Anna Sokolow

Anna Sokolow (born February 9, 1910, Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.—died March 29, 2000, New York, New York) was an American dancer, choreographer, and teacher noted for her socially and politically conscious works and her unique blend of dance and theatre choreography. She is also recognized for her instrumental role in the development of modern dance in Israel and Mexico.

The daughter of Russian immigrants, Sokolow grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and took her first dance lessons at the Emanuel Sisterhood settlement house on the Upper East Side and at the Henry Street Settlement, located in her own neighbourhood. Beginning in the mid-1920s she studied movement at the Neighborhood Playhouse (part of the Henry Street Settlement at the time) under Michio Ito and Benjamin Zemach and dance under Martha Graham and Louis Horst, both of whom would exercise a strong influence on Sokolow’s work. While a member of Graham’s dance company (1929–38), Sokolow assisted Horst in his choreography classes. She also formed her own company, the Dance Unit, which performed for workers’ unions, a cause she became familiar with through her mother, a garment-industry worker, International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union member, and union organizer. Labour unions and the social problems of the Great Depression provided themes for Sokolow’s early works, which included Strange American Funeral (1935), Slaughter of the Innocents (1937), and The Exile (1939).

From 1939 through 1949 Sokolow spent over half of each year in Mexico, where she formed, taught, and choreographed for Mexico’s first dance company, La Paloma Azul (founded 1940). During World War II, Sokolow also turned her attention to Jewish themes in her choreography. Songs of a Semite (1943), the title based on a poem by Emma Lazarus, was a suite of dances that wove together her personal history, biblical stories, and current events to express themes of persecution, exile, and suffering. She choreographed Kaddish (1945), referring to the Jewish prayer for the dead, to Maurice Ravel’s score (1914) of the same name. Both of those works expressed the repercussions of the Holocaust. Sokolow would return to the horrors of the Holocaust in 1961 with her work Dreams.

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Beginning in 1953 she frequently traveled to Israel to teach and choreograph with the Inbal Dance Theatre, and in 1962 she formed the Lyric Theatre there, with dancers and actors, to create productions that seamlessly merged dance, theatre, and music. Sokolow addressed alienation in modern society in Lyric Suite (1953) and Rooms (1955). After retiring from performing in 1954 (because of a back injury), she taught at the Juilliard School and the Actors Studio, among other institutions. She also formed dance companies and worked as a freelance choreographer. Sokolow created dances to music by classical composers and also by 20th-century composers, including Alban Berg (Lyric Suite), György Ligeti (Moods, 1975), and jazz composer Teo Macero (Opus ’65, 1965). Among her later creations were Tribute, in memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968), Scenes from the Music of Charles Ives (1971), and From the Diaries of Franz Kafka (1980), an example of her hybrid dance-theatre productions. Candide (1956) and the original production of Hair (1967) are among the best known of the Broadway shows she choreographed.

Sokolow continued working well into the 1990s and directed her own company in New York City, the Players’ Project, choreographing for it works such as September Sonnet (1995). She was the recipient of numerous honours and awards, such the Order of the Aztec Eagle by the Mexican government (1988), that country’s highest honour to a foreign citizen, and the Samuel H. Scripps/American Dance Festival Award (1991) for her lifelong contribution to American modern dance. In the 21st century Sokolow Theatre/Dance Ensemble in New York, directed by Sokolow’s former student and collaborator Jim May, performs her works and trains dancers and choreographers.