TY - JOUR
AU - Enemark,, Nina
AB - Abstract This article considers the classicist Jane Ellen Harrison’s ritual theory of art as part of an intellectual, cultural and aesthetic zeitgeist occurring at the beginning of the 20th century. While centred on ancient Greek culture and art, Harrison’s work is directly connected to her concerns with religion and art in her own time. Her theory posits ritual as the forgotten origin of art and theology and sees in the modern period a return to this source in both religion and art. I argue that her theory implies a particular aesthetic which speaks to key shifts happening concurrently across the arts in Europe and America, and that the scope of her theory, incorporating insights from a range of fields of study, makes it a useful and unique lens through which to contextualise and view important developments in the arts during this period. Leading examples of these developments are considered from the fields of visual art, literature, theatre and particularly dance. It is at the outset one and the same impulse that sends a man to church and to the theatre.1 With this statement on the opening page of her short, popular book Ancient Art and Ritual (1913), Jane Ellen Harrison summarises her ritual theory of art. In her examination of ancient Greek religion, Harrison excavates what she sees as the religious impulse that develops into art and theology. This impulse finds its fullest expression in primitive ritual, she argues, and her work is dedicated to understanding this lost origin of art and religion. In this she applies anthropological findings to ancient Greece and draws on modern theories in philosophy, sociology, and psychology and builds on turn-of-the-century archaeological discoveries, radically challenging the prevailing rationalist, progressivist theories of anthropological mythographers of her day. In this way, her theory is very much a product of its time, intersecting with a number of major cultural and intellectual currents and concerns at the beginning of the 20th century. Indeed, religion itself and its relationship to art was admittedly the true object of her enquiry, her investigation of the religious impulse within the context of ancient Greece being, as she says, ‘incidental to [her] own specialism’.2 As her friend D.S. Mirsky writes in his obituary for Harrison, ‘by the time she had written Themis [the main treatise on her ritual theory], primitive religion had become for her a starting point for a general study of the human soul’.3 While Harrison’s commentary on her own age is weighted towards religion rather than art, this article explores the way in which the common origin she suggests for both makes it possible to posit a Harrisonian perspective on aesthetics, even a ritual aesthetic, and look at how this speaks to developments in the arts during this period. Harrison has become an increasingly prominent figure in modernist criticism over the past three decades as her relevance to the period is gradually uncovered. The impetus she believed lay behind religion viewed by her and her contemporaries as primitive, and the relevance she maintained it held for creativity, is strikingly in tune with major innovations across the arts and, as scholarship has shown, also helped to drive these innovations. This article aims to add to this body of work on Harrison and modernism, focusing specifically on how the emphasis on materiality, performativity, embodiment and process in her ritual theory of art intersects with key modern aesthetic shifts in literature, visual art, theatre, and particularly dance. Harrison’s formulation of ritual emerges from this interdisciplinary analysis as a fruitful idiom and framework for connecting these aesthetic developments with a wider landscape of shifts in culture and thought in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Harrison’s work on Greek religion builds on early anthropological scholarship on myth and ritual, a young field arising in the second half of the 19th century from a culture steeped in Enlightenment ideals of rationality and progress as well as an interest in origins, including those of religion.4 However, whereas other scholarly figures in this field distanced themselves from the archaic and indigenous religious practices they studied, referred to within the evolutionary paradigm and by ethnographers as ‘primitive’, Harrison’s brand of Hellenism was decidedly primitivist.5 While complicit in the universalism of the Enlightenment project which regarded these religions and cultures as less advanced than modern Western forms, she saw them as possessing a lost vitality and depth of feeling that was acutely missing in her day, both in religion and in art. With this perspective on the classics she played a major role in transforming her field. Unlike most classicism at the time, and the new anthropological approach to myth, Harrison’s work taps into what Margot K. Louis observes to be a shift in mythography—as practiced by poets and artists—in the late 19th century. The centrality of Olympian mythology in depictions of ancient Greece was being challenged and there was an increasing attraction to the Eleusinian Mysteries and the Dionysian energies connected with them—epitomised in the works of Algernon Swinburne and Walter Pater and fuelled inestimably by the publication of Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy in 1872 (although an English translation was only produced in 1909). This attraction, Louis argues, was arguably bound up with the late Victorian search for alternative forms of spirituality, which accompanied the gradual erosion of Christian belief,6 as well as the growing fascination with hidden, unconscious forces within the individual and society.7 Harrison’s theory builds on this revisionist wave of Hellenism, providing what Louis refers to as ‘the most eloquent and sustained attack on the Olympians in British mythography’,8 and presenting, through her version of the classical world, a particularly pertinent antidote to widely-felt religious, social and aesthetic lacks.9 Harrison’s work is based largely on turn of the century archaeological discoveries, unearthing what she refers to as a ‘lower stratum of thought’ which engendered religious practices contrasting starkly with Homer’s account of the Olympian gods: older, chthonic—that is, of the earth and underworld rather than sky—mystical, matriarchal practices, given to extremes of barbarous cruelty and licentiousness. In this she draws significantly on Nietszche’s treatise, set out in his Birth of Tragedy (1872), in which he associates Dionysus (a pre-Olympian figure) with mystical connection and the unknowable, intoxication, the body, dance and music, and Apollo (an Olympian god) with representation and appearance, serenity, clarity, and order. Like Nietzsche, Harrison believes much is lost in the evolution from pre-Olympian to Olympian religion and enlists modern ethnographical studies and theories in philosophy and sociology to try to recapture the impulse behind pre-Olympian, ritual-based religious practice. Harrison explains the impulse towards ritual by pointing firstly to the interval between perception and action: Perception is not immediately transformed into action; there is an interval for choice between several possible actions. Perception is pent up and becomes, helped by emotion, conscious representation. Now it is, psychologists tell us, just in this interval, this space between perception and reaction, this momentary halt, that all our mental life, our images, our ideas, our consciousness, and assuredly our religion and our art, is built up.10 She argues that ritual begins with the desire for something—an image, an idea—pent up in this space between perception and action, as the action desired has either already taken place or has yet to happen, so there is no immediate practical outlet. She gives the example of a hunt that has been successful or an anticipated hunt:11 there is a desire either to relive the emotion of the hunt if it has already happened, or if it has yet to happen and the cycle of perception-action cannot complete itself at the moment, then the desire for the hunt ‘grows and accumulates by inhibition, till at last the exasperated nerves and muscles can bear it no longer; it breaks out into mimetic action’.12 Physiological and emotional release are thus, according to Harrison, the focus of the primal impulse towards ritual. Diverging from the prominent progressivist, rationalist theory of the time (by Harrison’s colleague at Cambridge, J.G. Frazer) that magic is merely a means to an end, a primitive stage of science, Harrison argues that magic is ‘[as] modern psychology teaches us, in the main and at the outset, not the outcome of intellectual illusion, not even the exercise of a “mimetic instinct”, but simply, in its ultimate analysis, an utterance, a discharge of emotion and longing’.13 While other scholars of myth and ritual debated whether ritual preceded myth or the other way round, myth, she argues, originally referred simply to the magical words accompanying a physical ritual; it was the plot of the ritual, expressing the same emotion and desire as the ritual action.14 Ritual is thus a moment of embodied intention and expression, of heightened integration of body and mind. This focus on intention and expression rather than a scientifically assured outcome is at the heart of Harrison’s view of ritual. As she writes, ‘[t]he savage utters his will to live, his intense desire for food; but it should be noted, it is desire and will and longing, not certainty and satisfaction that he utters’.15 Following the work of the ethnographer Arnold van Gennep, she sees ritual as divided into three stages: pre-liminal, liminal, and post-liminal,16 and her emphasis is consistently on the liminal stage, the ‘midway state when you are neither here nor there’,17 and nothing is certain. It is a process, a transition with an uncertain outcome. Crucially, this expression of desire and emotion is a collective experience. Here again Harrison’s theory speaks to a cultural reaction to Enlightenment values of scientific progress and reason, tapping into the widespread challenge to individualist psychology emerging at the turn of the century and giving rise to social theories of psychology and behaviour. Durkheim’s thinking on collective consciousness becomes central to her theory: the intense emotion felt collectively by the tribe is perceived as something beyond and larger than individual experience and is thus externalised and projected through identification with a totem.18 Drawing as well on the philosopher and sociologist Lucien Lévy Bruhl’s notion of a ‘primitive mentality’, ritual for Harrison involves a sense of continuity and unity with the natural environment, Lévy Bruhl’s notion of ‘participation mystique’. This collectivism and mysticism then develops naturally into magic, which is the participation in and manipulation of the continuum of energy, or mana, running through nature. It is from this stage of totemistic, magical thinking, she argues, that ancient Greek religion emerged, with ‘mystery gods’ as she calls them, who pre-date Olympian gods. These older gods—or rather vague undefined spirits, half human or animal, half divine—are for Harrison part of the older matriarchal, chthonic religious system. Such a spirit is bound up with the earth and all living things and its death and resurrection must be enacted through a mystical ritual performance each spring to bring about the renewal of all life in nature. The Olympians, on the other hand, Harrison writes: are objects to a subject, they are concepts thrown out of the human mind, looked at from a distance, things known, not like the mystery gods felt and lived. The more clearly they are envisaged the more reasonable and thinkable they are, the less are they the sources, the expression, of emotion.19 In the shift to the religion of Olympian Greece, powerful matriarchal ritual figures, identified with the earth and responsible for all creation and renewal, are demoted to mere nymphs and Zeus the father becomes the cardinal figure amongst a host of deities who detach themselves from earth and reign instead from the distant heavens. As the Olympian gods leave the earth for the sky they renounce any totemistic identification with animals or plants, and the yearly cycle of death and rebirth of the mystery god is replaced with the immortality of the anthropomorphised Olympians. Worship and sacrifice replace participation in magical ritual, reflecting, for Harrison, an increased perception of separation of self from other, human from non-human as rationality gradually overtakes the mystical belief in magic. This shift from religion as embodied performance uttering desire and emotion to the intellectual contemplation of rationalised deities is encapsulated for Harrison in the concurrent development of ritual into drama. Harrison points out that the old Greek word dromenon, referring to ritual and meaning literally ‘a thing done’ shares the same root with word drama, which means ‘a thing also done, but abstracted from your doing’.20 Participative performance is thus replaced with spectacle—a representation of the act rather than the concrete experience of the act itself. The magical myths bound up with sacred ceremonial become aetiological, mere stories to complement the personalities of the thoroughly intellectualised Olympian gods. Harrison’s formulation of the transition from ritual to art and theology highlights a loss of concreteness of experience, that is, embodiment and a sense of process and indeterminacy, immediacy, and material engagement. In this, her work sits within a wider historical-intellectual context marked by an increasing interest in the unconscious and re-evaluation of the immediate flux of concrete experience in relation to purely logical abstractions and intellectual thought. Sanford Schwartz identifies a nexus of turn-of-the-century thinkers whose theories centre on an opposition between conscious surface and unconscious depth, between ‘conceptual abstraction and immediate experience, or … between the instrumental conventions that shape ordinary life and the original flux of concrete experience’.21 Schwartz’s study includes a discussion of the work of William James, who asserts that: (t)here are so many geometries, so many logics, so many physical and chemical hypotheses, so many classifications, each of them good for so much and yet not good for everything, that the notion that even the truest formula may be a human device and not a literal transcript has dawned upon us.22 Other theories in this grouping include Freud and Jung’s notions of the unconscious, Nietzsche’s ‘chaos of sensations’, F.H. Bradley ‘immediate experience’ and Bergson’s notion of ‘durational time’, or durée.23 Harrison’s preference for the concrete, embodied act—a process and transition—rather than abstract and intellectualised representation associates her with this strain of thought. Her archaeological approach to the classics reinforces this sense of her work. Harrison’s way into ancient Greek religion was through examining depictions of rituals on archaeological relics—vases and monuments and other ruins. She was part of a wave of classicists reacting to archaeological discoveries of classical ruins in the last decades of the 19th century and moving away from the text-based classicism that had defined the field until then. As Hugh Kenner points out, ‘Troy after Schliemann was no longer a dream, but a place on the map’, bringing a concrete reality to the classics that contrasted with the ‘vortex of mere lexicography’, the ‘din of words’ that characterised most of 19th-century classicism.24 The concrete medium through which Harrison approached ancient Greek religion—her focus on the materiality of tangible relics and things done, the rituals etched onto them, rather than relying on mythological texts, narratives representing events and characters—reflects the message of her theory. Her theory intersects with and draws on all the thinkers Schwartz discusses, but particularly Bergson, whose vitalist philosophy attempts to conceptualise time as it is experienced, as process, flux, and movement, an experience of reality as constantly changing and becoming. This he opposes to time that is no longer purely experienced but rather perceived by the intellect, immobilised, ‘spatialised’, as he understands it, and divided into categories, diminishing the richness and creativity of the psychic life. Psychoanalyst and Bloomsbury affiliate Karin Stephen writes in 1922 that Bergson’s vitalist philosophy is popular: because it gives expression to a feeling which is very