The Diagram on Stage Movement, Gesture and Writing

Abstract

From the diagram, which inscribes the line (διά-γράφειν), to the choreography (χορεία-γραφία), which inscribes the choir into the written form, we remark but a short step from the scène of the dance to the scène of the writing. The writing of dance, and likewise the writing of the body, makes the invisible visible within the movement. Bridging between notation, as capacity for mobilisation of new intuitions, and diagrammatization of forms and movements to compel the thought of new gestures, the diagram stands out as a scène or ‘picture’ whose axes (points, lines, arrows, circles, volumes…) simultaneously structure mobility in order to grasp the pulsating movement. The twentieth-century artistic avant-gardes will not remain indifferent to this ideography that, through leap and condensation, makes the materialization of the idea, the idea in the writing, possible.