Post on 27-Apr-2023
109
Taiwan Dance Research Journal No.9 December, 2014. pp.109~123
Are Dancers Robots? A Theoretical Consideration of the Body between Human and Robot in Performance
I-Wen Chang
Doctoral Candidate, Culture and Performance Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance
University of California at Los Angeles
ABSTRACT
In recent years, there has been an increasing focus on the body as a central topic of
investigation, especially in the fields of Taiwanese art, performance, and cultural studies.
However, the body is marginalized due to disproportionate emphasis on the mind. As a result,
many scholars look at the body through the lens of visual representation and treat the body as
a pure text. Not surprisingly, in the final competition of the 2012 Third Digital Art
Performance Award, one judge asked the choreographer and dancer Huang Yi—who
performed a duet with an industrial robot Kuka—“Are you indicating that dancers are like
robots that only follow rules without thinking1?”
This question indicates the common phenomenon of viewing the body as an abstract
and unsituated linguistic structure; therefore the dancers are without agency. However, by
introducing the latest corporeal theories from the discipline of dance and performance studies,
I argue that scholars have produced a new perspective to the theoretical understanding of the
moving body in digital performance, especially with respect to Taiwan. By analyzing Huang’s
1 The author was in the final competition of the 2012 Third Digital Art Performance Award on 6/24/2012.
Taiwan Dance Research Journal 9 ─────────────────────────────────────────────
110
piece from a dance theorist perspective and comparing Huang’s piece with two other digital
performances—Dominique Boivin’s Transports Exceptionnels, and Wayne McGregor and
Kim Brandstrup’s Machina, I assert that Huang’s performance is one example that celebrates
fascinations associated with machine embodiment.
There are three imperatives for my study: 1) to make a connection between dance
studies and digital performance studies in Taiwan; 2) to clarify the corporeal experience and
its significance to aesthetic studies, which has rarely been discussed in the growing
scholarship of fine arts in Taiwan; 3) to understand representation of the body in digital art
performance through corporeal and kinesthetic terms, which has not been fully discussed in
the growing scholarship in Taiwanese performance studies.
Key Words: Huang Yi and Kuka, Taiwan digital performance, choreographing empathy,
Dominique Boivin’s Transports Exceptionnels, Wayne McGregor and Kim
Brandstrup’s Machina (Metamorphosis: Titian 2012)
Are Dancers Robots? A Theoretical Consideration of the Body between Human and Robot in Performance
─────────────────────────────────────────────
111
Introduction
In the final competition of the 2012Third Digital Art Performance Award(台北數位藝
術表演獎)2, choreographer and dancer Huang Yi(黃翊) performed a duet with an industrial
robot, “Kuka”, in front of several judges3. The piece is a conversation between a human and a
robot. After the performance, one of the judges asked: “Do you intend to talk about the
relationship between choreographers and dancers? Are you indicating that dancers are like
robots that only follow rules without thinking?” Huang answered firmly: “I don’t think
dancers are like robots.”
The judge’s question sparked a discussion among people in dance circles after the
competition. Since most of the judges in Taiwanese digital performance competitions have a
fine arts and aesthetic theories background, it is not surprising that their way of interpreting
and valuing the performance would influence the way those experiments would be conducted
by artists. In traditional Taiwanese academia, the mind, in contrast to the body, is framed as
social, ideological, sophisticated, and logical. This perspective marginalizes the body, placing
undue emphasis on the mind. Not surprisingly, dancers who use their body to perform are
considered to be “robotic,” without agency, as the previous example illustrated. However, are
dancers really robots? What is the relationship between dancers, choreographers, and viewers
in a digital art performance? How can one account for that which endures in dance? If
movement is problematically considered as ephemeral, then what leads the dancing body to
become an endless series of aesthetic considerations? Might an existing theory both
kinesthetically and conceptually answer the philosophical question of the moving body?
