Dance and Dancers in the Victorian and Edwardian Music Hall Ballet

Alexandra Carter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351163620
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

First published in 2005. The Victorian and Edwardian music hall ballet has been a neglected facet of dance historiography, falling prey principally to the misguided assumption that any ballet not performed at the Opera House or 'legitimate' theatre necessarily meant it was of low cultural and artistic merit. Here Alexandra Carter identifies the traditional marginalization of the working class female participants in ballet historiography, and moves on to reinstate the 'lost' period of the music hall ballet and to apply a critical account of that period. Carter examines the working conditions of the dancers, the identities and professional lives of the ballet girls and the ways in which the ballet of the music hall embodied the sexual psyche of the period, particularly in its representations of the ballet girl and the ballerina. By drawing on newspapers, journals, theatre programmes, contemporary fiction, poetry and autobiography, Carter firmly locates the period in its social, economic and artistic context. The book culminates in the argument that there are direct links between the music hall ballet and what has been termed the 'birth' of British ballet in the 1930s; a link so long ignored by dance historians. This work will appeal not only to those interested in nineteenth century studies, but also to those working in the fields of dance studies, gender studies, cultural studies and the performing arts.

Chapter One
In Fit and Seemly Luxury: Ballet at the Alhambra and the Empire

The term 'music hall' is a generic one used to describe both the venues and the type of programme presented therein. This programme can be characterised as that which, in social class terms, grew from 'the bottom up'; that which, over the history of the halls from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth, embraced diverse, unrelated acts such as song, dance, comedy sketches, music, acrobatics, animal acts and, in the larger venues, more spectacular treats such as trapeze and tableaux vivants. These were all linked by a master of ceremonies who managed the order of the acts as well as inciting, and keeping in check, the audience. The acts embraced almost anything, in fact, that was not legitimate theatre, though performers did cross from one to the other.¹ Evolving from entertainment by and for the people, its main characteristic, argues Leslie (1978: 14) was 'the interaction between artists and audience which was peculiar to them and their time'. This notion of peculiarity to time and place is key. Though the halls in different cultural locations may have had similar precursors, they catered for the indigenous tastes of their location. To take the French halls as an example, they developed from the boîte, the bal musette and the guingette-similar to the British taverns, dancing saloons and pleasure gardens. Although modelled on the British music hall (the Folies Bergère was based on Leicester Square's Alhambra), there was a more political, satiric edge to their acts. From the 1900s, the French (or rather Parisian) halls focussed on spectacle and revue, thus departing from the traditional programmes by separating the lived experience of the audience from the erotic and exotic fantasies on the stage. American vaudeville (possibly a corruption of voix de ville: 'voices of the town') was similar in its component acts but there were significant differences in the tastes of the public. Two of these key differences were, first, that vaudeville had a cleaner, more respectable flavour compared with the vulgarity of the British halls (even though, being the Victorian era, that vulgarity was disguised in the central performance strategies of its songs, repartee and body language-innuendo and double entendre). Second, the vaudeville acts were more detached from the experiences of the audience; there was not the same sense of complicity, of shared toils and tribulations, of parody of the habits of the middle and upper classes which only the class conscious British could produce. Neither did vaudeville attract the literary and artistic milieu, those who flirted with the sensations of the fin de siècle which the larger halls of Britain and north western Europe presented in abundance.

It would be erroneous to trace a linear development of the halls in any given location, for their development is a web of intersecting and culturally specific influences. If commonalities can be discerned, however, they would cohere around the expansion of entertainment from that offered by the working class to their own class, with a commonality of interest (assumed or otherwise), to an increasingly theatricalised and commercialised profession. Performers were separated from audiences, both in spatial terms and then with stage curtains; attention was paid to costume and lighting and there evolved a professional hierarchy of performers. Most significantly, from free entertainment within a small community, entry charges were introduced and the music hall became big business.

The British music hall

Although the above commonalities can be traced across different national forms of popular entertainment, the concern here is with the distinctly British phenomenon of music hall. Its history is well documented and reveals a diversity of size, programmes, clientele and atmosphere.² A key thread in their history can be traced back to the 1830s and 1840s; to the all-male song and supper rooms and amateur entertainment offered in public houses (or taverns). Enterprising publicans or 'caterers' began to formally manage and present this entertainment, thus distinguishing the start of the halls. Charles Moreton is credited with the opening of the most famous of the early halls which he built in 1852 adjacent to his public house, the Canterbury Arms in London. Moreton not only encouraged the attendance of women, but also funded the entertainment on offer by charging for a refreshment ticket, a system adopted by many of the burgeoning halls in London and in provincial cities. The sale of drink was therefore inextricably connected to the provision of entertainment, a connection which was largely responsible for the disreputable status of the music hall throughout the remainder of its history.³ The halls developed apace, varying in size and atmosphere from the intimate concert rooms in the local tavern to large, purpose built or converted venues. From 1878, however, changes in safety laws for places of public entertainment, such as the statutory requirement for safety curtains and adequate exits, led to a decline in traditional venues and also in the spontaneity and informality nurtured by more basic facilities. A new class of entrepreneur evolved and both producers and performers drew apart from the social class whose experiences they appropriated but no longer shared. As Stuart and Park (1895: 190) observe,

