Making Broadway Dance

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.

Broadway Dance

The move away from modern dance and ballet to jazz dance as the prominent movement lexicon employed on Broadway is explored. I examine Katherine Dunham and Jack Cole’s influence on a generation of choreographers and Bob Fosse’s fusion of the dominant paradigms established by de Mille and Robbins. I give special attention to Fosse’s choreographic influences, including his early exposure to nightclubs and strip joints, comic/eccentric dancer Joe Frisco, Fred Astaire, and Jack Cole. Beginning with his work in The Pajama Game (1954) under the mentorship of Robbins and examining selected works from Damn Yankees (1955) and Sweet Charity (1966), I study Fosse’s choreographic development. My close reading of the musical number “Big Spender” reveals Fosse’s dramaturgical process. I examine the number in relation to the 1960s sexual revolution; representations of the female dancing body in both commercial theater and concert venues; and in relation to de Mille’s “Postcard Girls” from her Oklahoma! dream ballet, “Laurey Makes Up Her Mind.” I also consider Fosse’s post-Sweet Charity objectification of the female body; his late career disregard for the precepts of time and place in relation to character, and his formulation of a distinctly identifiable movement lexicon—the “Fosse Style.” The chapter closes with three more influential director-choreographers: Gower Champion, with his innovative cinematic approach to stage musicals and his standard use of showbiz dance lexicons undisturbed by modernist methods; Michael Bennett, a strict proponent of Robbins methods and the inheritor of the Robbins’ mantle; and Donald McKayle, one of the only African American director-choreographers working in the late twentieth-century Broadway arena.

Introduction

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’ ...

“A Fine Art in Danger”

During the 1950s and 1960s, jazz music became solidly entrenched in America’s institutions of high art patronage as the music’s most prestigious venues shifted from popular clubs and ballrooms to concert halls and upscale summer festivals, most notably the Newport Jazz Festival. While for most professional jazz dancers, this period marked a time when the work “dried up,” there were several lindy hop and rhythm tap dancers who managed to access these spaces through their relationships with jazz historian Marshall Stearns. Stearns was a key player in the adoption of jazz history as an academic subject and an advocate for the serious study of Black vernacular dance. This chapter asks why Stearns’s efforts to “legitimize” and institutionalize jazz dance largely failed, given that his similar advocacy for jazz music clearly succeeded. It argues that Stearns’s folkloric conceptualization of “vernacular jazz dance” fell short of the successful “consensus narrative” he built for jazz music in that concertized adaptations of Black vernacular dance practices by choreographers such as Katherine Dunham and Alvin Ailey were not legible to Stearns as contiguous extensions of the traditional folk and popular dance forms he problematically fetishized as dying folk art in need of preservation. The discursive barrier Stearns built between the worlds of vernacular and concert dance, while intended to safeguard from cultural appropriation so-called authentic or vernacular jazz dance forms, ultimately reinforced primitivist narratives that discursively foreclosed many possibilities for dance as a vital creative partner in jazz music’s present or future.

The Remarkable Curvature of the Mind of Abdias do Nascimento

Nascimento transcended the country of his birth and established himself in the minds and hearts of Africans everywhere as a combatant against racism and classism. Abdias do Nascimento was to Brazil what Langston Hughes and Katherine Dunham were to African Americans, a phenomenon of cultural energy that lifted his people to the highest dimensions of art in defiance of a designed degradation of blackness. Abdias grew up as a rebel spirit, as he would often say, in the tradition of his mother, who had called out abusive behavior toward blacks, in a brazenly racist country that had exploited the indigenous and African people for centuries. Thus, he was to become a Malcolm X, Du Bois, and Paul Robeson in the Brazilian context. Combining artistic skill, militant resistance, world knowledge, historical understanding, and an adventurous nature, his active mind did not rest in one field but in several art forms and research areas. He found his first love in the practice of African art and spirituality while creating the Black Experimental Theatre in Rio de Janeiro in the l940s.

Cuerpos como voces plenas. Un montaje polifónico

El montaje entre las ima?genes de Katherine Dunham y los bailarines populares del Noroeste Argentino tiene como objetivo visualizar las expresiones corporales danci?sticas en diferentes tiempos y espacios, pero con la misma intencio?n de articularse utilizando el cuerpo en las danzas, sea en un escenario profesional-arti?stico o en un escenario popular. La intencio?n es dejar hablar los cuerpos a trave?s de un dia?logo polifo?nico entre los diversos actores.

EL placer del movimiento – Cuerpos y danzas populares amefricanas en Argentina

Esta pesquisa enfatiza a articulação da dança, elementos culturais ameríndios e africanos que marcam a dinâmica “Amefricana” na sociedade atual. O objetivo é conectar a perspectiva teórico-prática de Katherine Dunham com as expressões da dança na Argentina, a fim de mostrar que os bailarinos populares entendem a dança como uma articulação da alegria, sensualidade, sexualidade e dramatização da vida social.

Dance History and Digital Humanities Meet at the Archives: An Interim Project Report on Dunham's Data

This interim project report addresses the ongoing work of Dunham's Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry. The project centres choreographer Katherine Dunham's transnational circulation, and takes a critical mixed methods approach informed by feminist and anti-racist discussions in the digital humanities in order to explore the questions and problems that make data analysis and visualization meaningful for dance history. Dunham's Data sits on robust datasets that we have manually curated from currently undigitized sources – an iterative and evaluative process that approaches these archives and the histories that they contain from a granular perspective. This update contextualizes our particular conjunction of archival and digital methods within dance history's precedents for curating data, and talks through our own datasets as tools for dance historical analysis in terms of Dunham's global legacy.