Segal, Edith

SEGAL, EDITH (1902-1997). Dancer, songwriter, and prolific poet, Edith Segal served the cultural Left through many decades. She started on this path by winning a prize for her music and lyrics at the Henry Street Settlement and graduating to the old Neighborhood Playhouse on Grand Street. She rightly took pride in her lifetime role as a “people’s artist.”

Born and raised on the Lower East Side to Jewish working-class parents, Segal grew up dancing in the streets to the music of organ grinders. The nearby Henry Street Settlement provided her with formal training in music and dance, including ballet. At age fourteen, with a scholarship in hand, she became a student at the Neighborhood Playhouse, an off-Broadway “little theatre,” where she continued to learn and perform for the next fourteen years.

The excitement of the Russian Revolution deepened Segal’s artistic endeavors and moved her in a distinctly political direction. For a time, she directed the Nature Friends Dance Group, occasionally staging young women in jump suits waving large poles with communist flags emblazoned with the hammer and sickle. In 1929, she formed her own dance company, the Red Dancers, which made its mark by orchestrating a tribute to Lenin. In 1930, Segal viewed the Communist experiment first hand. She traveled to the Soviet Union with a group of American artists, who, on their return, declared “Art is a Weapon.” This same year, she choreographed her best-known work, Black and White, which debuted as one of the earliest interracial dance performances in the United States. The Red Dancers soon allied with other Left dance groups, including the New Dance Group, which had recently formed to enroll workers and dancers in a collective mission of social change. Together, they took up the slogan, “Dance is a Weapon.”

Through the 1930s, Segal solidified her Left cultural mission. She continued to promote racial equality in three major contributions: Scottsboro, Third Degree and Southern Holiday. Dance historians claim that, among Left dancers, no one was more devoted to Black themes. Labor activism also featured prominently. The daughter of a union cigar maker, Segal considered dance a means to empower workers. She directed the Dance Group of the Needle Trades Industrial Union and, for a time, acted as social director of Unity House, the summer vacation resort of the ILGWU. Additionally, she integrated folk dances into her lessons to the Furriers Dance Group. From the 1930s into the 1970s, Segal taught at Camp Kinderland, which had been founded in 1923 by Jewish union activists, and at several additional progressive children’s camps in New York and New England.

By the end of the 1930s, Segal had moved away from performing herself and focused on teaching in Left, union, and Jewish children’s camps. Writing poetry and song lyrics served as a satisfying replacement, and she published dozens of books characterized by their progressive themes. I Call to You Across a Continent (1955) was dedicated to the memory of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and expresses her anger at the heinous miscarriage of justice. Notable is the “love song” she wrote in the voice of the Rosenbergs. “Dreaming of Waltzing” concludes with the stanza:

The people who fought for justice
Who saved us from death, we embrace
Arm in arm we go forth
Holding our sons aloft
Building peace in the new life we face.

Her late-life spouse and abstract expressionist Samuel Kamen illustrated several her poetry books. In the 1950s, she was called before a New York State legislative committee examining her ties to the Communist children camps.

Edith Segal Papers, 1915-1997. Jerome Robbins Dance Collection. Archives & Manuscripts. New York Public Library. http://archives.nypl.org/dan/1976.

“Politics and the Dancing Body.” Exhibition. Library of Congress.
https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/politics-and-dance/finding-a-political-voice.html

Edith Segal Oral History. Communist Oral Histories. Tamiment Library, New York University. https://wp.nyu.edu/tamimentcpusa/edith-segal/