Lotte Goslar’s Clowns

Lotte Goslar employed clowning and fairy tales throughout her choreographic career to create a feminist disruption of romanticism and tragedy in German and American dance representations of women. However, her departure from the tragic moods and narratives of Ausdruckstanz and her resistance to conventional representations of the intellectual emigration trouble the histories of dance and exile on both sides of the Atlantic. This chapter examines the performance of clowning in Goslar's works, an artistic strategy that marginalized the choreographer in histories of modern dance on both sides of the Atlantic. Writing Goslar back into both histories, it articulates a richly alternative vision of how dance engages its historical time and place.