(SE DESARROLLA UN CUARTO INTERMEDIO) Alcalde: Reanudamos nuestra Sesión de Concejo

At the same time that the Ballet promotes a sense of a literary stage, it also draws parallels between the page-stage and the real-world stage of the War. Lee’s exposition forecasts the opening of F. T. Marinetti’s “Manifesto of the Futurist Dance”, to come two years later. He too begins in the omniscient style of a lesson, writing:

Once the glorious Italian ballet was dead and buried, there began in Europe stylisations of savage dances, elegant versions of exotic dances, modernizations of ancient dances. Parisian red pepper + panache + shield + lance + ecstasy in front of idols that have lost all meaning + undulations of Montmartre thighs = an erotic passeist anachronism for foreigners.172

Both pieces begin with a dogmatic tone that stresses the unique, even revolutionary quality of the dance to follow. Both also stress the uselessness of “out of fashion” modes of dance in the representation (through allegory) of the human body at war. For Marinetti, the manifesto dance is a calculated response to tired European repertoire; however, at the same 172 _{All subsequent quotations from Marinetti’s “Manifesto of the Futurist Dance” are uncited; please} see the full text in appendix.

time, he credits Nijinsky with an admirable revival of the dance: “With Nijinsky the pure geometry of the dance, free of mimicry and without sexual stimulation, appears for the first time”.

The “Manifesto of the Futurist Dance” comprises three separate dances sharply divided into separate movements. Each instructs a vocabulary of dehumanised movement in which the human body is made to behave like an aircraft (“Dance of the Aviator”), a firearm (“Dance of the Machine Gun”), and other mechanical objects (“Dance of the Shrapnel”). The dancer in each case delivers text either through recitation or hand-held placards. The placards continuously reaffirm that the importance of the dance is its message, not its corporeal artistry. Instead, armed with the placards, the body conveys a restricted vocabulary of mechanical movements that emphasise militaristic procedures and deemphasise natural expression. Still, the dancer is human—the body is not concealed by the sort of abstract masking and costuming seen in works by Cocteau (the skyscraper silhouette of the manager in Parade comes to mind). Marinetti, therefore, seems to want to retain the ironic contrast between body and machine without subsuming one into the other. The Marinetti danseuse is like a soldier—a body conscripted to perform the movements whether it is willing or not.

The human body in Marinetti’s ballet is not only performing the human, but also the material and metaphysical properties of war. The bodies of the two dancers (one a soldier and the other the danseuse) conjure the sounds of machine guns and flying shrapnel through their movements, which combine with the subtitle effect of the placards:

Movement 4: With the whole body vibrating, the hips weaving, and the arms making swimming motions, give the waves and flux and reflux and concentric or eccentric motions of echoes in ravines, in open fields and up the slopes of mountains. The danseuse will hold up a sign printed in black: Water duty; another in black: Mess duty; still another in black: The mules, the mail.

The danseuse, holding her placards and moving through sequences that resemble military drills, is performing a dance of duty and necessity. Marinetti writes as a short preface, “I want to give the fusion of the mountain with the parabola of the shrapnel. The fusion of the

carnal human song with the mechanical noise of shrapnel. To give the ideal synthesis of the war: a mountain soldier who carelessly sings beneath an uninterrupted vault of shrapnel”. Through its mechanisation of the body and the diagnosing of the physical properties of surrounding space, Marinetti’s ballet (if we can call it that) represents a trope that becomes prevalent in modernist ballet throughout the 20th _{century to which I will return in the} following chapters.173 _{Here, however, I am specifically concerned with Marinetti’s} repurposing of the body on the page to perform war, and the ways in which his text subsequently relates to Lee’s.

Whereas Marinetti “extracts” his dances from “the three mechanisms of war: shrapnel, the machine gun, and the airplane”, Lee’s ballet makes her “mechanisms” out of the humans involved.Still, they are subjected to the very machines Marinetti forms from the dancer’s body. In Ballet of the Nations, the personified Nations must dodge “the meteor- curve of a shell or the leaping flame of an exploding munition-magazine, while overhead fluttered and whirred great wings which showered down bomb-lightnings”. The meteor- curve of shells in Lee’s ballet turns up again in Marinetti’s, where movement is punctuated by the “whistling parabola of shrapnel”. In both works, there are forces outside the human that are mathematically derived, therefore impersonal, fearsome, and inevitable. Writing his ballet in 1917, Marinetti repeats the tone of fellow futurist Enrico Prampolini two years earlier, who imagined a theatre that could construct “the imminent and inevitable identification of man with motor, facilitating and perfecting an incessant exchange of intuition, rhythm, instinct, and metallic discipline”.174 _{The mechanisation of the human is} essential to Lee’s ballet, in which the dancing Nations use bodies for expendable, numberless vessels.

