Worlds of social dancing: Dance floor encounters and the global rise of couple dancing, c. 1910–40

By Manchester University Press

By the 1920s, much of the world was ‘dance mad,’ as dancers from Buenos Aires to Tokyo, from Manchester to Johannesburg and from Chelyabinsk to Auckland, engaged in the Charleston, the foxtrot and a whole host of other fashionable dances. Worlds of social dancing examines how these dance cultures spread around the globe at this time and how they were altered to suit local tastes. As it looks at dance as a ‘social world’, the book explores the social and personal relationships established in encounters on dance floors on all continents. It also acknowledges the impact of radio and (sound) film as well as the contribution of dance teachers, musicians and other entertainment professionals to the making of the new dance culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Mar 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526156242

Book preview

Introduction

Dance floor encounters and the global rise of couple dancing: an introduction to the worlds of social dancing

Klaus Nathaus and James Nott

In 1927 popular British dance band leader Jack Payne was one of many to release a recording of the new hit song Since Tommy Atkins Taught the Chinese How to Charleston. A typical hybrid music hall/dance music number, the song comically recounts the attempts of British troops during China’s civil war to teach the local population the steps to the ‘latest’ dance that had captured the imagination of much of the western world in the previous two years. In reality, however, the Chinese didn’t need to be taught this globally successful dance by British soldiers – they’d already been dancing the Charleston in the proliferation of dance halls and ballrooms in Shanghai and other major Chinese cities for nearly as long as those in the West. Indeed, by this time, modern social dancing had reached across the globe and dances such as the Charleston and the foxtrot, and variations of it, were danced in Moscow, Tokyo, Auckland, Berlin and Buenos Aires.

One striking point from this period is the ubiquity of a small number of modern couple dances, regardless of fundamental differences in the political contexts of nations around the globe. The interwar years saw the rise of dictatorships and the competing ideologies of fascism and communism in some European countries and the persistence or growth of democracies in other nations. The period marks the decline of the British Empire and continued colonialism as well as the rise of the USA’s global leadership. It witnessed increasing nationalism as well as the internationalism of the League of Nations. Yet beyond these divergent political trends, seemingly everybody danced the Charleston, the foxtrot and the tango, often in dedicated, commercially run dance halls that looked surprisingly similar around the globe. In this volume, whilst recognising that social dance could act as a means of political resistance or promoting conformity, we suggest that in general these political trends shaped social dancing to a much lesser extent that one might think. Instead, it is argued here that the culture industry, media technology and broader local contexts were instrumental in the global distribution of couple dancing and its changes during the period. While steps proliferated around the world, social dancing remained an inherently local practice, framed by the circumstances under which dancers met. The Charleston, the foxtrot and other steps were danced in venues from upmarket cabarets and huge ballrooms to social clubs and private living rooms, on sprung wooden floors as well as on earth floors that were sprinkled with water to keep down the rising dust. Dances were accompanied by large orchestras, small bands or gramophone records. They were performed by dancers who had received lessons or by people who improvised steps, often informed by what they had seen in cinema films. Dancers came alone, in groups or as couples; they expected to find romance, recognition, respite, excitement, pleasure or sex. They left the dance hall as romantic partners or political comrades, with their friendship reinforced or their identity confirmed. Thus, local settings shaped the social relations that dancers forged during their dance floor encounters and sometimes maintained outside the dance venues.

The contributions to the present volume explore worlds of social dancing in both a geographical and a social sense. Case studies from all continents trace the global dissemination of dances as a composite of steps, movements, sounds, conventions and images. Looking out for the appearance of modern steps around the geographical world, they are interested in the growth of couple dancing in commercial venues as a major trend in the history of popular culture in the era of the two World Wars. At the same time, the chapters shine a light on the social world of dancing, where rules and conventions that were specific to this realm shaped the conduct of its population. This social world eclipsed the moral panic that condemned steps like the tango and the Charleston for being ‘frivolous’, ‘indecent’ and ‘foreign’, and afforded its participants alternative social relations and identities.

