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Ausdruckstanz, Workers’ Culture, and Masculinity in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s

Yvonne Hardt

in When Men Dance: Choreographing Masculinities Across Borders

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 ... More

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.Less

Jacob's Children and Flocks (29:31–Chap. 30): The Generating of Children (29:31–30:24)The Generating of Flocks (30:25–43)

Thomas L. Brodie

in Genesis as Dialogue: A Literary, Historical, and Theological Commentary

The account of the generating of Jacob's children (Genesis 29:31–30:24) is balanced by an account of the generating of Jacob's flocks (30:25–43). The children are generated in the context of the ... More

The account of the generating of Jacob's children (Genesis 29:31–30:24) is balanced by an account of the generating of Jacob's flocks (30:25–43). The children are generated in the context of the rivalry between Leah and Rachel; the flocks in the context of the rivalry between Laban and Jacob. The children carry the names of the future tribes, and the flocks have echoes of the people. Children and flocks promise well for the future.Less

The Long Journey Homeward (Chaps. 31–33): The Fear in Meeting Laban (31:1–32:2)The Greater Fear in Meeting Esau (32:3–Chap. 33)

Thomas L. Brodie

in Genesis as Dialogue: A Literary, Historical, and Theological Commentary

Jacob's journey homeward, after an absence of twenty years, consists of two main episodes: journeying in fear to meet Laban (Genesis 31:1–32:2), and journeying in greater fear to meet Esau, the ... More

Jacob's journey homeward, after an absence of twenty years, consists of two main episodes: journeying in fear to meet Laban (Genesis 31:1–32:2), and journeying in greater fear to meet Esau, the brother who once sought to kill him (32:3–ch. 33). Jacob's fear includes the fear of death. In meeting Laban, he is cowed initially; only in his anger does he find the courage to confront Laban. However, before facing Esau, Jacob wrestles with God, and then he faces the danger somewhat calmly. The night struggle with God has some aspects of a betrothal.Less

The “Kinesphere” and the Body’s Other Spatial Envelopes in Rudolf Laban’s Theory of Dance

Margareta Ingrid Christian

in Objects in Air: Artworks and Their Outside around 1900

This chapter focuses on Rudolf Laban, early twentieth century choreographer and theorist of modern dance and his text The World of the Dancer, Die Welt des Tänzers. It uncovers the many contextual ... More

This chapter focuses on Rudolf Laban, early twentieth century choreographer and theorist of modern dance and his text The World of the Dancer, Die Welt des Tänzers. It uncovers the many contextual layers – aesthetic, scientific, occult, and political – deposited in Laban’s vision of dancerly environment. In terms such as kinesphere, Laban suggests that space in dance is not an inert background but rather an active receptacle for bodily movements that extend dancers beyond their physical bounds. Dance movements create shapes not only in the body but also in the immediate space surrounding the dancer. Laban’s experiences with the quintessential fluid of air, encountered in its concrete sense in his climate therapy and in his choreography of open-air dances, influenced his space-centered dance theory, in which the dancer’s spatial atmosphere takes center-stage. Laban’s understanding of dance as overspilling into the atmosphere implies not only an ecological oneness between humans and nature, or a cosmological oneness between humans and the universe, but also a social oneness performed in Laban’s movement choirs. Communal dance is problematic in view of Laban’s penchant for thinking in terms of national and racial categories, and in view of his later choreographing of Nazi mass dances.Less

Space as Form

Margareta Ingrid Christian

in Objects in Air: Artworks and Their Outside around 1900

This chapter turns to Laban’s increasingly abstract understanding of the bond between dancer and space, a bond he views in terms of a crystal morphology. There is a historical trajectory that leads ... More

This chapter turns to Laban’s increasingly abstract understanding of the bond between dancer and space, a bond he views in terms of a crystal morphology. There is a historical trajectory that leads from the idea that form and space are continuous in nineteenth century theories of milieu, and their reception in Warburg, Riegl, Rilke, and Laban, to the practice of endowing space with plasticity in cubism. The chapter views abstraction’s development via the cubist molding of space as opposed to the suppression of space in Worringer. Riegl, Laban, Boccioni, or cubist paintings wrestle with the relation between figure and ground – a relation that is also at the heart of Gestalt psychology. In his essay Thing and Medium, the German Gestalt psychologist Fritz Heider rethinks the figure and ground problem in media theoretical terms as a thing medium relation. He reaffirms air as a privileged trope for conceptualizing the continuity between forms and their environing space when he uses air as an example that illustrates the ease with which a thing can become a medium, and a medium can, conversely, turn into a thing.Less