Importantly, “the ‘head’ of each nation is also what continues to survive in the ballet, even as the limbs are torn off and the body is disemboweled”. Each body comprises a dual nature: the body below the neck is offered to the bloodbath, whereas the head 173 _{See, for example: Patricia Gaborik and Andrea Harris. “From Italy and Russia to France and the} U.S.: ‘Fascist’ Futurism and Balanchine’s ‘American’ Ballet” in Avant-Garde Performance and

Material Exchange: Vectors of the Radical. Mike Sell, ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

174 _{Quoted by Gaborik and Harris, p. 27.}

(symbolising heads of state, government, authority) maintains its clarity and structure. The body is, in a sense, a war zone in and of itself. “Far from being an inert, passive, non- cultural and ahistorical term,” observes Elizabeth Grosz, “the body may be seen as the crucial term, the site of contestation, in a series of economic, political, sexual and intellectual struggles”.175 _{While the dancing body is subjected to the mechanical whims of} curves and parabolas, both ballets employ systems of physical and rhetorical structures to comment on war. One such structure is Satan’s matter-of-fact announcement that “this first figure of our Ballet is called The Defence of the Weak….

It will continue unremittingly at the Western End of the Stage, while the Eastern End is occupied by a not entirely symmetrical (for symmetry is apt to be fade176_{) choreographic invention called the Steam-Roller Movement} which will end up in the Triumph of such small Nationalities (and I sincerely hope many will join!) as may have any limbs left to dance with. With this pronouncement, Lee’s ballet is suddenly a map, defined by Western and Eastern ends. Similarly, Marinetti’s danseuse “will dance on top of a large, violently coloured geographical map (four meters square) on which will be drawn in large, highly visible characters the mountains, woods, rivers, geometries of the countryside, the great traffic centres of the cities, the sea”. The dance space is at once natural and political. The same can be said for the power which ballet itself wields in this new age: refashioned as war-dance, the previously tired form has sprung up in “South Africa and the Far East, and then in the Near East quite recently”. If ballet is now the means by which nations kill one another, then by Lee’s postulation it is a global danger.

Dance space, as an extension of theatrical space, helps Lee to articulate the abstract senselessness of war, a structure imposed by many. In the words of literary critic Paul Fussell, “Most people were terrified, and for everyone the dramaturgic provided a dimension within which the unspeakable could to a degree be familiarized and interpreted. After all, just as a play must have an ending, so might the war; just as an actor gets up

175 _{Elizabeth Grosz. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana} University Press, 1994, p. 19.

176 _{meaning tasteless, dull}

unhurt after the curtain falls […], so might the soldier”.177 _{Imagining the aftermath of war,} the English writer and diarist Lady Cynthia Asquith mused that “one will have to look at long vistas again, instead of short ones, and one will at last fully recognise that the dead are not only dead for the duration”.178 _{The safety of theatricality is an illusion, in other words.} There is a similar sense in Lee’s Ballet, that corporealising the warring nations provides a tangible vocabulary with which to articulate war-time sentiment and experience.

Additionally, by framing the global situation as a work of art, Lee lampoons human ignorance. The war becomes a spectator sport in which none of its participants seem concerned by the action or its consequences. Ballet dress, too, allows the bloodthirsty Nations to conceal their economic distress and consequently, part of their true identity: “The Nations had meanwhile assembled, each brilliant and tidy in its ballet dress, which was far better cut, and of handsomer stuff, of course, than its everyday broad-cloth or rags”. The ballet elevates its participants’ aesthetic standards so that the slaughter seems ironically placid and beautiful at the surface. By imbuing the scene with the elegance normally attached to the ballet, Lee highlights the vanity and oblivion of the figures within it.