Historiography

With its double interest in the global dissemination of social dance and the local, situational sociality of dancing, the volume builds on existing scholarship in history and dance studies, taking inspiration too from sociology. Social and cultural historians have studied social dancing for about forty years now as part of early twentieth-century commercial entertainment that also includes variety theatre, fairgrounds, cinema, popular music and spectator sport. Some studies focus on class conflict. They oppose the goings-on in popular dance venues with the vociferous critique of moral reformers and interpret social dancing as working-class resistance against bourgeois social control.¹ Other works are concerned with modernity and the cultural changes associated with it. They home in on the urban, middle-class pleasure seekers in the first three decades of the twentieth century who found the courage to follow their urge to ‘step out’ of Victorian restraints and onto dance floors to embrace the values of an emerging liberal-democratic consumer society.² Pointing to the fact that many of the fashionable steps of the period can be traced back to African American origins, some researchers have taken social dancing as a lens through which to study race relations and identities.³ In a similar vein, dance has been taken as an entry point to study debates about national identity and the impact of cultural Americanisation.⁴ Some of the latter historians’ work is informed by critical dance scholarship, a line of enquiry that interprets dance as ‘meaning in motion’, an embodied representation of identities and values.⁵

All these studies have in common a regard for social dancing as an emblem of larger societal trends and attitudes. They draw from an anthropological concept of culture as a manifestation of widely shared values and beliefs. This makes social dancing ‘a form of life or … a way of being’, ‘an arena for the articulation of different values and behaviors’ or ‘a symbolic abstraction of social dynamics [that] represents social life and thus offers participants a means of expressing their own views on its hierarchies, roles, and stereotypes’.⁶ From this assumption, historians study social dancing as a political expression, a means to participate in a wider debate about how society should be organised. In this view, social dancing serves as a mirror of society that reflects the fundamental values, needs and identities of social groups and offers insights into how they were ‘contested’ and ‘negotiated’, to use two key terms from this scholarship.

Conceptualising social dancing in this way directly links a practice that may, at first sight, appear peripheral and of minor importance to larger discourses of class, modernity, democracy and identity. At the time when research on popular amusements was very much a minority pursuit among historians, this concept of culture underwrote the legitimacy of the object of study, because it connected commercial amusements firmly to central topics on the historians’ agenda. Referencing Clifford Geertz, Antonio Gramsci, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Raymond Williams, this perspective drew on a number of theoretical interventions that were amounting to a wider ‘cultural turn’ in historiography from around 1980.⁷

The anthropological approach to culture fostered historians’ interest in popular entertainment and led to valuable insights. However, there are also problems with studies that perceive social dancing as symbolic resistance, a challenge to ‘cultural hegemony’, a manifestation of values or an expression of needs and desires. Firstly, these interpretations fade out the more specific concerns that dancers faced when they met on and around the dance floor. Elizabeth Clement has put this pointedly when she contends that historians present ‘working-class women in dialogue with the middle class … making it appear that the working class engaged in a constant conversation with the middle class about sexual behaviors and the definitions of respectability’.⁸ Her study on courting, treating and prostitution in New York in the first half of the twentieth century makes quite clear that this ‘dialogue’ did not take place and that working women followed their own rationales in their relationships with men. The contributions to this volume share Clement’s scepticism and subscribe to the same orientation towards actors’ bounded rationality. They start from her observation that the warnings about the dangers of the dance hall from moral reformers, priests, employers or parents shaped the conduct of dance hall patrons far less than the presence of observing peers and the interaction with the dance partner at hand. Movements had to be co-ordinated; conversations had to be maintained; and, above all, face had to be saved. Dancers negotiated situations rather than values; they behaved strategically rather than followed subconscious needs; they performed in front of relevant others rather than expressed attitudes to people who were not even present to witness it.

