A Short History of Dancing

Dancing, someone once said, is "the poetry of the foot." With equal accuracy, it might also be described as the limericks of the legs, the jingles of the arms, or the ballads of the belly and buttocks. Through the ages, every muscle, limb and organ of man's body has wiggled, jiggled and jumped in dancing celebrations of victory, puberty, birth, marriage, divorce, circumcision, the changes of the moon and the rising of the sun. At various periods and places, dances of the feet, neck, eyes, knees, lips, shoulders, thighs, breasts, hands and fingers have been used to arouse sexual desire, promote fertility, prepare for war, and to make rain, magic, money and whoopee.

The human desire to dance is basic. Man and his universe are all rhythm. The stars and galaxies move in an eternal ballet. The atom is a microscopic ballroom where particles swing and jitter to the frenetic jazz of energy and matter. Respiration is the rhythmic dance of breath, and the heart of the human embryo throbs in double-time syncopation with the maternal pulse. Upon birth, the infant is rocked and nursed at the breast, in what the Dutch psychiatrist Joost A. M. Meerloo calls the "milk dance." "In the Far East," he states, "I experienced several times this rhythmic encounter of mother and baby as a joyous play, full of erotic overtones."

A similar eroticism is present in all human dances, and springs directly from nature. The mating dances of whooping cranes, crested grebes, pheasants, moths and other winged amorists are counted among the big thrills of bird and bug watching, and zoologists aver that apes will shuffle and stamp around a tree for hours. A German psychologist, Wolfgang Köhler, who once made a study of such monkeyshines, reports that "In these dances the chimpanzee likes to bedeck his body with all sorts of things, especially strings, vines and rags that dangle and swing in the air" – thus displaying a sense of chic that compares with that of the primitive girl dancers depicted in the earliest Spanish cave painting of a human circle dance. Here, a group of Miolithic maidens are seen dancing in a ring around a rosy male youth whose nudity is emphasized by an enormous set of sex organs. Though prehistorians disagree as to the precise nature of this Stone Age shindig, the dance is almost identical with those performed at initiation ceremonies by many primitive peoples today. In central Australia, we are told, "the women dance with their arms flexed and make inviting movements," while on the island of Nauru, in the Pacific, the first menstruation of the chieftain's daughter is celebrated with a coming-out party at which dancers of both sexes "raise their grass skirts in front and behind and exhibit themselves to each other."

Simplest of all such dances are the erotic hoedowns of East African tribes, in which girl debutantes feverishly mimic the movements of coitus. Among the more complex is that of the Monumbo Papuans of New Guinea, who use the dance to instruct young tribal bucks in the responsibilities of manhood. We are told: "(1) they must often excite themselves by inserting a liana stalk in the penis; (2) they must steal diligently and not let themselves be seen by the women; (3) they must catch fish diligently with the fish spear; (4) they must diligently fetch down coconuts and drink the milk from them; (5) they must diligently fetch down breadfruits with pickers and foot slings; (6) they must delight in women; (7) they must secretly watch the women bathing."

As if this weren't enough to keep a young man out of mischief, most primitive societies demand his presence at numerous fertility rites. In the scholarly estimate of the musicologist and dance historian, Curt Sachs, "It would be difficult to imagine the motions of onanism and cohabitation ... the frenzied shrieking of obscene words, and the chants of unprintable verses which the dancers of both sexes in the various cultures, alone or in couples, bring to their dances." By way of restrained example, he cites the spring dances of the Watchandi of western Australia, who cavort around a large trench "decorated with bushes in such a way as to resemble the sex parts of a woman. In the dance they carry in front of them a spear to represent a phallus. Circling around the ditch, they poke the spear inside as a symbol of generative power, and sing continually, 'Not the pit, not the pit, not the pit, but the vulva!'"

In contrast, we have an anthropological report on the male-oriented sex hops of the Cobéua Indians of Brazil, whose dancers "have large phalli made of bast with testicles of red cones from the low-hanging trees, which they hold close to their bodies with both hands. Stamping with the right foot and singing, they dance at first in double-quick time, one behind another, with the upper parts of their bodies bent forward. Suddenly they jump wildly along with violent coital motions and loud groans of 'ai (ye) – ai (ye) – ai (ye)... .' Thus they carry the fertility into every corner of the houses, to the edge of the wood, to the nearby fields; they jump among the women, young and old, who disperse shrieking and laughing ..."

Though few instances can be found of the sexual act being consummated as part of the choreography, the fertility dance is always and everywhere a prelude to spirited intercourse – which often follows any other sort of primitive dance, as well. In the tribal mind, human potency and fertility are symbolic of health, abundance and victory over the forces of death and destruction. For this reason, fertility, war and funeral dances are more or less interchangeable, and anthropologists are often hard put to classify a given set of jumps, shuffles and grunts. From what has been learned, however, it's safe to assume that every step, leap, movement and contortion known to modern dancing had found its way into the primitive repertoire long before man emerged into the Bronze Age.

For all their aesthetic complexity, the dances of India still reveal a strong undercurrent of the erotic. Though divided into four regional types, every step and gesture is codified in the pages of the ancient Natya Sastra – a book which is believed to contain the dance secrets of the gods. "When the neck is moved backward and forward like the movement of a she pigeon's neck, it is called Prakampita. Usage: To denote 'You and I,' folk dancing, swinging, inarticulate murmurings and the sound uttered by a woman at the time of conjugal embrace." The hand held in one position conveys no less than 30 possible meanings, including "short man," "holding the breasts of women," "saying 'It is proper'" and "the flapping of elephant ears." When the dancer's third finger is doubled under the thumb, it may be construed as "flower," "screw pine," "the union of man and woman" or "rubbing down a horse."

Over countless centuries, the Indian dance has perfected 39 such significant hand gestures and 45 eloquent eye movements. All serve the purpose of storytelling dance dramas whose influence has spread through Asia to the islands of the South Seas, where the myths and legends told by a hula dancer's hands form a graceful counterpoint to her swaying hips and undulating torso. To the untutored eye of the mainland American, the story elements of the Hawaiian hula are considerably less interesting than the febrile footnotes of the dancer's pelvis, which speaks the same international language of l'amour that grandfather learned at carnival peep shows under the spangle-tossing tutelage of some itinerant Little Egypt. Curiously, however, the Egyptians themselves are supposed to have hipped to the traditional belly ballet from watching another group of traveling artistes: the bevies of bumping and grinding Hindu dancing girls who were brought to the Land of the Pharaohs in 1500 B.C. as part of the sensual spoils of war with kingdoms of the Middle East.

Spectacular, too, were Egyptian back bends, and the whirling dances which predated the hour-long trance dance of the Moslem "whirling dervishes." Such spinning dances were prevalent throughout the Middle East. Assyrian soldiers of the Seventh Century B.C. reportedly "whirled themselves like tops," and the ancient Hebrew name for the dancing of women derives from the verb for "turn" – as in a whirlwind or the swinging of a sword.

