University of California
German/Jewish Dance in Exile: Valeska Gert Before, During, and After World War II
This thesis offers is a critical account of the avant-garde German/Jewish modern dancer Valeska Gert (1892-1978), her performance spaces both in Germany and the United States, and the forms of sociality (and non-sociality) that she cultivated through her artistic practices. I argue that Gert used dance practice to create novel economies, meant in the broadest sense, which reassigned and redetermined value. First, I analyze how Gert used gender nonconformity to challenge contemporary notions of what or who was worthless. Through her onstage embrace of the tropes of the bad refugee woman, bad Jewish woman, and bad older woman, she overturned narratives about which people were good or bad in terms of a global marketplace. Second, I evaluate the work of her performance venues in creating unique opportunities for exchange between others who did not fit into limiting national, ethnic, class, and gender ideals. My project exposes underacknowledged alternative support structures of those with aims outside of dominant markets while, at the same time, making manifest the racialized, classed, and gendered prejudices to which Gert and others could not or would not conform. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach to historical methods, I combine traditional archival research on the topics of German/Jewish artists in exile and queer subcultural spaces with visual analysis, discourse analysis, and choreographic analysis—a method unique to dance studies that includes close readings of bodily movement to investigate what and how motions signify. While scholars have focused on the consolidation of German- and American-Jewish identity, my dissertation aims to investigate the role of the body in transgressing imposed identities.
Jackie Davis is a Ph.D. candidate in the World Arts and Cultures/Dance department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her research focuses on avant-garde German/Jewish modern dancer Valeska Gert (1892-1978), her performance spaces both in Germany and the United States, and the forms of sociality (and non-sociality) that she cultivated through her artistic practices. Overall, Jackie’s research evaluates dance and the production of subversive body politics. Jackie has received extramural awards from the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), Leo Baeck Institute, the University for Music and Dance Cologne, and the German Studies Association. She was also awarded intramural fellowships from UCLA’s Graduate Division, the Center for the Study of Women, the Center for European and Russian Studies, the Leve Center, and the Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. Jackie had a previous life as an experimental filmmaker and visual artist. Her work has been screened internationally and she has published a number of artist books. Jackie holds B.A. degrees in Dance and History as well as an M.A. in Culture and Performance.