Please join the Theater and Performance Studies Workshop for:
Clara Nizard
Joint-PhD Student, English/TAPS, University of Chicago
Who will present:
1904, GLOW
Respondent: Edgar Garcia, Associate Professor in English Language and Literature, University of Chicago
Tuesday, May 17,
4:30–6:00 PM CST
EXCLUSIVELY OVER ZOOM
Please register for the workshop HERE. The workshop coordinators will circulate the paper to all registrants and the Zoom link is made available upon registration.
(Please do not cite or circulate the works-in-progress without the author’s explicit consent.)
We are committed to making our workshop fully accessible to persons with disabilities. Please direct any questions or concerns to TAPS workshop coordinators, Michael Stablein (mstableinjr@uchicago.edu) and Catrin Dowd (catrindowd@uchicago.edu).
ABSTRACT: What impact did the discovery of perpetual motion at the sub-atomic level—which is to say, the discovery of the rhythms of entropy—have on the arts of movement? This paper takes up the influence of Marie Curie’s isolation and discovery of the element Radium on the choreographic aesthetics of Loïe Fuller, modern dance pioneer, whose Radium Dance first toured the United States in 1904. This paper is interested in a moment of scientific discovery which represented an epistemic shift in our general understanding of motion, and it foregrounds the art of dance as a critical-aesthetic response to the dawn of the atomic age. Fuller’s kinaesthetic vanguardism offers a prism for thinking about aesthetic and scientific régimes of visuality and motion at the turn of the century through her expertise as a choreographic and lighting artist concerned, since the beginnings of her choreographic production, with the interrelations between these two fields.
BIO: Clara Nizard (she/they) is a joint-PhD student in English and Theatre and Performance Studies. Her research considers motion, movement, and mobility, particularly the ways in which these terms intersect and bind Anglophone and Francophone histories of the Americas together. Clara has also shown multi-media performance work focused on queer epistemologies in France, the UK, and Canada.