Dance as History

Dancer/choreographer Netta Yerushalmy’s Paramodernities is an experimental project that bridges dance, critical theory, performance, aesthetics, and history. Yerushalmy has been systematically deconstructing the movement of landmark modern dance choreographies: The Rite of Spring (1913; Vaslav Nijinsky); Night Journey (1947; Martha Graham); Revelations (1960; Alvin Ailey); excerpts from the works of Merce Cunningham; Sweet Charity (1969; Bob Fosse); and Agon (1957; George Balanchine). Reshuffled movement – stripped of gender and racially-specific assignments, musical score, and compositional logic – is then performed alongside spoken original writing by scholars from different fields in the humanities, who situate these iconic works within the larger project of modernity. The event itself is a hybrid between performance, academic conference, and town-hall gathering.

In this presentation, historian Julia Foulkes, the scholar/writer on the installment on Bob Fosse’s Sweet Charity, will discuss with Yerushalmy the process of creation, how movement constitutes research, and what kind of history the series presents. It is an explicitly collaborative and collective process of creation among dancers, a primary source, and a scholar. There is little that is common about this as most dancers are not asked to voice their opinion, most choreography is reconstructed not deconstructed, and most scholars do not perform. Movement is the starting point of the discussion and analysis: How does movement carry history? What does it mean to put that history into one’s body? Dance is the instigation and the point in Paramodernities—this is an investment in older movement vocabularies and their attendant intellectual concerns borne and carried forth in bodies. But, for historians, what might these danced historical investigations tell us about the past and the practice of interpretation? Does Paramodernities enact a vision of the past not just as sacred treasure but as inheritance and foundation for a more courageous future?