Tap Dancing America

Tap Dancing America

Author: Constance Valis Hill

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2014-11-12

Total Pages: 462

ISBN-13: 0190225386

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Here is the vibrant, colorful, high-stepping story of tap -- the first comprehensive, fully documented history of a uniquely American art form. Writing with all the verve and grace of tap itself, Constance Valis Hill offers a sweeping narrative, filling a major gap in American dance history and placing tap firmly center stage.


A Century of Musicals in Black and White

A Century of Musicals in Black and White

Author: Bernard L. Peterson Jr.

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 1993-10-25

Total Pages: 554

ISBN-13: 0313064547

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This comprehensive reference book provides succinct information on almost thirteen hundred musical stage works written and produced from the 1870s to the 1990s involving contributions by black librettists, lyricists, composers, musicians, producers, or performers or containing thematic materials relevant to the black experience. Organized alphabetically, they include tent and outdoor shows, vaudeville, operas and operettas, comedies, farces, spectacles, revues, cabaret and nightclub shows, children's musicals, skits, one-act musicals, one-person shows, and even a musical without songs. In addition to the hundreds of shows independently created, produced, and performed by black writers and theatrical artists, it presents hundreds more representing a collaboration of black and white talents. An appendix organizes the shows chronologically and highlights those that were most significant in the history of the black American musical stage. An extensive bibliography and indexes of names, songs, and subjects complete the work.


Babylon Girls

Babylon Girls

Author: Jayna Brown

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2008-09-19

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 0822390698

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Babylon Girls is a groundbreaking cultural history of the African American women who performed in variety shows—chorus lines, burlesque revues, cabaret acts, and the like—between 1890 and 1945. Through a consideration of the gestures, costuming, vocal techniques, and stagecraft developed by African American singers and dancers, Jayna Brown explains how these women shaped the movement and style of an emerging urban popular culture. In an era of U.S. and British imperialism, these women challenged and played with constructions of race, gender, and the body as they moved across stages and geographic space. They pioneered dance movements including the cakewalk, the shimmy, and the Charleston—black dances by which the “New Woman” defined herself. These early-twentieth-century performers brought these dances with them as they toured across the United States and around the world, becoming cosmopolitan subjects more widely traveled than many of their audiences. Investigating both well-known performers such as Ada Overton Walker and Josephine Baker and lesser-known artists such as Belle Davis and Valaida Snow, Brown weaves the histories of specific singers and dancers together with incisive theoretical insights. She describes the strange phenomenon of blackface performances by women, both black and white, and she considers how black expressive artists navigated racial segregation. Fronting the “picaninny choruses” of African American child performers who toured Britain and the Continent in the early 1900s, and singing and dancing in The Creole Show (1890), Darktown Follies (1913), and Shuffle Along (1921), black women variety-show performers of the early twentieth century paved the way for later generations of African American performers. Brown shows not only how these artists influenced transnational ideas of the modern woman but also how their artistry was an essential element in the development of jazz.


Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?

Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?

Author: Shannon King

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2017-04

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1479889083

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Demonstrates how Harlemite's dynamic fight for their rights and neighborhood raised the black community's racial consciousness and established Harlem's legendary political culture. King uncovers early twentieth century Harlem as an intersection between the black intellectuals and artists who created the New Negro Renaissance and the working class who found fought daily to combat institutionalized racism and gender discrimination in both Harlem and across the city. --Adapted from publisher description.


American Musical Theatre

American Musical Theatre

Author: Gerald Martin Bordman

Publisher:

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 1033

ISBN-13: 0199729700

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Hailed as "absolutely the best reference book on its subject" by Newsweek, American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle covers more than 250 years of musical theatre in the United States, from a 1735 South Carolina production of Flora, or Hob in the Well to The Addams Family in 2010. Authors Gerald Bordman and Richard Norton write an engaging narrative blending history, critical analysis, and lively description to illustrate the transformation of American musical theatre through such incarnations as the ballad opera, revue, Golden Age musical, rock musical, Disney musical, and, with 2010's American Idiot, even the punk musical. The Chronicle is arranged chronologically and is fully indexed according to names of shows, songs, and people involved, for easy searching and browsing. Chapters range from the "Prologue," which traces the origins of American musical theater to 1866, through several "intermissions" (for instance, "Broadway's Response to the Swing Era, 1937-1942") and up to "Act Seven," the theatre of the twenty-first century. This last chapter covers the dramatic changes in musical theatre since the last edition published-whereas Fosse, a choreography-heavy revue, won the 1999 Tony for Best Musical, the 2008 award went to In the Heights, which combines hip-hop, rap, meringue and salsa unlike any musical before it. Other groundbreaking and/or box-office-breaking shows covered for the first time include Avenue Q, The Producers, Billy Elliot, Jersey Boys, Monty Python's Spamalot, Wicked, Hairspray, Urinetown the Musical, and Spring Awakening. Discussion of these shows incorporates plot synopses, names of principal players, descriptions of scenery and costumes, and critical reactions. In addition, short biographies interspersed throughout the text colorfully depict the creative minds that shaped the most influential musicals. Collectively, these elements create the most comprehensive, authoritative history of musical theatre in this country and make this an essential resource for students, scholars, performers, dramaturges, and musical enthusiasts.


