Last updated on December 29, 2003

About Our Name

Our name was inspired by the wonderful book, An Elegant Madness, by Venetia Murray, on the model of other historic dance groups such as the Lively Arts Society and the Vintage Dance Society.

The elegant arts are those which are enjoyable but not necessary:

"The elegant arts, as well as the useful, are founded in experience, but from the difference of their nature there arises a considerable difference both in their origin and in their growth. Necessity, the mother of invention, drives men, in the earliest state of society, to the study and cultivation of the useful arts; it is always leisure and abundance which lead men to seek gratifications no way conducive to the preservation either of the individual or of the species."

-- George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776)