DANCE AND SOCIETY

Among the spaces of dance, the court, literary and real, of the Christian west, the Byzantine empire, and the Islamic sphere, play a very important role in which the ceremonies, rituals of power and ostentation of privileges, use dance and music as a necessary manifestation to the proper fulfilment of pleasure. In the context of the geography of the Medieval Mediterranean, dance describes and outlines heterotopic spaces in which the West often stages the visual traditions of the Islamic courts, these in turn mixed with the Byzantine and Persian figurative culture. The project studies these migrations between East and West that make up the eminently political and self-representative discourse of court art that uses the visualization of the pleasures of the sovereign as a rhetorical instrument. This hypothesis is revealed by iconography: ivory pieces, fabrics, ceramics and even painted ceilings, often featuring musicians and dancers. In the eastern and western literary tradition, with their respective iconographic repertoire, parties, banquets, and dancing are recurrent paradigms. The palaces host imagined performances and live performances that openly manifest their mestizo nature: the documents tell us about the Muslim origin of some of the artists who performed in the courts and in the public celebrations of the medieval cities. Court dance follows a path of codification until it reaches the gates of the Renaissance totally normalized and hierarchized in its gestures, metaphors, and rhythms. Processions and games danced in Byzantine and Arab-Sicilian ivories (X-XII centuries), in ewer and in ceramics, dances in fabrics from the Nile Valley (V-VII century), dances in frescoes and in illustrations of Latin manuscripts, are just some of the visual sources that this repertoire gathers and that the project explores alongside narratives and ekphrasis of dance hierarchized in court novels, historical chronicles, poems and literature within the Mediterranean context.