Maguy Marin's Posthuman Cinderella: Thingness, Grotesquerie, and Cyborgs

Grotesque masks replace powdered noses, blushed cheekbones, and false eyelashes. Padded suits expand thin body lines. The doll costumes in Maguy Marin's Cinderella push the boundaries of late twentieth-century, Western ballet aesthetics. Simultaneously, they raise questions about the ballet dancer's role as subject and object onstage. In this essay, I use choreographic analysis to explore how Marin's characters, movement, and costumes expose and challenge multiple layers of dancer objectification. Situating the choreographer's tactics within a feminist framework, I argue that Marin's radical strategy centers on posthuman philosophy, paradoxically suggesting that a ballerina, through her thingness and cyborgian relations, can function outside of object-subject constraints.