Dance marathons were a phenomenally popular fad during the manic 1920s and depressive 1930s. What began as a craze soon developed into a money-making business which lasted 30 years. Some 20,000 contestants and show personnel participated in these events; audiences, the majority women, totalled in the millions. "A Poor Man's Nightclub," dance marathons were the dog-end of American show business, a bastard form of entertainment which borrowed from vaudeville, burlesque, night club acts and sports.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dancathons,
By Patricia A. Savage (Schenectady, NY) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Dance of the Sleepwalkers: The Dance Marathon Fad (Popular Entertainment and Leisure Series) (Hardcover)
There's something mesmerizing and addictive about watching people on the fringe of existence, people pushed to the edge, people in dire straits or even close. In the 1920s and especially during the Great Depresssion of the 1930s, dance marathon fads played on this morbid fascination we have for people with hard-luck stories, people down on the luck, people at the end of their rope.With uncommon depth and insight, Frank M. Calabria analyzes audience responses to these weird spectacles, the painful agony of the competition, and the abusive treatment by walkathon show organizers and their emcees. This 1993 book also includes a wonderful collection of period photographs. As a former psychology professor, Calabria is qualified to present what is surely a unique analysis of the increasingly tortured conditions of contestants' emotion state as a dance marathon progressed. Reading Calabria's book, I suffered from an interesting paradox: throughout the descriptions of sleep-deprived, hypnotic exhaustion endured by the wretched "dancers," I found myself alert and eagerly turning to the next page.
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