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Yvonne Hardt links the era of early German modern dance called Ausdruckstanz (expressive dance) and the workers’ culture movement in the Germany of the 1920s and 1930s. Both were influenced by the life reform movement (Lebensreformbewegung), which envisioned that a different society could be achieved by a new body culture (Körperkultur). Whereas Ausdruckstanz has most frequently been discussed in terms of how it could empower women, it also, theoretically, offered men the chance to “rediscover” themselves in ways that could emancipate them from traditional gender roles. At the same time, early modern dance could also reflect ideals of the Socialist and Communist ideology, which reinscribed some old male‐female divisions by emphasizing the physical strength of the male worker. Thematic aspects in the work of the following prominent Weimar dance figures are considered: Rudolf Laban, Martin Gleisner, and Jean (Hans) Weidt. Implicit in Hardt's analysis is the difficulty of embodying political ideals in dance in a way that acknowledges the multiple strands of complex gender identities.

This is a deeply textured argument that raises questions about the bonds connecting aloneness, relationality, and the ecstatic state, with reference to the theories of Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy. The springboard is two solo concerts in Switzerland: Vaslav Nijinsky's last performance ever when he was a patient suffering from schizophrenia in a mental hospital in St. Moritz; Mary Wigman's first ever solo performance in Davos, both in 1919 in the aftermath of World War II and a social milieu of rising consumerism. European modern dance and Ausdruckstanz would soon emerge.

This chapter examines the ways in which Lawrence contributed extensive and innovative literary engagements with dance in the modernist period. Lawrence’s citations of dance are most widely associated with the liberation of the body and identity through early twentieth-century dance practices such as social dance, Greek dance, and the work of Isadora Duncan. Yet, as this chapter explores, Lawrence’s narratives also reflect the aesthetics initiated by the innovations of the Ballets Russes, European Expressionism, and, latterly, the ritual dance of the American South - of Native and Pueblo Indian forms. In his late work Lawrence especially invokes dance experimentally to formulate a new literary critique of a failing European culture.

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.

Focusing on Sokolow’s work in Israel, this chapter highlights tensions between American Jewishness and Israeliness through critical response to her dances Dreams (1961), Opus ’63 (1963), Forms (1964), and Odes (1964). It introduces the term “sabra physicality” to describe the performative qualities of defiant vulnerability that dancers in Sokolow’s Israeli company Lyric Theatre introduced into her oeuvre. With financial support from the American Fund for Israeli Institutions (America–Israel Cultural Foundation), Sokolow was part of the North American influence building Israeli art and cultural institutions as postwar alliances formed between the United States and Israeli governments. This chapter further shows Sokolow’s role in disseminating American modern dance through the bodies of her students abroad, through her work with the Inbal Yemenite Dance Group (Inbal Dance Theater) and Lyric Theatre. In turn, the way those dancers performed Graham’s technique and Sokolow’s choreography changed American modernism.