In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

72 ARRAYS
around'-this is your opportunity to learn all of the latest Valencia, Fox
Trot, Waltz, Tango, and Charleston steps for almost nothing! While
becoming the very best dancer in your crowd, you will enjoy learning in
a few private lessons and in a class of congenial people" (New York
Times, September 22). Among the dances mentioned in this advertisement,
the tango has a specific status, for two reasons. Together with the
Valencia, and unlike the Charleston, it connotes, first, the "authenticity"
of Spanish and Latin-American culture, which is the only current alternative
to the "authenticity" generally attributed to the African and African-American
worlds. [see Bullfighting, Center vs. Periphery] Second,
among the dances performed by a couple, the tango is the only one that
does not prescribe complementarity between the movements of the man
and woman. Tango dancers look and act as if they did not see each other,
and their bodies are supposed to follow the rhythm of the music independently
from each other. Unlike the preestablished harmony of the
traditional partner-dances, the harmony of the tango couple is staged
either as emerging out of a free collaboration or as the-often violentresolution
of a potential conflict: "Not rounded, but broken, the rotation
produces no center of gravity between the partners but oscillates from
one to the other. If they stay at distance they lose each other, and will
never come together" (Elsner and Miiller, 318).
With its proliferation of old and new steps, dancing becomes assimilated
to virtually every other form of entertainment. [see Bars] More
than half the advertisements on the back page of the Berlin daily
8 Uhr-Abendblatt invite the readers to dance events. With a slogan that
seems inspired by the fashion for nonsense poetry, the Weidenhof, "Berlin's
most spectacular dance palace," emphasizes the contrast between
dull everydayness and the pleasure of moving one's body to the rhythm
of the music: "When things become too lousy, come over to the Weidenhof"
(October 19). Besides the "five-o'clock tea dance" with two orchestras,
the Weidenhof offers, at 8 P.M. and for a public of spectators rather
than dancers, a show by "Mme. Salome and her beautiful ballet. Twenty
ladies of overwhelming grace and beauty." The Tanz-Cabaret Valencia
features "five-o'clock tea dance, restaurant, bar, attractions," and a
"lighted floor" which makes the dancers feel that they have found some
other terrain than the stable ground of everyday reality. [see Uncertainty
vs. Reality]
Such forms of light amusement, however, exist side-by-side with the