Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Spinning Mambo into Salsa
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1/27/1972
WEBSITE:
CITY: Seattle
STATE: WA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://dance.washington.edu/people/juliet-mcmains * http://www.dance-addiction.com/bio.htm
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: nr2002014377
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/nr2002014377
HEADING: McMains, Juliet E.
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670 __ |a Dancing in the Millennium proceedings, 2000: |b p. 312 (Juliet E. McMains; dancer, writer)
670 __ |a Glamour addiction, 2006 : |b CIP t.p. (Juliet McMains) data sheet (b. 1/27/1972)
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PERSONAL
Born January 27, 1972.
EDUCATION:Harvard University, B.A.; University of California, Riverside, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Dancer, educator, and writer. Has taught in dance departments at universities in FL and CA; University of Washington, Seattle, Dance Program instructor.
AWARDS:Outstanding Publication Award, Congress on Research in Dance, 2008, for Glamour Addiction.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books and to periodicals, including Dance Chronicle and Dance Research Journal.
SIDELIGHTS
Juliet McMains is a longtime dance instructor who has taught at colleges in Florida and California and now teaches salsa, ballroom, and Latin dance in the Dance Program at the University of Washington, in Seattle. McMains has studied dance for almost a quarter of a century. When she was young she trained in ballet, tap, jazz, and theatrical dance, but she fell in love with ballroom dancing while pursuing her bachelor’s degree at Harvard University. McMains was president of the Harvard-Radcliffe Ballroom Dance Club, which won the national collegiate ballroom championships in 1994. She ended up writing her senior thesis on dance, titled “Tradition and Transgression: Gender Roles in Ballroom Dancing.” She proceeded to compete in dance as an amateur after college before finally deciding to pursue it as a career. McMains eventually earned her Ph.D. in dance history and theory at the University of California, Riverside.
Glamour Addiction
In 2006, McMains published Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry, which won the Congress on Research in Dance’s Outstanding Publication Award. In an interview with Nona Willis-Aronowitz on the PopMatters Web site, McMains discussed the notion of glamour and how it applies to dance: “Glamour is the central element to competitive ballroom dancing, both in doing it and the thrill of watching it. The Glamour system promises a transformation of personal identity, on any level. If you are not popular and you want to be popular, it promises that transformation. If you feel like you’re not sexually desirable, you’re too old, if you’re gay and you want acceptance in a heterosexual world, it fixes all of that. The machine does this through dangling objects and ideas really close so that you can touch them, but always keeping them at distance.” She added: “So the promise is actually never fulfilled. Glamour doesn’t work unless it’s a fantasy. It has to continually taunt you with this fantasy that you’re going to fulfill it.”
In a review in Dance Research Journal, Sherril Dodds expressed mixed feelings about the book. She wrote: “McMains commendably privileges ballroom as a movement practice that deserves attention for the way it produces and responds to specific cultural issues within its contexts of production and consumption. It is clearly a rich field of inquiry as, throughout the course of the book, McMains elucidates … how Glamour, as a power mechanism produced through the DanceSport industry, calls into question concepts of desire, class, economy, competition, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, race, and nationality. More importantly, she is specifically concerned with how these phenomena are created, enacted, negotiated, and destabilized through the body.”
Spinning Mambo into Salsa
In 2015, McMains published Spinning Mambo into Salsa: Caribbean Dance in Global Commerce, a history of salsa dance and how it evolved from three major areas: New York, Los Angeles, and Miami. She goes into how salsa differs from earlier Latin dance, in particular the mambo, from the 1950s. McMain tries to dispel the myth that one form is more authentic than the other by showing how each came into existence.
Reviewing the book for the Latin American Music Review, Sarah Town wrote: “Examining salsa from the mambo era of the 1950s through its commodification and stylistic consolidation at the turn of the millennium, she enriches the existing literature with myriad details culled from personal experience, interviews, and archival research.” Town added: “McMains tells us that her ‘motivation for writing this book was to offer thousands of salsa dancers a means of relating their own personal experiences to a broader story of salsa’s rich and multifaceted history.’ … Indeed, her most passionate writing seems directed precisely toward younger dancers, whom she believes are not sufficiently aware of the history and diversity of styles contained in their dance of choice.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Chronicle of Higher Education, November 17, 2006, Nina C. Ayoub, review of Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry.
Dance Research Journal, summer, 2008, Sherril Dodds, review of Glamour Addiction, pp. 86-88.
Latin American Music Review, fall/winter, 2016, Sarah Town, review of Spinning Mambo into Salsa: Caribbean Dance in Global Commerce, pp. 251-253.
ONLINE
Dance Addiction, http://www.dance-addiction.com/ (April 19, 2017), author profile.
PopMatters, http://www.popmatters.com/ (February 14, 2007), Nona Willis-Aronowitz, author interview.
University of Washington Web site, http://dance.washington.edu/ (April 19, 2017), author profile.
JulietMcMains
Ph.D., Associate Professor, Donald E. Petersen Endowed Fellow
mcmains@uw.edu
(206) 616-0931
Meany 260
Office Hours:
Thursday 11:00-12:00p
Fields of Interest
CaribbeanDanceDance HistoryDance SportGender, Women, and Sexuality StudiesLatino/a StudiesRace and EthnicitySalsaSocial DanceTango
Background and Experience
Summary
(Active Tab)
Research & Creative Work
Courses Taught
News & Events
Notable Works
Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry
Glamour Addition, by Juliet McMains
Spinning Mambo into Salsa: Caribbean Dance in Global Commerce
Spinning Mambo into Salsa
Juliet is a dance scholar and artist whose work centers on social dance practices and their theatrical expression on competition and theatrical stages. Her first book, Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry (Wesleyan, 2006) won the 2008 Congress on Research in Dance (CORD) Outstanding Publication Award. Juliet has also published articles on rumba, salsa, swing, and ballroom dance, all genres in which she has choreographed, performed, and danced socially for many years. Her latest book, Spinning Mambo into Salsa: Caribbean Dance in Global Commerce (Oxford University Press, 2015) is a history of salsa and mambo dancing (more info at palladium-mambo.com). Juliet's most recent passion is Argentine tango, which she dances, teaches, performs, and researches in the U.S. and Argentina. In addition to her rigorous training and experience in partner dance forms (ballroom dance, salsa, swing, tango, and contact improvisation), Juliet has extensive training in ballet, modern/contemporary, jazz, and AfroCuban folklore. She won numerous titles as a competing DanceSport professional, including being twice named a U.S. National Rising Star finalist. She served on the Congress on Research in Dance (CORD) Board of Directors from 2008-2011. Juliet has a Ph.D. in Dance History and Theory from the University of California at Riverside and a B.A. in Women's Studies from Harvard University. In the UW Dance Program, she teaches courses in cross cultural dance studies, research methods, dance ethnography, salsa, tango, swing, and ballroom dance. She has been appointed as a Donald E. Petersen Endowed Fellow for April 2013-March 2016. This appointment reflects Juliet's extraordinary record of achievement, along with the UW's expectation of her continued success and delight at her being a member of the faculty.
Research
Publications, Articles
McMains, Juliet. “Rumba Encounters: Transculturation of Cuban Rumba in American and European Ballrooms.” In Making Caribbean Dance: Continuity and Creativity in Island Cultures, edited by Susanna Sloat, 37–48. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2010.
McMains, Juliet. “Brownface: Representations of Latin-ness in Dancesport.” Dance Research Journal, 33, no. 2 (2001): 54–71
McMains, Juliet. “Hot Latin Dance: Ethnic Identity and Stereotype.” The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity, edited by Anthony Shay. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013
Publications, Books
McMains, Juliet. Spinning Mambo into Salsa: Caribbean Dance in Global Commerce. Oxford University Press, 2015.
Publications, Presentations
McMains, Juliet. “Brownface: A New Performance of Minstrelsy in Competitive Latin American Dancing?” Conference Proceedings: Dancing in the Millennium An International Conference, compiled by Juliette Crone-Willis, 12–316. Washington DC, 19–23 July 2000
Presentations
McMains, Juliet. “Brownface: A New Performance of Minstrelsy in Latin American Dancing?” Paper presented at Dancing at the Millennium Conference, Washington, DC, 22 July 2000.
