Having Fun and Liberating Bodies through Dance: The Cancan Wars in 1860s Hungary

• In Event: Discourses of Liberation in Hungarian Nightlife, Popular Entertainment, and Mass Media, 1800-1940s

Abstract

By the contemporaries’ admission, the 1860s were the decade of “patriotism and ethnicity” in Hungary when with the return to constitutionalism, Hungarians were once again able to freely express themselves in the press and in the public. Parallel with these new liberties, which ultimately led to the 1867 Austro-Hungarian compromise which granted Hungary autonomy within the Habsburg Monarchy, another struggle was waged over the meaning of the dancing of the French cancan which tested expectations of acceptable behavior in public. The paper argues that countering conservative and nationalist condemnations of the new dance was part of a broader struggle for emancipation which extended into the realm of popular entertainment where the dancing of cancan encouraged the acceptance of a new set of bodily freedoms.

Author

• Alexander Vari, Marywood U