Marking Modern Movement: Dance and Gender in the Visual Imagery of the Weimar Republic by Susan Funkenstein

The first scholarly monograph to analyze images of dance during the Weimar Republic, Marking Modern Movement presents an art scholar's perspective on modernist social and stage dance while its crossdisciplinarity engages a broad academic audience. Susan Funkenstein examines a wide array of art works, periodical images, and archival materials to challenge longstanding notions of categorical objectification of the female dancing body without dismissing the complexities of gendered subjects. Her nuanced and intersectional look at gender concludes that dance was often, although not always, a liberating force. This study shows how careful attention to a variety of images by men and women alike exposes the limits of dance for women as subjects, as well as the ways in which masculinity asserted itself within a female-centric dance culture.

The word marking in the title—a practice familiar to dancers and artists—"suggests a shared somatic practice of making" that centers the body much the way Funkenstein does throughout her monograph (9). The beautifully reproduced and adroitly interpreted forty-nine black and white and twenty-eight color images enrich the reader's experience and understanding, and the publisher's website contains quality digital copies of these images, which allow readers to appreciate details up close.

Six case studies of friendships between artists and dancers provide many specific examples within the frame of gender in Weimar dance depictions, yet Funkenstein also draws connections among the examples as intersections and tensions emerge. The case studies and the book as a whole draw upon the interdisciplinarity and multimediality now recognized as fundamental to modernist art and modernism as a whole.

Citing Kate Elswit's important work on Weimar dance, Funkenstein follows the trend in scholarship to examine concert dance alongside social dance without presumed cultural hierarchies. The study includes works from Berlin Dada, Expressionism, New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), and Bauhaus, although the movements are neither used as the driving principle of argumentation nor presented in neat one-to-one correspondence with dance of the time. Susan Manning's concept of "cross-viewing" (11) and Helmut Lethen's analysis of Weimar's "classification mania" (135) provide important frameworks for readings throughout the study.

The opening chapter presents Hannah Höch's early photomontages as examples of art works that challenge the premise that Weimar dance images all demonstrate a "radical potential to re-present women's subjecthood" (17). Dance history informs Funkenstein's rich analyses of collages that resist the common assumption of female dancers as symbolic of freedom and emancipation. In addition to demonstrating her own deep knowledge of dance history and imagery, Funkenstein makes the case that Höch possessed a robust knowledge of dance and the periodicals she mined for images. It thus appears purposeful that Höch incorporated images in line with conservative traditions in dance, fashion, and politics. The second chapter turns to Mary Wigman, arguably the most well-known dancer of Weimar Germany, to highlight how her understanding of female subjectivity influenced male artists' depictions of dancing bodies. The attention to whiteness, queerness, and class culminates in a nuanced examination of the ways in which Wigman and other artists broke down the subject–object dichotomy.

In her third and fourth chapters, Funkenstein turns to revue dance, introducing the third chapter by pushing against the dominant (male) readings of revue kicklines that frame female sexuality as mechanized, sexless, and not for other women. Examining periodicals and popular culture through a queer lens, the chapter emphasizes women's experiences of revues. Returning to Höch, Funkenstein argues that the revues were a place for female pleasure that could disrupt heteronormative ideals. The fourth chapter draws upon reviews, magazines, art works, ephemera, and autobiographical writings of Josephine Baker, the internationally renowned African American revue star, to demonstrate how Baker's dancing and images of her work both supported and contested stereotypes in Weimar culture.

In the final two case studies, Funkenstein shifts her attention to the New Man in dance imagery, an understudied aspect of Weimar visual culture. The fifth chapter examines artist Otto Dix's self-fashioning in connection to dance and popular culture, highlighting ways in which the white male primacy in Dix's images challenges the book's core argument about gender in Weimar dance. Dix's New Man is a (social) dancer who is interested in and shaped by the mass media and consumerism often ascribed to women of the era. Funkenstein's readings of paintings work to show how his Americanized image and performance of bourgeois identity despite a working-class background exist alongside clear artistic references to German cultural identity, such as his use of German renaissance style. Masculinity and class continue to drive analyses of dance and gender in the sixth chapter, which examines the Bauhaus by focusing on Oskar Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet and Bauhaus festivals. Building off Juliet Koss's work on Bauhaus and the Gesamtkunstwerk, Funkenstein introduces the term "Gesamttanzwerk," or "total work of dance," to prioritize the moving body over poetry in stage performances and festivals of the Bauhaus (205). Analyzing social and stage dance, she shows that despite the masculinity inherent in the Bauhaus institution, dance provided a site for gender fluidity and experimentation that subverted binaries but largely stayed within the carnivalesque space of the festivals.

The conclusion of the book traces the transition from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich and shows how differently the dance and art worlds weathered the regime change. Many visual artists struggled to sustain careers, and some found their pieces in the traveling Degenerate Art exhibit, whereas the dance world was able more easily to conform to politicians' conservative tastes. Few images of dance were produced during the Nazi era, and Funkenstein provides a typically astute reading of a notable exception, Adolph Ziegler's Terpsichore (1937), in which she recognizes a remnant of Weimar dance culture.

Funkenstein's focus on visual culture related to dance brings a refreshing perspective to modernist dance studies, while also challenging assumptions about the objectives and interventions of visual art. Her meticulous, multidisciplinary research not only draws upon visual art and dance studies, but also recent German studies research on literature, fashion, and queer studies. Importantly, her study considers racialized aspects of gender and dance throughout. The interdisciplinarity, clarity of writing, and case-study approach make this book appropriate for scholars and students of various fields engaged in cultural studies. Readers can gain an even fuller view of dance in Weimar culture by reading the study alongside Funkenstein's previously published scholarship on well-known dancers Gret Palucca and Anita Berber, both of whom inspired many images (the author opted to leave out these dancers in order to strike a balance of examples that did not prioritize the female concert dancer).