The Castles filmed the first dance instruction video, “Social and Theatrical Dancing”, in 1909, and as I browsed YouTube for clips of their creative partner and bandleader, James Reese Europe, I stumbled across clips of them dancing (with the added bonus of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle (1939) ). Check it out!

Welcome to the most influential dances of the early 20th century. These dances have shaped our social dance trends for almost 100 years. Below is an excerpt from Dances Through Time V2, which explains each dance, but you can also watch the dances individually in each section

ANIMAL DANCES

At the beginning of the 20th century, industrialization brought employment to the cities, so all classes of people were drawn to urban areas in order to participate in the new urban capitalism. As the society moved from aristocracy to democracy, so did the dances. There were popular assembly rooms, dancing in restaurants, increased prosperity, and a growing sense of individualism. Dances that were once the prerogative of the elite, were now enjoyed by all the classes. Dancing, in fact, represented a new freedom. People turned to the inspiration of animal behavior for their “Declaration of Independence.”

The animal dances were a reaction against inhibited and restricted movements (as well as against an antiquated lifestyle). New inventions happened faster than dance teachers could solidify and teach. These dances were adopted by all sorts of people without the training or experience to dance in “proper” positions with “correct” steps. Dance followed the new ragtime beat which was built on syncopation. Fast and slow beats alternated through improvisation. The uneven rhythms naturally brought wild steps, thus, the ballrooms became “playgrounds” for “grown ups”.

The new dance revolution developed a few new rules:

• Parallel feet replace turned out feet. (due to dance steps moving in lines and squares, rather than circles. These angular step patterns reflected the new ‘mechanical’ era).
• The man dances forward and the woman dances backward. (due to shorter skirts and the need for the man to steer the lady through an infinity of improvised movements. The turning positions of the previous century were mostly abandoned).

Amidst the craze of new dances were:
Fox trot, horse trot, kangaroo hop, duck waddle, the squirrel, the chicken scratch, the turkey trot, and the grizzly bear. The Fox Trot is the only animal dance whose legacy has lasted until today. It was attributed to Harry Fox who created a trotting dance to ragtime music in a 1913 Ziegfeld Follies. The ragtime movement of music and dance began in America, and has influenced our lives until today.

CASTLE WALK

The Castle Walk is built on the ‘one step’.
That simply means one step to the beat.
The one step came from the animal dances but removed the hopping motion to become a vibrant fast walk.

Irene and Vernon Castle, an American woman and an Englishman, created a dance team and a school which influenced the refinement of American social dance for our century. The style they gave, and the steps they taught, became the backbone of ballroom dance, from Arthur Murray to today’s ballroom dance styles. They took the early ragtime dances and invented rules which bridled the energy and enthusiasm fostered by the up-tempo music. Their rules legitimized the new ragtime fad of music and dance.
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Castle house Suggestions:
Do not wiggle the shoulders
Do not shake the hips
Do not twist the body
Do not flounce the elbows
Do not pump the arms
Do not hop-glide instead
Avoid low, fantastic and acrobatic dips

The Castles took the basic Ragtime rhythms and refined them to created an elegant style for all to follow.
In all, they brought grace, dignity, stateliness, good manners and good taste to the realm of social dance.

TANGO

In 1880 the Tango represented the epitome of degradation. It was danced in the brothels of Argentina, where it reflected the relationship between a pimp and a prostitute. Parisian travelers took the new dance fad back to Paris, as a trophy, after their visits to the Argentinean houses of ill repute. When it came to Paris, it evolved into a chic statement for society. It became smooth, gliding, and undulating. It imitated the “sensuous grace of the tiger”. It was “tamed” from the Argentine version. 1913 was the year of amazing Tango popularity, in the U.S. (as well as Paris). Tango teas were in vogue for all age groups. Cities went Tango mad. The Tango was considered an incitement for desire. As the popularity grew around the sensuality of the Tango figures, new figures were invented continuously. Thus the Tango of the early part of our century, contains more than 100 different figures. It was immortalized by Rudolf Valentino in “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”, a movie reflecting society’s changes throughout WWI. Ultimately, the Tango became an exquisitely popular exhibition dance.

MAXIXE

The “Machiche” was called the Tango Bresilienne. The acceptance and popularity of the Tango, coming from Argentina, paved the way for this South American dance, the Maxixe, which came from Brazil. The Maxixe was created by 3 converging elements:
The European polka gave the movement.
The Cuban Habanera gave the rhythm.
And the African styles contributed to the syncopation.
The 2-step plus the swooping body movements created a sensational alluring dance.

It’s beauty remains a unique statement from the early part of our century. Its original popularity was short lived due to the advent of WWI; but it was revived in the 1940′s, in the Samba

THE HESITATION WALTZ

The Waltz forms a bridge from the 19th to the 20th century. Its revolutionary youth shifted to maturity in the 19th century.
It reached its old age of nostalgic sweetness, in the 20th century. The original 19th century, 3 beat measure, became slower and was carried by sentimental melodies, in the early 20th century. The waltz of this era was referred to as ‘The Hesitation Waltz’, or often as the ‘Boston’. The essence of this waltz is that it allowed the dancers to “hesitate”, to hold a beat, or to miss stepping on every beat.

