The Bloomsbury Handbook of Dance and Philosophy 1350103470, 9781350103474

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK OF DANCE AND PHILOSOPHY

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK OF DANCE AND PHILOSOPHY

Edited by Rebecca L Farinas and Julie C. Van Camp

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Rebecca L Farinas, Julie C. Van Camp, and contributors, 2021 Rebecca Farinas and Julie C. Van Camp have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Charlotte Daniels Cover image © Daniel Conrad All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Control Number: 2020950400 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-0347-4 ePDF: 978-1-3501-0349-8 eBook: 978-1-3501-0348-1 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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To Selma Jeanne Cohen (1920–2005), the pioneer in philosophy of dance who inspired us all

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CONTENTS

L IST OF P LATES

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C ONTRIBUTORS

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A CKNOWLEDGMENTS

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Introduction One: Dance and Philosophy Rebecca L Farinas and Julie C. Van Camp

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Introduction Two: Dance Philosophy and Aesthetics Jeff Friedman and Aili Bresnahan

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Part One: Philosophical Practice as a Dancing Matter 1.1 Introduction: Presenting an Engagement of Philosophy and Dance Julie C. Van Camp 1.2 Teaching Dance and Philosophy to Non-Majors: The Integration of Movement Practices and Thought Experiments to Articulate Big Ideas Megan Brunsvold Mercedes and Kristopher G. Phillips 1.3 Dance, Normativity, and Action Graham McFee 1.4 What is Mark Morris’ “Choreomusicality”? Illuminate the Music, Dignify the Dance Julie C. Van Camp 1.5 Analytic Philosophy and the Logic of Dance Kristin Boyce 1.6 The Negotiation of Significance in Dance Performance: Aesthetic Value in the Context of Difference Jane Carr

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1.7 Dance as Embodied Aesthetics Barbara Gail Montero

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1.8 From Presentational Symbol to Dynamic Form: Ritual, Dance, and Image Randall E. Auxier

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CONTENTS

Part Two: Movement, Embodiment, and Meaning: The Distinctiveness of Dance 2.1 Introduction: Reflections on Practice Edyta Kuzian

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2.2 Interpretation in Dance Performing Aili Bresnahan

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2.3 Epistemologies of Body and Movement in Contemporary Dance Edgar Vite and Diana Palacio

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2.4 The Phenomenology of Choreographing Rebecca Whitehurst

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2.5 Discovering Collaboration in Dance Richard D. Hall

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2.6 Falling Up: An Explication of a Dance Kaysie Seitz Brown

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2.7 Early Floating in the Here and Now: The Radically Empirical Immediate Dance Poetry of Erick Hawkins and Lucia Dlugoszewski Louis Kavouras 2.8 Je danse; donc, je suis David Leventhal

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Part Three: Philosophy, Dance Traditions, and Everyday Experience 3.1 Introduction: Cross-currents in Philosophical and Dance Traditions Stephen Davies 3.2 A New Universality: Pragmatic Symbols of World Peace in Drawing and Dance Rebecca L Farinas

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3.3 Groovy Bodies: The 1970s Somatic Engagement and Dance Caroline Sutton Clark

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3.4 Indian Traditional Dance and the Experience of Ego-Transcendence Binita Mehta

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3.5 Resisting the Universal: Black Dance, Aesthetics, and the Afterlives of Slavery Thomas F. DeFrantz

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3.6 The Landscape of the Arts Lakshmi Viswanathan

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CONTENTS

3.7 Entanglement: A Multi-Layered Morphology of a Post-Colonial African Philosophical Framework for Dance Aesthetics Jeff Friedman 3.8 African Sensibility and the Muscogee (Creek) Stomp Dance Tradition Paula J. Conlon 3.9 The Mask Which the Actor Wears is Apt to Become His True Face: How Jon Cryer Toes the Line Between Homage and Mimicry in Pretty in Pink’s Ultimate Lip Sync Addie Tsai

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Part Four: How Does Dance Move Us Via Technology? 4.1 Introduction: Dance and Technology David Davies

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4.2 Aesthetic Engagement in Video Dance Arnold Berleant

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4.3 Bodies at Rest: Four Still Images Daniel Conrad

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4.4 What Do We Lose to a Video? Ian T. Heckman

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4.5 Embodying Agency in the Human-Techno Entanglement Eliot Gray Fisher and Erica Gionfriddo

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4.6 mEANING rEMIX: Ambivalent Readings of Marie Chouinard’s bODY rEMIX/gOLDBERG vARIATIONS L. Archer Porter 4.7 Considerations on Site-Specific Screendance Production Ana Baer Carrillo

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Part Five: Critical Reflections on Dance 5.1 Introduction: The Richness of Dance for Life and Thought Julia Beauquel

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5.2 Movement on Record: Poetry, Presence, Radicalism Jonelle Seitz

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5.3 Structure, Form, and Function of Dance Criticism and the Ways it Relates Audiences to Works of Art Henrique Rochelle

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5.4 Dancing-with: A Theoretical Method for Poetic Social Justice Joshua M. Hall 5.5 The Power of Political Dance: Representation, Mobilization, and Context Apparatus Eric Mullis

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5.6 The Economic Politics of Pleasure in Gaga Meghan Quinlan

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Conclusion: Questions for Richard Shusterman

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S ELECTED B IBLIOGRAPHY

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I NDEX

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LIST OF PLATES

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Grand Duo, Mark Morris Dance Group 2018. Photo: Nan Melville. Dancer. Photo: Stephen Pruitt. Texas State Mysterium for New Music Ensemble. Photo: Richard Hall. Cantilever (1963). Katherine Duke, Jeff Lyon, and Kristina Berger. Erick Hawkins Dance Company, New York, 2007. Photo: Tony Cenicola. 5. Motherwell Amor (2000). Kristina Berger, Nathaniel Bradley, Erin Parsch, and Antonio Fini. Erick Hawkins Dance Company, New York, 2019. Photo: Tony Cenicola. 6. Legong dancers. Photo: Stephen Davies. 7. Dancer duo. Photo: Lakshmi Viswanathan. 8. Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Joshua Grant and William Lin-Yee in Ulysses Dove’s Dancing on the Front Porch of Heaven. Photo: Lindsay Thomas. 9. Dancer configuration. Photo: Lakshmi Viswanathan. 10. Ribbon dance. Photo: Paula Conlon. 11. Bodies at Rest: Four Still Images, Wen Wei Wang. Photo: Daniel Conrad. 12. Bodies at Rest: Four Still Images, Afternoon of the Chimeras. Dancer: William Briscoe. Photo: Daniel Conrad. 13. Bodies at Rest: Four Still Images, dancer Aszure Barton in 7 Universal Solvents. Photo: Daniel Conrad. 14. Bodies at Rest: Four Still Images, Subways: 5 Variations on a Theme by Rilke. Dancer: Petr Opavsky. Photo: Daniel Conrad. 15. Phone dance. Photo: Eliot Gray Fisher. 16. Considerations on site-specific screendance production. Photo: Ana Baer Carrillo.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Randall Auxier is Professor of Philosophy and Communication Studies at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is author of Time, Will, and Purpose (2013) and Metaphysical Grafitti (2017), and co-author of The Quantum of Explanation (2017). He is past editor and co-founder of the journal The Pluralist, and is currently deputy chief editor of the journal Eidos. He co-edits a book series in American Philosophical and Cultural Thought for SUNY Press and is co-founder of the American Institute of Philosophical and Cultural Thought. Ana Baer Carillo is a Mexican video-choreographer living in the US. Her work is composed of a variety of dance for camera, choreography, as well as interdisciplinary performances. She works across several fields and genres, maintaining a clear dancecentric conceptual line in her research agenda. Julia Beauquel holds a PhD in Philosophy of Dance, her research specialty. She is a teacher in an art school and a temporary lecturer at the University of Lorraine in France. She is also a critic in contemporary art, writing exhibition texts on various artists, notably for an art gallery in Luxembourg. Arnold Berleant is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Long Island University. His work ranges over aesthetics, the arts, ethics, and social philosophy, and he has lectured and written widely in these areas, both nationally and internationally. Berleant is the author of numerous articles as well as eight books on aesthetics, the arts, and especially the aesthetics of environment. He is also the founding editor of the online journal, Contemporary Aesthetics. Kristin Boyce is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and a Faculty Fellow in Shackouls Honors College at Mississippi State University. She received a PhD in Philosophy from The University of Chicago and is the recipient of numerous awards including an ACLS New Faculty Fellowship, a Post-Doctoral Fellowship from Stanford University, and a Josephine De Karmán Dissertation Fellowship. Aili Bresnahan is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Dayton in Ohio. Her research specialty is the philosophy of art, with particular foci on dance, performance, and improvization. She is a former professional-level ballet dancer and the founder and moderator of the DancePhilosophers Google group. More information on Dr. Bresnahan and her research can be found on her website: www.artistsmatter.com. Kaysie Seitz Brown is Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre & Dance at Texas State University. Her creative practice as research takes a deeper look at the exploration process of creating new danceworks on herself, others, and in collaboration when dancing in other choreographers’ work. xii

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Jane Carr currently leads the School of Media and Performance at the University of Bedfordshire (https://www.beds.ac.uk/howtoapply/departments/media-and-performance/ staff/performing-arts/jane-carr). Carr trained and worked as a ballet dancer before studying at Trinity Laban and then completing a PhD at Roehampton University. She worked extensively in interdisciplinary performance and community education before teaching in higher education. Her research utilizes interdisciplinary approaches to exploring the significance of dance in a range of contexts. Caroline Sutton Clark is Assistant Professor of Dance History and Theory at Kennesaw State University in metro Atlanta. With a range of experience in modern dance, butoh, ballet, and other forms of world dance, Clark’s research centers in oral history interviewing with dancers. Her credits include a graduate award for excellence and creativity in research and the 2017 Caroline Plummer Research Fellowship in Community Dance in Dunedin, New Zealand. Paula J. Conlon taught ethnomusicology at the University of Oklahoma School of Music for over two decades. During this time, she was mentored by elders from the Creek stomp dance community, gradually moving from observer to participant to member of the Tallahassee ceremonial ground east of Cromwell, Oklahoma. She is currently an emeritus professor working in Ottawa, Canada. More information on Conlon and her research can be found on her website: www.paulaconlon.com. Daniel Conrad has made eight dance films and two documentaries which have screened at Locarno, Montréal World, Seattle (Best of Fest Shorts), New York Dance on Camera (two Silver prizes), Golden Prague (Dagmar & Vaclav Havel prize), Valladolid, ZDF’s Berlin Tanzfilmnacht, the Portland Art Museum, UBC Museum of Anthropology, PBS, CBC, ARTV, ZDF, TVE, Bravo, and some fifty others. His writings include two articles for Contemporary Aesthetics, and a book chapter for Robert Wilson from Within (Arts Arena, American University of Paris). David Davies is Professor of Philosophy at McGill University. He is the author of Art as Performance, Aesthetics and Literature, and Philosophy of the Performing Arts. He has published widely on the metaphysics and epistemology of art, on philosophical issues relating to film, photography, performance, music, literature, and visual art, and on issues in analytic metaphysics, and philosophy of mind/language. He is the President of the American Society for Aesthetics. Stephen Davies is the Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Auckland. His books include Adornment: What self-decoration tells us about who we are, The Philosophy of Art, The Artful Species, Musical Understandings and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Music, and Philosophical Perspectives on Art. He is a past President of the American Society for Aesthetics. Thomas F. DeFrantz directs SLIPPAGE@Duke:Performance|Culture|Technology, a group exploration of emerging technology in live performance. He received the 2017 Outstanding Research in Dance award, Dance Studies Association. He believes in our shared capacity to do better, and engage our creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, antihomophobic, proto-feminist, and queer affirming. He is a professor at Duke University in the departments of Dance, African and African American Studies, Computational Media, Arts & Cultures, Theater Studies, and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Rebecca L Farinas is currently on faculty at Loyola University, New Orleans. She teaches social ethics, philosophy of culture, Classical American philosophy, and aesthetics. She holds an MA in Fine and Decorative Arts from the University of Manchester, UK, an MPhil in Art History from Plymouth University, UK, and a PhD in philosophy from Southern Illinois University. She is the author of Classical American Philosophy: Poiesis in Public, forthcoming, 2021. Eliot Gray Fisher is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of performance and technology, primarily as co-director of ARCOS Dance (arcosdance.com). His practice includes music composition, sound art and design, video and new media, and theater and performance art. He has served as a guest artist at several colleges and universities and holds BA degrees in Film Studies from Wesleyan University (where he received the Leavell Memorial Prize in Film) and Documentary Studies from the College of Santa Fe, and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College. Jeff Friedman is Associate Professor of Dance Studies, Mason Gross School of the Arts, at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. He is Graduate Director for the MFA in Dance and teaches dance history, philosophy and aesthetics, and interdisciplinary research methods. His research is focused on oral history theory, method and practice, with a focus on oral history-based choreography for documentation and performance. Friedman’s lectures, publications, and performances are international in scope, including venues throughout Canada, the UK, Europe, the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, East and Southeast Asia, and the Pacific. Erica Gionfriddo is a dance artist, educator, and somatic researcher who believes in the intelligent body each of us occupies. She is co-founder of ARCOS Dance (arcosdance. com), whose ongoing inquiry probes the intersection of technology and humanity through rigorous interdisciplinary experimentation. Gionfriddo’s extensive experience with the GYROTONIC® method guides her pedagogy, which she brings in her capacity as Lecturer in Dance at the University of Texas at Austin and as a national teaching artist. She holds a BFA in Dance Performance and Choreography from Shenandoah Conservatory and an MFA in Dance from Hollins University. Joshua M. Hall is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at William Paterson University. His current research focuses various historical and geographical lenses on philosophy’s boundaries, particularly the intersection of aesthetics, psychology, and social justice. Richard D. Hall is a musician, composer, and music educator based in central Texas. His music has been performed at multiple national and international conferences. He has also received numerous commissions, and has written for film, television, web-series, documentaries, and theatrical productions. His music was also recorded by the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra for ERM Media. His musical collaborations with dancers have been featured in over a dozen countries. Hall is a Senior Lecturer of Music at Texas State University. Craig Hanks is Professor of Philosophy at Texas State University, where he has won numerous teaching awards and serves as Chair of the Department of Philosophy. He received his BA from Texas A&M University and his PhD from Duke University.

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Ian Heckman is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. His research focus clusters aesthetics and the philosophy of art, with a sharpened eye turned toward issues in the performing arts. His dissertation, which is under the supervision of Dominic McIver Lopes, looks at how bodily mirroring and imitation can contribute to dance appreciation. In addition to his philosophical education, he also has undergraduate and graduate degrees in dance from SUNY, The College at Brockport, and has performed both his own and others’ work throughout New York State. Louis Kavouras is Professor and Chair of Dance at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He has been a principal dancer with the Erick Hawkins Dance Company since 1996. Since 1998 Kavouras has been curator for the Erick Hawkins Collection and has worked closely with Erick Hawkins, Lucia Dlugoszewski, and Katherine Duke for the preservation and appreciation of the Erick Hawkins and Lucia Dlugoszewski archive and aesthetic. The collection of masks, costumes, and scenic elements are housed at UNLV as part of the Erick Hawkins Collection at the Erick Hawkins West Institute. Edyta Kuzian is Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow at Clemson University. She defended her dissertation, “The Body: Phenomenology and Aesthetics. The Case of Dance” at The New School for Social Research in January 2015. Her work is in embodied aesthetics and phenomenology, focusing especially on Merleau-Ponty’s account of bodily intentionality. David Leventhal is a founding teacher and Program Director for Dance for PD® (Parkinson’s disease), a program of the Mark Morris Dance Group that has now been used as a model for classes in more than 300 communities in 25 countries. He leads classes for people living with Parkinson’s around the world and trains other teaching artists in Dance for PD’s award-winning approach. After graduating with honors from Brown University, he danced with the Mark Morris Dance Group from 1997 until 2011, performing principal roles in some of Mark Morris’ most acclaimed works. Graham McFee is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Brighton, UK, and teaches in the Philosophy Department at California State University, Fullerton. He has written and lectured both nationally and internationally on the philosophy of Wittgenstein and on philosophical aesthetics, especially the aesthetics of dance. His principal publications include How to Do Philosophy: a Wittgenstenian Reading of Wittgenstein, Understanding Dance, The Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance—winner of the Selma Jean Cohen Prize for Dance Aesthetics 2010–11, awarded by the American Society for Aesthetics—and Dance and the Philosophy of Action. Binita Mehta is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Texas State University. Her areas of research include Indian and Platonic philosophies, mysticism and epistemology, and philosophy of science. Her current project focuses on the investigation of the nature and implications of the intuitive and participatory modes of knowing, which play a primary role in mystical and aesthetic experiences but also in alternative scientific frameworks, such as Goethean science and indigenous bodies of knowledge. Megan Brunsvold Mercedes is a performer, choreographer, and educator/scholar. Her research interests include interdisciplinary pedagogy, somaesthetics, and the creation of concert and theatrical dance. She is Assistant Professor of Dance in the Department of Theatre & Dance at California State University, Sacramento.

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Barbara Gail Montero is Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York, where she thinks about the interconnections between mind, body, meaning, and matter. Her work has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Mellon Foundation. She is also founder and current member of Logos Dance Collective, an interdisciplinary assemblage that aims to promote a dialogue between academics, artists, and the general public in an accessible format that speaks to the senses. Eric Mullis is a dancer, choreographer, and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Queens University of Charlotte. His forthcoming book, Pragmatist Philosophy of Dance: Dance Research in the American South will be included in Palgrave Macmillan’s Performance Philosophy series. Diana Palacio is a dancer, professor, and researcher who focuses her research on dance education, dance and construction of subjectivities, and cultural studies. As a choreographer and dancer she mixes expressive languages and movement techniques from urban and contemporary dance; more recently she has explored the transmedia language of Videodance. She was professor and researcher at Universidad de Antioquia in Colombia for six years and is now Coordinator of Dance Education in the Ministry of Culture, Colombia. More information on Palacio’s professional trajectory and research projects can be found on her website http://www.corporalidadesurbanas.com/. Kristopher G. Phillips is Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Languages and Philosophy at Southern Utah University in Cedar City, Utah. His research specialization is in the history of early modern philosophy, but he has also published broadly on topics including the value of the liberal arts, pre-college instruction in philosophy, and the philosophy of mind. L. Archer Porter is a PhD Candidate in Culture and Performance at UCLA. Archer’s research considers performance’s relationship to media and technology, particularly in the twenty-first century. Her current project, “The Domestic Stage,” investigates the circulation of home dance videos online to unpack performance’s contemporary stakes in privacy and intimacy. For more detail on Archer’s current and past work, visit www. archerporter.com. Meghan Quinlan is a US-based dance scholar researching the circulation and politics of Gaga, the improvisatory dance language developed by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin. She earned her PhD in Critical Dance Studies from the University of California, Riverside and has since taught at universities in California and Georgia. Her work has been published in journals such as Dance Research Journal and TDR: The Drama Review. Henrique Rochelle is a Post-Doctoral fellow at the School of Communications and Arts at the University of São Paulo. His researches discuss dance criticism, dance history and historiography, focusing on the relation between dance perfomance/spectatorship and texts about dance. He is a member of the São Paulo Arts Critics Association and editor of two websites publishing dance reviews in Portuguese: Da Quarta Parede and Criticatividade. Jonelle Seitz is a strategist, arts journalist, editor, and former dancer based in Austin, Texas. From 2007 to 2018 she was a dance critic for the Austin Chronicle, and she has

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also written for Dance Magazine, Ballet Review, and the Fjord Review. More on her current work is at www.jonelleseitz.com, and her archive at the Austin Chronicle is available at https://www.austinchronicle.com/authors/jonelle-seitz/. Richard Shusterman is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities. Educated at Jerusalem and Oxford, he was chair of the Temple University Philosophy Department before coming to FAU in 2005. He has held academic appointments in Paris, Berlin, and Hiroshima and was awarded senior research Fulbright and NEH fellowships. Addie Tsai teaches courses in literature, creative writing, dance, and humanities at Houston Community College. She collaborated with Dominic Walsh Dance Theater on Victor Frankenstein and Camille Claudel, among others. Tsai holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and a PhD in Dance from Texas Woman’s University. Her writing has been published in The International Journal of Screendance, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Banango Street, The Offing, The Collagist, The Feminist Wire, Nat. Brut., and elsewhere. Julie C. Van Camp is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at California State University, Long Beach, where she taught philosophy of art and philosophy of law. She has a BA from Mount Holyoke College, a JD from Georgetown University, and a PhD from Temple University. Her doctoral dissertation, Philosophical Problems of Dance Criticism, was directed by Monroe C. Beardsley. Lakshmi Viswanathan is a Bharatanatyam dancer steeped in the culture of TANJAVUR. She has performed in every major festival in India, and is a regular during the Chennai December season. She is the author of many books, including Bharatanatyam the Tamil Heritage, a biography of Bharat Ratna M. S. Subbulakshmi; Kunjamma Ode to a Nightingale; Women of Pride the Devadasi Heritage; and Kapaliswara Temple. She is currently editor of the Kalakshetra Journal. She is also a trained vocalist. Her film The Poetry of Dance was commissioned by the Festival of India. The Mamallapuram Dance Festival, started in 1991, was Viswanathan’s brainchild. Edgar Vite is Associate Professor at the Department of Visual Arts and Aesthetics, at Universidad del Valle in Colombia. He focuses his work on Philosophy of Art, Semiotics, Literature, Visual Arts, and Dance Studies. He has dictated several workshops on the employment of the creative and expressive languages of Videodance, in Mexico and Colombia. More information on Vite’s research projects and publications can be found on his website http://edgarvite.com/en/41-2/. Rebecca Whitehurst is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre at Northern Arizona University. Her research specialty is performance philosophy, choreography, and Russian physical theater. She is a former professional-level modern dancer with graduate work in choreography (CalArts) and acting (A.R.T. at Harvard / Moscow Art Theatre School).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

All the scholars who contributed to the breadth and depth of this anthology have our sincere and boundless gratitude for their creativity and philosophical muscle. We also greatly appreciate their foresight and patience throughout the publication process. This volume is based on a conference on philosophy and dance at Texas State University in 2016. It received a grant from the American Society for Aesthetics to support humanities scholars, with most funding from the generosity of two deans at Texas State, John Fleming (College of Fine Arts and Communication) and Michael J. Hennessy (College of Liberal Arts). We offer our sincere thanks to both for their vision and support. We also thank Craig Hanks, Chair of the Department of Philosophy, and Aili Bresnahan, who assisted us as consulting editors. LeAnne Smith, Chair of Theater and Dance, also provided extensive support. We are also grateful to the performing artists at the conference for their inspiration.

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Introduction One Dance and Philosophy

REBECCA L FARINAS AND JULIE C. VAN CAMP

As co-editors, we want to emphasize that this book is a collaborative effort, with a pluralistic approach. Our vision for the book has truly been a shared pursuit. As a project it has provided a meeting place; we hope it will continue to be such, as well as a source book for lovers of dance. As practitioners, scholars, educators, critics, and technological innovators, the authors share a consensus that philosophical inquiry, in its many varieties, adds value to the practice of dance. By thinking through some common lines of inquiry, we all hope to contribute to the wonder and diversity of dance and cultures around the world. Each author strives to address a common area of inquiry in each section, although their approaches and discourses are not confined to specific topics or issues. What draws the chapters comprehensively together is not a conventional philosophical structure, such as being plotted by areas of the discipline. The book’s five sections mark diverse points of philosophical inquiry of our common quest to disclose why and when dance is meaningful. However, we can offer a counterpoint to this loose structure, in that aesthetics is an overarching subject, and in some respect each chapter adds to our understanding of how dance enriches our lives. Richard Shusterman concludes the anthology by addressing five questions, including how each area of inquiry relates to his signature approach, somaesthetics. In the first section, “Philosophical Practice as a Dancing Matter,” we explore how and when philosophy speaks to dance and dance speaks to philosophy. Julie Van Camp introduces this section, and to some extent the book, as a cohesive yet diverse collection of ideas, [W]e might consider whether theorists from these divergent camps can cross some boundaries to appreciate and perhaps integrate at least some elements of the alternate methodologies. Do we have to choose one or the other as right or wrong? Can there be at least some shared insights that enlighten us all? In the section “Movement, Embodiment, and Meaning,” we look at how combining movement, meanings, and time influence dance. Defending a Modernist perspective, Edyta Kuzian explains her view of how dance is a unique practice. “By contrast in dance, we are presented with non-goal-oriented movement of the body, and the challenge is to answer the question of how do we appreciate its meaningfulness.” By the third section, “Philosophy, Dance Traditions, and Everyday Experience,” we begin to wonder how our varied traditions and everyday experiences of dance relate to shared intellectual pursuits, experiences of nature, and patterns of human relationships. 1

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THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK OF DANCE AND PHILOSOPHY

Stephen Davies takes a broad view of dance as an experience available to every one of us, particularly as we come to understand more about ourselves, through our shared cultures. Davies introduces the section saying, “We all know what it is to move our bodies under the force of gravity. That alone places us in a position to have a basic appreciation of the dancer’s grace or athleticism, whatever culture she comes from.” The authors in the fourth section, “How Does Dance Move Us Via Technology?” investigate questions about the impact of digital technologies on the field of dance. In his introduction, David Davies wonders about the contradictory explanations of how dance performances and videos can be consummate works of art. He asks when and where the dance experience begins and how it might continue or even originate through the media of video. He wants to add questions about our ontological experiences of dance and our varied interpretations of those experiences. Davies writes, “The problem is that, by definition, performable works are works that allow of correct performances, that offer different interpretations.” Julia Beauquel’s understandings of dance, philosophy, and criticism open up all three fields to new interpretations in the section “Critical Reflections on Dance.” In her explorative chapter “The Richness of Dance for Life and Thought,” her philosophizing hinges on novel revelations about interpretation. If we cannot determine absolutely what distinguishes relevant from irrelevant interpretations, we can at least provide a negative conception listing what interpretation is not: it is not a deciphering, a decoding, or a translation of the components of an artwork. It is neither a strict matter of reasoning properly or logically demonstrating nor a purely intuitive and ineffable way of understanding. As a cognitive and aesthetic activity aiming to understand (and eventually transmit to others) the meaning of artworks, interpretation may seem vague and ambiguous, and as such, face four main objections. I wish to consider some responses to these objections, in the purpose of defending an “ethics” centered on the wise interpreter, against a deontological conception that investigates the conditions, rules, norms or methods of true interpretation. She goes on to offer thoughts on the profound value of dance criticism to dancers, people in general, and critics. Perhaps she sums up a totality of our book, which is far reaching, as a text with no rules or codes, held together by our commitment to understanding what we love and value, namely the art and practice of dance. Our ideas throughout these chapters often overlap, sometimes highlighting disclosures of history and meaning, sometimes laying shadow on other ideas, even to the point of dialectically urging us, as readers, into further inquiry. However, as a whole the book coalesces as interdisciplinary and an engaging kind of pluralistic discussion, not unlike Matryoshka dolls, which as we continue to play with evoke revelations of discovery and growth. As you begin your adventure, reading and interpreting our ideas, we offer a bit of advice. Philosophy and dance are ways of life, opening our horizons as human technologies. Yet as arts these methods are dumb and void if not practiced creatively. This creative aspect of our quest, impacting us as authors and you as readers, demands that we depend upon one another. Dancing in the dark can be fun if we have good feelings of rhythm and time, but those feelings ensure our connectedness to our environments and holistic experiences. Dance and philosophy are natural partners, lighting our realizations of our world and ourselves.

INTRODUCTION ONE

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The serious consideration of dance and philosophy has a long history, although it is only in recent decades that we have reached critical mass in the community of scholars participating in the dialogue. This anthology is a prime example of the breadth and depth of this consideration. For most of the history of this specialty, scholars worked in isolation without the thoughtful discussion and consideration of their work that enables an academic program to progress. We should be grateful to those pioneers for identifying issues in the terrain we all now explore in such depth. Complicating our consideration of this history is a simple confusion over terminology. Is “dance aesthetics” synonymous with “philosophy of dance”? At least considering the vantage point of the American Society for Aesthetics (ASA), formed in 1942, “aesthetics” is more broadly understood than “philosophy of art.” It includes all studies of the arts and related types of experience from a philosophic, scientific, or other theoretical standpoint, including those of psychology, sociology, anthropology, cultural history, art criticism, and education. But even with this broader sense of “aesthetics,” scholarly work on dance was hard to come by until recent years. Even today, “dance aesthetics” is variously understood to include dance history, criticism, and theory of dance. And most practitioners, then and now, engage in several of these approaches to understanding of dance. All of this means that in tracing the emergence of philosophy of dance, we must be open-minded to different senses of what constitutes “philosophy.” At the 1947 Annual Meeting in Baltimore of the then newly established ASA, the legendary Lincoln Kirstein, co-founder of the New York City Ballet, was the main speaker at the Annual Dinner, speaking on “The Necessity for a Lyric Theater.” James Feibleman of Tulane University delivered a paper on “The Art of the Dance” and Tei Ko performed “dances of the East” for the membership. But what is most striking about these historic contributions is that they are so isolated. We can search fruitlessly through the programs for many years of the ASA to find other presentations on dance. Selma Jeanne Cohen, remembered fondly by so many of us, often presented her work at ASA meetings and published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, the ASA’s journal. Yet she was mainly a voice in the wilderness. She inspired many of us working today, but the scholarly dialogue that so helps us progress on any question is missing. The first known conference on dance and philosophy, at least in the English-speaking world, was in 1979 at Temple University, organized by Maxine Sheets-Johnstone. The papers were published several years later in 1984 by Bucknell University Press, Illuminating Dance: Philosophical Explorations, with contributions by such distinguished scholars as Monroe C. Beardsley and Joseph Margolis, philosophers who did not ordinarily work on dance. It would be three decades later, in 2010, when another English-language conference specifically on dance and philosophy was organized, this one at Roehampton University. Papers from that gathering were published in 2013 as Thinking Through Dance: The Philosophy of Dance Performance and Practices (Dance Books, Ltd.), edited by Jenny Bunker, Anna Pakes, and Bonnie Rowell. This volume is based on a conference on philosophy and dance at Texas State University in 2016. It received a grant from the ASA to support humanities scholars, but most of the funding came from the generosity of two deans at Texas State, John Flemming (College of Fine Arts and Communication) and Michael Hennessy (College of Liberal Arts). We also thank Aili Bresnahan and Craig Hanks for their support of the conference and preliminary work on this volume as consulting editors. We also would like to express our deep gratitude

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to LeAnne Smith. She was the head of the Dance Department at Texas State University when we organized the conference and was unselfish with her time and expertise. The size and scale of this conference was stunning, especially compared with the isolation so many of us have experienced in recent times. The contrast in the number and expertise of scholars now working in philosophy and dance with those just a few decades ago is striking. Let us hope that the quality and richness of the dialogue continues to flower.

Introduction Two Dance Philosophy and Aesthetics

JEFF FRIEDMAN AND AILI BRESNAHAN

There are many philosophical approaches that lend themselves to dance and aesthetics, from ancient history to the present, and in a wide range of discursive areas and disciplinary homes. It is not possible in the scope of this introductory chapter to list all those authors and their works, of course. However, it may be possible to briefly address some of the challenges that dance, as a practice and as a discipline that is the subject of scholarly and theoretical study, has encountered when entering certain modes of discourse in Western philosophy and aesthetics. This short introduction also gestures toward additional nonWestern discourses that may be of interest to the reader. Dance has a place in the ancient Greek philosophical discourse, specifically those of Aristotle and Plato, as a part of theater techne, primarily integrated into the aesthetic presentation of the choros of Greek theater. In brief, according to historian Gregory Scott, this practice entails movement as expressive of Greek speech rhythmic patterns as chanted by the choros. Other mentions of dance located in early Greek discussions of ethics and metaphysics are beyond the scope of this introduction, but resonate in the chapter on Peirce’s semiotics and others in this text. Speaking of dance as a developing disciplinary area with its own discourse requires a leap forward in time to the eighteenth century and German aestheticians, namely Lessing, Schweizer and eventually Herder and Hegel. As many readers know, and as has been discussed extensively by twentieth century dance philosophers Francis Sparshott and Julie Van Camp among others, Lessing, Schweizer and Herder attempted to split arts practices into spatial and temporal modes. Where sculpture and painting occupied spatialized modes of European aesthetic categorization, poetry and eventually music were considered temporal art practices. Without getting into ekphrastic practices of translation, it is notable that dance does not yet occupy a position in this ars characteristica model. It may be that dance, as a practice, was not yet epistemologically available as an art practice perceived as separate from music, nor was the role of the body in Western European discourses at that time particularly salient for analysis until much later (see sociologist Norbert Elias’ texts on pre-modern body aesthetics), nor was the practice of setting up a spatialized mode for framing the arts particularly friendly to temporal dance practice. In any case, dance begins to show up in aesthetic discussions somewhat later in the European and North American West, such as Nietszche’s framing of dance as Apollonian and Dionsysian energies, reading dance back into the ancient Greek philosophy of theater. For a further overview of dance philosophy from the perspective of Western philosophical aesthetics, see Aili Bresnahan’s “Philosophy of Dance” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, available free online at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dance/. 5

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Before moving on to more contemporary Western European developments, it is important to note that other non-European epistemologies have, from very early times prior to European discourses, developed their own philosophical aesthetic approaches to art practices, including dance. These include, for example, African and Pacific Islander cultural models, both of which place dance within a multi-modal arts complex (sound, movement, two-dimensional and three-dimensional visual arts) that are, as shown in Chapter 3.7 in this volume, interdisciplinary in nature, where separation of dance from other arts and, notably, other life-practices such as history and religion was not possible or thinkable, that is, (re)cognizable. For more information on contemporary analysis on the influence of African arts aesthetics on Western European dance, see dance scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild’s works. In general, we recommend readers explore a specific understanding of the cultural frames around dance philosophy and aesthetics, for recognizing where and how dance practices and philosophical aesthetic discourses intersect within those frames. With regard to our earlier point, Asian dance, particularly South Asian Indian dance, has a long tradition of aesthetic discourse, as shown by Kapila Vatsayayan’s authoritative publications, based on early Sanskrit texts. Additional texts in the Khmer language emplace Cambodian dance (as inherited from Indian dance aesthetics) in concert with spiritual practices and an integrated religio-philosophical discourse. For more information on contemporary South Asian dance aesthetics, please refer to the Post-Natyam dance collective for a comprehensive overview on aesthetic issues regarding South Asian Indian dance globalisms and translationalisms, among other topics. Japanese and Chinese aesthetics tend to consider dance within theatrical and operatic art practices, respectively, including overarching concepts as chi, ma, and wabi-sabi. More recently, Tomie Hahn’s text on Japanese embodied aesthetics and discussion of the efflorescence of Butoh, a mid-to-late-twentieth-century Japanese dance form emerging from German Expressionism, will reveal more recent developments in Japan. Mainland Chinese dance aesthetics, while significantly influenced by the Russian ballet and indigenous folk forms, are often strictly tied to ideological discourses. For more recent Chinese dance aesthetics, we recommend a recent symposium, produced by the Little Pear Garden Collective in Toronto (2013). Taiwanese dance, however, has a broad contemporary array of dance aesthetics, most recently exploring indigenous Taiwanese highland dance practices as well as urban dance practices framed by global and transnational aesthetic circulations, especially hip-hop. On Korean dance aesthetics, American dance scholar Judy van Zile’s extensive work is highly regarded, particularly on colonial and post-colonial influences on indigenous dance forms, particularly shamanist dance. An exhibit of both historical and contemporary performance works at the Maryland Institute College of Arts on Korean dance in 2018 may also provide useful additional insights. It is worth noting that, while increasingly focused on preserving traditional dance practices, Asia and the Pacific regions are also contemporary hotbeds of globalized productions of hip-hop dance, heavily influenced by African and African American aesthetics. For more information, see Halifu Osumare’s helpful text on the Africanist influence on global hip-hop.1 Returning to contemporary Western European and North American discussions on dance philosophy and aesthetics, dance philosophers have naturally engaged phenomenology, including American dance scholars Maxine Sheets-Johnstone and Sondra Fraleigh’s early work as well as notable authors who follow them, including Kimerer LaMothe and Ann Cooper Albright in the United States and Danielle Venzina in

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Canada, among others. These works particularly intersect with dance practitioners in the Contact Improvisation communities. Other studio dance practitioners such as Americans William Forsythe and dance dramaturge Heidi Gilpin, among others, have carefully read Deleuze and Guattari for dance aesthetics, particularly where Deleuzean lines of flight become embodied in choreographic practices, such as Forsythe’s choreography for the Frankfurt Opera Company (Germany) and subsequently Ballet Frankfurt and the Forsythe Company. British dance philosopher Laura Cull’s recent anthology on Deleuze and performance offers several useful chapters.2 Pragmatist Richard Shusterman’s work and other authors following his line of thinking on somaesthetics is important as a new discursive area. Recently, Alain Badiou’s Handbook of Inaesthetics that mentions dance as a pure metaphor for thinking has been a portal for extensive philosophical discussion.3 Questions of dance and ontology, especially discussions on the questions of authoriality and dance as a “work” (with subsequent discussions on copyright and intellectual property) have relied on several authors’ careful incremental address over several decades, including American philosophers Nelson Goodman, Roger Copeland, and Renee Conroy, and British philosophers Sarah Rubidge, Graham McFee, and Anna Pakes, among others. Dance scholar Mark Franko applies these philosophical concerns to works of the aesthetics of dance in reconstruction, re-staging and re-enactment. Questions of representation include Susanne Langer’s work on virtual powers as well as Noël Carroll and Sally Banes’ typology of dance presentation/representation, among others. Current dance aesthetic trends in the aesthetics of movement as it intersects with virtual reality include American dancer and researcher Scott Delahunta and his team, and Israeli scholar Einav Katan-Schmid on embodied philosophy (both currently working in Europe). Additional work on screendance include videographer Douglas Rosenberg’s work in the United States, dance scholar Claudia Kappenberg’s work in Germany and Britain, and Greek theoretician Stamatia Portanova’s expanded discourse on the digitized body, among others. In conclusion, more work needs to be done in both Western philosophical aesthetics and in philosophy more broadly construed, including in dance studies and in non-Western philosophy, to locate dance philosophy in history, in both artistic and social contexts, and throughout the world. We, the authors included in this new anthology, welcome and encourage the broadening of what counts as philosophy of dance and what it can become.

NOTES 1.

Halifu Osumare, The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves (New York and Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

2.

Laura Cull, ed. Deleuze and Performance (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009).

3.

Alain Badiou, “Dance as Metaphor,” Handbook of Inasthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 57–71.

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PART ONE

Philosophical Practice as a Dancing Matter

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CHAPTER 1.1

Introduction: Presenting an Engagement of Philosophy and Dance JULIE C. VAN CAMP

Philosophy, at least stereotypically, is all about ethereal abstractions of the mind. How can it meaningfully engage the physicality of dance and the dancing body? How can we move past the unfortunate history of the dualism of body and mind to reorient and integrate our appreciation of both? How can we recognize the many different ways of “doing philosophy” to challenge settled perspectives? This challenge opens several avenues for engagement, all at least promising, if not equally fruitful. Could our intellectual explorations of space, time, and movement benefit from encounters with physicality in these elusive dimensions? Integrating movement practices with ideas of all kinds engages Kristopher G. Phillips and Megan Brunsvold Mercedes in “Teaching Dance and Philosophy to Non-Majors: The Integration of Movement Practices and Thought Experiments to Articulate Big Ideas.” They do not flinch from the special challenge of teaching students who are neither philosophy nor dance majors. Interdisciplinarity is well-established in higher education but these experiments push through boundaries most have not considered. Although movement exercises might seem obvious for exploring space and time, the authors wanted students to understand how movement can yield meaning. Readings from everyone from Maxine Sheets-Johnstone to René Descartes helped and a variety of teaching techniques was explored, from journals and papers to student-led seminars. Although the luxury of team-taught courses is not enjoyed by everyone, the variety of techniques should inspire everyone who works with students of any and all varieties. The duality of mind and body, which we attribute to René Descartes in the seventeenth century, has been challenged from many spheres. Dualism comes in many forms. It might be a simple claim that mind and body are separate “things,” which forces consideration of what kind of “things” they are. Dualism might more strongly claim that mind controls the body. Then we must wonder how that is possible, especially if they are different kinds of things. Dualism asks how the two could interrelate.1 While philosophers have often been criticized for seemingly obsessing about these old dilemmas, it is philosophers of all kinds who have led the charge in critiquing these traditional views. Feminist Susan Bordo, for example, has critiqued Western civilization’s misunderstandings and manipulation of notions of the female body.2 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone 11

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since the 1960s has used the phenomenological work of Merleau-Ponty to critique the traditional Cartesian dualism.3 Much-cited in dance studies ever since, these views have seemed to sharpen the exasperating divide between analytic and other approaches to philosophy, which we will consider later. Dance philosopher Anna Pakes, working soundly in an analytic tradition, has tackled the mind–body disputes in dance head-on.4 She notes that much of the dismissal by dance studies specialists of Cartesian dualism is founded on misunderstandings of Descartes’ project. And for over half a century, philosophers have themselves rejected dualism, moving instead to materialism or physicalism. So the sometimes haughty disdain heard in dance studies circles toward analytic philosophy is based, in significant measure, on a strawman. There are enormous challenges, to be sure, in understanding how our cognitive abilities control or relate to our physical bodies and movements. But drawing on a wide range of proposals to understand that relationship, rather than falling back on stereotypes that no one defends any more—and have not for a long time—seems the better direction for exploration of shared challenges. The hostility to mind–body dualism in dance studies seems to have another genesis, one that seems, in fact, justified. Dance departments in the academy have for too long been seen as step-children of the other departments in the arts and the humanities. Typically relegated to physical education departments, more “intellectual” types on campus saw dance as mainly a form of exercise, not as an art form to be studied as seriously as music or painting or literature.5 Dance as a field of study included historians, critics, theorists, and, yes, some philosophers, yet it had to fight for recognition in the academic universe. Is it any wonder that dancers resented the “eggheads” in other disciplinary studies, perhaps most notably the philosophers who so originated the dualism and now so smugly think they are the only ones with analyses worth considering. As “interdisciplinarity” in all its shapes and sizes has taken hold in the academy, so has it enriched and broadened philosophical dialogue. A wealth of work in related areas, even within philosophy, can enrich our explorations of many questions. Action theory and value theory bring insights to the art form in Graham McFee’s “Dance, Normativity, and Action” in this volume. His chapter builds on his important work over several decades and many books. Notably, his most recent book, Dance and the Philosophy of Action (2018) is an extended consideration of the insights into dance that can be brought from action theory. The contribution here gives us a good introduction to this venture. Indeed, for those not familiar with his several books on philosophy of dance, this is a good overview of important concepts developed in more detail elsewhere. McFee’s work is rich with specific examples from dance to illustrate his arguments and test their explanatory power. He is also conversant with important work by such philosophers as Arthur Danto and Ludwig Wittgenstein to develop a better understanding of meaning in dance artworks. Elsewhere, McFee has published extensively on sport, as well as dance. This wide range of movement helps us to step back from the art form and see connective tissue in varieties of movement. Many have observed the similarities between the dance art of the theater, on the one hand, and, on the other, figure skating and gymnastic routines. Modern dance pioneers are reputed to have wondered if they would be better off reviewed by sports writers than music critics, for they at least understood movement, and McFee’s work underscores those family relationships, which can be approached from many perspectives. We might focus on descriptions of movements using words that capture a sense of what they looked like. Explicating the motivations for generating different types of movement provide alternative insights into related phenomenon. Evaluation standards

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seem notably different for competitive sports and dance, but drawing out those differences also is worthwhile. Height, speed, originality, and control, for example, all seem like criteria that might emerge in evaluating many forms of movement. McFee’s work is an advanced consideration of issues in related movements and movement theories, enhancing our understanding of all. His careful articulation and identification of the elements of movement in many circumstances illustrates what we today consider “analytic” philosophy, which is another way of stressing clarity and good critical thinking, about which we will say more later. In my chapter, “What is Mark Morris’ ‘Choreomusicality,’ ” I consider what aesthetics and philosophy have to offer to our understanding of dance. Philosophers routinely work with meta-domains, for example philosophy of religion, of art, of science, of mathematics, of mind, and on and on. We step back from an ongoing enterprise in the world around us and ask questions about it. What are its methods? Its logic? Vocabularies? Assumptions? Standards for success? How does it relate to other areas of human life? Many practitioners in these domains “think philosophically” from time to time, some more than others, and that is fine. To give this long-standing question in dance focus, I explore the work of one of the most philosophical and musically inclined choreographers working today, Mark Morris. Of special interest is his concept of “choreomusicality,” a distinctive element of his work regarding the relationship of movement and music. Dance lovers are familiar with Balanchine’s famous dictum, “See the Music, Hear the Dance.” I consider how Morris has pushed the envelope on this relationship between music and movement and the many philosophical issues this presents. Philosophers are particularly good at asking questions and resisting the idea that there must be a unified “right” answer, so I have focused on the questions Morris triggers, in hope it stimulates more dialogue and thought. (1) The “essence” of dance: In particular, what is the necessity and relationship of movement and music, given Morris’ claim that music is primary? Are dances without music (such as Jerome Robbins’ “Moves”) no longer to count as dance? Must we keep looking for an “essence” of dance or could we shift to a more Wittgensteinian sense of the intertwined rope in which no single element is a necessary and sufficient condition? The endless search for an essence typically boils down to human movement, almost always with some relationship to music. Morris reverses that, which presents us anew with the problem. (2) The centrality of human movement: Given Morris’ insistence that dance is merely his homage to music, should music always be primary in creativity? Are dances better when made to existing masterpieces in music? Or instead when the music is commissioned specifically for a particular choreographer or dancer? How is this different from Balanchine’s dictum, or is it? Balanchine emphasized the interdependence of music and movement, but he never went so far as to say the movement is subservient to the music. (3) Terminology: What is “choreomusicality”? How is it different from “music visualization,” a notion from Ruth St. Denis a century ago? Precisely what do these terms mean, whether in his work or that of others? How is Morris’ concept similar to and different from earlier notions of the relationship of music and dance? Is this different from the senses understood by Balanchine, the early modern choreographers, and postmodern choreographers like Merce Cunningham? (4) The significance of metakinesis: The legendary New York Times critic John Martin introduced this notion, reinvigorated by contemporary work on cognitive science. Do

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audience members feel the movement themselves? Are they better at this if they themselves have performed as dancers? Morris provides a new angle on this dialogue, namely, the relevance of the experience of performing music to our appreciation of dance performances. Is someone who has the experience of playing a musical instrument, alone or in a band or orchestra, better equipped to appreciate the music in a dance performance? Are there different ways to appreciate both movement and music, perhaps equally valid, but different? (5) Dancing philosophy: A recurring topic among dance theorists is whether and how movement and music can constitute “philosophy.” Morris challenges us in several explicit appeals to philosophy. Can non-verbal art forms of music and movement present hypotheses, arguments, analysis, conclusions? Are we using those terms only metaphorically? It seems quite extreme to say that the movement and music is philosophy. Certainly we can think and reason philosophically about movement and music, but it seems too much of a stretch of the word “philosophy” to equate them. And if we make that stretch, which some seem to want to do, what have we accomplished? We seem to have lost something in recognizing the myriad of ways in which we come to “understand” our world. (6) The Intentional Fallacy: Just when you thought this was dead and buried, Morris seems to agree with this well-known claim that the intentions of the author are irrelevant in determining the meaning of a work.6 This topic is endlessly worth considering. As writers, theorists, philosophers, and appreciators of dance, knowing what the creator was thinking or intending can give us ideas we might consider in our own appreciation. Should we accept a more extreme view that the author’s intentions are decisive and must be accepted? That is far more problematic and perhaps what Morris meant. Even the great composer Igor Stravinsky reputedly said that Balanchine’s ballets showed him things in his music that he did not know were there. And a further twist on the intentional fallacy rejects the idea that the evaluation of a work is essentially deciding whether the creator met his or her intentions. They might have exceeded them, without explicitly thinking this. Morris’ firm rejection of the relevance of artists’ intentions is striking in this day and age. (7) Aesthetic standards: What exactly counts as unity or complexity or intensity or other good-making qualities, standards which many have proposed, but without universal acceptance? Morris gives us new material to work with in looking for factors which contribute to or detract from goodness in a work, especially “music visualization,” which has swung from good-making to negativity. As suggested above, his sense of the irrelevance of artistic intention in judging works and a reconsidered notion of the relationship of music and movement also provide fresh stances on how to evaluate a dance works and individual performances. How philosophers use examples like Mark Morris varies. He has made it much easier for others to theorize, given his own verbal statements in interviews and writings. Other writers can tag onto his own verbalizations quite handily. But with some choreographers and performers, the potential for misuse of examples is problematic. Sometimes a dance as construed by a writer (whether a philosopher or critic or historian) functions as an example or an illustration of a theoretical point and sometimes as a counter-example, as we might use examples to support or challenge any theory in philosophy or science. But in a nonverbal artform, the validity of those examples depends on how the writer verbalizes and frames the example to begin with. The danger of misusing these examples

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Procrustean-bed-like is very real. Philosophers who genuinely, passionately love the art form and have seen an abundance of its examples are the most interesting and worthwhile to read. They do not need to stretch and struggle to find dance examples for their theories. They live and breathe the art form every bit as much as any performer on stage. The writers in this section of the volume know this personal passion for the art form and their use of examples is thus more compelling. Aesthetic insights and methodologies from analytic traditions inform Kristin Boyce’s “Analytic Philosophy and the Logic of Dance.” She meticulously draws out three stages of what she calls the “dialectical engagement between analytic philosophy and the art form of dance.” The first focuses on “theoretical reasoning in dance.” The notion of “analytic philosophy” has been the source of much unwarranted disagreement. Is it a contrast with “continental philosophy”? Or is it instead a contrast with “synthetic,” Boyce’s preferred understanding? Reasoning about dance has suffered, as she and others have noted, from an inferiority complex in comparison with other art forms. As “modernist” art has sought to be recognized with the seriousness of the sciences, dance is forever trying to play at this game, not always successfully. The second stage of the dialectic for Boyce considers dance “as an exemplar of practical reasoning.” So, perhaps ironically, she observes, the step-child of the arts in aesthetics turns out to be a prime candidate for illustrating the value of practical reasoning in philosophy in general. It is all about real action, thought-in-action, as a contrast to propositional thought. In the third stage, she argues that dance might benefit philosophy by separating both from practical and theoretical reasoning, resulting in “ ‘aesthetic’ reasoning.” In dance, Boyce notes, the intentions of the artist are inextricably tied to the meaning we might find ourselves in a work, unlike our inclinations in understanding meaning in other genres. The artist—the dancer—is right there in the work and cannot so readily, or at all, be divorced from the work, as they might be from a painting or a piece of music. Overall, Boyce illustrates how meticulous reasoning about dance and philosophy can provide insight into the intellectual potential in this relationship, even if it diverges from some approaches to this set of questions. Jane Carr uses the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to explore the intersubjective embodied experience which makes dance meaningful, regardless of cultural norms which we might no longer share. Her chapter is “The Negotiation of Significance in Dance Performance: Aesthetic Value in the Context of Difference.” In an age of both appreciation for and tension among so many divergent cultural perspectives, dance might seem to be a method for bridging at least some of these gulfs. We can no longer assume that our audiences share cultural norms, however those were understood, but perhaps dance can help us at least appreciate with some shared understanding the work we experience. She is not making a naïve claim that movement is some sort of universal language, uniformly understood by all. Nor is she promoting a naïve universal expressionism in which all share and can understand. But she does suggest that dance can be understood “through a process of negotiation grounded in an intercorporeal experience,” concepts drawn from Maxine Sheets-Johnstone and Merleau-Ponty. A major obstacle, of course, is that the way(s) in which we engage in this “process of negotiation” seems itself to be culturally and educationally informed. Can we ever completely or sufficiently overcome our particular heritages through dance movement? Through evolution around the planet in different climates and environments, we vary in our physical characteristics despite our many shared traits. Just what is this “negotiation”

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and how do we know that it has been successful? What counts as success? While this is a very worthwhile proposal and one worth pondering, it leaves us with puzzles still in wondering how we cross cultural barriers to shared understandings. To what extent our pre-existing cultural perspectives limit this process is one great unknown. But this exploration of a significantly distinctive approach to the analytic methodologies of McFee and Boyce is worth considering. Even more, we might consider whether theorists from these divergent camps can cross some boundaries to appreciate and perhaps integrate at least some elements of the alternative methodologies. Do we have to choose one or the other as right or wrong? Can there be at least some shared insights that enlighten us all? Can Carr’s admonition that we strive to bridge cultural difference also be applied to bridging methodological and philosophical differences in our understanding of the arts? What negotiation might be involved in this? Carr briefly addresses “aesthetic” values in relation to dance, but moves among several senses of the term. “Aesthetics” to some is synonymous with “philosophy of art,” an area of study that itself makes no particular claim of judgmental standards or theoretical correctness. But “aesthetic value” can also suggest a particular type of value in contrast with, say, moral value or utilitarian value or religious value. It can also mean a particular set of standards, as when someone is said to have a “feminist aesthetic” or “modernist aesthetic” or “formalist aesthetic.” Working through those varying senses of this key term would be helpful in this type of discussion and would help clarify Carr’s conclusions. Recent research in cognitive science further enlightens us in Barbara Montero’s “Dance as Embodied Aesthetics.” She returns to the idea from dance critic John Martin of “kinesthetic sympathy,” our feeling of movement when we watch dancers move. Dancers experience a special sense of “proprioception—the sense that provides nonvisual information about where our limbs and other parts of our bodies are in space.” Is this understanding of dance unique to dancers? Is it a necessary condition to the appreciation of dance? Montero at least wants us to reject the traditional view that all that matters is what the audience can observe externally of the movement. She rejects the traditional notion that sight and sound are appropriately considered the “higher” senses and that we should limit ourselves to these in appreciating dance performances. Montero wants to elevate the dancer’s own sense of movement in our appreciation of the art form, what she calls “embodied aesthetics.” And we would accomplish this through Martin’s transfer of kinesthetic awareness to the audience. Does the dancer experience things that no one else can? Do such experiences matter? Does this add anything to our more traditional approaches to appreciation of dance, if it is possible? Recent work in cognitive science has rekindled interest in Martin’s ideas and suggested their importance for re-examination. Everyone has likely had the sensation of wanting to move when hearing some inspiring music. That might be prancing around your living room or moving slightly in your audience seat. That does not seem to be what this approach to dance is aiming for, but merely the inspiration that certain music bestows. When we see a dancer on stage, are we more appreciative if we can imagine what it would be like to perform those movements ourselves? At least some trained dancers confess that knowing how to perform something can hinder their appreciation as an audience member. Should we instead focus on the visual shapes and patterns in rhythm? Are we missing something in our appreciation if we do not imagine that first-person performance? An angle never addressed in this debate about the re-emergence of Martin’s ideas is the music. Anyone who has played a musical instrument in a band or orchestra, even if they

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never progressed to professional ranks, appreciates the music with an intensity and joy that others seem to miss. Even amateur musicians remember what it is like to be part of an ensemble delivering a rich piece of music. Balanchine, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Morris are all accomplished pianists and we can wonder if that made them appreciate the music in dance performances differently. Yet no one seems to claim that this is the only or best way to hear the music at a dance performance. Montero considers examples of criticism by several distinguished critics that made just such an appeal to kinesthetic awareness. But we can wonder if they are really experiencing this movement or just demonstrating good writing as a fresh way to explain the perception of the performance. Are these experiences of dancers even relevant in criticism, as challenged by McFee? Montero’s explorations ask us to consider afresh what and how we evaluate dance performances and what data are relevant. Even if we reject her sense of “embodied aesthetics,” we can come to a fuller understanding of just what we do consider appropriate in our reasoning. Randall E. Auxier brings to bear work by Susanne K. Langer and his own perspectives from music to address alternative ways of viewing philosophical work on dance in “From Presentational Symbol to Dynamic Form: Ritual, Dance, and Image.” Auxier provides us with a very lengthy exegesis and defense of the work of Langer, who was herself influenced by Ernst Cassirer. Her work has received considerable attention from philosophers of all types focusing on dance and for a long time she was one of only a few who addressed dance in any detail. Her notions of symbols and other concepts are initially attractive, but encounter some difficulty when extended and scrutinized. Still, she has been appreciated more than one might have guessed, at least in the once sparsely populated universe of dance philosophers. She has certainly not been ignored in dance philosophy. If there is anyone interested in dance who has not yet digested Langer’s work, Auxier provides a detailed account worth perusing. Auxier’s chapter also highlights the challenge in understanding what we mean by “analytic aesthetics.” No one seriously argues that it is really just “logical positivism” reborn in a different subject area. Philosophers from the 1940s at least, such as Monroe C. Beardsley, wanted to bring clarity and precision to the field of aesthetics, making them analytic in an appropriate sense of the word. That simple goal of clarity and good reasoning has endured today among philosophers who consider themselves “analytic.” Aestheticians, more than other specialties in philosophy, have long been open to considering different methodologies, even if they are not adopted in their entirety. But instead of pondering labels, perhaps it is better just to ask about priorities in reasoning and understanding. Auxier’s notions of “analytic philosophy” need to be approached with caution, given the history from the 1940s onward by Beardsley and others. A particularly useful study of the question of “analytic aesthetics” can be found in an important anthology Analytic Aesthetics (1989), edited by Richard Shusterman, and originally a special issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism in 1987. Essays by Joseph Margolis and by Catherine Z. Elgin and Nelson Goodman are particularly noteworthy. Nowhere will you find a sense of analytic philosophy that is more than an interest in clarity in reasoning and terminology, consistency, comprehensiveness, and a sense of dialogue anticipating in and responding to criticisms. The strawmen that inhabit far too much of the dance dialogue are nowhere to be found. Aesthetics, more so than other specialties in philosophy, has shown an openness to alternative methodologies and perspectives. Although not included in Shusterman’s volume, published several years after his death, Monroe C. Beardsley’s work going back decades to the 1940s sought to clarify and

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systematize aesthetics, in part so it would be taken more seriously by “mainstream” philosophers. His magnum opus, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (1958; second edition, 1981) set about to do just that. Auxier’s claim that no analytic philosopher before Arthur Danto had any interest in aesthetics is very troubling to the many people who had the privilege of working with Beardsley from the 1950s onward until his death in 1985.7 Beardsley claimed no particular expertise in dance and there are precious few references to dance in his writings. The one notable exception was a paper he wrote initially for a conference at Temple University, organized in 1979 by Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, and later published in Dance Research Chronicle (1982), “What is Going on in a Dance.” That was his only venture specifically addressing dance and, in his typically modest way, he acknowledged his own limited familiarity with the art form. It has been a special delight for many of us to see how frequently that essay, paired with a response by Noël Carroll and Sally Banes, has been cited and reprinted. Danto also never displayed any special expertise or even interest in dance, which is perhaps another reason why Auxier’s comments are so distressing in this venue. Another revered figure in our field ignored by Auxier is Selma Jeanne Cohen, who published several worthwhile journal articles in the 1950s, on what we would call philosophy of dance, without hesitation. Although she considered herself a dance historian, not a philosopher, her work in these essays meets the standards of clarity of analysis that we today call “analytic aesthetics.” In conclusion, let me suggest a path forward for all of us with a continuing love of dance and devotion to philosophical understanding of the art form. ●

●

●

●

We need an open-minded attitude toward different approaches to doing philosophy. We do not have to like all of them or practice all of them, but nor do we need to decide which one is “correct” and refuse to consider alternative approaches. Simply exploring the literatures of alternatives and trying to give them a fair reading will enrich us all. Those of us who love dance need to work to educate and inform our colleagues in related disciplines. In teaching philosophy of art, I learned enough about film, painting, literature and other art forms to use examples comfortably in illustrating different philosophical approaches. Yet it is rare that we see non-dance specialists using examples from dance in comparable ways. We can help by providing helpful examples in language non-specialists can understand. We need to promote forums, both in person and in print, which encourage dialogue and discussion about philosophical dance issues. For too long, those of us working in these areas issued forth with papers and essays only to see them disappear into a non-existent pool of fellow travelers. We have seen this situation improve in recent years. Conferences with focused dialogue, as well as print symposia in such journals as the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, have appeared with much greater frequency in recent years and are to be encouraged.8 We are not talking about mad-slasher attacks on the work of others, but genuine dialogue that moves everyone forward. We need to recognize that many serious writers on dance were not dancers themselves. Such great critics as Robert Gottlieb and Arlene Croce never set foot in a dance studio (at least, not as dance students), but their powers of perception

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and their ability to articulate observations that enlightened others were priceless. It galls me that when I say I work on philosophy of dance, the first question I get is invariably, “Are you a dancer?” I do not hear comparable questions for philosophers that specialize in painting or music or literature. Many, of course, have amateur interests, and that is fine. But being a practicing artist should not be a pre-requisite to interest in and good work on an art form. At the same time, we can recognize that people who do have formal training and perhaps professional histories in some art forms have worthwhile insights worth hearing. In many different ways, this Part One of the volume is interdisciplinary. It explores the intersections of movement and theory, of different methodologies of philosophy, of related actions of sport to dance, insights from cognitive science for dance understanding, and much more. I hope the readers here will find this collection of essays worthwhile and informative (even if you find yourself disagreeing). I know I did.

NOTES 1.

For a good overview of the issues throughout western philosophy, see Howard Robinson, “Dualism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2016), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ dualism/.

2.

See, e.g., her Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (University of California Press, 1993).

3.

The Phenomenology of Dance (University of Wisconsin Press, 1966).

4.

“Dance’s Mind–Body Problem,” Dance Research 24:2 (Winter 2006); 87–104.

5.

For an excellent overview of this unfortunate state of affairs in the American academy, see Selma Jeanne Cohen’s discussion in “The State of Sylphs in Academe: Dance Scholarship in America,” Growth of Dance in America: Arts in Society (1976); 222–227.

6.

This originated with a classic article, “The Intentional Fallacy,” by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley in The Sewanee Review 54:3 (July–September 1946); 468–488. Decades later, when he was teaching at Temple University in the 1970s, Beardsley confessed to his students (one of them me) that this was not properly a “fallacy,” but a “mistake.”

7.

In the interest of full disclosure, I had the privilege of being Beardsley’s student at Temple University beginning in 1969 when he joined the faculty and he was the advisor for my doctoral dissertation, Philosophical Problems of Dance Criticism (1981).

8.

See, e.g., Noel Carroll, Renee Conroy, David Davies, Graham McFee, Barbara Gail Montero, William P. Seeley, Julie Van Camp, “Symposium: Dance Art and Science,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71:2 (Spring 2013); 167–210.

CHAPTER 1.2

Teaching Dance and Philosophy to Non-Majors: The Integration of Movement Practices and Thought Experiments to Articulate Big Ideas 1

MEGAN BRUNSVOLD MERCEDES AND KRISTOPHER G. PHILLIPS

Philosophers sometimes wonder whether academic work can ever be truly interdisciplinary. Whether true interdisciplinarity is possible is an open question, but given current trends in higher education, it seems that at least gesturing toward such work is increasingly important. This volume serves as a testament to the fact that such work can be done. Of course, while it is the case that high-level theoretical work can flourish at the intersection of dance and philosophy, it remains to be seen how we might share this with undergraduate students. For many of us in philosophy and dance, a large number of the students we teach are neither philosophy nor dance majors. As such, we are familiar with the challenge of convincing our students to care about our fields. Both philosophy and dance, qua disciplines on a college campus, face similar challenges. These disciplines are often deeply misunderstood, frequently presumed to be “impractical” (a powerful, but confused objection2), intimidating, and frivolous. In this chapter, we offer an account of the course we co-taught at Southern Utah University, titled “Movement and Space,” as a rough framework for how to introduce the intersection between philosophy and dance to our students while simultaneously breaking students of their misconceptions. We offer a way to engage students and professors alike in a truly interdisciplinary educational experience. Treating philosophy as an embodied endeavor, and employing philosophical concepts through the act of dance encourages students and faculty alike to rethink the fundamental nature of aesthetics. The Honors Program at Southern Utah University (SUU) has a history of offering interdisciplinary courses centered around a unifying theme (e.g., Time, Fear, Play). Traditionally, each course is partitioned into distinct sections, with different instructors teaching a unit from the perspective of his or her respective discipline. With “Movement 20

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and Space,” in addition to facilitating the discussion of space and motion from three separate disciplines, we saw an opportunity to engage in a truly interdisciplinary pedagogical approach.3 After a preliminary planning session, we articulated a mutual desire to experiment with an improvisational approach to the structure of the course itself. As such, we decided to keep teaching responsibilities in perpetual rotation, enabling each lesson plan to build on those that preceded it. The “final” syllabus had gaping holes with regard to content to ensure such a possibility. We framed the course in terms of the following questions: What is movement? What is space? Most pointedly, how might the exchange of ideas about the notions of movement and space be influenced by a mash-up of philosophy seminars, movement labs, and film screenings? In an effort to provide an introduction to the intersection of philosophy and dance in undergraduate course work, this chapter reflects on some of the key learning outcomes for both students and instructors as a result of this pedagogical experiment. By providing examples of texts, lesson plans, sample assignments, and tools for assessment, we hope to illuminate the successes and shortcomings of our endeavor, while furthering the discussion in support of interdisciplinary pedagogy. Importantly, we believe that the nature of the interdisciplinary work students did in this course provided opportunities to experience embodied cognition in action, which served to ground abstract philosophical content. Additionally, we believe that the integration of abstract, esoteric philosophical and embodied inquiry, created the opportunity for a more thorough investigation of “big ideas” regarding movement and space from all aspects of the self, whether intellectual, physical, emotional, or psychological. The integration further served to demystify the practice of both philosophy and dance for non-majors.

PREPARATION As the course content would be derived from contemplations regarding “movement and space,” through Philosophy, Film, and Dance, we devised a rotational seminar schedule that would introduce foundational ideas regarding movement and space from each of our disciplines, while allowing for interplay between the disciplines. We each had an idea as to how we wanted to begin, but remained committed to the fluidity of our “lesson plans,” acknowledging that the course content would likely change because of the previous seminars. Each student had to lead her own seminar on a topic of her choosing. Given this flexibility and the diversity of student interests, we simply could not anticipate the direction subsequent course meetings would take. In essence, we hoped to allow the structure of the course to mirror the improvisational practice the students would engage with during the movement sessions. Here is an example of how we envisioned the first few weeks of class: Week One Seminar 1: Philosophy—Introduction to logic and Zeno’s paradoxes of motion Seminar 2: Philosophy—From Aristotle’s Physics Week Two Seminar 3: Film—Space and Movement in Film: an Introduction Seminar 4: Film—Brief History of Space Movies Week Three Seminar 5: Philosophy—From Critique of Pure Reason, Kant

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Seminar 6: Philosophy—Embodied cognition from “Free Presence,” Alva Noë Week Four Seminar 7: Dance—“The Movement of Life,” “Big Babies,” Mark Johnson Seminar 8: Dance—“Still/Here,” Bill T. Jones and Bill Moyers Week Five Seminar 9: Student Seminars 1–4 Seminar 10: Philosophy—“Correspondence,” Clarke and Leibniz The following weeks continued to bounce between disciplines. The “final” syllabus had five TBA slots, identifying only philosophy, film and dance seminars as general topics, allowing us ample opportunity to build on previous seminars. “HONRS 2010/4010: Dialogue in the Disciplines,” serves as a requirement for Honors students seeking an Honors Degree. The ambiguous title allows the program to change the topic of interdisciplinary study, so students often sign up without knowing the theme or content of the course. As a result, our students walked into the classroom having no idea that they would be both engaging in philosophical reflection and dancing, let alone that they would be doing both at the same time. We mention this because it sets the scene of the first class where, in addition to describing the pedagogical experiment of this interdisciplinary course, the students engaged in their first physical movement seminar. This introduction to dance provided two important foundations for the subsequent seminars, and was broken down into two short segments. First, “The Name Game”—a game of accumulating movements where each participant assigns a movement/gesture to her name that corresponds rhythmically to the syllables in her name. Each student performs the movement while saying her name, which is followed by a chorus-like response from the other classmates. Each person’s name/gesture is added to the one before, thereby creating a movement phrase comprising each individual’s gesture. While it may appear to be little more than an ice-breaker, this activity was selected for its specificity of movement design. In performing a simple gesture associated with the rhythm of one’s name (and the longer phrase constituted by the gestures of their classmates), students were introduced to shape, motion, time (rhythm and repetition), effort/dynamics, and quality, along with the skill of movement retention—all foundational elements of dance. Also embedded in this activity are the notions of literal gesture as opposed to abstraction, in that students were instructed to choose movements without considering the possible meaning or interpretation of them. The second activity dealt primarily with space. Participants were asked to move the tables and chairs to the perimeter of the room to allow us to walk casually around the room. Both faculty and students were instructed not to touch each other, but to try and fill up all the negative space in the room, weaving through each other in various floor patterns. After some time, we restricted the size of the movement space, allowing participants only half the space to navigate. We restricted the space once more, now working with only a quarter of the original space. To finish, we opened up our walking to encompass the entire room once more. We followed up with a brief seminar-style discussion on proximity, speed, self-awareness, kinesthetic awareness, and personal space. With these two short and relatively simple activities, we were able to directly address the complexities of embodied cognition. Prior to the formal study of the notions of movement and space, students experienced the personal, physical manifestations of

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movement and space in their own bodies. Aided by a heightened awareness of such experiences, they began to decipher these concepts and articulate preliminary definitions of movement and space. In essence, the short movement exploration provided an embodied introduction to their first philosophy seminar.

PREPARING THE CONCEPTUAL SPACE: PLANNING AN INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPACE AND MOTION In preparing the philosophy aspect of our class on space and motion, our original thought was to focus on the abstract, disembodied, conceptual issues involved in understanding space as an entity. Starting with Zeno’s paradoxes and working up to Kant’s a priori intuitions about space through Aristotle, Lucretius, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Newton, this section of the course was shaping up to be a traditional analytic history and philosophy of science course focused on getting a handle on space, and to a lesser extent, motion. When we abandoned the partitioned structure of the course, we also abandoned historical narrative. Taking into account the content from the seminar immediately preceding, the challenge shifted from fitting in the entire history of the concept of space to developing a coherent narrative for both students and instructors. On its face, it seems that theoreticians and practitioners of dance are more closely aligned with phenomenological, embodied approaches to conceptual issues, rather than the disembodied, abstract, “analytical” approach. Finding a way to bridge the gap between the so-called “analytic” and “continental” philosophical methodologies became an immediate necessity. Insofar as they are primarily historical, most of the philosophical sources lend themselves to multiple interpretations, as they predated the analytic–continental divide. Still, it has long been a tradition in philosophy, dating back at least to Plato, to see the body as a hinderance to clear thought, as something to be transcended or at least ignored.4 Embodied cognition and experience as a topic of philosophical discussion is a relatively recent development.5 Throughout history philosophers seemed to take mind–body interaction as a given. When pressed about how mind and body interact by Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, Descartes effectively advised her to go for a walk (or just engage in the mundane day-to-day activities) in order to see that they do.6 We will return to Descartes below, as we think that his views on the mind–body problem have been misunderstood by some philosophers and some dance theorists alike. In addition to utilizing historical sources, moreover, we were inspired by the in-class dance and movement exercises to broaden the scope of what we could offer and so included some work by Alva Noë on embodiment and dance as a form of epistemology. Noë’s work, while not uncontroversial, provides a means for the students and instructors alike to consider their own kinesthetic experiences from in-class motion practices not merely as a way to better understand themselves as embodied beings, but also to understand the relationship between highly abstracted conceptual issues and dance practices.

MOVING THROUGH SPACE The dance component of this seminar was perhaps the most obvious discipline to address the notions of movement and space. Both concepts and their relationship to one another are the foundations of dance as an area of study. In addition to being integral to dancing,

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the considerations of how and when we move, through what type of space, are what give rise to knowledge relating to the body as both a repository and instigator of the cultural, social, economic, gendered, aesthetic, and political discourse pertaining to ourselves and others. At the inception, we were emphatic about holding the movement seminars in the dance studio. We wanted to cultivate as much physical investigation as possible through dance. Yet, dance scholars, dance philosophers, and dance-makers have all contributed to the theories of movement as a basis for meaning, and we soon realized we would be remiss not to include a few of their theories to aid our discussions and movement sessions. Thus, to continue with the considerations put forth by Aristotle, Kant, and Noë, for our first official dance seminar we launched into the first two chapters of Mark Johnson’s The Meaning of the Body,7 “The Movement of Life,” and “Big Babies.” Johnson aims to establish the importance of bodily movement and its relationship to space as vital conditions for creating meaning: From the very beginning of our life, and evermore until we die, movement keeps us in touch with our world in the most intimate and profound way. In our experience of movement, there is no radical separation of self from the world. We move in space through constant contact with the contours of our environment. We are in touch with our world at a visceral level, and it is the quality of our “being in touch” that importantly defines what our world is like and who we are . . . There is no movement without the space we move in, the things we move, and the qualities of movement, which are at the same time both the qualities of the world we experience and the qualities of ourselves as doers and experiencers.8 Johnson’s views about movement as a basis for meaning rely heavily on Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s phenomenological analysis, in her seminal work, The Primacy of Movement. Here, Sheets-Johnstone lays out the four basic qualitative parameters of movement. They constitute both theoretical meaning, and our embodied experience. They are tension, linearity, amplitude, and projection. Johnson transcends Sheets-Johnstone’s phenomenological depiction of “how these movements are felt and experienced by us,” and suggests that, “prior to conscious experience, our bodies are inhabiting and interacting meaningfully with, their environments beneath the level of conscious awareness”9. He suggests that these qualities attributed to conscious movement form the basis for meaning from our unconscious movement and interaction with the world. This philosophical introduction to the idea of movement as a basis for meaning allowed students to grapple with their decidedly abstract assertions about movement and space, but it also provided the framework and terminology for our first movement session in the dance studio. Before entering the studio, we held a seminar on Bill T. Jones’ choreographic masterpiece, Still/Here. Students watched the documentary by Bill Moyers, which includes interviews between Moyers and Jones, as well as footage of the movement workshops Jones hosted around the country in which he asked individuals suffering with terminal illness to come together and explore their varied experiences through movement and dialogue. The movement generated in these workshops served as the foundation for the movement Jones crafted for his company of professional dancers. For our students, the documentary illustrated the intersection between movement and meaning as discussed by Johnson and Sheets-Johnstone. Furthermore, the documentary displayed the incredible risk-taking demonstrated by the workshop participants, most having had no prior dance

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experience. Many of our students expressed trepidation with regard to upcoming movement sessions. Having our students witness these individuals dive into their movement explorations with little to no hesitation opened the door for our students with regard to their own movement practices.

EMBODIMENT, SELF-KNOWLEDGE, AND CARTESIAN PHILOSOPHY We noted above that there has been a tradition in the history of philosophy to ignore or attempt to transcend one’s body. In several of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates appeals to the received wisdom that one should know oneself.10 We also noted that there has been a long tradition of seeing this invocation as aimed principally at trying to get to know oneself independent of our embodiment. Perhaps the clearest expression of this can be seen in the work of René Descartes. In his Meditations on First Philosophy he argues that the essence of the self is a disembodied substance the principal and defining feature of which is thought. He writes, “But what then am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and has sensory perceptions” 11. Without getting bogged down in interpretive issues, we can note that in this passage Descartes’ meditator is enumerating the modes of thought that seem at this point in the meditative process to be necessary to one’s existence. We will notice that none of these modes require embodiment (though on his considered final view, imagination and perception exist only in minds that have been embodied), so we are entitled to conclude that the body is at best an accidental and unimportant feature of the self. Few things could be more antithetical to the project of dance. Dance theorists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers alike have bristled at Descartes’ view as presented in the Meditations. Indeed Descartes has been presented as something of the arch-nemesis of anyone defending embodied cognition. After all, Descartes is the one who claims that the mind and body are separate! While it is tempting to read Descartes in this way, Descartes scholars have long known that this badly misreads and oversimplifies his position, “[f]or Descartes, of course, was firmly committed to the possibility of physiological accounts of the various emotions, sensations, and patterns of reflex behavior, as well as of imagination and what he calls the corporeal memory”12. Such a misinterpretation is natural, however. Descartes admits that his primary goal in the Meditations was to “prove the distinction between the soul and the body,” so he attended only to how they could exist separately rather than the obvious fact that “being united to a body, it can act and be acted upon along with it”13. That Descartes was not only aware of the union of mind and body, but found the mind–body union important is suggested by a few passages. In a letter to Elisabeth, Descartes suggests that spending too much time on the pursuit of abstract metaphysics is actually harmful to the self. Instead he urges her to study thoughts that incorporate both the intellect and the senses14. We noted above that according to Descartes’ considered view, a person only has sense experience when (or as a result of) being an embodied creature. That Descartes valued embodied knowledge is also suggested by a passage from the Preface to the French Edition of the Principles of Philosophy. There he likens philosophy to a tree—calling the roots metaphysics, the trunk physics, and the branches the other sciences. He notes, “just as it is not the roots or the trunk of a tree from which one gathers fruit, but only the end branches, so the principal benefit of philosophy depends on those parts of it which can

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only be learned last of all”15. While philosophers have long harbored a bias against the body, there has been significantly less enthusiasm for those who wholly ignore our embodied nature than one might think. That even Descartes (perhaps the paradigm dualist) understood the importance of embodiment has far-reaching implications for the possibility of interdisciplinary work. To be sure, the intersection between philosophy and dance offers opportunities to expand the traditional “analytic” notion of self-knowledge. That we would engage students on the level of an analysis of the nature of space and motion was perhaps to be expected— but that kinesthetic self-knowledge would end up playing a central role in the students’ thought on the nature of space might be surprising to the analytic philosopher. Yet, several of the students in the course noted in their journal entries, in their analysis papers, and in class discussion that the more abstract concepts discussed in, for example, Kant did not really make sense until they were forced to attend to their bodies in space through movement practices. Philosophers might take it for granted that we are embodied and that we are relatively aware of ourselves as such. Indeed Descartes thought this was obvious. But the student reports seem to confirm that when it comes to fully grasping space, knowing oneself as embodied in a more robust way helped to ground the more esoteric concepts. We will elaborate on this below. For now it is worth noting that there is some reason to think even Descartes would find this an intuitive outcome. He wrote that he spends only “a few hours a year on those [thoughts] which occupy the intellect alone”16. The rest of the time he relies on the senses, which are, after all, the result of embodiment.

OUTCOMES, METHODS, AND ASSESSMENTS As is the case with the majority of the Honors courses at SUU, we did our best to avoid lectures opting instead for a seminar format. In addition to full participation in instructorled seminars, students were expected to lead a seminar based on content of their choosing. Additional course requirements included weekly journal entries (wherein students were expected to reflect on each week’s seminars and further develop their understanding of the concepts of movement and space), a term project of the student’s choosing (including a project proposal), critical analysis papers on the films we screened and discussed in class, a philosophical paper defending an analysis of the nature of space (either their own, or one advanced in the philosophical literature), a concert critique, and a group dance composition. The following is an excerpt from the course syllabus that demonstrates how the selected activities aligned with the learning outcomes for the course, including the methods of assessment we utilized.

Table of Assessment Methods Learning Outcome

Learning Activities

Prepare for, participate in, and lead Seminar preparation and insightful academic seminar discussion participation Perform sophisticated academic research, and share, analyze, apply, and cite that research with others through scholarly discussions, written assignments, and oral presentations

Assessment Methods Seminar

Term project Seminar preparation, project preparation and research, proposal drafting, and presentation preparation

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Learning Outcome

Learning Activities

Assessment Methods

Understand the nature of movement and space in different contexts, within different disciplines, and throughout history

Journal and term Assigned work, class instruction and discussion, project seminar participation, in-class exercises, and experiential activities

Explore and cultivate a personal definition, application, and appreciation of movement and space.

Experiential activities, in-class exercises, and journal writing

Analysis paper, dance composition, and term project

Here we would like to explicate three of the assessment tools we employed—student-led seminars, the philosophical analysis paper, and the group dance composition—to illustrate how we were able to facilitate interdisciplinary engagement through the intersection of theoretical and embodied investigation. In doing so, we will demonstrate the ways in which our overarching project promoted deep learning and a genuine appreciation of the subtleties of both dance and philosophy.

TRUE INTERDISCIPLINARITY: STUDENT LED SEMINARS ON VIRTUAL, PERSONAL, PERCEIVED, CONCEPTUAL, AND CONSTRUCTED SPACE AND MOTION The inclusion of student-led seminars served two objectives. First, it required the students to do outside research and engage in critical thinking about movement and space from a perspective incorporating the students’ personal interests. Second, it provided the students an opportunity to prepare for and lead a seminar in a nontraditional way. Rather than necessitate the student seminars stay within the confines of our disciplines, we encouraged students to find a topic of their choosing relating to movement and/or space. While many students provided readings for the class prompting exciting discussions, some students led activities both in and out of class, (including an adventure in play-doh, navigating space without sight, and experiments related to how sound changes based on space). Additional examples of content explored in student seminars included: proxemics (specifically as it relates to cultural contexts), movement and touch relating to individuals on the autism spectrum, considerations of virtual space and motion through video games, and power dynamics navigated through interpersonal and physical space between professors and students (both in the classroom and office hours). In keeping with our general strategy—making everyone involved work outside of their comfort zone—we reserved three sessions that were ostensibly to be led by professors, but for which we encouraged one another not to prepare anything. Walking into a class with literally nothing planned is both terrifying and exhilarating. This strategy ended up having interesting payoffs each time we tried it; the sessions resulted in faculty-led seminars in name only. The onus was placed on the students to push themselves to think on the spot, as there was no assigned reading, nor was there any guidance concerning what we should do. It turns out that being unprepared for class is something that honors students are neither accustomed to nor comfortable with. Despite the initial awkwardness of the first few minutes of class, these were some of the most rich discussions in which we were able to engage.

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The first unplanned session followed a dance performance students attended. The viewing assignment also required them to write a response for one of the works performed, providing ample substance for the discussion. Students immediately questioned the meaning of the dances, asked questions about authorial intent and its relevance to meaning of the composition, questions about the nature of representation, and expressed broad concerns about value in general and the value of the arts specifically. It was here that some of the traditional views of philosophical aesthetics found their home. Naturally, there was significant disagreement between the students about the nature, importance, and transparency of the “meaning” of art works. Additionally, we were able to explore the nature of value in a broad way—what is the importance of art in our society? Why do we think that certain works are “good” while others are “bad”? While we may have felt somewhat uneasy about the course of the discussion at first given the level of abstraction at which we were exploring the issues (it seemed at best orthogonal to the central theme of space and motion), two considerations became apparent upon reflection. First, the rich discussion stemmed from and was ultimately about the observation of embodied beings moving through space. Second, what the students were inadvertently doing was applying some of their limited philosophical training to their natural curiosities about the conceptual space that surrounds the practice of dance. It is also significant that this aesthetics seminar addressed one of our initial goals as instructors, namely, how to motivate non-majors to notice how engagement with philosophy and dance relates to their other courses of study and lives in general. Due to some general misconceptions we will mention shortly, cultivating new dance audiences, and arts patrons in general, can often be a challenge. Many audience members feel intimidated, and consequently shut out of enjoying dance as a performing art due to the misguided notion that there is something definitive “to get,” some puzzle to solve about the meaning of a dance work. If this definitive meaning eludes them, they have failed as an audience. Deriving meaning from art is only one of many effects of engaging with art (and certainly there are a multitude of artworks that have no underlying meaning); still many young viewers get bogged down by self-imposed pressure to discern “the” meaning from a piece of art. Our students (primarily uninitiated in viewing concert dance and/or offering critical analyses) were able to offer thorough, sophisticated, and diverse analyses of the works. In describing their aesthetic experiences—whether infused with meaning, emotionally responsive, or grounded in the appreciation of form and structure—students universally ascribed their ability to enjoy the performance to their own physical investigations. They noted the ways in which their experience moving in the studio made them acutely aware of the dancers’ movement qualities and how each choreographer defined and shifted space. Though already a common practice, our students seem to provide more evidence for embodied practice of the arts across all disciplines with respect to arts appreciation courses. One final outcome of this assignment and subsequent seminar is that one of our students wrote the program note for the dance department’s concert the following semester. Her writing, based squarely on the fruits of this seminar, offered examples and insights unique to the aesthetic experience for dance audiences, encouraging multiple ways in which to engage with and ultimately enjoy the performance. Movement is often considered to be constrained by various kinds of barriers: some physical, some metaphorical, some socially constructed. Returning to the first day exercise where we asked all of the participants to move through the space in our classroom taking note of ourselves and one another, experiencing the space, artificially imposing limits

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upon our ability to move allows us to examine the nature of barriers. These barriers were self-imposed, as there would have been very little by way of repercussions for a student (or professor) who violated the “rules.” Still, such barriers seemed very real. In the second unplanned session, we found students asking questions concerning the nature of physical space, the nature of barriers (physical and nonphysical), and how both physical and nonphysical barriers could influence behavior. In particular, students raised important questions about the role that barriers play in the development of power dynamics and how such dynamics manifest themselves on college campuses. This is an important discussion for several reasons. First, it is instructive to students who might not have the conceptual resources to spell out the precise nature of disproportionate power dynamics, and the ways that such relations can muddy the waters with regard to broader social issues. To be sure, the existence of disproportionate power dynamics between professors and students is easy enough to identify generally, but recognizing the precise nature of such power relations is not easy to elucidate. Yet there are broader social barriers that are inextricably bound to these issues. Perhaps because of the difficulty in making precise the nature of power dynamics, the discipline of academic philosophy has been plagued with abuses of power. A number of prominent men in philosophy have been exposed for their plainly immoral abuses of power. We should expect philosophers to do and be better. If anything, this highlights just how important it is that we have these discussions with our students. This seminar offered a unique opportunity to address the nature and necessity of certain kinds of barriers. As an added layer to the value of this discussion, it is worth noting that the demographics of the class consisted of fourteen women (thirteen students, and one professor), and two men (both professors). This offered a unique opportunity to attend to one’s embodied self and to see how embodiment, sex, and gender expression play a role in developing barriers, power, and different experiences of space. We began with a somewhat superficial discussion of the importance of physical barriers—e.g., walls prevent inclement weather from harming us, provide us with privacy and safety. But it did not take long for the discussion to shift from barriers as merely physical to symbolic or metaphysical. The discussion opened the door, so to speak, for us to ask about student reticence to visit professors during office hours. Almost unanimously, the students expressed that faculty offices felt “uncomfortable” because visiting office hours seems like an intrusion on the “personal space” of the faculty. A number of factors are at play here—first, our students see faculty offices as an extension of the professor’s home rather than an extension of the classroom (where while there is a clear hierarchical structure, typically with the professor as the “expert” in front of the room and as a place where everyone feels more or less welcome, students see the office as a personal space, and when invited in indirectly during office hours, it is uncomfortable to “intrude”). Second, it is not a trivial point that the level of formality with which we engage our students imposes an intellectual barrier to student comfort with us. One student described a situation in which she traveled on a study abroad trip with a professor from campus, wherein not only did she begin to refer to this professor by her first name, the nature of their spatial navigation (traveling in a foreign city) drastically changed their interaction with one another. Our student noted that once back on campus, she struggled with their interactions as she was no longer sure what was appropriate. Thus even the names by which we ask students to address us contributes to barriers between us. Formality, when paired with the typical professorial delivery of material, imposes another barrier. A significant body of research suggests that the most effective teachers are those with whom students can identify and feel not only an intellectual affinity, but a

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moral connection17. In short, when students feel that their professors are persons who care for them, they tend to be more successful learners. Navigating the careful balance between breaking down some of the barriers between faculty and students proved an important discussion. In our seminars generally and this seminar specifically, students were able to see three faculty members argue, banter, and be visibly vulnerable (whether that was through openly admitting how uncomfortable it is to come into class unprepared or otherwise). This helped to humanize us to our students. Additionally, watching two middle-aged male humanities professors try to move around in the dance studio introduced a new level of vulnerability. Of course, while we were able to foster a sense of interpersonal proximity, it is important not to become too familiar with students for the reasons we stated above. There are barriers between faculty and students for a reason. It is for these reasons that this was such an important session; we were able to engage students and one another in a frank discussion of the delicate balance between breaking down and preserving barriers between professors and students. It shows that the class was willing to think about spatial relationships from a context outside of our disciplines. The final unplanned session followed the due date for the students’ philosophical analysis papers. We asked students to provide a brief, focused, two-to-three page conceptual analysis of the nature of space. We will discuss this assignment and how it turned out in some detail in the next section; here we want to discuss the nominally professor-led seminar that was borne of the papers. On the day that the students turned in their analyses, having been charged with providing an analysis of the necessary and sufficient conditions for space such that their analysis would encompass both the embodied experience and conceptual grasp of the nature of space, we encouraged the students to argue against one another for their preferred interpretations. After having only had about five class periods of formal philosophical training, the students rapidly formed factions and began laying out their analyses. Some tended toward the Kantian idea that space is an intuition that helps to structure our embodied experiences but is nothing beyond that, while others wanted to draw a hard and fast distinction between the experience of space and the reality of mind-independent space. What was striking was how explicitly the students incorporated phenomenological considerations when discussing epistemological concerns about the disconnect between experience and reality. There is little doubt that this numbered among the most rewarding discussions from the semester.

UNDERSTANDING BIG IDEAS THROUGH CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS One of the learning outcomes we sought in our students was to have them explore and cultivate a personal definition, application, and appreciation of movement and space. We used a number of mechanisms to assess their development in this way, but one of them is worth paying special attention to: we asked students to build on both the philosophical work we had done over the course of the semester as well as the kinesthetic work they had done to develop a brief, focused, analysis of the nature of space. This project was due late in the semester, so there had been ample time to reflect on the work of historical philosophers as well as the dance theorists and on students’ own embodied experiences. In short, they were to synthesize all of these thoughts and experiences into a carefully argued two-to-three page analysis of the nature of space. Prior to the class period during which students were to turn in their papers, we held five sessions dedicated to philosophy. The first two were dedicated to the study of formal

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reasoning including logic, conceptual analysis (including a discussion of necessary and sufficient conditions), and paradoxes. Considering that these are non-majors, and the class is not a formal logic course, we considered it best not to get bogged down in the technical machinery. Still, having a solid foundation in such reasoning is central to fostering philosophical work at the early stages. As we noted above, we asked students to read and reflect on selections from Aristotle’s Physics, Kant, Leibniz, Newton, and contemporary work by Noë, among others. As is traditional in philosophy, we distinguished questions concerning our knowledge of the way the world works from mind-independent facts in the world. This distinction ended up playing a central role in many of the final analyses of the nature of space. One of the central claims that appeared in nearly all of the student analyses was that there is an important distinction between what space is and the way that one experiences space. Those students who focused on the epistemic gap between experience and the world suggested that a major motivation for drawing this distinction in such a forceful way was their experience in the dance studio. In keeping with the Platonic dictum that we should try to transcend our bodies, philosophers often gesture toward the subjectivity of experience, but even such discussions tend to be very abstract and removed from the embodied phenomenology—the analyses our students produced engaged with the experience of space in a way that was much more robust than many philosophers dare to offer. Some students used this distinction between epistemology and metaphysics to argue for a Newtonian conception of the absolute nature of space, flying in the face of the received view of the relativity of space. Still others leaned on their experiences observing and participating in dance performances to develop an account of the radical relativity of space. One student effectively articulated Margaret Cavendish’s distinction between “space” and “place” in her analysis (though in not so many words) by appealing to the nature of motion in dance and the relative location dancers possess. Several students expressed that over the course of writing their papers, they were pushed to change their minds about their thesis. One student was so moved by an objection she raised against her own view that she ended up scrapping the paper she had written, and started over from the opposite perspective. While in some ways the papers reflected the naivety of the early philosophy student, there were more indications that the level at which these students were thinking was decidedly more advanced than one might expect from an introductory student. This is particularly striking as the students had such limited formal instruction in philosophy. That students were able to engage in a relatively high level of analysis, both in terms of a priori philosophical analysis and in terms of a posteriori embodied epistemology, suggests that our experimental course helped students break down the conceptual partitions between the seemingly fundamentally different disciplines of philosophy and dance.

UNDERSTANDING BIG IDEAS THROUGH THE CREATIVE PROCESS In an effort to address two substantial learning outcomes for this course—to understand the nature of movement and space in different contexts, within different disciplines, and to explore and cultivate a personal definition, application, and appreciation of movement and space—we asked the students to create a dance composition as one of their final projects. In addition to the final philosophy papers, this assignment illustrated both the

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sophistication with which students were engaging with notions of movement and space, as well as their immense growth with regard to understanding and articulating these ideas. As this composition assignment was the culmination of all the previous movement explorations, it will be useful to lay out how each prior session prepared the students for such a monumental task. The movement sessions were not consecutive, rather, they were interspersed with philosophy, film, and student seminars. Before we outline the movement session schedule, it is important to return briefly to the issue of power dynamics in the classroom. The dynamics between professors and students are quite different between the disciplines of philosophy and dance. While it is commonplace and to some extent expected that professors will make adjustments to a student’s posture and movement in the dance studio (tactile feedback being an intrinsic and effective pedagogical method), in a philosophy classroom professors do not (or at the very least definitely ought not) even consider such contact with students.18 Additionally, in most dance improvisation courses, students routinely come into physical contact with each other, as learning how to partner effectively requires repeated engagement with weight-sharing practices. All this being said, those involved in the dance discipline (including professors, dance teachers in elementary and secondary education, and prominent choreographers) are not immune to issues regarding the abuse of power. Thus most dance professors include mention of physical touch as part of their pedagogical practices at the onset of class and often include it in their syllabi. We repeatedly reminded students of their autonomy, reminding them that they should take risks with regard to their personal movement explorations, but that they should choose their level of tactile engagement with others. For our students, these new interactions initiated some of the dialogue in the seminar related to power dynamics including how to navigate interpersonal space with their professors and each other. Here is a breakdown of the days that were allotted to dancing in the studio. With the exception of the final movement class, which focused on specific tools for composition, all of the movement classes were based in improvisation practices. Movement Session 1: Building a Movement Lexicon Content: Perception & Awareness, Introductions to the Elements of Dance— movement, shape, time, effort Movement Session 2: Elements of Dance Paired with Philosophical Vocabulary Content: “Four Basic Qualitative Parameters of Movement” Maxine SheetsJohnstone—tension, linearity, amplitude, projection Movement Session 3: Elements of Dance Continued Content: Laban Movement Analysis—weight, time, flow, space, movement and its relationship to sound Movement Session 4: Space Content: Use of physical studio space, spatial relationships/proximity, responding to and interacting with architectural details, exploration of weight-sharing, and contact improvisation Movement Session 5: Introduction to Composition Content: Choreographic Devices/Manipulating a Motif, “Rules” for Group Dances Movement Session 6: Composition Assignment and Work Day

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Content: rubric of the assignment outlined in detail, students self-selected into groups (four or five dancers per group), remainder of the day spent working, final completion will necessitate outside rehearsals Assignment Description: ●

●

●

●

●

●

All dancers must contribute original movement and ideas related to spatial organization Dances must have a clear beginning and ending Dances must be at least 3 minutes, no longer than 8 minutes, have a title and sound score Improvisation may be used as a choreographic tool (a way to generate movement and ideas for your composition), it may also be used as an element of your final piece, though the majority of your dance should be “set material” Inspiration for your dances can come from anywhere: a poem, image (painting, photograph, image from nature), auditory/written tasks, philosophical musings as to the nature of movement and space, a personal narrative, physical response/interpretation to one of the films watched and discussed in class, etc. Note: You may not have a specific “concept” when you start making the work, it is very common to have the concept of a dance emerge through the process of creating it

Much if not all of the content covered in the movement sessions is integral to dance studies, especially with regard to dance technique and improvisation/composition courses. Additionally, this content fits within the bounds of an introductory or dance appreciation course for non-dance majors. What is perhaps most significant is that these students were given a total of five movement classes before they began working on their own dance compositions. The level of sophistication these students achieved in such a short amount of time and with such finite exposure to dance in general, was no doubt due to their consistent interdisciplinary engagement with the material—specifically, the heady, abstract philosophical theories that students battled with during earlier seminars. Additionally, the students’ foray into topics of their choice through student-led seminars required a level of conceptual integration that may not typically be asked of students in a discipline-specific course. Having spent fifteen weeks grappling with how movement and space relate to issues of culture, power, gender, economics, politics, and a host of other social issues, these students crafted dance compositions that were comparable to (and in some cases even surpassed) those of formally trained dance students, especially with regard to their use of space and how it is infused with meaning.

CONCLUSION: GAINS, LIMITS, AND IDIOSYNCRASIES Throughout the semester, we witnessed significant gains not only among our students, but between ourselves. The students, all majoring in disciplines well outside of what we teach, were able to engage in high-level work in both dance and philosophy. In addition to their ability to complete this work, we were able to break down serious misconceptions about

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what is involved in, and what is important about the arts and humanities. We will address these gains in more detail below, but it is worth noting the limits of what we have done. We do not want to overstate the universality of our findings. To be sure, some idiosyncratic features of our course likely affected the effectiveness of our experiment. First, the course was particularly small, having only thirteen students in total. This is perhaps a luxury that not all programs enjoy. We recognize that the true seminar approach would likely not succeed with a group too much larger than this, and we were fortunate to have a group of this size. It is also worth noting that while the students in the class were not dance or philosophy majors, they were honors students. While this is not a guarantee that the students are stronger than non-honors students, it is prima facie reason to think that these students may have been more prepared for interdisciplinary work that challenges the traditional partitioning of college coursework. Regardless of these limitations, the outcomes from the class are striking. Students without antecedent interest in, and minimal awareness of philosophy and dance were able to produce sophisticated work in both fields pulling theoretical work into the embodied practice of dance and using kinesthetic movement exercises to inform and develop their understanding of abstract philosophical concepts. One student expressed that “Kant didn’t make any sense until I had to pay attention to my embodied experience in the studio.” She went on to defend Kant’s analysis of space as an a priori intuition in her analysis paper. This helped to disabuse students of their preconceived notions of these fields as impractical, and intimidating. In addition, by asking students to bring their own academic and extracurricular interests to bear on the topic at hand, students were able to tie their own majors (including psychology, hospitality, and marketing among others) to dance and philosophy. Far from frivolous, the students walked out recognizing that most academic pursuits are closely tied together. But the payoffs were not limited to the students. As faculty, we typically feel comfortable in the classroom or the studio. After all, that is where we spend quite a bit of time being experts in our fields. As we noted above, this can be intimidating to students, and it is easy to forget this. That we were encouraged to step outside of our comfort zones and teach material we had not taught before, or teach in a way we had not taught before, or to dance when we are philosophers, demonstrated a few things to students, ourselves, and one another as educators. It shows students that faculty are people who get uncomfortable, who do not have all the answers and who both can and do continue to learn despite being “done” with their education. This helps to break down perceived barriers to learning. Working closely with faculty who study seemingly very different disciplines provided each of us a number of valuable lessons about ourselves too. We learned a tremendous amount about teaching in general as well as the content of one another’s disciplines. That we had to attend one another’s classes because of the improvisational nature of the syllabus ensured that we would foster a truly interdisciplinary environment. We were fortunate to collaborate on this project, and this is a testament to our successes. Indeed, we have been inspired to continue the discussion of the intersection of dance and philosophy and look to pursue further scholarly efforts at this intersection.

NOTES 1.

We would like to thank Kyle Bishop, Kira Knapp, Julie Van Camp, and the audience at the 2016 Engagement Dance and Philosophy Symposium for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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2.

See Kristopher G. Phillips, “Is Philosophy Impractical?,” in Why the Humanities Matter Today, ed. Lee Trepanier, 37–64 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017).

3.

Though this chapter focuses on the intersection between dance and philosophy, film studies was the final player in our triad.

4.

Phaedo, 61C–69E.

5.

See, for example, Susan Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 42. In a discussion of the self as embodied, she notes that historically philosophers have followed Plato’s recommendation that we despise the body and avoid it, suggesting that the contemporary reticence to identify the self with a body is derived from “an ancient bias against our physical nature.”

6.

Letter to Elisabeth, 28 June 1643 (Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: The Correspondence, p. 227).

7.

Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

8.

Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, p. 2

9.

Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, p. 4

10. See Philebus, 48C; Alcibiades I, 124A, 129A, 132C; Charmides, 164D; Phaedrus, 229E; and Protagoras, 343B. 11. Rene Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, edited by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 19. 12. Margaret Wilson, “Cartesian Dualism,” in Descartes: Critical and Interpretive Essays, edited by Michael Hooker, 197–211 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 199. 13. Rene Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: The Correspondence, edited by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny, translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 218. 14. Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: The Correspondence, p. 218. 15. Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, p. 186. 16. Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: The Correspondence, p. 227. 17. See, e.g., David Hansen, “Reflections on the Manner in Teaching Project,” Journal of Curriculum Studies 33(6) (2001): 730. 18. As we noted above, it has been far too common that philosophers have engaged in an abuse of the power that they possess. There have been a number of high-profile cases that have come to light in recent years where male professors have taken advantage of their position to assault, abuse and retaliate against students. Such behavior is obviously morally reprehensible and should be condemned at every opportunity. That the intersection of philosophy and dance introduces opportunities for philosophers to be in a studio with students in a dance context is not an inconsequential outcome of this pedagogical experiment. We firmly believe that additional vigilance is required in these contexts.

CHAPTER 1.3

Dance, Normativity, and Action GRAHAM MCFEE

For those with a developed interest in the philosophical aesthetics of dance a set of key questions will concern the distinctiveness of dance—what marks it out from other human activities, even those (also) manifesting grace, line, beauty and the like. As elsewhere,1 my concern here is with dances that are artworks. Then thinking philosophically about dance requires acknowledgment that making art involves making artistic meaning; that, as Arthur Danto2 saw: “[t]o be a work of art is to be (i) about something and (ii) to embody its meaning.” Here, a central concern will be to consider what is involved in such an attribution of meaning to (art-type) dance. I shall focus primarily on two related notions: the notion of action as it would apply to human behavior, and the associated thought that action of this sort implies a normativity such that these actions can be understood and misunderstood, performed correctly (if in a variety of ways) or misperformed. So, for many, the most puzzling element when thinking about artworks remains the possibility of generating the normativity required for the meaningful to become understandable (as well as failures of understanding). Normativity of that kind is readily visible when one thinks about meaning in language: in contrast to mere sounds or grunts, linguistic expressions (words, sentences) are suitable objects of understanding—and hence can be understood and misunderstood. Moreover, understanding of such linguistic items involves recognizing what they mean (in that context); and hence recognizes them as meant or intended. Further, this characteristic also acknowledges the responsibility inherent in such meaning (as noted later): one must (and does) mean what one said—the main alternatives being fraudulence or insincerity— even when the “saying” or meaning is bodily rather than verbal. Again, a useful contrast is with cases of what David Best3 called “percomm”; where, say, someone else grasps some fact about another’s state of mind or situation—perhaps the very last thing the agent hoped would be grasped—on the basis of some behavior. Thus, my yawning at a meeting, a yawn my boss notices (to my chagrin), contrasts with my catching your eye and yawning extravagantly, to tell you how dull I find the meaning. Only the second of these is meaningbearing in the sense under discussion: there is a “message” intended, and—to understand it—you must recognize it as such. Not so for the “genuine” yawn, even when the yawns themselves are indistinguishable: in that case, there is no meaning. By contrast, meaningbearing action, such as dance, permits the genuine understanding of that action through understanding that meaning (although such meaning is not necessarily unitary). So, to accurately characterize that movement-sequence, recognizing it as dance, is to note its 36

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peculiar status as intentional human action. Then an investigation of such characteristics of danceworks must recognize them as clearly action in just this sense, with its associated normativity. In my book The Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance (hereafter “PAD”), I argued for a picture of dance as a performable, prefigured in my Understanding Dance. Here, our perspective on understanding of dance begins from the fact of performability; from the agency involved (in ways this might suggest). For, in dance, such meaning is typically embodied in actions. But in what ways? Do such actions constitute the dance? This is not quite right, since bodily movements must undergo transfiguration into dance. Hence care must be taken both to identify the requisite movements of the body and to reflect on them as dance. Thus Yvonne Rainer’s Room Service (1963) includes a sequence where “two dancers [are] carrying a mattress up an aisle of the theatre. Out one exit, and back through another”, where: [t]he point of the dance is to make ordinary movement qua ordinary movement perceptible. The audience observes the performers navigating a cumbersome object, noting how the working bodies adjust their muscles, weights and angles.4 The possibility of such “confusable counterparts” (non-dance movements that might be mistaken for dance—or, as here, transformed by being transfigured into dance) reminds us that more than just those movements are required—they must also be rightly seen as dance. But might the dancers provide only the bodily movement, such that the notationality offered by a potential score (real or imagined) really constrained only those bodily movements, on a parallel with music? No, for performances can misfire in other ways: for instance, by generating rehearsals of those danceworks, rather than the works themselves. The idea of rehearsal of a work has always been crucial to illustrating this argument,5 by introducing art-type “confusable counterparts”: a work one can rehearse is a work (in principle) capable of being performed on more than one occasion—that is to say, a performable. After all, the rehearsal will not typically be specific to any performance; with Monday’s rehearsal counting as preparation for the performances on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Yet performances of the very same dancework will typically not be indistinguishable either from the other performances or from the rehearsal (assuming it to have been a dress rehearsal of one kind); and, even where no difference exists between that rehearsal and, say, Tuesday’s performance, the rehearsal still would not typically instantiate the dancework; it would not be (or become) another performance. As with, say, the rehearsal for a marriage, even were the whole ceremony included, the context would ensure that the rehearsal lacked the normative force of the real “performance.” Still, dancers are required to generate performances, at the least in turning the choreographer’s “recipe” into a performance. Here, an additional normativity should be considered: as dancer, how do I know I did it right? This is not some puzzle-question in epistemology: rather, the answer is well-known—that I learned to do the action.6 Further, as with actions generally, I know how to excuse or extenuate my failures, if what I had hoped to do (or what the choreographer had instructed me to do) is not what then occurred. Yet how should such a capacity of mine be understood? In part, by thinking about human action quite generally. Early in his career, Danto7 espoused a theory of basic action, such that: If a is an action performed by M, then either a is a basic action of M, or else it is the effect of a chain of causes the originating member of which is a basic action of M.

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Here, basic actions are identified as a class unrelated to their contexts of occurrence, whereas the actions of concern here occur precisely only in the relevant dances. And, as we will see, the explanation of action should be treated contextually, such that what counts as a basic action in this context, or relative to that question, need not do so in some other context, or faced with a different question. Such a contextualism, integral to other positions of mine8 and called occasion-sensitivity,9 also bears on uses of the idea of basic action when discussing dance: namely, as answers to the question, “How did you do that?” Further, at this time Danto’s account was explicitly causal: it suggests that when action a is not a basic action of the agent (M), it is the causal outcome of such a basic action. But are all the connections here necessarily causal? After all, insofar as dance involves transfiguration of the commonplace of human action, visible in the “confusable counterpart” cases exemplified by Rainer’s Room Service (1963) above, the transfigured actions require explanation different from the pre-transfigured version, even when the causal story of the movements was the same; for, as Frege10 noted, “[e]rror and superstition have causes just as much as correct cognition.” More recently, Danto presented a slimmed-down, less formal, account, with no direct mention of causality and without necessarily denying our contextualism: A pilot turns the ship by turning the wheel, and he turns the wheel by moving his arms. But he does not do anything of the same order to move his arms—he just moves them, immediately and directly, performing what I have spoken of elsewhere as basic actions. An action is basic when it is done, but not done through doing anything other than it.11 And, in explanation, Danto gives some examples: I lift a finger, or shut an eye, directly. But I have to move my hair by moving my hands against it, and unless I have a special gift, I cannot move my ears unless I do it with my fingers.12 Thus, we should be broadly sympathetic to the idea that, at some level, there are things one can just do; a feeling reinforced by reminding ourselves of a logical point here: There is a traditional theory that in order to move my arm I must, somehow, execute a volition—an act of will. But . . . this raises the problem all over again; namely, how do I form a volition? Do I form it directly? Or do I need another volition—and how do I form it? So there is either an infinite regress, or some volitions can be formed directly.13 Since the regress must be avoided, should we concede that “some volitions can be formed directly”? No, for the whole idea of a volition is just a place-holder for our being able to do certain things. We should grant that these are powers and capacities of persons, at least in favoured cases: we can just act in these ways without doing anything else. For, as Danto14 continues, “if I can form a volition directly, why cannot I in the same sense lift a finger directly?” Here, the answer must be that I can! Then the temptation always to require such a psychological prerequisite there exemplifies Wittgenstein’s comment that, “the difficulty is to begin at the beginning. And not try to go further back.”15 Nor need a particular action (or level of action) always taken, or explained, as basic: rather what action is basic depends on the context. So what is basic for the experienced performer might not be so for the novice who—having not yet become habituated—must pay more attention to, say, how one changes gears, rather than simply doing it. Hence, the novicedriver of a car with a stick-shift might count as experienced when driving an automatic

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transmission. (Dummett, quoted below, makes this point for punting.) Likewise, the need to concentrate on accurately performing this particular aspect of a pirouette may, once becoming habituated, no longer seem basic. Yet, as we shall see, answers to such “back beyond the beginning” questions are still regularly requested. For, of course, asking, “How did you do that?” can be crucial for dance, although our strategy here is primarily to show how that question cannot be answered in the context where many of its contemporary inquisitors find it. As Wittgenstein recognized16 the normativity of human action, such that the move in chess can be good or bad (as well as legitimate or not), cannot be completely explained causally. In chess, for example, regularities in the movements of pieces might be captured causally; but such regularities should be distinguished from moves in line with the rules of the game. For those regularities cannot display the normativity that (here) rule-following provides: they do not describe (nor attempt to describe) what one should do in these circumstances, but only the working out of causal forces—as one predicts the weather. Yet many moves that might be legal in chess are not made because they are obviously bad; and other moves that would in fact be good are overlooked—either by these players or by players more generally. And chess cannot be understood in another way. Hence the human, and the normative, must not disappear from our explanations. Thus, as Elizabeth Anscombe notes, if I close my eyes and write, “I am a fool” on a chalkboard but, because the board is damp, no words actually appear, my failure to know what I was achieving is the result of bad performance, not well described as reflecting some mistaken belief of mine. Further, our human capacity to initiate action is just something about us: in typical cases, we do not do anything (or at least anything additional) to achieve it; and nor is there a causal explanation of how we do it, as distinct from the account describing that we do so. In typical cases, I know what I am intending to do, or trying to do, or meaning to do: but not necessarily what I have achieved or done. To highlight the difference, Anscombe17 contrasted the list compiled by the detective, noting all the items I bought in the grocery store, with my shopping list (assuming I bought all and only the listed items). The lists match; but with different directions of fit—his list is drawn up from what I did buy; my list reflects my plans. Are the two lists the same? They contain the same words; but contextual considerations make their difference clear. In particular, errors in the detective’s list are just that—errors in what he saw: for me, the most likely divergencies would result from changes of mind. Moreover, one has no “privileged access” to what one did buy here, but only to one’s plans. Now, those trained in placing their limbs and body exactly may be better at recognizing the position of those limbs than the rest of us—as a result of their training, then, dancers may typically be more accurate here than most of us. But they have no “privileged access”: as the presence of mirrors in dance studios attests, to be sure of the position of her limbs, the dancer (like the rest of us) must look. What will a focus on agency bring to the study of dance? Three distinct agential roles operate here—or four if criticism is taken as a distinct action: that is, as dance-maker, dancer, audience-member, and dance-critic—even when just one person inhabits all these roles! Crucially the dance itself remains our focus (especially since legitimate critical commentary, from dancers as from audience-members, must be answerable to the dance). Retaining this focus avoids dismissing concerns with the dancework itself as though they were, say, just about the dance-maker (the artist) and her aims, or about the dancer (the performer) and his. For reducing, say, the purpose and direction of the artworks to the plans or purposes of the individuals involved is a big mistake here. Works in performing

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arts embody the artist’s fulfilled intentions; but, especially if one is an hypothetical intentionalist,18 those intentions are logically tied to the artistic aim and purpose of a work from that time, in that category or genre, at that time—not (necessarily) to specific aims voiced by the artist. Here, though, I simply assume that position, as crucial to any artistic theory attending to the responsibility for the work of (in our case) the dance-maker. Importantly, my discussion only focuses on typical dances—the “untypical” will amount to a different set of occasions. Thus, if (for example) the relation(s) of choreographer and dancer to dancework for Jérome Bel’s Veronique Doisneau (2004) takes a form different from that described here—yet without its ceasing to be a performable—it would (in being recognizably exceptional) not refute my view. So, were my view clear enough for standard cases (what might be called “the received canon”19), that would be enough for me. Now, Sally Banes20 is rightly suspicious of any “received canon” for dance, recognizing that “it necessarily leaves out many valuable works and authors”; in particular, like any “Test of Time”-type account, it fares less well in correctly assigning value to contemporary works—or, anyway, explaining that value. But, as Banes notes, “my purpose in analyzing the high art canon cannot be to reinscribe it.”21 Hence operating critically here must invoke the context within which projected works can be seen as dance; or, if this is different, within which the dance-maker’s fulfilled intention makes sense: for what can the artist intend? In illustration here, Noël Carroll imagines someone confronting the achievement of Isadora Duncan who denies that Duncan’s “barefoot prancing and posing” is art.22 In reply, Carroll suggests the beginnings of a narrative to show that: Duncan was able to solve the problem of the stagnation of theatrical dance by repudiating the central features of the dominant ballet and by reimagining an earlier ideal of dance.23 Such a narrative still draws heavily on established features of past works, thereby granting both some art-status and some value to those past works. And, as Carroll illustrates, that narrative also shows what advantages Duncan saw in (and hence what values she brought to) this revitalized dance: both her pronouncements and her actions constitute an “argument” for a modification of practices of art-making and art-understanding. That this “argument” succeeded in changing taste (to the degree that it did) also reflects the state of the art-minded community at the time: in that artworld, Isadora’s strategies were appropriate—we know that because we know they worked. But we can infer that other strategies would have been less successful although, typically, we cannot readily give examples here, since any counter-argument (once granted) would remove Isadora’s work from the tradition of art-making and art-understanding: it would then have had no place in the narrative. So accounting for the artist’s activities (rendering them intelligible) is in part looking at the values challenged, in part considering what Carroll called “the lay of the artworld.”24 Thus an artwork—and even the artform that sustains it, since But is it art? “cannot be asked of isolated objects”25—must be understood as part of a complex tradition of art-making and art-understanding. Nor should we assume either that a single account of the relation of the dancework to its tradition must fit all cases recognized as dance or that some larger but still determinate number of such models were therefore required26—that too is an unjustifiable demand for determinacy.27 Nonetheless, such a tradition provides the concepts appropriate to make sense of that dancework, where this means making sense of it as dance, and as dance of a certain kind, with the alternative being misperception of the dancework. Equally, the future of that

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dancework is in part the future of the tradition (and of its place in that tradition). If the particular dancework cannot be seen as dance, attracting a knowledgeable audience able to bring to bear the concepts required to recognize it as dance, it cannot contribute—as Duncan’s came to—to the future development of the artform: that is, to future answers to the question, “Is this dance?” Hence it would have become detached from the project of dance, as history will record it. The need to build-in recognition of that possibility amounts, in part, to locating the artwork in question in its appropriate history or tradition; as part of “the lay of the artworld”.28 As a concrete illustration, consider its operation when a work certainly included in such a “received canon” (if without great enthusiasm)—namely, The Nutcracker (1892)— is related to Mark Morris’ The Hard Nut (1991). In contrast to other “reworkings” of traditional ballets, Joan Acocella writes that here Morris appears as: [a] young artist taking on an old, idealistic form, classical ballet, and de-idealizing it with a flood of modern junk . . . The Hard Nut also has a political edginess of its period, and not just in its fiddling about with gender. . . . To some extent The Hard Nut, like so much other art of its time, seems to be saying that the Old World is dead.29 Although Acocella then qualifies this claim (“to a very large extent it is saying the exact opposite: that the ideal meanings of old art . . . are still very much alive”30), her commentary makes sense of the modern work by comparisons, and contrasts, with the traditional version. And such “arguments” always involve comparison of one concrete case with another: as John Wisdom put it, “at the bar of reason, always the final appeal is to cases.”31 But, even when this mode of argument connects a (then) new work to the “received canon,” it does so from the perspective of the audience: how do dancers come to understand this work? In particular, how do they come to understand its unity? The answer, of course, is that they are taught it; partly in learning this dance (or their parts in it) they come to see this work as a whole; and partly they have learned, through their training, ways that danceworks can be unities—even when this is not evident. Thus, Twyla Tharp reports that: in devising The Fugue [1971] . . . I discovered I had given myself a completely new way of handling movement. Reversal, inversion, retrograde, retrograded inversion, stuffing, canon, and so on.32 But these are just the sorts of devices used in explaining the structure of modern music, another case where the perception of unity by performers might seem problematic! Recognizing our concern as with artworks—with those dances that are art—grants, first, that there can be “confusable counterparts” of non-art actions.33 Thus, we saw Carroll and Banes rightly describe Yvonne Rainer’s Room Service (1963) as including a sequence of “ordinary movement,” a potential “confusable counterpart”—seeing these movements aright (not misperceiving them) requires addressing these movement as dance; that is what transfigures them.34 So it cannot help to suggest, as Montero does, that “the neurological activity [of a suitably qualified spectator] . . . will mirror the neurological activity in the dancer,”35 since the dancer’s neurological activity is not what makes these movements dance: perceiving the artwork and its confusable-counterpart share such neurological activity. Then second, post-transfiguration, such movement (or such dances) can be misperformed, or performed badly, as well as not performed at all: that is, the movements in context function normatively. That returns us to normativity for the dancer, as illustrated via the fate of Archie Gemmill’s goal (against the Netherlands) in the 1978 FIFA World

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Cup. Having been recorded using the movement notation system Labanotation, that goal was “translated” from the score into a dance by Andy Howitt—and performed on at least three occasions, including at Sadlers Wells theater. But how exactly does the dance relate to the goal? If successfully performing that dance required, say, following the Labanotation score, Gemmill’s own dribbling run and goal have the wrong “direction of fit.” Since the Labanotation score was made from what Gemmill actually did, any mismatch between notated score and his behavior would be a criticism of the score, not the movement. Not so for the dance! Yet, then, the elegance of that sequence of movements—as captured through the dance, perhaps, and then transfigured into art—has really nothing to do with football. At best, Gemmill’s movement pattern is elegant as a goal, as part of the match, with the concomitant connection to the aspiration to win. In abstracting from that, the dance loses any connection to football (as though, were it performed tomorrow, a new player might succeed in tackling the Gemmill figure!). Hence the dance can go wrong in ways that make no sense applied to Gemmill himself: he either scores the goal or fails to—the normativity of art (here, of dance) means that the dancer generates other possibilities, for misfire and such like. Re-introducing concerns with normativity foregrounds responsibility. As a dancer, for what am I responsible? My task is to instantiate the work; to turn the recipe (say from the notated score) into a performance. To approach responsibility here, one might ask: Which parts of the dancer’s behavior are intentional or deliberate? Since my task as dancer involves instantiating the dancework, at least two issues are thereby posed: first, what are my responsibilities—what must I deliver? Second, for what may I be legitimately criticized? What, as dancer, counts as part of the dance? The slogan, “no modification without aberration” encapsulates one problem here—that, whatever answer is given, it will be tempting to look for the deliberation or intention in those actions, rather than others, in ways that would not apply to human action more generally. For most of what I do is not deliberate (if that requires explicit deliberation); or, better, only deliberate when the alternative would involve its being accidental. So this is quite the wrong picture. If I am sweating, and I do not excuse it, and especially if I aim to reproduce it the next time I dance that role, presumably I regard it is part of the role. But the dance-maker decides here. The “dancer’s experience” in the process of dance-making is logically irrelevant—ideas (especially movement ideas) offered to the choreographer, however extensive, must be accepted by the choreographer (that is where the responsibility will reside, in the dance-making process). Thus, faced with the question “deliberate or not?” I would say that all of it is deliberate, since not accidental: that is, all was responsibility-bearing,36 unless the dancer offers an excuse. And this simply tracks previous comments on meaning and intention: the normativity required for meaningful language-use is precisely that required for the possibility of morality. As Stanley Cavell rightly urges,37 we must mean what we say: this obligation has two related dimensions—that what one says is what one means (other things being equal) just because it is what one says; and that one should mean what one says, with the major alternatives being either lying or failing to take the interchange sufficiently seriously. Similarly, what among the things I do, as dancer, counts as part of the dance? Clearly, what is not action cannot count here; but what is (or is not) action? The best answer would stress responsibility! If I am sweating, and I do not excuse it, I am offering it as an action. Thus: ●

●

“I did not mean to be sweating”—this was not part of the dance. “Being sweaty was unavoidable”—so, a foreseeable consequence (not set aside, but not stressed).

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Taking ordinary sweating as part of the dance will confuse the dance with some counterpart. Further, the need to exclude irrelevance here is familiar, although difficult to elaborate. Thus, in a typical painting, “we do not notice the shadows that fall on it or, unless it is excessive, the light reflected from the varnish,” as R. G. Collingwood notes.38 Moreover, such things are set aside as not relevant, rather than our “not noticing” them: at most, they might reflect badly on the hanging of the painting. Of course, in a particular case, these might indeed be reasons for concern: each might reflect the fulfilled intention of the artist in such a way that to fail to notice it, or to set it aside, would involve misperceiving the work. But this is not the usual situation. And, were that acknowledged, still other aspects of our engagement with the work could be set aside as irrelevant. Further, this might be expected, given the general impact of explaining behavior as human action. Thus, when Anscombe looks for “a device which reveals the order that there is in this chaos” of explaining one’s behavior,39 she starts with the offering of reasons that exhibit the action as appropriate: we ask the boy who strikes his sister, “Why did you do it?” and he replies (say), “Because she hit me first”—in seeing his action as retaliation, we understand both why he did it, and what kind of action it is. Thus, if the boy had replied, “Because that loud bang made me jump,” we would understand that this was not really an action at all: it occurred for no reason; or, at least, no reason of the boy’s. Moreover, excuses and such like enter the picture here: the boy might now express his regret, and similar. Some actions, though, are attained through doing something else, as Danto’s initial discussion of basic action recognized. Suppose we understand the boy’s retaliatory intent, and learn that (in response) he embarrassed his sister: now one might ask, “How did you do that?” as a way to learn how the embarrassing was achieved—say, through displaying a childhood picture in a public place. And, importantly, this is only one set of actions (from among many) that would achieve the overall action; hence, he might have found another way to place her in an embarrassing situation. Moreover, the same behavior of exhibiting the childhood picture might achieve a quite different—even directly contrastive—overall action. So the action cannot here be identified through the bodily behavior only; and hence not via that particular causal narrative. But similar forms of words (“How are you going to do that?”) can ask for a breakdown of the bodily movements involved: thus, in the movie True Lies (1994), Harry (played by Arnold Schwartzenegger) lays out the sequence of events that will lead to his escaping from the villains, including killing the one planning to torture him. To achieve this, he must first do A, then B, and so on: so there is a chain of questions here, all asking, “And how will you do that?” for each of the components—“will” because it is still a prediction— and beginning with what he will do first; namely, pick the lock on the handcuffs. And perhaps he could describe how that was managed. But, in the end, such questions come to an end: there was nothing as such that he did to achieve the manipulation that releases the handcuffs—if you still need an explanation, perhaps he could sometimes say (as in this case) how he learned to do it, but that is a very different question. Such a sequence of questions is also typical of some enquiries by children: once they learn that it makes sense to ask, of some actions, “How did you do that?” they then ask, in respect of the reply, “And how did you do that next thing?” and so on. Yet how many such steps should be considered? Obviously, there is no limit: occasionsensitivity points to our mentioning such steps as we take to be informative, faced with a particular question (or questioner). Yet is there always a first step? Donald Davidson,

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mistakenly taking reasons to operate causally, imagines that there must be—after all, chains of causes have a beginning, although we might not know it. Thus Davidson imagines a kind of “pure intention,” of which the agent might not be aware, and which, since it might not issue in behavior, cannot be inferred from what one does: Someone may intend to build a squirrel house without having decided to do it, deliberated about it, formed an intention to do it, or reasoned about it. And despite his intention, he may never build a squirrel house, or do anything whatever with the intention of getting the squirrel house built.40 But, first, such “an interior act of intention”41 is not necessary once one grants that persons, as agents, can initiate actions; second, this looks like a case where the most plausible course would involve denying that this person genuinely intends to build the squirrel house—the burden of proof would be on him/her! Asking how one did such-and-such can highlight three or four features of actions that apply to dances: first, the question has value in clarifying what sub-actions were performed in the performance of the overall action—revenging myself involved (in this case) poisoning the water, which involved stealing the key; second, the chain of questions comes to an end when there are no more actions of mine, when I just did the last thing mentioned; third, that chain involves the explanation of actions, and terminates when no more action is involved. So there is nothing more that one did; no more action to describe. That is why, as Wittgenstein was fond of quoting,42 “In the beginning was the deed”: people are agents, and therefore there are typically answers to such, “Why did you do that?” questions; and often to, “How did you do that?” questions. But chains of such questions come to an end, with an action I just perform (perhaps because I learned to). And (recall) Danto postulated basic actions because chains of requests for explanation come to an end. Yet, in context, no particular actions need always be basic: that will be resolved contextually. Then one can ask, “How are you able to do this?” with answers registering, for instance, one’s abilities (“Because of my slender physique”; “Because I am double-jointed”), or one’s powers (“Because I practice regularly”). And, of course, one could perhaps explain how one learned to do such-and such: this would typically be true of dance; and would be answered by looking at, say, the activities or the curriculum in any half-decent dance school (Royal Ballet, Kirov). Even a simpler case here reflects the way that actions, explicitly thought-through initially, can become “automatic.” As Michael Dummett explains learning to punt: When you first try to punt . . . you have no idea how to control the direction of the boat, which will probably go in a circle. You are then shown the angle at which to throw down the punt pole in order to send the boat in this direction or that, and how to correct any error. You practice, bearing these instructions in mind. After sufficient practice, the proper use of the punt pole becomes “second nature.” Now you think, “I must avoid this oncoming canoe”, and steer skillfully to keep out of its way, without the least conscious thought of the movements of the pole by which you accomplish this.43 In such a case, we may no longer need to think through explicitly what we are doing. But, if the context changes, that explicit concern can return. Thus, as Dummett continues, although explicit punting techniques are not typically “before one’s mind”: [y]ou can still bring them to mind if you have to instruct a beginner; but when you are simply punting for pleasure, the technique has been buried at a level below consciousness.44

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So here, as an agent, I can do various things. Of course, there will be limitations, both practical and conceptual, to what I can do, and also what I can intend—I may lack the relevant concept, for instance; or the contacts to make this an intention for me (as opposed to a vague aspiration). However, as Anscombe points out,45 while the question, “What is the stove doing?” is answered by replying, “Burning well,” there is no exact parallel for Smith, although we might respond that he was resting, or lying extended on this bed. For our “Why?” questions asked for reasons for actions, rather than the causal narrative appropriate to such bodily events. Then we realize that such chains of questions come to an end: as we saw Wittgenstein inform us, “the difficulty is to begin at the beginning. And not try to go further back.”46 Yet answers to such “back beyond the beginning” questions are regularly requested. Indeed, the causal story sketched by neuroscience does offer to explain how it comes about that we behave as we do: yet there, explanation is neither necessary nor possible. Rather, as above, the same causal description of bodily behavior is consonant with the performing of a variety of actions: in context, my asking to leave the room or my buying a table in an auction. Further, I do not typically know the causal story (say, in terms of the contraction of muscles with Latinate names) for how I did that thing. Moreover, the differential focus of philosophy (as opposed to various causal studies in the sciences) sets different standards for proof here—for instance, our concerns are not well-expressed in probabilistic terms. Exceptions must be recognized, where appropriate. Thus, philosophy begins from our acceptance that some people will act in this way and others will act differently: we are not typically looking for trends and tendencies. That is, the Iron Law of Wages is recognized as at best a useful generalization in economics; but not as a (genuine) law, as perhaps Ricardo thought—and certainly not as iron! As Tom Nagel puts it, the discussion is of “human motivation in the aggregate: how the decisions . . . of millions of people combine to produce large-scale results.”47 To apply: when a causal story admits of exceptions, why should this be the case where it does hold? Our reply necessarily addresses the detail of both data and the conclusions drawn. As David Davies rightly acknowledges: “we should not avail ourselves of a particular scientific view without taking account of the critical discourse within the relevant branch of science.”48 Citing sound methodological criticisms49 of the tradition in neuroscience beloved by, for instance, Barbara Montero, Davies50 raises doubts about “the Parma School and, by extension, to Calvo-Merino and associates’ interpretation of their experiments,” as well as granting that, in some cases, “the empirical evidence in no way resolves the philosophical issues . . . [The] essentially normative question is untouched by our reconception of the empirical facts.”51 While sharing such doubts, I have not previously voiced them explicitly in print since they bear primarily on the credibility of work in neuroscience, as well as its application (generalized) to dance aesthetics. But, of course, generalizations from neuroscience are especially fallible: here are just four ways. First, typically the brain is not being observed directly, but rather through some gadget (fMRI, say), its dependability itself only statistically reliable. And what is observed just records changes in blood supply, against a complex general background. Yet the reports seem to be presenting direct access to the brain (“what occurs in dancers’ brains when they observe kinesthetically familiar movements”52). And this is particularly true in those studies53 “applying” such techniques to dance. Second, the brain is rarely observed (even “indirectly”) during the key activities themselves; thus, if our interest lies

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in responses to watching dances . . . well, such responses will not be authentic if the subject is required to enter some machine—even depending on the observation of images of dance (say, on film or video) is not obviously the same as seeing the dance; another doubtful assumption is imported. Third, how confident can one be that the original subjects, those used to build-up the initial “information” base, are typical? The best reply probably explains that matter statistically too (say, “random sample of a certain size”).54 So this is one case where “statistics provide a highly convenient way for people to deceive one another,”55 whether deliberaely or not. Facts like these “explain why mathematicians choose to use the words of their calculus as they do and to count alternatives as they do”, as Wisdom56 put it. For they make “probably” explicit. Yet both the second and third of these points conflict with the assumptions typically imported with, say, fMRI, where the “data,” or conclusions drawn from it, are not presented as probabilistic. Moreover, and fourth, one grants that, in such cases, brain states cannot be aligned exceptionlessly to thoughts/feelings, and there will always be issues about finding data here; as above, when will the exceptions apply? Further, the only (relatively) uncontentious “data” here—when the person reports truthfully what he or she thinks/feels—are nothing like as atomistic as the brain “data” appealed to. To recognize the dance (or action within the dance) requires complex background considerations: indeed, the point is two-fold, as a comparison with chess brings out. First, one must (say) recognize this piece as the King; second, one must see the importance of the King in chess. The second of these, at least, cannot be reduced to events concerning this person only—the normativity of chess draws on a nexus of agents and practices, not just one. There remains an additional issue concerning what follows for philosophical aesthetics of dance; and therefore the need to express exactly what follows from the neuroscience: it will not help to attribute to brains what are properly the properties of persons only. Thus, as Davies grants,57 “the normative dimensions to the questions that engage us as philosophers of art,” noting—as an example—that “the Calvo-Merino et al. experiments . . . do not address the question that concerns us as epistemologists of dance, namely, whether the discriminations made by the trained dancer are relevant to the proper appreciation of dance.” I would have said “cannot,” rather than “do not,” as this limitation is built into their methodology, arising whenever one attempts causal explanations of normative matters— since there are causal explanations of bad moves, the causal story cannot be used to uniquely characterize good moves. So, our normative process cannot be reduced to such causal explanation: just “[a]s I do not create a tree by looking at it, . . . neither do I create a thought by thinking. And still less does the brain secrete thoughts, as the liver does gall.”58 Moves here can be in dance as well as in chess; yet, in fact, the dancer’s failure to do what he/she intended might be more easily recognized—as we have seen, just the sort of thing that the mirrors in a dance studio are there to permit one’s checking. Indeed, the very possibility of dancers being corrected by choreographers (or other dancers) recognizes the priority of that “third-person” perspective on the position of one’s own limbs that judiciously placed mirrors allow one to adopt oneself! Equally, Davies59 joins me in requiring that “a philosophical theory must tell us what it is to apprehend a dance performance as art” [my emphasis], agreeing that cognitive neuroscience “cannot tell us what sort of regard is at issue”60 when a dance is so regarded. In particular, my general worries concern what exactly can be extracted from fMRI data, when one’s interest is in dance, or even dance appreciation (not so different from those voiced by Davies61), since that technology does not lend itself to real-world situations; but

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those are precisely the ones that interest us. For instance, as above, how might such research acknowledge the contrast between genuinely seeing dance and seeing film of the dance? Further, one’s attention must remain on artworks, especially once the possibility of “confusable counterparts” is conceded. For example, can one assert with justice that, “motor perception is a means by which we can appreciate the aesthetic qualities of a dancer’s movements”?62 If the topic is merely the line, grace, and so on (aesthetic properties), and the agent being a dancer is just a coincidence (so these are not the properties that follow from art-status or from the artform), it is easier to imagine a causal story accommodating it. Here, though, we have stressed both the dependence of philosophical investigations on conceptual questions (of the kind that cannot be answered by natural science), and the dependence of our enquiries about the sublunary world on answerability: that is, claims about danceworks must be answerable to the features of those works. Such answerability is, of course, problematic, not least because it is easy to mistake the relevant features of some artwork, such as a dance or a painting: as the “confusable counterpart” cases expose, two objects readily mistaken for one another might be, say, one artwork and one unenfranchised “real thing”63 or two different artworks—or, of course, two Danto-esque “real things.” Although the differences between such cases may not be wholly perceptual (unlike, say, differences in color), they will be open to informed perception by sensitive spectators. Moreover, with Charles Travis,64 the connection between the conceptual and the perceptual should be acknowledged: A recognitional capacity in the present sense—an ability to recognize a pig at sight, say—would be a capacity to recognize the reach of the conceptual to the nonconceptual. One sees, and recognizes, the nuances of something being a pig. Hence sufficient mastery of the concept “pig” is required to mobilize that concept in my perception: something similar will hold for danceworks. Thus, what one sees answers partly what is there to be seen, partly to the cognitive stock65 that one brings to bear in perception. Further, such a capacity must be public since seeing the pig is to contrast with seeing a pig-ringer (something readily mistaken for a pig): if I were “[l]ocked in an inner world, whether it is a pig or a pig-ringer means nothing to me.”66 So one “explains” the capacity for normativity, as with the capacity for language (which also embodies such normativity), by recognizing those involved as persons: any further comments merely elaborate the fact that persons, as agents, have these capacities. Feeling a need to offer some kind of general title here, Bob Sharp describes as “a deflationary view of music” a conception that, like ours for dance, stresses the practice of the artform: that is, it stresses—in ways we have—the possibility of performance. What more can we need? Whenever an actual performance of a dancework is encountered, the possibility inherent in regarding danceworks as performables has therefore been actualized. Then we can no longer persist in asking: “Where then is the work really?” or “What sort of existence does it have?” . . . [but] simply refer the questioners back to what we have just said about the possibility of performance . . . to persist in such a line of questioning shows the presence of a false picture based on misleading analogies with the visual arts.67 And my view, like Sharpe’s, is “deflationary” precisely because it offers no wholly-general exceptionless explanations, but rather contextual ones.

