Social Dancing

Sunday 7 April 2013 7:45AM (view full episode)

Arthur Marcel teaches at the Queensland University of Technology and he loves dancing. Dancing is part of our human culture and goes back many, many years. Arthur Marcel talks about what dancing was like in the past and he argues that there is a decline in social dancing.

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Robyn Williams: Dancing is not an obvious branch of scientific research, but like singing and painting and telling stories, it’s built into the fabric of human culture, going back millennia. So dancing is clearly useful, not just for fun, but for communication, exercise, even helping speech when you’re growing up. Indeed we shall soon have a science program on RN about the way the arts, that’s all of the arts, are the glue of civilisation, not just decoration.

So here’s Arthur Marcel from the Queensland University of Technology, to say what dancing means to him:

Arthur Marcel:  It’s been said that the 60s didn’t arrive in Australia until around 1972.  Certainly the world began to change very quickly for us at about this time and the rules of social engagement have never been the same since.  The 70s became a clearing house for post-colonial cultural baggage, most of which we came to believe had not been so good for us.  Australia’s actual 60s though were a very different decade.  They saw a rigorous defence of the old order by the guardians of public decency who equated the evils of communism with those of the Mavis Bramston Show. 

One particular battleground was the New South Wales public school system in which I had a box seat.  I went to an orthodox school, run by orthodox people in a manner which tended towards the militaristic.  We all marched from class to class in lines three abreast, we called our teachers “Sir”, they called us by our surnames and every boy knew the pain of the cane.  On the whole, I grew up somewhat socially ignorant and do not remember my school days all that well.  There is one memory however, that I do cherish, because it is the memory of first being taught at school a skill that has given me a lot of pleasure ever since.  In the 60s I had my first dancing lesson.

Dancing is an ancient human activity.  Understandably it is an activity that leaves little evidence in the fossil record but there is every logical reason to believe that humans have always danced.  Even before there was the music there was the beat and before the beat there would still have been meaningful movement. Like bees in a hive dance would have been used by our pre-linguistic, gesticulating ancestors to get their points across.  Dance is a form of expression that plausibly pre-dates not only meaningful oral utterance but also graphic forms such as cave art.  In this sense the relationship between dance and music is the opposite of what is commonly thought.

Dance is not a downstream development of music.  Music is better seen as an embellishment of dance in the same way that lyric is an embellishment of language.  Many musicians might scoff at such a heresy but let them consider the rhythmic movements of their arms and legs as they play their instruments, or the sway of their heads and the kinaesthetic anticipation of the notes yet to be played and yet to be heard.  Remove the medium of the air and its vibrations and they are still moving to the beat for the music is as much inside them as it is without. In an ensemble they listen to and move with one another in exactly the same way as dancers listen to and move with their music.

In the most basic of contexts the spirit of music is the spirit of dance.  Dance bands feed from the dance floor as much as dancers take their life force from them.  The energy of the dance occasion is generated mutually by both parties.  The music is the medium through which they communicate and the melody and the lyric are the poetry of a unified transcendent consciousness which lifts the spirit of both to levels singly unattainable.  When Deborah Kerr, in the words of Oscar Hammerstein, proposed to Yul Brynner in The King and I “Shall we dance?  On a bright cloud of music shall we fly?” she captured the very essence of ballroom.

Definitions of dance can be either descriptive or functional.  Descriptively there are three necessary elements.  Firstly there is dance technique.  This need not be complicated, simply placing the right foot after the left and transferring the weight from one to the other in time with the music is sufficient.  Of course dance technique is an open-ended concept and has its obvious refinements.  A point to be made however is that an ability to execute basic steps well is far preferable to knowing a lot of steps without the ability to do any of them properly.  When two people desire to dance together, they need a degree of shared and complementary technique.  Otherwise it doesn’t look good, doesn’t feel enjoyable, toes are stepped on, even injury done.

Secondly, dancing requires open channels of communication between participants.  Such communication between dancers and between them and their musicians is even more important than technique. Anyone who can walk without falling over has enough technical ability to dance, but taking subtle cues from a partner is something that gives many people a deal of difficulty.  Dancers need to be in touch with one another physically and psychologically.  They have to sense each other’s inclinations and respond.

