University Forum Lecture: “You Can’t Dance to It:” Bebop as Popular Dance Music in Las Vegas

University Forum Lecture: “You Can’t Dance to It:” Bebop as Popular Dance Music
The College of Liberal Arts’ University Forum Lecture Series presents "“
Can’t Dance To it:” Bebop as Popular Dance Music," a talk by Dr. Christopher J. Wells, Assistant Professor of Musicology, Arizona State University.
Bebop has a longstanding reputation as a music innately hostile to dancing, but this framing erases the lived experience of young African Americans in the 1940s and 1950s who treated bebop as popular music, dancing to it regularly. This lecture sheds new light on bebop’s status as dance music as revealed in oral histories with dancers and in Mura Dehn’s research notes for her film “The Spirit Moves.” Approaching bebop from social dancers’ perspectives also reveals that bebop’s “undanceable” reputation has less to do with the music’s difficulty than with a desire to position bebop as “art” rather than “entertainment.”
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