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In this essay I bring together costume, set design, music, movement, camera and text into a brief narrative discourse of physical and visual performativity. The hurling bodies of Edouard Lock's La La La Human Steps, Lloyd Newson's DV8 Physical Theatre and Gilles Maheu's Carbone 14 collided in the 1980s and 1990s on stage and screen. Charting new trajectories for western theatrical dance, Lock, Newson and Maheu with others of the Euro avant-garde redefined contemporary dance with their integration of an extreme physical movement vocabulary, popular music, set design, costume and film/video into a narrative, be it linear or nonlinear, structure. Breaking away from the now more traditional Foucauldian reading of the camera as a tool for surveillance I draw upon Walter Benjamin's conception of dialectical images to envision the camera as an instigator and participant in the kinetic fulfillment of the choreographic design of Newson, Maheu and Lock.