America Dancing

From the Cakewalk to the Moonwalk

Nonfiction, Entertainment, Dance, Performing Arts, History, Americas, United States, 19th Century
Cover of the book America Dancing by Megan Pugh, Yale University Press
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Author: Megan Pugh ISBN: 9780300216653
Publisher: Yale University Press Publication: November 17, 2015
Imprint: Yale University Press Language: English
Author: Megan Pugh
ISBN: 9780300216653
Publisher: Yale University Press
Publication: November 17, 2015
Imprint: Yale University Press
Language: English
The history of American dance reflects the nation’s tangled culture. Dancers from wildly different backgrounds learned, imitated, and stole from one another.  Audiences everywhere embraced the result as deeply American.
 
Using the stories of tapper Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, ballet and Broadway choreographer Agnes de Mille, choreographer Paul Taylor, and Michael Jackson, Megan Pugh shows how freedom—that nebulous, contested American ideal—emerges as a genre-defining aesthetic. In Pugh’s account, ballerinas mingle with slumming thrill-seekers, and hoedowns show up on elite opera house stages. Steps invented by slaves on antebellum plantations captivate the British royalty and the Parisian avant-garde. Dances were better boundary crossers than their dancers, however, and the issues of race and class that haunt everyday life shadow American dance as well. Deftly narrated, America Dancing demonstrates the centrality of dance in American art, life, and identity, taking us to watershed moments when the nation worked out a sense of itself through public movement.
View on Amazon View on AbeBooks View on Kobo View on B.Depository View on eBay View on Walmart
The history of American dance reflects the nation’s tangled culture. Dancers from wildly different backgrounds learned, imitated, and stole from one another.  Audiences everywhere embraced the result as deeply American.
 
Using the stories of tapper Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, ballet and Broadway choreographer Agnes de Mille, choreographer Paul Taylor, and Michael Jackson, Megan Pugh shows how freedom—that nebulous, contested American ideal—emerges as a genre-defining aesthetic. In Pugh’s account, ballerinas mingle with slumming thrill-seekers, and hoedowns show up on elite opera house stages. Steps invented by slaves on antebellum plantations captivate the British royalty and the Parisian avant-garde. Dances were better boundary crossers than their dancers, however, and the issues of race and class that haunt everyday life shadow American dance as well. Deftly narrated, America Dancing demonstrates the centrality of dance in American art, life, and identity, taking us to watershed moments when the nation worked out a sense of itself through public movement.

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