Browse

This book explores the Broadway legacy of choreographer Agnes de Mille, from the 1940s through the 1960s. Six musicals are discussed in depth—Oklahoma!, One Touch of Venus, Bloomer Girl, Carousel, Brigadoon, and Allegro. Carousel and Brigadoon were de Mille’s most influential and lucrative Broadway works. The other three shows exemplify aspects of her legacy that have not been fully examined, including the impact of her ideas on some of the composers with whom she worked; her ability to incorporate a previously conceived work into the context of a Broadway show; and her trailblazing foray into the role of choreographer/director. Each chapter emphasizes de Mille’s unique contributions to the original productions. Several themes emerge. First, character development remained at the heart of de Mille’s Broadway work. She often took minor characters, represented with minimal or no dialogue, and fleshed out their stories. Second, de Mille often came into conflict with her collaborators because of her strong views, but her dances added a layer of meaning that resulted in more complex final products. Finally, de Mille saw much of her choreography as an authorship and argued that she should be given the same rights as the librettist and the composer. Her work as an activist contributed to revisions in dance copyright law and the founding of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, a theatrical union that protects the rights of directors and choreographers. Agnes de Mille

Albion’s Dance was inspired by the author’s memory of her childhood ballet teacher who danced in Britain during World War Two. Dancers’ memoirs and the writings of dance critics are central resources for this book that asks how ballet in Britain survived during the war and how the end of war resulted in a newly refined national ballet. Exploring the so-called ballet boom during World War Two, the larger story of this book is one of how art and artists thrive during conflict, and how they respond pragmatically and creatively to privation and duress. The way ballet participated in propagandistic discourse and answered to a public mood of pragmatism and idealism are part of this story. Also considered are the distinct roles of dance critics, male and female dancers, producers, audiences, and choreographers. Each population contributed to the creation of a uniquely British ballet identity. After the war, British ballet emerged on the international stage demonstrating superb qualities of dramatic acuity, musicality, and sensitivity to the classic ballets.

Alla Osipenko is one of history’s greatest ballerinas, a courageous rebel who paid the price for speaking truth to the Soviet state. At Leningrad’s Kirov Ballet, Osipenko’s lines, shapes, and movement both exemplified the venerable traditions of Russian ballet and projected those traditions into uncharted and experimental realms. Her sharp tongue and candid independence, as well as her almost reckless flouting of Soviet rules for personal and political conduct, soon found her all but quarantined in Russia. An internationally acclaimed ballerina at the height of her career, she had to persist against constant attempts by the Soviet state and the Kirov administration to humble her. Throughout the book, Osipenko talks frankly and freely in a way that few Russians of her generation have allowed themselves to do. The book chronicles her life to the age of eighty-two—a great-grandmother, still outspoken, and still a dynamic participant in the international world of ballet. A cast of characters drawn from all sectors of Soviet and post-perestroika society makes this biography as encyclopedic and encompassing as a great Russian novel.

Here for the first time in English are freshly translated essays on famous women in the arts, in contemporary Russian life, and especially in the world of classical dance written by Russia’s foremost ballet critic of his day, Akim Volynsky (1861–1926). Volynsky’s depiction of the body beautiful onstage at St. Petersburg’s storied Maryinsky Theater is preceded by his earlier writings on women in Leonardo da Vinci, Dostoevsky, and Otto Weininger, and on such illustrious female personalities as Zinaida Gippius, Liubov Gurevich, Ida Rubinstein, and Lou Andreas-Salome. Volynsky was a man for whom the realm of art was largely female in form and whose all-encompassing image of woman constituted the crux of his aesthetic contemplation, which crossed over into the personal and libidinal. His career looks ahead to another Petersburg-bred “high priest” of classical dance, George Balanchine; indeed, with their undeniable proclivity toward ballet’s female component, Volynsky’s dance writings, illuminated here by examples of his earlier “gendered” criticism, invite speculation on how truly groundbreaking and forward-looking this understudied critic is.

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.

