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It is well known that choreographer and dance theorist Rudolf von Laban attended several Zurich Dada evenings with his students, several of whom—including Sophie Taeuber and Suzanne Perrottet—danced on Dada stages, often alongside the recitation of Hugo Ball'sLautgedichte(sound poems). Yet scholarly conceptions of Laban's choreographic work and Zurich Dada performance have remained seemingly irreconcilable. Charting the interanimation of bodily movement and oral declamation, this article shows how the interplay of dance, sound, and word was central to the work of both groups. Connecting them, I argue, was the dissemination of Wilhelm Wundt's theories of nervous transformation, which have been linked to Ball's sound poems and which Perrottet, after studying under Émile Jacques-Dalcroze, shared with Laban and others at his school in Monte Verità. Attention to the widerLebensreform(life reform) context of specific performance techniques also necessitates, as the article aims to show, a reevaluation of the historical avant-garde project as one aimed at training perceptual faculties. While avant-garde historiography has overwhelmingly centered artistic strategies such as photomontage and the extension of its shock-effects into the revolutionary potential of film, an acute consideration of dance sheds light on the ways that such tactics were aimed not only unidirectionally at the spectator but also back at the artists themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

First-generation Jungian analyst, Jane Hollister Wheelwright (1905-2004) found the transition into young adulthood challenging. During her formative years, she lived in the coastal wilderness of the Hollister Ranch in Santa Barbara County, California. The Hollister Ranch allowed Wheelwright freedoms unusual for women of her time and shaped her psyche. When she reached marriageable age, Wheelwright was expected to conform to the societal norms for a young woman of her era, norms that were too constraining for Wheelwright and did not affirm her values and experiences. Wheelwright was caught between the primitive values of her early years and the civilized values of the world she was expected to enter. After her freshman year at Bryn Mawr College, Wheelwright searched for a life path that would allow her to be herself. At this difficult time, her uncle, muckraking American journalist, Lincoln Steffens, mentored Wheelwright. He affirmed her gifts and brought her into the sophisticated world of the American expatriate in Europe in the mid-1920s. Wheelwright believed that her uncle Steffens had rescued her, and she credited Steffens and C. G. Jung with freeing her to be herself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that use of the concept of ‘political religion’ to describe the radicalized political movements of the twentieth century has again gained currency in recent years as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union as well as the global upsurge of religiously inspired violence and that research with respect to religion proper – what religion is, its role in public life, its evolving reception by ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ – can advance the discussion. The article subsequently offers the author's own research as evidence of the concept's applicability to the case of National Socialism. Analysis focuses, specifically, on a movement in nineteenth century Germany to develop a secular system of ethics, a project that eventually led, ironically and tragically, to the emergence of a new faith in a absolutized ‘collective will’ as the transcendent source of all moral values. The National Socialist movement subsequently co-opted this article of faith, the article argues, by transforming Hitler into a holy medium for the salvific dictates of what became, by the early 1930s, an unimpeachable ‘Volkswille.’ [Copyright &y& Elsevier]