Copyright by

Jeremy Caleb Arnold 2020 The Thesis Committee for Jeremy Caleb Arnold Certifies that this is the approved version of the following thesis:

RHYTHMS WORTH SHEDDING:

Reconciling Jewish Participation in Tap Dance through the

‘Re-appropriation’ of The Morton Gould Tap Dance Concerto

APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE:

Supervisor Charles O Anderson

Gesel Mason

Rebecca Rossen RHYTHMS WORTH SHEDDING:

Reconciling Jewish Participation in Tap Dance through the

‘Re-appropriation’ of The Morton Gould Tap Dance Concerto

by

Jeremy Caleb Arnold

Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Fine Arts

The University of Texas at Austin May 2020 Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my parents for their constant support throughout this process and for always encouraging me to chase my passion. Without your relentless encouragement, I am not sure where I would be.

I owe a huge dept of gratitude to the choreographers and collaborators of my thesis project, Karissa Royster, Siobhan Alexis and Peter Rioux. Your vision, passion, and generosity of spirit brought the work to life. I’m forever grateful for your commitment to the mission of the work.

I would also like to thank the faculty of the University of Texas Dance Department who challenged me immensely these last two years. Charles O Anderson, I’m forever grateful for your mentorship and friendship.

iv RHYTHMS WORTH SHEDDING:

Reconciling Jewish Participation in Tap Dance through the

‘Re-appropriation’ of The Morton Gould Tap Dance Concerto

by

Jeremy Caleb Arnold, M.F.A.

The University of Texas at Austin, 2020

Supervisor: Charles O Anderson

As a uniquely American artform, tap dance reflects American culture. Throughout its history, from vaudeville to the movie musical and then to its presentation on concert dance stages, tap dance has gone through multiple cycles of appropriation.

Jewish performers, producers, and directors were directly involved in many of these moments. As a white Jewish American professional dancer and dance scholar, I have studied tap dance’s

v appropriative history and examined the white supremacist structures that have dominated and continue to dominate the presentation and production of the form. Rhythms

Worth Shedding is a research-driven tap dance performance that that re-imagines an appropriative moment of Jewish intervention in tap dance’s history. Through the process of creating this concert, I sought to confront and leverage my own privilege in service to culturally correcting a problematic yet seminal component of the tap dance archive - The

Morton Gould Tap Dance Concerto. This thesis seeks to explore Jewish identity through tap dance performance and grapple with the responsibility of contemporary Jewish tap dancers given the historic role of Jewish appropriation in tap dance.

vi Table of Contents

Rhythms Worth Shedding ...... 1

Introduction ...... 1

Untapping The Schtick Biographical Information ...... 11

Mazeltoes ...... 12

American Jewish Performance ...... 15

Descriptive Analysis ...... 17

Rhythms Worth Shedding, Theory to Practice ...... 24

Karissa Royster ...... 35

Siobhan Alexis ...... 38

Accompianment ...... 40

Rehearsal Residency ...... 43

In Performance: A Descriptive Analysis ...... 45

Conclusion ...... 51

Bibliography ...... 56

Vita ...... 58

vii RHYTHMS WORTH SHEDDING:

Reconciling Jewish Participation in Tap Dance through the

Re-appropriation of The Morton Gould Tap Dance Concerto

Introduction

Although there are concrete examples of Jewish jazz musicians and modern dance artists who have successfully carved out space for Jewish cultural exploration on American stages, Jewish tap dancers today, despite their critical mass, rarely explore Jewishness in performance - or the tensions and dissonances between whiteness and Jewishness. Dance historian and performance scholar Rebecca Rossen defines Jewishness as “the social meanings that have been historically ascribed to Jews and to Jewish bodies, behaviors, and cultural productions, or that Jews attribute to themselves.” (Rossen 4) Importantly,

Jewishness and Judaism are not synonymous. In the current socio-political climate that has seen a marked increase in hate crimes against minority groups and virulent anti-Semitism, many of today’s Jewish Americans are left grappling with lingering questions about privilege, whiteness, and responsibility. Using the Charlottesville rally as the social justice impetus for this project, and the Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh as reinforcement of a sobering societal reality, this thesis seeks to grapple with the importance of claiming, while critically examining, one’s identity as a Jewish American through contemporary tap dance performance informed by liberatory aesthetic practices.

This autoethnographic project was informed by the following questions:

1 1. Given the complexities of racial identity and anti-black racism - what is

contemporary Jewish American tap dance?

2. Given the history of tap dance in relationship to the complexities of racial identity

- what is the responsibility of contemporary Jewish American tap dancers?

3. How can a white identifying Jewish American tap dancer leverage their ‘white

privilege’ to facilitate ‘re-appropriation’ of cultural forms that have been

systematically ‘whitewashed’ historically? What are the stakes?

Race and ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality are staple ingredients in the conversation around American nationhood. They are salient aspects of social being from which economic practices, socio-political policies, and popular discourses create

“Americans.” The history of Jews in the United States is one of racial change. Because the aforementioned aspects of social being in America have such significant meaning, they also carry critical consequences for both individual and group success and well-being which in turn impacts how one perceives themselves socially and politically. Examining my own family history since WWII as an example, I posit that Jews in the United States have occupied a kind of racial ‘middleness’ – marginal whiteness depending on the socio- historical moment in relationship to white supremacist agendas and other ‘white’ people and core whiteness in relationship to blackness.

As a fourth-generation Jewish American, the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in

Charlottesville, Virginia was a jarring yet galvanizing moment in my life. Watching the spectacle unfold brought up many questions surrounding my identity and the unique complexities of my whiteness. At the time of the rally, I had been living in Austin, Texas 2 for three years. I remember feeling a strange dissonance as I heard the chants of “JEWS

WILL NOT REPLACE US” but acknowledged that I look like, and benefit from, the same privileges as many of the marchers due to skin color. My social experience residing in

Texas attests to that. In Texas, Jewish people are not as well represented as in the northeast where I was born and raised. While personally I experienced no discrimination and never faced violence for being Jewish, there were several anti-Semitic acts in the Austin community where I reside including the vandalization of a Jewish-owned burger joint, and death threats against a prominent Jewish member of the community whom I know personally. As jarring and frightening as it was to see hatred embodied and emboldened, I don’t wear Jewishness on my skin. Through generations of assimilation, I have inherited the privilege to expose or to hide that part of my identity. This led me to consider what it means to have the privilege to hide within your own (white) body and the complex relationship that Jewish people have to hiding as an act of resistance and survival as well as an (in)action of resistance to racial oppression. When considering ‘Jewish American- ness’ specifically, I began to think about how about how this relates to and has shaped my artistic practice and led me to the realization and subsequent questioning of why I have been hiding my Jewishness in my work as a rhythm tap dance artist.

My understanding of ‘whiteness’ in this thesis is informed largely by American

Studies scholar George Lipsitz’s definitions in his book, The Possessive Investment in

Whiteness. “Americans are encouraged to invest in whiteness, to remain true to an identity that provides them with resources, power, and opportunity. The whiteness is, or course, a delusion, a scientific and cultural fiction that like all racial identities has no valid 3 foundation in biology or anthropology. Whiteness is, however, a social fact, an identity created and continued with all-too-real consequences for the distribution of wealth, prestige and opportunity.” (Lipsitz vii) Participation in whiteness is encouraged for white

Americans of all ethnicities and it is important to remember that not all who are white now were always considered white. My references to whiteness in this thesis are guided by the knowledge that investment and participation in whiteness is synonymous with investment and, participation in the reinforcement of white supremist systems. And further, that white privilege is the ability to not have to acknowledge that these systems even exist.

Between 1880 and 1914, almost two million Ashkenazi Jews emigrated from

Eastern Europe to the United States to flee antisemitic violence. While antisemitism in

America was not nearly as dangerous as in Europe, in the early twentieth century,

American Jews were not white. They faced discrimination, racial stereotyping, and marginalization. They were barred access to residential areas, restaurants, country clubs, hotels, and were subject to quotas on enrollment in colleges and universities. The 1913 mob lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory superintendent falsely accused of murder and subsequentially lynched, is seen as a key moment of reunification of the Ku Klux Klan. Up until the Charlottesville rally I had not really considered the process by which Jews have become white in this country.

Growing up in a predominantly Jewish suburb of Philadelphia, Jewishness and whiteness were virtually synonymous. When my older family members occasionally spoke about their first-generation American experiences, hard work, perseverance, and adaptability seemed to be the pillars of these stories. However, according to Karen Brodkin, 4 activist and author of How Jews Became White Folk and What That Says About Race in

America, these stories do not paint the full picture: “The myth that Jews pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps ignores the fact that it took federal programs to create the conditions whereby the abilities of Jews and other European immigrants could be recognized and rewarded rather than denigrated and denied.” (Brodkin 50) In the wake of the horrors of WWII, mainstream antisemitism waned, and many Jewish veterans were able to take advantage of federal programs stemming from the GI bill which created access to suburban home ownership. These opportunities were not afforded to African American soldiers as the bill largely still upheld Jim Crow laws - legalized and socially sanctioned racism. Brodkin asserts that a key constitutive myth of American nationhood is that our country is only comprised of white men and women and the only options available to others is to ‘whiten’ themselves or exist in an underclass. (25)

The acculturational and assimilationist processes of Jewish ‘whitening’ in this country were not entirely monolithic. For some Jews it was simply an inherited skin benefit while for others the effort was more conscious and conscientious. While the process of

Jewish ‘whitening’ relied in part on the aforementioned federal programs, it was also achieved by some who used active demonstrations of separation from this societal underclass and in turn salient aspects of Jewish culture and tradition. Prior to these federal programs, nowhere was this ‘whitewashing’ process more evident than in the Jewish participation of blackface minstrelsy in the early twentieth century.