widespread at the present time, a distrust of systems, theories, logical constructions, the assumption of premises and then the acceptance of everything that follows logically from them. There is a sense of impatience with thought and a thirst for the actual, the concrete. It is because the whole drift of Bergson’s writing is an incitement to throw over abstractions and get back to facts that so many people read him.25 Harrison draws on Bergson’s formulation of two levels of reality and time to conceptualise the difference between pre-Olympian and Olympian religion. While art and theology—Olympian products—are associated with the static, representing intellect, ritual, in Harrison’s Bergsonian schema, is synonymous with the sense of process and immediate experience that defines durée. Harrison’s theory brings an additional, unique formulation of the opposition between surface/depth and abstraction/experience to this turn-of-the-century discussion. Her work is arguably less abstract than the above-mentioned philosophical theories, and more concretely focused on art and religion, making it a valuable idiom for understanding some of the key developments in this area of cultural life at the time. Applying her theory to her own time, Harrison launches an attack on the theology-based religion of her day in a way that echoes her attack on the Olympians of ancient Greece. She writes in 1915 that ‘the idea of theology—i.e. a science of the unknowable—is, if not dead, at least … dying’.26 Here she makes the distinction between eikonic and aneikonic religion. Eikonism ‘takes the vague, unknown, fearful thing, and tries to picture it, picture it as known, as distinct, definite—something a man can think about and understand … it is thus an ‘attempted expression of the unknown in terms of the known’.27 Aneikonic religion on the other hand ‘does not make its gods, it finds them—finds them in the life of Nature outside man, or in the psychological experience, the hope, the fear, the hate, the love, within him’.28 It ‘aims at union; in a word, it is sacramental, mystical’.29 Later, in 1919 and 1922, she refers to a ‘new spirit’ among the younger generation which ‘resents abstractions’.30 The essence of this spirit, she writes, ‘is that the so-called supernatural refuses any longer to be torn from, abstracted from, the natural’.31 This desire among the younger generation for a ‘natural’ religion for her marks ‘a resurgence of an instinct very, very old’.32 It is expressed in the Christian faith in the turn towards ‘immanence’, which she says (claiming to quote the Pope), is ‘the essence of Modernism’ (in the theological context33), and is a concept dating back to Augustine which holds that divinity is not external to the person, but rather maintains that ‘the Kingdom of God is within us’.34 She sees this shift manifested clearly among Anglicans, ‘who not so long ago boasted themselves Protestants’, to whom now ‘sacraments are felt to be of more spiritual value than sermons; not, I think, because they embody any savage and obsolete magical efficacy, but because they stand for a mystical communion; they leave the spirit free for experience’.35 Paralleling this rejection of theology in favour of what she sees as something approaching an older, ritualistic religious practice, Harrison observes a similar shift in art at the beginning of the 20th century. ‘Art in these latter days,’ she says, ‘goes back as it were on her own steps, recrossing the ritual bridge back to life.’36 This observation, although not fleshed out to the same extent as that of the return of religion to its ritualistic roots, speaks to developments and innovations in the arts on a number of overlapping levels. Significantly, it does not, for Harrison, refer to what she views as a backwards-looking ‘cult of savagery’,37 the craze for ‘the primitive’ which was widely manifested in tropes used across the arts.38 Nor does she see the future of art as lying in revivals of folk-songs, or a medieval inseparability of art and religion, or re-enactments of Greek plays. ‘Life,’ she writes, ‘is doomed to make for itself moulds, break them, remake them.’39 A return to ritual therefore depends on art arising from the here and now, in new and relevant forms. It must emerge, she writes, ‘from a keen emotion felt towards things and people living to-day, in modern conditions, including, among other and deeper forms of life, the haste and hurry of the modern street, the whirr of motor cars and aeroplanes’.40 In this, she sees the art of the Futurists (with their love of speed and new technology) as pointing in the right direction. This is echoed in the way the critic John White argues that the Futurists can be understood as attempting to rediscover a lost ‘quasi-Dionysian vitality’ but not through already-used prehistoric art forms, rather through a ‘counter-primitivism’ which used war and the city and machines in the way Gauguin used Tahiti.41 At the same time Harrison refers to her ‘apologia pro vita mea’ as the enjoyment of ‘great things in literature, Greek plays for example’, precisely ‘when behind their bright splendours I see moving darker and older shapes’,42 the paradox, as K.J. Philips terms it, of ‘novelty with tradition’. Such a return to the ‘darker and older shapes’ of ritual within the context of ‘things and people living to-day, in modern conditions’ is a frequent theme of modernist literature, and much literary scholarship over the past three decades has demonstrated that Harrison not only observed but also helped to drive this trend among writers. As Shanyn Fiske notes, Harrison’s anthropological studies played a leading role in creating a ‘seductive and practically usable space for the modernist imagination’.43 Her privileging of an intuitive, creative sense of continuity with the ancient past through the ‘sympathetic imagination’ over what was traditionally an elitist, male-dominated discourse enabled, as Fiske argues, ‘an epistemology of loss and a rationale for imaginative recovery’ in the modern age.44 This imaginative recovery, as much criticism has shown, preoccupied many leading modernist writers, including Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, H.D., and Butts. Modernist scholarship has done much to show Harrison’s influence and relevance to this project, tracing anthropological tropes and themes from Harrison’s theory in the works of these writers, and considering intersections with their explorations of, among other things, the relationship between life and art, and the role of desire and of the artist.45 Another level on which the return to ritual takes place in literature (and other art forms, as will discussed below) involves what is arguably a different kind of recovery, one which resonates with Harrison’s own tactile approach to the classics. It also parallels perhaps even more closely her observations on the turn towards immanence in theology: the yearning for the union of supernatural with the natural and physical, and the aneikonic discovery of the gods either from within or from nature rather than an eikonic representation of them through the symbolism of the known. This recovery relates to the formal and aesthetic implications of Harrison’s formulation of ritual: her emphasis on concreteness and materiality, embodiment, performative ‘doing’ and expressing rather than representing, which speaks to a very similar emphasis in modern aesthetics. This recovery is thus one of the lost tactility of the dromenon. It aligns with what Johanna Drucker has described as the early 20th-century ‘theme of materiality, the self-conscious attention to the formal means of production in literature and the visual arts (as well as music, dance, theatre, and film, it could be added)’; connecting all these different uses of materiality in art, Drucker argues, is their insistence on ‘the capacity of works to claim the status of being rather than representing’.46 On this level, Harrison’s observation of a return to ritual principles connects with a wave of experimentation in early 10th-century literature that celebrated the materiality of texts, what Jerome McGann refers to as ‘thicken[ing] the medium … literally, to put the resources of the medium on full display, to exhibit the processes of self-reflection and self-generation which texts set into motion, which they are.’47 These experiments