AFTERLIGHT: AN ESSAY ON FLICKERING PHOTOLOGY
BY NIGEL STEWART
This essay explores what I will call dance photology. Photology itself literally means ‘knowledge of light’ (from photo, Greek for ‘light’; and -ology, ‘a branch of knowledge’). However, by dance photology I not only mean technical and aesthetic knowledge of the relationship between movement and light (rather than just movement per se) in past and present dance practice, but also how that knowledge can suggest ways in which dance produces philosophical knowledge. This is because light is the founding metaphor of western philosophy. As Derrida observes in Writing and Difference, ‘the entire history of our philosophy is a photology, […] a history of, or treatise on light,’[1] since it is based on ‘the metaphor of darkness and light.’[2] From Plato’s allegory of the cave,[3] in which ‘those who seek exposure to the truth must turn their gaze from the artificially lit cave of the world towards the sun as the origin of what can be known,’[4] to Descartes’ belief that divine light is mirrored by the light of human reason, ‘light is always understood as a metaphor for seeing the invisible in the visible’ and, crucially, for ‘seeing things in an intelligible form that holds all that exists together but is itself devoid of sensible qualities.’[5]
The same is true of the natural sciences. The western sciences render material things intelligible by ‘illuminating’ the principles which account for the behaviour of those things and then by applying those principles to other contexts, even though, as the historian Mario Biagioli explains, those principles depend not only upon the replication of the experiments through which those principles were originally tested, but upon an unacknowledged acceptance of the tacit bodily skills through which the scientific instruments used in those experiments were expertly manipulated.[6] And it is not difficult to see scientific instruments in general—from the surgeon’s speculums and endoscopes to the dentist’s drills and probes—as emblems of a fundamentally ocularcentric economy continuous with Cartesian philosophy in which what is seen seems immediately present to the self who sees. Indeed, for Kant ‘[v]ision’, unlike touch, ‘is a transcendental faculty.’[7] This is because light is the medium through which vision, like reason, produces an ideal relation to an exterior object since that object can be perceived as a complete whole and ‘in its material absence.’[8] As a result, Kant assumes an identity between, on the one hand, the exterior object that is seen and, on the other hand, the seer’s interior perception of that object, so that the difference between the two is never questioned. For Descartes and Kant, seeing is believing.
This idealising and totalising vision through which the seer takes possession of the seen is evident in many of the arts, most obviously in colonial landscape painting,[9] early-modern wilderness film,[10] or naturalistic drama of the proscenium arch theatre. In such cases the control of scale and creation of a single vanishing point ‘fix the structure of an objectively perceived world’[11] and create a ‘spectacle’ out of nature as much as any scientific paradigm.[12] Here, then, the frame of the painting or the ‘fourth wall’ of the theatre provides a one-way looking glass through which the spectator can examine and objectify human and other phenomena without being implicated in those phenomena.
But the notion of the theatre as an instrument through which human behaviour can be objectively perceived and kept at a critical distance for examination is demonstrated in theatre far closer to home. I am thinking in particular of the post-Bauschian Tanztheater of the German dance artist Thomas Lehmen for whom I have danced and about whom I have written.[13] Lehmen asks the dancers with whom he works to choreograph their personal interpretations of a number of different concrete social actions (for example, ‘thinking’, ‘disco dancing’, ‘telling a story’) and what he calls the ‘human functions’ of ‘working,’ ‘eating,’ ‘sleeping,’ ‘fucking,’ and so on.[14] Crucially, one dancer’s interpretation can be compared with another through a specific system that organises those interpretations in time and space. Spectators are made absolutely conscious of the system that is used. For instance, in Schreibstück each spectator is given a print of the ‘score’ of the show so maximum attention is drawn to how each of the three trios who meet to perform the score differently realise the social actions and human functions of which it is composed.[15] In Funktionen spectators are made aware of the box containing the cards which dictate what the dancers should do and where and for how long they should do it.[16] Lehmen refers to each of these systems as a spiegelglas―literally the ‘mirror glass’ or transparent glass that divides, and mediates between, the inside world of the stage and the outside world of the auditorium.[17] It seems appropriate that the actions and functions seen through this spiegelglas are almost always performed on a white dance floor and are illuminated by an even wash of very bright, white light. The connotations of a scientific laboratory or operating theatre are unmistakable.
