Excerpt from Grammar of the Art of Dancing, Theoretical and Practical: Lessons in the Arts of Dancing and Dance Writing (Choregraphy); With Drawings, Musical Examples, Choregraphic Symbols and Special Music Scores
At the Convention of the American National Association of Masters of Dancing held at Columbus, Ohio, June 12-17, 1905, the dedication of this edition of the Grammar was accepted and the work adopted as the standard of authority. The resolution also strongly recommends the book as a text-book for students and teachers.
The Appendix, which relates to deportment, has been purposely omitted for the reason that, while it is the duty of teachers of dancing to pay some attention to that subject in the course of their instruction, it does not in itself, technically, form a part of the art of dancing.
Again, rules of deportment are largely local in their application and of too transient a nature to be of authority after a lapse of twenty years. Social customs are, for the most part, creatures of fashion, and fashion is too fickle a goddess to submit to the tyranny of settled rules.
Herr Zorn himself expresses the belief that persons who contemplate teaching dancing will get more practical ideas regarding deportment from their experience as teachers than it would be possible to obtain from any book.
And now having set forth the principal points of this edition and the fact that it has been prepared to supply a great and increasing demand, the Editor wishes, in conclusion, to register the hope that the movement toward abandoning the use of French technical terms will be given up.
These terms now form the only common ground upon which the dancing profession of the world can meet, and to discontinue them would be to indefinitely postpone the date of a possible Universal Academy. Let us not only learn these terms which have acquired such important technical significance, but let us use them. Of course there is no call for a pedantic display of them in teaching social dances, and such a use of them would be in poor taste, but it would be a distorted allegiance to the mother tongue to so far overlook our manifest advantages as to insist upon the substitution of our own language for terms that have for centuries been accepted without cavil by other nations who do not speak French.
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