DANCING VISIONS NOBLE AND IGNOBLE
Sex Purity and the Giddy Whirl
SOME COMIC AMERICAN CAMPAIGNS
(By RANDOLPH BEDFORD, for The Sunday Times.)
A restaurant in Forty-second-street, New York ; lights, mirrors, statues, revue turns, handicapped by performance on the same floor-level as the diners, the mad noises of the jazz band ; statues of Venus in concrete repeated to infinite weariness ; dancers revolving and back stepping solemnly, like the larrikin waltzers of Sydney Harbor picnics in the 90's—moving so slowly that they seem to suspend all action, bipeds closely holding each other, so that they seem to be single quadrupeds—the cheek-to-cheek dancing which makes Dr. Stratton and Canon Chase to roar in anguish.
The "music," a broken symphony filled with surprises, and apparently written by Isidore Pappelbaum in collaboration with Rastus Crow ; the same as composed the Prohibition Sonata, the Meningitis Two-Step, and the Bright's Disease Gavotte.
The Meke of Fiji and the Hula of Samoa, the sex and war dances of the Papuan and the graphic drama of the North Australian corroborree are dignified classics.
ANOTHER MEMORY.
I remember landing on an island in the Coral Sea in the beginning of a bright moonlight night, the air saturated with rays pouring from the great lucent orange that was the moon. Above the white sickle of the beach nothing was quiet but the moonlight. Fires of drift blazed and crackled about the noisy dancers, and over all the unconcerted sounds came the song of deep voiced men singing an interminable chant that would have wearied but for the wonderful harmony of it :
"Au Mara ! Au Mara ! Au Mara !
La hala ! La hala ! Hoo Wau !"
The backcloth of this great stage was a cocoanut grove and a belt of paw-paw ; many wongi trees held scores of polished brown-red children chattering like parrots, and eating the red, astringent, date-like fruit at the same time. The boomerang of beach and the sea silent, the land lipped by the quiet lagoon ; the drift sand above high water beaten and stirred by many feet. No finer service is possible than the street whose final preparation is constant pressure by the naked feet of humans until it is soft as dust and firm as a camel pad ; but the continuously sifted sand of the "stage" was one moment beaten hard by the stamping of the dancers, and in the next figure torn to atoms by the tireless side-movements of 200 feet.
The human color fell in splashes on the silver-blue night ; red men, copper men, black men, dressed in sulus and grass anklets, and with flowers and feathers in their glossy black hair: men with skins of burnished copper dressed in red sarongs, with bunches of red leaves ; Ki Wai boys—the black Jews of the Gulf of Papua—greatly energetic and wearing head dresses of palm leaf ; Binghis, black as swans ; and the earnest, Semitic faces of the Papuans as their feet beat the sand and spurned it. Dancing with wild abandon and tireless energy—every muscle working in these dances of menace and of battle ; dances of Dutch courage to screw the heart of the warrior to the sticking place ; dances of homecoming, hunting, and farewell.
They were bone-dry with weariness ; the voices of the old men husky with singing and the breathing of sand-laden air ; they had been dancing almost continuously for four-and-twenty hours—yet they finished each figure of the dance with blood-curdling yells as they rushed to the palm grove which was their green-room—yells that in the old days often led to a frightened trader firing a gun and loosing a massacre. Yet after a minute at the green-room they returned as if the one swift touch of nature of the grove had renewed their youth.
The small, naked, pot-bellied boys came from the wongi trees and imitated the dance at the edge of the sand. The new dance was of sea-fighting and of hunting the Dugong; the song of the sea, and of the strength of a man fighting it, the hiss of the snake, the barking of the village dogs at the return of the hunters and a howl for a death in the tribe.
A BLACK HERCULES.
The leader was a shining black marble Hercules, but not too strong for grace ; his tremendous voice led the chant of the warriors in the cry for war, drowning the old man's feebler cry for peace. And there was a girl of Samoa—her face, but for the high cheek bones, of that handsomeness which is the beauty of perfect health, her eyes fine, her teeth perfect, her body rippling grace. Her calico smock recalled the Roman toga ; her smiling dignity made of her a Roman matron of classic time. She seemed to forget everybody in the dance—Hercules and all men. The moonlight and the fire-glare shone of her handsomeness as she led in the dance of the life a woman—the household tasks, the bearing of burdens while the buck walks easily, carrying the spear ; courtship, the unwelcome lover and his repulse, marriage, maternity, the departure of the husband to hunting or to battle, his return and the dragging of the canoe up the bleached sands, the little feast of fish, sago, yam and cocoanut under the nipa thatch.
Honest in expression, they illustrate what they mean ; but this jazz business is ugly and vainly hypocritical.
THE PROFESSIONAL REFORMER.
The main interest of jazz to me is that it provides new material for the wowsers—giving the paid and self-advertising reformer his second wind. The reformer not only desires to abandon the shimmy, the turkey trot, the bunny hug, and other forms of cheek-to-cheek dancing, but all dancing ; and in State Legislatures they promote and lobby for Bills to make dancing illegal by making real dancing impossible if the proposed laws are ever to be observed. Such dances as Toddles, Chicago, Krazy Kat, the Camel, and the Finale Hopper are especially loathed by reformers. A Bill specifically aimed at these is being introduced in New York State Legislature, with Canon Chase, of Brooklyn, as Chief Lobbyist. The Canon insists that dancers shall be at least four inches apart, which suggests that policemen shall haunt dance-rooms with tape measures if the Bill becomes law. The Canon also desires a fixed minimum of clothing during dancing; being moved thereto by the fact that in many dance halls and jazzoriums the cloakrooms bear the sign "Park your corsets here."
