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DANCE VIEW; What’s Become of the Magic?

Hudson Review, August 1993

The People Spoke, by Marcia B. Segel

MARCIA B. SIEGEL 

The People Spoke 

AMERICAN DANCE INSTITUTIONS LEAD NOTORIOUSLY SHORT LIVES. The dance didn't really get started here until the second decade of this century, and its sustenance has come from dedicated, underpaid individuals obsessed with the notion that dancing offered something to the soul no other human activity could provide. This isn't exactly the most marketable project, and dance schools and companies seem to wilt when their idealistic founders move on to other things. So the survival of the New Dance Group from 1932 to today is an extraordinary achievement. The Group antedates the School of American Ballet (founded in 1934) and the American Dance Festival (a continuation of the Bennington School of Dance, 1934), and virtually every modern dance and ballet company still in existence. To celebrate this prodigious longevity, last June the American Dance Guild presented an extraordinary concert of works by choreographers associated with the Group over the years. Given in conjunction with the joint conference of the Congress of Research in Dance and the Society of Dance History Scholars, the event touched off a series of provocative reminiscences. Regrettably, none of the collaborating organizations took the opportunity to commission any in-depth writing on the subject, though a handsome memorial brochure was produced. 

One reason for the New Dance Group's long life was that it never became the domain of a single artist. A collective in both its teaching and producing activities, the Group founded its identity on the idea of dance as “a viable weapon for the struggles of the working class," rather than the individual voice of any member. These modern dancers thought they were dancing about real people and real people's lives. They taught classes at low prices and choreographed political messages to rouse the masses. We can hardly imagine today the assemblages, big and small, that fired up the populace in the thirties. Dancers, singers, actors, speechmakers wanted their audiences to be galvanized into action, to demand tolerance, fair wages, and an end to war. Even the political marches of the sixties didn't have the idealistic fervor of those times. 

It was communism's proletarian vision that seized artists in the thirties. Politically naive but socially concerned, they espoused the Soviet experiment, which seemed to them the only hope for righting the injustices of the world, and particularly the injustices of capital ism. Whatever we now recognize as communism's failures, its early manifestation held out hope that the humanist's dream of equality, freedom, and an end to poverty could actually be realized. This is the challenge the early New Dance Group choreographers flung at their audiences, in the form of dances that would wake people up, reflect the trials and joys of their lives, and allow them to hope for a better life to come. 

Dancers hardly ever think of themselves as political animals. Even today, when you can scarcely set foot in a dance performance without witnessing radical criticism of mainstream values, transgression seems less a risk than a trend, and the images of Lesbian Nation or an AIDS-free world are as fictitious as Shangri-la. How credulous the thirties seem to us now—the murals of stalwart laborers marching shoulder to shoulder into a glorious future, the great choral hymns to the American spirit, the pamphlets and the cell meetings and the earnest editorials. This was idealism soaked in belief. The earliest classes at the New Dance Group, according to founding member Jane Dudley, consisted of three hours, equally divided between technique, improvisation on a specific social theme, and Marxist theory. The theory may have been pretty basic, said Dudley at one of several CORD/SDHS conference sessions devoted to the New Dance Group's history, but the main concern was how to make dances that would effectively propagandize for the cause. 

The flavor of those times was reconstituted by Edna Ocko, a rosy octogenarian none the worse for a many-layered career that included being chief apologist for the left-wing dancers. Interviewed at the CORD/SDHS conference by critic-historian Lynn Garafola, Ocko gave a lively account of the scene. Ocko is a shadowy fixture of the thirties dance world. I'd seen her writing, usually in the form of crumbling newsprint from long-defunct publications, while research ing some dancer or other. I'd noticed her slip in and out of the Federal Dance Project and other progressive experiments. What struck me on encountering her in the flesh for the first time was her matter-of-factness about things the dance world prefers not to recall. Who today acknowledges the New Masses, for instance, as a champion of modern dance? 

In those formative days, one of the modern dance's natural allies was the left-wing press. The most staid and settled of dance's vanguard-Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Hanya Holm-were considered far outside the mainstream of the arts. Though espoused by New York Times critic John Martin, they were nonetheless the enemies of classical dancing and other traditional modes of expres sion. Often, as in the case of those independents who gravitated to the New Dance Group, they were also avowed political activists. Ocko, in love with modern dance and determined to promote its aesthetic, became a critic because, she says, she danced and she could spell. Using a variety of pseudonyms and styles, she often wrote reviews of the same concert for different papers, figuring there was always more to say about something than she could fit in one short piece. 

