Recovering hurston, reconsidering the choreographer

Kraut, Anthea

doi:10.1080/07407700500515936

Cited by 14 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…As Anthea Kraut has discussed in debating whether to describe Hurston as a "choreographer," a title that Hurston herself never claimed, this dilemma "provides an opportunity to re-assess the very terms we use" to describe the production of performance and the theories that surround it. 69 Hurston's work shows us that performance theory emerged in dialogue with-and in many cases, as an appropriation of-the work of transdisciplinary scholar-artists whose creative labor was not accommodated on the midcentury American stage.…”

Section: Participating In Performance Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Staging Hurston's Heaven: Ethnographic Performance from the Pulpit to the Pews

Kastleman

2022

Theat Surv

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It was May in Eau Gallie, Florida, and Zora Neale Hurston was headed to church. Shutting the door to her cottage near the shores of the Indian River, Hurston set out to join the local Baptist congregation, where she would hear a sermon delivered by its pastor, the Reverend C. C. Lovelace. Hurston had been pondering the question of how to represent the experience of a church service in a theatrical performance. “Know what I am attempting?” she had written to Langston Hughes a few days earlier, in April 1929. “To set an entire Bapt. service word for word and note for note.” Listening to Lovelace's sermon in Eau Gallie, Hurston admired how the preacher's oratory built seamlessly from a creation story into a fiery vision of divine retribution. She was so taken by the poetry of Lovelace's words that she transcribed his sermon in its entirety. This sermon later served as the centerpiece of the play The Sermon in the Valley, a work that testifies to Hurston's aim to render a Baptist service “word for word and note for note.” Like many of her plays, The Sermon in the Valley reveals the intimate entanglement of her ethnographic compositions and her writing for the stage.

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Section: Participating In Performance Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Staging Hurston's Heaven: Ethnographic Performance from the Pulpit to the Pews

Kastleman

2022

Theat Surv

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“…is double standard can be seen with respect to African American dance artists, such as Zora Neal Hurston, Katherine Dunham, and Pearl Primus, all of whom struggled to legitimate their choreographies of the pan-Africanist diaspora. For more, see Manning 2004;Kraut 2006;Kowal 2010;Das 2017. 17.…”

Section: [ ] Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dancing the World Smaller

Kowal

2019

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Mark Franko, Series Editor French Moves: The Cultural Politics of le hip hop Felicia McCarren Watching Weimar Dance Kate Elswit Poetics of Dance: Body, Image, and Space in the Historical Avant-Gardes Gabriele Brandstetter Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body,...

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“…Social dance was a tool by which working class African Americans could challenge the dominant cultural milieu and expectations/disciplining of black bodies (Unruh ). The relationship between bodies, work, and capitalism is manifested in social and theatrical dance (Franko ; Kraut ). Through the lens of dance, we are able to observe performance‐centered relationships between individual agency and political forces (Hancock ).…”

Section: Capitalism Work and African American Vernacular Technologymentioning

confidence: 99%

African American Cultural Technology: The Lindy Hop, the King of Pop, and the Factory Worker's Experience

Stovall

2015

Transforming Anthropology

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African Americans have been integral in shaping the aesthetics of modernity generally, and with respect to dance in particular. Through labor, art, cultural technology, and social life, African American aesthetics have breathed life into modern and contemporary American culture. The stress and fatigue of machines, labor, capitalism, and racism, imposed on bodies during the industrial revolution and in the post-industrial era have provided raw material for black artistic expressions during the mid-to-late twentieth century. Furthermore, this artistic expression, fueled by the angst of changing times generally and tensions facing African Americans in particular, has served as American catharsis through the creation of innovative cultural expressions. This article analyzes the dialectical relationships of industrialization, racism, and modern aesthetics, through the lens of the innovative African American social dance form, the Lindy Hop; and the virtuosic pop performances of Michael Jackson. The important contributions of the Lindy Hop as a dance style and Michael Jackson as a performer have had a profound impact on the aesthetics of modernity in American social and popular concert dance. To better understand the relationship between industrialization and the African American shaping of aesthetics of modernity, this article analyzes black experiences and embodiment of industrial labor and the ways that African Americans drew from their particular experiences of industrial labor toward the creation of critical cultural technology.The Negroes of the USA have breathed into jazz the song, the rhythm, and the sound of machines. -Le CorbusierMichael Jackson both incarnates and transcends the trope of the human motor, combining the virtuoso's seemingly mechanical exactitude with suprahuman charisma.-Judith Hamera

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Recovering hurston, reconsidering the choreographer

Cited by 14 publications

References 27 publications

Staging Hurston's Heaven: Ethnographic Performance from the Pulpit to the Pews

Staging Hurston's Heaven: Ethnographic Performance from the Pulpit to the Pews

Dancing the World Smaller

African American Cultural Technology: The Lindy Hop, the King of Pop, and the Factory Worker's Experience

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