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Gestural Imaginaries: Dance and Cultural Theory in the Early Twentieth Century offers a new interpretation of European modernist dance by addressing it as guiding medium in a vibrant field of gestural culture that ranged across art and philosophy. Taking further Cornelius Castoriadis's concept of the social imaginary, it explores this imaginary's embodied forms. Close readings of dances, photographs, and literary texts are juxtaposed with discussions of gestural theory by thinkers including Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, and Aby Warburg. Choreographic gesture is defined as a force of intermittency that creates a new theoretical status of dance. Author Lucia Ruprecht shows how this also bears on contemporary theory. She shifts emphasis from Giorgio Agamben's preoccupation with gestural mediality to Jacques Ranci?re's multiplicity of proliferating, singular gestures, arguing for their ethical and political relevance. Mobilizing dance history and movement analysis, Ruprecht highlights the critical impact of works by choreographers such as Vaslav Nijinsky, Jo Mihaly, and Alexander and Clotilde Sakharoff. She also offers choreographic readings of Franz Kafka and Alfred D?blin. Gestural Imaginaries proposes that modernist dance conducts a gestural revolution which enacts but also exceeds the insights of past and present cultural theory. It makes a case for archive-based, cross-medial, and critically informed dance studies, transnational German studies, and the theoretical potential of performance itself.
Gestural Imaginaries: Dance and Cultural Theory in the Early Twentieth Century offers a new interpretation of European modernist dance by addressing it as guiding medium in a vibrant field of gestural culture that ranged across art and philosophy. Taking further Cornelius Castoriadis's concept of the social imaginary, it explores this imaginary's embodied forms. Close readings of dances, photographs, and literary texts are juxtaposed with discussions of gestural theory by thinkers including Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, and Aby Warburg. Choreographic gesture is defined as a force of intermittency that creates a new theoretical status of dance. Author Lucia Ruprecht shows how this also bears on contemporary theory. She shifts emphasis from Giorgio Agamben's preoccupation with gestural mediality to Jacques Ranci re's multiplicity of proliferating, singular gestures, arguing for their ethical and political relevance. Mobilizing dance history and movement analysis, Ruprecht highlights the critical impact of works by choreographers such as Vaslav Nijinsky, Jo Mihaly, and Alexander and Clotilde Sakharoff. She also offers choreographic readings of Franz Kafka and Alfred D blin. Gestural Imaginaries proposes that modernist dance conducts a gestural revolution which enacts but also exceeds the insights of past and present cultural theory. It makes a case for archive-based, cross-medial, and critically informed dance studies, transnational German studies, and the theoretical potential of performance itself.
Gestural Imaginaries: Dance and Cultural Theory in the Early Twentieth Century offers a new interpretation of European modernist dance by addressing it as guiding medium in a vibrant field of gestural culture that ranged across art and philosophy. Taking further Cornelius Castoriadis's concept of the social imaginary, it explores this imaginary's embodied forms. Close readings of dances, photographs, and literary texts are juxtaposed with discussions of gestural theory by thinkers including Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, and Aby Warburg. Choreographic gesture is defined as a force of intermittency that creates a new theoretical status of dance. Author Lucia Ruprecht shows how this also bears on contemporary theory. She shifts emphasis from Giorgio Agamben's preoccupation with gestural mediality to Jacques Ranci?re's multiplicity of proliferating, singular gestures, arguing for their ethical and political relevance. Mobilizing dance history and movement analysis, Ruprecht highlights the critical impact of works by choreographers such as Vaslav Nijinsky, Jo Mihaly, and Alexander and Clotilde Sakharoff. She also offers choreographic readings of Franz Kafka and Alfred D?blin. Gestural Imaginaries proposes that modernist dance conducts a gestural revolution which enacts but also exceeds the insights of past and present cultural theory. It makes a case for archive-based, cross-medial, and critically informed dance studies, transnational German studies, and the theoretical potential of performance itself.
Tracing a developing fascination with rhythm's significance, its patterns, and its measures, across philosophy, psychology, science, and the whole range of arts, Rhythmical Subjects shows how and why attention to rhythm came to serve as connective tissue between fields of inquiry at a time when modern disciplines were still in the process of formation or consolidation. The concentration on 'rhythm' and its cognates largely arose, Laura Marcus demonstrates, from the desire to reclaim or retain human and natural measures in the face of the coming of the machine and the speed of technological innovation. Rhythmical Subjects uncovers the disparate routes by which rhythm acquired its newfound ability to link ancient and modern forms of intellectual inquiry, and to fathom and re-invigorate temporal articulations of modern subjective life. Among the numerous intellectual and artistic developments set in a new light by this brilliantly wide-ranging book are: the long line of philosophical and theoretical writing on rhythm, from Nietzsche to Bergson and their twentieth-century interlocutors; psychological explorations of rhythm as the fundamental law of life, from Herbert Spencer and Ralph Waldo Emerson to Elsie Fogarty; more experimental engagements with psychology's rhythms, from Wilhelm Wundt, Théodule Ribot, and Karl Groos to the aesthetic writings of Vernon Lee; the history of prosody; pioneering applications of rhythm studies to social and sexual reform, by Havelock Ellis, Marie Stopes, D. H. Lawrence, and Mary Austin (among others); Lebensreform movements and the contribution of Rudolf Steiner and Emile Jaques-Dalcroze; and numerous endeavours in artistic and critical innovation, from the small modernist magazines of Bloomsbury and Paris to art salons and dance studios across Britain, Continental Europe, and America.
