#source: bandstand the musical

[incorrect-republic-of-doyle]

Des: I'm trying my best

Jake: I know. Heartbreaking isn't it?

[broadway-shenanigans]

Nick: Guys.

Donny and Julia: What?

Nick: What is this? When did you turn into an old married couple?

[juniperss]

“First Steps First” Jessamine ‘Lark’ Waterson (OC) x Neil ‘Chick’ Harding

A/N: so I’ve really been wanting to write something for Jessamine and Chick for a while but was super anxious and self conscious about it for a couple of reasons. The first being that I don’t write much fanfiction anymore and the second is because I’m not wholly convinced I nail the atmosphere of period shows/movies. But this idea just wouldn’t leave my head so I’m biting the bullet and swallowing my doubts!

This fic takes place in episode 4 during Dye��s celebration party (I can’t get over Harding saying “single fillies”, okay?) and inspired by the song “First Steps First” from the musical Bandstand. The song they dance to is “It’s Been a Long Time” and I don’t care that this version came out in 1945, it’s my favorite LOL

also hey autocorrect pls stop changing Chick to Chuck, thanks

Word count: 1,730 words (😧)

Warnings: none, other than the fact I don’t know how the military works so please ignore inaccuracies🤡😂 this is about the FICTIONAL version of Col. Harding

I saw that you said it was okay to tag you in OC stuff @rosies-riveters, so I hope this is alright and that you enjoy!

“Pardon my brashness, dear

Seeing you standing here

Dancing's more customary

For a soirée."

As much as Jessamine Waterson took pride in her work as a nurse on the Thorpe Abbots base there was no denying the fact that it was grueling, emotionally draining and often went without the accolades that came with other roles in the war. And while most days she was just fine with that, today had been particularly tiresome and Jessamine was glad for the change of pace the evening’s festivities allowed. The anxious energy that had gripped every person on the airbase had been exchanged for easy laughter, jokes, and celebration. After all, it wasn’t every day a pilot and crew successfully flew 25 missions. 

As she sat with Beth and Ginny, an American nurse and mechanic respectively, who had become two of her fastest friends, listening idly to them chat about the dances they’d returned from moments ago, it took much of Jessamine’s will to avoid allowing her gaze to linger for too long on the man who had just entered the room. She had spent months chiding herself for the way her heart started racing at the mere thought of Colonel Harding being so near and despite the effort she put into acting completely normal on the instances their paths crossed, she feared her feelings were all too transparent. 

 It was inconvenient to have a crush during war and even more inconvenient that it was on a man who was not only a good handful of years older than she was, but compounded by the fact that he was an American soldier. An American soldier who was dashingly handsome and confident, who had just looked in her direction and caught her staring. Jessamine busied herself with the drink in front of her trying to ignore the heat burning in her ears.

 “Oh well that was just adorable.” 

Beth’s voice with it’s charming southern accent was usually a source of soothing reassurance and good advice, was now riddled with mischief and good natured humor now that the two women’s attention was focused on their friend. “You know there’s no shame in a little flirting, a little conversation. Why don’t you go ask him to dance?”

Ginny nodded in agreement, leaning across the table, “It’s not like you’ve never spoken to him before,” before turning conspiratorially to Beth, “remember how she gave him pain medication for his headache that one time.” 

Jessamine’s hands came up to cover her face, the full weight of her body resting on her elbows as she suppressed a groan and a laugh. Of course the two of them remembered the  first time she had met the Colonel; a simple exchange of names and him asking for something for a headache. Jessamine, partly sleep deprived and partly fighting off the butterflies in her stomach fumbling with the bottle before spilling a handful of pills across the floor of the nurses station.

It certainly wasn’t necessarily the most romantic or charming first meeting on her part, but Col. Harding had only smiled before kneeling and helping her gather the runaways. There had been a quip about how she could’ve just said no that resulted in flustered laughter from her and another grin from him. And her friends hadn’t let her live it down since she confided about it to them the following day over breakfast. 

“I’m surprised he said anything to me after that.” Jessamine admitted and revealed her face to her friends. Though there had been more interactions with the Colonel after that, they remained confined to mostly professional settings save for a few pleasantries while off duty. “And to answer your question, Beth, I’m certainly not going to bother him and ask for a dance!” 

Ginny rolled her brown eyes and tossed her head back in a sign of exasperation, looking up to the ceiling pantomiming someone experiencing a great tragedy which in turn caused another round of laughter at the table. “Well, if he asked you to dance, would you say yes?” Beth finally asked.  This time all the hints of teasing had left her friend’s tone and there was nothing but curiosity and sincerity. 

Jessamine nodded slowly, allowing the fantasy to tease at the corner of her mind just for a moment but unable to answer because just as she parted her lips to reply another voice cut in. 

“Excuse me, ladies.” Colonel Harding’s voice sent a rush of heat through Jessamine’s body and she felt her posture straighten. She pried her eyes off of Beth to glance up, up, up at the tall soldier now standing beside their table and found that, despite him addressing them all, he was looking determinedly at her alone. “I don’t mean to interrupt, but I was wondering if I could steal Miss Waterson for a dance.”

“You’re not interrupting at all, sir.” Ginny chimed in, eyes flitting from the Colonel to Jessamine, “In fact, we were just talking about how much Jessamine was wanting to dance.”

Oh, that Ginny was going to get stern talking to later, Jessamine promised herself, but at that moment she was already standing. Hardings’ hand reached out and enveloped hers as he guided her to the dance floor. 

