Embodying Modernism: The Ballets Russes and Modernist Literature
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Authors
Argyrides, Patty
Date
Type
thesis
Language
eng
Keyword
Modernism , Literature , Ballet , Ballets Russes , Dance , Choreography , Vaslav Nijinsky , James Joyce , Virginia Woolf , Gertrude Stein , Sergei Diaghilev , Wayne McGregor , W.B. Yeats , Interdisciplinary
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Abstract
This dissertation examines the performativity of language and gesture in modern narrative form in the texts of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, W.B. Yeats, and Virginia Woolf, and the ballets created by the Ballets Russes. The context for this research is cross-disciplinary studies in the arts, and in particular, current debates regarding creative and artistic responses to modernity manifested and represented through the body. In Modernism (2008), Peter Childs details the overarching stylistic characteristics and preoccupations of modernist writers such as opting for spatial and/or rhythmic rather than chronological form, technical and formal experimentation, linguistic innovation, and a new understanding of time and space. These innovations in form, content, and the deconstruction of language associated with modernist writers are also echoed in the works of modernist ballet dancers and choreographers. As a former ballet dancer, I explore how poetic discourse, narrative, and formal experimentation lend themselves to this embodied dance vocabulary.
I begin by reassessing the ways in which the ballets performed by the Ballets Russes have been studied and canonized as modern. I argue that much of the canon has been shaped and contorted by Sergei Diaghilev’s masterful marketing of the company, and by Eurocentric and disciplinary biases that have prioritized European collaborators and critics. Chapter 2 takes on a question that has yet to be asked by interdisciplinary studies: what were the ballet dancers, choreographers, and directors reading? I contend that the interrelations between the Ballets Russes and literary modernists were not coincidental; they were consuming and responding to the same art and philosophy as writers, each in their own artistic discipline. Chapter 3 offers a re-reading of Ballets Russes dancer Lydia Lopokova’s place within the Bloomsbury group. I argue that the character of Sasha in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) is a xenophobic caricature of Lopokova. Chapter 4 highlights the significant formal and thematic parallels between Vaslav Nijinsky’s The Afternoon of a Faun (1912) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). I demonstrate how Nijinsky’s movements reverberate through Ulysses and inform Joyce’s conception of the moving body in writing. Chapter 5 brings us into the contemporary moment with a study of Woolf Works (2015), a ballet based on the life and works of Virginia Woolf.
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ProQuest PhD and Master's Theses International Dissemination Agreement
Intellectual Property Guidelines at Queen's University
Copying and Preserving Your Thesis
This publication is made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws without written authority from the copyright owner.