Baroque Bodies: Agency, Expression and Movement

Abstract

The focus of this chapter is the human body as it is represented and interpreted in baroque writing and performance. In his 1677 treatise Ethics the philosopher Baruch Spinoza contradicts Cartesian dualism, claiming that matter and spirit are united by one fundamental universal substrate. Between the late 1800s and 1914 the German scientist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel popularised many of Spinoza’s ideas for a modern readership, and Haeckel’s comprehensive exposition of pantheism and monist beliefs underpinned his own aesthetic sense of nature and her forms. My work on the Trauerspiel in earlier chapters suggests a particular preoccupation with the realm of matter, the significance of the human body and soul and a defining relationship between subject and object. Duncan’s theories of dance allow me to further explore these themes and to strengthen my argument by using a completely different combination of modernist art-form and baroque source. My focus will be Spinoza’s definitions of body, spirit, ‘motion-and-rest’, ‘conatus’ and form, and the ways in which the Isadora Duncan assimilated these monist theories in her writing and choreography. Whilst developing arguments from previous chapters, this section reveals a very different kind of gesture and physicality when compared with those of baroque tableau and Schrei performance.