Minstrelsy was an enormously popular form of entertainment in the United States in the nineteenth century. Often considered the first true American form of popular 5 entertainment, from its inception in the nineteenth century and lasting into the early twentieth century, minstrelsy became a viable mode of employment for a diverse range of

‘white’ (and later black) performers who would don blackface to perform comedy, dance routines, and other variety acts to distort African American identity and culture pre-and post-slavery. Employment provided economic and social mobility. These performances reinforced stereotypes aimed at dehumanizing African Americans following the Civil War in service to maintaining the perception of white superiority and black inferiority as recently emancipated slaves sought access to civil rights afforded to all Americans.

Tap dance’s origins can be traced to these performances in the mid nineteenth century, specifically in the Five Points district in Manhattan, where freed African American slaves and recently emigrated Irish Americans lived in extremely close proximity. Master

Juba or William Henry Lane is considered to be the first tap dancer and was one of only a handful of African American performers to be allowed to perform on the white minstrel circuit. He still had to don blackface despite the fact that he was an African American man.

(Stearns and Stearns) Jewish participation in blackface coincided with the influx of Jewish immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “Jews—Al Jolson, Edie

Cantor, George Jessel, George Burns, Sophie Tucker—had pretty well taken over blackface by the early twentieth century.” (Rogin 16) While Jews were not directly involved in the creation of tap dance, through the vaudevillian circuit, many of the Jewish blackface practitioners either learned the form and eventually performed it in blackface or utilized other tap dancers in their acts. At this time, Jews and African Americans were both subject to damning stereotypes aimed at maintaining Anglo-Saxon white superiority. 6 As Jews occupied what Brodkin describes as a societal underclass during this time, their participation in the blackface tradition was not only self-serving materially and economically, but also a means through which to become more American themselves by demonstrating their separation from the African Americans they were impersonating.

(Rogin) This separation was illustrated by Jews performing harmful and pervasive stereotypes of African Americans that served to mitigate and obscure the stereotypes they too endured at the time. Jews donning burnt cork and shoe polish was part of the process of establishing a racial hierarchy within the underclass, and thereby promoted the Jewish effort to assimilate into whiteness, or at the very least, separate from blackness. The extent of Jewish involvement in blackface and minstrelsy is the first of several key moments of

Jewish participation in white supremacist appropriation in tap dance’s history in America.

A later example of Jewish participation in appropriation can be seen in the use of jazz music (and later tap dance) in classical music to ‘elevate’ the musical form.

This is part of the heritage I inherited. While I have had access to cultural forms on the margins of (white) mainstream society, I also benefit from being able to be SEEN and even rewarded for my fluency in the dance forms due to the legacy of skin color privilege.

It is for this reason I call this an autoethnographic thesis informed by liberatory aesthetic practices. As sociologist Carol Ellis describes in her book, Evocative Autoethnography:

Writing Emotionally About Our Lives, “I made myself begin again in an autoethnographic voice that concentrates on telling a personal, evocative story to provoke others’ stories and adds blood and tissue to the abstract bones of the theoretical discourse.” (Ellis 117). By tilling and then critically examining and engaging with my own biographical soil, I was 7 able to create the artistic framework to address my research questions surrounding my participation in tap dance as a Jewish man.

For this thesis project I worked iteratively, developing a series of shorter works that ultimately led to my final thesis project Rhythms Worth Shedding. For the live performances, I employed a Practice as Research methodology, a context-aware and historical process working inside-in, beginning and ending within an artistic practice. To this end, I employed a combination of traditional scholarly research, archival inquiries, and an integrated studio practice. This Practice as Research (PaR) methodology requires a shift in the formally established ideas about what constitutes research says Robin Nelson.

Nelson goes on to describe PaR as, “ a research project in which practice is a key method of inquiry and where, in respect of the arts, a practice (creative writing, dance, musical score/performance, theatre/performance, visual exhibition, film or other culture practice) is submitted as substantial evidence of a research inquiry.” (Nelson 8) Sparked by the

Charlottesville rally and driven by my initial research question - Given the complexities of racial identity and anti-black racism - what is contemporary Jewish American tap dance?

- my initial research led to the creation of “Untapping the Schtick,” a self-choreographed solo in three parts, as a means of addressing what contemporary Jewish tap dance might look like in the wake of the current turbulent social-political moment. This work utilized stereotypical Jewish gestures, klezmer music, soundbites from the Charlottesville rally, and elements of Jewish ritual as my way of uncovering the hidden part of my identity.

While Untapping the Schtick afforded me the opportunity to grapple with my personal identity and address anti-Semitism and ‘hiding’ behind whiteness as a mode of 8 survival, it also led to deeper questions surrounding my participation in tap dance and the privilege that my whiteness affords - my second and third research questions were borne.

Standing upon the sonic and aesthetic traditions of tap dance and facing the historical contexts that afforded me the exposure to these traditions, I began to investigate how I could leverage my privilege in service to a creative process and physical practice informed by liberatory aesthetic principles. In other words, by exploring race-conscious and counternarrative choreographic and dramaturgical strategies as a way to undo and overcome the exclusion of non-white thought and experience, I became invested in the process of facilitating re-appropriation as cultural intervention. I define re-appropriation as the process of repurposing either language or works of art which have previously been used in a disparaging or culturally irresponsible way for the purposes of social change. Two years of research and embodied knowledge culminated in the presentation of my thesis concert, Rhythms Worth Shedding, a re-imagination of the Morton Gould Tap Dance

Concerto. The re-imagining of this seminal tap work created by Italian American choreographer Danny Daniels and Jewish American composer Morton Gould, provided space to consider the roles of hierarchy, appropriation, Jewishness, and responsibility in tap dance, all while offering an alternate way to engage with complex and problematic histories, and still honoring the tradition and lineage of rhythm tap dance.

The following sections detail my specific creative research practice which was a dialogic process between traditional scholarly research and studio-based tap movement exploration and inquiry that details my journey from page to stage. I first explain my process of endeavoring to create a Jewish tap dance in response to the current socio- 9 political climate with Untapping the Schtick. I then detail how this process led me to grapple with my inherited legacy and strategize about ways to take responsibility for being a white Jewish tap-dancing man throughout my process of creating Rhythms Worth

Shedding.

10 Untapping The Schtick

Biographical Information: Locating Myself

I was born to Jewish parents and raised in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, a predominantly Jewish suburb of Philadelphia. Bala Cynwyd is less than a mile from the city line where many of the greatest tap dancers grew up, including the Nicholas brothers,

Charles ‘Honi’ Coles, Steve Condos, and LaVaughn Robinson. My mother is a lawyer and my father is a classical violinist in the Philadelphia Orchestra. I asked my mother for

‘tapping’ shoes at age three after watching Savion Glover on Sesame Street and began taking classes a few weeks later. I trained with Betsy Daily in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, who grew up performing on the Steel Pier in Atlantic City and trained with vaudevillian performer Tony Grant. As my training became more serious, I began to commute to New

York City on the weekends to work with the Tap City Youth Ensemble, directed by Susan

Hebach of the American Tap Dance Foundation. There I had the opportunity to study with artists such as Michelle Dorrance and Brenda Bufalino. I attended several national tap festivals including the Chicago Human Rhythm Project, where I was able to study with tap masters Jimmy Slyde and Harold Cromer. In my search for college dance departments, it became blatantly clear that no school existed where I could study with any of the legendary

African American tap masters. I attended Muhlenberg College and double majored in

Communications and Dance, where I was mentored by Shelley Oliver, a co-founder of

Manhattan Tap. Upon graduation from Muhlenberg College, a private Lutheran liberal arts institution that boasts one of the largest Jewish student populations on the east coast, my

11 first professional dance job was with a Jewish tap company in New York City which has since disbanded.

Mazeltoes

The aptly named Mazeltoes performed for the Jewish community around the Jewish high holidays, re-imagining familiar events and ceremonies in tap dance form. We created a rhythmic Passover Seder using the cadence of traditional prayers and blessings and a rhythmic lighting of the menorah which utilized cleverly placed flashlights. Mazeltoes was an entirely Jewish company and all of the company members shared an upper-middle-class upbringing. This shared generational Jewish American experience of privilege was clear from our rehearsal process but never talked about or referenced in the work. Our audiences were comprised primarily of upper-middle-class Jewish families. The repertoire relied heavily on gimmicks in its references to elements of Judaism and Jewish culture while utilizing the structure of established tap dance choreographies of African American men such as Ernest “Brownie” Brown’s Copasetic Chair Dance, and Leonard Reed’s and Ardie

Bryant’s Shim Sham Shimmy.

I thought the work would be fun and entertaining and a way to connect to my Jewish identity. I discovered in the process that it lacked depth and was void of social commentary for its Jewish audiences. I found the reliance on performative gimmicks problematic because tap dance as a form is itself often considered to be a novelty itself. Dancers in the tap community have long been plagued by the classist, sexist, and racist remarks of dance critics who deemed tap unworthy of the concert stage. To a general audience unaware of 12 these longstanding biases, the tendency has been to take at face value the views these writers expound, leaving the cultural authority unchallenged and the sonic voice and power of tap dance silenced. I began to feel the repertoire of Mazeltoes played directly into the notion that tap dance is not a serious art form deserving of a place on American concert dance stages, and that it is only a performative or nostalgic form capable of light socio- cultural references. These perceptions are reflected in tap dance’s marginalization in university dance departments around the country, in its limited institutional presentation on American concert dance stages, and in its limited and narrowly defined offerings in dance studios. Reflecting on my experience with Mazeltoes helped to formulate my ideas about the intersection of Jewishness and white privilege in tap dance. We borrowed material and structures from the archive of African American tap dance choreography and performed it as entertainment to be consumed by insular upper middle class Jewish communities with little to no appreciation for tap’s cultural legacy - it was appropriative.

