A Creature of American Bone: American Civil Religion and the Genealogy of Cultural Abstraction in Appalachian Spring Ballet

Abstract

This thesis examines the cultural and symbolic formation of Appalachian Spring, situating the ballet within a broader framework of American civil religion and postcolonial theory. It traces how the collaborative work of Aaron Copland, Martha Graham, and Isamu Noguchi transformed national myths, religious idioms, and historical trauma into a high-modernist aesthetic via a mediating field of abstraction. Drawing on the ballet's early scripts, related political oratory, and contemporary literature, the study shows how marginalized figures—particularly Indigenous and African American presences—were progressively abstracted or muted in the construction of a unified national narrative. Engaging theories of hybridity and the "third space," the thesis investigates how Appalachian Spring negotiates the tension between democratic ideals and histories of dispossession, functioning as a paradigmatic site where civil religious logic is simultaneously realized and tested. It concludes by demonstrating that abstraction served as the primary cultural mechanism by which these discordant histories were condensed into archetypal figural and ritual containers, allowing affective historical pressure to persist below the threshold of explicit recognition—thereby symbolically reconstituting mid-twentieth-century American identity and collective memory in performance.