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Book Review Dancing the night away

FIONA O’CONNOR enjoys a book that is a fascinating people’s history of dancing but also a cultural history of social space

Ballroom A people’s History
by Hilary French
Reaktion Books. £18

AS a kid growing up in ’60s Dublin I attended Miss Eveline Burchill’s Dance Academy.

In an elegant Georgian drawing room overlooking St Stephen’s Green, we children learned steps from our Royal Academy syllabuses.

Miss Burchill was an English grande dame of exacting standards. In the evenings, her studio would be packed with adults learning the social dances she was expert in.

People from all trades and professions arriving from work changed into their dancing shoes and were themselves transformed; graceful gliders, poised and elegant, waltzed around the room.

Hilary French’s fascinating people’s history of dancing is also a cultural history of social space: those cathedral-sized palaces created to meet the enormous demand for dancing at the turn of the 20th century.

Evocatively named — Dreamland (Margate), Palais de Danse (Wimbledon) The Empress Ballroom at the Blackpool Winter Gardens, The Locarno (Streatham) — vast spaces were designed to transport dancers into a fantasy world of aristocratic luxury.

Grand staircases and promenades, sliding glass roof-panels opening to the sky, Baroque, Rococo and Louis XV interiors, these “people’s palaces” must have seemed heavenly.

Through the marbled and mirrored dance halls, French shows a progression of dance fashions and also the changing social norms occurring over a century.  

As Britain moved to the public ballroom from the confinement of society ball seasons, so the dances took off. Influences from around the world generated an explosion of styles, techniques, rhythms and moods.

English fustiness was replaced by exotic physical exuberance. Class war was waged on the dance floor. Committees formed — something had to be done. Statements were made about the “Englishman’s self-control.”

“Undoubtedly it is in England that the modern style of dancing is purest and most aesthetic.” 

Controlling bodies drew up rules to control bodies: standards had to be maintained.

Against this the dances flooded in, their names alone suggest the fun to be had on the sprung hardwoods of ballrooms all over Britain: the grizzly bear, the camel walk, el chucho, the shimmy, the bunny hug, the Boston dip, the shiver, to name just a few.

Throughout Britain, Cuban rhythms, samba figures, Harlem syncopated moves, tango, mambo and cha-cha-cha, were the experience of the masses.

In 1964 a government survey found that five million people went dancing every week and a further one million were attending classes or lessons.

French’s dance history brings the reader right up to date with the popularity of Strictly Come Dancing, the world’s most successful reality TV show.

 

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