from the Serpentine Dance to the modern Tiller Girls.

The creators of this beautiful hypnotic silent movie -the Lumière Brothers, were one of the earliest filmmakers in history. The Serpentine Dance is a video from 19th century, inspired by the dance of Loie Fuller, one of the pioneers of modern dance and stage lighting. The woman in this video is often mistaken for Loie Fuller but it is actually not Loie but some unknown dancer. The Lumière Brothers shot this video in black and white and then hand painted each frame to achieve the affect similar to Loie's live performances.

Loie Fuller

In her live performances, Loie danced in her long silk skirts using different sorts of lights projected onto her skirt creating that misty and magical atmosphere leaving the audience hypnotized and delighted.

Now fast forwarding to our time.
I recently saw a dance performed by 32 robots and I have to admit I had that same hypnotic feeling just as if I was watching people dancing.

"The Tiller Girls" is a project that explores if the actions of a human and a robot can be equally regarded as art performance. The man behind the concept is Louis-Philippe Demers ,a multidisciplinary artist with a list of impressive robotic works so far. This project was inspired by famous dance troupe of 1900s- the Tiller Girls whose performances were hypnotic for the audience because of their preciseness and synchronization.

The Tiller robots were built to have only minimal freedom of movement but yet they achieve a large variety of expressions and behaviors which makes the performance really breath taking. I loved the collision of art and science in this piece, I loved the music and the lighting , the whole viewing experience was truly magical so if you get the chance to see the Tiller Girls, don't miss it.