Dance

DANCE

Dance Overview

The 1930s were a period during which America shook off European influences in order to develop its own ballet and its own modern dance, both with distinctly American themes. While Martha Graham experimented with mystical imagery, Helen Tamiris created dances based on Walt Whitman's poetry, and across the nation jitterbugs created an interracial swing subculture whose frenetic signature dance alarmed moralists.

Duncan and St. Denis

Until Ruth St. Denis and her husband, Ted Shawn, formed their Denishawn dance company in 1915 in Los Angeles, Americans had to rely on European touring companies for their dance. In fact, both St. Denis and Isadora Duncan got their starts in theatrical productions and danced extensively in Europe before coming back to the United States. Duncan's influence sprang in large part from her image, which was one of unfettered sexuality. She derived her plots from classical sources, but she appeared on stage barefoot and in loose clothing. St. Denis and Shawn, along with Duncan, appealed to those progressives who wished to break loose from the shackles of Puritanism: their ambiguous sexuality and their combining of orientalist and athletic traditions helped them to create a dance that was distinctly American. By stretching the rules of ballet until they were close to breaking, St. Denis and Shawn helped create what became known as modern dance. Moreover, St. Denis and Shawn are important not only for what they themselves did but for the dancers they spawned.

Passing the Torch

Although Martha Graham did not even begin her dance training until 1916, when she was twenty-two, by the mid 1930s she had become perhaps the most influential choreographer in America, a position she retained throughout her lifetime. Indeed, three-quarters of her company members since the early 1930s have become choreographers. Inspired by the self-consciously exotic performance of St. Denis, whose pieces bore titles such as The Veil of Isis, Incense, Radha, and Yogi, Graham began her formal dance training at the Denishawn academy. Her first star performance was in Xochitl (1920), a ballet set centuries in the past, concerning a Toltec girl, written for her by Shawn. It was also here that she would forge a lasting romantic and professional link with Louis Horst, the married composer and musical director of the Denishawn dance company, who was to remain one of her greatest artistic influences. Although she had broken from St. Denis and Shawn and was beginning to shed the exotic, romantic style promoted by Denishawn, Graham's first pieces still bore titles such as Flute of Krishna (1926) and Three Gopi Maidens (1926). Many works choreographed in the period from 1926 to the mid 1930s resembled those in the repertory of the more innovative ballet companies of the time; the group dance Primitive Mysteries (1931) is still hailed as a masterpiece. By this point she had already developed her signature spiral movements and linear stage patterns.

The Dance Repertory Theatre

In 1930 Graham, Tamiris, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weldman formed the Dance Repertory Theatre, whose stated goal was to develop dance as an American art, one that would have a less polished texture than European ballet, one that would express the raw energy of the nation. As Graham said, "A new vitality is possessing us. No art can live and pass untouched through such a vital period as we are now experiencing." Gone would be the lavish costumes, fancy scenery, and timeless, storybook themes favored by Anna Pavlova and Duncan; instead, the work would take place on a bare stage and would center on themes of modern life, social injustice, nature, and relationships between the sexes. This new dance, called "modern dance," would be punctuated by "America's great gift to the arts … rhythm: rich, full, unabashed, virile." Starting in 1934 this collaboration would be furthered by the participation of Graham, Doris Weidman, and Charles Humphrey, and choreographer Hanya Holm, in five summers at Bennington College's School of the Dance, which enabled the pioneers to teach their method to a new generation of dancers. Dance Repertory Theatre pieces tended to emphasize the country's past as well as to describe the current scene, as witnessed by such productions as Humphrey's American Holiday; Weidman's American Saga, a dramatization of the Paul Bunyan legend; and Graham's American Document.

