Anna Sokolow (1910–2000), an American Jewish choreographer known for her social statements, led the workers dance movement and performed as a soloist with Martha Graham. She imbued her dances Strange American Funeral (1935) and Case History No.— (1937) with proletarian ideology that spoke to 1930s working- and middle-class audiences aligned with values of revolutionary and modern dance. These choreographies spoke to a political atmosphere focused on social justice while they appealed to a broad dance-going public. Sokolow's Graham training engendered a modernist aesthetic in her choreography that led critics to consider her work universal instead of marked as coming from a working-class left-wing Jewish dancer. This article argues that while narratives about Sokolow's work downplay her Communist affiliations, these ideals played a critical role in her choreography and in her navigation of international Communist circles. As Sokolow's choreography reinforced her politics, so too did her affiliations support her dance work.

At the first National Dance Congress and Festival, which was held in New York in May 1936, Edna Ocko, the dance editor of New Theatre Magazine, told the assembled delegates, “One cannot minimize the importance of an artist's social point of view, for it is he who, bringing his ideas before vast audiences, can organize and direct social thought” (25). Noting that young, politically aware choreographers had already embraced the political potential of dance, Ocko listed several topical social themes recently explored in choreography, including the need for “Negro and white unity”—an assertion championed by other speakers and formally adopted in the final session of the gathering when the delegates passed the following resolution: “Whereas the Negro People in America have been subject to segregation and suppression which has limited their development in the field of creative dance, be it resolved that the Dance Congress encourage and sponsor the work of the Negro People in the creative fields” (Ocko 1936, 27 and “Resolutions” 1936, 94).

Although scholars, including myself, use Blood Memory to quote Martha Graham as evidence, other academics and dancers themselves have asserted that Graham did not write or construct the “autobiography.” The cross-reading of archives uncovers the narrative history of the making of Blood Memory, and how Graham, editors, and handlers constructed and reconstructed the book. In conclusion, by reading Graham's extensive oral histories and early writings, both scholars and dancers can recover the voice of the choreographer and woman.

This recent exhibition in Budapest assembles a fascinating documentation of the life and work of Dr. Alice Madzsar-Jászi (Photo 1), who, from her first opening of a dance school in 1912 to her untimely death in 1935, wove an intricate path through the cultural, political, and artistic avant-gardes of modern Hungary. At the turn of the century, just ten years before Madzsar launched her school, Isadora Duncan had made her solo debut in Budapest, where her improvisation to Strauss's “Blue Danube Waltz” had affected the Hungarian audience like “an electric shock” (Duncan 1927: 74). Madzsar was one of the key figures to channel that early modernist shock into the collective body electric in an increasingly diversified set of dance-related body practices, including free dance, movement culture for women's health, avant-garde theater, worker's sport, recitation choruses, and collective spectacles (Photo 2).

Over the years, screendance has generated flurries of interest within the scholarly dance community, only to watch that interest wane again and again with shifting academic trends. The past decade, however, has seen a slow-churning energy that may result in a more sustainable conversation around dance onscreen, much of which has been fueled by screendance artists and programmers themselves. A number of volumes of interest to academia have emerged as screendance artists have made homes for themselves in university settings. For makers of dance onscreen, Katrina McPherson's Making Video Dance: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Dance for the Screen (2006) and Karen Pearlman's Cutting Rhythms: Shaping the Film Edit (2009) are especially noteworthy. After Sherril Dodds's important historical and analytical book Dance on Screen: Genres and Media from Hollywood to Experimental Art (2001), however, screendance scholarship was not positioned to capitalize and build on Dodds's provocation. Liz Aggiss and Billy Cowie's edited collection Anarchic Dance (2006) offers a wonderful model for gathering together the creative work of a team of artists and scholarly writing about their work, but like Envisioning Dance on Film and Video (2002), a collection that was pulled together under Judy Mitoma's direction, the tone is somewhat self-congratulatory and the analysis is tepid. Finally, two books have come out that will stand alongside Dodds's to re-ignite conversations in the screendance field and in Dance Studies generally, and will do so in a generative and critical way: Douglas Rosenberg's Screendance: Inscribing the Ephemeral Image (2012) and Erin Brannigan's Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image (2011).