Mansfield, Movement and the Ballets Russes

Summary

‘If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution. Emma Goldman

‘I would like you to see the dancing here.

Mansfield to John Middleton Murry, 27 October 1922

For Katherine Mansfield, dance – especially Russian dance – was integral not only to her life but also to her art, as her 27 October 1922 letter to her husband John Middleton Murry from Gurdjieff's institute in France demonstrates. The expressiveness, staging, excitement, exoticism and movement of dance found its way into her prose following her exposure principally to the Ballets Russes. The company's thrilling visual narratives initially encouraged Mansfield to experiment and revise her own treatment of language and form. Rhythm, the journal she co-edited with Murry, contained numerous commentaries and essays on the Ballets Russes, along with dramatic woodcuts of dancers in action, reflecting both the Ballets Russes's style as well as Mansfield's own attitude towards movement, which would later be expressed in her writing.

The impact of modern dance on Mansfield's writing, expanded by her love of Russian culture and music, is wide-ranging. For Mansfield, dance became the entrée to a new form and a new freedom of expression which she found intoxicating. The influence of dance on her work, however, is less the idea of social dance recently studied by Rishona Zimring, concentrating on festivity and the power of women, but a more avant-garde, experimental dance seen in the Ballets Russes that offered unorthodox movements, stage design and costumes that presented Mansfield with original approaches to character and setting. Nolonger would she deal with, in the words of Woolf, ‘this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner’. Her short stories would assume an incisive objectivity reflecting a Chekhovian dispassion to create a truthful vision of life and death marked by movement and action, duplicating the free expression found in the new dance. To do otherwise would be ‘false, unreal, merely conventional’. A new emphasis on movement accompanied the new attraction of dance, which was soon visible in the dance imagery of Yeats, Eliot and Lawrence as well as Mansfield.

‘At the Russian Library you meet men belonging to every class of society [… and] the smoke which issues from cigars and pipes and cigarettes welds all these atoms of Russian society into an indistinct mass.

Count E. Armfelt7