Please join us for the book launch of Dr. Wesley Lim's new book Dancing with the Modernist City (2024). He will be in conversation with Dr. Meindert Peters (Oxford), a fellow collaborator and dance scholar.

As the 20th century dawned, authors, artists, and filmmakers flocked to cities like Paris and Berlin for a chance to experience a bustling urban life and engage with other artists and intellectuals. Among them were authors and filmmakers such as Harry Graf Kessler, Rainer Maria Rilke, August Endell, Alfred Döblin, Else Lasker-Schüler, Segundo de Chomón, and the brothers Max and Emil Skladanowsky. In their writing and artistic work from that period, they depicted the perpetual influx of stimuli caused by urban life as well as how these encounters repeatedly paralleled their experiences of watching early twentieth-century dance performances by Loïe Fuller, Ruth St. Denis, and Vaslav Nijinsky. The convergence these writers and filmmakers saw between the unexpected encounters during their urban strolls and modern dance performances led to writings that interwove the two motifs.

Dancing with the Modernist City argues that these writers and artists created a genre called the metropolitan dance text, which depicts dancing figures not on a traditional stage, but with the streets, advertising pillars, theatres, cafes, squares, and hospitals of an urban setting. Breaking away from the historically male, heteronormative view, this posthumanist mode of writing highlights the visual and episodic unexpectedness of urban encounters. In doing so, they upset conventional depictions of performance and urban spaces in ways paralleling modern dance.

This is a hybrid event. You are welcome to attend either in person or online via the Zoom link: https://anu.zoom.us/j/3114904953?pwd=bzE1NXdQVGJvVElnSUl5Z3B1RFNvdz09

This event is co-sponsored by the Transnational Research Network (TRN) and Cultures of Screen, Performance & Print Network (CuSPP).

No registration required. All welcome.