Abstract
The article investigates Walter Benjamin’s notion of allegory in The Origin of German Tragic Drama as a theoretical perspective on dance historiography from a cross-cultural perspective. It is argued that Benjamin’s definition of allegory as “embodied idea” offers a comparative mode of analysis which allows to investigate the body’s potential for archiving performative knowledge across different historical periods. Dance historiography would thus read history into contemporary performance in terms of an invocation of embodied cultural memory through practice. The article introduces three examples of such comparative historical analysis by analyzing the embodied archive of mania and melancholia in three different examples: 1. Greek tragedy via Theodoros Terzopoulos’ The last Mask, 2. medieval dance craze and dance of death, and 3. neo-baroque aesthetics in Trisha Brown’s L’Orfeo.