Step Style

Directed by Alan Lomax

Alan Lomax and his associates, beginning in the late 1950s undertook a monumental study of the relationship between style in song and dance cross-culturally. It began with Cantometrics which developed a common language description for the many variables in performance style in the diverse cultures of the world and measured how those variables clustered geographically and in relation to means of subsistence and aspects of social organization. Choreometrics continued this investigation into dance and movement. A continuation of Alan Lomax & Forrestine Paulay's Choreometrics project, this film examines the use of the foot in dance cross culturally. Though this film comes from later in the project, below is an interesting article written by Lomax about the methodology he was developing for this sort of film.