Modernisms Moving Bodies

Michelle Clayton, Brown University

Abstract:
This article explores the movements of modernist bodies across Europe and
the Americas in the early twentieth century. Arguing that scholarship is
still insufficiently attuned to the diversity and porousness of art-forms and
languages that actually characterized the period, the essay tracks the movement
of dancers through an expansive Western circuit, showcasing their involvement
in unsuspected forms of circulation, collaboration, and cultural exchange.
Focusing in particular on Trtola Valencia, Vaslav Nijinsky, and Charlie Chaplin,
the article demonstrates the cross-cultural movements implied in their own
performances and tours; but it balances this interest in the modernist traveler
with a focus on the figure designated by Mary Louise Pratt as the travelee,
the one who is visited. Collecting responses in multiple languages and artforms from travelees in the spaces through which these performers passed,
it is argued, allows scholars to configure new maps of cultural modernity.
Keywords: modernism; dance; travel; Chaplin; Nijinsky; Trtola Valencia.

In April 1915, the African-American boxer Jack Johnson, who had

held the title of World Heavyweight Champion since 1908, was finally
defeated in Havana. His seven-year reign of superiority over a series
of white rivals had provoked considerable anxiety throughout the
United States, and there was tremendous eagerness in the country to
watch his defeat on film. However, a 1912 ban on the transportation
of fight films enacted in part because of Johnsons triumphs made
it impossible for the material object itself to be brought into the
United States. The films producer devised an ingenious way around
Modernist Cultures 9.1 (2014): 2745
DOI: 10.3366/mod.2014.0072
Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/mod

Modernist Cultures
the edict: positioning his projector on the far side of the Canadian
border, he projected the film onto a tent pegged just inside the United
States, where a team proceeded to rephotograph its individual frames
with an eye to retranslating them into film. The judge appointed to
oversee the case, however, was unamused and unbending, and the
experiment in infiltration and reconnection was brought to a sudden
halt.1
This policing of borders might stand as an image for the current
state of modernist studies. For all its recent vaunting of a new
transnational interdisciplinarity, modernist scholarship still tends to
restrict itself to circuits involving common languages (usually English)
and single art forms; those studies which aim to dismantle boundaries
between different disciplines such as literature, art, music, film, and
dance remain markedly monolingual in their scope.2 Yet the early
decades of the twentieth century saw much more flexible forms of
circulation, collaboration, and cultural exchange than this separation
allows for, forms characterized by porousness between artistic media
and geographical and linguistic areas. When we broaden our focus to
accommodate work in multiple languages or in multiple art-forms,
a very different picture of the period begins to emerge: a picture
populated by swarming bodies in real or virtual transit back and forth
between different geographical areas. The most interesting Languages
of Modernism the theme of a recent Modernist Studies Association
conference may not be languages at all, but rather dance, film,
material artifacts and traveling cultures.
These languages traveled through the movement of bodies. Take
the example of Marcel Duchamp, who crisscrossed the Atlantic north
and south several times during the war years, alongside a host of
avant-garde accomplices such as Francis Picabia, whose painting Star
Dancer on a Transatlantic Steamer hints at eclectic travel-companions.3
Another ubiquitous performer was the Swiss-born Dadaist Arthur
Cravan, nephew of Oscar Wilde, who appeared on virtually all the
stages available to a modernist artist: page, stage, screen, even boxing
ring. He threw himself into the latter role with such determination and
ostentation that he actually faced Jack Johnson in a much-publicized
fight in Barcelona in 1916, geared to raise money to finance Cravans
escape from war-torn Europe to the United States.4 Poet and pugilist,
Cravans body showcases the multiple capabilities of the avant-garde
artist, the ability to function within different arenas and to turn bodies
as much as language into art-works; but it also shows his contact with
other bodies, the impressions left upon them, even by a performance
which may have remained virtual.

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Cravan ultimately disappeared on a boat off the Gulf of Mexico
in 1918: en route to Argentina, where he was expected to meet a
variety of fellow European artists in refuge from the war, including
the ubiquitous Duchamp, and Cravans pregnant wife, British-born
poet Mina Loy. Cravan may have failed or perhaps refused to leave
any lasting trace of himself, yet his example presents a knot which
I want to untangle in what follows: the movement of modernist
bodies-in-transit across a variety of spaces, whether geographical,
scenographic, filmic, or textual, and the transformations they effected
in themselves and others through their movements. As we will see,
this is the case even, or perhaps especially, when those transformations
are truncated. In other words, I will be mapping out here a series of
neglected, forgotten, or unnoticed encounters, which nonetheless, I
will suggest, had enormous cultural relevance, and around which we
can reorganize our understanding of the period in its cross-cultural
interplays.
The best place to begin this reorganization is with arts of
movement, particularly dance. Dance was not only the occasion for
intercultural connections in the modernist period, but their vehicle,
and the tours of dancers placed unusual pressure on the cross-cultural
relation between performer and public. Audiences proved themselves
inordinately sensitive to the micro-politics of movement onstage and
off, to the bend of a neck, the flick of a wrist, or the sideways cabriolet
which punctuates so many of Chaplins dance-like films. In a variety
of locales, audiences built important, if imaginary, cultural projects
around their own reimaginings of those gestures, extending them
in ways and in generative directions unimagined by the performers
themselves. Gesture is here suggestion, an invitation to cross divides of
space, time, culture.
These kinds of cross-cultural journeys began with a fantasy of
time-travel. In 1896, Maurice Emmanuel published an enormously
influential study which not only deduced images of movement from
the static attitudes represented on Greek frescoes, vases, and statuary,
but just as significantly, suggested that the process might be reversed:
that by striking those attitudes, present-day bodies might access
and recapture the sensibility of the classical past.5 The following
years saw dancers such as Isadora Duncan flocking to museums the
British Museum and the Louvre and increasingly, to sites associated
with a European classical past (Athens) or synonymous with a
time-transcending exoticism (India, Japan, North Africa).6 By the
1910s, this had translated into a double pedigree expected of all
dancers in Europe: to have immersed themselves in the study of

