Gestural Imaginaries

Gestural Imaginaries offers a new interpretation of European modernist dance by addressing it as guiding medium in a vibrant field of gestural culture that ranged across art and philosophy.

Lucia Ruprecht is a Fellow of Emmanuel College and an affiliated Lecturer in the Department of German and Dutch, University of Cambridge, UK. She studied German and French literature at Universities in Germany, France, and the UK. She has been an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Institute of Theater Studies, Free University Berlin, and the inaugural Visiting Research Scholar at Boyer College of Music and Dance, Temple University, Philadelphia. She works at the intersection of dance, film, literature, and cultural theory from the enlightenment to the contemporary.

- Foreword by Mark Franko
- Acknowledgments
- List of Figures
- List of Abbreviations
- Inaugurating Gestures: Le Sacre du printemps
- Introduction: Gestural Imaginaries
- 1. A Second Gestural Revolution and Gesturing Hands in Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin, Mary Wigman, and Tilly Losch
- 2. Gestures of Vibrating (Interruption) in Rudolf von Laban, Mary Wigman, and Walter Benjamin
- 3. Conducts and Codes of Gesture in Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka
- 4. Gestural (In)visibility in Béla Balázs and Helmuth Plessner
- 5. Gestures Between Symptom and Symbol in Aby Warburg and Sigmund Freud
- 6. Gestures Between the Auratic and the Profane: Niddy Impekoven's and Franz Kafka's Reenactments of Liturgy
- 7. Gestural Drag: Baroquism and Modernist Minstrelsy in Alexander and Clotilde Sakharoff
- 8. Floral Pathochoreographies: Mime Studies by Harald Kreutzberg, Alfred Döblin, and Jo Mihaly
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index