cancan

The French cancan descends from an older word, cancaner, meaning to gossip, to make a racket, or to quack like a duck — and the connection is not as absurd as it sounds. The verb was built on an imitative reduplication of the syllable 'can,' which mimicked both the sound of chattering birds and the sound of loud, indiscreet human talk. By the early 19th century, cancan had acquired a slang meaning of 'uproar, scandal, noisy commotion' — the kind of disturbance that draws a crowd and makes respectable people look away. When a new style of energetic, improvised dancing began spreading through the working-class dance halls of Paris in the 1820s, the name attached itself naturally: this was dancing as scandal, as noise, as deliberate transgression of decorum. The dance and the word were made for each other.

The cancan emerged in the popular guinguettes and public dance halls of Paris's outer boulevards — places like the Bal Mabille and the Prado — where the lower bourgeoisie and the working class mixed with students, artists, and the demimonde. Its defining movements — the high kicks, the splits, the cartwheels, the lifted skirts — were adaptations of the quadrille, a respectable square dance imported from England. The cancan began as a way of dancing the quadrille badly on purpose, with maximum energy and minimum propriety. It was a deliberate inversion of the polite salon form, and the Parisian public adored it. The authorities did not. The Paris police intermittently banned it, prosecuted individual dancers for indecent exposure, and fined dance hall operators throughout the 1830s and 1840s. Each crackdown increased its fame.

The dance's transformation from working-class improvisation to theatrical spectacle was accomplished by Jacques Offenbach, whose operettas of the 1850s and 1860s featured cancan sequences that cemented the form in the global imagination. Orphée aux Enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld, 1858) contained the cancan music now inseparable from the dance — the galloping, frenetic melody in 2/4 time that plays in the brain of anyone who sees a dancer raise her leg. The Moulin Rouge cabaret, which opened in 1889 at the foot of Montmartre, institutionalized the cancan as the signature entertainment of Parisian nightlife, with professional dancers — the most famous being La Goulue and Jane Avril, both immortalized by Toulouse-Lautrec — performing a choreographed, gymnastic version of what had been improvised street dancing.

The cancan's journey from scandal to tourist attraction is one of the most complete rehabilitations in entertainment history. What was prosecuted in the 1840s as an offense against public morality became, by the 20th century, the postcard image of Parisian gaiety — performed in feathered costumes for audiences of international visitors who traveled to the Moulin Rouge specifically to see it. The word itself migrated into other languages carrying its French aura: English speakers use cancan without translation, recognizing in the doubled syllable something of the dance's excessive, repetitive energy. The quacking noise became the name of one of the most globally recognizable dance forms in the world, which is perhaps what happens when scandal performs itself long enough to become tradition.