The lost story of James Joyce’s daughter as a Parisian
dancer
irishtimes.com/culture/stage/the-lost-story-of-james-joyce-s-daughter-as-a-parisian-dancer-1.3534604
June 21, 2018
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James Joyce’s daughter Lucia was a remarkable dancer –
something that has been buried in her troubled history
about 13 hours ago
Deirdre Mulrooney
Lucia Joyce: Samuel Beckett kept a photograph of her in her silver fish costume. Photograph:
Berenice Abbott/Getty
Lucia Joyce, born to James Joyce and Nora Barnacle in Trieste in 1907, has captured the
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imagination of many writers and artists as tragic muse. Film-makers, dramatists and novelists
have projected everything from Mills & Boon-style narratives where the real protagonists are
famous male writers – Samuel Beckett, one of Joyce’s many boyfriends; and her father – for
whom she is just a bridge, to unfounded stories of incest and child abuse, to comic-strip
extravaganzas.
How did Lucia get to be such a supine, empty space? Apart from Carol Loeb Shloss’s
groundbreaking and controversial 2003, biography Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, you
don’t hear much about the facts of Joyce the dancer, who once declared in exasperation,
“C’est moi qui est l’artiste,” or “It’s me who’s the artist.” I’m most intrigued by Lucia Joyce the
artist in her own right, of whom the Paris Times remarked, in 1928: “When she reaches her full
capacity for rhythmic dancing, James Joyce may yet be known as his daughter’s father.”
With her impressive avant-garde dance training, Joyce would have had a lot to contribute to the
Abbey Theatre Ballets
While making Georgie’s Vision, the first ever documentary about Mrs WB Yeats – Georgie
Hyde-Lees, another extraordinary and overlooked woman – for RTÉ Lyric FM I was thrilled to
discover that news of Joyce’s prowess had found its way into Yeats’s correspondence with his
wife, a month before that Paris Times mention. The poet had just founded his short-lived Abbey
Theatre Ballets with Ninette de Valois, the Irish dancer and choreographer who later founded
the British Royal Ballet, and was on the lookout for outstanding dancers to help him realise his
vision in his Plays for Dancers. “Tom [MacGreevy] has written praising above all other public
dancers, James Joyce’s daughter,” he wrote to his wife. “We may use her someday.” The
unfulfilled possibilities hinted at here are exciting, both for Lucia Joyce and for the ultimate
development of dance as an art form in Ireland.
Joyce, who was 21 at the time, was causing a stir with her modern dance performances in
Paris and the south of France. In 1927 she had even toured back to Trieste, city of her birth,
with Les Six de Rythme et Couleur, a group of dynamic and idealistic young artists “in bare
feet and tunics, wholeheartedly and unselfconsciously bringing in a new age”.
The finest moment of Joyce’s dance career, when she was a runner-up at Paris’s first
international festival of dance, was witnessed by her father and his guests, Tom MacGreevy,
who had tipped Yeats off about Joyce; Alan and Belinda Duncan, friends of Yeats; and Samuel
Beckett, fan of Yeats’s Plays for Dancers, in May 1929. To their delight the dissatisfied crowd
cheered support for Joyce: “L’Irlandaise! Un peu de justice, messieurs!” or “The Irish woman! A
little justice, gentlemen!” Beckett kept a photograph of Joyce that night, in her magical, self-
made and indeed rather Yeatsian silver fish costume, for the rest of his life.
With her impressive avant-garde dance training, Joyce would have had a lot to contribute to
the Abbey Theatre Ballets, which ran from 1927 to 1933. She began at the age of 15, in 1922,
with Émile Jacques-Dalcroze’s eurhythmics, and immersion at Akademia Raymond Duncan, a
hippy-style commune in the Paris suburb of Neuilly. Duncan, a counterculture guru – and
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brother of the renowned interpretive dancer Isadora Duncan – lived as if he were a
contemporary of Ulysses himself, wearing sandals and togas while advocating a vegan
lifestyle.
Lucia Joyce in Jean Renoir’s The Little Match Girl
Beginning to create her own choreographies, Joyce embraced his unconventional philosophy,
and the “Greek dancing” movement style, emulating poses like those depicted on Grecian
urns, accompanied by lyres and other antique instruments. In 1925 Joyce took up training with
a new mentor, Margaret Morris, granddaughter of the English designer and craftsman William
Morris and founder of a free-movement style that is still going strong in the UK.
Despite Joyce’s refusal of a job offer from Duncan’s sister Elizabeth, to teach at her school in
Darmstadt, near Frankfurt, a focus on solvency and independence is evident from the “Physical
Training” business cards she made for a prospective venture with her fellow dancer Kathleen
Neel, aka Kitten – with whom she had also danced a duet in Jean Renoir’s 1928 film, The Little
Match Girl.
