Dancing the Politics of Pleasure at the New Orleans Second Line

Dancing the Politics of Pleasure at the New Orleans Second Line
Author: Rachel Carrico
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2024-10-22
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 025204715X

On many Sundays, Black New Orleanians dance through city streets in Second Lines. These processions invite would-be spectators to join in, grooving to an ambulatory brass band for several hours. Though an increasingly popular attraction for tourists, parading provides the second liners themselves with a potent public expression of Black resistance. Rachel Carrico examines the parading bodies in motion as a form of negotiating and understanding power. Seeing pleasure as a bodily experience, Carrico reveals how second liners’ moves link joy and liberation, self and communal identities, play and dissent, and reclamations of place. As she shows, dancers’ choices allow them to access the pleasure of reclaiming self and city through motion and rhythm while expanding a sense of the possible in the present and for the future. In-depth and empathetic, Dancing the Politics of Pleasure at the New Orleans Second Line blends analysis with a chorus of Black voices to reveal an indelible facet of Black culture in the Crescent City.

Dancing in the Streets

Dancing in the Streets
Author: Judy Cooper
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2021
Genre: African American fraternal organizations
ISBN: 9780917860829

"Explores the history, social ties, fashion, dance, and music of second lines, participatory parades put on by New Orleans's network of social aid and pleasure clubs. "Dancing in the Streets" brings together historical photographs with the work of ten contemporary second line photographers, profiles all clubs active today, and explores the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the tradition"--

Jazz Religion, the Second Line, and Black New Orleans

Jazz Religion, the Second Line, and Black New Orleans
Author: Richard Brent Turner
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2016-10-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0253025125

This scholarly study demonstrates “that while post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans is changing, the vibrant traditions of jazz . . . must continue” (Journal of African American History). An examination of the musical, religious, and political landscape of black New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina, this revised edition looks at how these factors play out in a new millennium of global apartheid. Richard Brent Turner explores the history and contemporary significance of second lines—the group of dancers who follow the first procession of church and club members, brass bands, and grand marshals in black New Orleans’s jazz street parades. Here music and religion interplay, and Turner’s study reveals how these identities and traditions from Haiti and West and Central Africa are reinterpreted. He also describes how second line participants create their own social space and become proficient in the arts of political disguise, resistance, and performance.

Freedom's Dance

Freedom's Dance
Author: Karen Celestan
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018-02-26
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0807168831

In this pivotal book, the captivating and kinetic images of noted photographer Eric Waters are paired with a collection of insightful essays by preeminent authors and cultural leaders to offer the first complete look at the Social, Aid and Pleasure Club (SAPC) parade culture in New Or-leans. Ranging from ideological approaches to the contributions of musicians, development of specific rituals by various clubs, and parade accessories such as elaborately decorated fans and sashes, Freedom’s Dance provides an unparalleled photographic and textual overview of the SAPC Second Line, tracking its origins in African traditions and subsequent development in black New Orleans culture. Karen Celestan’s vibrant narrative is supplemented with interviews of longtime culture-bearers such as Oliver “Squirk” Hunter, Lois Andrews (mother of Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews and James Andrews), Fred Johnson, Gregory Davis, and Lionel Batiste, while interdisciplinary essays by leading scholars detail the rituals, historic perspective, and purpose of the Second Line. Freedom’s Dance defines this unique pub-lic-private phenomenon and captures every aspect of the Second Line, from SAPC members’ rollicking introductions at their annual parade to a funeral procession on its way to the crypt. Visually dazzling and critically important, Freedom’s Dance serves as both a celebration and a deep exploration of this understudied but immediately recognizable aspect of the African American tradition in the Big Easy.

I See America Dancing

I See America Dancing
Author: Maureen Needham
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2002
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780252069994

Representing dancers, scholars, admirers, and critics, I See America Dancing is a diverse collection of primary documents and articles about the place and shape of dance in the United States from colonial times to the present. This volume offers a lively counterpoint between observers of the dance and dancers' views of what they do when they dance. Dance traditions represented include the Native American pow-wow; tribal music and dance activities on Sunday afternoons in New Orlean's Congo Square; the colonial Playford Balls and their modern offspring, country line dancing; and the Buddhist-inspired Japanese Bon dances in Hawaii. Anti-dance perspectives include government injunctions against Native American dancing and essays from a range of speakers who have declared the waltz, the twist, or the senior prom to be a careless quick-step away from hell or the brothel. I See America Dancing examines the styles that have marked theatrical dance in America, from French ballet to minstrel shows, and presents the views of influential dancers, choreographers, and the pioneers of early modern dance in America. Specific pieces examined include George Ballanchine's ballet Stars and Stripes, Yvonne Rainer's protest piece "Flag Dance, 1970," and Sonjé Mayo's "Naked in America." Covering historical social attitudes toward the dance as well as the performers and their works, I See America Dancing is a comprehensive, scholarly sourcebook that captures the energy and passion of this vital artform.

