As a parent of three teenagers, I appreciate the fact that every generation has its modes of dance that shock the older generation. When my mother was young it was Elvis’s hip gyrations. When I was a kid it was disco. Now it’s moshing and grinding and freaking and other terms I have probably not yet heard of. What was the shocking dance in the early 1800s?
The waltz.
Yeah, I guess I gave it away by posting the picture above, but the waltz alarmed people when it first arrived in England and France from Germany. Before that, people didn’t dance with one partner, and they certainly didn’t clasp one another around the waist. They line danced, more or less. A demure touching of palms was what they were used to.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge complained about it in 1798: “I am pestered every ball night to dance, which very modestly I refuse. They dance a most infamous dance called the Waltzen. There are perhaps twenty couples—the Man and his Partner embrace each other, arms and waists, and knees almost touching, and then whirl round and round .. . to lascivious music.”*
In “The Works of Lord Byron,” the introduction to Byron’s poem The Waltz quotes Thomas Raikes, who declared, “’No event . . . ever produced so great a sensation in English society as the introduction of the German waltz…. Old and young returned to school, and the mornings were now absorbed at home in practising the figures of a French quadrille or whirling a chair round the room to learn the step and measure of the German waltz. The anti-waltzing party took the alarm, cried it down; mothers forbad it, and every ballroom became a scene of feud and contention.’”