Reflection by Alena Shmakova
On the 3rd and 4th of August, Inch House Community Centre hosted a weekend of historical dancing from the Victorian period (1838-1901), led by USA-based expert Susan de Guardiola. Historical or early dance is a dance style based on written descriptions from earlier periods, as opposed to reconstructing dances from the 1920s, when video recordings became possible. It is a practical aspect of dance history when researchers and enthusiasts interpret the instructions of the dancing teachers of the past. The Edinburgh Victorian weekend featured two main activities: a costumed tea dance with live music by Matthiew Shiel on Saturday evening, which was a cooperation with fashion history lovers; and a workshop on Sunday titled A Bridge across the Sea, which focused on couple dances of continental origin that were popular in Scotland during Queen Victoria’s long reign.
Historical detour
Inch House has been a venue for several historical dance events since 2022, aligning with its rich history as a country house dating back to the sixteenth century. There is something special when the events bring period dances back to the walls (and floors) that likely witnessed them when they were first performed in Scotland. Inch House contains many Victorian period features due to its last major rebuilding in the 1890s, including wood panelling, bay windows and a magnificent double staircase leading to the Large Drawing Room, now known as the Main Hall. Drawing rooms were typically the biggest rooms in private houses and were often used for dancing. This tradition is reflected, for example in the influential mid-nineteenth century dance manual La Danse des Salons (Dance of the Drawing-Rooms) by the popular Parisian dancing master Henry Cellarius (1805–1876), whose father immigrated to France from the area near Stuttgart. Cellarius popularised and adapted for European fashionable society traditional couple dances from Central and Eastern Europe such as polkas and mazurkas; the coupled dance version of the latter was even called Cellarius Waltz. Louis Antoine Jullien (1812-1860), another French-born composer and orchestra leader, was one of those who brought continental flavours to Scotland. He visited Glasgow and Edinburgh with annual concerts between 1842 and 1859 and occasionally conducted balls. His ‘promenade concerts’ are predecessors of today’s Prom concert series.
Jullien composed and played popular music, including polkas, mazurkas, waltzes and quadrilles. Some of Jullien’s dance pieces can be found in music collections in Scottish country houses such as Newhailes in Edinburgh and Drum Castle in Aberdeenshire. Other cultural ambassadors bringing continental fashion to Scotland were also dancing masters. They often attended dancing schools of successful French colleagues to bring the most fashionable dances back home to complement country dances, reel and Highland dances, which were a traditional part of the dancing schools and ballroom repertoires, especially in the countryside. Examples of ball programmes from Scotland from the 1890s indicate a mixed repertoire of country dances, reels, quadrilles, polkas, waltzes, schottisches, etc. Similar mixes were remembered by the interviewees in Fletts’ Traditional Dancing in Scotland (1964).
Current affairs
Victorian Tea Dance in Inch House on Saturday evening was a modest affair compared to the events associated with the programmes above. It was envisaged as an introduction and as a Ceilidh with a Victoriana twist, rather than a Grand Ball. Susan de Guardiola compiled a dance programme similar to the period ones, including quadrilles, schottisches and country dances. However, it was shorter to allow time to learn dances as most attendees had little experience. Afternoon tea-style refreshments, the tradition popularised in the Victorian period, were served during the break, followed by a talk by Olha Kryzhanivska about her experience of recreating and wearing costumes from the nineteenth century and a display of her collection of original pieces, including corsets, jewellery, hats, etc. The atmosphere was friendly and welcoming, aiming for people to mix and explore history through bodily experiences, including costumes, music and dancing.
Victorian-era dancing style is simple overall, and most movements are walking-like. More complicated Scottish favourites of continental origin were taught at the Sunday workshop, including La Varsovienne (or as it was called in Scotland, La Va), polka, waltzing and Highland Mazurka, which was invented by David Anderson (c.1850-1911), a dancing master who worked predominantly in Dundee and the surrounding area. Anderson’s Ballroom Guides, again from almost 150 years ago, were used to teach people the art of dancing.
Anderson’s Guides were not the only ones that were used, however. De Guardiola has been researching and collecting dancing manuals for decades, possessing one of the largest private collections of dance treatises, which allows her to analyse the instructions to determine similar patterns and highlight regional differences. Her research also helped her to invent her own method of teaching Victorian-era couple dances by showing the structural elements of the dance (similar to Figures in country dances) and combining them to ‘improvise’, following nineteenth-century ballroom practices. Such a method is unlikely to be identical to that of the nineteenth-century dance teachers. However, it helps to build the network of movements in the learners’ brains, that would have been known to most of the nineteenth-century dancers, starting from the simple gallop and stringing hops, cuts and turns as beads, to making them into schottisches, polkas, La Va or Highland mazurka. We learnt about ten dances and variations in roughly three hours, and although the steps were easy, rounds of gallops, polkas, and Highland mazurka were a great cardio to start Sunday morning.
Acknowledgements
The organisers are grateful to Inch House Community Centre for their continuous support and to Creative Scotland for the funding provided through Tasgadh (Traditional Arts Small Grants) for the opportunity to bring Susan de Guardiola’s expertise and knowledge to a Scottish audience. Alena Shmakova was the main organiser of the weekend.
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This reflection is published by Traditional Dance Forum of Scotland as part of our Traditional Dance Criticism Course, led by dance writer and editor Róisín O’Brien and supported by dance scholar and editor Dr Wendy Timmons.
Alena Shmakova was one of the six applicants, alongside Yuxi Jiang, Catherine Coutts, Vassia Bouchagiar-Walker, Inesa Vėlavičiūtė and Yanmei Bowie, who were selected to participate in this pilot edition of the course in 2024.
A Bridge across the Sea was held at Inch House Community Centre, Edinburgh 3-4 August 2024 as part of International Festival Fringe. It was one of the shows and events with trad dance roots across the Edinburgh’s summer festivals we hand-picked to review. Images courtesy of Alena Shmakova.
