Dominic Bliss lifts the curtain on the shocking history of France’s notorious dance…
The frilly skirts and petticoats, the long, bare legs, the high kicks, the cartwheels, the feathered headgear, the yelps, the risqué underwear… all to the accompaniment of Jacques Offenbach’s famously frenetic piece of music, Galop infernal. Surely no dance exists that’s more quintessentially French than the can-can? Initially a form of rebellion, later a national symbol and more recently in some opinions, at least – a bit of a cliché, this energetic, almost Bacchanalian art form has shocked, thrilled and titillated spectators in equal measure. There’s no denying it: it’s now a symbol of national culture, as French as the Eiffel Tower and La Marseillaise.
No one is quite sure how the can-can originated. Most experts agree it evolved from a dance for four couples called the quadrille, but it was also influenced by foreign dance forms, such as the Spanish fandango. Dr Clare Parfitt, of the London Contemporary Dance School, believes it emerged from a dance called the chahut, an improvised, working-class version of the quadrille. The name can-can is probably derived from old French slang for malicious gossip.
Lautrec_moulin_rouge,_la_goulue_(poster)_1891
Initially, in the 1820s, it was performed by couples in the working-class dancehalls and cabaret clubs of Paris. By the start of the 20th century, it had developed into the chorus line of frilly female dancers we are so familiar with today at clubs such as the Moulin Rouge. In the original clubs, young middle-class men, often clerks or students, would try to pick up working-class girls, using vigorous dancing as a sort of mating ritual. The high kicks and other athletic moves appealed to their sense of rebellion against the bourgeois classes they hailed from. “In the late 1820s, the authorities became concerned about the can-can and its predecessor the chahut,” says Parfitt, who is about to publish a book called The Kinetics of Memory: Popular Dance Between France and the Atlantic World. “Policemen were circulating the dancehalls looking for people to arrest on indecency charges because they were improvising beyond the set choreographies of the quadrille. There was a rebellion against bourgeois ways of comporting oneself.”
Façade du Moulin Rouge – verticale ©Philippe Wojazer – Moulin Rouge®
There’s even evidence that some of the female dancers wore pantalettes with an open crotch on stage, which rendered those high kicks even more risqué. It’s not unreasonable to view the can-can as a 19th-century version of pole dancing. A book published during this period described the dance in all its glorious detail: “They are off! It is a helter-skelter of bewildering dash, of electrifying enthusiasm. One dancer leans languidly over, straightening himself again with vivacity; another races the length of the ballroom, stamping with pleasure. The girl darts by as if inviting a fall, winding up with a saucy, coquettish skip; that other passes and repasses languidly, as if melancholy and exhausted; but a cunning bound now and then, and a febrile quiver, testify to the keenness of her sensations and the voluptuousness of her movements. They mingle, cross, part, meet again, with a swiftness and fire that must have been felt to be described. It is a total dislocation of the human body, by which the soul expresses an extreme energy of sensation… a superhuman language, not of this world, learnt assuredly from angels or from demons.”
Inevitably, given the can-can’s notoriety, many dancers became legendary. One once leapt from the balcony at the Paris Opéra into the orchestra pit to win a bet. Another, Brididi, was double-jointed, and famous for spinning his arms wildly, like a windmill. The most famous can-can dancer of the 1840s was Céleste Mogador. According to David Price, author of the 1998 book Cancan!, she was the illegitimate daughter of a courtesan, plying her trade as a Parisian prostitute until a wealthy client paid off her debts and allowed her to become a full-time dancer. Then there was Nini-la-Belle-en-Cuisse (Nini, the beauty with thighs). In his book, Price says Nini “gained her nickname… by walking the length of the dance floor on her hands, showing to everyone that she was wearing no drawers”. He adds: “A policeman watching was so overcome by this spectacle that instead of arresting her he exclaimed: ‘Cré Dié! Les belles cuisses!? and Nini’s future was assured.”
