New German Dance Studies offers fresh histories and theoretical inquiries that resonate across fields of the humanities. Sixteen essays range from eighteenth-century theater dance to popular contemporary dances in global circulation. In an exquisite trans-Atlantic dialogue that demonstrates the complexity and multilayered history of German dance, American and European scholars and artists elaborate on definitive performers and choreography, focusing on three major thematic areas: Weimar culture and its afterlife, the German Democratic Republic, and recent conceptual trends in theater dance. Contributors are Maaike Bleeker, Franz Anton Cramer, Kate Elswit, Susanne Franco, Susan Funkenstein, Jens Richard Giersdorf, Yvonne Hardt, Sabine Huschka, Claudia Jeschke, Marion Kant, Gabriele Klein, Karen Mozingo, Tresa Randall, Gerald Siegmund, and Christina Thurner.

Susan Manning is a professor of English, theater, and performance studies at Northwestern University and the author of Ecstasy and the Demon: The Dances of Mary Wigman. Book jacket.

First Published in 1995. In Modern Dance in Germany and the United States: Crosscurrents and Influences Isa Partsch­Bergsohn discusses the phenomenon of the modem dance movement between 1902 and 1986 in an international context, focussing on its beginnings in Europe and its philosophy as formulated by the pioneers Dalcroze, Laban, Wigman and Jooss. The author traces the effects the Third Reich had on these artists, and shows the influence these key choreographers had on the developing American modem dance movement through the postwar years, concentrating in particular on Kurt Jooss and his Tanztheater. When America took the lead in modem dance innovation during the sixties, artists such as Martha Graham, Jose Limon, Paul Taylor, Alvin Ailey and Alwin Nikolais overwhelmed European audiences. Subsequently, the artists of the New German Tanztheater revitalized German theatre traditions by blending new content with some of the American contemporary dance techniques. Although the history of modem dance in these two countries is closely linked, the author describes how each country has kept its own unique and distinctive style.

While much has been written about the visual artists and playwrights of early twentieth-century Germany - Nolde, Kandinsky, Kokoschka and others - their equally innovative contemporaries in dance have not been studied so extensively. The development of the New Dance, also called Ausdruckstanz, paralleled that of expressionist art and drama. This study focuses on nine choreographers whose theories, work, aesthetic values and artistic intent convey the variations and commonalities of this dance form. They are Mary Wigman, Gret Palucca, Harald Kreutzberg, Yvonne Georgi, Vera Skoronel, Berthe Trümpy, Niddy Impekoven, Grete Wiesenthal, and Valeska Gert.

The Body of the People is the first comprehensive study of dance and choreography in East Germany. More than twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Jens Richard Giersdorf investigates a national dance history in the German Democratic Republic, from its founding as a Communist state that supplanted the Soviet zone of occupation in 1949 through the aftermath of its collapse forty years later, examining complex themes of nationhood, ideology, resistance, and diaspora through an innovative mix of archival research, critical theory, personal narrative, and performance analysis. Giersdorf looks closely at uniquely East German dance forms—including mass exercise events, national folk dances, Marxist-Leninist visions staged by the dance ensemble of the armed forces, the vast amateur dance culture, East Germany’s version of Tanztheater, and socialist alternatives to rock ‘n’ roll—to demonstrate how dance was used both as a form of corporeal utopia and of embodied socialist propaganda and indoctrination. The Body of the People also explores the artists working in the shadow of official culture who used dance and movement to critique and resist state power, notably Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, Arila Siegert, and Fine Kwiatkowski. Giersdorf considers a myriad of embodied responses to the Communist state even after reunification, analyzing the embodiment of the fall of the Berlin Wall in the works of Jo Fabian and Sasha Waltz, and the diasporic traces of East German culture abroad, exemplified by the Chilean choreographer Patricio Bunster.

The Bloomsbury Companion to Dance Studies brings together leading international dance scholars in this single collection to provide a vivid picture of the state of contemporary dance research. The book commences with an introduction that privileges dancing as both a site of knowledge formation and a methodological approach, followed by a provocative overview of the methods and problems that dance studies currently faces as an established disciplinary field. The volume contains eleven core chapters that each map out a specific area of inquiry: Dance Pedagogy, Practice-As-Research, Dance and Politics, Dance and Identity, Dance Science, Screendance, Dance Ethnography, Popular Dance, Dance History, Dance and Philosophy, and Digital Dance. Although these sub-disciplinary domains do not fully capture the dynamic ways in which dance scholars work across multiple positions and perspectives, they reflect the major interests and innovations around which dance studies has organized its teaching and research. Therefore each author speaks to the labels, methods, issues and histories of each given category, while also exemplifying this scholarship in action. The dances under investigation range from experimental conceptual concert dance through to underground street dance practices, and the geographic reach encompasses dance-making from Europe, North and South America, the Caribbean and Asia. The book ends with a chapter that looks ahead to new directions in dance scholarship, in addition to an annotated bibliography and list of key concepts. The volume is an essential guide for students and scholars interested in the creative and critical approaches that dance studies can offer.

When it was first published in Germany in 1995, Poetics of Dance was already seen as a path-breaking publication, the first to explore the relationships between the birth of modern dance, new developments in the visual arts, and the renewal of literature and drama in the form of avant-garde theatrical and movement productions of the early twentieth-century. Author Gabriele Brandstetter established in this book not only a relation between dance and critical theory, but in fact a full interdisciplinary methodology that quickly found foothold with other areas of research within dance studies. The book looks at dance at the beginnings of the 20th century, the time during which modern dance first began to make its radical departure from the aesthetics of classical ballet. Brandstetter traces modern dance's connection to new innovations and trends in visual and literary arts to argue that modern dance is in fact the preeminent symbol of modernity. As Brandstetter demonstrates, the aesthetic renewal of dance vocabulary which was pursued by modern dancers on both sides of the Atlantic - Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller, Valeska Gert and Oskar Schlemmer, Vaslav Nijinsky and Michel Fokine - unfurled itself in new ideas about gender and subjectivity in the arts more generally, thus reflecting the modern experience of life and the self-understanding of the individual as an individual. As a whole, the book makes an important contribution to the theory of modernity.

A collaboration between well-established and rising scholars, Futures of Dance Studies suggests multiple directions for new research in the field. Essays address dance in a wider range of contexts--onstage, on screen, in the studio, and on the street--and deploy methods from diverse disciplines. Engaging African American and African diasporic studies, Latinx and Latin American studies, gender and sexuality studies, and Asian American and Asian studies, this anthology demonstrates the relevance of dance analysis to adjacent fields"--

The Routledge Dance Studies Reader has been expanded and updated, giving readers access to thirty-seven essential texts that address the social, political, cultural, and economic impact of globalization on embodiment and choreography. These interdisciplinary essays in dance scholarship consider a broad range of dance forms in relation to historical, ethnographic, and interdisciplinary research methods including cultural studies, reconstruction, media studies, and popular culture. This new third edition expands both its geographic and cultural focus to include recent research on dance from Southeast Asia, the People’s Republic of China, indigenous dance, and new sections on market forces and mediatization. Sections cover: Methods and approaches Practice and performance Dance as embodied ideology Dance on the market and in the media Formations of the field. The Routledge Dance Studies Reader includes essays on concert dance (ballet, modern and postmodern dance, tap, kathak, and classical khmer dance), popular dance (salsa and hip-hop), site-specific performance, digital choreography, and lecture-performances. It is a vital resource for anyone interested in understanding dance from a global and contemporary perspective.