This dissertation analyzes choreography and visual art that use discretion in performance to reflect on racial violence. The project recognizes distinct concepts of black minimalisms, theories and practices in historiography that stem from traditions of masked protest on slave plantations and fuse with the restraint of expression in postmodern dance. To build this framework, three recurring strategies used by black postmodern choreographer Ralph Lemon are analyzed: subterfuge, pastiche, and task. This research then deconstructs each element in a comparison of Lemon’s work to that of three feminist visual artists of color: Ana Mendieta, Alison Saar, and Nicole Miller. In their focus on the aftermath of violence, they turn to archaeological ruins, found materials and objects, and fragments of oral histories to reconstitute what has been destroyed. Each comparison produces its own version of black minimalism shaped by the artists’ relationship to postmodern dance genealogies, the African diaspora, and the Civil Rights Movement. The manner in which these artists deploy subterfuge, pastiche, and task-based choreography creates spaces to pause and reflect on violence. These approaches respond to communities that grieve losses that occur in rapid succession.

ABSTRACT

The Modern Physis of Léonide Massine: Corporeality in a Postwar Era

by

Lauren Elda Vallicella

My dissertation is an attempt to re-examine and re-frame the artistic legacy of Les Ballets Russes choreographer Léonide Massine (1896 – 1979), while simultaneously defining (through choreographic analysis and historical contextualization of Massine’s work) the term “postwar corporeality.” While the innovative achievements of the Russian émigré company Les Ballets Russes have been discussed by many authors—notably Lynn Garafola, Richard Buckle, Juliet Bellow, and Davinia Caddy—the contributions of Massine himself have been vastly overlooked. My dissertation therefore places Massine as a central figure within the creation of Modernism in postwar European dance. Through an analysis of both dancing/performing bodies and French critical reception, my dissertation seeks to understand notions of identity, physicality, and corporeality in late-Industrial Europe, in turn deepening the place of Léonide Massine (and dance history at large) within an interdisciplinary understanding of Modernism.

My writing specifically examines Massine’s representations of the body in three ballets from the company’s early postwar seasons: Parade (1917), La Boutique Fantasque (1919), and Pulcinella (1920). While previous accounts of these ballets (primarily Parade and Pulcinella) have placed an emphasis on art historical and musicological aspects, my readings place the body and Massine’s choreography at the center. When viewed together, I argue that Parade, La Boutique Fantasque, and Pulcinella highlight the aesthetics of Massine’s Modernist choreography, revealing his exploration of the unhuman, or antihuman, character. Blending the style of the danseur noble with the comique and grotesque, Massine choreographically synthesized disparate sources (Russian Imperial Ballet, Russian avant-garde theater, Italian Classical Ballet, Romantic French Ballet, American Modern Dance, national dances of Spain, etc.) to craft a postwar vision of the fragmented, displaced body.

My writing takes an interdisciplinary approach in considering Massine; my in-depth choreographic analysis is woven together with archival historical research and theoretical texts from the fields of Performance Studies, Literature, and Philosophy. In defining postwar corporeality, I employ Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “modern physis,” a corporeal physicalization of the trauma wrought on the body by technology, urbanization, and World War I. Furthermore, I relate the term corporeality to American modern dance artist Loïe Fuller’s transformation and abstraction of the physical body into something more than or other than human. Thus, I define “corporeality” (specifically in performance) as a Benjaminian aura or Bergsonian élan vital, an ephemeral, yet kinesthetically perceivable representation of the body read symbolically. By taking Massine’s postwar choreography as moving examples of Benjamin’s modern physis, I argue that Massine choreographically formulated an embodied, gestural language of anxiety, fragmentation, and trauma made kinetic: a postwar corporeality.

From Magdalenism to Slut-Shaming: A Performance Historiography of Female Containment in Modern Ireland studies how reproductive rights and women’s sexuality are entangled with the limits of national identity and belonging. Focusing on the campaign to Repeal the Eighth, the constitutional amendment that criminalized abortion until 2018 in the Republic of Ireland, this dissertation investigates feminist protest tactics that use multiple media forms and embodied practices to intervene in contemporary body politics. I situate reproductive politics and feminist activism within a performance historiography of national struggle enacted across and through women’s bodies. As a contemporary protest movement, the fight for bodily autonomy is waged in the streets and town squares, and on social media and the Internet. Thus, in considering the digital as another site in the containment and control of women’s bodies, this project expands the field of feminist performance historiographies. It exposes a transhistorical framework of misogyny that endures on- and offline, continuing to regulate women’s sexuality, visibility, and access to state power.

From Magdalenism to Slut-Shaming suggests that the labor of representation for Irish women and other menstruators continues to be burdened by Marian iconography. It considers how Repeal artists and activists engage intermedial performances that expose the material consequences of legal, political, and moral boundaries imposed on abortion-seekers. An intermedial approach accounts for the interactions among the body, media types, and technologies in meaning-making; these performances blend spaces, media, and realities, thereby animating the political potential in disturbing the bounds of the sacred and secular, past and present, visible and invisible.

In accounting for the material and visual culture of the Repeal campaign, From Magdalenism to Slut-Shaming simultaneously engages performance, art history, and popular media. It explores the interplay of everyday rituals and performances, of live arts and still arts, that shape public spaces and mobilize bodies. Repeal artists and activists stage challenges to the stigma of shame associated with abortion, the cultural phenomenon of abortion travel, and inequities to abortion access such as class, race, ethnicity, and citizenship status. My primary sites of study include Two Women Travel, a live-tweeted abortion journey that follows two anonymous women as they traverse geographic and media borders; the on- and offline circulation and reproduction of Savita Halappanavar’s mythic image as a symbol of Repeal; the home|work Collective’s pop-up performance action The Renunciation which repurposes the Angelus prayer into a performance of abortion truth-telling at sites of transit; and Tara Flynn’s one-woman show Not a Funny Word, in which she uses comedy, song, and dance to stage her autobiographical experience as an abortion-seeker and target of digital gender harassment.