This article is the final installment of a special series on the Visualities blog exploring digital archives connected to modernism’s visual cultures. Contributors to the series introduce and model the uses of online resources spanning art, film, media, book history, print cultures, and more. In attending to specific visual artifacts from these collections, they also reflect on issues of methodology raised by developing and using digital archives, including in times of crisis and remote working...

In his latest work, contemporary choreographer William Forsythe tries to create, in his own words, a “short-term literacy” in his audience. The piece begins without music in order to isolate the individual phrases of movement: “it might be perceived that there has been a subtraction, which would be music. But in fact, dancers being the musical engines behind any dance, their breathing alone causes you to understand the phrase.” [1] The intention is to create a more skilled viewer who is focused on the movements that make up the dance without the distraction of the music. When music and movement come together in a more traditional way in the second act, the audience is, or so is the idea, more literate in what is presented to them: “suddenly, you are able to read.”

It’s rare to read an account of the process of learning about a new artform or medium from the beginning. Maybe because, at least for me, it’s hard to remember the first time I read a poem or a novel or saw a painting or heard a piece of music. Or maybe because that experience merges uncomfortably with a non-critical stance of “appreciation,” a word that doesn’t deserve some of the pejorative associations attached to it.

In January 1940, amid the confusion of wartime London, the Sadler’s Wells Ballet opened its somewhat cautious season with a premiere of Frederick Ashton’s new work Dante Sonata. Conceived after the September 1939 declaration of war, the ballet is Ashton’s response to the developing events of the Second World War. It is a dark, relentless, and violent work with overtones of romantic melancholy that emphasizes nineteenth-century artists’ engagement with Dante’s Divine Comedy. It would become one of the company’s preeminent wartime ballets, regularly performed by the company and strongly admired by audiences both in London and on national tours. What is surprising about this work is its pronounced expressionist quality—a characteristic often associated with what was becoming known as modern dance. This article examines how Dante Sonata’s departure from traditional ballet aesthetics can be read as a reaction to a larger onto-historic disposition relating to the growing anxiety about the failed project of modernity. To do this I argue for the importance of a panoramic view of Dante Sonata in its relationship with both modernity and trauma. Dance is a multivalent art form. It offers powerful yet nevertheless complex, multi-layered and contradictory meanings. Because of this, it can provide a unique, and if the popularity of dance during the war is anything to go by, compelling form of comment on the deeply challenging events and experiences with which modernity is associated. A work of ballet can focus and express the apprehension and preoccupations of a society and its individual constituents at a particular historical moment and offer a means to think through the defining circumstances of the era. It may offer new possibilities for understanding the responses to trauma in a representational form implemented through and received in live and manifestly enfleshed environments. Exploring Dante Sonata thus offers a fresh conduit for understanding the experience of modernity as cultural trauma, set against the effects of the wider twentieth-century development of Total War.

—Max Eastman It is perhaps only the advent of animal studies in the last decade that allows us to return to the often-cited comment above and link it in a serious intellectual manner with Isadora Duncan’s own understanding of her dancing and of the dancing body as she was helping to shape and articulate it in modernism. While recent work on Duncan emphasizes her interest in the machine, her aesthetic commitments are more fully articulated by elucidating the pivotal animal and elemental strains in her work. Duncan recites again and again in her essays that movements ought to be “natural and beautiful like those of the free animals.” In conjunction with this repeated claim, she insists upon the human harnessing of earthly vibrations, the value of nudity and barefootedness, and certain border figures (woman and child) that inform her creatural aesthetic. Understanding Duncan’s bio-aesthetic engagements enriches our assessment of her cultural disruptions, contributions, and legacies.

Finally appearing in English translation twenty years after its first appearance in German, Gabriele Brandstetter’s Poetics of Dance: Body, Image, and Space in the Historical Avant-Gardes retains its groundbreaking force.