La Valse

“No dance, indeed, tends more to turn the heads of women, and to inflame their senses.”

                     – The Balance, Hudson, N.Y. 1808

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ON THE BEAUTIFUL, BLUE DANUBE

When we hear the word “Waltz,” chances are we envision dashing, mustachioed cavaliers whirling crinoline-skirted beauties around a candlelit Viennese ballroom. Violins throb, sabres and jewels flash; the scent of gardenias and the sound of laughter fill the air. We have Johann Strauss Jr. and, of course, Hollywood to thank for that image.

The Waltz, like many later 19th century ballroom dances, had its origins somewhere in central Europe, appearing first in the 1770s as a variation used in cotillions and contredances, then gaining popularity as a dance in its own right in Vienna and Berlin before being exported to Paris and London. By the time Strauss, “The Waltz King,” introduced his stirringly sentimental composition “The Blue Danube,” in 1867, the Waltz had reigned in European ballrooms for over seventy years.

The road from little known dance variation to “Queen of the Ballroom” had been slow, unsteady and beleaguered by opposition. The staples of the 18th century dancing assemblies had been the Minuet and the Country Dance (see the February 19 post, below.) Both comprised strictly regulated movements,  allowed only minimal physical contact between dance partners and demanded awareness of not only other dancers, but of the scrutiny of onlookers as well. The Waltz, however,  was done in close embrace, with partners gazing into each others eyes, isolating each couple in their own private sphere of enjoyment (see illustration below). In this sense, the Waltz was the first of what we would consider our repertoire of modern social ballroom dances.

Arms were wrapped about each other, heads were flung from side to side in abandon and legs were intimately intertwined as the pair glided counter-clockwise around the room while rotating clockwise about each other (see illustration, right), like the celestial dance of the earth and the moon as they revolve around the sun. Worried mothers not only complained that their daughters now appeared in the intimate embrace of a man in public, but they feared  that the constant voluptuous whirl of the dance would make young girls giddy and prone to lapses of good judgment, claiming that dancing three Waltzes made females as light headed as drinking three glasses of champagne. Rumors even spread of young married women who, “running into the vortex of the waltz with impaired features and fatigued organs,” were seen to fall dead in the arms of their partners!

WICKED, WICKED

The early illustrations of the Waltz, above, showing skimpily clad couples dancing in intimate physical contact and enjoying it immensely, help us to understand that many of the initial objections to waltzing were not unfounded. American reactions to the dance were as varied as European ones, from enthusiastic acceptance, to ambivalence to outright condemnation. In 1802, indignant reader wrote to the Federalist Gazette of the United States:

“. . .the Waltz dance, by the discreet and correct part of our community, is decisively conceived to be incompatible with the dignity and delicacy of the “American fair,” and to be only adapted to the character of an hireling or a slave in the halls of an Eastern despot, where the effeminate lord and the abject ministers of his pleasure are upon the same level of baseness and degradation.”

- LYTTLETON

Seen as the product of foreign sensuality and degeneracy, in “Lyttleton’s” eyes, the Waltz had no place in virtuous American ballrooms.

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AMONG PHILADELPHIANS

In 1802, Jewish educator, philanthropist and celebrated beauty Rebecca Gratz, left, was 22. Philadelphia at the time was swarming with French emigrés; it was said that one could not walk down city streets without hearing French spoken. In a letter to her friend Maria Fenno, she described her reaction to first seeing the Waltz done at a ball attended by many of the French community: “The French ladies & gentlemen danced the volts [sic]. It is not a delicate or I fancy an agreeable dance.”

Some feared that the democratization of the French during their revolution led to the democratization –and corruption– of popular dancing there. It would take several years before the Waltz would become an accepted part of genteel social dance in Philadelphia.

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THE CORRECT METHOD

The first treatise on the Waltz to appear in English was Thomas Wilson’s “A Description of the Correct Method of Waltzing, the Truly Fashionable Species of Dancing,” which was published in 1816. Like all dance masters, Wilson tried to regulate the more objectionable parts of the Waltz, strictly describing the dance’s steps using the technical balletic five positions of the feet and warning against all attitudes and movements that were not “graceful and pleasing.” He attributed the bad reputation of waltzing to the fact that “every dance was subject to abuse, and now that waltzing was more prevalent among other than the first classes of society, it was in danger of being less refined, less proper and far less than correct.” He claimed to have published his book, therefore, with the intention “of remedying so great an evil.” The reference plate of acceptable Waltz positions from his treatise, below, certainly shows a far more formal and controlled style than the wild abandon apparent in the French engravings, above, from ten years before, but many more holds and positions than are seen in ballrooms today. Wilson also distinguished between two main types of Waltz: French Waltzing, done high on the toes to slower music and German Waltzing done on a flat foot to faster music.

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ONE MORE FIRST FOR PHILADELPHIA

Philadelphia lays claims to many American innovations; the first hospital, fire insurance company, lithographer, steamboat, horticultural society, even American’s first carpet factory.  The list may seem endless, but perhaps we can add one more item.

In 1793, Thomas Wignell and Alexander Reinagle opened their beautiful New Theatre on Chestnut Street west of 6th Street. The opening season was spoiled by the onset of the Yellow Fever epidemic in the city. Wignell used this unfortunate delay to sail for England to hunt for talent for his theatre. Among the many performers he hired were the accomplished dancer, comedian and character actor, William Bodley Francis, right, and his actress wife. In the fall of  1796, Wignell also hired James Byrne, who had been the ballet master and principal dancer at London’s prestigious Covent Garden, and Byrne’s wife, who was also a dancer. After only a few weeks, Byrne and Francis had formed a partnership and opened a dancing academy at Oeller’s Hotel on Chestnut Street across from the Theatre where they performed; many 18th century Philadelphia stage dancers supplemented their incomes by teaching social dancing classes. (For a description and illustration of Oeller’s, see the February 16th post, below). Philadelphia city directories from the period show the Byrnes and the Francises all sharing a house at 70 N. 8th Street.

On February 25th, 1797, Francis and Byrne placed the following advertisement in the Philadelphia Gazette:

It is possible that Byrne, having just arrived in Philadelphia from Europe a few weeks before, could have brought the new dance with him. This would mean that Philadelphia ladies were ahead of their Boston and New York sisters in having their senses inflamed and their organs fatigued, and adds another in the long list of firsts for Philadelphia. I wonder if the “German Waltz” the ad refers to is the flat-footed style that Thomas Wilson described in his treatise, a style that would have been more popular before the Waltz was metamorphosed in Paris. Byrne and his wife returned to London a year later, but Mr. Francis made his home here in Philadelphia, teaching and performing at the Chestnut Street Theatre until his death in 1827. He is buried in Christ Church Burial Ground, only a few blocks from the Chestnut Street hotel where he first helped introduce Philadelphia, if not America, to the voluptuous whirl of the Waltz.

“Get all the ladies that you can
And let each lady have a man;
Let them in a circle plac’d,
Take their partners round the waist;
Then by slow degrees advance,
Till the walk becomes a dance;
Then the twirling face to face,
Without variety or grace,
Round and round and never stopping,
Now and then a little hopping;
When you’re wrong, to make things worse,
If one couple, as perverse,
Should in the figure be perplex’d,
Let them be knocked down by the next,
‘Quicker now!’ the Ladies cry,
They rise, they twirl, they swim, they fly;
Pushing, blowing, jostling, squeezing,
Very odd, but very pleasing–
Till ev’ry Lady plainly shows,
(Whatever else she may disclose,)
Reserve is not among her faults,
Reader, this it is to waltz!”

- The Newburyport Herald, 1820

SOURCES

●   French illustrations from Le Bon Genre, 1801 and 1806

●   “The Circle Formed in Waltzing” and the Waltz “Reference Plate,” from Thomas Wilson’s Correct Method of Waltzing, London, 1816

●   Portrait of Rebecca Gratz by Thomas Sully, 1831

●   Excerpt from a letter of Rebecca Gratz to Maria Fenno from the Manuscripts Collection at the Library of Congress

●   Engraving of Mr. Francis after a painting by J. Neagle. The engraver, James Barton Longacre, is best known for designing the Indian Head Cent. This print was published in Philadelphia in 1826, shortly before Francis’ death.

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We’ll Have a Barrel of Fun

“It is a dance-intoxication, in which people for the moment release themselves from every care, every burden and oppression of existence.”

- Frederika Bremer

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In the long history of ballroom dances, there is only one of them whose American debut would be forever linked with a presidential race. In June of 1844, Philadelphia’s North American reported:

“We are not given to faith in the marvelous, but it is passing strange that at the moment when fantastic toes in Europe are busy with the Polka, equally fantastic pates in America are busy with a Polk.”

