Watching Weimar Dance

Kate Elswit

Oxford Studies in Dance Theory

Brings insights from Dance, Theatre, and Performance Studies to Weimar Studies and vice versa to develop a culturally-situated model of watching
Considers the transnational connections and afterlives of Weimar-era dance, including historicizing the post-World War II usage of Ausdruckstanz
Offers new methods for dance scholarship to shape cultural history through, rather than despite, the instabilities of performance
Based on a collection of rare archival materials, from published cartoons and annotated 1920s scrapbooks to legal case files from a copyright suit

Watching Weimar Dance

Kate Elswit

Oxford Studies in Dance Theory

Description

Watching Weimar Dance asks what audiences saw on stages from cabaret and revue to concert dance and experimental theatre in the turbulent moment of the Weimar Republic. Spectator reports that performers died or became half-machine archive not only the physicality of past performance, but also the ways audiences used the temporary world of the theatre to negotiate pressing social issues, from female visibility within commodity culture to human functioning in an era of increasing technologization. Archives of watching a range of performance artists, including Oskar Schlemmer, Valeska Gert, Kurt Jooss, Mary Wigman, Bertolt Brecht, Anita Berber, and the Tiller Girl troupes also revise and complicate our understanding of Ausdruckstanz as the representative dance of this moment in Germany. They further reveal how such practices came to be imbued with different significance in the postwar era as well as in transnational context. 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 spectatorship that not only offers a new narrative but also demonstrates new methods for dance scholarship to shape cultural history.

Watching Weimar Dance

Kate Elswit

Oxford Studies in Dance Theory

Watching Weimar Dance

Kate Elswit

Oxford Studies in Dance Theory

Author Information

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.

Watching Weimar Dance

Kate Elswit

Oxford Studies in Dance Theory

Reviews and Awards

Winner of the Oscar G Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research from the Dance Studies Association
Honorable Mention for the Joe A. Callaway Prize for Best Book on Drama or Theater

"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)

"Elswit provides an interdisciplinary framework that reveals new insights about topics of longstanding interest to scholars of Weimar culture, including expressivity and representation, the mechanization of bodies, and the commodification of art...this amply illustrated volume with extensive notes and references is a valuable new resource on modernist performance culture."--H. D. Baer, University of Maryland - College Park

"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

"Watching Weimar Dance is a stellar work of scholarship. Elswit tackles some of the central issues in how dance history is researched and narrated, and her points are all the more convincing because they are supported by meticulous research...Watching Weimar Dance should be a welcome addition to dance studies, German studies, and as a model for interdisciplinary scholarship on the body."--Dance Research Journal

"In Watching Weimar Dance, Elswit has made an important contribution to the way we practice dance historiography."--TDR: The Drama Review