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Lucia Joyce: Samuel Beckett kept a photograph of her in her silver fish costume. Photograph:
Berenice Abbott/Getty
A modern young woman, Joyce had a series of boyfriends. Not unlike the German
expressionist dancer Mary Wigman, after a few broken engagements Joyce had a nervous
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breakdown. While Wigman survived hers to become one of the most important figures in
modern dance, Joyce was incarcerated by her brother, Giorgio, and ended up trapped in
mental asylums for most of her life.
With many equivocal diagnoses, she was straitjacketed and once even injected with bovine
serum. (Giorgio Joyce, a tragic figure himself, would also commit his “marvellously wealthy”
older wife, Helen Fleischmann, to a mental institution.) Joyce’s father, who was her greatest
champion and supporter, died when she was just 34. After his death, Barnacle never visited
her again. Giorgio visited her only once, in 1967. Lucia Joyce outlived them both and died in
1982 in St Andrew’s asylum in the English town of Northampton.
But the family meddling didn’t stop there. Lucia Joyce’s only nephew, Stephen, for whom she
knitted a jumper when he was born, in 1932, took most of her writing – allegedly including a
novel and poetry – as well as her cherished correspondence with her father, from the National
Library of Ireland, and destroyed it in 1988. Family friends were also encouraged to destroy all
correspondence, so silencing Joyce, robbing her of agency, and rendering her a supine empty
space, albeit a compelling one on which anyone could project any narrative they liked.
As a dance historian keen to restore the lost “herstory” of modern dance in 20th-century
Ireland, in which Joyce is a key figure to be reclaimed, I believe she deserves to be considered
for her actual artistic trajectory and achievements, unmuddied by subjective fictional flights of
fantasy.
Paradoxically, while the ‘Ulysses’ author delighted in avant-garde dance, he pronounced it
unseemly for a girl to dance on stage
Could Joyce have continued the legacy of the Abbey Theatre Ballets, Ireland’s answer to the
Ballets Russes, when de Valois left, in 1934, to found Vic-Wells Ballet, the Royal Ballet’s
forerunner? After Frederick Ashton turned Yeats down, was Joyce the answer to the poet’s
search for a dance artist to take over from de Valois? Emulating de Valois’s Ballets Russes
pedigree, Joyce had trained rigorously in Lubov Ergova’s Ballets Russes feeder school in Paris
in 1929. It’s wrong to equate this with the ill-fated Zelda FitzGerald, seven years older than
Joyce, who had started training at the school two years earlier.
Joyce would have been familiar with what was afoot at the Abbey Theatre Ballets via George
Antheil, the American avant-garde pianist, who was composing an iconoclastic score for
Yeats’s Fighting the Waves, which de Valois choreographed and in which she featured. At the
same time he was a guest at Joyce’s 1928 Paris birthday party, bringing the Joyces to see the
Ballets Suédois, and working on an opera with Ezra Pound and James Joyce. All evidence that
the Abbey Theatre Ballets was very much on Lucia Joyce’s radar.
Paradoxically, while the Ulysses author delighted in avant-garde dance, and his daughter’s
artistry fed his work – he cast her in Finnegans Wake as Issy the temptress, who magically
dissolves into the colours of the rainbow – he pronounced it unseemly for a girl to dance on
stage. Unfortunately, and perhaps reluctantly, he ultimately encouraged her to jettison dancing
for a career in illustration.
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For Nora Barnacle, a victim of unconscious misogyny herself, a woman could be only a muse
and a servant, and certainly not an artist with her own agency. She was even less enthusiastic
about their daughter’s dance career and, according to Giorgio’s wife, nagged her until she
finally gave it up, around 1932.
Could Lucia Joyce be Ireland’s Camille Claudel, an artist who died in obscurity and whose
originality, and significance, came to be appreciated only after her death?
Deirdre Mulrooney, who is developing a documentary about Lucia Joyce’s dance career,
will be talking about her at Trieste Joyce School on June 28th
Topics:
Irish abroad
Alan Duncan
Camille Claudel
Carol Loeb Shloss
Deirdre Mulrooney
Elizabeth Duncan
Emil Jacques Dalcroze
Ezra Pound
Frederick Ashton
George Antheil
Giorgio Joyce
Helen Fleischmann
Isadora Duncan
James Joyce
Jean Renoir
Lucia Joyce
Margaret Morris
Mary Wigman
Ninette De Valois
Nora Barnacle
Raymond Duncan
Samuel Beckett
Tom Mac Greevy
Wb Yeats
William Morris
Zelda Fitzgerald
Abbey Theatre
Akademie Raymond Duncan
National Library of Ireland
RTÉ
Russes Feeder School
TG4
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Yeats S Fighting
Erina Brady
Irish German
Les
NORA
Valois
Darmstadt
Dublin(IE)
France
Georgia
Ireland
Northampton(GB)
Paris(FR)
Trieste
United Kingdom
Read More
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