4.7: Narrative and Technique

As Rudolf von Laban and Mary Wigman choreographed the opening number for the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, across the Atlantic, an up and coming American choreographer Martha Graham was invited to represent the United States in a dance exchange hosted by the Nazi Reich. Despite promises of immunity for Graham’s Jewish and non-white dancers, she summarily rejected the invitation insisting that her dance company would not be comfortable performing in Germany while so many artists were subjected to persecution (Hanley, 2004).

It is crucial to understand the impact that dance can play in comprehending the realities of history and the role that dance played between two world wars. This lens to view dance as a propaganda for Nazism can be met conversely as a mechanism for resistance. Dance used dance as political tool amid the geo-political turmoil (Cox, 2018).

Figure 4.9. Martha Graham and her company dancer Bertram Ross in dramatic posture indicative of Graham’s repertoire. (File:Martha Graham and Bertram Ross.jpg - Wikimedia Commons; Source: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/van/item/2004662957/)

Second generation modern dance pioneer Martha Graham (1894 – 1991) had studied at Denishawn and soloed under Ted Shawn’s reimagining of a Toltec maiden who defends her honor against a drink-maddened emperor. Hence, even after her years training in Los Angeles, much of Graham’s subsequent work after relocating to New York elevated narrative content with meaningful, psychologically potent storylines. She continued to employ narrative tales, spectacular sets, and costumes, cojoined to crowd-pleasing stagecraft, though her acknowledgement of Denishawn’s cultural inauthenticity prompted her to innovate a new modern dance technique known as Contraction and Release.

Definition: Contraction and Release

Martha Graham’s technique is called Contraction and Release.

Modern dance was deeply impacted by Graham’s iconic dramatic body postures, cupped hands, and flexed bare feet, being described as “that arty, angular women who moves in spasms and jerks” (Cohen, 1974, p. 135). Of her 181 works, three that have come to be synonymous with Graham’s innovation includes her solo Lamentation (1930) in purple bounded dance sack, Appalachian Spring (1944) set in rural America to depict struggles inherent to the human experience, as well as her iconic Night Journeys (1947) featuring long lines in diagonal asymmetry. This new vocabulary for modern dance revealed passion, rage, ecstasy, or fury – the ugliness and brutality common to human existence, effectively deposing the centrality of classical ballet as the dominant form in 20th century dance.

As a young African American child growing up in Los Angeles, Lester Horton (1906 - 1953) loved the popular and elaborate Denishawn productions (Blumberg, 2023). An interpretive dance production based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha was Horton’s first performance experience, and to prepare for his lead role, he traveled to New Mexico to study the traditional chants and dance steps associated with Native American cultures in the region. And later, having chosen California as his own base of operations, America saw one of the very first racially integrated dance companies. Horton created choreographic works for stage and Hollywood between 1942 and 1945, including Moonlight in Havana, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and White Savage, all set in exotic locales so Hollywood could utilize people of color in the dance sequences popularized in the film industry.

His potent and enduring masterpiece is The Beloved (1948), a danced narrative account of a husband who beat his wife to death with a Bible suspecting her of infidelity. His exaggerated, creative, and unusual, choreography employed distinctly unballetic steps (Britannica, 2023). Horton was unafraid to incorporate movement from global and folk traditions such as Japanese Kabuki, Native American imitative tribal dances, Javanese isolations, as well as Afro-Caribbean undulations, creating his own style, known today as Horton Technique.

Born in Texas, Alvin Ailey (1931 – 1989) was raised as a Christian, a deeply rooted spiritual framing that informed Ailey’s future work in dance. Industrial jobs abounded due to America’s entry into WWII, and in 1942, his family moved to Los Angels for work. This move to LA was another step on Ailey’s journey that aided his exposure to influences that would shape his destiny. His high school teacher took the class to see Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe, then he saw an ad for Katherine Dunham’s all black dance company and the mustard seed of hope, passion, and purpose had been planted.

After attending UCLA, Ailey studied under Katherine Dunham for a time then became Lester Horton’s protégé. Still honing his craft, his mentor passed away in 1953 and Ailey took over artistic leadership of the company to fuse Horton’s technique with Ailey’s choreographic voice, embodied in his Southern experience as a black with emancipatory Christian perspectives. In 1954 Ailey relocated to New York City an embarked on the creation of a choreographic body of work changing the landscape of American dance forever. His most iconic work is packed with powerful emotional and technical feats, Revelations (1960) is set to a suite of traditional gospel spirituals, a narrative choreography that tells the story of the African American experience with bounded movement built into modern and jazz dance. “Choreographed when he was only 29 years old, Revelations is an intimate reflection inspired by childhood memories of attending services at Mount Olive Baptist Church in Texas, and by the work of writers James Baldwin and Langston Hughes (Ailey, 2024). Revelations reflects intense cultural, political, and spiritual themes and made an appearance on a U.S. postage stamp. It has been performed numerous times at the White House twice and was repurposed for the 1968 Olympic opening ceremonies.

Figure 4.10. Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre performs legendary Revelations. Photo credit: Paul Kolnik

(File:Alvin Ailey - Revelations.jpg - Wikimedia Commons; Source:https://www.flickr.com/photos/knightfoundation/5985641517/in/photostream/; Author: Knight Foundation)

Dance as a Political Act

Modern dance was priming America for a new generation of dance pioneers that, like Dunham and Ailey, brought dance into the forefront of politics and social injustice. Daughter of Russian immigrants, Anna Sokolow (1910 - 2000) was an American dancer and choreographer who had an intense interest in social and political issues, molded by her upbringing in New York's Jewish immigrant community. She started her dance training under Martha Graham in 1929, but soon became affiliated with the controversial “radical dance” movement to forge her own choreographic path, becoming a dance rebel with a social agenda. Sokolow’s dances early on highlighted the Jewish plight in Germany in her Anti-War Trilogy (1933). In 1936, Sokolow organized her own company Dance Unit, featuring politically driven imagery through the use of flexed feet and flexed wrists set to the musical downbeat. This was distinctive in Sokolow’s choreography for both solo and ensemble works focused on the exploitation of working class, founding the Worker’s Dance League (Prickett, 2016).

Figure 4.11. Sokolow’s work is associated with the Workers dance League, union protests, organizing, and women’s rights; CIO pickets jeering at few workers who were entering a mill in Greensboro, Greene County, Georgia,May 1941

(File:CIOstrikersa.jpg - Wikimedia Commons; Source: Library of Congress CALL NUMBER: LC-USF33- 020936-M2; Author: Jack Delano (1914–1997))

Sokolow choreographically tackled themes of isolation, tension, alienation, deprivation, human suffering, and war (Wozny, 2017) through her use of empathic gestures such as gripping, clinging, use of gravity. Sokolow’s Rooms (1955) was an ensemble dance that grew from the topic of urban alienation, from which her choreographic aesthetic was been described as “American expressionism... Miss Sokolow can sum up a state of being -- an entire society -- in an arrested pose” (Kisselgoff, 1991). Her piece Dream (1961) revealed the horrors of the Holocaust, earning her the distinction of being credited as “the Solzhenitsyn of twentieth-century dance… consistently and uncompromisingly reflect[ing] the reality of society through her work” (Freed, 2022, para 7).