My Peak Dance Experiences, Spring/Summer 2026

Sometimes, when a dance performance takes hold of me, I have such a visceral reaction that I feel like I’m on high alert the whole time. I savor these moments. Recently, a number of performances had this effect on me.

 

Calvin Royal III in “to be seen” by Kyle Abraham when it premiered in 2020, ph Christopher Duggan (tnx to Khara Hanlon for the graphic)

One Sunday morning in May, Kyle Abraham presented a program in Van Cleef & Arpels’ “Spring is Blooming” day at Rockefeller Center. His solo to be seen (2020), danced by American Ballet Theatre’s divine principal Calvin Royal III, to Ravel’s Bolero, was breathtaking in its silky integration of classic lines and vernacular swagger. Royal’s classicism is totally unforced, relaxed, and he has a sweet way of connecting with the audience. He can easily slip between modes, giving us a new, sly way to hear Bolero.

“A Duo” by Aszure Barton with Aaron Choate and Abdiel Figueroa Reyes, Courtesy Hubbard Street Dance Chicago

The year of women dancemakers at 92NY, called “Women Move the World,” culminated in a wildly successful evening of old and new works by Aszure Barton. This program revealed her fertile and fearless mind. The Y gathered dancers from her own company, Aszure Barton & Artists; from Gauthier Dance, where she is house choreographer; and from Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, where she is resident artist. Her choreography gives gravitas to goofiness, and the dancers bring joyousness to eccentricity. The evening had everyone cheering for the brash/elegant/dreamlike/unpredictable images bursting from Barton’s imagination. A Duo, an especially gloriously impulsive package of surprises, gets me every time.

Mira Nadon and Ryan Tomash in Wheeldon’s “Continuum,” ph Erin Baiano

New York City Ballet excels in works by Christopher Wheeldon, who was the resident choreographer from 2001 to 2008. The company premiere of Continuum, Wheeldon’s second of three “difficult” Ligeti ballets, was given in April.  (The other two — Polyphonia [2001] and Morphoses [2002], were already in the rep, but Continuum had premiered with San Francisco Ballet in 2002.) Each section is sharply focused on a particular concept of form. With its bracing partnering, extreme lines, and astonishing inventiveness, Continuum is like cut crystal.

Ingrid Silva of DTH in “Blake Works IV (The Barre Project)” by William Forsythe, ph Cherylynn Tsushima

Brazilian ballerina Ingrid Silva was absolutely thrilling in William Forsythe’s Blake Works IV (The Barre Project) at Dance Theatre of Harlem in April. In Silva’s body/mind, momentum and precision mix with joy. She has stepped down after eighteen years with DTH, and this was her last NYC performance. Damn, I feel like I just discovered her! (You can find out what she has cooking post-DTH here.)

Pelican (1963) by Robert Rauschenberg, reimagined by Tara Lorenzen, performed by Rashaun Mitchell, Ashley Hod, and Silas Riener, ph Maria Baranova

It was exciting to see the remake of Pelican, originally created by Robert Rauschenberg in 1963—his first performance piece— as part of Judson Dance Theater. The photos of him skating with a parachute on his back are iconic. Remounted at Xanadu Roller Rink in Brooklyn as the centerpiece of the Trisha Brown Company gala in May, it was reimagined by Trisha Brown alum Tara Lorenzen. Two ex-Cunningham dancers, the formidable duo Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener, donned roller skates just as Rauschenberg did in 1963, wearing parachute blooms on their backs. The role originally played by Carolyn Brown on pointe was nicely handled by Ashley Hod of NYCB. There was something mythic about witnessing this reconstruction. Plus it highlighted the long artistic relationship between Rauschenberg and Trisha Brown.

Lucinda Childs in her new “Geranium ’64,” ph Maria Baranova

Also related to Judson Dance Theater was a remake by Lucinda Childs of her wacky, absurdist solo Geranium from 1965. In the new Geranium ’64, Childs slowly trudges across the Fisher the space at Bard, pulled/supported by a rope held offstage right. In back of her is a shifting textured wall by Albanian media artist Anri Sala, where a memory of a 1964 football game (thus the date in the new title) comes alive in a cloudy video. Childs’ arch-professional voice oozed with an officiousness that matches the sports announcer’s voice. It’s funny, it’s weighty, it’s memory poking through a haze. For more on her company’s season for Bard’s SummerScape 2026, see my program essay on her entire program, “Momentary Reprise.”

Catherine Hurlin of ABT in “Don Quixote,” Ph Rosalie O’Connor

In late June, Catherine Hurlin burst onto the stage as a high-spirited Kitri in Don Quixote at ABT. Her brash energy and the comedic savvy she shared with her partner, Isaac Hernandez, kept me involved. Technically and dramatically, she was at the top of her game. In her single/double fouettés, when she held the fan overheard during the doubles, my jaw dropped.

Jane Comfort’s “Gulf of America,” ph Steven Pisano

The attacks of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in our streets have infuriated many of us in the U.S., including choreographer Jane Comfort. Always a political dance maker, she premiered The Gulf of America at La MaMa in March. It included a posse of menacing, masked, characters who violently assaulted innocent citizens. The melee unexpectedly came to a standstill when members of both sides quietly looked into each other’s eyes. Wishful thinking for connection across the gulf of misunderstanding.

Kyle Abraham’s “White Space,” Jacob’s Pillow, L to R: Mykiah Goree, William Okajima, Luc Simpson, ph Christopher Duggan

Kyle Abraham’s new White Space at Jacob’s Pillow starts with Kyle himself dancing, melting and melding soft release with hip hop moves. Then he releases a white balloon into the air—just one way of letting go. The piece leads us into an incredibly rich movement vocabulary, of both the individuals and the group. There are subtle cause-and-effect unfoldings (dramaturgy by Charlotte Brathwaite), crafted with a growing sense of humor. The balloon comes back in surprising ways, with contributions by vivid, crafty individuals. With painterly lighting by Dan Scully, we get to share in Kyle Abraham’s beautiful way of looking at the world.

Mindscape in front of the Henry Moore sculpture in Hearst Plaza

Mindscape by Shen Wei

Shen Wei’s Mindscape celebrated light, motion, bright colors, and community. It came to Lincoln Center’s Hearst Plaza, where we could take in the twelve main dancers and the extras sprinkled throughout the plaza environment as one constantly changing picture. While it had the air of fun and lightness, Mindscape is a major work. Watching the progression from ceremonial procession to full-body motion, to sculptural interactions, to dipping in the pool, to making marks on the big white canvas, to drenched body mess was a wonderful ride that kept renewing itself. When the dancers started leaving trails of paint on the white canvas flooring, I thought, What marks are we making? What pictures are we leaving behind?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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In Memoriam: Paul Sanasardo (1928–2026)

One of the fascinating dancer/choreographers of mid-20th-century American modern dance, Paul Sanasardo died on July 23 at the age of 97. He made works in the intense expressionist mode of Anna Sokolow, co-created an experimental space called the Studio for Dance, and taught rigorous technique classes for decades. He made more than eighty ballets, many of them full-evening works.

Born in Chicago, Sanasardo studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago. He took ballet lessons with Bentley Stone and occasionally with modern dance improvisor Sybil Shearer. He served in the army from 1952 to 1954, but his longtime friend Douglas Nielsen, says, “Paul conscientiously objected to using a gun, so he was assigned to be a cook.” On his time off, he studied in Washington, DC, with Erika Thimey, a proponent of the Mary Wigman/Hanya Holm style, and danced with the Washington Dance Theatre. In 1954 he moved to New York, where he studied on scholarship at the Martha Graham School and also with Antony Tudor, Margaret Craske, Mia Slavenska, and Karel Shook. He danced with Anna Sokolow, who cast him in the original “Panic” solo in her masterwork Rooms (1955). For years, he was a guest artist with Pearl Lang, partnering her often, and also appeared on live television and Broadway.

The Path (1972), Sanasardo with Michele Rebeaud, ph © Max Waldman

In 1958 he teamed up with Donya Feuer, a Juilliard grad who had danced with Graham, to establish the Studio for Dance (later Modern Dance Artists), a hub of experimental work that tended toward dance theater. (See Mark Franko’s excellent book Excursion for Miracles: Paul Sanasardo, Donya Feuer, and Studio for Dance, 1955–1964.) At Tudor’s urging, Sanasardo invited Pina Bausch, who was in New York on a grant to attend Juilliard, to work with them. She collaborated with them in Phases of Madness (1960), about which Paul joked, “We just beat each other up onstage.”[1] She performed with them at the 92nd Street Y while still a student. (For my essay about Bausch’s time in NYC, I interviewed Sanasardo about his influence on her.)

One of the extraordinary aspects about the Studio for Dance is that it nurtured a children’s company. It wasn’t just annual recitals, but these kids were serious players in the works. Eleven of them performed in In View of God (1959). Pina’s observation: “There was nothing childish. They were like adults, only very young ones: Young human beings. There was nothing cute. It was very simple.”[2]

Metallics (1964) with Holly Cavrell, Courtesy Cavrell

After Feuer decamped for Sweden in 1963, Sanasardo started the Sanasardo Dance Company, which quickly attracted both audiences and critics. As a performer, he had a double-edged intensity. As Doris Hering noted, “He could be simultaneously evil and heroic.”[3] According to Nielsen, he created his best work in the 1960s including Metallics, Shadows, The Path, and Pain. Anna Kisselgoff described Metallics, which entered the reps of both Ailey and Nederlands Dans Theater, as “an enigmatic psychological study in solitude.” Deborah Jowitt wrote in the Village Voice, “Sanasardo is concerned with human feeling, with powerful emotion. His dancers are all steel-and-fire supermen—beautiful and almost terrifying in their strength.”[4]

 

Pain (1969), with Sanasardo, center, ph © Max Waldman, 1970

Poster forfrom Bausch Fndn

Sanasardo was a revered teacher, fielding requests from all over the country, including for the Ailey company. From 1969 to 1974, he founded and led the School for Modern Dance at Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs, NY, with his protégé Manuel Alum as assistant director. During the summer of 1972, Pina Bausch joined his  residency, and that summer the showcase included works by guest artists Alum and Bausch. Pina showed Nachnull (After Zero) and PHILIPS 836 887 DSY, and Manuel showed Sextetrahedron. French dancers Dominique Mercy and Malou Ariado, whom Alum had met in France, were part of the company that summer. When Paul could no longer procure visas for them, they both became founding members of Pina Bausch’s company in Wuppertal the following year.

Pina Bausch in her solo PHILIPS 836 887 DSY, included in the Sanasardo Showcase, 1972, Bausch Fndn

In 1971, Doris Hering, reviewing a concert that Sanasardo shared with Alum, wrote, “What I like most in the choreography of both Sanasardo and Alum is the deep sense of responsibility. It extends them beyond themselves. More than that, it affects their beautifully trained and obviously committed company. It also frees their choreography.”[5] However the constant pitch of angst was sometimes hard to sit through, causing Anna Kisselgoff to remark, “No one leaves a Sanasardo concert laughing.”[6]

Cut Flowers (1966) with Mark Franko at right, ph Oleaga, Courtesy Franko

A Consort for Dancers (1975), with Diane Germaine, center, ph Lois Greenfield, Courtesy Germaine

 

But Sanasardo was finding his way. “You learn by doing,” he said in an interview. “Your dancers have a tremendous influence on you.” [7] As if to prove that, Sanasardo generously gave opportunities to his main dancers to show their own choreography. They included Willa Kahn, Diane Germaine, Gerri Houlihan, Joan Lombardi, and Manuel Alum. It was risky for Sanasardo. On at least one occasion, Alum, who was an extraordinary dance artist, was reviewed more favorably than Sanasardo. (My historical essay on Alum as one of my Unsung Heroes of Dance History is here.) In 1971, Clive Barnes wrote in the New York Times, that Sanasardo’s

works have a high degree of polish and finesse. What they do not have is that quality of raw creativity that ironically enough is quite often shown by Mr. Sanasardo’s best‐known student and leading dancer, Manuel Alum. Mr. Alum is a disciple of all of Mr. Sanasardo’s virtues and adds a certain abrasive quality of his own.[8]

Sanasardo put his company on hold in 1978 when he went to Tel Aviv to direct the Batsheva Dance Company on a three-year contract. When he returned three years later, he resumed making dances, and Kisselgoff wrote that “Mr. Sanasardo is still at his best when he is exorcising his demons.”[9] But, as Nielsen says, “His heart wasn’t in it.” He disbanded his company in 1986. He and his life partner, William Weaver, moved to a small farmhouse in Cooperstown, NY, where he could paint in a silo. After Weaver died, in 2003 he returned to Chicago, where he was active, teaching steadily (free of charge) and choreographing with Larry Long at the Ruth Page Center for the Arts. He made a new ballet for Joel Hall Dancers to recordings by Nina Simone (an idea that he had hatched earlier with Alvin Ailey). And he continued painting.

In 2011, he was honored by the American Dance Guild with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

§§§

Memory Suite (1975) with Nielsen and Janet Panetta, Courtesy Nielsen

Sources: Douglas Nielsen, David von Ehrlicher, Chicago Dance History Project 2016 interview, my essays on Pina Bausch and Manuel Alum, the International Dictionary of Modern Dance, and Mark Franko’s book, Excursion for Miracles.

Memories from his dancers…

Paul always told the story that when Antony Tudor first saw Paul dance a solo, he said, “You couldn’t teach that to anyone” In four words: Feelings. Action. Drama. Humanity. No steps. Who but Paul Sanasardo would dare choreograph an entire evening to the spoken word from The Death Notebooks by poet Anne Sexton? (A Consort for Dancers, City Center Downstairs, NY, 1975.) We were actors who danced. After that Paul choreographed a duet, Abandoned Prayer, based on Christ and Judas. Paul was Judas. In rehearsal he kissed me on the cheek, but onstage he kissed me on the mouth. When Paul became the director of Batsheva Dance Company, I went with him and stayed three years. When we got back to NYC, Paul and I collaborated on a duet, Five Cases, which again felt more like a play without words.
—Douglas Nielsen is a performer, choreographer, teacher, art collector and former professor in the University of Arizona School of Dance. After performing and teaching in many countries, he founded his own group in 1981.

Both photos: Abandoned Prayer, with Nielsen and Sanasardo, Courtesy Nielsen

 

 

 

 

Paul was complex—a storyteller who could not be reined in, an old school taskmaster, passionate and overwhelming, not at all politically correct. Deep and dark and emotionally direct, Paul was also so very sentimental and generous in every way with a beautiful smile full of warmth and vitality. Through my magical introduction to dance as a member of his children’s company, my memories revolve around the tender treatment of his “children” in the dances that he and Donya Feuer created in that unique time and place in the late 1950’s/early 60’s at Studio for Dance. In the numerous times we connected throughout Paul’s long life, I was forever 12-year-old Judy Canner, one of his “children.” I am so grateful for Paul’s love and artistry, his forceful nature and his giving heart.
—Judith Canner Moss, Dancer/Choreographer/Teacher, on the faculty of Queensborough Community College
—I am also including this link to the short film/interview with Paul made by Sally Bowden and me in 2007, videotaped by Michael Moss with post-production/editing by Andrew Gurian.

Children rehearsing: Ruth Frank, Ellen Shookhoff
Judith Blackstone, Kathy Bushnell, Willa Kahn, Judith Canner Moss, Courtesy Moss

The Children’s Group in Sanasardo’s Pictures in Our House (1964): L to R: Judith Blackstone, Willa Kahn, Judith Canner Moss, Sally Bowden, Courtesy Moss

Paul’s advanced classes were unusually diverse even for the 1960s. Company members included at different times across the decade Loretta Abbott, Gus Solomons, jr., Martin Bland, Strody Meekins (who also danced with Eleo Pomare), Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, Diana Ramos, Michelle Llauger and Milagro Llauger, and, of course, Manuel Alum. In class one could see Juan Antonio, Ulysses Dove, Roberta Pikser, Clyde Morgan, Dyanne Harvey-Salaam, John Parks, Zita Allen, Uttara Coorlawala, and Virginia Johnson. Paul’s classes were a who’s who of New York dance—ballet and modern. Doing combinations across the floor toward the end of class invariably accelerated into a performance that all could see as well as be part of. With so much talent in the room and Paul’s demanding and inspiring way of teaching, nothing could be done by rote.
—Mark Franko, Dancer/choreographer/scholar, Emeritus UC Santa Cruz and Temple University, author of Excursion for Miracles.

 

Diane Germaine in Shadows (1973), ph David Fullard, Courtesy Germaine

Paul Sanasardo was a humane mentor, friend, and very physical creator; his technique was nuanced, energetic, thorough and often collaborative.  Paul was a strong, verbal, and poetic man full of communicated imagery and philosophy to invest a role we might be working on, or further our mastery of technique, or understand our life. Paul could be kind, he could be difficult,  but working with him for thirteen years as his principal dancer became the important and continuing base for me to be able to continue later as my own artist in the field as choreographer and writer.
—Diane Germaine, Dancer/choreographer/writer.