"Isn't the band sublime?

And as it happens I'm

Just in the mood to do

A two-step, Do step

Out on the floor with me.”

The two of them found a place surrounded by three or four other couples just as the band changed from the upbeat, two step to a slower tune that made Jessamine’s heart pitter faster. If Harding felt any nervousness at the now much more intimate situation the change of song put the two of them in, he didn’t show it. Instead he wrapped an arm around her waist with the ease and confidence of a man who knew what he was doing. Her breath hitching just slightly before she felt him placing the flat of his hand lightly, respectfully against her back. 

Every nerve was firing at once, each hair on her arms standing on end, she was sure of it as her mind raced. She was trying to remember just how one slow danced fighting through the nervousness, when she felt the firmness of her foot under her own. 

“I’m so sorry, colonel.” The apology came out high pitched and squeaky and with the attempt to pull away from the man in front of her. But Harding kept his gentle grip and shook his head.

 “It’s not the first time someone’s stomped on my foot. At least this time it wasn’t on purpose. And Neil is fine, or Chick if you think Neil is too familiar.” 

There he goes again, Jessamine thought, being so effortlessly charming and saving me from my own awkwardness. Sometime in the desperate squeak of an apology she had been repositioned to properly be dancing. One soft hand held in his much larger one, the other placed on his shoulder, and her face precariously close to his as she found herself peering up at him. The rhythm was easy to find with Neil leading and the familiar trumpet crooning at the stage and Jessamine had to fight to keep her eyes from closing. 

“Might you be charmingly coerced

No need to be so shy

Take reassurance, I

Know how to guide you through

The worst steps, first steps first

 “It’s not too late to admit you picked the wrong dancing partner.” Jessamine finally found her voice and the confidence to add just a bit of a teasing tone to it, a smile itching at the corner of her lips. Her cheek had come to rest just slightly against his shoulder as they swayed to the music and as a result her voice was slightly muffled by the material of his dress shirt.

 “You’re selling yourself short. It’s been at least a minute since we’ve had another incident. You’re a natural.” Each time he spoke she could feel the rumbling of his chest against hers and her head felt dizzy with the warmth and solidity of him. 

“And I’m certainly not going to say that after I finally got up the guts to come ask you for a dance in the first place.” Neil’s confession took Jessamine by surprise and she pulled back to look him in the eyes searching for any signs of jest but only finding an intensity that sent her stomach exploding into a storm of butterflies. 

“You...you had to work up the courage to ask me?” The image of Colonel Neil Harding having to work up the nerve to ask anything of Jessamine was too comical to be taken seriously but there was no denying the truth behind his statement. “You’re a beautiful woman, Jessamine. And smart and successful. Hell, you’d have every reason to reject a dance from an old colonel like me.” 

This was almost too much for Jessamine to take and she struggled to wrap her mind around his confession. All she could do was blink dazedly up at him as her cheeks flushed bright red. A smile broke out across Neil’s face and he laughed, arm tightening around her waist for a moment. “I hope that wasn’t too out of line and that I haven’t just read this entire interaction incorrectly. But your friends made it pretty clear to me earlier that you felt the same about me.” 

Oh…oh…oh it was all coming together now.

Jessamine couldn’t help the laughter that bubbled up from her chest and she leaned forward to rest her forehead against his shoulder. His own rumbling laugh was mixing with hers and soon Jessamine had relaxed with the words of his confession replaying in her mind. The song faded and another slow ballad picked began, nothing but their breathing and the shuffling of shoes on the floor mixing with the music to fill the space between them.  “So,” Neil murmured, dragging Jessamine’s attention to his face once again, “you do feel the same?” 

This time, Jessamine didn’t shy away from the intense and earnest way he was looking at her. Instead she lifted herself up on the tip of her toes just enough to bring her lips to his cheek. 

 She would have words with Ginny and Beth about this. But later…after another dance. 

Yes, after another dance with Neil.

[acefictionwriting]

Hello and Masterlist

My name is Fiction! I write only SFW stuff, so absolutely no NSFW asks, please!

I'm very new to writing, and I made this blog on a whim. Let's hope I can keep it up! I made this blog specifically because I am ace, and there is too much smut out there, so I will write SFW stuff myself!

I WILL WRITE FOR:

Doctor Who:

The Doctor (all of them, even Classic Who):

Stranger Things:

Jonathan Byers:

Steve Harrington:

Eddie Munson:

Bandstand the Musical:

Johnny Simpson:

Warm Series 1:

https://www.tumblr.com/acefictionwriting/742993475251978240/ways-johnny-simpson-is-warm?source=share

Donny Nova:

Asking You on a First Date: https://www.tumblr.com/acefictionwriting/742704236632096768/may-i-have-a-crumb-of-donny-nova-content-like-a?source=share

Wayne Wright:

Nick Radel:

David Zlatic:

Jimmy Campbell (he's gay, folks, he's only for guys):

Julia Trojan:

Newsies (Musical):

Jack Kelly:

Crutchie:

Davy:

Race:

Ride The Cyclone:

Mischa Bachinski:

Ricky Potts:

DC:

Wally West (Young Justice):

Richard Grayson:

Jason Todd:

Connor Kent (Young Justice):

Edward Nygma (Gotham):

Oswald (Kapelput) Cobblepot (Gotham):

EVENTS:

TF2 Big Bang Event 2024!