From Mysticism to Social Consciousness

While Graham experimented with orientalist and Jungian imagery, choreographer Tamiris focused on social problems in her dance pieces. As the head of the Federal Theatre Project's New York-based Dance Project, Tamiris was responsible for a wide range of productions on American themes, including Walt Whitman's Salut au Monde (1936), the Living Newpaper One-Third of a Nation (1937), and perhaps her most famous piece, How Long Brethren (1937), her dance dramatization of Lawrence Gelert's African American Songs of Protest. Tamiris combined elements of modernism and popular culture to create dance pieces that would be accessible to a mass audience and pack a political wallop.

Americanism

As Horst said, "The artist is always a radical. If he is an artist he is progressive and if he is progressive he must break with tradition. All great art contains an element of social criticism, for it expresses the life of its time." This attitude was reflected in Graham's more-documentary work in the late 1930s. While her work in the 1920s and early 1930s was far from political, with her pre-1934 pieces typically bearing titles such as "Adolescence," "Ekstasis," and "Four Insincerities," in the period from 1935 to 1940 fully three-quarters of her work was based on American themes or dealt with the political situation abroad. Perhaps her most representative work of this period was the highly acclaimed American Document, a ballet that reviewed the country's past, incorporating such documents as the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence. One of the ballet's five sections, titled Puritan Episode, used the modernist technique of collage in its juxtaposition of readings from Jonathan Edwards and the Song of Songs. Other Graham works of the 1930s included American Provincials (1934), the anti-fascist Deep Song (1937), and American Lyric (1938). Although from a slightly later period, one of Graham's most acclaimed works, Appalachian Spring (1944), with music composed by Aaron Copland, belongs to this group of dances.

The New Ballet

Although many critics, including the influential John Martin of The New York Times, rejected ballet as being academic and, worse, representing European cultural dominance, ballet in the 1930s was given a distinctively American slant by a young department-store heir named Lincoln Kirstein, creator of the American Ballet Company. The company, founded in 1934, had as its aim the development of a uniquely American form of ballet, one which incorporated both traditional elements and popular music, notably ragtime and swing. The success of its early productions moved the Metropolitan Opera to adopt the American Ballet Company as its official ballet. Although that connection was broken in 1938, and although the company had practically ceased to exist by 1940, Kirstein had by that point founded the Ballet Caravan, which performed such American-themed works as Pocahontas (1936) and Filling Station (1938).

Jitterbugging

With the swing craze that swept the nation in the 1930s came the advent of a new dance, the jitterbug. Swing fans themselves became known as jitter-bugs, or alligators, and their dance inspired the condemnation of moralists and jazz musicians. As Benny Goodman recalled, "The bugs, literally glued to the music, would shake like St. Vitus with the itch. Their eyes popped, their heads pecked, their feet tapped out the time, arms jerked to the rhythm." Psychiatrists worried about the appearance of mass hysteria and the resulting loss of inhibitions: jitterbugging was banned in some midwestern dance halls by 1939. Jitterbugging was an interracial phenomenon, though the skilled dancers whose intricate and innovative steps incorporated more acrobatic variations with each passing year tended to be black and to congregate in urban ballrooms. By contrast, the high-school-and collegeaged white jitterbugs often demonstrated more enthusiasm than skill and annoyed musicians by applauding at the wrong moments: these belonged to the group dismissed as "ickies," With the end of Prohibition, dance clubs, at least in large cities, became more respectable, were more racially integrated, and began to attract a wider range of classes and ages. At the height of the swing craze, in 1938, it sometimes seemed as though all America was dancing—frenetically, energetically, intricately—in a style that an earlier generation found virtually unrecognizable.

Sources:

Charles C. Alexander, Here the Country Lies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980);

Merle Armitage, ed., Martha Graham: The Early Years (New York: Da Capo Press, 1978);

Hallie Flanagan, Arena: The Story of the Federal Theatre (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1940);

Ernestine Stodelle, Deep Song: The Dance Story of Martha Graham (New York: Macmillan, 1984);

William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973);

David W. Stowe, Swing Changes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994).