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Dancers as Diplomats: American Choreography in Cultural Exchange

Online ISBN:
9780190226329
Print ISBN:
9780199958191
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Dancers as Diplomats: American Choreography in Cultural Exchange

Clare Croft
Clare Croft

Assistant Professor of Dance

The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
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Published online:
19 March 2015
Published in print:
3 March 2015
Online ISBN:
9780190226329
Print ISBN:
9780199958191
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

This book examines the American government’s harnessing of dance to export an idealized image of “America,” focusing on the early decades of the Cold War and of the twenty-first century, periods when the State Department engaged in cultural diplomacy by sending American dance companies abroad to advance its foreign policy objectives. The companies who have traveled as American cultural ambassadors included the New York City Ballet, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the Martha Graham Dance Company, Urban Bush Women, Ronald K. Brown’s Evidence, ODC/Dance, and the Trey McIntyre Project—all chosen after a layered approvals process in which they were deemed to be appropriately “American.” Narrating the story of the dance-in-diplomacy programs from the perspective of the dancers who traveled on tours through the Soviet Union, Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Eastern European communist bloc, the book exposes on-the-ground tensions as well as possibilities for intercultural exchange as the dancers reconciled their “official” status as cultural ambassadors with their identities as artists. Revealing the shifts in America’s foreign-policy agenda that were often the catalysts for tour planning and execution, the book sets the tours against the backdrop of history, in particular the US-Soviet standoff, the Cold War’s most foundational policy frame; postcolonial movements in Africa and Asia; and the eventual “collaborative turn” in American cultural diplomacy, the hallmark of the twenty-first-century programs that focused on building international relationships rather than exporting American superiority.

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