Clever Machines: American Dance Diplomacy and Cold War Physical Nationalism

Just a few years after the 1957 East-West conference that enabled cultural exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and during a two month span that saw these nations teeter on the brink of nuclear war, came a monumental cultural battle: the Bolshoi and New York City Ballet exchange of 1962.  Impressions gathered in person, from performances and studiowork, were voiced in articles such as “The American School . . . and Russian Opinion” or “Moscow and Leningrad: The Contrast in Styles and the Reasons Why.”  Standard Cold War cultural barbs shaped the language, but the evidence offered was physical—how the dancers bodies looked and moved—as often as aesthetic (e.g. repertoire, music, or costuming.)  Visual scrutiny of physical forms provided a means by which the two sides negotiated their differences: the younger and racially mixed Americans were rigid, clinical, “clever machines,” while the more physically mature Soviets were soulful “artists.”

But the physical translation of national stereotypes was not restricted to the postwar dance world.  As this paper will argue, the dance diplomacy debate was a condensed version of a larger American inquiry between 1945 and 1970, where study after study projected questions of nationhood onto physical bodies.  Efforts at American self-definition, prompted internationally by Soviet threat and domestically by Civil Rights unrest, penetrated down to the country’s bones.  Identification of an ideal, healthy American body implied two things.  First, in a proactive sense, that these were the type of Americans required to combat the Soviets’ own archetype, the “New Soviet Man.”  And second, in a prescriptive sense, that if there was an American ideal, there were also bodies to exclude, bodies not desirably American.  This paper will cut through the spectacle of cultural diplomacy to define dance’s role in creating this American physical ideal.