In this study, we investigated the characteristics and methods of dance ekphrastic. We take a look at the concept of ekphrasis and then looked into the notion of ekphrasis in dance. Ekphrastic dance takes into consideration the historical, political and cultural context of the piece whilst interpreting its content. Ekphrasis accompanies dance studies, making intermediality an inherent part of the discipline. There have been few studies on ekphrastic dance, or the art of transforming dance works into text. This study uses methodology from literature studies by exploring books, music, digital ekphrasis. Such a study can give something as fleeting as a dance movement theoretical and historical weight. By transforming dance into words, we hope this study will provide new perspectives and extend the concept of dance research.

This study aims to explore the critical approach toward media in contemporary dance, which avoids conventional understanding of dance and artistic media. After reviewing important contexts and debates concerning contemporary dance, this study discuss the matter of its ambiguous boundaries and expansion through the concept of intermediality.

The idea of performance and dance with its ephemeral nature and media being used to preserve it, has constituted a conventional understanding of its temporality. However in contemporary dance, the archive expresses the request for extended temporality that enables the simultaneous existence of what is remaining, what is captured, and what is progressing in the performance. In addition, these archives expand into living spaces so that performances can lead to theoretical, educational, or political discourses, and function as a mediating space where heterogeneous entities such as art, virtual reality, and real life meet.

Moreover through this study, I wish to illuminate the expanded understanding of media in contemporary choreography as a criticism on previous media conventions, by introducing certain examples of autobiographical performance pieces in which the performer tells his or her own story. These works show the blurred boundaries among verbal languages, documents, and corporeal performance. They also bring participants in communication with performers, who can be understood as a physical archive of memories and experiences, roaming the ambiguous space inbetween reality and arts. Accordingly, an autobiographical performance creates an intermediality that allows the body-archive to experience and construct the virtual identity of the body in a fragmented manner.