When Gabriele Brandstetter published Tanz-Lektüren: Körperbilder und Raumfiguren der Avantgarde in 1995, German dance studies hardly existed. The book was a pioneering effort that exerted considerable influence on dance studies in Germany as it developed over the next decades. Now, twenty years later, Tanz-Lektüren has been translated into English, and its appearance is most welcome. The book's importance is not merely historical; on the contrary, it has much to offer today's anglophone reader, particularly in Brandstetter's use of Aby Warburg's theories to analyze dance imagery and movement patterns. Important, too, is her inclusion of numerous writers and artists whose views on dance are little known, or at least little analyzed, in English.

The title chosen for the book's translation is Poetics of Dance, which is apt, since it focuses on both the structural and interpretive elements of “reading” dance. As Brandstetter states, “the concept of reading implies that dance in its cultural and performative form can be understood as a discursive formation” (xvi). In this way she begins to outline her approach and how she intends to conduct her analysis. What Brandstetter is reading is the interrelationship among dance, text, and visual arts in the avant-gardes that developed in Europe from the late nineteenth century into the 1920s. She couches her analysis within the crisis of perception that was central to modernism, as artists, writers, and dancers rejected tradition in the face of new theories and technologies that were transforming the world around them.

Brandstetter approaches reading through a concept of lecture corporelle, which is based on Mallarmé's concept of écriture corporelle, where the emphasis is placed on “body semiotics contained in the generation of movement signs in dance” (8). A good deal of this analysis focuses on deciphering the signs and symbolic systems that became visible as artists and writers read dance. Thus, she discusses work by such authors as Lafcadio Hearn, Maurice Emmanuel, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Valéry, and above all Hugo von Hofmannsthal. She also discusses avant-garde theater theory, especially through the writings of Gabriele D'Annunzio and the Futurists, whom she views as a bridge between dance and literature. Her nuanced analyses show the central place dance held in the thinking of theorists, critics, and especially poets in the early years of the century. However, as rich as this material is, it is her use of Aby Warburg's pathos and topos formulas that is most innovative.

In Warburg's theory, pathos formulas dealt with body imagery, while topos formulas concerned the body's relationship to space. Brandstetter argues that pathos formulas helped constitute the subject at the turn of the century but also provided for its dissolution, which was furthered, as the twentieth century advanced, by new ways in which bodies were made to relate to space.

Warburg's theories have universalizing and essentializing tendencies that may be problematic; however, Brandstetter avoids such pitfalls by being clear about their specifically Western social and cultural basis (13). Warburg's ideas centered on visual images that recur through history. These images morph into different forms at different times, but nevertheless reappear. They constitute a “primal expression of human passion” and are “visual inscriptions of collective cultural memory,” which he called “dynamograms” (15). Thus, the Victory of Samothrace, Isadora Duncan's La Marseillaise, and, by extension, Serena Williams's upraised arms as she wins another Wimbledon championship all draw on the same triumphal image embedded in cultural memory. However, pathos formulas were not just a means of remembering and remaking the past; Warburg saw them in terms of movement, as mnemic kinesis so that, in Brandstetter's words, “memory itself moves or is made up of movement” (xvii).Footnote ¹

In discussing dance in relationship to pathos formulas, which takes up the first part of her book, Brandstetter does not attempt to reconstruct dances, nor would one expect her to in this kind of analysis. In many cases it would be impossible because the dances no longer exist.Footnote ² Rather, her focus is on finding “the patterns that form the deep underlying structures that shaped the foundation of dance” at the turn of the twentieth century. She rightly calls this approach a form of indirect analysis (13).

With Warburg's theory of pathos formulas in mind, Brandstetter shows how experimental dancers, such as Isadora Duncan, visited archives and museums to study Greek sculpture and early Renaissance painting. They did this in order to gain access to what they believed was a dance that preceded the ravages wrought by modern Western society, a society that had destroyed authentic experience. In this sense, Brandstetter treats dance figurations as an act of “re-membering” the past, “which draws its energy in mnemonic form from cultural archives and discourses,” creating corporeal memory in the body of the dancer (xvi). I would point out that this idea of embodied memory also contributes to current debates concerning dance and ephemerality. Pathos formulas assume that dance leaves traces, which are reconstituted and given new forms and contexts, thus countering theories of dance's disappearance.Footnote ³

Yet while Brandstetter argues for the enduring aspect of pathos formulas, she also contends that for turn-of-the-century writers and artists it was dance's seeming ephemerality that was one of its most potent attractions. The crisis of perception called into question fundamental assumptions of the past, including the truth of language and the unity of the subject. The dancer escaped language through the disappearance of the dance as it was executed. For contemporary commentators, St. Denis's Incense was as ephemeral as the smoke that wafted from the censor on stage. What is more, the dancer became art (8). The dancer and the dance were one; there was no intervening medium, no written word, no paint and canvas. In this sense dance was a modern art, par excellence.

