BALLROOM DANCES

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLI, Issue 20326, 27 January 1936, Page 10

BALLROOM DANCES

THE NEW FASHIONS In dancing, as in most other things, there is really nothing new under the sun. What may be a novelty to London may be boringly familiar in the African jungle and vice versa. Changes which cause occasional sensations In our ballrooms usually turn out, on investigation, to be only an eccentric variation of something we have seen or heard before. All this is apropos of a demonstration of the “coming" steps by Joan Morris and Gerald Clare, at the Margaret Morris Institute, when this graceful couple performed in a manner which made the onlookers quite ill with envy, wrote a London correspondent of the “Sydney Morning Herald" on Demebber 14. This year there are to be two main innovations. The Charleston (though dead these six years) is revived and in its new form will be a hybrid of the Old Charleston (the high-kicking variety) and the later “flat” Charleston. Thus it will contain the typical Charleston turn of the foot but will not include kicking. The reason, said Mr Clare, for this revival was a desire to bring at least a little smile to what he called the faces of the gloomy English dancing men and women. We have all seen those faces —the faces of the very earnest, “so very good” type of dancers vzho actually make mare false steps to the square yard than they would care to hear about. The other big change is in the Rumba, which is no longer to be the tight “bear-hug" that it has been till now, but is to be danced with the "female partner” held at the full extent of the man’s arm, leaning on his full swings and curves of a Viennese bent wrist. As demonstrated it has the waltz rather than the familiar wriggles of the Rumba, and so should appeal to those of us who pride ourselves on being ultra-conservative. Lest we should die of ennui. Mr Clare has Introduced a new step of his own to enliven the quickstep, still the staple diet of every dance floor. He calls it an “eight-step” because of the eight quick little movements which are its characteristics. It is a quaint and fascinating manoeuvre that is certain to become popular among the few dancers capable of learning it. But. when all is said and done, we are not so much in need of new dances as new dancers—new dancers who are imbued with the spirit of dancing and what, if we were French, we would call joie de vivre. There are few spectacles so gruesome, mournful and conducive to pessimism, as a London ballroom in full swing. Foreign visitors invariably view it with goggle-eyed incredulity. “But, what would you? The English are mad, is it not?” That is what they ejaculate.