Customer Reviews

Dance of the Sleepwalkers: The Dance Marathon Fad (Popular Entertainment and Leisure Series)

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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.