ABSTRACT
This essay introduces ideas of public sphere (Habermas) and public art into the domain of dance. Issues of performance and discursivity (as in Chapter 2) but also now a politics of criticism (Croce) in which the critical project (ridiculed in Chapter 4) here seems to implode of its own weight. At the same time, the question of the representation of politics emerges as does that of the politics of representation. Dance circulates in the public sphere as discourse and returns to respond to that discourse. Dance is conceptualized to be in a dialogue with (public) discourse, hence, dance as a public object or as constituting a choreographic public sphere. As in Chapter 13, the sociology of eighteenth-century society and theatrical aesthetics plays an anachronistic yet, I think, thematically justified role in the analysis.
