America Dancing - From the Cakewalk to the Moonwalk (Hardcover)

An exuberant history of American dance, told through the lives of virtuoso performers who have defined the art 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.

General

Imprint:	Yale University Press
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	2016
Authors:	Megan Pugh
Dimensions:	235 x 156 x 29mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover - Cloth over boards
Pages:	416
ISBN-13:	978-0-300-20131-4
Categories:	Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Dance > General
LSN:	0-300-20131-1
Barcode:	9780300201314

Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate? Let us know about it.

Does this product have an incorrect or missing image? Send us a new image.

Is this product missing categories? Add more categories.

Review This Product

No reviews yet - be the first to create one!