If the Bill becomes law it will close dancing halls from Van Cortlandt Park
to Coney Island, and prohibit the extreme dances of the stage. The draft of the Bill was accompanied by sketches 'showing dancing positions which are to be made illegal. The prohibitions include "Vulgar jazz music" which influence dancers to use jerky steps and immoral variations.
"Holding partner tightly."
"Cheek to cheek dancing."
" The neck hold."
"Dancing which consists of shaking or jerking the upper part of the body while taking short steps."
"Dancing which consists of exceptionally long or short steps."
"Dancing which consists of movements above the waist rather than from the waist down."
"Dancing which consists of suggestive movements."
"Extreme dancing as seen on the modern stage."
RECTOR'S IDEAS.
Interviewed by the New York World on this Bill, Canon Chase showed that he knows his subject. Says the World :
"The young man must not shimmy across the dance hall to the young woman whom he desires to dance with, declared the rector. "He must walk sedately over, bow, and present himself to her as a gentleman, not a beast from the woods.
"Then the lady should place her left arm on the partner's arm or shoulder but not to extend to the neck or back This cheek-to-cheek and neck-hold dancing is criminal. "The young man should encircle the lady with one arm only, and place his other hand on the opposite hand of his partner off to the side and free from his or her body. And partners at all time should keep their bodies and faces free from each other."
Asked how distance of four inches between partners could be preserved in a crowded restaurant or jazzorium, the Canon said : "It would be easy with police supervision."
So there they are again— the police engaged in everything but arresting criminals, and by and by a police force as big as a standing army.
WHAT DANCING MASTERS SAY.
The National American Association of Dancing Masters and the International Association Masters of Dancing—two rival organisations—agree that dancing is growing away from the jazz steps, and that the tango, fox-trot, and straight waltz, with variations of the "canter" and "hesitation" steps, will be the new vogue. Major Gaynor, an 80-year-old dancing master, agrees with Canon Chase as to the "girl of to-day being unable to dance unless she has a death-grip on the neck of the man partner." Major Gaynor says he is "a Methodist in old standing," and he regrets the passing of the Methodist resolution of 1872 against dancing, card-playing, and theatre-going.
The Associations object to the camel the Chicago, and the shimmy, but think well of the walking dance known as "scandal."
THE DIE-AWAY DRAG.
The Chicago is also known as the "drag," and it has superseded all the older forms of shocking the dancing public. It boomed in Chicago last Winter, and now it is booming in New York, and it has spread throughout the country. The drag is a jazz of the ankles. The left foot twists in jazzy rhythms following the out-of-time bouncing, gliding, jumping beat of the clarionet, and the right foot drags behind with the slow, infectious slide of the trombone. Meanwhile the shoulders are inert. From the knees up there is no motion. If a couple in the throes of the "drag" succeeds in circling the outer edge of a medium-sized dance floor once on the course of a dance, it has more than exceeded the speed limit. The most snail-like of all dances and the one requiring the least effort is the "drag."
In those places where the regulations require that dancers be separated by a distance of six inches or even of one inch, the "drag" has no place. Its popularity is due to the fact that the partner can be held to the limit of closeness without breaking the rhythm. There is no rhythm to break.
In hot weather the "drag" has its advantages. It is the laziest, slowest, most indolent of all dance-hall steps. But it is not an easy to acquire as it looks. You must be able to jazz your feet—you must learn the knack of dancing out of time, for the "drag" is like the after-beat of a discordant horn. It never comes exactly on the beat.
WHAT SHORT SKIRTS MEAN.
The chairman of the committee on dance reform of the national Association of Dancing Masters says that short skirts brought the "drag" step into popularity. With girls wearing short skirts there was always a temptation to dance improperly. The jazz should be taken out of dance music—it is too excitable. The tempo of the fox-trot has been gradually slowed down to a dangerous, languid beat, with little jerky jazz counter-rhythms ; and this has a bad effect on dancers.
The jazz seems to have found dancing out—not the vile amusement imagined by the Grave Ones, but also not as the skipping of lambs and children, as asserted by the dancing masters. In the adult it is sex expression, even though unrecognised, and it was never any more than that. So, therefore, law and prohibitions, and policemen with little tape measures to keep dancing partners at their proper distance, are ridiculous, and must fail.
A NEW DISEASE.
A new disease, styled "diarthrositis," has apparently come out of jazz, or has been invented to help a Chicago girl find a new excuse for litigation and damages; and Marie Erler's suing Ernie Young, theatrical prosecutor, for $100,000 damages for "diarthrositis," induced by giving jazzing exhibitions in Young's Cabaret. Her claim states that she has further contracted a disease which makes her limbs and body quiver when she hears jazz music, her work in Young's cabarets requiring her to "execute many contortions, convolutions, distortions, and gyrations associated with modern dancing aberrations, particularly twisting and writhing of the hips and shivering and convulsing of the shoulders, producing a jazz emotion particularly sensitive to sonniferous instruments, suggestive of an accentuated syncopation of a jazz orchestra, and inciting her involuntarily and unconsciously to wiggle and revolve."
With juries full of "chivalrous respect for womanhood"—even wiggling and revolving women—the outlook is black for Mr. Young.
Sunday Times (Sydney, NSW : 1895 - 1930), Sunday 8 April 1923, page 13
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