Façade, Elvis Legs, and the Humorous Pleasures of Dancing

Abstract

This chapter compares sections of two English dance works from different periods of the twentieth century that refer in humorous ways to the pleasure of dancing as popular entertainment. These are the Tango Pasodoble from the 1931 ballet Façade, choreographed by Frederick Ashton, and Lea Anderson’s Elvis Legs, created in 1995 as part of the evening-length programme The Featherstonehaughs Go Las Vegas. The Tango Pasodoble in Façade, initially performed by Ashton himself and Lydia Lopokova, was played for laughs, both in its choreographed comic incidents and in the way Ashton and Lopokova were knowingly cast against type. Thus Ashton, an Englishman, was cast as a foreign professional dancer or ‘gigolo’, while Lopokova, a Russian ballerina, was cast as an English debutante.