In 1971 Alvin Ailey devised a solo dance piece called Cry for the dancer Judith Jamison, dedicated to “Black women everywhere”. Just before the first performance, Jamison got hold of “a voluminous white skirt”, and according to Rita Felciano, photographs of the dancer that show “her yards‐wide ruffled skirt swirling, dipping and extending her magnificent body” have helped to make the piece “among the most famous in modern dance”.
Cry is one of 30 individual works reviewed in this St James Press heavyweight, which contains around 400 articles on “all aspects of modern dance”, especially prominent individuals, companies, styles and movements, and developments in particular countries. There are also articles on topics like Costume Design, Criticism, American, Futurism, Preservation, and Technology. The articles on individuals are preceded by biographical details and supplemented by lists of roles, works, and writings on or by the subjects. In a preface Don McDonagh sketches the history of modern dance. A chronology begins with the year 1839, when Franscois Delsarte began teaching his principles of movement and expression. At the back are; a 197‐item bibliography, nationality and subject indexes, and notes on the 150 advisers and contributors. The articles are not cross‐referenced. There are many black‐and‐white photographs, including at least three of Jamison.
I counted 144 items in the list of Merce Cunningham’s works, and 187 in Martha Graham’s oeuvre. On page 96 there is an interesting photograph of John Cage, holding a very large conch shell. The work of the painter and set‐designer and sometime dancer Robert Rauschenberg is said to be about “the interrelationship of all things”. Cunningham’s Winterbranch has been seen as evoking the aftermath of a nuclear war, or a concentration camp, or “simply the hell of the human soul”, but according to its creator it is about “falling”.
As well as Cry, I would like to see Ailey’s The River (score by Duke Ellington) and Twyla Tharp’s Nine Sinatra Songs. Laura Dean (born 1945), who specialises in spinning, choreographed routines for the great figure skater, John Curry. AIDS seems to have had a devastating effect on modern dance in the USA. In 1994 the New Yorker’s Arlene Croce began a piece attacking Bill T. Jones’s Still/Here with the surprising sentence: “I have not seen Bill T. Jones’s Still/Here and have no plans to review it.” I thought an article on Isadora Duncan was badly written in places, e.g. “All her life her fight between her work and her loves waged.”
Christopher Caines suggests that Einstein on the Beach carried on a modernist tradition of baffling the audience, while providing a spectacle that was in keeping with “the 1980s’ circus of conspicuous cultural consumption”. There is no entry on George Balanchine, but Caines sees an affinity between his work and that of Edinburgh’s favourite dancer, Mark Morris (born 1956). Both men have made “visible music”.
