Feminine Futures – Valentine de Saint-Point – Performance, Danse, Guerre, Politique et ÉrotismeAdrien Sina

Feminine Futures – Performance, Dance, War, Politics and EroticismCurated and edited by Adrien SinaPERFORMA Biennial, New York, November 3, 2009 - January 7, 2010

Texts by Adrien Sina, Giovanni Dotoli, RoseLee Goldberg (Performa), Nancy G. Moore, Philippe de Lustrac, Sander L. Gilman, Frédérique Poissonnier, Maja Durinovic, Sarah Wilson, Patricia Guinard, Eric-Noël Dyvorne, Barbara Ballardin.

Graphic design: Adrien Sina.

Les presses du réel – 2011texts in French, English, Italian, German23,5 x 30 cm (hardcover). 512 pages (2500 ill. color) 48.00 €ISBN : 978-2-84066-351-5 EAN : 9782840663515http://www.lespressesdureel.com/EN/ouvrage.php?id=1621&menu=!A reexamination of the role of female avant-gardes in the fields of performance and dance: a comprehensive publication with over 2500 color illustrations, together with documentary material on Valentine de Saint-Point, Marinetti, Futurism, Canudo, Russian Ballets, German and American expressionism (original photographs, manuscript letters, drawings, woodcuts, manifestos, first editions and ephemera).

“Feminine Futures”, an exhibition curated by Adrien Sina, was staged for the Performa Biennial at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York in 2009. It focused on the role of early twentieth-century female avant-gardes in the field of performance and dance. Structured around a unique personal collection, it included a significant number of previously unpublished pieces, some of which subsequently featured in “Danser sa vie” at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 2011-2012.

The examination of hitherto unknown source material – photographs, films or manuscripts unknown to art historians or public collections opens new horizons here. The premises of modernity are challenged with new material, in particular the documentation of ephemeral actions which left few traces.

The reader confronts the very origins of performance and the interdisciplinary practices that have inspired generations of artists through the twentieth century and up to today. A female history of the avant-garde is pioneered here, freed from the hegemony of the “isms”, defined by dominant male artists. A new repertoire of creations and acts of dissidence may be traced through this magnificent archive and book.

This publication is depicts as well a history of photography. An exceptional filed of convergence is opened in the encounter between dance, movement, body language and photography. Genuine artistic strategies remain behind technical processes and their specific pictorial qualities. The photographic pieces of “Feminine Futures” are also witnesses of the history of photography. Half a century of imaginative mutation between the years 1890' and 1940'... From albumen paper, silver or radium bromides to silver prints, a large chromatic spectrum of chemical experiments are gathered, between stability and self-destruction of the visible matter.

Peaks of plastic and artistic mastery are reached in the collaboration between photographers and choreographers such as Isaiah West Taber or Harry C. Ellis with Loïe Fuller, Hixon-Connelly or Herman Mishkin with Vera Fokina and Anna Pavlova, Lou Goodale Bigelow or Nickolas Muray with Ruth St. Denis, Isadora Duncan and Arnold Genthe, Charlotte Rudolph and Hugo Erfurth with Mary Wigman and Gret Palucca, Barbara Morgan and Chris Alexander or Isamu Noguchi with Martha Graham, Maurice Seymour and Siegfried Enkelmann with Ruth Page and Harald Kreutzberg...

Historical section, first half of the twentieth century

Loïe Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Anna Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, Lou Goodale Bigelow, Mata Hari, Cléo de Mérode, Valentine de Saint-Point, Sarah Bernhardt, Rose Caron, Cécile Sorel, Natalie Clifford Barney, Renée Vivien, Liane de Pougy, Colette, Rachilde, Jane Catulle-Mendès, Hedwig Reicher, Maud Allan, Lillah McCarthy, Mina Loy, Gertrude Hoffman, Anna Pavlova, Vera Petrovna Fokina, Ida Rubinstein, Tamara Karsavina, Désirée Lubowska, Sonia Delaunay, Eleonora Duse, Lyda Borelli, Jia Ruskaja, Giannina Censi, Enif Angelini Robert, Karola Zopegni, Elena Sangro, Evan Burrows Fontaine, Josephine Baker, Mary Wigman, Charlotte Rudolph, Gret Palucca, Hedwig Hagemann, Valeska Gert, Anita Berber, Tashamira, Tilly Losch, Lucia Joyce, Berenice Abbott, Margaret Morris, Loïs Hutton, Lizica Codreano, Ursula & Gertrude Falke, Edith von Schrenck, Laura Österreich, Yvonne Georgi Chari-Lindis, Sent M’ahesa, Niddy Impekoven, Valeria Kratina, Dorothea Albu, Erika Lindner, Martha Graham, Barbara Morgan, Doris Humphrey, Ruth Page, Myra Kinch

and their intellectual partners

F.T. Marinetti, Ricciotto Canudo, Vaslav Nijinsky, Mikhail Fokin, Léon Bakst, Serge de Diaghilev, Enrico Prampolini, Ardengo Soffici, Luigi Russolo, Umberto Boccioni, Guillaume Apollinaire, Gabriele d’Annunzio, Morgan Russell, Vivian Postel du Mas, Auguste Rodin, Gerda Wegener, Gino Baldo, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Francesco Balilla Pratella, Mario Castagneri, Tato, Elio Luxardo, Harold Eugene Edgerton, Nelson Morpurgo, Armando Mazza, Renato Bertelli, Rudolf von Laban, Harald Kreutzberg, Hugo Erfurth, Siegfried Enkelmann, Isamu Noguchi, Maurice Seymour, Erick Hawkins

Intellectual and artistic affinities since the 1960s

Aube Elléouët, Gina Pane, Michel Journiac, Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono, Hannah Wilke, ORLAN, Marina Abramovic, Ana Mendieta, Martin Scorsese, Pina Bausch, Joëlle Bouvier + Régis Obadia, Sonja Dicquemare, Teiji Furuhashi, Franko B., Ron Athey