Dance

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DANCE

Dance played a vital role in the new American nation, as the country struggled to unite and assimilate its diverse cultural, ethnic, and racial traditions into a new "American" identity. As the nation transformed throughout the early national period, dance styles shifted to keep pace with rapidly changing ideas about social relationships and cultural aesthetics.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, the dancing assemblies of the elites in both Philadelphia and Savannah issued extensive guidelines for their members. The elites' organized balls and assemblies proceeded according to social status and strict rules of etiquette. Evenings began with the French minuet, a slow, delicate dance led by the highest-ranking couple present. As the evening progressed, couples enjoyed French quadrilles, Scottish reels, and English jigs. Indeed, by the mid-eighteenth century, social dancing had become much more than a simple pastime in which participants worried only about mastering the steps. It had evolved into a complicated ritual that could indicate who did or did not "belong."

Dancing manuals had been a staple of colonial society, including The Art of Dancing (1715) and The Compleat Country Dancing-Master (1731). These manuals contained every kind of dance, from jigs to cotillions to minuets, and they featured intricate diagrams to guide readers through the steps. Dancing schools in Massachusetts, South Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Maryland trained pupils in the most fashionable French and English dances. Letters and diaries of the colonial period record the colonists' love of dancing.

dancing in everyday life

While balls and assemblies entertained the colonies' wealthiest citizens, many Americans enjoyed less formal celebrations. Almost any public occasion offered an excuse for dancing, including weddings, court days, barn raisings, corn shuckings, harvest festivals, and market fairs. Country (or "contra") dances were the favorites, because unlike the minuet, rigadoon, or jig, they required less intricate steps and could be learned more easily. The dances held at weddings and fairs reflected the musical traditions of a wide range of ethnic and regional backgrounds (rather than what was popular in the courts of Europe). While the governor and his lady might dance to the music of an orchestra, a country wedding might feature a fiddle, a flute, a fife, or even a bagpipe for accompaniment.

revolutionary transformation

The Revolution brought a reduction (though not a complete cessation) in the young country's craze for dancing. While resolutions passed by the Continental Congress in 1774 and 1778 tried to discourage any luxurious entertainments that might distract citizens from the war effort, occupying British forces in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere frequently staged balls for the entertainment of their officers and American Loyalists.

In the wake of the Revolution, many colonists tried to reestablish the traditions and pastimes the war had interrupted. Yet they met with opposition from those who categorized such entertainments as too "European" for American sensibilities. However, dancing was too much a part of the social fabric of the nation to be easily eradicated. Dancing schools reopened throughout the new nation, many of them run by actors seeking extra income, or even by French refugees from the Haitian rebellion. Dancing masters created a demand for their instruction by hosting public balls; one even bragged in a 1791 newspaper advertisement that he would "take the opportunity of shewing the improvement of his scholars by a double Minuet … and several new Cotillions" (Bond, p. 10).

professional dance

By the 1790s, professional dancers played in theaters as well as dancing schools. While most plays featured some kind of dance (a minuet or cotillion or jig) as part of the performance or as an entr'acte (between acts), as a growing number of dance artists came to the United States, dancing occupied a greater and greater share of the theatrical repertoire, ranging from John Durang's solo hornpipes to elaborate pantomime ballets such as Les deux chasseurs, presented at the Holliday Street Theatre in Baltimore on 19 August 1795. Theater managers cleverly incorporated patriotic themes into dance performances, celebrating the Fourth of July or the anniversary of a major battle. Professional dance continued to expand until the advent of America's own native stars in the mid-1830s.

alternate traditions

While the development of American dance owed much to its heritage from England, Ireland, Scotland, and France, other traditions shaped the nation's dance history as well; perhaps African American culture had the most significant impact of these. Historians have chronicled the preservation and transformation of African dance rituals from Catherine Market in New York, to the rural plantations of the South, to Congo Square in New Orleans.

After a number of eighteenth-century slave uprisings, African Americans were prohibited from using drums in their performances, so they evolved new styles of dancing (including tap, where the percussive rhythm mimics the telegraphic beat of the drum) and incorporated new instruments, including the banjo and the "bones" (usually pig bones, used as a kind of rattle or percussive instrument). One of the most widespread performances was known as the juba, an African-inspired dance that used the entire body to create rhythmic variations, often by "patting" parts of the body or stamping the feet. Slaves on the plantation might incorporate "Patting Juba" into a corn-shucking ritual, a Christmas holiday, or harvest celebration.

In 1819, the architect Benjamin Latrobe described the dancing he witnessed among the slaves and free blacks in Congo Square as, "a moving hieroglyph that appears, on the one hand, informal and spontaneous, yet on closer inspection, ritual and precise." Latrobe's recognition of the "ritual" in African dance was, in many ways, ahead of its time. As blackface minstrels appropriated African American culture in the 1820s, many of the dances lost their original significance.

new styles

The nineteenth century introduced a dance that scandalized the young nation: the waltz. Writing in 1827, future president John Tyler described it to his daughter as a "dance which you have never seen, and which I do not desire to see you dance. It is rather vulgar I think" (Marks, p. 74). Unlike the sprightly jigs or dainty minuets that kept partners at arms' length, the waltz involved close and sustained personal contact. As the dance historian Joseph E. Marks III has suggested, the new styles of dancing "characterized the age of the common man…. They were wild, reckless, daring" (Marks, p. 76).

As young men and women crowded into urban centers seeking employment, as they stepped out of the shelter of their family homes to taste life in the wicked city, many older adults feared that a dance which allowed men to put their arms around the waists of unmarried women would result in the downfall of civilized society. And as working-class audiences poured into theaters to witness minstrel shows and dances, the cultural traditions of Africa, England, Scotland, Ireland, and France finally merged on the popular stage, completing over a century's worth of transformation.

See alsoAfrican Americans: African American Life and Culture; Theater and Drama .