Both the Talmud and the Old Testament testify to the fact that the ancient Hebrews danced for joy and the glory of the Lord. King David danced before the Ark of the Covenant, and when the children of Israel had safely crossed over out of Egypt, Miriam the prophetess "took a timbrel" – or tambourine – "in her hand; and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances." Easily the most sensational dance in Biblical history was the one performed by Salome at Herod's birthday party – a dance which so pleased Herod that "he promised with an oath to give her whatsoever she would ask." Salome, at her mother's urging, requested and got John the Baptist's head. Her dance, which Victorian poets were prone to interpret as a pretty twinkling of the feet, was, according to all earlier evidence, nothing more nor less than a danse du ventre, or Eastern belly dance.

Salome aside, the belly dance was far from typical of the Jewish people, whose gay, skipping courtship dances were of the sort which "the daughters of Jerusalem went forth and danced in the vineyards." An equally idyllic dance is described in the Iliad as characteristic of the Homeric Greeks: "And now would they run round with deft feet exceeding lightly... . And now anon they would run in lines to meet each other." To the poet Pindar, Hellas was "the land (continued on page 157) HISTORY OF DANCING (continued from page 80) of lovely dancing," and modern dance critics still invoke the name of the Greek muse Terpsichore in their reviews of "terpsichorean" performances. But it would be erroneous to imagine that Hellenic dances were all graceful leaps and toe steps. In addition to the ancient Etruscan squatting dance, the Greeks also enjoyed hand-clapping, thigh-slapping dances which reached their peculiar peak in the rhathapygizein – a species of fanny-slapping fun step in which girl soloists kicked their own bare buttocks pink with the soles of their dainty feet.

Other crowd pleasurs were the gymnopaidiai, in which naked young men danced intricate wrestling movements, and war dances in which soldiers mimicked an actual battle. It was Socrates' opinion that the best dancers made the best warriors, and Sophocles danced in the chorus of his own dramas in order to strengthen his sense of the poetic meters – all of which had their origins in the dance, and are still described in terms of "feet." The spondee, with its foot of two long syllables, takes its name from the solemn dance which accompanied a sponde, or drink offering to the gods. The trochee was once the tripping trochaios, and poems written in the meter of bawdy Bacchic hymns are "ithyphallic," in allusion to the huge phallus which was carried in dancing processionals at the festival of the wine god.

Large-size facsimiles of the membrum virile erectus were standard equipment for erotic satyr dances performed by trios comprised of one man and two women, and were worn like souvenir badges at the Bacchanalia, where drunken male celebrants danced lasciviously around ecstatic maenads – the sacred "mad women" of the Dionysian cult. In imperial Rome, where orgiastic dancing embraced every erotic movement and gesture conceivable to the human imagination, the Bacchanalia became wild, drunken sex brawls. Contrary to popular belief, however, such erotic binges were not always typical of Rome. Indeed, the only dancing that appealed to the old Roman upper crust was the storytelling gesture dance of gods and heroes. But as spectacles and circuses became bigger and more gory under each succeeding Caesar, the pantomime adopted crime and horror formats, and farces were laced with erotic ballets performed by women dancers who disrobed during the course of the play in a sort of integrated striptease. Their frenzied grinds and breast vibrations were cheered by plebs and tired businessmen, while Juvenal reports that women were aroused by lewd dances of the kind used to express Pasiphaë's hankering for intercourse with a bull.

The reaction of the early Church was one of righteous wrath and condemnation. Converted to Christianity after a dissolute youth, Augustine, the sainted Bishop of Hippo, declared, "The dance is a circle with the devil in the center." But when people refused to give up their old fertility frolics, the Church fathers sought to make the dance symbolic of the joyous afterlife to come, when, in the words of Clement of Alexandria, "Thou shalt dance in a ring together with the Angels, around Him Who is without beginning or end." On saints' days, ceremonial dancing was often conducted within the church, and lively funeral dances around the churchyard celebrated the rebirth of the dead in Paradise. Since secular dancing was frowned upon as pagan, dancing in graveyards became a favorite outlet for peasants of the Dark Ages. Haunted by fears of plague, famine and war, their dancing was often obsessive. Epidemics of uncontrollable dancing broke out in towns and villages, and have been attributed to mass hysteria, nervous disorders due to a disease of the rye used in bread, and chorea – a neurological ailment which laymen still call "St. Vitus's dance," in honor of the patron saint whose influence was sought in prayers for the afflicted. Regardless of causes or cures, the grotesque "dancing mania" became associated in the minds of clergymen, poets and painters with the eternal dance of death, and church murals showed skeletons and mortals linked arm in arm in a danse macabre.

One theory has it that the word "macabre" was imported into Europe by the Crusaders, who filched the melancholy adjective from the Saracen makabr, meaning "graveyards." Less linguistic knights, such as Frederick II of Sicily, brought home gayer baggage in the form of dutyfree dancing girls, which they had picked up in the East to entertain their guests with after-dinner belly dances. To the sensual strains of Arabic dance music within castle walls, were added the castanets, tambourines and fiery guitars of wandering gypsy tribes, who danced their way across medieval Europe. It was the gypsies – formerly the "Gipcyans," or "Egyptians" – who kept alive the ancient dance of joy in southern Europe, while peasants of the north danced out their fears and repressions in damp graveyards.

In Provence, where the ideals of love and courtliness were sung by wandering troubadours, aristocrats and nobles formed "courts of love," and danced the farandole and branle. The branle, also known as the French brawl, was a swaying circle dance, and the farandole a kind of rhythmic follow-the-leader in which a group of dancers joined hands and gaily tripped through gardens and over lawns. To promote the cause of personalized romance, some unsung genius of Provence conceived the idea of breaking the group up into couples, who would dance side by side, holding hands. When, in the 13th Century, Provence became the scene of a bloody religious crusade, the aristocracy was virtually exterminated, but a sufficient number of nobles and troubadours escaped to carry the idea of couple dancing to the courts of Germany, Italy, France and England. The dance, which was called the estampie gai, swept all Europe. Servants and heavy-booted peasants copied the dance at frolics on the village green. Earthy leaps, swings and steps were added, and from these rustic variations courtly dancing masters created enough new dances to beguile knights and damsels for the next 500 years.

Uncertain, though, are the origins of the courante, which seems to have involved a certain amount of genteel leaping, and the German Trotto, which was known in France as the allemande – a name which still lingers on in the repertoire of American square-dance figures. Also alive today are the staccato stamping steps of 16th Century Spanish dances, which began with the canary dance, an Old World refinement of a wildly sexual funeral dance which Spanish explorers learned from the grief-stricken native girls of the Canary Islands. Easily the most notorious of all such imports was the Central American saraband, a dance of such unparalleled indecency that a Spanish law was passed in 1583 to prevent people from humming its music. In one account, the saraband is described as a dance in which girls with castanets and men with tambourines "exhibit indecency in a thousand positions and gestures. They let the hips sway and the breasts knock together. They close their eyes and dance the kiss and the last fulfillment of love."

