Karen Campos McCormack MA
PhD candidate
E-mail: [email protected]
Area(s) of interest: Colonialism & Postcolonialism, European History, Gender, Music & Theatre History
Cohort/Start PhD: 2023-2024
Jazz Dancing Across the Atlantic: exploring the history of Black American jazz dancers in interwar Europe
University of Groningen
Supervisors: Prof. Kristin McGee and Prof. Alex de Lacey
Duration: Start 12-2023, end 11-2027
I am researching the history of Black American jazz dancers in inter-war Europe -a phenomenon whose significance remains to be fully explored in popular culture and scholarship-, and how that history has been erased, forgotten, remembered and transmitted. Many Black American dancers crossed the Atlantic in the 1920s and 1930s spreading the new rhythms of jazz as part of touring musical reviews and shows, and I will be researching these histories focussing especially on dancers in Spain and Ireland. Jazz dance in this era was both globally popular and the site of much contested ideological debate. The lens through which I approach this subject includes feminist, critical race, dance and jazz studies, as I examine these marginalized histories and geographies of jazz and Black dance. I am interested in processes of knowledge transmission and adopt an interdisciplinary methodology to encompass a subject that has been excluded from academia. Focussing on the case studies of individual dancers allows me to investigate their personal stories, creative connections and the complex performance contexts these artists negotiated in their transnational careers. The time-frame of my research ranges from the early jazz dancers in 1920s Spain, such as Louis Douglas and Ruth Bayton, to the arrival of Lindy hop in Europe in the 1930s, the 1937 Cotton Club Revue at the Theatre Royal in Dublin, and the legacy of dancer Norma Miller in Europe. By re-centring the histories of these Black American dancers, my project engages both with jazz dance history and the living jazz dance tradition. I aim for my research to contribute to both academic knowledge and to dance communities and practitioners.