bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Shabtai, Yaakov (1934–1981)
Authors: Ginsburg Shai
Published: September 2018

An Israeli Hebrew author, playwright, lyricist, and translator, Yaakov Shabtai was born in Tel Aviv in 1934 (Wikipectia …). Shabtai began translating plays and writing lyrics and original plays following his military service, when he lived in a kibbutz. In 1967, he moved back to Tel Aviv to dedicate himself to writing. In 1972, a collection of his short stories was published. Both his plays and short fiction received mixed reviews at the time of their original publication. In 1977, Shabtai published his first novel, ZikhronDvarim [Past Continuous], which was immediately recognized as a unique literary achievement and as one of the most significant works of modern Hebrew literature. Shabtai died in 1981 of heart failure. His second novel, SofDavar [Past Perfect], edited jointly by his widow, Edna Shabtai, and by the literary critic Dan Miron, was published posthumously in 1984 to great critical acclaim.
Natsume, Sōseki (1867–1916)
Authors: Abel Jonathan
Published: September 2018

Natsume Sōseki (b. Natsume Kinnosuke, generally referred to by his pen name Sōseki, adopted originally for signing his poetry) is commonly held to be the greatest modern Japanese novelist. An idiosyncratic man of letters, he was a path-breaking satirist and stylist, as well as a critic and scholar of English literature. Among the first Japanese writers to make a living solely by the sales of his own literary work, Sōseki occupied the ironic position of having become widely popular by writing about the extreme loneliness of the modern condition. His place in the Japanese canon has only grown since his death, with his works appearing in anthologies of modern literature and regularly listed in school curricula; his visage also appeared for decades on the 1,000 yen note.
Horton, Lester (1906–1953)
Authors: Dinerman Diana
Published: September 2018

Lester Horton, regarded as one of the founders of American modern dance, worked outside the established center of New York City, establishing a permanent dance theater in Los Angeles in 1946. The Lester Horton Dance Theater was a multidisciplinary arts school for children and adults, offering training in all aspects of theater production; both the school and company were multiracial, a rarity at that time. Horton’s broad choreographic range allowed him to work in films, nightclubs, and on the concert stage. His fascination with folklore, cultural history, and ethnic dance informed his diverse body of work, with themes ranging from the classics to melodrama, social commentary to satire. Working with his dancers, most notably Bella Lewitzky, he developed the Horton technique over two decades of classroom work, which is still taught today in the U.S. and abroad. In addition to Lewitzky, Horton’s influence continued through the careers of Alvin Ailey, Janet Collins, Carmen de Lavallade, James Mitchell, Joyce Trisler, and James Truitte.
Vaginov, Konstantin Konstantinovich Wagenheim [ВАГИНОВ, КОНСТАНТИН КОНСТАНТИНОВИЧ ВАГЕНГЕЙМ] (1899–1934)
Authors: Pavlov Evgeny
Published: September 2018

Konstantin Konstantinovich Wagenheim Vaginov was a Russian poet and novelist affiliated at different points with a number of literary groups in Petrograd/Leningrad. While originally born in St. Petersburg, he spent most of his life in Petrograd, which occupies a central position in his writings. He is best known for his four novels in which he ironically depicts the demise of Russia’s pre-revolutionary Silver Age in the Soviet Union of the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Born on 16 April 1899 in St. Petersburg, he died in Leningrad on 26 April 1934. Vaginov grew up in the family of a high-ranking police official of German (and possibly Jewish) background. The family Russified their name after the start of World War I. Vaginov attended the Law Faculty of Petrograd University from where he was called upon to join the Red Army in 1919. Upon returning to his home city, he was active in several literary circles, including Acmeist Nikolai Gumilev’s Poets’ Guild, which he joined in 1921. He co-founded the Islanders group, in whose collected volume his poetry was first published. In 1924, Vaginov met the critic and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. Members of Bakhtin’s intellectual circle later served as prototypes for Vaginov’s first novel, Goat Song (1927). After 1927 Vaginov was affiliated with the avant-garde group Obedinenie real’nogo iskussta (OBERIU) and, together with its key members, participated in OBERIU’s famous evening "Three Left Hours," which he parodied in his second novel, Works and Days of Svistonov (1929). In 1931, Vaginov was subjected to a vicious attack by members of the proletarian writers’ group RAPP. His last two prose works, Bambocciada (1931) and Harpagoniana (1933, unpublished in his lifetime), explore many of the same themes as his first two novels, but irony and the carnivalesque give way to the grotesque in both. Vaginov died of tuberculosis in 1934, after a long illness.
von Heidenstam, (Carl Gustaf) Verner (1859–1940)
Authors: Hron Irina
Published: September 2018

Verner von Heidenstam was a Swedish poet and prosaist whose name is closely associated with modern Swedish nationalism. He is counted among the most influential advocates of the conservative movement throughout early Swedish modernism and was also attacked by Strindberg during the famous Strindberg Feud. The national romantic tendencies in his literary works, as well as their idealistic historicism, stand in sharp contrast to the realistic, socio-critical slogans of the 1880s. As of 1912, Heidenstam was a member of the Swedish Academy, and in 1916 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1910 he acquired the manor Övralid in the south of Sweden where he died in 1940.
Zacharia, Paul (1945--)
Authors: V Sanil
Published: September 2018

Paul Zacharia, a short story writer, novelist, and essayist, introduced the notion of counter-modernity to Malayalam literature in the late 1960s. He rejected the self-definition of Western modernity and its Indian nationalist versions. Drawing upon the clarity of vernacular Biblical idioms and the intelligence of everyday rural life, Zacharia probed the fragile certainties of urban life, intellectual establishments, and religious orthodoxies. He acknowledged that ‘Jesus Christ, cinema, bars, friends, lovers, hens and dogs have given me stories.’