Thomas Defrantz’s lecture performance, White Privilege helped contextualize what made me feel uneasy about Mazeltoes’ repertoire:

“White privilege. Taking without asking. Borrowing, you think, as you take and

take and take… White privilege is doing it just because. Without a group to answer

to, or create among, not really, when everyone is out for their individuated white

selves; the privilege is the assumption that it’s okay. It’s okay to just go on and see

what happens. Without reflection. Or obligation. Or connection. It’s okay. Because

you can.” (Defrantz 23)

13 My experience with Mazeltoes was ultimately uncomfortable and left me fraught with concern about what I was really taking part in because there was no clearly defined mission beyond marrying superficial and affected elements of Jewishness with tap dance for the primary purpose of entertaining upper-middle-class white Jewish audiences. We were not honoring the legacy of tap nor really honoring Jewish culture. Particularly in an art form with repeated moments of appropriation committed by Jews, this was irresponsible. As tap dancers, and especially tap dancers who benefit from white privilege,

I already understood that there is great responsibility whenever we revisit or re-imagine material from the archive. The majority of the ‘historic routines’ that comprise much of our collective American tap dance memory was created by African American men in the mid to late twentieth century. Today, these routines are performed, taught, remixed, and reproduced for profit with regularity. Yet rarely are any monetary residuals paid to the estates of the choreographers, many of whom worked in the shadows of and in service to

Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly and Ginger Rogers for pennies on the dollar without the resources to copyright their work. While cultural borrowing is a part of the American experience, borrowing and redistributing while in a position of power obscures the origins of what is borrowed which constitutes appropriation. This ensures that hierarchies of power and wealth are maintained squarely within the confines of whiteness, in service to white cultural supremacy. Jewish tap dancers have had a long history of participating in appropriation as a means of assimilation into whiteness. As a result, I began to realize that while I know many Jewish tap dancers, I have never really seen Jewish tap dance.

14 American Jewish Performance

As I began thinking about how to create my Jewish tap dance, it was a priority for me to investigate the relationship between my racial identity and my ethnic or religious identity. Although there is no real definition of Jewish tap dance, there is a rich history of

Jewish jazz music, a form with which tap dance has a shared history. Looking at Jewish jazz musicians and music was helpful in exploring Jewishness within the racial paradigm of American culture. As is commonly understood, jazz music is a multicultural musical form, invented in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that was created and developed by African Americans using European instruments with Jewish Americans and others mixing in to further diversify the music. Often performing as members and later leaders of integrated jazz bands, Jewish Americans were able to thrive in jazz because of the probationary whiteness they were allotted. Another aspect of Jewish success in jazz music stemmed from a perceived Jewish dispositional proficiency for jazz.

“Many of the Jews participating in the production of popular music were sons of

cantors. The fact of biography, however, was only a starting point. The melancholy

of the cantor’s art displayed a striking resemblance, for many, to the pathos of

African American music, which suggested that because of centuries of suffering

had instituted lamentation as a dominant expressive form in Jewish culture,

individual Jews were particularly able to give musical voice to affliction.”

(Melnick 169)

As depicted in Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer, Jewish Americans were able to take jazz music that African Americans developed and bring it into popular culture, as Jewish 15 artists were able to access venues and audiences from which African Americans were legally separated. The plot of The Jazz Singer is partially autobiographical as Al Jolson’s father, like his character Jack Robin, is in fact a cantor. While many Jewish jazz artists utilized jazz as a means of becoming whiter, again, this was not a monolithic approach.

Mezz Mezzrow, a Jewish clarinetist associated himself with jazz as a means of abandoning his Jewish identity entirely in service to becoming what Melnick calls a ‘Jewish white

Negro.’ While he is perhaps better known for his marijuana dealing than his playing,

Mezzrow famously requested to be jailed with black prisoners after a drug dealing arrest.

Mezzrow, Artie Shaw (another Jewish clarinetist,) and to a lesser extent, Benny Goodman represent Jewish artists whose fully immersive experiences in African American culture legitimized their jazz proficiency. Paradoxically, George Gershwin utilized jazz music for his high art ambitions without ever really living the life of a jazz artist. His lavish ethnographic vacation to South Carolina which served as his inspiration for Porgy and Bess speaks to this dissonance.

Reflecting upon my upbringing and training as the son of a Jewish classical musician, I decided that my embodied exploration of my whiteness and Jewishness would start by utilizing classical music as the site to accentuate my whiteness in its sonic dissonance from the tap dance tradition. I will now offer a contextual analysis of Untapping

The Schtick, which can be seen in its entirety here: -Untapping The Schtick.

16 Descriptive Analysis/ “Reading of Untapping The Schtick”

Before the Bach partita began, I engaged in the Jewish prayer ritual of shuckling, swaying forward and backward repeatedly, until a female voice asks, “You’re a Jew, yes?” This opening situates the subsequent action and locates the performance in

Jewishness. It forces the audience to consider what Jewishness looks like by framing the section within the structural confines of whiteness, as tap dancing to classical music has generally been an ambition of mostly white artists. I purposefully tried to embody the specific approaches of white tap dancers in this section. I thought about Paul Draper, Bill

Evans, and Sam Weber, artists who combined elements of tap and ballet and how their dancing is decorated by a controlled and light upper body.

“Yes I am a Jew, a Big Jew. Big.” The unmistakable voice of Larry David responds to the question posed in the first section. While most of my research revealed Jewish artists hiding their Jewish identity in pursuit of the American dream, here I decided to ‘put on’ or wear my Jewishness loudly in performance. I pulled my yarmulke from my jacket pocket,

(referencing a recognizable object of Judaism) winked as I shook my hips at the audience, referencing the ‘tango pirate’ or ‘lounge lizard’ stereotype of lower-class Jewish men who attracted wealthy women with their dancing skills in the early twentieth century. (Melnick)

Throughout history, Jews have been subject to harmful stereotypes aimed at demonstrating their danger to society. Distorted physical appearance, greed, and perverse sexuality were pillars of these stereotypes which followed Jews to America in the wake of their mass migration.

17 Unlike the first section of Untapping the Schtick, which was highly introspective and void of any outward gaze, the second section was highly performative and clearly intended to “entertain.” I smiled as I referenced the older Jewish stereotype of the money grubber, wiped sweat from my brow with my yarmulke, and shouted ‘tradition,’ an ode to

Fiddler on the Roof while performing a step from the Shim Sham Shimmy. This second movement utilized a klezmer jazz arrangement that allowed me to access traditional tap dance ideas including swing, three and a break, and references to historic steps while staying rooted in a discernably Jewish sound, thanks to klezmer’s minor chord structure. I was thinking deeply about vaudeville and minstrelsy as I crafted this section. While

Mazeltoes utilized performative gimmicks, I aimed to employ performative schticks

(Yiddish for a comic routine or style of performance) as counternarrative. This way of employing schtick was evident in Jewface or Hebrew comic performances in early vaudeville, largely preceding the Jewish participation in blackface. “Additionally, almost every major traveling burlesque show had a wisecracking Jewish comedian, often a bearded, unkempt figure who walked with a limp and stood in grotesque contrast to the alluring dancing girls who surrounded him.” (Erdman 102)

While the physical representation of Jews in these early performances played into harmful stereotypes, these performances were often for Jews themselves. The language was coded with different meanings and interpretations depending on who was in the audience. I played up Jewish stereotypes and participated in the mocking of Jewishness in service to amplifying my white skin privilege, knowing that for this particular performance in the south, the audience would be mostly non-Jewish. This invitation for the audience to 18 laugh at Jewish denigration was an invitation to witness and react to ‘Jewface’ minstrelsy, a lesser known mainstay of the vaudevillian circuit which was a response to growing

Jewish immigration to America in the late nineteenth century. Jewface was initially performed by non-Jews acting as large-nosed, Yiddish speaking, Jewish caricatures, but was eventually performed and produced by Jews themselves often performing for Jewish audiences in the early twentieth century. These performances stopped around 1918 after the Anti-Stage Ridicule Committee and Anti-Defamation League deemed these characterizations of Jews derogatory and sought to end the performances of these stereotypes. (Erdman) The end of Jewface minstrelsy coincided with the rising number of

Jewish blackface performers. My ‘big Jew’ encouraged audiences to laugh at theses derogatory gestures and themes. By implicating both myself and my audience in Jewish denigration, I am simultaneously re-imagining the ‘self-hating Jew’ stereotype coming from the Jewish participation in Jewface and setting up the next section to destabilize the construct of ‘whiteness.’

As I encourage and soak in the audience’s applause of the virtuosity of the movement and humor of the stereotypical performance, chants of “Jews Will Not Replace

Us” echo around the space. The symbolism of the yarmulke shifts dramatically as I quickly move to hide it. Through this simple gesture, I am demonstrating (and embodying) the socio-cultural hiding behind relative ‘whiteness’ some Jewish folks have done at various socio-historical moments. By repeating the gestures of the previous section, which read as humous and lighthearted just moments ago, they now take on entirely new meaning. These gestural movements which facilitated Jewish humor now represent and reference tangible 19 fear and danger - frequent conditions in the Jewish experience. I touch my nose to interrogate the site of these stereotypical markers. I appear white, but my privilege depends on who believes that to be true. It is in this section that I clearly demonstrate the concept and power of counternarrative – introducing a way of reading the narrative of the first section that splinters widely accepted truths about people, cultures, and institutions as well as the value of those institutions and the knowledge produced by and within them.

In the final section of the dance, I take off my tap shoes, put on leather-soled shoes, and drape myself in my tallit, or Jewish prayer shawl. This ritual places me squarely into my Jewish spiritual identity without standing on other assimilationist traditions. Schtick was a weapon for early Jewish performers to express themselves in a time before Jews were white, it was a cultural tool which used humor as commentary. In this third section, I somberly work through what it means to be Jewish when I have the option not to be, thinking deeply about the victims of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh. I was interrogating the spiritual aspects of Jewish identity which I see as connected to but also distinct from the religious aspects. My muted shoes frame this section as quiet and stark compared to what came before. My vulnerability is defiant given the dangers of the current socio-political climate referenced earlier in the work. The atmosphere of the quiet and slow jazz ballad represents a safe space and a time when Jews and African Americans saw each other’s societal position very clearly.

