Text as Dance: Writing movement as Baroque recovery  

The relation of dance to writing has often been linked to the phenomenon of dance notation as invented in the seventeenth century by Raoul Auger Feuillet and significantly developed by Rudolf Laban in the early twentieth century. It has also been viewed as an invention of aesthetic modernism with reference to Stéphane Mallarmé’s idea of the dancer as an unwritten body writing. To say that dance can be thought of either as an action that can be preserved in notation or as a metaphor for the act of writing itself in the absence of a writing instrument is nonetheless distinct from another idea to which I will turn my attention in this talk: that writing itself can be constituted by movements. As elaborated in my recent book Text as Dance: Walter Benjamin, Louis Marin and Choreographies of the Baroque, I propose that a dance textuality emerged in the twentieth century’s study of the Baroque. I return to the writings of Walter Benjamin and Louis Marin in this talk to develop this proposal.

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