Dance pathologies : performance, poetics, medicine

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.