Plural Modernisms and Dance

When asked to contribute to this collection, I hesitated. ‘Legacies’ implies writing of contemporary work, and words like ‘abstraction’ and ‘modernism’ carry the historical weight of canonical accounts about what qualified as ‘art’ in the past. In the end, I chose examples of contemporary dance works by Pichet Klunchun, Ola Maciejewska, Eszter Salamon and Nora Chipaumire that, intentionally or not, reflect upon legacies of early-twentieth-century dance. Through these contemporary examples, I discuss how appropriation of the Other was at the heart of the modernism of both the Ballets Russes and Denishawn companies, and how what has been understood as ‘abstraction’ in the dancing of figures like Loie Fuller and Isadora Duncan effectively constructs a framework of aesthetic evaluation that privileges whiteness and Euro-American genealogies. Relating references to Greek antiquity to pseudoscientific theories about ‘races’, and showing how ‘natural dancing’ implied cultivation of whiteness, I ask if these glorified past examples have been more significant for racial segregation of art/concert dance than for aesthetic, pedagogical or reportorial developments in the art form. The chapter finishes in the invention of ‘kinaesthetic empathy’ in the 1930s, arguing that this theoretical apparatus further limited all claims to innovation, novelty or aesthetic relevance to hegemonic whiteness.

To think of ‘modernist legacies of contemporary dance’ is a terminological challenge, because categorisations of dance only superficially follow those of other arts. ‘Modernism’ is rarely used by dance scholars, either as a stylistic category or as periodisation; key terms like ‘abstraction’ also shift because in a corporeal art form, the performing body is always-already figurative. In creating a canon for the art form, certain dances have been set up as examples of ‘abstraction’ or defined as having other formal characteristics typical to what is seen as modernism in other arts. But this also means that the characteristics associated with ‘modernism’ rely on criteria derived from other arts rather than dance itself, so that dance and dancing bodies are conspicuously absent from discussions of ‘modernist dances’.

As with discourses of oil painting or productions of Shakespeare, analysing dance requires fathoming the different genealogies and relations between forms, styles, corporealities, design principles, compositional paradigms and intertextual references in what is being danced and by whom in what context.