Since the middle of the twentieth century, American dance artists have presented
complicated images of American identity to world audiences, as dance companies traveled
abroad under the auspices of the US State Department. This dissertation uses oral history
interviews, archival research, and performance analysis to investigate how dancers
navigated their status as official American ambassadors in the Cold War and the years
following the 2001 terrorist attacks in the US. Dance companies worked and performed in
international sites, enacting messages of American democratic superiority, while
individual dancers re-interpreted the contours of American identity through personal
encounters with local artists and arts practices. The dancers’ memories of government-sponsored
tours re-insert the American artist into American diplomatic history, prompting a reconsideration of dancers not just as diplomatic tools working to persuade
global audiences, but as creative thinkers re-imagining what it means to be American.
This dissertation begins in the late 1950s, as the State Department began
discussing appropriate dance companies to send to the Soviet Union, as part of the
performing arts initiatives that began in 1954 under the direction of President Dwight
Eisenhower. The dissertation concludes by examining more recent dance in diplomacy
programs initiated in 2003, coinciding with the US invasion of Iraq. My analysis
considers New York City Ballet’s 1962 tour of the Soviet Union, where the company
performed programs that included George Balanchine’s Serenade (1934), Agon (1957),
and Western Symphony (1954), and Jerome Robbins’ Interplay (1945) during the
heightened global anxieties of the Cuban Missile Crisis. My analysis of Ailey’s 1967 tour
of nine African countries focuses primarily on Revelations (1960), which closed every
program on the tour. Moving into the twenty-first century, I analyze A Slipping Glimpse
(2007), a collaboration between Margaret Jenkins Dance Company and Tansuree Shankar
Dance Company, which began as a US State Department-sponsored 2003 residency in
Kolkata. To explore each tour, I consider government goals documented in archived
minutes from artist selection panels; dancers’ memories of the tours, which I collected in
personal interviews conducted between 2007 and 2009; and performance analysis of the
pieces that traveled on each tour. / text
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UTEXAS/oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/ETD-UT-2010-05-768 |
| Date | 16 September 2010 |
| Creators | Croft, Clare Holloway |
| Source Sets | University of Texas |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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