 

 

 

 

I started dancing with Donya (Feuer) and Paul in their children’s company when I was 10. Although we were kids, there was nothing childish about the pieces they choreographed and we performed. A lot was expected of us and as a result, we gave a lot. Working with them then was wonderful. It shaped my childhood until I started dancing in the adult company when I was in my teens. Almost 70 years later I still have close ties to several of those “kids.”
—Willa Kahn
—After I left performing, I taught for several years and ultimately went back to school to become a doctor. I jokingly say I was looking for another profession with a ‘d’ but really I wanted to give back. For 30 years, I served an indigent population as a family doctor, retiring 7 years ago. While it was fulfilling work, it never had the transcendency of dance. I feel so lucky to have been able to do them both.

Fatal Birds (1965) composite, L to R: Sanasardo, Judith Blackstone, Willa Kahn, Germaine doubled, Willa Kahn, Courtesy Germaine

In February 1971, I was a beginner dancer arriving from France, striving to study modern dance, which I had discovered just a few months ahead. Having heard of Paul’s classes on 21st Street, I dropped by his studio. I took his class every day. His approach of technique was unique and extremely efficient, mixing Graham and ballet exercises in a perfect balance. It was gradual and altogether very dynamic. He made me progress so rapidly that he took me into his company after just a year and a half of training with him!
—Dominique Petit, who danced in Sanasardo’s company 1972-74, later danced with Carolyn Carlson and had his own company. He has recently worked with Akram Khan in Outwitting the Devil

The Path (1972) with Nielsen and Germaine, ph © Lois Greenfield

Paul was inspirational, intelligent, intense, playful, expressive, theatrical and charismatic. Class was Paul’s vehicle for conveying his philosophy and thoughts. The essence of dance for Paul was to express ideas and emotions arising from life’s vital struggles. In his class, technique was strongly applied at the barre. For musical accompaniment Paul turned to Gene Lester on the piano, but Paul often added drums, cymbals, his voice, chants, all of which built intensity. His training helped mold me into the dancer/person I became. His imaginative spirit gave me the understanding, knowledge, and motivation to seek the expressivity of ideas and the potential for building a creative career as a choreographer, teacher, architectural designer, and painter.
—Joan Lombardi, member of Sanasardo Dance Company 1962–1984
Santa Fe, NM

Triad (1977); L to R: Sanasardo as Julius Caesar, Naomi Sorkin as Cleopatra, Nielsen as Mark Anthony, ph @Lois Greenfield

Footnotes

[1] From Chicago Dance History interview

[2] Quoted in Excursion for Miracles, 65.

[3] Doris Hering, “A Darkening Pond: Paul Sanasardo Reviewed,” Dance Magazine, August 1971, 73-74.

[4] This quote came via Doug Nielsen.

[5] Doris Hering, “A Darkening Pond: Paul Sanasardo Reviewed,” Dance Magazine, August 1971, 73.

[6] Kisselgoff, “Dance: Sanasardo Group,” New York Times, April 28, 1973.

[7] Chicago Dance History Project interview, 2016. Accessed August 7, 2026.

[8] Barnes, “Dance: Three Works by Sanasardo,” New York Times, May 22, 1971.

[9] Kisselgoff, “Dance: Sanasardo,” New York Times, May 20, 1982.

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Archives: “What Wendy’s Watching”

A few years ago, as editor at large for Dance Magazine, I was asked to produce short video previews of exciting dance happening in the NYC area. Along with video producer Kelsey Grills, I created 37 “What Wendy’s Watching” from September of 2017 to December of 2018. I had fun with this because I love all the dance houses where we filmed these, and I tried to give a bit of context with each preview. Actually not all were previews. Occasionally I commented on an event that already happened. I am posting the links here because they are hard to find on the Internet. The following are roughly in chronological order:

Dance Now at Joe’s Pub, including clips of works by Jane Comfort and Sara Pearson, Sept. 2017

20 Fall for Dance Companies in 2 Minutes, Sept. 2017

Chatting with the Stars at the Chita Rivera Awards, Al Hirschfeld Theatre, Sept. 2017

Eiko’s Haunting Vision Comes to the Metropolitan Museum, Nov. 2017

Nora Chipaumire Comes to Alliance Française, Sept. 2017

Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker Tackles Coltrane at NYLA, Sept. 2017

Twyla Brings Old and New to the Joyce, Oct. 2017

The 3 Best Moments of NYCB fall season, including Tiler Peck’s debut in Swan Lake

Can The Red Shoes Ever Be Contemporary? NY City Center, Nov. 2017

David Dorfman Portrays Tenderness and Hope at BAM’s Next Wave, NOv. 2017

Stepping into Black History with Step Afrika! New Victory Theater

Trisha Brown’s Rarely Performed Works at the Joyce, Dec. 2017

Jamar Roberts’ New Work, Members Don’t Get Weary, for Ailey, Dec. 2017

Kota Yamazaki at Baryshnikov Art Center, with Mina Nishimura, Dec. 2017 

Michelle Dorrance Brings New Work to the Joyce, Dec. 2017

Jodi Melnick and Sara Mearns at Works & Process, Jan. 2018

A Blast from Molissa Fenley’s Past at the Kitchen, Jan. 2018

NYCB Reprises Mauro Bigonzetti’s Immigrant Ballet, Oltremare, Jan. 2018

Arthur Mitchell Blazes a Ballet Trail, exhibit curated by Lynn Garafola, Columbia University, Jan. 2018

Wayne McGregor’s Genome-Inspired Autobiography, at the Joyce, March 2018

Stephen Petronio Straddles Past and Present at the Joyce, April 2018

The Edgy, Ancient Magic of Meredith Monk, at BAM Harvey Theater, March 2018

Gibney Dance Company at Gibney Space, May 2018

Mark Dendy’s Elvis Everywhere, NY Live Arts, May 2018

What Makes Robbins’ Glass Pieces So Powerful? NYCB, May 2018

Women Choreographers at Ailey This Week: Jamison and Zollar, June 2018

Ishmael Houston-Jones’ Them, About the Danger and Fears of AIDS, at P.S. NY, June 2018

Translucent Borders, with Dancers from Ghana, Cuba, Israel, Palestine, and the U.S., at NYU, June 2018

Tap City’s Rhythm in Motion, Symphony Space, July 2018.

Batsheva Youth Ensemble in Naharin’s Virus at the Joyce, July 2018

Sarasota Ballet Brings 2 Ashton Ballets + Marcelo Gomes to the Joyce, Aug. 2018

Bill T. Jones’ 6-Hour, 3-Part Trilogy at the Skirball, Aug. 2018

Boris Charmatz’s 1000 Gestures at the Skirball, Sept. 2018

The Adrenaline Rush of Tharp’s In the Upper Room, Now Returning to ABT, Oct. 2018

James Whiteside Explores His Creepy Side in Arthur Pita’s The Tenant, the Joyce, Nov. 2018

Ailey Celebrates Its 60th Anniversary with Works by Ron K. Brown, Wayne McGregor, and Jessica Lange, NY City Center, Dec. 2018

The Judson Revolution Comes to the Museum of Modern Art, Dec 2018–Feb 2019

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Exploring Possible/Impossible Technologies with Moving Bodies

The legendary 1966 series 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering involved nine interdisciplinary artists. When a 2024 exhibit at the Getty looked back at this landmark event, curator Nancy Perloff invited me to write about the four dance artists who contributed. (Also in that series were John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Alex Hay, Robert Whitman, David Tudor, and Öyvind Fahlström.) This text is reproduced from the exhibition catalog Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), edited by Nancy Perloff and Michelle Kuo © 2024 J. Paul Getty Trust.

“Looking back at 9 Evenings allows a glimpse of the wild imagination that fueled a burgeoning alternative to conventional concert dance.”

When given the opportunity to work with engineers from Bell Telephone Laboratories, four dance artists—Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda Childs, and Deborah Hay—welcomed the chance. They were all living in or near SoHo, the New York City neighborhood where artists of different disciplines were blurring genre boundaries in a spirit of collaboration. Billy Klüver, the physicist and engineer who helped instigate 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, told the artists to ask for anything they wanted—or could imagine—and that his team of engineers would try to invent what didn’t yet exist. The final series, with ten artists’ works (each one performed twice), took place at the massive 69th Regiment Armory in New York in October 1966.

Flyer for 9 Evenings

Each of the dance artists had a different fantasy about what would be possible. But there was one wish they all seemed to share. Julie Martin, director of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), recalled, with only slight exaggeration, that when Klüver asked the artists to state their desires, “Everybody wanted to float.”[1]

 

The Influence of John Cage, Robert Dunn, and Simone Forti

It’s true that all four dance pieces had a component that defied gravity. But it’s also true that they stayed grounded, task-like, insistently mundane. These four dance artists valued the ordinary realm that Robert Dunn had encouraged a few years earlier. A disciple of John Cage, Dunn taught a composition class at Merce Cunningham’s studio from 1960 to 1962, breaking open the possibilities of what a dance could be. As Rainer said recently, Cage “was constantly broadening what was acceptable as art.”[2] Embracing the ordinary was a way to pay attention to what was present, what was real, to notice the life around you.

Like Cage, Dunn was deeply influenced by Zen Buddhism; he fostered an environment where the students felt free to experiment, unjudged. Paxton, Rainer, Childs, and Hay were all part of that class, and visual artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Morris often visited the sessions. The ensuing explosion of activity led to the groundbreaking collective Judson Dance Theater, so named because the place that welcomed this band of renegades was Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village.

Simone Forti was also in that class. After about five years of improvising with Anna Halprin in California, she was familiar with the practice of making dances based on scores, lean structures to be fleshed out by the performers in their own ways. It was the encounter between Halprin’s approach to tasks in natural settings on the West Coast and the more structured approach of Dunn that led Forti to create Dance Constructions in 1961.[3] In these short works, Forti paired motion and object such that each was necessary to the other. For example, Slant Board (1961) conjoined an object—a 45-degree angled wooden surface with ropes attached—with the performers’ task of traversing that steeply sloping surface while holding the ropes to keep from falling. Neither the construction nor the task made sense without the other. Forti considered these pieces to be both dance and sculpture.

Dance Constructions can be seen as a precursor to 9 Evenings, which could almost have been called Advanced Dance Constructions or Dance Constructions’ Leap into Science Fiction. Although Forti was not one of the four dance artists “commissioned”[4] for the Armory event, she was in some ways a presiding spirit. Rainer and Paxton had performed in her Dance Constructions, which had opened up new ways of exploring the physicality of motion.[5] For the Armory event, Forti, who was married to performance/theater/media artist Robert Whitman at the time, became the person responsible for keeping track of the meetings and writing reports.

Forti’s observation that 9 Evenings was more of a way station than a point of arrival is well taken. None of the dance pieces was a finished, repeatable product. There was never a dress rehearsal that integrated the technology with the choreography. Further, no one was trying to make a work that was recognizable as art. As Paxton said while describing Marcel Duchamp’s influence, “It was almost that our art of those times was anything that did not look like any art that had happened.”[6] (I don’t think it was lost on Paxton or anyone else that Duchamp shattered existing notions of art at the same armory in 1913.)

Cage’s concept of the permeability of art and life infused these works, and along with that came a certain acceptance of messiness. Forti described it to me in terms of the changing goals of literature: “In fiction there’s probably less interest in a story that gets wrapped up in the end with some kind of punchline. [There was] a leaning toward having things open. . . . It was kind of a philosophical need John Cage filled.”[7] Forti wrote during the planning process: “I’m beginning to feel that the main function of the performances is not so much the presentation of art pieces, but a step towards the creation of a situation that will later be important to the making of art.”[8]

Cage and Dunn embraced the Bauhaus idea of using available materials. If you have copper handy, you use copper, not gold. If you have paper clips handy, you make a necklace out of them and do not wait for diamonds. For the Armory project, there was a shift away from this idea to dreaming bigger and imagining the possibilities of new technologies, even though there were bound to be “techno-hiccups” along the way.

Influence does not always involve a direct connection. As Forti speculated, groundwork for the future was being laid. Stephan Koplowitz, the longtime explorer of site-specific work and author of On Site: Methods for Site-Specific Performance Creation (2022), was a student at Wesleyan University in the late 1970s. In a recent conversation, he recalled the excitement he felt when learning about 9 Evenings: “When I read about 9 Evenings at Wesleyan, it blew my mind. It was the Holy Grail. It made me wonder, What is possible? How can we combine technology and the body and still keep our humanity? Technology and human bodies are blurring now. 9 Evenings was the beginning of that.”[9]

All four dance artists, plus Forti, sustained long international careers almost entirely outside the proscenium stage. Looking back at 9 Evenings allows a glimpse of the wild imagination that fueled a burgeoning alternative to conventional concert dance.

 

Steve Paxton’s Physical Things

For Physical Things, Paxton used clear polyethylene sheets to build a gigantic maze that the critic Lucy Lippard called “a series of billowing tunnels” attached to a hundred-foot-tall tower.[10] “I was drawn to the inflatability of the material,” Paxton wrote, “and that you could make shapes with it and change your perception of the space.”[11] Paxton had been experimenting with plastic inflatables since 1963. On 29 January of that year, he performed Word Words, a collaborative duet with Rainer, in silence, at Judson Memorial Church. The next night he created Music for Word Words, which he conceived as accompaniment for the duet the night before. He started Music for Word Words standing inside a room-sized bubble that had been inflated by an industrial vacuum cleaner. He simply deflated the plastic until it shrank to drape over his body like a rumpled suit. He used polyethylene again for The Deposits (1965), which included an inflated plastic armchair at Kutsher’s Hotel and Country Club in upstate New York that Paxton and Hay batted around with big paddles. Another instance was Earth Interior (1966), for which he created a hundred-foot tunnel with side passages in a skating rink in Washington, D.C.

In Physical Things, audience members had to pass through this structure, and along the way they could perceive other people ahead of them. Seen through the plastic dividers, those figures looked hazy and ungrounded—floating, as if in a fog. Spectators also encountered bizarre sights like limbs of performers that protruded from a dark mound—“highly surrealistic in effect.”[12] As they exited the last “room,” each audience member was given a wireless radio handset so they could hear voices and sounds coming from a layer of sound loops overhead. As they changed locations, they could assemble their own sequence of sounds. In the documentary film,[13] we hear a snippet about the astronaut John Glenn’s trip to outer space, which was uncannily apt.[14]

Paxton’s Physical Things; photo by Peter Moore showing an overview of large inflated air structures from the balcony behind the control booth, Getty Research Institute

The Armory was the last site of Paxton’s love affair with polyethylene. The outgassing chemicals hadn’t bothered him before, but by 1966 he had become aware of their toxicity. Noting that hordes of people had passed through his plastic enclosures, he was just a tiny bit rueful on the phone: “It was toxic. They were just subtly poisoned. Sorry, everybody.”[15]

 

Yvonne Rainer’s Carriage Discreteness

For Rainer, the many tasks and objects in Carriage Discreteness were typical of her work at the time—for instance, the red rubber balls in Terrain (1963), mattresses in Room Service (1963) and Parts of Some Sextets (1965), and various weighted objects like paper and bubble-wrap in The Mind Is a Muscle (1966)—but more elaborate in terms of space and mechanics. She gathered a wide array of differently weighted objects that included—at least in the plan—one hundred wooden slats, one hundred foam slats, six mattresses, five pieces of paper, two elevator weights, and five Styrofoam beams donated by the sculptor Carl Andre (who also performed in the piece).[16]

Rainer split most of the actions into two kinds of events: performers moving objects to specific spots on the floor, and mechanically activated events like movie fragments, slide projections, light changes, closeups on TV monitors, and a small plexiglass globe guided by an elevated pulley across the space—all planned to happen in a prescribed sequence. During the performance, Rainer was sitting high on a balcony, directing the performers to carry an object, one at a time, and place it in one of twenty rectangles marked on the floor. The performers were receiving her messages through a walkie-talkie attached to either a shoulder or a wrist. Perhaps because they were intent on hearing the instructions, they wore a bit of a zombie look. Rainer later regretted her elevated perch. In her autobiography, she wrote that she was “in the remote balcony overlooking the 200 x 200-foot performing area like a sultan surveying his troops on a vast marching field.”[17] She could have given her performers the freedom to make their own choices, which undoubtedly would have made for a livelier performance. “But no,” she wrote, “I had to exercise my controlling directorial hand.”

Yvonne Rainer’s Carriage Discreteness, Peter Moore’s photo shows the vast Armory, the objects on the floor, a freestanding screen, and Steve Paxton swinging from the rafters.

(Rainer had another reason for bad memories of this evening. In the wee hours after the first performance, she was struck with a medical disaster that almost killed her. She was rushed to the hospital and operated on immediately. For the second night of Carriage Discreteness, Morris, who was her romantic partner at the time, stepped into her role as “sultan” and things went smoothly. But it took months for Rainer to recuperate from a severe intestinal blockage replete with gangrene and peritonitis.[18])

In 1966, Rainer was soon to migrate from performance to film, and Carriage Discreteness foreshadowed that shift. The film elements included clips of the actors W. C. Fields and James Cagney projected onto a large, freestanding screen and the audiotape of a conversation between a man and a woman about a film. This dialogue, originally between Rainer and Morris, and vocalized by Childs and William Davis, suggests that talking about films can be as seductive as watching a film.

