Malcolm X and Lindy Hop

Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little on this day, 19th May 1925.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written by him with Alex Haley, was published shortly after his assassination in 1965. Much of the book concerns his involvement with, and later break from the Nation of Islam. But the earlier part of the book contains some fascinating memories of nightlife in Boston and New York in the early 1940s.

In Boston, Malcolm worked as a shoeshine boy at the Roseland Ballroom and was clearly a big fan of the music played there. He talks approvingly of seeing Peggy Lee, Benny Gordman, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and many others, and recalled the fierce dancing competitions:

'"Showtime" people would start hollering about the last hour of the dance. Then a couple of dozen really wild couples would stay on the floor, the girls changing to low-white sneakers. The band now would really be blasting, and all the other dancers would form a clapping, shouting circle to watch that wild competition as it began, covering only a quarter or so of the ballroom floor. The band, the spectators and the dancers would be making the Roseland Ballroom feel like a big rocking ship. The spotlight would be turning, pink, yellow, green, and blue, picking up the couples lindy-hopping as if they had gone mad'.

Before long, he was a zoot suit wearing dancer himself (and indeed had progressed from shining the musicians' shoes to dealing them 'reefers'), and describes with evident relish lindy-hopping to Duke Ellington: 'Laura's feet were flying: I had her in the air, down, sideways, around: backwards, up again, down, whirling... Laura inspired me to drive to new heights. Her hair was all over her face, it was running sweat, and I couldn't believe her strength. The crowd was shouting and stomping'.

Still for all its liberation, nightlife was completely racialized. At the Roseland, some white dancers attended the black dances, but no black people were allowed to dance at the white dances, even if the music was provided by black musicians. Moving to New York, black Harlem had been catering since the 1920s for wealthier whites looking for thrills but not genuine social equality. I was surprised to read the word 'hippies'' dates back to that period: 'A few of the white men around Harlem, younger ones whom we called 'hippies', acted more Negro than Negroes. This particular one talked more 'hip' than we did'.

During the war, resentment against racist treatment grew. 'During World War II, Mayor LaGuardia officially closed the Savoy Ballroom. Harlem said the real reason was to stop Negroes from dancing with white women. Harlem said no one dragged the white women in there'.  In his recent biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (2011), Manning Marable provides some background:

'Since its grand opening in 1926, the Savoy, located on Lenox Avenue between 140th and 141st streets, had quickly become the most significant cultural institution of Harlem. The great ballroom contained two large bandstands, richly carpeted lounges, and mirrored walls. During its heyday, about seven hundred thousand customers visited each year... In a period when downtown hotels and dancehalls still remained racially segregated, the Savoy was the centre for interracial dancing and entertainment. On April 22nd 1943, the Savoy was padlocked by the NYPD, on the grounds that servicemen had been solicited by prostitutes there. New York City's Bureau of Social Hygiene cited evidence that, over a nine-month period,  164 individuals has "met the source of their [venereal] diseases at the Savoy Ballroom". These alleged cases all came from armed services or coast guard personnel. Bureau officials offered absolutely no explanation as to how they had determined that the servicemen contracted diseases specifically from Savoy hookers... The Savoy remained closed throughout the summer of 1943' (it reopened in October).

During the period of the closure there there was a major riot in Harlem on 1 August 1943 after a black soldier was shot by a white policeman. 6 people died and 600 were arrested.

Marable reveals an interesting detail that Malcolm does not mention in the Autobiography - that under the stage name Jack Carlton, he performed as a bar entertainer at the Lobster Pond nightclub on 42nd street in 1944, dancing and sometimes playing the drums on stage.

Sadly it was another ballroom, the Audobon in Harlem, where Malcolm was murdered in February 1965 as he rose to speak at a public meeting there.

There's a great recreation of the Lindy Hop scene at the Roseland Ballroom in Spike Lee's film Malcolm X (1992).

54 and Filuzzi

54 by Italian collective author Wu Ming is a novel set in 1954, with a fine plot involving the mafia, secret services, communist ex-partisans in Italy and Yugoslavia, the geopolitics of the post-WW2 period and Cary Grant.

One of the themes of the book is what might be termed 'proletarian dandyism' - working class pride in dressing up and looking sharp as an assertion of human dignity and as a refusal to accept an 'inferior' social status.

Two of the characters - Grant and Tito (leader of Yugoslavia) - are seen to share this perspective, with the Cary Grant character concluding that "he and Tito had a great deal in common. Above all there was his obvious interest in matters of grooming and clothes... And then there was the fact that they had both become famous with a name other than their given name. They had both passed through different identities".

The authors put an explicit defence of dressing-up into the mouth of 'Tito': "the mirror unites the individual with the community, and its admission into proletarian houses has cemented class pride, that sense of decorum thrown back into the bosses' faces, 'We have been naught, we shall be all! We can be, and we are, more stylish than you are!'".

Pierre, another key character, is a communist bar worker who models himself on Cary Grant. He is a local face as a filuzzi dancer in the dancehalls of Bologna, a scene involving competitive displays of dancing prowess to mazurkas and polkas:

'Everyone took to the floor for the mazurka, even the women, who couldn't usually keep up with the giddy rhythms of those dances. Two or three pieces in, the rhythm started to speed up. Nino Bonara's concertina, supported by bass and guitar, sounded as though it was never going to stop. By the sixth item on the programme only the musketeers of the Bar Aurora were left on the floor. Shouts of encouragement rose up from the tables, along with applause for the more complex movements... the four filuzzi followed the music each on his own, the couples parting and reforming each time the tune came round again..."

