John F. Kennedy's inaugural address of January Reference Kennedy1961 is often quoted as a harbinger of the changes that took place in the 1960s. Most people remember the line, “And so my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” It is worth recalling his next line, “My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.” At the start of his address, Kennedy celebrated “freedom,” which symbolized “an end as well as a beginning—signifying renewal as well as change” (1961). Rebekah Kowal's first monograph is a splendid history of change in modern dance in America during the two decades leading up to 1960. She concludes by referring to Kennedy's address and to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s work of the preceding years.
How to Do Things with Dance contributes to our understanding of dance in a number of ways and on a number of levels. Kowal considers a selection of dance artists from Martha Graham to Pearl Primus to Anna Halprin in terms of dance as action. This allows her to consider the changing cultural situation of the time and, in doing so, suggest ways in which dance has a consonance with movement and movements outside the theater and the studio. Although its subtitle Performing Change in Postwar America locates the action in the U.S., its research and analysis will be of interest to dance scholars in the wider community. It is exemplary in its scholarship, historical method, and originality. Above all, it speaks of a historical period and, in the way that it considers the period, exemplifies dance history research at its best. The British historian R. G. Collingwood made the simple historical point that a clue to what is possible is what has been achieved already (Reference Collingwood1946, 10). To paraphrase, from the point of view of dance, the value of history is that it teaches us what dance has done—and thus what dance is—and what it can become. Kowal's daring scholarship illuminates a period now half a century distant and, in doing so, she says much about the continuing possibilities that dance offers.
Until quite recently, dance, especially modern dance, in the post–World War II decades (the 1940s and 1950s) got rather a bad press. Nowhere is this more marked than Sally Banes's indictment: “The late 1940s and early 1950s were not creative years in modern dance” (Reference Banes1980, 5). Banes was laying out the territory in her early account of postmodern dance at a time when, “to Americans today, modern art already seems old-fashioned” (1980, 1). Since that time, there has been a great deal written on the new creative period that she was espousing—the 1960s and 1970s. Much of this has focused on the experiments in dance and performance in America. However, more recently, there have been dance historical accounts that have painted on a broader canvas, such as Ramsay Burt's (Reference Burt2006) re-examination of Judson Dance Theater from a more international perspective. The dance of the 1930s has also provided a rich vein for dance scholars to mine, especially in terms of the politics of the time. Again, America, and American modern dance, have been well served, not least by Mark Franko's (Reference Franko1995) re-evaluation of modern dance in both America and Europe in terms of expression, modernism, and politics. Until quite recently, the intervening decades have been all but ignored, with the exception of scholarly accounts such as Naima Prevots's (Reference Prevots1999) examination of dance and cultural diplomacy during the Cold War.
In the last few years, there has been a renewed interest in modern dance during the immediate postwar years. Indeed, it could be said that Gay Morris's (Reference Morris2006) A Game for Dancers: Performing Modernism in the Postwar Years, 1945–1960 pioneered research into this period. While hers has been the main account, others have begun to fill in what had begun to be seen as a missing period in the UK and continental Europe, as well as in America. Morris reconsidered the period in terms of an examination of modernism in dance. She drew attention to the theory developed by earlier writers, not least John Martin, that helped underpin developments. Her canvas was commendably broad, enabling her to take account of postwar developments in American ballet and making a particular point of including the African-American dance vanguard within her consideration. Thus her account ranged widely to include detailed consideration of the postwar work of Martha Graham, José Limón, Merce Cunningham, Donald McKayle, Pearl Primus, Anna Sokolow, George Balanchine, Talley Beatty, and Alwin Nikolais.
