Stages, Streets, and Screens: The Geography of NYC Dance in the 1960s-1970s “Dance Boom”
By Emily Hawk
In the early 1970s, New Yorkers could see concert dance performances at Lincoln Center as well as in the open-air splendor of Central Park’s Delacorte Theater. Crowds could gather in Harlem to catch the DanceMobile, and families could turn on their television sets to watch evening-length concerts on PBS. The prevalence of dance throughout and beyond the city resulted from the “dance boom” in the previous decade. Beginning in the late 1950s and accelerating through the early 1970s, the dance boom greatly expanded national audiences and international prestige for American modern dance and ballet. The geographic footprint of concert dance in the city changed drastically, spilling out of the dark proscenium setting into parks, streets, and onto airwaves. With new access to city spaces and robust institutional backing, concert dance artists shaped New York’s cultural identity and functioned as keen observers of city life. Looking at early 1970s choreography by George Balanchine, Twyla Tharp, and Alvin Ailey that explicitly depicts New York City, it becomes clear that the dance boom democratized access to dance despite the elitist impulses of the simultaneous urban renewal project.
The dance boom began in the late 1950s, when New York was a particularly fertile place for dance. The city emerged as the global capital of dance after Cold War cultural diplomacy tours impressed international audiences, compelling European dancers to train in American studios for the first time. Dance critics at The New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and Village Voice regularly covered and advertised dance performances throughout the city, building a loyal audience among city residents. Aesthetically, modern dance and ballet choreographers more frequently crossed lines of genre in their collaborations, working on Broadway shows and experimenting with new technology in television and film. It was a period of fruitful cross-pollination that laid the foundation for continued artistic growth.
In the early 1960s, funding for the arts ballooned and added institutional scaffolding to dance in New York City. The Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Harkness Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts offered grants to many dance companies that had been created in the postwar years. This funding sponsored the creation of new works, longer performance seasons, and tours beyond New York City. Colleges and universities throughout the city, from Barnard and New York University to Hunter College and the New School, founded dance departments around this time. These programs gave dance an intellectual grounding and offered college students the chance to train in ballet and modern techniques.
In some cases, the advances of the dance boom aligned with the exclusionary project of urban renewal that was advocated by Robert Moses. As historian Samuel Zipp has shown, the construction of Lincoln Center razed housing on Manhattan’s West Side to make way for a European-style plaza. This venue, which opened in 1964, represented Moses’s idea that New York should be a symbol of modernity and American power and a capital of elite culture for a white, wealthy, and highly educated audience. George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein’s New York City Ballet (NYCB) became the company-in-residence at Lincoln Center’s New York State Theater.[1] NYCB’s move left a vacuum at their previous residence, the City Center of Music and Drama on 55th Street, a non-profit venue dedicated to affordable ticket pricing that ultimately became a constituent of Lincoln Center.
Balanchine’s choreography at Lincoln Center affirmed New York as the American capital of elite culture. This directive meshed with Balanchine’s personal creative goals, as he had long been interested in crystallizing an American essence in movement even though he was not an American by birth. Born in St. Petersburg and hailing professionally from Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Balanchine arrived in the United States in 1933 to found a ballet school with Lincoln Kirstein. He spent his subsequent choreographic career at NYCB defining a quintessentially American style of ballet by asserting that classical elements of the form could be transposed to an American context. His first piece at Lincoln Center, Jewels (1967), did just that by placing the jazzy and precise American-style “Rubies” section between “Emeralds” and “Diamonds,” which evoked classical French and Russian aesthetics.
George Balanchine’s Who Cares? balletwest.org, photo by Quinn Farley
In his 1970 season at Lincoln Center, Balanchine debuted a piece that referenced New York City: Who Cares?, a forty-minute work set to George Gershwin’s tunes from the 1920s and 1930s. Balanchine’s intention in this work was to portray “a dynamic that is uniquely American and, more specifically, evocative of New York City.”[2] To do so, skyscraper silhouettes remain lit on the backdrop behind the dancers throughout the entire piece. Combining ballet vocabulary with popular music in Who Cares?, Balanchine presents New York as the ideal setting for this quintessentially American fusion. He uses the upward trajectory of the New York skyline as shorthand for the innovation of American style. The New York Times critic Clive Barnes took note, describing the piece as having “an exquisite awareness of time past and dance present.”[3] In other words, it was both a product of New York’s vibrant dance scene and an encapsulation of the thesis Lincoln Center promoted in this period.
