The Amplification of affect: Tension, intensity and form in modern dance

The concept of affect in contemporary theory marks a return to the body as a site for the interplay of thought and feeling, and its importance derives from its refusal to reduce the body to the status of a container for either the mind or, by implication, the emotions. The body is the very condition for the transmission or distribution of affect both in terms of its capacity for movement and for perceptual engagement, whereas emotion is a particular type of containment and localisation of affect within the body. For modernist dance, the breadth of the theory of affect means. "From abstract