Cancan!
by David Price
Category: Performing Arts

Cancan! covers the nineteenth-century influences on the dance's development, including women's fashions (particularly their underwear), sex and morality, and major political changes. Author David Price describes the colourful personalities responsible for the transformation of what was an amateur dance into a professional entertainment, and the theatres, music-halls and dancing gardens where they performed. The book gives a full account of the ballets, operettas and musicals by Offenbach, Lehar, Cole Porter and others featuring the cancan, as well as the artists and film-makers who depicted the dance in their work - artists like Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat, Picasso, Rouault and the Second Empire illustrators; and film-makers such as Jean Renoir, John Huston and others. Included are comments from dancers and choreographers in France, Britain and the USA.