To answer the above questions, I want to introduce dance theory and performance
theory into the discourse of Taiwanese cultural and art criticism. The notion of the body as an
abstract text has been challenged by dance theory scholars. Dance—as a corporeal
discourse—is a unique form of culture and knowledge production that both embodies and
produces cultural meanings (Novack, 1990). Scholars have established dance as a site of
everyday political meaning making that works against a reified notion of abstract political
reality bound to governmental power (O’Shea: 2007, Savigliano: 1995, Wong, 2002). By 2 By the term digital performance, I refer to the performance that involves visual elements, as well as
experimentation with any computer technology, including robotics. 3 KUKA is a manufacturer (Keller und Knappich Augsburg Roboter GmbH) and trademark of industrial robots.
Taiwan Dance Research Journal 9 ─────────────────────────────────────────────
112
theorizing the dancing body as a site of meaning making, these scholars challenge the
body/mind dualism, and at the same time bring insight to the discourse of the moving body.
The term corporeality refers to the knowledge system and theoretical discourse on the body.
We should keep this definition in mind, since it is crucial to realizing the meaning of the body
in relation to current experiments in digital art performance in Taiwan.
In this paper, I first trace theories from distinguished theorists on the subject of the body,
and then compare these bodily theories from the perspectives of feminist studies, performance
studies, and dance studies to free the body from its subordination to the mind. These
perspectives provide a basic understanding of the theories of the corporeal. I focus on multiple
possibilities of how theories of dance can enrich our understanding on digital performance in
Taiwan. By exploring dissonance in the relation between mind and body, I argue that dance
studies offers a new conceptual understanding of the moving body in digital performance.
Lastly, I use Susan Leigh Foster’s theory from Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in
Performance (2010) to further analyze Huang Yi’s piece and conceptualize its meaning in the
digital art era in Taiwan. I assert that Huang’s performance shows the artist’s celebratory
attitude toward the humanization of machines. I also compare Huang’s piece with two other
digital dance pieces—Dominique Boivin’s Transports Exceptionnels, and Wayne McGregor
and Kim Brandstrup’s Machina— to examine the different body in human, cyborg, and robot.
Literature Review on Corporeality and the Body
The body has remained a conceptual blind spot in both mainstream Western philosophy
and contemporary Taiwanese art theory. In Taiwan, building of theory on digital art
performance is mostly grounded on theories of aesthetics. However, Taiwanese theories of
aesthetics are largely influenced by Western theory. In Western epistemology, the Cartesian
binary system distinguishes the body as primitive, natural, biologically determined, fixed,
ahistorical, and pre-cultural, in distinction to the mind, which is framed as social, ideological,
sophisticated, and logical. This conceptual rift between body and mind marginalizes the body.
Since dance involves physical movement, it is not surprising that dance is problematically
labeled as ahistorical, mysterious, primitive, pre-cultural, and feminine by scholars and
theorists who are not familiar with dance studies. And under the influence of this
dichotomous view on mind and body, even dance studies is marginalized in academia. As a
Are Dancers Robots? A Theoretical Consideration of the Body between Human and Robot in Performance
─────────────────────────────────────────────
113
result, corporeal theory from the perspective of dance studies does not get the attention it
deserves in academia.
This is where my essay begins, by bringing the body back intoTaiwanese scholarship on
art and aesthetics from the perspective of dance theory. Body/mind dualism results in a lack
of theorizing bodily experience as having positive potential for agency. However, the
Cartesian body/mind dualism has been challenged by theorists, including Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, Michel Foucault, as well as Deleuze and Guattari, all of whom have rethought the
concept of the body through either philosophical or phenomenological lenses. Theorists
propose the work of corporeal inscription. These philosophers emphasize productivity of the
body, ways in which the social inscriptions of bodies produce effects of depth. However, their
discussions are based on male bodily experience, and those experiences should not be taken
for granted as universalized or generalized norms. Even so, feminism and dance theory are
both theoretically marginalized for their connection with the body. While the dichotomous
body/mind concept is challenged by feminist theories, it makes sense that dance theory also
challenges the Cartesian dualism.
