Abstract
Rogers and Hammerstein’s 1965 movie musical, The Sound of Music, has been the subject of scholarly attention in cultural theory, film, and musical theater for more than a half century. Few of these studies investigate the centrality of dance in its narrative, or the unusual placement of a Hollywood reconstruction of a forgotten eighteenth-century Hapsburg ländler, in its principal courtship scene. Yet, when analyzed with recourse to choreographic history/theory, the symbolic currency of the forgotten ländler, coupled with the historical context of its forgetting, exposes a choreonecrology or a body politic that analogizes the forgetful dancing body with political disaster.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Arbeau, Thoinot. 2012. Orchesography. London: The Noverre Press.
Bröcker, Marianne. 1996. Folk Dance Revival in Germany. The World of Music 38 (3): 21–36.
Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning. 2006. The 19th-Century Ländler: Some Thoughts. The Musical Times 147 (1897): 63–76.
Franko, Mark. 2007. Dance and the Political: States of Exception. In Dance Discourses: Keywords in Dance Research, ed. Susanne Franco and Marina Nordera, 11–28. London: Routledge.
Graml, Gundolf. 2005. The Hills Are Alive…Sound of Music Tourism and the Performative Construction of Places. Women in German Yearbook 21: 192–214.
Hewitt, Andrew. 2005. Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement. Durham: Duke University Press.
Knapp, Raymond. 2004. History, The Sound of Music, and Us. American Music 22 (1): 133–144.
Lamb-Faffelberger, Margarete. 2003. Beyond ‘The Sound of Music’: The Quest for Cultural Identity in Modern Austria. The German Quarterly 76 (3): 289–299.
Lange, Karl-Heinz. 1994. “Verbano deutscher Tanzkreise.” In Der Tanz in der 1. Hälfte des 20. Jahrhund, Klotzsche, ed. Tanzhistorische Studien IX. Informationen zum Tanz 22. Remscheid Bundesverband Tanz e. V., 103–13.
Lepecki, André. 2013. Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: Or, the Task of the Dancer. TDR/The Drama Review 57 (4): 13–27.
Lodge, Mary Jo. 2013. Dance Breaks and Dream Ballets: Transitional Moments in Musical Theatre. In Gestures of Music Theatre: The Performativity of Song and Dance, Dominic, ed. Taylor Symonds, 75–91. Millie.
McKee, Eric. 2005. Mozart in the Ballroom: Minuet-Trio Contrast and the Aristocracy in Self-Portrait. Music Analysis 24 (3): 383–434.
Osborne, Monica. 2011. Making the Wound Visible: On Midrash and Catastrophe. Religion & Literature 43 (2): 164–171.
Siegmund, Gerald. 2012. Negotiating Choreography, Letter, Law in William Forsythe. In New German Dance Studies, ed. Susan Manning and Lucia Ruprecht. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Taft, Steve. 1999. Interview with Marc Breaux. Sites.uni.edu, June. https://sites.uni.edu/taft/breauxinterview.html. Accessed 1 March 2019.
———. 2017. Interview with Dee Dee Wood. The Website of Steve Taft. https://www.stevetaft.com/the-marc-breaux-story/dee-dee-wood-interview/. Accessed 1 March 2019.
Thacker, Eugene. 2015. Tentacles Longer Than Night. New York: Zero Books.
Tratner, Michael. 2008. The Passion of Mass Politics in the Most Popular Love Stories. In Crowd Scenes: Movies and Mass Politics, 51–72. Fordham University Press.
von Feldtenstein, C.J. 1767. Die Kunst Nach Der Choreographie Su Tanzen Und Tänze Zu Schreiben. Brunswick: Schröderschen Buchhandlung.
Vansant, Jacqueline. 1999. Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music and the ‘Denazification’ of Austria in American Cinema. In From World War to Waldheim: Culture and Politics in Austria and the United States, ed. Ruth Wodak and David F. Good, 165–186. New York: Berghahn Books.
White, Hayden. 1980. The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality. Critical Inquiry 7 (1): 5–27.
Wise, Robert, et al. 1965. The Sound of Music. Beverly Hills, CA: Twentieth Century Fox.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Thomas, P.A. (2021). Courting Disaster (“I Don’t Remember Anymore”): The Forgetful Dancer and the Body Politic in The Sound of Music (1965). In: Parfitt, C. (eds) Cultural Memory and Popular Dance. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71083-5_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71083-5_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-71082-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-71083-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)