No dancing - the 1918/19 influenza epidemic

The flu epidemic of 1918-19 killed millions of people around the world, including over 200,000 in the UK. As with the Covid-19 pandemic there were social distancing measures, though these seem to have mostly been implemented at a local level. These examples of dances being cancelled on health grounds come from Ashbourne in Derbyshire and Falkirk in Scotland.

A letter from Newcastle in November 1918 argues that 'It is inconceivable that when people are dying right and left of this dangerous disease that these village dances, generally given in small rooms, should be allowed'

Derbyshire Advertiser, 28 February 1919

Falkirk Herald, 2 November  1918

Newcastle Journal, 25 November 1918

'Flappers as Anarchists' - sharp dressed radicals in Newcastle, 1914

'Flappers as Anarchists: delegates who do not look as though they used bombs'

'Anarchists are in conference at Newcastle-on-Tyne. The statement sounds very terrible and smacks of bombs and desperate deeds against society, but the delegates are in reality the mildest people imaginable. There are between thirty and forty of them, including three girls in the "flapper" stage. They dress like respectable Unionists or Liberals' (Daily Mirror, 14 April 1914)

(move over Peaky Blinders)

The Octoroon Ball, from WEB Du Bois' The Crisis

One of the most exciting sites I have come across recently is the Modernist Journals Project, a joint project of Brown University and the University of Tulsa that is digitising key early 20th century English language magazines. There's some astounding material there, not least numerous issues of 'The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races', the ground-breaking journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People edited by W.E.B. Du Bois.

From Issue no.5 (March 1911), here's a poem by Rosalie Jonas entitled Ballade des Belles Milatraisses. Its subject matter is the Octoroon Balls of 19th century New Orleans where white men would meet 'mixed-race' women (octoroons were defined as one-eighth black, quadroons as one-quarter), and from which black men were excluded - or almost. As often in the history of American music and dance, black people were both excluded from fully participating as equals while simultaneously being central to it as musicians and performers. In this instance it is the fiddler who is "the one man of 'colour' admitted" but with the instruction "Play on! Fiddler-man, keep your eyes on your bow".

Dancing in the Dark - Bert Williams

'These were bright new monied times in which society people were encouraged to enjoy the primitive theatrics of those who appeared to be finally understanding that their principal role was now to entertain. Listen. The wail of a trumpet as it screeches crazily towards heaven and then shudders and breaks and falls back to earth where its lament is replaced by the anxious syncopated tap tap tapping of clumsily shod feet beating out their joyous black misery in a tattoo of sweating servitude. Performative bondage'

Dancing in the Dark (2005) by Caryl Phillips is a fictionalised account of the life of Bert Williams (1874-1922), a Bahamas-born performer who became famous on the American stage in the era when black actors were expected to wear 'blackface' to conform to white audience's expectations.

As such it is a beautifully-written reflection on the role of the black performer in a racist context, whose very achievements come at high personal and collective cost. Williams was in some ways a groundbreaking figure - co-writer of the first black production on Broadway (In Dahomey, 1903); the only black performer in Ziegfeld's follies before the First World War; helping to spread the cakewalk dance craze across the USA and then to England on a visit here; and a singer in the early days of the record industry. But his success was predicated on him continuing to play the stereotypical role of the dim-witted 'darky' and when he attempted to step beyond this the response was hostile. Williams was one of the first black film actors in the now lost Darktown Jubilee (1914), but the sight of a zoot suit wearing black leading man provoked near riots among white audiences.

'Others will come after me to entertain you, and they will happily change their name and put on whatever clownish costume you wish them to wear, and dance, and sing, and perform in a manner that will amuse you, and you will mimic them, and you will make your money, but know that at the darkest point of the night, when no eyes are upon them, these people's souls will be heavy, and eventually some among them will say no, and you will see their sadness, and then you will turn from them and choose somebody else to place in the empty room, or nudge onto your empty stage'

Dancing is poetry with arms and legs

'The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs. It is matter, graceful and terrible, animated and embellished by movement'

(Charles Baudelaire, La Fanfarlo, 1847)

Photo of Mary Wigman, 1912, by Hugo Erfurth

May Day Song and Dance - Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1890-1964), lived to see many May Days as a key figure in the US workers movement for more than 50 years. In 1939, she looked back on some of the May Days she had taken part in, in an article called Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory which evokes the songs and dancing on the parades:

'Thirty-three May Days have come and gone since my activities in the American labor movement began. In memory I view them – an endless procession of red banners, flying high and wide, in the eager hands of marching, cheering, singing workers. Banners of local unions and AFL central labor councils; three-starred IWW banners; banners of Amalgamated, of International Ladies Garment Workers, furriers, pioneers of unionism for the “immigrants and revolutionists"; banners of craft unions, independent unions, industrial unions, and at lone last the CIO. Many were tasseled banners, sold and black, silver and blue, with the names, numbers and places beautifully embroidered; clean, unwrinkled banners, preciously guarded in locked glass cases in dingy halls, throughout the year – liberated to fly proudly on May Day...

