Mura Dehn was a white, Jewish, Russian woman, who spent 50 years documenting African American Black social dance. She was one of the only writers in the 1930s who was banging the pots and pans exclaiming jazz is our first American folk dance, jazz is America moving, and it is changing the way the entire world moves. She started writing about jazz, filming dances, interviewing jazz artists, and created a performing company with some of the finest Black social and theatrical dancers of her lifetime. She worked on her mission for over 50 years, with little support and died with little recognition though her archival collection in the NYPL contains nearly 2400 articles, monographs, interviews, films, programs and pictures.

Dehn was the only person allowed to record the dances inside of the Savoy Ballroom in New York City, the “Home of Happy Feet.” This was where jazz/swing proliferated, flourished, fostered. It was one of the most important venues in New York City for 20 years, and she was there nightly. At some point she convinced the manager that she needed to record it. Though he was very leery of a white woman filming African American dance he finally allowed her if she set up the camera in a corner and didn’t disrupt the patrons. Those particular films are some of the only footage available of the originators and the innovators of the form and became very important in the current swing/jazz dance revival. 

Mura’s research took her to dancehalls, the streets of NYC, to Black churches, to the segregated southern United States and the Caribbean. When people asked what she was doing she would answer that she just made a film, and realized she needed one to represent the earlier era, and another film of rock n’ roll” and she kept working. What is so amazing is in her eighties, she filmed the early hip-hop and street dancers. She walked the streets of Spanish Harlem and the Bronx asserting, these street dancers were just like the beginning of jazz. Dehn saw jazz through hip-hop on a continuum of social/street dance. She wrote that they were not only acts of expression using movement and rhythm, but also political resistance, social commentary, and the embodiment of ideology.

Close to the end of her life, a swing dance revival began. There's actually a swing dance society in most major cities in the world right now, and a number of website historians doing remarkable work, trying to find out whatever they can about the originations of the form, including researching the dancers. They got ahold of her films. And through a system of conferences, conventions and the internet, her work has become iconic in some circles decades after her death. 

When asked to write a book on Mura Dehn, the publisher was also interested in the voices of her dancers, her “company” who created extraordinary art movement on a daily basis. Having been a professional dancer I was in many a company or a collective and sensitive to the fact that the dance is originated on the dancers’ bodies, they’re the muses, they’re the projection. And yet, they are unnamed. So the book became a historical biography of Mura and her company. It illustrates a history of the jazz cultural phenomena that shaped the American character and ways of moving. Jazz dance and music were grounded in innovation, individualism and improvisation, the sound and movement espoused liberation, freedom, and creativity, which is the American ethos. The book is also an anthology containing almost 50 mini-bios of her dancers, revealing what it was like for great African American social, jazz, and tap dancers and musicians in the 20^th century. The most fulfilling aspect of the book, for me, is their names are now in ink; they are now named for posterity's sake.