George Balanchine is today one of the most celebrated figures in twentieth-century ballet and is closely identified with the two institutions he helped found in collaboration with Lincoln Kirstein: the School of American Ballet and the New York City Ballet. During the early years of their efforts in the 1930s, Balanchine and Kirstein’s enterprise underwent numerous changes and transformations. The complexity of their endeavors has been misrepresented in many existing accounts of their lives and careers, in part because their activities have not been assessed as a whole. This book chronicles Balanchine’s and Kirstein’s work between 1933 and 1940 in the spheres of ballet, opera, Broadway musicals, and Hollywood cinema. This new account shows the ways in which their collective and individual efforts influenced and affected one another and ultimately shaped the character of the institutions they would eventually found. The work of the short-lived organizations the American Ballet (1935–38) and Ballet Caravan (1936–40) brought together dozens of dancers and collaborators, and the activity of these companies was closely related to work of the School of American Ballet as well as Balanchine’s projects in Broadway musical theater and film.

This book is a dual biography of the early lives of two key figures in Russian ballet: famed choreographer George Balanchine and his close childhood friend and extraordinary ballerina Liidia (Lidochka) Ivanova. Tracing the lives and friendship of these two dancers from years just before the 1917 Russian Revolution to Balanchine's escape from Russia in 1924, this book sheds new light on a crucial flash point in the history of ballet. The book weaves a fascinating tale about this decisive period in the life of the man who would become the most influential choreographer in modern ballet. Abandoned by his mother at the St. Petersburg Imperial Ballet Academy in 1913 at the age of nine, Balanchine spent his formative years studying dance in Russia's tumultuous capital city. It was there, as he struggled to support himself while studying and performing, that Balanchine met Ivanova. A talented and bold dancer who grew close to the Bolshevik elite in her adolescent years, Ivanova was a source of great inspiration to Balanchine—both during their youth together, and later in his life, after her mysterious death just days before they had planned to leave Russia together in 1924. The book shows that although Balanchine would have a great number of muses, many of them lovers, the dark beauty of his dear friend Lidochka would inspire much of his work for years to come.

Surveying American ballet in 1913, Willa Cather reported that few girls expressed any interest in taking ballet class and that those who did were hard-pressed to find anything other than dingy studios and imperious teachers. A century later, ballet is everywhere. There are ballet companies across the United States; ballet is commonly featured in film, television, literature, and social media; professional ballet dancers are spokespeople for all kinds of products; nail polish companies market colors like “Ballet Slippers”; and, most importantly, millions of American children have taken ballet class. Beginning with the arrival of Russian dancers like Anna Pavlova in the early 1900s, Ballet Class: An American History explores the growth of ballet from an ancillary part of nineteenth-century musical theater, opera, and vaudeville to the quintessential extracurricular activity it is today, pursued by countless children nationwide and an integral part of twentieth-century American childhood across borders of gender, class, race, and sexuality. A social history, Ballet Class takes a new approach to ballet and helps ground an art form often perceived to be elite in the experiences of everyday people who spent time in barre-lined studios. Drawing on materials including children’s books, memoirs by professional dancers and choreographers, pedagogy manuals, dance periodicals, archival collections, and oral histories, this pathbreaking study provides a national perspective on the history and significance of recreational ballet class in the United States and its influence on many facets of children’s lives, including gender norms, consumerism, body image, children’s literature, extracurricular activities, and popular culture.

During the Cold War, the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union developed cultural exchange programs, in which they sent performing artists abroad in order to generate goodwill for their countries. Ballet companies were frequently called on to serve in these programs, particularly in the direct Soviet-American exchange. This book analyzes four of the early ballet exchange tours, demonstrating how this series of encounters changed both geopolitical relations and the history of dance. The ballet tours were enormously popular. Performances functioned as an important symbolic meeting point for Soviet and American officials, creating goodwill and normalizing relations between the two countries in an era when nuclear conflict was a real threat. At the same time, Soviet and American audiences did not understand ballet in the same way. As American companies toured in the Soviet Union and vice versa, audiences saw the performances through the lens of their own local aesthetics. Ballet in the Cold War introduces the concept of transliteration to understand this process, showing how much power viewers wielded in the exchange and explaining how the dynamics of the Cold War continue to shape ballet today.