A show that is conscious of the power of the one-way looking glass and literally features one is Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men, the now legendary work of the British-based company DV8 Physical Theatre which was created in 1988 from the four dancers’ personal responses to the notebook of the homosexual, serial killer Denis Nielsen.[18] The second scene juxtaposes two relations. The first is a sado-masochistic relation in which Nigel Charnock wraps himself around the shoulder girdle of Douglas Wright who, with trousers hanging around his ankles, staggers with increasing difficulty in a counter-clockwise circle around a plinth. The second is a primarily narcissistic-voyeuristic relation between Russell Maliphant and Lloyd Newson. Maliphant stands on the plinth assuming a number of different poses from classical sculpture and gay iconography whilst contemplating his own image in the reflective surfaces of a closed venetian blind. Abruptly the slats of the blind are opened to reveal Newson staring morbidly at Maliphant. Even though this work demonstrates remarkable awareness of the link between sexuality, sight and power―particularly the ‘the phantasy of control that the subject has over the object viewed’― it nonetheless provides no alternative to this despotic photology.[19] It is, then, ironic that a dance work which does provide an alternative photology involves a turning body and was choreographed, twenty-one years later, by Russell Maliphant himself. I am speaking of Afterlight.
AFTERLIGHT
COILING
The full-length version of Afterlight consists of an hour-long trio, premiered in 2010, with lighting designed by Maliphant’s long-time collaborator Michael Hulls, and costumes by Stevie Stewart. The first part of this trio, now known as Afterlight (Part I), consists of a 15 minute stand-alone solo which was first performed by the Argentinean dancer Daniel Proietto in 2009 at the In the Spirit of Diaghilev festival at Sadler’s Wells. [20] Simply put, Afterlight (Part I) depicts Vaslav Nijinsky—Diaghilev’s lover and Ballet Russes’ greatest dancer—as he descended into mental illness at the end of his glittering stage career. The solo is in four sections which Maliphant calls ‘Turning,’ ‘Trails,’ ‘Opening Out’, and ‘Pouring In.’ [21] Each section is accompanied by one of the four Gnossiennes composed for piano in 1893 by Eric Satie, who went onto compose Parade for Ballet Russes in 1916. In what follows I want to concentrate on Afterlight (Part 1) because, by Maliphant’s own admission, that solo, and indeed his choreography of solos in general, has explored more fully the interplay between motion and light.[22]
Indeed, as important as it is to recognise the articular and dynamic range of Maliphant’s choreography, an approach to Afterlight that only concentrates on that choreography might conclude that the work is still ensnared by a Cartesian way of thinking and thus provides a universalising and totalising effect, returning to what I earlier called a despotic photology. Certainly, a movement analysis of ‘Turning’, the first section, can suggest that the work engenders a narcissistic state of consciousness in which the meaning of the dance seems immediately present to the dancer’s perception of his own dancing. For this section Maliphant referred to publicity photographs of Nijinsky to create poses on Proietto, then evolved short movement phrases from those poses, and finally used Final Cut Pro software to edit those short phrases into longer ones. In so doing, Maliphant’s choreography makes substantial demands on Proietto’s ability to modulate the tensional qualities of his body as he morphs from one shape into another whilst continuously turning. This is especially the case with the way in which Maliphant makes most of Nijinsky’s épaulement. To get down to choreutic detail, at one point Proietto’s torso inclines on the diametal cross to right side high whilst his head tilts along the diagonal cross towards right back high. Simultaneously, his shoulders twist in the opposite direction to allow the upper half of his left arm to reach sagittally to back high whilst the lower left arm unfolds laterally to left side high. In contraposition to this, the upper right arm reaches down along the diagonal to right forward low whilst the lower right arm deflects sagittally along the diametal to forward low. Momentarily, Proietto is then let loose from this complex assemblage of counter-tensions and deflected planes into a faster turn and freer outward flow of energy with the left arm releasing to left side middle and the right arm in the same lateral plane to right side low. This choreutic analysis of just a fragment of Maliphant’s choreography is indicative of how, in general, Proietto’s body alternates between, on the one hand, suspenseful, centripetal counter-twists in which, as it were, time is squeezed to a stop, to, on the other hand, centrifugal releases in which time flurries and quickens, and that more importantly the release of tension and flow is not immediate but rather happens sequentially through a pouring of weight initiated from the torso towards the hands and other peripheral parts. Now, these movement sequences were produced from Maliphant’s grasp of the tensional qualities of Nijinsky’s poses, and his épaulement in particular, in terms of the myofascial meridians, a concept popularly known as Anatomy Trains developed by Tom Myers with whom Maliphant trained in Rolfing®. Anatomy Trains is a somatic practice in which sequential motion can be understood in terms of tracks of fascia which loop around the whole body.