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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.

Turning to gestural performance in dancefilm, this chapter examines the exchange between silent film performers and the new discipline of modern dance in the first decades of the twentieth century, connecting this to the choreographic project of Pina Bausch. In the early years of cinema in Hollywood, many actors were originally dancers or were sent to study with the early modern dance duet Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn at the Denishawn School in Los Angeles. The focus on physical performance in the silent film era brought dance and acting into an intimate relationship and produced a gestural mediality—a term drawn from Giorgio Agamben's theory of gestural cinema—that can be traced through to contemporary dancefilm.

Maya Deren's writings on film provide the basis for considering her dancefilm works such as A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) and Ritual in Transfigured Time (1945–1946). A pivotal figure in the history of dancefilm, Deren's films marked the re‐emergence of the form within the avantgarde for the first time since the experiments of the Futurists, Surrealists, and Dadaists earlier in the twentieth century. Operating outside the major American film studios, which were releasing their highest output of dance musicals, Deren was working with modern and untrained dancers to create choreographies for the screen. Deren realized seminal strategies for dancefilm in the mid‐twentieth century that can be found in the most recent examples of the form. Vertical film form is a concept developed by Deren to account for the different film structure in non‐narrative films—what she calls “poetic film.” Rather than progressing “horizontally” with the logic of the narrative, vertical films or sequences explore the quality of moments, images, ideas, and movements outside of such imperatives. Depersonalization refers to a type of screen performance that subsumes the individual into the choreography of the film as a whole. Actors become figures across whom movement transfers as an “event.” The manipulation of gestural action through stylization occurs through individual performances as well as cinematic effects, the two levels of filmic performance combining to create screen choreographies.

Modern dance in Europe established itself as a distinctive aesthetic experience in the early twentieth century through solo dancing by a lone woman in a program of dances designed to reveal the power of movement to define and amplify her unique personality. To be modern was to be alone and free of social contexts. The dancer was allowed by audiences of the day to appear on stage in sensual and seductive ways. The door was open to expressionist dance. Nine dancers are presented: Mata Hari, Olga Desmond, Anna Pavlova, Gertrud Leistikow, Lavinia Schulz, Edith von Schrenk, Niddy Impekoven, Oda Schottmüller, and Ella Ilbak.

This chapter further scrutinizes gender and Jewishness through an examination of Anna Sokolow’s Songs of a Semite (1943), Pearl Lang’s Song of Deborah (1949–67), and Victoria Marks’s My First Solo (1997). Unlike the women discussed in chapter 1, Sokolow and Lang avoided the stigma of “Jewish dance” through their deployment of mythic modernism. Their triumphant depictions of biblical heroines undermined ideas about Jewish victimhood prevalent during and after World War II, while also asserting the value of women to Jewish and American history. During the mid-twentieth century, many Jews moved from the urban working class into the suburban middle class, replacing secular radicalism with a more conventional value system. Marks addressed the impact of this shift in My First Solo, in which she took a biblical anti-heroine, Lot’s wife, and transformed her stasis into an inspired rebellion against organized Judaism and middle-class gender norms.

Ramiro Guerra, the fountainhead of Cuban modern dance, looks back on this life and work, from his childhood in Havana in the 1930s, to becoming a dancer and beginning to transcend the conventions of dance and theater, to his innovative work as the founder of Cuba's national modern dance company, Conjunto Nacional de Danza Moderna, now called Danza Contemporánea de Cuba. After a daring site-specific piece of his was suspended by the government in 1971, Guerra left the company to explore Cuban folklore, gesture, and humor, to choreograph for other companies such as Danza Voluminosa and Danza Libre, and to write about dance. He continued to choreograph highly experimental works such as “De la Memoria Fragmentada” and “Ordalias,” which used unusual spaces, including his own apartment tower.

Dance is a fundamentally embodied art, and the ballet body has always been a contested site. Modern dance pioneers distinguished their fledgling art form by denouncing ballet as unnatural and particularly unsuited for the modern American dancer. Concerns about the pernicious effects of the idealized ballet body, especially on girls and young women, led to sharp medical and psychological concerns that seeped into popular representations of ballet class. Feminist critiques of ballet for supposedly oppressing women gained currency at the end of the twentieth century. Whatever the merits of such critiques, ballet can also be empowering for women in terms of bodily strength and artistic integrity, as seen in the controversial figure of the ballerina.

