The Ballroom

Participation in social dancing was an important marker in the Jewish process of embourgeoisement. European Jewish literary texts portray the ballroom as site for testing Jewish admission to elite pastimes and present the ball as a window into Jewish cultural aspirations. The question of whether both Jews and Christians are included in these social spaces is an important issue in many of these texts, revealing the way the dance floor shows gendered pathways to acculturation. Authors frequently underscore this theme by using the dance floor in the service of (unsuccessful) marriage plots. This chapter explores two types of ballroom space: elite non-Jewish balls to which only very select Jews were invited (such as in Karl Emil Franzos’s Judith Trachtenberg, 1891) and Jewish balls that might also include non-Jewish guests (such as in Clementine Krämer’s Der Weg des jungen Hermann Kahn, The Path of Young Hermann Kahn, 1918).

“Counter-Bopaganda” and “Torn Riffs”

This chapter focuses on the subculture of young African Americans who developed forms of social dancing to bebop music as recounted to the author in oral history interviews with self-identified bebop dancers and as documented by Russian modern dancer/choreographer Mura Dehn in her film The Spirit Moves and in her drafts for an unfinished study on jazz dance. Dehn’s work reveals fascinating creative adaptations to bebop’s accelerating tempos and complex melodic structures in new and expanded dances such as the applejack, Jersey bounce, and bop lindy. Through these developments, dancers engaged in intricate metric and hypermetric play with bebop music—which they refer to as dancing “off-time”—while also embodying bebop’s “cool” aesthetic and the emergent cynicism and radicalism that shaped postwar African American political culture. Their experiences, and Dehn’s work to document them, demand a re-examination of the discursive work performed by bebop’s reputation as a music innately hostile to social dancing, a label that has less to do with the music’s difficulty than with a desire to position bebop as “art” rather than “entertainment.” The chapter closes with a discussion of “the problem of Dizzy Gillespie” to highlight and explore the historiographic challenges that discussion of social dance poses to canonic narrative positionings of bebop. It suggests that bebop is better understood as part of a contiguous spectrum of Black popular culture that thrived alongside, rather than in opposition to, rhythm & blues and other popular music genres.

12. The Ban on Round Dances 1917–1957

Bakka (Norway), discusses, and contextualises, the banning of round dances by one of Norway’s largest youth movements for about forty years from 1917. He shows how the three popular movements that built assembly houses had conflicting attitudes towards social dancing, and dealt with it in different ways. The Liberal Youth Movement, which imposed the ban, gave a variety of reasons, first among them being that it destroyed interest in popular enlightenment, which was the main aim of the movement. The movement also did not consider round dances to be folk dances, and therefore held them to be of less national and educational value. However, only the lay Christians strongly rejected round dances as having a sinful and morally corrupting effect.

Bildaktivism i dansarkivet: Betydelsen av Anna Wikströms Akademi för dans

The article combines Critical Archival Studies theory about agency and activism with an empirical exploration of dance history in Gothenburg, Sweden’s second city. It focuses on Anna Wikström’s Academy for Dance (1930-1965), an education which has not been explored in previous research. A previous member of The Swedish Ballet, Wikström offered her students courses in artistic dance, dance as physical exercise, pedagogy, and social dancing. Thereby, her broad education differed from the narrow, elitist Ballet School at The Stora Teatern. The article accounts for how the collaboration between choreographer and dancer Gun Lund and Astrid von Rosen, scholar at the University of Gothenburg, contributes new knowledge about the local dance culture. It is argued that archival and activist approaches make it possible for more voices, bodies, and functions to take place in dance history. As such, the exploration complements previous postmodern dance historiography (see for example Hammergren 2002; Morris och Nicholas 2017) with a Gothenburg example.

Confessions of a Dance Hostess: Social Dancing in Shanghai and Self-Portrayals of Hostess-Writers, 1930-1949

This paper adds to the existing scholarship on republican Shanghai and the study of social dancing, and dance hostesses, during that period. The key to this revision is the examination of the self-portrayals of hostess-writers throughout the 1930s and up to 1949. Hostess-writers documented their lives and careers as dance hostesses by writing about and publishing topics that ranged from politics to aspirations and personal tragedies. These writings were produced against a tumultuous political backdrop of war and nation-building, a period when social dancing blossomed in China as a popular entertainment option for people of different social classes. This paper considers the agency of dance hostesses before and after the Sino-Japanese War. It argues that they actively sought to mediate their existence through the power of narration that best suited their personal and financial interests.

Frenzied Flappers: The Hysterical Female in Early Twentieth-Century Social Dance

It is widely acknowledged that the freer, more sexualized movements of social dancing in the early twentieth century (1900–1929) accompanied the beginnings of female emancipation both socially and politically. However, less explored are the similarities between the provocative, inelegant choreography of such social dances and the symptoms of female hysteria, a medical phenomenon that saw the body as a canvas for mental distress as provoked by social tensions. This essay will address the possible alignment of hysteria and popular social dance in relation to the evolving Modern Woman. It will examine the motivations of modern, ‘hysterical’ dances, and discuss their progressive status in terms of gender by considering perceived psychosomatic interactions within the female dancing body.