Hermione Sessions: Dancing, The Winter's Tale, and the Kinaesthetic Imagination

Abstract

This essay traces the development of a solo modern dance interpretation of the final scene of The Winter's Tale, in which Hermione "awakens" to be reunited with Leontes and Perdita. Part diary, part dialogue between dancer and choreographer, the essay, like the dance itself, also conducts a critical analysis of Hermione's embodied history in order to understand the moment of choice and agency revealed in her final gesture, the open hand. Engaging with Shakespeare's play from the perspective of dancer-researchers, we take up Ann Cooper Albright's assertion that dancing is "physical thinking" and that the "kinaesthetic imagination" is a powerful interpretive tool. We draw on phenomenology and the history and philosophy of modern dance in order to explore the ways in which dancing, as an art that exists dynamically and ephemerally in time and space, opens up the possibility of feminine agency through a resistance to the reification and erasure that characterizes Hermione's representation in the play. The insistence of the body counters the power of Leontes' reifying language. To breathe in and as Hermione is to emphasize the insistent expression of her suppressed, embodied self.