ABSTRACT
‘The term “modern” dance is obviously an inadequate one’, John Martin, The New York Times’ dance critic, declared in his 1933 book The Modern Dance (Martin 1933: 3). According to Martin, the label – ‘a blanket word which has succeeded in making itself equally offensive in all the arts’ – was doomed to lose its descriptive accuracy the instant the choreography it described was supplanted by subsequent innovations (3). Despite this reservation, Martin attached the phrase to a diverse range of concert dance choreographers and performers, including Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, and Hanya Holm – known as the Big Four because of their prominence and leadership within the New York modern dance community. In so doing, Martin constructed a chartable timeline and genealogy, which granted artists associated with this genre passage into the broader realm of aesthetic modernism.
