New German Dance Studies

Abstract

Since the 1990s, research in dance has established itself within the German academie context as a discipline in its own right. The confident methodological assertion of this emergent field as no longer mere adjunct of sports or theatre studies, alongside its infrastructural manifestation in newly established professorial chairs and master pro grammes across the German-speaking countries, has prompted wide-spread interna tional attention which this collection of 15 essays responds to. Edited by Performance Studies scholar Susan Manning (Northwestern University) and German Studies Scho lar Lucia Ruprecht (Emmanuel College, Cambridge), the book at the same time re flects the recent fascination, not the least by US-American scholarship, for theatre and popular dance in 1920's Germany. The essays address four distinct themes: Ausdrucks tanz or, as it is here proposed: >Weimar dance dance studies new German dance studies immediacy truth deceitful< language of words) have their roots in a topology of dance and emotions asserted at that historie juncture. Claudia Jeschke then outlines how ^-Century celebrity Lola Montez actively manipulated dance discourses of her time. The focus on a discourse analysis of dance is most thoroughly substantiated by the methodological centrepiece of the book, Sabine Huschka's critical interroga tion of the assumed continuities between Mary Wigman's Ausdruckstanz of the Wei mar Republic and the Tanztheater aesthetics of Pina Bausch as they emerged in the 1970s. Against this rarely challenged claim of a historical linkage, Huschka's metic ulous analysis of Wigman's and Bausch's respective dance styles reveais the contrary politics of the body at work. Wigman's »emotional immediaey« fosters notions of a shared collective communion. Her »absolutist model of the passively moved sub ject« (p. 183) not only enshrines her commitment to an essentialism of the German Volk (also addressed, earlier in the volume, in Marion Kant's critical portrayal of the dancer), but also prefigures the peculiar self-stylization of many dance artists (and certainly many Germans) as equally passively moved victims of the Nazi Regime. Such a body politics could not be further from Bausch's radical commitment to a