Twyla Tharp’s Making Television Dance (1977) and the Technologized Dancing Body

Abstract

This article looks at the technologized dancing body on television, particularly in videodance. It asks and begins to answer the question: What were emerging technologies of the late twentieth century able to do with, to, or for the dancing body that was not possible previously, and which built the foundation for the ways today’s digital technologies interface with the dancing body? In beginning to answer this question, the article closely examines Twyla Tharp's Making Television Dance (1977) and argues that Tharp's piece condenses and summarizes the experiments of videodance during the late twentieth century, highlighting its foundational shift from using technology to exclusively do things to the body or extract things from it, to instead using the body to interface with and demonstrate the capabilities of a new technology—​triggering the machine’s capabilities using the body’s cues. In other words, videodance reframes the body as a (technologized) tool. Ultimately, this article reveals that late 1960s and 1970s videodance was a transitional interstice between two more enduring forms of screendance: celluloid dance film and digital dance data.