His campaign against Henry Clay would be subject to endless jokes, but Democratic candidate James K. Polk, whose running mate was Philadelphia born George M. Dallas, would survive the unfortunate similarity of his name to that of the dance to become the 11th President of the United States. As for the Polka, its rise from obscurity to universal fame had began only a few short years before.

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PRAGUE TO PARIS TO PHILADELPHIA

The Polka originated somewhere in rural eastern Europe and appeared in salons in Prague and Vienna by the late 1830s. By the time it exploded upon the ballroom dance world of Paris in the early 1840s, its origin had been lost in myth; those who can profit by a new fad always like to claim a role in its success.  Overnight, all of Paris was in the thrall of what was commonly called  “Polkamania.” As the public clamored for lessons to learn the new dance, well-known teachers like Henri Cellarius, featured left, on the cover of an 1848 Polka published in Philadelphia, and his rival Jean Coralli of the Paris Opera Ballet nearly came to blows in a public showdown, each claiming to be teaching the “authentic” version of the Polka. The dance’s popularity was helped in no small measure by the fact that in an effort to take advantage of the demand for lessons, these and many other Parisian dance teachers had hired attractive ballet-girls as teachers. This filled their dancing salons with hormonal young men as eager to embrace their lovely teachers as to learn the proper mechanics of the dance.

Early in 1844, ballerina Carlotta Grisi, who had originated the role of “Giselle,” danced the Polka with her partner Jules Perot on the stage of Her Majesty’s Theatre in London, right, thus introducing it to English audiences. Not everyone was thrilled with the dance. The April, 1844 The Illustrated London News stated:

“It is a waste of time to consider this nonsense. The weathercock heads of the Parisians have been delighted always by any innovation, but they never imported anything more ridiculous or ungraceful than this Polka. It is a hybrid confusion of Scotch Lilt, Irish Jig and Bohemian Waltz, and need only to be seen once to be avoided forever.”

The fact was that the small, graceful hops of the Polka  could easily turn into a rollicking, raucous romp – fun, yes, but unacceptable in the polite ballroom, see illustration below.  It presented the tempting possibility to deviate from the physical control and decorum that was the hallmark of Victorian gentility. In only a few months, this controversial new dance would reach Philadelphia.

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POLKA WARS

Polka sheet music was being published here in Philadelphia by Fiot at 169 Chestnut St. by 1843, but as late as June 4th, 1844, the actual dance was still only a rumor to readers of the North American:

“The Polka is the name of a Bohemian dance, now the rage in London and Paris. Nearly all the professors of the ‘poetry of motion’ have recently visited Paris for the purpose of acquiring a knowledge of the dance, and each maintains that his is the only true Polka.  . . . The “hard-fisted democracy” will find it extremely difficult to learn this new dance, however fascinating and easy it may be to their willing teachers. It may be more difficult for them to to introduce the Polka into the country than they imagine”

Rumor would become reality in a few weeks. By the end of August, Philadelphia Dance Mistress, Madame Hazard, advertised that she would begin classes the first of September in:

Not to be outdone, a Miss Mallet announced that she had the pleasure to announce to her patrons and Ladies of the city that she was now ready to teach

On September 18th, Henry Whale, at the Assembly Buildings at 10th and Chestnut Sts, joined the fray, offering simply to teach:

“The Bohemian and Parisian Polka, Waltz and all the new and fashionable dances will be taught during the season.”

The key words in dance instruction advertisement during most of the 19th century  were “new” and “fashionable.” Many local dance masters traveled to Paris and London each summer to learn the latest dances being done there so they could bring them back in time for Philadelphia’s winter social season. It’s no wonder that the same atmosphere of rivalry that set Parisian dance academies at each other stirred up Philadelphia competitions. Things begin to heat up as the season progressed, as Madame H. modified her advertisement to read:

“Mad. H.’s great success in teaching the very elegant and brilliant dance called the Polka, as danced in all the brilliant circles of Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Dresden, London &c., is rewarded by a numerous class at her residence. She will be happy to receive a few more pupils to prevent delay.”

She now not only advertised the authenticity of her dance instruction, but actually claimed the Polka as her own. Miss Mallet soon countered, claiming:

“. . . she is ready to teach the celebrated POLKA DANCE. It is an easy, graceful and most fascinating dance, having nothing Theatrical about it, and can be learned in a very few lessons, either in a class or privately.”

Mallet was hinting that perhaps Madame Hazard’s version was the crass theatrical variety, while hers was “graceful” and suitable for the genteel young ladies who were her pupils.

The last entrant in Philadelphia’s “Polka Wars” was an exiled Hungarian army officer dashingly named Gabriel de Korponay, left, who arrived in December at middle of the season. A dancer and teacher, he conducted classes here in English, German and French and  claimed to have introduced the Polka to America. His wife played piano, composed and gave music lessons. Korponay would settle in Philadelphia and later served as a captain in the Mexican War and as a colonel in the 28th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War.

These extravagant claims and the one-upmanship continued to appear in the advertisements of the North American throughout the rest of the 1844-45 social season. However, the fact is that by 1844, the “authenticity” of any Polka style being taught was really a moot point. The dance, like most of the fashionable dances of the nineteenth century, had been entirely re-made in Parisian ballrooms to suit polite tastes and had lost most of the rough edges of its peasant origin. This same phenomenon would appear again in 1913 when the Tango was introduced to America from Argentina after being sanitized by Parisian dance masters.

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NEW AND FASHIONABLE, FASHIONABLE AND NEW

For a brief period, the Polka replaced the Waltz as the most popular couple dance in Philadelphia ballrooms. Polka Quadrilles were now all the rage, replacing the usual simple walking steps used in the figures with the Polka “hop, step, step.” In early 1845, Godey’s Ladies’ Book published a color lithograph called “The Polka Fashions” below:

The Polka was the topic of conversation on everyone’s lips, “Have you seen it?” “Can you do it?” Philadelphia stores sold Polka hats, Polka jackets, Polka boots and the only Polka fashion that has endured to this day – fabrics covered with Polka dots.

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DANCE & ETHNIC PRIDE

“Polkamania” lasted only a brief time. The European and American interest in the struggles for independence among the Czechs and Poles that had turned all eyes on eastern Europe and discovered the Polka now welcomed newer dances like the Mazurka, the Redowa and the Polonaise. The Polka would continue on as a staple of fashionable society balls until the end of the nineteenth century, when it would wane and finally give way to the two-step and American-born ragtime dances. It wouldn’t see a major revival in the U.S. until around World War II,  becoming a source of traditional ethnic pride among eastern European immigrant communities in American cities and celebrated in popular songs like “The Pennsylvania Polka” and “The Beer Barrel Polka,” composed by the Czech musician Jaromír Vejvoda:

“There’s a garden, what a garden,
Only happy faces bloom there
And there’s never any room
For a worry or a gloom.
There’s music, and there’s dancing
And a lot of sweet romancing.
When they play the polka.
They all get in the swing!”

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NOTES

●  The Polka quote from Swedish writer and feminist Frederika Bremer is taken from the 1844 New Monthly Magazine and Humorist.

●  The 1848 Cellarius Polka Quadrilles were truly a local production. The sheet music was printed by the Philadelphia publisher A. Fiot,  the dance sequence was choreographed by Philadelphia dance master Jules Martin and set to music composed by Philadelphia African-American musician  A. F. R. Conner.

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In Philadelphia, Everybody Was Doin’ It . . . or Not.

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     This month I’ll concentrate on dance crazes that swept Philadelphia: the waltz in the late 18th century, the polka in the 19th century and the ragtime mania of the early 20th century. Click on any image for a closer view.

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THE VICTORIANS AT HOME

In 1914, Elizabeth Robins Pennell wrote a memoir called “Our Philadelphia,” which her husband Joseph illustrated.  In it, she recalls her childhood in the late nineteenth century, her grandfather’s house on Spruce and 11th Sts., right, and the Philadelphia world in which she moved. Here she describes the sometimes frustrating predictability of  Philadelphia society and dancing during her youth at the end of the 19^th century:

“Philadelphia had a standard for its parties, as for everything, and to deviate from this standard, to attempt originality, to invent the “freak” entertainments of New York, would have been excessively bad form. You danced in the same spacious front and back parlors . . . to the same music by Hassler’s band; where you ate the same Terrapin, Croquettes, Chicken Salad, Oysters, Boned Turkey and Ice Cream, where the same Cotillon began at the same hour with the same figures and the same favors and the same partners. There was no getting away from the same people in Philadelphia. That was the worst of it.”

She had grown up in that timeless post-Civil War Philadelphia where  “good” Philadelphia families, meaning those residing south of Market Street, sent generations of children to the right dancing school, i.e. Solomon Asher’s Academy at the venerable Natatorium at 219 South Broad Street, below, to learn the correct Philadelphia deportment while doing the correct quadrilles, waltzes and two-steps.

