Book description
At the height of the Cold War in 1954, President Eisenhower inaugurated
a program of cultural exchange that sent American dancers and other
artists to political "hot spots" overseas. This peacetime
gambit by a warrior hero was a resounding success.
Among the artists chosen for international duty were Jose Limon, who led
his company on the first government-sponsored tour of South America;
Martha Graham, whose famed ensemble crisscrossed southeast Asia; Alvin
Ailey, whose company brought audiences to their feet throughout the
South Pacific; and George Balanchine, whose New York City Ballet crowned
its triumphant visits to Western Europe and Japan with an epoch-making
tour of the Soviet Union in 1962. The success of Eisenhower's program of
cultural export led directly to the creation of the National Endowment
for the Arts and Washington's Kennedy Center.
Naima Prevots draws on an array of previously unexamined sources,
including formerly classified State Department documents, congressional
committee hearings, and the minutes of the Dance Panel, to reveal the
inner workings of "Eisenhower's Program," the complex set of
political, fiscal, and artistic interests that shaped it, and the
ever-uneasy relationship between government and the arts in the US.
CONTRIBUTORS: Eric Foner. NAIMA PREVOTS is Professor of Dance at
American University and the author of American Pageantry: A Movement for
Art and Democracy (1990) and Dancing in the Sun: Hollywood
Choreographers, 1915 - 1937. (1987).
