Experiences in Dancing by Helen O. Storrow
November 18, 2024
Printed with permission from the Girl Scout Museum at Cedar Hill. Originally printed in the 1938 issue of The Trail Maker, the magazine of the Massachusetts Girl Scouts 1933-1942.
Experiences In Dancing
By Helen O. Storrow
Helen Osborne Storrow in Silhouette 1936 Photo by Perdue Cleaver
It seems as if everyone who loves music and has a sense of rhythm, must like to dance, if given a chance. I cannot remember when I did not love to dance; indeed I must have been very young when I first went to dancing school. The opening bars of a quadrille or the lancers always brought me up on my toes, and the music of a waltz made me feel like floating in the air. Ballroom dancing, however, is dependent upon partners, and not being a belle, I never had enough of it. Then for years, after I married, I did not dance at all; it was not then much the fashion for married people to dance and my husband was too busy earning a living to go out often in the evening.
When I was about forty, a Women’s Athletic Club was formed in Boston, in which one of the activities was “Aesthetic Dancing.” I was asked to join a class, and for the first time felt the joy of moving freely to music. Dressed in our accordion pleated skirts, wearing ballet shoes, we swayed, leaped, kicked, pirouetted and “pas de Basqued” over the great expanse of the large gymnasium floor, with an abandon hitherto unknown to my conventionally brought-up generation. Mr. Gilbert, with his black skull cap on his bald head, showed us the simplified ballet steps, and we did our best to imitate him, not always gracefully, but with great earnestness. Filled with enthusiasm, I determined to take the summer course for teachers, and I still have my diploma, tied with white ribbon, in a drawer of my desk.
A young friend, Emma Wright, had come on from Auburn to take the course with me, and the following winter we started teaching classes at the North Bennet Street Industrial School. About this time I discovered that under Luther Gulick’s enlightened regime, the Physical Education Department had introduced Folk Dancing into the New York public schools. Emma and I went to New York to see what it was like. We were shown demonstrations in several of the schools, and while I was talking with the teachers, Emma made notes of the steps, and with all the assurance of ignorance, we began teaching folk dancing from these notes! Longing to share this new-found delight, I started classes for the teachers in several public schools, the Wells and Hancock Schools in Boston, the Bunker Hill School in Charlestown, the Pierce School in Brookline and an open class in Perkins Hall in the W. E. & I. Union. It was the first time dancing had been taught in the Boston schools.
For several years I taught four or five classes a week, and what rubbish I taught! Still, I do not regret it for I am sure it was a good thing to get teachers, tired with the daily routine of the class-room, into the assembly hall, where, with windows open, they frisked about for an hour like children. We rented a hall, where Emma held private classes, and two other young friends joined us.
In the meantime, we were constantly taking lessons of every teacher we could find. Our repertoire of folk dances grew, our technique improved, and always we enjoyed the work immensely. Russian, Polish, Scandinavian, Scotch, English, even Japanese were among our teachers. Miss Lucille Hill, who had done so much to improve the physique of Wellesley students, taught us “Natural Dancing,” to use our bodies in a more natural way, and was the first to show us the absurdity of our ballet training.
Mrs. Storrow with her dog, “Mr. Pepys” at Long Pond, 1920
Then came Mr. Cecil Sharp, the founder of the English Folk Dance Society, who had given years to collecting the old English songs and had incidentally discovered a wealth of old English dances that were fast disappearing. A musician of note and a student, the last thing he ever expected to do was to teach dancing, but the more researches he made, the more apparent it became that if these old dances and customs of England were to be preserved for future generations, he was the man who would have to preserve them, so he did it.
First he tried them out in his own family with his wife and daughters. His wife once told me that she could never engage a cook or a housemaid who was not willing to dance “to make up a set.” Then he introduced it into a club for underprivileged girls, and finally he founded the English Folk Dance Society. The Society grew rapidly; Oxford and Cambridge took up Morris and Sword dancing; mixed groups of young people met for Country Dancing. It became very popular.
Then came the war. All the young men joined the army, while the young women joined the V. A. D. or the Red Cross—so it happened that Mr. Sharp came to this country, primarily to direct the dancing in Granville Barker’s production of Midsummer Night’s Dream, but also with the hope of interesting Americans to form a branch of the Society.
Prof. George Baker of Harvard had become interested, having seen the dancing in England, and I had already joined the Society — the first American member. So we met Mr. Sharp and formed the American Branch of the E. F. D. S. with Mr. Baker as president, and me as vice-president. It was Mr. Sharp who finally shook the nonsense out of me, and showed me the beauty of simple natural movements. For three summers he held a summer school for us, bringing over several of his teachers, and also training Emma as an assistant.
The war came to us, so for several years our branch dwindled, but later it revived, and is now an active branch, with many centers in cities throughout the country. We hold a school every year, the last two weeks of August, at our old Pine Tree Camp on Long Pond, now called “Pinewoods Camp,” and a national festival takes place every May in New York.
As for Ballroom Dancing, when my four nephews began coming to college, I occasionally went to parties with them, and renewed my old love for this more formal type of dancing, but when the Turkey Trot and Jazz came in with its horrible raucous, blaring music, I thought it too disgusting, and stopped short going where I should hear or see it.
It was not until members of the Arthur Murray School of Ballroom Dancing came to Bermuda five years ago, that I realized the modern dances could be beautiful. I still object to much of the music, but even that I put up with, and have become an addict to the Fox Trot, the modern waltz and the Tango. They seem to my old eyes as charming, when danced well, as our old quadrille, lancers and waltzes did to my young eyes, and with a good partner, I enjoy an evening of dancing now, more than I ever did before.