Anna Sokolow

A pioneer choreographer in modern American dance, Anna Sokolow has led a bewildering, active international life. Her meticulous biographer Larry Warren once looked up Anna Sokolow in a few reference books and found that she was born in three different years and that her parents were from Poland except when they were in Russia, and found many other inaccuracies. Drawing on material from nearly 100 interviews, Larry Warren has created a fascinating account and assessment of the life and work of Anna Sokolow, whose nomadic career was divided between New York, Mexico, and Israel. Setting her work on more than 70 dance companies, Anna Sokolow not only pioneered the development of a personal approach to movement, which has become part of the language of contemporary dance, but also created such masterpieces as Rooms, dealing with loneliness and alienation, and Dreams, which concerns the inner torment of victims of the Nazi Holocaust.

First Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This volume publishes Anna Sokolow's Ballade in Labanotation for the first time. It is a dance which explores youth and its discoveries, following the restlessness and inconclusiveness of young love to a final sombre note. The complete score is accompanied by detailed study and performance notes, historical background and photographs. Since moving to New York in 1961, Ray Cook has worked as a dancer and notator with many leading choreographers and has dedicated himself to working with Labanotation. He has directed major dance works from score, restaged many which had been considered lost and proven through his work that Labanotation is an essential means of preserving our dance heritage. He is currently an Associate Professor of Dance at Vassar College.

Drawing on material from nearly 100 interviews, Larry Warren has created a fascinating account and assessment of the life and work of Anna Sokolow, whose nomadic career was divided between New York, Mexico, and Israel.

Alex North (1910-1991) was one of America's most renowned film composers. His musical scores enhanced more than 60 major motion pictures--A Streetcar Named Desire, Cleopatra and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf among them. He had 15 Oscar nominations, and received the Lifetime Achievement Oscar. This book begins with his early life in Pennsylvania, and moves through his studies at Juilliard and in Russia and Mexico, his early experiences in modern dance, documentaries, and theater, and his major work in film. The book also offers analyses of North's musical scores for Streetcar, Spartacus, The Misfits, Under the Volcano, and Prizzi's Honor. Appendices include a bibliography, a filmography, a listing of other North compositions, a discography, and a listing of awards.

If we imagine multiple ways of being together, how might that shift choreographic practices and help us imagine ways groups assemble in more varied ways than just pairing another man with another woman? How might dancing queerly ask us to imagine futures through something other than heterosexuality and reproduction? How does challenging gender binaries always mean thinking about race, thinking about the postcolonial, about ableism? What are the arbitrary rules structuring dance in all its arenas, whether concert and social or commercial and competition, and how do we see those invisible structures and work to disrupt them? Queer Dance brings together artists and scholars in a multi-platformed project-book, accompanying website, and live performance series to ask, "How does dancing queerly progressively challenge us?" The artists and scholars whose writing appears in the book and whose performances and filmed interviews appear online stage a range of genders and sexualities that challenge and destabilize social norms. Engaging with dance making, dance scholarship, queer studies, and other fields, Queer Dance asks how identities, communities, and artmaking and scholarly practices might consider what queer work the body does and can do. There is great power in claiming queerness in the press of bodies touching or in the exceeding of the body best measured in sweat and exhaustion. How does queerness exist in the realm of affect and touch, and what then might we explore about queerness through these pleasurable and complex bodily ways of knowing?

CONTRIBUTORS: Jose Limon, Anna Sokolow, Erick Hawkins, Donald McKayle, Alwin Nikolas, Pauline Koner, Paul Taylor.

Honest Bodies: Revolutionary Modernism in the Dances of Anna Sokolow illustrates the ways in which Sokolow's choreography circulated American modernism among Jewish and communist channels of the international Left from the 1930s-1960s in the United States, Mexico, and Israel. Drawing upon extensive archival materials, interviews, and theories from dance, Jewish, and gender studies, this book illuminates Sokolow's statements for workers' rights, anti-racism, and the human condition through her choreography for social change alongside her dancing and teaching for Martha Graham. Tracing a catalog of dances with her companies Dance Unit, La Paloma Azul, Lyric Theatre, and Anna Sokolow Dance Company, along with presenters and companies the Negro Cultural Committee, New York State Committee for the Communist Party, Federal Theatre Project, Nuevo Grupo Mexicano de Clásicas y Modernas, and Inbal Dance Theater, this book highlights Sokolow's work in conjunction with developments in ethnic definitions, diaspora, and nationalism in the US, Mexico, and Israel.