The second shortcoming of scholarship that looks at dance as a mirror of society, or ‘meaning in motion’, is that it does not pay enough attention to the influence of commercial providers of dance events on the development of the practice. The managers of cabarets and ballrooms, dance teachers and professional dancers, musicians and broadcasters as well as record and film producers all contributed to shape the multifaceted phenomenon that is social dancing. They created spaces and atmospheres, supplied sounds, suggested looks, offered guidance and popularised scripts that dancers drew from when they met on the dance floors. Their contribution to the making of the social world of dancing was neither motivated by the aim to gain social control, nor did it follow directly from the demand of ‘the people’ who would steer the supply of culture by selectively opening their wallets. Instead, their offerings resulted from collaboration and competition among themselves, an interaction that was constrained by laws and regulations, media technology, power relations in the industry, skills and visions of the market.⁹ For instance, the stricter regulation of taxi-dancing, where male patrons bought tickets to dance with female dancers-for-hire, motivated ballroom promoters in early 1930s America to cater to dating couples. The transition to sound film and the subsequent boom in dance movies both fostered dancers’ expectation of romantic love and lifted dancing’s reputation. Dance teachers all over the world established the distinction between ‘elegant’ and ‘vulgar’ ways to execute fashionable new steps. The transnational vaudeville touring circuit and the global recording industry allowed for the worldwide distribution of steps and sounds. The rise of broadcasting in the USA gave white dance bands national prominence, while excluding black bands, which in turn divided the dance industry along racial lines.

These and other developments on the production side of dance culture by no means determined dance floor encounters. However, they structured these situations spatially and by disseminating conventions, while also providing dancers with a repertoire of behavioural strategies to navigate the dance halls. Under the conditions of a growing dance industry, the provision of venues, steps, music and scripts was largely allocated to specialists. As they did not directly emanate from people’s needs, the study of how, when and why they changed has to take the inherent dynamic of the entertainment industry into account.

Following from this critical discussion of existing scholarship, the present volume sees a need to break social dancing out of its conceptual lockstep with larger political, social and economic trends and put greater weight on both the interaction on the dance floors and the development of the entertainment industry. In this way, we hope to account for changes in social dancing as well as the social relations forged on the dance floors.

Approach

The approach that seems most congenial to this endeavour dates back to our period of study, when sociologists at the University of Chicago concerned themselves with urban life, including the commercial amusements that flourished in the big cities. Pioneering work on Chicago’s taxi-dance halls was the first research to suspend the moral condemnation of commercial social dancing and take the phenomenon seriously as a subject in its own right.¹⁰ Paul Cressey and his team of field workers studied the halls as a social world to uncover the conventions that governed the conduct of the people who populated them. Like many other scholars of what is sometimes called the ‘Chicago School’ of sociology, Cressey and his collaborators first looked at this particular social world in isolation, closely observing its participants on site and in action to understand the rationale of their behaviour. Subsequently, they followed taxi-dancers outside the halls, as some of them met with patrons after their shift and even moved in with them, trying to maintain relationships that had started with the exchange of money for company. In this way, taxi-dancing established new gender relations that were independent of ties of kinship and community but threw up new questions of trust and economic and emotional dependency.

Since Cressey’s research, the study of dancing as interaction has continued, resulting in publications that exemplify the insights this approach may yield.¹¹ Frequently, research on the social world of dancing has featured prominently the aforementioned ‘motley crew’ of entertainment suppliers, as for instance in Howard Becker’s work on dance musicians in post-1945 Chicago or in David Grazian’s look behind the scenes of urban nightlife in Philadelphia in the early 2000s.¹² All these studies perceive dancing as a kind of social drama, performed by the dancers for each other, set on stages that were prepared by professionals from the amusement trades.

