A history of dance's pathologization may startle readers who find in
dance performance grace, discipline, geometry, poetry, and the body's
transcendence of itself. Exploring dance's historical links to the
medical and scientific connotations of a "pathology," this book asks
what has subtended the idealization of dance in the West. It
investigates the nineteenth-century response, in the intersections of
dance, literature, and medicine, to the complex and long-standing
connections between illness, madness, poetry, and performance.
In the nineteenth century, medicine becomes a major cultural index to
measure the body's meanings. As a particularly performative form of
madness, nineteenth-century hysteria preserved the traditional
connection to dance in medical descriptions of "choreas." In its
withholding of speech and its use of body code, dance, like hysteria,
functions as a form of symptomatic expression.
Yet by working like a symptom, dance performance can also be read as a
commentary on symptomatology and as a condition of possibility for such
alternative approaches to mental illness as psychoanalysis. By redeeming
as art what is "lost" in hysteria, dance expresses non-hysterically what
only hysteria had been able to express: the somatic translation of idea,
the physicalization of meaning.
Medicine's discovery of "idea" manifesting itself in the body in mental
illness strikingly parallels a literary fascination with the ability of
nineteenth-century dance to manifest "idea," suggesting that the
evolution of medical thinking about mind-body relations as they
malfunction in madness, as well as changes in the cultural reception of
danced representations of these relations, might be paradigmatic shifts
caused by the same cultural factors: concern about the body as a site of
meaning and about vision as a theater of knowledge.
