Owen Burke reviews benefits for Spain and China by some of the world’s leading dancers.

‘Dances for Spain and China’ by Owen Burke from New Masses. Vol. 26 No. 8. February 15, 1938.

FOR Spain, for democracy and peace against fascism and war, the American Dance Association continued its excellent cultural work with a presentation at the Hippodrome, N.Y., of the cream of the dance world in one of the best recitals of this or any season.

Anna Sokolow’s dance unit performed the anti-fascist War Poem, Martha Graham did her poignant Imperial Gesture and intensely emotional Deep Song, and her group danced the swift paced Celebration. Tamiris and her group did Momentum. Hanya Holm appeared with her group in sections from Trend.

For the ballet section of the evening, Paul Draper, tap dancer par excellence, appeared for the first time in New York under an anti-fascist banner, and took the house by storm. Draper has a good knowledge of ballet technique and uses it to considerable advantage in his Minuet, Ain’t Necessarily So, and Blue Danube to the music of Handel, Gershwin, and Johann Strauss, respectively, but I find his tap a bit cold. There is enough good movement in his dancing, and he covers good bit of territory, but the warmth of Bill Robinson and Fred Astaire won’t be found in his work. Draper is the polished intellectual stylist. Bill Robinson is still the only Bojangles.

Arthur Mahoney, whose stage presence is one of the most lively in the dance field, did his always popular Farruca. Mahoney’s Spanish folk dancing is especially gifted, and by far the most successful of the many forms with which he works in the concert medium.

Lincoln Kirstein’s Ballet Caravan, appearing too for the first time in a program for Spain, closed the evening with Show Piece, recently reviewed.

The dance movement in America has been persistently progressive, if not revolutionary.

That almost without exception every mature and important dancer appeared at the Hippodrome for the Medical Bureau and the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy is further testimony of the position and temper of the American dancer in the daily cultural and economic struggles.

For China, Si-lan Chen made her American debut at the Windsor Theatre under the auspices of the American Friends of the Chinese People in a concert of character and folk dances.

Si-lan Chen has an exceedingly warm stage personality, works on small sketches principally from ballet base, and her dancing is not too much unlike the recent work of Angna Enters. She mimes a Landlord on a Horse, a Boat Girl, does clipped Shanghai Sketches: Empty Bowl, Rickshaw, slight sketches, not too profound and not too thorough in their analysis of subject matter. Her most satisfactory composition was the story of a Chinese student who is killed while distributing leaflets. Most pleasing, however, was the beautifully lyric Uzbek folk dance. Naïvely childlike, winsome, the dance is as delicately conceived in movement as an Oriental carving. It was a gem and was easily the happiest indication of the wealth of dancing there is to be seen in the Soviet Union.

For China, too, as guest artist, Anna Sokolow presented her Ballade and her Case History No.– which continues to stand out as one of the most magnificent pieces of solo work in the dance theater. Intense in structure, literally tearing away at space in a nervous staccato rhythm, dominated by a desire for security, the dance is the story of the breaking down of the morale of the typical youngster outlawed to a street-corner existence. In composition, dramatic conception, and presentation, it is easily one of the most gripping compositions to come from the younger dancers.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s and early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1938/v26n08-feb-15-1938-NM.pdf