Dancing the World Smaller

Front matter

Oxford Studies in Dance Theory MARK FRANKO, Series Editor

French Moves: The Cultural Politics of le hip hop Felicia McCarren

Watching Weimar Dance Kate Elswit

Contents

Foreword by Mark Franko ix

Introduction 1 1. Staging Integration: Around the World with Dance and Song at the American Museum of Natural History, 1943-1952 32 2. Staging Ethnologic Dance: La Meri, Whiteness, and the Problems of Cross-Ethnic Embodiment 72 3. Staging Diaspora: Asadata Dafora and Black Cultural Diplomacy 120 4. Staging Diversity/Staging Containment: Paradoxes of Mid-Century Globalism 164

Acknowledgments 205 Notes 209

Foreword

Rebekah Kowal’s Dancing the World Smaller is the first monograph to address how mid-century concert dance in New York City coincided with the aims, but also the paradoxes, of US globalist policy from the early 1940s through the mid-1950s. The practices of globalism were meant, as Kowal explains, to be pluralistic and international—indeed, were based on an aspirational notion of cultural universalism in the wake of the devastation of World War II. The United Nations was founded in 1945 and foresaw a globalized resolution to the end of the war as well as an internationalist forum located in New York City. As well, the United Nations ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Globalism, however, also served the dictates and priorities of American diplomacy once the nation became a major world power and as New York came to be considered the cultural capital of the world. Here, one notices a certain parallel in art history with Serge Guilbaut’s How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, except that globalism when staged as dance obtained an ethnological dimension that interfaced significantly yet also uncomfortably with aesthetic modernism in dance whereas the relocation of the art world to New York effectively asserted a revolution in modern art itself. The globalist moment, in other terms, was of less import in shifting the cultural balance toward the idea of New York as the dance capital of the world, yet it did have a role to play in the establishment of this idea. Kowal’s account is one, in the final analysis, not of triumph but of failure.

The context of Kowal’s study is therefore the birth of globalism and how dance at mid-century was identified as a medium particularly well suited to foster enhanced international and intercultural understanding. This was, perhaps, the first self-conscious statement of a world-dance idea, yet starting in the 1970s dance scholars also exposed it to sustained critique. In some cases, Kowal attempts to resolve the differences between earlier views and later arguments by historicizing the early views. Kowal returns in this book to the forgotten origins of the world dance idea itself and suggests thereby a new historiography of the concept. The artists who claim her attention may have been well known at the time but did not become canonical and today are relatively forgotten. Kowal devotes extended analysis to La Meri, Asadata Dafora, Ram Gopal, Serge Lifar, and Charles Weidman (as a representative of the United States). The venues in which these artists were produced were all influenced by some version of the globalist credo: the Museum of Natural History’s Around the World with Dance and Song festival (1943-1952) and the international dance festival that was contained within the 1948 New York Golden Jubilee Celebration. Kowal’s narrative moves adroitly between issues of presenting and production, issues of creative process and intention as well as professional status, and issues of critical reception. All of these modalities are unified under the rubric of “staging.” The historiographical conceptualization of global dance unveils a forgotten cultural landscape within an early stage of globalization.

While there has been notable dance scholarship investigating how American concert dance was exported to the world at large during the Cold War, this book takes the opposite perspective. Dancing the World Smaller focuses on how dance from abroad was imported to the United States either literally or figuratively (depending on the background and nationality of the practitioner) and for what reasons. Kowal reveals how the situation of dance in this pre- and postwar context endeavored to move beyond the exoticism of earlier modern dance that sought inspiration in non-Western sources and how it advanced to a more scholarly and systematic approach to dance presented on stage as cultural expression. Authenticity was, however, the sticking point. Critics were often aware they were accepting as authentic something of which they had no knowledge. Further, the demands of theatricality in the representation of otherness could and did clash with the aims of modernism understood as creative work whose basis was guaranteed by the individual artist rather than the communal culture. In this critical framework, the demands of innovation and tradition clashed. The resulting friction between dance modernism and ethnographic inquiry is one of many provocative aspects of the book and should take a seminal position in generating future research.

