Category: dance

Astaire Week Grand Finale: Four easy pieces with Ginger Rogers

August 30, 2012 • 4:02 pm

Ginger Rogers (1911-1995) appeared in 11 films with Fred Astaire and was paired with him in more than 35 numbers. She is, by far, the partner most often associated with Astaire.  She wasn’t as adept a dancer as, say, Rita Hayworth, but compensated for it with her charm and acting ability. As one commenter said on an Astaire/Rogers video, Ginger wasn’t the best dancer with Fred, but she was Fred’s best partner.

To learn a lot more about the duo, read the “Astaire and Rogers: 1933-1939” section of the Wikipedia entry on Ginger Rogers, along with the first paragraph of the “after 1939” section.  There’s really too many good YouTube clips to present, and it took me a long time to choose (click here if you want to see them all). I wanted to concentrate on their dancing, so I’ve excluded the wonderful singing videos like “The Way You Look Tonight” (1936; watch it!) from my choices below.  The four clips do, however, show the range of their dancing skills, from tap to waltz (and roller-skating!), and their onscreen chemistry that made “Astaire and Rogers” a household phrase.

I’d like to thank my friend (and editor) Latha Menon for reactivating my interest in Astaire and his partners, and for drawing my attention to some of their best work onscreen. I hope you’ve enjoyed the past x days, where x represents a number I can’t recall.

First, we have “Hard to handle”, (1935; sometimes called “Too hot to handle”), from the movie Roberta. Latha describes it as “a relaxed fun dance, with pleasant banter between the two first, showing their onscreen charm as a couple”:

“Let’s call the whole thing off” (also know as “You say tomato, and I say tomahto”) was written by George and Ira Gershwin especially for this movie: Shall we Dance (1937).  A lover’s quarrel turns into a duet on rollerskates (remember when they had two fore-and-aft pairs of wheels?)

“Waltz in Swing Time” (from Swing Time; 1936, music by Jerome Kern) demonstrates the full range of their dancing skills; it’s a lovely piece. As Wikipedia notes:

“Waltz in Swing Time”: Described by one critic as “the finest piece of pure dance music ever written for Astaire”, this is the most virtuosic partnered romantic duet Astaire ever committed to film. Kern—always reluctant to compose in the Swing style—provided some themes to Robert Russell Bennett who, with the assistance of Astaire’s rehearsal pianist Hal Borne, produced the final score. The dance is a nostalgic celebration of love, in the form of a syncopated waltz with tap overlays—a concept Astaire later reworked in the similarly impressive “Belle of New York” segment of the “Currier and Ives” routine from The Belle of New York (1952). In the midst of this most complex of routines, Astaire and Rogers find time to gently poke fun at notions of elegance, in a delicate reminder of a similar episode in “Pick Yourself Up”.

“Isn’t this a lovely day?” is from Top Hat (1935), with music written by Irving Berlin (the movie also introduced the famous song “Cheek to Cheek”).  Again, Wikipedia gives some good notes on this dance:

In “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (to be Caught in the Rain)”, while Rogers is out riding, a thunderstorm breaks and she takes shelter in a bandstand. Astaire follows her and a conversation about clouds and rainfall soon gives way to Astaire’s rendering of this, one of Berlin’s most prized creations. Astaire sings to Rogers’ back, but the audience can see that Rogers’ attitude towards him softens during the song, and the purpose of the ensuing dance is for her to communicate this change to her partner.The dance is one of flirtation and, according to Mueller, deploys two choreographic devices common to the classical minuet: sequential imitation (one dancer performs a step and the other responds) and touching. Initially, the imitation is mocking in character, then becomes more of a casual exchange, and ends in a spirit of true cooperation. Until the last thirty seconds of this two and a half minute dance the pair appear to pull back from touching, then with a crook of her elbow Rogers invites Astaire in The routine, at once comic and romantic, incorporates hopping steps, tap spins with barrages, loping and dragging steps among its many innovative devices. The spirit of equality which pervades the dance is reflected in the masculinity of Rogers’ clothes and in the friendly handshake they exchange at the end.

