Dance: Breaking the Rules

DANCE: BREAKING THE RULES

Strictly Ballroom

The combination of a puritan sense of decency and a Victorian sense of decorum had kept dancing under strict social control in America for two hundred years. To be sure, the lofty European ballet and the antics of "theater people" were tolerated, but Americans in general did not appreciate expressive movement of the body. Until the late nineteenth century, the genteel upper classes considered dancing a "common" amusement, and the public dance halls that peaked in popularity in the first decade of the 1900s were most decidedly for the commoner sort.

The Waltz

The trend toward dining out and night-time entertainment that began in the Gilded Age of the late 1800s had a liberating effect on well-to-do sensibilities. By the turn of the century the annual charity cotilion had given way to the occasional private ball, and the ability to dance was a valued social grace. Still, the waltz (its face-to-face, semiembracing posture was no longer shocking, as it had been when first imported from Europe) was the favored step. Waltzing couples, after all, remained as formal on the dance floor as they did at the punch bowl, with the system of signing dance cards and "saving" dances assuring that partners changed often enough to prevent untoward intimacy.

Ragtime

But the increasingly syncopated beat of popular music inaugurated by ragtime tolled the end of formalism in American social dancing. Ragtime, which had originated in its modern form in the honky-tonks of black America, was now marketed nationally in sheet music and player-piano rolls by the song merchants of Tin Pan Alley. From 1900 on it was heard everywhere. Experimenting with the quick-moving two-step and the shuffle, whites of all classes attempted to emulate the dance steps of blacks as they moved to the "ragged" beat of the new music.

Youth Embraces the Dance Craze

Dancing had never been the pastime of the settled, sedentary older generations, and now young people were discovering attractions in dancing that their parents and grandparents had not: rhythm, expression—and bodily proximity. As a result, more people were dancing, in more places, and in more ways, than ever before. The popularity of the Pianola (the player piano) and the phonograph made dancing in the home an acceptable evening's activity (one print ad of 1906 encouraged young women to "Entertain the Boys" with an Edison Phonograph). Dancing could be done "out" on restaurant rooftop gardens and in hotel ball-rooms. The craze spread from big cities to small towns and filtered upward to young marrieds and even to the past-its-prime fortyish set. New dance steps proliferated: by 1907 "ragtime dances" like the one-step, the bunnyhug, the grizzly bear, and the turkey trot were giving palpitations to the dowagers of correctness, who had already been dealt a severe blow by the growing trend away from chaperon age. The dance craze reached its peak toward the end of the decade but would last well beyond it. By the time Irving Berlin's song "Everybody's Doin' It Now" came out in 1911, most of the youth of America had already been "doin'" ragtime dances for many years, and patterns of premarital social interaction had changed for good.

The Culture of the Cakewalk

The black musical spirit of the American South that gave birth to ragtime, the blues, and jazz has an accompanying dance history. African American dance culture originated in the sacred and secular dances of West Africa as well as in European tradition. Slave entertainments frequently involved dancing, and from those early expressions of joy, sorrow, or everyday concerns came the dances that would not only set white youth to "turkey trottin'" in the early part of the century but also to "rwistin'" in the 1950s and 1960s. Wringin' and twistin', the buzzard lope, the breakdown, and the pigeonwing all predated the ragtime era. But blacks also danced formally, in learned application of the customs of the dominant culture. Northern blacks of the middle and upper classes sponsored balls and cotillions that were as decorous and as elaborate as those of white society. Along with traditional set-and-figure dances was included—as it was in other areas of black culture like minstrel shows—the cakewalk, a formal, high-stepping movement in which couples paired up and promenaded to a slow but syncopated tune. The irony was never lost on blacks: the cakewalk, which had originated as a slave-time dance contest, was an open parody of the exaggerated mannerisms of southern white socialites. A double irony occurred when, thanks to the popularity of minstrel shows, the cakewalk was heralded as the nation's most fashionable dance from 1900 to 1904.

Theatrical Dance

Basic choreography was an important element in cabaret shows, vaudeville acts, and Broadway revues. Musicals such as Florodora (1900), light on plot and heavy on spectacle, were boxoffice bonanzas. Florodora, which featured the high-stepping Florodora Sextette, was so popular that a special train run called "The Florodora Express" deposited theatergoers in Manhattan in time for the curtain. In 1904 another musical, Piff! Paff! Pouf ! , presented a "Radium Dance," in which chorus girls in luminescent costumes jumped glowing ropes. George M. Cohan, the ultimate Broadway song-and-dance man, seldom resisted adding fancy footwork to the lighthearted plays he wrote, produced, and performed. In 1907 Florenz Ziegfeld presented the first of his "Follies," which starred magnificently clad young women trained in stage movement. Professional ballroom dancers were popular draws in cabarets because they introduced new dance steps. Maurice and Florence Walton, Joan Sawyer and Rudolph Valentino, and Bonnie Glass and Clifton Webb were some of the big names in ballroom dance during the decade.

