Browse

Before ‘Fred and Ginger’, there was ‘Fred and Adele’, a show business partnership and a cultural sensation like no other. It is difficult in our ‘celebrity’-sated era to comprehend what a genuine phenomenon the Astaires were. At the height of their success in the mid-1920s the siblings were seasoned transatlantic commuters, ambassadors of an art form they had helped to revolutionize, adored by audiences, feted by royalty, and courted socially by the elite in just about every field of endeavour. They seemed to define the Jazz Age. They were Gershwin’s music in motion; a fascinating pair who wove fascinating rhythms in song and dance. The story of Fred and Adele Astaire is an extraordinary one and is told here in depth and within its historical and theatrical context. It is not merely the first part of Fred’s long and illustrious career; it holds a significance and a fascination of its own, as well as having implications for Astaire’s subsequent career, which have not been fully appreciated. The story of the Astaires is also the story of an era. Born at the close of the nineteenth century, they, in effect, grew up together with the new century. Manifestly children of their time, they glamorously embodied the interwar style they had partly originated. At the same time, their appeal as performers was based largely on their apparent defiance of the darker aspects of the interwar psyche. They were an affirmation of life and hope in the midst of a prevalent crisis of faith and identity.

Dance on Its Own Terms: Histories and Methodologies anthologizes a wide range of subjects examined from dance-centered methodologies: modes of research that are emergent, based in relevant systems of movement analysis, use primary sources and rely on critical, informed observation of movement. The anthology fills a gap in current scholarship by emphasizing dance history and core disciplinary knowledge rather than theories imported from disciplines outside dance. Individual chapters serve as case studies further organized into three categories of significant dance activity: performance and reconstruction, pedagogy and choreographic process, and notational systems and other written forms that analyze and permit dance documentation. The breadth of the content reflects the richness and vibrancy of the dance field; each deeply informed examination serves as a window opening onto the larger world of dance. Conceptually, each chapter also raises concerns and questions that point to broadly inclusive methodological applications.

The influence of film on dance goes as far back as the earliest years of cinema. African American street dancers mimicked the slow‐motion effects of film, performing their dances in perfect half‐time. The Ballets Russes encountered the Futurists in 1916 who were experimenting with film, resulting in a collaboration between Léonard Massine and Giacomo Balla that approximated the effects of film on stage. Meanwhile, dance was a favorite subject of Thomas Edison in the United States and the Lumière brothers in France, who recorded the performances of vaudeville artists such as Amy Muller and Betsy Ross against black curtains with a locked‐off camera. The ways in which dance and film have collaborated since these early encounters contrasts with much of the writing on dancefilm. While dancers, choreographers, and filmmakers have explored the points of contact between choreography and the moving image, critics and theorists have struggled to reconcile dance and film in their writing, favoring one discipline or the other. There has been no survey of the history of the form and few convincing attempts to describe the type of cinematic movements it produces. Drawing on intersecting points in the fields of dance studies and film theory to describe the devices and formal parameters of dancefilm, this book offers a new perspective and interpretative framework for considering the form.

In the early 1960s, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater was a small, multi-racial company of dancers that performed the works of its founding choreographer and other emerging artists. By the late 1960s, the company had become a well-known African American artistic group closely tied to the civil rights struggle. This book chronicles the troupe's journey from a small modern dance company to one of the premier institutions of African American culture. The book not only charts this rise to national and international renown, but also contextualizes this progress within the civil rights, women's rights, and gay rights struggles of the late 20th century. It examines the most celebrated Ailey dances, drawing on video recordings of Ailey's dances, published interviews, oral histories, and interviews with former Ailey company dancers. The book reveals the relationship between Ailey's works and African American culture as a whole. It illuminates the dual achievement of Ailey as an artist and as an arts activist committed to developing an African American presence in dance. It also addresses concerns about how dance performance is documented, including issues around spectatorship and the display of sexuality, the relationship of Ailey's dances to civil rights activism, and the establishment and maintenance of a successful, large-scale Black Arts institution. Throughout, the book illustrates how Ailey combined elements of African dance with motifs adapted from blues, jazz, and Broadway to choreograph his dances, arguing that Ailey played a significant role in defining the African American cultural canon.

The book reveals how the Dance of the Old Men and Night of the Dead of Lake Pátzcuaro act as icons of Mexico and Mexicanness. Covering a ninety-year period from the postrevolutionary era of the 1920s to the present day, and incorporating multifarious contexts in Mexico, the USA, and Europe, this study proposes a theory of performism as a frame for interpreting the processes at play as local dance, music, ritual practices, and locations are deployed as national and global spectacles and attractions. Wholly embedded in political, ideological, economic, and aesthetic particularities, this study is concerned with analyzing official constructions of indigenous/indigenousness and folklore/folklórico, focusing on the ideology of indigenismo and the P'urhépecha peoples. Central to the analyses are notions of shaping a collective gaze, authentication, embodiment, folkloricization, ideological refunctionalization, commodification, and commoditization. Key to understanding these cultural constructions are issues of centers and peripheries as this investigation moves between local lives and international politics. Drawing on extensive ethnographic, archival, and participatory experience this interdisciplinary study expands and enriches understanding of complex processes of creating national icons, cultural artifacts, tourist attractions, and representative dance repertoires, specifically engaged with the signifying power of the human body. The book shows how constructions of Mexicanness and Mexico are manifest in multiple theatricalized, musical, filmic, literary, and visual representations as found in an eclectic range of sources.