This solo was a way of coming out of hiding both artistically and personally while intellectually interrogating and ‘re-purposing’ some of the prevalent Jewish stereotypes to reveal their connection to current moments of resurgent anti-Semitism. Since the Tree of 20 Life shooting in Pittsburgh, I have opted not to attend synagogue services in Texas, and I felt apprehensive about showing this solo in the south. Despite my trepidation, Untapping

The Schtick debuted at ACDA’s southeastern regional conference at Kennesaw State

University’s Stillwell Theatre in Marietta, Georgia, less than a mile from where Leo Frank was falsely accused of murder and lynched ninety-six years earlier.

“In the current environment, many Ashkenazi Jews—i.e. those tracing their

heritage through the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe—struggle to acknowledge

their whiteness and role in broader systems of racism because anti-Semitism from

the Left and Right distracts them, clouding their judgement creating little space for

them to exercise the vulnerability necessary for reflection.” (Ladon)

In many ways, this solo was my process of recognizing, reflecting, and coming to terms with my privilege and my relationship to Jewishness. I found that creating a contemporary tap dance rooted in Jewish themes meant acknowledging the socio-political realties of increasing anti-Semitism around the world, but also considering the complicated involvement of Jewish artists in tap dance’s history. In creating this solo, I was able to clarify my positionality and experientially deconstruct just how fictitious whiteness is and how American Jewishness is not purely Judaism. Nothing about my body changed throughout this performance, but my socio-political identity in relationship to my audience did - in this extreme example of anti-Semitism, there were very real social implications.

After creating a work which grappled with my Jewishness and whiteness, I started to understand with greater clarity my personal participation in white supremacy, specifically in terms of tap dance. How could I use contemporary tap dance informed by my Jewishness 21 to expose the ongoing cultural inequities and cultural appropriation still prevalent, but largely unacknowledged, in tap dance today? How can I reconcile my legacy of appropriation of tap dance due to white privilege?

Many of the structural inequities that stifle opportunity for non-white folks in capitalist America are mirrored in the tap dance community. The three major presenting bodies, American Tap Dance Foundation, Chicago Human Rhythm Project, and Tapestry

Dance Company are all run by white artistic directors and virtually every tap festival in the world is white owned and operated. Tap choreographers for Broadway shows (with the exception of Savion Glover) are overwhelmingly white and male, overlooking countless more qualified men and women of color. Men and women of color also are underrepresented as tap instructors in regional dance studios nationally, on the faculties of the dance convention circuit, and in higher education institutions teaching tap dance.

As an American art form, it is somewhat unsurprising that the form is a microcosm of American inequity. The opportunities I have been afforded are often the result of have being allowed in the door in the first place. My relative success in my professional career is certainly due in large part to the skin privilege as being read as white. Creating this work helped me to see that as a white Jewish tap-dancing man, I have a responsibility to leverage my privilege in service to producing social justice-oriented work. I knew that my work going forward needed to expose the hypocrisy and absurdity of both whiteness, and the structural systems that white supremacy operates in. This anti-racist artistic practice would seek to destabilize these systems of white supremacy by exposing inequities both in the tap dance archive and those at play in the tap dance community today. I sought a new project 22 to help me solve the riddle of how to utilize my Jewishness and whiteness while interrogating the legacies I might unconsciously still uphold.

23 RHYTHMS WORTH SHEDDING

Theory to Practice

I always knew that I would learn the Morton Gould Tap Dance Concerto at some point in my life. Growing up, classical music was the accompaniment of my childhood.

My father, who is in his thirty-seventh year with the Philadelphia Orchestra, often suggested that I learn the work, which debuted on the same stage where he made his professional debut in Rochester, New York. His father, a classical musician and composer in his own right, worked for Morton Gould as an arranger in New York in the early 1950s, quite possibly on this very work. My personal connection with the work ensured that the concerto would be a meaningful site to explore my research.

My research for Untapping the Schtick uncovered that Jewish musicians such as

George Gershwin and Benny Goodman, standing on the shoulders of jazz music, utilized the classical music arena - high art - as a means of solidifying their relative whiteness and in service to becoming the authoritative figures of jazz music. Gershwin wrote Rhapsody in Blue in 1924, his first classical work which combined elements of jazz music in classical form. He credited Ravel, Debussy and other European classical composers as his major influences. These European composers point to jazz as their inspiration. None mention the

African American jazz musicians who clearly influenced them. Goodman’s 1938 concert at Carnegie Hall was described by music critics of the time as the single most important jazz or popular music concert in history: jazz’s ‘coming out’ party to the world of

‘respectable’ music. However, these artists had vastly different approaches and goals.

Benny Goodman was more invested in jazz culture. He worked with integrated bands and 24 established a fluent and unique voice within the confines of the jazz idiom. His access to white audiences and opportunity created the conditions whereby his music was deemed

‘acceptable’ by white audiences. Paradoxically, George Gershwin’s high art ambitions meant that his relationship to jazz music and culture was more ethnographic and less authentic. Interestingly, while Goodman was more invested in the jazz idiom, it was

Gershwin’s music that was more fully embraced by African American communities. Both musicians were demonstrating the peculiar process of Jewish appropriation of black cultural forms by legitimizing their work created from their marginal status of whiteness, or ‘middleness,’ for white highbrow audiences. In doing so they also erased the visible presence of African Americans in the demographics of their orchestras. In Benny

Goodman’s Carnegie Hall concert, his orchestra was entirely white with the exceptions of

Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton, and today, ninety-six years after Rhapsody in Blue debuted, African Americans only account for 1.8 percent of the racial makeup of American orchestras nationwide. (Vann)

With this legacy in mind, my subsequent questions guided my transition from traditional research to embodied practice: What happens when the archive (The Morton

Gould Tap Dance Concerto) becomes re-embodied by folks who are typically excluded form it? What are the implications of engaging, challenging, and modifying an important piece of the tap dance archive? In what ways does this project challenge the hierarchical structure of both dance and music? How does one hold reverence for a work that has such problematic appropriative origins? Is there a right way to tap dance to classical music? Is there something innately Jewish about Gould’s composition? How might this Jewishness 25 show up in performance and is this Jewishness complicated depending on the identity

(Jewish or non-Jewish) of whoever is choreographing or performing the concerto? The fall

2019 graduate course, Performance as Research served as a catalyst for me to begin to engage with these questions and helped me to start the transition from research to embodied practice. The first part of this process involved watching and listening to every available recording of the Morton Gould Tap Dance Concerto, reading reviews and visiting archives, in order to track the legacy of both composer Morton Gould (who was Jewish) and original performer Danny Daniels (who was not).

Early on in my research, it became apparent that Danny Daniels held racist views regarding the origins of tap dance. “Tap dancing,” he stated in a 1984 interview with Jane

Goldberg, “came from the Irish step dancers from England and the Africans picked up their footwork and used their own rhythms to it. They changed a little of the rhythmic structure, but its origin is Ireland... they were doing Irish step dancing in Ireland a long time ago; it's really traditional Irish dancing... It isn’t black; it’s Irish." (Goldberg) Daniels’ inability to concede that tap dance is at least partially African American-derived egregiously and blatantly ignores the documented history of the art form. I argue that Danny Daniels was using the arena of classical music as a means of justifying his views on the form and legitimizing his own identity as an Italian American tap dancer. As an Italian American man with considerable power within the tap community, these views were not simply ignorant, but violent in their erasure. His views certainly frame the Morton Gould Tap

Dance Concerto as an extremely troublesome moment in tap dance’s continual appropriation. Like the Jews and the Irish, Italians in America held a probationary status 26 of whiteness for generations in the United States. By associating himself with highbrow

European music, Daniels was trying to demonstrate a separation from the Africanist roots of tap dance which he adamantly denied.

This hierarchical demonstration was not only achieved by the concert hall venue of the work, but by Daniels’ embodied approach to the form. Early in his career, Daniels sought out ballet training and infused a significant amount of ballet technique into his tap choreography. Incorporating ballet technique into tap dance fundamentally changes the aesthetic value system of the form. As a form born out of the African diaspora, tap dance values and honors the earth and gravity, while ballet aspires to defy it. In this way, Daniels relied on an appropriative bodily approach to the form as a means of making tap dance more palatable for white audiences. This phenomenon is hardly new. As American Studies professor Jeff Melnick writes: “Ragtime and jazz dance, not surprisingly, were frequently described in terms of sex… In the dance world, white performers such as the husband and wife team of Vernon and Irene Castle (and later Fred and Adele Astaire) established careers by taking what was perceived as overt sexuality out of the supposedly freer African

American dance forms.” (Melnick 22) Daniels’ balletic approach to the form would align more closely with the expectations of these white, highbrow audiences. This is not to say that Daniels lacked talent as a tap dance practitioner, but I argue that his approach and entry points into the form were strategic. His foray into classical music tap dancing was not limited to the Gould concerto itself.

Daniels was working on additional classical music projects around the same time in the early 1950s. For example, in the finale of Just Rhythm, an orchestral concert for 27 young people, Daniels dances the cake walk (a plantation slave dance) in tap shoes, on the classical music stage, for an audience of white youth, the proverbial appropriative superfecta. A critic from Dance Magazine remarked about the event: “Danny Daniels certainly deserved a big cake for his cakewalk” (Dance Magazine 1952) (see fig. 2)

(Fig. 2)

Morton Gould, a Jewish American composer, conductor, arranger, and pianist worked in a wide array of genres and mediums including orchestra, chamber music, television, film, and ballet. Gould was considered particularly gifted at combining disparate musical genres and elements into classical form. In addition to the tap dance concerto,

28 Gould also created classical works from Negro spirituals. In his 1941 work Spirituals for

Strings Choir and Orchestra, he writes:

Spirituals are spiritual. They are simple and profound, unique and recognizable.

