Antonia Rosa Mercé y Luque, known by her stage name La Argentina, was the most celebrated Spanish dancer of the early 20th century. Greatly influenced…
In 1919 a young architect named Walter Gropius initiated one of the most modern art schools of the twentieth century in the city of Weimar…
This brief preamble will introduce the kinds of material the reader can expect to find in the entries treating drama, theater, and performance, and suggest…
Futurism emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century as a movement that explicitly conceptualized the process of literary and artistic experimentation as part of…
Historically, modern dance scholarship has followed the contours of the field as defined by John Martin, the revered dance critic for The New York Times,…
Though they often escape critical scrutiny, concepts such as modernism, modernity, and modernization are at the heart of the concept of development, and thus omnipresent…
The Film Section includes entries on a variety of modernist genres, periods, movements, directors, films, and critical modes aligned with modernist aims and intellectual attitudes.…
Dada began in Zurich, Switzerland, in the midst of World War I. Several expatriate artists converged in the city to escape the brutal and seemingly…
Soupault’s publication of Manifeste du Surréalism in 1924. Rising in the wake of the First World War, Surrealism revolted against a world that had become…
The term ‘modernism’ is commonly used to describe some of the literary and cultural production of the early twentieth century in China, Japan, and Korea,…
Abstract Expressionism was a movement initiated by a group of loosely affiliated artists that came together during the early 1940s, primarily in New York City.…
Prior to World War II, Constructivism attracted little interest from British artists apart from the few involved with Circle in 1937. Circle consisted of a…
In South Asia, a certain haziness regarding modernism and modernity derives not only from the manner in which they can be elided with each other,…
In Canada and the United States modernism emerges from transnational engagements with global intellectual movements while also grappling with local intellectual, cultural, and political developments…
Expressionism was one of the foremost modernist movements to emerge in Europe in the early years of the twentieth-century. It had a profound effect on…
Vlastislav Hofman was an architect, graphic artist, and stage designer who gave shape to Czech Cubist architecture and avant-garde stage design. In his early career…
Teresa Żarnower was a Polish painter, graphic artist, sculptor, and stage/architectural designer. One of the most prominent representatives of Polish Constructivism, Żarnower was also linked…
The Russian Revolution occurred in two stages toward the close of World War I. It led to the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty and the…
The term Dance Director was used in the first three decades of the twentieth century for stage and film work. At first, it simply meant…
Magical on stage, elusive off stage, Janet Collins was an enigmatic and complex presence in twentieth-century dance. As the first full-time African American ballerina at…
J. M. Synge (pronounced “Sing”) is best known for his plays, first staged at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, that vividly depicted rural life in Ireland. His…
Founded in 1931 by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, and Lee Strasberg, the Group Theatre was conceived as a company dedicated to staging socially relevant plays,…
Arthur Penn was an American stage director, television producer, and filmmaker. During the 1950s, Penn’s successful run as a director of television dramas led to…