Talk this dance: on the conceptualization of dance as fictive conversation

As a means of expression, the unequivocally physical experience of dance is typically construed and spoken about in communicative terms, as a 'conversation between body and soul,' a 'dialogue between dancers' or a means to 'tell a story' to an audience. This chapter analyses this metaphor through a case study of Tiago Rodrigues' choreography A Perna Esquerda de Tchaikovski. The choreography is self-referential, a form of meta-theatre: it is a performance about performing that grants an unusual view of pre-show work. As a choreography about the memory of the body, the piece makes use of marking as a strategy for simulated movement, with the body as a carrier of memories (scars, pains, etc.). The collection of pains is the collection of memories that the dancer reconstructs in dialogue as the episodes of her own story, in essence, they represent cause-effect compressions of her career.