Steppin' on the blues : the visible rhythms of African American dance / Jacqui Malone.

Title :

Steppin' on the blues : the visible rhythms of African American dance

Author:

Malone, Jacqui.

Format:

Books

Summary:

Steppin' on the Blues explores not only the meaning of dance in African American life but also the ways in which music, song, and dance are interrelated in African American culture. Dance as it has emanated from the black community is a pervasive, vital, and distinctive form of expression - its movements speak eloquently of African American values and aesthetics. Beyond that it has been, finally, one of the most important means of cultural survival. Former dancer Jacqui

Malone throws a fresh spotlight on the cultural history of black dance, the Africanisms that have influenced it, and the significant role that vocal harmony groups, black college and university marching bands, and black sorority and fraternity stepping teams have played in the evolution of dance in African American life. From the cakewalk to the development of jazz dance and jazz music, all Americans can take pride in the vitality, dynamism, drama, joy, and uncommon

singularity with which African American dance has gifted the world.

Language:

English

ISBN - ISSN:

0252022114 (acid-free paper)

0252065085 (pbk. : acid-free paper)

Physical Description:

xiii, 272 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Contents:

1. "Gimme de Kneebone Bent": Music and Dance in Africa -- 2. "Keep to the Rhythm and You'll Keep to Life": Meaning and Style in African American Vernacular Dance -- 3. Mocking and Celebrating: Freedom of Expression in Dance during Slavery -- 4. Black Dance on the Road: Minstrelsy and Traveling Shows -- 5. Dancing Singers and Singing Dancers: Black Vernacular Dance on Stage, 1890-1940 -- 6. Jazz Music in Motion: Dancers and Big Bands -- 7. "Let the Punishment Fit the Crime": The Vocal Choreography of Cholly Atkins -- 8. "W'en de Colo'ed Ban' Comes Ma'chin' down de Street": From African Processions to New Orleans Second Lines -- 9. The FAMU Marching 100: From Ballpark Bleachers to the Champs-Elysees -- 10. African American Mutual Aid Societies: Remembering the Past and Facing the Future -- 11. Stepping: Regeneration through Dance in African American Fraternities and Sororities.

Subject:

African American dance -- History.

Series:

Folklore and society.

First Title value, for Searching:

Steppin' on the blues : the visible rhythms of African American dance / Jacqui Malone.

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Library	Audience	Home Location	Material Type	Shelf Number	Status
Searching... African American History Research Center, Gregory School	Adult	Reference Material	Reference material	793.31973 M257	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

This award-winning cultural history of black dance explores the meaning of dance in African-American life and the connections among music, song, and dance in African-American culture.

Reviews (2)

Choice Review

These two books take on the interesting subject of how the African American culture has made a difference to art in America--what this difference is and how it is manifest. Gottschild's subject is the saturation of America with the African. Distinguishing African aesthetics from the flux of other cultural imperatives and influences is not an easy task. Gottschild (Temple Univ.) relies mostly on secondary sources to make her argument that physical and verbal movement (words that connote action) in combination with an unresolved juxtaposition of opposites is at the heart of the African sensibility: hot and cool; loose and tight; detached and intense. These characteristics, first noted by Robert Farris Thompson (African Art in Motion, 1972), get played out in a variety of American performance forms. Gottschild focuses on dance but includes the minstrel stage, jazz, vaudeville, Gangsta Rap, the 19th-century "Hottentot Venus" (the pejoratively named African woman who was brought to England and displayed as a freak), performance criticism, and Native American powwow. A free wheeling writer, Gottschild often segues into a general discussion of racism and its impact on the performing arts in pointing out the locations of African influence in American performance. Despite unnecessary neologisms such as "blackenized," "invisibilized," and "Africanisms," Gottschild on the whole does not weigh down her prose with oppressive jargon. In Steppin' on the Blues, Jacqui Malone (CUNY Queens College) is not so much interested in African influences as in the history and processes of African American creativity. She gives her readers eight well-researched chapters on the history of vernacular dance, followed by three chapters on vernacular dance in three contemporary African American institutions: vocal-harmony groups, black college and university marching bands, and black sororities and fraternities. From music and dance in Africa to step-dancing on college campuses, Malone's discussion of the celebratory, rhythmic, cultural, and artistic intricacies of African American vernacular dance is praiseworthy for its documentation of dance as well as for its analysis of complex cultural processes. Malone's eminently readable book revises one's understanding of both African American and European American vernacular dance. Both books are welcome additions to a burgeoning literature on African American performance. Recommended for all academic collections. C. Martin New York University

Library Journal Review

Opportunities for self-expression were limited during the days of slavery, but at a dance, anyone with the right moves could become the king or queen of the floor. Dance styles from Western and central Africa became the basis for a vernacular dance style that made the rhythms of the music visible. In stark contrast to the erect spines and stiff legs of European dance, the spontaneous, bent-kneed, and angulated bodies stressed a life-affirming joy that remains vital today. From the public Negro dance contests of slave times, to the wildly popular minstrel shows, to the Harlem cabaret scene of the 1920s, to the stylized moves of Motown vocal groups, Malone records this history with an energy befitting her subject. She takes us to the present, where the heritage survives in the choreography of African American marching bands and the recent explosion of African American fraternity and sorority step shows. Recommended for public and academic libraries.Dan Bogey, Clearfield Cty. P.L. Federation, Curwensville, Pa. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.