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Movement and meaning: an enquiry into the signifying properties of Martha Graham’s Diversion of Angels (1948) and Merce Cunningham’s Points in Space (1986)

The premise of this article is the usefulness of Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic theory when it is used in the activity of decoding or recouping meaning from ‘pure’ dance works. It begins with a survey of the field of semiotics and although it concentrates on sign theory as formulated by Peirce, other principles of semiotics such as theories of codes are also explained and feature within the methodology. Semiotic methods are then applied to Martha Graham’s Diversion of Angels (1948) and Merce Cunningham’s Points in Space (1986) to demonstrate how the semiotician gleans several layers of meaning from choreography which at first sight may appear to communicate little beyond the qualities of the dance for its own sake.