Bop till you drop: the staggering true stories behind America's dance marathons | Stage
In 1933, 14-year-old Anita O’Day went home to her Chicago apartment and told her mother that she was dropping out of school to go dancing. For 24 hours a day, seven days a week. She was to be part of an endurance spectacle that had taken a feverish grip on the nation, the dance marathon, where couples would dance non-stop for days, weeks, even months, to try to win a huge cash prize. “They feed you seven times a day and see that you get free medical care,†she told her mother, which proved good selling points in a time of severe financial crisis.
For O’Day, a “professional†contestant who had answered an ad in Billboard magazine and sang numbers with the band for extra cash, this was the beginning of a lauded jazz singing career. For others, the dance marathon remains the embodiment of Depression-era desperation, serving up suffering as entertainment and exposing the lengths to which people will go when they’ve got nothing to lose, just for the glimmer of financial redemption.
O’Day’s marathon career came to an end two years later when a truant officer spotted her and sent her back to school. Her last big event was in Springfield, Illinois, where she and her partner danced for 97 days, covering 4,656 miles in 2,328 hours. They came second.
The dance marathon was a short-lived phenomenon that has lingered long in the popular imagination. Its most famous fictional incarnation is Horace McCoy’s 1935 novel, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, and Sidney Pollack’s film adaptation, from 1969, with an Oscar-nominated performance from Jane Fonda.
McCoy had worked as a bouncer on Santa Monica pier, where marathons were held, and that experience formed the basis for his story of a naive young couple, Robert and Gloria, who escape from the problems of the world outside into a world of competition that turns out to be just as brutal.
Simone de Beauvoir called it America’s first existentialist novel, and the slim book’s story has remained potent. It’s been transferred to the theatre â€" Northern Stage made an atmospheric production in 1995 â€" and its theme has continued to inspire, whether in choreographer Arthur Pita’s Nobody’s Baby (2014), Alexander McQueen’s spring 2004 catwalk or one of the best episodes of noughties drama Gilmore Girls.
Now the dance marathon has inspired a new theatre piece, No Miracles Here, which opens at the Edinburgh fringe this summer. It was created by young Newcastle company The Letter Room, six actor-musicians who devise theatre pieces around live music. They started with the idea of depression, but this time it was not to do with a tanked economy, but with mental health.
“We were talking about how sometimes when you’re depressed it’s like, ‘I’ve just got to keep going, don’t stop, don’t stop’,†says performer Meghan Doyle. The idea of desperation and hope that’s embedded in the marathon reeled the group in. However, they’re not making a period piece, but drawing on music that got people’s feet moving throughout the last century, particularly Northern Soul. For them, this is not just a story of endurance but one with a more positive message of finding a community on the dancefloor. “The highs and lows of it,†says Doyle. “How dancing just makes you feel so alive, that’s the feeling we wanted to capture.â€
The company will be boogying non-stop throughout the show, as well as playing their instruments, although only two of the six are experienced dancers. The others, well ... “That phrase ‘dance like no one’s watching, that’s Stanâ€, says Doyle, pointing to fellow performer Stan Hodgson. “Napoleon Dynamite is probably my dancing spirit animal,†Hodgson agrees. In the show, they will only be dancing for an hour, whereas the original dance marathons lasted for hundreds of hours. “But maybe by the last day of the fringe we might feel close to that,†says Doyle.
No Miracles Here is a world away from the marathons of the 1930s, but there is a connection in its north-east provenance, because the history of dance marathons actually begins not in the US but in Sunderland, where on 18 February 1923, Olie Finnerty and Edgar Van Ollefin set a record by dancing seven hours without stopping. It was part of a broader 1920s craze for all sorts of record-breaking feats â€" flagpole sitting, endurance kissing, egg eating, gum chewing â€" with Americans in particular keen to prove their prowess in pointless occupations.