Since Spanish dons and dames continued to do the saraband on the sly, dancing masters developed a legal noknock version which was tame enough to be danced in the courts of southern Europe. Its chief competitor was the Nizzarda, an action-packed promenade in which the gentleman made his lady "leap three times in the air," and "with his knee as support, lifts her up high and lets her down again." In the Germanic nations, lady-lifting was practiced by rakes of all ranks, who hoisted their partners aloft by placing their hands intimately beneath the "busk," or corset. Moralists clucked their tongues at the "shameful touching," and clucked again when their gemütlich compatriots made the remarkable discovery that couples need not dance, side by side, but could spin and hop around the floor while locked in a close embrace! The dance, which was called the volta, excited the interest of even the most sophisticated Frenchmen.

In the New England of America, however, the strait-laced settlers at Plymouth were distressed to find that the Indians not only danced on Sunday, but leaped and stamped about "like Anticks." Worse yet, in 1625, one Thomas Morton opened a non-Puritan plantation at Merry Mount with free beer and dancing around an 80-foot Maypole. In the roaring condemnation that followed, Morton and his men were accused of setting up a "Stynking Idol," and "inviting the Indean women for their consorts, dancing and frisking togither (like so many fairies, or furies rather), and worse practises," which smacked of "ye madd Bacchanalians!" More moderate opinions were imported from the mother country with the arrival of the Reverend John Cotton, in 1633: "Dancing (yea though mixt) I would not simply condemn," he reasoned, with appropriate quotes from Scripture. "Only lascivious dancing to wanton ditties, and amorous gestures and wanton dalliances ..." The majority soberly agreed, and by the end of the 17th Century the Puritan penchant for self-improvement led to the recognition of dancing as a social discipline, and dancing schools were opened in Boston, where "Grave Persons" taught "Decency of Behavior" to the young.

In 1666, Samuel Pepys visited the court of Restoration. England, and witnessed "corants" and French dances so "rare" and subtle that they quickly "grew tiresome." The ultimate in spectator boredom was yet to come, however, in the form of the French minuet – a folk dance of Poitu, which palace dancing masters refined into a pastiche of dainty steps, chivalrous bows and coy curtsies. Lacking both vitality and joy, the minuet proved to be the dancing masters' most lucrative creation – a choreographic clockwork that provided lifetime careers for three generations of snuff-sniffing sycophants. Treatises were written on the proper turning of the wrist. Sixty pages were required to describe the intricacies of the gentleman's bow, and dancing became an exhibition of rhythmic etiquette.

Long before the French Revolution put an end to aristocratic airs and graces, the nobles of Versailles, themselves, grew weary of the decorous minuet, and promptly turned to other dances as soon as the opening minuet had been danced for the sake of form. In Colonial America, a typical dance program was "first minuets one round; second giggs; third reels; and last of all country-dances." The belief that our forefathers spent their evenings dancing minuets may be attributed largely to Ye-Olde-Tea-Roome type historical pageants, which depict colonial Americans as superrefined stuffed shirts. Actually, 18th Century Americans were among the liveliest dancers in the world, ready to step out with both feet when the fiddles struck up The Virginia Reel or The Devil's Dream.

Toward the end of the century, more and more Americans were choosing partners for a secular square-order dance, the quadrille, which came to the States by way of England. Books appeared outlining "figures," and simple "prompts" were called out by a leader at every assembly. The original French terms were given in Anglo-American approximations – and thus, chassé glided into the language as "sashay," and dos-a-dos or "back-to-back" became the familiar "do-si-do."

In Germany, lively cheeked Fräuleins were rendering their Herren blissfully speechless with the eloquence of an invigorating new version of the volatile old volta. Now called the waltz – from wälzen, meaning "to roll" or "revolve" – the new Danube dance divided the Western world into those who found it an endless delight and those who considered it a source of eternal damnation. For moderns who wonder why the waltz was once called "naughty," history offers an eyewitness report by Ernst Moritz Arndt of the way it was rolled and revolved in 1804, in the vicinity of Erlangen: "The dancers held up the dresses of their partners very high so that they should not trail and be stepped on, wrapped them tightly in this shroud, bringing both bodies under one covering, as close together as possible, and thus the turning went on in the most indecent positions; the hand holding the dress lay hard against the breasts pressing lasciviously at every movement; the girls, meanwhile, looked half mad and ready to swoon ..." Over the protests of aroused moralists, the waltz whirled across Europe in sprightly three-quarter time. By 1797, it was responsible for the opening of 684 dance halls in Paris alone. "'Une valse! Oh encore une valse!' is the constant cry," Arndt reported seven years later. In England, where it was denounced as "the most degenerating dance for more than a hundred years," Byron penned a lordly paean to the "endearing waltz," which could "wake to wantonness the willing limbs," and permitted hands to "freely range in public sight."

While breast-pressing and skirt-lifting were never official features of the American waltz, it still raised the moral neck hair of many social conservatives. "The waltz is a dance of quite too loose a character, and unmarried ladies should refrain from it in public and private," opined The Gentleman and Lady's Book of Politeness, in 1833. "Very young married ladies, however, may be allowed to waltz in private balls, if it is very seldom and with persons of their acquaintance."

In 1844, Polk was nominated for the Presidency, but bluenoses of all political tints joined in the hue and cry against a scandalous new foreign dance: the polka. Described by one horrified American critic as "a kind of insane Tartar jig," the polka was rumored to be the invention of one Anna Slezakova, a Bohemian peasant girl, who improvised its steps out of sheer joy in the early 1830s. Introduced into New York society, the polka became the pet pastime of the American haut monde at Newport and Saratoga, where the abandoned display of debutante ankles caused the New York Herald to describe the happy hopping dance as one of the most "scandalous exhibitions ever exhibited outside the common gardens of Paris."

The polka was forbidden to be danced in the presence of Queen Victoria, and was excluded from all state functions at the White House. Quadrilles were danced at President Lincoln's inaugural ball, but with the firing on Fort Sumter, the White House ballroom lights went out, and Washington became patriotically austere. As the war dragged on, however, people turned to gay balls and parties for relief from the tedium and tension. There were Enlistment Fund balls and Patent Office balls – and, ultimately, there were Victory balls and peacetime parties at which prominent Washingtonians danced the "kiss quadrille."

