The Viennese waltz: social transformation and the shock of the new
Date
2024
Authors
Stratton, J.
Editors
Advisors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Type:
Journal article
Citation
Social Identities, 2024; 30(4):383-399
Statement of Responsibility
Conference Name
Abstract
The Viennese waltz was the first vernacular, modern dance. Modern, here, Carrie’s the meaning of modernity. Such dances have an expressive relationship with the body and this requires a specific discursive understanding of what a body is and how it can be experienced. That is, modern, vernacular dancing is a function of the modern body. The modern body evolved as part of the social transformation of society from a feudal order to one founded on capitalism and industrialisation. The modern body is understood, and experienced, as limited by the body’s physical form, distinct from its environment. The body is the site of the individual, and, at the same time, it is the expressive site of mental stimulation.
Notoriously, René Descartes theorised this construction in terms of a distinction between the ‘mind’ and the ‘body’ in Meditationes de Prima Philosophia published in 1641. A problem for modern, bourgeois society then became, how to control the expressiveness of the body in dance. This problem of management pervades modernity and is central to this article. The Viennese Waltz was the first modern dance, the first manifestation of dance as individual expression and, consequently, the first time the problem of how to control expression presented itself, and what the consequences might be if the dancing body was not controlled.
School/Discipline
Dissertation Note
Provenance
Description
Access Status
Rights
Copyright 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License, which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)