highlighted the medium of literary expression rather than abiding by a conventional representational aesthetic which rendered the medium invisible. Hugo Ball, in the Dada Manifesto (1916), writes: I let the vowels fool around. I let the vowels quite simply occur, as a cat meows. … Words emerge, shoulders of words, legs, arms, hands of words. … Each thing has its word, but the word has become a thing by itself. Why shouldn’t I find it?48 Prominent examples of this mainly Continental trend centring on the physicality of the written and spoken word included Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligrammes, the Surrealist livre d’artiste, Dadaist sound poetry and typographical experiments by the Futurists and poets published in magazines such as Nord-Sud.49 Avant Garde poetic experiments of this kind were invariably fuelled by (and themselves fuelled) the popular trend of primitivism, which, as Torgovnick establishes, relied on problematic stereotyping of non-Western cultures. As, for example, Richard Sheppard argues in a discussion of Dada, these experiments ‘were less about nostalgia for the presumed innocence of non-Western cultures and more about transgressive exploitation of “primitive” energies of the psyche’, about spontaneity in defiance of convention, which echoes White’s analysis of the Futurists.50 The primitivism of Apollinaire and his contemporaries was, as one critic notes, ‘the return to first principles and to fundamentals’.51 A return to ritual in this context thus involves a recovery of the origins of the medium of language itself, a starting over in language, emptying it of meaning and concretely building it up again renewed and reborn. The ‘darker and older shapes’ behind these art works are not anthropological motifs but concrete, tactile processes of making and doing which relate to the ritual mode. Textual theorists such as Jerome McGann and George Bornstein (following the lead of pioneering book historian D.F. McKenzie) have also posited a separate sub-strand of this literary trend focused on the materiality of texts: a British tradition reaching back to William Blake’s illuminated manuscripts and continuing with the work of William Morris and the pre-Raphaelites through to W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound in his Cantos.52 The main thrust of this tradition, McGann argues, lay in its attempt to harness the materiality of texts to signify a historical context. They also contend that the effects of this tradition are visible in the modern interest in the self-referentiality of language, notably in Gertrude Stein’s work and in later experiments in concrete poetry. An example of this is Stein’s poem ‘If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso’, which almost needs to be read aloud to catch the emphasis on the materiality of language.53 The first collection of lines run as follows: If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him. Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it. If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him would he like it would he like it if I told him.54 This is language performing, doing, rather than representing. The medium rather than any semantic message is highlighted. This performativity in language can arguably also be linked to the idea of a text as a process rather than product, or what Marjorie Perloff calls the ‘poetics of indeterminacy’. For Perloff, this quality emerges in a strand of modernist writing beginning with Rimbaud, continuing through Apollinaire, various cubist, dada, and surrealist works as well as Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound, and is later found in for example the musical compositions of John Cage. Perloff describes the work of these artists as ‘compositional rather than referential’;55 that is, their meaning lies in the process through which the work is composed and experienced. Another exceptional, and uniquely relevant, example in this context is the long poem Paris (1920) by Harrison’s student and companion Hope Mirrlees. Like T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, to which Paris is often compared, Paris draws on Harrisonian motifs, but furthermore harnesses the formal implications of the ritual theory through a performative use of typographical space.56 This anti-representational focus on materiality, being and doing is clear in Harrison’s comments on modern visual art, where she makes the distinction between art that imitates and art that expresses. She groups the Futurists together with post-Impressionists as Expressionists (adding that she knows ‘[t]hey will not gladly be classed together’57). These artists, she notes, ‘no matter by what name they call themselves, have one criterion. They believe that art is not the copying or idealizing of Nature, or of any aspect of Nature, but the expression and communication of the artist’s emotion’.58 She finds this expressiveness in the literary theory of Tolstoy as well, noting his affinity with the post-Impressionists,59 and argues that it answers a need that has been neglected by art: the life of the imagination, and even of the emotions, has been perhaps too long lived at second hand, received from the artist ready made and felt. To-day, owing largely to the progress of science, and a host of other causes social and economic … there comes a need for first-hand emotion and expression … .60 This rejection of a ‘second-hand’ reception of the emotions and imagination that motivate the artist, the emphasis instead on first-hand expression, returns to ritual principles in that an artwork becomes again something done, an emotion is expressed in a concrete way, through making or doing. Thus, it involves a heightened stress on the materiality of the artistic gesture—whether in painting, literature or performance. In their bold, subjectively expressive use of colour and perspective, modern visual artists highlighted the materiality of the artwork,61 with prominent examples including works by Matisse, Gauguin, and Picasso displayed at the 1910 exhibition ‘Manet and the postimpressionists’ curated by Roger Fry, which famously prompted Virginia Woolf to comment that this was the moment that ‘human character changed’.62 Rather than using materials to pictorially refer to, or represent, something other than itself, such artworks drew attention to their own material existence and to the process of their construction. A return to ritual around the beginning of the 20th century is, however, perhaps most viscerally felt in developments in the performing arts, where the aesthetic principles connected to Harrison’s ritual theory—embodiment, connection, immediacy of expression—explicitly come to the fore. In theatre, key examples of attempts to restore the dromenon behind the drama at this time can be found in the work of T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and Antonin Artaud. Taxidou (drawing on Carpentier) discusses how Harrison’s and the Cambridge Ritualists’ embodied view of preclassical ritual and myth, blending in with themes of primitivism, inspired Eliot and Yeats towards new modes of performance that attempted to reinstate the religious function of drama. For both, this led to drawing on the ritualistic theatres of east Asia particularly Noh theatre and its use of masks, accentuating the role of rhythm, and transposing elements of ancient ritual into a contemporary setting and fusing it with religious modes that each felt to be relevant to their present-day context: for Eliot, Christianity, and for Yeats, Celtic mysticism.63 By contrast, while no direct connection between Harrison and Artaud has been established, an even greater affinity can perhaps be sensed with regard to Artaud’s recovery of the formal elements of ritual. Conscious of the ‘old ceremonial magic’ at the root of theatre,64 Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, inspired by watching Balinese and Cambodian dance and theatre, attempts to forcefully break down the barrier between actors and the audience, placing the spectator at the centre of the spectacle, ‘engulfed and physically affected by it’.65 The theatre experience becomes not something watched but something participated in and shared. Echoing Harrison’s writing on ritual, there is a heightened focus in Artaud’s theatre on embodiment as Artaud intuits that ‘[o]ne does not