Alexis White

The history of American modern dance has long been written as a conceptual rejection of the narrative spectacle of nineteenth-century ballet in favor of pure, abstract movement. This dissertation instead attributes the stylistic shift from ballet towards modern dance to new garment types, such as the leotard, made possible by the explosive growth of American’s knitting industry in the early twentieth century. Knitted goods did not just change dance costumes, but eventually transformed the American wardrobe and drove the widespread adoption of a new American body ideal. Using a mixture of archival research, historical costume reconstructions, and participatory experimentation, this project re-explores “plastic,” a key aesthetic concept in modernism which was shared between dance and visual art, as the outgrowth of this material transformation.