Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Da nce St udie s
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New German
Dance Studies
Edited by
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Contents
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Editors Acknowledgments
Susan Manning and Lucia Ruprecht
We first must thank all our authors, who responded excitedly to our initial queries four years ago and who have responded to all our subsequent queries with
equal enthusiasm. No edited volume can encompass all the first-rate scholarship in a field, and we are well aware of how many other authors might have
added their voices to this collection. Indeed, this anthology emerged from our
sense that the last decade has witnessed such a rich outpouring of scholarship
on dance in German-speaking Europe that a collection was warranted. So in
the broadest sense, we are indebted to all the authors who have contributed
to the field, whether they are represented in this volume or not. We have attempted to survey the broader field through our introductory essay, yet we
fear that we undoubtedly have included only the proverbial tip of the iceberg.
Our home institutions contributed financial support that enabled us to
engage graduate students as our able assistants. At Cambridge University Charlotte Lee, Christopher Geissler, and Max Haberich translated essays written
in German into (British) English. At Northwestern University Tara Rodman
served as our (American English) copy editor and our project organizer, tracking
all the myriad details necessary for collaboration across two continents. For
granting us permission to reprint illustrations, we thank the Bauhaus Archive
in Berlin, the Bildarchiv Preuischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resources, the Derra de
Moroda Dance Archive, Galerie Baudoin Lebon, the German Dance Archive in
Cologne, the Harvard Theatre Collection, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the
New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the Staatliche Kunstsamm
lungen in Dresden, Stiftung Archiv der deutschen Frauenbewegung, and the
Transit-Film-Gesellschaft.
After years of conversations at theater and dance conferences, Susan finally
sent a book proposal to Joan Catapano, associate director and editor in chief
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Editors Acknowledgments
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Contributors Acknowledgments
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Contributors Acknowledgments
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Introduction
New Dance Studies/
New German Cultural Studies
Susan Manning and Lucia Ruprecht
New German Dance Studies offers fresh histories and theoretical inquiries that
will resonate not only for scholars working in the field of dance, but also for
scholars working on literature, film, visual culture, theater, and performance.
The volume brings together essays by scholars working inside and outside
Germany, by established leaders in the field as well as new voices. Topics
range from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theater dance to popular social dances in global circulation, although emphasis falls on twentieth- and
twenty-firstcentury modern and contemporary dance. Three research clusters
emerge: Weimar culture and its afterlife, a focus that is still particularly strong
in German studies outside Germany; the GDR (German Democratic Republic),
where our contributions work toward filling a persistent gap in East German
cultural history; and conceptual trends in recent theater dance that are only
slowly finding an audience outside continental Europe.
This introductory chapter sketches the intellectual and artistic trends over
the last thirty years that have shaped the scholarship featured in New German
Dance Studies. This overview follows the broadly chronological organization
of the volume as a whole: opening essays on theater dance before 1900; then
research clusters on Weimar dance, dance in the GDR, and conceptual dance;
and a closing reflection on the circulation of dance in an era of globalization.
Throughout we emphasize the complex interplay between dance-making and
dance writing, as well as interrelations between dance practice and research
and artistic and intellectual trends in German culture at large. Although we
cannot detail all these interconnections, we remain aware that the essays
collected in New German Dance Studies participate in broader cultural transformations even while documenting and narrating how these transformations
have impacted dance research.
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Ausdruckstanz informed their later rejection of the ballet boom in its varied
forms in East and West Germany.