From Delsartianism to "Dance of the Future."

Dance was gaining respectability as an art form as well. A field of study called expression (which included a mild form of gymnastic movement, pantomime, and dramatics) had been taught in the United States since the 1820s. Its most popular manifestation was "Delsartianism," named for François Delsarte (1811-1871) and promoted in the United States by actor-director Steele MacKaye (1842-1894). Delsartianism emphasized relaxation, naturalness, and flexibility and was embraced throughout the country by the middle and upper classes as a healthful form of physical culture. Delsartianism helped break down the puritanical and Victorian attitudes Americans had toward the body, but in spite of MacKaye's theatrical applications of the system, it remained essentially an amateur endeavor which, in performance, consisted of statue-posing to music.

"LADIES TEN CENTS, GENTLEMEN A
QUARTER"

America n youths of every economic class were "dance mad," but the brightly lit dance halls that proliferated in metropolitan areas in the early 1900s were especially popular with young adults of the working classes. For these unmarried men and women, who worked long, hard days and whose wages most often helped support parents and siblings, twenty-five cents or less was well worth the gala evening promised by the dance establishments. Admission to the large halls with their polished floors, lively music, and festive atmospheres meant a respite from the day's labor and the night's boredom. The chance to leave the confines of the family tenement and to spend the evening perfecting the latest dance step was also an opportunity to socialize with members of one's own age group—and of the opposite sex.

Ticket prices were always affordable, but commercial dance halls varied in respectability: some establishments were committed to orderly decorum and advertised lessons in the two-step and waltz, but others promoted more sexually expressive dance styles—often by distributing printed cards with suggestive illustrations—and some were actually brothels. In 1906 "pivoting" and "spieling" were at the height of their popularity; one early observer described the performance of the steps:

Julia stands erect, with her body as rigid as a poker and with her left arm straight out from her shoulder like an upraised pump-handle. Barney slouches up to her, and bends his back so that he can put his chin on Julia's shoulder and she can do the same by him. Then, instead of dancing with a free, lissome graceful, gliding step, they pivot or spin, around and around with the smallest circle that can be drawn around them.

Performances like Julia and Barney's were attacked because they seemed to lack the self-control and skill needed to achieve the more "proper" form of the waltz; and in fact, the pivot and spiel was a parody of that more genteel dance form. But gentility was no longer the order of the day, and the dance craze was only one more indication that the young generation would not be marching to the staid measures of tradition.

Duncan

Isadora Duncan (1878-1927) was the innovator who forged the Delsartian idea into an artistic dance form. Duncan, a native of San Francisco, spent much of her life in Europe, where her bohemian lifestyle and Marxist sympathies were more accepted. Nevertheless, her new theories of dance, as well as her progressive ideas on art in general, education, and women's issues, influenced American thought for decades. Duncan, who researched all her methods with painstaking care, emphasized the importance of individual expression in dance movement. She rejected the rigidity of classical ballet, although she incorporated ballet into her work and influenced its American future. She called for a dance form that united body and spirit in the manifestation of an "inner music" heard, Duncan suggested, only at the profound center of the being. An eclectic artist, she often based her choreography on literature or classical music, dancing barefoot in loose, flowing costumes. Despite Duncan's lack of popularity in the United States during her lifetime, America was never far from her thoughts. In the emotional culmination of her 1903 essay "The Dance of the Future," Duncan wrote, "I see America dancing.… dancing the language of our pioneers, the fortitude of our heroes … the justice, kindness, purity of our women.… When the Children of America dance in this way, it will make of them Beautiful Beings worthy of the name of Democracy. That will be America dancing."

St. Denis Americanizes an Art

Another product of American Delsartianism was Ruth St. Denis (1878-1968). Although she traveled and toured in Europe, St. Denis, who was more conventional in her personal life than Duncan, did most of her work in the United States. Like Duncan, she rejected the formalism of ballet while still using and influencing its forms, and she, too, devoted much time to academic research of the material that shaped her ideas. Although not the groundbreaker Duncan was, Ruth St. Denis is known as the second great pioneer of American dance.

