It should be noted that dance, which is both bird and flight, is also everything that the infant designates. Dance is innocence, because it is a body before the body. It is forgetting, because it is a body that forgets its fetters, its weight. It is a new beginning, because the dancing gesture must always be something like the invention of its own beginning. And it is also play, of course, because dance frees the body from all social mimicry, from all gravity and conformity. A wheel that turns itself: this could provide a very elegant definition for dance. Dance is like a circle in space, but a circle that is its own principle, a circle that is not drawn from the outside but rather draws itself. Dance is the prime mover: every gesture and every line of dance must present itself not as a consequence, but as the very source of mobility. And finally, dance is simple affirmation, because it makes the negative body — the shameful body — radiantly absent. Dance lends itself to the traversal of innocence by power. It manifests the secret virulence of what initially appeared as fountain, bird, childhood.
- Alain Badiou, “Dance as a Metaphor for Thought” (Handbook of Inaesthetics)
