Making Broadway Dance

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liza Gennaro
Keyword(s):  
Musical Theater ◽  
Character Analysis ◽  
Dance Studies ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Script Analysis ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
Art Design ◽  
Bob Fosse ◽  
Katherine Dunham

Musical theater dance is an ever-changing and evolving dance form, egalitarian in its embrace of any and all dance genres. It is a living, transforming art developed by exceptional dance artists requiring dramaturgical understanding; character analysis; knowledge of history, art, design; and, most importantly, an extensive knowledge of dance, both intellectual and embodied. Its ghettoization within criticism and scholarship as a throw-away dance form, undeserving of analysis—derivative, cliché ridden, titillating and predictable, the ugly stepsister of both theater and dance—belies and ignores the historic role it has had in musicals as an expressive form equal to book, music, and lyric. The standard adage, “when you can’t speak anymore sing, when you can’t sing anymore dance,” expresses its importance in musical theater as the ultimate form of heightened emotional, visceral, and intellectual expression. Through in-depth analysis author Liza Gennaro examines Broadway choreography through the lens of dance studies, script analysis, movement research, and dramaturgical inquiry offering a close examination of a dance form that has heretofore received only the most superficial interrogation. This book reveals the choreographic systems of some of Broadway’s most influential dance-makers, including George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, Jerome Robbins, Katherine Dunham, Bob Fosse, Donald McKayle, Savion Glover, Sergio Trujillo, Steven Hoggett, and Camille Brown. Making Broadway Dance is essential reading for theater and dance scholars, students, practitioners, and Broadway fans.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Liza Gennaro
Keyword(s):  
Musical Theater ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Bob Fosse ◽  
Katherine Dunham

I come to my interest in musical theater dance genetically. My father, Peter Gennaro, was a Tony Award winning choreographer and star dancer/choreographer on Broadway and television variety shows. My mother was a ballerina-turned-Broadway-dancer who danced for Bronislava Nijinska, Agnes de Mille, and Michael Kidd. My father, before becoming a choreographer in his own right, danced for Katherine Dunham, Hanya Holm, Michael Kidd, Bob Fosse, and Jerome Robbins. My parents were voracious dance and theater goers and I spent my childhood and teenage years seeing great dance and theater that included Judith Jamison in the premiere of Alvin Ailey’s “Cry,” Mikhail Baryshnikov’s first performances with The American Ballet Theatre, the premiere performance of Jerome Robbins’ ...

Musical Theater Dance Training and Choreography in the 1920–1930s

2021 ◽  
pp. 9-29
Author(s):  
Liza Gennaro
Keyword(s):  
Essential Role ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
Black Dance ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Musical Play ◽  
Radical Innovations ◽  
Dance Teachers ◽  
Dance Training ◽  
The Common ◽  
Historical Basis

This chapter provides an examination of how Broadway dancers were trained, the introduction of jazz dance to Broadway, the 1920s gradual move away from unison line dancing in favor of the individuated chorus, and how a few dance directors began to consider dance in musicals in relation to the libretto as an integrated and meaningful addition to the musical play. The common practice of Black choreographers being pushed aside while white choreographers claimed credit for their work and the essential role Black dance teachers and coaches played in training white dancers for Broadway is discussed here. Examinations of choreographic works by dance directors Buddy Bradley, Charlie Davis, Seymour Felix, Sammy Lee, Albertina Rasch, and George Balanchine establish a historical basis in preparation for the radical innovations to be discussed in subsequent chapters.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Kevin Winkler
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Equal Importance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Bob Fosse ◽  
The Way

The Introduction juxtaposes the musicals of Tommy Tune during the 1980s with the large-scale British extravaganzas that dominated Broadway in the same decade. These imported “megamusicals,” featured lavish spectacle, special effects, cookie-cutter casting, and booming, pop-rock soundscapes. By contrast, Tune’s shows were simple, elegant, and filled with unique personalities (including Tune himself). The special effects in a Tommy Tune show were ingeniously staged singing and dancing. Tune coined the term “guzzintahs” to refer to the seamless melding of song, dance, and story, as in “this goes into that, and that goes into this.” The Introduction also offers a brief history of the director-choreographer, including George Balanchine, who integrated ballet into Broadway dance and Agnes de Mille, who established her choreographic authorship as of equal importance alongside a show’s book, score, and direction. The creative use of “guzzintahs” by later figures such as Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, Gower Champion, and Michael Bennett is explored, pointing the way toward Tune’s especially unified staging concepts.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 218-220
Author(s):  
Liza Gennaro
Keyword(s):  
Musical Theater ◽  
Character Analysis ◽  
Art And Design

Musical theater dance is an ever-changing, evolving dance form, egalitarian in its embrace of any and all dance genres. It is a living, transforming art developed by exceptional dance artists and requiring dramaturgical understanding; character analysis; knowledge of history, art, and design; and most importantly, an extensive knowledge of dance, both intellectual and embodied. Its ghettoization within criticism and scholarship as a throw-away dance form, undeserving of analysis—derivative, cliché-ridden, titillating and predictable, the ugly stepsister of both theater and dance—belies and ignores the historic role it has had in musicals as an expressive form equal to book, music, and lyric. The standard adage, “when you can’t speak anymore sing, when you can’t sing anymore dance” expresses its importance in musical theater as the ultimate form of heightened emotional, visceral, and intellectual expression....

