Fifty years...
/“Fifty years ago”…
It used to be I could hear that phrase and muse along with the narrator of whatever news article or history blog I was reading, muse what life was like “fifty years ago.”
Now, of course, I hear “fifty years ago” and wonder what I was doing on that day.
We’ve already passed the 50th anniversary of my attending the Georgia Governor’s Honors Program, which changed my life forever. (See also…)
Now we’re getting into some serious anniversaries. Fifty years ago I was starting my senior year at the University of Georgia. I met the lovely Virginia Henninger in costume design class. And in December of that year, Jennifer Jenkins and I traveled to Washington, D.C. to do research for the UGA Period Dance Group’s program for the Bicentennial: Six Inaugural Balls.
The Period Dance Group was an invention of some grad students in Dr. Jackson Kesler’s new course, Period Dress, Manners, & Movement. In the class, they developed the theory that if actors learned to perform social dances from historical periods — and then performed them in costume — then when they were cast in a period show, they would have some inkling of how their movement would be affected by their costume before it arrived. (For those not in the know, costumes don’t usually show up until about a week before opening, and if you’ve never worn a corset or paniers or a ruff, it can be an adjustment.)
This is the actual Period Dance shirt!
For our first two years we performed those social dances in a program called Five Centuries of Dance, from the 16th century to the 20th: the galliard, the gavotte, the minuet, the waltz, the tango, et al. Our audiences would be seated around the room as if they were at the social gathering themselves, and each cast had a blast inventing personae and business/gossip/flirting to create the high class ambience we reveled in. It was fun.
Then for the nation’s Bicentennial, we decided to present the inaugural balls of Washington, Madison, Jackson, Lincoln, Cleveland, and Coolidge.
Why these? Mostly because of the First Ladies’ gowns as exhibited in the Smithsonian. Those, along with actual dance cards/programs from the balls, were our goal, and we achieved it. We were given entree into the Smithsonian’s files and to the White House library. “Just take the tour,” we were told, and just before the exit we’d see a door on our left. Just tell the guard you’re expected and he’ll let you in. Which he did. If you can imagine such a thing.
Here, go look at our official website, which I created years after the UGA Period Dance Group was long gone. Be warned, it is a creature of its time, i.e., the mid-1990s, and all the links are graphics. The two groups of photos are Five Centuries of Dance and Inaugural Balls. Have fun exploring!
All of this was triggered by finding the Period Dance shirt in my closet, which got me to thinking about other significant events whose anniversary might be coming up sooner than later. There’s our wedding, of course, in a couple of years, and then the actual reason for this post popped into my head: A Christmas Carol.
The connection between period dance and christmas carol, if you needed one: fred’s waltz (and fezziwig’s country dance)
I was a bit dazzled to realize that this year, 2025, is 45 years since members of the Newnan Community Theatre Company decided I needed to make a musical out of Dickens’s classic, one that we could pull out every year like dance companies do Nutcracker. And that means that it’s only five years until Christmas Carol will be 50. Wow.
If you’re a theatre practitioner and your company wants a short and sweet adaptation for your holidays, I highly recommend mine. Only one act, almost all the text is straight from the book, and the “Finale” rocks. Now is the time to start planning for 2027 and beyond, after all.
The best part? It’s free. It will be my gift to you and your theatre: No royalties, no fees. Hit me up.
(Apologies for this post turning into one of those recipe blogposts where the author natters on and on about irrelevant details before they get to the actual thing you were interested in cooking.)
