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[38] resurrecting the Future Body/Image/Technology Screendance Conference, American Dance Festival, July 2006. i feel compelled to begin with a confession. i am, by nature, a technophobe. Physically addicted to moving in real time and space, politically committed to supporting live performance, i tend to resist screens of all kinds. i mean it: i am so bad i still write first drafts with a pen and paper. When i began my book on loïe Fuller, little did i imagine that the research for the last chapter would bring me—of all people—to a conference on Screendance at the American Dance Festival. Yet, as we shall see, Fuller’s innovative use of light and motion (the two essential elements of any screendance) prefigured many twenty-first-century experiments with these same elements. in addition, the critical reception of her work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries parallels in enlightening ways contemporary dialogues about dance and technology. At the core of these discussions lies the complex relationship between physical expression and visual abstraction, between body and image in dance. loïe Fuller’s early works such as the Serpentine Dance and Fire Dance embody a central paradox of dance as a representation of both abstract movement and a physical body. her dancing epitomizes the intriguing insubstantiality of movement caught in the process of tracing itself. Surrounded by a funnel of swirling fabric spiraling upwards into the space around her and bathed in colored lights of her own invention, Fuller’s body seems to evaporate in the midst of her spectacle. Because of this, many scholars cover over the kinesthetic and material experience of her body in favor of the image, rather than reading that image as an extension of her dancing. Descriptions of her work get so entangled with artistic images or poetic renderings of her serpentine spirals and multicolored lights that they easily forget the physical labor involved. Then too, there are all those apologies and side notes about how loïe Fuller did not have a dancer’s body, or any dance training really, as if the movement images were solely dependent on the lighting, as if it were all technologically rendered. (one typical example: “The influence of loïe Fuller upon the theater will always be felt, particularly in the lighting of the scene and in the disposition of draperies. But she was never a great dancer. She was an apparition.”1 There is an odd urgency in my responses resurrecting the future 355 to these commentaries; my whole body revolts with the somatic knowledge that something else was going on. What was going on, of course, was a performance that confused conventional ways of looking at dance, one that turned on a completely new movement vocabulary based on a series of strategic movement impulses. not only did Fuller’s work eliminate the poses and aesthetic placement of limbs in steps and gestures, but it also used the body sequentially. Working with suspensions and momentum, Fuller initiated a twist in her torso that swirled through the upper body to lift the fabric. She then rode that motion, recognizing through trial and error when she needed to move again. if she moved too soon, the suspension was cut short and the expansive billowing of fabric was truncated. Similarly, if she hesitated, the fabric gained too much momentum in its descent that made it that much harder to get back up into the air. This was a little like riding a bike—knowing exactly when to pedal and when to coast. Because Fuller quickly mastered the complex figure-eight coordination necessary to keep one side or another of her costume billowing in the air, it was the serpentine figures in the air, rather than her body, that became the focus of the audience’s gaze. As giovanni lista makes clear in his comments on Fuller’s early choreography: The veil becomes the space for the lines until it is no more than the surface on which, as in Art nouveau, the pure lines appear. The dancer’s body is completely absent, all the while being absolutely present as a force creating waves of lines. it is at precisely this moment that her vital soaring is closest to her being: a pure energy revealing and inscribing the movements of life, the manifestations of the spirit, and the very impossibility of representing it through depictions of nature.2 This description of Fuller’s dancing as figurative lines drawn...

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