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The progress of dance in America has been bedeviled by labels affixed to it by the early white settlers-largely Puritans laboring hard to make the colonies inhabitable (by then standards) and Christian. Dancing was frivolous and potentially sinful. Increase Mather's thirtypage tract "An Arrow Against Profane and Promiscuous Dancing Drawn out of the Quiver of the Scriptures" made it clear in 1665 that men and woman mingling in dance might be tempted to mingle in other, even less acceptable ways.
The charges of frivolity and time-wasting didn't entirely squelch dancing done for enjoyment and to let off steam. In the eighteenth century, working people in cities performed their reels and jigs in taverns. Among the upper crust, knowledge of the steps of the minuet and the patterns of the cotillion were mandatory (George Washington showed himseh as an adept dancer at a ball in New York days after his inauguration as the country's first president). It was when French dancing masters expanded from teaching ballroom steps into giving ballet lessons, and variety shows began to flourish, that ministers worked themselves up more strenuously about sinfulness.
Professional women dancers took most of the heat. Surely no decent woman would wear skirts so short! And while men ballet dancers in nineteenth-century America weren't denigrated, as they were in France by such influential critics as Théophile Gautier and Jules Janin, for being aU too unappetizingly and stolidly male in a gossamer world, they were largely ignored.
The men who made a decent living as dancers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were those who used their feet like tools and didn't wave their arms around and strike attitudes. The popular white choreographer-performer John Durang (who maintained a wife and ten theater-sawy children) initially made his name with his solo hornpipe, while the African-American minstrel William Henry Lane (known as Master Juba) thrilled London with his nimbleness and quickness of foot. It's not clear exactly when the charge of effeminacy first began to be leveled at male dancers, or when a boy studying ballet might be labeled a sissy (a term not always a euphemism for homosexuality). But tap dancers, black or white, largely escaped the labeling. They were showing you their intricate steps with concentration and frank enjoyment,-...