Despite the diffuse quality—and the fact that on the first night the mechanical events had been accidentally programmed backwards (!)—Carriage Discreteness had two spectacular moments. The first was when, in a clip from the film The Old Fashioned Way (1934), Fields is precariously balancing a pile of cigar boxes when a man in his audience throws a ball that topples the boxes. Suddenly, the huge screen in the Armory broke apart and crumbled to the floor in big chunks. What was two-dimensional vaudeville self-destructed in a real, three-dimensional way. Forti remembers it vividly: “Suddenly the parts came apart and it fell down in parts. It was quite beautiful, quite loud, quite surprising.”[19]

The other highlight of Carriage Discreteness—this is where floating came in—was Paxton sitting on a swing that soared out into the upper reaches of the 120-foot-high Armory. He wasn’t pumping his legs (that was “forbidden,” he said);[20] rather, he just let the action subside after the first big push. For Paxton, it was a stimulating kinetic experience: “The initial swoop of the swing was great, but what was best was that the piece lasted long enough that . . . the swing just died down. It got smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller till I could barely tell I was moving. I was going a little bit forward and a little bit back and no sense of arc at all, and that was incredible. That was like a revelation.”[21]

Fast forward to Rainer’s recent work, Hellzapoppin’: What about the Bees (2022), in which the performance area was also split into two parts, with dancers on stage right and film projections on stage left. When reminded of this congruence with Carriage Discreteness, Rainer said, “I guess I’m interested in a field of activity where you can’t take it all in, you have to choose where you focus your attention.”[22]

 

Lucinda Childs’s Vehicle

Childs, who had given a brilliant, absurdist cast to choreographing with objects (for instance, in her 1964 solo Carnation, she manipulated sponges and other domestic objects to hilarious effect), knew from the beginning that she wanted to experiment with the Doppler sonar device. To elicit sound from the invisible sonar beam, Childs stood among three hanging, sand-filled buckets, guiding them in circular motion. (These red buckets were part of the sprinkler system required of every SoHo loft. As Childs quipped, they were “stolen from the fire department.”[23]) Hanging at just the right level to be intercepted by the sonar beam, the buckets created a sound that Klüver called “a swishing noise like wind blowing through a forest.”[24]

Lucinda Childs’ Vehicle, Peter Moore photo showing William Davis and Alex Hay, left, inside plexiglass enclosure, Childs at right with buckets, Getty Research Institute

The piece began with a floating plexiglass cube, airborne via old-fashioned methods: suspended from a scaffold and rotated by the currents of an electric fan. This cube bobbed in the air, with a lightbulb inside it, at about eye level. A larger, phonebooth-sized plexiglass enclosure, with Alex Hay inside, was air-cushioned from below with what Klüver called a “ground-effects machine.”[25] It didn’t work quite the way they had planned, so William Davis (a dancer with Cunningham’s company) helped steer it in order to deliver the three red buckets to Childs. To extend the action outward, the sound from the sonar beam was amplified by twenty speakers, and images and shadows of the objects were projected onto three screens.[26]

Childs was happy with at least two of the components: the variety of sounds elicited by the swinging buckets and the oscilloscope that projected the image of the sounds onto one of the screens.[27] However, the process of trying to put it all together in her loft was “frightening because nothing really totally came together until the time of the performance.”[28]

 

Deborah Hay’s solo

Although Deborah Hay’s solo[29] also had technical problems, it’s probably the one dance piece that created a cogent aesthetic effect. With dancers gliding by on individual remote-controlled platforms, it was otherworldly, like traveling on a moon rover. Hay was studying tai chi at the time, which gave the movement of the performers a spare steadiness. She was also influenced by the stillness she saw in traditional Japanese performing arts like bugaku (dance) and bunraku (puppet theater). At times one person would lie prone on a rolling platform, creating an almost morgue-like effect. At other times performers were walking alone or in groups of two or three. Long, translucent plastic sheets were hung in front of the audience, rendering the sixteen dancers (including herself) quite distant, as though seen through a frosty window. Hay didn’t want the audience to see the bodies clearly “but just to get almost like a mirage.”[30]

Hay’s written description focused on formal qualities: “Solo is a white, even, clear event in space. The performers are part of the space and light. . . . All movement is with the intention of maintaining a balance of order and evenness.”[31] The signaling system, however, only worked for about three platforms, so solo ended up having more walking than gliding. The dancers gradually walked in twos or threes without disturbing the calm.

Deborah Hay’s solo. Peter Moore photo showing D. Hay, at right atop platform, and Alex Hay, left, prone on platform, Getty Research Institute

Among those Hay recruited for her Armory piece were Robert Rauschenberg, the painter Marjorie Strider, and the sculptor Fujiko Nakaya.[32] They were three of the eight friends serving as remote-control operators, guiding the dancers on the rolling platforms. Hay called them “fake musicians,” because they were dressed formally in black, seated in a row, and “conducted” (or perhaps only given a starting flourish) by the composer James Tenney.[33] The real music was Funakakushi (1965) by Toshi Ichiyanagi, a protégé of Cage (and the ex-husband of Yoko Ono). David Tudor arranged for this richly textured electronic score to migrate from speaker to speaker, the effect being intermittent eruptions beneath the quietness.[34]

Deborah Ha’s solo

While Hay’s vision was cool and calm, her cast of characters came out of a warm, somewhat unruly environment: “What I used to do is teach free classes on Spring Street . . . several times a week and all these artists and artists’ friends and dancers would come, and I’d put on great music and half the people were stoned and we would dance for an hour.”[35]

 

An Unmoored Voice

There was one additional airborne element that did not come from any of the four choreographers. It came from the second performance of Rauschenberg’s Open Score. In a new concluding section, Rauschenberg picked up an unwieldy white sack and carried it from place to place. A beautiful, reverberating sound emanated from whatever he was carrying. It was the voice of Forti singing an Italian folk song from inside the bag. She was not amplified, but, with the six-second reverberation time of the Armory, her voice echoed hauntingly. As Lippard wrote, Forti sang “in a thin, clear, sweet voice that literally pierced the silence.”[36] According to Forti, “It was quite dreamlike to be in the sack singing.”[37]

 

Audience and Critical Reaction

The general sensibility of 9 Evenings was anti-narrative, which was part of the zeitgeist of Judson Dance Theater. That sensibility may not have translated well from a small church to a vast armory. In addition, there were long lulls due to technical problems. The performances were so low-key that the New York Times art critic Grace Glueck was able to quote a viewer saying, “Nothing’s happened yet” at the end of the first evening.[38] She also joked, with some detail, that the luminaries in the audience were more interesting than the performance. The Times dance critic, Clive Barnes, no friend of the avant-garde, called the second evening a “depressing spectacle.”[39]

Another problem was that a pro bono public relations firm had promised such a magical encounter that it backfired.[40] According to Rainer, “The whole thing was so pumped up to be a phenomenal event and the audience came with great expectations.”[41] When asked recently what they objected to, she said, “I remember they were outraged at the minimalist approach, a real letdown for them. They booed and clapped when something went on too long.”[42] Lippard confirmed that Carriage Discreteness, which she felt was one of the best works, “was greeted by the rudest audience reception.”[43]

On 13 October, Forti wrote in her report, “The audience was incensed. There was a feeling of disaster.” But, she added, “The history books are full of accounts of performances at which the audiences were incensed and that later were recognized to be important achievements.”[44] Touché!

 

Notes

[1]. “E.A.T.: Experiments in Art & Technology,1960–2001,” lecture by Julie Martin, Neukon Institute, Dartmouth College, 2013.

[2]. Yvonne Rainer, phone interview, 14 November 2022.

[3]. For more on Forti as a bridge between Halprin on the West Coast and Dunn in New York, see Wendy Perron, “Simone Forti: bodynatureartmovementbody,” in Radical Bodies: Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York, 1955–1972, ed. Ninotchka Bennahum, Wendy Perron, and Bruce Robertson, exh cat. (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 88–119.

[4]. I put that word within quotation marks because, according to Julie Martin, there wasn’t enough money to pay the artists, even though Klüver and Rauschenberg, who had worked closely with Klüver to coordinate the whole series, raised a small amount of money to produce 9 Evenings.

[5]. For more on the specific ways Forti influenced Paxton and Rainer, see Perron, “Simone Forti,” 88–119.

[6]. Steve Paxton, “The Inflatables in the Age of Plastic” (transcript), ed. Tom Engels and Myriam Van Imschoot, 2019, Conversations in Vermont: Steve Paxton,

[7]. Simone Forti, phone interview with the author, 13 September 2022.

[8]. Forti, “A View of 9 Evenings,” 145.

[9]. Stephan Koplowitz, phone interview with author, 2 January 2023.

[10]. Lucy Lippard, “Total Theatre?,” in 9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theater, and Engineering, 1966, ed. Catherine Morris, exh. cat. (Cambridge, MA: MIT List Visual Art Center, 2006), 71.

[11]. Paxton, “Inflatables,” 2019.

[12]. Lippard, “Total Theatre?,” 71.

[13]. 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, directed by Barbro Schultz Lundestam, executive produced by Billy Klüver and Julie Martin (Lyon, France: Numeridanse, 2013), .

[14]. Colonel John Glenn was the first American to orbit Earth; he launched from Cape Canaveral on 20 February 1962. The many radio sounds for Physical Things were taped in advance.

[15]. Paxton, “Inflatables,” 2019.

[16]. See the list of objects in Yvonne Rainer, Work, 1961–1973 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1974), 303.

[17]. Yvonne Rainer, Feelings Are Facts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 275–78.

[18]. Rainer, Feelings, 275–76.

[19]. Forti, interview 13 September 2022.

[20]. Steve Paxton, phone interview with author, 13 September 2022.

[21]. Paxton, phone interview, 13 September 2022.

[22]. Yvonne Rainer, phone interview with author, 14 November 2022.

[23]. Lucinda Childs, phone interview with author, 31 October 2022.

[24]. Billy Klüver, “9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering; A Description of the Artists’ Use of Sound,” in Für Augen und Ohren: Von der Spieluhr zum akustischen Environment, ed. René Block (Berlin: Akademie der Künste Berlin, 1980).

[25]. Lucinda Childs, “Lucinda Childs: A Portfolio,” Artforum 11, no. 6 (1973): 56.

[26]. The sources for this description are my phone interview with Childs, e-mails with Julie Martin, and Childs, “Lucinda Childs: A Portfolio,” 50–56.

[27]. Mini-interview with Lucinda Childs, 9 Evenings, .

[28]. Childs, interview, 31 October 2022.

[29]. The title was probably based on Hay’s solo from 1965 called solo, performed at the New York Theatre Rally and at Rauschenberg’s loft. In this precursor she wore a cellophane garment and stood on a kind of skateboard.

[30]. Deborah Hay, phone interview with author, 6 September 2022.

[31]. Quoted in Klüver, “9 Evenings Theater,” 1980; and “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering,” Moderna Museet.

[32]. Fujiko Nakaya attended Hay’s dance sessions around the time she was painting clouds. She had met Rauschenberg when she translated for him in Japan in 1964 (during Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s  world tour). In 1970, Nakaya was invited by Klüver to make a fog sculpture for the exterior of the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka. She also became an active member of E.A.T., heading up a branch in Tokyo. Nakaya created another fog sculpture for Opal Loop, her 1980 collaboration with Trisha Brown, which is one of Brown’s most acclaimed works.

[33]. Hay, interview, 6 September 2022.

[34]. Hay, interview, 6 September 2022; and Klüver, “9 Evenings,” 1980.

[35]. Hay, interview, 6 September 2022.

[36]. Lippard, “Total Theatre?,” 66.

[37]. Forti, interview, 13 September 2022.

[38]. Grace Glueck, “Arts and Engineering Are Mixing It Up at the Armory,” New York Times, 14 October 1966.

[39]. Clive Barnes, “Dance or Something at the Armory,” New York Times, 15 October 1966.

[40]. The publicity flier, created by the PR firm Ruder Finn, claims magical acts like “You will see without light . . . You will see dancers float in the air . . . You too will float.” Flier courtesy of Julie Martin.

[41]. Rainer, Feelings.

[42]. Yvonne Rainer, interview, 14 November 2022.

[43]. Lippard, “Total Theatre?,” 72.

[44]. Simone Forti, “A View of 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering,”

https://monoskop.org/images/8/8b/Forti_Simone_2015_A_View_of_9_Evenings_Theatre_and_Engineering.pdf  See also Clarisse Bardio, The Diagrams of 9 evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theatre, and Engineering, 1966” trans. Claire Grace  (Cambridge, MA: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2006), 45-54 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02338052/document

 

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Notable Dance Books of 2025

Every year, I compile a list of the groovy dance books published that year. When I was writing the whole column myself, I posted short blurbs, much like the endorsements you see on the back covers of books. I tended to choose volumes that center dancers’ stories, because that’s what I love to read. Since 2022, when I started asking colleagues to help me in this endeavor, the blurbs grew into reviews, and the choices expanded too. I try to offer each colleague a book they might enjoy, and I hope you enjoy these recommendations too.

This year I am kicking off the column with two items that convey the monumental work of two of our greats: Martha Graham and George Balanchine. Both are visually spectacular while also making strong connections between past and present.

Btw, here’s some good news for readers: The American Dance Guild is organizing the second Dance Book Fair on March 29. The first one, last year, was a well-organized, festive event. It’s a great place to meet dance writers and to browse dance books published in the last 15 years.

 

Martha Graham Dance Company 100 Years
Produced by Ken Brower and Deborah Ory, NYC Dance Project
Introduction by Janet Eilber
Text by Peter Sparling
Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers

Reviewed by Wendy Perron

To celebrate the centennial of the oldest dance company in the country, The NYC Dance Project has produced a weighty book of starkly striking photos of twenty-four works by Martha Graham. As Janet Eilber writes in the introduction, “She taught us that when the body is stationary, the inner life can provide intense psychological movement—the growing fury, crushing grief, deepening desire, dawning recognition, or any number of emotional revelations that can stop us in our tracks. And in those moments, Martha wanted us to vibrate with intention that could be felt in the balcony of the theater while never moving a muscle.” These images do indeed vibrate. Almost each section starts with a historic photo that anchors us in the past. For example, Barbara Morgan’s iconic photo of Primitive Mysteries (1931), back when Martha herself was the sole figure, or Mary Hinkson as Circe (1933) by Anthony Crickmay. The current full-size photos of recent dancers like Lloyd Knight in El Penitente, Xin Ying in Imperial Gesture, and Peju Chien-Pott in Night Journey are simply magnificent. The black-and-white photos give a sense of volume and depth, while the color photos are vibrant but look less timeless.

That special kind of severe sculptural beauty of Graham dancers has lasted through the ages due, no doubt, to the strict technique classes. As you linger on each page, you could eventually get a sense of Graham’s psychological choreographic oeuvre over the century.

Some of the images place distinctive roles within a natural environment. Lloyd Knight and So Young An, shown in Circe on a rocky beach, bring out the danger of that story. Leslie Andrea Williams, posing in front of Noguchi’s fence in Frontier (1935), gives a different meaning to that dance, perhaps suggesting (optimistically) that a young Black woman could now survey the land with the same sense of hope that a young white woman did in 1935.

It’s satisfying that each of these great Graham works is represented by both the past and the present, thus implying a strong future. One could explain the magic with the famous Graham sound bite writ large on one of the early pages: “Dance is the hidden language of the soul.” Here’s to 100 years of dancing and watching that language.

 

In Balanchine’s Steps: How The George Balanchine Foundation Preserves His Genius
Photographs by Costas, Additional photographs by Brian Rushton
Designer and Photo Editor, Kyle Froman
Text Editor, Mindy Aloff
George Balanchine Foundation and TideMark

Reviewed by Barbara Forbes

This beautiful book documents the process of creating the Video Archives for the legacy of George Balanchine (1904–1983). Dancers who worked directly with the choreographer were invited to coach those who continue dancing his ballets in his absence. Thanks to former New York City Ballet dancer Nancy Reynolds, who brought the idea to Barbara Horgan, founder of the Balanchine Foundation, in 1994, this video archive is growing. In Balanchine’s Steps allows us to glimpse how the transmission takes place.

A brief biography of each contributor, dancer, teacher, writer, and critic accompanies the stunning in-studio photographs by Costas and Reynolds’ husband Brian Rushton. Each pairing of coach and dancer offers historical context, first-hand tips, and inspiring insights. The voice of each contributor is unique and absorbing as we learn about the process.

Memories even reach into Balanchine’s past, for example when Patricia Wilde shares that Balanchine adored Olga Spessitseva’s Odette, having worked with her on Diaghilev’s one-act Swan Lake. In other cases, the photographs themselves convey the communication, as with Stephanie Saland coaching Miriam Miller in Vienna Waltzes, or Suzanne Farrell coaching Elisabeth Holowchuk and Michael Cook in Meditation.

Occasionally philosophical disagreements are revealed. Bart Cook advises that Agon is “not a relationship…We’re things…we’re energies.” To which his partner Allegra Kent responds, “We’re not things. We’re human beings.”