If the kiss quadrille was ever danced as far west as the Rockies, it was more likely to be known as "Smooch and Swing" – for homesteaders, hillbillies, miners, farmers and cowboys had long since given the quadrille a vital American stamp that was evident in the titles of their "square dance" tunes and figures: Birdie in a Cage, Old Arkansaw, Tum-bleweed, Steal a Little Peek, Chase the Goose and Ladies' Choice – Cheat or Swing.

In the rootin', tootin' West, the cowboy's swinging partners were most likely to be professional dance-hall girls and lowfalutin ladies of easy virtue, who hustled drinks for the house and doubled in brass beds as prairie prostitutes. But, from all accounts, the most notorious dance dives of the period were in New Orleans, where concert-saloon "waiter-girls" danced the high-kicking cancan as it was originally performed in France, with a multitude of fancy flounces and a total absence of pants.

Throughout most of the United States and Europe, the female form was bustled out of sight beneath voluminous Victorian skirts, and the erotic origins of the dance were being denied or disguised. The "indecent" polka was refined into a mosdestly gay routine, and the once "naughty" waltz emerged as the genteel "culmination of modern society dancing." In the Gay Nineties the waltz was the universal favorite. "Casey would waltz with a strawberry blonde" in 1894 – and, 12 years later, in 1906, American blondes, brunettes and redheads were still singing Waltz Me Around Again, Willie.

Early in 1907, the tune suddenly changed, however, and Willie's sweetheart was dancing to a new beat from the band. I'd Rather Two-Step than Waltz, Bill expressed the new American preference for a syncopated march tempo that opened the way for the turkey trot, cakewalk and bunny hug. Couples in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and San Francisco strutted and stepped to peppy ragtime rhythms which white musicians had borrowed from New Orleans' Negro marching bands. Outraged oldsters bemoaned the fact that young people didn't waltz anymore, and professional prudes were quick to trace the relationship between syncopation and sin. The Negro musicians who played in New Orleans' funeral processions and carnival parades also performed in the brothels of Storyville – they played two-steps for tarts, one-steps for whores, and obliged Basin Street "specialty" dancers with renditions of the hootchy-kootchy!

The sin snoopers, who were short on historical perspective, denounced the hootchy-kootchy as a symptom of 20th Century depravity, and blamed the bawdy belly dance on Little Egypt, whose undulating midriff was the main Midway attraction of the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893. The "cooch," as it came to be called, was so basic in its appeal to a generation struggling to break free of Victorian restraints, that it was widely imitated by professionals and amateurs alike. In London, a dancer named Maud Allen wiggled her way to world fame by appearing in vaudeville as Salome – complete with harem costume and John the Baptist's head on a platter. Imported to America, the Scriptural squirm was such a success that girl dancers by the hundreds rented prop heads of St. John, and set themselves up as Salome acts. Over the next five years, Salomes of all shapes and sizes strove to outcooch each other. Theaters were raided, Salomes were jiggled off to jail, and burlesque buffs claimed a so-called "first" when a dancer named Odell went all the way by tearing off a striptease on the stage of the American Theater in New York, in 1907. With the premiere of Richard Strauss' Salome, opera fans donned soup-and-fish to ogle Mary Garden's gauzy gyrations in "The Dance of the Seven Veils" – a coloratura cooch which was so mercilessly satirized by Eva Tanguay, that vaudeville Salomes began to draw more laughs than applause. Within two years, the Salome bit went bust. Dance bands played Sadie Salome, Go Home, and the shelves of theatrical prop shops were lined with unemployed heads of John the Baptist.

As America swung into 1911 with Alexander's Ragtime Band, the first furor over the new dances began to die down. The two-stepping maxixe and the snuggle-clutch bunny hug were just beginning to be upgraded from "immoral" to "vulgar," when prudish ears pricked up at the sound of a new double-entendre dance ditty – Everybody's Doin' It Now! "Doin' what?" the lyrics asked. "The turkey trot!" Looking back down the years, it's difficult to discover why the energetic one-step caused such an uproar. The reasoning seemed to be that if everybody was doin' it, the turkey trot must be pleasurable, and anything pleasurable that occurred while a man and woman were standing that close together must be immoral. Since it was impossible to eradicate the ragtime trot by ranting, pressure was applied wherever stuffiness had the upper hand. One Broadway producer posted a notice that chorus girls caught dancing the turkey trot would be dismissed, and the Ladies' Home Journal reportedly fired 15 girl employees for doin' it during lunch hour. But daytime dancing was on the rise. Housewives were leaving their homes to attend afternoon "tea dansants" in public ballrooms, and department stores combined fashion shows with "tango teas."

Denounced by the Federation of Women's Clubs in 1914, the "degrading" tango had already seized Europe in its passionate Latin grip. In London, a character played by the glamorous Elinor Glyn took stage center to describe how ladies of quality were "clasped in the arms of incredible scum from the Argentine, half-castes from Mexico, and farceurs from New York, decadent male things they would not receive in their antechambers before this madness set in." In America, a wave of adultery suits and blackmail scandals alerted hard-working hubbies to the fact that many wives were receiving ballroom gigolos in their bedchambers for two-timing tango matinees. Militant noises were made, and most middle-class dance palaces dropped the afternoon dansants in the interest of preserving the American home.

Tea dancing at the better hotels continued as a favorite afternoon diversion of the wealthy smart set, however, and classy cabaret dance teams set the style for both dancing and evening wear. By 1914, the turkey trot had become passé. Couples were dancing Irene and Vernon Castle's "Castle walk," the old maxixe, and three variations of the tango. Fleeting favorites were the aeroplane waltz, the Negro drag and walkin' the dog. In 1916, bands added guitars and ukuleles to lend aloha atmosphere to a string of Hawaiian-type novelties with titles like Yacka Hula Hickey Dula and Yicki Hacki Wicki Wackie Woo. But the term most Americans were just beginning to be conscious of was a new wicki-wackie word spelled "jass," or "jaz." Some said it came from Chicago. Others said it was an old New Orleans Creole word, meaning "to speed up." A strong case was made for the theory that it first came into use in Vicksburg, in 1910, when dancers cheered on Alexander's Ragtime Band with shouts of "Come on, Chazz!" – the "Chazz," or "Chas." being an abbreviation of Alexander's first name, Charles. Still others maintained that its roots lay in the Arabic jazib, "one that allures," the Hindi jazba, meaning "ardent desire," and jaiza, an African tribal term for "the rumble of distant drums."

