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Chapter 22 - Dance

from Part IV - Arts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2024

Julian Onderdonk
Affiliation:
West Chester University, Pennsylvania
Ceri Owen
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
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Summary

This chapter situates Vaughan Williams’s involvement with dance in a capacious network of literary, theatrical, choreographic, and visual associations. Dance – performed (such as ballet and modern solos) and participatory (such as folk dance and other forms of social dance) – is crucial to understanding conscious and subconscious efforts at cultural renewal in interwar Britain, efforts that in turn should be understood as a response to the devastation of the First World War and as part of the story of modernist experimentation. In this context, Vaughan Williams’s important composition for the ballet Job: A Masque for Dancing, first staged in 1931, having been premiered in Norwich as a concert work the year before, was a crucial contribution to interwar dance history. Job’s context is the vibrant, formative, intensely experimental interwar period of twentieth-century British dance history. Job belongs to what cultural historian Susan Jones calls ‘an important transitional moment in British dance’; new experiments in collaborative theatre and dance stirred excitement, and Job was staged amidst a creative ferment that intermingled British and continental artists and visions. Job shared with much experimental interwar British theatre a focus on daring and provocative experiments with dance drama as cultural commentary.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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  • Dance
  • Edited by Julian Onderdonk, West Chester University, Pennsylvania, Ceri Owen, University of Birmingham
  • Book: Vaughan Williams in Context
  • Online publication: 28 March 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108681261.023
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  • Dance
  • Edited by Julian Onderdonk, West Chester University, Pennsylvania, Ceri Owen, University of Birmingham
  • Book: Vaughan Williams in Context
  • Online publication: 28 March 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108681261.023
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Dance
  • Edited by Julian Onderdonk, West Chester University, Pennsylvania, Ceri Owen, University of Birmingham
  • Book: Vaughan Williams in Context
  • Online publication: 28 March 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108681261.023
Available formats
×