This was a formal paper written for a Modern Civilization class during the latter half of college. We were free to choose our topics - so on a whim I of course said "I wanna write about dance", which mutated into "dance caused WWI" which solidified into "the political impact of dance in history." And when the papers were handed back, this one had a happy "A+" scrawled across the top (that paper was 40% of the class grade too). Of course I'd just stayed up absurdly late the night before and cranked the paper out with almost no editing. My guess is that the professor loved the topic, read the first few paragraphs and slapped the grade on there. I'll take it. Reading this now, the paper should've been reorganized and better applied to politics - but hey, an A+ is an A+.
I bolded a few cool facts and threw in some pictures to keep things interesting.
I bolded a few cool facts and threw in some pictures to keep things interesting.
By the 18th century, the Enlightenment was in full swing, and Europe was a storm of change. Events like the Glorious Revolution, Waterloo, and the Industrial Revolution blew strong winds of social, economic, and cultural progress. “For the first time in history, the living standards of the masses of ordinary people have begun to undergo sustained growth. ... Nothing remotely like this…behavior has happened before" (Lucas, 109-10). After the French and Indian war in America and relentless colonization worldwide, Great Britain became a global power. Great philosophers of the age – like Locke, Voltaire, and Hobbes – only created greater waves, questioning everything in social order, the church, and even reality itself. The bloody French Revolution was a direct result of these ideas, and governments scrambled to prevent similar revolutions from happening in their countries. New ideas of liberty and equality were spouted everywhere, and the difference in the old and new was drastically apparent.
…the sublime indifference of court and aristocracy; a national debt that had reached fabulous figures; new dogmas proclaiming "the rights of man" and assaulting the timeworn tenets of social justice; and finally the shot fired by those Massachusetts farmers at Lexington, re-echoing around the world with the sweet promise of independence-all things combined, resulted in an overthrow of mildewed conceptions, creeds and customs (Engel, 528).
With said creeds and customs in such a tenuous state, many found
themselves thinking and questioning alongside the great philosophes. This storm
of thought, tearing through all aspects of political and social life, significantly
manifested itself in dance, most notably in the Waltz.
From practical execution
to symbolic implication, Waltz could only be described with one word:
revolutionary. Before the French Revolution, the Minuet held great meaning, as
the head couple (usually consisting of the King and Queen) stood in place while
the lesser aristocrats flowed around them in coordinated dance. The focus of the dance was the king, and everything done in Minuet reflected this fact. All movements overtly or subtly deferred to the head couple, improvisation was discouraged, and physical contract was severely limited between partners. And since musicians and music halls demanded exorbitant fees, “...[dance]
remained for a long time the privileged entertainment of the noble and rich,
and more particularly of the regal courts” (525). In short, “the minuet was a
symbol of the aristocracy...[throughout] the first half of the 18th
century” (Kassing, 118).
In contrast, the Waltz “expressed a spirit of popular rebellion against aristocratic tradition that favored the social significance of the romantic couple over the hierarchies of paternalistic aristocratic tradition” (Claire, 206). Where most steps in other dances held the tradition of emphasizing the difference between genders, the Waltz became known as the “egalitarian” dance, as each partner had the same steps, merely reversed in order to permit synchronized dancing. And as sexual disparities were minimized, so were political differences. Social lines were flattened, as in Waltz all couples are equal. This dance was about the individual, the person’s own mind and creativity, and one's own improvisatory freedom to occupy public space. “The manner in which each couple improvisationally navigated this sens du bal (direction of dance) permitted and enabled couples to physically and metaphorically trace their circulation in society” (207). Even the Waltz dance position held certain political power. The man places his hand on the woman’s back, the woman’s hand on his shoulder, and swirling away they go. In contrast to the lonesome pirouette of the soloist, in the closed embrace the dancers revolved around each other. When leading forward or backward, the male must place his leg in-between his partner’s, a huge departure from distanced court dancing. The focus here is again on the individual, on the couple’s personal journey and progress around the dance floor. In contrast to the previous focus of dance – that of honoring a King or noble – this distinction is enormous. Instead of dancers moving around a set point in respect to a royal personage, each couple revolves one another. Gleefully abandoning straight choreographed lines, couples would set their own speed and path as they moved counter-clockwise around the dance floor (in the sens du bal), navigating not a hierarchy of royalty, but merely other dancers. And perhaps most importantly, as they moved around the floor, all couples revolved around an empty center. The seat of power – the center of the room, the axle upon which the dancers rotate – is intentionally left empty. In Waltz, the seat of the king is left conspicuously unoccupied.