The couples in filuzzi were usually men dancing with each other. It was specifically a Bologna scene - in fact it still exists there to an extent - and there is very little about it written in English. There is, however, some filuzzi footage on youtube:


Wu Ming are in London this week doing a series of events, I am planning to go along to Cafe Oto in Dalston tomorrow night.

History of the Flyer (3): Dance Cards

Closely related to the history of the flyer is the dance card - popular in the 19th century and beyond in Europe and the US, they set out the programme of dances and were often used by women dancers to record who they were dancing each dance with. They also served as souvenirs of the event and were, like flyers, designed to create a particular visual image of the event and its style.

There's some interesting examples online, including at the Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library at the Alamo blog. The following example comes from that collection - the front of 'a dance card for a masquerade ball held at Lenzens Opera House on March 7, 1891. The name "Miss Laura Stein" appears in the lower right corner' - probably the name of a dancer at the ball.

There's some examples from Cork at Set Dancing News, including this one for a National Dance at the Hibernian Hall in 1916:

Jerkin'

It started in Los Angeles last summer and is now being touted as the new breakdancing.

From Hip Hop's new steps, New York Times, 20 November 2009:

“Jerking started off in L.A. as just a little inner-city dance,” said one of the New Boyz, Earl Benjamin, 18, known as Ben J. “We used to search for it on YouTube and we noticed it had potential to be bigger than it was. It was like when you first saw break dancing: it has so many different parts, and when you get the dance down pat, you wanted to do it all the time. It reminded you of how fun hip-hop used to be.”

... Seen in formal terms, said Sally Sommer, a dance historian who teaches at Florida State University, jerking may merely be a cousin to the “lambada or the twist.” It is certainly, Ms. Sommer said, less physically demanding than krumping or vogueing or the other highly skilled and innovative urban forms of dance. But the lambada was a fad. The twist was a fad. And jerking, its adherents say, has a cultural resonance that goes beyond the Reject and the Tippy Toe. “Jerking is a movement, almost like in the ’80s when rap started,” said Tammy Maxwell, the manager of the Ranger$ and the mother of Julian Goins. “There’s a style to it, and a music and a lifestyle and all the kids have really jumped on it.”

The Ranger$ Jerkin in JerkVille (dancing doesn't get started until about 1:20):



New Boyz, "You're A Jerk":

Marx and the Mazurka?: Dancing with the First International

The International Working Men's Association (later know as the First International) was established in 1864, with its famous statement 'That the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves, that the struggle for the emancipation of the working classes means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies, but for equal rights and duties, and the abolition of all class rule'.

The following year, the International Working Men's Association held a conference in London
as part of which, on the the 28th September 1865, they held a soiree at St Martin's Hall in Long Acre. According to the programme, the aim was 'To celebrate the foundation of the Association; to welcome the Continental delegates; and to congratulate the people of America on the abolition of slavery, and the triumph of the Republic. It promised 'Tea on the table at half past seven. During the tea the band of the Italian Working Men’s Association will perform', speeches in English, French and German, and songs from The German Chorus.

Then it was time for dancing, with a challenging international programme of dance styles. The programme continues:

'At half past 10 dancing will commence:

1st. — Palermo Polka — Canti
2nd. — Quadrille
3rd. — Schottische
4th. — Valse — Godfrey
5th. — Lancers — Albert
6th. — Mazurka
7th. — Caledonians — Cootes
8th. — Varsovienne — Tonatta
9th. — Polka Italia — Martini

An interval of 20 minutes for refreshment and, promenade

PART II

1st. — Parisian Quadrille
2nd. — Schottische
3rd. — Lancers — Albert
4th. — Valse — Godfrey
5th. — Polka la bella — Gigogine Giorgi
6th. — Caledonians — Cootes
7th. — Mazurka
8th. — Quadrille
9th. — Varsovienne and Gallop

Cards of membership can be obtained in the Committee room, under the platform. Enter by the left hand door. FEMALES are eligible as members. Annual Subscription, 1s. 1d. Address and Rules, 1d. Wines, spirits, ales, stout, tea, coffee, &c., at tavern prices'.

The event was reported in the Workman's Advocate No. 135, October 7, 1865:

'The hall was most appropriately decorated with flags of the different nationalities, the place of honour being assigned to the Stars and Stripes of America. The soirée served a threefold purpose — first, to celebrate the anniversary of the Association; secondly, to welcome the Continental delegates; and, thirdly, to adopt an address to the people of America congratulating them on the success of the Federal arms and the extinction of slavery. Over 300 sat down to tea, the social qualities of which seemed equally to be appreciated by the Continental delegates and their English friends.

The speaking was interspersed with music and singing by the Garibaldian Band and the German Working Men’s Choir, which gave the Marseillaise and other pieces with much effect.
The hall was then cleared for dancing, which amusement was followed up with much spirit for some hours. At two o’clock the Committee and delegates assembled in the Committee room, where Citizen Cremer was most warmly received, and the thanks of the delegates accorded to him for the able manner in which the soirée had been got up and the splendid success they had that night witnessed'.

