DANCE: A VERY SOCIAL HISTORY by Carol McD. Wallace, et al. (Rizzoli International/The Metropolitan Museum of Art: $25; 128 pp., illustrated)

A swift overview of social dancing is offered by the four essays that make up this book, a set of quick turns around the floor to four different kinds of music while bright images flicker past the sweeping gaze. The fact that this volume was published to coincide with a costume exhibition called “Dance” currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, explains its deliberately entertaining flavor and eye-catching format, as if it were a short documentary film frozen in book form to accompany the casual viewer through the show. It is by no means a catalogue, only an additional collection of the same sort of easy-to-take historical material offered by the exhibit itself--some lively facts pointed up by dazzling visual display, uninterrupted by anything tedious or awkward, complex or deep. A good time is meant to be had by all.

After a long, three-part trumpet fanfare--a foreword, a preface, and an introduction, all by different sponsoring spirits--this short quadrille of a book leads off briskly with an amusingly written account of ballroom antics since the days of Louis XIV by Carol McD. Wallace, co-author of “The Preppy Handbook” and “The Debutante’s Guide to Life.” It is not exactly history, as Wallace’s previous works might indicate, but a bouquet of historical anecdotes presented with journalistic flourish in such a modern tone that all the old revelry is brought to life as if the author had been there.

The note seems the right one to strike for the subject. The essay touches on the vast sums spent on balls both private and public, the extreme kinds of display they often required and the atmosphere of hilarity, hysteria and anxiety that has always surrounded great social occasions where the sexes mingle freely in some kind of ritual circumstance. A big dance has always brought matters of dress and behavior into acute sexual focus no less at the prom than at Versailles; and Wallace peppers her tale with lively views of royal flirtation, sexual social climbing, and the transformation of awkward girls into marriageable beauties, all through the special alchemy of ballroom erotics.

The succeeding essays in this volume fall far short of the first one in charm, but they qualify better as actual history, especially the one by Don McDonagh on the evolution of social dancing itself. Here we may learn of the fundamental virtue attached to the dance by Renaissance rulers seeking to regulate behavior and enforce a courtly standard of social self-awareness in their followers. Court dancing, like fencing much later, was perceived as an important discipline, a way of defining oneself as subject to a formal physical rule that expressed one’s capacity for all other kinds of skill and self-control--a civilizing agent. Sexual behavior in particular was tested, tempered and refined in the dance, as men and women approached, touched and parted from each other with strictly regulated phrasing. Sexual encounters in such a framework might thus stand for all the other kinds of critical and risky confrontations in life, all to be met with equal grace and measured aplomb.

Meanwhile peasant dancing developed its own regional patterns for expressing sexual exuberance and ritual excitement; and one of the constants in the history of social dancing is the taming and assimilation of wild lower-class dances for use in polite society. The waltz, for example, had been a country dance from Germany and Austria called the landler, a closed-couple turning dance that shocked and captivated the polite world just the way the tango did much later, and as the daring dances culled from harsh milieus have continued to do ever since. New and crude-seeming dances tend to drive out the decorous measures of the previous generation, becoming quaint and tacky in their turn as society discovers new ways to shock itself on the dance floor. The figured dances of the past nevertheless survive in modern country-dancing and also in the professional ballet, where society can no longer follow and must forever be an envious wallflower.

Jean Druesedow’s essay on dress for dancing takes the subject no further back than the late 18th Century, perhaps because her chapter has the most need to match the garments in the exhibition. She concentrates on the great fantasy-confections of the later Romanticism, the sparkling ball dresses of the last two centuries that were created expressly to transform women into diversely brilliant and mobile apparitions, while men all wore the same thing and effaced themselves in austere black and white. Although this dress code for the sexes was invented in the early days of the Romantic movement, it remains in force to this day, still an apparently satisfying reflection of modern romantic ideals. The man in his muted tail coat, a natural poet and dreamer, seems to conjure the lady out of his own longings--and behold, here comes the vision, floating down the stairs!

Readers who have come through the previous historical chapter with McDonagh will look vainly in this one for anything about special dancing clothes worn by men and women during Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque times, when both sexes shared in the most vivid possibilities of dress, and exquisite masquerade festivities were common. Moreover, during those earlier centuries, men often performed feats of skill in the dance while their partners watched; it would be interesting to hear how dress and dancing were deliberately made to reinforce each other’s effects in those remote days when elegant gentlemen still excelled in sexual display.

Druesedow does describe one exception to the austerity of the Romantic male on the dance floor, that of his glittering uniformed counterpart. Military dandyism had in fact become a feature of European society during and after the Congress of Vienna, although it was derided in England and America where understatement had seized masculine fashion in its lasting grip. But in the ballrooms of Prague and Vienna and Budapest, of Moscow and Warsaw and St. Petersburg, the gauzy skirts of ladies vied in brilliance with the uniforms of hussars in their white doeskin trousers and fur-trimmed pelisses, of officers’ dress uniforms from every sort of regiment or those of men in the many civil uniforms of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. All this gear was tight-fitting, trimmed in dazzling silver and gold and made in an array of bright colors set off by polished boots and dress swords. Here, indeed, were fantasy-visions come to life, this time out of the fervid yearnings of romantic girls; but these are unmatched and unrealized in most modern ballrooms. Gaudy military trappings have wholly lost their chic in this grim century.

The final piece is an essay by Laurence Libin and Constance Old called the Iconography of Dance, about how to interpret the images of dancers that fill the history of art with puzzling scenes, some ideal and some real, some allegorical and others plainly meant to appear documentary. This chapter is the least-focused and the least well-written, although it has, like all the others, a range of spectacular pictures to illustrate it. The authors labor the point about how hard it is to know precisely what dance is being done in a work of art, but they do not take into account the artistic conventions of rendering dance that may always be a stronger influence on an artist than the evidence of his own eyes. It may often be more desirable to copy the poses familiar from earlier pictures than to observe dancers and record the impression they make; the idea gets across faster. The Teniers painting shown in the book probably owes more to the example of Bruegel’s peasants than to Teniers’ own experiences outside the village inn.

Both the first and last chapters refer to the lasting contribution the great exhibition ballroom dancers have made to the world’s pleasure--the incomparable Rogers and Astaire, and their forerunners Vernon and Irene Castle. Perhaps the loveliest illustration in the whole book is Cecil Beaton’s photograph of Irene Castle that forms the frontispiece, a haunting vision that catches the rapturous spirit not always so well evoked by the authors of the text. The pictures generally dominate the book, and the essays appear in intermittent patches of printed type. Perhaps that is not a bad arrangement in this case--the reader can whirl through all the prints and paintings and photographs and attend to the essays while resting afterward with a plate of ice in the conservatory.