The focus of social dance evolved from king to individual, respect to relationship. Indeed, the closed position for such dances “requires an elongated spine, locked torso, and expanded frame. Assuming this position is a theatrical gesture, but it is also a kind of political one, commanding space and attention as one traverses the entire floor” (Bosse, 31). Dancers reveled in the unpredictable vertigo in the literal and figurative revolution inherent to Waltz. Inevitably, the social and political innovations exemplified in ballroom dance soon found strong resonance in the hearts of people across Europe.
In contrast, the Waltz “expressed a spirit of popular rebellion against aristocratic tradition that favored the social significance of the romantic couple over the hierarchies of paternalistic aristocratic tradition” (Claire, 206). Where most steps in other dances held the tradition of emphasizing the difference between genders, the Waltz became known as the “egalitarian” dance, as each partner had the same steps, merely reversed in order to permit synchronized dancing. And as sexual disparities were minimized, so were political differences. Social lines were flattened, as in Waltz all couples are equal. This dance was about the individual, the person’s own mind and creativity, and one's own improvisatory freedom to occupy public space. “The manner in which each couple improvisationally navigated this sens du bal (direction of dance) permitted and enabled couples to physically and metaphorically trace their circulation in society” (207). Even the Waltz dance position held certain political power. The man places his hand on the woman’s back, the woman’s hand on his shoulder, and swirling away they go. In contrast to the lonesome pirouette of the soloist, in the closed embrace the dancers revolved around each other. When leading forward or backward, the male must place his leg in-between his partner’s, a huge departure from distanced court dancing. The focus here is again on the individual, on the couple’s personal journey and progress around the dance floor. In contrast to the previous focus of dance – that of honoring a King or noble – this distinction is enormous. Instead of dancers moving around a set point in respect to a royal personage, each couple revolves one another. Gleefully abandoning straight choreographed lines, couples would set their own speed and path as they moved counter-clockwise around the dance floor (in the sens du bal), navigating not a hierarchy of royalty, but merely other dancers. And perhaps most importantly, as they moved around the floor, all couples revolved around an empty center. The seat of power – the center of the room, the axle upon which the dancers rotate – is intentionally left empty. In Waltz, the seat of the king is left conspicuously unoccupied.
The focus of social dance evolved from king to individual, respect to relationship. Indeed, the closed position for such dances “requires an elongated spine, locked torso, and expanded frame. Assuming this position is a theatrical gesture, but it is also a kind of political one, commanding space and attention as one traverses the entire floor” (Bosse, 31). Dancers reveled in the unpredictable vertigo in the literal and figurative revolution inherent to Waltz. Inevitably, the social and political innovations exemplified in ballroom dance soon found strong resonance in the hearts of people across Europe.
The revolutionary Waltz dominated Europe, creating both animosity and obsession in the process. Waltz with its modern hold took root in England in about 1812; in 1819 Carl Maria von Weber composed Invitation to the Dance, which marked the adoption of the waltz form into the sphere of accepted music. England had narrowly emerged from the Napoleonic Wars only to find itself trudging through high unemployment, stagnant trade, and agricultural inflation. All of these began to cause street riots in 1816. As social madness was in turn fueled by social pastimes, this led many to pin this chaos on the Waltz, which was itself linked to France’s own bloody revolution (204). The dance was initially met with tremendous social opposition due to the semblance of impropriety associated with the closed hold, though the stance eventually softened. In our “softened” closed position today, the man places his right hand respectably high on the lady’s left shoulder blade. In the early days of the Waltz, the man would place the length of his arm around the lady’s waist, a position seen as positively scandalous by English society. The Times of London was outraged, exclaiming that the introduction of the Waltz “is a circumstance which ought not to be passed over in silence. National morals depend on national habits: and it is quite sufficient to cast one’s eyes on the voluptuous intertwining of the limbs…to see that it is far indeed removed from the modest reserve which has hitherto been considered distinctive of English females” (Claire, 203). As mentioned before, the dancer’s legs did indeed undergo a degree of “intertwining”, though perhaps labeling it voluptuous was an exaggeration. However the church agreed with such allegations, and sent out missionaries to preach against these abuses of decency. During the Carnival of 1819, thirty missionaries swarmed the province of Bourgogne, forbidding all dances and profane entertainments (Engel, 528). Governments attempted to blacken dance in any way possible, whether through newspapers, the church, or science. Physicians were called upon in England, Germany, and France to publish negative works on dance, all claiming that “waltzing and the vertigo it produced would lead women into a general state of weakness, physical collapse, sterility, and eventually death” (Claire, 204).