Karl Marx was certainly present at the conference, whether he was up for the four hour dancing session I do not know.

Homage (from a beach) in Catalonia

I'm not going to claim that I got any great insights into the local musical/political/social milieus whilst lazing round in the sun in Catalonia recently. The closest I got to radical politics - other than reading Planet of Slums by Mike Davis on the beach - was buying an Accio Antifeixista(anti-fascist action) t-shirt from Partisano, a militant ska punk emporium in Girona.


As for music, well let's just say that all I learned was that Swedish indie pop band I'm from Barcelona have reached the dizzy heights of having their epynomous theme song used in a TV advert for San Miguel lager.

Still I did come across some interesting stuff in Colm Toibin's book Homage to Barcelona (2002) about how the politics of war, revolution and dictatorship were played out musically in the 2Oth century.

The fascists in Spain sought not only to crush worker insurgency but to impose one unified Spanish state with one language (Castillian Spanish) and one Catholic culture. Under the 1920s military dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, not only the anarchist CNT union was banned but also the Orfeo Catala, the main Catalan language choir (there was a strong choral tradition among factory workers with 85 workers choirs in Catalonia by 1861). For a while Barcelona FC matches were stopped after the crowd booed the Spanish national anthem.

CNT sticker in Catalonia last week

Under Franco the Catalan anthem Els Segadors was banned along with the public use of the language and Sardanes, a popular Catalan circle dance. During the dying days of the dictatorship these elements became expressions of resistance, including songs from La Nova Canca folk movement. Lluis Llach's 'song L'Estaca became the battle hymn of Catalonia in the last years of the old regime. It was about a stake in the ground, and how if youi beat at it for long enough it would fall. The chorus repeated the word fall, and everybody who sang the sing wanted it to fall, fall, fall. On Sunday nights in the mid-1970s the sardana would be danced in the Placa de Saint Jaume, and afterwards they would join hands in the square and sing "L'Estaca". Sometimes the police would come in jeeps and attack people, but most of the time it was quiet and orderly, there was just the fervour of the chorus "Segur que tomba, tomba, tomba"' (Toibin).

Image from the Franco period (I found this on a 1975 Calendar)

Toibin also notes how a new political elite was waiting in the wings to take over from Franco. Interestingly, in view of earlier discussions at this site about dancing and class formation, he identifies a Barcelona nightclub situated by Santa Maria del Mar as the key location for the emergence of this elite.

Zeleste was set up in a former clothes shop in 1973 by Victor Jou to offer 'a venue to more marginal and left wing groups, to jazz bands, and to people who wanted something new and different' in a city whose nightlife was dominated by flamenco bars; 'Twice during the early years of Zeleste the police came in vans and arrested the entire bar - all three hundred clients - and took them in for interrogation'.

Increasingly, the club became where 'the new ruling class, the men and women who later came to run the city, used to meet in the years before they took power. Zeleste was the place where the young designers and architects, painters and writers, politicians and journalists had discussed matters of mutual importance late at night in the last years of the dictatorship'.

In the 1980s it was replaced by Zeleste Nou, a 2500 capacity converted warehouse with a dancefloor downstairs and passageways along the roof for those needing some fresh air. By this time some of Zeleste's former denizens, the Socialist politicians who now ran Barcelona, were working hand in glove with ex-Francoists like Juan Antonio Samaranch to plan for the 1992 Olympics. The latter had gone from running Barcelona under Franco to becoming President of the International Olympic Committee.

Poster in Girona last week promoting musical and other events 'per la Independencia i el Socialisme'

Moonwalking

It's taken my brain a while to make the connection between two of the recent themes at this site - the 1969 Moon landing and the death of Michael Jackson, Moonwalker.

In relation to Jackson, it's his popularisation of the Moonwalk dance that has been the centre of the various flashmobs since his death. For instance at the recent Fusion festival in Germany, there was this mass Moonwalk (well yes I know most people seem to be just shuffling backwards, rather than creating the illusion of stepping forward at the same time, but they are trying):



Contrary to popular mythology, this dance was not invented by Jackson. The backslide (as it was known) has long been in the repertoire of dancers as the following film makes clear with examples from dancers including Fred Astaire, Bill Bailey, Cab Calloway (in white suit at 1:49), Sammy Davis Jr. and many others. The earliest example features Daniel L. Haynes in King Vidor's film Hallelujah in 1929 (at about 2:36 in this video), but doubtless it goes back further than that. It has also featured in the mime routines of the likes of Marcel Marceau and Lindsay Kemp.



It was after Jackson started using these moves in 1983 to accompany his song Billie Jean that the move became known as the Moonwalk. According to Jeffrey Daniel, the dancer/choreographer who taught Jackson the moves, it was Jacko himself who called it the Moonwalk, mistaking the backslide for another dance move with that name (the actual Moonwalk step according to Daniel 'makes it look like you're on the moon and it's less gravity than you would have on earth'). By this act of creative misrecongition, Jackson linked the dance directly with the dreams of his generation - it was after all in the 1969 summer of Apollo 11 that the Jackson 5 recorded their first album and made their first TV appearance.