While national in origin, they echo man’s soul everywhere. Their appeal is

universal. They were the start of our jazz, and have spiced and seasoned our

creative musical scene, both popular and symphonic. Spirituals are derived from

both Negro and white sources, and these influences combine, like all folk

expressions, to make an indigenous musical language. (Gould)

Clearly, Gould was aware of black culture’s influence on American culture.

However, he himself was not invested in any part of black culture. He was invested in the schtick. Using tap dance and more specifically a ‘whitened’ version of tap dance, Gould was able to compose a work for the American classical stage. Gould often lamented that he was not taken seriously as an American classical composer because of his affiliation with television and film. Gould sought to use tap dance as his gimmick to carve out space for himself within the classical music realm. Ironically, it did not really work. Today, the

Morton Gould Tap Concerto is considered a novelty within the classical realm. It is not generally played by major orchestras and when it is, it is often programed for family or popular concerts, rather than more serious subscription concerts. Tap dance’s perceived inability to successfully integrate into high art spaces is acknowledged by dance critic John

Martin who reviewed the work’s premier in 1952. “To be sure, Mr. Daniels was not concerned with any great revolution, but only with devising an engaging choreography for an engaging piece of music. If the crude and shoddy spots in the medium itself were shown 29 up in the process, that is certainly not to be laid at his door.” (Martin) Martin’s view that tap dance is not a visually engaging enough art form for the classical stage is significant because it demonstrates that even as tap dance was being ‘elevated’ by Gould and Daniels, it was still being marginalized in these high art spaces.

Much like other twentieth century Jewish composers such as George Gershwin,

Irving Berlin, and Benny Goodman, Gould ‘translated’ black sound for white consumption.

Jewish composers at this time were seen as having a special proficiency for adapting and appropriating African American sound, which can be directly attributed to physical (and class) proximity between Jews and African Americans in the early twentieth century and the relative ‘whitening’ of Jewish Americans in American society at that time. These composers, like their Jewish predecessors in the vaudeville circuit, not only utilized black forms for career success but also as a means of becoming more American themselves.

(Rossen)

The more I learned about Danny Daniels and Morton Gould, the more I felt something akin to the unsettling experience I had working with Mazeltoes. The work is a remarkable musical achievement but is unable to escape the specific historical context from which it was conceived. As I grappled with these conflicting emotions, I learned that a friend would be performing the concerto with an orchestra in Phoenix. I began to think about how the work is still performed with some regularity around the world despite its origins, and I couldn’t help but think about the specific tap dance ideologies that are supported by the work’s continual life. Unsurprisingly, the overwhelming majority of dancers who have participated in the work are white and male. It is also the case that many 30 of these artists who continue to either perform or staunchly support the work hold positions of power within the tap community, a curious and potentially emblematic connection between the work and structural racism. I began to grapple with how to approach the concerto with this in mind, particularly as a white Jewish man. In order to fully understand the scope of my research inquiry, I needed to bring this history into the studio while also experiencing the Gould concerto as traditionally practiced by learning the first movement note for note as it was written in the score by Gould and Daniels.

The score was useful as a primary source and contained a few significant choreographic suggestions, but since my music reading skills are somewhat limited, I had to go about learning the concerto kinesthetically and aurally rather than relying on the written composition. I embarked on the painstakingly slow process of learning the first movement of the concerto note for note using YouTube video footage. Unwittingly at first,

I was learning this classical composition of tap dance through the Africanist pedagogical process of imitation and orature. As I learned from watching, dancers have the freedom to choreograph their own steps as long as they stay true to the rhythmic score. Within these choreographic choices, the dancers I watched displayed a wide range of accents, dynamics and tempos making it challenging to discern one agreed-upon sonic approach to the material. The music is written in a variety of irregular time signatures and unlike most jazz music with which tap dancers are more familiar, classical music employs frequent tempo changes. Distinct musical decisions unique to each conductor further complicate the process.

31 Learning the first movement created the space for critical insight into how the process typically unfolds. I learned the notes, transposed them into steps and then crafted my own choreographic arc. With each trip into the studio, I chipped away a bit further and began to feel this strange sense of dissonance. I found that I really enjoyed the experience dancing the first movement in its original iteration despite what my research had uncovered. The process was incredibly rewarding, almost like solving an extremely complex puzzle. I was connecting the dots left by Gould and Daniels. With each new measure I felt a real sense of accomplishment. There was beauty both in the process of being rhythmically and performatively challenged, and in the composition itself. I found that it was difficult to wrestle with this sense of reverence while simultaneously grappling with the history of the work. I understood the allure of viewing this work as an ‘elevation’ of tap. I could see how easy it is to forget the socio-historical legacy upon which vernacular tap dance was born. Tap dance as utilized in this work has gotten farther away from its original source and is in a context where black people lacked the resources to access it. I began to understand that the reliance on systems to which few African Americans (or women) have access, also reinforced the appropriative act of erasing the cultural origins of tap dance.

In conducting my research, I recognized many tap dance icons who had performed the work in addition to Daniels, including Lane Alexander, Fred Strickler, Sam Weber,

Max Pollack, and Cheryl Johnson – all of whom are white. The lesser known soloists who have performed the work are almost exclusively male. The more I watched footage, the more I began to think about those who were absent from the archive of this work, and in 32 the tap archive more generally. I found a few mentions of African American men who performed the work. A quick jaunt through Marshall & Jean Stearns Jazz Dance The Story of American Vernacular Dance (considered by many to be a bible of sorts for tap dancers) affirms just how forgotten women of color are to tap dance’s history. White women are well represented in tap dance history and are largely credited as being instrumental in the

‘renaissance’ of the form which took place in the late 1970s and continued into 1980s.

Many white women including Brenda Bufalino, Jane Goldberg, and Gail Conrad sought out mentorships with the mostly African American male tap masters, many of whom had retired or were working other jobs due to tap dance’s decline in popularity. The tap dance revival story frames the effort of these women as heroic as they encouraged these African

American men to put their shoes on once again, thus saving tap dance from an early death.

In looking at how white the tap field is today, there is something very colonialist about that story. While the contributions of women of color are largely ignored, it is widely known in the tap community that African American artists such as Mable Lee, Arlene Kennedy and

Harriet ‘Quicksand’ Browne all played instrumental roles in the education of younger artists. These names are rarely mentioned in mainstream conversations about tap dance’s important historic masters and teachers.

I began to think about this project within the context of cultural erasure, visibility, responsibility, and social justice. I knew that I would be re-imagining the Morton Gould

Tap Dance Concerto, but I had more clarity as to how that might happen. As Diana Taylor says in Framing [Performance,] “Performance, however is not limited to mimetic repetition. It also includes the possibility of change, critique and creativity within the 33 frameworks of repetition.” (Taylor 15) Understanding that this seminal tap dance work is another key moment of Jewish appropriation in tap dance history, I started to wonder what it might look like to re-imagine the Morton Gould Tap Dance Concerto specifically through the eyes of contemporary female artists of color. With the intention of producing and engaging with social justice-oriented work, I was interested in re-appropriating the concerto specifically through the eyes of women of color, who historically have been entirely left out of the performance of this particular work (and excluded from the tap dance archive more generally.) There were several factors I considered as I was deciding who to ask to choreograph the concerto. It was important to me to work with female artists of color. The documentation of tap history has continuously left out the contributions of women of color despite their critical mass. In thinking about my responsibility to re- imagine this specific history, it was imperative to hold space for the very people Daniels’ views erased. I also wanted the artists to about my age. I wanted to work with dancers who were moved and shaped by Bring in ‘da Noise Bring in ‘da Funk like I was, but I also wanted to work with artists who I knew had first-hand experience with appropriation within tap dance. By choosing to work with artists who had similar artistic experiences to mine, I was able to contextualize my experiences through a different cultural lens. I commissioned tap dance artists Karissa Royster and Siobhan Alexis to rechoreograph the concerto, not as originally written into the score, but in their own contemporary interpretation of the music.

34 Karissa Royster

Karissa Royster was an obvious choice. Karissa, who is a mixed-race woman of

Chinese-Indonesian and black ancestry trained with me in New York, and also at the tap program at Jacob’s Pillow. She was the dance caption of the Broadway musical Shuffle

Along and continues to perform with tap dance icon Savion Glover, who made his

Broadway debut at age 11 in the 1985 musical The Tap Dance Kid, choreographed by

Danny Daniels. I was interested in this indirect connection with Daniels, but also in

Karissa’s experience navigating a new Broadway tap project with an entirely white and entirely male production team. I called Karissa to tell her about this project and after explaining how this version would differ from how it is typically performed, she agreed, and we set dates and rates. Since every publicly available recording of the concerto contains tap dance notes, I hired a pianist to record the piano reduction of the concerto without any tap dance. I listened to the recordings at length to decide which movement to send to

Karissa. I landed on the third, a slow and difficult-to-count waltz with frequent musical shifts. The original tap dance composition of this movement is repetitive in its structure of eighth notes and triplets. I felt that Karissa’s mastery of tone and her unpredictable rhythmic patterns would be best utilized in this movement which contained enough open space for her to be as rhythmically creative as she wanted. My only choreographic parameter for Karissa was that she not watch the original choreography before setting the work.

