Eighteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

This piece of work, based on my final project in the degree in Aesthetics, is an exercise to analyse dance from the perspective of the new materialisms. I study Alexander Ekman’s A Swan Lake ballet (presented at the Oslo Opera House in 2014), aiming to answer the following question: how are the possibilities of movement and script in the ballet reconfigured by the irruption of a lake in the second act of A Swan Lake? I propose that by paying attention to the corporeality of dance itself as a discursive practice, it is possible to appreciate the creation of a kind of language or codes that can be interpreted. Following Barad (2003), a discursive practice is not a synonym for language or what is said, but it is what allows certain things to be said and here it is not just the body of dancers that allows saying, but also the water itself. In other words, the encounter of the materiality of the human, meaning the body of the dancers, and the non-human, namely the water, provoques new ways of moving and therefore forma part of the choreographic composition, co-creating the ballet itself. The above accounts for the agency of the non-human, which Bennet (2010) calls “thing-power” - the ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce dramatic and subtle effects.