Brynn W. Shiovitz, PhD is a writer, scholar, educator, and dancer based in Los Angeles. She is the author of Behind the Screen: Tap Dance, Race, and Invisibility During Hollywood’s Golden Age (Oxford, 2023), which explores a history of audible blackface and more covert forms of racial masquerade in live action film and animation during the 1930s and 1940s. In particular the book explores how tap dance and technology helped to mask racial caricature and ultimately how, in combination, allowed films to sidestep Production Code guidelines. Her dance scholarship has been featured on NPR, the BBC, and Newsweek.
Following the on-camera debut of tap dancer Bill Robinson’s stair dance in Harlem is Heaven (Irwi... more Following the on-camera debut of tap dancer Bill Robinson’s stair dance in Harlem is Heaven (Irwin Franklin, 1932), replicas of Robinson’s image appeared everywhere.1 Famous Hollywood dancers such as Fred Astaire in Swing Time (George Stevens, 1936) or Eleanor Powell in Honolulu (Edward Buzzell, 1939) referenced Robinson in live-action film.2 Animators often drew caricatures of him performing his popular stair dance, in films such as Clean Pastures (Friz Freleng, 1937), Have You Got Any Castles? (Friz Freleng and Frank Tashlin, 1937) and You’re an Education (Frank Tashlin, 1938).3 Everything from puppets to automata were being fashioned in Robinson’s image (figure 1). Reproductions of Robinson, and the fabulations they produced, became more popular and possibly more real than the man himself. This essay explores a phenomenon that occurs when the white cinemagoing public latches on to an iconic Black performer and begins to see other Black artists working within the same genre or discipline as mere replicas of the more famous original. The individual’s unique looks and stylistic qualities dissolve, and are subsequently re-presented in the guise of a caricature.4 Looking specifically to animated iterations of this kind, I challenge the techniques and technologies that governed animations of tap dancers in the 1930s and a more generalized Black sound in the 1940s.
Introducing a new theory of covert minstrelsy, this book illumines Hollywood’s practice of capita... more Introducing a new theory of covert minstrelsy, this book illumines Hollywood’s practice of capitalizing on the Africanist aesthetic at the expense of Black lived experience. The book looks at how and why outdated racial content, and specifically blackface minstrelsy, was not only permitted but in fact thrived during the 1930s and 1940s, despite the rigid motion picture censorship laws enforced during this time. The musicals made during this period show that Hollywood utilized a series of covert “guises” or subterfuges to distract both censors and audiences from seeing the ways they were being fed a nineteenth-century White narrative of Blackness. Drawing on the annals of Hollywood’s most popular and its extremely rare films, Behind the Screen uncovers a half century of blackface application by removing the individual layers of disguise through close analyses of films that paint tap dance, swing, and other predominantly Africanist forms in a negative light. The book goes beneath the image of recognizable White performers, exploring the high cost of their onscreen representational politic. The book also recuperates the stories of several of the Black artists whose labor was abused during the choreographic and filming process. Behind the Screen recovers the visibility of Black artists whose names Hollywood omitted from the credits and whose identities America has written out of the national narrative.
Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, and ensemble perform "Mandy" in White Christmas, 1954. The song al... more Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, and ensemble perform "Mandy" in White Christmas, 1954. The song always maintained a connection to the minstrel stage, Brynn Shiovitz explains-reminding white theatergoers of a time when they could put down "the other" without fear of consequence. Private collection, courtesy of author.
