Etienne Jules Marey, jump with the perch. The movement, 1894. It is one of the first examples of chronophotography, a photographic process in which a sequence of 12 frames is displayed, made with a special tool, the photographic rifle.

In “L’outil photographique et l’ètude de la danse antique” (https://journals.openedition.org/inha/468, 2013) the French researcher Audrey Gouy illustrates a method of investigating, the “Reconstructionism”, (thanks to a particular photographic techniques chrono-photography) by putting the individual postures of ancient Greek dance in the right sequence, it is possible to reconstruct the whole dance with a good approximation. The comparison from the reconstruction is contemporary classical dance. The thought process consists of comparing similar postures, both ancient and contemporary. This method allows the scholar to visualize the phases that precede or follow the moment in which the dancer’s gesture is fixed in the image. The postures represented in Greek figurative art – A. Gouy states – are considered reproductions of reality, and the photographic instrument appears as the experimental means used for the analysis of the ancient choreographic movements and the reconstruction of dance”.

The first to apply the reconstructionist theory to the dance was the French scholar Maurice Emmanuel (La danse grecque antique d’après les monuments figurèes, 1896). The starting point of Emmanuel’s theory is that the intuition that the choreutic movements represented in the ancient works of art are the same that characterize the contemporary French classical ballet. Germaine Proudhommeau (La danse grecque antique, 1965) continued the master’s work by going into detail on the gestures and movements of the Greek dance, elaborating a wide typology totally free from any chronological reference and making a systematic comparison between the ancient figurative movements and the lexicon of modern ballet.

In 1970 T.B.L. Webster was among the first to express doubts about the retraining method. According to Webster, the procedure developed by Emmanuel and refined by Proudhommeau, however attractive, “carries with it the obvious danger that the modern steps belong to a completely different dance tradition which may be largely misleading” (The Greek chorus, 1970), introduction, xi).

In 1997 the reconstruction method was also questioned by Frederick G. Naerebout who judged it “a somewhat confused account of the positions, steps, and gestures of the ancient Greek dance” (Attractive Performances: Ancient Greek Dance: Three Preliminary Studies, Amsterdam, 1997, page 62).

In the 1990s Marie-Hèlène Delavaud-Roux was the author of some important essays on dance in the ancient world (among many: “Les Danses en Grèce antique”, 1998) to distance herself from her predecessors, she introduced a comparative approach that has opened the way to new interpretations of dance movements and functions.

For A. Gouy “the use of contemporary classical dance as a reference point for understanding the postures of Greek dance seems risky. Associating and correlating two types of dance so distant temporally seems to be an anachronism. A dance belongs to the culture that produces it and can only be understood in its context “(Gouy, 2013).