Roots of Jazz & Social Dance Book Club *Special Holiday Edition

This will be a special holiday book club meeting with special guest Hannah MacKenzie-Margulies. She will be sharing her master's thesis at a new location (Benji's!). Please join us for this educational delight. **There will be refreshments & snacks!** Paper Title: Looking for Leon: Negotiating Culture, Defining Art, and Dancing Jazz in Mid-Century America Abstract: Despite vernacular jazz dance’s formative relationship to both jazz music and modern dance in the United States, the form remains an under-recognized force in mid-century American performance culture. In this paper, I hone in on the case of dancers Al Minns and Leon James and their collaborator, jazz educator Marshall Stearns, who applied unsuccessfully to perform on a State Department-sponsored cultural tour in 1958. Further, I examine the effect that freshly established and increasingly cemented definitions of “culture” in mid-century America wrought on vernacular jazz dancers, arguing that new distributions of cultural capital served to render them nearly invisible. Bio: Hannah MacKenzie-Margulies is a recent graduate of Reed College, where she completed an interdisciplinary degree in dance and music. An active lindy hop dancer and teacher, Hannah’s thesis explored performances of “Americanism” by jazz musicians and dancers on the State Department’s Cold War Cultural Tours through archival and practice-based research. About the Book Club: A monthly meetup and discussion of jazz, the social dances that grew/are growing out of it, and the people and places that made it all happen, in the past, and the present. Amira Selim will choose selections from the Shimmytown library and lead group discussion. Selections will be based on what you (yes, you!) would like to learn about! The readings will be fairly short, so the time commitment outside of meetings isn't huge. New readings will be sent out through a mailing list, two weeks before the next upcoming meeting. Subscribe to the mailing list here: http://eepurl.com/c5qNHr We schedule meetings on 1st or 3rd Sundays, so we can head over to Amnesia (across the street!) for some of The Hot Baked Goods afterwards.