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Modern Dance Before Bennington: Sorting It All Out

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

Marcia B. Siegel
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Extract

The young people who began to assemble in the New York dance studios early in the 1930s were seized by reformist zeal. They believed they were building a better world, and their idealism served them well, both as incentive when there were few other rewards, and as a sign to the world that they were to be taken seriously. For indeed, they wished to be taken seriously, and in those very first days, their legitimacy in the world of American art seemed certain.

As Doris Humphrey began to think more formally about the group that was to realize her works, she set forth her aims in a long letter to prospective members. She was enlisting them in a crusade. With the extraordinary mixture of crystalline practicality and inspirational ardor that she kept all her life, she foresaw a journey that would be all the more glorious for the obstacles they would surmount together. “I am first a creative artist, thirsting to see my conceptions made visible; after that I am also interested in developing individual talent in others, in performing for audiences, educating audiences, promoting the cause of Dance, making money, and establishing a Dance Theatre in America.” The order in which she set down these goals was not accidental. She wanted her dancers to understand that Humphrey-Weidman could pay virtually nothing — $10 a performance — and she frowned on the commercial theater as a supplementary source of income. “All group dancing in musical comedy or opera or motion picture houses” she placed in a “different class” — by implication an inferior one.

Type
Research Article
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , Summer 1987 , pp. 3 - 9
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 1987

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References

NOTES

Besides the newspapers, clippings and scrapbooks in the Dance Collection, Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, I have drawn from several manuscript collections. Those referred to below are coded as follows: DCH: Doris Humphrey Collection; JLP: José Limün Papers. Numbers following the code refer to folder where the document is located.

1. DHC C280. 1.

2. King, Eleanor, Transformations (Brooklyn: Dance Horizons, 1978), p. 12Google Scholar.

3. Graham, Martha, “Seeking an American Art of the Dance”, Sayler, Oliver M., ed., Revolt in the Arts (New York: Brentano's, 1930)Google Scholar.

4. DHC C274.13 and JLP 34.

5. “A Study in American Modernism”, Theatre Arts Monthly, March 1930Google Scholar.

6. New York World, 31 March 1929.

7. Shawn, Ted, One Thousand and One Night Stands, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1979), p. 213Google Scholar.

8. New York Herald Tribune, 28 April 1929.

9. New York Times, 10 February 1929.

10. DHC C270.2.

11. The Dance, January 1931.

12. The Dance, June 1930.

13. DHC C270.2 and C276.4.

14. New York Herald Tribune, 3 March 1929.

15. DHC M-48.

16. DHC C274.8.

17. New York Herald Tribune, 5 January 1930. For other accounts see Schlundt, Christena, Tamiris, A Chronicle of Her Dance Career (1972)Google Scholar; Lloyd, Margaret, The Borzoi Book of Modern Dance (1949)Google Scholar; Martin, John, America Dancing (1936)Google Scholar.

18. Watkins, , New York Herald Tribune, 5 January 1930Google Scholar.

19. DHC C275.10.

20. DHC M-48.

21. Schlundt, Christena, Tamiris, A Chronicle of Her Dance Career, (New York: NY Public Library, Astor, Lenox & Tilden Foundations, 1972), p. 7Google Scholar.

22. Ibid., p. 10.

23. New York Times, 19 January 1930.

24. New York Herald Tribune, 15 February 1931.

25. Variety, 18 February 1931.

26. New Yorker, 18 January 1930.

27. Anonymous clipping, Dance Repertory Theatre scrapbooks.

28. New York Times, 15 February 1931.

29. King, p. 52.