This book tells the story of a boy from Tennessee who, armed with only an 8th grade education, an inexhaustible imagination, and an innate talent for dancing becomes the most prolific and popular choreographer of the glory days of the Hollywood musical. As luck would have it, Pan’s movie career began and ended working with Fred Astaire, the most famous dancer on film. The pair made nearly two dozen movies and television shows together and in Astaire, Pan found an artistic soul mate with whom he would develop a symbiotic relationship for the rest of his life. A devout Roman Catholic, Hermes was interested in perfecting the souls as well as the physical technique of his dancers and the book explores the profound effect he had on the lives of stars such as June Haver, Ann Miller, Rita Hayworth, Linda Darnell, Ginger Rogers, and Betty Grable. The book examines each of Pan’s eighty-nine films offering a panoramic view of Pan’s choreography from Flying Down to Rio in 1933 to Aiutami a sognare (Help Me Dream) in 1980 and comments on the development of Pan’s art throughout his fifty-year career. Although Pan lived what many considered a “blessed” life without scandal or controversy as a Catholic, homosexual, Tennessee gentleman living as one of the “A-List” of Hollywood’s elite, the book explores Pan’s personal conflicts and doubts, his uneasiness with the film community, his spiritual vocation as well as his artistic philosophies.

Kinesthetic City takes as its premise the idea that moving bodies, place, history, and identity are mutually productive. Analyzing both everyday movement and contemporary concert dance in five Chinese urban sites – Shanghai, Taipei, Hong Kong, New York's Chinatown, and the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles – this book explores transnational formations of Chineseness. Not definable by national boundaries, biological essences, central political systems, or even shared cultural norms, Chineseness is a mobile yet abiding idea. This book examines the ways that Chineseness is, at key historical moments, highly contested in each of these cities while paradoxically sustained as a collective consciousness across all of them. It argues that global communities can be studied through an investigation of dance and everyday movement practices as they are situated in particular places and times. This project claims choreography not only as an object of study, however. That is, it relies not merely upon movement analyses of concert dance in these Chinese cities, but also upon kinesthesia — one dancer-scholar's somatic sensation of movement — as a way to analyze these urban spaces. Choreography serves as both subject and method in this book. Kinesthetic City expands the fields of dance studies and Asian/Asian American studies by placing personal kinesthetic experience of city space in dialogue with a study of aesthetic movement practices in order to theorize the ways in which choreography, broadly conceived, is productively intertwined with processes of space, time, and community formation in a globalized era.

Using newly discovered archival sources this book examines the major works of Martha Graham between 1938 and 1953, arguably her most productive period. Graham’s artistic maturation overlaps the global crisis of fascism, the conflict of World War II, and the post-war period that ushered in the Cold War. It also corresponds to the trajectory of her personal and professional relationship with dancer Erick Hawkins who first appeared with the Martha Graham Dance Company in 1938 when her art was taking on new dramaturgical complexity, political commitment and mytho-graphic dimension. As a relationship between a young man and a mature woman as well as between an established and a fledgling artist, the Graham-Hawkins story was a tormented one. The vicissitudes of this relationship and its emotional tone will be an integral part of the description of Graham’s work undertaken in this study. The sociological axes of seven major works are Graham’s involvement with anti-Fascism prior and during World War Two and her involvement with post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory and Jungian psychoanalysis in the postwar period. This book relates Graham’s original and groundbreaking use of myth to both anti-fascism and psychoanalysis, before and after the war respectively, and thus brings her choreography into direct relationship both to the key events of her time and to her personal life.

This is the first lengthy inquiry into the life and times of René Blum, the successor to Serge Diaghilev and a distinguished Parisian author, editor, critic, and producer. Léon Blum, his older brother, became the first Socialist prime minister of France. René’s early life was dedicated to publicizing and celebrating young playwrights, artists, and writers. Long before his ballet career began, Blum co-edited Gil Blas, the great French literary paper, and wrote art criticisms that inform us about his aesthetic stance and interest in modernism. For example, Blum wrote the preface to the catalogue of an early exhibition of cubist art in 1912. Another aspect of his life concerns his friendship with Marcel Proust. Proust’s letters frequently mention Blum, especially because it was he who helped Proust find a publisher for the first volume of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. As artistic director of the Théâtre de Monte-Carlo, Blum worked with many important playwrights of his generation and, later in 1932, some of the greatest choreographers such as Balanchine, Massine, Fokine, and Nijinska, providing them with the resources for their unique choreographies. His Ballets Russes de Monte-Carlo and Ballets de Monte-Carlo toured extensively and brought brilliant Russian and European dancers to America during the 1930s. Many escaped to the United States in the wake of World War II. Entrapped in Paris during the Nazi Occupation, Blum was rounded up with 742 other Jewish intellectuals and killed in the Holocaust.