The dark history of dance marathons

On 31 March 1923, Alma Cummings put her feet into a bowl of cold water. Then, tired-eyed but smiling obligingly for the photographer, she held up her dancing shoes. There were holes in both soles. Cummings had just finished a 27-hour stint of waltzing at a Manhattan ballroom, wearing out not just her shoes, but six male partners in the process. The dance instructor was one of the Americans responsible for a strange cultural phenomenon that swept the United States over the next two decades — dance marathons.

Cummings’s record was soon beaten and within a few years promoters were organising public competitions across the States in which couples danced for hours, days, months even, to win prize money. Some collapsed and even died in the process. In 1928, Gladys Lenz danced 19 hours straight at a Seattle marathon even after getting punched in the jaw by a partner who, newspapers reported, ‘went squirrelly’. Fatigue-induced psychosis was not uncommon among contestants. But after receiving $50 for coming fifth, while the winning couple waltzed off with $1,000, Lenz attempted suicide.

In 1933, Callum DeVillier and Vonny Kuchinski of Minneapolis took first prize in a marathon at Somerville, Mass, after dancing for five months. A headstone in the Showmen’s Rest section of Minneapolis’s Lakewood Cemetery reads: ‘DeVillier, World Champion Marathon Dancer 3,780 continuous hours.’ He and Kuchinski, subjects of the 2018 stage musical Dance ’Til You Drop, show up Strictly for the mimsy charade that it is.

But while endurance hoofing has long been seen as symptomatic of American desperation during the Great Depression of the 1930s, with poor folk battling for prizes sometimes worth more than a farmer’s annual income, dance marathons arose in the more optimistic and prosperous Roaring Twenties. They originated at a time when, like ours, humans were tentatively trying out a new move.