Modern Dance

MODERN DANCE. Emerging as a new art in New York in the late 1920s, modern dance was born of the quest to discover the real capacities of the human body as a means of expression, which in turn implied a revolt against the stifling conventions of ballet. The principal initiators of the new movement were Doris Humphrey, Martha Graham, and Helen Tamiris. Although there have been many male dancers of significance, the central and innovative figures of modern dance have been women, exemplifying an important aspect of feminist culture that not only persisted but flourished after the eclipse of the women’s suffrage movement following the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.

Emphasizing that modern dance began as a movement of, by, and for women is the fact that its chief forerunners were two maverick matriarchs. At the turn of the century Isadora Duncan had boldly proclaimed a strong feminist dimension of her own dance, inspiring at least two generations of women—and not only women—to take risks for the sake of freedom and self-fulfillment. An enthusiastic supporter of the Russian Revolution, Duncan left a legacy of wholehearted rebellion.

The less radical Ruth St. Denis also played a liberating role, spearheading exploration of the possibilities of non-Western dance. As it happened, the vaudevillian St. Denis influenced the course of modern dance more directly than the “Divine Isadora,” largely because Duncan lived in Europe while modern dance was slowly taking shape in her native land. Duncan’s dance, moreover, was the spontaneous and unique result of her own intuition and, as such, unteachable by anyone but her. Of course there were, and still are, some worthy proponents of one variety or another of “Duncan dance”: the line of descent from Isadora through Julia Levien to Annabelle Gamson, the outstanding interpreter of Duncan’s dances in the 1980s, is straight and unmistakable. Dance à la Isadora was featured at the anarchist Modern School in Stelton, New Jersey, and the “Natural Rhythmic Expression” taught by the little-known Bird Larson at New York’s socialist Rand School also owed much to Duncan’s example. But the fact that there are so many different versions of Duncan dancing raises doubts about how much of Duncan survives in any of them. Few of the founders of modern dance ever saw Duncan herself dance, and they tended to be unimpressed by what they did see of Duncan-style dancing, which, in any case, has been peripheral to the development of the modern movement.

St. Denis, by contrast, was engaged in the day-to-day business of giving practical, technical dance instruction to pupils who intended to earn their living by dancing. For more than fifteen years, first in Los Angeles and later in New York, she directed (with Ted Shawn) the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts.

St. Denis’s own variety of theosophy was an important part of the Denishawn curriculum. Instilled with her belief that Dance (with the capital D) was a mystical mission, the best students were expected to remain with the company, not only as teachers, but as propagators of the Denishawn faith on extensive tours. Such a self-effacing regimen was not for everyone, and it is hardly surprising that the most gifted dancers eventually broke away.

Among the graduates of Denishawn were two dancers who, by 1929, were recognized leaders of a “revolution” in dance. A direct descendant of Miles Standish, Martha Graham (1893–1991) was born and raised in a Pittsburgh suburb and moved to California with her parents in 1908. After seven years with Denishawn she set out on her own. By decade’s end the very titles of her performances—“Revolt,” “Immigrant,” “Poems of 1917,” “Heretic”—seemed to confirm New York Times critic John Martin’s remark that her effect “has not been one of warmth and elevation, but rather of tension and disturbed thinking.”

Doris Humphrey (1895–1958), who was born in Oak Park, Illinois, and grew up in Chicago, went west in 1917 to enroll in Denishawn, in whose company she remained for eleven years. In 1925–1926 she took part in the Denishawn tour of Asia. An outstanding theorist as well as practitioner of dance (her classic treatise, The Art of Making Dances, was published posthumously in 1959), Humphrey played a role in the formation and elaboration of the modern movement equal to that of the more publicized Graham, and not a few dancers and critics have regarded her as the greater choreographer.

