Hollywood Dance-ins and the Reproduction of Corporeality

FAIN: HB-288189-23

Anthea Kraut
Regents of the University of California, Riverside (Riverside, CA 92521-0001)

Research and writing leading to a book about Hollywood film musicals of the 1940s to the 1960s and the “dance-in,” a dancer who rehearsed a star’s choreography prior to filming.

This project proposes that a figure who barely registers in film studies or dance studies can help us re-think the body. The book will be the first scholarly study of the dance-in, a dancer who rehearsed a star’s choreography prior to filming and often served multiple unseen roles, including choreographer’s assistant and dance coach. Rarely if ever credited, dance-ins illuminate the acts of reproduction that lay concealed behind filmic images of seemingly autonomous dancing bodies. The book examines these acts of reproduction, focusing on the relationship between a handful of Hollywood stars and dance-ins from the 1940s to the 1960s, during the “Golden Age” of Hollywood musicals. While stars in this era were predominantly white and choreographers predominantly male, attention to dance-ins reveals a more complicated raced and gendered ecosystem of bodies in Hollywood. Ultimately, the book shows how the labor of dance-ins has functioned to uphold the fiction of white corporeal autonomy.

Associated Products

Hollywood Dance-ins and the Reproductions of Bodies (Book)
Title: Hollywood Dance-ins and the Reproductions of Bodies
Author: Anthea Kraut
Abstract: This book proposes that a figure who barely registers in film studies or dance studies offers valuable insight into ideas about “the body” and the reproductive labor that gives rise to images of bodies. The book is the first scholarly study of the dance-in, a dancer who executes a star’s choreography as cameras are being focused and lights set. While they share similarities with doubles and stand-ins, dance-ins do not replace stars’ bodies on screen, and they often serve multiple unseen roles, including as choreographers’ assistants and stars’ coaches, making them vital to the creation and transmission of film choreography. Focusing on dance-ins in mid-twentieth-century Hollywood, when film musicals and the studio system were at their height, the book exposes a racialized and gendered “corporeal ecosystem” that operated behind the scenes, propping up but concealed behind the seeming self-referentiality of white stars’ dancing bodies. To unpack the workings of that ecosystem, the book tells the stories of the 1940s white pin-up star Betty Grable’s dependence on her white dance-in Angie Blue; the African American jazz dancer Marie Bryant’s private coaching of myriad stars in the late 1940s and early 1950s; Carol Haney’s and Jeanne Coyne’s training of the white ingénue Debbie Reynolds for Singin’ in the Rain (1952); the Mexican-born dancer Alex Romero’s partnership with the white star Gene Kelly; and the biracial star Nancy Kwan’s exchanges with a white production team and Asian/American ensemble members in Flower Drum Song (1961).
Year: 2025
Primary URL: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/hollywood-dance-ins-and-the-reproduction-of-bodies-9780197789674?lang=en&cc=us
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780197789674
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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