As Tanztheater became an emergent and then dominant form in the 1980s
and 1990s, research into the lives and careers of individual dancers in the 1920s
and 1930s revealed the breadth and depth of dance reform and experimental
dance in Germany and in German-speaking Europe between the two world
wars.5 This research inevitably engaged the question of how practitioners of
Ausdruckstanz had negotiated the radical break of 1933, when the Weimar Republic gave way to the National Socialist state. Biographers of individual artists
handled this question in varying ways. Some studies, such as Hedwig Mllers
biography of Mary Wigman, sought to understand the choreographers involvement with the Nazi state from the artists own perspective during the Third
Reich, emphasizing her commitment to German culture as expressed through
her letters and diaries of the time.6 Other studies, such as Valerie PrestonDunlops biography of Rudolf Laban, sought to portray the artists involvement
with the Nazi state from the perspective of his 1938 exile, acknowledging his
earlier employment by the Nazi cultural bureaucracy but emphasizing the
hardships he endured after his employment contract had been terminated.7
It was not until studies were published that examined the broader role of
Ausdruckstanz under National Socialism that questions of individual culpability could be seen in relation to larger institutional and ideological dynamics.
In 1993 a major exhibition staged at the Academy of Arts in Berlin traced the
history of Ausdruckstanz from 1900when the movement emerged as part of
the life reform movementthrough the years of the Weimar Republicwhen
a broad range of expressive dance practices became an integral component of
the eras artistic experimentationand into the Nazi yearswhen the National
Socialists embraced Deutscher Tanz (German Dance, as Ausdruckstanz was
now called) as part of a Volksgemeinschaft (literally folk community) that
divided true Germans from Communists, Jews, homosexuals, and other outsiders. Titled after Labans statement that everyone is a dancer, the catalog
accompanying the show printed primary documents from the three Dancers
Congresses in 1927, 1928, and 1930 organized by proponents of Ausdruckstanz
and from the German Dance Festivals in 1934 and 1935 and the 1936 Olympic
Festival organized by the National Socialists, as if to underscore how the Aus
druckstanz ideal of a Tanzgemeinschaft (dance community) had given way to
the Volksgemeinschaft.8 Over the next decade, other scholars also published
their primary research into the broader question of the alliance of Ausdrucks
tanz and National Socialism, and varied perspectives on the troubling alliance
became subject to debate.9
Further research also made clear that the methods associated with Mary
Wigman, Rudolf Laban, and their disciplesthe social and artistic formation
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introduction
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introduction
the thrill of that first walk across Berlin and his dismay at the erasure of his
experience. Despite their very different perspectives, all three authors call for
a more nuanced view of East German dance and cultural history.
Strikingly, all but one of the authors in this volume writing on Weimar
dance, dance in exile, and dance in the GDR are based wholly or partly outside Germany. Marion Kant divides her time between Cambridge (U.K.) and
Philadelphia, while Franz Anton Cramer divides his time between Paris and
Berlin. Susanne Franco teaches in Venice and in Salerno. Jens Richard Giersdorf, Karen Mozingo, Tresa Randall, Susan Funkenstein, and Kate Elswit are
affiliated with colleges and universities in the United States. Many of these
authors build on the significant body of work produced in Germany by Hedwig
Mller, Patricia Stckemann, Franz-Manuel Peter, among othersthe generation inspired and provoked by the emergence of Tanztheater in the 1980s to
excavate and fathom the history and politics of Weimar dance.
The one exception is Sabine Huschka, whose essay Pina Bausch, Mary
Wigman, and the Aesthetic of Being Moved rethinks the relationship between Wigman and Bausch from a viewpoint informed by recent philosophical
approaches to dance history. Challenging often-stated continuities between
the two choreographers based on genealogies of pedagogical transmission,
Huschkas aesthetic analysis of major choreographic concepts in Wigman and
Bausch reflects back on the different politics of the body and the different
social and cultural concerns that the two artists espoused. But her inquiry into
the charged emotionality of Ausdruckstanz and Tanztheater also complements
Thurners investigation of dances history as an expression of affect.
