UC Santa Barbara

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.