{"id":507,"date":"2019-03-01T16:18:50","date_gmt":"2019-03-01T16:18:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/?p=507"},"modified":"2022-10-19T16:19:07","modified_gmt":"2022-10-19T16:19:07","slug":"mars-2019-not-a-girl-dancing-gender-spectacle-and-disembodiment-in-the-work-of-loie-fuller-and-freya-olafson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/mars-2019-not-a-girl-dancing-gender-spectacle-and-disembodiment-in-the-work-of-loie-fuller-and-freya-olafson\/","title":{"rendered":"Mars 2019 – \u00ab\u00a0Not a Girl Dancing\u00a0\u00bb: Gender, Spectacle and Disembodiment in the Work of Lo\u00efe Fuller and Freya Olafson"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"
Lo\u00efe Fuller Dancing, Samuel Joshua Beckett, Gelatin silver print, circa 1900, Metropolitan Museum of Art: Gilman Collection, Purchase, Mrs. Walter Annenberg and The Annenberg Foundation Gift, 2005<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In 1892, American dancer\u00a0Lo\u00efe Fuller\u00a0became one of the first performers to explore the potential of electric light, when she staged her\u00a0Serpentine Dance<\/em>\u00a0at the\u00a0Folies-Bergere\u00a0in Paris1<\/sup>. Fuller\u2019s experiments with fabric and coloured lights, at a time when theatres were just beginning to convert gas to electricity, stunned audiences and transformed her female body into what the\u00a0London Standard<\/em>, in 1900, called a \u201ckaleidoscopic vision\u201d (Merwin, 1998, p. 73-92). Fuller has since been championed as a feminist figure for her fusion of art and science and the way the spectacle of her stage show worked to defer fixed representation, in an \u201contology of becoming2<\/sup>\u201d. I read Fuller\u2019s cyborg body in performance as an example of posthuman dance, which I trace also to the work of Canadian intermedia performance artist\u00a0Freya Olafson. Olafson\u2019s 2013 performance artwork\u00a0HYPER_\u00a0<\/em>features a combination of dance, computer animation and improvisations with technology that enact upon the dancer a visual experiment in body erasure. Both Fuller and Olafson employ imagery in their work that positions them between states of disembodiment and multiple embodiment. Likewise, both artists work with expressive materials, made \u201clively\u201d by invisible corporeal labour; their female bodies disappear within moving swathes of fabric and projected images, yet it is precisely their bodies, which serve as both living canvases and energetic operators, that make such non-human performativity possible. In this way, I see gendered embodiment as crucial to a feminist-posthuman analysis of these intermedia dance performances. Fuller and Olafson dance more than a century apart yet their performances are driven by a similar ethos, one that demonstrates the persistent signification of the female body, even in its disappearance3<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Analyses of dance collaborations with technology often extol the potential of such works to highlight distributed agency and imagine new possibilities for embodiment and representation, or their ability to effectively convey the impact of technology on modern life4<\/sup>. Critiques of intermedia dance might object to the ways in which technological props and extensions can limit the range of expression for the human performer, but rarely are such works examined from the intersection of posthuman techno-embodiment and identity politics5<\/sup>. Human markers of identity such as gender or race are seldom taken into consideration in critical analyses of intermedia dance works. Both Lo\u00efe \u00a0Fuller and Freya Olafson perform work that addresses the category of the \u201chuman\u201d in their cultural present, yet even as they contribute to general definitions of existence, they use their specifically\u00a0gendered<\/em>\u00a0bodies to do so. In employing the emergent technology of electric light, Fuller\u2019s\u00a0Serpentine Dance\u00a0<\/em>acted as a Symbolist response to the rapid changes of modernity in fin de si\u00e8cle North America and stood as a prediction for future cinematic visions. Similarly, Olafson\u2019s use of multiple screens and projected 3D footage comments directly on the ways in which subjectivity in the digital age has become increasingly layered and fragmented. Rather than view these performers as metaphors for the general human subject of their respective historical moments, however, Fuller and Olafson\u2019s work benefits from an analysis that specifically focuses on the role of the female body (and its various stages of spectacle and embodiment) in their live dance productions. In analyzing Fuller and Olafson\u2019s work both visually, in terms of an aesthetics of disembodiment and transformation, and formally, in terms of their facilitation of the displacement of dance movement from their own bodies to the expressive materials they manipulate, I wish to expose a historical continuum of the desire, not just for imagined alternate existences and possibilities for embodiment, but, more troublingly (in part because it is screened on the female body itself), the desire to\u00a0see woman erased<\/em>.