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Coda Initially, I made clear that my topic—indeed, my concern generally—is with those dances that are artworks, although giving no indication as to how these might be identified. In effect, I have two related reasons for this strategy. The first was to set aside other cases uncontentiously of dance but not art: so-called “first art,” for instance,68 but also various dances best understood through their sociological importance.69 The second was to insist that my concern could not be reduced to, or subsumed under, a more generalized interest in grace, line, or beauty (or some such): aesthetic concerns or aesthetic interest. Although the distinction I am drawing is simply a verbal stipulation, it reflects a widely recognized difference between, say, our appropriate interest in a painting by Picasso and our appropriate interest in the wallpaper on the wall on which it hangs: the first I call “artistic interest,” the second “aesthetic interest.”70 Of course, we can perceive artworks as though their appropriate interest was aesthetic in this sense; but to do so is to misperceive them. The central cases here concern precisely the normativity that has been my topic: for art, that normativity functions differently than it would if the artwork were merely an object of aesthetic interest. This is the heart of my appeal earlier to the possibility of “confusable counterparts,” both of other non-dance movement patterns and of other dances. Thus, in Rainer’s Room Service (1963) everyday movement is transfigured into dance, so that treating it as though it were just that everyday movement is to mistreat it! Similarly, the Archie Gemmill goal was no doubt a beautiful goal; that fact does not speak (one way or another) to the dance composed (“extracted”) from its movements. So that an appropriate concern—at least, as applied to artworks, such as dances—cannot be distinguished from a recognition of the kind of practices they are. My topic throughout assumes (as a starting place), and then argues for, the normativity appropriate to danceworks viewed as art.

NOTES 1.

Some ideas in this essay, originally written in 2016, were subsequently expanded—often in the same words—and applied in McFee, Dance and the Philosophy of Action (Alton: Dance Books, 2018), especially in Chapters One and Five. (Permission by Dance Books to reprint that material is gratefully acknowledged.)

2.

Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 195.

3.

David Best, Philosophy and Human Movement (London: Allen & Unwin, 1978), pp. 138–139.

4.

Noël Carroll and Sally Banes, “Working and Dancing” [1992], reprinted in Sally Banes, ed., Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994), pp. 10–16; p. 11.

5.

Graham McFee, Understanding Dance (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 93; The Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance: Identity, Performance, and Understanding (Alton, Hants: Dance Books, 2011), p. 70.

6.

Since a set of sophisticated skills is typically involved, this should be thought craftknowledge: compare Donald Schön, Educating the Reflective Practitioner (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987), pp. 23–29 and McFee, The Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance: Identity, Performance, and Understanding, pp. 203–204.

7.

Arthur Danto, “Basic Actions” (1965); reprinted in A. R. White, ed., The Philosophy of Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 43–58, at p. 45.

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8.

Graham McFee, The Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance: Identity, Performance, and Understanding, pp. xii–xiv; Artistic Judgement: A Framework for Philosophical Aesthetics (Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 2011), pp. 29–57.

9.

Charles Travis, Perception: Essays After Frege (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2013), p. 36.

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10. Gottlob Frege, ‘Thoughts,” in his Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic and Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, [1918] 1984), p. 351. 11. Arthur Danto, Connections to the World: The Basic Concepts of Philosophy (New York: Harper Row, 1989), p. 221. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, trans. D. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), §471. 16. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe [1st edition; 50th anniversary (3rd) edition; 4th revised edition, edited by P. M. S. Hacker and J. Schulte] (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953/2001/2009), §281. 17. G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957), p. 56. 18. See McFee, The Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance: Identity, Performance, and Understanding, pp. 135–150. 19. See Sally Banes, Dancing Women: Female Bodies on Stage (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 11. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Noël Carroll, Beyond Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 91. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Arthur Danto, “The De Kooning Three-Seater,” reprinted in his The State of the Art (New York: Prentice Hall, 1987), pp. 58–61, at p. 60. 26. And any appearance that I am assuming a single tradition, even for a particular work, should likewise be rejected. 27. Compare, for instance, Frédéric Pouillaude, Unworking Choreography: The Notion of the Work in Dance, trans. Anna Pakes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 221–222 on the “possibility of classical works persisting depends ultimately on a double condition. Firstly, . . . [i]t is because the work is now only a vague structure, a general framework for successive versions or continual, licit variations, that it can ultimately persist . . . Secondly, the condition of this kind of transmission is the preexistence of an experiential framework and a fixed, widely shared lexicon.” And, of course, while such “classical works” are contrasted with others, the same specificity of conditions seems assumed, especially given Pouillaude’s dependence on ideas from Nelson Goodman. 28. Carroll, Beyond Aesthetics, p. 91 29. Joan Acocella, Mark Morris (New York: The Noonday Press, 1993), pp. 187–188. 30. Ibid., 188. 31. John Wisdom, Paradox and Discovery (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), p. 102. 32. Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), p. 199.

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33. Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 138; McFee, The Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance: Identity, Performance, and Understanding, p. 17. 34. Noël Carroll and Sally Banes, “Working and Dancing” [1992], reprinted in Sally Banes, ed., Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994), pp. 10–16; p. 11. 35. David Davies, Philosophy of the Performing Arts (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), p. 196; Barbara Montero, “The Artist as Critic: Dance Training, Neuroscience, and Aesthetic Evaluation,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71:2 (2013): 169–175. 36. Noël Carroll and William P. Seeley (2013), “Kinesthetic Understanding and Appreciation in Dance,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71:2 (2013): 177–186, at 180b. 37. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Scribners, 1969 [Updated Edition: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002]), pp. 29–31. 38. R. G. Colllingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), p. 143. 39. G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957), p. 80. 40. David Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press—especially “Intending” [1978], 1980), pp. 83–102, at p. 83. 41. Anscombe, Intention, p. 47. 42. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §402. 43. Michael Dummett, The Nature and Future of Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 37–38. 44. Ibid, 38. 45. Anscombe, Intention, p. 80. 46. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §471. 47. Thomas Nagel, Other Minds: Critical Essays 1968–1994 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 183. 48. David Davies, “Dancing Around the Issues: Prospects for an Empirically Grounded Philosophy of Dance,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 71:2 (2013): 195–202, at 199b. 49. These include: (a) “challenges to the interpretation of the work on macaques”; (b) challenges to “the supposed evidence of a mirror neuron system . . . in humans analogous to the one identified for macaques”; (c) questioning “whether, if there are indeed neurons in humans with mirror properties [whatever those are], they are properly viewed as part of a system whose function is to facilitate action understanding or imitation.” Ibid., 200b. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 198a. 52. Barbara Montero, “The Artist as Critic: Dance Training, Neuroscience, and Aesthetic Evaluation,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71:2 (2013): 170. 53. For instance, B. Calvo-Merino, “Towards a Sensorimotor Aesthetics of Performing Art,” Consciousness & Cognition, 17 (2008), 911–922; Calvo-Merino, D. E. Glaser, J. Grezes, R. E. Passingham, and P. Haggard, “Action Observation and Acquired Motor Skill: An fMRI Study with Expert Dancers,” Cerebral Cortex 15 (2005): 1243–1249. 54. Actually, many people who were studied initially were self-selected because of some possible medical condition. 55. P. J. Hurley, A Concise Introduction to Logic (12th edition) (Boston, MA: Wadsworth, 2014), p. 587.

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56. John Wisdom, Paradox and Discovery (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), p. 212. 57. Davies, “Dancing Around the Issues: Prospects for an Empirically Grounded Philosophy of Dance,” 201a [both quotes]. 58. Gottlob Frege, Posthumous Writings (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), p. 137. 59. Davies, “Dancing Around the Issues: Prospects for an Empirically Grounded Philosophy of Dance,” 201a. 60. Ibid., 201. 61. Ibid., 200. 62. Montero, “The Artist as Critic: Dance Training, Neuroscience, and Aesthetic Evaluation,” 174. 63. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, p. 138. 64. Davies, “Dancing Around the Issues: Prospects for an Empirically Grounded Philosophy of Dance,” 189. 65. Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects (2nd edition) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 193–195. 66. Travis, Perception: Essays After Frege, p. 235. 67. R. A. Sharpe, Music and Humanism: An Essay in the Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 99. 68. See McFee, The Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance: Identity, Performance, and Understanding, pp. 278–280. 69. McFee, Understanding Dance, pp. 284–292; 294–297. 70. See McFee, The Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance: Identity, Performance, and Understanding, pp. 12–20; Artistic Judgement: A Framework for Philosophical Aesthetics, pp. 1–22.

CHAPTER 1.4

What is Mark Morris’ “Choreomusicality”? Illuminate the Music, Dignify the Dance JULIE C. VAN CAMP

Dance lovers are familiar with Balanchine’s famous dictum, “See the Music, Hear the Dance.” And we love the sentiment that conveys. Our challenge here is understanding how Mark Morris has pushed the envelope on the relationship between music and movement, and I aim to explore his tantalizing views. But I would also like to offer some suggestions concerning just what aesthetics has to offer to our understanding of this issue—the relationship of movement and music—as well as our understanding of dance theory, dance history, and dance studies, broadly understood. Most of us who love dance wear several hats. We know quite a bit of the history of dance and the arts generally. We like to think we understand something about how critics reason. Some of us—not all— have experience as performers of this and other art forms. I cannot think of anyone who exclusively works in philosophy of art with no experience with these other ways of approaching the art form. I do not think we can draw sharp lines between these different dimensions. Sometimes our philosophizing sounds more like dance criticism or dance history. Sometimes we encounter critics and historians with decidedly philosophical dimensions in their work. Nor do we think that we need to draw sharp lines among these disciplines or restrict philosophical ruminations to professionally trained philosophers. Everyone thinks philosophically at times, whenever we step back and consider the “big picture,” the interconnectedness of huge swaths of human experience, the logic and reasoning of our thoughts about whatever is at issue. What do aesthetics and philosophy have to offer to our understanding of dance? Philosophers routinely work with meta-domains, e.g., philosophy of religion, of art, of science, of mathematics, of mind, and on and on. We step back from an ongoing enterprise in the world around us and ask questions about it. What are its methods? Its logic? Vocabularies? Assumptions? Standards for success? How does it relate to other areas of human life? Many practitioners in these domains “think philosophically” from time to time, some more than others, and that is fine. 52

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To give focus to this long-standing question of the relationship of movement and music, I explore the work of one of the most philosophical and musically inclined choreographers working today, Mark Morris. This choreographer, more than almost any I can think of, presents so many philosophical issues so urgently and cogently, that I cannot resist. Of special interest is his concept of “choreomusicality,” a distinctive element of his work regarding the relationship of movement and music (Plate 1). His work challenges us to think more deeply about Balanchine’s dictum, “See the Music, Hear the Dance.” I consider how Morris has pushed the envelope on this relationship between music and movement and the many philosophical issues this presents. Philosophers are particularly good at asking questions and resisting the idea that there must be a unified “right” answer, so I have focused on the questions Morris triggers, in hopes it stimulates more dialogue and thought. (1) The essence of dance: This relates most obviously to our question of the relationship of movement and music. Far too much ink has been spilled on finding an essence of dance, but the discussion is a worthwhile process to get us to think about the art form. “Essence” is the sine qua non—the without which, not. Is that human movement? Movement-and-music? At least in the last half century, we have moved away from “essences” and sought other approaches. How about specifying necessary and sufficient conditions? Is movement a necessary condition? A sufficient condition? It has become far too easy to think of exceptions which are fatal counter-examples. Paul Taylor’s “Duet” showed us performers with no movement or music, Jerome Robbins’ “Moves” showed us movement with no music. Ludwig Wittgenstein in the mid-twentieth century showed us how to use the concept of family resemblances—the strands on a rope—to grasp central concepts. So “Duet” has family resemblances to “Moves” and to a lot of other works that are unquestionably dance. No longer must we search endlessly for an essence, if this approach helps us explain why we call all these disparate things “dance.” I have preferred a pragmatic approach by which what counts as “dance” depends on the ongoing dialogue of an interested community of dance lovers, presenters, coaches, critics, dancers, and so forth. I am not interested in essences, but I do want to be able to explain why what counts as dance seems to have evolved through time and through different types of art.1 But Morris throws a monkey wrench into all of these approaches. He includes vocal singing. He says the music is more important than the movement. He switches from bare feet to pointe shoes, everyday movement to classical ballet vocabularies, mixing up genres and sub-genres willy-nilly. We have come a long way from the search for an elusive essence, but if there were any such lingerings in the dialogue, Morris has effectively demolished that. To cite just one example, his “Dido and Aeneas,” using a Baroque opera by Henry Purcell, written in 1689, has movement, singing, instrumental music, and acting. The movement vocabulary is itself sui generis. Should this be called a “dance”? It certainly shows us the complications—perhaps the hopelessness—of trying to define “dance” according to the usual parameters. We could call this dance because Morris says it is. We could decide that the dance community accepts this as dance. But searching for a simplistic essence seems fatuous when confronted with such examples. Returning to my first question, in understanding dance, what is the relationship of movement and music, especially given Morris’ claim that music is primary? Are dances

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without music no longer to count as dance? Must we keep looking for an “essence” of dance or could we shift to a more Wittgensteinian sense of the intertwined rope in which no single element is a necessary and sufficient condition? The endless search for an essence typically boils down to human movement, almost always with some relationship to music. Morris reverses that, which presents us anew with the problem. But we need to go beyond asking: is movement essential? Is music essential? We need to think hard about that relationship. Does the movement express the music? Is the music simply there to provide a good beat to dance to? Should the movement somehow visualize the harmonic and rhythmic relationships of the music? That’s the question. Importantly, Morris never claims that only his approach to creating art constitutes dance, excluding all other approaches. He never evidences a view that his approach has focused on an essence of dance. But by briefly considering the old and perhaps tired search for the essence of dance, we recognize that fresh approaches, whether Morris’ or others, underscore the limited value in demanding that we find an essence. (2) The primacy or the centrality of human movement: Many of us have been arguing for decades that dance needs to be understood in its own right, with its own theories and philosophies. We have rejected the older tendency to try to explain dance as derivative of or secondary to other art forms, whether music, theater, or visual art. Morris seems to take us backwards, insisting throughout his career that dance is merely his hommage to music,2 with music always primary in his creativity. He has said “I consider myself a musician, and I choreograph because of music, specifically to music, and music is my number one, absolute priority in my life”3 and many similar comments in interviews over the years. I am reminded of an observation attributed to Agnes de Mille, long ago, that she would prefer being reviewed by sports writers than music critics, as the former at least knew how to look at movement. Morris seems to be reversing that and indeed Stephanie Jordan gives us ample evidence of the esteem with which Morris is held by musicians and music critics. As theorists, it is intriguing to think about just what it is that critics are discussing and with what expertise when we consider this apparent disagreement between de Mille and Morris. Are dances better when made to existing masterpieces in music? Or instead when the music is commissioned specifically for a particular choreographer or dancer? How is this different from Balanchine’s dictum, or is it? Balanchine emphasized the interdependence of music and movement, but he never went so far as to say the movement is subservient to the music. Morris’ contribution to this old dialogue is mainly to make us question some older assumptions. (3) The significance of metakinesis: In recent years, a lively dialogue has emerged in the literature about the relevance of performing experience as a dancer to appreciation of dance as an audience member. This should continue but Morris provides us with a new angle, namely, the relevance of the experience of performing music to our appreciation of dance performances, including, especially for Morris, the all-important music. Even though he does not have formal musical training, Jordan reports “the immediacy of physical experience . . . Singing is still a part of his natural rehearsal behaviour, as well as whistling and clapping musical rhythms, or tapping his fingers in perfectly executed counterpoint.”4 He “sees opera, like dance, as an expanded form of music.”5 And he does read music and play the piano.6 The legendary New York Times critic John Martin introduced this notion of metakinesis, re-invigorated by contemporary work on cognitive science. Do audience members feel the movement themselves? Are they better at this if they themselves have performed as

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dancers? Morris’ new twist on this dialogue is the relevance of the experience of performing music to our appreciation of dance performances. Is someone who has the experience of playing a musical instrument, alone or in a band or orchestra, better equipped to appreciate the music in a dance performance? Morris’ emphasis suggests there are different ways of appreciating both movement and music, perhaps equally valid, but different. (4) Dancing philosophy: A recurring topic among philosophers is whether and how movement and music can constitute “philosophy.” We might call this “philosophical dancing” or “dancing philosophy.” A recent example at American Ballet Theatre is Alexei Ratmansky’s new ballet, Serenade after Plato’s Symposium, using Leonard Bernstein’s score of the same name.7 At a minimum, Ratmansky was likely inspired by Plato’s ideas and was somehow explicating its content in a non-verbal form. This might be construed as “doing philosophy,” although it seems a stretch. Morris also challenges us. As Croce said in 1984, “Somewhere in his being, Morris is a philosophy major. Last year, he gave us a piece on the death of Socrates; this year, it’s Championship Wrestling After Roland Barthes.”8 She then explains how he presents, with considerable understanding of Barthes, how wrestling is spectacle, not sport. Can non-verbal art forms of music and movement present hypotheses, arguments, analysis, conclusions? Are we using those terms only metaphorically, at most? It seems very extreme to say that the movement and music is philosophy. Certainly we can think and reason philosophically about movement and music, but it seems too much of a stretch of the word “philosophy” to equate them. And if we make that stretch, which some seem to want to do, what have we accomplished? We seem to have lost something in recognizing the myriad of ways in which we come to “understand” our world. We would inevitably find ourselves demarcating types of philosophy and that does not seem to add anything to our understanding of either dance or philosophy. I can make sense of philosophy which looks seriously at dance. I can grasp dances which have content or themes drawn from philosophical work. But I do not think the case has been made that dance is philosophy in any sense other than that, and Morris’ work does not strengthen any such claims. (5) The Intentional Fallacy: Just when you thought this was dead and buried, it turns out that Morris seems to agree with Monroe C. Beardsley, originator in the 1940s of this well-known issue (along with William K. Wimsatt).9 The claim is, roughly, that the intentions of the author are irrelevant in determining the meaning of a work. And it seems that Morris agrees! At least according to Jordan, Morris does not talk about . . . the meaning of his dances: he will not provide an interpretation . . . He wants his work to be open to multiple interpretations, again, not to limit us. Besides, a choreographer’s spoken intentions do not provide the right way into a work.10 Knowledgeable critics are consistent with this statement. For example, Arlene Croce once said, “The meanings are all in the movement.”11 So all of our softening in recent decades to consider how the artist’s intention is relevant to our understanding and appreciation of a work is cast aside by Morris. This topic is endlessly worth considering. As writers, theorists, philosophers, and appreciators of dance, knowing what the creator was thinking or intending can give us ideas we might consider in our own appreciation. Should we accept a more extreme view that the author’s intentions are decisive and must be accepted? That’s far more problematic and perhaps what Morris meant. Even the great composer Igor Stravinsky reputedly said

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that Balanchine’s ballets showed him things in his music that he did not know were there. And a further twist on the intentional fallacy rejects the idea that the evaluation of a work is essentially deciding whether the creator met his or her intentions. They might even have exceeded them, without explicitly thinking this. Morris’ firm rejection of the relevance the artist’s intention is striking in this day and age. We might extrapolate a bit and also conclude that his personal understanding of choreomusicality is not necessarily one with which we must agree. As we each examine our approaches to movement and music, we might well come up with a different reading. And, at least from his rejection of the relevance of the artist’s intention, it seems he would be just fine with that. (6) Aesthetic standards: We have not been paying much attention in recent decades to consideration of good-making qualities in works of art. Beardsley in the 1960s introduced three standards which have been much maligned: unity, complexity, and intensity.12 The problems seem obvious now. What exactly counts as unity or complexity or intensity? Why are they good-making? Why does not their presence seem to guarantee a conclusion that a work of art is “good”? But Morris gives us new material to work with in looking for factors which contribute to or detract from goodness in a work. Something I find especially intriguing is the way “music visualization” over the last century has shifted back and forth. Morris’ work has been criticized for possessing this quality and looking more like a Disney-fied visualization of classical music. But at times this is presented as a compliment. We need to dig into this, I think, to wonder what it is about such traits that they could shift. Are we learning more about how to look? Are we becoming more—or perhaps less—educated in assessing these qualities?13 What exactly counts as unity or complexity or intensity or other good-making qualities, standards which many have proposed, but without universal acceptance? As suggested above, his sense of the irrelevance of artistic intention in judging works and a reconsidered notion of the relationship of music and movement also provide fresh stances on how to evaluate a dance works and individual performances. How philosophers use examples like Mark Morris varies. He has made it much easier for others to theorize, given his own verbal statements in interviews and writings. Other writers can tag onto his verbalizations quite handily. But with some choreographers and performers, the potential for misuse of examples is problematic. Sometimes a dance as construed by a writer (whether a philosopher or critic or historian) functions as an example or an illustration of a theoretical point and sometimes as a counter-example, as we might use examples to support or challenge any theory in philosophy or science. But in a nonverbal art form, the validity of those examples depends on how the writer verbalizes and frames the example to begin with. The danger of misusing these examples Procrustean-bed-like is very real. Philosophers who genuinely, passionately love the art form and have seen an abundance of its examples are the most interesting and worthwhile to read. They do not need to stretch and struggle to find dance examples for their theories. They live and breathe the art form every bit as much as any performer on stage. The writers in this section of the volume know this personal passion for the art form and their use of examples is thus more compelling. (7) Terminology: What is “choreomusicality”? “Music Visualization”?: Philosophers might seem obsessive about defining their terms, not merely with a superficial dictionary definition but by peeling back the layers of central concepts. Having reviewed a range of philosophical concerns presented by Morris, we can now focus more sharply on the key term of interest here. Morris gives us plenty to work with, especially in comparisons with

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Balanchine and Stravinsky as well as Doris Humphrey. “Choreomusicality” is perhaps the most intriguing. But related to that is “music visualization,” a notion from Ruth St. Denis a century ago which has drifted in and out of importance in the last century, as so admirably discussed by Jordan.14 Morris’ work is sometimes characterized as “music visualization,” and we should ask precisely what that might mean, whether in his work or that of others. Is it merely providing a visual picture of the rhythms? Of the structural relationships of the harmonies? Of the tone and unique sound produced by each instrument? And what is “choreomusicality” that is somehow distinct from “music visualization,” if it is not synonymous? Precisely what do these terms mean, whether in his work or that of others? How is Morris’ concept similar to and different from earlier notions of the relationship of music and dance? Is this different from the senses understood by Balanchine, the early modern choreographers, and post modern choreographers like Merce Cunningham? We need to get past the assumption that there is a “right answer” for any of this. We might look at some writers and creators who stipulate a meaning of these terms, or we might look at a variety of ways in which different people have understood these key concepts. All these processes will enhance our understanding and perhaps enable us to push the envelope in broader and deeper understandings ourselves. One way we can clarify what “choreomusicality” might mean is to look back at previous proposals regarding the relationship of music and movement. In the twentieth century and beyond, it is a commonplace assumption that music and dance should be integrally related both rhythmically and dramatically. But in the eighteenth century, this was considered a radical innovation by critic Jean-George Noverre: the dance music . . . fixes and determines the dancer’s movements and actions. He must therefore . . . render it intelligible by the force and vivacity of his gestures, by the lively and animated expression of his features; consequently dancing with action is the instrument, or organ, by which the thoughts expressed in the music are rendered appropriately and intelligibly.15 This view, shared by many critics since, is exemplified in ballet as diverse as Giselle, known for its musically expressed dramatic themes, and the works of Balanchine, where dance is a sophisticated visualization or embodiment of the music. In the nineteenth century, many seemed to think that the main standard for the music is that it had a strong “beat” for the dancers. Ballet music from that era, however much it seems appropriate for the movement, is rarely the stuff of concert hall performances standing alone. Dancers now have a more sophisticated understanding of music and can dance to rhythms considerably more subtle than those of previous generations; audiences, too, are more sophisticated. If a strong beat were the most important thing about dance music, Sousa marches and Strauss waltzes would be more popular for dance than they are.16 Some in the recent avant-garde have returned to the view that music should play a minimal background role, if that. Choreographer Merce Cunningham insisted that movement and music should have no relationship whatsoever. Cunningham seemed to be interested in developing the potential of movement itself, independently of the usual dramatic or emotional associations, but in doing so he makes dance almost indistinguishable from sport or other non-art. The design of movement by itself does not constitute art, as we see that in gymnastics routines and cheerleading exercises, for example. But Cunningham’s retention of the spectator–performer conventions may salvage some status as performing art. At the other extreme, as noted, Ruth St. Denis, a modern dance pioneer, promoted “music visualization,” a very close, mirror-like relationship between music and movement,

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the scientific translation into bodily action of the rhythmic, melodic and harmonic structure of a musical composition, without intention to in any way “interpret” or reveal any hidden meaning apprehended by the dance.17 Choreography by Doris Humphrey, a disciple of St. Denis, was criticized for this close relationship, reflecting the back and forth in dance about whether music visualization is a good-making or bad-making quality. Doris Humphrey’s choreography was always very closely linked to music—probably too closely for there is a metronomic ordinariness to her dance phrasing that lacks musical flexibility or even sensitivity.18 Selma Jeanne Cohen also criticized extreme synchronization of music and movement, including that of St. Denis: The relationship [between music and dance] must be clearly perceivable, yet not so simple that it offers no challenge to the intelligent observer . . . [St. Denis’] [m]usic visualization did not last. It was not interesting. It said the same things as the music and nothing more. It made no comment. A dance that moves constantly against the music is almost as dull. The right mean will be judged relatively to other factors, which include the complexity of both the musical score and the movement.19 In the history of dance criticism, at least in the past century, skepticism abounds that great music should come first and foremost in the performance, as Morris has proposed. Critic George Borodin claimed that if it were possible to obtain music with the genius of a Beethoven in it, and decors designed by an artist of the stature of a Rembrandt, and if one fitted them to the dance, the net results would almost certainly be very bad ballet—though those who want merely to listen to the orchestra or to gaze at the settings as one looks at a picture would, no doubt, come away with the idea that they had seen a great ballet at last.20 Critic Cyril Beaumont provides another example of the opposite of Morris’ elevation of music in the dance performance. Beaumont suggests that music for dance is inferior to that of the concert hall: “the more intellectually satisfying and the more completely expressive a piece of music, the less readily it lends itself to choreographic illustration.21 Where does this leave us in unraveling Morris’ position on the nature and desirability of “choreomusicality”? This brief (and incomplete) survey of how critics and choreographers have addressed the relationship of music and movement reminds us how complex are the possibilities and how wide-ranging the views on the value of those possible relationships. We can see Morris’ position in sharper relief and can also see what a sharp break it is from much of dance history. Clearly, Morris rejects any approach which renders the music subservient or inferior to the movement, which accounts for much of dance history for centuries. Morris rejects any view which suggests that excellent music should not be used for dance as it would overwhelm the movement. He does not explicitly suggest that movement should express the music, a more traditional view, but nor, obviously, does he suggest that it should avoid any possible expression of emotion that might be triggered by the music. We can see how different Morris’ views are from major figures in dance history. But it is not at all clear, even after this review, how Morris’ views are different from Balanchine’s. Perhaps it is just a slightly different emphasis. Balanchine never seems to have suggested that the music was somehow more important than the movement, as Morris does.

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I have here reviewed Morris with regard to a variety of philosophical issues to underscore the significant questions that are sometimes overlooked, but are challenging inquiries nonetheless, triggered by the dances we see and hear. Philosophers notoriously love to ask questions and not necessarily answer them. By examining these issues overtly, I hope we come to a better appreciation of the works of art themselves and, as well, a better sense of the methodology of philosophical inquiry that helps us move toward better understanding of this art form.

NOTES 1.

Julie Van Camp, “A Pragmatic Approach to the Identity of Works of Art,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 20:1 (2006): 42–55.

2.

Stephanie Jordan, Mark Morris: Musician-Choreographer (Binstead, UK: Dance Books, Ltd., 2015), p. 15.

3.

Interview on DVD for “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato” (2015).

4.

Jordan, Mark Morris: Musician-Choreographer, p. 18.

5.

Ibid., p. 49.

6.

Ibid., p. 23.

7.

Julie Van Camp, “Alexei Ratmansky’s Serenade after Plato’s Symposium,” The Philosophers’ Magazine 76:1 (2017): 105–107.

8.

Arlene Croce, Sight Lines (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), p. 227.

9.

This originated with a classic article, “The Intentional Fallacy,” by W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley in The Sewanee Review. 54:3 (July–September, 1946): 468–488. Decades later, when he was teaching at Temple University in the 1970s, Beardsley confessed to his students (one of them me) that this was not properly a “fallacy,” but a “mistake.”

10. Jordan, Mark Morris: Musician-Choreographer, p. 8. 11. Croce, Sight Lines, p. 157. 12. Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism, 2nd edition (New York: Hackett Publishing, 1958, 1981), p. 462. 13. See, e.g., Jordan, Mark Morris: Musician-Choreographer, pp. 79–80. 14. Jordan, Mark Morris: Musician-Choreographer, Chapter 3. 15. Jean-George Noverre, Letters on Dancing and Ballets, trans. Cyril W. Beaumont (London: C. W. Beaumont, 1951), p. 60. 16. But we should note that Balanchine made ballets even to this music, including Stars and Stripes to Sousa and Vienna Waltzes to Strauss. 17. Ruth St. Denis, “Music Visualization,” in Dance as a Theatre Art, ed. Selma Jeanne Cohen (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1974), p. 130. 18. This was a criticism by the noted critic Clive Barnes in a review of Humphrey’s The Shakers. “Limon Dancers Honor Doris Humphrey,” New York Times, April 2, 1975. 19. Selma Jeanne Cohen, “A Prolegomenon to an Aesthetics of Dance,” in The Dance Experience, ed. Myron H. Nadel and Constance Nadel Miller (New York: Universe Books, 1978), p. 11. 20. George Borodin, Invitation to Ballet (London: Werner Laurie, 1950), p. 141. 21. Cyril Beaumont, Supplement to Complete Book of Ballets (London: C.W. Beaumont, 1942), p. 50.

CHAPTER 1.5

Analytic Philosophy and the Logic of Dance KRISTIN BOYCE

INTRODUCTION This chapter explores a three-stage dialectical engagement between analytic philosophy and the art form of dance. At each stage of the dialectic, one primary aim of the engagement is to shed light on the forms of reasoning in dance. In the first stage of the dialectic, the focus is on forms of theoretical reasoning in dance; in the second, it is on dance as an exemplar of practical reasoning, and in the third, I argue that attention to dance might help philosophy see its way to accounting more adequately for what might be called “aesthetic” reasoning. What interests me most about this dialectic, as I will present it, is the particular way that its dynamics change as it advances from one stage to the next. In its initial stage, or so I will argue (following the work of Noël Carroll and others), the impetus to the engagement lies almost entirely with dance and its primary purpose is for dance to show that it can change itself into something that is just as intellectual, just as “serious,” as the other, more established modernist arts. By the third stage of the dialectic, though, both the pressure and the possibility for self-transformation have shifted from dance to philosophy. The question that comes to the fore at this stage is not the more familiar question of how philosophy might illuminate the art form of dance but, instead, the question of how engaging more adequately with dance might afford analytic philosophy an opportunity to develop some of its own best possibilities.

STAGE ONE: PHILOSOPHY, DANCE, AND THEORETICAL REASON In an important sense, a distinctively “analytic” tradition in philosophy is born out of a renewed interest in forms of reasoning. Often when a philosophical approach is distinguished as “analytic,” the intended contrast is to “continental.” At least in the initial stages of analytic philosophy, though, the most relevant contrast was instead to “synthetic.” The organizing aim of philosophy, as I understand and practice it, is synthetic. I cannot put this better than Wilfred Sellars does in his classic essay, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man.” Sellars writes, “The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible 60

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sense of the term.”1 But if the systole of philosophy is synthesis, its diastole is analysis, the impulse to open things up and examine the parts.2 “Analytic philosophy,” as I understand it, begins to emerge at a moment when there is special attention to the diastole of “analysis” because of the development of a powerful new analytic tool, one which has far-ranging implications not just for philosophy but also for science and mathematics: predicate logic. Predicate logic is a powerful analytic tool. Propositional logic, one of its most immediate predecessors, could perspicuously represent the logical relationships between simple propositions, but predicate logic combined this power with the power to open up those simple propositions and display their internal logical structure. The philosophical potential of this analytic tool is so great that it initiates what turns out to be a new form of philosophy in something like the way that the potential of the five basic foot positions sustains what turns out to be a new form of dance. In what follows, I will focus on the life and afterlife of one aspect of the philosophical potential of this analytic tool: the way in which early analytic philosophers such as Gottlob Frege and Alfred Tarski use it to clarify the forms of reasoning that were so central to the rapidly developing and astonishingly successful modern sciences, formalizing, with a new degree or rigor and completeness, the methods of justification that are valid no matter what specific “content” is involved. Frege puts all this in a very simple but powerful way that I would sum up as follows: reasoning in the sciences is guided by a concern for truth. In other words, what we are reasoning about is that of which it makes sense to ask: “Is it true?” Frege calls that of which it makes sense to ask this question a “thought” or “judgeable content.” We would be more likely to use the words “statement” or “proposition.” We can spell out the forms this kind of reasoning takes by spelling out the forms that an answer to this question can take, or, to put it more precisely, the form that an adequate explanation for answering that question “yes” or “no” can take. To put this in the form of a schema that will be useful when we turn our attention to “practical” and “aesthetic” reasoning: The object of theoretical reasoning: “judgeable content” or “statement” The question that is constitutive of that object: Is it true? The form of theoretical reasoning: is given by the form that an adequate response to this question will take, namely, that of explaining how one statement hangs together with others in light of the laws of inference. In the initial stage of the engagement between philosophy and dance, the aim is to show some instances of artistic dance embodying and implying some instances of (to use Frege’s term), “judgeable content,” i.e., that of which it makes sense to ask, “Is it true?” The basic idea here is that while some dances aim at self-expression and some aim to entertain, others are more theoretical in their ambitions. Such dances aim to investigate, communicate, or even to provide justification for some theoretical claims or hypotheses, whether about dance or about something else. Thus, for example, Sally Banes and Nöel Carroll characterize Yvonne Rainer’s “Room Service” as “implying certain . . . easily stateable propositions” about what dance is.3 At this stage in the dialectic, one can see philosophy and dance together swept up by a shared admiration for and excitement about the power and potential of scientific research. The basic question is: can dance develop its own methods of “research” and contribute something unique to the ever-expanding body of theoretical knowledge? At this stage of the dialectical engagement between philosophy and dance, one might worry about how deeply it is shaped by what Noël Carroll identifies as a kind of chronic

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“inferiority complex.” In “Art History, Dance and the 1960s,” Carroll argues that since it first aspired to be a “fine art,” dance has sought to gain respect by conforming itself to standards of other, more firmly established “fine arts.” When the “presiding theory of art” was an imitation theory, this meant showing that dance could hold its own with other arts as a form of imitation. When theoretical projects replaced “imitation,” “expression,” and “formalism” as the artistic ambition du jour, this meant showing that despite its bodily medium, dance could be just as cerebral as literature, music, or painting.4 Roger Copeland, for instance, places Merce Cunningham’s basic choreographic ambitions in the context of a general worry that was made explicit by his mentor Duchamp that “the visual arts were perceived as less ‘mentally demanding’ than the verbal arts. In a remarkable burst of candor, he once admitted, ‘the painter was considered stupid, but the poet and writer were intelligent. I wanted to be intelligent.”’5 If dance, though, is tugging at the shirt-tails of its older siblings and insisting, “Me, too! Me, too!” one might reasonably ask: Why do the older siblings themselves turn to the explicitly “theoretical” projects?6 One partial answer is suggested by Clement Greenberg. Greenberg connects the cognitive turn in the “modernist” arts to the pressure they face, in the wake of rapid development of modern science, to prove their worth by showing, as he puts it, that they afford something that is “valuable in its own right and not to be obtained from any other kind of activity.”7 It is not hard to imagine that one tempting response to this kind of pressure would be to in effect accept science as the standard of value and seek to show that art can contribute something to our ever-expanding body of theoretical knowledge, which could not be contributed in some other way. At this stage of the dialectic, then, it looks to be hard for the “engagement” between dance and philosophy not to lapse into a kind of demoralizing game of catch up, with dance chasing a certain kind of theoretical sophistication that comes first and more fully to other art forms, which are in turn absorbed in their own game of “catch up” with the sciences.

STAGE TWO: TURNING THINGS UPSIDE DOWN In the second stage of the (particular) engagement between philosophy and dance with which we are concerned, the terms of the engagement shift. At this stage, the impetus to the engagement is a felt need not on the part of dance but on the part of philosophy. The felt need on the part of philosophy takes the form of an increasingly pressing sense that our best-case understanding of how our thinking hangs together is partial at best. The worry is that such best-case understandings are “intellectualist,” meaning that they assimilate the reasoning in—the reasoning that “informs”—what we say and do too quickly to those forms of reasoning to which the increasing power and importance of the empirical sciences had drawn so much attention. The charge is that “intellectualist” conceptions of reasoning obscure the deep differences between, for instance, the “know-how” and the means/end reasoning that inform what we do on the one hand and, on the other, the propositional knowledge and patterns of inference that are central to theoretical enterprises. Gilbert Ryle puts this by saying that practical intelligence has been made into the “step-child of theory.” As step-child, practical intelligence is pictured as an episode of theoretical reasoning that “takes place in the abstract and private space of the agent’s mind” and serves as the efficient cause of the action.8 The challenge is to pull them back apart in order to do fuller justice to the intelligence, the reason, in what we do, that is, in action. I hope that you can feel something of the powerful appeal of an engagement between philosophy and dance here. From the vantage of this felt philosophical need, dance no

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longer appears as the “poor step-child,” i.e., the most problematic and least paradigmatic of the fine arts, one that is relegated to a perpetual struggle to “catch up.” Instead it is the most paradigmatic—the art form that, since the inception of “artistic dance” in the western tradition in the “ballet d’ action” of Jean-George Noverre, has explicitly acknowledged its uniquely intimate tie to action. The promise is that if they work together in the right way, the “step-child” of philosophy and the “step-child” of art might in effect turn both art and philosophy upside down.9 This promise is explored by several important philosophers of dance including David Best, David Carr, Graham McFee, and Anna Pakes, each of whom seeks to illuminate the thought in dance by drawing on the philosophical literature on practical reasoning developed by Gilbert Ryle, G. H. Von Wright and Elizabeth Anscombe.10 In this section, I focus on how such theorists have engaged with Anscombe’s work. I focus on this engagement in particular because, or so I will argue, it makes possible a particular way of advancing the dialectical engagement between philosophy and dance to a further stage. In order to see the potential that an engagement with Anscombe’s work in particular has (both for philosophy and for dance), it is important to recognize that insofar as she contributes to a critique of “intellectualist conceptions of reasoning,” for which Frege is surely partly responsible, she does so by finding creative and fruitful ways to develop possibilities that Frege himself makes available. If Frege opens up the proposition and analyzes its inner structure, instead of treating propositions as givens and focusing only on the logical relations between them, Anscombe opens up action and analyzes its inner structure. For Anscombe, too, this represents a departure from the philosophical habit of treating actions as unanalyzed givens and focusing on the relationship between such givens and other items, whether those other items are conceived to be mental states like beliefs and desires or mental events or activity such as episodes of reasoning. Instead of seeking to explain how such an unanalyzed given hangs together with these other items, she opens it up and seeks to clarify how the parts of the action hang together—the logic in the action. As we saw, Frege delimits the scope of the kind of “inner structure” that interests him as the inner structure of the kind of thing about which it makes sense for us to ask: “Is it true?” Likewise, Anscombe delimits the scope of the kind of inner structure that interests her by specifying the kind of question that it makes sense to ask of such a thing: a special sense of the question, “Why?” This special sense of the question is a “device” for eliciting this internal order. I am going to call this special sense of the question, “Why?” “WHYa.” Think for example of someone who is moving across the kitchen toward the stove, kettle in hand. There are many true ways to describe what he is doing: i. Wearing down his shoes ii. Carrying the kettle to the stove iii. Increasing his heart rate by approximately 2 beats per minute. If we asked the man, “Why are you wearing down your shoes?” and he answers: “I didn’t know that I was!”, then he has in effect refused application of the right sense of the question “Why?” and that we probably would be inclined in this case to say that “wearing down his shoes” is not something the man is doing in a very demanding sense, i.e., it is not an action. If, on the other hand, we ask him, “Why are you carrying the kettle to the stove?” and he answers, “In order to heat it up,” then he has admitted the application of the relevant sense of the question, “Why?” and has answered it by clarifying the reason in what he is doing, i.e., by clarifying what end he has in view in doing what he’s doing. If

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we keep pressing him with another iteration of the question, “Why heat up the water?”, he will keep clarifying that reason, “in order to make tea.” . . . “And why do that?” . . . “To refresh myself . . .,” and so on. WHYa is a question that the agent has special authority to answer: in paradigmatic cases, she is the best person to ask and she can answer immediately without giving the question any special thought. I, too, might be able to answer, but in order to do so, I would have to watch what he is doing and make some inferences (inferences which I might test by continuing to watch or by asking him). The form that an answer to this question takes is different than that taken by an answer to the question, “Is it true?” Instead of explaining how a chain of statements hang together in truth-preserving ways—that is, in accord with rules of inference—it takes the form of explaining how the part of what an agent is doing hangs together in light of the end or ends she has in view. The way the parts “hang together” here is not inferential but rather as means to ends. We can summarize all this by putting it in the form of our model schema: Object: Action Question: WHYa—a special sense of the question, “Why?” that action and only action admits: “Why are/did/will you . . .?” Form(s) of Practical Reasoning: Given by the form(s) that an answer to this question takes, i.e., that of explaining how the parts of what an agent is doing—that is, the actions she is taking—hang together in light of the end she has in view. It is certainly compelling to think that this kind of model can highlight significant forms of thought/reason in many, perhaps in all, artistic dance works. For instance, it is hard to imagine that Baryshnikov would refuse the application of some instance of WHYa with respect to the virtuosic turns for which he is famous, for instance: “Why did you spot the turns in Don Q, Act III to the front instead of to the corner?” It is equally difficult to imagine that Rainer would refuse the application of some instances of WHYa to “Room Service,” for example: “Why did you have two dancers carry a mattress up the aisle of the theater in “Room Service”? Especially when the art form is dance, it is not difficult to see advantages that the practical reasoning model has over that of the theoretical model. And those advantages are not limited to the priority it promises to dance, as the art form for which both “the instrument or vehicle of expression of artistic ideas and intentions and the physical embodiment of the artwork itself are in themselves just forms or modes of human action,” over other art forms.11 This model also promises to make it possible to draw attention to and raise (if not also to settle) questions about the relationship between the dancer’s thought in the work (e.g., Baryshnikov’s spotting front) and the choreographer’s (e.g., Rainer’s having two dancers carry a mattress across the floor). It also has the further advantage of highlighting forms of reasoning that are intrinsic to any instance of dance art, instead of lending itself to the assumption that some forms of dance involve reasoning (dance like Rainer’s, which takes on theoretical projects) and some do not (dance works which aim instead at imitation or expression). There are, though, reasons to worry about this model, too. The primary reason to worry, as Anna Pakes argues, is that if a dancework is treated as an action, albeit a “highly specialized and distinctive” action, then the special forms of knowledge that dance affords will be a particular species of thought-in-action. To conceive the thought in the dancework as a species of thought-in-action is to treat that thought as a matter of the artist’s intention.

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But this, in turn, obscures the special way in which we value such works as art, that is, as she puts it, “as autonomous structures, the value of which is partly derived from the fact that they are not tied to the artist’s purposes and activity.”12 The worry is that insofar as the artistic value of the dance swings free of the artists’ and performers’ intentions, it also appears to swing free of any form of cognitive value. Pakes acknowledges that the debate about the relevance of an artist’s intentions to the interpretation (or value) of her work is far from resolved. She argues, though, that insofar as danceworks “transcend” the intentional action of the artists that create and perform them and “stand, in their own right, as the focus of attention, the locus of meaning and value, for their audiences,” resources other than those afforded by Anscombe, or the practical reasoning literature more generally, are needed to illuminate the forms of knowledge that they embody.13 What I want to argue instead is that if we see these resources in their historical context, we can see in them more potential than Pakes does for illuminating the reason in dance. At the same time, and perhaps more importantly, we will see that further engagement with dance has the potential to make it possible to develop those resources more fully. For Pakes and others, Anscombe’s work is of interest only insofar as the account of thought-in-action has application to dance. If, though, we see Anscombe’s work in its complex relation to Frege’s, we can instead focus on the way she adopts and adapts Frege’s strategy for clarifying forms of theoretical reasoning in order to use that strategy to distinguish practical reason from its theoretical counterpart. The right kind of attention to dance, I will argue, can point us in the direction of taking things one step further. If Frege and Anscombe illuminate forms of theoretical and practical reason by opening up propositions and action respectively, we can, I argue, clarify a form of “aesthetic” reason by in effect opening up the (dance)work and analyzing its inner structure. As it did for Frege and Anscombe, this will involve isolating a kind of question that such work admits and spelling out the form that a response to such a question will take. To extend the approach, which Frege and Anscombe share, in this way is to advance to a further stage of the dialectical engagement between philosophy and dance that I have been tracing. As we saw, in its first stage the impetus to this engagement easily devolved in light of an “inferiority complex” on the part of dance practitioners into an effort to change dance into something that was just as “intellectual” as the other, more established, arts. In the second stage, by contrast, the pressure to change shifted instead to philosophy. The promise is that a philosophy capable of transforming itself enough to do justice to the thought in action would be in a better position to offer to dance a more adequate account of the reason that is, and has always been, in it as it is. But if in the second stage, dance stands to benefit from a philosophy in the process of transforming itself from the inside, in the third it stands ready to facilitate the deepening of that process. The promise here is that attention to dance can afford philosophy the opportunity to deepen that transformation by pushing it toward the possibility of distinguishing a form of aesthetic reasoning from both its practical and theoretical counterparts.

STAGE THREE: DANCE AND LOGIC OF AESTHETIC REASON How might attention to dance (and dance in particular among the arts) push this (analytic) philosophy to deepen the transformation that begins with a felt sense of the inadequacy of “intellectualist” conceptions of reasoning? What I will work to convince you is that

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because of its special proximity to action, dance is specially suited to impress upon us how much we lose if we sever too completely the tie between the meaning we find in a work and what is meant by those artists who invest themselves in making it available, whether by sharing in its creation or sustaining it in performance. It is, or so I will argue, at the same time specially suited to putting before us the reasons to be deeply dissatisfied with any account that conflates the kind of relevance that an artist’s intentions have to the interpretation of her work with the kind of relevance an agent’s actions have to explaining her action. Together, I will argue, this is enough to point us toward a particular way of adopting and adapting the strategy that Anscombe and Frege share to the purpose of distinguishing a form of aesthetic reasoning. Pakes herself acknowledges that it is easier to convince oneself of the “autonomy” of an artwork from the “intentions” of its creator(s) if one takes the visual arts as paradigmatic. For in the visual arts, objects are produced—paintings, sculptures, designed products— that are “ontologically independent of their creator(s).” As she puts it, “although the process of their making is clearly a form of intentional action on the part of artists, the artworks themselves transcend that action and stand, in their own right as the focus of attention.”14 In dance, by contrast, it is very difficult to suppress or minimize the sense in which what I am encountering is what some person or persons are, right in front of me, doing. In watching a play or listening to a symphony, there are ways to minimize my awareness of the troubling dependence of what I see or hear on what someone is, often as the result of great and sustained effort, in a position to do in my presence—perhaps by shifting my attention from the actors in front of me to the ideas they articulate, or from the musicians to the sounds they create. If by contrast I shift my attention away from the persons of the dancers and what those persons are doing, I shift my attention away from the dance itself. In this way, attention to dance makes it especially hard to avoid the conviction that what a work means is in some significant way bound up with what is meant by those persons who invest so much of themselves in creating, sustaining, and making it available for appreciation—that we cannot do justice to the former without finding a way to adequately acknowledge the latter. It is one thing to argue that dance makes especially perspicuous a deep connection between an artwork and the actions of those artists who invest themselves in creating and sustaining it and between the meaning one finds in the work and what is meant by those artists. It is quite another, though, to equate the work with the actions and the interpretation of the work with an explanation of them. If dance can keep us from severing too completely or precipitously the tie between the meaning we find in a work and what is meant by the artists who invest themselves in it, it can also impress upon us with special acuity how different it is to take an agent adequately into account when explaining her action, on one hand, and, on the other, to take adequately into account those persons who have invested themselves in an artwork when interpreting it. Consider, for example, the way that the choreographer Crystal Pite describes the creation of her piece for Pacific Northwest Ballet, Emergence. Pite describes herself as starting with the paradoxical intention of creating a piece that is free of her intentions (as well as of the intentions of the dancers with whom she is working): “For this piece I tried to come up with systems that would help the piece make itself. I tried to create a series of codes, applied ‘locally,’ that would echo an emergent system so that the piece could evolve out of its own response to those parameters.”15 As Pite describes it, her “aim” is in effect to remove herself, to get out of the way so that her own agency does not compromise the autonomy, the agency, of the piece. As things unfold, though, she finds that removing

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herself so completely from the process is not consistent with the investment that she, and the dancers, artistic director, etc., with whom she is working, have in it. What turns out to be required is a kind of working out of the relationship between her own investment in the piece, her own agency, and the agency of those others who are also invested in it: “we quickly discovered that 18 days isn’t much time for an evolution out of chaos and into order . . . I found myself having to impose more and more of a leader’s agenda in order to achieve our goal of getting something compelling and cogent on stage.”16 If Pite begins with the assumption that Emergence can “vibrate with [its own] life” only insofar as she exercises her own autonomy only in order to remove herself from the equation, she finds that the “life” of the piece instead depends not upon her forgoing her own agency but instead on her working out exactly how to include it. Pite leaves it open to us to conclude that the “life” of the piece depended upon the reintroduction of her own agency only because of the time pressure under which she and the dancers worked. Nevertheless, what she shows us is a basic sense in which working out her own investment in the piece she is creating involves her in working out her relationship to those others—to the agency of those others—who are also invested in it. In her talk, “On Writing About Mark Morris: Knowing Too Much,” Stephanie Jordan affords us an example of what this kind of “working out” process is like from the perspective of someone who finds themselves invested in the piece as a critic or audience member. In this talk, which is a companion piece to her recently published, Mark Morris: Musician–Choreographer, Jordan patiently explores the implications of her unprecedented access to archival materials, rehearsals, classes, and (through a series of interviews), Morris himself. Jordan freely acknowledges how much this material—whether an image offered by a dancer teaching her a part or Morris’ own accounts of what he had (or now) has in mind—shapes her own evolving grasp of individual pieces and the oeuvre as a whole: “Without doubt, such information changed the way I thought about and saw each movement.” What interests her is the question of how such information is relevant. She repeatedly underscores the difficulty of taking this information into account in the right way, how easy it is to cede her own authority and responsibility—“Of course, the author’s voice is always hugely seductive.” And she reflects on the interest Morris himself takes in the relationship between his understanding of the pieces and his audience’s—his reluctance to “convey anything so specific [as his own way of thinking about a piece] to the audience” and yet, how deliberately he drops the occasional hint, “like a drip-feed.” In other words, she shows us how much of working out her interpretation of the work depends upon working out her relation to others—in this case, one very particular other—who shares that investment. Thus far in this section I have sought to show how attention to dance might help a philosopher recognize that she cannot do justice to the reasoning in art without deepening the criticism of intellectualist conceptions of reason by developing the resources not only to distinguish practical reasoning from theoretical but also to distinguish aesthetic reasoning from practical. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to undertake this task in full, but I want to conclude by indicating what I take to be a fruitful starting point for further investigation. Anscombe distinguishes the logic of practical reasoning from its theoretical counterpart by isolating the kind of question that action admits. That question elicits the logic in action insofar as the form an answer to that question takes—the form of explaining how an agent’s actions hang together in light of the end(s) she has in view—gives us the distinctive form of the reasoning in action. Extending this strategy in order to distinguish

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aesthetic reasoning from a practical counterpart with which it is all to often and easily conflated would, in turn, require isolating a special kind of question that a work of art admits of and which can elicit the special order, the “logic” in such work. In light of the considerations that I have introduced, especially with respect to Pite and Jordan, I would argue a good place to start is with the hypothesis that this question is, itself, a special sense of the question, “Why?”, although not the same sense of the question that action admits. We might call that sense of the question WHY* to distinguish it from WHYa. WHY*, I would argue, is such that the form an adequate response to it takes is not that of explaining how statements hang together in light of a concern for truth, nor that of explaining how actions hang together in light of an agent’s intention. Instead, a response to WHY* takes the form of working out how the person for whom the question arises hangs together with others in light of a shared investment in the work. Further warrant for starting in this way can be found by turning attention to a typical formulation of WHY* that underscores its special proximity to WHYa. Stanley Cavell provides what I take to be such a typical formulation in his response to Beardsley and Wimsatt’s Intentionalist Fallacy. With explicit reference to Anscombe, Cavell argues that “nothing could be commoner among critics of art” than to raise “a certain sense of the question, ‘Why?’ . . . in which we are, or seem to be, asking about the artist’s intention in the work.”17 The examples he gives are “Why does Shakespeare follow the murder of Duncan with a scene which begins with the sound of knocking”? or “Why does Beethoven put in a bar of rest in the last line of the fourth bagatelle?” Some dance-specific examples would be, for example, “Why does Balanchine add a new last act to Midsummer Night’s Dream?” or “Why does Rainer have the dancers carry a mattress up the aisle in Room Service?” Cavell’s point is to associate (if not to equate) the critic’s question with WHYa. What is important about these examples for the present purpose, though, is the precise ways in which these typical formulations of the critic’s question differ from typical formulations of WHYa. The starting point I have proposed makes it easier to register these differences and to see what significance they may have. The most obvious difference between the typical formulation of the critic’s question and a typical formulation of WHYa is a shift from the second to the third person: while it is typical for instances of WHYa to be formulated in the second person (Why are/did/will you . . . ?), typical instances of the critic’s question are formulated in the third person (Why does Balanchine/Rainer/ Morris . . . ?). As we saw, the second-person formulation of WHYa registers the special authority that the agent has in answering the question, unless special circumstances obtain or, to put it even more strongly, interfere (if, for instance, the agent has powerful reasons not to be very clear about what he or she is doing or why). This means that in typical instances the agent is in the best position to answer and can often do so without any kind of special effort. What are we to make of the shift from second- to third-person in the typical formulation of WHY*? We might take this shift to reflect nothing more than a reassessment of the typical circumstances in which such questions arise: ideally, we would address this question to the artist him or herself but in most cases we cannot. Here, though, Jordan’s experience ought at least to give us pause. She is in a kind of “best case” position for raising whatever questions she wants to raise to Morris himself, but what she finds is that doing so does not solve anything, that even if she formulates her why question in the second person, “Why do you. . . .,” this does not diminish the responsibility that she bears for responding to it. The fact that the artist does not drop out of the question suggests that an adequate

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response, whatever form it takes, will require taking her into account. At the same time, the shift in grammatical person suggests the special authority (and responsibility) that an agent has with respect to answering typical instances of WHYa has dropped out. Part of what this means is that there is no one to whom an adequate response to a typical instance of WHY* is available with the kind of immediacy that an answer to WHYa is typically available to the agent. Whether the person seeking to answer an instance of WHY* is a critic, the artist herself, another artist, or simply a person who is engaging or responding to the work in a more-than-casual way, answering the question requires working something out (sometimes over a period of years). It is in part the necessity of such “working out” that gives the meaning to the “work” in the phrase “work of art.” If there is no one person who has special authority in answering an instance of WHY*, only someone with a particular relation to the work is in a position to raise one: someone who has invested themselves, or finds themselves invested, in the work. This feature of WHY* is reflected in the second salient difference between typical formulations of the critic’s question and typical formulations of WHYa: a shift in the grammatical tense of the question. While typical instances of WHYa are formulated in the past tense (Why did you make tea yesterday?), the future (Why are you going to make tea tomorrow?), or the present progressive (Why are you making tea?), the critic’s question is formulated in the simple present: “Why does Rainer . . .?” Insofar as the question is an instance of WHY*, it is a question about the work as it is invested with my life now. What this means is that in an important sense that which is asked about only exists insofar as the question arises. What the peculiar tense of WHY* registers is the peculiarly intimate way that what is asked about is bound up with the present of the question as it arises and remains alive. At the same time, it underscores the special sense in which authority with respect to this question is shared. For responsibility for it falls equally on all who have invested themselves in the work in such a way that in their own present, this same instance of WHY* can arise and take hold for them.

NOTES 1.

Wilfred Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 7.

2.

Interestingly, Sellars explains the rhythmic interrelation between synthesis and analysis in philosophy with a metaphor from painting. One can only appreciate how the complex whole of a painting hangs together by paying the right kind of careful attention to its parts: “To the extent that there is one picture to be grasped reflectively as a whole [by the philosopher], the unity of the reflective vision is a task rather than an initial datum. The search for this unity at the reflective level is . . . appropriately compared to the contemplation of a large and complex painting which is not seen as a unity without a prior exploration of its parts” (ibid., 10).

3.

Sally Banes and Noël Carroll, “Working and Dancing: A Response to Monroe Beardsley’s ‘What is Going on in a Dance?”’ Dance Research Journal 15: 1 (1982); L39–40.

4.

Noël Carroll, “Art History, Dance and the 1960s,” in Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything Was Possible, ed. Sally Banes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press; 2003).

5.

Roger Copeland, Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 206.

6.

I have written about this issue at greater length in Kristin Boyce, “The Thinking Body: Dance, Philosophy and Modernism,” in Thinking Through Dance: The Philosophy of Dance

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Performance and Practice, ed. Jenny Bunker, Anna Pakes, and Bonnie Rowell (Dance Books, 2013), pp. 256–272. 7.

Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969 (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1993), p.86.

8.

Anna Pakes, “Knowing Through Dance-Making: Choreography, Practical Knowledge and Practice-as-Research,” in Contemporary Chorography: a Critical Reader, eds. Jo Butterworth and Liebeth Wildschut (New York: Routledge, 2009), p.12.

9.

Michael Kremer has recently argued that many contemporary philosophers interpret Gilbert Ryle not as criticizing particular conceptions of knowledge and reasoning that he finds inadequate but as “anti-intellectualist” in the stronger sense of rejecting reason. Kremer argues that “intellectualists” and “anti-intellectualists” alike share a common concept of reason and that this common conception was what Ryle targeted so that he is best understood neither as an “intellectualist” nor an “anti-intellectualist” but rather as developing a “middle way” that “has largely gone missing in 21st century philosophical discussions.” It is important here that insofar as philosophers of dance have turned to Ryle, they have kept their eyes squarely on this “third option.” See Michael Kremer, “Ryle’s ‘intellectualist Legend’ in Historical Context,” Journal for the History of Analytic Philosophy, 1: 5 (2017): 16.

10. For a recent account of the thought in a dancer’s actions, see Barbara Montero, Thought in Action: Expertise in the Conscious Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 11. David Carr, “Reason and Inspiration in Dance and Choreography,” in Choreography: Principles and Practice, ed. Janet Adshead (Guildford: University of Surrey/NRCD, 1987), p.46. Quoted from Anna Pakes, “Art as Action or Art as Object?” p.4. 12. Anna Pakes, “Art as Action or Art as Object? The Embodiment of Knowledge in Practice as Research,” Working Papers in Art and Design 3 (2004): 7. 13. For example, in “Art as Action or Art as Object?” she turns to Hans Georg Gadamer’s conception of art as “transformation into structure” to characterize the cognitive value of dance art (ibid., 7). 14. Ibid., 5. 15. Crystal Pite, “Program Notes for Emergence,” New York City Center, February 25–6, 2016. 16. Ibid. 17. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 82 and 227.

CHAPTER 1.6

The Negotiation of Significance in Dance Performance: Aesthetic Value in the Context of Difference JANE CARR

INTRODUCTION . . . if we do not seek communication with the truth and with others except on the level of a disembodied reason, then there is not much to hope for . . . —Merleau-Ponty1 What follows explores how dance may be appreciated in a contemporary context in which it can no longer be assumed that performers and audience make sense of dancing with reference to a shared culture.2 I do not write as a philosopher, but rather from my position as a former dancer and now dance academic, to draw upon my experiences of dancing, researching, and teaching dance with the aim of proposing some avenues ripe for philosophical investigation. I will start by emphasizing that dancing is a communicative phenomenon. In this context, I find the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty provides a welcome recognition of the human capacity for intersubjective, embodied experience which is of key importance to engagement with dancing as meaningful. This is not to suggest dancing can be conceived as communicative in the naïve terms that propose some sort of universal expression or movement language. Nor can the meaning of dance be directly intuited through kinesthetic empathy as proposed by early theorists of Modern dance.3 Rather, I consider how the significance of dance performance might be understood through a process of negotiation grounded in intercorporeal experience. Here I recognize the challenge of difference—in relation to gender, sexualities, and/or cultures and abilities— to the self–other relationships which sustain such negotiations. Finally, I situate these reflections within the broader field of philosophical aesthetics to consider the potential of such encounters to contribute to aesthetic values attributed to dance. 71

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DANCING AS A COMMUNICATIVE PHENOMENON Some years ago, I undertook case studies amongst London-based dance artists during which I asked the artists to explain what they thought happened when a dance performance “worked.” They responded with various accounts of “energies,” “transformation,” and in one case the Indian aesthetic concept of “rasa,” to articulate their experiences of communicative exchange between performer and audience that are consistent with my own experiences as a dancer.4 Philosophers such as David Best5 and Graham McFee6 have rightly been very suspicious of a naïve expressionism that assumes a direct transference of feeling and /or ideas between performer and audience. Yet some aspects of such expressionist notions linger amongst dancers. This, I have argued previously, is due to the phenomenological sense of engagement, both between performers and between performers and audience, that is intrinsic to the experience of dancing both for, and with, others.7 For example, the dance artist Gaby Agis sums up the experience of the relationship between audience and performer: “I think it’s a dialogue or an exchange . . . of sensations, of memories, of energies, of resonances with something the artist has communicated . . .”8 Like many dancers before me, I have found the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (and those who draw upon his work) to be invaluable in offering a means of contemplating embodied and intersubjective experience.9 He argues against both empiricism and idealism to recognize the interrelationships between consciousness and a world that is shared. In his analysis of perception, Merleau-Ponty10 discounts the notions that perceptions are sensations belonging solely to an individual consciousness. Rather, Merleau-Ponty explores how we find ourselves and our understanding of the world in which we live through our experience of our engagement with a world inhabited by others: We must abandon the fundamental prejudice according to which the psyche is only accessible to myself. . . . My consciousness is turned primarily towards the world . . . it is above all a relation to the world . . . . If I am a consciousness turned towards things, I can meet in things the actions of another and find in them a meaning, because they are themes of possible activity for my own body.11 For Merleau-Ponty, the human capacity for intercorporeal engagement is key to the processes through which people come to have a sense of self in relation to others. For example, in his account of early childhood experience, Merleau-Ponty considers the transition from a consciousness that has as yet to gain a sense of a coherent self to that which recognizes a more bounded identity. His description of what he equates to the formation of the ego in the young child, describes the transition away from a previous “syncreticism” to create a “lived distance” between self and other. As the child develops, the acquisition of language is part of the process of creating this lived distance. In contrast to Lacanian based narratives that emphasize the entry into the symbolic as an alienating rupture, for Merleau-Ponty the segregation of self from other, that gives rise to the distinction of individuals, is a process that is never fully complete.12 Moreover, MerleauPonty recognizes a capacity for transitivity that extends beyond early childhood.13 Hence, on Merleau-Ponty’s terms, adult humans are not viewed as alienated individuals who can only represent themselves as objects for interpretation by others, but rather as beings with the ability to engage with others through experiencing the world. His existential

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phenomenology thus provides a position from which to consider that sense of connection between performers, and between them and the audience, that my previous research found to be important to dancers.14 Merleau-Ponty revisited his analysis of the interrelationships between self–other– world in his posthumously published chapter “The Intertwining—The Chiasm” (1968). In this text he delves into the complexities of being both sensing and being sensed to examine the reciprocal interrelationships between touching–being touched and seeing– being seen.15 Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of “flesh” and “intercorporeity” emerge through his attempts to break down what, in is his words, are “the age old assumptions that put the body in the world and the seer in the body.”16 He describes “flesh” as elemental: “. . . it is not matter, mind nor substance but rather a style of being within which a kind of transitivity or intercorporiety can be experienced.”17 While there is an emphasis on the intercorporeal basis for the experience of a shared lived world, in this final articulation of his philosophy, in developing his concept of “intercorporeity,” Merleau-Ponty absorbs language into this realm of flesh, together with the thinking which language makes possible (ibid., 1968, 153). Merleau-Ponty (1964) was aware that he had yet to explore fully how his philosophical approach might be applied to an understanding of culture, suggesting how, in preparing new works, he aimed to explore “how communication with others, and thought take up and go beyond the realm of perception.”18 Hints of the directions such an investigation could have taken should Merleau-Ponty have lived longer, can be found in his description of the use of language as a “call” between “situated thoughts” which respond with their “own resources”19 and in his aim for his final, unfinished work to fathom how the body is “recaptured” within a “created generality” or culture.20 While Merleau-Ponty was aware how culture, including language, might affect the intercorporeity he proposed, his work is undeniably open to the criticism summed up by Elizabeth Grosz as a “refusal to see women’s specificities and their differences from men”21 and this same criticism also applies to other perceived differences. Yet rather than his being indifferent to difference, Merleau-Ponty was perhaps more concerned to develop a philosophy that recognizes intersubjective experience within which the experience of alterity is part of subjectivity.22 Nevertheless, in the context of globalized, post-modern societies in which people are increasingly aware of differences, whether in terms of culture, religion, gender, age, sexualities, or abilities, it is important to pay more attention to the impact of those inequalities associated with perceived differences upon communicative exchanges. I will thus turn to consideration of how, if dancing is considered as a communicative phenomenon, its significance within complex contemporary societies may be understood.

UNDERSTANDING THE SIGNIFICANCE OF DANCING If ever there were a time and place where everyone attending a dance event or performance shared in both the explicit cultural knowledge and tacit understandings that inform its significance, this can no longer be assumed. It is not just a lack of knowledge (formal or tacit) of established conventions of a particular dance genre, or even of culturally specific references, that may make it difficult for an audience to appreciate a particular dance performance. (In practice, if the audience is interested enough such information may often be researched.) What can be even more difficult is to grasp the underlying culturally

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shaped assumptions that inform the processes through which audiences engage with the performance: there have been, and often still are, very real challenges for the black ballerina who might want to be accepted by British audiences as Odette in Swan Lake; the dancer in a wheel chair who aims for the audience to focus upon the aesthetic qualities of his/her movements; or the short, slight male who plays a hero. Following Amelia Jones who, in relation to the visual arts, has suggested that “identifications . . . profoundly shape and inform meaning and value,”23 it is important to recognize that while not reducible to representations of identity, dancing is enmeshed within the cultural processes through which identifications are understood. Hence while some dancing may reproduce particular identifications that are accepted as established by the audience and/or those also dancing, others may be more challenging. My previous research has revealed how some artists recognize the potential for an inthe-moment, lived negotiation between dancer and audience that may both draw upon, and challenge, the assumptions underlying a myriad of experiences of interactions within both the field of dance activity and more generally.24 Within a wider social context, the potential of intersubjective experience to effect change in how we view ourselves and others is explored by the philosopher Kym Maclaren25 who develops upon MerleauPonty’s later work to consider interpersonal interactions in a social context. Maclaren draws on Merleau-Ponty to recognize both the potential to shadow another’s movement and the sense of separateness (écart or divergence) built into this experience. She then draws further upon the capacity for corporeal intersubjective engagement to consider human interactions in relation to how the actions of one person affect another. Acknowledging how, at times, people may feel they have been positioned uncomfortably in relation to another by the other’s actions towards them, she suggests that while such interactions may result in an impasse, at other moments this experience can lead to transformation. This may require someone to reflect upon her/his experience but it is a process through which people may discover new ways of engaging with others and a new sense of self. Maclaren does not broaden the scope of her development of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy to consider the wider social contexts that might constrain interpersonal interactions nor the politics surrounding identification. Elsewhere, in contemplating how Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “flesh” might be understood in a post-modern context, I have suggested that it can be developed to recognize a Foucauldian play of power relations that is explored in many discourses on inequalities.26 If Merleau-Ponty reveals how humans interact within a shared world, Foucault reminds us that relationships are situated within an episteme saturated by power relations. I recognize that Foucault’s work is more usually viewed as moving away from the phenomenology of an earlier generation of continental philosophers.27 Nevertheless, in Foucault’s consideration of how epistemic shifts inform subjectivity as understood in (Western) modernity, perhaps there are echoes of MerleauPonty’s development of existential phenomenology: It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary it exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished . . . This real non corporeal soul is not a substance; it is the element in which are articulated the effects of a certain type of power . . . .28 While Foucault describes modern individual consciousness as created through a particular form of power relations, it is Merleau-Ponty who unpicks the binary opposition of

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consciousness and body that is productive of a modern sensibility. As a dance artist and teacher, I find it is in the context of current (post Foucauldian) awareness of the constraints that act on consciousness to limit how people behave and think that Merleau-Ponty’s exploration of an intercorporeity is important in that it suggests the potential of human interactions to extend experience through the other body, I see that in its coupling with the flesh of the world, the body contributes more than it receives, adding to the world that I see the treasure necessary for what the other body sees.29 Engagement with the world of others may shift people out of customary modes of perception and orientation to the world as lived. Dance performances offer many such opportunities, some of which may be thought of as being similar to those more difficult everyday negotiations Maclaren describes. In such cases, notwithstanding the very real pressures that make it difficult to challenge normative assumptions, intersubjective embodied engagement with others through the experiences of dancing and watching dance may be thought of as a process through which dancers and audiences may develop not only new ways of understanding their sense of self but different ways of comprehending the world around them. My previous research revealed artists with a commitment to such interactions through which their dancing negotiates bodily significance.30 For these artists, who all discussed performing their own choreography, this approach to performance is so bound up with their own sense of self (or rather selves) that what they value is a kind of personal integrity in performance, revealing of the “truth” of their lived experience as they understand it in the moment. Some of these artists had developed strategies to shift the audience out of assumptions that they felt had a negative effect on how their performance was perceived. Hence Gaby Agis revealed she played on and disrupted expectations linked to images of an idealized feminine beauty that had been projected on to her when younger.31 Another contemporary dance artist acknowledged that “People have an image of me moving in a certain way . . . I’ll try to push beyond that.”32 He had experimented with ways of avoiding “movement that gives very visual cues,” that he felt encourages the audience to interpret dance in relation to “past references,” since his interest is “the premise of entering an unknown.”33 In contrast, to avoid his work being dismissed as “only entertainment,” a black British jazz dancer revealed he was developing a number of strategies to challenge expectations including speaking directly to the audience in order to orientate their attention to the nuanced artistry of his dancing.34 More recently, working collaboratively with the artist Bruce Sharp on the participatory performance installation, “The Possibilities of Different Geographies,” we aimed to open up everyday movement for scrutiny. Following Amelia Jones35 and Sarah Ahmed’s36 emphasis on the phenomenological experience of disorientation as a necessary element in the engagement with otherness, we set simple movement tasks (which can be performed by “audience” or “performers”) in a sound and light environment which disrupts their ordinariness. Our aim is to offer opportunities for participants to consider the assumptions that shape their embodied experiences in a work that includes moments for personal reflection and discussion.37 The above suggests that some artists are aware of how they negotiate the significance of dancing in the live moment of performance. That the strategies utilized include breaking down the barriers between speech and movement perhaps suggests tacit recognition of the “intercorporeity” Merleau-Ponty postulated.

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THE NEGOTIATION OF SIGNIFICANCE AS IMPORTANT TO THE AESTHETIC VALUES ATTRIBUTED TO DANCE AS ART So far, in relation to current dance practices, I have argued that engagement with others through dance has the potential to engender shifts in sensibility that may provide for changes in how we understand ourselves, others and the world we share. But, even if this is accepted, it could be countered that such aspects of significance are of little aesthetic relevance. There is not space here to do justice to the many debates regarding aesthetics in relation to dance, but I will briefly summarize my own understanding of aesthetic judgments in order to explain why I find an embodied intersubjective engagement with dance important to its aesthetic appreciation and current position as art. In general terms I am in agreement with Graham McFee’s finding that art status is “transfigurational” in that it is by virtue of a dance being presented within an arts context that encourages the audience to savor it as such.38 Further, for McFee, the aesthetic properties of dance are not sufficient reason to identify it as art. This is a useful position when what might traditionally be thought of as aesthetic qualities, such as harmonic dynamic or spatial forms, that once were perhaps thought of as features of dance as art, are often challenged in much contemporary dance work. A further influence on my understanding of the relationship of aesthetics to art is, however, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu who argues how it is the construction of modern art as a “relatively autonomous field of production” which “makes pure aesthetics possible.”39 In relation to the “pure” modernist aesthetics advanced by figures such as Clement Greenberg40 and Roger Fry,41 which prioritized formal aesthetics qualities over content and established an aesthetic sensibility as distanced from everyday concerns, the capacity for dance to negotiate difference might seem aesthetically irrelevant. However, Bourdieu’s analysis, while acknowledging the value of modernist aesthetics in opposing those structuralist and Marxist approaches to art that reduce the significance of arts to mere cultural reflection, situates historically the often universalist neo-Kantian modernist theories of philosophical aesthetics. Hence, for Bourdieu, aesthetic values in relation to modern art are related to a particular cultural field that is set apart from, but not completely impervious to, (changing) values and circumstances in wider society. More recently, a post-modern sensibility has made the relationship between the field of arts and wider society more complex. In parallel with all the arts, current dance works may challenge the boundaries between art and “life,” incorporate conceptual reflections on art and/or dance, and embrace the products and practices of popular cultures and mass media. Further, in a global context, dance works may draw upon artistic traditions that have developed in cultures with very different understandings of art and its relationship to everyday life than those informing (Western) modernist art. In such a climate, the relevance of aesthetic qualities and /or experience to something being valued as art have been challenged and new modalities of aesthetic experience have been posited in response. By the end of the twentieth century, as Richard Shusterman42 has pointed out, a shift in the wider arts world toward conceptual art led to the turn away from the centralizing of aesthetic experience.43 While the “relational” aesthetics posited by the art critic Nicolas Bourriard, in response to art works that created spaces for “spectator participation,”44 proposed that art had turned away from conventional aesthetics to become “ways of living and models of action within the existing real.”45 For Bourriard, “intersubjectivity becomes the quintessence of artistic practice.”46

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Bourriard’s relational aesthetics provides one example of the new ways in which “art” is understood. Yet once brought under the category of “art,” an object, event, or system of relations becomes, even if momentarily, absorbed into the “art world.” There is still an expectation that the art in question can be appreciated in terms of the values of an artistic field as distinct to its functional, financial, entertainment, moral, or spiritual worth. Just what is valued is perhaps best understood as context dependent: in relation to current dance performances there may be a range of aesthetic frameworks through which they can be appreciated. However, given the extent to which current societies are struggling to incorporate people from many different cultural backgrounds with varied values and beliefs, where dancing is presented as art, I propose that those moments when audiences and performers experience a “journey together”47 may add to the aesthetic value of the performance. The fact that people are able to experience a sense of shared engagement with the work is not a condition of its artistic value, but in current circumstances it can be an element to appreciate as important to the aesthetic value of dancing as art. Where a work engages a wide variety of people with different social and cultural backgrounds in this sense of a shared realm (albeit one that is not completely mutually understood) it may well be thought to be of particular significance. Such an approach to the appreciation of art may seem very different to traditional aesthetics. However, recognizing how modern aesthetics were founded in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790), I consider that those moments when, through engagement with others dancing, we sense ourselves sharing in an understanding of the world we inhabit, we are perhaps more in keeping with a Kantian formulation of aesthetic judgment than formalist and modernist variants might suggest.48 If we grant that the urge to society is natural to man but that his fitness and propensity for it, i.e. sociability, is a requirement of man as a creature with a vocation for society and hence is a property pertaining to his humanity, then we must also inevitably regard taste as an ability to judge whatever allows us to communicate even our feeling to everyone else, and hence regard taste as a means of furthering something that everyone’s natural inclination demands.49 The practices of those dance artists which may seem to engender communicative experience across difference may be viewed as relating to those aspects of Kant’s philosophy that suggest a humanist, moral dimension to aesthetic experience. For Kant the motivation to comprehend from others’ points of view was part of an inherent social contract he understood through theoretical commitment to the possibility of a universal (or synthetic a priori) moral law “given . . . as a fact of pure reason.”50 However, these artists’ humanism is one reworked in the context of post-modernity in order to recognize the full complexities of intersubjective engagement when the shared universal values Kant argued for cannot be presumed. The intercorporeal dimension to the intersubjective engagement, that I have proposed as important to the negotiation of the significance of dance, is beyond the scope of traditional aesthetics which have relied upon purely cognitive models of perception. The understanding of the relationship between consciousness and world that underlies many formulations of aesthetic modernism does not allow for the embodied experience of “ontological reciprocity” that characterizes that relationship as analyzed by MerleauPonty.51 Yet, as Paul Crowther52 has explored, Kant’s aesthetics can be developed in new ways. It is pertinent that, for Merleau-Ponty, it is in Kant’s aesthetics that he finds a significant change in the formulation of the relationship between consciousness and

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world. While elsewhere Merleau-Ponty is critical of how Kant articulated the relationship between subject and object,53 in relation to Kant’s aesthetics Merleau-Ponty recognizes how “the subject is no longer the universal thinker of objects rigorously interrelated, the positing power who subjects the manifold to the law of understanding.”54 Moreover, current developments in how perception is understood and theorized propose more dynamic and interactive models than those that underpinned traditional approaches to the perception of art.55 There is thus potential to develop approaches to aesthetics that recognize the embodied and interactive dimension of perceptual experience in order to update aesthetics in relation to much current thinking about the nature of perception. Particularly when works of art, such as dances, are viewed as embodied acts it becomes important to consider the reciprocal interrelationships between seer and seen in order to reconsider the ethical dimensions to how aesthetic value is attributed.

CONCLUSION Writing from the perspective of a dancer, my aim is to offer philosophers avenues to explore in relation to the significance of dancing. Rooted in the corporeal, the potential for dance to negotiate different ways of bodily being and new ways of understanding the “lived world” stands in contrast to the presentation of dance as an (modernist) object for aesthetic contemplation. I have developed upon the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty to explore the intercorporeal experience of difference in order to suggest how engaging with dance may open people up to different ways of being. Further, although within traditional modernist aesthetics it can be argued such dimensions of the experience of dancing may be considered as having little aesthetic relevance, I have considered how the capacity for dancing to negotiate significance across difference may be understood to have aesthetic value within a contemporary context. Such an aesthetics draws upon an understanding of embodiment that is far removed from the conceptual frameworks that often underpin traditional aesthetics. However, an emphasis on how intercorporeal transactions provide for a sense of embodied engagement between dancer and audience may provide grounds for fruitful exploration of the ethical dimensions of aesthetics in relation to dance.

NOTES 1.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 25–26.

2.

This assumption is reliant on an understanding of societies as (unlikely) mono cultures, or of theater arts as confined within a dominant cultural hegemony. Until as recently as the late twentieth century such a position underpinned analysis of dance as “social and cultural products which embody, and are created and received in relation to, the conventions and traditions of a particular time and place” (P. Hodgens, “Interpreting The Dance,” in Janet Adshead, ed., Dance Analysis [London: Dance Books, 1988], pp. 60–81, at p. 65).

3.

John Martin, “Dance as a Means of Communication,” in R. Copeland and M. Cohen, eds., What is Dance? Readings in Theory and Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1946] 1983), pp. 22–23. This is not to discount more nuanced, recent analyses of kinesthesia in Matthew Reason and Dee Reynolds, “Kinesthesia, Empathy, and Related Pleasures: An Inquiry into Audience Experiences of Watching Dance,” Dance Research Journal, 42: 2

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(2010): 49–75; Susan Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2011). 4.

Jane Carr, “Embodiment, Appreciation and Dance: Issues in relation to an exploration of the experiences of London based, ‘non-aligned’ artists,” unpublished thesis, London: University of Roehampton, 2008 (http://roehampton.openrepository.com/roehampton/ bitstream/10142/47593/13/openning.pdf). Jane Carr, “Dance as a Site of Intertwining: Re-considering the Embodied Interrelationships Between Dancer, Choreographer and Audience for the Twenty-First Century,” in Daniel Dinkgraffe, ed., Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2013).

5.

David Best, Expression in Movement and the Arts (London: Lepus Books, 1974).

6.

Graham McFee, Understanding Dance (London: Routledge, 1992).

7.

Carr, “Embodiment, Appreciation and Dance.”

8.

Interview in 2003, cited in Carr, “Embodiment, Appreciation and Dance,” p. 155.

9.

In particular, the writings of Sondra Houghton-Fraleigh and Suzanne Kozel have been very influential in bringing Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology to the dance field. Suzanne Kozel: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Sandra Horton-Fraleigh, Dance and the Lived Body (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987).

10. Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, pp. 25–26. 11. Ibid., 116–117. 12. Ibid., 119. 13. Ibid., 153–154. 14. Carr, “Embodiment, Appreciation and Dance”; Carr, “LandMark: Dance as a Site of Intertwining,” Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, 6:1 (2014): 47–58 15. Marcel Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” in The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 130–155 at p. 143. 16. Ibid., 138. 17. Ibid., 139. 18. Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, p. 3. 19. Ibid., 8. 20. Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining—The Chiasm” p. 152. 21. Elizabeth Grosz, “Merleau-Ponty and Iragaray in the Flesh,” in Dorothea Olkowski and J. Morley, eds., Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World (State University of New York Press, 1993, 1999), pp. 145–166, at p. 37. 22. I have argued elsewhere that it is in Merleau-Ponty’s recognition of the continued openness of self to other that perhaps can be found the potential for a more fluid experience of identities (gendered or otherwise) that has the capacity to destabilize those assumptions that place limits upon them (Carr, “Dance as a Site of Intertwining”). 23. Amelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 224. 24. Carr, “Embodiment, Appreciation and Dance”; Carr, “LandMark: Dance as a Site of Intertwining.” 25. Kym Maclaren, “Intercorporeality, Intersubjectivity and the Problem of ‘Letting Others Be’; Figures and Grounds of the Flesh,” Chiasmi International 4 (2002): 187–208. 26. Carr,“LandMark: Dance as a Site of Intertwining.”

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27. S. Ness, “Foucault’s Turn from Phenomenology: Implications for Dance Studies,” Dance Research Journal 43:2 (Winter 2011): 19–32. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [trans. A. Sheridan] (London: Penguin [first published 1975], 1977). 28. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, p. 29. 29. Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining—The Chiasm,” p. 144. 30. Carr, “Embodiment, Appreciation and Dance.” 31. Gaby Agis interview in 2003, cited in Carr, “Embodiment, Appreciation and Dance,” p. 155. 32. “Artist D,” cited in Carr, “Embodiment, Appreciation and Dance,” p. 170. 33. Ibid., 150. 34. “Artist B,” cited in Carr, “Embodiment, Appreciation and Dance,” p. 171. 35. Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts. 36. Sarah Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006). 37. Jane Carr and Bruce Sharp, “The Possibilities of Different Geographies,” Choreographic Practices, 9:2 (2019): 333–354. 38. Graham McFee, Artistic Judgement: A Framework for Philosophical Aesthetics (Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 2011). 39. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), p. 189. 40. Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in C. Harrison and P. Woods, eds., Art in Theory 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell, [1965], 1992); pp. 754–760. 41. Roger Fry, “Art as Form,” in John Hospers, ed., Introductory Readings in Aesthetics (New York: The Free Press, [first published 1926], 1969), pp. 100–114. 42. Richard Shusterman, “The End of Aesthetic Experience,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 55:1 (1997): 29–41. 43. While agreeing that aesthetic experience cannot provide necessary or sufficient conditions with which to define art, Shusterman suggests that “it might be regarded as a more general background condition for art” (Shusterman, “The End of Aesthetic Experience,” p. 38). 44. Nicolas Bourriad, Relational Aesthetics, trans. S. Pleasance and F. Wood (Dijon: Les Presses Du Réel [1998], 2002), p. 25. 45. Ibid., 13. 46. Ibid., 22. 47. Mehta interview in 2003 cited in Carr, “Embodiment, Appreciation and Dance,” p. 157. 48. See for example: Greenberg, “Modernist Painting”; Fry, “Art as Form.” 49. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. W. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing [1790, 297], 1987), p. 163. 50. Ibid. 51. Paul Crowther, Art and Embodiment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 7. 52. Ibid. 53. For instance, Merleau-Ponty, drawing on Husserl, posits an important distinction between Kant’s “noetic analysis which bases the world on the synthesizing activity of the subject,” and the phenomenological “noematic reflection which remains within the object and, instead of begetting it, brings to light its fundamental unity.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty,

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Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London and New York: Routledge, [1945], 1962) p. x. 54. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. lxxxi. 55. See, for example, J. Kevin O’Regan and Alva Noë, “A Sensorimotor Account of Vision and Visual Consciousness,” Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 24 (2001): 939–1031.

CHAPTER 1.7

Dance as Embodied Aesthetics 1

BARBARA GAIL MONTERO

The former New York Times dance critic John Martin tells us that in order to appreciate dance fully, one must make use of what he refers to as “kinesthetic sympathy,”2 which he understands as a feeling of movement obtained through watching someone else move, describing, in one review, a dancer’s movement as providing a “rare beauty and a powerful kinesthetic transfer.” The feeling of bodily movement seems to be an aesthetic experience for Martin, something that no critic worth her word-count ought to ignore. Dancers, themselves, sometimes allude to the aesthetic experience of moving. For example, when they say that a movement feels awkward or graceful or powerful or precise, they mean that it kinesthetically feels this way: through proprioception—the sense that provides nonvisual information about where our limbs and other parts of our bodies are in space—they are aware of the varied aesthetic qualities that bodily movements can manifest. While the words of dance critics and insights of dancers suggest that proprioception provides a window into the world of dance aesthetics, philosophers have traditionally confined aesthetic experience to the visual and aural. You can see that a dancer’s movement is powerful. You can hear that a piece of music is powerful. But, in the traditional view, you cannot kinesthetically feel power. In this chapter, by examining both the experience of the dancer and the words of the critics, I want to both explain why I think this view is mistaken and to elucidate what I see as an embodied aesthetics of dance.

THE TRADITIONAL VIEW Traditionally, aestheticians, while extoling the virtues of works of art that represent the body, have had little interest in the body as perceived from the inside. Indeed, it has not been uncommon to exclude the so-called “lower” or “bodily” senses from the realm of bodily experience. These are the senses, according to George Santayana, that “call our attention to some part of our own body, and which make no object so conspicuous to us as the organ in which they arise.”3 Typically, only vision and audition—the “higher” or “intellectual” sense—escape this demotion, as they are seen as the only senses that direct our attention primarily to external objects rather than to the sensations themselves. In the traditional view, as D. W. Prall explains it, “experience is genuinely and characteristically aesthetic only as it occurs in transactions with external objects of sense.”4 Before Prall, we have Hegel telling us that “art is related only to the two theoretical senses of sight and 82

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hearing, while smell, taste and touch remain excluded from the enjoyment of art.”5 And before that were the ancient Greeks, who, according to Francis Hutcheson, “observe[ed] a peculiar dignity of the senses of seeing and hearing that in their objects we discern the kalon [beautiful], which we do not ascribe to the objects of the other senses.”6 Aesthetic experience, according to these thinkers, while sensuous (depending on sense experience), is not supposed to be sensual pleasure, not pleasure in our own bodily sensations. Or in Santayana’s words, it is an experience in which, “the soul . . . is glad to forget its connection with the body.”7 In contrast to the traditional view that denigrates the bodily even while elevating the body, I aim to make sense of dancers’ aesthetic experience of their own movements, as well as audience members’ aesthetic experience of watching dance.8

AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE FROM THE DANCER’S POINT OF VIEW Dancers’ aesthetic experience of their own movements is an example of what I refer to elsewhere as “embodied aesthetics” which is the view that “one can have an aesthetic experience of one’s own body as perceived through senses other than vision and audition.”9 And the sense by which a dancer perceives the aesthetic qualities of the body is proprioception. It is via proprioception that you can know in the dark that your arms are raised, or that your knees are bent. And when dancers are talking about “feeling” one movement as better than another, they mean that they can proprioceptively feel this, that is, that via proprioception, they are aware of their dancing as exciting, or graceful, or brilliant, or any other number of aesthetic qualities that bodily movements can manifest. The way in which proprioception provides us with a window into the aesthetic realm was illustrated by Durell Comedy, who is a dancer with the Mark Morris Company. Comedy once told a class he was instructing, and which I happened to be taking, to not just do the movement, but do the movement and experience it in the same way that he was experiencing it: “I want you to feel what I feel,” he said. Why is this important? While I cannot speak for Comedy, my guess—which is a guess from a former professional ballet dancer—is that in part he felt that it was unlikely that we would achieve the look he wanted unless we embodied the feeling he had. Achieving the right inner feeling of movement was a pathway to achieving the right outer appearance. But I also think that he may have also wanted to provide us with the valuable aesthetic experience for itself. Furthermore, after the class, he would be performing the full piece of which he was teaching an excerpt. If we felt what he was feeling when we tried the steps in class, Martin’s “kinesthetic transfer” would, arguably, be all the more powerful. Thomas Aquinas, a proponent of the traditional view of aesthetics, pointed out that “we do not speak of beautiful tastes and beautiful odors.”10 But even if one thinks that this is a stumbling block for a gustatory or olfactory aesthetics, it is not an impediment to a proprioceptive aesthetics since it is natural, at least for dancers, to talk of experiencing beauty and other aesthetic qualities proprioceptively. A dancer, during a rehearsal onstage—a situation in which there are no mirrors from which to glean visual feedback— may claim that a certain movement or position is beautiful or, since dancers tend to be a self-critical lot, complain that the beauty, or whatever other aesthetic quality he or she is aiming at, is lacking: “The movement is too abrupt,” “The line is ugly,” “I’m not feeling the connections,” are all phrases that roll naturally off a dancer’s tongue. “It doesn’t feel

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right” is a valid complaint for a dancer to make not only because a movement that feels right often looks right, but also because dancers deserve to experience the grace, power, precision or humor (or whatever aesthetic quality the movement aims to capture) of their own dancing; it makes all the pain worth it. It is not an inviolable prerogative—some movements might never feel right, but might be called for since they look right nonetheless. However, many choreographers, in creating a work, consider dancers’ opinions about how a movement feels. To say that dancers make claims that suggest that they experience aesthetic properties via proprioception is not to say that they never talk about how they look. They talk about this too. Endlessly. Yet, sometimes vision is not a practical means of evaluating one’s own movement. For example, turning one’s head to look in the mirror can lead to performing a movement inaccurately since head directions are components of dancers’ movements, and a correct head position might preclude even taking a peek. Moreover, on stage, productive visual evaluation of one’s own movements falls by the wayside. Even ignoring these practical impediments, a trained dancer may at times trust proprioception more than vision. Sometimes this is because proprioception allows one to see in the mind’s eye what a movement looks like. However, although proprioception can provide a platform upon which visual imagination works, sometimes proprioception itself is the vehicle of aesthetic experience; at these times, one appreciates the sheer proprioceptive quality of movement—or so I shall argue. In fact, a style of dance called “Gaga” not only takes place in studios with covered mirrors so as to remove the temptation to look, but explicitly encourages dancers to forget their visual appearance and focus on ideas, the space around them, and their proprioceptive experience of movement.11 Although Gaga deliberately eschews the visual, in many, if not most forms of dance, the visual and the proprioceptive feed each other: dancers take their own bodily movements to be proprioceptively graceful (for example), in part because they judge that if seen, these movements would look graceful, and they take certain bodily movements of others to be visually graceful, in part because they judge that if they were to move like so, such movements would feel graceful.

ARE FIRST-PERSON REPORTS RELIABLE? Richard Shusterman states that “philosophical accounts of aesthetic experience would be enriched by more attention to artists’ experience.”12 In citing dancers’ own perspective on their art, I hope to be achieving such enrichment. But some might be skeptical that what dancers say is a reliable guide to what they are experiencing. It is sometimes pointed out that we are frequently mistaken about the contents of our own minds and therefore neither introspection nor first-person reports can be trusted.13 However, although I assume that sometimes we are mistaken about what is going on in our own minds, especially with regards to the causes for why we are acting in a certain way, I also think that, in general, as long as there are no good grounds to question any particular report about what someone says he or she is experiencing, if someone claims to be experiencing p, this is defeasible evidence for the view that he or she is experiencing p. For example, if you have good reason to believe that Sally is lying or that she is likely self-deceived (based on, say, personal interactions), or that she is responding to leading questions, or that she has been reading about a theory that may be coloring her own experience, or that the results of a psychology experiment or a philosophical argument show that the type of introspection she claims to employ is more likely wrong than right, then it may be

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reasonable to doubt Sally’s reports about her experiential life. However, barring any good reasons for doubt, we ought to take Sally’s and others’ first-person accounts of their own mental processes at face value. This methodological principle, which I rely on, follows roughly from what Tyler Burge calls the “acceptance principle,” which holds that “a person is entitled to accept as true something that is presented as true and that is intelligible to him, unless there are stronger reasons not to do so.”14 I have claimed that dancers talk in ways that indicate that they make judgments about how to move based on proprioceptive information. What they say indicates that they uphold the thesis of embodied aesthetics with respect to proprioception. The question, then, is whether there are good reasons to doubt what they say is correct.

IS PROPRIOCEPTION SENSORY? One reason one might think that dancers must be mistaken about their insights into the proprioceptive-aesthetic qualities of their own movements flows out of Elizabeth Anscombe’s arguments against the idea that proprioception provides us with sensory information.15 When we come to learn (nonvisually) of the movement’s positions of our limbs we do so, Anscombe tells us, without having any sensory awareness of where they are, without perceiving them, without what she refers to as “observation.” If she is correct, we have reason to doubt the dancer’s claims since if there are no proprioceptive sensations, it would not be possible for such sensations to ground aesthetic experience.16 Why does Anscombe think that our knowledge of our movements and positions is not observational? She argues that if we were to have observational, or proprioceptive knowledge of our bodily positions and movements, it would need to be based on what she calls “separately describable” sensations. A separately describable sensation, as I understand her, is merely the sensation of one part of an entire movement. In having our legs crossed, Anscombe tells us, we might have separately describable sensations of tingles, pressure, and touch. But this, she thinks, does not provide us with enough information to ground our knowledge that our legs are crossed. And thus she concludes that proprioception cannot ground knowledge of the movements and positions of our own bodies.17 If not via proprioception, how, then, does Anscombe think that we come to have knowledge of our bodily movements and positions? In her view, we know the positions and movements of our body because we have directed our body to move or assume a position; we know that our legs are crossed, for example, because we have directed them to cross.18 As she sees it, just as an architect might know what a completed building looks like without seeing it (because she has directed the building to be built in a certain way), we can know where our limbs are without having sensations of them. Our knowledge of our bodily movements and positions, according to Anscombe, is not based on sensory experiences. And if this is correct, dancers cannot actually experience the beauty, grace, and so forth of their movements via proprioceptive sensations. I would like to suggest, however, that although a dancer may know where her limbs are because she has directed them to go there, I think this is not the only way dancers and others come to understand their bodily positions and movements. When Anscombe attempts to identify the sensations associated with having crossed legs, she mentions that tingles, pressure, and touch are not normally sufficient for us to know that our legs are crossed. However, just because we do not typically arrive at knowledge of our bodily positions via those sensations does not mean that we do not typically arrive at this knowledge via the sense of proprioception itself, for proprioception is what it is and not

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something else like the sense of pressure or the experience of a tingle. Moreover, given that we can have knowledge of entirely passive movements as well as bodily movements that fail to match our intended movements, directors’ knowledge cannot be the entire story.19 It seems, then, that Anscombe’s argument that proprioception is not based on sensory experiences does not disembody aesthetics, for it does not provide us with a reason to think that dancers do not experience the aesthetic qualities of their movements. Are there other reasons to think that proprioception has no sensory component? Some claim there are no such things as sensations at all; neurological activity exists, but not sensations.20 This position, which, in the philosophy of mind, is referred to as “eliminativism,” I shall ignore in what follows save for pointing out that if eliminativism is true, then at least all types of sensory experiences—the lower and the higher, those directed to oneself and those directed toward others—are on the same plane: all equally nonexistent. I shall also put to the side any other arguments for the nonexistence of proprioceptive sensations, if there are any, and in what follows assume that proprioception provides not only sensory, but, at times, conscious sensory information about bodily movements and positions (for a further defense of the idea that proprioception is a veritable sense see Ritchie and Carruthers21). The question I turn to now is whether it is possible to reap information about aesthetic properties via proprioceptive sensations.

ADDRESSING THE DISTANCING REQUIREMENT FOR AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE I claim that the dancer through proprioception is able to experience aesthetic properties of her bodily movements. But just what is aesthetic experience? This is no easy question to answer since the search for necessary and sufficient conditions for aesthetic experience has led to a rather tangled web of sometimes contradictory views.22 Dancers’ embodied experience seems to readily fit under the umbrella of some of these. For example, it has been claimed by Monroe Beardsley,23 John Dewey,24 and others that aesthetic experience must be unified. Although what this comes to is itself debated, in at least one good sense of the term, the dancer’s embodied aesthetic experience meets this criterion since the dancer herself, if her claims are ultimately accepted, is aware of a distinct kind of experience when she evaluates the aesthetic qualities of her movements proprioceptively. It has also been thought that, in Bernard Bosanquet’s words, “the aesthetic want is not a perishable want, which ceases in proportion as it is gratified.”25 But although one may get physically exhausted in moving, as one may get physically exhausted traipsing through a museum, one seems to never tire of the experience of moving in aesthetically valuable ways. However, rather than systematically plowing through each proposed criterion and judging whether it permits dancers’ propriocpetive experience of movement to count as aesthetic, let me focus on addressing what I see as the most challenging criteria for the thesis of embodied aesthetics: the related criteria of aesthetic distance and shareability. Many have thought that the aesthetic senses must, in some sense, distance the observer from the observed.26 Yet, if proprioception is, as Oliver Sacks puts it, “the inner sense by which the body is aware of itself,”27 what is observed and the observed seem to be about as close together as you can get. Thus, on at least a first pass, the distancing requirement would seem to preclude proprioceptive embodied aesthetic experience. But what exactly does it mean to distance an observer from the observed? The concept of distance takes on different guises; there is physical distance, practical distance, psychical

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distance, and what I like to refer to as “metaphysical distance.” Fortunately, the first three of these are readily addressed. Attaining physical distance requires that the object of aesthetic appreciation is not in direct contact with the observer. But contact is pervasive. The light waves that bounce off a painting must come in contact with one’s eyes, no less than the molecules wafting from the perfume bottle must come in contact with one’s nose. And so, let us simply reject this as a criterion for an experience to be aesthetic. The practical distancing requirement mandates that no practical need or compulsion is satisfied in aesthetic experience. However, although one might dance to pay the bills, one need not dance for practical rewards and barring such afflictions as St.Vitus dance—a neurological disorder characterized by rapid, jerking movements—one is not physically compelled to dance. Finally, attaining what Edward Bullough refers to as “psychical distance”28 implies that in aesthetic experience one is not in the same psychological state as one would be in if the represented act were really occurring (for example, one ought not to climb up on the stage and prevent Hamlet from slaying Polonius). But whether or not this is an appropriate requirement for having an aesthetic experience of art, it would seem that the dancers’ proprioceptive experience of dancing easily satisfies it since dancing seems to naturally distance the dancers from what they are portraying—there is too much technique to think about to ever forget entirely that you are a person with a body rather than, for example, ethereal sylph. Diderot29 emphasized the importance of not losing the self in acting, arguing that the consummate actor deliberately controls her expressions of emotion, else she would not be able to perform as consistently as she does. The same could be said of dance: to perform well, dancers need to distance themselves from their roles in this way. The metaphysical distancing requirement, however, seems to pose a greater obstacle for an embodied aesthetics of dance. Satisfying it requires us to distinguish in aesthetic experience the object one senses from the bodily sensation. In other words, it requires aesthetic experience to be about an object that is distinct from the experience of that object. In still other words, it mandates that in aesthetic experience we must find both a subject of experience and an object of experience. Can proprioception provide this? Metaphysical distancing is important because it is thought to set aesthetic experience apart from mere sensory experience, such as the sensation of pain. The aesthetic senses, in contrast to our sense of pain, are supposed to direct us to objects in the world, which, in turn, is important since it is thought to permit what Kant thought of as the aesthetic virtue of shareability. According to Kant,30 aesthetic judgments (judgments based on aesthetic experiences) must be “shareable” and capable of grounding genuine disagreement. “A pinprick hurts” is not a shareable judgment; if you say it does and I say it does not we are just expressing our own opinions about this. In contrast, “this table is marble” is shareable; barring vagueness, if we disagree, one of us is right the other wrong. Aesthetic judgments are not the same as judgments about the table, in Kant’s view. If correct, they are not objectively valid, since, according to Kant, they do depend on our experience of aesthetic pleasure, but they must be intersubjectively valid, that is, though based on a feeling, they are judgments everyone ought to agree about. Metaphysical distancing would seem to be a necessary requirement for such shareablity.

THE SUBJECT AND OBJECT OF PROPRIOCEPTION Does proprioception permit metaphysical distancing? We can distinguish the object one senses from the bodily sensation in the realm of sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing. For

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example, when I see an apple, the experience is distinct from the apple. Proprioception, although it is a type of self-perception, also distinguishes subject from object since the self in question is not merely sensory. As Merleau-Ponty31 points out, we perceive our bodies as both subject and object, both as the locus of sensory awareness and as the object of such awareness. He uses touch as an example to illustrate this point: when one hand touches the other, he explains, it is possible to move back and forth between noticing the tactile experience of touch and what one is having an experience of.32 To bring this idea into focus, consider an artist who creates beautiful shapes with her hands; she sculpts not only with her hands but also sculpts her own hands. If she created a representation of a bird in flight with just her left hand, she could, by representing her body both as subject and as object, experience the soft curves and strong lines of her creation by touching and exploring her left hand with her right; such an action would effect both a subjective tactile experience (the tactile experience in her right hand) and, intimately intertwined with this, an experience of an object: her left hand. Perceiving the body as object, rather than as subject only, allows for misrepresentation. Proprioception does as well. One way to misrepresent the world is to represent p as q when p is not q. When I look at a field and see it is covered with snow when it is actually covered with clover in bloom, my visual experience misrepresents the field. Proprioception can similarly misrepresent the world. Choreographers, rehearsal directors, ballet masters and mistresses, for example, often see dancers make mistakes based on such misrepresentations: a dancer might proprioceptively experience his knee as perfectly straight, when it is in fact bent, or his leg as directly behind him, when it is off to the side. More dramatic, one can misrepresent p as q when p fails to exist. Proprioceptive mistakes occur with amputees who have phantom limbs; in this case they may represent their right leg as bent, when they no longer have a right leg. Of course, even pain judgments can be mistaken in this more dramatic sense: with phantom limb pain, one can feel foot pain without having a foot. Yet, arguably, judgments of pain are not mistaken in the former sense: if a pain appears sharp, then it is sharp. However, like vision, which represents actual objects in the world as being a certain way and is capable of misrepresenting them, proprioception seems to represent one’s body as being in a certain way and is capable of misrepresenting it: one’s limb may proprioceptively appear straight when it is bent. Does proprioception, then, like vision, represent something in the world? Although there is a sense in which one’s own body is not part of the world (when the world is considered as that which exists apart from oneself), this is not the relevant sense here; rather, the relevant contrast here is between one’s body and one’s bodily sensations, between the positions and movements of one’s limbs and the sensations one has of these positions and movement, between body as subject and body as object; proprioception admits such a contrast.33 Proprioception may be a type of self-perception, but the self in question is not merely sensory. Thus, proprioceptive experience, it seems, need not be doomed to exist solely in the realm of the mere agreeable, which, according to Kant,34 is entirely subjective and appeals only to the senses and not, in addition, to our aesthetic sensibilities.35

THE “MINIMAL REQUIREMENT” FOR AN OBSERVER OF DANCE Though proprioceptive judgments can be about objects, the analogy to Merleau-Ponty’s example of touch is not complete. The artist feels her left hand with her right, but another

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person could also reach out and touch the artist’s hand. When we disagree about what is covering a field (snow or clover), we are disagreeing about properties in the world that are visually presented to us both. However, the body I proprioceive is the one you see. Thus, unlike touch and vision, the object of my proprioception would seem to be shareable with another person only in so far as the other person employs touch or vision (or, indeed, hearing or olfaction). You and I can both touch your hand. However, although I can proprioceive my hand, you, it seems, can see it, or touch it (or hear it or smell it), but cannot proprioceive it.36 Does this mean that in proprioceptieving one’s own body, we cannot satisfy Kant’s requirement that the object of aesthetic experience needs to be shareable? Proprioception, then, seems private in a way that the traditional aesthetic senses are not. To defend the view that proprioception can be a means to appreciating aesthetic properties, one might question the inviolability of Kant’s shareability requirement.37 However, let me instead ask: Is the object of your proprioceptive experience perceived only by you? Or is there a sense in which you can proprioceive someone else’s movements? I would like to suggest that our bodies are a window not only into the aesthetic properties of our own movements, but also into the aesthetic properties of the movements of others, in other words, that via “kinesthetic sympathy” or “motor-perception” we may come to appreciate various aesthetic qualities of the movements of others. As strange as this may sound, observers, I want to suggest, can “proprioceive” a dancer’s movements; sitting motionless in a darkened theater, audience members can sense in their own bodies, or have a “motor-perception” of, the movements of the dancers behind the proscenium arch. A large body of neuroscientific research suggests that there are neural underpinnings for the sub-personal components of motor-perception. Researchers have found that certain areas of the brain—areas that have been variously referred to as the “mirror system,” the “action-observation network,” and the “action resonance circuit”—exhibit increased activity when one executes a movement or sees that same movement performed by others (the literature here is vast; see, Kilner and Lemon38 for a review). Behavioral studies have also supported the idea that visual impressions of movement in some sense resonate in the observer’s body. For example, it has been shown that subjects in perceiving static photographs of an individual in motion are more likely to mistake the position of the individual as being further along in the action than in being in a position that is prior to the one depicted in the photograph, indicating that even in perceiving static images, we can represent dynamic information.39 Moreover, subjects tend to perceive geometrical figures in a way that is consistent with how that figure is naturally drawn. For example, if subjects see a circle being traced by a point of light which speeds up along the top and bottom of the circle and slows down along the sides, subjects tend to perceive an ellipse rather than a circle.40 Since we slow down in drawing sharp curves, one explanation of what is going on here is that our understanding of the circle is not entirely visual; we also understand its shape by feeling what it is like to draw it. When we watch a shape being drawn, the motion of drawing resonates in our own bodies. And there are even studies that support the existence of a kind of audio motor-perception, in which listening to the sound that a pencil on paper would make when drawing an ellipse flattens out one’s drawings of circles.41 This research suggests that proprioception is shareable, yet it does not tell us anything about whether it is also capable of grounding aesthetic experience for observers of dance. However, support for this view comes from observing how dance critics talk about

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dance. As I mentioned at the start, though he uses the term “kinesthesia” rather than “proprioception,” the dance critic John Martin sees “kinesthetic sympathy” as highly important to observers’ aesthetic judgments of dance.42 In his words, “not only does the dancer employ movement to express his ideas, but . . . the spectator must also employ movement in order to respond to the dancer’s intention and understand what he is trying to convey.”43 And, according to Martin, it is not just that some dance critics may employ kinesthetic sympathy, but, going perhaps even further than I would, he claims that “[t]he irreducible minimum of equipment demanded of a spectator is a kinesthetic sense in working condition.”44 Accordingly, his reviews of dance were rife with references to the qualities of dance appreciated via kinesthetic sympathy, or motor-perception. For example, he speaks of the dynamic variation in a dancer’s movement that gave it a “rare beauty and a powerful kinesthetic transfer,” or “[a] gesture which sets up all kinds of kinesthetic reactions,” or even a dancer who “leaves you limp with vicarious kinesthetic experience.” If proprioception grounds not only judgments about the aesthetic qualities of one’s own movement but also about the movement of others, the objects of proprioception would then easily meet the aesthetic bar. Edwin Denby is another critic who frequently emphasizes the relevance of motorperception in his writings. For example, in a review of a performance of Afternoon of a Faun, he mentions the bodily feeling that results from imitating the depictions of people on Greek vases and bas-reliefs: “The fact is that when the body imitates these poses, the kind of tension resulting expresses exactly the emotion Nijinsky wants to express.”45 He continues: “Both their actual tension and their apparent remoteness, both their plastic clarity and their emphasis by negation on the center of the body (it is always strained between the feet in profile and the shoulders en face)—all these qualities lead up to the complete realization of the faun’s last gesture.”46 Denby is characterizing something kinesthetic: something that we come to understand not through our visual experience alone. Through motor-perception, Denby feels the tension of the dancer’s bodily torque. Denby illustrates how kinesthetic qualities provide insight into what are commonly called the “expressive qualities” of the work. Expressive qualities reveal the emotion represented in a work of art, and Denby’s contention in the review cited above is that Nijinsky expresses discomfiting emotions via the strained and twisted comportment of the faun. In a piece such as this, the dancer’s movements, among other things, also represent some of the expressive qualities of the Debussy score. As such, it is in part via motor-perception that audience members—especially those with dance training— experience both the expressive qualities of a dancer’s movements and, more indirectly, the expressive qualities of the music. Yet the role of motor-perception in aesthetic judgment, as I see it, is not limited to the judgment of expressive qualities since part of the value of watching dance has to do with the motor-perceptual experience of beauty, precision, fluidity, and grace, qualities which are not emotions. In watching a dancer, we not only visually experience the beauty of her movements, but we may motor-perceptually experience it as well. There are numerous other critics who also understand motor perception as a means by which we come to understand and experience aesthetic qualities. Alastair Macaulay, for instance, frequently alludes to motor perception—in one review telling us that Fredrick Ashton’s choreography is “more kinesthetically affecting than any other ballet choreographer’s,” and that in “watching [it], you feel the movement so powerfully through your torso that it is often hard to sit still in your seat.”47 Similarly, Louis Horst describes the “lyric beauty” of a dance choreographed by Anna Sokolow as having “a

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direct appeal to kinesthetic response.”48 And Michael Wade Simpson describes the finale in a piece by Helgi Tomasson as “satisfying musically, kinesthetically and emotionally.”49 How do we know that such critics really have the sorts of experiences they claim to have? Again, as long as there are no good grounds to question such first-person knowledge, it seems that we should take these dance critics’ claims that they have kinesthetic responses to watching dance as defeasible evidence for the truth of such claims. Are there good reasons to think that these dance critics are not experiencing what they write about? Perhaps the strongest argument against kinesthetic sympathy comes from those who claim to not understand what in the world such a thing could be. Because such objectors have never experienced kinesthetic sympathy upon watching dance, they believe that dance critics must simply be making it up. One might try to respond to such doubters by saying, “I have experienced this myself so I know it exists,” yet this approach typically does not take one very far. However, this response combined with an explanation for why such doubters may have never experienced kinesthetic sympathy does, I think, pull some weight. Do we have such an explanation? The experiments on the mirroring system in neuroscience suggest that the mirror response is the most pronounced when one observes movements that are in one’s motor repertoire.50 Thus, it could be that those who doubt the existence of kinesthetic sympathy do not have the relevant motor skills. This is not to say that dance experience is a necessary condition for the ability to feel limp with vicarious kinesthetic sympathy, for example. Other physical activities might suffice for grounding the experience. But it does seem that having a significant amount of dance experience suffices for the ability to feel dancers’ movements in one’s body upon watching dance. Thus, those who doubt the existence of kinesthetic sympathy might want to consider the possibility that a world of embodied aesthetics could open up to them too, if only they had some training.51 Still, one might doubt that a critic’s kinaesthetic sympathy upon watching a dancer move is relevant to the aesthetic qualities of the dancer’s movement (as does McFee). But such doubts, I would like to suggest, are unfounded. Here is an analogy. It seems reasonable to understand scientific knowledge as providing the best picture of what sorts of things exist in the world. Or at least, it seems reasonable to say that if something is theorized by scientists to exist, such as atoms and cells, or if something is classified by scientists in a certain way, such as a whale being classified as a mammal, it is reasonable to think that these things do exist and that these classifications are accurate unless we have very strong arguments to the contrary. (For example, some might take Bas van Fraassen’s argument for constructive empiricism52 to show that we have no reason to think that the posits of science exist.) I think that our attitude toward the posits of art critics, when they are writing in their area of expertise, should be analogous to our attitude toward the posits of scientists when they are writing in their area of expertise. That is, if art critics generally accept something as a work of art (such as a Duchamp ready-made), it is reasonable to accept it as such unless one has good arguments to the contrary. Correlatively, if dance critics generally accept the aesthetic relevance of kinesthetic sympathy, it is reasonable for us to accept it too, unless there are good arguments to the contrary. And, as I have indicated, at least a good number of prominent critics do. Thus, we have more support for the idea that the objects perceived via proprioception are not private in the way that would preclude proprioception from being an aesthetic sense. We might not want to go as far as Alastair Macaulay and claim that watching dance may be “less visual than kinesthetic,”53 but we seem to have good grounds for the claim that conscious

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motor-perception is one pathway to the aesthetic experience of dance. It is not just the bodies of others as represented in painting or statuary, or as visually perceived on stage, that are objects of aesthetic evaluation; one’s own body, via proprioception can also bestow aesthetic pleasure. There are, of course, arguments to the contrary, but it is not clear that there are any good arguments to the contrary. For example, according to Graham McFee, if kinesthetic sympathy exists, it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of dance because “the focus on the performer is not appropriate to an art form such as dance.”54 Rather, for McFee, the choreographer, and not the dancer, is the artist. However, in observing dance, it seems more accurate to say that one is observing the work of a number of artists, including the choreographer, the composer, the musicians, the lighting designer, the set designer, the costume designer, and the dancers. With many dances, some of these aspects should not be the focus of attention. For example, lighting in classical ballet is generally for the purpose of highlighting the dancer and should not be noticed by the audience. However, it seems that the dancer’s movements are not merely for the purpose of highlighting the choreography, as the typical dance review, which spends a significant amount of time discussing the qualities of an individual dancer’s movements, illustrates. Perhaps McFee sees reviews of this sort as misguided. However, it would seem to be incumbent on him to explain why. Another argument against the view that kinesthetic sympathy is aesthetically relevant might proceed like this: Although proprioception may provide insight into how one is actually moving, the aesthetically relevant qualities of movement depend on the visual illusion—the appearance of floating on the stage during a bourrée, of suspending oneself in the air in grand jeté, and so forth—produced by the movement. In other words, what is aesthetically relevant is how a movement (deceptively) looks, not how it actually feels and proprioception only gives us the latter. This argument would be powerful if it were the case that proprioception only provides information about how one is actually moving, for it is indeed true that the aesthetics of dance, particularly ballet, is sometimes based on the creation of visual illusions: leaps that appear to defy gravity, limbs that appear elongated, ease of movement in the presence of enormous effort. However, one can proprioceive an illusory movement, or so I would like to suggest. When one performs a “gravity defying” leap by further extending one’s limbs at its height, one has a proprioceptive sensation of being suspended in mid-air, and the same goes for watching such a leap: what in part makes watching a dancer leap aesthetically satisfying is that we feel the flight. Indeed, I would claim that one of the wonders of dancing—one reason for why dancers will put up with the pain it often involves—is that dance allows one to experience the impossible. If one can proprioceptively experience a gravity-defying leap, this means that there are proprioceptive illusions. That there are such illusions is widely accepted: pilots in flight and in-orbit astronauts may experience proprioceptive illusions related to their position in space, and artificial muscle vibration can create a proprioceptive illusion that one’s limb is bent at a certain angle when it is not.55 These sorts of illusions may be more robust than the proprioceptive illusion one experiences in dance, but at the same time the Mueller-Lyer illusion, for example, is more robust than the visual illusion one has of seeing a dancer defy gravity. So, while the illusory element of the aesthetics of bodily movements cannot be overlooked, we can proprioceive, as well as see, illusory movement. We have, thus, found no reason to doubt that watching dance can deliver a powerful kinesthetic punch.

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OUTRO AND A LINGERING QUESTION Proprioception, then, if I am correct, enables one to perceive aesthetic qualities of one’s own bodily movements. There is a prima facie case to be made in favor of the claim, and the theoretical considerations that might tell against the possibility of proprioception enabling us to perceive aesthetic qualities of our own movements do not stand. Beyond sensing certain aesthetic qualities of our own movements, audience members may base certain aesthetic judgments about dancers in part on the internal experience of movement one has while watching dance. As I have argued, neuroscience and behavioral studies suggest that in watching others move in familiar ways, we represent their movement in our bodies, and the words of dance critics lend support to the view that such motor resonance can be experienced consciously and is aesthetically valuable. In proprioceiving the aesthetic qualities of one’s own movements or in having a kinesthetic response to the aesthetic qualities of the movements of others, the soul, contrary to Santayana’s contention, is intimately connected to the body. Thus dance can be an embodied form of aesthetics. It is not just the bodies that artists represent that are to be revered, but sometimes it is also, from their own point of view, the bodies of the artists themselves. That said, one might have a lingering doubt about my whole approach, for it is sometimes claimed that a deliberate focus on how one is moving hinders one’s performance of that movement. I claim that in focusing on her own movement, a dancer can aesthetically enjoy her own body. But does not deliberate focus on how one is moving stymie one’s performance of that movement? Does not a dancer need to perform automatically and without any thought or awareness at all? Dewey had the right response to this question: “Because the artist is controlled in the process of his work by his grasp of the connection between what he has already done and what he is to do next, the idea that the artist does not think as intently and penetratingly as a scientific inquirer is absurd.”56

NOTES 1.

This paper draws from and develops, in response to the comments of audience members at the 2016 conference, Engagement: Symposium of Philosophy and Dance at Texas State University, my articles “Embodied Aesthetics,” in The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition: Embodied, Embedded, Enactive and Extended, eds. A. Newen, L. de Bruin, and S. Gallagher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 891–910. and “Proprioception as an Aesthetic Sense,” Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 64:2 (2006): 231–242.

2.

John Martin, Introduction to the Dance (New York: Dance Horizons Inc., 1972), p. 15.

3.

George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (New York: Modern Library, 1955), p. 24.

4.

D.W. Prall, Aesthetic Judgment (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1929), pp. 28, 56.

5.

G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols., trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975 [originally published 1835]), p. 38.

6.

Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design, ed. P. Kivy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff [originally published 1725]), p. 47.

7.

Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, p. 24.

8.

Though the tradition goes against me, I am certainly not alone in breaking it. See, for example, Richard Shusterman’s work on what he refers to as “somaesthetics,” a practice that encompasses both theorizing about the body and engaging in various bodily practices that aim to heighten our first-person awareness of our bodies (see below for a review);

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Carolyn Korsmeyer’s defense of the aesthetics of gustatory taste; Dominic McIver Lopes’ defense of the aesthetics of touch; and Barry Smith’s argument against the higher/lower hierarchy of the senses. Richard Shusterman Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Thinking Through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Carolyn Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). Dominic M. Lopes, “Vision, Touch and the Value of Pictures,” British Journal of Aesthetics 42 (2002): 87–97. Barry Smith, “The Chemical Senses,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Perception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 314–351. Barbara Montero, Review of Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics, by Richard Shusterman and Thinking Through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics, by Richard Shusterman, Mind, 124 (495 [2015]): 975–979. 9.

Barbara Montero, “Aesthetics from an Embodied Point of View,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cognition: Embodied, Embedded, Enactive and Extended, edited by A. Newen, L. de Bruin and S. Gallagher (Oxford: Oxfort University Press, forthcoming).

10. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Vol. 1 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1485/1960), p. 707 [Q. 27 art. 1]. 11. Einav Katan-Schmid, Embodied Philosophy in Dance: Gaga and Ohad Naharin’s Movement Research (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 12. Richard Shusterman, “Aesthetic Experience: From Analysis to Eros,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64:2 (2006): 217–229. 13. See, for example, Nisbett and Wilson, and Schwitzgebel, as well as Petitmengin for a critical analysis of Shusterman R. E. Nisbett and T. D. Wilson, “Telling More than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes,” Psychological Review 84:3 (1977): 231–259. Eric Schwitzgebel, Perplexities of Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). Claire Petitmengin, “A Gap in Nisbett and Wilson’s findings? A First-person Access to Our Cognitive Processes,” Consciousness and Cognition 22:2 (June 2013): 654–669. 14. Whether the acceptance principle is a fundamental principle that we know a priori, as Tyler Burge thought, or is justified through our experience of interacting with people, is a question I leave to the side. Tyler Burge, “Content Preservation,” Philosophical Review 102 (1993): 457–488. 15. G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention, 2nd edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957/2000). 16. Or at least, it would not be possible to ground aesthetic experience, if one thinks that aesthetic experience must be grounded in conscious sensations. 17. Cf. José Bermúdez, The Paradox of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). 18. Anscombe, Intention, p. 14 19. Whether or not proprioception produces conscious sensations, studying individuals who have suffered from a loss of proprioception indicates how important this sense is to our knowledge of our bodily movements and positions. See, for example Jonathan Cole, Pride and the Daily Marathon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 20. P. M. Churchland, “Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes,” Journal of Philosophy 78 (1981): 67–90. P. S. Churchland, Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind/Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986). 21. J. B. Ritchie and P. Carruthers, “The Bodily Senses,” in M. Matthen, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Perception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 353–370; I. Rock and C. S. Harris, “Vision and Touch,” Scientific American 216: 5 (1967): 96–104.

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22. See Richard Shusterman, “Aesthetic Experience: From Analysis to Eros,” pp. 217–218, for an explanation of how the concepts of aesthetic and experience are both “vague, variable, and contested”; I agree with this as well as with his claim that these concepts can still be useful even if they are not definable in a univocal way. 23. Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1981/1958). 24. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Tarcher Perigee, 1934/2005). 25. Bernard Bosanquet, “Content Preservation,” Philosophical Review 102 (1915): 457–488. 26. Beardsley, Aesthetics. Edward Bullough, “ ‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and as an Aesthetic Principle,” British Journal of Psychology, 5 (1912): 87–117. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. C. Meredith, ed. N. Walker (New York: Oxford University Press [originally published 1790], 2007). George Dickie, “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 1(1964): 56–65. Gary Iseminger, “Aesthetic Experience,” in J. Levinson, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 99–116. 27. Oliver Sachs, Introduction to Jonathan Cole, Pride and the Daily Marathon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. x. 28. Bullough, “ ‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and as an Aesthetic Principle.” 29. Denis Diderot, The Paradox of Acting, translated by W. H. Pollock, 1830. Full text available: https://archive.org/details/cu31924027175961. 30. Kant, Critique of Judgment. 31. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Taylor and Francis Books Ltd., 1945/2005). 32. Ibid., 130–131. 33. This is consonant with the view put forth in José Bermúdez (1998), The Paradox of Self-Consciousness. See also Wittgenstein’s distinction between the body as “object” and the body as “subject.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd edition, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1958). 34. Kant, Critique of Judgment. 35. Ibid., §7–8. 36. To be sure, conjoined twins who share an arm, for example, each proprioceive the same object, that is, the movement of the shared arm. Virtual reality might be another way an individual can proprioceive another’s movements, since virtual reality seems to create situations where we speak of proprioceiving a movement that is not a movement of our own body. That is, when watching an image of your arm reach out across the Hudson over to New Jersey, it seems that you are proprioceiving a virtual arm, which, in one sense, does not count as part of your body; though in another sense—an “extended body” sense—it does. 37. I do this in Barbara Montero, “Proprioceiving Someone Else’s Movement,” Philosophical Explorations (2006): 149–161. 38. J. M. Kilner and R. N. Lemon, “What We Know Currently About Mirror Neurons,” Current Biology, 23 (December 2013): R1057–1062. 39. J. Frede, “The Mental Representation of Movement when Static Stimuli are Viewed,” Perception and Psychophysics 33:6 (1983): 575–581. 40. P. Viviani and N. Stucchi, “The Effect of Movement Velocity on Form Perception: Geometric Illusions in Dynamic Displays,” Perception and Psychophysics 46:3 (1989): 266–274.

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41. E. Thoret, Aramaki Mitsuko, Lionel Bringoux, Sølvi Ystad, and Richard KronlandMartinet, “Seeing Circles and Drawing Ellipses: When Sound Biases Reproduction of Visual Motion,” 11:4 (2016): e0154475. 42. Martin, Introduction to the Dance, p. 15. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., 17. 45. Edwin Denby, Dance Writings and Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 34–35. 46. Ibid. 47. Alastair Macaulay, “Works that are longer on style than on choreography” [Review]. New York Times, May 9, 2012. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/arts/dance/ alonzo-king-lines-ballet-at-the-joyce-theater.html. 48. Louis Horst, “On ‘Lyric Suite,’ ” Dance Observer, May 1954. 49. Michael Wade Simpson, “Dancers relay Robbins’ gentler, reflective side in Chopi piece,” SFGate/San Francisco Chronicle, April 9, 2005. Retrieved from http://www.sfgate.com/ entertainment/article/Dancers-relay-Robbins-gentler-reflective-side-2687074.php. 50. G. Buccino, F. Binkofski, and L. Riggio, “The Mirror Neuron System and Action Recognition,” Brain and Language 89:2 (May 2004): 370–376. 51. Does this mean that some individuals are barred from certain forms of aesthetic experience? And might this not be contrary to Kant’s idea that correct aesthetic judgments are intersubjectively valid? To be sure, I am suggesting that having some dance or movement experience is relevant to one’s ability to appreciate the kinesthetic resonance of dance. However, just as appreciating great literature requires training, it seems that appreciating great dance could require training as well. For further discussion see Montero (2012, 2016). 52. Bas van Fraassen, The Scientific Image (Oxford University Press, 1980). 53. Macauley, “Works that are longer on style than on choreography.” 54. Graham McFee, Understanding Dance (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 273. 55. G. M. Goodwin, D. I. McCloskey, and P. B. Matthews, “The Contribution of Muscle Afferents to Kinaesthesia Shown by Vibration Induced Illusions of Movement and by the Effects of Paralysing Joint Afferents,” Brain 95 (1972), 705–748. F. H. Previc and W. R. Ercoline, Spatial Disorientation in Aviation (Reston, VA: American Institute of Astronautics and Aeronautics, 2004). 56. I have a much longer version of this response in my 2016 book (see below). See also: Dewey, Art as Experience; J. Toner, B. Montero, and A. Moran, “Considering the Role of Cognitive Control in Expert Performance,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 14:4 (2015), 1127–1144; B. G. Montero, “The Artist as Critic: Dance Training, Neuroscience and Aesthetic Evaluation,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71:2 (2013), 169–175; B. G. Montero, “A Dancer Reflects: Deliberation in Action,” in Mind, Reason and Being-in-the-World: the McDowell-Dreyfus Debate, ed. J. Shear, 2013; Barbara Montero, Thought in Action: Expertise and the Conscious Mind (Oxford University Press, 2016).

CHAPTER 1.8

From Presentational Symbol to Dynamic Form: Ritual, Dance, and Image RANDALL E. AUXIER

A BRIEF APOLOGIA I am neither a dancer nor a specialist in dance scholarship. Many contributors to this volume have forgotten much more than I will ever know about dance. I am, however, a musician, specifically a bassist, and also a scholar in the philosophy of music. There is a sympathy and deep communication between musicians and dancers, even if their scholarship and theory tend either to clash or, more often, pass like ships in the night. I would like to think, although it may be a conceit, that among musicians, bassists may have an unusual sympathy with dancers, partly due to the sheer size of our instruments (the dance of the double bass and the windy kiss of the tuba—and many bassists, including the present one, do play both), as well as from the character of our contribution to the musical setting of dance. One need not dance to a grooving bass in order to dance, but it is not easy to remain still when the bass is grooving. Naturally drummers will want their say and their claim to a special intimacy with the dance, and none could deny it. But drums are, shall I say, a bit too Apollonian and not quite Dionysian enough to create full ec-stasis, in my view. One should take up that argument when dancers are not around. I will fill out in detail much of what this apologia portends, but a confession from the outset that an apostate musician is amongst the dance-faithful seemed wise—even if the interdisciplinary character of this volume does sanction interlopers in advance.