Of course, this did not occur in all dance. It was the mark of what Brandstetter calls “free dance,” the dance of Fuller, Duncan, St. Denis, Allen, and others who revolted against the tradition of ballet in order to develop new, “authentic” forms. These were women, primarily soloists, who created and performed their own works. Often haunting museums as “storehouses of cultural memory,” dancers drew on two central sources: the Hellenic and exotic (27). Typical of the former was Duncan, who attempted to regain authenticity through Greek models that were thought to be closely connected with nature and uncontaminated natural movement. Duncan's aim was not to replicate the antique but to wrest from it essential movement and emotion. Important models, which Brandstetter explores, included the winged Nike, goddess of victory; Primavera, associated with rebirth and new beginnings; and the Maenad, a figure freed from all constraints. The exotic is illustrated by dancers like St. Denis and Allen, who found inspiration in Orientalist figures such as the nautch girl and Salome. Like the Hellenic model, the exotic, too, was associated with the natural in that it was thought to express primal emotion and desire.

Some of Brandstetter's most provocative analysis centers on Hellenic-derived images that signaled loss of control, ecstasy, and hysteria, and exotic figures conveying eroticism, danger, and even death. The former could be seen in such forms as the Maenad and the Bacchantes, where movements included extreme back bends and whirling movements, the latter in figures such as Salome and in fire, bee, and trance dances. Somewhat startling to a twenty-first-century reader is the total absence of feminist theory in Brandstetter's analysis of such imagery. For example, she might have considered negative female images as signs of male panic at increased female freedom and power at the turn of the century. Instead, she simply treats them as indicating an ambivalence toward modernity. Nor does she address exoticism as a product of colonialism; her focus remains narrowly on a semiotic analysis of dances and dancing within the context of modernism and the historical avant-garde.

Related to pathos and topos formulas in Warburg's theory is a concern with costume, particularly drapery, which for him helped give an illusion of movement to paintings and sculpture, perhaps countering Winkelmann's view of classical art as “still grandeur” (Rampley Reference Rampley1997). Brandstetter devotes several sections of her book to discussions of the importance of costume in free and avant-garde dance, recounting how the fluttering drapery of Greek and Renaissance figures and the veils of the Orient aided in both conveying particular qualities of movement and in concealing or revealing the body. These flowing, diaphanous fabrics in turn influenced European fashion through designers such as Fortuny. Costume was also essential for artists such as Oskar Schlemmer, the multifaceted artist/dancer Akarova,Footnote ⁴ and Valeska Gert, all of whom used costuming to alter the figure's relationship to space.

Brandstetter turns to topos formulas to address the topic of abstraction, which as an aspect of self-reflection was an essential element of modernism. For dance, abstraction meant first and foremost an elimination of narrative, which opened the way to authenticity, whether of essential form or emotion. While free dancers tended to be interested in feeling (with the possible exception of Loie Fuller), as the twentieth century took shape, avant-garde dancers moved toward an abstraction of form. Brandstetter discusses the relationship of figure to space in terms of the transformation and dissolution of body imagery into spatial patterns. She conceptualizes these as aspects of changing perceptions of space and time in the early twentieth century due in part to the introduction of new technologies. In her reading, body imagery became fragmented, disguised and sometimes eradicated, as in Loie Fuller's seeming disappearance in the folds of draperies and light, and in the labanotation system devised by Rudolf von Laban, where the human body in movement is transformed into a spatial configuration, a nonfigurative linear system.

In another example of the body's abstraction, Brandstetter discusses Oskar Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet of 1922. Schlemmer hoped to escape representation by encasing the human body within masks and costumes, thus transforming it into an art figure, an “ambulant architecture” (291). The figure's movements, supposedly determined rationally and mathematically, emphasized body mechanics. The figure was meant to interact with the cubical space of the stage so that the whole space became expressive. In concealing the body, Schlemmer also aimed to circumvent human affect and ego. This echoes Gordon Craig's theory of the “übermarionette,” in which the art figure is freed from human limitations, although in fact Schlemmer's costumes imposed increased limitations on the body.