Dance comes to corporeality with the new language of performativity, a term that was
created in order to rethink ideas of subjectivity, embodiment, and social identity. According to
post-structuralist philosopher Judith Butler, performativity is a repeated practice of “doing”
that suggests a “dramatic and contingent construction of meaning (Butler, 1990: 177).” The
concept of performativity is also an attempt to find a more embodied way of rethinking
relationships between determined social structures and personal agency.
However, for Butler, the body is a submissive field where performativity takes place to
reinforce compulsory heterosexuality. She sees the body as a surface on which cultural norms
are applied. As a result, Butler looks at the body simply as a social construction without
agency or resistance. Her concepts about the body are problematic because they do not
account for the meaning making process that the body can produce. On the contrary,
phenomenologist Elizabeth Grosz argues that bodies can be viewed as liberating terms of
cultural, sexual, and racial production. She disagrees with the notion of bodies as ahistorical,
pre-cultural, or natural objects. Instead, Grosz claims that bodies are not only inscribed,
marked, and engraved by social pressures external to them, but that bodies are also the
products of social constitution itself (Grosz,1994:x). Extending Butler, who treats bodily
Taiwan Dance Research Journal 9 ─────────────────────────────────────────────
114
experience as an abstract text, Grosz provides an ontological approach that locates the
possibility for transformation within materiality, which is the lived bodily experience.
Like Grosz, philosopher Susan Bordo argues that knowledge is ‘embodied,’ produced
from a ‘standpoint,’ by a body located as a material entity among other material entities. For
her, analyzing the “definition and shaping” of the body enables us to see struggles over the
shape of power (Bordo, 1995: 17). Bordo’s work is often compared and contrasted with Judith
Butler’s theory. Butler theorizes the body as a pure text (an abstract, unkinesthetic, and
unsituated linguistic structure). On the other hand, Bordo sees the body as a shifting text, or
discursive effect. The body is fixed and has no agency, but is produced by the reiterated,
gendered act. On the contrary, Bordo questions the idea of a purely textual body. Although
Bordo does imply that the body is a text to be inscribed upon and interpreted, she also
emphasizes the materiality and locatedness of bodies within Western culture. While Grosz
and Bordo disagree with Butler’s treatment of the body as a text without agency, these
scholars do not provide a better term to replace Butler’s “performativity.”
Dance studies, a New Perspective?
I suggest that the theories from dance studies can bring a new perspective to theorizing
the body. Moreover, dance studies brings insight into the understanding of bodily practice,
which focuses on the agency of the moving body. Emphasis on the dancing body enables us
to see the bodily experience as different from abstract and submissive bodies, such as those
often seen in the digital art aesthetic domains. This emphasis on the body as a central focus
frees the body from what Butler claims as pure textual body without agency. In other words,
addressing the dancing body as a site of meaning making can challenge the body/mind
dualism, and at the same time bring insight into the discourse of agency in the moving body in
digital art performance.
Scholars have established dance as a site of everyday political meaning making that
works against a reified notion of abstract political reality bound to governmental power.
Undergirding my grasp of the dance studies framework is the assertion that dance is “a
cultural practice that embodies a broader scope of purpose and influence” (Wong, 2002: 70).
Thus, as embodied corporeality, dance situates bodies as relational, and moving within
Are Dancers Robots? A Theoretical Consideration of the Body between Human and Robot in Performance
─────────────────────────────────────────────
115
networks of power (Savigliano, 1995), which can reveal social values embodied in everyday
practice.
Ever since the 16th century, Western theatrical dance has moved increasingly within
mechanisms called choreography. Choreography, using Deleuze and Guattari’s term
“apparatus of capture” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987:424-73, cited from Lepecki), becomes a
core concern not only in the field of technology of the body, the mode of composition, but an
apparatus (Lepecki, 2007).In addition, performance theorist André Lepecki argues that “to
conceive choreography as an apparatus is to see it as a mechanism that simultaneously
distributes and organizes dance’s relationship to perception and signification” (Lepecki, 2007).
However, while Lepecki focuses on the ephemeral quality of performance in an always
vanishing present, his approach neglects the ways that performance endures in cultural and
individual imaginaries over time (Foster, 2011:4).
