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 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.
Industry Reviews
"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