It is interesting that what caught people's imagination in relation to the actual moon landing was less the scientific achievement of a vehicle taking people from earth to its satellite and back again than the simple human act of walking on the moon. After all the first words spoken by Neil Armstrong in 1969 where precisely 'That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind'. And the Apollo 11 astronauts left behind a plaque with the inscription reading: 'Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all mankind.'

What would it feel like to take that most fundamental of biped actions in space? Jackson's Moonwalking answer is that it is something thrilling, a step beyond normal human motion. Other musicians have also pondered the significance of lunar steps, or used them as a metaphor. In Walking on the Moon by The Police it's the lover's feeling of weightlessness that prompts the comparison: 'Giant steps are what you take, Walking on the moon... Walking back from your house, Walking on the moon, Feet they hardly touch the ground, Walking on the moon' (there's a nice jazz version of this song by Philippe Kahn).

Walk on the Moon by New York indie band Asobi Seksu picks up on that other space meme - not elation but the isolation of the lonely traveller in a monochrome world 'swimming in gray'. Then from the hippy musical Hair (1967), there's the psychedelic dimension of 'Walking in Space' - a trip in every sense - 'My body Is walking in space, My soul is in orbit, With God face to face, Floating, flipping, Flying, tripping...Tripping from Mainline to Moonville... On a rocket to The Fourth Dimension, Total self awareness The intention' etc. etc.

Arthur Russell's This is How We Walk on the Moon, featured in an earlier post, seems to envisage the moon walk as an optimistic struggle, moving forward one step at a time: 'Each step is moving, it's moving me up, moving, it's moving me up, Every step is moving me up... This is how we walk on the moon'. A metaphor for a personal struggle against adversity or perhaps for something wider - moving on up. There are also instrumental pieces like Moon Boots by ORS (1977).

The imagining of walking in space (and dancing in space, sex in space...), beyond the limits of gravicapital, was part of the project of the Association of Autonomous Astronauts, of which more to come.

Dancing the Twist, 1963

Old home movies are a fascinating source for how people actually danced in the past. This is a great clip of a New Year's Eve party in 1963 - not even sure where, it looks North American (the clip was posted by Candadian-based Fun with Stuttering)



One of the things that interests me is at what point did it become acceptable for a single woman or man to go out on the dancefloor and dance on their own - without being asked to do so by and with a member of the opposite sex first (chiefly by a man asking a woman)? Before the Second World War, social dancing in Europe and America seems to have been very much 'couple dancing'. Perhaps jitterbugging/jiving was a transitional point - while the dancing was still couple based it did not require the constant physical contact between dancers. I have found references to women dancing on their own, or with each other, in London during the war.

In this 1963 film, there are couples dancing but also people dancing on their own, or rather dancing as part of a group without being attached to a member of the oppiste sex. There is a woman on the edge of the group doing the Twist in her own space, and two women doing the Twist opposite each other. So perhaps the Twist was a step towards the modern dancefloor, where by the disco period couple dancing was confined largely to the slow dance at the end.

Pop Feminist tells me she's doing some research on the Twist, look forward to seeing what she comes up with.

More Soho Nights: Hand Jive

More on Soho Nights from today's Guardian:

'... in 1956, I heard about this new dance craze called hand-jiving. So I made a number of visits to a coffee bar called The Cat's Whiskers in Soho. Cliff Richard used to appear there. I remember the place was crowded with young kids when I arrived. It was pretty late, but not after midnight. In those days, midnight was the witching hour; things closed up after that. I did not speak to anyone, but I do remember the atmosphere was very jolly. Wholesome would be a good word. And the reason they were jiving with their hands was just because there was precious little room to do it with their feet. Everyone was doing it, which was quite a bizarre sight.
The craze just fascinated me. It seemed like a strange novelty, but it really caught on. There were quite a few variations they could do, like one called the mashed potato... What's more, hand-jiving was an activity that everyone shared and had a go at in their own particular style. Not being a great jive artist myself, it was one of the things I could do, and I used to join in. .

Ken Russell's work features in Soho Nights, at the Photographers' Gallery, London W1 (0845 262 1618), until 8 February.

Teddy Girls

I am hoping to get to the Photographers Gallery (London) next week for an exhibition on 1950s Soho Nights which apparently includes some images by Ken Russell. I am sorry I missed the Bombsite Boudiccas exhibition a couple of years ago, featuring pictures Russell took of London Teddy Girls in 1955.



For the launch of the exhibition at the Spitz in East London, the organisers tracked down some of the women in the photographs, as reported in the Times:

'"We weren’t bad girls,” says Rose Shine, then Rose Hendon, who was 15 when she posed for Russell. “We were all right. We got slung out of the picture house for jiving up the aisles once, but we never broke the law. We weren’t drinkers. We’d go to milk bars, have a peach melba and nod to the music, but you weren’t allowed to dance. It was just showing off: ‘Look at us!’ We called the police ‘the bluebottles’ – you’d see them come round in a Black Maria to catch people playing dice on the corner. But we’d just sit on each other’s doorsteps and play music.”

