In Watching Weimar Dance, Kate Elswit tackles the problematic of spectatorship: what audience members think they observed, Elswit contends, is as much about how the tensions of the times informs the experience of the corporeal, both in and outside the theater, as it is about the particulars of a dancer's movement. Because spectators’ experiences of Weimar dance functioned “in dialogical relation to everything that surrounded them” (xiv), the dynamic between viewers, the stage, and the street was also ever changing and fundamentally unstable. Plus, what remains of those fleeting and ephemeral performances is, in many regards, unreliable: spectators’ memories are fuzzy, and archival remnants are scant. Thus, as much as scholars might attempt to faithfully reconstruct a choreography, such a task is ultimately impossible because the archival materials to do so either do not exist or lead us to misremembrances and inconsistencies. The lack of archival remains poses particular problems in Germany, I would suggest, where bombings during World War II destroyed countless repositories. Elswit's approach, then, is to underscore the challenges inherent in dance historical scholarship, for artifacts can be seen “not in terms of a singular mapping of movement onto culture or vice-versa but, rather, as evidence for a range of possible responses that were made available through the specifics of the performance and those who attended it” (xviii). In her thoughtful, rigorous, and historically grounded study, Elswit exposes the inherent subjectivity of source material, and then utilizes the contradictions in that material to explore spectators’ complex and varied responses. As Elswit notes: “By taking multiple perspectives together, we start to see a composite yet still dispersed picture […] of how these performances existed in a changing world” (xiii).

That “changing world” was the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), and these diverse viewing perspectives matter because they tell us how people navigated its vibrant cultural, social, and political terrain.Footnote ¹ Historical surveys have characterized Germany's first democracy as one of extremes and as a “crisis of modernity” (Peukert Reference Peukert and Lane1993), but instead of crippling stasis, this crisis brought tremendous dynamism, as exemplified by increased public visibility for women, consumerist global cities such as Berlin, and technological innovations. Some Germans embraced these changes, but more often than not, the rapidly modifying sociocultural landscape created some degree of fear and concern. Thus, shifting attitudes on the true potential for women's emancipation and grappling with war trauma became significant themes in the arts of the Weimar era (Kaes Reference Kaes2009; Makela Reference Makela and Von Ankum1997).

These broader historical events and shifts figure prominently in Watching Weimar Dance in a “culturally situated model of watching, one that allows dance to intervene in Weimar studies through, rather than despite, the instabilities of performance” (xiv). Prominent topics in Weimar studies scholarship—death, the machine, gender, politics, and postwar memory—are the dominant chapter themes in this book. Elswit expertly elucidates correlations between Weimar dance and related scholarly fields such as film, Weimar dance's interplay with its German sociopolitical contexts, and how dance and its spectators were similarly informed by shared contextual circumstances. In these ways, Elswit illuminates the larger ramifications of her temporally specific case studies. For instance, she notes that a scene from Arthur Schnitzler's novella Fräulein Else (1924) might or might not have served as a basis for an act of unveiling that Anita Berber may or may not have done. Elswit then pulls back from that moment of slippage to explore its broader significance, including how physical unveiling in Weimar dance functioned symbolically as emotional revelation, and how shifting notions of women's visibility in the Weimar public sphere figured into how women functioned alternately as consumers or consumable objects (60–62). Elswit is able to delve into this material so capably because her excellent understanding of German enables her to grasp the subtleties of word choice to reveal nuanced perspectives on her Weimar contexts, performances, and spectatorship.

Elswit writes from the perspective of reception history, mostly through written criticism and images, emphasizing throughout her book that these are limited impressions, from specific individuals at a specific time. She marshals that reception history in her selected case studies, which include Weimar reviews of performances by Anita Berber, in which she wore a costume but was perceived as nude; repeated disconnects between Oskar Schlemmer's expressed hope for a metaphysical theater and viewers’ opinions of the heavy, limiting costumes; and a 1951 West German copyright suit, in which a desire for fidelity to the “original” 1932 Green Table contradicted the fact that the performance was supposed to change over time. Through these and many other examples, Elswit explores how the gaps and slippages between what occurred on stage and what viewers believed they witnessed created meaning.

