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The details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use, go to dying days of the war in Vietnam.

I'm Francis Burns and this is the BBC World Service, a Cold War Dance.

I was at a performance by the Martha Graham Dance Company in New York.

The artistic director Janet Janet Elba, introduced the dance they were about to perform,

Appalachian Spring, set to Aaron Copeland's score, Bally for Martha.

And Martha Graham and her collaborators wanted to create a work about American hope

and optimism for the future. The ballet tells the story of a young frontier couple on their wedding day.

What could be more hopeful?

And Janet said to her audience,

I remember dancing Appalachian Spring in 1974 in Saigon.

During our tour in the Republic of Vietnam,

we have all seen what communism can do to a struggling nation in our world community.

In Saigon, Vietnam, in 74.

In Appalachia Spring was a very interesting score, very, very rural Americana, for one thing it has the

shaker tune in it, called a gift to be simple.

In 1974 the only American officials left in Vietnam are a skeleton staff of advisors and diplomats.

U.S. troops have gone home after 19 years of war, making the South Vietnamese defeat by communists more likely.

That's when the American government sends a troop of modern dancers to the capital, Saigon.

The State Department funded the trip and not just of Vietnam,

Saigon was the last stop on a tour of Southeast Asia.

Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Burma,

...