Charles Dana Gibson was a well-known artist whose black and white sketches of lively young American women quickly became iconic of the changing look of American femininity. The “Gibson Girl” was youthful and active, often pictured outdoors riding a bike or swinging a tennis racket. She was, in the words of Fairfax Downey, “a pretty American girl speeding joyously along on a bicycle. On that simple machine she rode like a winged victory, women’s rights perched on the handlebars and cramping modes and manners strewn on her track” (qtd. in Banta 88). Two decades later much had changed in American culture, and Irene Castle, a famous ballroom dancer, was the new icon of a woman in motion (partnered by her husband, of course). Irene Castle had famously bobbed her hair, and her loose, flapper-style dress allowed even more freedom of movement in the legs and arms.

From the perspective of the 21st century, it is hard to comprehend how vivid and viscerally exciting changes in everyday transportation were to most people used to walking or riding in a carriage or horse and buggy. The massive expansion of railroads and the increasing availability of wheeled transport (including motor cars) radically altered people’s experience of time and space. This accelerated speed of travel meant that journeys that used to take a week or more could now be accomplished in a day. In addition, individual appetites for movement expanded as the whole world seemed to explode into motion in the first decades of the 20th century. In his essay “Torque: The New Kinaesthetic of the Twentieth Century,” Hillel Schwartz surveys a myriad of cultural discourses to show how many aspects of life were influenced by new ideas about movement. “Over the new century, between 1840 and 1940, children and adults would slowly be rehearsed into a habit of gesturing and a repertoire of ‘streamlined’ gestures central to the new kinaesthetic – clean, fluid, curvilinear gestures moving from the center of the body outward through uninterrupted but muscularly well-controlled rhythmic impulses” (Schwartz 91).

Classroom Activities:

• Read: “From Ballroom to Hell” by Thomas Faulkner and excerpt from Modern Dancing by Irene Castle
• Move: Have the class begin walking around in an enclosed space (not too big, a classroom size is perfect). After a minute ask the students to begin walking forward, backward, sideways, trying to shift directions without losing the constant rhythm of your steps. Speed up the pace and see what happens. Next ask the students to keep moving at that faster pace and find spaces between people to move through. Keep finding new spaces and continue for several minutes. Then ask everyone to find a space and stand still for two minutes, feeling the minute adjustments one has to make to stand up.
• Write: Take a few minutes to have the students write about their experience of speed and space in the above exercise.
• Discuss: What is our contemporary relationship to extreme motion and speed today? Have the students compare experiences of spinning fast, riding waves, being on a rollercoaster or in an elevator or plane.
• Watch: Find a video of Irene Castle partner dancing (e.x. Excerpt from “Whirl of Life,” Dance Heritage Coalition) and discuss your experience watching the video, after focusing in on your physical relationship to speed and direction.
• Analyze: Compare images of the Gibson Girl with Irene Castle. Then have the students look for contemporary images that are similar to the “New” woman’s streamlined look. What are the differences between the “streamlined” look of the early twentieth century and those of the early twenty-first century?

Banta, Martha. Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History. New York: Columbia UP, 1987.

Burbank, Emily. Woman as Decoration. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1917.

Schwartz, Hillel. “Torque: The New Kinaesthetic of the Twentieth Century.” Incorporations. Eds. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter. New York: Urzone, 1992.

The most artistically developed of dances were performed in the royal court and not in the temple. The court or salon repertoire was variously known as chaduru or sadir (“performed before an audience”), melam (“troupe” or “band”), mejuvani (“entertainment for a host”), kaccheri (“concert”) and kelika (“play”) in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Tamilnadu and Andhra Pradesh. This court repertoire forms the basis of the modern art form known as Bharatanatyam. This suite, consisting of seven major compositional genres, was crystallized by four brothers, known as the Thanjavur Quartet in the nineteenth century, in the Maratha-period court of the city of Thanjavur. It displays a logical and gradual unfolding of the form, and provides a balanced representation of the two elements of nritta (abstract dance) and abhinaya (mimetic dance). The majority of dance compositions in the traditional repertoire were meant to be somatic exegeses on poetic texts that were usually erotic in nature. Longing, separation, and union were the core situations that characterized the poetic texts that were performed in courtly and salon contexts.
Devadasis were socially anomalous women. Some women from the devadasi community were ritually married to temple deities in a ceremony called bottukkattudal (“tying of the bottu [marriage emblem]”) and thus were considered to be set aside from the rest of Hindu society. After the bottukkattudal, they were usually entitled to a small income or tax-free land (called maniyam) from the temple or the feudal kingdom in the region. They often lived in matrifocal households, and usually took on male partners of their choice. The children born out of such relationships would live in the homes of their mothers, aunts, sisters and cousins. Female children could be dedicated for temple work or could live within the devadasi household as non-dedicated performers. Male offspring could become musicians for the women in the community or could leave the household after marriage. Many devadasi women did not undergo a marriage to a deity, but also performed in the context of court and home concerts.

Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, a series of social reforms were ushered in by reform-minded Indians that dislodged devadasis from their traditional socio-cultural and religious roles. Devadasis were equated with prostitutes because they did not fit into the new paradigms of womanhood that were being enforced by Victorian colonialism and a nationalist resurgence of indigenous patriarchy that valued women’s domestic roles. Today, the art of the devadasi community has emerged on urban stages in India through a complex process that re-named and re-structured it, and the women of the devadasi community have been severely marginalized and socially and economically disenfranchised.

Classroom Activities

• Discuss: How can we think about the relationship between women’s dancing bodies and discourses of morality and control of female sexuality in India and beyond?

• Read: Davesh Soneji’s article on the lives of the modern descendants of the devadasis. Think about the idea of collective memory. What other examples of a community having collective memory can you think of? Soneji writes of bhogemelams shifting from being performed in front of large, elite audiences to being performed behind closed doors. How might this shifting context changed the performance?

• Expand: Consider the ties between economic or social status and ability for artistic expression. How did this affect the Kalavantulu? How has it affected other performers (ex: early African-American vaudeville performers, women in the British theater in the 17th & 18th centuries)?

Martha Graham’s Frontier, an early solo piece by the great choreographer, focuses on the frontier woman and the challenges of Westward Expansion. Graham’s innovative work utilized a minimalist set by Isamu Noguchi and music by Louis Horst to highlight the emotions and symbolism within the work.

Classroom Activities

Discuss: Ask the group what the term frontier means to them and ask them to create their own lists of definitions and associations for the word.

Analyze: Using the Movement Analysis Worksheet, have students identify spatial patterns (i.e. circular, rectangular, lines at right angles) within Graham’s Frontier. Once students can confidently identify these patterns in space, ask them to identify body shapes and different movement qualities (i.e. light/strong, fast/slow, direct/indirect).

(For more information about Movement Analysis, student should read: Words for Movement, Movement Observation Guidelines, and Rethinking Movement Analysis.)

Discuss

• What are the movement themes (repeated gestures, locomotor movements) in Frontier?
• What are the repeated spatial patterns and movement qualities (i.e. strong movement, light movement) in Frontier?
• What traits does the woman in Frontier seem to have?
• How does the dance relate to America’s Westward Expansion?
• Why might these ideas about being American have resonated within the cultural agendas that defined 1930s America?
• How might the dance have resonated with those concerned about American economic and agricultural issues?
• How does the Frontier woman resonate with our ideas about American women in the 1930s?  With contemporary ideas about women?
• Ask students to compare the definitions and associations list they created at the beginning of the class, based on their interpretation of the concept of the frontier, to their present understanding.
• Can you think of other ways that dance and movement might create a distinctive national or ethnic identity?