Zacharia was born in the village of Urulikunnam, near Kottayam, and published his first story, ‘Unni the Child’, in 1964. Zachariayude Kathakal, the collection of his short stories written up to the year 2000, won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2006. Two of his novellas, Praise the Lord and Enthondu Visesham Pilathose? [What News, Pilate?], have been translated into English. Two short story collections are also available in English: Bhaskara Pattelar and Other Stories and Reflections of a Hen in Her Last Hour and Other Stories. Vidheyan [The Servile], a film that won best Malayalam film in 1993, was an adaptation of Zacharia’s story ‘Bhaskara Pattelarum Ente Jeevithavum.’ Zacharia has been active in print media and publishing; he was one of the founders of the Asianet television network.
Zangwill, Israel (1864–1926)
Authors: Greenberg Erik
Published: September 2018

Israel Zangwill was a British-Jewish author, journalist, and activist. Among his best-known literary works are the novel The Children of the Ghetto (1892), and the melodrama ‘The Melting Pot’ (1908). In Jewish political circles, Zangwill was well known both for his role in the Zionist movement and as the founder of the Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO). Like other modern Jewish thinkers, Zangwill pursued a Jewish identity that balanced tradition and assimilation. Initially attracted to the Zionism of Theodore Herzl, Zangwill later founded the ITO, which sought a Jewish home in any plausible location as a result of the Kishinev pogroms of 1903, Britain’s subsequent offer of an autonomous Jewish home in Africa (the Uganda Plan), and Herzl’s death in 1904. But Zangwill also argued that the growing importance of the American Jewish community should become a cultural centre of Jewish life by means of the creation of a vibrant, evolutionary, Jewish religion and culture, uniting Jewish history with American creativity. Zangwill eventually abandoned both Zionism and American idealism as solutions. In a 1923 address to the American Jewish Congress, which alienated many listeners, he pronounced political Zionism dead, arguing that the restrictions of the Balfour Declaration and the demographic superiority of the Arab population would doom the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine — a prediction that resonates today. Zangwill also criticized the American Jewish community for its failure to demand social justice in the political arena. After 1923, Zangwill was a marginal figure in Jewish discourse, though today there is renewed scholarly interest in his work.
Zenkevich, Mikhail Aleksandrovich (1886–1973)
Authors: Cheloukhina Svetlana
Published: September 2018

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Zenkevich was a Russian poet and author, one of the founders of Tsekh poetov [The Guild of Poets] and the Acmeist movement—a representative of its left wing, Adamism. The association of Zenkevich and Narbut with Acmeism has often been referred to as one of a social and rather conventional nature, yet for both poets it was indisputable. Zenkevich’s first book, Dikaia porfira [Savage Purple] (1912), praised by Acmeism’s leader Nikolai Gumilev (1912), as well as by fellow poets Sergei Gorodetsky and Georgy Ivanov (1994), is on a par with Anna Akhmatova’s Vecher [Evening] (1912), Vladimir Narbut’s Alliluiia [Hallelujah] (1912), and Osip Mandelstam’s Kamen’ [Stone] (1913) for its importance to the Acmeist aesthetic.

Zenkevich’s legacy is significant and diverse. He authored twelve books of poetry, two novels, Muzhitskii Sfinks [The Peasant Sphinx] (1928) and Na strezhen’ [To the River Bend] (1994); short prose, dramatic poems—Al’timetr [Altimeter] (1991–1921, 2004) and Triumf aviatsii [The Triumph of Aviation] (1937, unpublished)—translations, and critical articles. He became one of the founders of the Russian 20th-century school of poetic translation and was the longest surviving member of Acmeism.
Zinovieva-Annibal, Lydia Dmitrievna (1866–1907)
Authors: Baer Brian James
Published: September 2018

A Russian prose writer and dramatist, Zinovieva-Annibal (with her second husband, Viacheslav Ivanov) hosted the influential literary salon known as The Tower. Born in St Petersburg into an aristocratic family, Zinovieva-Annibal was a rebel and nonconformist throughout her life and in her work. She was known for her intensity and eccentricity. Writing in various genres, she produced Symbolist plays, such as The Rings [Kol’tsa] (1904) and The Singing Ass [Pevuchii osel], the novels Thirty-three Abominations [Tridtsat’-tri uroda] (1907) and The Tragic Menagerie [Tragicheskii zverinets] (1907), and other short stories, many of which were published only posthumously in the collection entitled No! [Net!] (1918). Zinovieva-Annibal is perhaps best known for Thirty-three Abominations, the first work of Russian literature to deal openly with the theme of lesbianism, which is portrayed in a decadent, tragic light. Like the short story ‘The Head of the Medusa,’ Thirty-three Abominations critiques the objectifying male gaze. The semi-autobiographical Tragic Menagerie, considered by critics to be her strongest work, is a female Bildungsroman, which traces the evolution of the heroine, Vera, from childhood to adulthood, when Vera is able ultimately to reconcile nature and culture on the Italian seashore.
Acogny, Germaine (1944--)
Authors: Baker-Tarpaga Esther
Published: September 2018

In a career that has spanned over forty years, Germaine Acogny has contributed to modernism in dance by merging culturally situated West African dances from Senegal and Benin with Western dance forms such as the Graham technique and classical ballet to create a new African dance aesthetic. Her work emerged from an African postcolonial framework, and her pedagogy codified a modernist Africanist technique. In the 1960s when African dance was viewed by some Western audiences as primitive and timeless, Acogny advocated the necessity of viewing African dance as evolving and changing. Senegal’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and French choreographer Maurice Béjart appointed Acogny director of the Senegal-based Mudra Afrique that trained African-based choreographers and teachers. Acogny has taught and performed globally and is the founder of École de Sables (School of Sands), a training, residency, and research center in Senegal. She also founded the Jant-Bi (The Sun) Company in 1996. She is known as "Mama Acogny" because she has mentored numerous young dancers and choreographers in Africa and globally. She has also been referred to as one of the founders of contemporary African dance. Fagaala (2003) is a notable touring work, which addressed the Rwandan genocide. It was a choreographic collaboration between Jant-Bi and Japan’s Kota Yamasaki in 2004.
Ailian, Dai (1916–2006)
Authors: Wilcox Emily E.
Published: September 2018

Dai Ailian, a woman of Chinese descent, was born and raised in Trinidad and first visited mainland China in 1941. Together with Wu Xiaobang, Dai helped pioneer twentieth-century Chinese dance, especially Chinese ballet, and modern Chinese folk and ethnic dance. Dai received early ballet training in Trinidad. In the 1930s she studied ballet and modern dance in England, where she began choreographing and performing her own work before the age of twenty. After the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, Dai served as founding director of the Central Folk Song and Dance Ensemble, the first principal of the Beijing Dance School, president of the China Dancers’ Association, and artistic director of the Central China Ballet. Dai’s major works include Longing for Home, Sale, The Mute Carries the Cripple, Air Raid, Dove of Peace, Lotus Dance, and Flying Apsaras. Apart from her contributions as a dancer, choreographer, and teacher, Dai was instrumental in introducing Labanotation to China. She led the founding of the Labanotation Society of China in 1983 and produced numerous notations of Chinese folk dances, and taught China’s first generation of Labanotation experts. A bust of Dai Ailian is displayed at the Beijing Dance Academy, commemorating Dai’s life-long contribution to Chinese dance.
Araiz, Oscar (1940--)
Authors: Fortuna Victoria
Published: September 2018

Oscar Araiz is a central figure in the dance world in Argentina and internationally. Maintaining equal prominence in the modern and classical dance communities throughout the course of his career, Araiz’s prolific artistic production includes both original works and signature reimaginings of repertoire pieces, such as La consagración de la primavera (The Rite of Spring, 1966) and Romeo y Julieta (Romeo and Juliet, 1971). Stylistically, his works range from virtuosic neoclassicism to minimalism. The influences that inflect his works are also broad and reflect the confluence of modernist styles circulating through Argentina in the mid-twentieth century, in particular German expressionism and US modern dance. He has served as artistic director of the most significant dance companies in Argentina, including the La Plata Argentine Theater Ballet, the San Martín Municipal Theater Contemporary Ballet, and the Colon Theater Ballet. Internationally, he served as artistic director of the Geneva Grand Theater Ballet and has worked with companies including the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, the Joffrey Ballet, and the Paris Opéra. Araiz has received multiple honors including the Konex Platinum Award (1989), the María Ruanova Prize (1990), and the Career Achievement Award from the Argentine National Arts Fund (2006).
Keita, Fodéba (1921–1969)
Authors: Cohen Joshua
Published: September 2018

Fodéba Keita was a poet, playwright, musician, choreographer, impresario, anti-colonial activist, and statesman. As the leader of several musical bands, author of poems and essays, founder of the Paris-based performance company Les Ballets Africains, and architect of Guinean cultural policy under President Sékou Touré, Keita pioneered modern African traditions in music, literature, theater, dance, and national arts. He is perhaps best known for having brought African music, dance, masquerade, and oral narratives to the stage, particularly with Les Ballets Africains, which toured internationally during the 1950s before becoming Guinea’s national dance company in 1960. Numerous African countries subsequently adopted the ‘‘ballet’’ form for presenting national cultural heritage. Despite early ties to Lépold Sédar Senghor and other proponents of Negritude, Keita eventually came to reject race-based conceptualizations of African art and culture, writing in 1957 that, ‘‘it seems … tendentious to try systematically to classify the whole of this vast continent by reference to the colour of its inhabitants. The influence of background upon man is far more important than that of the degree of pigmentation of his skin.’’
Burrowes, Leslie (1908–1985)
Authors: Nicholas Larraine
Published: September 2018

