When Dance in New York Took Center Stage

The American dancer Martha Graham.Photograph from Hulton Archive / Getty Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story“My initial impression of New York City was that it was full of people who cared about dance, who understood it as a vital part of our cultural history,” Rennie Mc Dougall writes on the first page of his new book, a survey of dance in New York called “Nonstop Bodies: How Dance Shaped New York City” (Abrams Press). Like so many before and after him, Mc Dougall moved to New York to be a dancer—in his case, an experimental dancer in the tradition of Judson Dance Theatre and Grand Union. His is a version of the New York bildungsroman. The desire to dance is an analogue for the striver’s desire to make it in the city, a concept mythologized by shows like “Fame” and “Étoile” and movies like “Center Stage” and “Black Swan,” which stars Natalie Portman as a deranged ballerina. It is the same idea that has drawn dancers and choreographers as varied as George Balanchine, Martha Graham, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and your cousin Susie from Peoria. We don’t bat an eye when the gangster’s girlfriend in “Carlito’s Way,” who works as an exotic dancer, turns out to harbor aspirations of being a ballerina and trains at a studio that looks suspiciously like Steps on Broadway, a legendary dance school on the Upper West Side. We’ve all been there.

And yet, by the time McDougall, now an arts journalist, moved to the city, eleven years ago, the realities of dance in New York—as opposed to the glamourized movie version—had shifted. People no longer line up overnight to catch a glimpse of Baryshnikov leaping across the stage of the Metropolitan, or get into fights about whether Mark Morris or Twyla Tharp is a better choreographer. Dance has fallen so far out of the cultural mainstream that it was possible for the doe-eyed Timothée Chalamet, who grew up in the city, with a mother and a sister who both studied ballet, to calmly assert, in remarks that circulated widely this year, that ballet was a “dying art form,” and that “no one cares about this anymore.” Sometimes it does feel that way. There are extraordinary dancers performing in New York right now—dancers who can change how you feel about your day, or week, or about life itself—but they are known mainly to a devoted segment of the population that follows dance closely, even obsessively. (New York is, and has always been, a city of fanatics.) The same is true of a handful of choreographers in our midst, whose work is full of wit and depth and imagination. With the exception of the American Ballet Theatre star Misty Copeland—that company’s first Black female principal dancer, who announced her retirement last year—dancers are not on the covers of magazines, or being interviewed by celebrity journalists. Dance in New York today is a niche passion.

It’s hard not to feel nostalgic for the twentieth century, a particularly dance-rich time in the city. Not so long ago, during the New York “dance boom” of the sixties and seventies, money flowed to the arts, and Soviet defectors such as Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova assured coverage in the popular press and long lines at the box office. It is that century that occupies most of McDougall’s attention in “Nonstop Bodies,” which begins in its earliest years, with the revolutionary modern dancers and choreographers Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller, whom he refers to as “mothers of the new century.” Duncan, whom McDougall frames in feminist terms (her dancers were all women), eliminated confining costumes—no more pointe shoes or tutus—and arranged natural-looking movements like skipping and running and bending to serious music like Chopin and Rachmaninoff rather than the specialized music of ballet. She embraced Communism and resisted the pressure to get married. Fuller, in turn, tapped into the new technology of electricity to create trippy fantasias in which the body merged with fabric and color to become something larger and weirder than itself. Both danced in New York before going on to greater acclaim in Europe.