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images of the classical past, and to have visited sites outside the
European circuit usually to the east, but occasionally encompassing
a south beginning in Spain. In these tentative engagements with the
foreign, the European dancer was expected to remain a neutral or
universal subject, studying particularisms without sinking into them.
The point of these journeys (which were most often imaginary) was
the production of a mobile European subject whose performances
might offer audiences a synecdochic, kinaesthetic experience of other
cultures, i.e. the dancer as a portable worlds fair. Dancers movements,
both within their own dances and on their ever-more ambitious tours
of regions of the world, promised to bring both the past and the
foreign within physical and conceptual reach of early twentieth century
European publics.
What tends to be left out of these accounts is the question of the
reception of those dancers while on tour, or what Mary Louise Pratt
has proposed in a self-effacing but enormously suggestive footnote in
Imperial Eyes as the role of the travelee: the one who is visited, and
whose response to visitors merits detailed comparative study.7 When
we chart the responses from poems to paintings to reviews which
dancers generated in the many places through which they passed,
and particularly, once we put these responses in conversation with
one another, a provocative counter-narrative of those tours begins
to emerge. In other words, what from one perspective looks like the
triumphant Bildungsreise of a European or North American dancer
brushing lightly against the spaces through which they move begins
to reveal a series of cultural skirmishes being plotted out within
or between individual countries.8 These skirmishes were frequently
focalized precisely around dance, which was being pressed into the
service of performing cultural modernity in quite surprising ways in
the early twentieth century. The case of Isadora Duncan in Argentina
provides a compelling example of this. It is often repeated, although
the story is entirely apocryphal, that she participated in the 1910
centennial celebrations in Buenos Aires a myth made plausible by
Loie Fullers performances at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris,
and by the consequent sense that a dancer celebrated in Europe would
be a natural crowning presence at a national celebration. Duncan
did, however, visit the city in 1916, and the actual responses to her
visit diverge from what we might expect: some newspaper articles
pilloried her anachronistic performances surreptitiously declaring
Argentinean cultural superiority over European publics while others
bridled at her impromptu rendition of the himno nacional while draped

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in the Argentinean flag. Thus in the false account, an internationallyacclaimed figure seals the legitimacy of the local; in the true story, she
impardonably desecrates it. In both, she swaggers provocatively, and
moves the nation.
Duncan represented a peculiarly universal or unmarked version of
the modern dancer. Others, however, were (required to be) associated
with the performance of a particular ethnicity, or indeed with the
performance of ethnic dance per se, as a multiplicity of nonEuropean (or simply non-white) ethnicities were compressed into an
eclectic repertoire.9 A single dancer, often presented (fictitiously) as
representing a particular ethnic group, could, on the same program,
present an Indian nautch dance, an indistinctly Arabian dance,
Spanish flamenco, and classical European solos, without inducing any
kind of cultural whiplash. This sense of the multiple potential markers
attached to certain dancers, paradoxically, seems to have rendered
them peculiarly attractive to artists and intellectuals from other
countries involved in elaborating new cultural figures for their own
nations. A performance of a particular kind of particularism, in other
words, seemed to offer itself for reworking in different local contexts.
Hence what Ill be tracing here as a new ground for comparative
modernisms has less to do with modernist cosmopolitanism than
with comparative particularisms: particularisms performed by moving
bodies, and resignified by their shifting publics.
I will be focusing in what follows on three specific figures in
movement through various geographical spaces and media in the
1910s and 1920s. The first case, the Spanish dancer Trtola Valencia,
involves real movement, the elaboration of a flow which ties together
spaces and times: across the stages of Europe in the early 1910s, and
thereafter through the theaters of north and particularly central and
south America, performing cultural clichs which gradually shade into
a full-bodied engagement with local indigenist politics. The second is
that of Vaslav Nijinsky, who leapt onto and then off the Western stage
with a series of blazing performances between 1909 and 1917, but
whose figure was held aloft as a glimmering possibility for new cultural
practices in the spaces through which he passed. The third involves
Charlie Chaplin, whose movement on film was of course virtual, but
whose impact via celluloid sent out ripple effects which prompted
the reorganization of aesthetic politics in an unprecedented, and still
incompletely imagined, variety of locales.
Trtola is now barely-remembered; Nijinskys is a legendary
disappearance; Chaplin lives on almost too visibly; but I will be

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examining them in analogous lights to probe what their movements
tell us about the relations between local and international cultures
in the early twentieth century. In watching the non-linguistic
performances of Trtola, Nijinsky, and Chaplin, audiences throughout
the West were acutely conscious that they were seeing what everyone
else was seeing, and often seized the opportunity to stage their
reactions to them as a way of engaging with audiences elsewhere.
These three figures, in other words, not only mobilized modernism
through the movements of their bodies across stages and settings,
but themselves served as screens for local projections of modernity
in the locales they visited. Thus in tracing responses to these globesweeping icons we find ourselves drawing new and livelier maps
of modernism. To paraphrase Adornos statement on Chaplin, all
three of these icons brush against the world like a slow meteor,
bringing with [them] imaginary landscapes landscapes which ripple
with the momentary contact of these dancers, often against their own
grain.10

