German Studies Review

The theme of expressionistic dance (Ausdruckstanz) from Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany has received significant attention in recent scholarship, such as Susan Manning’s study of the implications of Mary Wigman’s dance on nationalism in Ecstasy and the Demon (2006), and Michael Cowan’s interdisciplinary study of body culture in Technology’s Pulse (2011). Dance historian Kate Elswit’s book, Watching Weimar Dance, adds to this scholarship through her focus on expressionistic dance in a state of experimentation read through the context of its cultural-historical moment. Elswit is sensitive to how the spectator creates meaning in the face of the necessary impermanence of a dance performance. Drawing on archival evidence, she broadens the meaning of Ausdruckstanz to include performers such as Wigman, Kurt Jooss, Anita Berber, Valeska Gert, the Tiller Girl troupes, and Oskar Schlemmer. She explains her hermeneutic approach as engaging in “diverse choreographic investigations into the potential of the body, which fed into and grew out of understandings of bodies circulating in the wider culture” (xv). For Elswit, dance is not only a means for a grander artistic narrative, it also reveals a more mundane world of “day-to-day bodies,” which encapsulate the era. Throughout her study, Elswit draws attention to expressionistic dance as a collection of various performances and ideas that defy one single taxonomy.

Elswit begins by discussing the work of performers that treat death including Jooss, Gert, and Berber. Elswit notes how these performers’ mystical themes evoke a certain response in their audiences: “a perceptual dance between the physical and the abstract that enabled audiences to watch things happen that were not actually visible” (3). She then discusses how dance as an art form integrated technological properties as may be seen in the work of Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet (1922) and in the performances of the Tiller Girls. At a time when machines were increasingly dominating the popular imagination, audiences could easily imagine the rhythmic motions of the dancers as if they themselves were automatons and not human performers (28–29). Chapter 3 investigates the dance of Berber, Gert, and the Tiller Girls in the context of the sexual liberation of the New Woman. Elswit describes how these dancers offered their “private parts, both physical and personal, as objects for public consumption” (62). In an era when women were supposed to dress with modesty and [End Page 218] clearly differentiate themselves from prostitutes, female dancers were heralding a new era by violating this sort of morality code and unveiling themselves on the stage.

In chapter 4, Elswit investigates the German reception of Albert Talhoff and Wigman’s multimedia spectacle Totenmal (1930) with the US reception of Wigman’s dance cycle Opfer (1931). Elswit notes how both audiences read the theme of martyrdom; however, while notions of trauma and identity were conjured in the minds of the post–World War I German audience, the American audience perceived the separation between the mystical and mundane worlds (97). She then compares choreographer Kurt Jooss’s 1932 and 1951 stagings of Der Grüne Tisch. In a 1951 court case addressing the issue of copyright infringement of Jooss’s dance, it was argued that the later performance of Green Table shared essential qualities with the dance’s premiere some twenty years earlier. Its “sameness” accounts for its positive reception as a symbolic return home (Heimkehr), a sentiment that allowed West Germany to move on without reflecting on its recent past (141). West German audiences used Weimar dance to negotiate the past while finding a way to express continuity with the past, and at the same time accessing a forum to express a postwar sentiment to break with the past (137).

Drawing on various archival and historical documents—cartoons, interviews, letters, photographs, and works of fiction—Elswit grounds her interpretations of audience reception of works of expressionistic dance. She argues that early twentieth-century dance allowed its audiences to work through contemporary issues such as human and machine hybridity, female visibility, and war trauma. Elswit’s Watching Weimar Dance makes a significant contribution to the literature on German dance in the early twentieth century and is recommended for both advanced students and scholars working on the topic.