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Steven Swarbrick deposited Dancing with Perdita: The Choreography of Lost Time in The Winter’s Tale in the group
TC Disability Studies on MLA Commons 2 years, 6 months ago
Shakespeare scholarship has long been interested in the temporal dynamics of The Winter’s Tale, and has often turned to melancholic or traumatic time frames to explain the thematic persistence of lost time in Shakespeare’s romance. In this chapter, I argue that dance provides a key interpretive framework for understanding the play’s interest in bodily movements that exceed static oppositions between absence and presence, time lost and time regained. Drawing on recent theorizations of “crip time” and the posthuman, I read Perdita’s dance as a figuration of bodies, sexualities, and histories without proper figure; in so doing, this chapter sets out to choreograph lost time via the space between movements—where generativity and negativity dance.