ABSTRACT
Audiences flock to movie theaters for the latest Hollywood productions accompanied by lavish, live shows (including instrumental music, opera singing, and dancing) spearheaded by impresario Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel. Thalia Zanou is historiographically marginalized for overlapping reasons. Few sources exist on Zanou: some performance programs, newspaper articles, and ads announcing the film evenings she featured in. The shift of ballet toward explicitly “American” popular styles—characteristic of European artists immigrating to the US—reveals how foreign artists inscribed their practices in the novel cultural narrative surrounding them and the extent to which immigrant culture nourished US-American cultural products. Thalia Zanou’s dance balanced at the intersection of ballet and early 20th-century US-American cinema. Zanou herself balanced at the limits of US-American whiteness. Skillfully circulating between “high” and “low” culture, employing their codes in context-specific ways, and fine-tuning the cultural markers embodied by her dance, she reframed her practice as US-American.
