Amanda Kubic (University of Michigan)
In this paper, I will explore the particular logics of Ovidian metamorphoses centering (de)animation and (in)animacy, bodily and environmental instability, and the use of ars or techne that inform the choreographies and production designs of (post)modern dancers like Loie Fuller, Jodie Sperling, and Kinetic Light. Although Fuller danced in Paris in the early 20th century while Sperling and her company Time Lapse Dance (TLD) and the disability arts group Kinetic Light are both contemporary American ensembles, these women dancers are all interconnected through their staging of corporeal and environmental metamorphoses—metamorphoses that implicitly recall Ovid’s “forms changed into new bodies” (in nova fert animus mutates dicere formas / corpora, Met. 1.1-2). I will argue that using a “rhizomatic” model of adaptation (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, DuBois 2010, Lanier 2014) we can trace the proliferating roots and offshoots, the many bodies and forms of the Metamorphoses, as they wind their way through the works of Fuller, Sperling, and Kinetic Light. This dancerly Ovidian rhizome can help us see more clearly the connections between ancient, modern, and post-modern ideas of movement, liveliness, technology, and transformation, as well as the resonance that the Metamorphoses continues to have in the increasingly global and multimodal world of dance.
Loie Fuller, one of foremost innovators in modern dance choreography and technology, has been the subject of several scholarly monographs (Current 1997, Albright 2007, Garelick 2007), yet the Ovidian intertexts latent in her work have gone largely unremarked. Fuller’s legacy via Sperling and TLD’s Fuller-inspired dances has likewise received little attention outside of Garelick 2007, nor has any connection been made between Fuller, Sperling, and Kinetic Light. Nonetheless, I follow Wheeler 1999, Solomon 2014, Lada-Richards 2016, and Starks 2019 in thinking about receptions of Ovid in (post-classical) performance contexts. I also align myself with Traub et al. 2019 in thinking about Ovid and receptions of the Metamorphoses in terms of instability and relationality and networks of sameness and difference, rather than through strict historical and hierarchical genealogies.
I will begin my paper with an examination of extant photographs, promotional materials, and motion pictures featuring Loie Fuller. I’ll argue that Fuller’s performances enact an Ovidian metamorphosis from a female human body into an assemblage of body/environment/ fabric/light/sound/and assistive technology–an assemblage much like Haraway’s (1991) cyborg, “a hybrid of machine and organism,” and also similar to that which we see in Sperling and Kinetic Light. Like Ovid’s poem, Fuller’s dances reimagine the parameters of animacy, humanity, and ability. I will then turn to Sperling and TLD’s contemporary recreations of Fuller’s dances and explore how Sperling adds an additional layer of environmental awareness and metamorphosis to her performances. Finally, I will analyze Kinetic Light’s Descent, an hour-long multimedia performance that, like Fuller and Ovid, reimagines what is means to animate the body and become animated by it. Descent, I argue, asks us to reconsider classical notions of the natural/human body and of bodily “incompleteness” through a logic of disability aesthetics and cyborg politics.