<\/strong>\u00a0I argue that Fuller and Olafson are commentators on, not casualties of, this social anxiety; these artists know that the sexualized female presence, itself, already illustrates a kind of objectification that troubles the human\/non-human binary, and as such, this presence haunts their performances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cyborg Dancers<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Lo\u00efe Fuller\u2019s signature \u201cSerpentine\u201d and \u201cFire\u201d dances involved a costume made of many yards of heavy white silk, manipulated invisibly from within by hooked bamboo canes, which were designed and patented by Fuller. Guiding the fabric in spirals and loops with her canes, Fuller orchestrated a fluid spectacle that appeared like a rippling sculpture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Portrait of Loie Fuller, Photograph by Frederick Glasier, 1902<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

She was also one of the first performers to harness the power of luminescent chemical salts for stage lighting, and Fuller\u2019s magic lanterns, which shone on her from a variety of angles, were fitted with translucent, colourful gel lenses that projected the playful dance of colours onto her moving costume. She also devised and patented a glass floor, upon which she danced, lit from below. The aura of enchantment that Fuller\u2019s performance bestowed upon her audiences is evident in Isadora Duncan\u2019s description of the show:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBefore our very eyes she turned to many-coloured shining orchids, to a wavering, flowing sea-flower, and at length to a spiral-like lily, all the magic of Merlin, the sorcery of light, colour, flowing form\u2026She transformed herself into a thousand colourful images before the eyes of her audience. Unbelievable. Not to be repeated or described6<\/sup>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notably, Duncan compares Fuller not only to natural images but to the male sorcerer Merlin, of Arthurian legend, implying that the power of Fuller\u2019s transformation is enhanced by her evasion of the female form via her appropriation of the masculine tools of magic and electricity. Indeed, Fuller\u2019s love of science and her innovation in stage lighting were uncommon for women at the time. She was a member of the French Astronomical Society, was well-respected in the French scientific community, was close friends Marie Curie and had her own theatre in the Paris Exposition of 1900 (Gunning, 2003, p. 83). It was Fuller\u2019s use of technologies of light, in particular, that contributed to the spectacle of her stage show as precursor to cinematic technologies. She was the first to use a \u201cblack-out\u201d prior to the beginning of her stage performances, and in dancing within dozens of projected lights, she effectively turned\u00a0herself<\/em>\u00a0into an animated screen, blending flesh and technology to produce what I see as a kind of cyborg body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The figure of the cyborg is key to discourses of posthumanism. In her early work, Donna Haraway positioned the cyborg as a kind of \u201cboundary rider\u201d\u2014a fluid figure somehow both intrinsically female and also capable of transcending oppressive categories of gender and race. The feminist potential of the cyborg is located in her gendered body, a machinic-organic hybrid that \u201cskips the step of original unity\u201d and acts as a figuration for something Haraway calls \u201cworlding\u201d: a convergence of forces (including the human) that come together to produce identities and relations (Haraway, 1991, p. 149). I see Fuller as a precursor to Haraway\u2019s cyborg in that her performances staged an interface between technology and the body, evoking the feminist potential of the cyborg. Yet, feminist analyses of Fuller\u2019s work often cite her transformative potential\u2014the\u00a0erasure<\/em>\u00a0of her fixed female form\u2014as liberating, rather than view her hybrid dance as a kind of assemblage or \u201cworlding.\u201d Certainly, Fuller\u2019s skirt dances can be read as a protest against the commodification of woman, but we must remember that the magic of her metamorphosis into a dehumanized spectacle in part hinges on the very thing it is erasing: Fuller\u2019s own female body, which was fetishized on the many posters that advertised her stage show. These posters implied that Fuller might be dancing nude beneath her costume, when in reality the audience would experience a kind of reverse striptease, in which her body became increasingly abstract and dehumanized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Advertising Poster for Lo\u00efe Fuller\u2019s Performance at the Folies Berg\u00e8re, Jules Ch\u00e9ret, chromolithography, 1893<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Posthuman Striptease<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Freya Olafson\u2019s 2013 performance work\u00a0HYPER_<\/em>\u00a0actively plays with images of the posthuman cyborg body in the digital age.\u00a0HYPER_<\/em>\u00a0features a mix of live dance, digital arts, 3D animation, UV light and large scale projections that absorb the dancer in a series of transformations. The screen is immersive, working to combine virtual bodies with Olafson\u2019s live, organic dancing body and enact a spectacle of disembodiment, or rather, a striptease that reveals a \u201cbody\u201d made of muscle and bone, in several stages. Olafson\u2019s work comments more directly than Fuller\u2019s on the role of gender in relation to new technologies, largely in part because Olafson is creating over a century after Fuller, at a time in which feminist approaches to art-making are much more commonplace. In\u00a0HYPER_,<\/em>\u00a0the somatic feminine presence is fetishized alongside technological objects and processes, and Olafson\u2019s body mutates from material human canvas, upon which information is displayed, to an entity at one with that very information. Throughout\u00a0HYPER_<\/em>, Olafson projects filmed images of her body onto the screen behind her in order to produce the effect of multiple selves7<\/sup>. Near the end of the piece, Olafson emerges from the wings having painted her limbs, torso and face with glow-in-the-dark paint to resemble a skeleton. When viewed in darkness, and with the 3D glasses provided, the rest of Olafson\u2019s human body melts away and the audience is left alone with her performative skeletal form, which, aided by a projection, has now multiplied by three. When she dances with her skeleton clones, they are like a balletic trio in perfect unison; Olafson has done away with the involuntary clumsiness of the human form in favour of a perfectly programmed and synced alternative. Her simulacra counterparts are both completely her yet also separate from her, presenting multiple embodiment as an alternative to the human being as a discrete or unique entity, in keeping with the aesthetics of posthuman dance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Freya Bj\u00f6rg Olafson in her work HYPER_, 2013, photograph by Hugh Conacher<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"
Freya Bj\u00f6rg Olafson in her work HYPER_ , 2013, photograph by Hugh Conacher<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Later in the show, a projection features a series of multiple copies of the same choreographic clip, timed sequentially and at a lag, to give the effect of Olafson\u2019s body leaving itself. The imagery pays homage to\u00a0Norman McLaren\u2019s NFB classic Pas de Deux\u00a0(1968), and as such, Olafson extends the notion of multiple embodiment to include the cinematic bodies she references with her gestures and techniques8<\/sup>. In this way, the dance body becomes a referencing machine, which always carries with it the trace of past movement, demonstrating that cyborg identity need not leave the body behind. Yet despite these moments of \u201cworlding\u201d that occur between and across bodies,\u00a0HYPER_<\/em>\u2019s primary theme, as conveyed through Olafson\u2019s nuanced presentation of various states of (dis)embodiment, seems to be centered on the erasure of the female body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Freya Bj\u00f6rg Olafson in her work HYPER_ 2013, photograph by Hugh Conacher<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Like Fuller, Olafson uses her body and costuming to produce an animated screen. Just as Fuller was pioneering in the emerging field of electric light, Olafson, who holds an MFA in New Media from the Transart Institute \/ Donau Universit\u00e4t in Austria, is responsible for designing and programming the technics of her own shows. Like Fuller, Olafson fashions herself into a dancing cyborg. However, whereas Fuller\u2019s body became more obscured over the course of her show, engulfed in moving folds of heavy fabric, Olafson\u2019s HYPER_<\/em> parodies the performance of a striptease, in which her nude body is only an afterthought, a decoy for the real, technologically-enhanced, attraction. This approach is evident from the start of the show, at which point we see a projection of footage from a video game in which the goal, it seems, is to get a bikini-clad avatar to perform a pole dance. The animated dancer stands obstinately by her pole, wagging her hips to the music as the gameplay cues pass by and refusing to perform; the male voice of the narrator announces: \u201cI smell bad pole dancing.