Yet, not all advances of the dance boom were linked to the mission of urban renewal. Just as activist Jane Jacobs wrote about the “ballet of the good city sidewalk” in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the dance boom brought live performance into the parks and streets of New York City.[4] Other venues for dance – more democratic in their stated missions – appeared around the city with municipal support. These include the open-air Delacorte Theater, which opened in Central Park in 1962. Following that year’s first Shakespeare in the Park season, the Harkness Foundation sponsored a free dance festival at the Delacorte featuring the José Limón company, American Ballet Theatre, and the Alvin Ailey company.[5] This New York Dance Festival continued annually through 1980, allowing New Yorkers to regularly see live performances in the park with no cost of admission.
In 1971, prolific modern dance choreographer Twyla Tharp premiered her first work for the proscenium stage at the Delacorte. The piece, titled Eight Jelly Rolls, uses a score of original recordings by jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton and costumes the dancers in black-and-white tuxedo unitards. Tharp states that “the comedic timing and slippery flow of the choreography reflect the sense of ease and freedom of the 1920s,” a time when “America shook itself loose of stiff European traditions.”[6] With these ideas in mind, Tharp makes a statement similar to Balanchine’s in Who Cares?, using iconography of the 1920s as shorthand for a uniquely American innovation that contrasts staid European classicism.
The choreography in Eight Jelly Rolls evokes life in New York City. For one, the speed of the movement parallels the pace of urban living. There are hardly any moments of stillness in the entire piece; the dancers are not allowed to pause, rest, or recover from the madness of the movement. In describing her creative process for inventing the piece’s movement vocabulary, Tharp lists several actions reminiscent of city life as inspirations: “hitching a ride, shooting craps, looking at traffic, bouncing a basketball.”[7] A viewer can easily recognize these gestures despite the frantic stream of choreographic phrases. Indeed, critic Clive Barnes noticed these elements, reviewing the work as “an essay in abstract jazz dance and urban despair.”[8]
Original production of Deuce Coupe, 1973. Playbill.com, photo by Herbert Migdoll
In this way, Tharp’s work embodies the improvisational energy that Jacobs ascribed to New York City streets and sidewalks. Two years later, in 1973, Tharp explicitly engaged with the culture of New York City’s streets in Deuce Coupe. Dancing to the music of the Beach Boys, the ensemble of Deuce Coupe performs choreography inspired by social dance of the 1960s. They revolve around a solo figure, who moves through the classical ballet vocabulary in alphabetical order. Anna Kisselgoff’s review of Deuce Coupe reads like Jacobs’s description of the streets; she writes of “an unfolding human scroll of intricate patterns, delightfully timed exits and entrances and moments of humor and beauty.”[9] Behind the choreography, Tharp placed the work’s most radical element: artists from the United Graffiti Artists collective, led by Hugo Martinez, spray painting the backdrop.[10] This feature elevated street art at a time when it was perceived to be a dangerous output of urban blight. By including popular and vernacular elements in the music, set, and movement of her pieces, Tharp democratized the content of concert dance.
A DanceMobile performance in 1967, The New York Times (July 27, 1967)
Another important development of the dance boom that democratized access to dance was the DanceMobile, a program started by the Harlem Cultural Council in 1967 and funded by the New York City Administration of Recreation and Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts.[11] The DanceMobile brought professional concert dance directly to communities of color in all five boroughs, showcasing the works of Black and Latinx choreographers such as Eleo Pomare and Syvilla Fort. The events were lively and allowed for large crowds to gather in streets, parks, and playgrounds without the threat of police intervention. As one reporter noted, “there were only a few uniformed police – no helmets, no broken windows, no hint of menace.”[12] The DanceMobile provided a small but meaningful reprieve from mounting police violence against these communities in this tumultuous period.
The dance boom also expanded the audience for concert dance beyond New York City via the medium of broadcast television. Some artists, like Alwin Nikolais and Merce Cunningham, used television to make experimental works for the screen that played with elements of light and sound. Most others treated television as an opportunity to reach national audiences, and critically, tap into new sources of funding. Martha Graham, Agnes de Mille, and Paul Taylor had features on the educational program Omnibus and on National Education Television, both owned by the Ford Foundation. Religious programs also became important spots for dance on television, particularly for Black dancers. Lamp Unto My Feet, a nonsectarian Sunday show on CBS, commissioned Carmen de Lavallade to star in biblical ballets throughout the 1960s. The same program aired Alvin Ailey’s masterpiece Revelations (1960), set to spiritual music from the African American tradition, in 1962. Even as live dance performances thrived locally in New York City, choreography from New York-based dance artists earned national attention through television.
Alvin Ailey’s Night Creature. Alvinailey.org, photo by Pierre Waccholder.
Alvin Ailey premiered some of his choreography on television, including his 1974 work Night Creature, another piece evocative of life in New York City. The television network CBS commissioned Ailey to make six new works paying tribute to Duke Ellington, whose death occurred earlier that year. Night Creature, set to Ellington’s composition of the same name, is “at once wistful and sassy, [and] it beckons viewers into a nocturnal world populated by jazz babies and night owls.”[13] The piece suggests the creative vitality of nightlife during the Harlem Renaissance, when Ellington got his start in the 1920s. The choreography juxtaposes movement idioms from jazz and social dance with those of classical ballet, cutting from energetic heel-toe struts to sweeping waltz steps without warning.
It is significant that a national audience saw the interracial cast of dancers in Night Creature navigate these stylistic transitions smoothly. Perceived as inferior to the Eurocentric standard of ballet, Black dance forms like jazz did not receive wholly enthusiastic treatment from dance critics throughout the 20th century. By placing the two movement languages side-by-side, Ailey insisted that both styles were aesthetically valuable forms that could be performed skillfully by dancers of color. Anna Kisselgoff took note, stating, “it is startling how Mr. Ailey gets away with it—all those girls doing their développés into arabesques penchés… and still being part of the hip-jutting, wiggling pulse that colors the entire ballet.”[14] Such stylistic interplay was uncommon prior to the cross-pollination of the dance boom. Even as private funders aimed to keep Black art separate from the elite mainstream, Ailey succeeded in cultivating a diverse national audience for his work.[15] In the process, he defied stereotypes about who could perform concert dance on the proscenium stage, and whose work would appeal to a large and loyal audience.
The success of the dance boom not only innovated the aesthetics of the art, but also changed the geographic footprint of concert dance performance in New York City. Despite the elitist aims of urban renewal, the dance boom ultimately democratized access to performances in the city and beyond. This expansion allowed for the commentary of choreographed works to reach a wider, more diverse audience. It allowed choreographers to craft an image of the city as a place of vibrancy and spontaneity, mirroring the energy of New York City’s streets. It is important to remember that concert dance, with institutional investment, once thrived in performance halls and parks, in the streets and on television. Even as the city’s national reputation waned on the eve of New York’s 1975 fiscal crisis, audiences remained excited by the advances of concert dance and the many spaces it inhabited on the city’s cultural landscape.
Emily Hawk is a PhD candidate in history at Columbia University. Her research centers on 20th century American dance and cultural history. Her current projects investigate American choreography produced during the period of urban renewal in New York City and performative representations of the U.S. Presidents in the aftermath of the Watergate crisis.
[1] Known as the David H. Koch Theater since 2008.
[2] “Who Cares?,” New York City Ballet. https://www.nycballet.com/ballets/w/who-cares.aspx (Accessed 19 August 2020).
[3] Clive Barnes, “His Newest Work, A Tribute to the City, Is Unveiled” in The New York Times (6 February 1970), 24.
[4] Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Vintage Books, 1961), 50.
[5] “Dance Series Begins Sept. 4 at Delacorte in Central Park,” New York Times (4 August 1962), 11.
[6] “Eight Jelly Rolls,” Twyla Tharp Dance Foundation. https://www.twylatharp.org/works/eight-jelly-rolls (Accessed 18 March 2019).
[7] “Twyla Tharp and Eight jelly rolls.” Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library, Digital Collections, 1974.
[8] Clive Barnes, “Dance: A Park Marathon,” in The New York Times (18 September 1971), 16.
[9] Anna Kisselgoff, “Twyla Tharp’s ‘Deuce Coupe’ Is a Vividly American Dance,” in The New York Times (3 March 1973), 17.
[10] “Deuce Coupe,” Twyla Tharp Dance Foundation, https://www.twylatharp.org/works/deuce-coupe (Accessed 27 August 2020).
[11] “Dancemobile Launched for 5 Wks,” New York Amsterdam News (29 July 1967), 18.
[12] Richard F. Shepard, “’DanceMobile’s First Stop: 134th Off Lenox,” in The New York Times (27 July 1967), 28.
[13] “Night Creature,” Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, https://www.alvinailey.org/performances/repertory/night-creature (accessed 20 August 2020).
[14] Anna Kisselgoff, “Dance: ‘Night Creature,’” in The New York Times (24 April 1975), 39.
[15] For more on separatist private funding for the arts in this period, see Karen Ferguson, Top Down: The Ford Foundation, Black Power, and the Reinvention of Racial Liberalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).