Dance, Modernism, and Modernity

Ramsay Burt, Michael Huxley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429855948
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

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 I

1

Introduction

Dance, modernism, and modernity

Ramsay Burt and Michael Huxley

This collection of new essays, some of which are jointly written, explores connections between dance, modernism, and modernity. It examines dance examples from a period beginning just before the First World War and extending to the mid-1950s, and ranging across not only mainland Europe and the United States but also Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific–Asian region and the UK. Each of the essays asks questions about how, in these places and times, dancing developed and responded to, or came out of an ambivalence about, or a reaction against, the experience of living in modern times.

Modernity during this period was a dynamic complex of factors. These included scientific and technological innovation, and its implementation through industrialisation; the impact of these on the development of the modern metropolis; expanding capitalist markets with commodification and consumerism; and the development of the modern nation state. Sociologist Anthony Giddens defines modernity as ‘a certain set of attitudes towards the world, the idea of the world as open to transformation, by human intervention’ (1998, 94). The modern dance discussed in this book sometimes appears to exemplify this openness to change and transformation, but it can also appear to be critical of the effects of modernity or even as a retreat from these. As sociologist Zygmunt Bauman notes,

there is a hate-love relationship between modern existence and modern culture … It would be futile to decide whether modern culture undermines or serves modern existence. It does both things. It can do each one only together with the other.

(1991, 9)

It is this ambivalence about the experience of modernity that the German philosopher Walter Benjamin identified, in 1931, in the writings of Franz Kafka:

The precisely registered oddities that abound in the life [that Kafka’s fiction] deals with must be regarded by the reader as no more than the little signs, portents, and symptoms of displacements that the writer feels approaching in every aspect of life without being able to adjust to the new situation.

(Benjamin 2005, 496)

It is these kinds of signs, portents, and symptoms that we identify in the dance examples that we discuss in this book. The historical and geographical range of these examples of the relationship between modern dance and modernity is informed by a recent expansion of the idea of modernism in the arts within what has come to be known as the new modernist studies.

Critical literature in the second half of the twentieth century identified canons of modernist writers, composers, painters, and choreographers whose progressive and innovative rejection of the conventions and traditions of nineteenth-century art led to the emergence of artistic modernism characterised by, for example, stream-of-consciousness novels, atonal music, abstract painting, and abstract formalist choreography. Key accounts of this modernism were Clement Greenberg’s 1961 collection Art and Culture and Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane’s 1976 survey Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930. Some of the early writing on modernism in dance drew on so-called Greenbergian modernism and were concerned solely with formal and aesthetic issues (e.g. Banes 1980; Cohen 1981; Copeland 1983). This approach was then challenged by, amongst others, Mark Franko and Susan Manning (e.g. Franko 1997, 1998; Manning 1988, [1993] 2006). Recently there has been a call by those associated with the new modernist studies for a wider and more inclusive definition of modernism that is alert to contextual factors, and it is this development that informs the essays in the present collection. Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longman, and Andrew Thacker characterise this as a move,

not just of including once forgotten (or marginalized) writers, texts, and movements but of rethinking the frames of reference according to which such forgetting and marginalizing occurred in the first place.

(Brooker, Gasiorek, Longman, and Thacker 2010, 1)

This rethinking, for Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz (2008, 737–738), involves expanding the range of works and artists that scholars choose to investigate. This expansion, they argue, takes place along three axes: temporal, spatial, and vertical.

The temporal and spatial axes—the time period and the geographical focus—are closely connected. The premiere of Le Sacre du Printemps and Mary Wigman’s break from the relationship of dance to music in her first Hexentanz, Wassily Kandinsky’s first abstract compositions, and Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso’s development of cubist collage, the emergence of twelve tone serial music, and the publication of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses, all took place within a few years of each other. If one confines artistic modernism to this period, one limits it geographically to a few Western metropolitan cities and discounts modernism elsewhere because it supposedly only arrived there later. To do this is to lose sight of the global dimension of modernism, which was particularly the case with modern ballet and modern dance that crossed borders more easily than verbal forms that required translation. It is also to discount transnational dialogues that spread ideas about dance and modernism beyond these metropolitan centres. It thus ignores the ways in which artists in Western colonies were themselves responding through their work to the experience of modernity. Expanding the temporal axis—the longue durée or slow long-term development—of modern dance, and broadening its spatial axis shifts the focus away from formal innovation as the sole criterion for modernism towards the relation between modernism and modernity within particular social, economic, and political contexts. Thus, rather than seeing modernist dance as dance that develops progressively towards abstraction, this book recognises choreography as modernist when it speaks to the experience of modern life.

When Mao and Walkowitz describe their third axis as a vertical one, they are referring to the boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’—between ‘serious’ art and popular entertainment (2008, 737–738). The latter, they point out, should also be recognised as modernist. In dance studies there has admittedly been scholarly research into cabaret and revues and the work of artists like Josephine Baker and Anita Berber. But there was initial reluctance to acknowledge the fact that ‘serious’ artists like Fredrick Ashton, George Balanchine, and Michio Ito created choreography for ‘low’ forms like revues, stage musicals, and Hollywood films. Balanchine’s contributions, for instance, have been substantially reconsidered (e.g. Franko 1998). There is also the complicated relationship between an avant-garde sensibility and mass culture that can be found, for example, in Valeska Gert’s solos, which draw from ‘low’ sources but present them in a disturbingly avant-garde way. The boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ become even more complicated where African-American dance artists are concerned, because popular entertainment was a field where their artistry was valued. Thus, Katherine Dunham’s programmes of dances like her Tropical Review (1944) set out to perform a history of the continuity of African diasporic dance forms from what, in the terminology of the times, she called ‘primitive’ through agricultural folk dances to urban jazz dance. Her modernist intention was simultaneously both serious and popular. Following Mao and Walkowitz, the essays in this book seek to explore modern dance and modernity during the period between the early 1900s and the mid 1950s in ways that expand the range of works and issues along the temporal, spatial, and vertical axes.

