Don't Act, Just Dance

Catherine Gunther Kodat

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780813573090
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

At some point in their career, nearly all the dancers who worked with George Balanchine were told “don’t act, dear; just dance.” The dancers understood this as a warning against melodramatic over-interpretation and an assurance that they had all the tools they needed to do justice to the steps—but its implication that to dance is already to act in a manner both complete and sufficient resonates beyond stage and studio. 
Drawing on fresh archival material, Don’t Act, Just Dance places dance at the center of the story of the relationship between Cold War art and politics. Catherine Gunther Kodat takes Balanchine’s catch phrase as an invitation to explore the politics of Cold War culture—in particular, to examine the assumptions underlying the role of “apolitical” modernism in U.S. cultural diplomacy. Through close, theoretically informed readings of selected important works—Marianne Moore’s “Combat Cultural, ” dances by George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, and Yuri Grigorovich, Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, and John Adams’s Nixon in China —Kodat questions several commonly-held beliefs about the purpose and meaning of modernist cultural productions during the Cold War. 
Rather than read the dance through a received understanding of Cold War culture, Don’t Act, Just Dance reads Cold War culture through the dance, and in doing so establishes a new understanding of the politics of modernism in the arts of the period. 

Part I

Rethinking Cold War Culture

1

Combat Cultural

The Moiseyev Dance Company of the Soviet Union made its U.S. premiere at the old Metropolitan Opera House in New York City on Saturday, April 19, 1958. The troupe’s visit had been organized by the charismatic impresario Sol Hurok, whose energetic courtship of Soviet cultural officials had begun two years earlier, but the company arrived in Manhattan just three months after the signing of the nations’ first bilateral cultural exchange agreement (a circumstance that delighted Hurok because it not only endowed the privately arranged booking with a certain official gravitas but also set the stage for similarly lucrative opportunities in the future).1 When New Yorkers opened their Sunday papers to rave reviews by the New York Times’s John Martin and the Herald Tribune’s Walter Terry, the public’s already strong interest in the company developed into near-mania. The Moiseyev played to a sold-out house through the rest of its New York City engagement, and Ed Sullivan dedicated an entire evening’s broadcast to the troupe (Martin, “The Dance: A la Moiseyev”; Terry, “Dance: Russians Blaze”).2

Among those who made their way to the opera house was poet Marianne Moore, who was also a guest at Hurok’s Saint Regis Hotel luncheon for company founder and artistic director Igor Moiseyev on the day of the troupe’s last performance.3 On June 6, 1959, a little more than a year after her night at the Met and her afternoon at the Saint Regis, Moore published “Combat Cultural,” a seven-stanza rumination on this momentous Russian season, in The New Yorker. Moore had an extraordinary zest for revision: over the course of almost fifty years she whittled “Poetry” from five stanzas to just three lines; when compiling her final collection, she set aside more than half of her work. Yet she kept “Combat Cultural” largely intact when she republished it in her 1959 collection O to Be a Dragon. After making a few more changes (small but, as we will see, not insignificant), she included “Combat Cultural” in her ruthlessly edited Complete Poems. (Recall that collection’s famous epigraph: “Omissions are not accidents.”)4 It seems safe to assume, then, that the poem had some significance for a writer who was not especially reverent about her own past work. Still, the poem drew scant critical interest during Moore’s lifetime or in the earliest efforts to assess her oeuvre following her death in 1972. More recent scholarship has accorded it almost no attention whatsoever.5

“Combat Cultural” is something of a pièce d’occasion; like Moore’s more famous “Hometown Piece for Messrs. Alston and Reese” it draws mostly apologetic side-glances from the handful of critics who have chosen to acknowledge it.6 Fewer than forty pages of scholarship have been devoted to “Combat Cultural,” and they present two possible approaches to the poem. According to the first view, it is one of several entertaining but minor poems that “indicate [Moore’s] pleasure in devising ever-changing rhymes and meters for the service of the arts,” a somewhat patronizing approach that ignores or misconstrues crucial aspects of the event that inspired the piece. The second view connects it to philosophical concerns addressed in other Moore poems, a well-intentioned effort that also blunts the work’s historical relevance (Stapleton 198).7

Granted, no amount of fancy critical footwork will turn “Combat Cultural” into “What Are Years.” Even so, it makes some difference to understand what the poem describes—not only the actual event that provided its central image but also the peculiar Moiseyev approach to folk dance and the political conditions that shaped it. “Combat Cultural” deserves analysis that makes clear the connections linking its subject, the circumstances that occasioned its creation, and its formal properties. Despite its teasing conclusion that the dance it describes (and so, by extension, the poem itself) “may . . . point a moral,” “Combat Cultural” is best understood not as a claim about some universal property of wisdom but rather as a meditation on the relationship between artistic and political regimes of representation, a meditation so steeped in the event it describes that the reader who knows nothing about U.S. and Soviet government efforts to enlist the arts in the cold war may find the poem incomprehensible.