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PROPER PHILADELPHIANS MEET IMPROPER RAGTIME

Those same proper Philadelphians were far from prepared when the “modern” ragtime music and dance craze swept across the Quaker City in the 1910s just as it did across the rest of the country. These new dances didn’t come from the elegant Paris and London salons that had been regarded as the ideals of taste and culture for so long, but from the dance halls and honky-tonks of the notorious Barbary Coast in San Francisco. They were a veritable menagerie of dances like the Grizzly Bear, (left), the Turkey Trot, the Chicken Scratch and the Bunny Hug. First seen as novelty dances on Philadelphia vaudeville stages, they soon swooped, loped and trotted their way into Philadelphia society. They were raucous, they were lively, they were fun and they were truly American in origin, but were they “decent?” Philadelphia wasn’t sure. At first, the New York Times reported,

“The Turkey Trot has invaded Philadelphia’s most exclusive dancing circles. ‘Everybody is doing it this season,’ Mrs. Drexel Biddle said, ‘and I am doing my best to learn it . . .  It is a hard dance to do.’”

Within a month, though, the city’s taste makers thought better of it, and in a total about-face, headlines now read,

“PHILADELPHIA BANS THE TROT! The turkey trot and grizzly bear will no longer be tolerated in society here. It is understood that the two dances have all but caused several scandals in some of Philadelphia’s best families.”

Within the next few months universities, clubs and churches all over the Philadelphia region vied in banning these new dances.

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COCKTAILS AND TANGO TEAS

To make matters worse, 1913 saw the introduction of the most insidious, controversial and exotic dance of all – the tango.  The tango came to Philadelphia from Argentina by way of Paris. The Pope in Rome immediately forbade all Catholics from dancing the tango, but Philadelphians took more time about making up their minds. Some condemned it without ever seeing it, some ran to be the first to take lessons. Within a few months, however, restaurants and hotels were clearing spaces for  late afternoon “tango teas” so that downtown shopgirls and secretaries could spend an hour or two practicing the latest steps –and imbibing a cocktail or two– before heading to the trolleys and trains that took them home. Wanamakers, Strawbridges and Lit Brothers sold “tango shirts” and “tango shoes” for men  and “tango sashes,” “tango hats” and even flexible “tango corsets” for women. Bolts of brilliant orange fabric that had sat unsold in dry goods stores flew off the shelves when the color was dubbed “tango.”

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DANCE MANIA!

The number of studios in the city teaching the “modern dances” tripled within a year. The Inquirer and the Evening Ledger competed to print whole series of articles describing the latest steps and the newest dances; the Hesitation Waltz, the Castle Walk, and something called the Foxtrot.  Advertisements for locally made Victrola gramophones assured Philadelphians that they could now practice their tango variations in the privacy of their homes, even on Sundays, when Pennsylvania Blue Laws forbade public dancing. Respectable ballrooms and “dance palaces” appeared in the city for the first time. (In 1918 The Roseland Ballroom would open on Market Street, long before its more famous other location in New York.)

* * *

Riding on the crest of this dance mania were the first American ballroom stars, Vernon and Irene Castle, right. The Castles removed all the objectionable elements from ragtime dances, and shrewdly marketed themselves, their dances and their elegant New York studio to the best society in the city. They warned “Do not wriggle the shoulders. Do not shake the hips. Do not flounce the elbows. . . Remember you are at a social gathering, and not in a gymnasium. Drop the Turkey Trot, the Grizzly Bear, the Bunny Hug, etc. These dances are ugly, ungraceful, and out of fashion.” When they appeared at B.F. Keith’s vaudeville stage at 1116  Chestnut Street in November 0f 1914, the house was sold out and many were turned away as Philadelphians thronged not only to see the newest dances performed by America’s ballroom dance stars, but to catch a glimpse of Irene’s bobbed hair and latest, fashion-setting gowns.

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America’s entrance into World War I put a sober end to that incredible “modern dance mania.” When the doughboys returned after the war, something called “jazz” had taken the place of ragtime music.  But in those amazing few years before  the war, the Turkey Trot, the Grizzly Bear and the Bunny Hug had shaken up traditional Philadelphians, forever changing the way they danced and the kind of music they danced to. As the story of Marguerite Walz, January 22 post, below, shows us, in the 1920s jazz music and jazz dances like the Charleston along with the impossible task of enforcing of National Prohibition would create new scandals and problems for Philadelphians.

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SOURCES

●  “Our Philadelphia,” Elizabeth Robins Pennell, 1914, illustrated by Joseph Pennell

●   The Philadelphia Inquirer 1911-1916

●  “Modern Dancing,” Vernon and Irene Castle, 1916

●   The New York Times, December 22, 1911 and January 5, 1912

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The Poetry of Skirts

* * *

THE GAIETY GIRLS TAKE PHILADELPHIA

In 1889 and again in 1891, the London Gaiety Girls descended on Philadelphia. They were the girls of the chorus line from London’s Gaiety Theatre – polite, genteel, well-bred young ladies. They introduced Philadelphians to a novelty dance originated by one of their members, Miss Kate Vaughn; see photo right. Kate had costumed herself in a long, black, accordion-pleated skirt which she swirled about as she danced around the stage, creating with it images of voluminous  silken butterflies, flowers and serpentine forms. Audiences were enthralled. “Skirt dancing” didn’t require years of ballet training and impeccable technique, it only needed a few dozen yards of silk, a lithe figure and some feminine gracefulness.

Within a few years Miss Vaughn had spawned hundreds of disciples, variations and imitations in England and America, including Letty Lind, Mable Clark, Chrissie Sheridan, Chicago’s Annabelle Moore and Philadelphia’s own Bessie Clayton.

In 1892, Lottie Collins, left, appearing at the Walnut Street Theatre, brought the house down by adding a little bit of the naughtiness of the  can-can, as she did her high-kicking rendition of the skirt dance to the immensely popular tune “Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay!” Depending on the venue, the skirt dance could supply enough artistry to satisfy the ladies and enough glimpses of leg to satisfy the men in the audience.

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* * *

DANCE AND ART

From about 1890 to 1910, skirt dancing was synonymous with dancing that was modern and artistic.  It captured both the spirit of the healthy, athletic, “New Woman,” and the aesthetics of the blossoming Art Nouveau movement, which celebrated the curving, sinuous lines found in nature; see William H. Bradley’s 1894 cover for the Chapbook entitled “The Skirt Dance,” below, right.

Soon dance masters in Philadelphia were teaching skirt dancing to every female in their classes between the ages of 5 and 45. Since it required more charm and gracefulness than technique, skirt dancing often showed up at recitals and soirées at the  homes of the social set all around the city. (The New York Times reported that a craze for skirt dancing even appeared among the pupils of a private boys’ school – Columbia University – until it was stopped by the officials of the college on the ground that “the exhibitions are not manly. There is something distinctly effeminate in the spectacle of a boy in girl’s clothing, talking and acting like a girl.”)

Here, the debutante who once entertained guests with tearful ballads warbled at the piano now displayed her terpsichorean skills in a parlor version of the skirt dance. The Philadelphia Inquirer had this to say:

“The muscles of the skirt dancer are so symmetrically developed that there is no touch of ungainliness about the physical form. The unattractive lumps that are painfully visible in the legs of the pirouetting French danseuse are replaced by the long slim lines that bend as gracefully as a reed.

The plump woman must bow to her slim sister’s superiority in this profession, as every teacher of the art will confess . . . her preferable weight is 96 pounds.”

This was, perhaps, the beginning of the 20th century American obsession with the slim, athletic woman and the death knell for the Victorian idealization of the hourglass figure.

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LA LOÏE

In 1891, Illinois born actress Loie Fuller appeared in a bit part in a vaudeville melodrama called “Quack, M.D.” In it, she portrayed a character who performed a skirt dance while under hypnosis. The play was a mediocre flop, but Loie was a hit. She soon found herself drawn more to dance than to acting. She began experimenting with costume design for her “Serpentine Dance,” using hundreds of yards of gauzy silk for her skirts and manipulating them with long bamboo wands, left.  She also created innovative lighting designs, bathing herself with electric lights, brightly  colored with gels and luminescent salts. Art Nouveau glassmakers were known to consult her about colors and dyes. Her stage craft innovations and effects, using as many as eight lighting technicians, multiple mirrors and projections, were so creative that they were featured in an 1895 issue of Scientific American; see illustration, right.  An article in Cosmopolitan Magazine entitled “The Poetry of Skirts” remarked:

“The blackness of the night, the brilliancy of noon, the fluttering of the leaves in the forest, the undulation of the grass on the prairie, the yellow waves of a field of wheat, the tossing surf of the rocky coast, the gleam and glister of the frost on the deadened turf, the sweep of the blowing, blustering, billowing snow – all can be portrayed.”