Heirs and Affines in The Merchant of Venice

Katharine Eisaman Maus

in Being and Having in Shakespeare

In The Merchant of Venice, written between Richard II and 1 Henry IV, Shakespeare considers some of the same issues from a different generic point of view. Merchant can highlight the question of what ... More

In The Merchant of Venice, written between Richard II and 1 Henry IV, Shakespeare considers some of the same issues from a different generic point of view. Merchant can highlight the question of what can be bartered for, exchanged, contracted for, and what can’t, in a way that is even more pointed, because more counterfactually vivid, than the history plays can accommodate. As a comedy, it is more interested in intimate and domestic relations than in power politics; Merchant focuses particularly on how property figures in the intimacy between marriageable or married couples, the intimacy between parent and child, and the intimacy between friends of the same sex. This chapter focuses particularly on the property transfers that attend the marriage of heiresses such as Portia and Jessica, and the mixed emotions that those transfers generate on the part of the heiresses’ fathers, their new sons-in-law, and the heiresses themselves.Less

Becoming the Dada Body: Masks, Dance and Mime

Dafydd W. Jones

in Dada 1916 in Theory: Practices of Critical Resistance

The performative aspects of Zurich Dada (without which the inaugural formation would surely have passed unnoticed in the middle of the First World War) constitute the central interest of chapter 2 – ... More

The performative aspects of Zurich Dada (without which the inaugural formation would surely have passed unnoticed in the middle of the First World War) constitute the central interest of chapter 2 – the body, masks, puppets, dance, starting with what can be described from the few visual renderings that we have of the Cabaret Voltaire. With the masked face that dominates Marcel Janco’s painting Cabaret Voltaire, the philosophical work of Emmanuel Levinas is introduced in discussion of the face and its masking in relation to theoretical readings of otherness. The performative dimension of Dada activities allows deliberation of a philosophical fundament for the centrality of the body and of its surmounting face in cabaret fare – debated through Schopenhauer on will, with detours to more recent instances in the YBAs or in American Psycho. The masks of Marcel Janco, the contorting body of Emmy Hennings and the Dada dancers all deposit cultural leads that are here given contemporary continuity in their recontextualisation.Less

Bodies in Motion: An Introduction

Ann M. Axtmann

in Indians and Wannabes: Native American Powwow Dancing in the Northeast and Beyond

This chapter introduces the Native American intertribal powwow as a popular and prolific performance genre. Powwows are spiritual, social, and communal events that occur annually throughout North ... More

This chapter introduces the Native American intertribal powwow as a popular and prolific performance genre. Powwows are spiritual, social, and communal events that occur annually throughout North America and vary significantly by geographical region, tribal and community organizers, and participants. Powwows are also present in our daily lives through music, television, and film; photojournalism; and academic studies. After examining some of these sources, Axtmann discusses the importance of studying powwow through its everyday movement and dance––and, more specifically, proposes bringing choreographic tools, Laban Movement Analysis, and notions of “performance” and “performativity” to this project. In particular, she considers the genocides historically suffered by Native peoples in relation to how the body expresses itself through dance. Finally, Axtmann announces the central topics of her book by chapter, introduces key terms that will be used throughout, and explains how her own identity as a non-Indian dancer, choreographer, and performance scholar is located within the project.Less

Ezra Pound on Kinaesthetics, the Russian Ballet, and Machines

Susan Jones

in Literature, Modernism, and Dance

The American writer Ezra Pound explored a range of genres, disciplines, and cultural contexts throughout his career. The chapter focuses on a neglected area of interest—his engagement with movement ... More

The American writer Ezra Pound explored a range of genres, disciplines, and cultural contexts throughout his career. The chapter focuses on a neglected area of interest—his engagement with movement and dance, both in the formation of his poetics and in his essays on ballet, music, and sculpture. Although critical of aspects of Diaghilev's ‘orientalism’, his role as arts reviewer for the New Age and the Athenaeum provoked his interest in the relationship between human and machine movement. His praise for Massine's ‘impersonal’ choreographic style for the puppets of La Boutique fantasque leads to a re-evaluation of the Ballets Russes and to later enquiries into the human interaction with machines in industrial production. Pound's explorations intriguingly match the innovative dance theories of the expressionist Rudolf Laban, and show the extent to which dance and writing of the twentieth century inform the discourses of modernity.Less

The Eye of the Storm: Preston Sturges and Performance

Diane Carson

in Refocus: the Films of Preston Sturges

This chapter analyses performance in The Lady Eve and The Palm Beach Story with comparisons and contrasts to several other Sturges comedies. It examines performative choices by Barbara Stanwyck, ... More

