Abstract
Samuel Beckett wrote that he could not talk about dancing in his German Diaries, on 11 February 1937. However, in this chapter, I aim to prove that during his formative years his encounter with dance, an art of ‘no-word’, affected durably his aesthetics and his ethics and made him someone new: a new writer speaking of a ‘literature of no-word’ (in a letter to Axel Kaun 9/7/1937) and a new citizen aware of the dangers of body and mind control and of political manipulation of language.
There is dance in Samuel Beckett’s own work: Lucky’s dance, the dance of the old fool, a far cry from the dance of glorious bodies of the Nazis. His representation of weakness, illness, and disability on stage has had a major influence on French contemporary dance, in particular the choreographer Maguy Marin, who continues in a certain way Samuel Beckett’s political work.
When the sense is dancing, the words dance.
(Dis 27)
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Notes
- 1.
‘Quad is close to a ballet. The general similarities between the work of Beckett and modern ballet are numerous: the abandonment of all privileging of vertical stature; the agglutination of bodies as a means of keeping upright; the substitution of any-space-whatever for designated areas; the substitution of a “gestus” as a logic of postures and positions for all story or narrative; the quest for a minimalism; the appropriation by dance of walking and its accidents; the acquisition of gestual dissonances […]. It is not surprising that Beckett requests that the walkers of Quad have “some ballet training”’ (Deleuze 1995: 13–14).
- 2.
See Beckett’s letter to Thomas MacGreevy of 8 October 1935: ‘There is Otway’s Soldier’s Fortune, T.S.E’s Sweeney & Ballets Jooss and a new Garbo Karenina. Perhaps the last might be managed’ (LSB I 284).
- 3.
The Green Table, interview with Kurt Jooss by Robert Joffrey (1975), see www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTciXKBpNgE.
- 4.
Personal communication with Irène Lindon, director of Les Éditions de Minuit (email, 14 January 2016).
- 5.
See Beckett’s letter of 9 July 1937 to Axel Kaun: ‘Literatur des Unworts’ (LSB I 515), translated into English by George Craig as ‘literature of the non-word’ (LSB I 520).
- 6.
See for example Beckett’s letter of 22 September 1935 to Thomas MacGreevy: ‘I went to Woizikosvki [for Woizikovsky] ballet Thursday & and saw Sylphides, which I find positively ugly, Amour Sorcier & Petrouchka. Tarakanova danced the Widow & the Doll extremely well […]. Woizikovski does not dance so subtly as Massine’ (LSB I 277–278).
- 7.
‘The medieval death dances […] interest me very much, especially the one in Marienkirche in Lübeck which unfortunately has been destroyed by fire’ (Jooss 1975).
- 8.
Throughout the article, the author provides her translations of the original quotes in French.
- 9.
Interview with Laure Guilbert, 20 April 2016.
- 10.
‘For joy’ was added in the English version. In French, Lucky leapt or jumped: ‘Il bondissait’ (Beckett 2009: 52).
- 11.
When the scene is studied, it is usually related to Heinrich von Kleist’s essay about the marionette theatre, Über das Marionettentheater (1810), which Beckett is known to have read and brought up frequently during rehearsals of his plays and teleplays (see Paraskeva 2013).
- 12.
Ce dont on ne peut parler, c’est cela qu’il faut dire is the title of a film by Raphaël O’Byrne about the Franch-Swiss playwright, director, and painter Valère Novarina (2002), a coproduction of Arte France and Les Films à Lou.
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Clavier, E. (2018). Samuel Beckett and Modern Dance. In: Beloborodova, O., Van Hulle, D., Verhulst, P. (eds) Beckett and Modernism. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70374-9_13
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