Description Winner of the CORD Outstanding Publication Award (2012) In Postwar America, any assertion of difference from the mainstream anticommunist culture carried professional and personal risks.
Kowal won the 2008 Gertrude Lippincott Award from Society of Dance History Scholars for her article on Pearl Primus, a version of which appears in How to Do Things with Dance..
She has published articles in TDR (The Journal of Performance Studies) and The Returns of Alwin Nikolais: Bodies, Boundaries and the Dance Canon, edited by Randy Martin and Claudia Gitelman (Wesleyan, 2007).
Kowal is an associate professor of dance at the University of Iowa.
About the author REBEKAH J.
Artists covered include Martha Graham, Jos Lim n, Anna Sokolow, Katherine Dunham, Pearl Primus, Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Donald Mc Kayle, Talley Beatty, and Anna Halprin.
Kowal shows how specific choreographic projects demonstrated increasing awareness of the stage as a penetrable space, one on which socially suspect or marginalized modes of being could be performed with relative impunity and exerted in the real world.
Concentrating on choreographers whose artistic work conceived dance in terms of action, Rebekah J.
How To Do Things with Dance positions modern dance as a vital critical discourse, and suggests that dances of the late 1940s and the 1950s can be seen as compelling agents of social change.
Instead they expressed themselves in movement.
For this reason, modern dance artists left much of what they thought unsaid.
Description Winner of the CORD Outstanding Publication Award (2012) In Postwar America, any assertion of difference from the mainstream anticommunist culture carried professional and personal risks