This chapter analyses performance in The Lady Eve and The Palm Beach Story with comparisons and contrasts to several other Sturges comedies. It examines performative choices by Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, and Charles Coburn in The Lady Eve and acting choices by Claudette Colbert, Joel McCrea, Mary Astor, and Rudy Vallee in The Palm Beach Story. Using Laban methodology, it describes the affective qualities of expressions, gestures, and voices as well as the impact of costuming. Consideration is given to Sturges’s cinematic presentation of actors’ movements and physical attributes with particular attention to how differences in gesture and expression shape audiences’ perception of characters. The essay also considers characteristics of screwball comedies and gender representation within them.Less

A Genealogy of Rhythm

Paola Crespi and Sunil Manghani

Paola Crespi and Sunil Manghani (eds)

in Rhythm and Critique: Technics, Modalities, Practices

Building on the conceptual account offered in the Introduction, this chapter provides an extensive survey of critical literatures in which rhythms and ideas about rhythm are significant, and which ... More

Building on the conceptual account offered in the Introduction, this chapter provides an extensive survey of critical literatures in which rhythms and ideas about rhythm are significant, and which have been influential for later thinking. Offering key extracts from all of the major thinkers surveyed, it maps philosophical thinking on rhythm from the turn of the twentieth century through to the present, but with specific focus on how these materials come together within critical literatures of the 1970s and the varying shifts up until the present.Less

Drawing Rhythm: On the Work of Rudolf Laban

Paola Crespi

Paola Crespi and Sunil Manghani (eds)

in Rhythm and Critique: Technics, Modalities, Practices

This chapter locates, in the wider context of critical theory, the practice-based approach to rhythm of choreographer and movement-thinker Rudolf Laban. In doing so, its aim is both to add a ... More

This chapter locates, in the wider context of critical theory, the practice-based approach to rhythm of choreographer and movement-thinker Rudolf Laban. In doing so, its aim is both to add a significant and overlooked voice to the ongoing debate on rhythm as it has unfolded in Western thought, and to argue for the value of a practitioner’s insight into an otherwise prominently if not exclusively theoretical discourse. Laban’s work in define and understand rhythm is here discussed in relation to his politics, his artistic output and his philosophy through an exploration and analysis of his unpublished manuscripts and diagrams held at the National Resource Centre for Dance at the University of Surrey.Less

Rudolf Laban’s Dance Film Projects

Susanne Franco

in New German Dance Studies

Rudolf Laban was one of the leaders of Ausdruckstanz, and he has been studied as a thoughtful writer and theoretician, a talented choreographer, an inspired teacher, and a tireless organizer of ... More

Rudolf Laban was one of the leaders of Ausdruckstanz, and he has been studied as a thoughtful writer and theoretician, a talented choreographer, an inspired teacher, and a tireless organizer of schools, associations, and festivals. Less known are his mostly unrealized film projects, conceptualized for different purposes on different occasions. This chapter considers how film offered Laban yet another arena within which to promote his distinctive vision of dance. Laban was interested in using cinema as a tool to disseminate his ideas and to expand the potential audience for modern dance, ensuring its position as a respectable social practice, as a form of high art, and as a professional field. He understood the great economic potential that cinema, as a popular medium, could give to dance in supporting his enterprises. The chapter also wonders whether Laban's apparent turn away from film in the mid-1930s reflected his engagement with the National Socialist cultural bureaucracy and the opportunities it offered for his vision of mass dance.Less

Expressive Performance: Laban Movement Analysis

Paola Savvidou

in Teaching the Whole Musician: A Guide to Wellness in the Applied Studio

This chapter addresses the expressive component of performance as it relates to healthy physical alignment and effective communication using Laban Movement Analysis (LMA). The point of departure for ... More

This chapter addresses the expressive component of performance as it relates to healthy physical alignment and effective communication using Laban Movement Analysis (LMA). The point of departure for the presentation of the LMA system is the visual element of musical performance and its importance in communicating to the audience. LMA is presented incrementally with movement activities geared toward re-patterning neuromuscular connections. This approach also aims to cultivate a wider movement vocabulary. Exercises and applications of the movements in musical performance are provided for each of the new concepts. At the end of the chapter, a toolkit is provided with two self-observation exercises.Less

From Earthquake to ‘Red Maquis’, September 1954 to June 1956

Neil Macmaster

in War in the Mountains: Peasant Society and Counterinsurgency in Algeria, 1918-1958