McMains, Juliet. “Followers on the Dance Floor/Leaders in the Dance Industry: A Cross-Generational Comparison of Female Pioneers in 1950s Mambo and 1990s Salsa.” Paper presented at Congress on Research in Dance Annual Conference, Hollins College, Roanoke, VA, 15 November, 2008.
McMains, Juliet. “From Mambo to Salsa: Dancing Across Generational Divides.” Paper presented at Society of Ethnomusicology Annual Conference, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, 26 October, 2008.
McMains, Juliet. “Kineschizophonia in Latin Dance Music.” Paper presented at Dance and Music: Moving Dialogues Conference. McGill University, Montreal, February 17, 2011
Selected: Publications, Books
McMains, Juliet. Spinning Mambo into Salsa: Caribbean Dance in Global Commerce. Oxford University Press, 2015.
McMains, Juliet. Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006.
Selected: Publications, Articles
McMains, Juliet and Ben Thomas. “Translating from Pitch to Plié: Music Theory for Dance Scholars and Close Movement Analysis for Music Scholars.” Dance Chronicle, 36, no. 2, (2013): 196–217.
McMains, Juliet. “Hot Latin Dance: Ethnic Identity and Stereotype.” The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity, edited by Anthony Shay. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013
McMains, Juliet. “Rumba Encounters: Transculturation of Cuban Rumba in American and European Ballrooms.” In Making Caribbean Dance: Continuity and Creativity in Island Cultures, edited by Susanna Sloat, 37–48. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2010.
McMains, Juliet. “Reality Check: Dancing with the Stars and the American Dream.” The Routledge Dance Studies Reader, 2nd ed., edited by Alexandra Carter and Janet O’Shea, 261–272. London: Routledge, 2010
McMains, Juliet. “Dancing Latin/Latin Dancing: Salsa and DanceSport” Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader, edited by Julie Malnig, 302–322. Indianapolis: University of Illinois Press, 2008.
McMains, Juliet and Danielle Robinson. “Swingin’ Out: Southern California's Lindy Revival, 2000.” I See America Dancing: Selected Readings, 1685–2000, edited by Maureen Needham, 84–91. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002.
McMains, Juliet. “Brownface: Representations of Latin-ness in Dancesport.” Dance Research Journal, 33, no. 2 (2001): 54–71
Selected: Creative Work
Four to Tango, choreography by Juliet McMains with Conrad McGreal, Greg Rolnick, and Nicole Adams, performed at Gould Hall, Seattle, WA, May 24, 2014.
McMains, Juliet. Solo un fantasma, (UW Faculty Dance Concert, Meany Studio Theatre, Seattle, WA 2010)
McMains, Juliet. Ritmos de posibilidad, (UW Faculty Dance Concert, Meany Studio Theatre, Seattle 2009)
McMains, Juliet. Fragments of Salsa History, (UW Faculty Dance Concert, Meany Studio Theatre, Seattle, WA 2007)
Selected: Creative Work, DVD/Film
McMains, Juliet. Squint, (Short Film Directed by Tony Griffin, won Malibu Film Festival)
Selected: Presentations
McMains, Juliet. “Queer Tango Embraces: Female Homosociality in Buenos Aires’ Tango Scene.” Paper presented at Decentering Dance Studies: Moving in New Global Orders, joint conference of Congress on Research in Dance and Society of Dance History Scholars, Riverside, CA, November 16, 2013.
McMains, Juliet. “From Pitch to Plié: Music Theory for Dance Scholars and Close Movement Analysis for Music Scholars.” Paper presented with co-author Ben Thomas at the joint meeting of Congress on Research in Dance and Society for Ethnomusicology, Philadelphia, November 19, 2011.
McMains, Juliet. “Current Problems & Methods in Dance Reconstruction: Focus on Cross-Cultural and Social Dance Reconstruction.” Roundtable in conjunction with Danielle Robinson and Clare Parfitt-Brown, presented at Society of Dance History Scholars Annual Conference, Toronto, June 2011.
McMains, Juliet. “Kineschizophonia in Latin Dance Music.” Paper presented at Dance and Music: Moving Dialogues Conference. McGill University, Montreal, February 17, 2011
McMains, Juliet. “Redirecting the Paths of Dance Migration through Hyperlinks: How the Web Shaped Salsa Commerce, Community, and Technique.” Paper presented at Society of Dance History Scholars Annual Conference, Stanford University, 20 June 2009.
McMains, Juliet. “From Mambo to Salsa: Dancing Across Generational Divides.” Paper presented at Society of Ethnomusicology Annual Conference, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, 26 October, 2008.
McMains, Juliet. “Followers on the Dance Floor/Leaders in the Dance Industry: A Cross-Generational Comparison of Female Pioneers in 1950s Mambo and 1990s Salsa.” Paper presented at Congress on Research in Dance Annual Conference, Hollins College, Roanoke, VA, 15 November, 2008.
McMains, Juliet. “Finding the Beat: Rhythmic Controversies in the Salsa Dance Industry.” Paper presented at Congress on Research in Dance Annual Conference, Barnard College, 9 November, 2007; Paper presented at the International Congress on Music, Identity and Culture in the Caribbean, Centro León, Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic, 14 April, 2007.
McMains, Juliet. “Brownface and Dancing with the Stars: Reality Television and Off-stage Dance Realities.” Paper presented at Re-Thinking Practice and Theory, Joint Conference sponsored by Centre National de la Danse, Society for Dance History Scholars, and Congress on Research in Dance, Pantin, France, 24 June, 2007.
McMains, Juliet. “Rumba Encounters: A Dialogue between Guaguancó and International Style Ballroom Dancers.” Paper presented at Congress on Research in Dance, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 3 November 2006; Paper presented at the World Dance Alliance Global Assembly, York University, Toronto, Canada, 21 July 2006.
McMains, Juliet. “‘Authenticity’ in the Contemporary Salsa Dance Industry.” Paper presented at the Latin American Studies Association Conference, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 15 March 2006.
McMains, Juliet. “Playing with Structure: Improvisation in Partnered Social Dance.” Workshop presented at Congress on Research in Dance Annual Conference, Florida State University, 5 March 2005.
McMains, Juliet. “Social Dancing or Theatrical Representation of Social Dance? Conflation as a Marketing Strategy in the American Ballroom Dance Industry.” Paper Presented at the Society of Dance History Scholars Conference, Duke University, 19 June 2004; Paper Presented at the Popular Culture Association National Conference, San Antonio, TX, 10 April 2004.
McMains, Juliet. “‘Latin’ American Dance: Salseros and Ballroom Dancers.” Paper Presented at Congress on Research in Dance Annual Conference, New York City, 27 October 2001; Paper Presented at American Studies Annual Conference, Washington, DC, 9 November, 2001; Paper Presented at Southern American Studies Bi-annual Conference, Tallahassee, FL, 7 February 2003
McMains, Juliet. “Swinging Out: Southern California's Lindy Revival.” Paper presented with co-author Danielle Robinson at Dance Under Construction, Second Annual Graduate Student Dance Conference, UC Riverside, 11 March 2000.
McMains, Juliet. “Brownface: A New Performance of Minstrelsy in Latin American Dancing?” Paper presented at Dancing at the Millennium Conference, Washington, DC, 22 July 2000.
McMains, Juliet. “Dancesport Lifestyle: The Glamorous and the Grotesque in Competitive Ballroom and Latin Dance.” Paper presented at Dance Under Construction, Second Annual Graduate Student Dance Conference, UC Riverside, 11 March 2000
McMains, Juliet. “Corporeal Negotiations in Ballroom and Latin Dance: The Glamour Class.” Paper presented at Congress on Research in Dance Annual Conference, Pomona, CA, 3 December 1999; Paper presented at Cultural Dance Studies Conference, UC Los Angeles, 6 March 1999.
