Priscilla Pena Ovalle, <em>Dance and the Hollywood Latina: Race, Sex, and Stardom</em>

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dance and the Hollywood Latina: Race, Sex and Stardom Jennifer Zale (bio) Priscilla Pena Ovalle, Dance and the Hollywood Latina: Race, Sex and Stardom. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010. Reviewed by A fair number of film stars trained to become professional dancers before beginning their careers in cinema. Audrey Hepburn, one of the more famous examples, planned to become a classical ballerina and trained with the legendary Marie Rambert before having her dream shattered by trauma suffered during World War II. Although Hepburn’s dancing is showcased in certain films like Funny Face with Fred Astaire, her name is by no means synonymous with dance. In Dance and the Hollywood Latina: Race, Sex, and Stardom, Priscilla Pena Ovalle explores the careers of five Hollywood stars who could arguably be considered dancers before actresses. In any case the careers of Dolores Del Rio, Carmen Miranda, Rita Hayworth, Rita Moreno, and Jennifer Lopez cannot be divorced from the medium of dance that was crucial to their rise to stardom. Unlike Hepburn, all of these women are Latinas and therefore needed to use dance to create an “in-betweeness” (to borrow Ovalle’s term) to negotiate between the white and nonwhite worlds of Hollywood that were often not ready to accept a nonwhite actress in a lead role of a mainstream film (p. 4). In Dance and the Hollywood Latina, Ovalle discuss dance as a technique very generally because she is not a trained dance scholar (which she readily admits at the beginning of her book). This is a common problem occurring with film scholars who write about dance (from the silent era all the way to the present) and reminds us of the necessity for both dance and film scholars to work together on such projects in order to obtain the most accurate results. However, while this book may have been enriched by a deeper knowledge of dance technique and history, Ovalle’s lack of knowledge on this topic did not spoil her overall goal of explaining how these actresses used dance in order to become mainstream stars and appeal to Latino and possibly other marginalized audiences such as blacks. She does a particularly detailed job of describing costume, cosmetics, and hairstyle and relating these elements to [End Page 168] dance in a way that is often neglected by dance scholars. When considering a particular performance these elements can be equally as much a part of the dance as the actual steps themselves. For the Latina actresses discussed in this book, costume and physical appearance were fashioned by Hollywood and determined their public image just as much if not more than the actual dance steps they performed. Ovalle’s chapter on Delores Del Rio is especially intriguing since her films date back to the silent era and she is lesser known than the other actresses discussed in this book. The transition from silent to sound film was obviously extremely difficult for all actors not working in their native country as the language/accent barrier posed a new problem. Since so many actors were forced to stop working during this period, it is interesting, as Ovalle notes, that Del Rio herself continued to make films even if her roles were increasingly limited to those of visibly foreign characters. As Ovalle further points out, it is also interesting that film frequently made the association between “dancer,” “prostitute,” and “unconventional morals” (p. 25). Film periodicals that date back to the silent era mention numerous films starring actresses playing provocative—if not evil—Spanish or Latin vamps. These women are almost always dancers and there are often allusions to the subject of prostitution. The tango is a common theme in these films and the plot often involves the dark, mysterious woman outsmarting and sometimes murdering the white male love interest. One example would be roles played by Russian actresses Vera Karalli and Vera Kholodnya during the silent era. Both of these actresses were classically trained in ballet (Karalli was actually a prima ballerina at the Bolshoi Theatre) and both European with dark hair and features that would allow them to pass for Latin or Spanish. Indeed, dark haired actresses were popular during this...