The Egalitarian Waltz

One need not be an anthropologist or a cultural historian to remark that social dancing these days seems to isolate the individual in a trance-like self-absorption which virtually disconnects him from the world and even from his partner. Indeed, the dance of the day—like other art forms—is often a good reflection of the values of a given time and place. Today's developments, both in the dance and in society, provide more than the usual scholarly justification for looking back to one of the earliest manifestations of individualism and escape in the dance and its association with the values of liberty, equality and uncertainty which followed upon the French Revolution. The dance was the waltz; the dancers, at first, were the middle classes, soon to be joined by both upper and lower classes; the time and place are Central Europe, and soon the whole Western world, at the beginning of the nineteenth century.