Selected: Publications, Presentations
McMains, Juliet, Clare Parfitt-Brown and Danielle Robinson. “Current Problems and Methods in Dance Reconstruction: Focus on Cross-Cultural and Social Dance Reconstruction.” SDHS 2011 Conference Proceedings, edited by Ken Peirce, 123–140. Toronto, CA, June 23–26, 2011
McMains, Juliet. “Brownface: A New Performance of Minstrelsy in Competitive Latin American Dancing?” Conference Proceedings: Dancing in the Millennium An International Conference, compiled by Juliette Crone-Willis, 12–316. Washington DC, 19–23 July 2000
Dance Addiction
Now teaching in Seattle
Salsa, Ballroom and Latin Dance Specialist
JULIET McMAINS, Ph.D.
Juliet has just relocated to Seattle, WA to teach in the Dance Program the University of Washington. With an eclectic dance background--including ballroom, salsa, swing, ballet, jazz, modern, yoga, and dance history, Juliet brings a broad array of experience and perspective to her teaching. While twenty-four years of intensive study in multiple dance disciplines underlies the breadth of her knowledge, the depth of her insight into partnering cannot be overstated. She has been teaching salsa since 1997 and has introduced thousands of students to the excitement and joy of social salsa dancing. See testimonials to read what students are saying. She comes to Seattle from Orlando where she was teaching salsa and ballroom at the Zebra Room and at the University of Central Florida. As a DanceSport professional, she has taught at studios in Boston, California, and Florida, traveled internationally to perform and compete, won championships in the U.S. and Canada, and twice been named a U.S. National Rising Star finalist. She has taught in dance departments at universities in Florida and California. Juliet has a Ph.D. is Dance History and Theory from the University of California at Riverside and a B.A. in Women's Studies from Harvard University.
Juliet McMains has been studying dance for twenty-four years and teaching for the past nineteen. Her early training was in the disciplines of ballet, tap, jazz, and theatrical. In college, she was infected with the ballroom dancing virus. Soon she was devoting every spare minute and dollar to lessons and competitions. It even invaded her academic work, resulting in her senior thesis, "Tradition and Transgression: Gender Roles in Ballroom Dancing." Senior year of college, Juliet was president of the Harvard-Radcliffe Ballroom Dance Club, which won the national collegiate ballroom dance championships in 1994. She competed in amateur standard at the championship level after college before conceding that she was not actively pursuing a sensible career like other Harvard graduates because she was devoting all her time to dancing. So in January of 1997, Juliet "turned pro" so that she could justify spending so much time in a mirror-lined wooden box. A partner change at this time also precipitated a decision to switch her own competition focus from standard to Latin. In the fall of 1997, she moved to Southern California to pursue a Ph.D. in dance history and theory at the University of California, Riverside.
In California, Juliet threw herself into study of dance from many angles-that of professional dancesport competitor, entertainer, dance scholar, dance teacher, and social dance enthusiast. It was during this period of extensive participation in multiple dance communities that Juliet was able to develop her own theories about dance. Her academic work brought her into contact with multiple world dance forms and equipped her with tools for close movement and choreographic analysis. Training among Southern California's professional top dancesport competitors tuned her technical prowess in partnering. Late nights spent in Southern California nightclubs dancing salsa, swing, and tango taught her about improvisation, musicality, and playfulness. Working in Hollywood's entertainment industry, re-embracing ballet classes, discovering the tremendous benefits of yoga, and soaking in the myriad of performing companies touring Los Angeles have likewise contributed to her multifaceted approach to dance.
In 2001, Juliet relocated to Orlando, FL to pursue a professional dance partnership in International Latin with Radim Lanik and spread her newfound passion for social dance with Central Florida. During her five years in Central Florida, Juliet won many DanceSport competitions with Radim, and then later with American Smooth partner Rick Elliot. She also spent three semesters teaching in the nationally renowned dance department at Florida State University and two semesters teaching at the University of Central Florida. In 2003, she completed her Ph.D. in Dance History and Theory and has since continued her dance scholarship by presenting papers at national and international conferences. Her current research projects include a history of salsa dance and an examination into the relationship between ballroom rumba and Afro-Cuban rumba. Juliet's academic specializations include dance ethnography, social dance history, post-structural theory, cultural studies, and feminist theory. For a taste of her academic work, see these publications:
McMains, Juliet. Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006.
McMains, Juliet. "Brownface: Representations of Latin-ness in Dancesport." Dance Research Journal, 33/2, Winter 2001.
McMains, Juliet and Danielle Robinson. "Swinging Out: Southern California's Lindy Revival." I See America Dancing: Selected Readings, 1685-2000, Ed. Maureen Needham. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002.
SEAN WILSON
Originally from Jamaica, Sean moved to the United States at age eleven, where he began studying trombone and pursuing his growing passion for jazz music. After high school, Sean joined the U.S. Army and played trombone in the 82nd Airborne Division Band. He then returned to school to pursue a degree in computer science and began intensive training in Wing Chun kung fu, which he continues today. After completing his degree and beginning work as a computer programmer, Sean was eventually lured into salsa classes in 2003. His prior musical training and the awareness of energy flow he had gained from martial arts enabled Sean to move quickly through his salsa education. Sean began studying casino style salsa, but soon switched to LA style salsa and began performing with Salsa Karibe Dance Team in 2004. It is, however, when he is dancing NY style salsa/mambo on2, that Sean feels his instincts as a jazz musician can be most fully expressed as a dancer. Impressed with his musicality, Juliet invited Sean to teach for Salsa Addiction in 2006. His patience, sense of humor, and ability to relate to a wide range of people quickly helped him become a superior teacher. Sean currently teaches classes on1 and on2. Sean's salsa style, marked by rhythmical shines and the ability to easily adjust to partners of varying skill sets, makes him a highly sought after dance partner for salseras of all levels.
Juliet McMains
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Juliet E. McMains is a United States dance scholar and instructor,[1] the author of the Glamour Addiction, the first comprehensive study of the United States DanceSport.[2][3]
Juliet McMains started doing ballroom dancing as a teenager. Eventually she became professional ballroom dancer until she stopped competing in 2003.[1] Her Senior thesis in the college was Tradition and Transgression: Gender Roles in Ballroom Dancing. She earned B.A. in Women's Studies from Harvard University and PhD in dance history and theory (2003) at the University of California, Riverside.[4]
As of 2006, she is a teacher of World Dance History, Beginning Salsa and Beginning Tango at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her academic specializations include dance ethnography, social dance history, post-structural theory, cultural studies, and feminist theory.[1][4]
Scholar works[edit]
2006: Juliet E. McMains, "Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry" Wesleyan University Press, ISBN 0-8195-6774-4
2002: Juliet McMains and Danielle Robinson. "Swinging Out: Southern California's Lindy Revival." in: I See America Dancing: Selected Readings, 1685-2000, Ed. Maureen Needham. University of Illinois Press
References[edit]
^ Jump up to: a b c "Dance fever: Recovery can be hard", by Nancy Wick, University Week (University of Washington), November 30, 2006
Jump up ^ "Permission to Follow: Interview with Juliet McMains", 15 February 2007
Jump up ^ A review of Glamour Addiction in the Dance Research Journal, Volume 40, Number 1, Summer 2008 doi:10.1353/drj.0.0012
^ Jump up to: a b Juliet McMains biography
JULIET MCMAINS, PH.D.
Juliet has a Ph.D. in Dance History and Theory from the University of California at Riverside and a B.A. in Women’s Studies from Harvard University. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Dance Program at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Juliet McMainsJuliet was first introduced to mambo in college when she became an avid competitive ballroom dancer, although this ballroom version of mambo bore little resemblance to that danced at the Palladium Ballroom. Her background in theatrical dance (ballet, jazz, modern) abetted a successful career as a competitive ballroom dancer, including two U.S. National Rising Star finalist titles. It was not, however, until she moved to Los Angeles in 1997 where the salsa dance boom was in full force that she began to fall in love with Latin music and the improvisational possibilities it invited for the dancer. Juliet has been a salsa addict since her first night at LA’s Club Mayan, regularly dancing and teaching social salsa ever since. Her first love was LA style salsa, although she became a New York style convert while living in Orlando from 2001–2006. She has also traveled to Cuba to study Cuban son, danzón, rumba, and Yorban folklore.
