The venue was New York’s Madison Square Garden (MSG), June 1928. This was not the Madison Square Garden you and I might know, but rather a sturdy, rectangle-shaped arena located in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen. (It was the third building to bear the MSG name; the current home of the Knicks, in Midtown Manhattan, is the fourth.)
The 1920s were roaring loudly; choose your favorite Gatsby trope. Skyscrapers sprouted up all over Manhattan like steel and glass dandelions. Bootleg booze fueled the city’s nightlife, sexual expression was on the rise. It was an era of the Madam, with underground queens like Polly Adler providing an archetypal heavily connected women who provided powerful men with their midnight kicks.
And a new form of entertainment had arrived in the city: the dance marathon. Madison Square Garden was the venue of what was dubbed “The Dance Derby of the Century.” Its scale, organizers said, would be unprecedented.
The premise was simple: competing couples would dance on the arena floor continuously, twenty-four hours a day, for the entertainment of a paying audience. For every hour, contestants were permitted ten minutes of rest. This would continue until only one mighty couple remained, with no maximum time limit. The winners would scoop $5,000 — almost $95,000 in today’s money.
Dance marathons evolved from an earlier, more stripped-down version of the spectacle. At these events, a single participant, typically a woman, would attempt to continually dance without rest for longer than anyone else on record. Of all the women to attempt this test of endurance, history most clearly remembers Alma Cummings, a dance instructor who, in 1923, swayed away with six different men for twenty-seven consecutive hours at the Audubon Ballroom, a vaudeville house in Washington Heights, New York.
Dance marathons evolved from an earlier, more stripped-down version of the spectacle.
One photographer snapped Cummings in the aftermath — her feet soaking in a…
Auteur: Dean Van Nguyen