The opening of the new Pavilion in 1884 may be said to have inaugurated a fresh area in music hall history. It marked the final and complete severance of the variety stage from its old associations of the tavern and the concert salon ... hitherto the halls had borne unmistakable evidence of their origin, but the last vestiges of their old connections were now thrown aside, and they emerged in all the splendour of their new born glory.

This seemingly linear development was particular to London, however, for the regional halls did not suffer the constraints of competition and retained their special characteristics far longer.

By 1890 Anstey (p. 190) was able to distinguish four types of London music hall as:

the aristocratic variety theatres of the West End ... the smaller and less aristocratic West End halls ... the larger bourgeois halls of the less fashionable parts of London ... (and) ... the minor music halls of the poor and squalid districts.

By the outbreak of the First World War music hall in its conventional form had declined and by the Second World War even the variety theatres had lost to the competition of cinema and broadcasting.

Throughout the history of the British halls, programmes were diverse but there was an emphasis on song interspersed with dialogue.⁴ Many artists adopted songs which become their trademark and these, together with a distinct use of spoken and body language, comprised the artists' stage identities or 'characters'. Some halls ran two shows a night, others a continuous evening of acts; a programme from the Tivoli in London, 1892, lists twenty eight different 'turns' (Disher 1938: 23). Whilst rooted in the lower strata of a highly inequitable class system, working class music hall was far from radical. The upper classes, or 'toffs' were depicted with fondness rather than resentment. In songs, character roles and in the topical ballets (see Ch. 4) the social classes were juxtaposed but the hierarchy was never questioned.

The rapid expansion of music hall gave rise to opportunities for a large number of amateur performers to achieve fame. A circuit of established artists developed and the new ease and speed of transport enabled the more popular ones to perform at several venues on the same night and also to tour the provinces, thus becoming national stars. Whilst actresses in legitimate theatre were fighting for recognition and status with actors (see, for example, Holledge 1981; Davis 1991) women, from the 1880s, had a well established and frequently starring role in music hall. Performers such as Marie Lloyd, Vesta Tilley, Jennie Hill and Lottie Collins became household names; music hall was a rare outlet for women to make public their creative talents and lead independent lives. Part of their acceptability, however, was their distancing from the audience by costume and stage persona. Stage clothes were exotic or ornate, bearing little resemblance to the working class apparel of the time. Women performers were often girlish or ingénue or, the ultimate in distancing, cross-dressed.

The popularity of the halls is indicated by the words of a song which included the lines:

And I'd bring her to see the music halls
Every Saturday night

Pearsall 1983: 74

Although these lyrics are undated, they signal not only the frequency of attendance but also the fact that audiences were of mixed sex. In the halls of the industrial north of England, women would attend unaccompanied without detriment to their reputation, for it was recognised that the large number of female factory workers were entitled to leisure. In the differently constituted demography of London, however, it was more challenging for a woman to attend a place of entertainment alone without being viewed with suspicion. The high population of prostitutes on public display compounded this suspicion. Although it is impossible to ascertain accurate statistical data for the number of people who attended the halls, the rapid expansion in the number of venues; their increased seating capacity; their significance in popular folklore; the attention given to them in the popular press and contemporary testimony such as the above song, all bear witness to their popularity. Even those who would never have contemplated the idea of setting foot in a hall, such as Rose Macaulay's highly respectable, staid and staunchly middle class fictional Grandpapa, were aware of their product: 'Grandpapa was more stirred ... by the alarming increase of female bicyclists and by the prevalent nuisance of that popular song, 'Ta-ra-ra-boomdeay' (Macaulay [1923] 1986: 111).

The halls undoubtedly reached the peak of their popularity in the final decades of the nineteenth century. In order to see how the spirit of the fin de siècle (a French term, but one which resonates with the spirit of the 1880s and 1890s in Britain), it is to the cultural context of the age that I now turn.

The vibrations of life: the music hall and the fin de siècle

History does not, of course, separate itself into distinct decades; it is historians who achieve this by ascribing common phenomena to a period, albeit rather loosely. (For example, the Swingin' 'Sixties of the twentieth century actually happened in the 1970s.) Nevertheless, the end of the nineteenth century does appear to be a particular kind of age, the specificity of which lies in contrast to the preceding decades. Houghton, in his key text The Victorian frame of mind (1957) frames his investigation within the years 1830-1870, stopping when Queen Victoria herself had thirty more years to reign. His rationale for defining Victorianism thus is that

After 1870, while many of the characteristics persist through the century ... their dominance and their peculiar coherence were breaking down. Victorianism was dying, and a new frame of mind was emerging, a late Victorian frame of mind, which pointed forward to the postwar temper of the 1920's.

