Book Review: Dance in Musical Theatre. A History of the Body in Movement.

Academic suggestions that dance sequences may have seven key different roles within a musical may come across as over-theorising a rather jolly theatrical device designed to lighten up the action. This collection of essays by Methuen, however, written by a mix of theatre practitioners and academics, does bring intriguing, insightful and varied perspectives on the role and history of dance in musical theatre that may escape the casual theatregoer. This is a book well worth making time for.

We learn how classical, 16th-century ‘en pointe’ ballet, initially serving only as interlude in between opera’s acts in Paris, gained standalone art form status in the early to mid-18th Century, when London’s 1734 performance of Pygmalion first proved that bodies in motion can, by themselves, tell a story in a cohesive way. Ballet retained its high art status in Europe throughout the ’20s and ’30s right to today thanks, in no small measure, to  Labanotation, the first codified method in the Western world for describing space, time, weight and action in dance. It is because ballet has a canonical syntax that 1841’s Giselle, 1877’s Swan Lake and 1890’s Sleeping Beauty can be performed today in every corner of the world exactly as they were first conceived.

Simultaneously, across the Atlantic, the fascinating convergence of ballet with musical theatre during New York’s ’30s and ’40s was due to key figures such as Balanchine, who had been choreographing for both, and who blended classical ballet with tap and jazz for eighteen Broadway musicals.

We learn how minstrelsy is not credited enough for being the precursor of the two American dance forms par excellence that are jazz and tap, and for the key role it played in amalgamating – in a single performance – influences ranging from African vernacular dance, to the Irish reel and jig and the Lancashire clog. We discover how Black choreographers’ early, rich contribution to the Broadway dance canon went uncredited and unrecorded. Only in 1925 was tap dancing, and its correspondence of foot movement to sound, codified and, to a large extent, appropriated by Ned Wayburn, and only when film dance sequences inspired by a musical were choreographed by the same artist can we be certain of what the original Broadway production may have been like. Mr Bojangles made it to us but how many more didn’t? Even today not all dance musicals are recorded by default, with the result that choreography, memorised through the bodies of the performers, can be forgotten after a dancer’s generation retires.

Importantly, we learn the neuroscience behind dance in musical theatre. Far from being a gratuitous diversion, performers moving in synchronised harmony induce in a viewer a specific form of affective joy: the rhythmic entrainment connecting both performers and viewers is felt on the bodily level and is the key trigger for empathy and fellow-feeling towards the characters portrayed.

Writers or directors who treat dance in musical theatre as an afterthought had better read this wonderful collection of essays.

Book editors: Phoebe Rumsey, Dustyn Martincich
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Imprint and Series: Methuen, Drama and Performance Studies
Publication date: December 2023  
ISBN: 9781350235526