nude dance as reformation of morality

In the years immediately after World War I, several impulses within the German modern dance movement attempted to present the nude body as a sign of a modern, liberated identity “in the age of mechanical reproduction.” Congruent with the appearance of the Nackttanz, or nude dancing, was the discovery, one might say, of modern relations between desire, the body, and the gaze.

Shortly before World War I, Adorée Villany, Olga Desmond, and Nina Hard acquired fame in Central Europe as a result of performing solo dances completely in the nude; so too did the Dutch dancers Mata Hari and Gertrud Leistikow.

Information about the nude dances performed by these women is obscure and highly unreliable….. what knowledge we do have suggests that nude dancing actually had the effect of producing significant differences between performers in their attitudes toward modernity.

Adorée Villany … apparently performed a kind of refined striptease, which unveiled her body as an artwork.

Munich police … found these strategies distressing and prosecuted her for obscenity in 1911. The following year, she responded to her conviction by publishing a huge book [Tanz-Reform und Pseudo-Moral] in which she argued that her art was an attempt to reform, not dance itself, but ‘morality’.

Undaunted by condemnation as a narcissicist and exhibitionist, she perceived that to overcome a pervasive fear of the female body one had to gaze at it with the same seriousness that one applied to the contemplation of artworks.

… she made extensive, un­precedented use of photography to document her aesthetic and link her dances to the lofty zones of consciousness occupied by the visual arts.

DANCER IS ACQUITTED.
Munich Jury Defends “The Higher Interests of Art.”

The case of the Parisian dancer, Adoree Villany, who dances without clothing, and who was charged with giving an immoral performance here last November before an invited audience of painters, sculptors, and Academicians, came up for trial on Thursday, and ended in the acquittal of Mile, Villany and her theatrical managers. March 10, 1912, Transatlantic Wireless Telegraph to The New York Times

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… it is quite difficult to determine what happened to her after 1912. In 1915 she performed, as a “special attraction,” a nude dance at the Oscar Theatre in Stockholm …. After that, I find no trace of her.

ref: Nudity and Modernity in German Dance, 1910-30, Karl Toepfer photos: Adorée Villany, circa 1910, Bain News service photo via Library of Congress