Clare Croft's Dancers as Diplomats opens with a compelling story about Oberlin Dance Collective's performance in Mandalay, Burma, in 2010, where the company was touring as part of the State Department–funded DanceMotion USA program. The U.S. government promoted ODC's presence in Burma as cultural diplomacy; the country was only nine months away from its first election in twenty years. In response, the Burmese government staged its resistance to these diplomatic efforts by making it difficult for citizens to attend the performance and even shutting down power (and the music) during the concert's final dance. Drawing upon interviews with ODC dancers, Croft vividly recounts the moment when dancers and audience members joined together to collectively clap a beat, generating “a collaborative space” that literally hummed with a shared energy, uniting dancers and audiences in a manner that challenged their respective governments’ inability to engage and momentarily “exceeding the frames of national difference that were also present in the performance”(4).
Throughout this beautifully crafted, clearly written book, Croft discusses the U.S. government's reliance on dance to convey idealized notions about “America” abroad and forge diplomatic relationships during two distinctly charged periods in American history. Dancers as Diplomats builds significantly on previous research on this subject, particularly Naomi Prevots's Dance for Export (1999) (and portions of Rebekah Kowal's How to Do Things with Dance), which focused on dance diplomacy in the Cold War. Croft addresses multiple State Department tours at midcentury that, with the input of the America National Theater and Academy (ANTA), sent the New York City Ballet to the Soviet Union, the Martha Graham Dance Company to Asia, and the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater to Africa. However, she advances previous research significantly by placing this history in conversation with Cold War studies, while also offering a much more nuanced assessment of the ways in which race, gender, and sexuality complicated the messages offered in the dances as well as the experiences of the dancers. Further, Croft brings this history forward to the twenty-first century to discuss DanceMotion USA, a State Department program curated and organized by the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). Since its inception in 2010, DanceMotion USA has sent a number of mid-size dance companies to countries in South and East Asia, South America, Africa, and the Middle East including ODC/Dance, Urban Bush Woman, Ronald K. Brown/Evidence, and the Trey McIntyre Project.
Countering the State Department's categorization of dance as “cultural” rather than “political” diplomacy, Croft deftly exposes the overt and covert politics embedded in the formation and administration of these programs, as well as their selection of companies, repertory, and tour destinations. Throughout, she argues that dance has the capacity to bolster state-sanctioned narratives about “America” while subtly challenging official histories and ideals through embodiment, interpersonal interactions, and choreographic dissent. Interestingly, Croft's interview subjects tended to be resistant to describing their mission on tours as “political.” I was consistently impressed by how she addresses the politics and ideologies at play in the tours while still respecting the dancers’ experiences and perspectives.
Indeed, Croft conducted more than seventy interviews with dancers and choreographers, which not only makes the book significant for its historical contribution, but also for its methodology. Through her close consideration of different dancers’ memories about these tours, she shows the complex ways in which dancers negotiated their roles as “official” Americans in relation to multifaceted identities that often exceeded or conflicted with normative ideas about Americanness. As Croft points out, her commitment to “bring[ing] the dancers’ voices and experiences to the center of the historical record” is “an effort to expand a dancer's role beyond that of mute muse or object,” and instead to understand dancers as “astute respondents to the nation” (25).
Dancers as Diplomats also incorporates insightful dance analysis and extensive archival research (particularly government documents and correspondence). Croft weaves this together to produce a robust and deeply contextualized history that demonstrates how dance makes meaning well beyond the limits of the stage and how these meanings continually form and reform in conversation with evolving temporal, political, and geographical contexts.
The book is divided into two halves, corresponding to mid-twentieth-century and early twenty-first century tours. The first chapter, “Ballet Nations,” focuses on the New York City Ballet's 1962 tour to Russia, which coincided with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Croft ably situates the tour within the complex politics between the U.S. and USSR during the Cold War. The repertory that was offered (including Balanchine's Western Symphony and Agon) aimed to emphasize what made American ballet “American,” modern, and superior. And yet, by reinserting dancers’ experiences into this story, Croft shows how the dancers’ kinesthetic connection to Russian ballet technique muddled “the stark distinction between American and Soviet ballet imagined” (40).
