Few will dispute the profound influence that African American music and movement has had in American and world culture. "Dancing Many Drums" explores that influence through a groundbreaking collection of essays on African American dance history, theory and practice. In so doing, it reevalautes "black" and "African American" as both racial and dance categories. Abundantly illustrated, the volume includes images of a wide variety of dance forms and performers, from ring shouts, vaudeville and social dances to professional dance companies and Hollywood movie dancing. Bringing together issues of race, gender, politics, history and dance, "Dancing Many Drums" ranges widely, including discussions of dance instruction songs, the blues aesthetic, and Katherine Dunham's controversial ballet about lynching, "Southland". In addition, there are two photo essays: the first on African dance in New York by noted dance photographer Mansa Mussa, and another on 1934 "African opera" "Kykunkor, or the Witch Woman".
Author(s): Thomas Defrantz
Series: Studies in Dance History, A series of the Society of Dance History Scholars
Edition: 1
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 388
City: Madison, Wisconsin
Tags: african dance;dance history
Dancing Many Drums
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
African American Dance: A Complex History (Thomas F. DeFrantz)
Part 1. Theory
1. Christian Conversion and the Challenge of Dance (P. Sterling Stuckey)
2. Dance and Identity Politics in American Negro Vaudeville: The Whitman Sisters, 1900-1935 (Nadine A. George)
3. Awkward Moves: Dance Lessons from the 1940s (Marya Annette McQuirter)
4. (Up)Staging the Primitive: Pearl Primus and “the Negro Problem” in American Dance (Richard C. Green)
Part 2. Practice
5. African Dance in New York City (Marcia E. Heard and Mansa K. Mussa)
6. From “Messin’ Around” to “Funky Western Civilization”: The Rise and Fall of Dance Instruction Songs (Sally Banes and John F. Szwed)
7. “Moves on Top of Blues”: Dianne McIntyre’s Blues Aesthetic (Veta Goler)
Part 3. History
8. Kykunkor, or the Witch Woman: An African Opera in America, 1934 (Maureen Needham)
9. Between Two Eras: “Norton and Margot” in the Afro-American Entertainment World Brenda Dixon Gottschild)
10. Katherine Dunham’s Southland: Protest in the Face of Repression (Constance Valis Hill)
11. The New York Negro Ballet in Great Britain (Dawn Lille Horwitz)
Contributors
Index