Cancan ©PhilippeWojazer – Moulin Rouge
CABARET STARS
The late 1890s saw dancers such as Louise Weber and Jane Avril at the newly opened Moulin Rouge on Paris’s Boulevard de Clichy. The former earned her nickname La Goulue (The Glutton) through her fondness for guzzling the drinks of cabaret guests. The latter suffered from a disorder called Sydenham’s chorea, characterised by nervous tics and jerky movements – all adding to her can-can skills.
By the late 1850s, a dancer called Rigolboche was drawing crowds to Paris’s Casino Cadet. “She said that she was attacked by a form of madness when she danced, and that the music affected her so much that she became drunk, as if on champagne,” Price explains in his book. Rather too fond of cigars, rum and absinthe, she had several aristocratic lovers, one of whom once persuaded her to saunter completely naked across the Boulevard des Italiens. One of Rigolboche’s peers and rivals was Finette, who was originally from Réunion Island. She achieved notoriety for her grands écarts (jump splits) and extra-high kicks, with which she would knock the hats off gentleman spectators.
ITS APPEAL SPREADS
There are several highly athletic moves key to the can-can. As well as the grand écart, there is la roue (cartwheel), le battement (high kick), le rond de jambe (rotation of the lower leg) and le port d’armes (turning on one leg while holding the opposite ankle). By the second half of the 19th century, the can-can had danced its way across the Channel. One of the better-known British performers was Sarah Wright, aka Sarah the Kicker or Wiry Sal, whose exploits so shocked the authorities that in 1870 they forced one of the theatres where she performed to forfeit its licence. Around the same time, a quartet of male can-can dancers called the Quadrille des Clodoches was scandalising audiences in Paris and London. One wore a Scotsman’s kilt, another dressed as a fireman and the other two wore drag.
Soon this contagious dance had been exported further afield, even as far as North America. Parfitt explains how, in the final years of the 19th century, the Klondike Gold Rush in the Yukon proved fertile ground for dancers. “There was a huge influx of young men for the gold rush. Can-can dancers saw the opportunity and went there to entertain the men.” Interestingly, the can-can culture has remained in the Yukon. When Parfitt visited the territory’s capital, Whitehorse, the town mayor told her he had always believed the can-can was a Canadian invention, and had no idea it had originated in France. “That’s how embedded it became as part of the culture,” she says.
Cancan 1889©Moulin Rouge®
Meanwhile, back in France, during the Third Republic, the can-can had become so emblematic that politicians began to claim it as the national dance. Its reputation was further cemented – both at home and abroad when it featured in famous paintings by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Georges Seurat and Pablo Picasso, and in Émile Zola’s novel, Nana. More recently, it has played a starring role in movies such as John Huston’s Moulin Rouge (1952), Jean Renoir’s French Cancan (1955), and the 1960 Frank Sinatra and Shirley MacLaine musical film, Can-can.
IN PARIS TODAY
But it was Baz Luhrmann’s sumptuous 2001 musical film Moulin Rouge! that really placed this dance in the global consciousness. It starred Nicole Kidman as a can-can-dancing courtesan and Ewan McGregor as a struggling young writer who falls in love with her. But where can one see the can-can performed live nowadays? Paris is still your best bet. Paradis Latin, for example, in the 5th arrondissement, features the dance in its cabaret show, as does La Nouvelle Eve, in the 9th.
But it’s the Moulin Rouge, on Boulevard de Clichy, which is perhaps most impressive. Twice every evening, it stages its cabaret show, Féerie, in four acts. The climax, naturally, is a wonderful rendition of the can-can in all its frilly glory. “A whirlwind of feathers, sequins and rhinestones,” is how they describe it. Happily, it’s just as exciting, just as energetic and just as risqué as it was back in the 1800s.
From France Today Magazine
Lead photo credit : Henri_de_Toulouse-Lautrec
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