The social world approach has informed some historical studies on our topic as well, most notably works that used the archives of Chicago sociologists as primary sources. Examples include Randy McBee’s study of social dancing in the USA from the turn of the century to about 1930, which shows that working-class men, just like their female counterparts, developed tactics to negotiate the presence of women in their places of conviviality while maintaining as much as possible the idea of masculine superiority.¹³ Another example of a historical study that takes an interactionist approach is Chad Heap’s book on ‘slumming’ in New York and Chicago from the late nineteenth century to the Second World War. It argues that the engagement of white middle-class men and women with lower-class, racialised entertainment re-affirmed rather than eroded class and race boundaries.¹⁴ Observations from the social world of dancing can also be found in some of the historical studies mentioned earlier. Kathy Peiss, for instance, analyses ‘treating’, the gendered exchange of gifts for sexual favours, as interaction; Lewis Erenberg describes New York cabarets as an ‘action environment’, drawing on terminology coined by Erving Goffman, probably the most famous Chicago School sociologist.¹⁵ However, these hugely insightful ‘social world’ observations sit uneasily with the narratives of their respective studies, because they give rise to different concerns than the struggle against cultural control or the emancipation from the mental constraints of Victorian inhibitions that Peiss and Erenberg were aiming at.

The contributions to the present volume set aside such ‘grand’ interpretations and foreground dance floor interaction to tell different stories of social dancing. They achieve this through a social world perspective, but also through a slightly different periodisation and topical focus. The volume takes the three decades before the Second World War into view, with the 1930s as a vanishing point and a few years around 1930 as a possible caesura. Histories of dancing that are primarily concerned with class conflict, women’s emancipation or the rise of a modern mindset have prioritised the period from the turn of the century into the ‘Roaring Twenties’ with its highly controversial cake-walks, ‘animal dances’, the tango and the Charleston. They have taken energetic jives and jitterbugs of the late 1930s into view as precursors of rock ‘n’ roll from the mid-1950s, when rebellious youth picked up the thread of emancipatory steps again and rang in a ‘cultural revolution’ that culminated in the late 1960s. In contrast to this familiar narrative of social dancing as a challenge to the status quo, the present volume puts greater stress on the 1930s as the decade when heterosexual couple dancing became firmly established, and with it new modes of conduct and social relations. These developments will not appear as particularly progressive or challenging from a viewpoint that cherishes a critical edge in popular culture. However, they represent what most people associated with and practised as social dancing in the middle of the twentieth century. This warrants the phenomenon the same scholarly attention as the dance ‘crazes’ of subsequent ‘roaring’ decades and leads to an interpretation that features social dancing as an object sui generis.

Findings

Covering dance halls from Buenos Aires to Tokyo, from Liverpool to Johannesburg and from Chelyabinsk to Auckland, the chapters in this book paint a picture of couple dancing’s global proliferation that shows great similarities as well as local variation. To be sure, the social world of dancing encompassed many venues, styles, steps, situations and functions. Old-time and community dances did not disappear during the period of study, though they receive less attention in this book. Amidst multiple variations, however, two central institutions emerged that drew the attention of dancers and dance industry professionals like a magnet turns iron filings. The first one was the cabaret; the second one, the grand ballroom or ‘palais de danse’.

From around 1910, key developments in the history of social dancing originated from cabarets, which opened for business in many cities around the world. Typically combining floor shows with drinking and dining, cabarets featured vaudeville acts, presenting them in a more intimate setting. Through their link with variety theatre, cabarets participated in the transnational touring circuit that had been established at least ten years earlier, with the transatlantic link between the metropoles in North America and Europe as a hub.¹⁶ This circuit sent variety acts around the world, serving as a major travel route for stage dancers who introduced audiences across the globe to newly fashionable dance steps. Other ways for dances to travel in the 1910s and 1920s that are mentioned in the chapters of the present book include films, press reports, entrepreneurs in the amusement business, migrant workers and soldiers, but also international delegations. At the latter’s events, knowledge of certain steps was becoming de rigueur, as Igor Narskiy and Yuiko Asaba point out in their chapters on dancing in Russia and Japan.

