Embodied Nostalgia: Early Twentieth Century Social Dance and the Choreographing of Broadway Musical Theatre

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Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part 1: Ragtime - The Heartbeat of the Modern Era
Chapter 1: "Juke joints supposed to be in the woods": Nostalgia for privacy and place in The Color Purple
Chapter 2: "This was a music that was theirs": Ragtime and the Breakdown of Collective Nostalgia
Chapter 3: "Till Georgie Took 'Em Away": Counter Nostalgia and Cultural Theft in Shuffle Along, Or The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed
Part 2: The Charleston - Lively and Liberated
Chapter 4: "Men say it's criminal what women will do": Thoroughly Modern Millie and Nostalgia for the "New Woman"
Chapter 5: "I need to do the Black Bottom!": Demystifying Nostalgia in The Wild Party
Chapter 6: "I don't want to show off no more": Parody and Nostalgia Go Toe to Toe in The Drowsy Chaperone
Part Three: Swing Dance - Rally and Rebound
Chapter 7: "Good neighbors - Good neighbors": Wonderful Town and Nostalgia for Lost Communities.
Chapter 8: When Nostalgia is Your Only Hope: Steel Pier and Dance Marathons
Chapter 9: "Get in the game": Destabilizing Nostalgia in the Crisis of Identity in Allegiance
Conclusion: "Just like it was before": The Promise Continues
Index

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Embodied Nostalgia is a collection of interlocking case studies that focus on how social dance in musical theatre brings forth the dancer on stage as a site of embodied history, cultural memory, and nostalgia, and asks what social dance is doing performatively, dramaturgically, and critically in musical theatre.

The case studies in this volume are all Broadway musicals set during the Jazz Age (1910-1950), however, performed and produced after that time, creating a spectrum of nostalgic impulses that are interrogated for social and political resonance and meaning. All reflect the fractures or changes in the social dance when brought to the stage and expose the complexities of the embodied nostalgia – broadly interpreted as the physicalizing of community memories, longings, and historical meaning – the dances carry with them. Particular attention is focused on the Black ownership of the social dances and the subsequent appropriation, cultural theft, and forgotten legacies.

By approaching musical theatre through this lens of social dance––always already deeply connected to notions of class and race––and the politics of choreography therein, a unique and necessary method to describing, discussing, and critically evaluating the body in motion in musical theatre is put forth.

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