Helen Tamiris (1905–1966), a third major figure in the formative years of modern dance, started out as a student of classical ballet in New York City, where she was born. Remarkably versatile, she later choreographed Broadway musical extravaganzas and Hollywood films such as Show Boat and Annie Get Your Gun. In the late 1920s she was one of the first modern dancers to identify herself with the revolutionary workers’ movement. “The validity of the modern dance,” she argued, “is rooted in its ability to express modern problems and, further, to make modern audiences want to do something about them.”
Although critics applied the term “revolutionary” to any and all modern dancers, Tamiris’s avowedly activist orientation was not shared by Graham or Humphrey, who remained aloof to the political turmoil of the Depression years. Graham’s biographer, Don McDonagh, notes that “her vision was directed to unlocking the fetters that bound the spirit, not those twisting the social fabric.” In a period of mass labor organizing, Humphrey refused to join a union, fearing that such membership might somehow limit her freedom.

The apoliticism of some of its leading personalities notwithstanding, modern dance began as an integral part of the American Left milieu and was regarded as such in the United States. “I never heard of a modern pro-fascist dance,” wrote Margaret Lloyd, dance critic for the Christian Science Monitor. Such was not the case, however, in Germany, where leading dancer Mary Wigman appeared uncomfortably close to the Nazis. In the United States, the modern dance movement was close to the Left and repeatedly denounced in the conservative and occasionally the liberal press. The modern dance audience, moveover, consisted almost entirely of young people who thought of themselves as radicals and revolutionists.

Tamiris welcomed the objective link between social radicalism and the new dance, while Graham and Humphrey can be said to have resigned themselves to it. All three, however, agreed that dance could not and should not be reduced to any sort of propaganda or even to a narrowly “social” esthetic. For her part, Tamiris clearly felt that a certain amount of red-flag-waving was permissible, as in her “Revolutionary March” of 1929, and even Graham and Humphrey sometimes touched on “social” themes. But the heart of their work lay elsewhere. Most of their dances—such as Humphrey’s “The Shakers” and “Square Dances,” Graham’s “Frontier” and “Letter to the World” (inspired by Emily Dickinson), Tamiris’s “Circus Sketches,” “Prize Fight Studies,” “Negro Spirituals,” and “Walt Whitman Suite”—were rooted in myths, poetry, folklore, and other magic-laden byways of the American past and present. Left critics tended to be sympathetic to this effort. Recognizing in such dances something of the Left’s own striving toward a radical reinterpretation of the American experience, they embraced the new movement as an important component of an emerging revolutionary culture.

For an increasing number of student dancers, however, this vague association of modern dance and social radicalism was not enough. These youngsters, many of whom were members of the Communist or Socialist parties, sought to place the whole modern dance movement at the service of the revolution. Eager to make dance itself play a role in the overthrow of capitalism, they choreographed dances to serve the workers’ everyday struggle against the bosses. The Communist Parry’s ideological tightening-up at the turn of the decade hastened this process. With slogans of “Bolshevization” and the “Third Period” quickening their pulses, young dancers took their cue from manifestoes for “proletarian culture” and proclaimed that “dance is a weapon.”

Tamiris, the most politically radical of the elders, was a natural leader of these boisterous troops. Ironically, however, Graham’s and Humphrey’s students made up much of the active core of such militant groups as the Red Dancers, organized in 1929, the Rebel Dance Group, New Dance Group, Theatre Union Dance Group, Office Workers Dance Group, and nearly a score of others that formed over the next few years. Several of Graham’s students, celebrated dancers in their own right in later years, were especially prominent. Jane Dudley danced “In the Life of a Worker” (1934) and “Song for Soviet Youth Day” (1935); Anna Sokolow danced an “Anti-War Cycle” (1937) and Sophie Maslow offered her comrades “Two Songs About Lenin” (1934) as well as a “May Day March” (1936). Eleanor King, Humphrey student who later established her own school in Seattle, choreographed “A Song About America” (1939), featuring homages to the abolitionists and the Haymarket martyrs; sponsored by the Communist Party, the performance took place on the fifteenth anniversary of the death of Lenin. There were dances to poems by Communist Mike Gold and Socialist Arturo Giovannitti, and others inspired by the Scottsboro and Tom Mooney cases. Is it necessary to add that most of these dances were ultra-serious, even somber? Here and there, however, humor was allowed to hold the stage, as in the Red Dancers’ “Sell-Out” (1934), choreographed to a parody of “The Man on the Flying Trapeze” and first performed at a textile workers’ union meeting in Paterson, New Jersey.