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introduction
Beyond Berlin
Within the German-speaking countries today, significant alternatives to the
Berlin School are the dance programs at the Institute for Applied Theater
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Studies in Giessen and at the Institute for Theater Studies in Berne. There are
dance studies pathways within the departments of theater studies in Leipzig
and Munich, and at the University of Music and Dance in Cologne. Together
with Claudia Jeschkes Department of Dance Studies in Salzburg, the Austrian
center for contemporary dance and theory Tanzquartier in Vienna, and the
Institute for Performance Studies established at the University of Hamburg
by Gabriele Klein, they represent a thriving research culture.25 Whereas in
Berlin and elsewhere, the focus is on high art and theatrical dance, Klein
works from the premises of sociology, and she has written widely on popular
dance and cultural theory.26 Her concluding essay to New German Dance Stud
ies, Toward a Theory of Cultural Translation in Dance, uses a case study of
tango to point toward a broad range of research topics made possible through
ethnographic approaches and theories of globalization.
Kleins essay takes on a special relevance when contrasted with Claudia
Jeschkes essay on Montez. As a pioneer of dance studies, Jeschke started her
career when an academic position in the field was barely conceivable in Germanspeaking Europe, and she has subsequently helped establish academic programs
in Cologne, Leipzig, and Salzburg, where she is now head of the Department
of Dance Studies and director of the Derra de Moroda Dance Archives. Her
publications have laid substantial methodological foundations for the study
of dance, ranging from reconstructions and systematic movement analysis to
new forms of historiography.27 Klein too is a pioneer; she started her career at a
time when performance studies was not a viable practice in German-speaking
Europe, and she has broadened the field of dance studies beyond the theatrical
stage. The distance from Jeschkes account of an exoticized Spanish dancer on
the nineteenth-century stage to Kleins account of tangos global circulation
frames the last three decades of scholarship on German dance.
It is our hope that the essays in New German Dance Studies will enrich both
dance studies and German cultural studies. Indeed, we believe that dance studies can profit from cultural studies approaches, and cultural studies can profit
from the inclusion of dance. At the intersection between fields, dancing bodies articulate forms of knowledge and practice as they negotiate psychosocial
potentials and prohibitions, intellectual innovations and traditions, cultural
imagination and physical reality.
Notes
1.Gabriele Brandstetter, Intensive Suche nach einem neuen Denken: Ein Manifest
fr den Tanz, Theater der Zeit 12 (2004): 2225, here 25 (translated by Lucia Ruprecht).
It has been argued before that cultural studies can profit from specialist research on
embodied forms of representation and interaction; however, the discussion within dance
studies tends to focus more on the benefits and problems of its own theoretical turn
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introduction
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13
1992); Gunhild Oberzaucher-Schller and Ingrid Giel, Rosalia Chladek: Klassikerin des
bewegten Ausdrucks (Munich: K. Kieser, 2002); Frank-Manuel Peter, Valeska Gert: Tnzerin,
Schauspielerin, Kabarettistin (Berlin: Frlich and Kaufmann, 1985); Frank-Manuel Peter,
ed., Der Tnzer Harald Kreutzberg (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1997); Frank-Manuel Peter
and Rainer Stamm, eds., Die Sacharoffs: Zwei Tnzer aus dem Umkreis des Blauen Reiters
(Cologne: Wienand, 2002); Valerie Preston-Dunlop, Rudolf Laban: An Extraordinary Life
(London: Dance Books, 1998); Dirk Scheper, Oskar Schlemmer: Das Triadische Ballett
und die Bauhausbhne (Berlin: Akademie der Knste, 1988); Ralf Stabel, Tanz, Palucca!
(Berlin: Henschel, 2001); Patricia Stckemann, Etwas ganz neues muss nun entstehen:
Kurt Jooss und das Tanztheater (Munich: K. Kieser, 2001); Patrizia Verioli, Milloss: Un
maestro della coreografia tra expressionismo e classicit (Lucca, Italy: LIM, 1996); Brigitta
Weber, ed., Die Tnzerin und Choreographin Yvonne Georgi (19031975): Eine Recherche
(Hannover: Niederschsische Staatstheater, 2009); Giorgio Wolfensberger, ed., Suzanne
Perrottet: ein bewegtes Leben (Bern: Benteli, n.d.). An edited anthology by Gunhild Oberzaucher-Schller, Ausdruckstanz: eine mitteleuropische Bewegung der ersten Hlfte des
20. Jahrhunderts (Wilhelmshaven: Florian Noetzel, 1992; 2nd ed. 2004) brings together a
wide range of biographical and thematic essays.
