Performing vulnerability: hand in hand with Les Enfants d’Isadora

Abstract

ABSTRACT Damien Manivel’s Les Enfants d’Isadora (2019) is inspired by Isadora Duncan’s solo dance ‘Mother’, which she choreographed after the tragic loss of her two young children. Manivel’s film shows a series of women who engage with the dance in contemporary times, juxtaposing their interpretations of the solo with scenes from everyday life. These women’s performances point to a shared vulnerability, stemming from, but not limited to, Isadora Duncan’s grief. In contrast to studies of vulnerability in film that concentrate on vulnerable individuals, this reading of Manivel’s film explores how vulnerability subtends the formation of relational identity. Drawing first upon Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of vulnerability, before centring on the ethico-political work of Judith Butler on vulnerability, performativity and gesture, the article shows how Manivel scrutinises actions and gestures both in and beyond dance, frequently singling out people’s hands. The film’s performance of vulnerability through its attention to hands is bound less to the proximity of tactility and contact or identification and empathy than it is to distance. By valorising distance and difference between the disparate women who are otherwise united by the same dance, the film enables us to re-view the ties that bind both them and us to each other.