ABSTRACT
Dance is integral to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Dance provides a medium for turbulent communications, creating or exacerbating disorder. In complexity theory, disorder is vital for a system's growth. This generative role of disorder is evident in the dances of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which create and then negotiate moments of systemic crisis or chaos – in complexivist terms, 'bounded instability'. Bounded instability is a critical and invaluable state because it enables a complex system to develop. This complexivist definition of dance as a series of complex interactions that transform the dancer and the dance is consistent with the depiction of dancing throughout A Midsummer Night's Dream. In this chapter, an ambitious leap of the imagination will be made through conceptualising dance within early modern discourse, modern dance theory and philosophy, and complexity theory. These frameworks are essential for constructing a well-rounded understanding of dance as both a literal act of artistic expression and a metaphor for system behaviour.
