Susan at the Ridgewood Duck Pond working out the dance list for the ball. (Just kidding!) Illustration by Charles Dana Gibson.
The ballroom was dominated by two round (turning) dances: the waltz and the two-step. Some dance cards of the era are nothing but an alternating list of these two dances. The polka was mainly dismissed as "vulgar", but the schottische survived and was most often found in its incarnation as the Barn Dance, also known as the Military Schottische.
Quadrilles remained very popular, including many variations on the Lancers quadrille. Our National Two-Step Lancers was composed by midwestern dancing-master A.C. Wirth and published in 1902. Few contra dances appear, but the Virginia Reel and Spanish Dance remain.
Opportunities for silliness in the ballroom include mixer dances like the Round Two-Step as well as quadrille figures such as The Cheat and The Flirt.
Finally, from England came the new trend of sequence dances, short sequences of moves repeated by all the dancers in unison, A few of the myriad sequence dances were the Veleta, St. George Waltz, Rye Waltz, and the Sousa-inspired Washington Post.
--- Susan de Guardiola