The dance The Opera appears in the book A New Academy of Compliments Or, The Lover’s Secretary, printed in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1795, which contains dance descriptions on four of its 144 pages. There are a couple of odd things about its appearance in that book. For one thing, it appears twice in the book, with two different descriptions, two pages apart, that seem to be describing the same dance. For another, it seems to be based closely on the dance The Opera, or The Ape’s Dance that appears in Playford’s Dancing Master as far back as 1675, and also appears in a dance manual from 1719.