In spirit, if not in fact, jazz was all these things and more. But speculation as to the origin of its name was cut short by the rumble of distant cannon in Europe. To the accompaniment of stirring song-and-dance hits by Irving Berlin and a versatile hoofer named George M. Cohan, America marched off to war. In servicemen's clubs and cabarets, in New York, London, Paris and Pocatello, doughboys and gobs grabbed partners and danced to Goodbye Broadway, Hello France. Early in 1918, the king of the pre-War ballroom dancers, Vernon Castle, was killed in a military plane crash. Ragtime and the Castle walk were "old hat," and the Armistice was celebrated at Reisenweber's New York cabaret to exciting new sounds played by the Original Dixieland Jass Band. With the new music came new dances. Couples circled the floor with a snappy fox trot, and two girl dancers from Chicago – Gilda Gray and Bee Palmer – introduced the country to a torso-shaking fertility fling, called the "shimmy-shewabble." Believed to have been "invented" in the bawdy bistros of San Francisco's Barbary Coast, the 20th Century version of the old breast-knocking saraband gave rise to more yelps of indignation than the Kaiser's rape of little Belgium.

In the 1919 edition of the Ziegfeld Follies, Bert Williams made a show-stopping plea for the end of Prohibition, when he complained You Can't Make Your Shimmy Shake on Tea. But in clubs and cabarets, the "real stuff" was available to trusted customers, and couples shimmied and fox-trotted on whiskey and gin, as the band blared Ain't We Got Fun? "Oh, boy, I'll say!" was the flapper's giggled rejoinder, as she pressed her body tight against her partner for a session of "button shining" on the crowded floor. Corsets were removed in the ladies' room and checked for the rest of the night. "The men won't dance with you if you wear a corset," the girls explained – and neither were the men inclined to dance with a "back number" who refused to "pet" or take a friendly nip of hooch from a fellow's hip flask. "The low-cut gowns, the rolled hose and short skirts are born of the Devil and his angels, and are carrying the present and future generations to chaos and destruction," the President of the University of Florida exclaimed, pointing an accusing finger at the immoral hussies who were to become today's gray-haired grandmothers.

The American phobia against dancers in short skirts was extended to include even the classical ballet tutu of the world-famous Anna Pavlova, whose tours were threatened with banning unless she "chose to wear longer skirts." Defiance of the law, and a general conventions-be-damned attitude marked the 1922 appearance of Isadora Duncan, America's barefooted mother of the modern dance, who outraged an audience of Boston bluebloods by dancing in a gauzy red scarf, sans undergarments. "Nudity is truth; it is art," Isadora insisted in a later interview, but the scandal all but wrecked her American career.

Since the demise of the vaudeville Salomes, tap and rhythm dancers had moved into theatrical headline spots, and agents classified hoofers according to type – blackface, whiteface, Irish, Dutch, rough, neat, acrobatic and grotesque. The basic steps of the tap dance had been improvised by Southern Negroes from white jigs and clogs, and the names of the jazzed jig steps had a distinctly down-home flavor: buck, wing, flea hop, falling off the log, hitch kick, rubber legs, and the old soft shoe. Double soles duplicated the slapstick sound of a poor plantation worker's dance in shoes with loose soles, and the sand dance was born of some long-forgotten shuffle on a gritty cabin floor.

The rhythmic impact of jazz-dancing Negro performers in Shuffle Along jogged the Broadway musical stage out of its time-stepping rut, and the Harlem version of a knock-kneed, heel-kicking dance from South Carolina created a new dance craze in the mid-Twenties – the charleston. Strictly for the young and limber, the fast-stepping charleston came in for its share of condemnation, though perceptive prudes were willing to grant that its breakaway buoyancy had greatly reduced "button shining," and was apt to leave both sheik and sheba more pooped than passionate. Considered more objectionable was the fanny-slapping black bottom, a copyrighted creation presented as "the new twister" in 1926. In reply to criticism of its anatomically descriptive title, apologists for the dance explained that the name referred to the muddy bottom of the Suwannee River, rather than dark-skinned rumps. No one accepted the fanciful etymology for a moment, however, and in England it was called "the black base" – or, with more dubious decorum, "the black bed."

Impressed by the commercial possibilities of creating a copyrighted dance craze, showmen and performers conspired to invent a new line of novelty dances, such as the sugar foot strut and the new low down. Most were too complicated to catch on, however, and only the varsity drag enjoyed a short semester of favor. When young Charles Augustus Lindbergh made his historic solo hop to Paris in 1927, jubilant tin-lizzie pilots and their high-flying flappers fox-trotted to Lucky Lindy. Prosperity made for positive thinking, and sweet "dansapation" was being pushed by such highly arranged bands as those of Vincent Lopez and the hugely popular "Pops" Whiteman. Three years later, in the wake of the Wall Street Crash, tempos slowed, skirts and hair styles grew longer, and dancers clung to each other as though for reassurance. For a quick escape from economic anxiety, nothing could beat the supercolossal dance spectacles that Hollywood began dishing up with the advent of sound films in 1929, when Ann Pennington, "The Girl with the Dimpled Knees," was seen top Tiptoe Through the Tulips with a bevy of beauteous chorines in Gold Diggers of Broadway. Under the direction of Busby Berkley, other girls with dimpled knees, cheeks and chins moved in eye-filling masses to form human fountains. Girls danced out of clouds in windblown gauze. Girls kicked and tapped and imitated trains. Whole battalions of girls lay on their backs and were photographed from above, as their arms and legs formed floral patterns that changed into wheels and stars.

No less numbing to the senses were the awesome precision drills of the 32 girl Rockettes at the Radio City Music Hall. In 1934, New York spectator shorts who could afford a movie date took their girls to the Music Hall to enjoy the top-hat sophistication of a new Hollywood dance team – Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. While the professional intricacies of the continental and the carioca were not easily mastered, house-party imitations of the Astaire-Rogers technique were good for laughs, and the musical suggestion of faraway places helped to popularize Latin-type tempos and dances. Though the rhumba had already arrived with New York's international set, and The Peanut Vendor had been a hit in 1931, most Americans approached the seductive Cuban dance as though it were a coochy fox trot, and party wags retitled the tune "The Penis Bender."

More to the mass taste was the familiar fox-trot beat of commercial dance bands led by such big-time radio "maestros" as Ben Bernie and Rudy Vallee. Large public ballrooms competed for Depression dollars with big-name bands, while many smaller operators switched to a dime-a-dance policy. Couples were welcome, but the appeal was largely to footloose males who could hire a "glamorous hostess" for a turn around the floor, just as they might hire a cab for a spin around the block – for which reason the girls were called "taxi-dancers." The dreariest ballroom device, by far, was the dance marathon – an endurance contest in which competing couples danced, walked and stumbled around a dance floor for weeks and months on end. Most marathons were rigged, and all traded on a brand of lowgrade show-business hoke that brought audiences back night after night to root for "the brave little kiddies."

Among the major box-office attractions of 1933 was the Streets of Paris side show at the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition, where a dancer named Sally Rand was offering glimpses of her pinktoned torso through the artful manipulation of a pair of fluffy plumes. The sensational success of Miss Rand's breezy fan dance touched off an imitative flesh-and-feathers fad among girl performers in the new post-Repeal night clubs, and the resourceful Sally switched to a copyrighted bubble dance for an engagement at Broadway's Paradise Restaurant, where she performed behind a transparent screen to protect her bubbles from the pinpricks of practical jokers at ringside.Less cautious artists continued to shake their fans in the smaller clubs clustered along New York's 52nd Street, where they were eventually displaced by groups of fully clothed male musicians who played a new style of jazz, called "swing."