[23] So if proprioception is the body’s ability via receptors in the inner ear, muscles, tendons and joints to gather information about its own events, in particular the relative position of and relationship between different moving parts, then we can say that, by organising Nijinsky’s body shapes into a complex flux of tensions grasped at a myofascial level, Maliphant was not obliging Proietto to merely copy the exterior aspects of those shapes, but rather was inviting Proietto to delve within his own proprioceptive sensations of those shapes.[24]
Accordingly, at this point Maliphant’s choreography provides for Proietto an intrasubjective and autoeffective structure in which Proietto gains a plenitude of his own proprioceptive presence. Indeed, this structure seems narcissistic: in performance, Proietto seems spell-bound by himself. Turning in the centre of his own aura, Proietto as Nijinsky seems fully self-possessed, riveted to his own being. In this sense, Proietto’s movement is ‘an internalising movement which Levinas describes as a “coiling” into [consciousness of] self.’[25] Although this self-sealed state of coiled consciousness is kinaesthetic, it seems as complete as ‘the Cartesian cogito, in which the self is immediately present to itself, is taken as the basic proof of existence, and things directly perceived are apodictically privileged.’[26]
UNCOILING
However, dance photology offers an alternative understanding of Afterlight. An approach that pays attention to the interplay of motion and light notices how Proietto’s state of consciousness is split open to suggest the dehiscence of a different kind of philosophical knowledge. In the central sections in particular we see the body uncoiling beyond its place as it encounters through light an anonymous elemental other that it traces but can never fully know. Crucially, the spectator, too, is involved within, but can never master, this encounter between motion and light. Apart from four profile lanterns set at just 15% either side of the stage, Proietto is only lit from a single source, which is not a theatre light at all but a film projected from 8.2 metres above Proietto’s head.[27] The images of globules of light and shade that are projected were created with Jan Urbanowski through specially-designed animation software in which particles are generated, split and shifted within the frame. In ‘Turning’ and ‘Pouring In’ (the first and last sections) those globules turn in time either with or in the opposite direction to Proietto’s turning body. However, in ‘Trails’ and ‘Opening Out’ (the central sections) those globules of projected light and shade expand and shrink, and swirl, suck and pour into different locations around the stage. As they do so, Proietto loses possession of his world: he is pulled forth, uncoiling beyond his place, rising and falling amongst those globules, unfurling his legs and arms in sinuous curves that trace and chase after or ripple through them. For these sections Maliphant was inspired by drawings by Nijinsky which show abstract trace-forms containing not arcs of a circle but curves with no obvious centre, suggesting the blurred after-image of a body shifting through space.
Motions of Meaning
We can understand these trace forms in three respects, each of which indicates that, if theory is ‘an instrument of multiplication [that] also multiplies itself,’ Afterlight is theory in motion.[28] Firstly, we can understand the trace as an arch-trace (arch-writing or proto-writing) in the sense meant by Derrida, that is, a différance in which things differ from one another, but also where the meaning of those things is differed from one thing to the next and where meaning has thus to be felt as a trace, or a motion of meaning, in between and through those things.[29] This is the case with these globules of light and shade. In a manner reminiscent of Merleau-Ponty’s magnificent meditation on the colour red,[30] the meanings of this light fluctuate from one unstable floating thing to another: from things above such as a cyclone seen from space or ‘a swirling feathery-edged cloud with a black hole in the middle,’[31] to things below such as floating ice, lily pads, rippling water, quick sand, fluttering silk, undulating velvet, and evaporating smoke. This is no longer the body getting a grip of itself, still turning in its own place, still groping around the perimeters of its own aura; rather, this is the body in ek-stasis, tracing the elemental qualities of an anonymous other that always recedes beyond reach.
