Abstract
Dance is a powerful tool for disseminating and strengthening ideas across time. Dancing bodies act as cross-cultural archives that enable us to comprehend identities projected through inherited gestures. This presentation aims to provide an early methodological approach to analyze the constructed image of Spain in ballet, an amalgam of cultural stereotypes rooted in Romanticism. The provided theoretical framework allows us to perform an interdisciplinary analysis of The Three-Cornered Hat´s jota case study. Sergei Diaghilev fostered this ballet as a Russian-Spanish collaboration in which the choreographer Léonide Massine embodied jota steps after travelling to Saragossa. By so doing, the jota movements, symbolizing Aragon´s inhabitants, evolved into an international choreographic language that enhanced interwar cosmopolitan culture.
Presenters
Gonzalo Preciado AzanzaResearch Fellow, Department of Art History, University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2023 Special Focus—Images Do Not Represent Us, They Create Us: The Image and its Transforming Power
KEYWORDS
Ballet, Dance History, Cross-culturalism, Jota, Methodology, Stereotype