Whereas in music halls and cinemas, as well as at vaudeville and operetta theatres, the dancing remained on the screen or the stage, in cabarets dance demonstrations mobilised the audience to participate. At cabarets, fashionable stage dances were transformed into social dancing. How exactly that happened begs explanation. As Klaus Nathaus argues in his chapter on the American case, cabaret acts literally overstepped the edge of the stage, which was often low to begin with, to venture into the auditorium and engage with guests. At the same time, amateur dancers were encouraged to step into the limelight at dance competitions or, at the height of the pre-World War I dance fad, to become professional dancers or dance instructors. As a form of entertainment that was created by patrons themselves, social dancing was something that cabaret owners were quite happy to facilitate. For many guests to take the plunge and go out to the dance floor, however, it took an extra nudge. Cabarets provided this through the social composition of their patrons, Nathaus proposes. Attracting showbiz affiliates and experienced nightlife revellers, they built up a critical mass of people who were ready and able to join the merriment, pulling the rest of the audience with them. The framing of the dance fad as a ‘craze’ gave ordinary people the licence to let go of their concerns about losing face and partake in the turkey trot, grizzly bear and bunny hug, something that, as Irving Berlin’s contemporary hit assured them, ‘everybody’ was doing. From all this, it follows that social dancing in cabarets should be considered foremost as a form of participation in urban nightlife, related more closely to courting, treating, ‘slumming’ and singing along than to codified dances like the waltz.

The excitement of the cabarets gave rise to dancing across the classes, but also, and predictably, to status concerns. In this situation, dance instructors offered help by teaching refined versions of fashionable steps that were supposed to distinguish the ‘elegant’ from the ‘vulgar’ dancer. The issue of class as well as race became entangled with dance styles. In the case of tango in Japan, for instance, the discourse of dance, with its charged opposition between ‘elegance’ and ‘vulgarity’, travelled at least as fast as the actual steps. By the time the tango was first performed on stage in Yokohama in May 1914, news about its scandalous impact in Europe and America was almost a year old, so that the explanation given by the performers that it was the person who made the dance ‘elegant’ fell on fruitful soil.

Throughout the period studied in this book, dance teachers tried to refine popular steps and guide the dancing public to what they considered the correct styles. National schools emerged in the interwar years. In Britain and its former colonies, prominent dance instructor factions propagated the ‘English style’ of ballroom dancing. In Johannesburg, as Alida Maria Green shows in her chapter, leading dance teachers were trained in London and ballroom competitions adjudicated by British judges. The manager of Johannesburg’s leading ballrooms had been recruited in London, and local musicians sat as understudies with famed British bands to learn directly from them. According to John Griffiths, the English style was almost as dominant in New Zealand, where local members of the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dance relayed the ‘dos and don’ts’ of ballroom dancing to local dancers. In Japan from the late 1920s, supporters of the English style competed for authority with followers of the French way of dancing the tango. Interestingly, the latter considered themselves ‘naturally talented’ and accused the former of being ‘industrious’ and ‘ordinary’, thus reiterating the distinction between ‘elegance’ and ‘vulgarity’. This opposition was still prominent in the interwar years, not only in Japan and not just with regard to the tango. In South Africa in 1926–27, the Charleston provoked a similar reaction among dance teachers, who offered to teach ‘refined’ steps to a white clientele that was concerned about their black servants enjoying the same dance.

In other countries, national styles were promoted in defence against western or American steps. In the Soviet Union, the position of choreographers and dance teachers to dances from the West changed in reaction to official cultural policy, but also in view of the popularity of imported steps. In the late 1920s, this resulted in the codification of the ‘Sport-trot’ as an attempt to ‘Sovietise’ the foxtrot. Political demands from the state, real or perceived, affected dance teachers most clearly in the European dictatorships. In Germany, dance teacher Walter Carlos anticipated in late 1932 the increasing nationalisation of dance and propagated the Deutscher Sporttanz (German sport dance), ‘Deta’ for short. Subsequently, dance teacher organisations tried to please the new Nazi government by reviving (or reinventing) traditional German steps. In Italy, Fascist opposition to ‘foreign’ dances in general and ‘black’ dances in particular led to the development of an Italian style of jazz and the substitution of English-sounding names for dance venues with Italian ones, as Kate Ferris mentions in her chapter.