Along similar lines, Foster proposes that the term “choreography” brings agency to the
body and bodily experience in both cultural and individual aspects. Foster claims
“choreography is a set of culturally situated codes regarding gestures and movements through
which identities and social memberships are configured (Foster 1998: 4).” She argues that the
metaphor of choreography works better than “performativity” to convey the codes, traditions
and conventions people produce, as well as the enactment of gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity,
and racial or national identities.
The idea of choreography brings to light the way that dance can be read as politics.
Foster demonstrates how dance practices have been aligned with other forms of cultural and
knowledge production. Corporeality and textuality work for each other in dance practices.
Choreography, as the act of theorizing bodily identity, makes choices about who and what the
body is. By analyzing the choreography of bodily movement, the knowledge of corporeality
can produce and influence the construction of power and knowledge.
Moreover, in her book Choreographing Empathy, Foster argues that the relationship
between the dancer and the observer is highly influenced by ever-changing socio-cultural
conditions. Similar to performance theorist Diana Taylor, who proposes the term “scenarios”
that render visible power relations for any performance to create a trace whose ideological
impact can be examined and evaluated (Taylor, 2003: 142-143), Foster proposes the concept
Taiwan Dance Research Journal 9 ─────────────────────────────────────────────
116
of “kinesthesia in performance,” where she examines historical genealogies of the terms and
concepts of choreography, kinesthesia and empathy. Through those analyses, she challenges
the assumptions of a natural or spontaneous connection between the dancing body and the
viewer’s body. She argues that those experiences are often carefully constructed and that the
“dancer’s performance draws upon and engages with prevailing senses of the body and of
subjectivity in a given historical moment (Foster, 2011:2).”
Theorizing the Body in Huang Yi and Kuka
In the piece Huang Yi and Kuka, choreographer and solo dancer Huang Yi dances with
a robot named Kuka. Huang sits down and starts to dance in a chair, and Kuka follows his
dance. The robot holds a flashlight in its arms and directs the light toward Huang. Huang then
plays with the light-filled space, indulging himself in a dance between the light beam shot
from the robot and the music. Kuka moves precisely due to its accurate auto-programming
system, representing itself as a robot with life on the stage. Even though Huang and Kuka
perform a duet, Kuka seems to be an observer as well as an active participant in the
performance. In addition, their movement, as shown in the piece, identifies and suggests the
possibility of communication between the human being and the robot.
Huang creates dance that flows smoothly through space, seemingly blending his body
into the surrounding air. Bodies, lights, and sounds deliver an abstract line of dramatic
language, allowing the dancers to open up possibilities in the audience’s perception of
physical movements and interactions with the surroundings. At the end of the piece, Huang
gets closer and closer to Kuka, and finally takes the flashlight away from the robot. This
action suggests the switching of roles played by Huang and Kuka. If the light symbolizes
power and knowledge, Huang seems to take control over the robot in this moment. On the
other hand, the moment their playfulness with each other starts also symbolizes a
collaborative exploration between the two.
Huang tries to dance with the robot and questions the distinction between the human
being and mechanism, a question reminiscent of the pioneering and influential idea of
“cyborg”—a term made famous by the philosopher Donna Haraway to describe a being with
both biological and artificial human-machine systems. In similar fashion, artist Andy Warhol
Are Dancers Robots? A Theoretical Consideration of the Body between Human and Robot in Performance
─────────────────────────────────────────────
117
once said “I want to be a machine. I think everybody should be a machine 4 .” Perhaps
Haraway and Warhol’s ideas also inspire artists to experiment with possible relationships
between robots and humans. As Ollivier Dynes’s book Metal and Flesh and Donna
Haraway’s famous “A Cyborg Manifesto” suggest:
We are no longer merely entangled with machines, no longer simple soldered to
their experience; we literally coevolve with them. We must now perceive of
technology and human beings as one entity. We are machines and the machine is
within us. The machine breathes. (Dynes, 2001: 32)
By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras,
theorized and fabricated as hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are
cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a
condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres
structuring any possibility of historical transformation.(Haraway, 1991: 150)
I assert that Huang’s performance is one example of fascinations associated with
machine embodiment, showing the artist’s attitude toward a distinct theme: the humanization
of machines. In Huang’s piece, the robot does not just follow Huang’s movements, but also
interacts with Huang (even though these interactions are all pre-programmed). Their moving
“bodies” in space suggest communication between the two. While one might be suspicious
that a machine could actually “dance,” I would suggest that the audience can sense the
kinesthetic dimension of the performance, and thus be able to empathize with the relationship
between the human and the robot.
