- The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity
- Dedication
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- List of Contributors
- Dance and Ethnicity: Introduction
- “And I Make My Own”: Class Performance, Black Urban Identity, and Depression-Era Harlem’s Physical Culture
- “Do You Want to See My Hornpipe?” Creativity and Irish Step Dance in the Work of Jean Butler and Colin Dunne
- Dancing Jews and Jewesses: Jewishness, Ethnicity, and Exoticism in American Dance
- Queering Ethnicity and Shattering the Disco: Is There an Enduring Gay Ethnic Dance?
- Dancing Multiple Identities: Preserving and Revitalizing Dances of the Skolt Sámi
- To Call Dance Japanese: Nihon Buyô as Ethnic Dance
- Diasporic Ethnicity, Gender, and Dance: Muslim Macedonian Roma in New York
- “An Interesting Experiment in Eugenics”: Ted Shawn, American Dance, and the Discourses of Sex, Race, and Ethnicity
- Dancing Angels and Princesses: The Invention of an Ideal Female National Dancer in Twentieth-Century Iran
- The Spectacularization of Soviet/Russian Folk Dance: Igor Moiseyev and the Invented Tradition of Staged Folk Dance
- LADO, the State Ensemble of Croatian Folk Dances and Songs: Icon of Croatian Identity
- Authenticity and Ethnicity: Folk Dance, Americanization, and the Immigrant Body in the Early Twentieth Century
- A Folklorist’s View of “Folk” and “Ethnic” Dance: Three Ukrainian Examples
- The Jarabe Tapatío: Imagining Race, Nation, Class, and Gender in 1920s Mexico
- Perception, Connections, and Performed Identities in American-Ghanaian Dance Encounters
- Orientalism and the American Belly Dancer: Multiplicity, Authenticity, Identity
- Black Erased: The Tango de Negros in Spain’s Romantic Age
- English-Canadian Ethnocentricity: The Case Study of Boris Volkoff at the 1936 Nazi Olympics
- La Meri: Purveyor of the Dancing Other
- Choreographing Interculturalism: International Dance Performance at the American Museum of Natural History, 1943–1952
- “Hot” Latin Dance: Ethnic Identity and Stereotype
- From Salsa to Salzonto: Rhythmic Identities and Inventive Dance Traditions in Ghana
- Spectacles of Ethnicities: The San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival
- Dancecapes of Dionysus: From Kali Vrisi (Northern Greece) to the Olympics
- Ballet and Whiteness: Will Ballet Forever Be the Kingdom of the Pale?
- Men and the Happiness Dance
- From Powwow to Stomp Dance: Parallel Dance Traditions in Oklahoma
- Beyond Colonization, Commodification, and Reclamation: Hula and Hawaiian Identity
- Crossing the Seas of Southeast Asia: Indigenous Diasporic Islam and Performances of Women’s Igal
- San Miguel the Arcángel, Capitan of Many Troops: An Ethno-Iconographic Study of Danza de Migueles
- Black Dance after Race
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
In the 1930s, “Jewish dance” emerged in the United States as a category that drifted between ethnic and modern dance. Although some Jewish choreographers were able to transcend their ethnicity through the universalism of modern dance, others, like Belle Didjah and Dvora Lapson, were ghettoized by their overtly Jewish characterizations of Hasidic Jews or exotic Jewesses. Despite their exclusion from modern-dance history, Didjah and Lapson identified with modern dance, reinvented cultural traditions and rituals for the stage, and used the solo form to imagine expanded roles for women. Although some of their dances emphasized Jewish difference over assimilation, they aimed to make a place for Jewish expression on the American concert stage, and to expand possibilities for constructing Jewish-American identities through a mode of performance that was both ethnic and modern.
Keywords: dance, Jewish identity, Jewish dance, Jewishness, ethnic dance, modern dance, Dvora Lapson, Belle Didjah, Rebecca Rossen, ethnography, Hasidic dance, orientalism, United States
Rebecca Rossen is assistant professor in the Performance as Public Practice Program at the University of Texas at Austin. Her writing has most recently been published in Theatre Journal, TDR: The Drama Review, and Feminist Studies, and she is currently completing a manuscript, Dancing Jewish: Jewish Identity in American Modern and Postmodern Dance (forthcoming with Oxford University Press).
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- The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity
- Dedication
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- List of Contributors
- Dance and Ethnicity: Introduction
- “And I Make My Own”: Class Performance, Black Urban Identity, and Depression-Era Harlem’s Physical Culture
- “Do You Want to See My Hornpipe?” Creativity and Irish Step Dance in the Work of Jean Butler and Colin Dunne
- Dancing Jews and Jewesses: Jewishness, Ethnicity, and Exoticism in American Dance
- Queering Ethnicity and Shattering the Disco: Is There an Enduring Gay Ethnic Dance?
- Dancing Multiple Identities: Preserving and Revitalizing Dances of the Skolt Sámi
- To Call Dance Japanese: Nihon Buyô as Ethnic Dance
- Diasporic Ethnicity, Gender, and Dance: Muslim Macedonian Roma in New York
- “An Interesting Experiment in Eugenics”: Ted Shawn, American Dance, and the Discourses of Sex, Race, and Ethnicity
- Dancing Angels and Princesses: The Invention of an Ideal Female National Dancer in Twentieth-Century Iran
- The Spectacularization of Soviet/Russian Folk Dance: Igor Moiseyev and the Invented Tradition of Staged Folk Dance
- LADO, the State Ensemble of Croatian Folk Dances and Songs: Icon of Croatian Identity
- Authenticity and Ethnicity: Folk Dance, Americanization, and the Immigrant Body in the Early Twentieth Century
- A Folklorist’s View of “Folk” and “Ethnic” Dance: Three Ukrainian Examples
- The Jarabe Tapatío: Imagining Race, Nation, Class, and Gender in 1920s Mexico
- Perception, Connections, and Performed Identities in American-Ghanaian Dance Encounters
- Orientalism and the American Belly Dancer: Multiplicity, Authenticity, Identity
- Black Erased: The Tango de Negros in Spain’s Romantic Age
- English-Canadian Ethnocentricity: The Case Study of Boris Volkoff at the 1936 Nazi Olympics
- La Meri: Purveyor of the Dancing Other
- Choreographing Interculturalism: International Dance Performance at the American Museum of Natural History, 1943–1952
- “Hot” Latin Dance: Ethnic Identity and Stereotype
- From Salsa to Salzonto: Rhythmic Identities and Inventive Dance Traditions in Ghana
- Spectacles of Ethnicities: The San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival
- Dancecapes of Dionysus: From Kali Vrisi (Northern Greece) to the Olympics
- Ballet and Whiteness: Will Ballet Forever Be the Kingdom of the Pale?
- Men and the Happiness Dance
- From Powwow to Stomp Dance: Parallel Dance Traditions in Oklahoma
- Beyond Colonization, Commodification, and Reclamation: Hula and Hawaiian Identity
- Crossing the Seas of Southeast Asia: Indigenous Diasporic Islam and Performances of Women’s Igal
- San Miguel the Arcángel, Capitan of Many Troops: An Ethno-Iconographic Study of Danza de Migueles
- Black Dance after Race
- Index
