Reimagining Byzantine Dance XOPÓΣ: The Dance of Adam. The Making of Byzantine Chorography, The Anthropology of the Choir of Dance in Byzantium By Nicoletta Isar. 448 pp. Illustrated. Leiden: Alexandros Press, 2011. €250 paper. ISBN: 78-94-90387-04-4 paper. Elemental Chorology: Vignettes Imaginales By Nicoletta Isar. 448 pp. Illustrated. Leiden: Alexandros Press, 2020. €250 paper. ISBN: 978-90-80 64760-2 paper.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes* Isar borrows the term chorology from John Sallis, who applied it to his study of the archaic and enigmatic making of the cosmos in Plato’s Timaeus, see Sallis, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).1 Nicoletta Isar, “The Dance of Adam: Reconstructing the Byzantine Chorós,” Byzantinoslavica 61 (2003): 179–204.2 Alexei Lidov, “Hierotopy: The Creation of Sacred Spaces as a Form of Creativity and Subject of Cultural History,” in Hierotopy: Creation of Sacred Spaces in Byzantium and Medieval Russia, edited by Alexei Lidov (Moscow: Progress-Tradition, 2006), 32–58.3 Lidov, “Hierotopy,” 36.4 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, translated by Willard Trask (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1957), 20–29.5 Nicoletta Isar, “Chorography (Chȏra, Chorós) – A Performative Paradigm of Creation of Sacred Space in Byzantium,” in Hierotopy: Creation of Sacred Spaces in Byzantium and Medieval Russia, edited by Alexei Lidov (Moscow: Progress-Tradition, 2006), 59–90.6 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, translated by Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984 [1974]).7 Bissera Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 155–82.8 Kimerer LaMothe, Why We Dance: A Philosophy of Bodily Becoming (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).9 Robert Farris Thompson, African Art in Motion: Icon and Act (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); Thompson, “An Aesthetic of the Cool: West African Dance,” African Forum 2, no. 2 (1966): 85–102.10 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2013 [1998]).Additional informationNotes on contributorsKathryn DickasonKATHRYN DICKASON is a Public Relations Specialist at Simmons University in Boston. She has a PhD in Religious Studies from Stanford University and has published widely on Western medieval dance, iconography, literature, and sign theory. Her first book, Ringleaders of Redemption: How Medieval Dance Became Sacred, was published in 2021 by Oxford University Press. Currently, she is guest editing a special issue of postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies on the legacies of medieval dance and is writing her second book on Western medieval dance iconography.