The Dance Body as an Arena of Values and the Chronotope of the Theater – An Exercise of Analysis

The exercise of analysis of performance dance discourse is carried out grounded in Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope. On the basis of the classical ballet genre, theater is established as a constitutive chronotope that materializes its social-aesthetic values spatial-temporally. The analysis of chronotopic transgressions allows identifying the emergence of modern ballet based on two choreographies by Russian artist Vaslav Nijinski.


Introduction
This article aims to continue a previously published study whose analysis of dance was conducted with the assistance of the concept of discourse genre discussed by Bakhtin and the Circle. The same methodological approach will be adopted here, as we will focus, in the multisemiotic discourse of dance, on the choreographic dimension. In the previous study we were able to establish typical utterances of different genres, such as romantic classical ballet and hip-hop. We could thus identify the social-aesthetic values of each discourse (Amorim, 2020).
The result of this approach is a partial analysis that does not intend to cover dance in its global-aesthetic condition, 1 a totality that is woven by several languages.
We have chosen to call it an exercise of analysis as we aim to allow it not only to deepen our understanding of the production of meaning from a specific corpus, but also to concretely practice using one or more concepts of the theories we have adopted so as to confront their limitations and possibilities. Therefore, this exercise should bring theoretical contributions whether by specifying and deepening the concepts used or by broadening their scope of validity.
Focusing on the discourse of dance as an object of research entails accepting its verbal-visual nature. Although permeated by verbal components, such as the titles of the performances, which actively participate in the entire production of meaning, its visual component is undoubtedly predominant. On this material component, Grillo states that "(…) language is founded on an indexical matrix that includes either an iconic relationship or a relationship of resemblance with referents of the world" (Grillo, 2012, p.241). 2 However, as we advance in the history of dance, we learn that, apart from the pantomime of the first classical ballets, the iconic dimension of visual discourse becomes more complex. In fact, if it is not inscribed in a universe of genres that hold their own values, it becomes more difficult to read and analyze the discursiveness of dance choreography. Complex iconicity is the term we have chosen to name this form of All content of Bakhtiniana. Revista de Estudos do Discurso is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution-type CC-BY 4.0 meaning relation with which the visual discourse of dance operates. Thus, in our previous study, as we identified the recurrent forms of different dance discourse genres, we demonstrated that the utterances of each genre affirm and embody specific social and aesthetic values that inform and conform the iconicity of choreographic movements.

The Concept of Chronotope
The complex iconicity of choreographic discourse requires that we use another Bakhtinian concept, that is, the concept of chronotope. This is due to that fact that Bakhtin himself points to the importance of discussing the chronotope of the genre when the concept was first formulated.
For Bakhtin, the term chronotope, which is borrowed from biology and physics, defines certain conditions of inseparability between time and space within a narrative.
In the literary analysis he carries out, space is marked by temporal indices and time is only embodied in that space; thus, a particular space-time corresponds to a specific discourse genre. For example, as Bakhtin analyzes Flaubert's Madame Bovary, he shows the form of time as he confers to it a material density: Such towns are the locus for cyclical everyday time. (…) Time here has no advancing historical movement; it moves rather in narrow circles: the circle of the day, of the week, of the month, of a person's entire life. A day is just a day, a year is just a yeara life is just a life. Day in, day out the same round of activities are repeated, the same topics of conversation, the same words and so forth (…) This is commonplace, philistine cyclical everyday time. (…) Time here is without event and therefore almost seems to stand still. Here there are no "meetings," no "partings." It is a viscous and sticky time that drags itself slowly through space (Bakhtin, 1981, pp.247-248 (Bakhtin, 1981, p.243;emphasis in original). 4 Bakhtin's concept of chronotope refers to the empirical extra-discursive reality.