Of the quality of the dancing itself little is known, for these dances long ago disappeared from the repertories, and few if any were filmed. Critic John Martin was probably not far from the mark when he wrote, in America Dancing (1936): “In the early stages of the movement, dancing … consisted of choosing some literary slogan in conformity with orthodox radical political thinking, and of showing with what energy the dancer or dancers involved agreed with the sentiments thus conveyed. The power of expressional movement, the real stuff of the dance, was not seen to exist.”

Undaunted, however, by criticism from anyone other than workers or comrades, the movement spread like wildfire and the modern dance audience, once a mere coterie, grew enormously. The young radicals performed at the New School for Social Research and other educational institutions as well as at trade union picnics, strike meetings, and political rallies. It was said that Graham and Humphrey had a hard time scheduling performances for the first of May because so many of their dancers were away giving performances of their own at May Day gatherings.

The proliferation of radical dance groups around the country inevitably suggested a federation. The Socialist Party’s Rebel Arts included several dance groups, but the Workers’ Dance League, politically allied with the Communist Party, was much larger and more influential. Organized in 1932, the league had more than a dozen affiliated groups in New York City, plus others in Brooklyn, Yonkers, Newark, Passaic, Boston, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Individual dues were twenty-five cents a year. Its “Aims and Functions” included: “Building a dance art vital and clear, a dance art that is inspired by and useful to workers. Organizing dance groups in working class neighborhoods.... Broadening the dance audience by performing wherever workers gather.... Educating dancers and audiences to the problems of the working class.... Cooperating with artists in other fields of revolutionary cultural activity.”

Working conditions in the dance world were generally poor—long hours and low wages prevailed—and the Workers’ Dance League Bulletin (later New Dance) regularly covered dancers’ struggles to improve their lot. In November 1934 league members, with Tamiris in the forefront, helped form the New York Dancers’ Union, open to all dance-workers. A year later New Dance reported that the burlesque dancers were organized but that the effort to line up the taxi-dancers had thus far met with limited success. An ad hoc Dancers’ Emergency Association was set up to organize the unorganized dancers but, like many other organizations of “cultural workers” spearheaded by Communists in those years, the “dancers’ union” proved ineffectual and ephemeral.

Unemployment during the Great Depression was a serious problem for dancers, and many, including those in the Workers’ Dance League, looked to President Roosevelt’s New Deal relief programs to solve it. Meanwhile, significant changes were taking place in the Left dance scene. With the advent of the Communist Party’s Popular Front line in 1935, the Workers’ Dance League quietly became the New Dance League, and the shrill rhetoric of its early days was toned down in the process. The accent was no longer on class war and impending revolution but rather on the need to support the Congress of Industrial Organizations and to combat race discrimination and fascism.

This policy doubtless facilitated the administrative involvement of a number of Party members and sympathizers in Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects. Tamiris helped organize the Federal Theater Project and, by means of a visit to Roosevelt’s adviser Harry Hopkins, saw to it that dance was an integral pat of the program. Late in 1935 the Dance Project was started in New York, with a hundred dancers; a unit began in Chicago the following year. WPA productions, some of which had impressively long runs, provided work for many unemployed dancers and incidentally introduced modern dance to a substantially larger audience. This experiment in government-subsidized dance proved short-lived, however, for Congress put a stop to it in July 1939. In New York, according to ballet-critic Anatole Chujoy’s Encyclopedia of Dance (revised edition, 1967), the Dance Project “petered out” even earlier “due chiefly to improved theater business.” Other commentators, including many dancers active in the project, maintained that Congress acted in response to prodding by the recently formed House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

