For a possible project, I have been going over a number of pro- and anti-social dance manuals from the 1910s and early '20s, and they are such a hoot. This is from The Modern Dance and What Shall Take Its Place, 1921—I cannot for the life of me figure out how this couple is built, unless she is dangling upside-down from the ceiling and he’s a giraffe:
Her breast rests upon his shoulder, her face is upturned to his, her naked arm is almost around his neck: her breast heaves tumultuously against his: face to face they they whirl . . .
And this, from The Modern Dance, 1916, purports to show the evil of those scandalous parties the young folks indulge in. Does this sound like the best party ever?
Myriads of roysterers, in fantastic and strange garb, in outre costumes and next to nothing costumes, dancing the turkey trot in the sands and in the water . . . There were slim painted girls in the diaphenous gaubes of Pierettes, butterflies, fairies and snow queens, their thin silks hanging wetly to their supple limbs, their white arms twined round the necks of chosen youths garbed as devils, cavaliers, clowns, Arabs and mountebanks and what not. All were madly dancing in the foam of the incoming surf. And the booming surf mingled with the shrill, ecstatic and abandoned cries of the dancers, creating a sound that the sun had never heard before. Far out into the water some were dancing. They moved to the lay of a wild violinist, who garbed as a satyr, stood neck deep in the water and holding his instrument safely above the waves played amorous tango music for those who danced about him. Occasionally a girl, exhausted by her dance, would sink into the water in her silks and paint and be lifted forth by her partner and carried to the beach. There on the sands were hundreds of less hardy folk who had not braved the water. These danced the tango and the castle walk back and forth over the seaweed and the conch shells, their costumes flying in the morning wind, their voices lifted in careless joy of life.
