"Fanciful, gay and exhilarating" ... Contemporary cartoonists’ take on the Charleston. IMAGES: ODT FILES
In a six-part series Mike Houlahan looks back at how the Otago Daily Times covered burning issues of yesteryear. We begin by considering the moral panic which ensued in some quarters when the Charleston hit the South.
To modern eyes the Charleston, a 1920s dance craze, seems entirely innocuous.
Invented in 1923 and peaking in popularity in 1926-27, the fast-stepping, high-kicking dance was paired to high-tempo jazz and big-band music and swept all before it across the globe.
However, it also attracted the opprobrium of the nervous classes who felt that it was too rumbustious to be performed safely, or too indecent to be performed with proper decorum.
"A dancer of average ability can pick it up in two or three lessons, but for the less experienced it takes practice and patience," he said.
However, he went on to note that the Charleston "is likely to be viewed with prejudice" as it departed from the waving, smooth-flowing glide of the dominant dance of the day, the foxtrot.
"It certainly looks less enjoyable than it proves in practice," he sniffed, before setting out detailed instruction as to how it should be performed.
"The Charleston, which is fanciful, gay and exhilarating, is undoubtedly in the right mood," he concluded.
Far less sanguine about this new dance was the ODT, which in June reprinted a Daily Mail article which described it as "a series of contortions without charm or grace, reminiscent only of the negro orgies from which it derives its creation".
Confronted with couples dancing the Charleston in London nightclubs the correspondent despaired: "surely London society has not yet come to such a pass that it must indulge in these ridiculous imitations of heathen rites as a means of passing an evening."
He, for one, welcomed news that some of the bigger hotels were banning the "latest monstrosity" that was the Charleston.
Nervous readers could chart the imminent arrival of the Charleston on these shores, with news that it was being demonstrated in JC Williamson theatres in Australia, and local band advertising that they were able to play the Charleston for willing dancers. In September Ilma Strange and Bill Heaten, "the world’s freshest Charleston steppers", demonstrated their artistry
at Dunedin’s Princess Theatre, seemingly without causing alarm or incident.
Trouble was looming though with news in October that the Roman Catholic Bishop of Goulburn in Australia had banned the dance from any church buildings. A few weeks later a congress of French professional dancers condemned the Charleston and declared that women who danced it might never be able to have children.
By the end of the year, it was reported that the dance had been banned closer to home, in Timaru, but cooler heads were starting to prevail.
The March 1927 the Witness ran a column by Maxwell Stewart ("world’s champion ballroom dancer 1924-25-26") in which he opined that the Charleston has passed through a "boisterous adolescence" but that we had now got it in hand.
"The new dance was so new, gay, expressive and utterly joyous that we lost our heads and hearts to it . . . it was, as danced, ugly and annoying" but the new, modern Charleston could be learned with the utmost confidence.
By May the ODT was, reluctantly, reporting that the dance was now seemingly accepted as part of the repertoire for society balls and by October the Witness pronounced that the Charleston had been toned down and was now a "thoroughly respectable ballroom dance", although "denunciations of the ‘immoral and indecent’ Charleston" were still rife.
And with that the dance world, and the Otago Daily Times, moved on to consider new dances such as the trebla, and to call for a return to the ascendancy of the foxtrot in our ballrooms.
