Judge — August 1932 — page 20: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

the United States was writing a pla It now seems that every other woman in the United States is hoping to be a stage dancer. The New York market is currently so overcrowded with all sorts and con- ditions of females who are possessed of an overpowering urge to get up on a platform and hoist their big toes into the air that there is no hotel and boarding-house room left even for the half dozen remaining German acrobats. The condition has got to be so serious, indeed, that in order to take care of the overflow, they’ve put up a special building in West 54th Street, known as “The Dancers’ Club,” where for a few dol- lars a week the hopeful pavlowas can at least get bed and a sandwich once in a while, and sometimes even a bath. This Dancers’ Club gets out a monthly bulletin, a glance at which shows the extent to which the leg- lifting and bottom-wriggling busi- ness has lately developed. It appears that there are now more teachers of stage dancing hereabouts than deli- catessen stores. There are teachers of Nautch dancing, pantomime danc- ing, Burmese dancing, Egyptian dancing, ballet dancing, tap dancing, Devil dancing, fantastic dancing, Singalese dancing, Chinese dancing, Javanese dancing, Moslem dancing, waltz, tango, rhumba and_ bolero dancing, plastique dancing, Spanish dancing, native Hula Hawaiian danc- ing, operatic dancing, toe dancing, gypsy dancing, interpretive dancing, plasto-rhythmics and eurythmics in every block, to say nothing of teach- ers of the buck and wing, soft shoe, double rhythm soft shoe, eccentric, acrobatic, whirlwind, stair and Ten- nessee Strut dancing. In the West Forties, Fifties and Sixties, in point of fact, there are so many teachers of dancing that the dentists have had to find room on the upper floors of the neighborhood speakeasies. I: was once said that every man in THEATRE of George Jean Nathan All these teachers of dancing and their pupils are intensely serious about the busin Little girls from the cow country, middle-aged women from the visible reinforced stocking- heel belt, females of all varieties from Maine to California have de- scended upon New York in droves, all determined someday to get up on a theatre stage, or at least a cabaret floor, and ist in the culture of the nation by kicking their feet over their ears and simultaneously displaying to the hungry populace a view of their more intimate anatomy. Hour upon hour through the long days the poor souls tap and kick and sweat themselves into a state of exhaustion in the fond faith that it will not be long before Ziegfield or some other such magnifico comes around, gets down on his knees and begs them to favor his stage with their dazzling presence. And in the meantime a lot of poor yokel papas in the hind- quarters of the Republic are work- ing themselves to death in order to get the money to allow their loved ones to pursue their great art. One of the results of all this pa- thetic effort is a wave of what are called dance recitals. It seems that whenever a girl has reached the stage where she can elevate a leg on a level with her nose without losing her balance and falling down, she rushes triumphantly out, buys herself six dollars’ worth of green gauze and persuades someone to let her demonstrate her amazing achievement, in some theatre of an afternoon. In the last six months there have been, by actual count, no less than 3,258 of these dance re- citals in New York below 72nd Street, the statistics on the number above 72nd Street not yet having reached me. The dance recital gen- erally follows an invariable pattern. The curtain rises and discloses a baldheaded man seated at a piano at stage left. He briefly entertains the dozen or so customers assembled with 18 a little Grieg. Then the lights are lowered and out pirouettes C Caralo (née Mabel Rindsfoos) in the six dollars’ worth of green gauze. The Mlle. Rindsfoos, or Siy- nora Carola Caralo if you will, now waves her arms in the air, pi eight or ten times around the stage, comes back to stage centre, lifts up first her right leg, then her left ley. and—the piano professor suddenly stopping for a breathless moment agitates her rear by way of a big climax, at the end of the agitation dejecting herself upon the floor. This is symbolism indicating, cording to the one-sheet prog: that was printed in the window of Moe Levin's combination cigar and fountain pen store, the dismay of Aphrodite over the wanderlust of Zeus. What the rest of the dance recital is like, no one knows, as no one ever remains after the first num- ber except the ballerina’s aunt and uncle who, being members of the family, won't tell. The only variation in these recitals is to be found in the professional performances of German dancers, who, save in the instance of Mary Wigman and Harold Kreuzberg, are of such amplitudinous rears that. out of regard for the safety of the stage’s underpinnings, they have to eliminate from their routine the pos- terior agitations and dejections upon the floor and in the performances of Japanese dancers who substitute for the aforesaid agitations and dejec- tions the climacteric business of dashing madly to stage right w head down, body forward and y sol half opened, indicating the brav- ig of a strong gale, and then dash- ing even more madly to stage left and whipping the parasol open, s nifying the defeat of the Samurai the witches of the Loochoo Islands New York, however, has no monopoly on the dancing trade. There are horners-in in all parts of (Page 29, please) comicbooks.com