The cancan , or Cancan , is a Danse, carried out (generally) by women in the Cabaret S at the end of the 19th century.

Origins

With Paris in 1850 Celestial Mogador, dancer high-speed motorboat of the Ball Mabille invents a new dance, the squares naturalist. Nini Pattes in the air drew from it probably the cancan. It was known as that it would have also taken as a starting point the dances of the washing machines which were diverted in Montmartre, Sundays, and showed their underskirts in fact split, even their mounaques.

If the type-setter Jacques Offenbach wrote his works (with the reputation long-lived and light) at this same time, the cancans which one wants to allot to him are only diversion of its pieces. The most famous case is that of the infernal gallop, resulting from sound Orphée to the Hells, that are often allowed the arrangers to re-elect in French-cancan in an abusive way. Offenbach would have entrusted besides to its close relations as of the beginnings that the cancan was not it for what he wrote, and which he was opposed to these interpretations. Confusion however persists mainly.

Rules

The rules of the cancan, by the fact that it is resulting from the popular culture, are rather flexible according to the dancers. There is besides no school which teaches it except that created by Nini Pattes in the air: that does nothing but take part in the scattering styles, intentions.

However, the principal figures settle durably. One can thus quote those from which the name is resulting from the military vocabulary: the wearing of weapons , the machine-gun , the attack , the not of load , or the childish plays: the leapfrog , puppies …
The unit remains uniform besides: an exclusively female dance, based on the famous step, gone up thigh and leg downwards, drawn on the poster opposite.

The image of the cancan

The cancan crystallizes the image of a frivolous and dirty Parisian company, near to that described caricaturalement in Parisian life of Offenbach. On a scene, women show their lower parts, raise their laces: the provocation interfered complicity makes fury.

Black bottoms, jarretelles and frou frou take very picturesque and largely sexually connoted nicknames. The cancan symbolizes in that a first outline of sexual release and emancipation of the woman, who is this time that which allures.

The Guide of the pleasures of Paris of 1898, as for him, gives this description of the dancers: an army of young girls who are there to dance this divine Parisian uproar, as its reputation requires it with an elasticity when they launch their leg in the air which lets to us predict of a moral flexibility at least égale.

See too

Internal bonds

• the film Cancan

External bonds

Random links:

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