Salvation and performance
Across ballet and contemporary dance, ideas of salvation and redemption recurrently emerge as moments of transformation: points at which balance appears to be restored, a body is reconfigured, or a horizon of meaning briefly opens. In many traditional ballets, salvation functions as a central narrative device, marking the resolution of a complex dramatic plot. The figure who brings about this resolution — lover, ruler, supernatural entity or sacrificial body — acts as the agent of transformation, restoring order or offering the promise of harmony.
Over time, these redemptive structures have been repeatedly reimagined. Choreographers have altered their dramaturgical outcomes in response to shifting historical sensibilities and ideological horizons, producing optimistic, ambivalent, or radically disenchanted visions of transformation. Depending on who is allowed to save, who can be saved, and under which conditions, distinct scenic perspectives unfold. Salvation thus appears not as a stable motif, but as a historically contingent device through which dance articulates collective expectations, anxieties, and ethical tensions.
Against this background, this project approaches salvation not as a narrative endpoint, but as a critical lens. Rather than asking whether redemption is achieved, my writing examines how performance negotiates agency, endurance, fragility, and disappearance. Dance — even in its most abstract, non-narrative forms — remains an art grounded in the vulnerability and transience of the human body. Precisely because of this, it persistently raises questions about presence and loss, and about the desire for permanence within an inherently ephemeral medium.
This perspective is informed by my MSCA postdoctoral project MappingSalvation, which develops an epistemic model for analysing salvation as a non-linear process structured by conditions, agents, and itineraries rather than by fixed outcomes. My writing on performance and dance constitutes a form of dissemination and conceptual transfer of this research: a public-facing space in which theoretical tools developed within academic research are tested, translated, and made accessible beyond the university.
Engaging with performance allows the category of salvation to circulate across disciplinary and social boundaries, entering a field where bodies, affects, and spectatorship play a central role. In this sense, these texts function both as critical analysis and as a mode of knowledge dissemination and popularisation, addressing a broader cultural public while preserving analytical rigour.
In contemporary choreographic practices, traditional redemptive narratives are often displaced or suspended altogether. Salvation, when it appears, takes the form of a fragile itinerary: a temporary, reversible reconfiguration of meaning unfolding within conditions of limit, exposure, persistence, and exhaustion. It is in these unstable zones — where balance is never fully restored and disappearance remains imminent — that performance opens a space for thinking salvation otherwise.
Features
Inventing the diva: ballet stars of the 19th century. Today’s dancers dazzle onstage – yet offstage they reveal a human world of physio sessions, heartbreaks, swollen ankles and tough days. They leave soirées at grand opera houses in hoodies and trainers, returning to a life that feels unexpectedly close to our own. The contrast with the so-called golden age of ballet, when the art form took its current shape, could not be greater. Bachtrack, Dec. 2025.
Reviews
Notre-Dame de Paris – Paris Opéra Ballet. Fjord Review, Dec. 2025.