We entered the studio on a sunny September morning in Austin with the stated goal of ‘getting through’ half of the third movement. Our process was unique. Karissa listened 35 to short musical sections and generated choreography spontaneously. I stood back and watched, learning steps once they were deemed acceptable enough for Karissa’s standards, again accessing the Africanist pedagogical process of imitation and orature. The process was not traditionally how tap dance is taught. Often times, expectations of efficiency and

‘professionalism’ which are markers of white supremacy creep into the choreographic process. Karissa’s choreography was intricate but light. She moved through space coolly and effortlessly navigated her rhythmic score of swung and straight rhythms which were both in contrast and in line with the music. I struggled immensely with Karissa’s weight shifts. Her choreographic tendencies were foreign to me and while her choreography looked clean and effortless on her body, I felt clumsy and struggled with both the steps and the feel. As I watched myself in the mirror struggling to master Karissa’s work, I found myself unable to separate my dancing body from the other countless white performers of the work. Susan Foster writes “A historian’s body wants to inhabit these vanished bodies for specific reasons. It wants to know where it stands, how it came to stand there, what its options for moving may be.” (Foster 6) I realized that although I was trying for a different embodied approach, even with Karissa’s choreography, my body performing this work would not result in the kind of radical jostling of the archive that I hoped it would. I accepted that it would take a while to embody her style, knowing that I could reference our footage during my rehearsal process.

On the second day, our aim was to finish the work. We kept chipping away in the same fashion, making significant progress until we hit a roadblock. There is a particularly challenging musical section about three quarters of the way through the third movement. 36 When we got this point, Karissa listened to the section over and over again, trying to make sense of the musical phrasing. She kept trying different ideas but none of them seemed to satisfy her artistic standards. For the first time, Karissa became visibly frustrated. I assured her that she need not worry and should take her time to figure it out. I believed this moment to be an important window into the structural challenges of pairing forms that do not share common histories. In this musical appropriation of jazz, concepts and ideas familiar to

Karissa became unrecognizable in their appropriated high-art form. Karissa’s struggle with this section was the manifestation of the cultural violence that appropriation creates. The musical dissonance from its original source demonstrates how cultural erasure functions.

Tap dancers are used to internalizing time and rarely encounter such sudden shifts in phrasing and feel in jazz music. Eventually, Karissa opted to skip the section, think about it for a few weeks and send it back to me remotely. We finished the rest of the movement without incident.

One thing Karissa said during our process really stood out to me. When talking about her artistic practice she said, “It’s impossible to separate who I am as a person from the work that I do.” Karissa was talking about the difficulty she faced participating in a show in New York with an all white and all male creative team for a show that was set in the nineteenth century and utilizes tap dance as the main vehicle for expression. Karissa demonstrated the cycle of artists of color having to participate in these white systems that utilize tap dance in an appropriative manner. Work for tap dancers is often scarce and many artists do not have the financial privilege to decline work even if it doesn’t align with their world view. 37 As I thought about what Karissa said, I realized that my body could not solely inhabit Danny Daniels’ role in the work without reinforcing his specific views of the form.

No matter how hard Karissa’s choreography swung, I still looked like every other white male performer of this work. If I truly wanted to facilitate a re-appropriation as a means of cultural intervention, I realized that it could not just be my own body in the space. I felt that if willing, Karissa needed to be a part of the performance. About a week after working together, I called her to see if she would perform in the concert with me in Austin in

February. She agreed enthusiastically. We set dates for rehearsals in New York City over winter break, and I began to rethink the structure of the performance.

Siobhan Alexis

I formally asked Siobhan Alexis to choreograph and perform the work with me just a few days after speaking with Karissa. Siobhan agreed and we set rehearsal dates for an early November weekend. Siobhan and I both attended Muhlenberg College and danced together with Tapestry Dance Company from 2014-2017. Tapestry, like the American Tap

Dance Orchestra, Jazz Tap Ensemble, and Manhattan Tap, is a concert tap dance company.

While tap dancers in mid-twentieth century typically travelled with jazz bands as either soloists or partnerships, the tap dance ‘renaissance’ spawned a series of tap dance companies. These companies were exclusively created by white women using the modern dance company model to feature tap dance on the concert stage. Many of these companies utilized a multi-form approach fusing tap dance with elements of modern dance and ballet and also featured mostly white ensembles. The appropriative parallels between the 38 foundation of tap dance companies and the pairing of classical music with tap dance, made

Siobhan an appealing choice. Given Siobhan’s lengthy career with Tapestry and lifetime of studying with Tapestry founder Acia Gray, I was fascinated to see how she would synthesize her professional experiences as a woman of color working in those spaces for this project.

While I asked Siobhan not to watch the original before we started, I also asked if she would be willing to choreograph the work in the ‘sanding’ or sand dance technique, using kosher salt in lieu of sand. While the kosher salt alludes to my Jewish identity as well as Gould’s, the sanding technique also repositions the piece firmly in tap dance’s Africanist roots. It was a priority for me to challenge my audience not to just see the piece in a new way, but to hear the piece in a way that it hasn’t been danced before. By forcing the audience to be aware of the sonic differences between tap dance and ‘sanding,’ I hoped to encourage deep listening throughout the work. I quickly learned that the body has a different relationship to the ground in the ‘sanding’ technique which is in stark contrast to

Daniels’ approach to the work. Like tap dance, sanding is uniquely American. It grew out of African enslavement as a plantation dance and was frequently practiced on the vaudeville circuit. In Siobhan’s time with Tapestry Dance Company, she had the opportunity to study directly with Heather Cornell (founder of Manhattan Tap) who trained with one of the last great sand dancers, Harriet “Quicksand” Browne, giving Siobhan direct access to a technique that has almost been lost to time.

Siobhan’s choreography presented its own unique challenges. I realized almost immediately how different a technique ‘sanding’ is from tap dance. Siobhan continually 39 reminded me to keep pulling up through my core and to bring my shoulders and upper body slightly forward to free up my hips. I also learned that this movement stays closer to the ground and should not feel as large as tap dance. In her preparation for rehearsal, Siobhan sensed how this section felt musically humorous and conversational, a view reinforced by the score’s suggestion that the soloist use a newspaper as a prop in this section. With that in mind, Siobhan staged this work as a duet infused with comedic moments of eye contact interspersed with hesitation, uncertainty and at times unity. Siobhan spoke about how she felt this piece was a good opportunity to explore personal identity within the social contexts of comfort and discomfort. In our time together with Tapestry Dance Company, Siobhan and I have developed a playful and trusting performative rapport. Siobhan leaned into this chorographically, leaving space for us to play.

Accompaniment

Based on my budget and logistical realities, it was not possible to perform the Gould

Concerto with a full orchestra in this iteration. With my specific entry points into the work, it became a priority to transpose the work from its traditional high-art concert hall venue, into a black box theatre. This juxtaposition would allow for the opportunity to consider and illuminate both the conventions of high art classical music out of its traditional context while also considering representation in terms of place and space. I was not willing to forgo live music entirely because the conversation between tap dance and live music is critical in both the original and in the re-imagination. I asked Canadian pianist and jazz professor

Peter Rioux if he was interested in learning the score and performing the piano reduction 40 of the work with us. Choosing Peter gave me the opportunity to discuss the intricacies of this classical score with a jazz artist.

A month before the performance, I commuted to Dallas on consecutive weekends to practice each movement with Peter, to ensure that our limited rehearsal time together as a full cast would be as efficient as possible. With a one-day theatre rental, our spacing, technical, and dress rehearsals all needed to happen the same day as the performance!

During our Dallas rehearsals, Peter talked at length about how difficult it was for him to learn the work. As an improvisational jazz artist, Peter generally does not read sheet music.

I had given him the recordings to work with since that was the version Siobhan, Karissa, and I had been utilizing in rehearsals. Peter spoke about the differences in how time functions in jazz music and classical music. While jazz musicians’ meter generally stays consistent through rests, classical time leaves a bit more open to interpretation. This confirmed one of my biggest frustrations about the recordings, which was that the rests felt irregular and that the tempo changed sporadically. Since we had such limited rehearsal time as a full cast, I asked Peter to approximate his playing in the exact meter of the recordings.

As tap dancers, Karissa, Siobhan, and I mostly work in the jazz idiom and there was something poignant in an aligned epistemological understanding in our collective approach to classical material.

During these Dallas rehearsals, Peter articulated how Gould was attempting to reference jazz techniques and conventions throughout the score, particularly in the third movement. He demonstrated how Gould utilized a walking bass line to hint at the boogie- woogie, a jazz tradition which was popularized in the late 1920s but grew out of African 41 American communities in the 1870s. Peter also observed that the score hints at the blues piano tradition of bending notes as a tool for impersonating horns or vocals. He articulated his belief that while jazz artists such as Bud Powell, Oscar Peterson, and Art Tatum have successfully integrated classical music themes into their jazz music, Gould’s attempt to merge these jazz idioms into classical form did not fully work. Peter voiced what I believe was the source of Karissa’s frustrations in the studio. While Gould was hinting at a swing idea, the music itself could not actually swing because of its adherence to classical structure. Karissa was trying to implement a swing feel because she sensed its reference yet was unable to find the exact musical pocket because it was not really there.

I reflected on my experiences with each of my collaborators. All of the rehearsals yielded tremendous movement and music-based discoveries, but I felt as though the conversations I had during each of the rehearsals were as critical and poignant as the material itself. Since the show was about re-imagining the work specifically through the eyes of Karissa and Siobhan, women of color, I felt as though I needed to hold the space not just for their artistic voices through the use of their bodies and creative vision in performance, but their actual voices as well. Tap dance itself functions as a conversational exchange of ideas, but given tap’s performative and entertainment-based roots, artists rarely have the opportunity to speak during performance, especially about the relationship between race and systems of oppression. I inserted moments of public dialogue between each performer and me as transitional interludes between movements as an effective way of disrupting the classical conventions of performance with a critical and reflective lens. I wanted to hold space for Karissa and Siobhan to be able to speak about their specific 42 appropriative experiences within tap dance inside the structure of an appropriative piece of tap dance history.

