"Danced through its seven phases": Samuel Beckett, symbolism, and stage choreographies

Allusions to dance are rife in Beckett’s work, and the early development of his choreographic imagination owes much to late nineteenth-century Symbolist appreciations of dance. Symbolism’s aesthetic outlook was crucially shaped by the choreographic proclivities of its key practitioners: a group that included Stéphane Mallarmé, W. B. Yeats, and Maurice Maeterlinck. In his Divagations (1897), Mallarmé declared that both ballet and modern dance perfectly modelled the union of content and form that Symbolist poetics sought to achieve. Early Beckett texts including “Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce” (1929) and Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932) reveal his interest in the forms of “corporeal writing” described by Mallarmé, while also reimagining the index of Symbolist dance imagery in relation to the techniques practised by dancers he knew, including Peggy Sinclair and Lucia Joyce. These forms are condensed and developed in the late work Quad I + II(1981): an abstract play for four dancers.