ABSTRACT
Kierkegaard states in his journals, “I dance to the glory of the god.”2 Another journal entry mentions practicing and developing dance steps.3 Dance was part of his world. He was writing during the glory days of Romantic ballet (from the 1830s to the 1880s), as the Royal Danish Ballet under the leadership of August Bournonville (1828-79) was a cutting-edge company, well ahead of dance in Germany: “Ballet in Copenhagen at the time was a polished and refined art, presided over by strict dancing masters who drilled dancers to develop technical prowess.”4 Kierkegaard had given thought to the multidimensional activity of dance and employed dance as a figure for representing areas of life he was analyzing. Nowhere in his corpus did he provide a sustained treatment of dance, but incidental references to dance and especially to the metaphor of the dancer are sprinkled around his writings.
