Epistemologies of the Dancing Subject

This paper examines efforts by modern dancers in Germany before 1928 to understand physical expression as a system of knowledge. Casting modern dance as a method to uncover the basic features of the natural world, biological life, and human behavior that no other art, or science, could furnish, a small group of dance theorists devised a set of performance, pedagogical, and critical practices that cast the figure of the modern dancer as a new social subject for the modern moment: one who was free and self-legislating yet compatible with the wider claims of public authority. This presentation will trace the development of this dancing, sovereign subject to argue that German modern dance formed a powerful theory of social relations whose main ideas drew from the Sentimental Enlightenment and, curiously, advanced a set of deeply anti-modernist values.