A figure suspended among invisible threads: Cosmic and modernist worldmaking on the stage of Pavel Tchelitchew’s Ode (1928)

This contribution examines interweavings of humanity, nature and technology in twentieth- century (dance) modernity through the Ballets Russes’ 1928 Ode. Situating this interweaving in the context of the complex transfers of Russian modernism in Western Europe, we acknowledge avant-garde choreography as a field where non-Western-European worldviews were staged and enacted. Initially inspired by an eighteenth-century poem, Ode was transformed, through the contributions of surrealist painter Pavel Tchelitchew, intoameditation on the modern human subject and its relationship with nature in a both spiritually and scientifically-technologically construed cosmic framework. Impregnated with multiple layers of Russian thought, ranging from physicotheology to cosmism, Ode goes far beyond artificial demarcations between human and non-human in dominant Western consciousness. Drawing on visual and textual sources, this contribution reads Ode as an instance of dance as a performative making of plural, overlapping worlds.