Touring History: Trtola Valencia

In a prescient early interview dating from her first stage-appearance
in London, Trtola Valencia anticipated the chameleonic nature of
her unfolding career: Wherever I go it is the same to me. I adapt
myself; nothing is ever strange.11 Her figure, indeed, would turn out
to be remarkably malleable. Born in Seville in 1882, but raised outside
London by an English aristocrat, she was presented to the British
public on her 1908 stage-debut as an already-celebrated Spanish
dancer, then repackaged for the same enraptured public just a few
months later as an Algerian dancer. Her fame in Europe, accrued
on tours over the next few years, finally brought her name to the
ears of Spanish intellectuals, who in 1913 orchestrated a homecoming
for their errant cosmopolitan daughter with her British-accented
Spanish which took care to claim her for a national culture in the
process of reformation. Trtola herself cannily capitalized on these
divergent readings of her figure, developing a polymorphic repertoire
involving dances clustered largely around the Spanish/Oriental pole,
but also involving some sequences of poses based on Duncans
sculpture- and fresco-based practices, even if these lacked the driving
vision of Duncans mission to create a dance of the future.
In 1916, Trtola began a first tour of Latin America turning
eventually into five expansive circuits of the continent which would
have a striking effect on her choreography. Her travels placed her in

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contact and conversation with a series of Latin American intellectuals
and artists from various parts of the region who were working to
draw attention to their own understudied, unprotected pre-Columbian
heritage, and to educate national publics about local cultures which
survived only in static fragments. Trtolas burgeoning historicist
interest connected seamlessly with these projects. The prospect of
applying Emmanuel- and Duncan-derived movement methods to body
forth an image of that culture gave a new dynamism and coherence
to her choreography, which now set itself the challenge of bringing
those fragments to life for an audience. This marked a radical
departure from her own earlier methods, not to mention from the
practices of her European contemporaries. Where the latter tended
to base their choreographies on pieces of Greek and Roman (and
occasionally Egyptian) civilizations collected in European museums,
Trtolas inspiration for her Latin American indigenous dances was
grounded in work with far more fragmentary materials: a tiny portion
of pre-Columbian artifacts had to that date been excavated and
preserved in museums, and archaeology as a discipline was in its
infancy. The archive with which Trtola was working, in other words,
was not just made up of fragments, but was itself known to be
particularly fragmentary.
As early as her first visit in 1916, Trtola pledged to Peruvian
circles that she would soon begin work on an Inca dance, inspired
by indigenous huaynos (Andean tunes) heard at a banquet, and by
costumes and ceramics she had studied at the Museo Histrico
Nacional. To flesh out the sensorial dimension of her performance,
she brought in a sumptuously imagined dcor and costumes, but
also carefully-selected contemporary local music. Where her earlier
choreography had featured incongruously modern music Debussy,
Saint Saens, Granados for both her classical and ethnic dances,
in Latin America she began to draw inspiration from indigenous
themes, working closely with individual composers and folk collectives
while plotting out her movements. Thus in choreographing a preColumbian dance on the basis of pottery shards, fraying textiles, and
contemporary indigenous music, Trtola was not simply repeating
scholarly discoveries about foreign cultures, but was attempting to body
forth an image of a little-understood past for a local audience.
The process was notably time-consuming. Newspaper articles over
the years carried various reports and promises of Trtolas danza incaica
guerrera (Inca Warrior Dance), but it was not until 1925 that she finally
presented it in Limas main theater. This special event featured the
President of the Republic and a Municipal Council, which awarded her

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a medal of honor for her service to the nation, and extracted from her
a promise to perform it abroad, underlining her perceived importance
as a carrier of culture between cultures. And Lima, significantly, was not
the dances final resting-place. Trtolas publicity photograph for the
event would continue to circulate, as the planned frontispiece for an
English-language book on Inca civilization which was never published.
Far more importantly, it was made the centerpiece for Perus exhibition
at the 1929 Panamerican Exhibition in Seville. In this palimpsestic
image, the choreography of a Spanish-born, British-raised performer
known primarily in Europe for her Oriental dances becomes a means
for Peru to effectively represent its patrimony both to itself and to its
former colonial master.
If this image can be extracted from Trtolas repertoire as a
frozen moment of cross-cultural creativity, it is also tethered to a
much broader question about the ways in which modernist bodies-intransit engaged with the cultures through which they passed. A striking
number of dancers performing on these expanding international
circuits turned themselves into collectors, both of local gestures and
of material artifacts, assembling their own traveling exhibitions of
costumes, jewelry, paintings, ceramics, poems and newspaper reviews
which they frequently placed on display in hotel rooms as an external
frame for their performances. Those material assemblages indeed
often came to invade the space of the stage, as an abundance of
folds gathered around the performing body, aiming to entirely fill the
senses of the spectator. Trtola, for instance, amassed seventy trunks
of luggage over the course of her Latin American tours, many of which
constituted dcor for her stage-sets and her person.
She also assembled twenty-eight voluminous albums of press
clippings, and this is not an idle point, nor are these simply disposable
documents.12 As soon as we begin to attend to newspaper reviews of
touring performers, in different parts of Europe and the Americas, we
start to notice projected dialogues taking place. For instance, during
Trtolas first tour to her ostensible homeland in 1913, audiences in
Spain were made acutely aware that the rest of Europe was watching
their reaction; faced with the likelihood that southern music-hall
audiences, accustomed to more ribald fare, would reject the errant
daughter, cultural elites effectively took over the theater, mounted a
vigorous press campaign, educated the public in advance, and finally
produced a resounding success for their adoptive muse. This also,
of course, indexes dances precarious status in the period, straddling
popular entertainment and high art, an in-between position given a
further twist in its perceived subordination to music. This was, felt

