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Feminist modernist dance

This is the first of two special issues of Feminist Modernist Studies dedicated to feminist modernist dance (the second will be Summer, 2022). We have wrestled in our joint editorial work here, as well as in our own work, over the disjunctions embodied in these three terms conjoined. Though feminist scholars have been doing important work in modernist studies for half a century, the termmodernism remains mired in gatekeeping canon formations that center white male artists, primarily writers, with few exceptions. The continued need to specify “feminist modernism” signals an exasperating truism that modernism persists in its reliable male orientation. At the same time, feminist modernist studies struggles with its own rigid canon, rooted in literature despite attempts to be interdisciplinary, and forged around a handful of authors. Dance, an art form in which women dominate, similarly shares a fraught relationship with the term modernism. Dance played a critical role in defining and disseminating modernist aesthetics, occupying center stage for some of our most retold stories about modernism’s rocky relationship with a resistant public, as in the legendarily tumultuous 1913 premiere of the Ballet Russes’ Sacre du Printemps. But as Carrie Preston points out in her introduction toModernist Cultures’ 2014 special issue on dance, even in this instance where dance provides the occasion for interdisciplinary modernist artistic innovation, the embodied art of the dancers themselves is neglected in critical discussions in favor of attention to the score, the set, and even the impresario. Dance lies at the center of mythologies of modernism and its aesthetics, and yet it is under-acknowledged in contemporary modernist studies. Among the early twentieth-century avant-garde artists central to our contemporary understanding of modernism, however, the significance of dance to a revolutionary artistic ethos was a given. For example, T. S. Eliot’s 1925 review of Cecil J. Sharpe’s The Dance: An Historical Survey of Dancing in Europe disparages the historian’s myopic account of an art Eliot considers worthy of anthropological, philosophical, and scientific exploration. His dismissal of Sharpe’s study as having “a somewhat smug, Margaret Morris, Chelsea-cum-Golders Green flavour,” baffles today, without the social memory attached to dancer and choreographer Morris and the vibrant arts scene based in the London boroughs Eliot references, where she and canonical modernist figures like Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, and, even, Eliot shared and studied art. Our vision in planning these issues has been to foreground histories and theories of dance as integral to modernism, as well as explore the ways that dance exists in a broader cultural context than the problematic