with right-hand ladies turn by the right hand (polka steps)
4b    Head gentlemen with left-hand ladies turn by the left hand (polka steps)
4b    Head gentlemen with right-hand ladies promenade halfway round
4b    Head gentlemen with right-hand ladies right and left (chaîne anglaise) to places
16b  "Chorus" figure (described in detail here)

At the end of the figure the two ladies in each trio will have exchanged places.  Head couples repeat, then side couples twice more.

The National Park Quadrille (1 of 3)

The sheet music for Clifford G. Sweet's National Park Quadrille, published in 1892, immediately intrigued me because the cover (shown at left, click to enlarge) proclaimed it "For 8 Ladies & 4 Gentlemen".  In other words, it was a trio quadrille, for four trios in a square, which is one of my favorite variant quadrille formations.  The sheet music was not accompanied by dance figures, but, happily, they are available elsewhere, though not in their original publication.  Two near-identical versions of the instructions may be found in The American Prompter and Guide to Etiquette by E. H. Kopp (Cincinnati-New York-Chicago, 1896) and a late edition of Clendenen's [Fashionable] Quadrille Book and Guide to Etiquette (Chicago, 1899).  Given how close the language is in the two sources, I suspect that both authors were copying from the missing original.

The National Park Quadrille is a four-figure set performed with either polka steps or plain steps ("according to the ability of the dancers") for most of the figures, with a generous amount of polka for couples thrown in during the "chorus" that ends each figure, during which the glide polka, discussed here, should be used.  This is essentially a combination of two slides of galop (one measure) plus a polka step (one measure).  If dancing the polka in the casual slide-together-slide style, which I suspect was typical at this time, it will feel much like a four-slide galop (as described here).

The most interesting element of this quadrille is the back-and-forth progression for the ladies: on each iteration of the quadrille, they change places within their trio, from left side of the gentleman to right and vice-versa.  Since the ladies on the left and right of each trio perform different figures, this prevents any imbalance in the dancing.  Each of the four figures should be performed four times, twice for the head couples and twice for the side couples.  It is noted that if this feels too long, the first three figures can be done only twice (once for heads and once for sides), but that produces a slightly strange result, with the ladies in different positions in each figure and one lady getting more polka-round opportunities than the other.

The America

In honor of America's birthday, here's an appropriately-named variation by C. A. Carr (creator of the Highland Glide) which is long enough with enough dancing in place that it should probably be classified as a sequence dance and danced by all dancers in unison, as it would be quite the annoyance to other couples if done in the midst of a normal dance.  In M. B. Gilbert's Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890) it is listed in the redowa/mazurka section and in George Washington Lopp's La Danse (Paris, 1903) under "Les mazurkas".  If forced to a decision, I'd call it a polka mazurka and note that it features a stealthy bit of York hidden inside it.

A Pumpkin Party 1890

A Pumpkin Party may seem misplaced in the calendar at this point, but this is specifically a Thanksgiving pumpkin party, taking place the evening of Thanksgiving Day, so it should be considered more like pumpkin pie and less like a jack-o-lantern, though there's definitely an element of that in the theme as well.  The overall concept is more harvest than Halloween, however, similar to the Red Ear Party except more, err, orange.

The description of the party -- possibly, but not necessarily, fictional -- was published in Demorest's Family Magazine, No. CCCXXIX, Vol. XXVII, No. 1, dated November 1890.  Demorest's began as a fashion magazine but expanded to include a wide range of material, including quite a few little dance tidbits.

The pumpkin theme began from the very start, with the invitations, which were sent on "pumpkin-colored round cards".  The party was held in a "pretty little stone barn and stable" with illuminated "pumpkin lanterns of all shapes and devices, some wearing the old familiar goblin-like 'eyes, nose, and mouth.' while others were cut in stars and flowers and geometrical designs."  This is, quite literally, a barn dance.

A Louisville Masquerade, 1843

Here's a lively account of a jolly and slightly drunken masquerade held in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1843.  This account has a little of everything: costumes, bad puns, a bit about the dances, and the effects of alcohol on the revelers.  It's too long a report to comment on every bit of it, but the entire thing is transcribed at the bottom of this post.

The report starts out with a lot of philosophy about the joys of masquerades, but the first really useful bit is that as in A Few Friends, the unmasking is done at supper-time, which was probably around midnight:

The unmasking at the supper table is often a great source of laughter and surprise, when it discovers the faces of numerous acquaintances who have been playing off their wit and raillery against each other all the evening, under their various disguises. 