As a salsa dance teacher, Juliet incorporates history lessons into her technique classes, educating students about the history of salsa music and dance, tracing both back to the Mambo Era. She is also proud to incorporate live music into her salsa classes. Juliet also teaches courses in tango, swing, and ballroom dance as well as academic courses in cross-cultural dance studies, dance ethnography, and dance research methods.
Her Publications Include:
Books
McMains, Juliet. Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006.*
* Winner of the CORD 2008 Outstanding Publication Award
Chapters/Articles
McMains, Juliet. “Hot Latin Dance: Ethnic Identity and Stereotype.” In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity, edited by Anthony Shay. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, in press.
McMains, Juliet, Clare Parfitt-Brown and Danielle Robinson. “Current Problems and Methods in Dance Reconstruction: Focus on Cross-Cultural and Social Dance Reconstruction.” In SDHS 2011 Conference Proceedings, edited by Ken Peirce, 123–140. Toronto, CA, June 23–26, 2011.
McMains, Juliet. “Rumba Encounters: Transculturation of Cuban Rumba in American and European Ballrooms.” In Making Caribbean Dance: Continuity and Creativity in Island Cultures, edited by Susanna Sloat, 37–48. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2010.
McMains, Juliet. “Reality Check: Dancing with the Stars and the American Dream.” In The Routledge Dance Studies Reader, 2nd ed., edited by Alexandra Carter and Janet O’Shea, 261–272. London: Routledge, 2010.
McMains, Juliet. “Dancing Latin/Latin Dancing: Salsa and DanceSport” In Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader, edited by Julie Malnig, 302–322. Indianapolis: University of Illinois Press, 2008.
McMains, Juliet and Danielle Robinson. “Swingin’ Out: Southern California's Lindy Revival, 2000.” In I See America Dancing: Selected Readings, 1685–2000, edited by Maureen Needham, 84–91. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002.
McMains, Juliet. “Brownface: Representations of Latin-ness in Dancesport.” Dance Research Journal, 33, no. 2 (2001): 54–71.
McMains, Juliet. “Brownface: A New Performance of Minstrelsy in Competitive Latin American Dancing?” In Conference Proceedings: Dancing in the Millennium An International Conference, compiled by Juliette Crone-Willis, 12–316. Washington DC, 19–23 July 2000.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
Spinning Mambo into Salsa
Genesis of the Project
Trained as both a dancer and a dance historian, Juliet McMains began teaching salsa at the university level in 1998 and was frustrated for many years by the lack of written resources on salsa dance history to assign in her classes. In 2006, with her first book at the press, she turned her attention to helping fill this void. Juliet embarked on an extensive oral history project to document salsa and mambo dance history, focusing on Los Angeles, Miami, San Juan, and New York. In 2015, her efforts culminated in publication of Spinning Mambo into Salsa: Caribbean Dance, Commerce, and Culture (Oxford University Press), a history that is based on over 100 interviews, archival research, and ethnography. Because Juliet found the Palladium Era dancers she met during her research had such compelling stories to share, a central focus of the book explores the evolution of Palladium Era mambo into modern salsa. Much of the information included on this website is culled from the interviews with Palladium Era mambo dancers who were gracious enough to share their memories.
New York Mambo
Although the seeds of mambo music were planted in Cuba where composers Orestes and Israel “Cachao” López, Arsenio Rodríguez, Pérez Prado first began hybridizing Cuban son and danzón with American jazz; it was in New York where mambo music matured and achieved international celebrity. Likewise, mambo dancing is deeply indebted to earlier Cuban dance traditions, especially the Cuban son and rumba. It was, however, in New York’s multicultural dance halls where these dances combined with American swing, Puerto Rican bomba, and other Caribbean sensibilities to give birth to mambo dancing.
Project Goals
The history of Latin music during the Mambo Era has been documented by several scholars (see additional resources), but very little has been recorded about mambo dancers of the period. Only two short films of the period are widely available (Mambo Madness, Mura Dehn’s The Spirit Moves), and written histories that do mention the dancers of the era are incomplete and often exaggerate the contributions of individual artists while diminishing the legacy of others. The goal of this website is to create a resource where the contributions of all Palladium Era mambo dancers can be celebrated and shared. If you have additional information about Palladium Era mambo dancers, please contact us so that we can expand this resource.
Other Mambo Venues
Although the Palladium was the most famous of Latin dance venues of the era, numerous other New York venues regularly programmed Latin music in the 1950s and 60s, including:
Park Plaza/Palace in Spanish Harlem
Hunts Point Palace in the Bronx
Ben Maksik’s Town and Country Club in Brooklyn
Manhattan Center
Tropicana in the Bronx
Many Catskill Mountain Resorts also regularly hired Latin bands and mambo dance acts, including:
Grossinger’s
The Concord
The Raleigh
Brown’s
Corey’s Chinese Restaurant
Stevensville
The Evans
Laurels Country Club
Kutcher's
Choreography
Juliet has choreographed two dances based on her research into Palladium Era Mambo, Fragments of a Salsa History (with Sean Wilson, 2007) and Ritmos de Posibilidad (2009).Below are short excerpts from each piece with comparison footage from Palladium Era dancers embedded into the shot.
Excerpt from Fragments of a Salsa History, choreographed by Juliet McMains & Sean Wilson:
Excerpt from Ritmos de Posibilidad, choreographed by Juliet McMains:
Credits:
The photographs on the website page headers are from left to right:
Mike Vázquez and Aníbal Vásquez as the Mambo Aces (photo gift of Mike Vázquez) Jackie Danois (photo gift of Jackie Danois)
Website design by: Wren McMains, Cherryfield.net
Funding for research on Palladium mambo dancers was provided by: University of Washington Royalty Research Fund
Juliet would like to extend special thanks to: Carlos Arroyo, Fran Chesleigh, Jackie Danois, Nina Lazar, John Lucchese, Luis Maquina, Mike Greenbaum, Gene Ortiz, Roberto Roena, Steve Sands, Artie Shepard, Mike & Elita Terrace, Mike & Ana Vázquez, and David Carp whose interviews with Palladium Era dancers are archived at the Bronx Historical Society.
email: Juliet • dance-addiction.com
phone: 206-293-6915
Juliet has been teaching dance for well over two decades. She is a serial dance addict, spending her youth performing and teaching ballet and jazz before beginning a 15-year career as a competitive ballroom dancer. During this time, she developed a serious obsession with social dance forms of salsa and swing, which she taught full-time in Florida before moving to Seattle in 2006.
After being introduced to the infinite improvisational possibilities of tango by Jaimes Friedgen, Juliet soon began to focus her social dance addiction almost exclusively on tango, although she continues to enjoy dancing salsa, swing, ballet, modern, and contact improvisation. Juliet is an Associate Professor in the Dance Program at the University of Washington where she teaches studio and academic dance classes in many styles, including tango. She also teaches tango at The 8th Style School of Tango.
Juliet is also a dance scholar who has published numerous articles on ballroom, rumba, salsa, and swing. Her first book, Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry, received the Congress on Research in Dance 2008 Outstanding Publication Award. Her second book, Spinning Mambo into Salsa: Caribbean Dance in Global Commerce is due out in 2013. Juliet has a Ph.D. is Dance History and Theory from the University of California at Riverside and a B.A. in Women’s Studies from Harvard University.
QUOTED: Glamour is the central element to competitive ballroom dancing, both in doing it and the thrill of watching it. The Glamour system promises a transformation of personal identity, on any level. If you are not popular and you want to be popular, it promises that transformation. If you feel like you’re not sexually desirable, you’re too old, if you’re gay and you want acceptance in a heterosexual world, it fixes all of that. The machine does this through dangling objects and ideas really close so that you can touch them, but always keeping them at distance. So the promise is actually never fulfilled. Glamour doesn’t work unless it’s a fantasy. It has to continually taunt you with this fantasy that you’re going to fulfill it.
