Remote Choreography and Monster: Moving Beyond the Human in Transatlantic Dance and Interdisciplinary Performances of the Long Nineteenth Century (1750-1914)

Abstract

This dissertation examines four nonhuman discursive constructs materialized in transatlantic dance and interdisciplinary performances of the long nineteenth century (1750-1914). Turning to these performances as case studies, I demonstrate that the transgressive movements of creaturely others in theatrical performance served as the fulcrum by which state-sanctioned and culturally acceptable norms pertaining to the human were repeatedly negotiated and reassembled.

My fundamental premise is that not only did choreography intersect with discourses of the normative in the production of the nonhuman ‘other’ on the theatrical stage, but choreography, as patterned movement, was a cardinal axis by which the human’s ‘other,’ the nonhuman, was generated and performed. Unearthing findings both archival (text, aural and visual records) and ethnographic (interviews with human participants) pertaining to this diverse assemblage of interdisciplinary performances, I argue that the movement qualities of creaturely others deemed peripheral enabled in each case, a choreographic reconsideration of the parameters of the normative human. Three of the case studies (the automaton, the sylphide and the yogi) are situated firmly within the long nineteenth century, while the fourth and final construct of the ghost straddles the nineteenth century and the twenty-first, drawing links between precedent performances of the ghost and instantiations of the virtual within dance and performance studies.

The primary contribution of this dissertation resides in its singular approach to the historiography of the nonhuman (and the monster in particular) as choreographic constructs. Supplementing existing understandings of the monster produced in literary studies, anthropology, religious studies and other disciplines, it posits that the perturbing difference constituted by the monster in particular, obtains not solely from its morphology, but from its aberrant mobility, i.e. those provocative motions choreographed to represent its distance from the human. Choreographed movement, I argue, is the cardinal axis of the monster’s magnified, ‘kaleidoscopic’ difference.

My findings reveal that the dissertation’s discursive constructs are related through a common subset of artistic techniques and technologies that deploy ‘remoteness.’ Accordingly, I advance ‘remote choreography,’ a theoretical paradigm that addresses the nonhuman as ‘illegible’ recruit, a surrogate situated to perform and make visible the nonhuman’s distance from the normative through movement. These displays of difference I contend, respond to the presence of real historical actors deemed to likewise transgress or exceed the human. As a result, the nonhumans examined are also marked by a polysemy observable through conflations and continuities in the performance of difference across separate chapters.

Proceeding from this, I argue that the nonhuman is a hypothetical other, a palimpsest repeatedly materialized in relation to discourses of legitimacy (and the human) developed not only in politico-philosophical, religious, biomedical and artistic contexts, but also under normative frameworks of the law. Accordingly, the choreographic representation of the nonhuman in multiple disciplines (dance, theatre, performance studies, religious studies) is shown to intersect crucially with tangible socio-political realities, impacting discourses pertaining to human rights, disability, technosensuality and biopower. In this way, ‘remote choreography’ used as a theoretical paradigm, advances knowledge of not only the socio-political function of nonhumans in multiple disciplines (dance, theatre, religious studies), but also identifies choreography as a powerful tool that may be used to actively intervene in changing historical understandings of the human.