All sorts of people attended masquerades, which is part of what made them scandalous.  In Kentucky, at least, this mixing was not to be feared, though I suspect the upper classes might have differed on this point:

A masquerade is an unsorted class of society, it must be admitted; but are you not liable to mix with bad persons in the best regulated companies?  Even robberies have frequently been committed in churches; and if you keep aloof from mankind on that account, you may soon become a crying philosopher, afraid to stir from your own fireside, in order to prevent contamination, and be devoured by hypochondria the remainder of your days.

The writer had a few drinks before arriving and is thus in a good mood:

It was at a late hour that I entered the room, and I was in a right good humor for fun and frolic, and the scene before me, having taken a glass or two of Walker’s rich old wines, the vivifying qualities of which would almost make the dumb to chatter. 

Remember "vivifying".  The extra "life" provided by alcohol recurs later.

Professor Webster's Masquerade Party, 1876

On March 18, 1876, the Morning Herald of Wilmington, Delaware, published a short blurb covering a recent "masquerade party" given by one Professor Webster at the Dancing Academy Hall.  Unusually, the newspaper coverage says nothing about the costumes other than that there were enough of them to "have exhausted a first class costumer’s establishment, and have taxed the ingenuity of an artist."  Instead, we get an actual dance program, consisting entirely of quadrilles, Lanciers, and glide waltzes, and accompanied by names which might be masquerade costumes, though I'm not certain of that.

Professor Webster was a long-time Wilmington dancing master - he was still teaching as late as June 4, 1899, when the Sunday Morning Star reported on the closing reception of his current series of dance classes (see about two-thirds of the way down the first column here.)

Here's the list of dances, in order.

A promenade of 15 minutes, presumably the Grand March, followed by a polka.
1. Quadrille, plain, Des Layton, No. 100, Thatcher
2. Waltz Glide, Flag of Truce, White
3. Quadrille, Lanciers, Tin Fiddle, Hildreth
4. Quadrille, plain, Jigiana, Cleland
5. Quadrille Polka, Mary’s Lamb, Osborne
6. Waltz, Glide, Old Mother Goose, McIntire
7. Quadrille, Robinson, Fandango, Aiken
8. Quadrille, blain [sic], Auld Lang Syne, Burk
9. Quadrille, Polacca, breakdown, Stidham
10. Waltz, Glide, Timber Heels, Simmons
11. Quadrille, Mazourka, Red, White and Blue, Grant
12. Quadrille, plain, Lunatic, Pierson
13. Quadrille, varieties, La Manayunk
14. Waltz, glide. Spring Chicken, Vanderbreak
15. Quadrille, plain, Piccodilly [sic], Mose
15. [sic] Lanciers, Shoddy, McCall
17. Waltz, glide, Go, Lang.

A Fancy Dress Party (from A Few Friends), 1864

A Few Friends, by Korman Lynn, was serialized in nine parts in Godey's Lady's Book during the year 1864.  The serial doesn't have a lot of plot; it describes eight evenings of a group of friends gathering together to, for the most part, play parlor games.  It's great for anyone who wants to research mid-nineteenth century parlor games, which are described in elaborate detail, but the only section of any real interest to me is the final one, in which the friends gather for a fancy dress party.

To pick up the story at this point, it is only necessary to know that the kind and generous Ben Stykes has been quietly pursuing the lively Mary Gliddon from the beginning of the story, though a certain Mr. Hedges, a young man from Liverpool, is also interested in her.

Even a single part of the story is too long for me to transcribe here, but I'll quote the costume descriptions, some of which are detailed and unusual, and the resolution of the romance.

A Fancy Dress Hop at West Point, 1865

On Saturday, September 9, 1865, The New York Times published an account of a fancy dress "hop" given by the ladies of Cozzens' Hotel in West Point, New York, home of the famous U. S. Military Academy. 

Cozzens', established in 1849, was a prominent hotel near the Academy.  The original building was destroyed by fire in the March of 1861 but quickly rebuilt.  The image below is a late-nineteenth-century print by Max Egalu of the view of the Hudson River from the hotel; the original is in the collection of the Boston Public Library.


With its ready supply of eager cadets from the Academy, Cozzens' was a popular site for dances.  In 1859, an article in Harper's Weekly explained that:

"...the rigors of military etiquette are mitigated thrice a week by balls or hops, which are given by the cadets to their friends and guests at Cozzens’s Hotel and elsewhere in the neighborhood. These gay parties are justly famed among the fair sex; for better and more indefatigable dancers than the cadets are not to be found even in New York. Pretty girls who go to West Point to spend a few days in the bracing air, and enjoy the lovely Hudson scenery, invariably declare that they never enjoyed any ball in their life so much as the Cadet Hops."

