Guest post by Jessica Friedman, 2019 NYPL Short-term Research Fellow with the Jerome Robbins Dance Division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Friedman is a Ph.D. student in Interdisciplinary Theatre and Drama at Northwestern University. Her work focuses on American modern dance in the 1940s. 

Many minoritized subjects who experienced the 92nd Street Young Men’s-Young Women’s Hebrew Association in Manhattan, or the Y, during the 1940s described it as a haven from discriminatory practices, positioning it as a utopic common space. Key to this space was the Y’s featuring of politically-motivated dance pieces choreographed and performed by African Americans and Jewish Americans. With the support of a New York Public Library Short-Term Research Fellowship, I traveled to the NYPL Library for the Performing Arts Jerome Robbins Dance Division in July 2019 to interrogate the intersection of African American and Jewish American modern dance at the Y. In particular, I analyzed Jewish dancer Sophie Maslow’s (1911-2006) 1942 Folksay, which had its concert hall debut at the Y, and African American dancer Pearl Primus’s (1919-1994) 1943 Hard Time Blues, which premiered at the Y, as case studies to document this interconnection. Folksay, with its interracial cast, inserted Jewish and African American bodies into American folk idioms. Hard Time Blues articulated the exclusion of African American sharecroppers from economic prosperity. In researching these works together, I interrogated the possibilities and limits that the Y’s space and rhetoric fostered for different expressions of radical inclusivity. In order to do so, however, I first needed to create written performance reconstructions of the pieces from archival materials.

Written performance reconstructions are a key aspect of my methodology. I draw together performance programs, photographs, choreographers’ notes, correspondence, critical reception, and video footage (when possible) to craft a sense of what a dance looked and sounded like, who was on the stage and in the audience, and how it was interpreted. In the case of Folksay and Hard Time Blues, materials found in the Dance Division's collections provide information that is structural in my reconstructions and provocative for further interrogation.

Programs are the first material I use when reconstructing a dance piece. The Sophie Maslow Papers ((S) *MGZMD 372) and John Martin Papers ((S) *MGZMD 260) house programs from the debuts of Folksay and Hard Time Blues at the Y, respectively. These provide crucial information on how the individual dance pieces fit into the recitals of which they were a part.

Both Folksay and Hard Time Blues were placed at the ends of their respective programs, signaling their perceived suitability as finales. Folksay ends with its ensemble of ten dancers walking in unison across the stage. Hard Time Blues finishes as Primus walks directly towards the audience beating her thigh, as though making a demand on behalf of the African American sharecroppers of whom she danced. These pieces’ endings take on more registers of meaning when analyzed not only as the last steps of a dance piece, but also the last steps of an entire dance recital.

Folksay is comprised of numerous small segments that need to be ordered in a written reconstruction. In addition to folk music performed by Woody Guthrie, Folksay includes narration of Carl Sandburg’s poem, "The People, Yes," and banter onstage between Guthrie and his fellow musicians. In the Merry-Go-Rounders (the Y’s dance and theatre group that performed for young audiences) Record Box ((S)*MGZMD 211), I found a script for Folksay that enables me to reconstruct how the performance flows between modern dance, Guthrie’s folk music, poetry narration, and improvised/lightly scripted banter. 

Many photographs in the Dance Division’s archives aided in my written reconstructions by providing evidence of movement quality and costume choice. One of the most notable photographs, however, was not taken at the Y. In the Ivan Black Papers (JPB 06-20), I found a photo of Primus dancing the thigh-beating conclusion of Hard Time Blues at Café Society, a nightclub for which Black was a press representative. In the photo, a white couple is visible just over Primus’s shoulder. The space is tight and the stage is small. The couple holds Primus in their gaze as she makes her final demand on behalf of African American sharecroppers. This image provokes questions on how Primus made room for her political interventions in tight, and mostly white, spaces.

Written reconstructions of dance performances require searching across many different archival collections in order to find materials necessary to craft a sense of what the performance might have been like. Although dance cannot be fully captured by words, these reconstructions provide a basis from which historiography can be conducted and theoretical interventions made. Moreover, they demonstrate the non-ephemeral quality of dance performances as they live on through archives.