Empathy as a term was first used by German aestheticians seeking to describe and
analyze the act of viewing painting and sculpture. They believed there to be a kind of physical
connection between the viewer and the art in which “the viewer’s own body would move into
and inhabit the various features of the artwork (Foster, 2011:10).” Empathy therefore
connotes the viewer’s physical responsiveness to objects. 4Andy Warhol Interview with Gene Swenson, Art News. 1963.
Taiwan Dance Research Journal 9 ─────────────────────────────────────────────
118
Kuka in Huang’s piece is a humanized machine. Huang carefully choreographs Kuka’s
movement so that the robot moves like a human being. Kuka swirls, extends, and projects the
light toward Huang when dancing. All these movements are carefully manipulated. While
Kuka is a mechanical device, its movement resembles human movement. It is only when the
audience gains the immediate empathetic capacity(because they have an emphatic response)
that they are able to sense Kuka’s movement. Kuka’s mechanical arm projects perceived
human emotions (such as curiosity and exploration), whereas Kuka’s mechanical lower half
displays the purely kinetic repertoire of a machine. If Kuka’s lower half were only to repeat
its spiraling pattern, the robot would not resemble a living organism. In contrast, Kuka’s
upper half is a carefully crafted representation of human-like movement recognizable within
many cultures around the world. Therefore, audiences are able to read and relate to the
affections of Kuka. The ability to sense Kuka’s movement in relation to Huang's movement
gives the audience access to read Kuka as a humanized machine.
While the idea of dancing with a machine is novel to most of the Taiwanese audience,
Huang is not alone in experimenting with this concept. A number of European choreographers
have choreographed dance for large machines. For example, in 2005, French choreographer
Dominique Boivin choreographed a duet piece called Transports Exceptionnels for dancer
Philippe Priasso and a five-ton excavator. Boivin is the artistic director of the dance company
Beau Geste, a company based in Val-De-Reuil in Northern France. In this piece, Boivin uses
Western classical music that highlights the impact of the hugeness of the machine and the
space it occupies. Throughout the piece Priasso moves within the digger, climbs on, and
dangles from it. This duet, a meeting between a seemingly indestructible machine and a
comparatively fragile man, draws on the Ballet tradition of partner dance in performance.
Similar to Huang & Kuka, Transports Exceptionnels explores an unexpected moment
shared between iron and flesh. Despite similarity, distinct differences exist between the two
pieces. In Transports Exceptionnels, an invisible dancer sits in the operator’s cab of the
excavator, whereas in Huang’s piece, Kuka is an entirely pre-programmed robot. Boivin’s
piece deals with the intimacy between two individuals— the dancer and the operator inside
the excavator. This poetic pas de deux is conducted by two different people: one is a “normal”
dancer, the other is a machine. The movement dynamitic from the machine is still controlled
by the operator, and therefore becomes the extension of the operator’s body. In contrast,
Kuka’s movement in Huang’s piece, due to its pre-programmed setting, is choreographed by
Are Dancers Robots? A Theoretical Consideration of the Body between Human and Robot in Performance
─────────────────────────────────────────────
119
Huang. Therefore, Kuka is like the extension of Huang’s body, following Huang’s will, and
therefore Huang Yi is actually dancing with himself.
Although the two pieces are similar in format, Huang’s piece is detailed and precise,
programmed with highly organized choreography. The pieces deal with different
philosophical considerations; Huang’ piece is about how one subject (the artist) extends
himself toward another non-human mechanism, whereas Boivin’s piece is about two subjects
(artist and the machine) in dialog with each other. None of the above mentioned pieces offer
us the possible interaction of human beings dancing with a representation of artificial
intelligence as they’re not yet considered to exist within the computing community. However,
their intention and creativity do provide us an optimistic imagining of the possible future
when human and artificial intelligence coexist together peacefully. Their works offer a
different theoretical approach toward robots and human interaction in performance.
