TEA DANCES

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19732, 29 December 1926, Page 11

TEA DANCES

A CHANGED OUTLOOK INTERESTING NEW PHENOMENON 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 me when I was shown a charity organiser’s dance list for the autumn and winter season (writes Patrick Chalmers in tho “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 tho 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 in the evening. Who wants to dance at 4 o’clock?’’ The answer to-day is that any number of people want to dance at 4 o’clock, irrespective of what they were 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 tse afternoon.

But intelligent people have tranformed the afternoon dance now into a happy informal party, which does not take the edge off any evening dance that may be coining. 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 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 bctw’een dances. The principle is: “People come to have tea and dance, not to dance and snatch te.a as if it were a sandwich and a glass of lemonade at the buffet. ”