Kay Mazzo helps Miriam Miller understand that performing Balanchine’s ballets demands a rich connection with one’s internal self, “a dialogue guiding your presence and aura.” Jonathan Stafford writes of his sessions with Merrill Ashley and Mimi Paul that they changed the way he approaches those roles. And Peter Boal recalls being coached by Maria Tallchief in Scotch Symphony pas de deux, and her gazing up at him. “When her eyes met mine, she blushed. I’ll never forget that look.”

It is clear that passing on Balanchine’s choreography is not only a question of mastering the steps. There’s Edward Villella advising the male dancer in Bugaku to “keep a space between her waist and your palms” to allow your partner to function (in his case, Allegra Kent); Violette Verdy observing that “It’s about a little thing called atmosphere;” or Kay Mazzo advising Miriam Miller that “not to make ballet positions.” Each dancer finds a new relationship with the role they are dancing. “You open your eyes to a whole different layer of the work,” says Maria Kowroski, on being coached in Bugaku by Mimi Paul and Villella.

Perusing the evocative photos and intimate observations in this book convinces me that Balanchine’s legacy lives in the hearts of dancers. Those who created roles in his ballets are guiding the next generations, enlivening his choreography with nuance, imagination and sensitivity.

 

Nevertheless, A Choreographic Workbook
By Yvonne Rainer with Emmanuèle Phuon
Illustrations by Pascal Lemaître
Yale University Press

Reviewed by Nancy Alfaro

If only I’d had Yvonne Rainer’s Nevertheless, a Choreographic Workbook back in the day! This book is a gem, full of unique ideas for choreographing and teaching movement to trained dancers and pedestrian performers.

The first section of the workbook, titled “Conversation,” includes an insightful discussion with Yvonne Rainer and dancer/scholar Emmanuèle Phuon. Here they discuss Rainer’s early teaching session, “Nevertheless.” Rainer recorded it with instructions for the performers to interpret as they wished, while she lay on the floor pretending to sleep. The recorded instructions allowed the choreographer a chance to participate in the process, rather than being a hierarchical observer. When asked by Phuon what her motive was for ignoring the performers, Rainer said, “It was a one-shot experiment. It was a way of contesting or complicating my own authority. Or maybe amplifying it?”

The “Nevertheless” section includes a multitude of structural ideas and prompts for those who are doing pedestrian, trained, or task-oriented movement. (No Pantomime!) In this section, the body is deconstructed into segments, and Rainer proposes a variety of ways for these segments to move separately or in relation to each other. She also encourages her performers to integrate text, photos, film, and other mediums that have influenced them, culminating in a collage of words, movement, and visuals.

In the “Workbook” section, Rainer gives a series of short, choreographic commands, like, “Make a complicated two-minute piece,” or “Improvise spontaneously and emphasize one of the following: Time, Body, Light, Rhythm etc.” One of my favorite prompts is, “Make a piece that contains both functional and nonfunctional activities.” Pascal Lemaître’s simple, joyful illustrations are a gift throughout the book, but here his lunging and tumbling figures burst off page. These illustrated pages are followed by blank Notes pages so you can play along and notate your ideas.

Another section is called Pedagogical Vaudeville, so titled after a performance by students Rainer led in workshop at the Danish Academy of Art in 2000. Because she was working with untrained art students rather than professional dancers, she felt compelled to introduce ideas, rather than counting on them to bring in pre-determined moves. Here Rainer invites the reader to use the book’s Pedagogical Vaudeville diary as a score for a dance they may want to create.

Dancers, artists, musicians, choreographers, and educators will enjoy reading this engaging book by this inventive, critical thinker and creator.

 

The Choreography of Environments: How the Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Design
By Janice Ross
Oxford University Press

Reviewed by Stephan Koplowitz

Janice Ross’ latest book isn’t just a record of two creative rule-breakers; it’s a deep dive into what made their genius and iconoclastic reputations possible. Perhaps I am biased, given my interest in anything site-specific. However, this book creates an immersive world filled with insight and interesting stories that will appeal to many readers. More than a biography of a house, Ross renders the home as a real, living place, filled with purpose and teamwork, where many artists found inspiration and ideas for years.

Ross’s relentless attention to detail is utterly compelling. She takes a subject that could seem academic—the connection between art and architecture—but always brings it down to the actual day-to-day of the Halprins’ home life. Her research delves into every conceivable aspect of the space, and we are privy to Anna Halprin’s private journals, Lawrence Halprin’s architectural sketches, their shared correspondence, and several photographs. She investigates the form, function, and furniture of the home, revealing how each element was a deliberate act of design, part of a larger, domestic choreography. We learn, for example, about the sloped floors and split-level rooms that were not mere aesthetic choices but direct provocations to movement. The large, sliding glass doors were not simply for light but were designed to dissolve the boundary between indoors and out (a prime California element), inviting the natural environment into their lives and creative process. The benches and other design elements “honor the unwritten credo of the Halprin home: to build with nature, not on it.”

The most celebrated feature of the home is, without a doubt, the dance deck, and Ross provides a thorough analysis of its importance. “On the surface,” she writes, “the dance deck might seem merely a trendy backyard feature born in the postwar era of mid-century modernist homes… Yet viewed from the intersecting perspectives of theater, social history, and the architecture of domestic space, it is a transformative object.” The deck—and, by extension, as Ross describes, the entire home—set in motion new paradigms for how the body relates to space. It is no surprise that dance masters Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, and Meredith Monk (to name the boldest) found new perspectives on the deck, guided by the Halprins’ vision for movement and designed space.

The Choreography of Environments will delight anyone wishing to delve deeply into an artistic life that seamlessly blends personal ideals of aesthetics, function, and movement into daily life. One can’t leave this book without looking at one’s own home space with new eyes, and what if…

 

Hollywood Dance-ins and the Reproduction of Bodies
By Anthea Kraut
Oxford University Press

Reviewed by Elizabeth Zimmer

Hollywood Dance-ins and the Reproduction of Bodies might well serve as a litmus test for aspiring dance scholars. If readers are prepared to spend many hours parsing the theoretical language and following the thousands of superscript numbers to the 80 dense pages of notes and bibliography at the rear of Anthea Kraut’s new book, and if those readers do so with excitement, even delight, they are probably in the right business. If not—if their attention wanders, and if they give up the quest—well, one of the reasons people become dancers is that they’d rather not sit and read and ponder all the time, right?

I love this book. It opens doors for me to vocabularies and ways of thinking that first surfaced after I left grad school in the 1970s—to the language of literary theory, of critical race theory, of feminist and cinema studies. After a while Kraut’s flood of information mutates into wisdom; anyone who makes it through the text will be changed by her subtle interweaving of hard facts with lucid analysis. We will also have made the acquaintance of several people—Marie Bryant, Angie Blue, Alex Romero and others—mostly absent from even a good dance history education, screen dancers likely to have been uncredited in films or assistant dance directors and teachers paid a mere fraction of what their male equivalents, like Hermes Pan, were earning.

Kraut declares that her aim is “to advance understandings of credit and debit as racialized and gendered relations that play out at the level of the body…” Intrepid readers will absorb concepts like surrogation, indexicality, “above the line” and “below the line” positions, and how these apparently simple, often financial terms apply to the transmission of dance information. They will learn about the role Ebony magazine, the Black community’s equivalent to Life, played in the years before television took over the job of showing us to ourselves. Ebony and its sister publication, Jet, collected and preserved many stories of the remarkable women and gay men who transmitted the work of film choreographers to white stars who worked less hard than they otherwise might to look spectacular onscreen. They’ll discover the trio of invisibilized dancers, Ernie Flatt, Carol Haney, and Jeanne Coyne, responsible for Debbie Reynolds’ triumph in Singin’ in the Rain. Kraut also details the remarkable interracial collaboration between Black star Lena Horne and white dancer Haney, herself celebrated for her performance in The Pajama Game on The Perry Como Show.

Hollywood Dance-Ins is a book I wish I had written, but in a thousand years I would not have had the patience, or the insight, to do the research and the thinking involved here. Masquerading as a dance history book, its real subject is political economy. If they bother to read it, it will inflame the barbarians currently running our country and our schools. Buy it quickly before they ban it or burn it and it becomes impossible to find.

 

Balanchine Finds His America: A Tale of Love Lost and Ballet Reborn
By Elizabeth Kendall
Oxford University Press

Reviewed by Martha Ullman West

Elizabeth Kendall’s deeply personal account of the great choreographer’s early years in this country is as meticulously researched and richly detailed as its predecessor, Balanchine and the Lost Muse: Revolution & the Making of a Choreographer. Yet it’s startlingly different.

The author also of Where She Danced, an elegantly written book about the feminist origins of modern dance, in which Kendall examined the lives of her subjects (readably !) in the context of their times and their culture, does the same in Balanchine Finds His America. In 207 pages, including an exhaustive bibliography (Disclaimer: my book, Todd Bolender, Janet Reed and the Making of American Ballet, is one of her sources) Kendall examines, through the contradictory lenses of feminism and Freudianism, a fifteen-year period of Balanchine’s life and work that was phenomenally productive professionally, and personally pretty turbulent.

She begins with his arrival in New York in 1933, a survivor of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution who was recovering from tuberculosis, broke, jobless, and having cast his lot with a young moderately wealthy American named Lincoln Kirstein. She ends in 1948: Balanchine has led three companies, choreographed for the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and Denham’s Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, established the School of American Ballet and New York City Ballet, headed American Ballet Caravan’s government-sponsored 1941 tour of South America, choreographed for Broadway and the movies, been married twice and had multiple affairs with dancers. Serenade, Concerto Barocco, Theme and Variations, and Four Temperaments were all made in this period.

The dancers who inspired these ballets were not all women, although readers new to Balanchine’s story might think so. They might also, mistakenly, think the music was of secondary importance. As for Balanchine the predator, of which Kendall both accuses and forgives him, he was after all a man of his time, and in at least one instance, on the 1941 tour, teenager Marie-Jeanne Pelus, according to one dancer, pursued him relentlessly.

“I want Balanchine’s story to stand in for the all-too-human stories of all great artists, as they make the bold and often treacherous inner discoveries that lead to their art,” Kendall writes at the end of her preface. That’s ambitious: All artists are products of their times and their cultures, and some, Balanchine included, are focused more on making the work than probing their own psyches. To give Balanchine’s life story immediacy, Kendall chose to write it in the present tense, making the reader wonder if something actually happened, and how she knows. However, with Balanchine Finds His America, Kendall makes her readers think and question, not only what she says about Balanchine and his work, but also the art of biography.

 

Fantasies of Ito Michio
By Tara Rodman
University of Michigan Press

Reviewed by Wendy Perron

The Japanese-born Michio Ito is a fascinating precursor to American modern dance. But when you read the research, you realize that the stories he told about himself were sometimes true and sometimes fictional. Tara Rodman’s solution to this dilemma is to say that his fantasies are equally important to the reality, that his desires say something about him as a boundary-crossing artist and about the culture surrounding him.

“Fantasy is how we know ourselves,” Rodman offers, “how we perform ourselves and come to think of those performances as constitutive of ourselves.” She alternately defines his tall tales as either self-promotion or “creative acts of the imagination that sustained” him. Another layer is that Ito, as an Asian dancer in the West, was a screen onto which many fantasies of others were projected, relating to “the national, racial, and imperial significations assigned it.” So on the one hand, we have his fanciful stories about dancing at a Pavlova performance or being pals with Nijinsky, and on the other hand we have his arduous path of building communities for dance in New York and Los Angeles during the time of the “yellow peril.”

One of the ways Ito was a pioneer of modern dance was that he influenced Louis Horst, the composer who laid down the rules for structuring choreography. When I researched Ito for my Unsung Heroes of Dance History series in 2021, I discovered that Horst had modeled his ABA structure on what he learned from Ito in the 1920s. That format became the favored method of organizing materials in modern dance for decades.

After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, the FBI raided Ito’s home in L.A. and arrested him as an enemy alien—which was not uncommon for issei men (born in Japan). He was taken into a series of prison-like DOJ facilities. In 1943, his request for repatriation was granted, and he sailed back to Japan. The American government had killed his dream of being a “universal artist.” But then—irony of ironies—that same American government offered him the job of producer at the Ernie Pyle theater in Tokyo, a top position during the American Occupation. In bombed out, devastated Japan, as Rodman points out, Ito became part of the remaking of his home country.

Ito is a towering, idealistic figure who crossed cultures, national identities, and dance genres. Rodman’s research is vast and impeccable. Because she traveled to Japan and learned the language, she could report on how the Japanese media covered him in both L.A. and Tokyo over the years. Rodman gives us a comprehensive excavation into his life, his work, and his dreams.

 

Juliet Prowse: Born to Dance, The Extraordinary Life Story of My Aunt
By Juliet E. Prowse
Prowse Media

Reviewed by William Whitener

Juliet E. Prowse has written a loving tribute about her aunt, the great and magnetic entertainer, Juliet Prowse. The author traces Juliet’s early years as a child in South Africa, where she studied ballet with Marjorie Sturman, co-founder of the Festival Ballet Society. It was 1948 and Juliet showed tremendous promise as a 12-year old. Long-limbed, strong, and with a smile that lit up the room, the young dancer became a member of the company and performed as the Queen of the Willis in Giselle. By 1954, she was living in London with the hope of joining Anton Dolin’s Festival Ballet. Alas, she was six feet tall on pointe and not chosen. Juliet began to forge her own path. The author proudly recounts her aunt’s rapid ascent, boosted by the encouragement of family members, friends, and lovers.

After replacing a principal dancer in a pantomime at The Palladium, Juliet tried out for the eminent team of Jack Cole and Gwen Verdon, who were in London auditioning dancers for the film Gentlemen Prefer Brunettes. She was cast, and this opportunity was followed by a featured role in the West End production of the musical Kismet. Her boundless talent was recognized by leaders in the field including the choreographer Hermes Pan. Juliet Prowse was launched.

The remainder of the biography chronicles the trailblazing efforts of Juliet as she became a dazzling presence on stage, film, and television; she developed a company of loyal dancers, choreographers, designers and musicians. Lauded for her fine singing and comedic gifts in musical theater productions, she was one of the most celebrated and highly paid performers in Las Vegas. Her artistic standards were legendary.

This is an inspiring remembrance of a beloved woman who successfully brought dance, both subtle and extravagant, to the general public. In her niece’s detailed portrait, Juliet’s love of life, joy, heartbreaks, and determination are on solid ground.

 

Dancing on the Fault Lines of History
By Susan Manning
University of Michigan Press

Reviewed by Morgan Griffin

Eminent dance scholar Susan Manning kicks off this selection of her essays with a brief history of herself. I appreciated this inclusion, as any interpretation of dance history is inherently personal. Her foreword reveals not only her own privileges and biases, but also her revised thinking over time. In fact, the evolution of these preconceptions serves as the through line of the book.

Divided into sections by “keywords,” the essays, spanning from 1986 to 2025, are organized into themes of “Gender and Sexuality,” “Whiteness and Blackness,” and “Nationality and Globalization.”

These themes are interpreted through the lens of spectatorship. The essays recount how viewership of these themes not only vary from viewer to viewer, but also adapt over time based on social movements, global awareness, and personal preferences. Isadora Duncan is on one hand viewed as a feminist offering liberation of the body, on the other hand viewed as objectifying the female body and simultaneously glorifying whiteness. Pina Bausch is criticized for her representation of traditional and at times violent gender roles. Or is her work purely a commentary deeply rooted in German history? Did Mary Wigman appropriate and Orientalize Asian influences, or did her work inspire Ohno Kazuo, who then adapted her forms into the Japanese dance world? Was she a Nazi empathizer or did she succumb so as to provide safety and subtle rebellion?

At the onset Manning acknowledges the fact that two or many different things can be true. Dance is an ephemeral art that puts bodies on view for people to see, to perceive, to interpret. How can there not be one million truths? Nonetheless, I felt a kind of hesitation on Manning’s part to make any real claim, any strong stance. She introduces each essay with a short forward calling out missteps or missing perspectives which she has since acknowledged. There seemed a bit of nervousness written between the lines. Perhaps a fear of being a white woman writing across these fault lines? And yet in teetering (even dancing) between these lines, I was left with no “aha” moments, no final clarity. Instead, I was left with a web of interweaving histories, accounts, and viewpoints that I struggled to synthesize.

And yet perhaps Manning has skillfully made her point. We are constantly faced with the struggle of how on earth to capture dance history at all, given the volume of oral and written histories we have access to. What Manning eloquently reveals is that we have the power to reconstruct our perceptions, by constantly learning more, by actively seeing differently, by changing our former understandings to try to absorb as many histories as we can.

