Moving Violations: Dance in the London Music Hall, 1890-1910

Abstract

Theatrical dancing-public, paid dance performance -underwent a dramatic change in cultural status in the early twentieth century. Despite the brief flourishing of Romantic Ballet in the first half of the nineteenth century, no form of dance had held the kind of privileged position granted other performed arts-music, opera, drama--in Western culture; however, with the arrival of the Russian Ballet and the development of modern dance, this devaluation of dance as an art form was to end. Although it is important to understand the reasons for and consequences of this sudden willingness to bring dance into the fold of high art, my argument does not directly address this phenomenon. Rather it attempts to formulate the conditions governing theatrical dancing just prior to this change in status, and to map out the cultural space that new, or revalued, forms of dance could appropriate, redefine or reject. The tendency to focus scholarly attention on the most successful, visible, or elite practices of an art form not only turns cultural history into, as Walter Benjamin puts it, a history of the victors,' but also discounts the role played by a prior set of historical conditions in the emergence of new art forms. My aim, then, is dual: first, to recover aspects of dance performance usually discounted or ignored by traditional dance histories; and second, to lay the groundwork for an understanding of elite forms of dance which acknowledges their participation in the larger arena of dance performance in Western culture.