Wojciech Klimczyk, The Virus of Mobilisation. Dance and the formation of modernity 1455-1795 [Wirus mobilizacji. Taniec a kształtowanie się nowoczesności 1455 - 1795], vol. 1-2, Kraków 2015.

The Virus of Mobilisation is an attempt to write an original history of dance in modern Europe. It is not a history of choreographic works, although they are mentioned in the book. It is also not a history of dance technics and styles, even though they are obviously not completely omitted. The main idea is to propose a study of cultural forces that bring dance to existance answering in part a fundamental question: why at a given stage of cultural development man dances as he does and not differently. What values were realised in dance in the early modernity? What models of humanity and society were underlying the dances of the past? These are other questions that inspired the book.

            While dancing and conceptualising dance individuals and communities build specific identities opting for certain values at the expense of others. Dance as a creation of kinetic community is always involved in ideological debates. The book reconstructs these debates according to the chronology of early modern European history, starting from Renaissance courts, through absolutist palaces to burgeois salons and revolutionary offices, in order to tell a turbulent story of the shaping of dance modernity – to show the roots of contemporary dance sensibilities, understand why today we dance the way we do.

The project was realised with the scholarship from the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage

More information and table of contents (in Polish) is available here.