The Stage

Getting off to a good start - village hall dance schools

Published Friday 2 April 2004 at 12:45 by Bob Sterling

Bob Sterling looks back at the role village hall dance schools played - and still continue to play - in creating professional dancers

In the days of the variety theatres - when they were a vibrant part of our culture - a popular way of putting your daughter on the stage was to enrol her in the local dance school, where the teachers were responsible for maintaining the very backbone of variety and musical shows.

The schools provided the seemingly bottomless well from which the local pantomimes fulfilled their annual demand for dancers. After attending day school, the childrens’ mothers would take them to the other school, which represented the doorway to the glamorous world of showbusiness, romance and escapism from the everyday life of the working class. Mothers would sit at the back, doing their knitting and watch impassively as their ‘little angels’ went through their routines.

One of the mothers might make tea for the teacher as she worked non stop through class after class, while the pianist ground out the same relentless music. Outside in the street, passers by would be treated to the stentorian chant of the teacher repeating the instruction, “shuffle, hop, step”. Before and after the pantomime season, in order to keep their pupils up to scratch and to give them the experience of being onstage, the teachers put on shows when and wherever they could or entered them for the numerous dancing competitions. Erstwhile members will recall perpetual favourites such as the Post Horn Gallop, Hungarian mazourkas and the cancan. However, winning certificates did not mean a thing when it came to a professional auditions. The girl with the best figure and a bigger personality would invariably be chosen instead of the plain girl who had loads of awards.

A 1959 flyer from the now defunct Pamela Latour school in the West Midlands describes what is expected of The Latour Babes: “As the pantomime runs for about three months, arrangements have to be made for the children to have their school lessons during the matinee performances in between their appearance onstage. They are encouraged in their spare time to take up knitting, embroidery and other handicrafts”. Former pupils who had succeeded on the commercial stage - if they had a few weeks out - would return and proudly demonstrate the latest dance routine to their fellow aspirants.

All over the world there are British dancers who are in demand because of their high technical ability and their aptitude for accepting the hard work and discipline that is required. These qualities were imbued in them at an early age by their dance teachers who progressed them from tiny tappers to when - having passed the various grades - they went into the professional ranks. Today the teachers still go unheralded.

However, a move in the right direction in recognising this forgotten group of stalwarts, albeit in a serendipity circumstance, was when the playwright Richard Harris wrote Stepping Out. It was about a dance teacher who, while trying to teach her pupils how to tap, became involved in their personal problems. The play was later turned into a successful film starring Liza Minnelli and was probably seen by most of the dance teachers in the country. The climax of the movie was when the class, resplendent in top hat and tails, finally displayed their routines on a professional stage. If that moment was meant to capture the emotions of the audience, it succeeded magnificently.

Paradoxically, although the variety theatres have gone the way of old band parts, the dance schools are still around and just as strong - with second and third generations teaching in the same draughty old church halls. It is hard to believe that out of such humble and basic establishments comes the raw material which is shaped and worked upon, so that eventually it shines in the show places of the world.

Like the post office and the village shop, the dance school is part of our social fabric and provided a valuable amenity long before the emergence of the glitzy fitness centres which have proliferated in every town. Dance school teachers by and large go unrecognised by the establishment and do not get mentioned in the honours list. So the next time you see dancers in a show, you will know that they have realised their ambition but spare a thought for the teacher who has been there and whose reward is realised by helping - if she has the right talent - to put your daughter on the stage.