1st Edition

Dance, Modernism, and Modernity

By Ramsay Burt, Michael Huxley Copyright 2020
    244 Pages 7 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    244 Pages 7 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    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.

    List of illustrations

     

    Foreword

    Claire Warden

     

    Acknowledgements

     

    PART 1

    1. Introduction: Dance, Modernism, and Modernity
    2. Ramsay Burt and Michael Huxley

    3. Dance and Modernism: A Historiographical Consideration
    4. Michael Huxley and Ramsay Burt

    5. Dance and Modernism: Natural Dancing and Modernity
    6. Ramsay Burt and Michael Huxley

    7. Dance and Modernism: Transnational Currents
    8. Ramsay Burt and Michael Huxley

       

      PART 2

    9. Wassily Kandinsky, Dance, and Interdisciplinary Modernism 1908-1914
    10. Michael Huxley

    11. Breaking into the Male Modernist World: Akarova and Margaret Morris
    12. Ramsay Burt

    13. Modernist Dance, War, and Precarious Life: Isadora Duncan and Mary Wigman
    14. Ramsay Burt

    15. The New Ballet: Kurt Jooss, Ballet and Modernity
    16. Michael Huxley

    17. The New Ballet: Antony Tudor’s Jardin aux Lilas and the Loss of Gesture
    18. Ramsay Burt

    19. Breaking Boundaries: Hanya Holm from Trend to My Fair Lady
    20. Michael Huxley

    21. Modernity, Ritual and Diasporic Culture: Katherine Dunham and Berto Pasuka

              Ramsay Burt

     

    Afterword

    Ramsay Burt and Michael Huxley

     

    Index

    Biography

    Ramsay Burt is Professor of Dance History at De Montfort University, UK. He is director of the university’s Dance, Drama and Performance Studies Research Institute. His publications include The Male Dancer (1995), Alien Bodies (1997), Judson Dance Theater (2006), and Ungoverning Dance (2016).

    Michael Huxley is Emeritus Reader in Dance and former director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Dance at De Montfort University, UK. His most recent book is The Dancer’s World 1920–1945: Modern Dancers and Their Practices Reconsidered (2015), and he has been published in dance periodicals such as Dance Chronicle, Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, and Discourses in Dance.