![]() ![]() Jumping line dance participation dance free#Then came disco, he said, and black social dances were about mobility with partners and featured lots of swing, circular gestures and free energy. In the soul dances from the 1960s during the Black Power era, DeFrantz said, dancing bodies were held tight, and hands were balled in fists - a metaphor for the era. “They tell us about black lives, black faith, black transcendence and black resistance,” he said of the dances. And that evolved into traditions like the “Soul Train” line and soul line dancing. DeFrantz, a Duke University African and African American studies professor who specializes in black dance customs.Īfrican Americans also maintained a tradition of dances with “callers,” he said, where a leader announces what to do next. The tradition of group dance instruction songs stretches back to a time when African Americans were enslaved and when spirituals were used to help find the Underground Railroad, said Thomas F. ![]() “But line dancing just kinda brought it out in me.” “In my early 20s, I noticed I wasn’t a clubgoer and I was cool with that - I would only do lame dancing before this, and then I had the nerve to be shy sometimes,” Spires said, while toweling off in between dance numbers during a Friday-night social. Plus, he said, it’s just plain fun, and it’s not intimidating. “Those types of movements,” he said, have “cultural influence.” When he is dancing, he does it knowing the steps can be traced back to his ancestors. Spires, 27, who drives for a local paratransit service, was invited to his first line-dancing event by his mom’s friend. Such synchronized movements were a staple of the Harlem Renaissance and have recurred again and again through the decades at sock hops, disco soul lines and choreographed hip-hop dance routines. For many of them, the dancing brings a cultural connection that traces its roots to Africa and the Caribbean. Many soul line devotees - nearly all of whom are African American - take classes, attend socials and even travel together in line-dancing groups. You know, those group dances - the electric slide, the cupid shuffle, the wobble - in which participants seem to magically know the choreography and do flash mob-style dance routines at picnics and weddings and on cruises. ![]() What exactly is soul line dancing? The simplest explanation is that it is line dancing to R&B and hip-hop songs. It’s soul line-dancing night at a community center in Jessup, Md. He’s moving in unison with more than a dozen other dancers. Nelson Spires twists his body, slides to the right and then to the left. The dancing style pairs traditional country-western line dancing with the sounds of hip hop and R&B. With a majority of examples taken from marginal film forms, such as shorts and B movies, the book highlights their role in disseminating alternative images of racial and gender identities as embodied by dancers – images that were at least partly at odds with those typically found in major Hollywood productions.Soul line dancing has become largely popular in the Washington area and, according to dancers, you can find a dancing event somewhere every week. Jumping line dance participation dance series#Topics include Hollywood's first Black female star (Nina Mae McKinney), male tap dance "class acts" in Black-cast short films of the early 1930s, the film career of Black tap soloist Jeni LeGon, the role of dance in the Soundies jukebox shorts of the 1940s, cinematic images of the Lindy hop, and a series of teen films from the early 1940s that appealed primarily to young White fans of swing culture. ![]() Arguing for the transformative and subversive potential of jazz dance performance onscreen, the six chapters address a variety of films and performers, including many that have received little attention to date. Looking at intersections of race, gender, and class, the book examines how the racialized and gendered body in film performs, challenges, and negotiates identities and stereotypes. Jumping the Color Line discusses vernacular jazz dance in film as a focal point of American race relations. Black performers, however, were marginalized, mostly limited to appearing in "specialty acts" and various types of short films, whereas stardom was reserved for Whites. From the first synchronized sound films of the late 1920s through the end of World War II, African American music and dance styles were ubiquitous in films. ![]()
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