9.15.2011

Everybody Apache Dance

Apache dancers, c. late 1920s?
This couple look really hard core. I'm guessing early 1950s but I could be wrong.
Above and top from French CanCan
"Prada Candy....pure pleasure wrapped in impulsive charm... a new facet of femininity
where more is more and excess is everything."
She's doing the Apache Dance.

You can see how they filmed the commercial here

Le Bateau Lavoir, a ramshackle area in Montmartre, 1900——> Apache territory!


"The Apache is the plague of Paris", 1907
Krazy Kat as an Apache dancer, 1930.
watch the cartoon at Uncle John's Crazy Town
Apaches, 1911

 "A Tough Dance"-- 1902


 La Danse Apache - Alexis Et Dorrano 1934
Prada's got a new perfume: Candy. Normally I wouldn't rush to post about that but when I heard they'd hired gnomish photographer-director Jean Paul Goude to create an over-the-top visual match for the perfume's "excess is everything" PR I thought I'd investigate. (I liked some of his work with Grace Jones and loved that iconic Chanel Egoiste commercial....) In the new video, a French ingenue music student jumps her piano teacher and launches into an exuberant terpsichorean frolic. The acrobatic dance sequence is a revival of the Apache Dance.

Pronounced “ah-PAHSH” (remember, it's French!) the Apaches were a late 19th century Parisian street gang—or rather, they were reputed to be "as violent as wild Apaches" and they thought that sounded pretty good and the name stuck. Later, "Apache" became a general reference term for a thug or a pimp. The Apache Dance—became popular just after the turn of the century. By 1908 they were doing it on stage at the Moulin Rouge (it was revived and adapted in movies and by teens up through the 1950s). Part tango, part stage combat—the original Apache Dance fit in perfectly with the other "rough" and "degenerate" dances so popular in those years: Grizzly Bear, Turkey Trot, Boston Dip. The whole schtick is that it mimicks a violent encounter between pimp and prostitute: he "slaps" her, tosses her around, and drags her by the hair. Actually, it all sounds rather like an old Snoop Dogg video...

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