Overall, attempts by the dance teaching profession to harness dancers and make them execute the ‘correct’ steps had surprisingly little impact on the development of social dancing, even where such efforts were urged on and supported by state authorities. In most parts of Italy, for instance, Fascist as well as Catholic opposition to social dancing subsided. Ferris quotes a high-ranking official, who in 1925 commented on a memorandum with a hand-written note saying, ‘let them dance, for pity’s sake!’, which makes the resignation palpable. Likewise, in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia ‘homegrown’ dances that had party approval never caught on, as dancers found ways to move the way they wanted. Efforts to roll out the English style across the British Isles and the Empire or to teach the Japanese how to tango had marginal effect, as apart from in the most general terms they did not reach far beyond the inner circle of the dance profession. Dance teachers in 1930s America still discussed the basic question of how they could standardise dances, which suggests that there were still many people who made up steps as they went along.

To be sure, evidence of failed control shows that people voted with their feet and found ways to pursue the dances they preferred. However, this is only part of the story, because on the whole social dancing did become more formal during the interwar years. Tellingly, the concern with class status, a pressing issue in the early 1910s and during the 1920s, had become less important by the 1930s in the cases studied in this volume. Concomitantly, gender relations were deemed less problematic in the course of the period too. ‘Moral panic’ subsided, and social dancing became a legitimate pastime across classes and races, safe enough even to serve as a conduit for the pursuit of heterosexual romance with strangers.

The following chapters show that this development was primarily due to changes in the entertainment business and to media convergence. All the countries covered in this volume saw an increase in the number and the size of dance venues, including purpose-built dance palaces for a few thousand patrons, but also multifunctional halls that were used for dance events. In Britain and the USA, private companies like Mecca and National Attractions invested in ballroom chains. In South Africa, the African Theatre Trust branched out into first cinemas and then dance palaces. In Buenos Aires and Tokyo, operators who ran amusements parks and other entertainments added dance halls to their portfolios. Elsewhere, the state provided venues that were subsequently used for social dancing. In 1930s Russia, where Joseph Stalin declared that ‘life has become more cheerful’, the government built tens of thousands of culture palaces and workers’ clubs in cities and in the countryside, adding to thousands of restaurants and cinemas where dance events took place. In Kenya, the British colonial administration welcomed the interest among Kenyan youth in ‘European’ dances and provided halls to be used for social purposes from the 1940s.

Upmarket dance venues became veritable entertainment palaces. Berlin’s Residenz-Casino featured table telephones, a pneumatic post system and fountains that sprinkled water to the rhythm of the music. Buenos Aires’s Palais de Glace, converted from an ice-skating rink, was ornately decorated with columns, mirrors and chandeliers and allowed dancing under an impressive skylight. In Auckland, the Click-Clack Cabaret, the Peter Pan and the Winter Garden competed for the social elite with cosmopolitan flair, while in Shanghai, elegant ballrooms were either stand-alone buildings or located in luxury hotels or department stores. To be sure, the luxury offered at these venues was well above the standard of the great majority of dance halls. However, this luxury was reaching a wider clientele in the 1930s. Pictures and descriptions of the interior of high-end dance venues were widely publicised in magazines, on posters and postcards as well as being featured in the many music films that were released after the advent of sound film, with consequences for dance floor encounters in popular halls, as some of the following chapters suggest. Furthermore, luxurious venues that had opened their doors in the late 1920s to a better-off clientele had to reconsider their business model when the 1929 crash hit the entertainment industry and often opened up to a popular audience. Dress codes were scrapped and admission prices lowered. The cover charge that had been the rule in cabarets was replaced by ticket sales, and many dance palaces offered free instruction. The Mecca chain in Britain, for example, even developed ‘party dances’ to encourage popular participation. It appears that the economic crisis after 1929 hit the exclusive cabarets hardest, directing the investment of the industry to halls that were catering to popular audiences.