\u201d Directly following, the lights come up on Olafson. She is wearing a black strapless dress that fragments her body by highlighting her chest, arms and face and erasing her torso into the black scrim behind her. Olafson moves through a series of sexualized and mechanical poses, stopping now and again to put two fingers to the inside of the opposite wrist. She checks her pulse to remind us of the thin line between her living body and the animated female form we just saw on screen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Throughout the show, live dance is interspersed with projections of animated female bodies. Some of this is found footage, and some of it, like the clip titled \u201cRelease Technique,\u201d was created by Olafson in a \u201ckeystroke choreography\u201d using a movement study game interface. The female body in this virtual choreography is manipulated by the player through keystrokes in order to facilitate her free-fall, maneuvering her around and between large round obstacles that block her path. The digital woman is disturbingly corpselike (her eyes are closed and her limbs are limp) and, again, dressed in overtly sexual attire (a black string bikini). As she falls through virtual space, her body goes through a series of violent transformations. She is bent in half, her joints are hyperextended, and her face ricochets off of the blunt objects as she hits them. Her inhuman flexibility gestures towards an objective of ultimate maneuverability. Furthermore, her fall appears endless, with no endpoint, suggesting an infinite infliction of brutality upon this virtual body. By including such images in her show, Olafson demonstrates that digital-era fantasies of somatic-enhancement via technology are often matched by fantasies of violence, centered on women\u2019s bodies. This footage serves as a constant reminder, throughout HYPER<\/em>_, that this spectacle has a gender.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Video still from \u2018Keystroke Choreography: Release Technique\u2019 by Freya Bj\u00f6rg Olafson, screen capture, 2013, Freya Bj\u00f6rg Olafson<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Olafson satirizes the notion of disembodiment as a kind of erotic striptease, inhabiting various states of \u201cundress\u201d which allow her to shed recognizably feminine epidermic features in favour of a genderless science-body. These include a bodysuit printed with human musculature and a glow-in-the dark skeleton body painted directly on the skin of her torso, limbs and face which, when lit by blacklight in darkness, looks alarmingly realistic, producing a result is both humorous and uncanny. The intermittent use of strobe light in this sequence highlights Olafson\u2019s naked body just briefly, in a harsh white flash, so that her human form becomes a ghost within the assemblage, a naked distraction amid the skeleton trio dreamscape. We are offered brief glimpses of her humanness \u2014 her real breasts, her pubic hair \u2014 beneath the two dimensional, frenetic skeleton that masquerades as her, but by the end of the show there is no trace of human left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Freya Bj\u00f6rg Olafson in her work HYPER_, 2013, photograph by Hugh Conacher \u2013 HYPER_FreyaOlafson_1.jpg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Symbol: \u201cMade Visible By an Artifice\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

