As Yuletide prices soar, it’s time to dance

The waltz was denounced when first danced by royalty in England in 1816 but Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark and Princess Mary enjoyed a wedding waltz in Copenhagen in 2004.

Years ago, when I was young enough to frequent the sort of dives that the unwary enter on a whim and leave on a stretcher, dancing was a skill, not a spasm.

It is true that my local, Le Bananier Trafiquant (the smuggling banana ship), did not draw its habitues from Gai Paree’s creme de la creme. But while an impenetrable cloud of smoke hovered motionless over the dimly lit cellar, tightly entwined couples glided through steps that ranged from the jive to the splendours of La Javanaise.

It was, it seems, the last, tobacco-infused, gasp of a long tradition. Dancing had been banned in France during the wars of religion; but Louis XIV had put the minuet at the heart of his court’s rituals. The Sun King’s dance masters not only formalised the minuet’s movements, ensuring that mastering its meticulous etiquette required decades of training only the aristocracy could afford: they also converted it into a mirror of courtly society, with the order in which the couples danced reflecting their social standing.

All that vanished as the nobility’s heads tumbled into the guillotine’s blood-soaked bucket. In its place, the Revolution’s elites put a dance whose origins lay in the ordinary people. Transformed and infused with new elegance as Napoleon’s armies spread it throughout Europe, the waltz was as revolutionary as the circumstances propelling its rise to prominence.

In the minuet, the couples turned away from one another, facing the audience rather than each other. Equally, in the contredanse, couples were separated into lines of men and women, coming close only for fleeting moments. The waltz, in contrast, detached each couple from the group and plunged it into unprecedented physical intimacy.

The freedom that brought was exhilarating. “I saw the real Waltz for the first time,” Eliza de Feuillide breathlessly wrote her cousin, Jane Austen, in 1797. “The man takes his partner COMPLETELY in his arms – and they whirl around, face to face.”

Already, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), a passionate dancer, had influentially celebrated the liberation “das Walzen und Drehen” (literally, rolling and turning) brought from stifling, class-ridden, social norms in Wilhelm Meisters’s Travels and in The Sorrows of Young Werther. Soon thereafter, Austen wove the new dance into her pioneering novels, notably Emma (1815) and Persuasion (1817), as a symbol of changing relations between the sexes.

And on July 12, 1816, the waltz received the supreme imprimatur when it was danced, for the first time ever, at George III’s Birthday Ball. Not everyone was thrilled. “We remarked with pain,” The Times editorialised, “that the indecent foreign dance called the Waltz was introduced at the English court on Friday last.” Bemoaning its “voluptuous inter-twining of the limbs”, the paper denounced the waltz as fit only for “prostitutes and adulteresses”.

Equally, Viscount de Brieux Saint-Laurent, a stout defender of courtly manners, declared, with more outrage than logic, that “no woman who has danced that dance can be entirely a virgin”.

But those jeremiads couldn’t prevent the waltz from sweeping Europe, inaugurating two centuries of close-couple dancing. As every aspect of life seemed to accelerate, dances too became faster paced, evolving from the waltz to the foxtrot, the quickstep and the tango, before reaching the Cuban rumba and the swirls and swivels of the Parisian jive.

Keeping up was never easy, even for the fittest and keenest; but close-couple dancing was not merely a lesson in footwork – it was a school of sociability. After all, executing intricate steps in tight synchronisation at lightning speed required what came to be called “inter-corporeality”: a fusing of two bodies and minds. The partners, said the great philosopher Martin Buber, “don’t look at each other; they look into each other”, their glance exposing a subjectivity that is always mindful of the risk of things going wrong.

Close-couple dancing was, in that sense, an exercise in accountability, embodying a discipline proximate to manners – an attempt at respectful co-ordination, a recognition that we must act in harmony, careful not to tread on each other’s toes.

Today, only the most artificial vestiges of the tradition of close-couple dancing remain. Instead, as distorted guitars vibrate and singers utter bottomless growls, the mosh pits pulsate with bodies that sway mindlessly before erupting into a vortex of inexplicable movement. Slamming arbitrarily into one another, the “dancers” merge into a blur: all together – and each entirely alone.

 

Little wonder so many young people struggle to define a stable identity, a sense of how to relate to oneself and others. And little wonder too that this year’s Christmas Price Index, which measures the cost of The Twelve Days of Christmas, reveals the horrifying fact that our expert dancers – the ladies dancing and lords leaping – have seen their real incomes collapse by 40 per cent over the past decade.

Meanwhile, inflation, boosted by recent increases in the price of partridges, turtle doves and swans, continues to soar. With the Prime Minister crying fowl, the government promises its Christmas Affordability Plan will stop producers feathering their nest. It could, however, prove the domestic industry’s swan song, as growers struggle with flocks of regulators and swarms of regulations that strangle supply.

Good policy, the critics say, is as scarce as hen’s teeth. Perhaps it is. But it’s time for a pause. Irresistibly, Le Bananier’s secret entrance beckons, leading to the Shangri-La where crook backs and creaking knees can relive the glories of jiving in 12/8, before succumbing, as the morning sun rises, to the timeless languor of La Javanaise.

It may be that my escapade will be thwarted by the zealots who, only a few weeks ago, forced a dance instructor to resign from one of France’s most prestigious universities for referring to “male” and “female” roles while teaching the tango, that most sensual of dances. But as Louis XIV’s favourite playwright, Jean-Baptiste Moliere, whose 400th birthday we celebrated this year, put it, “humanity is nothing without dance” – and the beauty of dance’s sense of motion will disappear from ordinary experience unless we rekindle its magic.

May this Christmas therefore find you on your feet, gliding around the room as light as air, as bright as a shimmering star. And may the new year bring you, your loved ones and this troubled world of ours the peace, prosperity and progress we crave, and so desperately need.