Secondly, these trace-forms of an elemental other set up a relay from the present to the historical past. Certainly, in creating in Afterlight ‘a poignant meditation on [Nijinsky’s] later years,’ ‘Royal Ballet-trained Maliphant was also reflecting on his own life and career,’ but equally this rehearsal of [Maliphant’s] own kinaesthetic heritage extends not just to the way in which Proietto ghosts the trace-forms of Nijinsky’s drawings but to early-modern experiments with motion and light in dance, painting and science.[32] This not only includes early-modern dance works, but the representation of those dance works through photography and the influence that photography has had on modern dance choreography. Most explicitly, Hulls wanted to generate monochromatic lighting states to evoke the same battered old black and white photographs of Nijinsky and other dancers from the Ballet Russes from which, as I have already indicated, Maliphant created phrases on Proietto. Furthermore, the beanie hat worn by Proietto alludes to the hats designed by Léon Bakst for Nijinsky. Even so, those allusions are never confirmed: there is no earline-hugging hat to strengthen the suggestion of Nijinsky’s role as the Favourite Slave in Cléopâtre,[33] no ear-ring to ratify the reference to The Golden Slave in Shéhérazade[34], no horns to denote the Faun from L’Apres midi d’un faune.[35] These allusions in costume design, lighting and choreography are, then, part of a larger strategy of forming a relay with, rather than a slavish illustration of, the historical past in which both present and past are never conflated but find points of fusion or interplay to create what Gadamer calls a historically-effected consciousness.[36]
When watching Afterlight the early modern dance works of which I become most conscious are those by the American modern dance pioneer Loïe Fuller. After Afterlight Maliphant created The Rodin Project,[37] inspired by the work of Auguste Rodin, and Maliphant says that Rodin’s drawings of Fuller’s hands have influenced his choreography for the Rodin Project and Afterlight.[38] However, the work that has had a more profound influence is, I suggest, Fuller’s own Serpentine Dance, patented by Fuller, and filmed by the Lumière Brothers, in 1896.[39] If Fuller was known as ‘the goddess of light’[40] then, as was wonderfully illustrated by the Royal Academy’s Degas and the Ballet exhibition of 2011, Fuller’s experiments with projected light on her own turning body were themselves influenced by visual art that evoked motion by testing the relationship between line, colour, volume and space, as in Degas’ paintings; photographic studies of human motion, as in Muybridge’s photographs and Marey’s chronophotographs;[41]and optical studies that used some kind of rotating circular device, as in Willéme’s photosculptures and Richer’s discs.[42]
Unstable Auras
For Fuller, Nijinsky and Maliphant, photographic light is essential to the aura of the turning body. I mean aura in several senses: aura in the scientific sense of the optical effect of diffraction, sometimes known as a corona, which surrounds an illuminated object; aura in the philosophical sense of the unique reality, rather than reproducibility, of a thing as perceived from a distance;[43] aura in the phenomenological sense of the ‘amplitudinal quality’ (or ‘felt expansiveness and contractedness’) of the ‘moving body’ which is one of four ‘cardinal structures of kinaesthetic consciousness;’[44]and aura in the metaphysical sense of an energetic field surrounding a body, sometimes known as a halo. Some of Nijinsky’s own drawings evoke aura in all these senses, in particular his geometric drawings in which eyes are figured in the intersections of circles and ovals, and one of Michael Hulls’ initial inspirations was the aura of soft cloudy light with a shadowy hole at its centre projected onto his bedroom ceiling from a domestic pendant light.[45] With Urbanowski’s film this aura expands and shrinks. With Urbanowski’s film this aura expands and shrinks.