 <\/strong>HYPER_<\/em> closes with a sequence that features a set of swirling red and blue rhythmic gymnastic ribbons. Operated by Olafson\u2019s unseen hands, the ribbons dance fluidly, diving and skipping along the ground, swirling up into rogue pirouettes and leaps. We know Olafson\u2019s body is still there, working hard at making these materials expressive, but because her body is hidden in the blackout, we are able to imagine that the ribbons have their own agency. The effect of this displacement, which projects the labour and magic of Olafson\u2019s invention onto the dehumanized material, is much like that of Lo\u00efe  Fuller\u2019s stage shows: the symbolic image usurps the particulars of the body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fuller\u2019s work is often associated with Symbolism, the late-nineteenth century European arts movement which rejected realism in favour of spirituality, imagination and dreams to better represent anxieties about the influx of new technologies at the time. Her work was thought to be Symbolist because of its ability to blur the lines between illusion and reality\u2014an effect described by famous Symbolist poet Stephane Mallarme as \u201cthe dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.\u201d (Ranci\u00e8re, 2007) Fuller\u2019s gender, or rather, her ability to transcend her gender, was also key to her role as the Symbolist\u2019s muse. In \u201cBallets\u201d (1886),\u00a0St\u00e9phane Mallarm\u00e9\u00a0writes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cthe ballerina is not a girl dancing \u2026 she is not a girl, but rather a metaphor which symbolizes some elemental aspect of earthly form: sword, cup, flower, etc., and that she does not dance but rather, with miraculous lunges and abbreviations, writing with her body, she suggests things which the written work could express only in several paragraphs of dialogue or descriptive prose. Her poem is written without the writer\u2019s tools.\u201d (Mallarm\u00e9, 1976, p. 94)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his aesthetic abstraction of the dancer, Mallarm\u00e9 demonstrates that in his view, the dancer\u2019s body is also prosthetic to the imagery she is capable of evoking. As\u00a0Amy Kortiz\u00a0writes, \u201c[t]he dancer\u2019s agency has at best a precarious place in [Mallarm\u00e9\u2019s] formulation, since she is text, writing implement and meaning all at once, while at the same time not being a subject, who could write.\u201d (Anderson, 2008, p. 355) Fuller\u2019s work was often described using spectral terms such as \u201cunique, ethereal, [and] delicious.\u201d (Gunning, 2003, p. 79) She was called a \u201cmagic blossoming,\u201d a \u201cwhirlwind of light and veils\u2026vanishing and disappearing like a pale mist,\u201d (Lista, 1994, p. 25) and a \u201clovely apparition.\u201d (Gunning, 2003, p. 79) Reviewers in Paris and New York constantly referred to her in ephemeral rather than material, human terms; Fuller was not even a body in motion but rather, motion itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Given that Fuller came to exemplify such an array of abstract and philosophical conceptions, and that she is often described in inhuman, even immaterial, terms, it is easy to forget that she was also just a woman, dancing in front of an audience9<\/sup>. Her female body still bore the objectifying gaze associated with spectacle, whether dancing on stage or screen. In fact, many of Fuller\u2019s fans were surprised by the shape and size of her body when they saw her offstage, in normal lighting, and there she was, a \u201crather plan-looking girl from Illinois.\u201d (Sutton, 2012) There was a contrast between the \u201chighly eroticized body\u201d portrayed on Fuller\u2019s publicity posters and her real, \u201crather pudgy\u201d body. (Gunning, 2003, p. 84) Despite the dehumanized spectacle she presented on stage, Fuller was well-known to her audience, who was very familiar with her eroticized body, as established during her vaudeville career. It can be argued that her skirt dance was all the more beguiling because it actively excised these past versions of Fuller, the woman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The sexualized female body is the ghostly signifier in both Fuller and Olafson\u2019s work \u2013 the non-presence that announces itself in its absence. In erasing the fetishized image of a \u201cgirl, dancing,\u201d these artists ask us to question the politics of our own persistent desire for the dehumanization of art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Advertising Poster for Lo\u00efe Fuller\u2019s Performance at the Folies Berg\u00e8re, Jean de Paleologue, hand drawn, Zimmerli Museum of Art,\u00a0http:\/\/www.danceheritage.org\/fuller.html<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion: Return to the Body<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The aesthetics of intermedia dance can often be mapped onto the aims of posthumanism; both practices acknowledge the power of technologies to produce new understandings of subjectivity and embodiment rooted in hybridity, extension and dispersed agency. Yet the problem, as I see it, is that as important as it is to expand ethics and politics beyond the human as discrete entity (with intermedia arts acting as a useful platform for exploration of new bodies and identities), in slotting \u201cthe human\u201d into one category of sameness, this proposition does not acknowledge the multiplicities that already exist within said category. To hybridize and transform \u201cthe human\u201d is a dream rooted in imagined possibilities but these possibilities are often represented aesthetically as a flight from the body, what\u00a0Susan Bordo\u00a0calls the \u201cview from everywhere.