Dancer, choreographer, and teacher Leslie Burrowes was the first British recipient of the full certification of Mary Wigman’s Dresden School, which licenced her to teach Wigman’s modern dance technique to amateurs and professionals. Before beginning her training with Wigman in 1930, Burrowes had studied and performed with Margaret Morris, whose "free dance" method belonged to the Hellenic and Duncanesque nonballetic dance techniques of early twentieth-century Britain. Burrowes rejected her original dance training in favor of Wigman’s expressionism, returning to London in 1931 to proselytize on its behalf and to serve as Wigman’s official British representative. Burrowes’ attempts to establish Wigman’s dance in Britain were largely unsuccessful, caught in the squeeze between the better-established ballet and Hellenic dance. However, she is an important figure in the development of modern dance in Britain, providing a thorough aesthetic education to some of the teachers and lecturers who, from the 1940s, were instrumental in establishing Laban-based modern dance in British teacher training colleges and schools.
Dent, Nancy Lima (1919–2013)
Authors: Clare Carolyne
Published: September 2018

Nancy Lima Dent helped to establish modern dance in Toronto. She initially studied with Rita Warne and Boris Volkoff, and later was a student of modern dance luminaries Doris Humphrey, José Limon, Martha Graham, Charles Weidman, Pearl Primus, and Katherine Dunham. Starting in 1946, Dent worked as a performer and choreographer with the Toronto-based Neo Dance Theatre (renamed the New Dance Theatre in 1949). In 1960, Dent established her own dance company, the Nancy Lima Dent Dance Theatre. The company received positive critical reviews for their performances in prominent Toronto theaters including Hart House Theatre and the Centre Stage Theatre. Dent participated in three Canadian Ballet Festivals and she helped to found the Festival Evening of Modern Dance Festival in 1960. The festivals were well attended and critics noted that Dent’s choreography was especially engaging. In general, her choreographies highlighted personal expression, drew upon several modern dance techniques, and grappled with the political and ethical questions of her day. Dent was also a highly appreciated dance teacher who taught in various Ontarian cities for diverse types of students. She presented dance on television, and while recovering from an injury, she served as an effective administrator in various industries.
Liu Feng-Shueh (1925--)
Authors: Ya-ping Chen
Published: September 2018

Dr. Liu Feng-Shueh is a modern dance pioneer in Taiwan. She was the first person to conduct systematic experimentation with the formal elements and creative methods of modern dance in postwar Taiwan. Her research into historical Chinese dance since the 1950s has produced reconstructions of court and ceremonial dances from the Tang (618–907 CE), Sung (960–1279 CE) and Ming (1368–1644 CE) dynasties. This has enriched her interpretation of modern dance within the Chinese cultural context. As a choreographer, she has attended to the dialogue between tradition and modernity through upholding the value of individual freedom in creation while devoting herself to finding contemporary meanings for traditional dance forms and cultures. In a career that has spanned over six decades, Liu has studied the dance traditions of Taiwanese indigenous people and has choreographed modern dances inspired by them. These works raise important social and cultural issues faced by contemporary indigenous societies. In addition, she has been one of the most important leaders in Taiwan’s dance education with influence ranging from dance for children to professional training in higher education.
Halprin, Anna (Schuman) (1920--)
Authors: Ross Janice
Published: September 2018

A dancer, choreographer, community leader, and educator, Anna Halprin helped to pioneer what she called "experimental dance" in the 1960s. After training with the modern dance performer and choreographer Doris Humphrey, she turned to dance education, fusing these dual tracks of performance and pedagogy into a practice where dance changed the dancer. Her experimental dance theater events helped prefigure happenings, performance art, and experimental theater works. Located at the boundaries between art and life, healing, ritual, and performance, Halprin created participatory site-specific dances, art events situated in the midst of urban life. Breaking down the boundaries between spectator and performer, her dance events deliberately reconfigured socially marginalized individuals as the subject and medium of performance, including people with HIV/AIDS and the aged. Beginning in the early 1960s, Halprin started offering dance workshops on the "dance deck," the dramatic outdoor wooden dance studio designed in 1953 by Arch Lauterer, the theater designer, and Lawrence Halprin, Halprin’s husband and a renowned urban designer. Halprin’s students in these early years included several who would become founders of dance minimalism, including Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and Meredith Monk—artists who were inspired by her precedent for framing pedestrian actions as dance, relinquishing control, and embracing difficult personal history as legitimate subject matter for dance.
Hijikata Tatsumi (1928–1986)
Authors: Candelario Rosemary
Published: September 2018

