From the Ballroom to Hell: Grace and Folly in Nineteenth-Century Dance - Hardcover

Aldrich, Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810109123 ISBN 13: 9780810109124

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 1991

Synopsis

"Dancing and etiquette are inseparable," wrote one 19th-century dancing master quoted in this scholarly glimpse into ballrooms past. Newly moneyed Americans of that era craved guidance on how to comport themselves, and publishers responded with scores of manuals on etiquette, fashion, and dance instruction. As dance historian Aldrich demonstrates through more than 100 excerpts from these guides, balls and dance offer a key to understanding the social aspirations of the period. These volumes gave unflinching advice, from injunctions against nose-picking to the proper way to lead a partner through the quadrilles. In a brief historical essay, Aldrich dissolves the veneer of naivete from these admonitions, placing them in the context of a society in which woman's role had become centered on domestic affairs and in which the ballroom was the showcase for one's social accomplishments. Illustrated.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

'From The Ballroom To Hell' collects over one hundred little-known excerpts from dance, etiquette, beauty, and fashion manuals from roughly 1800-1890. It will be of great interest to dancers and dance historians, choreographers, and dramatists interested in accurately reproducing nineteenth-century dance scenes and the surrounding social mechanisms.

About the Author:

Elizabeth Aldrich is director of the International Early Dance Institute and is president of the Society of Dance History Scholars. Co-founder of the Historical Dance Foundation, she is a consultant to the Smithsonian Institute and has choreographed for the American Ballroom Theatre, the New York Baroque dance Company, and the Court Dance Company of New York. Ms. Aldrich has provided reconstructions and choreography for several major feature films, includingMr. and Mrs. Bridge starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.

Mina Mulvey, who wrote the forward to this volume is Executive Editor of Good Housekeeping.

About this edition

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0810109123
• ISBN 13: 9780810109124
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 225