Submit a quarter-page typewritten summary of the assigned reading The progress o
ID: 3485706 • Letter: S
Question
Submit a quarter-page typewritten summary of the assigned reading
The progress of dance in America has been bedeviled by labels affixed to it by the early white settlers--largely Puritans laboring hard to make the colonies inhabitable (by their standards) and Christian. Dancing was frivolous and potentially sinful. Increase Mather's thirty-page tract "An Arrow Against Profane and Promiscuous Dancing Drawn out of the Quiver of the Scriptures" made it clear in 1.665 that men and woman mingling in dance might be tempted to mingle in other, even less acceptable ways The charges of frivolity and time-wasting didn't entirely squelch dancing done for enjoyment and to let off steam. In the eighteenth century, working people in cities performed their reels and jigs in taverns. Among the upper crust, knowledge of the steps of the minuet and the patterns of the cotillion were mandatory (George Washington showed himself as an adept dancer at a ball in New York days after his inauguration as the country's first president). It was when French dancing masters expanded from teaching Ballroom steps into giving ballet lessons, and variety shows began to flourish, that ministers worked themselves up more strenuously about sinfulness. Professional women dancers took most of the heat. Surely no decent woman would wear skirts so short! And while men ballet dancers in nineteenth-century America weren't denigrated, as they were in France by such influential critics as Théophile Gautier and Jules Janin, for being all too unappetizingly and stolidly male in a gossamer world, they were largely ignored. The men who made a decent living as dancers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were those who used their feet like tools and didn't wave their arms around and strike attitudes. The popular white choreographer performer John Durang (who maintained a wife and ten theater-savvy children) initially made his name with his solo hormpipe, while the African-American minstrel William Henry Lane (known as Master Juba) thrilled London with his nimbleness and quickness of foot. It's not clear exactly when the charge of effeminacy first began to be leveled at male dancers, or when a boy studying ballet might be labeled a sissy (a term not always a euphemism for homosexuality). But tap dancers, black or white, largely escaped the labeling. They were showing you their intricate steps with concentration and frank enjoyment; it was their job to entertain you, and they did it with muscular ease. Fred Astaire, who began as one half of a vaudeville duo with his sister Adele, is an interesting case. He wasn't a brawny hunk, or even a typical romantic lead; the characters he portrayed onscreen--witty, dapper, debonair and definitely not day laborers--seemed almost asexual. Until he danced. He wasn't just an imaginative solo tapper, he exercised power over the women he partnered onscreen. In many duets, he woos an initially reluctant beauty by swirling her into increasingly ardent steps until she's putty in his hands. At the end of "Night and Day," his character's life-changing number with Ginger Rogers in the 1934 Gay Divorcee, he dances her over to an upholstered banquette and slides her onto it just as the music ends. The camera closes in on her-stunned and starry-eyed--then cuts to show him brushing his hands together, as if he's just finished up his work for the day (The fact that Astaire made a very good living in films certainly helped to convey a dancer's potential to be a success in business--another token of masculinity.)Explanation / Answer
Initially in America, the dance was not accepted but there ahs been a gradual rise in the dance as a form of expression. This article succinctly tries to put forth the growth of dance as an art form. Slowly after much anticipation, in the beginning of 18th century, working class people started making their own jigs and reels. In the beginning women who indulged in dance were not appreciated and so were men who earned money through dance. The article also puts forth the case of Fred Astaire and his sister Adele. Astaire was supposedly the main protagonist on stage and was a typical Ballroom dancer. The role he portrayed succinctly brought out dancing style and persona. Through his dances he portrayed the masculinity in the far and wide places of America. Ted Shawn, another dancer, forcefully portrayed ad depicted masculinity through his dances. Shawn also tried to bring to fore the relationship between dancers and athletes or a connection between dance and sports. Through his dance forms, he projected the body postures of athletes and bodybuilders. Gradually, this art form of projecting masculinity through dancers and their dance forms was widely accepted during 1940s. The article then enumerates various instances and case studies of dancers and their major dance forms.