The modern dance choreographer can draw on decades of dance revolutions that inspired new forms of dance and body movement. Modern American ballet holds deep roots in tradition yet it has inspired contemporary dancers to go beyond the confines of rigid tradition holding them back. Martha Graham, a classically trained American dancer, broke from ballet to become one of the most renowned modern dancers of her day. As stated by the Martha Graham Dance Company, “by focusing on the basic activities of the human form, [Graham] enlivened the body with raw, electric emotion. The sharp, angular, and direct movements of her technique were a dramatic departure from the predominant style of the time.”¹ Graham’s departure from traditional techniques inspired a revolution of post modern dance.

Graham’s television specials in the 1950s also brought a new type of entertainment to the homes of Americans. Graham’s performance of Night Journey, inspired by Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, was televised via CBS in the late 1950s. Modern artists have taken Graham’s media interaction and created multimedia productions incorporating video technology and animation in their work. Animation done by animators such as Lotte Reiniger, painters like Henri Matisse, and companies such as Pixar have changed the way we interact with animation and dance. A recent breakthrough in dance and animation came when  Anarchy Dance Theatre² Taiwan collaborated with the avant-garde new media creative firm Ultra Combos³ to create Seventh Sense (2011), a performance stage that works as a canvas for a series of optical-illusion projections that shift according to dancers’ movements, turning what was a white box into a reactive environment. This reactionary response of environments is revolutionary because of the melding of dance to technology, giving the stage a dynamism and identity of its own. Technology and identity meet in animation through movement.

The identity of dancers in animation can be styled or melded to tell a story of its own. Early animation and dance interacted first in the 1920s with Lotte Reiniger creating feature length films with screen prints set to music scores.⁴ She used her animations to tell folk tales and stories such as Sleeping Beauty, and The Grasshopper and the Ant. Reiniger’s style held a romantic aesthetic, which contributed artistically to the stories she chose to tell. William Moritz, a Professor at California Institute of the Arts, examines the work of Reiniger and her identity as a Jew in Pre-war Europe. In 1936 Reiniger and her husband decided to leave Germany: “Lotte resolved to leave Germany for good, even if it meant a transient existence, which it did.”⁵ This transient identity was expressed in her later work such as Pied Piper, a story about a transient mystery man.

Animators now aren’t limited by paper screens and can use materials ranging from clay to software to create animations giving each a unique identity. Each artist’s animation has its own identifier or artistic language. Another early contributor to dance and animation was Bauhaus painter and choreographer Oskar Schlemmer; who, in the 1920s, created dances to look like abstract paintings. He did this through his use of Mass and Volume. The New York Times states that “In most of them, dancers wearing helmets and encased in costumes resembling the suits of deep-sea divers crossed a stage hung with black curtains, and these bulky costumes emphasized shapes and positions rather than flow or dynamics.”⁶ This emphasis created a live animation that told an abstract story and gave Schemer’s work an abstract identity of its own.

The design aesthetic of animation houses translates into the identities of their work, and on occasion these identities aren’t human and take other forms. Walt Disney experimented with dance and animation in the 1920s. In The Skeleton Dance⁷ skeletons are featured dancing in a graveyard. Another house that experiments with their characters’ identity and design language is Pixar. Over the years Pixar has created many identities and artistic languages in its short films. On occasion these identities aren’t human and take other forms. Boundin’ ⁸ is a short created about a dancing sheep who feels ashamed when its coat is sheared. This short expresses through dance the embarrassment the sheep is feeling, a human emotion expressed through dance and animation giving this Pixar tale a playfulness and lightness due to the medium on which it was created.

Identity created through dance forms the basis of culture; the beats and the steps are embedded in generations of people. Yet culture, as an identifier is not easy to grasp due to its overlapping of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic identifiers. American Jewish culture is based around a transient identity focusing on communities, both spiritual and unaffiliated with religious connections. Jewish identity in dance is traced both from spiritual and religious beginnings and from the culture of questioning societal norms or the morals of actions and their consequences. There is also the identity as Jews as “people of the book.” The Jewish identity travels through modern dance in many forms. Jewish dancers use identity as a form of communicating the Jewish story through dance. Rebecca Rosen states in her book, Dancing Jewish: Jewish Identity in American Modern and Postmodern Dance that “Jewish dancers have consistently utilized the concert stage as a site for building multifarious identities and have attempted to dance a balance between seemingly conflicting positions…achieving a position of solidarity while in constant flux.”⁹ This platform of dance gave room for the questioning of Jewish Identity.

Anna Sokolow, a disciple of Martha Graham, used her Jewish heritage and newfound modern dance revelations, taught by Graham, as an inspiration for pieces that raised awareness of the Holocaust, called Songs of a Semite, which started each new section of dance with passages from the Torah.¹⁰ This is a direct questioning of Jewish faith and identity through dance. In Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and Invention of the Jewish Man, UC Berkeley History Professor Daniel Boyarin states that “by embracing and perpetuating their identity as ‘people of the book’ Jews foregrounded the mind as a mitigating substitute for what others, and they, perceived as physical pathological and inferiority.”¹¹ This idea of people of the book draws attention to thought and the brain as an identity. Bavarian assumes a scholarly inward questioning, which can be seen in the modern idea of Judaism and the questioning of Zionism and other moral and religious rights. The connections from these religious ideas to dance are not an obscure one. Yet dance as an entity is meant to tell a story, evoke a feeling, like theater, to hold a mirror and question what is right.

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