Dance
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,…
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,…
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…
The Black Bottom dance began as an early twentieth-century African American social dance in the Southern United States. It later entered the American mainstream via…
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…
In 1919 a young architect named Walter Gropius initiated one of the most modern art schools of the twentieth century in the city of Weimar…
Futurism emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century as a movement that explicitly conceptualized the process of literary and artistic experimentation as part of…
Mambo music, which emerged in Cuba in the 1940s but was popularized in Mexico City and New York, blended jazz harmonies and instrumentation with Afro-Cuban…
In a modernizing society undergoing rapidly increasing mechanization, industrialization, urbanization, commercialism, and consumerism, the dance marathons of the 1920s and 1930s reflected social developments of…
In the 1920s and 1930s, Harlem became a major hub of New York City nightlife and a prolific space for African American artistic creation. It…
The cancan is a popular dance form closely associated with the Parisian setting in which it emerged and underwent much of its early development. From…
The term Dance Director was used in the first three decades of the twentieth century for stage and film work. At first, it simply meant…
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…
Black dance is both an aesthetic and historical category. When the term first appeared in the late 1960s, it referred to dance forms grounded in…
Mura Dehn was a dancer, choreographer, writer and filmmaker whose work focussed on African-American vernacular jazz dance. Her greatest contribution to Modernism and jazz discourses…
Frequently credited with the invention of modern dance, Isadora Duncan was a choreographer, dancer, educator, international star, and author of a bestselling autobiography My Life…
Rock ’n roll dance was a major American dance form that became prominent in the 1950s and soon thereafter spread to the UK. The dance…
New York’s Palladium Ballroom is commonly revered as the birthplace of modern Latin dancing. Known as “the home of the mambo,” the Palladium was New…
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…
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 jook house (also juke joint), an African American institution found mainly in semiurban areas in the Southern United States, is an important cultural phenomenon…
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…
Denishawn, a for-profit enterprise combining a school and dance company, was founded in Los Angeles in 1915 by the internationally acclaimed solo performer Ruth St.…
Afrocubanismo was an esthetic trend in art music during the first half of the twentieth century focusing on African cultural features in Cuban society. The…
The Savoy Ballroom, Harlem’s largest and most famous ballroom during the Swing Era, was nicknamed ‘The Home of Happy Feet’. After it opened in 1926,…
Talley Beatty, whose career began in the mid-1930s and extended six decades, was a leading modern dance artist. He was a prolific choreographer, exquisite dancer,…