Dancing the World Smaller examines international dance performances in New York City in the 1940s as sites in which dance artists and audiences contested what it meant to practice globalism in mid-twentieth-century America. Debates over globalism in dance proxied larger cultural struggles over how to realize diversity while honoring difference.
Dance is often considered an ephemeral art, one that disappears nearly as soon as it materializes, leaving no physical object behind. Yet some dance practice involves people trying to embody something that exists before - and survives beyond - their particular acts of dancing. What exactly is that thing? And (how) do dances continue to exist when not performed? Anna Pakes seeks to answer these and related questions in this book, drawing on analytic philosophy of art to explore the metaphysics of dance making, performance and disappearance. Focusing on Western theater dance, Pakes also traces the different ways dances have been conceptualized across time, and what those historical shifts imply for the ontology of dance works.
Dante, Artist of Gesture proposes a visual technique for reading Dante's Comedy, suggesting that the reader engages with Dante's striking images of souls as if these images were arranged in an architectural space. Art historians have shown how series of discrete images or scenes in medieval places of worship, such as the mosaics in the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence or the frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, establish not only narrative sequences but also parallelisms between registers, forging links between those registers by the use of colour and gestural forms. Heather Webb takes up those techniques to show that the Comedy likewise invites the reader to make visual links between disparate, non-sequential moments in the text. In other words, Webb argues that Dante's poem asks readers to view its verbally articulated sequences of images with a set of observational tools that could be acquired from the practice of engaging with and meditating on the bodily depictions of vice and virtue in fresco cycles or programmes of mosaics in places of worship. One of the most inherently visible aspects of the Comedy is the representation of signature gestures of the characters described in each of the realms. This book traces described gestures and bodily signs across the canticles of the poem to provide a key for identifying affective and devotional itineraries within the text.
Dances and balls appear throughout world literature as venues for young people to meet, flirt, and form relationships, as any reader of Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, or Romeo and Juliet can attest. The popularity of social dance transcends class, gender, ethnic, and national boundaries. In the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish culture, dance offers crucial insights into debates about emancipation and acculturation. While traditional Jewish law prohibits men and women from dancing together, Jewish mixed-sex dancing was understood as the very sign of modernity––and the ultimate boundary transgression. Writers of modern Jewish literature deployed dance scenes as a charged and complex arena for understanding the limits of acculturation, the dangers of ethnic mixing, and the implications of shifting gender norms and marriage patterns, while simultaneously entertaining their readers. In this pioneering study, Sonia Gollance examines the specific literary qualities of dance scenes, while also paying close attention to the broader social implications of Jewish engagement with dance. Combining cultural history with literary analysis and drawing connections to contemporary representations of Jewish social dance, Gollance illustrates how mixed-sex dancing functions as a flexible metaphor for the concerns of Jewish communities in the face of cultural transitions.
"Joins a growing body of scholarship dealing with the productive relationship between literature and cognitive studies while also positing a new theory of modernism. How do we habituate ourselves to environments that are not yet, or no longer, familiar? What is at stake in adapting our behavior to new or changed situations? The present study explores these questions by bringing German literature and thought of the early twentieth century - a time of immense social and material change in Europe - into dialogue with contemporary research in embodied cognition. In six close readings of texts by Vicki Baum, Walter Benjamin, Alfred Dèoblin, Martin Heidegger, Georg Kaiser, and Rainer Maria Rilke, it brings into relief German modernism's concerns over how we adapt our behavior to environments that are new, changed, and/or changing. Rather than emphasizing the alienation and isolation that these texts investigate regarding the modern urban experience, as much of the research on literary modernism has traditionally done, Meindert Peters's book draws out the more dynamic moments of mastery, responsiveness, and cooperation that underpin habituation. Moreover, it extends these questions of habituation to the function of literature itself by showing how modernist forms invite engagement and participation. Habituation in German Modernism not only joins a growing body of scholarship dealing with the productive relationship between literature and cognitive studies but also posits a new theory of modernism"--
"In the much-anticipated update to a classic in dance studies, Mark Franko analyzes the political aspects of North American modern dance in the 20th century. A revisionary account of the evolution of modern dance, this revised edition of Dancing Modernism / Performing Politics features a foreword by Juan Ignacio Vallejos on Franko's career, a new preface, a new chapter on Yvonne Rainer, and an appendix of left-wing dance theory articles from the 1930s. Questioning assumptions that dancing reflects culture, Franko employs a unique interdisciplinary approach to dance analysis that draws from cultural theory, feminist studies, and sexual, class, and modernist politics. Franko also highlights the stories of such dancers as Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and even revolutionaries like Douglas Dunn in order to upend and contradict ideas on autonomy and traditionally accepted modernist dance history. Revealing the captivating development of modern dance, this revised edition of Dancing Modernism / Performing Politics will fascinate anyone interested in the intersection of performance studies, history, and politics"--