Nietzsche's Dancers: Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and the Revaluation of Christian Values (review)

What is the role of bodies in recreating the truth and dynamism of religious values? This question guides Kimerer L. LaMothe’s work in the study of religion. One might describe her as a kinesiologist of religious values, a scholar who investigates the ways that values are discovered, realized, and transformed through movement of human bodies. In Nietzsche’s Dancers, LaMothe focuses on modern dance as one source of such discovery. In this detailed study, she explores dance imagery in Friedrich Nietzsche’s (d. 1900) writing, and then shows how this imagery was extended and tested in the choreography of dance pioneers Isadora Duncan (d. 1927) and Martha Graham (d. 1991).

LaMothe suggests that contemporary study of religion is distorted by two modern temptations—overbearing confidence in intellectual processes and overwrought sensitivity to feelings. These temptations are sustained by an obsessive focus on thought, words, and writing, as the objective conditions of truth. To oppose such distortion, LaMothe presents projects by Nietzsche, Duncan, and Graham, respectively, as efforts to engage religious values by refiguring bodily dimensions of being. Nietzsche’s repudiation of the ascetic ideal of Christianity, she argues, was positively refigured as an ideal of dance. Both Duncan and Graham were inspired to address Christian decadence by developing innovative practices of dance; each was directly and pervasively engaged with the writings of Nietzsche. Further, reading Nietzsche through the choreographies of Graham and Duncan, LaMothe argues for the objective import of Nietzsche’s dance imagery. The dance ideal is not metaphorical; it aims at refiguring the bodily conditions of truth by recreating kinetic fluency.

Nietzsche’s Dancers is divided into three parts, each devoted to one of LaMothe’s interlocutors. Part I reviews contemporary literature on Nietzsche and traces the interpretive choices scholars make to evade the significance of kinetic practice for Nietzsche’s project. LaMothe shows how scholars persistently capture Nietzsche’s dance imagery as linguistic phenomena—as metaphors for thinking rather than as the bodily condition of values formation. Re-inscribing dance within processes of thinking or writing allows Nietzsche’s readers to repudiate Christian values but in ways that do not demand movement to transform them. In a central chapter on Zarathustra, LaMothe argues that for Nietzsche values cannot be reformulated by thinking alone: pure thought makes Zarathustra melancholy and resentful. Rather, Zarathustra prophesies values that will arise from refiguring the condition of bodies. He learns to embrace the return of abysmal thoughts as he discovers his ability to dance. The practice of dance enables decadent formations to be objectively refigured through kinetic expression, allowing ambiguities, tension, and even suffering to be put into joyous play, yet with discipline—reworking the ascetic’s rich attention to physiology in ways that affirm life. LaMothe argues that Niezsche’s dance ideal takes up and transfigures the ascetic ideal of Christian religion. Her contribution points to Duncan and Graham as Nietzsche’s most acute interpreters.

In Part II, LaMothe develops Isadora Duncan’s fearless effort to reinvent religion. Duncan turned to dance as the kinetic practice that would enable a religious renaissance, but then found that the dance traditions available to her were mired in the decadence she wanted to overcome. Therefore, she generated a new repertoire of exercises and gestures that would both critique and refigure modern religion and dance. Duncan viewed herself as being steeped in Christian physiology, and yet she wanted to liberate herself from the hostility to sensuality that she perceived Christian religion to demand. LaMothe shows how Duncan worked with her ambivalence towards Christian values through gesture rather than argument.

Duncan’s discovery of the “undulating line,” for example, became central to her project of refiguring religion and dance. Duncan found the undulating line in her studies of Greek art, in natural phenomena such as waves, trees, and animals in motion, and also in her experiments with dance technique. The isomorphic repetition of the undulating...