A game for dancers: performing modernism in the postwar years, 1945-1960
ISBN: 9780819568045
Platform/Publisher: ACLS / Wesleyan University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Ten pages at a time; Download: Ten pages at a time
Subjects: Dance & Performance History;

A Game for Dancers examines the difficulties American modern dancers faced as the Cold War took hold and the genre became institutionalized after its pioneering phase. It draws on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu to explore the interconnections between art and politics, while paying close attention to modern dance's ambivalent relationship to the market. At the heart of the book is an inquiry into modernism itself, and how dancers struggled with modernist ideas of abstraction and autonomy while rarely questioning them. Crucial, too, is the issue of embodiment, which appeared to answer modernist skepticism of representation and aid modern dance's elusive pursuit of independence. Subjects include modernist dance theory, the emergence of new constituencies, including African-American choreographers, and the work of Merce Cunningham and Alwin Nikolais, whose objectivism was declared a new modern dance vanguard in the 1950s.

Gay Morris is a dance and art critic whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including Dance Research, Art in America, and Body and Society. Currently she is a research fellow in sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and the editor of the anthology, Moving Words, Rewriting Dance (1996).

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