An understanding of Fred Astaires work must begin with an understanding of his life, especially since Astaire danced from such a young age. Born Freidreich Emmanuel Austerlitz, Astaire was the son of immigrants. Early on in his life, after his father lost his job in the family’s hometown of Omaha, Nebraska, young Freidrich moved to New York City with his parents and sister Adele. He and Adele, who was a natural performer, were trained to become a brother-sister act off the sort then common on the New York vaudeville stage. Their act was a hit, and they played Vaudeville’s finest theaters.
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It wasn’t until several years into their career that the Astaire children began to add tap dancing into their act, and Astaire worked with many famous dancers of the time, in all genres, to become even better. Astaire and his sister appeared on Broadway beginning in 1917 and also in London, where they continued to performed to great acclaim. At this point, Astaire was considered a fantastic tap dancer, but his work was not thought of as something that could translate to film until a dance number in a play made it a hit, and Astaire was cast in the film version. That film, The Gay Divorcee, truly launched his Hollywood career. (The film was controversial due to the title-the play had been called The Gay Divorce, which was considered too scandalous for Hollywood at the time.) The film launched Astaire’s movie career, as well as his film partnership with Ginger Rogers, for which he is best known to the casual observer.
Fred Astaire at RKO
Fred Astaire made many movies in his career, but it is not merely because he is prolific that we celebrate him. In fact, his innovations in choreography and artistic freedom were just as interesting and innovative. While musicals were already a popular genre of film, they were not as we know them today. That is, the musical numbers were meant as spectacle, and were not really integrated into the plot. The Ziegfeld Follies and other movies choreographed by Busby Berkeley featured beautiful women in elaborate costumes, who sang and danced to songs in the context of a flimsy plot, if any plot was even attempted. These were much like the shows on the Vaudeville stage from which Astaire had come, but the advent of his career began to change the mode of musical theater in Hollywood for good.
Astaire’s movies began to try to combine the music and dance sequences with the plot, although this was not always as successful as in later musicals and musical films such as On the Town (a vehicle, incidentally, for another fantastic tapper, Gene Kelly.) In Astaire’s films, however, his character was always someone for whom dancing made sense, and noted dance scholar John Mueller points out that even at the start of his Hollywood career, Astaire “had given a lot of thought to the problems of integrating dance into a story” (30). In movies like The Gay Divorcee and Top Hat, Astaire’s character was suave and debonair. His dance partner in these films, Ginger Rogers, was a better actress than dancer, but the two made many films together and were a huge success for RKO, an established movie studio in the 1930s.
In these films, Astaire had almost complete control over the dances. For a star to have control over his own part was unheard of in those days, when stars could not even pick their own projects because of the confines of the studio system. RKO understood what a wonderful artist they had at their disposal, and accordingly they allowed Astaire creative freedom. He choreographed his own numbers in all forms of dance, from ballroom to tap.
Astaire was also, interestingly, in control of the way his dance sequences were shot. He liked to use a single, stationary camera and long takes to shoot dances, and famously opined that it was he who should be dancing, not the camera. In an era when few stars had control over their own roles, let alone over how their movies were shot, Fred Astaire all but acted as his own cinematographer.
Astaire’s Later Films
Fred Astaire was loath to work constantly with any one partner, even one as well-suited for him as Ginger Rogers, and after a couple of solo vehicles, he ended up eventually leaving RKO, his first studio, and making other films. This was when he did some of his most innovative work, including a number in which he used dance to conduct an orchestra, as well as perhaps his most famous solo number, “Putting on the Ritz.” At this point, two films with Rita Hayworth gave Astaire an opportunity to take steps and elements of Latin dance and work it into his routines, which today may seen fairly basic, but then was innovative. Astaire eventually retired from dancing in films, although he did make a few special appearances, memorably dancing with Gene Kelly in one of the That’s Entertainment films when in his mid-seventies.
Astaire’s Style
Fred Astaire termed his style of dance “outlaw style,” and in a way it was. In a time when African-American culture was still far outside the mainstream, Astaire worked with Bojangles Robinson and other celebrated African-American artists, incorporating the traditionally African-American soft-shoe and shuffle into his routines. Tap was an African-American specialty, and one which Astaire did much to pull into the mainstream.
He combined his interest in the typically difficult and syncopated rhythms of African-American popular dance with the stiff form of ballroom dancing that was popular toward the beginning of his career. As already mentioned, he later included Latin influences as well. Many of his numbers began with an idea inspired by the music or the plot of a film, such as dancing with his shadow in one movie. Astaire collaborated with other choreographers, but was a relentless perfectionist when it came to his dancing, controlling everything down to how many takes he insisted on if he hadn’t gotten it exactly right.
Astaire’s Masculinity
Nowadays, much of our popular culture does not consider partnered, ballroom-style dancing especially manly, although this is changing with the advent of shows like Strictly Come Dancing and Dancing with the Stars, in which people famous for something else take on the challenge of ballroom dance in a different style each week. However, Astaire was adept at choreographing dances of seduction, as in Silk Stockings, when “Astaire ‘gets somewhere’ with [Cyd] Charisse because he does succeed in luring her into dancing with him” (Cohan and Hark 49). Astaire’s dancing, even though it could be playful and fun, was also manly, even when he was dancing without a partner. This sense of the erotic possibilities of dance for the plot of a movie or merely the presentation of a song is one of Astaire’s legacies.
