“Ms. Pugh’s writing is excellent, and the book is mind opening. To an invaluable extent, it’s about the influence of African-Americans on American dance... The breadth and wealth of information often dazzle... This book alters and enriches American dance history. ”
“In clear and sensual prose, Megan Pugh has fashioned a history of modern America in gestures and movement. The pages never hold still. ”
An exuberant history of American dance, told through the lives of virtuoso performers who have defined the art.
The history of American dance reflects the nation's tangled cultures. When dancers imitated, learned from, and stole one another's steps, audiences embraced the results as deeply American. Using the stories of tapper Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, ballet and Broadway choreographer Agnes de Mille, choreographer Paul Taylor, and Michael Jackson, Megan Pugh shows how freedom—that nebulous, contested ideal—emerges as a genre-defining aesthetic. In Pugh's account, ballerinas mingle with slumming thrill-seekers, and hoe-downs show up on elite opera house stages. Steps invented by slaves captivate British royalty and the Parisian avant-garde. Dances were better boundary-crossers than their dancers, however, and the racism and inequities that shape everyday American life shadow American dance as well. Deftly narrated, America Dancing demonstrates the centrality of dance in American art and identity, taking us to watershed moments when the nation worked out a sense of itself through public movement.
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