Permission to Follow
Interview with Juliet McMains
BY NONA WILLIS-ARONOWITZ
14 February 2007
POPMATTERS TALKS TO DANCER AND AUTHOR JULIET MCMAINS ABOUT HOW THE FORCES DRIVING DANCESPORT MIRROR AMERICAN NATIONAL IDENTITY: DESIRE FOR BOTH PASSIONATE ABANDON AND STEADFAST RULES, OBSESSION WITH SELF-IMPROVEMENT AND COMFORTABLE GENDER ROLES, AND CRAVING FOR A LITTLE THING CALLED GLAMOUR.JULIET MCMAINS AND RICK ELLIOTT AT THE EMERALD BALL, MAY, 2003
PHOTO: PARK WEST PHOTOGRAPHY
Admit it: even if you’re not a woman under 35, you still remember how obsessed America was with Dirty Dancing. The star-crossed lovers, the energized Mambo scenes, the moment in which watermelon-toting Baby is seduced by the working class world of soulful gyrating—it’s an irresistible story driven by its sexually charged dance scenes.
So the next time you hear that ABC’s Dancing with the Stars’ season finale pulled in 27 million viewers a few weeks ago, don’t act so surprised. In a world where gender roles and racial categories are constantly up for debate, America has re-embraced the most tried-and-true form of courtship: ballroom dancing. Juliet McMains, in her new book Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry, studies this subculture-cum-national fascination in light of ABC’s celebreality surprise hit.
cover art
GLAMOUR ADDICTION: INSIDE THE AMERICAN BALLROOM DANCE INDUSTRY
JULIET MCMAINS
(WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS)
AMAZON
Every week on the show, the viewer-watched stars—loveable D-list ones like Mario Lopez or Joey Lawrence—learn and perform dance numbers with professional competitive ballroom dancers. Then, in true American Idol form, the fan dialed the number they see on their screen and vote for their favorite couple. Once they unglued their eyes from the TV set, this viewer may have grabbed the latest issue of US Weekly to find out which couple is starting a hot-and-heavy romance behind the scenes. And after watching a juicy episode, couples and singles were often motivated to sign up for salsa or waltz lessons, participating in the 40 percent spike in ballroom dance school enrollment since Dancing‘s premiere in the summer of 2005.
America has gone through a handful of dance booms in the 20th century, and evidently, we are in the midst of another one. At once writing a social history and an empathetic exposé, Juliet McMains grapples with the pleasures and addictions of ballroom dance from the perspective of an insider. She is not only a dance historian at the University of Washington, but a dancer in the world of professional competitive ballroom dance—rechristened in the 1980s as “DanceSport” in a successful attempt to be accepted as an official Olympic sport.
PopMatters spoke with McMains by phone about how the forces driving DanceSport mirror our national identity: our desire for both passionate abandon and steadfast rules, our obsession with self-improvement and comfortable gender roles, and our craving for a little thing called Glamour.
You describe the appeal of the ballroom dance industry as Glamour Addiction. Can you explain what that is? Is that why people are so drawn to a reality show about ballroom dancing?
Glamour is the central element to competitive ballroom dancing, both in doing it and the thrill of watching it. The Glamour system promises a transformation of personal identity, on any level. If you are not popular and you want to be popular, it promises that transformation. If you feel like you’re not sexually desirable, you’re too old, if you’re gay and you want acceptance in a heterosexual world, it fixes all of that. The machine does this through dangling objects and ideas really close so that you can touch them, but always keeping them at distance. So the promise is actually never fulfilled. Glamour doesn’t work unless it’s a fantasy. It has to continually taunt you with this fantasy that you’re going to fulfill it.
So I think that show just finally hit the right formula for capturing the interest of the American public. This whole sensibility—constantly desiring more and more, and craving fantasy—is very much part of American culture. Hollywood is a really big part of it, and Dancing with the Stars capitalizes on it as well. Viewers can feel this vicariously through the dancers and celebrities. It’s the combination of that viewer saying, “Wow, this person’s only had a week to learn this, so I could do it too,” with a celebrity—a professional performer—being good enough so that it’s actually entertaining to watch. And, of course, Americans really like competition. It’s the mode of our entire culture. It’s how capitalism works, it’s how our kids are raised in school—we’re constantly taught to compete.
So is the rise in enrollment in ballroom dancing schools driven by this Glamour they see enacted in the show?
Yes, partly. Even the next day after a particular show airs, people will call the studios all hyped to learn whatever dance they saw on the show the night before. Obviously the dances on the show can’t be learned in real life in a week. It’s impossible. But suddenly people have all these fantasies that they’re going to be able to do that, and want to enter this kind of seductive fantasy world.
But ballroom dancing seems so arcane—why are people so into it now?
There’s a lot of anxiety in our culture about dating and increased STDs—especially 10 or 15 years ago with AIDS—and ballroom dancing is a safe, non-threatening way to interact with the opposite sex. Lately there has been an enormous fluidity of gender roles and people not knowing how to relate to the opposite sex. People talk about returning to traditional gender roles and family values, and for some people, this is increasingly becoming a way to do that, because it’s so structured for them. The gender roles are so clearly laid out, literally even taught in books—“here’s how to be a successful man, here’s how to be a desirable woman.” How comforting is that? I’m always shocked—and I guess it was true for me, too—that even my students in college who seem to identify strongly as feminists and independent seem to find a comfort in playing this feminine role, having permission to follow for three minutes.
The tabloids have been all over the “real-life romances” of some of the stars on the show. In your book, you often talk about overlapping personal lives of partners and the sexually charged environment of ballroom dancing. Is it common for partners to turn into couples, or is that aspect romanticized for reality TV?
Oh, no it’s not romanticized ... it’s incredibly common in real life for the boundaries to get crossed. It’s almost guaranteed that a student will think they’re in love with their teacher, especially when it’s a professional-amateur pairing, like on Dancing with the Stars. The teacher is showing them how to move in a way that they’ve never moved before. They’re feeling amazing physical sensations they’ve never felt before, and they’re looking into the eyes of this usually very attractive, physically and socially adept, suave individual. It’s easy to confuse the love of dance with the love of the dance teacher.
But the situation with Dancing with the Stars, where the student is also a celebrity, there’s some sort of mutual fascination between teacher and student. A real-life romance between a dancer and a celebrity makes for a great tabloid story, and creates an even more glamorous world for the audience of Dancing with the Stars.
Is this promise of sexual tension intentional—to keep the student coming back?
Yes, the dance teachers know they have to foster that false association, because that’s part of what keeps the student hooked and paying for more lessons. DanceSport is incredibly expensive. The lessons can be anywhere from 50, 100, even 200 dollars an hour. But the teacher doesn’t always want the student to get too involved and cross that line. Most studios have a strict rule about no dating between students and teachers. But this is broken all the time.
You discuss in your book that many of the male dance competitors are gay, even though they are in a hyper-heterosexual role. Is this something that is in the forefront and readily accepted in the industry?
Everyone knows who’s gay; it is really part of the landscape. People are completely open about it, although they won’t put it in print. We just can’t write about it.
A don’t ask, don’t tell sort of thing?
It’s not even that, because it’s common knowledge, there’s not anyone to tell. I guess I probably shouldn’t “out” who’s gay on Dancing with the Stars—but I know. Everyone knows in the ballroom dance industry. It’s accepted and acknowledged. But for some reason it’s never plainly written about.
What kind of people attend DanceSport competitions? Is there a subculture based around going to these shows?
Not in the US, except maybe in Utah. Utah has a really large participation by youth and it’s part of the culture there. But the rest of the country, people who attend are other competitors, so the audience is just other students or teachers. It’s just too expensive for the general public.
Juliet McMains with Sonny Perry
Photo by Dave Head
Utah? Why would DanceSport be so popular in Utah?
