Event
The Dancer's Two Bodies
Slought Foundation and Penn Cinema Studies are pleased to invite you to join us for "The Dancer's Two Bodies," a seminar by Istanbul-based author Jalal Toufic, followed by a public conversation with Eduardo Cadava of Princeton University.
Taking their point of departure from a film in which a dancer enters a painting, the seminar and public conversation will begin with a fairly conceptual question: what kind of body image is produced by dance, especially when this dance enables a body to do what normally cannot be done? The question suggests that there may be different ways of considering what dance is, and even what a body may be. In one way of thinking about dance, the dancer remains in the homogenous space and time where his or her physical body is--this is a form of theater or performance rather than dance. But another kind of dance projects a dancer into a realm of altered movement, body, space and time specific to it. Following the strange, but related logic of these two versions of dance, the seminar and conversation will consider the relation between dance and cinema, what Walter Benjamin called a medium of sudden "changes of places and focus." By exploring the fractional dimensions of the altered space of dance, with its flat backdrops and its zones of spatial inexistence, we can perhaps come to understand the unusual space-creation of the dancer in general.
This program is made possible in part through the generous support of the Cinema Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania and the Society of Friends of the Slought Foundation.