Nonstop Bodies traces several different dance cultures across New York City from the turn of the twentieth century to its gentrified end, with bankruptcy and deindustrialization in-between. Covering the Depression-era dance marathons, held at places like Harlem’s Manhattan Casino and Midtown’s Madison Square Garden, and the origins of the Lindy hop at the Savoy Ballroom, McDougall deftly links dance to politics and policies that sought to reign in trends considered unruly or ungovernable. There is a revisionist spirit embedded in this history as the book explores the unsettling homogeneity of the Rockettes, and their celebration of a particularly militant American dominance in the wake of World War II; tells the true story of disco, emanating out of Soho lofts and divorced from the fantasy of Saturday Night Fever; and recounts the rise of hip hop and breaking, released from the reductive embers of the vacant buildings that were burning in the Bronx. McDougall argues: 

“The practices that coalesced into hip hop, however, were at play before that summer night in 1973, having just as much if not more to do with ongoing dance practices of Black Americans than with a reactionary movement against oppression.” 

In McDougall’s narrative of the city, empowerment and play coexist with resistance and reaction. He never loses sight of the self-expression and embodied affirmation that dance contains, even when it is being used as rebellion or protest. 

Which is not to say that powerful politicians, like mayors with racist policing agendas, and city planner Robert Moses, whose outsized influence on the city lasted four decades, do not loom in the wings. Even as Alvin Ailey choreographs “Revelations,” he is also a citizen wrongly detained and beaten by the police. (In another anecdote, he is a night owl running the light grid at a makeshift disco after hours in the Nuyorican Poet’s Café on the Lower East Side.) In a chapter on voguing, a chance encounter between Willi Ninja and Archie Burnett in Washington Square Park would not have happened if Moses had been successful in his plan of running an elevated expressway through its famed central fountain. 

In the evolving story of concert dance, where each generation of choreographers makes a strong case for refuting past styles and beginning anew, McDougall notes the threads of influence that bind no matter what. We find Martha Graham compelled by the simple unaffected stage action of an Isadora Duncan dancer picking up a flower and later, Yvonne Rainier moved by the un-stylized stage walk of Erick Hawkins, Graham’s dancer and lover. And then there is Jerome Robbins, researching in the dance clubs uptown and in the outer boroughs, and directing “West Side Story” with its mambo-inflected song “America” amidst a backdrop of urban renewal and headlines of gang violence. Following on the heels of the pulsing chapter on mambo, McDougall’s shift to Robbins and the changing Broadway musical puts mainstream success and the concept of “artistic colonialism” side by side.