FASHIONS IN DANCING.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXIV, Issue 4591, 22 August 1923, Page 4

FASHIONS IN DANCING.

HOW THEY HAVE CHANGED. ‘ ‘ How the fashions in dances have changed,” writes “X.” “Some twenty years ago a young girl never dreamed of going to a dance without being taken there by a friend, relative, parent, or a chaperon, and the imprint on a ball ticket reading, ‘Double ticket, ios.; single 7s 6d,’ simply meant a lady and gentleman, .10s.; single gentleman, 7s 6d. Now, all that is changed. The girl of to-day has been emancipated,, and the single ticket applies as. much to her as to him. Indeed, it goes further —a girl may even buy a double ticket, and being so possessed will sometimes ring up a young man and ask him to come along as her guest—which he often does. What, however, is profoundly amazing to a man of an older generation is the freedom with which yoting men —' college youths and university students — ‘ring up’ or ask- a girl if she will go to a dance (i.e., paying her own way!). Such is the emancipation the fair sex has undergone that she as often as not agrees to this arrangement. I don’t know whether the ypung lady has been so ‘emancipated’ as the young man, who thereby escapes a great deal of expense his father was put to in making himself agreeable to his (the young man’s) mother. In my day a dance was a more or less democratic social amenity. That, however, is all changed now. One goes to a dance and throughout the evening keeps to one partner. That would have been a scandal twenty years ago. Not only is this the common vogue, but young couples become their own ‘dancing partners, a term which is not meant to convey anything more than it says ; and so a couple may dance together, almost exclusively, for an entire season witnout evoking anything other than a raised eyebrow. So we have it that the scandal of one generation becomes the fashion of the next. Our world keeps rolling on, heedless of time and custom. Where semi-naked cannibals danced their war dances only a hundred years ago, children jazz almost continually (and almost as lightly clad on the one side), with their ‘dancing partners,’ forsooth! . . . . In place of the lancers, quadrilles, d’Alberts, polka, waltz, and schot-

tische, which everybody danced once Upon a time, there is only the one rhythmical shuffle —the jazz.