Atlanta Waltz Society

Atlanta Waltz Society
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Split Tree Home Page Updated: 3/28/2007

What about the challenge of dancing to some of AWS's special, wide range of waltz music? One regular waltzer emailed her thoughts about the joy of dancing with a partner to the same drummer: "In reference to the waltzes played, I love to hear a familiar pop tune and realizing it's a waltz. I also enjoy the challenging waltzes - especially if the leader and I are 'dancing to the same drummer'. If he is dancing to a 'different drummer', I'll dance his song... but it's the ultimate to hear the same thing as your partner, and be able to enjoy the dance with the music."

With the interest in our musical selections, we'll return to putting out playlists so you can mark your favorites and also less favorites for the non-playlist.
Editor: Email us your thoughts to share on waltzing. We love all dances and all music and honor the differences.

Says Goethe about waltzing, speaking as the hero in the German romance novel "The Sorrows of Young Werther": "Never have I moved so lightly. I was no longer a human being. To hold the most adorable

creature in one's arms and fly around with her like the wind, so that everything fades away...."

Or as a early 20th century dance historian put it: "Character, expression, spirit, passion--everything the new era [starting with the French revolution in 1789] demanded from the dance, it found in the waltz....For the first time in centuries a dance conquers the world without the sanction of the powers that be, of courts, of dancing masters, of France....At the end of 1791 an anonymous author in Berlin writes that 'the waltz and the waltz only is now so fashionable that one sees nothing else at dances; if you just know how to waltz, everything goes fine....'"

At the end of 1791 an anonymous author in Berlin writes that

'the waltz and the waltz only is now so fashionable that one sees nothing else at dances;
if you just know how to waltz, everything goes fine..."
Unusual European figurines of waltzing couples from the Split Tree waltz collection
(note the direction of the lady's gown, showing both left and right turns)
(Larger figurine, right, given to Richard Powers at Split Tree Waltz Weekend Nov. 2004)

''If you could dance with the days of your life,
if you could take life by the wrist and dance,
I think it would be a waltz.
Forward and back, sad and happy, high and low.''
from John Patrick Shanley's new play ''Sailor's Song,''
a romantic fable about a dreamy seaman grappling with the mysteries of love, death and destiny.

If you're interested in the basic ideas of partner dancing, here's a good lesson web link (from the ballroom world).
Link: http://www.ballroomdancers.com/Learning_Center/Lesson/. Many of the fundamentals apply to improvised, slower social waltzing, although from my experience fast turning waltz is another universe of dance where different rules apply. Since variety is our philosophy, we expect our new ballroom dance friends, Michael and Vanessa, to teach some of these moves and ideas soon. Also at this link, starting on the home page, are samples of slow (90 BPM) and Viennese (180 BPM) music.

Kind words from a new waltzer: "I have found the Atlanta dancing community to be composed of extraordinary people. I showed up at my first AWS dance a novice who knew almost nothing. I was greeted with smiling faces and offers of help. The experienced dancers were willing and eager to dance with me. I was surprised to find myself on the dance floor almost constantly. It didn't take me long to realize that I had discovered something special. The combination of friendly people, beautiful music and graceful, elegant dancing made an indelible impression on me. Now you know why I drive two hours to your dance." -- Many Thanks, Bob Bennett, Anniston, AL (by permission). AWS photos by Bob Bennett

Due to the diversity of our dance community, we normally do not take holiday breaks unless dancers stop coming. For fall 2005, we have voted to remain at Knights of Columbus ballroom and return to weekly waltzes each Sunday 2-6 pm. The price remains $5. We will send regular email reminders but please check our web page before each dance for updates in event of emergencies or studio unavailability and for the program, which evolves as we all learn more about our waltz heritage. We may explore new dance spaces during the coming year, always with adequate notice, and we welcome suggestions for low-cost wooden dance floors inside the perimeter.

