AUTUMN DANCES

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 72, 18 December 1928, Page 53 (Supplement)

AUTUMN DANCES

Style versus Step

Features of the New Season

Shorter dances, a smaller programme, and quieter dancing, w’ith an occasional break-through into the gay and prancing past of barn dance and polka—that is about how dancing will run this autumn, writes a correspondent in the London “Observer.” Walta and foxtrot—two versions of the latter, a fast step and a slow step, for the sophisticated—will see the average dancer through quite comfortably; but the enthusiast will need, in addition, blues and tango.

I say nothing of the one-step, for a number of the best bands are dropping it out. Since my return to town I have danced at a number of wellknown clubs and restaurants for -a couple of hours or more without once meeting a one-step. It is, after all, unsuited to latter-day ballroom conditions. The middle-aged and elderly people who compose so large a proportion of the clientele of. the fashionable dance places find the fastest of all modern dances too exhausting. They prefer a merry interlude in which they can let themselves go and forget good dance form—as the jazz age understands it—in one of the prancing old dances which to the modern generation look as quaint as a topper of the ’nineties. The New Dances. There are, of course, new dances. No lack of them! The Rhythm Step, Baltimore, Sugar-Step, Heebie-jeebies, and Tile Trot head the list. One or two are old friends from last season, dished up again now because the course was unanimously passed when offered before. But the dance teachers have adopted a new attitude toward them. Instead of foolishly announcing them as “all the rage”—as, indeed each one was, in the studio of its inventor —in the hope of starting a rush to the academies to acquire the latest fashion, they list them usually as “trial” dances now, 4as distinct from the standard dances Which everyone knows and does. This is wise. That section of the public which periodically pays its two guineas for five lessons from an expert was becoming a little tired of acquiring “the latest step,” and then searching the ballrooms in vain for an opportunity of practising it. The new policy of the more intelligent teachers is to reduce the standard dances to a minimum, and concentrate on imparting' the subtle secrets of style to pupils who already know the steps, but don’t feel at ease when dancing. The Foxtrot and its Age. Style is, indeed, the whole secret of good dancing and of pleasure in dancing. It is lamentably absent from the modern ballroom. The average dancing at Hunt and County balls is more than deplorable—it is terrible. And yet the fact that latter-day dancing is derived from negroid jazz does not in the least mean that its execution must inevitably resemble the awkward antics of simians in the jungle. On the contrary, it can be made a thing of machine-like precision and beauty—if one appreciates the beauty of flexible machine motions and the ineffable elegance of long lines. See a really good dancer caught by the slow-motion camera in the movements of foxtrot or up-to-date waltz, and you perceive a miracle of balance and control, a lovely pattern of long, free, graceful swings, a lithe dance in the spirit of the age. Detractors of the foxtrot are too fond of separating the dance from its age and comparing it—to its disadvantage—with the graces of a bygone day. A foxtrot may look foolish in the painted halls of Versailles, but imagine a minuet in a skyscroper! . . . The quick foxtrot, played at around 56 bars a minute, and in any case never under 50, dominates the dance scene. The average dancer can do almost anything to this music, and most do the foxtrot. But the practised dancer fits some foot-straddling, too —when they have a partner sophisticated enough to grasp what is going on and agile enough to play this deft dance game, to the fast music the set of steps known as the quickstep. Professionals and very keen young men go in for ordinary fast foxtrot, merely slowing down their steps for the “glow-step”