ABSTRACT
Animals have provided a theme and a model for movements in dance from time immemorial. Dance shows the distinction between man and animal more in the figuration of the body, in metamorphosis, in specific movements and in the shaping of space. Reports of cultic practices and animal dance rituals often refer to shamanistic and totemic cults. Following Walter Benjamin, one could understand this figuration — between mimesis and abstraction — as animal ornament: “Ornament is close to dance. In short, mimesis plays a role not only in art and aesthetics, but in all fields of human action that involve imagining, speaking and thinking. In Poetics, Aristotle defined mimesis in anthropological terms as a capacity that man shares with others. The media hybridization shifts the boundaries: Transformation now is structured and formatted by media. It is not the animal body, but the video as a media construction of the animal-man relationship that drives the relationship with the other.