Fred Astaire Week: Fred and Cyd Charisse

August 28, 2012 • 5:30 pm

Fred Astaire Week is drawing to a close. I envision only about two more posts, but I hope you’ve enjoyed the artistry of Astaire and his partners (and don’t forget his co-choreographer Hermes Pan).

This lovely sequence, a jazz dance, is from the 1953 MGM musical The Band Wagon. Remember that Astaire was 54 at the time. The sequence is called “The Girl Hunt,” and Astaire plays a tough detective, using, in his voiceover, every cliché from the Mickey Spillane handbook. Charisse plays both the blonde, who turns out to be the killer, and the brunette vamp.

The famous part of the dance, in the “Dem Bones Cafe,” starts about 7.5 minutes in, so you can skip to that if you just want the center of the cinnamon roll. But I’d recommend watching the whole 12-minute clip.

One of the YouTube notes say the following, which I haven’t verified:

The Girl Hunt is one of the most magnificently staged numbers ever imagined.

An amusing anecdote: It has been said, that Gene Kelly became absolutely sick with envy after seeing this on opening night, and suffered a severe bout of depression for weeks thereafter. I consider The Bandwagon, along with Kiss Me Kate – the absolute best of MGM musicals, better than the over-hyped “Singing in the Rain” although it does have its redeeming moments too… Conrad Salinger’s scoring is gorgeous.

In her autobiography, Charisse compares the two great movie dancers who were her partners: Astaire and Gene Kelly (I wish I could have a week for him!):

 “As one of the handful of girls who worked with both of those dance geniuses, I think I can give an honest comparison. In my opinion, Kelly is the more inventive choreographer of the two. Astaire, with Hermes Pan‘s help, creates fabulous numbers – for himself and his partner. But Kelly can create an entire number for somebody else … I think, however, that Astaire’s coordination is better than Kelly’s … his sense of rhythm is uncanny. Kelly, on the other hand, is the stronger of the two. When he lifts you, he lifts you! … To sum it up, I’d say they were the two greatest dancing personalities who were ever on screen. But it’s like comparing apples and oranges. They’re both delicious.” 

h/t: Latha Menon

Fred Astaire Week: Fred and Rita Hayworth

August 27, 2012 • 6:19 pm

I love this clip—it’s full of energy and brio. How can you not smile when you watch it? Rita Hayworth makes a great partner for Astaire, and although she can’t match his grace (nobody possibly could), she matches his energy and still makes it look effortless.

They dance to “The Shorty George,” whose name comes from the dancer in the second video below.  The song is by Jerome Kern, and the orchestra conducted by Xavier Cugat. As far as I know, the YouTube notes below are completely accurate:

You Were Never Lovelier was Rita’s third and last film released in 1942 and her second time as Fred Astaire’s dancing partner. Except for “The Shorty George” number, all their dances were rehearsed in the attic of a funeral parlor! They had to stop every time a funeral procession came through and couldn’t start up again until all the mourners had left. But if those conditions disrupted rehearsals, it didn’t show on-screen. The results were fabulous. Rita later called this movie one of her favorites, but it was also memorable to her for another reason. During rehearsals of “The Shorty George”, Rita experienced one of her “most embarrassing” moments when she fell down during the dance and knocked herself out cold! The film is set in what was one of Hollywood’s favorite locales at the time, Buenos Aires, and also features Xavier Cugat and his Orchestra to add to the Latin flavor of this memorable musical.

“Shorty George” Snowden was a renowned dancer at the Savoy, one of New York’s great black ballrooms of the jazz era.  He’s said to be the one who invented the name “Lindy Hop,” a famous dance of the 30s and 40s that started in Harlem (my parents could do it!). Here’s Shorty Lindy Hopping with his much larger partner:

Shorty George Snowden was the top dancer in the Savoy Ballroom from its opening in 1927 into the early 30’s, when he formed the first professional Lindy Hop troupe, the Shorty Snowden Dancers. They performed with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra at the Paradise Club downtown through most of the thirties.