At the same time, Elswit cautions against essentializing viewing positions around particular social identities, such as gender or occupation (159, no. 2). Instead, she documents a panoply of opinions in a complexly theorized and historicized contexts of reception. Elswit showcases a tremendous range of spectators. Some were well-known dance and cultural critics from prominent Weimar-era newspapers, such as Fred Hildenbrandt (Berliner Tageblatt), Siegfried Kracauer (Frankfurter Zeitung), and Artur Michel (Vossische Zeitung); others published under their initials, or anonymously, in reviews found in books, national and regional newspapers, highbrow cultural magazines, and society and women's leisure magazines. She locates additional perspectives in letters, diaries, caricatures, photographs, and film. The broader message, it seems, is that no single version or vision of dance could or should dominate. Elswit argues that some commentators may have been more prolific or widely recognized, but all conveyed mistaken recollections and inflected their dance interpretations with the collective cultural experiences of off-stage Weimar bodies. All of the spectators contributed to the construction of dance's meaning; they were, in fact, as central to the enterprise as the dancers on stage.

Elswit's scholarship is quite agile in balancing multiple perspectives. Many of her case studies appear in more than one theme-based chapter—a strategy suggestive of the possibilities for re-viewing, re-analyzing, and re-framing in Weimar and beyond. The Tiller Girls, for example, appear in Chapter Two with an emphasis on dance-as-machine, as well as in Chapter Three, which deals with nudity, gender, and sexuality. Likewise, Valeska Gert's work is discussed in Chapter Three, as well as in Chapter One on death dances and in Chapter Five on emerging postwar formulations of Ausdruckstanz. Elswit has even re-framed her analyses across her own award-winning scholarship, in most instances tackling different issues in Watching Weimar Dance than she addressed in her previous publications. To take one example, Elswit's (Reference Elswit2009) article on Weimar dances of death explores the “problems of representation” of the expressive body, but in the book she examines a broader cultural context for such dances and how a viewer's understanding of the spectacle critically interplayed with the dancer's own experiences (3).

Although the book thoroughly engages with German film and literature, Elswit primarily focuses on Weimar dance, and one of her strengths is how she problematizes the term Ausdruckstanz. As numerous other dance historians have noted, Ausdruckstanz is a retroactive construct, formulated after World War II in ways that narrativized diverse Weimar stage dance practices into a narrower history of German modernism (Franco Reference Franco, Franco and Nordiera2007). Elswit addresses the issue throughout her book, particularly in Chapter Five, “Watching after Weimar,” when Ausdruckstanz became more fully codified in West Germany. Elswit's tackling of the term is important to her argument for numerous reasons, two of which I will note here. First, Ausdruckstanz prioritized West German modernists, such as Wigman, over East German dancers (Giersdorf Reference Giersdorf2013), and exiled dancers such as Gert, whose works evolved significantly after her Weimar years, and the Tiller Girls and Berber, whose popularity or scandals would have tainted “pure” modernism. Second, Weimar dancers and their spectators shared in a “physical dramaturgy,” in which viewers were recognized as playing an increasingly important role in constituting meaning (xxvii). Thus, to embrace a more expansive notion of what constituted Weimar stage dance has the additional effect of expanding our understanding of how and why people watched dance.

Elswit's democratic paradigm of spectatorship also tends to minimize the role of identity politics. For example, much recent scholarship on gender and spectatorship in numerous fields, including dance, incorporates Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theories as a way of structuring difference through the gaze. Although certain terms do appear in the endnotes, Watching Weimar Dance barely mentions this body of literature. I am not suggesting it should be included, but rather I am remarking upon how much psychoanalytic film theory, in which spectatorial experience is framed as unidirectional, differs from Elswit's more relational (and destabilizing) model of engagement. Moreover, Elswit's most extensive discussion of a national, racialized dance is not exemplified by Nazi policies on the body or even from within Germany. Rather, the most overt example is from Canadians and Americans watching Wigman on her 1931 international tour (120). In keeping with Elwit's attention to the parameters of Ausdruckstanz, the example serves to illustrate how some critics in Canada and the United States characterized Wigman's modern dance as German well before many Germans critics defined their own Ausdruckstanz in national terms.

The highly democratic model of spectatorship demonstrated in Watching Weimar Dance, I would suggest, parallels the highly democratic, even cacophonic, character of the Weimar Republic. With most censorship laws lifted, a booming and diverse newspaper culture, and a wide range of active political parties, the Weimar era distinguished itself precisely by its plethora of voices–a condition that was its strength and contributed to its downfall. Indeed, the relationship between reception and stage in Watching Weimar Dance depends to a significant degree on a democratic society; such a model would have been far different, if not impossible, in the Third Reich.

Watching Weimar Dance is a stellar work of scholarship. Elswit tackles some of the central issues in how dance history is researched and narrated, and her points are all the more convincing because they are supported by meticulous research. Her challenges to dance's history are expressed through respect for the fields in which she works and for the scholars and bodies of literature that preceded her.Footnote ² Watching Weimar Dance should be a welcome addition to dance studies, German studies, and as a model for interdisciplinary scholarship on the body.