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How Did Jack Cole Use Ethnic Dance Contribute To Me

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I was born to the name John Ewing Richter, on April 27, 1911, in the city of New Brunswick, New Jersey. It was around the beginning of the war in which I dropped my German-sounding name and adopted my stepfather’s last name combined with my own personal nickname resulting in the name I am now recognized by; Jack Cole. Over the course of my career I developed a distinct style of dance for both the screen and stage. I looked to all different kinds of dance, including but not limited to, modern, ethnic, ballet, and popular, to pioneer my own kind of dance, which eventually became known as theatrical jazz dance. My innovative contributions to dance have earned me a spot as one of the most influential dancers of all time. Ethnic dance was a major influence on my personal style. My first exposure to ethnic dance was in the pageants of Denishawn, which included Indian, Native American, Caribbean, Ancient Greek, Renaissance Commedia del’Arte, and Spanish dancing. I found these dance styles fascinating, and sought out and mastered authentic forms of ethnic dance. I learned the Indian dance form before continuing to study Afro-Caribbean, Spanish, and South American dance forms. …show more content…

Usually the dancers display a clear and combustible dance language, moving through space at varying levels and elevations and facing all directions. I frequently assembled the dancers in geometric formations, including but not limited to, lines, wedges, and clusters and then I would move moved them around, not just leaving them dully in the center. Set design in my movies gave me further elements to make my dance sequences unique. I was quite fond of using ramps, ladders, poles, platforms, and staircases to use space horizontally, vertically, and diagonally. These simple structures gave my dances an extraordinary sense of

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