INTRODUCTORY

You must play. It has been said, and truly, that the play of childhood is the most serious thing in the world. It is just as serious a matter for your own concern and well being.

Clean and wholesome play, temperate, healthful relaxation is the infallible way of dissolving the mental and physical toxins generated by our intense American way of living and working.

Dancing is the perfectly natural and soundly reasonable way open to your play. Primarily we moderns dance to enjoy, but we are offered meanwhile further material aids. No better exercise, nor one that has such direct appeal to the feminine temperament and physique, and one that brings the physical machinery into such perfect coordination could be advised. And eminent physicians, authoritative guardians of our health, have so advised. They have recognized its service in unmistakable terms and have told us many significant things about its benefits; of its assistance by a synthesis of music and rhythmic movement in the treatment of neuro-muscular diseases; and of many other things of equal importance, the limits of space alone precluding their further exposition. But the physician insists that there are peculiar and profound reasons for prescribing music with exercise.

In short, dancing when enjoyed in moderation is a peerless tonic, a promotion of health, a router of Melancholia and its attendant ills. The physician further recommends it as a beauty treatment, since to his keen eyes beauty means health.

Modern educators, too, now deem it a fundamental part of our education. Courtliness, poise, grace of carriage, are but surface indications of a blossoming grace of mind.

Proficiency in the dance develops these virtues and stimulates the mental poise; unconsciously we are taught how to walk gracefully; how to stand; how to take our own part in self-conscious moments.

Dancing is a social and cultural necessity. It promotes social morality and when properly administered the community is socialized, humanized and made to express itself spontaneously. It is not a prediction but an actual fact that our public schools are including dancing on the regular school roster. A belief is unfortunately too prevalent that gracefulness is wholly due to nature, but the idea is as far from the truth as that expression in music is wholly natural. In the absence of great gifts, ordinary ability may be much improved by training. With children the effort to move gracefully produces a desire to be gracious in manner, and this is one of the best influences of the dancing school. The frequently recurring circumstances of their social intercourse impress their mind practically with the value and beauty of politeness. When good motions are established, children should be allowed to take lessons for a time every year so that physical growth may not create angularity.

The dancing lesson will serve as a wholesome relief to the activities of the brain when the child is studying with the intensity necessary to acquire a modern education.

The manifold advantages derived from dancing as an exercise, the great delight it affords as a recreation, its refining influence on manners, are becoming each year more fully recognized. Parents should be anxious to give young people an opportunity to become accomplished in the graceful art. It may not be in the province of the present volume to pass at much length on the adverse criticism of dancing.

The puritan, the self-styled purist, hath ever railed at our least departure from his rigid laws. "Dancing appeals to the senses only" — he exhorts us. But then so does every art and it is eminently proper that they should. To be aesthetic, to love what is beautiful, is to perceive through the senses, and it is a matter for our moral consciences to select or reject that which goes to make up our philosophy of taste, our science of things that are beautiful. And we are sentient beings and should not deny ourselves a full portion of happiness whenever it offers as moderate and as natural an impulse as dancing. Dancing is a form of expression, and an exquisite one, and is quite apart from our morals.

"As a man in his heart thinketh, so is he" —and if there be a latent grace the dance visualizes it; if there be a latent vulgarity the dance exposes it. One may sing a hymn or fly a kite in an uncouth manner. Manifestly, in striving for proficiency in the dance we are moving toward higher and finer ideals; a new life opens to us and a keen sense of this truth should be in every dancer's heart.

While it is true that the dances of a short while ago were heaped with abuse, such abuse was deserved and those who held sacred the canons of propriety in the dance were most lavish in that abuse. It were well; dancing had fallen upon decadent days, and the moderate saw what had been their recreation swept away and a dissipation take its place. Followed an orgy of perversion, designedly so by instructor and dancer alike. Flagrant excesses made a wanton of the dance and the night was made hideous indeed. All barriers were beaten down and the zoological packs were upon us: Turkey Trot, Bunny Hug, Grizzly Bear.

Undisciplined and in some measure even vicious, many of the dances, or wriggles or contortions as they should be called, that followed in the van of these, well deserved the censure of all good people. A hysterical time in which the vogue seemed to change over night; and incidentally a golden harvest time for the unscrupulous instructor. But presently saner days came to us and through this acrobatic bedlam came the Tango, the Hesitation, and other good influences to chasten and redeem. And this process of reform formulated and established what we accept as the Modern Dances.

Are You Ready To Move Onto The Next Lesson? Click Here...