The Mereotopological Space/Time of Dance

Abstract

This article will test the functioning of topology in the analysis of a particular choreography by Anglo-Indian kathak dancer Akram Khan and French ballet dancer Sylvie Guillem, titled Sacred Monsters, a dance performed between classical traditions and contemporary styles. In particular, we will draw on Alfred N. Whitehead’s “mereotopology,” a topology of “regions” (rather than “points”) where the ontological relation between A and B as perceivable and thinkable “regions” allows us to bypass the infamous dualism of body and mind (or the topological aporia between process and point). The final aim will be to isolate from the choreography of Sacred Monsters some gestures as mereotopological invariants or perceivable movement sections, simultaneously abstracting them from their physical and cultural dimensions and revealing them as “virtual movement-objects” to be differently actualized: rather than an ethnographic analysis of the performed dance in its physico/cultural peculiarities, a mereotopological, abstractly empirical study of its space and time.