Minstrel Show
In the early days of the minstrel show, this was often a skit set on a Southern plantation that usually included song-and-dance numbers and featured Sambo- and Mammy-type characters in slapstick situations. The emphasis lay on an idealized plantation life and the happy slaves who lived there.
Black Face
Blackface is a term which is used to describe a form of theatrical make-up which is predominantly used by non-black performers in order to represent a caricature of a black person. The term is also used in reference to black makeup, which is worn as part of folk tradition and disguising rather than as a racial stereotype of black people.
Alhambra Theater, founded on September 13, 1880 in the heart of the City of Havana.
Th Tampa Connection
Ybor City was founded as an independent town in 1885 by a group of cigar manufacturers led by Vicente Martinez-Ybor and was annexed by Tampa in 1887. The original population was mostly composed of Cuban and Spanish immigrants who worked in the cigar factories. Italian and Eastern European Jewish
immigrants followed shortly thereafter and established many retail
shops, farms and grocery stores, box factories, print shops, and other
enterprises which catered to the cigar industry and its workers.Theater was also popular with the introduction of Cuban vernacular theater, which also included black-face.
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Tap
Tap's roots were in minstrel shows, it gained prominence in Vaudeville, then emerged into an art form and means of expression alongside the evolution of jazz. There are several styles of tap dance, including rhythm, classical, Broadway, and post-modern.
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Little Colonel Bojangles Dance
Bill "Bojangles" Robinson (1878-1949) was an American tap dancer, actor, and singer, the best known and the most highly paid black American entertainer in America during the first half of the 20th century. His long career mirrored changes in American entertainment tastes and technology.
According to dance critic Marshall Stearns, (1968) Robinson's contribution to tap dance is exact and specific. He brought it up on its toes, dancing upright and swinging, adding lightness and presence. His signature routine was the Stair Dance, in which he would tap up and down a set of stairs in a rhythmically complex sequence of steps, a routine that he unsuccessfully attempted to patent.
He is best known today for his dancing with Shirley Temple in a series of films during the 1930s, and for starring in the musical Stormy Weather (1943), loosely based on his own life. He used his popularity to challenge and overcome numerous racial barriers, including becoming:
- one of the first minstrel and vaudeville performers to appear as black without the use of blackface makeup
- one of the earliest black performers to perform solo, overcoming vaudeville's two colored rule
- an early black headliner in Broadway shows
- the first black performer to appear in a Hollywood film in an interracial dance team (with Shirley Temple in The Little Colonel, 1935)
- the first black performer to headline a mixed-race Broadway production
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