Career
She started her professional career in 1929 as a member of Martha Graham's company. Beginning in the 1930s, she affiliated herself with the politicized "radical dance" movement, out of which developed her work Anti-War Trilogy (1933). By 1936, she had organized her first company, Dance Unit. Sokolow was also associated with the socially conscious collective the New Dance Group and the larger Workers Dance League. According to dance historian Ellen Graff, Sokolow's work with these groups was instrumental in transforming the "agitprop style" associated with early political dance by melding it with "emerging professional and artistic standards in 'new' dance." Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, she performed and choreographed both solo and ensemble works, which tackled subject matter that included the exploitation of workers and growing troubles of Jews in Germany. Several works from this period, including Anti-War Trilogy, were set to music by the composer Alex North.
In 1939, Sokolow began a lifelong association with the dance in Mexico and Israel. Her work for the Secretariat of Public Education facilitated the establishment of the National Academy of Dance. In Israel, she choreographed for major dance companies, including Batsheva, Inbal, and the Lyric Theatre.
Sokolow created works full of dramatic contemporary imagery, revealing the full spectrum of human experience and reflecting the tension and alienation of her time. Rooms (1955), featuring music composed by Kenyon Hopkins for a jazz ensemble, dealt with urban alienation, while Dreams (1961) grew from the horrors of the Holocaust. Other major modern dance works included Lyric Suite (1954), Odes (1965), and Opus 65 (1965). In 1991, Anna Kisselgoff summed up Sokolow's aesthetic as "American Expressionism," and commented that "Stillness is a large part of her choreography, and Miss Sokolow can sum up a state of being -- an entire society -- in an arrested pose."
In addition to her work as a choreographer, Sokolow was also an influential teacher of both dance and movement for actors. At Juilliard, she taught what she called "method dancing" from 1958 to 1993.
Sokolow was inducted into the National Museum of Dance's Mr. & Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney Hall of Fame in 1998.
Read more about this topic: Anna Sokolow
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