Putin's enemies are keeping a close eye on a bird in pointe shoes, because a broadcast of "Swan L... more Putin's enemies are keeping a close eye on a bird in pointe shoes, because a broadcast of "Swan Lake" may reveal his demise. The ballet-a more-than-century-old staple of our own highbrow culture-is one of Russia's most famous contributions to the arts. It is a work that contains all the pathos and depth of the modern Russian nation, a dark story with a tragic ending. (Or a happy one, if one delves deeper in the ballet's evolution.) It's also a secret key to the state of things in the Kremlin. Swan Lake has all the elements of a modern-day binge-able series: young, scantily dressed women, a winged sorcerer, an evil stepmother, a handsome prince, a double suicide. Broadcasts of "Swan Lake" could indicate the death of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
https://www.newsweek.com/putin-dead-pay-attention-when-russia-starts-broadcasting-swan-lake-1707162
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2009
In this roundtable discussion, hosted at New York University (19 February 2009, 7: 008: 30 pm) b... more In this roundtable discussion, hosted at New York University (19 February 2009, 7: 008: 30 pm) by Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory and the Department of Performance Studies, the participants discuss how they came to and experienced the ...
Two men dressed in blue coveralls, their faces semi-obscured by the big hairdos, beards, and larg... more Two men dressed in blue coveralls, their faces semi-obscured by the big hairdos, beards, and large-frame glasses typical of 1983 fashion, syncopate each other’s footsteps with successive accents that stem from their hands. With simply four drumsticks and their own bodies, these experimentalists “play” a rhythmically complex “Tune for KB” in an arrangement that is as much a dance as it is a musical score. In this choreo-composition, Keith Terry and Paul Arslanian embody the spirit and mission of the Jazz Tap Ensemble (JTE), a company dedicated to the interplay between dancers and musicians and the synchrony of their respective arts. Lynn Dally’s recent DVD anthology, Jazz Tap Originals: A Collection of Live Performances (1979–2012), showcases repertoire spanning over 30 years, performatively highlighting the centenary relationship between jazz music and tap dance. In 1979, Lynn Dally founded the country’s first touring tap dance company, along with fellow dancers Camden Richman and Fred Strickler, and musicians Paul Arslanian (piano), Tom Dannenberg (bass), and Keith Terry (drums). Together, they helped to realize Dally’s dream of bringing original tap dance choreography accompanied by live jazz music to the concert stage. Dally narrates a detailed history of the company at the beginning of each of the five discs while selections from the company’s comprehensive archive of posters, programs, clippings, and photographs decoupage the underlying screen, visibly bridging three decades of artistic collaboration. Several thematic devices recur across the anthology: A newer version of the band (1998)—Theo Saunders (piano), Henry Franklin (bass), Jerry Kalaf (drums)—plays a brass-less version of the Thelonious classic, Monk’s Dream in the background of Dally’s introductions. Along with this soundscape, live performance footage of the band playing Monk’s tune and a projection of Dennis Diamond’s blue-hued video design—two screen close-ups of Saunders’ rapid-fire fingers on the piano and Kalaf’s quick drum brush strokes on a worn surface and adjacent high hat—unify the five distinct subject matters Dally takes up over the collection’s 253 minutes of edited material. While each disc encapsulates a different aspect of the company’s aesthetic, the five discs coalesce under a series of Africanist principles that both tap dance and jazz music share: call-and-response, polyrhythm, contrariety, ephebism, high-affect
Author(s): Shiovitz, Brynn Wein | Advisor(s): Foster, Susan L | Abstract: ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERT... more Author(s): Shiovitz, Brynn Wein | Advisor(s): Foster, Susan L | Abstract: ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATIONMasks in Disguise:Exposing Minstrelsy and Racial Representation within American Tap Dance Performances of the Stage, Screen, and Sound Cartoon, 1900-1950byBrynn Wein ShiovitzDoctor of Philosophy in Culture and PerformanceUniversity of California, Los Angeles, 2016Professor Susan Leigh Foster, Chair Masks in Disguise: Exposing Minstrelsy and Racial Representation within American Tap Dance Performances of the Stage, Screen, and Sound Cartoon, 1900-1950, looks at the many forms of masking at play in three pivotal, yet untheorized, tap dance performances of the twentieth century in order to expose how minstrelsy operates through various forms of masking. The three performances that I examine are: George M. Cohan’s production of Little Johnny Jones (1904), Eleanor Powell’s “Tribute to Bill Robinson” in Honolulu (1939), and Terry-Toons’ cartoon, “The Dancing Shoes” (1949). These performan...