Rehearsal Residency

The week of the show was the first time Siobhan, Karissa, and I were actually in the same space together. We had four days to mount the show before incorporating Peter who was unable to arrive until the day before the premiere. Before Siobhan’s and Karissa’s arrival, I sent them talking points for our transitional conversations and time stamps for choreography of the fourth movement. There were still large chunks of the show I felt uncertain about. I was highly cognizant that my role as director, producer, and choreographer was at odds with the intended purpose of the show. I was struggling to balance the responsibility of making overarching decisions about the production with not wanting to inundate my artists with even more directorial minutiae in a show that already required a significant commitment from them. I was aware that my decisions about lighting, transitions, and other performative elements were informed by my own biases and preferences, which admittedly was not ideal for a show that is about empowering women of color. I knew that I had the trust of my collaborators, but there was still a major element of white patriarchy in the structure and production of the work that felt hypocritical.

As the week of rehearsals began with Siobhan and Karissa, I attempted to rectify the patriarchal structural realities of the production by chiseling away at my involvement in the performance. Each moment became easier to stage as I reflected on the mission and purpose of the production, which often meant shifting the spotlight away from myself. The 43 transitional interviews became less conversational and more prompt based, so that Siobhan and Karissa had space to reflect on their specific experiences. Until this time, I had imagined that the fourth movement would be performed by all three of us, but as I watched the bodies in space, it became clear that removing myself entirely was the strongest way to end the work. I found that the process of removing my body and voice from the work was also a way of re-imagining the Jewish “middleman” stereotype, especially poignant given the role of Jewish Broadway producers in tap dance’s history. I thought again about

Defrantz’s performed lecture and found that I was walking a fine line between making social justice-oriented work and what Defrantz amusingly categorizes as another form of white privilege;

“Yes, making space. Allowing. Letting them come to the table. Affirmative action.

‘we want your difference, that beautiful dusky skin, those eyes that hardly open,

your nouveau-trans use of ‘they’ instead of ‘her.’ We will allow for you here; we

will expand our possibilities by being more diverse!” (Defrantz 27)

Was this project going to effectively hold space or was it just a feeble attempt at inclusion?

I was aware that the work could be viewed through this lens, but I do believe that there is actually something revolutionary about seeing Karissa and Siobhan create, perform, and exist inside of a work that is so deeply rooted and upheld by white supremacist ideologies.

44 In Performance: A Descriptive Analysis

After eighteen months of research, the night of the performance arrived. On

Sunday February 16, 2020, Rhythms Worth Shedding debuted with Millie Heckler’s Pink

Booth Confessions on a split bill, one-night event at the Vortex Theatre in Austin, Texas.

Rhythms Worth Shedding

The performance begins with Karissa, Siobhan, and me on stage trading

improvisations to jazz piano. We gradually begin to improvise simultaneously and

form a line, listening and responding to each other’s rhythmic inclinations. As

the lights fade on Karissa, she walks off the wooden board. Several moments later

the same occurs with Siobhan on stage left. We are left with lights only on me, the

only white dancing body in the space. (See Rhythms Worth Shedding 0:01)

The environment of the performance at the top of the show was noticeably casual.

In classical music spaces, there are specific protocols for almost everything. There is applause when the concertmaster enters the stage, the tuning of the entire orchestra is cued by the highest-ranking violinist, and more thunderous applause when the conductor enters from stage right. Everything is remarkably formal and precise. In this performance, however, those formalities were replaced with ambiguities. Peter began playing before anyone had taken their seats. The trading of four bars was informal in contrast to the costuming and eventual music content. The light going dark on Karissa and then Siobhan evoked the forgotten histories of those not deemed worthy of being included in the archive of tap dance.

45 The first movement of the concerto begins with a video projection casting light on

the two upstage walls. Various soloists are performing the work synchronously

behind me, all white and all male, as Karissa and Siobhan sit upstage watching. I

highlight my upper body, suspending notes with an elongated port de bras, not

quite joking, but clearly exaggerating. I mirror the videos as the archival dancers

walk to the edge of their tap board and wait during extended pauses only to

embark back out again as the formalities of the score dictate. (See Rhythms Worth

Shedding 3:00)

The casual nature of the beginning is immediately disrupted by the highbrow formalities introduced both in the projections and my own body. I lean into ballet training and attempt to emulate the physical approach of Danny Daniels, Paul Draper, Bill Evans and Sam Weber as a means of appeasing the expectations of highbrow audiences. The relationship to the floor is airier and more lifted, noticeably different from when I was trading with Siobhan and Karissa just a few moments earlier. This section demonstrates the Morton Gould Tap Dance Concerto as originally conceived, visually stripped of any

African influence on the form.

I re-enter the space simultaneously with the projections as though I am about to

dance again, but just before the cadenza can begin, I speak directly to the

audience about the history of the Gould concerto. Karissa and Siobhan rise, wraith-

like, in low light and begin to whisper a swung ostinato, subtly hinting at tap

dance’s jazz origins. I fade back and join the ostinato line as Karissa steps forward

and asks the audience to consider the implications of place and space given that 46 most performers of the work look just like me. As she fades back, Siobhan steps

forward to share Danny Daniels’ problematic views on the form. Siobhan, Karissa

and I declare in unison: “This is the re-appropriation of the Morton Gould Tap

Dance Concerto!” We finish the first movement without the projections in a fast-

paced rhythmically complex flurry accompanied by Peter. (See Rhythms Worth

Shedding 7:10)

The image of Karissa and Siobhan sitting upstage with legs crossed watching the concerto in its original iteration serves as a reminder that in the tap community and communities everywhere, access and opportunity still are governed by systems of white supremacy. Performers and supporters of this work and others like it disproportionally hold positions of power in the tap dance community through festival ownership, tap companies, and other presentational means. Karissa and Siobhan entering and speaking in the middle of the first movement is quite literally a cultural intervention to the work’s sixty-eight-year appropriative history and tap dance’s continual appropriation more generally.

Siobhan and I stand in adjacent square pools of light holding cylindrical Morton’s

kosher salt containers. The salt dances in the light as it is poured into the small

square sandboxes. I continue to pour for several moments after Siobhan has

finished. As we move the sound scratches with the tones more drawn out than tap.

Slow and highly syncopated, it calls and responds and finds counterpoint through

asynchronous choreography. Siobhan weaves through double time as I calmly play

the bass rhythms. We playfully exchange looks, gestures, and rhythms, generating

a lightness in the space as the audience laughs throughout the work. The lights fade 47 then come back up. The audience sees Siobhan and me seated in the middle of the

space. The lightness that just existed seconds ago evaporates and is subverted by

the seriousness Siobhan exudes as she speaks about her experiences with legacy,

lineage, and cultural erasure. (See Rhythms Worth Shedding 11:28)

Siobhan writes about this section: “The snarky and playful nature of this piece represents the political tango that tap dancers engage in everyday based on their racial background. The choreography is inspired by the quirky nature of the musical arrangement and the decision to use Morton’s kosher salt. The choreography has an intentionally satirical air. During the counterpoint, while the white man is allowed to return to the comfort of the slow tempo, the woman of color continues to work ‘double time’ in order to maintain relevance. The work ends with the white man having the final word just before the work concludes.” In the transitional conversation that follows the second movement,

Siobhan contextualizes the concerto within the double standard that exists with reproducing, remixing, or re-imagining historic black versus white choreographies.

Siobhan points out that the archive of tap dance consists largely of choreography of men of color and that their work is constantly being used, but that with white artists, there are commissions, lawyers, and rights. She emphasizes that through these remixed versions, artists of color are effectively being erased from history. This section was also a way of implementing schtick. While Mazeltoes often employed performative gimmicks, they were only in service to entertainment. By connecting the salt with larger socio-political themes,

I believe we utilized schtick in a way that found relevant social commentary, which has always been a critical component of Jewish humor. 48 Karissa and I walk toward each other as the lights come up. We gently approach

the floor with a flurry of whispered subdivisions. We circle around each other and

fall in and out of swung and straight patterns dancing mostly in unison. Karissa

executes the double-time section with absolute mastery, minimizing the visibility of

her difficult weight shifts. The circling continues until we face each other one last

time. The atmosphere suddenly shifts as Peter turns Gould’s minuet into blues form.

The music is tension-filled as it rises, falls, and shifts into stop time. Here, Karissa

and I are freed of the rigidity of the classical music as we improvise, listening

deeply to our combined rhythm and tone. (See Rhythms Worth Shedding 21:46)

Karissa writes about this section: “This piece is a rhythmical exploration of the relationship between jazz and classical music. Sonically, Morton Gould’s third movement hints at a blues feel in certain sections while still mostly adhering to classical structure and aesthetic. The choreography is meant to play with the rules of both musical genres before resolving with a distinctly jazz re-appropriation: the pianist riffing off the movement’s melodies and the tap dancers engaging in an improvisational moment, free from the previous structures.” Following the third movement, Karissa explains to the audience that many of the structural inequities that existed at the time of the work, are still very much at play today and that people who are in positions of power have the final say on what stories are told. She shares her experiences having to navigate situations with all white creative teams as a woman of color. Karissa demonstrates that the Gould concerto is not just an isolated moment of appropriation, but a work that encapsulates historic and current systems of power. 49 The fourth movement begins with Siobhan and Karissa flying through the fast-

paced tempo with flurries of triplets and sixteenth notes as they navigate a

constantly changing classical meter. Karissa’s solo is meticulous in its musical

placement. She patiently fills measures with space, punctuating her phrases with a

single satisfying note. She references tap dance’s traditional steps but flips the

downbeats to a different part of the step, making it her own. Siobhan enters the

space graciously as she applauds Karissa’s performance. Siobhan’s approach is

more lifted. She navigates the space expertly with a coquettish grin, paying close

attention to her tonal range and volume as she shouts through a double time triplet

section and then effortlessly pulls back to a whisper just a few moments later.

