Library of America’s latest anthology, Dance in America, brings together dancers and choreographers, impresarios and critics, and enthusiastic literary observers to present a kaleidoscopic portrait of a great art form. Edited by the veteran dance writer Mindy Aloff, the book tells the story—through more than a hundred selections spanning two centuries—of how dance took on fresh life with new, vital, and distinctly American innovations and adaptations.
Aloff is Dance Editor of The University Press of Florida and has taught dance criticism and history at the Macaulay Honors College of CUNY (at Hunter College) and at Barnard College. She is a former editor of the Dance Critics Association News and serves as a consultant to The George Balanchine Foundation. The author of Dance Anecdotes: Stories from the Worlds of Ballet, Broadway, the Ballroom, and Modern Dance (2006) and Hippo in a Tutu: Dancing in Disney Animation (2008) and the editor of Agnes de Mille’s Leaps in the Dark: Art and the World (2011), Aloff has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and The New Republic, among many other outlets.
In this interview, Aloff explains how she made her selections.
Library of America: In your introduction, you write that Dance in America “was not intended as a book of greatest hits by hall of famers.” Can you elaborate a little on what you mean by that?
Mindy Aloff: Gladly. A “greatest hits” approach would require including pieces that are too long, too familiar, too expensive, or too arcane to be interesting to the general reader. If you wanted to put out an anthology of “greatest hits” relating to dance in America, you’d have to include some of the writings of aesthetician Susanne Langer because her legacy is so pervasive, even for writers and dancers who never heard of her. Then you’d have to include the “Burnt Norton” section of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, a poem of universal veneration, where dance indicates a concept rather than a practice, and Edwin Denby’s game-changing essay on the photographs of Vaslav Nijinsky, which has been so widely reprinted that it’s included in other anthologies from Library of America. The same is true of Albert Murray’s chapter “The Blues as Dance Music,” from his widely admired and widely available collection Stomping the Blues, a crucial contribution for a dance hall of fame.
You’d have to include other major essays from the landmark 1940s monograph series Dance Index, which the Eakins Press has just made easily available in its historical entirety online—essays such as Ann Barzel’s 1944 “European Dance Teachers in the United States,” a unique history of the origins of ballet in America. For range of research, no subsequent history of American ballet pedagogy can touch this one-hundred-page monograph. And among the greatest hits, I think you’d have to include the full version of Lillian Ross’s “Dancers in May,” her majestic Reporter at Large story that follows one public school teacher over an academic year as she introduces a class of Lower East Side fifth graders of diverse heritages to six European folk dances, which they learn and practice for months and then perform at an annual Mayday fête of Manhattan’s public schools, in Central Park. A story that offers dance in America as a democratic ideal, it takes up most of a 1964 issue of The New Yorker and would have occupied a tremendous chunk of our current anthology.
So, instead, I opted for a counter-intuitive compendium of mostly well-known writers and mostly unfamiliar, even unclassifiable, writings on subjects that can be surprising. My first standard for choice was that the prose had to stand on its own, without accompanying illustrations. The accident of inclusion produced some improbable yet provocative associations: Janet Collins on Léonide Massine’s imperial authority and Massine himself on eking out a living at the Roxy, La Argentina in performance as rekindled in awe by Agnes de Mille and the tangos of exhibition ballroom dancer Tony De Marco as portrayed with a smile by Margaret Case Harriman, Black Elk’s sacred vision as embodied in choreography for living horses and Edmund Wilson’s gently profane invocation of the “ponies” at The Follies.
Three highly anticipated books on Balanchine are in preparation—by Arlene Croce, Elizabeth Kendall, and Jennifer Homans. All those authors are represented in our anthology, but only one small writing by Arlene, of her three here, focuses on Balanchine’s choreography. I wanted readers to see that even the most knowledgeable scholar-writers devoted to him as a subject have also written brilliantly on a great range of dancing and dancers.
LOA: The contributors to Dance in America include a number of non-specialists, or names we associate with other contexts, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, and George Catlin. Why did you think it important to bring in these perspectives?
Aloff: Unlike art or theater writing, which, in the United States, were thought worthy for cultivated American readers from at least the eighteenth century, dance itself was considered so specialized, or so far outside polite society, or so downright blasphemous, that dance writing of any type, outside technical manuals, isn’t easy to find until the 1900s. Still, beginning in the nineteenth century, one encounters more than we might expect: in poems (Dickinson), journals (Emerson), travel reports by missionaries and adventurers (Catlin). Fiction writers would bring descriptions of dancing into their stories as presentation pieces: Washington Irving, for instance, apparently loved to dance himself, but Irving’s most sustained dance writing that I found discussed European social dancing when he was abroad.
The thing is, most writers—whether they dance or not—are fascinated by dancing, perhaps in part because to bring it back alive on the page presents interesting literary challenges. And, as in the poems and writings of Langston Hughes, included in our anthology, not all of the dance written about is theatrical. Another gorgeous example of such dance writing in our book is George Washington Cable’s long-ago remembrance of the Sunday dancing and music by African American slaves in the Congo Square of New Orleans. Cable not only had a great memory but also a keen eye for fast movement, and that facility is as rare today as in his time. Try it yourself: The next time you watch a dance, see if you can isolate two adjacent steps and then describe them so that a reader who wasn’t there can visualize them. Or, even harder, see if you can describe the way steps and music connect in time for one passage of the dance. Good luck!
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