6.Mller, Mary Wigman, 214268. For an English-language account, see Hedwig Mller, Wigman and National Socialism, Ballet Review 15:1 (Spring 1987): 6573.
7.Preston-Dunlop, Rudolf Laban, 172203.
8.Hedwig Mller and Patricia Stckemann, eds., ... jeder Mensch ist ein Tnzer:
Ausdruckstanz in Deutschland zwischen 1900 und 1945 (Giessen: Anabas, 1993). The exhibition, which was shown in Dresden as well as Berlin, was titled Weltenfriede-Jugendglck:
Vom Ausdruckstanz zum Olympischen Spiel.
9.See Inge Baxmann, Mythos: Gemeinschaft. Krper- und Tanzkulturen in der Moderne
(Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2000); Terri J. Gordon, Fascism and the Female Form: Performance Art in the Third Reich, Journal of the History of Sexuality 11:1:2 (2002): 164200;
Laure Guilbert, Danser avec le IIIe Reich: Les danseurs modernes sous le nazisme (Brussels:
ditions Complexe, 2000); Laure Guilbert, Fritz Bhme (18811952): Archaeology of an
Ideologue, in Dance Discourses: Keywords in Dance Research, eds. Susanne Franco and
Marina Nordera (London: Routledge, 2007), 2945; Yvonne Hardt, Ausdruckstanz und
Bewegungschor im Nationalsozialismus: Zur politischen Dimension des Krperlichen und
Rumlichen im modernen Tanz, in Krper im Nationalsozialismus: Bilder und Praxen,
ed. Paula Diehl (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2006), 173190; Lilian Karina and Marion Kant,
Tanz unterm Hakenkreuz (Berlin: Henschel, 1996; 2nd ed. 1999); English translation of
Karina and Kant by Jonathan Steinberg, Hitlers Dancers: German Modern Dance and
the Third Reich (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003); Marion Kant, Practical Imperative:
German Dance, Dancers, and Nazi Politics, in Dance, Human Rights, and Social Jus
tice, eds. Naomi Jackson and Toni Shapiro-Phim (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2008),
519; Susan Manning, Modern Dance in the Third Reich: Six Positions and a Coda, in
Choreographing History, ed. Susan Foster (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995),
165176; Gunhild Oberzaucher-Schller, Dramaturgy and Form of the German Ballet:
Examination of a National Socialist Genre, in Dance and Politics, ed. Alexandra Kolb
(Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 145165.
10.Susanne Franco, Ausdruckstanz: Traditions, Translations, Transmissions, in Dance
Discourses: Keywords in Dance Research, eds. Susanne Franco and Marina Nordera (Lon-
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introduction
don: Routledge, 2007), 8098. This volume was first published in Italian as I discorsi della
danza: Parole chiave per una metodologia della ricerca (Torino: UTET Libreria, 2005).
11.See Gabriele Brandstetter, Unter-Brechung: Inter-Medialitt und Disjunktion in
Bewegungskonzepten von Tanz und Theater der Avantgarde, in Bild-Sprung: TanzTheater
Bewegung im Wechsel der Medien (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2005), 160181; Michael Cowan,
Cult of the Will: Nervousness and German Modernity (University Park: The Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2008); Michael Cowan and Kai Marcel Sicks, eds., Leibhaftige
Moderne: Krper in Kunst und Massenmedien 1918 bis 1933 (Bielefeld: transcript, 2005);
Michael Cowan and Barbara Hales, eds., Moving Bodies, Moving Pictures: Dance in Early
German Cinema, special issue of Seminar 46:3 (2010); Andrew Hewitt, Social Choreog
raphy: Ideology As Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 2005); Juliet Koss, Bauhaus Theater of Human Dolls, in Modernism
after Wagner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 207243; Karl Toepfer,
Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture 19101935 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997).
