Futurists’ fascination with Serpentine Dance

In the 1910s, Loïe Fuller's research about dance and lighting design, aroused the interest of the brothers Arnaldo and Bruno Ginanni-Corradini, also known as Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra. They came from the Cerebrists movement and, when they converged with the Futurist one, they provided it with their expertise in terms of cinematographic technique. In 1911, for the reissue of l’Arte dell’avvenire (The Art of the Future), Ginna and Corra contemplated the cinematography for the first time and they also made tribute to Fuller describing her as the ‘unaware precursor of the new art (Lista, 2010: 34)’. Ginna and Corra realized some abstract movies, including the lost short LA DANZA (The Dance, 1912): an experiment aimed to translate the music in images or, better yet, in colours (Lista, 2010: 137-138). A dance given by the movement of forms and colours instead of bodies, then. Moreover, consider that the Cerebrist movement, from which the two brothers came, was also devoted to spiritualist philosophy, sciences of the occult, metapsychology, and theosophy. Theosophy was the movement in which Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy originated (Lista, 2010: 30-35): in 1913, the Austrian philosopher founded the movement of anthroposophy in Germany, devoted to a deep renewal of the dance, that he considered a privileged access to a sacred dimension of the Self.