A Tough Dance (1902) This film clocks in at just under a minute and features a man and woman both dressed up in ugly clothing that is too big and quite dirty. The two start dancing but as they continue their dance becomes rougher and uglier until they end up falling down. A TOUGH DANCE is, I'm guessing, supposed to be a comedy but it's certainly not funny by today's standards and I'm honestly doubting that it was funny in 1902. The two basically just dance in a rough fashion and this starts off with the man slapping her. From here things don't really get any better. Out of all the various dances movies I've seen from this era this here is one of the worst.

A man and a woman, both dressed in rough clothing, go around and around, half dancing and half wrestling, until they tumble to the ground in a heap.The Apache dance was named not after the Indians of the American Southwest, but the lower class demimondaines of Paris. Acts like this were popular because they permitted their audiences to go slumming, attending events that looked and seemed risky but in truth were not.Acts like this were part of the reason that public dancing was often seen as disreputable. Polite society restricted their dancing to private parties where dances like the waltz and polka -- which had been shocking half a century earlier -- were performed. It would take the influence of Vernon and Irene Castle and the rise of night clubs during Prohibition to make public dancing respectable again.In the meantime, there's this. It's not very graceful.