1957: xv

It is this late Victorian 'frame of mind' with which we are concerned here. Queen Victoria had reigned since 1837 and although she had become more of a recluse than an active monarch her Golden (1887) and Diamond (1897) Jubilees were celebrated with due recognition for all the 'achievements' of her reign. There was a resurgence of her popularity-a phenomenon also seen with Queen Elizabeth II's Jubilees. Industrial development at home and colonisation abroad had made Britain a tremendously powerful nation, not only in economic and military terms but also through the dissemination of religious tenets and social systems. There was a sense of the old passing and the new beginning or, as Wilson, using the metaphor of advances in the photographic image, looking at the 1880s is 'both like watching the modern world beginning to rouse and like intruding into a world about to evaporate' (2002: 437). As Darwinism had exposed fundamental flaws in traditional notions of man's relationship with God and the research of social reformers such as Rowntree and Booth brought into question man's relationship with man (women were not considered to have had much of a relationship with anyone, except their families), religious, political and social ideologies began to crumble. The Boer War of 1899-1902 dented the nation's confidence and complacency was further disrupted by the psychological significance of the end of a millennium, the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 and the accession at long last of her son Edward VII.

The late Victorian and Edwardian age emerges as a time of tremendous change in beliefs, values and customs. The fact that the heyday of the music hall embraces this period from the 1880s to the outbreak of the First World War is no coincidence. For the working classes, there was an increase in leisure time and disposable income. Many of the aristocracy, freed from the constraints of mid-Victorian court life, made a pastime of pleasure. Those who had become wealthy through trade and commerce comprised a new plutocracy. For a golden sovereign, a man could 'dine well wherever he pleased and after his wine and cigar would still have enough to pass him in to the Empire or the Alhambra, or drive him to his club' (Booth, J.B. 1929: 22). (As discussed in Ch. 2 a 'golden sovereign', or approximately one old British pound sterling, would have been the weekly wage of a ballet girl.)

The relaxation or repressive social customs was manliest in the gay nineties. Life was far from 'gay' for the masses and there was still appalling poverty, but the period did seem to represent a nation letting out its breath, having held it for so long. J. B. Booth, who took an active part in London life, chronicles it with fondness.

The nineteenth century closed in national prosperity and its last decade had been one of fierce interest in literature, in art, in the theatre and in life. Life was extraordinarily vivid, it had a gusto, a savour; there was an intense craving for the new.

1929: 28

Paradoxically, serious theatre and music were at a low ebb, but there was plenty of music, song and drama of a kind being created in the music halls. It was 'the creative vitality of the music hall, in comparison with the legitimate theatre, which was its attraction' (Felsteiner in Green, ed. 1986: 47). Sorell (1981: 302) makes a similar observation:

It was at the Alhambra in London or smaller dance halls in Vienna where ... the intellectual elite could find the fascination and vibrations of life that the commercial theatre did not offer.

It is within this context of moribund traditional art forms that Perugini could make the claim that the ballet in the music halls was 'among the few vital forms of art during the later years of the nineteenth and earlier years of the twentieth century' (1946: 261). Flitch (1912: 91) encapsulates the ambiance of the time and its manifestation in the dance. As the century came to a close,

the older formal and unhasting rhythms tended to break up; the pace quickened; the tranquillity which the nineteenth century had carried over from the eighteenth had disappeared in the excitement of the fin de siècle spirit. Something of the change of the social spirit was reflected in the dance.

Ballet: a disappearing act

Dance, both as part of song or comedy routine and as an act in its own right, was a vital part of music hall programmes. Venues had to apply for a special licence for dancing, whether it was participatory by the public (a tradition from the older dancing saloons) or on stage. These licences might not be renewed if the local authorities were concerned about any perceived indecency in the performance, as was the case with the Empire in the mid-1880s (see Ch. 6). It is not always possible to discern exactly what kinds of dance were presented as artists were often billed, for example, as 'serio-comic and dancer'. Clog or step dancing, which derived from working class family tradition and was performed mainly by men, was o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• General Editor's Series Preface
• Preface
• Prologue
• 1. In Fit and Seemly Luxury: Ballet at the Alhambra and the Empire
• 2. From the Principals to the Passées: Performers in the Music Hall Ballets
• 3. Dancing the Feminine: Gender and Sexuality on Stage
• 4. A Fairyland of Fair Women: Dancing the Narratives of the Age
• 5. Images and Imagination: Poetry, Fiction and the Eye of the Writer
• 6. Prejudicial to Public Morality: The Moral Image of the Dance and Dancer
• 7. Cara's Tale
• Epilogue
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index