American Performance Traditions
From 1880 to 1930, Americans flocked to this touring variety show genre, which featured dance, burlesque, trained animals, and ventriloquists.
What is Vaudeville?
This Native American dance originated as a healing practice during the 1918 flu pandemic and is now commonly seen at powwows and private healing ceremonies.
What is the Jingle Dress Dance?
A dancer and anthropologist, she developed the Dunham Technique, blending Caribbean and African styles with ballet and modern.
Who is Katherine Dunham?
This movement that began in 1970s Bronx includes graffiti, DJ-ing, rapping, and breakdancing as its four main pillars.
What is Hip-hop?
This Alvin Ailey masterpiece, set to African American spirituals, celebrates Black resilience and joy, with a finale called "Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham."
What is Revelations?
These late 19th- to early 20th-century touring shows offered romanticized portrayals of cowboys and Native Americans and helped shape the myth of the American frontier.
What are Wild West Shows?
This dance, once performed by enslaved people for a prize dessert, satirized the mannerisms of White plantation owners and later appeared in minstrel shows and vaudeville.
What is the Cakewalk?
She danced barefoot, wore flowing tunics, and drew inspiration from nature and ancient Greece, rejecting ballet norms and expectations for women at the turn of the 20th century.
Who is Isadora Duncan?
This artistic explosion from 1918 to 1937 celebrated Black American life in Harlem and included contributions in literature, music, theater, and visual art.
What is the Harlem Renaissance?
In this 1930 solo, Martha Graham expresses overwhelming grief while seated and enveloped in a stretchy tube of fabric.
What is Lamentation?
Coined by Allan Kaprow in the 1950s, this term described multimedia events that blurred boundaries between art forms and often took place outside traditional theater spaces.
What are Happenings?
Known for its energetic kicks and inward and outward rotation of the legs, this 1920s social dance craze embodied the exuberance of the Jazz Age.
What is the Charleston?
This early modern dance innovator used light, fabric, and projection in her performances, pioneering stage lighting effects, as in her famed Serpentine Dance.
Who is Loïe Fuller?
Beginning in 1890, this Native American movement used dance and prayer to resist colonial domination and envision a peaceful restoration of indigenous life.
What is the Ghost Dance?
Set to Bach and using running, sliding, and falling instead of traditional technique, this 1975 Paul Taylor piece celebrates the beauty of everyday movement.
What is Esplanade?
These intertribal gatherings began in the 1920s and focus on shared Native American traditions through dance and music.
What are Powwows?
Often practiced in pairs, this dance form founded by Steve Paxton emphasizes shared weight, touch, and spontaneous movement.
What is Contact Improvisation?
This African American performer became a superstar in France during the 1920s, known for her vernacular dance style, including the famous banana skirt, and later became a civil rights activist and World War II spy.
Who is Josephine Baker?
This early 20th-century musical movement, characterized by syncopated rhythms and dances like the Cakewalk and Turkey Trot, gave urban America a new sound and scene.
What is Ragtime?
Created in response to the AIDS crisis and the loss of a company member, this 1989 Bill T. Jones piece is set to Mendelssohn and celebrates community, resilience, and survival.
What is D-Man in the Waters?
This NYC-based postmodern dance collective developed out of the Judson Dance Theater, exploring improvisation and challenging dance norms.
What is Grand Union?
Unlike Broadway-style tap, this tap dance style highlights percussive footwork and complex rhythms over flashy performance.
What is Rhythm Tap?
This Jewish choreographer used modern dance to explore themes of racism and violence and ran the Dance Project for the Works Progress Administration from 1935 to 1939. In the 1940s she shifted from modern dance to musical theater, choreographing eighteen musicals including the Broadway hit Annie Get Your Gun.
Who is Helen Tamiris?
This 1940s literary and social movement saw its members, known as beatniks, challenging norms through jazz-inspired fashion and free-spirited writing.
What is the Beat Generation?
This piece, choreographed in 1955 by Anna Sokolow, deals with the psychic isolation and unfulfilled desires of people living in the big city.
What is Rooms?