Nonstop Bodies: How Dance Shaped New York City

Journalist McDougall’s ambitious debut traces the evolution of modern dance in New York City in the 20th century. He explores how the city’s dancers and choreographers reworked familiar forms, with George Balanchine making New York the epicenter of American ballet in the 1930s and ’40s while drawing subtly from jazz in dances that broke “ballet’s familiar lines.” In later decades, Alvin Ailey Jr. reshaped modern dance, jazz, and ballet in performances like Revelations, a gospel-influenced ballet that drew on his Texas roots to “speak to African Americans’ shared experience of struggle and hope” and attracted new, nonwhite audiences to the art form. McDougall also explores how vastly different dance styles coexisted in the city, with the high-kicking “militant unison” of the Rockettes, whose popularity climbed in the ’30s and ’40s, contrasting with the looseness and abstraction of jazz and downtown troupes like the Communist Workers Dance League. While the author sometimes struggles to synthesize the wealth of material, he comprehensively catalogs the people and places who shaped the city’s dance innovations and teases out how dance intersected with or served as a testing ground for questions about race and gender. Dance aficionados will find plenty of interest. Photos. (May)