This brought the following innovations:
Fewer and, therefore, slower steps for each waltz measure, plus the free form ability to play with the rhythm (due to the influence of Ragtime).

This slow dignified waltz balanced the vivacious ragtime dances. It became the ultimate pendulum for skillful dancing. It is the single dance that kept its dignity and importance through both the 19th and the 20th centuries. As all things change,including dances, still the waltz has remained the crown of never-ending beauty.

For more information, visit Carol at DanceTime Publications, where she sells scads of incredibly instructive videos and books on dance history, or, visit one of the best dance blogs around: Capering & Kickery.

The Cakewalk had its origins in slavery. Peering through the windows at the spectacles hosted by white planters, enslaved blacks would then prance and preen in imitation of whites at their own dances, using exaggerated movements, curtsys and bows to and adopting “high-toned” clothing to mock. In performance, couples would line up to form an aisle, down which each pair would take a turn at a high-stepping promenade through the others. The irony was extended when white planters began to host and judge Cakewalk competitions, awarding a cake of some kind to the winning couple.

The meaning of the dance was lost on white minstrel performers, who added the exaggerated, over-the-top dance to their repertoire to portray the bumbling attempts of poor blacks to mimic the manners of whites. No longer was the Cakewalk a dance of satire; minstrels and their audience genuinely thought it signified blacks wanting to be like whites. By the turn of the century, the Cakewalk was used by both black and white minstrel performers far from its original intentions, and when the musical comedy gained prominence in theatre, the Cakewalk was transferred from the circuit theatre to Broadway.

Dora Dean and her husband Charles E. Johnson brought the dance to the Great White Way in the 1893 production of The Creole Show. Their performance was a sensation. Not only did Dean, Johnson and the entirely black cast dispense with blackface, but the partner dancing on stage was a novelty. This success was followed by the musical comedy Clorindy The Origin of the Cakewalk (1898), an hour-long sketch that was the first all-black show to play in a prestigious Broadway house, Casino Theatre’s Roof Garden, whose ragtime music was scored by Will Marion Cook and whose cast of black dancers and white actors became the first instance of integration on stage in New York. The comedy also introduced the actors most associated with the dance, George Walker and Bert Williams.

Walker and Williams teamed up in the early 1890s after meeting in San Francisco. They performed the typical song-and-dance numbers, comic dialogues, skits and humorous songs of the vaudeville oeuvre, but found fame when they discovered, after portraying the stereotypical vaudevillian roles of con-man and victim (Williams and Walker, respectively), that they got a better reaction by switching roles. The slender Walker eventually developed a persona as a strutting dandy, while the stocky Williams played the languorous oaf. Their performance in the musical farce The Gold Bug electrified audiences when the duo’s performance of the cakewalk so captured the audience’s attention, they soon became so closely associated with this dance that many people still think of them as its originators.

This success was followed by a booking at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall in New York. Playing this well-known venue was a step up for them, and many doors opened as a result. Joining them was Walker’s wife, Ada (or Aida) Overton, whom George met in 1898 after they posed for a cigarette advertisement. They married the following year and she became the leading lady and soubrette in the Williams and Walker Company, soon after becoming famous in her own right as a performer of the Cakewalk.

She dazzled early-twentieth-century theater audiences with her original dance routines, her enchanting singing voice, and her penchant for elegant costumes. Her interpretation of the Cakewalk was to rewrite the bodily gestures of the dance in ways that appealed to white elites and black Americans, and make the dance “respectable.” Her elegant cakewalking opened the door for the Four Hundred to pick up the dance and Ada was hired frequently by New York’s renowned hostesses to teach guests how to Cakewalk at fancy balls and tableaux.

This success was fine, but the ultimate goal the Williams and Walker Company of was to produce and star in their own Broadway musical. From their original meeting, the men wanted to introduce African themes on Broadway and rid the theatre of the limitations placed on black actors. In 1902, the duo teamed with Will Marion Cook, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and Jesse Shipp to produce In Dahomey, the first musical to open on Broadway written and performed entirely by African-Americans.

The musical was a resounding smash hit, and the company took In Dahomey to England the following year. Initially met with tepid response, the play picked up after the Royal Family requested a special performance at Buckingham Palace, where King Edward sent a courtier to inquire whether the cakewalk just performed was the most absolute form of the dance, and of course, the company said it was. In Dahomey ran for four years, and broke all records: it helped make its composer, lyricist and leading performers house-hold names, and its score was the first black musical that had its score published (in England, not America).

The Cakewalk became the first black dance to be accepted by white society, which paved the way for the acceptance of other dances of African-American origin, such as the turkey trot or bunny hug, and later, the Black Bottom, the Charleston, all the way to the Electric Slide. As for the Walkers and Bert Williams, the trio continued their success despite George dying of syphilis in 1908, and Ada succumbing to kidney failure in 1914. Bert Williams continued as a solo artist, become a star performer with Ziegfeld’s Follies, and recording songs to much acclaim. He died in 1922. Despite their early deaths, George and Ada Walker, and Bert Williams proved the talent and dedication of black actors, and their successes pushed a recalcitrant Broadway (and society) to accept the presence of a black performer, or a black star, on the stage.