Her Two Cents

Her name is widely known and revered in dance and theater circles; her work and ideas were deeply influential for many decades. Anna Sokolow was a seminal figure in American modern dance—a deeply individual, strongly committed artist who connected profoundly with the issues, conflicts and sensibilities of her times. For Jim May, who danced in her company starting in 1966 and now directs the Sokolow Theatre Dance Ensemble, what made her work distinctive and powerful was “the honesty. It’s not superficial. She believed that emotion created motion,” he says. “And a lot of dance is done with the motion first, and then they add emotion on top of that. With Anna, you had to find the emotion, and then that would lead to the movement.”

Sokolow would have turned 100 on Feb. 9, and both May’s ensemble and the Limón Dance Company are taking note of the centennial. The former will perform excerpts from a sampling of her dances spanning more than 50 years, while the Limón troupe will perform her most well-known and revered work, Rooms, which May staged for them in 2008. When they danced it as part of their Joyce Theater season that year, the terse, edgy jazz score by Kenyon Hopkins was heard in recorded form. For this centennial event, it will be performed live by the Manhattan School of Music Jazz Department.

Rooms, which had its premiere in 1955 at the 92nd Street Y, is a dance of searing power—a spare, devastating evocation of people trying to break out of their isolated existences. Its eight dancers portray very contemporary people, each attempting to find escape, a confining, isolated world, some through their imaginations, some through anger.

May was speaking from Boston, where he was in the process of staging Rooms for Boston Conservatory students. Asked about the challenges of getting Sokolow’s ideas across to today’s young dancers, he said, “One of the things is that they don’t know anything about the other arts. They only know about dance as a pure-movement thing. That’s really difficult when you’re dealing with Anna, who was involved with all the other arts.”

Sokolow’s repertory calls for dancers who are also actors, he emphasized. Her work demands much of performers: “You have to study acting as well as dance. And your dance training has to be eclectic, you have to know tap, ballet, the different modern styles. Also, you need to have maturity.” Sokolow herself worked often in theater—on Broadway, she was the choreographer of Kurt Weill’s Street Scene and Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, among others—and for many years, she taught movement for actors at Juilliard, where she influenced several generations of dance and theater students.

She was an early member of Martha Graham’s company, dancing in the severe, all-female works of the 1930s. She left the company just before Graham brought in her first male dancers, Erick Hawkins and then Merce Cunningham. While always based in New York, Sokolow developed close ties with Mexico and Israel, helping to found and nurture companies in both countries. During the 1940s, she spent half of each year in Mexico, where she helped found the first government-sponsored modern dance company.

For the Sokolow Theater Dance Ensemble’s salute to her centennial, May has selected a particularly representative sampling of her dances. It includes Kaddish, a 1945 work in which she responded to the horrors of the Holocaust, evoking Jewish prayer rituals and evoking a sense of profound loss. The program includes works set to Scriabin, Rachmaninoff and Kurt Weill as well as an excerpt from Frida, her last work. May describes this 1997 homage to Frida Kahlo as “a spectacular multi-media dance.” The excerpts shown at the Y should whet appetites for the full work, which the Sokolow Theatre Dance Ensemble will present at its Joyce Soho performance in April.

May explained how he fortuitously encountered Murals, a Sokolow work he had not previously known, that will also be shown in excerpted form at the Y and complete in April. “She made it in Mexico 1980, for students in Vera Cruz, and it was never performed again. I met a Mexican dance teacher who had been in it, and had a pirated video, and I’ve reconstructed it on my company. It’s set to a Carlos Chavez drum score, and is in a very different style, very primitive. I was quite amazed at it.”

Truly representative of the early generation of modern dance, for whom dance could confront essential human conflicts and delve into deep subject matter, Sokolow remained a singular and influential figure throughout her life. In a thoughtful 1966 essay about modern dance, she wrote, “The artist should belong to his society, yet without feeling that he has to conform to it. He must feel that there is a place for him in society, a place for what he is. He must see life fully, and then say what he feels about it.”

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Limón Dance Company Celebrates Sokolow

Feb. 9 & 10, Baryshnikov Arts Center, 450 W. 37 St. (betw. 9th & 10th Aves.), 212-777-3353, ext. 10; 8, $20 and up.

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Sokolow Theatre Dance Ensemble 100th Birthday Tribute

Feb. 14, 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center, 1395 Lexington Ave. (at E. 92nd St.), 212-415-5500; 3, $12.