It came as no surprise, when the Russian Army invaded Ukraine two years ago, that archives were among its primary targets. More than five hundred libraries have been damaged or demolished, and military police have seized or destroyed K.G.B. records, Ukrainian archives, and books on Ukrainian resistance and independence movements. If you want to erase a country, start by erasing its memory.
Bilger, Burkhard, “Piecing Together the Secrets of the Stasi,” New Yorker, June 3, 2024, p 45
- Deborah Jowitt’s, Errand into the Maze: The Life and Works of Martha Graham (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), 2024
- Mindy Aloff’s Why Dance Matters (Yale University Press), 2022
- Halifu Osumare’s Dancing the Afrofuture: Hula, Hip-Hop, and the Dunham Legacy (University Press of Florida), 2024
- Marina Harss’ biography, The Boy from Kyiv: Alexei Ratmansky’s Life in Ballet (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), 2023
Three of these four dance books published in the last two years have indicated in their acknowledgements, credits, and/or notes that they made use of archives to write their manuscripts. In this era of banning books and destroying archives, it’s encouraging to see new books getting published and, in particular, ones that rely on archives and libraries. Access to information, photos, books, films, and videos, which had been preserved and made available, allowed these writers to check facts, find new trails of research and investigation, hear and see recordings of interviews and multiple versions of a particular dance. This enabled them to take that information and create a book based on their own vision and understanding, which could become a link for the next person’s area of research—as long as the archives and libraries survive.
For these dance books, the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center has an honored place in the acknowledgements. Full disclosure: I’m curator emerita of the Dance Division and I was pleased to be mentioned in Deborah Jowitt’s Preface. I have a great deal of love and respect for any archive and its personnel, but the Performing Arts Library and its staff members get special love and respect from me.
DEBORAH JOWITT’s Errand into the Maze: The Life and Works of Martha Graham joins an impressive list of tomes written about legendary icon and dance figure Martha Graham, a list that includes Martha Graham’s own 1991 memoir “Blood Memory.” Dance, an ephemeral art form, is notoriously difficult to write about, but Deborah Jowitt is exceptionally capable of taking on such an assignment, as she has been dancing, choreographing, and reviewing dance since the early 1960s. She had a weekly dance column in the Village Voice from 1967 to 2011.
In Jowett’s telling of the life and works of Martha Graham, she includes Graham’s relation to those who came before her. Jowitt’s deft prose flickers with fast footwork and her sentences sway like long flexible arms.
Graham, like the pioneering American dancers who preceded her, was given to recounting epiphanies. Loïe Fuller, performing in a play when the lighting system accidentally dimmed, filled time by rushing around the stage brandishing an overlong skirt that she happened to be wearing: “It’s a butterfly!” cried the enchanted crowd (and so began Fuller’s transformative solos with fabric and light). Isadora Duncan experienced her revelation in the Parthenon (“I had found my dance, and it was a prayer”). Ruth St. Denis wrote of being steered into the spiritual reaches of Orientalism by a cigarette poster in a Buffalo drugstore window that showed the goddess Isis on her throne. The facts do not fully support these inspirational claps on the head as jump starters for careers, but—polished by memory and repeated many times—the stories provided iconic assists for the women’s attempts to dignify dancing and separate it from popular entertainment. p. 13
Focusing on Graham’s history, choreography, performance, and innovative philosophical relationship to dance, Jowitt carefully and comprehensively takes us on a tour of Graham’s dances, dancers, and travels. Martha Graham also had her personal goblins, but Jowitt doesn’t hover long on her alcoholism that only grew worse as alcoholism mostly does: Neither does Jowitt linger on her enchantment with Ron Protas, who, after Graham’s death, took the Martha Graham Dance Company to court over the rights to her choreography. The Company retained the rights and the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts acquired the Graham archive. Led by Janet Eilber, Artistic Director, the company has been invigorated, adding choreography of others as well as restaging Graham’s works. Jowitt’s book adds significantly to the picture of Graham, whose life and work requires multiple books and films, videos, and restaging to address the place of this dance giant and to further establish her legacy.
