The Sixth Sense of the Avant-Garde: Dance, Kinaesthesia and the Arts in Revolutionary Russia

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List of illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements Note on text/translation List of abbreviations
Introduction Movement and exuberant modernism
Chapter 1 The sixth sense The senses Muscular feeling and kinaesthesia
Chapter 2 Search for deeper knowledge The kinaesthetic intellect 'The higher sensitivity' Kinaesthesia and synaesthesia
Chapter 3 Expression in dance The new dance The Russian Hellenes 'Ach, the devil take it, they're dancing here again'
Chapter 4 Speaking movement The perfect language: Andrei Bely on gesture The dance-word: the creative union of Esenin and Duncan Word plasticity: the budetliane and the bare-footed
Chapter 5 By 'the fourth way' The mystic arts From Dalcroze to Gurdjieff 'Presence'
Chapter 6 Thinking with the body Mayakovsky dances the fox-trot Brik-dance Who thought up biomechanics?
Chapter 7 Art as bodily knowledge Technique Kinaesthesia in culture Further reading Notes
Index

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This book turns to history to show just how significant movement and the sense of movement were to pioneers of modernism at the turn of the 20th century. It makes this history vivid through a picture of movement in the lives of an extraordinary generation of Russian artists, writers, theatre people and dancers bridging the last years of the tsars and the Revolution. Readers will gain a new perspective on the relation between art and life in the period 1890-1920 in great innovators like the poets Mayakovsky and Andrei Bely, the theatre director Meyerhold, the dancer Isadora Duncan and the young men and women in Russia inspired by her lead, and esoteric figures like Gurdjieff. Movement, and the turn to the body as a source of natural knowledge, was at the centre of idealistic creativity and hopes for a new age, for a ‘new man’, and this was true both for those who looked forward to the technology of the future and those who looked back to the harmony of Ancient Greece. The book weaves history and analysis into a colourful, thoughtful affirmation of movement in the expressive life.

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This volume examines kinesthesia-the sense of movement-as a foundation of personal knowledge and cultural innovation, claiming primacy of kinesthesia over the other senses in that it affords unmediated contact with the world... The extensive notes and suggestions for further reading compensate and make the book invaluable. Summing Up: Recommended

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