Although he was barely five feet tall, Snowden made his height an asset rather than a liability. With comic genius, he parodied himself in his signature “Shorty George” step, in which his bent his knees, swinging from side to side, exaggerating his closeness to the ground. [JAC: note that Astaire does this at the beginning of the dance above, and both Astaire and Hayworth do it at 3:51.]

Shorty’s partner, Big Bea, towered over him. They often ended their routines in a comic move in which she carried him off the dance floor on her back. Frankie Manning says that this move inspired him to create his first air step, in which his partner started out on his back and then she flipped over his head and landed on the ground. Ironically, Shorty was defeated by Manning in a major competition when Manning introducted this first air step in 1935. Manning replaced Snowden as reigning king of the Savoy.

Fred Astaire Week: Hatrack dance from “Royal Wedding”

August 26, 2012 • 1:00 pm

Fred made even a hatrack look good. This famous clip, called “Sunday Jumps,” is from the movie Royal Wedding, made in 1951 when Astaire was 52. There’s another famous dance scene in this movie—you might know it—which I’ll highlight later in the week. We haven’t even gotten to his famous partners yet: Cyd Charisse, Rita Hayworth, and of course Ginger Rogers.

Wikipedia says this about the scene:

“Sunday Jumps”: Astaire credits the idea for this famous solo to his long-time choreographic collaborator Hermes Pan. In it, Astaire parodies himself by dancing with a hatstand and appears to parody his rival and friend Gene Kelly by inserting a mock bodybuilding episode during which he kicks aside some Indian clubs in a reference to Kelly’s routine with The Nicholas Brothers in The Pirate. The fame of the dance rests on Astaire’s ability to animate the inanimate.

The solo takes place in a ship’s gym, where Astaire is waiting to rehearse with his partner Powell, who doesn’t turn up, echoing Adele Astaire’s attitude toward her brother’s obsessive rehearsal habits to which the lyrics (unused and unpublished) also made reference. Controversially, in 1997, it was digitally manipulated to show Astaire dancing with a vacuum cleaner in Dirt Devil commercials. In a missive, later published in Time Magazine and Variety, Astaire’s daughter Ava severely criticized the corporation’s president, writing: “Your paltry, unconscionable commercials are the antithesis of everything my lovely, gentle father represented.” This number has been referenced by Mel Gibson in What Women Want and by David Byrne in the live film of his band, Talking Heads, and was also parodied by Kermit the Frog in The Great Muppet Caper.

Fred Astaire Week: I Won’t Dance

August 24, 2012 • 5:35 pm

Astaire was an artistic polymath: this clip, from the movie Roberta (1935), demonstrates his singing, dancing, and piano playing. Yes, that’s Fred at the beginning, playing hot stride piano, and he’s really good! He then segues into a duet, the Jerome Kern tune “I won’t dance“, with his most famous dancing partner, Ginger Rogers (I’ll show some of their dances in a day or two). And don’t forget his drumming skills from yesterday!

Finally, Astaire does some of his seemingly effortless tap-dancing—perfected, of course, through endless practice. Notice that he manages to tap while piroutetting at 4:40, and there’s a wild, machine-gun finish.

I think we’ll need at least four more days to show off this man at his best.

Fred Astaire Week: Nice Work if You Can Get It

August 23, 2012 • 6:47 pm

I find this one of Astaire’s most stunning performances: he uses the drumsticks, drums, and tap-dancing to produce an amazingly intricate bit of choreography.

The movie is “A Damsel in Distress” (1937), the song is the George and Ira Gershwin standard “Nice Work if You Can Get It,” and the whole sequence was shot in one take.

Unbelievable. Only one man could ever have done something like this.

More cowbell?

Fred Astaire Week: a guest post and “Puttin’ On the Ritz”

August 22, 2012 • 5:31 pm

I got re-energized about Fred Astaire—hence “Astaire Week”—through correspondence with my friend Latha Menon, who lives in Oxford, is pursuing a Ph.D in paleobiology, and is also the editor of the UK edition (Oxford University Press) of WEIT.  Her emails about Le Fred were so enthusiastic that I asked her to write a guest post, and she’s kindly obliged.  I’ve put at the bottom one of his finest dance sequences, from “Puttin’ On the Ritz,” and linked Latha’s discussion to a few of the videos she describes. You might not want to watch them yet, for I’ll be featuring a few in the week to come.