 

Characters in Motion: A Workbook of Improvisational Exercises
By Lanny Harrison, edited by Jane Zipp
Vervante

Reviewed by Wendy Perron

An unforgettable performer, Lanny Harrison embodied many colorful characters within Meredith Monk’s The House for years. As Harrison recounts in this book, “I fell in love with improvisation—minimally held within simple structures.” Her lively approach comes out of a lifetime of teaching theater and movement on tour with Monk, at Naropa University, and in New York. Although the assignments are geared more to actors than dancers, this workbook offers many clues for anyone to begin envisioning and improvising. Some of the exercises are group visualizations; others are very specific. In the series called Tiny Two-Character scenes, one score is simply “2 characters: 1 is the Earth, 1 is the Moon. They are old lovers having an argument.” Other examples are Characters with their Shadows, in which the Shadow reflects the Character’s movements in some way. The Shadow can be inserted into other formats, for instance, Difficult Landscape with Shadows. In the Circle Dance, students pick up gestures and vocalizations during the movement session. As Harrison says of this end-of-class ritual, “Everyone is a Leader and everyone is a Follower.” Also a visual artist, Harrison has adorned these pages with vibrant watercolors and whimsical stick figures. Permeating the book is a level of charm—or maybe a faith—in a sophisticated kind of make believe.

 

Resistance and Support: Contact Improvisation @50
Edited by Ann Cooper Albright
Oxford University Press

Reviewed by Wendy Perron

With a touch of nostalgia for the 47 years of the engaging journal Contact Quarterly, I welcome this volume, which came out of the 50th-anniversary celebration at Oberlin College in 2022. Edited by Ann Cooper Albright, who organized the anniversary conference and a three-day writing workshop, these 20 essays highlight the evolution of Contact Improvisation from many angles. In the introduction, Cooper Albright writes that she chose the title, a seeming binary of “Resistance and Support,” because of its potential synergy. In the CI world, physical resistance is a way of supporting your partner, and she extends that idea to the intellectual realm: “When I push back on your ideas in a responsive and not a reactive manner, it is a kind of support.”

A glance at the contributors’ list reveals how CI, spearheaded by Steve Paxton (1939–2024) has spread from its beginnings at Oberlin and Bennington Colleges to other countries including Canada, Poland, China, Brazil, Mexico, and Taiwan. As we enter a post–Paxton period of CI, this collection is an expansive guide as well as a provocation.

In the first essay, “Mindfully Rocking and Rolling,” Dena Davida recalls the beginnings of CI cradled in an era of idealistic, bold, feminist rebellion. The entire volume is a testament to that 1970s slogan “The personal is the political.” One cannot write about CI without being personal because it is about one person’s body touching another person’s body. Kristin Horrigan writes on how gender identities complicate the experience of CI, poignantly lacing her essay with her own experience. In “The Small Dance of Listening,” Lesley Greco takes off from Paxton’s idea of the small dance as a score for how gravity affects us. She extends it to communing with other bodies, describing describes various listening practices where “Thinking and sensing are each part of an integrated whole.”

Sarah Young’s essay “Underscoring Nancy Stark Smith’s Legacy: Definitions and Disruptions” honors Nancy Stark Smith (1952–2020) with an explanation—and challenge—to Smith’s invented form, the Underscore. It’s a framework for solo and group improvisation that is performed annually at 70+ sites simultaneously. As one of the facilitators, Young has stretched the score, generating a bunch of questions for herself. Ultimately this is a loving tribute, reflecting the generous openness and questioning that Smith brought to her teaching and her editing of Contact Quarterly.

Paul Singh and Emma Bigé’s dialogue, “Doing It Wrong: Contact’s Counter Countercultures,” referring to that famous 1983 moment when Ishmael Houston-Jones and Fred Holland created Oo-Ga-La to declare their resistance as Black men wearing boots. Coincidentally, Houston-Jones just gave the score for that piece to a younger generation who will perform it in January at New York Live Arts.

To see such a robust treatment of CI at this point is heartwarming. CI has lasted way longer than its antecedents: Judson Dance Theater of the early 1960s and Grand Union of the ’70s. This collection helps expand and diversify a beloved form of American dance.

§§§

 

Books Announced or Received

Moving through Life: Essential Lessons of Dance
By Naomi Goldberg Haas
With Mikhaela Mahony
University Press of Florida
After a career that included dancing with Pacific Northwest Ballet, Naomi Goldberg Haas started a unique endeavor: Dances for a Variable Population. It’s a group of older dancers and nondancers that performs for senior centers and in parks in the NYC area. Her new memoir traces her dance journey and give uplifting lessons according to Movement Speaks® a curriculum that Goldberg Haas developed for aging people. DVP also has a teacher training program.

Teaching and Learning Dance through Meaningful Gestures
Text by Annabella Lenzu, photography by Todd Carroll
A longtime teacher at NYU Gallatin, Annabella Lenzu gathers nuggets from her 35 years in the field into three sections: Teaching, Learning, and Resources. This promotional video illustrates her lively style and holistic approach. Another achievement of Lenzu is that she organized the Dance Book Fair mentioned above.

Dance and Science in the Long Nineteenth Century: The Articulate Body
Edited by Lynn Matluck Brooks, Sariel Golomb and Garth Grimball
University Press of Florida
These 20 essays consider the ways that science and dance looked at the human body during an era of colonial expansion. With contributions by Jane Desmond, Emily Coates, Claudia Jeschke, Pallabi Chakravorty, Andrea Harris, and others, the scope is global. According to the press release, this collection “sheds light on a historical interplay that has shaped many of today’s political and cultural realities.”

White Screens, Black Dance: Race and Masculinity in the United States at Midcentury
By Pamela Krayenbuhl
Oxford University Press
Pamela Krayenbuhl suggests that Africanist movement vocabularies prevalent in mid-twentieth century film and TV have produced models of masculinity that still hold sway today. These styles are described in these four chapter headings: The Nicholas Brothers: Classy and Dignified; Gene Kelly: Brash and Athletic; Elvis Presley: Virile and Phallic; and Sammy Davis, Jr. Modish and Chameleonic.

Radical Sensing and Performer Training: Elsa Gindler’s Embodied Translations
By Rebecca Loukes
Routledge
An early pioneer of somatic practice, Elsa Gindler (1885–1961) rebelled against the aggressive ways that Gymnastic was taught in Germany. She was a teacher of both Charlotte Selver and Carola Speads, both of whom influenced Elaine Summers. Loukes devotes one chapter to Summers’ development of Kinetic Awareness as well as the Sonic Meditations of Pauline Oliveros, the avant garde musician who studied with Summers. Oliveros’ idea of Deep Listening is related to Summer’s idea of sensory awareness as a way to explore and to heal.

Reissue in paperback: Making Caribbean Dance: Continuity and Creativity in Island Cultures
Edited by Susanna Sloat
Florida University Press
Originally produced in 2010, this anthology is a touchstone to scholarship about dance in this part of the world. The twenty-one essays are grouped into the following sections: Island Connections, Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, Dominica, St. Lucia, Barbados, Haiti, Carriaco, and Trinidad and Tobago. Writers include illustrious dancer/scholars like Cynthia Oliver, Celia Weiss Bambara, and Tania Issac.

Buddhist Dances: Movement & Mind
By Joseph Houseal
Edited by Mindy Aloff
Motilal Banarsidass

Longtime dance writer Joseph Houseal has explored sacred dance as expressions of Buddhist philosophy, including chapters on Antony Tudor and Merce Cunningham. From the website: “This richly illustrated volume documents rare and endangered Buddhist dance traditions in ten countries, including Japan, Bhutan, India, Nepal, China, Tibet, Mongolia, Sri Lanka, England, and the United States.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Eiko Otake & Margaret Leng Tan at Green-Wood Cemetery

A ghost, an apparition, a figure somewhere between life and death, emerges from an alcove. Holding a candle, she touches the wall, as though to ensure that the physical world is really there. This wraith looks into the eyes of some of us witnesses sitting on the pews in this small, stained-glass windowed chapel.

The image of Eiko in a quarry projected on the walls of the historic chapel at Green-Wood Cemetery. All photos by Maria Baranova

I’m watching Eiko Otake in Stone 1, a collaboration with avant-garde pianist Margaret Leng Tan at the Historic Chapel of Green-Wood Cemetery, June 28.

Because of the dimness, sounds help to define the environment. In another alcove, Tan gently plays the toy piano, blows a red bird whistle, and tips a rain stick to make the sound of wind or water. Sometimes we hear the crunch of pebbles or dirt landing on the floor. The sounds bring us closer to nature, and the music provides a path into Eiko’s memories.

Otake, Tan

Eiko and Tan

Eiko brings her history with her as she creeps or staggers around the room. We’ve already seen videos projected on the walls of this century-old chapel, sometimes with her tiny image amidst a massive quarry. This piece is all about stones—huge, medium, and small. Her quarry self, filmed last year in Sweden, seems to be in conversation with her three-dimensional self, both wearing beige raincoats.

Friends matter to Eiko. That raincoat belonged to an old friend, Sam Miller, who died in 2018. (See her Letter to Sam, where she talks about remembering the dead and how the coat came to her.) She dunks the coat in a bucket of water, lifts it up, and mightily wrings it out. Is she trying to wring life back into the coat? Stone 1 is dedicated to Alice Hadler, a recently deceased friend and colleague at Wesleyan, where Eiko is a visiting artist.

Tan and Otake

Tan and Otake

After thrashing around with the coat, Eiko climbs onto a pile of stones and lies down. I remember her saying in an interview, “I practice dying onstage.” Tan approaches and carefully places stones on Eiko’s torso. She then puts her ear to her belly. Perhaps Tan has healed her, because Otake rises, all four limbs floating upward.

Tan and Otake

Tan and Otake

The piece has a special quality of touch: hands on walls, on stones, stone on skin, hands on doors, stones on body, head to chest, hands holding earth, earth holding bodies.

Eiko slowly opens the double doors to the outside, letting the nighttime in. We feel the enveloping darkness. A firefly darts in the distance. It occurs to me that this is the only place in the city where the doors of a performance space open onto complete darkness and quiet.

Film of Eiko projected on the walls of the chapel

Eiko with bucket of water; projection of film above the double doors of the chapel

There is only one Eiko Otake. She is such a vivid presence that you never forget that this suffering, searching figure is Eiko. Yet what she is saying is universal. As she wrote in her book The Body in Fukushima, “We are breakable. All are fragile.” Although Stone 1 reminds us that death comes to all, there’s something spiritual in the idea that we share the earth with natural entities that last much longer than we do.

¶¶¶

Credits:

Music: Erik Griswold, Béla Bartók, and Bunita Marcus

Videos: George Rodriguez & Eiko Otake, Thomas Zamola for the Stone Quarry film shot at the Gylsboda Quarry in Sweden, via Milvus Artistic Research Center

Dramaturgy: Iris McCloughan

 

 

 

 

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March Madness — Dance Blooms in NYC

In the New York dance world, March came in like a lion and went out like a lion. The density of performances seems to have returned to pre-pandemic levels. Here is a quick round up of some of our local March Madness.

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago exploded onto the Joyce stage with two programs of rich repertory. In the first, Darrell Grand Moultrie’s Dichotomy of a Journey (2022) contained a gorgeous duet in which elbow-contact grew into a romantic adagio. The still in-process Nevermore, by Thang Dao, played with spooky imagery based on Edgar Allen Poe’s poem The Raven. For a rip-roaring finish, Rennie Harris’ new Dear Frankie revved up the dancers to full-blast house dancing in a tribute to Chicago’s influential DJ Frankie Knuckles. Alysia Johnson tore into this material while Cyrie Topeke nailed a jazzy solo and Aaron Choate strutted in fine flamboyant drag style.

Aaron Choate in Rennie Harris’ Dear Frankie, Ph Michelle Reid

At Danspace, Stacy Matthew Spence crafted a spare piece with live music by Charlotte Jacobs and Raf Vertessen. For I am, here; Here with us; Where we find ourselves, he brought a gently erupting, slightly jazz-inflected rhythm to his opening solo. When other dancers entered one at a time (Joanna Kotze, Tim Bendernagel, and Hsiao-jou Tang), it got more complex but avoided the usual liftings and partnerings. The connections were more subtle—just a whiff of a shared phrase or direction here and there.

Stacy Spence with Joanna Kotze, Ph Elyssa Goodman

 

The celebration of 150 years of the 92nd Street Y (newly branded 92NY), featured three companies—Graham, Limón and Ailey— that found a home at the Y in their early years. Each company paired an old chestnut with a new or in-progress work. The new work for the Limón company was Like Those Playground Kids at Midnight by Omar Román de Jesús, who also performed it with Ian Spring. Borrowing from contact improvisation, this duo created dramatic huggings and hurtlings, taking startling risks. Representing the Graham company’s forward look was an excerpt of We the People by Jamar Roberts, showing the dancers’ unadorned, ready strength—to songs of Rhiannon Giddens.
A highlight of the evening for me was watching the sublime Bahiyah Sayyed as a guest in Manifesting Legacy, which Hope Boykin made for Ailey II. Oh, the wisdom and sensuality of that dancing body!
And for a condensed education on modern dance, the accompanying exhibit, Dance to Belong: A History of Dance at 92NY, is on view in the Y’s Weill Art Gallery through October.

Bahiyah Sayyed, right, with Ailey II in Boykin’s Manifesting Legacy, Ph Richard Termine

Another anniversary—30 years of Buglisi Dance Theatre—brought Jacqulyn Buglisi’s lustrous Frida (1998) to the Chelsea Factory. Three former Graham stars—Terese Capucilli, Christine Daykin, and PeiJu Chien-Pott—reveled in the tortured soul of Frida Kahlo. Also on the program were the lively Caravaggio Meets Hopper (2007) and the earthy premiere, A Walk Through Fire.

Frida with Christine Dakin, PeiJu Chien-Pott, and Terese Capucilli, Ph Kristin Lodoen

Illinoise had fans of singer/songwriter Sufjan Stevens cheering at the Park Avenue Armory. Justin Peck’s direction and choreography gave it kinetic momentum. The young dancers, huddled around a campfire or dancing out their yearnings, had energy to burn. But the show took its time settling on a plot. I hope this problem gets solved by the time the production reaches Broadway on April 24.

Illinoise, Ph Liz Lauren

Shen Wei’s Dongpo: Life in Poems filled the Koch Theater with a visual splendor that was a both ancient and modern. Drawing on his background in Chinese opera and contemporary dance, choreographer/painter/poet Shen Wei created sumptuous, beguiling, dreamlike visions. More about it here.

Shen Wei’s Dongpo: Life of Poems

The musical Water for Elephants, with choreography by Jesse Robb & Shana Carroll, combined circus, aerial dance, and Broadway dance in captivating ways. Imagine the soul of an injured horse expressed in aerial silks! With this team of vivid characters occupying the Imperial Theatre, you could see why someone might want to run away with the circus.

Water for Elephants with Isabelle McCalla and Grant Gustin, Ph Matthew Murphy

Glacial Decoy (1979), the first work Trisha Brown choreographed for the proscenium stage, was quietly radiant at the Joyce. The contrast between Rauschenberg’s workaday photos (a lightbulb, a truck, a cow’s head) and the ethereal nightgowns billowing around the spring-y, lilting movement created a mesmerizing effect. If you missed it, find an excerpt on the Trisha Brown Company’s new Vimeo page. Also on the program were Working Title (1985, a stripped down version of Lateral Pass), and Noé Soulier’s premiere, In the Fall, an absorbing study in off-balance.

Glacial Decoy with Jennifer Payán and Cecily Campbell, Ph Maria Baranova

Existentialism, directed by Anne Bogart in collaboration with the wondrous actors Paul Zimet and Ellen Maddow, came to La MaMa. They showed how the sparest of movements can indicate affection, indifference, everyday drudgery, or a spark of curiosity. And when Zimet and Maddow, who are married in real life, find a moment to dance together, one cannot help but smile.

Ellen Maddow and Paul Zimet in Existentialism

Another show about an elderly couple—and their past— is the musical The Notebook. Noah and Allie’s long romance culminates in the poignant situation of her succumbing to dementia. The movement of Maryann Plunkett, who plays Older Allie, reveals her loss of control as much as the script. The halting, destabilized zig-zagging is painful to watch yet thrilling because Plunkett embodies Allie’s psychological plight so fully.

Marianne Plunket and Dorian Harewood in The Notebook, Ph Julieta Cervantes

For its Spring Dances program, Juilliard challenged its students with works by Kyle Abraham, Bobbie Jene Smith & Or Schreiber, and Shen Wei. Abraham’s Studies on a Farewell interlaced different ways of touching and caring with nicely open ballet lines. In Smith and Schreiber’s Fugue in Crimson, shape-shifting characters goaded each other with stylized aggression by way of brilliant choreographic imagination. Shen Wei’s Map (2005) traced the evolution of movements that paralleled the rhythmic changes of Steve Reich’s Desert Music—played live by the Juilliard orchestra—to a powerful cumulative effect.

Fugue in Crimson, with Polina Mankova & Reginald Turner, Ph Rachel Papo

Shen Wei’s Map, from left: Julie Ciesielska, John Chapell, and Kayla Mak, Ph Rachel Papo

At the Chocolate Factory, Ursula Eagly re-jiggered the space to transform it for Dream Body Body Building. With audience on one side of the wide space and performers on the opposite side. After a period of stillness on both sides, the performers picked up their chairs and infiltrated the audience. They started telling us their dreams—a few inches from our faces. An unexpected intimacy.

Ursula Eagly, with Madeline Best and Takemi Kitamura in her Dream Body Body Building, Ph Brian Rogers

Although the monumental Border Crossings exhibit at the NY Library for the Performing Arts closed in mid-March, the catalog, with many essays (including mine on Syvilla Fort/Merce Cunningham/John Cage at the Cornish School in the 1930s), is now available at here.

