Cultural Memory and Popular Dance: Dancing to Remember, Dancing to Forget (Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies)

✍ Scribed by Clare Parfitt (editor)

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2021
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 312
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book focuses on the myriad ways that people collectively remember or forget shared pasts through popular dance. In dance classes, nightclubs, family celebrations, tourist performances, on television, film, music video and the internet, cultural memories are shared and transformed by dancing bodies adapting yesterday’s steps to today’s concerns. The book gathers emerging and seasoned scholarly voices from a wide range of geographical and disciplinary perspectives to discuss cultural remembering and forgetting in diverse popular dance contexts. The contributors ask: how are Afro-diasporic memories invoked in popular dance classes? How are popular dance genealogies manipulated and reclaimed? What is at stake for the nation in the nationalizing of folk and popular dances? And how does mediated dancing transmit memory as feelings or affects? The book reveals popular dance to be vital to cultural processes of remembering and forgetting, allowing participants to pivot between alternative pasts, presents and futures.

✦ Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Introduction: Dancing with Memory
Embodied Memory: Interdisciplinary Movements Between Memory and Popular Dance
Mapping the Terrain
References
Part I: Pedagogic Invocations of Afro-Diasporic Memory
Tap Dance and Cultural Memory: Shuffling with My Dancestors
Defining Dancestry as a Facet of Cultural Memory
Tap Dancestry: Respecting the Past, Revising in the Present
Classic Choreographies as Dancestral Inheritance
Maintaining Dancestral Inheritance: Embodying Named and Unnamed Dancestors
Bibliography
“Salsa con Afro”: Remembering and Reenacting Afro-Cuban Roots in the Global Cuban and Latin Dance Communities
“A Que Le Llaman ‘Salsa’ Si Esto Es Son?”1
“Une Vraie Sauce”
Rumba: “The Forbidden Black Dance”
Orishas: “And What Do You Want Them to Give You?”
“But Where Is the (Rueda de) Casino?”
“Ya Es Muy Rico”
“Una Onda Gozadera”
Bibliography
Between Creolisation and Kinaesthetic Transnationalism: Zumba Fitness as Mimetic Parody and Ritual Re-enactment
Introduction
Situating Zumba: Between Popular Dance and Cultural Memory
Mimesis and Alterity
Parody and the Carnivalesque
Incorporated Practices and Commemorative Ceremonies
Conclusion
Bibliography
Part II: Manipulated Memory and Reclamation
Parading the Past, Taming the New: From Ragtime to Rock and Roll
Cultural Memory and Remembering the Past
Irene and Vernon Castle
Arthur and Kathryn Murray
References
Queer Tango—Bent History? The Late-Modern Uses and Abuses of Historical Imagery Showing Men Dancing Tango with Each Other
Tango and ‘Men Dancing with Men’: A Contested History
Representations of Men Dancing Tango with Other Men
Queer Tango: Historical and Theoretical Contexts
Online Image Searching: Dodges and Dangers
Images in Contexts and the Generation of Meanings
Type 1. Mainstream Websites with Content About Tango or Queer Tango
Type 2. Mainstream, User-Generated Web Pages Such as Pinterest
Type 3. Mainstream Tango Websites
Type 4. Queer/LGBT Websites
Type 5. Queer Tango Online Presences
Concluding Remarks
References
Bomba Cimarrona: Hip Interactions in the Afro-Ecuadorian Bomba del Chota as a Decolonial Means to Remember
Afrodescendants in Ecuador
The Categories of the Bomba Event
Bomba Cimarrona and Collective Memories
Transmitting Collective Memories Through Bomba Cimarrona Dancers’ Hips
Collective Memories of Freedom in Bomba Cimarrona: Hip-Pushing While Dancing
References
Youthful Bodies as Mnemonic Artifacts: Traversing the Cultural Terrain from Traditional to Popular Dances in Post-independent Ghana
Background
Theoretical Underpinnings of Dancing Bodies as Cultural Memories
Popular Dance and Some Theoretical Frameworks
Bases of Some Mnemonic Artifacts in Postcolonial Ghanaian Popular Dance
Key Movements in Azonto and Their Mnemonic Elements
Toh nɔ or Ironing Movements
Aaka or Drying Movements
Conclusion
References
Part III: National Memories and Amnesias
Csángó Space and Time in the Hungarian Táncház Revival
Introduction
Ildikó’s Return
Unstable Transitions and Distant Pasts
The Search for a National Dance
Opening the Doors
Conclusion
References
National Identity in Philippine Folk Dance: Changing Focus from the Cariñosa to Tinikling
Nationalism and Folk Dance
Aquino and the Beginnings of Collection
The Maria Clara Suite
Visualised and Embodied Strategies of Representation
Gender Identity
The Rural Suite
Conclusions
References
Archive and Memory in Cuban Dances: The Performance of Memory and the Dancing Body as Archive in the Making
Popular Dances in Cuban Archives
Conjunto Folklórico Nacional: Intersecting Temporalities of Archive and Performance
Body, Memory and Transmission
Conclusion
References
Courting Disaster (“I Don’t Remember Anymore”): The Forgetful Dancer and the Body Politic in The Sound of Music (1965)
Dancing the Body Politic: A Choreonecrology of the Forgetful Dancer
Austria and the Pastoral Ländler
The Ländler, Memory, and World War Two
The Dis-Ease of Forgetting, the Disastrous Body
References
Part IV: Im/mediate Memories
Feeling with, Moving Toward: Empathetic Attunement as Dance Reconstruction Methodology
Introduction
New Materialism and Performance Studies
A New Materialist Approach to Dance Reconstruction
Empathetic Attunement
Conclusions
References
Mother Tongue: Dance and Memory, an Autobiographical Excavation
References
Filmed, Felt, and False Rhythms: Dance Videos and an Embodying “Home” in Post-migration
Dance/Music Lineages
New Proximities and Shifting Identifications
The Sensory Experience of Dance on Film
Conclusion: Holding Post-migrants Accountable
References
The Transmission of Nostalgia and (Be)Longing in Popular Screendance, or Recollecting Damien Chazelle’s La La Land
Prelude: Recalling La La Land
Remembering Nostalgia
(Re)Collecting Memory: La La Land’s Restorative Nostalgia
Postlude: La La Land’s Reflective Nostalgic Aftermath
References
Part V: Conclusions
Some Dance to Remember, Some Dance to Forget
Bibliography
Index