America Dancing: From the Cakewalk to the Moonwalk by Megan Pugh

By Megan Pugh

The background of yank dance displays the nation’s tangled tradition. Dancers from wildly varied backgrounds realized, imitated, and stole from each other.  Audiences in all places embraced the end result as deeply American.
 
utilizing the tales of tapper invoice "Bojangles" Robinson, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, ballet and Broadway choreographer Agnes de Mille, choreographer Paul Taylor, and Michael Jackson, Megan Pugh exhibits 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 appear on elite opera condo levels. Steps invented via slaves on antebellum plantations captivate the British royalty and the Parisian avant-garde. Dances have been larger boundary crossers than their dancers, although, and the problems of race and sophistication that hang-out daily life shadow American dance in addition. Deftly narrated, America Dancing demonstrates the centrality of dance in American paintings, lifestyles, and id, taking us to watershed moments whilst the state labored out a feeling of itself via public movement.

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