The Twist- A Feminist Genealogy of Postwar Dancing [Public]

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Introduction“

The Twist” dance instruction from the liner notes of Ray Charles's 1961 album, "Do the Twist!"

The Twist was a guided missile, launched from the ghetto into the very heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion and law could never do, in writingin the heart and soul of what the Supreme Court could only write on the books.-Eldridge Cleaver,

Soul on Ice

Eldridge Cleaver, a prominent leader of the Black Panther Party, wrote these words in1968, the epoch of Sixties unrest. Prior to being struck by this ghetto-launched missile,suburbia was a monument to the Fifties

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ethos of white separatism and domestic bliss,

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Throughout this paper I will use the terms “Fifties” and “Sixties” not in correlation with their dates (1950–1959, 1960-1969), but in reference to the cultural eras they tend to connote. The Fifties (also to be referredto as the postwar era and Cold War America) will be defined as 1945-1963, or World War II through theBritish Invasion. Thus, I may refer to an event that takes place in 1962 as occurring in the Fifties. TheSixties I define as 1964-1969, or the British Invasion through the Stonewall Riots. If, however, I use

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typified on television by Cleavers of an entirely different sort.From the utopian vantage point of Beaver, Wally and June’s happy home, it seemsthe height of improbability that the postwar era would culminate in the dizzying turmoil andtantrums of 1968—the year the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive, studentprotests became violent revolts, the Democratic convention witnessed an explosion of civicdiscontent and corresponding police brutality, Richard Nixon was elected President of theUnited States, race-riots ravaged the nation’s capitol, The Beatles released their fragmentedmasterpiece “The White Album,” and Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy and AndyWarhol were shot. Poised on the verge of pandemonium, the neo-Victorian mythology,which characterizes Fifties popular culture is a rather understandable effort at zeitgeistrepudiation—but the momentum of “change” could not be derailed by denial, no matter howshrewdly it may have been marketed.Technological innovation was both cause and consequence of the twentieth century’smany political, cultural and social transformations. Extraordinary devices such as theairplane, radio and telephone exceeded the very limits of the human body, and in the postwarera, transcendence was manifest anew with the debut of the television.Gary Simpson, NBC’s Television Director, wrote in 1955:Mr. Public views that television set in his home as a 20thCentury electronic monsterthan can transport him to the ball game, to Washington D.C., to the atomic blast inNevada—and do it now. The viewer is inclined to accept it as his window to theworld, as his reporter on what is happening now—simultaneously. The miracle of television is actually Man’s ability to see at a distance while the event is happening(Spigel 1992, 99).The prefix “tele” means “distance," and with the widespread availability of “distance-

“1950s” or “1960s”, then I am referring to the actual years within the decade.

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vision” in the Fifties, the human body (particularly those bodies most confined within thedomestic space) experienced the liberation of overcoming itself in this way for the first time.What would be seen through this “window to the world” from the perspective of television executives was determined by the basic inquiry: where was watching done, whowould be watching, and when? The answers were clear enough: (mostly) middle-classsuburbia, (generally) mom in the daytime, dad at night, and the kids after school.Todd Gitlin, former president of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), recalls“the electric subcurrent of the Fifties was above all rock ‘n’ roll, the live wire that linked andbedazzled teenagers around the nation” (1993, 37), and it wouldn’t take producers long todetermine that rock ‘n’ roll should feature prominently in teen-geared afternoonprogramming. Correspondingly, sponsors didn’t fail to notice that teenage girls in particularwere not only more likely to be home directly after school to help around the house, but theywere more avid consumers generally and “responsible for the majority of record purchases”(Coates 2007, 70) in the early days of rock ‘n’ roll.

American Bandstand’s

girl-friendly dance party became an after school televisionstaple, where regardless of the distance between giddy fans at home and the teenage dancersin South Philadelphia, in 1960,

Bandstand

was the forum where they all learned how to“twist."

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Cleaver goes on to explain, “The Twist was a form of therapy for a convalescingnation."[Dancers] came from every level of society, from top to bottom, writhing pitifullythough gamely about the floor, feeling exhilarating and soothing new sensations,release from some unknown prison in which their Bodies had been encased, a sense

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The Twist refers the song, the dance and the cultural phenomenon. Generally, when I speak of the Twist, Iam gesturing towards all three simultaneously and will thus signify it as: the Twist. However, whenspecifically referring to the act of twisting, I will write: twist. When I am referring to the song alone, I willwrite: “The Twist”.