Danza, desiderio e tempo in Tasso

The essay addresses the relationships between dance and literary text through a thematic path within Tasso’s lyrical poems which, from time to time, have considered the choreutic experience as a lyric-narrative situation, as a structural pattern of composition, and as an exemplary practice of reconfiguration (including the political one) of the dyalectic between desire and time. As symbolic stylizations of the dynamics of courtship, the abstract social dances of the festive courtesan protocol were based in fact on codified micro-gestures with evident semantic functionality but also with undeniable erotic implications, which Tasso fully exploits in his lyric production.