When Dance in New York Took Center Stage

Then came the modern-dance pioneer Martha Graham, who founded her company at Carnegie Hall, in 1926. Graham developed a new way of expressing emotion and meaning through the body, using breath as a source of explosive energy, and tapping into her internal drama as subject matter. In 1933, Balanchine came to New York, all the way from Leningrad, after a stop in Europe, to found a school and a company. In his hands, ballet became as modern and exciting as the Chrysler Building. They and others were drawn to New York by the concentration of theatres and artists, the ferment of ideas, the intensity of its artistic milieus, and, no less important, the presence of wealthy mentors who could pay for their visions.

What distinguishes “Nonstop Bodies” from other histories of dance in New York City is that McDougall pays as much attention to the social and cultural context in which dancing occurs as he does to the more rarefied corners of high art. For him, Graham is important because her work conveyed the idea that “bodies had something serious to say,” and her subject matter was the inner life of women. He finds the style of mambo that emerged in New York City in the late forties exciting because of how it physicalizes the fusion of Afro-Cuban rhythms and American big band, allowing its practitioners to become creators in their own right, right there on the dance floor, freed from the dictates of a choreographer.

For McDougall, the art of dance rises and falls as a series of waves, in which the innovations of the few are submerged in the stories of the many. “Dance history,” he writes, “often maintains a separation between ‘high’ and ‘low,’ most keenly observed in the divide between concert dance and social dance.” He rightly points out that historians have tended to underestimate the influence of African American music and dance on other forms, from Broadway to ballroom dance to modern dance to ballet. Segregation, cultural appropriation, and racial bias—sometimes intentional, sometimes more systemic—have been a constant. As he notes, Duncan may have liberated the female body through her Grecian-inspired dances, but she also wrote in an essay from 1927 that this new dance she had invented “will have nothing in it either of the servile coquetry of the ballet or the sensual convulsion of the South African negro. It will be clean.” For most of the century, Black and Latin dancers were few and far between in modern-dance companies. The first Black Rockette only made her début in 1988. Even the pioneers of the city’s experimental-dance scene in the sixties and seventies, so open-minded and self-aware in some respects, mostly forgot to think about race. They were almost all white. (Recently, Yvonne Rainer, one of the leading experimentalists of the era, has acknowledged her own past race blindness, referring to herself as a “permanently recovering racist” and making works about race, with mixed results.)

McDougall places this élitist, separatist tendency side by side with the more democratic, but no less fertile, creativity of the people who invented the city’s iconic dances. The Lindy Hop, an inventive, joyfully virtuosic dance to jazz, was developed in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance. The dance, he writes, “actively rejected the idea of individual creators,” revelling instead in the inventions of each dancer, each couple, who contributed to an ever-expanding pool of ideas about movement, which subsequently became available to all. The Lindy Hoppers challenged each other to greater and greater feats of virtuosity, flips and slides and airborne moves in which one partner tossed the other high into the air, daring gravity. McDougall draws a metaphorical line that runs from these dancers to the hip-hop dancers of the latter part of the century, making up new moves on street corners and in clubs, expanding the form’s range and complexity.

In the sections of the book in which McDougall deals with popular forms like voguing and breaking, his writing becomes more personal, more irreverent. “It is this central paradox of vogue,” he writes, “being a place to both fuck with identity and find your identity that makes it a uniquely queer arena, a space where one learns who they are by slipping between and around the codes that rule identity.” Unlike ballet, modern dance, and postmodern dance, mainly the redoubt of singular creators, often though not exclusively white, these styles rose up within the racially diverse, economically strapped communities of New York: African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, the queer community. The spaces in which they danced were, unsurprisingly, also more open to the mingling of folks of different races and economic backgrounds. Both the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem and the Palladium Ballroom in midtown, sanctuaries of Lindy Hop, mambo, and salsa, were integrated. (Both eventually succumbed to the implacable reality of New York real estate, as well as to changes in musical taste.) These popular dance forms, born of the city, are a product of its cultural variety and geographical compression, and the rubbing together of different people. In this sense, it is New York itself that shaped dance in the twentieth century, and not the other way around.