Dancers Break the Rules

DANCERS BREAK THE RULES

The Professional Dance World

During the 1910s most Americans thought of dance as amusement rather than art. Yet several events in the world of professional dance made headlines—and affected the evolution of dance traditions in the United States. Among them were the first American performances of Sergey Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1916 and the debuts of two great Russian ballet dancers, Anna Pavlova in 1910 and Vaslav Nijinsky in 1916. Moved by Pavlova's Dying Swan, parents dressed their daughters in tutus and sent them off to ballet school. Modern dance was also taking hold in the United States. The first American pioneer of this dance form, Isadora Duncan, spent most of the decade performing in Europe and South America, but she danced at the Century Theatre in New York City during the 1914 season and performed in New York City and San Francisco in 1917.

Denishawn

More significant than Duncan's contributions to modern dance during this era were those made by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. The New Jersey-born St. Denis (originally just Ruth Dennis) had spent the first decade of the century dancing in Broadway shows while developing her own exotic style based on Asian traditions. During the early years of the 1910s she toured vaudeville theaters performing dances with names such as Egypta and the Japanese O-Mika. Denver native Ted Shawn, who began dancing professionally in 1911, was a former theology student who, like St. Denis, believed that spirituality was expressed in movement. When the two met in 1914, each found a soul mate. Despite their age difference (she was thirty-seven and he twenty-three), they married and settled in Los Angeles, where in 1915 they established Denishawn, part school and part dance company, which emphasized the connection of mind, body, and soul. During their seventeen-year professional partnership, the couple choreographed dances that were performed nationally by Denishawn dancers. Some were distinctively American, with themes such as cowboys or industrial workers. More typical of their work, however, were their Oriental dance Serenata Morisca and the Aztec ballet Xochitl, both of which starred their student Martha Graham. (Doris Humphrey, who also became an important American dancer and choreographer, was another student.) Movie stars such as Lillian Gish went to Denishawn to learn mime skills or improve the grace of their movements. The proximity of Denishawn to Hollywood was fruitful. Ruth St. Denis choreographed the Babylonian ballets for D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916). Ted Shawn, who during the early 1910s had appeared in an Edison movie called The Dance of the Ages, danced around Gloria Swanson in Cecil B. DeMille's Don't Change Your Husband (1919).

Dance on the Popular Stage

Both St. Denis and Pavlova took their classical training to Broadway and vaudeville houses, where they drew large audiences. At one point Pavlova was dancing two performances a day at the five-thousand-seat Hippodrome Theater in New York City—and earning $8,500 a week, Elsewhere in vaudeville, the Mosconi brothers, Charles and Louis, delighted theatergoers by dancing halfway up the walls of the stage, while Percy Oakes drew gasps from his audiences when he spun his wife and partner, Pamela Delour, above his head. One version of Florenz Ziegfeld's Mid-night Frolic show was called "Dance and Grow Thin"; after the show was over, the audience could dance until 4 A.M. In the Ziegfeld Follies Fanny Brice's dancing spoofed Nijinsky's, while Vera Maxwell and Leon Errol performed a comic ballroom dance called "The Seasick Dip." The most popular of all dance acts was the husband-and-wife team of Vernon and Irene Castle, who performed their "Castle Walk" and other new syncopated steps based on the rhythms of ragtime on Broadway and in the movies. More important—through the dance clubs they opened, a national contest they headlined and judged, and instructions they gave in magazines—they encouraged Americans to get out onto the dance floor. The Castles' clean-cut image also legitimized public performance of many new dances that had been branded immoral. In October 1913 the magazine Current Opinion noted that "people who have not danced in twenty years" were doing so again and reported that "up-to-date restaurants provide a dancing floor so that patrons may lose no time while the waiter is changing the plates."

Dance Clubs and Bands

All across the country restaurants hired dance bands. In New York there were dozens of such places: Bustanoby's, where the house band was initially conducted by operetta composer Sigmund Romberg (who also played ragtime piano with the band); Louis Martin's Café de l'Opéra on Broadway, in whose floor show the Castles had gotten their first American notices; Reisenweber's on Columbus Circle; Murray's on Forty-second Street; Lee Shubert's Palais de Danse; the Jardin de Danse, on the top floor of Marcus Loew's New York Theatre; and the Castles' own Castle House on Forty-sixth Street, where the all-black band of James Reese Europe played. Europe—who cowrote two of the Castles' best-known dance tunes, "The Castle Walk" and "Castle House Rag"—became the first African American bandleader to make a record when his band was featured in a series of dance records released by Victor in 1914. The many dance-music records made during the 1910s gave a crucial commercial boost to the relatively new recording industry and allowed Americans who did not live in major cities to hear music and dance to it at home.

THE "ANIMAL DANCES"

During the middle years of the 1910s, all across the United States—in restaurants and clubs, in contests, at parties, and at home—ordinary people jogged, hopped, and otherwise moved in strange new ways to dances with extraordinary names. Most were named for animals—presumably the creatures dancers resembled when performing the steps. The now-well-known fox-trot was only one of a menagerie of what critics (who thought them immoral) called "animal dances." There were also the grizzly bear, the bunny hug, the turkey trot, the camel walk, the lame duck, the crab step, the kangaroo dip, the fish walk, and the snake.

Sources:

Irene Castle, as told to Bob and Wanda Duncan, Castles in the Air (New York: Da Capo Press, 1958).

Sources:

Ronald L. Davis, A History of Music in American Life: Volume II, The GildedYears, 1865-1920 (Huntington, N.Y.: Robert Krieger, 1980);

Joseph H. Mazo, Prime Movers: The Makers of Modern Dance in America (New York: Morrow, 1977);

Waiter Terry, The Dance in America, revised edition (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).