A Short History of Cancan
Can you still be a respectable woman if you dance so hard and kick so high that your underwear shows?
Valencienne Zeta is a baron’s wife, and not at all the sort of woman who dances the cancan with ladies of the night to entertain a crowd. At least not at first.
When we meet Valencienne in Act One of Austro-Hungarian composer Franz Léhar’s 1905 operetta The Merry Widow, she’s at a party in Paris celebrating the birthday of the Grand Duke of Pontevedro, a poverty-stricken Balkan principality. Although she is content in her marriage, Valencienne's husband is the ambassador of the impoverished Pontevedro. And he is preoccupied with finding a Pontevedran to marry a recently widowed woman with a sizable fortune who also happens to be in Paris. Finding a match for this widow before she falls in love with some French guy is the primary plot of the operetta. But while Valencienne’s husband is busy insisting the widow’s love life is an important matter of state, Valencienne becomes the object of one such Frenchman’s affections.
Camille de Rosillon has been flirting with Valencienne all night at the party, lavishing her with attention her husband doesn’t grant her. But when Camille writes, “I love you,” on her fan, Valencienne pulls back a little, insisting (in song!) that she is a “respectable wife.” Her story is about her flirtations with that line between respectable wife of a man who barely notices her and the kind of woman who would cheat on her husband with a sweet-talking man she meets in Paris.
Valencienne is caught in that universal struggle between the comfortable life she knows and the idea that there’s something more exciting to be found elsewhere. As the story unfolds, Valencienne loses her fan with the incriminating message. When it makes it to her husband, he doesn’t even recognize it as his wife’s. Camille, however, persists. To keep temptation at bay, she offers Camille up as a potential match for the wealthy widow. This, she finds, isn’t easy because it’s quite nice having a fellow’s attention.
Valencienne almost gets caught with Camille in a gazebo at a garden party. But even that fails to steer the Baron’s attention toward his wife. Then, in Act Three, Valencienne—in the throes of the one wild night she’s allowing herself—jumps in with the sex workers known as grisettes and dances the cancan in front of all her friends and husband’s colleagues.
The Merry Widow is a romantic comedy operetta and has been adapted into movies and performed all over the world. It’s about the wild, fun life that Paris was known for internationally. I happened upon it when researching the history of cancan for my novel Complications in Paris. My protagonist’s favorite pastime is cancan dancing in dance halls, an activity that they didn’t have back in her small, conservative hometown in upstate New York. I chose cancan because it’s so French and also considered racy in that very French way. In The Merry Widow, which is largely a celebration of Parisian culture, the dance is both the epitome of naughtiness but also liberated fun.
The cancan—also known as the polka piquée, the chahut, and the quadrille naturaliste—originated in working-class dance halls in the 1830s. It was an amateur, spontaneous, disorganized quadrille that involved closer bodily contact between partners and lively kicking. Men did most of the high kicking at first because women’s skirts made it difficult. As fashion changed and women’s skirts became less structured and more frilly, the women started kicking too. During the Second Empire, cancan started evolving from a popular participatory activity into a spectacle with star performers. These women were often, like many performers of the day, courtesans who relied on support from wealthy, often married men. This was when the cancan went abroad, becoming a symbol of France with traveling shows in more conservative places, like Russia and the United States.
The liberated French attitude toward sex has been both criticized and adored by foreigners since England and France stopped fighting in 1802. British men visiting Paris encountered women scantily clad compared to what they were used to. Cabarets in Paris featured shows with more nudity and sexual content than would be tolerated in mainstream venues elsewhere. This image of Paris as a liberated, carefree, culture of loose morals was a popular theme in ballets and operettas like The Merry Widow. Cancan, because the women lift their skirts, was a part of this image. Moralists have criticized the cancan because it was liable to reveal underwear and maybe even private parts. And this perception of cancan bolstered the image of Paris as the licentious center of immorality.
After the Paris Commune in 1871, cancan and the cancan courtesans fell out of favor in high society. By the turn of the century, the cancan stars were replaced by the choreographed chorus line group performances that are still popular today. But the working class, whose lives hadn’t changed much with the political winds, kept the cancan alive in the public dance halls. This is where my protagonist encounters it for the first time.
The cancan—with its high kicks and cartwheels and flying splits—glorifies femininity, and its history runs right alongside that of the changing role of women in society. But it also pushes against the boundaries of acceptability. Who can blame Valencienne for wanting to try it, with a husband who has barely noticed that Camille has been all over her?
The dance does get his attention, and he eventually realizes the fan belongs to his wife, who has been the object of another man’s affection. When the Baron confronts her, Valencienne directs him to the rejoinder she wrote for Camille on the opposite side of her fan, which reads, “I am a respectable wife.” She’s there with him, and now her husband appreciates her. So in the end, they all live happily ever after, even the widow.
In its light, comedic way, The Merry Widow explores many themes about love and romance and women’s roles in society. And the cancan is the best part. Is it acceptable to dance so hard and kick so high that your underwear shows? Can you still be a respectable wife? These are very un-French concerns. The French don’t view the cancan as erotic. They see it as fun and witty, which is the view I prefer. It’s not about lifting your skirts to make an offer, it’s lifting your skirts so you can kick higher.
Notes:
Price, David. Cancan!. Cranbury, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998.
Raskauskas, Stephen. “High Kicks and High Notes in Lyric’s 'Merry Widow’.” WFMT.com, November 13, 2015, wfmt.com.
While writing this, I watched two different versions of The Merry Widow on YouTube. In one version, recorded in Beverly Hills in 1977, Valencienne doesn’t dance the cancan in Act Three. This decision could have been because the soprano playing Valencienne couldn’t dance. Cancan is physically demanding. But could the decision have been made because some intrepid rewriter couldn’t fathom a respectable wife dancing the cancan with the grisettes?
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I enjoyed this! I studied ballet growing up, and I've always had a deep love for all kinds of dance. I'm glad to know more about the cancan.
It makes sense that it was the precursor to the chorus line kicks made famous on Broadway and by The Rockettes. I'm from suburban Houston, where drill teams are very much a part of high school culture, and we certainly had kick routines for the football games; I'm thinking even these are descended from the cancan. :)