Making Dance Modern

Ana Isabel Keilson

Between 1890 and 1927, a group of dancers, musicians, and writers converged in Germany, where they founded an artistic movement known as German modern dance. This dissertation provides a history of the origins of this movement and its central figures, including Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman, Rudolf Laban, Hans Brandenburg, and Valeska Gert. These figures, I show, developed modern dance in an attempt to theorize and transform the social order. With the exception of Gert, this was a social order based upon principles of stability, unity, and consensus, which they developed in performance, pedagogy, and writing through inventive approaches to concepts from Western theatrical music, natural science, philosophy, and politics. Such order, they further demonstrated, could be displayed through the physical movements of the individual dancer, whose dancing body and the...