Dancing Through The Night And All That Jazz
Dancing Through the Night and All That Jazz
From the very beginning of the 1800’s, musicals and operas have always been an interesting and popular source of entertainment. With the introduction to film and the use a vitaphone in the early 1900’s, the production of musical films were created. A musical film had the actors singing songs that are related in with the storyline. In the years of silent films, musical films were unable to be produce because the audience would be unable to hear the actor’s voices. The vitaphone had the ability to record the actor’s voices and then play them back during the silent film. This device then led to the ability for actors to sing and dance because the songs would already be prerecorded. With musical films …show more content…
In the first musical, The Jazz Singer, Al Jolson just stays on the stage and sways with very minimal dance movements while he sings. Over the years, the idea of just standing and singing changes drastically. The actors then begin to do both, singing and dancing simultaneously. In The Wizard of Oz, the audience sees Dorothy and the gang singing, “Were off to See the Wizard” while walking/skipping to the beat of the song. This is where you first see the combination of both. This then leads to the 1961, very fast paced, dancing packed film, West Side Story, with choreography by Jerome Robbins. Jerome incorporates the dances into the movement on how the actors walk from the very start of the film. This film also uses a type of ballet and walts. The Sound of Music has some similarities with West Side Story including the dances for example, in both films you can fin the use of the Irish high jump and then they make their ankles meet in mid-air. The spectacle of the dance numbers in musical films have only gotten larger over the years. As the audience can see in Rocky Horror Picture, during the performance of “Time Warp”, there are many different dancing styles all put into one which can be credited to the choreographer, Peter Suschizky. Lastly, in the 2002 film, Chicago, the musical number “Cell Block Tango” does not use many props, just like the numbers found in The Jazz Singer, but it does have more movement and step-by-step placements. These are ways on how cherogrphy in musical films have stayed the same and some ascpects and changed in
From the very beginning of the 1800’s, musicals and operas have always been an interesting and popular source of entertainment. With the introduction to film and the use a vitaphone in the early 1900’s, the production of musical films were created. A musical film had the actors singing songs that are related in with the storyline. In the years of silent films, musical films were unable to be produce because the audience would be unable to hear the actor’s voices. The vitaphone had the ability to record the actor’s voices and then play them back during the silent film. This device then led to the ability for actors to sing and dance because the songs would already be prerecorded. With musical films …show more content…
In the first musical, The Jazz Singer, Al Jolson just stays on the stage and sways with very minimal dance movements while he sings. Over the years, the idea of just standing and singing changes drastically. The actors then begin to do both, singing and dancing simultaneously. In The Wizard of Oz, the audience sees Dorothy and the gang singing, “Were off to See the Wizard” while walking/skipping to the beat of the song. This is where you first see the combination of both. This then leads to the 1961, very fast paced, dancing packed film, West Side Story, with choreography by Jerome Robbins. Jerome incorporates the dances into the movement on how the actors walk from the very start of the film. This film also uses a type of ballet and walts. The Sound of Music has some similarities with West Side Story including the dances for example, in both films you can fin the use of the Irish high jump and then they make their ankles meet in mid-air. The spectacle of the dance numbers in musical films have only gotten larger over the years. As the audience can see in Rocky Horror Picture, during the performance of “Time Warp”, there are many different dancing styles all put into one which can be credited to the choreographer, Peter Suschizky. Lastly, in the 2002 film, Chicago, the musical number “Cell Block Tango” does not use many props, just like the numbers found in The Jazz Singer, but it does have more movement and step-by-step placements. These are ways on how cherogrphy in musical films have stayed the same and some ascpects and changed in