Mark Franko Series Editor

[x] Foreword

Introduction n the summer of 1948, New York City officials staged a Golden Jubilee L Celebration to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the unification of the city’s five affiliated boroughs and tasked Grover Whalen, president of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, to program the festivities. Responsibility for planning the Golden Jubilee gave Whalen a second chance to preside over a grand and festive event. The outbreak of World War II in 1939 had dampened activities at the New York World’s Fair necessitating a thematic shift during the fair’s second season in which the utopian “The World of Tomorrow” programmed for 1939 gave way to a focus on “Peace and Freedom” in 1940 (Duranti 2006, 1).* Much had changed in the nine-year interim between Whalen’s assignments. In securing the Allied victory, America had gained global standing in what had become a new world order (Rosenboim 2017, 2).? Likewise, New York City had become the “culture capital of the world.”* Accordingly, Whalen conceived of the festivities for the Golden Jubilee Celebration as occasions to look back and to look forward. Some events highlighted the city’s legacy as the national seat of 1930s popular and cultural fronts, including a “New York at Work” parade, which paid tribute to municipal laborers, a massive exposition showcasing the city’s 102 municipal departments, and a month-long fashion show highlighting the city’s garment district. Other events anticipated the city’s future as a center for global trade and technological development, including an International Air Exposition heralding aviation innovations and transatlantic travel as well as a nuclear energy display, sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission and Life magazine.*

Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America. Rebekah J. Kowal. © Oxford University Press 2020. Published in 2020 by Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/o0s0/9780190265328.03.0005

Figure I.1 “Man and the Atom” Exhibit Floor Plan. Courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives.

A New York Times editorial entitled “Our Great City” explained the significance of the Golden Jubilee for the city’s residents, asserting that the “entertaining and enlightening show...will offer New Yorkers an opportunity to understand their city better” (August 23, 1948). Among other things, the celebration highlighted the city’s demographic, economic, and cultural transformation over the past fifty years. Its population nearly tripling in size to 8 million people since the original unification of the city’s five boroughs in 1898, by 1948 New York had become an international center of cultural and commercial production, supplanting European capitals such as London, Paris, and Berlin, all of which had been decimated by World War II. In the words of the paper’s editorial board: “As a sort of capital city of the world—a position reinforced by the location of the United Nations headquarters here—we symbolize the democracy and opportunities of America” (1948, 16, New York City Municipal Archives [NYCMA], emphasis mine).° In figuring the city as “a sort of capital city of the world,” the editorial advanced the idea that New York was a global nexus of cultural diversity. Going further, it underlined a correspondence between the city as site and symbol: a physical place for cultural, commercial and diplomatic activities, and a symbol of “opportunities” afforded by American democratic capitalism. The paper’s editorial board therefore took advantage of the occasion of the Golden Jubilee Celebration to promote the city’s role in furthering the nation’s postwar globalist goals, premised on securing a new world order founded on free-market economic policies as well as on American political and military leadership (Hearden 2002, 51; Reynolds 2006, 305).°

Conceiving the Golden Jubilee Celebration as an opportunity to feature New York City in these lights, Whalen factored an international dance festival into his overall plan and hired famed impresario Sol Hurok as its producer. A native of Russia and naturalized US citizen, Hurok was well known in dance circles at the time having managed extensive American tours of Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova from 1921 to 1925 and the Ballets Russe de Monte Carlo in the 1930s; he had “played a major role in popularizing dance with a wider audience and is regarded as a major force in the rapid growth of the American dance ‘industry’ in the mid-twentieth century” (Robinson 2012, 1).” Hurok envisioned a memorable event for which invited countries would send “their representative dance companies to New York,” putting the city on the map as a destination not only for modernist dance but also for international dance performances (correspondence July 3, 1947, NYCMA). In Hurok’s words, “The focus of the Festival would be New York City. This would be the first time an achievement of such scope would be accomplished in this field, a fitting climax to illustrate the cultural development of our city” (July 3, 1947, emphasis mine). Initially Hurok sought to hold the festival at

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the Metropolitan Opera House, along with an international dance competition “similar [to] but more comprehensive than those in recent years held in Copenhagen, Geneva, and other European cities,” which could feature “classic, folk, and native dances” (July 3, 1947, letter, NYCMA). He also entertained the possibility of organizing a national tour for participating artists to “other major cities” in the United States. In the end, none of these more ambitious plans materialized.

