Moving Images, Moving Bodies: Greek Dance, Eugenics and Fascism

At the end of the nineteenth century, under the influence of chronophotography and the arguments of the French musicologist Maurice Emmanuel, it was believed that ancient dance could be recovered for the modern world by animating the figures on ancient Greek vases. This led to a flurry of practitioners of so-called ‘Grecian’ dance across Europe, the US and the British Empire. At the beginning of the twentieth century, moving like a Greek became as popular and as liberating for women of the upper classes as discarding a corset and dressing in a Greek-style tunic. In the Edwardian period, since the most celebrated practitioners of Greek dance were women, this new corporeal Hellenism was viewed with deep suspicion as a perilous bid for Sapphic liberation from the patriarchy. But this new corporeality was no less part of a wider utopian return both to nature and the ideal of the collective that laid the groundwork for fascist appropriations of Greek dance in the 1920s.