Abstract
This chapter concludes that modern dancers of the period 1920–1945 wrote about their practices mainly in terms of their dancing. In this sense it was a dancer’s world. Modern dancers did begin to refer to themselves as choreographers too and this began to mark changes in their practice. In the ensuing decade, the 1950s, some new dancers, such as Merce Cunningham, began writing of their dancing. The practice extolled by Martha Graham in her film A Dancer’s World and in Doris Humphrey’s The Art of Making Dances marked a distinction between up and coming practices and those of the pre-war period too. Dancers’ writings include those of Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey and Pearl Primus.
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Notes
Virginia Stewart and Merle Armitage, eds, The Modern Dance (New York: Dance Horizons, 1970 (first published 1935, New York: E. Weyhe).
Elizabeth Selden, Elements of the Free Dance (New York: A.S. Barnes, 1930), 157 (glossary: ‘modernistic’).
Valeska Gert, ‘Dancing’, In Valerie Preston-Dunlop and Susanne Lahusen, eds, Schrifttanz a View of German Dance in the Weimar Republic (London: Dance Books, 1990) (first published as ‘Tanzen’, Schrifttanz 4, no. 1 (June 1931): 5–7) (’Welchen Platz hat der moderne Tanz in der Kunstgeschichte der Zeit’, p. 5 in the original).
Ruth St Denis (Motion Picture) Moments from Famous Dancers, Dir. Philip Baribault, Paramount Pictures (1932/1933). (’What is called the modern or classical dance was begun by two American pioneers — the late Isadora Duncan and myself’.)
Mary Wigman, ‘The Philosophy of Modern Dance’, In Selma Jeanne Cohen, ed., Dance as a Theatre Art, 149–453 (New York: Harper & Row, 1974) (first published in Europa 1, no. 1 (May–July 1933)).
Elizabeth Selden, The Dancer’s Quest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1935).
Martha Graham, ‘The American Dance’, In Merle Armitage and Virginia Stewart, eds, The Modern Dance (New York: Dance Horizons, 1970), 53–58 (first published, New York: E. Weyhe, 1935).
Martha Graham, ‘Graham 1937’, In Merle Armitage, ed., Martha Graham, 83–88 (Los Angeles, CA: Armitage, 1937; repr. New York: Dance Horizons, 1966).
Ted Shawn, ‘The “Modern” Dance’, In Fundamentals of a Dance Education, 25–27 (Girard, Kansas: Haldeman-Julius, 1937).
Martha Graham, ‘A Modern Dancer’s Primer for Action’, In Frederick Rand Rogers, ed., Dance: A Basic Educational Technique, 178–187 (New York: Macmillan, 1941).
Louise Soelberg, ‘Modern Dance: What Is It?’ (TRT Publication, 1942). NRCD: LB/E/91.
Doris Humphrey, The Art of Making Dances (New York: Rinehart, 1959).
Martha Graham, ‘This Modern Dance; Two Important American View-Points’, The Dancing Times (December 1938), 270–272, 270. See the original in Martha Graham, ‘Graham 1937’, In Merle Armitage, ed., Martha Graham, 83–88 (Los Angeles, CA: Armitage, 1937. Reprint, republished by Dance Horizons, New York, 1966). There is no acknowledgement of the original 1937 source in the 1938 article. The 1937 essay was written especially for Armitage’s book.
Doris Humphrey, ‘What a Dancer Thinks About’, 1937, In Cohen, ed., The Vision of Modern Dance, 55–64 (identified by Cohen as unpublished Ms. from NYPL Dance Collection).
See Sali Ann Kriegsman, Modern Dance in America: The Bennington Years (New York: Harper Row, 1981). Group works resulting directly from the workshop/professional programme were, chronologically, Panorama (Graham, 935); With My Red Fires (Humphrey, 1936); Quest (Weidman, 1936); Trend (Holm, 1937); American Document (Graham, 1938); Dance Sonata (Holm, 1938); Passacaglia (Humphrey, 1938); Opus 51 (Weidman, 1938).
John Martin, ‘The Dance Completes a Cycle’, In Sali Ann Kriegsman, ed., Modern Dance in America: The Bennington Years (New York: Harper Row, 1939), 288–290 (first published 1943 in American Scholar 12, no. 2 (Spring 1943): 205–215).
Gay Morris, A Game for Dancers: Performing Modernism in the Postwar Years, 1945–1960 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006);
Rebekah J. Kowal, How to Do Things with Dance: Performing Change in Postwar America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010);
Mark Franko, Martha Graham in Love and War: The Life in the Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Walter Sorell, ed., The Dance Has Many Faces (New York: World Publishing Company, 1951). This edition differs in content from the subsequent editions.
Peter Glushanok, ‘A Dancer’s World [Martha Graham]’ (Pittsburgh: WQED-TV, 1957).
Martha Graham, ‘A Dancer’s World’ Dance Observer 25, no. 1 (January 1958): 5.
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© 2015 Michael Huxley
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Huxley, M. (2015). Conclusion: A Dancer’s World. In: The Dancer’s World, 1920–1945: Modern Dancers and Their Practices Reconsidered. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137439215_6
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