Another development that affected the dance hall industry around 1930 was its integration with film and broadcasting. As all the following chapters show, synergies with film and the cinema affected the experience of social dancing in profound ways. Multiple links existed between the two branches of the entertainment business, and connections go back to the pre-sound era. To begin with, cinema foyers were used as dance venues, as in Soviet Russia, for example. Film screenings were also coupled with dance demonstrations, as Green mentions for South Africa, and new steps featured in films. While it was hardly possible to learn dancing from watching moving images without synchronised music, films like How To Dance the Foxtrot, shown in New Zealand shortly before the First World War, gave audiences at least an impression of a new dance. John Griffiths also mentions ‘movie balls’, which were held in Australia and New Zealand after the First World War. At these events, patrons danced before a backdrop of theatrical sets and were dressed up as film stars. The fact that profits from these balls were donated to charity helped to improve social dancing’s reputation.

With the coming of sound film, social dancing and film integrated further. Audiences in Shanghai, Germany, the USA and elsewhere – largely owing to the reach of Hollywood – were offered a glut of music films that featured extended ballroom scenes. These familiarised new audiences with the social world of dancing, and the screen presence of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers or local equivalents inspired many to take dance lessons, as dance instructors noted. The presentation of social dancing in moving images that were synchronised with the most popular music hits and embedded in happy stories helped immensely to co-ordinate both the movements and the expectations of dancers, thus solving a problem that had been raised frequently in the dance community, as Nathaus shows for Germany. Dancing became associated with stars, and cinema audiences began to emulate their behaviour in dance halls, as American sociologists found out in interviews with high school and college students. These observations suggest that dance and music films offered ‘scripts’ which dancers took as guidance when navigating the dance floor. The integration of social dancing as an attractive feature or key plot device in uncontroversial films that were aimed at a mass audience also served to enhance the reputation of dancing. This may be most apparent in the case of Shanghai, as Andrew Field shows, where the movie presence of the most famous dance hostesses elevated Chinese dancers-for-hire to stardom, well above the status of courtesans.

While sound film was the medium that impacted social dancing the most, the influence of the gramophone and of broadcasting was far from negligible. As Ferris and Narskiy show for two cases where the dancing of western steps was officially restricted, the gramophone enabled dancers to practise those steps at home. The global distribution networks of the record industry also played a role in proliferating the music that was meant to accompany jazz dances like the Charleston, thus contributing to the establishment of dance conventions around the world. Dancers became familiar with new sounds and rhythms before they heard them in the dance hall, and musicians learned international hits from recordings, as Green mentions for South Africa and Griffiths for New Zealand. In some countries, dance teachers convinced record producers to issue discs that had the ‘correct’ speed to accompany certain steps. However, the gramophone could also be a factor that discouraged social dancing, as Asaba argues. In 1930s Japan, collectors and connoisseurs of Argentinian tango and other western music met in music cafés (ongaku kissa) to listen to music rather than dance to it, taking pride in contemplative reception and preferring it to dancing. Similar developments can be observed elsewhere in our period, for instance in the USA, where ‘name’ bands began to attract audiences who wanted to listen rather than dance. A small but growing community of jazz fans, focused on recorded music, sought intellectual stimulation in music and the cultural capital that came with it. This interfered with social dancing in some instances and kept some people from stepping out, though its detrimental effect on dancing in general and couple dancing in particular would only show prominently later, in the 1960s with the rise of rock music.

Radio, the medium that rose parallel to sound film, influenced social dancing in similar ways to the gramophone, as it allowed dancing at home and featured the latest international dance music, performed by popular bands. The share of modern dance music on radio programmes increased even in Italy, Germany and Soviet Russia, whose governments explicitly condemned ‘American’ or black music. Many dance broadcasts were transmitted ‘live’ from metropolitan ballrooms, which stimulated if not a sense of immediate participation in this social world at the very least curiosity about it. Finally, radio contributed to the standardisation of danceable music, because playing to a microphone favoured arranged music over improvisations born of the performance situation, as Nathaus shows in his chapters.

