A Second Gestural Revolution and Gesturing Hands in Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin, Mary Wigman, and Tilly Losch

Abstract This chapter has two aims: to trace in more detail gestural dance’s ability to realize what Susan Leigh Foster calls “physicality as a discourse”; and to show how modernist dance reflects upon this discursiveness through the pronounced and sometimes self-referential use of hands. Addressing modernist choreography as a second gestural revolution, the chapter argues that it constitutes a recovery, on its own terms, of the meaningful corporeality that was established by the first gestural revolution of the eighteenth-century ballet reform. In order to test Jacques Rancière’s modernist aesthetic of the autonomous subject on a set of examples, the chapter also explores Hilde Doepp’s 1926 book Träume und Masken (Dreams and Masks), Rainer Maria Rilke’s writings on Auguste Rodin, photographs of hands by Albert Renger-Patzsch and Charlotte Rudolph, and the queer aesthetic of Tilly Losch’s Tanz der Hände (Dance of the Hands).