This paper is concerned with resonances of the tragic in twentieth-century central-European dance theatet, to be discussed with particular reference to Pina Bausch's 1975 Orpheus and Eurydice. In my study Resonances of the Tragic: Between Event and Affect (2015), I have argued that in terms of a history of the “longue durée,” the evocation of the tragic occurs in a field of tension between technique, the mise-en-scène, and conceptions, as well as procedures and moments of interruption, of suspension, of disruption and of the indeterminable resulting from ecstatic corporeality. Its structure and function can generate an event in the emphatic sense of the term; consequently, it provides a paradigm for recognizing structures of form and of an aesthetic of reception, structures emerging from individual constellations of the fictional and choric, absence and presence. From the perspective of dance studies, the tragic emanates from the representation of horrendous monstrosity testing the limits of what can be imagined by means of the moved body in all senses of the word; but how exactly does Bausch produce the qualities of the ambivalent, ambiguous, and paradoxical—and, consequently, the tragic?

When looking at dance and its aesthetics, I start with the view offered by Ellen Dissayanake that “art” is about “making special” (1988, 1992). Like her, I am unhappy with an elitist notion of art and aesthetics supported by modernism and want to look at aesthetics as being part of a sensitivity that underlies all cultural systems. For me to study aesthetics is a way of entry into different conceptualisations, different ways of making sense of the world, therefore it does not necessarily solely deal with the “arts”. This is why the very broad notion of “making special” is useful as it allows the examination of the connections between the activities that are generally considered “art” and other exploratory, imaginatively structured systems of actions, thus moving away from potential ethnocentrism. In this approach, I am following the footsteps of anthropologist and Tiwi expert Jane Goodale who, in a paper about Tiwi creativity, argued:

For most people carrying out research in ritual and traditional dance forms, ‘modernisation’, usually understood as ‘Westernisation’, is seen as something destructive. Often rituals are studied as fairly static phenomena. Even though in our fieldwork we never see a ritual repeated in precisely the same manner, because our informants often insist on standardisation and on the possibility of exact ritual replication, we tend to look for a “proper”, archetypal form from which all other forms have deviated. As Gerd Baumann has argued (1992), from Durkheim onward much of the anthropological discourse about ritual has been based on a number of closely related assumptions:

1. 1. Rituals are seen to be symbolic performances at the core of the social identity of communities;

2. 2. They create and maintain (or transform) a society's cultural identity and social relations;

3. 3. The existence of a ritual community or congregation is assumed, whose members share a relationship to the performance, its symbols and their meanings;

4. 4. Thus, rituals are seen to be best understood as acts internal to the category or group that celebrates them or celebrates itself through them, the group being essentially concerned with itself rather than with the outside world.

The study of dance, let alone “dance anthropology,” is still barely accepted by academia in the schools and universities of the United Kingdom. On the whole, Farnell's 1981 discussion of dance and dance education in England is still relevant. There is, however, a growing awareness among British anthropologists of the critical relevance of dance within the field of anthropology and among dance scholars of the relevance of anthropology to dance studies.

In the last decade or so a number of studies that look at the state of the art within the field of “dance” anthropology have been published in the United States and in Europe (see, for example, Giurschescu and Torp [1991], Kaeppler [1991], Lange [1980], Sklar [1991], and Williams [1986]). It would be more accurate to talk about the anthropology of human movement, as do a number of the writers mentioned above, since the concept “dance,” as known in English and other cognate languages, may not be appropriate cross culturally. I find the term “anthropology of human movement,” however, rather cumbersome, and since it is “dance”—rather than martial arts or signing systems, for instance—that is usually looked at by the authors I will be referring to later, I consider the use of the term “dance anthropology” justifiable.