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particularly sharply in Latin America, where musicians and dancers
appeared in the same newly-built theaters and opera houses, where
dancers were obliged to teach accompanying scores to inadequatelytrained in-house orchestras, and where dance reviews were written by
music critics which explains the predominant focus in many of those
reviews on music, costumes, or set designs, almost entirely neglecting
choreography or movement.
More significant still is the fact that in these writings we find the
initial outlines of comparative cultural criticism: a criticism attuned
to local forms of reception as much as, perhaps even more than,
forms of production. In writing about Trtola (or any of the many
dancers who traveled through the continent in the 1910s and 1920s),
Latin American critics were explicitly cognizant of the fact that they
were focusing on a performer who had already generated copious
amounts of writing elsewhere, and therefore seized the opportunity
to stage their own reactions, in a bid to prove themselves up to
the task of properly evaluating a universally-celebrated figure. In the
provinces of various Latin American countries, or in less-accessible
capital cities (along or off the Pacific coast), Trtolas passing-through
was heralded as evidence that the country or city concerned had now
earned a place in a continental or indeed transcontinental circuit;
events were therefore staged with an eye to having her and her fellow
visitors carry reports of those events on their further tours. In cities
more accustomed to visits by European luminaries, such as Buenos
Aires or So Paolo, newspaper reviews turned into battlegrounds
over cultural modernity, as local writers vied to produce the most
insightful readings of these traveling icons, or occasionally attempted
to upstage European audiences by declaring themselves unimpressed
and the spectacles anachronistic. It is clear that dancers on tour
in this period served as screens onto which local audiences could
project their own anxieties, aesthetics, and agendas. In seeing Trtola,
for instance, everyone knew that they were seeing what everyone
else was seeing, and this established a basis for dialogue, for parity,
but also for assertions of difference. These continental and/or transAtlantic tours gave audiences the certainty however illusory of equal
if intermittent access to cultural modernity, of being plotted on the
same map as viewing publics in other parts of the world. It is a fine
irony that the monolingualism or restricted linguistic scope of so much
modernist criticism today bars access to those responses, meaning that
the South American tours not only of Trtola but of Duncan, Pavlova,
and the broader Ballets Russes are relegated to speechless history,
blindspots of modernity.

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Suspended Animation: Vaslav Nijinsky

Listening to those silences allows us to pick up on anecdotes which
speak volumes. One such anecdote involves the Russian dancer Vaslav
Nijinsky, who visited Buenos Aires on two occasions as a member of
the Ballets Russes, a visit which quite implausibly on each occasion
ended with his departure from the group. But before delving into the
intricacies of the question, we should begin by noting that Nijinsky
was of course always a figure apart, always standing out from his
backdrops with remarkable clarity. This is a point emphasized by
multiple commentators and from various perspectives. First on the
technical level: witnesses to his legendary performances emphasized
his ability to remain suspended in mid-air, in a precision which lifted
him out of the moment and into the eternity of the imagination. The
question also vibrates in the realm of technology. As Isaki Lacuesta
notes, Nijinskys fluidity of movement would have posed particular
difficulties for the relatively slow shutter-speeds of cameras in the early
twentieth century, yet the snapshot taken of him by sculptor Auguste
Rodins official photographer, Eugne Druet, in 1910 catches him in
a mid-air pose of perfect definition; it is the background which is
blurred, as though Nijinskys precision were so extreme that it threw
everything around him into tremors.13 Finally, it is striking how much
critical ink has been spilled in an attempt not only to give an image of
his dancing, but to do so in response to actual images of his dancing, in
the form of text accompanying still photographs (Carl van Vechten;
Edwin Denby) or sketches (Francis de Miomandre, commenting
on illustrations by Georges Barbier): clear instances of language
trying to put itself in motion to do justice to that stilled moving
body.
From his explosion into the Western imagination in 1909 as part
of Sergei Diaghilevs first Russian season in Paris, Nijinsky quickly
created a series of indelible images from his dances: the slave in
Scheherazade, the doomed clown of Petrouchka, the spirit of Spectre de
la Rose, which famously ended with Nijinskys breath-stilling leap out
the window. In his work as a choreographer, he went on to cause
scandal upon scandal, beginning with the sexually-suggestive LAprs
Midi dun Faune of 1912, followed just a year later by the aggressively
primitivist, anti-balletic Le Sacre du Printemps. Both of these works gave
their viewers the sense of a dance made up of fragments. Francis de
Miomandre, Paris-based translator of many Latin American texts and
author of several monographs on dance, in a 1913 essay described
his choreographies as successions of states of immobility.14 Lincoln
Kirstein, another outstanding commentator, described LAprs Midi