        --- Harper's Weekly, September 3, 1859

 

The article was accompanied by an engraving of such a "hop", specifically described as "a scene familiar to the happy people who spend summer days at Cozzens's at West Point."

 

The original may be seen at archive.org (engraving, article).

 

A more detailed history of the hotel may be found at The News of the Highlands.

Dance Card: United Six, 1879

And...here's the "United Six" dance card that inspired me to write about "Roy's Wife"!

The back of the card (click to enlarge) gives the printer as "Danvers Mirror Print", a printing company located in Danvers, Massachusetts (formerly Salem Village, of the famous Salem witchcraft trials) in the late nineteenth century.  The date on the front of the card, April 2, 1879, called "Fast Eve" confirms the Massachusetts connection -- in 1879, April third was proclaimed Fast Day, a day of "fasting, humiliation, and prayer" by then-Governor Thomas Talbot.  His original proclamation may be seen at the Boston Atheneum Digital Collections. 

Sadly, there is no further information about the location of the ball on the card, and I have not been inspired to do a lengthy search.  When the card was originally posted on Facebook, it was speculated that the ball was held by six local Masonic Lodges; I have no evidence one way or the other for that.

Fast Days in the young United States could be proclaimed anytime, but a springtime Fast Day was an ongoing tradition in many New England states in the nineteenth century.  The day was officially religious in nature, and at least one Fast Day sermon from 1879, "The Future of New England", by noted minister Edward Everett Hale of the South Congregational Church. was later published and may be read here.

Not everyone's mind was solely focused on religion, however.  The Pilot, a Boston-area Catholic newspaper, reported on March 22nd that the St. Mary's Young Men's Temperance Society, Bunker Hill District, would hold "an interesting exhibition of gymnastics on Fast Day" and on April 12th that members of St. Augustine's Lyceum had held a "Pedestrian Contest", a series of footraces, that day.  In 1894, Massachusetts, perhaps bowing to the inevitable, converted Fast Day into Patriot's Day (April 19th), commemorating several battles -- most famously, those of Lexington and Concord.

The Vienna (La Viennoise)

The Vienna, or La Viennoise, is a late nineteenth century schottische variant which originated in America and traveled to France with the inimitable George Washington Lopp, though it's not clear to me whether it had much (or any) popularity there or, for that matter, in America. 

My first American source for the dance was, unsurprisingly, M. B. Gilbert's Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890), which collected a wide assortment of the couple dances of the 1870s and 1880s.  Gilbert and Lopp (in La Danse, 1903) agreed on how the Vienna was danced.  Going with Gilbert's description, giving the gentleman's steps (lady dances opposite):

The Vienna (four measures of 4/4 schottische music)
(joining right hands with partner, facing the opposite direction)
1b   Slide-cut-leap-hop forward, starting left, raising right to fourth on the hop
1b   Repeat, starting on right foot

1b    Slide left to side (1), close right to left (2), leap back onto left (&), slide right to side (3), close left to right (4)
1b    Repeat, starting on right foot, leaping forward

Lopp mostly agreed, though he had the final repeat also leaping backward, which I believe to have been an editing error, since his instructions are otherwise almost word-for-word from Gilbert, translated into French.

There are...some problems with this.

A Leap Year Ball, Nevada, 1880

Moving back to the frontier, specifically to Carson City, Nevada, this is my absolute favorite of my little collection of leap year ball descriptions.  The ball was held on Friday, January 30, 1880, and the description published in the Morning Appeal on Saturday, January 31, 1880.  It apparently went to press while the ball was still in progress, but that did not prevent it from being one of the lengthiest writeups of a leap year ball that I've yet found.

The absolute highlight of the article is the following of the same convention as at the 1892 Providence leap year ball: only the "escorted sex" got their outfits described.  In this case, that meant the men, the "gentlemanly belles".

But before getting to the funny part, let's look at the background.

A Leap Year Ball, Providence, 1892

Moving from the American frontier back to the east coast and into increasingly amusing descriptions of leap year events, here's a very upscale event held in Providence, Rhode Island, on Monday, February 29, 1892, and reported in The Providence News on Tuesday, March 1.  This was a much more glittering affair than the frontier balls in Montana and Wyoming.  According to the article, subscriptions to the ball cost $25 for eight invitations, and the German (cotillion) favors cost an estimated $900.  In today's terms, that is around $700 for the tickets and an eye-popping $25,000 for the favors, which were always an opportunity for conspicuous consumption among upper-class society.

The ball was held at the brand-new Trocadero (1891), which, according to Providence's inventory in 1980 for the National Register of Historic Places, was a restaurant and dancing parlor owned by local businessman Lloyd Tillinghast, who also provided the ball supper, served on "small and beautifully decked tables" by waiters brought in from Boston and New York.  The Trocadero no longer stands, alas.  Two bands were engaged: Reeves' Band and the "Hungarian band of New York", who alternated playing. 