Beliefs

St. Denis believed the dance to be above all a spiritual art. Drawn at first to Christian Science, St. Denis's also studied yoga and Eastern religious philosophies. It is perhaps a tribute to St. Denis's American sensibilities, however, that one of her most significant spiritual experiences was inspired by an advertising poster. She saw the poster, with its Egyptian motif, in a drugstore while on tour with the theatrical impresario David Belasco. The figure of the goddess Isis, she later wrote, was for her a "universal symbol" that inspired a vision of her next work. The resulting dance piece, finally set in India rather than Egypt, became Radha, which she performed to enthusiastic reviews in New York City in 1906. One of St. Denis's major contributions to dance in the United States was simply to popularize it. Her theoretical concerns, inner harmony and spiritual self-improvement, were compatible with American middle-class values. Even her interest in Eastern mysticism followed American thought back to the nineteenth-century transcendentalists. Her triumphant national tour, begun in 1909, enthralled audiences from Boston, Massachusetts, to Chico, California, and created enthusiastic acceptance for modern dance as an art form.

Tap

The purest American dance form to reach the level of art is tap. Developed in the 1800s by African Americans who combined traditional African dances with the Irish jig and the Scottish clog, the intricate figures of tap were perfected and professionalized in the early 1900s. Among the famous tap dancers of the decade were Willie Covan, who began his career before he turned five; Harland Dixon, of the vaudeville duo Dixon and Doyle; Ulysses "Slow Kid" Thompson; and the inimitable Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. In 1903 Thomas Edison made a twenty-one-minute film of professional tappers demonstrating time steps, breaks, the strut—and the popular cakewalk.

LOIE FULLER: BECOMING LIGHT

Loie Fuller's contribution to the dance, and to stage performance in general, is now largely forgotten. In the first decade of the century, however, she was at the apex of her influence; "La Loie" was the darling of Parisian society and a much-admired entertainer of European royalty.

Fuller (1862-1928) began her stage career as a child in Illinois. She performed on the temperance-lecture circuit and in vaudeville until the 1890s when, she recalled, she found a filmy, almost translucent silk skirt in a costume box. As she performed in the costume, lifting its voluminous folds about her body, the audience first whispered, then shouted, its various interpretations: "A butterfly!" "An orchid!" "A spirit!" Loie abandoned acting for dance. Her programs of simple motions and novel lighting effects became nationally famous, and by the turn of the century she was touring Europe.

Experimentation with light and color had become her chief artistic absorption, and, in Paris, Fuller's innovations brought audiences almost to the point of frenzy. For her "Fire Dance" she employed fourteen electricians who bathed the stage in an Impressionist palette of light. Of Fuller's performance (which she danced on a sheet of glass) one reviewer wrote, "luminous streams seemed to flow toward her. With the rhythm of the music the color changed … there was a kaleidoscopic vision. Violet, orange, purple, and mauve movements.… the hues of the rainbow … every fold [of her costume] had its tint and scheme of color intensified … until the eye could scarcely bear to look."

Fuller's experimentation with lighting led her to Marie Curie, whom she wrote shortly after the Curies' discovery of radium to inquire how to treat her wings with the substance. The scientist discouraged her. Fuller did, however, experiment with phosphorescent salts mixed with paint for luminescent effects and invented a workable process that was applied both in and out of the theater for many years.

Loie Fuller influenced Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis, both of whom saw her in Paris. Seeing Fuller perform, Duncan wrote in her memoirs, was magical: "Before our very eyes she turned to many-colored and shining orchids, to a wavering flowing sea-flower and at length to a spiral-like lily, all magic of Merlin … sorcery of flowing form. What an extraordinary genius.… She was one of the first original inspirations of light and changing color—she became light."

Sources:

Isadora Duncan, The Art of the Dance, edited by Sheldon Cheney (New York: Theatre Arts, 1928);

Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890-1930 (Westport, Conn.: Green-wood Press, 1981);

Katrina Hazzard-Gordon, Jookin': The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990);

Paul Magriel, Chronicles of American Dance (New York: Holt, 1948);

Thomas L. Morgan and William Barlow, From Cakewalks to Concert Halls: An Illustrated History of African-American Popular Music from 1895 to 1930 (Washington: Elliott & Clark, 1992);

Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter, Reformers and Visionaries: The Americanization of the Art of Dance (New York: Dance Horizons, 1979);

Ruth St. Denis, An Unfinished Life: An Autobiography (New York: Harper, 1939).