What is worth knowing, then, about the arts of the cold war if one is to understand “Combat Cultural”? We could start with the poem’s manifest (though never directly named) subject, the Moiseyev Dance Company. Igor Moiseyev (who died in 2007 at age 101) trained at the Bolshoi Ballet school and spent his early dance career entirely within the confines of the Russian ballet. He founded his company in 1937, a year after being appointed director of the Moscow Theatre for Folk Art. As the founding date hints, and as a glance at the company’s repertory makes clear, Moiseyev was quite mindful of the Soviet government’s rapidly-growing suspicion of modernist, “Western,” aesthetic values, a suspicion that burgeoned into the Stalinist zhdanovshchina aesthetic. Moore, herself a modernist with a keen understanding of dance, would have recognized that even though popular and folk material did inform certain advanced artistic practices of the period (say, the work of Charles Ives and Béla Bartók), Moiseyev’s choreography could not be termed modernist. Emphasizing technical virtuosity and bravura physical display, the repertory of the Moiseyev Dance Company favored the broad, flat road of the circus act, its folk details working largely to solicit state sanction of production values more in the spirit of Radio City Music Hall than of a collectivized farm or factory.8 As Moore’s poem slyly (but non-judgmentally) observes, Moiseyev’s was not the kind of “high quality” art “unlikely to command high sales.” On the contrary, his dances were built to deliver mass-appeal spectacle—what “one likes to see.”9

“Combat Cultural” offers brief, single-stanza sketches of two Moiseyev dances that neatly represent popular 1950s American notions of Russia: “a documentary / of Cossacks” points to the stoical Red solidarity of the company’s celebrated “Partisans,” while the “aimlessly drooping handkerchief” signals the czarist affectations of “City Quadrille.” From this introduction the poem moves to its main image, taken (as Moore explains in the footnotes to her final version) from “Two Boys in a Fight,” a choreographic one-liner that for years was one of the most popular works in the company’s repertory.10 Moiseyev Dance Company programs routinely claim that the piece reproduces the wrestling style of “the Nanayan people” of “the frozen regions of the Northern Soviet Union,” and “Combat Cultural” provides an accurate description of the piece (Moiseyev Dance Company 16).11 What appear to be two small figures clenched together and swathed in fur-trimmed Arctic native garb wrestle back and forth across the stage. The dance proceeds through a comic series of leg holds and falls, including a bit of apparent wall walking and a moment of literal brinksmanship at the edge of the orchestra pit, before its conclusion, when the costume pops open to show that the two identically dressed “battlers” are in fact “just-one-person.” The slapstick contest between adversaries so perfectly matched as to be “seeming twins” is, then, only half of the joke: With the trick of the dance revealed, viewers realize that the joke has been on them, and the register of their enjoyment shifts from laughter at the farcical antics of two boys in a fight to wonder at the skill of the single dancer who so ably carried off the deception.12

In rendering “the favorite sport and constant pastime” of a Siberian native people as music hall shtick, “Two Boys in a Fight,” despite its seeming oddity, is representative of the Moiseyev approach to folk dance (Moiseyev Dance Company 16). Shortly after founding his troupe, Moiseyev articulated its four aims: to “create classic national dances . . . reject everything extraneous . . . raise the skill of the performance of folk dances to the highest artistic level, and . . . improve ancient dances in such a way as to influence the creation of new national dances” (Moiseyev Dance Company 4). The company’s mission was not, then, to preserve vanishing cultural treasures (riven as they often were with politically problematic, “extraneous” material) but to streamline and modernize (without making modernist) “ancient,” ethnic dances so that they would embody, in ways that were both inspiring and reassuring, a Soviet vision of cultural unity-in-diversity. As anyone who has seen the Moiseyev knows, this involves adding gymnastic and ballet values to what otherwise are quite simple steps.