Swing, like all earlier jazz, was music for dancing. Let's Dance was the theme of the Benny Goodman band, and in the vanguard of the new movement were such robust ballroom veterans as Louis Armstrong, Louis Prima, Fats Waller, Red Norvo, Wingy Manone and Red McKenzie. Slicker and less exciting, perhaps, were the carefully contrived arrangements of Glen Gray, Hal Kemp, Kay Kayser and the Dorseys. Slick or "hep," the swingy style inspired dancers to cut loose from gliding fox-trot forms, such as the westchester and the peabody. Couples "jumped for happy" in a face-to-face kind of jig, called the "lindy hop." Crepe-soled saddle shoes gave added bounce and served as shock absorbers for the jazzy jumpers, who soon earned the name of "jitterbugs." Breakaways and fancy swing-outs widened the gap between partners. To the original face-to-face "shag" motif were added the sideways-shuffling "Suzy-Q," and a tricky little step with one wagging finger raised, called "truckin'." Considered new and novel, the strange jitterbug japes elicited expressions of despair from post-Depression worry warts, though every movement the "hepcats" made could be found in the aforementioned Natya Sastra. What was "peckin'," for instance, but the old Prakampita, in which the neck moved backward and forward like a she pigeon's. "Usage: To denote 'You and I,' folk dancing, swinging, inarticulate murmurings and the sound uttered by a woman at the time of conjugal embrace."

Jitterbugs were not apt to spend their time browsing through the Natya Sastra, however. They swung like "gates," and, as everyone knew, "gate" was also the nickname for "alligator." "Greetings, 'gate!" "See you later, alligator!" were the hepcat's "hello" and "goodbye," and anyone who wasn't "hep to the jive," and preferred sweet music, was a sticky "ickey." America was "hoof-nutty," Variety declared, and cited the fad for a new dance originated by the Gullah Negroes of the Carolina coast, which required "a lot of floating power and fannying." Called the "big apple," the short-lived swing dance inspired the creation of the little pear and the little peach – novelties that proved even more ephemeral than the English "lambeth walk."

In 1938, hepcats danced to the humorous sound of The Flat Foot Floogie, "with a floy-floy," but they no longer jived with the same intensity. Couples cooled their socks by hanging around the bandstand, listening to musicians improvise, and many went dancing mainly to enjoy the impromptu jam sessions, which Benny Goodman built into a nightly feature with his trio and quartet. While watching Gene Krupa and Lionel Hampton work, dancers were too enthralled to move, and welcomed the chance to sit down and listen when the Goodman band made its 1938 concert appearance at Carnegie Hall. As the Thirties rode to a close, good swing was ear music, and no one over 15 would admit to being a jitterbug. Glenn Miller could still put a party in the mood for dancing with Tuxedo Junction, but serious students of jazz spent their time listening to old Bix Beiderbecke records.

A 1940 fox trot, called Six Lessons from Madame La Zonga, extolled the hip-and-knee freedom of the rhumba and the conga – the latter an Afro-Cuban chain dance, in which dancers lined up in single file with their hands on the shoulders of the person in front, and snaked around the room with a "One, two, three, kick!" The conga, while generally popular, was biggest with the café-society set who doted on the Latin exotica of bands like Xavier Cugat's. But when the smart New York clubs shut down for the night, the conga was forgotten. Slumming sophisticates took cabs to Harlem hot spots, where the after-hours floor show would feature a line of nude chorines, and nude girl soloists who would jive up to your table and simulate coitus with a lit-cigar phallus and an empty highball glass turned on its side.

For flesh fanciers who couldn't afford to stay up all night, the Thirties had offered "continuous burlesk," with such dancing strip stars as Gypsy Rose Lee, Ann Corio and Margie Hart. Queen of the nonstop grinds was jiggle-bottomed Georgia Sothern, while the ancient breast dance was the muscular specialty of king-sized Carrie Finnell, who could make her bounteous bosoms rotate clockwise and counterclockwise, one at a time or in titillating tandem. In New York, big-time "burleycue" was reformed clean out of the theaters in the late Thirties, and "exotic" dancers were given early World War II asylum in the less successful swing clubs of 52nd Street, where they strutted and stripped for the soldier-and-sailor trade.

During the war years, the fox trot, the lindy, the rhumba and waltz served all ranks and serial numbers with an excuse to hold a girl in their arms. Stepwise, all was status quo, save for an occasional outburst of the Pennsylvania or Beer Barrel Polka, and the discovery of the American square dance by Eastern GIs stationed in the West. Elements of the square dance were corralled by Agnes De Mille in her cowboy ballet, Rodeo – a rousing 1942 success, which earned her the choreographic assignment to the Broadway musical Oklahoma! Similarly, the big-city jazz style of Jerome Robbins' ballet Fancy Free was apparent in his choreography for the 1944 musical hit, One the Town. Equally urban and unique was the characterization Gene Kelly tapped out in the title role of Pal Joey, and wartime moviegoers applauded his Hollywood dancing debut with Judy Garland. Teamed with tapmaster Fred Astaire, the glamorous Rita Hayworth drew wolf whistles from armed-forces audiences, as did the lithesome legwork of blonde Betty Grable, whose photos in GI foot lockers qualified her for the role of America's favorite pin-up girl.

Victory in Europe and Japan did nothing to diminish the American interest in pretty dancing girls, but the post-War period was far from hoof-nutty. Among avant-garde musicians, the wartime beat of boogie-woogie was replaced by the improvised non sequiturs of bebop – an introspective kind of jumpless jazz that left dancers flat-footed. The new hepcats, now called "hipsters," didn't dance. They dug the sounds, and cooled it with an occasional shrug or finger snap. The physical and emotional responses that dancing required were "neo-ickey," or "square" – as were the "nowhere" audiences who were picking up on the classical ballet kick, and the aging jitterbugs of yesteryear who sat at home with their new TV sets.

Ballrooms, bands and night clubs went into a state of economic collapse. In New York, a growing Puerto Rican population supported a small number of ballrooms specializing in the Brazilian samba, the Cuban mambo and the Dominican merengue – dances which North American dance instructors adapted for mass consumption. But most of the country had kissed off Latin tempos with South America, Take It Away, and mainland club owners of the early Fifties couldn't even count on the cultish devotion of the few to keep a small rhumba combo working. The new no-dance jazz thrived modestly on recordings issued by small record companies, while big record companies cut their dance-disc output to a minimum, and plugged for million-copy sales with recordings by name vocalists. By 1953, the disastrous unemployment situation among dance-band musicians led Down Beat to launch a campaign to promote dancing on the college and high school levels. Kids don't know how to dance, a headline quoted bandleader Stan Kenton as saying. "Every place we played during the past year, I noticed that the younger couples, for the most part, didn't seem to know what they were doing on the floor – particularly when we played numbers with any real beat, rhythm things that really jumped." In ensuing weeks and months, all sorts of remedies were suggested, but the ultimate cure lay in the bottom category of Down Beat's biweekly breakdown of current record releases: "Rhythm and Blues."

