Intimate alterities: Thinking-dance with Cristina Caprioli in Venice, 2024

In July 2024, the choreographer and dancer Cristina Caprioli won the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Dance at the Venice Biennale. This occasion prompted ‘Intimate Alterities’, an extended meditation on three dances Caprioli presented in Venice: Deadlock, The Bench and Flat Haze . Suggesting that Caprioli’s choreography is rooted in the space between the dot and the arch of the question mark, Phelan contends that a more explicit allegiance to the work of dance-thinking and thinking-dance might allow dance studies (more intimate) access to its own ethical and affective questions. Moving between scholarly and personal address, the article enacts some of the consequences of creating both choreography and discourse in the space between the dot and the arch of the question mark.