Honest Bodies: Revolutionary Modernism in the Dances of Anna Sokolow by Hannah Kosstrin (review)

Monographs on the politically radical generation of dancers and choreographers who came of age in the 1930s are few and far between. With the appearance of Hannah Kosstrin’s Honest Bodies: Revolutionary Modernism in the Dances of Anna Sokolow, we have the second book on Sokolow—a major twentieth-century choreographer of international reach—and perhaps also a promising sign of a second wave of serious scholarly attention to politically radical dance of the 1930s and its aftermath (Franko 1995, 2002; Graff 1997). Sokolow first broke through as part of the proletarian avant-garde of the radical decade, a time that left scant documentation in its wake (the ingenuity required to find so many excellent photographs is to be commended). If Larry Warren’s Anna Sokolow: The Rebellious Spirit (1991) was an insider narrative, Kosstrin’s monograph takes a necessary distance from her subject, although she has included a fair amount of oral history as well (most productively with Ze’eva Cohen; I regret she did not interview Paul Sanasardo). Not quite fully a biography, therefore, but not only an analysis of her aesthetics and ideas either, Kosstrin’s book is devoted to Sokolow’s activism as it manifested in artistic, political, and personal terms. Kosstrin is selective about the time frame of her study and the works she chooses to focus on. Sokolow’s output was enormous, and I would have liked to hear more about her choreography for the Tennessee Williams/Elia Kazan production of Camino Real in 1953. Although probably not a major work, this and other theater productions on and off Broadway are passed over in silence, with the exception of Hair. The book itself, however, is informed by a deep political commitment that is unique in scholarly terms, but would not have been permissible in Sokolow’s own time. There is always a certain drama involved in taking historical distance from such charismatic figures of modern dance. But this distancing is also a sign that, as she recedes from us in history, Sokolow is also in the process of becoming herself for posterity.

Sokolow may be unique for meeting the challenge of the 1930s in the way she did, by combining political commitment with aesthetic sophistication. Having danced for Martha Graham in the 1931 Primitive Mysteries and other works, she adapted Graham’s vocabulary to her own needs as of 1933 in creating dances of social protest and anti-fascist affect. Through Kosstrin’s careful reading of reviews, precious detail is extracted about largely unknown works (it was absolutely out of the question that they could ever have been revived in the Cold War era). Kosstrin’s major claim is that “Sokolow expanded the political statements women could make regarding class and race in a 1930s communist milieu that, through its egalitarian claims, usurped women into an oft-assumed male-gendered whole” (32). Kosstrin’s general argument about Sokolow’s work in the 1930s concerns what she calls “a contrapuntal play between thematic groupings of Jewishness, communism, modernism, and gender” (25). Throughout, Kosstrin emphasizes how Sokolow harnessed the potential for modernist abstraction in modern dance to create dances of stirring political content “within an aesthetic marriage of experimental form and anti-capitalist content” (17). I applaud Kosstrin for cutting the Gordian knot of Marxism and modernism that has previously blindsighted some aspects of scholarship on this era, although I do not agree that form is always a matter of abstraction, which I take to mean the absence of subject matter.

It is generally known that by the early 1940s Sokolow was only intermittently on the New York concert scene as she chose to work extensively, first in Mexico (1939–1945) and later in Israel (starting in 1953). But the details have never been explained. Kosstrin’s discussion of Sokolow’s engagement with Mexico and the left politics of mestizaje (miscegenation) is fascinating. Equally so is...