In this Book

How To Do Things with Dance: Performing Change in Postwar America

Book
Rebekah J. Kowal
2010
Published by: Wesleyan University Press
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Winner of the CORD Outstanding Publication Award (2012)

In postwar America, any assertion of difference from the mainstream anticommunist culture carried professional and personal risks. For this reason, modern dance artists left much of what they thought unsaid. Instead they expressed themselves in movement. How To Do Things with Dance positions modern dance as a vital critical discourse, and suggests that dances of the late 1940s and the 1950s can be seen as compelling agents of social change. Concentrating on choreographers whose artistic work conceived dance in terms of action, Rebekah J. Kowal shows how specific choreographic projects demonstrated increasing awareness of the stage as a penetrable space, one on which socially suspect or marginalized modes of being could be performed with relative impunity and exerted in the real world. Artists covered include Martha Graham, José Limón, Anna Sokolow, Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Donald McKayle, Talley Beatty, and Anna Halprin.

Ebook Edition Note: All images have been redacted.

Table of Contents

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Cover

pp. c-vi

Contents

pp. vii-viii

Acknowledgments

pp. ix-xvi

Introduction Modern Dance and the Cultural Turn to Action

pp. 1-18

[ 1 ] Setting the Stage: Modern Dance Universalism and the Culture of Containment

pp. 19-51

[ 2 ] Precursors to Action: Martha Graham and José Limón

pp. 52-85

[ 3 ] Action Is Ordinary: Anna Sokolow

pp. 86-116

[ 4 ] Action Is Effective: Pearl Primus

pp. 117-150

[ 5 ] Action Is Finding Subjectivity: Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor

pp. 151-193

[ 6 ] The Uses of Action 1: Talley Beatty, Katherine Dunham, and Donald McKayle

pp. 194-225

[ 7 ] The Uses of Action 2: Anna Halprin

pp. 226-256

Notes

pp. 257-282

References

pp. 283-312

Index

pp. 313-324
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