The teddy girls left school at 14 or 15, worked in factories or offices, and spent their free time buying or making their trademark clothes – pencil skirts, rolled-up jeans, flat shoes, tailored jackets with velvet collars, coolie hats and long, elegant clutch bags. It was head-turning, fastidious dressing, taken from the fashion houses of the time, which had launched haute-couture clothing lines recalling the Edwardian era. Soon the fashion had leapt across the class barrier, and young working-class men and women in London picked up the trend.

...Rose and her group of West End teddy girls would meet at the Seven Feathers Club in Edenham Street, North Kensington, a youth club popular with both the boys and the girls. “There was a jukebox and dancing,” she says. “Just tea and cakes, because we didn’t go to pubs then. It wasn’t until we were 20 that we might go to the pub. We weren’t bad, not like some of the boys. There was this song called Rip It Up… Well, the boys, they used to go and rip the seats.”

...Teddy girls from different parts of London rarely mingled. Grace Curtis (then Grace Living) was one of the girls Russell photographed in the East End. “We hung out down the Docklands Settlement – a club where there was space for dancing and boxing. We were East End. In those days you just stuck to your area. There was a little snack bar in the club where you could buy drinks and we just all got together and danced.”

Both women hoot with excitement when they remember dancing The Creep by Ken Mackintosh – a slow shuffle of a dance so popular with teddy boys that it led to their other nickname of “creepers”. “It’s the best dance,” says Curtis. “You used to dance or jive with your girlfriends, but for The Creep you could choose your partner. You could pick up a fella and go and dance with him.”

(more at When the Girls come out to play, Times, 5 March 2006)

The bottom photograph shows Elsie Hendon, 15, Jean Rayner, 14, Rosie Hendon, 15, and Mary Toovey on a bombsite in Southam Street, North Kensington, West London.

Argentine Floggers

From Latin American Herald Tribune, 26 December 2008:

'A 16-year-old boy died over the weekend in the central province of Cordoba after being beaten by other youths, police said, adding that the victim was apparently attacked for looking like a "flogger," a popular new fashion in Argentina. Three suspects, two of them 16 years old and another who is 20, have been arrested for allegedly attacking the teenager, hitting and kicking him as he was leaving a discotheque early Sunday.

Precinct chief Oscar Criado told Argentine media that the victim was wearing "clothes that identify floggers," as Argentines call those who contact each other publishing photos on Internet social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. "Flogger" comes from Fotolog.com, a photoblog social web site that is particularly popular in Argentina. Floggers usually wear tight jeans, canvas sneakers or skate shoes, colorful T-shirts, with a hairstyle that includes a fringe that tends to cover the eyes completely or partially, and is the same for girls and boys.

Other common characteristics include listening to electronic music and dancing in their own peculiar way. The most popular move, related to the French tecktonik and the Australian shuffle and the Charleston of 100 years ago, consists of rapidly spreading one leg, hitting the floor with the heel, and drawing the other leg backwards, and then quickly changing the position of the legs (spreading the other leg, and shifting backwards the one that was spread)...'

Here's how ('floggers,glams, chetos villeros etiketense todo es posible!' sourced from youtube):

It is wild. It is sexy. It is the mambo

Around 1950 a new music and dance craze swept across the Americas - Mambo. It had emerged in Cuba during the 1930s as a series of variations within existing styles before becoming seen as something new, distinct and fashionable.

In New York, the key centre for Mambo was the Palladium dance hall in Manhattan. After visiting it in 1951, writer Jess Stearn wrote an article for the New York Daily News with the headline: 'Touch of Jungle Madness: Denizens of Broadway go Slightly Primitive under Spell of the Wild Sweaty Mambo'. The article continued 'it may turn the Great White Way into a veritable Congoland before it is through. It is wild. It is sexy. It is the mambo'.

David Garcia argues that such statements - not uncommon amongst writers in the USA and Cuba - reflected a 'shared sense of anxiety over and desire for racial and cultural Others whose sounds and bodily movements did not complement those commentators' concepts of a culturally and racially homogeneous nation'. They tended to cast 'Latin musicians and mambo music as relics of the remote or "primitive" human past' and by implication not belonging in the present on equal terms with other musics or indeed people.

Dance teachers saw a potential new market in popularising Mambo, but only by reducing it to a simplified series of steps. In a 1951 article in Dance Magazine, Don Byrnes and Alice Swanson argued that 'It is now the responsibility of the teacher to standardize, discipline and properly present this thrilling dance to make it acceptable'.

By contrast, Garcia found that 'Cuban and Puerto Rican dancers... emphasize the individuated, extemporaneous and communal aspects that defined and inspired their dancing in the 1940s and 1950s'. In contrast to rigid steps, the first generation of Mambo dancers stressed 'feeling the music', inner emotions, spontaneity and dancing as 'an embodied experience, in which sound and movement were merged through the body'.

