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The Workers' Dance League One wonders what they thought was sinful and gross about Allen's. The mixture of races, nationalities, and religions? The frank acknowledgement of sexual needs, symbolizing submission to irrational forces the middle-class tried to repress? Dancing that looked free or chaotic? The anonymity of the partnering? The mood of immediacy, of urgency, of the squandering of money and strength in play? The clash of cultures and languages erupting into physical violence? Self-defined, improvised uses of time and space in a culture that with increasing industrialization valued hierarchical management and ordering of time and space? Perhaps the participants in the event found other aspects sinfuldrugging and robbing disoriented sailors, profit-making by a man from women's sexual relationships, the loneliness of urban life and the dissolution of family ties that would have brought them there. Perhaps, had the participants themselves the means to describe and preserve their perceptions , we would have a different view of John Allen's dance house today. 23 Red Shoes: The Workers' Dance League of the 1930s The past few years have seen an upsurge of political activity among downtown dancers, from organizing for nuclear disarmament to making dances against U.S. intervention in Central America to making statements about black identity and history. This alliance between the avant-garde and progressive politics might seem surprising (in the U.S., though not in Europe). Yet there are precedents, not only in the 1960s, but from the beginnings of American modern dance. Operating in a less fragmented political scene and a smaller, tighter dance world, the Workers' Dance League ofthe 1930s was a highly organized, polemical body for producing political dance and organizing dancers. Although the history of American dance has whitewashed it from Village Voice, April 24, 1984. 199 200 Other Subversions memory, avant-garde dance and the rise of left-wing culture in the United States in the 1930s collided at a critical moment. During the late 1920s, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman broke away from Denishawn to form their own groups. In 1931, Hanya Holm founded the American branch ofthe Mary Wigman dance school. At the same time, a number ofworkers' theater troupes sprang up in NewYork City, offering a radical, serious alternative to what they saw as the frivolous Broadway stage. After the economic crash in 1929, the left-wing theater brigades found larger audiences than ever among the millions of unemployed. In the context ofwidespread depression and the organizing efforts ofmasses of workers, aided by a growing Communist party, the workers' theater movement burgeoned, fueled by the CP's Third Period policies, which emphasized the imminence ofworldwide revolution and called for suitable artistic theory and practice as part of political strategy and action. Unlike the activity ofso much avant-garde theater and dance today, these groups found large working-class audiences, given the political context and the tight CP organization as well as its goals. Today we have no models. But then, the obvious model for left-wing American artists and intellectuals was the young Soviet Union, which had managed to create modernist, avant-garde, politically charged artworks in every genre. In the United States, CP officials urged the building of radical working-class culture through its literary magazine, New Masses; through literary John Reed Clubs; and through various theater, music, film, dance, and sports groups. Through these arts and pastimes, class consciousness would be sharpened into a "weapon," to be wielded in the coming revolution . Some of the young dancers who studied and worked with Holm, Graham, Humphrey, Weidman, Tamiris, Fe Alf, and other "bourgeois" modern dancers were working-class women, often the daughters of immigrants , who marched in May Day parades and stood with their parents on picket lines. They brought to the artistic "revolution" of modern dance a political commitment that led them to repudiate the work oftheir teachers as too abstract, mystical, or nostalgic. They looked to the model of the workers' theater movement for themes and social forms, a new content for the new dance forms they were discovering. And naive as it may seem to us, they really meant it when they wrote things like "Dance must be used to teach workers' children that they belong to the working class.. " Use themes of nature to teach children to dance together in harmony, just as workers on a Soviet collective work together." Thus, Kay Rankin explained, children could be won over through dance to join the revolutionary movement and...

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