Choreographies of African Identities

Choreographies of African Identities
Author: Francesca Castaldi
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2010-10-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0252090780

Choreographies of African Identities traces interconnected interpretative frameworks around and about the National Ballet of Senegal. Using the metaphor of a dancing circle Castaldi's arguments cover the full spectrum of performance, from production to circulation and reception. Castaldi first situates the reader in a North American theater, focusing on the relationship between dancers and audiences as that between black performers and white spectators. She then examines the work of the National Ballet in relation to Léopold Sédar Senghor's Négritude ideology and cultural politics. Finally, the author addresses the circulation of dances in the streets, discotheques, and courtyards of Dakar, drawing attention to women dancers' occupation of the urban landscape.

Hot Feet and Social Change

Hot Feet and Social Change
Author: Kariamu Welsh
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 446
Release: 2019-12-23
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0252051815

The popularity and profile of African dance have exploded across the African diaspora in the last fifty years. Hot Feet and Social Change presents traditionalists, neo-traditionalists, and contemporary artists, teachers, and scholars telling some of the thousands of stories lived and learned by people in the field. Concentrating on eight major cities in the United States, the essays challenges myths about African dance while demonstrating its power to awaken identity, self-worth, and community respect. These voices of experience share personal accounts of living African traditions, their first encounters with and ultimate embrace of dance, and what teaching African-based dance has meant to them and their communities. Throughout, the editors alert readers to established and ongoing research, and provide links to critical contributions by African and Caribbean dance experts. Contributors: Ausettua Amor Amenkum, Abby Carlozzo, Steven Cornelius, Yvonne Daniel, Charles “Chuck” Davis, Esailama G. A. Diouf, Indira Etwaroo, Habib Iddrisu, Julie B. Johnson, C. Kemal Nance, Halifu Osumare, Amaniyea Payne, William Serrano-Franklin, and Kariamu Welsh

Dance in US Popular Culture

Dance in US Popular Culture
Author: Jennifer Atkins
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2023-07-21
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1000904547

This innovative textbook applies basic dance history and theory to contemporary popular culture examples in order to examine our own ways of moving in—and through—culture. By drawing on material relevant to students, Dance in US Popular Culture successfully introduces students to critical thinking around the most personal of terrain: our bodies and our identities. The book asks readers to think about: what embodied knowledge we carry with us and how we can understand history and society through that lens what stereotypes and accompanying expectations are embedded in performance, related to gender and/or race, for instance how such expectations are reinforced, negotiated, challenged, embraced, or rescripted by performers and audiences how readers articulate their own sense of complex identity within the constantly shifting landscape of popular culture, how this shapes an active sense of their everyday lives, and how this can act as a springboard towards dismantling systems of oppression Through readings, questions, movement analyses, and assignment prompts that take students from computer to nightclub and beyond, Dance in US Popular Culture readers develop their own cultural sense of dance and the moving body’s sociopolitical importance while also determining how dance is fundamentally applicable to their own identity. This is the ideal textbook for high school and undergraduate students of dance and dance studies in BA and BfA courses, as well as those studying popular culture from interdisciplinary perspectives including cultural studies, media studies, communication studies, theater and performance studies. Chapter 11 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY 4.0 license.

The Folklore of the Freeway

The Folklore of the Freeway
Author: Eric Avila
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2014-05-01
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1452942900

When the interstate highway program connected America’s cities, it also divided them, cutting through and destroying countless communities. Affluent and predominantly white residents fought back in a much heralded “freeway revolt,” saving such historic neighborhoods as Greenwich Village and New Orleans’s French Quarter. This book tells of the other revolt, a movement of creative opposition, commemoration, and preservation staged on behalf of the mostly minority urban neighborhoods that lacked the political and economic power to resist the onslaught of highway construction. Within the context of the larger historical forces of the 1960s and 1970s, Eric Avila maps the creative strategies devised by urban communities to document and protest the damage that highways wrought. The works of Chicanas and other women of color—from the commemorative poetry of Patricia Preciado Martin and Lorna Dee Cervantes to the fiction of Helena Maria Viramontes to the underpass murals of Judy Baca—expose highway construction as not only a racist but also a sexist enterprise. In colorful paintings, East Los Angeles artists such as David Botello, Carlos Almaraz, and Frank Romero satirize, criticize, and aestheticize the structure of the freeway. Local artists paint murals on the concrete piers of a highway interchange in San Diego’s Chicano Park. The Rondo Days Festival in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the Black Archives, History, and Research Foundation in the Overtown neighborhood of Miami preserve and celebrate the memories of historic African American communities lost to the freeway. Bringing such efforts to the fore in the story of the freeway revolt, The Folklore of the Freeway moves beyond a simplistic narrative of victimization. Losers, perhaps, in their fight against the freeway, the diverse communities at the center of the book nonetheless generate powerful cultural forces that shape our understanding of the urban landscape and influence the shifting priorities of contemporary urban policy.

African American Culture and Society After Rodney King

African American Culture and Society After Rodney King
Author: Dr Josephine Metcalf
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2015-07-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1472455398

1992 was a pivotal moment in African American history, with the Rodney King riots providing palpable evidence of racialized police brutality, media stereotyping of African Americans, and institutional discrimination. Following the twentieth anniversary of the Los Angeles uprising, this time period allows reflection on the shifting state of race in America, considering these stark realities as well as the election of the country's first black president, a growing African American middle class, and the black authors and artists significantly contributing to America's cultural output.