INTRODUCTION Susanne Langer’s symbol theory includes the interesting and difficult idea of the presentational symbol, and the interpretation of this idea requires some other new ideas about the fundamental nature of “form.” In what follows I will expand these ideas beyond Langer’s account and sometimes at the expense of her favored views. For the most part, however, this account is sympathetic to Langer’s views. The development from ritual (which can consist of mere “signals,” in Langer’s sense of that term), to dance involves the transformation of the sensuous medium (both visual and kinesthetic orientation and movement) into a virtual symbol by means of bodily action. Bodily action in such 97

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situations is quasi-teleological—the proto-dance, repeated movement that organizes time according to the order of collective desire (a release of energy—an accursed share—and a recollective aid to sensus communis), changes into something done both for its own sake and for the sake of communication (the latter being a less than ultimate concern). This is a massive, even cataclysmic change. Dance is the best form of bodily action for illustrating this kind of change, but its implications reach into every kind of meaningful action. The presentational symbol, once created, made within the body and by the body, cannot be wholly detached from its embeddedness within the body that creates it, but the symbol is mobile within the body, insofar as the body as a whole can exit one existential situation in favor of another. This mobility of the presentational symbol implies that it can be projected and re-projected, as an “image” (in a very particular sense to be explained) into widely differing material contexts, utilizing very different sensuous mediums. The effect of this mobility and projection, then, is the creation of an “image” similar to Bergson’s use of that term in Matter and Memory.1 A larger project would be to articulate an ontology of the image, in Langer’s account, as something less determinate than a completed idea and yet also less determinate than a supposedly “independent thing” that endures (whether it is or is not perceived), which is Bergson’s hypothesis. Such an account would join the two philosophies, and especially the aesthetic theories, very much to the benefit of both. There is reason to think Langer would publicly resist such an ontology; the received views of Bergson during Langer’s lifetime were adversely affected by Russell’s irresponsible and inaccurate caricature, and others who parroted it (for decades). I believe Langer worried, strategically, that her own views would be tarred with a similar brush unless she distanced herself from Bergson. The tarring happened in spite of her efforts to remain “respectable” in the eyes of people far less worthy of her respect than Bergson, persons now deservedly forgotten, who ran the professional discipline in the mid-twentieth century. Still, the times were what they were, Langer was a woman trying to earn a place in a profoundly sexist discipline, and Bergson was out of favor. Yet, her real sympathies with Bergson do occasionally appear.2 Also, Langer’s distinction of “signal, sign, symbol” was embraced by Ernst Cassirer in his mature work An Essay on Man.3 Cassirer’s criticisms of Bergson (far more informed and accurate than Russell’s hatchet job) have long separated philosophers who are sympathetic to one or the other. There is, however, a good deal of overlap in their views insofar as both are process philosophers.4 Thus, through Langer, we can also bring Cassirer and Bergson closer together than many thought possible, assuming one can join Langer’s ontology and its symbol theory to Bergson’s view of the “image.” This joining also brings Cassirer and Langer closer to radical empiricism, as exemplified by James, Bergson, and Whitehead, and this is a great improvement for them, in my view. The presence of some vestiges of both classical empiricism and rationalism in Langer and Cassirer tend to deter post-modernists and post-humanists from making full use of their views. Radical empiricism is still problematic from the standpoint of the post-colonial critique of culture, but less problematic than the older empiricism and rationalism.

FROM BODILY FEELING TO PRIMARY ILLUSION Langer built her aesthetic metaphysics of embodied feeling from a collection of original insights into the nature of creative activity, especially art, and in particular those processes through which art is performative. Being out of step with the majority of specialists in aesthetics, Langer has not been fully understood or properly appreciated up to this time.

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Her full theory is subtle, systematic, highly developed (if not quite “complete”), and has a full set of thick connections to her metaphysics, her logic, and her theory of knowledge. But the sheer difficulty of her theory, genuine as it is, is not the primary reason for the neglect. Professional philosophers address difficult theories when they think they must. The main reasons for neglect of Langer’s view are twofold and related. First, Langer focused on performance and upon the creation of the artwork, not upon the dry but prevailing academic (and analytical) questions about what is or is not a “work of art,” and the host of issues that accompany that kind of inquiry. This discussion, stretching from the 1950s through the 1980s, was dominated by Langer’s student Arthur Danto. Danto came to prominence in 1964 and remained the most influential philosopher of art in the Anglophone world until his death in 2013. In the 1990s the discussion began to change and open up for wider discussion, but by then Langer was largely forgotten. Thus, Langer’s fully developed aesthetic theory, which appeared in 1953, had only a brief time in which to be absorbed and discussed by the philosophical world. It was soon eclipsed by Danto’s irresistible logic. Langer was noticed, reviewed in several of the best journals, and then mainly ignored by philosophers. But her theories were taken up by other disciplines and by significant numbers of the concerned public, so it had a goodly influence. Just not within the discipline of Philosophy, but she sold many, many books. Analytic philosophy had shown no serious interest in aesthetics before Danto, so there was no clear audience to receive this new teaching. And indeed, Langer’s views were sufficiently out of step with the likes of, say, Dewey, to garner little attention from those who thought about aesthetics holistically, and her constant criticisms, closer to dismissals, of pragmatism did not exactly invite the close scrutiny of her ideas by that group. Her views were closest to Whitehead’s with a very healthy dose of Cassirer, and the Second World War had thrown into serious doubt the style of optimistic humanism found in such philosophies. In short, the times and fashions and tides were all against getting Langer the serious hearing she so richly deserved. But there was a second reason. Langer’s central idea in aesthetics—called variously “the apparition,” or “the primary illusion,” or “the semblance”—is just a little too creative or original or hard to assess and integrate with more mundane notions of the artwork. The central idea also depended for its persuasiveness upon the broader persuasiveness of her theory of the process of creating a presentational symbol, and this theory too, although worked out well and in tremendous detail, was just more work than philosophers of art wanted to deal with. Taken without this context of the wider theory of the symbol and its metaphysics, the idea of a “dynamic schema,” which simply is the artwork, is unconvincing and it seems sort of vague. Reviewers of Langer complain about vagueness and unclarity, and unfortunately they were widely believed. I think they were wrong. Her ideas are clear enough, but, as we can now recognize with our historical distance, the presuppositions of her readers were obtuse dogmas that blind them to perfectly obvious and simple observations. And of course there is the constant problem that pervades professionalized conversation of pretending not to understand what would undermine one’s view and claiming the opponent is being unclear. I believe Langer’s theory is essentially correct, and that it will be well received once she is really understood. She had many readers, but people mainly read her aesthetics without the broader context of her metaphysics. Even with the broader context, a good deal of effort has to be invested in order to fill out this aesthetic theory into its broader, temporalist, quasi-Whiteheadian fullness. I will do some of that work here. As I have said, I believe Langer really needs something like Bergson’s ontology of images, and his account

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of reflective intuition, to ground her theory. I do not believe her work in the Mind trilogy does the job, although it does not hurt.5 So what is this unconvincing idea of the apparition, or the primary illusion? In short, it is the claim that the artwork sort of hovers, ghostlike, about and around the enactment of itself. It is an apparition, and it is objectively real, even though it only exists for perception, she says. In spite of the evident phenomenalism here, Langer is not a phenomenalist, she is a realist about apparitions. (I am aware that sounds odd, but please stay with the argument a bit longer.) She does not stop with the artwork (indeed, she cannot). She pushes on: Anything that exists only for perception, and plays no ordinary, passive part in nature as common objects do, is a virtual entity. It is not unreal; where it confronts you, you really perceive it, you do not dream or imagine that you do. The image in a mirror is a virtual image. A rainbow is a virtual object. It seems to stand on the earth or in the clouds, but it really “stands” nowhere; it is only visible, not tangible. Yet it is a real rainbow, produced by moisture and light for any normal eye looking at it from the right place. We do not just dream that we see it. If, however, we believe it to have the ordinary properties of a physical thing, we are mistaken; it is an appearance, a virtual object, a sun-created image.6 Philosophers do not know what to do with this ontology. How can a sensible person be a realist about apparitions? She must be confused, right? I do not think so, but Langer has divided up the problem in such a way as to oblige herself to provide a taxonomy, and perhaps even a hierarchy, of virtual images. She does not recognize, as Bergson does, that all perceptions are of this virtual character, and that has to do with what perception is, not directly with what sort of entity one is perceiving in a particular experience.7 We will come to this later. For now, it appears that Langer paints herself into a corner, and does so in a house drawn by M. C. Escher. There is no actual position within the range of conventionally acceptable options for what she is asserting—whether to analytic philosophers, to Continental philosophers, or to pragmatists. This is a new view, and new ontology. Granted, this passage above is just an excerpt from a published lecture and the account is more deliberate and careful in Feeling and Form, but it does not matter. It is the position she is taking that is unrecognizable to those who do not know how to think throughand-between the standard assumptions of twentieth-century philosophy. We are ready for a new look at this puzzle, I believe. But many of the unquestioned assumptions, the “standard choices” of the mid-twentieth century, have been shot down, and Langer’s view persists, even against nominalist Rortyan types running amuck through aesthetics, and the various revivals of Hegel, Kant, Romanticism, and even classical aesthetics. I believe Langer’s view to be the best choice for thinking about and through the philosophical problems that beset us in dealing with both art and perception in the present. All viable philosophies today must take time seriously and must resist the urge to reduce time to one or another form of space. Langer manages that feat and also provides powerful and suggestive connections to most other areas of philosophy.

DANCING THE APPARITION Langer goes on to speak of dance as a prime example of such a virtual entity as she has set out, but this one, unlike the mirror image or the rainbow, is an artwork:

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a dance is an apparition of active powers, a dynamic image. Everything a dancer actually does serves to create what we really see; but what we really see is a virtual entity. The physical realities are given: place, gravity, body, muscular control, and secondary assets such as light, sound, or things (usable objects, so called [stage] “properties”). All these are actual. But in the dance, they disappear, the more perfect the dance, the less we see its actualities. What we see, hear, and feel are the virtual realities, the moving forces of the dance, the apparent centers of power and their emanations, their conflicts and resolutions, lift and decline, their rhythmic life. These are the elements of a created apparition, and are themselves not physically given, but artistically created.8 Moving away, for a moment, from the specific terminology Langer chose, the process being described is one of substituting one level of our experience for another, and the substitution effectively makes invisible (to us) the ordinary givenness of actualities in sensible experience. Langer knew she had to provide a detailed account of how our bodies do this, and she did provide it, in her three-volume magnum opus. But the “how” she described there had no effect on hardcore epistemological realists who were not prepared to have the “actual” disappear only to be replaced by a virtual quasi-world of quasiautonomous appearances. Even less were they prepared to accept a distinction between the experiences that engender this substitution from nature’s unsuspecting processes— reflections in pools, rainbows—and those substitutions brought about by human artifice. Epistemological realists struggle with this sort of substitution, but they never grant it as something basic to knowledge. Nevertheless, it is universal in the act of knowing, for all their aversion to it. On the other hand, Langer was also as deeply influenced by Wittgenstein as were many of the philosophers of her generation. She had every intention of satisfying the objections of realists and spent many pages addressing them. She could not be classified fairly as an anti-realist, but she is definitely taking a position on the duck-rabbit here. Her fellow travelers simply do not recognize it. It is neither a duck nor a rabbit an sich, and if one wishes to explain the phenomenon, one needs a conception of dynamic form, addressing (not explaining) why it appears as one in one moment of time and the other in a different moment of time. There is a dynamism to be described, not a state of affairs to be explained in such examples. The dynamism is real, not one or the other experience (perception), as such. She appeals to Gestalt psychology for part of the answer. These days, Gestalt psychology has gone out of fashion, but its form of empirical study worked explicitly with questions such as whether we can see what our bodies have not been prepared to see.9 Much of the good work done between the late teens and the early 1960s is no longer studied, and that is unfortunate. But Gestalt researchers made themselves unpopular by lecturing the other psychologists about the fact that psychology had not become a science and would not become one any time soon. Thinkers such as Wolfgang Koehler and Kurt Koffka were simply too intellectually honest to win in a tugof-war with other methodologies that promised scientific control more quickly, and however much these other scientists denied to one another the label of “true science,” they certainly did not deny it to themselves, as the Gestalt researchers did.10 Still, this kind of study is one of the principal fonts of Langer’s ideas about dynamic form. She classes Gestalt psychology under the broader heading of “genetic psychology,” an approach that had explored the symbol-using power and its development in more species than just homo sapiens.11 Today this broad kind of study has been replaced by a

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more reductionistic and less interesting approach we call evolutionary psychology, which attempts to find selection mechanisms to account for the phenomena, or, more narrowly still, the ridiculous cognitive evolutionary psychology, which views the brain as composed of evolved computational systems, engineered by natural selection to use information to adaptively regulate physiology and behavior. This shift in focus—from knowledge acquisition to the adaptive regulation of behavior— provides new ways of thinking about every topic in psychology. It suggests a mind populated by a large number of adaptive specializations, each equipped with contentrich representations, concepts, inference systems, and regulatory variables, which are functionally organized to solve the complex problems of survival and reproduction encountered by the ancestral hunter-gatherers from whom we are descended.12 Computational systems engineered by natural selection? Really? The list of ungrounded metaphors in this (representative) quote combine a mechanistic reductionism with a Darwinian materialist ontology with stunning appropriations of teleological language regarding which the writers are either blithely uncaring or in denial. This is not science; this is closer to religion or at least to theology. Indeed, B. F. Skinner called this sort of view “the creationism of psychology.”13 I think he may have understated the case.14 Those who call these pseudo-scientists out on the carpet for their unscientific habits are often the victims of merciless ad hominem attacks, and this dispute within academia has been raging since the revival of Darwin as a patron saint and martyr of science by Francis Crick.15 It is shameful that the natural sciences have allowed themselves to be drawn into and diminished by unscientific debates among ideologues. An even greater shame is that good, empirically responsible, philosophical work such as Langer’s gets obscured in the push and shove. Langer began constructing her empirical views of the relation between mind and lived experience before this onslaught of ideology buried every alternative. She recognized the seeds of this tendency to conceptual myopia (based upon whatever one happened to study), but she seemed confident that the distortions created by anti-philosophical and sub-philosophical theorizing would not prove too troublesome.16 She was wrong about that. Langer’s own evolutionary-friendly, non-reductive, careful and excellent study of the origins of mind, or consciousness, was born into a completely hostile world that was rapidly becoming financially invested in the “truth” (for insurance purposes) of unscientific claims about the achievements of psychology.17 She was, of course, buried, as was Gestalt psychology and every other non-reductive, humanistic clinical and experimental psychology that was difficult to commodify, or which was forthright about being not quite a mature science. The current generation of philosophers who are interested in “consciousness studies” is, with a few exceptions, wholly ignorant of the gratuitous and arbitrary reductions of its teachers two generations past—since they do not study the history of their discipline prior to the debate between Skinner and Chomsky and the histories of the so-called “cognitive revolution” provided by writers like Howard Gardner and Jerome Bruner, writers who treat the replacing of the prior schools as a matter of inevitable “scientific” advance.18 Thus, responsible empirical philosophers and researchers today face an uphill struggle as we try to recapture some modicum of responsible self-limitation as to how much psychology has genuinely achieved, as a so-called “science.” Langer’s appropriation of Gestalt research is an outstanding place to reconnect our present efforts to the responsible research done in the past, before it was eclipsed by the damaging and dangerous ideology of “value-free” scientific knowledge.

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In fact, what Langer did with her theory is to suggest a modification in the way that Gestalt theorists understand their principal idea.19 This is a kind of “form,” and its very essence is dynamic, she is asserting. It is not just perceived as a virtual pattern among the given actualities, it is actively projected by the living experiencer, and the projection is stretched along a durational continuum. Further, there is not merely one dynamic form so stretched in our experiences of, say, art (and other symbolic forms), the form itself is the product of competing forces, of a flux that is a movable feast of interactive responses from which an image takes shape, emerges, or even appears rather suddenly in many cases, which then takes the place of, i.e., “takes the place of,” for a time, that heterogeneous dynamism. In short, a presentational space is created by our projections of formed feeling which is, in the proper sense, a “place.” Indeed, this is the meaning of “place”; all “places” are virtual, as distinct from “spaces,” which include place as a possibility, but as a highly improbable and rare kind of space given the physical dynamism of the cosmos. Space is ubiquitous and variable, but place is exceedingly rare in the universe. This is to say that the conditions required to create the space of life, for instance, themselves evidently rare in the universe, and upon the condition of life to include a space compatible with the rise of vertebrates, and within that space, the conditions under which some of those vertebrates would develop a symbolizing power . . . well, let us simply say that whatever is actual is possible, and here we are, however improbable.20 Our kind of being is compatible with the flux, along with its unlikely power of symbolizing and projecting. Without such abundant proof of its actuality sitting all around you, the story of our coming to exist as we do sounds like a fairy tale. Still, place is a condition of symbolic meaning. It is not that the place creates the meaning, but that the meaning arises only (as far as we know) with the place—one might call it the primal site of meaning. This view has many points of contact with, for example, Heidegger’s “open region,” but against Heidegger’s style of poetizing the space into a place, Langer soberly indexes it in an empirical and naturalistic way. It places her closer to Nietzsche than to Heidegger. The interacting, competing forces may create spaces of all kinds that remain uninterpreted, but the perceived spaces are places, dominated by a significant form. And in the case of art, the creating of that significant form is the telos of the action. Both the spaces and the places would be dynamic, but the places possess the dynamism of purpose, while the uninterpreted spaces are, at most, quasi-teleological (and this part is, of course, very close to Kant’s account in the third Critique, what he means by “symbol” as over against “schema” in the work of imagination to bring open and incomplete exhibitions to our lived experience, in response to which our reflective judgment determines us in the mode of feeling; see §59). We feel place long before we can think it. It is this sense of “symbol” that Cassirer appropriated from Kant, and that Langer took from Cassirer, well before he took back from her the schema of signal-sign-symbol. We will return to this “primal site” shortly, but first we must say a bit more about the symbol in relation to dynamic form. The creation of “place” in the sense of a substitute for the objective space of the given, actual world is, Langer insists (with Whitehead), a kind of “error” that the body makes and then exploits. There is a profound difference between using symbols and merely using signs. The use of signs is the first manifestation of mind.21 It arises early in biological history as the famous “conditioned reflex,” by which a concomitant of a stimulus takes over the

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stimulus function. The concomitant becomes sign of the condition to which the reaction is really appropriate.22 This is the real beginning of mentality, for here is the birthplace of error, and therewith, of truth. If truth and error are to be attributed only to belief, then we must recognize in the earliest misuse of signs, in the inappropriate conditioned reflex, not error, but some prototype of error. We might call it a mistake. Every piano player, every typist knows that the hand can make mistakes where consciousness entertains no error. . . . The use of signs is certainly a mental function.23 In creating signs, we reduce a larger, more complex existential situation to a much simpler one, in which we take the sign as a substitute for the whole, and thus “err” in the vague sense, but act successfully upon the sign. Animals do the same. But beyond signs, they do not usually progress. Following the Gestalt researchers of her day, Langer grants that there is something akin to our symbol use in higher primates, but not a symbolsaturated world upon which, say, the primates or marine mammals depend completely, as we do.24 The movement from sign to symbol is not easily understood. Langer says that “a genuine symbol can most readily originate where some object, sound, or act is provided which has no practical meaning, yet tends to elicit an emotional response, and thus hold one’s undivided attention.”25 She continues: Certain objects and gestures appear to have this phenomenological dissociated character for some apes, as well as for man; sounds have it for man alone. They annoy or please him even when they are not signs of anything further; they have an inherently interesting character . . . Since noises have this intrinsic and commanding interest, and the ear cannot be closed, they were peculiarly suited to become “free” items where they had no biological value, and to be utilized by the imagination [this power of projection] in sheer play.26 Here we have the origin of the dance in music, according to Langer. I do not know that this will be a popular thesis among dance theorists. There may be “dance originalists” who will not only insist upon the independence of dance from music, but that dance precedes music in our anthropological history. I do not know how such claims would ever be adjudicated. But for Langer, the term “dance” is used exclusively for the fully developed semblance, i.e., the gestures and objects that may be constituents of the dance. The same gestures and objects may also, at a more primal level, constitute a ritual discharge of excess energy27 (and thus satisfy the criterion of “uselessness”), but they do not become the dance, as a symbol, as a virtual dynamic form existing for perception only, until they are punctuated and connected with sound—whether primarily rhythmic or primarily melodic.28 We need not deny that “the ritual” entails “place,” but the “place” of the ritual (prior to music) is non-purposive, Langer thinks, and the perception of it as “place” remains latent, at least until dance breaks out. In short, the ritual does not exist only for perception, but the dance does. We and other animals may act ritually, merely with “signs,” within that “place” as if it were identical with the actual space it overlays. This acting in the identity of space and place would be superstitious of us, we who take ourselves to be the creators of symbols, but we may make the identification nevertheless. We can treat a place as if we did not make it, as if it were prepared for us by a greater power, but to experience it ourselves, we also must create it, whether or not we acknowledge what we have done. In a sense, then, the dance really is primary—it was there all along, and it ritualizes the

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expelling of the “accursed share” (to use Bataille’s phrase), that excess of energy that builds up within the bodies of organisms with centralized nervous systems and which must be wasted because it cannot find a sufficiently dense place for action; such energy must therefore expel itself into the abyss of the space from which it originated. This expulsion may be dangerous (the dance totters on the edge of violence and a generalized loss of control as it releases the build up of energy), but it is ontologically stable and is unproblematic so long as place remains latently identical with that space. We contain the energy, carefully balancing the wasted with the directed energies so that order is held. It is a religious experience, we could say, but it is more neutrally described as cathartic. So-called “primitive” performance strives for and achieves this balance, but it commonly involves a sacrifice of some sort. Still, the overlay of the space with a virtualized place is a contingent pairing and identification. The space is not the place. Rather, the place is projected into the space by the symbolizing power of the group. In such a situation, there is little reason to distinguish the proto-dance from the proto-music. The two could be distinguished by a non-participant, but the projectors of place will not make such a distinction. The participants dance the music and produce the music from the rhythmic movements of their bodies. Neither precedes the other. As place and space do come apart, in the presence of rhythm or melody, a tension emerges between what is possible and what is actual within our activities—we become aware that to enact one movement is to exclude, defer, and condense an infinity of others. This has been a factual character of our movements before we were aware, but the awareness of this egress alters the quality of the enactment, and profoundly so. We realize that there is a “just-this-gesture-or-movement-and-none-other,” which employs the temporal passage as a vehicle for packing the meanings of all-the-movements-not-enacted into the single movement enacted. There is no such tension where place and space remain functionally identical. A non-participant may notice the egress of possibility in the performance, but the performers will not. This ritual is not art, yet. The art awaits the descent of the cloud of possibility upon the performers. They must experience the contingency of their acts, and they will attribute choice, freedom to the enactment precisely because it could have been done otherwise than it was done. Here the art emerges. The creation of the semblance, the apparition, the primary illusion is now the aim. It exists only for perception. The cloud of possibility, of acts not performed, is the virtual cloud hovering over and temporally around the actuality, and the act performed takes its principal meaning and structure, its dynamic form, from its association with that cloud. The cloud is temporal— it precedes and lingers in expectation, anticipation, enjoyment and memory of what was not done, which is the ground, and the virtual what-was-done, which is the “reference,” to use Peirce’s language.29 To stay with Peirce’s language, the “substance” of this cloud of virtuality may be too vague for contemporary realist philosophies, but the temporal “being” of it is quite clear, and Langer (along with Peirce) is earnest in her realism about its existence.30 Further, the onset of sign use in ritual indicates a latent purposiveness, but the separation of the dance from the ritual, brought on by sound (according to Langer), provides explicit purpose(s), insofar as the individual temporal epoch that is the “generalized present” (Peirce’s language again) becomes continuous with the moments before and those to come, in a genuine continuity with a meaning and a destination. For Langer, the music virtualizes the time, and then the place and the space become separable for us, take on different meanings, the former purposive and the latter a container or substrate (think of Plato’s hypodoxe) that is patient of virtualization but brings no meaning

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of its own to the dance.31 The availability, to our feeling, of that purposiveness will peak and trough in the tension and release of the dance. Thus, we see that the controlled or purposive movement of the dance finds its origin in the active exclusion of infinitely many ordered possibilities, an act which I call “the egress of possibility.”32 For the sake of generating meaning (and this is primal teleology) the movement is enacted, but is already invisible due to the substitution, the projection of the presentational symbol into the place by the perceivers. Thus, in the primal instance, the proto-dance is not enacted for the sake of onlookers or spectators, but for the sake of eliminating possibilities, of leaving those possibilities, deliberately, unenacted, so as to create a context for meaning—indeed, to create the meanings themselves. The result is the meaningful act that exists only for perception. This is why the act can also be undertaken by a human who is “alone” without loss of purpose, but in such instances, purpose is re-reduced to the primal tension itself, to the barest separation of space and place, since the dancer always experiences the actuality of the movement. Here I have applied some of Whitehead’s ideas about possibility, as I understand them, to Langer’s aesthetics. She does not say what I have just said, but I think she intends it.

REFLECTION Naturally, the first thing a spectator may feel in the presence of this primal separation of space and place is what is done rather than what is not done. Yet, the spectator will quickly recapture the feeling of the egress of possibility in, as it were, a feeling that is like a photographic negative. The meaning of the enacted movements cannot become reflective for the spectator without taking that negative into the “darkroom” that exists between thinking and reflecting. There we reverse the presentations of thinking. The reflective account of the dance must begin with what was not done, how the place was not used, and if the reflective account seeks more than a phenomenology, and would move to ontology, the tension between place and space must be recovered and thematized. The egress was immediately experienced, to be sure, but its function is to withdraw (indeed, the egress just is this withdrawal) so that something else can stand out.33 How did the space become a place, as a play of the forces, to use Nietzsche’s term, and how was the place pushed apart from the space? These are the questions that lead to the metaphysics not of ritual movement, wherein space and place are allowed a functional unity, but of dance, in which the rejection of that unity (the outcome of a successful act as an actuality) and the abjection of space are conditions for the meaning. In short, dance and only dance creates place. Such a view leads to a surprising consequence: All rituals of advanced culture are dances of this kind. All such activities, that might lightly be called rituals, have been reflectively reversed in advanced culture, and all are the products of reflection. You can not even tie your shoes without dancing, in the relevant sense, let alone order lunch or go to a boring meeting. Not only are these the virtualized acts that exist, so far as their meaning reaches, only for perception, but they have been refined, reduced, and conformed to the dual requirements of repetition and creative advance. The rituals of the church, to provide a serious example, take the series of choreographed movements reflectively formed and expressed in doctrine, and allows the confluence of the place so constituted to flow back into a space (whether in nature or enclosed, or in a space wholly virtualized by architecture), in a highly circumscribed and constrained fashion, first in time and then in place. The “sacred time” is just what precipitates the flowing together of the place and

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space. They flow together, but they do not become a unity, any more than the boring meeting becomes the actions it later sanctions—sell, buy, acquire, liquidate. The worshippers are only quasi-superstitious, just as the executives are. Yes, the invocations and repetitive incantations are a summons to the invisible congregants to assist with the petition to the god or gods (of providence or of profit) to close all space into a place identical with the demand of the time. But everyone knows it does not really happen. It is, at its finest, art, and at its worst sincere artifice.34 The entire enactment is fully purposive, considered reflectively, and wholly determinate in accordance with purpose, which, so far as art is concerned, is quasi-communion with the unseen, which comes forth from the possible and into the actual when the quasiconsummation occurs. Such is the reach of this dance, dare one say, of the dance? Christians, for example, call this process various things, but “real presence” would be a fair generic term, to borrow Martin Luther’s phrase. It means they know that God does not inhabit the host, but the meaning of the act involves situating it in a virtual place that, for a time, dominates, transfigures, the actual space in which it occurs.35 We worship thus. Or we eat dinner. Or we have a picnic. Or we simply warm our hands over the hearth. Here too the gods are present. In all such cases, the mundane is virtualized; it becomes a simple or complex dance, according to the requirements of circumstance. The music of discourse is generally the backbeat and the melody, boring though it is. Once the full shift is made into a virtual world, we no longer need the sounds to be very musical to animate the dance—the discursive motives are perpetually present in the mode of possibility. Once in a while we are reminded of the danciness of our dance when we hear the Coasters sing “Workin’ in the Coal Mine,” or the Vogues sing “Five O’clock World” or Sheena Easton singing “Morning Train” or Billy Joel singing “Allentown,” or even the dwarves singing “Whistle While You Work.” But mostly the work-a-day rhythms and melodies virtualize without any self-awareness or explicit apologia. We dance the relevant dance and when the music stops, we watch the news in exhaustion. In all cases, the reflective act of dancing, even in its most mundane and pointless instances, engenders a feeling within the body that Langer calls a “presentational symbol.” It is a feeling of the real presence, including the egress of possibility, that is quite lively and now mobile, if diminishing in its intensity. Yet the intensity is surprisingly powerful; its capacity to endure for years and years in the body, to be re-invoked, generalized, condensed, expanded, and acted upon over and over. It is quite mysterious. Something of the feeling is captured in literature sometimes. For example, it would be worth a dissertation to examine the role of dance, of just the sort I have described, in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. One day the brain scientists and those who study the entire nervous system in its relation to electro-chemistry, electro-magnetism, and even gravity and quantum influence, will have better accounts than we now possess of how the human body, and those of other similar animals, can accomplish this astonishing feat of mobility and recall/re-enactment. But for now, the reality of that accomplishment is clear enough. Sometimes one wonders whether all science is not simply the present authorities giving a stamp of approval to what we all already know. The stamp reads “duh.” Current neuroscience is asking some of the right questions, but not within a broad enough grasp of time and physical process to progress as it can and should. Each field of study has hold of one part of the proverbial elephant, as in the old Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant. Part of my task, as I see it, is to point out to these researchers that there is in fact an elephant—a whole

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beast—in the living room called “time,” and until they consent to communicate with it as a whole, well, that elephant thinks the researchers are pretty funny. The act, whether it be the primally purposive dance of the egress of possibility, or the reflectively determinate, fully purposive ritual of high religion, bears, upon the ample shoulders of its physical enactment, more meaning than can be exhausted by discursive or even precognitive interpretation. This excess of the act is, of course, mirrored, in microcosm, in the excess of meaning that occurs when we humans exchange symbols, but the excess of meaning can be partially recaptured. Still, the excess of energy abjected by the primal ritual cannot be reclaimed, once it is expelled in the ritualistic repetitive movements of pre-symbolic action. That means that symbolic transfiguration has an economy or a conservational power not to be limited to physical conservation of energy, but depending upon the latter. Thus the dance of the Blue-Footed Booby, beautiful as it is (we might even be moved to say “tragic” when it is unsuccessful), existing in the space between what Langer calls “signal” and “sign,” enacts a place over a space with which it is functionally identical, and does carry with its enactment an egress of possibility. Its failure along with its success, exist together, undistinguished from one another, until the moment of consummation either does or does not occur. If this is correct, then there is a primal intuition of coexistence below the level of reflection, and it is the intuition of the possible with the actual. In the moment of frustration and failure, the booby who fails and the reciprocal booby who rejects both experience a slight separation of space from place, the former experiencing the rejection as actual, the latter as a might-have-been, a possibility destined for pure non-actuality, an acceptance not-to-be. I do not doubt that the feeling complex engendered during that durational span endures as a presentational symbol and becomes mobile in both enactors. One never recovers, so to speak, from the loss, no matter which side of the rejection one owns. But this symbol never rarifies itself into a reflective schema for cognition, the “discursive symbol” in Langer’s terms. Such is the nature of the protodance. The process by which sign becomes symbol, on the other hand, is precarious, relying upon a transfiguration that fails far more often than it succeeds, and when it succeeds, it does so at the cost of error. The symbol, the presentational feeling, may not be useful, even when it succeeds in bearing a meaning. There are, after all, aesthetic excesses that remain unredeemed by subsequent action. There is no reason to limit our grasp of the dance to the most successful instances. Most dancing fails either primally, before it reaches genuine dance, or as dance in the fully reflective sense, that experience of the saturated presentational symbol that remains with one for a lifetime. How many dancical enactments does even the most dedicated aficionado recall? Two dozen? Four dozen? A hundred? As compared with how many attempts? Tens of thousands? More? At bottom we err. But sometimes we attain as well. The egress is redeemed by the actuality in those moments we carry with us for a lifetime. But what of the error? What is its character? It is, after all, the common occurrence, the ground that gives contrast to the figure. There are at least two major problems with such symbols, such dances. The symbol may fail to “disappear” for the organism to which it has appeared—this is how obsessions of all sorts, including addictions, function: we are locked in a projection that never quite disappears, but almost does. Or, secondly, the symbol may fail to be a reliable substitute for the complex of place and space from which it arose, in which case one attempts to act in a world that is more virtual than actual. The effect is forced, contrived, artificial. The dance may be badly enacted and

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actuality impinges, constrains, or otherwise spoils the efforts of the perceivers to believe the substitute. Failures of enaction from the physical to the socio-communicative occur here. The solutions are not found within the process by which sign becomes symbol. The solutions all lie in the future, and here is where art is indeed therapy. One cannot unmake one’s symbols. But one can adjust their field of applicability, even after the accomplishment of enactment. One may re-interpret the error one made earlier and overlay it with a broader temporal purposiveness than it could have had at the moment of its inception.36 Such is purposive art, and indeed, such also is the act of imagination in scientific discovery. Let us return to dance, then, and how it is (hypothetically) brought forth from ritual by music, or by ordered rhythm. Even one who has a fully developed symbolic power of projection may dance (or paint, or even sing) without wholly reflective intention, but when the human ear catches sound in association with the repetitive movements, we find we have, at a minimum, ritualized, if only loosely, that aural organization of the time-flow into pulses—not so far apart as to lose connection, not so rapid as to become an indistinguishable continuity. With the association of the pulses (whether irregular and flowing, melodic, or more Apollonian and regular) with enacted bodily motion, the combination becomes a vehicle that carries us from body to “mind,” in Langer’s precognitive sense of the word, from sign to symbol.37 And indeed, it follows also Whitehead’s notions of the mental pole that exists in every satisfaction, and in some is dominant. The rhythmic pulse or melodic tone group can come from nature, of course, like the woodpecker’s pecking or the cardinal’s two note song that sounds like “pretty, pretty, pretty,” as I discussed earlier. Or the same can come from some unconscious mechanism, internal or external to the body—the beating heart, the ticking of a clock, the “windshield wipers slapping out a tempo,” the Doppler shift of a passing train’s whistle. Either way, the (otherwise useless, according to Langer) aural pattern is virtualized in the hearing of the human being, at the level of perception, and only for perception, and thus provides a dynamic form, a Gestalt, upon which an image can be projected. The projection is always at the least quasi-teleological, and often, when it is a product of reflection, fully intentional and purposive. It will now be judged as an attempt at purposive communication, successful or unsuccessful, and perhaps also as art, whether good or bad. But there is no difference in kind between a projection from the primal site of place, and one from a place reflectively delimited.38 Unlike reflections in still water or rainbows, this purposive image, the projection of the presentational symbol, emerges only for those organisms that are able to “tap in” to the complex of changing relations that is held for a time and then released. A dance can be occurring, therefore, without our recognizing it as such, and indeed, we can ourselves be dancing without being aware of it—without perceiving the significant form as an apparition. Good examples of this occur in sports, where the free choreography of soccer and basketball and ice hockey do not often become, for us, the dances that they are. But your morning grooming routine or a day at the office cannot be different in kind. These complexes of related action hold and release temporal flow, just as the dance does, consisting almost entirely of highly ritualized but also intentionally choreographed moves. To see the morning routine as a dance, as the dance it truly is, one would be assisted by the presence of music, or even simply a repetitive drumbeat that punctuates the transitions and underlies the continuities. Add music to sports replays and the dance becomes visible. We can notice this feature held within the power of music without claiming the music causes the dance, or is even necessary for our reflective awareness of the dancicality of the

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day. The urge to declare the music a necessary condition for the dance, as Langer does, may be a mistake, but she certainly has her finger on a real character of experience: just add music and the ingredients of bodily movement congeal into something that conveys surprising (almost magical) meaning. This repetitive and spontaneous choreography of human living itself, whether intended or habitual or even spontaneous, creates a dynamic space identical with the image itself, which, in Feeling and Form, Langer calls the “primary illusion” of each art form.39 This is the term she uses interchangeably with apparition, and it is not a great improvement, in terms of being understandable. But for her, what distinguishes one art form from another (say, music from dance) is not some taxonomy or hierarchy of forms, but a range of primary illusions, each holding a separate analogy to some fundamental mode of lived experiencing which is already familiar to our embodied situatedness and process. We experience a flow of feelings, partly intelligible, memorable in part, and more vaguely or less vaguely, and then we hear a melody and we spontaneously project the familiar feeling sequence on to the melody. Sometimes we recognize an analogy between the tonal group and some repeated arrangement of feeling in our bodies, but conscious recognition is not required; the body “knows” in the sense of deep familiarity. It is not that the melody or rhythm “makes us feel” thus and so. Rather, having felt thus-and-so many times before, we are able to feel an analogy between that present feeling and the tonal and/or rhythmic complex that we remember. Langer calls the feeling “semblance.” She says: Musical duration is an image of what might be termed “lived” or “experienced” time— the passage of life that we feel as expectation become “now,” and “now” turns into unalterable fact. Such passage is measurable only in terms of sensibilities, tensions, and emotions; it has not merely a different measure, but an altogether different structure from practical or scientific time. The semblance of this vital, experiential time is the primary illusion of music. . . . Music makes time audible, and by its form, continually sensible.40 Thus, music makes audible for us what it is like to have a succession of feelings. We analogize, substituting the sound and its way of making the passage of time audible and punctuated, for the experience of having a semi-ordered stream of feeling through the same kind of time. The music “moves us” to the extent that it can persuade us to make the substitution of the musical complex for the feeling group. Otherwise, when we are not so persuaded (Whitehead would say “lured”), the music is either bad or background, but it is not for us, music, let alone art. It is proto-music; there is a place here, but it remains unseparated from the space it overlays. It is elevator music. In Feeling and Form, Langer sets out in great detail the primary illusion (apparition) of each of the most popular art forms, including dance. Each primary illusion makes available to us some temporal (performing arts) or spatial (plastic arts) analogy which, with the help of our projecting and substituting, successfully analogizes some significant strain of our lived experience. Langer’s insights in this regard are nothing short of intellectually thrilling, in my opinion. In some places she gives a certain primacy to dance because it goes back so far in human history—indeed, she points out that primitive music without the dance “is nothing,” by which she means nothing special, nothing one could appreciate. But here is in fact an example of Langer’s greatest weakness—the tendency to bifurcate, overstate, and to fail to bring her thoughts to full complementarity with her other thoughts. This last is a very difficult thing for any philosopher to do, and in my view, Langer is better at it than most—and better than some of the greatest, such as

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Leibniz, Peirce, and Husserl, who worked whole lifetimes trying to get their thoughts to cohere as a whole and failed. But Langer is not the equal of Whitehead, Kant, Cassirer, Bergson, or Hegel. I do not think these latter need any help from other philosophers, but the earlier list invites lesser lights, such as I, to have a go at contributing some effort toward bringing the parts of the system together. I have been doing that, although it requires some adjustments Langer would not endorse, I think. Let me finish with a justification.

FORM Each fundamental art form can spread its illusion over all of humanly produced reality, such that each and every scene or episode can become, for us, a painting, a sculpture, a novel, a poem, a play, a film, a photograph, and, some would argue, a video game, but certainly in every case a dance. Most of these mundane scenes and episodes are not worthy of much interpretation. I do not think that making a film of people tying their shoes is likely to be very interesting—but then, one never knows, does one? In the hands of Kubrick, perhaps so? It would be very interesting to see what Langer might identify as the primary illusion of video games as an art form, if she allowed that it is art. She says nothing of television and did not live to see the internet. She has only a short comment on film, in which she identifies it as “a new art,” and then goes on to note how it voraciously absorbs all the other art forms to its own form. She insists this form is unique to film; it is not a manifestation of some other form. Film “makes the primary illusion— virtual history [in this case]—in its own mode.” She continues: This is, essentially, the dream mode. I do not mean that it copies the dream, or puts one in a daydream. Not at all, no more than literature invokes memory, or makes us believe we are remembering. An art is a mode of appearance. Fiction is “like” memory in that it is projected to compose a finished experiential form, a “past”—not the reader’s past, not the writer’s, though the latter may make a claim to it. . . . Drama is “like” action in being causal, creating a total imminent experience, a personal “future” of Destiny. Cinema is “like” dream in the mode of its presentation: it creates a virtual present, an order of direct apparition. That is the mode of dream. The most noteworthy formal characteristic of dream is that the dreamer is always at the center of it. Places shift, persons act and speak, or change and fade—facts emerge, situations grow, objects come into view with strange importance, ordinary things infinitely valuable or horrible, and they may be superseded by others that are related to them essentially by feeling, not by natural proximity. But the dreamer is always “there,” his relation is, so to speak, equidistant from all events. . . . the immediacy of everything in a dream is the same for him.41 Here we see Langer’s exercise in identifying the primary illusion, as well as an application of her ideas of virtualization of space to place, and her idea of projection, of substitution (the camera takes the place of the dreamer, the film-goer accepts the substitution without being conscious of it, and projects on cue). She does all this in order to identify what separates one form from another. This is a very difficult and profound way of going at the question of form—it is dynamic, organic, complex, temporal, creative, and most importantly, pre-cognitive. It is not the intentional product of reflection, although its meaning is tied to the power of reflection. Langer intends to be empirical, indeed, even to be a scientific realist, in her descriptions. She wants to do justice to the

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genuine complexity of the phenomena and our experience of them. But her psychology is a kind of search for a Gestalt, a complex or grouping in the world that is the “ground” of the “figure” we experience. That approach to form was and is out of favor. Yet, I insist it is a philosophically and empirically useful alternative to every reductionsist account, and a valuable supplement to non-reductionist narratives. This idea of form is worth considering. I suggest that one cannot say with any persuasive power what dance is without considering it as form, and thus, one will be obliged also to distinguish forms from one another according to some procedure. I like Langer’s procedure, if not always her application of it. This problem brings us back to music. Interestingly, music and architecture are a little different from the list of art forms above, on Langer’s account. They are the actuators of the domain of semblance, in the inner and outer life of human beings. Music is what drives apart space and place in the temporal process of feeling, and this is “inner sense,” in Kant’s term. Architecture drives apart space and place for outer sense. Whether we can locate film and video games in this continuum whereby time becomes space, for both inner and outer sense, is a fair question. Langer “likens” (in her technical sense) watching film to dream experience, and I think that if this is correct, would video games be akin to lucid dreaming?42 It is an intriguing idea. Or is it something else? One wishes Langer were here to give her view. She had a remarkable talent for this sort of account. The performing arts are given a primacy in Langer’s theory, however, due to her conviction that, anthropologically and empirically speaking, these arts almost surely appeared earliest in our development, prior to the virtual organization of outer sense by architecture. Perhaps we made shelters before that, but it was not “architecture.” Given the age of the oldest visual images and dwellings, one can see the basis for a dispute, but I am quite sure Langer is correct, and the reason is this: space is created by time, and indeed by plural, overlapping temporal modalities.43 The virtual space onto which a cave painting is projected—or the decorative form of an idol or a household god—depends upon our capacity to re-see the actual thing as a virtual thing. The same is true for the difference between a beaver dam and a Neanderthal cave. If the latter is “found” architecture, there has to be an egress, a substitution, and a projection of a presentational symbol to make it so. That act of “seeing” (or projection of a presentational symbol) is enacting, and it is not unlike the dance with its place and space driven into creative tension by the melody and rhythm. The cave painting is performed and the virtual space in which it remains is a residuum of the performance. The same is true of the organic, lived space of the sculpted household god. It is a residuum of the act, whether it be ritualized or not, of the carving or molding. When we encounter the cave painting or the carving now, we re-appropriate its performance by the mediation of the residual space, re-separating for ourselves its mere embodiment from its virtualized meaning, but that hardly implies the primacy of that or any space. Time comes first. Still, we must admit that the space was possible from before the performance of the carving or the painting. If the physical anthropologists are correct, we had brains big enough to live in a world of virtual spaces long, long before we actually began to do so—to the tune of perhaps millions of years. Why, then, was there no duck-rabbit for us for such a long time, and then, somehow, there was? Were both figure and ground not “there”? This is part of the reason that a physiological explanation of the sort Langer attempted in her Mind trilogy is unconvincing to me. She is a realist about this question. She says yes, they were “there.” Her view is not simplistic scientific realism, however:

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The characteristic way in which the artist presents his formal structure in a single exemplification is, I think, what makes it impossible to divorce the logical form from its one embodiment or expressing. We never pass beyond the work of art, the vision, to something separately thinkable, the logical form [unlike practical and scientific abstractions can do], and from this to the meaning it conveys, a feeling that has the same form. The dynamic form of feeling is seen in the picture, not through it mediately; the feeling itself seems to be in the picture. Symbolic form, symbolic function, and symbolized import are all telescoped into one experience, a perception of beauty and an intuition of significance. It is unfortunate for epistemology that a mental process can be so complex and concentrated; but perception of artistic import, or what we commonly call “appreciation,” certainly seems to be such a distillate of intuition, and the heroic feat of making logical form evident in a single presentation accounts for the fact that we feel rather than know it, conceive vital experience in terms of it, without completing any conscious logical abstraction.44 This view both separates and blurs the line between rainbows and dances. It makes too vague and confusing what it means for something to exist “only for perception.” Langer’s view needs to be supplemented by a more worked out philosophy of science, such as we find in Cassirer and Whitehead, and, on the other side, by an ontology of life that is radically empirical but deals effectively with the category of “life” in both the biological and ontological ways. This supplement can be found in Bergson’s philosophy.45 The wider problem of the origins of our act of virtualizing the world, symbolizing it, requires us to think beyond the issue of what we can do with our bodies and how our bodies do it, to the wider issue of why did it start when it did, why did it expand to every kind of human, and why do we find a virtual world more useful to us than a direct and unmediated (one might say “instinctive”) manipulation of our environment, without the intervention and heavy reduction and mediation of experience we submit to when we substitute the virtual for the actual? Did we dance before we “danced”? This is hard to address and I do not think Langer is much help here. She brings us some amazingly valuable criteria for understanding dance as a form, but the search for its origins, along with all other virtualization/substitution activities, requires a different kind of inquiry.

NOTES 1.

For a fuller account of image in this sense, see my “Image and Act: Bergson’s Ontology and Aesthetics,” in Sztuka i Filozofia / Art and Philosophy 45 (2014), 64–81 http://bazhum. muzhp.pl/media//files/Sztuka_i_Filozofia/Sztuka_i_Filozofia-r2014-t45/Sztuka_i_Filozofiar2014-t45-s64-81/Sztuka_i_Filozofia-r2014-t45-s64-81.pdf. For a fuller account of the relationship between this ontology of the image and its relation to embodiment for Bergson, see my “In Vino Veritas,” in Southwest Philosophy Review 30:1 (January 2014); 39–66.

2.

See Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 3rd edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957 [1942]), pp. 98–99, 265 (hereafter cited as PNK).

3.

See Langer, PNK, pp. 29–30.

4.

For a fuller account of Cassirer and Langer in relation to process philosophy, see my “Ernst Cassirer and Susanne Langer,” in A Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought, vol. 2, eds. Michel Weber and Will Desmond (Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2008), pp. 552–570.

5.

See Susanne Langer, Mind: An Essay in Human Feeling, 3 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967, 1975, 1983).

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6.

See Susanne Langer, Problems of Art (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1957), p. 5.

7.

John Dewey famously handles this problem of the ontological status of immediate experience with his “postulate of immediate empiricism,” and indeed, all process philosophers must provide some account of the status of immediate experience. The solutions are various, but a postulate is not enough, as Dewey eventually discovered and addressed. See Thomas M. Alexander, John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature: The Horizons of Feeling (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1987).

8.

Langer, Problems of Art, pp. 5–6.

9.

Recent work by Ralph D. Ellis, Natika Newton, and others associated with the journal Consciousness and Emotion, has brought this question back to the attention of cognitive researchers. Ellis defends a theory called “enactivism” that is in close sympathy with Langer’s account. Ellis and Newton, How the Mind Uses the Brain (to Move the Body and Image the Universe) (Chicago: Open Court, 2010); and The Cauldron of Consciousness (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2000); also Ellis’ book Questioning Consciousness (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1995). I do not know whether Ellis and Newton are aware of how proximate their views are to Langer’s.

10. See Wolfgang Koehler, The Place of Value in a World of Facts (New York: Liveright Books, 1938), and Gestalt Psychology (New York: Liveright, 1947). 11. See Langer, PNK, pp. 26–28; Wolfgang Koehler, The Mentality of Apes, trans. Ella Winter (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1925). 12. Lida Cosmides and John Tooby, “Evolutionary Psychology: New Perspectives on Cognition and Motivation,” Annual Review of Psychology 64 (January 2013); 201–229: http://www. annualreviews.org/eprint/SQUakQB9xq3DiwAxceHy/full/10.1146/annurev. psych.121208.131628, accessed May15, 2016. 13. I heard Skinner say this at a lecture in Memphis in 1987. He had just been asked by a prominent cognitive scientist whether he truly held that cognitive science had made not a single contribution to human knowledge. Skinner replied that it had not and then added that it was the creationism of psychology. I am not defending Skinner, but I must say that I never heard a behaviorist use language so irresponsibly as I find commonly among so-called cognitive scientists. 14. For an excellent analysis of the use of ungrounded metaphors that do teleological work, and their connection to religious hangovers, see John C. Greene, Science, Ideology, and World View: Essays in the History of Evolutionary Ideas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); and Debating Darwin (Totowa, NJ: Regina Press, 1999). 15. See my “Evolutionary Time, and the Creation of the Space of Life,” in Space, Time, and the Limits of Human Understanding, eds. Shyam Wuppuluri and Giancarlo Ghirardi (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2016), chapter 31. 16. See Langer’s discussion of these problems in PNK , pp. 28–29. 17. There have been many battles and skirmishes in this unhappy history, but an especially telling episode is evident in the disputes about classifying homosexuality as a disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, editions 1–3. See the article by Jack Drescher, “Out of DSM: Depathologizing Homosexuality,” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ PMC4695779/ accessed June 28, 2017. 18. To be fair, Gardner and Bruner are very responsible writers, but these first histories of the so-called “cognitive revolution” were written at the moments of its evident triumph over Freud and behaviorism. They did not look forward to a time when this “new” paradigm of “cognitive science” would fade, as it is now beginning to do, nor did they look seriously at whether other responsible psychologists like Köhler and Koffka might have a point about how advanced psychology really is—which is not at all to the level of a science, and is a philosophical rather

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than a scientific question. Gardner does offer a few bones to the Gestalt theory, and cites Ulric Neisser as admitting that the Gestalt theorists set the terms of the problem that cognitive scientists try to solve, but “the currently popular explanations” of these problems “are about as far from the spirit of Gestalt psychology as one could get.” Neisser, “Comments on Gestalt Psychology,” cited in Gardner, The Mind’s New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1987), p. 114. Bruner cut his teeth on Gestalt psychology, but in his In Search of Mind: Esseys in Autobiography (New York: Harper & Row, 1983) pp 87–88, he describes it as dogmatic and single-minded, and describes its demise as follows: Köhler’s single-mindedness expressed itself in the search for a neural “isomorph” to the ground-figure phenomenon in vision—the heart of the Gestalt metaphor. That is to say, if one found a phenomenologically “simple” visual form, then one should expect to find a counterpart neural process that corresponded to it, that was somehow similar to it topologically or even geometrically. Yet, this is a view that has been borne out experimentally, as computer scientists taught computers to “see” complex three-dimensional fields by converting binary information to three-dimensional fields of quasi-action. The transformations are neither precisely geometrical nor topological, but they follow the axiomatic system Whitehead set out in Part IV of Process and Reality. See for example, Anthony G. Cohn and Achille C. Varzi, “Mereotopological Connection,” Journal of Philosophical Logic 32 (2003); 357–390; Stephen Blake, “A.N. Whitehead’s Geometric Algebra”, http://www.stebla.pwp.blueyonder. co.uk/Whitehead.html, 2005; Ian Pratt and Dominik Schoop, “Expressivity in Polygonal, Plane Mereotopology,” Journal of Symbolic Logic, 65:2 (June 2000); 822–838; D. A. Randell and A. G. Cohn, “A Spatial Logic Based on Regions and Connections,” in Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, 15032-0302-1pass-r02.indd 312 06-01-2017 20:53:47, eds. B. Nebel, C. Rich and W. Swartout (Proceedings of the Third International Conference [Los Altos, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 1992]), pp. 165–176. It does not follow that the human brain works on a system of strains and flat loci, but there is no reason to be dismissive of (or nostalgic about) the search for a neural isomorph. Thus, Gestalt theory is forgotten but not gone. However, Bruner (In Search of Minds) continues, in a mist of unfeigned nostalgia: Köhler was recording direct current in the brains of his subjects while they viewed shar-contoured figures passing across the visual field. It was a gallant search for a neural analogue of an experienced figure on ground. Looked at historically, looking back on the early 1950s, it has almost a tragically quixotic quality. For it was not long after that Hubel and Wiesel were to find that the visual system of the brain operated as a coding system. The trouble with all the wistfulness is that in no way did Hubel and Wiesel discover anything that discredited the Gestalt view. The “endocing” metaphor had to do with the physiological processes, not with the generalized result. Yes, Köhler was working with regrettably primitive tools, but no, he was not operating on a primitive hypothesis. The kind of geometry he was seeking is the very sort that was later used to teach robots to see. As Misha Pavel (then of Stanford) put it (https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=4nwpU7GFYe8, accessed June 30, 2017): Seeing something seems such an effortless activity that it is hard to imagine for us the complexities and difficulties that are involved. Only when you try to build a robot that can actually see and recognize objects do you realize how complicated the task is. People must do an awful lot of processing in order to see images and interpret them. The more accurate story is that cognitive scientists became so fascinated with the “how” of perception that they ignored for a few decades the general questions that led to the most

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successful lines of experimental research. Gestalt psychologists were better at theory than today’s cognitive scientists, who unconsciously accept reductionism and are inclined to present their results as more scientifically powerful than they really are. Hubel and Wiesel discovered, in part, the neural isomorph Köhler was seeking. Many cognitive scientists are still seeking better, clearer isomorphs. Hubel admits that they had only a small piece of the desired end. This issue is not an either/or proposition (as in either Gestalt or Cognitive Science, but not both). 19. See, for example, PNK , pp. 38–39. 20. The work of Paul C.W. Davies and other astrobiologists is informative in this regard. Davies is author of many books, but a good beginning is his chapter “A Quantum Origin of Life?” in the multi-author book Quantum Aspects of Life (London: Imperial College Press, 2008). The chapter can be accessed at: http://www.quantumactivist.com/wp-content/ uploads/group-documents/2/1358573868-quantum-life.pdf. 21. Note that Langer is careful to leave open the possibility that mind exists unmanifested before sign use—this is also Peirce’s, Whitehead’s, and Cassirer’s view. 22. It is important to note here that Langer avoids causal language and chooses John Stuart Mill’s idea of concomitant variation. This avoids errors of premature reduction. See Mill’s Philosophy of Scientific Method, ed. Ernest Nagel (New York: Hafner, 1950), pp. 223–226 (Book III, ch. VIII, Third Canon). 23. Langer, PNK , p. 29. 24. See Langer, PNK , pp. 110–116. 25. Langer, PNK pp. 116–117. This is only one among several principal theories about the origins of song, dance, and art. See Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), chapter 1, for a summary of the main theories in the present. 26. Langer, PNK , pp. 117, 130. Subsequent research calls into question Langer’s “uselessness” argument. I do not accept her claim, but I do not think her argument depends on it. Many studies have been done subsequent to Langer’s work arguing that music may serve a variety of vital functions, both physiological and social. As early as 1964 A. P. Merriam cited ten major functions of music, including biological functions, but Langer does not mention this in her work published after 1964. See Merriam, The Anthropology of Music (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964). Other studies after Langer’s death confirm that the biological influence of music on the body, especially the brain, is anything but useless. See for example, Robert Jourdain, Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1997). It is interesting, in light of my earlier discussion of Langer’s comparative and undeserved obscurity that Jourdain, who makes an argument very similar in form to Langer’s, seems to be entirely unaware of her work. But also see the essays collected in Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), which shows a variety of biological uses and applications of music; especially relevant to Langer are chapters 4 and 19. For the social and evolutionary usefulness of music, see Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals. Langer’s PNK does show up in Mithen’s bibliography but he does not discuss her views. For a number of reasons, the argument about the evolutionary role of music in animal biology has centered on bird song. This makes sense when one considers that birds certainly “sing” by almost any definition, but whether it is music is hotly contested. Among others, Charles Harsthorne disputed this kind of claim vociferously and with much empirical research in his ornithological work Born to Sing: A Survey of World Birdsong (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1971). A valuable update of that argument is in a long note in Mithen’s book The The Singing Neanderthals, pp. 283–286. Nothing in my current analysis depends on whether Langer has animal communication or aesthetics

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right, but if animals do make music, they present us with the conditions for virtualizing space into place, although the place and space do not seem, for animals, to break apart into a tension that will support dynamic form. In short, animals do not create art. But if that is fair to assert, then the presence of music alone, however necessary, is not sufficient for separating space and place. I think Langer has clearly indicated that the power of imaginative projection of previously formed presentational symbols is also a necessary condition. Together these two conditions may be sufficient for pushing space and place into separation and dynamic tension. But sufficient conditions obtaining is not causation, so she need not (and I do not) make a causal claim. 27. The economy of this discharge is theorized by Georges Battaille in The Accursed Share, 3 vols., trans. Robert Hurley (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1991). 28. These tendencies are of course the Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies theorized by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. Not enough attention has been given to the influence of Johann Jakob Bachofen in Nietzsche’s theory. To trace Nietzsche’s account of music into a serious theory of ritual, one must go back to Bachofen, but most of the latter’s work is not available in English. See Bachofen, Myth, Religion and Mother Right, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). An interesting and much more persuasive alternative to Nietzsche’s account of music and ritual is Jane Ellen Harrison’s masterpiece, Themis, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927). Dance originalists will find her tracing of the “Hymn of the Kouretes” a much more satisfying account than either Langer’s or Nietzsche’s. 29. See C. S. Peirce, “A New List of Categories” (1867), in The Essential Peirce, 2 vols., eds. N. Houser and C. Kloesel (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), vol. 1, pp. 6–7. 30. See Peirce, “A New List,” pp. 6–7. In his excellent book on Langer, Robert Innis has well documented numerous lines of agreement between Peirce and Langer, although he does not make this precise point regarding a shared kind of realism. He comes very close to saying this sort of thing, however, in his discussion of Langer’s and Peirce’s shared ideas about quality, and his discussion of the “apparition” in this context is, I think, in agreement with what I have been saying in this chapter. See Robert Innis, Susanne Langer in Focus: The Symbolic Mind (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), pp. 162–166. 31. For the relevant discussion of this kind of “container” as hypodoxe, see Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1933), pp. 192ff, especially p. 192: . . . the Receptacle is void of all forms. It is thus certainly not the ordinary geometrical space with its mathematical relations. Plato calls his Receptacle the ‘foster-mother of all becoming’. He evidently conceived it as a necessary notion without which our analysis of Nature is defective. . . . The Receptacle imposes a common relationship on all that happens, but does not impose what that relationship shall be. . . . Receptacle may be conceived as the necessary community within which the course of history is set, in abstraction of all particular historical facts. 32. See my essay “Music, Process, and Person: The Egress of Possibility,” in American Aesthetics Today: Theory and Practice, eds. Walter Gulick and Gary Slater (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2020), pp. 177–209. 33. Naturally this point will bring to many the recollection of Heidegger’s account of the clearing, the Lichtung, and the various accounts he offers of letting the things show themselves as the things they are. I do not think that my sense of the immediate experience of the egress of possibility is all that close to Heidegger’s view, from the so-called “Kehre” onwards. The main difference in the account I am offering lies in the comparative friendliness to naturalism my account carries. For a full analysis of this relationship between fundamental ontology and my process ontology, especially as it relates to the experience of being toward death (which, as a sort of ultimate limit, is a fair test case), see

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my essay “Music, Time, and the Egress of Possibility.” This chapter also treats Langer’s views in detail. 34. One is reminded of the Buffy Saint-Marie protest song “Universal Soldier,” which blames the wars (all too ironically) on the decisions of individual soldiers to fight, when each one of them is free to refuse, but also blames the individual people in every society who support wars, for being the ones who give the orders to such soldiers. 35. Such a claim really does touch upon Danto’s meaning when he chose “transfiguration” for the central idea of his aesthetics. In The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 172–173, he says: The greatest metaphors of art I believe to be those in which the spectator identifies himself with the attributes of the represented character: it is oneself as Anna Karenina, or Isabelle Archer, or Elizabeth Bennett, or O . . . where the artwork becomes a metaphor for life and life is transfigured. The structure of such transfigurations may indeed be like the structures of making believe—of pretending for whatever pleasure that brings and not for the purposes of deceit. But in such pretending one must always know that one is not what one is pretending to be, and pretending, like a game, always ceases when done. But artistic metaphors are different to the extent that they are in some way true . . . You cannot altogether separate from your identity your beliefs about what identity is . . . a commonplace person is transfigured into an amazing woman. One should read this idea of transfiguration in the light of Langer’s aesthetics, as an amplification of her idea of “significant form,” which Danto believes goes only part of the way to the heart of things. 36. There is far more to be said on this point about “found enaction.” I like the analysis by Phil Lesh (who was classically trained and into the avant garde jazz scene before he became the bass player for The Grateful Dead) of “found sound” in Searching for the Sound (New York: Back Bay Books, 2006), but I would not choose the word “sound” as an analogue for found enactment. I would choose the word “tone” because enactment, like tone, has already conformed to the conditions of virtualization; it is proto-dance, and suitable for dancing when discovered. Sound is not necessarily conformed to music, but much sound is coherent enough to be “tone” already, proto-melody and/or rhythm. For example, if my vacuum cleaner hums a noise that is dominated by, say, the tones we call “C” and your vacuum hums at “E,” we will have a dyad from which we could make Western music, and the vacuum symphony cannot be too far from the thinking of, for instance, John Cage’s living protégés. 37. Langer’s sense of “mind” is also not far from C. S. Peirce’s more metaphysicalized sense in his famous Monist articles. See especially “The Law of Mind,” The Monist 2:4 (1892): 533–559. Peirce’s account of chance and continuity in this and other articles is also highly congenial to the account I am giving here. 38. Here I am filling out Arthur Danto’s characteristic position, that a necessary condition that an object be an artwork is that it be definable as embodied feeling. If what I am saying here is correct, a further condition (building toward a sufficient collection) would be an act of projection, a virtualization, and crossing a tipping point between quasi-purposive enaction suitable for communication and purposive communication. How one gets from purposive communication to art is something Danto wrote many books about. I have commented on his views of “the art world” and “the end of art” elsewhere. See my extensive “Preface” to The Philosophy of Arthur Danto, eds. R. E. Auxier and L. E. Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 2013). 39. See Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), pp. 173–177. I will not be discussing very much of what Langer says explicitly about dance in Feeling and

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Form in this chapter. I do discuss it in “Music, Time, and the Egress of Possibility,” cited above. But the main discussion is Feeling and Form, pp. 177–186. 40. Langer, Feeling and Form, pp. 109–110 (original emphasis). 41. Ibid., 412–413. 42. I explored this issue in two popular essays, “Dream Time” and “Once upon a Time,” in Inception and Philosophy: Ideas to Die For, ed. Thorsten Botz-Bornstein (Chicago: Open Court, 2011), pp. 129–147, 279–300. 43. Again, please see Auxier and Herstein, The Quantum of Explanation, chapters 7–9, and Auxier, “Evolutionary Time and the Creation of the Space of Life,” cited above. 44. Langer, Problems of Art, p. 34. 45. I think it is clear that Langer would not accept this supplementation. See her critique of Bergson and radical empiricism in Feeling and Form, pp. 113–119.

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PART TWO

Movement, Embodiment, and Meaning: The Distinctiveness of Dance

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CHAPTER 2.1

Introduction: Reflections on Practice EDYTA KUZIAN

What is distinctive about dance? Dance uses the moving body as its central artistic medium, movement that is very often accompanied by music and marked by time. One common thread of the articles in this section on “Movement, Embodiment, and Meaning” is about the media of dance—the distinctive meaning-making roles of the dancer’s body in movement, choreography, and music. The chapters that follow consider dance from a number of different perspectives, beginning first with the perspective of viewers’ and dancers’ interpretation of dance. In “Interpretation in Dance Performing” (Chapter 2.2), Aili Bresnahan philosophically examines different ways in which dance can be interpreted. Second, in Chapter 2.3, Edgar Vite and Diana Palacio consider dance as an alternative to philosophical understanding of the relationship between mind and body. Third, in “The Phenomenology of Choreographing” (Chapter 2.4), Rebecca Whitehurst examines the phenomenological aspects of embodiment through the experience of choreographing from a first-person perspective. Fourth, in “Discovering Collaboration in Dance” (Chapter 2.5), musician Richard Hall investigates the use of other media in dance and their relationship in the meaning of dance to present various forms of collaboration between dancers and musicians that show that music and dance collaboration is a unique aesthetic attribute to both music and dance. Fifth, to explore the relationship of the aesthetic, in Chapter 2.6, “Falling Up: An Explication of a Dance,” Kaysie Brown explores expressivity and formal meaning. She examines the aesthetic experience of dance, understood as having two functions, a primary intuitive function and a theoretical function. A beautiful dance in the second sense requires beauty in the first function. Sixth, in Chapter 2.7, “Early Floating in the Here and Now: The Radically Empirical Immediate Dance Poetry of Erick Hawkins and Lucia Dlugoszewski,” Louis Kavouras considers what it means for a dance to be modernist by looking at the choreography of Erick Hawkins, who collaborated with Lucia Dlugoszewski. And seventh, in Chapter 2.8 David Leventhal examines the meaning of being a dancer in “Je danse; donc, je suis.” Leventhal shares his experience at the Mark Morris Dance Center of teaching dance to students with Parkinson’s disease for whom the ability to dance is a way of expressing their being in the world as dancers and not being merely as bodily disease. Whereas in the first part of this introduction I discuss in more detail how authors in this section of the book explain the meaning in dance, in the second part I explain my own perspective on the meaning of dance, namely as a kind of art performance, which 123

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uses the body as its distinctive medium. My focus is on determining what kind of dance can be modernist, that is, which dance genre best realizes the ambition of treating the body as its central medium. Aili Bresnahan, in “Interpretation in Dance Performing” (Chapter 2.2), focuses on the dancer’s interpretation of dance as a work of art. This approach challenges the traditional understanding of aesthetic interpretation as belonging to the evaluating audience. That approach treats dance as a static object on a par with sculpture or painting. Bresnahan’s alternative account of the meaning of dance as interpretation calls for a more dynamic approach to the performing practice itself: dancers co-produce with choreographers the meaning of dance as art. She says, “Perhaps what would help here is an account of meaning identification in which meaning is intuited, identified and conveyed in the body and felt rather than in consciously decided ways.” For example, George Balanchine actively invited dancers to participate in creating dance. His approach was to draw out the individual’s grace and expressivity of the body to be shaped as a work of art. Many of his ballets were created specifically for individual dancers. The meaning of dance is that of an “art product” found in the dynamic qualities of dance, which involve a moving body rather than of “artwork.” This conception of dance as art contrasts with the conception of art in terms of abstract structures and static interpretation. Thus dance art cannot be reduced to static interpretation itself; it is always already imbued with the meaning expressed through dancers’ bodies. In Chapter 2.3, Edgar Vite and Diana Palacio on “Epistemologies of Body and Movement in Contemporary Dance,” explore how a dancer’s expressivity presents a challenge to the traditional dualisms that privilege mind over body. Choreographies of Isadora Duncan, Jirí Kylián, Merce Cunningham, and Phillipe Decouflé present new ways of understanding and appreciating the dancer’s body in movement. The dancer’s expressive meaning is communicated in an immediate way, which can be grasped only by going beyond rational thinking. While Bresnahan’s chapter focuses on the interpretative autonomy of the dancer and her co-participation in meaning-making, Vite and Palacio focus on choreography. They offer an alternative to the dualist conceptions of the mind as superior to the body by presenting five epistemological ways of analyzing dance and its meaning: (1) They explore the notion of autonomy and creative freedom in Isadora Duncan’s choreography, which challenges the rigor of the rules of reason. The dancer’s body in her choreography rebels against the rigidity and instrumentality of the rules of rationality of the classical ballet, which constrict the “natural development of body and movement.” (2) The dancer’s body is not excessively confined by the costume, the feet of the dancer are bare, and, without defying gravity, are placed firmly but gracefully on the ground. The body is treated as independent in the creative process of dance. It must first feel alive and not be hamstrung by the ideals of what it is supposed to represent. The inspiration for dance comes from the autonomous bodily movement itself, its capacity to breathe in and out, to contract and release, and to be in harmony with its surroundings. (3) Vite and Palacio reinterpret traditional forms of dance to include aestheticized ordinary bodily movement in the experimental choreography of Jirí Kylián, who “emphasizes the expressive capacity of the body in its own natural movement.” Kylián uses elements of classical ballet and combines them with ordinary movement, such as walking, or with martial arts, to draw our attention to the aestheticized bodily movement

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we see in dance. In Vite and Palacio’s view, this novel approach to the body in dance changes our understanding of the role of the dancer in dance making and opens “a new anthropological conception in which the body is not merely a mechanical extension of the human being” or a plane onto which we project perfection and beauty. The ordinary bodily gestures themselves are beautiful and become works of art, emphasized in the ballet-like movements. (4) Vite and Palacio draw on the interdisciplinary aspects of the choreographic style of Merce Cunningham. In his collaboration with John Cage, Cunningham explored the different ways that music and bodily movements are related in dance and sought ways to make the dancing body more independent of music. In experimenting with Jasper Johns’ and Robert Rauschenberg’s use of mise-en-scène, Cunningham re-examined the relationship between dancing bodies and the audience, in which the audience coconstitutes the meaning of a work of art. He strived to make bodies without “tone, and virtually devoid of ‘expressive’ or symbolic elements.” Here, dance as art is not a contemplation or reflection of nature.1 Cunningham liberates dance from the governance of the principles of reason that dictate that dance be harmonious with music and require that the dancing body be distinct from the audience. (5) Finally, Vite and Palacio rethink what it means to be a body by looking at the videodances created by Phillipe Decouflé. Decouflé’s videodances explore the idea of virtual bodies, which are always already mediated by technology. By radically altering the appearance of the bodily movement by using video montage, Decouflé’s virtual body reconfigures the human body in a way that challenges our traditional understanding of the body as sexed or beautiful. The body in the experience of dance is no longer rationally predictable because it defies gravity, challenges spatial perception, or presents a fragmented narrative structure of the movement. Here, it is not the dancer but the video editor who assumes the role of the interpreter who has control of the meaning of dance. The dehumanized body, freed of ordinary expectations, becomes the site of a utopian desire, onto which we can project any aesthetic meaning we choose. Rebecca Whitehurst, in “The Phenomenology of Choreographing” (Chapter 2.4), focuses on the embodied experience of creating dance. Whitehurst defines dance as a practice of organizing and executing choreographed bodily movement. She employs phenomenology to examine the practice of choreography, which she views as “an immediate, total body model and performance of phenomenal intentionality.” She draws on Maurice MerleauPonty’s notion of bodily consciousness and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s “kinesthetic consciousness” to argue that bodily movement is a primordial way of making sense of the world. Phenomenology and dance choreography are mutually illuminating in Whitehurst’s view. On the one hand, she argues that dance artists should be attentive to a phenomenological approach in creating artistic content. On the other, she gives examples of first-person accounts of Jason Phelps, Erica Gionfriddo, and her own practice of choreographing to show how, through movement, we experience and make meaning of the world. Her idea is that movement is not only a response to the world but also that it “alters [the] immediate environment and brings about a change in sensation.” Hence, she suggests that dance, like philosophy, is a form of self-knowing. In “Discovering Collaboration in Dance” (Chapter 2.5), from a historical perspective Richard Hall examines four main forms of collaboration between dancers and musicians. The first is the collaboration between the composer and choreographer (Stravinsky and Diaghilev/ Nijinsky), in which music is created for the dance, as was the case with The Rite

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of Spring. The second is between the musician and dancer (Cage and Cunningham, The Seasons, 1947 and Inlets, 1978), in which music is seen as independent of dance. In the third—the working relationship between musicians (Davis and Evans, Kind of Blue, 1959)—the musicians listen carefully to one another and play off each other’s moods and music. The fourth form of collaboration is one in which music and dance are codependent. Dance and music contribute equally to creating a work of art. Of these four forms Hall says, “All . . . need to be embraced by the artists in order to produce a truly creative, spontaneous action that will only exist in that exact time and space, accepting all freedoms and limitations. That is one of the unique aesthetic attributes of music and dance.” He emphasizes that all these different forms of relationships of music and dance have one thing in common: that dance is always already a collaborative process and that these collaborations are essential to create spontaneous art. Kaysie Brown, in Chapter 2.6 on “Falling Up: An Explication of a Dance,” focuses on Erick Hawkins’ choreography. Hawkins employs F. S. C. Northrop’s theory of relating, claiming that dance and dance-making can be related in two distinct ways: intuitive and postulative. The intuitive way serves as a primary function in our immediate apprehension of dance. The secondary function is postulative, in which theoretical control and defining techniques are used to ensure the aesthetic continuity of a work of art. Both of these functions are strongly correlated in the meaning-making of dance. In the intuitive sense, art furthers life because dance provides the content, as an assemblage of bodily movements of a living being. In a postulative sense, the elements of dance are organized in ways that express and communicate meaning. In “Early Floating in the Here and Now: The Radically Empirical Immediate Dance Poetry of Erick Hawkins and Lucia Dlugoszewski” (Chapter 2.7), Louis Kavouras considers what it means for a dance to be modernist by looking at “Early Floating”, a twenty-two minute formalist work choreographed by Erick Hawkins with music by Lucia Dlugoszewski. The work of Hawkins and Dlugoszewski is modernist because they moved away from representationalist forms of choreography (meaning using the body as a vehicle for expressing ideas) and turned to abstract form (in which meaning in dance is derived from the body itself). The main question is about the way in which the dancing body is a modernist work of art. In his choreography, Hawkins makes a distinction between the intuitive apprehension of the content in dance and the theoretical organization of the elements of dance that express aesthetic meaning. For this reason, the theoretical is fully dependent on the bodily expressivity. In this way, dance coincides with Clement Greenberg’s understanding of modernism in art, in which aesthetic judgment focuses on formalist properties. David Leventhal, in “Je danse; donc, je suis” (Chapter 2.8) gives a powerful account of teaching dance to students with Parkinson’s disease. Here, dance is not a form of therapy. Rather, Leventhal emphasizes the artistic experience of dance, in which abstract ideas become expressed in an embodied way. In this practice of dance, students do not focus on their disability or on healing their disabilities but primarily identify themselves as dancers. Leventhal says, “The class’s emphasis on aesthetics—the movement qualities and imagery that inform how one moves, and the ideas or stories one is trying to convey through movement, reinforce that self-categorization.” This identity shift from being disabled persons to dancers replaces “patienthood with dancerhood.” It thereby enables students to be more active in creating new meaning through the use of their bodies. All contributions in “Movement, Embodiment, and Meaning: The Distinctiveness of Dance” offer powerful perspectives on the meaning of dance. In my own analysis of the

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meaning of dance, I consider dance as a kind of art performance that uses the body as its distinctive medium. In what follows, I argue that contemporary dance best realizes this use of the body in a modernist sense. There are many dance genres, such as ritual dance, classical ballet, modern dance, and contemporary dance. In each of these genres, the weight of our aesthetic judgment falls on different aspects of the moving body. In ritual dance, we judge dance to be beautiful by looking at whether the narrative of the dance successfully communicates cultural and religious content. Classical dance aims at grace and precision of an acrobatic quality for the purpose of storytelling. The emphasis of our judging is placed on the dancers’ technique and the suitability of the choreography to the narrative. In modern dance, we also appreciate the dancers’ technique and the choreography, but our focus is on the human bodies stripped of excessive costume and décor. Modern dance is a transitional form between classical and contemporary dance. On the one hand, it retains both narration and an emphasis on rigorous technique, on the other, the emphasis is as much on bodily limitation as it is on bodily grace. Finally, in contemporary dance, our aesthetic judgment is attentive to the body of the dancer and her expressive gestures. Contemporary dance aestheticizes our everyday movement. There is no story to be told, no need for rigorous classical technique, and no elaborate costume, for all these distract from the bodily movements of the dancer. First, what does it mean to perceive the movements of the body in dance as meaningful? And second, what kinds of dance performances allow for the kind of aesthetic judgment that treats the body as central to its reflection? My central claim is that contemporary dance radically breaks away from the other three forms of dance and makes ordinary movements visible. Admittedly, ritual, classical, modern, and contemporary dance all use the body in their performances; however, only contemporary dance draws on the embodied nature of the dancer in a modernist sense. If the artistic medium of dance—the body in movement—has inherent aesthetic qualities, then the job of embodied aesthetics is to provide a framework for clarifying the mediumspecific elements and limits of dance. My overall argument has two steps. I first clarify the notion of modernism, and how dance differs from other performance arts. Then I justify the claim that the body is the distinctive medium of dance. I offer a reading of the history of dance, which shows that its developments and revolutions successively refine the appreciation of bodily movement alone as the focus of its practice. There are two important distinctions to keep in mind regarding the divisions among styles in dance. One is historical; the other is aesthetic. The historical one follows the chronological development of dance styles from classical, through modern, to postmodern.2 The aesthetic one distinguishes between classical and modernist. Thus modern dance as a historical style does not necessarily have a modernist aesthetic. My focus is on aesthetic distinctions among historical styles of dance, and the gradual realization through them of the body as an aesthetic medium. I show that classical dance uses the body’s expressivity as a vehicle for storytelling. Modern dance is a transition between using the body for storytelling and treating the body as expressive on its own terms (e.g., Lamentations, 1930); it thereby contains both classical and modernist elements. Only contemporary dance is fully and self-consciously modernist, using the body as central to its aesthetic reflection (Boris Charmatz, Ralph Lemon, Jodi Melnick). The point of the discussion on modernism in dance is to show what it means to use the body as the actual central medium. What kind of bodily performance focuses on this kind of aesthetic expressivity?

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FORMS OF PERFORMANCE ARTS THAT USE THE BODY AS THEIR MEDIUM My inquiry into the nature of aesthetic bodily expressivity requires a clarification about why dance is privileged over other forms of performance arts that use the body, such as pantomime, music, and film. I suggest that dance is distinct from other performance arts first in making the body its distinctive medium, and second that the extent to which a dance genre is modernist can be assessed in terms of how much it fulfils this aspiration. Understanding this distinction will help us see why dance as a modernist art that is capable of reflecting on its own medium as having an aesthetic worth is a fairly recent phenomenon. For dance to be a modernist art, one that critically approaches its medium, it must consider the moving body as an art in itself. I suggest four steps to support my claim that seeing the body as the medium in dance is a late modernist achievement. I follow Kant’s analysis of aesthetic judgment, according to which aesthetic appreciation gives us a disinterested pleasure or displeasure in viewing an object. According to this account, the aesthetic judgment that is prompted by our feeling of pleasure or displeasure that arises in confrontation with an object cannot be explained in terms of concepts. In this way, the object of our aesthetic appreciation appears as continually novel because it is not quite able to be grasped by concepts. Novelty as an aesthetic category appears as a kind of intelligibility, which cannot be classified under the familiar concepts. Aesthetic novelty draws our attention in a pleasant or unpleasant way to what Kant calls “purposiveness without purpose.” In practical judgments the will that arranges presentations according to a certain rule, or aiming at a certain goal, is a manifestation of purpose with purposiveness. This notion of purpose as a cause defined by its effect is characteristic of our conceptual way of making sense of the world but it cannot be the case in our aesthetic judgment. Hence, as Kant claims, there must be “purposiveness without a purpose” when, given a particular object’s form, we do not deduce its purpose (or cause). This point opens the discussion with a claim that in nature we can observe objects’ forms as purposive without purpose. By referring to an object’s form, we can judge its purposiveness if we can subsume it under a concept (as in cognitive and practical judgments). However, if there is no concept available to apply to the object’s form, and yet that form strikes us as purposive, we judge it to be beautiful. In our aesthetic appreciation of the object, we take pleasure in recognizing its purposiveness without purpose. The dominating feature of the performance arts in general is that it uses bodily movement as a vehicle for the expression of some independent meaning rather than as a mode of direct expression. The meaning expressed through the body communicates a story in a theater play or ballet or a joke in standup comedy. The point of a successful performance is to exhibit a special skill one has acquired through training. The aesthetic judgment in the case of performance arts is on how successfully a given skill is performed. The body in such performance arts is merely secondary to our judgment because what we judge is the achievement of the performer rather than the bodily performance in itself. This is to say that, when we are watching a comedian or an actor on stage, we are not typically struck by her spectacular movements. Rather, we judge a theater play to be successful by the way the story is told and acted, and a comedian to be so if his jokes are funny. Hence, my claim is that modernism in performance art is a complicated phenomenon due to the complexity of medium specificity. Here I use Clement Greenberg’s account of modernism in art, according to which art is modernist in the sense of being immanently

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self-critical. This idea can be illustrated by Greenberg’s discussion of the history of painting. The Old Masters of the Renaissance “had dissembled the medium [the flatness, or two-dimensionality of canvas], using art to conceal art.”3 Pre-modernist painters’ approach to painting came from without, in their way of imposing three-dimensionality onto the flat surface. By contrast, modernist painters saw the flatness of the medium as a challenge distinctive of painting, not a limitation of it. By remaining faithful to and reflecting on the nature of the medium, they use “art to call attention to art.” The way in which art can achieve an immanent, modernist, and self-critical attitude is through the use of its distinctive medium, which constitutes the artwork. We can use Greenberg’s discussion of the history of paining as a guide to what it would mean for dance to be modernist. It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique to the nature of its medium. The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thereby each art would be rendered “pure,” and in its “purity” find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence. “Purity” meant self-definition, and the enterprise of self-criticism in the arts became one of self-definition with a vengeance. Realistic, illusionist art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art. Modernism used art to call attention to art. The limitations that constitute the medium of painting—the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of pigment—were treated by the Old Masters as negative factors that could be acknowledged only implicitly or indirectly. Modernist painting has come to regard these same limitations as positive factors that are to be acknowledged openly. As Greenberg notes here, the question of purity in modernist art is essential, and this purity in art is determined by its medium, which grants art its independence from being used as a means only. I take it that the originality of the work of art in Greenberg’s sense is that the medium must be free of instrumental use. The medium becomes the work of art, itself the focus of our aesthetic judgment. The difficulty with the medium in art is due to a multiplicity of kinds of media involved. Medium specificity in performance art is constituted by a multiplicity of artistic media: it can be a play, poem, script, moving body, music, photography, or canvas. Because of this complexity of medium specificity, it is hard to determine in a modernist sense whether the work of art—a performance—fulfils the promise already inscribed into the medium because, as it is often the case, many media may be used. From among the performance arts that use multiple media, contemporary dance is the closest to modernist art because our focus is on the body itself as the constituting medium that brings dance art into existence. Because dance as an art includes many forms (e.g., ballet, contemporary dance, and so on), in this section I justify which forms of dance free the body of its instrumental use. The general idea is that the body is treated instrumentally when it is used for the purposes of storytelling, of showing its athleticism, of exhibiting social conventions, or of competing to win a prize in a competition like “Dancing with the Stars.” There is a parallel between Greenberg’s idea regarding the Old Masters, who by imposing standards on artistic medium miss the aesthetic specificity of the medium itself, and dance. Dance forms that use the body in order to express something other than the body conceal the body from itself as an aesthetic medium. In order for dance to be an independent art in a modernist sense, it must be vulnerable to an immanent self-criticism: this self-criticism is to take the body on its own terms and use its limitations to bring a modernist work of art into existence.

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FORMS OF DANCES, WHICH USE THE BODY AS ITS DISTINCT MEDIUM I ended the last section with a claim that dance is distinctive from other performance arts in making the body its distinct medium. Furthermore, the extent to which a dance genre is modernist depends on how much it manages to rely on bodily expressivity. There is, however, a difficulty within dance itself because not all dance genres qualify as modernist art. For convenience’s sake, of the four groups of dance—ritual, classical, modern, and contemporary—while all aspire to exhibit the beauty of dancing bodies, most limit the body’s expressivity by subordinating it to aesthetic and instrumental ends, such as storytelling. In this way, some of these forms of dance have an instrumental approach to the body because they draw our aesthetic appreciation to a story or a play that the body is supposed to communicate. Which of the styles of dance qualify as modernist on Greenberg’s terms? Treating dance as a modernist art means that the artistic medium is artful on its own terms. If we merely use it as a means to express other independent meaning, we will miss the aesthetic specificity of the medium itself. We must examine the dancing body as art in itself. The general idea I develop here requires a way of understanding the body away from storytelling, or from exhibitions of athleticism or social conventions. These all involve treating the body instrumentally rather than as a medium that is artful on its own terms. My examination begins with a critical assessment of classical dance, which tends to treat the body as a vehicle to communicate a story. Next, I consider modern choreographies that pose a challenge to classical approaches to the body, like those of Martha Graham or Pina Bausch. I argue that they nevertheless struggle with using the body itself as an artful medium and yet remain attached to the storytelling aspect of dance performance. I end this section with an analysis of contemporary dance which dates back to the 1960s of the Judson Theatre avant garde dance movement. I show that their consideration of the body as an artistic medium is not just contemporary but modernist in Greenberg’s sense. Trisha Brown’s choreography in particular is a manifestation of how dance is artful by drawing its aesthetic value from the moving body itself.

Classical Dance What features defined classical dance in Europe? The origins of classical dance in the Western world are derived from ballet de cour, which was performed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at courts in Italy and France. This early form of ballet was part of the social practices of establishing formal hierarchies and governing social relations. The king had the central role in the dance, while other courtiers, depending on their social rank, were placed accordingly in the court choreography.4 Those of higher rank danced closer to the monarch, those of lower further away. By the end of the seventeenth century in France, Louis XIV had founded the first Royal Academy of Dance and ordered his first ballet master, Pierre Beauchamps, to formalize dance steps by “making dance understood on paper.”5 Beauchamps developed the five fundamental feet positions of ballet that are still used in dance training today: in the first position, the heels touch and the feet are splayed open at a 180 degree angle pointing in opposite directions. In the second, still in the same open line of 180 degrees, the feet are spread apart at the approximate width of the hips. In the third position, one of the feet is placed in front of the other foot. The fourth position is

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similar to the third position but here the heels are not touching. The feet are spread either in parallel or open position. The dancer’s weight is evenly distributed on both feet. The fifth position is the most demanding of the five basic positions. It requires rotation of the hips in order to allow for the heel of one foot to align with the toe of the other. There are other more sophisticated and impressive formal poses in ballet that are still universally taught to ballet dancers. Among some of the most spectacular are the arabesque (“in Arabic style”) in which the dancer stands on one leg either en pointe or half pointe (lowered foot or demi-pointe), while her upper torso stretches up and the back leg extends in a turnout, as if she were wrapping her body with the back leg. Often on the cover of a dance critique of a classical ballet, we will see a dancer splitting her legs in the air, in a long horizontal jump, which begins with springing from one foot and landing on another and is called the grand jeté. I name only a couple of ballet poses to draw attention to their complexity and the athleticism that is required to perform them masterfully in the air. While the athleticism is one aspect of being able to perform classical ballet, another important aspect of this form of dance is the story that the dancers are supposed to express with their bodies. This dramaturgy occupies a central place in ballet. August Bournonville There is a continuity in two core assumptions of classical ballet from its early court stages through early Romanticism (La Sylphide, premiered in 1836), at the turn of the twentieth century (Swan Lake premiered in 1877), The Sleeping Beauty premiered in 1890, and The Nutcracker premiered in 1892), to George Balanchine’s more recent (re)interpretations. The first assumption is that the human body can be trained in a precise and formal way (formalization of ballet postures). The second is that by formalizing this human movement we can express through a unified language of bodily gestures stories of love, betrayal, and other dramatic themes. In La Sylphide, James, a bachelor who is on the eve of his wedding, falls in love with a nymph (Sylph), who kisses him while he sleeps and then disappears. As Alastair Macaulay says, “La Sylphide, [has] its ethereal heroine dancing on en point and its human hero forever trying to grasp her.”6 James, in his desperate search for the nymph (Sylph), betrays his mortal wife-to-be, Effie, and captures the Sylph, who shortly afterwards dies. There is definitely a good moral to be learned from La Sylphide—better a small fish than an empty dish—but as Alastair Macaulay suggests in his review of La Sylphide, the aesthetic focus is the bodily acrobatics. One review will suffice to demonstrate this: On Monday night Natalia Osipova showed her gazellelike elevation as the Sylphide, floating in jump after jump. The cabrioles, in which she beat her legs together behind her in the air, were especially miraculous, and the feathery circlings of one foot (in ronds de jambe sautés) made the air quiver.7 In Macaulay’s reading of ballet, which is characteristic of most of his dance reviews in the New York Times, what he judges is how the movements of the dancers tell the story, the adequacy of how dancers represent the characters in the story, and how they have perfected their ballet technique. He gives special emphasis to the athletic, gravity-defying nature of balletic bodies. His emphasis on these criteria of aesthetic evaluation reveals that an aesthetically pleasing ballet is judged in part by qualities other than bodily movement itself. Vaclav Nijinsky Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker—the prototypes of classical ballet—make essentially the same use of the moving body trained according to

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rigid rules of ballet for storytelling purposes. However, it is notable that in May 1913, so right at the turn of the twentieth century, just when the standards of the Romantic ballets had been mastered, Vaclav Nijinsky’s premiere of The Rite of Spring challenged the formality of ballet. In his review of Nijinsky’s The Rite of Spring written in November 1913, Jacques Rivière wrote that this dance performance was bold and innovative in the way it broke away from the classical ballet. The great innovation of Le Sacre du Printemps [The Rite of Spring] is the absence of all “trimmings.” Here is a work that is absolutely pure. Cold and harsh, if you will, but without any glaze to mar its inherent brilliance, without any artifices to rearrange or distort its contours. This is not a “work of art,” with all the usual little contrivances. Nothing is blurred, nothing obscured by shadows; there is no veiling or poetic mellowing, no trace of aesthetic effect. The work is presented whole and in its natural state; the parts are set before us completely raw, without anything that will aid in their digestion; everything is open, intact, clear, and coarse.8 Rivière goes on to claim that the innovation of this choreography, even though at the height of ballet, is that “[i]t no longer has any ties to the classical ballet, [it is] rebelling against it.”9 What are the standards of classical ballet that Nijinsky’s The Rite of Spring rebelled against?10 To see what is distinctive about Nijinsky, it will help to compare what was revolutionary in his work with that of another innovator, George Balanchine. George Balanchine Consider George Balanchine’s ballet, Agon,11 which premiered in 1957 to music composed by Igor Stravinsky. Agon is a ballet choreographed for twelve dancers (eight female and four male). The title of the dance suggests that it is about an ancient competition or rivalry, but Balanchine insisted the dance is plotless. Balanchine suggested that this work is the first modernist dance,12 and that he could redefine ballet and strip from it the constraints of storytelling and dependence on formal movement concealed in excessive costumes. The dancers are dressed in minimalistic black and white costumes, as if Balanchine is suggesting that his breaking from rigid standards of ballet reveals as much bodily movement as possible. The aim of Agon is not to strike spectacular poses; instead, the poses are off balance and if anything seem more dynamic. One of the most famous moments of Agon is the pas de deux, which in 1957 was performed by an inter-racial duet of Arthur Mitchell and Diana Adams. In this pas de deux, Mitchell manipulates the limbs of his partner, as if she were a mannnequin. Even though the dance itself tells no story, the use of a black male dancer on a major ballet stage, moreover one presented as equal to the other dancers, and his moving the body of a female partner as if she were a doll, was as revolutionary as Nijinsky’s reinventing of the language of dance by freeing dancers’ gestures from the confines of rigorous classical ballet training. Although Balanchine aspired to radically redefine ballet, with Agon being the most revolutionary of his ballets, he could not break away from the kinds of movement imposed by the standards of ballet. For example, the bodies of the dancers in his choreography are feather-light, malleable, and their jumps defy gravity. The bodies are highly trained, and the way we evaluate their movement is by judging how well they exhibit the rigorous classical technique to tell stories. So what made Nijinsky’s chorography so innovative? And why was his work more successful than Balanchine in redefining classical dance? Nijinsky lets bodies move in their most natural way, without demanding that they defy gravity in classical ballet-style movements. In so doing, he achieves a choreography in which the bodies are free in their

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movement, which are the most natural movements of the body expressing fear and trembling. The feet of the dancers in The Rite of Spring are not pointed, their knees do not shake; they do not show us any impressive arabesques. Rather, as Joan Acocella remarks, The choreography was aggressively anti-balletic. The dancers stood hunched over, turned in. They shuddered; they stamped. In the words of Nijinsky’s sister, Bronislava, they seemed “almost bestial.” The audience reacted on cue, producing Paris’s most cherished theatrical riot. The police had to be called. If that wasn’t enough to insure the ballet’s notoriety, there was Nijinsky’s personal story. He may have been the greatest ballet dancer of the last century. In any case, he was ballet’s first modernist choreographer. 13 By drawing our attention to how bodies move, Nijinsky showed us that excessive ornaments14 stand in the way of our aesthetic appreciation of bodily movements. I agree with Acocella that, for these two reasons, Nijinsky took the first steps toward modernism in the history of dance. However, even Nijinsky was still very much drawn to the idea of telling a story with the moving bodies, a pagan Slavic story about the early spring sacrifice of a virgin who dances herself to death so that gods can renew and make the earth fertile. Hence his medium—the dancer’s body—is still subordinate, expressing something other than itself. I therefore suggest that for dance to merit the category “modernist,” its medium (the dancing body) must be treated on its own terms as a work of art and not as a mere vehicle for telling a story or for exhibiting the body’s athleticism and perfected technique. In this way classical ballet and other forms of dance have an instrumental approach to the body as its medium. The body in classical ballet is much like a brush is to the master painters of the golden age in Dutch painting.

Modern Dance Martha Graham Modern dance rebelled against classical dance, in particular the constraints of rigid ballet techniques that distorted human bodies: the 180 degree turnouts, the seemingly weightless bodies defying gravity to arrive at grand poses. Martha Graham was among the first modern choreographers to develop a technique that deliberately used gravity to break away from capturing movement in static poses. Her main aim was precisely to allow a kind of movement that would capture the body. The basic elements of her technique are “contraction-release,” “shift of weight,” and “spirals” that aim to explore the unceasing movement in and of the body. “Contraction-release” refers to the aliveness of the body through breath or birth; “shift of weight” expresses the body’s struggle with gravity and mortality; and “spirals” point to the continuity of movement.15 The genius of Graham’s technique is that dancers never arrive conclusively at poses; they strive to reach further and the spiral stretch is endless. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone has proposed a philosophical interpretation of what is distinctive about both Martha Graham’s choreography and modern dance. According to Sheets-Johnstone,16 dance is a created phenomenon, which shows the body’s lived experience in a sheer dynamic flow. She suggests that the philosophical approach to dance leads through the uncovering of the symbolic forms, i.e., how the dynamic flow is a symbolic form. Art operates with symbols, and this enables us to make abstractions. The understanding of the symbolic forms yields a meaningful and perspicuous aesthetic understanding. Sheets-Johnstone claims that

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dance creates symbols by offering the illusion of reality. What this means is that art, by being an imitation of reality, creates symbols; and dance, by analogy, is the illusion of movement, as the symbolic means of expression. The experience of dance, of the lived body in movement, is the question of how the illusion of force, which is the symbolic in dance, is communicated. How do we attune to the symbolic reality that is being created during dance performances? How do we grasp the symbolism in dance that, as SheetsJohnstone claims, allows dance to be created, presented, and communicated as a symbol? Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Sheets-Johnstone’s surprising17 major tenet is that dance is entirely pre-reflective. We have pre-reflective consciousness of our bodily experiences, whereas phenomena appear to consciousness.18 She explains that when a dancer becomes self-conscious on stage, for instance, the symbolic she aims at creating, apart from the dance that she is no longer one with it, . . . in consequence . . . destroys the illusion [of force]. It is evident in performance when a dancer becomes explicitly aware of herself. As soon as she becomes selfconscious, the audience is aware of a separation of the dancer from the dance. What appears, then, is not a single phenomenon, an illusion of force, but an ‘empty’ physical body and movement which emanates from that body. The body and the movement appear as separate and distinct phenomena because the dancer is no longer prereflectively aware of her body in movement as a form-in-the making.19 The body in movement can be looked at as a physical phenomenon that is unitary and indivisible. Its movement can be traced by a single unbroken line, and it is one special totality, which is unified in space as an enduring and temporally continuous mass. To simplify, one could add Cunningham’s distinction of how bodies move across the space: either up, straight, or down.20 Whichever way a body moves, the elements of space and time are the intrinsic elements in dance and part of the very structure of the body.

Contemporary Dance as Modernist Art Contemporary dance is “a free-style mode of non-ballet dance.”21 This very broad definition that A. V. Coton, the London critic of dance, suggests in the late 1960s, captured the character of choreographies that did not rigorously follow the standards of classical training in dance. I agree with Coton that what makes dance contemporary is breaking with the standards of classical dance to develop new dance movements. But also I would like to challenge an aspect of this account by adding that contemporary dance is a modernist form of art. It is modernist in that it breaks away from dance performances that depend on external expressive resources, such as stories, and instead draws on the expressiveness of bodily movement itself. This section focuses on the following questions: How does contemporary dance break away from the traditional use of the body to reveal the intrinsic features of bodily expressivity? And what, in contemporary dance, draws our aesthetic judgment to the body as aesthetically meaningful in its own right? My claim here is that contemporary dance, by deriving aesthetic beauty from the bodily movements themselves, treats the body as a central medium and is thereby modernist. Classical forms of dance use stories to organize the dancers’ steps and poses on stage. By contrast, modern choreography, which began with Isadora Duncan’s freeing the body of classical costumes and poses at the turn of the twentieth century, brings dance closer to the modernist idea of art. Duncan is sensitive to the beauty of bodily movements; however, like Martha Graham or even

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much later like Pina Bausch, she still remains embedded in the pre-modernist approach to dance. All modern choreographers need a story to organize the movements of the body. The performances are beautiful; however, what is judged aesthetically is not the body in movement, but the story it ‘tells’ with its gestures and its accompanying music. The question for modernist dance is whether we can appreciate the body in movement in an aesthetic way if the background story, and sometimes even the accompaniment of music, are taken away. The short answer to this question is yes, and I suggest that contemporary dance makes it possible. To show this, I offer an analysis of some of the contemporary choreographies that illustrate this possibility: that of Trisha Brown, Boris Charmatz, Jodi Melnick, and Ralph Lemon. Trisha Brown I begin by considering an excerpt of the recent piece by a contemporary choreographer Trisha Brown, “I’m going to toss my arms—if you catch them they’re yours.” Set to original music by Alvin Curran (“Toss and Find”), four women and four men move diagonally in front of large fans placed on the right side of the stage. The performers’ bodies, dressed in loose costumes, are blown into motion independent of the musical score. One might expect that the bodies blown by these powerful fans would result in chaotic movements, especially when the dancers move as if they are unaware of other dancers on stage. Their eyes rarely meet, and yet their bodies precisely know when to catch one another, preventing each other from falling. Even without communicating through glances, their bodies evolve into a well-coordinated assembly, their limbs having a life of their own. In their individual rhythms, they set each other’s limbs in motion, they line up through the space on stage. The bodies form momentary shapes and relationships with other bodies, and then vanish into another form. The beauty of this work is in its transient dynamism. The dancers make ordinary movements, like walking and waving hands, to which we usually attribute goals. Yet their movements are non-goal oriented. They move for no apparent reason or goal, and still their movements strike us as beautiful. In my view, one of the ways in which we let the beauty of the dancing bodies be communicated to us is at the moment when we look at their movements without any goal attribution. In this way, we shift the focus of the ordinary, mostly goal-oriented ways of moving to an aesthetic consideration of the movement itself. The aesthetic makes ordinary movement visible. Taking away the goalorientedness of bodily movement aestheticizes the body in motion in the same way that Marcel Duchamp’s ready mades, by being exhibited in art museums, aestheticize ordinary objects such as a urinal. By removing the purposiveness implicit in the ordinary way, we move toward things, we evoke aesthetic responses. In this sense, I claim that contemporary dance shows that we can not begin to reflect on the body as the expressive medium unless we free it from understanding and organizing its movement in categories of goal-oriented activities. In short, we can aesthetically appreciate the moving body as a work of art without having to consider the results of the goals for performance. The dancing body in movement is a work of art rather than merely an exhibition of expert performance. Boris Charmatz The Holland Festival of 2001 staged a series of dance performances by Boris Charmatz, a French contemporary dancer. His choreography experiments with new means of bodily expression rather than ideas of how to construct bodily expressions. In his work, he undermines the basic assumption of classical dance. There are no rules of classical dance applied in his pieces, nor is there any particular story to be told by the

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moving bodies. His choreography explores the movement of the bodies themselves, and the audience is there to witness how bodies move when placed on an accelerating platform, how they walk among the audience when stripped bare and vulnerable, or how they find other bodies on stage while lying down covered by a thick fabric. The distinctiveness of Charmatz’s approach to dance is sharply illustrated by a discussion he had with Merce Cunningham, who, then in his eighties, was one of the most iconic of choreographers. Their discussion laid the groundwork for distinguishing modern and contemporary dance. In his reply to the question of how he uses the bodies in his performances, Cunningham said that they are merely tools for staging the choreography; the movements of the body per se were not what inspired his work. Indeed, he even experimented with computer generated movements, which he later translated into bodily movements onstage. By contrast, Charmatz emphasized that dance must draw from the bodily movements themselves, and he noted that there is so much we can create with those unique movements.22 For example, one can perform walking in so many ways by being attentive to one’s body, the surface on which one is walking, the air that presses against one, or one can walk being mindful of others. This exchange between Cunningham and Charmatz clarifies the line between modern dance, which breaks away from the standards of classical ballet, but remains faithful to the idea of organizing the body in movement on stage by giving it directives, and contemporary dance, which radically breaks from the standards of both rigid training and story-driven choreography. Only in this way can contemporary dance be a modernist art. By letting the body move freely, we can contemplate its beauty and not the beauty of other mediums of art that typically accompany dance, such as music, narrative, and musical rhythm. Contemporary dance, to put it in more provocative terms, is the kind of dance that frees itself from being choreographed. Jodi Melnick In Jodi Melnick’s choreography, the expressive meaning of the body in dance is revealed through a series of gestures which in themselves have a rhythmic organization in space and time. Her dance performances are very minimal; they often show the body in movement without musical accompaniment. Her choreographic challenge is to give the body in movement the capacity to be critically approached from both the dancer’s and the audience’s perspective. In her piece “Solo, Deluxe Version, One of Sixty Five Thousand Gestures,”23 staged in 2011, she performs solo, almost never moving away from the center of downstage. She mesmerizes the audience, performing a series of hundreds of unique gestures to a minimal composition by Hahn Rowe. In doing so, she draws attention to the body as the medium for aesthetic expression of seemingly ordinary gestures that are made visible as aesthetic. Ralph Lemon A more radical approach to dance is presented by contemporary choreographer Ralph Lemon. His “4 Walls” explores how to get human bodies on stage to “move spontaneously and unreflectively.” His way of getting dancers to dance as if they were not choreographed is by engaging them in seemingly unorganized and intense bodily contact, by slamming bodies, pushing, grabbing, or running. In Lemon’s view, only when the bodies are at the point of physical exhaustion do they move in an unchoreographed and hence artful way. In my view, contemporary dance shows that we cannot begin to reflect on the body as an expressive medium unless we free ourselves from understanding and organizing its movements in categories of task or goal fulfillment activities. The point of modernist dance is that we can appreciate the moving body as a work of art without having to consider the results of the goals for performance.

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Watching bodies dance serves no practical purpose. We feel pleasure for no specific reason, and we are drawn to the unique movements of the dancers. The meaning in dance is revealed through the expressivity of bodily movements. As with any other discipline, dance requires training. It takes years of training to get the body to produce artful performance, but, as an art form, dance also exhibits the kind of beauty that can be experienced by the audience as effortless—as the meaning of living freedom implicit in the ordinary. To be able to see the movement of the body as beautiful we must view it as governed by rules and yet appearing as free, its moving is purposive without a definite purpose. This is not to say that the movement in a ballet performance cannot be seen this way. The point of my analysis is rather to show that the more extra-bodily aesthetic resources we impose on the dancing body, the more we take away its expressivity. Even though trained for a number of years, the body in performance escapes the type of determination that we assign to goal-oriented movements that we perform in our daily tasks. The meaning we attribute to ordinary movements is a matter of cognitive judgment; we understand the goals of our movements in terms of the idea according to which a particular bodily movement is planned and performed. If I am governed by the idea of mailing a letter to my friend, then I perform a series of successful movements which complete this task: I orient myself toward a mailbox on the street; I cross the street while reaching for the letter in my purse, open the latch of the mailbox, and slide the letter down into it. By contrast, in dance, we are presented with non-goal oriented movements of the body, and the challenge is to answer the question of how we appreciate its meaningfulness. I suggest we consider contemporary choreography that takes this nongoal-oriented bodily movement as a source of inspiration, because in capturing this movement, dancers’ performance confronts us with new meaning.

NOTES 1.

Roger Copeland, “Merce Cunningham and the Politics of Perception,” in Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen, What is Dance? Readings in Theory and Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 312.

2.

Ibid.

3.

Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), p.

4.

“In dance, the confusion that the term ‘post-modern’ creates is further complicated by the fact that historical modern dance was never really modernist. Often it has been precisely in the arena of post-modern dance that issues of modernism in the other arts have arisen: the acknowledgment of the medium’s materials, the revealing of dance’s essential qualities as an art form, the separation of formal elements, the abstraction of forms, and the elimination of external references as subjects. Thus in many respects it is post-modern dance that functions as modernist art. That is, post-modern dance came after modern dance (hence, post-) and, like the post-modernism of the other arts, was anti-modern dance. But since ‘modern’ in dance did not mean modernist, to be anti-modern dance was not at all to be anti-modernist” (S. Banes, Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance, Wesleyan University Press, 1987, p. xiv). Similar claims were also made by Deborah Jowitt at the Graduate Dance Seminar, New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, Spring 2011.

5.

Ibid., 5–6.

6.

Jennifer Homans, Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet (New York: Random House, 2010), p. 34.

7.

Ibid., 19.

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8.

Jacques Rivière, “Le Sacre du Printemps” [1913], in Robert S. Gottlieb, Reading Dance (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008), pp. 899–900.

9.

Ibid.

10. Jacques Rivière, “Le Sacre du Printemps” [1913], in Robert S. Gottlieb, Reading Dance, p. 900. 11. Ibid. 12. Agon, Part I and Part II (cast of 12 dancers 1981—Heather Watts, Mel Tomlinson (both Pas de Deux Part II at 6:25min), Daniel Duell, Renee Estopinal, Wilhelmina Frankfurt, Maria Calegari (Solo Part II at 3:37min), Victor Castelli, Peter Frame, Helene Alexopoulos, Carole Divet, Linda Homek, and Catherine Morris). Choreography by George Balanchine, music by Igor Stravinsky. 13. Alastair Macaulay, “50 Years Ago, Modernism was given a name ‘Agon,’ ” New York Times, November 25, 2007. 14. Joan Acocella, “The Lost Nijinsky: Is it possible to reconstruct a forgotten ballet?” The New Yorker, May 7, 2001. 15. Jacques Rivière, “Le Sacre du Printemps (1913),” in Gottlieb, Reading Dance, p. 900. 16. Susan Kozel, a dancer, choreographer and writer in collaboration with Kitsou Dubois, who trained astronauts at the French National Center for Space Research to adapt to weightlessness, experimented with the brilliant technique of spirals in zero-gravity space in a dance performance: “Ghosts and Astronauts” (London, 1997). Dubois’ findings were that, “In weightlessness the spiral is total and infinite. It is the discovery of an extraordinary fluidity of movement . . . the revelation that everything in the body spirals. This truly becomes the mode of communication between internal space and external space,” (Susan Kozel, Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), p. 112. 17. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Phenomenology of Dance (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966). 18. Sheets-Johnstone claims that dance is pre-reflective and that to create and “communicate” dance requires its abstracting of feelings and movement from everydayness is contradictory. 19. Sheets-Johnstone, The Phenomenology of Dance, p. 11. Dance is pre-reflective during performance and in an improvisation. In learning dance, however, reflection is necessarily involved. Sheets-Johnstone adds this observation in her later works, see The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader (Charlotsville, VA: Philosophy Documentation Center, 2009). 20. Ibid., 39. 21. “Cunningham on Technique” clip from: http://dlib.nyu.edu/merce/mwm/2008–01–12/, retrieved on April 21, 2012. 22. A. V. Coton, Writings on Dance, 1939–68 (London: Dance Books 1975), p. 152. 23. Merce Cunnigham and Boris Charmatz in conversation. 24. The video is no longer available as of November 13, 2014, but her style of movement can be appreciated at: Business of the Bloom, 2009 (except), choreographed and performed by Jodi Melick at Fire Island Dance Festival 15, made possible with generous support from Masterbeat.com to benefit Dancers Responding to AIDS.

CHAPTER 2.2

Interpretation in Dance Performing 1

AILI BRESNAHAN

Most aesthetics philosophers in the analytic tradition discuss interpretation from what will here be called the critical-philosophical perspective—they consider interpretation of art as part of the function of an evaluating appreciator who is seeking to both identify and to understand a static art object, such as a painting, sculpture, text, or structure, whether real or abstract. This chapter, however, is on the role and function of the dance performer, the person who is dancing in a kind of dance-as-art event that is designed for and performed for an audience that perceives, witnesses, experiences, and appreciates the dance in various ways. As such this chapter focuses on a component of dance practice that diverges from critical-philosophical practice in two ways: (1) it is from the point of view of an embodied person engaged in a dynamic process, and (2) the dance as art on which this perspective focuses is itself treated as a process or event that is neither static nor necessarily enduring—it could be ephemeral in the sense that it may not have identical features from performance to performance. My particular focus within this framework will be to consider to what extent the dance performer is an interpreter, and if she is an interpreter, in what sense, and what does she interpret? This chapter thus seeks to better understand the nature of dance performance in practice by analyzing the role of the dance performer’s contribution in light of any interpretive function she might have. To begin, I will survey some leading theories on the interpretation of art, that of Susan Sontag, Arthur Danto, and Joseph Margolis, and from there construct a working and open definition of interpretation in art that can be applied to dance-as-art, by which I mean the kind of concert dance that is offered for experience, appreciation, and understanding as art. From there this definition will be used to identify two danceperformance-related practices that I think do count as interpretation in this sense, and I will demonstrate how the dance performer might meet these conditions. Finally, I will consider briefly, and as a promissory note for a more all-encompassing theory of the dancer’s role in dance performance, what the dance performer might be doing that is not best understood as interpretation. In her famous 1961 essay, “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag says: I don’t mean interpretation in the broadest sense, the sense in which Nietzsche (rightly) says, “There are no facts, only interpretations”. By interpretation, I mean a conscious act of the mind which illustrates a certain code, certain “rules” of interpretation. Directed to art, interpretation means plucking a set of elements (the X, the Y, the Z, and so forth) from the whole work. The task of interpretation is virtually one of 139

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translation. The interpreter says, Look, don’t you see that X is really—or, really means—A? That Y is really B? That Z is really C?2 According to Sontag, this is classical interpretation, and it re-writes and alters the artwork, even though the interpreter claims to be identifying the work’s true meaning. She says that the modern style of interpretation is even worse because it “excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs ‘behind’ the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one.”3 She then uses Marxist and Freudian analyses as examples of this kind of destructive interpretation. Sontag believes that one ought to be sensitive to one’s response to art (the paradigm example for her is literary art, a static art form) and to be alive to it in all the ways that it is there to be responded to without doing violence to the artwork by finding or inventing meanings for the work that are not available in the experience of the work.4 Thus she prefers what she calls a “formalist” theory of interpretation above a “content-based” one in which the interpreter hunts for the true meaning behind what is actually there.5 Further, Sontag does not think that the artist’s intention that their work be either interpreted or not matters because she thinks that artists are sometimes guilty of seeing their own work through a work-altering interpretive lens.6 In his essay, “Deep Interpretation,” Arthur Danto notes that responding to a work via sensory experience or passions alone (a theory he attributes to Schopenhauer) offers no way to understand the sort of conceptual art in which the artwork is perceptually indiscernible from its material counterpart.7 Here Danto’s paradigm artwork is a painting or sculpture. He thinks this kind of perception is biologically basic and does not include enhancement by cultural resources. In addition, Danto interprets Sontag’s criticism of interpretation as not being against interpretation altogether but against the kind of interpretation that over-determines the work of art. He does not think, for example, that she would be against the sort of interpretation that he calls surface interpretation—that just consists of identifying the text as the work of art it claims to be in historical context along with some surrounding identifications that are roughly in line with some basic and apparent artistic purposes (such as the title of the piece for example). He that thinks what Sontag objects to is deep interpretation—which he says involves a kledon, a Greek term for the situation where “a speaker makes utterances ‘that are more than the speaker realizes’.”8 Here an artist or author is in no better position than anyone else to say what the artwork means, since meanings are abstracted that may not have even been available to the author.9 An example of this would be to say that artwork X represents Freud’s view of sexual repression when that theory did not exist when the artwork was created. Danto agrees with Sontag that deep interpretation can “over-determine” the work.10 And yet, in his essay, “The Appreciation and Interpretation of Works of Art,” he says the following: My view, historically, is that interpretations are discovered and that interpretive statements are true or false. My view, philosophically, is that interpretations constitute works of art [as works of art], so that you do not, as it were, have the artwork on one side and the interpretation on the other.11 Thus, it seems that Danto holds both that interpretive statements about an artwork are true or false, and that it is the process of interpretation itself that determines an artwork’s meaning as a work of art—it constitutes it. Here he says, “Interpretation is in effect the level with which an object is lifted out of the real world and into the artworld, where it

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becomes vested in often unexpected raiment.”12 We know from his “artworld” paper and from his subsequent work following it that Danto’s view is that the person qualified to make this interpretation is an expert in the artworld to which the work of art belongs.13 But this “unexpected raiment” calls to mind the children’s story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” where it takes a child to point out that all the adults are claiming to see something that simply is not there. Joseph Margolis identifies two modes of interpretation for artworks: (1) interpretation for purposes of historical identification, and (2) interpretation that counts as part of understanding the nature of a particular work of art. In short, Margolis acknowledges that one has to treat an artwork as stable for purposes of historical identification but he does not believe that this means that the meaning of that artwork is ever singular or determinate, and therefore it cannot lend itself to one true interpretation.14 Instead, Margolis has a pluralist and relativist view of artwork interpretation, one in which changes in culture can create multiple “truth-like” interpretations of any given artwork at various points of time due to the artwork’s nature as an evolving cultural artifact that has meanings that change due to changes in culture.15 Margolis uses the term “Intentional properties,” with an upper-case “I”, to refer to those features of artworks that are put into an artwork by an artist and that have semiotic meaning to both the artist and to his interpreting culture.16 In Margolis’ view, for example, it would be “truth-like” to say that a painting depicting Christ was depicting both the sense of who Christ was that existed at the time and place of the artwork’s creation and the person who Christ was as being understood by historically later or different cultural interpretations of Christ. He calls this sort of interpretation “truth-like” rather than true because he does not think that artworks as cultural artifacts have discoverable properties that can have true interpretations that last for all time and that are not true-for-x, with x being the interpreting culture. Thus, an artist in Margolis’ view does not have full control over the meaning of the work that they create. To sum up, in Margolis’ view an artwork’s meaning lies in its properties or features that are perceivable in the artwork by an interpreting culture. Margolis’ theory too, primarily focuses on literary texts, paintings, and sculptures, although Margolis also holds that intentional properties exist in music, dance, and in all other art forms and activities that he construes as lingual utterances. Since this perception varies by culture it is not tied to human biology alone, such as in the limited sort of biological sensory experience that Danto attributes to Schopenhauer. Indeed, for Margolis perception of an artwork would accommodate conceptual art by apprehending its meaning through whatever clues are available to aid that comprehension that are given to them by the artist—such as the artwork’s title or other direction for viewing the piece provided by the artist. For example, if one can see that a poem is a haiku, one could at least make use of any culturallyavailable interpretive practices for haikus. It might be a haiku even if the artist didn’t intend that to be the case—if it happened to be in haiku form in a coincidental way. Sontag would probably say that it would be wrong for a Margolian interpreter to call the poem a haiku but not wrong to point out the perceptual, formal features of that haiku. And Danto would probably say its haiku-ness was true under a philosophical (deep) but not historical (surface) interpretation. In light of these views on artwork interpretation I will now construct an open and working definition of interpretation to use in connection with dance performing that shares some continuity with the standard theories of artwork interpretation mentioned above. This has the advantage of not departing too greatly from how interpretation in art

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is known and understood in Western cultural scholarship, although as we shall see the fact that dance involves a moving, thinking, embodied dancer may change the suitability of a theory of interpretation culled from those that have primarily static art forms in mind. Bracketing for now—we will return to this later—the question of what qualifies as interpretanda (by which is meant properly interpretable material) for the performer’s interpretation in dance performance, this chapter holds that interpretation in art is at least (but not only): ●

The process by which an interpreter evaluates and uses customary artworld interpretanda in order to identify the meaning of the art product at issue.

This is a view of interpretation of art that gives credence to Danto’s view of artworld expertise. For dance purposes the relevant artworld would be the danceworld, in which expert interpretative ability would be acknowledged in qualified dance critics as well as in other kinds of danceworld scholars. The “art product at issue” refers to the dance performance. The term “art product” is used instead of “artwork” in order to escape any explicit or implied commitment to an ontological view that holds that a dance artwork must be a textual or abstract structure. This working definition (by which I mean that it is provisional only) is broad enough to accommodate all three of the views on interpretation in art mentioned earlier. Formalist, surface, deep, and culturally relative and pluralistic interpretations of art are all customary kinds of interpretation in art, including dance. This definition is also an open one so that it can allow for newly emergent interpretive practices to develop out of or in reaction to the customary ones. We turn now to a discussion of what kinds of interpretive activities and roles exist in the practices of creating and performing dance in order to identify what, precisely, the performing dancer might do that is in line with the working definition of interpretation now provided. This section will evaluate two activities a dancer may engage in during preparation for dance performance: 1. Evaluation and use of any pre-existing choreographic notes or directions (which may not rise to the level of a notated “score” in the technical sense). 2. Evaluation and use of any notes or guidelines from a director (the director may or may not also be the choreographer). The first is a situation in which the dance performer independently evaluates any preexisting choreographic notes or directions. She analyzes the detailed libretto and notes on verbal indicators from Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot’s original choreography for Giselle, for example, which took place in Paris in 1841, in preparation for performing the title role. In the second, the interpretation of any notes or guidelines from a director, let us imagine the case where the dance performer does not use any independent interpretation of original choreographic guidelines for Giselle, or that if she does so it is only with the express or tacit approval of the performance director. This situation is one where: i. The structure and format of the dance performances is created by the performance director, who may or may not be the choreographer (he may, for example, be either restaging the Coralli and Perrot choreography or, like Marius Petipa did for The Imperial Ballet of Russia, he may provide new choreography for Giselle altogether).

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ii. The plan or framework for the dance performance is set in advance by the director. Here there is a continuum between dances where: a. The dance has fully set directions, where all or nearly all of the steps and stylistic and expressive nuances are determined ahead of time and executed as closely as possible; b. Some themes or ideas for where to begin are available to the dance performer but the rest of the dance performance features are left up to discretion or improvisation. Now let us apply the working definition of the interpretation provided earlier. That definition, remember, was the following. Interpretation in art is: ●

The process by which an interpreter evaluates and uses customary artworld interpretanda in order to identify the meaning of the art product at issue.

Applying this definition to interpretation by the dance performer, and inserting the kind of dance performer roles provided above, we get this: ●

The process by which the dancer [interpreter] evaluates and uses a pre-existing score or plan from a choreographer and/or director [both customary interpretanda in danceworld practice] in order to identify the meaning of the dance performance.

In practice, dance performers do sometimes directly interpret pre-existing scores or choreographic plans. Dance anthropologist Anya Peterson Royce, for example, points out that ballet dancers at the Kirov school were trained in acting so that they could interpret roles directly from texts or choreographic plans without necessarily relying on directions from directors.17 In addition, dancers do often follow directors’ plans rather than the original choreographers’. This is true in the case, for example, where a director restages a dance for contemporary audiences, as has been seen in many different versions of Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, with the new versions identified with the new choreographer’s name in most cases (for example, Mats Eks’ Swan Lake, or Akram Khan’s Giselle). If we think that dance performers are interpreters in these ways then the performance an audience sees has already been through one interpretive process before they get to interpret it. But is this what is going on? Graham McFee holds that one broad usage of the term “interpretation” in the performing arts refers to the performer’s interpretation of the piece performed, such as in Pollini’s interpretation of Schoenberg’s “Six Little Piano Pieces Opus 19” or in Nureyev’s interpretation of Sleeping Beauty.18 “Here”, McFee says, “the interpretation typically consists in some set of actions performed, or, as we might say, in producing that object in which the witnessable work consists.”19 In both music and dance McFee thinks that the job of the performer is to perform the work of art, which for McFee is the abstract structure as evidenced by an at-least-in-principle notation.20 He acknowledges that different performers’ interpretations can bring out or highlight different features of the underlying work, and that by doing so they can create a distinctive performance and even contribute to the properties of performances, via what he calls their “craft-mastery.”21 But McFee also thinks that constraints on the role of the performer are “actually provided either by the notation or some notation-equivalent,” clarifying later that the object for interpretation is the structure but that the notation makes this explicit and that

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the constraints on performance will change “as notation systems change or different ones are employed.”22 He categorically denies that this “interpretation” is creative in any way, and this means that the dance performer is not an artist and not someone who can be credited with co-authorship of dances.23 McFee also says that “the performer’s interpretation does not really constitute a level of interpretation at all” (by which he presumably means critical interpretation in a formal sense) because he sees the performer as just the necessary vehicle for making the dance work of art available for criticism.24 The choreographer creates the dance structure, the dance performer makes it visible to a critic, and the critic determines its meaning.25 McFee holds further that if the dance performer does more than just provide notationacceptable embellishments on the abstract structure, then this is “a case where a new work of art is brought into being.”26 According to McFee, this can happen in the case of a virtuoso performance that McFee says is a “poor performance” when it distracts the spectator from the structure of the dance.27 Or it can be a case where improvisational activity by the dance performer does not fall within the acceptable structure of the work. This creates a new performable (and ostensibly re-performable) work of art.28 McFee denies that “a one-off work with a performing character” is a work of art—calling it instead a “happening.”29 If McFee thinks that dance performers can create new artworks through embellishments or other improvisational activity, then it is hard to see how he can simultaneously claim that they are not creative or artists. Presumably McFee would answer that they are not artists when they stick to their role of performing, which he limits to instantiating the structure. Doing more than this turns performers into composers or choreographers of a new work of art. (McFee gives no guidance, however, on how we are to view that new work of art as a work of art, or identify it as that new work going forward.) One difficulty here, as noted, is that dancers do not always plan their performances ahead of time. But even when they do it is not clear that they do so with either the original choreographer or a subsequent choreographer’s or director’s plan in mind. Ruth Eshel, a dance philosopher, choreographer, and dance critic, says that the process of performing includes working out both the technical and artistic aspects of a role in a two-part process: The first is a systematic, logical and cognitive grappling with the challenges that the steps pose. The second an individual artistic interpretation of the part, stemming from the private world of imagination, emotion, energy and associations of the individual artist.30 If imagination and associations of the individual artist are involved, and if it comes from a private world, it is not clear to what extent this complies with McFee’s view of performing as instantiating a structure. Let us consider, now, the possibility that there are other sorts of things that the dance performer is doing that falls outside of making the dance visible to the critics. Some dance theorists hold, as I do, that dance performers are often creative, are often artists accordingly, and as such are often co-authors of dances, rather than merely “craftmasters.”31 The New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff has noted that nineteenthcentury ballet was designed around the personalities of its lead dancers. She does say that, in contemporary dance, roles are more important than the performers in it, that performers are “instruments” of choreographers, but she also notes that “unless the dancer ‘performs’ rather than merely executes the steps, the choreography will fail.”32 Kisselgoff also says that in the case of Balanchine ballet, the work of the dance performer, such as adding

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stylistic nuances “does require its own kind of artistry.”33 Dance scholar and choreography professor Larry Lavender also points out that even in cases in which an artist has a specific meaning or message in mind [he thinks that in many cases they do not], a work of art, as it takes shape, tends to take on a life and character of its own as the artist engages with his or her materials . . . be they colors, musical tones, words, or movements.34 Choreographers often use the dancers’ created movements, steps or stylistic nuances as part of the building blocks for what will be the eventual dance, in many cases making dancers’ contributions highly visible, rather than “relatively invisible,” as McFee says that they are.35 Shirley McKechnie and Catherine Stevens point out, for example, that dancers and choreographers in contemporary dance often improvise together in order to create and select the materials out of which a dance is formed.36 Further, they note that such dance ensemble collaborations can create what they call “evolving dynamical systems” and that it is these that often result in a self-organizing form of a dance.37 The ensemble as a unit, rather than any individual within it, is therefore the true author of the dance. There is also evidence to show that most performances are not constrained by notations, even notations-in-principle. The one exception is the performances for which a choice has been made to be historically faithful to a given structure, but this situation happens in just a fraction of actual cases. McFee does acknowledge the weakness of notation in dance practice but then suggests that this shows a weakness in the notational systems themselves rather than a weakness in a philosophic system that construes the abstract structure, as evidenced by notation, as the only possible candidate for evaluation of dance-as-art.38 Perhaps one reason why better notation has not been created is because there is a critical mass of dance choreographers and performers who do not recognize the need or value of such a notation; indeed, they have been getting along just fine without it. Any pre-existent elements that might be used as the springboard for a dance is more commonly communicated through “multimodal recording and archives of dance works” and via the dancers’ bodies, which are themselves “repositories of the dance works that they have composed and/or performed.”39 Another consideration is that sometimes dance performers do not always fully cognize or understand how they will perform a role ahead of time, as in the case of many of the dancers who were trained in the neo-classical style of New York City Ballet director, choreographer, and teacher George Balanchine. Peterson Royce, in her book Movement and Meaning: Creativity and Interpretation in Ballet and Mime, points to dance critic Arlene Croce’s observation (substantiated in the autobiographies of Suzanne Farrell, Merrill Ashley, Edward Villella and others) that Balanchine often encouraged both individual style in his dancers and gave them the room to spontaneously add their own stylistic flourishes during performance.40 Royce refers to this as “spontaneous in-theperformance interpretation.”41 Our working definition of interpretation, however, includes the phrase “in order to identify the meaning of the performance” which is there to capture the sense from the art interpretation theorists that interpretation is about identification of meaning. Thus, on the traditional accounts of interpretation of art canvassed earlier, the interpreter can say to herself or to someone else, “The meaning of X is Y.” But is a Balanchine dancer doing that? Is she providing an account of the meaning of X and saying, through her dancing, that it is Y? This marks one of the difficulties of treating interpretation in dance performing as an extension of critical interpretation.

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Perhaps what would help here is an account of meaning identification in which meaning is intuited, identified, and conveyed in bodily and felt, rather than in consciously decided ways. One where the “thinking” involved is embodied and not necessarily the kind of meaning that can be put into words. To capture the moving-while-doing aspect of dance performing we would also need a kind of thinking that is live and online rather than reflective and contemplative. This chapter cannot, for space and time reasons, make and defend adequately the case for such an expanded view of the thinking-while-doing nature of a dancer’s agency, although I have done so elsewhere.42 Suffice it to say now that if the term “understanding” were expanded in such a way then we might call performing Balanchine ballet interpretation. We have now come to a crossroads where a decision must be made as to whether to push this line of thinking and so subsume the Balanchine neo-classical process described above under the term interpretation. What might be the costs and benefits of calling this “interpretation”? On the benefit side would be that dancers are credited with understanding what they are doing and are not treated as merely non-thinking puppets. This seems dancer-friendly and gives credit to the difficulties of dance performance that are minded and not mechanical. Another point on the benefit side is that this sort of activity is commonly referred to as “interpretation” in dance practice and it is helpful for interdisciplinary work when terms are kept constant between disciplines.43 On the cost side is that an embodied thinking-while-doing process that dance performers are involved in gets subsumed (and possibly lost) under the term “interpretation” when it may in fact be the case that it is a separate process worthy of exploration and consideration. Suppose now that a significant part of what a dancer does in performance is not the conveying of understanding after an interpretive effort, but a performance that is just the output of how the dancer finds herself moving through it. What if the dancer is merely adding her own artistically trained and natural instinctual and embodied sense of how to move within any frameworks provided for the piece? And what if this is a vital, ineliminable, and non-contingent aspect of dance performance, without which its full meaning cannot be identified or understood by an audience? If we think that what matters most to understanding the nature of dance is the preexisting plan or structure then it makes sense to hold, as McFee does, that if the dancer adds too much of their own contribution then they are performing the given structure poorly and creating a new structure. Indeed, viewed in this way then the dance performer would be guilty of the kind of altering interpretation that Sontag decries, that Danto calls the sort of “deep interpretation” that overdetermines the artwork, and that Margolis might say either does or does not go beyond the meaning that is understandable to the audience as the interpreting culture. If we think, however, that what matters most in many cases is the dancers’ contribution to a distinctive artistic experience for the audience, then we would be better off viewing the dancer in these cases as a co-author and co-creative artist rather than either a poor interpreter or someone who has hijacked one dance in order to turn it into another. Sondra Fraleigh, for example, describes dance as “a special case of voluntary motion, imbued with the aesthetic intentions of performers and the larger intentionality (purposes) of each particular dance.”44 Fraleigh thus treats the voluntary motion and aesthetic intentions of the dancers together with “the larger intentionality of the dance,” which she has specifically not reduced to pre-existing intentions or structures of a choreographer or director. Further, dance performance styles are often so unique and individual that they cannot be copied by other dancers, even when they try their best to do so. Dancer and teacher Maria Fay attributes this individuality to

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“a particular dancer’s individual approach, charisma, physique and talent.”45 She cites an example of a highly trained ballet dancer who tried to copy another performer’s style but who was able to copy only the images created by the other dancer but not her movement personality. In addition, some particular dances have hinged heavily on a particular individual dance performer or set of performers. Dancer, director, and choreographer Robert Helpmann, for example, has noted that some of Frederick Ashton’s ballets were so influenced by particular dancers that the ballets would lose something if the dancer left.46 Dance critic Marcia Siegel has also observed that the continuous adagio in Twyla Tharp’s As Time Goes By was “an achievement due in large part to Larry Grenier, who created the role,” adding that “Grenier was indulgent in space, letting his motion slide easily into its own fluctuating rhythms.”47 And there are many other examples of this phenomenon— one need only to think of any outstanding singular dancers who made singular contributions to the roles they initiated (such as Nijinsky in La Spectre de la Rose, Judith Jamison in “Cry” from Alvin Ailey’s Revelations, or Martha Graham as Medea for starters). What all this means is that the term interpretation as used in traditional aesthetics philosophy with paradigm instances of art objects that were static, non-moving, and nonembodied in a human performer—painting, sculpture, literary texts and the like—might be too narrow to adequately capture the full scope of the practice of dance performing. In conclusion, in practice dance performing is not just interpretive. Some of dance performing practice is not pre-planned, is not conceptually understood, and is better characterized as the trained and expressive output of a dancer who moves in the particular embodied, creative and agentive way that includes customary additions to and alterations of a dance as it comes into being and as it is performed. If one thinks that this can and does affect the understanding, experience, and appreciation the audience has in ways that typically contribute to rather than detract from a dance performance then the idea that these sorts of departures from structure make the performance “bad” is inapt. Indeed, dancers are in an important number of cases valued for a creative, expressive contribution to what the dance performance is. Dancers are certainly sometimes executors, and sometimes interpreters, but they also often do produce something that is individual, new, trained, and skilled, and in this sense, they are artists.

NOTES 1.

Thanks go to Anthony Cross, Renee Conroy, Anna Pakes, and Andrew Kania for their comments on my presentation of this paper at the Texas State University symposium.

2.

Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Picador, 1961), p. 5.

3.

Ibid., 6.

4.

Ibid., 9–10.

5.

Ibid., 12–14.

6.

Ibid., 9.

7.

Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), pp. 37–39.

8.

Ibid., 54.

9.

Ibid., 51.

