The British dance hall (1918-1939) and its present-day digital commemoration

Abstract

The traditional narrative surrounding the fate of the twentieth-century British dance hall goes something like this: after a period of heightened popularity in the 1950s the dance hall and dance culture went into a period of decline, and were ‘lost forever’, as James Nott argues, with Britain’s social and cultural life being ‘poorer for it’.

This thesis shows that key historical narratives at the heart of the inter-war dance hall experience – a multi-sensual modern experience of phantasmagoria, judgements concerning notions of ‘atmosphere’ in dance hall design, and dual, contradictory conceptions of the dance hall being at once a location of women’s emancipation while signifying male chauvinism and attempts of control – reappear in presentday social media communities, highlighting these communities as what Andrew Hoskins calls ‘digital memory ecologies’. Not only do we find these historical narratives reappearing on social media networks, but it is shown how they can be repurposed to suit present-day concerns.

The contribution is thus multi-faceted. An examination of life at the inter-war dance halls yields significant results. I identify the dance hall as an important location of the multi-sensual modern experience of phantasmagoria, expanding the parameters of where and for whom this experience was available, while arguing it contributed to changing conceptions of romance and intimacy in twentieth-century Britain. I argue that the ‘atmospheric’ design principles which came to define dance hall interiors were far from merely transposed from US cinema designs, as has been suggested, but were brought into these leisure venues in a highly variable form, while challenging established notions of middle-class taste. I argue that reactions to the infamous dance the Lambeth Walk reveal a modern nation coming to terms with its national identity in an increasingly culturally fragmented and diffuse world, and that the dance hall represented not only an unrivalled location of women’s emancipation in 1920s and 1930s Britain, but it was also a centre of male chauvinism and the increasing freedom women claimed resulted in a backlash on the part of those anxious at the pace of change.

The subsequent online commemoration of the dance hall in the present represents an important digital ‘site of memory’ (Pierre Nora) and ‘digital memory ecology’ (Andrew Hoskins), reproducing and reconfiguring these themes through digital communicative networks. The British dance hall was thus not ‘lost forever’ after the 1960s, but continues to play a significant role in the historical memory of twentieth-century Britain.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Benjamin Francis Giordano: orcid.org/0000-0002-5620-7532

ORCID for Heidi Armbruster: orcid.org/0000-0002-5630-5896

ORCID for David Millard: orcid.org/0000-0002-7512-2710

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