Playford Revisited
...and like that, circa 1710...
The Scots were a proud, canny and musical people, and the Scottish character in the faces of most who attended the dance, was manifest.
It was America of the opening decades of the twenty-first century: their surnames were an incomplete index to cultural identity. But the set of their jaws, the coloration of their faces, the way in which they carried their genetic endowment from dance figure to dance figure, gave an indication.
He would, from the corner of his eye, note the habits and relative grace of each of his dance colleagues and friends. For him, it was a matter of biological display, he mused silently, listening to Tom Spilsbury’s instruction.
As each new dance was introduced, the master experts referred to as “caller”, would mention in reverential tones, the names Playford and Sharp, and their contemporary cultural descendants when it came to local variants of certain dance moves.
There was “siding”, a classic Playford move in which partners or their surrogates, approached face to face in step with the music, brushed shoulders, but not quite, and retreated away in long lines.
Its recent variant called “Cecil Sharp, or ‘curly’ siding”, was a slight twist and turn accomplishing the same movements, and Tom would take a moment while looking directly at the ceiling over the tops of his glasses, as he illustrated with hand and arm gesticulation, to emphasize the move.
The crowd would be at ease watching, some swaying in sympathy as if encoding superficial muscle memory in real time, or eyeing their newest partner for a sign of her humor.
Tom would press his glasses back up the bridge of his nose, and glance over to Judy Meyers, the pianist and with his head movements, indicate to her and the fiddle player, the tempo he expected.
The lines would square themselves up, as habit for the experienced, directly glance across at their new partner and listen carefully.
Each dance began with a note or two, during which partners would assume deferential postures to “honor” their partners, and the real movement of limb and body would begin.
It was three years before he learned that although the woman’s honor posture seemed more acknowledgement, the man would extend one leg slightly and with as much grace as he could muster, foot turned outward with arms to the side, palms up, in a gesture of offertory.
Best foot forward as it seemed. Interesting, that the origin of the man’s honor display was to offer his most shapely leg, originally clad in a tight stocking that revealed contours, to his partner as a show of physical and metaphoric strength.
The dances gave ample opportunity for both partners to display and observe physical and psychological coordination, and their essential humor. In fact, dance was a mute image of personality that coordinated movement, coordination, grace and social intelligence.
***
It had been shocking a few years earlier, to discover in an obscure Georgetown archive, that a direct lineal antecedent and socially prominent inhabitant of N Street, had been a prime mover in the reestablishment of a Victorian dance society. This was motivated by the desire of the right sort of young men, to socially engage the right sort of young women in entertaining and colorful events staged in the dark season of the year.
Such dance forms as lancers, polka and waltz seemed to occupy the greater number of offerings on the formally printed ca. 1885 dance cards and musical programs, several of which had been preserved in an archive box entitled “A. A. Snyder, M. D.”.
Further, the organizing members of that extinct Georgetown Dance Society and its subscribers, were also found as hand written lists dating from the late 1880s and 1890s. Most interesting was a moth-eaten page bearing Arthur’s account of the founding of the society.
It was almost as if it had been foreordained more than a century later, that someone from the twenty-first century would come across these documents in one of the research trips he had indulged, in case the opportunity to see DC friends, materialized.
Perhaps in the cosmic scheme of things, there had been a plan to draw him toward Virginia, Georgetown and Anglicanism.
* * *
The venue Michelle had chosen for her classes, was Dumbarton House between 27th and 28th Streets and east of Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown. The brick Federalist mansion had been owned by the Society of Colonial Dames of America, an ancient and once revered association of the current generation of society women descended from the Founding Fathers.
The house was built on a tract patented in 1703, and likely begun in 1799 by Samuel Jackson and completed in 1805 by a federal officer named Joseph Nourse. It became a society headquarters in 1928, and opened to the public four years later during the Depression.
It was associated with Dumbarton Oaks, a massive tract of real estate on S Street and R Street in a region of the Greater DC vicinity, in an area where even tiny plots reached exorbitant land values.
The necropolis of Oak Hill Cemetery, 28th through 30th Street N.W. in Georgetown, in its plan of burial plots, resembles nothing so much as a butcher’s map naming cuts of meats superimposed on a beef carcass.
The relationship between that Victorian graveyard, the Dumbarton Oaks mansion, the botanical institute and the modern English Country Dance society associations around DC and Baltimore was…
(…to be continued…).