In clinical medicine the perception of an expanding and shrinking aura is known as Alice in Wonderland Syndrome.[46] This is not only because the perceptual distortions of AWIS are exemplified by the hallucinogenic effects of Lewis Carroll’s two Alice stories―their narrative transformations being effected by abrupt compressions or extended amplifications of time and space―but also by the visual artists and poets who, through direct or implied reference to Carroll’s works, have explored ‘the recognition and attribution of meaning as a cognitive process based on sensory perceptions.’[47] Given this link to Carroll’s Alice books and to AWIS, and the fact that Fuller’s Paris debut was in 1871 (the very year in which Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass was published), I fantasise that Afterlight provides a looking glass worthy of Lewis Carroll in which Loïe Fuller and Vaslav Nijinsky appear as the positive and negative of a single photograph—or maybe the White Queen and Red Queen of early-modern dance history: one, an American female, lit from beneath through frosted glass to evoke fiery forms that arise and gather such as flames, orchids and butterflies; the other a Russian (albeit represented by an Argentinean) lit from above to evoke watery things that descend or dissipate such as vapours, streams and ice; both, though, are Paris-based, both possess colourful biographies and fluid sexualities, both turn continuously, both evoke natural forms and forces, both make light flicker. By providing such a looking glass to imagine the past, Afterlight sets up a relay, in the sense meant by the editors of this volume, that is, an event, which arises in the folds of artistic creation, which transmits and transforms the historical past, and also, which refracts and multiplies the historical present.
Tangible Visible
But for all this, Maliphant, like Fuller and Nijinsky before him, is all too aware of the material basis of the auras they create. And that material is literally material: silk. Certainly, Fuller’s voluminous and billowing silk dresses were essential to her lighting effects, her stage presence, her public appeal and her place in history. Furthermore, costume historian Sarah Woodcock notes that Nijinsky and the other principals in ‘Cléopâtre[48], Shéhérazade[49] and Le Dieu Bleu[50] were covered, neck to ankle, with prosaic silk’ but that, since stage light intensified the sheen and lustre of that silk, audiences ‘saw’ bare flesh, as proved by the impact of Cléopâtre and the scandalous success of Shéhérazade.[51] Daniel Proietto’s grey tracksuit trousers seem off-the-peg, but, in a kind of homage to Bakst as well as for practical reasons, were specially made from silk, and he wears flesh-coloured silk socks.
Woodcock complains that Bakst’s ‘completed costumes lack the eroticism that oozes from [his] designs, in which wisps of fabric barely cover breasts, thighs and body hair’ and that the loss of that eroticism is all the more disappointing in ‘un-retouched photographs’ in which ‘creases [of silk] at elbows or knees are clearly visible.’[52] By contrast, I want to suggest that in Afterlight creases are not only erotic, but that this eroticism is indicative of a flickering (material and unstable) photology. In Afterlight creases are literally mani-fold: in the off-white tea-stained sleeveless t-shirt with its carefully constructed folds of material, and in the folds of the grey jogging pants. And then there are the folds of the body. ‘The light,’ comments Maliphant, ‘folds into the fingers’ as the hand passes thought the light, and, since Proietto turns directly underneath its source, that dappled down light deepens the shadow under every crease, wrinkle, fold and tuck of bone, flesh and cloth.[53] Importantly, the effect even in ‘Turning’ is to refuse the spectator a totalising vision of Proietto’s body, not only by fragmenting it kaleidoscopically into patterns of light and shade but also by forever changing those patterns by virtue of the fact that Proietto catches the light differently as he continuously morphs from one shape to another whilst all the time turning in place, here keeping pace with the light, there fluctuating slower or faster, here turning in the same direction as the projected image, there accelerating in the opposite direction.
