Having longed to dance and envied those who could, 
and after a couple of unhappy attempts at modern
ballroom dance lessons in a commercial studio, Bob and Mary happened upon Vintage Dance, a term coined by Stanford University dance historian and teacher Richard Powers to describe the social dances from the mid-Victorian era (1850s) through the Ragtime era (late 1910s). We’d seen a church friend dancing at a Traditional Jazz festival, and she told us about a Hartford dance teacher, Marc Casslar, who held six weeks of classes, followed by a ball. He repeated that same cycle would be repeated three times a year, allowing us to experience dances from three eras: 1860s, 1890s, and 1910s.
What appealed to us about Vintage Dance was its social nature: unlike many modern ballroom dancing programs, it was oriented strictly toward socializing and enjoyment, rather than competition. Participants learned the waltz, foxtrot, one-step or dozens of quadrilles for the pure fun of it. We dressed up in period costume (or whatever approximations we could come up with), and rotated among many different partners a - clever dance teacher technique that speeds up the learning process while helping salvage relationships between partners whose frustration during the learning process might take a sad toll on the relationships themselves!
After a couple of years we felt confidant enough to begin attending weekend dance workshops conducted by the likes of Richard Powers, and ventured away from the “safe” confines of Hartford to scary places like Cincinnati and Boston, where we made many good friends among the members of the Commonwealth Vintage Dancers (CVD).
For nearly three decades, CVD members have organized the Newport Vintage Dance Week, held initially on the beautiful ocean-side campus of Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island. For the past ten years, it’s been held at the lovely Portsmouth Abbey School, about nine miles north of Newport on Narragansett Bay. In 2009, the dance week at Roger Williams College in Bristol, still within reasonable driving distance of Newport. This remarkable and fun week includes daily dance classes, evening balls - several in Newport “cottages” such as the Astors’ Beechwood - and other programs and trips.
Over the years we’ve also attended Vintage Dance weeks in Cincinnati and San Diego, Prague and Vienna. And every spring we spend a lovely weekend in the gorgeous Victorian town of Cape May, dressing up and dancing at the Hotel Chalfonte. By far the most spectacular ball we’ll probably ever attend was the millennial ball in Paris in 2000.
Bob and Mary now dance with Triangle Vintage
Dance,
a Vintage Dance group in Durham, North
Carolina, who hold weekly dance classes, demonstrate Victorian and Ragtime dances at public and private events, and put on
a beautiful Country Ball once each year.
For many years, Bob produced Vintage Dance Events, an e-newsletter which listed and described various balls and workshops held throughout North America (and occasionally Europe). Distributed online to about 600 dancers worldwide, it ceased publication in 2008.
F
or more information about Vintage Dance, check out the following sites:
photo copied from the Blah Blah