The Dancing Machine

Abstract This chapter tracks dance as a cultural technique for engineering vitality in nonhuman or inanimate bodies. The chapter offers four case studies to illustrate a brief history of the (feminized) dancing machine: Olympia, the automaton from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1817 German-Romantic short story “The Sandman”; Maria, the maschinenmensch from Fritz Lang’s German-Expressionist film Metropolis (1927); Kyoko, the AI Japanese cyborg from Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014); and Lil Miquela (2016–present), a digital Instagram influencer who sings and dances. All four of these artificial women are brought to life through dance, and all four navigate the plight of their choreographed existence by blurring the line between puppet and agent of their own desire. This chapter underscores the crucial role of the screen (from cinema to the iPhone) and the gaze in the transmission of narratives and fantasies about the dancing machine whose anima (or soul) is produced through the technique of dance.