Arts: Fred Astaire, a consummate dancer of the Movie Age

There's a new book out, being a biography of Fred Astaire the dance work of whom, in the comic vein mostly, set a dance-aesthetics standard that still holds. His dances, a body of artistic work from one dance routine to the next in a given movie, and from film to film, these choreographic accomplishments remain somehow normative today because of old movies that still dazzle us with his showmanship. His work was slanted by the mass-communications medium of the cinematographic camera's angle. He danced to the camera's eye for the future ticket-purchasing audience of each movie, and often gently deconstructed himself in his role, larger than any role in a movie, as big as life. Leading male dancer in the early movies which were viewed in movie theatres, Fred Astaire is an entertainer par excellence; and he became a bon vivant.

A fine boildown of an important theme of Jason Epstein's new book, Fred Astaire (Yale University Press), was recently recently posted on the American Heritage website. Jason Epstein, "Like kissing your sister: the sibling partnership that launched Fred Astaire into stardom" (posted Oct28,2k8).

In noting how important Adele Astaire was, we underscore an axiom of dance aesthetics -- at least of the dancer business and profession -- that we have to say male dancer or female dancer when we indulge ourselves in ranking the stars of movie dance and dance movies. The instant I think of Astaire's female partners, once he got into the movies, it's Ginger Rodgers who stands out, to my mind. She played with Fred in several memorable storyline dance-movies (really a form of "musical," carried over the top by fancy footwork).