Whalen did follow up on Hurok’s initial recommendations, however, sending a cablegram to the foreign ministers of Mexico, England, France, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Sweden, Cuba, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, China, and India inviting their respective countries “to participate and be represented by a classic or folk-dance group.” Whalen’s cablegram advertised the international dance festival as an occasion befitting the selection of New York City as the “chosen...capitol of the United Nations,” an event that would “demonstrate” “the cultural contribution of the peoples of the world toward the growth of the City of New York” (July 29, 1947, NYCMA).® Correspondence by Hurok and Whalen makes manifest their belief that hosting an international dance festival within the Golden Jubilee Celebration would reinforce the city’s reputation as a global destination for concert dance production, while, at the same time, showcasing its vital multiculturalism.

Considering the core contentions of this book we could go further to say that Whalen and Hurok clearly envisioned what can be called a “globalist project” in grafting the global onto the local and imagining the international dance festival as both a microcosm of the United Nations and an extension of New York City’s role as the postwar cultural capital of the world. Furthermore, Whalen’s and Hurok’s assumptions that an international dance festival could advance such a project and that audiences would be receptive to such an event indicate salient features of the existing cultural environment within the city itself, including the institutions, audiences, and ethos that supported dance artists, dance making, and dance performance, and how these entities may already have been invested in engaging with globalist ideas and ideals.

For one, Whalen’s and Hurok’s plan to produce an international dance festival leveraged the city’s function as “the dance center of the world,” owing to the vibrant development of American dance modernism. Modern dance and ballet thrived in the city after World War II in a fertile cosmopolitan environment in which modernist art forms including in dance were celebrated as emblems of American artistic and cultural dominance (Garafola 1988; Polcari 1991; Harris 1993; Franko 1995; Jackson 2000; Foulkes 2002; Manning 2004; Kowal 2010; Harris 2017). In the ensuing Cold War years, the US government capitalized on the strength of modernist dance production, largely based in New York City, enlisting dance artists to extend the reach of the nation’s dominance by sending them around the world to work as cultural ambassadors (Kammen 1996; Prevots 1998; Von Eschen 2004, Croft 2015). Functioning in this capacity, American dance and dancers embodied American cultural and political values.

Alongside these efforts to cultivate and export American artistic talent both at home and abroad was a parallel effort to promote globalism at home through engagement with international dance artists and the cultures they represented through their dancing. Initiatives such as the idea to host an international dance festival as part of the 1948 New York Golden Jubilee Celebration, therefore, both originated from and harnessed a contemporaneous zeitgeist. Evidence can be seen in two cultural phenomena beginning in the early 1940s, which form the basis of my investigation in this book: the first was a proliferation of performances of international, or what was then called “ethnic” or “ethnologic” dance, during and after World War II in New York City and elsewhere across the United States; the second was a sense among artists and audiences at the time that participation in such events contributed to national efforts toward finding common ground among diverse peoples through cultural exchanges and with an expressed goal of promoting world peace and security.

With respect to the first phenomenon, the terms “ethnic” and “ethnologic” dance were used broadly at the time by dance artists, dance critics and scholars, and audience members to denote movement forms that, in the words of dance critic Walter Terry “mirror similarities and differences which distinguish eras, races, nations and regions” (July 3, 1949). Anthropologist Maya Deren defined these terms along similar lines in an article she wrote for Mademoiselle magazine in 1948 entitled “Ethnic Dance” in which she asserted that “unlike modern dance or traditional ballet, ethnic dancers are physical statements of a cultural totality,” and that the “accumulation of [their] labor over time results in a ‘rightness’ in the relationship between physical movement and ideological content, a rightness which could scarcely be achieved by a modern dancer who starts at the bottom with only her individual ingenuity and experience to bring to the resolution of an original problem” (169). Both Terry and Deren saw cultural dance forms through essentialist lenses, or, in dance historian Walter Sorrell’s words in defining ethnologic dance as late as 1967, as “the art expression of a race.”®