Where have I been on May Day? Once it was Newark, N. J. James Connolly, leader of the Irish Easter rebellion in 1916, and I spoke from an old wagon in Washington Park. He was a poor and struggling worker, sad and serious. His daughter told me how, years later in Ireland, he smiled and sang a little song Easter morning, 1916, when he went out to die for his country’s right to be free...

In 1912, I was in Lawrence and Lowell, Mass. on May Day. Textile workers, twenty-five different nationalities speaking forty-five different dialects, celebrated their victories after the fierce strikes of the preceding winter. Banners demanded the freedom of the imprisoned leaders, Ettor and Giovannitti. After the parades came the dancing, the different sorts of music – yellow-haired Northern girls dancing in raven-haired Italians – the laughter and gayety of one race trying to learn the songs, the dances of another. I can see Big Bill Haywood in the Syrian Hall in Lawrence surrounded by workers. Smoking their strange pipe, which stood on the floor, the smoke cooled through a fancy water bowl, decorated in spring flowers in honor of Bill.

May Day, 1913, was in the midst of the Paterson silk strike. Jack Reed taught the strikers many grand songs, old French revolutionary airs and English labor songs, Solidarity Forever – the Red Flag – the Carmagnole. The bosses were trying the now hackneyed “Back to work under the American flag” gag. The strikers carried high on May Day their singing retort, “We refuse to scab under the flag!"

... After that a long period of illness, when I read longingly of May Day parades and heard in memory the songs, the cheers, the music of bands and marching feet. I thought I had seen May Days, but nothing excelled in fact or memory the May Day of 1937, when I returned to New York City. Now we marched on the West Side; and the Irish bagpipes joined the music makers. Now the James Connolly Club and the unions of Irish workers paraded. I waited long to see the happy day the Irish were not all in the ranks of the police, Irish on the marching side, shamrocks, harps, Irish songs, Kevin Barry, Soldiers of Erin – Jim Connolly, I wish you were alive to see that grand sight!

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was the model for the Rebel Girl, celebrated in the song by Joe Hill

London Sound Survey

London Sound Survey is an ambitious and 'growing collection of Creative Commons-licensed sound recordings of places, events and wildlife in the capital'. You can, and probably should, spend a lot of time there listening to some very evocative, and well-recorded London soundscapes. Current favourites of mine are recordings of buskers including a child playing the accordion for money on the London underground, and a Saxophonist playing the Girl from Ipanema against a background of sirens in Old Compton Street. There's also the sound of a riot in progress on May Day 2001.

Unfortunately we don't have sound recordings from the past, a gap which London Sound Survey seeks to fill by including some written descriptions of historical London sounds, such as this account of a London market from Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861):

'A bootmaker, to 'ensure custom', has illuminated his shop-front with a line of gas, and in its full glare stands a blind beggar, his eyes turned up so as to show only 'the whites', and mumbling some begging rhymes, that are drowned in the shrill notes of the bamboo-flute-player next to to him. The boy's sharp cry, the woman's cracked voice, the gruff, hoarse shout of the man, are all mingled together. Sometimes an Irishman is heard with his 'fine ating apples', or else the jingling music of an unseen organ breaks out, as the trio of street singers rest between the verses'.

Here's a couple of other descriptions of London noises I have come across which London Sound Survey might want to add. The first is from Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway, set immediately after the First World War:

'For having lived in Westminster—how many years now? over twenty,— one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June'.

The second is a description of Deptford Market from Geoffrey Fletcher's The London Nobody Knows (1962):

'Saturday morning is the time to see the human element at its richest in Deptford, and in the crowded High Street are all sorts of buskers and street entertainers whose presence gives additional character to the street: an organ grinder, perhaps, whose instru­ment is more properly termed 'a street piano' (there is still one firm left hiring out the' pianos' in London, near Saffron Hill: look for the pictures of Edwardian beauties on the panels of the organ), one-man bands, sellers of Old Moore's Almanack and so on. Today, a couple of stocky, red-faced men take their stand under the railway bridge - one plays an accordion and the other sings 'The Mountains of Mourne'. Appropriately, too, for Irish ideas are not lacking in Deptford - witness the large pub charmingly named The Harp of Erin and here today at the Catholic Church a gaudy Irish wedding takes place. As the bride and groom assemble on the steps, they are joined by their families and friends, the women in pale blue and the men in navy-blue suits. All wear large pink carnations, and the men's faces, each creased in a wide grin, are all red from the application of yellow soap. Small boys, also in blue suits and with even shinier faces, cross their legs uneasily, and the accordion plays 'The Meeting of the Waters'... '

Jazz Babies

THE VOICE: ...You will be known during your fifteen years as a ragtime kid, a flapper, a jazz baby, and a baby vamp. You will dance new dances neither more nor less gracefully than you danced the old ones.