"A literary work's artistic unity in relationship to an actual reality is defined by its chronotope" (Bakhtin, 1981, p.243). 5 However, As we have already said, there is a sharp and categorical boundary line between the actual world as source of representation and the world represented in the work. We must never forget this, we must never confuseas has been done up to now and as is still often donethe represented world with the world outside the text (naive realism) (…). All such confusions are methodologically impermissible (Bakhtin, 1981, p.253;emphasis in original). 6 This does not justify the idea that there is no relationship between them: The work and the world represented in it enter the real world and enrich it, and the real world enters the work and its world as part of the process of its creation, as well as part of its subsequent life, in a continual renewing of the work through the creative perception of listeners and readers (Bakhtin, 1981, p.253). 7 We see that Bakhtin also relates the chronotope to the author's and the reader's space-time context as empirical units always inscribed in discursiveness: How are the chronotopes of the author and the listener or reader presented to us? First and foremost, we experience them in the external material being of the work and in its purely external composition. But this material of the work is not dead, it is speaking, signifying (it involves signs); we not only see and perceive it but in it we can always hear voices (even while reading silently to ourselves) (Bakhtin, 1981, p.252 We insist on the quotations and the nuances each one brings because we understand, as Holquist (2010, p.19) 9 puts it, that "chronotope remains a Gordian 10 knot of ambiguities" due to its countless interpretations and uses. Holquist refers to the two parts of the essay "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope:" the first one written from 1934 to 1937 and the second, in 1973. The first part was written when Bakhtin was concerned about the theory of the novel. For example, he analyzes the way Goethe's understanding of time frames his narrative. The second was written when he had returned to the metaphysical interests of his youth and his dialogue with Kant. Holquist explains that Bakhtin adopts the Kantian notions of the divided self and the noncoincidence between consciousness and knowledge and the empirical reality of the world. This understanding breaks with the Cartesian idea of the "transparent I." Nevertheless, Bakhtin disagrees with Kant's categories of space and time, which are a priori and transcendental. For Bakhtin, space and time integrate the empirical and historical concreteness.

Holquist thus focuses on the complexity of Bakhtin's text and concludes that
Bakhtin's discussion on the concept of chronotope during his mature years, that is, a few years before his death in 1975, delineates the limits of his analysis and places it in the discursive dimension. He compares Bakhtin and Kant once again.
Another huge difference between Kant and Bakhtin (…) [is that] Kant famously never raises the question of language's role in negotiating appearance. For Bakhtin just the opposite is the case: he is as focused on language as Kant was dismissive of it. (…) if time and space have their "natural" home in logic and science, chronotopes have their naturaltheir onlyhome in language. In our daily use of chronotopes the abstractness of time-space is domesticated when we deploy them in speech (Holquist, 2010, p.31). 11 We agree with Holquist and come to a first conclusion. We use Bakhtin's words in which the space-time unit of the chronotope is seen as expression and is endowed with the form of a sign:  We somehow manage however to endow all phenomena with meaning, that is, we incorporate them not only into the sphere of spatial and temporal existence but also into a semantic sphere. This process of assigning meaning also involves some assigning of value. But questions concerning the form that existence assumes in this sphere, and the nature and form of the evaluations that give sense to existence, are purely philosophical (although not, of course, metaphysical) and we will not engage them here. For us the following is important: whatever these meanings turn out to be, in order to enter our experience (which is social experience) they must take on the form of a sign that is audible and visible for us (a hieroglyph, a mathematical formula, a verbal or linguistic expression, a sketch, etc.) (Bakhtin, 1981, pp.257-258;emphasis in original). 12 We also conclude, now from a methodological standpoint, that Bakhtin himself provides us with "the boundaries of a chronotopic analysis" and the definition of the limits of the research that uses this concept. He does it when he establishes that the object of the human sciences is discourse. Therefore, as we are not historians, geographers, philosophers, architects, or engineers, "our" chronotope must always be circumscribed to the dimension of language.

The Starting Points
We begin by stating that it is possible to use categories and concepts Bakhtin developed to discuss verbal language and literary art to analyze verbal-visual or visual materialities. Thus, we face the challenge of considering that, in general, it is possible to understand the performance of dance choreography as a discourse that can be pertinently analyzed through the concepts of discourse genre and chronotope.
As to the latter, which it the object of this study, a caveat is in order. We will not discuss the chronotopes of the represented stories of the different ballets. We approach the choreographies of The Dying Swan, The Afternoon of a Faun, and The Rite of Spring from the genre perspective and not from the specificity of each narrated story, for the same story that uses the same music can be represented in different choreographies and be inscribed in other discourse genres whose social and aesthetic values change radically. We know that, from a Bakhtinian standpoint, if values are altered, the aesthetic object is not the same anymore. This is the case of the street dance version of We take into account that the history of ballet and dance develops through the hybridization and creation of genres. Based on that, a task was assigned in our previous study, that is, to identify typical choreographic utterances. Such generic utterances recurrently occur in different choreographies and thus became an object of our interest insofar as they affirm the same social and aesthetic values. As we continue this line of methodological inquiry, we will work on the concept of chronotope in its close relationship with the values of genre as they are materialized in the spatial-temporal dimension.
