Queer Orientalism and Modernism in Dance Photographs of Harald Kreutzberg and Yvonne Georgi

This article analyzes the staging, costuming, make-up, and gestural semiotics of Zeremonienmeister and Persisches Lied, two 1929 photographs of the German Expressionist dancers Harald Kreutzberg and Yvonne Georgi, while reflecting upon the affordances of still photography as a medium for the representation of their movement-based art form. In these staged photographs, Kreutzberg and Georgi present their distinctive brand of modernist movement aesthetics, which both Orientalized and queered the dancing body. In cultivating a queer indeterminacy, these dancers embraced the emancipatory ethos of Weimar modernism, but by treating the East as an amalgamized, exotic source for civilizational regeneration, they exploited non-white cultures and became vulnerable to, and later complicit in, the instrumentalization of their dance aesthetics by the Nazi regime.