This has been a hard post to write. When I read the description of The Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry, I was intrigued, particularly regarding the book’s claim to explore “economics that often foster inequality,” so I ordered a copy and read it cover to cover.
What I read infuriated me.
The author, Juliet McMains, was one of the top professional dancers in the United States and, it must be acknowledged, understands what she is talking about. Dancers may choose to pay the often exorbitant costs of ballroom dancing or may choose not to, but we are rarely surprised by them; a non-dancer is far more likely to be shocked at the notion of paying $3,000 for a gown but a dancer understands the costs associated with specialized worksmanship that appeals to a limited customer base and is less likely to be outraged at the notion of paying that much for a gown, even if she chooses not to purchase it. For someone with McMains’ experience to come off as critical of ballroom economics as she does, we cannot blame sticker shock.
I keep dancing around the issue without describing the book, so let’s get to it.
Preface
McMains begins by describing her own dance history, beginning with her training in ballet and performance dance in secondary school, then beginning ballroom and competing on the school team when she attended Harvard as an undergraduate. After completing her bachelor’s degree, she took a position at a Fred Astair studio that appears to have embodied the worst of all the chain studio stereotypes. She continued teaching and competing professionally even while attending graduate school, the continued moving around the country to pursue competition training and partnerships, until the biography abruptly ends with her partner quitting dance altogether and McMains’ own future uncertain.
Introduction
This section, brief though it is, gives us the key terminology to understand McMains’ work. An important, but ultimately secondary role, is to explain the mechanics of how dance sport competitions work: what is meant by pro-am, how judges are appointed, and so on. The primary purpose of this section is to explain Glamour, the key term that is central to McMains’ thesis of abusive and harmful practices in the dance industry.
I’d hoped to be able to use a quote here, but upon re-reading this section, I can’t find any place where McMains actually says, “Glamour is…” and defines the term. Rather, she describes Glamour’s components and methods of production, but seems unable to say what it truly is. It is possible that this is because McMains considers the term ephemeral, shifting to suit the industry’s needs and thus incapable of being defined. It is also possible that she is unclear on the concept herself, though given her strong academic background and dance background, I cannot accept that McMains is so ignorant regarding her core term.
Glamour, as McMains uses the term (with a capital G) refers to the processes used by the dance industry and its chief product. Glamour encapsulates all the ideals and dreams that sell dance lessons and that people claim to take away (pleasure, grace, class, socialization, spectacle, beauty, admiration, artistry, etc.) and all of the mechanisms that produce them (lessons, competitions, costumes, parties, performances, etc.). She goes into the history of glamour as an industry, including other social artifacts that have sold themselves through Glamour, such as the Zieffeld Girls from the early 20th century.
Having explained, if not defined, Glamour, McMains becomes critical of it, taking the stance she will maintain throughout the entire book. Her opposition to Glamour is based on three tenets:
1) Glamour is impossible to fully achieve.
2) The dance industry exists to sell Glamour.
(one can already see the problem McMains is driving at)
3) The dance industry is forced to engage in immoral practices in order to achieve point 2 while hiding point 1 from its patrons.
Chapter 1: The Glamour Machine
This chapter focuses entirely on the Dance Sport experience, from competitions to training, amateur and professional, dancer and judge. McMains not only describes in great detail what competitions are like, but delves into the history of Dance Sport in America in order to explain how things became the way they are.