Source: Going primitive to the movements and sounds of Mambo, David F. Garcia in Musical Quarterly, volume 89 (4), Winter 2006

Some great footage of Mambo dancing in Harlem in early 1950s, posted by the folks at dancehistory.org:

Dancing by The Docks

London's decline as a port city in the second half of the twentieth century also saw the end of a transnational nightlife near to the docks of East and South London, with clubs and dance-halls frequented by sailors on leave as well as the migrants from all corners of the globe who settled nearby. There is a fascinating account from 1872 (published in The Metropolitan) of one such dance hall near Ratcliff Highway in East London:

"Not far from Wellclose-square is a large tavern known by the Teutonic sign of the "Preussischer Adler," and into this palace of dazzling light our custodian led us... We could hear the strains of music and the rushing of many feet coming from the floor above, and turning to a staircase on our left, we prepared to ascend. But a placard posted at the foot of the steps attracts our attention, and we pause to read it - this is the substance in brief:- "All persons are requested, before entering the dancing saloon, to leave at the bar their pistols and knives, or any other weapon they may have about them." Fancy such a regulation being necessary in civilised London! At any rate, it was very reassuring to us, and with renewed confidence we mounted to the domains of Terpsichore.

It was a long room, with tables and seats aligning the walls, the centre being given up entirely to a crowd of dancers, who were waltzing to the by no means bad music of half-a-dozen German players, who piped away in a raised orchestra close by the stair-head. But what an assembly! There were French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Dutch seamen; there were Greeks from the Aegean Sea; there were Malays, Lascars, and even the "heathen Chinese," disguised in European costume, with his pigtail rolled up under a navy cap. There were mariners in fezes and serge capotes; there were Mediterranean dandies, girt with broad crimson scarves, and with massive gold earrings glistening as they twirled about. No wonder it had been found necessary to collect the knives and pistols from the hot-blooded cosmopolitan crowd. A blow is soon given, and with weapons at hand, who can tell where a quarrel might end? Yet I must say that, while we were present, everything was conducted in the most orderly manner, though the animated impassioned talk in a dozen different languages led one to imagine that a breach of the peace was imminent at any moment.

The waltz, which all alike danced admirably, had something of the heroic about it. Each couple made three or four sharp turns, and then came to a pause with a smart stamp and heads thrown back defiantly. Catching the time to a nicety, they would repeat the movement; and when I mention that there were considerably more than a hundred dancers on the floor, the staccato effect of the stamp, coming almost simultaneously, may be imagined. Of the female portion of the assemblage, I need not say more than that they were, in nearly every instance, foreign, the German and Flemish nationality mostly predominating. Short "Dolly Vardens," scrupulously clean, embroidered petticoats, and neatly-fitting high-heeled Hungarian boots, was apparently the favourite costume. To come suddenly upon the "Preussicher Adler's dancing saloon" out of the crowded streets of the English metropolis has a most startling effect upon the casual visitor, who is unprepared for any thing of the kind. It is absolutely as though one had been transferred, magically, to a casino in the neighbourhood of the docks of Marseilles or Genoa, or to the halls of "Tutti Nazioni" (all nations) on the Marina of Messina.

Another account appears in Twice Round the London Clock by Stephen Graham, published in 1933, with a chapter entitled Dancing Sailors describing a visit to a North Woolwich dance hall: "The interior of California in North Woolwich is something like part of a ship...perhaps that is why an otherwise ordinary public house has become one of the gay spots in Dockland...The sailors ashore looks for something like a boat, and they are almost all sailors who dance there."

There is dancing to "the shabbiest piano, with its top partly removed to let out more noise, and then to a one-man jazz band of the kind that used to be the wonder of children in the streets" and "The barmaids are buxom, well-cared for and independent. Sailors treat them respectfully. But the dancing girls, in their smart stockings and shabby everything else would really be kept out of the public houses except that they bring more custom". However, not everyone is interested in dancing with women - "the men did not get off with the girls at all" but "danced together in the funniest burlesque style...when there is shore leave one may see hundreds of couples of sailors dancing together". The author blames this on jazz, which has "infected ships by way of radio and, as, except on passenger ships, there are no women the 'nancy boys' dance together."

Thanks to Greenwich Phantom for the Stephen Graham quotes and image - I must try and get hold of this book.

Ballroom Dancing Made Easy (1942)

I am fascinated by old dancing manuals - this example is 'Ballroom Dancing Made Easy' by Robert Brandon, first published by C.Arthur Pearson Ltd, London in 1936, and then revised in September 1942. I like the notion of people trying to teach themselves the Slow Foxtrot from a book in the middle of the Second World War.

The English ballroom dancing phenomenon successfully translated a range of dances from across the world into rigid routines with the gendered foosteps of 'gentleman' and 'lady' clearly laid out. How far the tango, as precribed here, reflects the origins of tango in Argentina is another matter. Over time a fixed repertoire of dances developed - this book advises that only four main dances are essential: the Waltz, the Slow Foxtrot, The Quick Step and The Tango.

Let's Twist Again

"The Twist, superseding the Hula Hoop, burst upon the scene like a nuclear explosion, sending its fallout of rhythm into the Minds and Bodies of the people. The Fallout: the Hully Gully, the Mashed Potato, the Dog, the Smashed Banana, the Watusi, the Frug, the Swim. The Twist was a guided missile, launched from the ghetto into the very heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books. The Twist was a form of therapy for a convalescing nation..

They came from every level of society, from top to bottom, writhing pitifully though gamely about the floor, feeling exhilarating and soothing new sensations, release from some unknown prison in which their Bodies had been encased, a sense of freedom they had never known before, a feeling of communion with some mystical root-source of life and vigor, from which sprang a new appreciation of the possibilities of their Bodies. They were swinging and gyrating and shaking their dead little asses like petrified zombies trying to regain the warmth of life, rekindle the dead limbs, the cold ass, the stone heart, the stiff, mechanical, disused joints with the spark of life.' (Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 1968).