The chapter examines how the Communist Party, following the decision of June 1955 to organize the paramilitary Combattants de la libération (CDL), established a short-lived guerrilla, the so-called ... More

The chapter examines how the Communist Party, following the decision of June 1955 to organize the paramilitary Combattants de la libération (CDL), established a short-lived guerrilla, the so-called ‘Red Maquis’, in the Chelif region. The clandestine structure had begun to take root as a consequence of the massive earthquake of September 1954, centred on Orleansville, that exposed the long-term failure of the colonial state to develop the rural economy. The communists rapidly created the Fédération des sinistrés that established a network of peasant cells that soon became the base of the Red Maquis. While the communists were successful in creating a guerrilla base centred on Medjadja, the main group inserted by Laban and Maillot in the Beni Boudouane was rapidly located and destroyed by the army, assisted by the bachaga Boualam. The catastrophic failure of the Red Maquis highlighted the failure of the Algiers-based central committee to prepare the ground for a guerrilla movement. However, several key participants escaped the military encirclement and were soon absorbed into the FLN on the dissolution of the CDL in July 1956.Less

Dada Dance: Sophie Taeuber’s Visceral Abstraction

Nell Andrew

in Moving Modernism: The Urge to Abstraction in Painting, Dance, Cinema

Among the founding members of Zurich Dada, Sophie Taeuber created patterned textiles, pure painterly abstraction, anthropomorphic sculpture, intimate dolls, collaborative collages, and live dance ... More

Among the founding members of Zurich Dada, Sophie Taeuber created patterned textiles, pure painterly abstraction, anthropomorphic sculpture, intimate dolls, collaborative collages, and live dance performances, but she is predominantly discussed as a designer and applied artist without political motivations. Using a photo of Taeuber in a dancer’s pose and costumed in a Dada body mask, this chapter registers her dance training and performances as a potent hybrid of art and movement that bridged the polarized concerns about art making during wartime. Taeuber’s danced intervention amid her artist colleagues puts Dada’s self-estrangement and alienation into contact with visceral self-recognition and agency. By working across a diversity of media, Taeuber’s process harnesses adaptive, circulating, collaborative, unauthored, and private modes of making, which highlight and bridge the gulf between the aesthetic and the political, or in avant-garde terms, between art and life.Less

Gestures of Vibrating (Interruption) in Rudolf von Laban, Mary Wigman, and Walter Benjamin

Lucia Ruprecht

in Gestural Imaginaries: Dance and Cultural Theory in the Early Twentieth Century

This chapter compares Rudolf von Laban’s and Mary Wigman’s practices and theories of vibrant gestural flow with Walter Benjamin’s theory of gesture as vibrant or intervallic interruption. For Laban ... More

This chapter compares Rudolf von Laban’s and Mary Wigman’s practices and theories of vibrant gestural flow with Walter Benjamin’s theory of gesture as vibrant or intervallic interruption. For Laban and Wigman, gesture mirrors a vitalist understanding of life that is based on the assumption of transhistorical continuities of vibratory exchange between human and cosmic energy. Benjamin’s Brechtian gestures, by contrast, address historical inscriptions and manipulations of bodies, which provide comment on the conditions of society by subjecting to critique aspects of the idea of flow that pertain to unquestioned political figurations of power. This chapter thus explores three gestural manipulations of vibrant energy, and shows what they engender: in Laban, a process of transmission between dancers and spectators; in Wigman, an “action mode” of movement, which she called “vibrato”; and, in Benjamin, a possibility for philosophical insight, but also a disruptive revolutionary charge.Less

Darion McCloud as Dave the Potter: The Model and the Artist’s Mission

Dianne Johnson

in Where Is All My Relation?: The Poetics of Dave the Potter

Johnson investigates the recent award-winning children’s book by Hill and Collier about Dave the Potter, in particular, the illustrated representation within it of the figure of Dave the Potter. A ... More

Johnson investigates the recent award-winning children’s book by Hill and Collier about Dave the Potter, in particular, the illustrated representation within it of the figure of Dave the Potter. A noted children’s author herself, Johnson interviews the model for the depicted character of David Drake, Darion McCloud. The interview is used as the springboard into making observations about Bryan Collier’s collages—such as the embedded visual reference in a major spread of the book to Tom Feelings’s Soul Looks Back in Wonder, also a winner of the Coretta Scott King Award. Along with the racial significance of the brown hues used by Collier, this piece analyzes Collier’s illustration of a tree as a symbol of what McCloud refers to as the world community.Less