Elsa Giovanna Simonetti
Writing on dance, criticism, and the cultural afterlives of salvation.
Dance productions and performances have consistently explored salvation as transformation: the restoration of balance, the generation of meaning, and the reconfiguration of embodied existence. In many canonical ballets, salvation functions as a
Over time, such redemptive structures have evolved. In response to shifting historical sensibilities, choreographers have reimagined dramatic outcomes, producing optimistic, ambivalent, or radically disenchanted final scenes. A striking example lies in the many endings of Swan Lake. Depending on who is permitted to save whom, and under what conditions, distinct ethical and theatrical worlds emerge. Salvation thus appears as a historically contingent device through which dance articulates collective expectations, anxieties, and moral tensions.
This critical project approaches ballet and performance through that lens. It asks how choreographic works negotiate agency, fragility, endurance, disappearance, and the desire for permanence within an art form defined by transience. Even in its most abstract forms, dance remains grounded in the vulnerability of the human body and in the unstable relation between presence and loss.
This perspective is informed by my MSCA postdoctoral project MappingSalvation, which develops an epistemic model of salvation understood not as a fixed end-state but as a non-linear process shaped by conditions, agents, and itineraries. My writing on dance and performance extends that research into the public sphere, testing and translating its conceptual tools through criticism addressed to a broader cultural readership.
These texts combine analytical precision with accessibility: they read performance closely while opening scholarly questions outward, beyond the university, into the wider life of contemporary culture.
Selected feature
Essay
Inventing the diva: ballet stars of the 19th century
Today’s dancers dazzle onstage, yet offstage they reveal a world of physio sessions, heartbreaks, swollen ankles, and difficult days. They leave grand opera houses in hoodies and trainers, returning to lives that can feel unexpectedly close to our own. The contrast with ballet’s so-called golden age, when the mythology of the star dancer first took recognisable modern form, could hardly be greater.