Kate Elswit
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199844814
- eISBN:
- 9780199376056
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199844814.003.0004
- Subject:
- Music, Dance
This chapter begins with Mary Wigman’s 1930 Totenmal collaboration with Swiss poet Albert Talhoff. The multimedia spectacle’s invocation of the World War I dead was meant to be “apolitical” even ...
More
This chapter begins with Mary Wigman’s 1930 Totenmal collaboration with Swiss poet Albert Talhoff. The multimedia spectacle’s invocation of the World War I dead was meant to be “apolitical” even though it has retrospectively been read ideologically in terms of a proto-fascist aesthetic. Soon after, Wigman toured her solo dance cycle Opfer around the United States. This chapter considers watching as a form of political activity by comparing divergent audience responses on both sides of the Atlantic to these two late Weimar-era performances that were constructed from similar components and addressed themes of sacrifice and human fate. By focusing on the ideologies of reception, including the multiple models of community in play and the power of underreading, this chapter locates the politics of dance in how its spectators negotiated its meaning. In so doing the chapter offers a new perspective that neither situates dance as a dress rehearsal for German fascism nor neglects its continuities.Less
This chapter begins with Mary Wigman’s 1930 Totenmal collaboration with Swiss poet Albert Talhoff. The multimedia spectacle’s invocation of the World War I dead was meant to be “apolitical” even though it has retrospectively been read ideologically in terms of a proto-fascist aesthetic. Soon after, Wigman toured her solo dance cycle Opfer around the United States. This chapter considers watching as a form of political activity by comparing divergent audience responses on both sides of the Atlantic to these two late Weimar-era performances that were constructed from similar components and addressed themes of sacrifice and human fate. By focusing on the ideologies of reception, including the multiple models of community in play and the power of underreading, this chapter locates the politics of dance in how its spectators negotiated its meaning. In so doing the chapter offers a new perspective that neither situates dance as a dress rehearsal for German fascism nor neglects its continuities.
Kate Elswit
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199844814
- eISBN:
- 9780199376056
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199844814.003.0005
- Subject:
- Music, Dance
This chapter takes up larger questions of retrospective watching through the post-World War Two moment at which understandings of Weimar dance were consolidated. Beginning from the copyright suit ...
More
This chapter takes up larger questions of retrospective watching through the post-World War Two moment at which understandings of Weimar dance were consolidated. Beginning from the copyright suit that Kurt Jooss filed against the musical revue film Sensation in San Remo after the return of his 1932 Green Table to West Germany in 1951, the chapter shows how one of the pieces most directly associated in retrospect with connecting inter-war and post-war German dance figured actively in reconstituting a postwar dance community. Returning from 19 years of exile, Jooss’s stylistic fusion was cited as an unfinished form of late Ausdruckstanz and used to bridge interwar and postwar dance, in the process justifying continuities with fascist aesthetics through, rather than despite, the legacy his work carried. This chapter thus historicizes how Weimar-era dance came to be understood in relation to successive generations of German dance, including dance theatre.Less
This chapter takes up larger questions of retrospective watching through the post-World War Two moment at which understandings of Weimar dance were consolidated. Beginning from the copyright suit that Kurt Jooss filed against the musical revue film Sensation in San Remo after the return of his 1932 Green Table to West Germany in 1951, the chapter shows how one of the pieces most directly associated in retrospect with connecting inter-war and post-war German dance figured actively in reconstituting a postwar dance community. Returning from 19 years of exile, Jooss’s stylistic fusion was cited as an unfinished form of late Ausdruckstanz and used to bridge interwar and postwar dance, in the process justifying continuities with fascist aesthetics through, rather than despite, the legacy his work carried. This chapter thus historicizes how Weimar-era dance came to be understood in relation to successive generations of German dance, including dance theatre.
