After the Ballets Russes: movement and modernism in British theatre, 1914-1935
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis illuminates the significant yet frequently overlooked contribution that Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes made to the development of British theatrical modernism. The extraordinary historical importance of leading dramatists and theatre practitioners such as Harley Granville Barker, J. M. Barrie, Terence Gray, and W. H. Auden has long been recognised, yet the debts they owed to Diaghilev’s company have remained neglected. This thesis recovers a striking selection of these debts, tracing the complex ways in which Barker, Barrie, Gray, and Auden gestured to various formal and aesthetic aspects of Diaghilev ballets in their endeavours to create total theatre art. Galvanised by the philosophical conditions of Britain’s early twentieth-century theatre scene, which saw growing interest in Nietzschean responses to classical drama and Wagnerian notions of the Gesamtkunstwerk, these theatre figures found inspiration in the formal and choreographic innovations of the Ballets Russes—particularly those pioneered by the revolutionary choreographer Michel Fokine. It was chiefly by taking these innovations as a point of departure that this diverse group of dramatists and theatre practitioners began to experiment with using the moving body to express aspects of dramatic texts, harnessing the company’s avant-garde repertoire to the service of advancing theatrical modernism. The first full-length study of the wider theatrical significance of Diaghilev’s company in the context of British drama and dramaturgy, this thesis offers new insight into the genesis, evolution, and performance of distinctive new theatrical forms, including a whimsical balletic burlesque and a deeply political poetic dramatic satire, as well as prominent modernist stagings of Shakespearean comedy and classical Greek tragedy. Grounded in extensive archival study, historical research, and textual, choreographic, and photographic analysis, this thesis provides a fresh account of underexplored areas of modernism in performance. It unfolds the nuanced ways in which the theatrical legacy of the Ballets Russes enhanced, inflected, and intertwined with a plurality of the period’s broader dramatic and dramaturgical developments, elucidating its relationship to everything from the Wagnerian theatre theories of Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig to the iconoclastic aesthetics of central European expressionism, from the Mallarméan concerns of symbolist playwrights such as W. B. Yeats and Maurice Maeterlinck to the new forms of embodied stage poetics pioneered by figures such as Jacques Copeau, Rolf de Maré, and Jean Cocteau. In recovering the Ballets Russes’ role in British theatre history, this thesis thus illuminates a series of new artistic networks, expands understandings of some of the most eminent dramatists and theatre practitioners of early twentieth-century Britain, and uncovers a selection of literary and dramaturgical innovations that have previously been neglected in studies of British modernism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".