How to Do Things With Dance

by Kowal, Rebekah J.

• ISBN13: 9780819568984
• ISBN10: 0819568988
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-09-10
• Publisher: Wesleyan Univ Pr

Summary

In postwar America, any assertion of difference from the mainstream anticommunist culture carried professional and personal risks. For this reason, modern dance artists left much of what they thought unsaid. Instead they expressed themselves in movement. How To Do Things with Dance positions modern dance as a vital critical discourse, and suggests that dances of the late 1940s and the 1950s can be seen as compelling agents of social change. Concentrating on choreographers whose artistic work conceived dance in terms of action, Rebekah J. Kowal shows how specific choreographic projects demonstrated increasing awareness of the stage as a penetrable space, one on which socially suspect or marginalized modes of being could be performed with relative impunity and exerted in the real world. Artists covered include Martha Graham, Jose Limon, Anna Sokolow, Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Donald McKayle, Talley Beatty, and Anna Halprin.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Modern Dance and the Cultural Turn to Action

Setting the Stage: Modern Dance Universalism and the Culture of Containment

Precursors to Action: Martha Graham and Jose Limon

Action is Ordinary: Anna Sokolow

Action is Effective: Pearl Primus

Action is Finding Subjectivity: Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor

The Uses of Action 1: Talley Beatty, Katherine Dunham and Donald McKayle

The Uses of Action 2: Anna Halprin

Notes

References

Index

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