Sur quel pied danser? Danse et littérature (review)

The problem with the subtitle of this volume is not its two nouns but the coordinating conjunction. To explore the relationship between dance and literature presupposes a multiplicity of approaches, if not of methods. The captatio benevolentiae of the Introduction states that the collection aims to ‘laisser ouverte la question de la relation entre danse et littérature’ (p. 7), and so the editors must surely have been aware that a volume of conference proceedings entitled ‘dance and literature’ would inevitably produce a heterogeneous group of essays. Nevertheless, the results can be fruitful: by providing a broad chronological spectrum from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, the volume offers the reader the possibility of establishing several unexpected relations. These can be found in texts discussing dance as a locus of tensions reflecting social, moral, and cultural anxieties: Michael Freeman on the fifteenth-century tradition of the danse macabre explores the perception of dance as a celebration of mundane pleasures, but also as a reaction against moralizing positions; Andrew McQueen on the bals costumés in Zola’s cycle of the Rougon-Macquart identifies in the experience of the ball a form of escapism towards an idealized past prior to the Second Empire. The main value of this volume is to be found in texts dealing with the relationships between dance, its metaphors, and the act of writing. Mallarmé, to whom dance was a ‘poème dégagé de tout appareil du scribe’, is the object of two essays: Hélène Stafford discusses the poet’s writings on dance and the idealization of the female dancing body through Mallarmé’s gaze; Pascal Caron questions the relationships between Nijinsky’s choreography for Debussy’s Prélude on Mallarmé’s L’Après-midi d’un faune. But it is in Marguerite Duras’s literary works that dance as literature finds its most impressive achievement, especially in her ‘Indian cycle’. Christophe Meurée’s text investigates this typically ‘durassien’ motif of the ball and its capacity to open in the fictional space a place of isolation that allows the suspension of temporality and a reinvention of dance as an experience that goes beyond language. Not all the essays find their natural place within the volume, particularly those concerned only with the aesthetics and theories of dance. Such is the case with Dee Reynolds’s discussion of modern and postmodern practices of dance and twentieth-century kinetic theories, and Jennifer Thorp’s contribution on the notion of choreographic ‘grace’ through the case-study of an early eighteenth-century French ballet dancer, Mlle Guiot, although her text does prepare the ground nicely for Edward Nye’s study of eighteenth-century poetic metaphors of ‘grace’ and of the poet viewed as a dancer. Dance as a mirror of literature is indeed a recurrent trope — a mirror by which the text can be grasped through a peculiar angle, one that confronts literary substance with choreic interpretation. It is no surprise, then, that the texts that build the strongest case are the ones dealing with dance in literature, and these, fortunately, happen to predominate in this book.