-
CHAPTER SEVEN: Folk Revival Connection: The Dancers
- University Press of Mississippi
- Chapter
- Additional Information
161 Chapter seven Folk Revival Connection The Dancers While revivalist musicians and revivalist dancers came at different times and by different routes, both groups had accumulated strong cadres in northern California with well-developed social networks before the enthusiasms of a few of them turned to Louisiana French music. Just as the folk musicians who got interested in Cajun and Creole music early would go on to contribute musically to bands that play for dances, international folk dancing provided a pool of people who were curious about other cultures and welcomed the challenge of learning new dance steps and styles. A handful of these dancers became interested, then pulled in their other folk dancer friends. From club owner David Nadel’s perspective, “Back in the Queen Ida days people didn’t know how to do two-steps, waltzes, and shuffles. They did the old Berkeley jiggle-around step. Once dance teachers began to give lessons to the locals, Cajun-zydeco music found its sustaining power.”1 Folk Dancing across the Nation and in California Urban social reform movements within the United States that began in the nineteenth century led to, among other things, settlement houses and organized programsofrecreationforurbanworkers .Urbanchurchleadersandsettlementworkers saw dance halls—where young couples danced waltzes, two-steps, rag, and jazz steps unsupervised and switched partners often—as immoral and hoped to lure immigrants and their offspring away from them with folk dancing. Settlement houses offered a model of “mental integrity” for urban workers that included recreation and cultural activities such as ethnic music and dance. Educators used folk music as an Americanization tool with immigrant children by having them sing English words to “their” melodies and by having immigrants perform dances not only of their own culture but of their fellow immigrants from other lands, thereby 162 Folk Revival Connection: The Dancers promoting mutual respect among the various groups. Beginning in the early twentieth century, a sanitized version of folk music and dancing found its way into institutionalized physical and music education for public schools. Of Henry Ford, Robert Cantwell writes that out of “class anxiety and ethnocentrism” he “sought . . . to museumize the preindustrial artisan economy that his own enterprise had done so much to abolish, even to the extent of installing it among his own workers with instruction in square dancing and vegetable gardening.”2 International folk dancing came out of the dances prepared in the settlement houses and physical education programs, retaining dances from a wide variety of cultures while downplaying the values of moral and physical discipline in favor of fun and recreation. This form of folk dancing, a leisure activity for adults both foreign- and native-born, first took institutional form in the 1930s on college campuses and in projects of the federal Works Progress Administration. Dancing to piano accompaniment gave way to music provided by recordings, especially once recordings made especially for folk dancing were made in the 1940s. Song Chang formed a folk dance club in San Francisco in 1937, which received much public attention two years later when it performed at the San Francisco World’s Fair on Treasure Island. Very soon thereafter, the membership of Chang’s group swelled, other groups formed, and folk dancing was a popular activity in the Bay Area, with classes available every night of the week. The Folk Dance Federation of California , formed in the Bay Area in 1942, became important to folk dancers across the state and across the country for developing a notation system for dances, publishing numerous folk dance books, and generally standardizing an international folk dance repertoire for Americans. In addition to its popularity as a participatory activity, performance troupes of folk dancers such as Changs International Folk Dancers continued to prepare and give choreographed presentations of folk dance on stage.3 While international folk dancing was still in the process of becoming institutionalized , another trend developed which threatened its “forty dances, forty countries” model by focusing on the music and dance of a single region. Just as Shane Bernard describes a “Cajun craze” that appeared in the 1980s, Laušević writes of a “Balkan craze” that swept through the international folk dance scene in the 1950s. Also known as “kolomania” after the kolo, a line dance where a dancer holds hands with dancers on either side and dances in a procession that circles or snakes around the dance floor in step with the music, the Balkan craze was experienced across the country but with special intensity in California, where early...