Rethinking Modernism and Modernity: A Dance Approach

Ramsay Burt and Michael Huxley’s Dance, Modernism, and Modernity offers an important contribution to our understanding of the nexus of dance, modernism, and modernity. The term “modernity,” cited from sociologist Anthony Giddens, is defined as “a certain set of attitudes towards the world, the idea of the world as open to transformation, by human intervention” (p. 26). This openness to change and transformation, according to Burt and Huxley, is exemplified by the potential of dance to bring about “the diversity, fluidity, and contradictions of modernism” (p. 30). However, in this book, “modernism” no longer connotes “male, heteronormative, resolutely literary, Anglophone” (p. 16), but is characterized by the “expansion” proposed by Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz in their 2008 article “The New Modernist Studies.” Such an expansion, “in terms of discipline, geography, definition and identity” (p. 18), takes place along three axes—temporal, spatial, and vertical—through which the authors conduct a multiple-angled analysis of how dance has developed and responded to the experience of living in modern times. Thus Burt and Huxley’s critical approach is to eschew early writings on modernism in dance that are concerned solely with formal and aesthetic issues—such as Marshall Cohen’s questioning of Susanne K. Langer’s claim that dance creates the illusion of the conquest of gravity as an embodiment of modernism—and attempt to develop a wider and more inclusive interpretation of modernism. After the lengthy and thorough foreword by Claire Warden, this collection of eleven essays—four by Burt, three by Huxley, and four by them both—is thoughtfully organized into two parts. Part 1, co-written by Burt and Huxley, is concerned with key factors and issues about modernism and modernity in dance during the period, with chapter 1 serving as the introduction. Chapter 2 centers on a historiographical (temporal axis) consideration of modern dance from the early 1900s to the mid-1950s. The authors