Power structures and dynamics have resorted to choreographies in numerous ways, investing in them with their own meanings and purposes. Since Antiquity, dance events and practices have accompanied the Western body politic, reflecting on discourses that represent and inform it. Dance has both empowered and excluded its practitioners – or else served to challenge, rather than reaffirm, the status quo. Social hierarchy, gender, age group and family status, ethnicity, religious or other identity are just a dense list of key variables that define groups that have historically used a variety of dance forms to define and establish themselves, build bridges with one another, or else barriers.

         The legal status of dance – encouraged or at least allowed vs prohibited under some circumstances or even entirely – offers a telling example of a battlefield where a range of attitudes have been expressed and put into practice, not rarely as crucial points of cultural conflicts. Furthermore, what was at stake was not simply whether or not to dance (nor how, with all the other variables). This particular form of practice, with the way it deploys the body in space and time and creates connections between individuals, has served as a metonymy for the human experience in general, the mysterious and variously interpreted ontological and phenomenological relation between a physical and a spiritual dimension, as well as the interaction between the one and the many, or with a reality beyond ordinary perception, that can be mediated exclusively by performing a certain set of poses and steps.

An interpretation proposed by Quentin Skinner – one of the most influential historians of political thought both methodologically and for his revisitation of the Italian late medieval and Renaissance case – has charged the group of dancers at the centre of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fresco on The Effects of Just Government in the Town (Siena, 1337-39) with deep symbolic resonance. In his opinion, they are young men performing a tripudium, a collective dance celebrating civic concord and pride. If this is the case, dance becomes a central iconographic device employed to affirm and disseminate key political ideas. It is difficult to avoid registering, however, we do not know for certain if that was the intention of the artist or of the commissioning city government. In the end, meaning is created in the interpreter’s mind. To such a degree, the common view was and remains that these are women engaged in joyful recreation. This conflict of interpretation, rather than being an obstacle to proper understanding, may be appreciated methodologically as evidence of how images work and interact with various audiences and stakeholders.