"Not a Girl Dancing": Gender, Spectacle and Disembodiment in the work of Loïe Fuller and Freya Olafson
In this article, I draw links between two intermedia dance works, Loïe Fuller's Serpentine Dance (1892-1908) and Freya Olafson's HYPER_ (2013). Dancing more than a century apart, both Fuller and Olafson use their bodies as screens for various mediated effects, actively obscuring their corporeal female forms. In analyzing Fuller and Olafson's work visually, in relation to an aesthetics of disembodiment and transformation, and formally, in terms of how they make inanimate materials with the invisible labor of their own bodies, as crucial to a feminist-posthuman analysis of intermedia dance performances.