ON WITH THE DANCE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 928, 24 May 1957, Page 4

ON WITH THE DANCE

ANNED by ths warm, tropical air, the thermometer on the sun-deck crept reluctantly downward from 8&6 degrees to 83. The phonograph beat its hot rhythm into the warm breeze. A group of passengers watched, silent but not unmoved. Hips rotating, challenging, the dancers undulated toward each other, their sandals scuffing the deck rhythmically in answer to the pervasive beat. The girl leaned backward, archly, her dress clinging wet to the perspiring muscles of her back. The boy crouched, shoulders hunched, arms drooping, feet pawing the deck. "Blimey!" breathed an onlooker. "Africa, ’ere we come!" A youth, reclining in Edwardian boredom, sniffed. "They think that’s Rock ’n’ Roll!" Disgust overcame him. "Ruddy ballroom stuff!" The jungle tension broke. Suddenly the dance was less exciting; more civilised; safe. A name could be put to it: a@ name everybody knew. The dancing symbols of universal Man and Woman became again two youthful British migrants, killing time on the long voyage. Not only the atmosphere changed. Rock ‘n’ Roll or African jungle; whatever the title, the dance was already old hat. The heavy, tom-tom beat was giving way to a lighter, less primitive rhythm from Trinidad. The dance would follow suit. Calypso was already a music to reckon with. Add to it the steps of the Rumba and a few new names like Cha Cha or Maringa, and you have the

certifiably newest fashion. Rock had gone perhaps once round the clock. The Banana Boat was coming fn. Most young people will welcome the change. Some will hold aloof for a time. The new craze is seldom quite as good as the old. A few-‘"the eccentrics who refuse to get off the last band-wagon but one"-will be downright annoyed. They will-be found in remote corners

of dilapidated dance halls, moving to unsuitable music in the difficult steps, now dignified by time, of the Jive. With them will be the loyal shades of even older enthusiasms-the Lambeth Walk, the Lindy Hop, the Squere, the Raccoon, the Black Bottom, the Kangaroo Hop, the Turkey Trot, the Cakewalk, and, of course, the late, great Charleston. One or two of the old timers are still in fine fettle; in particular the Foxtrot and.its half-brother, the Quickstep. Few of the remainder are more than nostalgic memories in the minds of the middleaged. Occasionally one will be found in the repertoire of some country dance orchestra, and the young will sit and stare at their elders’ animated rendition of Under the Chestnut Tree, the Conga, or Boomps a Daisy. Whether they are allowed to do so or not seems to depend finally on the musicians. Dances linked to particular tunes die immediately the professionals tire of the music. There is enough variety to keep the Waltz, the Foxtrot, the Quickstep and perhaps the Rumba going for generations to come. Not so with the Lambeth Walk, for instance, or Ballin’ the

Jack, each of which owns only one song and one tune. Even Rock ’n’ Roll is in a similar plight, no imitation of the original tune having equalled or surpassed its exemplar. In both cases, however, the differences between the fashions are more noticeable than the similarities. According to Bob Bothamley, in charge of NZBS jazz, most dances are variations of the four-beat rhythm, or of the two-beat march rhythm, as in Dixieland. Rock ’n’ Roll simply emphasises the off beat. Superficially, it is more muscular than most, but older people who have performed the Cakewalk or the Charleston -or even the square dances of a few years back---might challenge that. The Cakewalk, for instance, was a high-kicking dance in which elevation, form and endurance were all factors in attaining excellence. Like many dance fashions it was accused of almost everything down to and including undermining the church, but its passing was almost certainly due to the fact that it was (in the middle of the "gay nineties") the most demanding and exhausting dance of all time. In those days, of course, people still danced to the music. It was not till later that the notion of going to a dance simply to listen to the band took hold. Strange, perhaps, when one considers that the Cakewalk’s popularity was so great it even attracted composers of the quality of Claude Debussy, who wrote the "Golliwoe’s Cakewalk’ as part of his Children’s Suite. As muscular, if not more so, was the Charleston, the craze which swept the world in the mid-twenties. In Show Biz it is reported that "in Boston’s Pickwick Club, a tenderloin dance hall, the vibrations of the Charleston cancers caused the place to collapse, killing 50. The following year saw a Charleston matathon at Roseland Ballroom on Broadway, which lasted 22% exhausting hours." The American Square Dance-New Zealand’s craze-before-last — drew no marathon performers, but nevertheless called for hard muscles and soft arteries. To hop and leap and cavort to the swift, traditional melodies after a day’s work required stamina of a high order. The dance seems to have arisen among hardy farming communities, where it was comtmmon for a working "bee" on a