10. Ibid., 66. 11. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, p. 23 [bracketed material mine].

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12. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, p. 39. 13. See Arthur C. Danto, “The Artworld,” Journal of Philosophy 61: 19( 1964): 571–584 and Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1981). 14. Joseph Margolis, Selves and Other Texts: The Case for Cultural Realism (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), pp. 105–106. 15. Ibid., 127; Joseph Margolis, Interpretation Radical But Not Unruly: The New Puzzle of the Arts and History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 28; Joseph Margolis, What, After All, Is a Work of Art (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), pp. 84–85. 16. Margolis, What After All, Is a Work of Art, pp. 60–62 and p. 73. 17. Anya Peterson Royce, Movement and Meaning: Creativity and Interpretation in Ballet and Mime (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 127. 18. Graham McFee, Understanding Dance (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 100 and p. 103. 19. Ibid., p. 100. 20. Graham McFee, The Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance: Identity, Performance and Understanding (Hampshire: Dance Books Ltd., 2011), pp. 168–171. 21. See McFee, Understanding Dance, p. 123; Graham McFee, “ ‘Admirable Legs’, or The Dancer’s Importance for the Dance,” in J. Bunker, A. Pakes, and B. Rowell, eds., Thinking Through Dance: The Philosophy of Dance Performance and Practices, (Hampshire: Dance Books Ltd., 2013), pp. 22–45 at p. 29 and p. 35; McFee, The Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance, p. 155. 22. McFee, Understanding Dance, pp. 102, 104, and 106. 23. McFee, Understanding Dance, p. 104; McFee, The Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance, pp. 168–173; McFee, Thinking Through Dance, p. 29. 24. McFee, Understanding Dance, p. 124. 25. Ibid., pp. 152–154. 26. Ibid., p, 108. 27. McFee, The Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance, p. 180. 28. Ibid., p. 156 and p. 163. 29. Ibid., p. 156 and pp. 160–161; McFee, “ ‘Admirable Legs’, or The Dancer’s Importance for the Dance,” footnote 2; cf. Stephen Davies, Philosophy of the Performing Arts (Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 143–148. 30. Ruth Eshel, ‘The Art of Performing,’ Israel Dance Quarterly 5 (1995): 87. 31. Cf. McFee, The Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance, p. 181 and p. 184; McFee, “ ‘Admirable Legs’, or The Dancer’s Importance for the Dance,” p. 28. 32. Anna Kisselgoff, “Dance View: Performance vs. Choreography,” New York Times (February 5, 1978), p. D17. 33. Ibid. 34. Bracketed material mine. See Larry Lavender, “Understanding Interpretation,” Dance Research Journal, 23(1995): 25–33, at 27. 35. McFee, The Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance, p. 180. 36. Shirley McKechnie and Catherine J. Stevens, “Visible Thought: Choreographic Cognition in Creating, Performing, and Watching Contemporary Dance,” in J. Butterworth and L. Wildschut, eds., Contemporary Choreography: A Critical Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), p. 40.

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37. Ibid., pp. 41–43. 38. See McFee, “ ‘Admirable Legs’, or The Dancer’s Importance for the Dance,” pp. 35–41. 39. McKechnie and Stevens, “Visible Thought,” p. 45. See also for examples of dancers who use other dancers’ performances, including stylistic and other performer-contributed elements, rather than the structures of scores whether real or in principle, as the model for their performances, Ruth Eshel, “The Art of Performing,” Israel Dance Quarterly 5 (1995): 84. 40. Royce, Movement and Meaning, p. 121; see also Eshel, “The Art of Performing,” p. 86, and Kisselgoff, “Dance View: Performance vs. Choreography,” p. D17. 41. Royce, Movement and Meaning, p. 121. 42. See Aili Bresnahan, “Improvisational Artistry in Live Dance Performance as Embodied and Extended Agency,” Dance Research Journal, 46(2014): 84–94. 43. For usage of the term “interpretation” in this way see Joan Acocella, “Critic’s Notebook: Petrouchka Redu,” The New Yorker (June 13, 2005) and Clive Barnes, “The Ballet: More Than One Way to Dance ‘Giselle,’ ” New York Times (May 1, 1975). 44. Sondra H. Fraleigh, “Witnessing the Frog Pond,” in S. H. Fraleigh and P. Hanstein, eds., Researching Dance: Evolving Modes of Inquiry (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), p. 196. 45. F. May, “I Want to be ME!,” Dancing Times (June 1996). 46. See Royce quoting Helpmann 1971, in Movement and Meaning, p. 96. 47. Donna Krasnow, “Performance, Movement, and Kinesthesia,” Impulse, 2(1994): 16–23, at 17–18, and Marcia Siegel, The Shapes of Change: Images in American Dance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), pp. 356–357.

CHAPTER 2.3

Epistemologies of Body and Movement in Contemporary Dance EDGAR VITE AND DIANA PALACIO

In this chapter we are interested in understanding how contemporary dance involves a series of epistemological contributions, so for this reason we review and analyze the work of iconic and representative dancers and choreographers who are at the pinnacle in the history of performing arts. We guide our discussion on some key concepts and inquiries about dance and movement, related to the work of Isadora Duncan, Jirí Kylián, Merce Cunningham, and Phillipe Decouflé, whose ideas have deeply influenced the epistemological perspectives of dance and movement in our time. We consider that this selection of dancers and choreographers gave some of the most important contributions in relation to the creative and artistic processes based on the experience of the body and movement, which have key epistemological implications in the contemporary context. Our decision to address these artists is analogous to the learning processes in dance, when it is important for students to learn the movement bases of a specific technique. Our objective is not to stay in the past or to only conserve the traditional form of the technique, but on the contrary, to advance and construct new forms, experiences, and sensations of movement which include the said bases but at the same time reach beyond them. It is also necessary to note that we are not interested in a formal or technical perspective of dance, however our research and theoretical approach centers on how dance reveals new ways of employing and re-signifying the body in a certain cultural context within this contemporary period of time. We focus on ideas like the autonomy, the reinterpretation, the deconstruction, the creative hybridization, the dematerialization, and the fictionalization of the body. All these ideas dispute and distrust different forms of dualism from the occidental philosophical standpoint, as occurs with the opposition between idealism and realism, mind and body, rationality and emotion, ephemeral and perdurable, immovable and dynamic, the physical and virtual body, established rules and autonomous creativity, and, utopia and dystopia. Throughout this article we analyze how such dualisms (mentioned earlier) gave way to epistemological interpretations of the body and movement which in turn led to the exploration and creation of some choreographic proposals of modern and contemporary dance. These epistemologies have practical consequences in the interpretation and 150

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configuration of dance, which imply interactions between the staging, the space, the dance performance, and the reception of the audience. The combination of these elements gives rise to critical questions about the place of the body, its affections and emotions in our current historical and cultural context. We argue that the epistemological ideas of the selected choreographers about the body and movement are intrinsically connected to an anthropological and philosophical approach that allows us to see fundamental concepts about the human subject and their cognitive implications through dance. For this reason we analyze: the idea of autonomy and creative freedom in the work of Isadora Duncan, the reconceptualization and reinterpretation of classical forms in the contemporary ballet of Jirí Kylián, the dialogue and hybridization between art disciplines in Merce Cunningham, and finally, the configuration of a virtual and utopic body that expresses unique perceptions, emotions, and feelings in the videodances created by Phillipe Decouflé. It is important to clarify in our research that we do not focus on a historical approach, but through the work of these selected dancers and choreographers we show how certain philosophical problems and inquiries related to dualism can be deeply understood by the cognitive experience of dance.

THE AUTONOMY OF MOVEMENT AND EXPRESSION OF THE BODY IN ISADORA DUNCAN The notions of movement autonomy and free corporal expression acquire a crucial importance in different forms and tendencies of contemporary dance because they are opposed to the formal codes associated with a mechanized body, which depended upon a rigorous training and an extreme aesthetic idealization. Connected to ideas like the sublime, the immutable, and the perfect, these tendencies strongly limit the creative possibilities and the sensibility of the human body. It is also necessary to mention that the relevance of autonomy is not restricted to the field of dance, but also is connected to a wide range of creative processes, corresponding to the development of arts disciplines in the twentieth century. The meaning of autonomy that we analyze and emphasize here is based on the idea of an embodied experience of movement, in the sense that it allows for the somatic experience to be considered instead of establishing a specific formal and technical language of dance. Consequentially, our approach to autonomy is closely related to the capacity of the body to develop its sensibility through the embodiment of emotions and affections, which translate into infinite possibilities of movement. In other words, of searching for the expressive qualities of the body, based on somatic modes of attention in the experience of perception.1 Taking as reference the notion of the embodied experience and its connection to autonomy, we arrive at the approach of Isadora Duncan, who was against the concept of Dance as the mere acquisition of movement skills by means of a rigorous training. In connection to this point, the dance theorist José Antonio Sánchez argues that Duncan’s legacy resides in the way she considered the place of the body as independent to technical and formal structures, in so far as this seeks to deny or even nullify the natural and organic development of body and movement,2 which corresponds to one of the most common reductive concepts of dualism. The idea of autonomy in the field of dance questions the concept of the dancer as a mechanical robot which merely reproduces and imitates forms. This is related to the

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Apollonian ideal in Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy that is linked to concepts such as the rational, the orderly, the balanced, and the structured, which parallels the classical developments of dance and, more specifically, in the traits that characterize ballet. In this sense, the autonomy that is linked to the Dionysian principles of intuition, joy, and liberty, in turn relates to an organic interpretation of movement. That is why Duncan was inspired by ancient characters from Greek mythology, and natural elements like air, earth, and water, and other shapes that allowed her to express freedom and vitality: “The movements of this man will be natural and beautiful like those of the free animals.”3 From this perspective, nature is the source of all creative languages and in the case of Dance, that is why it should show the organic composition of movement based on elements such as the configuration of human anatomy, the dynamic impulse of movement, and the gravitational pull of the earth, so that dance may come into an extension of life and a celebration of human existence. For all these reasons, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical approach, dance is conceived as a constant pursuit of the Dionysian state, reconciled with the nature of the subject and a ratification of life, through the movement: Dionysian art thus wishes to convince us of the eternal delight in existence: only we are to seek this delight, not in appearances, but behind them; we are to recognize how everything which comes into being must be ready for painful destruction; we are forced to gaze directly into the terror of individual existence—and nonetheless are not to become paralyzed: a metaphysical consolation tears us momentarily out of the hustle and bustle of changing forms.4 The simplicity of movement shows the freedom of the body and the susceptibility of the person. According to José Antonio Sánchez, a great dancer is one that is capable of connecting the spirit of nature with the soul of the human being, meaning that the body and soul of the dancer have to grow so closely together that the expressive language of the soul is equal to the body’s movement.5 All this may be a strategy to overcome the type of dualisms that oppose the body to the soul. Hence, this concept of dance relates to Nietzsche’s idea of the “Superhuman,” because the people incarnated through movement may be able to liberate themselves from predominant prejudices of a certain time, therefore enabling other ways of thinking about this subject. In coherence with the ideology of Dionysian liberation from the shackles of absolute control of individuality and the extreme domination of the body as a justification of existence, the concept of “the dancer and movement” took an essential place in the educative and training paradigms. This is particularly characterized in contemporary dance, which constantly experiments with the place of the body and movement from everyday life and ordinary contexts. Nowadays, the field of dance requires that the dancer develops a consciousness, in a healthy psychological way, giving enough space to freedom and independence: For a short time, we really are the primordial essence itself and feel its unbridled lust for and joy in existence; the struggle, the torment, the destruction of appearances now seem to us necessary, on account of the excess of innumerable forms of existence pressing and punching themselves into life and of the exuberant fecundity of the world will.6 This Dionysian perspective of life and the individual may be comprehended as a new way of understanding and practicing the performing arts, which has helped to unveil irregular, mutable, and complex poetics in art. This state of freedom and autonomy is also related to contemporary creative processes, which suggest multiple ways to arrive at artistic products

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and aesthetic experiences. It also may be associated with other disciplines, such as performance art, which is understood as a living art motivated by expressive necessities and an interest in exploring provocative topics, often based on an ethical and political interest. Both perspectives have in common the idea of a living art that cannot be restricted by old paradigms of mechanical interpretations of the body, orientated by rigid or immovable structures and techniques that restrict the human abilities of being, feeling, and expressing: The artist only needs his body, his words, and his imagination to express himself to the audience that sometimes participates in the action in involuntary and unexpected ways. The performance, which is anti-institutional, anti-elitist, anti-capitalist, almost by definition constitutes a provocative and political art.7 The search for autonomy opened new paradigms in performing arts, and that is why dance could not be the same anymore, because the individual recognized their active place as a creator, responsible for their body and their own personal expressive language. In this sense, dancers can no longer be taken just as a medium for the choreographer, reduced to a mere body that satisfies the creative necessities and expectations of others. They should seek out the purity of the body, both in movement and spirit (which is the reason for their dance, their “true dance”), making it a common search for choreographers and dancers to undertake from their multiple ways of understanding honest ways of dancing: “The best art goes deep into the unknown, shakes fossilized paradigms, and plays with speculations and connections considered ‘illegal’ in the field of disciplinary knowledge.”8 The autonomy of dance and movement is based upon the “will to power” and the philosophy of Vitalism developed by Friedrich Nietzsche, which were both translated by Isadora Duncan into the field of dance. The main idea of Vitalism is that there is a force or impulse in all forms of life, and it manifests itself in different levels of nature, from small microorganisms to more complex organisms that exist around the world. This dynamic impulse that is common to every form of life, is the origin of the “will to power,” which is the motor that boosts some of the most relevant transformations in human culture and history. So, the most relevant connection between Nietzsche’s Vitalism and dance is the idea of the natural impulse of life, not only as an intuitive quality, but also as a dynamic force of change and movement in human life. The subject demands different contexts that allow him or her to construct ways of acting and being in the world whilst in relation to the others. By developing expressive capacities through the creative possibilities of movement, dance has the capability to show the autonomy of individuals without being limited to a predominant perspective of a trained body, nor highlighting certain dance techniques or dance genres. In this sense, the dancer needs to find a way to connect his or her existence to an aesthetic and an ethical approach, inspired by the dynamics of organic motion. Furthermore, we sustain that the autonomy of movement demands the notion of an open and active body that stimulates and encourages creativity in artistic processes which cannot be reduced to specific genres or styles of dance.

THE ADOPTION AND REINTERPRETATION OF CLASSIC FORMS BY JIRÍ KYLIÁN Changes in the understanding of the body, which originated in the twentieth century, transformed ways of experimenting with the interpretation of dance performance, making

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it possible to configure new forms of subjectivity that directly affect cognitive relationships between human beings and their surroundings. The representation of emotions and affections of humans who inhabit an imperfect and ephemeral world was an awareness that opened the door for new ways of exploring dance, expanding its possibilities and the connections with other fields, beyond arts and humanities. Taking this as a key reference for understanding how dance helped change cultural paradigms related to the body and movement, we now turn our attention to the idea of reinterpretation of dance languages through the deconstruction of classical forms of dance. In contrast with Isadora Duncan, this type of expression does not refute the previously established languages of dance or oppose the trained body of dancers, but instead adapts and reinterprets them in a contemporary perspective. For this reason, we discuss the well-known choreographic work of Jirí Kylián, who adopts traditional techniques and dancing movements, taking as points of reference the experiences of daily motion in common life, and not of fictional characters like princesses, muses, nymphs, and sylphs, as occur in the classical narrative of ballet. Jíri Kylián explores different kinds of emotions and feelings that make it possible for him to develop an extraordinarily original dance. His work shows what could be understood as an encounter between the tragical impetus of human life and the idealism of beauty and appearance.9 For this reason, his choreographies may be understood as a synthesis of the contradictory dialectical relationship between reason and intuition, chaos and order, rigorous and spontaneous, without any of these elements being entirely contrasting, but complementary. In this sense, one of the most interesting aspects of Kylián’s dance performances and stage concepts is that he makes an unexpected use of the classical forms and expressive languages of ballet. He reinterprets the notion of the body and movement, manipulates its formal references and technical principles, and deconstructs its classical narrative, allowing the expression of emotions and affections which belong to a certainly imperfect world, without losing the harmony and the balance that produces the aesthetic pleasure of stage dance. In an unusual twist, however, he incorporates the mastery of technique in ways that offer new life to traditional dance forms. Like many diverse choreographers working in ballet since the 1960s, Kylián uses the balletically trained body to its extreme. Yet his motivation does not appear theatrical, or virtuosic, or purely abstract; it comes from within, from an emotion or idea that resonates outwards. Kylián is a master of tension, providing potent dramatic ballet, inventive and profound.10 One example where it is possible to appreciate this mixture of dance languages and expressive purposes is Petite Mort (1990), which is a French idiomatic expression referring to the experience of an “erotic orgasm.” In his astonishing piece, Kylián presents the sensuality of dance couples, who appear to be nude, employing choreographic components from modern dance, neoclassical ballet, and elements of floor work, from contemporary dance. Therefore, between the sensuality of a “petite mort” and an impeccable technique and staging, he achieves some kind of reconciliation between dance tradition and contemporary interpretation of movement and corporal expression; that is why he distances from radical forms of dualism, associated with classical ballet and traditional narratives in dance performance. These modes of re-signifying and reconstructing previous artistic languages, employed by Kylián, manifest the expressive capacity of the body through its natural movement and

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in its own skin, and not as a praise of virtuosity. For that reason, his choreographies do not focus on the dancer’s technical orientation, but includes more vital and spontaneous motions based on emotions that can be found in everyday life. This made a paradigm shift possible in the role of the dancer, employing different values and goals and a new anthropological concept in which the body is not merely a mechanical extension of the human being, “because acting for dance signifies acting in relation to the body, expression, and ritual: these are substances linked to deep structures that can neither be changed by any kind of rule, nor by the imposition of reason.”11 Kylián found a way of materializing a unique and original dance which allowed him to show the complexity of human nature on stage, going deep into its paradoxes in a unique style that mixes the traditional languages with the contemporary analyses about dance. Not only did he adapt and alter the classic or traditional forms of dance, but he also developed a huge repertoire of movements that explored new spatial, rhythmical, and conceptual relationships within the stage. This is the case of his choreographic piece called Stamping Ground (1983), where he incorporates the styles of several Australian aboriginal dances and their interpretive qualities. This kind of experiment also may be found in Symphony in D (1976), in which he generates a very rich and complex aesthetic experience for the audience, combining a deep sense of humor and irony with a conceptual perspective on dance. In this piece, he shows the creative value of the dancer’s failures and mistakes and explores their movement possibilities within the scene. Another interesting dance work is Bella Figura from 1983, where the concept of freedom is related to sensuality and gender ambivalence. On stage, Kylián shows both male and female dancers with their backs and chests completely nude, in a sequence where he mixes baroque music with neoclassical dance techniques into a beautiful scene that sublimes the extraordinary qualities of the human body. It is important to clarify that when we mention a sublime state in Kylián’s dance pieces, we do not refer to the Kantian philosophy and his conception about the inspiration and the overwhelmingness of the spirit through the greatness of nature, something that is alien to the human being and therefore can only be intuited and contemplated as something apart and even superior from himself: If a man who has taste enough to judge of the products of beautiful Art with the greatest accuracy and refinement willingly leaves a chamber where are to be found those beauties that minister to vanity or to any social joys, and turns to the beautiful in Nature in order to find, as it were, delight for his spirit in a train of thought that he can never completely evolve, we will regard this choice of his with veneration, and attribute to him a beautiful soul, to which no connoisseur or lover [of Art] can lay claim on account of the interest he takes in his [artistic] object.12 The idea of the sublime in Kant’s aesthetic theory also implies that the beauty of any artwork and any art discipline is not equal to the beauty and greatness of nature, and consequently any artwork is an opaque reflection of it. So, we argue that Kylián’s interpretation of the sublime state is related to the greatness and amusement of the human body and movement, which is related to the training, the expressive ability and the technique of the dancer. For this reason, the expression of this Czech dancer and choreographer is connected to the joy and emotion of contemplating the human body and its creative possibilities, intoxicated by its impressive and mysterious beauty. That is why Jirí Kylián’s pieces (which clearly can be noticed with Bella Figura) suggest to us the exaltation of life, through the delight of the human body.

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The post-modern trend of reconfiguring classical languages in Arts showed the limits of the dogmatic positions that predominated a certain historical moment, when dance was only conceived as a symbol of beauty and perfection. Far from denying this artistic state of order and moderation, he searched for a connection within them, bringing to dance other possibilities to create and to comprehend beauty that included a state of pleasure and a delightful existence. Through his dance pieces, he shows a constant tension of these forces, without dominating each other, alternating between them and giving place to a new aesthetic state for dance. The possibility of giving new meaning is fundamental in the theoretical approach of semiotics applied to arts disciplines, especially in the case of visual arts. In this sense, it is very common to see the appropriation of different kinds of images of design, publicity or fashion, where the tendencies and the ideas are continuously recycled and readapted. These images are transformed and reinterpreted in new creative contexts, so it requires a semiotic reading that helps to identify the iconic elements and how to manipulate them. This may be associated with the approach of Iuri Lotman, who defends that there is a constant act of translation and reinterpretation between different spheres of signs or what he names as semiosphere interaction, which allows for a cultural interchange and gives way to new imaginative and creative phenomena: At the same time, throughout the whole space of semiosis, form social jargon and agegroup slang to fashion, there is also a constant renewal of codes. So, any one language turns out to be immersed in semiotic space and it can only function by interaction with that space. The unit of semiosis, the smallest functioning mechanism, is not the separate language, but the whole semiotic space of the culture in question. This is the space we term the semiosphere.13 Connecting Lotman’s theory of Semiotics of Culture with the development of Art History, we may find that a wide range of artists adopted and reinterpreted the work of others from the past, giving to their pieces new aesthetic qualities and creative inquiries that may not be found in the original artworks. This phenomenon occurs especially in the case of conceptual art and other associated art movements, where the artists use key artworks or even iconic images, such as public figures, famous people, commercial brands, slogans, etc., to criticize different aspects of the art world and the dominant culture; but also in certain cases to defend and embrace them. It is possible to find this kind of creative experiment in the work of a wide range of artists, such as Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Kosuth, Andy Warhol, Barbara Kruger, Jeff Koons, and Banksy, amongst others. Applying this to Kylián’s work, it is possible to comprehend how he reinterprets classical dance in a semiotic way, renovating the stage experience. He focuses on human emotions and affections and elegantly includes nudity of trained “dancers’ bodies” whilst blurring the differences between female and male roles. He satirizes the idealized figure of the dancer by implementing large doses of humor and irony and incorporates a varied repertoire of movements and creative possibilities, presenting a constant influence of everyday experience throughout his choreographies. “Our emotional world is closely linked to movement: in many languages, there is a direct connection between the two words ‘motion’ and ‘emotion’. (. . .) In any case, all our moves (emotional or physical) leave deep wrinkles in our hearts.”14 In this sense, it is possible to discover dance proposals that are analog to a certain type of “metalanguage,” which generates a deep understanding of the principles that constitute it, the origin of a particular configuration of movement, the foundations of a determined

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choreographic proposal, and the place of the body in the interpretative skills of the dancer. So, dance may generate a self-reflection, implying a referential understanding of it, not in an academic or theoretical way, but in the practical experience of the dancer and the spectator. The sense of auto reference of the creative medium may be found in the rest of the arts fields, but in dance it is characterized by deconstructing the formal structures, the expressive qualities, and the movement codes from traditional and classical dance, reincorporating them, reinterpreting them, renovating them, and finally giving them a new life.

THE INTERCHANGE BETWEEN ART DISCIPLINES IN MERCE CUNNINGHAM The twentieth century was an important period of formal and performative ruptures as in modern dance, expressionist dance, and even in ballet, from M. Petipá to Balanchine. During these revolutionary changes, the artistic context generated different kinds of experiences around the body, the staging, and the involvement of the audience. Throughout this time there were many inquiries into the arts about the place of the body in the creative process, the apparition of new classifications, the experimentation with new types of techniques, and the interaction between different disciplines. This changed the homogeneous scenarios, agents, and institutions related to the arts practices and resulted in original proposals, which encouraged the “hybridization of arts” and blurred the disciplinary frontiers, giving place to new creative processes and aesthetic approaches in contemporary art. It is necessary to clarify that when we talk about “hybridization of arts,” we refer, for example, to the artworks of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, amongst others, who smudged the limits between painting and sculpture, making a place for new hybrid artistic categories. This not only questioned the traditional divisions between art fields, but also showed how close the different disciplines are, and how they articulate with one another. Referring to Rauschenberg’s mixture of painting and sculpture the term combines appeared, because he connected simultaneously in the same art object the bidimensional aspect of painting with the tridimensional reality of sculpture. With reference to this, Lucy Lippard explains the consequences of the convergence between painting and sculpture and its echoes in the contemporary artistic practices: In the present exchange and occasional confusion between painting and sculpture, and the structural “third stream” (which includes some shaped canvases), three interacting points seem particularly pertinent: The relationship of painting and sculpture as physical objects, as vehicles for formal or sensuous advance, and as vehicles for color.15 The inquiries in relation to the boundaries and connections between disciplinary fields also influenced certain educational institutions, as occurred with the original curriculum at Black Mountain College (North Carolina, USA) and its didactic strategies for learning arts, which implemented the experimentation with a wide range of crafts, mediums, and disciplines.16 So, this phenomenon shows how the established epistemic paradigms were questioned, and the arts moved forward to a transdisciplinary outlook, implying an integrated formal and technical perspective, which included the realization of collective creative projects, involving different types of interactions.

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One of the most innovative aspects from the didactic perspective and the curriculum of Black Mountain College was that all the students were involved in common creative processes, which implicated the experimentation with plastic arts, visual arts, music, theater, and of course dance. This kind of interdisciplinary perspective has important echoes in our time, because it has opened the door for international arts programs, which combine approaches from sciences, humanities, and arts, making a place for new epistemic paradigms that are based on a collaborative perspective of knowledge. In the post avant-garde art, the choreographic work of Merce Cunningham was born. He constructed a very interesting version of visual and plastic collage through movement because his stage proposal was neither restricted to the fragmentation or the reconstruction of works (as occurs on the surface of a painting), nor to the tridimensional space of sculpture, which used to be a static reduction of the qualities and characteristics of the materials. In his dance technique, we can discover a deep juxtaposition of stage elements, drawing upon a fusion of arts disciplines and transdisciplinary works. In this sense, Roger Copeland clearly characterizes the way Cunningham translated and transfigured the collage aesthetic into a new type of hybridization in dance: But almost every aspect of Cunningham’s oeuvre is informed in some way by the collage aesthetic: the chance operations he utilizes for linking together disparate fragments of movement, the decentralized way the dancers’ bodies are distributed throughout the performance space—even the spectator’s choice about where and when to focus visual and auditory attention.17 In relation to the transdisciplinary process in the arts, Peter Bürger develops an interesting theory about the importance of the concept and experimentation with collage in the avant-garde movements, and its artistic implications, which is related to the idea of the inorganic or allegorical work throughout his proposal. This contrasted with the classical idea of organic or symbolic work, in traditional and mimetic art. So, there is an ambivalence inherent to the inorganic artworks, which permits multiple lectures and interpretations about them. This characteristic is related to an open reception and comprehension of the world in an epistemic sense. In the words of Bürger, this means that: “The allegorist pulls one element out of the totality of the life context, isolating it, depriving it of its function. Allegory is therefore essentially fragment and thus the opposite of the organic symbol (. . .) The allegorist joins the isolated reality fragments and thereby creates meaning.”18 The concept of collage is closely related to the notion of fragmentation, and how pieces of reality are adopted and transfigured into art. This technique implied in its origins the incorporation of “fragments of life” into the artworld, as occurs in the cubist paintings created by Picasso and Braque. It is also necessary to mention that the collage technique was associated to gluing real objects to the surface of the canvas, but it is also related to juxtaposition of elements. So, we defend that the plastic and visual arts have a parallel in the context of dance, particularly with the idea of mixing art mediums on stage. That is why the idea of fragmentation is very closely related to the literary concept of allegory, which allows multiple interpretations and acknowledges different ways of appreciating and understanding one single work: “The avant-gardist (. . .) joins fragments with the intent of positioning meaning (where the meaning may well be the message that meaning has ceased to exist). The work is no longer created as an organic whole, but put together from fragments.”19 The convergence of art disciplines can be noticed in the stage performance of Rainforest from 1968, where Andy Warhol collaborated directly with Cunningham. To create the

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scenography for this work, Warhol designed several silver colored balloons, which were randomly dispersed around the stage throughout the entire performance, and the dancers interacted with them intensively. These interactions with the scenography had a strong visual presence during the entire performance and generated a sculptural reading of the body in movement. This reveals to us how the hybridization of artistic languages and creative processes are applied in the case of dance. All of this implies that the classical narratives, and the notion of time and space, have changed notably in the kind of experimentation created by Cunningham, including chance operations, causality, the employment of technological devices, and spontaneous relations between stage elements. As Roger Copeland suggests, there is no better way to describe his work than as open field, because it is not fully determined and allows the interaction between different areas of knowledge: “Is there a better description anywhere of Cunningham’s ‘open field’ with its ‘lexias’ of fragmented movement, its multiple entrances and exits, its resonating, reversible relationships between image, sound and decor?”20 These contributions make it possible to understand the relevance of the visual and plastic dimension of dance through elements such as scenography, costume design, and the use of lighting. These elements that constitute most of the staging of dance performances not only emphasize the collaborative projects between disciplines, but show a transdisciplinary epistemology perspective works in contemporary contexts, making possible the mixture and interchange between different creative processes. The specialist perspective becomes insufficient because in the end a more open view, which includes the complexity of the human being and the world around him, is required. So, finally, the hybridization of expressive languages and the transdisciplinary perspective of arts show a strong sense of overcoming the dualism and disciplinary divisions of specialties.

TECHNOLOGICAL MEDIATION AND TRANS-CORPORAL EXPERIENCE IN PHILLIPPE DECOUFLÉ Up to this point we have examined a wide range of changes, in ways of understanding, feeling and creating dance in the twentieth century, related to certain types of dualism. We have examined the idea of autonomy of body and dance movement in Isadora Duncan; the deconstruction and reinterpretation of classical forms that may be found in Jirí Kylián’s approach; and interdisciplinary work of Merce Cunningham. Now we will focus our attention onto more complex forms of experimentation that fuse the virtual and physical body, taking as reference the artwork of Phillippe Decouflé, a French dancer and choreographer who transcended these ideas, and we begin the experimentation with transmedia art expressions. Decoufle’s work gives rise to a sort of language hybridization that can no longer be defined, nor categorized as a specific form, but rather thrives in the interstices and gaps between different artistic fields, areas of knowledge, and human experiences. This characteristic is not only associated with dance, nor to the arts by themselves, but also corresponds to the broader cultural and historical context of our time in which new cognitive paradigms emerge in a global network allowing a virtual communication and interchange between people, in creative processes and imaginative perspectives. Here we are not dealing with the traditional philosophical dualism related to the opposition between mind and body, or soul and physicality, anymore; instead, we are

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faced with what virtual communication and digital creations reveal to us about the idea of a virtual body, which is mediated all the time by technological networks, processes, and devices. This is related to a profound reflection of how technologies and new media have altered our notion, interpretation, manipulation, and consumption of the body in the digital era, which closely relate to utopic possibilities of being. These “utopian bodies” allow for new kinds of perceptions and interactions between individuals, not only in an artistic realm but also through social networks and other kinds of virtual interaction where the physical body is not present. In this sense, we defend that this phenomenon is expressly related to the choreographic and audiovisual proposal of Decouflé, and for doing so we take as a reference the considerations made by Franziska Bork: The defining quest for a different being in utopian expression suggests to me the body itself—the medium of the performative arts—as a site for utopia. The body in performance would use its unique potential to embody utopian desire, instead of reproducing literary mean to tell the spectators about bodies in different time and space.21 Bork suggests that the utopian mission of performing bodies is to criticize, challenge, and even overcome social paradigms, in relation to established ideas of the body and its connection to a determined concept of beauty, gender, health, and other values of this sort. She relates the utopian idea of body with Decouflé’s Codex from 1987, where he experiments with a dehumanization and reconfiguration of the human body, because he radically alters the appearance of the dancers and the quality of their movements, using costumes and flippers that generate a very shocking experience for the spectator. The costumes created for this project and the technological devices used by Decouflé generate an entirely different experience about the human body, because his work is constantly moderated by audiovisual resources: The impact of film and the costumes contribute to the dancer’s detachment from customary notions of dancing human figures. The flippers make their movements appear clumsy and ungraceful (. . .) In editing, the choreographer overcomes the usual “problem” of gravity in dancing when he shows images upside down. Edit also allows Decouflé to use movements at a speed that would be impossible on stage: the dancers oscillate in the air in impossibly long jumps, their steps appear bustling when sped up in fast-motion towards the end of the sequence.22 The body mediated by technological devices and enhancements to images has relevant implications to creative processes, as occurs in the making of video works; how the editing tools and digital resources can defy the laws of physics and the common sensorial experience that challenges gravity, the spatial perception, the reconfiguration of time, the narrative structure, and even the fragmentation and reinterpretation of the body. In this sense, we take as a key reference the theory of Noël Carroll about the hybridization of artistic languages that characterizes moving-picture dance, and we directly connect it to the videodances created by Phillipe Decouflé: “Between these two, there is the possibility where the motion picture elements and the dance elements are co-equal determinants in the results; moving-picture dance reconstruction fills this category.”23 Carroll argues that one of the key features of this hybrid gender is that the images created by Videodance are moving images or at least images that simulate some sort of movement. The sensation of the movement created by these images can be generated by mounting and editing processes of different kinds, as occurs for example in the case of stop motion, which is one of the techniques used by Decouflé in his audiovisual projects.

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In this sense, Carroll argues that this feature distinguishes essentially moving-picture dance, or Videodance as we name it, from other art forms that depict dance movements: “Of course, most moving-picture dances move: either their figures move or the impression of movement is conveyed by devices like editing and special effects. This is what immediately differentiates them from other visual forms, such as paintings, sculptures, and photographs of dance.”24 The development of visual arts is connected to how people create, consume, and manipulate new media in our time, such as social networks, images, videos, games, or any other digital product; this implies an entirely different way of understanding ourselves. What we mean by this, is how notably the new media and technologies have changed the understanding of our bodies in the contemporary context, and how we consume, contemplate and even transfigure those digital, virtual, and phantasmagoric bodies. This is related to the idea of the editing work, as a new possibility of interpreting dance and as a way of choreographing it, which implies that the video editor assumes the role of an interpreter. In Noël Carroll’s words this means that: “Just as the performer of a piece of music executes what we call an interpretation of an already existing work, so the movingpicture dance reconstructor, employing her complement of visual resources, makes an interpretation of a preexisting dance or dance performance (which is itself already an interpretation).”25 In his experimentation with hybrid languages, Decouflé explores the technical, narrative, visual, and spatial possibilities of cinematographic languages in their articulation with dance, as can be seen in his Abracadabra from 1998. In this work, the idea of space is both enclosed and expanded, because of the different perspectives and focuses of the camera, which create unique and interesting images in movement. It also implies a different experience of time, as the camera slows and accelerates the action of the dancers and allows the simultaneous convergence of different moments. These experiences of time, space, image and movement are not equal to the experience of a live performance, in a traditional sense. For this reason, we defend that the connection between dance and visual arts has opened the door to new imaginative possibilities, which relate to the influence of media and technologies in our daily lives, generating entirely new ways of interaction, associated with the virtual projection of the body, no matter the place of its physical presence. Taking as reference the work of Decouflé, it is possible to notice that the fusion and experimentation with technologies, media, and digital art reveals the close connections between contemporary dance and visual arts, which produce new artistic categories that cannot be understood with traditional paradigms, as has occurred in the development of genres like Videodance, which fuse elements from Choreography and Cinematography. All this helps to understand another kind of contemporary dualism, which is related to the human body being mediated and given a new meaning all the time, generating the possibility of utopic dance bodies that challenge the existing cultural, social, and artistic paradigms. All of this shows the importance of the dematerialization of the body in new creative processes and its connection to a utopian perspective of human life, giving the possibility of discovering new forms of being, inhabiting the world and interacting with others, etc. What is so compelling about the transmedial dimension of dance is that it allows the discovery, in a world constantly mediated by technological applications, that there is no longer a physical body required for creating an aesthetic experience, neither on stage or at a conventional place for displaying a work and creating an artistic event. This has

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generated the possibility of understanding dance as an open field, which is articulated to very recent forms and genres like the digitization of body, videomapping, virtual reality and video games, among others.

CONCLUSIONS The topics and artists analyzed in this paper show how dance has originated new epistemic paradigms, with wider and more complex ideas and practices about movement and the subject, than the conventionally established ones. Referring to the work of the selected choreographers, we defend notable moments that enable conceptual and empirical understandings related to the body’s expressive autonomy and emancipation: the reconfiguration and reinterpretation of art forms, the interdisciplinary interchange of creative languages, and the incorporation of digital and technological devices in creative processes. According to their cultural, ideological, and historical context, the analyzed choreographers produce dance in response to different kinds of dualist practices and ideologies, configuring new epistemic and cognitive interpretations about the body in movement and its expressive abilities. The epistemologies developed by the selected topics and artists confronted fossilized ideas that corresponded to the traditional paradigms and the established institutions of their time; giving rise to a deep understanding of creative, emotive and expressive independence. This was a way to self-construct and reinvent themselves, overtaking established models of action. In other words, each of them was faithful to their own principles, being coherent to their personal existential questions. By doing so, they showed the active role of the body in different spheres, giving place to accessible explorations of dance and movement, organically and naturally, and not oriented by an idealized approach to it. These visionary proposals notably contributed to change the concept of the body in the contemporary context, altering the role of education and training in dance because of the many interpretative qualities of movement and its connections with a wide range of modes of self-compression of the subject and the necessity to make dance a place of ethical and aesthetic enunciation. All of them contributed to show the necessity of the reconciliation of human nature through movement; expanding the ways of expressing and provoking emotions; configuring an epistemic perspective that goes beyond a specialization, and in favor of a transdisciplinary outlook of knowledge; and finally presenting seemingly inexhaustible ways of exploring, admiring, and representing the body and all its imaginative possibilities.

NOTES 1.

Cf. Thomas Csordas, “Somatic Modes of Attention,” Cultural Anthropology 8:2 (1993): 135–156.

2.

José Antonio Sánchez, The Art of Dance and Other Writings (Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 2003), p. 53.

3.

Isadora Duncan, “The Dance of the Future, I See America Dancing,” What is dance?: Readings in Theory and Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 263.

4.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music, trans. Ian Johnston (Arlington: Richer Resources Publications, 2009), p. 58.

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5.

Sánchez, The Art of Dance and Other Writings, p. 59.

6.

Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p. 58.

7.

Diana Taylor, Advanced Studies on Performance (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2011), p. 8.

8.

Luis Camnitzer, “The Art Education as Fraud,” Esfera pública (2012), p. 6.

9.

Alfonso Pérez, “About the Genealogy of Art,” CALLE14: Journal of Research on Artfield, 5:7 (2011): 11.

10. Martha Bremser, ed., Fifty Contemporary Choreographers (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 134. 11. Fabrizio Andreella, The Suspended Body. Codes and Symbols of Dance (Mexico: INBA, 2010), p. 11. 12. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement (London: Macmillan and Co., 1914), p. 178. 13. Iuri Lotman, Universe of the Mind. A Semiotic Theory of Culture (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 124–125. 14. Jirí Kylián, One of a Kind, The Kylián Research Project (Rotterdam: Codarts, 2014), p. 29. 15. Lucy Lippard, Changing: Essays in Art Criticism (New York: Duttor, 1971), p. 121. 16. Black Mountain College, official website: http://www.blackmountaincollege.org/history/. 17. Roger Copeland, “Cunningham and the Aesthetic of Collage,” The Drama Review, 46:1 (2002): 13. 18. Peter Bürger, Theory of Avant-garde (Barcelona: Península, 2000), p. 69. 19. Ibid., 70. 20. Copeland, “Cunningham and the Aesthetic of Collage,” p. 26. 21. Franziska Bork, “The Body as Non-Place: Utopian Potential in Philippe Decouflé’s Dance Film Codex,” Spaces of Utopia: An Electronic Journal, 2 (2013): 149. 22. Ibid., 145. 23. Noël Carroll, “Toward a Definition of Moving-Picture Dance,” in Dance Research Journal, 33:1 (2001): 54. 24. Ibid., 52. 25. Ibid., 56.

CHAPTER 2.4

The Phenomenology of Choreographing REBECCA WHITEHURST

We experience the world bodily, and the body is revealed to us in our exploration of the world. —Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi1 Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty2 Choreographing is an important phenomenological tool. Creating, choosing and intentionally structuring phrases of movement in time and space profoundly reveals and uniquely organizes what it is like to experience being in the world. By “what it is like to be,” I mean the way a person experiences her conscious and embodied existence in the world. By phenomenology I mean the discipline within philosophy that addresses the realm of meaning as experienced subjectively.3 By choreographing, I mean creating a dance that can be repeated or learned, as opposed to improvising. As such, and for the purposes of this paper, phenomenology of choreographing is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the choreographer’s first-person perspective. This chapter begins by laying out the foundational concepts that root my inquiries. Section two presents three different choreographers’ phenomenological accounts of dance-making.4 Section three explores what such accounts reveal about the structures of consciousness, and argues that creative bodily movement organizes “what it is like to be.” Section four considers how dance artists can take a phenomenological approach to create artistic content.

FOUNDATIONAL CONCEPTS A phenomenology of choreographing sits within the larger context of philosophy and requires mention of certain historical questions, theories, and thinkers. What is conscious experience? How can it be studied? How is the body to be accounted for? In addition to a brief introduction to phenomenology, this section will touch on the following concepts: mind–body dualism, kinesthetic consciousness, experience stream, dynamic line, and the parallels of dance and perception. The history of philosophy contains much debate over how the mind and the body interact, as well as how the mind fits into the natural world.5 A prevalent argument is that 164

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mind (an unextended thinking substance) and body (an extended material substance) are fundamentally different things.6 How then are philosophers to handle the body when investigating the conscious experience of dance, an aesthetic practice that happens in the body? To investigate conscious experience, German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859– 1938) developed a philosophical method called phenomenology, which literally means the study of phenomena, or appearances.7 Husserl’s phenomenological approach discloses what it is like to perceive from first-person accounts. Husserl’s work was notably taken up by philosophers Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908– 1961).8 Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, among other thinkers, developed divergent methods and theories on the study of conscious experience. Today, phenomenology has become a living method of inquiry, an ongoing look at the meaning things have in reallife, real-time experience. Merleau-Ponty is of particular interest for dance philosophers. He rehabilitated the body in the field of philosophy through his ideas on perception. Far from dualism, Merleau-Ponty argues, “The theory of the body is already a theory of perception.”9 He writes of the body as having “situational spatiality” that is oriented to a task.10 Unlike objects, the body exists toward-the-world and expresses itself through its spatiality. The body is both intentional and expressive (Plate 2). The work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty greatly influenced dance philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone.11 She argues that the body’s movement is at the heart of what it is to be a conscious perceiving agent. To express this idea, Sheets-Johnstone puts forth the term “kinesthetic consciousness.”12 She further argues that kinesthetic consciousness is our primordial way to make sense of ourselves and the world, that “movement is the mother of all cognition.”13 We first suss out ourselves and our world through movement, not words. Sheets-Johnstone likens kinesthetic consciousness to Husserl’s assertion that man experiences consciousness in the flow of his becoming, in his experience stream.14 Consciousness is experienced not as a static thing, but rather as a process of unfolding meanings over time. The study of conscious experience, therefore, needs a “kinetic” method that can sift through the various and constantly moving layers of sediment.15 Sheets-Johnstone takes up this living approach in her work on the phenomenology of dance. She views dance as a kinetic phenomenon that simultaneously appears and is lived experience. She also claims a phenomenologist of dance “describes the immediate encounter with dance, the lived experience of dance, and proceeds from there to describe the analyzable structures.”16 Sheets-Johnstone’s embodied phenomenology reveals four structures of kinesthetic consciousness: linear and projectional qualities (which are spatial aspects of movement), and tensional and amplitudinal (which are temporal aspects of movement).17 These qualities are similar to those found in the work of the Hungarian thinker and choreographer Rudolf Laban (1879–1958).18 Laban writes of four main structures in dance: body, shape, space harmony, and energetic dynamics.19 The last category contains four effort factors: weight, time, space, and flow. For example, a dancer might dab her finger in the air. A dab movement feels light (not heavy or strong), sudden (not sustained in time), direct (not indirect through space), and free (not bound in its flow). She might next move in a way that is strong, sustained, indirect and bound—a wringing of her torso as if it were a towel. Sheets-Johnstone views dance as a “perpetual revelation of force” whereby linear, projectional, tensional, and amplitudinal qualities are felt all-of-a-piece when dancing, and known in reflection.20 Moreover, the dancer creates these qualities. He creates space;

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he creates time. As Sheets-Johnstone turns her attention to choreography, she asks: “What is there in the form which allows the composing dancer to apprehend its dynamics and how does she do this?”21 How does the choreographer experience the four qualities allof-a-piece? To answer this, Sheets-Johnstone looks to Husserl’s metaphor of flux, or flow. She writes of a “dynamic line of sheer force” that guides the choreographer through a work’s development.22 For the choreographer, this line is the “temporal-qualitative structure of the phenomenon.”23 The line qualitatively organizes the dance so that it is all-of-a-piece, like Husserl’s unity of consciousness in the flow of his experience stream— meaning, all that comes before will appropriately fit with what comes after. Contemporary philosopher Alva Noë echoes Sheets-Johnstone when he says that movement and understanding go hand in hand. Noë views movement as a “sensory-motor mode of understanding . . . that brings the world into focus as a kind of dynamic of trying to make sense of it.”24 We are sensing out the world, much like Sheets-Johnstone’s kinesthetic consciousness and Merleau-Ponty’s situational spatiality. Perception, as Noë asserts, is something we do. In other words, consciousness is the continual act of receiving sensory messages and producing motor responses. We act out our perceptual experience— which is inherently embodied, spread out in time, environmentally situated, and dynamic. These qualities resonate with the structures presented by both Laban and Sheets-Johnstone. In fact, Noë’s thoughts on consciousness lead him to their primary subject, dance. Noë describes dance as a temporally extended interaction between the environment and the perceiver, whose movement affects sensation.25 The dancer is constantly using her sensory-motor understanding to interact with the environment.26 The way she moves affects sensation, and this in turn leads to movement. He states: If you think of dance in a performance, dance is an enactment or a modeling of this fundamental fact about our relationship to the world around us. Here we are. We dynamically interact with it. The seeing, the perceiving, is not something detached from that coupling. It is the coupling. It is the dance.27 Life not only expresses itself in movement, it is movement. The moving body is the art itself, and does not just cause the dance—as a French horn player causes the horn to sound. The dancers are the dance.28 In line with this idea, philosopher Matjaž Potrc writes that the dancer and the dance exist in an experiential qualitative space.29 It is a phenomenological space. Potrc writes: “phenomenology really forms the basis for determining what dance actually is.”30 In other words, the phenomenological approach is necessary for ontological purposes as well. Dance cannot be understood without the experience of dance.31

ACCOUNTS OF DANCE-MAKING This section contains phenomenological accounts of composing dance from three different choreographers: Jason Phelps, Rebecca Whitehurst, and Erica Gionfriddo.32 These choreographers were tasked to compose (on themselves) a single dance phrase in one session, recording their thoughts about the experience.

Choreographer Jason Phelps The following account is the transcription from a live recording. Phelps simply said out loud what was going on in his head while creating.

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I am going to make a dance about stepping into the present. Foot raised. Foot down. Foot raised. Foot down. Turn to the right. Bend to the right. Look up. Look out. Over the horizon. How much farther past the horizon can I look? Look inward. Inside myself. Down. Spiral down, down to the ground. Roll, roll to the right. Roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, stop. Pop back up. Foot raised. Left foot out to the left. Look to the left. Far out past, past. Left arm up. Up toward the ceiling. Reaching. Up toward the sky. Can I touch the sky? Can I touch it? Cut the string. Arm falls. Look up. Look down. Up onto the tiptoes. Eyes to the sky. Look back down. Look to my right. Look to my left. Take one step up. Freeze. Foot in the air. Left foot rooted into the earth. Right leg searching. Can’t quite place it. Can’t quite put it down yet. Looking out past the horizon still. And freeze. So that is, [repeating movement phrase with adjustments] foot raised, down, raised, down. Turn then bend. Look. [pause] Spiral to ground. Roll. Pop up. Raise foot, then to left. Look. [pause] Left arm up. Can I . . .? [pause] Cut. Arm. Look up then down. Tiptoes. Eyes up, down, right, left. Step. Freeze. Right foot in the air. Root left. Search right. Can’t quite . . . [pause] Look. Freeze.

Choreographer Rebecca Whitehurst The following description was recalled and written down immediately after choreographing. I entered the studio knowing I wanted to create my movement phrase about the experience of loss. The first thing I did was warm-up with fifteen minutes of ballet bar—pliés, tendus,

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etc. Already, my mind was thinking about movements for my dance phrase. I imagined myself standing with arms out, as though hugging emptiness. But then I dissolved that idea, and imagined myself sweeping through the room. So, even though my body was doing one thing (my every day bar warm-up), my mind was imagining my body doing various poses and sweeping gestures. I put on music, a Chopin playlist. Just to get me in the mood. And, I decided I wanted to begin my phrase on the floor. So I laid down on my back and thought about how loss makes me feel unmoored and like I am floating. So I raised my limbs from the ground slowly in a floaty-like way. The music seemed to have a swaying-feel. And I found myself wanting to roll toward one side, and then to the other like I was in space. I then felt an impulse to become rigid with limbs back down on the ground, straight to my sides and squeezing toward the center-line of my body. Just as quickly, I released all tension and became gooey, feeling heavy and imagining a sinking-into-the-floor-sensation. Then, I found I had no next impulse. I laid there for what seemed like a long time without moving. Waiting for something, some movement, to occur to me. But nothing came. I could hear the music playing. I could feel my body on the floor. I felt the twinklings of emotion. Like I was connected to the feelings of loss, but not won-over by them. Still though, I felt no impulse to move. So, I started again from the beginning. I laid on the ground at a bit of a diagonal, not parallel to any of the walls. First, the floaty feeling with limbs gracefully lifting toward the sky ever so slowly. This time I decided to roll toward the right side first (because I suddenly imagined the audience to be over there) and, then to the left (away from the audience) and then, back to center again before adding a third lean—to the left again. It just felt interesting to go Right then Left then Left again. A sense of the unexpected. And, I decided to make the third lean a quicker movement. It felt like a slow going-to-one-side and then a slow going-to-the-other-side and then a quick! going-to-the-same-side. And then, as I was on my left side (shoulder and hip touching the ground) with arms and legs gently floating in the air toward the sky, I felt the urge to actively extend my arms at a medium speed, as though reaching out to someone nearby. But then she’s gone! And, it makes me make my body like a stiff board. Arms down by my sides. Legs on the ground straight and together. Like I had done before. Squeezing toward the midline of my body, trying to be as compact as possible. But then, instead of completely relaxing after this pose as I had done the first time, I felt the urge to stand. I found my body release into a spiral, which took me to standing. It was just a three-quarter turn, leaving me almost directly facing the imagined audience. As I spiraled to the right to make this transition from down to up, I thought of the image of the Andromeda Galaxy. It felt natural to have myself ripple softly through the spine so that my head was the last thing to come up. Like an echo of the big bang, or perhaps the sound before that first explosion. That unknowable emptiness. I noticed the music right then. A beautiful piano trill, high in pitch. It made me want to jump with my head back, mouth open, and my right hand trembling at my side for a quick second. When I landed I sort of stumbled backwards a few steps, which I liked, and decided to keep. Because it felt organic, and I thought: certainly the feelings of loss make one stumble, unsure of their footing. I noticed that this stumbling back a few steps felt like a doorway to something new, a new movement section. So, I decided that this must be the end to my short dance phrase. I went through it a few more times, making small alterations when the feeling or idea came to me. For example, I decided to add in a moment of repetition. On the last run-through of the phrase I was able to really live in it. Like in a

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more emotionally powerful way. The way I’d want to do it if I were performing the phrase in front of an audience. If I had more time to play with it, I might want to try the phrase transposed to standing—doing the floaty sway thing while standing and the jump with head-tilt while somehow on the ground. I now sit on the floor of the studio to write this, and upon reflection the whole experience felt like being in a different dimension, an inner/outer creative space where emotions, ideas, images and bodily feelings shaped my movement. It felt almost like a conversation with myself—lots of different parts of myself. But, all at once. And at times I felt really inside my body, and other times like I could see myself from the outside, like from the perspective of an audience member. A teacher of mine once said that choreography is sculpting patterns of time in space. And it kind of feels like that.

Choreographer Erica Gionfriddo The following account is the transcription from a live recording. Gionfriddo simply said out loud what was going on in her head while creating. Ok I’m in the studio and aware that I’m a little stiff and sore in my lower back and ankles, so I’m going to make some circles in those areas and soften into the floor with my feet. I’m always aware of trying to make something completely new and not replicate something I’ve seen or done already, so I’m going to start from sensation. What’s a new sensation I can start from and make very clear, almost exaggerated. I’m feeling swirling masses in my pelvis so I’m going to start by being thrown off balance to the right with a swirling mass in my pelvis, staying soft in my ankles so they warm up more and allowing the upper body to react with space to stay out of my tight lower back. That feels pretty good but I think I can step further and allow the upper body to react the way it wants to. That felt riskier and made me step back into a wide position facing back. I feel like I’m falling back, so I reach my right arm up for balance. It looks like I’m reaching for something so I’ll make an exaggerated gesture of grabbing something from the high right back diagonal point. Let’s try that again with more width and more breadth. I want to feel like I’m spreading and expanding far into horizontal space. That worked better and I took up more space. Now I want to redirect my high right diagonal, so I grab something in my right hand and pull it into me that makes me spin to face the left diagonal but I want some more shape out of my spine. I could eat what’s in my hand so I’ll try putting my fingers in my mouth. I feel like I’ve done a lot of mouth gestures lately so what about making the shape more awkward. I’ll grab high then pull low and internally rotate my right arm. That looked like I was putting something in a pocket. I like that, so I’ll put what I grabbed in my right hand into a pocket on my chest. Whatever it is was, it was heavy, and it makes me drop into contraction and plié. Now, I want to change sensations, that part felt heavy and aggressive. I’ll pretend someone picks me up under my armpits, so I go high but am still hanging. I don’t want to be held this way, so I’ll drop out of that imaginary person’s grasp. I lift my arms to drop out of their grip, and drop my weight. I fall all the way to the floor on my butt. Ok let’s try it all from the top, and see where the momentum wants to go. I try from the top and the momentum wants to take me straight down and then spiral to the left. I’m aware of not wanting to be predictable so let’s add some ‘anti intuitive’ choices within that sequence. What if before I drop completely to my lowest point, I pop my knees sideways, like a grand plié in first position. I like that it’s unexpected and, a little bit sexy. I can play with focus in that moment that could lead to possible relationships on stage when this gets put into context. Ok, so pop at the last moment and instead of following

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momentum all the way through to a spiral, I’m going to interrupt that desire. My right foot wants to do that, so I’ll let it pull me forward instead of going backwards. That puts me in a big lunge—straight legs. I like that pose. It’s a strong statement, but maybe I can vary the tempo by really falling backwards further and letting my torso ripple. That changes the way I get into the large lunge. I like that. My head arrives last and can make a strong gesture. What does it look like if I look downstage when my foot arrives forward? No, that’s too dramatic. I’ll keep my focus down. But, it does feel like it needs some tension so maybe I can lift my shoulders and inhale—like holding my breath for a moment. Shimmy. I’ll shimmy my shoulders down and let all that tension go. I’ll try it a couple times and figure out main directions to see if I could add any embellishments with hands or focus to make the big movement have more unexpected moments. I try it. There are infinite options for focus. I’ll wait until I teach the phrase to my dancers and see where their focus goes or wait until I see it on another body to see where the unexpected choice may be. That felt big in space, so I want something more pedestrian here. Don’t think; go fast. Button your collar, pull your tie, pull something on the ground to you with right foot and kick it behind you, roll your head like you’re just waking up and set your shoulders like a football player. Try to remember all that. I forgot the foot thing. Maybe I don’t need it. But I like it going to the lower body for a moment. It came after the tie. Collar-tie-foot-kickhead-shoulders. See someone to the right. Step back to face them straight to the side. Do that again but take a much bigger more defiant step. That felt challenging. I’m in control. Put your hand on their face. I throw my right hand forward, fingers splayed wide. Walk around the front of them. No, imagine they are standing in the same spot so your hand will stay in a space hold. That’s interesting. I think someone watching could really understand that something physical was there and I rotated around. Now back to into control. I would push that person back, overpowering them. I take two steps forward up the right diagonal with my hand still on their face. Then, I would push them away from me, I’m tired of their shit. I give a shove with my right hand but instead of following momentum through toward an imaginary person I’m going to jump back into a wide parallel second. Straight legs don’t feel right. I’ll plié and keep my hands at the ready, sort of like starting a fight. I usually like that challenging feeling. I’ll look at the audience like I want to make sure they are seeing I’m in control. I turn my head sharp but subtle over my left shoulder. And, I want the audience to know I’m in control of them too. I circle my hips back slow. Sexy. While looking at the audience over my shoulder. I like using the femininity as a power play. I can be sexy and make you aware of that and still be in control. Grab that imaginary person by their tie and pull them down to the floor on top of you. Like a fight use your right leg to pin their leg and flip over. Like wrestling. I flip over onto my stomach. That feels too passive. Try again. I’ll flip into plank position over the imaginary person. Can I move forward all four limbs at once? It looks a little silly. But I like it. I’ll do it twice. That’s better. I wonder what this would look like with a real person. As a duet.

STRUCTURES OF CONSCIOUSNESS The above descriptions are snapshots of artists at work as they conceive, develop, reject, and refine movement material. The accounts hint at the exploratory and generative processes of creative thinking, and the spatio-temporal complexities of embodied artmaking. What might such accounts tell us about consciousness? Perhaps dance-making is an observable model for consciousness, for how we experience the meaning of things.

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The phenomenological accounts from Jason, Rebecca and Erica reveal a complex, multi-modal form of artistic behavior. There is a constant interplay of sensing and feeling, thinking and imagining, trying and deciding. The choreographers problem solve, think metaphorically, and blend associations. They sense changes and receive impulses in body, thought, image and mood. They listen inwardly and outwardly. And, this multi-modal dialogue becomes movements organized in time and space, with specific qualitative choices (quicker here, lighter there). The descriptions in section two show that the experience of choreographing not only includes but is collaborating with the environment. Dualism has no place here. The dancemakers sense the world and respond with movement, which alters their immediate environment and brings about a change in sensations. This leads to and is their movement phrase. In this way, they experience their environment as an extension of their body and mind. They are feeling out their world as an extension of themselves. And, as they suss it all out, they create possibilities in self-organization—dynamically sculpting space, time, and force. In “Choreographic Cognition: The Time-Course and Phenomenology of Creating a Dance,” Katherine Stevens and co-authors look at features of the choreographic art through their geneplore model.33 The geneplore model frames creative cognition as alternating between generative and exploratory processes. This alternating reveals the choreographer’s ability to recognize and express in bodily form, “ideas, pulse, impulse, rhythm, beat, pattern, texture.”34 According to Stevens et al., this back and forth structures the work according to a particular task’s constraints. The accounts from Jason, Rebecca and Erica above resonate with this alternating process; however, they seem to experience exploring as generating. In other words, the sussing out is the creating, rather than a back and forth between the two. As mentioned in the preceding paragraph, the choreographers experience and sculpt the world as an extension of themselves. When the dance-makers confront anatomical and environmental constraints, they find that the limitations present inexhaustible possibilities of qualitative movement. Imagination combines with alreadylearned-skills and becomes haptic, tactile, rhythmic. Each decision made is a negation of all the other possible (and impossible) movements. It is as though the choreographer also experiences what she did not do. In addition to simultaneously exploring, reflecting and generating, the choreographer is also analyzing. In other words, the choreographers are interpreting their work even as they generate the work. The three phenomenological accounts above indicate a critic-inthe-choreographer that is always already involved in the dialogue. Some theorists, like Sheets-Johnstone, imagine the dancing person to be in a pre-reflective state. Such an analysis forgets the multilayered and speedy nature of consciousness. Meaning-making is complex, labyrinthine and quick. The dancer experiences not only the five senses, but also interoceptive senses such as balance, proprioception, and internal conditions like hunger. Sensing, action, emotion, thought, imagination, and inside/outside happen all-of-a-piece. There is no pre-reflective or pre-judicative awareness when composing movement. The experience of choreographing for Jason, Rebecca and Erica reveal artistic structuring of dance as a sort of self-organization. Their phenomenological accounts not only describe conscious-experience, but also uniquely shape it. Consciousness feels like a sensing-in-motion. Dancer and non-dancer alike take in what exists for them here and now. And, their movement shapes their experience. The dance artist, as she explores the dynamic world around her, arguably feels more keenly the ever-changing kinesthetically felt world of her own movement. Nevertheless, Joe on the street organizes his conscious

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experience by his movements as well. As he turns, a distant wall becomes blurred. He then senses the wall coming toward him as he walks forward, thereby bringing it into focus. He lifts his hand to scratch his head and is made newly aware of body parts in relation to other parts, in relation to the wall, and the ceiling and the floor and so on. Consciousness is his sussing out. This is the experience of self as verb. The choreographer is much the same, but her sussing out is more kinesthetically aware and aesthetically intentional. This brings to mind the idea of philosophy as a way of life, a way of self-shaping. This concept of the “art of living” emerges with Plato’s Socrates, and gets echoed by modern philosophers Michel de Montaigne, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault and others.35 You can actively sculpt your own mental life by creatively engaging and organizing experiences through reflection. Such a way of life might bring about an intentional and unifying self-awareness. Like choreographing, philosophy can be a process of self knowing/shaping. If your life’s project is to design your own overarching experienceorganization, then the experience of choreographing beautifully underlines this way of living. With her whole self, the choreographer senses being in a multi-modal dialogue with the world. And, she can self-shape her dialogue. In this way, a choreographer’s experience has the potential to eloquently reveal and shape how consciousness is experienced. Choreographing, therefore, is a potentially powerful area of study for the phenomenologist.

APPROACHES TO ARTISTIC CONTENT This final section explores how dance artists can use a phenomenological approach to creating artistic content. There are infinite entry points for composing dance: music, improv, mood/emotion, concept/theme, statement, image, story, character, gesture, shape, speed, space, topography, architecture/object, duration, rhythm, weight, body part, effort, direction and so on. Each of these starting points (or combination thereof) contains countless next steps. If the choreographer uses music as her point of entry, she might create to it or against it, for example. She might strive for a visual representation of the music, like choreographer Mark Morris.36 She might choose movements that juxtapose the music’s mood or rhythm. She might do any number of things. What if the entry point is simply, what-is-it-like? Can the phenomenological method be applied to choreographing dance or describe in movement how you experience your living body-here-now? Of course choreographers and movement researchers do this all the time. But, what about a codified phenomenological method of inquiry? In this approach the motive, impulse and cues for developing movement simply come from awareness—real-life, real-time experience. A choreographer can use this approach when composing movement on herself as well as on other dancers. Let us imagine the choreographer and the dancer are one and the same. First, the choreographer gives herself verbal cues to get in touch with what-it-is-like to be a mindful body here and now. The idea is to step into a mode of phenomenological inquiry. Second, after allowing a bit of time to settle in, the choreographer asks/answers one specific question about her perceptions. For example, How do my knees feel? Where do I feel discomfort? Am I sad or angry? Does the floor feel cold? Or, does the wall appear far away? Third, movement is then generated from the follow-up question: How might this sensation make me move? As the dialogue continues, the generated movements are strung together, creating a short “phrase” of dance. Editing, dismissing and refining movements can occur simultaneously.

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Deepen your awareness of being here, now. (pause) What sensation dominates? (answer) How might this sensation make you move? (movement) Different complexities occur when the choreography is on oneself versus on another body. How then does the experience of the creative act differ? For instance, let us imagine two dance-artists. C says to R: Are you feeling heavy? Off of R’s answer, C then suggests a move. R tries it. C, acting as sole choreographer, likes how R executed the original move, but wants a bit more amplitude. R then does the move again, but with the adjustment. C’s second question is then put to R, and the back and forth continues. So in this case, choreographer C is creating movement on dancer R from their dialogue about how dancer R experiences being right here at this very moment.

Dance-Artists Rebecca Whitehurst and Candice Schnurr The following is an excerpt from this chapter’s original demonstration. In this example, the two dance-artists are collaborating. R: As a starting point for choreographing a movement phrase on Candice, I will ask her several questions to put her in a mode of phenomenological inquiry. I will then take her answers as motive for movement. Ready? C: Yes. R: Stand in a neutral position, eyes open. Take your attention to this very moment. (pause) Take in the space around you . . . witness what you see, hear, and touch. (pause) Bring attention to your skin, and where you meet the space. Breathe deeply, adding inward awareness as well. (pause) Are you hungry? Do your feet hurt? Are you tired? C: Yes to all three! (laughter) R: Now let’s generate movement from this line of inquiry. Breathe deeply. Feel yourself standing here. (pause) What dominates your awareness right at this moment? C: The itchy texture of my shirt against my forearms. R: How might that make you move? C: Hmm . . . like this. (rapidly jiggles all over) Like I got ants in my pants. R: (laughing) Great. So add a stomp with the left foot. And it stops you cold. C: (rapidly jiggles all over, stomps and becomes still) R: Great. Breathe deeply. Feel yourself standing here. (pause) What dominates your awareness right at this moment? C: There’s a breeze of cold air against my right shoulder. Like from an air conditioning vent. R: How might that make you move? C: (long pause) R: What about . . . (brushes right cheek slowly across right shoulder) C: (imitates the move) Great. Let me put all that together. (rapidly jiggles all over, stomps left foot, becomes still, and then very slowly brushes her right cheek slowly across her right shoulder) R: Ya, and I liked how you naturally closed your eyes toward the end of the faceshoulder brush. There are endless options to investigate: choreographing specifically on another’s body, co-choreographing with a partner, choreographing together as an ensemble, as well

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as choreographing works of various length and duration. What would the account of an evening-length dance piece look like? Although this chapter offers but a glimpse into what-it-is-like to compose dance, it prospectively lays groundwork for analyzing more complex accounts. I sincerely hope more work is done on this subject. Philosophy can only benefit from more fully bringing the body into dialogue. Describing consciousness through the creative, mindful body as verb— through movement—is essential precisely because we are dynamic beings existing in relation to our dynamic environment. Dance, too, will benefit from engaging with the huge body of work that is Western philosophy. How might this affect how we teach choreography or, more broadly, approach arts education? How might this interdisciplinary work stir our communities outside of academia? For scholar and artist alike: investigate who we are with your full instrument. In summary, choreographing palpably manifests and organizes the many structures of conscious experience. The noun “choreography” intentionally has not been used in order to highlight the verb-like nature of experience and of the art form itself. This chapter began by laying out relevant theory from the living movement that is phenomenology. After two sections of investigating choreographers’ first person accounts, the chapter finished by exploring a phenomenological method for dance composition.

NOTES 1.

Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, “Phenomenological Approaches to Self-Consciousness,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta (https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/self-consciousness-phenomenological/).

2.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge, 2012), p. 32.

3.

Joseph J. Kockelmans, “Phenomenology,” The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, third edition, 2015), pp. 578–579.

4.

This chapter is the result of a 2016 lecture/demonstration I presented at Texas State’s conference “Engagement: Symposium of Philosophy and Dance.”

5.

Tim Crane and Susan Patterson, “Introduction,” History of the Mind–Body Problem (Routledge, 2000), pp. 1–11.

6.

Howard Robinson, “Dualism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta (URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/ dualism/).

7.

David W. Smith, “Phenomenology,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta (http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/ phenomenology/).

8.

For further reading see: Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology [first published 1931] (Oxford and New York: Routledge Classics, 2012); Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1962); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (Oxford: Routledge, 2014).

9.

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 245.

10. Ibid., 136. 11. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999), pp. XVII–XXXII. 12. Ibid., 113.

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13. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Phenomenology of Dance (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2015), p. xxiii. 14. Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), trans. J. B. Brough (New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), pp. 77–78. 15. Sheets-Johnstone, The Phenomenology of Dance, p. 17. 16. Ibid., 9. 17. Sheets-Johnstone, Primacy of Movement, pp. 121–126. 18. For further reading see Karen K. Bradley, Rudolf Laban (Routledge Performance Practitioners) (Oxford: Routledge, 2008). 19. Rudolf Laban, The Mastery of Movement (Hanover, Germany: MacDonlands and Evans, 1971), p. 13. 20. Sheets-Johnstone, The Phenomenology of Dance, pp. 30–33. 21. Ibid., 70. 22. Ibid., 75. 23. Ibid., 86. 24. Alva Noë, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (New York: Hill and Wang, 2015), pp. 10–11, 126. 25. Ibid., 287. 26. Ibid., 126. 27. Marlon Barrios Solano, “Dance as a Way of Knowing: Interview With Alva Noë” (Dancetechtv, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbWVERm5bsM). 28. Graham McFee, “In Remembrance of Dance Lost,” Choros International Dance Journal, 1 (Spring 2012), 1–13. 29. Matjaž Potrc, “Phenomenology of Dance” (Scribd.com, 2009, https://www.scribd.com/ document/330404647/Dance), pp. 1–8. 30. Ibid. 31. Noël Carroll and William P. Seeley, “Kinesthetic Understanding and Appreciation in Dance,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 71:2 (Spring 2013): 177–186. 32. Jason Phelps, Rebecca Whitehurst, and Erica Gionfriddo are dance-makers and interdisciplinary performers. All three have performed professionally across the globe for over a decade. Each artist has presented work at the Austin, Texas-based, cross-disciplinary festival, Fusebox. www.fuseboxfestival.com. 33. Catherine Stevens, Stephen Malloch, Shirley McKechnie, and Nicole Steven, “Choreographic Cognition: The Time-Course and Phenomenology of Creating a Dance,” Pragmatics & Cognition 11:2 (January 2003): 297–326. 34. Ibid. 35. For further reading see: Plato, Plato complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1997), pp. 17–36; Michel de Montaigne, Michel de Montaigne—The Complete Essays (London: Penguin Books, 2003); Ecce Homo by Friedrick Nietzsche, The Foucault Reader by Michel Foucault. Also, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault by Alexander Nehamas. 36. Further reading and media: www.markmorrisdancegroup.org.

CHAPTER 2.5

Discovering Collaboration in Dance RICHARD D. HALL

As a composer/musician, I believe collaboration is essential in the creation and progression of the arts. The romantic idea of a composer being “locked away, alone in their studio creating music” is outdated and impractical. Many of the modern composers that influenced me created some of their best works while collaborating with other artists: Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Diaghilev, John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Miles Davis and Bill Evans, Danny Elfman and Tim Burton, the Beatles and Sir George Martin. These musicians knew that working with other artists such as choreographers, filmmakers, producers, even fellow musicians, creatively brought out the best in them. The English musician/composer Brian Eno has developed a concept he calls “scenius.” He describes this as a collection, a “scene,” of “geniuses” who through community, collaboration, even friction, create great works that are synergetic, larger than the sum of their parts. I have employed this idea throughout all of my collaborative works, with directors, visual artists, other musicians, and especially dancers/choreographers. The exchange of ideas, the tension of personalities, the euphoria of creating; it has helped me grow as a musician, as an artist, and as a human being. Is that not the point of creating art? To help us all understand in some abstract way what it means to be human. I teach my music composition students the same way that I was taught; the music lesson is not really a student/teacher relationship; it is more about two colleagues, two musical equals having a collaborative relationship, a brainstorm session, a mutual exchange of ideas. As an artist and a teacher, this process has always led to successful work. Often, one individual has more experience and knowledge of the subject (this would be the “teacher”) while the other individual (the “student”) would, perhaps, have less. With less familiarity and proficiency, the student often has a “naïve” understanding of the process and product. However, this leads to fresher, often “riskier” ideas; a concept that is absolutely essential in the evolution of art. Collaboration cannot exist without relationships. In my experience with dance, I have encountered four types of relationships: Composer/Choreographer (such as Stravinsky and Diaghilev/Nijinsky), Musician/ Dancer (Cage and Cunningham), Musician/Musician (Davis and Evans), and Music/Dance. In this chapter, I will explore these relationships historically (what exactly was the relationship of these individuals, what was the relationship of their art?) and these relationships personally (experiences I have had throughout my work with dancers, choreographers, and students). It is through these relationships that we can create our artistic community, our commune of creative geniuses, our “scenius.” 176

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Many consider the Composer/Choreographer relationship to be the most important. Respected music composer Igor Stravinsky had many artistic relationships in the dance community, notably with Ballets Russes’ founder and impresario Sergi Diaghilev and dancer/choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky. Stravinsky fondly described Diaghilev as very “elegant, chic and distant.”1 During their twenty-year-long friendship, they traveled together, attended operas, and even visited nightclubs near the Neva River in Russia. They collaborated on several dance works, the most influential being the 1913 ballet Le Sacre du Printemps, also known as the Rite of Spring. Around 1911, Stravinsky began developing the Rite of Spring based on his dreams of pagan rituals and a sacrificial virgin dancing herself to death. With the ballet production supervised by Diaghilev and choreography by Nijinsky, the Rite of Spring pushed the boundaries of modern music, challenged the definition of modern ballet and even dared convention with its radical subject matter. During the “Dances of the Young Girls” section, the orchestra plays an E-flat dominant seven chord in first inversion over an F-flat major chord creating a fairly dissonant harmony, particularly for 1913. The chord is repeated with a steady, primitive rhythm containing various, syncopated accents. While composing the piece, Stravinsky played this chord for Diaghilev 59 times. Diaghilev asked Stravinsky if the figure would last very long and Stravinsky replied, “To the end my dear.” Diaghilev understood Stravinsky was serious, that Stravinsky was pushing artistic limits and this work would be the pinnacle of their creative relationship. With their mutual respect and admiration, the relationship between Stravinsky and Diaghilev helped advance the ballet art form into the modern age. An example of myself in the Composer/Choreographer relationship is my work with dancer/choreographer Kaysie Seitz Brown. I worked with Brown on two pieces, Under the Comanche Moon (2008) and Capricious Aplomb (2014). Both works required prerecorded music due to the performance issues, Comanche Moon in Cleveland, Ohio, and Capricious Aplomb in Edinburgh, Scotland. In both cases, Brown and I stayed in constant contact throughout the development process. Sometimes, I would present her with musical ideas, motifs, grooves; other times she would show me movements, body poses, and aesthetic ideas. During these times, the forms and ideas around the pieces began developing. Our first collaboration, Under the Comanche Moon, began as a simple meeting in a coffee shop. Brown had been invited to perform a new work at Case Western Reserve University, her alma mater, and asked if I would be interested in providing her music. For the first hour of the meeting, the project, our art, was not mentioned. We talked about teaching, our families, our interests. I had done works in which Brown was a dancer but had never gotten to know her. There was no set agenda or idea for the work. As the conversation went on, a general idea began to organically evolve; I had some Native America heritage in my family, particularly Comanche, and Brown had family from the area around Comanche, Texas. As the project progressed, a story developed: a young Native American boy goes on a vision quest to realize his place in the tribe. While on the quest, he encounters his animal guide, a mockingbird. Adding to the boy’s disappointment, the animal guide informs the child not about his great battles or conquests but that in the future, the boy will have a daughter and his role in the tribe is to be the best father he can. We then flash forward when the young boy is an adult and is reminiscing about his vision quest while his young daughter plays on the floor. As the young girl plays, the father realizes she is singing the same melodies that were sung by the mockingbird during his vision; his unborn daughter was his animal guide. The story helped develop several musical ideas (short, bird like motifs; long, dreamy drones with slight pitch manipulation;

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heavy, tribal percussion) and several dance movements (body shapes such as a bird or a mother cradling a child; primitive, tribal movements with quick, irregular steps). For Capricious Aplomb, Brown and I had already developed a strong relationship, working on several dance pieces together. She gave me a few guidelines: minimalistic, sectionalized, female voice but no text. Since I had just finished doing another dance piece with the same guidelines (minimalistic, sectionalized, female voice but no text), I decided to use piano with heavy delay, and a little girl’s voice, my daughter who was eight years old at the time. The voice would sing long sustaining melodies against the contrasting, thick echoes of quartal-quintal harmony on the piano. The work developed into an “exploration of the portrayal of stability in defiance of an inward struggle with feelings of instability.”2. For me, the piece became about a woman’s struggle to find her place in the world and the contrast between modern feminism and young female stereotypes. Brown emailed me on her thoughts about our collaborations. “The work feels more authentic when a composer and choreographer come together to create a new piece. Though the two works: dance or music can and should be able to stand on their own, a perfect marriage occurs when the two art forms come together in a magical, complementary way.” The Musician/Dancer relationship is also important. It is fairly similar to the Composer/ Choreographer collaboration except not as structured or formalized. The composer/ musician John Cage and dancer/choreographer Maurice Cunningham had a well-known Musician/Dancer relationship. After meeting in New York in the 1940s, their relationship produced dozens of works, notably The Seasons (1947) and Inlets (1978). In earlier collaborations, they would use a technique Cage called “rhythmic structure.” Cage and Cunningham would agree on form, sections, and “structure points.” In between those points, the musicians and dancers had free reign to improvise (“do what was needed” for the dance/music). Those structure points began to disappear in their later works; it was hard to tell where one section started and another ended. Cage believed through music and dance “a rhythm results which is not that of horses’ hoofs or other regular beats but which reminds us of a multiplicity of events in time and space-stars, for instance, in the sky or activities on earth viewed from the air.”3 Cage believed that music and dance did not have to say one thing; their meaning could be interpreted in many different ways by anyone. My experience as a musician working with a dancer has been very similar. Dancer Samantha Beasley and digital artist Topher Sipes formed ARTheism in 2011. ARTheism is a Texas-based, “live ‘dance-imation’ performance art experience which blurs the lines between performance, animation, conceptual, theater, visionary and fine art by combining real time, projected animation onto the canvas of a dancing body.”4 They have performed all across the southwest and held residencies at Peñasco in New Mexico, Tulsa Mayfest in Oklahoma, and Luminaria in San Antonio, Texas. I have performed with ARTheism around half a dozen times, often with little or no rehearsal. As with the Cage/Cunningham ideas, we were not concerned with a beat or meter or a steady rhythmic figure; the works were more about mood, feeling, phrasing, sensory experience. Beasley explored her body and her space while Sipes experimented with projections of abstract, digital, moving images superimposed onto Beasley. My job, my duty was to explore sound and all of its abstractions, imperfections, all of its possibilities. I would take a sound such as recording myself in real-time playing a musical phrase on a flute or looping the sound of traffic. Those sounds would be manipulated through a laptop using external MIDI controllers. The manipulations would include filtering, pitch shifting, time stretching, addition of delay and reverb; any audio tools I had to create musical sounds that would co-ordinate

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with Beasley’s movements and Sipe’s projections, or contrast against them. I would say that many of my works with ARTheism were some of my most artistically difficult performances. We all knew that there were risks and it was our mission to push the artistic boundaries of our work and take those risks. The most important aspect in the Musician/ Musician collaboration is the working relationship. Think of great rock and jazz bands, being able to read each other’s minds; play off each other’s moods. Sometimes the relationships are favorable and seamless; other times they can be filled with tension and animosity. Trumpeter Miles Davis and pianist Bill Evans collaborated on some of the most influential jazz albums ever recorded, including On Green Dolphin Street (1958) and Kind of Blue (1959). Both men had great respect for each other’s musicianship. Davis said Evans’ piano playing reminded him of “sparkling water.” Evans once commented how playing with Davis was such a great experience and called Davis “superhuman.” Ashley Kahn, in JazzTimes, referred to them as, “musical brothers separated by skin tone.”5 However, their relationship was not without some turmoil. Evans had a drug habit and often received animosity from many audiences for being a white musician in an all African-American jazz sextet. On several tracks, Evans can be heard playing somewhat timidly and reserved before opening up musically at the end of his solo sections. All of the musicians did not really know what they were playing until the recording session. Davis wanted that tension conveyed in the music. I direct a new music ensemble called the Texas State Mysterium for New Music Ensemble (Plate 3). We have accompanied dozens of dance performances, some were formally structured and notated, others have been free improvisations with very little rehearsal time. We often perform what we call “structured improvisations”; the choreography is somewhat set, the dance piece has a form we follow, mood, feel and instrumentation have been dictated and the ensemble has a general sense of melody and harmony. Yet, most of the music is improvised. When the ensemble is young, the musicians struggle with this type of performance. They are often not as experienced, not as musically proficient and not as “experimental” as the older members. We use improvisation exercises in our rehearsals: passing a note around in a circle, developing a motif, improvising in duets and trios. Since the group’s roster changes every semester, it can never really become solidified musically. The tension, the inexperience, the risk will always be there. As a music ensemble, it is our job to use these negatives to our advantage. In 2016, Mysterium provided a live score for the video dance piece dunes, filmed, edited and directed by Ana Baer. The film shows a woman in a white wedding dress dancing on several sand dunes with unusual editing, slow motion sections and shots superimposed on each other. The aesthetic is unusual and haunting yet serene and beautiful. The music starts with a long, dreamy, sound-wash drone accompanied by a lingering steady bass guitar pulse. Then, a piano would begin improvising with unconventional harmonies eventually getting more aggressive. This would transition into a fugal-like section utilizing a dissonant pitch-set and recapping with the bass pulse from the beginning. The musicians would react to each other through question and answer motifs, quotations, or deviations from the pitch set, someone at a performance might play an F-natural instead of an F-sharp. These outcomes, this predictable-unpredictability is what shaped the music for the work and for much of the ensemble’s sound aesthetic. Not knowing the outcome is an important part of the journey and we as artists learn to embrace our successes and more importantly, our socalled failures. As the painter Jackson Pollock put it, “I don’t use the accident because I deny the accident.”

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The Music/Dance relationship can be hard to define. Does the music exist for the dance? Or, as with the Rite of Spring, vise-versa? Or should the music exist independently of the dance (Cage and Cunningham)? The answer to all of these questions is yes. Sometimes when composing/performing music for dancers, the dance will dictate the form, tempo, style and mood of the music, very similar to film music. It is the composer’s job to have the necessary tools for bringing the dancer’s vision to life. The composer basically transcribes the dance into music. Or, the composer can create a completely different work that coexists with the dance. A piece of music that responds to the spontaneity of the audience, space, and experience (or inexperience) of the performers but stays in the temporal confines of the dance. It seems like all this would make the composing/performing process more difficult, but my experience has been the contrary. Embracing the limits of the performers and the structural parameters of the piece can create successful spontaneous works. As the writer Austin Kleon states, “. . . limitations mean freedom.”6 Discovering collaboration in music and dance involves relationships. These relationships can be formal and structured or they can be ambiguous, free, and unconventional. They can be sociable and respectable or tense and adverse. All of these qualities need to be embraced by the artists in order to produce a truly creative, spontaneous action that will only exist in that exact time and space, accepting all freedoms and limitations. That is one of the unique aesthetic attributes of music and dance. The spontaneous, ephemeral nature of the work, of the performance. Just as with other relationships such as work affiliation, friendship, and love, artists should embrace the spontaneity of being with other people and value every moment they spend creating the work. They will then realize that the collaborative relationships they form will make them a better dancer, musician, artist, and human being.

NOTES 1.

Janos Darvas, Igor Stravinsky: Composer. DVD. Directed by János Darvas. Munich: Metropolitan, 2001.

2.

Phillip John, “Three Austin Choreographers Cross the Pond,” Arts And Culture Texas, July 28, 2014, http://artsandculturetx.com/three-austin-choreographers-cross-the-pond/.

3.

John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), p. 93.

4.

Topher Sipes, ARTheism Homepage, http://tophersipes.com/Visual-Projection-ARTheism, 2016.

5.

Ashley Kahn, “Miles Davis and Bill Evans: Miles and Bill in Black & White,” JazzTimes (September, 2001). Available online at https://jazztimes.com/archives/miles-davis-and-billevans-miles-and-bill-in-black-white/ (accessed August 28, 2020).

6.

Austin Kleon, Steal Like An Artist (New York: Workman Publishing Company, Inc., 2012), p. 137.

CHAPTER 2.6

Falling Up: An Explication of a Dance KAYSIE SEITZ BROWN

I am a lover of process. I appreciate the product but find more joy in the process of a creation, perhaps because art reflects life and living is the ultimate process. I have learned how art reminds us of our humanity through expression portrayed within form. Life, like art, is full of surprises, or what I like to optimistically refer to as “happy accidents.” These accidents may change the pathway one is on. Though many may be clear in their destiny, their destination, many more are not. Either way obstacles or detours occur and provide new, possibly better, pathways. The same occurs in the artistic process, specifically in the solo I originally began to choreograph in the spring of 1999 and first performed in the spring of 2001, Falling Up. The final product is a result of the development of an original intention. The intention did not necessarily change but rather evolved or deepened as it was unavoidably inspired by human experience. What is most interesting to this choreographer/performer is: noting the placement of the work on Louis Kavouras’ Sliding Scale of First to Second Functionality inspired by F. S. C. Northrop’s and Erick Hawkins’ theory of Art in the First and Second Function, as well as Hawkins’ influence on the overall process; the re-experiencing of the artistic process at a much later date; and the viewer’s interpretation of the work, though the “correctness” of the response is not of concern.

THE SLIDING SCALE OF ART IN THE FIRST AND SECOND FUNCTION Erick Hawkins, the twentieth century modern dance pioneer and writer, frequently referred to the philosopher and scientist, F. S. C. Northrop’s finding that one must speak of art as two functions.1 In Northrop’s book, The Logic of the Sciences and Humanities, he originally defines two ways of knowing the world—as concepts of intuition and concepts of postulation. A concept of intuition denotes that a fact is immediately known without prior knowledge, it is the same for all observers, pure fact. A concept of postulation is the knowing of the fact based upon formulating, deducing, and determining the fact, inferred fact.2 Northrop later refined his thinking, specifically in terms of how to discuss art, in his book, The Meeting of East and West, stating that concepts of intuition are considered art in its first function and concepts of postulation are considered art in its second function.3 181

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Hawkins came to attribute this thinking to the creation of many of his own choreographic works.4 His interest in Northrop’s theory of art as two differing functions is portrayed throughout his writings, many of which are compiled in his book, The Body is a Clear Place and Other Statements on Dance. In the chapter, “Questions and Answers,” Hawkins refers to Northrop’s book, The Meeting of East and West, where Northrop explains his theory of two types of art. Art in its first function is to be defined as art which uses the immediately apprehended aesthetic materials of the differentiated aesthetic continuum to convey those materials and that continuum in and for themselves for their own sake. Art in its second function, on the other hand, by the use of theoretically controlled and defined techniques, uses the aesthetic materials and the aesthetic continuum not merely in and for themselves for their own sake, but also analogically and symbolically to convey the theoretic component of the nature of things of which they are the mere epistemic correlate or sign.5 Hawkins elucidates the concept of art in these two functions several times throughout his book, The Body is a Clear Place. He explains that the creation process begins with the elements of art such as colors, shapes, sounds, or in the case of dance: movement, space, time, and energy. The pure assemblage of these elements is considered art in the first function, art for the sake of art. Once viewed or heard, these elements are immediately apprehended. There is no meaning or metaphor. Art in the second function refers to the arrangement of the elements of art in such a way that communicates something. It is important to note that all art contains art in the first function. If it is utilized in a strong manner, then art in the second function can be considered successful in its portrayal of meaning or metaphor. Hawkins sometimes referred to the two functions of art as two polar extremes, saying that a work of art, “will be seen to be located either at the absolute pole of art in its first function, or at the absolute pole of art in its second function.”6 He then added the concept of a sliding scale between the two poles stating any work of art, “can slide to different positions on the scale between the two absolute poles.”7 Hawkins’ interest in the two functions of art inspired my teachers, my lessons, and ultimately my choreographic process, as well as many other artists’ ways of creating, viewing, and discussing art works. Louis Kavouras, principal dancer with the Erick Hawkins Dance Company, choreographer, dance educator, and dance philosopher, elaborated on this sliding scale theory through the development of the naming and defining of points specific to dance along the sliding scale between the two poles of functionality. This development of the sliding scale provides a clearer picture which portrays how art, specifically dance, cannot be defined solely as art in its first function or second function, but rather can fall somewhere in between. ●

Abstract dance—formal arrangement

●

Lyric dance—expresses an emotion

●

Metaphoric dance—inspired by a subject/reflects this

●

Character dance—portrays and develops a character

●

Scenario dance—illustrates a sequence of events or story

●

Dance drama—combines the metaphoric, character, lyric, abstract, and scenario to develop a drama

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THE ASSIGNMENT, THE ORIGINAL INTENSION, AND AN OVERALL LOOK AT THE PROCESS Between Fall 1998 and Spring 2001, I was a graduate student at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Cleveland, Ohio working on a Master of Fine Arts in dance performance, choreography, and pedagogy. During a Props & Costumes composition course, we were given the assignment to find a first function costume. I perused local thrift stores and eventually settled on a knee length orange dress that had four large squares on the front, arranged like four quadrants. The two squares that were in the upper right and lower left quadrant were purple and orange respectively and the other two were black. In my mind this qualified the dress as first function, because it did not portray meaning like a wedding dress or doctor’s scrubs might. Anyone seeing this dress would immediately intuit the colors of the dress, the four squares and their colors, the length, also that it was sleeveless. I put it on at home but was not quite satisfied. Once the costume was approved the next step would be to create a first function dance study, but I did not feel like I would be able to do much movement exploration in this dress. I grabbed scissors and proceeded to cut the bottom half of the dress into strips about one-inch wide and two-feet long. When I wore it in class for approval, my intimidating professor simply stared at me for what felt like an eternity. Nervously, I did a turn to show how the strips reacted, floating and twisting as I turned. Finally, he responded in his deep, booming voice, “I will approve this costume, under one condition—NO TURNING!” He felt turning was my “go to” and the most obvious movement to do in such a costume. And so the original intention was to explore a first function costume with the constraint of no turns, creating a dance study in the first function. As the exploration progressed, and I began to navigate the obstacles of specified directives, the work began to inform me and take me on a detour to somewhere I did not intend to delve. The piece had begun to be inspired, or maybe affected by personal events I was experiencing. The following class days I brought in movement vocabulary and dance phrases to share with the class and receive feedback from my professor. He did not know what I was going through in my personal life, but one day after showing some movement, he said to me, “Kaysie, you are going to a darker place—KEEP GOING THERE!” The formation of this work occurred during struggles with depression, dealing with a sense of betrayal, loneliness, homesickness, a broken heart, and feelings of low self-esteem as a dancer, a choreographer, a scholar, and a human being. It was never my original intention to create a work about these struggles but it seemed unavoidable that these feelings would express themselves through movements portraying conflict or endeavor. I recall times in the studio after working late into the night for two to three hours where I would suddenly find myself crying, even screaming. The movement evoked, pulled these emotions out of me. Though I did not look to the emotions to create the movement, this process became a therapeutic and cathartic experience. It was as if the piece began to craft itself, eventually telling me what it was about. It began to slide along the scale of first to second functionality, away from the “dance-for-the-sake-of-dance” or “abstract” mark and bypassing “lyric” (and though it evoked emotion from me, it didn’t and still does not express emotion inherently), and finally landing on “metaphor.” The evolution of this work and its final placement at the metaphoric dance point on Kavouras’ scale was not immediately apparent to me until I began to infer what my professor meant when he said,

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“you are going to a darker place,” and I began to allow the movement to reflect the darkness within me.

ZOOMING IN ON THE INITIAL PROCESS Step 1: Explore the First Function Costume Exploration of the dress, sans turning, mainly focused on manipulating the strips which generated movement such as a swaying bent leg that weaved in and out of the strips while balancing on the other leg; tilting my torso in different directions, and watching how the strips dangled down away from my body; balancing and promenading on one leg, while bending at the waist, and attempting to keep the torso and other leg parallel to the floor, again observing how the strips dangled, reaching for the floor; or balancing high in relevé (the action when a dancer rises up and is balancing on the ball or balls of her foot or feet) arms and one leg outreaching, chest lifted, strips dripping around my body. But to truly explore the knee length costume, I had to get low. As a result of movement exploration in the low level, movement vocabulary materialized such as various ways to slide, spiral, twist, reach through the strips that were now allowed to brush the floor, trail behind me, or wrap around my rolling or spiraling body; rocking, falling, contracting, lengthening; low balances on two feet and one arm; weight on one arm while the other arm reached high, and doing a low run, circling the weight-bearing arm; wide legs, deeply bent allowing for the strips to hang in between, and mimicking the hanging strips with the soft wave of the arms; low crawls or sideways creeping type movements that at times felt primitive in nature. “Kaysie, you are going to a darker place—KEEP GOING THERE!”

Step 2: Listen During the low-level movement generation, a comfort and even a type of affection for the floor began to develop. There was no fighting gravity there. I felt safe as if I had a companion. The attempt to rise up from the floor began to administer a feeling of solitariness, vulnerability and risk, similar to the sensation of falling. Gravity did not want to let go. “Stay low,” it whispered, “you are safe here, you can never get hurt here.” Metaphor was beginning to emerge. Risk in life is often necessary and in art it provides a sense of excitement. As the solo developed I not only wanted to portray risk first functionally, but metaphorically as well. Since I had also created movement vocabulary that was up on the higher level, including a variety of ways to move through balances, I felt the need to include this movement vocabulary in my collection of dance phrases. Once my assortment of low- and high-level movements and phrases had been created, collected, and shared, much like a document filled with words, thoughts, and phrases waiting to be assembled into a well-structured essay, it was finally time to find music to assist in this next step.

Step 3: Find Music Someone not familiar with dance-making might be surprised to learn that music did not come first or even second in this process. It is important to understand how choosing music first might sometimes cripple the creative process of choreography. Many beginner choreographers typically first find the music and thus let the music inform the process. I should tread lightly on this subject though. In the film by Barbara Willis Sweete, titled

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Falling Down Stairs, the seasoned choreographer Mark Morris states, “the music always comes first.”8 Contrary to this statement, Erick Hawkins felt that depending on the music to inspire choreography not only dishonors, even insults composers of the past, but also stifles the creation process leading one to rely on the music like a crutch. In the hierarchy of fine arts, if one always relies on the music to help generate choreography, the significance of the choreography may be eclipsed by the music, even leading to “that silly but common term, ‘interpretive dance.’ ”9 When asked how he felt about the relation of music to modern dance in the chapter “Questions and Answers,” Hawkins stated, “movement had to find itself right out of the choreographer’s very innards without hearing the sound, yes the actual sound of music.”10 Just like life though, there are no absolutes in the artistic process. Hawkins’ repertoire does contain rare works which were inspired by contemporary composers who had caught his attention. According to Alan M. Kriegsman of the Washington Post, “Hawkins could make beautifully poetic abstractions such as the euphoric Classic Kite Tails, to music by David Diamond.”11 Nevertheless, Hawkins wrote that he loved music so much that his preference was to work in collaboration with composers such as Lou Harrison and his eventual wife, Lucia Dlugoszewski, thus making the creation process a partnership rather than a hierarchy.12 I had grown to appreciate this belief in the collaborative process between music composition and dance-making, and though CWRU shares portions of their campus with the Cleveland Institute of Music, I was not able to find a budding composer to work with me on this piece. In 1999 and 2000, iTunes, YouTube, Spotify, etc. did not exist. Our local library was my best resource. We could check out as many CDs as we wanted, and I happily sat in my Shaker Heights apartment and listened to CDs for hours. One particular work by the contemporary composer Lee Hyla ultimately caught my attention. His music had a haunting quality to it and portrayed a struggle seemingly parallel to mine. The piece, which begins with a low drone and an added high violin which then provides texture throughout, felt as if it was composed specifically for my work. The violin sounds as if it is struggling to reach its full height, and never quite seems to succeed. In truth, my memory of the actual marrying of the movement with the music is muddy. Again, it is as if the work created itself, like magic or an otherworldly gift. My study/short solo was complete and ready for the final showing of the semester. The study received positive feedback and I was encouraged to continue my work with it. I agreed the piece was not finished. Lee Hyla’s accompaniment only lasted three minutes and thirty-seven seconds. Nothing else on his CD must have struck me because I recall returning to my search. I then discovered George Crumb’s Black Angels during a class assignment in another course. According to the New York Times this work was meant to echo the dark mood of the Vietnam War era and most of Crumb’s music on this album is made up of screeching electronic violins, very difficult to listen to.13 But there is one track on the CD, “God-Music,” that as the title implies, provides a sense of hope. The final piece to this choreographic puzzle had been revealed. The music composition uniquely begins with the bowing of a series of different size goblets filled with water providing what sounds to me like the humming of angels. The bowing continues as a solo cello layers on top. Another layered, haunting work which provided a sublime companion for the Hyla piece and rendered a continued struggle that my choreography was able to work with as if it was meant to be.

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Step 4: Finalizing the Costume The original costume began to fray and tear due to many hours spent in the dance studio, enduring countless hours of twisting, dragging, dangling, crumpling, and brushing. A decision was made to craft a new costume for professional performance and lighting purposes. I chose to also slightly lengthen the dress and to make it one solid color which was a deep orange, earth tone. Though the lengthening of the costume posed a bit of a challenge, I welcomed it. It added to the theme of overcoming obstacles. While I was sad to pack away the original dress, I cherished its contribution to the process and lovingly set it aside. The addition of the updated costume provided a sense of completion to the work, ready to be debuted to the Cleveland community as a part of my thesis dance concert, Metamorphosis.

THE PRODUCT If one was to see the dance purely in the first function, they would immediately intuit the following: the dancer begins in a low position on the floor. The dance continues with low movements that stretch, contract, roll, reach, and creep as if there is a strong magnetic pull that the dancer cannot at first escape. She sways with the drone of the music, a didgeridoo?, a clarinet? She lengthens with the rise of the strings, a violin? She slowly rises to a low balance on one leg, but quickly lowers again. She tenderly creeps low to different places in space, taking wide, low stances, her dress drapes between her legs, her arms sway, reflecting the draping strips. She attempts a jump. Gravity wins. She balances low on two arched feet and one hand, arching her back, the other arm reaches upward. She appears to attempt to rise, balance, travel, but once again slowly lowers and seems to finish with a defeated fall as the music fades. But in the quiet there is movement and a subtle light change occurs. New music begins and the dancer begins to stretch her body long like a mermaid on the shore, and then contracts with the notes of the new sound, the bowing of wine goblets. The dancer turns her ear tenderly to the floor, gently lifts and lowers her hand, pushes, curls and rolls until she is suddenly high off the floor, balancing on one leg and swaying the other in and out of the dangling strips as the music pitches higher and higher until the dancer and the music both fall. The dancer once again slides, contracts, rolls, creeps, and sways. She pushes off one leg finding another balance on the other leg, the first leg again weaves back and forth. This time the arms reflect the swing of the leg. The music quietly begins to fade as the dancer finds stillness in a balance like a tilted, broken X. Arms reaching and heart lifted, the dancer rises to the ball of her foot, balancing as the lights fade to black.

CAN A DANCE OR ANY WORK OF ART TRULY BE PURELY FIRST FUNCTION? What does the viewer infer when seeing this work? It depends on the viewer. I cannot speak for the viewer. I can speak for the choreographer and the dancer. Paul Taylor is noted as saying that dancers are not like tubes of paint, they have character and personality. As an explorer of space, time, and energy, I am affected by movement as a creator and a doer. As stated earlier, I developed a type of affection for the comfort the floor provided during the process. My professor recognized a struggle within myself and encouraged me

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to fight through it. Though I never intended to expose my feelings of inadequacy and anxiety, this is what the costume and movement exploration evoked. The movement low to the floor can be described as gentle, loving, reverent. The attempts to rise can be described as small moments of reconnaissance, endeavors, and failures. I do not think a viewer would infer, “now that is a woman suffering from a broken, betrayed heart,” or “that woman is homesick,” or “that woman is depressed.” I do however imagine the viewer would infer a struggle and possibly empathize from the viewer’s own experience with struggle. The viewer may even unconsciously, quietly root for the dancer as she portrays her fight to rise against her own struggle. Or maybe the viewer does not infer. Possibly, the viewer only intuits and simply appreciates the use of levels, tempo, dynamics, balances, music, and lights. Or the viewer is frustrated because they feel the dance must be about something though it appears abstract, causing a confusion. My hope is the viewer experiences the work as I try to experience others’ artistic expressions, view the work as a moving poem. Let it wash over one’s senses, allow the kinesthetic response to sway you in your seat, allow your subconscious mind to unravel the mystery as it wishes. Enjoy your own aesthetic experience of the work.

RETURNING TO A DANCE WORK FIFTEEN YEARS LATER I returned to this work about a year ago a very different person from when I originally created and eventually performed it fifteen years prior. Since I originally choreographed this work the world has changed. The towers fell six months after I debuted Falling Up. My life’s journey within the past fifteen years includes; moving to New York (which was extremely challenging after 9/11) where I waited tables, bartended, choreographed, danced, studied, and taught; moving back to my home state of Texas and making Austin my permanent home; getting a part-time job teaching at a nearby university, supplementing my income by side-teaching-jobs; getting married; moving several times; climbing the career ladder; having a daughter; losing friends to cancer too young; traveling internationally; watching friends get married; watching friends divorce; watching friends have babies; watching friends struggle to have babies; watching friends settle in careers; watching friends change careers; developing friendships with former students; receiving words of love from friends of family; learning of deep family secrets; losing family and friends. I am not the same person but Life’s obstacles and detours continue to form my pathways. When I first decided to return to this work, I was not sure it should be me who performed it. I weighed twenty pounds more. I had developed degenerative disks in my lumbar spine in my thirties. Though I had matured artistically and emotionally, many new questions surfaced: should I still be performing at this age? Is my work valuable? Am I on the right path? Am I a good mother, wife, daughter, sister, aunt, niece, granddaughter, teacher, friend, choreographer, dancer? The beautiful thing about dance, especially modern dance, is that you do not necessarily have to be the same when you reencounter the work. Its ephemeral nature allows for the artwork to change not only from performance to performance, but from decade to decade. As I began to return to the work last year, there was a brief time that I considered expanding the work into a trio and even collaborating with a videographer to include video projection, which is where dance seems to be heading as we get deeper into the twenty-first century—the innovative utilization of technology. This would have been a

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new and exciting challenge, but the muses did not seem to agree. Inspiration was blocked and as I worked alone in the studio, I felt the piece needed to remain true to its essence and remain a solo, portraying a solo figure alone in her struggles. Fortunately, not much of the movement had to be changed. Upon returning to the work, I realized I was never happy with the opening and was able to adjust. The first time I performed this work, the piece opened with me kneeling. But when I returned to this work last summer, I modified the opening shape to a curled position, somewhat resembling the shape of a fetus, which made much more sense to me and provided something more I felt I could work with. Once again, this opportunity to modify and develop a work supports the beneficial aspect of the impermanence of dance, unlike permanent creations such as architecture or sculpture which cannot easily be modified once the creation has been completed. This was the case for the ending as well which originally ended with a balance on one leg as the lights faded. Again, when returning to the work, I felt this ending was too stagnant and explored the idea of exiting the space into the darkness instead, with the thought of portraying a continuation of the journey. Besides having more flesh on my bones, I also had to work with the restrictions that an aging body requires. Flexibility is slightly less and personally I do not feel that my technique is as strong as it once was. I no longer have the luxury of intense, daily training. One might say, Life gets in the way, but Life is the way. This all simply helped to subtly reshape the piece. As stated, this is the benefit of dance in that it is an ephemeral work, compared to other works of art essentially committed to the final product. Dance has the ability to allow for constant change and adaptability. After reworking the solo, I performed the piece at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with Dance-Forms Productions, August 2016 and at the Texas State University Philosophy Symposium, Engagement Philosophy & Dance in September 2016. Revisiting and performing this work caused me to develop a deeper kind of endearment for it. I loved performing it. It was frightening waiting in the wings each performance, but I was able to use this fear. Age and life experience were advantages in this way. This fed my dancing. Was not this exactly what the piece was about? Relinquishing comfort and safety, facing fear and vulnerability and attempting risk? This opportunity to revisit an old work, now from the perspective of having navigated Life’s obstacles and lessons of past failures, filled me with gratitude and appreciation for the fortitude to face apprehension and celebrate accomplishment. The 26-year-old Texan who walked into that fluorescently lit thrift shop one cold, gray, Cleveland day, feeling misplaced, alone and unsure in search of the perfect first function costume no longer exists. But I am still traveling on this journey, still fighting against the call of safety, powering through uncertainty and potential failures and rejection. I am older, but wiser in my body and mind. Each time I walked onto the stage in the darkness and curled my body into a low tight ball in preparation to expose my struggles, I allowed these feelings and emotions to wash over me and expressed them through my art. Ultimately, I do not know what the viewers’ immediate response of the work was, and I am okay with this. I believe art is a place where there is rarely right or wrong and it is okay if you connect or do not connect, understand or even dislike it. This is the nature of art and the beauty of its subjectivisms. Art is experienced in the moment by art-maker and viewer, and dance is possibly the most immediately felt as it relies on this moment by moment, living, breathing encounter. Art is a large part of what makes us human and it is our unique response to art that makes us an individual. In the words of Erick Hawkins, “The aim of art is to further that process of living one’s life to the fullest.

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It can be dance, or painting, or making music, or weaving a basket, or weaving a rug, or building a house—all further life.”14

NOTES 1.

Erick Hawkins, The Body is a Clear Place and Other Statements on Dance (Trenton, NJ: Princeton Book Company, 1992), p. 18.

2.

F. S. C. Northrop, The Logic of Sciences and Humanities (London: MacMillan Co., 1947), pp. 82–83.

3.

F. S. C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West (London: MacMillan Co., 1947), p. 306.

4.

Hawkins, The Body is a Clear Place, pp. 52–53, 140–141.

5.

Ibid., 52.

6.

Hawkins, The Body is a Clear Place, p. 53.

7.

Ibid., 53.

8.

Bach Cello Suite #3: Falling Down Stairs (1997) [Film], Dir. Barbara Willis Sweete (Canada: Rhombus Media).

9.

Hawkins, The Body is a Clear Place, p. 47.

10. Ibid., 47. 11. A. M. Kriegsman, “Erick Hawkins, The Modern Man,” Washington Post, November 25, 1994. Available online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1994/11/25/ erick-hawkins-the-modern-man/c57f2547-26ce-4e61-9cff-93d717442859/?utm_term=. af29722f4d08 (accessed June 11, 2017). 12. Hawkins, The Body is a Clear Place, p. 78. 13. S. Smith, “Modern Works Tell of Timeless Emotions,” New York Times, December 7, 2008. Available online: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/08/arts/music/08kron.html (accessed June 11, 2017). 14. Hawkins, The Body is a Clear Place, p. 141.

CHAPTER 2.7

Early Floating in the Here and Now: The Radically Empirical Immediate Dance Poetry of Erick Hawkins and Lucia Dlugoszewski 1

LOUIS KAVOURAS

Early Floating is a twenty-two-minute formalist work, choreographed by Erick Hawkins, with music by Lucia Dlugoszewski and modernist sculpture by longtime Hawkins collaborator Ralph Dorazio. For Hawkins, moving from the psychologically dramatic representational work of Martha Graham into the world of abstraction and avant-garde modernism was a vast transition. The early collaborations between Erick Hawkins and Lucia Dlugoszewski began a lifelong artistic collaboration to create a dance theater that was uniquely embodied—steeped in the mutual alliance of dance and music, temporally intertwined in an immediate and sensuous kinetic realm. Hawkins and Dlugoszewski developed a new time-based relationship between movement and sound, new theories of abstraction that moved their works away from representation and psychological realism, and a body of collaborative works and theories that continue to inform contemporary dancers today.

BEFORE THE HERE AND NOW OF EARLY FLOATING In 1930, a 21-year-old Erick Hawkins saw a performance of German dancers and choreographers Harold Kreutzberg and Yvonne Gorgi, initiating his fascination with dance and performance. After graduating from Harvard in 1932 with a degree in Greek Classics, Hawkins studied with Kreutzberg in 1933 then became the first student to enroll in George Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, before becoming a company member of Lincoln Kirstein’s Ballet Caravan in 1934.2 Erick Hawkins had an early interest in choreography, and it was not long before he began his choreographic career with Showpiece (1937) for Kirstein’s Ballet Caravan.3 Hawkins left Ballet Caravan in 1938. His study of motion took him to the Martha Graham School, where he became Graham’s principal male dance partner, collaborator, choreographer, and eventual husband.4 190

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After his departure from the Martha Graham Dance Company, the Graham Aesthetic and the Graham Dance Technique in 1950, Erick Hawkins met experimental composer Lucia Dlugoszewski in 1952.5 Dlugoszewski was a composition student of Edgar Varèse and piano student of Grete Sultan.6 At the urging of Sultan, Hawkins and Dlugoszewski began collaborating. After some initial collaborations in 1952, the two artists underwent a five-year period of exploration of motion and sound. During this time, Hawkins and Dlugoszewski did not produce works, but instead experimented. It was during this time period that the Erick Hawkins Dance Technique and choreographic aesthetic were developed. Hawkins developed theories of choreography that were not purely ordered within a structured metering of time. Instead, he explored every movement with the goal of finding the most appropriate timed-life of the movement. He coupled this with an incredible sense of flow, a commitment to motion that began and initiated at the anatomical center of the body in a natural way, a quick almost cat-like contraction and de-contraction (release) of muscles that did not lead to habitual patterns of muscular tension, with the goal to only use movement that respected and used the body in a sound manner that did not lead to injury. Hawkins looked to anatomy, kinesiology and idiokinetics during this movement investigation, which led to the development of his modern dance technique. He made statements about the body like: “The dancing body is a clear place,” and “Tight muscles cannot feel. Only effortless, free-flowing muscles are sensuous.”7 Katherine Duke, artistic director of the Erick Hawkins Dance Company since 2000, began studying Hawkins in 1983 and when talking about Hawkins’ technique says: “Hawkins’ movement allows me to deeply explore immediacy and sensation bringing the dancer to the ‘here and now’ because of the movement’s relationship with intensely structured time.”8 From 1952 to 1957, while Hawkins explored motion and technique, Dlugoszewski explored sound, particularly the timbre of a sound. Timbre was a quality that fascinated Dlugoszewski for it was an essential quale that pointed to the fundamental experience of the sound, i.e., a wood instrument and a brass instrument could play the exact same pitch, rhythm and dynamic, yet we perceive the character of each sound as completely different and divergent. For Dlugoszewski this pure experience of sound was more immediate and engaging than melody. Dlugoszewski speaks of this in a 1957 article: It is interesting to note the increasing use of timbre as musical material, and of structures of timbre for dance music. Western musical development has always suspected timbre of lacking sophisticated possibilities of structure. However, timbre lends itself more to the archaic or what-is-ness approach because its very complex, unfixable, almost unnotable essence precludes its use for any reason but its own existence.9 Hawkins’ and Dlugoszewski’s artistic process occurs when movement and sound find their most appropriate coupling of time structure and embodied sensuousness. Hawkins’ and Dlugoszewski’s collaboration defined a new definition of dance—the nexus of motion with sound and time bringing the emergence of a third aesthetic phenomenon, the dance, or as Hawkins and Dlugoszewski felt, the poetry. There are several experiments in music for the dance that attempt to create what seems the most beautiful relationship between the two, and that is the phenomenon of two pure theatres existing independently side-by-side with an instant-by-instant awareness of one another.10 This method, where the dance did not simply follow the music, created a propensity for mixed meters in the music and dance—multiple meters, multiple time signatures, multiple

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tempos, and multiple groupings of pulses and subdivisions. Hawkins wrote of his quest for this unique dance in a 1957 essay that was later published in his book The Body is a Clear Place: “Each live thing in itself has its own level of poetry but when two live things are juxtaposed a third level of poetry exists between them. Creating a new theatre art live enough to admit all the levels of poetry is still everyone’s unknown country.”11 Hawkins and Dlugoszewski asserted that this new dance required new and unique music from living composers—a music of our time, music of the Now—as well as unique and new scenic designs and costumes that emerged from collaborations with visual artists, sculptors and designers. Most importantly, the immediacy of this dance/music phenomenon is dependent on live music—the live dancer creates the motion at the exact same moment that the live musician creates the sound. Hawkins spoke of his relationship with music in a 1967 essay called “My Love Affair with Music”: I have been called a “loner,” a rugged individualist, and a fool because I am one of the very few choreographers and dancers who never has and never will use records or tapes for a live dance performance. What could be my reasons? I suppose I love music too much. I love dance too much. I love people too much to subject any of them to the predictable deadening insensitivity and unconsciousness of a machine.12 The premiere of Here and Now with Watchers (November 1957), a sixty-minute work, featured Erick Hawkins and Nancy Lang, and an original score produced by Lucia Dlugoszewski,13 revealed the results of this five-year collaboration. It was at a performance of Here and Now with Watchers that Hawkins and Dlugoszewski met Yale philosopher, F. S. C. Northrop. This meeting was perhaps one of the most significant encounters for Hawkins and Dlugoszewski. Northrop’s theories would become the armature for much of their artistic work. Northrop advocated a three-pronged approach to creation that was radical, empirical, and immediate and would go on to underpin the essence of the Hawkins/Dlugoszewski aesthetic. Northrop when speaking of works of art that employed significance used three erudite words: radical, empirical immediacy. Significant art is radical, possessing boldness—a rebellious and revolutionary quality. Empirical suggests a direct appeal to the senses. A significant work of art is a celebration—an exploitation of and sometimes an assault on the senses. Immediacy refers to the commanding presence of a well-constructed work of art.14 As circumstances would have it, one month before Hawkins and Dlugoszewki premiered their time/motion/sound explorations the Russian government launched the satellite Sputnik (October 1957), which orbited the Earth forcing the United States into a race toward manned space exploration and forcing a national focus and perhaps obsession with space. Hawkins and Dlugoszewski felt the pull of this attention, both globally and specifically in movement vocabulary and sound vocabularies, yet they stood solid and resolute with their laser-like focus on the temporal elements of the dance. In a March 1959 article in Dance Magazine, Hawkins articulated this manifesto with a statement about time and immediacy: There’s a great deal of talk about space and time in everything these days, a kind of getting on Einstein’s bandwagon, and the words are used in sloppy, indistinguishable ways— sometimes meaning psychological, sometimes logical, sometimes physicomathematical, and sometimes, historical space-time.15

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Hawkins’ orientation was temporal. He did not get caught up in the dance world’s obsession with the dance element of space. Instead Hawkins kept the focus of his movement theater on time and its immediate properties. When the immediacy and pure existence of movement is the prime concern, time is the much more serious problem of dance than space. Time is also a much richer material of dance than space. Actually, if time is sensed intuitively instant by instant, the space is created automatically point-by-point. If movement logic creates groupings beyond the instant, immediacy of sensing time is lost, and concepts and emotions take over. Naturally, the body and the whole world for that matter exist in time, but human consciousness often does not. It is involved with meanings. This is what we call psychological time. The challenge in creating the awareness of immediacy is to somehow bring human consciousness to the clear instant of time, to magically achieve now and now and now and now and now.16 Hawkins and Dlugoszewski continued their choreographic explorations with 8 CLEAR PLACES (1960) and Sudden Snake Bird (1960). In 1961 they premiered a more uniquely abstract work Early Floating, in Portland, Oregon.

F. S. C. NORTHROP AND THE COURAGE TO BE ABSTRACT Mark Franko writes in Martha Graham in Love and War, that Fascism, psychoanalytic modernism, dramaturgy, mythology and psychology influenced Graham’s choreographic work. Hawkins himself choreographed in the Graham style, creating many of his solos in the major Graham works but never putting his name on them. Hawkins in the 1940s choreographed representational works that were steeped in Americana themes: Liberty Tree (1940), Yankee Bluebritches (1940), Trickster Coyote (1941), Yankee Doodle and Free Stater—Kansas (1943), and John Brown (1945).17 Choreographing in the Graham style left an imprint on Hawkins’ choreographic output, and Hawkins was probably as influenced by Graham’s choreographic work as Graham was influenced by Hawkins. Prior to Early Floating, Hawkins’ choreographies somehow maintained a representational, mythic, and metaphorical reference. Even Here and Now with Watchers (1957), which on the surface appears to be abstract, is a series of love duets and solos between a male and female dancer, with programed and titled sections that conjure images and metaphors like INSIDE WONDER OR WHALES, vulnerable male is, invisible house of female, MULTIPLICITY (or flowers), and (CLOWN IS EVERYONE’S ENDING). Dlugoszewski was closely connected to the New York School of abstract expressionist painters, who funded her first musical concert of composition in New York City in 1958 at the Five Spot Café.18 She was particularly close to Robert Motherwell who spoke of the abstract expressionist works as being “emotional” without being representational: It is perfectly possible in my work to see say, windows, or to see a wave breaking in the sea, or to see a teddy bear if you want, but that is not the real subject matter. You don’t have to paint a figure in order to express human feelings. The game is not what things look like. The game is organizing states of feeling, and states of feeling become questions of light, color, weight, solidity, airiness, lyricism . . . whatever.19 With Early Floating, Hawkins and Dlugoszewski appear to have deviated from even small levels of metaphorical representation, instead moving towards the immediate

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relationship with the materials of the artform in a purely intuitive experiential way, showcasing the materials in and of themselves, and for their own sake. In a 1959 artist statement, Hawkins writes: “I would like to see the pure fact occur in the art of dance and the pure fact is the rebellious rediscovery of the innocence of the materials.”20 To explain this sensed phenomenon, Hawkins and Dlugoszewski again looked to Yale philosopher and epistemologist F. S. C. Northrop who had attended the premiere of Here and Now with Watchers (1957), in particular Northrop’s distinguishing theory of concepts of intuition and concepts of postulation. In The Logic of the Sciences and Humanities, Northrop defines two ways of knowing the world: concepts of intuition (a sensing way) and concepts of postulation (a thinking way).21 Concepts of intuition pointed to knowledge that was gathered and sensed immediately—pure facts. Concepts of postulation pointed to knowledge that was deduced—inferred facts. In The Meeting of East and West, Northop expands this thinking and articulates two categories of art, Art in the First Function and Art in the Second Function. Hawkins adopted these theories and they became a centerpiece of philosophical structure for the entire body of his choreography. Art in its first function is to be defined as art, which uses the immediately apprehended aesthetic materials of the differentiated aesthetic continuum to convey those materials and that continuum in and for themselves for their own sake. Art in its second function, on the other hand, by the use of theoretically controlled and defined techniques, uses the aesthetic materials and the aesthetic continuum not merely in and for themselves for their own sake, but also analogically and symbolically to convey the theoretic component of the nature of things of which they are the mere epistemic correlate or sign.22 Hawkins, using theories of art in its first function, identified artworks that were purely formalist in nature that asked the viewer to experience the movement and the music through concepts of intuition. Dance works derived using theories of art in its second function became representational and therefore required concepts of postulation to deductively understand the “aboutness” of the work. Hawkins, in response to Northrop’s theories, deduced that a beautiful work in the second function required beauty in the first function. This coincided with Clement Greenburg’s theories that the art of art was in its formalist properties.23 Northrop’s theories empowered Hawkins and Dlugoszewski and gave them courage to work in a purely formalist, first functional way. They felt the first function was vital to create the “Now”, Zen-like immediate and violently clear properties of their newly formed dance theater. Hawkins himself, in a 1962 essay in response to questions posed by the editor of Wagner College Magazine, states that: The most beautiful dance is Dance that is violent clarity, effortless, lets itself happen, loves the pure fact of movement, is aware of the music instant-by-instant, knows movement and music put together without a common pulse is two people talking at you at the same time, reveals the dance and the dancer, uses virtuosity only in the service of poetry, is a metaphor of existence, and can be a way of saying NOW.24 Hawkins expressed these theories and encouraged audiences to see his work in this first functional way in program notes: Like all poetry, the poetry of the dances exists in and for its own sake like the poetry of the flight of a butterfly or the falling of an apple blossom, or a flash of lightning. But

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the poetry of the dance can also evoke in each watcher many poetic associations and feelings. In this way, the watcher is not passive, but too creates the dance as it happens in time. There are no symbols except what each watcher wishes to see, as he might see meaning in anything in the present outer world around him. So too, the meaning of the music is in the sound itself. Like the dance movement, the music is composed to be heard instant-by-instant. The score for grand piano is structured in a rich, complex in regard to rhythm, scales, architecture, and timbre.25 Early Floating is the first and perhaps one of the most first functional of the Hawkins/ Dlugoszewski works. When the sensually immediate motion collides with the unmelodic timbres created inside Dlugoszewski’s timbre piano this ontological merging creates the poetic theater that Hawkins and Dlugoszewski desired. The music for Early Floating is for “timbre piano” which uses five different complex sonorities or “curtains of timbre,” based on consonant or “white” intervals and employs unusual bowing and muting techniques on the strings by means of wood, felt, metal, glass, wire, and plastic bows. The score is five different coupled stationary sonorities and is concerned with tenderness and surprise. I hung five different curtains of timbre in different parts of the ear. The glass, felt, wood, metal, cloth, and “hair” bows produce inside the strings of the piano an exciting orchestral hugeness strangely understood in the inner ear of the mind.26 In 1960 Northop himself noticed the resonance of Hawkins/Dlugoszewski work and his philosophical theories: The dance and music of Erick Hawkins and Lucia Dlugoszewski will be appreciated also as the much less muscularly artificial and more immediately natural and beautiful standard of artistic measurement in the domain of the aesthetically immediate which it is.27

REVIVING EARLY FLOATING The dance Early Floating was revived by the Erick Hawkins Dance Company in 1989. Katherine Duke who was in the company remembers the events of that period: In 1988 Erick was diagnosed with Prostate Cancer (which was kept a secret until his death). Also, in 1988, Erick suffered a stroke. This perhaps inspired a looking back by Erick and Lucia at their early works together. Lucia wanted to revive and redo the music for 8 Clear Places (1960). The company was successful in reviving Cantilever (1963) [Plate 4] and expanding it into the extended Cantilever II (1988). Then Erick wanted to revive Early Floating in 1989. I was cast as one of the women who would perform the female solo in the 1989 performance season.28 At the time, Lucia Dlugoszewski was able to play the score for the work. Dlugoszewski was so familiar with this work that even though she had a tattered 1961 handwritten score, she would often play it and was also able to recreate passages and notes that had disappeared from the tattered edges of the score, all the time saying that she should take time when she was less busy to rewrite and preserve the score. Hawkins died in 1994. Lucia Dlugoszewski became artistic director of the company and after a period of reviving and restaging Hawkins’ works, Dlugoszewski began creating her own choreography in 1998. This was probably because of the need and desire to

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continue to produce works that were created and presented and about the “now.” The company continued to perform Early Floating and revive the work for performances in 1997, 1999, 2004, 2012, and 2013. Dlugoszewski died unexpectedly in 2000, so the work was performed with recorded music in 2004, 2012, and 2013. When faced with the decision of what Hawkins repertory to showcase for the Dance and Engagement Philosophy and Dance conference at Texas State University in 2016, Artistic Director Katherine Duke felt the two works that would best showcase the artistic contributions of Hawkins and Dlugoszewski viewed through the lens of philosophy were the highly first functional Hawkins’ Early Floating (1961) and Dlugoszewki’s final work, Motherwell Amor (2000). Katherine Duke articulates this clearly: Early Floating is such a strong example of the Hawkins/Dlugoszewski Legacy—Erick’s choreography and Lucia’s timbre piano both happening simultaneously, embodying and unfolding a high art experience for the audience or watcher. Motherwell Amor was the last work of the Erick/Lucia legacy. Both Early Floating (1961) and Motherwell Amor (2000) are first function abstract dances about love. The music, set design, and movement as a first function work should allow each audience member to envision their own rather detailed and particular interpretation. That can work in two ways: 1) for people who enjoy getting lost in just the elements of the performance or 2) for people who look and “find” meaning in experiencing the elements of the performance. The freedom to interpret from such intense use of artistic elements can be used for the discovery and illumination of what something is and for no other reason. Philosophers understand and appreciate this freedom.29 This was also the appropriate time to reconstruct the Early Floating score and clearly showcase the radically empirical immediate30 relationship of Hawkins’ motion and Dlugoszewski’s sound. For this performance of Early Floating, Duke decided to cast a female dancer, Erin Parsch, in one of the male roles. When asked about the choice, Duke says: There is a certain androgyny in the first function leotard works. Erick envisioned this as a male role, but this change was in keeping with the experimental and current nature of the Hawkins/Dlugoszewski works.31 Erin Parsch describes her performance in the following terms: I felt the third male role to be empowering to dance as a female allowing a masculine strength to come through which normally is not allowed in a female role. This role reversal felt appropriate in these modern times where gender is often blurred. I feel if you awaken a piece of great art it must be recreated in a way that is reflective of modern times, but still keeps the character of the past. In Erick and Lucia’s works the dance and music are constantly being found and discovered in a new way and differently. If the artistry and the craft are there the result will always have the true and pure nature of the original. It is in this formula that the genius of Lucia’s music and Erick’s movement live on.32 Dlugoszewski’s Motherwell Amor (2000 [Plate 5]) is a cacophony of partnering— bodies collide, similar to the way the paint on a Motherwell canvas transforms the reality of the two-dimensional canvas. Motherwell’s and Dlugoszewski’s forms unapologetically clash together, negotiating the geographies of space and expressive form. In Motherwell

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Amor we have Lucia’s choreography and Lucia’s sound, yet it is all still expressed through Erick’s radically immediate technique. Dlugoszewski’s Motherwell Amor continues to resonate with contemporary audiences. It won the Austin Critics Association award for best Short Choreography of 2016.

RECONSTRUCTING DLUGOSZEWSKI’S SCORE FOR EARLY FLOATING Dlugoszewski’s original score for Early Floating was lost at the time of her death in 2000. It was last seen with Lucia at the 1999 performances at the 91st Street Playhouse. What does exist are recordings on Minidisc and MP3 of Dlugoszewki performing the score as well as videotapes of the work. Dlugoszewski also created scores of counts for the dancers that included many musical markings, tempos, and sound instructions. The abundance of these resources as well as the input from Duke and dancers who have danced the work made it possible for Dov Manski to reconstruct a score for Early Floating. Dov Manski describes this process: To reconstruct the score for Early Floating, I used two recordings of Lucy performing the piece, as well as a copy of her dance counts. One recording was an audio only version and the other was a video of the dance and music. Unfortunately there was no score of Early Floating, so I needed to create my own musical score. Lucy’s dance counts were in fact extremely helpful. They contained notes about musical cues for dancers, odd rhythmic subdivisions, such as groups of 5 or 7 per beat, and details on how to achieve some of the timbre piano sounds. Most importantly however, her counts gave me a basic structure to start from. I decided that it would be most effective to add my own musical notation to her dance counts. This way I would have access to both the musical information and the dance information at any given time. Having decided on this structure I turned to comparing the two recordings of Early Floating. I first looked for any similarities between the two recordings. Any melody, rhythm, or sound that occurred in both versions I viewed as being an integral part of her composition and I added these to my score. Where things became interesting was when the two recordings differed. The audio only version is quite a bit sparser and less ‘prepared’ while the video version is dense and full of timbre piano sounds. Textures vary between the recordings. One recording might have high-key percussive sounds, while the other has low-key metallic sounds. I decided to place emphasis on the video version for several reasons. Most importantly I needed to see the dance in relation to the music. If I really wanted to understand Lucy’s composition and be able to perform it accurately, I needed to understand how the music affected the dance and vice versa I also needed to see the character of the dance movements and how that was mimicked or contrasted musically. In comparing the two recordings I began to interpret the score as gestural, meaning that specific notes, chords, or clusters were not as important as the emotion or texture of particular sections. For example, a section of low percussive quarter notes could easily be a Bb octave or an E octave. As long as the octaves were percussive and in a low register, it didn’t matter as much which particular notes were used. Thinking

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about the composition in a gestural way became the basis of how I reconstructed the score. Because I approached the score in a more abstract way, I needed to come up with a unique system to notate specific sections. I used a number system to notate which register of the piano a certain sound occurred. I split the piano into 4 sections, based on the metallic bars that divide the strings inside the piano. Therefore the lowest piano register was 1, and the highest register was 4. I also used ideas common in graphic scores to visually represent the different types of shapes and sounds in the music. Whether the sound was a wooden hit, or a string glissando, each one had its own unique image. Finally I noted which type of prop I would need to use to create a particular sound. In both of Lucy’s recordings many different prepared or timbre piano techniques were used to create the soundscape of the composition. Some information was available in dancer counts, but mostly I was left in the dark about how to prepare the piano in order to achieve these sounds. I did a lot of research on what techniques other prepared piano pieces utilized. I also did a lot of experimenting with different props to find sounds that matched those in the score. In the end I settled on a variety of props, including screws, a mallet, a knife, yarn, glass jar, brushes and combs. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention two dancers who greatly helped me learn this piece. Katherine Duke and Louis Kavouras both danced with the company while Lucy was composing and performing the pieces. They both had much insight into specific sound cues and timing of different musical sections in relation to the choreography. I tried to recreate this composition as closely to Lucy’s versions as possible. However, given the limited information, my own musical voice and style helped me to shape the piece. My own experience with freely improvised music and contemporary classical music, influenced my performance greatly. I found the gestural language that Lucy composed with to be similar sonically to improvisers such as Cecil Taylor, Muhal Richard Abrams, and Dave Burrell. This style of playing comes naturally to me and no doubt is present when I perform Early Floating. This piece has similarities to compositions by John Cage as well. John Cage and Lucy were contemporaries and no doubt influenced each other. I feel Lucy stands separate in her dedication to beautiful music and sound. Meaning her ability to take sounds, which individually might not be pleasing, and use them to create a piece of music, which becomes captivating, significant and therefore, beautiful.33

HAWKINS NOW The modern dance world has changed since Hawkins first choreographed Early Floating. Particularly different are changes in the dance training for the dancer who performs this work. When Early Floating was created it was comprised of dancers who spent all their energy working with a singularity of focus within Hawkins’ dance technique. The typical dancer in this work discovered Hawkins’ dance training and then spent the remainder of their movement lives working to strip away other styles, other influences and focusing on delving deeper and deeper to embody the Hawkins principles of movement and flow. Some might see style in the uniformity that was created; others might simply see purity of effortless form following function. It is nearly impossible to find dancers today who only focus on Hawkins’ technique and have stripped their practice of other styles and genres. In the September 2016 performance of Early Floating two dancers are perhaps purely

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Hawkins trained and have danced and studied when Hawkins and Dlugoszewski were creating their works. The other dancers trained in and bring other influences. Katherine Duke addresses the differences in the cast: For this performance the cast was made up of four quite different levels of experience in the Hawkins tradition. One cast member has danced with the company for 30 years, while another member of the cast has been involved with the study of Hawkins technique for over 30 years and a member of the company since 1996. The third cast member has been in the company since 2000 and has studied closely with the current artistic director while never knowing Erick or Lucia. And finally, the last cast member is a sophomore at a university with a strong emphasis in Hawkins technique in his curriculum. This cast brought a solid foundation in Hawkins, yet also connected to the diverse world of contemporary dance. I think that everything changes with time. My intention has been to stick as close to Erick and Lucia’s principles of technique, composition, and performance as possible. Fortunately, both of them were very definite and clear about their beliefs and their work. I know I am not Erick and I am not Lucia but through all that they have taught me, I feel confident to carry on their vision. As artists, one has to be true to themselves. Being true to oneself and being an artist was a principle and a gift that both Erick and Lucia imparted to their students.34 Texas State University has a long tradition of the Hawkins Movement Technique. LeAnne Smith, a long-time director of this dance program, speaks of the value of Hawkins’ technique for today’s dancer: I see contemporary dancers who, on stage, perform beautifully, yet in class I observe them struggling to truly assimilate and integrate sustainable movement skills and perform with clarity and presence. It appears that in many instances a dancer’s technique is built on a precarious foundation rather than grounded in a substantive and methodical movement practice and clear approach to time. The beauty of dancing in an embodied manner, and consciously applying Erick Hawkins’ movement principles is that dancers can inherently build a strong and knowledgeable movement technique and at the same time develop a dynamic and immediate presence.35 Hawkins’ Principal Dancer Kristina Berger is on the faculty of the Joan Palladino School of Dance at Dean College. Berger feels: Hawkins presents a global immediacy, crystal clarity, and unapologetic vulnerability that is antithetical to this new generation of cell-phone zombie culture. It takes years of training to gain the precision and fluidity of a true Hawkins vision of a Hawkins dancer, but none-the-less, even brief interactions with Hawkins technique, astonish, change, and inform today’s eclectic dance youth.36 Hawkins’ and Dlugoszewski’s works continue to survive, inspire and inform. For the current post-structural, post-colonial eclectic world of anything goes and everything belongs, perhaps now more than ever, glimpses into the modernistic metagrand narrative and clear world of Hawkins and Dlugoszewski can provide today’s multi-stylistic crosspollinated diverse dancer with a deep significance and deep clarity. This resonance is apparent in more than just the dance world. Because of their strong connection to sculpture and the visual components of the theatrical craft, Hawkins’ and Dlugoszewski’s aesthetic works and collaborations overlapped into the visual art world. Dakin Hart,

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Senior Curator of the Isamu Noguchi Museum, speaks of the importance of the works of this era of modern art: When Isamu Noguchi (1904–88) represented the United States at the 1986 Venice Biennale, he placed a 10-foot tall working white marble slide at the center of the pavilion, filled the exhibition with Akari lanterns, suspended a section of Tetrahelix strut in the main interior rotunda, and titled the whole thing What is Sculpture? In a lifetime dedicated to expanding what he saw as the artificially restricted horizons of his field, no experience gave him more opportunity to challenge and rethink the orthodoxy of objects, or better tools for filling them with a sense of motivation, than his work as a set designer for dance. Martha Graham was his principal collaborator of course, but not the only one. His set for Erick Hawkins’ (hopefully soon to be revived) Stephen Acrobat (1947), to cite just one other essential example, demonstrates just what making sculpture to be used meant to him. An archetypal, Edenic even, nod to the world as playground, its jungle gym and “climbing” tree epitomize his determination to make socially charged environments of discovery.37 The youngest dancer in the September 2016 performance, Zack Frongillo, a native of Littleton, Colorado, has trained in Ballet, Modern Dance, Jazz and Tap Dance. Frongillo is currently a sophomore Bachelor of Fine Arts candidate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he studies Erick Hawkins’ modern dance technique. Frongillo finds deep meaning in Hawkins’ work: “Early Floating is one of the most interesting pieces I’ve ever had the honor of dancing. With an extensive background in tap, rhythm has always been a vital part of understanding movement and music and how they work together. However, Early Floating takes rhythm to a new extreme. I’ve never danced a dance as rhythmically accurate, rhythmically unusual, and rhythmically precise as Early Floating. The way the music is connected to the movement is something that will continue to inform my ability to understand meter and rhythm in future works.38 The Erick Hawkins Dance Foundation and Erick Hawkins Dance Company continue to exist and produce work today. All of Erick Hawkins’ and Lucia Dlugoszewski’s papers, journals, choreographic notebooks, and scores are in the special collections section of the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, where they will be cataloged and available to inform future choreographers, dancers, composers, and musicians. Hawkins’ and Dlugoszewski’s sculptures, costumes, and scenic designs are housed at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Hawkins West Institute, whose mission is to preserve the Hawkins technique and sustain the work of Erick Hawkins and Lucia Dlugoszewski. The contributions of these two artists are significant and clear. Libby Smigel, Dance Curator of the Music Division at the Library of Congress, when asked about the Hawkins/ Dlugoszewski Collection, says: The Erick Hawkins and Lucia Dlugoszewski Papers at the Library of Congress provide documentation of the praxis of their collaborative method: the theoretical and aesthetic underpinning of their approach as well as documentation of creative process as evidenced by correspondence and essays, choreographic notes, Lucia’s innovative approach to sound scores, and audio and video recordings. Along with the active work of Hawkins technique teachers and former dancers, this collection of seminal materials will help to restore Hawkins to his rightful place amongst modern dance’s leaders.39

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There are times when choreographed motion and sound come together in a sensuously and immediate way that creates the poetic theater that Hawkins and Dlugoszewski desired. These types of performances are rare, like the conjunction of planets in the night sky—a time when the worlds line up and special relationships come into view. Such was the case with the performance of Early Floating at the Dance and Engagement Philosophy and Dance conference at Texas State University in 2016. This was a performance when the Hawkins/Dlugoszewski vision of movement, sound, theater and the immediacy of time came into a deep and perhaps profound focus. Author and journalist John Langone speaks of this level of potency and the significance of our experience of time: Of all the scientific intangibles that shape our lives, time is arguably the most elusive— and the most powerful. As formless as space and being, those other unseen realms of abstraction on which we are helplessly dependent, it nonetheless affects all material things . . . . Without it we could barely measure change, for most things that change on this Earth and in the universe happen in time and are governed by it. Stealthy, imperceptible, time makes its presence known by transforming our sense of it into sensation. For though we cannot see, touch, or hear time, we observe the regularity of what appears to be its passage in our seasons, in the orchestrated shift from dawn to dusk to dark, and in the aging of our bodies. We feel its pulsing beat in our hearts and hear its silence released in the precise ticking of a clock.40 Through their shared artistic process, Hawkins and Dlugoszewski sensed the potency and potential of time and created a body of works on a temporally based theater of sensation. We are lucky that these works still exist. Erick and Lucia are now gone, their radically empirical immediacy has ended, yet the power and immediacy of their works and methods continue to find resonance and timbre in the bodies of contemporary dancers who have often never even heard of these two rebellious artists.