Fuller found her most responsive audiences in Paris, who called her “La Loïe” and she became the first American expatriate dancer. She returned to the U.S. on  tour many times, however, performing to adoring crowds in Philadelphia’s Walnut Theatre and Chestnut Street Opera House.

* * *

AN ELECTRIC SALOME

Fuller did something entirely new; she created a dance form that involved her entire body; she was entirely transformed into an abstract, evocative swirl of color and light. The effect was “unique, ethereal and delicious.” Before Ruth St. Denis and Isidora Duncan, whom she introduced to Parisian audiences, she abandoned corsets, danced in bare feet and trained a company of women dancers in her style. She lived openly as a lesbian in Paris for decades, continuing as a pioneer in both dance and technology. She proved that other types of dance than classical ballet could have an intense emotional impact and be perceived as serious art.  Her integration of music, movement, lighting and costume influenced theatre for years after her death.  Fuller had opened the door to 20th century modern dance.

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The beautifully hand colored silent film “Danse Serpentine,” below, was made in 1896 at the Lumière Brothers studio in France. The identity of the dancer on the stage is unknown, but she comes closer to capturing the style of Fuller than some of the dancers filmed by the American Edison studio around the same time.

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SOURCES

● “Fifteen Years of a Dancer’s Life,” Loie Fuller, 1913

● “The Poetry of Skirts,” Cosmopolitan, April, 1900

● “The Skirt Dance,” Scientific American, June, 1896

● “Skirt Dancing and Its Charms,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 3, 1895

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When Philadelphia Went to the Ballet

March being Women’s History Month, during the next few weeks I’ll highlight Philadelphia women in dance. History tends to ignore the influence of dance on popular culture and, in doing so, often keeps hidden the inspiring stories of daring, creative women.

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OF FAIRIES AND BALLET-GIRLS

Throughout the 19th century, ballets in America most often served as diverting, if lightweight,  additions to opera and theatre. The eye-pleasing color and motion of  these “incidental dances”  relieved the often static staging of serious operas and plays; both the Academy of Music and the Metropolitan Opera maintained a corps of dancers. In the complementary world of vaudeville and popular music houses, elaborately costumed dances were usually part of a kaleidoscopic program that might include songs, magic acts, trained dogs, pantomimes and clowns. There were exceptions, like Philadelphia’s own Mary Ann Lee and Augusta Maywood (more on them next time), but the ballet dancer, daring to expose her shapely limbs in “fleshings,” spangles and short skirts,  was generally seen as something closer to chorus girl than to ethereal fairy. In short, the “ballet-girl” was something no better than her wicked sister, the actress. The Daily Evening Bulletin described this scene from a ballet presented at the American Theatre in 1867:

“The dancers are dressed in an extreme ballet costumes, the majority of them are wearing the shortest possible skirts, with their extemities clothed in flesh colored tights . . .  The dance is perhaps no worse than many others of the same character that are given at other places of amusement, and yet it will scarcely be denied that its chief attraction was its lascivious character, and that the theatre was crowded nightly by men, who came her for the extreme purpose of seeing this dance, and the women who engaged in it”

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PAVLOVA – THE IMMORTAL SWAN

The person who did the most to publicize ballet and create new audiences in the early 20th century was without a doubt Anna Pavlova. It was for the frail-looking Pavlova that Michel Fokine created the solo The Dying Swan, the role with which she would become most closely associated. In an era before air travel, it was estimated that Pavlova logged over 400,000 miles while touring the globe. She first appeared in Philadelphia with the Russian Imperial Ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House at Broad and Poplar Streets in 1910 to a house nearly filled by a curious public.  The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that “this form of entertainment possesses pleasurable possibilities which had not before been adequately realized in this vicinity . . . it did prove once more that the dance is entitled to be admitted to the company of the fine arts.” Indeed, Pavlova was to return to Philadelphia many times in the teens. Her face appeared on Wanamaker Department Store ads and, over eighteen weeks in 1915, The Evening Public Ledger published a series of  illustrated articles in which “Pavlowa, peerless dancer” would instruct Ledger readers  in her versions of the waltz, the onestep and the polka. The incomparable Pavlova had shrewdly used the mania for ragtime ballroom dancing to promote her company and classical ballet, widening her audiences and her appeal.

* * *

CATHERINE LITTLEFIELD – FIERY AND COOL

Around the same time that Pavlova began appearing on Philadelphia stages, West Philadelphian Catherine Littlefield began studying at her mother Caroline’s dance school. Later, she studied and performed in New York, then in Europe with the Paris Opera. Returning home to Philadelphia, she began choreographing and dancing for the Philadelphia Civic Opera, of which her mother was ballet director, and the Philadelphia Grand Opera Company. Soon, she was teaching at the family’s Littlefield School of Ballet at 1815 Ludlow St., near Rittenhouse Square. From that school, in 1935, grew the Littlefield Ballet which quickly became the Philadelphia Ballet. Mother Caroline accompanied classes on piano, sister Dorothie was ballet mistress and brother Carl was enlisted to dance with the company.  (See Catherine rehearsing the Philadelphia Ballet in the Ludlow St. studio, right.) The New York Times wrote of the new company in December of 1935:

“With no fanfare whatever, but considerable promise of success, a new ballet organization has slipped into the American field with Philadelphia at its centre and Catherine Littlefield as its director. Though it came into official existence no longer ago than Oct. 25 with a modest suburban performance, it is already worthy of attention for several reasons. In the first place, it is a healthy step in the direction of breaking down the centralization of all dance activity in New York . . . In the second place, Miss Littlefield’s procedure is eminently practical, devoid of all pretension and Barnumism, and based on the good old fashioned principal of making haste slowly.  . . At present the repertoire consists of three pieces composed by Miss Littlefield with a very definite end in view. They have been designed to make an appeal to audiences which may never have seen any kind of dance before, and at the same time to be in every way up to the best standards of dance.”

Appealing to a wide audience was just what Littlefield did. The Company performed where they could find an engagement – in high schools, women’s clubs and athletic associations.  The company was fresh, young and full of enthusiasm. They performed pieces set to classical European music choreographed for them by Littlefield, such as Bolero to music by Ravel, Viennese Waltz to Strauss melodies and a full length Sleeping Beauty. However, they also performed American themed pieces like Barn Dance, which popularized American rural themes before Agnes DeMille’s Rodeo and Eugene Loring’s Billy the Kid (see photo, below); The Rising Sun, an historical piece marking the 150th anniversary of the Pennsylvania constitution and Cafe Society, a spoof of the nightclub scene. The company performed to acclaim in New York, and later with the Chicago City Opera. In 1937, Littlefield’s Philadelphia Ballet became the first American company to tour Europe.

In the early 1940s Littlefield lost too many men to the war draft  to maintain a performing company – she had always stressed the importance of strong, athletic male dancers. She spent the rest of the decade choreographing ice shows and making significant contributions to musical theatre. Littlefield crackled with energy yet was calmy focused; a contemporary commented, “She was dry ice–fiery and cool.” Cancer ended her life in 1951.

The short career of Philadelphia dancer, teacher, choreographer and director Catherine Littlefield, as well as the fact that she was a woman artistic director in what had been a man’s game, only make her accomplishments more extraordinary. Like Pavlova, she widened the audience for dance with her commitment, high technical standards and personal vision. An amazing woman,  Littlefield’s story is a significant, if forgotten,  chapter in the history of 20th century American dance.

Yes, Washington Danced Here Part II

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WHAT WOULD WASHINGTON DANCE?

We don’t have any evidence about how or when George Washington learned to dance, but it probably wasn’t from a book. His formal education, provided to him as one of ten children of an aristocratic Virginia family, ended in his early teens. The dances of 18th century ballrooms, the minuet, the reel, the jig, the cotillion and the country dance all required skill, grace, rhythm and balance. Washington loved music but was not a musician. Even so, while in Philadelphia, he held his own in company with polished dancers, all the  while under the scrutiny of the  highly critical public. He must have had instruction somewhere, especially to execute the complicated rhythms, patterns and steps of the minuet.

Below is a letter of recommendation by Washington on behalf of Philadelphia dance master James Robardet, who had instructed the President’s grandchildren at his dancing school on Walnut St. between 3rd and 4th Sts.:

Philad. April 26th 1792.
Dear Sister & Dear Madam,

Mr James Robardet, who has taught my two Grand children dancing, proposes going into your part of the Country to establish a School, if he should meet with sufficient encouragement, and has requested that I would give him a line of recommendation to some of my friends. Mr Robardet’s attention to my grand children, and the progress which they have made under his instruction, induce me to recommend him on these accounts from my own knowledge: He has likewise kept a dancing School in this City the winter past—in which I am informed he has given much satisfaction, and his conduct has been marked with decency & propriety, so far as I have heard.

