Dance Marathons Were the Forerunners of Today’s Reality TV
The dance marathons of the Great Depression have gone down in legend as a way of turning desperate people into fodder for exploitative entertainment. The spirit of the marathons is alive and well in the contemporary world of reality TV.
The economic collapse of the Depression created a new base of dance marathon contestants: the downtrodden, the dispossessed, and the desperate. (Bettmann / Getty Images)
The venue was New York’s Madison Square Garden (MSG), June 1928. This was not the Madison Square Garden you and I might know, but rather a sturdy, rectangle-shaped arena located in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen. (It was the third building to bear the MSG name; the current home of the Knicks, in Midtown Manhattan, is the fourth.)
The 1920s were roaring loudly; choose your favorite Gatsby trope. Skyscrapers sprouted up all over Manhattan like steel and glass dandelions. Bootleg booze fueled the city’s nightlife, sexual expression was on the rise. It was an era of the Madam, with underground queens like Polly Adler providing an archetypal heavily connected women who provided powerful men with their midnight kicks.
And a new form of entertainment had arrived in the city: the dance marathon. Madison Square Garden was the venue of what was dubbed “The Dance Derby of the Century.” Its scale, organizers said, would be unprecedented.
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