"Nonstop Bodies: How Dance Shaped New York City" at Mass MoCA

Saturday, May 30, 5pm | North Adams, MA | Free

Brooklyn writer Rennie McDougall brings his debut book Nonstop Bodies: How Dance Shaped New York City to the R&D Store at Mass MoCA on May 30 for a conversation and signing. The book, published by Harry N. Abrams, is a sweeping cultural history of twentieth-century New York told through the movements of its dancers—from Prohibition-era dance marathons and the Rockettes to the Judson Dance Theater, hip hop in the South Bronx, and the disco.

The argument McDougall makes is that you can read the entire arc of New York's social history through who was dancing, where, with whom, and under what pressures. Martha Graham shares a lineage with the West African dances being brought to New York stages by Katherine Dunham; George Balanchine's innovations drew from the acrobatic feats of the Nicholas Brothers; the partnered dancing at the Palladium fed into Jerome Robbins's Broadway choreography and preceded the individualized freedom of disco. Each chapter treats a different form and era, and the connective tissue between them is the city itself.

McDougall's writing has appeared in T Magazine, The Village Voice, Lapham's Quarterly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Slate, among others. He received the Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism in 2018 and was named a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in 2023. This is his first book, and it's landing at an apt venue — Mass MoCA has presented dance throughout its history, and the R&D Store is one of the better small-event rooms in the region.

Mass MoCA R&D Store, 1040 Mass MoCA Way, North Adams, MA. Free. More at massmoca.org.