A pleasant coincidence today: the novel I’m currently reading, The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner, contains a passage about dancing, and the story I posted today, “The Dance Lesson,” is also about dancing. I suppose that’s the extent of the similarity, but I do enjoy when this happens. Here’s the paragraph from The Children’s Bach:
People danced there, in the daytime, in the middle of the morning, down the aisle between the two long rows of tables. The songs they favoured were South American ones with titles the Australians passed over in ignorance, thinking them Italian: the songs were more passionate, more driven, more intellectual than anything we know of here. They danced in each other's arms, with their elbows up high and no expression on their faces: it was all form and precision. They did the tango, the rhumba, the samba. They knew the steps. They never stumbled. Their arms and legs were long and sinewy. The dresses were a spray of light. The men's trousers hit the shoe just right.