separate the mind from the body nor the senses from the intelligence’;66 thus, he insists that ‘it is essential to put an end to the subjugation of the theatre to the text, and recover the notion of a kind of unique language half-way between gesture and thought’.67 This entails finding an expression in theatre which is ‘unafraid of going as far as necessary in the exploration of our nervous sensibility’; space, rhythm, sound, ‘the visual language of things’, an expression where movement acts directly on the audience’s sensibility.68 Artaud’s innovations anticipate the ritual theatre of Jerzy Grotowsky and Peter Brook as well as the problematisation of the performer/spectator boundary found in Samuel Beckett.69 With his emphasis on the physicality of theatre, his work is certainly a forerunner of physical theatre. It echoes, furthermore, in the words of Marina Abramović, a leading figure in performance art, who has been making work since the early 1970s: Theatre is fake: there is a black box, you pay for a ticket, and you sit in the dark and see somebody playing somebody else’s life. The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real.70 Artaud can in this way also be credited with helping to pave the way for performance art, which defines itself against the illusionism of theatre and thus continues the project of recovering the formal underpinnings of ritual as artistic practice. A similar and perhaps even more pervasive return to ritual principles can be seen in a wave of innovation in approaches to dance and movement during the first decades of the 20th century. Here too there was an attempt to rediscover natural origins—the origin of dance and movement itself—and discover a language through which the medium of dance, the body, could genuinely speak. Indeed, the relationship between dance and primitivism is well established, with Frank Kermode in 1961 referring to the way in which dance has, since before the turn of the century, represented art in its most undissociated form and how it is therefore seen as able to momentarily reunite mind and body, form and matter. Within this primitivist notion, he writes: ‘dance belongs to a period before the self and the world were divided.’71 Roger Copeland adds that ‘[w]e might go so far as to suggest that modern dance aspired to the condition of ritual’.72 He specifically names Harrison (along with Frazer) as ‘required reading for the early pioneers of modern dance’,73 and highlights the way her theory prioritises the tactile experience of ritual over the visual consumption of theatre,74 and the way in which ‘modern dance is envisioned as the art most fully capable of restoring a lost (or vanishing) sense of tactile connectedness’.75 This is owing, as Copeland argues, quoting dance critic John Martin, to the ‘inherent contagion of bodily movement’ by which an audience can vicariously experience the movement of a dancer, eroding the distance between performer and spectator.76 ‘Dance,’ Copeland writes, ‘is thereby entrusted with preserving that “participation mystique” which the anthropologist Levy-Bruhl identified as a prime characteristic of “primitive” life’77 -a concept upon which (as noted above) Harrison drew heavily in her formulation of Dionysian indivisibility and embodiment in ritual. Modern dance pioneers thus sought primary physical-emotional sources and principles of movement that could evoke this participatory response from audiences, often seeking inspiration in non-western or archaic cultural dances, which were felt to be closer to the genuine, natural or spiritual origins of dance. Attempts to excavate the holistic origins of dance are arguably inextricable from the rise of physical culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in America and Europe which pervaded all areas of the arts and culture.78 An increased interest in and promotion of physical health, movement, sport, and dance in America and Europe mirrors the ‘theme of materiality’ Drucker observes in the arts. Likewise, Harrison’s foregrounding of embodiment in her ritual theory is itself arguably embedded within this modern preoccupation with physicality, which in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s gave rise to the theories and techniques of, among others, F.M. Alexander and Mabel Todd centred on mind-body unity that would later inspire a proliferation of somatic practices.79 Harrison’s focus on the integration of mind and matter clearly resonates, as well, with the aims of two influential movement theorists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Francoise Delsarte and Émile Jaques-Dalcroze. Delsartism comprised a system of poses and gestures aiming to correspond to inner mental and emotional states and became especially popular internationally between about 1880 and 1920, while the Dalcroze system of Eurythmics, greatly influenced by Delsarte, focused on increasing bodily awareness in teaching music and rhythm. Both approaches greatly impacted the early development of modern dance, making mind-body integration a central aspect of innovations in dance in the early 20th century.80 Within this zeitgeist of enthusiasm for embodiment and uncovering the natural, integrated connection between body, mind, and movement, experimental dance practitioners in the early decades of the 20th century developed their ideas in opposition to what they perceived as the artificiality of the main concert dance form at the time: the ballet. Echoing Harrison’s description of art (as opposed to ritual) as ‘a very dead face’,81 the American dance innovator Isadora Duncan writes of the ballet: A deformed skeleton is dancing before you. This deformation through incorrect dress and incorrect movement is the result of the training necessary to the ballet.82 For Duncan and other pioneers of modern dance, the set repertoire of ballet was felt to limit the expressive capacity of the moving body. Its movement language was perceived as unnatural, contrived and overly centred on fixed poses rather than movement itself, paralleling Harrison’s critique of art and theology as aloof abstractions of the real embodied process of ritual, following her Bergsonian understanding of ritual as durée—experience, process, becoming. And just as Harrison’s classicism brings ancient Greek religion down from immortal, Olympian heights down to earth-bound, embodied ritual, new approaches to dance embraced the natural weight and rhythms of the body, contrasting with ballet’s illusion of defying gravity. Isadora Duncan, quoted above, was a prominent early example of this experimentation, and overlaps temporally as well as in important thematic, aesthetic ways with Harrison. As well as being influenced by Delsarte’s methods,83 Duncan shared Harrison’s Nietzschean vision of ancient Greece and, like Harrison, drew on depictions of ancient ecstatic Dionysian ritual dance on artefacts at the British Museum, as well as on trips to Greece.84 The two even are recorded as having performed together once, Harrison reading from Theocritus while Duncan danced,85 and were infamously linked by the influential classicist Paul Shorey in his disdainful reference to ‘the corybantic Hellenism of Miss Harrison and Isadora Duncan …, the irrational, semi-sentimental, Polynesian, free-verse and sex-freedom Hellenism of all the gushful geysers of “rapturous rubbish” about the Greek spirit’.86 For Duncan, ancient Greek dance represented a lost, primitive ideal which paralleled Harrison’s recovery of ancient Greek ritual in her search for the source of art and religion. As one critic wrote: It is far back, deep down the centuries, that one’s spirit passes when Isadora Duncan dances; back to the very morning of the world, when the greatness of the soul found free expression in the beauty of the body … when men and women danced before their hearthstones and their gods in religious ecstasy.87 Her interpretation of ancient Greek dance thus becomes the focal point for her recovery of the original, natural source of dance, dance that expressed the soul. With a primitivist mysticism mirroring Harrison’s theory, Duncan claims to find the natural origin of dance in the movements and rhythms of nature—the sea and wind, the wings of birds—which she connected with the rhythms of the breath.88 Just as the human and natural world are connected, body and spirit are inseparable in