Waltzes, Newports, and Rackets: Common Movement Units in Late 19th Century American Couple Dance
(Susan de Guardiola)

The rapid explosion in published dances, dance sequences, and dance steps for the couple dance repertoire in America during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the practice of annotating such dances beat-by-beat and movement by movement (slide/glissé, leap/jeté, cut/coupé, etc.) leads to the conceptualization of variations in couple dancing of this era primarily as fixed, often lengthy, sequences of steps with weirdly colorful names: Eclair, Metropole, Antlers, Pasadena, Bronco, Manitou, etc. As a result, dance pedagogy in late nineteenth-century social dance can devolve into teaching historically insignificant sequences - dances, rather than dancing - which masks the substantial similarities among them and inhibits the development of partner connection and improvisational ability. Extracting and analyzing larger movement units employed by dancing masters across different couple dances and musical forms enables the isolation of common elements which, when taught as such, enable more effective development of high-level improvisational skill and the efficient mastery of the elaborately named choreographic sequences of the era. In this workshop, a selection of frequently-employed movement units will be taught and applied across several different dance forms, demonstrating how a relatively small repertoire of movements allows dancers to enjoy couple dancing to a wide range of music and to quickly understand and perform lengthier published dance variations.

Susan de Guardiola, New Haven, CT, USA:

Susan de Guardiola (BA, Yale; MSEd, University of New Haven) is an independent scholar in social dance history, an American resident in Russia. She has presented her work at conferences including the Dolmetsch Historical Dance Society Conference, the International Congress for Medieval Studies, and Stanford University Historical Dance Week. In 2013-2014 she conducted research at Harvard University as a New England Regional Fellow. Research interests include improvisation in social dance, the evolution of the ballroom repertoire over the course of the nineteenth century, and the development of American social dance from its European origins. Her teaching focuses on exploring and recreating both the skill sets and mindsets of the social dancers of the past. She publishes brief dance reconstructions and research excerpts online at Capering & Kickery (http:// www.kickery.com).