Worlds of social dancing

Dance floor encounters and the global rise of couple dancing, c. 1910–40

James Nott, Klaus Nathaus, Jeffrey Richards

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781526156242
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

By the 1920s, much of the world was 'dance mad, ' as dancers from Buenos Aires to Tokyo, from Manchester to Johannesburg and from Chelyabinsk to Auckland, engaged in the Charleston, the foxtrot and a whole host of other fashionable dances. Worlds of social dancing examines how these dance cultures spread around the globe at this time and how they were altered to suit local tastes. As it looks at dance as a 'social world', the book explores the social and personal relationships established in encounters on dance floors on all continents. It also acknowledges the impact of radio and (sound) film as well as the contribution of dance teachers, musicians and other entertainment professionals to the making of the new dance culture.

1

Tango dancing in Buenos Aires: women, style and intimacy, 1920–40

Cecilia Tossounian

In 1925, a man called Romualdo wrote a letter to the advice column of the national mass-market women’s magazine Para Ti (For You) asking for counsel. He was concerned about the fact that his girlfriend regularly patronised ‘every dance she possibly could’ but didn’t allow him to kiss her. Romualdo complains about this ‘absurd’ behaviour, stating that he has a hard time understanding how a ‘a girl that dances Shimmys, tangos and other dances’ refuses to be kissed by her boyfriend. Leda, the columnist, concurs with Romualdo that hers is a bizarre choice, even more so as dances have changed in the last twenty years, and now young women let strangers tightly embrace them while dancing.¹ What the male reader and the magazine counsellor define as ‘absurd’ conduct can also be understood as an expression of a radical set of changes in young women’s behaviour. Not only did the girlfriend in question patronise dance halls without her boyfriend, and did so frequently, but also she did not conclude that dancing the tango and shimmy should oblige her to be intimate with her boyfriend. A series of common assumptions about gender roles was called into question through this ‘absurd’ behaviour, and much of it had to do with dance halls, tango and gender relationships.

This chapter explores dance hall culture in Buenos Aires during the 1920s and 1930s, paying special attention to the cultural depictions and lived experiences of young women who patronised them. In particular, it explores the rise of the dance hall and its impact on young women’s leisure time. There are a number of key focuses for this chapter. Which styles did young women choose to adopt when patronising the diverse dance halls of the city? How did they negotiate their relationships with men? How did their contemporaries make sense of changes in leisure, dance and social relations forged in these commercial amusements? To achieve this, it analyses the public elaboration of the dance hall world in popular media. The historiography on Argentine women in the 1920s and 1930s has explored women’s significant involvement in the public sphere. It has focused, particularly, on the feminist movement and on female political engagement, education and labour market participation from a social perspective.² The present article engages with this scholarship and argues that popular culture, and principally beauty, fashion, intimacy and courtship, were relevant practices in the real lives of young women as well as crucial discourses in the shaping of their identities.³

The dance hall culture is better understood not only if situated in the broader social and cultural context of Buenos Aires, but also by taking into account its internal dynamics and particularities. The dance hall spread during a period of intense urbanisation and shifting gender roles. Within a few decades, largely as a result of external migration, Buenos Aires transformed from a small town to one of the largest cities of South America. With 2.3 million inhabitants by the 1930s, porteños – as the inhabitants of Buenos Aires are known – were experiencing rapid social change.⁴ While upon their arrival the two largest groups of immigrants, Italians and Spaniards, retained strong ethnic identities, this did not preclude a relatively rapid process of national integration. By 1930s, owing to significant social mobility, a vast part of the immigrant population was already Argentinised.⁵ Many of the young women who are the protagonists of this chapter were the Argentine daughters of these European immigrants, who were adjusting themselves to the city’s social fluctuations. Their everyday lives were considerably altered, as they became increasingly visible in urban spaces of work and leisure. Developments in women’s employment and education allowed many of them to attend school, learn teaching and business skills and enter the labour market, especially in the tertiary sector.⁶ Equally important was the new sense of freedom and autonomy that many of these young women experienced through commercial entertainment. They attended outings and cinemas, interacted with men without the control of their parents and experimented with different styles and looks when out and about. In this context, issues of female morality, style and social class become crucial for understanding these young women’s participation in porteño urban life.⁷

At the same time, commercial leisure offered several venues and activities, each with their own particular characteristics. Dance halls were one among the many commercial offerings that young men and women could attend in Buenos Aires in the 1920s and 1930s. For a few pesos, porteño people could also admire internationally acclaimed performers such as La Mistinguet, Maurice Chevalier or Josephine Baker at the famous El Casino music hall, stroll through El Parque Japonés amusement park or frequent one of the many cinemas the city hosted.⁸ As Carolina González Velasco has shown, the core of porteño commercial leisure was Corrientes Street, where the majority of theatres, coffee houses, restaurants and cabarets were located, with the different barrios (neighbourhoods) supplementing local entertainment through their social and sport clubs and mutual aid societies. Porteños’ enthusiasm for leisure and fun can be gauged in numbers: in 1922, in a city of almost two million inhabitants, there were twenty-six million attendances at the diverse programmes offered by commercial entertainment.⁹

