Abstract
Considering the chronological coincidence of the birth of cinema parallel to modern dance, the research about Futurism – a movement of chief importance, which, during the silent era, accomplished its parabola – has to take account of its effects on these two arts of movement, especially when they interact with each other. In fact, when cinema was born, also the instances of renewal of dance modernism, promoted by performers such as Loïe Fuller, Ruth St. Denis, and Isadora Duncan, came to life. Their ‘new dance’ had an important impact on Italian silent cinema too. Among the various types of ‘new dance’, one of the most innovative was the ‘avantgarde dance’, here interpreted in a broad sense. This macro-category is divisible into further subcategories in turn, each one corresponding to the diverse artistic flows that influenced it, as Futurism.
Keywords: Dance, Silent Cinema, Thaïs, Futurism
Futurists’ fascination with Serpentine Dance
In the 1910s, Loïe Fuller's research about dance and lighting design, aroused the interest of the brothers Arnaldo and Bruno Ginanni-Corradini, also known as Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra. They came from the Cerebrists movement and, when they converged with the Futurist one, they provided it with their expertise in terms of cinematographic technique. In 1911, for the reissue of l’Arte dell’avvenire (The Art of the Future), Ginna and Corra contemplated the cinematography for the first time and they also made tribute to Fuller describing her as the ‘unaware precursor of the new art (Lista, 2010: 34)’. Ginna and Corra realized some abstract movies, including the lost short LA DANZA (The Dance, 1912): an experiment aimed to translate the music in images or, better yet, in colours (Lista, 2010: 137-138). A dance given by the movement of forms and colours instead of bodies, then. Moreover, consider that the Cerebrist movement, from which the two brothers came, was also devoted to spiritualist philosophy, sciences of the occult, metapsychology, and theosophy. Theosophy was the movement in which Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy originated (Lista, 2010: 30-35): in 1913, the Austrian philosopher founded the movement of anthroposophy in Germany, devoted to a deep renewal of the dance, that he considered a privileged access to a sacred dimension of the Self.