Indeed, Maliphant and Hulls’ desire to render vision unstable was acute at the start of the project. Very early on they experimented with ‘small matchbox-size beams of light where you could flash something through: where you could get―tish!―a moment, then, two, three, four, five, six more moments so more of the movement is [momentarily] revealed.’[54] The effect is like that of an old film or cartoon flip book that flickers so much that the illusion of motion in both revealed and concealed when the material basis of that illusion comes to the fore. So if, for Kant, there is an identity between the seen object and the seer’s perception of that object, in Afterlight that identity breaks down since the total form of the dancing body remains unknown whilst the different ways in which aspects of that body appear to the spectator are manifold, and the very material textures and sensuous surfaces (real or imagined) of which those bodily aspects are composed are felt through the ways in which they flicker in and out of light.
I suggest this signals a paradigm shift from a pure photology of the transcendental visible in which thought, through the erasure of its material conditions, is understood in the restrictive sense of pure signification to, on the other hand, a flickering photology of the tangible visible in which thought is incarnate in the fleshly textures of dancing. This can, above all, be sensed through the third way in which the trace-forms of Afterlight are performed, namely, as caresses. Maliphant and his assistant, Dana Fouras, coached Proietto not just to swing his pendulous limbs through the light to trace shapes, but to ‘lick’ the light as he did so, and not just with his hands and his silken feet, but also with his rib cage and hips when, at one point, he log rolls, rapidly and luxuriously, from stage left to right and then with his back as he returns through a forward roll.[55] For the spectator this is revelatory: the medium of light makes visible the medium of touch to reveal the body as tactile, and the medium of touch makes tactile the visible quality of light. Following Merleau-Ponty, these tangible, visible textures can be theorised as a chiasmic intertwining of subject and object, or of self and other, which takes the form not only of an intertwining of the seer and the seen within a general Visible, or the toucher and the touched within an overarching Tactile, but an organic intertwining of the tactile and the visible within a general Sensible in which ‘every visible is cut out in the tangible, every tactile being [is] in some manner promised to visibility.’[56] As Merleau-Ponty then explains, this general Sensible also involves an intertwining of sense and sensation, ‘ideas’ and ‘carnal texture’: ‘we do not see, do not hear the ideas […] and yet they are there, […] behind the lights or between them, recognisable through their […] always unique manner of entrenching themselves behind them.’[57] And so I suggest that Afterlight carries ideas that retain their potency precisely because they are entrenched within the carnal textures of a costumed moving body made tangible and visible through flickering light. Any of Afterlight’s associations―things that float and ripple; Nijinsky’s poses and personae; the flickering forms of Fuller, Degas, Muybridge and Marey; unstable auratic shapes; the psychophysical disturbances of medical conditions and children’s literature― are all enfolded into the textures of Urbanowski’s light folding into Stewart’s costume folding around Proietto’s turning body.
Unfixable Light
In this flickering photology of the tangible visible what Proietto licks is lost. And this is what is erotic about the caress and what makes a caress a caress, for ‘in the erotic encounter there is an obsessive involvement with the discontinuity or the loss of any conscious hold over an otherness which itself has no formal basis or power.’[58] Indeed, whether the other takes the form of an amorphous element, psychophysical state or fictional or factual figure from the past, this other always recedes and is ungraspable. For this reason, as we see with the central sections of Afterlight, the caress of light gathers pace. Here, as Levinas says in Time and Other, the other is:
always still to come. The caress is [ultimately] the anticipation of this pure future without content. It is made up of this increase of hunger, of ever richer promises, opening new perspectives onto the ungraspable.[59]
To end, I will again cite Cathryn Vasseleu whose book Textures of Light has been of such great inspiration to these reflections on dance photology.[60] Eliding the difference between turning and re-turning, she indicates that Luce Irigaray develops Levinas’s theorisation of eroticism by arguing that carnality involves a re-turn to a state in which vision is lost in a very particular way. Vasseleu’s summary of Irigaray’s argument goes to the heart of Maliphant’s Afterlight. ‘Voluptuousness,’ writes Vasseleu, is full of wonder:
[It] is a re-turning to a state of movement, a corporeality oscillating between materiality and light. Far from simply being a movement into night, this is a passion for an unopposable, unknowable, unfixable light.[61]
This unfixable light, this erotic light, is after light. In this special sense, Afterlight is after light.
