W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture: "The Roaring of Nature"

Johanna Pitetti-Heil’s lecture interrogates the concepts of nature and culture in early US American modern dance. Tracing the discourse that modern dancers established regarding the liberation of women’s bodies through moving naturally, the lecture focuses on the writing and training practices of Isadora Duncan. While Duncan discursively naturalized bodies and their movements, she also participated in a technicalization of training methods. Duncan deployed her own understanding of nature and culture to train women’s bodies so that they would be able to express themselves. Duncan’s own dance-making was steeped in what she might have called Bolshevik-yet-Democratic ideas of equality, but her history of modern dance’s liberation of moving bodies also needs to be contextualized in the light of modernist eugenicist discourses on the body. These have to be acknowledged in the practice of gymnastics as much as in the genre-specific discussions of modern dance and its discourses on what essentialized white and racialized Black dancers’ bodies were allowed and expected to perform on stage. Whereas some writing on dance of the period is explicitly racist and racialized, reading early US American dance criticism and Isadora Duncan’s writings via the nature/culture debate makes visible the more tacit ways in which essentializing, racializing, and racist discourses shaped modernist dance practices and dance criticism alike.

Johanna Pitetti-Heil is an American studies scholar and senior lecturer in gender and diversity studies at the English Department I at the University of Cologne, Germany, where she serves as a co-editor of gender forum. She is the author of Walking the Möbius Strip: An Inquiry into Knowing in Richard Powers’s Fiction. Her work on American literature, dance studies, cultural studies/theory has appeared in Amerikastudien/American Studies, Dance Chronicle, Hypatia, the forum of J19, WiN, and in edited collections. She is currently turning her Habilitationsschrift (“Becoming-Body: Practices of Freedom and Technologies of the Self in American Modern Dance”) into a book publication.

More information on the W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture Series.