Body Knowledge

In Body Knowledge: Performance, Intermediality and American Entertainment at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, Mary Simonson leaps feet first into her study of turn-of-the-twentieth-century American performances that combine more than one artistic genre. As the book’s title suggests, at the heart of her discussion is dance, or at least the physical motions of bodies and their meanings. But Simonson’s focus is multifaceted, and she embraces Broadway shows, vaudeville, ‘classical’ music, pageantry, opera, film, photography, early modern dance, ballet, and popular dance forms. In so doing, she takes her readers into regions and contemplates relationships that some scholars, hemmed in by disciplinary boundaries, have been reluctant to consider. Simonson’s willingness to focus on the points of intersection between genres is what makes her work so exciting. She examines a series of performances dating from the early twentieth century in all their ‘intermediality’ and complexity, rather than focusing just on...

Aesthetics · Art · Dance · Entertainment · Focus (optics) · Opera · Visual arts · Cinema and Media Studies · Diversity and Impact of Dance · Theater, Performance, and Music History