Chapter 2 focuses on how the State Department deployed dance modernism to support narratives of “American superiority and the global adaptability of American ideals” such as democracy and equality (67). However, the State Department also found itself in the position of countering international concerns about racial oppression within the U.S.—a political issue that the government hoped Alvin Ailey might help solve. The Ailey Company completed numerous tours on behalf of the State Department to the African continent, where it was hoped the company might help steer newly decolonized nations away from communism and toward democracy. Croft demonstrates how Ailey strategically navigated this political terrain, sometimes highlighting the company's universality and other times emphasizing the specifics of Black experiences and histories. The examples offered in this chapter show how works like Revelations imploded modernism's abstraction, placing African American culture at the center of American expression and presenting African American dancers as “figures with the ability to reshape American narratives about race” (104). At the same time, Croft uncovers the ways in which the Lavender Scare shaped Ailey's participation in the tours, demonstrating how homophobia and racism shaped the experiences of dancers both at home and abroad.
Straight, white artists like Martha Graham did not have to fight for the privilege of representing American universality abroad. However, Cold War era ideas about femininity certainly informed the politics surrounding Martha Graham's work with the State Department. Chapter 4 focuses on the Graham Company's tours to Asia in the mid-1950s and 1970s, including 1974 Saigon. Graham was the only female choreographer to receive consistent State Department support, and Croft considers how she was able to work within this framework to stage subversive depictions of gender and female sexuality. This chapter, “Too Sexy for Export, or Just Sexy Enough,” highlights national tensions about sexuality, and offers a riveting discussion of public debates about Graham's sexiness. Ultimately Graham was granted the liberty to perform female sexual autonomy, which Croft terms the “diva stance,” a freedom that did not extend to African American women. Indeed, she offers compelling evidence (culled from ANTA's minutes) that reveal concerns about black female artists, bodies, and bodies of work standing in for America.
Such anxieties certainly informed definitions about what constituted American modern dance. As Croft points out, the U.S. government and ANTA played a significant role in sustaining and crafting the canon. It remains to be seen if DanceMotion USA, which Croft discusses in the book's final two chapters, will play as formative a role in defining twenty-first-century dance history. However, she notes that BAM has chosen male-led companies twice as often as female-led companies since the program's inception (and only two of the fourteen companies chosen have been run by women of color).
Croft argues that DanceMotion USA was developed to reimagine ideas about the nation as relational—as part of a global network. Dance in this model is deployed not to spread American superiority, but rather, as a means to forge international relationships and mutual understanding, particularly in countries with limited diplomatic relationships with the U.S. Thus, tours are organized as opportunities for cultural and artistic exchange, prioritizing workshops and lecture-demonstrations over performances, and, in its most recent iterations (discussed in the final chapter), offering opportunities for collaboration.
Croft roots DanceMotion USA in a post-9/11 landscape in which “the United States sought to reclaim its global power while also distancing itself from human rights violations” (148). The program emphasizes American and non-American bodies moving together; however, Croft uncovers some of the ways in which unequal power dynamics between nations, and thus, between dancers, sometimes undermined this vision of equitable exchange. At the same time, BAM chose companies whose skills in community engagement and collaboration prepared them for the intricacies, challenges, and pleasures of dialogic and embodied exchange. Significantly, many of the dance companies chosen for their expertise in community engagement also root their work and aesthetics in the African diaspora. While companies like Ronald K. Brown/Evidence and Urban Bush Women served the State Department's diplomatic goals, Croft shows how their performances of diaspora counter American exceptionalism and standard narratives of the nation-state.
Dancers as Diplomats is an impeccably researched, highly readable book that demonstrates the significant role that dance and dancers have played in cultural diplomacy. As such, the book will not only appeal to dance studies readers, but also to readers interested in the Cold War, American studies, and history. I found myself combing through footnotes and marveling at the range of sources Croft draws upon. Most impressive, however, is Croft's ability to reconstruct the experiences of dancers on the move, whose kinesthetic encounters on- and off-stage complicate and exceed official narratives, demonstrating the vital ways in which dance and politics converge in the choreography of nation-states.
