Background Information “Dance Marathon” Philip Evergood

2. Background Information“Dance Marathon”Philip Evergood “Dance Marathon,” one of Evergood’s masterworks of social critique, depicts a phenomenon that swept the country during the Depression and had become to be a symbol of desperation. Couples entered dance marathons as much for the food and shelter as for the prize money.

3. “Dance Marathon: After Philip Evergood”By: Steven G. Kellman You cannot tell the dancer: quit the dance. Not while Little Mike, serving eight to ten, sits seething in a cell, and Annie’s got the cancer. fired by the bindery, he grasps a chance to pay rent, pressed against a drooping stranger, strutting striding, slipping, sagging. If life is a fight, he might be Braddock, slugging flesh into submission. But after seven weeks, even nimble Fred Astaire would not jig gingerly. It’s all or nothing now, this endless tango, tussle against insolvency, mortality. Totentanz, a gruesome way to foot the bill. Only a connoisseur of calamity could bear to park himself and stare. See the smug man in the stand? Like a patron at a painting show, he gawks at waltzing misery. Five hundred dollars to buy a place at the gala suckers’ ball. Now don’t that take all?