Flickering Photology: Turning Bodies and Textures of Light

Abstract

This chapter explores the first part of Russell Maliphant’s Afterlight, a highly acclaimed solo for Daniel Proietto with lighting by Michael Hulls, animation by Jan Urbanowski and costumes by Stevie Stewart, which premiered at the In the Spirit of Diaghilev festival at Sadler’s Wells, London, in 2009. Taking note of the mesmerising effects created on Proietto’s body as he turned in circles and spirals under Urbanowski’s expanding and shrinking nocturnal imagery, the chapter considers the ways in which Afterlight reflects early twentieth-century experiments with light and colour in the paintings of Degas and the movement studies of Muybridge and others. Furthermore, the chapter takes Afterlight as a postmodern looking-glass through which we can glimpse early modern dance works of the same period, particularly those by Nijinsky and Fuller, that transfigure the human form through the play of light on bodies that turn in stage space. The chapter argues that Afterlight creates a flickering ‘photology’ or knowledge of light in which there is not only a relay from Maliphant’s work to optical experiments in early modern dance and visual art, but also a relay from those practices to phenomenological theory, especially as that has been developed by Merleau-Ponty and Levinas. This theory provides an alternative to the hegemonic Western philosophical and scientific tradition in which gross material things are ‘illuminated’ by the ‘light’ of transcendent human reason. Afterlight offers an after light, or erotic light, in which the dancing body at first coils into consciousness of itself, but then unfolds to trace and caress, but never grasp, the textures of light of an elemental other that is non-possessable and indeterminable.