Speaking of archives and Graham impersonators, Richard Move spent much of his active performance life doing sometimes hilarious, sometimes serious characterizations of Martha Graham. On March 19, 2024, I attended the LGBTQ+ Artists Archive Exhibition opening at the BAM Harvey Theatre Rudin Gallery. This exhibition, led by the Pick Up Performance Co. project co-directors Linda S. Chapman and Alyce Dissette, celebrated these LGBTQ+ artists and their archiving journey, even as they continue to be active and perform, The artists included Five Lesbian Brothers, Ain Gordon, Ishmael Houston-Jones, John Kelly, Richard Move, Lola Pashalinski, and, Carmelita Tropicana. At the exhibition we found Richard Move standing in front of an extra-large photo of himself as Martha Graham in “Lamentation.” Kristin Kimmel, who attended with me, had to ask him if the gold sneakers he was wearing were the newly issued $200 Gold Trump Sneakers. He smiled slyly and nodded. When Kristin looked as though she might tear him to pieces, he laughed and told her that they weren’t Trump sneakers. In fact, he’d had these $20 gold sneakers for years, though he did assume they were the same as the ones Trump was selling at ten times the price.
MINDY ALOFF’s Why Dance Matters was published in 2022 as part of the Yale University Press series, Why X Matters. This series “aims to champion the cause of important disciplines and influential thinkers that are perhaps under-represented in modern discourse.” Aloff’s book, by its meandering through her own life spent watching and writing about dance, answers this question of why dance matters in sparkling, expansive prose from her peripheral personal space that communicates to the reader in much the same way dance communicates to an audience.
Whatever leads you to take the first step into dance, on either side of the footlights, the usual (and essential) provocation to keep on with it is the continual possibility that in the course of dance you will experience a state of creative flow—an ephemeral condition that unites thinking and action, as if one were sailing or flying or were otherwise motivated by an outside force to keep going without assistance. Ballerinas—for example, Vera Zorina—have written about this condition. The flow is not in the movements themselves. And it is not independently visible. It is a catalyst that makes the movements legible to anyone watching you dance. When teachers and choreographers refer to dance as what takes place between the steps, they are referring to this unifying, and clarifying, connectivity. pp. 88-89
In this same chapter, Aloff, in writing about some people’s difficulty in “understanding” dance, describes some of a dancer’s process.
Simply trying to appreciate what actually takes place in a dance—the facts of dance action—is hard enough. A more extreme brain workout is trying to witness what the dancers are doing while remaining aware of the theatrical effects or illusion their movement is intended for the audience to see. If the choreography is coordinated to a musical score, then to recognize and track points of coordination as they happen and be able to recall them later should earn you admission to Mensa. And trying to keep track of all this while remaining receptive to whatever epiphanies of meaning the dance may provoke—and perhaps while being overtaken by rapture, too—require a type of multitasking in which your consciousness, so to speak, has one eye on the stage and one watching your brain be a brain. pp. 91-92.
Aloff goes on to discuss the prodigious memories for dance movements of writers such as Deborah Jowitt and Alastair Macaulay. Then she turns to the work of “the preservation of a dance.” Her examples demonstrate the need for saving the multitudinous elements that go into such preservation, from re-stagings, to oral histories, to photographs, to films and videos and more.
Though wide-ranging, Aloff’s book Why Dance Matters does not attempt to be a comprehensive book about world dance styles throughout history, but instead offers us a path for feeling our way into and around dance, much as if we were at a performance. Through her musings on how dance connects among its various styles and across art forms, as a reader, I felt the transcendent embodiment of this art form as it crosses from dancers to audience.
HALIFU OSUMARE’s new book Dancing the Afrofuture: Hula, Hip-Hop, and the Dunham Legacy is the second volume of Osumare’s memoir. The first, Dancing in Blackness: A Memoir, was published in 2018. Dancing the Afrofuture, had me underlining every other paragraph. I wanted to hold her words in my mind, but, as if I were watching a dance, they flowed away with the excitement of each new paragraph.
But my love of dance in relation to an activism illuminating Black culture, which I argue is central to the US and the world, remains at the core of my story. Dancing in Blackness revealed hints of my future as a scholar, but Dancing the Afrofuture foregrounds the gradual shift from active performer to observer-commentator. In the process I find the relationship between the two—dancing on the stage to dancing on the page. I transform what I learned in the first part of my life as dancer-choreographer-activist into a career as academic in the second part. Hawai‘i became the entry way for that transformation. p. 3
Halifu Osumare has spent her much of her life connecting with the dance, philosophy and choreography of Katherine Dunham.
