Ideas of Nature, the Natural and the Modern in Early Twentieth-Century Dance Discourse

Abstract

This chapter examines the way dance writers at the beginning of the twentieth century negotiated ideas of the natural. It argues that shifts in the way people perceived and experienced different ways of moving, during the first quarter of the twentieth century, represent changing ideas about nature, the natural and the modern. This was a time when rapid technological changes and their social effects caused anxieties about loss of freedom and individuality. It was also a period during which there were deep anxieties around notions of the health of the body. This chapter proposes that discourses about dancing at this time reveal an antinomy between two different notions of the natural. The first of these manifested itself as a call to get back to nature that could sometimes betray implicitly reactionary tendencies. The second of these is concerned with investigations within the natural sciences, particularly in medicine and neurophysiology, which offered people methodologies for making sense of the way the world was changing.