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dun Faune as a series of related plastic poses, on a single plane, like an
animated bas-relief, [in which] no movement was made which was not
significant for its absolute kinetic succession. There was no pretext for
dancing. It was all a coherent fluid activity built logically within its own
terms.15 That this was a far cry from Duncans classicizing idealism
was perceptible to all of Nijinskys viewers far too perceptible in the
case of his faun, whose excitement at the presence of nymphs and
their material vestiges would have been notably perceptible through
his carefully observed profile.
It was equally distant from Trtolas avowed historicism, and
it is noteworthy that many commentators underlined their sense of
Nijinskys otherworldliness. Miomandre, for instance, wrote that [h]e
impresses us as of another essence from ourselves, and we are no more
jealous of him than we should be of a creature fallen from another
sphere where the air had more buoyancy than on this planet of earth.16
To certain viewers, however, this signaled not so much his detachment
from the world as his availability for attachment to different regional
productions, as becomes evident in the following anecdote.17
As noted before, Nijinsky had visited Argentina with the Ballets
Russes in 1913, and he returned there with the troupe in 1917. The
first visit had produced Nijinskys surprise marriage to Romola de
Pulszky, which became a central point in the companys reception and
reviews; by the time of the second visit, however, Nijinskys relations
with the rest of the company had deteriorated to such an extent that he
used every spare moment to escape onto the streets of Buenos Aires.18
On one of these escapes, he became acquainted with the musicologist
Blemey Lafont, who introduced him to two friends with extravagant
plans for new national productions: artist Alfredo Gonzlez Garao
and writer Ricardo Giraldes. Both men had spent time in Europe,
seeing the Ballets Russes in Paris before the companys arrival in
Buenos Aires;19 inspired by that example, they had begun to toy
with the idea of producing a ballet based on indigenous themes.
The Ballets Russes, it bears emphasizing, signified not only the latest
modernity seen in their explosive effect on fashion and dcor but
also a modernity which harnessed and transformed the national
past, transmuting Russian primitivism into the up-to-date. Gonzlez
Garao and Giraldes set themselves to thinking about ways in which
they might accomplish the same feat for Argentina. Their ideas, as
they developed, drew upon conversations with Juan B Ambrosetti,
director of the Ethnographic Museum of Buenos Aires, which had
been inaugurated a decade prior; Ambrosetti was himself intensely
engaged in gathering folktales from different parts of the country

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in the project of producing a fully-fleshed-out national imaginary.
Gonzlez Garao and Giraldes contracted the composer Pascual de
Rogatis to provide music for the project, but this choice brought
with it some ambivalence regarding the national past. In his 1916
opera Humac, de Rogatis had effectively sidestepped the question
of Argentine indigenism, which would have entailed confronting a
violent void in the nation: the Desert Campaign of the 1870s had
destroyed indigenous culture, making impossible its deployment in a
contemporary opera. De Rogatis solution was to turn instead toward
trans-Andean themes, elaborating a new national motif connected
less to the local than to the neighboring Incan, appropriated for the
Argentinean nation in a creative stretching of geography.
Giraldes and Gonzlez Garaos ballet fixed its attention on a
different region, at the juncture of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay,
the region being mined by Ambrosetti for its folktales. They selected
as a motif the tale of Caapor,20 wrote the libretto, and drew up
vibrant costume and set designs which owe equal debts to Andean
ceramics, Ballets Russes modernism, and German expressionism. On
learning that Nijinsky would once again be visiting Argentina in 1917,
they decided to issue an invitation to him to choreograph and star
in the ballet. The moment could not have been more auspicious.
Sunk in paranoid disillusionment with the Ballets Russes, Nijinsky was
toying with the idea of decamping to establish his own touring ballet
company. His reported enthusiasm for the project being developed
in Argentina was undoubtedly connected to the realization that his
work with Stravinsky on Russian folk motifs, which had produced
Sacre and its attendant scandal in 1913, was a portable model,
capable of generating exciting new projects in different locations,
a polymorphic particularism which well-suited the star dancer and
challenging choreographer of the Ballets Russes eclectic repertoire.
This, however, would require the participation of Stravinsky, which in
turn meant the jettisoning of the composer already attached to the
project, the Argentine indigenist de Rogatis. Giraldes and Gonzlez
Garao leapt at this suggestion: evidently thrilled at the prospect
of engaging an internationally-celebrated musician, but also, very
conceivably, realizing that the participation of a foreign composer
would neutralize any lingering Incan residue attaching to de Rogatis
participation.
Paradoxically, this was both the projects ignition-point and
its meltdown. When Nijinsky left the region later that month, he
suggested a meeting for all concerned with Stravinsky in Switzerland
the following year a meeting which never took place, as Nijinsky sank

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into psychiatric turmoil, and Stravinsky, apparently, never got wind of
the project.21 The projected ballet literally fell to pieces, living on for
a brief period in solo exhibitions of set designs under the name of
Gonzlez Garao. The indigenous-themed intermedial collaboration
may have burned itself out as a promise, but it comes back to light here
as a figure for local projects running momentarily on international
wheels.

Exits and Entrances: Charlie Chaplin

Caapor is not the only recently-uncovered project focused on Nijinsky.
In 2012, researchers at the Cineteca di Bologna discovered Charlie
Chaplins manuscript outline for a screenplay about a dissipated
dancer, dating from the mid-1930s, parts of which clearly made their
way into the 1952 film Limelight.22 Chaplin and Nijinsky had previously
crossed paths on the latters visit to Hollywood during the 191617
tour of North America. In this encounter, during the filming of Easy
Street, Chaplin was so unnerved by Nijinskys refusal to laugh at his
bodily antics that he silently signaled for film to be removed from
the camera an extraordinary admission of physical failure by an artist
notorious for squandering film-stock while working through iterations
of a sequence.23
Commentators from the earliest days of Chaplin-mania were
acutely aware of the physical effort behind the effortless lines of his
films, and soon began to draw connections between his on-camera
performances and early modern dance.24 In the first book-length
study of his work, in the still-early days of film criticism, French
critic Louis Delluc was forced to draw upon painting, theater, and
dance to explain Chaplins technique; quite remarkably, he compares
Chaplin to Trtola and Nijinsky.25 This is partly a reaction to Chaplins
extraordinary physical grace, foregrounded in several of his films,
particular 1919s Sunnyside, where he appears as a proto-Duncan
dancer in a pastoral reverie brought on after he is thrown off a bull
(the nymphs are Duncanesque, but the broader homage is to Nijinskys
LAprs Midi dun Faune). But Dellucs reading also has to do with
Chaplins particular use of film as medium. Unlike his contemporaries
Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, Chaplin was less interested in
technological innovation at and on the surface of film the question
of montage than in presenting his own body as the incarnation of
film: a body which disarticulates and rearticulates itself in scenes
tied together by the movements of that body around their space.
And because Chaplins antics drew upon a repertory of both prior
cultural forms pantomime, the circus and new, ontologically filmic

