Kyle Bukhari

This article focuses on two experimental films from the 1960s: Yvonne Rainer’s Hand Movie (1966) and Richard Serra’s Hand Catching Lead (1968). It scrutinizes the way both works exhibit a hybridized and indeterminate approach to artistic media. It offers an empirical reading of the films’ movement and contextualizes them historically to move on to a theory of medium informed by Deleuze, Levinson, and Rajewsky. How does Rainer’s move from the time-based media of dance and choreography, and Serra’s move from the object arts of painting and sculpture, into the medium of film, advance our understanding of what is at stake aesthetically when boundaries of media are dissolved, transited, or displaced? Dance aesthetics requires that we show how movement gets translated into medium. I propose that the movement of media creates a displacement that is parallel to the displacement from the empirical to the theoretical in this article, where displacement becomes a form of reflection and critique.

This chapter focuses on Twyla Tharp’s career-long engagement with classical ballet. In particular, it looks at Deuce Coupe (1973) and In the Upper Room (1986) and suggests these works, that featured classical and modern-trained dancers together on the same stage, constitute early experiments in contemporary ballet. Tharp did not hybridize the dance forms; rather, she allowed them to coexist in a discrete, stylistic duality. This chapter asks how this radical juxtaposition of genres might have contemporized the classical ballet form. Early negative critical reception to Tharp’s use of traditional ballet choreography and pointe shoes raises the question of possible gender biases against Tharp as a female choreographer in a male-dominated field. While Tharp considers herself a modern and ballet choreographer, this chapter proposes it is through the pastiche of dance postmodernism that Tharp was able to incorporate classical ballet as a ready-made and that her work of the period can be ...