As usual willing tutors of both genders will work with dancers new to 3/4-time partner dance during our 3-6 pm regular dance times. We can offer or recommend special lessons during the week if there is enough interest from beginners. However, we are not a commercial ballroom dance community but rather a social waltz community at this stage of our development. We can recommend workshops, teachers, and ballroom studios for those just starting to learn couples dancing.

We welcome new CDs with selected waltzes we can sample for the dancers and if enjoyed by most to add to our collection. We offer many folk and popular waltzes but we always push the edge with new and different 3/4 time music from all over the world in every style; most work, some do not. Our mission is to offer the highest quality and variety of waltz music from waltzing's more than 200-year history and to allow dancers to explore and extend the range of their waltzing abilities and to meet exciting dance partners in a safe social space free of smoke and alcohol. We sometimes play a little swing, tango, blues, foxtrot, Latin, Cajun, etc but our focus and interest is what it was from the beginning in July 2000 -- a dance with varied waltz music both live and recorded for any style of waltzing or dance steps that couples create together and safely share. Soon we should be ready to offer Atlanta an evening of the finest waltzing anywhere and we believe learning the basic rotary waltz to the faster tempos, such as Strauss wrote, is the first step in that direction.

Dean Paton, from "Night Work-The Waltz Book": "I had to keep reminding myself that almost all great waltzes, from Viennese epics to Parisian musettes, and even those commercially inspired pop waltzes from the first years of the Twentieth Century, were meant to be danced first and listened to as an afterthought. The composers set out to entice a connection between two people who had learned to twirl in tandem. Was it not Strauss who wrote, "Connection is the opiate of the waltzer"? From Night Work Press. Copies of Jane Candice Bullard's little waltz book are available at Split Tree dance store.

If old dance manuals or instruction books are of interest, go to a Library of Congress site,
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/dihtml/dihome.html. Learn how to avoid the evils of the sinful waltz, as our 19th century ancestors saw this dangerous, scandalous practice.

Waltzing couples in a Vienna Dance Hall (from Encyclopedia Britannica Dance History pages)

Says Goethe about waltzing, speaking as the hero in the German romance novel "The Sorrows of Young Werther":
"Never have I moved so lightly. I was no longer a human being. To hold the most adorable creature in one's arms and fly around with her like the wind, so that everything fades away...."
Or as a early 20th century dance historian put it: "Character, expression, spirit, passion--everything the new era [starting with the French revolution in 1789] demanded from the dance, it found in the waltz....For the first time in centuries a dance conquers the world without the sanction of the powers that be, of courts, of dancing masters, of France....At the end of 1791 an anonymous author in Berlin writes that 'the waltz and the waltz only is now so fashionable that one sees nothing else at dances; if you just know how to waltz, everything goes fine...."

Or as that famous Southern gentleman Rhett Butler put it: "You need to be
waltzed - and by someone who knows how."--paraphrase from Jeff J.

Dear Atlanta and area waltzers:
Enjoy this waltz poetry from the web page of a NYC musician, Bob January, who I'd like to consider bringing to Atlanta for our first Viennese Waltz Ball.
Waltz -- by Bob January, New York City
Link: www.bobjanuary.com
In 1919, H.L.Menken wrote

“The waltz never quite goes out of fashion;
it is always just around the corner;
every now and then it returns with a bang . . .
It is sneaking, insidious, disarming, lovely. . . .
The waltz, in fact, is magnificently improper..
the art of tone turned lubricious. . . ."

Austrian music scholar, Max Graf, wrote,
“If there exists a form of music
that is a direct expression of sensuality,
it is the Viennese Waltz...."

The WALTZ was a smash hit from the very start, mesmerizing its listeners into non-stop revelry. The waltz swept out of Germany in the middle of the eighteenth century to conquer all of Europe, inspiring an old German verse: “Whosoever the dance did discover/Had in mind each maid and lover/With all their burning ardor.”