Ocko's account of the radical dances confirmed what you can see in archival photographs, but what is never spoken. “We weren't very aesthetic. We looked down on agitprop dancing, it wasn't really dancing, and we wanted to be more artistic than that. The workers liked ballet—they had good taste. We liked ballet too, but we thought we should look dilapidated and ragged. We put things together with safety pins." The best of the kind of thing Ocko meant was a dance like Jane Dudley's Harmonica Breakdown (1934), to music of Sonny Terry. Performed at the retrospective concert by an electrifying Sheron Wray, the dance is spare and gritty, unsentimental but full of the feelings of discouragement, determination, and irrepressible though groundless laughter. “I think of it as a dance of misery--and defiance rising out of it," Dudley said at the conference. “There was a drive to life and the misery and difficulty of life.” The same sense of life scraped down to the bone was felt in Eve Gentry's Tenant of the Street (1938), danced by Mary Anne Newell. To the noise of automo bile traffic, a bent figure lurches across the space, arthritic fists seeming to pry open a pathway. The figure hugs the ground, sometimes scrabbling on the floor or huddled in fear, but she's never defeated, and trudges on as the dance ends. 

Character studies of the poor and oppressed weren't the only political dances these choreographers made. There were many direct statements about events in the headlines-strikes, political trials, the Spanish Civil War. The most important of these thematic works given on the concert was Charles Weidman's still-powerful Lynchtown, which wasn't actually a New Dance Group original. Weidman made it in 1936 for the company he directed with Doris Humphrey. More overtly radical than his partner, and less preoccupied with a singular choreographic vision, Weidman moved around more in the dance world, choreographing enthusiastically for operas, Broadway shows, political rallies, the WPA, and independent concerts with non Humphrey-Weidman dancers. Made long before Weidman taught for the New Dance Group in the sixties, Lynchtown was a strong addition to the program as performed by his last direct heirs, the Deborah Carr Theatre Dance Ensemble. 

Lynchtown is a dance about mob violence. Typical of modern dance's determination to avoid literalism, it isn't a picture of wild rioting or rabble-rousing; there's no physical blow struck. Instead the energy of the blood-lusting mob is abstracted and contained in careful group patterns that build and travel inexorably toward a place offstage where the murder will take place. The pursuers strain forward, leap on each other's backs like jockeys, weave through the crowd. They mass together, lashed to fury by one woman. This mob has a strange intensity. The members don't seem to speak to each other, but they communicate their hatred body-to-body, like a herd of animals. Of dozens of impassioned dances Lynchtown is virtually the only one to survive the thirties. No one remembers, for instance, the New Dance Group's famed Van der Lubbe's Head, an award-winning, collectively choreographed response to the Reichstag fire that engineered Hilter's rise to power. Martha Graham's protests against the war in Spain, Immediate Tragedy and Deep Song, are lost, though Graham in her final years re-activated Deep Song from photographs. And many more works, perhaps less memorable but equally timely, simply disappeared. Often they were outright ephemera, made for election rallies or benefits, and only performed once. I suspect too that during the forties and fifties, when they could have been brought into the repertory of newly-formed dance companies, they would have been an embarrassing reminder of political indiscretion. 

By the end of the thirties, communist and socialist sympathies had become the brand of a traitor. Artists who'd been altruistic enough to join the party or work for social reform, were hounded by zealous legislators and denounced in the press. Edna Ocko admitted her gradual withdrawal from dance writing was partly due to the threat of this kind of persecution. In the early fifties she was named as a party follower by Jerome Robbins, whose disclosure of information to a congressional committee was one of the public humiliations artists had to undergo in order to avoid even worse ones. Henry Cowell, for instance, wrote several scores for modern dancers while sitting out a California jail sentence. Dance, like the other arts of protest, pulled in its horns, as the campaigns of intimidation meant it to do. Modern dance had always had both a political and an artistic agenda, and essentially it was the artistic side that continued to develop during the silent years until the next revolution, in the sixties. Things became more dramatic, more concentrated on individual experience and eccentric character, more celebratory and patriotic, and in some cases more esoteric. 

