Eighteenth-century social dance is a complex topic. Every occasion where dancing occurred looked different from most others. Important variables that affected the performance were the participants, the on-lookers, the reason for the gathering, the location, the temperature of the room, the hour of the day, and the amount and type of beverages everyone had been drinking. Each of these could change what dance types were selected and how they were actually performed.
A popular country dance might be selected in the spring of 1779 at an officers’ ball hosted by General Greene at the Artillery Park Ballroom in Pluckemin, New Jersey, with music provided by one of the American regimental bands. The same country dance might be chosen six months later in a private room of a ramshackle tavern in Sunbury, Pennsylvania where some of the same officers, a few local merchants and their families and a local fiddler might gather, hosted by the innkeeper himself. Patriotic toasts and minuets might open both occasions. The tunes and the figures might be the same, but there the similarities would probably end.
Dancing has always been a public expression of personal abilities. In the eighteenth-century, dance events were one of the few venues that brought men and women together in a social setting. There they could publicly display themselves and their families, and solidify friendships that could help with business or political dealings. Since marriages created or continued power dynasties, these dances were important as showcases for eligible partners. On the frontier, dancing after community corn-husking certainly helped the romances of young people who spent their days on homesteads far distant from one another.
On plantations, African-Americans weary from days of toil alone in the fields could gather in groups to relax with dances from their homeland across the sea. It was a chance to re-affirm themselves as a community. In all of these events, the participants enjoyed the pleasure of moving together in time, feeling a sense of oneness with each other and relishing the physical release from daily pressures and cares. In addition, the musicians, showiest dancers, hosts, managers and even the caterers gained in status, affecting local balances of power in small but significant ways.
In the century between 1660 and 1760, as the old court-directed society crumbled and the merchant class gained in size and power, the need to establish a social order that all would recognize became urgent. A heavy burden fell on the obtaining and display of consumer goods to define differences. Domestic architecture, clothing, dining customs and material goods served these functions. In addition, physical demeanor played an increasingly important role. Dance was the art that filled this need, serving the elite well. Instruction in manners, genteel behavior and movement created visible and portable signs of personal and commercial achievement. Where seventeenth-century sumptuary laws had kept newcomers at bay in the past, a new code of conduct developed that did not require legislation. The test of a gentleman was whether he had the time to absorb the mounting intricacies of taste, grace, fashion and elegance. The eighteenth-century aesthetic of austerity and nonchalance was considerably harder to emulate than seventeenth-century opulence and bravado.
The “Rules of Civility” that Washington copied out show how real the layers of his society were. In these rules, every social encounter was assessed; participants ranked each other and acted appropriately. Walking and talking with someone in a building or in the street had an etiquette that if mishandled could give insult:
57th: In walking up and Down in a house, only with One in Company if he be Greater than yourself, at first give him the Right hand and Stop not till he does and be not the first that turns, and when you do turn let it be with your face towards him, if he be a Man of Great Quality, walk not with him
Cheek by Joul but Somewhat behind him.
The depth of a bow was important.
26th: In Pulling off your Hat to Persons of Distinction . . . make a
Reverence, bowing more or less according to the Custom of the Better
Bred, and Quality of the Person.
Frontier and plantation communities were small and tightly knit. Everyone knew everyone else and there was no need to engage in one-ups-man ship. It was in larger population areas that dance came to be used as a badge of membership. Like paper money, gentility was presumed to stand for tangible social assets and was generally accepted at face value. The dance floor was the place where a person’s command of the attributes of gentility: costume, manners, movement grace and ease, were put to the ultimate and most public test. In 1776, John Adams both acknowledged and decried this display as the “exterior and superficial accomplishments of gentlemen upon which the world has foolishly set so high a value” (Cary Carson 271).
Dance fashions were set by cultivated urban societies as expressions of social status. Enterprising dance professionals devised appropriate movement vehicles to satisfy these needs. Successful dances were promoted as “the latest” or “the most fashionable,” and they displayed the performers to best advantage. Dancing teachers reaped financial gains from the sale of public classes, private lessons, and pre-ball review events. That these lessons and public perception were important is reinforced by William Turner’s advertisement to newly wealthy merchants of Boston in the boom times before the war. In 1774, having just returned from London where he gathered the latest dance fashions, he offered private lessons to “grown gentlemen and ladies, & assures the utmost secrecy shall be kept till they are capable of exhibiting in high taste” (Boston Evening Post May 30, 1774).
Tomlinson begins his treatise called The Art of Dancing Explain’d (London, 1735) saying "Let us imagine ourselves, as so many living Pictures drawn by the most excellent Masters, exquisitely designed to afford the utmost Pleasure to the Beholders."
In the eighteenth-century, dance was meant to be enjoyed as much by the audience as by the participants. As Cary Carson points out, taste and gentility were sought after and acquired after diligent application and validated only by open demonstration. (Carson 272, 656) Life, in a way, was theater. It needed a setting, props and an audience, and it was full of aspiring imitators. Rules and standards helped to distinguish the genuine article from the counterfeit.
**Please click on "Next" for the different dance styles of the Colonial period.**
