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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
W. B. Yeats's "Two Plays for Dancers" presents a remarkable fusion of poetry, drama, and choreography, offering fresh interpretations of classical themes through a modernist lens. The collection features 'The Land of Heart's Desire' and 'The Only Jealousy of Emer,' both exemplifying Yeats's unique ability to blend lyrical language with the visceral energy of movement. Written during a period of intense cultural revival in Ireland, these plays highlight Yeats's engagement with the burgeoning Nationalist movement while encapsulating the tensions between myth and modernity, spirit and the corporeal. The integration of dance motifs elevates the theatrical experience, inviting readers to engage deeply with the dialectics of emotion and form. W. B. Yeats, a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival, was deeply influenced by his interest in mysticism, folklore, and traditional Irish culture. His lifelong exploration of spiritualism, coupled with a passionate commitment to artistic expression, culminated in these works, which reflect his quest for a deeper understanding of the human condition. Yeats's association with the Abbey Theatre and his engagement with dancers and choreographers illustrate his dedication to expanding the boundaries between poetry and performance art. "Two Plays for Dancers" is essential reading for anyone fascinated by the intersection of theater and dance, as well as those interested in modernist literature. Yeats's visionary approach not only reshapes traditional narratives but also offers a profound exploration of the transformative power of art. This work stands as a testament to the enduring legacy of one of the 20th century's most significant literary figures. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Two plays for dancers
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume presents a focused selection from W. B. Yeats’s dramatic art: a single-author collection that gathers a preface and two of his “plays for dancers.” Rather than a comprehensive Collected Plays or a full body of work, it offers a concentrated view of a distinct mode within his theatre, where poetry, ritual, and choreographed movement converge. The purpose is to bring into one place a compact statement of Yeats’s mature dramatic experiment, allowing readers and theatre-makers to encounter the texts as a complementary pair. Together they exemplify his quest for a symbolic, ceremonial stage that resists naturalism and privileges the image and the song.
The collection includes three kinds of text: an authorial preface and two verse dramas designed for dance. The preface provides context for reading and staging, positioning the plays within Yeats’s evolving theatrical ideals. The dramas themselves belong to a hybrid genre—spoken poetry shaped for stylized movement, with roles conceived for dancers as well as actors. Their dramaturgy depends on chant-like speech, symbolic actions, and suggestive staging, rather than conventional plot-driven realism. They are lyric dramas that invite musical accompaniment and choreographic design, written to be experienced as a fusion of voice, gesture, and image in a spare, ritualized performance space.
Composed in the early twentieth century, these plays reflect Yeats’s engagement with myth, folklore, and non-Western performance models, especially theatre that values concentrated gesture and musical pattern. By turning to dance and mask-like characterization, he created a modern, symbolic theatre distinct from the prevailing realist stage. The collection demonstrates how Yeats cultivated a dramatic language where poetry carries the weight of action, and where the stage becomes a site of visionary intensity. It also reveals his conviction that drama can renew cultural memory through ritual form, and that the theatre, stripped to essentials, can embody states of mind as much as events.
The preface frames the purposes and methods of the plays, guiding readers toward a mode of attention keyed to rhythm, image, and ceremony. It underscores that the works are written to be seen and heard as well as read, and that their economy of setting is not austerity but concentration. In presenting the rationale for dancer-centered dramaturgy, the preface clarifies the desired balance between speech and movement, between narrative outline and symbolic act. It also invites consideration of how music, costume, and pace shape meaning, preparing audiences for a theatre of suggestion where implication and pattern matter more than explanation.
The Only Jealousy of Emer draws upon the heroic legends surrounding Cuchulain and the pressures that mythic love and renown exert on mortal lives. Its premise turns on a crisis in which the hero stands at the edge of the human world while those who love him confront the claims of the otherworld. The drama unfolds through patterned dialogue and movement rather than literal combat, focusing on inward conflict and the discipline of feeling. By setting speech against ritualized dance, the play explores how fidelity, desire, and honor are tested when fate and supernatural forces hover at the border of ordinary life.
The Dreaming of the Bones turns to Irish history and legend, bringing a contemporary wanderer into encounter with figures from the nation’s troubled past. Its premise rests on a nighttime meeting in a landscape saturated with memory, where the living are asked to weigh an old transgression and its lingering stain. The play does not proceed by historical explanation, but by lyrical suggestion and carefully patterned appearances. Dance and song condense time, allowing past and present to co-exist on stage. Through gesture and chant, the drama considers whether forgiveness is possible, and what it would mean for a country haunted by betrayal.
Read together, the two dramas illuminate a shared constellation of concerns: love pledged against forces beyond human command, the cost of loyalty, and the persistence of guilt across time. Each play sets a human choice within a ritual frame that amplifies its significance, linking private feeling to communal fate. The characters are emblematic without losing tenderness, and the action is purposeful yet dreamlike. Yeats aligns myth with the present, not to escape history but to deepen it. The result is a theatre where ethical and emotional questions are not argued but enacted as patterns of movement, sound, and silence.
Stylistically, these works are marked by compressed verse, refrains, and a musical syntax that shapes how the audience breathes and sees. Repetition functions as thought made visible; masks or mask-like characterization strip away accident to reveal type and destiny. Stage pictures are spare and bold, favoring emblematic objects and controlled lighting. The plays rely on choruses and attendant figures who comment, frame, or ritualize the action, turning scenes into ceremonies. Silence, too, has weight, as pauses become part of the score. This is drama as incantation: language and gesture interlock to make a single fabric of sound, pattern, and vision.
Because movement is integral, these texts invite choreographic interpretation rather than exhaustive scenic detail. The dancer’s body becomes an instrument of metaphor, translating inner conflict into line, tempo, and stillness. Music—whether drum, flute, or voice—supports the cadence of speech and the entrance of presences that are not strictly naturalistic. The plays are scaled for intimate venues, where concentration can be sustained and nuances register. Yet they are not limited by size; their theatrical economy seeks intensity, not smallness. Directors and performers will find that the scores of speech and motion yield differently with each ensemble’s rhythm and discipline.
The collection remains significant for its modernist recasting of theatre’s resources. Yeats integrates lyric poetry with dance to propose a drama of essences, anticipating later experiments in movement-based staging and intermedial performance. He demonstrates how myth can be contemporary without becoming decorative, and how stylization can produce emotional clarity rather than distance. For readers and practitioners alike, these plays continue to model an approach where form is meaning—where structure, pacing, and imagery carry ethical and historical weight. Their influence persists in the idea that theatrical truth can emerge from pattern and ritual, not merely from the reproduction of everyday behavior.
For readers approaching the volume on the page, the preface offers orientation, while the plays reward attention to cadence, repeated motifs, and the understated richness of stage directions. One reads not for exposition but for the choreography of feeling. Imagining the score of movements—entries, turns, stillnesses—unlocks dimensions that prose synopsis cannot capture. The texts encourage a kind of reading that is simultaneously auditory and visual, where the eye measures lines as steps and the ear hears silence as part of the music. In this way, the volume becomes both literature and blueprint, sustaining the creative act of performance in the mind.
Taken as a whole, the collection presents a distilled theatre of vision. It gathers two plays that converse across legend and history, each illuminating the other’s concerns with love, choice, and the burden of memory. The preface situates their aims, so that readers and stage artists can respond with informed imagination. While not a comprehensive survey of Yeats’s drama, it offers a clear path into one of his most distinctive undertakings. It invites reflection on how tradition can be renewed through form, and how the simplest means—voice, rhythm, gesture—can carry a world of feeling and thought to the stage.
