Anna Sokolow

Anna Sokolow (1910-2000)

Dancer and choreographer. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, her family moved to New York in 1912, where she was raised and educated. She took her first dance classes at the Emanuel Sisterhoods of Personal Service and at age 15 she attended the Henry Street Settlement House(s), the original Neighborhood Playhouse, with Blanche Talmud and Louis Horst. In 1930-38 Sokolow danced with Martha Graham’s company, and at the same time joined the Radical Dance Movement, where she started to choreograph. In 1936, she founded her own company, Dance Unit. In 1939, she was invited to Mexico where she founded the country’s first modern dance company.
In the 1940s, after returning from Mexico to New York, Sokolow choreographed for Broadway theater plays and musicals and worked with leading figures such as Bertolt Brecht, Tennessee Williams, and Leonard Bernstein. She was a member of the Actors Studio, Elia Kazan’s training school, where Stanislavski’s system was taught. For forty years, she taught dance and drama in Juilliard.
In 1953, at Jerome Robbins’s recommendation, the America-Israel Cultural Foundation invited Sokolow to lay the technical-professional groundwork for Inbal. Indeed, she was instrumental in preparing the company’s for its successful tour in Europe and the US. In 1957, she was appointed the company’s artistic consultant, and ever since then kept visiting Israel regularly and giving lessons and workshops. Her contacts with the Israeli dance scenes became stronger and in 1962 she established the Lyric Theater which operated for three years – a professional company that represented a turning point in the local scenes, both in terms of her expressive dances she choreographed and stage, and in terms of the quality of the dancers working with her. Some of them moved to Batsheva after its establishment, starting a process that eventually forced the Lyric Theater to close. At the same time, Sokolow worked with theaters in Israel, particularly with the Cameri Theater, in the classic musical King Solomon and Shalmai the Cobbler (1964).
In the 1970s, William (Bill) Louther invited Sokolow for the first time as a guest choreographer for Batsheva. During this visit, she staged the dances Deserts and Friendship, the solo Poem for Ehud Ben-David, and In Memory of No. 52436, a solo dance for Rina Schenfeld – all in 1973. Later on, she choreographed Poems of Ecstasy (1976) for Batsheva, for which she also designed the costumes, as well as Rooms (1977); Dreams and Scenes from the Music of Charles Ives (1978); and Les Noces (1982).
In 1956, she was a candidate for the Tony Award for choreographing a play by Seán O’Casey. She won the Dance Magazine Award in 1961 and the American Dance Festival Award in 1991.
Anna Sokolow kept on working as a choreographer, lecturer and artist until not long before her death at age 90, in 2000.