The corpus of this study is comprised of three discursive fragments from YouTube videos. We analyze the tense dialogue between them and the genre that is conventionally called classical ballet. The analysis thus starts with the latter and its specificities to carry out the analysis of the former.
The classical ballet genre reaches its pinnacle and materializes its values in typical utterances and in the chronotope of the theater, constructed in several western countries during the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. We will specifically refer to the following theaters: Mariinsky in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and Châtelet, Opéra Garnier, Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris, France, constructed in this chronological sequence. The data from French Wikipedia are in the Appendix. 13 It was analyzed in our previous article.   Although these places are not only different, but are from different dates and have different architecture, our first analytical hypothesis is that, in terms of the classical-romantic ballet discourse genre and the values that penetrate their typical utterances, they pertain to the same chronotope. We thus should analyze their characteristics.
The layout of concert hall of the four theaters is known as "Italian theater," which is a large U-shaped room with a wide and elevated stage. This ensures great visibility to the audience. The absolute boundary between audience and stage is concretely established.  Another concrete element we find is the thick, usually velvet 20 curtains. They close the stage area and hinder the audience from having access, from an acoustic standpoint, to what happens to the artists when the performance ends. The specific characteristics of this space only work if they are intrinsically related to the specific characteristics of time: there is a scheduled time to start and end the show; there is a right time for the audience to enter and leave the room; there is a right time for the audience to applaud or otherwise to boo, etc. When the space of performance is coordinated with these moments, it is shown or hidden; it is closed or opened. Thus, we see that this chronotope outlines another important component of the genre according to Bakhtin: the relationship with the listener-spectator, which is entirely regulated as the regular audience knows the rules and adheres to them.
Another important element of the chronotope is stage lighting as it sets the timespace of the show: when the lights go down, the scene unfolds and the show starts; when the lights are turned back on, the show ends or an intermission of the show's discursiveness occurs. We should also discuss the space-time of the applauses 22 which somehow can be understood as a small chronotope, related to the general chronotope described. In this chronotope, lights are on, but the performers and the audience are still in the theater. Although spatially separated, they establish a direct dialogue: applauses and shoutings of "bravo!" are responded with the performers' codified body movements of gratitude and possible expressions of smile or emotion. Going to and from the scene does not mean disappearance and appearance, but a response to the audience that continues to applaud. The timing of this dialogue is also conventional and understood by the audience: even when the applause is fervent and prolonged, it has to stop; after a series of applauses/gratitude movements, the performers do not return to the stage and the audience leaves the theater.
When a spectator leaves the theater during the show, not many interpretations can be offered. It is possible to say that his/her departure is equally codified. Unless there is a problemfor example, a spectator feels sickhis/her leaving the theater may be interpreted as his/her disapproval of the show. It is logical to state that if several spectators leave, the first hypothesis is discarded. In addition, the disapproval of some may somehow influence how the others will respond, possibly stimulating hesitant spectators to leave the theater as well.
What does the chronotope of the theater 23 typified here allow us to say? What aesthetic-social values of classical-romantic ballet genre are realized in it? To answer these questions, we resort to an example of the exemplary ballet genre, namely, the famous The Dying Swan, created in the Mariinsky Theater in Saint Petersburg in Russia.
The theater is a center of excellence for Russian professionals of the art of ballet: dancers, musicians, choreographers, costume designers, etc. We focus on Mikhaïl Fokine, who is considered the great master of the transition to romanticism, valuing not only technique, but also dramatic expressiveness.
In our previous study we concluded that every classic ballet choreography affirms the idea of elevation as a value. The verticality to heights indicates a schism with the daily world. It offers an image of ideality in which the lightness of a nearly diaphanous body frees it from the weight and disarray of our daily gestures. This leads to applaud the dancers even if the lights are down. When the applause ends, the dancing and the plot resume. See, for example, the renowned ballet Le Corsaire by Marius Petipa . 23 The expression "chronotope of the theater" will be used throughout the text to always refer to large western national theaters that were built until the beginning of the 20th century.
to the use of pointe shoes, which elongate the body and place it at a higher level. Legs and arms, feet and hands reach for heights. The same happens with the use of light fabrics, such as the tulle of tutus. The hierarchization between both worlds is clear as the elegance of the forms and the delicacy of the colors point to a sublimated and purified humanity.
Body measurements are entirely proportional and harmonic. Nothing is off or out of place. In addition, there is a predominance of line over volume. The body is combined with a costume that highlights length and slenderness. Specifically in The Dying Swan, the dramatic nature of the proximity to death is expressed and emphasized through the tension between high and low, flight and the immobility of death.
