Director Luca Guadagnino's film Suspiria (2018) depicts the dancer Susie Bannion joining a dance academy secretly run by a coven of witches in Berlin during the German Autumn of 1977. This article analyzes how Mary Wigman's Hexentanz II, contemporary dance, and horror film practices inform Susie's neo-expressionist movement form, which is also steeped in the discourse surrounding the RAF (Red Army Faction), the West German far-left militant organization, and fascism. I argue that “historical breathing”—breaths and sighs—takes on a sensorial mode by surveying the past and current situation of the dance school. By inhaling, Susie embodies the dance Volk (1948) and can feel its vexed choreographic history—its occult origins and Ausdruckstanz practices. Furthermore, her dance futilely attempts to comes to terms with the Nazi past but inevitably replicates the violence of the RAF.

This article compares Rudolf von Laban's and Mary Wigman's practices and theories of gestural flow with Walter Benjamin's theory of gesture as interruption. For Laban and Wigman, gesture mirrors a vitalist understanding of life that is based on the rediscovery of transhistorical continuities between human and cosmic energy. Benjamin's Brechtian gestures address inscriptions and manipulations of bodies, which provide comment on the conditions of society by subjecting to critique the essentializing aspects of historical and vitalist flow. Addressing in particular forms of vibration as both enriching and destabilizing the gestural from its margins, my article explores how vibratory energy indicates a self-reflexive theory of media, but also a revolutionary charge, in Benjamin; how it engenders a politically ambivalent process of transmission between dancers and audience in Laban; and how it becomes an actual mode of movement in Wigman. The historical inquiry contributes to a genealogy of vibration in contemporary dance.

In 1975, German choreographer Kurt Jooss created his last dance, Dixit Dominus, for Swedish-based Indian dancer Lilavati Häger. After Rani Nair reconstructed what is often seen as a “minor” work, she then created Future Memory (2012) to engage more directly with her inheritance, from caring for the personal things and stories that surrounded the piece to re-working its promise of dancing between European and Indian forms. Working outward from my position as dramaturg and historian for this project, this essay addresses the potential and precariousness of contemporary dance's experiments with redoing history at the intersection of multiple contested legacies.