The Mormon Church fully supports ballroom dancing. They fund the ballroom dance program at Brigham Young University, the biggest ballroom dance program of any university in the country, by a long shot. They support dancing as a way for their young people to meet each other. It’s sort of a courting mechanism. It’s surprising because of how overtly sexual ballroom dancing can be ... but they do practice it slightly differently. They have more stringent dress codes in the costumes, things like that.
Do you think these competitions could eventually become a mainstream event in the United States?
Maybe. It’s not yet something that people are willing to pay a lot for. Like with football, for instance, people will pay a lot to go watch a football game, because it is part of the American culture. People do pay to see the ballet, because it’s associated with a high-class position. Ballroom dance competition doesn’t have that status, but maybe that’ll change. I mean, even though ballroom dancing is a performance of class, it sort of hovers between class and trash. The costumes are classy but also Vegas-style showgirl. Ballroom dancing in general has had this class tension for a while—having elements of high society and low society.
As a Harvard graduate, in what ways did you experience this class tension?
Early on when I first made the leap from amateur to professional ballroom dancer, I didn’t fit in with other DanceSport professionals. Ballroom dance teachers in the US rarely have a college education. Most of them come from a working class family background. My colleagues didn’t understand why I would want to use my Harvard degree to pursue a career in ballroom dancing. I remember one friend noting, “We’re all trying to get out of this business and you’re trying to get in.” I’m sure she thought I was terribly naive about the harsh realities of life as a DanceSport professional. And I probably was. But I did eventually learn how to become fluent in that social setting and made friends in time.
What do you mean by “harsh realities”?
Sometimes, being a professional ballroom dancer feels like being a prostitute. You are selling your body in a sexual way. You’re a servant to the person who’s hiring you, even when you’re the teacher. A teacher has power as being the source of knowledge but they’re getting directly paid. That feels particularly so if you’re a professional being hired to escort your amateur student to a competition. It just didn’t feel like a high-class job. It was weird for me, from where I came from. There’s not a broad support system.
I experienced the Glamour Machine from the two ends of the spectrum. On one hand, I had enough money to go from amateur to pro, so that made it easier. On the other hand, the way I looked and was raised violated the norms of the Glamour Machine, these sexual dynamics, so it was even more apparent to me than others that this Machine can’t deliver what it promises. It was frustrating.
So is the dynamic between students and teachers often tense because one is from a working class background and one is usually wealthy?
Well, no, it’s more like the students and teachers use each other to fulfill parts which each are missing. The teacher’s got a beautiful body and dance movement, more socially adept because they’ve learned all these social codes through their training. There’s a culture where you greet the students with a kiss on the cheek and there’s this performance of a social behavior where everyone must be polite. There is some sort of mutual fascination and dependence. The industry needs to be financed, and it is financed if there are glamorous bodies to desire. Of course, with Dancing with the Stars, the dynamic is different—they’re not paying the teachers. They’re all paid by ABC. That’s a really important aspect taken out of the teacher-student relationship.
You have a chapter in your book about brownface, about how bronzers and skin darkeners are a performance of Latin-ness. Can you explain that?
I draw parallels between painting light skin darker for these competitions and blackface minstrelsy. Painting the skin darker than it naturally is implies that I am “performing” Latin-ness. This is primarily done in the Latin dances, because there’s the most skin exposed. I was blown away in Dancing with the Stars when Monique, who is an African-American woman, said that even she did the skin darkening. It’s so much part of the culture that even if your skin is already dark, you gotta do it more.
But the thing is, there is no DanceSport in Latin America, so the idea of performing Latin dances is just misleading. These dances bear very little resemblance to social dancing in Latin America. So I don’t object to the process of brownface itself, so much as what it’s wrapped up in. Of course any culture is going to grow and change, and when a dance moves from one country to another it’s going to adapt, and I don’t think that’s inherently bad. The problem is when the American dance industry becomes the superior authority on what is Latin dance. I performed DanceSport on television in Nicaragua, and people thought it was beautiful, but they had no idea what it was.
But at the same time, you write that some people refer to DanceSport as a racial utopia, where all races can come together through their common love of dance. Some say that the bronzer is just stage makeup; it’s not a racial thing. What would you say to those people?
I think that ballroom dancing, and the entertainment industry in general, is about glossing over all unpleasantness in life—that’s part of the glamour. Of course the industry is going to downplay the negative. Race is a really touchy subject in the US. So to even suggest that DanceSport has any racist aspects at all is so offensive to people that they don’t want to even consider it. I think Monique, on Dancing with the Stars, said she thought it was funny, but people are scared to talk about race.
But I know Latinos wonder, “Why are these people dressed up this way and dancing like this when these dances aren’t the dances that we do?” And African-Americans wonder, “Why are there no black people doing this?” Although Dancing with the Stars makes a huge effort to include African-Americans, at least the stars on the show. But there are almost no African-Americans participating in DanceSport in the US.
You write that the persistent appeal of Glamour reveals America’s fundamental optimism for a better future, but that its seduction can be destructive. Is this your comment on the entertainment industry in general?
I do think that what I write about is applicable to much of American culture. People want to be carried away by something that offers an escapist route to the drudgeries and realities of life. Both the dance shows on TV and the dance lessons offer this. I don’t think that’s such a terrible thing—sometimes it’s necessary for survival. But I think we’ve gotten so obsessed with the glamour that people are really missing something. If people are more interested—and they are—in Dancing with the Stars than the upcoming election or in the war in Iraq, I think there could be some dangerous consequences.
Dance Week: Juliet McMains On DanceSports' Addictive Glamour
Juliet McMains headshot After a childhood of ballet, tap, and jazz dance lessons, Juliet McMains was mesmerized the first time she attended a professional ballroom-dance exhibition. "There must have been a man in the partnership, but I only remember the woman," she writes in her 2006 book, Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry. "She was unbearably sexy and sophisticated, and I made up my mind right then and there to become the heroine I imagined her to be." McMains had discovered the glamour to which she soon became addicted, a "perpetual longing" for the perfection she glimpsed in that dance.
I suppose my initial fascination with ballroom dance sprang largely from the romance it portrayed, its impossible promise of happiness and acceptance, the assurance that every woman would be accessorized with an adoring male partner, the clothes that signified such elegance and classiness, the inflated importance of each motion of an arm or an eyebrow—in short, the Glamour of it all.
As a Harvard undergraduate, Juliet did, in fact, become a successful competitive dancer—not the typical Cambridge extracurricular activity. She eventually turned pro, teaching in studios in Boston, California, and Florida, and winning championships in the U.S. and Canada before retiring in 2003, the year she received her Ph.D. in dance history and theory from the University of California-Riverside. She now teaches at the University of Washington. As both a scholar and a participant, she agreed to share some of her insights into the allure of DanceSport, the world of competitive ballroom dancing.
DG: Dancing with the Stars is wrapping up its eighth season. What do you think its attraction is for people who don't themselves dance? What do you think of the way it portrays ballroom dance?
JM: The show’s portrayal of personal transformation through hard work and perseverance in the face of physical and emotional adversity is pretty seductive. I don’t think the show would work without all the shots of contestants struggling, falling, and crying in rehearsal. Seeing celebrities, who are usually portrayed in some idealized state, at their most vulnerable is perhaps the most important aspect of the formula. I also think the wide variety of contestants ensures that viewers of any background can relate to someone. The balance of different ages, races, professions, body types, and social backgrounds is quite clever in this regard. I also think the wide range of contestants’ natural dance abilities is pretty important. Each season, there is at least someone who is so awkward that living room viewers can be assured that they could do better than him or her. So fans can relate not only to the contestants, but they can becomes judges themselves. And of course the glamorous costumes and bodies are essential.
I think it portrays ballroom dance with a touch of irony and less seriousness than the ballroom dance industry takes itself. I think this is a healthy thing. Ironically, because they take themselves less seriously, they have managed to make ballroom dancing much more important to the general American public than the ballroom industry has ever done. It’s not mastery over the “right way” to dance that makes dancing powerful. Its power is in its ability to transform people as they get in touch with their own bodies.