In this book, I deploy the anachronistic terms “ethnic” and “ethnologic dance,” used during the mid-century period, as a means of investigating how artists who affiliated themselves with these terms, producers such as Hurok, and theatrical venues including the 1948 International Dance Festival, staged globalism through dance and performance practices, providing artists and audiences occasions for dancing the world smaller.’ Other such venues in New York City included the American Museum of Natural History, which sponsored a long-running concert dance performance series, “Around the World with Dance and Song” between 1943 and

1952; Carnegie Hall, which presented three “African Dance Festivals” in 1943, 1945, and 1946; and the School of Natya, later called the Ethnologic Dance Center, which hosted what were called “reunion concerts” featuring the Natyas, students of modern dance pioneer Ruth St. Denis and ethnologic dance pioneer La Meri, La Meri’s Exotic Ballet company, and other performers identified with the field of ethnic dance." As I will detail in chapters that follow, as extensions of these New York-based activities, performances along the same lines took place elsewhere in the American heartland, when, for example, Sierra~-Leonean choreographer and dancer Asadata Dafora and his company, Shologa Oloba, toured historically black colleges and universities and cities in the South and Midwest between 1946 and 1947; also manifesting the interest in ethnic dance, Edna Dieman and Julia Bennett, protégés of La Meri, established the Dieman- Bennett Dance Theatre of the Hemispheres in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1951, a school that operated actively until 1997 under the banner “Diversity in Dance.”

As I will reveal, artists whose work was produced in venues primarily in New York City and elsewhere across the United States were prominent and celebrated in their time. Yet their legacies have since been pushed to the margins of dance historical scholarship; caught in the cross-hairs of legitimate debates about appropriation, authenticity, and exoticization; and/or subordinated within assessments of their relative aesthetic value compared to modernist dance formations. Dancing the World Smaller recognizes these issues as part and parcel of the story it seeks to tell about what has persisted as the invisible contributions of ethnic dance artists in ushering in an era of American globalism alongside and often in dialog with formations of modernism in American dance. Whereas other scholars have focused on ideological and political aspects of globalism, my research seeks to understand globalism from the perspectives of dance and performance studies, as a practice and lived experience, on the one hand, and as a performance, on the other."

In short, Dancing the World Smaller investigates how dance artists, critics, and audiences contested what it meant to stage globalism in mid-century America. I show how individuals and communities that formed around a common investment in international dance performance engaged in imagining America’s role as a global superpower following the Second World War and a world with the US at the center. Examining both the artistic practices and productions of then-called “ethnic” and/or “ethnologic” dance artists and the discourses surrounding their labors, I seek to illuminate consequential debates both within the dance field itself and within American social and cultural life during the 1940s. In fact, debates that might appear to pertain exclusively to a dance context can be seen on further examination to proxy larger cultural struggles over how to reconcile the nation’s new role in the world and what that meant in a domestic context. In dance as in cultural politics, Americans struggled over whether and/or how to become a heterogeneous and inclusive nation. At issue was the country’s fraught relationship with diversity in both international and domestic spheres, characterized by dueling impulses toward openness, multiculturalism, and multilateralism, all key components of postwar globalism, on the one hand, and nationalism, containment, homogeneity, and isolationism, vestiges of nativist and racist American cultural legacies, on the other."

