The “Can-can” is a high-energy and physically demanding music hall dance, traditionally performed by a chorus line of female dancers who wear costumes with long skirts, petticoats, and black stockings.
Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880) was a German-born French composer and impresario of the romantic period. He is best remembered for nearly 100 operettasof the 1850s–1870s and his uncompleted opera “The Tales of Hoffmann”. He was a powerfulinfluence on later composers of the operetta genre, particularly Johann Strauss, Jr. and Arthur Sullivan.
The “Can-can” is a high-energy and physically demanding music hall dance, traditionally performed by a chorus line of female dancers who wear costumes with long skirts, petticoats,and black stockings. The main features of the dance are the lifting and manipulation of the skirts, with high kicking and suggestive, provocative body movements. It first appeared in the working-class ballrooms of Montparnasse in Paris in around 1830. The dance did cause something of a scandal,and fora while, there were attempts to repress it. Occasionally people dancing thecan-can were arrested but it was never officially banned.
