ABSTRACT
This essay was commissioned for a musicology conference at the University of Chicago and is pitched at a nonspecialist audience. It is one of the few essays here that makes reference to my work in the early modern (see also Chapters 5 and 11). The question of dance notation as a writing for the body sets the stage for the issues surrounding dance and writing in the following three chapters where it is a matter of (1) critical interpretation faced with modernist aesthetics (Chapter 2), (2) the circulation of choreography in the public sphere as discourse (Chapter 3), and (3) the American critical reception of the theoretically informed work of William Forsythe (Chapter 4). These three chapters also develop the theme of dance and writing in the context of the criticism of the critics. In all of these cases, it is not only a question of dance in writing but also of dance as writing (a root sense of the term choreography). And it might also be noted that the interactions of dance and new media overlap perhaps more than we should like to admit with the theme of the archive in which notation participates as well as with the question of the score that is present in the phenomenon of danced reenactments as well as in new cognitive studies of dance. This theme also bleeds into Chapter 6 (“Figurae”) under the guise of drawing as writing. In this way, one can begin to see how the thematics of dance and writing also engage with the visual. I should note, finally, that Frédéric Pouillaude’s masterful chapter in Unworking Choreography on “Writing that Says Nothing” opens up new vistas in this conversation.
