Iconodansa

The international research group ICONODANSA (Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona) was born in 2011, bringing together researchers from various fields who share a strong interest in visual art and view it as a link between dance and theatre. Establishing a constant dialogue on the textual and figurative representation of dance, the team aims to reconstruct the rich social, anthropological and literary background of dance that emerges from cultural studies.

The moving body as a symbolic form defines the space of the town and works as a creative moment of popular identity. But these are only two of the issues that attracted the researchers’ interest in past decades, when dance became a relevant subject of scientific research. In the Middle Ages, the cultural studies led by Jean Claude Schmitt, for example, prioritized attention given to the body, dance and rhythm. It should not be forgotten that Aby Warburg’s considerations, at the beginning of the XX century, highlighted the importance of the moving images, like traces of a form that passes through time, adapting itself to new styles and meanings. Other fundamental contributions are the studies in dance iconography led by musicologists and historians of art and theatre. They demonstrated how certain visualisations of dance may be considered paradigms or epistemological key issues, to approach ideas and concepts of the past and the present. Dance, seen as a cultural phenomenon, is aided by the comprehension of historical facts in the broad sense. This has been proved by Alessandro Arcangeli on many occasions—by research that is a methodological model for dance analysis. All in all, it is not about isolating a concept or metaphor, according to Giorgio Agamben, but about understanding to what extent the mechanism that allows us to identify the paradigms of culture is important for our interpretation, analysis and comprehension. The ICONODANSA group, following these methodological paths, is researching the role of dance in theatrical, ritual and political creation of narrative in the medieval Mediterranean.