If Popular Front strategy eased the entrance of Communist-oriented dancers into the larger society, it also diminished the necessity for an organization made up exclusively of Communist-oriented dancers. In addition to the Workers’ Dance League and Rebel Arts there were numerous dance groups linked to unions; the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in New York had an extensive dance program involving more than two hundred participants. The National Dance Congress in May 1936 brought together the whole range of American professional dancers and prepared the way for the amalgamation of the league and other groups to form the American Dance Association a year later. The Congress was organized by Tamiris, who became the first president of the new association. Communists, liberals, apolitical dancers, and perhaps even a few conservatives, were now united under one umbrella.

There were many reasons why the explicitly revolutionary political phase of modern dance was of such short duration. The free-spirited young women who made up the great majority of modern dancers could hardly have felt at home for long in any male-dominated political apparatus. A tension that must sometimes have been overwhelming existed between these dancers’ well-meaning social aspirations and their fundamentally avant-grade sensibilities. A few may have abandoned dance to work full-time for the Party, but most of them preferred to abandon the Party. By mid-decade, when it became more widely known how severely modern dance was frowned on by the official ballet-loving “socialist realist” aestheticians of the Soviet Union, the romance between dancers and Communists was already declining. Most dancers, in any case, were interested in politics as it affected dance more than in politics as such. “These young rebels,” wrote Eleanor King many years later, “were as much against abstraction and mysticism in dance as they were against fascism, exploitation of the workers, and poverty.”

It is notable that the decade of “red” dance produced no enduring body of Left dance criticism—a failure all the more striking in view of the pioneering role of socialists in this field. Back in the 1910s, two of the most prominent personalities of the Masses—novelist/essayist Floyd Dell and painter John Sloan—had commented insightfully on the dance of Isadora Duncan. In the same years Louis C. Fraina, Marxian economist and a founder of the Communist Party, edited and wrote much of Modem Dance magazine; although this publication focused on social dancing, Fraina also wrote of Duncan and other forerunners of the new dance of the late twenties. Another periodical, the Dance-Lover, which started in 1923 and evolved into today’s Dance Magazine, was edited for its first four years by an outspoken leftist, Vera Caspary, best known as the author of the film scenario Laura, based on her own detective novel. These promising beginnings, however, were not fulfilled. The Communists’ Daily Worker, New Theater magazine, and especially the New Masses (the Socialists’ equivalent was Arise) included much material on dance, but most of it was mere reportage and the rest tended to be trite superficialities or propagandistic bombast.

As dancers’ faith in the Soviet Union diminished, so did their sympathy for the cause of socialism. “There are no reds in modern dance today,” Margaret Lloyd wrote in 1948, but in fact the radical dance movement was already over by the start of World War II. The anti-war dancers of the 1930s did not perform their anti-war dances once war had begun. By the end of the decade the character of the entire modern movement had changed beyond recognition. Activist dance largely disappeared: the postwar strike wave and the struggle against Taft-Hartley had to get along without dancers’ support. Showing just how far the pendulum had swung, in 1954–1956 the once-redbaited Martha Graham, whose company had included so many emphatically pro-Communist dancers, made several overtly anticommunist overseas tours organized by the U.S. State Department, who touted her as America’s “Ambassador of Dance.” The sole survivor of the Workers’ Dance League, the New Dance Group School in New York, took up nonobjectivism and existentialism.

Developed especially by Merce Cunningham, this tendency paved the way for the minimalist and conceptualist dance of the next generation. As dance shrank from real human problems, its audience shrank with it. Modern dance was “no longer a revolutionary emancipating principle,” wrote John Martin, but rather “an academic tyranny as binding as that of the traditional ballet against which it originally rebelled.”

