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An Autumn Leaf Dance
IN the fall, after school has opened, some class often likes to give a reception to the entering class. An autumn leaf dance in October is the prettiest kind of one to have.
Decorate the school hall with branches of scarlet and yellow maple leaves, or deep red and russet oak boughs.
For the dance programs make covers from water-color paper cut and painted to look like oak or maple leaves. The inside pages can be of thin white paper in the same shape.
Attach little red pencils.
Plan one autumn leaf dance in which each girl receives a wreath of autumn leaves from her partner. For refreshments have orange or raspberry ice with vanilla ice-cream, and serve it on plates covered with leaf-shaped paper doilies. [36] A
A short, practical page: a school dance in October, decorated with branches, with a leaf theme carried into the programmes, the favours and the ice. It assumes one piece of social machinery that has disappeared.
- The dance programme is a booklet, not a leafletFor the dance programs make covers... Attach little red pencils. A dance programme listed the numbered dances with a blank beside each for a partner to sign his name, which is why it needed inside pages and a pencil tied to it. Without knowing that, the leaf-shaped covers and the attached pencils make no sense.
- The craft is simple and the materials are currentWatercolour paper cut to the shape of an oak or maple leaf and painted, with thin white sheets inside. Everything named is still sold in an art shop, and the method — cut the silhouette first, paint second — is the right order.
- Branches, not loose leavesThe page says branches of maple or boughs of oak, and that is the practical detail. Cut leaves curl and drop within a day; a branch in water, or even dry, holds its leaves long enough for an evening and reads from across a hall as colour rather than as litter.
- One scripted gesture holds the evening togetherPlan one autumn leaf dance in which each girl receives a wreath of autumn leaves from her partner. A single named dance with an instruction attached is what turns a hall full of people into an occasion, and it works because somebody announced it. The book assumes an organiser with the authority to tell everyone what to do.
- The refreshment is two things served togetherA fruit water ice — orange or raspberry — with vanilla ice cream beside it on the same plate. The contrast of a sharp ice with a plain cream is the whole idea, and it needs no sauce, no garnish and no further work.
- Everything unstated was standardThe page gives no music, no timings, no guest list and no supper. A school dance was a known form, so the author supplies only the theme and leaves the rest to a committee that had been to one.
The occasion is a reception given by one class for the class entering below it: an initiation dressed as a welcome, organised by students for students. What it tells us is how settled the form was. A mixed dance with programmes, partners and numbered dances needed no explanation to the reader, and the courtesies were built into the choreography — each girl is presented with a wreath by her partner, at a prearranged moment, as part of the evening’s plan. The labour, meanwhile, is paper and scissors and a few branches, which is what a committee of schoolgirls could produce in a week without money.