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In this short monograph Dr. Robitsek has presented and interpreted various features of the Cotillon dance. The word Cotillon is of French origin, meaning petticoat, and is used to designate a lively quadrille comprising a great variety of steps and figures. The Cotillon which was quite fashionable during the reign of Charles X was derived from the branles, an ancient peasant dance indulged in by ladies wearing short skirts and during which kissing was part of the play. In the United States the name was used for a group of “round dances” characterized by fanciful evolutions.
The modern Cotillon, a descendant of the French dance above referred to, is an extremely elaborate affair in which women and men alternately select partners for the succeeding dance presenting them at the time, with various trinkets, toys, and “favors,” in fact hundreds of figures with their associated symbols such as balloons, lighted tapers, discs, umbrellas, etc., etc., have been contrived for this amusement.
The study by Dr. Robitsek contains twenty illustrations of this symbolic behavior and he offers an interpretation of a large number of the dance situations. He shows how various features symbolize the defloration process (i.e., thrusting of sword through a paper disk), the many erection and intercourse motives systematically carried out, and the sexual orgasm. In some of the dance formations the man's head plays a phallic rǒle, in others his entire body serves this function, which is represented by the dancer performing inside a huge slipper and in still other situations, the head may be covered by a large bird head mask, adorned by an artificial nose of significant dimensions, or covered by a particular type of tall hat.
Women in the “lancer dance” perform with the lances and the men with the paper discs; in the course of the dance, the lances being thrust through the discs, thus symbolically reversing the sexual rǒles. There are numerous illustrations, of symbols of erection, and other pha