Dis-identifying : dancing bodies and analyzing eyes at work. A discussion of Vera Mantero’s “a mysterious Thing, said e.e. Cummings”

Isabelle Ginot (1)

1 Laboratoire d’analyse des discours et pratiques en danse

"a mysterious Thing, said e.e. cummings", a solo by Portuguese dancer and choreographer Vera Mantero, calls into question practices of dance criticism. Although overloaded with layers of signification (of genre, race, dance, etc.) and therefore apparently calling for interpretation, the forces working within the dancer’s body seem to disable the mechanics of signification. That resistance to semiotization, in turn, is calling for a mutation in the critic’s work, maybe opposing to the free-trade in the markett of semiotics a new position of stasis, and offering an arrest of the flow of meaning, and the time to a reconfiguration of perception.

Keywords: Dance criticism; Semiotics; Vera Mantero; Movement analysis

Domains: Musicology and performing arts

Isabelle Ginot. Dis-identifying : dancing bodies and analyzing eyes at work. A discussion of Vera Mantero’s “a mysterious Thing, said e.e. Cummings”. Discourses in Dance, 2003, Vol. 2 (n° 1), p. 23-34. ⟨hal-02292394⟩