Hijikata Tatsumi is considered to be the founder of butoh, though titles such as instigator or ringmaster may be more appropriate. Hijikata premiered his first choreography in 1959, an adaptation of Mishima Yukio’s 1952 homoerotic novel Kinjiki (Forbidden Colors). Reaction to the then shocking depiction of sodomy led Hijikata and a number of his colleagues to split from the All Japan Art Dance Association in what would seem to be a classic break of the postmoderns from the moderns. However, as Hijikata’s work developed from a series of happening-like "Dance Experiences" in the 1960s into carefully choreographed group works in the 1970s and 1980s, his dances exhibited hallmarks of Japanese surrealism (prewar and postwar), the second Japanese avant-garde, and modernism, often all at once. His work fragmented meaning—initially across writing, visual arts, and performing bodies, and later across different parts of his dancers’ bodies—and then layered the fragments one on top of another. Hijikata choreographed for individuals (e.g. Ashikawa Yoko, Kobayashi Saga, Tanaka Min) and groups (Ankoku buyō-ha, Hangi daitō kan, Genjûsha, and Hakutōbō), as well as directed dances for Ohno Kazuo. Hijikata also engaged seriously in writing as an artistic practice—not to explicate or supplement his dances, but as a parallel endeavor. His surrealist texts and scrapbooks are now considered to be part of his artistic achievements.
Jarvis, Judy (1942–1986)
Authors: Anderson Carol
Published: September 2018

Judy Jarvis, a choreographer, dancer, and teacher, was a significant figure within the Canadian modern dance community. Following early dance studies in Toronto, she spent two years at the Mary Wigman School in Berlin, and considered Wigman her mentor. On her return to Canada, she launched a solo career, and soon opened a Toronto studio, starting a school as well as the Judy Jarvis Dance and Theatre Company. From 1967 to 1983, she worked with numerous dancers, creating and touring across Canada and to the Edinburgh Festival. In 1974, Jarvis was the first modern-dance winner of the prestigious Jean A. Chalmers Award for Choreography.

Her significant works include Bird (1967, later renamed Flight), Clouds (1972), and People…People (1974). Jarvis’s work became increasingly theatrical and difficult to categorize, contributing to the Company’s 1983 loss of funding. Jarvis disbanded her company in 1983, and spent her final years teaching dramatic arts at Madonna High School. She is remembered through the legacy of her influential teaching; through remounts, including Bird/Flight, which was performed by Denise Fujiwara in 1986, and by Gina Lori Riley Dance Enterprise in 1989 of Clouds, People…People, Three Women, and other works; and repertoire performed by the Danny Grossman Dance Company. The Judy Jarvis Foundation, established in 1988, protects Jarvis’s work.
Karsavina, Tamara (1885–1978)
Authors: Eliot Karen
Published: September 2018

Trained at St. Petersburg’s Imperial Ballet School, Tamara Karsavina became, in the course of her long and varied career, the prototypical modern ballerina. A dancer of rare intelligence and versatility, she was a key member of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and a muse of modern choreographers. As an artist, she was closely identified with Michel Fokine’s "New Ballet," which emphasized expressivity, dramatic veracity, and a more creative approach to ballet language and convention. She originated roles in some of Fokine’s greatest works, such as Chopiniana/Les Sylphides (1908–9), Firebird (1910), Petrouchka (1911), and Le Spectre de la rose (1911), and in many now forgotten works such as Thamar (1912) and Le Coq d’or (The Golden Cockerel, 1914). She was an ideal collaborator, as an artistic risk-taker who immersed herself in the style and atmosphere of a work. With Fokine and her most celebrated partner, Vaslav Nijinsky, Karsavina developed a modern performance aesthetic for early twentieth-century ballet.
La Création du Monde
Authors: Bellow Juliet
Published: September 2018

A ballet inspired by a creation fable in Blaise Cendrars’s Anthologie nègre (1921), La Création du monde (The Creation of the World) was produced by Rolf de Maré’s Ballets Suédois troupe, premiering on October 25, 1923 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Paris. Together with the painter Fernand Léger, Cendrars proposed a ‘‘ballet nègre’’ in 1921 to de Maré and the troupe’s choreographer Jean Börlin. Börlin’s 1920 suite of solo dances Sculpture nègre signaled his interest in African art and artifacts then on display at the Musée d’Ethnographie and in galleries and private collections—an influence also visible in the stylized body-masks that Léger designed for La Création du monde. The ballet’s score was contributed by Darius Milhaud, a member of the group Les Six, known for infusing the European symphonic tradition with aspects of jazz and blues music. Freely mixing African and African American cultural references, La Création du monde grew out of European primitivism and typified the ‘‘negrophilia’’ which pervaded high art and popular culture in the 1920s. The ballet’s narrative, which resembled the biblical story of Genesis, purportedly drew from myths of the Fang peoples of West Central Africa, then part of French Congo. This theme of creation linked the French colonial enterprise with the regeneration of the nation in the aftermath of World War I.
Leyda, Jay (1910–1988)
Authors: Park-Primiano Sueyoung
Published: September 2018

Jay Leyda’s peripatetic life and protean career cut a unique, remarkable path. The long list of roles he mined include filmmaker, photographer, critic, archivist, art dealer, translator, librettist, and educator. He is best remembered, however, as a leading historian of early and Soviet and Chinese cinemas, interests he started to develop in the vibrant art circle he helped establish in New York City in the 1930s.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Leyda was raised by his grandmother in Dayton, Ohio. His artistic training started early; after studying photography under Jane Reece, he moved to New York City in 1929 to work as Ralph Steiner’s darkroom assistant. After a year of working for Steiner, Leyda left and supported himself by freelancing as a portrait photographer for various magazines, including Vanity Fair and Arts Weekly; in this capacity he met and photographed Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the person largely responsible for establishing its film library. Leyda also secured a position as sound and recording arranger at the Bronx Playhouse, where he was exposed to repeated showings of films by internationally acclaimed directors including Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov.
Modern Belly Dance
Authors: Karayanni Stavros Stavrou
Published: September 2018