In the face of this opposition, many found the sudden power and freedom inherent to this dance intoxicating, and Waltz found itself spreading throughout ballrooms across Europe. Dress became more than just a fashion statement. According to Lynn Hunt, “You could tell a good republican by how he dressed. The right dress was a sign of virtue, and dress in general made manifest the political character of the person” (Hunt, 81). And where else might one better draw eyes to one’s dress than swirling around the middle of a dance floor? Inevitably, passion for the Waltz grew with its popularity. In Vienna, Waltz became such an addiction that birthing rooms were commonly located immediately off the dance floor, in order that pregnant yet eager female dancers might go about their favored activity as long as possible (Claire, 204). As unbelievable as this obsession might seem, what made the dance floor of the 1840s remarkable was not the obsession surrounding it but its connection to a merging oppositional civil society of associations and the press. “Civil society…was the framework in which the principles and practices of patriotism were made known, debated, and modified” (Nemes, 822), and in no place was this better exemplified than in 19th-century Hungary.
And dance did indeed take on that “heightened significance”. An excellent example of this was seen in the 1843 Carnival season. The famous Zichy sisters of Pest, both of great wealth and political sway, decided to plan a uniquely Hungarian ball. They were politically savvy enough to observe how balls in the 1840s offered a new method of political participation, and wished to use this power for Hungary. For promotion, the sisters went about wearing entirely Hungarian-made dresses, attempting to instill pride in products solely created from the homeland. The attempt worked. “The announcement of the dance created great excitement, and people besieged the merchants of Pest, demanding silk, velvet, or simple cotton, which they took to tailors to be cut into dresses and suits for the ball” (812). The ball itself was a smashing success, and popularity was suddenly equated to Hungarian nationalism. Hungarians fervently striving towards this sense of national pride became known as “Patriots” and began to organize countless more balls to expand upon the Zichy sisters’ success. A police informant for the government “reported that the balls organized by patriotic associations ‘laid the foundation of particular political tendencies and the advancement of nationalism’” (812). Soon, the more “organically Hungarian” one could appear, the more favored one became on the dance floor. This nationalism began to infiltrate all aspects of dance, from music to the actual step itself. By the late 1840s, patently Hungarian dances and music dominated ballrooms everywhere. Before, “least three-quarters of the dances had been waltzes, polkas, and French quadrilles. In contrast, guests danced the Circle Dance, the Diet Csardas, the Wreath Dance…and even the Pannonia Waltz” (814), all organic Hungarian dances. The "values, expectations, and implicit rules that expressed and shaped collective intentions and actions" (Hunt, 10) is the definition of political culture, and through dance such a culture had been created. In short – the dance floor permitted everyone to physically and publicly demonstrate their support for a wide range of political causes through the utilization of Hungarian national culture.
All could see the impact of dance. Across Europe, dance had caused national upheaval, forcing people to question deeply help convictions about gender role, modesty, and government itself. In Hungary, by linking “authentic” Hungarian costumes and dances to opposition politics, Hungarian nationalists invested the social event of dance with political depth. To many throughout Europe, the dresses, dances, and language undoubtedly allowed many men and women usually excluded from public life to openly display their civic standing, social opinion, and political persuasion. In this way, those who rushed to the dance floor were able not only to participate in, but also to define, the political culture of the 1840s. For one night at least, the participants of the dance were given a voice. This is perhaps the best definition of dance – a voice. In this way, the voice of dance permitted the ideas, feelings, and allegiances screaming through culture in the 18th-19th centuries to be publicly heard across Europe. It is foolish to wonder if the dance floor was ever more than just the location for an impressive routine or a sparkling dress. Ultimately, dance is a voice, a medium of self-expression for all to silently hear between promenades and spins, a voice that creates great social, political, and personal impact wherever it sings.
Works Cited
Bosse, Joanna. Whiteness and Performance of Race in Ballroom Dance. Journal of American Folklore 120 (2007): 19-47. JSTOR. Web. 23 Oct. 2010.
Claire, Elizabeth. “Monstrous Choreographies: Waltzing, Madness, and Miscarriage.” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 38 (2009): 199-235. Project MUSE. Web. 23 Oct. 2010.
Engel, Carl. “Why Do We Dance.” The Musical Quarterly 6 (1920): 510-531. Project Muse. Web. 23 Oct. 2010.
Hunt, Lynn. Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984.
Kassing, Gayle. History of Dance: An Interactive Arts Approach. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2007.
Lucas, Robert E., Jr. (2002). Lectures on Economic Growth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Nadel, Myron Howard., and Marc Strauss. The Dance Experience: Insights Into History, Culture, and Creativity. Hightstown, NJ: Princeton Book, 2003.
Nemes, Robert. “The Politics of the Dance Floor: Culture and Civil Society in Nineteenth-Century Hungary.” Slavic Review 60.4 (2001): 802-23. JSTOR. Web. 14 Nov. 2010.