This book constructs a wide-ranging cultural history to explore the earliest stage works of Leonard Bernstein, written during World War II: the Broadway musical On the Town, the ballet Fancy Free, and a nightclub comedy act called The Revuers. Bernstein and his collaborators—including the choreographer Jerome Robbins and the writing team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green—crossed artistic, political, ethnic, and racial boundaries with abandon. With the zeal of youth, these emerging artists infused their work with progressive political ideals. On the Town focused on sailors enjoying a day of shore leave, and its first production featured a mixed-race cast, contributing an important chapter to the racial desegregation of American performance. It projected an equitable inter-racial urban vision in an era when racial segregation was being enforced contentiously in the U.S. military. The show starred the dancer Sono Osato, even as her father was interned together with so many Japanese Americans. Fancy Free amiably encoded its own dissenting narratives. Based on a controversial painting by Paul Cadmus, it grew out of a complex web of gay relationships. The book explores cross fertilizations across art forms and high-low divides, drawing on intensive archival research, FBI files, interviews with surviving cast members, and previously untapped criticism in African American newspapers.

Bob Fosse’s work continues to be the most recognizable of the great choreographers of Broadway’s post–World War II golden age. This book offers deep analysis of Fosse’s development as a choreographer, including the various dance influences he absorbed as a young performer. It examines key Fosse dances and contextualizes them across his career. It looks at how he influenced changes in the musical theater, particularly as a director, and how early mentors George Abbott and Jerome Robbins shaped his theatrical outlook. It compares his work to that of peers like Robbins, Gower Champion, Michael Bennett, and others. The book also examines his choreography for film and looks at how his film experiences influenced his stage work. It also considers the impact of his three marriages—all to dancers—on his career. Finally, the book investigates how Fosse’s evolution as both artist and individual mirrored the social and political climate of his era and allowed him to comfortably ride a wave of cultural changes.

In the early twentieth century, female performers regularly appeared on the stages and screens of American cities. Though advertised as dancers, mimics, singers, or actresses, they often exceeded these categories. Instead, their performances adopted an aesthetic of intermediality, weaving together techniques and elements drawn from a wide variety of genres and media, including ballet, art music, photography, early modern dance, vaudeville traditions, silent film, and more. Onstage and on-screen, performers borrowed from existing musical scores and narratives, referred to contemporary shows, films, and events, and mimicked fellow performers, skating neatly across various media, art forms, and traditions. The performances and conceptions of art that emerged were innovative, compelling, and deeply meaningful. This book examines these performances and the performers behind them, focusing particularly on the ways in which they negotiated turn-of-the-century American social and cultural issues, including technological developments and commodification, new modes of perception, evolving understandings of the body and the self, and shifting conceptions of gender, race, and sexual identity. Tracing the various modes of intermediality at work on- and offstage, Body Knowledge re-imagines early twentieth-century art and entertainment as both fluid and convergent.

This portrait of the Nicholas Brothers, Fayard and Harold, two of the most explosive dancers of the twentieth century, who refined a centuries-old tradition of percussive dance into the rhythmic brilliance of jazz tap at its zenith, interweaves an intimate portrait of these great performers with a detailed history of jazz music and jazz dance, bringing their act to life and explaining their significance through analysis of their eloquent footwork and full-bodied expressiveness. The book narrates the Nicholas Brothers’ soaring careers, from Cotton Club appearances with Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and Jimmy Lunceford to film-stealing big-screen performances with Chick Webb, Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller. Drawing on numerous hours of interviews with the Nicholas brothers themselves, the book documents their struggles against the nets of racism and segregation that constantly constrained their careers and denied them the recognition they deserved.