References to dances of the East have appeared in Western sources at least since the beginning of the Christian era, yet what has become known and established as "belly dance" seems most closely connected to the World Expositions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 was an event that formally introduced the danse du ventre or belly dance to American audiences and caused a stir in public morals, reformed concepts of the exotic, and revolutionized ideas about the relationship between movement and aesthetics (kinaesthesia). Even though renditions of the dance have varied greatly, there are choreographic elements that make belly dance immediately recognizable and even objectionable to some audiences: elaborate hip articulations, isolations that often layer the choreography and express the texture of the music, and movement on the vertical and horizontal axis without covering a large performance area. In terms of culture, the space it has occupied both in its "native" lands (predominantly but not exclusively, Egypt, Turkey, Lebanon) and in the West continues to be contested in choreographic, social, cultural, and even national politics of the twentieth century and beyond. Like many dance forms, belly dance has had an uneasy and anxious passage through modernity.
Montreal Modern Dance Company (1952–1955)
Authors: Templeton Melissa
Published: September 2018

The Montreal Modern Dance Company (1952–1955) was an important though shortlived collaborative project between Lithuanian émigrés and dancers Yoné Kvietys (1924–2011) and Birouté Nagys (1920--). Though unacquainted prior to their arrival in Canada, they both studied movement in Lithuania with Danuté Nasvytis, a dancer who trained at the Mary Wigman School in Germany. They met while dancing in Montreal with the Wigman-influenced choreographer Ruth Sorel. The Montreal Modern Dance Company gave its first evening-length performance in early January 1954, and that same year the Company performed at the sixth annual Canadian Ballet Festival. Both performances were well received. The company disbanded in 1955 when Kvietys moved to Toronto. Kvietys and Nagys would collaborate again several years later at the 1963 Canadian Modern Dance Festival when Kvietys invited Nagys to act as guest-choreographer for her Toronto-based group, the Contemporary Dance Company.
Samba
Authors: Lior Mika
Published: September 2018

Modern samba music and dance began in Rio de Janeiro’s Afro-Brazilian communities in the early 1900s and spread rapidly to international audiences through twentieth-century technologies of mass media, recording, and cinema. Rio’s samba developed from Bahian samba de roda, which has been danced and played by enslaved Africans and their descendants from the sixteenth century to the present. Modern samba differed from the circular samba de roda through its harmonic elements, the linear use of space, increased speed and footwork, and stylized upper body positions.

First brought to the US by Brazilian sensation Carmen Miranda through Hollywood films of the 1940s, samba’s numerous rhythmic variations have achieved broad global recognition in the twenty-first century. The fast-paced samba no pé singularizes Rio’s world-famous carnaval, which expanded through modern industrial fabrication of floats and costumes and through increasingly cross-national commerce while continuing to capitalize on influences from traditional Afro-Brazilian dance and percussion. The partner dance samba de gafieira has spread from its origins in Rio’s neighborhoods to nightclubs in urban locations across Brazil, North America, and Europe. Meanwhile samba reggae, a late twentieth-century reappropriation of samba within northeastern Brazil that integrates African aesthetic elements with reggae beats and steps has become emblematic of Bahian popular culture.
Mambo
Authors: McMains Juliet
Published: September 2018

Mambo music, which emerged in Cuba in the 1940s but was popularized in Mexico City and New York, blended jazz harmonies and instrumentation with Afro-Cuban rhythms. Mambo dancing evolved in New York City in the late 1940s and became an international dance craze by the early 1950s. The dance was based on the Cuban son, with the addition of turns borrowed from American swing dancing, and solo dance steps adopted from Cuban rumba, Puerto Rican bomba, and African American jazz. The dance emerged through the intermingling of these traditions in New York’s dance halls, especially Harlem’s Park Palace/Plaza and the Palladium Ballroom. Jewish resorts in the Catskills provided economic capital to sustain and disseminate the form by employing dozens of mambo bands and dancers every summer. The source of both mambo’s scandal and its appeal was the sensuality of the dance and the unpredictability of its improvisational solo steps. Mambo dancing evolved into salsa dancing in the 1970s and later experienced a resurgence of popularity in the late 1990s and 2000s during the salsa dance craze. Many New York salsa dancers prefer to identify their dancing as mambo, often drawing on 1950s mambo steps for inspiration.
Vainonen, Vasily Ivanovich (1901–1964)
Authors: Scholl Tim
Published: September 2018

Dancer and choreographer Vasily Vainonen created several signature choreographic works of the Soviet ballet repertoire of the 1930s, including composer Boris Afasiev’s The Flames of Paris (1932) and Partisan Days (1937). Vainonen made his debut as a choreographer at the cusp of a shift from the experimental works he danced in the 1920s to the drambalet (dramatized ballet) of the 1930s. His best-known works were pivotal in this transition, foreshadowing the emphasis on psychological realism and folk dance material to highlight the participation of politicized masses. Vainonen’s most celebrated works featured bravura dances, especially for men, and folklore adaptations, which highlighted the corps de ballet as a dancing collective.

