One of the most important American choreographers of the 1940s, Jane Dudley, who also made a significant contribution to contemporary British dance, has died aged 89 of a heart ailment. A leading dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company in New York from 1937 to 1944 - and later a guest artist - she was, in 1970, a founder of the London Contemporary Dance School.
Her roots were in German expressionist dance, and her greatest artistic period was as part of the Jane Dudley/ Sophie Naslow/William Bales Trio, launched in 1942. Her unforgettable solo work Harmonica Breakdown (1938), inspired by the music of blues harmonica player Sonny Terry, expressed a link between the work of the great expressionist soloists - Mary Wigman, Hilde Holger and Gertrud Bodenweiser - but within an American social framework. Other work she choreographed in this period included The Lonely Ones and Conte Flamenco, inspired by La Pasionaria, Dolores Ibarruri Gómez, the communist Spanish civil war heroine. Dudley also appeared in Celebration, Primitive Mysteries, American Document and Letter To The World.
Born into a comfortable German-English family in New York, she was educated at the Walden School and the University of North Carolina. From the radical climate of her home town, and training with Hanya Holm at the Mary Wigman School from 1930-1935, she inherited the experience and aesthetics of new European dance that was beginning to arrive in the United States with refugees from Nazi Germany.
Dudley was part of the left theatre movement that spilled over to dance. A founder, in 1932, of the New Dance Group, which performed in union halls and factories, her aim was to make dance accessible to a non-dance audience, and to offer material with a political orientation.
She assisted Graham at the Neighbourhood Playhouse School and taught at her studio. Her fellow-collaborators were the choreographer/dancers Doris Humphrey, José Limon and the composer Louis Horst. She began to focus on social issues, such as the 1946 ballet The Lonely Ones, rather than concentrating on the political. As she said: "The flight into the personal is perhaps an unconscious reaction against the insidious power of the right."
"Inner immigration" was a phrase coined by writers in the Soviet bloc, but it was also a disease affecting many American intellectuals, including Dudley. The red scare of the early postwar years even began affect the dance world. And Dudley's former husband, filmmaker Leo Hurwitz, was blacklisted.
She was director of the New Dance Group Studio from 1950-1956. In the 1960s, she taught dance at Bennington College, in Vermont, and was artistic director of the Batsheva's Dance Company in Israel, between 1968-69. After 1970, she based herself in London for the rest of her life, and created work for Extemporary, Spiral and Phoenix Dance Companies. Harmonica Break Dance was revived by London Contemporary Dance Theatre in 1988 to celebrate 50 years of Dudley's dance-making. But, out of the social context - and in a modern dance world obsessed with a post-modern aesthetic - it seemed out of place.
In 1990, Dudley devised and presented After The Ark, a celebration of Jewish culture in dance, music and song at the Purcell Room, in London's South Bank Centre. The following year, she choreographed the movement for the Guildhall School of Music and Drama's Betrothal In The Monastery, with music by Prokoviev, and, in 1992, she choreographed the opera Siege Of Calais, with music by Donizetti.
Those later years marked Dudley out as a singular teacher of the Graham method. She was kept somewhat of a secret in the British dance world, and rarely enjoyed the acclaim she deserved. But those who met her, worked with her and became her students, will carry some of her energy, politics and spirit for the rest of their days. She was a dynamic personality with a vigorous mind that was somewhat wasted in the anti-intellectual climate of the postwar British dance scene.
She is survived by her son Tom, a cinematographer of New York, and three grandchildren.