Border Crossings Exile and American Modern Dance

A bi-coastal exhibition, book, and symposium curated by Ninotchka Bennahum, Bruce Robertson, and Rena Heinrich, and performance series curated by Brandon Whited and Delila Moseley, celebrates the heroism of immigrant and BIPOC artists and challenges previous histories of dance to consider how war, exile, inequality, and injustice shaped 20th century performance art. A manifesto of the unsung, Border Crossings demonstrates how exiled and marginalized artists catalyzed modern dance, giving voice to crucial issues of geopolitical circumstance and structural racism. Crossing borders—physical, geographic, racial, artistic, spiritual—either by choice or by force, became a historical circumstance out of artists’ control. These crossings are woven into the grammar of “the modern” in dance; they are its DNA.

The Border Crossings exhibition highlights the myriad ways in which dance is documented and showcases rare films, photographs, costumes, designs, and archival objects to tell both biographical and generational stories. 

The exhibition curators ask the viewer to consider two fundamental questions: What is a choreography of social justice? How is dance a weapon for social change?

The exhibition includes works by artists from many communities: Tom Two Arrows, Aida Overton Walker, José Limón, Carmen Amaya, La Argentina, Si-Lan Chen, Katherine Dunham, Edna Guy, Michio Ito, Yeichi Nimura, Pearl Primus, Uday Shankar, Anna Sokolow, and lesser- known companies such as the New Dance Group (1932), the Wisconsin Dance Group (1947) and the First Negro Classical Ballet (1949). Placing the present in conversation with the past, the exhibition includes new interviews with contemporary choreographers, Michelle Manzanales, Kyle Abraham, Eiko Otake, Kiri Avelar, Dianne McIntyre, Preeti Vasudevan, Pam Tanowitz, Dante Puleio, Richard Move, Muna Tseng, Rachna Nivas, and Pam Tanowitz who reflect on exile and border crossings within their work.