The third descriptive element of dancing, and one often overlooked, is the need for cultural immersion.  The greater the dancer’s familiarity with the traditions of the dance style and its musical evolution, the more pleasure they will derive from its execution.  Dance and dance music evolved together.  Taking a dance from its natural musical environment is like taking a frog from its pond.  Dancers must expose themselves not to the dance and the music, but to the history.  The more they dance and the more they listen, the more dancers are driven by associations which go well beyond the dance floor, associations triggered and supported by melody and lyric in the same way that people who like poetry are inspired by rhyming verse.

When it all comes together, when the band, the partner and other dancers are nailing it technically, when the interaction between all participants is both harmonious and reciprocal and when cultural cues are relevant and inspiring – in short, when the joint is truly jumping, then aeronautical metaphors are not inappropriate.

Dance bands ideally have vocalists but they don’t need to sing every number.  Dancers are inspired by lyrics, sung or unsung, so a good dance band never allows the floor to lose their place in a song.  Dance bands sometimes improvise, but never self-indulgently. They shadow the melody, they build on it, they embellish it, they invigorate it, they never quite lose it and they always bring the dancers back to it. They usually improvise only once through the chart at a time.

If one accepts that we spend our lives liking most the music and dance styles of our formative years one might assume that dance and music are purely relative phenomena, one style equally as good as the next, just a matter of fashion so to speak.  To understand why this view is incorrect, dancing must be considered from a functional perspective.  Primarily social dancing has always been a mating ritual, an opening skirmish with ongoing potential for romantic renewal.  Before the later 19th century however, it was a reasonably formal affair with many set piece dances.  It was only after the arrival of European waltzes and polkas that men and women were freed from the formality of the set.  Suddenly they were able to escape into their own space with autonomy of movement across the whole dance floor.

This licence to move together in any direction carried through into the ballroom dances of a more syncopated 20th century.  The first of these dances was developed by one Harry Fox, a New York impresario who created a gliding, twirling dance he called the foxtrot.  Between the world wars this dance evolved into the quickstep and a newer foxtrot was developed for slower numbers.  The waltz was also slowed and merged with this new gliding style.  Then, from South America, came the variously accented eight-to-the-bar Latin rhythms.  Not only did all these new dances give couples the freedom of the floor, they also allowed them to hold each other more closely.

There is no doubt that the popularity of the 20th century social dancing in this style owes a lot to early American musical cinema, particularly to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.  The social dancers of the day must have idolised the pair and so dancing for them was as much a fantasy as it was a there and then physical activity.  For some of us, nothing has changed.

At the dances I attended in my teens and twenties very few people came with partners.  Everyone sat around the walls and it was the prerogative of the men to ask the women to dance.  It was possible to have an intimately close but socially acceptable experience with multiple members of the opposite sex.  This communicative closeness involved all the senses bar perhaps one.  Dancing mouth to ear, even cheek to cheek in the ballroom hold, conversation was easy.  Many people met their marriage partners at these dances.

About two years ago at a dinner party I was bemoaning the fact that we were transiting a modern Stone Age with regard to social dancing, when I was taken to task by a thoroughly modern woman who decried the bad old days when men did the asking and women were obliged to accept. Not only that, she absolutely condemned the idea of men always leading and women being forced to follow.  Obviously, she wasn’t a dancer.  Firstly I explained that back then the most popular girls were often not the good looking ones but always the ones who could dance.  Any girl could become popular simply by taking a few lessons, whereas today it’s perhaps more often a matter of plastic surgery.  I also explained that it is technically necessary for there to be a leader.  My wife and dancing partner of 28 years then suggested that the uppermost level in the hierarchy was being overlooked, a chauffeur might drive your car, but ultimately he takes you where you want to go or loses his job.

Multiple factors have been responsible for the decline in social dancing.  Particularly pervasive had been the popularity from the early 60s onwards of the snare drum driven, eight-to-the-bar pop rock beat.  Then there was the discotheque phenomenon of the 70s and 80s, again with its simplified percussive rhythms.  Worse still has been the electrical amplification of live music, often making conversation impossible to the point of hearing damage. Also, young people are perhaps not as fit as they used to be.  However, the most insidious enemy of healthy dance culture in this country has been the emergence of excessive alcohol consumption as the dominant cultural symbol of a good time.

