Nation, Class, and Ethnicities in Modern Dance of the 1930s

Modern dance in Depression-era America distinguished itself from other forms of theatrical dancing by its “primitive” style and psychological content. The primitive aspect of psychological content led to modern dance’s markedly affective—or emotional—expression. But the role of what I shall refer to generically as “feeling” was not limited to physical styles; it also played a part in the cultural politics of subjectivity subtending class and racial tensions during the Depression. In fact, it was through theatrical manifestations of feeling in modern dance that concepts as different as psychological depth and ethnic identity became symbolically wedded to movement. Once psychology and ethnicity were concomittantly embodied, as it were, modern movement could bear testimony to national, class, and ethnic identity. In other words, expressive bodies conveyed significant ideological content, and were themselves ideological constructs. A critical theory of ideology is, therefore, indispensable to the reassessment of modern dance during this period. The ways in which personal bodily experience and ideology were conjoined in modern dance performance can be illustrated not only by dances, but also by the modernist critical discourse generated in response to them. The general aim of this article, however, is to explore the relation between performances of feeling and ideology in modern dance of the 1930s.

Between 1931 and 1935, Martha Graham, Jane Dudley, and Asadata Dafora danced distinctly different versions of subjectivity. Their only commonality was “primitivism,” by which I mean a commitment to embody psychological identities in their movement. This commitment to embody identity also defined the general goal of an ideological program. In Louis Althusser’s thinking, interpellation, or “hailing,” functions precisely through this ascription of identity to the subjects of ideology: “All ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, by the functioning of the category of the subject.” ¹ I argue that the feelings a dance unleashes in its audience constitute that dance’s hailing of its audience’s subjectivity. Thus, the “psychological” factor in historical modern dance, its primitivism in sum, was not originally solipsistic testimony to “feelings” as sacrosanct depth, but rather interpellation of spectators as subjects of nation, class, and race. ² Modern dances, in other words, were a very public and potent form of interpellation. To anticipate the following discussion somewhat too schematically: affect, emotion, and possession in the dances we shall examine hailed the (white) American national, the (proletarian) working class, and the “Negro,” respectively. Since each choreographer’s hailing was ideologically imbued, I refer to the discursive field within which the psychological attained cultural embodiment simply as “feeling.” The following comparative study of Graham’s Primitive Mysteries (1931) and Frontier (1935), Dudley’s Time Is Money (1934), and Dafora’s Kykunkor, or Witch Woman (1934) shows how a concept of the primitive in thirties modern dance was sufficiently elastic to account for Graham’s nativist modernism, Dudley’s Marxism, and Dafora’s Pan-Africanism. ³

I

“Primitivism” indexes the tendency of modern dance to conjugate body and feeling in diverse and opposed understandings of “authentic” cultural identities. Dance critic John Martin relied on the term to differentiate modern dance of the 1930s from ballet and ethnic dance. He called modern dance “the externalization of emotional states in terms of physical action.” ⁴ Although he was committed above all to high modernism, Martin’s criticism receives sustained attention here because he situated all modern dance within a theory of the primitive that diminished the central importance of aesthetic innovation to modernism. That differently inflected performances of feeling were accounted for in critical discourse as “modern” is, of course, part of what rendered them effective interpellations. Yet because Martin did not wish to acknowledge dance’s ideological power, he rendered the meanings of “primitive” and “modern” interdependent and mutually restricting.

In four essays appearing in The American Dancer between 1936 and 1937 Martin dismissed the term modern as an unfortunate misnomer. It signaled the new, whereas he argued for modern dance’s traditional, even archaic, features adapted from primitive dance. ⁵ It is worth quoting him at length on this idea:

The [primitive] dance was primarily a serious medium...