I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom

2. We Insist! Seeing Music and Hearing Dance

rather than another in the Palladium, it becomes clear that dance conventions do not exist in static opposition to or in a separate sphere from the social conventions present in everyday life. In a space where no next move was ready and waiting, women occasionally burst through social expectations, ‹lling their open shines with shimmying shoulders and spacious kicks. Dressed like a conservative schoolgirl in a full white skirt and starched collared shirt, one woman in The Spirit Moves not only shimmies her chest but repeatedly kicks her right leg forward and then arches back, egging her partner to do the same. She smiles as she ›ings her wide-open gestures, suggesting exhilaration in moving beyond gendered modes of normative public movement, if only brie›y. Her ›at shoes give her a sporty look, and before long, her male partner begins to swivel, also bending gendered expectations. In addition to gender norms, wealth and racial difference also strati‹ed patrons at the Palladium, creating additional tight places. Thompson notes that visitors entering the dance hall would have seen “amazing concentric circles of class and focus, an outer circle of rich visitors and celebrities seated at tables by the side of the dance ›oor, an inner circle of Latino and black dancing connoisseurs seated on the ›oor communally, and, in the sovereign center , the star dancers themselves. Such was the spatial logic of the Palladium during Wednesday night contests and performances.”52 On Wednesday nights, the dancer Frank Piro, an East Harlem–born Italian American known as “Killer Joe” for his ability to outlast others on the dance ›oor, gave dance lessons from eight to nine P.M., before the Palladium’s weekly mambo contest and performance began. Having honed his dancing skills at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom as a teenager, Piro served in the marines and won the “servicemen’s division” of a jitterbug contest held at the 1942 Harvest Moon Ball. He was the ‹rst white man to win the national competition . During the early 1940s, he spent much of his time dancing with hostesses at the Stage Door Canteen, a club on 44th Street that catered to armed forces on leave. A few years after the war, Piro began teaching at the Palladium , receiving ‹fteen dollars per week to teach the dance hall’s patrons how to mambo. An hour before the Wednesday-night showcase, Piro conducted mass mambo lessons, where he led hundreds of dancers through the form’s basic steps. A sinewy man of ‹ve feet six inches, Piro taught dancers mambo’s rudimentary patterns, which partners depart from and return to in their open shines. The emphasis was on partnered steps and the basics of clave, rather than on improvisation, which, as a mode of making dance rather than the dance itself, is harder to teach. 44 i want to be ready Piro was a tremendous hit among novices and the celebrity set, and he opened the dance ›oor to patrons who otherwise might have felt ill equipped to dance. Nevertheless, after noting that “the master of ceremony is signi‹cantly white,” Mura Dehn remarks: “The authentic Mambo dancers— Cubans and Puerto Ricans—never recognized Killer Joe. They dismissed him with a smile of disdain. He had no rank amongst them.”53 Later, still talking about Piro’s role at the Palladium, Dehn remarks: “The Afro American folk dancers are the most intolerant non-integrational group. They would never admit an outsider into their midst.”54 The point here is not that the Cuban and Puerto Rican dancers were the most “authentic.” Millie Donay, an Italian American, was one of the most incredible mambo dancers in New York. Nor, by quoting Dehn, do I wish to suggest that African American dancers were less tolerant than other groups. Still, Dehn’s observations challenge the abundant claims that race didn’t matter at the Palladium. Even the claims lauding the dance hall’s integration reveal the racial tensions of the times. Describing how the Palladium shifted across various nights of the week, José Torres explains: “The audience was never exclusively Latin. A pattern soon established itself. On Wednesday nights when ‘Killer Joe’ Piro gave dance lessons, the crowd was Jewish and Italian. Friday was for Puerto Ricans, Saturday for Hispanics of all origins . . . and Sunday . . . was for American blacks. Everybody danced to Latin music.”55 It’s signi‹cant that while Torres proudly emphasizes the fact that “everybody” danced to Latin music, his description suggests that, for...