Corporeality

Abstract

This chapter evokes those disturbing qualities of the body that kept reappearing when the Russian male dancer was discussed as a genius: the fact that dancing was always the work of physical bodies, the labour of muscles that had to be trained to perform to perfection. By looking at the qualities associated with the dancing genius, I offer some reasons why this trained body has been relatively absent from the Nijinsky myth. In particular, I want to emphasise that the materiality of the dancing body may not be as opposed to writing as is often claimed — its absence simply requires implementation of different methods of source criticism.