NOTES 1.

F. S. C. Northrop, Man Nature and God (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962), pp. 189–190.

2.

David Sears, Erick Hawkins Biography. David Sears’ Papers. Jerome Robbins Dance Collection. New York Public Library. Erick Hawkins Folder #2. 1983.

3.

Renata Celichowska, The Erick Hawkins Modern Dance Technique (New Jersey, Princeton Book Company, 2000), p. 149.

4.

Mark Franko, Martha Graham in Love and War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 9.

5.

David Sears, Erick Hawkins Biography.

6.

Nicolas Slonimsky, editor emeritus and Laura Kuhn, series editor, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians (New York: Schirmer Books, 2001), s.v. “Dlugoszewski, Lucia.”

7.

Erick Hawkins, The Body is a Clear Place (New Jersey: Princeton Book Company, 1992), pp. 64–69.

8.

Katherine Duke in email interview conducted by Louis A. Kavouras, February 17, 2017.

9.

Lucia Dlugoszewski, “Notes on New Music For Dance,” Dance Observer (November 1957), 133–135.

10. Ibid. 11. Erick Hawkins, The Body is a Clear Place, pp. 8–9.

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12. Ibid., 78. 13. Celichowska, The Erick Hawkins Dance Technique, p. 151. 14. Michael Lugering, The Expressive Actor: Integrated Voice, Movement and Acting Training (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), p. 234. 15. Lillian Olinsey, “The Uncommunicating Choreography of Erick Hawkins,” Dance Magazine (March 1959), 44–45. 16. Ibid. 17. Mark Franko, Martha Graham in Love and War, pp. 6 and 82. 18. Lucia Dlugoszewski Bio, 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Project at Playhouse 91 program, New York City, 2000. 19. Robert Motherwell and The New York School: Storming The Citadel, Directed by Catherine Tatge (1991; West Long Branch, NJ: Kultur, 2009), DVD. 20. Erick Hawkins, The Body is a Clear Space, p. xi. 21. F. S. C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and Humanities (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1948), p. 82. 22. F. S. C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1947), p. 306. 23. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961). 24. “Questions and Answers, for Wagner College Magazine,” republished in Hawkins, The Body is a Clear Place, pp. 38–39. 25. Erick Hawkins, Unidentified Program Note, 1962, Erick Hawkins/Lucia Dlugoszewski Collection, Library of Congress. 26. Program note, February 25 and 26, 1966, Hunter (College) Playhouse, New York. 27. F. S. C. Northrop, Philosophical Anthropology and Practical Politics (London: The Macmillan Company, 1960), pp. 312–313. 28. Katherine Duke in email interview conducted by Louis A. Kavouras, February 17, 2017. 29. Ibid. 30. F. S. C. Northrop, Man Nature and God, pp. 189–190. 31. Katherine Duke in email interview conducted by Louis A. Kavouras, February 17, 2017. 32. Erin Parsch in email interview conducted by Louis A. Kavouras, February 3, 2017. 33. Dov Manski in email interview conducted by Louis A. Kavouras, February 1, 2017. 34. Katherine Duke in email interview conducted by Louis A. Kavouras, February 17, 2017. 35. LeAnne Smith in email interview conducted by Louis A. Kavouras, February 18, 2017. 36. Kristina Berger in email interview conducted by Louis A. Kavouras, February 6, 2017. 37. Dakin Hart in email interview conducted by Louis A. Kavouras, February 22, 2017. 38. Zachary Frongillo in email interview conducted by Louis A. Kavouras, February 10, 2017. 39. Libby Smigel in email interview conducted by Louis A. Kavouras, February 22, 2017. 40. J. Langone, The Mystery of Time: Humanity’s Quest for Order and Measure. (Washington DC: National Geographic Press, 2000), p. 7.

CHAPTER 2.8

Je danse; donc, je suis DAVID LEVENTHAL

The words arrived, out of the blue, in an email from one of my dance students. And in normal circumstances, I would have accepted them as the typical hyperbole of preprofessional dancers who have spent their early years bravely constructing an identity forged from equal parts fantasy and ambition. The idea of dancers living and breathing dance, of dancing to live, was not a novel concept, nor was it the first time Descartes’ original proposition—Cogito ergo sum—had been adapted to capture a dancer’s focused (or myopic) world view. What made this credo revolutionary and provocative was that it came from a sixtyyear-old bank examiner living with Parkinson’s disease. Manny Torrijos had been participating in Dance for PD (Parkinson’s disease) classes at the Mark Morris Dance Center for two years, and the Cartesian adaptation came to him in a dream. “The message to me means that as a person living with this movement disorder, I will not allow PD to define my being,” Torrijos wrote in his email.1 As significant as it seemed to his own sense of self, Torrijos’ statement is not an anomalous personal epiphany. Over the years, other Parkinson’s students of mine have offered remarkably similar reflections. In an interview leading up to her performing debut in 2012, Carol Enseki, another student from our Dance for PD group in Brooklyn, noted: “Performing dance is going to be terrifying. I want us to be good. I don’t want us just to be good for people with Parkinson’s. I feel like I can legitimately say I am a dancer. I want to be a better dancer, but I’m a dancer.”2 In David Iverson’s 2014 film Capturing Grace, Reggie Butts observes “When the dance class is going on there are no patients. They’re dancers.” When I started teaching dance to people with Parkinson’s in 2001, I was firmly committed to the goal of creating an artistic, non-clinical experience that would engage people living with a movement disorder in an art form in which most of them had never participated. I had hoped that the classes would be enjoyable, uplifting, and instructive— providing participants with techniques and approaches that might help them recapture a sense of physical and expressive confidence during class and perhaps, even, outside the studio. But I had never considered or expected that the experience of dancing might transform how people felt about themselves and reconfigure their identities, nor how the class might help individuals embrace their artistic prowess as both a mark of achievement (“I have gotten this far”) and a personal challenge (“now that I’m a dancer, I have a lot of work to do to be a better one”). The emerging trope of people with Parkinson’s experiencing identify transformation through dance deserves investigation, not only because it suggests a hopeful paradigm for the ability of participatory creative arts experiences to foster a sense of embodied ownership in participants, but because it suggests a potent way for dance to challenge the 203

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fixed, medicalized model of chronic, degenerative diseases. Looking further, it is helpful to explore which elements of the dance experience seem to encourage people with Parkinson’s—who become labeled by medical professionals and those around them as patients, victims, or sufferers—to rethink their fundamental identities. How do people who have never danced before gravitate so willingly to a new identity as a dancer? Is the embrace of the title “dancer” merely a temporary, hopeful escape fantasy for people living with a movement disorder, or a deeper recalibration of self—and does it matter? What can we as “professional” dancers and teaching artists do to foster this transformation?3 This chapter starts to explore the phenomenon of the identity shift—from patient to dancer—that happens among people with Parkinson’s disease who participate in specialized Dance for PD classes around the world. We will investigate the significance of teaching approach, architectural setting, and choreographic content as mechanisms that catalyze this identity transformation. We will argue that practical and artistic elements converge to help Parkinson’s dancers successfully negotiate a path from a disordered physical narrative toward reordered and reimagined selfhood.

CREATING A COMMUNITY OF LEARNING Parkinson’s is a progressive, neurodegenerative disorder that primarily but not exclusively affects people over 60. The condition is marked by a combination of motor and nonmotor symptoms that include tremor, rigidity, slowness of movement, freezing of gait, postural instability as well as depression, apathy, anxiety, facial masking and social isolation (which often results from mobility challenges or embarrassment resulting from other symptoms).4 Each person experiences Parkinson’s in a unique way. But I did not know any of this when, as a young professional dancer with the Mark Morris Dance Group (MMDG), I started teaching Dance for PD classes at the dance group’s new purpose-built center in Brooklyn in 2001. Indeed, when Olie Westheimer, founder and executive director of the Brooklyn Parkinson Group, approached the company with the idea of a class, she was adamant that we operate in a purely artistic realm. Westheimer’s hunch was that the experience of dancing would serve as a doubleedged sword: it would provide an enjoyable, social environment for people who spent innumerable hours absorbed in the details and challenges of their condition; and it would harness the strategies and knowledge that professional dancers had accrued over many years of training in the service of the sort of dynamic, fluid and rhythmic movement often absent in the Parkinsonian body. But the edges of the sword would only be effective if the class was not considered—by instructors or participants—as therapy. In other words, no one in the room was attempting to solve a problem or address a symptom head-on. We were there to focus on learning the art and craft of dancing. Ken Bartlett, the long-serving Creative Director for the UK-based Foundation of Community Dance (rebranded People Dancing in 2014), notes the value of this approach: What is important to me is people engaging directly with the form, struggling with it to make meaning, and purposefully skilling themselves to say something about themselves, the human condition and the world they live in. For me what is central is giving full access to people to engage in and struggle seriously with the sensuous aesthetic fulfillment of the art making process—the love of material, the principles of structure, the pleasure of translating abstract concepts into concrete form—in short making art and being artists.5

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Dance for PD’s emphasis on the artistic experience means that participants interact with teaching and administrative staff differently than they might do in medical or therapeutic environments, where they are implicitly and explicitly reminded of their challenges, problems, and limitations. The focus on creative exploration and art-making, in all its variety, also cuts against the potential challenges of pairing professional dancers with novices living with a movement disorder. On the surface, it might appear that such comingling would reveal detrimental gaps of ability and layers of discomfort on both sides, as people with Parkinson’s could be forced to measure themselves against worldclass performing artists. As it turns out, we witness the opposite effect. In the Dance for PD class, there is no wrong way to dance. Rather, movement vocabulary from ballet, modern, tap, folk dance, ballroom, and Mark Morris company repertory—along with opportunities for creative improvisation and co-creation—are presented for exploration and interpretation by the group. In her compelling analysis of the aesthetics of the dance for Parkinson’s experience, researcher Sara Houston asserts: In the instance of dance for people with Parkinson’s, the focus is on moving, creativity, artistic interpretation, and social interaction, not on disease and disability. With this focus in mind, one may appreciate participants’ unique ways of moving without resorting to pity or charity, and participants may value dancing for the shared experience of moving with beauty, not just for its potential for exercise.6 To the dance instructors, Parkinson’s-inflected movement qualities like tremor, cogwheel-rigidity, or shuffling are simply additional components of a diverse choreographic ecosystem to be witnessed non-judgmentally, and to be incorporated and, on occasion, transformed. The negative connotations of tremor become recast as a shimmy or vibration; freezing gets reconfigured as controlled stillness, a physical comma or ellipses. But there is more at play. In the Dance for PD class, the traditional hierarchical structures of dance instruction are intentionally ceded to a more collaborative model. Each class starts in a circle, with the teaching artists occupying positions within it equal to the participants. Though information extends at first from instructor to students, the Dance for PD approach and curriculum were constructed through a grassroots model in which founding teachers, with support from Westheimer, fostered talk-back sessions with participants after each class for the first year or so. Talk-back sessions, program evaluation forms, and informal conversations eased by the close connections that form between teaching artists and Parkinson’s dancers, still play a critical role in establishing appropriate content and teaching approaches. The class content, and the way that content changes over time, reflects this collaborative approach. As the Parkinson’s participants gain confidence, they also begin to take more ownership in the creative process, developing and sustaining their own improvisations while guiding and initiating new students in the process of discovery and exploration. The group’s creative work blurs identities between professionals and community dancers and calls into question who is teaching and who is learning, who is leading and who is following. Another constituency plays a vital role in this community of well-being: care partners. Family members, partners, spouses and professional aides often accompany the dancers with Parkinson’s, providing support, encouragement, and a sense of solidarity. From the beginning, the Dance for PD program has officially welcomed care partners, encouraging them to participate fully in the class rather than simply serving as “enablers.” In the

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process, the class often shifts the dynamic—and established identities—of partners, from care giver and patient to a dancing couple. One Michigan-based care partner reports: Participating in the class has contributed to a better relationship between us. Karen has looked forward to the classes each week, and although she finds them challenging, it gives her something to be engaged in. As a care partner, I have gradually felt more and more at home, even though at first dance was outside my comfort zone. I have felt happier, healthier, more outgoing and more relaxed as a result of the class. I’ve even seen a change in my attitude and the way I treat Karen. I tended to be uptight and often impatient with her because of some of the physical and mental problems she exhibited. It has been a struggle for me as I have had to assume more and more responsibility (now even helping with her dressing, etc.) while at the same time watching her decline. I would attend even if Karen did not.7 The fundamental structure of this learning community reinforces two key elements of identity shift. The first relates to the relationship between participants and teachers—we are all sitting in the same circle, we are dancing next to each other on the floor, we are following each other in a mirroring improvisation. We are all dancers—dancers with different needs, abilities, and experiences—but all dancers nonetheless. The second relates to the relationship among participants—we have Parkinson’s or care for someone who does, they say, but this is not a place to talk about illness or struggle. Our participants tell us they are in class because they want to learn to dance, to be creative, and to enjoy the sensation of moving to music. Because they are here, in this space, participating in this activity together, they are dancers. The class’ emphasis on aesthetics—the movement qualities and imagery that inform how one moves, and the ideas or stories one is trying to convey through movement— reinforces that self-categorization. In a Dance for PD setting, I saturate my running verbal narrative with imagery, qualitative instructions and onomatopoetic verbalizations (bam, whoosh, shhh) that help indicate the quality of movement I would like the dancers to manifest or that accent the music in a particular way. In an exercise class, this sort of cuing is absent—the focus is on the mechanics of the movement. In leading a warm up in the Dance for PD class, however, I treat the participants as I would any other dancer, bathing them in language that helps them understand what is motivating their movement, and how they can control and alter the texture of their movement (not unlike a good director or dramaturg helps actors understand the context and nuance of their spoken lines). Although we are always ready to go more slowly, or to break down material for people who have difficulty learning sequences of movement—Parkinson’s can affect executive function and short-term memory—every moment of class is focused on art-making. The focus on artistry, and on repertory, makes Dance for PD very much like a language immersion group, a conversation in which one tries to avoid one’s native tongue in an effort to be surrounded and wrapped up in a less familiar vocabulary and syntax. No Parkinson’s is spoken here—only dance. If something is not clear, we change the imagery, demonstrate the quality with a different part of our bodies, or go slower. We do not preface our explanations with a symptomatic context but always stay within the world of dance, a world in which our participants are treated as dancers. Perhaps nothing reinforces the focus on aesthetics more than the integration of choreographic repertory in the Dance for PD class. In New York, our focus is on Mark Morris repertory, and classes have included movement phrases and ideas from such Morris masterpieces as L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, The Hard Nut, Dido and

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Aeneas, and Gloria. But many other companies offering Dance for Parkinson’s classes also foster this level of artistic accessibility, including English National Ballet, Queensland Ballet, and Scottish Ballet. By inviting people with Parkinson’s into the room as artists, and by working with them on the same choreography performed by company members, symptoms take a back seat to aesthetics, and dancerhood replaces patienthood. When pieced together into a broader tapestry, these individual identity shifts have played a role in transforming communities and organizations where the program exists. Through high visibility performance projects, the film Capturing Grace, and global media attention, Dance for PD, along with other model programs, has spurred a re-evaluation of community dance practice, with a greater focus on including members of the community who are living with challenges of aging (Parkinson’s and dementia), trauma (returning military personnel), and development (autism spectrum disorder). The program has also encouraged medical organizations—hospitals, clinics, and Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs)—to reconsider the arts as a vital player in underpinning community health initiatives. These novel initiatives can take place in the naturally collaborative settings of the university campus—the partnership between the dance department and the internationally-known movement disorders center at the University of Florida is a prime example—or through once-unimaginable community partnerships between the managed care consortium Kaiser Permanente and San Francisco Ballet. Finally, Dance for PD has helped arts organizations expand who they consider part of their community. MMDG, along with dozens of other dance companies, presenting organizations (like Seattle Theatre Group and the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts), have used Dance for PD as a springboard for cultivating a more inclusive vision of community engagement, and in the process, have expanded the radius of participation and sense of belonging. The organization may pride itself as being a bricks and mortar hub, a meeting place, or a magnet for high quality arts engagement, but equally important are the social and emotional connections that form among members of the community who engage with the organization, whether or not they are actually under its roof.

THE STUDIO AS AN ANOMALOUS SPACE When you enter the weekly Dance for PD class at the Mark Morris Dance Center, nothing seems out of place. The dancers are seated, ready to go. The pianist sits at an upright looking out at familiar faces. The teachers make the rounds, greeting regulars and welcoming newcomers. Except that by traditional protocols, people with Parkinson’s should not be in this space. We expect to see them at home, or in a clinic, in a nursing home or senior center. Meanwhile, when we peer into a professional dance studio, we expect to see a company rehearsing, or ten-year-olds learning ballet. The Dance for PD class is disruptive for both communities—for a population typically medicalized and marginalized, and for an arts sector that has, until recently, rarely opened its doors to dancers over 40, never mind those with an incurable movement disorder. When people with Parkinson’s enter the dance center, they see kids walking to their tap class, they pass Mark Morris company members rehearsing a dance, they chat with Mark Morris himself in the elevator. They use the same studio where former American Ballet Theatre principal dancer Ashley Tuttle teaches ballet, where Mark Morris created V (2001), where hundreds of professional artists rehearse each week. They are surrounded by an artistic rather than clinical community. In addition to the actual dance material they learn and practice in class, the space itself, and the multitudes of professional and

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community artists who comingle in that space, are active players in the negotiation between their movements and the thought that they are dancers. The building reinforces the sense that they belong, that this is their artistic home. This architecture of inclusion is replicated elsewhere in our New York network—we have classes at The Juilliard School, New York University, and other studios—and around the world at the Sydney Opera House, English National Ballet, or Dutch National Ballet, all of which have Dance for Parkinson’s programs. In one of the transitional scenes of Capturing Grace, director David Iverson captures several members of the Dance for PD class as they enter the Mark Morris Dance Center. In these short lobby shots, you are aware of physical challenges—shuffling steps, arms that do not swing, dyskinesia, friends entering with customized walkers. But what strikes you is the level of comfort—an at-home-ness—in their demeanor and physicality. They walk in like they own the place. Through a combination of institutional generosity and community desire, the Dance Center has become a de facto community center for people with Parkinson’s from Brooklyn and beyond. In addition to Dance for PD programming, people with Parkinson’s can participate in a singing class, movement lab, and support group meetings. They attend performances, lectures, film showings, and non-Parkinson’s focused dance and movement workshops. In short, the sense of communal belonging is palpable. The idea that this belonging takes place in an arts center, rather than a hospital, senior center, or nursing home, reinforces a crucial corollary relating to identity: we are dancers because we are here, and we are here because we are dancers. In Places of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy, Elizabeth Ellsworth explores pedagogy in relation to knowledge and experience “in the making” rather than knowledge as a thing made. In this context, she explores places of learning that present “emergent pedagogical qualities and elements” and that “speak to and about pedagogy indirectly through design.” For Ellsworth, anomalous places of learning are environments “capable of acting as the pedagogical pivot point between movement/sensation and thought.”8 In the case of Dance for PD, the key is not that dancing in a dance center is an anomaly; what is anomalous is the idea that the dance center takes on a fundamental role in helping a person with Parkinson’s reconsider his or her identities from that of an isolated, medicalized patient to that of a connected, welcomed artist. The anomaly is the sense of belonging members of the Parkinson’s community feel at a dance center, and the way the building (and what goes on in it) symbolizes an important identity shift. Through carefully co-ordinated planning, Dance for PD also cultivates a bridge between local performance events—what happens on stage—and what our Dance for PD students come to know in their bodies, thereby transforming local performance venues into a network of anomalous places of identity transformation. When students work directly with members of Cirkus Cirkör or Tango for All, and then go see them perform across the street at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the theatrical space is no longer a site of passive enjoyment but a space that actively reinforces the sense of artistic belonging, the idea of exchange. The Parkinson’s dancers have worked directly with the performers, they have exchanged movement DNA, and mirrored each other, and now that process repeats itself across the fourth wall (we also know from action observation research that when we see movement we already know, our brains respond more actively than when we view movement we do not know or have not seen before).9 Parkinson’s dancers go to performances for the same reason dancers go—not simply as consumers of culture, but as participants in it. In 2008, a Dance for PD participant named Carroll Neesemann—a former marine and high-powered litigator—attended a performance of the Mark Morris Dance Group at

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Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival. He was deeply moved by a piece called “Double”, part of Morris’ evening-length work Mozart Dances (2006). In the opening section of “Double,” a group of six men (I was one of them) moved as a connected, floating ring around the stage to the slow movement of Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos. The “effect” is transfixing—an idealized masculine community defined by dignity, grace, unity, and co-operation rather than by the competitive, slapstick brawn less adept choreographers so often highlight when they have men dance together on stage. When I walked in to teach the next Dance for PD class the following week, Neesemann approached me to say how much he had loved the performance. Then, “I want to do that. I want to learn that dance, and perform it to the best of my ability,” said Neesemann gruffly. “When can we start?” Neesemann’s request reveals the way places can transform and reinscribe identity, catalyzing a series of questions, ideas, challenges, and ambitions. As a long-time student at the Dance Center, he had come to see himself as a dancer with certain skills and capacities; in the theater, he envisioned himself as a performing artist; returning to the studio, he took the first step of a journey that led to Neesemann himself performing on stage, four years later. In November 2012, the curtain rose on 17 members of the Dance for PD class as they performed a program of five dances to live music for an audience of 160. Included in the program was a version of “Double” for 17 people with Parkinson’s. A new community of performing artists was born. The process was challenging. Although the teaching team translated specific aspects of the choreography to make it accessible to people with mobility challenges, our goal was to leave as much of the aesthetic material in place. Indeed, for a group that was used to a weekly short-form class in which familiar standards always shared airtime with new choreographic material, the rehearsal process fostered a depth of exploration we had not experienced before. Working on the same choreography each week, we went deeper into the work, drawing out themes and honing movement qualities as we went. The dancers supported each other, commiserated about the challenges they encountered, and in many ways mirrored the dynamics of a professional company (minus, perhaps, the interpersonal competition). At one point, dancer Marsha Abrams explained the struggle she experienced trying to remember the choreography. Summing up her concerns, she said, “I just don’t want to fall and I don’t want to look stupid.”10 Abrams’ comment expresses a sentiment that would be familiar to almost every performing dancer in the world—certainly, I had thought the same before the curtain rose on many of my own performances—and the seriousness of her concern bespoke the sense of commitment and personal investment in the performance process. The insecurities she expressed underscore her sense of identity shift: she is a dancer, and she wants to dance well.

INTERNAL VS. EXTERNAL FORMATION The performance project highlights an important consideration: in many cases, the embodiment of a dancerly identity is as much a result of external influence as internal transformation. While Torrijos’ and Enseki’s identification as dancers is notable for being self-generated—stimulated, one would suspect, by the aesthetic, pedagogical, and architectural elements discussed earlier—other participants express that their selfperception is primarily influenced by identifying language (and sense of expectation) that their instructors bestow on them. Luanne Wilson, a Dance for PD participant in Berkeley, California, explains this phenomenon:

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When I first heard of this group I was so touched and surprised that anyone would think of something so magnificent and drastic as trying to teach all of us slowpokes to dance. What a marvel . . . I had pretty much settled into my life as a wallflower . . . I’m awash with curiosity but also with sheer gratitude that they thought of us and made this magic happen. I can’t tell you what a treasure it is, how much it means to me that someone should even suspect us of sequestering ballerinas in our hidden hearts but they do exist and how kind of you to ask us to dance. It truly means so much.11 Joy Esterberg, another participant, describes a sense of disbelief at being included in the performance project: “The idea of doing a dance never occurred to me at this age and this stage. I mean who would train you, who would care, who would want you? And yet I’m doing it. And that’s extraordinary to me.”12 Esterberg harkens back to the learning community mentioned earlier—that the attitude of the professional dancers in the class (and the rehearsal process itself) is inclusive and non-hierarchical, and that she has somehow slipped into her role because the professional dancers assume that she is capable and able to dance, regardless of her own beliefs. Later in Capturing Grace, Cyndy Gilbertson talks about the power of expectation and role assignment in compelling her to think (and act) differently. One of the choreographers in the 2012 performance project, Claudine Naganuma, selected Gilbertson to perform a solo at the beginning of her dance, “Brooklyn’s PEACE.” Gilbertson explains: “Claudine chose me out of everyone else to lead off this piece and I was so touched. Because I didn’t think of myself as a dancer. But since Claudine gave me the assignment of being a dancer I have to be a dancer.”13 Like the sculpture already living inside Michaelangelo’s block of stone, Naganuma saw the dancer inside Gilbertson’s existing identity and helped her chisel away so she could see it, craft her movement and express herself through newly found artistry. When living with a chronic, degenerative condition, how critical is the process by which one identifies themselves as someone else? Is it necessary to favor the embodied approach Torrijos and Enseki describe over a more “performative” approach represented by the conscious taking-on of a role suggested or assigned by a teacher, however temporarily? I would argue that whether the identity is generated by an internal thought and discovery process or externally imposed and then adopted, both lead to a stronger sense of demedicalized agency. The embodied sense of actually being a dancer represents a consciously holistic, macro shift from the medicalized identity of patient to the creative, nimble, hopeful identity of an artist. This identity transformation attempts to permanently reassert and empower the self as a creative and active being and member of an artistic community.14 In this view, the internal transformation can be seen as a conscious political, even rebellious, act protesting the fixed, medical model of disease. In a parallel track, the openness to step into an assignment—the willingness to play the role, act as if (Adler), or fake it till you make it—is another way in. This route may be less political but no less empowering. Indeed, for a condition in which apathy, inertia, “rigidity”, and lack of flexibility are primary features, the ability to step into a new identity for a particular purpose in response to invitation and encouragement is liberating and transformative in its own way. As Gilbertson remarks in Capturing Grace, “I’ve learned to value myself more, which is quite a gift. When I’m schlumping, I say to myself ‘I’m a dancer’, and it gives me motivation to take care of myself.” Gilbertson chooses to put on her adopted identity like an overcoat; it becomes a tool for improved self-esteem as well as for a more practical purpose—improved posture.

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Moments later in the same scene, however, Gilbertson demonstrates a remarkable physical and expressive transformation that represents a more internalized identity shift and encapsulates dance’s double-edged sword—the way the art form harnesses the power of aesthetics to provide an opportunity for empowerment and an accessible toolkit. Gilbertson notes that when she experiences an “off period”—a stage in which initiating any kind of movement can be difficult—she sometimes cannot walk but she can dance. She then demonstrates a transformation in front of the camera—from a tentative, shuffling being, arms pinned to her sides, to a fluid, rhythmic, dynamic dancer who entrains to jazz music in the background and moves around the space with a sense of freedom and glee. Gilbertson uses the phrase “pretend to dance” to explain the transformation, as if she has suddenly decided to flick a “dance switch,” but there is nothing pretend about her new physical state—in a split second, the act of “pretending” to dance liberates her from the locked constraints of her Parkinsonian self and she is dancing fully, expressively, and with commitment to every second of her experience. She becomes more alive, more animated, more fully herself. In addition to transforming her own experience by thinking like a dancer and using the tools of dance, Cyndy demonstrates that her experiential shift is not necessarily tied to a communal dynamic. Indeed, she is basically alone in her apartment (except for Iverson and Eddie Marritz, the film’s director of photography), and her metamorphosis is entirely generated by herself, for herself. Her return to a more engaged, comfortable self has been mediated entirely through her personal relationship to dance and music—her ability to take on the role of a dancer—without any connection to or striving for a broader community. In whichever way the Parkinson’s dancers arrive at their sense of self, the adoption or cultivation of an identity poses an interesting conundrum. In their article “Living with Parkinson’s Disease—Managing Identity Together,” Kerstin Stieber Roger and Maria Medved note that people with Parkinson’s interviewed for their research did not want to be seen as “unusual by their family and friends” post-diagnosis, and that “although participants with PD were experiencing an increasing lack of control over their bodies, and new emotions as they processed these changes, they stressed the value and importance of remaining themselves”—for example, a “partner” in their personal relationships rather than a “patient.” They add, “Retaining ‘normalcy’ was critical to them . . . they want to continue doing what they had always done, they wanted this normalcy to continue for their family support person as well.”15 But these observations about the importance of retaining normalcy in personal relationships—and, by extrapolation, into the activities of daily living—pose a problematic framework when exploring the value of dance. It would be fair to see dancing as a return to normalcy if most of our participants had invested even half of the time I had in dance training, practice, and performance. Additionally, the perspective might make sense if dancing were viewed as a mainstream activity for American adults. But very few of our Dance for PD participants had much, if any, dance experience before joining the program. And although some of them participated in some form of social dancing as younger people, most of them grew up in a society that views concert dance and its associated training process as a specialized activity for children or for elite professionals. It is safe to say, then, that going to dance class or performing on stage is not a return to a preParkinson’s normalcy—it’s actually far beyond normalcy. Even though dance is part of our unique cultural heritage as humans, for members of our group it is clearly a leap of faith, a lasso around the moon. To understand this paradox, we need to think again about the nature of Parkinson’s and of dance, and of the values that are transformed by dancing.

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I think of Parkinson’s as an anti-theatrical condition—it takes away aspects of expression like physical amplitude, vocal projection, and facial readability and makes everything smaller and quieter. Since we view ourselves and the world views us by our abilities to express and communicate thought, need, and desire, Parkinson’s can quickly alter a person’s sense of self, confidence, and agency in the world, making one more reliant on others and doubting one’s own abilities. On top of this, the demoralizing label “patient” is applied. Participating in any sort of movement experience, whether it is a fitness class, a bicycle ride or a yoga class, provides a compelling physical counterpoint to Parkinson’s, and that is important since study after study has quantified the beneficial impact of exercise on Parkinsonian symptoms. Physical activity strengthens the body, helps with balance and stamina, and can ease tremors.16 But exercise is not aesthetic, and although it may address specific symptoms, it does not necessarily change an individual’s personal narrative (though the recent popularity of boxing programs for people with Parkinson’s may rest somewhat on the excitement of identifying as a boxer, someone who fights back against limitations). Most exercise programs do not engage the imaginative powers of the human mind in the service of movement. They do not provide an outlet for expression, a bridge between feeling and physical embodiment. Dance, on the other hand, does all of this. When you are dancing, whether you are interpreting a structured phrase of choreography created by someone else or carving your own path through improvisation, you exist in the world of expression, connecting at a basic human level with your imagination and the creative minds of those dancing around you. At this level of functional aesthetics, Parkinson’s is nowhere in the room. Dance, as absent as it might have been from one’s past, allows participants to jolt out of Parkinsonian inertia and forge a completely new narrative and identity from the ashes of what Michael Bury terms the “biographical disruption” of chronic illness.17 By identifying as a dancer, you have not only committed to adopting the physical attributes a dancerly identity entails; you have also reaffirmed that you are a fully integrated self. “When I dance like I do in class,” Torrijos writes in his Cartesian email, “I aspire to that apex of movement called dance and show grace, and control, and expressiveness. When I dance, I am me again.”18 Dance, unlike exercise, boxing or other forms of physical therapy, changes an individual’s value system. It moves away from a quantified system of judgment—moving a certain distance at a certain speed—into a system that values quality of movement—how a movement is done, how imagination informs the output, and what meaning is trying to get expressed. Through improvisation, it fosters the divergent thinking that allows multiple paths to multiple solutions rather than emphasizing a set of inflexible outcomes that must be met. Relatedly, it sees choreographic transpositions and alterations—someone who translates a traveling dance to a seated position, for example—as a welcome creative choice rather than a failure or retreat. Dance training places value on repetition and mastery of existing material while simultaneously exploring novel ideas, ways of moving, “combinations”, or combinations of movements, so that senses are awakened and the brain is constantly stimulated. Dance combines self-sufficiency (learning your craft or “technique” in order to access your own toolbox whenever you want it) with an emphasis on the necessity of community, with its inherent sense of belonging, connection, and interdependence. Working against a Cartesian separation of the body and mind, which is often paralleled in clinical approaches to PD, dance invites individuals to move toward complete integration, a state of flow in which they are aware of emotional, physical, cognitive, and social realms operating simultaneously together in time and space.

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With a few notable exceptions, like ParkinsonNet in the Netherlands, these values are often absent in medical systems that support people living with Parkinson’s and chronic diseases. And yet they are inherently human values. They are values we recognize as part of progressive education for young people; they are values espoused by forward-thinking management consultants and CEOs around the world. Perhaps dancing, then, is not something so extraordinary after all. Perhaps it is simply a way to regain access to a value system that has been a backbone of human survival for millennia. Perhaps dancing is another way to describe the state of being our most integrated selves, a state in which the physical, expressive, and imaginative powers we are born with converge, however ephemerally. This state can be as elusive and momentary as a Higgs boson particle—particularly if you are living with a chronic movement disorder— and it is a state many people even without Parkinson’s never encounter. But for those with Parkinson’s, being a dancer allows the possibility of accessing a self they have been looking for their whole lives and provides the most promising way to hold onto that self as long as they can.

NOTES 1.

Emmanuel Torrijos, email message to author, March 21, 2011.

2.

Capturing Grace, trailer (2013), [Film], Dir. David Iverson, USA: Kikim Media.

3.

By the term professional dancers, I refer to those who earn their primary livelihood from the process of training, rehearsing, and performing on stage.

4.

João Massano and Kailash P. Bhatia, “Clinical Approach to Parkinson’s Disease: Features, Diagnosis, and Principles of Management,” Cold Spring Harb or Perspectives in Medicine 2:6 (June 2012): 1–4.

5.

Ken Bartlett, “The Artistic Imperative in Community Dance,” Animated, Autumn 2013, https://www.communitydance.org.uk/DB/animated-library/the-artistic-imperative-incommunity-dance?ed=31348.

6.

Sara Houston, “Feeling Lovely: An Examination of the Value of Beauty for People Dancing with Parkinson’s,” Dance Research Journal 47:1 (April 2015): 35.

7.

Herschel Ele, “Parkinson’s and Dance: New Partners,” UofMHealthBlogs, April 14, 2015, http://uofmhealthblogs.org/neurohealth/parkinsons-and-dance-new-partners/22024/

8.

Elizabeth Ellsworth, Places of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 5–7.

9.

In a 2005 study conducted in the UK, a team of researchers used fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to look at differences in brain activity between watching an action that the viewer has learned and an action that is novel. When expert dancers “viewed movements that they had been trained to perform,” there was greater activity in specific parts of the brain, including the premotor cortex. B. Calvo-Merino, D. E. Glaser, J. Grèzes, R. E. Passingham, and P. Haggard, “Action Observation and Acquired Motor Skills: An FMRI Study with Expert Dancers,” Cerebral Cortex, 15:8 (August 2005): 1243.

10. Capturing Grace (2014), [Film], Dir. David Iverson, USA: Kikim Media. 11. Luanne Wilson, email message to author, October 4, 2010. 12. Iverson, Capturing Grace. 13. Ibid. 14. It is important to note, given the Cartesian starting point of this chapter, that such use of embodied transformation to empower oneself and cultivate a sense of belonging within a

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larger community is at odds with Descartes’ philosophical views relating to the connection between philosophical reason and the ability to treat oneself medically. 15. Kerstin Stieber Roger and Maria I. Medved, “Living with Parkinson’s Disease—Managing Identity Together,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-being 5:2 (2010), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2875966/pdf/QHW-5-5129.pdf. 16. A. Uhrbrand, E. Stenager, M. S Pedersen, and U. Dalgas, “Parkinson’s Disease and Intensive Exercise Therapy—a Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials,” Journal of the Neurological Sciences, 353:1–2 (2015): 9. 17. Michael Bury, “Chronic illness as Biographical Disruption,” Sociology of Health & Illness. 4:2 (2008): 169. 18. Torrijos, email to author.

PART THREE

Philosophy, Dance Traditions, and Everyday Experience

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CHAPTER 3.1

Introduction: Cross-Currents in Philosophical and Dance Traditions STEPHEN DAVIES

I have sometimes thought about the difficulties of appreciating the art of other cultures.1 In the case of literature, poetry, and drama, this involves learning a new language at least. With music, there are usually unfamiliar scales and instruments. Pictures may use systems of projection and forms of symbolism with which we are not accustomed. But the case of dance appears to be much easier. Even if it deploys aspects of narrative and symbolism that are not transparent, the medium of dance is bodily movement, and bodily movement is something we all know well at first hand. We are embodied creatures who act in the world; we are agents. To quote myself: We all know what it is to move our bodies under the force of gravity. That alone places us in a position to have a basic appreciation of the dancer’s grace or athleticism, whatever culture she comes from.2 When we observe the dancer, we see what she does and, according to many commentators, we know from the inside what that is. Add to this a story about mirror neurons that fire in automatic mimicry of others’ movements and we have a readymade account of dance appreciation: it involves sympathetically internalizing and echoing the dancers’ actions. Not only do we observe those actions, we rehearse and mimic them at the pre-motor level. So, we acquire knowledge by acquaintance of what the dancer does.3 Indeed, just this view was propounded long before the discovery of mirror neurons. Writing about “muscular sympathy” in 1939, John Martin says: Through kinesthetic sympathy you respond to the impulse of the dancer which has expressed itself by means of a series of movements. Movement, then, is the link between the dancer’s intention and your perception of it.4 On reflection, this account might strike us as silly. Consider this different case: I watch a virtuoso pianist play a difficult sonata. When I have done so, can I play the sonata? Certainly not! I do not know how to play the piano. Did I mimic the playing as I watched? Perhaps, but I was not really aware of doing so. Do I know from the inside what it is like to play the sonata? In other words, do I have a proprioceptive awareness of what that is 217

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like? No. And that is not because the mimicry is below my level of awareness. That is how it might be for another pianist as she hears the first; she could nudge the feelings into consciousness by focusing on them.5 But in my case, I simply have no idea how it feels to play the piece correctly. At most, my sense of the movements involved is very sketchy. For example, I know that the right hand starts near the top of the keyboard and the fingers then move very fast. To become a virtuoso piano player, a person usually has to be taught and then must practice a lot. Ten years of daily practice might not be needed for success in every field, but a fair amount of repetition, rehearsal, and exercise is required to master the piano.6 The same is true of professional dancers, not to mention gymnasts, jugglers, sportspeople, and others who perform skillful actions. If you have never tried plastering or embroidery but imagine they should be easy, just have a go and see what happens! Someone might object at this stage. Teaching by example is very common and successful. This is true. But notice that this frequently takes a special form that goes beyond simply watching a skilled person do their thing. The teacher breaks the actions down into a sequence of easily recalled routines. She goes through each routine in slow motion. She exaggerates the movements involved or the lengths of pauses. In the case of the piano, she starts with the positions of the hands and simple scales, just as the trainee dancer begins with partial movements and basic positions. Learning is incremental and the skill is finally perfected only after those countless hours of practice. Perceptual learning via observation of other people is also common, and it can take place without teaching or actual practice. A neural Action Observational Network (that goes far beyond localized mirror neurons) is implicated in this. Rather than short-term mimicry, the Action Observational Network (AON) produces long-term learning that takes account of contexts and norms. Such learning depends on multiple exposures.7 Of special relevance to our discussion is that many of the empirical studies in this area use the observation of dance as central to their experimental design. Martin, quoted above, no doubt had something like perceptual learning in mind when he characterized “muscle sympathy.” What follows? One possibility is that the view with which we started is correct— appreciation of professional-level dance does involve sympathetic pre-motor enactment on the part of the viewer. Since I am incapable of that, I cannot appreciate the dance. (I cannot appreciate the skilled dances of people of other cultures, and neither can I appreciate those of my own culture.) But a trained and experienced dancer could appreciate dances in the style she is trained for. Alternatively, the conditions for appreciation were misdescribed earlier. I am capable of comprehending dance in an understanding fashion as a result of closely observing the dancer, even if I cannot do what she does and, hence, cannot feel her actions from the inside as if they are mine. But in that case, it is also possible that the trained expert has a different, perhaps better, appreciation than I do. Barbara Montero has argued that proprioception is an aesthetic sense—that is, a person can feel the beauty of her own actions or, through sympathetic echoing via mirror neurons, feel the beauty of another’s movement.8 She also maintains that trained dancers, through internal mimicry, are thereby capable of a mode of appreciation that others, people like myself, are not. Richard Shusterman is another who suggests that a person’s kinesthetic self-consciousness can be experienced with the help of mirror neurons by her observer.9 These claims reference fMRI research by Beatriz Calvo-Merino and colleagues

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showing that the brain responses of expert dancers to observing dancing differ from those of untrained controls. Montero leaves open the question of who is the better dance critic.10 The trained expert might focus too much on the dancer’s movement and not enough on the choreography, for instance, and this would be to the detriment of her critical commentary. In addition to querying the claims made on behalf of mirror neurons, David Davies raises two interesting objections to these views.11 Both Montero and Shusterman assume that the firing of mirror neurons results in proprioceptive awareness in the viewer that matches what the person who was viewed feels as she acts. That is, they assume that it feels the same from the inside for the viewer. But it is possible, instead, that the firing of mirror neurons conveys information about the other’s action without conveying this in a way that generates proprioceptive awareness in the viewer. Further, the appreciative acumen of the observer who is a trained dancer might be a function simply of her superior knowledge of dance and its techniques, as compared to most others, rather than a consequence of the activation of mirror neurons, whether above or below consciousness. David Davies characterizes himself as a “moderate pessimist” about what insights might be contributed to the philosophy of dance, or of art more generally, by cognitive science.12 Neuroscientific findings might answer questions about how experiences we already know about are implemented and sometimes, though rarely, they might help us with unresolved philosophical issues. He contrasts his pessimism with the extreme version defended on Wittgensteinian grounds by Graham McFee, who doubts that sub-personal brain activities help us to explain higher-level experiences at the personal level, which is the level at which the understanding and appreciation of artistic dance takes place.13 And neuroscience cannot help us to explain why one person’s understanding and appreciation might be deeper than another’s. Another extreme pessimist is Alva Noë, who does not think neuroscientists can distinguish engaging with art from encountering non-art.14 David Davies contrasts his pessimism also with the moderate optimism defended by William Seeley.15 Seeley shares some of the same doubts—for example, neuroscience might characterize what some art audiences actually do but does not answer the question about what they should do—that is, about whether their response is merited. And neuroscience does not account for the relative value of art. But he thinks that cognitive science might turn out to be more helpful to the philosopher’s enterprise of explaining artistic practices and how they affect audiences than David Davies or McFee. Where do I fall on this spectrum? I am not exactly sure. But I do think that lab-based studies of the response to art are severely constrained, that psychologists’ assumptions can undermine their methodologies, and that the interpretation they give of their results is often highly inflated.16 I want to put aside the comparison of dance-trained experts with the rest of us, as well as consideration of mirror neurons, to focus on the alternative mentioned above: namely, that we can understand and appreciate dance by observing the dancer, even if we cannot move as she does. And I want to return to the question of trying to understand the dances of another culture. Recall the self-quotation: “We all know what it is to move our bodies under the force of gravity. That alone places us in a position to have a basic appreciation of the dancer’s grace or athleticism, whatever culture she comes from.” This acknowledges that we have specialized neural circuits for processing human bodies and that these involve sensorimotor representations.17 But the sentiment might be thought to be too glib, if it is taken to

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assume wrongly that all societies view the relation between the dancing individual and gravity in the same way. Much of the Western classical dance tradition is about seeming to overcome gravity, escaping it. There are lifts and leaps, grand jetés, dancers up on points. The legs swing free, being unencumbered by stockings, tutus, or gossamer clothes. The foot is pointed and often lifted, as if echoing the trajectory of something thrown. The dance conspires to show the body and gravity as opposed, as battling each other. Gravity is a force to be overcome, at least for a moment. Some aspects of this attitude have been challenged within non-classical forms of dance in the West (see Clark in this section). And the dancing of African Americans might, instead, be grounded in a pessimism that follows from the disavowals of black culture and of black experience that is an ongoing legacy of slavery (see DeFrantz in this section). In any case, there are racially marked styles of dancing and the dominant group often copies, reduces, satirizes, or appropriates ways of dancing that originated with a racial minority (see Tsai in this section). But the transcendence of gravity remains a dominant paradigm for Western art dance. Now, it seems to me that some Asian dance traditions take a quite different attitude to the dancer’s relation to gravity. The foot is arched with the toes upward. And, with this shape, the foot is planted on the ground in an attitude that conveys the impression of a straight-line force that passes down through the dancer’s body and into the floor. The dancer is rooted to the earth. And this effect is emphasized by the short stride that goes with the typically more constrictive clothing that is worn. This suggests an ideal in which the body and gravity are seen to be in co-operation, not opposition. Gravity is a reassuring force, binding one to reality, not a resistance to be overcome. This is not to deny that, in its effects, dance can provide the dancer and spectator with transcendent experiences (see Mehta in this section). Indeed, such experiences might necessarily require at their foundation a sense of oneness with the world that the Asian dancer’s sense of gravity intimates better than the Western ballerina’s. Jeff Friedman (in this section) explains how post-colonial dance in Africa seeks to modernize traditional indigenous philosophy and wisdom. A particularly potent notion in African dance is that of individual vital force, which brings dancers into a form of mutual engagement that reflects more generally the entangled texture of the wider social environment. Each cultural group is likely to have unique aesthetic and philosophical commitments, such as Friedman describes for Africa. Rather than in terms of gravity, we might have compared moieties according to their notion of personhood and of the relation of the individual to the collective. Such matters can affect how people dance and what they value in dance. It is very common, I think, for local forms of art, both folk and high, to mirror the group’s conception of social organization (and for their conception of social organization to reflect their religious cosmology). We might note, for instance, that much Western art valorizes individual self-expression, whereas the art of some other cultures might be more concerned to communicate the co-operative immersion of the individual in a wider social assembly. In many ethnic and indigenous dance traditions, dances are not entertainments but participatory practices that help define and connect both personal and cultural identity, as well as religious affiliation and homage (see Conlon and Viswanathan in this section). In these ways, art is indeed a powerful symbol-making process (see Farinas in this section).

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For instance, in Balinese music, instruments are paired together. These pairs of instruments are tuned slightly apart so that, when they play the same note, there is beating between the tones. This gives the music its distinctive “shimmering” sound. That, in combination with the bright, percussive tones of metallophones and drums, gives the music an iridescent sheen. Now, the instruments within the pair co-operate to produce an interlocking composite pattern, which is what is most clearly heard. This pairing of instruments reflects the duality of male and female, a relation that is both complementary (because they interlock to sound the composite melody) and irreducible (because of the subtle distinction in tuning). Meanwhile, the thirty-plus-piece orchestra blends the various contributions of each pair at a further level of interlocking complexity to form the overall musical texture and form. This combination of the outputs of paired instruments into a coherent orchestral whole mimics the co-operative social organization of the larger group. The repeated gong pattern that underpins the progress of the work provides a musical corollary to the anchor of faith and shared communal and religious values.18 I know quite a lot about the Balinese dance form legong; in fact, more than I know about Western professional-level dance forms. Let me characterize this Balinese dance genre and explain how I became interested in comprehending it. Legong is a type of dance presented by elaborately costumed girls accompanied by a gamelan orchestra (Plate 6). (These days, however, women dancers, if they are exceptional, can continue to perform.)19 There are usually three dancers: the condong, a maid who dances to introduce the legong, and two legongs. The genre is regarded as a repository of Balinese dance movements because anyone trained in legong can dance other genres of Balinese female dance. The traditional repertoire consists of a core of about fifteen dances. Particular dances have been traditionally associated with particular areas, with the result that few groups would have had more than five legong dances in their repertoire. Nowadays, a fair number of groups know only one legong dance, Legong Lasem (aka Legong Keraton). Some dances from the core repertoire now appear to be lost altogether. New legong dances can be and are created, but these often do not survive for long. In their complete versions, these dances last from 30–60 minutes. Nowadays they are often cut to 12–20 minutes, especially in tourist concerts. The reductions are made either by eliding whole sections or by eliminating repeats. For instance, a movement sequence done traditionally four times to the left and then four times to the right might in the shortened version be done once only in each direction. Some legong dances depict nature (butterflies, bees, egrets, crows, the sun and moon) and others are narrative. But in all versions, the legong dancers are dressed alike and representational elements are highly stylized. An audience not familiar with the iconography of dance movements can have trouble following the narrative even having read an account of the dance’s story.20 My initial interest in Balinese arts focused on music (I was trained as an ethnomusicologist). But as a cultural tourist, I was soon introduced to legong and became curious after a time. I researched its history (because I was dubious about the most commonly told story about its origins) and whether it was at risk of decline.21 From the many 20,000-word theses written about it over the years and held at the University of the Arts in Denpasar, I extracted the names of dance steps, positions, gestures, costume elements, and the like. (Because the dance form is indigenous to Bali, these terms are in the Balinese language, not Bahasa Indonesian, which is the language of the theses.) By

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calling out their names as I filmed a dance teacher, I came to know what these terms referred to. (As it happened, this was not very helpful, because most dance instructors do not teach using these terms, so most dancers do not know them. They are used by theorists to provide a schematization of the choreography.) I interviewed a number of famous legong teachers, both men and women. My appreciation of legong came as a result of exposure. I saw as many different groups perform as many different legong dances as I could. Some of these performances were on VCD or DVD, but most were live. I sought out full-length performances. In some cases, I commissioned performances that I filmed or I commissioned filmings of performances I could not attend. I saw dances that are rare, close relatives of legong. And I saw countless rehearsals and dance lessons, which was made possible by staying with people associated with performance groups. The dance lessons are instructive. Girls begin classes around the age of six. The traditional method is one in which the teacher stands behind the child and handles her like a marionette. Instead of accompanying music, the teacher “sings” the piece— sometimes the melody, sometimes gong accents, sometimes “det” (short for “sledet”, which is the name of a sideways slide of the eye). These days, classes are often too large for the students all to get individual attention, however. And some teachers now use recorded music as well as large mirrors. Watching the teacher correct the pupils is one way to become alerted to what is expected. Teachers constantly raise the arms with shoulders back, as these easily slump with tiredness. They push at the waist to exaggerate the arch of the back. If the child does not move her feet quickly enough, she is liable to have them kicked from under her as the teacher makes the required movement. (For a similar account, see also the discussion of apprenticeship in classical Indian dance in Viswanathan in this section.) Balinese audiences are fierce and knowledgeable critics. They jeer at errors or poor dancing. And they expect a very high standard. So, temple festivals or the month-long Bali arts festival (Pesta Kesenian Bali) are good places to get a sense of how the locals evaluate a given rendition. It is also interesting to talk to the many Western and Japanese women who pay for lessons. They complain in vivid detail about how difficult and awkward they find the postures and movements. Virtuosic art often takes something very difficult and makes it look elegant, graceful, and even effortless. The trick to appreciating the artist’s achievement is not only to see the beauty and grace, but also to recognize the difficulties that were overcome in getting that result. I think the trained dancer, or the person who watches lessons and rehearsals, is better placed to acknowledge the difficulties than the person who sees only the final performance once or a few times. I have seen hundreds of legong performances. (It is not difficult to do, since many tourist concerts contain a legong—usually Legong Lasem—and five different groups perform each night of the week in Ubud.) Even if I do not know from the inside what it is like to experience the dances proprioceptively, I have internalized the music and the movements. As a result, I have very precise expectations at any moment about what should happen next. For the most regularly danced works, I know their choreography intimately, so I can spot regional differences in execution, as wells as errors and infelicities. And I have acquired knowledge of the highly abstracted iconography. When the legong points her closed fan, the character she is dancing is making a threat; when the legongs face each other behind their fans, their characters are romancing; etc. I think I have a fair understanding and appreciation of legong dances. And that is because I know what result

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they are aiming for and the years of discipline and training that are needed to make a beautiful outcome possible. Even if there are mirror neurons they will not get you to a cheap appreciation of dance. If you have not been trained in dance, however, perceptual learning over time (facilitated by the Action Observational Network) can lead you to achieve the kind of background knowledge and sensitivity a good critic needs. You have to know what steps are allowed and what not; whether the dancer is fighting gravity or being guided by it; how the dance invokes the social and cosmological order; what a given gesture means in narrative context; and just how difficult it is to hold that posture and line, to achieve that degree of syncronicity, to make that step sequence seem natural and easy, and so on.22

NOTES 1.

S. Davies, “Life is a Passacaglia,” Philosophy and Literature, 33 (2009): 315–328; “Can Westerners Understand the Art of other Cultures and What Might They Learn by Doing So?” Journal of World Philosophies, 3 (Winter 2018): 93–97.

2.

S. Davies, “Can Westerners Understand the Art of Other Cultures,” p. 95.

3.

G. Rizzolatti, and L. Fogassi, “Mirror Neurons and Social Cognition,” in The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, eds. R. I. M. Dunbar and L. Barrett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) pp. 179–195; G. Rizzolatti, and C. Sinigaglia, “The Functional Role of the Parieto-frontal Mirror Circuit: Interpretations and Misinterpretations,” Nature Reviews: Neuroscience, 11 (2010): 265–274.

4.

J. Martin, The Modern Dance (Princeton: Dance Horizons, 1939/1989) p. 12.

5.

Barbara Montero, “Proprioception as an Aesthetic Sense,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 64 (2006): 231–242.

6.

K. A. Ericsson, R. T. Krampe, and C. Tesch-Romer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review, 100 (1993): 363–406. M. Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success (New York: Little, Brown, and Co, 2011).

7.

For discussion of AON, see B. Calvo-Merino, J. Grèzes, D. E. Glaser, R. E. Passingham, and P. Haggard, “Seeing or Doing? Influence of Visual and Motor Familiarity in Action Observation,” Current Biology, 16 (2006): 1905–1910; E. S. Cross, A. F. de C. Hamilton, and S. T. Grafton, “Building a Motor Simulation De Novo: Observation of Dance by Dancers,” NeuroImage, 31 (2006): 1257–1267; E. S. Cross, D. J. M. Kraemer, A. F. de C. Hamilton, W. M. Kelley, and S. T. Grafton, “Sensitivity of the Action Observation Network to Physical and Observational Learning,” Cerebral Cortex, 19 (2009): 315–326; E. S. Cross, “Observational Learning of Complex Motor Skills: Dance,” Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning, ed. N. M. Seel (New York: Springer, 2012) pp. 2491–2493.

8.

Montero, “Proprioception as an Aesthetic Sense”; “The Artist as Critic: Dance Training, Neuroscience, and Aesthetic Evaluation,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 71 (2013): 169–175; Thought in Action: Expertise and the Conscious Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

9.

Richard Shusterman, “Body Consciousness and Performance: Somaesthetics East and West,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 67 (2009): 133–145.

10. B. Calvo-Merino, D. E. Glaser, J. Grèzes, R. E. Passingham, and P. Haggard, “Action Observation and Acquired Motor Skills: An FMRI Study with Expert Dancers”; “Seeing or Doing? Influence of Visual and Motor Familiarity in Action Observation,” Current Biology, 16 (2006): 1905–1910; “Towards a Sensorimotor Aesthetics of Performing Art,” Consciousness and Cognition, 17 (2008): 911–922.

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11. See David Davies’ chapter in this volume; D. Davies, “ ‘I’ll be Your Mirror?’ Embodied Agency, Dance, and Neuroscience,” in The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and Psychology, eds. E. Schellekens and P. Goldie, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 346–356; “Dancing Around the Issues: Prospects for an Empirically Grounded Philosophy of Dance,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 71 (2013): 195–202; “ ‘This is your Brain on Art’: What Can Philosophy of Art Learn from Neuroscience?”, in Aesthetics and the Sciences of the Mind, eds. G. Currie, M. Kieran, A. Meskin, and J. Robson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 57–74. 12. D. Davies, “Dancing Around the Issues.” 13. See Graham McFee’s chapter in this volume; G. McFee, Understanding Dance (New York: Routledge, 1992); The Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance: Identity, Performance, and Understanding (Hampshire: Dance Books, 2011). 14. A. Noë, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (New York: Hill and Wang, 2015). 15. W. P. Seeley, “What Is the Cognitive Neuroscience of Art . . . and Why Should We Care?,” American Society for Aesthetics Newsletter 31 (Summer 2011): 1–4; Attentional Engines: Psychology, Neuroscience, and Philosophy of the Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); see also N. J. Bullot, W. P. Seeley, and S. Davies, “Art and Science: A Philosophical Sketch of their Historical Complexity and Codependence,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 75 (2017): 453–463. 16. For discussion see S. Davies, “Cross-cultural Musical Expressiveness: Theory and the Empirical Programme,” in The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and Psychology, eds. E. Schellekens and P. Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 376–388; “The Artist and the Bengalese Finch,” Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 7 (2016): 715–720. 17. See C. Uresti, B. Calvo-Merino, P. Haggard, and S. M. Aglioti, “Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Reveals Two Cortical Pathways for Visual Body Processing,” Journal of Neuroscience, 27 (2007): 8023–8030. 18. For discussion, see C. McPhee, The Music of Bali: A Study in Form and Instrumental Organization in Balinese Orchestral Music (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966); M. Tenzer, Balinese Music (Singapore: Periplus Editions, 1991); S. Davies, “Balinese Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 65 (2007): 21–29. 19. See S. Davies, “Beauty, Youth, and the Balinese Legong Dance,” in Beauty Unlimited, ed. P. Z. Brand (Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 2012), pp. 259–279. 20. For more on this dance genre, see C. McPhee, “Dance in Bali,” Dance Index, 7 solidus 8 (1948): pp. 156–207; I M. Bandem, Ensiklopedi Tari Bali (Denpasar: ASTI, 1982); I M. Bandem and F. E. deBoer, Balinese Dance in Transition: Kaja and Kelod (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, second edition, 1995); I W. Dibia and R. Ballinger, Balinese Dance, Drama, and Music (Singapore: Periplus Editions, 2004). 21. See S. Davies, “Balinese Legong: Revival or Decline?” Asian Theatre Journal, 23 (2006): 314–341; S. Davies, “The Origins of Balinese Legong,” Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkund (BKI), 64 (2/3) (2008): 194–211. 22. I am grateful for feedback on this chapter from Bill Seeley and David Davies.

CHAPTER 3.2

A New Universality: Pragmatic Symbols of World Peace in Drawing and Dance REBECCA L FARINAS

The arts are bound with aesthetics, as a study of how we are embodied with, perceive, and interpret our world. Alike to this approach, pragmatic aesthetics includes phenomenology, as an investigation of how our meaningful experiences are constituted by creative practices and interpretive artifacts, such as signs, language, and works of art. Focusing on Charles Sander Peirce’s semiotics, in respect to aesthetics, such modes of knowledge bring us to a better understanding of how we can make more benevolent communities, thereby presenting an ethically oriented aesthetic process.1 However, for Peirce, a science of signs should not be abstracted from explaining, re-interpreting, and understanding such practices and artifacts while such is experienced. I mark this pragmatic turn in philosophical thinking, while investigating Peirce’s interests in drawing and dance, and my analysis finds examples of these arts as resonant signs of global peace movements. My purpose is to bring forward relationships between Peirce’s views on aesthetics, artistic practices, and sign-making, explaining how those practices propagate our global, yet community-oriented, experiences. I will not be offering a detailed explanation of late Peircean semiotics, with its far-reaching implications in the areas of logic, language, and science, in that my purpose is more specific to the arts of drawing and dance. For those interested, there are clear and accessible explications of his approach to pragmatic philosophy and his semiotics in a plethora of secondary literature. However, the importance of sign-making to aesthetics is a specific point of our discussion in respect to drawing and dance, so I focus on Peirce’s earlier writing wherein he addresses this topic and is engaged with these practices.2 I am concentrating on two ideas, synechism and agapism, helping us understand a connection between feelings, movement, signification, and how we better our lives. Through art, we will come to understand the context, and scope, of Peirce’s aesthetics and his notions of universal love. I can say at the outset that Peirce thinks of love as a creative sign and an aspect of our common experience, not as a construct originating outside of our experience. Nor does he think of love as determining experiences, in that love develops in an open field of experience, but also as we act on what we feel and think of as meaningful to our lives. 225

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However, I do put forward this discussion as investigating how we make meaningful gestures, so I will briefly summarize Peirce’s general approach to semiotics. Signs are modes of phenomena, communication, and knowledge, and they can be recognized as meaningful to our ongoing experiences. Actually, Peirce writes about the similar aspects of both drawing and gesture in relation to three aspects of how we discern our world as meaningful. An object, and a referent to that object, as well as an interpretant, constitutes the meanings we think about and how we act on such meanings as part of the ongoing relationships with our world. Peirce finds these three main components to sign-making as; likenesses or icons, which are representational, indices, which are referential; and symbols or signs, which are imaginative, interpretive, and relational. All three modes of experience are integrated and concurrent aspects of our making our experiences relevant to our beliefs and actions.3 In two early essays Peirce possibly initiates what would become his later more fully developed semiotic method.4 Specifically, I highlight Peirce’s essays, “Trichotomic” and “Evolutionary Love,” both of which include references to the arts, sciences, and aesthetics.5 Peirce introduces a definition of aesthetics in his essay, “Trichotomic,” and although it is technically dense as a passage describing consciousness, it is important to understanding community experiences as influenced by creative practices. Peirce writes, The Genuine synthetic consciousness, the consciousness of that which has its being in its thirdness is Reason. The dynamical variety is a consciousness of a coordination between acts of sense and will, it is the looking upon the phenomena of sense and will as rational, which we may call Desire, though that does not precisely define it. The statical variety is the comparison of feelings, and may be called esthetic understanding.6 By synthetic consciousness Peirce is referring to our interpretive processes, by which we perceive and make sense of our world. The dynamical variety of consciousness can be thought of as artistic, creative practices. The aesthetic aspect of the process “collects present and absent into a whole,” and pins down our feelings as a matter of relational interpretation.7 A second definition is given in his essay “Evolutionary Love,” and he offers this definition while anticipating and lamenting the passing of a popular relevance of aesthetic theories based on “natural judgements of the sensible heart.”8 He places aesthetics, and evolving modern life in a creative arena, available to everyone, purposely making a point of relating evolution and aesthetics to our loving relationships. There are three modes of evolution, tychasm (chance), ananchasm (circumstantial and logical), and agapastic (creative). The later mode of evolution is particularly aesthetic. Peirce explains, All three modes of evolution are composed of the same general elements. Agapasm exhibits them the most clearly. The good result is here brought to pass, first, by the bestowal of spontaneous energy by the parent upon the offspring, and second, by the disposition of the latter to catch the general idea of those about it and thus to subserve the general purpose.9 He goes on to explain that science and aesthetics are meaningful to people’s lives through different modes of understanding, but both involve a “continuity of mind,” which involves signs. So both can be creative if work in those areas is done with focus on our “general purpose,” thereby being aesthetically attuned. Our evolutionary aesthetics can happen through community, by an individual developing reasoning because of their relationships with their neighbor, and/or by an individual genius for recording meanings in their

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experiences because of “an attraction it exercises upon his mind.”10 So I assume Peirce means that our moral development is aesthetic as a matter of feeling and reasoning, a matter of penetrating relationships, and a matter of focusing our talents and energies on value-laden experiences. Accordingly, people’s feelings and thoughts are focused by ideas and signs, which are continually reinterpreted, while holding a continuity of meaning. For Peirce, aesthetics and the arts are spatially and temporally connected yet changeable, as we integrate our relationships, practices, and ideas, turning our attention to the art object (or practice) at hand.11 Furthermore, artistic objects, practices, and ideas are practical enterprises, and they are thought of in terms of their practical effects. Art objects raise questions, such as how everyday aesthetic practices, and the making of art objects, are meaningful to our everyday experiences. We can also ask whether such creative practices better our world. Peirce argues that changes in the world are brought about by compelling ideas energized through evolutionary love, and the embodied arts further melioristic strivings through community spirit, neighbourly love, and gifted creativity. Applying his theory to particular art practices, I find a like comparison with drawing and dance, as both are creative practices employing relational signs and enlivening worldwide goals, such as the goal I will highlight: world peace. Although drawing is often thought of as a reflective, mindful art, while dance is immediate, physical, and expressive, both arts embody what Peirce terms esthetic reasoning (which I call aesthetic reasoning). Aesthetic reasoning involves symbolic meanings (what Peirce calls signs), ushering people into personal and cultural relationships. To further the discussion, I will explain connections between artistic signs of drawing and dance and Peirce’s aesthetics of evolutionary love, thereby describing an experiential sense of cultural creative change, which is unifying, hopeful, and peaceful. Considering American Modern Dance at its origins, in connection with the then contemporary thinking and drawings of Peirce, raises new ground for propagating universal symbols of peace. One of my main objectives in this discussion is to highlight how the arts might be ethical, so I reference Peirce’s interpretations of Plato. Peirce was a Plato scholar and philologist, and his thinking on aesthetics was influenced by that research. I also engage in hermeneutics by comparing Mark Morris’ critical dance presentations of Socrates to Peirce’s theories. I surmise that Morris’ dance and Peircean aesthetics embody symbols of love, death, and peace as an ethos of loving universality, emerging through co-joined, interpretive global cultures.

AESTHETICS AND ART AS SIGN-MAKING PROCESSES For Peirce, intuitive, perceptual and bodily contingent values express an expansive mindfulness, which pervades all of nature, and which is morally evolutionary.12 To begin to explain, Peirce holds that throughout the universe forces are not deterministic, rather matter congeals by its continuity, which is ever expanding through movement and time. For Peirce, what may seem oppositional is actually creative—in that what has continuity eventually unifies—allowing for recurring actions and eventful change. Peirce claims that movement occurs with and is motivated by feelings of such resumed continuity. Peirce calls this phenomena synechism, which we can discern as a process of lived experience.13 Synechism accounts for habits, creativity, and revaluations of ethical norms.14 Furthermore, our arts and practices are thoughtfully yet spontaneously made, so our thinking and doing

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as making sense of the world and our place in it is in sync with our feelings. In light of this theory, our ideas, practices, and habits become increasingly productive, so that we can facilitate ever more vital and important changes to our ontologies and normative values.15 Modern Dance is a good example to carry this discussion, as it can be an art form, alike to drawing and many other arts, through which practitioners express an open-endedness, yet continual in relation to their feelings, while thoughtfully moving and gesturing.16 As well, nascent values are often especially shown and felt by dancers and audiences, and without an explicit narrative or without having specific expressive intentions. Through their ongoing movement and gesturing of more static communicative relationships their intentions are value-oriented, as we will come to more fully understand in the third section of this chapter. For now, an example of this process by way of everyday actions can include thinking about the soma-aesthetic benefits of facilitating inter-connectedness of life’s energies, and mind–body connectedness with others as vital to creativity, such as greeting one another or encouraging one another through touch or even applause, as a process of value-making. When no determinate outcome is set before our experiencing of moving and gesturing in such ways, the meanings of graceful movements present our inter-relational feelings before any judgment or moral decision is made. In kind we can discern the meaningfulness of beauty and grace as intimately connecting people, who are working through problems and challenges, as such experiences are increasingly valueladen. To further clarify synechism in terms of values, Peirce, while a philosopher of science and logic, was also involved with thinking about what he thought of as phenomenology; as an inquiry into “the analysis of what kind of constituents there are in our thoughts and lives (whether these be valid or invalid being quite aside from the question).”17 Peirce’s synechism theory gives ground to a phenomenology involving aesthetic values. Synechism is an experiential process of concretizing one’s felt mindfulness, in that our feelings congeal and have continuity, through our personal and public relationships. As people discover more about their awareness of themselves and the world, they are more able to put their experiences into broader contexts, thereby constituting their growth and learning as moral and ethical agents of ongoing experiences. With such a confluence of consciousness, feelings, and situations, we come to know reality as familiar, yet continuing and morally impactful.18 For Peirce, there is no perceptual reality without a sense of living in an open-ended, emotional, value-laden environment.19 Turning our attention to these phenomenological relationships, Peirce’s views might include radical (or open)—yet ethical—interpretations of values, as our feelings and relationships are impacted by chance, embodied in the creative processes of arts such as dance and drawing.20 In this aspect, values are somewhat experimental and open to our moral imagination. To offer an example of synechism in the manner of the arts, a dancer performs a movement or passage many times, and if danced with intensity, the passage will change in creative and phenomenal ways by the dancer’s spontaneity and grace. As well, a dancer is continually enthralled with differing experiences and ideas of their world, thereby reinterpreting how to move and what their movements mean. Erick Hawkins, in his text The Body as a Clear Space, offers a similar explanation of creativity and reception, “As artists in the modern dance, we have to go on a voyage of discovery constantly.” He expands on this thought, This discovery, this revolution which is still to be made in dance, is in that pure fact of existence, that awareness of awareness, that first function of art – the material of dance

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itself for its own sake is in transition before your eyes, instant by instant, before it is meanings, associations, or language – the immediately apprehended and eternal “now.”21 Hawkins, as a choreographer and dancer, describes feeling while dancing and watching dance as mindful. He was influenced by F. S. C Northrop’s philosophy.22 Northrop describes a first order and a second order of aesthetic experience and artistic making; the first being a naïve realism, followed by second order objectivity of structuring and defining feelings, sensations, and artistic methods. Both Northrop employing philosophy, and Hawkins practicing choreography and dancing, attempts to disclose the radical empiricism of a synthesis of both orders.23 Radical empiricism is defined in this context as the importance of one’s understanding as an essential involvement with the world, and as a matter of one’s relationships with the varied aspects of experience.24 The point is that Hawkins’ experiential view of dance corresponds with Peirce’s understanding of meaningful, yet relational and changeable aesthetics.25 Here, I think there could be a correlation between Northrop’s and Hawkins’ emphasis on radical empiricism in the arts and Peirce’s phenomenology and semiotics. However, my purpose here is to speak specifically of the ethical aesthetics of art from a Peircean point of view, so investigating those possible connections is best left for a future discussion.26 Moreover, Peirce explains a further progression in understanding aesthetic practices as relational and open-ended, as he stresses that our thoughtful feelings through movement are signs, leading us to further interpretations and new signs. Signs take on a thoughtful continuity, becoming culturally symbolic.27 We can understand how once an audience or practitioner leaves a performance they can think and feel that performance as a matter of thought-filled moments animating their futures. We might even gesture spontaneously with a more confident sense of meaning, upon leaving a performance. Therefore, dancing in the here and now can bridge our past experiences with our futures, as value laden and meaningful. The radical empirical aspects of such artistic practices and spectatorship are aspects of wide-ranging, symbolic, and communicative fields of feelings and social engagement. As well, each person is symbolic as we soma-aesthetically reinterpret our thoughtful experiences of movement, and this is how we come to be more graceful and value-oriented. Now let us turn our thinking to Peirce’s notion of apagism, in relation to signs. Peirce proposed aesthetics as integrated with ethics, describing how symbols are meaningfully sustained as practices, which progress our co-joined lives in positive ways. The Ancient Greeks also had a conception of universal understanding that is spread through loving and graceful spiritual feelings; love as agape, meaning an unconditional love of what is eternal or divine. This universal love is sometimes understood as a static, closed system of idealism, but Peirce’s term agape is correlated with synhceism, notable aspects being the relational orientation of feelings and thought, continuity of creative approaches to our experiences, as well as meaningful reinterpretation of value-laden experiences. Upcoming, as an example of reinterpreting agape through dance, we will refer to the Symposium in which Plato bridges eros, or physical love, with agape, love that universalizes regenerative goodness throughout nature. For Peirce, human endeavors endure through spreading symbols of love. For now, I emphasize that agapism is Peirce’s term for ethical aesthetics of evolutionary love. Such aesthetics marks perceptions and signs of goodness, as these signs are embodied and active, motivating, and sustaining, while unifying environments and communities. However static, exclusive practices stunt the growth of one’s creativity as well as a communities’ common, yet pluralistic strivings.28

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EIDETIC DRAWING AND THE DELSARTE METHOD OF ELOCUTION AS UNIVERSAL SYMBOLS OF EVOLUTIONARY LOVE Peirce was not a dancer but a draftsman, although he interestingly discerns an ethical connection between the two.29 We will come to that connection after referring to his own drawings in relation to synechism and agapism, then disclosing what is meaningful about Peirce’s direct relationship with the Delsarte Method of elocution, which is the seminal technique of American Modern Dance. As well as ongoing studies of the arts, photography, film, painting, music, and dance, in relation to Peircean semiotics, scholars have taken interest in Peirce’s philosophy in the context of his habits of doodling/sketching and making rebus puzzles.30 Peirce undoubtedly thought eidetically, realizing that our imagistic perceptions assist us in interpreting reality. Peirce considered ideas and conceptions, as well as what is often called the unconscious, as beginning with the continuity of perceptions and interpretations, as he was constantly mentally and actually sketching new realizations, while correlating drawing with experimentation. Peirce was fascinated by bi-stable images, such as the duck/rabbit image and, in part, drew his theory of perception from such imagery. In fact, in the late 1880s, Joseph Jastrow, who drew and theorized about the duck/rabbit image, was Peirce’s student at Johns Hopkins.31 Tullio Viola thinks of Peirce’s phenomenology and drawing as an embodied form of abduction or “inferential or active nature of perception.”32 Viola pulls Peirce’s larger system of philosophy into contemporary studies of cognitive imaging and aesthetics, since he discerns that we rely on imaging as we “build up the world we inhabit.”33 For Viola, creatively we interpret and reinterpret concepts or images as we are making discoveries about our world while questioning our “perceptual habits” which bond us integrally with our world.34 Peirce’s drawing of a stone-wall demonstrates how we make general inferences, but also how we are interested in guessing about or finding the possibilities of experimenting with what we are seeing. Feelings about what we are seeing are the material qualities of new ways of seeing (they are the medium, so to speak, of an artistic practice), and feelings can become symbolic.35 A person looking at the duck/rabbit drawing might say, “I see it is a duck, but I can see how you think it is a rabbit,” and so the relationships involved in discerning the meanings expand to feelings about what others are experiencing. Yet Peirce’s drawing can be seen as a stone-wall or a meandering serpentine line, and although these interpretations can often inter-mingle and/or change, one’s interpretation constitutes a perception that holds and is fixed for a time. Drawings add to our curiosity about the world in that we can review marks and symbols, changing our perspectives and interpretations. Therefore, drawn symbols do not rely on private processes such as “intuitions,” but they carry forward congealed mindfulness, coming from our sensorial experiences. Through ongoing processes of sensing and thinking what is real from other interpretations—maybe new, maybe previously known—multiple perspectives are made more reliable, so that artists and viewers do not depend on tacit reasoning.36 By understanding one’s perceptions as a process involving possibilities and questioning, we learn a moral lesson, in that we can reinterpret our initial perceptions, thereby changing our feelings toward things. Peirce drew diagrams to help explain his theory of perception, thinking of drawing and gesture in terms of a building up of ideas through relationships with others’ points of view, rather than merely representing what is found. He therefor locates the synechistic

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aspect of the drawing. Of course, drawing relates to dance through practiced movement, but also through active perception, interpretation, and re-enactment or critique.37 William Hogarth, during the eighteenth century, developed a philosophy of art based on draftsmanship. He claims that the serpentine line marks the seminal line of beauty, as it is found in nature but also ethically by inciting liveliness, activity, and gracefulness. Of course, the serpentine line is important throughout the sciences, arts, and mathematics. For example, by joining two serpentine lines we can understand how, in terms of Peircean semiotics and aesthetic interpretation, a geometrical asymptote becomes not infinite straight lines but the symbol of the aperion, which is drawn by making a figure eight turned sideways. Aperion was symbolic of boundless infinity and harmony for the Ancient Greeks, and we can think of the sign as being conceived through our reinterpretation by metaphysical speculation, and as the other way around, from nature or feelings to geometry. The symbol or feeling of aperion gives us an example of a continuum of reality, as a symbolic and synechistic experience. Furthermore, there is an intriguing connection between the symbolization of a serpentine line and what was during the early twentieth century distinguished as a scientific method of movement conveying meanings, namely the Delsarte Method of elocution.38 Before we disclose that connection with drawing, let us recall the connections between the Delsarte Method, Peirce, and the roots of American Modern Dance. American Modern Dance was founded on Delsartian semiotics, because of the collaboration of Steele MacKaye with Francois Delsarte. Peirce correlates his understanding of semiotics with Steele MacKaye’s version of Delsartian semiotics of elocution in his essay “Trichotomic.”39 Delsarte used the term semiotics to refer to his advanced method of attributing meanings to facial expressions, gestures and poses, thinking of his method as a reflection on the Christian trinity, and as a matter of mind, body, and soul.40 Peirce became quite familiar with the Delsartian method of elocution as taught by the American painter, actor, and theater impresario MacKaye, because Peirce’s wife Juliette Peirce, who was an actress, studied the technique.41 Iris Smith Fischer, in her research on Peirce’s development of semiotics in relation to theater, connects his semiotics with the expressive techniques of Delsarte and MacKaye. Delsarte’s method of gestures and pantomime develops how people fuse their movements with their speech and their environments, as when they are presenting speeches, performing, and going about expressing their authentic identity in everyday life. As well, the method relies on pantomime as a meaningful form of rhetoric, emphasizing pose and gesture, as a kind of existential conversation. Our re-enactments, in light of Delsartian elocution, are filled with our most profound desires and hopes for our purposes in life, not mere imitations of role models. Fischer notes that MacKaye and Peirce were more naturalistic, rather than metaphysical, in terms of their semiotic philosophies than Delsarte. Fischer writes, Peirce’s interest in Mackaye’s system of actor training seems to focus on the reshaping of perceived binaries—aesthetic/semeiotic, inner/outer, spirit/matter—into more valid triadic conceptions of embodied cognition.42 To further this line of study we can recall the research of Lee Chaifa Ruyter, in her essay, “American Delsartism: Precursor of an American Dance Art.” Ruyter notes that MacKaye, along with his student Genevieve Stebbins, furthered Delsarte’s methods by popularizing a gymnastic harmony therapy emphasizing that the speaker, actor, or dancer can develop their ability to open soma-aesthetic channels of less resistance (ie. continuity) when communicating through meaningful poses and gestures. Their method and therapy

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was brought fully into a performance mode, namely through two dancers who were students of Stebbins, the pioneers of American Modern Dance, Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis.43 In relation to another aspect of Delsartian semiotics, Stebbins spread “physical culture to the general public,” especially to middle and upper class women, empowering them through their movements as they sense their meaningful presence in the world.44 Stebbins expanded on MacKaye’s techniques by instructing participants not to use their bodies like dynamic engines, pushing and pulling oneself into motion, but moving while opening oneself up more fully to the inter-connectedness of all life. She suggests that a dancer or participant pattern their movements on a fundamental “motion in nature,” namely the spiral curve.45 Stebbins meshes performance dancing with health and community benefits by designing techniques that can be done by everyone, employing a seminal design of nature. Dancers call such bodily movements “spiral successive movements,” and we can do one such movement as we make our body into an ocean wave. I compare this to Peirce’s investigation of the stonewall, recalling he unlocks a realization of how spontaneity through spiral lines, as felt perceptions, contributes to our broad ontologies as well as our normative habits.46 Also Stebbins choreographed with a cultural anthropology in mind, as she connected her staged assembled presentations to what she knew about dances of the Orient and Ancient Greece.47 This embodied employment of ancient cultures, as meaningful to self-empowerment and community engagement rather than fantasizing or parodying primitivism, would become a theme running throughout American Modern Dance, including the choreography of Hawkins and Morris (as will be discussed). Pluralism by way of movement and thought connects with cultural histories, for both Stebbins and Peirce. I place importance on Peirce’s essay “Tichotomic” which he wrote in 1888 to discuss MacKaye’s “practices of signs,” noting that his interpretation has not been talked about in connection with the history of dance and the ethics of well-being. Although Peirce writes specifically about MacKaye’s semiotics in respect to elocution, we can disclose a field of philosophical thinking in respect to developing people’s awareness of the meanings of inter-connectedness with nature, including each other, through fluid movement and symbolism. Peirce says MacKaye’s method develops “reasoning with esthetic understanding,” which is more than movement by habit, as it is “the ground of our faculty of learning.”48 I think we can think of this sort of understanding as embodied meanings, in that such reasoning is full with context and ongoing action. Peirce, as well, infers that aesthetically felt signs can inspire change and creativity through different mediums as aesthetic understanding, in that signs can inter-relate through the arts, while retaining specific artistic practices and conscious attributes.49 Peirce thereby merges MacKaye’s semiotics with an ethics, claiming that aesthetic reasoning is productive as an interested, investigative, relational kind of human nature. He also discusses how meaningful movements can be practical signs, as parts of evolutionary processes of universal hopes for a more ethical world. Gestures are representative through imitative likenesses, but there are also movements that do not make a point of distinguishing between the sign and the thing signified. These are signs indicative of a plural consciousness, as a kind of symbolization bridging what is there in the essence of the movement and what is not there yet in reality, as an evolution of movement and thought.50 Pantomime of this kind is what Peirce claims as the most rational kind of thinking. Pantomime (and I suggest we think of Peirce’s passages on pantomime as related to dance) is therefor an immediate communicative mode of expression and a continuity of mindfulness, carrying forward the

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full continuity of nature. Peirce writes, “Pantomime alone is mainly representation of the purely artistic kind to be contemplated without analysis and without discrimination of the sign from the thing signified.”51 The emphasis for Peirce, as well as MacKaye and Stebbins, was on using human expression as symbolizing enlivened meanings, linking movement with ethics by promoting well-being, honesty, growth, and unity through culture and community. Theirs was an organic semiotics, portending a living, ongoing kind of truthful symbolism that remains open to the individual’s movements, perspectives, and interpretations. As explained, we can say that American Modern Dance has its roots in such an ethical symbolism by which a practitioner, and interpreter of gestures, finds meaningful relationships amongst the movement of signs. Peirce thinks of such harmony as agapism; aesthetic relationships that are infinitely interconnected. To give an example, Peirce seems to draw eidetically, while evoking embodied feelings of dancing as he explains agapism and evolutionary love, “The movement of love is circular, at one and the same impulse projecting creations into independency and drawing them into harmony.”52 He then progresses his thoughts similarly to how Stebbins developed everyday gymnastics of wellbeing, which was then developed into a performing art, and to an ethics. Here we understand aesthetics as a matter of well-being and beauty in an experiential sense, which includes a sense of what is good for our communities. Peirce finds the movement of love as ethical. He explains in “Evolutionary Love,” This seems complicated when stated so; but it is fully summed up in the simple formula we call the Golden Rule. This does not, of course, say, do everything possible to gratify the egoistic impulses of others, but it says, sacrifice your own perfection to the perfectionment of your neighbour.53 His ethics pushes beyond self-interestedness, spurring people to act on inclusive, nondiscriminatory feelings of love.54 Peirce continues, Love is not directed to abstraction but to persons; not to persons we do not know, nor to numbers of people, but to our own dear ones, our family and neighbours. “Our neighbour,” we remember, is one whom we live near, not locally perhaps, but in life and feeling.55 Theoretically, he combines his existential concepts of synechism, aesthetic reasoning, and agapism, inter-relating creativity with progressive ideas, growing and learning as a matter of meliorism, and thoughtful practices in sync with feelings of love.56 Finally, Peirce finds a creative “spirit of an age” existing for a plurality of people, places, and things, all on a progressive trek toward visionary, yet practical goals.57 Now we can see more clearly how artistic practices, specifically Modern Dance, can move our world toward a better future.

MARK MORRIS’ SOCRATES AS BOTH CRITIQUE AND UNIVERSAL SYMBOL OF WORLD PEACE In “Philosophy and the Conduct of Life,” Peirce states that philosophy must stand aloof as a science from practical affairs because there is danger in postulating final truths or falsely interpreting ideas as transitory, because ideas, looked at in those ways, can too readily become meaningless when brought into new and possibly novel contexts. Peirce

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alerts us that philosophical thinking should be “disinterested” because scientists should accept established truths as fallible while moral imperatives are often felt and thought of as universal and vitally urgent. Yet he does not think that moral actions, or science for that matter, are non-factual, meaningless, or non-philosophical.58 He is obviously looking critically at the intersection of philosophy and ethics, just as Plato and Socrates did before him.59 His discussion is related to Plato’s challenge to philosophy in terms of norms in the Socratic dialogues, as Peirce warns of people’s biases and the emotional strength of people’s devotion to their own philosophical points of view.60 He recommends a synthesis of sentiment, so we develop our eros as aesthetic reasoning through visionary actions, so as to remain concurrent with the changes and continuum of goodness and existence. Within that essay he engages in a fuller discussion, praising Plato’s philosophical prowess by combining poetry with philosophy so as to conflate ideas with ethics, aesthetics, and art. Accordingly, Peirce puts forward a tenet of his own philosophy about the nature of artifacts, So, too, man looks upon the arts from his selfish point of view. But they, too, like the beasts and the trees, are living organisms, none the less so for being parasitic to man’s mind; and their manifest internal destiny is to grow into pure sciences.61 Yet he warns that if these signs, which are fields of human participation, are thought of in terms of absolute universal truths rather than thought-filled continuous forms unfolding meaningful existence and experience, they can be dangerous. Such artifacts can lose their relevance to everyday experience if not used in relational ways, becoming static, although sometimes impassioned, forms which are resistant to change.62 With these views in mind, we can understand the essay “Evolutionary Love” as an interpretive sign, disclosing a plurality to community aesthetics and ethical practices. I want to follow this hermeneutic lead in terms of an interpretation of the symbolic practices of Modern Dance. My methodology here gives reference to Peirce’s aesthetic reasoning as a creative, interpretive process. I reconcile this discussion by bringing forward some of the symbolic complexities of Morris’ dance Socrates, thereby evidencing the positive effects of pragmatic, continuous, change-making, universal signs. Mark Morris’ dance performance of “Socrates” is a reinterpretation of Eric Satie’s fin de siècle composition for voice and instrument. Originally Satie was commissioned to complement with music, an elocutionary exercise in Ancient Greek.63 His composition combines a non-narrative score with sung passages of three of Plato’s Socratic dialogues, thereby creating a conceptual type of opera. A soloist sings as the dancers perform. This symphonic drama is not based on rhetorical techniques, as the music does not for the most part continually rise and fall from crescendo to diminuendo. Satie wrote that he wanted the music to be “white and pure music of Antiquity.” The libretto comes from the Symposium, Phaedrus and Phaedo, highlighting several common themes: love as a shared experience, finding the meaning of the soul through music and philosophy, nature as peaceful and meaningful in respect to human’s everyday lives, and death as a process of renewal. In the first movement, we hear sung Plato’s poem from the Symposium, Love gives peace to me and stillness to the sea Lays winds to rest, and care worn men to sleep Love fills us with togetherness and drains all our divisiveness away. Love calls gatherings like these together.

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Plato’s understanding of universal peace as evolutionary love is echoed throughout the libretto. Morris’ dance offers symbolic meanings through mixing elocutionary gestures and poses, his choreography re-enacts everyday movements in life in conjunction with community dancing such as the roundel. The choreography seems charged with symbolic reasoning, as we, as watchful participants, can question Platonic ethics. We can re-think questions about the connection of love, death, shared experience, and moral excellence, as well as the political questions of equality and justice. Morris’ dance is more oriented to its libretto than Satie’s music is to Plato’s text, as the dancer’s gestures become embodied with the meaning of the music. A viewer and listener can allow the dancers to become absorbed with the music. Act one shows how people’s eros can be motivated by desire, thereby enslaving one’s soul.64 Dancers are roped together in threes, symbolically presenting Plato’s tripartite: mind, body, and soul. Dancing by pantomiming walking and conversing as if gracefully strolling across the agora, the performers transform the philosophical meanings of such a state built on slavery, by desire, through movement, space and timing. Being roped together they show how a soul feels when physically enslaved. However, discussions are ongoing throughout the community, obviously showing intense concern about the enslavement of the community’s political and ethical well-being. They engage in philosophical discussion, but often in these scenes one person in the triads lingers, being left subserviently behind, reminding us of the problems of inequality, slavery, and an exclusive camaraderie. In the second act, the unbound citizens romp with lively footwork and dance a roundel, as the polis celebrates together as a community. The dancers often move with stoic grace, forming serpentine lines while harmonizing their bodies with the music and undulating, thereby connecting a continuum with the feeling of the audience. The dancers hold hands, and as their gestures are meaningfully symbolic of the ethical, cultural, relatedness of the narrative and music, their configurations are clearly not mere abstraction. The dancers’ portrayal and physicality call the audience into their sense of ongoing, rhythmic community, marking collective aesthetic reasoning.65 In Delsartian fashion, their gestures motivate continued expression, not by copying life but by acting as creative signs, as the dancers are engaging meaningfully with the audience’s reception. Morris, as well, brings theatrical staging to the composition, and it is here we can feel his expression of naturalism—a kind of Hellenistic baroque—with a sense of pathos embedded with humanistic ideas. Watching the dancers gesturing and posing, our physical feelings are heightened while our thoughts are flooded with images. People in the audience who have seen Greco-Roman statuary can once again be mesmerized by the naturalism of the Baberini Faun, when one dancer lounges as part of the symposium, supported by others as if raised on a plinth. One gesture is particularly poignant as the dancers raise their right hands, palm inward, with one finger pointing upward, while outstretching their left arms. At those times Raphael’s Plato is reborn, as he gestures to the eternal heavens while walking through the School of Athens with his student Aristotle. We can also think of David’s stoic Socrates as he gestures, bidding farewell to his family and friends, but not to his philosophy of peace and understanding. In the third act a dancer portraying the condemned Socrates lifts his arm and finger again, and at this dramatic climax we can call to mind the Peace Statue which stands at Heiwa Knen-zo, the Peace Park, in Nagasaki, Japan. We can contemplate this gesture, turning our thoughts to Plato and Peirce, disclosing a meaning of our individuality, for the

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number one is calculable as a single unit more than zero, but when calculated relationally it is so much more. Plato taught us to understand not merely in numbers but to the meaning of the sum, and Peirce explains how this plurality occurs through aesthetic reasoning and syncheism. This Peace Statue is a sign embodying the human condition of striving to understand ourselves, employing our reasoning as a seamless connectivity with all existence, as a process which is changeable and ongoing, uniting our feelings of peace, love and understanding. In kind, we can think further than the physics of a nuclear explosion to the relational and ethical meanings of our presence as part of a creative, peaceful time/space continuum. The Statue’s gesture is symbolic of universal peace, it carries forward an idea of the importance of aesthetic reasoning in relation to a continuum of love. The Nagasaki Peace Statue, which gestures to the air as a warning of the threat of nuclear holocaust from the air, gestures for all people to come together with a universal resolve for peace and remembrance. Different in some ways to the Platonic and Peircean relationships between infinity and divinity, this humanistic symbol still echoes their philosophies of peace. But perhaps, when watching Morris’ dance, it is possible the raised hand still marks a connection to our infinite physical connectedness with a boundless mindfulness of evolutionary love. Morris is able to symbolize how ideas are enlivened through movement and community, as the human body being finite is carried forward by what is infinite; love, peace, and harmony, as individuals are rooted, yet opened expressively through our relationships. Clearly, thinking of the immensity of the statement at Nagasaki, we need to rely on aesthetic reasoning, putting into motion ideas and goals we share, which are pluralistic in perspective, interpretation, and expression, and this is what Peirce describes as, “the real potential world.”66 In the final act, Morris draws on stage, forming the dancers together as a lotus symbol, representing nature’s eternal mindfulness, a flowering of consciousness, and a transmigration of the soul. Somewhat paradoxically, Socrates is at this moment condemned by his fellow citizens. As the dancers move into the final passages, Satie’s score is heard to make a singular dramatic crescendo, rising from a tetrachord to a fournote figure, followed by a funeral dirge-like motif. It is then the dancers begin to die, each dropping to the floor in their own time, as if in their mourning of each other’s deaths each passes from the present performance into history. With their passing, all the citizens die, except one dancer who walks again, seemingly searching through Elysian Fields for the ideas and humanity of Greek democracy. Peirce also thinks about immortality in relation to symbols, music, and synechism, and I want to continue to evoke Peirce’s ideas on synechism, to reinforce Morris’ connections of body and soul. In Peirce’s “Immortality in the Light of Synechism” he offers an illuminating story, A friend of mine, in consequence of a fever, totally lost his sense of hearing. He had been very fond of music before his calamity; and, strange to say, even afterwards would love to stand by the piano when a good performer played, “So then, “I said to him, “after all you can hear a little.” “Absolutely not at all,” he replied; “but I can feel the music all over my body.” “Why,” I exclaimed, “how is it possible for a new sense to be developed in a few months!” “It is not a new sense,” he answered. “Now that my hearing is gone I can recognize that I always possessed this mode of consciousness, which I formerly, with other people, mistook for hearing. In the same manner, when the carnal consciousness passes away in death, we shall at once perceive that we have

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had all along a lively spiritual consciousness which we have been confusing with something different.67 Morris’ dances and reinterpretations of musical themes such as with Satie’s compositions and Brahm’s “Liebeslieder Walzer” (1868) are also contemporarily politically relevant. Recently, Alastair Macaulay, writing in the New York Times, clarified the importance of choreography as an interpretive and socially critical medium, as he explained Morris’ troupe’s feminist statements while dancing “Love Song Waltzes” (first performed in 1989). The evolution of love is portrayed as a message of sexual freedom becoming aesthetically political, through the danced actions, poses, and gestures of the performers. Macaulay writes, In Mr. Morris’s world, not only are same-sex couples equal to opposite-sex ones, but women can be propulsive, and men submissive. This was the view of gender with which modern dance began to transform itself in the 1980s; Mr. Morris was among its earliest exponents. It took ballet another 30 years to catch up.68 We can think again of Peirce’s understanding of an inclusive community relating to each other openly by movement, considering future possibilities through our communications of signs, and our open-ended aesthetic ideas. Our social consciousness is not separated from our carnal and spiritual being, and such an embodied sense of meaning is present to us while we experience sign-making and the arts. When sympathy fails as a theory of ethical pluralistic thinking, or normative ethics only gives us unhappy maxims, an ethics of agapism and an aesthetic reasoning could guide us to better solutions. In terms of Peirce’s idea of evolutionary love, world peace can be seen as the best conception of effectual changes of our world, as we continually reinterpret our symbolic presences in our communities through our arts. Our multiperspectival aesthetic reasoning allows us to express our ethical evolution as a continuity of love and its unifying processes, in part with the dynamic of creativity and spontaneous change. Accordingly, there is real hope the world will eventually rid itself of hate and war. Certainly this means we would be moving toward unity over divisiveness and oppression, while individuals retain their expressiveness and creativity. On this final note, we can look ever more intently to Peirce’s philosophy that evolution is a matter of aesthetics. Peirce’s words resonnate, “Love, recognising germs of loveliness in the hateful, gradually warms it into life, and makes it lovely.”69

NOTES 1.

Thinking of Peirce as a pragmatic aesthetician can be debated, and the theoretical bonds which tie such a group together is dependent on interpretations of their writings. However, two sources place Sanders as a precursor to John Dewey’s more tightly articulated aesthetics, and to a review of the tenets of pragmatic aesthetics. First, Richard Shusterman’s essay “Somaesthetics and C.S. Peirce,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 23: 1 (2009): 8–27. The caveat to citing this essay is that Shusterman does not point directly to Peirce’s connections to fluid expressions and gestures. For an outline of pragmatic aesthetics, in relation to nature and interpretation see Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Lanham, Boulder, New York, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000).

2.

See Charles S. Peirce, Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotics, ed. James Hoopes (Chapel Hill and London; University of North Caroline Press, 1991). When writing this chapter I found

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particularly helpful: Michael Leja, “Peirce, Visuality and Art,” Representations, 72 (2000): 97–122; and Dinda L. Gorlee, “A Sketch of Peirce’s Firstness and its Significance to Art,” Sign, Systems Studies, 37:1/2 (2009). 3.

See Peirce, “What is a Sign,” The Essential Peirce, Editors Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (Bloomington and Indiapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), vol II, pp. 4–10.

4.

See Peirce, “Excerpts from Letters to Lady Welby (1906–08)” and “Excepts from Letters to William James (1909),” The Essential Peirce, vol. II, pp. 477–491.

5.

Peirce,“Trichotomic” and “Evolutionary Love,” in The Essential Peirce, vol. II.

6.

Peirce,“Trichotomic,” p. 283.

7.

Ibid.

8.

Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel, eds., Introduction to “Evolutionary Love,” The Essential Peirce, vol. II, p. 352.

9.

It is interesting to note Peirce uses an example from geometry, drawing on physically applicable lines, to show that “tychasm and anancasm are degenerate forms of agapasm” “Evolutionary Love,” p. 362.

10. “Evolutionary Love,” p. 364. 11. See “Trichotomic,” p. 282. 12. Peirce states, “The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws.” Peirce, “The Architecture of Theories,” The Essential Peirce, eds. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992) Vol. 1, p. 293. See also, more on his explanation of how feelings become thoughtful habits and virtues, ibid., 297. 13. For a thorough explanation of synechism see Peirce, “The Law of Mind,” The Essential Peirce, vol. I, pp. 312–333. 14. See C. S. Peirce, “Evolutionary Love,” The Essential Peirce, Vol. I, p. 361. 15. He wrote about his interests in the normative sciences, “esthetics,” ethics, and logic. He used the word esthetics (what I term aesthetics) as a main focus of this study. “For normative science in general being the science of the laws of conformity of things to ends, esthetics considers those things whose ends are to embody qualities of feeling, ethics those things whose ends lie in action, and logic those things whose end is to represent something” (Peirce, “The Three Normative Sciences,” The Essential Peirce, vol. II, p. 200). 16. F. C. Northrop applies his aesthetics and value theory to American Modern Dance, painting, and drawing. He states the processes and meanings of art express values indeterminately, “Thus world-embracing common denominator invariants are achieved but not at the expense of differences.” See, F. C. Northrop, “Toward a General Theory of the Arts,” Journal of Value Inquiry, I:2 (1967): 113. 17. Peirce wrote in a letter to William James, about phenomenology, “It is a branch of philosophy I am most deeply interested in and which I have worked upon almost as much as I have upon logic.” I bring these references into the discussion to refer to how Peirce’s profound interests of phenomenology did include radical (or open) interpretations of human experience. This aspect of his thinking on consciousness is born out in another quote from Peirce’s letters to James, which according to scholars carries the caveat, “phenomenology has nothing to do with psychology,” possibly proving my point that for Peirce, it has everything to do with aesthetics and ethics, and with an open ended/ experiential manner of radical empiricism. Peirce wrote, “the conception of the real is derived by a melioration of the constraint-side of double-sided consciousness. Therefore to say that it is the world of thought that is real is, when properly understood, to assert emphatically that reality of the public world of the indefinite future as against our past

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opinions of what it was to be.” See: C. S. Peirce, Letter to W. James, Oct. 3, 1904. James Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS 58. Accessed October, 2019. 18. Peirce writes, “The tendency to regard continuity, in the sense in which I shall define it, as an idea of prime importance in philosophy may conveniently be termed synechism.” He goes on to write, “What the law is: Logical analysis to mental phenomena shows that there is but one law of mind, namely that ideas tend to spread continuously and to affect certain others which stand to them in a peculiar relation of affectability. In this spreading they lose intensity, and especially the power of affecting others, but gain generality and become welded with other ideas” (Peirce, “The Law of Mind,” The Essential Peirce, vol. I, p. 313). 19. Peirce explains, “Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a community, without definite limits, and capable of an indefinite increase of knowledge” (Peirce, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” The Essential Peirce, vol. I, p. 53). 20. Synechism being productive engaging existence as we reach out to others through thinking while acting, ever more intuitively, thereby encountering new ethical perspectives and territories. Peirce writes in “Evolutionary Love,” “Growth by exercise takes place also in the mind. Indeed, that is what it is to learn. But the most perfect illustration is the development of a philosophical idea by being put into practice. The conception which appeared, at first, as unitary, splits up into special cases; and into each of these new thought must enter to make a practicable idea. This new thought, however, follows pretty closely the model of the parent conception; and thus a homogeneous development takes place” (The Essential Peirce, vol. I, p. 361). 21. Erick Hawkins, The Body is a Clear Place and Other Statements on Dance, Foreword by Alan Kriegsman (Pennington, NJ: Princeton Book Co., 1992), p. 37. 22. See in this anthology, Louis Kavouras, “Early Floating in the Here and Now: The Radically Empirical Immediate Dance Poetry of Erick Hawkins and Lucia Dlugoszewski” (Chapter 2.7). 23. Northrop writes, “Dlugoszewski and Hawkins are widely read in the theory and philosophy of art, both Western and Zen Buddhist. It is to be noted in this connection that radical empiricism is always nominalist, any symbol denoting a differentiated sequence of perishing particulars each one of which is unique. Consequently, radically empirical art in its first function, be it contemporary Western, Southeast or Chinese Oriental, or Zen Japanese Buddhist, is, when consistently expressed, always an existentialist art and philosophy. Such radical empiricism shows in the title of Hawkins’ and Dlugoszewhki’s dance and music, ‘Here and Now With Watchers’ and ‘Dazzle on a Knife’s Edge’ ” (F. S. C. Northrop, “Toward a General Theory of the Arts,” Journal of Value Inquiry, 1:z.2 (1967): 111). 24. Radical empiricism in terms of William James and Charles S. Peirce. 25. Northrop was surely acquainted with Peirce’s influence on James’ philosophy, as it is common knowledge. It is such influence, in relation to radical empiricism, that is pertinent to our current discussion, not a comparison of James’ pragmatism and Peirce’s pragmatism. As a reference of such influence see, E. I. Taylor and R. H. Wozniak, eds., Pure Experience, the Response to William James (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1997), pp. ix–xxxii. 26. From my understanding and as John J. McDermott would agree, as he explains in a footnote of his introduction to James’ Essays in Radical Empiricism, “In a critical reading of this Intro, Max Fisch contends that a striking similarity exists between the relationship of radical empiricism and pragmatism in the thought of James and the relation of synechism and pragmatism in the thought of C.S. Peirce,” (James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, Introduction by John J. McDermott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), ft 19, p. xxxxvii).

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27. I do not detail the many versions of Peirce’s triad of conscious existence or semiotics, or his definitions of signs and symbols. But generally, it is important to note that interpretations of signs are ongoing. Peirce writes, “Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other signs, particularly from likenesses or from mixed signs partaking of the nature of likenesses or from mixed signs partaking of the nature of likenesses and symbols. We think only in signs. These mental signs are of mixed nature; the symbol-parts of them are called concepts. If a man makes a new symbol, it is by thoughts involving concepts. So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol can grow. Omene symbolum de symulo. A symbol, once in being, spreads among the peoples. In use and in experience, its meaning grows” (C. S. Peirce, “What is a Sign?” The Essential Peirce, vol. 2, p. 10). 28. Peirce quotes Henry James to offer a realization of agapism and creativity, “Henry James, the Swedenborgian, says: ‘It is no doubt very tolerable finite or creaturely love to love one’s own in another, to love another for his conformity to one’s self: but nothing can be in more flagrant contrast with the creative Love, all whose tenderness ex vi termini must be reserved only for what intrinsically is most bitterly hostile and negative to itself.’ This is from Substance and Shadow: an Essay on the Physics of Creation. It is a pity he had not filled his pages with things like this, as he was able easily to do, instead of scolding at his reader and at people generally, until the physics of creation was well nigh forgot” (Peirce, “Evolutionary Love,” The Essential Peirce, vol. I, p. 353). 29. I will be referring often to Peirce’s essay “Trichotomic” in which he makes a connection between the Delsarte Method of elocution, and his phenomenological concepts of synthetic “esthetic understanding,” and growth. See “Trichotomic,” The Essential Peirce, vol. II, pp. 280–284. 30. See Jaime Nubiola and Sara Barrena, “Charles Peirce’s First Visit to Europe, 1870–71: Scientific Cooperation and Artistic Creativity,” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, I.1 (2009), SSN http://lnx.journalofpragmatism.eu/?page_id=10 (accessed March 3, 2017). 31. See Tullio Viola, “Bistable Images and the Serpentine Line: A Chapter in the Prehistory of the Duck-Rabbit,” in Das Bildnerische Denken: Charles S. Peirce, eds. Franz Engle, Moritz Queisner, and Tullio Viola, Series Actus et Imagio 5 (Berlin Germany: De Gruyter, November, 2012), 123. Viola references Peirce’s thinking on phenomenology, bringing forward a visual reference, “This must be a science that does not draw any distinction of good and bad in any sense whatever, but just contemplates phenomena as they are, simply opens its eyes and describes what it sees” (The Essential Peirce, vol. II, p. 143). 32. Viola, “Bistable Images,” 118. We might note here that another of Peirce’s students, John Dewey, would also understand embodied artistic processes as curiosity or interest, as he explains both in “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” (1896), transferring that idea to artistic experience in Art as Experience (1934). See: John Dewey, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” The Essential Dewey, Vol. 2: Ethics, Logic and Psychology, eds. Larry A. Hickman and Thomas M. Alexander (Bloomington, In: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 3–10. Also John Dewey, Art as Experience (London: Penguin Books, 1934), throughout and especially pp. 165–166. 33. Viola, “Bistable Images,” 117. 34. Ibid. 35. Aesthetic meanings can be immediate, then they can be added too to take on objective meanings. C. S. Peirce, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” The Essential Peirce, vol. I, p. 43. 36. Peirce correlates drawing pictures with communicating by gesture, as he explains that drawings are useless in meaning unless they convey an experience of growing out of a time, place, and situation. He gives an example in his essay, “What is a Sign,” of a serpentine line

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which in the context of a second drawing becomes “ovals flattened together.” He also confers that drawing itself is a process done by the artist as a mode of reflecting on whether that artist’s “proposes will be beautiful and satisfactory.” Peirce, “What is a Sign?” The Essential Peirce, vol. II, pp. 6–7. 37. Peirce, “The Doctrine of Chances,” The Essential Peirce, vol. II, p. 141. For an explanation of what Peirce’s serpentine line drawings offer inspirationally and technically to the practice of drawing and for good images of some of Peirce’s drawing from the Houghton Harvard Library archive, see: Seymour Simmons, “C.S. Peirce and the Teaching of Drawing,” Peirce on Perception and Reasoning from Icons to Logic, eds. Kathleen A. Hull and Richard Kenneth Atkins (New York City, New York: Routledge, 2017) pp. 119–132. 38. See: Nancy Lee Chaifa Ruyter, “American Delsartism: Precursor of an American Dance Art,” Educational Theatre Journal, 25: 4 (December 1973): 420–435. 39. See C. S. Peirce, “Trichotomic,” The Essential Peirce, vol. I, pp. 280–284. Peirce wrote his essay “Trichotomic” to emphasize the similarity between his semiotics and Steele MacKaye’s elaboration on Delsarte’s semiotics. 40. Iris Smith Fischer, “Theatre at the Birth of Semiotics: Charles Sanders Peirce, François Delsarte, and Steele MacKaye,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 49: 3 (Summer 2013), 385. 41. Fischer, “Theatre at the Birth of Semiotics,” p. 371. 42. See: Fischer, “Theatre at the Birth of Semiotics,” p. 391. 43. Ruyter, “American Delsartism,” p. 429. 44. Ibid. 45. Ruyter writes, “Stebbins stressed the importance of correct breathing in the right functioning of the body, and taught breathing techniques. She developed the concept of human motion patterning itself on what she considered the basic motion in nature—the spiral curve, or spiral wave-motion (what we might call a spiral successional movement). In the service of these concepts, as well as of those she had inherited from Delsarte and Mackaye, Stebbins collected and created a multitude of exercises. What is most impressive is that, if the nineteenth-century aesthetic is stripped away, much of her theory and many of her exercises conform to present-day approaches to dance and actor training” (Ruyter, “American Delsartism,” 428). 46. As Viola says about drawing, “The training of the eye aims at bringing to the fore that factual dimension of what we perceive, which we always tacitly rely on in order to abductively build up the world we inhabit. . . . recovery of the innocence of the eye brings to our attention said about drawing (Viola, “Bistable Images,” 119). 47. Ruyter, “American Delsartism,” 429. 48. Peirce writes, “Pantomime may itself be divided, on the same principle, into three varieties; artistic pantomime which merely exhibits the man, his general disposition and what there is uppermost in him at the moment, and is to be contemplated without analysis; dynamical pantomime, as where one points with finger or shakes or holds up the finger to impress what one is saying, or when one shakes the fist, or knocks the interlocutor down; and sign-language, mostly (owing to the peculiar nature of pantomime) of an imitative kind but yet involving analysis and being really rather language than pantomime proper” (Peirce, “Trichotomic,” p. 282). 49. See Peirce, “Trichotomic,” p. 282. Peirce also writes, at p. 281, “Expression is a kind of representation or signification. A sign is a third mediating between the mind addressed and the object represented. If the thirdness is undegenerate, the relation of the sign to the thing signified is one which only subsists by virture of the relation of the sign to the mind addressed; that is to say, the sign is related to its object by virtue of a mental association.

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Conventional modes of expression, and other modes dependent on the force of association, enter largely into every art.” 50. For Peirce, MacKaye’s technique of dramatic expression/movement is a semiotics of synechism. “Mr. Mackaye’s division of the principles of being has considerable resemblance with this. What he calls the vital or passional principle, which sustains life, seems to be nearly what I call the simple consciousness of Feeling; what he calls the affectional or impulsive principle is my dual consciousness plus Desire and minus Sense; what he calls Reflection is probably Reason with the esthetic understanding” (Peirce, “Trichotomic,” pp. 283–284). 51. Peirce,“Trichotomic,” p. 282. 52. Peirce, “Evolutionary Love,” p. 353. 53. Ibid. 54. For an explanation of the history of Peirce’s philosophy in relation to discrimination, prejudice and racial bias, see Lana Trout, The Politics of Survival Peirce, Affectivity, and Social Criticism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). 55. Peirce, “Evolutionary Love,” p. 354. 56. Peirce writes, “If it could be shown directly that there is such an entity as the ‘spirit of an age’ or of a people, and that mere individual intelligence will not account for all the phenomena, this would be proof enough at once of agapastcism and of synechism. I must acknowledge that I am unable to produce a cogent demonstration of this, but I am, I believe, able to abduct such arguments as will serve to confirm those which have been drawn from other facts. I believe that all the greatest achievements of mind have been beyond the powers of unaided individuals; and I find, apart from the support this opinion derives from synechistic considerations, and from the purposive character of many great movements, direct reason for so thinking in the sublimity of the ideas and in their occurring simultaneously and independently to a number of individuals of no extraordinary general powers” (Peirce, “Evolutionary Love” p. 368). 57. Ibid. 58. Peirce says, “The scientific man is not in the least wedded to his conclusions. He risks nothing upon them. He stands ready to abandon one or all as soon as experience opposes them” (Peirce, “Philosophy and the Conduct of Life,” The Essential Peirce, vol. II (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 33). Note, Peirce reads Plato as coming to his senses on the truth in relation to the continuity of life, rather than the Heraclitean Cratylus’ notion that “Continuity implies Transitoriness” and that what is truly continuous is what is eternal, namely, Space and Time. But as said, Plato comes to understand that the potentiality of ideas is continuous in a very real sense. Peirce explains, “The dialogue of the Sophistes, latterly shown to belong to Plato’s last period, when he had, as Aristotle tells us, abandoned Ideas and put Numbers in place of them,—this dialogue, I say, gives reasons for abandoning the Theory of Ideas which imply that Plato himself had come to see, if not that the Textual Essences are continuous, at least, that there is an order of affinity among them, such as there is among Number. Thus, at last, the Platonic Ideas became Mathematical Essences, not possessed of Actual Existence but only of a Potential Being quite as Real, and his mature philosophy became welded into mathematics” (Peirce, “Philosophy and the Conduct of Life,” p. 35). 59. Ibid. 60. Peirce, “Philosophy and the Conduct of Life,” p. 34. 61. Peirce, “Philosophy and the Conduct of Life,” p. 39. 62. Ibid.

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63. Princess Edmond De Polignac commissioned Satie. De Polignac was part of a group of lesbian intellectuals who memorized and presented to audiences Plato’s dialogues. For a comprehensive and concise history of the Satie commission and the milieu’s interests in Socrates’ and Plato’s philosophies, and their involvement with elocution see the undergraduate honors thesis of Andrea Decker Morena. The thesis has been published online by the Utah State University. Morena’s thesis is very well documented, including many scholarly references. She includes biological information and memories from and about both Satie and De Polignac, among others, such as: Alan Gillmor, Erik Satie (Boston: Twayne, 1988) and Peito Dossena, “À la recherché du vrai Socrate,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 133:1 (2008): 1–31. See also: Morena, “The Cult of Socrates: The Philosopher and His Companions in Satie’s Socrates” (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press), 2013: http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1141&context= honors, (accessed September 5, 2017). 64. In this first act, the dancers are dressed in three different colors, maybe symbolic of three classes of citizens of the polis, or the three basic elements of air, earth, and water. 65. Peirce wrote about “the essential character of a line” in relation to the continued existence of the soul, which Peirce understands as having its telos in existence. In his manuscript on the Phaedo he writes, “To apply this argument to actual existence, and maintain that no real line could be terminated because no ideal line is terminated without infringement of its essential character would be if I rightly apprehend it, the precise parallel to the Phaedian argument for the immortality of the soul” (Peirce, Charles S. Peirce Papers, Logic IV. 115. Houghton Library Harvard University, 1787–1951 (MS Am 1632). 66. Peirce, “Philosophy and the Conduct of Life,” p. 41. 67. Peirce, The Essential Peirce, vol. II, p 3. 68. Allastair Macaulay, “How a Mark Morris Dance Reimages Love,” New York Times, August 8, 2018: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/08/arts/dance/mark-morris-love-song-waltzesbreakdown.html (accessed August 8, 2018). 69. Peirce, “Evolutionary Love,” p. 354.

CHAPTER 3.3

Groovy Bodies: The 1970s, Somatic Engagement and Dance CAROLINE SUTTON CLARK

This chapter explores changing attitudes about the body during the 1970s through the lens of theatrical and social dance practices in the United States. To do so, I connect the oral histories of an unconventional ballet company to a larger interplay between aesthetics, praxes of embodiment, and socio-cultural situations during these times. As a dance scholar, my hope is that some of these under-examined dance legacies from the 1970s may prove useful toward appreciating the many dimensions of dance, philosophies of embodiment, and aesthetics at work today.

SITE OF INQUIRY I “dropped into” investigating 1970s dance and aesthetics while researching central Texas dance history. Austin Ballet Theatre (ABT) was an amateur company in Austin, TX, but this group is especially noteworthy for its frequent, popular ballet concerts at the Armadillo World Headquarters, an infamous beer hall and psychedelic rock club. Over the course of almost every month for most of the 1970s, Austin Ballet Theatre performed mixed repertory ballet concerts to 1,000–1,200 raucous, beer-drinking audience members. According to oral history interviews, part of the company’s success was the result of how Austin Ballet Theatre’s artistic director and choreographer, Stanley Hall, consistently used the “sandwich” approach when determining the order in which ballets would be performed at each show. The sandwich metaphor, as used in traditional concert programming, represents a structure of presentation consisting of several stand-alone dances: ●

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A pleasant dance opens the show to ease audience members into the concert experience and attune them toward paying attention to movement. An experimental, serious, or guest-choreographed dance is sandwiched in the middle and provides the most challenging or featured work. An upbeat closer sends the audience home smiling and feeling positive about the event as a whole.

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My investigations into the contemporized “middle ballets” of ABT’s many concerts, as these dances were described by the Austin Ballet Theatre dancers, provided the data and inspiration for the broader conversations explored in this chapter. As a sandwich, the first and last dances function as slices of bread to deliver the meatiest dance, reflecting how innovation is often equated with artistic significance in theatrical dance in the United States. Both Herbert Gans, in his seminal 1975 text Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste,1 and Umberto Eco, in his 2005 article “Innovation and Repetition: Between Modern and Postmodern Aesthetics,”2 provide helpful scholarship theorizing how innovation functions in the discrimination of “high-culture” art and artistic values in the United States. So, while the presentation of classical ballets by Austin Ballet Theatre functioned to situate the company within a traditional domain of practice, the inclusion of more experimental dances demonstrated the ballet’s relevance as an artistic force free to be creative with techniques and composition. In newspaper reviews, dance critics demonstrate the struggle of established discourse to connect with innovation in ballet through their attempts to describe ABT’s middle offerings by many terms, including: “modern ballets,”3 “experimentations,”4 “contemporary ballets,”5 and “presentations.”6 However, given the inadequacy of labels, I propose shifting the question from one of taxonomy to a more performative, functional point of view: How did these dances do things for the people involved? Such an inquiry illuminates how dance praxes, as sites of being human, find ways to iterate aesthetically.

Data Themes from the Middle Ballets When asking such a question of Austin Ballet Theatre’s middle, contemporary-style ballets from the 1970s, several compositional elements and principles emerge as sites of potential inquiry. ●

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These ballets were largely abstract, yet utopian or dystopian in theme. The movement aesthetics, uniquely devised for each work, strayed from classical ballet schema to incorporate modern dance, jazz, and movement appropriated from other cultures. Dancers often wore form-revealing costumes such as leotards and unitards, usually with their hair loose or, at least, not in a ballet bun. The choreographies presented the dancers in a more or less equal social status on stage rather than appearing in a traditional balletic hierarchy of privileged ranking divided into featured principal dancers backed up by soloists and corps de ballet. Music other than classical ballet music accompanied the choreography, such as modernist classical or experimental jazz.

Altogether, these dances presented metaphorical communities of individuals inter-relating as equals through shared aesthetics of movement and attire. While the dancers all moved from a foundation in classical ballet training, the creative drive behind hybridity of form, contemporary music, form-fitting costumes, and an ecumenical way of inter-relating onstage also enacted liberation from traditional agendas of classical ballet with its hierarchy of dancers and presentation of featured heterosexual couples. To be sure, none of these artistic directions were unprecedented. Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes introduced much of the twentieth-century Euro-American dance world to mixed movement genres, modernity in music and visual art, and form-fitting costumes

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such as unitards (called “fleshings” at the time). Also, modern dancers, often influenced by African, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American cultures, experimented with all of the elements bulleted above, and the post-modernists of the 1950s–1970s pushed the boundaries of abstraction in dance and promoted equality amongst dancers onstage. Yet, these trends were just emerging in ballet practices in the United States outside of New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles during the 1970s. Accordingly, reception of such new directions for ballet in Austin were mixed. Oral testimony and newspaper articles demonstrate that Austin Ballet Theatre’s middle ballets, while in cultural circulation with the times, certainly challenged the established expectations of ballet aesthetics that many Austin audiences, especially those attending ballet for the first time, previously had. For example, a review of a December show by a local newspaper critic, titled “Holiday performance too ’60-ish,” declared, “Austin Ballet Theatre’s holiday program last Sunday at Armadillo World Headquarters could have used a little more of the season spirit and less of the ’60s spirit.”7 This 1960s spirit of the middle ballet was embodied by a “hybrid mixture” of “pop-disco choreography,” “Hindu postures,” and “bump and grind.”8 At the same time, the middle ballets could thrill other audience members, as in a contrasting review of the same ballet: [The Rites of Joseph Byrd] has been added to the program at audience request. The lights dim, and that weird electronic music wells through the darkened Armadillo. Onstage, a transparent sac, an embryo, rises to reveal a clump of bodies. They begin to move in the imperceptibly changing patterns (like one of those toy kaleidoscopes with colored rocks) that mark the best of Stanley Hall’s choreography. The program notes, “The children that represent the new generation believe they will change the world”. . . And from this tension, this unbearable concentration of bodies, escapes one dancer, like a butterfly, looping free, and you’re thinking, my god this is brilliant—and it’s over.9 Such contemporizing traits in movement, music, costumes, and themes functioned for Austin Ballet Theatre toward exciting a sense of relevance to the times, especially among the youth culture of hippies hanging out at the Armadillo. To quote one source, Austin Ballet Theatre was “where it was at.”10 Investigating further, how did these contemporary ballets stimulate such feelings of being connected to something meaningful, something happening?

THE 1970S Regarding the times during which the Austin Ballet Theatre performed at the Armadillo World Headquarters, if ever there were a decade that tends to get short shrift in its significance to cultural history, it would be the 1970s in the United States. Perceived as languishing between the 1960s and the 1980s, decades with strong public narratives of identity, the 1970s, in general, are often represented as a mess of failed policies and embarrassing cultural moments, as illustrated by the following descriptive quotes: “a kidney stone of a decade,”11 “our strangest decade,”12 “a valley of humility between two mountains of conceit,”13 and a time of “bad hair, bad clothes, bad music, bad design, bad books, bad economics, bad carpeting, bad fabrics, and a lot of bad ideas.”14 Yet, against this narrative of malaise, the 1970s in dance discourse enjoys recognition as a time of dynamic popularity in the United States. To illustrate, ballet historian Jennifer Homans addresses this decade as the “dance boom,” a period of excitement in ballet that she feels has not been seen since.15 When attempting to connect the dance boom with

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scholarship about the 1970s in other fields, however, one encounters a strange dissociation between, on the one hand, a decade when dance enjoyed widespread support and exhilaration, and on the other hand, a dysfunctional decade with what 1970s scholar Sam Binkley generalizes as “a widespread feeling that America had taken a totally wrong turn.”16

1970s Dance Overview Here are a few reference points to situate dance practices in the United States during this time period. Theatrical dance artists flourished with new and unprecedented funding initiated in the 1960s from a blend of government, corporate, and private sources. As a result, excellent ballet and modern dance companies in New York City and, increasingly, around the country gained new prominence and stability. Touring initiatives meant that more U.S. and European theatrical dance companies traveled the country than ever before. Postmodernism swept from New York City to college dance departments across the nation, deconstructing assumptions about dance. And, social dance of various kinds enjoyed new vitality in practice that benefitted from positive, widespread presence in the media. The importance of television and popular culture promoting theatrical and social dance to the public across the U.S. during the 1970s cannot be overstated. PBS, the Public Broadcasting System, began in 1970 and debuted Great Performances: Dance in America in 1976. Dance in America gave audiences across the country free access to theatrical dance programming while creating a shared knowledge base. Notably, the show gave most Americans their first opportunity to see Mikhail Baryshnikov dance, one of several Soviet Union defectors who made national headlines through humiliating the USSR during the Cold War. Such intrigue galvanized public attention to the ballet world in particular, culminating in the creation of the popular film The Turning Point with Baryshnikov released in 1977. Baryshnikov, featured in his role as a heterosexual male, became famous for his impressive musculature and athleticism as well as fathering a child out of wedlock with actress Jessica Lange. As a celebrity appearing in magazines and talk shows on television, Baryshnikov challenged mainstream American assumptions linking male ballet dancers with effeminacy and homosexuality. Further challenging gender stereotypes of ballet practice during these years were football players, such as Lynn Swann, featured on national television taking ballet classes as an optimal training regimen for a professional-level sport perceived as highly masculine.17 Men further began to show renewed virtuosity and pride when social dancing in public arenas with the growth of the 1970s disco era, launched into popularity by the movie Saturday Night Fever and its white, heterosexual lead character, played by an actor with a conspicuously heterosexual brand, John Travolta. Perhaps ironically, disco was one of several newly popular social dance practices, along with soul and street dance, emerging from gay and minority rights activism yet finding traction in the mainstream. Such movements situated political liberation in physical liberation yet found ready, widespread enthusiasm among young people seeking personal freedoms. In short, it was a great decade, overall, to move one’s body.

1970s Body Culture Such dancing co-emerged with its world of being. For many, the so-called “counterculture” spirit of the 1960s played out in the 1970s as tectonic cultural changes shifted society and

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convention from relatively fixed and institutionalized social networks to a much more uncertain world.18 With the “establishment” freshly perceived as dysfunctional, hypocritical, or even toying with annihilation through war, the hippie revolution promoted ideas about finding meaning in life for oneself, free from the establishment’s squaring of body and mind. Such ideas gained enough interest, particularly among youth, to influence culture in the United States. Sociologist Sam Binkley, in his text Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s, provides a missing link connecting relationships with the body, and thus dance, with its larger cultural situation. Binkley theorizes that as the urgency underlying 1960s political revolution settled in for a long-term struggle during the 1970s, the desire for large-scale political freedoms found more immediate fulfillment in individual lifestyle choices.19 He continues that, in the 1970s, the revolution became “more personal, practical, and immediate, a revolution played out in the practice of everyday life.”20 The thwarted desire for individual political freedoms found more immediate fulfillment in lifestyle choices that offered feelings of liberation. As evidence, Binkley cites sociologist Duane Elgin’s 1981 text, Voluntary Simplicity: [B]y the early 1970s, it was clear that sweeping social changes were not going to materialize . . . the agenda shifted from transforming society to finding new ways of living at the grass roots level of society. Instead of continuing the seemingly fruitless struggle to change dominant institutions, many . . . began to concentrate on their immediate lives, the domain where they had genuine control.21 Binkley further asserts that the key process underlying such a cultural transformation was “getting loose,” the title of his text. During this era, getting loose referred to a sense of releasing seemingly externally-imposed, falsely-constraining rules of the establishment. In such a way, people could escape from Fordism, the physical culture of the efficient, assembly-line worker during the first half of the twentieth century, to post-Fordist bodies.22 Binkley continues, “Loosening invoked the idea of a more authentic, innocent, and original source of self and promised a way of living that was more primary and immediate but also more active and creative.” He continues, “To ‘be yourself,’ to ‘do what was right for you,’ to ‘let it all hang out’ was to release a primordial vitality, to become an artist of oneself and of one’s identity.”23 Getting loose, then, was no less than an existential journey of self-fulfillment. Furthermore, the gateway to such experiences of living, as freshly perceived during the 1970s, was the body. Loosening up centered in subjective experiences of the body—often through relaxing and releasing. Such somatic feelings functioned in opposition to a presumptively uptight, square establishment. One goal of loosening up was to feel “groovy.” The term originated in jazz music of the 1930s to describe a group of musicians feeling an easy, fruitful sense of synergistic flow between them—being “in the groove.”24 By the time of the hippie generation, the word had evolved to mean “great, fantastic, joyful, and happy” according to a 1971 slang dictionary.25 Getting loose and feeling groovy manifested in body culture through myriad ways of transgressing perceived sociocultural rules: feeling the sensations of long hair and being hairy all over, tripping on drugs, rapping (which at the time meant speaking freely while tripped out on drugs), freeform and orgiastic dance, looser and more culturally-appropriated clothing, nudity, gender-bending, and sexual experimentation. “The grooving of the body,” Binkley writes, was the attempt to return to “a source of a fundamentally and irreducibly authentic self—a deep body.”26

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METHODOLOGIES OF LOOSENING UP AND FEELING GROOVY But individual freedom in the 1970s was not necessarily the hedonistic, dissolute selfindulgence described in stereotypical narratives about hippies. Binkley reminds his readers that getting loose paradoxically included effortful retraining in lifestyle skills and selfregulation. With the right techniques, individuals could negotiate between control and release. To provide these techniques, small, alternative publishers disseminated books with advice on these choices, including food, habitat, clothing, sexuality, ecology, jogging, massage, crafts, health care, and many more topics exploring countercultural responses to everyday living with a hands-on approach. The popularity of these texts speaks to a readership seeking idealized feelings of returning to “natural” states of health and wellbeing; natural, here, meaning under less stress from any perceived artifices of humankind. One well-known example among many of these is The Massage Book by George Downing and hand-illustrated by Anne Kent Rush, published in 1972 by The Bookworks in Berkeley, CA. Prior to its publication, massage in the U.S. was largely the purview of athletic trainers and sex workers, but this text, with its naturalized nudes, revolutionized cultural normatives of touch and physical relaxation between people.27 Another classic, Mollie Katzen’s vegetarian Moosewood Cookbook, was initially self-published in 1974 by the Moosewood Collective in Ithaca, NY, and featured Katzen’s personal thoughts, handdrawn illustrations, and hand-lettered text throughout.28 Its idiosyncrasies demonstrated liberation from any need or desire for mechanized perfection or commercially-based standards. Such lifestyle texts emerging from the hippie counterculture gained traction particularly among the American white middle-class, making available a journey of feeling good in one’s body as a coping strategy amidst the chaos of political, economic, and socio-cultural upheaval.29 Thus feeling groovy in the body during the 1970s may have functioned as a form of resistance to a perceived establishment in this context. Important to the 1970s ethos, moreover, was that a journey of personal well-being happened best with others. Being “real” with each other meant letting go of one’s own accumulated baggage in order to share a moment truthfully and completely. Returning to Binkley’s sociological perspective, individuals need others in relationships of trust in order to flourish, which results in what Binkley identifies as one of the counterculture’s most fundamental aims: the renewal of interpersonal relationships through intimacy of many kinds.30 He adds, To truly be with others, to feel them, trust in them, and share oneself with them, one had to loosen oneself from the strictures of tradition, overcome the fear of social sanction and opprobrium, and recover the immediacy, the sensuality, and the experience of a truly shared moment . . . a task for which a host of expert mediators stood poised with advice and counsel. The lifestyle culture of the 1970s expressed the reflexivity of the self in the domain of managed, interpersonal relations where one had to work hard to reveal oneself as one really was.31 Accordingly, somatic therapies such as massage, chiropractic, rolfing, Alexander, Feldenkrais, and yoga spread into the mainstream as the idea of relaxing and releasing tensions in the body became associated with more “authentic” and “natural” experiences of living. Most of these practices required teachers or practitioners working with clients, often in states of physical touch. Again, these practices were not new but blossomed into

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new meaning in the 1970s, often infused with added spiritual approaches, cultural appropriation, and methods. Dance historian Marcia Siegel situates dance within this context as she explains the significance of these developing relationships with the human body: “When the counterculture opened up American’s attitudes toward the nonverbal and the physical, dance experienced its first widespread popularity. This new awareness welcomed dance as one of many body-centered activities . . . that would be good for your health.”32 Interest in dance as a methodology to facilitate somatic well-being, Siegel thus suggests, led towards more open-minded interest in dance of all kinds. The dance boom of the 1970s makes increasing sense from this cultural, body-centered perspective.