\u201d Bordo writes that in order to achieve \u201chuman freedom from bodily determination\u201d we have metaphysically deconstructed the body in the digital age into a fantasy \u201cideology of limitless improvement and change [that defies] the historicity, the mortality and, indeed, the very materiality of the body.\u201d (Bordo, 1993, p. 245) This fantasy of limitless multiple embodiments, Bordo argues, is just another kind of disembodiment: in her words, \u201cthe postmodern body is no body at all.\u201d (Bordo, 1993, p. 229)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, some may say that in enacting a continuous set of transformations on the body, Fuller and Olafson demonstrate the true nature of embodiment as a \u201chighly complex and fluid state, at odds with a psycho-social imaginary that privileges corporeal wholeness and integrity.\u201d (Shildrick, 2018) Philosophically, we know that the image of corporeal wholeness is a fantasy, especially in the digital age in which our consciousness is split and fragmented across screens and different modes of interaction. In my research, I have found that traditional definitions of dance often align with fantasies of disembodiment similar to those we imagine new and interactive technologies might facilitate. In\u00a0Time and the Dancing Image<\/em>\u00a0(1988), American dance historian\u00a0Deborah Jowitt\u00a0writes of the weightless, supernatural quality prized by classical dance in the romantic era where \u201cinsubstantiality [was] close to godliness.\u201d (Jowitt, 1988, p. 39) Dancers were praised not so much for their physical prowess as for their ability to look and move in an angelic fashion. Jowitt remarks that the female dancer in particular was a creature of paradox in that she was seen as both a poetic image and a \u201cpanting perspiring body.\u201d (Jowitt, 1988, p. 39) The frequent use of the word \u201cfreedom\u201d in descriptions of dance\u2019s aim is striking, and also points to the sexist impulse to wish away the abject corporeality of the (often) female dancer. Susanne Langer argues that \u201cthe most important [force], from the balletic standpoint, is \u2026 the sense of freedom from gravity\u201d (Langer, 1953, p. 43) as does Paul Val\u00e9ry, who writes that in dance, the body seems to have \u201cbroken free from its usual states of balance. It seems to be trying to outwit\u2014I should say outrace\u2014its own weight, at every moment evading its pull, not to say its sanction.\u201d (Val\u00e9ry, 1983, p. 60) In the words of French poet Th\u00e9ophile Gautier in the mid-1800s, dance is \u201cessentially materialistic and sensual.\u201d (Copeland, 1983, p. 52) To the dancer, dance is a felt physical sensation, to the viewer, dance is an image. In the topic of dance on stage, the\u00a0image<\/em>\u00a0of the body, and the spectator\u2019s relationship to that image, takes a primary importance. The images given to us by Fuller and Olafson\u2019s performances are just as powerful as the tools they use to get there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lo\u00efe Fuller\u2019s theatre shows, which featured a \u201cdark and bare stage\u201d upon which her \u201cbody and veils [were] splashed with coloured light,\u201d can be considered a precursor to cinema pre-1907, an era Gunning terms the \u201ccinema of attractions,\u201d in which the body on stage or screen is the \u201centire spectacle.\u201d (Gunning, 1986, p. 63-70) Films such as the first Edison Kinetoscope projects, which played \u201cwithin shallow spaces, [and were] often shot against a darkened background,\u201d directed the viewer\u2019s focus to the \u201cdirect stimulation\u201d of non-narrative spectacle (Gunning, 2003, p 66). In using the \u201ccinema of attractions\u201d to think about Fuller and Olafson\u2019s work, I wish to draw attention to the ways in which \u201cattraction\u201d is rooted in the visual spectacle of feminine disembodiment. Or rather, the way in which the \u201cattraction\u201d of the female body acts also as vehicle or screen for a process of transformation away from the human form. Hopeful ideas about hybridity and distributed agency, common to discourses of new materialism, posthumanism, and techno-utopian approaches to