Staging Diversity/Staging Containment

Chapter 4 focuses on the 1948 International Dance Festival and the New York Golden Jubilee Celebration to investigate the cultural paradoxes surrounding international dance performance in the early Cold War years. Promotion of cross-cultural exchange and openness to difference took a nationalistic turn if the public reception and critical discourse surrounding the festival are any indication. The chapter reveals through this case study that by the late 1940s the promise of American globalism imagined at the conclusion of World War II had diminished under the strain of containment of communism, signaling a growing public anxiety about the threat of cultural outsiders and outside influences. The 1948 International Dance Festival highlights the shifting attitudes to American globalism and the redirection of national ideals regarding cultural pluralism, within the culture of containment.

Staging Integration

Between 1943 and 1952, the American Museum of Natural History sponsored a dance program called Around the World with Dance and Song. Chapter 1 focuses on the history of this program as evidence of the museum’s efforts to stage globalism. Drawing on extensive archival materials, the chapter documents the role of director Hazel Lockwood Muller to develop the program as part of the museum’s larger educational outreach activities. The chapter details how over the course of its history the program met growing cultural expectations that public institutions such as museums serve the public good. Serving in this capacity, the museum become a de facto concert dance venue, elevating the profile of international dance performance in New York City and for the nation and heightening a globalist consciousness among its audiences. Even so, the museum’s performances and the challenges the museum faced in sustaining them manifested the difficulties of putting globalism into practice. While the program was successful in elevating values of ethnic self-definition in embodied dance practices, it promoted an ideology of cultural integrationism that maintained dominant universalist assumptions about Western cultural superiority.

Introduction

In 1948, New York City celebrated the unification of its five boroughs with a Golden Jubilee Celebration, organized by Grover Whelan, who had directed the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Included in the slate of events was an international dance festival, produced by famed impresario, Sol Hurok. The Introduction investigates the phenomenon of the international dance festival to mobilize its central contentions about the cultural significance of international dance performance and embodied cultural otherness in mid-century America. In this case, the international dance festival amplified New York City’s global cultural dominance while at the same time symbolizing the contributions of diverse peoples to the city’s rich cultural life. Moreover, as illustrated, international dance performance on concert stages in New York City and elsewhere in the US contributed to broad scale national efforts to enhance America’s image on the geopolitical stage. Additionally, the Introduction identifies and defines key terminology used throughout the book and establishes the book’s seminal argument, that aesthetic and cultural debates over the meanings of international dance performances in the mid-century proxy larger national struggles over how to become a diverse and multicultural society.

Staging Diaspora

Chapter 3 focuses on the artistic, cultural and political significance of Sierra-Leonean choreographer Asadata Dafora’s work in the mid-1940s. The first part of the chapter examines the import of three African dance festivals that Dafora directed and produced at Carnegie Hall on behalf of the African Academy of Arts and Research (AAAR), a pro-nationalist and anti-colonialist organization founded by Nigerian students living in New York City at the time. Seen in this light, Dafora’s performance of diaspora makes visible practices of black creativity and resistance, seeking to bridge Africanist solidarities toward the formation of a black American identity defined in global terms. The second part of the chapter analyzes the importance of a tour Dafora took with his dance company, Shogola Oloba African Dance Group, across the American South and Midwest, performing “Africa” for largely African American audiences on the eve of the civil rights movement.

Staging Ethnologic Dance

Chapter 2 examines La Meri’s controversial legacy in American concert dance. An Anglo-American dance artist who specialized in Asian and Latin American dance practices, La Meri fashioned herself as a dance polyglot, having studied with instructors at stops along the way of her worldwide performance tours in the 1920s and 1930s. When World War II commenced in Europe, La Meri settled in New York City in 1940 and established herself as one of the world’s foremost ethnologic performers. This chapter investigates debates that surrounded La Meri in the 1940s to illuminate the tensions that developed between so-called ethnic dance and modern dance, on the one hand, and cultural formations of whiteness, on the other.