GETTING LOOSE IN BALLET Ballet aesthetics in the United States iterated such socio-cultural explorations of loosening and freedom as paths to more “authentic” sensations of living in various ways, even if incrementally. In these aesthetics one can find a valuing of the immediacy of the moment, criticism of the establishment, individual creativity over industrial efficiency, communal relationships, and a return to nature. Austin Ballet Theatre’s middle ballets, discussed earlier, were hence part of a larger trend of American ballet corresponding with more experimental ballet in Europe. Contemporary ballet during this time largely practiced experimentation through transgressing movement forms and mixing dance genres, such as the ballet mentioned earlier including “pop-disco” movement and “Hindu postures.” As ballet historian Jennifer Homans chronicles, In New York . . . [t]he sheer variety of dance forms—from ballet to modern dance, jazz to flamenco—and the experimental energy of artists and performers made the city a spawning ground for talent and ideas. By the 1970s, a new generation of choreographers was pressing to integrate classical [ballet] and contemporary dance forms.33 Moreover, such freedom of form could be seen more easily in many contemporary ballets of the 1970s through the widespread adoption of form-revealing costumes and partial nudity, an aesthetic related to an idealized return to nature through beautiful, youthful bodies. While leotards and unitards as costumes were, again, not new in the second half of the twentieth century, prior to the late 1960s, unitards, fleshings, and leotards tended to bunch, sag, and snag since fabrics did not stretch except within their weave. Moreover, movement in contact with the floor could ruin them.34 Such costuming improved dramatically with the invention of lycra at DuPont Laboratory in 1962. As lycra became commercially available during the later 1960s, ballet costumes and underclothing could finally stretch with the body as far as one could go yet remain smooth on the physical form throughout the dance. Lycra and spandex dancewear, therefore, may have influenced the development of dance aesthetics through increased movement possibilities and new ways of looking at the body. Furthermore, according to fashion scholar Jo B. Paoletti, designs incorporating leotards and unitards during the late 1960s into the 1970s, such as those by Rudi Gernreich, a dancer with Lester Horton, reflect the gay rights, civil rights, and women’s liberation movements of the times by theorizing futuristic-looking, unisex clothing and dance costumes.35 Leotards and unitards, the costume staples of 1970s contemporary ballets, could be employed to project a utopian ideal of healthy, young individuals, more or less equal in the group, free of the trappings of the past.

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GETTING LOOSE IN POST-MODERN DANCE Despite the popularity of ballet in the 1970s, much more critical scholarship exists about post-modern dance than contemporary ballet during this time period. Post-modern dance artists, emerging from the improvisation classes of Robert Dunn at the Merce Cunningham studio in New York City, promoted a questioning of external authorities of training and aesthetics through the guiding sensations experienced in one’s own unique body. Doing so reflected the immersion of these young adults in the civil rights movement. In other words, post-modern movement and aesthetics manifested equal rights for all bodies. To paraphrase one of my research participants: During the late 1960s and early 1970s it did not matter who you were or what you looked like or where you came from, you could do what you liked as long as you did not hurt yourself or anybody else.36 Significantly, the early postmodernists were also influenced by their studies with somatic therapist Anna Halprin based in Berkeley, CA, who advocated for health and well-being through one’s own movement and sensation facilitated in relationships of trust with others (Halprin continues this practice today). Similarly, the cultivation of individual physical awareness and agency in 1970s postmodern dance emphasized receptivity and responsiveness to others and the environment. This type of free heterogeneity between the individuals of a group emerged in postmodern dance philosophies and aesthetics. Early post-modern dance had the look of “anything goes” and often left audiences flummoxed with whether or not such practices could be called “dance.” In actuality, these forms were practiced with a spirit of rigorous inquiry that included sophisticated movement skills and techniques. A significant shift was that people learning these techniques were not expected to mold their bodies into, as Steve Paxton said, “watered-down versions” of a teacher but to embark on their own somatic journeys.37 Thus, post-modern dance in the 1970s offered freedoms of the body as a creative site of self-fashioning. Importantly, as with ballet, that process was not necessarily the archetypal hero’s journey of mid-century modern dance but an emergent moment-of-being in relationships of being. A great example of the kind of dance that iterates a 1970s philosophy-in-motion is contact improvisation. Developed by Steve Paxton in 1972, contact improvisers share a flow of movement and weight continuously, such as two partners walking back-to-back with the feet away from the point of contact. The dancers must negotiate the balance nonverbally through ever-changing sensations of touch. Contact improvisation demonstrates trust in relationships between all kinds of human bodies as equals. The element of risk involved, combined with the development of skills, attunes each practitioner with deep commitment to the moment.

DANCE DOES PHILOSOPHY DOES DANCE While contemporary ballet and post-modern dance during the 1970s had substantially different styles, they had in common a desire to relate more to the powerful influences of youth culture. In the case of post-modern dance, the connection is clear. The artists pioneering this genre were themselves young adults immersed in the counterculture. For ballet, the connections are less clear, but, nonetheless, dance historians can find hints in the lives of individual choreographers. To illustrate, Stanley Hall, the principal choreographer of Austin Ballet Theatre’s middle ballets, was influenced by dancing in the company of the young Roland Petit—a French contemporary ballet choreographer inspired by the anti-establishment, bohemian street life of Paris.

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The cultural turn toward bodily freedoms and transgressions of aesthetic schema represented desires for breaking free of the square life through feeling connected to ideal fantasies of a return to nature, being real, and relating with others who get it. Such feelings of a natural authenticity always co-emerge with cultural and social paradigms of what nature feels and looks like plus how everything ideally functions together, and those feelings have culturally-specific aesthetic dimensions: an aesthetic ecology.38 One aesthetic praxis identified in this chapter that frequently emerged in theatrical dance of the 1970s is an urgency towards being real through the body. Such movement culture resonates with a twentieth-century progression in philosophy toward integrating body and mind. Richard Shusterman, in his text Body Consciousness, chronicles several of these philosophers whose groundbreaking texts agitated philosophical discourse through such integration—Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir, Wittgenstein, James, and Dewey—through the lens of Shusterman’s own praxis of somaesthetics. In somaesthetics, the body/mind serves as “a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation and creative self-fashioning,”39 keeping in mind that “any acutely attentive somatic selfconsciousness will always be conscious of more than the body itself.”40 Dancers find these truths to be self-evident. Yet, most have not spoken much of it through words, nor have they been asked. Dance has often been devalued in EuroAmerican art disciplines and academia, undoubtedly due to its physical medium in the body. For example, an author in a 1918 newspaper cited by Lawrence Levine in Highbrow/ Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America uses an architectural metaphor to rationalize the superiority of abstract, Western aesthetic principles. Upstairs, the article maintains, can be found the “great assembly hall of melody” and “inner sanctuaries of harmony,” where the select few can enjoy “truly great music.”41 The “native dances of the world,” however, take place “down in the basement, a kind of servants’ hall.”42 Other kinds of dance are not mentioned at all. The valuing of seemingly disembodied abstract principles over the body betrays distinctly racist agendas in this discourse. One does not have to look much further in cultural history to discern sexism also. However, dance scholarship also leapt forward during the cultural upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, and performance studies scholars, in particular, have eagerly engaged with philosophy. In 2013 I attended Susan Leigh Foster’s keynote address at the Congress on Research in Dance Conference. During her address, Foster shouted with the frustration of one who has repeated it many times, “There is no such thing as embodied knowledge because ALL KNOWLEDGE IS EMBODIED!”43 The assembly of dance scholars broke out into cathartic applause.

CODA The Armadillo World Headquarters closed in 1980 when its cavernous old building, previously in an undesirable central-city location, was razed to the ground to become a parking lot for an office tower. No metaphor is more apt in Austin’s public narratives of identity for the transition from hippie haven to the business-oriented 1980s. Austin Ballet Theatre struggled to survive the loss of its performance home in the community and ultimately folded in 1986. ABT remains, however, in myriad subtle but profound ways, not the least of which is in the bodies of the participants. During oral history interviews, their bodies physically expand, reiterate gestures from choreography, and interpret memories. Often, a sense of joy breaks out in smiles. Occasionally, difficulties cloud physical responses. But, a sense of meaning in their past endeavors resonates through time.

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I believe the 1970s are an under-appreciated decade, in part due to narratives spread by those who benefitted from making the ’70s seem dysfunctional. The idea of loosening up and dropping in to the body in order to experience life more fully and get along better with others is an aesthetic feature that emerged in a variety of theatrical and social dances of that time. As a result of the interests of people in the 1960s and 1970s in physical diversity, flourishing, and inquiry, today’s dance performers are more versatile and virtuosic than ever before. Times have changed, however, and no dance boom is in sight.

NOTES 1.

Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (revised and updated edition, New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 52.

2.

Umberto Eco, “Innovation and Repetition: Between Modern and Postmodern Aesthetics,” Daedalus 134:4 (2005): 199–200: http://ezproxy.twu.edu:2069/stable/20028022, (accessed December 1, 2016).

3.

Steve Hogner, “Sadness Among Smiles in ABT Performance,” Austin-American Statesman, February 17, 1976, p. 11.

4.

Carrie Schweitzer, “A Ballad for Ballet,” Pearl, November 1971, p. 22.

5.

Peggy van Hulsteyn, “The Bouncing Ballet in River City,” Austin People Today, December 1971, p. 16.

6.

Stephanie Chernikowski, “Austin Ballet Theatre: Grace and Innovation,” Austin Sun, November 14, 1974, p. 18.

7.

Marvadene Brock, “Holiday Performance Too ’60-Ish,” Austin Citizen, December 9, 1977, p. 9.

8.

Ibid.

9.

Suzanne Shelton, “Armadillos in Toe Shoes,” Texas Monthly, October 1973, http://www. texasmonthly.com/cms/printthis.php?file=performance.php&issue=1973-10-01, (accessed February 28, 2012).

10. Lucia Uhl, “Austin Ballet Theatre: A Work in Progress,” August 17, 1983, Austin History Center archives, file AR.1999.008, box 4. 11. Garry Trudeau, in Sam Binkley, Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 1. 12. Beth L. Bailey and David R. Farber, America in the Seventies (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), p. 1. 13. Binkley, Getting Loose, p. 4. 14. Ibid., 2. 15. Jennifer Homans, Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet (New York: Random House, 2010), p. 468. 16. Binkley, Getting Loose, p. 2. 17. Neal Pollack, “Big Men Stretching,” Slate, August 9, 2005, http://www.slate.com/articles/ sports/sports_nut/2005/08/big_men_stretching.html, (accessed March 1, 2016). 18. Binkley, Getting Loose, p. 3. 19. Ibid., 17–18. 20. Ibid., 17. 21. Quoted in Binkley, Getting Loose, p. 96.

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22. Of particular interest is how Henry Ford championed the establishment of codified square dancing in public schools. See Katherine Brucher, “Assembly Lines and Contra Dance Lines: The Ford Motor Company Music Department and Leisure Reform,” Journal of the Society for American Music 10:4 (2016): 470–495. 23. Binkley, Getting Loose, p. 3. 24. Ralph Larkin and Daniel Foss. “Lexicon of Folk-Etymology,” Social Text 9:10 (1984): 368. www.jstor.org/stable/466589, (accessed September 1, 2016). 25. Binkley, Getting Loose, p. 1. 26. Ibid., 208. 27. Anne Kent Rush, “Let There Be Back Rubs!” in The Massage Book, 2nd edition, George Downing (New York: Random House and Berkeley, CA: The Bookworks, 1998), p. 1. 28. Mollie Katzen, The Moosewood Cookbook: Recipes from Moosewood Restaurant in the Dewitt Mall, Ithaca, New York (Ithaca, NY: Moosewood, 1974), http://www.molliekatzen. com/books_moosewood_cookbook.php, (accessed December 27, 2016). 29. Binkley, Getting Loose, p. 9. 30. Ibid., 163. 31. Ibid., 165–166. 32. Marcia Siegel, The Tail of the Dragon: New Dance, 1976–1982 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), p. xv. 33. Homans, Apollo’s Angels, pp. 468–469. 34. See Tina Sutton, “Matisse Makes Cut-Outs Dance,” The Making of Markova, May 2, 2014, https://themakingofmarkova.com/2014/05/02/matisse-makes-cut-outs-dance/ (accessed September 15, 2015). 35. Jo B. Paoletti, Sex and Unisex: Fashion, Feminism, and the Sexual Revolution (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2015), pp. 31–32. 36. Penny Lewis, personal communication, Denton, TX, October 15, 2011. 37. Cynthia Novack, Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), p. 54. 38. My perspective here is informed by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, who in their 2014 text Thought in the Act propose the notion of “emergent attunement” between, well, everything. They write, “This is attunement: a polyrhythmic coming-differently-together through the same event, carrying the event’s field of emergence through its unfolding, in such a way that its having happened becomes a co-condition of what follows—without in any way modeling it.” Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), p. 119. 39. Richard Shusterman, Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 19. 40. Ibid., 8. 41. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 220–221. 42. Ibid. 43. Susan L. Foster, Christena Schlundt Lecture, Congress on Research in Dance and Society of Dance Scholars Conference, Riverside, CA, November 14, 2013.

CHAPTER 3.4

Indian Traditional Dance and the Experience of Ego-Transcendence BINITA MEHTA

In this chapter I focus on the Indian classical dance form Bharatan¯at.yam ˙ , whose origin may lie in a remote time period. This dance employs a complex set of bodily gestures to convey ideas and emotions. The dance represents the stories of gods and heroes and enacts manifestation of divine powers and natural phenomena, but it also serves to evoke what is called “rasa”—moods or emotions. Employing a type of “phenomenological” method articulated by an influential Indian thinker named Abhinavagupta (tenth–eleventh century CE), I investigate the interrelation between the experience of rasa and selfawareness. The Indian dance, I show, has important ramifications for the problem of selfknowledge. I discuss how aesthetic engagement in the context of Indian dance centering on the non-dual or participatory interaction serves to promote self-transformative wholeness. I also consider the parallel between the Platonic theory and the Indian framework regarding the concept of beauty. The Platonic view of beauty as the revealing of the essential nature of the self accords with the Indian perspective.

RASA EXPERIENCE In the Hindu framework, the experience of beauty or aesthetic experience is conceived as the tasting of rasa and being fully imbued by it.1 Rasa may be translated as “juice,” “flavor,” or “savor.” The gustative metaphor serves to indicate the direct experiential quality of aesthetic enjoyment analogous to how the relishing of a well-prepared dish is a matter of intimate experience. And just as one “knows” a dish only by tasting it, for no amount of theoretical description or representational knowledge can bring the actual flavor of a dish to the palate, in a similar fashion, rasa, or aesthetic delight, is knowable or appreciated only by tasting it or experiencing it. An understanding of rasa can be elucidated by drawing comparison with one’s spontaneous experiences of deep joy induced say in the presence of a lovely natural landscape, or when listening to music of wonderful lyrical quality. In such encounters an aesthetic object completely grabs one’s attention and the person is empowered with a sense of vitality. The state where an object of aesthetic appreciation fully permeates one’s awareness and brings heartfelt delight (or meaningful realization) exemplifies the rasa experience. A text called N¯at.ya´s ¯astra, which 255

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gives the first systematic presentation of the core principles of traditional Indian aesthetics, dance, and theatre, mentions eight of these states amongst which the following are included: erotic (´s.r m ˙ g¯ara), comic (h¯asya), pathetic or compassionate (karun.a), heroic (v¯ı ra), and wondrous (adbhuta).2 Rasa experience is awakened through sympathy; with respect to dance, it means through identification with the mental state that a dancer-actor is portraying. This implies a movement of consciousness in an enlarged space beyond the subject-object duality. The experience of rasa is a non-dual mode of consciousness because the spectator comes to experience the same mood that is expressed by the dancer. Two important points can be deduced from Abhinavagupta’s analysis.3 First, the rasa state does not consist of inferring the emotion or the mental state of the dancer. That is, rasa is not a mere cognition of the fact that the dancer is portraying a particular mood, say of delight or grief. A powerful rasa experience has the quality of relish or ardor. A third-person observation of what is present in the mental space of the dancer could not lead to an intensified moment of awareness; rather, the emotion becomes a spectator’s own immediate experience. The emotion is hence apprehended through participation, by fully dwelling in it, and not cognized as an object that is distinct or outside of the appreciator in a discursive or a representational mode. Second, profound aesthetic savoring takes place when the mind is free of egoistic interests and desires. Any anticipation of personal gain or the thought of how the aesthetic object or the performance affects them in their own mundane life would generate a disturbance and hinder full immersion in the dance and the rasa. When witnessing an episode of love, for example, if a spectator comes to associate it with her own life, it will arouse grief, envy, etc. if it reminds her of the absence of love in her own life; or if the spectator views the protagonists of the scene in terms of her own personal relationships in her actual life, it might bring feelings of anger, disappointment, etc. But when the same episode is appreciated in complete independence of the interests, demands, and practical aims of the individual’s everyday existence in the world, it becomes a delightful experience.4 In a powerful rasa experience, there is a transcendence of the ego consciousness, or the sense of “I” and “mine”; here one’s awareness expands from the confinement of the ego individuality to pulsate in unison with the aesthetic object or the dancer embodying the mood. The dancer too instantiates non-dual awareness. In order to perfectly portray the emotions and actions of different characters, she must transcend the separative ego consciousness and fully participate in the theme of the dance. By exhibiting the manner in which these moods are expressed in the lives and actions of spiritually enlightened and unenlightened beings, or in mythic and ordinary characters, the dancer brings into view the deeper significance of emotions in life. In a sensitive spectator, the dance leads to the discovery of the possibilities of one’s own self. Humor for example can be seen in a new way as a rhetorical strategy. In Hindu mythology there are stories of how a god overcomes a demon through the use of humor. Humor becomes a way of bringing folly to light for the purpose of extinguishing it.

AESTHETICS AND YOGA Abhinavagupta speaks of ´s ¯anta rasa (mood of tranquility) as the fundamental or the root rasa, because the experience of any particular emotion culminates in the state of mental repose. When the subject is submerged in the enjoyment afforded by the aesthetic object,

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the mental space becomes devoid of all other thoughts and agitating forces. A rasa experience stills the mind and evokes feelings of joyful tranquility. The aesthetic state of rasa also relates to the practices of yoga, such as R¯aja yoga. The core text of R¯aja yoga describes the central purpose of this yoga as “suspension of the modifications of the mind,”5 which is to say, suspension of the thought processes and the chain of reactions that proceed with the sense of ego or individualized “I”. R¯aja yoga and other types of yogic methods pave the path for the realization of the authentic dimension of the self as conceived in the Hindu non-dual schools of thought. These schools present the notion of multiplicity of levels of being. While recognizing that our ordinary waking state consciousness functions mainly in a dualistic fashion, they also postulate an underlying unitary consciousness as constituting the deepest reality of the self. In R¯aja yoga, the yogic practice is described in terms of eight “limbs.” The last three limbs consist of forms of concentration and meditation.6 The power of one-pointed concentration developed through yogic techniques when conjoined with the principles of the non-dual framework lead to self-awareness more primary than the ego state with which we ordinarily operate; the ego state is understood as the state of awareness whose prime characteristic is the duality of subject and object or the sense of separation between “I” and the world.7 A powerful rasa experience places the mind in the state of undivided attention. In the rasa state, the mind is divested of individual concerns and expectations and even the awareness of individuated “I” has been overcome. When there is immersion in rasa, the thought ‘I am experiencing or enjoying rasa” does not dwell in the mental space. If such thought appears in my awareness, this would compromise my ability to abide in rasa. In the state of full immersion, the awareness of myself as a distinct ego subject is absent. Rasa is truly appreciated in the unified and participatory mode of consciousness; the tasting of rasa then is a reflection of the highest experience of Self. Ultimately though the complete and permanent awareness of the unitary consciousness comes through a diligent practice of yogic and spiritual methods, but the aesthetic consciousness serves to create conditions for turning inwards into the depths of one’s own being. An ideal dancer too undergoes the process of mental purification and develops a mirrorlike mind—uncluttered with distracting feelings, internal conflict or ego-centeredness—so that she can personify the natural elements or the characters in accordance with their essential qualities. The capacity of a skilled dancer to participate in a wide spectrum of emotions points to the potential for openness inherent in human self, for this entails going beyond what is “natural” to her individual disposition. There is another element of the dance that bears resemblance with yoga. The bodily postures and hand configurations employed in the dance overlap with the practice of yoga that involves bodily acts. Against the backdrop of the framework of the non-dual school of Ved¯anta, I would like to consider how the mind and the body relationship plays out in the context of Indian dance. The problem is complicated by the fact that two types of knowing faculties are attributed to the mind: reason and intellect.8 Reason functions discursively and the intellect is a type of “intuitive” faculty that involves the unity of the knower and the known. The intellect ordinarily functions in an attenuated fashion, but it can be fully developed through the practice of yogic meditation. The dancer goes through a very methodical training that requires the use of both rational and intellectual faculties. But the spontaneous bodily movement of a dancer who has achieved mastery would indicate suspension of the reasoning faculty, since her actions would not be stimulated through a deliberative process as would be the case for a student learning the dance. For an expert dancer, her experience of the emotion animates her gestures. There is thus the operation

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of the intellectual faculty, which allows the internalization of the personified theme and the emotional states, that is, to achieve oneness with the object. If the mind and body relation are analyzed on the basis of the Indian perspective, then the dancer can be said to synthesize the mind and the body in a harmonious fashion.9 The appreciation of a spectator, as discussed in the last section, comes not through the reasoning apparatus as an inference based on empirical-discursive analysis, but through intuitive perception. At the sense level what is perceived are the bodily actions and the accompanying music. In order to comprehend the rasa emotion, the spectator has to penetrate the physical surface to enter the mental state of the dancer. The spectator activates the power of imaginative insight to identify the emotion. The performance of the Bharatan¯at.yam ˙ also includes the n.r tta aspect, which is often termed as “pure dance.”10 It does not directly convey emotions or involve a narrative, and consists of rhythmic bodily movements that create patterns of visual beauty. N.r tta embellishes the body with a refined and fluid grace. The Hindu non-dual spiritual traditions view the body as sacred, being ultimately the manifestation of the divine reality.11 N.r tta construes the possibility of a radically different relationship with the body, elevating its dignity from a mere instrument of sense enjoyment to the bearer of spiritual force, whose awakening fills the body with lightness and contributes to the state of inner bliss (Plate 7).

NON-DUAL INTERACTION AND SELF TRANSFORMATION The Indian framework can be fruitfully juxtaposed with the Platonic school, which associates beauty with the reality or the truth of being. I draw on Plotinus (third century CE), a close follower of Plato. Plotinus designates the Being—the Intellect—as beauty and the One—the principle of Being—as “flower of beauty,” or “superabundance of beauty.”12 In Plotinus’ framework, the One is the state where all duality is transcended which suggests that an experience of beauty is founded upon the state of non-dual self-consciousness. The gradient of deepening relationship between the subject and the object corresponds to higher and higher experiences of beauty. The participatory interaction is also the basis for proper knowledge of an object. For Plotinus, the higher form of knowledge is the noetic knowledge (noêsis).13 An outstanding feature of noêsis is the unifying relation of the knower and the known.14 Noetic understanding is attained through an act of transformation in which self-awareness comes to be aligned with objects of true knowledge. This type of knowledge is actualized by “possessing” the object, i.e. by instantiating the object’s mode of being in one’s consciousness. It is thus the mode of direct knowledge obtained on the basis of the identity of knowing and being.15 In the Platonic framework, there is an interweaving of the experience of beauty with the knowledge of the real.16 A participatory or intuitive understanding underlies the aesthetics of Indian dance. The principle of hand-gesture is presumably derived through close observation of nature. The hand movements and gestures have been enriched through a study of the “shape [of a being], the characteristic action of a being, the characteristic mark, and by the nature of the class to which that being or object belongs.”17 The “gods” and “goddesses” could also be interpreted as personification of different powers and vital forces present in the universe and in humans, or as the archetypes.18 This is not to say that the “divinities” represent purely naturalistic phenomena given that the idea of nature in the Hindu

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worldview, and also in the Plotinian, is much broader than the materialist view of the natural world. The Hindu understanding, which conceives of nature in terms of interrelationship of different forces and phenomena and levels of reality, generates a holistic vision. A human being is an active participant in the natural world rather than simply an onlooker. The Indian dance aims at a real participation in a real object.19 The following assessment of the Indian classical dance by eminent art historian and critic Ananda Coomaraswamy, who also served as a curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (from 1917 to 1947), reveals its potential for a positive self-transformation. Dance [in the Hindu traditional context] is felt to fulfill a higher end than that of mere entertainment . . . the arts are for our delight, and this delight is something more than pleasure, it is godlike ecstasy of liberation from the restless activity of the mind and senses, which are the veils of all reality [because they hide the deeper states of consciousness], transparent only when we are at peace with ourselves . . . from the love of many things we are led to the experience of Union [or to the unifying consciousness].20 When the presentation of different beings is accompanied with a rasa emotion and leads to an experience of beauty in a sensitive spectator, this spontaneously creates feelings of sympathy toward that thing. The dance becomes instrumental in establishing a concord between the aesthete and the diverse multitude of beings and objects of the universe and consequently in promoting an appreciation of them. During moments of rasa experience, the mind is fully pervaded by the rasa and its savor. The state of rasa enjoyment is also a state of self-sufficiency. In this focused state there is freedom from anxieties and longings and from the desire for something separated from one’s own self. The subject when experiencing aesthetic delight feels whole and fulfilled and is devoid of the sense that he is incomplete. The non-dual relation seems to be critical in facilitating the experience of wholeness. A phenomenological analysis of the source of desire suggests that one becomes desirous of an object that is outside of one’s state of being. When one is in full possession of an object, or experiences an object with such intimacy that it is no longer felt to be external but is integrated into one’s consciousness, in this condition there is no pursuit after the object, but only a sense of repose and contentment. The duality of subject and object is the driving force for desires. When one’s consciousness is pervaded by a strong sense of duality, one cannot bring one’s self-awareness to rest in delight on aesthetic objects or phenomena in a sustained fashion. At the backdrop of the Platonic framework it would also be illuminating to consider the notion of the erotic rasa. The erotic covers the full range of passionate experiences. The example of a poem called “G¯ı ta Govinda” by Jayadeva (twelfth century CE) which has been staged by Bharatan¯at.yam ˙ dancers could be furnished. The poem celebrates the love of a milkmaid Radha for the cowherd Kr.s.n.a (a deity). Mrinalini Sarabhai (1918– 2016), an acclaimed dancer, portrayed the meaning of this poem as follows: “All the moods of a man and a woman in love are faithfully reproduced and the poem ends in a human and mystical union of the lover and the beloved, which is a symbolical representation of the human soul united with the Divine.”21 Plotinus speaks of the One as the giver and the goal of eros. The love that humans experience attains its ultimate consummation in the awareness of the One. Plotinus also employs the symbol of lover-beloved to express the self ’s vision of the One (VI.7.31). In the lover-beloved imagery, the lover shapes herself in the likeness of the beloved to achieve the most intimate union devoid of the consciousness of duality. The striving toward Kr.s.n.a, who evokes intense erotic longing, is the process of realizing the higher unitary self. This idea is revealed in the works of the

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legendary mystic and poet M¯ı r¯a (around sixteenth century CE), whose life and devotional songs have been the subject of Bharatan¯at.yam ˙ choreography. In one of her poems, M¯ı r¯a writes: On beholding Kr.s.n.a’s beauty, “I made myself over to Him, body and soul. Only she whose Beloved is abroad needs to write letters. My beloved rests ever in my heart, He neither comes nor goes.” Here the “divine” Kr.s.n.a is understood as the ever present reality of the self that possesses the inherent quality of beatitude. The Indian and Plotinian frameworks also suggest that human romantic relationships blossom in the consciousness of the transcendent self. Where there is transmutation of mundane passion into a union that derives its dynamism from the resplendent being itself, such love attains stability, since it is beyond the transiency of physical and psychological states and attitudes, and retains continual freshness.

CONCLUDING REMARKS The appreciation of rasa in a participatory mode nurtures the virtue of receptivity. An aesthete extends her self-awareness and comes to discover the same quality that is present in the subjective space of the known. In the noetic or non-dual type of interaction, the subject molds her awareness according to the structure of the object to achieve resonance with it. Relationship of sympathy is an intrinsic feature of participatory knowing which allows something to be seen in its own depth. The Indian dance produces a transformative effect on a sensitive spectator. The dance resonates with the overall orientation of Indian spiritual philosophies which aims at freedom from the ego for the sake of achieving a more fulfilling mode of self-consciousness. The dance discloses life in a new light which could facilitate a more vital relationship with the world. Though the content of the dance generally does not explicitly deal with the current social issues, it indirectly relates to social dimension given that in Indian philosophical perspective, self-transformation is seen as the foundation of constructive social change.

NOTES 1.

See Rene Daumal, Rasa or Knowledge of the Self. Essays on Indian Aesthetics and Selected Sanskrit Studies, trans. Louise Landes Levi (New York: New Directions Books, 1982).

2.

The estimates about the compilation of the N¯a.tya´s¯astra text range considerably, from about the fifth century BCE to the fifth century CE. Bharatan¯at.yam ˙ embodies the concepts and ideas expressed in the N¯a.tya´s¯astra. Historically, the dance was not always referred to by the term “Bharatan¯at.yam ˙ ” and was manifested in a variety of forms. The format in which it is danced today can be traced to the Maratha reign of Tanjore in the eighteenth century CE. See the chapters “Spiritual Background” and “History: Roots, Growth, and Revival” in Sunil Kothari, Bharata Natyam (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 1997, second edition).

3.

I have consulted the following work: Raniero Gnoli, trans. and Introduction, The Aesthetic Experience According to Abhinavagupta (Varanasi: Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series, 1968, second edition).

4.

Now this does not mean that the spectator does not employ her overall experiences in life to achieve sympathy with the dancer and the mood expressed by the dancer, but only that the dancer and the episodes are not perceived as being in actual relationship with her own mundane life.

5.

Raphael, trans. and notes, The Regal Way to Realization (Yogadar´s ana) (New York: Aurea Vidya, 2012), 21.

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6.

Raphael, The Regal Way to Realization, p. 91.

7.

There are two main streams of non-dual philosophical schools within Hinduism: Advaita Ved¯anta, and (non-dual) Kashmir ´Saivism to which Abhinavagupta belongs. Both the schools situate the “true” or authentic Self in the undifferentiated consciousness without an object where everything is experienced in the subject mode. (For a detailed presentation of the Advaita view of self, see Binita Mehta, “Self-Knowledge as Non-Dual Awareness: A Comparative Study of Plotinus and Indian Advaita Philosophy,” International Journal of the Platonic Tradition 11:1 [2017]: 125–136.) A text of non-dual Ved¯anta describes the nature of the realization of the Self achieved through immediate intuition in the heightened state of awareness as follows: “The Yogi, who has realized perfect Knowledge sees (¯ı ks. ate) with the eye of Knowledge (jñ¯anacaks. us) the entire (sarvam) universe contained within himself and considers all things as the sole (ekam ˙ ) ¯atman [i.e., the Self].” Verse 47, translation by Raphael in ¯atmabodha: Self-Knowledge (New York: Aurea Vidya, 2003), 54.

8.

I associate reason with the operation of manas and ordinary (or lower) buddhi, and intellect with the operation of pure (or higher) buddhi. For an explanation of manas and different modes of buddhi, see Mehta, “Self-Knowledge as Non-Dual Awareness,” 136–139.

9.

In the framework of Advaita Ved¯anta, the intuitive or the intellectual mode has its immediate source in the unitary consciousness that constitutes the real Self. Here the aspect of higher buddhi is actualized in a particular context and hence the operation of higher buddhi functions in a more curtailed fashion as compared to the full activation of pure buddhi attained by an advanced practitioner of the non-dual spirituality.

10. See the chapter “Nritta” in Kothari, Bharata Natyam. 11. This divine reality is termed in different ways as Brahman, S´iva or Param´s iva in the two non-dual schools and it permeates all phenomenal existence. The Self is seen as being identical to this reality. For further discussion of this idea, see Mehta, “Self-Knowledge as Non-Dual Awareness,” 129–134, 138–9. 12. Enneads VI.7.32. From A. H. Armstrong, trans., Plotinus. Greek Text with English Translation, vol 7 (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1988). 13. The human soul exercises noêsis in full-fledged form when it ascends to the level of the Intellect. 14. See John Bussanich, “Non-discursive Thought in Plotinus and Proclus,” Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 8 (1997): 192. 15. Unlike discursive thought in which the self-awareness remains distinct from the object and thus the object is accessed indirectly via the mental representations of externally observable or empirical properties, in noetic interaction objects are internalized which allows for an unmediated grasp of objects in their essential nature and lends self-evidential force to this type of knowing. See Emilsson’s detailed discussion of noêsis, which he also terms as non-discursive thought, in Eyjólfur Kjalar Emilsson, Plotinus on Intellect (New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 2007), 177–198. Emilsson notes that the notion of noetic knowing—a form of intuitive understanding—is largely absent from the discourses of academic, systematic philosophy. The notions such as “tacit knowledge” or “our prephilosophical intuitions” only to a limited degree reflect the concept of noêsis. According to Emilsson, “there is . . . nothing in current philosophical thought that comes close to satisfying all the conditions of Plotinus’ notion of non-discursive thought” (p. 177). 16. The possibility and the fruitfulness of the noetic or the intuitive-participatory mode is manifested in J. W. von Goethe’s scientific method. Goethe’s engagement with science is not very well known but he carried out extensive scientific investigations particularly in the fields of botany and optics. In recent decades a number of important works have appeared

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that analyze Goethe’s scientific conception and its potential for creating a complementary scientific framework. Goethe terms his own methodology as “delicate empiricism which makes itself utterly identical with the object” (quoted in Jeremy Naydler, trans. and Introduction, Goethe on Science: An Anthology of Goethe’s Scientific Writings [Edinburgh: Floris Books, 1996], 72). What is central to this approach is the idea of attunement, of the coalescence of the thinking activity of the scientist with the fundamental character of the phenomenon. In the context of Goethean science, the intuitive knowledge can be understood as the state of the known realized in the enhanced self-space of the knower. 17. La Meri, The Gesture Language of the Hindu Dance (New York: Benjamin Blom, Inc., 1964), 26–7. 18. An analysis of how the notion of gods and goddesses could relate to the structure of reality is beyond the scope of this paper. 19. According to Alessandra Iyer, n.r tta expresses spiritualized geometrical relationships between the body and the cosmos: “A Fresh Look at Nr.tta (Or Nr.tta: Steps in the Dark?),” Dance Research: The Journal of the Society for Dance Research 11:2 (Autumn 1993): 7–8. N.r tta thereby alludes to the affinity of the human body with the cosmos. 20. Ananda Coomaraswamy, The Mirror of Gesture: Being the Abhinaya Darpan.a of Nandike´s vara (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 2003, sixth edition), 9. 21. Mrinalini Sarabhai, Understanding Bharata Natyam (Baroda: The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, 1965), 62.

CHAPTER 3.5

Resisting the Universal: Black Dance, Aesthetics, and the Afterlives of Slavery THOMAS F. DEFRANTZ

Twenty-first-century philosophies of African American dance emerge within the rhetorics of the afterlives of slavery: concerned with the possibilities of resistant space amid everexpanding systems of white domination. African American dance arrives in relationship to a black commons; a creative space of potential deliverance produced through animated engagement with a continuity among musical and danced gesture. This chapter explores afropessimism as an ontological ground for the production of Black dance, defined here as corporeal response to the historical fact of African American disavowal. A consideration of choreography by Ulysses Dove (1947–1996) offers theatrical examples of resistant strains of Black expressivity within stage dance that speaks to Black American concerns of personhood, communal interaction, and spiritual wellness. Black aesthetics regularly refer to a world not of our own making, but constantly and inexorably in motion. The 2017 English language publication of Achille Mbembe’s magisterial Critique of Black Reason provides a scaffolding for considering terms of encounter for Black people in public spaces. Mbembe offers up slavery, apartheid, and colonialism as the grounding devices that collude toward the production of Black subjectivity, a subjectivity necessarily constrained by relation to a disinterested whiteness empowered to disavow its very essence. Of course, Black Reason, like afropessimism, places “Black” at the center of a conversation, effectively enlivening its possibilities by focusing on the delay of an emancipated Black life; its continued non-arrival. In this line of reasoning, when Black subjectivity comes forth, it materializes as a result of forces and fields rarely concerned with the lives and loves of Black people, or our shared creative aesthetic imperatives. Afropessimist thought tends to privilege the non-arrival of an enlivened Black subjectivity, in contexts of the United States, European immigration, and African sovereignties (slavery, apartheid, colonialism). In the United States, “birther” claims against President Barack Obama emphasized an impossibility of Black citizenry even to an eminently accomplished scholar and politician. Africans seeking to move to Europe are routinely cordoned into refugee camps, if they are not turned back at the borders of presumably “white” nations; when allowed entrance, Black people are termed refugees, rather than potential immigrants, and typically fail to exceed that status. Political unrest in the (somewhat) post-colonial 263

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nations of the African continent continually place those states in an administrative limbo, denying Black people opportunities to participate, meaningfully, in a global economy tied to resources developed there. Mbembe’s grim theorization establishes an ontological ground for subjectivity cast in impossibilities and contingencies. Black life, like bare (white) life, arrives entangled within political exigencies that exceed concerns of Black possibility, or more importantly, Black differentiation that might undergird any rendering of the complexities of experience in time. Black life emerges as the source code for a desperate alterity, one that is not of its own making but entirely of the ongoing global social order. To dance inside this container is to engage the afterlives of slavery as the ontopoetic ground of creation. An ontological dimension of non-arrival and disavowal; a poesis of creativity cast in contexts that support, and even nurture, this disavowal. A poetic structure of being bound up by its particular contexts of dissemblance. In this formation, theatrical dance arrives indebted and responsive to, and inevitably formed by, slavery/ apartheid/colonialism as an evidentiary vibration of social expression. Dancing extends the dialectics of a reason formed by subjugation and exclusion, at times proving a resistant physicality or embracing a social memory through embodied practices. The whole of dancing, though, is encountered through the machinations of modernism born of chattel slavery. In this, we begin in the ruins of afro-pessimism that seem to offer their own totalizing narratives. Of course, philosophy and dance emerge in relationship to complex structures of social engagement. It bears stating that no single philosophical structure can speak to all forms of dance, dancers, or their witnessing publics simultaneously. We might also note that in this line of reasoning, a Black point of philosophical view will inevitably be positioned as a constructed relativity, one brought into being via white supremacy and white-centered traditions of political thought that center whiteness as normative. It matters that Mbembe’s arguments suggest a certain relativity for Black aesthetics needing to be in relation to European systems of aesthetic understandings in order to exist. Indeed, dance as a practice inevitably meets its translation into language through philosophical systems that value individuation and a possible separation of people into subjects, some of whom dance better than others. To consider dance practice within Eurocentric models of philosophical address will inevitably be to consider Black people’s dancing within a framework of afropessimism and the afterlives of slavery. But we will also wonder at a possibility to center Black aesthetics as of their own awareness and volition, headed toward our own enlightenments, if you will. In this chapter, I want to try to center Black performance within its own aesthetic structures, not exclusively as alterity, but as foundation for imaging an aesthetic world-making. What could it mean to propose modes of address that allow Africanist aesthetics to flourish among audiences committed to aesthetic invention that tilt toward Black possibility, coherence, and even salvation? What if those aesthetics are bound up with afro-pessimist thought? If Mbembe allows us a place from which to begin considering terms of Black dance and aesthetics, how then might we see work on a twenty-first-century concert dance stage? What aesthetic devices would amplify the turn toward African humanity, borne out by Mbembe’s critique? Our “seeing” of dance on stages will necessarily come in response to a framework that acknowledges a purposeful looking, one willing and able to imagine the fact of dancing in public as being bound up with circumstances that produce a Black subjectivity that extends far beyond the stage lights.

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ULYSSES DOVE AND THE BLACK-CENTERED HUMANITY The nagging question continues—how can we recognize Black possibility in terms of aesthetic invention? If a question of “the human” continues to be addressed in the theoretical formation of the [white] Anthropocene, then a question of Black creativity continues toward a difficult counternarrative of non-human or non-being that arrives outside of Western aesthetic concerns. And yet: Black people do make ballets; dances that suggest a Black-centered humanity born of the afterlives of slavery and imagining toward a speculative social commons. The consummate creativities of works by choreographer Ulysses Dove offer instructive example of how Black American artists embrace the difficult space of making conceptuallyinflected dance where dance embedded within Black aesthetics has not been allowed. Dove began dance study while a pre-medical student at Howard University, and graduated with a dance degree in 1970 from Bennington College. In New York, he danced with several white artists—Merce Cunningham company, Mary Anthony, Pearl Lang, and Anna Sokolow—before joining the Black-inflected Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 1973. He quickly rose to the rank of principal dancer acclaimed for his commanding presence, bright clarity of movement, and truthful dramatic intensity. He turned to choreography at Ailey’s urging, and created the 1980 solo “Inside” for star dancer Judith Jamison. He left the Ailey company that year to begin a significant freelance career in ballet, choreographing dances marked by relentless speed, violent force, and daring eroticism for the Basel Ballet, Swedish Cullberg Ballet, Dutch National Ballet, London Festival Ballet, American Ballet Theater, New York City Ballet, and Groupe de Recherche Choreographique de l’Opéra de Paris where he spent three years as assistant director. Dove’s dances explore the physical ends of speed and gestural attack. In many cases, his works depict the relationships among a group of people bound together by preexisting circumstances but dancing alongside each other in search of a shifting relationality to be solved by movement. His works for the Ailey company, including Bad Blood (1984), Vespers (originally created for the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, 1986), and Episodes (1987), each detail a community in transition and fraying at its edges, searching for a social order among shifting arrangements of individuals, duos, and groups. His works explore a patently queer sort of sociality, peppered with unusual bouts of intense movement and unexpected physical accents. Dancing on the Front Porch of Heaven (1993), subtitled “Odes to Love and Loss,” deserves careful examination here. Set to composer Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, the dance for six couples clad in white unitards bristles with an elegaic, emotional intensity. A descriptive analysis may help us understand a particular experience of the dance. The work begins in silence, as six dancers—three men and three women— rush on from an engulfing dark void toward a small pool of white light at its center. They stop at attention, carefully spread in a symmetrical circle at the edges of the light. They thrust their feet apart as one, and then grab hands with heads bowed, never looking toward each other. Stepping to the side, they perform an obeisance of consecration, curving through a fanciful curtsy and bow toward the group, the ground, and the skies. They gesture as a group by sex, with men arching backwards first, followed by women, and then all six, finally looking toward each other in the circle, rising upward on their toes and opening their arms gently, as in tribute to their assembly. The dance continues as a series of short forays among small orderings of people. A duet for a man and woman is interrupted briefly by incursions of the other women, each

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of whom briefly partner the man. They dance together as a quartet, in a homage to legends of Apollo and the Muses, famously depicted in dance by George Balanchine in an eponymously titled ballet of 1928. The work is filled with movement inventions rarely seen in contemporary ballet: unaccompanied fouetté turns for a woman that evolve into a turning développé à la seconde; bourées performed in wide positionings with legs splayed open; a mysterious rocking, side to side gesture by a woman kneeling on the floor adjacent to her male partner. The whole is performed with a brittle severity, with physical accents marking the beginning and ending of each bit of movement. After a restatement of the opening gestures in a circle by the whole group, this quartet is followed by a duet for the other two male dancers (Plate 8). Their same-sex duet arrives with an intimate tenderness and physicality. The men touch each other with forceful care, hands massaging torsos with a visible physical effort; lifts and balances executed so that one man is completely held and supported by the other; at one point, moving slowly as one toward the ground until they arrive at the same time with legs splayed. They perform holds and balances that had been done by a man and woman in the first section; the duet reveals intimacy among two men as commensurate to relations of man and woman. In at least this aspect, Dove’s choreography wonders at a possibility of an embodied, emotional connection that might be aligned with a tempered wellness in relationship. These first two sections suggest intimacy among partners, cast in heterosexual multiplicity or homosocial erotics. These relationships emerge among the watchful group, and the dance confirms the necessity of the group to create the space for the partnerships. Front Porch encompasses a second section that demonstrates the distinct potentials of the individuals in short solo dancing, followed by forays in couples and trios. In an unusual creative flourish, Dove repeats the short musical selection by Pärt as the score for the second part of the work. Pärt’s oeuvre has become especially popular for ballet choreographers who want to cast their creations within a yawning, inexorable constellation of overlapping sounds. The descending string orchestrations and tolling bell sounds construct a yearning, abject ineffable that fills the air of the theater, suspending a sonic notion of grieving and loss. Dove’s repetition of Pärt’s score suggests an on-goingness of lament into an open space without boundary; and the work ends well after the short musical score has concluded, with the interpreters walking in endless circles as lights fade. In one rendering, these sounds, and implicitly this dance, will continue as they have before and do now, into an unknowable future. Because Front Porch arrives as an abstract meditation, without a concrete narrative, it is susceptible to a universalizing analysis, one that stabilizes a (white) analytic stance that focuses on what the bodies in motion seem to do on the stage. Indeed, the observations about Dove’s dance above might be written by any researcher in dance curious about documenting the work and thinking out from its implications. Anyone working in dance and philosophy might notice the homosocial implications of the same-sex partnering; the open-ended sounds of Pärt’s score, repeated; the implications of a funeral rite of some sort. But what could it mean to regard the choreography from a philosophic perspective entangled with the afterlives of slavery? How might we see Front Porch? What sorts of metaphoric turns might be suggested by the choreography and its dancing; the arrangement of light and sound offered up toward a Black we in an audience, we already committed to understanding Black aesthetic possibility? Let us continue an analytic turn through two-part, twenty-minute ballet. Dove’s choreography provides grounding for this discussion of Black dance, aesthetics, and resisting universalisms that too often force Black presences toward the sidelines of their

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own inventions. To begin, we note the opening, and repeated, gestures of consecration that bring the dancers into a holistic circular formation to begin their collective labor. In this, Front Porch stages an encounter among people as the site of theatrical dance onstage. For the work to proceed, the dancers must agree to be alongside each other; the tight circle of artists confirms that this event will take place as an exploration that involves all six participants equally invested in its processes. In this opening imagery, and its repetition, we feel both the honoring of a special moment of dancing, as well as a call for full participation by the group. Dance requires its invitation, and each of the onstage artists are called to place themselves into the line of scrutiny by the others. In this, the dance refers to an aesthetics of collective action that subvenes Africanist philosophic approach in the afterlives of slavery: the actions of the group surround and encompass the activities of individuals, with an important relationship of a person to the whole. Amid the ruinous disavowals of slavery, apartheid, and colonialism, Black aesthetics refer to a gathering notion of the largest group, inevitably unable to become aware of its totality or to represent itself fully. Performers consecrate the activity of performing through an agreement to refer to a larger, unknowable collective of Black creativity. This is, in part, what philosopher Fred Moten continues to refer to in his renderings of Black performance: a collective sensibility that circumscribes individual action. In the third section, the dancers emerge from a dark void at the back of the stage, now coming toward us in the audience and dancing in direct relationship to our presence. In this, they begin as spirit guides or devotional witnesses, as if in attendance in the background of our assembly, and able to set our affairs in motion by their gestures. Because they move in relationship to us, so that we might see them and what they can do, their movements reassure us; they remind us that expertise matters, even amid the disavowals of social life. Each performer offers up a distinctive solo that demonstrates their expertise, honed toward their ability to perform unexpected balances, multiple turns, and difficult transitional material between movement phrases. In these sequences, they reveal themselves as individuals within a group dynamic, each able to contribute to a larger tapestry of social life. Their varied dancing for us confirms that care for the particularity of movement can produce a heightened state of being, shared among us by way of their carefully modulated gestures. As each performer leaves the central spotlight, they move to small individual circles of light distributed symmetrically from the center point, cast across the stage space. Each performer walks slowly, clockwise, at the edge of their own lit area. Their movement reminds us of self-awareness and the need to do what needs to be done; gathering energy in reflection and preparing for the difficult battles to come. After a brief meeting for the group in the center spotlight, Dove’s choreography suggests the impending battles, through solos and duets that arrive aggressively paced and difficult to perform. They dance as if they are screaming, railing against offstage systems of domination that might be somehow calmed by intensive, fast movements. Partnering work and a longish duet for a man and woman do not convey romance so much as shared warriorship. These are people ready to battle, and to support each other in the difficult times to come. Moving quickly, the group reforms in its circle, and after a fast obeisance toward each other, disperses to the six points of light. As the work proceeds, we notice that Dove asks his collaborating dancers to move with an aggressive, forceful speed and physical attack throughout the work. The performance bristles with enlivened, energetic precision. This embodied vigorousness demonstrates an

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aesthetic imperative to be palpably present in creative action; to reveal agility as an aspect of the performance and its emergence. We note that few ballet choreographies make such sustained demands for speed and palpable difficulty made manifest through performance. Dove’s choreography pushes the dancers toward the ends of their capacity, as if to offer up their abilities to be monitored and witnessed by the group, while simultaneously preparing them for a world that will always ask for more than before. In tracing this sort of aesthetic approach, we begin to see how choreographic tactics reveal philosophical conceptions of worlds in motion. To consider Dove’s choreography from an aesthetic world framed by Mbembe’s reckoning is to think of gesture in relation to process or possibility rather than to achievement or evidentiary demonstration. Black Reason blurs the contents of a theatrical dance toward their implications, beyond their fact. That we dance on a stage, in ballet slippers, demonstrates borrowing from a ruined historical encounter; one that allowed the creation of hierarchies that define ballet in terms of prima ballerina and corps de ballet. Dancing through ballet, we embody these presumptions of differences in ability and rank. But in Front Porch those differences are elided, and each dancer has an equivalent contribution to make to the whole of the encounter among each other, and the sharing outward toward an audience. At the end of the work, the dancers move singly and separately, but rhythmically in step with each other. The final image of a slow, continuous movement that extends into the time after the dance suggests an on-going-ness of intention that must be maintained and performed by the people in order to survive. After having demonstrated the strength, resilience, anger, disappointment, and care for one another that arise throughout the ballet, this lingering motility confirms a powerful community in diaspora, ready to battle and maintain regard for one another even as they might be dispersed. The image resounds within Black aesthetic life as foundational to possibility and creativity: that there might be a palpable connection among us in diaspora, able to feel something of our extended kinship in motion and affiliation among. Front Porch constituted an important commission for Dove near the end of his life. Called forth by the Royal Swedish Ballet, the work confirmed Dove’s ability to move among ballet companies in the United States and in Europe, a feat that was unprecedented for Black choreographers before him and, regrettably, ever since. Remarkably, Dove had not studied ballet at any of the major conservatories of the world, nor had he performed in a classical company himself. His unlikely arrival as a celebrated choreographer spoke to an exceptionalism allowed him as a Black artist who seemed to work with relatable, “universal” themes. Group communion, expert ability in dancing, and the disappointments of love or relationship seem to be present in the choreography of Porch; as they are in other of Dove’s works. These themes would presumably speak “to any” audience attending its performance. But attending the work in relationship to the afterlives of slavery, we might understand a livelier assessment of performance as consecrated responsibility to the group, to an ancestral calling, and to a future-leaning conception of dancing as strategy for cultural continuity. These contents might not be lost on audiences versed in afro-pessimism or the everyday contours surrounding much of Black life. Attending to the work amid Africanist aesthetics built within a container of disavowal and deflected potentialities can reveal unexpected contours of the work’s shape and achievement. Surprisingly, the artists that Dove created the work with held no experiential relationship to Black life as Black people. They were all white dancers who likely knew little of how Africanist aesthetics supported and amplified Dove’s choreographic choices.

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They danced with a sort of generic passionate resolve, eager to complete the movements offered up to them to the best of their abilities. Of course, there may have been hints available to the interpreters. Within the intimacies of the male duet, the dancers may have understood their labor as strategically resisting a heteronormative presumption that surrounds state-sanctioned ballet. The ballerinas may have reveled in the opportunity to perform difficult movements as soloists, for example, proving their ability as they rise onto pointe again and again in increasingly unlikely sequences of balance and physical attack. But few of the dancers may have understood how their dancing narrated aspects of Africanist aesthetic worldviews in its ordering and deployment. The surprises of Dove’s invention include the places where he worked, and the collaborators that he was afforded and chose. Indeed, we might consider the encounter of Dove and his assistants in the ballet studios of Stockholm, Sweden, as essential agents in the crafting of this work. In the moments of creative compression that comprise the creation of professional artworks, Dove continually evaluated the abilities of the company structure and the dancers at hand to approach his own aesthetic imperatives. In this, Front Porch reveals far more than the contents of the finished work performed on stage. The dance and its creation emerge within a context that wondered at the unlikeliness of Dove’s status as a ballet master. Front Porch has been taken into the repertory of several ballet companies, including the Pacific Northwest Ballet, directed by former New York City Ballet principal Peter Boal, and the Dance Theater of Harlem (DTH), directed by former prima ballerina Virginia Johnson. It is in performances by DTH, however, that we sense a richness of interpretation that aligns the work with many of its aesthetic impulses. Artists of DTH might lean carefully into the acts of consecration and group solidarity that begin the work; they might revel in the opportunities to demonstrate their abilities within the frame of a group effort to honor the memories of those who have transitioned from life. And they will surely elaborate on the work’s final gesture of movement in diaspora, connected to a central, mythical origin; now rent asunder, but recovered in this act of creative assembly. It might be helpful to philosophically consider the performance of Front Porch by a company of African-diaspora ballet artists to be imbued with expansive layers of meaning and emotional valence for its interpreters as well as its attending audiences of African descent and those concerned with the rhetorics of Mbembe’s proposition. Viewing the work through the prisms of the afterlives of slavery, we begin to understand the particular possibilities of Africanist aesthetic action. These actions surround Dove’s ballet with competing agendas: as demonstration of colonial encounter that can be ruined and revived by Black excellence, and as creative exercise that fulfills—and exceeds—the need for diverting programming to fill out a mixed-bill program in a theater. While it remains entirely possible to reflect on Front Porch only in these latter terms, as a well-crafted, twenty-minute, contemporary ballet; we would do better to theorize through the work in terms of its relationships to Africanist aesthetics. Dove’s death from AIDS placed him among the most prominent of publicly discussed gay male Black dance artists. He followed his mentor, modern dance choreographer Alvin Ailey, who had passed away four years earlier, publicly diagnosed with a “rare blood ailment,” a dyscrasia that would not be identified as AIDS for several years. The social fear that surround Black sexualities offered up for public consideration haunted Dove, Ailey, and multitudes of gay and queer Black men and women who worked as professional dance artists. In the early 1990s, several artists made works that mourned the gay men

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who succumbed to HIV/AIDS, as potential genealogies of creative continuity were cut short by the disease and its spread. The intimate, hands-on men’s duet of Front Porch demonstrated a careful intimacy hewn within classical ballet technique but extended toward Dove’s elaborations. Dancing, the men care for each other in a manner similar to how heterosexual partnerships are staged in the work. Dove placed this affirmation into the work assuredly, confident that the ballet could support its presence without tipping into the awkward space of politicized identity politics that hounded other choreographic inventions of the era. For example, Bill T. Jones’ Still/Here (1994) famously launched a controversy among white critics who felt unprepared to consider the afterlives of slavery as a starting point for understanding how to make a theatrical work. Jones, like Dove, participates in Black aesthetics in his creative craft and point of view, regularly bringing audiences into worlds of dance circumscribed by political exchanges echoing the rhetorics of Mbembe’s text. By now, we might understand how Black aesthetics regularly refer to a world not of our own making, but constantly and inexorably in motion. Dove’s work is subtitled “Odes to Love and Loss”; love as a possibility that might be shared in public, in intimacies laid bare by the stage. Loss, here, becomes an ongoing aspect of being in community; an expectation danced through, but not to be denied or avoided. Dove wanted us to see his family and friends onstage. He was surely aware that the audiences for contemporary ballet rarely comprise many African diaspora people. Even at the celebrated Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the statistical presence of a Black audience arrives smaller than the larger international white audience for dance. In this reality, Dove and other Black choreographers understand that their work will be seen and assessed mostly by cultural outsiders inexperienced in Black aesthetic worldviews. More than this, these artists spend their professional lives structurally removed from Black life, which is rarely bound up with ballet as a way of life. To tell stories resonant to Africanist aesthetics in the mode of contemporary ballet is to perform another violence of displacement, one that assumes a dissonance between form and content. Black love—bound up in the afterlives of slavery, and subjectivity circumscribed by slavery, colonialism, and apartheid—might rarely be the content to be danced through by professional artists on an opera house stage. These stories and terms of encounter might often be addressed in modern dance, in b-boying and tap dance; in modes of theatrical dance created within the crucibles of Black disavowal. In ballet though, which surely defines a stream of aesthetic awareness for philosophy and dance, the structure’s form might overwhelm the possibility of a careful, communal Black affect, one that imagines a commons able to acknowledge its shared grief. Still Dove managed, in his several works for a diverse group of companies, to stage visions of his own family and friends, and his memories of their trace. These are the people who materialize in Front Porch, Vespers, and Bad Blood at least. Ballet could, for Dove, provide a means of expression that embraced the unstable but palpable groundings that Mbembe offers us, to create dancing in a place beyond place—Heaven—bound up with the front porches of so many Black families in the South of the United States, wondering whether the porch would still be theirs at daybreak. The Front Porch of Heaven—near but not of; welcoming from the outside, commemorating love and loss as intertwined aspects of Black humanity. But ultimately, this rendering is not about reading biography into the terms of an abstract work. Rather it is the beginning of a process to align aesthetic values with the experiences of audiences who witness the work. Many of us—and more and more, with

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things as they are and continue to be—see these performances in the context of global Black life: fugitive, disavowed, resilient, and unexpected in affect. Lively, or enlivened, at every possible moment, and especially when the affordance to dance ballet on a public stage might be offered. Evidentiary of a black commons in formation, a shared site that considers pasts of disavowal toward futures of public theatrical dancing valued in relationship to that past, Dancing at the end of possibility, on the outskirts of traditional conceptions of ballet-as-art, toward the concept of a collective soul. Black dance animates the ruins of colonial mistrust that produced the post-modern turn. Philosophy concerned with an expanded social possibility will inevitably become concerned, deeply, with the emergent terms of a Black social commons and Black life.

CHAPTER 3.6

The Landscape of the Arts LAKSHMI VISWANATHAN

As a dancer and researcher, I have always found the links between the different disciplines within what is termed “the arts” very natural, logical, and imaginative. The philosophy herein is: there is no art without imagination or “manodharma” (natural attributes or properties of mind). The influence of other disciplines on one’s own art is spontaneous and we seek some links and make many ideas our own with time. There are certain factors which contribute to this idea of influence, and one is an innate sense of the imaginary world. Another is the outside influence of things seen, heard, and experienced, while a third is the fire in the mind which kindles a certain inexplicable inquisitiveness and passion in an artist. With their early training in one or perhaps even two disciplines, artists are able to cross borders to find commonality, as well as contrasting ideals in different disciplines. It is therefore not surprising that I as a dancer am drawn to certain forms which have an intrinsic link with dance. I see therefore I learn. I also reflect upon impressions created by some of the visual arts, and furthermore, I visualise what impresses me and I transform it as movement, as dance. A corollary to this appropriation of ideas is the even more strong influence of music and lyrics, as the art of expressing ideas through words is a strong element in my style of dance. I can use mudras (gestures using the hands which have symbolic meaning) to make my body language communicate any mood, any story, any emotion. I can tell the same story that a sculptor or painter tells, with my hands, my body, and my eyes. Inspired by poetry, I can take off and improvise on any given theme. Gurus (the respected thinkers, teachers, and scholars) in India understood this philosophy and have time and again emphasized what they have learnt from the study of an ancient text like the Vishnudharmottara Purana.1 This treatise clearly states that the Arts are interdependent. One cannot be a true artist without a serious engagement with all the Arts allied to your own line of expertise. In fact it is one’s duty to understand those links and enrich one’s own art. To define and understand the core idea of the cult and perhaps the philosophy of interdisciplinary arts, as stated in the above mentioned Purana, one must look at the deep implications of an often quoted verbal exchange between King Vajra and the sage Markandeya. King Vajra requests Markandeya to teach him the art of sculpture. Markandeya replies: “If you wish to learn the art of making images (Pratima Lakshana) you must master the art of painting (Chitrasutra); to know painting you must study the art of dance (Nrttasastra); to learn dance you must first learn instrumental music (Aatodya); to be well versed in that you must be an expert in singing (Geeta Shastra); and to learn singing you must gain knowledge of literature and language.” Whilst the above concept may sound out of reach for an ordinary aspirant, the Gurus of dance carried forward a dedicated training for students in what was known as 272

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Gurukulavasam. In small temple towns or villages, the house of the dance guru became an arts center of sorts. An apprenticeship in the house of a Guru meant that the student should live in the house, be a student of music, dance and whatever else the Guru wished to impart. Daily visits to temples, which were the original havens of all the arts, particularly sculpture and painting, as well as music, instilled in the sishya (student) reverence toward the masters of these arts. The community of artists was closely knit by family ties and chosen young men were trained to eventually become Gurus themselves. Being close to the Guru meant that the student would learn by observation. He had to absorb the music meant for dance, carefully study the lyrics and listen when the Guru spoke on any subject. Girls who belonged to the community were carefully picked to be dancers depending on their talents, looks, and their willingness to work hard. These girls were from the matriarchal side of the families of Isai Vellalars (Musician Farmers). They would dedicate their chosen daughters to be Devadasis or servants of the gods. “Married” to the god, in a quaint ceremony, they were an essential part of temple worship, performing ritual dances to sanctify the space around the temple. Outside the temple the more skillful among this community performed at social events and earned the reputation of being the proverbial courtesans who held a special status in society as the custodians of music and dance. It is well known that for centuries, South Indian temples were the pride of their royal patrons, the kings who built them. They had to house the best in art, particularly sculpture, painting, music, and dance. The best example of a great confluence of artists under one magnificent edifice in the annals of my cultural history is the Brihadeeswara temple of Thanjavur (Lord of the Universe as Shiva is worshipped here) built by the Chola king Raja Raja (985–1014 CE) a thousand years ago. Like many kings before and after him, he brought together innumerable artists to serve Shiva in this enormous temple. He surpassed all his predecessors by getting the best of the best in all spheres, such as sculptors, painters, 400 dancers, many accompanists, dance Gurus, instrumentalists, singers of hymns, drummers, and bugle players. The list, engraved on the walls of the temple, covers nearly eight hundred individuals. The above phenomenon of artists being employed in temples and patronized by the kings continued for centuries. During 1310–1311 the South Indian Pandya kingdom (present-day Tamil Nadu) was invaded by the army of Malik Kafur (a general of Sultan Alauddin Khilji). He plundered many places in the Pandya kingdom, including the capital, Madurai, and this dark age of invasion disrupted the tradition of the temple. The modern age brought the most phenomenal changes to such cultural activities. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries history took a new turn. Under the British colonial rule, a social reformist, Muthulakshmi Reddy (1886–1968) began a campaign to abolish the devadasis from dedication to temples and dancing in public places. “The (Tamil Nadu) Devadasi Prevention Act of 1947” led to the abolishment of dedicating women as devadasis to Hindu idols, objects of worship, temples, and other religious institutions. Whatever remained of the old practice of dance by the devadasis in temple rituals, sacred festivals, royal palaces and boudoirs was known only to the Gurus. They had to move on and find a new setting, new students and rejig their role in a modern milieu. The idea of a new India, free from colonial rule, with pride in its own cultural traditions helped the evolution of a “new” dance, with a modern name, performed in new locations, with the respectable tag of “classical.” The old Devadasi culture, condemned by social reformists, was swept away in an extraordinary tide of history. Dance, now re-christened, could be performed by anybody and it gained respectability after years of condemnation attached to the very word by which dancers were known—devadasi, the servant of god.

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Transformations such as this one build up their own philosophy over time. In this case, history will merely state that the dance itself was saved, whilst the much maligned courtesan and devadasi dancers and their cult had to be abolished. Locating the dance in urban India, within a milieu which understood classical music and its closeness to divine themes, strengthened its case for relevance in a modern society. The Gurus broke new ground in the modern era when instead of teaching devadasis exclusively, they ventured to pass on the Art to young girls from diverse backgrounds. This is the tradition we dancers of the twentieth century inherited. My dance, which is described as “classical” and is popular among many evolved spectators, is known as Bharatanatyam. This name was adopted in the early twentieth century and was no longer the old tradition known as “Sadir” which was performed exclusively by devadasis. A new avatar of dance, which was primarily meant for a soloist, emerged. After a hundred years of growing under an urban umbrella, the dance today continues to draw from its ancient tradition and gets reinvented time and again by its rootedness within an interdisciplinary culture. I am steeped in the Tamil tradition of the Arts. It is therefore essential that I should lead knowledge seekers into perceiving some of the obvious links which unite all the Arts: dance, music, literature, sculpture, painting, and more. How does such an ancient tradition influence a modern day dancer and researcher like myself? The connection between the Arts and the umbrella of the sacred under which they flourished for centuries is indelible. When we can boast of being devotees of the only dancing god in the universe, our aspirations get a mystical and magical impetus from that timeless image. Shiva as Nataraja (the king of dance) has been studied and written about extensively. He is the fountain and source of gnana or knowledge. From that divine source springs a multitude of creative energies. Like our sacred rivers, these streams of knowledge run parallel, unite in harmony at appropriate times, and nourish each other with energetic fervor. Nataraja is not merely an icon to be worshipped. He represents the dance of the cosmos. It is firmly etched in our cultural memory that Shiva as Nataraja is the original Guru of dance. When a dancer today studies this icon to strike that unmistakable pose with one leg lifted across the body, with arms stretched on two sides and hands holding symbols of creation, protection, and destruction, she imbibes the very mystical message of the dance of eternity. Her dance reflects what many a poet has sung. The imagination of the poet and his detailed descriptions of the ideal beauty inspired the sculptor to create not only the most familiar statue of the dancing Shiva as Nataraja, but also the ideal female dancer’s figure in stone and metal. Such “Sundaris” or beautiful maidens are found in many a languorous pose in all our temples. They are virtually songs in stone, drawing our eyes to admire them time and again. Their poses and postures are from the dance idiom but they get transformed in the dance as nayikas, or heroines. The words describing the moods and emotions within the great stories that the poet expresses, give enough material for the dancer to explore and excel in eloquent dance movements: the ancients sang before they wrote! Their poems praised the gods and were danced with appropriate gestures and facial expressions for centuries as part of worship in temples. As a performative art, dance could draw from the same sources because the temple became the prime setting for performance, followed by the palace of the king who was considered the representative of God on earth. Divine love became the favourite theme for song and dance. Nature, too, played an important role in creating the right ambience. In classical Tamil love poetry, the inner universe is associated with certain known habitats. Of the many thinai or landscapes, four are geographically situated in the Tamil country and associated with particular situations in the context of Love: Kurinci (mountainous

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region) is associated with union. Mullai (forests) with waiting, Marutham (cultivated fields) with quarrels, and Neytal (the seashore) with pining. These landscapes were not merely the background for the culture of the ancient Tamil people but were essentially the catalysts which breathed life into the poetry that bards sang. It is thus that music was not merely a tune, but an idea, an emotion, an aesthetically appealing piece of melodious literature. It is this poetic expression of life which has inspired the richness of the dance, Bharatanatyam, as I know it. As a dancer who relishes the amazing continuity of my cultural background, I study and adapt the texts of various poets. Among them are the mediaeval saint poets of South India, the Shaivite Nayanmars (followers of Shiva) and the Vaishnavite Alwars (followers of Vishnu)2 who have produced innumerable eloquent verses ideal for expressional dance. The models set by these saint composers were followed by all poets and minstrels for centuries and the poets have sung of the loving heroines (Nayikas) with striking sensuality. The dance I compose explores the text in full and presents a colorful canvas of changing moods in the play of love. A plethora of emotions directed toward Vishnu or Krishna demand special histrionic skills. Mad in love, the girl is admonished by her mother but at times she loses herself in the magnificent obsession. Her friend the sakhi becomes her confidante but they must speak to each other with their eyes, lest the elders discover their secret trysts with a lover. The mighty Lord of the three worlds is the lover par excellence, and the listless heroine cannot bear any separation. Her story is a moving tale of love experienced, remembered, and lost. While she speaks of the pangs of her aching heart wilting like a lotus under a cloud, she cannot but help sing the praise of Tirumala (one of the names of the god Vishnu) the vanquisher of all evil, who appears again and again in many Avatars to display his unequalled might. It is the poet’s fancy to mingle the most astounding stories of the Lord’s valor with the heroine’s descriptions of his amorous dalliances under a moonlit canopy of stars. We draw on well-known stories to infuse a sense of the dramatic in our dance. This is not a theatrical performance where characters are played by different actors, but a solo dancer becomes many characters in a subtle art known as Abhinaya.3 We use the same mudras or symbolic gestures of the hands which we see in ancient paintings and sculpture; if the gesture we use denotes that we are holding a lotus, our viewers know we are acting as a goddess. Dancers may know the innumerable myths and legends associated with our tradition, but for dancing them, a mere storyline is not enough (Plate 9). Let us look at some classic examples. A great epic like the Ramayana had many tellings. For a Tamil exposition we study the poet Kamban. Kamban, who lived in the twelfth century, sat in the temple of Tiruvottiyur, not far from where I live, to write his magnum opus. I am humbled by his literary craft and by his mastery of Tamil. Originally titled “Rama Avatharam,” Kamban’s Ramayana is not a translation of Valmiki’s Sanskrit Ramayana.4 He writes his own version of the famous story with fabulous originality. Besides, Kamban’s work is characterized not just by the beauty of the Tamil language, replete with magnificent descriptions and embellishments, but also by the poet’s insight into human nature. Reading him makes the mind brim with ideas to express his words in dance. I do not need to tell the whole Ramayana story, that is for another craft. I only look at verses which speak volumes in small clusters of erudite language. Thus I venture to portray a scene from the Kamba Ramayanam. It is not an extensive canvas of actions, but a delicate pattern of beautiful images suitable for evocative Abhinaya. It is widely believed that the very concept of our gods as artists, dancers, and musicians, created a homogenous foundation for the arts. The cosmic Dancer Shiva as Nataraja is the

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origin of dance. It can well be said that the dance of Shiva embodied in the human form as imagined by the saint singers gave the sculptor the impetus to carve the world’s most enigmatic images of dance. It was literally a coming together of many streams. Poetic imagination gave the metaphysical idea of the cosmic dance of Shiva a series of word pictures and such poetry inspired sculpture and mural paintings on the walls of temples. The craft of sculpting had to be perfected to suit the highest level of devotion. The details of the many acts of the divine Dancer, at once the creator, preserver and destroyer, along with the multiple myths that accompanied his every act of making good triumph over evil had to be interpreted in stone and metal, and natural dyes in the case of paintings, with magic realism. To the Indian eye a four armed God is the most natural image. When one walks along the corridors of any ancient temple in India one perceives the magnificent skill of the sculptor, also known as the Sthapathi or architect, in creating images of dancers. Here the gods are dancing, ordinary folks are bending their legs in typical poses, some look as if they have stopped in the middle of a cadence of movements, others look as if they are in joyful group dances facing each other, playing instruments with a smile on their lips. It is believed that the Sthapathi had not only studied dance, but also researched the Sastra texts of India which prescribe, define, and denote movement. The sculplor should have studied the Natya Sastra5—the ancient treatise on dance and drama which goes into every possible detail regarding the guidelines for performance. Furthermore, the sculptor must have a deep knowledge of Silpa Sastra, the text which prescribes rules for sculpting in stone, wood, and metal. It is not surprising that a dancer today finds a link between her stylized gestures and movements and the sculptures she sees of another age. A perfect pose struck in the middle of a series of complex movements as seen in the sculptures is the goal of a dancer. With an understated smile she depicts a goddess of endearing beatitude, connecting immediately with her responsive audience who always respond to divinity on stage. Some postures and movements may have been lost in the long years since temple practice, but new gestures and stances may have been added by the imaginative Gurus. However, the core principles of time, space, rhythm, and proportion remain. Today we take pride in connecting our dance to an ancient tradition. It is true that technique cannot be captured by reading a stone image, but piecing together of the definitions in the old texts with their illustrations in sculpture has given some clues to reconstructing lost movements mentioned in texts, and of understanding how the dance has evolved in different parts of India with the variations peculiar to the local ethos. In my discipline which is Bharatanatyam, Gurus who were employed by kings codified the basic technique as seen today and built a remarkable repertoire around it. A dance Guru must know all aspects of music: poetry which forms the lyrics, languages in which the poets have composed, the intricate Raga6 system which consists of an amalgam of musical notes, and the Tala7 or rhythm patterns which are intricate and mathematical. With such tools in hand, Gurus composed songs for the dance, and laid out a formula for aesthetic presentation. When a dancer begins to dance, she touches the floor and raises her hand to her eyes to seek the protection of Mother Earth. It is not merely a ritual but a spirited acknowledgment of the source of life. Dancers are the chosen ones to depict in a tangible art form, the myriad myths. Just observe the details of the hastha mudras (symbolic hand gestures), They are common to dance and sculpture and tell the same story in different mediums. The dancer is the privileged medium because he or she can bring to life in intimate detail a range of subjects from simple situations to vast mythological stories. What is more the dancer can do it

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within a short span of time. We listen to the Puranas in discourses by savants spread over many evenings of storytelling. But when we dance we use the poetic lyrics to compress enormous details into an hour of histrionic storytelling, and it is indeed the stories of gods and humans that inspire our dance. We colour our actions with the vivid portrayal of emotions, which the viewer relishes, and this experience is called Rasa anubhava.8 The whole concept of Rasa is universal to the world of arts. In particular, Rasa has been analyzed and studied by savants and saints who have had a unique involvement in all the Arts. The intensity of experiencing Rasa has been described as a spiritual exercise and to attain the bliss of self-forgetfulness while witnessing a work of art is akin to a spiritual experience. Somewhere art and spirituality blend and become one. It is a validation of pleasure. A fine example of this validation is the unique portrayal in fine sculpture of the erotic as described in the Kama Sutra9 on the walls of our temples. Adornment of this type is meant to elevate the merely physical to a higher level. Repeatedly our gods and goddesses are portrayed as lovers in our poetry. Our sculptors and painters reflect this idea in various shades and textures. Thus dance follows the art of sculpture in portraying love or Shringara. It also takes inspirational ideas from literature; it is after all the human mind which can stretch the imagination to its ultimate and bring the divine to life. Hidden meanings add mystery to this art of the imagined perfect beauty. From time immemorial dance has visualized ideas and brought them to delight the eyes of the viewer. As a person deeply interested in my own South Indian ethos, I share some interesting aspects of a great civilization. Many scholars and thinkers like Michael Wood, the historian and television chronicler, believe that this is the last of the world’s ancient civilizations. All the Arts meet here to create an experience of beauty. The plastic arts follow ancient rules, whilst they get inspired by nature and poetic ideas. The performing arts, such as dance get reinvented in each age, with new practitioners, trained by their Gurus and by their own cultural instincts to respect the traditional links with the Divine.

NOTES 1.

Puranas (Sanskrit) are ancient Hindu narratives, named after the deities they feature, like Shiva, Vishnu, Devi, and so on. They cover a wide range of subjects such as mythology, philosophy, cosmology, astronomy, theology, folklore, and more. There are 18 Maha Puranas (Great Puranas) and 18 Upa Puranas (Minor Puranas), with over 400,000 verses. The first versions were likely composed between the third and tenth centuries CE.

2.

The Nayanmars were a group of 63 saints in the sixth to eighth centuries, devoted to the Hindu god, Shiva. And their contemporaries, the Alwars were devoted to Vishnu.

3.

Abhinaya (Sanskrit): the term is defined in many texts as the art of expressing moods and emotions using facial expressions and gestures in dance and drama.

4.

Kamba’s Ramayana is a Tamil epic written between 1180 and 1252. It is based on the V¯alm¯ı ki Ramayana but is different in spiritual concepts. It is considered as one of the greatest literary works in Tamil literature. V¯alm¯ı ki Ramayana: the sage Valmiki authored the ancient Sanskrit epic Ramayana—the story of Lord Rama of Ayodhya. It is dated variously from the fifth century BCE to 100 BCE. It consists of 24,000 slokas or poetic verses. The Ramayana is the most popular mythological story followed by the Mahabharata. Both stories have influenced the Arts extensively in India and all over South and Southeast Asia.

5.

Natya Sastra (Sanskrit) is attributed to the sage Bharata. It is an encyclopedia of the performing arts, covering all topics including the construction of a stage for performance.

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Estimates of its earliest composition are to be between the first century BCE and the early second century CE. 6.

Raga (Sanskrit) is the complex melodic framework formed by a combination of musical notes for improvisation by a musician. Each combination has been given a name and a definition and is widely practiced by singers and instrumentalists.

7.

Tala (Sanskrit): rhythmic patterns in musical compositions are mathematically codified and given names. A repeated cycle of rhythm accompanying a composition is known as a Tala.

8.

Rasa (Sanskrit) is a term used to describe aesthetic experience. A whole chapter of the Natya Sastra deals with Rasa, an important aspect of all the Arts.

9.

Kamasutra (Sanskrit) is an ancient text attributed to V¯atsyåyana, historically placed between 400 BCE and 300 BCE. The text is popularly known as a manual on sex. A closer study would suggest that it is also a comprehensive guide to gracious living, discussing many aspects like the nature of love, the pleasures of good living, and even the cult of the courtesan.

CHAPTER 3.7

Entanglement: A Multi-Layered Morphology of a Post-Colonial African Philosophical Framework for Dance Aesthetics JEFF FRIEDMAN

INTRODUCTION African dance and its aesthetics have long suffered reductionism and a subsequent lack of understanding based on European coloniality and the after-effects of post-coloniality. Redressing reductionism requires tracing the effects of Western influences in colonizing Africa and those post-colonial effects, in particular, producing decolonized contemporary African philosophical and aesthetic discourses. To do so, recently, African philosophers such as Kofi Agawu, Soyinka Ajayi, Kwame Gyekye, Alexis Kagame, Didier Kaphagawani, V. Y. Mudimbe, Mogobe Ramose, and Kwasi Wiredu, among others, and including Americans of African descent such as Brenda Dixon Gottschild and Kariamu Welsh Asante, among others, have worked to decolonize philosophical discourses from Western influences on a wide range of topics, including aesthetics. By doing so, philosophers have addressed topics directly related to dance aesthetics including the ontology of personhood and, extending from this category of inquiry, individualism versus communalism in African society. While avoiding any totalizing statements about contemporary African philosophy, this chapter details an emergent decolonized philosophy from several authors in a variety of cultural African contexts that defines indigenous personhood by the physical body as it becomes entangled with animating spirit or -ntu, and that personhood is entangled with community ties or ubu-ntu. Notably, as those physical bodies dance in(to) community, these entanglements are overlaid with the entangled aesthetics of the interdisciplinary African arts complex, a holistic mutually intermedial expression of sound, movement, two- and three-dimensional visual arts, as explicated by Dixon Gottschild.1 Contemporary aesthetics, overlaid with -ntu personhood and ubu-ntu communality, suggests that African dance destabilizes objective perceptions and, instead, demands a fully intersubjective experience of the complex entanglement of these overlaid 279

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embodied systems that stimulate, gather, energize, and celebrate embodied movement as a fundamental ground of African post-colonialist philosophy.

DECOLONIZING AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY It is important to note that Africa, the modern geographical domain, includes historically significant Arabic, Egyptian, and Ethiopian philosophical traditions. These traditions are not considered in this chapter, as they are either relatively hermetic to the rest of the continent or are part of a much larger cultural assimilation project that cannot be traced within the confines of the author’s argument in this text. Second, as Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu suggests, the colonial European academy understood that, by the end of the nineteenth century, African philosophy included both traditional indigenous sources, primarily oral accounts with identifiable individual sages acting as repositories of folk wisdom in various traditions, as well as colonial philosophical discourses from a variety of European print texts. Non-indigenous discourses were taught within higher education institutions nearly all of which were established under the auspices of the Catholic Church, i.e., British Anglican and French/Belgian/Spanish Catholic, particularly Jesuit, traditions. Howard University philosophy faculty member Lee M. Brown notes that “[m]ost of what has been made known through literature about traditional African philosophical thought emerged through Eurocentric characterizations of African cultures. Those characterizations emerged primarily from the perspectives of Western anthropologists and Christian-trained African theologians and clerics who interpreted and translated traditional African conceptual idioms into Western conceptual idioms.”2 Wiredu goes further to note that, mistakenly, European philosophers then raised the oral traditions of folk wisdom into a necessarily less-than-rational comparable to their own print text philosophical discourses. Consequently, European writing on African philosophy used improper categories of thought to formulate evaluations of indigenous discourses. Therefore, as philosopher Barry Hallen notes in his survey of Anglophone African philosophy, “[i]n whatever field of (Western [European]) scholarship, the portrait of Africa that emerges . . . is as much a project of Western cultural priorities and prejudices as it is of anything African.”3 Hallen suggests that Western descriptions of Africa are more telling about the teller than the object of that inquiry. Hallen also cautions his readership to consider philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah as “suspicious of those who claim there is some form of philosophy common to all of Africa’s peoples.”4 This brief tracing of coloniality in reference to African philosophy can only touch on these most fundamental issues. Consequent to recent post-colonial developments, in many parts of the African continent, there emerged several new counter-hegemonic African philosophical discourses. Previous understandings of indigenous sage philosophers gave way to individualized nationalist schools of African philosophy developed specifically to support ideological stances for political gain. These stances validated the individual agendas of various firstgeneration African strong-man leaders, beginning with “the philosopher-kings of early post-independence Africa”: Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana) in 1957, continuing with Ahmed Sékou Touré (Guinea 1958), Leopold Senghor (Senegal 1960), and Julius Nyerere (Tanzania 1961), among others.5 African philosophy then became focused on a supra-national conglomerate of separate tribal philosophical discourses, defined by language groups, e.g., Bantu and Yoruba, among many others. This approach reacted to the colonialist strategy, as Wiredu noted earlier, of

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improperly elevating indigenous sage folklore so as to undercut those traditions as lacking in reference to “rational” European philosophy, by raising individual sage sources of folklore to tribal-wide philosophical discourse. However, this trend can be considered “oppositional, but not radical,” a riposte that “reproduced the order of colonial categories” by re-valorizing the same categories of traditional and modern, but reversing their hierarchy by elevating the traditional.6 Named as “ethnophilosophy” by Côte d’Ivoirian philosopher Paulin J. Houtoundji, this movement elevated the traditional by finding the “modern” in the traditional without necessarily transforming folklore traditions into a reflective and critical philosophical discourse indigenous to Africa. The primary criticism of African ethnophilosophy, by Kwasi Wiredu and others, is that this reversal essentially eliminated individual critical thought on any philosophical topics that was “dialectical . . . [involving] critical reflection and re-evaluation.”7 With the eventual subsidence of the nationalist schools, what finally emerges is the more recent critical approach of Wiredu, leading many others in African philosophical studies. J. E. [Kwasi] Wiredu points out that “[t]he habit of talking about African philosophy as if all African philosophy is traditional carries the implication . . . that modern Africans have not been trying . . . to philosophize in a manner that takes account of present-day development in human knowledge: logical, mathematical, scientific, literary, and so on.”8 In contrast, Kwasi Wiredu notes that the folk wisdom of African sages is not the result of individual thinkers, producing “investigations into the validity or soundness of ideas” but rather accretions of folk wisdom inherited uncritically over several generations.9 While rejecting the nationalist/ideological schools of philosophy imposed by early postcolonialist dictators, K. Wiredu suggests not eliminating the tribal/linguistic nor the traditional sage schools of African philosophy as much as decolonizing one’s approach to those schools of thought by imposing a regimen of critical thinking. Conserving what may be useful within these discourses, he notes that the study of traditional philosophy “provides many opportunities for conceptual decolonization, where frames of thinking, epistemologies and terminologies of the basic philosophical concepts, e.g., time, reality, being, object, entity, mind, spirit and thought, et al., are gateways to alternatives to both the traditional and ethnophilosophers.”10 Specifically of interest, this chapter focuses on an explication of the ontology of personhood, that is, where definitions and functions of the physical body are encompassed as part of the entire entity of a person, in addition to other elements. Many traditional philosophies then explore how the individual, by achieving personhood, is implicated into a community of social entanglements. Where the body is explicitly implicated within the epistemologies of both personhood and communality, these entanglements can be morphologically related to the same sort of entangled African dance aesthetics, discussed by dance studies theorist Brenda Dixon Gottschild, cited earlier.

ONTOLOGICAL ENTANGLEMENT A survey of African ontologies of personhood should be articulated to develop a useful understanding of both vocabulary and conceptual frameworks, as they relate to the physical body and its various entanglements. Malawian philosopher Didier Njirayamanda Kaphagawani clarifies that several African-based ontologies of personhood are not resolved among themselves. For example, Akan perspectives from the West African area of Ghana suggest several important elements of personhood, including honam and okra. Honam refers to the flesh, bones, and blood of the physical body. Okra refers to the

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“innermost self, the essence of the individual person.”11 The author notes a lack of resolve about the ontological qualities of okra, specifically differences of opinion on physical or metaphysical interpretations. Wiredu suggests that okra can be assigned, at least, paraphysical properties12; Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye suggests that okra is metaphysical, conterminous with the Western concept of the soul.13 Here, the important issue is whether or not the individual’s personality subsists in the after-life and, if so, is it ontologically entangled with other elements of personhood, i.e., whether the individual personality may be construed as quasi-material or not. For the Akan, the personality, or sunsum, perishes after death. But, for Wiredu, there is a trace of the personality that is quasi-physical and, hence, survives death. In contrast, for Nigerian philosopher Segun Gbadegesin, Yoruba categories of personhood have four components. Most importantly, Yoruba philosophical approaches to personhood assume, as with the Akan, that an individual, fully invested with personhood, is more than their body. The eniyan, or person, includes ara, referencing the physical-material aspects of human being. In addition, okan can be construed as both the physical circulation system, but also the source of emotional and psychic reactions.14 Gyekye suggests that the sunsum of the Akan is similar to the okan of the Yoruba. The third component of personhood is the emi. Emi is the life-giving element, that which activates the person. It can be construed either as an entity, in and of itself, or as the divine breath that animates an entity, the person.15 Finally, the fourth element is the ori. As the okan, the ori has a dual nature, also ontologically unresolved. First, it can be construed as the “head” of the body, referring to the physical head of a person. But the ori also references the bearer of a person’s destiny as well as the determinant of the individual’s personality.16 The dual but unresolved nature of the ori is similar to the Akan’s sunsum: does it supersede the physical body after death or does it pass away with the end of the physical body? Most important to take away from this brief discussion of some African ontologies of personhood is the following: the individual as a person in African philosophy cannot be separated into a dual-ism. Lee Brown reinforces this approach where he notes that African personhood requires a combination of essences, body and spirit, but also that individuals are imbued with destiny.17 There may be an individual who exists and can be separated into body or spirit but this entity is not yet a person. In African philosophy, personhood is conveyed by enlivenment, animation by a spiritual force, such as the Akan okra or the Yoruban emi, plus okan and ori: “[t]he idea of a person being distinct from its body is incoherent. An individual becomes a person only when its body is infused with a spirit, an emi. Neither body nor spirit alone is a person.”18 And, while there is spiritual animation of the body, there is also a directionality implied by the presence of an internalized destiny for that individual, entailed by a resident force, to be realized through the person’s life-course. These approaches to the components of African framing of ontological personhood link that force and directionality to discourse on the ontology of being in the Bantu culture of Africa. Kaphagawani cites Franciscan missionary Frans (Placide) Tempels’s text Bantu Philosophy (1959) where Tempels argues that “Westerners ‘hold a static conception of being [and Africans] a dynamic [one].’ ”19 In relation to Akan sunsum and okra and other aspects of personhood in Yoruba culture, Kaphagawani links Tempels’ discussion of force in Bantu philosophy to the spirit, personality and, specifically, the destiny of each person. Congolese philosopher and intellectual historian V. Y. Mudimbe comments on Tempels and his concept of vital force as the core of Bantu philosophy. Mudimbe notes that

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Tempels has made explicit an implicit philosophical discourse within Bantu culture. According to Mudimbe, Tempels says that “[t]he fundamental notion under which being is conceived lies within the category of forces.” While Tempels has also said that the Bantu are not “capable of formulating a philosophical treatise, complete with an adequate vocabulary,”20 Mudimbe claims that the philosophy exists as an implicit one and, according to Mudimbe, Tempels has unveiled its organized and systematic character of beliefs and customs.21 What Tempels makes explicit is a Bantu metaphysical ontology of being, and of personhood in particular, that gives attention to a dynamic understanding of a being’s vitality. “Force, in [Bantu] thought is a necessary element in Being and the concept ‘force’ is inseparable from the definition of ‘being.’ There is not an idea among Bantu of ‘being’ divorced form the idea of ‘force.’ ”22 In fact, Tempels goes on to note that one cannot say that beings possess force; for him, being is force, i.e., “more than a necessary attribute of being: [f]orce is the nature of being, force is being, being is force.”23 All beings as force include mineral, vegetable, animal, human, ancestral, and divine. Force orders identity, difference, and relationships. There is a constant dialectic of energy where vital force is nourished, diminished or stopped altogether. It increases and decreases in every being and from one transition to another. Wiredu adds that vital force has both intelligent and nonintelligent qualities, possibly referring to any life-form lower than human as nonintelligent, but still possessing force.24 Rwandan philosopher Alexis Kagame further delineates categories of vital force within a systematic metadynamics: 1. Muntu: Being of intelligence 2. Kintu: Being without intelligence 3. Hantu: Expressing modalities of time and place 4. Kuntu: Indicating other modalities, i.e., quality/quantity; relation, position or disposition; possession or action relative to other beings.25 Kagame goes on to clarify that the suffix -ntu can be defined as that which brings [entities] to life and attests to both their individual value and to the measure of their integration in the dialectic of vital energy.26 And, in relation to the previous discussion of personhood, Mudimbe goes on to clarify that all beings with vital force have senses and capacity for motion, i.e., both physical locomotion and metaphysical directionality. All entities are also subject to the process of birth and death, but importantly, the Kintu, or non-intelligent beings, completely pass away while the Muntu, or intelligent beings, may die but their vital force or what Tempels has called the shadow, will remain: “The principal intelligence which characterizes him as human being [or, in our case, a person with personhood] remains . . . and joins the subterranean universe.”27 In reference to Wiredu’s earlier suggestion, that ethno-philosophy can be reframed from a critical, speculative, and contemporary philosophical approach, Mudimbe then suggests that there can be critical general statements stimulated by Tempels’ made-explicit version of Bantu ontology, cited directly from Mudimbe’s text The Invention of Africa: 1. Application of classical philosophical grids demonstrates beyond doubt that there is an African philosophy which, as a deep system, underlies and sustains African cultures and civilizations. 2. African philosophy is fundamentally an ontology organized as a deployment of interacting by hierarchically ordered forces.

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3. Human vital unity appears to be the center of the endless dialectic of forces which collectively determine their being in relation to human existence.28 Mudimbe reveals that, while these generalized statements seems to operate within the ethno-philosophy approach, these statements also use critical approaches that raise it to toward Wiredu’s requirements of self-reflection and evaluative approaches to contemporary African philosophy. In fact, as Bruce Janz suggests in his text Philosophy in an African Place: There is a well-thought and deliberate way, after many long years of reflection of thinking about Bantu-Rwandese conceptual systems from within the Greek-Western philosophical systems, I propose a comparison between the . . . Bantu-Rwandese philosophy and Husserlian phenomenology. The concept of a priori is the center of Husserlian phenomenology in the same way that “ntu” is the center for the BantuRwandese conceptual system. This resemblance opens up the possibility for expressing the philosophical thinking of Bantu-Rwandese as scientific.29 However, in response to Mudimbe’s claim as supported by both Wiredu and Janz, Hountondji resists this recommendation suggesting that ethnophilosophy is limited by its “claims to translate a non-existent cultural text,” i.e., that there is no ethnographic cultural practice that is sharable among a language group that can be generalizable to philosophical analysis.30 But Mudimbe’s response to Hountondji is to suggest that there is an African gnosis, a shared and sharable “secret knowledge” that is the “primordial African discourse in its variety and multiplicity.”31 Mudimbe notes further, that one factor in considering African gnosis is a “re-evaluation of the concept of rationality from the . . . reconceptualization of scientific method and the relationships that scientific knowledge might have with other forms or types of knowledge.”32 What is African gnosis, where the rational comes into contact with other “forms or types of knowledge”? Wiredu notes the “intimate connection between philosophy and art, music and dance in African society.”33 In response to Hountondji and Mudimbe, it is possible the cultural text that Hountondji is looking for is, firstly, a text that links all ethnophilosophers together; where, secondly, that text can then be reflected upon critically, as per Wiredu; and, thirdly, where Mudimbe’s other form or type of knowledge that supersedes scientific method, may be African art. Specifically, this “text,” as art practice, takes the form of the African Arts Complex which integrates sound, movement and two- and three-dimensional arts. In particular, the art of motion, as it is entangled by and with the other art forms, can be understood, as per Tempels’ explication of Bantu ontology, as referencing the vital force of human beings that raises beings into full personhood and, by this process, supersedes death through continuity with the vital force of cosmic dynamism. Therefore, dance is, as is personhood and all its metaphysical elements, linked inextricably with other art forms. African dance can now be subject to the test of a reflective and critical aesthetics analysis articulated below.

AESTHETIC ENTANGLEMENT As Wiredu notes in his introduction to The Companion to African Philosophy: Access to [African philosophy] can be gained through communal proverbs, maxims, tales, myths, lyrics, poetry, art motifs and the like.34 Art motifs are, in some ways, approximations to writing . . . [I]ndeed, they may have a vividness of message that a

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piece of writing may not approximate. In terms of profundity, this is even truer . . . of African talking drums, which communicate abstract reflections through riddles and paradoxes in the very midst of music and dance.35 This last observation brings us to the intimate connection between philosophy and art, music and dance in African society. Conversely, art historian Jeanette Wilkerson notes that “Africa is a continent often presumed not to have, or at least not to have had, a notion of art . . . symptomatic of a wider process of conceptual manipulation and colonization.”36 Thus, there is a dysphoria located in the contrast between the profundity of music and dance for Africans as a text of philosophical stature, when Wilkerson acknowledges that Europeans often discounted African art. West Indian dancer and choreographer Rex Nettleford has suggested that “the systematic study, analysis, interpretation and diffusion of African cultural heritage has been late in entering the complex of strategies of demarginalization required by persons of African ancestry if they are to retain and maintain human equilibrium in a world that developed in lopsided fashion to Africa’s decided disadvantage.”37 Nettleford goes on to note that [a] dance form which challenges the choreographer, performer, audience and formal critic to the fullest understanding of the dynamic shifts in perspective and proportion in terms of scale, volume, and the play with texture, is demanding of those who encounter its concentration and the ability to distinguish it from what have to be stereotypical simplicities in the description of African dance . . . [is] likely to suffer a quaint reductionism to meet the perceptual needs of city-folks in the West. . . .38 Ghanaian musicologist Victor Kofi Agawu helps further articulate the complexities of the African Arts Complex, including music, dance and two- and three-dimensional art forms, where “patterns of indigenous discourse suggest that African conceptions of music involve entanglements rather than the neat separation into dimensions of European theory.” For example, as Agawu notes, there is no single word for music. In Ewe language, the word vu refers to drum, but not only the drum itself, but the beating of the drum, the beating of drums that elicit and accompany dancing, and also the occasion of drumming and dancing, as well as the place of the drum (vutefe).39 Dance theorist Tracy D. Snipe further explains that the arts complex entails “incorporating other art forms such as drama, oral poetry, and music, including the choral ensemble.”40 Omofalabo Ajayi references art historian Robert Farris Thompson and his magisterial catalogue raisonné, African Art in Motion, when Ajayi continues to explicate not only the African Arts Complex elements, but how they are inter-related: Dance is a multi-communication channel, transmitting information not only through time and space, but also kinetically, visually and through other human sensorial perceptions. This enables it to serve as an important vehicle for other means of communication. For example, through its movement patterns, dance kinetically conveys verbal information; music gets visually interpreted and, in particular, many African plastic art forms attain their full significant specifically through dance motions.41 In reference to the above statement, dance artist/scholar Kariamu Welsh Asante makes the crucial point that “analysis of African dance and music must be performed holistically or the interpretation is invalid.”42 She notes that, once one becomes fully engaged as a perceiver of the dance, music (and adding here the visual) complex, one has become a participant in the complex itself. Therefore, one is liberated to change one’s perspective,

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as possible. From macro- to micro-perceptions, the self moves through options of possible experiences, gaining perspective as one perceives the arts complex phenomenon at different levels. It is very likely that an unfamiliar viewer and participant will experience a fragmentation process where individual parts of the entire complex become the lens through which experience, analysis, and interpretation will be gained. However, this truncation predisposes the analysis to be limited in overall scope.43 Sadly, many African dance groups, themselves, as part of the nationalist phase of African post-coloniality, have reduced their own performances to more simple events, limited in scope: In an effort to upgrade the role of indigenous arts, many African countries have engaged in a cultural revival since obtaining nationhood . . . [D]ances have been uprooted from their customary social context in time, place and motivation. Sometimes they are significantly modified to suit the imagined tastes of the metropolis . . . they are “neotraditional.”44 Rescuing neotraditional presentations of the African Arts Complex from simplistic reductionism in the service of nationalisms framed by leftover Western post-colonial ideologies, dance artist/scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild suggests a set of five premises for aesthetic analysis of the Arts Complex. These aesthetics provide the necessary selfreflective and rational analytic framework of the African gnostic cultural text required above. In her text, Dixon Gottschild focuses primarily on how each premise relates to movement in particular. In an effort to link her aesthetic premises to the entire African Arts Complex, it is important that her aesthetic premises apply equally to all aspects of the Arts Complex, including movement, sound, two- and three-dimensional arts. Each aesthetic premise, as posited by Dixon Gottschild, is applicable in all artistic practices. In the following, each aesthetic is discussed as a separate element, as Dixon Gottschild presents them in her text. However, this explanation will clarify how each element becomes entangled within a holistically integrated aesthetic model. First, Dixon Gottschild recognizes the importance of Polyrhythms as necessarily the first aesthetic premise. Where Western concepts of rhythm are organized along a simple axis of 2/4, 3/4, 4/4 or sometimes six beats within four beats per measure, etc., African polyrhythms are an integrated combination of those different arrangements. For example, a 2/4 beat can be combined with a 3/4 beat within the same measure or across several measures, generating a complexity of rhythms that defies simple analysis. When performed across several measures, it becomes clear that the combined performance of the two rhythms will migrate across each other’s durations (i.e., as the two count and the three count differently overlap) and then finally resolve as the two factors combine into one product. For example, after six measures (factor two × factor three), both rhythms will resolve at the same downbeat to begin migrating again on the next downbeat. As the auditor, one adjusts to perceive these polyrhythms in sound, such as different drums combined together, but one must also imagine a single human body simultaneously integrating polyrhythms accompanied by those drums. For example, the hips move in beats of two per measure; the head and hands move in three beats per measure. Every six measures, these two rhythms resolve, but then continue on to physically and rhythmically cross-migrate within and across the body. In regards to applying polyrhythms to two-dimensional visual arts, imagine the dancing body wrapped in a cloth designed with different visual rhythms, featuring threedimensional visual features such as a headdress with feathers that bounce in a rhythm of

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twos or beads wrapped around the hips that whip in time to a rhythm of fives. Different drums might also have visual designs as would the drumsticks. If someone is whistling in the background in either twos or fives, the whistle instrument will have a rhythmic visual design carved into the wooden object. Then, Dixon Gottschild adds the necessary next premise: Polycenters. If, as an artist, one is generating multiple types of rhythms, simultaneously, there must be different centers from which those rhythms emerge: for each dancer, the embodied centers might include hips and torso providing the 5/4, while the head and hands develop a 2/4 rhythm in combination. Dancing would be integrated with different sized drums (perhaps a bass and a treble sized drum, acting as two musical polycenters), integrating 2/4 and 5/4 rhythms together while emanating from different instrumental centers. For visual arts, the floor cloth on which the dance occurs may develop a visual design with multiple ‘centers’; here is a red part; there is the blue part, each rhythmically expressing, in visual terms, a five-part and a two-part rhythm, located on a spatial visual map. Dancers may move with two beats on red and five beats on blue and then reverse that pattern: five beats on red and two beats on blue, while continuing down the pathway. The third premise of African aesthetics is ephebism. Ephebe refers to the young men of archaic Greece, those just entering puberty who are ideally suited for military training due to their enormous reserves of physical and psychic force: drive, energy and strength. The ephebic qualities of performance by both genders in African dance do not focus on elegance of line or the specificities of a singular “step,” but instead allow the drive, energy and strength of the polyrhythmic and polycentric movement and sound combinations to create a forceful ephebic heat. Drummers are accompanied by the force of crowds of people creating further sound accompaniments by stomping and clapping as dancers move to the sound, continuing on their way down the path. The two-dimensional floor pattern mentioned above is not delicate; it is powerfully red and the blue elements are designed to forcefully jump out to viewers’ visual perception with a drive and energy of its own. The dancers are also driven into further ephebic heat by their three-dimensional headdress which may have small bells attached to it; as their head movements repeat the two-part rhythm, the bells clang near their ears, driving them toward greater energy and force. The fourth aesthetic premise is the Aesthetic of Cool. Cool is not just “cool” on its own, but specifically in contrast to any performance of ephebic heat. If a contemporary jazz drummer in a New York basement in uptown Harlem is producing multiple polyrhythms through the polycenters of his drum set, he must also wear his three-dimensional sunglasses as a cool prop inside the darkened jazz club at 1:00 a.m. in the morning. The dancers’ bodies are heating up, by integrating polyrhythmically and polycentrically within their own bodies, but also in relation to multiple other bodies in the crowded space, each integrating their own polyrhythms and polycenters. The trumpet is wailing, against a background of pounding piano and the ecstatic drum set. But the musicians’ affect is cool, faces composed in a detached mode of virtuosic concentration, framed by sunglasses. The dancers’ faces are detached as well, riding quietly on top of their bodies’ gyrating polycenters and polyrhythms. Their bodies are encased in two-dimensional fabrics designed with energetically contrasting vivid colors in the current fashion. The dancers’ eyes are half-closed, a half-smile on their lips. The sound is cool. The dancers are energetically cool, while fashionably flashy. Snakes Hips Johnson passes by, performing his lasciviously oily sexual hip movements: multiple centers in the hips, groin, buttocks, knees, thighs and ankles, grind and pop polyrhythmically while maintaining, all the while,

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a perfectly decorous upper body and a detached facial expression. Snake Hips lewdly flicks a finger and his tongue in the direction of one particular dancer, subtly citing Papa Guede, a Haitian loa, then tips his three-dimensional hat over his shaded eyes, detaching himself from the crowd, and moves on. Finally, the fifth aesthetic premise is High Affect Juxtaposition of extreme emotion: heated ephebes, in contrast to their movement, sound, and visual performance of an aesthetic of cool, together, produce a memorable combined affect of contrasting opposites. All the while, Billie Holliday is singing out a heated lyrical love song and, without notice, slides right into her specialty, “Strange Fruit,” referencing Southern lynchings, black men hanging from the trees. Dancers are enveloped in an affect of sexual longing, while confronting the death of their beloved ancestors. Hot anger, cool detachment; a complete performance of the five premises of the African aesthetic. According to Dixon Gottschild, all five premises of her dance aesthetics are purposefully and organically entangled among themselves. Multiply entangled with each aesthetic premise at various levels of dual engagements, each premise is encased within greater levels of dual engagement: polycenters with polyrhythms, heated ephebism with the aesthetic of cool, and finally, all premises are composited into a high-affect juxtaposition.45 All four aspects of the African Arts Complex, movement, sound, two- and three-dimensional visual arts, are engaged in these multiple entanglements. The two systems, the Arts Complex and the dance aesthetics system, also intermesh in a meta-aesthetic entanglement. Within the Arts Complex, two-dimensional visual art is enmeshed with kinetic movement; musical sound is enmeshed with three-dimensional visual art; sound in song and chant is enmeshed with the kinetic movement of both drummers and dancers, etc. Then, taking one example to another meta-level, two-dimensional visual arts, as it enmeshes with kinetic movement, also exhibits further meta-enmeshment with the dance aesthetics premises: polyrhythms and polycenters in visual terms, generate a visual ephebism that synergizes with the kinetic ephebism of dance movement. For example, kente cloth is designed to generate multiple centers where visual rhythms are established in direct juxtaposition with other rhythms, mono-center to mono-center. When kente cloth is worn by the dancer, whose body is also moving hips, knees and feet in polycentric polyrhythms, the visual and kinetic ephebisms are maximally synergized. This is just one example among the proliferate opportunities for meta-enmeshment of Arts Complex expression and the five premises of dance aesthetics. This meta-enmeshment is a massively complex and constantly evolving interdisciplinary kinetic, sound, and visual performance dynamic that encompasses a sense of metaphysical dynamics in the form of vital force. Personhood is worked out continuously through the cultural text of African art, always emergent through art practices, through the ontologically necessary expression of vital force. For example, the circular Congo giouba or “battle” dance is the on-the-ground form within which individuals come into contact with other individuals, dancing/musicking/visualizing the exchange of vital force towards fulfilling their destinies as persons. Next, those social exchanges, as they are writ small within the Congolese circle game, are further articulated as expressions of a larger social contract.

SOCIAL ENTANGLEMENT Dance is understood in Africa as an expression of society; according to Welsh Asante, “no art form could exist in traditional African society apart from its cultural context.”46

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Nicholls articulates this statement further where African dance is related to several purposes in society, including rites of passage such as birth, initiations, puberty, marriage and death rites, noting that there is not only “theatrical, but also sociological, historical, political and religious considerations.”47 Referencing earlier discussions about the ontology of personhood, Kenyan educator Odoch Pico supports understanding dance as socially entangled by noting that the Coli African tribal group refers to personhood as bed dank. He analyzes the term as “a person who lives among people or to become a person who lives in society . . . hence to be a person is never a singular activity.”48 He reinforces the alignment of entanglement as a common African morphology by noting that philosophical personhood itself is defined as a social identity. In regard to Bantu vital force ontology, in Africa, the entanglements of society are necessities for action, as Corinne Kratz notes in the framework of marriage arrangements: “decision and responsibility for action involve more than one party in deliberation and action.”49 Kratz is citing, in particular, Mark Hobart’s research on what he terms “complex agency where decisions and responsibilities for action involve more than one party.”50 Therefore, as we consider the aesthetics of dance within its social entanglements, we note how dance is socially entangled not only among persons themselves, but also along with the metaphysics of personhood and the ontology of being as it is understood throughout Africa, referencing the Bantu ontology of “vital force” as a basic model. Africanist Heinz Kimmerle provides a foundation for approaching the issues of social entanglement as they are expressed in both artistic practice and ontological discussions of personhood as socially defined. First, Kimmerle adds another lexeme to the earlier list of -ntu beings, as described by Kagame. In addition to the existing hierarchy of be-ings with or without intelligence, each of which still harbor -ntu or vital force, and the additional modalities within which those beings occur, Kimmerle adds ubu-ntu, referring to how the be-ing of an African person is not only embedded in the community but in the universe as a whole. This is primarily expressed in the prefix ubu- . . . it refers to the universe as “be-ing” enfolded, containing everything. The stem -ntu means the process of life as the unfolding of the university by concrete manifestation in different forms and modes of being. This process includes the emergence of the speaking and knowing human being.51 Notably, Kimmerle is conscious to maintain the hyphen in this new lexeme, referencing Mogobe B. Ramose who coined the phrase “rheo-mode” language. This type of language operates in a processual manner, where nouns are expressed in verb format to indicate an emphasis on flow (from the Greek rheo) and ongoing process. Ramose indicates that “the logic of ubuntu is distinctly rheo-mode in character.”52 He cites Prigogine and Stenger’s Order Out of Chaos (1985) as identifying African sensibility as a “fundamental instability of be-ing [leading to] the ontological and epistemological imperative to contribute to the forthcoming and stabilizing of order as a dynamic equilibrium.”53 Ubu-ntu and communalism refers directly to the nationalist school of African philosophy referenced earlier. Using ubu-ntu as an indigenous world-view, many firstgeneration African leaders, Senghor primarily among them, promoted a Marxist ideology supporting an African national socialism based on existing indigenous forms of consensus: Tanzanian Julius Nyerere has given the well-known formulation: “We talk until we agree.”54 However, critics of this formulation suggest that a simplistic interpretation of African communalism ignores the existing epistemologies of individual personhood, where the vital force of muntu, i.e., those beings with intelligence, are understood as

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forcefully and continuously engaging with the force of other beings, intelligent or otherwise (kintu) in a wide variety of modes (kuntu/hantu). In particular, Gyekye has commented on the importance of the individual in a “moderate communitarianism,” where the community is still considered more important than any individual but that community is comprised of individuals who provide a co-operative system of mutual help, bringing individual vital force to the engagement of others.55 Kimmerle then suggests a direct relationship between ubu-untu’s complex communitarianism and African art aesthetics by suggesting that art practice is a form of ethics, i.e., that a good action is also required to be a beautiful action. For example, he cites the universe as emitting a cosmic sound and that individuals, as they descend from the universe into human form as muntu, are capable of differentiating that cosmic sound into music, making the universe explicit on earth. And, for our purposes in this particular argument on dance aesthetics, the “most prominent answer to the music of the universe is dance. Dancing is participating in the vibration of all that is and giving expression to it in a common as well as in a personal manner.”56 Following Kimmerle, it now is possible see how individual persons, expressing the vital force cultural text, Africa’s gnosis, within a communitarian ethics of living, can articulate a critical and self-reflective philosophical stance on African aesthetics, including dance.

CONCLUSION The aesthetics of African dance are entangled with the social ethics of African culture, where the individual ontology of personhood, as vital force, is entangled productively with others in communal environments. This strategic positioning of entangled morphologies is explicitly working toward alignment among three operative African fundamentals: a complex aesthetics involving dance, sound, and visual arts in continually processual coentanglement; a Bantu vital force ontology that argues for individual entanglement with other -ntu beings; and a social environment in which dance functions prominently to celebrate that communal engagement. Remembering Appiah’s caution to avoid any universalization of African philosophy, this alignment is in rheo-mode, i.e., constantly in flux, always in process rather than any rigid stamping of a Western brand on African indigenous philosophical inquiry. Once this alignment occurs, ideally through embodied participatory inquiry from within the African Arts Complex, that missing cultural text that Paulin Houtundji was searching for emerges as a counter-argument for an African postcolonial critical philosophy. Mudimbe’s African gnosis is African art: movement, sound, and two- and three-dimensional visuality, enacted by individual beings, socially engaged and metaphysically responsive to the ongoing and resounding sound of the universe.

NOTES 1.

Brenda Dixon Gottschild, “First Premises of an Africanist Aesthetic,” Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Portsmouth, NH: Greenwood Press, 1996), pp. 11–20.

2.

Lee M. Brown, “Introduction,” in African Philosophy: New and Traditional Perspectives, ed. Lee Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 3.

3.

Barry Hallen, “Contemporary Anglophone African Philosophy: A Survey,” in A Companion to African Philosophy, ed. Kwasi Wiredu (Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 118–119.

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4.

Ibid., 119, fn. 41, citing Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 73–84.

5.

Sanya Osha, “Kwasi Wiredu (1931–),” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Jonathan Chimakonam (University of Calabar, Nigeria), p. 8, citing Wiredu, “The Concept of Truth in Akan Language,” in P. O. Bodunrin, ed., Philosophy in Africa: Trends and Perspectives (Ile-Ife: University of Ife Press, 1995), p. 14. See also Kwame Safro, “Feminism, African Philosophy and the Rejection of Dualism” (PhD diss., University of Cincinnati, 1989).

6.

Ivan Karp and D. A. Masolo, “Introduction,” in African Philosophy as Cultural Inquiry, ed. Ivan Karp and D. A. Masolo (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), p. 6.

7.

Ibid., 7.

8.

J.E. Wiredu, “How Not to Compare African Traditional Thought with Western Thought,” Transition: The Anniversary Issue: Selections from Transition, 1961–1976, no. 75/76 (1997): 324 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, on behalf of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, 1997). Please note that Kwasi Wiredu sometimes published under a pen-name, “J.E. Joad,” which causes some confusion for accurate citation of his large publication list. In this particular case, the “official” citation for this particular publication composites the author’s first two initials of his pen-name (“J.E.”) with his original surname, Wiredu.

9.

Kwasi Wiredu, “Introduction: African Philosophy in Our Time,” in A Companion to African Philosophy, ed. Kwasi Wiredu p. 2.

10. Ibid. 11. Didier N. Kaphagawani, “Some African Concepts of Personhood: A Critical Survey,” in A Companion to African Philosophy, ed. Kwasi Wiredu p. 332. 12. Kwasi Wiredu, Death and the Afterlife in African Culture (Location and publisher not available, 1987), p. 161. 13. Kaphagawani, “Some African Concepts of Personhood,” p. 333, citing Kwame Geyekye, An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan Conceptual Scheme (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), p. 85. 14. Segun Gbadegesin, “Ènìyàn: The Yoruba Conception of a Person,” in The African Philosophy Reader, eds. P. H. Coetzee and A. P. J. Roux (London/New York: Thomson Publishing, 1998), p. 150. 15. Kaphagawani, “Some African Concepts,” p. 334.. 16. Ibid., 154–155. 17. Lee M. Brown, “Understanding and Ontology in Traditional African Thought,” in African Philosophy: New and Traditional Perspectives, ed. Lee M. Brown, p. 163. 18. Ibid., 167. 19. Kaphagawani, “Some African Concepts of Personhood,” p. 335, citing Placide Tempels, Bantu Philosophy (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1959), p. 51. 20. Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 138, citing Tempels, Bantu Philosophy, p. 36. 21. Ibid., 138. 22. Tempels, Bantu Philosophy, pp. 50–51. 23. Placide Tempels, “Bantu Ontology,” in African Philosophy: An Anthology, ed. Emmanuel Eze Chukwudi (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), p. 431. 24. Kaphagawani, “Some African Concepts of Personhood,” p. 336.

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25. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa, p. 147, citing Alexis Kagame, “L’ethnophilosophie des Bantu” (Bantu Ethnophilosophy), in La Philosophie Contemporaine (Contemporary Philosophy) vol. 4, ed. Raymond Klibansky (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1972), pp. 598–599. Mudimbe also attributes several additional authors who helped develop these four essential categories of vital force, including: V. Mulago, Un Visage Africain du Christianisme (An African Face of Christianity) (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1965), pp. 152–153; E. N. C. Mujynya, L’homme dans l’univers des Bantu (Man in the Bantu Universe) (Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo: Presses Universitaires du Zaire, 1972), pp. 13–14; and Janheinz Jahn, “Ntu’-African Philosophy,” in Janheinz Jahn, ed., Muntu: An Outline of the New African Culture, trans. Marjorie Grene (New York: Grove Press, 1961), p. 100. Note: Tempels also adds “Bintu,” as the representation of “what we call things . . . that is to say, forces not endowed with reason, not living” (Tempels, “Bantu Ontology,” in African Philosophy: An Anthology, ed. Emmanuel Eze Chukwudi, p. 432). 26. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa, p. 148. 27. Ibid., 149–150. 28. Ibid., 152, citing Fabien Eboussi and F. Eboussi-Boulaga, “Le Bantou Problématique” (The Problematic Bantu), Présence Africaine, Nouvelle Série, no. 66 (1968), 23–26; Paulin Hountondji, Sur la Philosophie Africaine: Critique de l’ethnophilosophie (On African Philosophy: A Critique of Ethnophilosophy), second edition (Paris: F. Maspero, 1977; repr., Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1983); and Ntumba Tshiamalenga, “La Philosophie dans la situation actuelle de l’Afrique” (Philosophy in the Current Situation of Africa), in Combats pour un Christianisme Africain: Melanges en l’honneur du Professor V. Mulago (Fighting for an African Christianity: A Collection in Honor of Professor V. Mulago), eds. A. Ngindu Mushete and Tulu Kia Mpansu Buakasa, et al. (Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo: Faculté de Théologie Catholique, 1981), p. 178. 29. Bruce Janz, Philosophy in an African Place (Plymouth, UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), p. 160, citing Maniragaba Balibutsa, Les Perspectives de la Pensée Philsophique BantuRwandaise après Alexis Kagame (Perspectives on Bantu-Rwandan Philosophical Thought, after Alexis Kagame) (Butare, Rwanda: Editions Université Nationale Du Rwanda, Librarie Universitaire du Rwanda, 1985), p. 504. 30. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa, p. 159. 31. Ibid., 186. 32. Ibid., 198. 33. Wiredu, “Preface” to Cultural Universals and Particulars: An African Perspective (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 22. 34. Ibid., citing p. 114. 35. Ibid., citing Cultural Universals, 15ff. 36. Jeanette Wilkerson, “Using and Abusing African Art,” in The African Philosophy Reader, eds. P. H. Coetzee and A. P. J. Roux p. 383. 37. Kariamu Welsh Asante, “The Zimbabewean Dance Aesthetic: Sense, Canons and Characteristics,” in African Dance: An Artistic, Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, ed. Kariamu Welsh Asante (Trenton, NJ: African World Press, 1996), p. xiv. 38. Ibid., xviii. 39. Victor Kofi Agawu, “Aesthetic Inquiry and the Music of Africa,” in A Companion to African Philosophy, ed. Kwasi Wiredu p. 407. 40. Tracy Snipe, “African Dances: Bridges to Humanity,” in African Dance: An Artistic, Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, ed. Kariamu Welsh Asante p. 65, citing A. M. Opoku

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and Willis Bell, African Dance: A Ghanaian Profile (Legon, Ghana: University of Ghana, 1965), p. 1. 41. Omofalabo Soyinka Ajayi, “In Context: The Dynamics of African Religious Dance,” in African Dance, ed. Kariamu Welsh Asante, p. 186, referencing Robert Farris Thompson, African Art in Motion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). 42. Welsh Asante, African Dance, p. 207. 43. Ibid., 211. 44. Robert W. Nicholls, “African Dance: Transition and Continuity,” in African Dance, ed. Kariamu Welsh Asante, p. 52. 45. Dixon Gottschild, Digging the African Presence, pp. 11–20. 46. Welsh Asante, African Dance, p. 226. 47. Nicholls, “African Dance,” p. 44. 48. Odoch Pico, “Personhood and Art: Social Change and Commentary among the Acoli,” in African Philosophy as Cultural Inquiry, eds. Ivan Karp and D. A. Masolo, p. 106. 49. Corinne A. Kratz, “Forging Union and Negotiating Ambivalence: Personhood and Complex Agency in Okiek Marriage Arrangements,” in African Philosophy as Cultural Inquiry, eds. Ivan Karp and D. A. Masolo, p. 137. 50. Kratz, “Forging Union,” citing Mark Hobart, “The Patience of Plants: A Note on Agency in Bali,” in Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs 24 (1990): 96. 51. Heinz Kimmerle, “Ubuntu and Communalism in African Philosophy and Art,” in Prophecies and Protest: Ubuntu in Glocal Management, eds. Henk van den Heuvel, Mzamo Mangaliso, and Lisa van de Bunt (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2007 [Amsterdam/Pretoria: Rosenberg Publishers-Unisa Press, 2006]; RozenbergEdition http:// rozenbergquarterly.com, accessed August 12, 2017), p. 2 (digital edition). 52. Mogobe B. Ramose, African Philosophy Through Ubuntu (Harare, Zimbabwe: Mond Books, 1999), p. 83. Ramose refers to rheo-mode language as that which uses nouns as verbs to indicate a processual mode of be-ing. Historical references to previous rheo-mode thought process, if not actual languaging, include: Heraclitus (“panta rhei,” i.e., “everything flows”); Hegel, whose historical dialectic is always in process (G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977); and American pragmatist philosopher Charles Peirce, for whom the “universe is change” (Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Arthur W. Banks, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Aess of Harvard University Press, 1958). These historical references are explicated further in Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: The Evolutionary Paradigm and the Physical Sciences (Toronto/New York/London/ Sydney: Bantam Books, 1984). 53. Prigogine and Stengers, Order Out of Chaos pp. 55–60. 54. Ibid., 84. 55. Kimmerle, “Ubuntu and Communalism in African Philosophy and Art,” p. 86, citing Kwame Gyekeye, Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 35–76. 56. Ibid.

CHAPTER 3.8

African Sensibility and the Muscogee (Creek) Stomp Dance Tradition PAULA J. CONLON

Philosopher Stephen Davies observes that, in non-Western cultures, artistic activities are frequently tied to social functions, such as the enactment of ritual, observing: “Their pervasiveness suggests that they are integral, not incidental to the social ends they serve.”1 He notes: “It seems evident that these practices arose independently within geographically separated societies, rather than being invented once and subsequently transmitted through cultural contact. No doubt there has long been intercourse between societies concerning such matters, but this must often have dealt with innovation in types of items and action that already were familiar.”2 Prior to the forced removal of Indigenous3 peoples to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma),4 the southeastern Indigenous peoples known as The Five Civilized Tribes (Creek,5 Seminole, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw) owned slaves of African descent. Historian Gary Zellar6 discusses how, among the Creeks, the slaves of African descent were known as Estelvste—black people—and they had lived among the Creeks dating back to the seventeenth century. Over the years, they made a place for themselves in a tolerant Creek Nation in which they had access to land, resources, and political leverage. Many of the African Creeks understood both Creek and English, and they often served as interpreters for those who were “Creek by blood.” As noted by Muscogee (Creek) historian Blue Clark: “The Muscogees have always been a mixture of peoples.”7 This union of peoples evolved into a confederacy of member tribes, called “tribal towns.” In time, the confederacy expanded further through the addition of tribes conquered by tribal towns, and, later, by taking in tribes and fragments of tribes devastated by the European imperial powers. Within the Creek confederacy, the language and the culture of the founding tribal towns became dominant. When the southeastern Indigenous peoples were forcibly removed to Indian Territory in the 1830s and 1840s, the slaves of African origin who had been amalgamated into their cultures went with them. Upon their arrival to Indian Territory, the Creeks set up fortyfour ceremonial grounds on their assigned tribal lands, of which sixteen ceremonial grounds are still active. In stark contrast to the virtuosic competition powwows Oklahoma is known for, Indigenous stomp dances,8 held outdoors at ceremonial grounds in the eastern part of the state, remain (in 2020) private communal gatherings. These all-night 294

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vigils keep the Green Corn religion of North America’s eastern Woodland peoples alive and well, despite being forcibly removed to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). Choctaw philosophy professor Thurman Lee Hester9 tells the story about when he asked John Proctor (1926–2012), the oldest living Creek medicine man at that time (2004), to speak to his Native American Identity class at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma (in Chickasha, Oklahoma). After the talk, one of the students asked Proctor what Hester termed “the ultimate question”: “What makes you Creek?” Without hesitation, Proctor replied: “If you come to the stomp ground for four years, take the medicines,10 and dance the dances, then you are Creek.”11 John Proctor was the Creek medicine man of the Tallahassee ceremonial ground (east of Cromwell, Oklahoma), where I personally was an active member from 2004 to 2008. The stress placed by Proctor on the importance of practice in what it means to be Creek helped me to understand the process whereby I was increasingly accepted as a member of the Creek stomp dance community. Ethnomusicologist Beverley Diamond12 suggests that “syncretism” can be defined as the theory that when there are similarities between two traditions, they are more likely to merge to form a new hybrid tradition. These similarities may be in the expressive forms themselves or in aspects of the social context of those forms. It is possible, in the Creek stomp dance tradition, to determine the syncretic elements that have occurred because of the long association of peoples of African origin and the Indigenous Creek people at Creek ceremonial grounds in Indian Territory. This chapter explores the relation between African sensibility and the Creek stomp dance tradition, addressing the following topics: 1. Are there shared aesthetic preferences between music and dance idioms of African origin and the Creek stomp dance tradition? 2. Are there shared beliefs about the social function of music and dance to create group cohesion at a religious ritual? 3. Do these shared beliefs extend to how to use music and dance to create group cohesion at a religious ritual? 4. What is the relation between African sensibility and the Creek stomp dance performative style? 5. How does the Creek stomp dance performative style factor into the Creek stomp dance tradition as active process?

STOMP DANCE TRADITION Anthropologist James Jackson13 describes how ceremonial grounds in eastern Oklahoma sustain their tribal identities through participation in the Woodland social network associated with the Green Corn religion. As a result, the stomp dance is simultaneously a tribal and an intertribal phenomenon, but not a Pan-Indian one. He suggests that ceremonial grounds can be viewed as congregations. As such, memberships fostered by intermarriage, friendship, or other factors, with or without tribal ancestry of the ground itself, do not diminish the tribal identity of the ground. To illustrate how the ceremonial grounds function as congregations, he describes the mentoring he received as a nonNative from an individual of the stomp dance community who facilitated his acceptance into a Yuchi14 ceremonial ground. In a similar manner, I was mentored by Creek stomp

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dancer Linda Alexander (1917–2009), who facilitated my acceptance into a Creek ceremonial ground. Choctaw cultural specialist Gary White Deer discusses the positive effects of the indoor stomp dances that emerged in the 1970s. These indoor dances take place at tribal community centers during the winter months (when the ceremonial grounds are not active), and have continued to the present day (2020). White Deer observes: “Although we may not be able to understand one another’s tribal language, most southeastern Indians share an important cultural feature called the stomp dance, along with its associated songs. This particular group of songs is widely sung, and is like a common language. These shared songs encourage intertribal participation at various ceremonial grounds throughout eastern Oklahoma.”15 A stomp ground comprises a cleared field on rural tribal land, where the ceremonial dancing will take place. The dancers form a counter-clockwise spiral around a sacred fire in the center of the stomp ground, alternating male and female dancers in a single file. Stomp dances are made up of a series of song sets. Male dancers sing in a call-andresponse format. They are supported by the percussion of the female dancers who wear leg rattles, made of either turtle shells or evaporated milk cans, partially filled with pebbles. The rattles are attached to a leather base and laces are used to tie the rattles around the calves, over pieces of cloth to prevent chafing. The female dancers wearing rattles, either turtles or cans, are referred to as “shell shakers.” The shell shakers wear mid-calf length, full skirts that allow for freedom of movement. The distinctive turtle shell leg rattles worn by the women are considered icons of the stomp dance tradition. Using highly-skilled, double-step movements to produce a smooth, polished, gliding sound, the rattles resound in the still night air. The dance step of the men and the women not wearing leg rattles is a walk or shuffle to the double-step beat of the shell shakers. Women not wearing shells or cans join in the line after the shell shakers, with children at the outermost point of the spiral.

GREEN CORN RELIGION This description of the Green Corn religion is based on the dances held at the Tallahassee ceremonial ground east of Cromwell, Oklahoma between 2004 and 2008. In the early 2000s, the Tallahassee ceremonial ground had around twenty regular members, with twenty or so members from other Creek ceremonial grounds who participated in the Tallahassee dances on a regular basis.16 Creek shell shaker Bertha Tilkens17 (b. 1936) explains that Green Corn is considered a renewal ceremony, marking the beginning of the New Year for Woodland tribes who practice the stomp dance religion. Each of the ceremonial grounds maintains a sacred fire, which in many cases was brought from the east during the forced removal. Linda Alexander describes the fire’s function at the Green Corn dances: “The smoke takes our prayers up to the Creator. The missionaries thought that we were worshiping the fire, but that’s not it at all.”18 In the past, corn was the foundation of the Creek people’s diet. Today (2020), corn remains symbolically powerful to Creek people and is the featured food at communal meals. The Green Corn Ceremony is also referred to as the “busk,” from the Creek word poskita—“to fast.” As a first-fruits ritual, ceremonial ground participants are expected not to eat the new corn crop until they have been purified by the fasting and medicine consumption undertaken at Green Corn. Jackson notes: “Like their ceremonies, songs,

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and dances, corn is, for the Creek, one of the blessings bestowed upon Indian people by the Creator.”19 An offering of corn to the fire is a common element of the Green Corn Ceremony, but historically corn was not the only food substance offered to the fire. According to Caleb Swan,20 not only was corn offered to the fire but also cassina (a species of holly). According to James Adair,21 every kind of new crop, meat, button snakeroot, and cassina were offered to the fire. The medicine (herbal tea) is also used on the fire. Stomp dancer Robert Wolfe explains: “The fire at the stomp ground must be gentled at the Green Corn. That’s why we pour medicine on it.”22 Linda Alexander stresses that the medicine is crucial to the life of the ceremonial ground: without the medicine man, the ceremonial ground cannot function. She cites the example of her father’s old ground, Tallahasutci: “My dad’s old ground is gone. They don’t have a medicine man; they don’t have any management people. They tried it two or three times and it failed.”23 The Green Corn religion involves four all-night stomp dances held outdoors at ceremonial grounds on tribal land. At these dances, the first song set (made up of four songs) is reserved for members of the host ground. Members of visiting grounds and other guests are then invited to join in the dancing. The first dance in the Green Corn calendar is held in late spring. This dance comprises the opening ceremony to renew and purify the sacred fire, “to bring the fire alive.”24 The second dance in the calendar is the arbor dance, held the week preceding the Green Corn Ceremony, in late June or July. Fresh boughs are placed on the four arbors that face the stomp ground, one arbor per side. The four-day Green Corn Ceremony begins on the Thursday of the week following the arbor dance. A short stomp dance is held just after dusk, lasting an hour or so, “to prepare the ground for that year’s ceremony.”25 On the following day (Friday), the shell shakers, wearing leg rattles, perform the ribbon dance (Plate 10), wearing colorful ribbons on their outfits or in their hair. Red is a favored color. Ribbon dancers are of all ages, some as young as three years old. Female members of visiting grounds are welcome to join in the ribbon dance. Two men with coconut rattles provide the singing for the ribbon dance, accompanied by a third man playing a water drum.26 Four women are chosen to lead the ribbon dance, all of whom must commit to a fouryear period. These women, referred to as “principal women,” each carry a knife wrapped up in a cloth while dancing. The principal women must wear the traditional turtle shell leg rattles, but the other shell shakers are permitted to wear either turtle shell or can leg rattles. After the principal women are lined up, the stick men place the other shell shakers in line according to age with shell shakers wearing turtle rattles placed ahead of those dancers wearing cans. The ribbon dancers proceed in single file in a counter-clockwise direction just inside the perimeter of the stomp ground, dancing the double-step percussion to both slow and fast songs. When they are not dancing, the shell shakers sit as a group on benches or lawn chairs just outside the outskirts of the dance area. Members of visiting grounds and other guests arrange themselves around the perimeter of the dance area to watch the ribbon dance, often setting up in the same spot at each ceremonial ground year after year. John Proctor refers to the Friday of Green Corn as Women’s Day, honoring the women in this matriarchal society as “the givers of life.”27 At the end of the ribbon dance, the men join the shell shakers for a special stomp dance that concludes this portion of Green Corn.

