Anna Sokolow’s Rooms

Cement skyscrapers, the smell of automobile exhaust, turned down faces of strangers. New York City during the Great Depression was at odds with the founding fathers' vision of America as a shining City Upon a Hill. Anna Sokolow's feelings about the modern urban landscape, the deadening isolation that often accompanies it, and its forsaken twentieth century anti-hero inspired her to create her celebrated and influential 1955 piece, Rooms. In this dance, Sokolow explores the uncanny loneliness that can affect those living in close quarters to others, specifically in busy, gritty, urban post-war America. During the first half of the twentieth century dancemakers and artists alike were creating a growing body of work that we can now refer to as Americana. These were works that self-consciously drew upon a wide range of American themes and stereotypes. While the politics and aesthetics of Americana are diverse, including work based on such themes as the American Frontier, and African American heritage, this thesis explores Rooms as a case study of a sub-genre I refer to as Dystopic Americana. This thesis represents the use of the Labanotation score of Rooms and historical research. I begin with introductory and contextual information about the study in general and Rooms specifically, followed by a general definition of Americana. I then explore three broad types of Americana: Mythic America, the African American Experience, and Dystopic America. Sokolow's Rooms is a work of Dystopic Americana. I then go on to explain three major themes characteristic of Dystopic Americana and present in Rooms: the modern, urban landscape, isolation and loneliness, and the anti-hero. From these investigations I draw conclusions about the experience of embodied research and argue for the synthesis of history and dance reconstruction as a model of best practices in the field.