Ecrire la danse

Romanic Review, Jan-Mar 2000 by Gordon, Terri J

Ecrire la danse. Edited by Alain Montandon (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 1999) Pp. 288.

In the famous passage in "Ballets" devoted to the metaphorical value of the dancer, a "poeme degage de tout appareil du scribe," symbolist poet Stephane

Mallarme envisions dance as a space of ideal writing.1 Corporeality and textuality have long been intertwined. From ancient writings on dance to modern texts by Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Valery and others, dance has been understood as a poetic space.2 Ecrire la danse, a collection of articles on dance edited by Alain Montandon, takes up the complex relationship between dance and writing (choreo-graphy). A highly scholarly work, this rich collection provides a wide array of articles ranging from ekphratic and mimetic accounts of dance in the Renaissance and classical period to representations of the ball in 19th-- and 20th-century texts, from the topos of the dance of death to that of the social ball, from the form of the dialogue on dance in antiquity to the modern day, from dance theory in Mallarme to dance criticism by Andre Levinson and Fernand Divoire.

In his introduction to the work, Alain Montandon sets out the central problematic of this collection: how to write dance, how to capture in words the fluidity and evanescence of the body in movement. This paradoxical endeavor, which one critic calls "le paradoxe de la permanence dans le mouvement" (65), forms the cornerstone upon which these essays rest. Montandon designates two paradigms which run through the collection: dance as a form of writing, an "ecriture corporelle," in the words of Mallarme, and writing as a form of dance, of which Celine's rhythmically charged style is exemplary.3 From the absence which marks Salome's dance in Mallarme and Wilde to the abstract symbolism of writings on the "serpentine dancer" Loie Fuller to the ephemeral image of the dance-as-flame in Rilke and Valery, writing dance is ultimately an inscription, a trace, a remains ("La trace ecrite nest que la stele ou l'epitaphe d'un corps vivant" (7)).

The first essay of the collection, "Les ressources de la langue" by MarieClaire Grassi and Marie-Joelle Louison-Lassabliere, undertakes an etymological study of dance, providing an essential grounding for the study as a whole. The following two essays approach the question of the signification of dance in the era of the court ballet. In "Ut Saltatio poiesis? Danse et ekphrasis A la fin de la Renaissance et A Page baroque," Franqoise Lavocat questions whether dance, as a mimetic art in Aristotelian terms, may be understood in terms of ekphrasis. Establishing a three-tiered analytic schema, which includes descriptions of dance (ekphrasis to the first degree), descriptions of art works representing dance (ekphrasis to the second degree), and commentaries on works of art treating dance (ekphrasis to the third degree), Lavocat studies examples of dance description in texts by Rabelais, Cyrano de Bergerac and Vigenere. In "Rhetorique et orchestique: un dialogue de Lucien a Page du ballet de cour," Emmanuel Bury examines the ways in which "De saltatione," the 2nd century C.E. dialogue attributed to the Greek sophist Lucien, found force in the classical period, particularly in Claude-Francois Menestrier's 1682 treatise on dance. Drawing on Lucien's "dance apology," Menestrier proposes a "poetics of the ballet" (103), interpreting the court ballet as an art of "imitation," on the order of painting, whose goal is to represent intellectual and moral ideas. Nicolas Perrot d'Ablancourt's 1654 translation of "De saltatione" appears as an appendix to this essay.

The following two essays move to the semiology of the body in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Guy Ducrey, who has treated the relationship between dance and writing his essential study of the turn-of-thecentury dancer, Corps et graphies (1996), focuses here on a literary form which is privileged in writings on dance: the form of the dialogue. In "Dialogues sur la danse et dialogues de danseuses: Enjeux d'une forme poetique entre 1900 et 1930," Ducrey examines modern dialogues on dance by Louys, Hofmannsthal, Valery, Symons, and Schnitzler. To the central question of the nature of dance and its signification, Ducrey suggests that the dialogue form, itself a kind of open-ended dance, provides a particularly poetic response. Like Ducrey, Yvonne Bargues-Rollins studies the resurgence of an ancient motif in the modern period. In "Usure d'un cliche: la danse macabre au XIXe siecle," Bargues-Rollins undertakes a detailed analysis of the dance of death (la danse macabre), a medieval dance which experienced a "resurrection" in the 19th century, particularly in the form of the seductive and often deadly "danseuse-etoile."

The third part of the work shifts from representation to writing and reception. In "Ecrire la danse au jour le jour: Enjeux et problematiques de la presse et de la critique de danse," Anne Decoret studies the relationship between dance and the press, paying particular attention to the often opposed positions of Andre Levinson and Fernand Divoire, the two leading dance critics of the 1920s and 1930s. Concerning the role of dance criticism as a social institution, the author draws our attention to the lack of a critical apparatus to read "exotic" non-Western dances (what she calls an "indigence ethnochoregraphique") (175), the power of critics to uphold a "star system," and the economic and social constraints placed on freedom of expression. While Decoret focuses on critics writing about dance, Helene Laplace-Claverie concentrates on authors writing for dance, from Gautier to Claudel to Cocteau.