SORRY I DON’T DANCE.’

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XVI, Issue XIII, 28 March 1896, Page 355

SORRY I DON’T DANCE.’

The dancing season will be here very soon now, and hostesses will be deploring the number of eligible young men who do not or will not dance. There is no hiding it : dancing is on the decline among men, or at least among those men mothers would choose for husbands. It is a hard saying, but none the less true, that skill in dancing varies (says a writer in The World) in a direct ratio with the social status of the modern man. Seventy or eighty years ago it was far otherwise, in the palmy days of Almanack’s, where Lord Palmerston had the reputation of being a most expert performer, and was one of the first of those who danced the waltz at that historic and exclusive resort. The exploits of Lord Yarmouth, who has achieved some notoriety as a skirt-dancer at the Antipodes, can hardly be taken as a serious modern instance of the successful cultivation of the art by a male amateur. The tyranny of the waltz—a striking instance of a good thing overdonehas of late years been slightly shaken by the introduction of kitchen lancers and the barn dance, but in the interests of grace and good manners it is by no means certain whether the remedy is not worse than the disease. Lady Ancaster’s lament in the pages of the Badminton book, on the deterioration of ballroom manners, is only too well founded. The very style of dancing is calculated to encourage Bounderdom in the literal and metaphorical sense of the word. And yet there are all the materials, so to speak, for a revival of the bygone graces of minuet, gavotte, pavane, and many another characteristic measure. The girls of to-day are both stronger and more active than their mothers, and the great development in the art of figure-skating among both sexes furnishes conclusive evidence of their latent capabilities in the cognate realm of dancing.