Dance: A Guide to Library Resources and Research: Call Numbers and Subject Headings (Books)

Primary subject heading: Dance > United States > History
Dancing embodies cultural history and beliefs, and each dance carries with it features of the place where it originated. Influenced by different social, political, and environmental circumstances, dances change and adapt. American dance evolved in large part through combinations of multiple styles and forms that arrived with each new group of immigrants. Perspectives on American Dance is the first anthology in over twenty-five years to focus exclusively on American dance practices across a wide span of American culture. This volume and its companion show how social experience, courtship, sexualities, and other aspects of life in America are translated through dancing into spatial patterns, gestures, and partner relationships.This volume of Perspectives on American Dance features essays by a young generation of authors who write with familiarity about their own era, exploring new parameters of identity and evaluating a wide variety of movement practices being performed in spaces beyond traditional proscenium stages. Topics include "dorky dancing" on YouTube; same-sex competitors on the TV show So You Think You Can Dance; racial politics in NFL touchdown dances; the commercialization of flash mobs; the connections between striptease and corporate branding; how 9/11 affected dance; the criminalization of New York City club dancing; and the joyous ironies of hipster dance. This volume emphasizes how dancing is becoming more social and interactive as technology opens up new ways to create and distribute dance.The accessible essays use a combination of movement analysis, thematic interpretation, and historical context to convey the vitality and variety of American dance. They offer new insights on American dance practices while simultaneously illustrating how dancing functions as an essential template for American culture and identity. Contributors: Jennifer Atkins | Jessica Berson | J. Ellen Gainor | Patsy Gay | Ansley Jones | Kate Mattingly | Hannah Schwadron | Sally Sommer, Ph.D. | Ina Sotirova | Dawn Springer | Michelle T. Summers | Latika L. Young | Tricia Henry Young

Primary subject heading: Dance > Latin America
This title in the American Dance Floor series provides an overview of the origins, development, and current status of Latin social dancing in the United States. Latin dance and music have had a widespread influence upon the development of other social dance and music styles in the United States. As a result, Latin dance styles are among the most important dance forms in America. Latin Dance addresses every major style of Latin dance, describing the basic steps that characterize it as well as its rhythmic pace and time signature, and examining its development from European, African, and Amerindian influences. The author explains the range of styles and expression to be found in Latin dances primarily within the context of couples social dancing, the popularity of salsa today, and the broader social meanings and implications of their multicultural origins from the 1600s to the present. The historic connection between exhibition Latin dance and American modern dance through vaudeville is explained as well.

Primary subject heading: Dance > Caribbean Area
Explore the vibrant and varied dance traditions of the Caribbean islands Caribbean dance is a broad category that can include everything from nightclubs to sacred ritual. Making Caribbean Dance connects the dance of the islands with their rich multicultural histories and complex identities. Delving deep into the many forms of ritual, social, carnival, staged, experimental, and performance dance, the book explores some of the most mysterious and beloved, as well as rare and little-known, dance traditions of the region. From the evolution of Indian dance in Trinidad to the barely known rituals of los misterios in the Dominican Republic, this volume looks closely at the vibrant and varied movement vocabulary of the islands. With distinctive and highly illuminating chapters on such topics as experimental dance makers in Puerto Rico, the government's use of dance in shaping national identity in Barbados, the role of calypso and soca in linking Anglophone islands, and the invented dances of dance-hall kings and queens of Jamaica, this volume is an evocative and enlightening exploration of some of the world's most dynamic dance cultures.

Primary subject heading: Dunham, Katherine
One of the most important dance artists of the twentieth century, dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham (1909-2006) created works that thrilled audiences the world over. As an African American woman, she broke barriers of race and gender, most notably as the founder of an important dance company that toured the United States, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Australia for several decades. Through both her company and her schools, she influenced generations of performers for years to come, from Alvin Ailey to Marlon Brando to Eartha Kitt. Dunham was also one of the first choreographers to conduct anthropological research about dance and translate her findings for the theatrical stage. Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora makes the argument that Dunham was more than a dancer - she was an intellectual and activist committed to using dance to fight for racial justice. Dunham saw dance as a tool of liberation, as a way for people of African descent to reclaim their history and forge a new future. She put her theories into motion not only through performance, but also through education, scholarship, travel, and choices about her own life.Author Joanna Dee Das examines how Dunham struggled to balance artistic dreams, personal desires, economic needs, and political commitments in the face of racism and sexism. The book analyzes Dunham's multiple spheres of engagement, assessing her dance performances as a form of black feminist protest while also presenting new material about her schools in New York and East St. Louis, her work in Haiti, and her network of interlocutors that included figures as diverse as ballet choreographer George Balanchine and Senegalese president Léopold Sédar Senghor. It traces Dunham's influence over the course of several decades from the New Negro Movement of the 1920s to the Black Power Movement of the late 1960s and beyond. By drawing on a vast, never-utilized trove of archival materials along with oral histories, choreographic analysis, and embodied research, Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora offers new insight about how this remarkable woman built political solidarity through the arts.

