"Focuses on the period between mid-nineteenth century and the early twentieth and considers dancers and social theorists in Germany, Britain, France and the United States. Analyzing the arguments of writers including Friedrich Schiller, Theodor Adorno, Hans Brandenburg, Ernst Bloch and Siegfried Kracauer, he reveals their thinking about the movement of bodies a shift from an understanding of play as the condition of human freedom to one prioritizing labor as either the realization or alienation of embodied human potential."--Cover.