Dances of Death: From Trans-genre to Media Phenomenon

Abstract

The article aim to give an account of the interest aroused by the Dances of Death in the framework of semiotic studies with a focus on the social life of the discursive genres and on that of the mediatization of “long journey”, that is to say that we consider this phenomenon as constituting the human being as a biological species. Therefore we will address the prospective path that explores the phenomenon and survival of the Dances since their consolidation in the Middle Ages, as a transgender, and then, considering their re-emergence as an object of study in the present, we will focus the analysis on cases in which this genre is called through two modes of expression typical of contemporary art: cinema and video dance.