This chapter focuses on Shawn’s extensive travels abroad during the height of the Denishawn enterprise in pursuit of learning and adapting authentic “foreign” or “ethnic” dances for the American stage. It details Shawn’s trips to Spain and North Africa (1923), where he traveled in search of the Ouled Naïl, the nomadic tribe of bejeweled dancing girls that had captured the imagination of Romantic artists and writers. It also covers Denishawn’s groundbreaking eighteen-month tour of the Far East (1925–26), focusing on the company’s status as “America’s unofficial ambassadors” and revealing Shawn’s artistic exchanges with local artists, royalty, and colonial officials. The chapter explains how Shawn translated his experiences abroad into dances that filled his repertory for years to come—as well as into business practices that helped him build an arts empire with school franchises, a mail-order dance business, and its own Denishawn Magazine.

Chapter 2 examines La Meri’s controversial legacy in American concert dance. An Anglo-American dance artist who specialized in Asian and Latin American dance practices, La Meri fashioned herself as a dance polyglot, having studied with instructors at stops along the way of her worldwide performance tours in the 1920s and 1930s. When World War II commenced in Europe, La Meri settled in New York City in 1940 and established herself as one of the world’s foremost ethnologic performers. This chapter investigates debates that surrounded La Meri in the 1940s to illuminate the tensions that developed between so-called ethnic dance and modern dance, on the one hand, and cultural formations of whiteness, on the other.

This chapter chronicles the world of country dance as it underwent changes during the 1970s. The controversial 1974 visit to Pinewoods Camp of the pioneering dance choreographer and teacher from London—Pat Shaw—was the transformative symbolic moment. Shaw's view of the folk reflected struggles within folklore generally, and while it empowered some, it threatened others, most especially those committed to preserving what they imagined to be Sharp's legacy: the Playford tradition. Shaw had set in motion the development of a new “modern” genre of dances in the spirit of historical English Country Dance, leaving it to choreographers to interpret how that historical “spirit” or “tradition” would be represented in the newly written “folk” dances. The result was the emergence by the century's end of a new subset of ECD: Modern English Country Dance.

Dancing Jewish investigates how Jewish identity is embodied and represented in American modern and postmodern dance over a seventy-five-year period (1930–2005). The introduction distinguishes “Jewish dance,” which implies a distinct and fixed genre, from “dancing Jewish,” a mode of representation in which Jewish choreographers continually engage (and revise) a select but shifting repertory of images and themes in crafting their work. In addition to outlining the scope of the project and situating her findings in relation to dance and American Jewish scholarship to date, Rossen examines how cultural identity, ethnicity, and gender are formed and performed through the body and its movements, and delineates a persuasive, interdisciplinary methodology for researching and interpreting Jewishness in American dance.

Writing about cultural diplomacy the year before Martha Graham left on her maiden tour, the United States Information Agency concluded, “Events should be planned and ‘planted’ to implement propaganda themes.” Unpacking the telling of modern dance history and Martha Graham’s position as both the global dance “Picasso” and the American “First Lady of Modern Dance” reveals how Graham’s tours became useful to the US government. During the interwar period, a formal definition of “modern dance” in the United States began with references to the pre–World War I and interwar Germans, with dancers seeking to create a distinctive medium informed by modernist tenets through a concept of the “free dance.” American Isadora Duncan, a “Mother of Modern Dance,” had performed for Lenin in the newly founded communist state, and then penned, “I See America Dancing.” Graham’s studies with Denishawn included “oriental” references in its new choreography, as well as Americana. With the rhetoric of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, Duncan, Shawn, Graham, and others explored a new dance for the United States in writing and practice: Graham used a technique of distillation and abstraction in Lamentation, and then utilized the approach with American pioneers and frontier nationalism. Thus in the United States, post–World War II scholars asserted that modernism could have emerged only from the “land of the free,” and not from totalitarian states such as Germany or Japan, and certainly not the Soviet Union. Freedom and universalism found through an exploration of the human psyche—tenets built into the form by Germans, Japanese, and Soviet followers—became particularly important in the Cold War “psychwar” campaigns once claimed as “distinctly American.”

