Journal
GERMAN QUARTERLY
Volume 95, Issue 2, Pages 167-182Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/gequ.12260
Keywords
Queer Orientalism; Expressionist Dance; Weimar Photography; Harald Kreutzberg; Yvonne Georgi
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This article analyzes the the staging, costuming, make-up, and gestural semiotics of two photographs of German Expressionist dancers, delving into the affordances of still photography as a medium for their movement-based art form. It discusses how Kreutzberg and Georgi presented a distinctive brand of modernist movement aesthetics that both Orientalized and queered the dancing body, while also highlighting the exploitation of non-white cultures and their complicity in the instrumentalization of their dance aesthetics by the Nazi regime.
This article analyzes the staging, costuming, make-up, and gestural semiotics of Zeremonienmeister and Persisches Lied, two 1929 photographs of the German Expressionist dancers Harald Kreutzberg and Yvonne Georgi, while reflecting upon the affordances of still photography as a medium for the representation of their movement-based art form. In these staged photographs, Kreutzberg and Georgi present their distinctive brand of modernist movement aesthetics, which both Orientalized and queered the dancing body. In cultivating a queer indeterminacy, these dancers embraced the emancipatory ethos of Weimar modernism, but by treating the East as an amalgamized, exotic source for civilizational regeneration, they exploited non-white cultures and became vulnerable to, and later complicit in, the instrumentalization of their dance aesthetics by the Nazi regime.
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