Victoria Thoms

Bio

Victoria Thoms is Research Fellow at the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE), Coventry University, UK. She is author of Martha Graham: Gender and the Haunting of Dance Pioneer (2013). Her current interests are in exploring dance and its relationship to trauma testimony. She is Vice-Chair of the Society for Dance Research in the UK.

Contributions

Modernity as Trauma and Frederick Ashton’s Dante Sonata

Peer Reviewed

Print Plus Exclusive

In January 1940, amid the confusion of wartime London, the Sadler’s Wells Ballet opened its somewhat cautious season with a premiere of Frederick Ashton’s new work Dante Sonata. [1] Conceived after the September 1939 declaration of war, the ballet is Ashton’s response to the developing events of the Second World War. It is a dark, relentless, and violent work with overtones of romantic melancholy that emphasizes nineteenth-century artists’ engagement with Dante’s Divine Comedy. It would become...

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dance trauma