Abstract Ivanov’s Nutcracker premiered in 1892 and since then, many choreographers have made thei... more Abstract Ivanov’s Nutcracker premiered in 1892 and since then, many choreographers have made their own versions of the work. This article examines two key productions in which Trepak, one of the act 2 divertissements, has remained largely unchanged—Willam Christensen’s 1944 version for San Francisco Ballet and George Balanchine’s 1958 version for CBS—and addresses the historical frameworks: namely, the impact of Russian Imperialism, World War II, and the Cold War that shaped them.
George M. Cohan’s Little Johnny Jones (1904) premiered at a pivotal point in American history. N... more George M. Cohan’s Little Johnny Jones (1904) premiered at a pivotal point in American history. Not only did it debut on the eve preceding one of America’s biggest presidential elections, but it arrived during a time of great influence and change for the nation. Although Johnny was not Cohan’s first Broadway production, it signaled his first engagement with “modern” musical theatre, and became the standard according to which all future musical theatre would be modeled. In addition to changing the popular theatrical structure from one comprised of disparate one-acts to a multi-act production of song and dance unified by a major plot, Cohan forsook the (visible) blackface mask, and instead made a series of small substitutions to mask his propinquity to a set of Africanist aesthetics. I posit that Cohan’s use of yellowface in Johnny illuminates one of his primary substitutions. By exchanging the “yellow” body for that of the black, pairing visible acts of yellowface caricature with “ethnic” leitmotivs, and lacing an otherwise syncopated production with ambiguous musical phrases, Cohan disguises the musical’s strong Africanist presence. While apparently less crude than the minstrel stage that preceded it, the Broadway stage of Cohan’s era presented its own racial economy.
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Jazz Perspect... more This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Jazz Perspectives on 30/011/2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17494060.2015.1258766
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Dance Chronic... more This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Dance Chronicle on 18/07/2011, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01472526.2011.549393
Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Aug 2012
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Women & Perfo... more This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory on 24/08/201, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2012.685403
Following the on-camera debut of tap dancer Bill Robinson’s stair dance in Harlem is Heaven (Irwi... more Following the on-camera debut of tap dancer Bill Robinson’s stair dance in Harlem is Heaven (Irwin Franklin, 1932), replicas of Robinson’s image appeared everywhere.1 Famous Hollywood dancers such as Fred Astaire in Swing Time (George Stevens, 1936) or Eleanor Powell in Honolulu (Edward Buzzell, 1939) referenced Robinson in live-action film.2 Animators often drew caricatures of him performing his popular stair dance, in films such as Clean Pastures (Friz Freleng, 1937), Have You Got Any Castles? (Friz Freleng and Frank Tashlin, 1937) and You’re an Education (Frank Tashlin, 1938).3 Everything from puppets to automata were being fashioned in Robinson’s image (figure 1). Reproductions of Robinson, and the fabulations they produced, became more popular and possibly more real than the man himself. This essay explores a phenomenon that occurs when the white cinemagoing public latches on to an iconic Black performer and begins to see other Black artists working within the same genre or discipline as mere replicas of the more famous original. The individual’s unique looks and stylistic qualities dissolve, and are subsequently re-presented in the guise of a caricature.4 Looking specifically to animated iterations of this kind, I challenge the techniques and technologies that governed animations of tap dancers in the 1930s and a more generalized Black sound in the 1940s.
