Dance into modernism
| Introduction | People | Projects | Statistics |
Dr Susan Sones, tutor in English at St Hilda’s college, has found more correlation than you might think between the 15 years she spent as a soloist with the Scottish royal ballet and her current career.
‘There’s a physical discipline as well as a mental discipline that’s common to the two professions’, she says.
In 2002 Dr Jones won an innovation award from what was then the AHRB to explore the relationship between narrative and dance in the choreography of the early Ballet Rambert and others. She now has a two-year Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to complete her work on literary modernism and dance in the first half of the 20th century.
‘This is not just about references to dance in books,’ she says, ‘but about the use by modernist writers of dance as a metaphor for such things as physical and spiritual liberation. Dance is used emblematically, as a metaphor for that which can be communicated without words.’ Working with the collection of filmed archives at the New York Public Library, Dr Jones is also studying the work of choreographers such as Leonid Massine, who collaborated with modernist artists, musicians and writers including Picasso, Satie and Cocteau.
