Books Briefly
Books Briefly Supporting apartheid Decoding Corporate Camouflage: U.S. Business Support for Apartheid, by Elizabeth Schmidt (Institute for Policy Studies, 1901 Q Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20009....
...While de Mille is less than reticent in estimating her own contributions, she is generous to other trailblazers, and writes with wit and spirit...
...She moves on to review "modern revolutionaries" such as Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Mary Wigman, and among "mavericks" she includes Katherine Dunham and herself (she calls her own work "eclectic, a mixture of classical and modern...
...When she turns to the development of ballet in America she centers on George Balan-chine, Lucia Chase, Jerome Robbins, and Antony Tudor...
...She evaluates "the new moderns" like Merc Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp, Eliot Feld, and the Pilobolus group...
...Dance in America America Dances, by Agnes de Mille (Macmillan...
...Most dancers, she notes, are paid less than half the costs of · stagehands and technicians...
...Balanchine, she writes, "has brought ballet back to the essentials but with a wealth of techniques...
...They do far more to buttress apartheid through this production than they do to counter it via minor workplace reforms...
...company is about to undercut the very basis for its profitable investment in South Africa...
...companies doing business in South Africa usually claim that their presence has a civilizing effect, slowly nudging the dominant white minority toward a more humane racial policy...
...It is apartheid which keeps that labor cheap, and no U.S...
...24.95...
...But, as Elizabeth Schmidt makes clear, noncompliance with the code is all but universal...
...4.95 paperback...
...222 pp...
...However, the failure of these companies to comply with their own code of conduct, the so-called Sullivan Code, reveals the hypocrisy of such claims...
...Perhaps the most dramatic failure of the code occurred in 1979, when Ford fired 700 black workers at its Port Elizabeth factory after these workers protested racist treatment by white supervisors...
...127 pp...
...Adopted in 1977, this code commits its signatory companies to fair employment practices in their South African branch plants...
...Unlike Margot Fonteyn, who in The Magic of Dance went back to the roots of dance in Rus-.sia and Europe, de Mille starts with Indian dances in early America and continues the evolution through square dances, the Virginia reel, the polka, and the waltz to the Castle walk, foxtrot, Charleston, and Black Bottom...
...Many photographs are included...
...In fact, the code functions as propaganda "camouflage" for the daily exploitation of black labor...
...Here a gifted American choreographer, dancer, and artist surveys the history of dance in this country...
...Probably because of her own financial struggles, she is highly conscious of money and its role in staging dance productions...
...Schmidt effectively presents the case against corporate collaboration in South Africa in a brief and compelling way...
...Moreover, Schmidt demonstrates that Sullivan companies are the most important suppliers of strategic goods (oil, transportation, computers) to the South African military and police...
Vol. 45 • April 1981 • No. 4
