The Birth of the Skirt Dance.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXX, Issue VII, 14 February 1903, Page 420

The Birth of the Skirt Dance.

Describing the skirt dance and its exponents in an illustrated article in the Christmas number of “Cassell’s Magazine,’’ Mr Sidney Dent says:— Miss Letty Lind, whose name should be written very large among graceful dancers in skirts, appeared in one

of the Gaiety pieces in an unusually ample accordion-pleated skirt. One night Miss Loie Fuller, with her mother and a well-known dramatic agent, attended the performance, and Miss Letty Lind’s accordion-pleated dress was the germ of an idea that was developed by Miss Loie Fuller into the serpentine danee. Never before in the history of the world has a lady worn a dress consisting of so many yards of stuff as those donned by Miss Fuller and her serpentine sisters. A hundred yards of silk is about the average, and its making must be as difficult as the feat of putting it on. Originally supporting masses of folds on two sticks—which have grown nowadays into fair-sized masts —while she worked her sticks up and down and from side to side, the serpentine dancer daneed; but the dancing was quite beside the point, and most “serpentinas,” to use a really shocking word, have quite given it up. Movement of body and of foot there is practically none. The serpentine-dance is skirt “et praeterea nihil.” Beautiful, therefore, as are the effects obtained, it must be confessed that they are effects of artifice rather than of art. The serpentine dance is a mechanical device, whilst the original skirt-dance, as practised by Miss Sylvia Grey, Miss Alice Lethbridge, and Miss Letty Lind, belongs wholly and entirely to the domain of art.