Dancing to Death: Ballet as Cathartic Coping Mechanism in Ukraine’s 2022/23 Defensive War against Russia by Paul Ryder and Adela Marian

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Our aims are to show how war and dance are inseparable and to argue that, through dance, war’s horrors are represented, confronted, and profoundly resisted. More particularly, through historical enquiry, semiotic analysis, the application of the principles of dance psychology, and primary research in the form of in-depth purposive interviews with two Ukranian dancers (and a personal reflection by one of the authors), we argue that, through dance, a cathartic state is achieved whereby death’s morbid grip on the imagination is profoundly loosened.  

DOI 10.33234/SSR.17.3