Dance and American Art: A Long Embrace

7. Social Dance: Visual Artists Take the Pulse of Twentieth-Century America

187 Social Dance Visual Artists Take the Pulse of TwentiethCentury America 7 S ocial dance, a kind of conversation between bodies, has often been celebrated , as well as inevitably altered, when seen through the bending lens of artistic representation. At the turn of the twentieth century, American artists looked to their own cultural lineage, as well as to European precedents, for ways to explore the expressive potential of social dance. The Impressionists, for example, had often enlisted the material capabilities of paint to express physical sensations, and especially the antic immediacy of the dance. Renoir’s Le Bal à Bougival (1883; fig. 111) portrays a kind of sun-dappled Eden, where dancers swirl in a working-class paradise.1 Renoir choreographed an idyll of urban leisure and outdoor pleasure, paced to the soft scrapings of dancing feet under the trees. In tune with his era, Renoir captures Baudelaire’s passing moment, but his dancers belong as well within the epic embrace of social dance in every era. If today we see bright, glancing movement in the swirling patterns of Renoir’s waltz, we should remember that that dance was not always viewed so benignly. When first introduced in the late eighteenth century as a reaction against the affectations of the minuet, the waltz’s close bodily contact between couples made it seem vaguely dangerous. But before long, taken up by the bourgeoisie, the waltz became a perfect subject for artists such as the Impressionists, who focused on the leisure activities of the middle class. The French had their airy balance valse, a slower, gliding variant of which became the Boston waltz. As communications improved, dances spread more rapidly and brought dramatic changes in the look and execution of social dance. Long after the shock value of the waltz dimmed, newer dances took on the mantle of the suggestive or outrageous. Wildly popular vernacular dances demonstrated modernity ’s redesign not only of painting, sculpture, and fashion, but of the human body itself, reconfigured to move in new and daring ways. Typically, the new jazzbased dances of the twentieth-century lacked bodily contact between participants . Instead, dancers swung their shoulders, moved their hands gesturally, and vibrated their legs. Watchers, including visual artists, saw the bodies turn, twist, and bob, disrupting expectations and keeping the traveling gaze in thrall. In the Black Bottom, for example, dancers slapped their hands on their backside, pushing their bodies forward through the pelvis. Dancers of both the Black Bottom and the Charleston moved the body as if it were one long tube, with hinged segments and flailing extremities. The Charleston kept knees close together, with feet Figure 111 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Le Bal à Bougival, 1883, oil on canvas, 71 5 ⁄8 × 38 5 ⁄8 inches. (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Picture Fund, 37.375) 189 socIal dance twisting out wildly, while arms flapped oppositionally or described Egyptiantype movements. Geometric, tube-shaped dresses enhanced the new angular separation of the body into parts (a reminder of what Nijinsky had done in theatrical dance performance). Jazz Age flappers, seeming to represent the restlessness, abandon, and daring of their era, made the Charleston the rage throughout the United States. Photographs from the 1920s gather into a single image the flailing motions of multiple arms and legs animated by the sweet-hot wail of a saxophone. Simultaneously, as the dances spread all over the Western world they carried the seed of American culture, a culture that, ironically, had assimilated many forms of imported dance and made them seem American. The 1920s introduced a period of unprecedented collaboration between elite and popular culture. As Ann Douglas has argued, it was an era when anything was “capable of popularization .”2 Thus, melding ballet with classical dance was an inevitable effort. One classic example of the incorporation of social dance styles into the broader range of American dance is seen in the efforts made by Lincoln Kirstein to Americanize George Balanchine, with whom he cofounded the New York City Ballet. In 1934 Balanchine choreographed a ballet called Alma Mater, one of the pieces that introduced his new choreography to American audiences.3 With sets and costumes by John Held Jr., the artist whose watercolors and illustrations expressed the quintessential spirit of the Jazz Age, Balanchine’s new ballet proved a veritable catalog of American types, behaviors, and social dances in full vogue. Lincoln Kirstein set the tone in the program notes he wrote...