Modern Dancers

To a ballet dancer the modern expressionist dance is a heinous horror; to the expressionist dancer the ballet is merely pretty movement to titillate the fancies of tired businessmen. The modernists have long held entrenched positions in arty lofts and studios, have expressed sexless conceptions of revolt and starvation to the tootling of oboes and the thumping of drums. In Broadway theatres on Sunday nights these restless, grim-eyed chorines illustrate the serious things of life before coal-black backdrops, attract audiences of starry-eyed worshippers at a $2.50 top (standees 50^).

Last week 3,300 Manhattanites, including hundreds whom bribery or culture-maddened wives could not have dragged to the ordinary Sunday-night doings, elbowed each other before Radio City's Center Theatre, paid as high as $5.50 a seat to see a hash of items mostly warmed over from past modernist recitals. Three hundred and fifty standees broke the theatre's record, established on the closing night of The Great Waltz. As the formal conclusion of Manhattan's five-week Olympic Dance International, what was old stuff to Greenwich Village longhairs became a tiptop Broadway box-office attraction.

Following an oration by funereal John Martin, dance critic of the New York Times, veteran Ruth St. Denis, artistic progenitor of most modern American expressionists, evoked past history as the evening's curtain raiser. The Japanese maiden of White Jade, more familiar to dance audiences of the medieval 1920s, proved the program's high point in pleasantness.

But pleasantness was not the idea. The mists & veils of Denishawn soon gave way to High Priestess Martha Graham's surrealistic fence-act. Frontier, and to stylized swaying and leaping by dead-pan Grahamite assistants. Favored by streamlined technique and by an early position on an anti-climactic program, mask-faced Graham's parsimonious convolutions drew bravos. So did the following Theatre Piece, in which Pantomimist Charles Weidman skittered in black tights while Doris Humphrey caressed a purple cube before a background of dismembered limbs and torsos. For a moment things looked better for the tired businessman when symbol-minded, mop-headed Tamiris shook substantial thighs beneath a raspberry-sundae skirt. But this performance was actually a satire on the evils of decadent capitalism. Hanya Holm, disciple of Mary Wigman. led massive cohorts of healthy-looking Backfisch through what resembled a Swedish drill, called the result Trend.

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