At the end of the nineteenth century, under the influence of chronophotography and the arguments of the French musicologist Maurice Emmanuel, it was believed that ancient dance could be recovered for the modern world by animating the figures on ancient Greek vases. This led to a flurry of practitioners of so-called ‘Grecian’ dance across Europe, the US and the British Empire. At the beginning of the twentieth century, moving like a Greek became as popular and as liberating for women of the upper classes as discarding a corset and dressing in a Greek-style tunic. In the Edwardian period, since the most celebrated practitioners of Greek dance were women, this new corporeal Hellenism was viewed with deep suspicion as a perilous bid for Sapphic liberation from the patriarchy. But this new corporeality was no less part of a wider utopian return both to nature and the ideal of the collective that laid the groundwork for fascist appropriations of Greek dance in the 1920s.

十九世纪末，在计时摄影术的影响和法国音乐学家莫里斯·伊曼纽尔的论证下，人们相信通过赋予古希腊花瓶上的人物动画，可以为现代世界恢复古代舞蹈。这导致了欧洲、美国和大英帝国涌现出一批所谓“希腊”舞蹈的实践者。二十世纪初，对于上流社会的女性来说，像希腊人那样行动变得像抛弃紧身胸衣、穿上希腊风格的束腰外衣一样流行和解放。在爱德华时代，由于最著名的希腊舞蹈实践者是女性，人们对这种新的有形希腊主义深表怀疑，认为这是将萨福人从父权制中解放出来的危险尝试。但这种新的物质性同样是更广泛的乌托邦回归的一部分，既是对自然的回归，也是对集体理想的回归，为 1920 年代希腊舞蹈的法西斯挪用奠定了基础。