Dr. Susan Jones
This book explores the complex relationship between literature and dance in the era of modernism. During this period an unprecedented dialogue between the two art forms took place, based on a common aesthetics initiated by contemporary discussions of the body and gender, language, formal
experimentation, primitivism, anthropology, and modern technologies such as photography, film, and mechanisation. The book traces the origins of this relationship to the philosophical antecedents of modernism in the nineteenth century and examines experimentation in both art forms.
The
book investigates dance's impact on the modernists' critique of language and shows the importance to writers of choreographic innovations by dancers of the fin de siècle, of the Ballets Russes, and of European and American experimentalists in non-balletic forms of modern dance. A reciprocal
relationship occurs with choreographic use of literary text. Dance and literature meet at this time at the site of formal experiments in narrative, drama, and poetics, and their relationship contributes to common aesthetic modes such as symbolism, primitivism, expressionism, and constructivism.
Focussing on the first half of the twentieth century, the book locates these transactions in a transatlantic field, giving weight to both European and American contexts and illustrating the importance of dance as a conduit of modernist preoccupations in Europe and the US through patterns of
influence and exchange.
Chapters explore the close interrelationships of writers and choreographers of this period including Mallarmé, Nietzsche, Yeats, Conrad, Woolf, Lawrence, Pound, Eliot, and Beckett, Fuller, Duncan, Fokine, Nijinsky, Massine, Nijinska, Balanchine, Tudor, Laban,
Wigman, Graham, and Humphrey, and recover radical experiments by neglected writers and choreographers from David Garnett and Esther Forbes to Andrée Howard and Oskar Schlemmer.
Introduction
A Poetics of Potentiality: Mallarmé, Fuller, Yeats, Humphrey, and Graham
Nietzsche, Modernism, and Dance: Dionysian or Apollonian?
From Dance to Movement: Eurhythmics, Expressionism, Language, and Literature
Diaghilev and British Writing
Two Modern Classics: The
Rite of Spring and Les Noces
The 'unheard rhythms' of Virginia Woolf
'Savage and superb': Primitivism in Text and Dance
Massine, Modernisms, and the Integrated Arts
Ezra Pound on Kinaesthetics, the Russian Ballet, and Machines
'At the still point': T. S. Eliot, Dance, and a
Transatlantic Poetics
Rambert and Dramatic Dance
Samuel Beckett and Choreography
Afterword
Bibliography
There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.
Susan Jones spent fifteen years as a soloist with the Scottish Ballet, Glasgow before becoming an academic. She now teaches English at Oxford, and has written on Joseph Conrad, modernism, and dance history and aesthetics.
Making Sense - Margot Northey and Joan McKibbin
Martha Graham in Love and War - Mark Franko
