The Broadway show Hamilton: An American Musical has generated an astounding level of popular acclaim, critical success, and political discourse, most of it centered around the musical’s writer, composer, and star Lin-Manuel Miranda. Additionally impressive, but less examined so far, is the striking and unusually central role played by Andy Blankenbuehler’s choreography. In this talk, the first of this series, music history professor Dr. Anne Searcy discusses how dance works as a central part of Hamilton and explores the implications that the choreography has for the political discourse around the celebrated musical.
Series Background
The UW School of Music presents “Creative Resonance,” a new three-part series featuring presentations by UW Music faculty on topics varying from music history to music-making during an era of social distancing.
Upcoming Events in this Series:
Apri 1: Robin McCabe, piano: “Frederick Chopin and the Piano”
May 13: Bonnie Whiting, percussion: "Re-imagining Performance: Musical Connection in a Time of Social Distance"
Faculty Bio
Anne Searcy researches the intersections of music, politics, and dance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her current book project is Choreographing Minimalism: Music, Neoliberalism, and the Creation of Contemporary Ballet, under contract with Oxford University Press. In this book, she explores how minimalist music helped create contemporary ballet in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, and how in turn writing for dance shaped minimalist music. A selection of this research appeared as an article in Journal of the Society for American Music.
Searcy’s first book, Ballet in the Cold War: A Soviet-American Exchange, analyzes the American and Soviet cultural diplomacy programs, focusing on tours by the Bolshoi Ballet in the United States and by American Ballet Theatre and the New York City Ballet in the Soviet Union. She has also published articles on the ballet Spartacus and the musical Hamilton.
As a teacher, Searcy leads courses on classical and popular music, including a nineteenth- and twentieth-century classical music survey, as well as courses on American musical theater, New York in the 1970s, Soviet music, Tchaikovsky’s ballets, and embodiment. As a pedagogue, Searcy focuses on using writing projects—broadly conceived—as a way of practicing thinking and communicating. She has recently been a member of the Writing Fellowship at the UW Center for Teaching and Learning.
Before coming to the University of Washington, she taught at the University of Miami.