In one way, Bring on the Lumière! is about bringing the Lumière brothers back to life as only dance can—by giving them wondrous new bodies to inhabit. In a deeper way, it is also about restoring a pre-history of early cinema, a narrative that has been obscured by the excitement of industrial light and magic. This is a dance of Edison bulbs and carnival tricks, and it tells the history of shadows made by real bodies.

​The piece foregrounds the physicality of early motion-picture performance history, including ombramanie shadow movement technologies and the laboring bodies of the Lumière brothers’ first film, La sortie des usines Lumière à Lyon, and suggests if we can understand what celluloid meant for corporeality perhaps we can deepen our sense of what “recorporealization” might mean for screendance in the future.