A history of dance's pathologization may startle readers who find
in dance performance grace, discipline, geometry, poetry, and the
body's transcendence of itself. Exploring dance's historical links
to the medical and scientific connotations of a "pathology," this
book asks what has subtended the idealization of dance in the West.
It investigates the nineteenth-century response, in the
intersections of dance, literature, and medicine, to the complex
and long-standing connections between illness, madness, poetry, and
performance.
In the nineteenth century, medicine becomes a major cultural index
to measure the body's meanings. As a particularly performative form
of madness, nineteenth-century hysteria preserved the traditional
connection to dance in medical descriptions of "choreas." In its
withholding of speech and its use of body code, dance, like
hysteria, functions as a form of symptomatic expression.
Yet by working like a symptom, dance performance can also be read
as a commentary on symptomatology and as a condition of possibility
for such alternative approaches to mental illness as
psychoanalysis. By redeeming as art what is "lost" in hysteria,
dance expresses non-hysterically what only hysteria had been able
to express: the somatic translation of idea, the physicalization of
meaning.
Medicine's discovery of "idea" manifesting itself in the body in
mental illness strikingly parallels a literary fascination with the
ability of nineteenth-century dance to manifest "idea," suggesting
that the evolution of medical thinking about mind-body relations as
they malfunction in madness, as well as changes in the cultural
reception of danced representations of these relations, might be
paradigmatic shifts caused by the same cultural factors: concern
about the body as a site of meaning and about vision as a theater
of knowledge.
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