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Susan Manning is a professor of English, theater, and performance studies at Northwestern University and the author of Ecstasy and the Demon: The Dances of Mary Wigman. Book jacket.
Imagine yourself in Weimar Germany: you are visually inundated with depictions of dance. Perusing a women’s magazine, you find photograph after photograph of leggy revue starlets, clad in sequins and feathers, coquettishly smiling at you. When you attend an art exhibition, you encounter Otto Dix’s six-foot-tall triptych Metropolis, featuring Charleston dancers in the latest luxurious fashions, or Emil Nolde’s watercolors of Mary Wigman, with their luminous blues and purples evoking her choreographies’ mystery and expressivity. Invited to the Bauhaus, you participate in the Metallic Festival, and witness the school’s transformation into a humorous, shiny, technological total work of...
The book explores the revolutionary impact of modern dance on European culture in the early twentieth century. Edward Ross Dickinson uncovers modern dance's place in the emerging 'mass' culture of the modern metropolis and reveals the connections between dance, politics, culture, religion, the arts, psychology, entertainment, and selfhood.
This collection of new essays explores connections between dance, modernism, and modernity by examining the ways in which leading dancers have responded to modernity. Burt and Huxley examine dance examples from a period beginning just before the First World War and extending to the mid-1950s, ranging across not only mainland Europe and the United States but also Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific Asian region, and the UK. They consider a wide range of artists, including Akarova, Gertrude Colby, Isadora Duncan, Katherine Dunham, Margaret H’Doubler, Hanya Holm, Michio Ito, Kurt Jooss, Wassily Kandinsky, Margaret Morris, Berto Pasuka, Uday Shankar, Antony Tudor, and Mary Wigman. The authors e...
During the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) sports emerged as a popular phenomenon that critics often derided as a degenerate fad. But sports and art institutions as well as avant-garde artists looked more closely at sports' potential to rejuvenate a populace demoralized by World War I and cultivate a more dynamic, harmonious society. This book examines images of sports in the visual arts of Weimar Germany to explore how institutions and artists forged a link between sports and art and gave new visual form to notions about the ideal body. It looks at the 1930 Berlin art exhibition Sports as Cultural Factor and sports at the Bauhaus and investigates the sports pictures of László Moholy-Nagy, Anton Räderscheidt, and Willi Baumeister as exemplary case studies. Besides examining Weimar sports culture and its link to art, this study illuminates the complex ways in which artists used the motif of the athletic body to define humans' relation to modernity while addressing issues of industrialization, gender, mind-body dualism, and the promotion of sports. This engaging work will be of particular value to readers interested in modern art, sports, and culture in Germany.
A century after the Bauhaus's founding in 1919, this book reassesses it as more than a highly influential art, architecture, and design school. In myriad ways, emerging ideas about the body in relation to health, movement, gender, and sexuality were at the heart of art and life at the school. Bauhaus Bodies reassesses the work of both well-known Bauhaus members and those who have unjustifiably escaped scholarly scrutiny, its women in particular. In fourteen original, cutting-edge essays by established experts and emerging scholars, this book reveals how Bauhaus artists challenged traditional ideas about bodies and gender. Written to appeal to students, scholars, and the broad public, Bauhaus Bodies will be essential reading for anyone interested in modern art, architecture, design history, and gender studies; it will define conversations and debates during the 2019 centenary of the Bauhaus's founding and beyond.
Modernism on Stage restores Serge Diaghilev?s Ballets Russes to its central role in the Parisian art world of the 1910s and 1920s. During those years, the Ballets Russes? stage served as a dynamic forum for the interaction of artistic genres - dance, music and painting - in a mixed-media form inspired by Richard Wagner?s Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art). This interdisciplinary study combines a broad history of Diaghilev?s troupe with close readings of four ballets designed by canonical modernist artists: Pablo Picasso, Sonia Delaunay, Henri Matisse, and Giorgio de Chirico. Experimental both in concept and form, these productions redefine our understanding of the interconnected worlds of t...
The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics presents cutting edge research investigating not only how dance achieves its politics, but also how notions of the political are themselves expanded when viewed from the perspective of dance.
As the 20th century dawned, authors, artists, and filmmakers flocked to cities like Paris and Berlin for a chance to experience a bustling urban life and engage with other artists and intellectuals. Among them were German-speaking authors and filmmakers such as Harry Graf Kessler, Rainer Maria Rilke, August Endell, Alfred Döblin, Else Lasker-Schüler, Segundo de Chomón, and the brothers Max and Emil Skladanowsky. In their writing and artistic work from that period, they depicted the perpetual influx of stimuli caused by urban life—including hordes of pedestrians, bustling traffic, and a barrage of advertisements—as well as how these encounters repeatedly paralleled their experiences of...