DANCES THAT SHOCK.

Otago Witness, Issue 3098, 30 July 1913, Page 75

DANCES THAT SHOCK.

(From the Spectator.) It will probably be found that few new dances have become popular without tho Cassandras prophesying that the end of decency was at hand. Nearly all dances are capable of vulgarity or offence of some kind. Parents readily let their children dance, because they have instructed them and trust thorn. The naturally vulgar will dance in a vulgar way; tlia others will not. What can you expect from a pig but a grunt But we fancy that there is none of the current dances which need be vulgar, and that there never lias been any dance in England which was necessarily vulgar. Those who make unwritten laws as to what dances and movements must be prohibited in their own world do so in order to 'Nave the convenience, as it were, of a ee-word which alone will admit a proto, der to their intimacy. The person who stands outside the charmed circle may not know what the puss-word is, or more probably docs not even know that there is a password ; 60 that if he is taken in accidentally on probation lie will soon be rejected its unlit for no reason that lie will ever discover. Mrs Ponsonby de Tomkyns, of course, knew something about that business when she loftily replied to the remarks, “ Reversing is going out of fashion,” “It never came in!’ It may be, as soma sceptical person has suggested, that those who decree a fashion ban what they cannot themselves accomplish. Or it may be that the present tendency to adopt a more emphatic and detailed method of dancing is a sign, however poor a sign to begin with, that British boys and girls are trying to -shake off oup national solf-eonsciousness. If they coultf! do that properly it would be a good thing. There is 100 rigid a condemnation of any declension from the normal. The fear of making one’s self conspicuous or foolish is a kind of moral paralysis; wo resemble too little the French, who are always grateful to anyone who makes in speech or action a contribution to ideas or gaiety. It never occurs to the French to regard anyone as ridiculous who has put himself forward and has tailed through want of skill. The customary British view is expressed in the episode o‘f the young lady who sang in a drawing room with remarkable feeling. The audience was thrilled, and inclined to avow its emotion till an experienced dowager corrected the unwnolcsomc tendency with the words, ‘ AN underfill : But ’it is a pity the poor child sings with so much passion. Someone ou< dit to tell her mother.” The dowager’s austerity was like that of the Roman Sallust,' who remarked that Sempronia .)laved and danced more skilfully than was necessary in an honest woman. But all suc h transgressions concern the “fine shade of the nice feelings” which the Misses Pole perfectly understood ; they are apart from actual vulgarity, and _ have nothing to do with it. The fact is, as we said, that a new popular dance is alwavs suspected of vulgarity, and if it * worthy of permanence always survives tho charge. . ~ Take the quadrille, for instance. Ii wo were asked to name a dance of almost pretentious inoffensiveness should we not pick out the quadrille? What could ho more pinner, more solemn, mors suitable for temporarily engaging the elderly persons who generally sit “on the bench . Long after ordinary dancers had pitchforked out tho quadrille as something too dull for flesh and blood, it was retained in the Royal balls as .suitable to the dignity and courtliness ni those ceremonious occasions. Yet, incredible though it may seem now, the quadrille was o.npe looked upon as something very “ subversive,” as old-fashioned people say of dangerously advanced opinions. In one of the most airy and engaging of his poems Moore wrote of the substitution of the quadrille for the country dance, and said just what he thought of the new importation from France. Moore imagines the nymph “ Country Dance” making a desperate bid for her life in a ballroom which was dominated by “ Mamsclle Quadrille.” There stood Quadrille, with cat-like face (The beau ideal of French beauty), A band-box thing, all art and lace, Down from her nose-tin to her Ehoe-tio. Her flounces, fresh from Tictorme-r-From Hippoivtc her rouge and haulier poetry, from Lamartine— Her morals from—the Lord knows, where. And. when she danced—so slidingl”. y :i near the ground she plied he.r art. You’d swear her mother-earth and she Ilr.'i made a compact ne’er to part.

Her face the while, demure, sedate, No signs of life or motion showing, Like a bright penclule’s dial-plate— So still, you’d hardly think 'twas going. Full fronting her stood Country Dance — A fresh, frank nymph, whom you would know For English, at a single glance— English all oc’r, from top to toe. A. little "gauche.” 'tis fair to own. Anti rather given to skips and bounces; Endangering thereby many a gown, And playing oft the devil with flounces. Unlike Mamselle —who would prefer (As morally a leaser ill) A thousand flaws in character To one vile rumple of a frill. No rouge did she of Albion wear; Let her but run that two-heat race She calls a Set — not Dian e'er Cams rosier from the woodland chase. And such the nymph, whose soul had in t Such anger now —whose eyes of blue (Eyes of that bright victorious tint Which English maids call ‘‘Waterloo’ ), Like summer lightnings, in the dusk Of a warm evening, flashing broke, While—to the tune of “Money Musk, ' Which struck up now she proudly spoke; “Heard you that strain —that joyous strain? ’Twas such as England loved to hear, Ere thou, and thy frippery train. Corrupted both her foot and ear —• “Ere Waltz, that rake from foreign lands, Presumed, in sight of ai! b-hoiders, To lay his rude, licentious hands On virtuous English backs and shotilders—“Ere times and morals both grow bad. And. yet unfleeced by funding blockheads. Happy John Bull not only had. But danced to ‘Money in both pockets.’ ” The valse, which is now said to be too tame to survive in its old form, was at first thought to be an impudent piece of licentiousness. When it appeared at Almack’s the year after Waterloo it was frowned on so severely that it probably would have vanished had not an august exemplar of the art of valsing set the fashion and saved the dance. Some of Byron’s lines on the valse are much worse than the thing he satirised. When the Troistemps gave place to the Deuxtemps the latter also was said to be indecent. But all decency, as Carlyle said in different words, is a matter of association. “ Honi soil qul mal y pense ” tells ns the same truth even better. The small boy who sat on the sofa with his arm round a little girl’s waist, and retorted (in answer to an explanation that this was only to be done when dancing) that they were “ dancing on the sofa,” offended only in not having mastered the law of association. Lady Bell lias made in The Times a very apt quotation from the correspondence of Lady Elizabeth Spencer Stanhope. The quotation is from a letter written in 1812. “Lady Elizabeth gave a very successful ball,* where for the first time in London the polka was- danced in public, and people stood upon the chairs and routseats to watch*it. . . . Mr Theodore Hook declared that ‘the obnoxious dance was calculated to lead to the most licentious consequences. . . . Subsequently the Sporting Magazine ... . denounced the dance,* widen, ‘to the of sense and taste, has obtruded itself into the whole circle of the fashionable world a will-corrupting dance ■ acompound of immodest gesture and infectious poison.’ ” Who could possibly think now of the polka as improper? Surely our chief memory of that fading dance is of an exhilarating, if stupid, romp. _ As Mr Grossnuth used to sing to his infectious melody : You should see me dance the polka, You should see me cover the ground, You should see my coat-tails flying, As I whirl my partner round. If the new dance with the zoological names arc not mere temporary aberrations. they will survive because they have some' lasting quality which we cannot profess immediately to discover. I hey answer in any case, rightly or wrongly > to some social tendency which cannot be disposed of by a curt prohibition. If they do survive we mav conclude that, like the quadrille, the polka, and the valse, they will ultimately reach a highly respectable and doddering old age. And when new zoological specimens have long since taken their°place, they will some day seem to have belonged to a sort of pleistocene age, when all the world was innocent.