Dancing Masters

An orchestra tinkled dreamily in the empty ballroom of the Hotel Waldorf, Manhattan. Empty? But no. For some 25 four-footed creatures glided over its glazed parquetry. The music stopped, the 25 four-footed creatures split apart, after the fashion of multiplying atoms, into 50 two-footed creatures. They were dancing masters of the U. S. gathered for their annual convention. Professor Philip N. Nutt, of Vineland, N. J., (in velvet plus-fours and silk stockings) waved his hand. The music began again.

“Glide, glide, glide, STEP, step.

“Glide, glide, glide, step, STEP.”

Was it the Esmeralda—that the orchestra played, apache dance of children’s parties, to whose rhythm plump little girls have danced with skinny little boys through generations of summer afternoons while pink palms grew moist and socks crept slowly down to form a wad at the heels of minute dancing slippers? Not at all. The dance was the odious “Charleston,” condemned by all dancing masters last year, now adopted in deference to popular taste, after vast modifications. No flourish of trumpets attends its innocent pattern. Dancing masters stand up straight; they do not lift their toes from the floor, or walked pigeontoed, box-angled, snake-hipped; 45 degrees to the right is the step, then 45 to the left.

Over the pedal deliberations of the convention presided Louis Chalif, President of the American Society of Teachers of Dancing. He, a graduate of one of the Russian Imperial ballet schools, onetime ballet master of the government theater at Odessa, is the founder of the famed Chalif Russian Normal School of Dancing, Manhattan —an establishment which has proved as remunerative as a tract of Florida real estate. Chalif is plump, prosperous, vigorous. His face invariably displays the bland amiability of one who is pleasantly stupefied by recent exertion. Once Pavlowa saw him perform.

“What do you think of my dancing?” he asked her.

“I admire your energy,” she replied.

Chalif proudly placed this clever compliment in all his advertisements.