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The Moscow Charleston same sequence favored by American shake dancers. But the meaning of the movement changes drastically when the context shifts. Roland Barthes has written that French striptease is a kind of harmless family entertainment that takes the evil out of sex by innoculating a nation with a dose of clinically sterilized voyeurism. The climax of the striptease - the ultimate revelation of the body- does nothing more, he writes, than turn the woman into an undesirable object. American striptease , especially as seen in this program, can be something else. As they taunted the men whose attention they held, these women became wielders, not victims, of power. The importance of their act lay in the process of unveiling, in the dance of undressing, rather than in the static nude image produced by that dance, almost as an afterthought. In the limitations ofthe economic and social structures ofstriptease - ofmarketing sexual appealthey have managed to let the brilliance and ease of performance shine through. 20 The Moscow Charleston: Block Jazz Dancers in the Soviet Union In 1926, authentic jazz dance arrived for the first time in the Soviet Union when an American black musical revue toured to Moscow and Leningrad.l The Chocolate Kiddies reached Moscow in February 1926. Billed as a "Negro operetta," the show played at the Second State Circus in Moscow and then moved on to the Leningrad Music Hall, remaining in Russia for three months. The advance publicity tantalized Soviet audiences with its lure of American exotica and at the same time assured them they could be as sophisticated as audiences in Paris, London, and Berlin. It was the middle ofthe jazz age in Western Europe. Although Russia was a backwater- uncharted territory for black dancers and musiciansSociety of Dance History Scholars Conference, Riverside, California, 1992. 161 162 The African-American Connection this was the middle of the NEP period. From 1921 to 1928, the New Economic Policy allowed limited capitalism and foreign trade, opening windows between the Soviet Union, Europe, and America, and creating a Soviet consumer culture as well as a nouveau riche bourgeoisie. During this relatively lax time of economic openness and exchange, a great many cultural commodities were imported from the West. And jazz was one of them. But at the same time, a political struggle over the value and meaning of this cultural exchange ensued. On the one hand, jazz was seen as the symbol of Western decadence. However, official Marxist ideology simultaneously celebrated Mrican-American culture as the expression of an oppressed proletarian class. Thus American jazz had a special, more complex and contradictory significance for Soviet culture than for the other foreign cultures to which it was regularly exported in the 1920s.2 The Chocolate Kiddies was a group put together in the United States by an emigre Russian impresario for a European tour, beginning in Berlin, in May 1925. Consisting of thirty-five dancers, singers, and musicians, the troupe was a merger ofpart ofthe cast ofthe recent Broadway musical revue The Chocolate Dandies and Sam Wooding's jazz band, which had recently moved from Atlantic City to Harlem to Club Alabam in Times Square. This troupe had already toured Europe and North Africa for nearly a year when they accepted the attractive offer made by Rosfil, the Russian Philharmonic Society, to visit the Soviet Union. In fact, the program was not an operetta, as billed (perhaps in order to capture-however inadequately-its multimedia nature).3 It was, as later ads made clear, a two-part show: the first act was actually The Chocolate Kiddies (a song, dance, and comedy revue) and the second act was a jazz music concert by Sam Wooding's band, which had served up the accompaniment in the first act.4 Wooding, the grandson ofa slave and the son ofa Philadelphia butler, had conservatory training in piano and music theory. During World War I he was in the army in France, playing tenor horn with the 807th Pioneers military band. When he returned to the U.S., he played jazz at nightclubs in Atlantic City. Although trained as a classical pianist, he remade himself into a jazz musician, he writes, to 'Team1my bread and butter."5 The conflict between Wooding's symphonic aspirations and his commercial success in the jazz world led to a conservative big band approach that garnered an uneven critical reception in Europe. He was often considered "too symphonic," and even in Russia some complained that his band was not at all...

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