The Body is an Instrument: Science, Therapeutics, and the Beginning of Modern Dance

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@ 3:30 pm - 5:00 pm

A sketch by Rudolf Laban of a head with a crystalline form indicating thoughts in motion beside it.
Diagram by Rudolf Laban of a state in a crystalline structure. No date, Rudolf Laban, (L/E/6/32), image courtesy of The Rudolf Laban Archive, University of Surrey.

Andrea Harris

UW–Madison open-topic senior fellow (2023-2027)

Professor, Dance, School of Education, UW–Madison

The Body is an Instrument: Science, Therapeutics, and the Beginning of Modern Dance

At the turn of the twentieth century, dancers in Western Europe and the US adapted recent innovations in experimental physiology to create new forms and theories that would later be called “modern dance.” Responding to widespread fears at that time that the conditions of European industrial and urban capitalism tended to weaken and even sicken its citizens, these dance artists crafted arguments for the healing capacities of dancing. Their manifestos put forth a fresh definition of the dancing body as an “instrument” for improving health and counteracting the physical, mental, and social decline that seemed to inevitably accompany capitalist progress.

In this project, I place modern dance inside a larger therapeutic cultural shift at the beginning of the twentieth century. At the same time, I show that these claims of modern dance’s therapeutic potential were possible because of radical changes to understandings of the mind-body relationship brought about by nineteenth-century neurophysiology and its sister field, physiological psychology. Nineteenth-century discoveries about the nervous system cemented recognition of the fact that mental activity never occurred without the cooperation of bodily movement. Modern dancers eagerly read this science and seized upon what they saw as the new agency it granted the body to impact the mind. They translated neuroscientific findings into movement practices designed to have a constructive impact upon human thought, volition, and even evolution, building a therapeutic impulse into the core of modern dance that persisted in its history through the rest of the twentieth century.

Andrea Harris is the author of Making Ballet American: Modernism Before and Beyond Balanchine (Oxford University Press, 2017), named a 2018 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, and currently undergoing translation into Russian. She is also the editor of Before, Between, Beyond: Three Decades of Dance Writing, the last collection of the writings of the dance studies pioneer Sally Banes. Andrea’s essays on American dance history appear in journals including Dance Research Journal, Dance Chronicle, Discourses in Dance, and the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, as well as several chapters in edited volumes. She is the Buff Brennan Faculty Fellow in Dance and a senior fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at UW–Madison.

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