                                                                       G.W.

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THE MINUET: THE PERFECTION OF ALL DANCING

The minuet was to 18th century ballrooms what the waltz would be in the 19th century, the enduring grande dame of dances. The dance steps and musical form of the minuet had originated in France in the 1660s. Under the watchful eye of Louis XIV, France had come to dominate European–and therefore American–fashions in clothing, food, art, music and dance and it would maintain that cultural dominance for several hundred years.

The 18th century ballroom minuet began every formal ball. 18th century dance manuals give detailed descriptions of the form and steps of the minuet. More “Dancing With the Stars” than leisure activity, it was performed by one couple at a time while the rest of the assembly looked on. The highest ranking or most honored couple would lead off the first one. In keeping with its highly ceremonial quality, the minuet began and ended with formal bows and curtsies called “honors” to partner and to the company. (See illustration, right, from Kellom Thomlinson’s Art of Dancing, London, 1735.) The unique quality of the minuet was that unlike other choreographed ballroom dances of the time, where certain steps went to certain parts of the music, it allowed for improvisation and spontaneity within a framework. There were sections that had to be performed, alternating with “S” patterns, where the couple exchanged places,  that could be repeated at will. (See the illustration from Thomlinson below, left.) There was a step vocabulary particular to the minuet, but the steps chosen and the number of steps used to complete each figure could vary. Good dancers were also encouraged to make figures NOT fit perfectly with the eight bar sections of the music. The dance demanded focus, control and spatial awareness of both the partner and the onlookers, all to achieve an air of unaffected ease and nonchalance. The dancers approached and withdrew from each other in a display of courtship, grace, skill and power. The level of skill necessary to carry all this off was akin to the training and technique a competent tango dancer needs today.

When the most important couple had completed the first minuet of the evening, they would separate and alternately choose another partner. There was an inherent protocol; being asked to dance the minuets was a distinct honor. Philadelphia ladies proudly noted in their journals and diaries when they had been asked to dance by Mr. Washington. On the other hand, there was also a certain social power that women could yield in the right of refusal. A 1749 letter to Thomas Penn describes an incident at a ball between his brother, Governor John Penn, and a certain Mrs. Taylor: “The Governor would have opened the Assembly with Mrs. __ but she refused him, I suppose because he had not been to visit her. After Mrs. __ ‘s refusal, two or three Ladies out of modesty & from no manner of ill design excused themselves so that the Governor was put a little to his Shifts; when Mrs. Willing, now Mrs. Mayoress, in a most genteel manner put herself into his way & on the Governor seeing this instance of her good nature he jumped at the Occasion and they danced the first Minuet.”

These technically challenging, presentational, single couple minuets would usually go on for the first few hours of the evening before giving way to the popular, more relaxed cotillions and country dances.

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COUNTRY DANCE

Much more democratic than the minuet, the country dances were done by couples in long parallel lines, men on one side, women on the other. In the course of the dance each couple proceeds up and down the rows to dance figures with all the other couples. (See the illustration, above, from Hogarth’s 1753 Analysis of Beauty.) Each “set” could contain up to ten couples, and large ballrooms could hold several sets of dancers, so the entire assembly could dance at once. The rows of dancers that country dances required help explain the long, narrow shape of the 18th century Philadelphia rooms that were used for dancing, such as the ballroom in the City Tavern and the upper floor of Independence Hall.

There are choreographies for thousands of 18th century country dances from England, Ireland and America. One of the earliest collection of these was John Playford’s The English Dancing Master, published in 1651. In the late 1680s, English country dances were introduced to France. There, they were fitted up with French dance steps: pas de bourrée, glissade, sissone, balancé etc. The term “country dance” was taken into French as “contredanse.” Ironically, the French “contredanse” wass then introduced to New England, where the French “contredanse” then became “contra dance.” The country dances and tunes found in early American collections took on a patriotic hue, boasting names like “Burgoyne’s Defeat,” “Washington’s Reel,” “City of Philadelphia” and “Lafayette Forever.”

* * *

LEGACY

Most of the figures of the 18th century English country dance were used the cotillion, a country dance variation where four couples faced each other in a square, rather than in long rows. Cotillions developed into quadrilles in the 19th century and eventually into western square dances. The steps and figures of country dancing, like allemande, casting off, changing places, ladies change and hands across are all familiar to modern recreational dancers who do square dancing or English country dancing. Its minimal skill requirement and sociability have served country dancing well; new dances. tunes and figures are still being created today in the tradition of 18th century English country dance.

The minuet hasn’t fared so well. By the time Washington was leading off the first dance at the Philadelphia Dancing Assembly, the minuet was already well over a hundred years old. Dances, like people, tend to slow down and become more sober as they age. By the 1810s, the minuet was a stodgy ballroom relic, used for only the most formal occasions. The minuet faded from national memory until 1876, the great Centennial of American Independence. When the dance was reconstructed for centennial celebrations, it became what 19th century Philadelphians wanted, a nostalgic symbol of a nobler, idealized era. Victorian reconstructions of the “stately” minuet featured much fussy bowing and scraping, fingertip hand holds and mincing,  daintily pointed feet – all of which would have been alien to the 18th century aesthetic. (See the illustration, above, right, “The Stately Minuet – the dance of our great-grand-sires,” from a 1900 stereopticon slide.) That precious, mincing minuet style reared its badly-wigged head again for the Sesquicentennial in 1926, where colonial dames appeared in white cotton wigs and ’20s-style dropped waist “revolutionary war-era” gowns.  It was this theatricalized style of minuet, filtered through the prism of Victorian romanticism, that has appeared in dozens of Hollywood movies from the 1910s right up to the present. Dancing, like history, tends to be what each generation needs it to be.

* * *

● Since dance is a visual medium, here’s a sample of a good reconstruction of part of an 18th century minuet on YouTube by Atlanta Baroque Dance:

● You can read more about George Washington and 18th century American dance in: George Washington: A Biography in Social Dance by Kate Van Winkle Keller, The Hendrickson Group, 1998 and in Dance and Its Music in America: 1528-1729, also by Kate Van Winkle Keller, Pendragon Press, 2007

● The inexpensive 1984 Dance Books Ltd. reprint of John Playford’s 1651 The English Dancing Master seems to be out of print, but there is an online facsimile of it here.

● Lastly, all of Kellom Thomlinson’s 1735 Art of Dancing is available on the Library of Congress wonderful “American Memory” website here.

Oh, and a happy Presidents’ Day 2012 to all!

* * *

Yes, Washington Danced Here. – Part I

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DANCE AS STATECRAFT

George and Martha Washington lived here in Philadelphia, in the large house on Market St. near 6th, from November of 1790 until March of 1797.  During those seven years, they were an important part of the social as well as political fabric of this city. An increasingly evolving protocol demanded that they host and attend formal dinners and parties, attend concerts and theatre and that they be present at countless balls, dances and assemblies.

The first president, although a large-framed man, was  graceful and athletic and thoroughly enjoyed dancing. The self control that Washington had mastered in his political demeanor served him well in the ballroom. History records him partnering with many Philadelphia belles on the dance floor; he danced at the City Tavern, Oeller’s Hotel on Chestnut St. near Sixth St. and often at the Powel House on Third Street. As for Martha, we have no record of her dancing and no reason given for that fact. Whether she couldn’t or wouldn’t dance remains a mystery.

* * *

THE PHILADELPHIA DANCING ASSEMBLY

Of all the social functions in the city, the most exclusive was the Philadelphia Dancing Assembly. The Assembly, founded in 1748, was an organization that sponsored formal balls every other week during the winter social season. Following the model of English upper class society, its membership was restricted to those who were of high enough social status, who could afford the subscription fee, maintain the necessary wardrobe and who had the leisure time and self-assurance to learn to dance well. By the 1790s, the Assemblies had outgrown their usual venue at the City Tavern. When Oeller’s Hotel, pictured above, far right, opened on the south side of Chestnut St. near 6th st., they moved their fortnightly dances there. Oeller’s was the first establishment in the city to call itself a “hotel.” Its Assembly Room, according to Henry Wansey’s Excursion to the United States, was “a most elegant room, sixty feet square, with a handsome music gallery at one end . . . papered after the French fashion, with the Pantheon figures in compartments, imitating festoons, pillars and groups of antique drawings, in the same style as lately introduced in the most elegant houses in London.”  The circular building in the center of the drawing, above, is Rickett’s Circus and to the left, across 6th St., is Congress Hall.

