Introduction

Abstract

A stage-like setting, with wooden floorboards and half-drawn curtains, provides the striking venue to showcase Blake’s grotesque creature in one of his most familiar paintings The Ghost of a Flea (c.1819–20). This creature — based on one of his visions and representing men who were in their human lives ‘blood-thirsty’ (BR 492) — stands in a performance space. In an article in The Guardian, Jonathan Jones says, ‘Blake’s flea is evil, gothic, grotesque, stalking through a starry realm between stage curtains — walking the boards, in fact, as if the artist had ensnared this creature to appear in a spectacle at Drury Lane Theatre’ (para. 5).1 Caught in mid-stride, the flea carries a receptacle for the blood of the victims that it will drink and puts itself on display presumably for an audience who sits in the darkened auditorium. It takes its mark, right foot forward, as one of the several stars falling onstage spotlights the flea, illuminating its body to indicate a pivotal moment in this performance much like the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theatrical convention of the ‘point’ where an actor interrupted the regular flow of a performance to enact a monologue explicitly for the spectators. Reminiscent of the way an actor distinguishes his/her performance of a famous speech in a play, Blake isolates this moment, where the creature flaunts the bowl used to collect the blood of its human target, with starlight.KeywordsDramatic PerformancePivotal MomentContemporary DanceRomantic TheatreDramatic TheoryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.