ABSTRACT
In an era where, as Donna Haraway (1991, 152) explains “our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert”, the contemporary choreographic imperative to pattern new movement experiences for audience, performer, and artifact becomes increasingly cogent. Concerns about the passivity of humans in the context of increasingly ‘lively’ machines and the diminishing of vitality and agency through the subjection of the human by the nonhuman, be that through industrial machinery, robotics, or AI (artificial intelligence), has been a choreographic theme since the ‘machine dances’ of twentieth-century modernism. Russian dancer/choreographer Bronislava Nijinska’s Machine Dances (1922–23), Austrian/Australian expressionist choreographer Gertrud Bodenwieser’s iconic Demon Machine (1926, recreated by the author in 2017), Italian futurist Nikolai Fonegger’s Dance of the Machines (1924), and Bauhaus artist, Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet (1922) are just some examples of a pre–World War II machine aesthetic that either paid homage to the rise of industrial production processes or offered a critique of the takeover of humanity by the machine (Salter 2010). In the twenty-first century, the liveliness of human-machine relations is expressed differently with the affordance of the digital. The potential to incorporate technologies through interactive staging enables coordinates to be encoded and embodied, generating immersive contexts for experiencing dance. Moving from the mechanical to the computational, flesh becomes data, and the risks of subjection and passivity of the actual body as host or puppet for the virtual becomes, depending which way you look at it, either more acute or, as we move from the representation of the machine to the performative effects of technology, more entangled.