In 1953, the rhythm-and-blues classification served to segregate the solid, rolling beat of Negro popular music from the integrated upper echelons of "jazz," and the white-angled arrangements of the commercially "popular." Its artists were mostly unknown, and titles like Brown Skin Butterball, Poon Tang and Rock, Rock, Rock were played by small-station disc jockeys who aimed at the Negro market. When it became apparent that teenagers of all races were tuning in on the rowdy record shows, white d.j.s began spinning the same 45s. The rhythms were so compelling that dancers couldn't help rocking, and when the racial distinctions of rhythm-and-blues broke down, the rolling two-beat tempo and all its lindybased dance variations were lumped together as "rock 'n' roll."

Parents, teachers, religious leaders and trained musicians set up a loud wail over the new "barbarism," but, from an historical point of view, rock 'n' roll represented a healthy revitalization of the age-old urge to dance. By late 1956, record companies were working three shifts to satisfy the multimillion-dollar demand for rock-'n'-roll records, dancing schools reported an upsurge in business, and rug manufacturers noted a trend to area rugs that could be rolled up for dancing. A quickie, low-budget film, called Rock Around the Clock, rang up a three-million-dollar profit, and when New York's Paramount Theater combined the premiere of Don't Knock the Rock with a rock-'n'-roll stage show, teenage fans began lining up at the box office at four A.M. The riotous behaviour of fans in Boston and other cities made rock 'n' roll synonymous with juvenile delinquency, but the new American tempo struck a responsive chord with rhythm-hungry young people the world over. Within a year, England, France, Germany and Japan began to develop their own rock-'n'-roll music, and Russian youths were beating it out high, wide and Amerikanski to black-market recordings of Hound Dog cut on old X-ray plates.

In 1959, Soviet authorities were still denouncing the Russian rock 'n' rollers as "lizards," "toadstools" and dupes of the American Central Intelligence Agency, when Premier Khrushchev startled the Western world with a front-page rebuke of Hollywood for inviting him to witness the filming of a modestly dressed version of the cancan. According to dancing star Shirley MacLaine, however, Khrushchev really enjoyed watching the old French dance, but hadn't dared to admit it because Mrs. K. was present and frowning. "He may bang his UN desk with his shoe," Miss MacLaine mused, "but, just like any other husband, he chickens out when his wife catches him getting too bright-eyed – girlwise."

In shopping around for old dances to censure, the Khrushchevs, or any other visitors to America, could have taken their pick of just about every sex-inspired dance the world has ever produced. With a little briefing on symbolic gestures, Americans and their guests could sit in a state of perpetual shock at ethnic dance recitals featuring obscure fertility motifs from Europe, India, Africa, Polynesia and the East and West Indies. Night clubs and hotel rooms offered opportunities to become outraged over the Hawaiian hula. The ancient North African belly dance invited outbursts of indignation several times nightly in the restaurants of Manhattan's "Greek town." A visit to any ballroom was almost certain to be rewarded with at least two suggestive demonstrations of the latest Latin American variations on the old Hispano-Indian saraband, the pachanga and the cha-cha – the first a courtship caper in which the gentleman gallops off on a make-believe pony and the second a funsy offshoot of the fertility-charged mambo. On the stage and in motion pictures, ballerinas in brief tutus performed dance dramas that had their origins in the kissing, teasing boy-girl balleti of the 15th Century. And, if this weren't enough, there was still the whole barefooted, Freudian field of the modern art dance that had sprung up since Isadora Duncan's early experiments with neo-Grecian scarves.

The fact that all such dance forms were no longer shocking to Americans may be attributed to the speed with which dances tend to become assimilated into the culture. Persons who were pained by the primitivism of rock 'n' roll one year were, 12 months later, anxiously phoning ticket brokers in the hope of procuring a couple of seats to Broadway's rock-'n'-roll version of the Romeo and Juliet romance: West Side Story. A couple of years later, in October 1961, many of the same cultured crowd could be found standing in line outside a noisy little rock-'n'-roll rendezvous on New York's West 45th Street, impatiently waiting for a chance to get inside and dance a new shimmy-shewabbling hootchy-kootchy, called the "twist."

With the twist, the history of dancing breaks into the bold, black print of recent headlines: Gay Night Club Dervishes Twist ... Café Society Voyages West Of Fifth Avenue To Pursue Fad – Peppermint Lounge Provides Required Rock 'N' Roll ... Governor Twists To Keep Fit ... New Jersey Teenager Twists 18 Hours ... Sophia'S Twist Gave Studio Gang A Turn ... The Twist Takes Washington ... Jackie Twists ... Meg Gives Twist Royal Treatment At Palace Ball ... In Paris It'S "Le Tweest" ... Warsaw Wiggles ... Twisters Give Tokyo New Tremors. As the flashbulbs popped and reporters scurried to scoop the names of notables seen twisting at the Peppermint Lounge, the history of the twist was already being snowed under by a blizzard of publicity releases. Among the more or less verifiable data was the fact that a rock-'n'-roll singer named Hank Ballard had recorded a song called The Twist five years before, and that a young singer from Philadelphia, who worked under the nom de disc of Chubby Checker, had been plugging the song and dance around the country. Amidst all the fanny-shaking rumpus, other old-time Philadelphians of 18 and 19 recalled doing the twist in their youth, when it was a purely local phenomenon known as the madison.

The facts, shaky as they were, ended there. But in the fall of 1961, the twist was making history by the minute. Never since the beginning of time had a dance craze spread so rapidly and through so many levels of society. At the Peppermint Lounge and the Wagon Wheel, kids in jeans and toreador pants were given the hip by VIP posteriors and socially prominent derrieres. Class distinctions and cultural barriers were twisted down overnight, and a group of leading psychiatrists assured The New York Times that the elbow rubbing between masses and classes bottomed out with a great big plus, mental-healthwise.

Within a very few weeks, the twist was indistinguishable from the ultrasocial whirl. At the charitable April in Paris Ball (held in October in New York), dancers dined and twisted at a nifty $150 a head. In the first week of November, another white-tie twist party was thrown for the benefit of homeless girls, and two weeks later, "silk-clad bodies and diamonds shimmered to the music of the twist" at a benefit bash held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In granting permission for the fete, the museum's director, James J. Rorimer, had evidently anticipated the usual fox trots, waltzes and rhumbas. When he arrived to find "the guests doing the twist in the shrine of Rembrandt and Cezanne," Mr. Rorimer objected. "I did not invite them," he shouted. "I was not aware of this!" But if the Rembrandts, Cezannes, Breughels and Egyptian mummies could have stepped down out of their frames and cases, it most certainly would not have been to rout the revelers from the museum's hallowed halls, but to join in the fun.