Each February, from 1791 to 1797, the Dancing Assembly hosted a birth night ball, in honor of President Washington.  The Federal Gazette described the 1791 ball: “. . . it is with particular pleasure we record one of the most elegant, numerous and splendid dancing assemblies ever in this city . . .  At the ball were present  besides our beloved General, his lady, the Vice-President of the United States and lady, several members of the United States and State Legislatures with their ladies, and a very brilliant concourse of strangers and citizens; the whole exhibiting the rapid growth and advancement of the refined and social pleasures in America.” In 1792, when a rival “New Dancing Assembly” was formed, there were TWO birthday balls on consecutive nights; Washington attended them both. Some of the birth night balls were so large that the dancing took place in the Rickett’s Circus building and refreshments were served next door in Oeller’s Hotel, with communicating doors added between them.

The birth night balls in Philadelphia became a tradition honoring America’s highly esteemed first president. The first of these was in February of 1798, almost a year after Washington had left office. The same invitation was sent to President John Adams as was sent to everyone else. Feeling slighted and perhaps insulted by the fact that there had been no ball honoring his own birthday the preceding October, Adams’ reply to the Dancing Assembly managers was short and to the point:

GENTLEMEN,

“I have received your polite Invitation to a Ball on Thursday the 22nd inst. & embrace the earliest opportunity to inform you that I decline accepting it.”

I am, Gentlemen,
Your most obedient
& humble Servant.

next: What Would Washington Dance?

A Gentleman Looks for Love

☛ As always, you may click on any image below for a larger view.

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A YOUNG  CONVEYANCER

Joseph Warner Erwin was born in the Blockley Township section of West Philadelphia in 1824 to comfortable, upper-middle class parents. As a young man, he worked with his father as a conveyancer – a writer of deeds, leases and other legal papers.  Like many young men in Philadelphia, he attended the theatres and cheered the star performers of the day, he promenaded with the other swells along Chestnut Street in order to see and be seen, he had late night dinners in oyster cellars, he went on picnics, he danced at parties both private and public all over the city and, luckily for us, he kept detailed records of it all. When his father died in 1845, the family moved to a respectable rooming house at 108 Walnut Street near Independence Hall and Erwin opened his own office nearby in the Mercantile Library Building, left,  on 5th St., below Chestnut St., just south of the Philosophical Society’s Library Hall.

* * *COTILLIONS & QUADRILLES

Erwin began his journal when he was 14 in 1839 and continued to make entries in it until 1854. In 1842, as he approached his 18th birthday, he entered the world of sociables, dances . . . and young ladies. Over the next few years he attended dozens of dances each year, sometimes several a week, always carefully describing and comparing the ladies he met there. In the first few years of the journal he seemed to favor the semi-private “cotillions” sponsored by local dance teachers.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the cotillion had been a separate dance, with its own figures and musical form. By the 1840s, the term “cotillion” meant not only a dance party but  it had become interchangeable for “quadrille,” another form of group dance. 1840s quadrilles/cotillions were dances that were done by four couples in a “square dance” formation; see the illustration right from Philadelphia dance master Charles Durang’s 1848 dance manual, Terpsichore. Each quadrille was made up of a set of five sections or “figures,” and each figure was repeated four times. As in modern square dancing, a Master of Ceremonies would usually call out the figures to be done.

16 March 1842.  It was clear and very pleasant all day with the wind from the NW. The thermometer at 5 1/2 a.m. was at 57 degrees, at 1 1/2 p.m. it was at 52 degrees. I was at the office all day and in the evening I was at Mr. Wales’ last cotillion party – I danced 11 sets. I got up at 5 a.m. and got to bed at 1/4 of 1 a.m.

Since each quadrille set could take up to a half hour, 11 sets may seem like a lot of dancing, until we recall that Joseph is only 17 in March of 1842. Dance masters held series of practice dances for their students and their guests during the social season, from November through the beginning of Lent. The “Mr. Wale” referred to above is Henry Whale, who had appeared on the stage of the Chestnut St. Theatre in 1809 as a “child wonder.”

11 February 1843.  In the evening I accompanied Lydia (his sister) to Mdme Hazard’s cotillion party to which place we were admitted by tickets procured through the kindness of Miss Adriana Brinckl. On entering the room, and for sometime afterward, I was under the impression that it would be rather a dry affair for me,  for I had been told visitors were not permitted to dance. I, however, was determined to dance, if I could possibly get permission, which I did after having a little confab with Mr. Hazard.

THE ASSEMBLY BUILDINGS

Mdme Hazard and her husband, Paul, had come to Philadelphia from the Paris Opera in 1835. Paul was the teacher of Augusta Maywood, America’s first internationally renowned ballerina. Both Hazards, as well as Henry Whale, taught at one of the most fashionable public spaces in the city, the Assembly Buildings on the southwest corner of Chestnut and 10th Sts., pictured in an 1853 lithograph, left. The buildings extendend all the way south to George (Sansom) St. There were retail spaces on the first floor and a restaurant in the basement. The second floor was devoted to two large and quite beautifully decorated salons, pictured right. The Grand Saloon (salon) was 120 feet long and adorned with 11 ten-foot long mirrors on one side. Described as “by far the most magnificent in our city,” it was leased to dance masters and also used for lectures, balls, performances and meetings. In the 1840s there were more than a dozen dance masters in Philadelphia, competing to fill classes and to sell subscriptions for series of cotillions or dances. In addition to being places where students could practice what they had learned in classes, these dances provided an important social outlet for young, genteel Philadelphians; they were some of the few places the sexes could mix freely in public.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK

Joseph Erwin and his wide circle of friends also met frequently for planned and impromptu parties. There were picnics on the Schuylkill and boat excursions to Cape May in the summer as well as wedding parties and sociables at private homes at holidays or in honor of special guests visiting from out of state. Any small gathering could be, and usually was, an excuse for dancing. Erwin usually used these gatherings to flirt and assess the charms of the women present:

9 March 1843.  Among the prettiest of the ladies there, I may class Miss Wallace, Miss Witman, Miss Blackwood, and one other whose name I cannot remember. These fair creatures lit up the room as it were by magic, with smiles, which came from their exquisitely formed mouths and piercing eyes which inspired all the poor fellows that were in reach of their charms with jealousy and love. At about 11 o’clock had a most sumptuous supper, with all the delicacies that could be obtained.

When there was no dancing, either because of a lack of space or music, he would complain that “the evening was quite stiff on account of it.” Whenever he attended the Walnut or Chestnut Street Theaters, Joseph Erwin would carefully describe the dancing he saw:

24 March 1847.  In the evening went up to the Walnut Street Theater to see the far-famed and much talked of Viennoises Danseuses, being 48 in number composed entirely of children. The first dance, viz., “Pas Des Fleurs” was certainly the most beautiful spectacle I ever witnessed. The grouping of the dances were indeed superb. It would be impossible to describe the various movements made by them, and with such accuracy as was really surprising among those so young. The second dance “Pas Horrois” was a very beautiful thing, it was performed by only 24, one half of which were dressed in male attire. The last dance, entitled the “Grand Pas Oriental” was superb. The groupings in this piece were beautiful indeed, and the rapid changes through which they passed with the white and red scarfs was astonishing. In this piece one half of the dancers are dressed as Moors. These dances are surely worth seeing by everyone.

He truly enjoyed and appreciated dancing.

In 1845, his circle of acquaintances decide to host their own sociables every other Monday evening at different members’ houses around the city. This increased the already large number of young, marriageable ladies who came into his sphere. In 1846, for instance, Erwin mentions by name and commented on more than 65 single misses he danced with or visited! In 1847, at a dance in the parlor of his own boarding house on Walnut St.,he met Caroline Borden:

3 November 1847.  At the office all day, until about 1 p.m. Then went up to Mr. Edward Roberts for Ma and Lydia who had been spending the day there to have them come home by request of Mrs. Crim (his landlady), as she was to have a dance in the parlor this evening. They insisted upon my remaining to tea which I did. Left there about 1/2 past 7, went home & dressed, and entered the parlor about 1/4 of 9. The company was composed principally of the boarders though there were some few strangers. We had a fiddler and kept up the dancing until about 1 a.m. spending a delightful evening. I made the acquaintance of Miss Borden this evening, one of our boarders, who has been here for some time though I had not become acquainted. She is quite an interesting young lady, and I am much pleased with her, though I must say she did not treat me very well regarding an engagement I had to dance with her. I suppose it was not intentional, as she afterwards made an apology.

Joseph W. Erwin and Caroline A. Borden were married on July 23, 1850. They bought a home west of Broad St. on Schuylkill 4th (19th) and Cherry Sts. near the original Wills Eye Hospital and raised two daughters.

SOURCES

Dancing was a very important part of the courtship and mating ritual of mid- 19th century Philadelphia. Athough rules of deportment and etiquette on the dance floor were strict and dances took place under the watchful eyes of chaperones or dancing masters, young people  still found the means for the flirtation and intimacy that would lead to solid, lifelong middle-class relationships.

