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9 Americans, blending heritages from Europe, Africa, and Asia, have invented and reinvented their culture repeatedly. Nowhere is this more visible than in the words printed on every American dollar bill: Novus ordo seclorum, a new order of the ages. Because of our relatively recent formation as a nation, Americans have often seemed less constrained by history, or guided by it for that matter, than other peoples. Change, newness, and selective resistance to old social models were built into American identity from its earliest days. Regardless of skin color or ancestral origins, Americans have embraced the possibility—indeed the necessity—of change in many aspects of their culture. Often they have equated change with renewal and have woven it, together with sustaining values such as a strong work ethic and the centrality of spirituality, into the fabric of a new society. In American places of all kinds, from the early seaboard settlements to newly minted cities, through the waves of westward migration, that notion of cultural renewal can be traced both in the written saga of the nation and in all its artistic developments. In painting, music, literature, and dance, Americans have pictured themselves, their places, their changing aspirations and entertainments . From early portraits to the advent of American landscape painting , culture and nature have contended and simultaneously reinforced each other, documenting new ways of relating to the natural world and to each other. If America’s landscape, as has often been observed, embodied the early promise of what the country might become, the cultural activities of its people imprinted the landscape with human traces. Matthew Arnold argued in his 1869 Culture and Anarchy that Britons and Americans needed to find a new cultural birthright in the arts. “Do not tell me only of the magnitude of your industry and commerce,” he admonished Americans, “tell me also if your civilization—which is the grand name you give to all this development —tell me if your civilization is interesting.”1 In America’s arts and entertainments, I will argue, we find captured some of its most interesting aspects of identity: its aspirations and dreams, its sense of uniqueness and destiny, its discoveries of cultural realities both compelling and unforeseen. This chapter traces ways in which dance, in a Art, Dance, and American Consciousness Part One 10 art, dance, and amerIcan conscIousness sustained if discontinuous dialogue with the visual arts, first extended, then challenged, America’s status as cultural appendage to Europe. Throughout the ensuing discussion, one thing is abundantly clear: the development of an American cultural consciousness occurred in fits and starts, eluding the historian’s desire for seamless and readable continuity. Instead, that cultural movement lurches from one significant moment to another, dictating an episodic approach to the structure of this book. More, if America’s cultural history is episodic in its chronology, it is also disjointed geographically: it was written and painted and sculpted—but also danced—in every corner of the country. Tracing dance through visual images helps to illuminate both the broad paths and the niches and byways of the nation’s cultural history. One of the early points of confluence for dance and the visual arts begins on the East Coast, where Southerners, New Englanders, and groups such as the Shakers incorporated dance into their secular and religious lives. In urban centers, as populations grew, Americans strove to reconcile their desire for a new, classless society with the realities of social stratifications imposed by wealth, race, and occupation. Dance, at times a leveling influence, at other times a mark of social status, was learned and performed in many contexts, and visual artists were there to record and comment on many of them. America’s immigrants, from the New Amsterdam Dutch to the street performers of later ghetto neighborhoods, flavored evolving American identities (for they are multiple), dancing into the paintings, sculptures, and photographs of many visual artists. As the ensuing pages relate, American art’s love affair with dance has taken a meandering course, reaching repeatedly across boundaries between “high” and “low” art, between theatrical and social dance, between elite and popular audiences. And it has flourished in all kinds of communities. Outside the cities, nineteenth-century Americans adapted imported dances and invented new ones to suit their rural circumstances. Where musicians were in short supply, a single fiddler might suffice, and visual artists exercised their own creativity to record simple scenes of solo or couple dances. The saga of America’s westward exploration has been...

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