
Watching Weimar Dance
Kate Elswit(Author)
Oxford University Press Inc
Published on 11. September 2014
Book
Paperback/Softback
288 pages
978-0-19-984483-8 (ISBN)
Description
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.
Reviews / Votes
In Watching Weimar Dance, Elswit has made an important contribution to the way we practice dance historiography. * The Drama Review * Groundbreaking ... Kate Elswit's writing is lucid, and her scholarship impeccable ... she cares passionately for the origins of the traces which she analyses (that is the dance themselves). * Julian Preece, The Times Literary Supplement * Kate Elswit thinks across history, theory, reception and corporeality and in so doing rethinks Weimar dance for the 21st century. * Susan Manning, Professor of English, Theatre, and Performance Studies, Northwestern University * In Watching Weimar Dance, Kate Elswit takes the traditional 'obstacles' of dance history - the fragmentary archive, ephemeral performances, and unstable objects - and transforms them into its very strengths. Approaching Weimar dance as a series of eventful and relational encounters, in which spectators contributed as much to the generation of meaning as the performers themselves, the book rediscovers modern dance both as a specific medium and as a forum shot through with broader issues of visual and corporeal culture. * Michael Cowan, author of Technology's Pulse: Essays on Rhythm in German Modernism (2011) and Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity: Avant-Garde-Advertising-Modernity (2014) *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
29 photographs
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
Thickness: 18 mm
Weight
498 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-984483-8 (9780199844838)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
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Kate Elswit
Watching Weimar Dance
Book
09/2014
Oxford University Press Inc
€220.80
Shipment within 15-20 days

Person
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.
Author
Lecturer in Theatre and Performance StudiesLecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies, Bristol University, Palo Alto, CA
Content
Acknowledgements ; Introduction ; 1. Impossible Spectacles: Death, Dance, and Direct Expression ; 2. Imagining the Dancing Machine ; 3. Three Stories about Private Parts ; 4. The Politics of Watching: Staging Sacrifice Across the Atlantic ; 5. Watching After Weimar ; Coda ; Index