With his research on actors' potential for expression via corporeality, Etienne Decroux (1898-1991) provided an important impetus to 20th century theatrical practice that was taken up well beyond his native France. At the same time, however, he was unable to extricate himself from insoluble theoretical contradictions serious enough to make the failure to resolve them an integral feature both of his work and his biography. Drawing upon source material, archival studies and a critical reading of his texts, AImpossible BodiesA supplies an introduction to Decroux' work and analyzes the contradictions at the heart of it as symptomatic of the development of theatre and drama over the last 100 years.

New German Dance Studies offers fresh histories and theoretical inquiries that resonate across fields of the humanities. Sixteen essays range from eighteenth-century theater dance to popular contemporary dances in global circulation. In an exquisite trans-Atlantic dialogue that demonstrates the complexity and multilayered history of German dance, American and European scholars and artists elaborate on definitive performers and choreography, focusing on three major thematic areas: Weimar culture and its afterlife, the German Democratic Republic, and recent conceptual trends in theater dance. Contributors are Maaike Bleeker, Franz Anton Cramer, Kate Elswit, Susanne Franco, Susan Funkenstein, Jens Richard Giersdorf, Yvonne Hardt, Sabine Huschka, Claudia Jeschke, Marion Kant, Gabriele Klein, Karen Mozingo, Tresa Randall, Gerald Siegmund, and Christina Thurner.