Dance Anima: Techniques of Vitality (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780197786635)

The practice of dance holds a paradox at its core: we view dance as a uniquely human thing, and yet, the acquisition of choreography and technique 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 technologies and the ontology of the human.

Through a series of interdisciplinary case studies from cinema, animation, robotics, and screen-based social media, and using a methodology critically attuned to issues of race and embodiment, author Hilary Bergen tracks dance's driving energy (or anima)---kinetic and collective force produced by dancers, choreographies, techniques, technologies, and the imagination of the audience-as a valuable (and extractable) resource for engineering life.

Dance Anima proposes that 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 be passed between (nonhuman, animated, robotic, digital) bodies. Why are the Boston Dynamics industrial-military robots, designed to be soulless and dehumanized on the battlefield, doing the twist to Black soul music in viral videos online? How does Loie Fuller's Serpentine Dance, described by symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé 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 viral vitality, and an uncontainable energetic force.

Author: Hilary Bergen
ISBN-10: 0197786634
ISBN-13: 9780197786635
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Language: English
Published: 04/28/2026
Pages: 200
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.01lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.63d