Cultural Trauma as a grid for Theatre History Studies I start thanking Laura Izarra for making SPECTRESS happen in University of São Paulo, where we have now a permanent group on Cultural Trauma Studies. The Bibliography I present in the end it is one of the achievements of this group that have been working both with the inputs of visitors from foreign universities as well as with the contributions of USP researchers that went abroad. My own investigation started, moved by the SPECTRESS Project but conjoining with the research on Theatre History I was involved with. Since I was planing to make an specific research on the so called Yeats “dance plays”, or “Noh plays” and touched by the coincidence of Yeats having staged the first of these plays, “At the Hawks Well” in London, for a small public of British aristocrats and, after, in second session, to a war charity organized by the Royals, three weeks before the Easter Rising, I’ve found interesting to investigate whether this apparently, at least, ironic fact, of the most important National poet be so distant from that events at the time they happened, could be better examined. My first, and today I can say, naïve hypothesis, was that the political tensions that preceded and conspired to the emergence of the Rising, which actually at that time I totally ignored, could have fuelled an escapist movement of Yeats, from his commitment with a National and popular Theatre to a more formalistic and aristocratic theatrical perspective. In psychoanalytical terms Yeats dance plays would had reflected a reaction to the eminent Civil war after 1912, and even towards de First World War, after 1914, and, the continuity of their writing in the same mood in the years that followed the Rising – “The only Jealousy of Emer” and “The Dreaming of the Bones” in 1919, and “Calvary” in 1920 – would express a traumatic reverberation and histrionic forsake of the actual civil war that would emerge in 1922. Well I didn’t know very much about the rising at that time, and less yet about the dispositions of Yeats towards it. In fact the most I knew about him was related with the partnership he had with English scenographer and theatre director Gordon Craig between 1910 and 1913, which resulted in the adoption by the Abbey Theatre of a Craig’s invention, the so called “screens”, in the production of a few plays, most notably in the 1911’s production of The Hour Glass. I had studied deeply this partnership two years ago through their exchange of letters, researching in the Craig’s archives on the Bibliotheque National de France, in Paris, and in the Victoria & Albert Museum, in London. Well I’ll come back to this soon. Before I must develop a bit the point about trauma issue and how this time I’ve been spending in Dublin, since January, and everything I could get about the Rising and about Yeats’s “Plays for Dancers”, have changed my mind about that first hypothesis. My new Hypothesis, built in the two months research I did in Dublin, is that Yeats doesn’t seem to have been traumatized in any way at all. On the contrary, I will try briefly to sustain, the answers that he gave as an artist and as a public man, reflect more his awareness of the importance of answering in some way to those facts, even that these answers were more staged than really deeply felt, or expression of a traumatic grief. In other words, Yeats reacted to the Easter Rising directly and pragmatically. He wrote, at least one famous poem and one play that explicitly mentioned it, and came back to the theme until his last and testimonial play The Death of Cuchulain. What I’m saying is that these answers don’t expressed a traumatic reaction in anyway and configured, much more, a very studied and detached response to it, dealing with the situation in a cold, for not saying cynical, manner. Let’s examine some facts. It’s historical. The tensions between Yeats and the Irish Nationalism began much earlier than the 1916 episodes. We can think here in two kinds of tensions. One that would be an internal, and never completely solved, in his own dramaturgy, between a highly lyricist approach and a more dramatic drive; and other between his project of a National drama captured through the old Celtic myths and a highly intellectual poetry, and the more realistic and naturalistic strategies, as for example that ones adopted by John Synge and Sean O’Casey in their dramaturgy. Well we could say that the happenings of the 1910’s could have pushed an intensification of this previous tensions towards a radical move in Yeats theatre to a more abstract drama, with much more intensified lyric drives than before, and this time incorporating the dance, as a language in itself, and the Noh theatre and its way to deal with metaphysical matters. But we couldn’t go further than this. Taking now the immediate and known reactions of Yeats to the Rising, lets examine two of them. Firstly we can face his poem “Easter 1916’ through the reaction it provoked in his beloved Maud Gone. We could imagine how important would be for him her opinion about it, but we should say that his poetic integrity spoke more louder than his affections and couldn’t uncover the detached manner with which he dealt with the Rising. Maud Gone wrote in a letter of November 8th from 1916: “No I don’t like your poem, it isn’t worthy of you and above all it isn’t worthy of the subject – Though it reflects your present state of mind perhaps, it isn’t quite sincere enough for you who have studied philosophy & know something of history. Know quite well that sacrifice has never turned a heart to stone though it has immortalized many & through it alone mankind can rise to God…There are beautiful lines in your poem, as there are in all you write but it is not a great WHOLE, a living thing which our race would treasure & repeat & which would have avenged our material failure by its spiritual beauty”. (GONNE, 1992, p. 217) A second fact that can be mentioned is the one related to repercussion of the Rising in the Abbey Theatre. As you probably know at least half of the actors and actress of the theatre was involved directly in the Easter Rising’s events, and one of them, Sean Connolly, died during the combats. Another member of the theatre, the prompter, Bernard Murphy, was responsible for saving under the Abbey’s stage, arms and pamphlets. Well, in the week of the Rising and in the following weeks there was a split between these artists politically engaged and the director of the theatre at that time, John Irvine, who was a Unionist. In the minute book of the 5th of June, the first after the Rising, which relate the meeting between Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Fred Harry, the auditor and a forth member of the board, Mr. W. Bailey, we can read: “The matter of the dismissal of the company on the 27th May, 1916, was then discussed. This dismissal was decided upon the recommendation of M. St. John Ervine, manager whose statement as to acts of insubordination and failure to attend a special rehearsal in Limerick of The Playboy of the Western World made this dismissal necessary. A wok’s notice was given to the players concerned but the players refused to perform during the week of the notice, and the company disbanded. The best means of getting together a new company was then considered. After a long discussion an arrangement was come to by the Directors and members present that the theatre would be closed for an indefinite period until such time as a Company could be got together again”. Although it seems implicit that the split in the company provoked by the Rising couldn’t be ignored, the simple fact that that meeting treats it as a single case of insubordination, without even mentioning those tragic events of two months before, it is enough to show how detached Yeats and Lady Gregory actually were from that events. Well, these two mentioned evidences could be seen as external facts towards my original object, the “Plays for Dancers”. So, we go now to the plays in themselves, trying to find out whether they reflect in anyway some anxiety of Yeats towards the political and military crashes of that period. We can say that amongst a lot of recent approaches to the matter the best answer I’ve found is in a recent article from Chris Morash, “The Dreaming of the Bones and 1916”, in which, besides recognizing a certain bewilderment of Yeats and an attempt of reviewing and in a certain way sublimating it, Morash show clearly how there is, mainly, detachment and a certain irony in his approach. Dreaming of the Bones would be a rhetoric strategy to deal with that surprising and uncomfortable situation, besides being actually, artistically, the best realized as expression of this Yeats’s formal turn. Now I would like to quickly mention the profitable way in which my specific research on The Plays for Dancers developed in this period. Yeats’s “Plays for Dancers” have been read by scholar approach as mainly derived from a turn of the Irish poet, made in early 1910s, towards the Japanese Noh theatre. They were taken also as a necessary step in his own Theatrical philosophy, preparing his mature works in prose, like A Vision of 1925.