Brooker, Gasiorek, Longman, and Thacker argue that modernism needs to be recognised as cultural production. The new modernist studies, they suggest, are also concerned with ‘where modernism(s) emerged; how they developed; by what means they were produced, disseminated and publicized’ and also point to the need to recognise the role of institutions, including ‘publishing houses, magazines, newspapers, galleries, museums, educational establishments’ that put ‘modernism on view, promoted its claims’ (Brooker et al. 2010, 2). The essays in this book explore theways in which the work of dance artists was produced, disseminated and promoted during this period. It considers the strategies that dance artists adopted for promoting their work. In particular it asks how discourses around dance drew on and contributed to wider discourses about modernism and modernity in the arts in general during this period.

One area in which dance practices were disseminated within Europe and North America during the period was within what is often called physical culture or body culture. Thus, for example in the 1925 film Wege zu Kraft und Schönheit dancers appear alongside exponents of various forms of physical exercise including athletics, gymnastics, calisthenics, and the rhythmic gymnastics of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze. The broader context of this was concern about the decline of physical fitness as a consequence of modern life. There were concerns that the great technological advances of the nineteenth century had resulted in too much emphasis on intellectual attainment at the expense of the physical aspects of being. These concerns fed into fears that Western society was becoming decadent. In contrast to such fears, the idea and image of dance and sports during the first half of the twentieth century came to exemplify the modern body.

The shifts in the theorisation of modernism that have been summarised here are matched by shifts in the nature of history since the 1970s. Following a brief period in 1970s and 1980s there has been, in the twenty-first century, what might be termed a return to historical method. This new historical turn has embraced a broader sense of methodologies, including an emphasis on transnationalism and, in doing so, arts, culture, and indeed dance have figured more prominently in the accounts of historians.

There has been an evident interest manifested by those explicitly concerned with new modernist studies. This has included both the curation of dance researches and individual new modernist writings that have focused on dance because of the particular attributes it brings to the discussion. For instance, a 2014 issue of Modernist Cultures brought together dance and other scholars to look at dance and modernism. In her introduction, Carrie Preston sets out their stall: ‘By bringing into focus the often uncomfortable positions of dance in relation to modernist cultures, this issue presents a flexible, mobile, rather messy version of modernism’ (2014a, 1). The writings in this issue are indeed diverse. They range from quite traditional and scholarly accounts such as Selma Odom’s dance historical account of Dalcroze, Rambert and Le Sacre du Printemps (2014) to Preston’s own boundary-breaking work on the use of marionettes in modernism. In ‘Modernism’s dancing marionettes: Oskar Schlemmer, Michel Fokine, and Ito Michio’ (2014b), Preston deliberately chooses a focus that allows her to break the accepted ideas of dance and modernity in respect of national borders and canonical genres. Other researchers have helped open the area of new modernist studies even further and, helpfully, explicitly. Most notable of these is Susan Laikin Funkenstein who, across a number of writings, has brought an art historical perspective to the work of Gret Palucca. Her essay ‘Engendering Abstraction: Wassily Kandinsky, Gret Palucca, and “Dance Curves”’ of 2007 for MODERNISM/modernity explicitly addresses the question of how to consider dance from the point of view of new modernism. All the writers mentioned seem to have recognised the potential of dance for embodying the diversity, fluidity, and contradictions of modernism. Our chapters in this book seek to build on these new ideas and approaches to focus on the relationship between modernism and modernity within the theatre dance of this period.

The nexus between dance studies and the new modernist studies continues to be explored in the journals Modernist Cultures and MODERNISM/modernity in particular. It has also been brought into focus in Stephen Ross and Allana Lindgren’s collection The Modernist World (2015). In this global survey, dance features as one of the emanations of modernism in many diverse forms. In this sense, dance provides a particularly good example, with practices embracing, for instance, abstraction in dance in Europe (Bellow and Andrew 2015) and an embodiment of post-colonialist liberation in sub-Saharan Africa (Welsh 2015). The recently published Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism does not have an entry on ‘new modernist studies’ as such. However, the introductory entry titled ‘Dance’ is written in a way that embraces many of the new perspectives and opens up dance to a much wider notion of modernism (Lindgren 2016).

This book’s focus on modernity allows it to embrace examples from a longue durée period and from a wide range of geographical locations. With the decline of the idea that formal innovation is the only criteria for modernism, it is no longer a problem if a certain instance of modern dance seems to appear later in a particular city or country than similar but earlier instances in a Western metropolitan centre. What is of interest in the cases considered in this book is the particular relationship between modern dance and the conditions of modernity at a particular time and place. While some chapters in this book focus on dance in the early years of the twentieth century, other chapters continue to follow artists’ careers into the 1950s. Most of the artis...