Dudley, Jane (1912–2001)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Phillips Geduld
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Professional Training ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
The United States ◽  
London School ◽  
Contemporary Dance ◽  
Martha Graham ◽  
Dance Movement ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Works

Jane Dudley, a key figure in the radical dance movement of the 1930s, was a choreographer who developed her own distinctive voice within the modern dance idiom and an educator who trained numerous dancers both in the United States and in England. An early member of the New Dance Group (NDG), she oversaw the creation of group works such as Strike (1934), while choreographing solos such as Time is Money (1934), in which she used the modern dance idiom to embody a worker’s oppression on the assembly line. A striking performer, Dudley joined the Martha Graham Company in the mid-1930s. At the same time, she continued to develop her own repertoire, in part through the Dudley–Maslow–Bales Trio, whose founders—Sophie Maslow, William Bales, and herself—remained committed to the social ideals of the 1930s long after they had abandoned the making of overtly political works. Dudley’s loyalty to NDG extended over several decades during which it became a major New York training venue, offering inexpensive classes and professional training to promising students, including many African Americans. From 1970 to 2000, Dudley directed the London School of Contemporary Dance, transforming it into one of Europe’s leading modern dance institutions.

Martha Graham's House of the Pelvic Truth: The Figuration of Sexual Identities and Female Empowerment

2010 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henrietta Bannerman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Female Students ◽  
The Body ◽  
Contemporary Dance ◽  
Martha Graham ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
Dance Training ◽  
To Come ◽  
The 1960S

Martha Graham writes in her autobiography Blood Memory that she was bewildered, or, as she puts it “bemused,” when she heard how dancers referred to her school as “the house of the pelvic truth” (Graham 1991, 211). We might perhaps agree with Graham that this is not the best description for a highly respected center of modern dance training; neither does it match Graham's image as an awe-inspiring and exacting teacher, nor does it suit the seriousness with which her tough technique is regarded. But the house of the pelvic truth does chime with stories about Graham's often frank method of addressing her students. She is reputed to have told one young woman not to come back to the studio until she had found herself a man. At other times she would tell her female students, “you are simply not moving your vagina” (211). Add to this other stories about the men in the company suffering from “vagina envy” (211), and it can be readily understood that the goings-on in the Graham studio gave rise to its nickname, “house of the pelvic truth.”In British dance circles of the 1960s, it was not rumors of the erotic that attracted most of us to Graham's work or persuaded us to travel to New York in search of the Graham technique. There was little in the way of contemporary dance training in Britain at this time, and we had been mesmerized by the beautiful and rather chaste film A Dancer's World (1957), in which Graham pronounces: a dancer is not a phenomenon … not a phenomenal creature.… I think he is a divine normal. He does what the human body is capable of doing. Now this takes time…it takes about ten years of study. This does not mean he won't be dancing before that time, but it does take the pressure of time, so that the house of the body can hold its divine tenant, the spirit. (1962, 24)

Gerrard, Saida (1913–2005)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seika Boye
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
The United States ◽  
Martha Graham ◽  
Professional Career ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Federal Theater Project ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
First Time

Toronto-born Saida Gerrard was one of the first artists to import modern dance to Canada following study in the United States. Her early training included character dancing and Dalcroze eurhythmics in Toronto, and in 1931 she moved to New York City to train at the newly opened Mary Wigman School, where she studied with Hanya Holm and Fe Alf. She later continued her training at the Martha Graham School and danced with Charles Weidman through the Federal Theater Project. Gerrard eventually settled in California where she continued to teach, choreograph, and perform. From 1932 to 1936 Gerrard returned to Toronto for personal reasons and opened The Studio of Modern Dance, teaching adaptations of exercises in absolute dance (Ausdruckstanz) learned at the Wigman School. Her influence is seen through to the professionalization of modern dance in Toronto in the 1960s. Gerrard’s professional career blossomed during her return to Toronto. She performed her own work before crowds as large as 8,000 with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, exposing many to modern dance for the first time. Her article/manifesto "The Dance" explains the artistic and philosophical impetus behind the developing art form. She eventually returned to New York where there was an infrastructure to support a professional dance career, which was not available in Canada at the time.

