Poetics of Dance: Body, Image, and Space in the Historical Avant-Gardes
Gabriele Brandstetter
Abstract
When it was first published in Germany in 1995, this book was seen as an important publication, the first to explore the relationships between the birth of modern dance, new developments in the visual arts, and the renewal of literature and drama in the form of avant-garde theatrical and movement productions of the early twentieth century. The book established not only a relation between dance and critical theory, but in fact a full interdisciplinary methodology that quickly found a foothold in other areas of research within dance studies. The book looks at dance at the beginning of the twenti ... More
When it was first published in Germany in 1995, this book was seen as an important publication, the first to explore the relationships between the birth of modern dance, new developments in the visual arts, and the renewal of literature and drama in the form of avant-garde theatrical and movement productions of the early twentieth century. The book established not only a relation between dance and critical theory, but in fact a full interdisciplinary methodology that quickly found a foothold in other areas of research within dance studies. The book looks at dance at the beginning of the twentieth century, when modern dance first began to make its radical departure from the aesthetics of classical ballet. The book traces modern dance’s connection to new innovations and trends in visual and literary arts to argue that modern dance is in fact the preeminent symbol of modernity. As the book demonstrates, the aesthetic renewal of dance vocabulary that was pursued by modern dancers on both sides of the Atlantic—Isadora Duncan and Loïe Fuller, Valeska Gert and Oskar Schlemmer, Vaslav Nijinsky and Michel Fokine—unfurled with new ideas about gender and subjectivity in the arts more generally, thus reflecting the modern experience of life and the self-understanding of the individual as an individual.
Keywords:
modern dance,
visual arts,
avant-garde,
modernity,
Isadora Duncan,
Loïe Fuller,
Valeska Gert,
Oskar Schlemmer,
Vaslav Nijinsky,
Michel Fokine
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199916559 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199916559.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Gabriele Brandstetter, author
Insitute for Theater Studies, Free University of Berlin, Berlin, Professor, Germany
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