Abstract
This chapter explores, in two case studies, how memory of the past—in one case the ancient past, the other the contemporary past—is “manipulated” (in Paul Ricoeur’s terms) to make seemingly transgressive social dance styles socially acceptable to a broad, commercial audience. Ricoeur’s concerns, described in Memory, History, Forgetting (2004), led me to consider the process by which popular dances, cast as risqué or immoral, are tempered by calls to past styles of dance to make them fit for modern consumption. The two examples here are ragtime dancers of the 1910s Irene and Vernon Castle and ballroom dancers and teachers of the 1950s Arthur and Kathryn Murray. While the Castles invoked antiquity to assuage anxieties about the new ragtime dances, the Murrays’ appeals to 1920s and 1930s dance styles were intended to legitimize rhythm-and-blues-based dances. This chapter considers how earlier styles of dance were memorialized in the new dances and received within the political and social framework of each decade—the 1910s and 1950s, respectively.
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Notes
- 1.
For further discussion, see my essay “Apaches, Tangos, and Other Indecencies: Women, Dance, and New York Nightlife of the 1910s” in Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy, Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader (Malnig 2009).
- 2.
Sociologist Marcel Mauss makes a similar argument in his 1935 essay “Techniques of the Body,” which explores the way bodily functions and actions are learned and are a combination of biological, psychological, and sociological factors.
- 3.
For more on this cultural history, and the phenomenon of the tango tea, that follows, see my book Dancing Till Dawn: A Century of Exhibition Ballroom Dance (Malnig 1994).
- 4.
The rag dances were primarily of African American origin and, as several dance scholars have pointed out, were essentially diluted versions of southern plantation dances. Danielle Robinson, however, explains that many of these dances, also performed by immigrants and working-class women and men, were essentially hybrid forms of black and working-class styles. Nonetheless, the dances were primarily considered “black” and thus needed to be shorn of what were deemed excessive and sexual bodily movement. On the ragtime dances, see Nadine George Graves, “Just Like Being at the Zoo”: Primitivity and Ragtime Dance, in Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader. Also see Danielle Robinson, Modern Moves: Dancing Race During the Ragtime and Jazz Eras.
- 5.
Exhibition ballroom dancers of the period often referred to their dances as “modern dancing,” when, in fact, they meant “modern ballroom dancing.” This is not to be confused with the early modern dance pioneers Ruth St. Denis, Isadora Duncan, and Loie Fuller, also performing at this time.
- 6.
See Andrea Carosso, Cold War Narratives: American Culture in the 1950s, particularly Chap. 8, “The Age of Rock ‘n’ Roll.”
- 7.
George Lipsitz, in his essay “The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class, and Ethnicity in Early Network Television,” deals primarily with ethnic, working-class sitcoms of the years 1949–1957, such as The Goldbergs, Mama, Life With Luigi, and others.
- 8.
The episodes of The Arthur Murray Party consulted are: The Arthur Murray Party, 195[?], *MGZHB 12-2655, The Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; The Arthur Murray Party, November 16, 1954, The Paley Center for Media, New York City; The Arthur Murray Party, February 23, 1960, The Paley Center for Media.
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Malnig, J. (2021). Parading the Past, Taming the New: From Ragtime to Rock and Roll. In: Parfitt, C. (eds) Cultural Memory and Popular Dance. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71083-5_5
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