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The Rodin Project. Choreographed by Russell Maliphant, London, 2012.
Vasseleu, Cathryn. Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty.
London and New York: Routledge, 1998.
Woodcock, Sarah. “Wardrobe.” In Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes 1909
1929. Edited by Jane Pritchard, 129–63. London: V&A, 2010.
[1] Derrida, Writing and Difference, 27.
[2] Vasseleu, Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty, 5.
[3] Plato, The Republic, 316–25.
[4] Vasseleu, Textures of Light, 3.
[5] Vasseleu, Textures of Light, 3, (emphasis added).
[6] Biagioli, "Tacit Knowledge, Courtliness, and the Scientist's Body."
[7] Vasseleu, Textures of Light, 100.
[8] Vasseleu, Textures of Light, 100.
[9] Sharma, Landscape and Memory, 185-205.
[10] Adams, “Performative Locations: Wilderness Space and Place in Early Film.”
[11]Vasseleu, Textures of Light, 2.
[12] Stewart, “Introduction: Spectacle, World, Environment, Void.”
[13] Stewart “Introduction: Spectacle, World, Environment, Void” and Stewart, “To and Fro and In-Between: the Ontology of the Image in Thomas Lehmen’s Stations.”
[14] Lehmen, Schreibstück.
[15] Schreibstück, choreographed by Lehmen.
[16] Funktionen, choreographed by Lehmen.
[17] Lehmen, interview with Stewart.
[18] Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men, directed by Hinton.
[19] Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, 175.
[20] Afterlight, choreographed by Maliphant.
[21] Maliphant, interview with Stewart. All interview quotations approved for publication.
[22] Maliphant, interview with Stewart.
[23] Myers, Anatomy Trains: Myofascial Meridians for Manual and Movement Therapists.
[24] Stewart, “Re-Languaging the Body: Phenomenological Description and the Dance Image,” 43-4.
[25] Vasseleu Textures of Light, 80.
[26] Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature, 132.
[27] Drake, “The Link Between Lighting and Dance and the Affect on the Spectator’s Experience”.
[28] Deleuze quoted in Foucault, “Intellectuals and Power,” 208.
[29] Derrida, “Différance.”
[30] Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining ― the Chiasm”, 132.
[31] Ismene “The Arts Desk Q&A: Lighting Designer Michael Hulls.”
[32] Jennings, “The Rodin Project ― review.”
[33] Cléopâtre, choreographed by Fokine.
[34] Shéhérazade, choreographed by Fokine.
[35] L’Apres midi d’un faune, choreographed by Nijinsky.
[36] Gadamer, Truth and Method, 357-62.
[37] The Rodin Project, choreographed by Maliphant.
[38] Maliphant, interview with Stewart.
[39] Serpentine Dance, choreographed by Fuller.
[40] Current and Current, The Goddess of Light.
[41] Kendall and DeVonyar, Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement, 148–68.
[42] Kendall and DeVonyar, Degas and the Ballet, 86–94, 182–3.
[43] Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 215-7.
[44] Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement, 140.
[45] Hulls, email.
[46] Hamed, “A migraine variant with abdominal colic and Alice in Wonderland syndrome: a case report and review.”
[47] Schulz, “Down the Rabbit Hole and into the Museum: Alice and the Visual Arts,” 16.
[48] Cléopâtre, choreographed by Fokine.
[49] Shéhérazade, choreographed by Fokine.
[50] Le Dieu Bleu, choreographed by Fokine.
[51] Woodcock, “Wardrobe,” 143; see illustration, 87, 142.
[52] Woodcock, Diaghilev and the Golden Age, 143.
[53] Maliphant, interview with Stewart.
[54] Maliphant, “Afterlight,” In The Spirit of Diaghilev.
[55] Maliphant, interview with Stewart.
[56] Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining - the Chiasm,” 134.
[57] Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining - the Chiasm,” 151.
[58] Vasseleu, Textures of Light, 77.
[59] Levinas, Time and the Other, 89.
[60] Vasseleu, Textures of Light.
[61] Vasseleu, Textures of Light, 116.
Photos by Philip Glendinning