Dancing With the Stars

Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey

The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions.

“We are not Greeks,” writes Isadora Duncan, “and therefore cannot dance Greek dances. But the dance of the future will have to become again a high religious art as it was with the Greeks. For art which is not religious is not art, is mere merchandise. The dancer of the future will be one whose body and soul have grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of that soul will become the movement of the body.”

In recent work, I examine the ways we use embodied practices such as movement as gateways into a participatory relationship with the cosmos. Experientially, such practices affect an “altered state,” shifting how we experience ourselves and our world. But I am also interested in the ways these practices are shaped by the cultural scaffolding available to us.

Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) once declared that Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walt Whitman, and Friedrich Nietzsche were her only dance masters. This is not because Nietzsche literally taught her how to move but because she considered movement a fundamentally philosophical act. More than this, Duncan’s embodied philosophy—the “high religious art” of the dance—was not mere theology, “god-talk,” but an act of theurgy, “god-work.”

Duncan was not alone. Through ideas expressed in the iconoclastic movements of their bodies, a cohort of women, Duncan’s contemporaries, brought forth what we now call modern dance. They considered their project deeply metaphysical. Swimming in a heady blend of Modernism, Romanticism, and Existentialism, they saw the body as the locus of spirit and a conduit of the cosmos.

Practically speaking, their methods rebelled against the rigidity of ballet, the dominant dance form of their time. This was loaded with cosmological import. Ballet represented a vision of the cosmos that was both competing and outdated.

Originating in the European Renaissance, ballet was born from the revival of Platonic and Pythagorean thought. Plato’s evocative description of the singing sirens mounted upon celestial spheres had long been married to the Pythagorean doctrine that the universe is ordered by the same mathematical proportions that produce harmony in music.

Beginning in the early Renaissance, these proportions were applied to everything from music to architecture to medicine. It was thought that the human body and soul resonated with this same harmony. Man and nature, microcosm and macrocosm, were masterfully wrought according to these perfect ratios.

Adherence to geometric proportion thus yoked together rationality and beauty. Contemporary dance increasingly incorporated complex circular and spiraling movements of group and couple choreography, imitating the movements of celestial bodies. Through dance, human bodies thus expressed the perfect divine order of the cosmos.

“Dancing is nothing other than an action that shows outwardly the spiritual movements, which must agree with the measures and perfect concords of harmony,” wrote Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro (1420–1484), a Jewish-Italian dance master central to the development of ballet. He explained that these cosmic harmonies descend into the human intellect as music, delight the heart, and birth a stirring of the spirit, which expresses itself through the dancing body.

A more esoteric form of this idea was articulated by Italian philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), who carefully combined Catholic orthodoxy with a revival of theurgic principles in his translations of the Neo-Platonic corpus. “Exercise by keeping constantly in motion and make various circular movements like those of the heavenly bodies,” Ficino advised in his De vita libri tres. “Since by their movings and circlings you were engendered, by making similar motions you will be preserved.” For Ficino, such movements were not mere imitation, but rather called down the divine celestial spheres into the human body. This was god-work.

Centuries later, such visions had become impossible. The Earth was no longer the center of the solar system. The orbits of the planets were not perfectly circular. Rationality remained an intellectual virtue, but it did not extend to the cosmos. By the nineteenth century, Romantic thinkers imagined something new: a universe not governed by orderly ratios but dynamically alive and pulsing with feeling.

Isadora Duncan and her contemporaries participated in this modern vision. “The movement of the universe concentrating in an individual becomes what is termed will,” Duncan wrote, “The dance should simply be, then, the natural gravitation of this will of the individual, which in the end is no more nor less than a human translation of the gravitation of the universe.”

This was a modernist aesthetic theurgy born out of the push and pull of Romanticism and Existentialism. Duncan could not look up at the stars and see gods, and so celestial influx became a different sort of force. For Duncan, the dancing body was a star unto itself, its gravity nothing less than cosmic. If movement was the language of the soul, in dance the body’s speech became a cosmic act. God-work.