12.See Jrgen Habermas, A Berlin Republic: Writings on Germany (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1997).
13.Ramsay Burt, Alien Bodies: Representations of Modernity, Race and Nation in Early
Modern Dance (London: Routlege, 1998); Delfin Colome, East DanceWest Dance, Asia
Europe Journal 2 (2005): 247257; Jens Richard Giersdorf, Von der Utopie zum Archiv:
Patricio Bunster und die politische Funktion der Choreographie, Forum Modernes The
ater 23:1 (2008): 2936; Giora Manor, Influenced and InfluencingDancing in Foreign
Lands: The Work of Choreographers/Dancers Persecuted by the Nazis in Emigration, in
Gunhild Oberzaucher-Schller, ed., Ausdruckstanz: eine mitteleuropische Bewegung der
ersten Hlfte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Wilhelmshaven: Florian Noetzel, 1992; 2nd ed. 2004):
471485; Susan Manning, Ausdruckstanz across the Atlantic, in Dance Discourses: Key
words in Dance Research, eds. Susanne Franco and Marina Nordera (London: Routledge,
2007): 4679; Joellen Meglin, Blurring the Boundaries of Genre, Gender, and Geopolitics:
Ruth Page and Harald Kreutzbergs Transatlantic Collaboration in the 1930s, Dance Re
search Journal 41:2 (Winter 2009): 5275; Shigeto Nuki, bersetzbarkeit von Tanz: Der
Fall Butoh, in Tanz anderswo: intra- und interkulturell (Mnster: LIT, 2004): 121124;
Isa Partsch-Bergsohn, Modern Dance in Germany and the United States: Crosscurrents
and Influences (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994); Valerie PrestonDunlop, Rudolf Laban and Kurt Jooss in Exile, in Artists in Exile, ed. Gnter Berghaus
(Bristol: Bristol University Press, 1990), 167178; Nina Spiegel, Cultural Formulation in
Eretz Israel: The National Dance Competition of 1937, Jewish Folklore and Ethnology
Review 20 (2000); Patricia Stckemann, Emigranten und ihre Zufluchtsorte, Tanzdrama
42 (1998): 1927; Yukihiko Yoshida, National Dance under the Rising Sun, International
Journal of Eastern Sports and Physical Education 7:1 (October 2009): 88103.
14.The parallel histories were visualized in an exhibit at the Academy of Arts in Berlin in
2003. See Hedwig Mller, Ralf Stabel, and Patricia Stckemann, Krokodil im Schwanensee:
Tanz in Deutschland seit 1945 (Frankfurt: Anabas-Verlag, 2003).
15.Rob Burns, ed., German Cultural Studies: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995).
16.On Konzepttanz, see Gerald Siegmund, Abwesenheit: Eine performative sthetik
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des Tanzes. William Forsythe, Jrme Bel, Xavier Le Roy, Meg Stuart (Bielefeld: transcript,
2006); Susanne Foellmer, Am Rand der Krper: Inventuren des Unabgeschlossenen im
zeitgenssischen Tanz (Bielefeld: transcript, 2009); Pirkko Husemann, Choreographie als
kritische Praxis: Arbeitsweisen bei Xavier Le Roy und Thomas Lehmen (Bielefeld: transcript,
2009); Andr Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement (New
York: Routledge, 2006); Helmut Ploebst, no wind no word: Neue Choreographie in der
Gesellschaft des Spektakels. 9 Portraits: Meg Stuart, Vera Mantero, Xavier Le Roy, Benot
Lachambre, Raimund Hoghe, Emio Greco/PC, Joo Fiadeiro, Boris Charmatz, Jrme Bel
(Mnchen: Kieser, 2001); Annamira Jochim, Meg Stuart: Bild in Bewegung und Choreog
raphie (Bielefeld: transcript, 2008); tanzjournal 2 (2004), Special Issue on Konzepttanz.
