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Castles and Europe : Race Relations in Ragtime

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Castles and Europe : Race Relations in Ragtime Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2005 The Castles and Europe: Race Relations in Ragtime Christopher Tremewan Martin Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF VISUAL ARTS AND DANCE THE CASTLES AND EUROPE: RACE RELATIONS IN RAGTIME By CHRISTOPHER TREMEWAN MARTIN A Thesis submitted to the Department of Dance in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2005 The members of the Committee approve the Thesis of Christopher Tremewan Martin defended on March 31st, 2005. John O. Perpener III Professor Directing Thesis Tricia Young Committee Member Sally Sommer Committee Member The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii This work is dedicated to those who toil in the fields of social dance instruction. May your labors bear fruit. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the entire faculty of the Department of Dance at Florida State University, and particularly John O. Perpener III, Patty Phillips, Sally Sommer, and Tricia Young, without whom none of this would have happened. Special thanks as well to my family for their unrelenting support of my quest for knowledge. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ……………………………………………. vi FOREWORD ………………………………….….………………. 1 1. CONTEXT: THE PROGRESSIVE ERA …..……………...….. 5 2. BIOGRAPHICAL OVERVIEW …………………………….. 17 3. THE MOVEMENT OF RAGTIME ..………………………… 42 4. RACE RELATIONS AND RAGTIME ….…………………… 62 CONCLUSION ………………………………………………….. 83 REFERENCES …………………………………………………... 85 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ……………………………………... 87 v ABSTRACT Were Vernon and Irene Castle drawing upon African American music and dance to advance their personal ambitions? Yes. Was the transmission of cultural elements between black and white society as simple as commodification and appropriation? No. The Castles’ work with James Reese Europe and the musicians in his Society Orchestra was extremely liberal for the times, complicating any attempt to simplify their efforts to popularize black music and dance forms. The first part of this paper lays out the racial conflicts that were everywhere in the Progressive Era. A simple biographical sketch of the affairs of the Castles and Europe follows. An examination of the physical elements of Ragtime dancing, detailing the elements that concerned the moralists of the time, and the efforts the Castles took to remove the blackness from movement is found in the third section. Finally, the implications of the Castles work is considered, looking at the context of the philosophies of racial uplift dominant at the time, and the Castles and Europe are found to be migratory agents of cultural transmission, collaborating to achieve personal ends while at the same time advocating positive racial relations. vi FOREWORD This study, of the artistic collaboration between white and black artists in the years before World War One (WWI), came about for many reasons, and as research projects often do, developed in several directions unanticipated at the outset. As the research evolved, it confirmed the importance of recent approaches to dance studies stressing the wider cultural, social, and political contexts that shape aesthetic practices. The life histories and creative innovations of Vernon Castle, Irene Castle, and James Reese Europe (Jim Europe), set against the backdrop of the Progressive Era, speak to many of the concerns and issues that are at the center of dance studies today. What are the effects of class and race distinctions on popular arts and the development of artistic hierarchies? How do the dynamics of ordinate – subordinate power structures impact cultural appropriation and hybridity? These, and related, issues are at the heart of the blend of European American and African American arts that comprised Ragtime dancing. Ragtime dances were hybrid forms, in which African American movement aesthetics were grafted onto the base European American form of walking, partnered dance. The cycles of appropriation and re-appropriation that sometimes drives the creation of new art forms can be clearly seen in the Castles’ restructuring of Ragtime dances for European American consumption. I came to this study with two goals. First, to begin to contribute to a deeper understanding of the impact that partnered social dancing has had on American culture since the beginning of the 20th Century, and second, to reposition the Castles in history as socially and racially progressive figures. As a social dancer and dance teacher, I knew that the elements of physical contact, proximity, and active participation in partnered social dance made for a powerful experience. In academia, however, I found a disproportionate focus on performative concert dance, and a concomitant inattention to those forms not falling neatly within the categories of classical ballet or contemporary modern dance. In the last twenty years, however, a trend giving attention to forms not falling under the rubric of concert dance has emerged, and in that vein I found support for the thrust of my studies. Partnered social dance is one area that has not yet, I believe, 1 received the scholarly attention that it merits. Today, in 2005, it is not a fashionable or “hot” subject for research, yet in almost every town across America, on almost every night of the week, some form of partnered social dance is being performed. Literally millions more Americans dance socially than will ever see a dance concert, and I hoped in this study to add to the body of work on this under-researched dance form. Yet popular social dance forms, in the last twenty years, have not been partner- based. True, there are some exceptions. The strong presence of Latin-American cultures in parts of America has kept Afro-Caribbean partner dance forms such as Salsa and Merengue in the public eye and throughout the south and west, Two Step and Swing dances retain a niche within the Country-Western aesthetic, though line dances have largely pushed partner dances to the side. Swing dance forms underwent a renaissance of sorts recently as part of a Retro trend – American popular culture recycling itself – and Argentine Tango remains a mysterious enigma that, a century after its first debut in America, still intrigues whenever the latest incarnation of Forever Tango comes to the local civic center. But by and large, when America dances today, she dances as an individual in a group of individuals. As a teacher of partner dance forms, I have often wondered how the country fell away from partnered dance. Many dance teachers blame music, such as the Beatles, or Disco, or simply say that the world moved on, and the dances failed to move with them. Those explanations always rang false to me, too easy or not sufficient. In researching the Castles and Jim Europe, I may have stumbled onto one factor answering my curiosity. I’ve come to wonder if everything didn’t start to go wrong for American partner dance at the Castle House. The Castles, guided by their agent Elizabeth Marbury, opened Castle House, a dance school for the well-to-do on E. 46th street in Manhattan, and there taught the elite families of the times the proper way to perform the new Ragtime dances. The Castles can easily be positioned as the first dancing masters of the 20th Century, establishing lists of rules and publishing a manual of instruction, following in a long tradition stretching back centuries. They also opened another school, Castles by the Sea, for the summer months when no one with the funds would stay in the city. Primarily performers, the Castle schools were a source of some income and a way to connect with the patrons who, 2 Marbury believed, most needed to be wooed for the Castle’s success. Instruction was mostly by Vernon himself, who had a knack for it – Irene had no patience for teaching – and in the operation of these sidelines to their career, the Castles differed only slightly from the dancing masters who had gone before them. In the past, the dance masters went to the elite to teach them in their homes – but the Castles had sufficient personal fame to create a new paradigm, where the elite would come to their place of business to learn what they had to teach, an important reversal of the power flow that typically existed between those rich in money and those rich in knowledge. This turned out to be an important shift, however. One of the Castle’s students was a young man named Arthur Murray. Many years after WWI, Murray would transform the instruction of dance in America by creating a viable franchise, one which tried to recapture the rarified atmosphere of Castle House, in any city that had a suitable economic base to support the instruction. Murray was tremendously successful in his time, inspiring the competition of the Fred Astaire dance schools – and these two chains are the largest corporate instructors of dance in America today. I have come to believe that these franchises finally won the long battle that the dancing masters of old were fighting – to establish in the mind of the public the belief that there was a single method for correctly performing dances. But in convincing America that social dance instruction was something to be bought and sold, they ended up losing the hearts and minds of the very people they sought as the prize of their fight; the public decided that, if they had to pay to learn how to dance with someone else, they’d be just as happy to dance by themselves. I will digress no further from the subject of this study, except to say this – of the many issues central to this thesis, coming to understand the manner in which partnered social dance has been developed as a commodity in America in the 20th Century must start with the Castles.
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