The project examines an aspect of the Holocaust that has been overlooked in the history of the ghettos and concentration camps of Nazi-ruled Europe: the use of dance in the Nazis’ genocidal strategies and its role in the victims’ struggle for survival. Drawing on the experience of dance movement as a scale of micro-historical observation, this research seeks to decipher the transformation of bodies, minds, and relationships during the Holocaust in order to highlight both the process of brutalisation of European societies, and the responses offered by dance through strategies of agency and resistance. Dance is understood here as a socioculturally situated practice: rhythmic languages, expressive and creative movements, choreographed performances, and group staging that took place individually and collectively, forcibly or clandestinely, within the spaces of the ghettos and camps. The research is based on untapped written, oral, and visual archives collected in Europe, Israel, and the United States. By combining the history of emotions with dance, visual, and memory studies, it aims to enrich an integrated history of the Holocaust, and a reflection on art and bodies under duress. It thus sheds new light on contexts of extreme violence and phenomena of resistance and resilience in mid-twentieth century Europe.
DR. LAURE GUILBERT
CURRICULUM VITAE
Laure Guilbert holds a PhD in history from the European University Institute in Florence and works as an independent scholar. She is an associate member of the Centre for Social History of Contemporary Worlds at Paris 1 University and of the Institut Convergences Migrations at the Condorcet Campus. Her research explores political history, forced migration, cultural memory and the neglected heritage of Central European dance communities in the twentieth century. Her fieldwork and oral history investigations in Europe, the United States, and Israel have been supported by a number of foundations and research centres. She is the author of Danser avec le IIIe Reich: Les danseurs modernes sous le nazisme (Dancing with the Third Reich: modern dancers under Nazi rule). She regularly teaches the history of the performing arts at universities and cultural institutions, and she co-founded the Association des Chercheurs en Danse (aCD) along with its online journal, Recherches en danse. Between 2002 and 2018, she was responsible for dance publications at the Paris Opera. In 2024, she curated the exhibition Paula Padani. La danse migrante: Hamburg, Tel Aviv, Paris (Paula Padani: Migrant dance – Hamburg, Tel Aviv, Paris) at the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris.