17.Gerald Siegmund, Konzept ohne Tanz? Nachdenken ber Choreographie und
Krper, in Zeitgenssischer Tanz: KrperKonzepteKulturen. Eine Bestandsaufnahme,
eds. Reto Clavadetscher and Claudia Rosiny (Bielefeld: transcript, 2007), 4459, here 48
(translated by Lucia Ruprecht).
18.See Inge Baxmann and Franz Anton Cramer, eds., Deutungsrume: Bewegungswissen
als kulturelles Archiv der Moderne (Munich: Kieser, 2005); Inge Baxmann, ed., Krperwis
sen als Kulturgeschichte: Die Archives Internationales de la Danse (19311952) (Munich:
Kieser, 2008); Gabriele Brandstetter, Sibylle Peters, and Kai van Eikels, eds., Prognosen
ber Bewegungen (Berlin: b_books, 2009); Sabine Gehm, Pirrko Husemann, and Katharina
von Wilcke, eds., Knowledge in Motion: Perspectives of Artistic and Scientific Research in
Dance (Bielefeld: transcript, 2007); Sabine Huschka, ed., Wissenskultur Tanz: Historische
und Zeitgenssische Vermittlungsakte zwischen Praktiken und Diskursen (Bielefeld: transcript, 2009).
19.See Janine Schulze, ed., Are 100 Objects Enough to Represent the Dance? Zur Ar
chivierbarkeit von Tanz (Munich: epodium, 2010); Christina Thurner and Julia Wehren,
eds., Original und Revival: Geschichts-Schreibung im Tanz (Zrich: Chronos, 2010); and
the series Tanz and Archiv: Forschungsreisen (Munich: epodium).
20.Gabriele Brandstetter, Dance as Culture of Knowledge: Body Memory and the
Challenge of Theoretical Knowledge, in Gehm, Husemann, von Wilcke, eds., Knowledge
in Motion, 3748, here 39.
21.See Gabriele Brandstetter, Tanzen Zeigen: Lecture-Performance im Tanz seit den
1990er Jahren, in Konzepte der Tanzkultur: Wissen und Wege der Tanzforschung, eds.
Margrit Bischof and Claudia Rosiny (Bielefeld: transcript, 2010), 4562; Sibylle Peters and
Martin Jrg Schfer, eds., Intellektuelle Anschauung: Figurationen von Evidenz zwischen
Kunst und Wissen (Bielefeld: transcript, 2006); Lucia Ruprecht, Martin Nachbar, Jochen
Roller, On the Road with Mnemonic Nonstop, in Memory Culture and the Contemporary
City: Building Sites, ed. Uta Staiger et. al. (Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan,
2009), 223233; http://www.unfriendly-takeover.de.
22.See Christiane Berger, Krper denken in Bewegung: Zur Wahrnehmung tnzerischen
Sinns bei William Forsythe und Saburo Teshigawara (Bielefeld: transcript, 2006); Senta
Driver, ed., William Forsythe: Choreography and Dance (London and New York: Routledge,
2000); Wibke Hartewig, Kinsthetische Konfrontation: Lesarten der Bewegungstexte William
Forsythes (Munich: epodium, 2007); Hartmut Regitz and Arnd Wesemann, eds., Forsythe:
Bills Universe. Yearbook Ballettanz 2004 (Berlin: Friedrich, 2004); Gerald Siegmund, ed.,
William Forsythe: Denken in Bewegung (Berlin: Henschel, 2004); Steven Spier, ed., William
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introduction
Forsythe and the Practice of Choreography: It Starts from Any Point (New York: Routledge,
2011); Gaby von Rauner, ed., William Forsythe: Tanz und Sprache (Frankfurt am Main:
Brandes und Apsel, 1993).
23.See Jens Richard Giersdorf, Dance Studies in the International Academy: Genealogy
of a Disciplinary Formation, Dance Research Journal 41:1 (Summer 2009): 2344; tanz.de:
Zeitgenssischer Tanz in DeutschlandStrukturen im Wandeleine neue Wissenschaft,
Special issue of Theater der Zeit, 2005.
