MODERN DANCING

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 April 1938, Page 10

MODERN DANCING

« FORTUNE FOR NEW RHYTHM. NEED OF THE BALLROOM. There is a fortune waiting for the man or woman who can think out something new in dance music, writes Jack Payne, famous dance band leader, in the London “Daily Mail.” New rhythm, new steps— that is the urgent need for the modern ballroom. For years the waltz, the fox-trot, and the quickstep have been the mainstays of dancing programmes, and will probably remain so for many years to come. That is all to the good. These are dances firmly established in public favour, and it is idle to contemplate them. What we need is' a dance that will make a- vital contrast to those three, something, if you like, that will shock us with its essential newness. If you can think out such a rhythm, if you can devise new steps to it, and —this is most important of all —if you can persuade the public to take it up, you will make a fortune. Very few people realise the extent of the modern dance music industry. In England alone something over 60,000,000 dance records are sold every year, and on each record a royalty is paid. Every time a dance number is played the composer receives a copyright fee. Billy Hill, composer of “The Last Round-up,” averaged £40,000 each in royalties on five of his songs. Mabel Wayne, who composed “Ramona,” “Who Made Little Boy Blue?” and “Little Man, You’ve Had a Busy Day,” has already received, it is said, more than £250,000 in royalties on her songs. It. sounds easy money, but is not. There is no primrose path to success in this dance music business. There are no hard and fast rules to guide you. THE CHANGING PUBLIC. The history of the fox-trot, best known of all modern ballroom dances, serves to show how illogical and perplexing public taste can be. The old Edwardian tradition in dancing was smashed on a certain day in 1911 when a young man at a party, Irving Berlin, sat down at a piano and improvised a tune we now know as “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” A young actor who was present, Vernon Castle, and his wife, Irene, made up some steps which, for those days, were utterly scandalising. But this new sort of dancing became a craze with the younger people. In the next four years scores of “modern” dances under such names as the Grizzly Bear, the Bunny Hug, the onestep, the fox-trot, the turkey trot, the Lame Duck, and the tango (not at all like the modern dance), made their appearance. Why the fox-trot and the one-step (from which we have derived the quickstep) should have survived while all those others have been forgotten, nobody knows. It is one of those things that “just happened.” An American enthusiast for figures has computed that if the inventors of the fox-trot had patented the dance and were in the position of demanding a penny for every 20 fox-trots publicly played, their annual income would now be something in excess of £2,000,000,000. FRESH IDEAS. In point of fact, the fox-trot was not invented but evolved from the Hesitation, the Lame Duck and the turkey trot, just as our modern quick-step evolved from the Bunny Hug, the Grizzly Bear and one-step. There are no proprietorial rights in dancing steps, and those fairy godparents of the modern ballroom, the Castles, claimed no royalties for the new ideas they had sprung upon an astonished world. Vernon Castle was killed in an air crash in Texas in 1918; had he lived he would have been a dollar millionaire many times over, such was his reputation as a dancer and teacher of dancing. Now we want to break with tradition as completely as the fox-trot broke with the tradition of the lancers and the quadrille. And I think that the next novelty for our ballrooms will be similarly evolved rather than from a synthetic effort by composers and dancing teachers in the Unpan alleys. Already American dance teachers are attempting to ''civilise” the Big Apple. In its original form this is really a round game set to music. But the new dance must come. What will it be?