Jazz Dance: A History of the Roots and Branches

29. Vernacular Jazz Dance and Race in Hollywood Cinema

29 Vernacular Jazz Dance and Race in Hollywood Cinema Susie Trenka The manifold varieties of jazz dance have always dominated dance in mainstream American cinema. Given jazz dance’s African roots and its many manifestations in the African-American vernacular, it is not surprising that its use in film almost always implicates issues of race and racism. This article looks at vernacular jazz dance in mainstream American cinema as a focal point of American race relations, focusing on two particularly influential areas of popular vernacular jazz dance: first, the authentic jazz dance developed alongside the jazz music of the 1920s to ’40s and featured prominently in films of the same period, and second, the hip-hop dance, which first appeared in film in the 1980s and which continues to be hugely popular in contemporary commercial cinema (as well as music television). Authentic Jazz Dance and Classical Hollywood When synchronized sound was introduced to film in the late 1920s and “all talking, all singing, all dancing” was declared all the rage, the new technology also marked a new beginning in the relationship between cinema and jazz. There would be much singing and dancing in the movies of the following decades, and a large proportion of it was jazz or at least jazz-derived .1 Not only would the musical become one of the era’s most popular film genres, but countless films of all genres would feature music or dance numbers, often with little bearing on the plot, and the cinema of the 1930s and early ’40s was jam-packed with chorus girls and ballroom couples, tap 240 dancers and jitterbuggers. The period’s popular music and dance was dominated by African-American styles, made available to a mass audience to an unprecedented degree through records, radio, and film. Yet in commercial terms, it was often the white performers and their adaptations of jazz music and dance that were most successful. In other words, black culture was appropriated —or colonized—by white people, while black people remained marginalized. In the mainstream film industry, African-Americans were relegated to so-called specialty acts in feature films, to appearances in shorts and Soundies (the 1940s precursors to music videos), and a handful of all-black musicals . This ghettoizing practice simultaneously—and paradoxically—denies and highlights white America’s debt to African-American popular culture: while it marks the limits imposed on black performers, the segregation from Hollywood’s white narratives also opens a space for potential subversion through the freedom of physical expression. At the present time there is a high degree of consensus among film historians that “the Hollywood musical’s barely repressed ghosts [are] the bodies, sounds, and steps of African-American vernacular dance.”2 The predominant dance form in this respect is tap dance, which developed in the nineteenth century from various influences and reached its peak around the 1930s. As the perfect fusion of music and dance, of the aural and the visual, the rhythmic art came to dominate popular dance in film during Hollywood’s Golden Age, bringing forth such white superstars as Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, and later Gene Kelly.3 Yet, despite the frequently unacknowledged borrowing by whites, black vernacular dance (and tap in particular), also played a more positive role in African-American film history. At the most basic level, the demand for dancers significantly increased the overall screen presence of black performers . More specifically, by successfully crossing over into the (white) mainstream , a number of black tap stars contributed to shifting the representation , perception, and status of African-Americans in ways similar to some jazz musicians.4 Intended as mostly nonnarrative interludes, the status of black tap dance acts would sometimes shift from that of an added attraction to that of a film’s main attraction, as is revealed by a number of historical case studies. Arthur Knight argues for the significance of the black specialty number as “a key mode of black reception” and cites the example of a press report on a screening of Hooray for Love (1935); the Harlem scene featuring Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Jeni LeGon, and Fats Waller was recognized as better than the rest of the film by the black audience, and it provided them with a Vernacular Jazz Dance and Race in Hollywood Cinema · 241 sense of identification based on Robinson’s stardom.5 Probably of broader significance is the instance reported by Constance Valis Hill...