Gestural Imaginaries

Abstract

Gestural Imaginaries: Dance and Cultural Theory in the Early Twentieth Century offers a new interpretation of European modernist dance by addressing it as guiding medium in a vibrant field of gestural culture that ranges across art and philosophy. Taking further Cornelius Castoriadis’s concept of the social imaginary, it explores this imaginary’s embodied forms. Close readings of dances, photographs, and literary texts are juxtaposed with discussions of gestural theory by thinkers including Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, and Aby Warburg. Choreographic gesture is defined as a force of intermittency that creates a new theoretical status of dance. The book shows how this also bears on contemporary theory. It shifts emphasis from Giorgio Agamben’s preoccupation with gestural mediality to Jacques Rancière’s multiplicity of proliferating, singular gestures, arguing for their ethical and political relevance. Mobilizing dance history and movement analysis, it highlights the critical impact of works by choreographers such as Vaslav Nijinsky, Jo Mihaly, and Alexander and Clotilde Sakharoff. It also offers choreographic readings of Franz Kafka and Alfred Döblin. Gestural Imaginaries proposes that modernist dance conducts a gestural revolution that enacts but also exceeds the insights of past and present cultural theory. It makes a case for archive-based, cross-medial, and critically informed dance studies, transnational German studies, and the theoretical potential of performance itself.