Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Section One LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE
- Section Two INSTITUTIONS, ART AND PERFORMANCE
- Chapter 7 ‘Make a Letter Like a Monument’: Remnants of Modernist Literary Institutions in Ireland
- Chapter 8 Storm in a Teacup: Irish Modernist Art
- Chapter 9 ‘Particles of Meaning’: The Modernist Afterlife in Irish Design
- Chapter 10 Animal Afterlives: Equine Legacies in Irish Visual Culture
- Chapter 11 Choreographies of Irish Modernity: Alternative ‘Ideas of a Nation’ in Yeats's At the Hawk's Well and Ó Conchúir's Cure
- Chapter 12 The Modernist Impulse in Irish Theatre: Anu Productions and the Monto
- Afterword: The Poetics of Perpetuation
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Chapter 11 - Choreographies of Irish Modernity: Alternative ‘Ideas of a Nation’ in Yeats's At the Hawk's Well and Ó Conchúir's Cure
from Section Two - INSTITUTIONS, ART AND PERFORMANCE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 July 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Section One LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE
- Section Two INSTITUTIONS, ART AND PERFORMANCE
- Chapter 7 ‘Make a Letter Like a Monument’: Remnants of Modernist Literary Institutions in Ireland
- Chapter 8 Storm in a Teacup: Irish Modernist Art
- Chapter 9 ‘Particles of Meaning’: The Modernist Afterlife in Irish Design
- Chapter 10 Animal Afterlives: Equine Legacies in Irish Visual Culture
- Chapter 11 Choreographies of Irish Modernity: Alternative ‘Ideas of a Nation’ in Yeats's At the Hawk's Well and Ó Conchúir's Cure
- Chapter 12 The Modernist Impulse in Irish Theatre: Anu Productions and the Monto
- Afterword: The Poetics of Perpetuation
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
Although movement is often viewed as forming the ‘kinetic basis’ of the modern age, the analysis of movement practices such as dance is often neglected in theories of modernity. Dance theorists such as André Lepecki (2006) and Randy Martin (1998) have argued for an awareness of how the kinaesthetic politics of modernity perform a colonization of space and bodies in their constant drive toward movement and mobility. This chapter examines how an analysis of two dance works by Irish artists, one from the early twentieth century and one from the early twenty-first century, can contribute to these discussions of modernity and dance, and how the works might illuminate connections between dance and politics in Ireland in their alternative approaches to these modernist kinaesthetic politics. Taking a brief, contextualizing look at an early dance play by William Butler Yeats, the chapter then focuses on what echoes, or afterlives, can be found from this early modernist work in a piece by contemporary dance theatre choreographer Fearghus Ó Conchúir. In both works we see the ability of dance to create an alternative space within the pervading discourses (or movements) of a sociopolitical and cultural landscape that allows the spectator – through a visceral connection with a dancer – to experience a different perspective on the ‘idea of a nation’.
In his revisionary study of modern dance, Mark Franko argues that modernist accounts of modern dance history, ‘perform the telos of aesthetic modernism itself: a continuous reduction to essentials culminating in irreducible “qualities” ’. In this chapter's discussion of what ‘afterlives’ a modernist dance piece in Ireland might have in the work of a contemporary Irish choreography, there can be no danger of such reductions being performed, as the (very) few examples of historical modern dance to be found are so thoroughly different from each other from a formalist perspective. However, this discussion does attempt to find echoes from a modernist work from the early twentieth century in a contemporary dance theatre piece – not from a formalist perspective, but through an examination of how these works engage in a ‘modernist cultural politics’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture , pp. 153 - 162Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2016