Wassily Kandinsky, a painter of color and form, once envisioned a future where dance would shed its ornamental constraints and move toward abstraction. In Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), he criticized traditional ballet for its inability to express the ineffable, calling instead for a new movement language, one that would evoke the unseen forces of emotion and thought.

Zadie Smith, a novelist and essayist known for her sharp intellect and stylistic range, wrote in a 2016 interview with The Guardian: “The connection between writing and dancing has been much on my mind recently: it’s a channel I want to keep open. It feels a little neglected – compared to, say, the relationship between music and prose – maybe because there is something counter-intuitive about it. But for me the two forms are close to each other: I feel dance has something to tell me about what I do.”

This gives the whole idea of dancing about architecture new meaning.

Zadie Smith’s Dance Lessons for Writers considers movement as a kind of geometry—bodies tracing lines in space, sentences etching their rhythm across the page. Writing and dance, she suggests, are both disciplines of position, tension, and release. She begins with Martha Graham’s famous assertion that an artist must “keep the channel open,” then shifts to the figures of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, who embody two distinct geometries of motion.

Astaire is a floating parabola, skimming across the stage in endless arcs, while Kelly is a series of perpendiculars—knees bent, weight dropped, firmly planted. The difference, Smith argues, is not just in dance but in prose. Nabokov, like Astaire, constructs intricate, self-contained curvatures. George Saunders, like Kelly, understands the weight of language, its direct impact.

From there, she widens the frame: Michael Jackson as a master of fixed angles and sharp contours, each movement an exclamation; Prince, by contrast, a vanishing act, a line that never quite closes its own shape. Beyoncé’s choreography forms a militarized auto-tuned grid, bodies in synchronic alignment, whereas David Byrne moves in erratic, off-kilter gestures—less symmetry, more collision. In Smith’s reading, even syntax follows this logic: the clipped precision of Joan Didion versus the sprawling, serpentine architecture of a writer like Octavia Butler.

Ultimately, she asks what kind of geometry a writer—or a dancer—should inhabit. Some artists impose structure, carve clear angles, command space. Others slip through it, suggest rather than state, dissolve instead of define. A great novel, like a great dance, is a composition of shapes—lines that converge and disperse, arcs that resolve or remain suspended. The lesson, perhaps, is that language, like movement, is never just about what is said, but about the spaces it leaves behind.