As it was in the Old Kingdom of the Nile, so it was in the capital of the New Frontier on the Potomac. Top-level twist parties were tossed by European ministers, ambassadors from the Near East and members of the President's Cabinet. It was diplomatically danced by officials of the State Department, visiting dignitaries, Congressional whips and bigbrass strategists from the Pentagon. When, on a memorable evening in February 1962, the First Lady twisted with the Secretary of Defense beneath the historic old crystal chandeliers of the White House Blue Room, the dance became as much a part of our national heritage as Hail, Columbia and Paul Revere's ride.

While President Kennedy has never been known to do the twist, the family's favorite bandleader, Lester Lanin, has been quoted as saying, "He likes good, spirited, cheerful dance music ... He doesn't dance often and he doesn't hold them close. He talks when he dances, and he only dances a couple of minutes, then he takes another partner later." To date, the President has yet to come out with any clear-cut policy statement on dancing. But his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, chose the occasion of the Eisenhower Library dedication in Abilene, Kansas, to make his own views known. "We venerate the pioneers who fought droughts and floods, isolation and Indians, to come to Kansas and westward to settle into their homes, to till the soil and raise their families," Mr. Eisenhower stated, by way of preface. "We think of their sturdiness, their selfreliance, their faith in God, we think of their glorious pride in America. Now, I wonder if some of those people could come back today and see us doing the twist instead of the minuet – whether they would be particularly struck by the beauty of that dance?"

Coming when it did, in the twist-mad spring of 1962, the Eisenhower statement gave many thoughtful citizens pause. Certainly, the opinion of any group of people who had fought so hard and endured so much in order to live in Kansas would be worthy of our deepest respect – even awe. But, unless the history of American dancing is in error, it would seem extremely doubtful that many of the muddy-booted forty-niners who first settled the Cornflower State had ever seen a minuet – much less danced one. Though lively reels and jigs were esteemed for their gaiety, the dainty steps of 18th Century Versailles would have been as out of place at a frontier dance as French perfume in a crock of "corn likker." The vigorous, nononsense twist, on the other hand, could have been adapted to life on the western prairies as easily as it has been adapted to life in Samoa and Japan. Besides hoeing down such familiar forms as the fly, the mashed potato and the slop, our funloving forefathers might have come up with an "Arkansas twist," "ladies' choice – twist or swing," the "twist quadrille" – or, perhaps, a variation we loose-living moderns have never even thought of: the "kiss twist."

No possibility, past or present, seems too farfetched in the light of a Time magazine report that German twisters had made a hit of a classically based Liebestraum von Liszt Twist, and that African and West Indian students were teaching the customers of West Berlin's Eden Saloon "a ritualistic 'voodoo twist.'" The Latin American influence was evident in the pachanga twist and the cha-cha twist, and a Spanish dance troupe worked out a flamenco twist, which put the heel-toe-rapping routine back in the old Canary Islands fertility groove where the Spanish conquistadors had originally found it in the 16th Century. For historical perspective, few observations were more to the point than those of the rebellious young Russian poet, Evgeny Evtushenko. "The twist is advertised as a miracle of the atomic era," he said in a Moscow interview. "But I remembered Ghana jungles two years ago where I watched African tribal dances. Those dances have existed thousands of years. They were ritual dances that had not yet been called the twist. This miracle of the atomic era is merely a modernized version of what was invented thousands of years ago."

Evtushenko's comments were made in the face of official Soviet attacks upon the twist and rock 'n' roll as "typical products of capitalist society." "I do not understand how dances can be divided into capitalist and socialist," the poet argued, and suggested that it was perfectly possible for the proletariat to perform the twist "in a pleasing manner." Whether his reasoning had any direct effect on Soviet thinking, it's impossible to say. Four days later, however, Premier Khrushchev put in an appearance at Moscow's Central Sports Arena to hear the touring Benny Goodman band play a concert of American swing. "I enjoyed it," he remarked with surprising mildness. "I don't dance myself, so I don't understand these things too well."

In view of Khrushchev's apparent tolerance toward Western dance music of the Thirties, admirers of the Russian dance might find some reason to hope that Moscow will one day be as receptive toward new dances as it has been zealous in preserving the traditional Russian folk and ballet forms. But, if the past be any guide, conservatives of all nations will continue to greet the new and novel with cries of outrage and alarm. What will the next shocker be like, we wonder? Will some venturesome devotee of Terpsichore discover that the twist can be danced by couples locked in a close embrace? Can we look for a revival of "smouching," hugging and under-the-girdle lady lifting? Or will American dancing go cool and neoclassical with organization-man minuets?

At the moment, all is terpsi-turvy, and the crystal ball is beclouded by international exchange. While malt-shop maidens and jukebox bucks continue to whip up new youth movements with a jungle twist, African diplomats from the newly independent nations have been introducing the attaché-case cadre to the genteel understatement of the high life – a slow and easy souvenir from old colonial days on the Gold Coast. The big beat, however, is bossa nova, a breezy Brazilian device for bringing the girl back into her partner's arms. Translated roughly as "the new bag," or "the new wrinkle," bossa nova is but a jazz switch on the old samba, and hence no more than a pleasant means of marking time until the next frenzied breakout of physical basics.

In his imaginative projection of the Brave New World of the future, Aldous Huxley once described the dance of tomorrow as a kind of carnal conga performed in the buff – the "orgy-porgy." "Round they went, a circular procession of dancers, each with hands on the hips of the dancer preceding, round and round, shouting in unison, stamping to the rhythm of the music with their feet; beating it, beating it out with hands on the buttocks in front; 12 pairs of hands beating as one; as one, 12 buttocks slabbily resounding ...

"Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun,Kiss the girls and make them One.Boys at one with girls at peace;Orgy-porgy gives release."

Huxley could have been wrong, of course, but the history of dancing indicates that his prophecy may yet come true. In which case, no one who has done his homework on the subject should be the least bit surprised. But if we, the sturdy, self-reliant pioneers of the early Space Age, were to come back and see our descendants doing the orgy-porgy instead of the twist – would we be particularly struck with the beauty of that dance? Would we join our Puritan ancestors in setting up a ghostly howl against "ye madd Bacchanalians"? Or would we accept the orgy-porgy in the spirit of the Cobéua Indians of Brazil, and help "carry the fertility into every corner of the houses, to the edge of the wood, to the nearby fields" with cheerful grunts of "ai (ye) – ai (ye) – ai (ye)!"