‘A whirling mass of limbs and lingerie’: the salacious, riotous story of the high-kicking cancan

As Parfitt puts it: “The white male bourgeois model of the self.” Consequently, the reason we know that the early cancan dancers were men is because of their arrest records. Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty ImagesWe do have some idea of what the early cancan looked like, though, from bohemian writers and cartoons of the day. Women started to become the face of the dance, often working-class women trying to find a way out of poverty. “There is this amazing community of cancan dancers in the Yukon in Canada,” says Parfitt. She’s more in tune with those early dancers of le chahut.