A Game for Dancers: Performing Modernism in the Postwar Years, 1945-1960.

A Game for Dancers: Performing Modernism in the Postwar Years, 1945-1960 By Gay Morris. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006. 254 pp. Illustrated. Paper, $24.95.

Author Gay Morris calls her book A Game for Dancers, but she doesn't treat its account of the postwar (1945-60) years in American dance as a game. She is seriously analytical about a time when the shift began from essential emotion to pure dance.

Inevitably, she begins with Martha Graham, whose language was personal as well as abstract. At the same time, younger artists were delving into dance as a literary, art. Their efforts caused philosopher Joseph Campbell to comment, "The entire modern movement is going over to ... a horrendous bastard-art of poem-dancing."

A further challenge came from Lincoln Kirstein, who felt that because modern dance was not founded on an impersonal vocabulary that could be expanded or refreshed, it would not last. When the New York City, Ballet was fully launched in 1948, Balanchine's so-called "abstract" ballets became a direct challenge to the modern dance of the time.

As she builds her case for objectivism, with movement at its core, Morris selects key ballets like Balanchine's Four Temperaments as examples.

The Holocaust brought on the subject of Jewish identity. Although the author mentions iconic choreographers like Hadassah, Fred Berk, and Pearl Lang, she specifically discusses Anna Sokolow's Kaddish and Sophie Maslow's The Village I Knew. With Village, Morris tends to take a critical tone. She is also disapproving of Maslow's including black dancers Ronne Aul and Donald McKayle in her depiction of life in a Russian-Jewish "shtetl." This objection does not take into account that Maslow depended upon the New Dance Group, where she taught, for her company personnel. Aul and McKayle were its best male students.

Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Talley Beatty, and McKayle represent the nascent black concert dance. When one compares their influence to that of later black artists like Alvin Ailey, Bill T. Jones, Ron K. Brown, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, it seems as though more progress has been made here than in any area of modern dance. Perhaps this is because training became more available to black dancers, and black choreographers began to explore a wider range of subject matter.

When Morris arrives at Merce Cunningham and Alwin Nikolais, not only does she describe their work cogently, she also finds their objectivity to be a "dedication to art's purification."

The time-span that Gay Morris examines parallels my initial years of viewing dance. Looking back through her eyes, it is refreshing to see the dance, not in isolation, but in its social and political context.--D.H.