An ominous ambience descended on the Baryshnikov Art Center for 4/2/3, choreographed by the amazing duo Baye & Asa. A program note said they “grapple with our collective search for blame.” Inspired by the riddle, “What has 4 legs in the morning, 2 legs in the afternoon, and 3 legs in the evening,” it’s divided into three acts. First, three children (mostly innocent with a few aggressive shoves here and there); second, five adult dancers (mostly sinister, with occasional moments of caring here and there); and third, a solo for an older woman. In this last, Janet Charleston glowed with wisdom and vigor and…a certain aura. She was a sorceress.

Janet Charleston in 4/2/3, Ph Maria Baranova

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Steve Paxton (1939–2024): A Lifetime of Burning Questions

Ph Monika Rittershaus

A mesmerizing dancer and an intellectual force in the field, Steve Paxton asked the most basic questions—about movement, performance, and hierarchies of all kinds. His curiosity led him to become a leading figure in three historic collaborative entities: Judson Dance Theater, Grand Union, and Contact Improvisation. For almost six decades, Paxton performed and taught around the world, earning the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennial in 2014. Since his death at Mad Brook Farm in Vermont on February 20, at the age of 85, expressions of intense gratitude have appeared across social media.

 

Paxton grew up in Tucson, Arizona, where he excelled in gymnastics. He also took Graham-based dance classes in community centers. To hear it from his childhood friend, the critic and educator Sally Sommer, “We partied all the time because we hung out at a friend’s ranch house, played records, and danced. We also danced at night on the tarmac of empty roads—turned on the headlights and cranked up the radio.” In school his two favorite subjects were English (hence, the eloquence of his writings) and microbiology (the curiosity of body mechanics). He attended the nearby University of Arizona, where his father was a campus policeman. He didn’t like the teachers, so he withdrew from college life.

He did like dancing. He accepted a scholarship to the American Dance Festival at Connecticut College the summer of 1958. Although the José Limón Company had provided the financial aid, it was his encounter with Merce Cunningham’s work that intrigued him. He recalled how the Cunningham company, during its first residency at this stronghold of established modern dance, caused “consternation” with his chance procedures.

Aeon, by Merce Cunningham,1961, From left: Steve Paxton, Carolyn Brown, Judith Dunn, Marilyn Wood, Viola Farber, and Shareen Blair (on floor). Studio photo Rauschenberg.

That fall, Paxton came to New York, where he continued studying with Limón. He soon added Cunningham classes, where, as a scholarship student, he helped clean the studio. Limón’s company was in residence at Juilliard, and when the school needed more men for the restaging of Doris Humphrey’s Passacaglia, Paxton was asked to step in. (Aside: Pina Bausch, who was a student at Juilliard that year, danced the lead female role.) He later said, “I regarded myself as a barbarian entering the hallowed halls of culture when I came to New York.”

When Robert Dunn offered a workshop in dance composition at the Cunningham studio in 1960, Paxton, along with Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti, was one of the first five to sign up. A protégé of John Cage, Dunn taught in a Zen manner, providing the space for experimentation without judgment. As Paxton has said, “The premise of the Bob Dunn class was to provoke untried forms, or forms that were new to us.”

Flat (1964) reprised in 1982 for Bennington College Judson Project, ph Tom Brazil

Stylistically, Dunn stressed the value of the ordinary rather than laboring to make a dance study “interesting.” From that evolved many of Paxton’s walking dances. Why walking? Of course it fits Dunn’s request for the “ordinary.” But also, as Paxton explained in this interview, at Walker Art Center, “How we walk is one of our primary movement patterns and a lot of dance relates to this pattern.”

Fellow student Simone Forti, who had studied with Anna Halprin, produced a historic evening of “dance constructions” at Yoko Ono’s loft on Chambers Street in 1961. Paxton performed in her works Huddle, Slant Board, and Herding. Forti had no interest in technique, preferring to meld the movement function to objects. As Paxton told me in a 2015 email, he found the effort to divest from his technical training “self-shaking, paradoxical, and enlarging.”

Also in 1961, Paxton joined the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Though bewildered at first, he loved the company and responded to the beauty and humor in the work. He felt drawn toward the Buddhist bent of John Cage and “felt at home” when listening to Cunningham, Cage, and visual collaborators Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

When the students in Dunn’s class wanted to show their work, they auditioned for the 92nd Street YMHA, the bastion of modern dance. Paxton, along with Rainer and Gordon, were rejected. (Aside: Lucinda Childs, however, was accepted and did perform at the Y in 1963.) So they went to Judson Memorial Church, which already housed the Judson Poets Theater and Art Gallery. Dunn’s students—who by then included Trisha Brown, Rudy Perez, Deborah Hay, Elaine Summers, and many more— collectively produced a series of sixteen numbered concerts, not all of them at the Church, from 1962 to 1964.

Trisha Brown’s Lightfall at Judson Church, Ph Al Giese

One of the early works at Judson was Trisha Brown’s Lightfall, in which Trisha and Steve perched on each others’ back until the standing person moved and the perching person slithered off. Robert Rauschenberg, who had started coming to Dunn’s classes, said, ”In Lightfall the two were just bouncing all over and under each other. The choreography seemed to be based on how much risk they could take.”

For an assignment to make a one-minute dance, Steve sat on a bench and ate a sandwich.

Paxton’s burning question at the time was Why not? About Judson Dance Theater, he said, “The work that I did there was first of all to flush out my ‘why-nots’…‘Why not?’ was a catchword at that time. It was a very permissive time.”

Yvonne Rainer wrote about his work at Judson in her memoir, Feelings Are Facts:

Steve’s was the most severe and rigorous of all the work that appeared in and around Judson during the 1960s…Eschewing music, spectacle, and his own innate kinetic gifts and acquired virtuosity, he embraced extended duration and so-called pedestrian movement while maintaining a seemingly obdurate disregard for audience expectation.”

One of the landmark pieces that came out of that aesthetic, which celebrated the untrained human body, was Paxton’s Satisfyin Lover (1968). In it, a large group of dancers simply walked, stood still, or sat on a chair. Jill Johnston wrote this now famous passage in the Village Voice:

And here they all were . . . thirty-two any old wonderful people in Satisfying Lover walking one after the other across the gymnasium in their any old clothes. The fat, the skinny, the medium, the slouched and slumped, the straight and tall, the bowlegged and knock-kneed, the awkward, the elegant, the coarse, the delicate, the pregnant, the virginal, the you name it, by implication every postural possibility in the postural spectrum, that’s you and me in all our ordinary everyday who cares postural splendor. . . .  Let us now praise famous ordinary people.

Paxton & Rauschenberg in their in Jag Vil Gärna Telefonera (1964)

Robert Rauschenberg, Cunningham’s lighting designer and frequent visual collaborator, visited Dunn’s class and started making his own performances. Paxton was often involved in Rauschenberg’s pieces, and the two were a pair at the time. In the fall of 1964, they collaborated on one duet, Jag vill gärna telefonera  (I Would Like to Make a Phone Call). This duet, based on photos of athletes, was reprised by the Bennington College Judson Project in 1982, and by the Stephen Petronio Company in 2018.

Judson Dance Theater marks a historical moment when (portions of) modern dance morphed into postmodern. At the time, Paxton thought of Judson as a place where you could just do stuff and not worry about big entertainment in big theaters. Rather than thinking they were doing something revolutionary, as Rainer felt, Paxton located himself in the lineage of modern dance tradition. In a recent Pillow Voices podcast about Grand Union, he says that modern dance—Graham, Limon, Cunningham, Humphrey, Dunham—gave permission to create new forms “from the ground up.”

Linoleum, a performance piece by Rauschenberg, with Paxton prone, 1966, ph Steve Schapiro

For an engagement at the L. A. County Museum in 1966, Trisha Brown convinced Paxton to improvise with her. He was amazed that her loose structure elicited an immediate response from the audience; he realized the “personal element reaching through the form” was the key to the audience response—and he got hooked on improvisation.

How can objects be transformative? In his surreal solo Bound (1982), Paxton wore a strange object around his neck that turned out to be a travel pillow. In some kind of endurance test, he walked slowly into a bright light, his eyes watering. For years he was fascinated by inflatable plastic sheets. In Music for Word Words (1963) at Judson Church, with the help of Rainer operating an industrial vacuum cleaner, he inflated a room-sized plastic bubble around himself, then deflated it and walked away. After several other experiments, his obsession reached its endpoint with Physical Things, the piece he made for “9 Evenings of Theatre and Engineering.” For that 1966 series in the massive 69th Regiment Armory, he created a huge inflatable tower that audience people walked through, realizing only later how toxic the plastic was.

Paxton in his Music for Word Word, 1963, Judson Church, ph Robert McElroy

Paxton’s Physical Things, 9 Evenings of Theatre & Engineering, 69th Regiment Armory, 1966, ph Peter Moore

Another question was about censorship: What, really, is obscenity? For a performance at NYU in 1970, he proposed a version of Satisfyin Lover in which 42 red-headed people would be nude. The university administration nixed it on the grounds of obscenity, so he replaced it with Intravenous Lecture, in which a medical assistant injects him while he keeps talking. This piece was reprised by Stephen Petronio in 2012 with instructions from Paxton to “make it his own.”

Stephen Petronio in Paxton’s Intravenous Lecture 1970), 2012, ph Julie Lemberger

In 1971, Paxton worked with Vietnam Veterans Against the War, who had made a documentary with testimonies of the atrocities that American soldiers committed against Vietnamese civilians. In Collaboration with Winter Soldier, he had two performers watching this anti-war documentary while hanging upside down.

In 1972, he proposed Beautiful Lecture, which juxtaposed a porn film with a film of the Bolshoi’s Swan Lake (the famous Ulanova version), to the New School for Social Research. Pressured by the authorities to omit the porn film, he replaced it with a documentary about people starving in Biafra.

 

Paxton’s dancing—with his loose limbs, swerving spine, and charismatic aura—was magnificent to behold. In Terpsichore in Sneakers, Banes described him as projecting “a continuing sense of the body’s potential to invent and discover, to recover equilibrium after losing control, to regain vigor despite pain and disorder.”

Steve Paxton while in with Grand Union, Walker Art Center Auditorium, 1975, ph Boyd Hagen

At the end of the Sixties, Paxton was working with Rainer on her piece Continuous Project—Altered Daily, which changed with every performance. Rainer had given the dancers—Paxton, David Gordon, Douglas Dunn, Barbara Dilley and Becky Arnold—so much freedom that the choreography eventually blew open, obliterating previous plans. After a period of uncertainty, the group then morphed into the Grand Union, an improvisation collective with no leader. It was then augmented by Trisha Brown, Nancy Lewis and Lincoln Scott. Some of Paxton’s questions at that time were “how to make artistic decisions, how not to depend on anyone unless it is mutually agreed; what mutuality agreed means, and how to detect it.”

Paxton witj, from left: David Gordon, Yvonne Rainer, Becky Arnold, Carol Dilley, ph James Klosty

In the June 2004 issue of Dance Magazine, Paxton said, “Grand Union was a luxurious improvisational laboratory. All of us were very formally oriented, even though we were doing formless work.”  He called the group anarchistic, which meant to him that they could do its work without a leader. He had witnessed a “dictatorial” situation and a fixed hierarchy in dance companies. For him, Grand Union “bypasses the grand game of choreography and company [where] ego-play is the issue.”

Grand Union residency at Walker Art Center, 1975. Steve jumping over David Gordon. At left: Douglas Dunn, Trisha Brown (almost hidden), Nancy Lewis and Barbara Dilley (head hidden), Tnx WAC Archives

Grand Union at Walker Art Center, 1975. From left: Barbara Dilley, David Gordon, Nancy Lewis, Douglas Dunn, Steve Paxton. Tnx to WAC Archives

When Grand Union was engaged for a residency at Oberlin College in 1972, Steve taught a daily class at dawn that included “the small dance.” Nancy Stark Smith, a student, took the class and loved it: “It was basically standing still and releasing tension and turning your attention to notice the small reflexive activity that the body makes to keep itself balanced and not fall over. So you’re standing and relaxing and noticing what your body’s doing. You’re not doing it but you’re noticing what it’s doing.” This concept of noticing interior movement became foundational for Contact Improvisation.

Barbara Dilley & Steve, Grand Union, Lo Guidice Gallery, 1972, ph Gordon Mumma

Trisha Brown supporting Steve, Grand Union, 1972, ph Gordon Mumma

 

He also taught an afternoon class in tumbling just for men. The question was: How can tumbling be taught in a non-aggressive way, with soft landings? The class produced a group piece called Magnesium that was, as Paxton said, a “prototype for Contact Improvisation.” After the performance, as he recounted, “Nancy told me that if it was ever performed again, she would like to be in it. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that such a rough-and-tumble dance would be of interest to a woman.”

Although Paxton is called the “inventor” of CI, he has pointed to the mutuality of the form. It’s “governed by the participants rather than by a leader, similar to the structure of Grand Union.”

Paxton & Nancy Stark Smith in a CI performance, ph Stephen Petegorsky. Behind them are Lisa Nelson, Daniel Lepkoff, and Christie Svane. Thorne’s Market, MA, 1980.

Contact Improvisation caught on for thousands of people who wanted to move—and move with other people—but who did not want to train to be concert dancers. Paxton and Smith co-founded Contact Quarterly, which presented an alternate vision of dance with its own strong aesthetic.

Lisa Nelson and Steve Paxton in their collaboration, PA RT, 1978, Ph Tom Brazil

He participated in Contact Improvisation, often with Nancy Stark Smith, for ten years. Then he started developing his solo works, including his improvisations to Bach’s Goldberg Variations from 1986 to early 90s. He then developed “Material for the spine,” which he described as “what the spine is doing in that tumbling sphere with another person—a kind of yogic form, a technique that focuses on the pelvis, the spine, the shoulder blades, the rotation of the head.” He has collaborated with Lisa Nelson, fellow improviser extraordinaire and his life partner, on two entrancingly improvised duets: PA RT (1978), and Night Stand (2004). Paxton has given workshops all over the U.S. and Europe, returning to some venues again and again, especially England, Netherlands, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Portugal.

Night Stand, ph Paula Court

When Paxton was honored by the Danspace Project in 2014, his Judson co-conspirator, Yvonne Rainer, gave a tribute. Here is an excerpt:

I won’t go into all the beautifully perverse and clarifying dances that Steve has created… over the years, like his performance of Flat from 1964, which I’ve heard drove members of a 2002 Parisian audience out of the theater as Steve took his own sweet time transforming himself into a clothes rack…and Proxy of 1961, which began with his promenading of Jennifer Tipton en passé on ball bearings in a washtub; and Steve’s glorious improvisations to Glenn Gould. Always we are riveted by his imposing presence and a solemnity that can morph unexpectedly into a wry comedic effect.

Paxton & Brown, Bennington College Judson Project, 1980, ph Tyler Resch

Trisha and Steve, ph Joanne Savio, Courtesy TBDC

In 1992, his burning question was What does an idea feel like? He brought this question to a panel at Movement Research at Judson Church. His Judson-era peers —Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, and Carolee Schneemann— seemed stumped by this question. No one answered him straight on, so he asked again: “Does an idea have a feeling for you? If you use a stove as a score, where’s the idea?”

 

The Beast ph Julieta Cervantes

His solo The Beast (2010), in which he seemed possessed, elicited intense reactions. When he performed it at Baryshnikov Art Center, dancer/writer Lisa Kraus wrote that he “presents his own body as a locus for inquiry… His investigation has become increasingly detailed, exquisite…he is pure facet, pure torque, pure stacked bones and stretched sinew.” Amy Taubin described it in ArtForum: “If a crustacean could trace its consciousness in its carapace, it might move as Paxton did in this darkly beautiful piece, an intimate examination of the living skeleton and an evocation of what remains in the grave.” One reviewer, however, claimed that the dance was “about” old age. In this interview at Dia:Beacon, Paxton rails against the word “about,” saying “it should be stricken from the vocabulary.”

While Paxton wasn’t a warm and cuddly teacher, he was thrillingly articulate. He never faked enthusiasm. He was trusted completely by his  colleagues from the Sixties—Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, and Cunningham dancer Carolyn Brown—in a way that I would call pure love.

Well after he had drifted away from CI, he extolled the efforts of Karen Nelson and others who brought CI to people with impairments. With democracy always in mind, he said, “that’s probably my favorite innovation in Contact Improvisation.”

Tea for Three at Danspace, 2017, From left: Rainer, Forti, Paxton, ph Ian Douglas

Reflecting on his role in the flow of dance history, Paxton said, while interviewed by Philip Bither at Walker Art Center, that he was both a “mutant” and an “evolver” (his terms), meaning he was both a maverick for change and a stabilizing force.

Paxton always opted for the organic, close-to-nature option. Toward the end of his life, he spent much time in his garden in Vermont. In a talk at the Judson Dance Theater exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in 2018, when asked about his life at that time, he said, “Every atom in the landscape in front of me that I look at every day is changing…I feel like it’s a living soup and I’m…kind of dissolving into its space.” He has now completed his dissolution.

