Proms, parties and gender politics: amazing photos from American dancefloors – and what they tell us about a changing nation

From George Balanchine to the Rockettes, the US magazine regularly ran lavish photo spreads dedicated to dance, with the myriad ways people moved their bodies holding up a mirror to the shifting times Life magazine launched in 1936. Its aim: to show the US the world, in pictures.

From George Balanchine to the Rockettes, the US magazine regularly ran lavish photo spreads dedicated to dance, with the myriad ways people moved their bodies holding up a mirror to the shifting times Life magazine launched in 1936. Its aim: to show the US the world, in pictures. At a time when television was still an experimental medium, a golden age of photojournalism brought the outside world into people’s homes.

Life ran weekly until 1972, spanning a transformative time in US culture. Photographers were dispatched across the globe, covering wars, political manoeuvres, social trends, hemlines and Hollywood. And in December 1936, the magazine dedicated its cover feature to dance, with dancers from the new School of American Ballet gracing the front page.

As such a vividly visual medium, dance would become a regular feature in Life’s pages across the years. When I was asked to write the text for a new book featuring a collection of dance-themed images from the Life archive, it was a kid-in-a-candy-shop situation. For a dance fan there were some absolute gems to be found: the great George Balanchine crafting his ballet The Seven Deadly Sins – and cooking dinner in his Manhattan apartment; Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev taking New York in a piece headlined The Hottest Little Team in Show Biz; or an ageing Agnes de Mille going full-throttle in rehearsal.

But the archive told a much bigger story than that. It was fascinating to see the reflection of society through the way people danced: in ballrooms, nightclubs, proms and parties. In the array of social dancers: from the waltz and tango to the lindy hop, mambo, twist and the frug, themes of the 20th century play out.

You can see a story of growing individualism in the shift from structured couple dancing to going freeform on the dancefloor – gender politics, too, as it was out with “May I have this dance?” and in with the democracy of the disco. Life columnist Albert Goldman asked: “Has there ever been a decade for dance like the 60s?” as he wrote of a power shift from the stage to the dancefloor, from the professional performer to the “inventive amateur”. There’s the birth of the teenager, too, bringing an explosion of pop culture and spreading dance trends on TV shows such as American Bandstand.

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