The Anatomy of Dance Discourse: Literary and Philosophical Approaches to Dance in the Later Graeco-Roman World by Karin Schlapbach (review)

Did dance as an art-form warrant intellectual scrutiny by ancient writers and thinkers? Does this ephemeral and largely lost medium warrant the attention of the modern classics scholar? Karin Schlapbach’s comprehensive and cogent book, The Anatomy of Dance Discourse, answers both questions affirmatively. Dance certainly did convey valued meaning to its ancient audience, often provoking them to have detailed discussions on the nature and limits of mimesis.

Schlapbach contends that for the ancients “the insight that dancing and witnessing others dance are a crucial tool in establishing shared meanings is grounded in observation, thought, and the literary imagination” (21). Likewise, as she goes on to argue, ancient understandings of dance were deeply tied to other forms of cultural criticism, and this wide-ranging study demonstrates that ancient thinkers saw in dance a mode of expressivity that although sharing similarities with words, still image, and music, had its own particular (and particularly appreciated) communicative power.

Schlapbach’s book is structured in two parts. The first explores how ancient discussions of language theory, poetics, rhetoric, and the visual arts inform the way that ancient texts, particularly those from the 2nd century c.e., discuss dance as a performance practice. The second half of the book turns to literary depictions of dance in Xenophon’s Symposium, the novels of Longus and Apuleius, and Nonnus’ epic poem the Dionysiaka. Throughout, Schlapbach pays attention to the distinction made by ancient authors between representational dance (which tells a narrative of some sort), and non-representational dance (movement for its own sake, devoid of narrative or mythical content). She also explores a somewhat interrelated distinction between the dancer as phenomenal body (i.e., the corporeal subject performing before one’s eyes), and semiotic body (i.e., the mimetic subject that the dancer is representing as part of their performance).

Chapter one, “The Grammar of Dance,” unpicks the relationship between word and dance, so intertwined in the ancient practice of choreia, by examining a theory of dance expounded in Plutarch’s Table Talk (9.15). This tripartite theory distinguishes between two elements, phrase (phora), and pose (schēma), which can both be considered as pictorial or referential, and a third element, pointing (deixis), which can be considered as non-pictorial or directly representational. This theory, on the surface, appears to borrow terms from the field of rhetoric. Yet through comparing the meaning of deixis in ancient language theory with that of it in Table Talk, antiquity’s most explicit theorization of dance, Schlapbach argues that dance has the ability to surpass language. Thus, whereas in language the signified is always mediated through a signifier, dance can signify the thing itself: a moving hand can simply mean a hand moving.

The overlap in discourses concerning the orator and dancer is analyzed in chapter two, “The Mimesis of Dance Between Eloquence and Art,” where Schlapbach argues that Lucian’s description of the mythological shape-shifter Proteus in On Dancing as “nothing else but a dancer” (Salt. 19) not only reverses pantomime’s status as a recent art-form, but claims for it a position prior to myth. The chapter then explores the relationship between ancient ways of reading static visual arts and the similarly visual, but kinetic, form of dance to conclude that for the ancients both were understood as able to communicate ēthos and pathos. In addition, the narrative strategies used in pantomime may, Schlapbach contends, have emerged from techniques used in Hellenistic group sculptures, such as the Niobids or the Ludovisi Gaul, which through their multisided composition encourage the viewer to comprehend a new complexity of narrative through a circumnavigational viewing process.

Chapter three, “Dance as Method and Experience,” looks at the use of dance in philosophical works and religious practices, arguing that dance could be used as a tool for instruction: whether analogously in various philosophical works...