ABSTRACT

People have always danced, and static representations of movement abound, from the earliest cave drawings to Edgar Degas’s paintings of racehorses. The desire to reproduce experiences of actual movement gave rise to Chinese mirrors, zoetropes, praxinoscopes,1 mechanical slides in magic lanterns, Eadweard Muybridge’s series of still camera shots of a horse in motion (made to settle a gentleman’s bet about whether a horse ever had all four feet off the ground at one time), and finally, in the late 1800s, the early experiments with motion picture cameras.2 After a century of cinema, that simple movement captured on celluloid has evolved into fantastic manipulation of digital data, producing a new reality limited only by a director’s imagination and needs. The first audiences, engaged by the simple production values of film fragments, could hardly have conceived of our present-day motion pictures, videotapes, digital videodiscs, broadcast television, and computer displays.