This volume examines the reach of modernism in design and performance in interwar Romania. It follows the transnational trajectories of several remarkable Jewish avant-garde artists, actors, and directors based in Bucharest, the country’s capital, in the 1920s and 1930s. The first part of the book recovers the history of Bucharest’s first modern design institution and investigates its links with German design and the Bauhaus. The second half focuses on several innovative collaborations in the realm of Yiddish theatre, including the time spent in Romania by the world-renowned Vilna Troupe. Based on extensive original research, the book shows how Bucharest was connected to Berlin, Riga, and Chicago, highlighting the contribution of Jewish cultural production to avant-garde movements in Europe and beyond.

In the much-anticipated update to a classic in dance studies, Mark Franko analyzes the political aspects of North American modern dance in the 20th century. A revisionary account of the evolution of modern dance, this revised edition of Dancing Modernism / Performing Politics features a foreword by Juan Ignacio Vallejos on Franko's career, a new preface, a new chapter on Yvonne Rainer, and an appendix of left-wing dance theory articles from the 1930s. Questioning assumptions that dancing reflects culture, Franko employs a unique interdisciplinary approach to dance analysis that draws from cultural theory, feminist studies, and sexual, class, and modernist politics. Franko also highlights the stories of such dancers as Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and even revolutionaries like Douglas Dunn in order to upend and contradict ideas on autonomy and traditionally accepted modernist dance history. Revealing the captivating development of modern dance, this revised edition of Dancing Modernism / Performing Politics will fascinate anyone interested in the intersection of performance studies, history, and politics.

Focusing on some of the best-known and most visible stage plays and dance performances of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, Penny Farfan's interdisciplinary study demonstrates that queer performance was integral to and productive of modernism, that queer modernist performance played a key role in the historical emergence of modern sexual identities, and that it anticipated, and was in a sense foundational to, the insights of contemporary queer modernist studies. Chapters on works from Vaslav Nijinsky's Afternoon of a Faun to Noël Coward's Private Lives highlight manifestations of and suggest ways of reading queer modernist performance. Together, these case studies clarify aspects of both the queer and the modernist, and how their co-productive intersection was articulated in and through performance on the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century stage. Performing Queer Modernism thus contributes to an expanded understanding of modernism across a range of performance genres, the central role of performance within modernism more generally, and the integral relation between performance history and the history of sexuality. It also contributes to the ongoing transformation of the field of modernist studies, in which drama and performance remain under-represented, and to revisionist historiographies that approach modernist performance through feminist and queer critical perspectives and interdisciplinary frameworks and that consider how formally innovative as well as more conventional works collectively engaged with modernity, at once reflecting and contributing to historical change in the domains of gender and sexuality.

Performing Blackness offers a challenging interpretation of black cultural expression since the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Exploring drama, music, poetry, sermons, and criticism, Benston offers an exciting meditation on modern black performance's role in realising African-American aspirations for autonomy and authority. Artists covered include: * John Coltrane * Ntozake Shange * Ed Bullins * Amiri Baraka * Adrienne Kennedy * Michael Harper. Performing Blackness is an exciting contribution to the ongoing debate about the vitality and importance of black culture.

This book comprehensively rethinks the relationship between G.K. Chesterton and a range of key literary modernists. When Chesterton and modernism have previously been considered in relation to one another, the dynamic has typically been conceived as one of mutual hostility, grounded in Chesterton’s advocacy of popular culture and modernist literature’s appeal to an aesthetic elite. In setting out to challenge this binary narrative, Shallcross establishes for the first time the depth and ambivalence of Chesterton’s engagement with modernism, as well as the reciprocal fascination of leading modernist writers with Chesterton’s fiction and thought. Shallcross argues that this dynamic was defined by various forms of parody and performance, and that these histrionic expressions of cultural play not only suffused the era, but found particular embodiment in Chesterton’s public persona. This reading not only enables a far-reaching reassessment of Chesterton’s corpus, but also produces a framework through which to re-evaluate the creative and critical projects of a host of modernist writers—most sustainedly, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound—through the prism of Chesterton's disruptive presence. The result is an innovative study of the literary performance of popular and ‘high’ culture in early twentieth-century Britain, which adds a valuable new perspective to continuing critical debates on the parameters of modernism.

