Kurt Jooss

Resumen . Abstract

“El cuerpo ya no es el obstáculo que separa al pensamiento de sí mismo”. Esta afirmación de Deleuze (La imagen-tiempo, Estudios sobre cine 2, l985) reinstala al cuerpo en el dominio del pensamiento. Con Nietzsche ya se sugería un pensar desde el cuerpo. El cuerpo insiste y es esa pulsión vital la que lo fuerza a pensar. Su capacidad de metamorfosis y de vértigos nos fuerza a interrogar su régimen de signos y valores. La Danza-Teatro y el psicodrama analítico pondrán en cuestión los automatismos psíquicos y los determinismos sociales. Siendo de este modo las pulsiones del cuerpo, sus vibraciones, su anatomía como destino y su morfo-fisiología las condiciones de posibilidad de los gestos, los que nos imprimen y dotan no sólo de una posición ética, sino también –y fundamentalmente– estética en la constitución de nuestra subjetividad. El vigor, la elegancia, el heroísmo o el júbilo no sólo responden a un talante ético, sino que originariamente son imágenes estéticas que proveen los cuerpos. El cuerpo así pensado se afirma como comportamiento y gesto.
Al aproximarnos a los dominios de la danza, en particular a la obra de Pina Bausch indagaremos el terreno de las transformaciones de la mundaneidad del cuerpo bajo los regímenes del deseo. Nos aproximaremos al cuerpo como producción expresiva del arte de vivir –como forma plástica y conceptual en el espacio– y de la ética como tonalidad y particular voluntad expresiva.

*WINNER OF THE OSCAR G BROCKETT BOOK PRIZE FOR DANCE RESEARCH and HONORABLE MENTION FOR THE CALLAWAY PRIZE

“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. ... Watching Weimar Dance should be a welcome addition to dance studies, German studies, and as a model for interdisciplinary scholarship on the body.” —Susan Funkenstein, Dance Research Journal

“Kate Elswit thinks across history, theory, reception and corporeality and in so doing rethinks Weimar dance for the 21st century.”
— Susan Manning, Professor of English, Theatre, and Performance Studies, Northwestern University

“In Watching Weimar Dance, Kate Elswit takes the traditional ‘obstacles’ of dance history – the fragmentary archive, ephemeral performances, and unstable objects – and transforms them into its very strengths. Approaching Weimar dance as a series of eventful and relational encounters, in which spectators contributed as much to the generation of meaning as the performers themselves, the book rediscovers modern dance both as a specific medium and as a forum shot through with broader issues of visual and corporeal culture.”
— Michael Cowan, author of Technology's Pulse: Essays on Rhythm in German Modernism (2011) and Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity: Avant-Garde-Advertising-Modernity (2014)

"Groundbreaking... Kate Elswit's writing is lucid, and her scholarship impeccable... she cares passionately for the origins of the traces which she analyses (that is the dance themselves)." — Julian Preece, The Times Literary Supplement

“Elswit provides an interdisciplinary framework that reveals new insights about topics of longstanding interest to scholars of Weimar culture, including expressivity and representation, the mechanization of bodies, and the commodification of art ... a valuable new resource on modernist performance culture.” —Hester Baer, CHOICE

In 1975, German choreographer Kurt Jooss created his last dance, Dixit Dominus, for Swedish-based Indian dancer Lilavati Häger. After Rani Nair reconstructed what is often seen as a “minor” work, she then created Future Memory (2012) to engage more directly with her inheritance, from caring for the personal things and stories that surrounded the piece to re-working its promise of dancing between European and Indian forms. Working outward from my position as dramaturg and historian for this project, this essay addresses the potential and precariousness of contemporary dance's experiments with redoing history at the intersection of multiple contested legacies.

... antidoted through representations that “exteriorise” this real by transferring it on to an image/signifier. ... the inanimate, whereas only Death, who was originally the choreographer, had to keepdancing. ... he used to define his charac-ters, based upon the eukinetic typing of dancers ...