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genres chase films, slapstick, even westerns his bodys movement
presented a palimpsest of familiar and original forms around which
film criticism in the 1920s would come to organize itself.
His quickly-spreading fame also tacitly connected different
publics. Chaplins earliest and most vocal admirers were the Dadaists.
In 1924 a group of writers and artists collaborated on a special issue
of the magazine Le Disque Vert devoted to Charlot; their short articles,
mimicking Chaplins own anarchic early short films, repeatedly cast
him as a cosmic citizen who unsettles systems from within; as a child
who is the strict contemporary of the playful art of cinema; and as a
perennial foreigner on earth, waddling across the globe and tickling
the crowds who assemble to watch him pass by.26 By the late 1920s
he had assembled a veritable army of international admirers, and
in 1929, there was a surge of writings from various points of the
Western hemisphere converging around the figure of Chaplin. Articles
by Rudolf Arnheim and Walter Benjamin appeared in Germany, hot on
the heels of a 1928 article by the French surrealist Philippe Soupault,
quickly translated into Spanish for Jos Carlos Mariteguis Limabased journal Amauta.27 Maritegui had published his own essay on
Chaplin in two separate Peruvian magazines in 1928, and in 1929,
when he was contemplating a move to Argentina, he published it
once again, in a decision which reverberates with significance: he had
been expected to produce a piece on local artistic indigenism, but he
clearly felt that Chaplin provided a more reliable passkey into another
national culture.28 This cements a generalized sense that, by this
point, Chaplin had become a portable object of study across regional
borders, but equally, that the most incisive comments on contemporary
culture might take place via a reading of Chaplins films, because
of their capacity to travel over geographical, linguistic, and class
boundaries.
Over the next two years, from 1929 to 1931, writings on Chaplin
by the central commentators on the interwar cultural industry would
continue to stream forth: a book-length study by Soupault, articles by
Theodor Adorno and Siegfried Kracauer, a string of articles issuing
from the Spanish, Russian, and North American avant-gardes.29 Many
of these were prompted by the conundrum of his fourth full-length
feature, The Circus, which was produced in the first flush of sound, yet
willfully moored itself in silence; continuing to reach across borders,
it did so at the cost of alienating an audience avid for technological
novelty. For Benjamin and Maritegui alike, this was precisely the
point: Chaplins reaffirmation of silence in this late silent movie was
an explicit statement of his commitment to innovating within an

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art-form whose essence was being perverted by the unnecessary
introduction of sound.30
But Chaplins gesture also hints at a loss of faith in language
which was central to both literary modernism and to interwar
geopolitics. This mistrust was a lingering residue of the first world
war, whose rending of civilizations had ushered in the bitterly parodic
performances of the multi-lingual Dada cabarets in Zurichs Cabaret
Voltaire from 1916 onwards. Other artistic groups had taken refuge in
sites such as the Swiss resort of Monte Verita, where dancers such as
Rudolf Laban and Mary Wigman developed new practices of ritual
or collective dance as a way of healing broken cultures and bonds
through bodily movement. Still others were forced overseas by the
lack of funding for performances in Europe; it was largely due to
the war that so many artists, especially dancers, embarked on tours
of North and South America between 1914 and 1918. In other words,
the broader circuits of cultural circulation which Im tracing here are
to a certain degree the ironic consequence of a momentary breakdown
of European culture.
The bodies left behind to fight Europes war entertained
themselves by watching Chaplin. One such viewer was the French
painter Fernand Lger, who discovered Chaplin while on trench leave
with the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, and who several years later
would produce drawings of Chaplin as an articulated doll for Yvan
Golls film-poem Chapliniade, as well as for his own short film of
1924, Ballet Mcanique. Another avant-garde poet who fought in the
war, Blaise Cendrars, went so far as to claim that Chaplins films
effectively won the war, boosting morale among French soldiers by
spreading an Esperanto of laughter along the torturous pathways
of the trenches, while the embargo on American films in Germany
through the war years and beyond barred the German publics access
to his regenerative slapstick comedy until the early 1920s.31
Given this belief in the universal communicability of gesture
versus the radical particularity of language, its no surprise that critics
have for the most part zoomed in on Chaplins gags involving bodily
motions. But Chaplin himself occasionally probed the relation between
text and gesture in the space of his intertitles, and significantly, he
does this to the greatest extent in a film set in the context of war,
the 1918 three-reeler Shoulder Arms. In this sequence, Charlie is on
the run from German soldiers, and he takes refuge in an unoccupied
house until its owner, played by Edna Purviance, comes home to
find him asleep on her bed, and a sequence of physical and linguistic
misunderstandings ensues. Through a fumbling dialogue between two