BEAUTY (in a whisper) : Will I be paid?
THE VOICE: Yes, as usual - in love.
BEAUTY (With a faint laugh which disturbs only momentarily the immobility of her lips): And will I like being called a jazz-baby?
THE VOICE (soberly) : You will love it .

(F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned, 1922; sheet music above from 1920, below from 1919).

F.Scott Fitzgerald - May Day

F. Scott Fitzgerald's story May Day, first published in 1920, is an account of a drunken night in New York in May 1919. Drunk socialites dance and argue before hitting an all night cafe, drunk soldiers attack socialists in the streets. He describes the different stages of alcohol intoxication, from feeling good to fighting: 'At the second highball, boredom, disgust, the monotony of time, the turbidity of events, sank into a vague back­ground before which glittering cobwebs formed. Things became reconciled to themselves, things lay quietly on their shelves... as he sipped his third highball his imagination yielded to the wann glow and he lapsed into a state similar to floating on his back in pleasant water'. Before the end of the story, the same character has been in a brawl with bouncers.

A key setting is a dance to a jazz band at Delmonico's, with the author conjuring up its smell: 'From the room she had left drifted out the heavy fragrance left by the passage to and fro of many scented young beauties - rich perfumes and the fragile memory-laden dust of fragrant powders. This odour drifting out acquired the tang of cigarette smoke in the hall, and then settled sensuously down the stairs and permeated the ballroom where the Gamma Psi dance was to be held. It was an odour she knew well, exciting, stimulating, restlessly sweet - the odour of a fashionable dance'.

Fitzgerald also notes the trance-like sensation of dancing and its stimulation of memory : 'this dance, first of its kind since the war, was reminding her, with the accelerating rhythm of its associations, of something else - of another dance and another man... another roving beam... threw flickering shadows and changing kaleidoscopic colours over the massed dancers. Edith had danced herself into that tired, dreamy state habitual only with debutantes, a state equivalent to the glow of a noble soul after several long highballs. Her mind floated vaguely on the bosom of her music; her partners changed with the unreality of phantoms under the colourful shifting dusk, and to her present coma it seemed as if days had passed since the dance began. She had talked on many fragmentary subjects with many men. She had been kissed once and made love to six times... her mind was passive now, her senses were lulled to trance-like sleep; only her feet danced and her voice talked on in hazy sentimental banter'.

Anita Berber: Dances of Vice, Horror, and Ecstasy

Anita Berber (1899-1928) was a dancer in pre-Nazi Germany, famous/notorious for a life of bisexuality, drugs and semi-naked performance.

With her sometime husband and dancing parter Sebastian Droste she published in 1923 a book of poetry, photographs, and drawings called Die Tänze des Lasters, des Grauens und der Ekstase (Dances of Vice, Horror, and Ecstasy), based on their performance of the same name.

In Berlin, "Berber was known to dance in the Eldorado, a homosexual and transvestite bar, where Rudi Anhang, dancer and jazz banjoist, accompanied her. Berber's speciality was a depraved dance number entitled 'Cocaine', performed to the music of Camille Saint-Saens. She also did a piece called 'Morphium'" (Kater).

Another dance, first performed in 1919, was Heliogabal where she played a sun-worshipping priest ‘Exquisite, entirely attired in gold, her metallic body lured the sun’ (Elegante Welt, 1919, cited in Toepfer).

In 1925 she was the subject of an expressionist portrait, entitled The Dancer Anita Berber, by the painter Otto Dix. 

Death in Vegas dedicated a song to Anita on their 2004 album Satan's Circus.

Berber's reputation still manages to wind up present-day Nazi sympathisers. While researching this I came across one such scum-site praising Hitler's cleansing of 'decadent' Weimar Berlin, and stating that Berber 'Typified the Jewish mindset. Her stage acts revolved around masturbation, cocaine, and lesbian love' (yes the fascists are still out there, though apparently there's now one less to worry about in Austria)

Sources: Michael H. Kater, Different Drummers: Jazz in the culture of Nazi Germany; Karl Eric Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935.