Introducing a new theory of covert minstrelsy, this book illumines Hollywood’s practice of capita... more Introducing a new theory of covert minstrelsy, this book illumines Hollywood’s practice of capitalizing on the Africanist aesthetic at the expense of Black lived experience. The book looks at how and why outdated racial content, and specifically blackface minstrelsy, was not only permitted but in fact thrived during the 1930s and 1940s, despite the rigid motion picture censorship laws enforced during this time. The musicals made during this period show that Hollywood utilized a series of covert “guises” or subterfuges to distract both censors and audiences from seeing the ways they were being fed a nineteenth-century White narrative of Blackness. Drawing on the annals of Hollywood’s most popular and its extremely rare films, Behind the Screen uncovers a half century of blackface application by removing the individual layers of disguise through close analyses of films that paint tap dance, swing, and other predominantly Africanist forms in a negative light. The book goes beneath the image of recognizable White performers, exploring the high cost of their onscreen representational politic. The book also recuperates the stories of several of the Black artists whose labor was abused during the choreographic and filming process. Behind the Screen recovers the visibility of Black artists whose names Hollywood omitted from the credits and whose identities America has written out of the national narrative.
Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, and ensemble perform "Mandy" in White Christmas, 1954. The song al... more Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, and ensemble perform "Mandy" in White Christmas, 1954. The song always maintained a connection to the minstrel stage, Brynn Shiovitz explains-reminding white theatergoers of a time when they could put down "the other" without fear of consequence. Private collection, courtesy of author.
Putin's enemies are keeping a close eye on a bird in pointe shoes, because a broadcast of "Swan L... more Putin's enemies are keeping a close eye on a bird in pointe shoes, because a broadcast of "Swan Lake" may reveal his demise. The ballet-a more-than-century-old staple of our own highbrow culture-is one of Russia's most famous contributions to the arts. It is a work that contains all the pathos and depth of the modern Russian nation, a dark story with a tragic ending. (Or a happy one, if one delves deeper in the ballet's evolution.) It's also a secret key to the state of things in the Kremlin. Swan Lake has all the elements of a modern-day binge-able series: young, scantily dressed women, a winged sorcerer, an evil stepmother, a handsome prince, a double suicide. Broadcasts of "Swan Lake" could indicate the death of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
https://www.newsweek.com/putin-dead-pay-attention-when-russia-starts-broadcasting-swan-lake-1707162
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2009
In this roundtable discussion, hosted at New York University (19 February 2009, 7: 008: 30 pm) b... more In this roundtable discussion, hosted at New York University (19 February 2009, 7: 008: 30 pm) by Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory and the Department of Performance Studies, the participants discuss how they came to and experienced the ...
Two men dressed in blue coveralls, their faces semi-obscured by the big hairdos, beards, and larg... more Two men dressed in blue coveralls, their faces semi-obscured by the big hairdos, beards, and large-frame glasses typical of 1983 fashion, syncopate each other’s footsteps with successive accents that stem from their hands. With simply four drumsticks and their own bodies, these experimentalists “play” a rhythmically complex “Tune for KB” in an arrangement that is as much a dance as it is a musical score. In this choreo-composition, Keith Terry and Paul Arslanian embody the spirit and mission of the Jazz Tap Ensemble (JTE), a company dedicated to the interplay between dancers and musicians and the synchrony of their respective arts. Lynn Dally’s recent DVD anthology, Jazz Tap Originals: A Collection of Live Performances (1979–2012), showcases repertoire spanning over 30 years, performatively highlighting the centenary relationship between jazz music and tap dance. In 1979, Lynn Dally founded the country’s first touring tap dance company, along with fellow dancers Camden Richman and Fred Strickler, and musicians Paul Arslanian (piano), Tom Dannenberg (bass), and Keith Terry (drums). Together, they helped to realize Dally’s dream of bringing original tap dance choreography accompanied by live jazz music to the concert stage. Dally narrates a detailed history of the company at the beginning of each of the five discs while selections from the company’s comprehensive archive of posters, programs, clippings, and photographs decoupage the underlying screen, visibly bridging three decades of artistic collaboration. Several