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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.