Language?” Dance: Current Selected Research, Volume 1, editors Lynette Y. Overby and James H. Humphrey. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1989.
Hanstein, from the Department of Dance at the Texas Women’s University, discusses the notion of dance as a language and points out the limitations of examining dance in these terms. Since it can be meaningful without necessarily meaning something, she argues that dance, unlike verbal communication, expresses, rather than states, meaning and that it conveys that meaning through the qualitative interaction between the performer and the individual viewer. Hanstein’s argument will be important to consider in my exploration, since dancers and choreographers utilized pointe shoes, and the techniques they made possible, to convey a particular effect/message to nineteenth-century audiences. Primary accounts and critiques will allow me to explore what meaning viewers received by watching dance and, in particular, ballet en pointe.