Organized by Dr. Emily Winerock, co-founder of the Shakespeare and Dance Project, this panel presents work by younger scholars building on and critiquing foundational works and methodologies at the intersection of dance and literature. The three panelists will present 15-minute papers, and Dr. Juliet McMains, Professor of Dance at the University of Washington, will serve as respondent. Drs. Winerock and McMains will jointly pose questions to the panelists and audience to ensure a fruitful 15-minute discussion period.
George Balanchine once wrote, “The dance has its own means of telling a story,” and “the controlling image for me comes from the music.” In “Narrativity in Concerto Barocco by Balanchine,” Amy Tai’s analysis of Concerto Barocco (premiered 1941), a plotless ballet to non-programmatic music, opens up larger discussions of narrativity in non-representational dance and its relationship with music. Music theorists have adapted formalist and structuralist approaches from literature to interpret how music conveys narrative, and Tai argues that analogous approaches can work for non-representational dance. Yet Balanchine’s treatment of dance and music in Concerto Barocco suggests that making one-to-one analogies, such as viewing dance as “music visualization,” is too simplistic. Rather, Tai proposes that form and content are generated as the formal properties of the two arts interact, such that the work acquires its own narrative logic that transcends the principles of music or dance alone. In this regard, she contends that formalist and structuralist models in literary and music analysis can provide fruitful inspiration, for they treat the work as its own referential world wherein form and meaning can be examined.
“Caroling around in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” by Clint Morrison Jr, examines the form of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight through the structure of the carole dance—a popular round dance for groups of couples that incorporates singing. Known for her careful attention to detail when describing landscapes, characters, and courts, the poet’s dependence on perspective and sight centers on individual bodies and landscapes framed in their backdrops like portraits. Morrison focuses on how these descriptions are given motion as they are grafted around the poem’s carole dances, and calls our attention to the poet’s unique use of the caroler’s perspective. The poet uses the term carole multiple times throughout the text but never explicitly describes the dance for the reader. Morrison argues that the poet’s carole does not require an explicit description because the alliterative form of the lines around the carole take on the structure of the dance. Building on the visual work of Sarah Stanbury (2001; 2007) and the New Formal approach to poetics and dance by Seeta Chaganti (2018), he contends that the Gawain-poet’s caroles create a convergence of poetic and dance form through the images seen around its dancer.
In “Invisible Dancing: The Messages of Dancing Bodies in Invisible Man,” Chelsea Adams’ calls our attention to the search for embodiment in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and the physical semiotic cues that teach him what it means to be empowered by black cultural heritage. Ellison was well aware of the complexities surrounding black bodies in cultural performance both from personal experience—he was known for his skill at dances such as the Eagle Rock—and from public engagement with minstrelsy. As Joshua M. Hall observes in “Syncopated Communities: Dancing with Ellison,” when looking at Ellison’s relationship with music and dance, it is important to understand “the immediate syntactical proximity of improvisational music and dance” (59). Ellison’s active participation in music and dance illuminates the empowering social functions of the expression of musical notation through body movement. Adams argues that focusing on the dancing described throughout Ellison’s novel and on the historical and cultural power invoked by those dances shifts the message of Invisible Man to that of an empowering physical embodiment of blackness rather than a disembodied, floating aural form of blackness. Attending to dance makes Ellison’s message clearer: the way forward is not through voices that carry no physical action, but through black bodies that innovate, imagine, and create new ways to subvert oppressive racist superstructures.
Other scholarly organizations and institutions have been quicker to embrace dance than the MLA. “Writing Dancing/Dancing Writing” was the theme of the 2014 joint conference of the Society of Dance History Scholars and the Congress on Research in Dance (now the Dance Studies Association), and the Newberry Library is hosting a symposium this year on Medieval and Early Modern Dance in the Book. Similarly, conferences hosted by the Shakespeare Association of America, World Shakespeare Congress, Renaissance Society of America, American Musicological Society, and the American Historical Association, among others, have featured papers and panels that explore the intersection of dance and literature. The proposed panel will not only highlight compelling research by young scholars that will be of interest to many MLA attendees, but it also seeks to introduce the larger MLA community to the vibrant and growing field of dance studies and its relevance to literary scholars, students, and teachers.