Women, Modernism, and Performance is an interdisciplinary 2004 study that looks at a variety of texts and modes of performance in order to clarify the position of women within - and in relation to - modern theatre history. Considering drama, fiction and dance, as well as a range of performance events such as suffrage demonstrations, lectures, and legal trials, Penny Farfan expands on theatre historical narratives that note the centrality of female characters in male-authored modern plays but that do not address the efforts of women artists to develop alternatives both to mainstream theatre practice and to the patriarchal avant garde. Focusing on Henrik Ibsen, Elizabeth Robins, Ellen Terry, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Edith Craig, Radclyffe Hall and Isadora Duncan, Farfan identifies different objectives, strategies, possibilities and limitations of feminist-modernist performance practice and suggests how the artists in question transformed the representation of gender in art and life.

This book argues that ideas first take shape in the human body, appearing on stage in new styles of performance.

A groundbreaking study on the vital role of baroque theater in shaping modernist philosophy, literature, and performance. Finalist for the Outstanding Book Award by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Honorable Mention for the Balakian Prize by the International Comparative Literature Association, Winner of the Helen Tartar Book Subvention Award by the American Comparative Literature Association, Finalist of the MSA First Book Prize by the Modernist Studies Association Baroque style—with its emphasis on ostentation, adornment, and spectacle—might seem incompatible with the dominant forms of art since the Industrial Revolution, but between 1875 and 1935, European and American modernists connected to the theater became fascinated with it. In Baroque Modernity, Joseph Cermatori argues that the memory of seventeenth-century baroque stages helped produce new forms of theater, space, and experience around the turn of the twentieth century. In response, modern theater helped give rise to the development of the baroque as a modern philosophical idea. The book focuses on avant-gardists whose writing takes place between theory and performance: philosophical theater-makers and theatrical philosophers including Friedrich Nietzsche, Stéphane Mallarmé, Walter Benjamin, and Gertrude Stein. Moving between page and stage, this study tracks the remnants of seventeenth-century theater through modernist aesthetics across an array of otherwise disparate materials, including modern opera, Bertolt Brecht's Epic Theater, poetic tragedies, and miracle plays. By reexamining the twentieth century's engagements with Gianlorenzo Bernini, William Shakespeare, Claudio Monteverdi, Calderón de la Barca, and other seventeenth-century predecessors, the book delineates an enduring tradition of baroque performance. Along the way, Cermatori expands our familiar narratives of "the modern" and traces a history of theatricality that reverberates into the twenty-first century. Baroque Modernity will appeal to readers in a wide array of disciplines, including comparative literature, theater and performance, art and music history, intellectual history, and aesthetic theory.

"In the much-anticipated update to a classic in dance studies, Mark Franko analyzes the political aspects of North American modern dance in the 20th century. A revisionary account of the evolution of modern dance, this revised edition of Dancing Modernism / Performing Politics features a foreword by Juan Ignacio Vallejos on Franko's career, a new preface, a new chapter on Yvonne Rainer, and an appendix of left-wing dance theory articles from the 1930s. Questioning assumptions that dancing reflects culture, Franko employs a unique interdisciplinary approach to dance analysis that draws from cultural theory, feminist studies, and sexual, class, and modernist politics. Franko also highlights the stories of such dancers as Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and even revolutionaries like Douglas Dunn in order to upend and contradict ideas on autonomy and traditionally accepted modernist dance history. Revealing the captivating development of modern dance, this revised edition of Dancing Modernism / Performing Politics will fascinate anyone interested in the intersection of performance studies, history, and politics"--

The first in-depth study of the modern dance world of the 1940s and 1950s