This book documents the unorthodox case of the Sexy Jewess, a distinctive figure of twenty-first-century American Jewishness. Versions of her image proliferate in US popular culture among neoburlesque, movie musicals, comedic television, ballet parody, and progressive pornography. In embodied plays with sexed-up self-display, the Sexy Jewess revises long-standing stereotypes of the ugly hag, the insatiable Jewish mother, and the self-obsessed Jewish American princess that sustain images of excess even as they have assimilated into the American mainstream. Talking back and dancing back at these stereotypes through gender and humor rebellion, a slew of celebrity and lesser known performers play up their Jewish and female difference as self-conscious comments on their majoritarian sameness. In doing so, performers invoke the Sexy Jewess as a postassimilatory, postfeminist persona with radical and conservative effects. The introduction, five chapters, and the conclusion show how this occurs in a spectrum of spectacle embodiments across a range of performance contexts. Extending across stage and screen legacies of a hundred years, The Case of the Sexy Jewess links humor to classed ideas about sexiness and links ethnicity to gendered constructions of race. Unique to the study of American Jewishness but not limited by its scope, the book situates the body as a site of critical agency in discussions of parody and representational politics, with an emphasis on cultural appropriation and reappropriation that provokes questions applicable to a wide range of other identity acts and impersonations.

Born in Philadelphia in 1905, Catherine Littlefield first learns dancing from her mother, Caroline (called Mommie), who was an expert pianist, and from a local dancing master, C. Ellwood Carpenter. As a teenager, Catherine becomes a Ziegfeld dancer and takes lessons from Luigi Albertieri in New York. She returns home in 1925 to help Mommie teach at the Littlefield School (among her students is Zelda Fitzgerald) and stage dances for women’s musical clubs and opera companies. William Goldman hires Catherine to produce routines in commercial theaters throughout Philadelphia and becomes her boyfriend. Catherine, Mommie, and Catherine’s sister, Dorothie, travel to Paris so the sisters can study ballet with Lubov Egorova. They become friendly with George Balanchine in Paris and help him establish his first American school and company when he comes to the United States in 1933. Catherine marries wealthy Philadelphia attorney Philip Leidy and founds her Philadelphia Ballet Company in 1935. She choreographs—and her company presents—the first full-length, full-scale production of Sleeping Beauty in the United States as well as popular ballet Americana works such as Barn Dance and Terminal. Her company’s European tour in 1937 is the first ever by an American classical ballet troupe. Catherine loses some of her protégées to the newly formed Ballet Theatre and disbands her company after the United States enters World War II; she then choreographs Broadway musicals, Sonja Henie’s Hollywood Ice Revues, and Jimmy Durante’s NBC television show before dying in 1951 at age forty-six.

This book addresses the interface between choreography and war in this century. The book challenges concepts of choreography as solely a structuring mechanism and an aesthetics of politics that is exclusively resistant. Instead, in the context of 21st-century war, it calls for a rethinking of choreography that incorporates the disorder and dispersion of power away from nation-states, which is central to this century. The book is composed of an introduction and sixteen chapters which work across a number of disciplines through field notes, case studies, participant observations, and photographs, as well as chapters reflecting on war issues and their relationship to choreographic practices.

This book provides a historical and cultural analysis of US–based dance-makers’ investment in intellectual property rights. Although federal copyright law in the United States did not recognize choreography as a protectable class prior to the 1976 Copyright Act, efforts to win copyright protection for dance began eight decades earlier. In a series of case studies stretching from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first, the book reconstructs those efforts and teases out their raced and gendered politics. Rather than chart a narrative of progress, the book shows how dancers working in a range of genres have embraced intellectual property rights as a means to both consolidate and contest racial and gendered power. A number of the artists featured in the book are well-known white figures in the history of American dance, including modern dancers Loïe Fuller, Hanya Holm, and Martha Graham, and ballet artists Agnes de Mille and George Balanchine. But the book also uncovers a host of marginalized figures—from the South Asian dancer Mohammed Ismail, to the African American pantomimist Johnny Hudgins, to the African American blues singer Alberta Hunter, to the white burlesque dancer Faith Dane—who were equally interested in positioning themselves as subjects rather than objects of property, as possessive individuals rather than exchangeable commodities. Choreographic copyright, the book argues, has been a site for the reinforcement of gendered white privilege as well as for challenges to it.