making art with technology need to be balanced with an awareness of the ways in which such approaches can also hinge on concepts of purity or neutrality, which seek to erase unique, lived experience in favour of an abstract, symbolic body. Karen Barad writes that \u201cposthumanism marks a refusal to take the distinction between \u2018human\u2019 and \u2018nonhuman\u2019 for granted, and [founds its] analysis on this presumably fixed and inherent set of categories,\u201d (Barad, 2003, p. 801-831) but too often the category of woman (which is already considered less than human by some) is the stage upon which this collapsed binary performs itself. As Donna Haraway writes, \u201curgent work still remains to be done in reference to those who must inhabit the troubled categories of woman and human\u201d before we can move past those categories in any significant way (Haraway, 2008, p. 17). Fuller and Olafson\u2019s gender is crucial to the way we read their performances. While technologized dance can sometimes appear to desire a posthuman (and post-gender) utopia, it is precisely the erasure of the gendered body, and the thrill therein, that should give us pause about such utopian pursuits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

[1] Viewers of the video linked here should keep in mind that film footage of Fuller\u2019s dances were hand-tinted in post production to attempt to portray the colourful effects of her liver performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[2] For feminist interpretations of Lo\u00efe\u00a0 Fuller\u2019s work, see also Erin Brannigan,\u00a0Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image<\/em>, Oxford University Press, New York, 2011; Elizabeth Coffman, \u201cWomen in Motion: Lo\u00efe Fuller and the \u201cInterpenetration\u201d of Art and Science,\u201d\u00a0Camera Obscura,\u00a0<\/em>vol. 17, no. 1 (2002), p. 72-105; Tom Gunning, \u201cLo\u00efe Fuller and the Art of Motion,\u201d\u00a0Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida<\/em>, Eds. R. Allen and M. Turvey. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003, p. 75-89; and Dana Mills, \u201cThe Dancing Woman is the Woman Who Dances into the Future: Ranci\u00e8re, Dance, Politics,\u201d\u00a0Philosophy & Rhetoric<\/em>, vol. 49, no. 4 (2016), p. 482-499.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[3] Although I use terminology such as \u201cthe body\u201d and \u201cthe female body\u201d in this paper, I do not wish to invoke \u201cthe body\u201d as a generic object of study, as it is precisely the distinctions among bodies that\u00a0 need to be grounded conceptually and historically. Whenever possible, I will attempt to use specific terms in relation to Fuller and Olafson\u2019s corporeality, while also acknowledging the power of the \u201cfemale body\u201d as generic cultural signifier in my analysis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[4] See, among others, Johannes Birringer,\u00a0Performance, Technology and Science<\/em>, New York: PAJ Publications, 2008; Susan Kozel,\u00a0Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology<\/em>, Leonardo Books, Cabridge: MIT Press, 2008; and Sophie Walon, \u201cCorporeal Creations in Experimental Screendance: Resisting Sociopolitical Constructions of the Body.\u201d In\u00a0The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies<\/em>, Ed. Douglas Rosenberg, New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, p. 321-348.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[5] Erin Manning, for example, has written that \u201cThe complex analog body is reduced by the prosthetic system to a passive interactivity, forced to conform to a pre-established definition of what a body can do. The body must move for the software\u201d (in \u201cProsthetics Making Sense: Dancing the Technogenetic Body,\u201d The Fibreculture Journal, issue 9, 2006, http:\/\/nine.fibreculturejournal.org\/fcj-055-prosthetics-making-sense-dancing-the-technogenetic-body\/).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[6] Quoted in Brannigan, p. 32.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[7] Similarly, Lo\u00efe Fuller\u2019s \u201cMirror Dance,\u201d in which her placement of four mirrors in a semi-circle behind her on stage gave the synthetic appearance of eight figures dancing in unison, used a more analog \u201ctechnology\u201d to experiment with images of multiple embodiment and distributed agency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[8] Between 1895 and 1905, Fuller\u2019s magical performances were copied and repeated by other dancers such as Ameta, Chrissie Sheridan, Annabelle, Ruth St. Denis and \u00c9milienne d\u2019Alen\u00e7on, Given her many imitators, Lo\u00efe\u00a0 Fuller\u2019s work can also be said to reference (or be referenced by) other bodies through time and space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[9] One reviewer remarked that the audience must insist \u201cupon seeing her pretty piquant face before they can believe that the lovely apparition is really a woman.