Women Dancing: The Structure of Gender in Yeats's Early Plays for Dancers

Women Dancing: The Structure of Gender in Yeats's Early Plays for Dancers AMY KORITZ Yeats's plays for dancers were, in part, a response to the failure ofhis version of national literature to establish, conceptually as well as practically, a popular context for his work. He wrote, in 1919, that the Abbey was not the kind of theatre he had wished to create, "and its success has been to me a discouragement and a defeat.'" In "The Theatre," Yeats gave up the earlier ideal of an elite art that is also "the Art of the people,'" and accepted the necessity for two theatres, the Popular Theatre, and his own, "unpopular theatre" meant for a small audience in a small room and for which "there are my Four Playsjor Dancers as a beginning." 3 Yeats's adaptation ofNoh drama, his decision to call plays based on that form plays for dancers, the placing of a dance at the climax of the play, "instead of the disordered passion ofnature'" these came at a time of retreat from a public theatre after the failure of his conception of the relationship between pOlitics and art to set the agenda for the theatre in Ireland. This retreat received further impetus from Yeats's long-standing commitment to anti-realistic drama and staging, which in turn supported his belief in the usefulness ofdance to dramatic form. As a poet, Yeats had tried to devleop a style of acting and speaking that would provide the best possible setting for poetic drama. He realized that poetry, being highly conventionalized, non-realistic language, would seem incongruous against representational scenery and "naturalistic" acting, and what he was after was a unified, harmonious effect. Thus he praised Craig's production of Dido and Aeneas at the Purcell Society in 1901 for its creation of an "ideal country where everything was possible, even speaking in verse, or speaking to music, or the expression of the whole of life in a dance." 5 Being a poet, Yeats wished to set his own art in the most advantageous manner among the visual arts ofthe stage. AMY KORITZ Therefore it is not surprising when, in 1902, thinking that too often the actors' movements got in the way of a play's language, he praised one of Sarah Bernhardt's productions because of the performers' tendency to stand still, commenting that he "once counted twenty-seven quite slowly before anybody on a fairly well-filled stage moved." In the same essay Yeats recalls that he "once asked a dramatic company to let me rehearse them in barrels that they might forget gesture and have their minds free to think ofspeech for a while." If the body is to be subordinated in the service of speech, however, scenery must still take second place to the body: "I have been the advocate of the poetry as against the actor, but I am the advocate of the actor as against the scenery."· Yeats is here attacking both "realistic" scene painting that attempts twodimensional representation in a context made three-dimensional by the presence ofan actor, and which must therefore always fail to sustain its illusion, and Craig's tendency to allow scenery and lighting to overwhelm his actors.7 Yeats rejects the technology of the theatre altogether in his introduction to Ezra Pound's edition of Noh plays, "Certain Noble Plays of Japan" (1916) drama should now take place in an ordinary room, under ordinary lighting, with no attempt made at representational scenery. It was under these conditions that a Japanese dancer "was able, as he rose from the floor, where he had been sitting cross-legged, or as he threw out an ann, to recede from us into some more powerful life." "Because," Yeats continues, "that separation was achieved by human means alone, he receded but to inhabit as it were the deeps of the mind." The aesthetic effect is clearly to be sought in those "deeps of the mind," those collective archetypal experiences that give art a quasi-religious function and authority, but only through the mediation ofhuman agency - more specifically, through the body - does art properly elicit those experiences. Yeats explains that "[a]s a...