The Embodiment of the Unconscious, Hysteria, Surrealism, and Tanztheater

Abstract

The primary subject of this dissertation is mental illness and performance of the hysterical symptom as they were investigated by the Swedish choreographer Mats Ek (Giselle, 1982), Tanztheater (from 1975-1979), and Second Wave Feminism. Historically, the examination begins in the nineteenth century, with the staging of madness in the romantic ballet Giselle (1841), and medical showings at Salpêtrière (1870s). The historical sites point to the interweaving of medical and dance cultures, and to a tendency towards pathologization of idiosyncratic movement expression within nineteenth century discourses on heredity, degeneration, and female health. To historically probe the ways in which twentieth century concert dance commented on pathologization of femininity, female performative labor, and expressive movement, the examination extends to: the fin-de-siècle café-concert scene; psychoanalytic sessions of 1890s, in which dancing played a role in both diagnosis and treatment; Nijinsky’s dance modernism as seen in Le Sacre du Printemps (1913); the anti-psychiatry within the post-1st World War Surrealism, and the post-2nd World War psychologically inflected choreographies by Antony Tudor, Martha Graham, Donya Feuer and Paul Sanasardo. The performance sites are investigated in relationship to the concepts of the unconscious, trauma, hysteria, hystericization, symptom, and expression. The dissertation proposes that late nineteenth century hysteria gained emancipatory meanings in the theoretical work of twentieth century dance scholarship, feminism, cultural criticism, and Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis. On the side of practice, Tanztheater participated in reclaiming hysteria. The Rite of Spring (1975), Bluebeard (1977), Café Müller (1978), and Arien (1979) explored traumatic memory, and male/female relationships in context of the post-2nd World War consumerist culture. I examine Pina Bausch’s and Mats Ek’s choreographies in dialogue with the contemporary theory to show that dance spectatorship can bring about an understanding of how the residues of political and personal past shape the experiences of the present.