Sokolow, Anna

Andy Piascik

SOKOLOW, ANNA (1910-2000). As a young woman, Anna Sokolow joined others to revolutionize modern dance in the 1920s and 1930s. Born in Hartford, Sokolow was the daughter of Russian Jewish garment workers who had been members of the Socialist Party during its heyday in the 1910s. After the family moved to New York’s Lower East Side, she dropped out of school at fifteen to study dance on a full scholarship at the Neighborhood Playhouse of the Henry Street Settlement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Having moved away from home, Sokolow supported herself by working in a factory.

One of her teachers at the settlement was Martha Graham (1894-1991), the most prominent figure of modern dance in the United States. Sokolow followed when Graham formed her own company. For eight years, she taught choreography and performed in many of the company’s works, most notably Rite of Spring in 1930. Sixteen years younger than Graham and fifteen years younger than Doris Humphrey (1895-1958), another modern dance trailblazer, Sokolow was one in a group of younger dancers more attuned to the radical currents of the Great Depression decade. She left Graham’s company to work with the Theater Union Dance Group and especially the New Dance Group, which was formed to choreograph and perform works dedicated to radical social change.

Although also moving left, Graham was less enthusiastic about working-class themes and revolution. The established dance establishment, which viewed classical ballet as the only true form, put up even greater resistance. Sokolow therefore turned to new groups like the NDG, which also took in Sophie Maslow (1911-2006), Jane Dudley (1912-2001) from the Graham Company, Helen Tamiris (1905-66), and others from the Federal Dance Project of the Works Progress Administration. These groups developed dances that spoke to the urgency of the times. Dudley in particular was close to the Communist Party (CP), and there was notable cross-fertilization between CP-sponsored organizations and these new groups.

Sokolow’s breakout came in 1935, and over the next four years she choreographed and performed dances that touched on a number of social themes: death on the job in Strange American Funeral; youth poverty and aimlessness in Case History No. ----; fascism in Inquisition ’36; atrocities by Franco’s forces in Spain in Slaughter of the Innocents; and war in both Anti-War Trilogy and Excerpts From a War Poem. True to the socialist milieu of her upbringing and her experiences as a worker, she performed in union halls. “The unions were really my first audience,” she later recalled. “Poets or writers would read their work, singers and dancers would perform in their halls.” Eventually, the dance establishment could not hold back the tide, and Sokolow performed on Broadway and in high-brow venues uptown. She was enthusiastically received in all.

While the radical dance scene went into decline in the early 1940s, Sokolow continued to choreograph work that was both personal and political. She did the choreography for a 1947 operatic adaptation of Elmer Rice’s 1929 master play Street Scene, collaborating with Rice, Kurt Weill, and Langston Hughes. She did other choreography on Broadway while also creating and performing new dances into her seventies, including Time+ in 1966, an impassioned piece opposed to the war in Vietnam. By this time, she performed internationally in scores of venues.

Sokolow taught dance for many years at the Juilliard School of Music, Dance Division. Known as the “Rebellious Spirit” of modern dance, she died at the age of ninety.

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Sokolow, Anna

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