In 2012, London based choreographer Wayne McGregor and Danish choreographer
Kim Brandstrup were commissioned to create a piece called Machina with sculptor Conrad
Shawcross. Interestingly, the visual image of this piece reminds us of Huang Yi and Kuka.
This piece also deals with a huge robot (mechanical arm that projects lights) and its
interaction with dancers on stage. However, unlike Huang’s embrace of mechanical
embodiment, McGregor and Brandstrup’s version shows the fear of human encounters with
an unknown power (robot). While Kuka behaves like a friendly and curious human being
ready to explore the world, the robot in Machina is threatening and powerful.
Machina was produced as part of Metamorphosis: Titian 2012, a co-production with the
National Gallery and The Royal Ballet in the UK. The creative stimulus for this piece is three
masterpieces by the Renaissance artist Titian: Diana and Actaeon, The Death of Actaeon, and
Diana and Callisto, all of which are based on the Greek myth of Diana and Actaeon, and
recounted by Ovid in Metamorphoses. The tale recounts the unfortunate fate of a young
hunter named Actaeon, and his encounter with chaste Diana, goddess of the hunt. While
Diana is nude and taking a bath, Actaeon unwittingly stumbles upon the scene. Diana madly
splashes water upon Actaeon. He is thus transformed into a deer and loses his ability to speak.
Actaeon is then killed by his fellow hunters and his own hounds because they could not
recognize him anymore.
Taiwan Dance Research Journal 9 ─────────────────────────────────────────────
120
In the performance, Diana is a huge robot (mechanical human-like swiveling torso) that
occupies half of the upstage area. In the opening, the dancers are barely visible on a smoky
gray stage. Only a bright point light shines behind them. The alien-looking robot, Diana,
stands aloof as dancers move through cross-currents. This gray metal robot is like a praying
mantis controlling the stage. When the dancer moves close, the Diana robot reacts wildly,
responding to the impending threat. This robot transforms Diana’s mettle (emotional) to metal
(mechanical), and her gaze and anger into a robotic metaphor–light beam shooting out in the
dark to the fellow dancers and audiences. The robot indicates an unknowable threat to human
beings.
McGregor captures actual human movements in the choreography of this robot. The
choreographers cleverly use the encounter between robot and man to indicate the meeting
between Diana and Actaeon. The robot in this piece is a mechanized human, showing the
artists’ interpretation of how powerful and threatening a non-human (goddess or robot) could
be. The choreography also represents a fear toward mechanism, cyborg, and machine.
Huang Yi and Kuka celebrates fascinations associated with machine embodiment,
whereas Machina shows fear of an unknown, non-human subject. However, in both pieces,
the movements of robots are choreographed and programmed beforehand. Although both
Huang and McGregor/Brandstrup intend to make the robot move as a human being (by
motion capture system of real humans moving), the robots are still used as tools. None of the
robots in the above mentioned pieces have artificial intelligence, therefore, all of the robots
are still under the control and command of the choreographers. The fears and celebrations
regarding those machines are manipulated carefully by the artists, and those emotional
responses are affected by how the audiences perceive or sense the moving body on stage.
Conclusion
Visual culture theorist John Berger argues that culture, knowledge, and belief systems
influence our ways of seeing (Berger, 1972). He points out that the way we see the world is
determined by what we know. Therefore, the different understanding on the discourses of
corporeality influences how we look at the body in digital performance. Similarly, in the
famous essay on “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproducibility,” Walter Benjamin
wrote:
Are Dancers Robots? A Theoretical Consideration of the Body between Human and Robot in Performance
─────────────────────────────────────────────
121
During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with
humanity’s entire mode of experience. The manner in which human sense
perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined
not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well. (Benjamin, 1988: 219)
While Benjamin mainly focuses on transformation from painting to film and
photography - his concept tells us that the nature of the work of art relies not just on the art
itself, but also on our perceptive-sensorial relation to it (Lepecki and Banes, 2007: 4).
