POPULAR TEA DANCES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19965, 6 December 1926, Page 12

POPULAR TEA DANCES

A CHANGED OUTLOOK. The day may be coming when dancing at tea time will be as settled a habit as dancing at night—when hostesses will not leave their tea guests to amuse themselves by the half-forgotten art of conversation. The thought occurred to ine when I was shown a charity organiser’s dance list for the autumn and winter season (writes Patrick Chalmers in the Daily Mail). It contained an astonishing number of tea dances; big affairs at fashionable hotels, about which the world will hear, and little private affairs, about which the world will not hear, but which will gather from 20 to 50 people and yield a return for some worthy cause. This is only one side of the whole tea dance vogue. But it gives a sort of bird’s-eye view of an interesting new phenomenon. Tea dances used to be considered unnecessary, and even a bore. People said: “If we are going to dance, let’s dance i t the evening. Who wants to dance at 4 o’clock?” The answer today is that any number of pepole want to dance at 4 o’clock, irrespective of what they are doing in the evening. The whole outlook on dancing has changed, however —and tea dances have changed, too. - They used to be “an affair/ like a dinner dance, or just any dance. It was considered necessary to send out cards for them, to make .arrangements, to put on best frocks, to hire a band, to reproduce all the paraphernalia of the ordinary evening dance just for an hour or two in the afternoon. But intelligent people have transformed the afternoon dance now into a happy informal party, which does not take the edge off any evening dance that may be coming. A gramophone or somebody’s ukelele makes the noise. Invitations go out by letter or telephone. Tennis, golf, riding, a long luncheon party often end up with somebody’s invitation: “Let’s go back and dance.” A business man I met at one the other day explained that once or twice a week he got away early for these affairs. They put him in a good humour, cleared his brain and gave him needed exercise. He hated late nights and the fuss of dancing at night. In fashionable clubs and hotels they have studied the trend, and suited the tea dance to it. You find music slightly slowed down, a longer interval between dances. The principle is: “People come to have tea and dance, not to dance and snatch tea as if it were a'sandwich-and a glass of lemonade at the buffet.”