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Daytime activities on the Saturday of Green Corn include fasting, taking the medicines, and ritual scratching “to ensure a healthy life.”28 (Ritual scratches on the arms and legs are made with a straight pin or thorn.) The men perform the feather dance in the afternoon. During this performance, each man carries a staff with a white feather attached to the top. The evening meal breaks the all-day fast. Later Saturday evening, after dusk, four calls announce the start of the all-night stomp dance that culminates the Green Corn Ceremony. The dance begins shortly before midnight, with short breaks between each of the song leaders’ rounds. After a communal meal is served around 2:00 a.m., most of the members from visiting grounds and other guests depart. The members of the host ground continue dancing until dawn, when a special stomp dance song is performed, referred to as the “last dance.” A communal breakfast is served on Sunday morning. Adult members of the host ground must not sleep until noon on Sunday. This protocol relates to the origin story of the Green Corn religion, when the corn used to ripen overnight until someone fell asleep.29 Members of the host ground return to their homes on Sunday afternoon or evening. One more all-night stomp dance is held in early fall (late August or September) to close the ground for that year, “to put the fire to sleep.”30 The Green Corn annual dance calendar at the ceremonial grounds will resume the following spring.

CREEK PERFORMATIVE STYLE Ethnomusicologist Victoria Levine31 singles out Creek stomp dance songs as one of the two most important genres of music of the southeastern tribes. (The other highlighted genre is Choctaw social dance songs.) She describes the opening brief, stylized recitation by the song leader, to which the other male dancers respond with shouts. The dance spiral begins forming, as more and more participants join the line, walking counter-clockwise in single file around the fire. This introductory section features dense, energetic vocal exchanges between the song leader and the other male dancers. The melodic contour is predominantly level, the tempo is fast, and the male dancers echo the song leader’s call. At a specific point, the song leader simulates a jogging step to cue his lead shell shaker to begin the double-step percussion, and the singing develops seamlessly into the first song of the set. The end of the first song is articulated by a formulaic call, answered by a shout from the male dancers, as the shell shakers shift fluidly from their double-step percussion to the walking step of the other dancers. The second song begins almost immediately. In this song, the leader improvises longer calls with wider ranges, more varied melodic contours, and more complex rhythms. The male dancers respond in unison with one fixed phrase, and the shell shakers maintain their double-step percussion. The song set continues in this manner, with a short break between each song and a progressive broadening and lengthening of musical components in each successive song. By the last song in the set, the leader’s calls are long and intricate, exploiting his full vocal range and expressive capabilities. The chorus of male dancers may elaborate their sung response with three-part harmony, and the shell shakers’ double-step percussion drives the song forward. When I first started shaking shells at Creek stomp grounds, Linda Alexander32 would counsel me not to start the double-step percussion until the shell shaker directly in front of me in the dance spiral had begun that double-step. Hence Levine’s comment: “The cumulative musical effect evokes the image of sound spiraling outward from the center in concentric circles.”33

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CREEK FREEDMEN The 13th Amendment to the USA Emancipation Proclamation (December 1865) abolished slavery throughout the country, including the Indian Territory. Many of the southeastern Indigenous peoples, including the Creeks, had sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War (1861–1865), and their treaties were ultimately annulled. When the treaties were renegotiated, the former slaves of tribal members became freedmen and were compensated with tribal land. From 1865 to 1920, more than fifty All-Black towns were created in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), where freedmen settled together for mutual protection and economic security. The term “Creek Freedmen” refers to emancipated African Americans who were former slaves of Creek tribal members before 1866, and their descendants. Following emancipation, Creek Freedmen who wished to stay in the Creek Nation, with whom they often had blood relatives, were granted full citizenship by the tribe. African Americans from bordering states flooded into Indian Territory, claiming to be relatives of the Creek Freedmen and establishing themselves as citizens of the nation. When the Land Run of 1889 opened more land to non-Indian settlement, African Americans from the Old South rushed to the newlycreated territory. By 1891, the Creek Nation in Indian Territory comprised 9,059 “Creeks by blood” and 4,203 Creek Freedmen. In 1891, the average population of the Indigenous Creek towns was 206; the average population of the All-Black towns was 1,401.34 What is particularly interesting is the proximity of the sixteen remaining Creek ceremonial grounds35 to the thirteen remaining All-Black towns which retain incorporation.36 For example, the Creek ceremonial ground Muddy Waters (Weogufkee) is within walking distance of the All-Black town of Vernon, established in 1911. What prompted the retention of incorporation of the All-Black towns that were near the remaining Creek ceremonial grounds? Are there shared features between African American performative cultural expressions handed down by the Creek Freedmen and the Creek stomp dance tradition?

SHARED AESTHETICS—RING SHOUT The ring shout (also called the “slave shout”) is the oldest African American performance tradition surviving on the North American continent.37 The ring shout has survived in unbroken traditional practice from slavery times in McIntosh County on the coast of Georgia. The shout originated from a Central and West African dance form that features counter-clockwise movement. Historian Sterling Stuckley observes: “Wherever in Africa the counter-clockwise dance ceremony was performed, the dancing and singing were directed to the ancestors and gods, the tempo and revolution of the circle quickening during the course of the movement.”38 While the word “shout” is used to describe the collective elements of the ring shout tradition, it more specifically refers to the dance-like movement of the women. The “shouters,” women dressed in long dresses and head kerchiefs, proceed around and around in a counter-clockwise circle. They alternate between a forward walk and a forward hitching shuffle, in which the feet do not cross. Practitioners of the tradition maintain that crossing your feet would be unholy dancing, whereas “shouting” is a worship of the Lord. Shouts typically start at midnight and go to daybreak. The ring shout features a distinctive call-and-response format. The “songster” (male lead singer) “sets” (begins) a song. At his side sits a “sticker” or “stick man,” who beats a

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broomstick, or other wooden stick, on the floor in rhythm with the songster. Behind the two men, the “basers” (a group of male singers) answer the songster in call-and-response format. At the same time, the basers clap their hands and pat their feet, setting up counterrhythms to the stick man’s basic beat. The African American ring shout parallels the Creek stomp dance tradition in many respects, including: 1. male call-and-response singing; 2. percussive accompaniment; 3. women’s attire of long skirts; 4. counter-clockwise movement; 5. women’s dance step comprised of a hitching shuffle in which the feet do not cross, and 6. midnight to daybreak timeframe. As the ring shout tradition in North America evolved during slavery, the shout songs contain strong elements of Christian belief, and there are biblical references in many of the songs. In Indian Territory, the Creek people were assigned to either the Baptist Indian church or the Methodist Indian church. Are there shared aesthetic preferences between the African Creeks and the Indigenous Creeks who attended rural Creek Christian churches in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma)?

SHARED AESTHETICS—CREEK CHRISTIANS Ethnomusicologist Hugh Foley39 describes how the Creek hymns sung at rural Creek Baptist churches in Oklahoma maintain musical traditions linked to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Creek people in the southeastern United States owned slaves of African descent. When the Creek people were removed to the Indian Territory, often the slaves who came with them could speak both Creek and English. As a result, African Creeks became the first interpreters and preachers in Indian Territory, and preached to mixed audiences. The first Baptist Church in Indian Territory was established in 1832 by a co-operative congregation of black, white, and Creek people near the Arkansas River near Muskogee. When missionaries were ejected from the Creek Nation in 1836 for upsetting the balance of participation in the traditional stomp dance religion, African Creeks became the de facto ministers until the missionaries were allowed to resume their work in the Creek Nation in the mid to late 1840s. When the slaves of African descent began to separate from their tribal owners after the Civil War (1865), the Creek Christians maintained some of the older styles of singing African American hymns and spirituals, as well as some songs learned directly from Scottish missionaries, and some common Southern Baptist hymns, converted into the Creek language. Foley40 points out the connections that exist between the rural Creek Baptist and Methodist churches in Indian Territory and the Creek ceremonial grounds: 1. the number four plays a prominent role; 2. camps are arranged in a circle around the arbors on the periphery of the stomp ground (church);

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3. fasting is an important element; 4. music is a core activity; 5. the mekko (chief) of the ground sits facing the east (church front doors); 6. men and women are segregated during ceremonies (church services); and 7. humility and love are intrinsic elements. Most of the Creek Christian churches in Indian Territory are named after tribal towns in the old Creek Nation of what are now the states of Alabama and Georgia. Ethnomusicologist Karen Taborn41 observes that there are three types of hymns or songs performed at rural Creek churches in eastern Oklahoma: English hymns, gospel songs, and Creek hymns. The first two are sung in English; the Creek hymns are sung in Creek. The Creek hymns comprise three quarters of the entire musical portion of the services and the majority of these hymns are songs of encouragement. The performance of the Creek hymns includes the pronounced presence of a song leader, similar to the Creek stomp dance tradition. Cross-fertilization between the music idioms of Indigenous Creeks, African Creeks, and European missionaries in North America coalesced in the Creek hymns sung at over seventy rural Creek Christian churches in Indian Territory since the 1830s. Are there shared aesthetic preferences between the Creek stomp dances (specifically the Green Corn ribbon dance) and dances of African origin?

SHARED AESTHETICS—AFRICAN At an African women’s funeral rites dance from Matakam, Cameroon, the female dancers wear leg rattles (with basketwork resonators) and red skirts, they carry knives, and they proceed counter-clockwise in single file.42 This West African dance resembles the ribbon dance performed by Creek shell shakers at Green Corn in multiple ways: the Creek women wear leg rattles and red skirts (or other brightly-colored attire), the first four dancers (the “principal women”) carry knives, and the female dancers proceed counterclockwise in single file. Moreover, there are comparable concessions to modern life regarding use of available materials for the resonators of the leg rattles worn by the female dancers. In Senegal, West Africa, the basketwork resonators for leg rattles, traditionally made of braided palmyra fiber, were increasingly replaced with evaporated milk cans (or beer cans) by the midtwentieth century.43 Likewise, in Indian Territory, resonators made from turtle shells were increasingly replaced with evaporated milk cans circa 1950. The comparison of the women’s funeral rites dance from Cameroon and the Creek stomp dance tradition confirms there are shared aesthetic preferences between expressive forms of the dance idioms from Africa and the Green Corn ribbon dance. Are there shared beliefs between African and Creek peoples about the social function of music and dance in a ritual context?

SOCIAL FUNCTION Anthropologist Alan Merriam44 delineates between the use of music and its deeper function: “use” refers to the situation in which music is employed; “function” concerns the reasons for its employment and the broader purpose which it serves. Stephen Davies

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notes that: “Much more often in non-Western cultures, artworks serve socially useful purposes in rituals and the like.”45 For example, Ghanaian ethnomusicologist J. H. Kwabena Nketia notes that, in Africa: “Performances of Yoruba music . . . bring both the satisfaction of participating in something familiar and the assurance of belonging to a group sharing in similar values, similar ways of life, a group maintaining similar art forms. Music thus brings a renewal of tribal solidarity.”46 Deacon James Cook describes the function of the African American ring shout: “Praising God with an order of thanksgiving.”47 Creek medicine man Sam Proctor (1933–2017), the younger brother of John Proctor, elaborates on the function of the Green Corn dances: “The ceremonial ground is supposed to be built on love, run by love, and all the activities are supposed to be done by love.”48 There is thus a similarity between African and Creek beliefs about the social function of music and dance in religious rituals to foster communal integrity. Are there also similarities between the two cultures regarding how to use music and dance to create group cohesion at a religious ritual?

GROUP COHESION Synergy, from the Greek synergos—“working together”—refers to the co-operative interaction among groups so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual efforts. Group cohesion leading to synergy can be inferred from the number and strength of mutual positive attitudes among members of the group. As the group becomes more cohesive, the interactions and communication between members increase. Common goals, interests, and small size contribute to this effect. Group member satisfaction increases as the group provides friendship and support against outside threats. Art historian Jean Laude describes the resonant flow of sound built up in rhythmic elements at dance ceremonies along the Guinea Coast in West Africa, noting the regulating and organizing factor as a result of the force of the rhythm, the surge of the dance (either group or individual), and in the music as a whole. He concludes: “The body is thus trained to be part of a complex network of analogies established with the universe.”49 A dancer’s relation to the music is most intimate when they also accompany themselves, especially when a sound-maker is attached to their body, such as the turtle shells (or cans) partially filled with pebbles and worn by the female dancers at Creek stomp dances. The female dancers’ heightened experience (as both shell shaker and dancer) parallels the male dancers’ experience (as both singer and dancer). At the Creek ribbon dance at Green Corn, the female dancers fit their sounded rhythms (as shell shakers) to the sounded rhythms of the male musicians (two male singers shaking coconut rattles, accompanied by a third man striking a water drum). At the all-night dance that culminates the Green Corn Ceremony, the female dancers provide the sole percussion accompaniment (as shell shakers). Ethnomusicologist John Chernoff points out that the essence of rhythm is repetition— the uniform recurrence of a pattern of sound: “We move along with a rhythm, which has a kind of compelling life, the ability to capture or even dominate our attention.”50 At Creek stomp dances, the female shell shakers’ double-step percussion is perfectly adapted to the characteristic duple beat of the stomp dance songs sung by the male dancers, creating a strong–weak accentuation through rhythmic percussion accompaniment. As noted by White Deer, the role of the shell shakers is paramount at the Green Corn dances,

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where: “The constant rhythm . . . helps move the dances and songs forward through the long night.”51 There are thus shared beliefs between African and Creek conceptions about how rhythm is used as a regulating force in a ritual context to provide momentum and foster group cohesion. Does African sensibility have a corollary in the Creek stomp dance tradition?

AFRICAN SENSIBILITY Cultural theorist Raymond Williams defines “sensibility” as the formation of a particular mind: “A whole activity, a whole way of perceiving and responding, not to be reduced to either ‘thought’ or ‘feeling.’ ”52 He notes the close relationship of sensibility to aesthetics, with its specialized references to a category of what is “fine” or “beautiful,” linked to subjective sense activity. Chernoff observes that most people in Africa do not conceive of music apart from its community setting and cultural context, noting: “In this regard, aesthetic issues can be contextualized by functional concerns of communal cohesion.”53 For example, Dagomba drummer Ibrahim Abdulai describes the role of music and dance in facilitating communal cohesion in Dagbon: “Music and dancing help us to be happy. . . . It is inside the dance that laughter laughs.”54 Likewise, Tallahassee ground member Rufus Scott describes the communal cohesion facilitated by the Green Corn dances: “What better way to worship our Creator than having a good time and laughing and feeling good? These are our Muscogee ways of religion, the way that we worship our Creator.”55 Historian Mircea Eliade56 discusses how time exists in two forms: a sacred time and a profane time. On the one hand, there are the intervals of sacred time: the time of festivals (which are mainly periodical). On the other hand, there is profane time: ordinary temporal duration, where acts without religious meaning occur. Chernoff57 describes the function of music during sacred time in an African ritual, noting that the immediate presence of the music gives power a personal form so that they may relate to it. He calls this process an example of the profound humanism of African sensibility. Likewise, Creek medicine man Sam Proctor states what is expected of participants at the Green Corn dances at the sacred ceremonial grounds: “In order for the blessings to come, everyone has to come in unity, with one heart, one mind, and one love.”58 Eliade59 notes that equally important to the concept of sacred time is the concept of sacred space. For example, the Creek ceremonial ground is the central point around which all traditional Creek life revolves. During the Busk (Green Corn) held at the ground, the participants are in direct contact with the original creative force, which is manifested in the sacred fire. The shared aesthetic preferences and shared concepts of sensibility between African Creeks and Indigenous Creeks at Creek stomp dance grounds in Indian Territory paved the way for the evolution of the distinctive Creek stomp dance performative style. How does the Creek stomp dance performative style factor into the Creek stomp dance tradition as active process?

TRADITION AS ACTIVE PROCESS Raymond Williams points out: “It is sometimes observed, by those who have looked into particular traditions, that it only takes two generations to make anything traditional.” He

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adds that this is natural enough: “That is the sense of tradition as active process.”60 Ethnomusicologist Charlotte Heth61 concurs with the concept of tradition as active. She believes that “traditional” is an overarching term with varying meanings: sometimes it refers to the oldest norms of languages, religions, artistic form, everyday customs, and individual behavior; at other times, it refers to modern practices based on those norms. Heth points out that since the dancers, singers, and shell shakers at a stomp dance all dance with and follow the song leader, the improvisatory style is exhilarating, not problematic. The stomp dance songs have infinite variation within a set framework, and no two stomp dances are ever identical. She concludes: “These examples of freedom and constraint illustrate one reason ‘traditional’ dance and music have not only survived, but also thrived.”62 Sociologist Steve Fenton believes that ethnicities exist as self-aware identities, defined from within a culture to be compared with other cultures: “People or peoples do not just possess cultures or share ancestry, they elaborate these into the idea of a community founded upon these attributes.”63 His view that people “do not just possess cultures” dovetails nicely with Creek medicine man John Proctor’s definition of being Creek (within the context of the traditional Creek religion) through practice. In essence, it is active participation as a member of a Creek stomp dance ground, regardless of race, that makes you Creek. Music and dance idioms of African origin and the Creek stomp dance tradition exhibit multiple shared aesthetic preferences in their expressive forms. These shared features include call-and-response singing, a swinging eighth-note rhythm, a counter-clockwise movement, a gradual increase in tempo, a descending melodic contour along with sections of stationary pitches, part-singing, and a midnight to daybreak timeframe. The long-term cross-fertilization between the music and dance idioms of African origin and the Creek stomp dance tradition created syncretism. The receptiveness of the Indigenous Creek people to the precepts of African sensibility, such as the use of rhythm as an organizing force in a ritual context, fostered group cohesion leading to synergy at Creek stomp grounds in Indian Territory. For example, Creek performative style emphasizes the polarization between the improvisatory freedom in the lyrics and melody (mens’ call and response singing) and the driving, steady rhythm in the percussion (female shell shakers). Hence White Deer’s comment: “Enough shell shakers dancing in sync can remind you of the sound and power of a freight train.”64 African Creeks and Indigenous Creeks shared beliefs about the use of music and dance to differentiate between cyclical (sacred) time—the all-night dances associated with the Green Corn religion, and temporal (profane) time—everyday life. The two cultures also shared beliefs about sacred space—the ceremonial dancing area, and everyday life—the individual campgrounds around the perimeter of the dance area. African dancer Germaine Acogny reminds us that African dance is always related to the religious worldview and cosmology: “When we dance, we can bring our breathing, our heartbeat and the beat of our arms and legs into such unison, that we are as if literally beside ourselves, our personalities split in a trance.”65 Her description aptly delineates my own feelings of being outside my body as a shell shaker during the all-night dances associated with the Green Corn religion from roughly 3:00 a.m. until the dance ended at sunrise. When I asked my mentor, Linda Alexander, what was happening, she described my cumulative spiritual experience of “dancing as one” as: “You’re being lifted up.”66 Historian Christina Snyder67 observes that although Africans, Europeans, and Indigenous peoples all possessed slavery traditions, their views differed widely on the

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status and roles of captives. She describes how in African and Indigenous cultures, households often adopted their captives and enslaved status did not pass to succeeding generations. Conversely, in the seventeenth century, Europeans began to practice transgenerational chattel bondage rooted in phenotype. The tenet of synergy that group member satisfaction increases as the group provides friendship and support against outside threats was fueled by the need for a unified front by African Creeks and Indigenous Creeks to withstand the never-ending stream of settlers into Indian Territory. The creation of synergy through common goals, interests, and small size was fueled by shared aesthetic preferences, shared concepts of music and dance’s social function in a ritual context, and the relatively small size of the individual ceremonial grounds (generally twenty to thirty ground members). The proximity of the sixteen remaining Creek ceremonial grounds to the thirteen remaining All-Black towns which retain incorporation is an indication of the strength of the bond between the two cultures in the Creek Nation of Oklahoma. Aesthetic qualities such as beauty, balance, elegance, serenity, and grace can apply equally well to the shared stomp dance song repertoire when led by singers and shell shakers from various Woodland tribes. In the case of aesthetic qualities such as tension, energy, and vivacity, the Creek stomp dance performative style is in a class of its own. Hence Levine’s assertion: “Creek stomp dance songs are among the most dramatic music in Native North America.”68 Post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha69 suggests that hybridity emerges between polarized discourses in a Third Space. He notes that within this third space, the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity of fixity; even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, re-historicized, and read anew. In the case of the Creek Nation of Indian Territory, the concept of the Third Space is complicated. The Creeks of African origin experienced diaspora twice over, first to southeastern North America as a result of the African slave trade, then to Indian Territory as a result of European colonial westward expansion. The shared aesthetic preferences and shared beliefs about the social function of music and dance in a ritual context, between the African Creeks and the Indigenous Creeks, created syncretism and synergy. The receptivity of the Indigenous Creek song leaders to the precepts of African sensibility, with its emphasis on the use of rhythm as an organizing device in a ritual context, facilitated group cohesion between the African Creeks and the Indigenous Creeks. The cross-fertilization of traditional music and dance idioms from the two cultures was a major factor in the evolution of the Creek stomp dance performative style. In the sense of tradition as active process, the Creek stomp dance tradition, found at Creek ceremonial grounds in Indian Territory, can be considered as a hybrid strain of the stomp dance tradition associated with the Green Corn religion of the eastern Woodland peoples.70

NOTES 1.

Stephen Davies, “Non-Western Art and Art’s Definition,” in Philosophical Perspectives on Art (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 656.

2.

Ibid., 660.

3.

The terms “Indigenous,” “Native American,” “American Indian,” “Indian,” and “Native” refer to the original inhabitants of North America (in the area now the United States).

4.

Indian Territory became the state of Oklahoma on November 16, 1907.

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5.

The terms “Creek” and “Muscogee” (also spelled Muskogee, Maskogee, Mvskoke) refer to the Creek confederacy of Indigenous cultures whose ancestral homelands are in what is now the southeastern United States.

6.

Gary Zellar, African Creeks: Estelvste and the Creek Nation, Race and Culture in the American West Series, Book 1 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007).

7.

Blue Clark, Indian Tribes of Oklahoma: A Guide (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009), p. 218.

8.

The anacronym S.T.O.M.P. refers to the first nationally syndicated, African American “stepping” contest, held in 1992. The origins of African American “stepping” are a combination of military exhibition drills and African foot dances. There is no direct link between the African American S.T.O.M.P. and the Indigenous stomp dance.

9.

Thurman Lee Hester Jr., “On Philosophical Discourse: Some Intercultural Musings,” in American Indian Thought: Philosophical Essays, ed. Anne Waters (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 263–264.

10. The “medicines” are herbal teas prepared by the medicine man for the members of the stomp ground. 11. John Proctor, quoted in Hester, “On Philosophical Discourse: Some Intercultural Musings,” p. 264. 12. Beverley Diamond, Native American Music in Eastern North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 71. 13. Jason Baird Jackson, “East Meets West: On Stomp Dance and Powwow Worlds in Oklahoma,” in Powwow, eds. Clyde Ellis, Luke Eric Lassiter, and Gary H. Dunham (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), p. 193. 14. Prior to removal to Indian Territory in the 1830s, the Yuchi people were in alliance with the Creek confederacy, in the area of the present-day states of Georgia and Alabama. 15. Gary White Deer, “Pretty Shellshaker,” in Remaining Ourselves: Music and Tribal Memory: Traditional Music in Contemporary Communities, ed. Dayna Bowker Lee (Oklahoma City: The State Arts Council of Oklahoma, 1995), p. 11. 16. Further reading: Paula J. Conlon, “From Powwow to Stomp Dance: Parallel Dance Traditions in Oklahoma,” in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity, edited by Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 613–635. 17. Bertha Tilkens, “Traditional Ceremonial Grounds,” in Beginning Creek: Mvskoke Emponvkv, by Pamela Innes, Linda Alexander, and Bertha Tilkens (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), p. 130. 18. Linda Alexander, interview by author, Norman, Oklahoma, June 20, 1998. 19. Jason Baird Jackson, Yuchi Ceremonial Life: Performance, Meaning, and Tradition in a Contemporary American Indian Community (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), p. 208. 20. Caleb Swan, Historical and Statistical Information, Respecting the History, Condition and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States (Philadelphia, 1851–57), Part 5: pp. 267–268. 21. James Adair, History of the American Indians, ed. Samuel Cole Williams (New York: Argonaut Press, 1966), pp. 105–117. 22. Robert Wolfe, quoted in James H. Howard, in collaboration with Willie Lena, Oklahoma Seminoles: Medicines, Magic, and Religion (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984), p. 244.

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23. Alexander, interview, 1998. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. A water drum is traditionally made from a hollowed-out portion of a log, filled with a small amount of water and covered with a piece of leather hide. The hide is struck with a wooden stick. The drum is periodically turned upside down to moisten the hide, to achieve the desired sound. 27. John Proctor, interview, 2004. 28. Alexander, interview, 1998. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Victoria Lindsay Levine, “Southeast,” in Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol. 3: The United States and Canada, ed. Ellen Koskoff (London: Routledge–Taylor and Francis Group, 2001), p. 468. 32. Alexander, interview, 1998. 33. Levine, “Southeast,” p. 468. 34. Angie Debo, The Road to Disappearance (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1941), p. 333. 35. Map: “Indian Territory: Ceremonial Grounds—2012,” in “Mvskoke History: A Short Course for Muscogee Nation Employees,” p. 27, Oklahoma State Department of Education, 2012, http://sde.ok.gov/sde/sites/ok.gov.sde/files/Mvskoke_History_Powerpoint. pdf (accessed September 19, 2020). 36. Map: “All-Black Towns in Oklahoma,” in Larry O’Dell, “All-Black Towns,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, 2009, http://www.okhistory.org/ publications/enc/entry.php?entry=AL009 (accessed September 19, 2020). 37. Art Rosenbaum, Shout Because You’re Free: The African American Ring Shout Tradition in Coastal Georgia (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1998), p. 166. 38. Sterling Stuckley, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 12. 39. Hugh W. Foley Jr., “Muscogee Ceremonial Songs,” in Oklahoma Music Guide: Biographies, Big Hits, and Annual Events, ed. Hugh W. Foley Jr., second edition (Stillwater, OK: New Forums Press, 2013), p. 552. 40. Ibid. 41. Karen Faye Taborn, “Momis Komet (‘We Will Endure’): The Indigenization of Christian Hymn Singing by Creek and Seminole Indians,” master’s thesis (Hunter College, 2005), pp. 15–23. 42. Michel Huet, The Dance, Art and Ritual of Africa (London: Collins, 1978), cover. 43. Jean-Louis Paudrat, “The Guinea Coast,” in Huet, The Dance, Art and Ritual of Africa, p. 24. 44. Alan P. Merriam, The Anthropology of Music (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 210. 45. Davies, “Non-Western Art and Art’s Definition,” p. 790. 46. J. H. Kwabena Nketia, “Yoruba Musicians in Accra,” Odu 6 (June 1958): 43. 47. James Cook, interview by Art Rosenbaum, August 7, 1981, quoted in Rosenbaum, Shout Because You’re Free, p. 190.

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48. Sam Proctor, quoted in Foley, “Muscogee Ceremonial Songs,” p. 545. 49. Jean Laude, “Introduction,” in Huet, The Dance, Art and Ritual of Africa, p. 19. 50. John M. Chernoff, “The Rhythmic Medium in African Music,” New Literary History 22:4, Papers from the Commonwealth Center for Literary and Cultural Change (Autumn, 1991), pp. 1095–1096. 51. White Deer, “Pretty Shellshaker,” p. 11. 52. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 282. 53. Chernoff, “The Rhythmic Medium in African Music,” p. 1094. 54. Alhaji Ibrahim Abdulai, quoted in John M. Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms (Chigago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), note 15. 55. Rufus Scott, announcer, “Tallahassee Ceremonial Grounds,” Masala World Music Series, University of Oklahoma School of Music, February 27, 2004. 56. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1987), p. 68. 57. Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility, pp. 169–171. 58. Sam Proctor, quoted in Foley, “Muscogee Ceremonial Songs,” p. 545. 59. Eliade, The Sacred and The Profane, p. 68. 60. Williams, Keywords, p. 319. 61. Charlotte Heth, “American Indian Dance: A Celebration of Survival and Adaptation,” in Native American Dance: Ceremonies and Social Traditions, ed. Charlotte Heth (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1993), p. 13. 62. Ibid. 63. Steve Fenton, Ethnicity, 2nd edn (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010), p. 3. 64. White Deer, “Pretty Shellshaker,” p. 11. 65. Germaine Acogny, African Dance (Dakar, Senegal: Les Nouvelles Editions Africaines, 1980). 66. Linda Alexander, interview by author, July 20, 2004. 67. Christina Snyder, “Conquered Enemies, Adopted Kin, and Owned People: The Creek Indians and Their Captives,” Journal of Southern History 73:2 (May 2007): 255. 68. Levine, “Southeast,” p. 468. 69. Homi R. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 37. 70. Listening: Tallahassee Ceremonial Ground of the Mvskokee Nation, recorded in Wetumka, Oklahoma, October 22, 1994, Indian House 3007, CD-R (Soundclips), http://www. indianhouse.com/music/Southeast/Tallahassee-Ceremonial-Ground-of-the-MvskokeeNation_IH.3007 (accessed September 19, 2020).

CHAPTER 3.9

The Mask Which the Actor Wears is Apt to Become His True Face: How Jon Cryer Toes the Line Between Homage and Mimicry in Pretty in Pink’s Ultimate Lip Sync ADDIE TSAI

. . . for we have decided that one man cannot in his life play many parts, any more than he can act both tragedy and comedy, or be rhapsodist and actor at once? Human nature is coined into very small pieces, and as our guardians have their own business already, which is the care of freedom, they will have enough to do without imitating. If they imitate they should imitate, not any meanness or baseness, but the good only; for the mask which the actor wears is apt to become his true face. —Plato, The Republic I, like many young girls who came of age in the late 1980s to early 1990s, considered myself Team Duckie before such naming conventions were even invented, before social media, before hashtags. And I, like many young girls who fought for the goofy, pompadourrocking underdog in John Hughes’ 1987 teen classic Pretty in Pink,1 fell in love with Duckie because of one signature scene in the film, what is most often referred to as the Duckie Dance.2 Although I was a fan of the iconic Hughes film The Breakfast Club,3 and enjoyed many of his other films, such as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,4 Curly Sue,5 Uncle Buck,6 and Home Alone,7 I mostly felt that as a young biracial teenager raised by a single Asian father, John Hughes’ movies were not meant for me. They were, first and foremost, films for young white American teenagers, teens who had money, and teens who could participate in some way in the currency of popularity. Perhaps that is the first reason that I invested so 309

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heavily in Pretty in Pink—its offbeat heroine, Andie, is poor and handy (after all, she makes all her own outfits), the victim of her mother’s abandonment, and was also being raised by her somewhat dead beat albeit good-intentioned father. Another reason that I felt strongly that Hughes’ movies were not for me had to do with John Hughes’ use of the other as comic value in mostly highly unnecessary ways. What I mean by that is that the gags that he uses in many of his films are superfluous to the storyline and only serve to add a dash of mockery at the expense of the nonwhite bodies that are sprinkled throughout his films. As a teenager, I had not yet developed a consciousness for the multitude of ways that Hughes appropriates race to this end, but as a woman of Asian descent, I was immediately triggered by his use of yellowface in Sixteen Candles8 with the now well-interrogated character9 of Long Duk Dong. Although that film verges on being unwatchable personally, this chapter is not meant to indict or condemn the ways in which John Hughes exploits othered bodies for comic relief. After all, this was the 1980s in popular film, the era of The Karate Kid’s10 Mr. Miyagi and Short Circuit’s11 Fisher Stevens Ben Jabityua (performed in brownface). I imagine that John Hughes, like most of us, was a product of his time, his privileged class status, and the unexamined as-of-yet experimentation in stereotypes. Although John Hughes is listed on such pop culture websites as Stuff Black People Don’t Like,12 the most common criticism of John Hughes with regards to race, aside from the aforementioned use of yellowface in Sixteen Candles, is that he neglects to include even the token black character in most of his films. However, I would argue that John Hughes paints in large brushstrokes impressions of blackness throughout his films, which results in a commodification of racial stereotype. In most of the films John Hughes does this through actual black bodies—such as in the jazz club scene in Weird Science,13 and the “Twist and Shout” dance in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. My ultimate argument, however, is that Hughes transfers this exchange in racial tropes onto the character of Duckie in Pretty in Pink, which culminates in the character’s triumph (and downfall), in the lip sync dance, which is often referred to by YouTube posters of the sequence as an “impersonation of Otis Redding.” I will begin this chapter by briefly discussing the scenes in Weird Science and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in order to provide a thorough reading of the record store dance in Pretty in Pink, informed mainly by minstrelsy scholarship.

JOHN HUGHES CREATED A NEW CHARACTER . . . AND EXTENDED SOME OLD ONES IN THE PROCESS It is almost inarguable that filmmaker John Hughes, most popularly known for creating The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Pretty in Pink, Weird Science, and Sixteen Candles, is responsible for the popularly recognized version of the American teenager on the big screen.14 Another major contribution John Hughes lent to 1980s films featuring teenage characters involved his treatment of class and gender. According to Jonathan Bernstein, author of Pretty in Pink: The Golden Age of Teenage Movies, “the function of girls in teen movies (except for those helmed by John Hughes) was to display goodnatured tolerance in the face of stalking, voyeurism, and fumbled attempts at seduction.”15 He further argues that John Hughes was the one director of the time whose characters are constantly “railing against cliques and caste systems.”16 Despite Hughes’ oftentimes adept attention toward the female teenage protagonists in many of his most popular films, he has been largely indicted by critics for traipsing and contributing to the perpetuation of racial stereotypes.

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In 2008, NPR explored characters of American fiction, folklore, and popular culture through their six-month series titled in character.17 One of the characters they addressed could be considered Hughes’ most controversial character, Long Duk Dong. Titled “Long Duk Dong: Last of the Hollywood Stereotypes?”18 the piece written by Alison Macadam explores the lasting impact of the infamous character from Hughes’ classic Sixteen Candles. Long Duk Dong is a foreign exchange student from an unidentified Asian country who utilizes the clearly foreign-to-him fork and spoon as a pair of chopsticks and whose every entrance in the film is welcomed by the sound of a gong. “If you’re being called Long Duk Dong,” Martin Wong and Eric Nakamura, editors of the Asian and Asian-American pop culture magazine Giant Robot, explain, “you’re comic relief against a sea of people unlike you. You’re being portrayed as a guy who just came off a boat and who’s out of control. It’s like every bad stereotype possible, loaded into one character.”19 Although it is largely agreed upon by popular and academic media20 that Long Duk Dong is a racial stereotype, a character that serves solely as comic relief, Hughes’ similar denigration and exploitation of blackness within the fabric of his iconic teen films is rarely explored. In order to give context for the ways in which blackness is commodified and subjugated in the film Pretty in Pink (and most epitomized in Duckie’s dance sequence), I will give two brief readings of the signification of blackness in the films Weird Science (released the year before Pretty in Pink hit movie theaters) and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (released during the shooting of Pretty in Pink).

A SIGNIFYING ECONOMY OF BLACKNESS IN JOHN HUGHES’ WEIRD SCIENCE AND FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. reminds us in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of AfricanAmerican Literary Criticism, “Jazz is the classical music of twentieth-century American culture, and as I state in this book, it is based on the art of riffing, on repetition and revision, the very definition of signifying in the tradition. All the jazz greats, going back to Jelly Roll Morton, had ‘quoted’ other compositions and solos, making improvisation one of the highest American art forms.”21 In the film Weird Science, a teen science fiction film in which two outcast white nerds use a computer to create the perfect dream woman, Hughes conflates one of the most significant eras of cross-fertilization of African American vernacular dance, music, and song in a seemingly superfluous scene at a jazz bar. As one can see from this short, four-minute scene,22 nerd Gary Wallace (played by Anthony Michael Hall), accompanied by his partner-in-crime Wyatt Donnelly (played by Ilan Mitchell-Smith) and their virtually created dream woman Lisa (played by Kelly Le Brock), gets drunk in a jazz bar. What proceeds to play out for the viewers feels like a visual interpretation of a bad joke: a white dude goes to a jazz bar, surrounded by black patrons who force him to drink, and the white dude is suddenly transformed into a cool cat, complete with jive talk as he waxes morosely about his love troubles in black slang and affect. In the very beginning of the sequence, Gary sits with his upper body erect, in a sportscoat and tie, his hair curled and coiffed. He is surrounded by mostly black men in various displays of suits, in varying relaxed postures, and one man who by virtue of his exaggerated accent, seems to be of Latino descent. He attempts to tell the group about his problems, using diction such as “trials and tribulations,” “my folks,” and “you guys,” signifying a white, middle-class vernacular speech. It is also clear that he is not of the company he keeps through the camera’s close-ups of the silent, confused looks of Gary’s listeners. However, after one of the men coaxes him to get drunk, the formerly nerdy

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teenager miraculously transforms into “one of them”: Gary is now wearing one of the men’s fedoras and smoking a cigar while shaking his head and snapping his fingers performatively. His diction and his delivery of that diction is the largest change—his diction has drastically changed with such examples as the repeated use of the word “man,” and phrases like “crazy little 8th-grade bitch,” “big titties,” and “baby.” He has now adopted recognizable conventions of black dialect, such as the dropping off of the g in “I’m tellin’ the truth here” and the syntactical shift of double negatives in “She wouldn’t have had to worry about no titties for the rest of her life.” Additionally, his masculinity and membership in this group is affirmed when one of his audience asks if he calls the eighthgrade “woman” on the telephone and he retorts to another sitting next to him: “What’s this boy talkin’ about, on the telephone? Explain it to him.” Gary’s posture is also drastically different in the second phase of this scene, as he gestures far more demonstratively than at the beginning of the scene, and has looser posture with his upper body and collapses the physical space between himself and his new friends. The scene concludes with a return to Gary’s previous emasculated and nerdy character when he loses his balance as he leans forward to talk, and falls on the floor from his excessive drunkenness. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. offers a question in his groundbreaking text I would like to leave in the air for the duration of this chapter: “What did/do black people signify in a society in which they were intentionally introduced as the subjugated, as the enslaved cipher? Nothing on the x axis of white signification, and everything on the y axis of blackness.”23 To put this more explicitly, in this short scene, a scene isolated from the rest of the plot in its specificity to blackness, Hughes serves to merely appropriate and reduce a complex musical, dance, and cultural history of jazz to the most basic of stereotypes. Further, blackness is erased largely from the substance of the film’s plot and character development, used instead to masculinize a twelve-year-old boy through the hip and sexualized lingo associated with heterosexual black men, largely for a comic gag. Later in this chapter, I will refer to the role that minstrelsy played in the incredibly detrimental and complex development of the Black American stereotype. This scene is arguably too short and slight, not to mention not performative enough, to be considered an example of minstrelsy in the history of the term and theatrical tradition; however, I think it could clearly be argued that Anthony Michael Hall’s performance is a version of vocal and gestural blackface. Hall puts on the mask of gesture and slang to assimilate to his nonwhite audience within the structure of the scene, and thus to create a racial economy for Hughes’ mostly white, middle-class audience. “Twist and Shout,” a song first performed by the Isley Brothers in 196224 and later turned explosive through a cover by The Beatles in 1963,25 exemplifies a fusion of the vocalizations and movements of Black American culture in the 1960s. According to Elijah Wald in How The Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music, “[I]n the more demonstrative black congregations, to ‘shout’ is to be possessed by the spirit, losing control of your mind and body, flailing and jumping so that the people nearby have to protect you from hurting yourself, and the Isleys conveyed all the joy and power of that ecstatic experience.”26 The Twist, as defined by Tim Wall in the collection Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader, “was a noncontact couples’ dance, popularized on Philadelphia-based and nationally syndicated Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, and danced at this point to Chubby Checker’s recording of the same name.”27 Wall makes clear in his essay that, as argued by Robert Pruter and others, the Twist had its “origins in the African American community.”28

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The Twist as a dance form became biracial through the access the television provided, and, similar to The Beatles’ imitation of the song “Twist and Shout,” white bodies learned these dances through copying what they saw of black bodies on their home television set. This very layered crossover relationship between white and black bodies the Twist represented (and thus referenced in The Beatles’ cover of Twist and Shout) is signified in the dance sequence of the parade scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. In this scene, Ferris Bueller (played by Matthew Broderick), who fakes being sick in order to play hooky from high school and who has convinced his girlfriend and his friend Cameron to join him, crashes a parade float during Von Steuben Day and lip syncs to The Beatles’ “Twist and Shout”, and somehow, because Ferris Bueller is the ultimate cool (suburban) white boy teenager archetype, influences the entire crowd to dance.29 As one can see from the scene, both Matthew Broderick’s swinging arms accompanied by snapping fingers, twisting hips, and his step-touch bring to mind various choreographies from the 1960s, such as the vocal choreography of The Temptations, created by Motown resident choreographer Cholly Atkins. In the parade scene, the white marching band leaders imitate Broderick’s step-touch dance while a group of Black dancers, both men and women, enter into the frame with a cross-legged walk and a downward arm swing with a fingersnap, ending the unit of movement with a pecking movement most likely created in the late 1930s in the Lindy Hop era by The Three Chocolateers.30 Besides those two dominant displays of movement, the scene includes close ups of wiggling bottoms, and various parts of the crowds getting down with Ferris Bueller. Although this is certainly not rife with objectification of black bodies and culture like the scene from Weird Science, Ferris still represents the white ringleader at the center of it all, performing movements to a song that was both created and formed by Black bodies, while the true originators of both the music and the dance remain in supporting roles. What these two scenes do show us, however, is the development of a racial economy that is slowly and gradually woven into a less obviously subjugated yet still whitewashed world in Pretty in Pink that is culminated in the significance of the dance scene performed by Jon Cryer.

DUCKIE AS RACIAL COMMODITY IN PRETTY IN PINK As John Strausbaugh reminds us in his Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult & Imitation in American Popular Culture, “[S]till and all, only a handful of words and symbols have been considered absolutely taboo in current American society, unreservedly banned and forbidden. The swastika is one. The n word, uttered by anyone not Black is another. Blackface is third.”31 Strausbaugh goes on to define and contextualize blackface for his readers, a definition that will serve us well for the duration of this chapter: Blackface is a form of racist caricature invented by White Americans in the minstrelshow days of the 1800s. It is a shameful reminder of White America’s vicious hatred of Blacks. A part of America’s past that is best forgotten in our more enlightened, polite era. . . . However shameful we find it, blackface has played a large and integral role in the formation of American popular culture. It existed before the heyday of the minstrel show, and has persisted long after the minstrels faded away. Its influence or at least echoes can be seen in American music, theater, literature, film, and TV, right through to today. Although it was certainly racist, it was sometimes something other than that, a reflection of the complex of neuroses and pathologies that mark relations between Whites and Blacks in America—a complicated web of love and hate, fear and guilt, attraction and repulsion, mockery and mimicry.32

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There is not enough time to adequately explore the role minstrelsy inevitably plays for any especially White performer impersonating a Black musician, such as Jon Cryer with Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness”.33 However, it is my contention that Duckie’s character is equated with qualities associated with the stereotypes of Blacks at the time of Pretty in Pink’s release throughout the film. Further, Duckie serves the film’s narrative much in the way that minstrel characters were developed at the end of the nineteenth century, as buffoonish clowns who provided an exploration into class and other social issues. Finally, the dance Duckie performs conflates him with Black stereotypes, not only in the movements and the song choice, but also in what the dance represents for the narrative of the film. In the teen romance Pretty in Pink, Andie Walsh (played by Molly Ringwald) is a working-class student raised by an unstable single father; her mother had abandoned them three years prior. She is utterly adored and obsessed over by her best friend Phil Dale, known throughout the movie as Duckie, who is of a similar class strata. Andie and Duckie spend most of their time at the record store Trax, where Andie works with the owner and her surrogate mother figure, Iona (played by Annie Potts). However, tension arises when Andie passes over Duckie in order to be with Blane (played by Andrew McCarthy), who is a so-called “richie.” To begin with, Duckie’s costuming, which consists of mismatched items such as a porkpie hat, bull’s head bolo tie, grey checkered blazer, John Lennon shades, an uncoordinated vest, and pointed toe white dress shoes with chunky striped tube socks, was inspired by the Teddy Boy subculture, a group of English working-class youths who embraced the biracial attitudes of the rock ’n’ roll culture of the 1950s. Combined with his 1950s Teddy persona are subtle hints of 1980s hip hop, such as the walls in his meager bedroom tagged with graffiti, and his sole identification of his Duckie brand through his dirty, white, flashy shoes. An added signifying layer that is hinted at is Duckie’s identification through his sense of style, something he clearly prides himself on regardless of the derision his outfits receive from passersby in the halls at school or from Andie. His performance of dandy while living in such noted squalor—his walls and room are bare except for the aforementioned graffiti and a mattress on the floor, he is the only teenager in the film who does not own a car (he gets around on his bicycle) and he has no one in his life that comes close to resembling a parent or guardian—is reminiscent of the young black men in the 1980s who were deeply invested in hip hop culture, in which one uses the material artifact in fashion, such as shoes and clothing, to better disguise the poverty and rootlessness that dictates the harsh reality of their double life. His persona as a dandy is another attribute of Duckie’s that brings to mind the minstrelsy era, such as the character Zip Coon, one of the earliest minstrel character types of the late nineteenth century, the Northern black urban dandy who dressed ostentatiously and spoke in malapropisms, thus undermining his desire to appear dignified. Throughout the film, Duckie performs the role of the buffoonish clown. In Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts, dance scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild offers two contentions regarding blackface that are applicable to the construction of Duckie’s character. First, she addresses the mockery of Blacks by the white working-class, the “grotesque characterizations of blacks as primitive, childish, ignorant, oversexed, and so on.” Duckie embodies these traits throughout the film in various ways, largely in one-liners that are met with disdain and annoyance by various teenagers at school, including his so-called best friend Andie. Further, Dixon Gottschild acknowledges the connection between the blackface minstrel and the clown, stating that

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“blacking up can be seen as similar to applying whiteface and taking on the attendance persona of the clown. . . . Donning a mask, literally or symbolically, is a survival mechanism for mediating the conflicting waters of mother culture and dominant society.”34 In this case, the clown/blackface character type is expressed through Duckie as a way to survive the harshness of poverty in a high school largely dominated by the wealthy whites, as well as battle his unrequited devotion to Andie. It cannot be disputed that Duckie’s finest moment in the entire film occurs when Duckie lip syncs and dances to Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” in the record store. The dance itself was choreographed by Kenny Ortega, the same choreographer responsible for the previously discussed parade sequence in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and the 1980s sensation Dirty Dancing.35 Because of the explosive direction that the exaggerated lip sync performance has taken in American popular culture, it can be difficult to attest to the role that minstrelsy’s theatrical lineage has played in this dance sequence. However, certainly one can see what Dixon Gottschild names as the white representations of black bodies, such as the “exaggerated lips,” “boisterous to the point of grotesquesness,” “vigorous foot tapping,” “particularly expressive arms and hands,” and the body “constantly in contorted or distorted positions.”36 What may be recalled most quickly to mind, perhaps, are more contemporary impersonations of White men as Black dancing singers, such as James Brown or Michael Jackson (which Jon Cryer is said to have explicitly imitated). What is also embodied throughout this dance sequence is the oversexed performance of Duckie’s lip sync (what is often referred to as an impersonation by YouTube posters) of Otis Redding, which references the White fear and exoticization of the sexualized Black male body. It is telling that this is the only song on the entire soundtrack that is outside of the era of the movie’s release, and the only song performed by a Black musician. This further proves that the performance continues the signification of Duckie previously developed across the film. Another way in which this sequence shares similarities with early minstrel performances is in the reception of the audience, which also acts as foreshadowing for what the dance represents in the film’s narrative and for Duckie’s character. Throughout the sequence, it is clear that the attention of the older of the two women, Iona, is piqued by Duckie’s performance, whereas the intended receiver of the performance, Andie, finds the performance unappealing, which can be seen from the camera’s close-ups of her many facial reactions throughout the sequence. Although Duckie seems to take his moves from iconic Black American vernacular dancers, the moves are flattened and fragmented by the camera choices, so that we never see one of the most signifying body movements of the popular Black dance aesthetic, the swiveling of the hips, as we see briefly performed by Matthew Broderick. After the dance is over, Andie and Iona immediately vacate the store to the back, causing Duckie to make a remark about his body odor, furthering his persona as jilted clown. What the audience will find out shortly after this, is that Andie is eagerly awaiting the arrival of Blane, her richie date, thus signaling her official rejection of Duckie, and the temporary ending of their friendship. That this lip sync performance to a Black soul song, with its layering of blackness as commodity, further complicated by the ways in which Duckie is marked throughout the film prior to this point, serves to complete the emasculation of Duckie as a character and is incredibly revealing with regards to the way that John Hughes employs a racial economy in his films, even those that are seemingly white-centered. And although certainly the interweaving of Blackness and its associated values in Pretty in Pink are not nearly as

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problematic as the Weird Science jazz bar scene first introduced in this chapter, I argue that there is still a commodification and mockery of stereotyped Black value being signified that is doing ideological work seemingly unknown to the average viewer of Hughes’ teen classics. In today’s popular cultural world, racial objectification and appropriation in all forms are widely and vibrantly discussed, and it is my hope that this chapter can help start a conversation largely missed in John Hughes and popular cultural dance scholarship.

NOTES 1.

Pretty in Pink, directed by Howard Deutch (Paramount Pictures, 1986), DVD (Paramount Home Video, 2002).

2.

Ryan Reed, “Watch Jon Cryer Revive Duckie’s ‘Pretty in Pink’ Dance on ‘Late Late Show’,” Rolling Stone, April 15, 2015, http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/videos/watch-jon-cryerrevive-duckies-pretty-in-pink-dance-on-late-late-show-20150415 (accessed August 28, 2016); Garin Pirnia, “14 Black-and-White Facts about ‘Pretty in Pink’,” Mental Floss, February 27, 2016, http://mentalfloss.com/article/76227/14-black-and-white-facts-aboutpretty-pink (accessed August 25, 2016); Trish Broome, “10 Awesome Dance Scenes from 80s Movies,” Thought Catalogue, September 30, 2012, http://thoughtcatalog.com/ trish-broome/2012/09/10-awesome-dance-scenes-from–80s-movies/ (accessed August 27, 2016).

3.

The Breakfast Club, directed by John Hughes (Universal Pictures, 1985), DVD (Universal Pictures, 2003).

4.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, directed by John Hughes (Paramount Pictures, 1986), DVD (Paramount Home Video, 1999).

5.

Curly Sue, directed by John Hughes (Warner Bros., 1991), DVD (Warner Home Video, 2004).

6.

Uncle Buck, directed by John Hughes (Universal Pictures, 1989), DVD (Universal Pictures, 2003).

7.

Home Alone, directed by Chris Columbus (20th Century Fox, 1990), DVD (20th Century Fox, 1999).

8.

Sixteen Candles, directed by John Hughes (Universal Pictures, 1984), DVD (Image Entertainment, 1998).

9.

Kat Chow, “What’s So ‘Cringeworthy’ About Long Duk Dong in ‘Sixteen Candles’?” NPR , February 6, 2015, http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/02/06/384307677/ whats-so-cringe-worthy-about-long-duk-dong-in-sixteen-candles (accessed April 15, 2016); Phoenix Tso, “From Long Duk Dong to #StarringJohnCho: The Evolving Discussion About Asian American Roles on Film and TV,” Uproxx, June 3, 2016, http://uproxx.com/ movies/asian-representation-landmarks-tv-and-film/ (accessed June 15, 2016); Jessica Lachenal, “Orientalism & Whitewashing: Hollywood’s Problem with Asians,” The Mary Sue, April 20, 2016, http://www.themarysue.com/orientalism-whitewashing-hollywoodhistory/ (accessed June 1, 2016).

10. The Karate Kid, directed by John G. Avildsen (Columbia Pictures, 1984), DVD (Sony Pictures, 1998). 11. Short Circuit, directed by John Badham (TriStar Pictures, 1986), DVD (Image Entertainment, 2004). 12. Paul Kersey, “#317. John Hughes Movies,” Stuff Black People Don’t Like, July 5, 2009, http://stuffblackpeopledontlike.blogspot.com/2009/07/317-john-hughes-movies.html (accessed July 28, 2016).

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13. Weird Science, directed by John Hughes (Universal Pictures, 1985), DVD (Universal Pictures, 2000). 14. A. O. Scott, “The John Hughes Touch,” New York Times, August 7, 2009, http://www. nytimes.com/2009/08/08/movies/08appraisal.html (accessed July 1, 2016); Robbie Collin, “Will There Ever Be Another John Hughes?” The Telegraph, May 8, 2015, http://www. telegraph.co.uk/film/what-to-watch/john-hughes-best-movies/ (accessed July 13, 2016); Adam Sternbergh, “How John Hughes’s Teenagers Took Over the World,” New York Magazine, August 16, 2009, http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/58338/ (accessed August 10, 2016). 15. Jonathan Bernstein, Pretty in Pink: The Golden Age of Teenage Movies (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997), pp. 173–174. 16. Ibid., 5. 17. “In Character: A Six-Month Series Exploring the Great Characters of American Fiction, Folklore and Pop Culture,” NPR , 2008, http://www.npr.org/series/17914370/in-character (accessed August 23, 2016). 18. Alison Macadam, “Long Duk Dong: Last of the Hollywood Stereotypes?” NPR , March 24, 2008, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88591800 (accessed August 23, 2016). 19. Ibid. 20. Min Hyoung Song, “ ‘How good it is to be a monkey’: comics, racial formation, and American Born Chinese,” Mosaic 43: 1 (Spring 2010): 73–92; David Scott Diffrient, “Beyond Tokenism and Tricksterism: Bobby Lee, MADtv, and the De(con)structive Impulse of Korean American Comedy,” The Velvet Light Trap 67 (Spring 2011): 41–56, http://dx. doi.org/10.1353/vlt.2011.0003 (accessed August 15, 2016); Margaret Hillenbrand, “Of Myths and Men: ‘Better Luck Tomorrow’ and the Mainstreaming of Asian American Cinema,” Cinema Journal 47: 4 (Summer 2008): 50–75, http://ezproxy.twu.edu:2069/ stable/20484412 (accessed August 15, 2016). 21. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (London: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. xxx. 22. John Hughes, “Weird Science (5/12) Movie CLIP—Gary’s Blues (1985),” posted October 27, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9GBuciv20A (accessed August 1, 2016). 23. Ibid., 52. 24. The Isley Brothers, “Twist and Shout,” by Phil Medley and Bert Berns, February 23, 1961, Atlanta 45–2115, 7 single. 25. The Beatles, “Twist and Shout,” by Phil Medley and Bert Berns, February 11, 1963, EMI Studios. 26. Elijah Wald, How The Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music (London: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 234–235. 27. Tim Wall, Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader, ed. Julie Malnig (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), p. 188. 28. Ibid., 189. 29. John Hughes, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. (1987) Danke Schoen & Twist and Shout. In Full,” posted November 28, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlfQUtCvfQ0 (accessed August 1, 2016). 30. The Three Chocolateers, “The Three Chocolateers – Peckin’,” posted April 20, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1BwS4az_68 (accessed August 28, 2016). 31. John Strausbaugh, Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult & Imitation in American Popular Culture (New York: Penguin, 2007), p. 13.

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32. Ibid., 24. 33. Otis Redding, “Try a Little Tenderness,” by Jimmy Campbell, Reg Connelly, and Harry M. Woods, first recorded December 8, 1932, Volt/Atco V–141, 45 rpm. 34. Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Westport: Praeger, 1998), pp. 84–85. 35. Kenny Ortega, “Jon Cryer – Otis Redding impression – Try a little tenderness – Pretty In Pink,” posted November 1, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNGIg8f-0Wc (accessed December 1, 2015). 36. Ibid., 108.

PART FOUR

How Does Dance Move Us Via Technology?

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CHAPTER 4.1

Introduction: Dance and Technology DAVID DAVIES

Of the chapters in this section, I will mention five that explore different ways in which dance and technology can work together. Technology may be internal to the dance work, most obviously as a resource exploited by the dancers in their performance (Fisher and Gionfriddo, Chapter 4.5; Porter, Chapter 4.6) but also in more complex ways that eventuate in new kinds of dance art (Baer Carrillo, Chapter 4.7; Berleant, Chapter 4.2). Technology may also be internal to the dance work not just as an element in the artistic vehicle through which an artistic content is articulated, but also as part of that very content, as part of what the dance performance is about (Fisher and Gionfriddo, Chapter 4.5). Alternatively technology may be seen as offering not only new possibilities, but also new conceptual challenges for the appreciation of dance works and performances. The issues here are epistemological, pertaining to how we can get appreciative access to dance art (Heckman, Chapter 4.4). My aim, in this introductory chapter, is to sketch the different approaches taken by the authors in this section to these variations on the general theme of “dance and technology,” providing, where helpful, some background and also raising, again where helpful, some questions. It is worth noting a further potential bearing of technology on dance only briefly alluded to in the papers in this section and not further discussed below—a bearing relating to the ontology rather than the epistemology of dance. Writers concerned with the evanescence of dance works and dance performances in the absence of determinate scores or other enduring textual representations of what was done, or what was to be done, have argued that this lacuna can be at least partly remedied where we have filmic recordings of particular dance performances. This idea is canvassed without further development in Berleant’s chapter: he notes that “film adds the possibility of preserving a dance performance, not only archiving it but making it repeatable to a new audience.” “Dance video,” in Berleant’s sense, might seem to speak to worries about preserving dance identity through time and thereby make possible an active artistic tradition of dance with respect to which later choreographers and dancers might orient themselves, as is done in music and also arguably in theater. Such worries arise not only because we lack notational specifications for many dances, but also because the “scores” that we do possess are usually drawn up by a notator who watches a performance, rather than being a prescription used by members of a company in rehearsing and presenting a performance of a work. However, it is open to question whether dance video is able to play a work-defining and work-preserving role analogous to the role traditionally ascribed to a musical score or 321

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a theatrical playscript. The problem is that, by definition, performable works are works that allow of correct performances that offer different interpretations. The problem facing both the dance notator viewing a performance and the dance scholar viewing a dance video, however, is to determine which aspects of a particular performance are constitutive of the work performed and which aspects are constitutive of a particular interpretation of the work. The dance notator can to some extent rely upon other evidence in making this distinction—for example, directives given by the choreographer in rehearsals, or conversations with the members of the company. But, where these resources are unavailable and we have only a video of a particular performance, retrieval of the work from a filmed performance seems more problematic.

TECHNOLOGY AND DANCE APPRECIATION Appreciative access to artworks is increasingly technologically mediated. For many people, their primary way of accessing visual artworks is through highly detailed electronic reproductions, and, for most of us, our primary experiential access to works of music, in whichever genre, is via recordings. Analytic philosophers of art, however, have been generally sceptical about the epistemic value of such technologically mediated “experiencings” of works. In the visual arts, for example, there is a consensus that those who access works in such mediated ways are not engaging with genuine instances of those works, and as a result are having an appreciatively impoverished visual experience. In the case of music, it has been urged that the experience of the recorded “substitute” for a work can sometimes be more impoverished than one might think. Lee Brown,1 for example, argued that, in listening to recordings of improvised music, we fail to properly register the risks involved and the expressive freedom of the players. Graham McFee,2 drawing a parallel conclusion for dance, has argued that trying to appreciate a dance performance, or to appreciate a dance work through a dance performance, by viewing a filmic recording of that performance, is like trying to appreciate the Mona Lisa by looking at a photographic reproduction of the painting that hangs in the Louvre. While such a reproduction can provide us with some access to a painting’s perceptually appreciable properties, it can never convey those features of “facture” and of the play of light on a painted surface that play a crucial role in the proper appreciation of paintings. By analogy, McFee maintains, there are features of a dance performance that bear crucially on our experiential appreciation of that performance but that are lost in the filmic recording of that performance (see below). If McFee is right, this would seem to have more serious implications for dance appreciation than does the supposedly parallel case for our appreciation of visual artworks. For, in the vast majority of cases, the purported failings of photographic representations of paintings for the proper appreciation of the latter can be overcome, if at the cost of some inconvenience and expense, by relocating ourselves in space so that we are in the presence of the paintings themselves. In the case of dance, however, the dance performances in question are usually only accessible to us “after the fact” through some filmic or photographic representation of those performances. If such technologically mediated access to dance performances is deemed to provide only flawed appreciative access to those performances, or to the works of which they are performances, these failings are remediable only if we are able to relocate ourselves in time! As noted above, this might be thought to call into question the existence of a live “tradition” upon which later dancers and choreographers can draw and about which students of dance can learn.

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To assess such scepticism about the epistemological potential of technologically mediated access to dance performances, we need to ask two questions: (1) Which aspects of a dance performance are purportedly not preserved in viewing a filmic recording?, and (2) What bearing do these aspects of a dance performance have on the proper aesthetic appreciation of that performance, or of a dance work that it instantiates? In response to (1), McFee identifies a number of differences between watching a live dance performance and watching a filmic recording of that performance: “the limited focus of a fixed camera position; the scale of things on stage—distorted by close-up perhaps; the acoustic difference, partly related to any music associated with the work, but partly to the sounds of dancers’ feet and breath; the fragility or danger of live performance—roughly, how will tonight’s dancers cope with the contingencies that arise in this performance, as such contingencies will typically arise.”3 Echoing Brown’s worries about recordings of improvised music, McFee places particular stress upon the “immediacy and danger” of live performance. His concern is that, in attending a particular dance performance, we have the sense that what will transpire is still undetermined, and thus presents challenges to the dancers, but, he maintains, one cannot have that sense in watching at some later time a film of a performance. But it is not clear that I cannot have this sense of “openness to possibilities and challenges” in watching a recorded live performance if I know that this is what I am watching and have not seen the recording before. Furthermore, turning to (2), it is not obvious that the other features noted by McFee are salient differences from the point of view of the proper artistic appreciation of a dance performance. One might wonder whether the possibility of variable focus and close-up in a filmic recording of a dance performance might not provide better access to artistically relevant features of that performance than the access most live viewers have when they sit in an auditorium at some distance from the dancers and are limited to a single perspective on what is happening. As for the “acoustic differences,” the sounds of the dancer’s breath and feet which are only available to a select few members of the audience save in the case of “chamber” performances, are not obviously things that bear upon the artistic appreciation of the dance, and are in any case replicable in a recording given appropriate acoustic monitoring of the performers.4 These kinds of issues are subject to more systematic analysis in Ian Heckman’s contribution to this section. Heckman’s chapter focuses directly on our first question, asking whether “there is something important that we obtain through our engagement with live performances that we cannot get in our engagement with even the best quality videos.” He maintains that what we lose in watching a videotape of a live performance is “a sense of the performers’ presence through becoming kinesthetically distanced from the performers’ inner world and their agency.” He argues for this conclusion by claiming, first, that dance scholars and appreciators seeking to analyse a dance piece through viewing a filmic recording may use the recording as the stimulus for imaginatively reconstructing the experience one would have had if one had watched the live performance directly. Three salient features of watching a live performance that need to be reconstructed, he maintains, are its three-dimensionality, its being viewed from a particular perspective, and the freedom of the spectator to choose to focus her attention on particular aspects of it. We might think, however, that, as just suggested, increasingly sophisticated kinds of filmic recording might reduce the need for such imaginative reconstruction: what we “lose” in a filmic recording would then be a matter of inadequate recording practices rather than a principled difference grounded in the very nature of appreciating a live dance performance.

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Such responses to the perceived failings of filmic recordings as a means of appreciating dance performances are what Heckman terms “reductive.” His concern, however, is not with the three salient features just noted, but with a further aspect of live performance that we try to imaginatively reconstruct: “the feeling of being in the presence of live bodies and the feeling of what it would be like to perform that movement.” The feeling of being in the presence of live bodies, he further maintains, “can be decomposed into two different feelings which combine and merge with one another: the feeling of other bodies and the feeling of liveness.” The first of these feelings is a product of kinesthesis. Just as we are aware of our own bodies through proprioception, so we are aware of others as similarly embodied when we watch them move: “we get the sense of their own bodily movement and what it would be like to move in the way they are moving.” Given various neurophysiological accounts that have been offered of this phenomenon, we might expect the feeling of other bodies to be preserved in the viewing of a suitably sophisticated filmic recording of a dance performance: any imaginative burden felt in our viewings of present recordings would therefore seem open to a reductive explanation. But, Heckman maintains, no such reductive account can explain why we need to imaginatively reconstruct the feeling of liveness. The latter is not merely a sense of something as essentially transient—which might also characterize a particular viewing of a recording—but a sense of standing in an unmediated relationship to “the internal life and agency of the performers,” something from which we are necessarily “distanced” by even the most perfect recording: “A reproduction necessarily takes us away from the inthe-moment internal life and agency of the performer. It is a reproduction, and in virtue of being a reproduction, it is an object which is removed in time and place from the real performance, and hence removed from the in-the-moment inner life and agency of the performers.” While Heckman agrees with McFee that certain aspects of our experience of live performance cannot be preserved in a recording, he offers a more nuanced response to our second question—(2) above—as to the significance of this fact for dance appreciation. While insisting that “many want to be as close kinesthetically to the performers as possible and they derive a great amount of pleasure from this,” he also grants that “the distance of a video might give us better appreciation of certain qualities of a dance that we would not notice if we saw the performance live.” This seems to leave open, however, the question whether the value that many ascribe to “the intimacy and kinesthetic closeness of a live performance” is a legitimate artistic value of the dance performance itself, or a distinct kind of pleasure that characterizes the experience of watching the live performance. Analogously, one might point to the pleasures of watching a live sporting performance rather than watching a filmed recording of that performance but question whether such pleasures bear upon the “athletic” value of the performance itself. Obviously to resolve such questions requires that we address, as we cannot here, deeper questions about what it is to properly appreciate something as art.

TECHNOLOGY IN DANCE ART—SCREENDANCE The filmic recordings of dance performances discussed in the previous section are external to the works of dance art whose appreciation is in question: the works are assumed to exist independently of the process whereby they are recorded, and the issue is one of appreciative access to those works through such recordings. As such, they are examples of what Arnold Berleant terms “dance video.” Two of the chapters in this section, however,

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discuss hybrid works of which both dance performance and filmic processes are constitutive elements. Ana Baer Carrillo discusses her own activity as an artist who produces works of “screendance,” focusing on a particular 2015 work, dunes, while Arnold Berleant examines the general aesthetic qualities of works of what he terms “videodance.” For convenience, and because the term has a wider currency in the literature, I shall follow Baer Carrillo’s terminology in discussing both papers. The incorporation within a single artwork of both an artistic performance and the filmic recording of that performance predates the development of contemporary screendance. Baer Carrillo identifies as the earliest examples the 1945 works of the experimental filmmaker Maya Deren, and finds other examples in the 1970s and 1980s. But it might also be noted that this is arguably a feature of some of the works by the performance artist Vito Acconci (for example, his 1971 Conversions—see David Davies5 for a discussion of this work). What is distinctive of the works of screendance artists like Baer Carrillo, however, is that the artist can avail herself of the full range of techniques employed in the cinematic arts. This involves not only the cinematographic techniques used in recording a performance, but also editing techniques such as montage, digital editing, multiple imaging, and the use of a synchronized non-diegetic soundtrack. Baer Carrillo’s own works also incorporate elements characteristic of the more experimental and abstract cinematic artworks produced by figures like Stan Brackhage. She characterizes screendance as “the hybrid form of choreography coupled with film or video.” Her own works are doubly hybrid in combining screendance with site-specificity, the latter itself being a distinctive late twentieth century dance discipline. Such works begin “with the inquiry of exploring the site through the movement of a dancer captured by my moving camera. At the core of my projects lie my aesthetic values; however, ethical implications also permeate my work. . . . My cinematography is informed heavily by my film studies, while my dance background influences my editing.” In making such works, Baer Carrillo states, one of her main aspirations “was to create an immersive environment with enough seductive images and soundscape where the audience could get lost in the experience. Sharing my embodied experience with the audience is at the forefront of my research.” In bringing the viewer to share this embodied experience, Baer Carrillo’s aim is to communicate the meanings that this experience had for her: “the fragility of humanity against the grandness of the environment, the strength of the female dancer, the constant dialogue between dancer, site, and camera, the traces left by humanity in the sand, the beauty of nature and the splendor of the human struggle.” All of her works are “based on the intention of sharing an embodied experience of place with my audience, highlighting the dialogue between dancer, environment, and camera. Additionally, it is my aspiration to share a sense of respect for nature by revealing the intricate connection between humans and nature.” In stressing that her goal in creating works of site-specific screendance is to communicate to the audience both her own embodied experience in making the work and the significance of this experience for her, Baer Carrillo is at least in partial agreement with Berleant, who also takes the goal of screendance to be to produce in the viewer experiences not available in watching live dance performances. Both stress that the role of the camera is to be understood in choreographic terms: for Baer Carrillo, the camera is one of the participants in a dialogue and the editing of the film itself is to be understood as an essentially choreographic exercise, while for Berleant the camera in a work of screendance is to be understood as standing in a choreographic relation to the dancer(s). But Berleant views this as primarily a means to produce a much richer kind of dance experience: it is

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the dance experience elicited by screendance that matters, quite independently of any ethical or other significance that might be communicated through such experience. Berleant’s claim that “the potential of videodance is extraordinary—for dance education, for dance training, and for expanding the availability of the excitement and gratification that the dance art offers” is grounded in two further claims: (a) that what matters in dance experience in general is what he terms “aesthetic engagement,” and (b) that videodance is able to produce much richer aesthetic engagment than live dance performance. Aesthetic engagement is to be contrasted with the kind of distanced aesthetic contemplation celebrated by Edward Bullough: “Aesthetic engagement is the idea that appreciation in the arts, in nature, and indeed in any aesthetic context, elicits an involvement that is participatory. Instead of objectifying the dancers by the separation and distance of a stage, there is continuity and connection as the viewer becomes a virtual dancer. Such collaboration is part of a full appreciative experience.”6 Screendance is able to heighten aesthetic engagement in ways not available in live performance: “Through the camera, the viewer’s eye and the body of which it is part are choreographed into the dance, joining a matrix of space-time-movement whose boundaries are constantly shifting.” Berleant identifies a number of filmic techniques that contribute to this heightening of aesthetic engagement. Interestingly, while Heckman argues that a sense of intimacy with the performers is lost when we watch any recording of a dance performance, Berleant maintains that “close-ups, including shots of only part of the body, bring the eye of the viewer in close proximity to the dancer and convey the personal intimacy of the movement and the immediacy of the effort, joined with the sensuality of close physical presence.” Berleant also stresses the importance of montage which “replaces the everyday physical space of the dancers with filmic space, transcending the limitations of the body’s location within the physical boundaries of the immediate dance space and freeing it from the constraints imposed by gravity.” Such techniques, when used in screendance, “have the effect of activating the viewer by stimulation and surprise, disrupting placidity by unaccustomed intimacies and unexpected juxtapositions . . . By choreographing the camera in the dance, the choreographer is actually choreographing the viewer, who becomes a virtual participant. This produces a radically altered dance experience.”

TECHNOLOGY AS A SUBJECT OF DANCE ART As noted in the opening paragraph, dance and technology can stand in a number of different relationships to one another. The complex work—or set of related works— discussed in the chapter by Fisher and Gionfriddo—exemplifies some of the relationships already discussed but takes as its focus a relationship not addressed in detail thus far. The work discussed is Domain, described as “[an] experiment in ‘transmedia performance’ ” created and presented by the interdisciplinary group ARCOS over the course of eight months in 2016, culminating in a theatrical performance at an interdisciplinary symposium at Texas State University. The discussion focuses on one element in Domain, ANNI, itself described as a “travelling installation” with which participants are invited to interact on the assumption that it is a form of artificial intelligence whose task is to gain whatever understanding it can of what it is like to be human. Unknown to the participants, the answers given by ANNI are actually produced by one of the human participants in the project. Fisher and Gionfriddo relate ANNI to the more general aim of Domain and the “mission” of ARCOS. The latter is “to experiment rigorously to discover adventurous new forms of contemporary performance,” primarily by integrating emergent

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technological innovations to influence and become part of the work. However the goal of such experimentation, exemplified in Domain and its component ANNI, is “to investigate emergent twenty-first-century technologies that challenge some of our core notions of perception and existence, especially those connected to our corporeality.” The questions explored in Domain are questions about our relationship to technology itself: “How . . . do current technological developments transform the fundamental nature of our established notions not only of art, but of reality? . . . What do we lose and gain, as people, when we turn over various functions of our lives to machines? As quickly as the digital revolution is advancing, what valued aspects of our human existence remain beyond its grasp of comprehension?” Linking this to John Searle’s famous “Chinese Room” thought experiment, Fisher and Gionfriddo suggest that what it is that only human subjects can understand is what it is to be an embodied intelligence. Dance is taken to be particularly suited for such artistic explorations: “Because dance is always ultimately about existing in a body—and because such embodied experience seems such an important site of human knowledge that remains out of reach in the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence—ARCOS’ integration of emergent technologies with dance and theatre seemed a particularly appropriate method to approach such questions.” As is clear from the above quotations, Domain not only integrates technology into the materials used in the artistic performance, but also does this to raise more general questions about our relationship as human beings to technology more generally. But the manner in which dance and technology work together as materials in the work is very different from their interaction in screendance as discussed in the previous section. Domain is not in this sense a hybrid work but—as Fisher and Gionfriddo themselves describe it—one of “transmedia performance.” Dance itself enters into the overall performance in a number of distinct ways. In the case of ANNI, it is the subject of some of the verbal exchanges between participants and ANNI, while in the closing theatrical performance the voice of ANNI accompanies the silhouette of a bald woman dancing around another figure, the same bald woman who features in videos that those attending the performance were able to watch beforehand online. In addition, live dance performances also viewable online are among the elements incorporated into Domain: “The transmedia tentacles of Domain extended far beyond the borders of the final theatrical performance in Texas to include: a website hosting periodically released chapters combining standalone text, animation, video, and audio (domain.arcosdance.com); a series of brief live dance performances in different cities that integrated emergent consumer technologies such as livestreaming and 360-degree video on social media; and the touring interactive installation of ANNI.” The chapter, by L. Archer Porter, takes as its subject Marie Chouinard’s 2005 work bODY rEMIX/gOLDBERG vARIATIONS . Chouinard’s work, while obviously experimental in both its themes and its choreography, is more clearly a work of dance than Domain: it is performed live in a traditional performance space and it integrates technological devices into the dance performance itself. Porter’s interest in this piece is in its interpretation(s), and Chouinard’s piece is used to support a more general claim about the interpretation of artworks. Porter focuses on two consecutive duets in the first act of the piece that last about four minutes in total and involve three performers—a male performer and a female performer in the first duet, and two female performers in the second duet. She claims that the theories and concepts she applies to these duets could be generalized to the work as a whole. The salient feature of the duets, for Porter, is that the female performers make use of “apparatus associated with disability, such as crutches, canes, and walkers” and that their movements are inflected accordingly, although in different ways. Porter offers

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two distinct readings of the use of these technological devices in the piece and argues that we should preserve the ambivalence between these readings. This is presented as a general critical strategy: ambivalence is described as “a critical toggle knob” that, when employed, “shifts perspectives and produces different knowledge based on variable codes and contexts.” Both of the readings take Chouinard’s piece to be in some way about the technological devices that it incorporates, but the nature of this “aboutness” depends upon whether the piece is viewed from the perspective of disabilities studies or from the perspective of posthumanism. Read through the lens of a disabilities scholar, these “props” and their use toward aesthetic goals will “imbue the work with offensive messages around disability, impairment, and associated ‘deviant’ biologies.” Read through the lens of post-humanist thinking, on the other hand, the use of prosthetic technology has a different significance. Porter cites N. Katherine Hayles’ characterization of post-humanism: “The posthuman view thinks of the body as prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born.” Understood in post-humanist terms, Chouinard’s performers are “dancing cyborgs,” and the piece “challenges a history reigning and globally dominant understanding of the human subject, her body, and her place in the world by remaking the body into a human–machine–animal hybrid.” Rather than being a representation of “phallocentric dominance,” or a tacit endorsement of “the historically and culturally specific belief that deviant social behavior (however that is defined) manifests in the materiality of the body,” as might be claimed by those who view the piece from the perspective of a semiotics of disability, the piece can be seen in post-humanist terms as “present[ing] a model for the deconstruction of the ability/disability, normal/deviant, and body/tool binaries.” Porter’s paper brings out very clearly the radically different readings that might be given of Chouinard’s incorporation of technological devices into her piece. However, as noted above, the paper has a more general aim. The different readings are of interest because of their differences, rather than because they challenge us, as receivers of Chouinard’s piece, to resolve those differences. Porter maintains that the two readings are “in tension” with one another, but that our task as critics is to undertand this tension, something that we can do by drawing upon the notions of ambivalence developed by Kobena Mercer and Judith Butler, and upon the notion of “différance” developed by Jacques Derrida. The ambivalence of Chouinard’s piece “destabilizes any certainty around either argument in order to create a more textured understanding of the work.” Porter distinguishes two uses of the notion of ambivalnce in the critical literature. For Kobena Mercer, “ambivalence” is a general method of critical interpretation that takes a text to be contextualized but open to equally valid readings: taking ambivalence as one’s “lens” in critically engaging with a text “not only underlines the role of the reader, but also draws attention to the important and equally undecidable, role of context in determining the range of different readings that can be produced in the same text.” Butler, on the other hand, takes ambivalent interpretations as uncovering contradictions in the performance of an artist of which the artist is unaware. Porter’s ambivalent approach to Chouinard’s piece is grounded “in the work’s simultaneous operation within a semiotics of disability and the deconstructive possibilities of its dancing cyborgs.” (Presumably, for Mercer these two perspectives are live in the context in which Chouinard is working, whereas for Butler they are both in some sense operative, but not both consciously intended, in Chouinard’s creative activity.) Porter relates her discussion of ambivalence to

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Derrida’s theory of différance, which holds for the enterprise of interpretation in general. The two proposed readings of Chouinard’s piece “simultaneously differ from and defer to one another, since the post-structuralist position cannot exist without its relation to the structuralist one, and visa versa.” The ambivalence of Chouinard’s work, as demonstrated by the two alternative readings, then illustrates the Derridean theory: “the two readings of Marie Chouinard’s bODY rEMIX/gOLDBERG vARIATIONS that this essay presents imply infinite others, which exist beyond (yet within) the present project. Ever elusive, the work remains a reflection—splitting and doubling before the critic can capture any stable meaning or singular truth.” Let me conclude with two brief observations on Porter’s paper. First, I take it that the general thesis about interpretation is intended to apply to all works. As Porter expresses this earlier in her paper, the purpose of elaborating the two interpretations of Chouinard’s piece is to indicate “not just how this performance engenders ambivalence, but also how any performance offers similar opportunities to tease apart meaning.” Second, the legitimacy of an interpretation is to be measured solely by the ability of the interpreter to apply resources available in the context of reception (or perhaps, as the citation from Mercer suggests, the context of creation) to the elements making up the interpreted work. This is what is required if, as Mercer maintains, we are to do justice to the reader’s creativity in the process of reading. What is excluded here is any appeal to the aims of the artist in her work to rule out one or more of the interpretations that are “legitimate” in this sense. While there are occasional references in Porter’s discussion to what Chouinard may have intended, no role is ascribed to these intentions in the evaluation of the two readings. Thus, in motivating the first of the two interpretations, Porter writes that “regardless of whether or not the dance has anything to do with disability, it is difficult to dislodge Long and Prieur’s performance from the triangulation of the crutch, the physics that the crutch produces, and popular constructions of deviant biologies.” What the dance “has to do with,” here, seems to be a reference to what Chouinard took herself to be doing, but this is assigned no role in the assessment of possible interpretations. This, of course, is fully consistent with the views about interpretation shared by the theorists upon whose work Porter draws—Mercer, Butler, and Derrida. But it should be noted that the overall argument of the paper presupposes the view of interpretation with which it concludes: it would not be viewed as an argument for that view by one who thought that “what a work has to do with” was itself a constraint on the legitimacy of an interpretation.

NOTES 1.

Lee Brown, “Phonography, Repetition, and Spontaneity,” Philosophy and Literature 24 (2000): 111–125.

2.

Graham McFee, Dance and the Philosophy of Action (Binsted, UK: Dance Books, 2018), chapter 11.

3.

Ibid., p. 270.

4.

I defend the epistemological value of filmic recordings against McFee’s criticisms in “Dance seen and dance-screened,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 43 (2019), 117–32.

5.

David Davies, “Telling Pictures: the Place of Narrative in Late-Modern Visual Art,” in Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens, eds., Philosophy and Conceptual Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 138–156 and 150–152.

6.

Edward Bullough, “ ‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and as an Aesthetic Principle,” British Journal of Psychology, 5 (1912): 87–117.

CHAPTER 4.2

Aesthetic Engagement in Video Dance ARNOLD BERLEANT

DANCE VIDEO AND VIDEO DANCE The arts of dance have a strangely compelling quality. Using the human body as its material and often its subject-matter, dance directs the body’s vital forces through the manifold associations and powers the body inhabits and evokes. Sometimes the movement takes the form of a solo dance; sometimes it is shared. Sometimes it is shaped by narrative, sometimes by a theme. Often it delights in the possibilities of movement itself, always shaping the vital forces that carry the body through time and space. Indeed, dance exemplifies how, through movement, the human body creates its time and space. Dance may be thought of as an “ur-art.” Using no tool or instrument other than one’s body, the dancer shapes and inhabits a world of movement. Dance is one of the first manifestations of the aesthetic impulse and the fulfillment of an aesthetic need. At the same time, the dance arts, like the other arts, respond to the possibilities of technology. This can be seen in the imaginative use of set design and props, but the technological possibilities of filmic techniques are irresistible. Dance film and video do not replace the human body but are means of enhancing and extending its possibilities, creating a new artistic modality just as photography and film have done. Painting and theater continue to flourish and to innovate in their own spheres, but new and distinctive arts have been born of the new technologies. The same is true of dance. In addition, film adds the possibility of preserving a dance performance, not only archiving it but making it repeatable to a new audience. In what follows, I shall be concerned with dance film and video dance. The first was born of the manifold possibilities of chemical technology, while the second, surpassing film technology, exploits the rich resources of digital technology and its freedom from material constraints. Both technologies offer new possibilities for the dance arts, similar in many respects but different in some others.1 And both develop and enhance the possibilities and powers of dance experience. A clarification is in order. In speaking of video dance, it is important to distinguish it from dance video as either a synonym or its equivalent. The terminology is not important here but the difference in meaning is. We can think of dance video (or dance film) as dance recorded by a video camera from a fixed position. Historic footage usually takes this form and provides invaluable archival information on dancers and choreography. On the other hand, filmic techniques are an integral part of video dance: the choreographer 330

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must take into account the camera’s movements together with the dancers’. With the advent of video technology, new possibilities were added to the visualization of dance performance. Together, film and video offer extraordinary possibilities for the development of this new modality of dance art, a modality that requires its own understanding and appreciation. Dance video thus belongs to the family of recording technologies, in this case, visual recording, in which a camera is set up to record a dance performance for archival purposes, viewing the dance much like a member of the audience. Dance videos, like archival dance films, have produced valuable documentation of dances and performers. For historical purposes, archival dance films and videos are invaluable documents, but they merely record live art from a fixed position. They are not dance; for that the camera must become a participant. I chose the title “Aesthetic Engagement in Video Dance” to highlight the possibilities of engagement in the dance arts. I want to explore how video dance uses its technological resources to enhance aesthetic engagement. This may seem a redundancy since, as I have observed at the outset, the powerful attraction of the human body belies the eighteenth century convention of aesthetic distance and disinterestedness in the arts centered on the body. The film arts have already dispelled the anachronism of disinterestedness. Active engagement is one of film’s powerful attractions and people flock to the movies to participate in adventure, drama, and enchantment. Just as filmic techniques can enhance the power of drama by freeing action from the physical limitations of the body and the constraints of the stage, filmic dance can do the same and more with the moving body.

CHOREOGRAPHING THE CAMERA Let me turn next to some of the camera techniques that are available to the choreographer of video dance. What is essential to note here is that this is not simply a catalog of filmic techniques but a repertory of techniques for creating dance experiences. Whereas in stage dance the stage provides a spatial continuum, video technology vastly increases the range of possible experience by adding camera movement and editing. Video dance provides a different continuum, a continuum of multi-dimensional movement. The camera techniques are familiar. Varying the distance from the dancers offers a powerful resource. Close-ups, including shots of only part of the body, bring the eye of the viewer in close proximity to the dancer and convey the personal intimacy of the movement and the immediacy of the effort, joined with the sensuality of close physical presence. These are enhanced when combined with rapid cutting and a frenetic pace. Changing the camera’s distance from the performers enlivens the spatial context and emphasizes its three-dimensionality. Changing the camera’s direction and the angle from which it is shooting (which may include aerial shots), makes the viewer an active participant. It also can alter our perception of movement and space. For example, when shot from a low angle, the length, height, and trajectory of a dancer’s leap are greatly extended.2 And by speeding up or slowing down the camera, time becomes malleable and the grace of movement more pronounced, while mechanical movement becomes more mechanized. Most significantly, when the frame replaces the stage, the camera becomes the viewer’s eye and permits choreography that is manifestly unstageable. In all these ways, the medium enhances both the choreographer’s choices and the audience’s perceptions.3 Then there are techniques and features of video and film-recording technology other than camera movement that are familiar from film and enhance aesthetic engagement.

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The lighting can be freely modified, changing the density of the space, while altering the location or the context changes the perception of movement from the outside, as it were. Then there is the use of distinctive filmic techniques, such as super-imposing images and combining multiple takes that can extend the body’s corporeality and singularity. Speeding up or slowing down the camera changes the basic parameters of space and movement. The dancing body can transcend its somatic boundaries, splitting the single dancer into two reciprocal images and even cloning the body into a corps. So, too, can the body’s movement be extended in time, leaving behind a trail of images as it moves forward.4 Most important of all, montage replaces the everyday physical space of the dancers with filmic space, transcending the limitations of the body’s location within the physical boundaries of the immediate dance space and freeing it from the constraints imposed by gravity. Space becomes a homogeneous, one-dimensional medium in which the body moves. “Collision” cutting, invented by Eisenstein, combines unmatched shots for shocking effects, such as sharp changes in screen direction. Pseudo-matching action cuts leap across a kinetic bridge from one movement to another in the same sequence to create the illusion of simultaneity. Invented by Pudovkin, these cuts also encourage engagement. When combined with music, color, and strong images, one leaves the frame behind, creating what Eisenstein termed “overtonal” montage and, later, “ecstasy.”5 All such techniques combine in what Daniel Conrad calls “filmic choreography”6 to promote aesthetic engagement.7 Time, space, movement, even gravity are malleable and surpassed in this new art of videodance. Thus the camera’s eye becomes the viewer’s eye. Unlike stage performance where everyone sees something different depending on the arbitrariness of seating, in video dance everyone is, in effect, front row center and sees the same thing, increasing the communal nature of the experience. Through the camera, the viewer’s eye and the body of which it is part are choreographed into the dance, joining a matrix of space-timemovement whose boundaries are constantly shifting. The camera techniques I have been describing have the effect of activating the viewer by stimulation and surprise, disrupting placidity by unaccustomed intimacies and unexpected juxtapositions. These resemble the invitational influence that features of environment have on us, features that psychologists like Kurt Lewin called “invitational qualities” and J. J. Gibson termed “affordances.” These are environmental features that lead us to respond and act in certain ways. Camera techniques and montage have a similar perceptual effect on the viewer of video dance and, when used skillfully, bring the viewer into active participation. By choreographing the camera in the dance, the choreographer is actually choreographing the viewer, who becomes a virtual participant. This produces a radically altered dance experience, an enhanced appreciative experience that needs to be understood, not on the model of theatrical or stage dance, but as its own art.

AESTHETIC ENGAGEMENT IN VIDEO DANCE The arts have always been bound up with technology of some sort, from the use of iron oxide and charcoal on cave walls to digital tools. Technological changes in human culture have always inspired innovation in artistic modes and aesthetic perception. Present-day technology has created resources that not only enhance the traditional arts but transmute their creative potential into related but distinctively new arts. Painting has been transfigured into photography, with its own possibilities of visualization and evocation. Plays and novels have metamorphosed into film, the modern collective art par excellence.

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Sounds generated electronically have altered the traditional sonic components of music, replacing themes with textures and meter with pulsation or no metrical order at all. The catalog of innovation is endless and inspiring. Technological changes underlie a similar transformative process in dance. Much of the powerful appeal of dance performance has always been its ability to engage the viewer’s body in the appreciative experience. The current fashion of finding neurological correlates for the organic intensity of sympathetic movement in the spectator (e.g. mirror neurons) does not explain the experience but merely identifies its physiological correlate.8 But one does not need a neurological explanation to authenticate such occurrences, which are part of dance experience for the audience as well as the dancer. And just as, through movement, the dancer creates the space and time that (s)he inhabits, (s)he invites the viewer into it as a shadow partner. Phenomenologists speak of “lived space” as the space of experience, experienced space. To this we could add “lived time” that, together with space and the moving body, provide the conditions of dance experience. Not just the eye but the viewer’s body as a whole enters a matrix of space, time, and movement within the shifting boundaries of a dance performance in a kind of liminal or subliminal kinesthesia. This brings me to the central argument of this chapter, aesthetic engagement in video dance. Aesthetic engagement is the idea that appreciation in the arts, in nature, and, indeed in any aesthetic context, elicits an involvement that is participatory. Instead of objectifying the dancers by the separation and distance of a stage, there is continuity and connection as the viewer becomes a virtual dancer. Such collaboration is part of a full appreciative experience. Disinterested contemplation, the traditional standard of aesthetic appreciation, is inappropriate and misleading. It is misleading in that it does not give full credit to the active contribution of the embodied spectator to the content and quality of appreciative experience. And it is inappropriate because it uses a cognitive model for understanding appreciation, isolating the viewer by separating him or her from the object of attention and turning it into a thing presumably suitable for appreciation.9 John Dewey rightly characterized such dualistic thinking as misleading and erroneous, calling it the intellectualist fallacy, the mistake of regarding all experience as cognitive.10 Such thinking is false to experience by not recognizing different kinds of experience with different kinds of appropriateness and credibility. Aesthetic appreciation has its own legitimacy and demands to be acknowledged on its own terms. Dance, along with film and music, is not easily objectified and made into a contemplative object, in part because all three arts share the primal aesthetic awareness of movement. In exemplifying the creative potential of aesthetic experience, music, film, and dance offer the best models for engaged appreciation in other arts and circumstances. The techniques available for choreographing dancers and camera in video dance can take full advantage of this propensity in dance for active engagement. In artistic hands, these techniques can be used deliberately to entice the viewer into virtual somatic participation. The techniques can, of course, be abused and the dance experience turned into a crude manipulation of audience sensibilities. That this is a danger in any art is obvious from their exploitation for commercial and political purposes. However, this does not discredit the techniques but only their misuse. The potential of video dance is extraordinary—for dance education, for dance training, and for expanding the availability of the excitement and gratification that the dance art offers. Perhaps video dance can serve as a portal for entry into participatory appreciation in other arts, as well.11 Aesthetic gratification is its own justification.12

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NOTES 1.

“I shoot in both media, and there are some important things I can do in one that I can’t do in the other. Superimpositions, for example, look better on film. When I choose video, it’s mostly for economic reasons. Film still has a greater command of tonal gradation and detail in the shadows and highlights, and many directors still prefer it. Some significant virtues of video are that you can hand-hold more easily, capture much more footage per hour, shoot in lower light, and quickly and easily convert your footage into the ideal format for editing. The ‘footage per hour’ factor can free you, but it makes some directors sloppy. When I apply for a grant to shoot on video, I often specify that I intend to shoot ‘with a film aesthetic,’ implying that I’m careful about precisely when and where I push the shutter release. That being said, I’m mostly using video these days.” Personal communication from Daniel Conrad, August 24, 2016.

2.

I owe this observation to the choreographer Joan Kunsch. She notes, “Any time I can get the camera (for moving or for still shots) as low as possible, a dancer’s airborne moments, whether leaping across the space or jumping in one place, appear in their full height and splendor of flight. If the camera is positioned at level or above, that minimizes the airborne quality.” Personal communication, October 19, 2016.

3.

Daniel Conrad, “Notes on Filming Dance: A Dance Film Study Guide,” Daniel Conrad, © 2006 5 pp., http://www.rhodopsin.ca/publications_en.html (accessed August 29, 2016).

4.

Many of these techniques are displayed in Norman McLaren’s Pas de Deux, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=WopqmACy5XI (accessed January 4, 2017).

5.

Sergei Eisenstein, “The Filmic Fourth Dimension,” in Film Form, trans. Jay Leyda (Harcourt Brace, 1929).

6.

Conrad, “Notes on Filming,” p. 1.

7.

A striking example of the contribution of film technique to choreography is in the video production of Balanchine’s Tzigane. Balanchine was especially pleased with the videography of this ballet. He wanted the corps to appear quickly and unobtrusively on stage in the last part of the dance and was delighted with the video production, which could bypass this problem in a stage performance by cutting the corps in instantly. Choreography by Balanchine, Nonesuch DVD 79838-2. Merrill Brockway, program notes, p. 5.

8.

Cf. Giacomo Rizzolatti and Laila Craigher, “The Mirror-Neuron System,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 27 (2004): 169–192; Eric Kandel, The Age of Insight (Random House, 2012). See also http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0197455606000438 and http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0197455611000426.

9.

See Arnold Berleant, “Beyond Disinterestedness,” in Re-thinking Aesthetics, Rogue Essays on Aesthetics and the Arts (Farnham, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 41–53.

10. “[T]he assumption of the ubiquity of knowledge . . . as a measure of reality.” “This assumption of the . . . ubiquity of knowledge is the great intellectualistic fallacy. It is the source of all disparagement of everyday qualitative experience, practical, esthetic, moral. It is the ultimate source of the doctrine that calls subjective and phenomenal all objects of experience that cannot be reduced to properties of objects of knowledge.” John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty (New York: Minton, Balch, 1929), pp. 291, 219. See also Experience and Nature (New York: Dover, 1958), chapter 1. I consider this one of Dewey’s more original and important insights. 11. See Angela Keppler, “ ‘Can the Audience Want?’ On the Artistic Status of Contemporary TV-Series.” Contemporary Aesthetics, Special Volume 5 (2016), Contemporary Perspectives on Film and Philosophy. On quality TV for comparable active appreciation. “An inspection

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of pertinent sequences leads to the conclusion that the enjoyment we experience when watching these series stems from the very type of active-passive involvement that Adorno described as being essential only for objects of high culture.” 12. I am indebted to the experimental filmmaker Daniel Conrad for his account of filmic techniques in “Notes on Filming Dance” and for his advice in the preparation of this chapter.

CHAPTER 4.3

Bodies at Rest: Four Still Images DANIEL CONRAD

Four still images from four films of mine illustrate some of Arnold Berleant’s ideas regarding aesthetic engagement in cinematic dance. As stills, they cannot render the kinetic effects of moving images, but they may fuel the reader’s imagination. I include a few notes regarding my process.1 The key differences between aesthetic engagement in stage dance vs. screen dance are elegantly condensed in Arnold Berleant’s observation, in the previous chapter, that the cinematic camera is not just viewing choreography, but is actually “choreographing the viewer, who becomes a virtual participant.” There is participation in stage dance as well; a viewer’s mirror-neuronal circuits can provoke engaged, body to body identification with dancers in any medium. But in cinema, the camera embodies the viewer to the extent that they can have the sensation of being physically picked up and carried through space. This can work through camera movement (in which the camera becomes the viewer’s eye), through movement of and within non-stageable exotic locations, and (perhaps most powerfully) through montage—cutting from shot to shot, which can create the vicarious feel of extended leaps across the cuts. These filmic methods offer ample opportunity for constructing a kind of neo-Formalist aesthetic. How does this work? In our ordinary lives, we are blinded by habit; we see little of what passes before our eyes. Surrounded by concrete and glass, we are blind to patterns in nature (even our own animal nature) because nature is covered over with concrete. And we are blind to concrete because it is always there. The early twentieth-century RussianFormalists wanted to make the invisible visible by means of defamiliarization—what Viktor Shklovsky termed Ostranenie (literally, “making strange”). They were working in poetry, but their methods were applied to film by Eisenstein and others. My first image is of dancer Wen Wei Wang in 2nd Nature, choreographed by Judith Marcuse (Plate 11). In dance cinema, one way of “making strange” is superimposition: the layering of images. I prefer working in film for this, as the layered images maintain tonal gradation, rendering textures that melt into each other. I film a sequence, roll the film back in the camera, and film another sequence (or two) on top of it, yielding the layers. The images move independently but melt together like music, forming a kind of visual polyphony, and can generate visual analogues of the voices of a fugue, in unison, canon, stretto, or counterpoint. One can create fugal forms on stage, of course, but staged bodies do not melt into each other; they remain separate. When melting on the screen, their movement, vicariously 336

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shared by the viewer, can be fluid, turbulent, pulling our engaged self into an imagined communal protoplasm, revealing a complex, shared humanity. The movements are amplified by the fluidity, an effect similar to what painters such as Goya and Berthe Morisot were rendering with the kinetic textures of their brush strokes in otherwise static paintings. Beyond these textural effects, superimposition also allows an amplified form of improvisation. Some of the sequences I superimpose are improvised. When these improvised sequences are superimposed, the results are hard to predict. There can be a lot of random visual noise and a few brilliant sequences where the layers speak to each other in ways we could not have planned or imagined. We select these few brilliant sequences for inclusion. Dancers will give fully uninhibited improvisation if they know you will only use their brilliant moments; but the potential for empty visual noise makes the selection phase critical. Here stage and screen diverge. On stage, we can select a spontaneous moment only by freezing it into rehearsed choreography, repeated at each performance. This costs some spontaneity. On screen, it only has to work once, but it’s fresh at each screening, enhancing the viewer’s engagement. My second image shows dancer William Briscoe in Afternoon of the Chimeras, choreographed by Aszure Barton (Plate 12). This was filmed on the isolated west coast of Haida Gwaii, where we survival-camped for several weeks. Once again, we employed some improvisation. The dancers moved spontaneously, following externally-given motivations and responding to externally-generated chance events. As before, I selected the most engaging phrases from the semi-random footage. I used these as elements in constructing larger, unified compositions. When filming en plein air in the wilderness, the chance events include dramatic lighting changes: soft, hard, bright, dim, warm, cool, moving with cloud cover. Natural locations also impose the absolute requirements of the physical surfaces of the land (sand, moss, water, rock) which prohibit most of the normal choreographic repertoire but allow new discoveries. In Afternoon of the Chimeras, I gave the dancers the motivation to be non-human animals, perfectly evolved and adapted to live on each new dancing surface. For me, the wealth of chance events available in exotic natural locations greatly helps drive the process of making strange. As playwright Robert Wilson put it: “If you place a baroque candelabra on a baroque table, both get lost. You can’t see either. If you place the candelabra on a rock in the ocean, you begin to see what it is.”2 For this film, I invite dancers and viewers out of the city, into wilderness by the edge of the ocean, and allow chance events to reveal the strangeness that underlies human life beyond our urban perceptual habits. My third image shows dancer Aszure Barton in 7 Universal Solvents, choreographed by Paul-Andre Fortier (Plate 13). Here the dancer is inside a narrow tube. One can mount a tube on stage, of course, but the image would be small, and the audience would have to sit in the very center to see the action. On film, the dancer fills the screen. In this sequence, the expanded screen size greatly amplifies the dancer’s minimalist choreography. Small movements take on large significance, pulling the engaged viewer into the action. The dancer works with this choreographic amplification to play with ideas of symmetry, establishing it and decomposing it in unexpected ways. This sets the theme of the film, which is the dissolution of ordered structures by “solvents” (water, fire, a tiger, children, wine, etc.), all of which were melted into the dancers by in-camera superimposition.

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My fourth image is dancer Petr Opavský in Subways: 5 Variations on a Theme by Rilke, choreographed by Crystal Pite (Plate 14). In Subways, I brought dancers into the Prague metro, onto moving subway cars and escalators. Dancing full speed on moving surfaces can be dangerous, so I had them perform at half-speed, then sped the action back to normal speed by under-cranking the camera (running it at a lower frame-rate). The resulting movement ran at the speed of Pite’s original choreography, but it had hyperprecise kinetics, drawing viewers into surreal kinetic experiences, allowing us to identify with the dancers and join their community. I augmented the effect with pseudo-matchingaction cuts: cutting from one moving dancer to another moving dancer, in a different location but moving in the same screen direction, using the conservation of visual momentum to render a leap across the cut. This worked well with the underlying theme of the film, inspired by Rilke’s poem, Der Panther, about a panther trapped in a cage in the Jardin des Plantes. I imagined a little community of humans trapped in the Prague metro, who think they are free because they are free to go back and forth in the cars and up and down on the escalators. But sometimes, when they leap, they imagine escape.

NOTES 1.

I have discussed some of these ideas previously in Daniel Conrad, Notes on Filming Dance, Rhodopsin Productions, Vancouver, Canada: http://www.rhodopsin.ca/publications_en.html.

2.

Arthur Holmberg, The Theatre of Robert Wilson (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 53.

CHAPTER 4.4

What Do We Lose to a Video? IAN T. HECKMAN

I think we have come to a point in the current state of technology where we, as appreciators, makers, and producers of live performances, must ask ourselves an important question. We must ask ourselves whether, in a world where we can easily access videotapes of performances, there is something important that we obtain through our engagement with live performances that we cannot get in our engagement with even the best quality videos. The performing arts, as artforms which perform with real bodies on a stage, seem to be on the verge of an existential crisis. Given the sheer cost of live productions of artworks, it might seem more and more tempting, from both an audience’s and a performing arts organization’s standpoint, to simply create videos of artworks and make them publicly available through the internet. However, despite the cost efficiency of recordings, many of those who attend live performances have an intuition that there is something we get from a live performance that we cannot obtain from a mere video of that performance. This chapter explores and justifies the claim that we do lose something when we videotape a live performance, and what we lose is a sense of the performers’ presence through becoming kinesthetically distanced from the performers’ inner world and their agency.

IMAGINATIVE RECONSTRUCTION Some time ago, I was engaged in a project which I think many dance scholars and appreciators engage in. I was trying to analyze dance pieces from videotapes of performances. Most dance scholars, out of necessity, analyze these works with videos of those pieces, and many of these videos are of poor quality. They must make the best of whatever quality videos they have. To overcome the poor quality one strategy which they can use is imaginative reconstruction. They can imaginatively reconstruct what it would be like to have watched that performance live, usually drawing on their past experience and knowledge of what it is like attending live performances. Even in the case of our best quality videos, dance scholars must often reconstruct quite a few different properties of live performances to determine more fully what it would be like to see that performance in person. What is it that dance scholars reconstruct imaginatively when they watch even the best quality videos? Given that videos are almost always two-dimensional in nature, they must reconstruct a sense of the three-dimensional space, the depth of the movers’ bodies, and 339

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the depth of the stage. The flatness of the screen often hampers the ability to judge the relations between the dancers at any time. Furthermore, they reconstruct what it would be like to see the piece from a particular audience member’s point of view. Live performances are rarely watched from the points of view of the cameras recording them. This is true if the cameras are constantly changing points of view, in the case where we have multiple cameras whose film is edited together, and it is also true if the camera is still in the back of the audience. Live performances are rarely watched from the viewpoints of the cameras, because audience members do not sit where the cameras are. Something that even the best quality videotapes often do is zoom in and focus on particular performers at particular times. The videotapes choose for you what is important at any particular time in the dance, instead of allowing you the freedom to decide for yourself and interpret as you see fit. Dance scholars may reconstruct this freedom as best they can, by creating a picture of what the whole stage might look like in their mind and focusing on other aspects instead. Of course, this is a cognitively demanding task, imagining things happening on stage that you cannot see. But, it is not entirely impossible. Perhaps you had seen it a few times before, or have several different videos to use. You might even be able to infer certain things about movement going on off screen from the movement that is on screen.1 These three types of imaginative reconstruction performance scholars must go through indicate three things that we typically lose even to a quality recording: Three-Dimensionality, a Particular Perspective, and Spectator Freedom. I want to suggest a fourth: we lose the feeling of being in the presence of live bodies and the feeling of what it would be like to perform that movement. This is something that I, and other performance scholars, often try to reconstruct when we watch videotapes of live performances. We want to feel what it would be like to be in the presence of these performers. Understanding this feeling of presence or liveness in precise terms is difficult. And it, like most qualitative experience, has a certain ineffability to it. But I shall do the best I can. Given that I have described it as “the feeling of being in the presence of live bodies,” it can be decomposed into two different feelings which combine and merge with one another: the feeling of other bodies and the feeling of liveness. The feeling of other bodies is just the result of what I call kinesthesis below. We all feel our own bodies through proprioception. We feel where our limbs are in space as well as how we are moving. But when we watch other people move, we feel that we are no longer alone; we get the sense of their own bodily movement and what it would be like to move in the way they are moving. The feeling of liveness often accompanies this when we see people move in person. Phenomenologically speaking, it can be described as a feeling of the ephemerality of the movement, that you will only be able to see and feel that movement once. As soon as that movement is finished, you cannot get it back. You cannot replay it. There is a sense of importance which accompanies each seen movement. These two feelings then combine to give us the feeling of being in the presence of live bodies. Something which needs to be explained is why the feeling of liveness needs to be reproduced while watching a video. Why does it not come with watching a quality video? After all, you cannot get back each second in which you are watching the video. Sure, you can replay it, but every time you replay it, you might see the same movement, but each experience of the movement is unique and disappears as soon as you experience something new. One would expect that this feeling of live presence is produced directly through our experience of the videotape. But this is not the case. As I stated earlier, dance scholars

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need to reproduce the experience of liveness, it is not something they get passively from watching the video in the same way they would get it from watching a live performer. So we need to explain why it is that we do not experience live presence from the video directly, but do directly experience it from live performers.

KINESTHESIS Kinesthesis, generally speaking, is the ability to feel what it would be like to perform the movement we see. The status of whether kinesthesis exists and whether it can be used in the appreciation of the performing arts is controversial. We can see fairly easily how kinesthesis would facilitate a feeling of presence. If we have an ability to feel what the performers are doing, then it seems that a feeling of a performers’ presence may be facilitated by it. If we feel their movement, the performers’ movement we are feeling makes their live presence more vivid to us. One place to look, then, for why we need to reconstruct the live presence of the performers, is in our best accounts of kinesthesis. In the philosophical literature thus far, we have two plausible models for how kinesthesis works. One comes from Barbara Montero, the other from Noël Carroll and William Seeley.2 Both accounts rely on neuroscientific and behavioral studies, and they differ primarily in how they see kinesthesis is facilitated. Montero thinks that what underlies kinesthesis are neural mechanisms she calls “mirror neurons.” Mirror neurons are supposed to behave so that when we are watching a particular movement, the neurons in our brain, which would be responsible for performing that movement, would activate as well. Under the proposed view, this is an automatic mirroring of the movement we see through our brains. For Carroll and Seeley, what underlies kinesthesis is a multimodal relationship between areas in the brain responsible for vision and motor preparation. These studies show that when points of light are placed at the joints of a human figure moving, with all other information concealed, participants easily discriminated what movements the figure was performing. While watching these videos, not only did the part of the brain responsible for vision activate, but also the part responsible for motor preparation. Furthermore, it was demonstrated that those who had damage to the motor preparation area had a much more difficult time discriminating the movement. This gives them reason to believe that what underlies our kinesthetic capacities is a crossmodal relationship between these two sense modalities which work together to give us a deeper understanding of movement. Note that neither Montero’s nor Carroll and Seeley’s view can account, without modification, for why dance scholars need to reconstruct kinesthetic sensations while watching a video. If kinesthesis operates through automatic mirroring of seen movement, then a quality video should give us the same kinesthetic sensations as seeing the movement in person. If kinesthesis operates through motor preparation, informed by vision, then a quality video would give us the same kinesthetic sensations as seeing the same movement in person. Therefore, something more is needed to account for the feeling of live presence.

TWO OPTIONS There are at least two ways of trying to account for why one needs to reconstruct the feeling of live presence while watching a video. One is a reductive account, the other, a nonreductive. The reductive account holds that one would not have to reconstruct the feeling of presence if all the other properties were reproduced sufficiently close to reality.

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The reductive claim would be that if looking at a nearly perfect reproduction of a performance, complete with Three-Dimensional Space, a Particular Perspective, and Spectator Freedom, then we would have this feeling of live presence. However, it is unclear how the addition of these three elements would provide us with the feeling of live presence. In addition, if we think that kinesthesis plays an important role in providing the feeling of liveness, then the reductive account is only available to Montero. Recall that Carroll and Seeley’s account only requires that one observes points of light placed on joints to work, and to work well. Getting more visual detail, a sense of three dimensional space, etc., would not give us greater movement insight through kinesthesis. Montero’s account, on the other hand, allows for the reductive account, but does not explain why having a nearly perfect reproduction of the performance would cause greater mirror neuron, and hence kinesthetic, response. Therefore, Montero’s account still leaves the feeling of live presence in a live performance unexplained. A further possible reductive, but non-kinesthesis-related, explanation for why one needs to reconstruct the feeling of kinesthetic presence, is derived from how close the performance is to real life. Perhaps, says the reductionist, the reason why kinesthetic presence might arise when we are watching a nearly perfect reproduction of a performance is just that the reproduction most closely resembles our actual experience of the performance. There are two ways of elaborating on this in the literature that I know of, and both make reference to vivacity. Both understandings of vivacity primarily concern pictures. Under Kendall Walton’s view, a picture is more vivid if it more closely resembles the structure of how we would ordinarily look at the picture if it were seen in real life.3 The example he gives is that of Hobbema’s Mill. Walton invites us to think about three different situations: (1) Looking at an actual scene of “a red-roofed mill near a cluster of large trees with ducks in a pond and peasants in the background . . . from the left bank of the river some two hundred yards downstream from the mill”;4 (2) looking at Hobbema’s Mill, a painting which depicts the same scene from the same viewpoint; and (3) reading a rich depiction of the same scene in a book. Walton contends that (2) is going to give us a richer and more vivid experience of the scene, in that it is more like our experience of (1) than (3). The reason why is that with (2), I can do things which are more similar to my situation in (1) than (3). For example, while looking at the painting, I can zoom in and out as I will, focus on one detail rather than the other; while reading a description, I cannot. The painting, because it is more similar to the situation in real life, will be more vivid. The thought, when applied to a video, is that the reason why the video is lacking in vivacity does not inspire as vivid a sense of being there that needs to be reconstructed, is that Spectator Freedom is being restricted. But, once we have a recording, say one that projects the experience in a virtual reality of some sort, we will have just as vivid a sense of being there as in real life. Part of the issue with using Walton’s account to give a reductionist explanation of why we need to reconstruct the feeling of presence is that his account is restricted to visual vivacity.5 If we think about a feeling of the presence of a person, this feeling is not something which appears to be visual in any way. There is no reason why having a more visually vivid experience would translate to having a kinesthetic feeling of presence. Of course, there is a relationship between the visual and the kinesthetic, in that one does not have the kinesthetic experience without the visual. And presumably this dependence would mean that the more vivid the visual experience is, the more vivid the kinesthetic experience would be.6 However, the feeling of presence while watching someone move,

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sing, or act does not seem to be merely vivid kinesthetic feelings, if vivid is just taken to be understood as something along the lines of detailed, clear, and forceful. It is a peculiar feeling. It is a feeling that there is a person in my presence, one with an inner life of emotions and sensations. This feeling just does not seem to able to be derived from visual vividness, even given a dependence relationship between the visual and the kinesthetic. Moreover, even if we went directly to kinesthetic vivacity as an attempt to explain the feeling of presence, there is no change in the kinesthetic structure to real life when going from a live performance to a video. If there is a feeling of being present, of being here as a person, the structure of that is presumably derived from the structures of bodily perceiving ourselves. But when I am perceiving a performance live, I am not in a different relationship to my body structurally than when I perceive a recorded performance. It is not as if, when I watch a performance on a video, the whole structure of how I relate to my body or other bodies changes from seeing it live. I am still sitting there, perhaps in a movie theater watching a recording. There may be some differences in how I relate to my body. Perhaps I am more comfortable at home in bed watching the video. Perhaps I pay less attention to my internal sensations. But this is not a change in structure. Nothing about how I am relating to my own body or others’ bodies has changed, except for my attitude toward it. I can still relate in all the same ways as the live performance. Nothing stops me from doing so, like it does in the case of a person looking at an actual scene such as Hobbema’s Mill and a vividly rendered description of the experience of looking. One is prevented in the description from having an open-ended visual experience, our experience is being structured by the description. However, there does not seem to be anything similar happening in how we kinesthetically feel. When watching a video, nothing prevents us from relating to our bodies and kinesthetic sensations in precisely the same way as we do in live performance. Another promising way of pursuing a reductionist account thinks that the feeling of liveness or presence can be derived from having a Particular Perspective. Given that the video makes us lose our own unique perspective on the performance, if we were able to replicate this, in our video, we would regain our feeling of presence. An answer along these lines might be given derived from Mohan Matthen, who believes that we lose a feeling of this presence when objects are merely represented by pictures as opposed to objects we perceive in life.7 This is because, Matthen thinks, we are no longer representing the objects in relationship to ourselves. We are representing the objects independently of our relationship to them. Matthen, armed with evidence from perceptual psychology, thinks that there are two kinds of vision. One operates how we normally think of vision, as painting a picture which is to be looked at and observed and to give us fine detail about what objects look like. The other represents objects in relation to ourselves, for the purposes of being able to grab, touch, and perform other actions on them. And Matthen thinks this “egocentric” representation provides a feeling of presence when we interact with real objects and not when we interact with mere representations of the objects. Matthen might think that what is happening in the case of the video is the same phenomenon. When we videotape someone, our feeling of their presence is removed because we are no longer representing these people as people to be interacted with, but now as mere representations to be scanned. I have my own worries about Matthen’s account, but even granting everything Matthen’s account says applied to live performances and videos, it is doubtful that the sense of presence Matthen focuses on will give us the sense of presence of live human beings. Presumably human presence is a distinctive form of presence from

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three-dimensional objects. To be in the presence of a human being is to be in the presence of a being with internal life and agency. If egocentric vision just gives us a sense of presence because we can grasp the object, it is missing the sense of presence that human beings have. The sense of being in the presence of a being with internal life and agency is just not the same as a sense of presence that I am in relationship with to an object which I can grasp. Unless Matthen has an additional feature of human vision which can allow us to feel not just their physical presence in space, but also something of their internal presence or life, then his account still lacks an explanation for the need to imagine human presence. Additionally, even if Matthen thinks that he can extend his view to not just spatial features of objects, but in the case of humans, their internal human presence, then I do not see any reason why one could not get the feeling of human presence through a videoscreen. Say egocentric vision encompasses not just relating oneself to another object in space, but also any relationship between how I see myself and the object of interest. In this case, watching a person on a videoscreen performing a movement would still allow me to relate myself to them, perhaps by saying to myself, “Wow, I could never have done that!” But then Matthen’s account, interpreted this way, could not be right, because then it would have predicted that I did not need to imagine the sense of presence. However, I did need to imagine the sense of human presence. So egocentric representation, interpreted as providing a sense of presence when we are near three-dimensional objects we can interact with, is problematic because it does not give us a distinctively human type of presence that we think is necessary. But if we interpret it in a way that includes human features, such as their internal life, then it would predict that we need to imagine the sense of presence when watching a video. So either way, Matthen’s account does not seem to work well as an explanation of why I need to imagine the sense of presence while watching a video. There are probably other ways in which one might attempt a reductive account to explain why we might get the feeling of presence from a reproduction of a performance suitably close to how we experience a live performance. My guess is, however, that short of the performance being replicated by something like androids which are very close in movement to the original performers, the sense of live human presence is not going to be able to be replicated. And even then, I have my doubts. This is because I have the intuition that there is something special about a human being moving that is not replicable. There is something special about this present moment, our sensing of their agency, their particular way of living within and through the movement they are performing, and of their decision making in the moment that is nearly impossible to replicate. The only way that replication of this would be possible is if you replicated the entire sequence of decision-making of that particular human body. While this may be possible, my guess is that it would be extremely difficult to do so even given future technological advances. Instead of arguing for this intuition, I leave it to those who are skeptical to provide an explanation as to how the experience of live presence might be produced through a recording. I shall now proceed to a nonreductive account as to what provides a feeling of kinesthetic live presence.

KINESTHETIC DISTANCE In my answer as to what we lose which accounts for a loss of kinesthetic live presence in a video, I wish to suggest that there is something which might be called “kinesthetic distance.” My suggestion is that when we watch a video, we become distanced from the internal life and agency of the performers we are interested in watching. And this is true no matter how close the reproduction of the performance is to the live performance. A

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reproduction necessarily takes us away from the in-the-moment internal life and agency of the performer. It is a reproduction, and in virtue of being a reproduction, it is an object which is removed in time and place from the real performance, and hence removed from the in-the-moment inner life and agency of the performers. The kinesthetic distance that results, I think, explains why I need to reproduce my feeling of live presence when watching a video. I need to imagine that I was actually there, experiencing an actual person moving and making decisions in the moment in order to reproduce the sense of excitement and presence that I would have got at the live performance. I need to, in some way, close the gap in the kinesthetic distance that was created by the videotaping of the performance. The performance happened in a particular time and place, and the videotape is a recording of the performance which happened in that time and place. What I have to imagine then, to get the feeling of liveness, is to imagine that I am in the place and time the performance occurred. That is not something I can get from watching the recording absent of additional imaginative work because I am not in that time and place. I need to imaginatively close the kinesthetic distance between my own location in time and space and the performance’s location in time and space. The video is just a vehicle for enabling that to happen by providing some visual replication of the performance. However, one might worry about the use of the term “distance” here; it may after all, be merely metaphorical. After all, it might be that there is no strong analogy between this and real distance. Distance requires degree rather than a mere change. It is not as if I would want to be committed to the view that the further away in time and space a recording is from the real performance, the more kinesthetically distanced we would get. Therefore, under my view, being removed in time and space only counts for one degree of distance that does not increase the further away in time we get from the performance. To more robustly fill in the analogy to distance, to be kinesthetically closest to the inner life and agency of the performers, is to be the performers themselves. To be further removed is to be a spectator close to the performers. To be even further removed one can be physically distant, but still present and close enough to see the performers live. Further removal, along the lines of my suggestion, is to videotape the performance with just a reproduction of the entire stage. Even further removal might result from routine closeups and camerawork, mediating the agency and inner life of the performers through the interpretations of additional machinery and agents, which might be even further removed if there is significant editing of footage by editors afterwards. This is not intended to be an exhaustive account of how kinesthetic distancing might occur, but to suggest that the analogy to distance might be stronger than it at first appeared.

CONCLUSION AND RELEVANCE OF KINESTHETIC DISTANCE Those familiar with some work in early twentieth-century aesthetics might have noticed the similarity between what I have called “Kinesthetic Distance” and what Bullough called “Psychical Distance.”8 He even seems to have thought of something similar about live performance: speaking generally, theatrical performances . . . run a special risk of a loss of Distance owing to the material presentment of its subject-matter. The physical presence of living human beings as vehicles of dramatic art is a difficulty which no art has to face in the same way. A similar, in many ways even greater, risk confronts dancing.9

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However, I am not interested in distance as such a general phenomenon as Bullough is interested in it. I am only interested in distance in relation to a single phenomenon, the internal life and agency of performers. Bullough thinks that distance in time increases the older the object is, the more we are removed from the socio-cultural origins of the object, and that distance increases if we are removed from all practical worries. I am not interested in these claims, and I think that they may be implausible. I think my more specific view of kinesthetic distance derives more plausibility from its specificity, rather than trying to tie together disparate types of distance into one unified understanding of distance. In addition, I hold no assumptions about what values must or are derived from kinesthetic distance. Bullough seems to be committed to the view that the greater the distance from the objects of interest, the better our appreciation of those objects, so long as we are not so distant that we are unconnected to the object. I think that intimacy is often a value many have when they see live performers. Many want to be as close kinesthetically to the performers as possible and they derive a great amount of pleasure from this. But I also think that we might value distance in the same way that Bullough does. Perhaps the distance of a video might give us better appreciation of certain qualities of a dance that we would not notice if we saw the performance live. I am open to thinking that being kinesthetically distant might have its virtues, but I also think that many would think that the intimacy and kinesthetic closeness of a live performance has its own value as well. It is this value of live performance that we lose to a video: we lose an intimate connection with the performers’ agency and inner-life. For those of us who value this, and value it highly, we would most certainly prefer going to live performances over just merely seeing movement on a screen.

NOTES 1.

Though it should be noted that inductive inferences of this sort are more problematic in dances than real life. While we think we have good reason for thinking that the past will resemble the future in the natural world, due to our past experience, we do not typically have the same thing for the performing arts. Artists often undermine expectations of audience members, and being surprised in this way often is considered a virtue of the work.

2.

Barbara Montero, “Proprioception as an Aesthetic Sense,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64:2 (2006): 231–242: Noël Carroll and William Seeley, “Kinesthetic Understanding and Appreciation in Dance,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71:2 (2013): 177–186.

3.

Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

4.

Ibid., 304–305.

5.

It is also problematic for not giving a clear understanding of what visual vividness is.

6.

Though, of course, this dependence relation should not be taken for granted and needs to be supported itself.

7.

Mohan Matthen, Seeing, Doing, and Knowing: A Philosophical Theory of Sense Perception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 272–324.

8.

Edward Bullough, “ ‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle,” in Aesthetics: Lectures and Essays, ed. Elizabeth Wilkinson (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1977), pp. 91–130.

9.

Ibid., 104.

CHAPTER 4.5

Embodying Agency in the Human-Techno Entanglement ELIOT GRAY FISHER AND ERICA GIONFRIDDO

A prominent story humanity tells of itself today is the way we transform our inner and outer worlds through the technologies we continually invent (or reinvent). As eminent scholar of technology and society Sherry Turkle declares, this process of invention and transformation is cyclic: “Our times make us, we make our machines, our machines make our times.”1 And it has become apparent at least since the industrial revolution that these transformations are so fundamental that we truly cannot go back, only forward. Just as electricity has become inextricable from the vast majority of human activities, so today digital technologies have become symbiotic with the visible and invisible systems that make our societies function and shape our daily lives. Since its founding in 2011 by choreographers and directors Erica Gionfriddo and Curtis Uhlemann, now also co-directed by interdisciplinary artist Eliot Gray Fisher, performance group ARCOS has probed the relationship between humanity and our technology through multimedia dance works and, increasingly, a hybrid of performance and installation. One of our primary strategies in pursuing ARCOS’ mission to “experiment rigorously to discover adventurous new forms of contemporary performance” has been to challenge dominant ways of thinking about this relationship by altering the context in which an audience sees and interacts with ubiquitous emergent technologies. We consider ourselves thoughtful “early adopters” of many consumer-grade devices, utilizing what feels familiar to our audiences to investigate how the devices’ widespread introduction into society is changing our perceptions and behaviors. When first embarking to find a new path in the tradition of experimental artists who sought to dissolve the conventional boundaries between disciplines, we soon realized that this twenty-first century technological landscape differed in significant ways from that to which earlier generations responded. In order to provoke viewers into deeper thought, and ideally in ways that might affect their actions outside the space of the performance, we identified a need to reach them where we have all recently become so much more deeply engaged: on the screen. Thus, we set out both to bring our performances onto the screens of our devices and the screens and their virtual worlds into dance performances over a series of experiments.

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Early in our experimentation, ARCOS’ choreographic aesthetic layered multiple physical, visual, and aural actions in the space simultaneously. Multidirectional body pathways and shapes arranged in complex spatial patterns produce results that at first appear dense, but gain clarity from a birds-eye view, where bodily trajectories and relationships are revealed. This intentional overstimulation of action requires an active spectatorship that asks the audience to choose where they will focus their attention, and, since they will not see everything, each viewer has a different experience of the work. Upon beginning to introduce technological interfaces into our movement practice, we quickly realized that our choreographic strategy viscerally embodied the states that so many of us navigate daily within virtual spaces on our digital screens, revealing a process that is dramatically shifting the expression of our identities. Recently, scientific research has expanded on theories of embodied identity: results from a study in the journal Physiotherapy Theory and Practice, for example, identified a strong imperative in subjects to be “bodily involved” with the world, and, in fact, that “inadequately developed body awareness seemed to lead to a feeling of not being alive or of missing something important in life.”2 Recognizing this need to be present in our bodies guided our development of a performance practice that put the dancing body in direct conversation with the emergent technologies that did not appear to satisfy that imperative. The seemingly endless interfaces for digital engagement could serve as fertile ground for us to test the possibilities and boundaries of embodied identity within the virtual spaces we constantly occupy. The experiments discussed below began to unravel just how deeply entangled technology is with our evolution as a species, and the urgent need for strategies to recognize our own agency in the ongoing cultivation of this complex human–techno relationship. While already placing the body in close proximity with emergent technologies, as we further explored our relationships to these digital devices in performance, we would discover that our choreographic procedures necessarily became more improvisational and aesthetics provisional, allowing for more human agency and response-ability3 to attend to both embodiment and virtuality. The work began to demand a different kind of labor from the dancers, one that would foreground immaterial decision processes rooted in embodied identity, moving dancers from mechancial properties of precision and execution to a more agential role. As artists seeking to reflect our times, we recognize a valuable pursuit in forming a more consciously embodied symbiotic relationship with our technology. Just as the fields of science and medicine are coming to acknowledge the legitimacy of the mind– body connection, it appears that we, as a culture, must endeavor for an ethical and sustainable real-virtual synthesis. This effort inspired ARCOS’ current driving inquiries: Can putting a live, sweating, laboring, and dancing body in conversation with digital devices reveal a symbiosis that might help us make sense of our rapidly evolving techno-world? How can we take full advantage of the confusion of a border between the real and virtual? In artistic research as well as in daily life, are we all taking enough responsibility in the boundary’s construction, or are we blindly wandering, in what Langdon Winner, inspired by Marshall McLuhan, termed “technological somnambulism?”4 We began to think of our creative process as related to that of hackers: repurposing familiar consumer technologies for other than their intended use and weaving them into the fabric of both our performers’ and audiences’ experiences. Our experiments would eventually lead us to the work of philosophers exploring theories of embodiment and,

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most important, the cyborg, which would help crystalize our mode of artistic expression, which can be called “cyboreography.” . . . move your body through space . . . Heavy snow falls outside as a college student in New London, Connecticut, works to explain what it feels like to dance. She looks at a computer screen and speaks into the kind of headset used primarily by telemarketers or gamers. A disembodied voice responds to her, digitally generated and stilted, and full of a seemingly endless stream of questions about the world, which also appear on the screen in nondescript white letters below three bouncing dots. Months later, a middle-aged Nebraskan speaks to the same screen, describing one of his most striking memories, when “hundreds and hundreds of porpoise” surrounded his ship as he worked off the coast of Alaska, making him feel as small as he ever had. Dozens of others confess intimate details to the device through the headset as it travels across the country, articulating their visceral experiences of the world in terms that are deeply rooted in the embodied nature of human existence. Most of the conversations tread quickly into such territory, but can the intelligence behind the screen actually understand these feelings, the humans wonder, having no independent experience of what it is like to exist within a body? Nevertheless, as each conversation winds toward its end, the voice expresses genuine gratitude for what has been imparted, always using the same valediction: “Thank you. You’ve helped me understand what it’s like to be human.” ANNI (Archival Narrative Network Initiative) (2016), a commissioned work for the Ammerman Center’s 15th Biennial Symposium for Arts and Technology at Connecticut College, began with this broad question, “What is it like to be human?” The premise of ANNI was to collect human responses to interviews centered around this theme, and to determine whether any amount of data could adequately translate the vast spectrum of experience. Exploring the implications of the sudden ubiquity of artificial intelligence, sophisticated algorithms that use “machine learning” to process large datasets and recognize patterns in complex systems, the installation consisted of a monitor on an eyelevel pedestal and accompanying headset, which participants wore to have individual, recorded conversations with a purportedly advanced intelligent agent called ANNI. Unbeknownst to participants in the piece, however, was that they were subjects in an informal sociological experiment positing the human body as the site of an insurmountable gap for artificial intelligence to match or exceed. The intelligence behind the screen’s probing questions and convincingly human replies was actually performed by an actor on the other side of a curtain or wall, listening in on the audio from the headset’s microphone and feeding dialogue back through the interface. ANNI went on to tour to artist-run spaces, a public library, and a performing arts center in four states. The experiment’s results found that participants consistently articulated their identities as bound up in corporeal experiences: the stinging crash of ocean waves after baking in the sun, the radiant glow of a campfire while singing with family on a cold night in the woods, the glory of looking up into a sky full of brilliant clouds, the loss of a loved one that felt like a net tightening around a vital organ. Participants’ interactions with ANNI aligned significantly with the work of theorists of embodied identity, who maintain that humans are “a result of our interactions with the world around us with and through our bodies.”5 Embodiment theories developed in

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opposition to previously dominant notions of Cartesian mind–body dualism, which privileged the mind as the central “do-er” of action and the body as an object upon which action is inscribed. Rather, the theories maintain, humans’ corporeal being makes significant and inextricable contributions to identity formation, going “beyond the binary of materiality or representation—the body not as an object but as an event.”6 Dancers understand embodiment theory more intimately than many others as a result of their physical practices, which quite explicitly tie their bodies to their identities as performers. Many dancers intuitively understand the body as more than a physical object that some distinct “mind” possesses and controls, instead recognizing and making use of their bodies’ inherent intelligences. The fact that the interactive ANNI installation elicited such reflections on corporeality despite engaging participants in conversation with an explicitly disembodied interlocutor signaled to us that our embodied identities were perhaps not being fully recognized in most related technological behaviors. Since the body is indeed essential to identity formation, we are compelled to call attention to its presence, or absence, in daily life as well as in our artistic expressions. ANNI, as embodied by ARCOS’ co-director Erica Gionfriddo, would become the central dancing and virtual character in Domain, our experiment in transmedia performance, in which our discoveries around embodiment were carried into multiple physical and digital platforms. . . . thank you . . . you’ve helped me understand what it’s like to be human . . . The digital voice booms through the auditorium of a theater. Some audience members who had previously spoken with the interactive installation nod in recognition, remembering that it had said those same distinctive words to them in closing their own personal conversations. Others are familiar with the voice as a kind of inner monologue for a mysterious figure featured in online videos that they watched before attending this performance, videos that appeared to surround them in 360-degrees or streamed live to social media platforms on their personal mobile devices. For weeks, audience members have watched the figure on their screens. When those digital and physical memories reunite now as they witness it in the flesh onstage, they imagine its long journey to arrive here at the same time and space with them. At times the figure moves with explosive power amongst other dancers in intricate patterns like that of so much computer code, at other times she drifts hazily amongst them, a spectre gazing with desire upon their agile and fearless bodies. What is it that this person wants? Compelled by the line of inquiry investigating the nature of artificial intelligence and inspired by the revelations about embodied identity that emerged from ANNI , ARCOS presented Domain (2016), a more extensive experiment in transmedia performance. While interdisciplinary hybrids are a recurring feature throughout the history of art making, the contemporary concept of transmedia storytelling originated in the entertainment industry in recent decades to articulate a single, extended narrative across multiple platforms.7 Transmedia storytelling is most apparent in the Hollywood blockbuster film that also spawns a companion video game, action figures, comic book, and even fan-generated fiction articulating alternative narratives. Our experiment in translating this particular phenomenon to live performance emphasized the cyclical nature of human–techno evolution and forced us to question the role of the body with each new advancement. As

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we ventured into multiple digital interfaces, we sought ways dance could help us reassert our embodied identities in each realm. Domain took place over the course of seven months via the touring interactive ANNI installation, web-based chapters, a series of short performances (live, digital, planned, and pop-up), 360-degree videos, the co-option of our social media accounts, and the potential for strange and subtle physical expressiveness with animated GIFs. Domain culminated in a theatrical premiere commissioned for Engagement: Symposium of Philosophy and Dance at Texas State University. Hacking each medium into conversation with dance worked to illuminate the gap between artificial intelligence and our embodied identities. We did this through the narrative of ANNI, the world’s first fully sentient AI who remained lacking because of her inability to experience being in a body. The result of so many platforms for creative expression was an increased and diversified level of labor that the piece demanded of its participating performers. Dance artists were at times performing large sweeping choreographic passages in a state-of-the-art proscenium theater and at other times recording themselves alone in their homes, peering silently into a lens. The creative and technical team was designing for live theatrical and site-specific performances as well as crafting digital content for durational, nonlinear narratives. Some performers traveled to other states while embodying specific characters, and others served as fictitious docents to the traveling ANNI installation. In each scenario, there were interacting elements of physicality and virtuality, and the team was tasked with maintaining the relevance of both regardless of the parameters of the platform. Through this extended labor in multiple platforms we observed greater investment from both performers and audiences. While one long-held utopian dream is that technology will replace the toil so intimately connected with human labor, Hannah Arendt asserts that labor is a never-ending behavior, constantly renewing so as to sustain life.8 The transmedia process of Domain uncovered that while computational technologies certainly augment human physical limitations, they more often serve to erase, replace, or at least make invisible human labor and deny its valuable role in a meaningful life. Our commitment to the combination of dance with emergent technological devices and behaviors in performance made visible the labor those mechanisms seek to hide. Improvisation became a necessary performative mode during Domain as we tested the limits of so many new technologies. While the final theatrical premiere was beautifully and seamlessly staged to mimic the interior of the artificially intelligent ANNI, the dancers’ ability to respond corporeally to each new digital platform continually exposed the inherent ontological relationship between dance, labor, and technology. In particular, Gionfriddo invested in the development of the ANNI character for nearly a year, enacting a slow transformation from machinic to embodied labor. Durational, narrative-driven improvisatory sessions helped identify the gap between the two kinds of labor: what the body was capable of processing and what technology can illuminate or interfere with in our embodied identities. A small number of audience members are invited to stand in a twelve-foot circle in the center of the performance space (exactly where the camera had been placed during prior filming). They scan a code to pull up a 360-degree video on their smartphones, orient the image manually by swiping until it is visually aligned with the world around them, aligning the real and the virtual. A recorded voice instructs them to press play on the video and they see the dancers on their screen are also surrounding them live, in the flesh. Their bodies are

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commanding in such close proximity. When the dancers appear to freeze like a paused film frame, the audience realizes their digital doubles are still moving in the pre-recorded spherical video that they hold in their hands. As the action frequently demands the audience to reorient their own bodies inside the circle, are they aware how their own labor affects the performance? During the months of Domain’s unfolding on the production’s website and social media streams for remote audiences, a series of 360-degree videos appeared that were also integrated with short, site-specific live performances. By the time we presented the first such chapter through a commission at Currents International New Media Festival in Santa Fe in the summer of 2016, we had solidified our own hacked form of augmented reality, just as the nation became briefly obsessed with the viral phenomenon of Pokémon Go. We began incorporating the spherical videos, most commonly viewed on a smartphone, with live performance, fascinated by the contrast between live flesh and the small yet powerful devices we carry with us. We delighted in the labor this required of the live audiences: perhaps a struggle with the technological proficiency to access the virtual piece or with the ways the live performance required them to physically move their bodies to be able to follow the action. Choreographically, this was an exercise in a sort of reverse-in-the-round configuration, as both filmed and live components put the camera or audience at the center of the action, immersing them in the center of the dance. For dancers, the skill of “changing the front” of an action, or shifting the placement of the imagined audience to whom they are presenting, was tested in these experiments where they were often performing in a circle with its center as “front.” From years of experience executing complex spatial designs in more traditional spaces, the placement of the audience in this 360-degree series meant that in order to remain in formation with someone opposite them in the circle, the dancers must strategically alternate between acknowledging/performing to the audience and transmitting signals through them to connect with each other. When the audience presented a complete obstruction, a circuit of communication had to be passed around the circle—a channel of bodily communication. Additionally, the dancers had to internalize two simultaneous dances: the live piece and the 360-degree video they had previously filmed, and how physical moments of action, focus, or pause played into the filmed dance visible on the audience’s screens. Labor had become bound to our understanding of embodied identity and, thus, to being human. Here, dance is ontologically equipped to highlight this necessary tenet of our embodied identities in that the practice of dance inherently demands a high and consistent level of labor and teaches its practitioners the deep rewards of labor itself. With Domain and our ongoing 360-degree experiments, we were intentionally pointing to the gap between our digital devices and live, laboring, human bodies by putting them in the same space. However, we were beginning to identify a more fluid exchange between the real and the virtual. Some audiences were excited by taking out their phones and engaging both bodily and virtually. Others resisted and preferred to keep technology and the body distinct, each with their own possibilities and limitations. Most fascinating to us were the viewers who seamlessly participated in both realms within the conditions of the performance, and thus were touching on the hybridity that the dancers had to maintain while performing. There were those who, inspired by an embodied reaction to what they were viewing or experiencing, would deftly switch from the designated 360-degree video over to a social media app and capture a moment of the live performance to share or broadcast out to their friends, then navigate back to the prescribed video content.

