Words Into Flesh: Parisian Dance Theater, 1911--1924

Batson, Charles Richard

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Description

Title

Words Into Flesh: Parisian Dance Theater, 1911--1924

Author(s)

Batson, Charles Richard

Issue Date

1997

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Armine Kotin

Department of Study

French

Discipline

French

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

Theater

Language

eng

Abstract

"The fourth chapter, ""Men in Tights,"" focuses on the performances of choreographer-dancers Vaslav Nijinsky and Jean Borlin to examine the construction of notions of gender through performance. I argue that dance theater of the 1910s and 1920s sought to identify itself as masculine, thus echoing post-war France's search for a new national identity, vital and virile. This new-found masculinization, however, was an uneasy one: in its attempts to erase the centuries-old interpretation of dance and music as weak and feminine, this new theater engaged in a hypermasculinity which was undone by the public's reading of the various performing bodies as homosexual. A concluding chapter, ""Relache,"" which takes its title from a 1924 work by the Ballets Suedois, continues this dissertation's focus on the work of the Swedish troupe, the Russians' artistic rivals in the Parisian avant-garde. I close on analyses of Relache, the Swedes' final ballet, to suggest that the work of performance itself lies in a game of present absences and absent presences. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)."

Graduation Semester

1997

Type of Resource

text

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/86288

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