ABSTRACT

This collection of new essays explores connections between dance, modernism, and modernity by examining the ways in which leading dancers have responded to modernity.

Burt and Huxley examine dance examples from a period beginning just before the First World War and extending to the mid-1950s, ranging across not only mainland Europe and the United States but also Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific Asian region, and the UK. They consider a wide range of artists, including Akarova, Gertrude Colby, Isadora Duncan, Katherine Dunham, Margaret H’Doubler, Hanya Holm, Michio Ito, Kurt Jooss, Wassily Kandinsky, Margaret Morris, Berto Pasuka, Uday Shankar, Antony Tudor, and Mary Wigman. The authors explore dancers’ responses to modernity in various ways, including within the contexts of natural dancing and transnationalism. This collection asks questions about how, in these places and times, dancing developed and responded to the experience of living in modern times, or even came out of an ambivalence about or as a reaction against it.

Ideal for students and practitioners of dance and those interested in new modernist studies, Dance, Modernism, and Modernity considers the development of modernism in dance as an interdisciplinary and global phenomenon.

part 1I|2 pages

chapter 1|8 pages

Introduction

Dance, modernism, and modernity

chapter 2|24 pages

Dance and modernism

A historiographical consideration

chapter 3|18 pages

Dancing and modernism

Natural dancing and modernity

chapter 4|18 pages

Dance and modernism

Transnational currents

part 71II|23 pages

chapter 6|27 pages

Breaking into the modernist world

Akarova and Margaret Morris

chapter 7|13 pages

MODERNIST dance, war, and modernity

Isadora Duncan and La Marseillaise

chapter 8|31 pages

The new ballet

Kurt Jooss, ballet, and modernity

chapter 9|18 pages

The new ballet

Antony Tudor’s Jardin aux Lilas and the loss of gesture

chapter 10|16 pages

Hanya Holm

A modernist pioneer

chapter 11|15 pages

Modernity, ritual and diasporic culture

Katherine Dunham and Berto Pasuka

chapter |2 pages

Afterword