The name of the waltz is taken from the Italian ‘volver’ - to turn, or revolve. It was an outgrowth of the ländler, a country dance in three-quarter time, and replaced the heavy hopping and jumping movements with more polished and graceful gliding.

It was, indeed, rural lads and lasses who first found these whirling steps so appealing. And so, the waltz originally was decidedly low-brow and provincial. In those days, there was something unsavory about a woman being gripped in a man’s embrace while whirling in a frenzy around the dance floor.

The close contact with one’s partners body contrasted sharply with the stately dances of the aristocracy - the minuets, polonaises, and quadrilles - in which one kept one’s distance. A first-hand account of a village dance in the latter part of the eighteenth century read “The men dancers held up the dresses of their partners very high so that they should not trail and be stepped on, wrapped themselves both tightly in the covering, bringing their bodies as closely together as possible, and thus whirling about went on in the most indecent positions....

As they waltzed around on the darker side of the room, the kissing and the hugging became still bolder. It is the custom of the country, I know, and not as bad as it looks, but I can quite understand why the waltz has been banned in parts of Swabia and Switzerland.”

Naturally, the scandalized upper classes could not endure to have the lower classes having all the fun, and so, in time, the waltz finally achieved a degree of legitimacy, yet not losing any of its basic appeal.

The Austrian music scholar, Max Graf, has written, “If there exists a form of music that is a direct expression of sensuality, it is the Viennese Waltz. It was the dance of the new Romantic Period after the Napoleonic Wars, and the contemporaries of the first waltzes were highly shocked at the eroticism of this dance in which a lady clung to her partner, closed her eyes as in a happy dream, and glided off as if the world had disappeared. The new waltz melodies overflowed with longing, desire and tenderness.”

These new waltz melodies could trace their ancestry back to the beer gardens of early eighteenth century Vienna, and to the rural inns and tavern situated on the outskirts of Vienna and on the banks of the Danube River. Traveling orchestras, some of them from the ships and barges that plied the Danube, whetted the Viennese appetite for this new dance, and the waltz craze soon reached epidemic proportions.

Into this dance-mad atmosphere stepped Josef Lanner and Johann Strauss the elder, both band musicians and both at one time members of the same orchestra. In the compositions of these two men the waltz gained sophistication and a distinctly Viennese light-hearted spirit.

A contemporary music critic, Eduard Hanslick, wrote that “You cannot imagine the wild enthusiasm that these two men created in Vienna. Newspapers went into raptures over each new waltz, and innumerable articles appeared about Lanner and Strauss.”

And when he visited he city in 1845, the composer Hector Berlioz, too, was struck with the passion for the waltz . “The Viennese youth abandons itself to its passion for dancing, a very real and delightful passion, which has led the Viennese to make a very real art of drawing-room dancing as far above the routine of our balls as the orchestra and waltzes of Strauss are superior to the polkas and strummers in the dancing salons of Paris. I have passed whole nights watching thousands on incomparable waltzers whirling about . . ."

Until his death in 1899 kept Europe whirling in blissful abandon. Even in 1919, H.L.Menken wrote: “The waltz never quite goes out of fashion; it is always just around the corner; every now and then it returns with a bang . . . It is sneaking, insidious, disarming, lovely. . . .The waltz, in fact, is magnificently improper-the art of tone turned lubricious. . . . There is something about a waltz that is irresistible. Try it on the fattest and sedatest or even on the thinnest and most acidulous of women, and she will be ready, in ten minutes, for a stealthy smack behind the door-nay, she will forthwith impart the embarrassing news that her husband misunderstands her and drinks too much and is going to Cleveland, O. on a business trip tomorrow.”

Yes, the waltz is irresistible-and exceptionally durable. In a world where the Mosh and the Monkey are popular social dances, and the macarena, line dances, and the chicken dance sometimes seem to be the only alternatives, the waltz still holds on tenaciously to a small part of our dancing lives, for its lilting strains never fail to evoke three pleasure dearest to the heart of civilized man – wine, women, and song!