Reading Crystal Pite’s 'Dark Matters' as a text : is the author dead?

Abstract

This dissertation discusses the role of the spectator in contemporary dance performance interpretation. In order to address this topic, intertextuality is used as a theoretical framework following Janet Adshead’s intertextual approach to dance analysis (1999). Accordingly, in this research, dance is considered as ‘text’, with the spectator being the ‘reader’ of the dance-text. In order to apply intertextual principles from literary theory to dance interpretation, Crystal Pite’s Dark Matters (2009) is understood and analysed as a dance-text. The textual models for dance analysis proposed by Marco de Marinis (1993), Pauline Hodgens (1988), and Janet Adshead (1988) are combined to provide an intertextual reading of the piece. The study of the piece is followed by a meta-analysis of the process of interpretation to discuss the role of the choreographer-author and the spectator-reader in the construction of meaning in Dark Matters. The study concludes that although the birth of the spectator-reader has been understood to happen at the expense of the death of the choreographer-author as announced by Roland Barthes (1967), in this study they seem to be both alive still. Both choreographer-author and spectator reader share an active role in the construction of meaning and in the act of interpreting a dance-text. The dissertation proposes that they engage in this process of meaning construction by freely selecting references from an infinite net of possible intertexts as much as activating the levels of textual analysis that their interpretation requires.