Dance Anima: Techniques of Vitality

The practice of dance holds a paradox at its core: we view dance as a uniquely human thing, and yet, training in technique and choreography produces the dancer as a mechanized body whose porousness of boundaries mark the more-than-human condition of our present. Furthermore, because dancing bodies have been instrumental in the development of photography, film, and motion capture tools, dance facilitates an exploration of two interrelated realms: emergent technology and the ontology of the human.

Through a series of interdisciplinary case studies from cinema, animation, robotics, and image-based social media, and using a methodology critically attuned to issues of race and embodiment, Hilary Bergen examines dance's driving energy, naming it "dance anima." Bergen argues that this kinetic power--produced collectively by dancers, choreographers, techniques, technologies, and the imagination of the audience--is a valuable (and extractable) resource for engineering life and infusing things with sentience and soul. A new history and theory of dance, one that moves beyond the human, is necessary to understand dance as a cultural technique of ensoulment that can travel between (nonhuman, animated, robotic, digital) bodies.

Why are the Boston Dynamics' military-industrial robots, designed to be soulless and dehumanized on the battlefield, doing the twist to African American soul music in viral videos online? How does Loïe Fuller's Serpentine Dance, described by symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé in 1897 as "the dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice," become even dizzier within today's algorithmic suck of YouTube, where it gathers up countless other dancers under Fuller's name? Dance Anima follows these and other questions to explore dance as both an apparatus of vitality and an uncontainable energetic force.