The most interesting part of the chapter is the beginning in which McMains creates composite characters to represent each type of person who participates in Dance Sport. She claims none are solely anyone in particular, but rather are composites of people she’s met, though it’s obvious that one is clearly a stand-in for her. These characters are fascinating because they very clearly illustrate the difference between the image that Dance Sport projects (Glamour) and the harsh, comparatively ugly reality which underlies the image and is required to produce it. For example:
It’s been two years since Karen graduated from Yale, where she was very successful on the university ballroom dance team. Ballroom dancing had been her main activity in college, the haven where she found like-minded friends who would rather spend their Saturday nights dancing foxtrots and cha chas in an old ballroom than guzzling beer at a dorm party. Since graduation, she has been work at a small marketing firm in Manhattan and has grown progressively more obsessed with DanceSport competition. She spends all her disposable income on lessons, and most of her free time as well. If she’s not practicing ballroom, she’s taking class in ballet or flamenco. Her Korean immigrant parents don’t understand her interest in dnace and are unsure of its value in the American social system. They didn’t pay for their daughter to go to Yale and become a dnacer. She has been studying ballroom for only five years, and she recognizes her disadvantage compared to the Russian kids who started when they were five years old. Karen believes she could be just as good as they if only she had a partner, which is why she is here. Karen hopes that by dancing the pro-am scholarship, the highest level of pro-am competition and the only one in which amateurs can win money (which can only be used for additional dance lessons because teh check is written out to the student’s teacher), she will increase her visibility in the industry, improving her chances of landing an amateur partner. Despite its roots in social dance, DanceSport is not practiced informally in social settings. To participate, one must be in a partnership – an agreement to train and compete together negotiated after several try-outs. Competitors do not dance casually or indiscriminately with friends or acquaintances – partners dance only with each other. There is no DanceSport practice session where one can drop in alone expecting to dance with whoever is available. In between partners, amateurs can only continue their training if they take pro-am lessons. Professionals have even fewer choices and between partnerships are likely to dance only with their students. Partnershpi searches may constitute a significant portion of a competitor’s career.
The problem with McMains’ claims is that she’s wrong. There are many Dance Sport competitors who dance socially as well as competitively. There are competition partnerships that meet social dancing (I’m in one right now). While between partners one is not required to compete pro-am; true, lessons will focus on your skills and technique rather than the partnership, but that’s not a bad thing. In fact, that’s why many amateur partners continue taking individual lessons.
This type of negative focus is characteristic of McMains’ book. She seems convinced that there is one way to approach Dance Sport, and that is her way, the Glamourous way, a way that she doesn’t like. With another of her composite characters, McMains notes, “It was eight months before Misty accidentally stumbled into a National Dance Council of America competition and began to realize that DanceSport extended beyond the dominion of Fred Astaire Studios.” It seems like McMains has yet to realize that dancing extends beyond her path.
Chapter 2: Representations of Social Dance: A Genealogy of Improvisation
In this chapter McMains criticizes social ballroom dancing in general for being false and lacking in improvisation. These are criticisms we have heard before and responded to.
McMains goes beyond criticizing the aesthetic of practiced social dance, however, and attacks the system that produces it. The reason, she says, social ballroom relies on patterns and practiced technique is because one cannot sell improvisation. If dance students were told they could do what they wanted, what would dance teachers sell? How can you sell lessons if what one teaches is irrelevant?
There are two problems with this view. The first is that improvisation can be taught, or at least encouraged. Anyone who’s ever taken an advanced class in hip hop, salsa, Argentine tango, or west coast swing, or even a beginner class in contact improv is aware of this, and anyone who’s ever gone social dancing on a crowded floor is aware of just how much ballroom dancers do improvise. The second probelm is that even if ballroom dancing had no improvisation whatsoever, that doesn’t invalidate it as a form of social dance. Folk dancing contains no improvisation, but folk dances are the oldest dance forms of social dance we know and are still practiced today by millions of people.
It is in this chapter that we begin to see that McMains truly has an axe to grind. She’s trying to make ballroom dancing into something else, but she’s doing so without taking the time to understand what it is – something I find very strange given her status as a national rising star finalist. What she’s trying to do, however, doesn’t become clear until the fourth chapter.
Chapter 3: Brownface: Representations of Latinness in Latin Dance
This chapter is actually an expansion of an article McMains published in 2001 in The Social and Popular Dance Reader. It is both simultaneously the most and least interesting chapter in the book, in that it presents a fascinating history but doesn’t say much of particular relevance.
McMains goes into the history of Latin dancing and how various South American dances were co-opted by the ballroom dance community, then distorted in such a way as to be scarcely recognizeable. Her descriptions of Afro-Cuban cha cha and rhumba and Brazillian samba are fascinating but leave me saying, “so what?”
Her main contention is that the dance we call “cha cha” isn’t real cha cha and is so different from Afro-Cuban cha cha that we should all be outraged. To be fair, this is an argument I’ve heard before, particularly from the Brazillian community regarding samba, and they are justified when a dance that is a cultural icon is taken, altered, and presented as authentic. It must be acknowledged that the ballroom Latin dances have very little in common with traditional Latin dancing, which may explain why outside of competitions they are rarely danced to actual Latin music.
