Watching Weimar Dance

Erscheinungsjahr 2014
ISBN: 978-0-19-984483-8
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 288 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 498 g

Reihe: Oxford Studies in Dance Theory

Watching Weimar Dance asks what audiences saw in the peculiarly turbulent and febrile moment of the Weimar Republic. It closely analyses the reception of various performances, from cabaret to concert dance and experimental theatre, in their own time and place - at home in interwar Germany, on tour, and later returning from exile after World War II. Spectator reports that performers died or became half-machine archived not only the physicality of past
performance, but also the ways audiences used the temporary world of the stage to negotiate pressing social issues, from female visibility within commodity culture to the functioning of human-machine hybrids in an era of increasing technologization. These accounts offer offer limit cases for the body on stage and,
in so doing, speak to the preoccupations of the day. Approaching a range of performance artists, including Oskar Schlemmer, Valeska Gert, Kurt Jooss, Mary Wigman, Bertolt Brecht, Anita Berber, and the Tiller Girl troupes, through archives of watching, the reception of these performances also revises and complicates understandings of Ausdruckstanz as the representative dance of this moment in Germany. They further reveal how such practices came to be reconfigured and imbued with new significance
in the post-war era. By bringing insights from theatre, dance, and performance studies to German cultural studies, and vice versa, Watching Weimar Dance develops a culturally-situated model of watching that not only offers a revisionist narrative, but also demonstrates new methods for dance
scholarship to shape cultural history.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Elswit, Kate

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Musikwissenschaft Musikwissenschaft Allgemein
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Theaterwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Tanz Ballett, Modern Dance
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Europäische Länder

Über Autor(innen)

Kate Elswit is Reader in Theatre and Performance at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. She is winner of the Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research, the Gertrude Lippincott Award, the Biennial Sally Banes Publication Prize, and honorable mention for the Callaway Prize, and her work has been funded by sources including a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University and the Lilian Karina Research Grant
in Dance and Politics. She also works as a choregrapher, dramaturg, and curator.