Ragtime Dancing
Ragtime dancing is a social dance practice, performed to ragtime music, that began in the 1890s and gained widespread popularity in US dance halls until…
Ragtime dancing is a social dance practice, performed to ragtime music, that began in the 1890s and gained widespread popularity in US dance halls until…
Historically, modern dance scholarship has followed the contours of the field as defined by John Martin, the revered dance critic for The New York Times,…
During the years 1911–1917, Irene Foote Castle (1893–1969) and her husband Vernon Castle (1887–1918) explicitly marketed ragtime dancing as “modern” to their upper-class and, increasingly,…
One of the earliest large-scale musical revues to be created and performed by an all-Black cast, Darktown Follies premiered in 1913 at the Lafayette Theatre…
The foxtrot emerged circa 1914, most likely within African American practices, as a variation on the older duple meter one step popular with dancers since…
The jook house (also juke joint), an African American institution found mainly in semiurban areas in the Southern United States, is an important cultural phenomenon…
Twentieth-century modern ballroom dancing differed from social dancing of the nineteenth century in its shift in focus from group cohesion to individual personal style. This…
At the height of her career in the late 1920s, Josephine Baker was perhaps the most famous dancer in the world. Her performances of ‘the…
Brother of the celebrated poet Sofia Parnok, Valentin Parnakh was a Russo-Soviet dancer, jazz musician, actor, poet, and translator, a mover and shaker of the…
In the years before the entry of the United States into World War I, the One Step replaced the Two Step as the common popular…
The shimmy, also known as the shim-me-sha-wabble, is a jazz dance that features the upper body, especially the shoulders, shaking and quivering horizontally from side…
Aida Overton Walker (born Ada Wilmore Overton) was one of the first female African-American stars of vaudeville, and perhaps the first to be recognized as…
The Waste Land is an influential and experimental 435-line poem written by Thomas Stearns Eliot and first published in 1922. Structurally, it is a pastiche…
Animator John Hubley, born in Marinette, Wisconsin, served as creative head of UPA (United Productions of America) in its early years and originated its most…
Russian-born Léonide Massine’s career flourished in the cities of Western Europe, where he made his name as a lead dancer and choreographer for Serge Diaghilev’s…
A one-act ballet on the theme of a fairground sideshow, Parade was produced by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, and premiered on May 18, 1917 at…
In the short span of about fifteen years in the early twentieth century, Cecil James Sharp ignited a folk revival in country song and dance…
Hollywood cartoon studio UPA (United Productions of America) was founded in 1943 by former Disney animators Steven Bosustow, Zachary Schwartz, and David Hilberman. It profoundly…
Jazz dancing is an important modern art form that developed in tandem with jazz music between the 1910s and 1940s in America. Emanating from African-American…
Erik Satie’s compositions, writings, and humor played an important role in many modernist movements of the twentieth century. Experimenting with simple forms, neoclassicism, mysticism, satire,…
In her seventy-year career, Anna Sokolow contributed to dance fields in the United States, Mexico, and Israel. A child of Russian Jewish immigrants, Sokolow rose…