- The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- Tracking the Political Economy of Dance
- Dance and/as Competition in the Privately Owned US Studio
- Racing in Place: A Meta-Memoir on Dance Politics and Practice
- Epiphanic Moments: Dancing Politics
- Performing Collectively
- Urban Choreographies: Artistic Interventions and the Politics of Urban Space
- The Politics of Speculative Imagination in Contemporary Choreography
- Toward a Choreo-Political Theory of Articulation
- Rehearsing In-Difference: The Politics of Aesthetics in the Performances of Pina Bausch and Jérôme Bel
- Problem as a Choreographic and Philosophical Kind of Thought
- The Politics of Perception
- The Politics of Speaking about the Body
- Dancing Disabled: Phenomenology and Embodied Politics
- Of Corporeal Rewritings, Translations, and the Politics of Difference in Dancing
- Planning for Death’s Surprise: Pina Bausch and Merce Cunningham
- Dancing D-Day
- Dance and Politics in China: Interculturalism, Hybridity, and the ArtsCross Project
- Between the Cultural Center and the Villa : Dance, Neoliberalism, and Silent Borders in Buenos Aires
- Modern Dance in the Third Reich, Redux
- The Micropolitics of Exchange: Exile and Otherness after the Nation
- <i>Black Swan</i>, White Nose
- Brown in Black and White: José Limón Dances The Emperor Jones
- Switch: Queer Social Dance, Political Leadership, and Black Popular Culture
- Politics of Fake It!: Janez Janša Interviewed by Janez Janša
- Identity Politics and Political Will: Jeni LeGon Living in a Great Big Way
- Dancing in the Here and Now: Indigenous Presence and the Choreography of Emily Johnson/Catalyst and DANCING EARTH
- Dance and Eastern Europe: Contemporary Dance in the Time of Transition
- Domesticating Dance: South Asian Filmic Bodies Negotiating New Moves in Neoliberalism
- Is It OK to Dance on Graves?: Modernism and Socialist Realism Revisited
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
The career of acclaimed tap dancer Jeni LeGon is remarkable not only for her style but also for the ways in which she navigated the racial politics of the 1930s Hollywood film industry. This chapter examines how identity politics affected LeGon’s movements on and off both stage and screen. Hollywood lacked the political will to commit to LeGon, but she countered with a black will to maintain control and subjectivity. As a light-complexioned African American woman cast in a variety of ethnic roles she demonstrates the fungibility of black and brown bodies. When she presented as both cutesy and powerhouse, and when she performed male lines of business in pants, she troubled conceptions of gender. That the same body read subservient in white films and leading lady in black films tells us about not only the practices of an industry but also the audience’s phenomenological experiences of race.
Keywords: Jeni LeGon, identity politics, political will, black will, Hollywood, tap dance, African American, gender, race, black films
Nadine George-Graves (BA, Yale; PhD, Northwestern) is Professor of theater and dance at the University of California, San Diego. Her work is situated at the intersections of African American studies, gender studies, performance studies, theater history, and dance history. She is the author of The Royalty of Negro Vaudeville: The Whitman Sisters and the Negotiation of Race, Gender, and Class in African American Theater, 1900–1940 and Urban Bush Women: Twenty Years of Dance Theater, Community Engagement and Working It Out as well as numerous articles on African American theater and dance. Her recent creative projects include directing Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog, adapting and directing Anansi the Story King, an original dance theater production of African American folk stories using college students, professionals, and fourth graders, and Architectura, a dance theater piece about the ways in which we build our lives. She currently serves as president of the Congress on Research in Dance (CORD).
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- The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- Tracking the Political Economy of Dance
- Dance and/as Competition in the Privately Owned US Studio
- Racing in Place: A Meta-Memoir on Dance Politics and Practice
- Epiphanic Moments: Dancing Politics
- Performing Collectively
- Urban Choreographies: Artistic Interventions and the Politics of Urban Space
- The Politics of Speculative Imagination in Contemporary Choreography
- Toward a Choreo-Political Theory of Articulation
- Rehearsing In-Difference: The Politics of Aesthetics in the Performances of Pina Bausch and Jérôme Bel
- Problem as a Choreographic and Philosophical Kind of Thought
- The Politics of Perception
- The Politics of Speaking about the Body
- Dancing Disabled: Phenomenology and Embodied Politics
- Of Corporeal Rewritings, Translations, and the Politics of Difference in Dancing
- Planning for Death’s Surprise: Pina Bausch and Merce Cunningham
- Dancing D-Day
- Dance and Politics in China: Interculturalism, Hybridity, and the ArtsCross Project
- Between the Cultural Center and the Villa : Dance, Neoliberalism, and Silent Borders in Buenos Aires
- Modern Dance in the Third Reich, Redux
- The Micropolitics of Exchange: Exile and Otherness after the Nation
- <i>Black Swan</i>, White Nose
- Brown in Black and White: José Limón Dances The Emperor Jones
- Switch: Queer Social Dance, Political Leadership, and Black Popular Culture
- Politics of Fake It!: Janez Janša Interviewed by Janez Janša
- Identity Politics and Political Will: Jeni LeGon Living in a Great Big Way
- Dancing in the Here and Now: Indigenous Presence and the Choreography of Emily Johnson/Catalyst and DANCING EARTH
- Dance and Eastern Europe: Contemporary Dance in the Time of Transition
- Domesticating Dance: South Asian Filmic Bodies Negotiating New Moves in Neoliberalism
- Is It OK to Dance on Graves?: Modernism and Socialist Realism Revisited
- Index