Mazes

The Cretan Labyrinth did not survive into the present, but the maze dances based on it seem to have. For while Theseus met the Minotaur in a Minoan maze, he and his men immortalized that adventure in dance on the way back from their miision. As Miller explains, "on the island of Delos they performed a peculiar dance called the ''Geranos'', or 'Crane Dane,' in which they went through the motions of threading the Labyrinth, and...this dance was perpetuated by the natives of that island until fairly recently" (19). Indeed Bord has found these dances alive in Italy, Munich, and Bavaria.

A maze becomes a dance when the pathways become the visual depiction of the dancer's path. Indeed the Crane Dance is just one many labyrinthine dances tracing back to antiquity. Several Roman writers, including Virgil , Suetonius, and Tacitus, recount a "Game of Troy" or simply "Troja", which appear disparately as a ritual around a grave site and a kind of formal demonstration performed by youths, perhaps a military review. Other labyrinthine dances appear as part of an exclusion right, in which "movements ....are intended to weave a magical entanglement and spread a field of magical force to exclude all that is not wanted to enter the guarded place" (Knight qtd. in Bord)". Still more appear to be tied to rites of Spring.

But where is the maze in the Maze Dance? It may have been one of the locations in which the dance was performed (Bord 13). However, more than likely the labyrinth is produced by the movement of the dancers. Kern notes that a consistent feature of Games of Troy is the demarcation of inside and outside. It is as if we can see through the walls to Theseus on his way through the Cretan trap. As a result, rather than a set of walls or lines, "maze" names a series of constraints to movement, a set of paths to be traversed, a procedure.

On Easter Sunday another maze dance took to the labyrinth in the cathedrals of Auxerre and Sens. In these rites, dancers ringed round the labyrinth while the bishop or dean moved along the path of the labyrinth into the center and back out. In his hand, he held a ball that he would throw out to the dancers. The presence of that ball and the human-ring of the dancers once again materialized the walls of the labyrinth depicted on the floor. The dean became the means by which the ball traversed the maze. If architectural mazes create passageways through material constraints over a given space, labyrinth dances create boundaries by materializing the inner passageways over a given time.

The maze-as-dance can be seen in contemporary video games, such as "Dance, Dance Revolution," which is presented as a series of proper moves. However, false steps do not trap the dancer in the space, they merely cost points. Moreover, the moves in the video game are disarticulted from space; whereas, the maze dance traces an imaginary space. In any event, dance in these games-as-labyrinths present sequences of moves of exploration.

In contemporary literature, Diana Slattery has created a work called The Maze Game" that brings together the maze as a site of meaningful dance. In her work of electronic literature and attendant novel The Maze Game, Slattery depicts an immortal race enslaved to a dance game by a mortal race of "Death Dancers." The maze becomes a site of a gladiator showdown, but moving through the maze takes grace.