Bad Language: Transpositions in Mark Morris’s Dido and Aeneas

Language, Gesture, and Drag

In the middle of Mark Morris’s ballet Dido and Aeneas, set to the Henry Purcell opera of the same title, a female dancer mimes the story of the Greek goddess Diana and her unfortunate suitor, Actaeon. While hunting in the mountains, Actaeon catches sight of Diana bathing nude, and the fiercely chaste goddess transforms him into a stag; his own well-trained hounds, baying triumphantly, turn on their master. When the word “mountain” is sung, the dancer marks out two jagged peaks over her head with one hand. When the hunter Actaeon is mentioned by name, the dancer mimes a bow being arched and an arrow shot from it. Then, as the line “here, here, Actaeon met his fate,” is being sung, the dancer points one finger down at a spot on the ground, nodding emphatically. It was here, she is saying—right here, where I am pointing, see?

The rest of the dancers in the Mark Morris Dance Company are gathered around her in two diagonal lines; they repeat her series of movements, so that in case anyone in the audience has missed her gestures or their importance, nine dancers will do it again, three more times. What is exceptional about this is that, first of all, no one needs the meaning of “here, here” pointed out with this degree of emphasis. “Here, here” is a gesture with a indexical sense that extends to concert dance as well as to quotidian communication, and it is only one of many movements of this type in Dido and Aeneas. The act of pointing is so referential that it does not achieve what Susan Leigh Foster, distinguishing the modes of representation through which dance alludes to a world beyond the stage, calls the “imitative” mode of representation; the dancer just points to the real object of her unmistakable, solid, deictic referent (Foster 1986, 66).

The pantomimic “hunter” gesture associated with Actaeon’s name helps the audience to understand the dramatic irony of this story. The libretto doesn’t make explicit that Actaeon’s identity as a hunter brings the tragic fate of being ripped apart by his own hounds upon him. It is only the pantomimic hunting gesture of letting an arrow fly from a taut bowstring that clarifies this essential narrative element. The libretto—which was written in 1689 by Nahum Tate for “Mr. Josias Priest’s Boarding School at Chelsey for Young Gentlewomen,” and thus strives hard for modesty (Acocella 1993, 98)—only recounts Actaeon’s story allusively: “Oft she visits this lone mountain/Oft she bathes her in this fountain/Here, here Actaeon met his fate/Pursued by his own hounds/And after, after mortal wounds/Discovered too, too late.”¹ Morris’s deictic and pantomimic vocabulary supplements the Actaeon text by linking Diana, the goddess of the hunt, with Acteon, the hunter she makes prey to his own hounds. The story hinges on the reversals of their shared identity as hunters: his glance pierces her modesty; ruthlessly, she sights him; he is changed in one terrible instant from man to stag; his bow clatters to the ground; he has trained his dogs entirely too well. It is Acteon’s inability to call off his hounds—the futility of his gestures to communicate as clearly as verbal language—that marks the culmination of the story’s tragic irony. For this reason, the more clearly and repeatedly the Acteon story is mimed, the more likely it is that the whole audience will come to understand the implications of reversed identities and gestural language—and the tragedy that it foreshadows for Dido and Aeneas, who are the ostensible audience for this nested subplot.

Finally, in the phrase “here, here, Actaeon met his fate,” there is a gesture associated with the word “fate”: “the dancer stretches his arms out sideways and up, twists his wrists, and splays his fingers,” in Joan Acocella’s description (Acocella 1993, 142–143). In the case of the “fate” gesture, which cannot have a clear indexical or pantomimic referent as “here” and “hunter” do, an...