Making Dance Modern
Making Dance Modern: Knowledge, Politics, and German Modern Dance, 1890 – 1927 Ana Isabel Keilson Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2017 © 2017 Ana Isabel Keilson All Rights Reserved Abstract Making Dance Modern: Knowledge, Politics, and German Modern Dance, 1890 – 1927 Ana Isabel Keilson Between 1890 and 1927, a group of dancers, musicians, and writers converged in Germany, where they founded an artistic movement that has come to be known as German modern dance. This dissertation provides a history of the origins of this movement and its central figures, including Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman, Rudolf Laban, Hans Brandenburg, and Valeska Gert. These figures, I show, developed modern dance in an attempt to theorize and transform the social order. With the exception of Gert, this was a social order based upon principles of stability, unity, and consensus. Modern dancers promoted this order through practices of performance, pedagogy, and writing; they elaborated their ideas in conversation with contemporary and historical debates in Western theatrical music, natural science, philosophy, and politics. Their efforts sought to demonstrate that the coordinated movement of society hinged upon a logic and order inherent to the physical movements of the individual dancer, whose dancing body and the knowledge it contained formed a perfect model for all bodies. In contrast to many of their contemporaries in literature and the arts, German modern dancers developed what this dissertation labels as “embodied conservatism,” which was an attempt to actively shape society according to principles of physical alignment, harmony, and order.
[Show full text]