Primary subject heading: Tap dancing > United States > History
Tap Dancing America presents the first comprehensive, fully-documented history of tap dancing - the oldest American vernacular dance form -- in its three hundred-year evolution in America.In this meticulously researched story, Hill, herself a tap dancer, traces the early origins of tap dance as an Afro-Irish fusion, as the melding of West African and Irish musical and dance traditions. It was through this three-hundred-year musical and social exchange, with its steady pattern of imitation, assimilation, and the transformation of such percussive step dances as the jig, gioube, buck-and-wing and juba, that tap dance evolved in America, and perpetuated such key features as the tap dance challenge -- any competition, contest, breakdown or showdown in which tap dancers compete against each other before an audience of spectators or judges. As such, the tap challenge is the rhythmically expressive "engine" and driving force in tap dance.Proceeding decade by decade through the twentieth century, Hill enumerates tap's musical styles and steps-- from buck and wing and ragtime stepping at the turn of the century, and jazz tapping in the twenties, thirties and forties, to hip-hop-inflected hitting and hoofing in heels from the 1990s to the millennium. She shows how the Irish jig and clog tradition and black rhythm tap tradition evolved along parallel but intersecting paths that were distinguished not by race or ethnicity but by rhythmic sensibilities. And along the way, she presents the contributions of women in this stereotypically "male " dance form, from the hundreds of chorus line dancers to the pioneering women composers of the tap renaissance and the hard-hitting rhythm-tapping women of the millennium.Groundbreaking in scope and detail, Tap Dancing America accounts traces how tap developed as people listening to and watching each other dance in the street, dance hall, or social club, as steps were shared, stolen and reinvented. Here is the story of a uniquely American dance form, a form in which the rhythms and steps of every dancer resounds the elders, ancestors, teachers and masters who came before.

Based on interviews with many of the dance's most significant figures as well as on four years of on-the-ground research in New York City, Foundation: B-boys, B-girls and Hip-Hop Culture in New York offers the first serious study of b-boying--commonly known as "breakdancing"--the pre-eminent form of hip-hop dance. While breakdancing is often dismissed as a fad that died in the eighties, Joseph Schloss explains that the dance's true form--known as b-boying--lives on in underground venues around the globe. This almost four-decade-old dance of the African Diaspora boasts a complex set of aesthetic principles, a fiercely competitive attitude, a unique and powerful musical repertoire, and a profound sense of its own history. Schloss, who learned to b-boy as part of the research for this book, presents an inside look at a dance that counts seventies gang culture, African religious tradition, professional gymnastics, and Black vaudeville among its major influences. Featuring chapters on music, pedagogy, aesthetics, space, battling, and history, Foundation explores a dance form that is at once aggressive and spiritual, raw and sophisticated, viscerally exciting and deeply introspective.

Primary subject heading: Hip-hop dance > France
For more than two decades, le hip hop has shown France's "other" face: danced by minorities associated with immigration and the suburbs, it has channeled rage against racism and unequal opportunity and offered a movement vocabulary for the expression of the multicultural difference that challenges the universalist discourse of the Republic. French hip-hoppers subscribe to black U.S. culture to articulate their own difference but their mouv' developed differently, championed by a Socialist cultural policy as part of the patrimoine culturel, instituted as a pedagogy and supported as an art of the banlieue. In the multicultural mix of "Arabic" North African, African and Asian forms circulating with classical and contemporary dance performance in France, if hip hop is positioned as a civic discourse, and hip hop dancer as legitimate employment, it is because beyond this political recuperation, it is a figural language in which dancers express themselves differently, figure themselves as something or someone else.French hip hop develops into concert dance not through the familiar model of a culture industry, but within a Republic of Culture; it nuances an "Anglo-Saxon" model of identity politics with a "francophone" post-colonial identity poetics and grants its dancers the statut civil of artists, technicians who develop and transmit body-based knowledge.This book - the first in English to introduce readers to the French mouv' - analyzes the choreographic development of hip hop into la danse urbaine, touring on national and international stages, as hip hoppeurs move beyond the banlieue, figuring new forms within the mobility brought by new media and global migration.

Primary subject heading: Salsa (Dance) > Social aspects > California > Los Angeles
In Los Angeles, night after night, the city's salsa clubs become social arenas where hierarchies of gender, race, and class, and of nationality, citizenship, and belonging are enacted on and off the dance floor. In an ethnography filled with dramatic narratives, Cindy García describes how local salseras/os gain social status by performing an exoticized L.A.-style salsa that distances them from club practices associated with Mexicanness. Many Latinos in Los Angeles try to avoid "dancing like a Mexican," attempting to rid their dancing of techniques that might suggest that they are migrants, poor, working-class, Mexican, or undocumented. In L.A. salsa clubs, social belonging and mobility depend on subtleties of technique and movement. With a well-timed dance-floor exit or the lift of a properly tweezed eyebrow, a dancer signals affiliation not only with a distinctive salsa style but also with a particular conceptualization of latinidad.

Primary subject heading: Tango (Dance) > Argentina > Buenos Aires
Argentine Queer Tango: Dance and Sexuality Politics in Buenos Aires investigates changes in tango dancing in Buenos Aires during the first decade of the twenty-first century and its relationship to contemporary social and cultural transformations. Mercedes Liska focuses on one of the proposed alternatives to conventional tango, queer tango, which proposes to rethink one of the alleged icons of a national culture from a feminist conception and to imagine social transformation processes from bodily experiences. Specifically, this book analyzes the value of bodily experiences, the redefinition of the mind-body relationship, and the transformation in the dynamics of the dance from the heteronormative movements of tango. In doing so, Liska addresses the ways in which bodily techniques and gender theories are involved in the denaturing and corporeality decoding of tango and its historical senses as well as the connections between different tango dance practices spread throughout the world.