The Language of Dance, the Dancer’s Eye, and Aesthetic Experience in Mary Wigman’s <i>Hexentanz II</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Early Ausdruckstanz theory often compared Ausdruckstanz to a language to explain how Ausdruckstanz conveys the deeply personal, self-expressive message to its audience. Using Susanne Langer’s study on expression in art and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s work on conceptual metaphors in tandem with early dance theory and Mary Wigman’s Hexentanz II, I argue for a conceptual metaphorical understanding of dance as language. Because dance possesses a physical, indexical connection to its meaning, the language of dance consitututes a series of conceptual, rather than linguistic, metaphors that explain how dance conveys meaning through symbolic form, which for Wigman’s Hexentanz II, I demonstrate, is a radically feminist message. Then, turning from the production of meaning in dance towards the perception of said meaning, using Wigman’s theory of the dancer’s eye, I show how the objective of Ausdruckstanz forms a bond between a dancer and audience, incorporating the audience into the dance and creating a new kinesthetic and aesthetic experience. With this goal in mind, Wigman’s Hexentanz II situates itself in the context of other early avant-garde and modernist movements that sought a complete re-evaluation of perception and aesthetic ideals as a response to modernity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".