Historian Walter Nelson will give a lecture on how 1920s and 1930s dance really was compared to modern distortions seen on TV and in film.
In the 1920s and 1930s, a greater proportion of the population was social dancing than at any time in history. Dancing happened almost anywhere people got together. The "Modern Dances" as they were called at the time were intimately intertwined with a sense of modernity. All around the globe, where people embraced the modern in art, architecture, technology, they also danced. This massive demand for dance created a vast infrastructure of dance venues to support it. However, despite its proximity to our own time and the ample evidence of how it was done, people today have a very distorted idea of how people actually danced at the time. Movies, TV, and "vintage dance" events almost never get it right.
This virtual presentation includes images and segments of film from the era to provide an overview of the importance of dance to the social scene in the age of Deco, the architecture that supported it, and the dances of the time. In an era when nearly everyone danced, they did dances almost anyone could do.
Please Note: This presentation will be hosted on Zoom and there will not be an in-person option. We will send out the Zoom credentials to ticket holders in advance of the event date.
About Walter Nelson: Walter has been involved in numerous aspects of public history for over forty years. He has lectured on topics such as Victorian etiquette, historical games, phrenology, historical costume, and the history of dance. He has appeared numerous times on the History Channel , Showtime, and A&E. Walter is also a lecturer on researching and recreating the social dances of the first half of the 20th Century, using films and images from the era as his principle source, and then using those sources to illustrate presentations and classes. He has lectured on this topic and led dance workshops all over California, as well as in the Washington DC area, Miami Beach, and Paris, France. Walter continues to be the energy behind successful recurring, long-running "Vintage Dance" programs such as the annual "Jane Austen Evening" and the "Avalon Ball" (both in southern California).