Duncan’s approach to dance.89 Searching for the ‘central spring of all movement’ in the body, Duncan finds this physically in the solar plexus,90 and insists on the primacy of this internal source: Before I go out on the stage, I must place a motor in my soul. When that begins to work my legs and arms and my whole body will move independently of my will.91 This emphasis on the body as fused with soul distinguish her work from, for example, the exoticism of her near contemporary, the very influential Ruth St Denis, who similarly sought inspiration for more meaningful, spiritual and natural dance outside contemporary Western forms, also through a Delsartean approach, but who treated the body as something that could be escaped through dance, the vehicle through which the transcendental and spiritual is revealed.92 The mystical connection between body and soul, self, and other, in Duncan’s understanding of dance is furthermore what led her to proclaim that in dancing she ‘tried always to be the Chorus … . I never once danced a solo’, indicating that dance, for her, could facilitate a ritual participation that included the audience.93 Duncan’s emphasis on the internal source and naturalness of movement produced a choreographic technique that gave the appearance of being improvised, bringing attention to the process of the performance as it unfolds, rather than to a ready-made choreography. Technically this involved, among other things, one movement logically succeeding another and highlighting an internal intention preceding movement, often by having the movement follow a beat behind the music.94 An affinity is visible here with the Bergsonian process-orientedness liminality of ritual as theorised by Harrison, and her emphasis on the ritual dance as originating in a need to express an inner desire. However, the illustrative quality of Duncan’s dance in the way it expresses music is at odds with the non-representational aesthetic of ritual and is also what Helen Thomas, among others, argues keeps Duncan on the cusp of modernism and romanticism. ‘Modernism in concerned to uncover the substance of art by peeling off the layers of all past traditions,’ Thomas writes, ‘and to work afresh from and through the primary substance of the art form, which, in dance, is movement.’95 While Thomas and others argue that Duncan’s use of Greek forms similarly separates her from the modernist project,96 Olga Taxidou has argued that Duncan’s specifically Nietzschean Hellenism enabled her to be ‘radical’, ‘experimental’ and ‘utopian’,97 which can be compared with the way that Harrison’s search for the origin of art and religion in ancient Greek ritual was according to her ‘incidental to [her] own specialism’. Duncan herself counters claims of being backwards-looking in her art, insisting that it is not her intention to ‘return to the dances of the old Greeks’, but rather to develop ‘the dance of the future [which] will be a new movement, a consequence of the entire evolution which mankind has passed through’.98 This dance of the future is epitomised for her by a dancer: whose body and soul have grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of that soul will have become the movement of the body. … She will dance the body emerging again from centuries of civilized forgetfulness, emerging not in the nudity of primitive man, but in a new nakedness, no longer at war with spirituality and intelligence, but joining with them in a glorious harmony.99 This ‘new nakedness’ echoes the Futurists’ vision of themselves as ‘primitives of a new sensibility’,100 and like the Futurists, Duncan, regardless of whether she achieved her aim, was instrumental in paving the way for other developments in this direction—in her case, an even more profound rejection of traditional aesthetics and foregrounding of the impetus and process of dance and concrete materiality of the body. Subsequent innovations in dance are borne out of many of the same aims and concerns explored by Duncan, including locating the original impetus for movement, which follows the natural forces of gravity and momentum and is attuned to the ritualistic potential that dance holds to invite empathetic participation from the audience. Just as Duncan declares she never danced a solo, American modern dance pioneer Martha Graham, according to Deborah Jowitt, ‘construed herself as both celebrant and priestess, bringing Western theatrical dancing as close to ritual as it has ever become’.101 Meanwhile, Rudolph Laban, a central figure of German expressionist dance, created ‘movement choirs’, very large groups of amateur dancers dancing together around a simple score, with much room for improvisation, which he claimed was ‘a rediscovery of a much earlier artistic community in which mysterious ritual was the foundation of social unity and the spectator played a secondary role’.102 Aesthetically, however, many of these developments contrast with Duncan’s relatively more upright, light and fluid movement and more intensely embrace the use of weight and starker, less conventionally attractive movement. The most iconic and shocking early display of gravity in dance came with Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography for The Rite of Spring. Drawing on ancient pagan Russian rituals (as well as on Dalcroze’s eurythmics103 and the indirect influence of Duncan through previous Ballet Russes choreographer Michel Fokine104), Rite boldly defied the defining aesthetic tenets of ballet with the heavy stomping movement, asymmetric gestures, hunched backs and turned-in toes that expressed Igor Stravinsky’s dissonant, polyrhythmic musical composition. Similarly, the bold, angular and austere work of Martha Graham never conceals weight and effort; if anything, these are emphasised, which for Graham was essential to expressing the passion and sorrow of the human condition. Indeed, the chthonic aspect of Greek myth—the chief subject matter of Harrison’s theory, contrasting with the light, cheerful Apollonian aspect—is a frequent theme of her work, and here Harrison’s influence has been noted, and Graham is known to have read Harrison religiously.105 Invoking Harrison’s use of the words ‘dromenon’ and ‘drama’ she writes in her memoirs that ‘[t]he word “theatre” was a verb before it was a noun’.106 This focus on embodied action rather than abstraction informs her aesthetic ideas about the source and purpose of dance: I wanted to begin not with characters or ideas, but with movements … I wanted significant movement. I did not want it to be beautiful or fluid. I wanted it to be fraught with inner meaning, with excitement and surge.107 For Graham, this internal impetus for dance is found in a ‘contraction and release’ initiated in the pelvis, with a strong emotional basis. The search for primary principles of movement among other leading modern dance innovators across Europe and America lead to other influential techniques such as Doris Humphrey’s ‘fall and recovery’ and Mary Wigman’s ‘tension and relaxation’, similarly emphasising the flow of weight and momentum and opposing forces in the body. Rudolph Laban, a leading figure with Wigman in the German Ausdruckstanz movement, while less known for producing a particular style or technique, equally helped shape modern and contemporary dance through his extensive system of notation that analysed the constituent components and fundamental factors of movement and their interactions, the aim of which was ‘to develop the fullest possible range and extent of movement vocabulary and use of rhythm, rather than any one particular style’.108 As with Graham, for whom ‘the dance does not interpret the music; the music is a setting for the dance’,109 these practitioners believed, as Thomas notes, that ‘the accompaniment should grow out of the movement form and not dominate it, as it seemed to do in ballet’.110 Thus modern dance grows out of working, as Thomas phrases it, ‘afresh from and through the primary substance of the art form’; in Drucker’s terms, it participates in the modernist ‘theme of materiality, the self-conscious attention to the formal means of production’, the insistence on ‘the capacity of works to claim the status of being rather than representing’.111 In doing so it realises perhaps even more intensely than other art forms the ritual aesthetic of embodiment, process and materiality