Translations from German of articles published in Schrifttanz, late '20s and early '30s, accompanied by new editorial material.

Body - Space - Expression: The Development Of Rudolf Laban's Movement And Dance Concepts (Approaches To Semiotics).

In a globalised society, dance is gaining in importance as a means of conveying body knowledge: It is perceived as an art form in itself, is fostered and cultivated within the bounds of cultural and educational policy, and is increasingly becoming the subject of research. Dance is in motion all over the world, and with it the knowledge that it holds. But what does body knowledge in motion constitute, how is it produced, how can it be researched and conveyed? Renowned choreographers, dancers, theorists and pedagogues describe the unique potential of dance as an archive and medium as well as its significance at the interface between art and science. Contributors are, among others, Gabriele Brandstetter, Dieter Heitkamp, Royston Maldoom and Meg Stuart.

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.

Rudolf Laban (1879 – 1958) was a pioneer in dance and movement, who found an extraordinary range of application for his ideas; from industry to drama, education and therapy. Laban believed that you can understand about human beings by observing how they move, and devised two complimentary methods of notating the shape and quality of movements. The Laban Sourcebook offers a comprehensive account of Laban’s writings. It includes extracts from his five books in English and from his four works in German, written in the 1920s and translated here for the first time. This book draws on archival research in England and Germany to chart the development of Laban’s groundbreaking ideas through a variety of documents, including letters, articles, transcripts of interviews, and his unpublished Effort and Recovery. It covers: The beginning of his career in Germany and Switzerland in the 1910s. His astonishing rise to fame in Germany in the 1920s as a dance teacher, choreographer and creator of public dance events. Following his move to England in 1938, the application of his ideas to drama, education, industry, and therapy. Each extract has a short preface providing contextual background, and highlighting and explaining key terms. Passages have been selected and are introduced by many of the world’s leading Laban scholars.

This biography of the dancer, choreographer, and artist Rudolf Laban offers a biographical discussion presenting Laban as a pioneering figure of European expressionism and the founding father of modern dance, as well as an analysis of the significance of Laban as an important representative of expressionist Modernism.

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.

Mary Wigman, Germany’s premier dancer between the two world wars, envisioned the performer in the thrall of ecstatic and demonic forces. Widely hailed as an innovator of dance modernism, she never acknowledged her complex relationship with National Socialism. In Ecstasy and the Demon, Susan Manning advances a sociological explanation for the collaboration between German modern dancers and National Socialism. She models methods for dance studies that contextualize choreography in relation to changing sociopolitical conditions, bringing dance scholarship into conversation with intellectual trends across the humanities. The introduction to this second edition brings Manning’s groundbreaking work to bear on dance studies today and reconsiders Wigman’s career from the perspective of queer theory and globalization, further illuminating the interplay of dance and politics in the twentieth century. Susan Manning is professor of English, theater, and performance studies at Northwestern University.

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.

The Dancer's World 1920-1945 focuses on modern dancers as they saw themselves. Five chapters describe a narrative arc that encompasses Europe and the USA with a focus between 1920 and 1945. A final chapter considers contemporary relevance for dancers, dance artists, choreographers, dance students and scholars alike.