Politics and the Dancing Body
Domestic Projects for Export

Anti-American sentiment began to build in Latin America during the 1930s, encouraged by the Communists and Axis powers. In response, President Roosevelt appointed Nelson A. Rockefeller as the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. In 1941, Rockefeller engaged Lincoln Kirstein to develop a ballet company to represent the best of U.S. dance. American Ballet Caravan toured South America in a repertory that included highbrow ballets, such as George Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco (1941), as well as ballets that represented Americana themes, including Filling Station (1938) an interpretation of the jobs of ordinary people choreographed by Lew Christensen.

After World War II, the U.S. State Department needed propaganda to help combat anti-Americanism and the spread of communism. In 1950, under the auspices of President Harry Truman, Ballet Theatre, traveling as the American National Ballet Theatre, was deployed abroad to perform works ranging from the classically based Les Sylphides to a tale of the western frontier, Rodeo. They appeared in Germany, a European “hot spot” of the Cold War, and in Latin America, where widespread poverty raised U.S. fears that socialism and communism might become popular.

Mexican-born José Limón (1908–1972) is acknowledged to have been one of modern dance’s greatest male dancers and choreographers. In 1954 the Limón Company was the first company to be dispatched to Latin America under President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Emergency Fund.” The U.S. developed an aggressive strategy against any threats, including covert Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operations, such as the overthrow in 1954 of the democratically elected President of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán. Dance company tours often followed CIA operations.

Between 1955 and 1962, the U.S. State Department sent dance companies to many of the Cold War’s contested regions, and, in October 1955, the Martha Graham Dance Company went to Burma, India, Pakistan, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaya, and Ceylon, believed to be countries that would create a “domino effect” if “lost” to communism. The tour ended in Iran in 1956 after the CIA-British led coup that deposed Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh's civilian government in 1953. This was the first of many State Department-sponsored tours undertaken by Graham.

The 1955 Hindusthan (India) Standard reported that Graham’s tale of the frontier “ ‘Appalachian Spring’ is the best representative of the country Miss Graham comes from . . . it brilliantly brings back a chapter of American history, those pioneering days—a much needed corrective to be set against the picture of the fat, well-fed, cigar-smoking American.” In 1974, the Graham Company again performed Appalachian Spring in American-occupied Saigon, Vietnam, less than a year before the North Vietnamese entered the city.

The Cold War heated up with the successful launch in 1957 of the Soviet satellite Sputnik and the 1959 Cuban Revolution, which led to the leadership of Marxist Fidel Castro, providing communists with a foothold in the Western Hemisphere. On the cultural front, the Soviet Union’s Moiseyev Dance Company took the U.S. by storm in 1956. The State Department responded by sending the American Ballet Theater to the Soviet Union in 1960.

During the Cold War, racism in the U.S. created a daunting foreign relations problem. The Soviet Union exploited racial injustice to expand its anti-American propaganda. A government report noted, “We cannot escape the fact that our civil rights record has been an issue in world politics.” In response, the State Department sent African American artists abroad. In 1962, Alvin Ailey and Carmen de Lavallade embarked on a tour of Australia, Burma, Vietnam, Malaya, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Formosa (Taiwan), Japan, and Korea.

Although the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, racial tensions rose after the assassination of Malcolm X. Riots plagued urban America, resulting in deaths and the destruction of property. Internationally, President Lyndon Baines Johnson ordered bombing raids over North Vietnam, leading to domestic protest. Soviet propaganda connected urban violence with the war in Vietnam. In 1970, five years before the end of the Vietnam War, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater was sent to the Soviet Union—the first American modern dance company to perform there.

As the Cold War drew to a close in 1987, Martha Graham and President Ronald Reagan each travelled to Berlin to celebrate the city’s 750th anniversary. The Graham Company performances in East Berlin included Frontier (1935), a work Graham had performed at the White House under President Roosevelt fifty years earlier. She described “the hold the frontier had always had on me as an American, as a symbol of a journey into the unknown.” During the year-long celebrations, President Ronald Reagan demanded “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” The Cold War officially ended in December 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as president of the U.S.S.R. and the Council of Republics of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. acknowledged the dissolution of the Soviet Union.