Editors' Note: Speculations on the Queerness of Dance Modernism

In our editors’ note to this special issue of Dance Research Journal, we invoke the spirit of a person whom we have encountered as Betty Baaron Samoa in the archival records, yet we do not know if this was the name she would like to be invoked by. Her likeness has been with us, but we did not notice her for a long time. She appears in a series of photographs of Rudolf Laban’s dance workshops on the Monte Verità, Ascona. Laban had commissioned the photographer Johann Adam Meisenbach to document his early experiments in free dance in the summer of 1914, shortly before the outbreak of a war that would change the face of Europe. There she is, sometimes eerily smiling at us, sometimes coyly looking away, alone or with others, dressed and in the nude, framed by the mountains and trees of the Ticino region. Betty Baaron Samoa has always been with us. Laban scholars noticed her, but did not write her into their research. We encountered her many times in Meisenbach’s pictures, for instance in the second edition of Hans Brandenburg’s seminal volume Der Moderne Tanz (Modern Dance) whose appendix of black-and-white photographs constitutes the core visual repository of early dance modernism in Germany. She appears in the second edition of this volume (ca. 1917), but not in the third edition that was published in 1921.1 The black-and-white reproductions hardly distinguish the tone of her skin from that of the other dancers (see photo 1). This changed when new color prints of the original autochrome plates started to circulate after the death of Laban associate Suzanne Perrottet, whose estate was donated to Kunsthaus Zürich (Schwab 2003; Prange 2014) (see cover image). Betty Baaron Samoa was a woman of color.