Dancing Across Modernities

Michelle Clayton is the Royce Family Associate Professor for Teaching Excellence in Comparative Literature and Hispanic Studies at Brown University. She has published widely on Latin American poetry, global modernisms and avant-gardes, and dance studies. Poetry in Pieces: César Vallejo and Lyric Modernity, published by the University of California Press in 2011, will appear in Spanish next year, and she is currently finishing a born-digital book titled Dancing Across Modernities.

Dancing Across Modernities tracks the movement of dancing bodies across theaters, writings, films, and art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, asking not only how to look at dance, but what looking at dance allows us to see. What becomes visible, besides dance itself, when we track its movements? What conversations did it engage in on its travels? How did it serve as an occasion for experiments across regions, across languages, across art forms? What new light can it shed on the transnational, interdisciplinary experimental practices that were central to global modernisms and the historical avant-gardes? And how might it redraw our maps, altering our sense of the spaces and times and experiential forms of modernity?