The device of the stage establishes a play of presence/absence, visibility/invisibility, aided by light effects and scenography as well as the alternation between getting on and off the stage. The darkness, which the performer penetrates to disappear to the audience and from which he/she emerges without being seen, engenders apparition and mystery theatricality in which, once again, the value of breaking with the everyday world is consecrated.
The stage is immense in all dimensions: width, height and depth, which accentuates the magical nature of every technical devicesets, costumes, lighting, etc.
The large velvet curtains, a noble and imposing fabric, not only intensify theatricality but also isolate and protect the performers. The relationship between the interlocutors, viz., the performers and the audience, is thus established, contributing to thematizing the separation between the ordinary and the extraordinary.
The access to the world of art as a sphere of elevation starts with the entrance to the theater and continues through the luxuriously decorated corridors, staircases, halls, etc. The monumental internal staircase leads the audience to their seats, which are hierarchically arranged according to their purchasing power and class. This hierarchy is inverted: the highest level (balcony) corresponds to the lowest purchasing power whereas the lowest level (orchestra), to the highest purchasing power.
The façade of the buildings itself indicates that the special world one enters has nothing in common with the everyday and banal reality. At the Opéra Garnier Theater in Paris, the external and internal staircases highlight the very sense of elevation. All these spaces to be walked through acquire meaning in the temporality that crosses them: the time before the show, the waiting time, and the expectation time that advances towards the great moment when the lights go down and the show begins. "real people," Bakhtin states that they are all located in a real, unitary and as yet incomplete historical world set off by a sharp and categorical boundary from the represented world in the text. Therefore we may call this world the world that creates the text, for all its aspectsthe reality reflected in the text, the authors creating the text, the performers of the text (if they exist) and finally the listeners or readers who recreate and in so doing renew the textparticipate equally in the creation of the represented world in the text. Out of the actual chronotopes of our world (which serve as the source of representation) emerge the reflected and created chronotopes of the world represented in the work (in the text) (Bakhtin, 1981, p.253; emphasis in original). 26 Although Bakhtin is referring to the novel and possibly to the dramatic text or poem, the quotation seems to apply to ballet and dance as theatrical shows.

Modernity
The birth of the so-called modern ballet, 27 as staged in the aforementioned great   This is a highly meaningful example of the principle of otherness that operates within the aesthetic form: art speaks to (or fights) art. Does it mean that this is a purely abstract form of art or, as one may put it, "art for the art's sake"? Absolutely not. This is a tension of form that attests to a clash between social-aesthetic values. In "The Problem of Content, Material, and Form in Verbal Art," Bakhtin criticizes what he calls "material aesthetics" and states that Form, understood as the form of a given material solely in its naturalscientific (mathematical or linguistic) determinateness, becomes a sort of purely external ordering of the material, devoid of any axiological constituent. What fails to be understood is the emotional-volitional tension of form-the fact that it has the character of expressing some axiological relationship of the author and the contemplator (…) (Bakhtin, 1990, p.264; emphasis in original). 32 The value of discursive openness and plurality of The Afternoon of a Faun is confirmed in the following year's choreography of the ballet The Rite of Spring, whose music was commissioned from Stravinsky. 33  found in the re-creation of dances and rites of the popular and profound Russia.
However, the laughter and irreverence of the Bakhtinian theme are not found. Despite its popular and peasant origin, this is a religious rite: the most beautiful young woman from the village is chosen to be sacrificed: her death is an offering to the gods. movements that encourage the idea of a dreamed scene, a daydream in a hot afternoon.
The stage's reduced depth and perspective evoke the aesthetics of flat paintings more than grandiose theatricality. In the Rite, the rhythmic violence, asymmetrical bodies, vigorous gestures, and the attractive force of the stage floor from which the movements seem to be engendered erase any image of lightness, softness or purity that come from an idealized world of the heights. During the performance, the rules of interaction between interlocutors were also broken. Although this is a theatrical device based on which the relationship between stage and audience should follow the rules of the classical genre of performance, boos and whistles hindered dancers from hearing the music; in addition, Diaghilev, who was in charge of the show, was forced to turn on the audience lights several times.
The transgression we have identified requires that we discuss the role of the listener or addressee as it was elaborated by the Bakhtin Circle. Vološinov (1983, p.14) 37 states that (...) the whole formal structure of speech depends to a significant degree upon what sort of relationship the utterance is in to the implied identity of evaluations of that social milieu to which the utterance is directed. Creatively productive, assured and rich intonation is possible only when a 'supporting chorus' is assumed.
