THE CAN CAN MOULIN ROUGE CANCAN FRENCH DANCE PARIS

THE CAN CAN

Art, music, dance, the stage - these are the kismet girls....

Any way you look at it, this is one of the greatest dances in the world. It is stylish, daring and provocative. The dancers really enjoy participating, they get a good workout and the males (and females) in the audience get a really stunning show of flashing dresses and frilly knickers to take home for their dreams.

The can-can (sometimes non-hyphenated as in the original French: cancan) is a high-energy and physically demanding music hall dance. Traditionally this is performed by a chorus line of female dancers who wear costumes with long skirts, petticoats, and black stockings. The main features of the dance are the lifting and manipulation of the skirts, synchronized with high kicking and suggestive, provocative body movements. The choreography must be good, as must the timing, so too the costumes. It helps if the girls performing are reasonably well matched in height and proficiency.

The cancan is now considered a part of world dance culture, and often the main feature observed today is how physically demanding and tiring the dance is to perform, but it still retains something of an erotic connotation for many. When the dance first appeared in the early 19th century, it was considered little more than a scandalous activity that young people indulged in, similar to how rock and roll would be perceived later in the 1950s. In the mid-19th century, when the dance was emerging from the working-class dance-halls into the mainstream, it was thought to be extremely inappropriate by "respectable" society. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the cancan was viewed as much more erotic because the dancers made use of the extravagant underwear of the period, and the contrasting black stockings. They lifted and manipulated their skirts much more, and incorporated a move sometimes considered the most cheeky and provocative—bending over and throwing their skirts over their backs, presenting their bottoms to the audience. The Moulin Rouge dancer La Goulue was well known for this gesture, and she had a heart embroidered on the seat of her drawers.

A Cancan dancer would sometimes stand very close to a man, and bet that she could take off his hat without using her hands. When he took the bet, she'd execute a high kick that would take off his hat - and give him a quick look at her underwear while she was at it. It was also a warning that anyone taking unwanted liberties with a dancer could expect a kick in the face.

It is a myth that the cancan was ever frequently danced without drawers. This mistaken belief has taken root probably because when the cancan first appeared in working-class dance halls in the 1830s, drawers were not a standard item of underwear. They were adopted in the 1850s because of the advent of the hooped skirt or crinoline. Initially drawers were of the "open" type, being essentially two tubes of material, one for each leg, and this is perhaps another reason for the myth. However, the Moulin Rouge management did not permit dancers to perform in such revealing garments.

Early editions of the Oxford Companion to Music defined the cancan as "A boisterous and latterly indecorous dance of the quadrille order, exploited in Paris for the benefit of such British and American tourists as will pay well to be well shocked. Its exact nature is unknown to anyone connected with this Companion." Hmmm, okay then, but what about the artistry?