The Work of Dance: Labor, Movement, and Identity in the 1930s (review)

Mark Franko's latest work investigates the convergence of dance and labor within reformulations of American theatrical culture during the 1930s. The political urgency of the Depression era, Franko relates, was particularly visible in representational practices: "Work's actual doing become a subject worthy of attention and artistic treatment, and hence the representation of work and workers by dancers and actors could itself be legitimately valued as labor" (1). Franko pursues the proliferation in forms of danced culture in order to explore variants of left-wing radical modern dance in conjunction with high modernism, ballet, and chorus dance. The core of the inquiry addresses the relationship between social engagement and aesthetic innovation by examining influences on modern dance arising from labor movements and union organizing, the Federal Dance and Theatre Projects, and theatrical dance and Hollywood dance films. The period, as Franko sifts through it, proves a contentious arena of cultural production and dance genres. With seven chapters in two parts, The Work of Dance is a tautly argued consideration of the enduring legacy of artistic radicalism that leaves one lingering over the question: What is the cultural value of dance work?

Addressing the performative economy of the 1930s, Franko begins by underlining the revolutionary climate stimulating the relationship between modes of production and choreographic embodiment. The potential to reshape the social body presented by communist, fascist, and capitalist architectures offered progressive politics utopian motives toward organizing labor and politicizing art. Franko specifically calls attention to the productive forces of communism and industrial capitalism represented in widespread mass organization in the early years of the decade. The dynamics of group experience within these working forms are elaborated in "two images of labor that haunted America in the 1930s: radicalism and labor efficiency" (23). Left-wing radicalism, associated with agit-prop performance and mass dance, is displayed in the collective ethos of the New Dance Group, while the "Taylorized choreography" of precision dancing, exemplified in the opening chorus of "We're in the Money" from Busby Berkeley's film Gold Diggers of 1933, is seen to commodify the dancer within the production values of the cinematography (31). Franko reaches into complex issues regarding work, class, and genre to asses the conflicts between labor and capital that erupted over the decade.

Part 1, "Emotion and Form," illuminates the ways in which choreographic structures expanded to embody differing values of social exchange as cultural ideology was reconstituted. Franko weaves into the discussion a wide spectrum of critical discourses to augment his contention that radical modern dance produced a fluent, alternative social space that challenged the cultural authority of aesthetic modernism. He distinguishes how modalities of emotional engagement within modern dance not only reproduce political subjectivity but shape social identity in order to "recast the form-versus-content cliché frequently imposed on political art of the thirties" (51). Franko employs the terms "affect" and "e/motion" to unearth the transfer of sensibilities from divergent aesthetic practices, explaining "in modern dance of the thirties, affective movement transmits the essence of feeling whereas emotional movement transmits specific, temporally contingent feelings" (52). Underscoring the ways in which choreographic style participates in creating and constructing class associations for an audience, chapter 3 looks at three variations in modern dance that evoke "ways of moving divided experience" (61). Martha Graham's Primitive Mysteries (1931) and Frontier (1935), examples of "nativist individualism," are set alongside the "emotional Marxism" of Jane Dudley's Time Is Money (1934) and the Pan-Africanism signaling from Asadata Dafora Horton's Kykunkor, or Witch Woman (1934). Chapter 4 develops Alan M. Wald's notion of the left-wing modern dancers' "cultural cross-dressing" to detail the ways in which radical modern dance addressed a plurality of experience and how questions of identify, ethnicity, and class were negotiated and received.

Part 2, "Genre and Class," extends into...