La Troupe de Mlle Eglantine: poster by Toulouse-Lautrec

Did you know that the first cancan dancers were men?! Or that the original dance was a ballroom dance, and it was only much later that it became an all-women chorus-line stage dance? These and other curious facts are revealed in this talk on the cancan, based on David’s book on the dance, Cancan!.

The cancan first appeared in 1830 and by the 1860s people were describing it as the “French National Dance”, but it’s most associated with the 1890s, when Toulouse-Lautrec’s famous models La Goulue and Jane Avril were dancing at the Moulin Rouge.

Illustrated with film clips (with music), and contemporary photographs, cartoons and paintings