Furthermore the decline in social dancing has been part of an overall decline in attendance at live music venues in general due to the ubiquity of high fidelity recorded music.  Within this diminished whole, a dichotomy has arisen between the concert venue and the dance venue.  Benny Goodman took jazz from the dance halls to Carnegie Hall in 1938 and since then the two streams have steadily diverged.  Jazz for sitting, for listening to, for eating to and for drinking to is currently in the ascendancy.  Jazz Clubs for instance often do away with their dance floors to make room for more bums on seats.  The quasi-classical master class mindset where musicians play interminable improvisations in collegial demonstrations of technical prowess is increasingly prevalent, due in part to the incorporation of the genre into university courses. Matters have become so esoteric at times that it is impossible to tap one’s foot to the music.

In this neo-stone age it is women who most miss their chance to dance.  Often they are to be seen gazing wistfully at other couples moving around the floor, somewhat bored with their sedentary male companions.  It is quite a common sight these days to see girls dancing together or simply standing around the floor.  They are instinctively drawn to it but their ignorance of dance culture often creates very forgettable moments.  One night recently my wife and I went to a nightclub, the name of which intrigued us.  We walked into a large three- storied atrium and were immediately disoriented by an array of strobe lights and tremendously loud music. Several young women staggered about a tiled dance floor, clearly inebriated, holding and sipping from their glasses.  The irony was that this nightclub was called Cloudland after the most famous of Brisbane’s 20th century dance halls, built in 1940 but wantonly destroyed overnight in 1982 by the wrecker developer cronies of Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

To quickly conclude this talk, let me simply say that the 70s were indeed a clearing house but not quite everything that was thrown out was so bad for us.  I find it unfortunate that so many younger people today will never have the unique pleasure of flying on a bright cloud of music.

Robyn Williams: Yes, it’s a petty to miss out, like I did, having three left legs and shoes made of concrete. One thing that could be worse than Arthur’s last example of the dance hall suffused with strobes and booze could be, and I’ve yet to see it, dancers looking down as they hold their smart phones and thumb their messages. It will happen, trust me. Arthur Marcel lectures at the Queensland University of Technology.

Next week: Frank Szanto on runaway trains.


Arthur Marcel
English Teacher


Robyn Williams
Brigitte Seega

Comments (5)

Add your comment

  • Mandy Lupton :

    06 Apr 2013 8:45:42pm

    All is not lost, Arthur. As a latin dancer I can attest to a thriving social dancing scene in contemporary Australian society, minus the booze culture (all dancers know that it is impossible to dance well after a few drinks).

    Latin American and African cultures have never lost their love of dancing, and in Australia we are fortunate to have many fine teachers of Latin American and African dance styles, particularly in Brisbane. If you drop into Cloudland on a Thursday night, you will find a live band playing salsa, and the joint will be jumpin' :)

  • the bar is lowering :

    08 Apr 2013 7:43:11am

    As a dancer i can say that i agree that the art of dancing is dying, if not dead. The really sad thing is that many of the teachers nowadays simply don't know how to dance. They know the moves but don't know the spirit. Salsa dancing may be very popular - but it is almost always done badly. I have only once seen a woman dancer actually following (West Coast Swing) and never danced with a woman that could follow.

    The criteria for skill seems to be how many moves one knows. I had someone tell me they were an advanced dancer and they knew 23 advanced moves (salsa dancer). That isn't the case, it's how well you execute the moves that you do know.

  • Carey McManus :

    09 Apr 2013 11:36:21pm

    As a 23 year old I found this episode of ockhams razor insulting, it felt like the nostalgic drivel of an old man that doesn't understand the new generations. I personally enjoy dancing alot, it is one of my favourite things to do and this is because of the socialness of it. I enjoy a variety of styles of music from country to soul to hip hop and in all of the venues where you see this music you find a distinctive dance style that brings people together while also providing an excellent work out. Alcohol is usually involved but I suspect that this was case for a lot of people in the narrators time as well.
    I am writing because I don't want to listen to the old men criticizing the youth of today on what is normally a thoroughly enjoyable show

  • John Casey, Treacle Toes :

    12 Apr 2013 5:08:44pm

    Why would anyone want to go robotic by indulging in repetitve stereotype movements. To drive out concious thought?

  • Cheshire Cath :

    10 Jun 2014 1:04:28am

    I thoroughly enjoyed this contribution. It highlights the subtle energy and focus in passionate dancers' practice. As a singer, this shows how many layers of beauty lie in the performers view, if they are not consumed by watching their chart or computer screen.
    I have had the pleasure of watching some fabulous dancers - and honestly, the Ballroom styles including the Latin - are so enjoyable to watch.
    There is a distinct charm and grace that some slightly younger than myself, may never have the pleasure to appreciate...Thank you Arthur!