Vainonen graduated from the Petrograd Dance Academy (now the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet) in 1919. He remained with the former Maryinsky Ballet (later, the Kirov Ballet) until 1938, working increasingly as a choreographer during the 1930s. As a dancer, Vainonen distinguished himself in character roles, including the Moor in Leonid Leontiev’s version of Petrushka (1920), the cat in Marius Petipa’s The Sleeping Beauty (1890), and folk dance divertissements in a number of nineteenth-century ballets.
Yakobson, Leonid (1904–1975)
Authors: Ross Janice
Published: September 2018

A Russian dancer and choreographer, Leonid Veniaminovich Yakobson choreographed for the Kirov and Bolshoi ballets from 1930 to the early 1970s, during which time he emerged as a powerful voice of Soviet ballet modernism. Based in St. Petersburg, his creative roots stretched back to the 1920s, a period of artistic experimentation when classical ballet developed exciting new movement vocabularies. He continued to explore and extend these influences until the 1970s, creating numerous short-format works—called ballet miniatures—that often used grotesque, athletic, or pantomimic movements to address social, dramatic, or erotic subjects with narrative clarity and concision. He favored original music, often in a contemporary style, believing that distinctive forms of music elicited an individual choreographic response. Among his most notable works were his full-length Spartacus (1956/1962)—which discarded the lifts and pointe work of traditional ballet language and featured characters who were fully developed psychologically—and Exercise XX (1972), a dance that verged on abstraction. In 1969, he founded Choreographic Miniatures, the first Soviet ballet company since the 1920s with a repertoire of original choreographic works by a single choreographer. Jewish by birth, Yakobson held onto his Jewish identity culturally as religious observance was effectively prohibited. During years of aggressive anti-Semitism, he created six ballets on Jewish themes; the first, Jewish Dance (1949), he created at a time when Jews were being actively persecuted.
Abdelké, Youssef (1951--)
Authors: Mejcher-Atassi Sonja
Published: September 2018

Abdelké was born in Qameshli, Syria, in 1951. He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus in 1976. Politically active as a member of the League of Communist Action (later renamed the Communist Labour Party), which was banned by the Syrian regime, he was imprisoned for two years and then left for France, where he continued his studies. He graduated with a diploma in etching from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris in 1986, and obtained a PhD in Plastic Arts from the University VIII in Paris in 1989. After more than twenty-five years in exile, he returned to Damascus in 2005, where he continues to live and work today.

Abdelké gives preference to drawing over painting. He has worked in different media, but has mainly focused on charcoals on paper. His drawings show still lifes: flowers, dead fish and birds, fruit, and everyday objects such as shoes, teapots, plates, and knives, with which he manages to express human tragedy in manifold ways. Closely linked to aesthetic concerns, the works explore, in the basic media of charcoal and paper, dimensions of art that have been neglected with the introduction of Western techniques—namely perspective—into modern artistic practices in the Arab world. In particular, they draw on concepts of one dimensionality and the flat surface, features that dominated Islamic miniature painting.
Abstraction-Création
Authors: Boate Rachel
Published: September 2018

Abstraction-Création was a collective of abstract artists active in Paris until 1936. Beginning in 1931, the founding committee was composed of Theo Van Doesburg, Jean Arp, Albert Gleizes, Jean Hélion, Auguste Herbin, František Kupka, Léon Arthur Tutundjian, Georges Valmier, and Georges Vantongerloo. Featuring reproductions of abstract paintings, sculpture, photography, and artists’ statements, participating artists were represented through the publication of the annual journal Abstraction, Création, Art Non-Figuratif (1932–1936). Abstraction-Création aimed to promote an international network of abstract artists, while simultaneously forming an aesthetic counterpoint to the increasing prevalence of Surrealism and social realism in France. Following the failure of the narrowly conceived abstract groups Art Concret and Cercle et Carré in 1930, Abstraction-Création pinpointed non-figuration as the only criterion for membership. This pluralist conception of abstraction reflected an intentionally democratic cultural position in contrast to the totalitarian regimes emerging elsewhere in Europe throughout the 1930s. At its peak, well-known abstractionist contributing members included Piet Mondrian, Vasily Kandinsky, Lázló Moholy-Nagy, Kurt Schwitters, Jacques Villon, Willi Baumeister, and Alexander Calder. A year-long exhibition of Abstraction-Création artworks began in December 1933 on the ground floor of 44 Avenue de Wagram, Paris. The 1935 magazine issue claimed a membership of over 400 individuals hailing from seventeen countries outside of France.
Achimota School
Authors: Woets Rhoda
Published: September 2018

The majority of Ghana’s modern art pioneers received their art education at Achimota School on the Gold Coast, now Ghana. Achimota School contributed in an important way to the formation of modern art in Ghana. Students trained at the Achimota Teacher Training Department spread new ideas about art and art education at the schools where they later worked. The discursive fields, in which modern visual artists came to discuss their work following independence, were embedded in a colonial past where European art teachers at Achimota had positioned African tradition as both preceding and opposed to modernity. Just like the art teachers at Achimota, modern artists deeply admired "primitive art" and considered local art forms to have roots stretching into a timeless past. Modern artists were, in this regard, influenced by their education at Achimota School as well as by nationalist ideologies that fostered pride in an African cultural past. Among the school’s most notable students are Oku Ampofo (1908–1998), Ernest (Victor) Asihene (1915–2001), Amon Kotei (1915–2011), Saka Acquaye (1915–2007), Kofi Antubam (1922–1964), Theodosia Akoh (1922), and Vincent Kofi (1923–1974).
Ainslie, Bill (1934–1989)
Authors: Stephenson Jessica
Published: September 2018

