This book tells the relatively unknown story of Mura Dehn (1902- 1987) a white, Jewish dancer from Russia, once deemed among the most beautiful classical dancers in Europe, who emigrated to the United States in the 1930s. For the first time the efforts of Dehn to record, analyse and champion the development of jazz dance in America during the 1930s, 40s and 50s are brought to life. The book celebrates and explores her long-term commitment to supporting and nurturing Black American jazz dancers, and devoting her life to heralding and chronicling its innovators and creators through performance, teaching and film-making. This work includes both first-hand accounts with people who knew and worked with Dehn, including her company manager Allen Blitz, friend Eiko Otake, and notable urban dance scholars such as Sally Sommer; and material from Dehn’s archival collection in the New York Public Library. The book offers a flavour of the dance halls, the first places of social-racial integration in America, where jazz was born out of African-American social dances, and gives credence to the growing acceptance of this form of art as equivalent to classical dance and music.