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characters but also between action and intertitle, body and script,
text and image, a gamut of questions are covered: from the most
basic question of whether a speaker can be properly heard (in a silent
film!); through the more academic question of which language is being
spoken, which feeds into the ideologically-tinged question of whether
the only linguistic options are French, German, and English. The
string of missed communications and miscommunications feeds into
a final practical question of how to perform ones national affiliation.32
Charlies pantomime solution, which involves hitting himself in the
head with a brick to produce stars (then drawing aerial stripes, and
finally, dizzily, waving a flag), is a hilarious makeshift response one
which also, nonetheless, hints at the violence of national attachment.
This pantomiming of nationalities and their varying understandings of gesture also loops back to a point of which Chaplin was
well aware; the fact, as Benjamin repeats, that he was understood
differently everywhere in Russia as a tragedian, in Germany as a
theorist, in England as a clown and yet that he was, precisely,
understood.33 And the place where all international critics throughout
the 1920s located his prime redemptive possibility was in his capacity
to make do in and move through a system which constantly sought
to reject him, to find an escape hatch out of any story which would
let him enter a new one; the most frequent closing image at the end
of his longer films has him wandering off along a path ostensibly to
nowhere, although we as viewers know (and his contemporary viewers
hoped) that the path led into a new film.
This moving in and out of spaces describes the worldwide circuits
of Chaplins films, the ways in which their movements (and the
responses they generated) can be used to plot out new maps of cultural
modernity. But the trajectory is also internal to the films themselves,
which constantly comment on the constrained and shifty mobility of
modernitys social subjects. In the 1923 four-reeler The Pilgrim, Charlie
is an escaped convict who steals the clothes of a swimming preacher in
Los Angeles and hops on a train to Texas, where to his great surprise
he is received as, precisely, an eagerly-awaited new preacher. On the
train itself we catch a glimpse of a newspaper headline which gives a
mini-narrative of his first escape, literally through the bowels of the
disciplinary system: Lefty Lombard alias Slippery Elm leaps into drain
pipe in dining hall of prison and escapes through sewer. Over the course of
the story Charlie will revert to type and end up under arrest once more
for bank robbery, albeit a Robin-Hood type one.
But the narrative has a very unusual end. Brought to the USMexico border by a sheriff, he is deposited there in the hope that he

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Modernisms Moving Bodies

will wander beyond the bounds of jurisdiction and become someone
elses problem; the sheriff tries several times to send him across the
border to pick flowers, but when Charlie each time eagerly complies
and returns with a bouquet, the sheriff finally resorts to a swift
kick and then rides off into his own western. Charlie at first has
difficulty believing his luck, then hops over to the Mexican side. But
the Mexican side, for all its flowers, is no bed of roses, being populated
by some close-up bandits in a very real shoot-out (or a Hollywood
shoot-out, which for a character living by the logic of a fiction film
might amount to the same thing). Unable to decide which way to pick
between his Scylla and Charybdis, Charlie hares off with one foot on
either side of the border. His position has now become entirely virtual,
caught precariously between two spaces and belonging to neither. In
the process like Trtola, like Nijinsky he offers a tentative, flickering
image of how modernist bodies straddled the transnational.
Notes
1. Lee Grieveson, Fighting Films: Race, Morality, and the Governing of Cinema,
19121915, in The Silent Cinema Reader, eds. Grieveson and Peter Krmer
(London: Routledge, 2004): 16987.
2. For recent interdisciplinary studies organized around dance, see Carrie Preston,
Modernisms Mythic Pose (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) and Susan
Jones, Literature, Modernism, and Dance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Two earlier music-centered studies, Douglas Kahns Noise, Water, Meat: A History of
Sound in the Arts (MIT Press, 1999) and Daniel Albrights Untwisting the Serpent:
Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2000), are admirably trans-lingual and trans-mediatic in their scope, as
is Felicia McCarrens Dancing Machines: Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction (Stanford University Press, 2003), which has unfortunately fallen
out of print. A striking number of museum exhibitions in recent years have
re-staged encounters between modernisms various art-forms: on the one hand,
centenary celebrations of the Ballets Russes (beginning in 2010 with an exhibition
at Londons Victoria & Albert Museum in 2010 and culminating in 2013 at the
National Gallery in Washington D.C.); on the other, explorations of modern
arts investment in moving bodies (the 201112 exhibition Danser sa vie at the
Centre Pompidou in Paris; the 2013 exhibition Inventing Abstraction at MOMA in
New York).
3. On Duchamps passage through Argentina, see Graciela Speranza, Fuera de campo.
Literatura y arte argentinos despus de Duchamp (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2006); on
Picabias passage through diverse media, see George Baker, The Artwork Caught by
the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).
4. There is some question as to whether the fight actually took place or remained,
indeed, virtual. Catalan director Isaki Lacuestas film Cravan vs. Cravan (Barcelona:
Planeta D, 2002) offers a playful re-enactive take on the question.
5. Maurice Emmanuel, La danse grecque antique daprs les monuments figurs (Paris:
Hachette, 1896).