This chapter examines how dance halls in particular challenged and redefined young women’s leisure time. In order to do this, the first section examines the development of milongas, academias and cabarets, and studies the diverse patrons that attended them, the social values these places endorsed and the dances that were in vogue during this period in Buenos Aires. The second section explores female representations and young women’s participation in dance hall culture. It examines two female figures that condensed the moral panic generated by the dance hall and explores ‘real’ young women’s visual styles and the relationships they forged with men when frequenting diverse dance venues. The chapter analyses representations of gender and dance hall culture in the yellow press and in general interest and women’s magazines and explores how young women experienced them through opinion pieces, advice columns and letters to the editor.

The dance hall as a novel social space

Dancing was one of the most popular amusements offered to young women and men. As in other big cities throughout the world at this time, young porteños were eager to dance. While patios and living rooms continued to host dances well into the 1940s, these traditional venues were no longer the most popular places for youth to dance.¹⁰ Balls in public places and dance halls progressively outnumbered these private sites. Balls hosted in social clubs located in the diverse barrios of the city became very popular during the 1920s and 1930s. Founded around 1880 as mutual benefit societies and ethnic associations, the Centro Asturiano and the Centro Catalán, Unión y Benevolenza as well as the Club Social Balvanera and the Defensores de Villa Crespo, to name just a few, let their saloons to dance promoters or organised their own balls, usually in order to raise funds or as part of their cultural activities.¹¹ The popularity of these balls, commonly called milongas, increased as the tango developed into a ‘respectable’ dance. The number of balls organised by porteño social, ethnic and sport clubs during these years is difficult to gauge because of a lack of records. However, some scholars have established that popular dances held in the most important neighbourhood clubs – such as Boca, River, San Lorenzo, Atlanta, Huracán and Vélez Sarsfield – could host several thousand people, especially at the end of the 1930s.¹² In Villa Devoto, a peripheral barrio of the city which by 1936 had 146,717 inhabitants, there were at least twenty sport clubs, ten neighbourhood clubs and six ethnic associations. During Carnival, these clubs organised, among other activities, several dances per night that lasted the four days of the celebration. On these days, neighbourhood social clubs’ balls became more crowded.¹³ The myriad of ethnic societies that populated Buenos Aires also offered their own balls and parties. In her book about the Jewish community in Argentina, Adriana Brodsky has pointed out that the Jewish associations were among the most active ones in organising social events, hosting several parties and dances per weekend, with the aim of making the young get together and raise money for the community.¹⁴

As dance was becoming a highly popular commercial entertainment, entrepreneurs tried to meet this increasing demand, creating new dance halls, dance palaces, cabarets and dance academies, which complemented the existing neighbourhood halls and social club dances.¹⁵ Some contemporaries seized the commercial opportunities that dance halls offered and opened new venues, often under the guise of philanthropic societies and bogus social clubs in order to circumvent licensing restrictions and official controls. Anyone willing to pay admission could frequent these neighbourhood dance halls.¹⁶ However, commercial entertainment tended to be in the hands of a few powerful European entrepreneurs, who profited from their transatlantic connections to lead the market.¹⁷ Among them was Charles Seguin, an enigmatic French entrepreneur who arrived in Buenos Aires in 1895, at the age of eighteen. He was at the centre of a huge business operation, which included the ownership and administration of the most impo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• General editor’s foreword
• Introduction: Dance floor encounters and the global rise of couple dancing: an introduction to the worlds of social dancing
• 1 Tango dancing in Buenos Aires: women, style and intimacy, 1920–40
• 2 Building ‘Dreamland’: dancers, musicians, and the transformation of social dancing into mass culture in the USA, c. 1900–41
• 3 ‘We do not want “fairies” in the ballroom’: working-class men, dancing and the renegotiation of masculinity in interwar Britain
• 4 Similar steps, different venues: the making of segregated dancing worlds in South Africa, 1910–39
• 5 ‘European dances’ in colonial Kikuyuland: modernities, ethnicity, and politics, 1926–47
• 6 Domesticating the social dance: the case of New Zealand between the two World Wars
• 7 Demarcating status: tango music and dance in Japan, 1913–40
• 8 The rise of Chinese taxi-dancers: glamorous careers, romantic fantasies, and sexual dreams on the dance floors of Shanghai, 1919–37
• 9 Dancing through dictatorship: everyday practices and affective experiences of social dancing in Fascist Italy
• 10 Co-ordinating for love: establishing conventions of romantic couple dancing in interwar Germany
• 11 Between control, education, and free communication: social dancing in the USSR from the 1920s to the early 1960s
• Index