An Intimate Affair

An Intimate Affair

Author: Jill Fields

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2007-07-02

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 0520941136

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Intimate apparel, a term in use by 1921, has played a crucial role in the development of the "naughty but nice" feminine ideal that emerged in the twentieth century. Jill Fields's engaging, imaginative, and sophisticated history of twentieth-century lingerie tours the world of women's intimate apparel and arrives at nothing less than a sweeping view of twentieth-century women's history via the undergarments they wore. Illustrated throughout and drawing on a wealth of evidence from fashion magazines, trade periodicals, costume artifacts, Hollywood films, and the records of organized labor, An Intimate Affair is a provocative examination of the ways cultural meanings are orchestrated by the "fashion-industrial complex," and the ways in which individuals and groups embrace, reject, or derive meaning from these everyday, yet highly significant, intimate articles of clothing.


Shuffle Along

Shuffle Along

Author: Noble Sissle

Publisher: A-R Editions, Inc.

Published: 2018-11-30

Total Pages: 639

ISBN-13: 1987200284

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The Broadway musical Shuffle Along—with book by Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, lyrics by Noble Sissle, and music by Eubie Blake—premiered on 23 May 1921 at the Cort Theatre on 63rd Street and became the first overwhelmingly successful African American musical on Broadway. Langston Hughes, who saw the production, said that Shuffle Along marked the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance. Both black and white audiences swarmed to the show, which prompted the integration of subsequent Broadway audiences. The dances were such a smash that choreographers for white Broadway shows hired Shuffle Along chorus girls to teach their chorus lines the new steps. “Love Will Find a Way,” the first successful unburlesqued love song in a black Broadway show, was so well-received that audiences demanded multiple encores. The show’s influences went far beyond Broadway: Some of the period’s most influential black musicians, including dancer Josephine Baker, vocalist Paul Robeson, composer Hall Johnson, and composer William Grant Still, all got their start in Shuffle Along. The editors have assembled the full score and libretto for this critical edition from the original performance materials. The critical report thoroughly explains all sources and editorial decisions. The accompanying scholarly essay examines the music, dances, and script of Shuffle Along and places this influential show in its social, racial, and historical context.


Race in American Musical Theater

Race in American Musical Theater

Author: Josephine Lee

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-06-29

Total Pages: 121

ISBN-13: 1350248223

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While most discussions of race in American theater emphasize the representation of race mainly in terms of character, plot, and action, Race in American Musical Theater highlights elements of theatrical production and reception that are particular to musical theater. Examining how race functions through the recurrence of particular racial stereotypes and storylines, this introductory volume also looks at casting practices, the history of the chorus line, and the popularity of recent shows such as Hamilton. Moving from key examples such as Show Boat! and South Pacific through to all-Black musicals such as Dreamgirls, Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk, and Jelly's Last Jam, this concise study serves as a critical survey of how race is presented in the American musical theater canon. Providing readers with historical background, a range of case studies and models of critical analysis, this foundational book prompts questions from how stereotypes persist to “who tells your story?”


Le Tumulte Noir

Le Tumulte Noir

Author: Jody Blake

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 1999-01-01

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 9780271017532

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Jody Blake demonstrates in this book that although the impact of African-American music and dance in France was constant from 1900 to 1930, it was not unchanging. This was due in part to the stylistic development and diversity of African-American music and dance, from the prewar cakewalk and ragtime to the postwar Charleston and jazz. Successive groups of modernists, beginning with the Matisse and Picasso circle in the 1900s and concluding with the Surrealists and Purists in the 1920s, constructed different versions of la musique and la danse negre. Manifested in creative and critical works, these responses to African-American music and dance reflected the modernists' varying artistic agendas and historical climates.