24.See Gabriele Brandstetter and Hortensia Vlckers, eds., ReMembering the Body
(Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2000).
25.The founding of dance programs has led to a number of programmatic methodological or introductory publications. See Margrit Bischof and Claudia Rosiny, eds., Konzepte
der Tanzkultur: Wissen und Wege der Tanzforschung (Bielefeld: transcript, 2010); Gabriele
Brandstetter and Gabriele Klein, eds., Methoden der Tanzwissenschaft: Modellanalysen zu
Pina Bauschs Le Sacre Du Printemps (Bielefeld: transcript, 2007); Gabriele Klein and
Christa Zipprich, Tanz Theorie Text: Zur Einfhrung, in Tanz Theorie Text (Mnster: LIT,
2002), 114; Katja Schneider and Frieder Reininghaus, eds., Experimentelles Musik- und
Tanztheater (Regensburg: Laaber, 2004); Gerald Siegmund, Zur Theatralitt des Tanzes,
in Claudia Fleischle-Braun and Ralf Stabel, eds., Tanzforschung and Tanzausbildung
(Berlin: Henschel, 2008), 2844.
26.See Gabriele Klein, Electronic Vibration: Pop Kultur Theorie (Hamburg: Rogner
and Bernhard, 2004); Gabriele Klein, ed., Bewegung: Sozial- und kulturwissenschaftliche
Konzepte (Bielefeld: transcript, 2004); Gabriele Klein, ed., Tango in Translation: Tanz
zwischen Medien, Kulturen, Kunst und Politik (Bielefeld: transcript, 2009). Gabriele Klein
and Malte Friedrich, Is This Real? Die Kultur des HipHop (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003).
27.See Claudia Jeschke, Tanz als BewegungsText. Analysen zum Verhltnis von Tanz
theater und Gesellschaftstanz (Tbingen: Niemeyer, 2000); with Ann Hutchinson-Guest,
Nijinskys Faune Restored (London: Gordon and Breach, 1991); with Nicole Haitzinger and
Gabi Vettermann, Les Choses Espagnoles: Research into the Hispanomania of 19th Century
Dance (Munich: epodium, 2009); with Hans-Peter Bayerdrfer, ed., Bewegung im Blick:
Beitrge zu einer theaterwissenschaftlichen Bewegungsforschung (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2000).
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The most secret movements of the soul, writes Friedrich Schiller in 1780,
are revealed on the exterior of the body; each emotion has its own specific
means of expression or, more precisely, its peculiar dialect, by which one
knows it.1 Accordingly, the language of the emotions isin the opinion of
Schiller and his contemporariesa physical one. It follows that the dancer,
whose means of expression is the body, has a virtually unparalleled command
of this language. The philosopher Johann Georg Sulzer likewise observes in
1774 in his Allgemeine Theorie der schnen Knste (General Theory of the Fine
Arts) that there is no state or character of the soul, no passion, which cannot
be portrayed in the most vivid way through dance,2 from which he concludes
that no art form can exceed the dance in terms of its aesthetic power.3
Such outspoken admiration for dance was new for the time: even though
dance served major politically representative functions in the shape of the court
ballet, from an aesthetic point of view it had been perceived until then as a
subordinated medium that functioned solely to complement a good education,
for social enjoyment or as a passing decoration in the production of other art
forms. Contemporary dance theorists now joined the exponents of philosophy
and general aesthetics in this new stream of praise with their emphasis on the
advantages of dance over other forms of expression, especially over language.
For example, the French dance theorist Jean Georges Noverre, to this day the
most famous of the eighteenth century, who was active as a dancer and choreographer in, among other places, Berlin, Stuttgart, and Vienna, commented
in his Letters on Dancing and Ballets: If one be deprived of the sight of the
facial expression of the orator, it requires a little time to fathom his meaning.
It requires no time for the face to express its meaning forcibly; a flash of light-
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