This chapter examines the relationship between private body and empire by focusing on the life experiences of two modern dancers from the colonies: Choi Seunghee (1911–1969) of Chōsen and Tsai Juiyueh (1921–2 005) of Taiwan. The stories of Choi and Tsai illustrate how the cosmopolitanism and universalism inherent in avant-garde art can overcome the colonial division between the metropole and the colonies and yet be handicapped by postcolonial conditions. These two women are prime examples of how knowledge and (colonial) modernity circulated within the Japanese empire. This chapter explores how the lives of Choi and Tsai intersected and were altered by their encounters with the Japanese modern dancer Ishii Baku. It also considers the role of dance in elucidating the diverse patterns and trajectories of knowledge flow and cultural exchanges within the empire, and in a global movement of avant-garde art.

Modernism came to Mexico before its revolution as evinced by its embrace of early modern dancer Loïe Fuller. The revolution spawned social changes that allowed the emerging “new woman” to link revolutionary values and theatrical dance. Defining what post-revolutionary Mexican theatrical dance was to be proved problematic as ballet, folk dance, and modern dance vied for prominence. One of the constants was a desire to be both “national” and “universal.” Educator José Vasconcelos’ decision to incorporate folk dancing into the curriculum of Mexico’s public school system in the hopes of establishing a classical dance culture helped cement a national identity that would prove both locally popular and exportable. Painter Miguel Covarrubias led what would be known as the Golden Age of nationalist modern dance in the 1950s, it would be supplanted by balleticized folk dancing in the 1960s.

This chapter traces the emergence of a transcontinental Modern English Country Dance (MECD) and the liberal body carriage that its music and style promulgated. In the last decade of the twentieth century, MECD became a robust transcontinental and transatlantic leisure activity of postwar baby boomers. MECD during this era became a continental movement, both in its geographic stretch and in its development of a mobile transcontinental and transatlantic community with shared passions and a shared emergent new dance practice. It was as much a new spirit, tempo, and style of dancing as it was a corpus of newly written dances that advanced that spirit. And within this thriving urban sphere, relatively affluent MECD dancers inhabited a countercultural space that echoed with the contradictions of liberalism.

This chapter introduces the reader to Ted Shawn and to the reasons his life deserves a critical reappraisal. It examines how a narrative of his life was constructed over his more than fifty years in the public eye, including the compromising depictions of him in the biographies of his wife Ruth St. Denis and his most famous student Martha Graham. It also considers his many own attempts to write about his life, especially his memoir One Thousand and One Night Stands (1960). The chapter argues that homophobia (including Shawn’s own) clouded the narrative of Shawn’s life and obscured his place in dance history and thus proposes a reconsideration of his life, writings, and dances based on sources that had thus far not been given full consideration.

This chapter explores the formative influences on Shawn’s decision to become a professional male dancer. In particular, it examines how a serious, paralyzing illness during his adolescence led him to study dance, thus derailing his plans to become a minister. It also considers how his early sexual experiences and the premature death of his parents and brother fueled his determination to become an artist. The chapter also details Shawn’s early appearances on stage (including his debut as a cross-dressing “Oriental sissy,” his move to Los Angeles to pursue a career in film, and his experience choreographing the “first all-dance film,” Dances of the Ages (1913), for the Thomas C. Edison Company, which gave him the confidence and finances to travel to the East Coast in pursuit of becoming a professional dancer.

This chapter examines the formation and early years of Denishawn, the first American modern dance company and school. It argues that the newlywed Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn harnessed the cultural fascination with eugenics—the science of race betterment—to catapult their unique brand of theatrical dancing into public renown. A cultural phenomenon, Denishawn appeared in magazines from National Geographic to Vogue, fast becoming a sensation among Hollywood directors, vaudeville producers, and high society elites. Denishawn’s meteoric rise was curtailed by World War I and Shawn’s enlistment in the army as well as the interpersonal conflicts between St. Denis and Shawn, which led the couple to seek marriage counseling from Havelock Ellis, a pioneer of the British eugenics movement, while in London in 1922 with their company.