The technical and stylistic gulf between actual folk dance and Moiseyev folk dance did not go unnoticed during the company’s Met season. John Martin commented on it in his review, though he found both the dancers’ extraordinary technical facility and Moiseyev’s creative approach to his raw material entirely praiseworthy, and most dance critics covering the 1958 season joined him in applauding Moiseyev’s artistic vision. “Of the present repertoire some of the numbers are highly selective arrangements and formalizations of an ‘authentic’ folk dance,” Martin wrote. “The hand of the choreographer . . . is clearly seen in them” (“The Dance: A la Moiseyev”).13 In accepting this substitution of deliberately arranged, highly schooled movement for more heterogeneous homegrown gesture, Martin and his fellow critics likewise accepted Moiseyev’s implicit claim (which amounted to a rewriting in dance terms of Russocentric Soviet policies) that the diversity of U.S.S.R. folk-dance forms could legitimately be subsumed under the category of Russian folk dance—a reclassification that in turn nicely licensed the revising, government-approved “hand of the choreographer.”14 That intervening hand is obvious in “Two Boys in a Fight,” a work that is much less a folk dance than an ethnic novelty act, one that in April 1958 translated particularly well from Russian to American. What had been written as “Samoyedic” in the Soviet Union could be read as “Eskimo” in an Arctic-fascinated United States, where, just three months after the Moiseyev season, President Dwight D. Eisenhower would sign the Alaska Statehood Act. The two nations’ parallel projects of extending national sovereignty into territory above the Arctic circle were indeed “seeming twins”—and not only geographically.15

Moore was almost certainly not familiar with the tragic facts of Nganasan life under Russian (later Soviet) rule, but she did know something about dance.16 It is revealing, then, that of all the works she saw during the Moiseyev’s Metropolitan Opera season she chose to apotheosize the piece with the least purely choreographic interest. For as its title indicates, and as drafts of the poem make clear, “Combat Cultural” is not centrally concerned with detailing the visual pleasures of the dance. The first stanza of the poem does cast the Moiseyev season as a specific example of the enjoyment offered by demonstrations of physical grace and athletic prowess, but two late typescript versions show that Moore saw this stanza as expendable.17 Rather, the poem subtly addresses the Moiseyev season as an aspect of the growing practice of using art as a tool to promote strategic national goals. Moore was not alone in seeing the Moiseyev as an invitation to consider the relationship between the arts and politics: most of Walter Terry’s Herald Tribune review of the company’s opening night performance was a polemic in favor of expanding U.S. cultural diplomacy. “One need not delve deeply into the political implications of the visit to come up with the simple fact that the Russians have made a mighty effective move in sending us a mass of smiling, richly talented ambassadors,” he wrote. “Only the United States government, if it recognizes the ambassadorial powers of the dance (and it should by this time), can see to it that the Russian people enjoy as stirring a glimpse of us as we have of them in the persons of the Moiseyev artists” (“Dance: Russians Blaze”). But while both critic and poet recognized the large issues afoot in the Moiseyev season, “Combat Cultural” shows Moore hesitant to tread where Terry rushes in. The poem has no interest in presenting the dancers’ “explosive exuberance and stunning virtuosity” as proof of the need for increased government “exploitation” of the arts (“Dance: Russians Blaze”). Instead, “Combat Cultural” takes up the representational challenge presented by “Two Boys in a Fight” to examine (rather than applaud, deplore, or quietly accept) the notion that the arts and politics should be seen as “battlers dressed identically.”

As a mode of artistic practice and scholarly exegesis, allegory is one of the oldest and most direct methods of linking artistic form to political event. Certainly, Moore’s description of the Moiseyev’s stagy Arctic wrestling match can be read as an allegory of the contemporaneous, extra-theatrical, and similarly “cold” U.S.-Soviet conflict. But following her allegory’s deepest implications leads a reader to the unexpected proposition that what looks like a struggle between two diametrically opposed political systems may be better understood as a trompe l’oeil rendering of a single phenomenon of aggression. I say unexpected because Moore’s poetry is not generally mined for its geopolitical insight. Yet as both David Caute and Odd Arne Westad have made clear, the cold war came about in no small degree thanks to the acres of political, cultural, and ideological common ground shared by the Soviet Union and the United States. Westad describes a “Russian exceptionalism” that, like its U.S. counterpart, entailed a belief in the “[Soviet] mission as part of a world-historical process.” Likewise, Caute observes that the cultural front of the cold war “was possible only because both sides were agreed on cultural values to an extent that may seem astonishing, given the huge divide between a ‘totalitarian’ system and a pluralistic democracy” (Westad 72; Caute, The Dancer Defects 4). On the whole, Westad’s and Caute’s studies have markedly different aims and take irreconcilable positions on the most substantive consequences of the cold war. Whereas Westad emphasizes its effects on the postcolonial fortunes of so-called “third world” nations whose internal political conflicts became bloody proxy wars between the superpowers, Caute claims that, “in forty-five years of cold war, Americans and Russians brought down the occasional plane, little more” (5). Given these differences, their shared point about U.S.-Soviet resemblance is all the more striking.

