AME RICA DANCING This page intentionally left blank AME RICA DANCING FROM THE CAKEWALK TO THE MOONWALK MEGAN PUGH NEW HAVEN & LONDON Copyright © 2015 by Megan Pugh. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Excerpt from “Dances Before the Wall,” from The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, by Frank O’Hara, copyright © 1971 by Maureen Granville- Smith, Administratrix of the Estate of Frank O’Hara, copyright renewed 1999 by Maureen O’Hara Granville-Smith and Donald Allen. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e- mail sales . press@yale . edu (U.S. offi ce) or sales@yaleup . co . uk (U.K. offi ce). Set in Meridien and Futura types by Westchester Publishing Services. Printed in the United States of Ame rica. Library of Congress Control Number: 2015939313 ISBN 978-0-300-20131-4 (cloth : alk. paper) A cata logue rec ord for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 for my mo ther This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS Ac know ledg ments ix Introduction: An American Style 1 1 The Cakewalk, Ame rica’s First National Dance 10 2 Bill Robinson’s Dream 29 3 Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Pick Themselves Up 84 4 Agnes de Mille’s Square Dance 138 5 Paul Taylor’s Bugle Boy 182 6 Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk 239 List of Dance Films and Videos 315 Notes 321 Index 377 This page intentionally left blank AC KNOW LEDG MENTS One of the perks of writing this book was that watching dance counted as work. If I felt stuck, I could pull up a YouTube video, slide a DVD into my laptop, or head to a concert hall and watch other people move. In the pages that follow, I refer primarily to recorded dances, but live perfor mances by the Paul Taylor Dance Com pany, San Francisco Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, and New York City Ballet—including productions of many of the pieces I discuss— also kindled my thoughts and excitement. When I was still in college, Elizabeth Dillon made me want to understand the complexities of American perfor mance, and Fred Strebeigh made me want to write better prose. Since then, many other teachers have helped me keep those goals in mind. Bryan Wagner has been deepening my thinking about this book since before I knew what I was thinking about. He has consis- tently encouraged me to keep the big picture in mind, on the page and off. Scott Saul provided advice, encouragement, and a model for what scholarship could look like; this book and I are better for it. Greil Marcus has given generously of his time and his knowledge for years. Thank you, Greil, for making so much seem possible, in writing and in life. Linda Williams enriched this pro ject with both comments on drafts and guidance through the history of musical fi lms. ix Eric Lott has infl uenced my ideas through his own work and his feedback on mine. I’ve also benefi tted from conversations and correspondence with Julia Foulkes, Laura Horak, Deborah Jow- itt, W. T. Lhamon, John Rockwell, and Laura Shapiro. Larry Billman, Paul Janusz, Julie Malnig, Teasel Muir- Harmony, Lewis Segal, and Michael Veal graciously answered my questions on topics ranging from outer space to reggae dancing. Julie MacDonald, Vincent Paterson, and Paul Taylor took the time to grant me interviews that were both fascinating and enjoyable. Thanks as well to Lisa Labrado at Paul Taylor’s Amer- ican Modern Dance, and to com pany archivist Tom Patrick, who helped me access research materials from the opposite side of the country with ease and good cheer. I’m grateful to the staff at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the Uni- versity of California, Berkeley, Library, the San Francisco Public Library, and the Lewis and Clark College library. Thank you to Dr. Jonathan Prude for permission to quote from Agnes de Mille’s papers; to Maureen Granville-Smith, for permission to quote from Frank O’Hara’s “Dances Before the Wall”; to Paul B. Goode, for his photographs of the Paul Taylor Dance Com pany; to Edward Burns at the Carl Van Vechten Trust, for permission to reprint Van Vechten’s photograph of Paul Taylor; and to Karen Langford and John Branka at Ziffren Law. I am also grateful to the Berkeley En glish Department, the Mabelle McLeod Lewis Memorial Foundation, and the Berkeley Center for Race and Gender Studies, all of which provided fi nancial support as I re- searched and wrote parts of this book. I worked out some of my ideas about Agnes de Mille, Fred Astaire, and Ginger Rogers in two pieces for Boston Review; read- ers of those essays will note some overlap with these chapters. x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My editors there, Deb Chasman and Simon Waxman, provided stellar feedback. I’m also grateful to Jim Gaines, formerly of FLYP, which published some of my earliest thoughts about Mi- chael Jackson back in 2009; some portions of that article persist in this book. That article also morphed into a pre sen ta tion for the Berkeley conference Michael Jackson: A Critical Refl ection on a Life and a Phenomenon, where I benefi ted from talks by and with my fellow presenters. I thank my fellow participants in Eric Lott’s seminar at Dartmouth’s Futures of American Studies In- stitute, Berkeley’s Transatlantic American Studies Group, and a 2013 working group that Bryan Wagner put together at Berkeley, for their engagement with various parts of this book. I am grate- ful to Shad A. Small and Jonathan Shelley for their help polishing the manuscript. And I thank my students at Berkeley and at Lewis and Clark, in whose company I’ve felt lucky to think through so many of the ideas that follow. Thanks to my agent, Paul Bresnick, for believing in this pro ject and helping it come to fruition. At Yale University Press, my editor, Steve Wasserman, ushered this book into being with savvy and kindness. Eva Skewes has responded to my every query with a thoroughness that makes her speed all the more remark- able. Thanks to Susan Laity for her phenomenally attentive man- uscript editing, and to my anonymous outside reader for his or her sharp eyes and smart suggestions. In the years that I have been working on this book, many friends have served as advisers, editors, and co- conspirators. Lyn Hejinian has been a model of intellectual and personal gen- erosity, practiced with rigor and with love. Monique Walton’s perceptive powers always make me want to sharpen my own. Ben Schrom’s enthusiasm for silent fi lm and so much else has ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi been helpfully infectious. Brian Pettit offered wisdom about tap dancing and brass bands. Chris Fan, my fi rst friend in graduate school, offered comments on drafts and helped me access research materials. Monica Huerta’s insights on these chapters have given them an enormous boost, and I feel lucky to call her a friend. Kate Marshall offered advice on publishing and made my baby laugh. On behalf of that baby and myself, I thank Adam Board- man, Ashlee Renfrow, and Laura Steele, whose care for Theo made it possi ble for me to steal away and work. Andy Horowitz has shared his friendship and writerly prowess with me for well over a decade; in many ways, this book is a product of our mutual enthusiasms, as well as his editorial hand. I miss the long talks and walks Gillian Osborne and I had when we both lived in San Francisco, but even at a distance, she continues to enliven my thinking and my writing. RJ Leland has now been a support and sounding board for well over half my life; only my sister, Elise Lauterbach, has fi lled those roles for longer. Her husband, Preston, had my love many years before he helped me navigate the publishing world; now he has my gratitude for that, too. Thanks to my father, Robert Pugh, for teaching me that every- one’s story matters, and to my mo ther, Dorothy Gunther Pugh, for teaching me—and so many others—to value dance. I also thank my in- laws, Becky Yeats and Steve Rose, for making me feel at home in a new city, raising my favorite person, and showering our son with love. My husband, Eliot Rose, has been an unwavering support, taking care of our house hold so I could hole up and write and then pulling me back into the world for adventures big and small. Eliot and Theo, you throw my favorite dance parties. xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AME RICA DANCING This page intentionally left blank INTRODUCTION An American Style Late on a spring eve ning in 1939, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson stood in Times Square and looked up. He was admiring an adver- tisement for his latest Broadway show, The Hot Mikado: a neon sign of himself tap- dancing. Robinson had been raised by his grand- mother, a former slave, in Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the former Confederacy.