Abstract

I was recently warned by a post-structuralist theatre historian to “Beware meaning for, as Baudrillard says: ‘meaning is the death certificate of Art’.” My methodology for the analysis of dance/music relationships (in which meanings or significances drawn from one dance are allowed to resonate in the interpretation of another) can be seen to reveal an allegiance to ‘bourgeois humanism’ (Eagleton, 1988). Bunuel’s film The discreet charm of the bourgeoisie indicates my probable fate. Using a work by Mark Morris as an example I propose that, taking a Peircean (rather than Saussurean) construction of semiotics, it becomes possible to deal with the contingent meanings that can result from, and contribute to, an ‘open’, intertextual, reading and thereby further the development of dance analysis.