The Jazz Producer: Mura Dehn and the Traditional Jazz Dance Company

Abstract

How do intercultural connections shape the history of jazz dance? My paper examines how jazz dance producer Mura Dehn and the dancers in the Traditional Jazz Dance Company worked together to stage/produce performances from 1932 to the 1970s. I am interested in the ways that their multiple personalities and identities affected their relationships and the ways in which they staged their works. Did they allow for the creation of subversive or counter-subversive performances, or both simultaneously? What are the consequences of Mura Dehn's essentialist ideas about the African American dancing body, and how do her writings posit black jazz dance as performing natural spontaneity while also desiring to credit black dancers as artists? I argue that Dehn's identity caused her erasure from the jazz dance genealogy, and that while her writings and ideas are at times problematic, they are critical to consider in dance history discourse.