The proliferation of large dance halls and their opening up to a popular audience and especially the integration of music and dance in film and broadcasting came to a head around 1930, as many of the following case studies show. In turn, these changes in the entertainment ecology shaped the social world of dancing through defining new settings and establishing new conventions. Centred around the large ballrooms, popular dance bands and romantic films, dance floor encounters afforded new social relations, which the contributions to the present volume explore.

First, there is evidence that social dancing’s function as a conduit for heterosexual romantic love became more pronounced during the period of study. In Europe and America, young people found marriage partners more often than not outside of kin supervision and followed their romantic emotions when looking for a partner. Several chapters in the present volume show that the dance hall provided a setting where this ‘romantic revolution’ took place and suggest that couple dancing served as a means to accomplish it. The link between dancing and courtship was, in many parts of the world, older. However, it was only by the interwar years and especially in the 1930s that couple dancing was widely considered a legitimate means to initiate romance. Earlier reservations about commercial entertainment as a context for encounters between unmarried men and women gave way to a discourse that was no longer concerned with the question if, but how courtship should be conducted. The chapters on Argentina, Germany, the USA and Britain as well as Russia and Shanghai present ample evidence for this discourse in the press, in novels and in film.

In the social world of couple dancing, gender relations and identities changed, in many cases in favour of an emancipated femininity and a gentler masculinity. Young women often appear to have been keener dancers than young men. The pleasure they derived from developing their own style with attractive clothes and make-up, from cultivating their own public persona and from moving relatively unrestrained on dance floors was in itself a factor in gaining independence, as Cecilia Tossounian suggests. In Buenos Aires, in Kenya and elsewhere, dance floors became sites where women experimented with identities and relationships. It is important to stress that the potential for emancipation did not simply equal the absence of constraints. As Nathaus argues in his chapters, the very conventions of couple dancing, as they were established by the 1930s, offered women room for manoeuvre. Even though the initiative to approach a dance partner was commonly attributed to men, the rules of couple dancing, popularised via mass media and laid down on dance floors, provided the female partner with the option of an easy exit, simply by saying ‘thank you for the dance’. Once the conventions of couple dancing were set, the social world legitimised women’s public presence and afforded them considerable agency.

In turn, men felt obliged to follow the conventions and show their gentler side, if they wanted to participate in dance hall culture. As James Nott argues with regard to the British experience, many men not only performed a ‘softer’ masculinity in the interest of finding a female partner, but actually enjoyed the social world of dancing for its absence of ‘the more brutal and restrictive demands of patriarchal culture’. Concomitantly, Nathaus in his chapter on the American case mentions that dancing was such a prominent feature of the dating life of college and high school students that any lack of necessary skills was felt desperately. Boys and men who were unwilling or unable to dance were aware that one way to approach potential romantic partners was closed to them. While formal couple dancing urged men to display their gentle selves, it was not incompatible with dominant masculinity. Kate Ferris points out that pictures of Benito Mussolini dancing were interpreted by his supporters as evidence for his ‘virility’, regardless of the concerns of fascist censors who had initially prohibited the circulation of such images, as they had feared that they might effeminate the image of the Duce. While it can be argued that social dancing throughout the twentieth century was avoided by he-men as an ‘unmanly’ practice,¹⁷ the thirty ‘golden years’ of couple dancing that began in the 1930s may still be considered the period in which male obstinacy towards dancing was at its lowest or, put positively, when heterosexual men found dancing most rewarding.

There were, however, limits to how far the performance of gender identities could divert from conventional binaries. For instance, while it was generally accepted in British dance halls that women danced as same-sex couples, the sight of men doing the same provoked homophobic reactions from other men. Some chided men for dancing with ‘too much swank’, others ridiculed them, while still others started fistfights with men they insulted