Dance

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explores Yeats’s apparent shift to a ‘new’ kind of dance for his plays and shows how it had a longer gestation than we might think. It suggests that the later dance style emerged as a natural development of Yeats’s ongoing ideas about the function of the symbol, ceremonial ritual, and a poetics of impersonality. Thus the chapter also considers the development of these three themes and their intersection principally in relation to the choreographic focus of later dance plays such as At the Hawk’s Well (1916), The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919), Fighting the Waves (1928), King of the Great Clock Tower (1934), and A Full Moon in March (1935). Finally, the chapter suggests how Yeats produced an innovative form of theatre that, in spite of his anxieties, found itself in step with debates among contemporary dance practitioners and choreographers of the period.