The Big Parade

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic McHugh
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
New Information ◽  
Depth Analysis

Meredith Willson is best remembered as the composer, lyricist, and book writer of The Music Man, one of Broadway and Hollywood’s most enduring works. But it was just one of his four stage musicals and just a small part of his career as a whole. This book uses newly available archival sources from New York, Indiana, and Wisconsin to reassess Willson’s contribution to the musical theater canon, including in-depth analysis of The Unsinkable Molly Brown, Here’s Love, and 1491, in addition to completely new information about the genesis of The Music Man.

Diaspora Dance in the History of Dance Studies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yvonne Daniel
Keyword(s):  
Visual Analysis ◽  
Franz Boas ◽  
Dance Studies ◽  
Spanish Caribbean ◽  
Dance Culture ◽  
Caribbean Spanish ◽  
History Of ◽  
Katherine Dunham ◽  
Dutch Caribbean ◽  
Dance Anthropology

This chapter examines Diaspora dance culture from a dance studies perspective. It begins by tracing the history of dance anthropology and Diaspora dance as a field of study, with a particular focus on some key dance scholars such as Franz Boas, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Margaret Mead, Gertrude Kurath, Katherine Dunham, and Pearl Primus. It then reviews the pioneers and pioneering literature of dance anthropology covering Caribbean, Spanish Caribbean, French/Kreyol Caribbean, English/Creole Caribbean, and Dutch Caribbean dance studies as well as dance studies of Afro-Latin territories. It also provides a short background on African and Diaspora U.S. dance studies and concludes by highlighting how visual analysis of dance formations permits a visceral understanding of Diaspora dance.

Everything is Choreography

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Winkler
Keyword(s):  
Musical Theater ◽  
Full Scale ◽  
Scale Analysis ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Broadway Musicals ◽  
Bob Fosse ◽  
Funding Environment

Everything Is Choreography: The Musical Theater of Tommy Tune is the first full-scale analysis of the work of Tommy Tune, and his place in a lineage of Broadway’s great director-choreographers. The decade of the 1980s was considered a low point for the American musical. Tune’s predecessors in the art of complete musical staging like Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, Gower Champion, and Michael Bennett were either dead or withdrawn from the Broadway arena. Yet it was the period of Tune’s greatest success. The book examines how he adapted to an increasingly corporatized, high-stakes producing and funding environment. It considers how Tune kept the American musical a thriving, creative enterprise at a time when Broadway was dominated by British imports. It investigates Tune’s work since the mid-1990s, when he shifted his attentions to touring and regional productions, far from the glare of Broadway. Unlike his fellow director-choreographers, Tune also maintained a successful performing career, and the book details the deft balancing act that kept him working as a popular singer-dancer-actor while he was directing a series of striking and influential Broadway musicals.

Taking the Reins

2021 ◽  
pp. 106-144
Author(s):  
Liza Gennaro
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
Peter Pan ◽  
West Side ◽  
West Side Story ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Artistic Vision ◽  
Male Dominated ◽  
Bob Fosse

The genesis of the present-day director-choreographer, starting with de Mille’s role as director-choreographer on Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ill-fated Allegro (1947), is explored. How she employed dance as a narrative and metaphorical device in support of the allegorical structure of the libretto, and how her artistic vision conflicted with her collaborators is investigated. De Mille’s directorial oeuvre is considered in the context of the male-dominated world of Broadway. Robbins’ ascendance as the most influential director-choreographer of twentieth-century musical theater is examined in a close analysis of his choreography for and direction of Pajama Game (1954 [co-directed with George Abbott, co-choreographer Bob Fosse]), Peter Pan (1954), Bells Are Ringing (1956 [in which he collaborated with Bob Fosse]), Gypsy (1959), and Fiddler on the Roof (1964). West Side Story (1957) will be discussed here as an anomaly in Robbins’ musical theater career. I argue that Robbins’ interest in movement innovation in relation to his choreography for the “Jets” in West Side Story (1957) differs from his previous musical theater works. In addition, I will examine Robbins’ West Side Story collaboration with co-choreographer Peter Gennaro.

Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Steichen
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Broadway Musical ◽  
Broadway Musicals

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.

Cabin in the Sky

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard Pollack
Keyword(s):  
Critical Reception ◽  
New Music ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Set Design ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Critical Success ◽  
Katherine Dunham

Cabin in the Sky was one of Latouche’s first major triumphs, an all-black 1940 musical for which he wrote the lyrics: music by Vernon Duke; book by Lynn Root; choreography by George Balanchine and Katherine Dunham; and sets by Boris Aronson; Ethel Waters and Dooley Wilson starred. The show proved a critical success, applauded for the sophistication of its score and the novelty of its choreography and set design; this included kudos in the black press, even as some progressive white critics took the work to task for perpetuating stereotypes. The show subsequently became a movie directed by Vincente Minnelli, with new music by Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg, and starring also Lena Horne. This chapter discusses differences between the stage and film versions, and further explores revivals of the stage show over the years, and the work’s continued controversial critical reception.

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