Dance Me a Song: Astaire, Balanchine, Kelly and the American Film Musical

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Contents
Introduction: The Synergy of Sound and Moving Image
Part I. From Stage to Screen
1. No Limitations I: Astaire's Outlaw Style and its New World Roots
2. No Limitations II: Astaire's Roots in Social Dance, Ballet, and Other Forms
3. Old World Meets New World on Broadway: Balanchine, Astaire, Dukelsky, Gershwin, Minnelli, Rodgers and Hart, Josephine Baker
4. Ballet Meets Jazz in Hollywood: Balanchine and the Film Ballet
5. Dancing with the Camera, Dancing in the Street: Introducing Kelly and Donen
Part II. Film Dance Genres
6. Seduction Dances: Astaire, Kelly, and Song and Dance as Courtship
7. Freedom Incarnate: The Dancing Sailor as an Icon of American Values in World War II
8. Dancing in the Street: Courtship, Euphoria, and Despair
9. The Dream of Courtship: The Cinematic Dance Drama
10. Making Film Dance: The Through-Composed & Through-Choreographed Musical
11. Legacy
Appendix I. Timeline
Appendix II. Dance Genres

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Dancer-choreographer-directors Fred Astaire, George Balanchine and Gene Kelly and their colleagues helped to develop a distinctively modern American film-dance style and recurring dance genres for the songs and stories of the American musical. Freely crossing stylistic and class boundaries, their dances were rooted in the diverse dance and music cultures of European immigrants and African-American migrants who mingled in jazz age America. The new technology of sound cinema let them choreograph and fuse camera movement, light, and color with dance and music. Preserved intact for the largest audiences in dance history, their works continue to influence dance and film around the world. This book centers them and their colleagues within the history of dance (where their work has been marginalized) as well as film tracing their development from Broadway to Hollywood (1924-58) and contextualizing them within the American history and culture of their era. This modern style, like the nation in which it developed, was pluralist and populist. It drew from aspects of the old world and new, "high" and "low", theatrical and social dance forms, creating new sites for dance from the living room to the street. A definitive ingredient was the freer more informal movement and behavior of their jazz-age generation, which fit with song lyrics that poeticized slangy American English. The Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, and others wrote not only songs but extended dance-driven scores tailored to their choreography, giving a new prominence to the choreographer and dancer-actor. This book discuss how these choreographers collaborated with directors like Vincente Minnelli and Stanley Donen and cinematographers like Gregg Toland, musicians, dancers, designers and technicians to synergize music and moving image in new ways. Eventually, concepts and visual-musical devices derived from dance-making would give entire films the rhythmic flow and feeling of dance. Dancing Americans came to be seen around the world as archetypal embodiments of the free-spirited optimism and energy of America itself.

Reviews

[A] rich and readable love letter to the Golden Age movie musical

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