Migrating Modernist Performance
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Migrating Modernist Performance
Exploring the experiences of early to mid-twentieth century British theatre-makers in Russia, this book imagines how these travellers interpreted Russian realism, symbolism, constructivism, agitprop, pageantry, dance or cinema. With some searching for an alternative to the corporate West End, some for experimental techniques and others still for methods that might politically inspire their audiences, did these journeys make any differences to their practice? And how did distinctly Russian techniques affect British theatre history? Migrating Modernist Performance seeks to answer these questions, reimagining the experiences and creative output of a range of, often under-researched, practitioners. What emerges is a dynamic collection of performances that bridge geographical, aesthetic, chronological and political divides.
Modernism after the Ballets Russes
Author: Gabriela Minden
language: en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date: 2025-08-14
Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes holds a renowned position in the history of modernism across various arts. The company's daring productions brought together leading artists working in diverse fields - from Igor Stravinsky to Pablo Picasso, from Bronislava Nijinska to Coco Chanel - redefining the possibilities of artistic collaboration and shaping the trajectories of dance, music, fashion, and the visual arts. But what of the Ballets Russes's role in the text-based theatre? Despite the intrinsic link between dance and theatre as performance arts, the company's contributions to dramatic literature and dramaturgy have remained surprisingly elusive. This book establishes the Ballets Russes as a powerful force in the development of modernist theatre in Britain, revealing how the company's avant-garde repertoire inspired the creation of new composition strategies and performance techniques that privileged the immediacy of expression offered by the moving, dancing body. Modernism after the Ballets Russes examines the philosophical conditions of early twentieth-century Britain's theatrical landscape, marked by growing interest in Nietzschean interpretations of classical drama and Wagnerian notions of the Gesamtkunstwerk, to illuminate the allure of the Ballets Russes's re-centring of dance as the foundation of theatre art. It shows that Diaghilev ballets provided new ways of thinking about the relationship between the literary and embodied aspects of dramatic performance, fueling collaborations between eminent dramatists and theatre practitioners - Harley Granville Barker, J. M. Barrie, Terence Gray, and W. H. Auden - and lesser-known choreographers: Cecil Sharp, Tamara Karsavina, Ninette de Valois, and Rupert Doone. Through the prism of the Ballets Russes, this group of artists crafted distinctive new theatrical forms, including a whimsical terpsichorean fantasia and a politically subversive poetic dramatic satire, as well as new methods of staging Shakespearean comedy and Attic tragedy. Together, this book contends, these literary and dramaturgical innovations represent a previously neglected strand of modernism: one that saw the dramatic power of the moving body expand the expressive resources of the period's theatrical arts.
The Ecologies of Amateur Theatre
This book is the first major study of amateur theatre, offering new perspectives on its place in the cultural and social life of communities. Historically informed, it traces how amateur theatre has impacted national repertoires, contributed to diverse creative economies, and responded to changing patterns of labour. Based on extensive archival and ethnographic research, it traces the importance of amateur theatre to crafting places and the ways in which it sustains the creativity of amateur theatre over a lifetime. It asks: how does amateur theatre-making contribute to the twenty-first century amateur turn?