Dancing with the Modernist City: Metropolitan Dance Texts around 1900

Dancing with the Modernist City explores the intersection of literature,dance,and urban life in the early 20th century, focusing on German-speaking authors and filmmakers who depicted the perpetual influx of stimuli caused by urban life and how these encounters paralleled their experiences of watching early twentieth-century dance performances. It argues that these writers and artists created a genre called the metropolitan dance text, which depicts dancing figures not on a traditional stage but with the streets, advertising pillars, theaters, cafes, squares, and even hospitals of an urban setting.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 324 pages
Publication date: 31 July 2024
Publisher: The University of Michigan Press

The 20th century saw a surge of creativity in cities like Paris and Berlin, attracting authors, artists, and filmmakers seeking a vibrant urban life and intellectual exchange. Among these figures were German-speaking authors and filmmakers who left a lasting impact on the literary and artistic landscape. Their writing and artistic work from this period captured the perpetual influx of stimuli experienced in urban environments, including the bustling streets, traffic, and advertisements, as well as the parallels between these encounters and their experiences of watching early twentieth-century dance performances by LoÏe Fuller, Ruth St. Denis, and Vaslav Nijinsky. This convergence led to the creation of a genre known as the metropolitan dance text, which depicted dancing figures not on a traditional stage but within the streets, advertising pillars, theaters, cafes, squares, and even hospitals of an urban setting. Breaking away from the historically male, heteronormative view, this posthumanist mode of writing emphasized the visual and episodic unexpectedness of urban encounters, challenging traditional conceptualizations of space and performance. These literary depictions made the protagonist and the reader feel like they were part of the urban landscape, blurring the boundaries between the real and the imagined. Dancing with the Modernist City explores a wide range of material from 1896 to 1914, including essays, novels, short stories, poetry, newspaper articles, photographs, posters, drawings, and early film, to analyze this genre and its impact on the literary and artistic world. It argues that these writers and artists created a unique form of writing that captured the essence of urban life and offered a fresh perspective on the city as a dynamic and ever-changing space. By examining the intersection of cultural, literary, dance, performance, and queer studies, the book sheds light on the ways in which urban encounters have shaped artistic expression and cultural understanding.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780472039692