Tag: dance

“Preferring Death to the Embrace of a Strange Dancing Woman”: Jewish Dancers in Victorian Ballrooms

Other

Dancing was perhaps the most universal and popular mixed-sex leisure pursuit in the nineteenth century. Yet dance was not purely a recreational activity. Ballroom etiquette demanded adherence to the rules of fashionable society, including precise rules for comportment, conversation, and choosing a dance partner. For upwardly mobile Jewish dancers, balls presented additional challenges. First of all, mixed-sex dancing was forbidden according to traditional Jewish law, which regarded men and women dancing together as a gateway to sexual impropriety. And while

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Kitty Lord’s Padded ‘Symmetricals’

Other, Victorians Beyond the Academy, Victorians on Display

This final post (see Parts One and Two) was inspired by a pair of pale pink knitted tights worn by the music hall singer Kitty Lord (1881-1972) in the early 1900s. Part of a collection of Lord’s costumes held at the Museum of London, these ‘symmetricals’ were carefully padded with wool to ensure that her thighs and calves looked suitably shapely and voluptuous [Figure 1]. As these padded symmetricals reveal, and this post will discuss, in late nineteenth century Burlesque

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The Industrial Devolution podcast

Digitizing the Victorians, Other, Victorians Beyond the Academy

The Industrial Devolution podcast is a new project by Dr. Tobias Wilson-Bates that seeks to think through many of the systems, practices, and aftereffects of the nineteenth century. In its first episode, Dr. Pearl Chaozon-Bauer and Dr. Sabrina Gilchrist lend their expertise to an exploration of the role dance plays in Jane Austen’s Emma (1815). By examining the text, the project seeks to explore how dance scenes’ narrative gravity was not only a product of good writing, but also a

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