America Dancing: From the Cakewalk to the Moonwalk

by Megan Pugh

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300201314
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	11/17/2015
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Megan Pugh has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lewis and Clark College. Her writings on American art and culture appear frequently, and her poetry has been published in The Oxford American and VOLT among other publications. She lives in Portland, OR.

Editorial Reviews

…valuable, original, refreshing, wide-ranging. You can find errors in it; you may howl about its omissions; you should argue with it. But it's good company: Ms. Pugh's writing is excellent, and the book is mind opening. To an invaluable extent, it's about the influences of African-Americans on American dance…The breadth and wealth of information often dazzle. [Pugh] also has an acute sense of dance movement; she can describe it vividly…This book alters and enriches American dance history. It doesn't change the record of what happened when; instead, it revises our sense of how things came to pass.

The New York Times - Alastair Macaulay

With her locomotive prose, virtuosic analysis, and acrobatic storytelling, Megan Pugh brings America's most dazzling dancers stair-tapping and moonwalking back to life.  With profound historical insight, she also shows how these gravity-defying heroes made their highwire crossings – between ‘high’ and ‘low’ taste, between classes and races – only look like a cakewalk.  America Dancing is more exhilarating, and more revealing, than cultural history has a right to be.”
JOHN BECKMAN, author of American Fun: Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt

John Beckman

"Pugh executes some fancy footwork of her own; and like Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson taking flight up a flight of stairs (and back down again), Pugh nimbly keeps step with a chronology that’s given to doubling back abruptly and leaping forward."—Boston Globe

Boston Globe

"This history  sizzles, glides, soars, skitters, hammers, taps, and leaps through decades as well as diverse dance forms, from the worlds of cinema to Broadway,  ballet and beyond.   An exciting, important book!"
PEGGY and MURRAY SCHWARTZ, authors of The Dance Claimed Me: A Biography of Pearl Primus

Peggy and Murray Schwartz

"Valuable, original, refreshing, wide-ranging. . . . Ms. Pugh’s writing is excellent, and the book is mind opening. To an invaluable extent, it’s about the influences of African-Americans on American dance. . . . The breadth and wealth of information often dazzle. . . . This book alters and enriches American dance history. It doesn’t change the record of what happened when; instead, it revises our sense of how things came to pass."—Alastair Macaulay, New York Times

New York Times - Alastair Macaulay

"Pugh handles dance as an art form and its historical context with equal deftness. She builds her book around the personal stories of some of the biggest names in American dance. . . . Not only does Pugh draw sometimes unexpected connections among them and place them within her larger story, she also describes their dancing so vividly that readers will want to see the dances themselves."—Shelf Awareness, Starred Review

Shelf Awareness

"As signifying dancers, men and women fly out of this deep, long-nurtured book. In clear and sensual prose, Megan Pugh has fashioned a history of modern America in gestures and movement. The pages never hold still."
GREIL MARCUS, author of The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs and Real Life Rock
 

Greil Marcus

10/15/2015
Critic and poet Pugh shares her perspectives on "American dancers who have been celebrated for embodying the country in movement." This book is divided into six sections and presented chronologically starting with the cakewalk ("America's First National Dance"). Tappers Bill Robinson and Fred Astaire are discussed, along with choreographers Agnes de Mille and Paul Taylor. The last chapter focuses on the influence of Michael Jackson. Legendary performer Robinson is known for his "stair dance" and was a key transitional figure in elevating tap into an art form. Astaire built on this and blended it with ballroom and ballet, while de Mille created Rodeo and choreographed Oklahoma! using square dance and country motifs. The troubled history of America is reflected in dance, says Pugh, who discusses the origins of the cakewalk, minstrelsy, and the career of Robinson, who played a supporting role to Shirley Temple in Hollywood movies. A list of dance films and videos is provided. VERDICT Major figures are highlighted in this cultural overview of American dance. Recommended for readers of dance history and for academic libraries with dance programs.—Barbara Kundanis, Longmont P.L., CO

Library Journal

2015-09-01
In her debut, a scholar and freelance critic transforms some key people and events into artful coat trees on which to hang the history of American popular dance. Pugh is offering not a detailed, comprehensive history but a focused, intentionally limited account. Some readers may quibble with her choices—why chapters on Agnes de Mille and Michael Jackson and not Bob Fosse and Gene Kelly?—but as the text unfurls, most readers will be satisfied (Fosse does get significant mention in Jackson's chapter). The author opens with a startling moment: the 1939 arrest of Bill "Bojangles" Robinson in Times Square for loitering while contemplating a neon sign of himself, and Robinson's influence, as well as the influences of numerous other black dancers, glides through the text. Others meriting considerable attention include Fred Astaire and Paul Taylor, but Pugh is careful to include myriad other important figures, including Hermes Pan (who worked with Astaire) and Cholly Atkins (whose work Jackson studied closely). Some will find surprises here, as well. With his wife, Henry Ford wrote a manual for square dancers (Good Morning, 1926), and Michael Jackson learned the moonwalk from others, practicing for years before he presented it to the public. Although Pugh's scholarship is considerable, she is writing not for a scholarly but for a general audience. Readers won't get lost in any forest of arcane vocabulary or be confused by charts and diagrams. Her intent, instead, is to show dance's sort of mockingbird origins: moves come from earlier moves and moments—evolution, not intelligent design. At times, the author has a dancer's grace in the flow of her prose. She calls a piece by Paul Taylor "an exercise in delicious contrarianism." Her tone is relentlessly positive, however, with seldom a discouraging word. Pugh gracefully dances the fine line between critic and fan.

Kirkus Reviews