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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