Dunham’s Stormy Weather choreography becomes the first vision we have through dance of the possibilities of Black self-envisioning beyond the white stereotypic gaze. As Dunham herself descends a ramp, seemingly manifesting out of the storm clouds, she meets the former street dancers now metamorphosed into a dignified community dancing in a futuristic self-empowered vision. They perform modernist leg extensions, elegant sultry walks, Caribbeanist shoulder rolls, low hinges into the floor, and balletic jumps. For the first time in American film, we witness Black dancers signifying a modernist aesthetic that is steeped in their cultural roots. Tommy Gomez and Lucille Ellis, long-term Dunham company dancers, along with Talley Beatty, who would go on to become a recognized choreographer himself, were now dancing an agency of self-definition, surrounded in a future vision of freedom to be their unencumbered selves. The Stormy Weather dream sequence represented choreography that was far beyond what 1940s audiences had witnessed performed by Black dancers. Even now when one views the film, one realizes this is a 1940s vision of Afrofuturism in dance. pp. 12-13
As Halifu Osumare’s book is a memoir, she is the only one who doesn’t mention archives or the Dance Division specifically, but she recently presented Dancing the Afrofuture for the Jerome Robbins Dance Division’s Dance Historian Is In program on February 28, 2024. Now, her book will join other research material and be available for future researchers to study—keeping her memories alive.
MARINA HARSS’ biography, The Boy from Kyiv: Alexei Ratmansky’s Life in Ballet, takes us through the life of a living, practicing choreographer, which means she not only had access to archives, but also access to Ratmansky, his family, other dancers and choreographers he worked with. This , which helped make this book not only enormously full of life, but is so close to the subject as to almost feel like he might have written it himself. At age ten, he was sent from Kyiv to Moscow to become a ballet dancer. There he dances then becomes a choreographer, then director of the Bolshoi Ballet, then he moves to the United States and is appointed artist-in-residence at the American Ballet Theatre, till now, when he is artist-in-residence at the New York City Ballet.
Marina Harss writes of the first ballet of Ratmansky’s she saw in a 2005 performance by the Bolshoi Ballet in New York City. The Bright Stream was known, she says, as a “tractor ballet.”
What was this ballet? It should have been terrible: anachronistic, ridiculous, stylistically retrograde. And yet it was exactly the opposite: funny and silly and sad, filled with touching details that laid bare our flawed human nature. . . .I was intrigued.
I was also surprised. My eyes, like those of many American Ballet lovers, had been trained in the cool, elegant modernism of George Balanchine. Like painting and music before it, ballet’s great advance in the twentieth century had been its move away from overt narrative and toward abstraction. Who wrote symphonies about the triumph of the spirit anymore? pp. 3-4
As Harss goes on to elaborate on the power, musicality and “radical departure” of this ballet, as a reader, I, too, was intrigued and surprised, a sign of the power, musicality and “radical departure” of her prose depicting a living artist whose work is far from finished. She also has a humorous vein. In her reading/discussion at The National Arts Club, on January 10, 2024, Harss spoke about Alexei Ratmansky’s desire to be a principal dancer at the Bolshoi Ballet and that, instead, he was funneled, to his dismay, into choreography. Harss adds, in speaking about one of the world’s foremost choreographers, that back at that time, “choreography was his side hustle.”
Every step of the way in the life of “the boy from Kyiv,” as Ratmansky was called when he was a child training in Moscow, is fraught, but with the invasion of Ukraine, since he is both Russian and Ukrainian, he finds himself on another cutting edge.
“I consider myself Ukrainian,” he told me in the summer of 2022. “This war has given me a sense of belonging, and it’s something very new to me. I feel it is my duty to support Ukrainian culture.” Like so many artists before him, he will be doing that from the city that has become his home, New York, a kind of neutral zone, defined in part by the fact that its inhabitants come from all over the world. In New York, he can just be. p. 411
Though the war started while Harss was writing this book, Ratmansky’s work, Solitude, about the disastrous invasion of Ukraine, was performed after. Another triumph of the spirit.
As I read these four books, I was so transported by their words, their descriptions, their interpretations, that I kept wanting to add more and more quotes to this piece. However, what I really wanted to do was pour these books into my head and into yours. The good news is, you can read them yourself. You can purchase them or get them free from a library. And you can write your own books, with free access to archives at libraries—not erasing memory, but preserving it.
—Jan Schmidt
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