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Astaire: song and dance man, supreme artist

by Latha Menon

Ok, I’m the one to blame for inspiring Astaire Week on the Coyne blog.*  So, what’s so special about Fred Astaire?

I write as an unashamed fan. But I’m in excellent company. The most obvious point about Astaire has to be his supreme artistry as a dancer, praised in the most effusive terms by the likes of Balanchine, Baryshnikov, and Nureyev. Yet by all accounts he considered himself as a ‘song and dance man’, not a proponent of ‘high art’.

But such barriers are, after all, artificial. As a perfectionist famous for his intense concentration and hours of practice, constant striving for development and innovation, and, most importantly, performances that transcended effort and technical precision to achieve a sublime sense of ease, naturalness, and grace, he is, in my view, to be compared to any of the greatest classical dancers. These are the qualities of any true artist. The first and finest dancer of the silver screen, Astaire’s use of the new medium not only reached wide audiences but has enabled his influence to permeate dance for generations. It continues to do so.

There are the dance partners to be considered too, of course, and for many that means almost exclusively Ginger Rogers. Clearly they worked well on screen as a dance couple, and some of the most beautiful and tender pas de deux were performed with Rogers (my favourites include those performed to Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” from The Gay Divorcee, and Jerome Kern’s “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” from Roberta). But I agree with those critics who view their success as mainly due to Rogers’s excellent acting rather than her dancing abilities. No matter. Rogers had spunk and style, she learned and improved, and the pairing worked. It’s hard to beat the charm of those ‘30s films.

Other partners, trained in dance, produced some fine performances in later films, and allowed the incorporation of new styles: think of Rita Hayworth’s Latin touches, Cyd Charisse and jazz ballet, not to mention the hard virtuosic glitter of Eleanor Powell’s ‘machine-gun’ tapping in “Begin the Beguine” (Broadway Melody of 1940). (Note that Astaire’s performance shows his fluid, whole body dancing style, even in the fastest tapping, while Powell’s approach is much more focused on the feet with some standard arm movement, to maximise speed.) And let’s not forget the elegance and style he gave to his least obliging partner – a hatrack.

But to see his full abilities just look at Fred’s solos: the use in his tap performances of overlays of different beat cycles and counterpoint (no wonder a parallel has been made with Bach), and sudden changes of rhythm; the extraordinary ability to incorporate and control props, most strikingly the use of a cane; and the use of combined drumming-tapping to produce complex sequences, for example to the Gershwins’ “Nice Work if You Can Get It”, in Damsel in Distress). (A fine choreographer himself, Astaire devised most of his early solo sequences, before collaborating increasingly and highly effectively with Hermes Pan; their depth of mutual understanding seems to have been extraordinary.) Perhaps the most striking of his solos, setting aside the clever transitions from face to face of a revolving room in Royal Wedding, is the angry, stylish, glass-breaking dance to Arlen and Mercer’s One For My Baby in The Sky’s The Limit. Real glass.

And then there was the singing. What a period the ‘30s and ‘40s seem to have been for songs – the standards of Kern, Berlin, the Gershwins among them. Many of the greats were written for Astaire (including “One For My Baby”).  And how he sang them! No crooner, he had a light voice but all his physical grace, charm, and musicality seems to have been poured into his singing, making him one of the most highly regarded interpreters of songs from this period.

And then there was the drumming and the ‘filthy piano’ playing (catch a bit of the jazz piano in the start of “I Won’t Dance: in Roberta). But I’ll stop there. Oh, except that I forgot to mention: it helps that he was kinda cute too.

*JAC: it’s a website!

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Thanks to Latha for the post. To complement it, here’s Astaire, in Blue Skies (1946), tapping up a storm and deftly wielding his cane to the Irving Berlin tune “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” To me this is one of Astaire’s best performances on film, and he was 47 years old. As we’ll see, he was going strong well into his fifties.