Nietzsche, Modernism, and Dance
Nietzsche, Modernism, and Dance
Dionysian or Apollonian?
Friedrich Nietzsche, together with Mallarmé, provided one of the major sources of inspiration for the relationship between literature and dance in the modern period. But whereas Mallarmé's symbolist reading ultimately resides in the beauty and elegance of the dancing figure, an opposing aesthetic polarity arises from the more earthy, agonistic style of Nietzsche's ‘Dionysian’. This chapter shows how Nietzsche's rediscovery of the Dionysian, through his exploration of classical drama, constituted a major influence on the aesthetics of modern dance and literature. Moreover, the tension between Dionysian and Apollonian modes, present in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, is illustrated by the aesthetic struggles of literary and choreographic experimentalism in the texts of J. M. Synge's prose, Yeats's drama, and through the experimental choreography, including Greek dance and the work of Isadora Duncan in Europe and innovators in the USA. Using the example of George Balanchine's landmark ballet Apollo, the chapter concludes by showing how modernism encountered the recovery of the harmony and rationality of the Apollonian in the twentieth century.
Keywords: Nietzsche, Dionysian, Apollonian, modernist aesthetics, chorus, identity
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