Bodies, Space-Time, Movement: Translating Dance in Film and Video Art

The essay by Nicola Dusi, "Bodies, Space-Time, Movement: translating Dance in Film and Video Art", considers different textual examples of early cinema, musical and video dance in order to think about theoretical problems found in those translation areas which extend among the fictional body, the virtual (digital) body and the dancing body. It also considers what happens when the body meets traditional media and new media. From Loïe Fuller's "Serpentine dance" to the video of a performance by the United Visual Artists (UVA) Dusi analyzes how repetitions, variations and figurative plasticity work in a close dialogue between live enactment and textual digital representations of movement. Motion capture or recent interactive 3D digital camera and other multimedia devices manage to translate the dancer's body in new substance systems, thanks to some common dimensions of rhythm and plastic contrasts (i.e. light, shapes, space and movement) that Deleuze would call "figural". The point is to look into representations of a dancer's body in cinema and video as a way to discover, and make it explicit, that "field of tensions and forces" (Deleuze) which lies underneath every human figure.