Poetics of Dance: Body, Image, and Space in the Historical Avant-Gardes by Gabriele Brandstetter (review)

In the final sentence of her path-breaking Poetics of Dance, after almost 400 pages of insightful analysis of avant-garde aesthetics, Gabriele Brandstetter leaves the reader with the unsettling words of choreographer William Forsythe: "One of the first goals of performance is not to know what one has done" (389). Brandstetter's tongue-in-cheek assessment of her own authorial intent does more than bring a refreshing air of irony to the end of what was originally her Habilitationsschrift. On one level, the quotation rightly characterizes her project as a virtuosic performance, a choreographic joining of once disparate elements from visual arts, literature, theater, criticism, film, and dance into meaningful, revelatory movement. On another level—one that has become apparent in the two decades between the book's first publication in 1995 and its first translation into English in 2015—the quote casts the project as a foundational, performative text that, in taking form on paper, also gave shape and life to the field of Tanzwissenschaft in Germany.

As befits such a watershed project, Poetics of Dance has ambitious goals: it aims not only to reimagine the avant-garde in the early twentieth century, but also to claim a central role for dance in that reimagining. The steps of Brandstetter's argument unfold against a background of the aesthetics of modernity, whose principles of movement, chance, and ephemerality, she contends, were embodied to an unparalleled degree by the medium of dance itself. That is, in the unmistakably mortal, yet symbolically rich dancing body, avant-garde writers and visual artists found the enduring signs that they employed in their own media united with the dynamism and precarity that they felt characterized their era. This extraordinary union, she claims, positioned dance as an overdetermined node in the web of cross-disciplinary connections that proliferated around the crisis of perception in the fin de siècle.

With that framework in place, Brandstetter addresses the subject matter of the book's original subtitle: Körperbilder und Raumfiguren. Brandstetter's analysis begins by adapting Warburg's concept of the pathos formula, i.e., universally recognizable figurations of emotion portrayed through gesture and facial expression. These visual tropes, Brandstetter argues, carried over into the corporeal medium of dance and gave avant-garde artists a versatile tool for engaging with the crisis of subjectivity facing them. The Pathosformel, however, serves only as the theme for Brandstetter's variation: her project ultimately aims to trace how corporeal pathos formulas, e.g., the maenad and the muse, are transcended by abstract topos formulas, e.g., the labyrinth and the spiral, in the aesthetics of the historical avant-garde. By invoking the term topos, Brandstetter deliberately places avant-garde dance into the context of classical rhetorical topoi, thus arguing for dance's spatial figurations as expressions of rhetoric's perceptual constructs. This logic then allows her to read the gradual abstraction of dance as a reflection of changing modes of perception. For instance, the shift in dance from an affective depiction of relationships between subjects (a Pathosformel) to an abstracted depiction of relationships between kinetic elements and the space that surrounds them (a Toposformel) becomes indicative of both the deconstruction of the holistic subject and the introduction of multicentered perspective in twentieth-century art and literature.

To ground these larger arguments regarding not only the cultural significance of dance but also the metamorphosis of perception in twentieth-century thought, Brandstetter provides a varied selection of case studies drawn from every corner of the cultural landscape. She does not sort her references into disciplinary categories, but rather groups them into thematic clusters around objects of interpretation that traverse various disciplinary boundaries, including influential dancers, enduring dances, performance venues, and costumes. As a result, the book possesses a flexibility that allows for unexpected and revelatory encounters, e.g., between the principles of aviation and the use...