My dear friends, I’d like to share with you a beautiful learning and inspiration resource.
THE SPIRIT MOVES: A History of Black Social Dance on Film by Mura Dehn
- Part 1 Jazz dance from turn of the century ’til 1950 (44 min.) 35
Features demonstrations of ragtime and jazz dances by well-known dance artists including James Berry, Pepsi Bethel, Teddy Brown, and more. Dances shown include the Cakewalk, Charleston, Black Bottom, Susie Q, Shake Blues, Gutbucket Blues, Trunky Doo, Big Apple, and aerial Lindy Hop. - Part 2 Savoy Ballroom of Harlem, 1950’s (34 min.) 6
- Part 3 pt. 2: Postwar era, 1950-1975 (40 min.)
Mura (Ziperovitch) Dehn, a Russian emigré, arrived in America in 1930 to study and research jazz dance and she focused on the jazz in Harlem.
Schooled in the dancing style of Isadora Duncan, Miss Dehn had been exposed to jazz in her native Russia, but she became a jazz fan when she met Josephine Baker in Paris in 1925
Dehn would later create a landmark documentary in The Spirit Moves: A History of Black Social Dance on Film, 1900-1986 which is a 5-hour documentary about the evolution of black dance in urban America in the early 1900s-to the mid-Eighties.
It captured not only these early jazz traditions but jazz dance performed to the upcoming stylistic innovation in jazz music, bebop, by dancers such as Clarence “Scoby” Strohman, Jeff Asquiew, Leory Appins, and Milton “Okay” Hayes.
