This article explores the movements of modernist bodies across Europe and the Americas in the early twentieth century. Arguing that scholarship is still insufficiently attuned to the diversity and porousness of art-forms and languages that actually characterized the period, the essay tracks the movement of dancers through an expansive Western circuit, showcasing their involvement in unsuspected forms of circulation, collaboration, and cultural exchange. Focusing in particular on Tórtola Valencia, Vaslav Nijinsky, and Charlie Chaplin, the article demonstrates the cross-cultural movements implied in their own performances and tours; but it balances this interest in the modernist traveler with a focus on the figure designated by Mary Louise Pratt as the ‘travelee’, the one who is visited. Collecting responses in multiple languages and art-forms from ‘travelees’ in the spaces through which these performers passed, it is argued, allows scholars to configure new maps of cultural modernity.

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In 1907, the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío published the collectionEl canto errante[The Wandering Song], containing a poem entitled “La bailarina de los pies desnudos” [“The Barefoot Dancer”]. The title leads the reader to anticipate an aesthetic of lightness and simplicity, yet the poem is weighted down by its many cultural references: at least one per line, and barely harmonizing amongst themselves. Its space is heavily perfumed, thickly ornamented, animated by the movements of a dancer who invokes different cultural references and plastic forms with each extended limb, each trembling body part. At first sight sinuously seductive, this central figure unravels into a welter of fragments and contradictions: both animal and divine, eroticized and chaste, a lunar deity (Selene) and a literary character (Anactoria), a “constellation of examples and of objects” (constelada de casos y de cosas) whose body, as the line suggests, barely contains its referential chaos.

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