Words Into Flesh: Parisian Dance Theater, 1911--1924

256 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1997.The fourth chapter, "Men in Tights," focuses on the performances of choreographer-dancers Vaslav Nijinsky and Jean Borlin to examine the construction of notions of gender through performance. I argue that dance theater of the 1910s and 1920s sought to identify itself as masculine, thus echoing post-war France's search for a new national identity, vital and virile. This new-found masculinization, however, was an uneasy one: in its attempts to erase the centuries-old interpretation of dance and music as weak and feminine, this new theater engaged in a hypermasculinity which was undone by the public's reading of the various performing bodies as homosexual. A concluding chapter, "Relache," which takes its title from a 1924 work by the Ballets Suedois, continues this dissertation's focus on the work of the Swedish troupe, the Russians' artistic rivals in the Parisian avant-garde. I close on analyses of Relache, the Swedes' final ballet, to suggest that the work of performance itself lies in a game of present absences and absent presences. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD