“Berlin … Your Dance Partner Is Death”

Dance and death combined in post-WWI Germany to complicate the material authority they were seen to share. Using nascent modern dance techniques to exploit the expressive capacities of the dancing body, choreographers turned to dances of death to portray the increasingly difficult conditions of humanity. The logistics of performing these spectacles of the real are investigated through three choreographer/performers of the Weimar Republic: Kurt Jooss, Valeska Gert, and Anita Berber.