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Books

When the music changes

5 November 2016

9:00 AM

5 November 2016

9:00 AM

In 2011 the New York Times’s chief dance critic, Alastair Macaulay, asked:

How should we react today to ‘Bojangles of Harlem’, the extended solo in the 1936 film Swing Time in which Fred Astaire, then at the height of his fame, wears blackface to evoke the African-American dancer Bill Robinson? No pat answer occurs.

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