Jessica Friedman

“Modern Dance in Crisis” examines how women used dance to embody and critique world financial, political, and aesthetic crises. As World War II gave way to the Cold War, a cohort of Black, Jewish, or queer women choreographed depictions of the cataclysms those wars left in their wake while gesturing to the economic and aesthetic impacts of that tumult on modern dance. In performing response to their contemporary catastrophes, such as the shooting of a Black chain gang member or a lesbian thrashing in shackles, these women mobilized crisis as a mode of identity formation. This book advances our understanding of historical and contemporary crises by providing a model for how crisis is politicized as such in the moment of performance.