Stacey Weber-Fève publishes chapter on Danse Film

Stacey Weber-Fève, professor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures, recently published an invited chapter in the anthologie, “Danser au féminin en Afrique: État des lieux, défis et perspectives” (Présence Africaine Éditions, 2025), was recently published over the summer. In her chapter, Stacey began a new research trajectory into the cinematic genre of Danse Film by reexamining the Tunisian-French film, “Satin rouge” (2002), by filmmaker Raja Amari through this lens. By drawing on the supposed transgressive nature of ‘raqs sharqi’ (“belly dance”) and emphasizing the kinesthetic effect of dance in film, Stacey shows how Amari introduces new channels of thought surrounding the multisensory nature of cinema and theorizations of the concept of embodied spectatorship. Underscoring the in-betweeness of dance and cinema and their experiential qualities as well as relationship to the spectator, Stacey illustrates how the filmmaker bridges the gap between the three-dimensionality of dance and the two-dimensionality of cinema; specifically through camera movement, framing, and represented (human sensorium) sensory cues in the film.