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- Title
The Elegant Passion.
- Authors
Peters, Sally
- Abstract
This article discusses ballroom dancing and considers ballroom dancers as slaves of passion. Not to be confused with social dance, competition dance demands much, but promises everything. For those who fox trot only at weddings, and only fox trot, ballroom dance evokes visions of Viennese waltzes and memories of Fred Astaire's legendary dance scenes with Ginger Rogers. In Le Bal, the Ettore Scola film, a single dance hall is the laboratory for examining the sexual manners and mores of twentieth-century Europe. It was said that ballroom dance elevates woman. The dances tell a different story, one drenched in eroticism and machismo. The Viennese waltz is imbued with the aura of the crystal chandeliered ballrooms where courtly couples so gracefully surrendered to romantic exuberance almost two centuries ago. Like all social dances, waltz reflected male/female relations in a specific cultural setting and functioned as a courting ritual as well. Structured on artistic proficiency, modern ballroom dance competitions, emphasizing challenge, technique, and propriety, assume the aura of a quite different kind of ritual event. What is intriguing is the way this formal event relies on fantasy, stylized, allusive, largely unarticulated. Psychologically, the encapsulated fantasies range from the ethereal to the erotic.
- Subjects
BALLROOM dancing; WALTZ; DANCERS; EMOTIONS; FANTASY (Psychology); ASTAIRE, Fred, 1899-1987; ROGERS, Ginger, 1911-1995
- Publication
Journal of Popular Culture, 1992, Vol 25, Issue 4, p163
- ISSN
1540-5931
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/j.0022-3840.1992.1674153.x