 

Sources

Books and journals:

• Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance
By Sally Banes
Wesleyan University Press, 1977, 1987

• The Grand Union: Accidental Anarchists of Downtown Dance, 1970–1976
By Wendy Perron
Wesleyan University Press, 2020

• Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture
By Cynthia Novack
University of Wisconsin Press, 1990

• Taken by Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader
Editors: Ann Cooper Albright & David Gere
Contact Editions

• Caught Falling: The Confluence of Contact Improvisation, Nancy Stark Smith, and Other Moving Ideas
by David Koteen and Nancy Stark Smith
with a Backwords by Steve Paxton
Contact Editions, CE Books in Print

“Trance Script,” Contact Quarterly, Winter 1989 Vol. 14 No. 1, Judson Project Interview with Steve Paxton, Sept. 12, 1980.

• Avalanche, 11, 1975

• Democracy’s Body 
by Sally Banes
Duke University Press, 1993

• Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue, exh. catalog, 2002

Online resources

Contact Quarterly — for many videos and articles

Steve Paxton Talking Dance, Walker Art Center, 2014.  Paxton gives a full account of his professional life with video clips spliced in, and allows questions to lead him into deep discussion.

Steve Paxton and the Walker: A 50-Year History

Steve Paxton and Simone Forti in Conversation, REDCAT, 2016, A charming performance/encounter between two old friends who are also dance icons.

Paxton Interview with Dia:Beacon, 2014

“How Grand Union Found a Home Outside SoHo at the Walker”

 

 

 

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Duets in Greyscale

I’m kicking off a new collection of duets in greyscale. For most of these images, I haven’t seen the dance they represent, I’ve just fallen in love with the photo—its composition, its tone, its hint of a relationship. Some of these will look familiar to you, others are more obscure. If you want to know more about a particular photo—or have something to add—please leave a comment below.

Katherine Dunham and Roger Ohardieno
in Dunham’s Barrelhouse, 1938

Viola Farber and Merce Cunningham in his Crises, 1963, Ph John Wulp

Baryshnikov and Makarova rehearsing Other Dances by Jerome Robbins, 1976, Ph Martha Swope, Billy Rose Theatre Collection

Bill Robinson and Jeni LeGon, publicity shot for Hooray for Love, 1935

Marcia Lerner and Art Bauman in Burlesque Black and White by Bauman, c.1968, Dance Theater Workshop

Louis Falco & Sarah Stackhouse in Exiles by Limón, ph Jack Mitchell, Dance Magazine cover, Aug. 1966

Tanaquil LeClercq, and Balanchine, Metamorphoses by Balanchine, 1952, Kino Lorber

Lisa Nelson and Steve Paxton in their collaboration, PA RT, 1978, Ph Tom Brazil

 

Arthur Mitchell and Diana Adams, Agon by Balanchine, 1957, Ph Martha Swope, Billy Rose Theatre Collection

 

Robert Morris and Yvonne Rainer in Rainer’s A Part of a Sextet, 1964 , Ph Peter Moore

Martha Graham & Merce Cnningham in Graham’s Deaths & Entrances, 1943, Ph Barbara Morgan

 

Ande Peck & Wendy Perron in Jack Moore’s Rocks, c. 1971, Ph Eric Reiner

 

 

 

 

Alvin Ailey & Judith Jamison, 1975, Ph Jack Mitchell

 

 

Rose Marie Wright and Sara Rudner in Raggedy Dances by Twyla Tharp, 1971, Ph William Pierce

 

Rudy Perez and Elaine Summers in his Take Your Alligator With You, 1963, Judson Memorial Church, Ph Al Giese

Betty Jones & José Limón in The Apostate by Limón, 1959, Ph Matt Wysocki

 

Carmen de Lavallade and Geoffrey Holder, c. 1958, Ph Peter Basch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Jeni LeGon (1916–2012)

With swinging arms and flashy legwork, Jeni LeGon could tap her way onto any stage or screen. Her lively eyes and enchanting smile put audiences in a good mood. Less polished than her white counterparts like Ann Miller and Eleanor Powell, she was more inviting, more joyful. There was a freedom to the way her limbs expanded a bit too much, her energy spilling over. When she rose up in a toe stand, it was as though sheer effervescence pulled her up.

Publicity shot, Smithsonian Papers

The first Black woman to sign a long-term contract with a major Hollywood studio, LeGon was caught between Hollywood’s ambivalent attempt at inclusion and the racism that was everywhere. If MGM had followed through on that contract, there would be a cluster of good movie musicals starring Jeni LeGon. But the opportunities she had to shine were mostly limited to low-budget Black musicals. Luckily, we can treasure glimpses of them on YouTube.

Jeni LeGon (née Jennie Ligon) grew up in a large, musical family on Chicago’s South Side. As a child, she took a few dance lessons at the Mary Bruce’s School of Dancing, but mostly she learned to tap in neighborhood theaters. In those days there was a stage show and a movie, and both would repeat. Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway would tour to one of the Chicago theaters with their bands and their dancers. Twice a week Jeni would use her lunch money to spend a day there. She’d watch the stage show, then, when the movie played, she’d go upstairs to the lobby to try out the steps. For the last stage show of the day, “I’d go back down and watch ’em again to see if I had remembered the steps well enough to get ’em in my head.” (qtd. in Greschuk) She would dash home to make it by 6:00. She never told her mother until years later that she had skipped school. In a sense, those stage shows were her schooling.

On weekends she organized “show gangs” with what she called “tramp bands” that might include a kazoo, a bass made of a string attached to a washtub, singers, dancers, and drummers (even if it was just tin pans or cardboard boxes). They performed to “patrons” who sat on the stoops:

We charged a nickel and a dime, people would sit on the steps and we would be on the sidewalks. We had kids who could do acrobatics or could sing. I was the boss. I’m a Leo, I was the head honcho. (qtd. in Abbott)

Her brother was an exhibition ballroom dancer and together they would enter competitions and sweep up. When she was only 13 or 14, she auditioned for the chorus line of Count Basie’s new band. She was the youngest and least developed, so when the new chorus girls tried on the sexy two-piece outfits, she didn’t fill it out.

“The bra hung down… and I felt so silly,” she recalled decades later. “The director had a fit: “What am I going to do with you?” I said, “I don’t wear those things. I always wear pants.’ ” When he found out she could sing, he said, “Then you don’t have to dance with the line, you can dance out front.” (qtd. in Greschuk) She had to quickly back up her claim by assembling a snazzy suit outfit with contributions from family members.

At 15, she joined the Whitman Sisters. Considered the royalty of Black vaudeville, the four Whitman Sisters were the only touring group produced and managed by Black women. The four sisters were known for cultivating the talents of many Black entertainers, including Count Basie and tap dancer Leonard Reed. They toured their variety show with a jazz band, comedians, acrobats, and a chorus line. As LeGon recalled,

The Whitman sisters had fixed the line so we had all the colors that our race is known for. All the pretty shading — from the darkest, darkest to the palest of pale. Each one of us was a distinct-looking kid. It was a rainbow of beautiful girls.” (qtd. in Frank, 122)

They toured the South, which was a daunting prospect for Black groups. For the first time in her life, LeGon saw signs requiring segregation in public spaces. But the Whitman group, numbering twenty or thirty performers, was well prepared: Mabel, the eldest sister and the one in charge of bookings, had arranged for hotels and rooming houses that served Blacks in every city. Alice, the youngest, was known as the top female tapper of the day, and Jeni would watch her hungrily from the wings. (Abbott) Alberta, calling herself Bert, would perform in pants, which must’ve confirmed for Jeni that it wasn’t too crazy a thing to do¹. Stepping out of the chorus line, LeGon was part of the Three Snakehips Queens (Malone 62), who performed a version of the dance popularized by Earl “Snakehips” Tucker: swiveling the pelvis, undulating the spine, and shimmying feverishly.

Robison and LeGon, RKA-Radio Detroit publicity ph Robert W. Coburn

After a season with the Whitman Sisters, LeGon formed a duo with her foster sister, Willa Mae Lane, for which she wore the pants and Willa Mae wore a skirt. They were performing in Detroit with other talented youth when they were approached by a man who claimed he would get them work at the Culver City Cotton Club. So sixteen of them took a bus out to Hollywood … but the gig never materialized.

Somehow they got connected to Earl Dancer, who had been Ethel Waters’ manager. According to LeGon, Dancer “used to supply Black talent for all the studios.” (Crowe) He organized a performance for casting directors at the Wilshire Ebell Theater. In the audience was RKO, which had just signed Bill Robinson and Fats Waller to appear in Hooray for Love. They liked LeGon so much that they added her to the cast. (This was 1935, the year that RKO released two films with Robinson and Shirley Temple dancing together.) LeGon was the first Black woman to dance with Robinson on screen.

On the RKO lot all the dancers rehearsed in the same building—and that included Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. LeGon and Robinson had a congenial relationship with the famous pair. According to LeGon, “We’d stop by one another’s rehearsal and do a little bit of exchanging of steps and yakkity yakkin’ and stuff like that. It was fantastic.” (qtd. in Frank 123) But she was never invited to any of the white performers’ homes except for Al Jolson and Ruby Keeler, and that was probably because Jolson and Earl Dancer were good friends.

Robinson & LeGon

In Hooray for Love, her song-and-dance number with Robinson, “Living in a Great Big Way” is part of a set play within a play. Jeni’s character is a forlorn young woman who’s just been evicted from her home. Wearing a white turtleneck and dark trousers, she looks like a gamin, a tomboy. Robinson struts on, twirling his cane; he is the flamboyant “mayor.” (Robinson’s real-life nickname was “Mayor of Harlem” so he was basically playing himself.) He snaps his fingers to snap her out of the doldrums. She gamely clicks and taps along, with what Constance Valis Hill calls “her added bounce and genuine sweetness.” (Hill 124) Her casual, un-Hollywood look only adds to her charm. Her movement quality—loose torso, flowing arms, head bobbing—contrasts with Robinson’s centeredness. Fats Waller, as one of the moving men, starts jiving along with them, then impulsively plays the piano that’s been put out on the street. With the help of Robinson’s upbeat rhythm and Waller’s jazzy piano, her character transforms from melancholy to cheerful.

LeGon loved dancing with Robinson, who was the supreme tap legend, then and now. “I was floored. Just to think that me, a little skinny-legged kid coming out of Chicago…to be able to work with him was the highlight of my life.” She appreciated his rigorous approach. “Bill was a task master. When he was showing something you paid attention and you got it. He wouldn’t do it twenty times. He’d do the step two or three times and you’d better get it.” (qtd. in Greschuk) An added bonus: He taught her to like ice cream. (Crowe)

The audience response to her at the opening preview was ecstatic:

After Hooray for Love was shown, we went out in the lobby, and the people just descended on me like it was no tomorrow! — asking for my autograph and congratulating me, and all that sort of business. As I’ve said before, at that time, we lived in this black-and-white world, definitely. But here were all these people of the opposite race hugging and kissing me, and man, I thought they had lost their minds!…It was just glorious that all those people would stop me and talk to me that way. (Frank 124)

Did she think they had “lost their minds” because they weren’t behaving the way white people normally behave toward Black people? Scholar Nadine George-Graves interprets those three words as meaning “The minds they lost were their rationalizations for their typical treatment of African Americans.” (George-Graves 535) For that moment of appreciation, they suspended their usual sense of superiority.

Mid-1930s

Jeni was so successful in Hooray for Love that Earl Dancer was able to convince the head of MGM to put her under contract. MGM immediately cast the young tapper in a supporting role in the upcoming movie Broadway Melody of 1936, starring Eleanor Powell. At a dinner to promote the show (some called it a charity banquet), LeGon was to perform a number from the film as an opening act for Powell. But her dancing was so beguiling that she received two encores. (Spaner) “They kept applauding and I’m bowing, bowing, bowing.” (qtd. in Crowe) It was just a little too much love shown for the opening act and not enough for Powell. The next day, Arthur Freed from MGM told Jeni’s manager, Earl Dancer, that they could not have two female soloists, so they dropped LeGon. This was rather abrupt considering MGM had circulated this announcement: “JENI LEGON: MILLION DOLLAR PERSONALITY GIRL SIGNED.” (displayed in Greschuk) She was to receive a hefty weekly salary of $1,250 that could be raised each year for five years to a maximum of $4,500. MGM must’ve seen a gold mine in her—at first.

She never did play a lead in an MGM movie.

 

Triumph in London

After negotiating with Earl Dancer, MGM arranged for the young tapper to star in the London cast of C. B. Cochran’s At Home Abroad, a revue whose New York cast had been led by Ethel Waters and Eleanor Powell. On the way to London the title changed to Follow the Sun; LeGon sang Waters’ songs and danced Powell’s routines. She was a hit. A reviewer for Empire News raved:

Jeni LeGon is one of the brightest spirits that ever stepped on the stage. It seems that little Jeni LeGon is overshadowing all other entertainers…Jeni LeGon, the sepia Cinderella girl who set London agog with her clever dancing and cute antics. (qtd. in Frank 126)

Dishonour Bright 1936

She loved London and its lack of American racism:

It was an entirely different kind of life. We went from black and white to just people. It was the first time I had been addressed by Miss LeGon. I didn’t have to worry about going to places and being told I couldn’t come in. (qtd. in Greschuk)

During her two-year stay in London she was very social. Guests at her birthday party included the Nicholas Brothers and singer/actor/activist Paul Robeson, who was friends with Josephine Baker. Though LeGon had never seen Baker dance, she emulated her from what she knew about her—being the end girl in the chorus line, taking comedic risks. (Her scene in Ali Baba Goes to Town with its over-the-top faux savagery, could have come right out of a Baker number. More about that later.) Through Paul Robeson and Earl Dancer, LeGon was introduced to Baker. “I finally met her—over the phone. Oh, I just carried on like a fool!” (qtd in Frank 125)

While in London she made the film Dishonor Bright (1936), a romantic comedy in which she played a cabaret dancer. She wanted to stay in London, where she was treated so well, but returned to the States in 1937 because of the first stirrings of war.

 

The Hoofers’ Club

Publicity shot for Hooray for Love

Almost as soon as she landed in New York, she was recruited to the Hoofers’ Club in Harlem, “the epicenter of twentieth-century tap” according to tap aficionado Brian Seibert. (Seibert 21) This was a small room with a piano in the same building as gambling and a pool hall. LeGon recalls that it was probably John Bubbles who brought her, and she was one of the very few women invited—possibly the only one. Bubbles, Robinson, Eddie Rector and other top tappers were regulars. It was a place for jamming, but it was rigorous: If the others didn’t like what you did, you would not be invited back. Or you would go away and work on your steps until you could master them, and along the way you developed your own style. The credo, according to Hill, was “Survive or die.” (Hill 87). LeGon valued both craftsmanship and “selling” it. “I absorbed it. Every time I’d see something that I liked, I would take it and tear it to pieces and make it my own.” (Qtd in Frank 127) The Hoofers Club, which lasted into the 40s, was portrayed in the movie The Cotton Club as a smoke-filled room where the denizens casually showed off their virtuosity.

 

More Screen and Stage

LeGon returned to Hollywood to make more films. In the all-black cast of Double Deal (1939), she is Nita, a cabaret dancer who is desired by both the gangster and the honest guy, played by popular Black actor Monte Hawley. Dancing her own choreography in “Getting it Right With You,” she does some Charleston-derived tapping, a bit of truckin’ and a hint of a rumba. Her flyaway arms and softly kicking legs signal a glorious comfort with her own body. When she throws her head back in joy you’re convinced she’s having the time of her life. (No wonder she brought the house down as a warmup act for the more severe Eleanor Powell!) This was a cherished role. Not only was she the romantic lead, but she got to dance her own steps — “Being myself when I danced as me.” (qtd. in Greschuk)

Dying in Cab Calloway’s arms in Hi De Ho

Double Deal was the first of four all-Black movies where she played a heroine. The next one was Crooked Money, later called While Thousands Cheer (1940). She plays Myra, who helps her boyfriend, the star of the college football team, outwit the gangsters.  In Take My Life (1942), she was paired with Hawley again, as his character’s wife. This film also featured Harlem’s Dead End Kids, a group of talented boys who appeared on Broadway as well as in Hollywood. The last of these was Hi De Ho (1947), a vehicle for Cab Calloway. Here she is cast against type as the possessive, threatening girlfriend. The script is so bad that one cannot even judge her acting in it: “I’ll see you dead before I let anyone take you from me,” she says to the man she loves. He slaps her, of course. But, as she said years later, “I got to die in Cab Calloway’s arms.”