“DANCING THE WORLD SMALLER”

The title of the book, Dancing the World Smaller, comes from a headline for Henry Simon’s December 14, 1943, article published in P.M. New York, in which he reviewed the 1943 African dance festival, an event sponsored by the African Academy of Arts and Research (AAAR) at Carnegie Hall. Here, Simon quotes Kingsley Ozumba Mbadiwe, director of the AAAR, who implored the crowd thus: “This is a small world. We must make it smaller. And only men and good will can make it stronger.”°

Dance critics John Martin, who wrote for the New York Times, and Walter Terry, who wrote for the New York Herald Tribune, shared Mbadiwe’s idea about the capability of dance to “make the world smaller.” In Introduction to the Dance (1939), for example, Martin outlined his theory of “metakinesis,” or “movement perception,” which owed to dance’s “employment” of the “movement of the body and its reactions to the environment...a material that is closer to life experience than that employed by any of the other arts.” Martin held that movement forged connections through empathic channels of recognition, as he explained: “All types of gesture and facial expression convey meaning to us automatically because we have felt similar muscular experiences ourselves and recognize the postural attitudes and their emotional connotations as having happened to us” (48).*6

Walter Terry’s writings went beyond those of Martin to conceptualize how dance could bridge boundaries as an avenue of diplomacy. Having served in the US Army during World War II in North Africa and Egypt, taught modern dance to Egyptian students at the American University in Cairo, and lectured to US troops stationed there during his spare time, Terry passionately advocated the cross-cultural benefits of dance on returning home. Terry frequently seized on opportunities to reflect on what he saw as dance’s contribution to cultural understanding. As he wrote in 1946, “The time is...ripe for a realization that the art of dancing can be one of the most potent means of cultural exchange, a realization which will probably dawn slowly (and understandably so) upon some Americans unaware of the prestige of dance in many other nations and unaware of our own recent achievements in the field” (Terry, December 8, 1946). As is evident in this passage and elsewhere in his body of work, Terry reasoned that dance’s role in “cultural exchange” owed to its nature as a nonverbal form of communication; in his words, “It is not shackled by the barrier of language.” Dance’s “greatest attribute,” Terry surmised, is its “inception, its existence and its fulfillment in the human body” (Terry, December 8, 1946). To validate this claim, Terry recalled what dance meant to him as a member of the US armed forces fighting in World War II, thus:

From personal experience, I can tell of the unifying factor of dance. An alien tongue, an alien faith or alien customs can be annoying or bewildering, but when the possessor of those alien properties commences to dance, accent is perforce thrown upon the common denominator of the human body and for the duration of the dance one is aware of that property which is common to all....If this awareness of the common denominator can be achieved from time to time through dance, then dance has done a good job not as a panacea but as a contributing agent to unity. In these times, any unifying agent is worthy of employ. Dance, I believe, can be such an agent (“Value of Dance to

Unesco’s Cultural Program Discussed,” December 8, 1946).

Terry's theorization of how dance functioned as a “unifying factor” foregrounds an experience of performance wherein the senses process difference in ways that would otherwise be blocked by cognitive perception. In this case, the dancing body eliminated barriers among people that would, under ordinary circumstances, underline distinctions, determine divisions, and/or open distances.

We might see impulses such as Terry’s as contributing to the cultivation of what dance historian Andrea Harris has called “an interdependent global community” in New York City in the early 1940s, a socio-cultural response to the trauma of war, the crisis of Fascism, and the subsequent dissolution of faith in human reason and fundamental goodness (2018, 156). In the late 1930s and early 1940s, choreographer Martha Graham, along with counterparts in the literary and visual arts, “explored human destructiveness and apocalyptic historic events in a mythic mode,” as her friend, poet Ben Belitt put it: “Tragedy in 1946 was forced upon both of us; we were both a version of some innocent identity who had thought the world was reasonable” (Franko 2012, 6; Belitt quoted in Franko). Terry’s and Belitt’s perspectives offer important windows onto the ways globalist ideas and ideals shaped critical thinking about dance and artistic practices at this time; they also bring us closer to conceptualizing what might have been at stake in staging globalism during the mid-century period.”

From this vantage point, it is not a stretch to project forward to 1954 and to understand the rationale behind the federal initiation of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Emergency Fund for International Affairs, a program that formally enlisted dance artists as cultural ambassadors through international touring activities, engaging in “dancing the world smaller” (Prevots 1998; Kowal 2010; Croft 2015).*8 In this case, the performing arts were used to bridge individual differences and cultural divisions so as to promote American political, cultural, and economic ideas across the world. In short, the arts manifest democratic values of artistic innovation, individuality, and ingenuity, thus standing as an exhibit A, if you will, for American objections to totalitarian systems that curtailed expressive freedoms of artists and intellectuals.