French Interwar Dance Theory

2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 104-110
Author(s):  
Mark Franko
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
The United States ◽  
Research Area ◽  
Martha Graham ◽  
Dance Studies ◽  
Dance Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Critical Discourses

Interwar French dance and the critical discourses responding to it have until recently been an underdeveloped research area in Anglo-American dance studies. Despite common patterns during the first half of the twentieth century that may be observed between the dance capitals of Berlin, Paris, and New York, some noteworthy differences set the French dance world apart from that of Germany or North America. Whereas in Germany and the United States modern dance asserted itself incontrovertibly in the persons of two key figures—Mary Wigman and Martha Graham, respectively—no such iconic nativist modernist dancer or choreographer emerged in France. Ilyana Karthas's When Ballet Became French indicates the predominance of ballet in France, and this would seem an inevitable consequence of the failure of modern dance to take hold there through at least one dominant figure. Franz-Anton Cramer's In aller Freiheit adopts a more multidimensional view of interwar French dance culture by examining discourse that moves outside the confines of ballet. A variety of dance forms were encouraged in the milieu of the Archives Internationales de la Danse—an archive, publishing venture, and presenting organization—that Rolf de Maré founded in Paris in 1931. This far-reaching and open-minded initiative was unfortunately cut short by the German occupation (1940–1944). As Cramer points out: “The history of modern dance in Europe is imprinted with the caesura of totalitarianism” (13). Although we are somewhat familiar with the story of modern dance in Germany, we know very little about it in France.

Itō, Michio (1893–1961)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tara Rodman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
The United States ◽  
Martha Graham ◽  
Greenwich Village ◽  
Modern Dancers ◽  
Poetic Drama ◽  
Ito Method

Michio Itō was a modern dancer and choreographer who worked in Europe, the United States, and Japan. After training at the Dalcroze Institute in Hellerau, Itō collaborated with Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats on the 1916 dance drama, At the Hawk’s Well. In New York City, Itō performed at the Neighborhood Playhouse and the Greenwich Village Theatre, and taught and worked with U.S. modern dancers, including Martha Graham, Charles Weidman, Pauline Koner, Ruth St. Denis, and Lester Horton. Itō moved to Los Angeles in 1929, where he worked in film and choreographed dance symphonies for the Hollywood and Pasadena Rose Bowls. Following the events at Pearl Harbor Itō was interned, and repatriated to Tokyo in 1943. When the war ended he became head choreographer of the Ernie Pyle Theatre in Tokyo, creating productions for the occupying troops. Itō developed his own modern dance technique, the Itō Method, which adapted Dalcroze movement exercises into a style that he described as a fusion of ‘‘East’’ and ‘‘West.’’ Itō’s intercultural approach and ability to move between elite and commercial projects allowed him to cross different streams of modernism—German eurhythmics, British poetic drama, U.S. modern dance, and the Americanization of postwar culture in Japan.

Itō, Michio (1893–1961)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John D. Swain
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
The United States ◽  
Martha Graham ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Extensive Body ◽  
Opening And Closing ◽  
The Guardian

Itō Michio’s creative endeavors spanned dance, theatre, and film, just as his career spanned the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans, however, his life as a creative artist was one of World War II’s international cultural casualties. After decades of work with people such as W. B. Yeats in Ireland, the Washington Square Players and Martha Graham in New York, and the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, Itō was repatriated to Japan in 1943 where he continued to teach and choreograph until his death. The first son of an old samurai family whose parents encouraged their children to pursue any avenue of interest, Michio was the elder brother by eleven years of Itō Kunio, aka shingeki theater director Senda Koreya. Itō collaborated with Yeats on his Plays for Dancers, and is probably best known for creating the role of the Guardian of the Well in (At the Hawk’s Well) 1916. His work as a dancer and choreographer in the United States is not as well remembered because almost none of that extensive body of work was preserved. He was to choreograph the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, but did not live to see that project materialize. Itō left Japan for Europe in 1912 to study voice. Once in Germany he became disillusioned with opera, but was entranced by the dance of Isadora Duncan, Pavlova, and Nijinsky. He decided to study modern dance, and entered the Dalcroze Institute in 1913. Much of his later work is influenced by eurythmics.

