Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University Religious Studies Theses Department of Religious Studies Summer 8-17-2012 The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Dance: Nietzschean Transitions in Nijinsky's Ballets Sarah Levine Georgia State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/rs_theses Recommended Citation Levine, Sarah, "The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Dance: Nietzschean Transitions in Nijinsky's Ballets." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2012. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/rs_theses/37 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Religious Studies at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Religious Studies Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY OUT OF THE SPIRIT OF DANCE: NIETZSCHEAN TRANSITIONS IN NIJINSKYʼS BALLETS by SARAH LEVINE Under the Direction of Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr. ABSTRACT This project compares the career of the early 20th century ballet dancer, Vaslav Nijinsky, to Friedrich Nietzscheʼs theory of the tragic arts. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and elsewhere, Nietzsche argues that artists play the central role in communal mythmaking and religious re- newal; he prescribes the healing work of the “tragic artist” to save modernity from the deca- dence and nihilism he identifies in scientism, historicism, and Christianity. As a dancer, and es- pecially as a choreographer for the Ballets Russes (1912-1913), Nijinsky staged a kinetic re- sponse to modern culture that not only displayed shared concerns with Nietzsche, but also, as I argue, allow him to be interpreted as Nietzscheʼs archetypical tragic artist.