Movement practices in the early twentieth century reveal a fascination with the relationship between stasis and motion, and the fluidity of these apparent polarities. When the pioneering dancer Margaret Morris sought to define her movement technique in an article of 1917, published in Arts and Letters alongside illustrations by Gaudier-Brzeska and J. D. Fergusson, she deployed but also complicated the longstanding binary of visual art and dance. ‘I look at dancing from the visual point of view of the artist,’ Morris writes, ‘seeing movements as combinations of shapes and lines, and ballets as pictures with the possibilities of actual movement added.‘ She foregrounds the static image as the source of her vision for dance, with gesture and movement as a translation of the drawn line. This intimate alliance between dance and painting was fundamental to her practice and it takes us to the heart of this chapter‘s inquiry.

Lynda Nead suggests that at the turn of the twentieth century the development of visual technologies rendered the still image ‘a conceptual impossibility’ at a time when scientific research was proving all bodies to be in a state of relative rest and movement, and psychologists of perception were revealing ‘constant muscular activity’ in the eye and nervous system. If stillness was ‘refuted as a property of the image, the object and the beholder’, as Nead suggests, then one might ask what place it could have in movement practices of the period? Through case studies of two European movement practices, this chapter explores the ways in which movement had the potential to encompass subtle scales of motion, including the manifestation of stillness in the body as a performance in its own right. As I suggest more widely in this book, the cultural potency of animation indicated not simply an attraction to speed, but rather to varied forms of motion and arrest – ‘diverse velocities’ – in Nead's useful phrase, which re-imagined the relationship between the ‘static’ and ‘mobile’ arts.