Abstract
The research is an examination of the hybrid relationships between dance and painting, contributing to the understanding of how these manifestations in postmodern culture differ from all their antecedents. This investigation is based on an analysis of a single work, The Featherstonehaughs Draw on the Sketch Books of Egon Schiele (1998), created by the contemporary British choreographer Lea Anderson and performed by her all-male company, the Featherstonehaughs. The choreographer appropriates the exact gestures and poses of models drawn by the Expressionist Viennese painter Egon Schiele, claiming that she does not wish to depict the essence of his art or his life; rather, her intention is for the dance to maintain its own mood and obsessions (in Robertson, 1998). Thus, Schiele’s expressionist paintings and drawings are subjected to Anderson’s contemporary postmodern consciousness as expressed in her dance. An investigation of the scope of hybrid relationships, based on the framework formulated by Jerold Levinson (1984), aims to classify the range and characteristics of the different relationships between dance and painting. Three basic types of hybrids are assessed against various examples, establishing that all but one are modernist, modernist avant-garde or high-modernism constructions and stressing their marked difference from the juxtapositional hybrid relationship as manifested in Anderson’s postmodern dance. Within juxtapositional hybrids, the ‘fluid boundaries’ instance demonstrates boundaries between art forms, disciplines, times and cultural discourses that are blurred; however, each form retains its own identity, underscoring another critical device - bilateral movement between these distinct fields. It is argued that Anderson knowingly plays with a variety of disciplines, discourses and devices to expand the boundaries of the conventional and recognisable patterns of thought commonly manifested in dance.