Born in 1934 in Bedford, Eastern Cape, South Africa, William (Bill) Stewart Ainslie was a painter and educator, and the founder of a number of visual art programs and workshops that countered discriminatory racial and educational policies in apartheid-era South Africa. These programs encouraged students to work in abstract and other modernist idioms not practiced in the country at the time. Until his untimely death at age 55, Ainslie melded his career as an artist with his vision of art as a means to combat apartheid. In the 1960s and 1970s, Ainslie fostered the only multiracial art programs in the country, culminating in a formal art school, the non-profit Johannesburg Art Foundation (1982). He helped found the Federated Union of Black Artists (FUBA) and the art schools Fuba Academy (1978), Funda Center (1983) (funda means "learn" in Xhosa), and the Alexandra Arts Centre (1986). The generation of modern African artists and educators trained at these institutions shaped the course of art after apartheid. Ainslie also organized short-term workshops, most notably the Thupelo Art Workshop (thupelo means "to teach by example" in Southern Sotho) in 1983. Thupelo linked local and international artists and focused on abstraction, a radical departure from the social realist style expected of politically engaged South African art of the 1980s.
Modern Ballroom Dancing
Authors: McMains Juliet
Published: September 2018

Twentieth-century modern ballroom dancing differed from social dancing of the nineteenth century in its shift in focus from group cohesion to individual personal style. This focus on personal expression paralleled Progressive Era values that emphasized free will and individual action as a means to social progress. Through the use of the closed hold, many modern dances (including the one-step, the Castle Walk, the maxixe, the tango, and the foxtrot) brought partners into closer proximity for extended periods of time. The resulting physical contact of partners combined with the unpredictability of movement inspired by the accompanying ragtime evoked public controversy over the propriety and decency of modern dances.

From the 1910s through the 1950s, these dances were standardized by an American modern ballroom dance industry capitalizing on new means of mass production and distribution to sell ‘‘refined’’ versions of these dances (all of which were of lower-class origin) for consumption by upwardly mobile clientele. The codification of modern dances for mass dissemination, however, eliminated many of their defining modern features, particularly personal expression through improvisation. Modern ballroom dances as interpreted by the English became the basis for ballroom dance competitions exported internationally by the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing throughout the twentieth century.
Atsuko, Tanaka (1932–2005)
Authors: Robinson Joel
Published: September 2018

Born on the February 10, 1932 in Osaka, Japan, Atsuko Tanaka was a leading figure in Gutai, an avante-garde artists’ movement which counted more women among its members than any other group in Japan’s art world. Yet, she stood apart from some of her male counterparts, who were not shy of stripping down to loincloths and using their bodies and paintbrushes much more gesturally to proclaim inner feelings of freedom, jubilation or angst. She retreated from subjective expression and concealed her body from public view, so as to explore the interface between the physiological and technological.
Barr, Alfred H. Jr. (1902–1981)
Authors: Guglielmo Antoniette M.
Published: September 2018

Alfred H. Barr, Jr. was an art historian and the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in Manhattan, New York, from 1929 to 1943. Upon assuming his post at the museum in August 1929, Barr proceeded to establish the institution as America’s first and premiere museum devoted exclusively to modern art. His vision involved developing an intellectual foundation for the development of modern art and popularizing it for the public. As part of this work, Barr created new collection areas not previously conceptualized as part of an art museum, such as film and video, photography, architecture and design, and industrial art. Barr conceptualized a canon for the development of modern art and the origins of abstraction, diagramming it in the exhibition catalog Cubism and Abstract Art (1936). During his tenure, he organized more than 100 exhibitions largely focused on European modernism. Barr was dismissed as Director in 1943 by the chairperson of MoMA’s board of trustees, but stayed involved with MoMA in various capacities until 1968.
Boccioni, Umberto (1882–1916)
Authors: Versari Maria Elena
Published: September 2018

Umberto Boccioni was the most famous painter and sculptor of the Italian Futurist movement. After an early career as a painter and illustrator, he joined Futurism in 1910, quickly becoming one of its leading members. Together with Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini he signed the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters (1910) as well as the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting (1910) and exhibited at legendary Futurist shows in Italy and abroad. His numerous conferences and articles were pivotal in furthering the theoretical development of Futurist aesthetics and defining Futurism’s identity in opposition to Cubism and Expressionism. His work is marked by a constant intertwining of theoretical definition and material experimentation. Artistic debates, but also contemporary scientific and philosophical theories, influenced his Futurist masterpieces, such as La cittàche sale [The City Rises] (1910–1911) and La risata [The Laugh] (1911). In 1912 his interest in sculpture led him to pen the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture and resulted in a famous exhibition of works in plaster and multi-media assemblages.