Curt Sachs (1881-) World History of the Dance, (Trans, Bessie Schönberg) The Norton Library: N.Y., 1937 (1965).
The Twentieth Century
The Tango Period
"Even before the end of the nineteenth century the dance teachers were trying to counteract the impoverishment of the society dance. Minuet- and gavotte-like figures, in Italy even pavannes of a sort, were to relieve the eternal uniformity of the waltz and the standardized quadrille, after the polka, galoppe, Rheinländer, and mazurka all had left the field.
"It was a mistaken procedure based on a false estimate of the historical situation. A society which was more and more ceasing to be a society in the old sense could not be fed on stale, warmed-over delicacies from the princely kitchen. To be sure, one could think of nothing better suited to the pseudo-rococo salons and the gilded palatial furniture of the bourgeois houses of about 1890 than these spurious minuets and gavottes. But they did not suit the people, especially not the young people. for this generation was not throwing off the bourgeois stamp to move in the aristocratic and courtly direction.
"Only two roads were open. The first was followed by those who were seeking a new order of society: the young, banded together in the youth movement, turned back to the communal dances of the people and of children, to which, at the turn of the century, Scandinavia and England had led the way. Rightly, since inner necessity pointed out this road, and successfully in most cases, though not in all, for many of these medieval choral dances had become too anemic and their spirit is often too narrowly circumscribed.
"The amorphous "society," on the other hand, had taken over new dances from America. Ostensibly these dances came out of a foreign world; in reality, however, they had preserved, more faithfully than the European, that original state in which the dance arose out of an inner and physical need. The adoption of American Creole and Negro steps corresponds exactly to the assimilation of Spanish and Slavic dances in earlier centuries.
"The discovery of the universal values of American Negro and Creole dances can in no sense be attributed to the bored and sensation-seeking snobs of the nineties. The sarabande and the chacona had been taken over more than three hundred years before. Two hundred years earlier in 1789. Moreau de Saint-Méry writes with graceful pen an enthusiastic little book about the dance in the French West Indies; and thirty years later, in 1820, the famous Parisian dancing master Charles Blais describes the Spanish and American Negro dances in a special chaper of his Traité. But it has to remain at the stage of mere admiration in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries, until the store of movement of the European dance is exhausted.
"Since the Brazilian maxixe of 1890 and the cakewalk of 1903 broke up the pattern of turns and glides that dominated the European round dances, our generation has adopted with disquieting rapidity a successsion of Central American dances, in an effort to replace what has been lost to modern Europe: multiplicity, power, and expressiveness of movement. to the point of grotesque distortion of the entire body. We have shortly after 1900 the one-step or turkey-trot; in 1910, inspired by the Cuban habanera, the so-called "Argentine" tango with its measured crossing and flexing steps and the dramatic pauses in the midst of the glide; and in 1912 the fox trot with its wealth of figures. After the war we take over its offspring, the shimmy, which with toes together and heels apart contradicts all the rules of post-minnesinger Europe; the grotesquely distorted Charleston; in 1926 the black bottom with a lively mixture of side turns, stamps, skating glides, skips and leaps; and finally the rocking rumba-all compressed into even movement, all emphasizing strongly the erotic element, and all in that glittering rhythm of syncopated four-four meausures classified as ragtime. One can hardly imagine a greater contrast to the monotony of steps and melody of the latter part of the nineteenth century.
". . ."
"Only the tango has continued to enjoy undiminished favor for more than twenty years in spite of polishing and refinement. To be sure, it is no pure Negro dance and owes its best qualities to the unusual dance talent of the Spaniards, who for four hundred years have made fruitful contributions to the European dance. When the tango made its appearance in the old world in 1910, it released a dance frenzy, almost a mania, which attacked all ages and classes with the same virulence. You may shake your head, smile, mock, or turn away, but this dance madness proves nonetheless that the man of the machine age with his necessary wrist watch and his brain in a constant ferment of work, worry, and calculation has just as much neeed of the dance as the primitive. For him too the dance is life on another plane.
". . ."
"The twentieth century has rediscovered the body; not since antiquity has it been so loved, felt and honored. Nobody really aware of what is taking place today needs to be told this. After a sleep of two thousand years the expressive imitative dance is awakening. Our generation does not find what it seeks in ballet, in the world of dancing slippers, gossamer skirts, and artificial steps. It cries out, as Noverre once did, for nature and passion; again it desires, as he did, though perhaps too strongly, to exchange stereotyped movement for something genuinely of the soul.
"As always, the new style begins not with the great performers, but with the people with ideas; as always, it turns back to the past to find not only form but courage to carry on. Isadora Duncan-and this shall be the only name we mention-breathes life into the statues of the Greeks. She frees the old Hellenic dance from the rigidity of sculpture, from its sleep in the museums. She is not the first and not the only one in the struggle against the ballet; but among her imitators at the turn of the century there was often much egotism and too little ability . . .
". . . And yet not only of mankind today, but of men of all races and in all ages. For that to which they give living expression has been the secret longing of man from the very beginning-the victory over gravity, over all that weighs down and oppresses, the change of body into spirit, the elevation of creature into creator, the merging with the infinite, the divine.
""Whosoever knoweth the power of the dance dwelleth in God." pp. 443-448