Limbo Gateway

"The limbo dance is a well-known feature in the Carnival life of the West Indies today... The limbo dancer moves under a bar which is gradually lowered until a mere slit of space, it seems, remains through which with spread-eagled limbs he passes like a spider.

Limbo was born, it is said, on the slave ships of the Middle Passage. There was so little space that the slaves contorted themselves into human spiders. Limbo, therefore, as Edward Brathwaite, the distinguished Barbadian-born poet, has pointed out, is related to anancy or spider fables. If I may now quote from Islands, the last book in his trilogy:

'drum stick knock / and the darkness is over me /knees spread wide / and the water is hiding me / limbo / limbo like me'

Limbo then reflects a certain kind of gateway or threshold to a new world and the dislocation of a chain of miles... I recall performances I witnessed as a boy in Georgetown, British Guiana, in the early 1930s. Some of the performers danced on high stilts like elongated limbs while others performed spread-eagled on the ground. In this way limbo spider and stilted pole of the gods were related to the drums like grassroots and branches of lightning to the sound of thunder"

From 'History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas' by Wilson Harris (1970)

Battle at the Roxy 1984

From the film Beat Street (1984), filmed at the Roxy in New York.

The Roxy, New York

As previously mentioned the Roxy club in New York closed this month. It opened in 1979 as a popular roller disco and, since 1991, had hosted a gay club on Saturday nights. Now it has been sold to developers - as the New York Press notes: 'sprawling redevelopment has engulfed much of the neighboring land on West 18th Street in recent years, and Roxy’s prime location directly below the soon-to-be renovated High Line made the former truck warehouse an irresistible target'. As it came to an end, the DJ played as the final record 'This used to be my playground' by Madonna.

In the early 1980s, the club was a critical stepping stone for hip-hop from Bronx scene to global phenomenon. As Jeff Chang describes it in his essential 'Can't stop ,won't stop: a history of the hip-hop generation':

"When Kool Lady Blue finally found a new home for her "Wheels of Steel" night, her club became the steamy embodiment of the Planet Rock ethos… To its ecstatic followers, the Roxy would become "a club that changed the world." In June [1982], Blue hung out a sign at the rink: COME IN PEACE THROUGH MUSIC. Her gamble was immaculately timed. She opened the club with all of the scene's leading lights at the beginning of a hot summer when graffiti and b-boying and hip-hop music was on everyone's minds.

"The regulars were Bam [Africa Bambaataa ]and Afrika Islam, and then Grandmixer DST, Jazzy jay, Grand Wizzard Theodore, Grandmaster Flash, and I'd rotate them," she says. "We had no booth. The DJ would be in the center of the floor on a podi­um. Everyone could see what he was doing, and he was kind of elevated to rock star status." On both sides of the DJ, large projection screens displayed Charlie Ahearn's slides of Bronx b-boys, rappers, and scenemakers. Nearby, the Rock Steady Crew convened all-night ciphers on the beautiful blonde wood floors.'"

Although it was "billed as the anti-Studio 54", the club attracted David Bowie, Andy Warhol, Talking Heads et al, facilitating the cross over of the music to a wider audience. One regular recalled "The crowds were very diverse. That was why I was so excited to be there. Suddenly this racially mixed group was having a good time partying in a room, which was a very rare thing. On the level of music and art, people were able to bridge all these boundaries."

The club was used as a setting for the 1984 film 'Beat Street', including the classic break dance battle between the Rock Steady Crew and the New York City Breakers (see next post for clip).

When the Waltz was Banned

The Waltz was the focus of outrage as the dance spread from Austria and Germany to France and England in the late 18th and early 19th century:

'[The Waltz] had a swing that demanded a new style of dancing, a close hold (to maintain balance), and a breathless turn of speed that was itself intoxicating. Naturally, the pleasure it gave to the couples who lost themselves in each other's arms, who pressed breast against chest and who, as the music whirled on, embraced each other more and more tightly, itself attracted strong criticism. In parts of Germany and Switzerland, the waltz was banned altogether. A German book proving that "the waltz is a main source of the weakness of body and mind of our generation" proved popular as late as 1799...

Byron himself displayed an extraordinary hostility to the dance. He objected to the "lewd grasp and lawless contact warm," especially between strangers; to the foreign origins of the dance and its adoption by the lower classes; and to the fact that "thin clad daughters" leaping around the floor would not "leave much mystery for the nupital night."

An article in The Times in 1816 about 'the indecent foreign dance called the "waltz"' fumed:

'National morals depend on national habits: and it is quite sufficient to cast one's eyes on the voluptuous intertwining of the limbs, and close compressure of the bodies, in their dance, to see that it is indeed far removed from the modest reserve which has hitherto been considered distinctive of English females. So long as this obscene display was confined to prostitutes and adultresses we did not think it deserving of notice; but now that it is attempted to be forced upon the respectable classes of society by the evil example of their superiors, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion'.