In Choreographing in Color, J. Lorenzo Perillo investigates the development of Filipino popular dance and performance since the late 20th century. Drawing from nearly two decades of ethnography, choreographic analysis, and community engagement with artists, choreographers, and organizers, Perillo asserts the importance in shifting attention away from the predominant Philippine neoliberal and US imperialist emphasis on Filipinos as superb mimics, heroic migrants, model minorities, and natural dancers, and instead asks: what does it mean for Filipinos to navigate the violent forces of empire and neoliberalism with street dance and hip-hop? Employing critical race, feminist, and performance studies, Perillo analyzes the conditions of possibility that gave rise to Filipino dance phenomena across viral, migrant, theatrical, competitive, and diplomatic performance in the Philippines and diaspora. Advocating for serious engagements with the dancing body, Perillo rethinks a staple of hip-hop’s regulation, the “euphemism,” as a mode of social critique for understanding how folks have engaged with both racial histories of colonialism and gendered labor migration. Figures of euphemism—the zombie, hero, robot, and judge—constitute a way of seeing Filipino hip-hop as contiguous with a multi-racial repertoire of imperial crossing, thus uncovering the ways Black dance intersects Filipino racialization and reframing the ongoing, contested underdog relationship between Filipinos and US global power.

Focusing on Western theatre dance, Choreography Invisible explores the metaphysics of dances and choreographic works. It draws on a range of resources from analytic philosophy of art to develop the argument that dances are repeatable structures of action. The book also analyses the idea of the dance work in long-term historical perspective. Tracing different ways in which dances have been conceptualised across time, the book considers changing notions of authorship, fixity, persistence, and autonomy from the fifteenth century to the present day. The modern work-concept is interrogated, its relativity and contested status (particularly within contemporary dance practice) acknowledged. As the dance work disappears from contemporary discourse, what can be said about the kind of thing it is? Choreography Invisible considers the materials of dance making and the nature (and limits) of choreographic authorship. It explores issues of identity and persistence, including why distinct (and sometimes quite various) performances are still treated as performances of the same work. The book examines how dances survive through time and what it means for a dance work to be lost, considering the extent to which practices of dance reconstruction and reenactment can recuperate or reconstitute lost choreography. The focus here is dance, but the book addresses issues with wider implications for the metaphysics of art, including how the historical relativity of art practices should inflect analytic arguments about the nature of art works, and what place such works have within a broader ontology of human and natural worlds.

This book traces the emergence and spread of the choreomania concept through colonial medical and ethnographic circles, showing how fantasies of instability—and of the Oriental other—haunted scientific modernity. Scenes from the archives of medical history, neurology, psychiatry, sociology, religion, and popular journalism show how the discursive history of the ‘dancing mania’ moved and transformed with its translations throughout the colonial world. From antiquarian references to ancient Greek bacchanals and medieval St. Vitus’s dances, to scientific reperformances of early modern religious ecstasies, and American government anthropology, ‘choreomania’ arose to signal every sort of gestural and choreographic unrest. Village kermesses, revolutionary crowds, and neuromotor disorders—including hysteria, epilepsy, and chorea—were among the many unruly forms of locomotion indiscriminately compared to bacchanalian turmoil. So too, charges of spontaneous political agitation levied against demonstrators from Africa and South America to the South Seas reveal heightened anxieties about the spread of social disorder. Initially employed to describe ‘contagious’ popular dances, jerking movements, and convulsions, with decolonization, the ‘dancing disease’ increasingly described the fitful drama of anti-European revolt. Closely indebted to the work of Michel Foucault, this book opens a new chapter on the way we think epidemic madness and the organization and disorganization of bodies and disciplines in the modern age. Setting ideas about disruptively moving bodies at the heart of the scientific enterprise, this book argues that disciplines themselves were at once more porous and mobile than is commonly allowed, and that ‘dance’ itself has to be radically reimagined across fields.