Monstrous Grace

The first decades of the twentieth century saw a flurry of dance ‘crazes’, from the tango and the Charleston to the jitterbug, increasingly mapped onto the language of blackness. Jazz, cakewalk, and animal dances infused the social and popular culture of American and European cabarets; yet in the literature on dance and public health, twisting, contortions, hopping, and contagious enthusiasm represented the spectre of sexually taboo and ungainly blackness, against which ‘modern’ (white) dancing set itself. The choreographic discourse on modernity after Sigmund Freud conjugated primitive, infantile gestures with the lowest classes, in contrast to the lithe, ‘graceful’ dancing body exemplified by white socialite teachers Irene and Vernon Castle. They, reprising medical opinion, argued that upright dancing exercised in moderation stimulated youthful health. But the fantasy of convulsive primitivism held strong: from the advent of rock ’n’ roll to raves and Burning Man, figures of Dionysian frenzy persist.