Spiel

Sidewalk spiel, New York 1895

The spiel is an obsolete historical dance from late 19th and early 20th century New York, which originated from the working-class of the Lower East Side and the Bowery. It was mainly performed by young women and children and became popular in the 1880s. The dance usually accompanied the music of the street organ in an uptempo triple meter, similar to the more formal European waltz, and its style was generally described as frenetic, twirling and ecstatic.

Etymology and meaning of spiel

Until the 1880s a vibrant German culture had developed in New York. The verb "to spiel", originally from German spielen ("to play", "to perform"), was at first used to denote the playing of circus music (spieling), often performed on organs. The term was transmitted via the music of the accompanying hand-organ of the hurdy-gurdy man and eventually entered the street vernacular of the East side and the dance halls of the Bowery, often with spieler as the general term for "dancer". In a more specific sense the term spieler usually described the women and children dancers, seldomly the male partner of the dance-hall spiel. The term spiel was soon applied as a pars pro toto for the sidewalk and dance-hall spiel as well as related dances like the tough dance (v.i.).

The original sidewalk spiel

The sidewalk spiel was mostly danced by young girls and children. James W. Blake's lyrics of New York's unofficial song of the time, The Sidewalks of New York, alluded to the spieling by referencing the waltzing dance of children to organ music on the city's sidewalks. Not unlike the victims of the legendary German pied piper, the children would gather behind the hurdy-gurdy man and follow him from block to block, sometimes dancing an often frenzied spiel for several hours. Apparently only one testimony by former spieler Marie Jastrow has survived, which describes the sidewalk spiel around the year 1900:

[…] foolish, little tripping dances, they were. First on one leg, twirling the other one around and around to the rhythm of the music. Then, a change to the other leg, when the whole process was repeated.

Dance-hall spiel

Dances like the spiel functioned as a means and symbol of liberation. Like feminism, which was at first a movement of the petite bourgeoisie, the dances of working-class women helped them overcome Victorian social constraints, which emancipated them earlier than women of the middle- and upper-class. The dance-hall spiel usually paired female and male partners, whereas the former was often swung high off the floor. Hutchins Hapgood commented on the dance-hall variant, which quickly developed from the sidewalk spiel:

The dance-hall is truly a passion with working-girls. The desire to waltz is bred in the feminine bone. It is a familiar thing to see little girls on the East Side dancing rhythmically on the street, to the music of some hand-organ, while heavy wagons roll by unheeded. When those little girls grow older and become shop-girls they often continue to indulge their passion for the waltz. Some of them dance every night, and are so confirmed in it that they are technically known as "spielers".

The culture of the dance-hall spiel was mentioned in the popular contemporary song The Spielers by J. L. Feeney.

Tough dance

LATER.

The Spielers

Spiel's end

The girl dancers of the sidewalk spiel remained "an enduring folkloric image of New York from the 1880s to around 1910", depicted e.g. on paintings by George Luks and Jerome Myers and referenced in other works of art, e.g. in the contemporary waltz rhyme reproduced at the end of the film Bowery Waltz:

My Pearl is a Bowering Girl,

As waltzing together we twirl,
She sets them all crazy, a spieler, a daisy,

My Pearl is a Bowering Girl.

The popular street dance of the young working women vanished quickly, when street-organs became frowned upon and their owners disbarred during the time of the First World War, while its dance-hall variants were gradually replaced by more favored dances.