Following its closing on July 28, the exhibition will travel to the Library of Congress/Ira Gershwin Gallery at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, where it will be on view from Aug. 25, 2012 - Feb. 16, 2013.
Photos:
(1) David Linton, photographer. Sophie Maslow and William Bales in “Sweet Betsy” from Maslow’s work Folksay, 1942. New Dance Group Collection.
Sophie Maslow (1911–2006) choreographed Folksay (1942), based on verses from Carl Sandburg’s The People, Yes and accompanied by ballads composed by singer-songwriter Woodie Guthrie (1912–1967). Guthrie accompanied the dancers on stage with a guitar signed, “This guitar Kills Fascists,” to protest the political threat in Europe during WWII.
(2) Jack Mitchell, photographer. April Berry in Katherine Dunham’s work from Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s 1987 “The Magic of Katherine Dunham,” ca. 1987. Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation Collection, Photo © Jack Mitchell.
Katherine Dunham (1909–2006) studied the African-based dances and rituals of the Caribbean area and based many choreographic works on that research. Dunham’s Bal Negre(1946) toured the United States for nine months before opening in New York. One of its most popular numbers was Shango (1946), based on Haitian vodun (voodoo) ritual.
Related Library of Congress Exhibitions
Related Library of Congress Websites
- Katherine Dunham
- Martha Graham
- "The New Deal Stage: Selections from the Federal Theater Project, 1935-1939"
Read More About It
Berg, Shelly C., ed. “Of, By, and for the People: Joint Conference of the Congress on Research in Dance and the Society of Dance History Scholars.” Dance Research Journal 25, no. 2 (1993): 64–68.
Foulkes, Julia Lawrence. Modern Bodies: Dance and American Modernism from Martha Graham to Alvin Ailey. Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
Franko, Mark. Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.
Geduld, Victoria Phillips. “Performing Communism in the American Dance: Culture, Politics, and the New Dance Group.” American Communist History 7, no. 1 (2008): 39–65.
______________. “All Fall Down: The Demise of the New Dance Group and the ‘Highest’ Stage of Capitalism.”American Communist History 9, no. 2 (2010): 201–209.
______________. “Dancing Diplomacy: Martha Graham and the Strange Commodity of Cold War Cultural Exchange in Asia.” Dance Chronicle 33 (2010): 44–81.
Graff, Ellen. Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City, 1928–1942. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.
Kant, Marion and Lilian Karina. Hitler’s Dancers: German Modern Dance and the Third Reich. Translated by Jonathan Steinberg. New York: Berghahn Books, 2003.
Kolb, Alexandra, ed. Dance and Politics. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011.
Prevots, Naima. Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War. A Studies in Dance History Book. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1998.
Prickett, Stacey. “Dance and the Workers’ Struggle.” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 8, no. 1 (1990): 47–61.
____________. “From Workers’ Dance to New Dance.” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 7, no. 1 (1989): 47–64.
Rosen, Bernice, ed. The New Dance Group: Movement for a Change. London: Routledge, 2000.
Illustration
Poster of Martha Graham Dance Company’s performances in Japan, 1955. Ethel Winter and Charles Hyman Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress:
Between 1955 and 1962, the US State Department sent dance companies to many of the Cold War’s contested regions, and, in October 1955, the Martha Graham Dance Company went to Burma, India, Pakistan, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaya, and Ceylon, believed to be countries that would create a “domino effect” if “lost” to communism. The tour ended in Iran in 1956 after the CIA-British led coup that deposed Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh's civilian government in 1953. This was the first of many State Department-sponsored tours undertaken by Graham.
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