thematic devices recur across the anthology: A newer version of the band (1998)—Theo Saunders (piano), Henry Franklin (bass), Jerry Kalaf (drums)—plays a brass-less version of the Thelonious classic, Monk’s Dream in the background of Dally’s introductions. Along with this soundscape, live performance footage of the band playing Monk’s tune and a projection of Dennis Diamond’s blue-hued video design—two screen close-ups of Saunders’ rapid-fire fingers on the piano and Kalaf’s quick drum brush strokes on a worn surface and adjacent high hat—unify the five distinct subject matters Dally takes up over the collection’s 253 minutes of edited material. While each disc encapsulates a different aspect of the company’s aesthetic, the five discs coalesce under a series of Africanist principles that both tap dance and jazz music share: call-and-response, polyrhythm, contrariety, ephebism, high-affect
Author(s): Shiovitz, Brynn Wein | Advisor(s): Foster, Susan L | Abstract: ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERT... more Author(s): Shiovitz, Brynn Wein | Advisor(s): Foster, Susan L | Abstract: ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATIONMasks in Disguise:Exposing Minstrelsy and Racial Representation within American Tap Dance Performances of the Stage, Screen, and Sound Cartoon, 1900-1950byBrynn Wein ShiovitzDoctor of Philosophy in Culture and PerformanceUniversity of California, Los Angeles, 2016Professor Susan Leigh Foster, Chair Masks in Disguise: Exposing Minstrelsy and Racial Representation within American Tap Dance Performances of the Stage, Screen, and Sound Cartoon, 1900-1950, looks at the many forms of masking at play in three pivotal, yet untheorized, tap dance performances of the twentieth century in order to expose how minstrelsy operates through various forms of masking. The three performances that I examine are: George M. Cohan’s production of Little Johnny Jones (1904), Eleanor Powell’s “Tribute to Bill Robinson” in Honolulu (1939), and Terry-Toons’ cartoon, “The Dancing Shoes” (1949). These performan...
Abstract Ivanov’s Nutcracker premiered in 1892 and since then, many choreographers have made thei... more Abstract Ivanov’s Nutcracker premiered in 1892 and since then, many choreographers have made their own versions of the work. This article examines two key productions in which Trepak, one of the act 2 divertissements, has remained largely unchanged—Willam Christensen’s 1944 version for San Francisco Ballet and George Balanchine’s 1958 version for CBS—and addresses the historical frameworks: namely, the impact of Russian Imperialism, World War II, and the Cold War that shaped them.
George M. Cohan’s Little Johnny Jones (1904) premiered at a pivotal point in American history. N... more George M. Cohan’s Little Johnny Jones (1904) premiered at a pivotal point in American history. Not only did it debut on the eve preceding one of America’s biggest presidential elections, but it arrived during a time of great influence and change for the nation. Although Johnny was not Cohan’s first Broadway production, it signaled his first engagement with “modern” musical theatre, and became the standard according to which all future musical theatre would be modeled. In addition to changing the popular theatrical structure from one comprised of disparate one-acts to a multi-act production of song and dance unified by a major plot, Cohan forsook the (visible) blackface mask, and instead made a series of small substitutions to mask his propinquity to a set of Africanist aesthetics. I posit that Cohan’s use of yellowface in Johnny illuminates one of his primary substitutions. By exchanging the “yellow” body for that of the black, pairing visible acts of yellowface caricature with “ethnic” leitmotivs, and lacing an otherwise syncopated production with ambiguous musical phrases, Cohan disguises the musical’s strong Africanist presence. While apparently less crude than the minstrel stage that preceded it, the Broadway stage of Cohan’s era presented its own racial economy.
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Jazz Perspect... more This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Jazz Perspectives on 30/011/2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17494060.2015.1258766
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Dance Chronic... more This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Dance Chronicle on 18/07/2011, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01472526.2011.549393
Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Aug 2012
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Women & Perfo... more This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory on 24/08/201, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2012.685403
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https://www.newsweek.com/putin-dead-pay-attention-when-russia-starts-broadcasting-swan-lake-1707162
https://www.newsweek.com/putin-dead-pay-attention-when-russia-starts-broadcasting-swan-lake-1707162