gender politics of U.S. dance. She is the author of Choreographing the Folk: The Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston and Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance, as well as the past recipient of an ACLS fellowship, an NEH fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Kraut applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Hollywood Dance-ins and the Reproduction of Bodies, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Hollywood Dance-ins and the Reproduction of Bodies reads:Learn more about Hollywood Dance-ins and the Reproduction of Bodies at the Oxford University Press website.It’s February 2019, and I’m at the Jerome Robbins Division of the New York Public Library, paging through an entire folder of clippings and notes devoted to Marie Bryant. The folder is part of the research files of D’Lana Lockett, who, according to the archive catalog, “was a tap dancer, dance instructor, and dance researcher who began research on a book on African American female tap dancers.” Lockett, a Black woman, died in 2006 at age forty-four; these files are what remain of the book that she never got to write. Thanks to Lockett, Bryant’s presence in the archives here, in contrast to the USC film records, is substantive and purposeful. Learning about Lockett through Bryant, and learning about Bryant through Lockett, it is clear that Bryant was never a lost subject waiting to be recovered. It is clear, too, that my own output, like that of the white women stars I’ve been analyzing, exists in a symbiotic but asymmetrical relationship with the labor of a Black woman whose shortened life surely cannot be disentangled from structural racism and racialized health disparities. In tracing Bryant’s flight, I too retrace the steps and stand in the place of a Black woman before me, and I too participate in a loop that is always in part indexing and in part obscuring its sources and debts.Page 99 is, on the one hand, a departure from the bulk of Hollywood Dance-ins and, on the other, a kind of X-ray of the book as a whole. The last page of Chapter 2, the passage on page 99 forms a bookend to the opening of the chapter, which narrates my discovery of the African American dancer Marie Bryant’s mis-spelled name in the University of Southern California’s Cinematic Arts Library, which first alerted me to her thirteen-second appearance in the 1949 film On the Town. In contrast to page 99’s first-person narration, the majority of the book tells the stories of dance-ins – dancers who took the place of stars prior to filming and often served as choreographers’ assistants – whose labor supported some of the most iconic stars of midcentury film musicals in the United States between the 1940s and early 1960s.
At the same time, page 99’s single paragraph encapsulates multiple strands of the book’s methodological, historical, and theoretical arguments. The passage references the racialized power imbalances that govern the archives and evokes the methodological tensions involved in researching the off-screen reproductive labor of dancers, especially dancers of color in white Hollywood, whose influence was both everywhere and invisible. Page 99 also reflects the book’s centering of Bryant, an exceptionally talented jazz and tap dancer (pictured on the book’s cover) who was never officially hired as a dance-in, but whose importance to a history of mid-century Hollywood musicals is hard to overstate. And finally, in its allusions to interdependent but asymmetrical cross-racial relationships and to the ability of bodies to simultaneously index and conceal their debts to others, page 99 hints at the book’s theorization of dance-ins as uniquely situated to expose the reproductions, substitutions, and displacements that have helped uphold “the body” as a racialized and gendered site of power in the U.S.
--Marshal Zeringue
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