Cross-space Consumption among Undocumented Chinese Immigrants in the United States

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Min Zhou ◽  
Xiangyi Li
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Chinese Immigrants ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Social Value ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Currency Exchange ◽  
The Social ◽  
International Migrants

We consider cross-space consumption as a form of transnational practice among international migrants. In this paper, we develop the idea of the social value of consumption and use it to explain this particular form of transnationalism. We consider the act of consumption to have not only functional value that satisfies material needs but also a set of nonfunctional values, social value included, that confer symbolic meanings and social status. We argue that cross-space consumption enables international migrants to take advantage of differences in economic development, currency exchange rates, and social structures between countries of destination and origin to maximize their expression of social status and to perform or regain social status. Drawing on a multisited ethnographic study of consumption patterns in migrant hometowns in Fuzhou, China, and in-depth interviews with undocumented Chinese immigrants in New York and their left-behind family members, we find that, despite the vulnerabilities and precarious circumstances associated with the lack of citizenship rights in the host society, undocumented immigrants manage to realize the social value of consumption across national borders and do so through conspicuous consumption, reciprocal consumption, and vicarious consumption in their hometowns even without being physically present there. We conclude that, while cross-space consumption benefits individual migrants, left-behind families, and their hometowns, it serves to revive tradition in ways that fuel extravagant rituals, drive up costs of living, reinforce existing social inequality, and create pressure for continual emigration.

Martin, John (1893–1985)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynne Conner
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Social Research ◽  
The United States ◽  
Martha Graham ◽  
New School ◽  
Form And Function ◽  
American Modern Dance ◽  
The Times ◽  
And Function

One of the first full-time newspaper dance reviewers in the United States, John Martin wrote for The New York Times from 1927 to 1962 and was often referred to as the dean of American dance critics during his 35-year tenure. Martin used his bully pulpit at the Times to launch a discourse within the dance community surrounding the aesthetics of modernism in dance as well as to educate and rally a new audience. In the process he helped to establish dance reviewing as a specialized field of arts reporting and commentary and not just a subgenre of music criticism, as it had been treated before 1927. A vocal defender of the legitimacy of an American modern dance as defined by New York-based practitioners such as Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey, Martin was among the first theorists of it, outlining a poetics of its form and function while introducing a new vocabulary. His prolific output includes thousands of essays and reviews for the Times and other periodicals, seven books, and a series of highly influential lectures given at the New School for Social Research, Bennington School of the Dance, and in the latter part of his career at the University of California-Los Angeles.

Fired by the Ideal

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcella Bencivenni
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Italian Immigration ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Ideal

This chapter details the social, political and historical context out of which Italian anarchism emerged in New York City. Embracing a transnational approach, she charts the movement's early roots, its main leaders, geopolitical spaces and distinctive subculture starting from the late nineteenth century when the great Italian immigration to the United States began through the 1920s when the movement started to decline under the blows of governmental repression and postwar nativist calls for 100 percent Americanism.

scholarly journals Inevitable Designs: Embodied Ideology in Anna Sokolow's Proletarian Dances

2013 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Kosstrin
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Case History ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Martha Graham ◽  
Dance Movement ◽  
Going Public

Anna Sokolow (1910–2000), an American Jewish choreographer known for her social statements, led the workers dance movement and performed as a soloist with Martha Graham. She imbued her dancesStrange American Funeral(1935) andCase History No.—(1937) with proletarian ideology that spoke to 1930s working- and middle-class audiences aligned with values of revolutionary and modern dance. These choreographies spoke to a political atmosphere focused on social justice while they appealed to a broad dance-going public. Sokolow's Graham training engendered a modernist aesthetic in her choreography that led critics to consider her work universal instead of marked as coming from a working-class left-wing Jewish dancer. This article argues that while narratives about Sokolow's work downplay her Communist affiliations, these ideals played a critical role in her choreography and in her navigation of international Communist circles. As Sokolow's choreography reinforced her politics, so too did her affiliations support her dance work.

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