Alan Lomax and Forrestine Paulay discuss footage of various dance styles (part 1)

Note: Male and female dancers doing the Twist contrasted. He is speedier, more angular. His movement extends from the scapula. She is somewhat more curvaceous. She presents buttocks. The corkscrew - a spiral kick toward the rear like a ballet arabesque but with turning. Leg action reminiscent of Brazilian leg fighting gestures go to erotic patterns. Buddy Holly has more movement in the torso than one notices at first, his movement is successive, with heel tapping. He comes across as very upright, relatively still, with small movements. Charles Moore doing the Ostrich Dance, a response to an African dance. Movement is highly successive, fluid, undulating. Less usual are the spiraling hand and pointy use of feet - an animal imitation. The successive use of arms recalls Watusi dancers' style. Shango, from Katherine Dunham's Bal Negre, is linear, with posed trunk and emphatic gesture. Waltz, from final rounds of an international ballroom dance competition. Cabaret-style free-form couple dances. Alan Lomax remarks on the changes of level use of the split and notes the influence of black dance styles. Analysis of Martha Graham and Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring, a dance marked by posing, small linear movement, and groups of people used as backdrop contrasting with simultaneous linear movement of the performing dancers, who jump and prance almost as in a musical comedy but with still, expressionless faces. Alan Lomax calls Copland's music, "charming, but thin gruel compared to the hard, tough wailing of authentic Appalachian music." He notes the enormous refinement of the whole dance, which he finds more exquisite than other fine dances they have seen. Forrestine Paulay: Fine art dances are characterized by extreme precision in their use of space and very refined and varied use of dynamics. Alan Lomax: The movement is done in the context of character development and role, and used to show different phases of the drama. Forrestine Paulay: The highly cultivated, linear simultaneous movement is characteristic of the northwest European tradition. There is no central impulse. There are more codes here for differential activity for the leaders than anywhere else. The plot focuses on the young couple, the formation of the nuclear family, and centers on the young girl's tender longing for a husband. It is a serious kind of romanticism, foreign to the sometimes cruel backwoods life of the south east United States. Irene Castle and James Fisher at the 1939 World's Fair ballroom dance exhibition in which the man maneuvers the woman and lifts her. There is a constant fluttering of fabric. Couple adjusts to each other with complex, intricate stepping as they move through space. Not much difference in patterning between the man and the woman, in contrast to Graham. Bill "Bojangles" Robinson dances with a restraint that suggests he has more to give. There are sudden flashes of acceleration combined with containment and readiness. Torso contrasts to Twyla Tharp. There is a laxness of body tone. He is playing it cool. No limpness (Europeans go limp), body in readiness. He poses the upper arm as a comic statement, leaps with the lower leg coming toward the hip. Ballroom dancing from the 1930s. A foxtrot film from Great Performances. This is the American middle class baseline from which everything is to be viewed. It is erect| the movement is moderate, with rebound. The effect is jerky. This dance portrays the society: hundreds of individualized couples, dancing face to face, belly to belly, step toward the free sensuality of the modern age to the syncopated beat of a jazz orchestra. Feet stay close to the floor (African influence?). Ball of foot skims along, not black style (where heel of foot makes it possible to feel the syncopation). The face to face dance is a European form, but belly to belly is not. A clip of dancers on top of a skyscraper, imitating machines.