Famous Last Words

On the lighter side of dance research...

There's plenty of silliness in historical dance manuals, ranging from mythological origins of dancing in general to apocryphal stories about the origins of particular dances.  But none of that makes me laugh quite so much as a couple of lines in Foulsham's Modern Dancing, by Maxwell Stewart, published in London around 1925 and ambitiously subtitled "A guide to everything the dancer old and young, skilled and unskilled, wants to know."  That was rather optimistic of Stewart; this particular dancer wishes he had included a lot more detail about some of the moves he described.  But the following has got to be one of the most risible lines I've ever found in a dance manual.

Regarding jazz music:

Now, this kind of music does not lend itself to dancing much besides the Fox Trot, the Two Step, etc., and it is, therefore, almost impossible to invent anything new which can be danced to jazz time.

With the advantage of hindsight, one can laugh oneself sick over Foulsham's hilarious failure to anticipate the coming of the Lindy hop and the whole related family of swing dances.  This is particularly ironic in a manual that does note and describe a few steps for the Charleston and has one of the earliest descriptions of the newly-developing Quickstep.

But even without the advantage of hindsight, betting against innovation is a fool's game, as the rapid changes in social dance -- and science, medicine, art, technology, music, etc. -- over the course of the 20th century demonstrate.  Everything changes, and the direction of a particular change can be unimaginable only a few short years before.  Social dance is no different.