We're excited to announce that the recording of the book launch for Dancing with the Modernist City (2024) by Dr. Wesley Lim is now available. The event, held on 25 July 2024 at the ANU School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics, featured a captivating conversation between Dr. Wesley Lim and fellow dance scholar Dr. Meindert Peters (Oxford).

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.

Don't miss this insightful discussion—watch the recording below!