Interruptions by inevitable petticoats: skirt dancing and the historiographical problem of late nineteenth-century dance

A craze for the skirt dance and for skirt dancing swept across the stages and dance floors and into the drawing rooms and schoolrooms of Europe and the United States of America during the 1890s. Individual skirt dance performers attracted mass fan bases and international celebrity status. The style became a characteristic of variety theatre programmes and was written into plays, musical comedies, pantomimes, skits and burlesques. Skirt dance lessons, instruction manuals and clothing brought the form into the class room and the domestic space. Fluctuating ideas concerning embodiment, gender and theatricality were embedded in each diverse, ephemeral performance of the skirt dance at the end of the nineteenth century.