The Irish Dancing: Cultural Politics and Identities 1900-2000

CHAPTER FOUR- Ballrooms of Romance: Dance, Modernity and Consumption

60 CHAPTER FOUR Ballrooms of Romance Dance, Modernity and Consumption Recreational dancing was one of the most common leisure activities for young people in Ireland throughout the 1930s,’40s and ’50s, with ballroom dancing being the predominant dancehall repertory. It is the romantic discourse that developed around ballroom dancing in these decades that is the focus of this chapter. The dancehalls themselves, it is argued, were constructed as romantic utopian spaces in which dancers could play out their identities. Furthermore, I make a case for the role of dance in ushering in new forms of identities for women in particular; identities that aspired towards and aligned themselves with the urban and the modern, and with an ethos of romance and consumption. If, as discussed in the last chapter, the ‘modern’ woman was represented as a potential threat to social order in the ‘degenerate’ dancehall space in the 1920s and 1930s, I want to propose that by the 1940s this image was being challenged and she had been transformed into a romantic and glamorous figure to be both envied and emulated on the dance floor. In pursuing the theme of this chapter I draw on a number of sources. It opens with a discussion of the establishment of public dancehalls in the 1930s and innovations in dancing that were effected in the original ‘Ballroom of Romance’ in Glenfarne, County Leitrim (see fig. 6). The chapter then goes on to examine how the links between dance, romance and consumption have been theorised, with specific reference to women, followed by evidence of how these elements are constructed within the dancehall space. The discussion then moves on to women’s personal reminiscences of the pleasures of dancing in the 1940s and 1950s. Finally attention is drawn to the tensions and contradictions in the ‘romantic utopia’ of the dancehall. Ballrooms of Romance 61 Public Dancing and Ballrooms of Romance Despite the campaign against ‘modern’ forms of music and dance discussed in Chapter Three, available evidence clearly suggests that the vast majority of Irish people preferred to listen and dance to ‘modern’ music. Indeed, Brown (1981, p. 41) as indicated in the previous chapter claimed that these modern influences were apparent very soon after the Treaty was signed in 1922 and the 1920s saw the increasing domination of the American–British ballroom repertory in dancing in Ireland.1 A number of dance venues were established to cater for the increase in the popularity of public dancing as a leisure activity. In addition to the building of parish halls a number of privately owned/commercial dancehalls were built (see fig. 7). The building of halls proliferated in the 1930s, in part because of the demise of house dancing as well as the increasing popularity of ‘modern’ dance music and the emulation of musical and dance trends from abroad, especially Britain and the USA.2 While there are no reliable sources of information on the exact number of dance venues in Ireland at this time,3 we do know that the opening of ballrooms continued into the 1940s, when the renowned National Ballroom opened in Dublin in 1945 and the equally popular Seapoint opened in Salthill, Galway, in 1949. The increase in dancehalls during these decades was not confined to the cities but was also evident in larger and smaller towns and villages. However, the dance halls to which I refer in this chapter, the bigger, more luxurious venues, were generally , though not exclusively, located in cities and provincial towns. I am proposing that these dance venues fostered the performance of romance in everyday life and drawing on Eva Illouz’s (1997, p. 120) claim that ‘[r]omance is lived on the symbolic mode of ritual, but it also displays the properties of the staged dramas of everyday life’. She notes how ‘the use of artifacts (clothes, music, light and food), the use of self-contained units of space and time’ are used to produce these staged dramas. Applied to the Irish context, dancehalls could be seen as one of the primary self-contained units of space in which artefacts such as décor, music, lighting combined to create a romantic ambience and were important props in the unfolding of the staged dramas of everyday life.4 An account of the reputedly original ‘Ballroom of Romance’, opened in Glenfarne, County Leitrim, in 1934 and recorded in a 62 The Irish Dancing: 1900–2000 radio interview...