My big complaint about the show is the music they choose for the Latin dances. It’s almost never Latin music and completely unrelated to the genre of dance they’re supposedly portraying. Latin dances are defined by their relationship to a particular style of music, so to extract the steps from the music/dance complex and call these Latin dances is a gross misrepresentation of Latin dance.
Juliet McMains Radim Lanik DG: In your book, you write about how your partner in Florida designed and made some "amazing dresses" for you. But, you say, "It was never as much fun being in the dress as it was imagining being in the dress, touching it from afar." What did you picture from afar? What did the dresses represent in your imagination?
JM: To me, the dresses represented perfect mastery of the technique, a perfectly disciplined body. I’m sure there was some conflation of that perfect body with fulfillment of emotional needs. If my body had achieved perfect mastery over movement, any feelings of inadequacy would vanish, my desire would be fulfilled, and I would be blissfully happy. It seems so naïve, but I suspect we’re all susceptible to similar fantasies.
DG: You point out several times that DanceSport has no backstage. How does that affect how participants and observers perceive the performances? Can a dance ever seem truly graceful and ideal if you see the dancers "off stage" before and afterwards?
JM: But the catch is that the professional dancers are never “off stage.” They know that they must always perform their glamorous identity even when they are not dancing. This is why I think that DanceSport’s Glamour Machine is particularly pernicious. Professionals loose touch with any experience of themselves other than the Glamorous ideal they’ve learned to perform.
DG: You're both a scholar/analyst of dance and a teacher/participant. How do those roles conflict? How do they complement each other?
JM: They conflict in that I really couldn’t continue to participate as a competitor in the DanceSport system once I had come to these conclusions. As a teacher, it means that I also have a hard time encouraging my students to compete if I think it’s going to be unhealthy for them. But I still continue to teaching ballroom dancing, and I do think there are ways to participate in competitions that are healthier than what I’ve described in my book, so I do hope that my experience can help others find a different way to interact with the system.
Juliet McMains Rick Elliott 2003 DG: To an outsider, especially a pale outsider like me, one of the strangest conventions of dance competitions is the spray tan. What is that all about?
JM: Participants will tell you it’s just makeup to make pale skin look better under stage lights. But I think there are many other levels. Many Americans and Europeans have internalized the idea that tanned white skin is more beautiful than pale skin, which is linked to the fact that most people work now indoors and do not have the leisure time and money to sun themselves outside. But I think the racial dimension is more troubling. When I’ve written about this practice, I’ve called it “brownface,” comparing it to blackface minstrelsy. Both are theatrical traditions in which performers paint their skin darker to perform stereotyped caricatures of a racial or ethnic group that has less power than the performers themselves. White competitors are putting on brownface to compete in Latin dances where they perform stereotypes of oversexed, overemotional Latinos. The ballroom Latin dances are not actually dances that are practiced in Latin America, but are American and European reinterpretations of them. So it’s not just the tan I’m worried about, but this history of appropriation and perpetuation of harmful stereotypes that it’s tied up in.
DG: You write that "The power of Glamour," by which you mean the "Glamour system" of DanceSport, "is located in its ability to suspend consumers in a state of perpetual longing, intensifying their desire by dangling symbols of its fulfillment within sight while simultaneously preventing its ultimate satisfaction." What are people longing for? What are those symbols?
JM: I think what people are really after are basic human emotional needs like love, recognition, validation, acceptance, and companionship. Almost any commodity can be associated with one of those needs so that students believe if they buy a dress or more dance lessons or a competition or the right dance shoes those needs will be fulfilled. It’s the basic premise of advertising, really. I just think it’s intensified by the DanceSport system. One of my students told me that she’s learned this same principle in her marketing classes. “Imagine how much more successful your marketing campaign could be if you spent hours in the arms of your customers,” I told her.
[Juliet McMains and Radim Lanik, Sarasota Dance Spectacular 2001, by Alliance Consulting. Juliet McMains and Rick Elliott, Florida Superstars 2003, by Park West Photography. These photos and more from Juliet McMain's site at Dance-Addiction.com.]
Posted by Virginia Postrel on May 12, 2009 in Interviews, Dance, Glamour Defined
3/10/17, 3:35 PM
Print Marked Items
Spinning Mambo into Salsa: Caribbean Dance in
Global Commerce. Juliet McMains. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015. 409 pp
Rachel Newcomb
Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. 21.2 (July 2016): p377. From Book Review Index Plus. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jlca.12224
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Newcomb, Rachel. "Spinning Mambo into Salsa: Caribbean Dance in Global Commerce. Juliet McMains. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015. 409 pp." Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, vol. 21, no. 2, 2016, p. 377+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA462735916&it=r&asid=55c829d8b9835d9639619facde6cb8f6. Accessed 10 Mar. 2017.
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McMains, Juliet. Spinning mambo into salsa: Caribbean dance in global commerce
S.E. Friedler
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1178. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Friedler, S.E. "McMains, Juliet. Spinning mambo into salsa: Caribbean dance in global commerce." CHOICE:
Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1178. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661581&it=r&asid=41e13de7199b4e8de876696e0ee12a9a. Accessed 10 Mar. 2017.
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Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry
Sherill Dodds
Dance Research Journal.
40.1 (Summer 2008): p86-88. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Dodds, Sherill. "Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry." Dance Research Journal, vol.
40, no. 1, 2008, pp. 86-88. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA181446543&it=r&asid=92e2898cf16b64229d3e1cea220bb3f3 Accessed 10 Mar. 2017.
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Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry
Ellen Gainor
Theatre Journal.
59.4 (Dec. 2007): p702. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gainor, Ellen. "Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry." Theatre Journal, vol. 59, no. 4,
2007, p. 702+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA176237322&it=r&asid=8ec48157ccd07849f4b9f426d812599e. Accessed 10 Mar. 2017.
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Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry
L.K. Rosenberg
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 44.11 (July 2007): p1923. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Rosenberg, L.K. "Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry." CHOICE: Current Reviews for
Academic Libraries, July 2007, p. 1923. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA167002700&it=r&asid=f5da41dce2f09fc51162d4e9b3ce9714. Accessed 10 Mar. 2017.
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'Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry'
Nina C. Ayoub
The Chronicle of Higher Education.
53.13 (Nov. 17, 2006): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2006 Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc. http://chronicle.com/section/About-the-Chronicle/83
Full Text:
Byline: NINA C. AYOUB
This week millions of Americans will tune in for the results of a long-awaited vote: the finals of Dancing With the Stars. The ABC television show, which pairs professional ballroom dancers with B-list or lower celebrities, is a top- rated hit with as many as 20 million viewers per show.
Watching, many who don't know a ballroom pasodoble from a ballet pas de deux have come to enjoy a world of dancing where no limb extension is too extreme or number of rhinestones too great. It's a world that Juliet McMains knows well. "I am a Glamour addict, struggling to stay clean," writes the scholar, an assistant professor in the dance program at the University of Washington.
Her rueful perspective is evident in Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry (Wesleyan University Press). The author uses a capitalized "Glamour" to identify both the engine and the commodity of the industry. In Ms. McMains's study of ballroom's political economy, cap-T theorists such as Judith Butler and Mikhail Bakhtin take a turn. But especially interesting are ethnographic tidbits that draw on her own experiences as a DanceSport professional. (DanceSport, she notes, is the name given to competitive ballroom in the 1980s in a bid to be recognized as a sport in the Olympics.)
What Americans know as ballroom dance was standardized in Britain and stripped of nearly every element of improvisation, notes the author. Exploring that process, she tracks the footprint approach of such impresarios as Arthur Murray. Yet Murray and his ilk also preached ballroom for self-transformation, an idea that continues to sell. Ms. McMains describes how the concept intersects with ballroom's gender, racial, class, and even immigrant politics as a wave of Eastern Europeans have come to dominate.
Spotlighting Latin ballroom, she draws parallels between blackface minstrelsy of the 19th century and "brownface" today. White competitors, she writes, slather on such products as "Profi-Tan-intensive-Latin-Color" to perform dances divorced from their origins. A ballroom rumba, for example, bears little resemblance to the rumbas of a Cuban dance hall, departing in stance, movement, and overall playfulness. Instead, Latin ballroom "borrows some of the passion and sexuality associated with Latin dancing without forfeiting the class and racial privilege by which ballroom dancing is defined."
