Modernism's Moving Bodies

Abstract

This article explores the movements of modernist bodies across Europe and the Americas in the early twentieth century. Arguing that scholarship is still insufficiently attuned to the diversity and porousness of art-forms and languages that actually characterized the period, the essay tracks the movement of dancers through an expansive Western circuit, showcasing their involvement in unsuspected forms of circulation, collaboration, and cultural exchange. Focusing in particular on Tórtola Valencia, Vaslav Nijinsky, and Charlie Chaplin, the article demonstrates the cross-cultural movements implied in their own performances and tours; but it balances this interest in the modernist traveler with a focus on the figure designated by Mary Louise Pratt as the ‘travelee’, the one who is visited. Collecting responses in multiple languages and art-forms from ‘travelees’ in the spaces through which these performers passed, it is argued, allows scholars to configure new maps of cultural modernity.

Introdução

“…As múltiplas turnés da troupe pela Europa e pelo continente americano, assim como os encontros parisienses entre os membros da companhia de dança e artistas e intelectuais de diferentes origens, cedo permitiram que a fórmula desenhada pelos russos se transformasse num modelo a replicar. Para as elites culturais de outros países periféricos, os Ballets Russes significavam que as tradições e as artes das suas populações rurais, tantas vezes depreciadas como testemunhos de pobreza e atraso, podiam agora ser transformadas em signos de uma nação culturalmente singular, mas ao mesmo tempo sofisticada e moderna (Clayton 2014). Sob esta influência, vários artistas "descobrem" os objetos de arte popular dos seus países.…”

Mapping Movement on the Move: Dance Touring and Digital Methods

“…By looking at the larger patterns of offstage life on tour in this way we can begin to locate what Greenblatt calls "contact zones" for dance-based exchanges of cultural goods 56 and find new ways to attend not just to the travelers, but to what Michelle Clayton borrows from Mary Louise Pratt to call the "travelee" narrative that may offer a counter-narrative to orientalist appropriation and the colonial dispersal of culture. 57 Dynamic spatial histories of movement need to be studied, like choreography, in terms of time and space simultaneously. Yet, because maps of absolute space privilege the destination and possibly certain intermediary points on the route, they risk losing duration.…”

Dancing Argentine Modernity: Imagined Indigenous Bodies on the Buenos Aires Concert Stage (1915–1966)

“…While Sacre staged an imagined Russian folk past as its choreography embodied the fragmentation of European modern life, it also functioned as a “portable model,” to borrow Michelle Clayton's turn of phrase, for Güiraldes and González Garaño (2014, 38). In developing Caaporá , these artists aimed to insert the Argentine local past into a dance style that represented the latest cultural modernity (Clayton 2014, 38). As art historian María Elena Babino puts it, Caaporá arose from Güiraldes and González Garaño's desire for “the utopia of the discovery of the American through the prism of modernity” (Babino 2010, 9) 17 .…”