Moore’s multiple drafts of “Combat Cultural” show that U.S.-Soviet cold war politics and the Moiseyev’s cold “battlers” comprised the poem’s theme and subject from its conception. “People to People / Person to Person” appears in the center of the single sheet of handwritten notes that were almost certainly her first approach to the poem. Distributed around these words are the phrases “in breathless contortion,” “bunnyhug,” “boy grapplers,” and “this remote cold Russia” (Moore Collection). Completely unrecognizable as verse, the notes show Moore following a line of associations stemming from Eisenhower’s early foray into cold war cultural combat: the People to People program of “citizen diplomacy” that had been launched with fanfare just two years before the Moiseyev season.18 An extremely rough typescript draft (possibly her first effort to transmute her impressions into verse) shows her widening the subject of the poem to include other dances (“A dance of the sabres—just for two”; “The dancer of old Russia for me: / with aimlessly drooping handkerchief”), toying with a title (“Old Russia Cold Russia,” “The (Cultural) Guests Fight Combat”), and adding an early version of the stanza that denies an inverse relationship between high-quality art and high sales by appealing to the manifest skill of “Two Boys in a Fight.” In this draft the poem’s final stanza begins to take shape: “Old Russia, did I say? Cold Russia / this time. matching tusslers / have to be two parts of one objective / wrestlers of old Russia / are symbolic not satiric.” Squeezed in between this stanza and several hastily scrawled stabs at a description of “Two Boys in a Fight” (“the bunnyhug,” “twisters in a rug,” “wrestlers in a rug”) are, again, the words “people to people / person to person” (Moore Collection).

“Combat Cultural” is topical, but its effects resonate beyond its immediate moment thanks to that final stanza, which adopts a skeptical view of the assumed genetic correspondence between cultural text and political pretext that is foundational not only to allegorical reading but also to any diplomatic or strategic use of the arts. Taken together, the poem’s central image and closing moral emphasize art’s power to misrepresent or alter reality, as the recognition that we have mistaken one for two opens onto its opposed (or twinned) realization: unities, too, may be seen as temporary, even imaginary, once we understand how the symmetry and wholeness of a work of art (Moore’s “objective symbolic of sagesse”) is an effect of a studied technical virtuosity, of cunningly worked “cement.”19 By casting “Two Boys in a Fight” as both an emblem of cold war superpower relations and a lesson on the craftiness of aesthetic wisdom, the poem pushes us to consider the complex and paradoxical relationship between politics and art, modes of organizing human life that simultaneously endorse and critique each other. Political entities may literally set the stage for the making, disseminating, and experiencing of art, thereby seeming to establish not only the conditions of an artist’s production but also the terms in which her work is presented. Yet they rarely succeed in dictating or controlling its reception or interpretation. Fourteen years after the Moiseyev’s New York season, in what could be understood as a mid–cold war philosophical treatise, Jacques Derrida insisted on writing’s combativeness, its ability to speak beyond, even to contravene, the intentions of its governing-authoring “father.” Though he focused on the word, his arguments hold true for the nonliterary texts of music, dance, film, and painting, as well.20 In truth, Moore’s poem configures the field of cultural production as a battleground in which deception in one register becomes illumination in another. For the “combat” of “Combat Cultural” is not only a battle for global political hegemony conducted in displaced fashion via cultural ploughshares beaten into ideological swords. It is also a battle over the politics of aesthetic signification, staged as much within the artworks themselves as within the opera house.

As Moore built up “Combat Cultural” from its early drafts, her bald references to Eisenhower’s cold war cultural program rapidly fell away. But close attention to the typescript drafts a...