Naomi Stewart - English
Studying Education with English Literature at Cambridge has enabled me to have a really broad scope and dip into a lot of my different academic interests. The English aspect of the course especially has given me the chance to write two dissertations (long essays instead of an examined course), one in my second year, and one in my final. This year I wanted to find a way in which to combine my two passions, literature and dance. The scope of the final-year English dissertation is so large that you can virtually write about anything you like, as long as it is a form of literature written in English! I had been really interested in some of the strange and evocative poetry from the so-called “Modernist” movement – from about the 1890s through to the 1920s. It’s a strange and expressive period, renowned for its stream of consciousness writing and, sometimes, its ambivalence and confusing meaning. I’d also increasingly become aware of the mentions of ‘dance’ and ‘movement’ that cropped up in a lot of the poetry, and even some of the plays. This was exciting as it was a way to get to write about my other passion: dancing! I started looking in depth at the connections between the dance world during this time period and the writers and their works. It turned out there was a lot more there than I’d initially thought. In my dissertation I thus wanted to establish and explore the links between these two interconnected forms of art. I sought to analyse the ways in which writers engaged with the dance world, by being physically present at performances, and through word of mouth, and incorporated this into their work, but also the way in which dancers utilised these works as inspiration for their performances.
Narrowing down a focus is always a difficult process and this proved to be a very fruitful line of inquiry for a number of authors and many dancers. I eventually ended up focusing on W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot. Both of these writers dealt mainly in poetry and occasionally in plays and they both proved to have deliberate links with dancers of the time. On the other side, I looked at two different aspects of the dance world – the balletic tradition and those that were transforming it, specifically the Russian Ballet (Ballets Russes) and Vaslav Nijinksy; and the other aspect concerned dancers that propagated the ‘Modern dance’ movement, including Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller and Martha Graham.
One of W.B. Yeats’s main preoccupations throughout his poetic works was with ‘Unity of Being’ – the idea of a perfectly unified soul, reconstructed identity, and mystical explorations of the self. This connected to his revelations about ‘the dance’ in his writings. His most infamous poem that mentions dance is Among School Children, which includes the lines: “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?” However there proved to be many links throughout his earlier writings as well – including some of his mystical plays, which used what was called the ‘Noh’ tradition, from Japan. He actually used different professional ballerinas, including Michio Ito, and Ninette Valois to play the central role and choreograph within his play At the Hawk’s Well. Yeats’ fascination with the mystical also translated to an appreciation of the explorations of Loie Fuller, a dancer who performed with big flowing scarves and represented the Oriental world. And finally, his connection to Isadora Duncan, a famous and very innovative (if sometimes controversial) dancer for her time, came through writings to his father and his lover Maud Gonne who had seen her performances and declared her greatness. Yeats’s utilisation of the dancer and the dance was centred in the idea of a cohesive, but subsumed identity – one which was consumed within the movement. His notions of masks, of confusing the dance from the dancer were fascinating in the light of the changes that were happening in both literature and dance at the time – a move away from clarity, and into indistinguishability, confusion and individualized manifestations.
T.S. Eliot’s own journey with the dance is mapped through his religious journey, and development of the concept of ‘impersonality’, by following the Ballet Russes. The idea of being able to transcend ‘time past and time present’ and find a sense of place in an increasingly confusing modern world appears central to some of his writings. Where Yeats’s search seemed to be for unity, Eliot looks for order. Eliot seemed to be able to find a simplification of life in the form of dance. He praised the “the most completely unhuman, impersonal, abstract” aspects of the Russian Ballet. This company, with lead dancers like the infamous Vaslav Nijinsky (who was famous for incredible leaps, and later, schizophrenia), pushed the boundaries of traditional nineteenth-century ballet. Eliot’s most elaborative depiction of the dance is in his long, four-part poem called Four Quartets, in the section called “Burnt Norton”. He wrote: “at the still point, there the dance is,/But neither arrest nor movement […] Except for the point, the still point,/There would be no dance, and there is only the dance”. This idea of ‘active stillness’ speaks to a sort of inner liberation which came through the dance, but also symbolically for Eliot, through a kind of religious freedom. He saw the physical training and discipline of the dancers as connected to a kind of spiritual training. It was necessary to emerge one’s identity into the goals of a greater pursuit, to be remade through the dance and through a transcendental moment within the soul.
The dancers that inspired these writers also used these works for their own purposes; Isadora Duncan read continuously all the current authors, and Martha Graham (slightly later generation) used notes from Eliot’s poetry to start the process of her choreography. They believed, like those they inspired, that dance could stay with people forever, could be expressive and meaningful, and was the central source of movement for body and soul. The importance of this dissertation for me was to be able to show that different forms of art are all valued, and connected. The ‘high art’ of literature, which is often regarded as more sophisticated than others, depends on and interacts with other forms that are just as stimulating, like dance. This dissertation was an opportunity to explore some strange and fascinating poetry, as well as have a look into some of the beginnings of modern dance and the people that ‘moved’ us into the twentieth century. It was really great to be able to explore in such depth a topic that I had personally chosen and to have a supervisor who was happy to guide me in helpful directions to get my ideas on paper!
Further Exploration
In Our Time - Yeats & Mysticism