Hidden in Plain Sight: Women Choreographers of 1940s American Modern Dance

Friedman, Jessica

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-2qgn-yf53

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Hidden in Plain Sight: Women Choreographers of 1940s American Modern Dance

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This dissertation examines how racially, ethnically, and sexually minoritized women embodied and contested competing images of national identity between World War II and the Cold War. I challenge dominant narratives of modern dance, which overlook gender politics as women left the art form and white men gained prominence in it during the 1940s. Those common narratives obscure a cohort of Black, Jewish, and/or queer women—Pearl Primus, Janet Collins, Sophie Maslow, Eve Gentry, Jean Erdman, and Sybil Shearer. These women used canonical dance techniques to reimagine national belonging as they protested racism and homophobia in the United States. In examining these women’s works, I address the previously unstudied decrease of women in modern dance during the 1940s. I demonstrate how aesthetic, financial, and political crises that the art form faced required minoritized women to shapeshift into ancillary theatrical genres as they were less able than white men to be read as the neutral bodies that modern dance in the early Cold War period required. Ultimately, I argue that marginalized women used established dance techniques in ways that redefined Americanness during the 1940s while responding to changing aesthetic, national, and transnational politics. By describing how minoritized subjects can use canonical and white-signifying practices as a way to dismantle those practices’ ideological underpinnings, this project interrogates how markers of identity can reinforce or resist the embodied implications of national and artistic belonging. This dissertation decolonizes the canon of US modern dance by attending to women whose interventions have been sidelined or written out by dominant narratives of modern dance. It shows how women danced against racism, homophobia, and fascism—dance content as urgent today as during the 1940s—in ways that pointed to the power of minoritized bodies to hold and carry forward histories of resistance and speculative futures. This dissertation extends the field of dance studies by demonstrating how marginalized artists maneuvered through and transformed time periods commonly understood as marked by stagnation. It also offers a model for understanding how dances of national identity could be used to offer transnational understandings of belonging. In examining where the women of US modern dance went during the 1940s, this dissertation contributes answers on how the art form shifted in political, financial, and aesthetic terms just before the turn to the latter half of the twentieth century.

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