Dancing Across History's Borders: Thoughts on Exile and Otherness by way of Kurt Jooss
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Speaker: Dr Kate Elswit
Kurt Jooss is one of the most important, but also one of the most instrumentalised figures in drawing connections between early twentieth century German dance, sometimes later known as Ausdruckstanz, and the Tanztheater associated with figures such as Pina Bausch. This talk triangulates the complications of German dance history when seen from a national perspective, and offers ways to think of it instead in a more globally permeable way.
The first part historicizes the afterlife of Jooss’s most well-known dance The Green Table in postwar West Germany. The second takes a practice-based approach to Jooss’s last dance, Dixit Dominus, which was made for Swedish-based Indian dancer Lilavati Häger. And the final section suggests how Jooss’s own history and his works themselves archive alternative possibilities for understanding the interconnections of national narratives and the person-to-person terms on which those must be realized.
Kate Elswit is an academic, dramaturg, and choreographer and has recently joined Central as Reader in Theatre and Performance.
Image: Kurt Jooss’ ‘The Green Table’ source