Another delicate topic is the "pro-am" couple. Most dancers struggle to make a living. One solution is to be paid to be the partner of an amateur in competitions. Ms. McMains describes how studios cultivate such desires by trading on sexuality and fantasy. "The system, relies on students' continual misinterpretation of a teacher's touch."
By NINA C. AYOUB
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Ayoub, Nina C. "'Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry'." The Chronicle of Higher
Education, 17 Nov. 2006. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
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QUOTED: McMains commendably privileges ballroom as a movement practice that deserves attention for the way it produces and responds to specific cultural issues within its contexts of production and consumption. It is clearly a rich field of inquiry as, throughout the course of the book, McMains elucidates [End Page 86] how Glamour, as a power mechanism produced through the DanceSport industry, calls into question concepts of desire, class, economy, competition, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, race, and nationality. More importantly, she is specifically concerned with how these phenomena are created, enacted, negotiated, and destabilized through the body.
Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry (review)
Sherril Dodds
From: Dance Research Journal
Volume 40, Number 1, Summer 2008
pp. 86-88
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Reviewed by
Sherril Dodds
Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry by Juliet McMains. 2006. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England. 268, 8 color plates, 25 illustrations. $26.95 cloth.
In keeping with the title of this book, Glamour Addiction, the front cover depicts an ideal image of slim physiques, a glittering rhinestone dress, precision makeup, gleaming manicures, and the perfect coiffures of a male-female couple locked in a tight ballroom clinch. It is this highly constructed representation of poise and beauty that Juliet McMains draws upon as the basis for her examination and critique of the ballroom dance industry. In the preface McMains positions herself within the research through a frank personal narrative of her aspiration to become a “DanceSport” (competition ballroom) star as a young woman. She provides a detailed and painful account of the financial, emotional, corporeal, and temporal investment ploughed into the desire for “Glamour,” which frequently eluded her through a combination of pragmatics and bad luck. Given that it is only within the last decade or so that scholars within dance studies have seriously begun to address those dance forms that fall within the domain of popular culture, it is a pleasure to see the publication of a book that focuses upon an area of dance practice that has often suffered derision, principally from outside its community of practitioners, for its “fake smiles,” “gaudy costumes,” and “exaggerated posturings.”
McMains commendably privileges ballroom as a movement practice that deserves attention for the way it produces and responds to specific cultural issues within its contexts of production and consumption. It is clearly a rich field of inquiry as, throughout the course of the book, McMains elucidates [End Page 86] how Glamour, as a power mechanism produced through the DanceSport industry, calls into question concepts of desire, class, economy, competition, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, race, and nationality. More importantly, she is specifically concerned with how these phenomena are created, enacted, negotiated, and destabilized through the body.
In spite of the wealth of ideas that emerge within this research, I have some reservations about the methodological approach and the theoretical framing of the volume. In the introduction McMains refers to “participant observation” and “ethnographic data” as key components of her methodology. Although McMains has undoubtedly had a vast amount of performance and teaching experience within competition and social ballroom dance, and thus gained valuable interactions within this dancing community, her research departs from the type of work one might traditionally expect from field-based studies. For instance, while she recounts her own involvement in the ballroom scene, she says very little about the self-reflexive issue of researching “at home” and how that impacts on the research. Although she occasionally draws upon interview data to substantiate an observation, there is a general absence of the participants’ voices constituting this study. She also chooses to draw on filmic representations of ballroom dance to illuminate popular perceptions of the ballroom scene. I appreciate that media texts can offer valuable insight into potential meanings and values rooted in cultural forms and, as McMains acknowledges, this is different from ethnographic data. However, because McMains has not done any audience-reception inquiry, only her readings of these textual fictions are brought to bear on the analysis. The consequence of these strategic methodological choices is that her personal voice comes to dominate the research project.
This is perhaps most problematic in chapter 1, which seeks to provide a contextual overview of how the “Glamour machine” operates in social, economic, pedagogic, and corporeal terms throughout DanceSport competition. In this chapter she creates a series of “composite fictional characters” loosely based on certain people and identities that she has come across in the ballroom scene. Although she suggests the rationale for this is a desire to protect anonymity of real individuals and that no theoretical framework can sum up the complexity of actual people, the use of fictional characters removes the rigor of this work from any kind of grounded reality. Significantly, within the field of cultural studies, which she notes as influential in the direction of her work, over the past couple of decades there has been a shift from textual...
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Reviewed by
Sarah Town
juliet mcmains. Spinning Mambo into Salsa: Caribbean Dance in Global Commerce. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 409 pp. ISBN: 978-0-19-932464-4.
The Caribbean dance called salsa has inspired a small flood of English-language scholarly publications in the past decade. In journals, edited volumes, and monographs, scholars have addressed the dance’s local and transnational aspects (e.g., Hutchinson 2014; Pietrobrunough 2006), its relationship to Puerto Rican and broader Latino identities (e.g., García 2013; Flores 2004), and female dancers’ experience of its gendered structure and aesthetics (e.g., Borland 2009; Skinner 2008), among other themes. Juliet McMains, herself a seasoned ballroom dancer and longtime salsera, joins this list with her most recent monograph, Spinning Mambo into Salsa. Examining salsa from the mambo era of the 1950s through its commodification and stylistic consolidation at the turn of the millennium, she enriches the existing literature with myriad details culled from personal experience, interviews, and archival research. Photos from her fieldwork and archival sources further enhance her narrative.
One of McMains’s principal goals is to address how processes of commodification have affected salsa dance culture. She does this in a few ways, scrutinizing salsa history and practice in three key US cities and their relationship to the “international salsa industry” (11). Thus, she elaborates on the emergence of the salsa congress and “congress style” salsa (265), and coins a new term to express concern over the impact of recording technology on dance culture in recent decades. Kineschizophonia, “the separation of dance from the performance of music for which it was made” (50), is introduced in the first chapter, and its echoes reappear throughout the book as McMains discusses developments in the dance that may have been facilitated by its separation from live musical performance, or worries—often through the nostalgic voices of interlocutors from older generations—that younger dancers have lost the crucial connection to live music. Aside from these mentions, though, the long and rather ominous term remains relatively undeveloped, leaving many questions answered incompletely or not at all. For example, how is live music qualitatively different from recorded music, from the perspective of dancers of different generations? What different practices, experiences, and aesthetics does [End Page 251] dancing to recorded music engender? Besides developing more complex turn patterns, are there other ways in which people dance differently? Do they listen to music differently? How do these different practices and aesthetics in turn affect dance to live music, which continues as a practice in each of these cities?
In many ways, McMains’s monograph follows pathways similar to previous scholarship on salsa, taking as touchstones such themes as the on-2 dance rhythm, studio culture, Latino identities, and the experience of female dancers. Yet the oral histories and photos she assembles put flesh on countless details of social dance history—a difficult and valuable task. These layers of detail and the passion with which McMains shares them are the book’s greatest strengths. The book’s greatest weakness is the chapter on casino in Miami and Cuba. For example, pursuing the theme of gender, the author draws on limited evidence to infer erroneously a greater agency for follows (typically women) in Cuban salsa than in other styles. Further, she inaccurately conflates timba music with casino dance—a complex and historically situated relationship worthy of nuanced discussion— but then refrains from exploring the dance practices that timba incites in the context of casino, and their gendered implications. Meanwhile, her sole focus on Miami as a pole for the export of Cuban salsa leads her to ignore the role of European and Canadian investment and tourism in the development of that cultural industry.
McMains tells us that her “motivation for writing this book was to offer thousands of salsa dancers a means of relating their own personal experiences to a broader story of salsa’s rich and multifaceted history” (25). Indeed, her most passionate writing seems directed precisely toward younger dancers, whom she believes are not sufficiently aware of the history and diversity of styles contained in their dance of choice. With its depth of historical detail, in narrative and photos, and its...