envisioned in Harrison’s theory. Harrison’s formulation of ritual as the source of art and religion not only contributed enormously to the transformation of the classics but reveals a figure both attuned to, and herself a major driver of, changing currents in the intellectual-cultural-aesthetic landscape of her time. Her theory on religion and art comments on the modernist period by elevating the role of aspects of life she felt were deeply needed in religious and artistic practice in her day: emotional expression, tactile embodied experience, immediacy, participation and connectedness. The immediate and concrete, as opposed to the abstract and intellectual, take precedence in her approach, and in this she taps into widespread intellectual and aesthetic trends of the early 20th century. This paper has considered examples from various art forms—visual art, dance, theatre, literature—highlighting the focus on performativity, materiality, embodiment and process that Harrison shares with what are generally considered to be crucial shifts towards a ‘modern’ aesthetic. Harrison’s observation that ‘[a]rt in these latter days goes back as it were on her own steps, recrossing the ritual bridge back to life’ thus emerges as part of a zeitgeist and provides a distinct and useful lens through which to view and bring together key developments in this period. Footnotes 1 J. Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual (Bradford-on-Avon: Moonraker Press, 1978), p. 1. 2 J. Harrison, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion. Epilegomena & Themis (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1962), p. 537. 3 D.S. Mirsky, ‘Jane Ellen Harrison. Died 15 April 1928’, Slavonic and East European Review 7.20 (1929) 415. 4 For the fullest version of this now fairly established narrative of the place of Harrison in the context of myth-ritual scholarship, see Robert Ackerman’s The Myth and Ritual School: J.G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists (New York: Routledge, 2002); for useful summaries, see also Robert Segal’s ‘In Defence of Mythology: The History of Modern Theories of Myth’, Annals of Scholarship 1 (1980) 3–49 as well as Matthew Sterenberg’s Mythic Thinking in Twentieth-Century Britain: Meaning for Modernity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 18–43; and Martha C. Carpentier, Ritual, Myth, and the Modernist Text: the Influence of Jane Ellen Harrison on Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1998), pp. 13–68. See also biographies by Annabel Robinson, The Life and Work of Jane Ellen Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and Mary Beard, The Invention of Jane Harrison (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 5 See Marianna Torgovnick for a seminal study on modernist primitivism (see M. Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990)), and, for example, Simon Gikandi’s writing on Picasso as an illuminating case study (‘Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference’, Modernism/Modernity 10. 3 (2003) 455–80). 6 M.K. Louis, Persephone Rises, 1860–1927: Mythography, Gender, and the Creation of a New Spirituality (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2009), p. 24. 7 Ibid., p. ix. 8 Ibid., p. 22. 9 For a more detailed contextualisation of the theological and social-scientific context to which Harrison was responding, see N. Enemark, ‘Recrossing the Ritual Bridge’: Jane Ellen Harrison’s Theory of Art in the Work of Hope Mirrlees, PhD thesis (University of Glasgow, 2015). 10 Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual, p. 18. 11 Ibid., pp. 19–20. 12 Ibid., p. 20. 13 Ibid., pp. 14–15. 14 Harrison, Themis, p. 331. 15 Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual, p. 32. 16 Harrison, Themis, p. 510. 17 Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual, p. 58. 18 Harrison, Themis, pp. 45–6. For Durkheim’s social theory of religion see his treatise, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 19 Ibid., p. 476. 20 Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual, p. 68. 21 S. Schwartz, The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth-Century Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 5. 22 W. James, qtd in Schwartz, The Matrix of Modernism, pp. 12–14. 23 Schwartz, The Matrix of Modernism, p. 5. 24 H. Kenner, The Pound Era (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 42–3. 25 K. Stephen, The Misuse of Mind: A Study of Bergson’s Attack on Intellectualism, with a Prefatory Letter by Henri Bergson (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1922), pp. 10–11. 26 J. Harrison, Alpha &Omega (London: Sedgewick and Jackson, 1915 (1947)), p. 204. 27 Ibid., p. 202. 28 Ibid., p. 203. 29 Ibid., p. 204. 30 J. Harrison, ‘Rationalism and Religious Reaction’, delivered at South Place Institute on 6 March 1919’ (London: Watts, 1919), pp. 13, 20. 31 Ibid., p. 20. 32 Ibid., p. 24. 33 For a discussion of how the term ‘modernism’ arose from a theological context and was only later applied to an aesthetic movement, see for example, Charles Lock’s article ‘Modernism, the Word’ (Rev. of Rethinking Modernism, Marianne Thormählen (ed.), Literary Research 20.39–40 (2004) 279–88.) 34 Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion: Epilegomena & Themis (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1962), pp. li–lii. 35 Harrison, ‘Rationalism and Religious Reaction’, p. 23. Here, Harrison’s own early interest in high church ritualism should be noted. For more detail see Margaret Armstrong’s Sacraments, Sacrifice, and Ritual: High Church Mysticism in the Letters of Jane Ellen Harrison and Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, PhD thesis (Florida State University, ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, 2007, 3263841) and Rita Wright’s Jane Ellen Harrison’s “Handmaiden No More”: Victorian Ritualism and the Fine Arts, PhD thesis (The University of Utah, ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, 2009, 3357464). 36 Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual, p. 113. 37 Harrison, Alpha & Omega, p. 218. 38 See Torgovnick for an analysis of how modernism glorifies, objectifies and appropriates what were seen as ‘savage’ cultures representing ‘our untamed selves, our id forces—libidinous, irrational, violent, dangerous’ but also mystically inclined and in harmony with nature (Gone Primitive, p. 8). 39 Harrison, Alpha & Omega, p. 218. 40 Ibid., pp. 232–40. 41 J.J. White, Literary Futurism: Aspects of the First Avant-Garde (Oxford: Oxford University Press/Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 302–3. 42 J. Harrison, Reminiscences of a Student’s Life (Richmond: Hogarth Press, 1925), pp. 86–7. 43 S. Fiske, ‘From Ritual to the Archaic in Modernism: Frazer, Harrison, Freud, and the Persistence of Myth’, in J. Rabarté (ed.), A Handbook of Modernism Studies (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell (2013), pp. 173–91, p. 175. 44 S. Fiske, Heretical Hellenism: Women Writers, Ancient Greece, and the Victorian Popular Imagination (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008), p. 162. 45 Numerous studies over the past three decades have traced Harrison’s influence on and intersections with the literary concerns of modernist writers. See K.J. Philips, ‘Jane Harrison and Modernism’, Journal of Modern Literature 17.4 (1991) 465–76; Carpentier, Ritual, Myth, and the Modernist Text; Robert Crawford, The Savage and the City in the Work of T.S. Eliot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Jean Mills, Virginia Woolf, Jane Ellen Harrison and the Spirit of Modernist Classicism (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University, 2014); Andrew Radford, Mary Butts and British Neo-Romanticism: The Enchantment of Place (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014) and ‘Excavating a Secret History: Mary Butts and the Return of the Nativist’, Connotations 17.1 (2007/08); Eileen Gregory, H.D. and Hellenism: Classic Lines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Elizabeth Anderson (H.D. and Modernist Religious Imagination: Mysticism and Writing (London: Bloomsbury, 2013) and ‘Dancing Modernism: Ritual, Ecstasy and the Female Body’, Literature and Theology 22.3 (2008) 354–67. 46 J. Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 10. 