Astaire’s Influence on Later Musicals
One influence that Fred Astaire had as a choreographer and performer was his influence on later performers in the same genre, those who worked in the traditional musical. Gene Kelly, whose athletic style owed a lot to Astaire’s introduction of African-American rhythms to tap, called Astaire his favorite dance partner. Other dancers also cited him.
Astaire’s influence can be felt in many aspects of the later movie musical. One of these is the camera work. For example, in Singin’ in the Rain, directed by Kelly and Astaire collaborator Stanley Donen, the titular song is shot as Astaire might have wanted, with a nearly solitary camera and one very long take. The result is one of the most instantly recognizable classic sequences in the entire history of the movies, let alone of musicals. This would not have been possible without Astaire.
Fred Astaire also was possessed of a purely musical legacy in musical theater, since George and Ira Gershwin wrote many of their songs for him. While his voice was not his strongest performing asset, Astaire was truly a song and dance man: the music he sang was a part of the plot of his movies and a huge part of the machine behind his wonderful dances. Without his insistence that plot be intimately, intrinsically wrapped up in each musical number, it is unlikely that musicals like West Side Story, in which the music and dance are a huge chunk of the story, would ever have been made. Truly, Astaire influenced the finest choreographers and auteurs of the American musical.
Astaire’s Influence Later
However, only some of what makes Fred Astaire great can be seen on display in the musicals section of one’s local video store. A lot of it is closer to us, culturally, than that: it is all around us. Given Astaire’s insistence that dance and music fit together with plot, he could certainly be considered the father of the modern music video. The combination of music with plot inspired by the song and dance inspired by both is the hallmark of the best music videos, and this something that owes a lot to Astaire. Indeed, Michael Jackson and other famous artists repeatedly spoke about how indebted they were to Astaire.
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Another, in some ways even more exciting part of Astaire’s lasting legacy is his commitment to African-American dance forms. Carol J. Clover says that “a variety of sources attest to Astaire’s involvement with black tappers” (741) at a time when this was shocking, if not taboo. Astaire worked with leading African-American artists in a time when racism was alive and well in the American zeitgeist in general and Hollywood in particular. He championed their artistry and incorporated their rhythms and ideas into his own work, bringing this form of dance to a much wider audience. This sort of groundbreaking work directly paves the way for cultural touchstones like Savion Glover’s Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk,” which is a dance show that, despite depicting some difficult history and lacking the sort of linear plot common to accessible musicals that become audience favorites, has enjoyed huge success. Every kind of dance that pushes the envelope today, from modern ballet to Stomp’s use of trashcan lids, owes something to Astaire, who was unafraid to be innovative and constantly striving to add something new to the world of dance.
Conclusion
All in all, Fred Astaire’s legacy as a tap dancer, choreographer, and cultural influence can really not be underestimated. Beginning life on the vaudeville stage, Astaire rose to stardom not by chance, but due to talent and impeccable dancing. Without his fastidious insistence on purely-shot musical numbers that integrated themselves into the plot of his movie, it is likely that the musical would not have become the thriving move genre that it was, and today’s experiments with the form would be unlikely in the extreme. When Rob Marshall’s characters, be it in the Oscar-winning Chicago or in the more recent Nine, sing in their fantasies, what is realized on screen for us is something that Fred Astaire would have approved of: music and dance rising directly from plot.
Perhaps even more impressive, Astaire’s influence extends far beyond the rarefied world of the musical. At a time when social mores would have frowned upon collaboration with African-American artists, Fred Astaire’s work with tap dancers like Bojangles Robinson brought African-American dance into the mainstream. His incorporation of Latin rhythms into his ballroom dance’s was the first exposure many had to dances like the tango and Cha Cha. His constant push for the new and different in his dances is reflected today in the most creative dance work currently being choreographed and performed. It is no wonder that so many people thank Fred Astaire and credit him with their inspiration: he was, in point of fact, a unique influence in the world of dance that cannot be underestimated, in his own time or in the present day.
Works Cited and Consulted
Clover, Carol J. “Dancin’ in the Rain.” Critical Inquiry Volume 21, No. 4. (Summer, 1995) 722-747
Cohan, Steven “Fred Astaire and the Spectacle of Masculinity in the Hollywood Musical” in Cohan, Steven and Hark, Ina Rae, eds. Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema. London, UK: Routledge, 1993.
Croce, A. The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.
Mueller, John. “Fred Astaire and the Integrated Musical.” Cinema Journal. Volume 24, No. 1 (Autum, 1984) p. 28-40.
Silk Stockings. Prod. Arthur Freed, Dir. Rouben Mamoulian. (Video) MGM, 1957.
The Gay Divorcee. Prod. Pandro S. Berman, Dir. Mark Sandrich. (Video) RKO, 1934.
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