Dance and the Visual Arts in the Digital Era

When thinking of the connections between dance and the visual arts, we tend to forget that dance is directed at the spectator’s eye before being deployed in its intersensorial sensibility, which one may describe in terms of proprioceptive, kinaesthetic, and synaesthetic perceptions. That said, behind the choreographer may well lurk a visual artist (Forsythe, Preljocaj, Saporta, Teshigarawa, Decouflé, Waltz, Lock, among many others who come to mind). Some choreographers, like Jan Fabre, may even be more visual artist than dancer.

Dance, the art of time, space, and body, can mesh with practically any art form. And as the twentieth century shows, it can very well suffice in itself; indeed, it must. Isadora Duncan danced without stage scenery, and at Hellerau, despite Émile Jaques-Dalcroze’s best efforts, Mary Wigman created dance without music. Dance, though, cannot do without light.¹ 1 - A counter-example: In March 1994, Tangente Danse Actuelle drew up a program comprised of braille characters that was meant for an audience composed of both the seeing and the blind; this was part of a “lab” event whose theme was “the sensory universe and its imaginary trajectories.” Lying at the heart of all scenography are the body and its shadows, dance, and lighting. What Adolphe Appia taught us in the early twentieth century holds true in the twenty-first, all the more so in that lighting technologies have developed to the point of blurring the lines between light projection and video projection, which has become all but commonplace since Édouard Lock’s Exaucé/Salt (1998). In one part of the show, a sequence of projected images moved across the backdrop, like spotlights. Circular in form and sometimes comprising close-up shots of faces, the projection produced a strange and paradoxical effect: what kind of lens were we looking through? The omnipresence of media devices has inured us to a plethora of real-time effects, constantly playing with scale and temporality. Artists adopted the digital tools discovered during the “technology shift” of the 1990s, tools that have since been replaced by new ones of exceptional high-performance, thus opening up dance to new worlds and potential new partners.