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Session 24	Dance in Social Contexts
Meg Brooker	Saturday Night at Noyes Rhythm Camp
	In 1919, Florence Fleming Noyes founded an annual summer camp in Cobalt, CT, creating a space for a community of women to explore a danced somatic practice influenced by the Delsarte tradition, Charles Wesley Emerson's theory of creativity, and the popular notion of rhythmic expression. Among the camp traditions that have been preserved for nearly ninety years is "Saturday Night," an evening of impromptu, vaudeville-style performance in an all-female, non-public context. This paper utilizes a queer theoretical perspective to explore the function of "Saturday Night" as a community building practice within the tradition of the summer camp culture.
Danielle Robinson	The Refinement of Ragtime Dancing and the Mass Marketing of Modern Social Dance
	At the heart of this study is an intertwining of commercialization with bodily performances of racial identity. In my paper I suggest that ragtime dancing was transformed into “modern dance” by social dance professionals during the 1910s to create a commercial dance product that could more easily be mass marketed to the white upper classes. Period social dance professionals called their transformation of ragtime a “refinement” and justified it through discourses of artistry and morality which referenced socioeconomic mobility. The changes they made to the dances, however, indicate that removing the black associations of ragtime dancing was a goal as well, or at least an effect of their labors. Thus, the creation and mass marketing of modern dance, which launched an American ballroom dance industry, were deeply rooted in powerful period racial tensions.
Juliet McMains	Followers on the Dance Floor/Leaders in the Dance Industry: A Cross-Generational Comparison of Female Pioneers in 1950s Mambo and Contemporary Salsa
	Based on oral history interviews, ethnographic research and close movement analysis, this paper will compare the role of female professional dancers in the 1950s mambo craze and the contemporary salsa craze. I will reveal differences in the feminine aesthetic in each form and consider how this shift is representative of a broader cultural transformation in representation of female sexuality. I will also explore similarities in the experiences of female Latin dancers in these two eras and propose possible interpretations for the seeming persistence of sexism in professional Latin dance over the past sixty years. Finally, I will consider how race and racial barriers are experienced differently by men and women in the Latin dance profession.
	Meg Brooker is an MFA Candidate in Performance as Public Practice at UT Austin. She specializes in early modern dance research, particularly the work of Isadora Duncan and Florence Fleming Noyes. With her thesis, she seeks to historicize the Noyes Rhythm technique as a danced somatic practice. Meg has performed and taught Duncan repertory as a member of Lori Belilove & Company and is an apprentice teacher of Noyes Rhythm. Meg was a 2007 recipient of a student travel grant to attend the SDHS conference with CORD in Paris. She earned her BA in theatre studies cum laude from Yale University.
	Danielle Robinson, Ph.D. is a dance scholar who researches the cross-cultural movement of popular dances of the African Diaspora within the Americas. Her published articles have focused on ragtime, jazz, and swing dancing in the U.S. in relation to period cultural politics. Most recently, she is pursuing a collaborative, interdisciplinary research project on Samba de Roda in Bahia, Brazil--for which she has received a multi-year grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her research has been honored with awards from SHDS, CORD, and ATHE/ASTR. She is currently an assistant professor of Dance Studies at York University.
	Juliet McMains is a dance scholar and artist who maintains an active career as a performer, choreographer, researcher, writer and teacher of dance. Her work centers on social dance practices (ballroom, salsa, swing, tango) and their theatrical expression on competition and theatre stages. Her first book Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry received the CORD 2008 Outstanding Publication Award. Juliet has a Ph.D. is Dance History and Theory from the University of California at Riverside and a B.A. in Women’s Studies from Harvard University. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Dance Program at the University of Washington.
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