Source: Peter Buckman, Let’s Dance: Social, Ballroon and Folk Dancing (Paddington Press, London, 1978), p.124-7

The Ravers Next Step: into the 1960s

In previous posts we have looked at the revivalist jazz raves organised by Mick Mulligan and Cy Laurie in 1950s Soho. From the mid-1950s a new scene was developing, based around 'traditional jazz'. The musical distinction was that while the former favoured the 1920s jazz band sound found on Chicago recordings by Louis Armstrong and others, advocates of the latter claimed that the real New Orleans sound was to be found in the music of players who had never left the city to head North, unlike Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton. This search for the ever-receding holy grail of authenticity was mocked by some at the time. Jeff Nuttall recalls that "Uncle John Renshaw, a band­leader of the time, used to say with some irony 'I'm in the sincerity racket, meself.'"

Despite its antiquarian musical roots, the trad jazz scene (and the related skiffle scene) was very much a youth sub culture of 'ravers'. Nuttall recalls that in the mid-1950s:

"Soho was alive with cellar coffee-bars, where skiffle and jazz could be played and heard informally and where the rich odour of marihuana became, for the first time, a familiar part of the London atmosphere. Sam Widges was the most popular. Also there was the Nucleus, the Gyre and Gimble, the Farm. They were open most of the night and often the management would leave you to sleep where you sat. It was a place to stay in the dry if you didn't want to go home. It became obvious that parental control was going to stop at about the age of fifteen for a large number of young people. Teenage wages were going up and so were student grants. It was becoming possible to push the leaky boat of adult delusions a little further away. The Soho Fair, which ran annually for three years [1955-7], was a festival of the ravers. Bands and guitars and cossack hats and sheepskin waistcoats flooded out of the cellars and into the streets. It was so good that it had to be stopped, so good that it was in the first Soho Fair that the real spirit of Aldermaston was born'. Trad jazz bands provided the soundtrack on the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marches to or from Aldermaston nuclear weapons base from 1958 (picture of dancers is from 1958 march).

In a 1962 New Statesman article, George Melly described 'An All-Night Rave at the Alexandra Palace', a "'trad' ball" where "Band followed band from 9.30 P.M. until 7.30 A.M. the next morning. The audience were dressed almost without exception in 'rave gear'... the essence of 'rave gear' is a stylized shabbiness. To describe an individual couple, the boy was wearing a top hat with 'Acker' painted on it, a shift made out of a sugar sack with a C.N.D. symbol painted on the back, jeans, and no shoes. The girl, a bowler hat with a C.N.D. symbol on it, a man's shirt worn outside her black woollen tights. Trad' dancing in the con­temporary sense is deliberately anti-dancing. When I first went to jazz clubs, there were usually one or two very graceful and clever couples. But today the ac­cepted method of dancing to trad music is to jump heavily from foot to foot like a performing bear, pref­erably out of time to the beat... Trad musicians have chris­tened these self-made elephants 'Leapniks'." The Acker referred to here was Acker Bilk, the jazz clarinettist and unlikely musical figurehead for late 1950s/early 1960s ravers.

The trad jazz scene as a youth movement was soon to be overwhelmed by The Beatles and everything that followed. In the semi-situationist journal Heatwave (1966), Charles Radcliffe included the ravers in The Seeds of Destruction, a ground-breaking survey of 'youth revolt':

"The Ravers... had some Beat characteristics and rather tenuous connections with the anti-bomb movement but their main preoccupations were Jazz clubs and Jazz festivals; this was the period when ersatz traditional (Trad) Jazz, as purveyed by Acker Bilk, Kenny Ball and others was inordinately popular. Partly Trad's popularity arose in reaction to the decline of the small fifties Beat scene; it was easy to dance to and Jazz clubs were among the few places where teenagers could do more or less as they wished without adult interference. Partly it arose because the musicians did not take themselves too seriously and were often simply good-time Ravers".

Ravers' dress was a kind of "'music-hall-cum-riverboat-cum-contemporary-folk-art' with Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament symbol decorated bowlers, umbrellas, striped trousers, elegant jackets. The chicks had long hair, wore ban-the-bomb type uniforms (duffle coats, polo-neck jerseys, very loose around the hips, and jeans). The Ravers were, on the whole, distrusted by other groups with whom they came into contact; the Beats used the term 'Raver' derogatorily and the nuclear disarmers treated Ravers' 'superficiality' with superior amusement and occasional annoyance... The Ravers, as such, died with the 'traditional' Jazz boom but the 'Raver philosophy' continues and there are once again groups calling themselves Ravers. The term has likewise regained its approbatory meaning after the frequent critical use by the CND generation".

Here we have a phenomenon that was to re-emerge with 'ravers' from the 1980s onwards - the use of the term as a put down by the would-be serious minded.

The George Melly quote is reproduced from 'Revolt into Style: the pop arts' (1970); Jeff Nuttall from 'Bomb Culture' (1969). Image source: Science and Society Picture Library. For more on Heatwave, see the excellent Dancin' in the streets! Anarchists, IWWs, Surrealists, Situationists & Provos in the 1960s as recorded in the pages of The Rebel Worker & Heatwave, edited by Franklin Rosemont and Charles Radcliffe, Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, Chicago. 2005

We would love to hear some first hand accounts of 1950s/60s raves - photos too would be great. If you were there why not leave a comment, or email transpontine@btinternet.com