The Queen of Ballroom Dances

The waltz as it is taught at Mrs McLean’s Waltzing Party was codified in England in 1927. The English Waltz reached that form after a campaign, immediately after World War I, by dance teachers and other aficionados in England to bring the waltz (or valse) back into fashion.

They did this through ballroom dancing competitions with cash prizes. According to “How the Waltz was Won: Transmutations and the Acquisition of Style in Early English Modern Ballroom Dancing,” Part 2 of which you can read here, the judges were looking for simplicity and “refinement.” Theatrics were frowned upon. The ideal, according to a leading instructor, Madame Vandyk, was “simplicity, grace, fluidity, and rhythmic quietness.”

The Roaring Twenties have the reputation of being wonderfully (or ignobly) wild, but English were still very interested in respectability and Christian morals. They valued “restraint, control, order, elegance, grace, lack of exhibitionism and a democratic approach as embodied in the ideal of the dancing partnership acting as one as they moved.” Such was the renewed and Anglicized waltz.

Many people in England disapproved by African or African-American style dances like the ragtime and then jazz, and many were disgusted by the Latin tango. Some of this is attributed to racism, and certainly racist tropes appeared in screeds against these dances. However, many of the new dance moves clearly went against such values as control, order and “lack of exhibitionism.”

The waltz as it was danced by Bavarian and then Austrian peasants in 1800 also went against such values. In his The Last Waltz: The Strauss Dynasty and Vienna, John Suchet characterizes the Ländler, the dance that eventually supplanted the minuet among the ruling classes as “stamping and whirling.”

“There was a unique feature that set these dances apart from the dances of the nobility. The man and woman faced each other, arms entwined, bodies clasped tightly,” Suchet adds. Originally danced in the peasants’ boots and clogs, the Ländler’s stomping became a slide. However the turning, and the close embrace, which was later dropped, remained:

The new dance was in three-four time, the man holding the woman close, one hand clasping hers, the other pressing her body to his. Faces could be close, cheeks could touch, lips brush lightly. The waltz was born.

No wonder the waltz, which travellers brought back to England, provoked a moral outrage. No less a Christian moralist than Lord Byron¹ condemned it and wrote a rude poem about it under a pseudonym. However, many tastemakers among the English aristocracy were charmed. As an introduction to “The Waltz” in E.H.Coleridge’s The Works of Lord Byron records:

“My cousin Hartington,” writes Lady Caroline Lamb, in 1812 (Memoirs of Viscount Melbourne, by W. T. M’Cullagh Torrens, i. 105), “wanted to have waltzes and quadrilles; and at Devonshire House it could not be allowed, so we had them in the great drawing-room at Whitehall. All the bon ton assembled there continually. There was nothing so fashionable.”

“No event,” says Thomas Raikes (Personal Reminiscences, p. 284), ever produced so great a sensation in English society as the introduction of the German waltz…. Old and young returned to school, and the mornings were now absorbed at home in practising the figures of a French quadrille or whirling a chair round the room to learn the step and measure of the German waltz. The anti-waltzing party took the alarm, cried it down; mothers forbad it, and every ballroom became a scene of feud and contention. The foreigners were not idle in forming their élèves [students]; Baron Tripp, Neumann, St. Aldegonde, etc., persevered in spite of all prejudices which were marshalled against them. It was not, however, till Byron’s “malicious publication” had been issued and forgotten that the new dance received full recognition. 

The Georgian waltz featured a close stance, the man’s whole arm was around the woman’s waist, the woman’s gloved left hand rested on the man’s right shoulder, and her gloved right hand was clasped in his gloved left one, but otherwise their bodies weren’t touching. The moralists were exaggerating when they deplored the “voluptuous intertwining of limbs.”

It is possible that contemporary writers were also exaggerating the wildness of the original Ländler, given this video illustration on YouTube. Of course, the moralists may have seen “the Spinner” danced by immoderate people who used the tempo or close position to grope one another. In the immortal words of Shim Sham hero Jimmie Lunceford, “It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.”

The postwar dance instructors definitely agreed with this sentiment when it came to the waltz. Blamed in part for the proliferation of “immoral” contemporary dances, they sought to restore “respectability” to dancing. According to the author(s) of “How the Waltz was Won”:

Given the turbulent social, economic and political unrest in the immediate post-war period, a way of dancing that threatened neither moral nor public order was essential to protect the dance industry. [Phillip J.S.] Richardson’s appeal for the restoration of ‘good form’ in the ballroom was not hyperbolic; and good form was an attribute believed to be peculiarly English.

Thus, the 20th century waltz became less “spinning” and more gliding than the 19th century versions, slower and much more distinct from what we call the Viennese Waltz today. There was also a “refinement” of other, more recent dances, like the foxtrot, to suit them to English notions of what was moral, decent and praiseworthy.

This reminds me of a common complaint about white Americans taking the music and dances of black Americans and changing them to suit their own cultural norms. But to be frank I cannot see how this should be cause for complaint when the motive is to preserve modesty and decorum. (Also, the artistic products of many peoples undergo changes when they are adopted by others, as we have seen in our discussion of the development of the English waltz from the German Ländler.) The jitterbug as it was danced in the film Hellzapoppin‘ would alarm Catholic parents today, and that was filmed in 1941. (Nota Bene: Viewer discretion advised. Meanwhile, this is not how we would dance the jitterbug at MMDP even if we could.)

As the English dance instructors of the 1920s did their very best to bring the waltz into the strict notions of how English gentlemen and and English ladies should behave, it is almost amusing that any Catholic of 2024 could find it objectionable on the grounds that St. Jean Vianney (1786 – 1859) loathed dancing.

However, this is a subject that I will have to return to later, as it is too involved for one post. In addition, I will have to do some reading to discover, as I was taught in graduate school to do, the cultural and pastoral circumstances in which someone like the Curé D’Ars took a scunner to the terpsichorean arts.

For the time being, here’s a sweet video clip from 1920 showing how to, and how not to, hold a lady when dancing.

UPDATE: A lovely reflection here today by Leila Marie Lawler on the complementarity of the sexes.

Catholic readers in the UK may be interested to know that tickets are still available for the Edinburgh Michaelmas Dance. This will take place on Saturday, September 28, 2024 from 7:30 PM to 11:00 PM. For tickets, please contact me at info@tradcathsocialdancing.co.uk.

1. Joke. ↩︎