ABSTRACT
The focus of this chapter is male roles in US modern dance during the first half of the twentieth century. In particular it discusses performances of masculinities in works by Ted Shawn, Michio Ito, Martha Graham, and José Limón. It locates these choreographers’ work within residual nineteenth-century gender ideologies and turn-of-the-century fears about the feminisation of American culture. Given that Christian ideas were, in differing ways, important to Shawn – who had wanted to be a Methodist minister – and to Graham and Limón, it considers the role that the idea of the Muscular Christian movement played in the development of a hypermasculine template for male dancing. Shawn and Limón were both gay at a time of hostile homophobic attitudes towards same sex attraction, and this, it argues, underlay the tough aggressive choreography for men that each created. The inclusion of Michio Ito alongside these three canonised US choreographers troubles canonical accounts while opening up discussions about two generally unexplored aspects of US modern dance: its whiteness, and its transnational nature. The chapter offers a comparison of the careers of Shawn and Ito, who were roughly contemporaries, before moving on to Graham and Limón. By doing so it uncovers the richness and depth with which all four worked through the complex and contradictory effects of the ideologies at that time around gender, sexuality, ‘race’, and national identity.
