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Dec. 25th, 2023 | 01:03 pm

It is often said that dance is the creation of illusion: for example, the illusion of a weightless body. (This might be thought of as the furthest extension of the phantasm of a body without fatigue.) But it would be more accurate to call it the staging of a transfiguration.

Dance enacts being both completely in the body and transcending the body. It is, or seems to be, finally, a higher order of attention, where physical and mental attention become the same.

(..)

Merce Cunningham and Lincoln Kirstein have both offered as a definition of dance: a spiritual activity in physical form. No art lends itself so aptly as dance does to metaphors borrowed from the spiritual life. (Grace. Elevation. . .) Which means, too, that all discussion of the dance and of great dancers, including this one, fit dance into some larger rhetoric about human possibility.

(Susan Sontag, 1987)

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