The original exponents of the Skirt Dance, as we have seen, were ballet-dancers, whose novelty consisted rather in their costume than in their methods. They adapted the steps of the ballet to the new style without great modification. They brought to the dance that culture of the whole body and not merely of the legs, which is proper to the well-trained ballet-dancer as distinguished from the mere step-dancer. But the misfortune of the
ALICE LETHBRIDGE
Photograph: Ellis & Walery
Skirt Dance was that it afforded a convenient concealment to the incompetent dancer. Less eminent artists were not slow to perceive that the instruction which had failed to give them distinction in the academic style was quite sufficient to make them resplendent as skirt-dancers. There is a menace that always threatens the dance, no less than the theatre, and that is the incursion of the incompetent professional beauty. The generous public is willing to pardon a multitude of sins for the sake of a pretty face. Now was the signal opportunity for the unintelligent beauty to masquerade as a dancer. Amateurs vied with professionals in seeking success in the simple intricacies of the Skirt Dance. By performing it in a London theatre at a charity matinée, the Countess Russell and her sister gave the dance the sanction of the social world. Philanthropy became the hobby of the fashionable skirt-dancer. A wit remarked that “charity uncovered a multitude of shins.”
In a criticism of the period, Mr G. Bernard Shaw ridiculed this cult of good looks and incompetence for which the Skirt Dance was responsible. “Thanks to it,” he said, “we soon had young ladies carefully trained on an athletic diet of tea, soda-water, rashers, brandy, ice-pudding, champagne and sponge-cake, laboriously hopping and flopping, twirling and staggering, as nuclei for a sort of bouquet of petticoats of many colours, until finally, being quite unable to perform the elementary feat, indispensable to a curtsey, of lowering and raising the body by flexing and straightening the knee, they frankly sat down panting on their heels, and looked piteously at the audience, half begging for an encore, half wondering how they would ever be able to get through one. The public on such occasions behaved with its usual weakness.... It was mean enough to ape a taste for the poor girls’ pitiful sham dancing, when it was really gloating over their variegated underclothing. Who has not seen a musical comedy or comic farce interrupted for five minutes, whilst a young woman without muscle or practice enough to stand safely on one foot—one who, after a volley of kicks with the right leg has, on turning to the other side of the stage, had to confess herself ignominiously unable to get beyond a stumble with her left, and, in short, could not, one would think, be mistaken by her most infatuated adorer for anything but an object-lesson in saltatory incompetence—clumsily waves the inevitable petticoats at the public as silken censers of that odor di femina which is the real staple of five-sixths of our theatrical commerce?” For his part, he continues, “the young lady who can do no more than the first sufficiently brazen girl in the street could, may shake all the silk at Marshall and Snelgrove’s at me in vain.”
It was possibly this fatal facility of the Skirt Dance that gave it its unparalleled vogue. For a time everybody skirt-danced. There has probably been no such sudden craze for any style of dancing as that which seized England at the time of the famous Pas de Quatre in Faust up to Date. The schottische-like melody composed for the dance by Meyer Lutz, the Gaiety conductor, was performed to satiety upon every orchestra in the country. In a mild form the dance was introduced into the ball-room, while certainly for years no pantomime was complete without the inevitable four girls in short accordion-pleated skirts, standing in a row behind one another, kicking out first one leg and then the other in time to the jerky music.
The grace of Kate Vaughan had given an extraordinary vitality to the Skirt Dance; her imitators’ lack of grace killed it. Because Kate Vaughan danced in the moonlight—or the livid hue which then passed for moonlight on the stage—every dancer had the lights turned down, with a special ray from the wings upon her whirling petticoats. Moreover the performers of the step-dance from the halls, the only dance really popular with the public before this time, took up the new fashion with alacrity and threw into it more than all their ancient energy. The dance became more and more violent. It was burlesqued out of recognition. The prettiness of the Skirt Dance as it was danced by Kate Vaughan perished in the contortions that were introduced from the Moulin Rouge and popularised in England by Lottie Collins.
