The Dancer from the Music

Revising Yeats's rhetorical question, this dissertation asks: "How can we tell the dancer from the music?" In the early twentieth century Isadora Duncan and her barefoot protégées initiated a performance tradition that would later be recognized as American modern dance. They did this, to a great extent, by embodying European "absolute music." Soon, however, choreographers and dancers of this new art form faced modernist calls for medium-specific "absolute dance" that would express movement's autonomy and not the autonomous music of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. As John Martin, one of the nation's first dance critics, wrote in 1933, "There is a long, sad story to be told about the use of music for dancing which was never intended to be danced to." Today that story is even longer; contra Martin, it is not sad. As the use of classical music was a primary component in the earliest forms of "free dance" and as it remains in some of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful modern dance today, this use is in need of critical and historical attention. Tracing an alternative genealogy from Duncan's then-scandalous embodied empathy with sacralized art music, the central chapt