Dancing the Homeland: The Emergence of American Modern Dance

Ann Daly. Done Into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002. xvii + 267pp.; ill.; ISBN 0-8195-6560-1 (pb).

Julia L. Foulkes. Modern Bodies: Dance and American Modernism From Martha Graham to Alvin Ailey. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xii + 257pp.; ill.; ISBN 0-8078-5367-4 (pb).

The "new modern dance," emergent in early-twentieth-century America, was heavily steeped in the political, social, and aesthetic concerns of the day, writes Julia L. Foulkes in her Modern Bodies: Dance and American Modernism From Martha Graham to Alvin Ailey. Dancers contested their individual uniqueness within a larger national search for communal harmony. At the end of World War I, in the first full flush of the machine age, facing the vicissitudes of the economy and the growing appeal of Communism and socialism in urban America, artists confronted new questions about the role of the arts in life: "Whom did art serve, and what was its function in society?" Dancers' responses were historically unprecedented and uniquely American: "In answer, modern dancers exalted individual expression and primal body movements. Proclaiming the worth of every body, modern dancers believed in the power of conjoining that variety in group movement. In its conception and its practice, modern dance illustrated the social tension between the heralding of the individual and the possibilities of mass appeal and participation" (2–3).

Their confidence in the primacy of the individual and the worthiness of "every" body, however, was made possible, to a great extent, because of the prior exhortations of Isadora Duncan, an artist whose long-term exile in Europe, says Ann Daly, only heightened "her relationship with her homeland"(x). Though Duncan was an expatriate for most of her adult life, Daly writes in her Done into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America, she sculpted her "new dance" on her own womanly American body and she negotiated a "range of cultural needs and fantasies" within a specifically American context (x). In large part, it was her ability to shape herself and her dance to mirror the popular discourses of the day that made Duncan a legend, and, ultimately, it was her capacity to connect herself with artists as well as wealthy socialites that eased dance's transition into the realm of serious art: "By World War I, in large part because of Duncan, dance had been transformed from entertainment into 'Culture,' at least in New York. Duncan not only reimagined the form and content of dance but also convinced an audience of its legitimacy as a 'high' art. She created a 'taste' for dance and, furthermore, made it a matter of 'good taste.' For working-class and immigrant girls and women, this style of dance literally added 'class' to their lives, because it had become an emblem of 'Cultural' refinement, in no small part as a result of its identification with classical Greece" (110).

But there were fault lines in Duncan's ideology, as Daly points out. Duncan's notions of the "Natural" body and of "good taste" were creations, part "artistic invention" and part "rhetorical strategy":

"Nature" was Duncan's metaphorical shorthand for a loose package of aesthetic and social ideals: nudity, childhood, the idyllic past, flowing lines, health, nobility, ease, freedom, simplicity, order, and harmony. Through a series of correspondences, she elided "Nature" with science, religion, the Greeks, and, finally, "Culture." The "Natural" body was "civilized" (and white) as opposed to "primitive" (and black). Functioning as the foundational trope for her artistic practice, the grace and clarity of the "Natural" body thus served to purify and elevate the sullied image of the dancer in turn-of-the-century America. Functioning, too, as the foundational trope for her social agenda, it provided not just a blueprint for social order and harmony but also a template of social control, at a time of backlash against immigrants, whose numbers were growing, and blacks, whose ragtime...