More to be Added SOON!

[sewers-headmates]

ok so. musical recommendations: A New Brain (same writer as falsettos, good story, purely selfless reasons here). Bandstand (my fave musical ever made. purely selfish reasons. ive considered becoming an alter maker purely to have a bandstand themed subsystem but they wont form naturally and im useless at making them).

also, could i get a combeferre from les mis alter? hes my fave and has been a comfort character for a while <3

- ☀️📹

we will check those out! we’ve heard of A New Brain but haven’t actually checked it out yet! We’ll check out Bandstand also…on a totally not creepy note we want to be your friend so bad /lh

ON TO COMBEFERRE

Name: Combeferre

Age: 22

Gender: male

Pronouns: he/him

Sexuality: gay

Ethnicity: french

Species: human

Source: les miserables

Roles: assistant (helps another alter or alters with their roles)

cisIDs: poor vision, glasses, quiet, freckles, student, ADHD, dyslexia

transIDs: transSharpTeeth, transNarcoleptic, transBipolar, trans1800s, nullDeath, transHOH, transHearingAids

Other Labels: pet regressed (/nsx) and ambiamorous

Appearance: ok so decided to make an aesthetic instead because i mildly overwhelmed myself trying to pick pictures so feel free to go with whatever version of Combeferre you want!

Aesthetic:

this made me just miss my source and souecemates so much! i really hope you enjoy him! ^^ as always feel free to change whatever you need!

-mod R

[berezina]

'You could almost feel the excitement coming up out of the crowds when that kid stood up to sing,' said Dorsey, whom Sinatra made the godfather of his firstborn child. 'Remember, he was no matinée idol. He was just a skinny kid with big ears. I used to stand there so amazed I'd almost forget to take my own solos.' In fact, the secret of Sinatra's vocal impact lay primarily in his observations of Dorsey's trombone playing. 'He would take a musical phrase and play it all the way through seemingly without breathing for eight, ten, maybe sixteen bars. How in the hell did he do that?' Sinatra told his daughter Nancy in her book Frank Sinatra: An American Legend. 'I used to sit behind him on the bandstand and watch, trying to see him sneak a breath. But I never saw the bellows move in his back. His jacket didn't even move. So I edged my chair around to the side a little and peeked around to watch him. Finally, after a while, I discovered that he had a ‘sneak pinhole' in the corner of his mouth—not an actual hole but a tiny place he left open where he was breathing. In the middle of a phrase, while the tone was still being carried through the trombone, he'd go ‘shhh' and take a quick breath and play another four bars.'

Sinatra began to 'play' his voice like Dorsey's trombone. 'I began swimming in public pools, taking laps under water and thinking song lyrics to myself as I swam holding my breath,' Sinatra said. 'Over six months or so, I began to develop and delineate a method of long phraseology. Instead of singing only two bars or four bars at a time—like most of the other guys around—I was able to sing six bars, and in some songs eight bars, without taking a visible or audible breath. That gave the melody a flowing, unbroken quality and that's what made me sound different.' His sound astonished even the professionals. 'After the first eight bars, I knew I was hearing something I'd never heard before,' I was told by Jo Stafford, who had never seen or heard Sinatra before he walked onstage with her and the Pied Pipers for his début with Dorsey.

~John Lahr [source]

[urapunk2023]

Ramones and Fashion

Hallie Ahrens

Punk centers a lot of its values around authenticity and displayed forms of self-expression, including style. One famous early punk group to have a strong connection to fashion are the Ramones. From the famous Ramones logo T-shirt now found in the mall chain store Hot Topic, to the leather jackets, ripped denim jeans and sneakers featured on the Ramones studio album Rocket to Russia, there is no denying that there is a certain desirable “look” that the Ramones possess.

source: hottopic.com

I, myself, am 21 years old, a member of the newer generation of Ramones fans. In this memo I further examine the importance of personal style to the Ramones and their fans.

Despite the individuality of punk, all four of the Ramones dressed in almost identical outfits. As one of the band members, Tommy, shared with Punk magazine for their January 1976 issue regarding their homogenous, leather jacket look: “It’s fashion - we like to be fashionable anyway - and we feel comfortable in them. Anyway, we’d feel silly in anything else, y’know?”.

This is the perspective of the Ramones and fashion from 1976; how does their reputation uphold today in 2023?

I chose to interview three peers of mine that are previously acquainted with the Ramones to ask them what they envision when they hear the band’s name.

Person A, age 61: “Weird bowl-cuts and leather jackets.”

Person B, age 22: “I think of their logo, which looks like a US presidential seal, and has their names in a circle around a bald eagle.”

Person C, age 21: “Four gangly guys in black leather and jeans.”

Clearly, there is a solid aesthetic association with the name of the Ramones to this day, at least within this small sampling of individuals.

It is not only the band that is associated with a particular aesthetic, but the group’s fans as well. Punk magazine writer Mary Harron describes her visual experience within the punk New York City club CBGB’s: “Black leather jackets surface around the bar, but it’s the girls by the bandstand that have the image. The one with the puffed-sleeve angora sweater and white lipstick, and her friend with the red razorcut bouffant hairdo, black leather and shades.”

The author speaks as a member of the audience at a Ramones show, to provide an exclusive firsthand account of the aesthetics of the scene. Through studying these aesthetics, one is able to sense the zeitgeist of a Ramones show at CBGB’s in the late 1970s. 

It is not only the visual style and aesthetics of the band that must be taken into consideration, but the band’s musical aesthetics as well. Despite the band’s edgy and dark image, with song titles such as “Blitzkrieg Bop” and “Teenage Lobotomy”, there is a certain youthful lightheartedness to the music that author Bill Ogersby writes about in his article, “Chewing out Rhythm on my Bubblegum”: “Plundering the vaults of American popular culture, bands such as… the Ramones created a playfully ironic pastiche of suburban adolescence. Here, the stereotypes and iconography of ‘teenage’ life 一 one of the greatest mythologies to emerge from the clear-eyed confidence of American consumer culture 一 were both blissfully celebrated and mercilessly parodied.”

Understanding past trends in fashion and music educates us to the origins of current trends as well.

source: rollingstone.com

Resources:

Punk magazine, vol. 1 iss. 1, January 1976.

“Chewing out Rhythm on my Bubblegum” by Bill Ogersby

Interview with three peers

[notenoughspace]

IN MATHIAS POLEDNA’S 16 mm black-and-white film Version, 2004, silence is deafening. The Los Angeles–based, Austrian-born artist’s most recent film features a dark space in which a group of young dancers sway languidly, their movements registering an unhurried and tranquilizing rhythm. The setting is strangely airless, a spatiotemporal vacuum that indicates nothing of its location; the music is audible only to those on screen as they weave about in a kind of trance-induced shuffle, an affectless ten-minute performance that loops repeatedly when projected. Poledna trains his camera on the dancers: We see tightly observed passages of hips, elbows, shoulders, and occasionally a face, only rarely glimpsing a broader view of the event. Without screaming “retro,” the dancers’ style appears of a certain vintage; but it’s hard to put a finger on precisely what that vintage might be. The jut of someone’s hair or the peculiar rise of a sweatshirt or jeans recalls stills from the annals of both modern and popular dance—think Judson Church or Yvonne Rainer, or better yet think American Bandstand—but the abstract quality of the film and its cinematic fragmentation of bodies resist seamless reads.

As in Poledna’s earlier, prefilmic, research-based work produced in Vienna and his more recent films Actualité, 2001, and Western Recording, 2003, Version delves into a virtual archive of what the artist calls “fragments of twentieth-century culture,” using histories of pop movements as an organizing principle. Without recourse to sound or voiceover to advance the scene, the audience is compelled to engage in an imaginative guessing game, scrutinizing not only scant visual details for clues to the work’s larger meaning but reflecting critically on the relationship between sound and vision in the various genres of music and dance cinema. The artist, however, injects a purposeful opacity into his representations. While his decisively grainy footage suggests antique film stock, the work does not so much play to nostalgic sensibilities as it troubles them relative to the range of their historical mediations. In Version, Poledna taps into a reservoir of these arcane associations, as if prompting us to ask, “Didn’t we see this film before?” But there’s something blank and miasmic about these references. They fail to sponsor any singular point of orientation for the viewer, lacking the declarative punch of a full-blown iconography and the stable signifying conventions that come with the territory.

Poledna achieves this effect by insisting on a certain discontinuity between sound and vision. In Version, it’s expressed as the rupture between diegetic sound and nondiegetic sound (Poledna effectively collapses the two) and mise-en-scène. The sound track’s absence suspends immediate access into the work for the viewer, who first attempts to fill in the narrative blanks before realizing the uselessness of the activity. What this suggests about Poledna’s ongoing project has to do with the ways in which different forms of media—in this instance, visual and audio material—coalesce into larger cultural representations; and how these forms supplement one another in the production of recent history. Indeed, prior to his making films (which he has been doing for the past five years), his practice engaged a variety of political and pop-cultural sources, producing a range of work every bit as diverse as the materials he was investigating. In addition to site-specific projects and interventions that gave nods to the first generation of institutional critique, Poledna contributed to the magazines Texte zur Kunst and springerin, writing reviews and features on architecture, design, books, and music. He was also working extensively as a graphic designer and organizing the occasional show. One work in particular foreshadows the quasi-ethnographic impulse distilled in his recent films: The video installation Fondazione was created in 1998 for an exhibition Poledna curated at the Generali Foundation in Vienna entitled “The making of.” The work is partly a documentary of the Fondazione Feltrinelli in Milan, one of the most extensive archives of literature related to labor movements and utopian thinking in Europe.

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Poledna repeatedly draws on such diverse strands of political and pop-cultural materials to investigate the multilayered and polyvalent dimensions of cultural representation, specifically those that assume the status of official history. His last three shorts—Actualité, Western Recording, and Version—reveal an emerging preoccupation with the relation of sound to images. In these films a thematic split occurs between the visual documentation of the staged event and the sound track meant to accompany it, as if one struggled to keep pace with the other and both fell progressively out of sync. Western Recording depicts a singer in a recording studio warbling an obscure Harry Nilsson tune from 1969. He is captured in a series of ever-multiplying perspectives within his tabula rasa setting, but the back-and-forth between close and medium views denies the audience the totality of the performance. Similarly, Poledna’s Actualité—equally inspired by the Lumiére brothers’ film of the same title and Godard’s fractured paean to the Rolling Stones, One Plus One/Sympathy for the Devil (1968)—sees a band of young musicians rehearsing on an empty soundstage (they are actually professional actors). Attempting to settle into a groove, they stop and start again and again—but to no avail. Like Version, Actualité is set in a kind of liminal zone; and like the dancers in the later film, the musicians appear to occupy some recent if not wholly nameable past, their wardrobe telegraphing the No Wave aesthetic of the early 1980s in keeping with the angular music they fruitlessly labor to play. This failure even to start a rhythm—to find a beat propulsive enough to motivate the events being projected—is equal but opposite to the soundless repetition of Version. Neither recording of the visual event matches up with its sonic unfolding in time.

Both approaches hint at a tension in our relationship with the sources to which Poledna implicitly alludes and at the ways in which the vagaries of collective myth and memory have come to stand as history itself. Poledna effectively overturns our comfortable habituation as viewers of time-based media. The disconnect between sound and vision in these works underscores a parallel failure on the part of their audiences: our vast capacity to be passively absorbed into the ambient space produced by the conjunction of music and cinema. An admittedly crude experiment helps illustrate the matter. Rent your average Hollywood blockbuster—a Jerry Bruckheimer flick will do just fine—and try to parse what little plot exists from the characteristically bombastic sound track. There’s a reason why Aerosmith tunes blare out at moments of high drama. Hard-rock histrionics play surrogate to the narrative complexity sorely lacking in movies of this genre.

And it’s for equally good reason that writers on Poledna have frequently turned to Theodor Adorno to countermand this musical logic. In one of his many bleak accounts on the role of popular music within the culture industry, the German philosopher lambasted what he called ’30s music’s “fetish character”: the reified nature of its easily assimilated melodies; its propensity to subsume listeners in a wash of aural pabulum; and its facilitation of a new mode of listening, described by Adorno as “regressive.” Poledna’s work corresponds well with this critique. For example, Actualité treats the musical riff as a twinned fetish of sorts, a commodity and object of desire. The riff is pop music’s sonic desideratum, the thing meant to “hook” you; its repetition sells the tune, as if the song had internalized its own advertisement. For Poledna, the musicians’ failure in Actualité to find a hook betrays the impossibility of their achieving either goal, of striking the elusive chord that resonates empathetically, and commercially, with their audience. By staging this musical scenario in an equally unreachable past, the “regressive” then assumes a historical dimension for Poledna as well. We may first be lured by a sense of nostalgia the film appears to invite but soon find that the experience is withheld at the level of narrative, which stumbles and stalls along with the music.

This may seem a less-than-promising diagnosis of the state of music and moving images, but there’s a dialectical component at work in Version that licenses both critique and pleasure. To withdraw the sound track in this film, after all, is to put that music in reserve: to deny its explicitly commercial function when instrumentalized in the service of images. (Witness the fate of countless punk, “indie,” or “alternative” songs in advertisements for SUVs, cruises, and other props of the lifestyle industry.) The communal aspect of Poledna’s soundless dance paradoxically suggests both utopian possibilities and the social mechanisms that stand to repress them. In fact, the inaudible song that sets the dancers into motion was performed by Junior Delahaye, whose politicized reggae and dub innovations of the early ’80s called equally on a world of hard work and the prospects of liberation (Delahaye’s key song here is 1983’s “Working Hard for the Rent Man”). This subtext, once brought to light, recasts our view of the performers, whose movements can read as both labor-intensive (or at least “task-oriented,” in the way defined by the “minimalist” performance of the ’60s whose practitioners are hinted at by Poledna’s choreography) and purposeless—and thus outside the strictures of work. The fractured glimpses of the dancers’ bodies in Version and the near-abstract way the camera tracks movement release the performers from a set narrative or stable personae that might lock them into an overdetermined historical scenario.

Following a practice established with early works like Fondazione, Version is quasi-ethnographic in spirit—though the artist hardly takes the ethnographic at face value. Just as he is interested in our collective imaginary around popular music and its mythos, so too will he investigate the logic of its mediation through ethnographic forms. A clue to precisely which aspect of pop ethnography surfaced when Version was shown at Richard Telles Fine Art in Los Angeles last spring. A program organized by the artist in conjunction with the exhibit was called “Films with Music from China, Haiti, Jamaica, North America.” The screening featured not only a special version of Version (called Sufferers’ Version, 2004, it is the same ten-minute sequence presented with its reggae sound track) but also Maya Deren’s Meditation on Violence (1948). A twelve-minute black- and-white study of martial artist Ch’ao-Li Chi performing Wu-Tang boxing and Shao-Lin movements, Meditation was one of three shorts to which her larger notion of “choreographies for camera” quite literally applied. But her association with anthropologist and choreographer Katherine Dunham—whose engagement with Haitian music sparked Deren’s subsequent interest in Vodoun ritual (culminating in her famous study Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti [1953])—is more telling with regard to Poledna’s interest in her work.

Deren’s art is upheld as paradigmatic of the “trance film,” P. Adams Sitney’s notion of a dreamlike and surrealizing cinema, but its ethnographic and ritualistic aspects play an equal share in her poetics. A canny use of sound highlights the precise means by which she manipulates movement cinematically and rejects the standard linear narratives expected of studio film. You can imagine Poledna drawing something from her example: Deren set Meditation to a sound track alternating between classical Chinese flute, Haitian drum, and extended gaps of silence; and her description of the composition would be as aptly applied to that of Poledna’s Version. “The film begins in the middle of a movement and ends in the middle of a movement, suggesting the infinite extensions of a fugue rather than an enclosed climactic structure,” Deren noted, adding: “The other problem which I began working on in this film is the relating of sound to images brought together from independent sources, rather than that the source of the sound and image be one and the same as in the theatrical tradition, which dominates most film.” Version is in keeping with the challenges Deren poses to film’s theatrical inclinations, though it finds its solution by avoiding sound altogether. And in the spirit of many of Deren’s films, it does so through the mediating role of ethnography.

On the occasion of the very first showing of Version, at Galerie Meyer Kainer in Vienna, Poledna pursued an ethnographic source of a more explicitly pop-cultural variety. In a gallery adjacent to the room where the film was projected, he displayed an untitled work consisting of a group of album covers, the titles of which represented a veritable library of ethnomusicology. Their display in a glass vitrine evoked museum exhibitions of material culture while harkening back to the methods of research Poledna had early on employed in his practice. Indeed, the albums that make up the work are culled from the catalogue of Folkways Records & Service Co., the New York–based label started in 1948 by Moses Asch and Marian Distler. Releasing more than two thousand records from the time of its founding to Asch’s death in 1986, Folkways’s original mission was curatorial, practicing a kind of “salvage ethnography” by gathering the music of tribal peoples once breezily described as “primitive.” In addition to these holdings, the label was also renowned for its critical role in the American folk-music revival. Artists from its ranks such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger would become formative influences on a younger generation of performers that included Bob Dylan.

Folkways’s linking the genre of “world music” to American source material sheds interesting light on Poledna’s ethnographic forays. Given the kind of titles usually associated with the label, one album displayed inspires a double take: A red-and-black cover with bold white letters announces Bertolt Brecht Before the Committee on Un-American Activities. That a record documenting one of the most ignominious episodes of American history could be classed alongside Laotian and central Indian tribal music suggests a more expansive notion of the ethnographic—not to mention the “primitive”—than what these words are generally taken to mean. By including this record, Poledna recasts our relationship to our own aural histories. The mythomania that spurred the actions of those responsible for the Communist witch hunt are indeed inseparable from the mythos surrounding American culture and the legacies of its recent past.

If you pay a visit to the website for Folkways—whose catalogue is now owned, not incidentally, by the Smithsonian Institution—you might come across a factoid of some relevance for Poledna’s work. The rumor goes that one of the label’s most popular titles from 1950, The Sounds of the Rainforest, a nature recording–cum–found music was actually recorded in a shower in New York City. Music has been regarded, at least since the Enlightenment, as the most transient and thus most aesthetic of the arts and the least subject to vulgarization. A noisy simulacrum of Amazon life would suggest, on the other hand, that modern recording technologies have irrevocably eroded that romantic ideal. Poledna starts from this point but goes much further in his critique. It’s through an apparently jumbled crossing of references—between the past and the present, avant-garde and mass culture, ethnography and myth, communal and private forms of social experience—that the artist betrays an acute instinct for our modern “folkways”: the behaviors we accord to the visual culture of music and the fractured dramas of history we spin from that culture in turn.

[crunchie-morris]

Davy: if rubbing alcohol fixes the outside boo-boo, drinking alcohol fixes the inside boo-boo

Julia: Dave no

[incorrect-bandstand-quotes]

when freud said bisexuality is what happens when you dont fully develop a brain he was right and im proof

probably donny

[broadway-shenanigans]

Nick: Gang, get in here. We’re going to New York City!

Julia and Wayne, confused: New York City?

Donny, excited: New York City?!

Nick: New York City!

Davy, shouting from the other room: SHUT THE FUCK UP!

[izzy-mccalla]

Davy: I spy with my little eye something beginning with 's'

Johnny: A saxophone?

Davy: No

Jimmy: *looks at Wayne and Nick arguing* Sexual tension?

[fireworkss-exe]

3, 8, 11, 12, 19, 22, 31, 40, 41, 48

These are a lot, and you are not required to answer them all, or answer promptly.

I am simply very curious about your obsession about this piece of media.

You are very normal about it, I promise *lying*

I am so abnormal about newsies. I start hyperventilating whenever I watch it.

3. Quote from newsies

"Either they gives us our rights or we gives them a war!" Just. Chills whenever I hear it.

8. Newsies fanwork that you’ve created

That one newsies lineup drawing I did back in October. I just think it's neat

11. Romantic ‘Ship (OTP)

Javid/Javy. I'm so mentally ill over them (or maybe I just like red and blue dynamics). I don't know why but I am shaking them like a snowglobe

12. Non-romantic relationship between two characters

Medda and Jack. Maybe it's because I have a rough relationship with my mother figures but it just makes me happy to see a mother-son relationship like that

19. Historical or modern AU

I like the modern au for funny purposes. Historical is my favorite though

22. Crutchie/Crutchy

I'm so glad you asked. He is The Silly ever. He definitely trips people with his crutch btw. Especially Kid Blink.

31. 3 background characters of your choice

Romeo. He tries to lift heavy things to impress girls but he always fumbles and ends up just making the girls laugh instead

Specs. He's really spaced out all the time and loses focus really easily. Because of this, Race started a rumor that he's an opium addict (it's not true, though. Specs is just. Like that)

Kid Blink. He HATES it when people call him a pirate

40. Why do you like newsies?

It's a story about the oppressed rising up to demand their rights. It's also a major source of gender envy. Also the music is good!! And it's a flop movie from the 90s. What's not to love?

41. How did you first discover newsies?

We watched 92sies when I was just a freshman in drama class and I thought it was just ok. Then I rediscovered it when I was older and fell in love with it for the first time

48. What other things (books, musicals, etc) would you recommend newsies fans check out?

Bandstand, Hadestown, and West Side Story are all pretty good musicals if you like Newsies. They're all pretty popular but I couldn't think of anything else

[broadwaybohemians]

There's a musical about the Hello Girls!?!??! Oh my god this is amazing! Is there anywhere that I can watch it?? Does anyone have a boot or a recording or anything? Cause I need to see this show immediately. The Hello Girls in WW1 are a huge interest of mine. And this show looks so good.

I am slightly confused as to why they seem more like a jazz band when the Hello Girls were female switchboard operators attached to the army during WW1. But here is some more information about the show. It sounds amazing and I appreciate how historically accurate it looks. Grace Banker was the real Chief Operstor of the Hello Girls so I love that shes the protagonist for this musical. And like Bandstand, all the actors are also musicians!

"The protagonist of that tale is Grace Banker (a commanding Ellie Fishman), chief of the first female telephone operators unit of the US Army Signal Corps. The unit was set up in 1917 on the orders of General Pershing (Scott Wakefield), who wanted skilled telephone operators to ensure effective communication between the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe. Of course, the best operators at that time were women, so that's who Pershing set out to recruit.

In order to coordinate with Ferdinand Foch's army, the operators also need to be fluent in French, making Franco-American Louise LeBreton (the feisty Cathryn Wake) a shoo-in. Idaho farm girl Helen Hill (Chanel Karimkhani) has been speaking French with her maman since she could crawl. Bertha Hunt (Lili Thomas) isn't content to sit at home while her husband ships off, so she joins the army too. Suzanne Prevot (Skyler Volpe) sees enlistment as an opportunity for adventure. She convinces Grace to join her, arguing, "Girls like us – we aren't cut out for tending Victory Gardens." Of course, Grace will have to cultivate her professional relationship with her immediate superior, Lt. Joseph Riser (Arlo Hill), a man's man who is none too thrilled about leading a company of ladies.

Mills (who wrote the music and lyrics) has filled this action-packed war story with instant-classic songs, like the wickedly fun "Je m'en Fiche," about a night of revelry before shipping out that features the saucy lyric, "Cause once the epaulettes are off, / I'm sorry, but all bets are off." Grace gets a jaw-dropping second act number with "Twenty," a song that ends with Fishman doing 20 pushups. "Quinze Minutes" touchingly depicts life between the shells of the Paris Gun in three-four time, and the rousing anthem "Making History" will send you out the door singing."

Sources: https://www.playbill.com/article/an-exclusive-look-at-the-hello-girls-musical

https://www.thehellogirlsmusical.com/media

https://www.theatermania.com/off-broadway/reviews/the-hello-girls-new-musical-female-army-world-war-i_87201.html

[lex-2002]

The Savoy Ballroom was a large ballroom for music and public dancing located at 596 Lenox Avenue, between 140th and 141st Streets in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. Lenox Avenue was the main thoroughfare through upper Harlem. Poet Langston Hughes calls it the Heartbeat of Harlem in Juke Box Love Song, and he set his work "Lenox Avenue: Midnight" on the legendary street. The Savoy was one of many Harlem hot spots along Lenox, but it was the one to be called the "World's Finest Ballroom". It was in operation from March 12, 1926, to July 10, 1958, and as Barbara Englebrecht writes in her article "Swinging at the Savoy", it was "a building, a geographic place, a ballroom, and the 'soul' of a neighborhood". It was opened and owned by white entrepreneur Jay Faggen and Jewish businessman Moe Gale. It was managed by African-American business man and civic leader Charles Buchanan. Buchanan, who was born in the British West Indies, sought to run a "luxury ballroom to accommodate the many thousands who wished to dance in an atmosphere of tasteful refinement, rather than in the small stuffy halls and the foul smelling, smoke laden cellar nightclubs ..."

The Savoy was modeled after Faggen's downtown venue, Roseland Ballroom. The Roseland was a mostly white swing dance club. With swing's rise to popularity and Harlem becoming a connected black community, The Savoy gave the rising talented and passionate black dancers an equally beautiful venue. The ballroom, which was 10,000 square feet in size, was on the second floor and a block long. It could hold up to 4,000 people. The interior was painted pink and the walls were mirrored. Colored lights danced on the sprung layered wood floor. In 1926, the Savoy contained a spacious lobby framing a huge, cut glass chandelier and marble staircase. Leon James is quoted in Jazz Dance as saying, "My first impression was that I had stepped into another world. I had been to other ballrooms, but this was different – much bigger, more glamour, real class ..."

The Savoy Ballroom was named after the Savoy Hotel in London as those who named the ballroom felt this gave the ballroom a classy, upscale feeling, as the hotel is a very elite, upscale hotel.

The Savoy was popular from the start. A headline from the New York Age March 20, 1926, reads "Savoy Turns 2,000 Away On Opening Night – Crowds Pack Ball Room All Week". The ballroom remained lit every night of the week.

The Savoy had the constant presence of the best Lindy Hoppers, known as "Savoy Lindy Hoppers". Occasionally, groups of dancers such Whitey's Lindy Hoppers turned professional and performed in Broadway and Hollywood productions. Whitey turned out to be a successful agent, and in 1937 the Marx Brothers' movie A Day at the Races featured the group. Herbert White was a bouncer at the Savoy who was made floor manager in the early 1930s. He was sometimes known as Mac, but with his ambition to scout dancers at the ballroom to form his own group, he became widely known as Whitey for the white streak of hair down the center of his head. He looked for dancers who were "young, stylized, and, most of all, they had to have a beat, they had to swing".

Unlike many ballrooms such as the Cotton Club, the Savoy always had a no-discrimination policy. The clientele was 85% black and 15% white, although sometimes there was an even split. Lindy hop dancer Frankie Manning said that patrons were judged on their dancing skills and not on the color of their skin: "One night somebody came over and said, 'Hey man, Clark Gable just walked in the house.' Somebody else said, 'Oh, yeah, can he dance?' All they wanted to know when you came into the Savoy was, do you dance?".

The northeast corner of the dance floor, nicknamed "Cats' Corner," was monopolized by the best and boldest dancers. Some sources claim only Whitey's Lindy Hoppers were permitted to dance there, while others are less specific. Competition for a place in Cats' Corner was fierce, and every serious hopper awaited the nightly "showtime". Other dancers would create a horseshoe around the band and "only the greatest Lindy-hoppers would stay on the floor, to try to eliminate each other". On 140th street was the opposite, mellow corner which was popular with dancing couples. The tango dancer known as The Sheik frequented this corner.

Many dances such as Lindy Hop (which was named after Charles Lindbergh and originated in 1927) were developed and became famous there. It was known downtown as the "Home of Happy Feet" but uptown, in Harlem, as "the Track" because the floor was long and thin. The Lindy Hop is also known as The Jitterbug and was born out of "mounting exhilaration and the 'hot' interaction of music and dance". Other dances that were conceived at the Savoy are The Flying Charleston, Jive, Snakehips, Rhumboogie, and variations of the Shimmy and Mambo. Capitol Records released at least one album devoted to the club, The Home of Happy Feet, from 1959.

It is estimated that the ballroom generated $250,000 in annual profit in its peak years from the late 1920s to the 1940s. Every year the ballroom was visited by almost 700,000 people. The entrance fee was 30 to 85 cents per person, depending on what time a person came. Thirty cents was the base price, but after 6pm the fee was 60 cents, and then 85 cents after 8pm. The Savoy made enough money by its peak in 1936 that $50,000 was spent on remodeling.

The ballroom had a double bandstand that held one large and one medium-sized band running against its east wall. Music was continuous as the alternative band was always in position and ready to pick up the beat when the previous one had completed its set. The bouncers, who had previously worked as boxers, basketball players, and the like, wore tuxedos and made $100 a night. The floor was watched inconspicuously by a security force of four men at a time who were headed by Jack La Rue, and no man was allowed in who wasn't dressed in a jacket with a tie. Besides the security staff, the Savoy was populated by "Harlem's most beautiful women": the Savoy Hostesses. They would be fired for consorting with patrons outside the ballroom, but inside the hostesses would teach people to dance and were dance partners for anyone who purchased a 25 cent dance ticket. Roseland Ballroom hostesses often visited the Savoy on their night off; this inspired Buchanan to create Monday Ladies-Free Nights. Other special events began during the week, including the giveaway of a new car every Saturday. The floor had to be replaced every three years due to frequent use.

During the 1930s, Chick Webb was the bandleader of the Savoy's most popular house band. Ella Fitzgerald, fresh from a talent show victory at the Apollo Theater in 1934, became its teenage vocalist. Webb also recorded the 1934 big band song and jazz standard "Stompin' at the Savoy", which is named for the Savoy. The Savoy was the site of many Battle of the Bands or Cutting Contests, which started when the Benny Goodman Orchestra challenged Webb in 1937. Webb and his band were declared the winners of that contest. In 1938, Webb was challenged by the Count Basie Band. While Webb was declared the winner again, there was a lack of consensus on who won. Earle Warren, alto saxophonist for Basie, reported that they had worked on the song "Swingin' the Blues" for competing and says, "When we unloaded our cannons, that was the end".

Floating World Pictures made a documentary called The Savoy King about the ballroom. It was shown at the 50th New York Film Festival. Other prominent Savoy house bandleaders included Al Cooper, Erskine Hawkins, Lucky Millinder (with Wynonie Harris on vocals), Buddy Johnson, and Cootie Williams.

The Savoy participated in the 1939 New York World's Fair, presenting "The Evolution of Negro Dance".

The ballroom was shut down in April 1943 as a result of "charges of vice filed by the police department and Army". Its license was renewed in mid-October of the same year.

[audreytwoapologist]

17 and 18 for the musical asks?

17. biggest "dream" role (a part you'll probably never play because of gender, age, voice part, race, show rights, etc.)

in no particular order (w/reasons)

Julia Trojan (Bandstand) - vocally I could probably do it but she's so far outside of my type that I don't think any director would consider me for the role

Chris Hargensen (Carrie) - same as above, also I'm fat and therefore will never get to play the Mean Girl

Winnie Foster (Tuck Everlasting) - I turn twenty in a few months

Judith Ford (36 Questions) - source material is a podcast and I don't see them ever turning it into a stage musical but I am telling you I would NAIL this one

18. biggest "goal" role (a part you don't intend on ending your theatre career without playing)

would genuinely sell one of my kidneys to play Medium Alison in Fun Home

send me musical theater asks!!