Confrontational and experimental, modern dancers questioned their own roles in society, the role of art in America, and the place of America in the world. Utilizing biography as a narrative tool, separate chapters focus on particular individuals to explore how each of these groups negotiated what it meant to be an American through dance.
Modern dance is a microcosm of the story of modernism in America.
In the 1930s, modern dancers shaped and promoted their art form within the popular front, democratic pluralism thrust of the times and attempted to appeal to a large audience, from workers in labor unions to townspeople in rural areas of the Midwest. Changes in nationalism were one reason that modern dancers shed their efforts to appeal to a mainstream audience and gravitated to a less constraining setting in colleges and universities and the avant garde. The evolution of modern dance into a high art form illuminates the course of modernism in America where social roles reinforced a marginal path. White women, African American men and women, and gay men created in modern dance a malleable art form within which they might re-imagine conventional social roles.