Therefore, in an age of mechanical reproduction in digital performance, it is necessary to
identify how audiences sense, perceive, and empathize with the performance. This empathy,
as suggested by Foster, is never apolitical.
Foster’s theory in Choreographing Empathy provides a good tool for analyzing how
perception and sense are political. In Taiwan, government policy and government-sponsored
competition play important roles in leading the directions of Taiwanese dance trends. In
current Taiwanese digital performance discourse, dance theory is marginalized. However, by
closely analyzing the moving body and actual behaviors, dance theory opens up theoretical
possibilities. With careful concern for the body and corporeality, dance studies can bring
current Taiwanese cultural criticism and discussions to a different level. Dance theory has the
ability to enrich the current digital performance discourse in Taiwan.
In this article, I have focused on how dance acts as one of many bodily tactics for
cultivating knowledge through digital art performance. In doing so, I do not devalue other
means of theorizing the body, but rather seek to introduce a new angle on dance theory in the
Taiwanese context. I hope the paper contributes to a new performance-based perspective to
understand the aesthetic realms outside of the domains of theatrical performance, and to
further the development of Taiwanese digital dance theory.
Taiwan Dance Research Journal 9 ─────────────────────────────────────────────
122
Bibliography
Banes, S., & Lepecki, A. (2007).The Senses in Performance. New York: Routledge.
Benjamin, Walter. (1988). “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”
Illuminations, edited by H. Arendt. New York: Schocken Books.
Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corp.
Bordo, Susan. (2004). Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Los
Angeles: University of California Press.
Butler, Judith. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New
York: Routledge.
Chang, I-Wen. (2013), “Dance and Technology: a New Aesthetical Trend in Taiwan,” online
journal CULTUREBO, January 10, 2013.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1987). A thousand plateaus: capitalism and
schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Dixon, Steve, and Barry Smith. (2007). Digital Performance: a History of New Media in
Theater, Dance, Performance art, and Installation. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Dyens, Ollivier. (2001). Metal and Flesh: the Evolution of Man: Technology Takes Over.
Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Foster, Susan Leigh. (1998). “Choreographies of Gender.” Signs 24(1): 1-33.
______. (2011). Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance. London: Routledge.
Foucault, Michel. (1977). Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. New York:
Pantheon Books.
Grosz, Elizabeth. (1994). “Lived Bodies: Phenomenology and the Flesh.” Volatile Bodies:
Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indian University Press.
Are Dancers Robots? A Theoretical Consideration of the Body between Human and Robot in Performance
─────────────────────────────────────────────
123
Grosz, Elizabeth. (1990). “Inscriptions and body-maps: representations and the corporeal.”
Feminine, Masculine and representation. Sydney : Allen & Unwin.
Haraway, Donna. (1985). “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-
Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” Socialist Review.
Lepecki, André. (2007). “Choreography as Apparatus of Capture,” TDR: The Drama Review
51, no. 2 (T194).
Lin, Yatin. (2012). “Technology and the Human Body in Performance: Taiwanese
Choreographer Huang Yi’s Interdisciplinary Experimental Collaborations,”
Unpublished paper presented at the PSi (Performance Studies International) #18
Conference, June 27-July 1, 2012. University of Leeds, UK.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1962). Phenomenology of perception. New York: Humanities Press.
Novack, Cynthia. (1990). Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture.
Madison: University of Wisconsin.
O’shea, Janet. (2007). At Home in the World: Bharata Natyam on the Global Stage. Wesleyan.
Savigliano, Marta. (1995). Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. Boulder: Westview
Press.
Sparshott, Francis Edward. (1988). Off the Ground: First Steps to a Philosophical
Consideration of the Dance. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Taylor, Diana. (2003). The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the
Americas. Durham: Duke University Press.
Wong, Yutian. (2002). “Towards a New Asian American Dance Theory: Locating the
Dancing Asian American Body.” Discourses in Dance 1.1.
Young, Iris Marion. (1990).“Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body
Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality.” Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in
Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.