Jahrestagung Plakat
Panel: Transnational, Decolonial, Queer.
New Approaches to the Modernist Gestural Imaginary
Friday 20 September 2024
Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Tanzforschung (gtf) „(Un-)Sichtbarkeiten – Moderner Tanz Re-Visited“
Folkwang Universität der Künste in Essen
Panel with Prof Lucia Ruprecht, Dr Lindsey Drury, Alina Saggerer, and Friederike Hartge, Institute of Theatre Studies, Division of Critical Dance Studies, Freie Universität Berlin
This panel showcases new approaches to researching and teaching dance modernism from transnational, decolonial, and queer perspectives. It draws on Lucia Ruprecht’s notion of the ‘gestural imaginary’ to enable a methodological grasp on the figurations of modernist dance that not only acknowledges dance’s actual but also its potential instantiations, its discursive and visual appearances, and its queer temporalities that pertain to the historical performative event as much as to the pre- and reenactments of gesture, to the readings and misreadings that occur before gestures are formed and after they have passed.
New Approaches to the Modernist Gestural Imaginary: Methodological Questions
(Lucia Ruprecht)
This paper frames the panel by taking stock of the state of the art in researching and teaching modernist dance from transnational, decolonial, and queer perspectives. It addresses questions that emerged in my recent research initiatives (‘Speculations on the Queerness of Dance Modernism’, DRJ Special Issue 2022, edited with Mariama Diagne and Eike Wittrock;‘Remapping Dance Modernisms’, Roundtables convened with Susan Manning at the 2024 DSA conference in Buenos Aires), explains their links with the methodological framework that I developed in Gestural Imaginaries: Dance and Cultural Theory in the Early Twentieth Century (2019), and charts the potential of current collaborative revisitations of the modernist imaginary.
Cannibal Choreographies: Dance Primitivism, Art History, and Modernist Anthropology
(Lindsey Drury)
Since the Spanish Requerimiento of 1513, colonial expansion was long defended by church and state with claims of Indigenous sacred violence. Despite the evidence that European colonizing forces habitually falsified reports of cannibalism to legitimate the conquering and subjugation of Indigenous communities to Spanish colonial rule, cannibal legends nonetheless long shaped settler imaginaries of Indigenous dance and ceremonial life (Vento 1998, 69; Restall 2021, 105; Seed 2001, 122). Thus, this presentation takes on conflicting colonial performatives of cannibal choreography. In this paper, I reconsider a history of cannibal concepts that shaped European thought on primitive dance, tracing how ideas about cannibal choreographies were transported across the Atlantic. To do so, my paper takes up Franz Boas’ address of Kwakwahkyah’wakw Hamat’sa as “the cannibal dance” and Aby Warburg’s ideas about Pueblo Indigenous Matachines as a dance of “hungry grandfathers”. Hamat’sa and Matachines are two dance drama forms in North America that have been in settler reception variously associated with a cannibal figuration in ways that vastly misunderstand Indigenous narratives of magic, eating, and otherization. In turn, I look to ways that Indigenous dance dramas draw on the figuration of ‘cannibal others’ to critically address colonial conditions and settler imaginaries while poking serious fun at outsider communities.
Queer Gestures: Sinnlichkeit und Exotismus bei Carmen Tórtola Valencia
(Friederike Hartge and Alina Saggerer)
Our paper examines the contribution of queer dancer Carmen Tórtola Valencia to early 20th-century dance modernism in peripheralized regions such as Spain and Latin America. We ask how queerness and otherness are performed in her gestures and how they bring about the sensual imag(inari)es of the exotic that her work evokes. By analyzing primary sources such as photographs and drawings, both by Tórtola Valencia herself and by artists such as Troy Kinney, we examine representations of exoticism, queerness, otherness and transnationality in her work. This includes the circulation of orientalist, Spanish and other exoticizing elements.Drawing on scholarship in Hispanic Studies and Critical Dance Studies, we offer insights into the cultural and political contexts that shaped Tórtola Valencia's artistic practice. She performed and produced her work without the support of men, creating stage characters with a prominent sensual side. Our paper will focus on these characters as they emerged both on stage and in photographs and drawings. We will thus shed light on the progressive and critical nature of Tórtola Valencia’s work and demonstrate its significance for the development of modernist dance aesthetics.
Contributors’ Bios:
Prof. Dr Lucia Ruprecht is Guest Professor of Critical Dance Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. She has published widely on dance history and theory, literature, and film. From 2004 to 2022, she was Lecturer in German literature and culture at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge. She held an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship at the Institute of Theatre Studies, FU Berlin, and was the Inaugural Visiting Research Scholar at Boyer College of Music and Dance, Temple University, Philadelphia.
Dr Lindsey Drury is an early modernist historian and dance/performance scholar who works on critical/digital research of colonial history and the ethnological archive. She is a Postdoc within Critical Dance Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin and was previously a researcher within FU’s Cluster of Excellence ‘Temporal Communities’. Recent publications appear in Postmedieval and Dance Research Journal. She is also co-editor of a forthcoming special issue of Interface Critique, due out soon.
Alina Saggerer is a PhD candidate and assistant researcher at the division of Critical Dance Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. Alina’s research focuses on the connection of dance theory and antisemitism theory, looking at solo works as well as group and mass choreographies/ornaments to analyse their risks but also their potential for critical reflection.
Friederike Hartge is a Master’s student and student assistant in Critical Dance Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. In her master’s thesis, she deals with questions of otherness, cultural appropriation and exoticism in classical ballets of the 19th century.