| This thesis is a biography of American Modern dancer Eve Gentry from her early career in California to her prominence in 1930s New York with the original Hanya Holm dance company and the leftist New Dance Group. Gentry's art embodies the way in which the lineage of German dance pioneer Mary Wigman's Ausdruckstanz was transmitted by Holm to the American dance landscape. Gentry's life also represents the socio-political changes that affected the emerging Modern dance movement.;The thesis explores the emphatic individualism that often defines Modern dance and stands in apparent conflict with the totalitarian movements in Depression-Era Europe and New York. It also considers how amateur movement groups organized, sometimes in tandem with emergent political movements; how the leftist New Dance Group grew out of the New York Wigman School during the Great Depression; and how the Group encouraged amateur dance and simultaneously supported the development of professional artists such as Gentry. |
