Abstract EN:

My thesis bears on the utopia of the New Man, which is supposed to be a remedy to the crisis of the modern man at the end of the 19th century. It also bears on the different conceptions of the social ties by means of which the individual is attached to the community ; it explores these conceptions in two domains of expression : theater and dance, whose diverse manifestations in the field of the French and German arts of expression reflect a large spectrum of esthetic, moral, ideological and political significances. Those manifestations reveal the profound cultural mutations of the years 1880-1920. In a time of great political and intellectual effervescence related to the particular moment of European history, artists and intellectuals incessantly evoke the neccessity of a radical change of the man and the world. It is in the arts of spectacle that this hope appears in its most vivid, but also in its most ambivalent : dramatists and choreographs have the tendency to replace to a properly revolutionary idea by the thematics of a spiritual conversion and redemption, that should reconcile the individual with herself and her community, as we can see, on both sides of the Rhin river, the works inspired by Wagner in the years 1880-1920. From the last pieces of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam to the mystical theater of Péladan and the pre-christian pieces of young Claudel, from the first choral stagings of Rudolf Laban to the parisian representations of the Russian and Swedish ballets, from the People’s Theater to the futurist scene and to the Bauhaus, the dream of a total work of art is indissociable from a manifold reflexion on the possibilities of an esthetic and religious renewal of decadent humanity.