Please join us for CuSPP Seminar in person (ADH Conference room) and online on Wednesday, 31 July from 5-6pm. Please refer to the CuSPP email or email Wesley.Lim@anu.edu.au for the link.

Dance adaptations of modernist works by authors such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, and Virginia Woolf have been thriving in the last twenty years. Why? Modernist literature’s exploration of the mind and its experiments with language seem at odds with the non-verbal medium of dance and its emphasis on the body and movement. By turning to this untold history of dance adaptations, Meindert Peters’s current research project ‘Dancing Modernist Literature’ generates a new understanding of the reception and continuing relevance of modernist literature in the twenty-first century.

These dance adaptations have uniquely foregrounded the moving body in quintessential modernist concerns, for example over identity. When Franz Kafka’s Gregor Samsa turns into a vermin overnight, for example, Arthur Pita’s 2011 ballet adaptation of The Metamorphosis emphasizes how he tumbles and falls, tests his physical abilities, and reaches new heights. Samsa’s alterity is not merely psychological but also bound up with corporeal pleasure and pain. My research centres around this corporeality, examining the twofold role bodily movement plays in modernist literature’s enduring legacy and appeal. The dance adaptations I explore reveal that the figure in motion and flux is an important subject of these literary texts, complicating modernist concerns over more intangible issues such as identity and language. And they show how the dancing body can be a powerful medium for rearticulating modernist narratives.

In this research talk, Peters discusses some of this work, including his practical work with choreographers.

Meindert Peters is Leverhulme Early-Career Fellow in German and Performance and Junior Research Fellow at New College, both at Oxford. His first book entitled Habituation in German Modernism (Camden House, 2024) explores early 20^th-century imaginaries around habit and skill. His current book-length project Dancing Modernist Literature (under contract with Edinburgh University Press) looks at 21^st-century dance performances of European modernist literature in theory and practice. He is editor of Brill’s Bodies and Abilities book series, co-curator of the Kafka: Making of an Icon exhibition in Oxford and New York, and a former professional (ballet) dancer, choreographer, and teacher.