About Laure Guilbert
Paris, France
Laure Guilbert (CBA ’19) is a French historian and editor. She received her Ph.D. from the European University Institute of Florence. She is the author of a book on modern dance during the Nazi period titled Danser avec le IIIe Reich. Les danseurs modernes sous le nazisme (Dancing with the Third Reich. Modern Dancers under Nazism, Brussels, Éditions Complexe, 2000; André Versaille Éditeur, 2011).
While teaching history and theories of performing arts at various universities in France, she has conducted several cultural missions for the Cité de la Musique and the Centre national de la Danse in Paris. From 2002 to 2018, she has been Chief Editor of the dance books of the Paris National Opera. She also cofounded and presided over the aCD (Association des Chercheurs en Danse) and cofounded in 2014 the first French-speaking digital dance research journal, Recherches en Danse.
In parallel, she has devoted herself to a second book’s research on the exile of the German-speaking choreographic world under Nazism – a project that has led her to travel to many archives in Europe and in Australia and that she will continue in New York. In this frame, she has been in 2015 and 2016 a Marie Curie visiting fellow in Germany at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder (Axel Springer Endowed Chair for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History, Exile and Migration), and at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin (Franco-German Research Centre for Social Sciences).
Exiles: The Forgotten Worlds of Dance. 1933-1949
The exodus of the choreographic Avant-garde from the Nazi Regime belongs to lost sites of research. At The Center for Ballet and the Arts, Guilbert aims to retrace and question the transnational paths of a few hundred Germans and Austrians dispersed in several continents and diasporic contexts: their escape, their routes, their sociocultural and artistic experiences that mingled survival dynamics and creative processes. This topic constitutes a new research field, which is at the crossroad of cultural history, migration studies and performing arts studies. At CBA, Guilbert will focus on the part of her second book that concerns the exiles who found refuge in United States.