Ballet

Allegory offers to the artist the way to reveal a meaning hidden by the literal sense of the work. Poetry and the plastic arts have used it to a great extent. So many fictions, metaphors, images the allegory has engendered! With so many tales and myths it has thronged creative imagination! However, nothing could respond to its solicitations better than dance. Under its diverse forms dance has succeeded in translating its numerous facets in manners both original and always renewed, thus instituting a tradition in constant mutation. In fact, by definition dance appears to be essentially allegorical. Through the linear diagram of the steps of the figured passages appears, in a more or less veiled way, a deeper and mysterious truth. Such degage, such arabesque, such manege of jetes en tournant or such mudra, such zapateado assume all of a sudden in a ballet, thanks to the choreographer and to the dancer, a precise meaning: contempt, request, joy, shout, martial exaltation. In fact, the audience attributes many hidden meanings to the slightest variation, even trying to discover an intellectual dimension where, at times, the choreographer had only shown the dynamic scale of bodies in motion. All too often, novice spectators, doubting that they understand correctly, build artificially a chimera, more conforming, they think, to the very nature of the show, but in fact created out of their unformulated aspirations

Allegory · Art · Art history · Ballet · Classical ballet · Dance · Incarnation · Theology · Visual arts · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Historical and Modern Theater Studies · Philosophy · Theatre and Performance Studies