DANCE AND DEATH

The Dance of Death, both in literature and in medieval visual culture, is another masterful example of the capacity of the rhythmic body to create heterotopic spaces, in which the reality of life's pleasures are transformed into a metaphor for a movement towards the cessation of all types of enjoyment: death. In the archetypal poetic-literary vision of the macabre dance, the rhythmic movement has the power to trace imagined and real places at the same time, in which different cultural, social, political roots end up coexisting and in which the ultimate encounter between the earthly and the beyond has its place. In the realm of the culture of death in the West, it is known how the mole of the Dance Macabre was one of the most powerful images of social self-representation in the late Middle Ages. However, it deserves a more thorough analysis of its literary and visual relationship with the East, and its American traces, which have been established by Iconodansa authors. The iconographic transposition of this powerful literary theme draws from many traditions, crossing the path of polite literature and the propaganda of the modern mendicant orders whose echoes are also picked up in the literary culture of the peninsula.

Danse Macabre, as a renewed classical tragedy, produces a collection of texts in the different European languages, a repertoire of images and choreographic forms that, born at the end of the medieval period, spread throughout the modern age with a particular momentum during the Baroque and some survive until today, especially due of the effects of the First and Second World Wars