Watching Weimar Dance by Kate Elswit (review)

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.¹ Historical surveys have characterized Germany’s first democracy as one of extremes and as a “crisis of modernity” (Peukert 1993), 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 2009; Makela 1997).

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...