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Modernist Cultures
6. The trope of the dancer in the museum was indeed so widespread that Gabriele
Brandstetter has proposed it as the emblematic image of the early modern dancer.
See her TanzLektren. Krperbilder und Raumfiguren der Avantgarde (Frankfurt:
Fischer, 1995): 58117.
7. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. (New
York: Routledge, 2008), p. 258, n. 42.
8. One notorious case in Peru involved the Swiss dancer Norka Rouskaya who in late
1917 danced for the Lima intelligentsia in the General Cemetery. The ensuing
scandal led to arrests for prominent cultural figures such as Jos Carlos Maritegui
and contributed to the political radicalization of the local avant-garde. See William
Stein, Dance in the Cemetery (University Press of America, 1997).
9. In a notable exception to this rule, Paul Valrys 1936 lecture Philosophie de la
danse, inspired by the Spanish dancer La Argentina (Antonia Merc), brackets
off the question of ethnicity in its attempt to conceptualize and universalize the
relation between dance and thought, performer and spectator.
10. Theodor W. Adorno, Chaplin Times Two, trans. John McKay, The Yale Journal of
Criticism 9. 1 (Spring 1996): 5761.
11. Interview in Womans Life, June 6, 1908. For a detailed and illustrated analysis of
Trtolas career, see my Touring History: Trtola Valencia between Europe and the
Americas, Dance Research Journal 44. 1 (Summer 2012): 2849.
12. Many of these items, including paintings by Trtola herself, boxes of photographs,
costumes, and those infamous albums, are housed at Barcelonas Institut del Teatre,
where I owe thanks to Carmen Carreo for access to the collection.
13. Isaki Lacuesta, Les lleis gravitatries [The Laws of Gravity], 16 November
2011; http://lacriticaespectacular.blogspot.com/2011/11/les-lleis-gravitatories.html
[accessed November 7, 2013].
14. Francis de Miomandre, foreword to Georges Barbier, Designs on the Dances of Vaslav
Nijinsky, trans. Cyril Beaumont (London: C.W. Beaumont, 1913), n.p.
15. Lincoln Kirstein, Dance: A Short History of Classic Theatrical Dancing (Princeton:
Dance Horizons, 1987), pp. 28384.
16. Miomandre, in Barbier, Designs, n.p.
17. The anecdote has been pieced together from statements in Adriana Armando &
Guillermo Fantoni, El primitivismo martinfierrista: de Girondo a Xul Solar, in
Ral Antelo (ed.), Oliverio Girondo: obra completa (Madrid: Archivos, 1999): 47589,
where the ballet is misidentified as Ollantay. After a flood in Ricardo Giraldes
ancestral home brought various papers to light, Mara Elena Babino put together
a full-color edition of the ballet, with manuscript and typescript librettos, costume
and set designs; see her Caapor: Un ballet indgena en la modernidad (Banco Galicia,
2010).
18. Andr Oliveroff, Nijinskys Last Days in the Theatre [1932], in Reading Dance, ed.
Robert Gottlieb (New York: Pantheon, 2008): 93237.
19. Another Argentinean intellectual who had seen Sacre in Paris was Victoria Ocampo,
who would organize Stravinskys visit to Buenos Aires in 1934. The opera
V.O., by cultural critic Beatriz Sarlo, which premiered in July 2013, takes the
encounter between Ocampo and Stravinsky as a flashpoint for the development
of internationalist cultural projects in Argentina.
20. See Juan B Ambrosetti, El diablo indgena: supersticiones y leyendas del folklore argentino
(Buenos Aires: Convergencia, 1976): 5356. The ballets libretto tells the story of
the princess eambi, kidnapped by the jungle-demon Caapor to prevent her
marriage to a rival, then turned into a songbird to mourn eternally.

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21. Stravinsky scholars are not aware of this proposed ballet, nor of his commitment to
it, which suggests that the information never left the shores of Argentina.
22. Available at http://download.repubblica.it/pdf/2012/doc.pdf, and in transcribed
form at http://download.repubblica.it/pdf/2012/trascrizione_chaplin.pdf. [Accessed
November 7, 2013.]
23. Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography (London: Bodley Head, 1964), p. 205.
24. For detailed examination of Chaplins relationship to dance, and its implications
for performances of masculinity, see Paul B. Franklin, The Terpsichorean
Tramp: Unmanly Movement in the Films of Charlie Chaplin, in Dancing
Desires: Choreographing Sexualities on and Off the Stage, ed. Jane Desmond
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001): 3596. Alex Clayton also discusses
Chaplins dancing body in The Body in Hollywood Slapstick (Jefferson: McFarland,
2007). Two recent dance-film projects grapple with the notion of Chaplin
as dancer: Catalan director Isaki Lacuestas 2008 short film Sol (online at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_wXqk2xYUs [accessed on November 8, 2013]),
which reimagines Chaplin as a female dancer; and Japanese director Masayuki
Suos Dancing Chaplin (2010), adapted from Roland Petits 1991 ballet Charlot danse
avec nous.
25. Louis Delluc, Chaplin (Paris: M. de Brunhoff, 1921).
26. Charlot (Paris: Le Disque Vert, 1924).
27. Rudolf Arnheim, Chaplins Early Films [1929], rpt. in Walter Benjamin and
Rudolf Arnheim on Chaplin, trans. John MacKay, Yale Journal of Criticism 9 (1996):
30914; Walter Benjamin, Chaplin in Retrospect, trans. Rodney Livingstone, in
Benjamin, Selected Writings 2:1 (192730): 22224; Philippe Soupault, Charlie
Chaplin, in Europe: Revue mensuelle 18 (November 1928): 379402.
28. Jos Carlos Maritegui, Esquema para una interpretacin de Chaplin, in
Amauta 18 (October 1928): 6671. [Explaining Chaplin: A Sketch, trans. John
Kraniauskas, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 10. 3 (December 2001):
30509].
29. Soupault, Charlot (Paris: Plon, 1931); Theodor W. Adorno, Chaplin Times Two;
Siegfried Kracauer, Two Chaplin Sketches, trans. John MacKay, Yale Journal of
Criticism 10 (1997): 11520.
30. For a comparison of Benjamins and Mariteguis readings of Chaplin, see John
Kraniauskas, Laughing at Americanism: Benjamin, Maritegui, Chaplin, in Walter
Benjamin. Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, vol. III, ed. Peter Osborne (Oxford:
Routledge, 2005): 36877.
31. Blaise Cendrars, Charlot et la guerre, in Le Disque Vert 45 (1924), p. 78.
32. This carries us back momentarily to Isadora Duncan, frequent performer of La
Marseillaise and sacrilegious wearer of another national flag in Buenos Aires.
33. Chaplin, Interviews, p. 85.

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