How to do things with dance

"Integrating dance into U.S. social and political life, Rebekah Kowal's book demonstrates persuasively that mid-century dance initiatives contributed crucial innovations to modern dance while also vitally engaging with the tensions within the American body politic that would lead to the fights for racial and gender equality in the 1960s. Her research combines meticulous scholarship with a broad and insightful command of U.S. history."--Susan Leigh Foster, Professor, University of California, Los Angeles

"Kowal convincingly argues that the most salient point of postwar American dance was not the insularity of objectivism but the engagement of action. By questioning the normative movement practices inscribed on our bodies, choreographers like Sokolow, Cunningham, and Halprin bridged method acting and the sit-ins."--Daniel Belgrad, author of Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America --Book Jacket.