Our panel, on “Dancing Democracy,” was conceived and organized this spring and summer, well before September 11. The New School turns out to be a prime location for the topic, and its unanticipated urgency, given the proximity of the New School to ground zero and its historical connection with the self-consciously democratic endeavor of modern dance. This was a genre that sought to distinguish itself as a democratic art form, in response to the perceived elitism of the European ballet. It was here at the New School in the 1930s that dance classes, recitals, and a now-famous series of lecture-demonstrations helped to cohere the young modern dance community.

Talk of dance and democracy has crystallized again 60-some years later, the result of a convergence of three intellectual and artistic trends.

First, there is the growing concern that a people once known for their civic associations are now, as sociologist Robert Putnam famously put it, “bowling alone.” Political philosophers such as Benjamin Barber have been analyzing the theory and practice of civil society as fundamental to the operation of what he terms “strong democracy.” We don't have to make an either-or choice, Barber tells us, between the purely public space of an invasive government and the purely private space of a crassly commercialized market.