Eva Palmer-Sikelianos Dances Aeschylus: The Politics of Historical Reenactment when Staging the Rites of the Past

Eva Palmer-Sikelianos (1874–1952), along with her husband, the poet Angehlos Sikelianos, founded the first modern Delphic Festival in 1927 in an effort to revive the Ancient Greek rites that took place on that spot over 2,500 years before. She invited “overseers of culture” from around the globe to convene in the holy city of Delphi for a reenactment of the performance of Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus in the ancient amphitheater, an Olympic-styled athletic contest, and an exhibition of Greek crafts. This paper explores Palmer-Sikelianos’s choreography, music and dramaturgy for her reconstructed Prometheus Bound in light of her own research on ancient Greek culture and our modern theories of historical reenactment. Based on silent film records of Palmer-Sikelianos’s 1930 festival, her own autobiography, her collaborations with Natalie Barney on Greek-themed theatricals in the early 1900s, and comparisons to the movement vocabulary and other contemporary stagings of ancient Greek festivals and sport, I demonstrate how Palmer- Sikelianos blended the oldest sources on ancient Greek ritual music and dance that she could find with what she saw as an authentic “spirit” of Greek culture as observed in modern Greek society. Compared to the Ballets Russes’s reenactment of ancient Greece, Palmer-Sikelianos’s project to reenact “authentic” Greek theater and choreography illustrates that theories of theatrical historical reconstruction in the early twentieth century were heavily influenced by contemporary theatrical, political, and social events. And like the Fokine and Nijinsky models, Palmer-Sikelianos’s staging redefines ancient dance through the prisms of ancient sources and modern aesthetics

Do the faun

Review of Lucy Moore\u27s Nijinsky </i

Приглашение к танцу: интермедиальные аллюзии в ранней поэзии Т. С. Элиота

В статье рассматриваются связи между танцем, изобразительным искусством и модернистской поэзией, послужившие основой поэтического эксперимен­та

Le sacre du printemps: The First Rite (An Exploration of Modern and Aerial Dance as Storytelling)

Le sacre du printemps, a ballet choreographed in 1913 by Vaslav Nijinsky, played an important part in changing the way the world thought about choreography. Since, modern choreographers such as Graham and Taylor have followed in the tradition of creating their own versions of Le sacre. This thesis outlines the significance of Le sacre. It also describes how Bates created a choreographic project using Nijinsky, Taylor, and Graham influences, and also combining modern dance floor techniques with aerial choreography

The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Dance: Nietzschean Transitions in Nijinsky\u27s Ballets

This project compares the career of the early 20th century ballet dancer, Vaslav Nijinsky, to Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory of the tragic arts. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and elsewhere, Nietzsche argues that artists play the central role in communal mythmaking and religious renewal; he prescribes the healing work of the “tragic artist” to save modernity from the decadence and nihilism he identifies in scientism, historicism, and Christianity. As a dancer, and especially as a choreographer for the Ballets Russes (1912-1913), Nijinsky staged a kinetic response to modern culture that not only displayed shared concerns with Nietzsche, but also, as I argue, allow him to be interpreted as Nietzsche’s archetypical tragic artist. By juxtaposing the philologist-philosopher and dancer-choreographer as artists, I situate the emergence of Modern Art as a nascent movement still bound to Romanticism even while rebelling against it, and as an attempt to reinterpret art in a mythic (and thoroughly modern) context

Nijinsky's images of homosexuality: three case studies

Many choreographies created by the Ballets Russes defied and disrupted conventional gender norms, thus helping to redefine methods of sexual presentation on stage. Drawing on material from gender and queer theory, including Judith Butler’s work, this interdisciplinary paper explores how the male dancer, notably Nijinsky, was used to portray three different types of homoerotic imagery. Fokine’s Le Spectre de la rose, Nijinsky’s choreography for L’Après-midi d’un faune, and Fokine’s Legend of Joseph are analysed against the backdrop of early twentieth-century research in sexual science and the literary reception of the male dancer by German-speaking authors