I seem to recall that you all were working on a quadrille that had the dancers going in and shouting "fire, fire, fire." I just got a copy from Denmark of Henry Ford's Early American Dances on 2 CDs. One dance is "Fireman's Dance, Circle Quadrille, With Calls" and seems similar to what you were working on.
Is it possibly the same?
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Oh no! The dance that will not die!
The one we did was called Fireman's Schottisch, Dedicated to the Protector Fire Company No 3 of North Bridgewater, Massachusetts, composed by A.Reynolds. Jr. in 1859. We didn't do it as a quadrille, but rather as a circle of six or so couples.
You might also be interested in another dance we did, called the Patty Cake! - Polka Caracteristique, by J.H. Mc Naughton, published in 1860. Dance Discovery did the "usual" Patty Cake Polka to it, but the music was quite different.
M
E
Well the dance said "circle quadrille" -- a bit of an oxymoron IMHO. The music doesn't seem to be a schottische. I'll have to let you hear it sometime.
Isn't the "patty cake polka" a modern dance? Great for beginners though. I've seen the music for the 1860s tune, I think through the library of congress website.
The Fireman's Schottisch--oh the memories. The music and the directions are somewhat oxymoronic. It's called a Schottisch, but the dance instructions kept calling for a polka. It was a great source of "fun" during practice. Is it a polka or a schottisch or a march? One last thing:
FIRE BOYS! MAN THE ROPES BOYS! BURN THAT DANCE BOYS!
Actually, the music for the Fireman's Schottische is all schottische, except for the shortish galop section, which is mostly chassees, right? When we first started rehearsing it, someone had decided that one of the schottishe sections should be a polka, but that idea was gradually abandoned when neither the music nor the dance lended itself to any polka-ing. It is also not in the sheet music, though the galop is. Since galops are often done to fast polka music, I can see where the idea might have come from.
At some point it occurred to me that the "STEP step step hop" of the schottische is not unlike the "hop-STEP step step" of a polka. The step in a Schottische or Polka from the man's perspective is LEFT right left, (hop left), RIGHT left right, (hop right), LEFT right left, etc. If you just took the hops out (and the extra beat), you would be waltzing! There's a different timing and styling for schottische, polka and waltz, of course, but it looks to me as if people were doing basically the same footwork in social dance throughout much of the second half of the nineteenth century. That must have made it easier to learn each new dance!
During those big long right hand turns in the chorus, we were doing the "hop-STEP step step" of a polka and not the step, step, step, hop(the music is running thru my head as I type this--aaarrrggghhh). But you are right that when the dance instructions called for a "polka" we didnt do the aforementioned stepping but just the schottisch step in ballroom hold. The confusing thing was that some people kept calling it a polka because of the ballroom hold and I remember at one point half the people were hop-step-steping and others were step-step-hopping. And each was telling the other to do it the other way around! Oh man it makes me laugh. I still cant believe we pulled that dance off.
So I guess that sort of makes 4 dances in one. Grand March, Schottisch, Polka and Gallop. And dont forget about cheating on the setting so we end ready to schottisch/polka/whatever on the right--I mean correct--foot.
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