When Dance in New York Took Center Stage
“My initial impression of New York City was that it was full of people who cared about dance, who understood it as a vital part of our cultural history,” Rennie McDougall writes on the first page of his new book, a survey of dance in New York called “Nonstop Bodies: How Dance Shaped New York City” (Abrams Press). Like so many before and after him, McDougall moved to New York to be a dancer—in his case, an experimental dancer in the tradition of Judson Dance Theatre and Grand Union. His is a version of the New York bildungsroman. The desire to dance is an analogue for the striver’s desire to make it in the city, a concept mythologized by shows like “Fame” and “Étoile” and movies like “Center Stage” and “Black Swan,” which stars Natalie Portman as a deranged ballerina. It is the same idea that has drawn dancers and choreographers as varied as George Balanchine, Martha Graham, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and your cousin Susie from Peoria. We don’t bat an eye when the gangster’s girlfriend in “Carlito’s Way,” who works as an exotic dancer, turns out to harbor aspirations of being a ballerina and trains at a studio that looks suspiciously like Steps on Broadway, a legendary dance school on the Upper West Side. We’ve all been there.
And yet, by the time McDougall, now an arts journalist, moved to the city, eleven years ago, the realities of dance in New York—as opposed to the glamourized movie version—had shifted. People no longer line up overnight to catch a glimpse of Baryshnikov leaping across the stage of the Metropolitan, or get into fights about whether Mark Morris or Twyla Tharp is a better choreographer. Dance has fallen so far out of the cultural mainstream that it was possible for the doe-eyed Timothée Chalamet, who grew up in the city, with a mother and a sister who both studied ballet, to calmly assert, in remarks that circulated widely this year, that ballet was a “dying art form,” and that “no one cares about this anymore.” Sometimes it does feel that way. There are extraordinary dancers performing in New York right now—dancers who can change how you feel about your day, or week, or about life itself—but they are known mainly to a devoted segment of the population that follows dance closely, even obsessively. (New York is, and has always been, a city of fanatics.) The same is true of a handful of choreographers in our midst, whose work is full of wit and depth and imagination. With the exception of the American Ballet Theatre star Misty Copeland—that company’s first Black female principal dancer, who announced her retirement last year—dancers are not on the covers of magazines, or being interviewed by celebrity journalists. Dance in New York today is a niche passion.
It’s hard not to feel nostalgic for the twentieth century, a particularly dance-rich time in the city. Not so long ago, during the New York “dance boom” of the sixties and seventies, money flowed to the arts, and Soviet defectors such as Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova assured coverage in the popular press and long lines at the box office. It is that century that occupies most of McDougall’s attention in “Nonstop Bodies,” which begins in its earliest years, with the revolutionary modern dancers and choreographers Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller, whom he refers to as “mothers of the new century.” Duncan, whom McDougall frames in feminist terms (her dancers were all women), eliminated confining costumes—no more pointe shoes or tutus—and arranged natural-looking movements like skipping and running and bending to serious music like Chopin and Rachmaninoff rather than the specialized music of ballet. She embraced Communism and resisted the pressure to get married. Fuller, in turn, tapped into the new technology of electricity to create trippy fantasias in which the body merged with fabric and color to become something larger and weirder than itself. Both danced in New York before going on to greater acclaim in Europe.
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.
McDougall’s chronicle ends in the current era. The picture he paints of our arts landscape, squeezed by the ravages of gentrification, impossibly high rents, social-media zombification, and reduced public funding, is inevitably grim. Today, in this once dance-crazed city, there is less and less space and money for creation and experimentation. Still, dance lives on. At any given time, there is dance happening in most corners of the city: on Broadway, at Lincoln Center, at studios and cultural centers across the five boroughs, in church basements, and in night clubs. Georgian kids fly through the air and onto their knees in Gravesend, Brooklyn, and women study flamenco zapateado in Queens. Just the other day, I found myself in close proximity to three guys doing backflips to loud music on the subway.
But it is increasingly difficult for people who want to devote their lives to dance to survive on dance alone. Even dancers employed by the most solvent dance institutions, like New York City Ballet, have trouble affording life in New York. McDougall’s book is, among other things, a cri de coeur. “We must remember,” he writes, “that our bodies, moving together against the tide of conformity, can grant us social and political purpose.” Rise up and dance, people! ♦