ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at representations of masculinity in the work of two black American choreographers – Eleo Pomare (1937–2008) and Alvin Ailey (1931–1989) – and two white ones – Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) and Steve Paxton (b. 1939). Through a discussion of their work, it examines their responses to the new, more complicated problems concerning gender, sexuality, ‘race’, and national identity in the United States during the post-war period from a point of view rooted in the city environment. It proposes some commonality between Pomare's politicised and ‘realist’ dance theatre up in Harlem and the experimental dance practices of Cunningham and the dancers associated with Judson Dance Theater down in Greenwich Village. However, the underlying anger in some of Pomare and Ailey's work and the apolitical indifference of the white avant-garde, though only a subway ride apart from one another, seemed to be coming from different worlds. The chapter reflects on the particular way in which oppositional or countercultural ideas about community and sociality developing in different parts of the city informed the ways in which Ailey, Pomare, Cunningham, and Paxton were able to relate to, or react against, the dominant gender ideologies of post-war US society.
