Salti e scatti. L'immagine dell'Ausdruckstanz fra storia e fotografia

This essay investigates the act of leaping in two photographs, dating respectively from the 1910s and in the 1920s, representing the two modern German dancers Gertrud Leistikow and Gret Palucca. The anonymous photographer and one of the most famous dance photographers of her time, Charlotte Rudolph, do not show us how these dancers were actually performing their movements as much as the subjectivities of the observers and the aesthetic ideals and notion of movement informing that leap, and the ways in which these dancers wanted to be represented. Using these case studies as starting points, this essay offers a historical contextualisation of the use of photography to document and transmit modern German dance. It examines the documentary value of photography, its ability to convey the constitutive elements of the new artistic language while creating a tension with the historiography of the same tradition based on different sources. In particular, I dwell on how the photographic device, as an instrument of vision, shows the ways in which various strands of research within modern German dance strived to achieve abstraction without necessarily taking a choreographic form.