On the Intolerable in Dance

VALLEJOS, JUAN IGNACIO

The Massachusetts Review

University of Massachusetts

Lugar: Amherst; Año: 2020

0025-4878

The intolerable lays bare an ethical question, one which relates to the idea of formal beauty in dance. Representing violence towards women as something beautiful, aestheticizing violence?that is indeed intolerable. And this is precisely where the problem lies: how to represent what is horrible through the medium of a body that has been disciplined to reproduce formal beauty? Yet surely dance?and art in general?are cultural expressions that must be capable of representing horror. In this sense, the fact that dance is capable of representing violence creates a challenge for certain choreographers: how to do so without aestheticizing it or generating morbid, voyeuristic pleasure? It is not the idea of representing violence in the abstract which seems intolerable, what is intolerable is the aestheticized mimicry of actual violence in the world.