America Dancing: From the Cakewalk to the Moonwalk

by Megan Pugh

The history of American dance reflects the nation’s tangled culture. Dancers from wildly different backgrounds learned, imitated, and stole from one another.  Audiences everywhere embraced the result as deeply American.   Using the stories of tapper Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, ballet and Broadway choreographer Agnes de Mille, choreographer Paul Taylor, and Michael Jackson, Megan Pugh shows 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 show up on elite opera house stages. Steps invented by slaves on antebellum plantations captivate the British royalty and the Parisian avant-garde. Dances were better boundary crossers than their dancers, however, and the issues of race and class that haunt everyday life shadow American dance as well. Deftly narrated, America Dancing demonstrates the centrality of dance in American art, life, and identity, taking us to watershed moments when the nation worked out a sense of itself through public movement.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Jazz

413 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 24, 2015

Reviews

[Ralphz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Despite the title, this is less about dancing and more about The Dance. Popular dance is the jumping off point for discussions of ballet, modern dance, race, and the creation of an American art form, from the cakewalk to tap and beyond.

Instead of a look at dances and their development, the popular forms and how they got there, we get theory and art and psychology, of all things. It's good for what it is, I'm sure, but for those of us who are not dance aficionados, it's not as fulfilling.

The writer also goes heavy into race, as most books about America do these days. She uses racial interpretations for apparently innocent moments. For example, in the first chapter, about the cakewalk, the author says sometimes dancers (usually black) would balance a water jug on a hand, "[seemingly] emblematic of the care oppressed people must take with regulations weighing heavily upon them..." That seems a stretch for a simple dance move.

But she does at least avoid the "cultural appropriation" argument that is fast becoming a cliche. She instead says that imitation and adaptation are always at the root of how art and other culture develops.

In other words, it's a mixed bag. It's not a history of popular dance and dances. It's really a look at race relations through the lens of dance.

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had high hopes for this book but I was a bit disappointed in its direction. I felt that there was a bit too much content when the author focused on racism when talking about the main characters in the book, especially the sections on Bill Robinson and Michael Jackson. While each chapter started out wonderful getting to know the lives of the 5 dancers depicted, I felt the author digressed thereafter and it git to the point where I was just trying to finish each chapter, hoping for better in the next one.

[Mills College Library]

793.31973 P9785 2015

[kyle]

Fun to read a book on dance again especially one that introduced me to so many figures I wasn't aware of (the chapters on the cakewalk, the moonwalk, and Bill Robinson were particularly illuminating).