Sadly, no dance list was included in the article, but the cotillion was described briefly:

Miss Goddard and Miss Gammell, who arranged the ball, led the cotillon.  At least eighty couples participated and the figures and the favors were greeted with equal admiration.  Flowers, ribbon bows and streamers, bells, odd bits of jewelry and bright-hued balloons were among them.

 

A Leap Year Ball, Wyoming, 1888

Continuing to roam around the late nineteenth century American frontier, where a surprising number of newspaper descriptions of leap year balls originate, here are some excerpts from a burbling account of a ball in the small town of Douglas, Wyoming.  Like Sun River, it was founded in 1867 and was probably extremely small.  The 1890 Wyoming census recorded only 2,988 people in all of Converse County.  The ball was described on page five of Bill Barlow's Budget on Wednesday, February 8, 1888, as having taken place the previous Friday evening.  The newspaper title is interesting; more about the paper and its colorful founder, Merris C. Barrow, may be found at the Wyoming Historical Society's Wyohistory site.

The ball was held at the Douglas opera house and was described as "the most successful and enjoyable affair of its kind in the history of Douglas."  Balls are generally described in newspapers as successful unless some sort of disaster occurs, but in a town whose history stretched back only two decades, it might actually have been true.

Leap year elements:

• the committees were all-female: five married women for invitations, five for reception, three unmarried and two married women for "floor", and two married women for finance (the ball had a $5 surplus)
• invitations were issued to ladies for "yourself and gentlemen"
• ladies "attended to every detail of the ball and supper"
• no gentlemen ("male biped") was allowed unattended on the floor
• a gentleman suggesting refreshments for his lady was given a "stony stare"

Wine, Tobacco, and Wallflower Angst

Here's something a little bit different: three of the Charles Dana Gibson drawings from his "In Leap Year" series, circa 1894.  The first two are not directly related to balls, but they show the leap year role reversal taken further than the norm, with the ladies actually drinking and smoking.  I'm fairly certain these are purely satirical...

IN LEAP YEAR.
THE GENTLEMEN LEAVE THE LADIES TO THEIR TOBACCO AND WINE.

A Leap Year Ball, Montana, 1876

On Monday, February 14th, 1876, the ladies of the frontier town of Sun River, Montana, held a leap year ball, as recorded a few days later in The Benton Record.  Sun River had been established less than a decade before, in 1867, and probably wasn't very large at the time -- the entire population of Montana was under 40,000 as of the 1880 census, and it had not yet been admitted to statehood.  According to Montana census records, the population of all of Chouteau County (which I believe Sun River was part of before Cascade County was split off) was 3,058 in 1880.

The frontier location is relevant: there apparently was, unsurprisingly, a surplus of men in the area, putting the women in a more powerful position regarding courtship and marriage than they might otherwise have enjoyed.  Women living in a small settlement in Montana were also probably strong characters to begin with; it wouldn't have been an easy life.

The article describing the ball was headlined "The Bells [sic] of Sun River" with subheadings including "Lady Beaux" and "How She Did It".

"A Leap-Year Ball", 1884

"Are you engaged?"

On Saturday, March 22, 1884, The Illustrated London News published a set of sketches of an imaginary leap year ball, accompanied by a short article on the topic.  The sketch above shows the central conceit of such a ball: gentlemen lounging on seats with their dance cards while the ladies move around asking them to dance.  Role reversal was the idea:

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.

Highland Glide

Photo: Andrew Trembley

The Highland Glide was the very last schottische given in M. B. Gilbert's Round Dancing (Portland, Maine, 1890).  It reappeared in George Washington Lopp's La Danse (Paris, 1903) under the name La Highland Glide (Schottisch).  The dance was created by Chicago dancing master C. A. Carr, who published sheet music advertising the dance, though the copy I have scans of does not include the dance instructions.  Part of the cover of the sheet music may be seen at left; click to enlarge.  It is dated 1890.  Carr advertised himself as the creator of the "popular" Carlton (a polka sequence which appeared in Gilbert and Lopp) as well as "famous" Newports (plural), by which I suspect he means he composed music for dancing the Newport, rather than the dance itself.  Gilbert and Lopp also credited him with the Ashland (another polka), Le Beau (a galop), and the America (a mazurka).

