I’m searching for a term that would help me find some sort of documentary evidence, preferably video, of a style of dance that was popular around the start of the twentieth century.

Backstory: I encountered a reference to John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” recently, which for some reason made me think of The Music Man and the scene where the mayor’s nasty wife Eulalie (Hermione Gingold) performs a classical “tableau” dance with the ladies dance committee (“one Grecian Urn”!) at the ice cream social near the film’s end.

Which then reminded me of a documentary I saw years ago with black and white footage of women doing a similar dance for real around the turn of the century.  Flowing Greek robes and all, just like the characters in The Music Man.  And it was incredibly beautiful.  When Eulalie and her biddies assume their “Grecian Urn” pose, it’s ridiculous.  But when these real-life women struck their poses, they were creating an art form in dance.

Naturally I can’t figure out what the documentary was or find any video clips online of women performing such a dance—although I did find some photographs of women in classical Greek gowns creating tableaux, like the one below.

Acadia Ladies Seminary Physical Cultural Exhibition Scene from fan drill, 1901 (retrieved from the Internet Archive https://web.archive.org/web/20150215141841/http://library.acadiau.ca/archives/sporthistory/sports/tumbling/1901.html)

And I found an extremely cool short film, “Serpentine Dance,” or “Danse Serpentine” (in French), from 1896 made by the famous Lumière brothers, French film pioneers.

The Serpentine Dance was created by Loie Fuller, Chicago burlesque dancer who experimented with the effects of stage lights on her swirling silk gowns.  Below is a photograph of the real Loie Fuller, taken by Frederick Glasier in 1902.

And here is the Lumière brothers’ film, one of the earliest “color” motion pictures.  Each frame was hand tinted to mimic the effect that stage lighting had on Fuller’s gowns.  This dancer is not the real Loie Fuller, but she is extraordinarily good.  Once you get past the kind of dorky opening 43 seconds, the swirling robes are astonishing.  It’s surprising to me that dancing from 100 years ago would still look so good today.  Somehow I just don’t expect it.

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