Karissa returns as they perform in unison rising and falling across the wooden

boards with tremendous virtuosity. The music and choreography continue to

build until the last moment, a triumphant slam of the side of the foot, and the lights

fade on Karissa and Siobhan.

Ironically, in a piece that I produced, directed, and co-choreographed, I do not think the work was fully realized until I removed myself entirely. This was the moment that the concerto became fully re-appropriated, as two brilliant female tap dance artists of color created magic within the shell of a racist artifact of tap dance history. Of course, the question remains - who is ultimately rewarded for this work? How and why?

50 Conclusion

By utilizing an autoethnographic process, I was able to see that my personal participation in white supremacist appropriation of tap dance started way before my professional career. Access to resources brought me into the same room with a lot of black pioneers who were not even present in my formal education. Almost all of my training was with white women, and the few experiences I had with the African American masters of tap dance were all facilitated through white-run organizations such as Jacob’s Pillow, Tap

City Youth Ensemble, and Chicago Human Rhythm Project. These tap masters were permitted to teach classes but were largely shut out from significantly profiting from their own materials, as they largely worked under the umbrella of white-owned organizations.

With the exception of LaVaughn Robinson and Leonard Reed, dance departments in institutions of higher learning were not interested in hiring these masters, as white tap instructors were generally deemed more appropriate in these settings. These structural realities continue to stifle opportunity and access to financial stability for non-white tap dancers today. My process has illuminated the extent of my current participation in these structures. While I know that my art will continue to address these inequities, I realize that if I plan to continue working with some of my current affiliations, I have to actively practice anti-racist strategies in these spaces. How can I do this in a way that both reflects my values and is appealing to for profit organizations most interested in the bottom line?

Studying the various moments of Jewish appropriation of tap dance within their specific historical circumstances brought me face to face with something resembling white

(Jewish) guilt but I found that by reflecting on traditional Jewish values, I was better able 51 to conceive of what my participation in tap dance might look like in the future. Part of the being a good Jew, is the obligation to repair and my process of creating Rhythms Worth

Shedding attempted to do that. By culturally correcting a problematic Jewish moment of appropriation, we did not only re-imagine the past, we re-imagined the future of a more just world. I also believe that through the re-appropriation of the Morton Gould Tap Dance

Concerto, we actually expanded and liberated the cultural relevancy of a work which is not considered ‘serious’ in classical music circles. By changing the setting and the structure of the work, we stripped it of its pejorative novelty and were able to communicate the power and seriousness of tap dance. This project was a model for how I want to navigate the leveraging of my privilege as a tap dance practitioner and advocate. I want to demonstrate that holding space for facilitation is not only an aspect of an artistic practice, but a methodological possibility which will permeate my pedagogy and presentation.

Reconciling my legacy of appropriation of tap dance due to white privilege sparked this process. How can I begin to encourage my white tap-dancing colleagues and friends to partake in similar autoethnographic processes to implicate their participation in systems of whiteness? How can I be of service to my tap dancing colleagues of color? How can I advocate for and respectfully facilitate further re-approriationist action?

I believe that a heightened understanding of my personal privilege and participation in white supremacy not only created the space for this re-imagination but has improved my choreographic artistry in general. I am more aware of culturally hegemonic assumptions of value and validity that I have long held and upheld that work to maintain institutionalized and structural racism. Centering the mission of the work throughout our process helped 52 me to realize that chipping away at my involvement in the work was the best way to truly hold space for these artists and their stories - getting out of the way but staying in the room can be socio-political action.

Prior to the debut, I was increasingly nervous about both the local and greater tap dance community reaction to the work. The concerto still has tremendous support in the larger tap dance community, and while I was advocating for a re-imagination as opposed to striking the work altogether, there is usually pushback when seminal tap dance works are challenged, particularly those of white artists. To my surprise, both locally and nationally (through a video link), the work was met with overwhelming acceptance and excitement. The audience was lively and engaged throughout the performance. Karissa,

Siobhan, and I were invited to perform excerpts from the concerto at various upcoming tap festivals and were invited to perform the full work at a college in Dallas, in a concert for their music department. As a result of the work’s success, I will be continuing to develop this project for future performance opportunities.

I have already found that the model I used for facilitating re-appropriation actually translates across forms. Prior to University of Texas cancelling classes because of Covid-

19, I started developing a contemporary dance work which utilized the same process of transcription that tap dancers typically use when learning the Gould concerto. It was a priority for me to find an entry point in my work for non-tap-dancing bodies. Utilizing the re-appropriated rhythms from Rhythms Worth Shedding, student dancers generated their own movement with specific choreographic parameters which was organized in space utilizing traditional Jewish folk dance patterns, as a way of re-situating the piece within my 53 specific research. Here, I am leveraging multiple parts of my identity in service to working with specific constituencies. By utilizing the circular nature of Jewish folk dances, I am not only exposing students to elements of Jewish culture but employing a pedagogical coding of sorts by demonstrating the cross-cultural similarities that exist between Jewish and Africanist traditions. I’m teaching through my experience as a Jewish American to give students access to their own auto-ethnographic possibilities. That work can be seen here: (R)evolution 2020 showing. Because the rhythmic patterns are derived from tap choreography specifically, the dancers sonically embody many rhythmic ideas that are often reserved for tap dance exclusively, including rhythmic displacement and embodying swung eight notes.

Finally, as someone who has come to realize that I get more joy from watching student growth and empowerment than any other part of my artistic or professional life, this project has fundamentally shifted how I will approach my pedagogy. The studio is where I get to teach history, culture, and compassion through tap dance and this research process has taught me both to deeply interrogate the context of the history we teach and that decentering myself is critical in holding space for student-centered learning. Social justice is a continual process, and in the classroom, it requires that I centralize conversations about race and gender, actively making and holding space for these conversations. As a white Jewish man, I am cognizant that because of the privileges that I have been afforded, I am in a position that may allow me to play a role in tap dance’s future. I now recognize that it is my responsibility to destabilize the white supremacist systems to make the field of tap dance a more equitable place so that the opportunities I 54 have been afforded are universal. My anti-racist approach to be a Jewish American tap dancer centers around social justice. This is both my mission and my method for working in the classroom and for my own artistic practice.

55 Bibliography

Brodkin, Karen. “How Did Jews Become White Folks?” How Jews Became White Folks & What That Says About Race in America. Rutgers University Press, 1998, pp. 25-52.

Defrantz, Thomas F. “White Privilege.” Theatre, Nov. 2018, pp. 23-37.

Ellis, Carolyn. “Writing Emotionally About Our Lives.” Evocative Autoethnography: Writing Lives and Telling Stories. Routledge, 2016, pp. 116-139.

Erdman, Harley. Staging the Jew: the Performance of an American Ethnicity, 1860-1920. Rutgers University Press, 1997.

Foster, Susan L. Choreographing Histories. University of Indiana Press, 1995, pp. 4-10.

Goldberg, Jane. “Danny Daniels [biography].” American Memory: Remaining Collections, Web. 10 Mar. 2020 http://memory.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/loc.music.tdabio.70/default.html.

Gould, Morton. Program Note for Morton Gould’s Spirituals for String Choir and Orchestra at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center, New York, 1941.

Hersch, Charles. “Swinging Haga Nagila: Jewish Jazz and Jewish Identity” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies. Vol. 33, Issue 3 2015 p 1-26.

J, L. “Danny Daniels Illustrates ‘Just Rhythm; .” Dance Magazine, Feb. 1952, p. 26.

Landon, Joshua. “The Dilemma of Jewish Privilege.” The New Republic, 27 July 2018. Web. 26 Mar. 2020 http://newrepublic.com/article/150241/dilemma-jewish.

Lipsitz, George. “Bill Moore’s Body.” The Possessive Investment in Whiteness. Temple University Press, 2006, pp. vii-xx.

Martin, John. “The Dance: Novelty: Morton Gould and Danny Daniels Unite In Concerto for Taps and Orchestra.” New York Times, 23 Nov. 1952.

Melnick, Jeffrey. A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song. Harvard University Press, 1999.

56 Nelson, Robin. Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Rogers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound, The New York Public Library. “interview with Morton Gould” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1980 - 1996. http://digitalcollectoins.nypl.org/items/56253b70-c351-0133-55d6-60f81dd2b63c.

Rogin, Michael “Uncle Sammy and My Mammy” Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot University of California Press, 1996, pp. 3-18.

Rossen, Rebecca. Dancing Jewish: Jewish Identity in American Modern and Postmodern Dance. Oxford University Press, 2014.

Stearns, Marshall., and Jean Stearns. Jazz Dance: the Story of American Vernacular Dance. Da Capo Press, 1994.

Vann, Matthew. “Lack of Diversity in Top Orchestras Remains a Major Challenge for Musicians of Color.” NBCNews.com, NBCUniversal News Group, 16 July 2018, www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/lack-diversity-top-orchestras-remains-major- challenge-musicians-color-n891386.

57

Vita

Jeremy Arnold began his dance training in suburban Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

He has worked on the University of Texas at Austin dance faculty since 2015, teaching courses in rhythm tap, jazz, and music theory. His work has represented the University of

Texas at ACDA in the Southeastern Regional gala performance and he was thrice nominated by the Austin Chronicle as ‘Best Dancer.’ Jeremy has performed with Charles

O Anderson’s Dance Theatre X since 2013 at venues such as NYLA, MANCC, ADF and the Fuzebox Festival. He has been featured in Dance Magazine, Dance Spirit Magazine, and in season 7 of PBS’s Arts In Context television series. He was a principal dancer with

Tapestry Dance Company from 2014-2017. Jeremy tours with Revive Dance Convention, the National Dance Honors, and has taught at tap festivals including, Riff Dallas Tap

Festival, Phoenix Tap Fest, Soul 2 Sole, True Sound Rhythm Festival, and Little Rock Tap

Fest.

Permanent address: 3410 Windsor Road

Austin, TX 78703

This thesis was typed by the author.

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