ABSTRACT
Folk dance revivalism contributed to visions of social dance as a physical and emotional cure for stricken bodies, alienated minds, and a society in recovery from war, faltering from urbanization. Efforts to discover a sense of authenticity and community were not always tied to organicist, rural ideals. Modernist ritualism inspired by Nietzsche and disseminated in part through the writings of Jane Ellen Harrison encouraged alternative visions of community associated with dancing in groups, located, for example, in the communal female experience of Harrison and others at Cambridge. Mass Observation’s ethnographic, documentary reporting on urban scenes, whether nightclubs or parks, also reveals an interwar predilection for representing social dance as a source of coherence in a chaotic world. These tendencies resonate with Lawrence’s projection of regeneration onto social dancing’s outlet for couples to court, though his apocalyptic despair has receded into the background. The connections between social dance and community-building also resonate with some of Bloomsbury’s dancing practices, most obviously in the communal ethos and socially conscious art of the Camargo Society, but also in the satirical social commentary of the “Keynes-Keynes,” with its affirmation of using dance not simply as a release, but as a method of fostering a critically aware, astute sociability in the intimate group. Social dancing’s power to draw people together in shared experiences of pleasure and cohesion is a recurrent theme of this study; the interwar context heightened desires for coherence, and dance often supplied exhibits and experiences of communal values, connection and order. At its most enchanting, group dances might provide what the dance of the villagers provides to the onlooker, William Dodge, in Between the Acts: “a mellay; a medley; an entrancing spectacle”; the music they dance to “makes us … join the broken.”1