The Highland Glide follows the common "double" schottische pattern of four measures of slow steps followed by four of faster steps, the first part with minimal turning and the second turning continuously using the typical late-nineteenth century waltz-galop step (explained here).  The measure count presents a minor reconstruction issue, since the steps are notated by Gilbert and Lopp in 4/4, but the sheet music is notated in 2/4.  It is fairly obvious from the rhythm and tempo given that two measures of the sheet music are what Gilbert and Lopp considered a single measure.

A Ballroom Basilisk, 1897

I'm just going to leave this story here without any commentary.

Happy Halloween!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

GONE WITH A BASILISK.

A LURID SHORT STORY.

BY G. L. Calderon

Reginald passed his hand wearily over his aching brow, and glided languishing between the purple portières.  Within was a chaos of whirling muslin and hungry faces swimming on a sea of passionate, throbbing music.  There was a mist before his eyes; grinning heads floated restlessly by, gibbering in the shell-like ears of painted women.  Amid the fevered maelstrom, one figure loomed large and close upon his attention.  It was the hostess.  A hot wet hand pressed his.  “Law! what a squash!” he murmured in her ear, then plunged into the stream, and was borne away to the other side of the room.

Masquerade Prizes, St. Paul, Minnesota, 1882-1883

Once again, October is fancy dress ball, masquerade, and general costumed silliness month at Kickery!  

While digging through the Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers website at the Library of Congress for dance references, I came across an interesting announcement of a post-Easter masquerade ball held in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1883:

Masquerade Ball.
The union depot employes [sic] give a masquerade ball at Market hall on Tuesday evening next.  The remembrance of the great success of their ball last year will draw many new faces the current season.  There will be a grand street parade on Tuesday afternoon, which will be led by Prince Carnival and his cavaliers.  One of the features of the evening will be the awarding of the following prizes:

1. For the most graceful round dancing couple will be awarded the championship and two beautiful gold medals.
2. For the most elegantly dressed lady will be given a handsome silk plush dressing case.
3. For the most comic dressed lady will be given an elegant toilet set.
4. For the most elegantly dressed gent will be given a very rich hammered water pitcher set.
5. For the most comic dressed gent will be given a fine cut glass wine set.
6. For the best clown will be given a large cabinet mirror.
7. For the best masqued group, $10 gold piece.
8. For the most natural and complete animal masque, $5 gold piece.

The prince and princess will be appointed and are not entitled to a prize.

--- from The St. Paul Sunday Globe, Sunday Morning, April 1, 1883, p. 5, under "Social World"  (original page at Chronicling America)

The timing of this ball is interesting, as it took place nine days after Easter, which was on March 25th that year, rather than before Lent like a traditional Carnival event.  

More intriguing was that the ball incorporated a costume contest, which is something I don't recall seeing before, and something of a dance contest as well, with a prize for "the most graceful round dancing couple".

Lawn Tennis Quadrille (3 of 3)

Winding up my Lawn Tennis Quadrille mini-series (see here for the introduction and first figure and here for figures two and three), here are the final two figures.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Figure Four: The Double Pastourelle
Music: A=8b, B=40b, played A+ (BA x4)

8b   Introduction (not repeated)

4b   Six (along top/bottom of set) forward and back
4b   Two raise arms and side lady (on left) passes under; ladies cross to side gentlemen
4b   Six (along sides of set) forward and back
4b   Two raise arms and side lady (on left)  passes under; ladies cross to head gentlemen
4b   Six (along top/bottom of set) forward and back
4b  Two raise arms and side lady (on left)  passes under; ladies cross to side gentlemen
4b   Six (along sides of set) forward and back
4b  Two raise arms and side lady (on left) passes under; ladies return to original places
4b   All four ladies forward and back
4b   All four gentlemen forward and back
8b   All forward and back to partners and turn by two hands

Repeat all of the above as written once more.
Repeat all of the above twice more with side couples leading.

Lawn Tennis Quadrille (2 of 3)

Continuing my short series on Lawn Tennis (see here for the introduction and first figure), here are figure two and the very exciting figure three!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Figure Two: The Varied Chains
Music: A=8b, B=16b, played A+ (BA x4)

8b   Introduction (not repeated)

8b    Head couples turn to right diagonal, sides to left; right and left (chaîne anglaise)
4b   With same couples, half ladies' chain
(Pairs are now: 1st lady/3rd gent, 2nd lady/4th gent, 3rd lady/1st gent, 4th lady/2nd gent)
4b   All turn new partners
8b   All balance to corners and turn corners

8b    Head couples turn to left diagonal, sides to right; right and left (chaîne anglaise)
4b   With same couples, half ladies' chain
(Ladies are now opposite their original places)
4b   All turn new partners
8b   All forward and back at corners and turn corners

Repeat all of the above to bring ladies back to original places.