* * *

•  The chromolithographs I’ve used are all from Graham’s Magazine, which Edgar Allan Poe both wrote for and edited in the 1840s while in Philadelphia. Among the reasons he gave for leaving the magazine were the “despicable pictures and fashion plates.”

•  The illustrations of the Chestnut Street Assembly Building are from an original copy of Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing Room Companion at the Free Public Library.

•  The quadrille illustration, above right, and waltzing couple, left, from Durang’s Terpsichore are from original editions in my personal collection.

•  If you’d like to read more of the journal of Joseph Warner Erwin, Bryn Mawr College hosts an on-line transcription  annotated by S. Hamill Horne here.

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1950s – The Philadelphia Way

* * *

We’re goin’ hoppin’ , we’re goin’ hoppin’ today
Where things are poppin’, the Philadelphia way
We’re gonna drop in, on all the music they play
on the Bandstand . . .  Bandstand!

                                       – Charles Albertine

It was a simple, low-cost idea: spin pop records on TV and show local Philly teen-agers dancing to them. It was pure gold.

* * *

• BOB HORN
In 1952, WFIL TV (now WPVI) in West Philadelphia asked veteran DJ Bob Horn to move his radio show to TV. After experimenting with music and videos (shades of MTV!), Bob began inviting local high school students into the studio to dance live before the cameras and decorated the studio set with Philadelphia high school pennants. He called the show Bob Horn’s “Bandstand.” The local ABC affiliate’s daytime broadcasting schedule was nearly non-existent at the time, so the producers ran the show in the after-school 3 – 5 pm slot. The show was an immediate hit.  Philly teens rushed home from school to catch the latest dance moves. Dancers on the show became minor local celebrities;  it was “Dancing with the Stars” where the stars were the kids next door.

In 1956, Bob Horn was involved in two drunk driving incidents as well as accusations of sexual misconduct with a minor. There was a lot of controversy over the legitimacy of the sexual misconduct charge. He was found innocent or sexual wrongdoing, but the three allegations put an end to Bob’s career at WFIL. In the wings his replacement was waiting; the young Dick Clark.

• DICK CLARK
Dick Clark was just what the station needed to take the spotlight off Bob Horn’s tarnished imaged. Dick was young, clean-cut and wholesome. He took over hosting the show changed its name  to “American Bandstand.” A year later, he was able to talk ABC into airing the show nationally. The New York Times had this to say about the show:

“Presiding over the show, which originates in Philadelphia, is Dick Clark, a well-groomed young man richly endowed with self-assurance. Mr Clark is inclined, when expressing agreement with guests on the program to use contemporary idioms such as ‘Crazy!’, ‘I’m With You’ and ‘Ah, too much.’ . . .  The girls wore pretty gowns and the boys were dressed conservatively. There were no motorcycle jackets and hardly a sideburn in the crowd.”

Overnight, local high school kids who appeared on the show regularly became national celebrities, getting fan mail and gifts from all over the country. America had its eyes on how Philadelphia teens were dancing. Philly gave birth to new dances and styles that spread across the country: the Bunny Hop, the Bop, the Slop and the Stroll. Philadelphia artists like Fabian and Frankie Avalon got national exposure on Bandstand. From the beginning, the show had also been a platform for African-American artists, including groups like The Chiffons, The Ronettes, the Coasters and the Five satins. It was a black teenager who gave the classic review of a song played on the “Rate-a-Record” segment of the show: “I like the beat and it’s easy to dance to.”

• THE BANDSTAND LEGACY

In 1963, American Bandstand and Dick Clark moved from their Philadelphia home out to Los Angeles. In a few short years the show had had an incredible influence on American music and dance. It had placed Philadelphia and Philly style dancing in the national spotlight. It had showcased countless upcoming rock and roll artists, both black and white. Dick Clark’s clean cut looks and jacket and tie had somehow sanitized what seen as anti-establishment rock and roll music and made it palatable for Americans. Importantly, the show had also helped create a new, teen culture in America; it was as if there had been no “teen-agers” before Dick Clark and American Bandstand. Finally, it had inextricably linked innovations in American music and dance to this emerging youth culture, something that would determine the course of pop music and popular dance in the psychedelic ’60s and ’70s.

* * *

The singers’ croonin’, he ain’t the greatest, but gee
My baby’s swoonin’, in front of all of TV
So if you tune in, you’ll see my baby and me
On the Bandstand . . .  Bandstand!

* * *

18th C – The Quakers and Dance

* * *

KEEPING THE HOLY EXPERIMENT HOLY

Right from the beginning, the fate of dance in Philadelphia was in jeopardy. The city’s formidable Quaker population saw theatre, music and dance as frivolous, dissipated and immoral. As early as 1695, they submitted a petition to the governor and the Pennsylvania Assembly,  ” . . . that fidling, dancing, gameing and what Elce may tend to debauch the inhabitanc and to blemish Christianity and dishonour the holy name of God, may bee curbed and restrained both at fairs and all other times.” The petition was in vain, and at their Yearly Meetings in 1696, 1705 and again in 1716,  the Friends had to admonish their members against dancing, gaming and music. The need to constantly repeat these warnings tells us how strong the temptations of music and dance were in the early colony. Twenty years later, this address printed in the August, 1736 American Weekly Mercury still summed up the Quaker attitude:

“There are a sort of Idle Artists that strole about the World, called Fencers and Dancers, who make it their Business to accomplish the Hands and Heels, rather than the Heads of our Youth; who under pretence of Teaching them what they call Good Breeding, too often teach them that of Sinning: At best they teach them but certain fashionable Airs or Gestures (which I count unnecessary, wanton, and effeminate) and this at the Expence of much Money, and the precious Time of our Youth: the only Time of Life, best suited, for learning ingenious, commendable and profitable Things.”

FALL FROM GRACE

William Penn’s original Charter had provided for the formation of a committee of manners, education, and arts, “that all wicked and scandalous living may be prevented.” At first, Quaker doctrine and discipline prevailed, but as the 18th century progressed, the Society of Friends gradually became less and less of a dominant force in Philadelphia and they found it difficult to hold others to their strict standards of piety and virtue. By 1706, the Quakers were complaining that a dancing and fencing school was being tolerated in the city and in 1710 we read in a private letter of a dancing master intriguingly referred to as “the facetious Mr. Staples.”

The first really magnificent documented ball in the city  was given by Deputy Governor Patrick Gordon for the newly crowned King George II’s birthday, during a three day festival in the fall of 1727. The next year George Brownell and his wife opened a boarding school on Second Street, where they taught reading, writing, cyphering, dancing and needlework to young Philadelphia ladies and gentlemen. This was the same peripatetic George Brownell who, years before, in Boston, had taught writing and arithmetic to a very young Benjamin Franklin.

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THE PHILADELPHIA DANCING ASSEMBLY

By the 1740s, Penn’s idealized Utopia had become a fairly secularized city. Quakers, although a dwindling minority, stubbornly tried to retain political power. Tensions led to the “Bloody Election Riots” of 1742, where they saw their dominance violently, but unsuccessfully, challenged.

Quaker influence in other areas of daily life in Philadelphia would not be so enduring. In 1748, the city’s elite came together to form its most exclusive social group, The Philadelphia Dancing Assembly. Over that winter of 1748-9 they held 9 balls, complete with lavish late night suppers with tea, madeira and chocolate. Dance was now more than just “frivolous” or even “dissipated,” it was a mark of social status and privilege. The subscribers included the governor, the mayor and most of the provincial council. It included wealthy merchants, bankers and professionals. There were Hamiltons, Bonds, Shippens and McCalls; there were Anglicans, two Jews, a few Presbyterians and even two ministers. There was not, however, even in 1748, a single Quaker.
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Dance and the Urban Landscape in the 19th Century

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EARLY  LITHOGRAPHY

The proliferation of the use of lithography in the U.S. in the mid-nineteenth century dramatically changed the world of popular visual art. The first lithograph in America had been made in Philadelphia by Bass Otis in 1818. Unlike woodblocks or etching, the process could cheaply and easily produce multiple copies of an image which retained the subtleties of a drawing or painting. Posters, books, advertising cards and even sheet music, were now alive with images of people, places and things both familiar and exotic. Lithographed sheet music covers were an odd marriage of musical composition and advertising; a union that produced a lively and spontaneous record of the mid-nineteenth century streetscape.

THE IMAGES
Below are some of those contemporary views of Philadelphia from dance music published here from 1836 to 1861. I like to imagine them propped up on the pianos that stood in the parlors of so many Philadelphia rowhouses of the time, part of the reassuring iconography of the middle class city.