Still, this argument always leaving me with a, “so what?” feeling. So ballroom rumba is different from Afro-Cuban rhumba – so what? In what way does that invalidate ballroom rumba as a dance? So ballroom samba bears little resemblence to Brazillian samba – does that mean one cannot or should not dance ballroom samba? The ballroom Latin dances are unique styles and if they lack historical legitimacy, that doesn’t mean they lack artistic legitimacy. If one enjoys the feeling of dancing ballroom cha cha or the visual aesthetic of watching ballroom tango, how is that a problem?
McMains seems to ignore the whole question of value. Her argument is based on historical authenticity and she does at last present a solution rather than a complaint. She recommends that dancers who want to learn authentic Latin dancing study salsa, though she points out the “disturbing” trend of salsa teachers becoming more like ballroom teachers. Curiously, she ignores the history of salsa, which evolved in New York City and is not a truly authentic Latin dance.
Chapter 4: Exceeding the Limits of Competition: Innovations in Theatrical Ballroom Dance
In the final chapter McMains presents some of her ideas for improving the world of ballroom dancing. Of all the chapters in the book, while I disagreed with this chapter more than any other I found that I supported her ideas more than any other section.
McMains presents some examples of creative approaches to ballroom dance in the exhibition category of competitions and then illustrates how dancers and choreographers attempted to transition these dances out of the ballroom and into theaters. While the pieces she cites are intriguing, she seems to be missing the point. Early on, in the first chapter, McMains describes a ballroom competition by saying, “competitors and audience memebrs continually exchange places, furhter blurring the dubious distinction between observer and observed.”
This is one of the greatest strengths of ballroom, and one of its appeals. The rise of performance dance – by which I mean ballet, jazz, contemporary, etc. – has created the notion that some people are dancers and some are not. Likewise, many of these performance dances have become so esoteric and technical in terms of their artistry that they are all but inaccessible to the common viewer. The advantage of ballroom is that anyone can take a class or lessons and then go out for a fun night of social dancing. Ballroom dance can have an audience, though it is not required to have one, and an audience can appreciate the aesthetic of the dances without having a formal training in said dance. Most of McMains’ suggestions seem to be aimed at making ballroom more theatrical, which I believe would lead ballroom into the same ghetto that performance dances are in: unaccessible to anyone except their practitioners and (mostly) incomprehensible to anyone except their small elite group of patrons.
My Impressions
McMains has some very strong points about problems in the dance industry. She is right that advancement in Dance Sport is often impossible to anyone who isn’t prepared to spend thousands of dollars on the sport, but what she fails to acknowledge is that that range is largely limited to Dance Sport’s super-athletes. For a social dancer who has no interest in competing, such an investment is hardly necessary. For a casual competitive dancer or a collegiate dancer, one cna participate at far less cost.
Is ballroom seductive? Absolutely. Who doesn’t dream of being the next Johnathan Roberts or Yulia Zagoruychenko? But why does that mean we must be these super heroes in order to enjoy dancing? One can enjoy singing karaoke at a bar without insisting on winning American Idol, so why shouldn’t one be able to enjoy ballroom dancing, even competitive dancing, without an insistence on being the Best There Is? By definition there can only be one Best and most of us aren’t going to be it, so we’d better find another reason to enjoy dancing.
I belive McMains’ blinders come from being burnt out on dancing. Her background was performance dance, her early experiences competitive, her later experiences professional, and it seems that sacrificing so much for the sake of competition became too much for her. Not only has she been living in the high-stakes world of upper-echelon professional ballroom dance for most of her dance career, but she never got to experience the lower echelons. McMains’ was never a pure social dancer so she doesn’t know what it’s like to consider oneself a social dancer. Her beginning competition experience was for one of the top ballroom competition teams in the country – no small pressure there – so how could she not integrate that pressure into her dancing? And then it was only a brief period before she entered the professional world.
McMains went right to the top of the dance world without building a solid foundation of how to enjoy it. Is it any wonder her pleasure wound up on shaky grounds before crashing altogether?
The Glamour Addiction is a fascinating book for its insights into the reality of what Dance Sport is like in terms of what happens at competitions, how teachers spend their days, what competitors do between lessons, how the current system came to be the way it is, and so on. One should be very careful about the value judgments presented, however, and remember that they are presented by what appears to be a bitter and burnt out fomer star.