In both of Nijinski's ballets, the supposed addressee is understood as a spectator of a high social class and habitué to great theaters; a subject who has been introduced to ballet references, or rather, to a discursive memory in which several aesthetic references that traverse the bodies could be mobilized to produce meaning.  Publications, 1983. pp.5-30. 38 A methodological issue arises: to discuss this broad-scope chronotope we need to focus on the discursiveness engendered in it before analyzing it. For example, we could have investigated the newspapers of the time and articles on literary criticism and other arts, but this has not been done for this study. Addressing as a relation of otherness is one of the axes of the Bakhtin Circle's conception of language. The other, who is summoned and to whom one responds, intrinsically participates in the discursive construction and its production of meaning. In our analysis, the difference between supposed addressee and real addressee is bluntly revealed. Most of the audience that actually and effectively watched both shows disapproved of Nijinski's work and did not become thus a "supporting chorus." In Vološinov's reflection on the relationship between the artist-creator and his/her listener, we notice that he does not leave much room for the presence of creative transgression. Although he admits the possibility of a disagreement and a tone of irritation in the utterance, he does not elaborate on the possible richness proper to transgression. On the contrary, When this [supporting chorus] is absent, the voice breaks off and its wealth of intonation is reduced, as happens to the joker when he realizes that he alone is laughing. The laughter either ceases or dies away, becomes strained, loses assurance and clarity and is unable to produce any funny or jovial words (Vološinov, 1983, pp.14-15). 39 We believe that in art it is impossible to understand transgressive and avantgarde creation without the concept of superaddressee. Voloshinov outlines elements to define this concept when he mentions the "third participant" (Vološinov, 1983, p.15), 40 but it is Bakhtin who clearly defines it.
The author can never turn over his whole self and his speech work to the complete and final will of addressees who are on hand or nearby (after all, even the closest descendants can be mistaken), and always presupposes (with a greater or lesser degree of awareness) some higher instancing of responsive understanding that can distance itself in various directions (Bakhtin, 1986, p.126; emphasis in original). 41 We can say that the superaddressee frees the work from the interpretive limits of its context, its evaluative purview, its "supporting chorus," and takes it to a time beyond its time. Bezerra (2016, p.163)

Conclusions
We want to conclude this article focusing on the issue of transgression, revealed as the main element of our analysis. We brought a historical example of chronotopic transgression produced by a radically innovative choreographic discourse, the precursor of a new genre that would later be known as Modern Ballet. We would like to end with an example of the inverse process, that is, the transgression of the meaning of a classical choreographic discourse, produced by the change of the chronotope.
We need to contextualize it first. We are in France, in January 2020, when huge from any control and affect the scansion of "listening" by altering the measurement of music time: horns, sirens, voices.
The source of lighting is daylight, which falls on everyoneartists and audience alikeand does not produce an effect of magic or mystery. In the gray cold of Paris, the scene is clear and transparent. The values of the popular chronotope are imposed on the ballet discourse, introducing it in the collective discourse. On the imposing arcades of the theater, protest banners are hanging. They take the role of a new component of verbal discourse, replacing the programs distributed before the shows: "Opera On Strike," "Culture in danger." The façade, the entrance, the arcades, and the staircase are the same, but now they have a new chronotopic dimension. The verticality of the imposing noble stone arcades is reduced by horizontal banners whose material, layout, and verbal content point to a popular origin with fighting value.
We thus see the political dimension of the chronotope, once polis is the space for living together; in addition, the way places and positions are distributed within it configures a political regime of shared artistic sensibility. In this Parisian "protest ballet," the space-time of the theater is reconfigured, and the tension between the values of the two chronotopes is the one that produces meaning intensity and density. Here we can identify the relationship between the chronotope and the empirical reality as Bakhtin points out.
The relation of otherness is the core of discursive meaning production: it is because that place refers to an art of the "heights" that the "lowness" of the street can be given voice. It is insofar that the entrance to the Opéra Garnier conventionally means an index of the values of the art of elevation that the difference with the chronotope of the street and the values of the social movement of protest is contrasted. As the choreography, music and costumes of the classical genre are maintained, the voice of traditional art joins the voice of popular manifestations, and the dance body joins the collective body. Here the artist not only serves a political cause, but also adheres to it. It is the very presence of classical and traditional forms of the body and the theater that gives force to discourse, establishing an effective dialogue between the popular and the cultured through the articulation between the ethical and the aesthetic.
Should we conclude that every single transgression is creative? Not really. We