\u201d In Sally R. Rommer, \u201cLo\u00efe Fuller,\u201d\u00a0Drama Review<\/em>, vol. 19, no. 1, (March 1975), p. 53-67.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bibliographie<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Anderson, Elizabeth, \u201cModernism: Ritual, Ecstasy and the Female Body,\u201d\u00a0Literature and Theology<\/em>, vol. 22, no<\/sup> 3, septembre 2008, p. 354-367.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Barad, Karen, \u201cPosthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter\u201d,\u00a0Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society<\/em>, vol. 28, no<\/sup> 3, 2003, p. 801-831.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Bordo, Susan,\u00a0Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body<\/em>,\u00a0 Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993, 361 p.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Gunning, Tom, \u201cThe Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,\u201d\u00a0Wide Angle<\/em>, vol. 8, no<\/sup>3, 1986, 63-70.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Gunning, Tom, Art of Motion<\/em>, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2003, p. 75-90.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Haraway, Donna, \u201cA Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century\u201d, dans \u00a0Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, <\/em>New York, Routledge, 1991, p. 149.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Haraway, Donna, When Species Meet,<\/em>\u00a0Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2008, 440 p. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Jowitt, Deborah, Time and the Dancing Image<\/em>, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1988, 184 p. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Langer, Susanne K.,\u00a0Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key<\/em>, New York, Charles Scribner\u2019s Sons, 1953, 431 p.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Lista, Giovanni,\u00a0\u00a0Lo\u00efe Fuller: Danseuse de la Belle\u00a0\u00e9poque<\/em>, Paris, Stock Somogy \u00c9ditions d\u2019Art, 1994, 682 p. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Mallarm\u00e9, St\u00e9phane , \u201cBallets,\u201d\u00a0Salmagundi<\/em>, no<\/sup> 33\/34, 1976, p. 92-97.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Merwin, Ted, \u201cLo\u00efe Fuller\u2019s Influence of F.T. Marinetti\u2019s Futurist Dance\u201d,\u00a0Dance Chronicle<\/em>, vol. 21, no<\/sup>. 1, 1998, p. 73-92.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Ranci\u00e8re, Jacques,\u00a0The Future of the Image<\/em>, Trans. Gregory Elliott, New York, Verso, 2007, 160 p. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Shildrick, Margrit, \u201cRe\/membering the Body,\u201d dans\u00a0Asberg, Cecilia et Braidotti, Rosi, A Feminist Companion to the Posthumanities<\/em>, New York, Springer, 2018, 245 p. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Sutton, Anne, \u201cInfinite Light: The Dance of Lo\u00efe Fuller,\u201d\u00a0The Australian Ballet<\/em>, 23 mars 2012, en ligne, <https:\/\/australianballet.com.au\/behind-ballet\/infinite-light-the-dance-of-Lo\u00efe -fuller> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2013 Val\u00e9ry, Paul, \u201cPhilosophy of the Dance,\u201d dans Copeland, Roger et Marshall Cohen,\u00a0What is Dance?<\/em>, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1983, p. 55-65. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1892, American dancer\u00a0Lo\u00efe Fuller\u00a0became one of the first performers to explore the potential of electric light, when she staged her\u00a0Serpentine Dance\u00a0at the\u00a0Folies-Bergere\u00a0in Paris1. Fuller\u2019s experiments with fabric and coloured lights, at a time when theatres were just beginning to convert gas to electricity, stunned audiences and transformed her female body into what the\u00a0London Standard, … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[36],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=507"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":518,"href":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507\/revisions\/518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archee.uqam.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}