Totally waisted

One of the sad things about popular dancing in the West is that the “fast dances” gave way to partnerless flailing and ballroom became “slow dancing.”

“Slow dancing”, when I was a teenager, was a kind of two-step performed in a loose hug. Girls put their hands on the boys’ shoulders and the boys put their hands around the girls’ lower backs. I can’t remember if the boys actually held the girls’ waists, but that might have been determined by height. Apparently at some Catholic schools that held dances, teacher-chaperones walked around yelling “Leave room for the Holy Spirit” at couples deemed too close together. (I don’t remember this ever actually happening.) The music, of course, consisted of heavy metal (“Angel”–Aerosmith) or pop (“With or Without You”–U2) ballads..

Suddenly I am reminded of the film version (2000) of Nick Hornsby’s 1995 High Fidelity: “What came first, the music or the misery?…Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands, of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?”

I have written elsewhere about the need for better dances, and I am overjoyed that they have come back–or, rather, that they were waiting for my generation to grow up and dance them. We still need some work bringing the social waltz and foxtrot into general circulation, but swing-dancing was revived in the 1990s and Latin dances like salsa became popular again among non-Hispanics.

Salsa is one of the hip-shifting dances so famously confusing to people used to dancing straight up-and-down. Many find it quite scandalous, whereas others are indignant that anyone could find evil in their innocently cheerful Cuban dance. And all three things—-dancing, disapproval, and indignation at the disapproval–seem to have existed at least sinceThe Second Book of Samuel, for King David danced for joy before the Lord, his wife Michal sneered at him for it, and David both rebuked her and made her sleep on the couch for the rest of her life.

In the long history of Christian dancing, there have been shifting interdicts. Early Christians once danced in religious processions, but they were told to stop when they entered their churches. Mediaeval pilgrims most definitely danced to folk tunes in the abbey church of Santa Maria de Montserrat in the 14th century; the monks merely asked them to dance to pious songs instead. The common people developed dances, and the aristocrats sometimes toned them down for more dignified court use. And one of the interesting aspects of dancing was that when men and women danced, they held hands (as they always had done in ring dances) or merely strolled around each other, except when the men lifted women into the air, as they certainly were doing by the end of the 16th century.

This is very interesting to me, for histories of the waltz emphasise (usually with derision) how shocked the non-waltzers were by the “close embrace,” which sometimes just means the man having his arm “around” the woman’s waist. However, Father Jehan Tabourot, the Canon of Langres, writing as Thoinot Arbeau around 1589, describes a dance called Lavolta, which was “a kind of galliard familiar to the people of Provence” and included a supported leap:

When you wish to turn, release the damsel’s left hand and throw your left arm around her, grasping and holding her firmly by the waist above the right hip with your left hand. At the same moment place your right hand below her busk to help her to leap when you push her forward with your left thigh. She, for her part, will place her right hand on your back or collar and her left hand on her thigh to keep her petticoat and dress in place, lest the swirling air catch them and reveal her chemise or bare thigh. This done, you will perform the turns of lavolta together as described above. And after having spun around for as many cadences as you wish, return the damsel to her place, when, however brave a face she shows, she will feel her brain reeling and her head full of dizzy whirling; and you yourself will perhaps be no better off.

And here’s what that looked like (albeit without the busk-grabbing):

It was very popular at the court of Elizabeth I of England and her successor James I, both of whom we Catholics are not huge fans, but they were conservative Christians—in their Lutheranish way. That said, many clerics thought Lavolta a “lewd and unchaste dance” (Fr. Tabourot himself was not pro-), and it was eventually banned from the French Court, where it had been introduced by Catherine de Medici circa 1556.

Part of the problem, of course, was that the gentleman grasped the lady by the base of her corset, which is not something we have even dreamed of at Mrs McLean’s Waltzing Party. Although we don’t do lifts either, it makes more sense to lift the lady by her waist as in the 16th century Branle de l’Official, which was danced to the tune now used for “Ding Dong Merrily on High.” Behold:.

Meanwhile, I have found (thanks to YouTube)many old folk dances, including a Greek one–Ballos–-that developed from ancient times, in which young men hold women around the waist, either to guide them around a circle or to pick them up. So, it seems that this aspect of dancing was not new to the 19th century.

It is, however, unknown or unusual at MMWPs, for we dance just a current version of the social ballroom waltz, Scottish ceilidh dances, and Lindy Hop. As has been customary since forever, we join hands. Sometimes we link elbows. For waltz and swing, ladies place their unclasped hand on the gentlemen’s shoulder or bicep, and the gentlemen place theirs on the ladies’ backs, usually on the nearest shoulder blade. Clearly we are more decorous than the court of Elizabeth I.

That said, although I am 100% against dancers seizing ladies by their undergarments, I think Lavolta and the Branle look like lovely dances that obviously can be done without corset-clutching. I would very much enjoy dancing to “Ding Dong Merrily on High” at Christmastide. I will now say an Ave for the repose of the soul of the Canon of Langres just for preserving the tune for future generations.

(Here, by the way, is a link to a list of our upcoming events.)