Gino Severini - futurism and dance

The credit crunch clearly hasn't hit the world of super-rich art collecting - last week Danseuse (above), a 1915 painting by the Futurist artist Gino Severini sold for more than £15 million at Sotheby's.

Unlike some of his Futurist contemporaries, Severini (1883-1966) seems to have been at least as interested in the flow of the human form as in that of machines, and a number of his paintings feature the figure of the dancer. Severini frequented dance halls and cafés when he was living in Paris before the First World War, including the famous Bal Tabarin nightclub in Montmartre which opened in 1912 and featured in one of his paintings.

Blue Dancer (Ballerina blu), 1912

Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin, 1912.

Sea=Dancer (Mare=Ballerina), 1914

Colette: The Vagabond

I have posted here before on the French writer Colette (1873-1954). Her novel The Vagabond, first published in 1911, is a fictionalised account of her experiences as a dancer in the cafés chantant and music halls, and of the tension, for a woman in this period, between the demands of a respectable marriage and freedom - even if the price of the latter was solitude.

I was struck by this description of her dancing in front of the kind of bourgeois onlookers from whose domain she was in flight, with its sense of the dance itself a rejection of the constraints on the female body:

"I dance and dance. A beautiful serpent coils itself along the Persian carpet, an Egyptian amphora tilts forward, pouring forth a cascade of perfumed hair, a blue and stormy cloud rises and floats away, a feline beast springs forwards, then recoils, a sphinx, the colour of pale sand, reclines at full length, propped on its elbows with hollowed back and straining breasts. I have recovered myself and forget nothing.

Do these people really exist, I ask myself? No, they don't. The only real things are dancing, light, freedom, and music. Nothing is real except making rhythm of one's thought and translating it into beautiful gestures. Is not the mere swaying of my back, free from any constraint, an insult to those bodies cramped by their long corsets, and enfeebled by a fashion which insists that they should be thin?"

'Hooliganism in Dancing' before World War One

The Daily Express has been a fount of right wing bile for many years. Here's a classic example of its historic racism, a leading article from just before the First World War bemoaning the popularity of US/African-American dance crazes:

Hooliganism in dancing has established itself in the ballrooms of today, and the whole charm and delight of dancing are threatened. The modern regrettable tendency to introduce any and every kind of eccentric dance into a programme where once the waltz held sway has now reached a point when it calls for protest from all those who do not desire to see any longer the antics of negro minstrels in the ballroom.

These new dances are now seriously taught in London. Certain people of New York indulge in the freak caperings that are known by strange names, and an attempt is being made by certain English hostesses to foist these dances on young people here.

The most outrageous of the latest dances to be imported from New York is the 'Turkey Trot'. It is both ungraceful and disgraceful in the ballroom. There is not one redeeming feature about it.
Its technical description may not sound very dreadful, but the real manner of its dancing can only be judged at sight. The couple wriggle a few steps together, and then take steps sideways, hopping first on one leg and then on the other, after the manner of a lame bird.

The next contortion is a bending of the body downwards with widespread legs so as to look as nearly like a turkey as possible. After that the couples go prowling about in circles round each other. They may make gobbling noises if they like.

Then there is the 'Huggie Bear' dance. The 'Huggie Bear' is capable - as indeed all these dances are - of degenerating into some­thing more than vulgarity. The gestures and the body movements are indecent in them­selves, and this is not surprising when the British public under­stand that these dances are taken direct from the negro dancing rooms and the night clubs of Vienna, Berlin and Budapest.

The 'Huggie Bear' consists of the two dancers hugging each other and performing a slow, irregular dance with the clumsy movements of bears. It is considered good form to growl during the 'Huggie Bear', and in America they make uncouth noises and sing at intervals:

Babe! Come along!
O kid! O kid!
Hug ‘em Hug ‘em
Put your arms around me Babe.

In the passion to model its ballrooms after the pattern of the 'coloured gentlemen's' places of amusement, society is learning the 'Huggie Bear', the 'Argentine tango', and the 'Dandy Dance'. The 'Dandy Dance' begins with the woman dancing along until she is caught up by the man, who draws her along with the familiar cake-walk steps, side by side. Occasionally the woman falls sideways or backwards, as in the 'Apache' dance. Then they gyrate face to face, and presently they change to a species of a waltz, kicking their legs backwards like hens scratching for grain. So it goes on.

Source: The Way we Were, 1900-1914 , based on the files of the Daily Express – James McMillan (William Kimber, London, 1978). The date of the article is not given but it must presumably have been after 1910, as this was the peak pre-war period of novelty dances.