new barn to be followed by group dancing therein, accompanied by a fiddler or two, and directed by a "caller." The latter’s hoarseness, rather than the dancers’ exhaustion, usually signalled the end of the fun. Together with their athletic and musical similarities, the dance fashions of yesterday hold one other point in common with the fashions of today. They attract dire prophecies of social and moral decay from those who either can’t dance or think they oughtn’t. Rock ’n’ Rollers may be pleased to know that their parents and grandparents endured almost exactly the same accusations of moral degeneracy, Apart from the Cakewalk, already mentioned, the Grizzly Bear seems to have attracted much of this kind of attention. Other variations of the dance were known as the Turkey Trot, the Crab Step, Kangaroo Dip, Fish Walk and the Snake. Most involved a crushing embrace, arching the lady’s back to near-breaking point. This apparently distressed some onlookers more than it did the ladies involved. A New Jersey court once jailed a young woman for 50 days for Turkey-Trotting, and in 1914 the Vatican officially came out against it. A similar, but less sweeping, inhibition overtook the English when the imported American Black Bottom swept the Charleston from the boards in the late twenties. Show Biz reports that "the name was supposedly derived from the muddy bottom of the Swanee: River, and the movements suggested the dragging of feet through the mud. London took to the dance, but baulked at thé name, which had a different significance in England. They presented it as the Black Base, or Black Bed. Actually, no one in America, either, believed that the ‘Bottom’ of the name referred to anything but the spot slapped by the dancer." Ballroom dancers who eschew the more violent manifestations. of the primitive urge to dance may be interested to know that even the stately Foxtrot attracted its share of attention. Cincinnati’s Catholic Telegraph declared in indignant tones that, "The music is sensuous, the embracing of partnersthe female only half-dressed-is absolutely indecent; and the motions-they are such as may not be described, with any respect for propriety, in a family

newspaper. it continued with a suggestion as to what kind of houses were appropriate for such dances; conclusions which we, in our turn, might regard as improper in a family newspaper. The march of progress has not led to any modification either of Puritanism or of the adjectives it employs. Only a month ago the secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, Mr Shepilov, took time out from his non-cultural activities to give his countrymen the line on some recent products ‘of the decaying west. Boogie Woogie, and Rock ’n’ Roll were denounced as "a chaos of meaningless sounds, a wild shrieking, squeaking, sighing, wailing, roaring . . . the braying of asses, the amorous croaking of an enormous bullfrog . .. a wild cavedweller’s orgy." Some of the west’s bour&eoisie may be found to agree with him. But the dancing proles never have been readers of edicts by the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, They carry right on, toeing their own moving, but comparatively changeless, line. So far, it seems, the dance crazes have in common their rhythm, their strenuousness and their critics. We were

to discover yet another-surprising-similarity, linking the Cakewalk with the Lambeth Walk, the Charleston with Rock ’n’ Roll, and the Lindy Hop with Jive. It is, the steps. Our informant was Jimmy James, a Wellington dance teacher who began his professional . career after his brother, the Charleston champion of Athens, introduced him to the steps, and gave him the itchy feet which perhaps brought him to New Zealand. How, we asked, did he learn the latest craze, in order to hand it on to his pupils? Simple, he said, it was all in the book. Professional teachers subscribe to a service which keeps , them up to date with the latest steps. But surely some of the steps are unique? Not at all; there’s nothing you can do with your feet-or body either, for that matter-which professionals have not noted and recorded years ago, "In a sense," Mr. James told us, "we’ve been doing Rock ’n’ Roll for 10 years-but doing it as Jive." Most of the short-lived fashions in dance, he said, owed their appeal first

to the music, which may become popular for a variety of reasons (Bob Bothamley attributed Rock n’ Roll’s warm appeal to reaction against increasingly "cool" jazz), and to the simplicity of the steps. Anyone can go on the floor, after one lesson, or even none, and perform a dance of the jitterbug genus. There is no set routine, no complicated Steps, to be learned. The dancers can move as the music takes them. Likewise, according to Mr James, there are two reasons for the survival of such long-run favourites as thé Foxtrot, Quickstep and Waltz: First, they require considerable effort to learn and are consequently less readily abandoned than those which come easily; and, secondly, they are, he thinks, intrinsically more beautiful, graceful to watch, and satisfying to perform. Of course, there is, too, an economic advantage to the hardy perennials. For its short duration Rock ’n’ Roll packed as many as 500 or 600 pupils a week into his studio, he said. But the steady hundred or so a week; who came to learn the Foxtrot went on and on while crazes came and passed. Voted most likely to survive were Foxtrot, Quickstep, Waltz, Samba, Rumba. Jimmy James’s own favourite among the Latin Americans is the Tango, but it is a skilled dance and, he says, orchestras are playing it infrequently, an ill omen for any Gance. In one way only do the recent fashions of Rock ’n’ Roll and the contemporary (at time of going to press) Calypso break with the pattern of recent years, They appear to have re-established intimate relations between music and dance, After about 1910 the publishers of popular music increasingly insisted that new songs be also danceable tunes. The trend persisted through the ’20s, but in the "30s, as jazz became more complex, and in some ways more interesting musically, there arose jazz clubs, which eschewed dancing and catered for an audience as serious and attentive as that of any concert hall. Today the trend of 1910 seems to have reasserted itself. Jazz may have grown out of its dancing childhood, but, if Rock ’n’ Roll indicates anything, the human race has not.