Date of Award
2022
Degree Type
Open Access Master's Thesis
Degree Name
Cultural Studies, MA
Program
School of Arts and Humanities
Advisor/Supervisor/Committee Chair
Darrell Moore
Terms of Use & License Information
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Rights Information
© 2022 Pilar von Hummel
Subject Categories
Critical and Cultural Studies | Social and Cultural Anthropology
Abstract
The body is a term that has been vastly manipulated but never fully trapped. The body is in constant transformation and movement, always becoming. Catherine Malabou claims that our bodies are plastic, meaning they have the capacity to give and receive form as well as to explode. Plasticity which has an element of temporality is resistance, it is multiple and transformational. What are the conditions of possibility for the body to transform? Art resists and dance as art resists with the body: its main medium is the body. I claim that dance as art is a site to put plasticity into operation. As my primary object I will analyze The Rite of Spring. The piece with music by Igor Stravinsky and original choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky will help us trace how dance can ignite plasticity. I will analyze Nijinsky’s version and two iterations by Pina Bausch and Jose Vidal. The Rite of Spring has not only transformed through times, through all its versions, it has advanced possibilities of thinking otherwise, to produce new relationships and connections, allowing newness. Dance as art produces a force, that ignites the possibility of change. By delving deeper onto a source that has changed through times, we can not only see how meaning changes from its original version through time, but we can analyze its re-imaginations, all departing from the original, all advancing a choreographic transformation. I will also analyze the possibilities of igniting plasticity through the performing arts event which happens in present time. If a work of art can affect, and tell a story, this story keeps affecting and appearing to be retold, always with traces of its history, always with new elements through different voices, always producing breaks.
ISBN
9798342762625
Recommended Citation
von Hummel, Pilar. (2022). The Rite of Becoming. CGU Theses & Dissertations, 882. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/882.
