Black Dance and Circumstance: The Ruse versus the “Real” when Harlem was in Vogue, Presented by Brynn W. Shiovitz, PhD (she/her)

Coinciding with the Broadway success of Miller and Lyles’ Shuffle Along (1921), wealthy White people began flocking up to Harlem to see what they believed to be “authentic” Black dance and music. Clubs like the Cotton Club began refusing Black patronage because they wanted to encourage White patronage. Simultaneously they began curating the kind of music and dance performed there to appeal to what they thought White people wanted to see and hear. This music and dance were very different from what Harlemites were actually performing in their own more private spaces and yet White patrons believed they were hearing/seeing the “real” Harlem aesthetic. This talk will speak to prevalent Black dance trends during the Harlem Renaissance, highlighting exceptional dance artists such as Aida Overton Walker and Bill Robinson. It will also trouble the idea of “authenticity” and explore how many Black artists used the fallacy of authenticity to double code their performances. Such double coding allowed for “success” in Hollywood at the same time it encoded silent acts of resistance into Black repertoire.

Attendees will receive a special discount code for 20% off of Dr. Shiovitz's book Behind the Screen after purchasing their tickets.

Please Note: This presentation will be hosted on Zoom and there will not be an in-person option. We will send out the Zoom credentials to ticket holders in advance of the event date. We will also share a recording with ticketholders after the event for those who are unable to attend.

Brynn Shiovitz is a writer, scholar, educator, and dancer committed to improving equity, access, and inclusion in higher education and the arts. She received her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles in Culture and Performance and is currently Lecturer in Dance at Chapman University in Orange, California. She is the author of the new book, Behind the Screen: Tap Dance, Race, and Invisibility During Hollywood’s Golden Age (Oxford, 2023), which explores a history of audible blackface and more covert forms of racial masquerade in live action film and animation during the 1930s and 1940s. In particular the book explores how tap dance and technology helped to mask racial caricature and ultimately how, in combination, allowed films to sidestep Production Code guidelines.

She is also the editor of The Body, the Dance and the Text: Essays on Performance and the Margins of History (McFarland, 2019), a collection of newly-published essays which explore the many ways in which writing relates to corporeality and how the two work together to create, resist or mark the body of the “Other.” Her writing on dance can also be seen in Dance Chronicle, Women and Performance, Jazz Perspectives, Theatre Survey, and Dance Research Journals, Dance, Dance Spirit, and Dance Teacher Magazines, and a forthcoming Oxford Handbook in Black Dance Studies edited by Thomas DeFrantz.