Ever wanted to do the Lindy Hop as it was swung at the Savoy Ballroom in the 1930s? To rock your hips through the mambo like dancers at the Palladium Ballroom in the ’50s? To pose as if in a vogue battle of the ’80s? All in a museum? Now’s your chance. Need a lesson? The Museum of the City of New York has you covered there, too.
In “Urban Stomp: Dreams & Defiance on the Dance Floor,” you can choose a record and put it on a turntable. So far, so ordinary. But wait. Here, spinning the record doesn’t just cue music. People — in video form — appear all around you, dancing and inviting you to join them.
The exhibition, which guides visitors through some 200 years of social dance in New York City, includes all the artifacts, photographs, wall text and video footage that you might expect in a museum show. But scattered throughout are also video monitors featuring friendly experts who teach the basics of various dance styles. The video-interactive dance floor comes at the end of the show, and the idea is that by the time you arrive there, you know a little something.
This unusual approach derives from the show’s subject. On the surface, “Urban Stomp” is about New York City as an incubator — “for either the creation of new dances or borrowing dances from other places and creating something new,” said Sarah Henry, the museum’s chief curator. But at a deeper level, it’s about what Henry called “the constant churn and creativity of New York.”
“The remixing, mashing up, a conversation of mutual influence that goes back to the 19th century, the promise of the city — all that is embodied on the dance floor,” Henry said.
The first tutorial video introduces early 20th-century ballroom dances popularized by Vernon and Irene Castle, white influencers of their day who borrowed from Black dances and collaborated with the Black ragtime musician James Reese Europe. A nearby vitrine has a few of the Castles’ instruction manuals and a lock of Irene’s hair, cut when she made the bob fashionable. You can look at those relics and then learn how to dance the fox trot and the Castle Walk.
Participation is built into the exhibition because the museum is trying to be more experiential, but also because the subject is dance. “One of the things we’re trying to solve,” Henry said, “is how to do justice to dancing in an exhibition. It doesn’t stay still. You can’t just put it in a box.”
The goal, she added, is a kind of “alchemy between the inert stuff that is quite eloquent”: an invitation to the 1860 Prince of Wales ball; a collage of fliers and tickets for salsa clubs; “and things that have three dimensions and bring the body into space” — the trumpets of Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis, Celia Cruz’s platform heels, Big Daddy Kane’s flashy track suit. “That’s the closest we can get to bringing those people here, and combined with historical footage and the instructional videos, you get the best chance of it coming to life.”
And if the dancing comes to life, so do the exhibition’s themes. As the scholar Derek L. Washington, the show’s other curator, put it, “The dance floor is a space where people are forming and reforming ideas about identity, race and gender. It’s about migration, immigration, a form of storytelling for people who might have been marginalized.”
In a sense, “Urban Stomp” is an expansion of “Rhythm & Power: Salsa in New York,” which Washington curated at the museum in 2017. That show focused on the mixture of Afro-Caribbean and European music and dance that was clumped under the umbrella term salsa in the 1960s. It looked at the influx of Puerto Rican immigrants in the 1950s and at salsa’s predecessor in the Afro-Cuban mambo craze of that time. (The show was bilingual, as is “Urban Stomp.”)
After the salsa show, Washington turned to a community-based project called “Urban Stomp: From Swing to Mambo,” which extended the story back to swing jazz and swing dances, like the Charleston and the Lindy Hop, largely developed by Black residents of Harlem in the 1920s and ’30s.
The “Urban Stomp” exhibition, stretching back into the 19th century and forward into the present, makes more connections, including the bachata and merengue of the Dominicans whose numbers surged in the 1980s and are now the city’s largest immigrant group. A section near the end clusters vogue, hip-hop and the hustle: three genres that originated around the same time (the 1960s to the ’80s) in some of the same neighborhoods (Harlem and the Bronx)
“Vogue and hip-hop and the hustle are in conversation with earlier balls,” Washington said. “Finding and creating spaces to dance, different ways of being inclusive or exclusive, different costumes and regalia.”
Giving a tour of the exhibition, Washington pointed out a dress worn at Studio 54 in the 1970s and how it resembled a tango dress in another gallery, worn by Irene Castle some 60 years before. “The changing same,” he said. Similarly, a visitor following the tutorials might notice a step learned in the swing section recurring under a different name in the hip-hop part.
Washington stressed how carefully the show attends to many kinds of diversity. Gender, race and ethnicity, of course. But there’s also diversity of age, borough and body type. The tutorials, as brief and basic as they are, also reveal diversity within each dance form: the many varieties of salsa or vogue and the distinctions among them (Salsa On2, Vogue Femme) or the hip-hop party dances of several generations (the Cabbage Patch, the Sturdy).
Most important, Washington said, was the input of leaders from each dance community. The lessons in vogue are taught by LeFierce LaBeija of the Royal House of LaBeija. Founded by Crystal LaBeija in 1972, this Royal House was the first of the ballroom houses — homes and chosen families for queer people of color.
“We are so proud to have 10 months to display who we are and what we are about,” said Jeffrey Bryant, the global overall overseer of the Royal House of LaBeija. Being in the museum, he added, “is a radical statement to say, ‘We are here and we are getting our just due.’”
“A lot of our culture is now in pop society,” he said. “We don’t mind you guys admiring it, but we would like you to know that there is a valid history. We want to take advantage of the platform to give people a little more education.”
As an example, Bryant offered the swanning drops to the floor called dips: “I would like it to be stated that Kiddie Liddah LaBeija” — Bryant’s house name — “said that it is not called the Death Drop and it is definitely not called a Shablam. It is called a dip.”
Karel Flores, one of the show’s salsa instructors, said that Afro-Latin dances like salsa “are often not even part of the conversation,” when dance history is presented. “This is a real step forward, for us to be given the place that we deserve.”
Although the exhibition can’t be exhaustive, it squeezes in many more dances in a final section called “Traditions Remixed.” Gathered here are newer city combinations: the Columbia cumbia that branched off into a New York style, the Punjabi bhangra that mixed in hip-hop, Chinatown block parties. A sign from the Urban Contradance scene reads: “Anyone Can Ask Anyone to Dance.”
“What connects from the beginning of the show to the end,” Henry said, “is that there’s no fixed thing that is dance in New York. There never was and there never will be.”
But what draws the most attention in the final room is the dance floor, inviting with its music and moving bodies, virtual or living.
“People love the dance floor,” Washington said. “And people mingling with other people in other dance communities is the whole idea.”
During the opening reception, he said, a multiethnic group of visitors danced the dabke, a form shared by several Middle Eastern peoples. “They recorded it and sent it all over, as if to say, ‘This is how the world could be if we were just able to dance with each other for a moment.”
Connected events encourage even more sharing and mixing. On April 12, there was a salsa party with live music. A vogue ball will be held on May 16, with additional events and classes in the works.
And, until “Urban Stomp” closes in February, there is that dance floor. Henry was standing next to it recently when a visitor who didn’t know she worked at the museum approached her.
“You can get out there,” the visitor told her. “Everybody can dance.”
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