America Dancing: From the Cakewalk to the Moonwalk
2016; Oxford University Press; Volume: 103; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jahist/jaw442
ISSN1945-2314
Autores Tópico(s)Sports, Gender, and Society
ResumoIn America Dancing Megan Pugh investigates the quest to define American dance in the twentieth century. As her subtitle suggests, she has a specific thesis: that African American culture, and the ways it has been borrowed, appropriated, and reworked across racial lines, lies at the heart of what makes dance American. America Dancing is not a comprehensive survey, but rather a series of six case studies. Because Pugh aims at a general readership that may not have much familiarity with dance history, her choices carry an extra burden of representation. Luckily, it feels like the right story to be telling in 2016 about how ongoing issues with racism have played out in the struggle to find American identity through dance. Pugh's first chapter, on the cakewalk, best supports her thesis that part of what makes a dance American is endless layers of racial parody and masking. In the cakewalk, it was not always clear who was parodying whom. Pugh argues that the cakewalk is “haunted” by the twin ghosts of “white brutality” and “the ingenuity of African Americans” (pp. 24–25). Chapters follow on Bill Robinson, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Agnes de Mille, and Paul Taylor that cover similar territory about how genres developed primarily by African Americans, such as jazz and tap, are woven both explicitly and implicitly (via haunting) into dance forms to make them “American.” Pugh's internal chapter organization can sometimes be confusing. Within chapter 2, she analyzes Robinson's parodic performance of Africanness in the 1943 film Stormy Weather, then zags to George Balanchine's 1957 ballet Agon, then circles back to Robinson's 1930 appearance in the musical Dixiana. While this approach allows Pugh to trace threads of influence and return to common themes, it does not provide a clear sense of change over time.
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