Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)
Use the search bar to search by name or title of paper/session. Note that this search bar does not search by keyword.
Click on the session name for a detailed view (with participant names and abstracts).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:59:02am EDT
|
Daily Overview |
| Session | |
|
Immersive Arts: Adapting Works for Dance Session Chair: Wayne Heisler, The College of New Jersey | |
    | |
"So firmly, so vitally entwined:" Isadora Duncan, the Three Graces, and the Politics of Dance in Tannhäuser California State University, Sacramento, In the summer of 1904, the American modern dancer Isadora Duncan brought her newly acquired celebrity to a three-month residency at the annual Wagner festival in Bayreuth, where she was to dance the First Grace in the opening Venusberg scene of Tannhäuser. For many, Duncan’s radical departure from traditional theater ballet, along with her deep reliance on Wagner’s writings for her own theory of dance, seemed to promise the long-awaited reunion of tone, word, and gesture that anchored Richard Wagner’s fabled theory of a Gesamtkunstwerk (unified artwork). To explain the anticipation Duncan aroused, I connect the muses of dance, music, and poetry, who personify Wagner’s tale of artistic unity in The Art-Work of the Future, to the Three Graces’ dancing role in Tannhäuser. This pairing helps to illuminate the aesthetic and political underpinnings of Wagner’s unified music drama and Duncan’s potential to realize them in the Venusberg scene. Correspondence between Duncan, Cosima Wagner, and Cosima’s Bayreuth administrators; archival records of the 1904 Tannhäuser production in the Richard-Wagner-Stiftung-Bayreuth; and Wagner’s own production notes for Tannhäuser further reveal why the Venusberg scene’s Bacchanale, with its three dancing Graces, was perceived as an exemplary dramatization not only of the unified arts, but also of Wagner’s longing for a politically unified Germany. How then, do we explain the explosion of German press criticism vilifying Duncan’s contribution to Tannhäuser, which insisted on its failure of unity? Drawing on scholarship in Wagner and dance studies, I argue that the effects of Duncan’s celebrity in Bayreuth, her idiosyncratic dance style and costume, the conservative Bayreuth establishment’s ironic stifling of her choreographic ambitions, and a long-standing critical resistance to her use of German concert music all contributed to this deeply nationalist critique of Duncan from advocates of a unified German Kulturstaat. Backlash against Duncan’s 1904 Bacchanal scene reveals a cherished belief in Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk—and the Three Graces in particular—as a crucial aesthetic model for a culturally unified and resurgent Germany. | |