Nearly all the post-thirties dances on the New Dance Group retrospective illustrated one of these themes: Jean Erdman's The Transformations of Medusa (1942), a portrait of an archaic but gorgeous post-Graham figure; Valerie Bettis' tormented solo-with-narrative The Desperate Heart (1943); Anna Sokolow's portrait of lovers trying to make contact, the duet from Lyric Suite (1954); Joseph Gifford's 1947 duet The Flight, with its Spanish street-band music suddenly diminishing to a funereal drumbeat; and Daniel Nagrin's 1948 Strange Hero, straight out of detective novels and noir films. The modern dance was growing tame. No longer a searing adventure into the emotional depths, it was evening out into movements of lyrical and even virtuosic splendor. 

The other great strength of the New Dance Group, and it went completely unremarked in any of the written or oral commentary around the concert, was its embracing of ethnicity. Nowhere in the history of dance can we find such a thoroughly integrated union of talents. Integration, assimilation, these were the watchwords of the liberal thirties. Take every person for the talents he or she can offer; respect everyone's roots and welcome the contribution each one can make to the American dream. Not only were black choreographers and teachers part of the New Dance Group (represented on the concert by Donald McKayle, Pearl Primus, Talley Beatty and Ronne Aul), but there were proponents of European folk dance, Hindu, Hawaiian, Spanish, and just about every other style known. Ethnicity is not so simple today; it evokes partisanship, even territoriality. I'm not saying I'd like to go back to the thirties, but I wish we hadn't so thoroughly lost the faith in goals that everyone could share, in dancing that could bring us together. For perhaps the only time in our history, the new dancers had the idea that they were part of the people, and that, in the heartening words of Woody Guthrie that accompanied Sophie Maslow's 1942 Folksay, “The people will stick around a long time." 

Dance Magazine, October 1993

New Dance Group Gala Concert LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts June 11, 1993 Reviewed by Marilyn Hunt It's an important event when a chapter of dance history comes alive onstage, as it did in the New Dance Group Gala Concert. Subtitled "An Historic Retrospective of the New Dance Group Presentations, 1930s-1970s," the evening was presented by the American Dance Guild in cooperation with the LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts Dance Department. 

The New Dance Group, started in 1932 by students of Hanya Holm to address social problems through dance, had a school which is still in existence today. As could be seen in this long, multifaceted concert, the school embraced a spectrum of styles, rather than concentrating on just one, and it was staunchly interracial. The performance coincided with an excellent conference on the social content of dance, "Of, By, and For the People," sponsored by the Congress on Research in Dance and the Society of Dance History Scholars. 

The works (some shown in excerpt) ranged from dances of protest to later, more lyrical, pieces. In the angry protest dances, the movement tended to be tightly organized and stylized, so that one felt the tension of emotion : beating against the walls of the body and barely restrained. But these dances, which were meant to communicate their messages to a mass audience, speak clearly through telling, compulsive gestures and repetitions, as in the insect-like mob dissected so chillingly in Charles Weidman's Lynchtown (1936) and the desperation of Eve Gentry's solo, Tenant of the Street (1938).

Tom Brazil Gentry's dance depicts a homeless person not with the lethargy of hopelessness but with active fury. Mary Anne Newell inched her way onto the stage, back rounded and feet sliding cautiously, but her arms stretched out stiffly, defiantly, as she actively explored the stage space to a back ground of traffic noise. In a poignant moment she cradled an imaginary baby, then beat her fists on the floor. She eventually drew herself up as she raised a fist to the sky. 

The strength and precision of Newell's movement brought the piece alive in a way that was typical of a program notable for its dancers' appropriate sense of weight. 

Reaching a wide audience was also part of the theory behind the use of folk material. But the dances suggest that it really came from the heart, as in Jane Dudley's Harmonica Breakdown (1934), where the electrifying Sheron Wray from London Contemporary Dance Theatre walked her defiant, mast-leaning-into-the-wind walk, with its determined changes of direction, to the exclamations of Sonny Terry's dri ving harmonica; or in Donald McKayle's well-known Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder (1959) with its chain-gang songs danced altogether convincingly by members of Dayton Contemporary Dance Company. 

The breadth of culture of the dances was one of the evening's joys. Jean Erdman, represented by The Transformations of Medusa (1942), is well known for her mythological themes. In The Flight (1947), Joseph Gifford used the unmistakable voice of 'flamenco singer La Niña de los Peines, powerful and nuanced as a trumpet. Poetry, too, had a strong role: Pearl Primus herself (offstage) spoke Langston Hughes's moving words in an excerpt from her 1944 The Negro Speaks of Rivers. In Time is Money (1934), Dudley placed a speaker of poetry as active onstage witness to a victim of the assembly line. These choreographers told us that to bear witness was to lay claim to hope.