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42 | 2 Orderly Bodies: Dancing New York, 1900–1914 Bodies never lie. —George Graham, to his daughter Martha1 Folk-dancing offers . . . possibilities as a Democratic Socializing Agent, and . . . value as a form of real Americanization. —Elizabeth Burchenal, 19202 Anglo-American exchanges in the decade before World War I, both of Americans traveling to the United Kingdom and of the British visitors to the United States, shaped awakenings of a folk revival in both New York and London. But, of course, English Country Dance was not new to America then; transatlantic crossings had brought country dance to the British colonies in the eighteenth century. At issue is how that past was remembered and the role of that past in the present. Colonial Americans danced, and as a British colony, they inherited English dance traditions; historians are only beginning to unravel the regional, class, and ethnic variations of their dance experiences. Elites favored the minuets and the country dances historians have associated with the gentry, although the category had varied meanings and porous boundaries and the country dance appears to have engaged more plebian sorts as well. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, New England and middle-Atlantic colonies tended to prefer the English dances, whereas the southern colonies, which maintained stronger allegiances to France, were more loyal to the minuet favored by their French allies. As important, English country dance traditions were reshaped by their encounter with ethnic American cultures, both religious and secular. Thus, the historian Rhys Isaac notes how “New Light” revivalists forced dancing underground in late-eighteenth-century Virginia and how African American dance culture informed the lively jigs. Isaac quotes the Virginian Andrew Burnaby, who found plebian country folk in 1759–60 challenging one another Orderly Bodies: Dancing New York, 1900–1914 | 43 with jigs, “a practice originally borrowed,” Burnaby was informed, “from the Negroes.” Thus, both a young Virginian and Jack Tar, the archetypical Revolutionary War–era sailor, might on any given evening have kicked up their heels at a local dockyard tavern or a rural schoolyard with a jig or hornpipe (the two were not distinguished in the eighteenth century). Improvising with exuberant steps, each would show off his skill and would strut his manliness to the assembled crowd.3 Meanwhile, across town or elsewhere in the county, in a plantation ballroom or one of the assembly rooms, George Washington—well known for his fancy footwork and grace—might have been opening the evening ball by dancing a minuet with the ball’s hostess. The minuet, an elegant showpiece ceremonial dance with steps characteristic of the Baroque period, was developed for the French court in the 1660s. It had complex and precise stepping with formal upright carriage and was performed by couples for the assemblage, each in descending rank taking a turn.4 It was English Country Dance, however, the dance tradition colonists shared with the mother county, that dominated most venues, whether it was the village taverns or the assembly halls of the growing metropolises, and most especially in the middle-Atlantic and northern regions. The jig was a solo dance, and the minuet required well-rehearsed training and skill for a couple dancing alone; in contrast, the country dance was a social dance for the assemblage and more easily accessible, demanding relatively little practice. As in England, by the eighteenth century, as the dances moved from the village green to the ballroom and upstairs into more elite quarters, set dances for three and four couples and rounds fell out of favor, and longways dances “for as many as will” predominated. These were typicallytriple minors, in which the top three couples danced together, and after a turn of the dance, the first couple progressed down the set one place to activate another couple. The dance would continue until all couples in the line were dancing. Moreover, English Country Dance, as dance historians Kitty Keller and Charles Hendrickson describe, was not wild and unstructured: “Despite the informal-sounding name, country dances were not undisciplined romps.”5 Eighteenth-century ECD in America was formal, celebrated composure and “complaisance” with a graceful elegance of carriage, and honored society’s local hierarchies. The dance also had its American inflections, much as folk traditions would often adopt local village characteristics. For instance, “Sir Roger de Cloverly” simply took on an American name, “The Virginia Reel.” Local choreographers wrote tens if not hundreds of dances to celebrate American events and historic sites, dances with names such as “Vernon...

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