Modernity's Dancers: Essays on Mediation and Anachronism in Salome and Metropolis.
Chieffo, Monica.
2017-04-18T13:54:28.817Z
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Abstract: This thesis focuses on two "modern dancers" from the early twentieth century . The first chapter studies the figure of Salome in perhaps her most famous manifestation, the musico-dramatic imagining of Richard Strauss, before moving, in the second chapter, to an analysis of what I dub the dance scene of the robot Maria from Fritz Lang's 1927 cult classic, Metropolis. If traditionally the ... read morereception of these dancing women has been strongly eclipsed by gaze theory and the female embodiment of the destructive potential of technology, here I explore how a multitude of other factors--musical, theatrical, technological, dramaturgical--construct each dance as a self-contained object. As a point of departure for this project, I invoke the idea of the historical anachronism as that which does not simply withstand time, but that continues to return persistently throughout historical time. It is no surprise that opera, Salome notwithstanding, persists through the repetition of performances and thus "returns" again and again on the theater stage, multiplex cinema, and now further re-mediated on DVD. Film, moreover, exists by its very nature through the act of replay, and thus of multiple returns rather than permanence. In this vein, countless performances of Salome have reiterated similar ideas on fin-de-siècle aesthetics to the extent that contemporary performances, while new, still rely on an unspoken ideal of the scandalous, morose visuals of the Decadent Salome so that the gesture of return inherent to live operatic performances becomes a practice in repetition of the history of Salome. Indeed, a spectacle of bloody heads and writhing naked bodies seem de rigeuer even today, as if unseemliness is scripted into the dramaturgy. But what happens when a production "unsettles," to borrow a term from David Levin, this already very unsettled operatic text?
Thesis (M.A.)--Tufts University, 2012.
Submitted to the Dept. of Music.
Advisor: Alessandra Campana.
Committee: Joseph Auner, and John McDonald.
Keywords: Music, and Film studies.read less - ID:
- dr26z885r
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