Dance Me a Song: Astaire, Balanchine, Kelly, and the American Film Musical - Hardcover

by Beth Genné (Author)

Dancer-choreographer-directors Fred Astaire, George Balanchine and Gene Kelly and their colleagues helped to develop a distinctively modern American film-dance style and recurring dance genres for the songs and stories of the American musical. Freely crossing stylistic and class boundaries, their dances were rooted in the diverse dance and music cultures of European immigrants and African-American migrants who mingled in jazz age America. The new technology of sound cinema let them choreograph and fuse camera movement, light, and color with dance and music. Preserved intact for the largest audiences in dance history, their works continue to influence dance and film around the world. This book centers them and their colleagues within the history of dance (where their work has been marginalized) as well as film tracing their development from Broadway to Hollywood (1924-58) and contextualizing them within the American history and culture of their era.

Author Biography

Beth Genné is Professor of Dance History and Art History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in the Dance Department and the Arts and Ideas concentration of the Residential College. She has written numerous book chapters on British ballet and dance in film (including Gene Kelly and Vincente Minnelli) and articles in such journals as Dance Research, Dance Chronicle, and Art Journal. She has contributed criticism and feature articles to The Dancing Times of London. She was Director of research for Balanchine's musical films for the Popular Balanchine Project of the George Balanchine Foundation. Her first book, The Making of a Choreographer, was on the early training and choreographic development of Ninette de Valois, founder of the Royal Ballet.