“A Revolutionary Reversal of Fascist Body Politics” explores the transnational influences of German expressionist dance on American revolutionary dance during the early to mid-twentieth century. Beginning in 1914 Germany, this paper first looks at Mary Wigman’s Witch Dance, and follows Wigman’s influences as they immigrate to the United States in the body and teachings of Hanya Holm in 1931. It then traces German expressionist influences as they are passed on from Holm to second-generation Russian-Jewish immigrant dancers of the revolutionary dance movement, Edith Segal and Miriam Blecher, and finds evidence of these influences in their Anti-fascist choreographic works, Kinder, Kuche, and Kirche (1933) and Van der Lubbe’s Head (1934). While researching these key figures and their works, this paper also examines the social and political issues that surrounded and informed the dance community at the time. “A Revolutionary Reversal of Fascist Body Politics” is heavily informed by Clare Croft’s book Dancers as Diplomats, which discusses the use of dance by artists as well as nations in forging new, idealistic identities and utopian narratives throughout history— especially during times of social and political controversy. It is interested in the irony of Russian-Jewish immigrants using German expressionist elements in their choreography to criticize and challenge fascism, arguing that by embodying and utilizing the German-Expressionist roots that grounded American revolutionary dance at the time, Jewish immigrant dancers reversed the body politics of fascism. Photograph: Members of the New Dance Group in Improvisation, 1932. (New Dance Group Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress)
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