Exceptions to the rightward trend took unexpected forms that didn’t fit any of the existing styles of American radicalism. Perhaps the most innovative and imaginative dancer of the post-1940 years, Chicago-based Sybil Shearer, defied all existing values with the insouciant extremism of a William Blake or a John Muir; baffled critics could not decide whether she represented a return to the simplicity and naturalness of Isadora Duncan or a plunge into the troubled waters of surrealism.

Another nonconformist was Californian Bella Lewitzky, who had been born in Job Harriman’s Utopian socialist Llano del Rio colony in the Mojave Desert, and was a member of the Los Angeles New Dance League in the 1930s. Her refusal to testify before HUAC in 1951 (“I’m a dancer, not a singer,” she quipped) provoked a barrage of obscene and threatening phone-calls, but she remained a familiar sight at protest meetings and on picket lines. In dance as in life, revolt and freedom have always been her favorite themes, as in “Tierra y Libertad” (1941, choreographed by Lester Horton), “Warsaw Ghetto” (1949) and “Leyendas de Mexico” (1953, based on the Indians’ struggle against the conquistadores), danced in an extravagantly antirealistic idiom that had nothing in common with the agitprop of earlier years.

Esther Junger, a student of Bird Larson’s who in 1935 had scandalized Boston as the star dancer and choreographer of the Theater Guild’s Communist comedy Parade, was yet another dancer who bravely resisted the downhill slide of modern dance from poetry to prose. One of the most singular personages of the modern movement, she was for a time choreographer for the Ringling Brothers/Barnum & Bailey Circus. Her dances inspired by jazz, wild animals, Gauguin’s paintings, and the lore of indigenous cultures added something new and unsettling to a dance scene increasingly dominated by the predictable.

Black modern dance also challenged the prevalent academicism and Cold War disengagement. Independent of the main currents of the modern movement, Chicago-born Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus of Trinidad, both with doctorates in anthropology, developed a powerful dance idiom rooted in Afro-Caribbean folklore. Dunham, director of the Chicago WPA Dance Project’s Negro Unit and later of the New York Labor Stage, also was choreographer for several Hollywood films devoted to black Americana, including Stormy Weather and Cabin in the Sky. Primus, widely regarded as the world’s foremost authority on African dance, choreographed several Negro spirituals. In recent years the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians has featured several innovative dancers in its celebrations of “Great Black Music.”

A modest resurgence of radical dance accompanied the social ferment of the 1960s. The Living Theater of Julian Beck and Judith Malina drew more or less equally on Antonin Artaud’s dance-based “Theater of Cruelty” and anarchist-pacifist-Industrial Workers of the World traditions to produce the Left’s most influential dance-theater of those years. Expressive movement has also been central to Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater. Agitprop resurfaced primarily in mime, most effectively in the popular San Francisco Mime Troupe. A student of Lewitzky’s, surrealist Alice Farley, one of the few contemporary dancers to champion the cause of social revolution, has performed extraordinary stilt-dances in New York anti-war parades. At the close of the century dance radicalism survived in widely scattered individuals and companies such as these, isolated in the outermost margins of the dance/theater world. But its heritage was a vital one and always capable of renewal.

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Foulkes, J. L. Modern Bodies: Dance and American Modernism from Martha Graham to Alvin Ailey. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

King, Eleanor. Transformation: The Humphrey-Weidman Era. Brooklyn: Dance Horizons, 1978.

Lloyd, Margaret. The Borzoi Book of Modern Dance. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949.
Martin, John. America Dancing. New York: Dodger, 1936.

Mazo. J. H. Prime Movers: The Makers of Modern Dance in America. Chicago: Independent Publishers Group, 2000.

Taub, Debra. “Dance and the Transformation of the World.” In Surrealism and Its Popular Accomplices, edited by Franklin Rosemont. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1980.