Dancing on Her Grave

In Grigori Kozintsev's Hamlet, Oliver Parker's Othello, and Rupert Goold's Macbeth, three esteemed directors break with tradition and insert a dance for the tragic heroine. They use the heroine's dancing body to contravene genre expectations, to complicate representations of dance as a social practice, and to highlight the theme of the heroine's sexual or political vulnerability. Close attention to these dance sequences and their historical associations demonstrates the crucial role dance plays in productions of Shakespeare and illuminates how twentieth- and twenty-first-century directors have (re)discovered the power of dance to communicate, in tragedies as well as comedies and romances, their visions to modern audiences

Art · Contemporary dance · Dance · HAMLET (protein complex) · Literature · Modern dance · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · Theme (computing) · Tragedy (event) · Vision · Anthropology · History · Law · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · Theater, Performance, and Music History · Theatre and Performance Studies