Dance and Urban Life in 1970s New York

Thirty years ago, Richard Sennett published Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, a historical perspective on “urban life through bodily experience.” Sennett traced how ideas about bodies—whether the discovery of blood circulation or importance of clean air—became embedded in urban design and policy. Scholarship on sex trades, racial segregation, protests and surveillance have filled out the ways in which our bodies determine and are molded by our cities. What roles and insights does dance, then, offer on these questions?

In 1970, the avant-garde choreographer Trisha Brown choreographed Man Walking Down the Side of the Building, which was exactly that in the lower Manhattan neighborhood of SoHo where her studio and that of other artists were located. A year later, Roof Piece placed dancers on surrounding roof tops conducting a chain of movement. These could be seen solely as the avant-garde dance experiments that they were or as an insight into how dance reveals elements of 20^th century urban life, whether the heightened verticality of living—and walking—in the air, stories off the ground, or the conforming patterns of moving crowds of strangers.

This paper examines the dance world of 1970s New York to think through the intertwining of dance and urban life. Both formal and informal dance rooted bodies into the contours and flows of urban circulation and contestation. Dance was ground for battles over inclusion in the dense streets of a city faltering from the consequences of urban renewal and an eviscerating fiscal crisis. Dance shifted the debate about the role of the arts in the city from objects to moving bodies; from established institutions to activities on the streets and subways; and from a time-bound rehearsed performance to the spectacles of the everyday.