ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that some of the most important works of ‘modern’ concert dance re-imagine participant religious ritual and reconstruct it for a modern theatrical context. The pieces examined are Bronislava Ninjiska’s. Les Noces, Anthony Tudor’s Dark Elegies, and Robert North’s Death and the Maiden. It argues that these pieces work as representations of participant rituals chorally performed. Participant chorality produces a sense of togetherness in the participants that establishes what anthropologist Victor Turner called communitas, an experience of unity that has a deep metaphysical or spiritual dimension. The dance-theatre pieces considered here therefore deal with transitions of loss and the communal rituals used to cope with these transitions. These theatrical works cannot reconstruct the original sense of communitas that traditional, fully participant societies created with choral rituals, but they can create a substitute-image of it. The heresy of these artists did not lie in breaking completely with the past, but in connecting with it to enable a deep, spiritual, imaginal communitas to arise. This chapter analyses the ways these dance-works achieve this through the combination of traditional forms and themes with selected modernist techniques.
