As a scholar of American popular music, I am often dismayed by how little attention is paid to the realm of social dance. Whereas musicologists are generally inclined to relate musical development to political, religious, social, and economic movements, we often neglect dance, even though many of the significant events in popular music have dancers to thank for making them so. One understandable reason for this oversight is the lack of resources available to non-dancers. A recent addition to the scant body of work is dance historian Renée Camus's Dawn of a New World: Two-Step to Lindy Hop (1890s–1940s), a DVD featuring reconstructions of couple dance traditions from turn-of-the-century America. Featured in the film are the two-step, the cakewalk, the Castle walk, several animal dances, the foxtrot, the blues, the maxixe, the tango, the Charleston, and the lindy hop. Each genre is treated in two chapters. The first provides a narrated introduction with information regarding the historical and social context, important innovators, comments on music, and a description of the genre's basic style. The second chapter features a choreographed demonstration of the dance genre performed by members of Centuries Historical Dance Troupe with costumes and musical accompaniment appropriate to the historical context.

As a reference work, Dawn of a New World does not posit a larger argument and there is no overarching narrative aside from the chronological ordering of the genres. The original scholarship is reflected largely in the performances themselves. Dance reconstruction for this time period and earlier is a challenging project that involves divining the nature of movement from written language found in primary source documents. This literature includes journalistic descriptions of movement and pedagogical guides with drawings and/or photographs. Much of it, however, is embroiled in the substantial debate over the morality of social dance and as such must be interpreted with a keen awareness for the authors' political agendas. Given the social, political, and religious climate of the first half of the twentieth century, many descriptions of social dancing are derogatory in tone, especially with regard to African American dance, or, on the other hand, employ such inflated language that would suggest dancing to be the most virtuous path to sainthood. Camus is successful in navigating the polemical rhetoric and provides a credible set of performances.

Dawn of a New World is particularly useful for teachers of American popular music interested in helping stimulate their students' historical imagination, providing demonstrations of genres that are otherwise no longer performed and are difficult to find on film. One of my favorite aspects of the recording is that it does not rely entirely on classically trained dancers, who often perform these kinds of “vernacular” dances in a manner that is highly stylized. The Centuries Historical Dance Troupe is made up of social dancers, and as such their style is more like the historical individuals they portray. Each choreographed routine comprises a large number of steps, providing a sense of the basic movement as well as the ways in which each genre was subject to innovation and the idiosyncrasies of individual dancers.

The quality of the work makes it clear that the project is a labor of love for its director, choreographer, reconstructionist, co-producer, co-writer, narrator, and featured dancer, Renée Camus, and many of the work's shortcomings are, no doubt, a result of budgetary constraints. Though the camera work and video quality is fine, the sound quality of the narrated chapters is poor and the packaging is minimal. Although the film is of use primarily as a pedagogical resource, incorporating a supplementary pamphlet with notes on the reconstruction process and perhaps a bibliography, discography, and filmography would have been helpful for scholars working in this area. It is still a useful addition to a library, for the performances themselves are excellent, but I found the sound quality of the narration too distracting for classroom use.

In sum, Dawn of a New World represents a unique contribution to the resources available on popular culture in the first half of the twentieth century. The technical drawbacks notwithstanding, the film presents us with a rare glimpse into turn-of-the-century American dance through movement itself rather than relying on texts and still images alone. Doing so, it encourages our students to engage the relationship between music and movement and brings them one step closer to understanding American popular music as a social phenomenon.