In his comic depictions of drunk dancing, Astaire used choreography to project social views and feelings about drunkenness, and to set up tensions between those qualities of inebriation and the precision and agility that his dancing embodied.
Memorable examples include the solo number “One for my baby (and one more for the road)” in The sky’s the limit (1943, above and below).
This according to “Stepping high: Fred Astaire’s drunk dances” by Sally Banes, an essay included in Writing dancing in the age of postmodernism (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1994, pp. 171–183).
BONUS: The astonishing New Year’s Eve dance from Holiday Inn.
Exotic dance is a theatrical art form that communicates within its own aesthetic. It is a multisensory nonverbal performance in which audience members may become active communicators.
But eroticism unleashes passions that defy the dictates of social conservatives, who have stoked public outrage and incited local and state governments to impose onerous restrictions on clubs with the intent of dismantling the exotic dance industry.
While the fight happens at the local level, it is part of a national campaign to regulate sexuality and punish those who do not adhere to conservative values. Ultimately, the separation of church and state is under siege and U.S. civil liberties—free speech, women’s rights, and free enterprise—are at stake.
The role of the belly dancer at elite weddings in Cairo illuminates Egyptian attitudes toward sexuality.
The dancer plays on ambiguous evaluations, using the wit associated with baladī-class women to subvert patriarchal constructions of sexuality. Song lyrics, dance forms, and musical styles are all important aspects of raqṣ baladī.
Using wit, gestures, and the raqṣ baladī genre of dance and music, the performer Fifi Abdou entertains through an elaborate joke form in which she deconstructs and reconstructs sexualized assumptions about Egyptian dance and herself as a sexualized dancer.
This according to “‘Oh boy, you salt of the earth’: Outwitting patriarchy in raqs baladi” by Cassandra Lorius (Popular music XV/3 [October 1996] pp. 285–298). Above and below, historic performances by Ms. Abdou.
The letters of Andrea Calmo, a 16th-century Venetian actor and playwright who wrote of having been taught the bassadanza by wolves, highlight how dance was regarded by a member of the middle classes in Venice.
As well as having a general appreciation of dance, which he saw as an enjoyable and moral activity, Calmo was knowledgeable about dance specifics and accurate in his use of dance terminology; in fact, his knowledge of dance practices was extensive enough to enable him to use specific dance references as a tool in creating the humor in his letters.
In a letter wooing a fine dancer, Calmo’s praises include the following:
“Now you can perform well the salti a torno, performing capriole, dancing on only one foot for half and hour, and moving the other foot so quickly it is as if your feet were tickling.”
“Alas, that to go behind, in front, those riprese, those clever steps and turns on joined feet, and all with mesura, with design and grace, in addition to the beautiful, grand, well-rounded and well-proportioned bosom.”
Launched in 2011 by the School of Dance at the University of Cape Town, South African dance journal examines past, present, and future perspectives on dance, and aims to create a space for established and emerging dance academic voices in South Africa, Africa, and the international community.
The journal is peer-reviewed, and its preferred language is English; however, contributions in indigenous South African languages will be accommodated at the discretion of the editors, who are also cognizant of the many forms English assumes on this continent, and who endeavor to give them a voice.
The peoples of the Caribbean welcomed Katharine Dunham and shared their dance cultures with her; her obligations toward them figure in her danced testimonies to their hospitality.
Her solo in L’ag’ya (1938) was not a collusion with colonial ideologies of appropriation—it was a testament to the immediacy of performance and the importance of maintaining a welcoming openness in the face of the overwhelming idea of infinity.
This according to “Hospitality and translation in Katherine Dunham’s L’ag’ya” by Ramsay Burt, an essay included in Proceedings: Society of Dance History Scholars (Stoughton: Society of Dance History Scholars, 2003) pp. 8–11. Above, Dunham with Vanoye Aikens in L’ag’ya in 1938; below, excerpts from Dunham’s solo from a silent 1947 film.
A black cow leads the members of a South Indian hill tribe, the Kotas, to the Nilgiri Hills and, with its hoof, indicates where to found each village. This footprint acts as a moral center of gravity, an important place for music making, dancing, and other rituals.
The Kotas anchor their musical and other activities around such places and significant moments in time and, in the process, constitute themselves as individuals and as a group.
This according to The black cow’s footprint: Time, space, and music in the lives of the Kotas of South India by Richard K. Wolf (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). Above, a Kota women’s festival dance; below, Kota men dancing at Kotagiri.
Although there is no record of Washington studying with a dance teacher, and rumors suggest that he was self-taught, the first U.S. President was widely known as a superb dancer.
One anecdote has Washington performing a minuet before French officers who admitted that his dancing could not be improved by any Parisian instructor. Washington’s dancing of a minuet in 1779 with Henry Knox’s wife Lucy inspired the following tribute from ThePennsylvania packet:
“The ball was opened by his Excellency the General. When this man unbends from his station, and its weighty functions, he is even then like a philosopher, who mixes with the amusements of the world, that he may teach it what is right, or turn trifles into instruction.”
This according to George Washington: A biography in social dance by Kate Van Winkle Keller (Sandy Hook: Hendrickson Group, 1998).
Today is Washington’s 280th birthday! Below, a minuet of the type that he would have danced.
The celebrated late–17th- and early–18th-century English dancing master known in historical sources only as Mr. Isaac may have been Edward Isaac, who was baptized in 1643 and whose particulars fit in circumstantial ways with what little is known about the choreographer.
By the mid-1670s Mr. Isaac was well-connected in the court and theaters, and recognition of his work continually grew, lasting into the reign of George I. His extant dances, notated by John Weaver and others in the Beauchamp–Feuillet system, show a typically English love of formal complexity and occasional departures from fashionable French models, yet they share qualities that mark them as definitively his own.
This according to “Mr. Isaac, dancing-master” by Jennifer Thorp (Dance research XXIV/2 [Winter 2006] pp. 117–137).
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