What does writing say about dance?

It is a question which ŻfinMalta will be exploring this coming Thursday with the help of Times of Malta arts and culture editor Lara Zammit.

Zammit will be the keynote speaker at an event titled ‘Writing Movement: Questions on Choreography’ – the opening session of the fourth season of ‘Movimento’, a series of talks organised by the national dance company. 

The ‘Movimento’ series will see experts from outside the field of dance discussing movement. The aim is to encourage the vast overlaps between artistic forms with the intention of cultivating active spectatorship in dance.

Times of Malta arts and culture editor Lara Zammit. Photo: Kenneth Abela

Zammit has written glowingly about ŻfinMalta in the past: “We tend to emerge from ŻfinMalta productions deeply connected with the unspoken parts of ourselves,” she once wrote – but she is acutely aware of the challenges in putting choreography to words. 

“There seems to be resistance to writing in the sphere of dance; the impression is that words tend to escape dance, or that dance exceeds language and cannot be contained by it, where dance is conceived of as non-textual and distinctively organic,” Zammit noted in a recent interview with the dance company.

That said, when transposing the question of writing onto dance and choreography, Zammit maintains that several questions emerge which can be both challenging and illuminating. One such question is that posed by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats in his poem Among School Children: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

“It appears that choreography exists at once independently of a performance as the ‘score’ of a dance and concurrently as the dance itself as it is being performed, where it is ‘written’ by the dancers themselves in real time and space,” Zammit posits.

The ŻfinMalta event will be held on Thursday, March 9 at ŻfinMalta studios in Valletta. It begins at 6.30pm. Tickets for the event are available here. For more information, visit the ŻfinMalta website.