| "Dancing Jewish: Jewish Identity in American Modern and Postmodern Dance" explores how American Jewish choreographers danced "Jewish" from the late 1920s to the present day and how these representations have shifted over time. Throughout, I investigate the role concert dance has played in the struggle between Jewish identification and integration into American life. This dissertation also contributes to a larger discussion about how cultural identity, ethnicity, and gender are formed and performed through the body and its motions. My research strives not only to build upon theories and methodologies from Jewish cultural studies and dance studies, but also to put these fields in dialogue and move them forward by asking how the undeniable connections between American Jewish history and modern dance make us look at both differently. "Dancing Jewish" scrutinizes how Jewish choreographers have utilized the American concert stage as a site for building polysemous identities, and how they have maneuvered themselves between seemingly conflicting positions---American and Jewish, insider and outsider, white and off-white, present and past, masculine and feminine, modern and folkloric---achieving a semblance of solidity while in constant flux. The artists included who established their careers before 1950 are Belle Didjah, Hadassah, Pauline Koner, Pearl Lang, Dvora Lapson, Sophie Maslow, Anna Sokolow, Helen Tamiris, and Benjamin Zemach. The postmodern choreographers I discuss are David Dorfman, Dan Froot, David Gordon, Margaret Jenkins, Liz Lerman, and Victoria Marks. One of the key issues that I pursue is how Jewish choreographers amalgamate Jewish material with modernist and postmodernist aesthetics, as well as modernist and postmodernist notions of identity. Ultimately, I demonstrate that Jewishness is not a matter of essences, but rather a repertory of tropes and framing mechanisms. To this end, chapters are orchestrated thematically, rather than chronologically, to better communicate the prevalence of particular frames for Jewishness. By investigating how Jewish choreographers working in modern and postmodern dance engage, revise, or subvert particular images and practices over the course of a century, I am able to evaluate how meanings for Jewishness evolve in relation to changing historical conditions and aesthetic practices. |