Fats Waller

From her days working on Hooray for Love, LeGon made fast friends with Fats Waller, who hired her for four of his shows including one at the Apollo (Crowe). He coached her on how to present a song, and you can see his influence in the way she rolls her eyes with a sense of mischief. She describes a particular skit where they one-upped each other: He would play a jazzy lick on the piano and challenge her to do it with her feet; then she’d tap a complicated rhythm for him to replicate on the piano. All the while Waller would be wise-cracking with his usual campy one liners like “All that meat and no potatoes.” They goofed off elaborately during their exit, with each miming No you go first. “And finally I would exit and he would grab the curtain and shake his bum! We would tear up the place!” (qtd. in Frank 125)

The last show she did with Waller’s music was Early to Bed, which opened at the Broadhurst Theatre in 1943. She landed the featured role of Lily Ann. Also featured was George Zoritch, a star of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. In a 2004 interview, LeGon recalled that Katherine Dunham’s company was performing nearby and she would go to see their Sunday matinee when Early to Bed was off. (Crowe) My guess is that she brought Zoritch with her, because he writes in his memoir that he started studying with Dunham around that time. (Zoritch 117) (I probably don’t have to tell you how rare it was for a Russian ballet dancer to study Dunham technique!)

Easter Parade (1948) with Ann Miller and Fred Astaire

One of her more active of her many servile roles was in MGM’s Easter Parade (1948) with Fred Astaire and Judy Garland. She plays Essie, the loyal maid to Ann Miller’s Nadine, the glam ballroom dancer. (I wonder if any of the executives at MGM remembered the high salary they first offered their “personality girl” thirteen years before.) Jeni manages to wedge in a bit of humor in addressing two of Nadine’s pets. To the first puppy she says, “C’mon, Short Hemline.” To the second one, a little pug, she says, “Who pushed your face in?” The 2010 Turner edition of the Easter Parade DVD carries a special feature in which John Fricke, a Hollywood historian, gives LeGon a morsel of attention. He calls her “this amazing talented dancer,” ticks her credentials like working with Count Basie, Fats Waller, and Bill Robinson, and claims she could equal the Nicholas Brothers “with acrobatics and the tap and all the style.” No mention of why, with all that talent, she was cast as the maid.

Magazine cover, 1937

LeGon occasionally branched out into writing. With her husband at the time, the jazz composer and lyricist Phil Moore, she wrote the song “The Sping,” blending Spanish and swing; they offered it to MGM for Lena Horne in Panama Hattie (1942). MGM accepted the song and asked LeGon to come and stage it. LeGon and Moore also wrote The Matriarch for Ethel Waters, though it was probably never produced. (A bit of gratuitous gossip: Moore, whom LeGon met while working on Double Deal, went on to become a composer, booking agent, and lover of Dorothy Dandridge.)

 

 

Activism: LeGon’s and others’

Around 1950 LeGon joined a group of performers seeking to raise the opportunities for Black actors to have dignified roles. They called on Ronald Reagan, then president of the Screen Actors Guild, to support their cause. About his response, LeGon said, “We tried to get him to intervene for us, but he wasn’t the least bit sympathetic. He didn’t even lie about it.” (Ebert) [2] She was friends with Paul Robeson, whose 1956 encounter with the communist-hunting House UnAmerican Committee destroyed his flourishing international career. It’s not surprising that many Blacks pulled back from protesting during that period.

While she lobbied for better roles for Blacks, LeGon also wanted to hold on the roles that were available. In the early 1950s, she appeared on the televised version of Amos ’n Andy, often as Kingfish’s secretary. She was sorry to see it cancelled:

It was one of the best all-around casts that I ever worked with. All the leads were exceptionally good performers. Amos and Andy and Kingfish and his wife Sapphire—a wonderful experience. A couple of the characters didn’t speak too well…deeze, dat and doze. The Black community got mad and wanted to cancel it. They succeeded and threw a whole bunch of people out of work. But the show was true to life, that was what was so funny about them—things that happened to everybody. I loved them, I thought they were grand.” (Greschuk)

The attacks on the show had actually started decades earlier.[3]

 

Boyish? Girlish? Mannish?

Although LeGon liked wearing pants while she danced, a headline in Sight & Sound that proclaimed she danced “like a boy” is misleading (Hutchinson). Yes, she did the boys’ moves like flips, knee drops and a man’s split (as in the Nicholas Brothers). But she did not take on male characteristics. She wasn’t like the flamenco dancer Carmen Amaya, who wore trousers to emphasize her jabbing male heel-work, transcending femininity with a volcanic force. She wasn’t like Marlene Dietrich, who wore pants to add a note of androgyny to her sexual allure. (Dietrich once said to her, “I say, my dahlink, you wear the pants better than I do.” (qtd. in George-Graves 517) I think she wore pants to edge away from the expectation of sultriness. Many glamorous female stars, like Lena Horne and Rita Hayworth, appear to be poured into their gowns. LeGon avoided that look even when she did wear a skirt or dress, and I think it kept her dancing fresh and energetic. Of course LeGon’s idol, Josephine Baker, made a fabulous mockery of seductiveness with her banana skirts and pelvic gyrations.

While singing “There’s a Boy in Harlem” in Fools for Scandal (1938), LeGon sways suavely in white top hat and tux. She could be that boy in Harlem herself. She’s backed by chorus girls wearing skimpy outfits or glitzy gowns, almost like a man would be backed by super femmy women. Her dancing here is minimal, sedate, allowing the fancy gowns to fill in the glamour quotient.

“There’s a Boy in Harlem” in Fools for Scandal

 

Later Years

Starting in the 1950s, LeGon ran the Jeni LeGon Dance Studio in Los Angeles. She hired Archie Savage to teach Dunham technique and a Russian ballet dancer, Lasar Galpern, to teach ballet. She taught jazz and tap herself. She organized a group with a steel band called Jazz Caribe that blended jazz and Calypso, in which she danced and played percussion. (She had learned to play conga drums from Dunham drummer Gaucho Vanderhans.) For five years they played gigs at clubs as well as military posts.

She sometimes took on choreographic assignments outside her circle. In 1965 she worked on the West Coast premiere of William Grant Still’s “African” ballet Sahdji (1930) with a full symphony orchestra and the Combined Youth Choruses of the City of Los Angeles. (Dance Magazine, July 1965)

LeGon in 2009

After two former students set her up to teach in Vancouver, she moved to that city in 1969. Basing her school at Kits House (Kitsilano Neighbourhood House), she formed a youth tap group called Troupe One that performed in hospitals and senior homes. In the mid-80s, she also had a jazz group, Jazz Cinq, that played Ellington, Cole Porter, and the blues. She’d sing, dance, and play congo drums, timbals and “scratchy instruments” in the band. (Creighton)

In the 1980s she visited London with a group called the Pelican Players. She also re-united with the Nicholas Brothers for a radio show in Oakland (Crowe). She was in Cold Front with Martin Sheen in 1989 (Creighton) (though her scene may have been cut because she is not listed in IMDB.) One of her last appearances was in Snoop Dogg’s 2001 film, Bones.

Jeni LeGon had a fruitful career, but she should have had more opportunities to really dance. She made bold choices from the beginning. As Rusty Frank has written about early tap dance, “The rarest act of all was the girl solo.” (Frank 118) On screen LeGon was not only a dancer with a unique style, she was appealing as a romantic heroine: attractive, savvy, expressive. Just as RKO took a risk when they paired Shirley Temple with Bill Robinson, MGM could have taken a risk by fulfilling their contract with Jeni LeGon.

 

Coping with Racism

Hollywood studios have been racist since Birth of a Nation (1915). LeGon encountered discrimination almost immediately. When she signed with MGM, she was only 17, so she had to attend the school on the lot. Her classmates were four or five other teenagers, including Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. She got along with the other kids, especially Mickey, but not with the teacher: “I was an ardent reader. She’d ask questions of our group…I’d raise my hand to answer. The teacher wouldn’t let me answer the questions.… She just looked [at me] like I wasn’t there.” (qtd. in Abbott) LeGon asked to be released from those classes and given private lessons. (For perspective: This is the period when Eleanor Roosevelt couldn’t even get President Roosevelt to consider an anti-lynching bill.)

Jeni could be defiant in her resistance, but she could also be playful. George-Graves relates a kind of game LeGon played with a friend when she returned to New York from London. She and the friend, who had also lived in London, would sit on a bus and carry on a conversation with their newly acquired British accents. They got a kick out of  confusing the white people on the bus. They also would browse fancy Fifth Avenue stores like Bonwit Tellers and Tiffany’s, making comments like “I wonder, my dear, just how much this is in pounds.” (George-Graves 527)

In her essay “Identity Politics and Political Will: Jeni LeGon Living in a Great Big Way,” George-Graves speculates that a series of incidents could have turned MGM against her. The day before the event when she unwittingly upstaged Eleanor Powell, LeGon and Earl Dancer had tried to enter MGM’s main dining room to discuss the score, not realizing that segregation was still the rule. They were turned away. MGM’s hypocrisy did not elude her: “Here, they were paying me $1,250 a week and telling me I wasn’t good enough to eat in their dining room.” The dining room episode might have been perceived as defiance. That, plus her refusal to continue classes with the racist teacher, suggests George-Graves, could have made MGM executives skitter away from her. (George-Graves, 518-19) Perhaps, in finding her a gig in London, MGM was giving her a peach after taking away a plum—or taking away the whole orchard.

Duke Ellington at left, on his birthday party, 1937

When talking about racism, LeGon was careful not to lay blame. In one interview she described Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney as “the kids next door” and said, “I didn’t fit in at the time as one of the kids next door.” She recognized that “Hollywood was no different to the rest of the country in that respect.” (qtd. in Hutchinson) In hindsight, she said, “It was very difficult for any of the minority groups to break into the movies at that time.” (qtd. in Creighton) She did occasionally make a stronger statement: “At that time blacks and whites did not mix, even if you had a little intelligence and could carry on a conversation. But the world had been whitewashed.” (qtd. in Abbott)

LeGon was clear-eyed yet patient in the face of closed doors. Another performer might have quit after being relegated to servant roles so many times (at least nine of her twenty-four films). There was a practical aspect to her patience. As she told the Vancouver Sun in 1989,

I think I played every kind of black maid you can imagine. I’ve been a maid from the West Indies, Africa, Arabia. It was frustrating, but what was I going to do? You gotta eat, darling — you gotta eat. (qtd. in Bernstein)

Black women who followed LeGon also had a hard time in Hollywood. In the 1940s Lena Horne turned down roles of maids and prostitutes. Dorothy Dandridge, another dazzling dancer/singer/actress, also turned down demeaning roles. After establishing herself as a formidable leading lady opposite Harry Belafonte in Carmen Jones in 1954, Dandridge hit a dry spell of three years.

In Grant Greschuk’s documentary, Jeni LeGon: Living in a Great Big Way (1999), she says,

After thinking about it all the years…I don’t think it has changed an awful lot. There’s some changes that have been good…but basically I don’t think they’ve done too much. There’s still this black and white world.” (qtd. in George Graves 530)

She found a measure of peace in Vancouver. Although she was the only Black person in her residential building, her neighbors were welcoming and warm to her. And she was beloved by her students, which is obvious in the documentary. She met Frank Clavin, a drummer, in 1977, and they worked and lived together the rest of her life.

 

Awards and Honors

Publicity shot

In 1987 Jeni LeGon was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame —along with Sammy Davis, Jr. In 2000 she received the Flo-Bert Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2002 she was inducted into the International Tap Dance Hall of Fame. That same year Oklahoma City University bestowed her with an honorary doctorate (along with eight others, including Fayard Nicholas, Leonard Reed, Jimmy Slyde, and Bunny Briggs). (Hill 330). And on her 90th birthday, British Columbia’s National Congress of Black Women Foundation held a luncheon in her honor. (Spaner)

“Swing Is Here to Stay” from Ali Baba Goes to Town

Perhaps the greatest honor for Dr. LeGon, however, came posthumously. She has been enshrined in Zadie Smith’s 2016 novel Swing Time as a shadowy inspiration. The narrator, a young British woman, and her best friend Tracey become obsessed with LeGon, spending hours watching the faux African number “Swing Is Here to Stay” from Ali Baba Goes to Town (1937) on VHS. It’s a ludicrous dream sequence, with LeGon sashaying across the space, doing Charleston-like swinging, truckin,’ and stomping on her toes—all her own steps—wearing a grass skirt. She’s backed by musicians in mock African regalia, including Eddie Cantor in blackface. In the novel, both girls notice that LeGon looks uncannily like Tracey. Taking that resemblance as a sign, Tracey identifies with the tapper so obsessively that she creates the social media tag of truthteller_LeGon. When she applies to a top conservatory, Tracey prepares for the audition by learning every step of LeGon’s sequence from “Swing Is Here to Stay.” The judges proclaim her choreography to be totally original, and she gets in. Years later, as a beleaguered single mother living in the projects, Tracey names her first daughter Jeni. (Smith 213, 401)

Jeni LeGon with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson

Also years later, the narrator (never given a name), while organizing a photo exhibit, chooses the photo of LeGon where she is springing up in a toe stand, with Bill Robinson kneeling at her side. She likes that shot because LeGon is above the famous male dancer. (What she doesn’t catch is that Robinson, although below her, is clearly telling the teenager what to do, with his finger pointing upward.)

While working on the photo exhibit, the narrator has burrowed into some research that shatters the girls’ fantasy of LeGon’s glamorous life. She learned that Fred Astaire had hobnobbed with LeGon and Robinson back in 1935, but by the time she played the maid in Easter Parade (1948), he ignored her. The narrator, whose voice is now conflated with that of Zadie Smith herself, explains her perception of what was going on in real life:

Astaire never spoke to LeGon on set, in his mind she not only played the maid, she was in actuality little different from the help, and it was the same with most of the directors, they didn’t really see her and rarely hired her, not for anything except maid parts… (Smith 428)

The narrator concludes that although the dancer was adored by her and her friend, Jeni LeGon is only a shadow, not a real person. And yet, on the final morning of the novel, she sees her old friend Tracey, still in bedroom slippers, dancing on her balcony with her three children. Even if LeGon was a shadow, her dancing was contagious.

That one of the best writers of our time fell under the tapper’s spell through video attests to LeGon’s power.

To come back to the non-fiction world, Jeni LeGon was embraced by the current tap community toward the end of her life. She was invited to several festivals and respected by a new generation. For Brenda Bufalino, a major dancer/choreographer who founded American Tap Dance Orchestra, LeGon was significant not only because she was one of the few women soloists in tap, but also, “She had a style that’s so delightful. This wonderful relaxed style, just swinging, more in line with the tap dancing of today.”

Oh, and in case none of the earlier clips made you fall in love with her, here is LeGon at 91, singing “Living in a Great Big Way,” charming as ever.

 

Footnotes

[1] For more on the Whitman Sisters, see The Royalty of Vaudeville by Nadine George-Graves.

[2] In 1992, Stephen Vaughn wrote this about Reagan’s leadership at SAG (1947–1952): “Reagan’s efforts for civil rights were secondary to his desire to combat communism and maintain a public image for the film industry.” For a complete discussion on Reagan’s changing position, see Vaughn’s essay, “Ronald Reagan and the Struggle for Black Dignity in Cinema, 1937–1953” in the Journal of Negro History, Vol. 77 No. 1, 1992.

[3] The all-Black show had started airing on a Chicago radio station in 1928. Although Amos ’n Andy was rated the most popular comedy show in radio history, the NAACP started objecting to it on the grounds of racial stereotyping in 1931. In 1953 CBS cancelled in response to those protests.

¶¶¶

Special thanks to the library staff at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

 

Works Cited

Books and articles

Bernstein, Adam. “Jeni LeGon dies at 96; dancer was one of the first black women to become a tap soloist,” Washington Post Dec. 11, 2012.

Crowe, Larry, interviewer. Jeni LeGon (The HistoryMakers A2004.113), July 28, 2004, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive.

Ebert, Roger. “Jeni le Gon: The first black woman signed by Hollywood was livin’ and dancin’ in great big way,” rogerebert.com, January 23, 2013

George-Graves, Nadine. “Identity Politics and Political Will: Jeni LeGon Living in a Great Big Way,” in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics, eds. Rebekah Kawal, Gerald Sigmund, and Randy Martin, eds, Oxford University Press, 2017.

Hutchinson, Pamela, “Hooray for Jeni LeGon: the Hollywood pioneer who danced ‘like a boy’” Sight & Sound, March 8, 2017.

Guide to the Jeni LeGon Papers, 1930s-2002, undated, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

Malone, Jacqui. Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance. University of Illinois Press, 1996.

Seibert, Brian. What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing. Farrar, Strouse and Giroux, 2015.

Smith, Zadie. Swing Time. Penguin Books, 2017.

Spaner, David. “I’m doing OK and I’m living in a great big way’: Jeni LeGon, often stole the spotlight dancing with the biggest stars of the 20th century.” The Province, Oct. 22, 2006.

Tinubu, Aramide. “The Hidden History of Lena Horne and ‘Stormy Weather.’” Zora, July 21, 2020.

Walling, Katie, ed. Tap Dancing Resources “Remembering Tap Dancer Jeni LeGon (1916-2012)”

Zoritch, George. Ballet Mystique: Behind the Glamor of the Ballet Russe: A Memoir by George Zoritch. Cynara Editions, 2000.

 

Film and video

Abbott, Dave. Global Village, The Tomorrow Channel, 2001. On Facebook.

Creighton, Gloria, host and producer. Interview with LeGon for Contact.

Rodgers Cable 4, West End NTV 1989.

Greschuk, Grant, director. Jeni LeGon: Living in a Great Big Way, documentary. Produced by National Film Board of Canada, 1999.

 

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