The Dance Has Many Faces

The Dance Has Many Faces. Ed. Walter Sorell. 3rd edition. Chicago, IL: a cappella books, 1992.

I had seen the title of this anthology on dance in many other sources, and thought it might be wise to look it up. While it has a great many pieces from important dancers, choreographers, dance critics, and lovers of the dance world from the 1900s-1990s, there was little here to help my current research on modern dance and Cuba.

Nonetheless, I thought it might be good to summarize what this anthology does offer for a future time. This updated version (the original published in 1951) has three sections: 1940, 1960, and 1990. In this way, there is a lot of archived information about the trajectory of dance in the U.S. (and abroad by the 1990s section). The writing is by the big names in the fields of modern dance, ballet, and post-modern/contemporary dance. Of interest to me was the writings by Ruth St. Denis, Doris Humphrey, Hanya Holm, Charles Weidman who all seem to write about the transformative nature of modern dance and movement. Yet, I did not want to photocopy or archive much of it, only Charles Weidman’s essay, for the writing itself is dreamy, unspecific, and almost religious in tone. Not that these are not important, just not quite helpful for my work at the moment.

What will be archived for my research files is the essay by dance critic Walter Terry called “Favorable Balance of Trade” which discusses how the 1960s/70s are an intense time of exchange of dance; an account of Pauline Kroner that gives backward and forward glances to the development of modern dance; and Murray Louis’ “100 Years of Dance” which gives an interesting perspective on the relationship between history and art. These works will be good at contextualizing my work on modern dance, while also providing great quotes by important people in the dance world.