Kowal makes it clear that her approach differs from accounts that have positioned postwar American modern dance as part of a larger transatlantic avant-garde (12). In this, she could be said to be going against the grain of recent scholarship. She questions some objectivist accounts that identify the modern dance of the period—especially that of Merce Cunningham—as a renewal that allowed Judson Dance Theater to flourish. Recently, Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Susan Leigh Foster, and Mark Franko have contributed to a heterogeneous writing of dance in the 1960s and 1970s, and Kowal acknowledges their importance in enabling her comparable account of the earlier postwar period. Likewise, she acknowledges the importance of Richard Schechner and Judith Butler in opening up the idea of where and how performative action can be found.
It is always difficult to delineate relevant historical periods for dance without seeming to be prescriptive, artificial, or, indeed, old fashioned. However, Kowal establishes her period 1945–1960 with confidence and great precision. The year 1945 marked the end of World War II. The year 1960 was marked in America by the Greensboro lunch counter sit-in where four African-American students began a peaceful resistance protesting against segregation laws and helping to initiate the swelling civil rights protests that followed. As Kowal points out, the sit-in began the day after Alvin Ailey's Revelations (1960) had premiered in New York City. She takes this juxtaposition as a paradigm to examine the ideas of dance as action and cultural action. It is this examination that then leads her to a conclusion that identifies Kennedy's appeal to Americans as one that recognized the potential that had been created in the previous years and to which dance had made a contribution. She considers, in turn, Martha Graham and José Limón (precursors), Anna Sokolow, Pearl Primus, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Talley Beatty, Katherine Dunham, Donald McKayle, and Anna Halprin. The social contexts that she draws on include Cold War cultural policy, the American consumer, the baby booms, the Jim Crow laws, the civil rights movement, Pearl Primus's visit to Africa, postwar housing policy, and, of course, the political changes that preceded Kennedy's election in 1960. The non-American reader gains considerable insight into some of the minutiae of American culture that, while geographically located, have had profound effects on the rest of us.
How to Do Things with Dance opens up numerous possibilities for rereading well known and lesser-known dance works of the postwar period. Thus Anna Sokolow's Rooms (1952) is reconsidered with respect to the planned contemporary living spaces of Americans as seen by an “outsider” (115); Donald McKayle's Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder (1959) is seen in the time of the Civil Rights Movement and the first sit-ins, and in relation to Talley Beatty's and Katherine Dunham's earlier works Mourners' Bench (1949) and Southland (1951), respectively. A key chapter is the one on Pearl Primus, which develops Kowal's (Reference Kowal2007) research, for which she received the 2008 SDHS Gertrude Lippincott Award. Primus's account of her trip to Africa in 1949 “offers a fuller picture of postwar diasporic subjectivity as a condition of defamiliarization: the feelings of belonging and not belonging to peoples and places she desired to call ‘home’” (149).
This reader was particularly struck by the place of Paul Taylor within the book. A reader cannot fail to notice the photograph of a besuited Taylor (1957) on the cover. He strides toward you with great purpose—a man of action—and stirs memories of a different age. I saw Taylor's Insects and Heroes (1961) in 1973 and 3 Epitaphs (1960) two years later, both during UK tours. The former dance was, to a young man four decades ago, quite baffling. Kowal's analysis shines a new light on both these works and, by refracting this light through the broader culture of the period, reveals something fresh and vital that I had not seen before. She considers Taylor along with Cunningham in terms of found objects and the use of “ordinary movement (action) to highlight elements of everyday life that people typically glossed over in the course of experience” (175). Her detailed descriptions ring true: the way she revisits the contemporary critical reception and identifies Taylor's innovations is a powerful response to any idea that the modern dance of the 1950s—3 Epitaphs appeared in its first version in 1956—was lacking in creativity. This example could stand for the rest of the book. Throughout, there is a most sophisticated rereading of dance of this period, and the dancers and their social situation appear refreshed, their relevance renewed.
The changes in postwar American modern dance and in American society are most ably addressed in How to Do Things With Dance. This new history challenges the conventional view of the dance of this period and contributes well to dance research, which has begun to discover new depths in modern dance in America. It would be interesting to place the ideas that emerge here in a broader international context, with John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in mind.