You may click on any of the images below for a larger view

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1836 – FAIRMOUNT QUADRILLES

The view is from the first landing on the steps leading up Faire Mount where the Art Museum stands today. We are looking south along the Schuylkill at the fountain just below the Water Works, with the upper Ferry Bridge beyond and Harding’s Hotel on the other bank. By this time Fairmount Park was being celebrated as a natural resource for residents and tourists and was on its way to becoming the largest municipal park in the country.

The music is for a quadrille, a ballroom dance done in a square by four couples, similar to modern square dancing. Inside are instructions for doing the particular set of figures for the “Fairmount Quadrilles.” The quadrille had been introduced to America in the early 19th century and was reaching the height of its popularity when this music was published. Quadrille parties blossomed in public halls and in fashionable private homes all over the city.

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1849 – THE LEDGER POLKA

This is the second location of the Public Ledger Building, at the SW corner of 3rd and Chestnut Streets. The Ledger had begun publishing in 1836, as the city’s first penny paper. The street corner in the image is crowded with top-hatted Philadelphia gentlemen eager to read the latest headlines. One lad stands amusingly on tiptoe to read over someone’s shoulder. The last home of the Ledger, built in 1921 on the SW corner of 6th and Chestnut Streets, is still standing.

The eastern European polka invaded Paris and London ballrooms in 1844 and “polkamania” swept Philadelphia that same year. By the fall, local belles were wearing fashionable polka dots and polka jackets and the city’s dance teachers were vying with each other to teach “the celebrated and real dance called the Polka” in the “latest, most elegant and brilliant style as danced in the best circles in Paris and London.” Would anything less do for Philadelphians?

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1852 – GIRARD HOUSE POLKA

The Girard House, on the north side Chestnut Street near 9th, across from the Continental Hotel on the south side,  had just opened in 1852 when this sheet music was published. The building was designed by John McArthur Jr., architect of Philadelphia City Hall. The hotel was very popular with European visitors; William Makepeace Thackeray stayed there the following year, 1853. In 1861 the Girard was commandeered as a uniform sewing factory and barracks for Union soldiers.

As for the1850s polka, Philadelphia dance master Charles Durang said of it: “There is only one Polka known or recognized in the fashionable world.; but the style of dancing it varies considerably. The most elegant people, and the best dancers, always dance it in a quiet, easy style; and those gentleman who rush and romp about, dragging their partners with them until they became red in the face and covered with the dewdrops of a high corporeal temperature, are both bad dancers, and men of very little good breeding.” Indeed.

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1855 – GRAND MASONIC MARCH

The Masons had moved from away this location earlier, in 1835, at the height of anti-masonic sentiment in Philadelphia. They were able to recover this property later and erected this magnificent Gothic structure here, dedicating it in September of 1855. The street level was rented for commercial space and the large assembly hall inside was used for lectures and balls. The interior ornaments were done by Joseph Bailey, whose most famous work is the statue of George Washington outside Independence Hall. The Masons moved out of the building when their new hall was completed next to City Hall on north Broad Street in 1879. The site continued to be used as a public venue until it burned in 1886.

The Grand March or Polonaise was a prelude to many formal balls in the mid-nineteenth century. Couples would enter the ballroom in a line, promenade around the room, separate and rejoin, walking various figures and patterns at the whim of the lead couple. More than a dance, it was a chance to see and be seen.

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1861 – ARCH STREET THEATRE POLKA

The venerable Arch St. Theatre, designed by William Strickland, opened in 1828. Mrs. John (Louisa Lane) Drew, to whom this musical composition is dedicated,  took over the management in 1861 and ran it as one of the nation’s leading stock companies for three decades. Louisa Lane Drew was the grandmother of the three Barrymores, Lionel, John and Ethel and the great-great-grandmother of Actress Drew Barrymore. John Wilkes Booth was perhaps the Arch St. Theatre’s most infamous company member.

By the end of the 19th century the Arch Street Theatre was home first to German language productions, then Yiddish. It was razed in the 1930s.

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1921 – Philadelphia’s First “Dance Cop”

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THE PROBLEM

Dance masters have always tried to control – and condemn – what the untutored masses do on the dance floor. In 1884, appalled by the vulgar habits and sloppy styling that had crept into our nation’s ballrooms, American dance teachers formed The National Association of Masters of Dancing. For decades, they tried unsuccessfully to refine or abolish, in turn, the two-step, the turkey-trot, the grizzly bear, the bunny hug, the tango, the foxtrot, the toddle, the shimmy, the charleston and the lindy hop. Whew! They knew that casting themselves as arbiters of taste and as the only authorities on the latest steps was good for 1. their prestige and 2. their business. The chronic problem, however, was that although teachers could monitor what went on in their classes, they had no control over what the fun loving public was actually doing in dance halls and at public dances.

MISS WALZ TO THE RESCUE

It was Marguerite Walz, a Philadelphia dance teacher and Association member, who decided to change that. In an article entitled “Unspeakable Jazz Must Go!,” The Ladies Home Journal reported: “Miss Walz went to the mayor of Philadephia in the spring of 1921 and suggested that the authorities should supervise public dancing. The mayor declared a cleanup was due and he appointed Miss Walz policewoman to supervise dancing in conjunction with the Rev. H. Cresson McHenry, who conducts a mission. ‘My duties,’ said Miss Walz,’ are largely the instruction of about seventy-five policemen who are detailed to enforce the dancing regulations. They are taught what is permissable and what is not . . . The police class in censorship is told not to permit cheek-to-cheek dancing, abdominal contact, shimmy, toddle or the Washington Johnny, in which the legs are kept spread apart.” Walz thus became not only the city’s first official dance censor, but the first Philadelphia policewoman . . . all without pay. The Evening Public Ledger used the awkward and slightly deprecatory term “copette” to describe her position.

CITY DANCES ON THE PARKWAY

In order to get dancers out of dark, smoky dance halls – there were 4,000 licensed in Philly – and out in public where they could be monitored, the city decided to sponsor outdoor summer dances on the new Parkway and in West Philadelphia. Marguerite’s short film “Etiquette and Dancing” was screened continually during the events and professional dancers were provided as “models” while the city’s police band played waltzes, polkas and very restrained modern tunes. Cash prizes were given to the best – i.e. “approved” – dancers. Although the Parkway was jammed with a crowd of 18,000 dancers in July, Walz made no arrests; the police would step forward and touch offenders on the shoulder and “that was the end of it.” At first demanding that men wear jackets, she settled for banning males with collarless shirts. At the Dancing Masters’ convention in New York in 1921, Miss Waltz could cheerfully report, “ . . . block parties, with thousands fox-trotting on the streets had improved the reputation of dancing in her city.” Was this anything more than optimistic posturing? We can’t know.

FAME

By 1922, Miss Marguerite Walz, (the real life Mrs. Charles Townsend of Lansdowne), had earned a national repution as “The East Coast Dance Censor.” Articles about her and quotes from her appeared in newspapers across the country. Touting her alleged Philadelphia accomplishments to Gothamites, she soon opened a branch dance studio in New York City. Paraphrasing Woodrow Wilson, she proposed forming a union of dance instructors, “to make dancing safe for decency.”  When later that year she was involved with scandal by association when her brother “Chubby” from Camden, NJ was arrested for murder, Miss Walz coolly and somewhat self-servingly replied, “This whole thing is terrible. You can tell the mothers of America that if the youth of today were not so blatant and vulgar in their speech, this terrible tragedy would never have occurred.”

LOOKING BACK

Today, 90 years later, it’s hard to judge Miss Walz’s motives and intentions. Was she a truly moral minded reformer, or was she a small time dance teacher with ambition and a keen eye for publicity? Early in 1922 Rev. McHenry distanced himself from the whole dance reform movement,  publicly charging that Miss Walz had distorted the dance evil facts for “self-glorification and business reason.” Walz replied, “For my part, it is much more fitting that this should be taken up and discussed in the privacy of the committee.”

How was a local dance teacher able to gain media attention and rise to national celebrity status?  How, not long after the frankly unenforceable Prohibition Amendment had taken effect, was the city able to spare seventy-five officers to police public dances? Perhaps frustrated reformers saw this as one small step in trying to control the social upheavals caused by jazz music, short skirts, technology, bootlegging and general lawlessness that threatened the complacency of 1920s Philadelphia.

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Evr’ybody shimmies now, ev’rybody’s learning how.
Brother Bill, Sister Kate, shiver, like jelly on a plate.
Shimmie dancing can’t be beat,
moves evr’ything except your feet.
Feeble folks mighty old,
shake the shimmie and they shake it bold.
Oh! Honey won’t you show me how,
‘cause ev’rybody shimmies now.

                              – 1919, Eugene West

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● I just discovered that the Fairmount Park Association’s “Museum Without Walls” Audio has some wonderful pictures of these 1920s dances on the Parkway here:

http://museumwithoutwallsaudio.org/dance-history/

Here’s a picture of the Parkway dances they posted from the Evening Bulletin: