This paper examines American national identity as reflected in dance, arguing that America's identity is national rather than cultural — a shared collective belonging rather than a common ethnic heritage. Using three landmark American musicals as case studies — West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, and South Pacific — the paper analyzes how dance on stage either reinforces specific cultural identities or blends them into a broader American context. The analysis traces how choreography, music, and movement vocabulary signal cultural belonging, and how mid-twentieth-century American theater both represented and occasionally stereotyped non-American cultures in its staging of dance.
The paper uses comparative case study analysis: rather than discussing dance in the abstract, it selects three musicals that each represent a different relationship between American and non-American identity on stage. This allows the argument to build progressively, moving from a blended/stereotyped portrayal, to an authentic one, to a hybrid, before drawing a synthesizing conclusion about American national identity.
The essay opens with a philosophical framing of American identity, then introduces the modern dance movement as distinctly American. Three body sections each analyze a different musical (West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, South Pacific), with close attention to how dance signals cultural belonging. The conclusion synthesizes all three examples to argue that mid-twentieth-century American musical theater offers an accurate window into America's national identity of that era.
In order to understand American dance, it is first necessary to understand what it means to be American. What is an American, exactly? Is it a nationality, a shared cultural identity, an ethnicity, a shared history, or something else entirely? Many countries in the world have their own unique cultures, and those cultures are represented in dances that can only be defined as belonging to their country of origin. You would not mistake a German dance for a French one, or an African dance for a Brazilian one. Each is uniquely identified by its country of origin.
It is the position of this paper that being American means sharing a common national, not cultural, identity with the other people who live here. America is a relatively new country compared to others in the world, and it has not had time to develop a strictly cultural identity, though it is moving in that direction. For now, the people who make up America are very diverse in their origins, and some still have very strong cultural ties to the countries of origin of their ancestors — be it parents, grandparents, or beyond. People in America often cling to their particular family's cultural identity while also embracing the national identity of America.
In America, the national identity is shaped by our shared history as the people who make up this nation. It is almost like a class of school children who come from many different backgrounds and recognize and embrace those backgrounds, but who also share an identity as members of their class. They have loyalty to their classmates and their teacher, and will compete with other classes under the banner of their own classroom. America is like that.
You become an American simply by being an American and embracing that shared national identity. There are perhaps outsiders in American society, just as there are in most classrooms, but those outsiders are either newcomers who have not yet integrated into American society (but are working on it), or people who have purposefully removed themselves from the mainstream, even if they were born here. Throughout the 225-plus years America has been a nation, part of its national identity has been expressed through the arts — including paintings, plays, sculptures, music, and dance, as well as other art forms.
Because America does not yet have a common cultural identity, the way it has expressed itself through dance has been as modern as America itself. The modern dance movement, in fact, is an accurate representation of America as a society — new, interesting, unique, exciting, and something most people (including the dancers themselves) haven't quite completely figured out yet. This is different from the traditional cultural dances of other nations, which have been represented on the American stage in musicals and other artistic performances. Modern dance is thoroughly American in its identity.
One example of how dance presents a specific cultural — rather than national — identity on stage is the musical West Side Story. This play represents the coming together, and clashing, of two societies: American and Puerto Rican. Though Puerto Rico is technically part of America, it is not a state, and it carries a very Hispanic cultural identity that the states do not. West Side Story dramatizes this clash vividly.
One of the dance numbers that most distinctly identifies the Puerto Rican characters is the number accompanying the song "America." In this song, the Puerto Rican girls sing about Puerto Rico versus America, with most favoring America and one girl championing Puerto Rico. While individual choreographers offer different interpretations, the dances almost invariably involve movements associated with Hispanic culture — lots of clapping, raised-arm movements, kicking, and twirling. This tendency is itself rooted in the music of the song, which uses double and triple metrical configurations known as a seis, a popular musical style in Puerto Rico when the song was written. The song also features sharp, rhythmic notes throughout that are reminiscent of the huapango, a Mexican style of dance.
While not entirely Puerto Rican in character, the song has distinctly Latin tones that make it something of a generic Hispanic composition. It does not fully embrace Puerto Rican culture specifically, but rather groups Puerto Ricans together with Mexicans and other Hispanic cultures as a whole. This was not uncommon in the 1950s, and remains common today, as American society has often shown little interest in distinguishing between the different nuances of distinct Hispanic nationalities and cultures. The dance in West Side Story reflects this tendency.
While Fiddler on the Roof has little to do with American identity other than being an American imagining of 19th-century Russian Jewish culture (based on research that made it largely authentic), West Side Story and South Pacific blend mid-20th-century American ideas and ways of life into the cultural representations of Puerto Ricans and Polynesians of the period. While there is definite misrepresentation and stereotyping in both, these plays were written before the Civil Rights movement and the broader push for cultural equality truly took hold.
Looking at them today, and at the dances they incorporate through both American and non-American characters, an audience member gains a surprisingly accurate representation of the overall American national identity as it existed from the 1940s through the 1960s. Dance, in this sense, functions not only as artistic expression but as a cultural document — one that captures, however imperfectly, who Americans thought they were and how they imagined the world beyond their borders.
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