How to Do Things with Dance: Performing Change in Postwar America (review)

John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address of January 1961 is often quoted as a harbinger of the changes that took place in the 1960s. Most people remember the line, “And so my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” It is worth recalling his next line, “My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.” At the start of his address, Kennedy celebrated “freedom,” which symbolized “an end as well as a beginning—signifying renewal as well as change” (1961). Rebekah Kowal’s first monograph is a splendid history of change in modern dance in America during the two decades leading up to 1960. She concludes by referring to Kennedy’s address and to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s work of the preceding years.

How to Do Things with Dance contributes to our understanding of dance in a number of ways and on a number of levels. Kowal considers a selection of dance artists from Martha Graham to Pearl Primus to Anna Halprin in terms of dance as action. This allows her to consider the changing cultural situation of the time and, in doing so, suggest ways in which dance has a consonance with movement and movements outside the theater and the studio. Although its subtitle Performing Change in Postwar America locates the action in the U.S., its research and analysis will be of interest to dance scholars in the wider community. It is exemplary in its scholarship, historical method, and originality. Above all, it speaks of a historical period and, in the way that it considers the period, exemplifies dance history research at its best. The British historian R. G. Collingwood made the simple historical point that a clue to what is possible is what has been achieved already (1946, 10). To paraphrase, from the point of view of dance, the value of history is that it teaches us what dance has done—and thus what dance is—and what it can become. Kowal’s daring scholarship illuminates a period now half a century distant and, in doing so, she says much about the continuing possibilities that dance offers.

Until quite recently, dance, especially modern dance, in the post–World War II decades (the 1940s and 1950s) got rather a bad press. Nowhere is this more marked than Sally Banes’s indictment: “The late 1940s and early 1950s were not creative years in modern dance” (1980, 5). Banes was laying out the territory in her early account of postmodern dance at a time when, “to Americans today, modern art already seems old-fashioned” (1980, 1). Since that time, there has been a great deal written on the new creative period that she was espousing—the 1960s and 1970s. Much of this has focused on the experiments in dance and performance in America. However, more recently, there have been dance historical accounts that have painted on a broader canvas, such as Ramsay Burt’s (2006) re-examination of Judson Dance Theater from a more international perspective. The dance of the 1930s has also provided a rich vein for dance scholars to mine, especially in terms of the politics of the time. Again, America, and American modern dance, have been well served, not least by Mark Franko’s (1995) re-evaluation of modern dance in both America and Europe in terms of expression, modernism, and politics. Until quite recently, the intervening decades have been all but ignored, with the exception of scholarly accounts such as Naima Prevots’s (1999) examination of dance and cultural diplomacy during the Cold War.

In the last few years, there has been a renewed interest in modern dance during the immediate postwar years. Indeed, it could be said...