Page:Modern Dancing (1914) Castle.djvu/32

Rh sign "Forbidden fruit" upon what otherwise would arouse no prurient curiosity. We are told that the new dances encourage too much freedom, and, while "all right if properly danced," are all wrong in a public dancing-room. These would-be reformers never see that they are tacitly admitting that it is ignorance of the dances, not knowledge of them, that does the harm.

It is not difficult to find the explanation of some of the undesirable dancing. A working man and girl go to a musical comedy. From their stuffy seats high up under the roof they look down upon the dancers on the stage. These are—so the program tells them—doing modern ball-room dancing. The man on the stage flings his partner about with Apache wildness; she clutches him around the neck and is swung off her feet. They spin swiftly or undulate slowly across the stage, and the program calls it a "Tango." The man and girl go away and talk of those "ball-room dances." They try the steps; they are novel and often difficult; they have aroused their interest. The result is that we find scores of young people dancing under the name of "One Step" or "Tango" the eccentric dances thus exaggerated and elaborated to excite the jaded audiences of a roof-garden or a music-hall.

There is no one to tell those young people that