Schlemmer was working at a time when the machine was viewed by many with admiration. The Futurists, in particular, had great enthusiasm for machines, and one of the most enlightening chapters in the book deals with Futurism and aviation. We live in an era when air travel is not only taken for granted, but is most often associated with interminable security lines and claustrophobic seating arrangements. Brandstetter makes clear how revolutionary the technology of flight was at the turn of the twentieth century and the heady effect it had on artists. Humankind had from time immemorial dreamed of flying, and now it was possible. Ideas of speed and flight not only provided inspiration for artistic subject matter but for entirely new ways of thinking. Brandstetter points out how F. T. Marinetti, in his 1917 “Manifesto for a ‘Futurist Dance,’” was not concerned with creating new forms of choreography but with radically transforming the human body into a new flying hybrid, in which humans would not be an accessory to the airplane but be one with it.Footnote ⁵ Fedele Azari created his manifesto “Il teatro aereo futurista” in 1919, in which he envisioned a theater of flight where the sky would be the theater, and where flight, while analogous to dance, would be superior to it since dance can only aspire to flight and to weightlessness.

Depersonalization, mechanization, and transformation are major elements in both Schlemmer's theater and that of the Futurists. Depersonalization as an aspect of abstraction was also important in the work of two little-studied vanguard dancers whom Brandstetter notes: Valentine de Saint-Point and Akarova. Saint-Point attempted to create a dance of pure form, one that would eliminate the female body as a site of eroticism and male desire, replacing it with the body as idea. Her best-known work was La Métachorie of 1913. In it she combined movement with diverse media, including text, music, costume, projections of geometric forms, and perfumed scent. This mix of media pushed the focus away from the female body as sign of the erotic, which Saint-Point furthered through a veil covering her face and angular, nongendered movement. Thus, Saint-Point eliminated emotion in favor of formal elements. Akarova also aimed for a formalist dance that incorporated a variety of media. Brandstetter explores her Lettres Dansantes as corporeal writing. In this solo from the 1920s, Akarova's costume consisted of a leotard-like garment covered with letters of the alphabet, and letters also adorned the backdrop. Brandstetter says this made the body disappear “among the dancing graphemes, in the figurative signs and visual backdrop of the dance-text” (351). In other dances, Akarova used abstract, geometric forms on costume and backdrop.

The disappearing body is a major theme throughout Poetics of Dance. Much of this is due to the emphasis Brandstetter places on how writers and visual artists responded to and represented dance. Excavating these scholars' work is valuable in that it demonstrates the central place dance held for art in general in early twentieth-century modernism. At the same time, it is important to understand that writers and visual artists were viewing dance through the lens of their own fields and attendant issues. Poets lauded dance for an ephemerality that their own art could not attain without annihilating itself. The dissolution of the body made sense in painting and sculpture at a time when the new technologies of photography and film loomed large. Abstraction lessened the importance of the human figure and thus helped insure visual art's autonomy and continued importance. Abstraction was also a vital element for avant-garde dance, but I wonder how strong the urge was for a complete eradication of the body. The dancer already attained abstraction through depersonalization and the elimination of narrative. Self-referentiality for the dancer meant a concern with the materials of dance, and surely the body was one of them. To create a disembodied dance was to succumb to illusionism, which could hardly be considered authentic. It is questionable whether Saint-Point and Akarova intended to eradicate the body; it seems more likely that they wished to integrate it with other media in order to meld art more closely with life. As for Laban's notation system, it was meant to aid the dancer, not replace her. Brandstetter gives one example that directly supports the view that the disappearing body may have been of more interest to writers and visual artists than to dancers. Her example is that of Valeska Gert, who criticized Futurist theories of mechanical art and argued for a renewed theater that centered on dancers and actors (373–374). Gert used costume to change the dancer's relationship to space, and she employed techniques such as syncopation, interruption, and distortion that corresponded to cinematic devices and rhythms. However, these were not to produce a mechanical or disembodied dance but to demonstrate a modern human body in motion. For her, shifting spatial perspectives and absorbing new technologies while maintaining the central importance of the body brought dance into the twentieth century.

However one may feel about individual points made in Poetics of Dance, the book's overall significance for dance studies cannot be diminished. As mentioned earlier, Brandstetter's opening the door to Warburg's pathos and topos formulas as a tool for dance studies is important. Of value, too, is her exposure and sensitive treatment of turn-of-the-century writers' and theorists' views on dance. More generally, the book gives anglophone readers new insights into the direction of the dance studies field in Germany. Finally, Poetics of Dance is completely engaging. Every page challenges the reader to think, consider, agree, or, indeed, disagree. The book should be included in the collection of any scholar interested in twentieth-century art.