Dance of the Marionettes

"How can we know the dancer from the dance?" In poems such as "Javanese Dancers" and in many prose texts (including fiction) Symons (1865-1945) offers a gloss on that well-known line by his friend and fellow-Celt, Yeats. This paper explores the relationship between Symons's views on theatre and those of Edward Gordon Craig (1872-1966); the two men commented on each other's work. There is a trajectory from Symons's response to dance (owing something to the popular native English tradition of music-hall, as well as to the more sophisticated developments of French Symbolism), towards Craig's theory of the Übermarionette, which found so little favour in Edwardian England - Symons apart - but was hugely influential in mainland Europe, anticipating Brecht's Verfremdungseffekte and providing a strong intellectual basis for the avant-garde Polish theatre of Tadeusz Kantor. Symons is clearly a key figure in the challenge to naturalism and to other forms of naïve representationism, including crudely emotional identification with characters and 'star' actors. I conclude with a brief reference to the non-naturalistic (but didactic) Edinburgh 'masques' of the Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes (1854-1932).