DANCE AND FORGET.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume VI, Issue 1623, 28 April 1919, Page 4

DANCE AND FORGET.

"JAZZ" MADNESS IN PARIS

In all the big cities of the Allied countries, in the provinces and villages, with or without music, the world dances. London danced during the war '' to forget the war,'' danced on Armistice Day — coster girls and staff officers together in Charing Cross station—because war had ceased, and tg-day Paris dances in an attempt to realise peace. I think Paris leads, writes Grace Curnock in the "Daily Mail." She is laying herself out to foster the dance, to surround it with a wealth of accessory, and to overload it with decoration. She is doing for the dance what the late Empire period did for her domestic artbecoming over-lavish in superimposition.

All over Paris salons are opening for dancing. It is a case of demand and supply. Afternoon and evening they are crowded by gaily solemn dancers learning new steps. French and American and English, Poles and Jugo-slavs, Czechoslovaks and Italians, men and women meet and dance.

Some salons keep almost severely to one nationality. I know one, ior instance, where American men and women on war and peace work will dash in and dance for a few minutes and dash out again, as if paying homage to some insistent goddess of dancing. *****

One salon just opened on one of the broadest avenues, and easily likely to be one of the most popular, is typical in its decoration of the feeling of the moment. Its director is a poilu not yet demobilised, and he has certainly evolved a unique temple for dancing ceremony. Its impulse is Chinese, I suppose. The walls are of that peculiar deep Chinese yellow, with Futurist apple blossom branches painted or distempered on them. The woodwork is black —dead, dull black. Long black curtains, striped with yellow ribbon, hang at the windows with inner curtains of gold silk. The musicians' alcove is screened behind gold tissue curtains, striped with black velvet, and the chairs are crudely made of white wood in square Chinese shape and painted black. Tangerine oranges and black grapes, Barbary figs, vine leaves, and olive branches add to the decoration of this peculiar room, which finds its only relief in a pale neutral carpeting. It has an intoxicating, giddying effect. I should not care to dance there, but many people do, and it certainly shrieks jazz.

When the French danced the deux temps and trois temps valses after the Franco-Prussian War and introduced the afternoon carpet dances of the seventies to London, they danced in salons where the minuet and pavane had been gracefully stepped. I defy anyone to dance or move gracefully amid the decoration of 1919—it is as odd as the figures of the year. In London we are sliding gradually into the waltz. Perhaps we are already feeling peace, having no devastated territory to forget as a nightmare.