Twelve days after Finnerty and Van Ollefin’s modest feat, Alma Cummings took the lead by dancing for 27 hours at the Audubon Ballroom in New York, and a frenzy of competitors across the US were inspired to challenge her. Within a couple of months the record was broken almost daily, rising to 56 hours, 69 hours, 82 hours, and the first voices of disquiet about this “dancing plague†began to emerge, especially after a man called Homer Morehouse died of heart failure after dancing for 87 hours.
“A dance epidemic always precedes national disaster, as clouds precede a storm,†Mina Van Winkle of the Washington DC police told the New York Times. And disaster was indeed looming: in 1929 Wall Street crashed, unemployment and poverty set in and savvy promoters turned this entertainment phenomenon into a kind of Darwinian theatre, and a grim profit machine.
In this professionalised era, marathons, or walkathons, would move from town to town like the circus. Prize money reached into the thousands but, regardless of winning, dancers would at least be provided with food and shelter as long as they were there. Rules began to be standardised, generally giving couples 15 minutes’ rest per hour, meaning that the competitions could last much longer, up to 12 weeks. Dancers reported hallucinations but as long as they were on their feet, moving with their partner, they stayed in.
With competitions lasting so long, things had to be kept entertaining. Elimination sprints, or “grindsâ€, were introduced, with couples running circuits around the dancefloor, sometimes blindfolded, chained together or running backwards. There were stunts such as being “frozen aliveâ€, with competitors encased in blocks of ice and paid a dollar a minute for as long as they could last, plus whatever money the audience threw on the floor in encouragement. Medical staff were on hand, partly for safety, but partly for theatre, to maximise the feeling of peril.
There were live bands and singers, sketches, raffles, mud-wrestling even. A raft of professional marathoners such as O’Day emerged, hoping to use the exposure to launch their showbiz careers. Soapy dramas, rivalries and love affairs would develop between hammed-up characters on the dancefloor. Some couples would go from venue to venue, pretending to meet on the dancefloor, fall in love and get engaged, with fake (and sometimes real) weddings taking place in the ballroom and the couple bagging lucrative wedding presents from the crowd.
It was a world of artifice and opportunism, desperate escapism and just plain desperation. And did anybody ever get the fabled grand prize money? That’s not always clear. But what’s interesting is that the audience weren’t completely being conned. They knew there was fakery and they enjoyed the pretence, but they also knew that the blisters, the sweat, the exhaustion were all real.
As Carol Martin says in Dance Marathons, her excellent history of the phenomenon: “Dance marathons presented life lived as theatre. Spectators simultaneously believed and disbelieved. It was a position Bertolt Brecht would have appreciated: the enjoyment of an aesthetic phenomenon only partly masked as a real-life event.â€
That world may seem alien and inhuman to us now, but arguably its essence has flourished more than ever in the last couple of decades, to be found in the form of reality TV. Taking pleasure in other people’s discomfort is the cornerstone of I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!, where competitors eat bugs and entrails for our entertainment, and are pushed to the edge of madness with tiredness and hunger. In Big Brother, characters play to the camera, forming factions and having rivalries and love affairs. In 2004’s Shattered, contestants had to stay awake for seven days in the hope of winning a £100,000 prize fund. Touch the Truck (2001) required them to hold on to an expensive vehicle, and the last one standing got to take it home.
All of these shows offer viewers the chance to goggle at the trials of others from the comfort of their living room. But the endurance challenge pulls people off the sofa too, in the fast-growing business of ultramarathons and Ironman triathlons. In what is, relatively speaking, a time of material comfort, we’re still gripped by the idea of pushing ourselves beyond normal human barriers, or at least watching other people do so.
“There was that famous image recently of the guy carrying the other guy across the line at the London marathon,†says Doyle, just as triathlete Alistair Brownlee did for brother Jonny in Mexico. It’s the equivalent of the photos of exhausted dance marathon couples holding each other up on the dancefloor, she points out, with the audience willing them to just get over the line. “We like that idea that someone coming to see our show would have that same will for a character,†says Hodgson. “That they’d be shouting, ‘Come on, just get through this!’â€
No Miracles Here is at Northern Stage at Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 26 August
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