Dance and Popular Culture
Panel Coordinator: The Hyper-Virtuosic Body in Science Fiction/Fantasy Film and Television
Panel Presentation: “The Ballerina as Cyborg: Summer Glau in Angel. Firefly/Serenity, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles”
Presented at the 2009 Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference.
Abstract: In Episode 7 of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the character Derek Reese—an anti-cyborg warrior sent from the future to save John Connor—spies on the cyborg Cameron Phillips as she beautifully executes a ballet phrase she recently assimilated. Reese’s face is a mix of horror, awe and disbelief as he watches the machine arabesque and pirouette with lithe, fluid grace. Meanwhile, Sarah Connor’s words echo in Reese’s and television viewer’s minds: “There are things machines can never do…. They cannot appreciate beauty. They cannot create art. If they ever learn these things, they won’t have to destroy us, they’ll be us.”
Perhaps. But diegetically, what Reese doesn’t realize is that the cyborg, in this scene, also mirrors the inverse image of the ballerina as a hybrid of earthly woman, otherworldly sylph and mechanized dancing machine generated during the Europe’s Romantic Era of ballet. This paper unpacks the viewer’s (Reese’s, and thus the public’s) intense, palpable anxiety about the blurring of human/cyborg identity encapsulated in the scene by:
Investigating the history of the hyper-virtuosic (cyborgian) female ballet body through the addition of such prosthetic devices as pointe shoes and wires (for flight), and an increasingly rigorous, militaristic training regime; and discussing how actor and dancer Summer Glau’s ballet training serves her fictional roles as human/cyborg/otherworldly dancing machine from the “Waiting in the Wings” episode of Angel, through her portrayal as River in Firefly and Serenity, and in her role as the cyborg Phillips.
In doing so, I argue that just as the directors of these productions deploy Glau’s ballet training as a way of feminizing her cyborgian characters (the soft, ethereal, Romantic Era ballerina still dominates the public and popular culture consciousness as the embodiment of the feminine ideal), such portrayals instead—when viewed through the lens of dance history—simply reinforce the ballerina as a breed apart, both victim and wielder of supernatural power.
“Rage Against the Colonialist Machine: Movement as a Means of Liberation in the Matrix Trilogy”
Presented at the 2008 Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference
Abstract: Throughout the history of colonialism in the United States, indigenous people retained their cultural identity and sense of freedom through dance, often while incorporating colonizing influences: e.g., the Ring Shout of the African slaves and Ghost Dance of the American Indians. In the fictional post-apocalyptic city of Zion in the 20th-century Matrix films, the human population—those liberated from the immobilizing pods created by the colonizing machines and connected to a mainframe through which their minds experienced the Matrix simulacrum—gather together in a tribal rave prior to battle with the machines.
This paper examines this tribal rave—created by concert-dance choreographer Charles Moulton—as a historic approximation of dance ritual as a means of liberation among indigenous, colonized populations. At the same time, this paper contrasts the tribal rave with the movements of the liberated humans who plug back into the simulacrum as individual, asexual, cyber-enhanced rebels in scenes choreographed by martial-arts expert Yuen Wo Ping.
In particular, the paper examines the movements of the re-birthed Neo who, while prone in the Nebuchadnezzar, re-enters the Matrix as a superhero progressively defying the simulacra of time, space and gravity. Only by plugging into the Matrix can Neo’s body move as an act of subversion and defensive measure against colonialist control. In the process, his movement becomes a neo-colonial facsimile of the robotic agents’ who patrol the Matrix. Within these provocative layers of simulacrum the mind is free, but the body is the means to an end.