Chronotopic revisions, embodiment, and adaptation in Shakespeare-inspired dance pieces.

ESRA conference, Porto, July 9-12, 2025

This year’s ESRA conference invites us to consider temporality from a wide array of perspectives, and this seminar aims at exploring how time and temporality play into adaptations of Shakespeare’s works into dance. Time is essential to dance as an art form: dancers have to keep time, and tempo underpins all aspects of the craft, from exercises in the studio to finding perfect adequacy between music and movement on stage for maximum expressivity. The question of time and temporality can also be raised in terms of the relevance of dance as an art form, particularly classical ballet: ballet has often been deemed “old fashioned”, “traditional”, or out of touch with the concerns and tastes of modern audiences, while contemporary dance, in its essence, engages with the present.

Drawing from Shakespeare’s universal plays and texts, choreographers, dancers, and viewers/spectators have reworked the Bard’s wor(l)ds through new, alternative and mostly unexpected “corporeal chronotopes”, to quote Bakhtin who theorized ‘time’ as a social location. The chronotope, Bakthin explains, epitomizes “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships” (Bakhtin 1981: 84), thus “time […] thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; [and] likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of plot, time, history” (84). Corporeal chronotopes are particularly relevant to describe the intertwining of time and temporality with space and all other features that concur to the realization of a performative, adaptational dancing event. The process does not rely merely on the rendering “into dance” of a Shakespearian text but also encompasses practices of community building, intimacy in motion, metaphoric and corporeal ambiguities, ….

We invite contributors to interrogate dance and temporality in Shakespeare-inspired pieces by proposing papers which address (but are not limited to) issues like:

- compression, condensation, or extension of time: how is dramatic time being transposed on the dance stage? Dance has its own codes in terms of narrativity and story-telling: which involves skipping over some parts of the play, accelerating, or, on the contrary, stretching others.

- temporality and the politics of time in pieces focusing on “co-textual elements”, i.e. the ‘internal regularities’ of the performance text, and “contextual elements”, which cover ‘external aspects’ of the performance, including the cultural context or the setting, the scenario in which the performance will take place.

- temporality, relevance: How do choreographers make stylistic choices that make a piece modern and appealing to the public, or conversely, embrace tradition and the past?

- trauma, memory, past and contemporary issues: Shakespeare’s works often engage with various forms of individual as well as collective trauma (war and casualties in the history plays, betrayal, intergenerational trauma, gender violence, …). Papers can focus on the way dance pieces have addressed these issues – from Preljocaj’s transposition of the war in the Balkans in his Romeo and Juliet to Benjamin Millepied’s recent adaptation of the same play which alludes to BLM, gender and racial violence, as well as violence against the LGBTQI+ community, …

- queer temporalities: how do queer adaptations of Shakespeare’s works into dance disrupt time? Papers can draw from concepts such as Halberstam’s “Perverse Presentism” for example.

Please send abstracts (200-300 words) and a short bio to Adeline Chevrier-Bosseau (Sorbonne Université, France – adeline.chevrier-bosseau@sorbonne-universite.fr ) and Mattia Mantelatto (Università Kore Enna – UKE, Sicily – mattia.mantellato@unikore.it ) before Dec. 02, 2024