AMERICAN GLOBALISM AT MID-CENTURY

Dance critics’ and later the US government’s assumption that dancers made good cultural ambassadors and that dance had the potential to bridge differences grew out of the national experience in the 1940s. In the early years of World War II, the United States had taken a “neutral stance” on Nazi encroachment in Eastern and Western Europe and implementation of Nazi plans to exterminate Jewish peoples. In the midst of a refugee crisis, in which hundreds of thousands of European Jews sought asylum in the United States, the vast majority of Americans polled (83 percent) opposed increasing immigration quotas to accommodate the waves of refugees (“The United States and the Refugee Crisis, 1938-1941,” Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed January 7, 2019). American involvement changed after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the collective mobilization required to wage a war on foreign soil to defend the world against fascism.

The central role the United States played in the conflict changed Americans’ perceptions of themselves and their country’s standing in world affairs, intensifying the public’s sense of the relative proximity of diverse peoples and cultures even across oceans and vast geographical distances. News accounts of battles fought abroad, as well as letters written by service members to their loved ones back home, heightened the public’s awareness of life in far-away places. Detonation of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945 intensified the public’s sense of the nation’s vulnerability owing to palpable fear that there was no place on earth beyond the reach of a powerful nuclear weapon (Graebner 1991).

The war brought a shift in worldwide thinking about cultivating global unity through a system of world government, called “One World” by supporters of the concept and by Wendell Willkie, former Republican candidate for president, who ran against President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and lost in 1940. This was the title of a book Willkie published in 1943 advocating that “there can be no peace for any part of the world unless the foundations of peace are made secure throughout all parts of the world” (Willkie quoted in Wittner 1993, 43). Furthermore, agreements formalized in the Atlantic Charter (1941) and the United Nations Declaration (1942) outlined some of the central tenets of American globalism along these lines in the mid-century, as these formalized multilateral solutions to geopolitical conflict and international security, organized around American military might and moral leadership, even as they prompted debates over the future of European colonialism (Von Eschen 1997; Meriwether 2002).”° We might also see the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” issued by the UN General Assembly in 1948, in this context, a document in which “the peoples of the United Nations have in their Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom” (“217 (III). International Bill of Human Rights,” 71).

Published in Life magazine, editor Henry Luce’s February 1941 editorial, “The American Century,” exemplified the logic of mid-century globalist thinking in envisioning America’s enlarged global position as well as its responsibilities in the aftermath of the war effort. Luce expressed the nation’s reluctance in prosecuting a war “not to defend American territory” but to “defend and even to promote, encourage and incite so-called democratic principles throughout the world” (1999, 161). Additionally, he wrote to persuade readers of their complicity in the nation’s failure to take an active role in world affairs, which, has led to “disastrous consequences for themselves and for all mankind.” As a “cure,” Luce envisioned one solution: “to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit” (165).

INTRODUCTION [TI]

Luce’s editorial articulated a globalist ideology founded on the moral imperative to rid the world of “tyranny” by fighting for “peace” and “justice,” and according to what he called a “Constitutional” internationalism envisioned “of the people, by the people and for the people.” (167-68). As imagined by Luce, American globalism would seek to remake the world in the nation’s own image, through the spread of democratic capitalism and “free market” trading practices, technological training of its own and the world’s citizens, and an adoption of “Good Samaritan of the entire world” policies to supply foreign aid and assistance to head off or to address international humanitarian disasters (168-71). In hindsight, Luce’s editorial also reveals the limitations of its own cultural and philosophical assumptions. Namely, his Anglo-centric perspective, as indicative of a dominant cultural view on the nation’s mid-century moral authority, failed to acknowledge the irony inherent in a globalist ideology that would support freedom, justice, and basic necessities for all the world’s citizens without addressing national policies and practices that denied Americans of color access to the same rights and comforts, and that would turn a blind eye to sexism in both the public and the private spheres.