47 J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 14. 48 H. Ball, ‘Dada Manifesto’, in H. Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, John Elderfield (ed.), trans. Ann Raimes (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 219–21. 49 For leading research on the trend of visual poetry see, for example, Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999); William Bohn, The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry, 1914–1928 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993); and Drucker, The Visible Word. For an exploration into the kinship between visual and sound poetry see Gerald Bruns, The Material of Poetry: Sketches for a Philosophical Poetics, Volume 1 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2005). 50 R. Sheppard, Modernism—Dada—Postmodernism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000), p. 184. 51 A.W. Geertz, ‘Can We Move Beyond Primitivism? On Recovering the Indigenes of Indigenous Religion in the Academic Study of Religion’, in J.K. Olupona (ed.), Beyond Primitivism: Indigenous Religious Traditions and Modernity (London: Psychology Press, 2004), pp. 37–70. 52 See D.F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); J. McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); and G. Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 53 This primacy of the aurality of this poem is also suggested by its inclusion in the Contemporary Poets Series, a series of recordings begun in 1931 for which its creators, professors W. Cabell Greet and George W. Hibbitt, actively sought to preserve poems that were better heard than read (see C. Mustazza, ‘James Weldon Johnson and the Speech Lab Recordings’, Oral Tradition 30/1 (2016) 95–110). 54 S. Gertrude, Gertrude Stein: Selections (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008), p. 190. 55 M. Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy, p. 23. 56 See N. Enemark, ‘Recrossing the Ritual Bridge’, pp. 64–177. 57 Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual, p. 127. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., p. 130. 60 Ibid., p. 113. 61 See, for example, Craig G. Staff’s Modernist Painting and Materiality (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011) for an overview of this development in the visual arts. 62 V. Woolf, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, in D. Bradshaw (ed.), Virginia Woolf: Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 38. 63 See Carpentier on Harrison and Eliot (Ritual, Myth and the Modernist Text, pp. 101–70) and Olga Taxidou, Modernism and Performance: Jarry to Brecht (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 148–55. 64 A. Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove/Atlantic Inc., 1994), p. 39. 65 Ibid., p. 96. See, for example, Bettina Knapp’s essay ‘Antonin Artaud’s Revolutionary Theatre of Cruelty’ (Today’s Speech 17.3 (1969) 26–30) for a useful overview. 66 Ibid., p. 86. 67 Ibid., p. 89. 68 Ibid., pp. 87–90. 69 Julie Stone Peters’ essay ‘Jane Harrison and the Savage Dionysus: Archaeological Voyages, Ritual Origins, Anthropology and the Modern Theatre’ (Modern Drama 51.1 (2008) 1–41) considers the link between Harrison’s theory and the turn towards anti-theatricality in the theatre in the early 20th century (although she does not consider any concrete examples of modern theatre). 70 S. O’Hagan, ‘Interview: Marina Abramović’ (www.theguardian.com, 3 October 2010), accessed 11 February 2018. 71 Quoted in R. Copeland, Merce Cunningham: The Modernising of Modern Dance (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 122–3. 72 Ibid., p. 132. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid., p. 134. 75 Ibid., p. 135. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid., pp. 135–6. 78 See, for example, H.B. Segel’s Body Ascendant: Modernism and the Physical Imperative (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) and Patricia Vertinsky’s ‘Transatlantic Traffic in Expressive Movement: From Delsarte and Dalcroze to Margaret H’Doubler and Rudolf Laban’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 26.13 (2009) 2031–51 (DOI: 10.1080/09523360903148879) on the modernist obsession with physicality. 79 M. Huxley, ‘F. Matthias Alexander and Mabel Elsworth Todd: Proximities, Practices and the Psycho-Physical’, Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices 3.1–2 (2012) 25–42. 80 See Carrie J. Preston’s Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) for an analysis of Delsartism and its influence on modern dance, particularly Isadora Duncan and Ruth St Denis and Ted Shawn. For an analysis of the influence of both Delsarte and Dalcroze on forms of expressive movement in dance and gymnastics around the turn of the century, see Vertinsky, ‘Transatlantic Traffic in Expressive Movement’. 81 Harrison, Alpha & Omega, p. 217. 82 I. Duncan, ‘The Dance of the Future’, The Art of the Dance (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1928), p. 56. 83 Preston, Modernism’s Mythic Pose, pp. 144–91. 84 I. Duncan, My Life (New York: Horace Liveright, 1917), p. 55. 85 D. Duncan, C. Pratl, and C. Splatt (eds), Life Into Art: Isadora Duncan and Her World (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), p. 36. See also 86 P. Shorey, qtd in L. Edmunds, Approaches to Greek Myth (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 41. 87 Mary Fanton Roberts, qtd in I. Duncan, My Life (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2013), pp. 195–6. 88 Duncan, ‘The Dance of the Future’, pp. 54–63. 89 See Preston’s Modernism’s Mythic Pose (pp. 160–8) for a discussion of how Duncan’s approach to the joining of body and spirit engages with the work of the three intellectuals that Duncan cites as her ‘masters’, Ernst Haeckel, Walt Whitman, and Friedrich Nietzsche. 90 Duncan, My Life, p. 75. 91 Ibid., p. 168. 92 H. Thomas, Dance, Modernity and Culture: Explorations in the Sociology of Dance (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 71. 93 Quoted in Copeland, Merce Cunningham, p. 137. See also Preston on Duncan’s attempts to break down the boundary between spectator and performer and encourage audience participation and how she drew on Harrison for this (Modernism’s Mythic Pose, p. 174). 94 See Preston’s Modernism’s Mythic Pose (pp. 178–160) for a summary of how Duncan constructs this ‘illusion of spontaneity’. 95 Thomas, Dance, Modernity and Culture, p. 66. 96 See also Preston, Modernism’s Mythic Pose. 97 O. Taxidou, ‘The Dancer and the Übermarionette: Isadora Duncan and Edward Gordon Craig’, Mime Journal 26.3 (2017) 8 (DOI: 10.5642/mimejournal.20172601.03). 98 Duncan, My Life, p. 62. 99 Ibid., p. 63. 100 U. Boccioni, ‘What Divides Us from Cubism’, in Ester Coen (ed.), Umberto Boccioni (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988), p. 247. 101 Quoted in Copeland, Merce Cunningham, p. 137. 102 Ibid., p. 132. 103 For the influence of Dalcroze on the Ballet Russes, through the dancer and choreographer Marie Rambert, see S.L. Odom, ‘The Dalcroze Method, Marie Rambert, and Le Sacre du printemps’, Modernist Cultures 9.1 (2014) 7–26. 104 D. Jowitt, Time and the Dancing Image (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1988). 105 M. Franko, Martha Graham in Love and War: The Life in the Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 112. 106 M. Graham, Blood Memory: An Autobiography (London: Sceptre Books/Hodder Stoughton, 1993), p. 7. 107 M. Graham, qtd in D. Reynolds, Rhythmic Subjects. Uses of Energy in the Dances of Mary Wigman, Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham (Alton: Dance Books, 2007), pp. 100–1. 108 J. Goodridge, Rhythm and Timing of Movement in Performance: Drama, Dance and Ceremony (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1999), p. 129. 109 Graham, Blood Memory, p. 224. 110 Thomas, Dance, Modernity and Culture, p. 129. 111 Drucker, The Visible Word, p. 10. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press 2019; All rights reserved. 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TI - Jane Ellen Harrison and a ritual aesthetic: the early 20th century turn towards materiality, embodiment and performativity in the arts
JO - Literature and Theology
DO - 10.1093/litthe/frz040
DA - 2020-03-01
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DP - DeepDyve
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