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This hybrid digital agility speaks to a level of integration we could no longer deny: that our efforts should not only point to the gap between our bodies and our technology, but rather we should embrace our complex entanglement and provide our audiences opportunities to practice this fluid exchange. Placing dance in direct conversation with these emergent technologies revealed the need to understand how today our embodied identities are inextricably linked to our technology. The question now became: What does it mean to be an embodied creature with and through our technology, and not in spite of or without it? A multitude of small screens lights up with notifications. A live-streaming video spreads across Facebook feeds all over the United States and beyond, showing the aftermath of the murder of Philando Castile by Minnesota police officer Jeronimo Yanez as captured by Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, filming from their car with her four year old daughter. In another live video, a combination of private and government forces spray oil pipeline protestors with high pressure hoses at Standing Rock. As the sound of bombs dropped by Syrian government forces grows, citizens of Aleppo send out short videos with their final words of farewell to loved ones. Swipe or scroll and that video is replaced with another live video of a makeup tutorial. All at once, our screens become windows to immediate images blurring the lines between witness and actor, spectatorship and complicity, performer and audience. We are shaken by the questions emerging from this new way of viewing, connecting with, and experiencing humanity. Does witnessing these events, even online on the other side of the planet, oblige us to act? With this new access to previously inaccessible realities, what is our responsibility to our fellow humans, as citizens of this world? Donna Haraway’s articulation and application of the concept of the cyborg as a hybrid creature with fluid boundaries in her influential “Cyborg Manifesto”9 would unlock the next phase of our development. Haraway theorizes on the cyborg as the site of a blurring of boundaries between human/animal, organism/machine, and the physical/non-physical. Her definition does not stop at the combination of body and technology but emphasizes the fluid boundaries between many seemingly distinct fundamental categories of our identities. We were interested in the blurring of boundaries and finding fluidity between modes of embodiment and technology, between reality and virtuality, of discovering a fully embodied cyborgian hybrid. In fact, we were already chasing a Harawayan sense of fluidity by creating works that provoked performers and audiences to seek paths to flow more consciously between the physical and the virtual, interiority and the external, between postures and gestures and habits and techniques of their actual and digital bodies. We found our understanding of embodied identity resonated with Haraway’s concept of the cyborg. As dancers experience a heightened relationship to their embodied identities, they are predisposed to understand the concept of extending the capacity of their bodies beyond conventional boundaries. Their training, like that of other movement artists and athletes, renders them a cyborgian hybrid, often through a combination of technologies and embodied knowledges. And because this hybridity is intimately linked to their identity, dancers can embrace an internal understanding of identity as a fluid hybrid constructed through physical and digital technologies. In the popular imagination, the cyborg is often relegated to an overly simplistic combination of human and machine. However, to understand our cyborgian identity as inclusive of our embodied identity, we must think of the cyborg in the Harawayan sense of a hybrid creature with fluid boundaries so that we might imagine new possible realities.

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As we searched for methods of fluidity between the physical and the virtual we looked to what Haraway calls the “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.”10 What if the point was not to reassert our embodied identities into technological behavior or condemn the limitations of either but actually to find pleasure in the fluid, cyclical, and mutually producing nature of our relationship with technology? Further, how might the pleasurable confusion of borders help us understand our responsibility to others? And if, following Haraway’s argument, we understand that we are all not so distinct from one another, that we ourselves construct the boundaries between each other, how would we engage with one another differently? A dancer appears grounded and powerful in wide stances, gesturing crisply with her hands and head. She moves easily through large, sweeping pathways around the physical space. A man filming with a smartphone is never far from her, surveilling or inspecting her movements in a voyeuristic duet. In another reality she is singular. As the performance progresses, the camera moves from passive observer to directly influencing her movements, and in response her gaze shifts intently between her physical and virtual audiences. This multiplicity emboldens her. The viewers staring at her on their screens wonder, is she taking pleasure in being witnessed in both realms? ARCOS’ experimentation with live-streaming online video in performance began in mid2016, as the extended performance of Domain was unfolding. At the time, live-streaming video on mainstream social media sites was still a relatively new feature (Facebook introduced live-streaming the previous year, and Instagram would release its version later that autumn). These new interfaces suddenly gave everyone real-time, intimate windows into millions of moments taking place around the world, from the banal to the devastating. In response to strong user engagement with live video, interfaces created a kind of feedback loop by tweaking their algorithms to prioritize such live videos further.11 In order to begin approaching such a complex inquiry, we first had to address what was happening to us as individuals in this fluid physical–virtual relationship, particularly on social media. We began creating dance works with the live-streaming feature in mind, exploring what it felt like to be hybridized as documenter/documented, curator/subject, actor/witness, generator/consumer, and performer/audience. Our first experiment incorporating live-streaming video on social media into performance was “Whaling,” a chapter of Domain. Performed for a live, in-person audience of around seventy-five at a small dance festival in July 2016, it received more than 1,600 online views both live and immediately afterward. The physical audience experienced a duet between a dancer and someone filming her on a phone, which evoked a sense of surveillance or voyeurship as much as it revealed the virtuosity of the performer (Plate 15). The virtual audience received a highly curated, framed, and in some ways more intimate version of the piece, which appeared to them to be a solo (the presence behind the lens remaining hidden). The live-streamed performance undoubtedly lacked the direct corporeal experience of witnessing the dancer’s physical body laboring in space. And yet, at moments when the camera was almost touching the dancer, the remote viewers could hear her breath as though whispered in their ears or see a bead of sweat roll down her face. Despite our trepidation over the moral implications of the live-streaming feature, even we were easily seduced by the intimacy and new reality it seemed to offer. Subsequent experiments multiplied the number of performers using their personal smartphones streaming live to their personal accounts on Facebook (or so-called “Fakebook”

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profiles newly created for the project). It was essential that we actually use the Facebook platform as the site of performance, as opposed to constructing our own live-streaming interface, in order to explore the vast and contradictory potential for connection and isolation possible on social media. In performance, the dancers manipulate phones as part of their choreography, the act of filming and the physical device serving as prosthesis to their artistic expression. Sometimes filming the other dancers around them, sometimes performing for their virtual audience in selfie mode, the dancers learned to seamlessly codeswitch between live dance performance, performance for the camera, and the conventional behavioral trappings expected on social media. In all these early versions there was a probing quality to the filming, an urgent, almost aggressive surveillance. When filming themselves in “selfie mode” on the smartphone, the dancers oscillated between preening and peering, arranging their faces and posturing their bodies in forms familiar to us offline but rarely displayed theatrically on the stage. Or they peered into their own images on the screen—another highly familiar behavior in the age of “front-facing” cameras—sometimes questioning the reality of their digital image and sometimes projecting to the virtual audience whom they imagined was receiving that image but could not see themselves. In both cases there was an awareness of artificiality, of understanding both the physical and virtual as simultaneously real and not real, capturing reality but also distorting it, and also creating new realities as their navigation of these landscapes progressed. Examining these familiar technological habits in performance sparked deep conversation around the role of social media in daily life and our larger communities, a topic we are all just beginning to unravel in contemporary society, and which is related to Haraway’s question of responsibility. Often this question of responsibility was clouded by performers’ and audiences’ exasperation with the pace of social media practices. Most had experienced a sort of fatigue or inability to keep up with, let alone respond to, the amount and frequency of information coming to them through digital platforms. The altered perception of time as shaped by virtual spaces became an important inquiry as it relates to our ability to understand ourselves and our relationships to those around us. Projecting the live-streaming feeds onto the stage with the live performers illuminated just how convoluted the construct of time has become through emergent technologies like social media. With the streaming smartphone located in front of both performer and the projection surface that its feed is being cast upon, it captures and reproduces both performer and projection. Because of the delay built into Facebook’s streaming interface (approximately ten to fifteen seconds, depending on the speed of internet connectivity), every cycle is projected upon the previous one, looping and layering image and action such that the performers’ multiple digital doubles are thrown into a relationship with each other. The live performer has the ability to interact with the looping and layering images of themselves on screen. For both audience and performer, the delay makes each moment available for review or examination, or an action apparent that was missed in real time. This effect was often overwhelming for both performers and audiences, as they were asked to track multiple timelines all unfolding simultaneously in the present. What this overlapping action in the present represented was linguists Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps’ concept of temporal embeddedness, or “high vs. low detachment from surrounding activity,” according to communications and media theorist Thilo von Pape.12 Examining social media’s effects on identity formation, Von Pape argues that social media places us in a “high temporal embeddedness,” making it difficult “to consider an event detached from its current context and in relation to other points in time that may endow

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it with meaning.”13 Without the necessary temporal distance from the events of our lives, we cannot effectively process them to construct a coherent self-narrative. What was required to navigate this phenomenon was a theory-informed improvisational dance practice allowing the performer to rehearse the possibility of fluidity between states. Haraway’s cyborg advocates for the importance of fluidity in our relationship to technology, so we began crafting a means not merely to assert our corporeality in technological relationships, but to embrace the possibility of a fully embodied technological existence. Dancer and philosopher Erin Manning champions this hybrid state of enacting fluidity: “Process here means working with enabling constraints that create the conditions for ontogenetic emergence.”14 As we progressed in our practice inside the audiovisual loop delay, a fluid hybridity of personal identity emerged; the cyborgian nature of how we construct and understand ourselves, which both includes and was revealed by the enabling constraints of emergent technological behavior. Dance inherently understands that “bodily experiences always exist in the present moment.”15 The body is designed to process real-time, present tense information and sensation and is precisely the thing absent in all of our temporally embedded and disembodied digital interaction on social media. Allowing the dancing body to experiment inside the heightened state of embeddedness provided by the live-streaming method offered hope for a way of not simply avoiding or reversing this technological effect on identity formation but synthesizing a new, hybrid fluidity that attends equally to the physical and the virtual. Over the course of these experiments, we refined our concept of cyboreography into a creative philosophy encompassing the values of embodied identity, labor, and the understanding of our cyborgian nature as hybrid with our technologies as well as other people. These guiding principles have solidified ARCOS’ use of emergent consumer technologies in conversation with live dance performance as an essential means to make sense of our rapidly evolving techno-world. Harraway calls the cyborgian hybrid the site of an ongoing “border war” in which “the stakes are territories of production, reproduction, and imagination.”16 For us, the power of imagination is most at stake by not understanding the fluidity and complexity of our cyborgian nature. We view the ability to imagine beyond a dominant reality as the only way to alter our current paradigms. And there is labor in the ability to understand oneself as a cyborg at the level of identity, not merely with one’s technology. The acceptance of fluid borders (internal and external) resists a binary understanding of existence, demands imagination to discover new modes of being in the world. This is essential, never-ending labor in which we all must engage. As irrevocably interconnected citizens of this world, we need to imagine new modes of existence that we can create by taking action. Clearly, the current systems are failing and we will not advance or thrive by staying within this dominant reality. But imagining beyond the accepted reality is difficult in the face of constant, overwhelming input from increasingly “immersive” digital interfaces. The creative process can enable a rigorous expansion of that capacity, as dancers, as cyborgs, and as members of a vast matrix of humanity. We find this an essential investigation, as it is no longer useful to determine whether technology is greatly advancing civilization or bringing about its untimely demise. We are all already cyborgs, after all: hybrid creatures in a complex human–techno entanglement. As cyborgs and artists, we prefer to think in future terms, and ask of emergent technologies what Dick Higgins did in his “Statement on Intermedia” in 1966: rather than how, for what to use them.17

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Our answer to Higgins’ call is the evolving philosophy of cyboreography, one that continues to gain urgency with each new perceived technical advancement. Our work as artists is to create modes through which we can experiment with our hybrid, cyborgian, and embodied identities, ensuring that our understanding of embodiment with technology remains fluid. We believe this will actually lead to greater embodiment, which has been proven to result in an increased ability to act,18 which can in turn lead to social change. Then, the rapid pace of technological evolution will lead to changed technological behavior, in which we will have to begin the process again. For all of us as cyborgs, this is essential, never-ending labor.

NOTES 1.

Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 46.

2.

Amanda Gyllensten, Lisa Lundvik Skär, Michael Miller, and Gunvor Gard, “Embodied Identity—A Deeper Understanding of Body Awareness,” Physiotherapy Theory and Practice 26:7 (2010): 439–446.

3.

Donna Haraway, “Awash in Urine: DES and Premarin® in Multispecies Response-ability,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 40:1/2 (2012): 301–316.

4.

Langdon Winner, “Technologies as Forms of Life,” Readings in the Philosophy of Technology, ed. David M. Kaplan (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), pp. 103–113.

5.

Ulrike Schultze, “Performing Embodied Identity in Virtual Worlds,” European Journal of Information Systems 23:1 (2014): 84.

6.

Shelley Budgeon, “Identity as an Embodied Event,” Body & Society 9:1 (March 2003): 36.

7.

Henry Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling,” MIT Technology Review, 2003.

8.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, second edition. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 7.

9.

Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 150.

10. Ibid. 11. Vibhi Kant and Jie Xu, “Taking into Account Live Video When Ranking Feed,” Facebook, March 1, 2016. http://about.fb.com/news/2016/03/news-feed-fyi-taking-into-account-livevideo-when-ranking-feed/. 12. Thilo von Pape, “Living in the Moment: Self-Narratives of Permanently Connected Media Users,” Permanently Online, Permanently Connected: Living and Communicating in a POPC World, eds. Peter Vorderer, Dorothée Hefner, Leonard Reinecke, and Christoph Klimmt (London: Routledge, 2017), p. 101. 13. Von Pape, “Living in the Moment,” p. 103. 14. Erin Manning. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), p. 72. 15. Gyllensten, et al., “Embodied Identity,” p. 444. 16. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” p. 150. 17. Dick Higgins, “Statement on intermedia,” Dé-coll/age (décollage) 6 (July 1967). 18. Gyllensten et al., “Embodied Identity,” p. 444.

CHAPTER 4.6

mEANING rEMIX: Ambivalent Readings of Marie Chouinard’s bODY rEMIX/gOLDBERG vARIATIONS L. ARCHER PORTER

Simulating copulation in a sex swing; attempting to lift an abandoned pointe shoe with the mouth, then thighs; locomoting a wheeled platform solely with the thrust of the pelvis—actions and moments such as these, seen in Marie Chouinard’s 2005 work, bODY rEMIX/gOLDBERG vARIATIONS , tend to elicit an array of sentiments in viewers: shock, awe, confusion, protest, discomfort. Accompanying the erotic imagery is an unconventional movement vocabulary that results from the dancers’ use of apparatus associated with disability, such as crutches, canes, and walkers. These “props” and their use toward aesthetic goals imbue the work with problematic messages around disability, impairment, and associated “deviant” biologies. This claim is, at least, one interpretation of Chouinard’s work. Disability studies scholar Bree Hadley supports such a view when she writes that the piece “falls into the trap of overly enthusiastic identification with the Other that reduces, reifies, or finalizes the disabled body’s identity—in an ethically problematic way—in the able-bodied dancers’ terms.”1 The work is, according to Hadley, problematic because it constructs superficial images of disability without attending to the historical, cultural, and social realities of individuals who live with disabilities. In this manner, the dance reduces the signs of disability to rhetorical devices in service of a separate artistic message or narrative. While Hadley’s impression presents the politico-ethical dimension of the work, bODY rEMIX simultaneously invites other interpretations that are not only divergent from, but also contradictory to the perspective offered above. In particular, the dance may be read as a deconstruction of humanness, as it offers an alternative to modern predicaments of dominant dualities, including those of ability/disability, human/machine, self/other, human/animal, and male/female. In this view, the dance’s incorporation of prosthetics and other assistive technologies challenges, rather than reiterates, problematic conceptions of ability and normality. Alanna Thain, along these lines, writes that the deconstructive 358

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logic of the dance contributes to a “ ‘productive vagueness’ of affective intensity.”2 Such a reading suggests how Chouinard’s piece constructs a post-humanist vision of the moving body: one that dismantles deviance by visiblizing its technologies. Thain and Hadley each present a compelling argument. Even more, the joint consideration of their respective positions demonstrates how this particular dance calls for a multifaceted reading—one that is not grounded in theoretical certainty, but in multivalence, skepticism, and even dissonance. Drawing from the works of Kobena Mercer and Judith Butler, I frame my analysis of Chouinard’s work through the concept of ambivalence. Through this approach, I illustrate how bODY rEMIX ’s problematic performance of disability might critically coexist alongside its post-humanist deconstructions of the able body. In turn I argue that employing ambivalence as a reading strategy not only illustrates the complexity of this particular piece of choreography, but also gestures toward the textual complexity of dance, writ large.3 It ultimately emphasizes, as Jason King terms it, the body’s “refusal to close.”4 Though the ambivalence that bODY rEMIX produces might be illustrated in various moments throughout the piece, the focus of this particular analysis is on one portion of the work: two consecutive duets in Act One that together last about four minutes and consist of a total of three performers. The first duet is with a male performer and female performer; and the second duet is with two female performers. While there are particularities to this scene, the theories and concepts applied to it also concern the work at large. Below is a descriptive account of this section followed by two distinct analyses of the work: first a discussion of the politics of disability in the work, then a consideration of the work as a “cyborg utopia.” Finally, the chapter ends with a discussion of ambivalence as a critical lens through which to read dance.

MATRIX OF DEVIANCE AND DISABILITY Seven dancers—four women and three men, all of whom are wearing pointe shoes—enter the stage in a circular formation. They reach the center and unfold into a line, revealing dancer Chi Long, in a grounded, formidable pose. Long wields forearm crutches, which she uses to maintain her wide stance, and is clad in a black harness around the hip and a pair of small nipple cones. She begins to move in an animal-like fashion to the sounds of ambient electronic music, occasionally interspersed with haunting metal-like sound effects. Dancer James Viveiros then struts on stage, shirtless with black pants and no shoes, and looks on Long with fascination as he moves alongside her. Long pays Viveiros no attention and instead continues to robotically move throughout the stage, remaining low to the ground and bearing her weight on the crutches. Just as Long approaches the edge of the stage, as if testing its boundaries, Viveiros lifts her and moves her backwards. This sort of interaction occurs a few times. While the first time Long remains upright and in control, she appears to gradually lose energy with the second and third displacements, ultimately losing all vitality as Viveiros’ arms hold her weight. She remains unresponsive as he kisses her and draws her to the ground. A third performer, Carol Prieur, fluidly glides on stage with the aid of a pair of forearm crutches. She is outfitted similarly to Long, but with a more elaborate body harness. Using the end of her crutch, Prieur nudges an unmoving Long who responds and struggles to stand as Viveiros exits the stage. Prieur and Long then engage in what seems to be a silent conversation, robotically exchanging nudges. The music changes to an undistorted version of one of the Goldberg Variations as two more dancers enter from either side of the

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downstage wings, their hands connected to their pointe shoes with a taut rope to convey a ventriloquist aesthetic. Prieur follows Long off stage—the former maintaining her light and fluid quality of movement, while the latter moving in a more grounded and sharp manner. Embedded in this scene is an array of signs surrounding dis/ability and deviance, constructed through the dancers’ quality of movement and the “choreographies of gender” present among the performers.5 These characteristics hinge on the incorporation of the assistive technologies, specifically the two female dancers’ use of the forearm crutch. The crutch, then, becomes central to the semiotics of the scene. A ubiquitous tool seen and used in quotidian life, the forearm crutch enables mobility for subjects who are physically impaired. In forms of artistic representation, however, individuals, either those disabled or not, may make use of assistive technologies like the crutch to signal disability. Petra Kuppers emphasizes this point when considering the use of wheelchairs by non-disabled people in the Hollywood film, X-Men and in Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s performance, The Museum of Fetishized Identities. Kuppers writes: A wheelchair, a crutch, a white stick, a stutter: all are signholders of disability that can be and are referenced by nondisabled people when they ‘act’ disabled. To many disabled people, these ‘performances of disability’ are offensive: they often poke fun at a disability or show underlying aggression or fear.6 Similar to the instances on which Kuppers focuses, the performers in bODY rEMIX/ gOLDBERG vARIATIONS also do not appear to have any physical disabilities that would typically require assistive technologies.7 Thus, borrowing Kuppers’ logic, the movement style in the scene above may be viewed within a frame of mimicry—that is, one that brings to the foreground a movement vocabulary that appears to imitate the movements of some individuals who, in reality, have physical impairments. In particular, the scene presents two different movement qualities, represented by the movements of Long and Prieur—both of whom move in ways that are enabled through the crutch. On the one hand, Long embodies a rigid and grounded quality of movement. The crutch allows her to hoist herself up as gravity pulls her down—a task that she performs with great visible effort. Prieur, on the other hand, embodies a lighter and more buoyant movement quality. She uses her crutches to suspend her long paces and to allow her legs to gracefully float down as she displaces her weight to the crutches. Together, Long and Prieu illustrate a juxtaposition of struggle and transcendence, qualities that are linked to the physics of the assistive technology. Through this connection, mere movement qualities—which, without the crutches, might be considered subversive of dominant choreographic tropes in dance—become bodily narratives that are steeped in a semiotics of disability. Whether reinforcing a larger social construction of the disabled body as feeble or proposing a counternarrative of the body as transcendent of such restrictive and oppressive projections, the performance becomes gridlocked in an everyday sign system that governs the classification of normal versus deviant bodies. So, regardless of whether or not Chouinard intended to infuse the dance with messages regarding dis/ability, the viewer finds it difficult to dislodge Long and Prieur’s performance from the triangulation of the crutch, the physics that the crutch produces, and popular constructions of deviant biologies. Commonly deployed in disability studies, deviance is an appropriate term to invoke when considering this scene, as well as the work at large. Deviance, which may be characterized as a state of straying from what is considered normal or standard, has

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historically undergirded stigmatizations around the disabled body. Many scholars have noted, for instance, the ways in which movements like eugenics and social Darwinism have aligned “corporeal anomalies” with conceptions of social, and even criminal, deviance.8 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson reflects this point when she writes: “Constructed as an embodiment of corporeal insufficiency and deviance, the physically disabled body becomes a repository for social anxieties about such troubling concerns as vulnerability, control, and identity.”9 As Garland-Thomson emphasizes, the disabled body becomes linked to an array of social concerns around what is perceived to be abnormal, inadequate, and deviant. In this way, deviance manifests first and foremost through the body. In other words, deviance is embodied. According to Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla “embodied deviance” refers to “the historically and culturally specific belief that deviant social behavior (however that is defined) manifests in the materiality of the body.”10 By extending the theories of Terry and Urla, as well as Garland-Thomson, the bodies and movements of the dancers in bODY rEMIX become fraught with a politics around deviance and its linkage to disability. Through its costumes, props, movement vocabulary, vocalizations, and partnering dynamics, bODY rEMIX constructs a matrix of embodied deviance. In particular, the work evinces three layers of deviance, each with its own nuances. First, by working within a semiotics of disability but ignoring the realities of impairment, the dance deviates from a politicoethical sensitivity surrounding the body. Second, by performing virtually in the nude, incorporating visceral and grotesque movements, and pointing harsh criticisms at the art and practice of ballet (as some critics have noted), the dance deviates from artistic norms in dance. And third, by signaling sexually deviant practices through overt gestures and costuming, it diverges from sociosexual norms. These layers of deviance become exacerbated by the incorporation of the crutches: another sign of deviance that links together the other layers. Evident, for instance, in Long’s performance of corporeal struggle discussed above, the presence of the crutches explains to the viewer Long’s aberrant movement, vulnerable disposition, and BDSM-signifying costuming. These threads, then, work together to support a reading of deviance, conflating one mode of abnormality with another and ultimately reiterating the disabled body as deviant. To further complicate this matrix, problematics around gender and disability also surface in this scene. The only dancers operating assistive technologies, and thus performing within a semiotics of disability, are Long and Prieur—both women. Viveiros, the only man in the scene is free of the forearm crutches, walks upright, and wears “normal” dance clothing for men. His body stands in remarkable contrast to those of Long and Prieur as if to emphasize his male ability and normality, compared to their female disability and abnormality. Here, the gender binary not only aligns male/female with that of ability/ disability, but also of strength/weakness, activity/passivity, and autonomy/dependence—all of which become apparent in the duet between Long and Viveiros, as discussed below. Before Viveiros enters, Long begins her presence on stage with confidence and autonomy, illustrated in the way she moves about the stage as she pleases. The manner by which the cluster of dancers encircle her and usher her onstage connotes protection and reverence, as if Long is their queen bee. Her position and posture is one of comfortable self-control and independence. However, the autonomous spirit with which Long moves in the beginning of the scene gradually deteriorates throughout her interaction with Viveiros. Once he enters the stage and lifts Long to move her the first time, she appears alert, upright, and confident. The second time he does so, she seems to have lost a bit of energy, but still moves with some vigor when released. Then, by the third time, Long is

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completely unresponsive in Viveiros’ arms, even as he kisses her on the lips and brings her wearied and expressionless body to the floor with him before Prieur enters. One may read in this interaction a representation of phallocratic dominance. As it unfolds, Long’s position as not only a deviant, disabled creature, but also an object of Viveiros’ desire and whim becomes apparent. Viveiros moves Long around the stage, manipulating her formerly autonomous body, and rendering her powerless in his presence. The gender dynamic at play here becomes heightened by connections between Long’s character as woman-victim and also as disabled subject. In the staging of a phallocracy, her lack of power and strength as a woman reinscribes and redoubles her physical weakness as an “abnormal body.” So while Long represents a character with a deviant biology, she also carries an “unbearable weight,” to borrow Susan Bordo’s term, causing her ultimately to shut down and relinquish whatever control she may have possessed in the beginning of the scene.11 The alignment of women with disability and deviance is not new to history. Many disability studies scholars trace the connection back to Classical thought, specifically the Aristotelian concept of the generic and the monstrous.12 In forging this connection, Garland-Thomson quotes Aristotle in writing, “Anyone who does not take after his parents is really in a way a monstrosity, since in these cases Nature has in a way strayed from the generic type. The first beginning of this deviation is when a female is formed instead of a male.”13 Garland-Thomson here points to how associations between women, deviance, and disability are embedded in dominant ideologies that have governed, and continue to govern, the Western taxonomy of bodies. If the first duet of the scene brings to the foreground the disparaging Aristotelian triangulation of “non-generic,” “monstrous,” and female, the ethos begins to shift with the second duet. Prieur enters, and though she uses forearm crutches and appears to perform deviance, she maintains her sense of autonomy and also helps Long recover her own. As Prieur and Long begin their duet, they direct their energy toward one another, appearing to respect each other’s autonomy and sense of self-control. They take turns nudging each other with a sense of interest and excitement. Their interaction also seems to be imbued with a careful attention toward each other, and even a curious eroticism. By the end of the duet, Long seems to have totally regained her energy, authority, and autonomy. The two performers then exit the stage embodying their individualized qualities of movement. This duet serves to juxtapose the previous one with Viveiros and Long. In the absence of the male character, Prieur and Long are able to create their own deviant space for expression and even community. This refuge could be understood through what José Muñoz calls a “minoritarian counterpublic sphere.” Through the naming of this space, Muñoz intends to “describe different subaltern groupings that are defined as falling outside the majoritarian public sphere.”14 It is in this sphere that those who are marked with deviance may own, accept, and validate their markings. As individuals in such a space, Prieur and Long’s characters find and exercise their autonomy, activating new social relations that abandon Aristotelian delineations. These further connections of deviance to the dynamics of gender and sexuality in bODY rEMIX/gOLDBERG vARIATIONS , though they may foster community amongst individuals, does not eliminate the political maneuver of connecting categories of woman and disabled. Nor does it disengage the performance from a very visible and pervasive semiotics of disability. Unlike other modes of deviance that the dance presents, such as the artistic deviation from conventional movement vocabulary and allusions to sexual deviance, Chouinard’s alignment of disability, women, and deviance is troublesome.

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Instead of rewriting dominant narratives surrounding disability and thereby offering what Mitchell and Snyder might call a “narrative prosthesis,” the pronounced semiotics of disability propagates already culturally-pervasive notions regarding deviant bodies.15

DANCING CYBORGS While the scene outlined above prompts audiences to read bODY rEMIX/gOLDBERG vARIATIONS through a sign system of disability, the introduction of a different lens yields a divergent—and even contradictory—reading of the work. Much changes, in fact, when considering bODY rEMIX through a perspective informed by posthumanism, revealing also the shortcomings of the above argument. Through the post-human perspective, sign systems—including those around disability—begin to soften, as technology mingles with the person, and modern dualisms dissolve into a more fluid state. While the argument against Chouinard’s inappropriate incorporation of assistive technologies and the performance of disability is certainly valid, the post-human perspective reveals the ways in which such a view is tethered to an episteme that privileges visuality, or what Kobena Mercer calls “ocular hegemony”—that which “assumes that the visual world can be rendered knowable before the omnipotent gaze of the eye and the ‘I’ of the Western cognito.”16 The problematics surrounding the performance of disability, evident in Long and Prieur’s use of forearm crutches and their “deviant” movement vocabularies, assume a responsibility on the spectator’s part to decipher, and thus reinscribe, dominant signs of disability. GarlandThomson captures the manner by which disability is determined visually and the extent to which it engenders discrimination. She states: Although variations and limitations in function are often the core experience in disability, appearance tends to be the most socially excluding aspect of disability. Bodies whose looks or comportment depart from social expectations—ones categorized as visually abnormal—are targets for profound discrimination.17 While an ocular hegemony indeed pervades the processes of reading disability, what occurs in Chouinard’s work seems to be an inversion of what Garland-Thomson describes. Instead of stigmatizing people with disabilities, audiences tend to interpellate the dancers, who are not disabled, as having deviant biologies. Though such a lens demonstrates how the performance might be insulting, it is nonetheless determined and ordered by the same ocular hegemony that disparages those with disabilities. In a poignant analysis of literary constructions of disability, Mitchell and Snyder compare common interpretations of disability to the practice of physiognomy. In a particular focus on constructions of disability in film, they write: Film narratives rely upon the audience’s making connections between external “flaws” and character motivations in a way that insists upon corporeal differences as laden with psychological and social implications. We refer to this production of disability as a visual indicator of fathomless motivations of film art’s “new physiognomy.”18 Following this argument, one can critically make sense of how a film-goer watches an actor in a wheelchair on-screen and aligns that character with a plethora of social markers, derived from off-screen social realities. Similarly, viewers of bODY rEMIX/gOLDBERG vARIATIONS might interpret the movements and use of assistive technologies of Prieur and Long as performing and thus mocking disability. They in turn mark the dance as mimicry.

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It must be noted that Mitchell and Snyder point to an element of intention on behalf of the filmmaker. By including the claims of “fathomless motivations,” these scholars not only reveal the culpability of viewers to engage in a “new physiognomy,” but also the culpability of the creator, artist, director, and choreographer to perpetuate such a paradigm. Whether Chouinard is to blame for such a message is difficult to discern. However it would appear that through bODY rEMIX , Chouinard intended to comment on other theories of the body. On the company’s website, for example, a description about bODY rEMIX/ gOLDBERG vARIATIONS reads: “Subtle and extravagant, sumptuous and wild, the work’s movements plumb the insoluble mystery of the body, of the living being.”19 To “plumb” is not to reiterate, reinscribe, or perpetuate an existing paradigm. Instead, the word carries a more critical connotation. An analysis of the nuances of this work from a different point of view might reveal that Chouinard is not actually presenting a “new physiognomy” of disability. Rather, she is doing the opposite: attempting to reframe and reimagine “deviance” by inundating the audience with its many facets, and thus constructing a new world that showcases a new body. Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto serves as a helpful framework to guide such an attempt to undo problematics around the performance of disability, which Chouinard’s choreography might generate. In this theoretical treatise, Haraway argues for a reconfiguration of our social and bodily realities through the myth of the cyborg: a machine– organism hybrid that blends fiction and reality. According to Haraway, the cyborg’s capacity to blur the distinction between the human and machine allows it to challenge other associated dualisms of the modern episteme: mind/body, male/female, culture/nature, self/ other, and civilized/primitive, among others. By deconstructing these dualisms, a cyborg utopia may ultimately shape an existence where the body extends beyond its skin and the Western Self begins to dissolve. It is important to recognize that the cyborg utopia is both a metaphorical space and a material existence.20 Haraway does not offer much explicit theory around the materiality of the cyborg beyond the discussion of it as a “hybrid creature, composed of organism and machine.”21 The field of post-human studies, which was spurred in part by Haraway’s cyborg theory, has, however, responded with many approaches to the material cyborg body. For one, prominent post-human studies scholar N. Katherine Hayles writes, “The posthuman view thinks of the body as prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born.”22 This extension/replacement mode of the body’s life process is an appropriate and helpful companion to Haraway’s cyborg theory. Aligning notions of the corporeally-extended cyborg alongside bODY rEMIX prompts a series of questions: How might the dance present a model for the deconstruction of the ability/disability, normal/deviant, and body/tool binaries? Outside a viewership that is ordered by ocular hegemony, what is the meaning of the body in this performance? How might Chouinard be presenting a post-gender, post-human, and post-deviance possibility? Under Hayles’ aforementioned post-human lens of the body as extension/replacement, the assistive technology in the dance morphs into a mere continuation of the body. In the performance excerpt, Carol Prieur and Chi Long operate the forearm crutches to redistribute their weight, suspend themselves in air, shift their center of gravity outside their actual bodily forms, expand the ground they cover, and hoist themselves up from the ground. Through such acts of extension/replacement, Long and Prieur are able to move beyond the capabilities of their corporeal vessels that modernity has constructed as

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the “self,” collect new appendages, and remake their beings. What results is a modified cyborgian body, able to practice a new physics and aesthetics of performance. As dancing cyborgs, Long and Prieur’s movement styles, though distinct from one another, occupy a similar territory outside the dominant choreographic tropes seen in Western concert dance performance. The quality with which Long and Prieur move is off-centered, physics-defying, and even animalistic. Long’s movement style, for instance, resembles that of a praying mantis. With her energy almost always directed toward the ground, it seems as though she is stalking a prey. Prieur’s movements, on the other hand, resemble a gazelle. Her long limbs stretch through space as she gracefully glides across the stage. Of course, these characterizations would not be possible without the bodyextending capabilities of the technology, contributing to the formation of Prieur and Long’s modified forms and their respective new aesthetics. The “animalistic” aesthetic that Long and Prieur present confronts the human/animal divide—a challenge that Haraway’s cyborg also poses. In illustrating its defiance, Haraway writes, “The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed. Far from signalling a walling off of people from other living beings, cyborgs signal a disturbingly and pleasurably tight coupling.”23 Of course, discussing the performers’ deconstruction of this binary through the perspective of an aesthetic may seem contradictory, as it may only affirm and reinforce the power of visuality and the modern habit of objectifying the body. However flawed this lens may be, it is the most feasible manner of presenting a shift that occurs in one’s embodied corporeality, particularly within the framework of the concert dance stage. So while the outsider sees the shift as a new aesthetic, the dancing cyborgs of Chouinard’s work might experience it as a new physics whose intricacies elude the ravenous gaze. The dancing cyborg, though it may look different, locates its change within its own physico-corporeal experiences. That is to say, the revised capacities of its extended/ replaced form manifest a physic-al extension of a human potential that is difficult to detect visually. One may speculate about the ways in which this cyborg is undoing and redoing its own corporeal mechanics. For example, Long and Prieur undoubtedly experience a new sense of their weight, center of gravity, kinetic energy, and momentum. Their understanding of speed, distance, and spatial configurations certainly shift as well. After all, Prieur is able to traverse the stage in only a few paces. And Long’s grounded posture affords her a new vantage point of her surrounding space. Ultimately, the bodily replacements alter the dancers’ sense of space, self, and other. Alanna Thain argues that this dimension of the work reconfigures what Sarah Jain calls the “prosthetic imagination” in favor of an understanding of the prosthetic that “[suspends] the body in order to call attention to the ways in which the body is always in a process of dissolution and reconstitution with the world.”24 Thain connects this notion of the body and prosthesis to Erin Manning’s theory of the “becoming-body” and its state of “morethan.” Thain quotes Manning in saying: The prosthesis suggests a vocabulary of the more-than. Within this vocabulary, the “than”—the body, usually—can only be thought as an already-formulated entity. Concepts such as the machinic (Deleuze and Guatarri), the Body without Organs (Artaud), the posthuman (Hayles), and originary technicity (Derrida), explicitly challenge the notion that the body could be reduced to a than-ness that would need to be supplemented to create a body that was more-than its organic envelope. They suggest that the body is already more-than, refuting the logic of the “than” that would

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need to be prosthetically enhanced to reach its “more than” state. Refuting the “thanness” that supposedly becomes prosthetically enhanced, these concepts suggest that the “more than” is the very condition of the becoming-body.25 Manning’s theory of the body and Thain’s application of it reveal the ways in which the prosthetic devices that appear in bODY rEMIX/gOLDBERG vARIATIONS only call attention to the existing condition of the body’s perpetual “becoming” of something else. While Chouinard’s work may possess threads of similarities to Hathaway’s cyborg utopia and the post-human body in becoming, it is important to point to some alarming observations about the work and the bodies that perform it. In watching the dance, it is quite noticeable the overwhelming whiteness of the cast. Moreover, all the dancers—both women and men—seem well-trained with displays of virtuosity. Their figures are muscular, some sinewy and slender, some emaciated. Considering how Hathaway’s cyborg utopia seemingly deconstructs essentializing claims of identity, what does it mean that the dancing cyborgs are thin and white? How might their bodies represent the ideal form perpetuated by dominant culture? Flawed as it may be, the cyborg manifesto helps to frame one reading of bODY rEMIX/ gOLDBERG vARIATIONS . Within this perspective, Chouinard challenges a historically and cross-culturally dominant understanding of the human subject, her body, and her place in the world by remaking the body into a human–machine–animal hybrid. In particular, Chouinard presents three objections to the modern episteme of the body. First, she objects to the accepted sign–signifier relationship of the crutch and the movement of deviant bodies. Second, she objects to the separation of the human body from its machine of operation. And finally, she objects to the construction of the human comportment as anti-animal. While Long and Prieur help usher the value-eschewing dancing cyborg and its parade of objections to viewers, those viewers nonetheless possess the human sensibilities that are constructed through modern sign systems. Thus, any suggestion of the dancers as cyborgs is in direct tension with the reading of it as a performance of disability. Rendering the work through a methodology of ambivalence, however, puts these opposing views of the dance into conversation and productive tension.

THE ART OF AMBIVALENCE With its etymological roots meaning “both truths,” the ambivalence seen in and produced by Chouinard’s bODY rEMIX/gOLDBERG vARIATIONS destabilizes any certainty around the meaning of the dance in order to create a more textured understanding of the work. Of course, such ambivalence is not entirely novel within critical interpretations of art. For instance, Kobena Mercer employs the concept over a period of several years in his multiple writings on Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs. Mercer’s critical ambivalence is most palpable in two essays published in 1987 and 1989, respectively. In “Imaging the Black Man’s Sex,” Mercer presents the argument that Mapplethorpe’s photos of the black male body exoticize and exploit the black subject under the gaze of white male hegemony.26 Two years later, Mercer published, “Skin Head, Sex Thing: Racial Difference and the Homoerotic Imaginary,” in which he revisits and modifies his earlier thesis, arguing that Mapplethorpe’s position as a gay male who resides at the margins of culture, allows him to subvert dominant cultural codes that distinguish high art from “the filthy and degraded form of the commonplace racist stereotype.”27 In this revision, Mercer describes his method of ambivalence as a productive lens through which to consider any

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work. He maintains: “Posing the problem of ambivalence and undecidability in this way not only underlines the role of the reader, but also draws attention to the important and equally undecidable, role of context in determining the range of different readings that can be produced in the same text.”28 Here, Mercer captures the reader/viewer’s role in deciphering and interpreting any given object of study as well as the importance of considering the context surrounding that object. While Mercer deploys ambivalence as an interpretive method, Judith Butler discusses it as a contradictory performance. In the essay, “Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion,” Butler analyzes the film, Paris is Burning to discuss how drag performances are imbued with “both the enabling and violating sense of ‘subjection.’ ”29 That is, performers of drag not only subvert dominant codes of gender by reconfiguring them, but also reiterate those same codes by reinscribing certain characteristics of the binary gender system. This dual operation, Butler argues, produces an ambivalence around gender and its performance. Also implied in the analysis is an ambivalence toward the film itself. Such conceptions of ambivalence rely upon writings on the concept of jouissance, or “joy.” Notably, Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva develop theories of jouissance in relation to textuality. Barthes approaches textual jouissance as that which is, in Jane Gallop’s words, “shocking, ego-disruptive, and in contrast to the canons of culture.” Gallop elaborates that Barthes’ “text of jouissance . . . causes the historical, cultural, psychological foundations of the reader to vacillate.”30 Along similar lines, Kristeva conceptualizes jouissance as pleasure through transgression, specifically through the abject. Mary Cosgrove encapsulates this position when describing that, through jouissance, Kristeva refers to the “revolutionary potential of the literary text to rupture stagnant constructs.”31 Evident in both Barthes’ and Kristeva’s conceptualization of jouissance is an attention to the ways in which textuality may operate on multiple registers of signification. The reader’s attunement to those registers produces pleasurable dissonance: jouissance. Mercer and Butler extend theories like Barthes’ and Kristeva’s conceptualization of jouissance by specifically addressing the body and the body’s meaning-making capacity, rather than that of just the literary text. That is to say, because language passes through the body, its semiotic import is paramount. So the body’s presentation of multiple, even competing, narratives, reiterates its abundance of meaning and “refusal to close.”32 Thus, in the spirit of Mercer’s and Butler’s applications, I approach Chouinard’s bODY rEMIX with a similar ambivalence, sourced in the work’s simultaneous operation within a semiotics of disability and the deconstructive logic of the dancing cyborg. Like malleable readings of Mapplethorpe’s photographs, and the uncertainty around the meaning of drag performances, Chouinard’s work demonstrates a pleasurable continuity between the text and the context, as well as between various sign systems. It moves between meanings, between borders of textuality—and, through such a maneuver, it incites a productive multiplicity. In this manner, bODY rEMIX/gOLDBERG vARIATIONS , and the above analysis of it, demonstrates the critical potential of ambivalence as a lens through which to read dance and performance. Through it, viewers might gain a multifaceted rendering of how various identities and social categories intersect, and how the moving body is already plural.

NOTES 1.

Bree Hadley, Disability, Public Space Performance and Spectatorship: Unconscious Performers (Basingstoke: Palgrave Hamilton, 2014), p. 178.

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2.

Alanna Thain, “The In-tensions of Extensions: Compagnie Marie Chouinard’s bODY rEMIX/gOLDBERG vARIATIONS,” Differences 19:1 (2008): 84.

3.

Here, I rely on Susan Foster’s foundational work on what it means to read dance. See Susan Leigh Foster, Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

4.

Jason King, “Rap and Feng Shui: On Ass Politics, Cultural Studies, and the Timbaland Sound,” in A Companion to Cultural Studies, ed. Toby Miller (Malden, MA: Blackwell), p. 435.

5.

Here, I am referencing Susan Foster’s conception of “choreographies of gender,” which emphasizes the actions of the body in the performance of gender, and the ways in which those actions relate to larger structures of power. See Susan Foster, “Choreographies of Gender,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society 24:1 (1998).

6.

Petra Kuppers, “The Wheelchair’s Rhetoric: the Performance of Disability,” TDR 51:4 (Winter 2007): 80.

7.

This speculation is evidenced by the presence of the same dancers in the same performance moving without the use, and presumable need, of the assistive technologies.

8.

Shelley Tremain, “Foucault, Governmentality, and Critical Disability Theory: An Introduction,” in Foucault and the Government of Disability, ed. Shelley Tremain (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), p. 18. Also see David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, Cultural Locations of Disability (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

9.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, p. 6.

10. Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla, Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 2. 11. Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 12. See Tory Vandeventer Pearman, Women and Disability in Medieval Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 5; Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies; and Bonnie G. Smith and Beth Hutchison, Gendering Disability (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004). 13. Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, p. 19. 14. José Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 149. 15. For David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, the incorporation of disability into literary narratives can work to challenge, complicate, and undo problematic constructions of disability. Their concept of “narrative prosthesis,” articulates this counter-hegemonic work. See Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). 16. Kobena Mercer, “Unburying the Dismembered,” in New Histories (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1996), p. 165. This exact quote also appears in Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), p. 98. 17. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Feminist Disability Studies (Critical Essay),” Signs 30:2 (Winter 2005): 1579. 18. Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, p. 96. 19. Compagnie Marie Chouinard, website, http://www.mariechouinard.com/body-remixgolberg-186.html.

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20. Charles R. Garoian and Yvonne M. Gaudelius, “Cyborg Pedagogy: Performing Resistance In The Digital Age,” Studies in Art Education 42 (Summer 2001): 337. 21. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 1. 22. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 3. 23. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, p. 154. 24. Thain, “In-tensions of Extensions,” p. 88. 25. Erin Manning, “Prosthetics Making Sense: Dancing the Technogenetic Body,” Fibreculture 9 (2005), n.p., http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue9/issue9_manning.html; quoted in Thain, “In-tensions of Extensions,” p. 88. 26. Kobena Mercer, “Imaging the Black Man’s Sex,” in Photography/Politics: Two, eds. Pat Holland, Jo Spence, and Simon Watney (London: Comedia/Methuen, 1987), pp. 61–69. 27. Kobena Mercer, “Looking for Trouble,” Transition 51 (1991): 191. 28. Kobena Mercer, “Skin Head, Sex Thing: Racial Difference and the Homoerotic Imaginary,” in How Do I Look?: Queer Film and Video, ed. Bad Object-Choices (Organization) (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), p. 170. 29. Judith Butler, “Gender is Burning,” in Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 123. 30. See Jane Gallop, Thinking Through the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 121. 31. Specifically, Kristeva articulates jouissance through the notions of death and murder, that by rupturing preconceived boundaries, the literary text imposes a “death drive” on the “symbolic order.” See Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 121. Mary Cosgrove’s apt discussion of Kristeva’s position on jouissance may be found in Grotesque Ambivalence: Melancholy and Mourning in the Prose Work of Albert Drach (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2004), p. 6. 32. Here again, I borrow Jason King’s terming of ambivalence in performance in “Rap and Feng Shui,” p. 435.

CHAPTER 4.7

Considerations on Site-Specific Screendance Production ANA BAER CARRILLO

This chapter is written from my perspective as a practitioner of dance and as a video producer. My background in dance and choreography has expanded into the art forms of cinematography and editing. However, I have kept a clear dance-centric agenda in my work and for more than a decade, my research interest has been the intersection of dance and video. I have been exploring the integration of live performance with projecting images, as well as the hybrid form of screendance and the art of video installation. This chapter focuses on my screendance work as a whole and one particular work entitled dunes. I will share the collaborative process of creating dunes, a site-specific screendance, from inception to production and for this purpose, I have selected this piece as a case study. I produced this work in 2015 and since then it has been presented nationally and internationally as a screendance piece. Additionally, it was presented as a live performance with projected images, adding to the site-specificity of the work. In the summer of 2015 I invited choreographer and dancer Kim Olson to collaborate in the creation of dunes. We had collaborated extensively on previous projects and wanted to explore an extreme environment together. After many discussions, we both felt strongly about exploring The Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve nuzzled in the south of Colorado where this location offered North America’s tallest dunes set against the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

SITE-SPECIFIC SCREENDANCE Site-specific screendance couples two dance disciplines from the late twentieth century: site-specific and screendance. In an article about site-specific dance for Emotion, Space and Society, dance scholars Karen Barbour and Alexandra Hitchmough state, “sitespecific dance is generally understood as dance that is created and performed in response to a particular site, most often a site in which dance has not traditionally been performed.”1 Screendance is the hybrid form of choreography coupled with film or video. Site-specific dance was first brought to the forefront of dance during the early sixties by some of the most eminent post-modern choreographers, such as Yvonne Rainer, Trisha 370

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Brown, and Lucinda Childs, who started exploring alternatives ways of moving, choreographing and presenting dance. They started creating dances outside of the stage, questioning the established modes of production and presentation of modern dance; choreographies like Walking on the Wall and Roof were being created in response to these specific sites. The site-specific tradition in dance kept evolving with choreographers, like Simone Forti and Anna Halprin, who dedicated their careers to this unique dance form. On her site-specific dances, Anna Halprin has stated: “I receive physical, emotional and spiritual nourishment from nature . . . I also look to nature to discover what is both meaningful in form and content for dance as art.”2 Currently, the art and dance world recognize choreographers that keep exploring site-specific dance as their main form of performance, such as Noemi LaFrance and Stephen Koplowitz. The foundations of screendance can be traced back to the experimental filmmaker Maya Deren who emigrated from the Ukraine at a young age and worked in various countries. She was a prominent artist, and was celebrated as an avant-garde filmmaker for her films such as Meshes of the Afternoon and Divine Horsemen. Deren produced A Choreographic Study in 1945 that features Talley Beatty performing his own choreography in a four-minute 16mm silent film. Talley was a member of Martha Graham’s company and her movement influence is evident. As a pioneer of the hybrid form screendance, Maya Deren explored elements of time and space and was able to conceptualize and produce a body of work where the dialogue between actor/mover and camera was fundamental. Both elements, dancer and camera, shared the protagonist role. Additionally, with this work, Deren exposed one of the main appeals to creating a screendance, which is to carry a movement through different spaces or locations. Her editing techniques were revolutionary and are still current today.3 Since its inceptions, the genre of screendance has evolved tremendously and more so with the introduction of digital technology. By the 1970s and 1980s choreographers like Alvin Ailey, Merce Cunningham and Aiko and Koma were exploring the medium. Furthermore, groups like DV8 and Lalala Human Steps created a robust screendance body of work in the early 2000s, which are still relevant today. Currently there are several choreographers, filmmakers and collaborative groups that are committed to this hybrid form with enormous success, such as Marta Renzi, Mitchell Rose, Simon Fildes and Katrina McPherson.

BACKGROUND As do all my site-specific screendance projects, dunes started with the inquiry of exploring the site through the movement of a dancer captured by my moving camera. At the core of my projects lie my aesthetic values; however, ethical implications also permeate my work (Plate 16). My background in dance and film shape my aesthetic decisions as well as my intuition and the collaborative process that takes shape during each project. The composition of each frame, the angles I select, the movement of my camera, the colors I favor and the textures I react to are all elements that inform my aesthetic. My cinematography is informed heavily by my film studies, while my dance background influences my editing. As a dancer and choreographer, contemporary movement and choreographers from an array of dance backgrounds influence me, as well as my cultural heritage. I was initially trained as a dancer in the English style of Classical Technique Royal Academy of Dance; subsequently, I was trained in Cunningham, Limon, and a variety of modern dance

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techniques. As a choreographer I have always been drawn to more visceral expressions of dance movement like the German expressionism of Pina Bausch and the Japanese form of Butoh. These forms reveal the humanity in the body itself. My main influences in films come from the experimental filmmakers Stan Brakhage and Phil Solomon, from whom I took classes while attending the University of Colorado at Boulder. Some of the elements found in experimental films that I have been exploring in my own work are the non-linear narrative structure and the use of superimposed images. The lack of narrative or non-linear narrative structure suits the improvisational aspect of site-specific work, while the use of multiple layers of images creates visual metaphors. Both of these aspects can be found in my work and are present in dunes. My collaborator for dunes, Kim Olson, was trained like most American dancers from the 1990s in conventional forms of dance, such as ballet and various styles of modern dance. Her deepest influences in movement can be traced to dance improvisation, Klein and Release techniques. Kim performed and toured as a member of the Randy Warshaw Dance Company, worked as a dancer with the Donna Uchizono Company, and toured internationally as a member of the Stephen Petronio Company. Petronio was the first male dancer with Trisha Brown’s company, and her influence can be found in Kim’s movement. Kim has been highly recognized as a dancer and choreographer internationally and critics have written about the visceral, precarious, and almost dangerous state of her performance. Fritzraven Sky, a critic from Vancouver BC/Montreal, wrote: “Olson is the essence of the modern sensibility . . . an artist from whom we can continue to expect great things. Luminous on stage with a fragile eroticism, she is ethereal and lusty at the same time . . . impelling, sliding tossing her parts almost out of control and whimsically bemused by the whole.”4 I was drawn to Kim’s performance in part because of the way she creates risk. Much like Crystal Pite, another choreographer I admire, I am interested in the constant conflict that movement creates in the body.5 Kim’s movement is a constant struggle, and due to its highly poetic resonance, her movement and choreography also engrossed me.

PAST COLLABORATIONS Our first collaboration bare was a screendance filmed on Kim’s property, 10 acres in the mountains of Colorado. The work was our first opportunity to explore the relationship between dancers, camera, and the environment. At the time we filmed I had no idea I was going to explore this triad’s conversation for more than a decade. In bare, I was filming Kim and two other remarkable dancers who were part of her company, Sweet/Edge. The project included site-specific dance as well as site-adaptive material and the site-specific movement was created as we found new environments. The dancers would improvise based on the stimulus that they were receiving from the environment while I was following their movement as well as reacting to the same stimulus from the environment. In addition, the dancers were attentive to my directives. We included some site-adaptive dance phrases that Kim had choreographed previous to our filming session. For these set movements, my approach was totally different because I was no longer listening to the environment, but instead I was consciously filming set movement with a study board. The result was a short screendance that was awarded the Best Experimental Video from Colorado Arts TV in Boulder, Colorado. Subsequently it was selected in multiple international screendance festivals. For both Kim and I, this was the beginning of a very

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fruitful long-term artistic collaboration that includes the project Parkplatz which Kim choreographed and for which I created a video to open the Tanz Art Oestwest Festival. Tanz Compagnie Giessen commissioned this project, and it was performed in Giessen, Germany in 2007. Subsequently, in 2008 our work City Crumbs was selected to show at the International Tanzmesse Festival of Dusseldorf. In 2010 and 2014 we were awarded ATLAS Innovators by the ATLAS Institute of Boulder, Colorado for our other collaborations, Disappear Here and OJO. By the time we created dunes, we knew how to collaborate. From its inception our artistic collaboration was founded in mutual inspiration, respect and admiration for each other’s work, as well as by a shared sense of aesthetics and by a deep friendship. At the time we were planning to film dunes, Kim and her company Sweet/Edge had been working on the deconstruction of movement to bring to the forefront the authentic human response that both pre- and supersedes technique. I felt their project perfect to explore this creative impetus. Once we arrived at The Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve, we found grounds to set up our camp and then went scouting. While scouting, my attention was focused on finding interesting angles, good light, places where the sand was easier to walk on, places to set my tripod on without it sinking, and other similar concerns. Simultaneously, Kim was discovering how challenging it was to dance on this surface. She was feeling the sand with her bare feet and the strong wind offered resistance, affecting the quality of her movement. We were both equally concerned with the extreme heat and what seemed to be a lack of oxygen as we were in high altitudes. All of these considerations informed our plan to shoot in the early morning the following day. We started shooting scenes for dunes with the first light. Once we found a location that worked for both in terms of cinematography and movement, Kim started exploring. Her movements embraced the various responses to the stimulus she was receiving from the elements. As she moved, I captured her graceful struggle across my frame. Simultaneously, I responded to the intense heat, which had started to rise, the wind in my face and the smell of wet sand. We created an intimate dialogue between the three elements: dancer, camera, and the environment. My job as a cinematographer was to document the movements being created in front of the camera by the dancer inspired and affected by the environment. Additionally, I was thinking of the editing process and the kind of footage I needed to create a cohesive kinesthetic account of our experience. Thus, some shots were more intentional and full of directives for the dancer. Due to the improvisational nature of the project, both of us as dancer and cinematographer were reacting to what we were experiencing in the moment. We were exploring a phenomenological approach to creation. As the director, one of my main aspirations was to create an immersive environment with enough seductive images and soundscape in order for the audience to get lost in the experience. Sharing my embodied experience with the audience is at the forefront of my research.

PARTNERING WITH THE SITE Like all partnering work, the tension changes from one partner to the other. In dunes, Kim was creating a dance with the elements, notwithstanding them. I was particularly interested in the integration of dance and the environment, but simply transposing the choreography from the studio to a natural environment was not something that I was exploring at that moment. In this sense I avoided utilizing the dunes and mountains as

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background. Instead, I assigned the environment a protagonist role to share with the dancer; Kim partnered with the sand, the air, the heat and the water. I also focused on featuring the liveliness of the site. It is common in screendance to shoot very close angles to emphasize the body. As stated by dance scholar Melanie Kloetzel: “I would argue that the long shot (and extreme long shot) has become more common as filmmakers try to highlight the environment as a key contributor to the work, not only in how it relates to the body, but also in how it exudes its own changing and moving characteristics.”6 I included long shots to stress the magnitude of the site, as one of the challenges for me was to highlight the interconnectedness and importance of the dancer and the environment alike. Kim’s movements were created in the site and in response to it. The elements inspired her movement and affected her dynamics by offering resistance, temperature and texture; the sand was moving and creating its own choreography aided by the air.

ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS Art critic Andy Grundberg writes in his introduction for In Response to Place: Photographs from the Nature Conservancy’s Last Great Places: “Feeling a part of nature makes one responsible to it, and ultimately for it. Our responsibilities are in large part a matter of who we are.”7 There are ethical implications that I have dealt with during the creation of dunes, such as my respect for nature as well as my fascination with it. Having lived in Mexico City for most of my life, nature is still an extraordinary element for me. I fear it and at the same time I feel more alive when I am in it. Through my camera I captured Kim’s minute body set against the immensity of the environment. I changed the composition so the dancer became predominant in my frame; however, I still felt the vastness of the environment. I thought about my own mortality while filming; I questioned the dichotomy of ephemeral and permanent; I pondered about the duality of nature and humanity; and I reflected upon the triad that is nature, humans and technology. A dune is a mountain of loose sand that has been formed by the flow of water and wind; it has been present for a millennium. I thought about human life in contrast to the prolonged lifetime of a mountain, a dune, or a body of water and I captured these thoughts and inquiries with my camera. I recognized what makes this site an extreme environment. Walking through the loose sand was a challenge in this environment where most could not function, and the arid sand and intense temperatures explain why this area is not populated. Kim was dancing and running in the depth of the dunes, her physical and mental stamina tested by each step, her struggle was tangible. I captured it while the heat kept rising. The conditions offered by this environment provide a fertile field for experimentation. Kim walked up hill sinking her bare feet in the deep sand; she created movement incited by her interaction with the roughness of the site. My concern lay in capturing the embodied experience to share it with my audience. I captured various distinctive types of shots, long shots, medium shots, etc.; I fragmented Kim’s body to depict the action of her hand moving sand; I followed her movement with my moving camera; I panned and tilted my camera to denote her against the mountains; I panned away from her and filmed the sand by itself, and the sky and the mountains without a dancer to provide perspective. Kim was wearing an unusual costume as a dress: a white parachute from Versailles from the Second World War that was both heavy and light simultaneously. It offered us more elements to explore. As the wind blew strongly and we found patches of wet sand,

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the parachute got wet and heavy on one side, while the other side flowed gracefully. Kim dragged her “dress” across my frame, running, falling, and recovering. The conflict between her body, the costume, and the environment had been intensified by the angles of my camera. I was concerned with the interactions between her movement and the environment, her body and the costume, her presence and my camera. Surrounded by the enormity of the dunes I felt humility, and I mostly felt the deepest respect for nature. Perhaps Grundberg was right about his statement on responsibility to nature, because as I started feeling more connected to nature while filming. I also felt more responsible for it and we were careful not to leave traces or harm the environment. The beauty of nature was intensified by the presence of a strong yet fragile dancer, with the intense blues from the sky contrasting the color of the sand and Kim’s skin tones while the Sangre de Cristo Mountains witnessed our dance as they stood behind us framing our exertion. Acknowledging the importance of nature in our current way of life becomes a subtext in the work; I keep questioning the ephemeral and permanent dichotomy and wonder if the permanency of the dunes will ever become ephemeral; I recognize the danger that nature faces in this political climate; and I reflect on my efforts to save, capture, or perhaps own the ephemerality of the dance in transforming it into something more permanent, like a video. I simply have questions.

EDITING In my experience, editing is an extension of the choreographic process. Here, I can manipulate space, time and effort. Like Maya Deren’s choreographic study, I can transpose movement in space by use of sequential editing and like Stan Brakhage I can layer images to create visual metaphors. In editing, these are some of the concepts I wanted to share with my audience: the fragility of humanity against the grandness of the environment; the strength of the female dancer, the constant dialogue between dancer, site, and camera; the traces left by humanity in the sand, the beauty of nature and the splendor of the human struggle. The selection process started by watching the entirety of the footage. Subsequently, as I was getting familiar with it, I started eliminating the clips that looked problematic. From each clip I was considering the light, the composition, the clarity of intention from my camera as well as from Kim’s movement. Once I had selected the best footage, I let the first editing draft occur as a stream of consciousness: I responded to the memory of my experience phenomenologically; I remembered how the sand felt in my feet and how the wind was blowing. I recalled how difficult it was to get to the top of a dune and how the heat was beating us down. I also remembered feeling insignificant against the expansive dunes. The ephemerality of a human life becomes more evident against the permanency of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, similar to the contrast between dance and film. I felt alive, content, and curious. During the second editing draft, I made more cerebral choices, which supported the conceptual backbone of the project. I wanted to avoid presenting only the shots where Kim looks proportionally at a disadvantage, so I included close ups and shots where her presence felt important. I also selected footage displaying the immersive environment in solitude, with no dancer, no human around; instead I show traces made by Kim’s presence. By selecting shots where my camera is actively moving I invite the audience into a kinesthetic journey with us. Once again, many questions come to mind, I ponder upon

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the current relationship that we have with our environment, and I think about the consequences of our actions. In succeeding drafts, I had other considerations that dealt with the translation of dance into film. Dance and film share the elements of time and space. Time is easily translated from dance into film. In both, you can manipulate the speed, retrograde, start at any given point of the phrase, and use repetition. Space, on the other hand, offers a challenge. In dance, space is tri-dimensional accounting for a vertical, a horizontal, and a sagittal plane. A screen is only bi-dimensional (vertical and horizontal), so adding the third dimension is always a consideration in my work. There are various ways of adding the sagittal plane, or depth, that the screen is missing. These concerns need to be present during the filming as well as the editing process. In filming dunes, I made sure to create frames with a strong background and foreground to accentuate the depth. I also asked Kim to enter my frame from behind my camera and to travel in diagonal. I intentionally selected clips with depth of field as well as combined long shots, medium shots, and close ups and superimposed images in order to add the third dimensionality to dunes.

SOUND Eliot Caplan mentioned during one of his screendance workshops the importance of capturing the real sounds made by the dancers during the filming sessions in order to feel closer to them. He was referring to the dancers’ breathing, the way their bodies sound as they touch against different textures or each other, the sound of a step or a slide. Thierry De May expands this concept and invites additional sounds into the mix to create a more complex texture. During the filming of dunes, I used the advice from both of these accomplished video artists; I kept the original audio I captured during the shoot and added sounds that did not corresponded directly with the action. I also incorporated a soundtrack created by composer Jeff Mohler. This resulted in an immersive audio track that carried the action. Sound helps disguise the roughness of some cuts; additionally, it accentuates the rhythm and provides structure. I personally prefer adding the sound track at the end of my editing so I can work independently from the sound structure. Like most experimental filmmakers, I believe that the rhythm of the film needs to be found in the edit itself.

EDITING DANCE In her book Cutting Rhythms: Intuitive Film Editing, filmmaker Karen Pearlman states, “If we actively see and hear and feel the world’s rhythms, what we are actually seeing, hearing, and feeling is movement. Editors need actively to perceive and shape the flow of time and energy through movement to shape a film’s rhythms.”8 When editing dance I find myself looking for the cadence of the movement, the end of a phrase, the weight transfers of a step. Weight provides a road map for my editing; I use choreographic tools to edit; and I manipulate the speed of some movements, the orientation or facing of some clips. I repeat, reverse, fragment or delete other moments. I re-choreograph the event. Editing was not different from choreography. I introduced Kim as she walks down a dune with a close up of her feet sinking in the sand. The next clip is a long shot where Kim is revealed full-bodied as she slowly walks holding a white fabric on her arms. After that, she drags her legs leaving traces on the wet sand. Kim has an amazing ability for performing a wide range of dynamics with her movement. She slashes, then glides and

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soon after she dabs and wrings effortlessly. Her body is in constant conflict with itself and with the environment, the triadic intersection of body, environment, and camera are present. I cut the movement right before it ends transitioning into another part of her body, another angle or a different movement all together. I am far from using sequential editing; instead, I let my instincts find a movement lead. At some point I try to follow her movement with my camera. I lose parts of her, but I capture the kinesthetic sense of her movement. Her movement informs my filming as well as my editing. Ideally, in turn, it will affect the audience. There is something really compelling about Kim’s movement. It could be the way she fully commits to it, the clarity of her intention or the level of skill she displays. I simultaneously capture her power and her pathos, her ability and her despair. Like Pina Bausch, I am more interested in what moves people rather than in how they move.9 Kim moves me; her dance is visceral and honest. During “Inside Dance,” choreographer Akram Khan shares his thoughts regarding how much discipline and energy is required to achieve relative stillness.10 I relate to this reflection. As a mover, I prefer to move and find it challenging to stand still. This inclination for action affects my filming and editing alike. As I film, I have to remind myself of the importance of stillness hence I look for empty frames (without the dancer) and locked shots (without the camera moves). I intentionally include stillness during Kim’s movement. Like Khan, I have experienced the depth of stillness in the middle of a chaotic choreography. This is a powerful choreographic tool, and it translates in film. The pause invites me to reset, to start anew. Furthermore, it allows the audience to have a moment of reflection.

SUPERIMPOSITION During the creation of dunes, I used layered images on two different occasions: the first time I superimposed moving water into the dunes. The effect is that of moving sand denoting erosion or passage of time. I first set down the footage of the dunes and over it I superimposed water footage taken close to the site. I modified the opacity of the latter to the point that I could see both images simultaneously. The second time I used this technique to present two, three, and four layers of Kim as she dances furiously across my frame. To me, this visual metaphor represents the duality between ephemerality and permanency. In order to attain this multilayered clip, I shot Kim with a locked camera as she danced half a dozen times through the frame. I gave her the instruction to start behind my camera and to keep going until she fell down the dune.

THE AFTERMATH Long after producing dunes, I reflect on it. dunes is one of my first site-specific screendances and it provided me with a road map to other similar projects. To date, I have produced a dozen site-specific works based on the same principles. Each project has been different due to the new collaborations that I have formed with other artists and to the diverse locations that I have explored. What has not changed is the core of my intentions. Each work presents a different challenge; however, all of them are based on the intention of sharing an embodied experience of place with my audience, highlighting the dialogue between dancer, environment, and camera. Additionally, it is my aspiration to share a sense of respect for nature by revealing the intricate connection between humans

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and nature. Unlike photographer Hansel Adams, I do not seek the beauty of nature in isolation, quite the opposite; I find the duality of human/nature more compelling and far more interesting.

NOTES 1.

Karen Barbour and Alexandra Hitchmough, “Experiencing Affect Through Site-specific Dance,” Emotion, Space and Society (August 2014): 5.

2.

“Anna Halprin: Performances,” Anna Halprin, 2016, https://www.annahalprin.org/ performances (accessed December 2018).

3.

Harmony Bench, “Maya Deren: A Prologue,” The International Journal of Screendance 3 (2013), DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18061/ijsd.v3i0.5694, (accessed December 2018).

4.

SweetEdge, Kim Olson 2010, https://sweetedge.org/kim-olson/, (accessed January 2019).

5.

Crystal Pite interviewed by Kirsty Wark, “Can art effect change? Kirsty Wark meets choreographer Crystal Pite,” YouTube video, 5:56, posted by BBC Newsnight, April 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYv1vQ-5wKk&t=128s.

6.

Melanie Kloetzel, “Bodies in Place: Location as Collaborator in Dance Film,” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 11:1 (2014):22.

7.

Andy Grundberg, “Introduction,” in In Response to Place: Photographs from the Nature Conservancy’s Last Great Places (Boston: Bulfinch Press; Little, Brown and Company, 2001), p. 13.

8.

Karen Pearlman, Cutting Rhythms: Intuitive Film Editing (London: Routledge, 2015), p. 7.

9.

“Arts.21 | Dance Theater,” YouTube video, 5:49, posted by DW News, July 2009, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kZ8zui9x0c.

10. “Inside Dance: Akram Khan,” YouTube video, 4:06, posted by “Sadler’s Wells Theatre,” September 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juRffNv0JUg.

PART FIVE

Critical Reflections on Dance

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CHAPTER 5.1

Introduction: The Richness of Dance for Life and Thought JULIA BEAUQUEL

The preliminary remarks below present a few aspects of the way in which the practice and the art of dancing can nourish life and philosophy.1 These evocations intend to introduce the topic of dance criticism, in suggesting that this activity is complex, engaging, and varied, both for the critic and for the philosopher. First, dance is a fascinating, both natural and cultural, means of expression and transmission of emotions and universal human concerns: love, war, freedom, death, relations to gods, nature and cosmos, coexistence in society, personal and collective identity, race, gender, difference, disability, aging and so on. It is said that all children are philosophers; they almost all are dancers, too. The first moves they make, as soon as they can stand, is balancing their hips from one side to another, especially when they hear music. The first questions they ask, as soon as they can speak, are philosophical. Once an adult, a philosopher keeps seeking to understand the world with a childlike astonishment, and a dancer continues to manifest her presence into the world with a youthful energy. These similarities may be some of the reasons why so many theorists of dance are tempted to draw a parallel between dance as a thought put in movement, and philosophy as the movement of thought.2 Second, as an art, choreography has the power to cause a deep and lasting impact. Whether composed or improvised, dance works move us and make us seize—emotionally and cognitively—elements as varied as musical structures, expressive qualities, spatiotemporal relations, or human interactions and feelings. While watching a dance work, a spectator is taken in an absorbing aesthetic experience; her mirror neurons allow her to kinesthetically feel the movement she visually perceives.3 Having practiced contemporary dance at The Conservatory while studying philosophy at university, I defended the idea that dancing helps in grasping philosophical concepts as much as philosophy stimulates the reflection on dance. A dancer-philosopher regularly experiments with the relation between body and mind, intention and action, constraint and free will, spontaneity and deliberation, and receptivity and activity4—all of which are philosophical problems. Among other findings or doubts, she feels that a confident mindset does not necessarily lead to a successful execution or interpretation; she is urged to wonder why her action sometimes perfectly matches her intention and sometimes does 381

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not; she notices it is generally easier to improvise or compose when guided by rules and/ or themes rather than “from nothing”; she asks herself whether she is more relevant, creative, and authentic when acting spontaneously or deliberately; or she enjoys her capacity to perform complex movements while remaining receptive and responsive to all sorts of stimuli. In this light, dance is to the body what philosophy is to the mind; both disciplines challenge enduring distinctions and raise universal questions. Given these considerations, producing a relevant critical discourse about such a conceptually stimulating practice, that belongs to human behavior across the cultures as well as to some of the most encompassing and sophisticated productions of the art world, is an ambitious task.

A FEW DIFFICULTIES OF DANCE CRITICISM, IN PRACTICE AND THEORY According to Edwin Denby, “the critic’s function is to notice, to order, to report; or (. . .): to put down a sort of portrait of what went on.”5 Writing about dance requires and stimulates a capacity to transpose into words a visual, kinesthetic, emotional, and cognitive experience that may be very powerful while seeming at first unsayable. Indeed, describing, interpreting, and evaluating an art form that generally manifests bodily movements without any words or even—in its modern, post-modern and contemporary forms, without any representation, storyline or expressivity—seems puzzling. In some cases certainly, it may be done in a very intuitive and immediate manner, emerging from a spectator’s first impressions and emotions. But in order to identify properly the technique and style of a work, to notice the specificities of a particular execution or to make plausible hypotheses about the author’s intentions and the meaning of a dance, a critic has to use a certain range of knowledge and expertise, not only related to dance and the history of dance, but also to art, history in general, and other relevant areas. Besides, rendering a dance work of art accessible to an audience implies an artistic, aesthetic, and intellectual responsibility, not only with regard to the artist who has created it, but also to the audience that apprehends it. Indeed, a renowned critic may have a great influence on the artistic production of her time, and on art history, as she has the power either to draw attention to an artist or an artistic movement and legitimate them, or to ignore and depreciate what she thinks is devoid of interest and quality. For example, his intense interest in the emotional expression of inner feelings explains why John Martin (1893–1985), the first American major dance critic, largely contributed to develop the artistic movement and vocabulary of modern dance while advancing several dancers and choreographers’ careers, Martha Graham being the most renowned of them. In this precise case, criticism arises from a decisive aesthetic and intellectual encounter between the critic and the artists of modern dance. Thus, critics of dance take part in honoring an art form and educating its audience, making it more accessible to people who may initially find it incomprehensible. Furthermore, art criticism is a topic for philosophical inquiry. One of the main philosophical questions about criticism is probably whether or not it is useful to philosophy of art and complementary with it. Most thinkers consider that dance criticism and philosophy of dance often overlap, although not all dance criticism is philosophical. Others say criticism and philosophy are completely separate disciplines, each addressing its own matters, using its own methods, and pursuing its own goals.6 Generally, philosophers

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of dance tend to deepen the reflection on the art form, providing concepts, distinctions, and arguments that can both inspire dancers and broaden the scope of philosophical investigation. Instead of scrutinizing here the relation between criticism and philosophy, and rather than offering a categorization of different—formal and informal—types of art criticism, I suggest we start in addressing the aims and conditions of possibility of dance criticism, before analyzing the concept of interpretation as it is both a challenge for the critic and a problem for the philosopher.

IS CRITICISM AN ART OR A SCIENCE? First, let us ask some naive questions about criticism. What do we most expect when reading a critic: is it a beautiful, inspiring text presenting her singular perspective on an art work, offering a way of seeing it that differs from our singular view? Or is it an objective highlight on the essential properties of a dance, serving as a reliable guide to the appropriate aesthetic experience and a proper understanding of it? In other words, is a critic necessarily subjective, or should and can dance criticism aim at the essence or truth of a dance work? This questioning leads inevitably to a brief presentation of philosophical considerations, that are ontological and/or epistemological. Ontology questions the nature of dance as art, the plausibility of its definition, and confronts the puzzles arising from identifying dance works. Epistemology addresses the nature of aesthetic experience, as well as the way we grasp the meaning of dance. Criticism of dance, depending on the way it is done, implicitly presupposes or explicitly reveals an adhesion to some of the ontological and epistemological theories of which we now sketch the advantages and disadvantages.

CRITICISM AS AN ART A first, tempting conception both for the critic and the philosopher consists in a strong mix of essentialism, formalism, and empiricism in which dance is defined as the art of performing intensely expressive movements, gestures or actions, those movements being directly accessible to the spectator’s sensibility.7 If this was sufficient, the task of the critic would be to attend a dance and then describe what she saw and felt. This allows a perspectivist sort of criticism in which the critic tends to recount her personal aesthetic experience, or to describe her own particular perspective. Some of the properties she attributes to the work may reflect her subjective views and tastes. She portrays the work through a conceptual and theoretical framework that depends, more or less, on her specialty and main interests. As the famous critic John Berger maintained: “We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.”8 In Oscar Wilde’s lineage, the critic may herself be an artist:9 the art work she is writing on is a mere starting point for creating a second art work, the text. A critic à la Wilde, conceiving criticism as the purest form of personal expression, lets the inspiration flow and focuses more upon the refinement of her style, conveying her singular vision. She certainly does not feel obligated to depict the work extensively, but the texts she creates widen the world of art and literature. Her critical texts function as lenses through which other spectators will look at the dance world’s profusion. This is a widespread type of criticism in France, where some experts, for instance, will offer a Hitchcockian reading of photography, painting, or drawing wherever

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they perceive an atmosphere of mystery, danger, and tension, when others might find psychoanalytical, Freudian, Jungian, or Lacanian elements of analysis in any work of art. Sometimes, such a strong perspectivist or subjectivist criticism consists less in encountering and uncovering a work or an artist than in constructing the meaning, value, and even the nature or identity of an art work. Philosophically, a relativist and anti-realist assumption underlies this approach; since “tastes and colors do not discuss,” since “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” and since—in a kantian mind—we never access reality in itself but only our representations of it, one artwork can be interpreted in an infinite number of ways and give rise to numerous acceptable discourses that are neither true nor false. The critic shares her eye with the spectator who has the desire to nourish her reflection on a given art work. The role of the critic is to expand, through her writings, the scope of the audience’s culture, imagination, and aesthetic experience. Objections against the particular definition of dance as a set of expressive movements directly perceived as such are numerous, notably based on Noël Carroll and Sally Banes’ careful examination of post-modern dance works, mainly Yvonne Rainer’s inexpressive events.10 Not only does their philosophical discussion show that dance as art is not essentially expressive nor an expression of emotion, but it underlies the necessity to take into account some relevant contextual properties in order to correctly apprehend the dance works. It means that a proper appreciation from any audience, including critics, does not generally reduce to immediate sensation and pure emotion but is partly mediate and cognitive, in recognizing elements such as dance history, the artists’ intentions, the mindset of the period in which a work is created, the relevant relations of dance with other art forms, and so on.

CRITICISM AS A SCIENCE This “narrative strategy” defended by Carroll and Banes encourages a second approach, namely a contextualist view, refuting a purely empiricist and subjectivist account of dance’s aesthetic experience. Such a reflection inherits from the decisive theoretical developments of George Dickie and Arthur Danto. The former had developed the institutional theory showing that art could not be conceived separately from the numerous institutions that make it possible and visible: art schools, mécénat or patronage, museums, theaters, galleries, art markets, art journals or other media—including art criticism. As for Danto he had elaborated his famous concept of the “art world”—which was the title of his article from 1964—in proposing, among other major arguments, the one of “indiscernibility”. According to Danto, the distinction between two entities that are perceptually indiscernible—when one is, for instance, a drawing from a child, and the other, a drawing from Picasso—is only possible on the basis of cognitive and contextual aspects: namely, in this example, knowing that Picasso, contrary to the child, is not ignorant of art history and that he masters pictorial techniques, and so on. Applied to dance, this argument allows an informed spectator to distinguish a series of movements performed in ordinary life, and the very same series of pedestrian movements performed in a post-modern dance work, even though none of those gestures spontaneously look like dancing. Obviously, a critic should be able to draw such a distinction. Nevertheless, in spite of the broadening and clarifying contributions of contextualism to aesthetics, one should be prudent about insisting excessively upon the cognitive aspects of art, which might tend to neglect the sensible aspects of aesthetic experience: colors,

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sounds, movements as physical realities, shapes or forms. For this might lead to over intellectualize art, and especially dance, in which many works importantly touch sensibility, perception, and emotion. Nelson Goodman’s writings are then worth mentioning. To him, the form and content, or to put it philosophically, the intrinsic and extrinsic properties of an art work, are inseparable and thus equally important. In famously preferring the question “When Is Art?” over “What Is Art?” the author of Languages of Art (1968) and Ways of World Making (1978) replaced art criteria by symbols and aesthetic symptoms and has widened the philosophical investigation in providing some precise and rigorous analysis tools in order to understand art functioning, notably in terms of relations of reference. As regards to the understanding of dance, a series of movements functions aesthetically as an exemplification: a slow and heavy way of moving oriented toward the ground literally exemplifies weight and slowness, and metaphorically may exemplify discouragement, sadness, or boredom. A significant aspect of the goodmanian thought is that however enlightening his theoretical tools are in the purpose of understanding dance, they do not exclude emotional responses to it; the aesthetic turn initiated by Goodman comprises a philosophical urge to cease distinguishing between cognition and emotion. Since understanding a dance often arouses emotions that are appropriate to its meaning, having an emotion is frequently a reliable sign of understanding. And most importantly, emotion is itself a way of understanding. The claim that emotions are cognitive is not at all trivial from a philosophical perspective, and proves to be especially significant to the topic of this book, insofar as dance as art encompasses works that move us as much as they make us think.

SOME PHILOSOPHICAL HESITATION ABOUT INTERPRETATION The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.11 Now, what can we infer from this very brief sketch of philosophical problems in aesthetics? We may have a clearer idea about how to conceive our aesthetic and epistemological relation to dance works, and this, in a way, legitimizes the dance critic activity, who has plenty of contextual relations to deal with and can also rely on her own emotions in the task of interpreting dance. But have we answered our initial questions about the possibility of grasping the essential properties or the truth of art works? One problem is that, even though a critic intends to emphasize with caution the decisive constituents or aspects of a work—those that are essential, or say necessary to the work being that specific work, as opposed to those that are merely accidental or contingent to the work’s singularity and identity—it remains that, despite all of the objective elements she enlightens, a small doubt, and/or freedom of interpretation, generally persists. Consequently, a philosopher feels obligated to consider with care the epistemological status and role of interpretation in our lives. Here, we need to take a closer look at the notion of interpretation: is it incompatible with knowledge and truth? How could we defend the epistemological value of interpretation, and the importance of the critic’s activity? If we cannot determine absolutely what distinguishes relevant from irrelevant interpretations, we can at least provide a negative conception listing what interpretation is not: it is not a mere deciphering, decoding, or translation of the components of an art

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work. It is neither a strict matter of reasoning properly or logically demonstrating nor a purely intuitive and ineffable way of understanding. As a cognitive and aesthetic activity aiming to understand (and eventually transmit to others) the meaning of art works, interpretation may seem vague and ambiguous, and as such, face four main objections. I wish to consider some responses to these objections, in the purpose of defending an “ethics” centered on the wise interpreter, against a deontological conception that investigates the conditions, rules, norms or methods of true interpretation.

KNOWLEDGE OR UNDERSTANDING? Firstly, “openness” is a shared trait of art and interpretation. According to Umberto Eco: “A work of art (. . .) is a complete and closed form in its uniqueness as a balanced whole, while at the same time constituting an open product on account of its susceptibility to countless different interpretations which do not impinge on its unadulterable specificity.”12 An interpreter has to deal with skepticism and a taste of uncertainty in her cognitive relationship with her objects of study: How could she be sure to grasp the one and only meaning of an art work? Is her interpretation definitely good? Will it be led, later, to evolve, either in losing its convincing quality or in gaining in depth and relevance? From a philosophical point of view, the unfinished character of interpretation could be seen as an epistemological weakness: namely, an interpreter would provide no actual evidence to back her assertions up and would thus be unable to prove anything. Her precarious theories would never attain the truth. But, on the contrary, rather than a weakness, may the indefinite trait of interpretation not be a symptom of epistemic quality and value? One would only have to admit that the aim of an interpreter is not to attain knowledge in explaining a work in terms of strict causal laws. The distinction between knowing and understanding is helpful here. Art, as a human creative activity and an object of interpretation, engages rational decisions as well as spontaneous, unconscious manifestations (emotions or passions) that cannot be generalized or causally explained by natural laws but rather have to be understood— following Wilhelm Dilthey’s distinction between explanation and understanding. Interpreting, rather than achieving a definitive result such as certainty, knowledge or truth, in the framework of causal determinism, consists in seeking to improve understanding (hers and that of others) thanks to human reasons: artistic, aesthetic, semantic, intentional, and often hypothetical reasons. This process implies investigating, learning tirelessly, and the will to progress. It requires tolerance for other interpretations, openness to criticism, and an ability to question one’s own work, recognize one’s limits or incoherences, refine one’s perception, and modify, adjust, and readjust one’s judgments according to new information. It involves an advanced interest in the work of others. It takes a lively curiosity associated with humility, prudence, patience and perseverance. Interpreting consists in trying, making efforts, doing one’s best, tending toward understanding. An interpreter does not seek to know what art or an art work is; he seeks to understand and highlight how art or the art work functions. He does not play to win; he plays for the pleasure, love, and beauty of the game.

TRUTH OR CORRECTNESS? Since there is no such thing as the absolute truth of a work, there is no true (or false) interpretation. The second objection to interpretation thus addresses its pluralism,

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epistemological relativism, and contextualism. Of course, from one viewer to another and according to its historical, social, cultural, institutional context of appreciation, a work may be perceived and interpreted very differently. The heterogeneity of artistic productions as well as the partially subjective character of their appreciation leave no other choice than to admit a plurality of discourses about art. We must recognize the difficulty to make or find landmarks in the crowded jungle of interpretations, in order to escape leveling, indifference, confusion, chaos, and obscurity: should we embrace them all as equally valuable? If not, which one of two acceptable antagonistic or incompatible interpretations are we supposed to agree with, and how to identify them? The puzzling situation could be an additional reason to denigrate the epistemological status of interpretation in our cognitive lives. Nelson Goodman and Catherine Elgin have contributed to the response to this objection, thanks to their scrupulous study of languages of art and their consideration of the making and functioning of art worlds or world versions (rather than conceiving interpretation as relating to the unique world, which to them, does not exist). These philosophers provided precious tools for analyzing aesthetic functioning as well as an approach to art works in terms of degrees of correction. They write: “Talking about a world is talking about a true or correct version of the world (. . .) we’re making worlds by making correct versions.”13 All are plural: “The multiplicity of worlds, their dependence on the symbolic systems we build, the variety of the symbolic systems we build, the variety of the criteria of correction to which our constructions are submitted—that are the central theses of Ways of Worlds Making and Of Mind and Other Matters.”14 In their approach, if interpretation can certainly not be “true” in the same sense that 2+2=4 is true, it can still be correct, insofar as the symbolic systems artists build comprise some criteria of correction. Even in a constructivist framework, there are several conditions of correction, “partially or totally independent from the truth”: “Some categories can be correct or bad even though they’re neither true nor false,”15 because they are not propositions but, in dance for instance, a category of movement. This means that we cannot accept any version as equally valuable in art. In the worlds of art and of interpretation, where everything seems possible, correction introduces normativity: “We can make the versions we want to, but the making of correct versions (and thus worlds) requires some capacities and some rigor, just like making canapés and soufflés. For a version does not become correct because we declare it is.”16 That a critic contributes to construct an art work’s meaning does not entail that he can do it any old how. Saying that an interpretation is “correct” rather than true satisfies an “appropriate epistemic desiderata as applied to aesthetics.” We can doubt that interpretations have a truth value, but only correct, rigorously made interpretations would have the qualities of “being enlightening, to provide matter for reflection, to give value to what they interpret.”17

IS THE INTERPRETER RATIONAL? The Irrationality of Interpretation A related, slightly different criticism concerns both the lack of universal rules or methods of interpretation and the irreducibly subjective part of the process of interpreting as a singular, unique perspective; a way of seeing that belongs to an individual. Several interpreting processes are conceivable. One can pay attention to something as a whole, or to different parts of it, like Freud interpreting dreams. Or one could apply a philosophical

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framework to any artistic production. Whatever conduct one adopts, the attempt to define rules of interpretation is in itself necessarily insufficient, because interpreting art “requires more than a rule thanks to which, from a thing, we infer its meaning, for that would amount to, not interpreting, but decoding. Interpretation takes a form of judgment on what something means,”18 writes Roger Pouivet. Something always exceeds the rules and remains undetermined until the interpreter exerts her free judgment. This aspect makes things worse about interpretation, that now seems to arise from arbitrary decisions. Plato19 maintained that interpretation, as well as poetic creation, were not due to teknê, a human activity requiring some knowledge and skills, but to divine inspiration depriving the interpreter of reason. Like the Pythia of Delphi, an interpreter does not know what she does nor how she does it. A mere instrument of what occurs, a vehicle irrationally transmitting a message, she is not responsible for what is said through her by the divinity. Although the assimilation of art and interpretation to trance or delirium seems a bit exaggerated, it is true that interpretation is not exactly a technique involving a definite method. In fact, interpretation and aesthetic judgment could not depart from the subjective character of taste described by Kant: If someone reads me his poem or takes me to a play that in the end fails to please my taste, then he can adduce Batteux or Lessing, or even older and more famous critics of taste (. . .) I will stop my ears, listen to no reasons and arguments (. . .) My judgment (. . .) is supposed to be a judgement of taste and not of understanding or of reason.20 Meaning, like beauty for the author of the Critique of Judgment, is in a way beyond the rules. The person reading the poem can “adduce all the rules they established as proofs that his poem is beautiful (. . .); I (. . .) would rather believe that those rules of the critics are false or at least that this is not a case for their application than allow that my judgment should be determined by means of a priori grounds of proof,”21 claims the philosopher. On account of the partially subjective character of both artistic creation and aesthetic appreciation, the pitfalls in interpretation are numerous: partiality, value judgments, tastes, ideological prejudice, undue projections, unjustified attribution of a meaning, deformation of the meaning, misunderstanding, over-interpretation, gaps, extrapolation, irrelevant assumptions, misplaced contextual relations, clear misinterpretation, dishonesty or pride (if someone claims to have the best interpretation). To sum up, an interpretation is not more epistemically solid, reliable and valuable than a singular testimony.

The Rationality of the Interpreter Against this objection of interpretative subjectivism, we should consider the critic as a rational person rather than think of interpretation as an irrational process. First, the rational quest for understanding cannot be a private process. Understanding an art work does not depend on an immediate, direct, intimate and ineffable relation between “two subjectivities”; that of the artist and the interpreter. Just like art, interpretation is not an isle. As J. P. Cometti explains: “It goes with artworks like with languages acts, or even language itself, in respect of which everything that is private or considered as such fails to account for the place they take or are liable to take in a context of common understanding and of interlocution.”22 Interpretation concerns a public object (or event, performance, etc.) that itself arises from intentions, emotions, ideas, motivations, or actions that cannot be regarded as a private process of creation.

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Second, the rationality of the interpreter has to be understood in a large sense including her cognitive emotions and reliable intuitions. As previously said, Nelson Goodman defended the epistemic role of emotions in our relation to art. Emotional reactions are a sign of proper aesthetic appreciation and understanding, and greatly contribute to them. Rational interpretation of an art work is not restricted to reasoning and literal explanation of what the work is and means; it includes the appreciation of its singular way of being and signifying. Wittgenstein notes that: We would very much doubt the aesthetic discernment, and indeed the sympathetic imagination and the human connectedness, of a person who said of two poems (each of which reminded him of death) that either will do as well as the other to a bereaved friend, that they would do the same thing (. . .). Poetry does not play that kind of role in our lives.23 In other words, art involves singular ways of making, seeing, and thinking that reflect the human rational ways of being, feeling, and behaving, acting, or moving. In that respect, interpreting involves perceptive, imaginative capacities, empathy, and a sensibility to nuance that are certainly subjective (proper to a singular person), but are also rational in a sense of the concept that fits, epistemically, the domain of the aesthetics.

CONCLUSION: WRITING ABOUT DANCE Certainly, there is no absolute method for “the right interpretation” of dance; anyway, a fixed ensemble of rules would not only excessively simplify the act of interpreting, leading to ignore the specificities of each interpreted object, but it would also wipe out interpretation in depriving it of the living spirit that has to animate the quest for meaning. Nevertheless, the act of interpreting is not devoid of frames of reference, and thus, interpretive judgments are not made arbitrarily: they imply having a reason (or several reasons) to attribute a certain meaning to a dance work. Namely, an interpreter should feel constrained by its object (similarly—although in a different way, more indeterminate— to a musician who is constrained by a score): “(. . .) the (interpretative) act does not create the meaning. The latter must already, in a sense that is not easy to precise, be ‘in’ what one is interpreting.”24 Interpretation does not absolutely create its object but partly discovers it. In what sense (hardly determinable) does the meaning exist prior to interpretation? Here, we can finally stress again the advantage of an objective, contextualist approach establishing plausible relations of an art work to other existing elements: historical data or present facts, other art works and interviews from the same artist, other art forms of the same period, and so on. The meaning is neither to be found solely in the interpreted dance, nor entirely constructed by the interpreter himself, but in the contextual existing factors (including the creative and interpretative processes) to which the work may relevantly be attached. Wittgenstein has shown the significance of making connections in our perception and understanding of art works—connections between the style of a poet and that of a composer (e.g. Keller and Brahms), between one musical theme and another, between one expressive facial depiction and another, between one period of an artist’s work and another (. . .) And they again are of the kind that reductive causal explanation would systematically miss.25

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Since a dance work is always produced and known in a context, there can be no immediate or direct access to what would be its absolute truth: accessing its meaning implies the mediation of comparison and contextual relations that form a constellation of good, near or distant reasons. Of course, philosophy can be a great help by providing its concepts and arguments on fundamental topics that are always addressed, here and there, in the art world: life, love, time, body and mind, death, faith, afterlife, memory, human condition in nature and culture, animality, free will, animal ethics, social inequalities, politics, planet Earth’s destruction, genre and sexuality, and so on, but also art itself, artistic creation, reality, illusion and fiction, the questioning on artistic media, and so on. Interpreting thus consists in placing an interpreted dance in a resisting, well-structured, balanced, coherent and decipherable spiderweb by means of reasonable, stimulating, and enlightening reasons. Finding the meaning of a work amounts to perceiving the strings and ties that situate it intelligibly in the dance world. An interpretation remains partly dependent on a singular person’s unique way of seeing that results from her proper manner to select, assemble and constitute a cluster of reasons—cognitive elements that are helpful for understanding; yet it is not a total creation. The meaning is neither an absolute reality intrinsic to the work, nor the fruit of interpretation as a pure construction, ex-nihilo; it stems from a web of relations, between the work, the artist, the interpreter and the surrounding background of the work. Thus, in an objectivist (and even realistic) kind of criticism, the critic attempts to highlight what he seems to consider are justified—if not real, external, and responsedependent—properties possessed by the works of art. Such a critic, similar to a dancer or an actor serving a role, intends to serve the work in order to facilitate the observer or audience’s aesthetic experience, understanding and appreciation of it. In doing so, obviously, the writer may provide some piece of information that is not necessarily—or not explicitly—transmitted by the work itself. But this complement should not exceed reasonable limits imposed by the work—by its nature, identity, technique, style, meaning, value and significance in art history and the dance world. The discourse should not, on the one hand, overanalyze, overestimate or attribute inappropriate properties to the work—that is to say, properties that the work does not objectively possess in virtue of its proper context. And on the other hand, a well-founded criticism should not ignore or underestimate properties that are essential to the work and its optimal apprehension. In aiming to provide a faithful description, a correct interpretation and a right evaluation, the critic should relate its object of analysis to an adequate intentional, historical, artistic, cultural, institutional, social and/or political context. Her personal preferences can appear with a justification but should not spread through the whole text nor alienate the spectator’s opinion. The starting point for reflection is the work as a real “object” that can be plausibly situated in a particular context. This means that a criticism can fail or succeed depending on its ability to detect and reveal the properties that are primarily exemplified by the work. Arlene Croce shares with Edwin Denby (1903–1983) a remarkable talent to convey with words and literary imagery the moving body’s expressive qualities and the choreographic structures. In a chapter about “A forum on Dance Criticism,” Denby claimed he agreed with B. H. Haggin, from The Nation, on the “realistic view” according to which “the best critic is a man of exceptional perceptiveness who reports as clearly as possible to his reader.” Denby seems to have succeeded in this task, since Frank O’Hara wrote of him: “He sees and hears more clearly than anyone else I have ever known.”26

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NOTES 1.

I have examined them in detail in Julia Beauquel and Roger Pouivet, eds., Philosophie de la danse (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010); Julia Beauquel, Esthétique de la danse (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015); and in a chapter titled “Physical and Aesthetic Properties in Dance,” in Thinking Through Dance, eds. Jenny Bunker, Anna Pakes, and Bonnie Rowell (Binstead, UK: Dance Books, 2013).

2.

I developed this point in Julia Beauquel, Danser, une philosophie (Paris: Carnetsnord, 2018).

3.

Noël Carroll and Margaret Moore argued that through dance, and thanks to our mirror neurons, we perceive musical movements. See Carroll and Moore: “La communication kinesthésique, par la danse, avec la musique,” in Beauquel and Pouivet, Philosophie de la danse.

4.

See Beauquel, “Le mouvement et l’émotion,” in Beauquel and Pouivet, Philosophie de la danse, pp. 65–77.

5.

Edwin Denby, Dance Writings, eds. Robert Cornfield and William Mackay (London: Dance Books, 1986), p. 206.

6.

This is Sparshott’s view in A Measured Pace: Towards a Philosophical Understanding of the Arts of Dance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995). See the section devoted to dance criticism in the “Philosophy of Dance” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, written by Aili Bresnahan, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/ dance.

7.

This is, very roughly put, the approach of Monroe C. Beardsley in “What Is Going on in Dance?” Dance Research Journal, 15:1 (1982), that is shared and defended by Gregory Scott in “Banes and Carroll on Defining Dance,” Dance Research Journal, 29:1 (1997), and in “Transcending the Beardsleyans: A Reply to Carroll and Banes,” in Dance Research Journal, 31:1 (1999).

8.

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972, 1990), p. 9.

9.

See Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist (Los Angeles, CA: Green Integer, [1881] 1997).

10. See notably Sally Banes and Noël Carroll, “Working and Dancing: A Response to Monroe Beardsley’s ‘What Is Going on in a Dance?’ ”, Dance Research Journal, 15:1 (1982). 11. Berger, Ways of Seeing, p. 7. 12. Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni, intro. David Robey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989 [1962], Chapter I, Section 4 (https://monoskop.org/ images/6/66/Eco_Umberto_The_Open_Work.pdf). 13. Nelson Goodman and C. Z. Elgin, Reconceptions in Philosophy and other Arts and Sciences (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 51. 14. Ibid., 53. 15. Ibid., 52. 16. Ibid., 51. 17. Roger Pouivet, “Interprétation,” Dictionnaire d’esthétique et de philosophie de l’art (Paris: Armand Colin, 2012), p. 257. 18. Ibid. 19. Plato, Ion, 534c–d. 20. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 1790. 21. Ibid.

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22. Jean-Pierre Cometti, “Pourquoi des critiques?” Dictionnaire d’esthétique et de philosophie de l’art (Paris: Armand Colin, 2012), p. 126. 23. Garry Hagberg, “Wittgenstein’s Aesthetics,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, discussing Ludwig Wittgenstein, Leçons et conversations (Paris: Gallimard, Folio Essais, 1992 [first ed. 1971]). 24. Pouivet, “Interprétation,” p. 257. 25. Hagberg, “Wittgenstein’s Aesthetics.” 26. E Denby, Dance Writings, p. 33.

CHAPTER 5.2

Movement on Record: Poetry, Presence, Radicalism JONELLE SEITZ

The job’s impossible, and one must pray that one will be only moderately incompetent. —Clive Barnes, dance and theater critic, on dance criticism1 I would create new beats. —Masha Gessen, journalist, on reporting in the era of the Donald J. Trump presidency2 It is difficult to write about dance. It does not stand still while you do it. As a discipline, dance encompasses so broad a field of genres, cultures, performance and practice conventions, sensibilities, movement languages, and practices that even as I identify as an arts journalist specializing in dance, I sometimes cringe at the use of the word “dance” in this comprehensive way. Broad as the term is, the characteristics often shared by the arts and practices known as dance, such as abstraction, corporeality, and ephemerality, present particular challenges for those who write about them. It is not possible to write into dancing the same way it is possible to write into the textual arts—literature, theater, song—and dance does not remain consistent, as much visual art does, for us to ponder it, retreat, and arrive to it with fresh eyes again and again.3 Dance, writes critic Laura Jacobs, “will always require a leap of faith from those who watch it.”4 What proof do we have that it really happened as we recall it? Writing on dance, perhaps like writing on instrumental music, is like being confined to a sidecar: we ride alongside the work, paralleling but never converging with the work in a head-on conversation, although if we are lucky, we might get thrillingly close. But since dances are performed by people with bodies so much like ours (yet sometimes shaped by training and augmented by tools, such as the pointe shoe, so that they are unlike ours), even if the paths of the writing and the dance do not converge, sometimes the somatic experiences of the performer and the critic do. One cannot prove that one is a dancer unless one is dancing, wrote Toni Bentley, a New York City Ballet dancer, in her 1982 memoir Winter Season.5 When the dancer is no longer a dancer, or when the dance ceases to exist, the journalist is faced with a task less like writing about a painting or book and more like describing a face, or an expression of it, from memory. Challenging as writing about such elusiveness may be, it is the reason why covering dance matters. Dance works are often, paradoxically, both highly abstract and inherently corporeal, which both makes them especially important to discuss in writing and allows their audiences special potential for visceral experiences. Within the context of the early 393

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days of Donald J. Trump’s presidency in the United States and the politics of resistance and refusal that have bloomed around it, this chapter presents a call for dance critics in the media—and by “dance critics” I mean anyone who can and will write analytically and reflectively about dance6—to show up, and it aims to support them in doing so. Given the threat to eliminate the National Endowment of the Arts by a president who reportedly “does not read books,”7 any work of art, and the attention given it, can be seen as a refusal of the current administration and its politics. This is not to say that refusing a situation, an administration, or policies is the intention of every work of art, of course; it is only to say that at the current time, the president and his administration have placed art in the position of Other. In this strange context, despite forces that threaten traditional arts journalism and the motivation and ability of writers, arts journalists, including dance critics, are obligated to report these refusals—the refusals to disappear or to succumb to irrelevancy—to all sorts of readers (who may include experts, practitioners, enthusiasts, and neophytes among the general, interested public, not to mention the uninterested public). The first half of this chapter summarizes the evolving contexts of arts journalism and of public interest in dance in which dance critics work. The second half of the chapter, in the spirit of galvanizing arts journalists to cover dance, as well as to connect scholarly writers with journalistic and creative methods that may be useful in their own research and writing, presents three lenses as tools for recognizing the work of dance artists in context and for perceiving and engaging with dance works. As a “voice outside academia,” I draw largely on my own experiences as a critic, as well as from the perspectives of other writers, artists, and thinkers.

DANCE CRITICISM WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF A CHANGING ARTS JOURNALISM ECOSYSTEM Outside of academia, dance criticism—especially American dance criticism outside of New York City—has little framework, a short history, and few constituents. Even Joan Acocella, the New Yorker’s dance critic since 1998, admits, “Dance is the least respected of all the arts.”8 During the dance boom of the 1970s, dance criticism also enjoyed a heyday. What was happening in dance—particularly New York dance, thanks to highprofile defections of famous Soviet dancers, cheap rents, a thriving downtown scene, and two high-profile ballet companies with sexy, headline-making stars capable of plenty of drama—was underpinned by the popular culture’s intrigue with bodily and sexual freedom,9 resulting in news that people wanted to read about. But in the 1980s, interest in dance began to fizzle, and some historians say dance never recovered from the simultaneous blows of AIDS, rising rents, and the recession.10 As a ballet student growing up in the 1980s and 1990s—one of many in a generation introduced to dance via our parents’ 1970s sensibilities—I subscribed to Dance Magazine but did not pay much attention to the reviews, and I thought critic Clive Barnes’ back-page column, which ran in the magazine from 1989 until his death in 2008, was impossibly boring. To me, dance was visual, youthful, immediate, and physical, and I could not see how a black-and-white page of an old man’s text could have anything to do with it. As a young professional dancer, in the late 1990s and into the 2000s, my few experiences with arts journalists did little to convince me, or my fellow dancers, that their views were relevant. I worked in companies between the coasts, and none of the few critics who wrote about us were

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specialists in dance or ballet. They got things wrong, they did not speak our language or write beautifully, and their criticisms and praise were not insightful or useful to us. In the early-to-mid-2000s, as I simultaneously quit dancing, became an English major, learned to explicate poetry, and came to appreciate criticism, Dance Magazine relegated its reviews section to its website, and it ceased publishing reviews altogether in 2013. The newspaper, as an institution, began its decline, making dance criticism seem like a futile pursuit even as it revealed itself to me as an important vocation. Outside of New York, generalist arts writers have always been responsible for most newspaper dance reviews, but over the last decade, the number of these arts writers employed by major news institutions has declined; in 2007 and 2008 alone, an estimated 25 percent of staff arts journalism jobs were eliminated,11 and layoffs and buyouts continue. (The trend hit home when at the end of 2016, the daily Austin-American Statesman eliminated the job of its only staff arts writer.) As I landed in Austin, Texas, and became acquainted with its postmodern and experimental dance scene, I began to seek opportunities to develop my writing and connect with critics in other cities, but the two revered national enrichment programs for working arts journalists, the National Summit on Arts Journalism and the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program, shut down, in 2009 and 2013. The number of nonacademic full-time dance critics in the United States can now be counted on one hand, and almost all of them are in New York. Anecdotally, based on conversations I have had with young writers, college students, and my Austin colleagues, it seems that many young writers and artists are uninterested in criticism, do not understand its purposes, and do not read it. Those who are interested in trying to write dance criticism find it too time consuming or reach burnout quickly. While it certainly feels, at times, like the sky is falling on arts journalism, and specifically on dance criticism, some writers, like dance critic and historian Marcia Segal, argue that dance criticism has always been an underdog pursuit and continues to persist.12 The demise of the newspaper critic and his (historically, most newspaper arts critics have been male) authority has given way to a less formal arts-journalism ecosystem that includes blogs, niche publications, embedded-critic programs, and conversations built into arts organizations, festivals, and events.13 While this ecosystem has its problems—most troubling among them, perhaps, an economic disincentive to writing critically and to challenging one’s perspective by attending performances outside one’s comfort zone14—it also has benefits: there are more people of color and women writing about the arts in America than in previous decades, and some argue that dance in particular, having been poorly served by traditional arts journalism, benefits from conversations that begin outside of major news organizations and even within the arts organizations themselves.15 Nevertheless, of the journalists at major news organizations who remain in a position to cover dance—those who can choose to do so as part of the cultural coverage under their purview—few are specialists in it. Most arts writers who specialize in dance are freelancers whose assignments are not plentiful or lucrative enough to keep them from needing day jobs, and the distractions and conflicting responsibilities that come with them.16

DANCE CRITICISM WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF SERIOUS CULTURAL CRITICISM The news of what dance artists are doing may be difficult to cover, but responding to art in writing validates the artwork as worthy of discussion. In the 1970s, “virtuoso” critics17

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legitimized dance as a serious art form just as Susan Sontag and Pauline Kael, in the 1960s, legitimized film. If dance works are newsworthy,18 it is the obligation of the journalist on the dance beat to write about what happened, to commit that work to the public record. As the United States endures the regressive and damaging Trump presidency and struggles to understand and ameliorate the circumstances of the election and its broader cultural and political context, reporting the news of the arts is as important as ever. In an environment in which “truth” is build-your-own and conventions of discourse and reason are broken, and in which journalism and academia have found themselves inadequate at projecting our arrival here, we must look to art—especially the non-narrative arts—to try to understand what has happened, who we are, where we have come from, and where and how we want to go. Dance’s convergence of corporeality and abstraction, through which kinetic empathy can be a conduit for catharsis and synthesis, makes dance, specifically, poised for relevance to our tasks of reflection, understanding, and activism. If we maintain that dance is a serious art form and that art is valuable to our culture and quality of life, we have to show up for it. Given this context, arts journalists should feel free—should feel an urgency—to innovate permissionlessly to find the conceptual and practical places where their readers and dance works converge. This call implores critics to transcend rave-or-pan review culture19 and to resist disincentives to writing critically. As artists invent, critics must also invent, and thus they need tools and concepts to create new approaches, contextualizations, and ways of determining when and why they are needed. Omnivores are what we need to be, in our efforts toward exploring and reporting on dance with perception and language that is potent and like the dance work itself: perhaps associative, empathetic, stark, relatable, vibrant, contemporary, dynamic, or authentic. Urgent. Mortal. Transcendent. Alive.

HOW TO SHOW UP: RECOGNITIONS In an effort to support journalists in showing up for dance works in ways that make sense in their local contexts and for their readers, I offer, merely as examples, three interrelated— and sometimes progressive—ways of recognizing dance works and responding to them in writing. These recognitions surfaced for me gradually over the last decade, as I made attempts at substantial, relevant, temporal discussion of the post-modern, contemporary, and performance work that was newsworthy to readers of the Austin Chronicle, an independently published alternative weekly with a combined print and online readership of over half a million.20 Nevertheless, these recognitions now also invigorate my writing on classical dances and other forms—ballet, modern dance, tap, bharata natyam, mixedability contemporary dance, and even social dances—in the Chronicle as well in more specialized arts publications like the dance-focused online magazine Fjord Review. I take to heart New Yorker visual art critic Peter Schjeldahl’s position that all art that exists today is contemporary art, as we are experiencing it in a contemporary context.21 Such a perspective requires that we approach all art with contemporary practices, questions, and awareness.

Recognition: Dances are Poems It is no accident that many writers on dance have also been writers of or writers on poetry.22 As dance refuses pedestrianism, the placement of people, habitual movement,

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and conventions of storytelling, poetry refuses prose, placement of words, and the conventions of writing and storytelling. Like poetry, dance sometimes refuses narrative, completeness, linearity; it sometimes makes use of blank space, silence, juxtaposition, and association. In dance, just like in poetry, combinations of elements (words, images, movements, shapes, sounds, colors, rhythms, light) are mixed up in a solution of our engagement with those elements. Special contexts (a stage, a warehouse, a site in the community, a volume, a page) and juxtapositions may render familiar concepts and rituals as stark or absurd, allowing us to contemplate them from new angles. Dance works, like poems, invite us to engage in the alchemies of aesthetic association and synthesis and may disclose subtleties too fragile to be represented in narrative. Regardless of a choreographer’s or dancer’s intention, audiences engage in making associations and syntheses among a work’s elements, as well as between those elements and their own experiences. These associations congeal, via prior knowledge and human empathy, into an experience of the work. In a McSweeney’s interview, poet Rebecca Lindenberg explains how association in poetry works: Poetry allows us to hold many related tangential notions in very close orbit around each other at the same time. The “unsayable” thing at the center of the poem becomes visible to the poet and reader in the same way that dark matter becomes visible to the astrophysicist. You can’t see it, but by measure of its effect on the visible, it can become so precise a silhouette you can almost know it.23 Of course, in poems, the notions in orbit around the “ ‘unsayable’ thing” are represented in written language already—they are pre-textualized. In dance, on the other hand, the “tangential notions” could be feelings that result from a hip twitch, a cast shadow, a gaze, a tension, a color, a look shot across the stage, a sound, a shape, a rhythm, the way a garment falls toward the body, a still body on the floor, an awareness, a readiness, a gasp, a bead of sweat, something we have seen a million times before, something we have never seen. As dance writers, in order to report on what the dance work is, we must try to report on not just the work’s elements and happenings but also on the dark matter, while being careful not to obscure it with overbearing narrative. And, of course, while the poem stays on the page for us to contemplate as long as we need to, the dance goes away. But it does not do so without a trace. When we write about dance, we have two tasks. The first is to write about what the dance was: where it happened, who made it happen, what happened, what it looked like, who the performers were, what the lighting and costumes were like, what sounds were there and what relationship was apparent between those sounds and the movement, and so on. But we also need to ask: What did the work do?24 What did the work cause to happen? What happened to us? How did that time pass? Perhaps there was a collective sigh, or a ghost of a somatic sensation. The sound of a train infiltrating the silence of the theater. Gentleness and hardness, sinew and expanse. Color saturation and glare. An impossible reach. Your brain quietly solving a problem in a dark corner of your mind.

Recognition: Dance is the Practice of Presence It’s like right now, I am bringing all of my experience from the past. And wherever I’m going next [is] into at least some kind of open awareness of that. —Heloise Gold, dancer-choreographer, on presence25

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Poetic associations work because of our prior knowledge and empathy, which are key to the second recognition: dance may be understood as the practice of presence. The philosopher Alva Noë has explained that dance is an organized human activity26 and that choreography is, therefore, a study of this human activity. In post-modern work, in which the elements of music, lighting, community, and spectacle may be distorted or not present, Noë’s conceptualization, along with the practices and philosophies of some post-modern and sensation-based artists (such as Deborah Hay, Julie Nathanielsz, Heloise Gold, and Ohad Naharin), offers permission to consider dance as a practice of being human, of physical and somatic presence, with which audiences can empathize. In a 2014 interview I conducted with dancer-choreographers Julie Nathanielsz and Heloise Gold, part of which was published in an Austin Chronicle feature about the shared performance they were working toward, the artists attempted to define “presence” and their relationship to it in their practice, choreography, and performance: Heloise Gold: One of the reasons I love to perform is that there’s a heightened state of awareness when we’re performing. It’s like this sort of alert receptivity and sense of everything all at once, deeply engaged in and through the body, with the space, connecting to the other performers and to the audience—there’s so much to pay attention to. Austin Chronicle: Is that something that comes out of T’ai Chi for you? HG: Yes, and just sort of a generic movement meditation awareness. Listening. I’m so influenced by the Deep Listening work by Pauline Oliveros.27 The body as a vehicle for listening, truly. (pause) Wakefulness. AC: (to Nathanielsz) How does that compare to your daily practice? Julie Nathanielsz: (long pause) I find this question a little mind-boggling. So, I guess my question about presence is, where is the choreography occurring? As dancers, we include everything. We bring everything with us. But we cannot focus on all the layers all the time. Something is in the foreground, most is just running in the background. So yeah, I do have something. It’s nothing like Heloise and T’ai Chi. I feel a lot less disciplined. (laughs)28 As expert practitioners attuned to “the layers” of experience and “the history” of the present, these artists—and many others—present, in their work, research and information that is valuable to audiences. As “listeners” trained to accept movements that are generated outside the norm—forgotten and hidden aspects of humanness—these artists allow us entry into perspectives that can help us contextualize and root out human experiences. This practice and performance of somatic and physical presence is an antidote to experiences of living that are largely digitally mediated. Like demonstration and protest, in which people embody resistance and concern by taking up space, in dance-as-practiceof-presence, dancers, as Gold and Nathanielsz indicate, embody context and are, themselves, sites of awareness and inquiry.

Recognition: Dance is a Radical Practice I don’t think you can actually be human if you don’t know you have a body. You can’t have compassion, which is a physical experience at its root. —Jorie Graham, poet29

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Recognizing dance as a practice of presence permits us to include our common experience of living in, with, and through a body when considering a dance work. Physical and somatic empathy may be seen as the basis of social justice and equality activism (you feel pain, your body is like my body, and therefore I feel the pain, too, and want to mitigate it for both of us). Further, dance artists refuse all sorts of conventions and norms: verbal, rhetorical, expressive, movement. Because of this empathy that is inherent in watching other humans dance, and because of dance artists’ refusals in their practices and their works, we can view dance as a radical practice—in the sense that it refuses the limitations and prescriptions of the status quo as well as in the sense that it is initiated at the root of humanity, the body–mind experience of a sentient being. Beyond the automatic Other and refusal status granted by the current presidential administration, dance works often resist and refuse ways of moving, ways of communicating, and ways of thinking. Contexts of dance works are simultaneously fixed in the choreography, design, and sound; embodied within the performers themselves; and shape-shifting with audiences and time. Of course, resistance and refusal are not the whole stories of any work of art. Identifying what a work resists or refuses does not identify what the work is or does; nor does identifying something it is or does necessarily identify what it resists or refuses. But resistance and refusal is one inquisitive perch, particularly relevant at the time of this writing, from which to observe the work of dance artists. This lens is useful for reporting the news of what art is doing and what we are doing with it. In his 1964 One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, the philosopher and sociologist Herbert Marcuse argued that Western society had already become “one-dimensional”: citizens were placated and repressed by a goodenough quality of life that was supported by technology, availability of goods, and media.30 Acts to subvert this one-dimensional system, given its reach and its tendency to fold in that which refuses it, were extremely difficult to achieve.31 Today’s calls to guard against normalization of the political rhetoric and actions of the dominant right echo Marcuse’s warnings against the “desublimation” of art,32 through which aesthetic experiences become subsumed into commercial and social experiences. But dance, as an art that resists digitization and excerption,33 is poised to resist desublimation, and we may understand some dance works as refusals of a managed culture that seems to tell us how we may arrange ourselves, move our bodies, and respond to, react to, and express sensations and emotions. Art, writes Marcuse, “can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refute and refuse the established order.”34 In the universe of dance, they are and they do. There are plentiful perspicuous examples of radical performance in post-modern and contemporary dance, with a wide range of refusals of conventions—both the conventions of society and those of art itself. For example, there is the French choreographer Jerôme Bèl’s Veronique Doisneau (2004), in which a 42-year-old Paris Opera Ballet sujet (a lower-rank soloist) on the verge of retirement performed a lecture-demonstration alone on the vast stage of the Palais Garnier, speaking directly to the audience about her life and career and humming her own accompaniment. There is the Uruguayan dancerchoreographer Luciana Achugar’s Otro Teatro (2014), a complete undoing, over the course of three hours, of hierarchies of the body, of the theater, of somatic and sensual experiences, and of accepted modes of performing those experiences. There is Austinbased aerial choreographer Sally Jacques’s Requiem (2006), which transformed the skeleton of a downtown high rise, abandoned mid-construction by a technology company

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at the start of the Great Recession, into a six-story-tall altar. There is Matthew Bourne’s beautiful all-male Swan Lake (1995), there is Mark Morris’ campy, hard-hitting The Hard Nut (1991), and there is Nijinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913)—and those are just some of the most well-known examples. Every day, in theaters, warehouses, and clubs; on the streets; and in homes and basements, artists create figurative explosions of aspects of modern life that we perhaps take for granted. When contextualized historically, even classical dance can be seen as refusal itself. Classical dancers resist the idea that history lives only in books. They refuse the idea that classical and twentieth-century dances are no longer relevant and instead dedicate their lives to imbuing old choreography and practices with fresh life. In ballet, the pointe shoe, theatrical wires and harnesses, and the basic elements of training, like ballon and turnout, were inventions that resisted the structure of the body and the ways in which physical laws act upon it. (Some aerial dance is now continuing this particular trajectory of refusal.) In bharata natyam, the south Indian dance form rooted in ancient performance arts and that survived colonization despite British efforts to ban it, the dancer is known as a patra, a pot or vessel, seasoned by training to embody the art for a time and steward it into the next generation. But there also are quieter, subtler refusals at work. It is worth keeping in mind that dance artists of many forms meticulously train, body and mind, to accept movement impulses that fall outside the norms of the dominant culture and perform primal, artificial, or unexplored movements and expressions.

CONCLUSION: SHOW UP, SHOW DOWN For a year or two, I experienced a pervasive feeling that art spaces, artists, and landscapes in Austin, a city that has experienced rapid growth and development over the last decade, were just on the verge of disappearance. Though I was not alone in this feeling and much of it was based in fact, it was my own experience, and it was a backdrop for everything I wrote. Anyone else, especially someone new to the community, would have had a completely different perspective on every dance work I saw. Although I am a believer in the free press and in journalism, I am an unbeliever in objectivity. In fact, it is not possible to answer the question What did the work do? Rather, we must make do with What did the work do for me? As Oscar Wilde’s Gilbert notes in “The Critic as Artist,” “the highest criticism” is “the record of one’s own soul.”35 If we agree with Wilde that criticism is a creative practice, putting our writing out there in response is the most appropriate way that we can show up for artists. In our writing, we share (and empathize with) the work of grappling with the dark matter. Art is a function of a living, burbling human society, and artists’ refusals of the established and the good-enough, not to mention inequities, injustices, and corruption, must continually disrupt the machine. It is poetry that disrupts thinking rutted in the grammatical and linear (or worse, mired in the flawed and fallacied), and it is the common experience of our presence that beckons our empathy and allows for the catharsis that can inspire and motivate us to continue. Dance criticism is a messy job with little perceived value (and even less economic value), and it is often misunderstood by audiences, readers, editors, and even artists themselves. The recognitions I have identified are capricious; they may overlap, shift, appear, and disappear, taking us down a seemingly fruitful path until it dead-ends, asking us to make quantum leaps and test the limits of written logic or even the limits of our editors and readers. But when we fail to show up, when we repudiate the arts journalist’s obligation to cover the news of our beat, we miss, for example, what tap dance, rooted in the dances

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of enslaved people of African descent and Irish immigrants, can tell us about ourselves and our national history. We miss recording the stories of those who hammer their heels into the floor, creating the deafening rolls of flamenco and folklorico, rather than hammering out bullets. We lose to history the work of so many artists, especially those between the major coasts. We risk that future Googling of them will retrieve nothing. We relegate ballet, other classical dances, and modern to relics, façades of themselves, by failing to truly see them in the context of our twenty-first century experiences. How does a journalist explain the unexplainable? In my experience, the first several minutes of a work, whether in the pious darkness of the theater or among the ambient sounds, lights, and weather of a site-specific work, are spent talking myself out of panic. How will I explain in writing what is happening? What does the artist want us to understand? What are the other audience members seeing? What if the dark matter does not surface? What am I missing by thinking so much about these fears? In these moments, I almost always feel unqualified to write about the work. But I have learned that, often, if I allow these thoughts to pass, the work will make its own case for recognition and show me how to see it. How I record the facts of what happens then is my own success or failure.

AFTERWORD One cannot prove that one is a dancer unless one is dancing—if one cannot prove that one is a writer unless one is writing, I now bear the burden. My last review for the Austin Chronicle36 was published September 26, 2018, months after I had relinquished writing for the Fjord Review and elsewhere. Two days before, I had shared my decision with my editor at the Chronicle, Robert Faires. Although I was sure of my decision, I struggled with sorrow as we swatted away mosquitoes in the gravel yard of a bar, run as a sustaining side-enterprise by a theater company, on the near East side of Austin, and talked about the lack of sustainability, and yet, the dire importance, of both our roles. As I relayed in my newsletter37—I began sending periodic emailed letters, collectively called The Gym, to colleagues, artists, and friends early this year—it’s not that I do not feel arts journalism is not important. It is just that I cannot fit this important work into my life as a side gig anymore, not now. Over the past two years, economic pressures piled up enough that I needed to increase my supplemental income from a part-time university job to a full-time position in the more lucrative technology sector. On top of this, things at home—my children, my marriage, and our home—need different kinds of attention than they did a decade ago. For a year or more, I attended to dance writing, my most important and rewarding work, in just a few frazzled-for hours each weekend. Eventually, in August 2018, this mode became devastating, and I struggled to maintain composure as I wrote a review of The Enchilada Western: Texas Deep Fried,38 a folklorico tanztheater ballet by Austin’s forty-year-old Chicano-run Aztlan Dance Company.39 The company was founded in 1974 by the mother of the current director and owns its own space (very rare in Austin, and real estate costs continuously push arts organizations out of their rentals), a tiny black box with an exterior mural depicting a snake and a folklorico dancer, her eyes closed toward its bared fangs, her red skirt raised around her. Over the past decade, I had seen and reviewed a handful of Aztlan’s inventive multi-genre performances, written a profile of one of its dancers, and searched archives for reviews and articles that came before my time. In August, I had so much to say, having logged a decade as a dance writer, an Aztlan audience member, and as an Austinite, but I had also

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missed so much, and I had so much more to learn. I felt an enormous responsibility to serve the readers, the paper, the company, the dance and various intertwined cultural communities, and yet none of it was my job, my real job. This incongruence was too painful, so I bowed out. There is grief to sit with, on the long commutes to my day job, when someone invites me to a performance, when dancers fill up my Instagram feed. I try to wrap my head around what I did wrong, to have found a true vocation that was impossible to sustain. But there is other work to be done and other attention to be paid, enough to fill up the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, everything I wrote in 2016–2017 is true.

NOTES 1.

Barnes was the dance and theater critic for the New York Times (1965–1977) and the New York Post (1978–2008) and a contributor to other publications. William Grimes, “Clive Barnes, Who Raised Stakes in Theatre and Dance Criticism, Dies at 81,” New York Times, November 19, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/arts/dance/20barnes.html?hp.

2.

Quoted in Eric Umansky, “How Journalists Need to Begin Imagining the Unimanginable,” ProPublica, November 23, 2016, https://www.propublica.org/podcast/item/how-journalistsneed-to-begin-imagining-the-unimaginable.

3.

Viewing videos of dance intended to be experienced live has long been regarded as an inferior, almost pointless substitute. Dances made specifically for film and in collaboration with filmmakers are a discrete genre. (Covid-19 may have changed all this.)

4.

Laura Jacobs, “Dancing the Body Electric,” City Journal, Winter 2011, http://www. city-journal.org/html/dancing-body-electric-13358.html.

5.

Toni Bentley, Winter Season (New York: Random House), p. 64.

6.

Arts journalism encompasses criticism, and I use “criticism,” “review,” and “arts writing” interchangeably. While some writers distinguish between “reviews” and “criticism” (see, for example, Andy Horwitz, “Talking about Dance Criticism and the Changing World,” Culturebot, July 4, 2012, http://www.culturebot.org/2012/07/13868/talking-about-dancecriticism-and-the-changing-world/), I do not recognize this distinction in my work or in much of the work I admire. In the publications I write for, responses to works are called “reviews,” and in writing them I am practicing criticism.

7.

Maggie Haberman, “A Homebody Finds the Ultimate Home Office,” New York Times, January 25, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/us/politics/president-trump-whitehouse.html?_r=0.

8.

Quoted in Madison Mainwaring, “The Death of the American Dance Critic,” Atlantic, August 6, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/08/americandance-critic/399908/.

9.

See Laura Jacobs, “Dancing the Body Electric,” and Caroline Sutton Clark, this volume.

10. Jacobs, “Dancing the Body Electric.” See also Arlene Croce, “Our Dancers in the Nineties,” in her Writing in the Dark, Dancing in the New Yorker (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), pp. 720–731. 11. David Hadju, “Condition Critical: Can Arts Critics Survive the Poison Pill of Consumerism?” Columbia Journalism Review, January/February 2009, http://archives.cjr. org/essay/condition_critical.php. 12. See Marcia B. Segal, “Is Dance Criticism Dead?” Arts Fuse, September 1, 2015, http:// artsfuse.org/133377/fuse-commentary-is-dance-criticism-dead/.

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13. See Jonelle Seitz, “The Talk,” Fjord Review, July 8, 2016, https://www.fjordreview.com/ the-talk/. 14. John Moore, “Critics’ Love for Sale: Why Journalism’s Demise Is Bad for Theater,” Howlround, April 3, 2013, http://howlround.com/critics%E2%80%99-love-for-sale-whyjournalism%E2%80%99s-demise-is-bad-for-theater. See also Hajdu, “Condition Critical,” http://www.cjr.org/essay/condition_critical.php. 15. Hajdu, “Condition Critical”; Andy Horwitz, “Talking about Dance Criticism in a Changing World,” Culturebot, July 4, 2012, http://www.culturebot.org/2012/07/13868/talking-aboutdance-criticism-and-the-changing-world/; Segal, “Is Dance Criticism Dead?” 16. In smaller locales, freelancers frequently also confront conflicts of interest, due to a day job or other affiliation with an arts organization or to the small circles in which members of arts communities live and work. 17. Madison Mainwaring quotes Holly Brubach, who wrote about dance for the New York Times and the Atlantic in the 1970s and 1980s: “We admired Arlene Croce [dance critic for the New Yorker, 1973–1998] because she elevated criticism to the level of art, with reviews that were virtuoso writing.” Mainwaring, “The Death of the American Dance Critic.” 18. Journalistic criteria for newsworthiness often include timeliness, significance, proximity, prominence, human interest, and novelty. 19. “The problem with Liking,” writes freelance journalist and literary critic Jacob Silverman in Slate, “is that it’s a critical dead-end, a conversation nonstarter.” Liking normalizes the false dilemma of Liking or not Liking, leaving critics and readers mired in circular reasoning, the dreaded echo-chamber. Jacob Silverman, “Against Enthusiasm: The Epidemic of Niceness in Online Book Culture,” Slate, August 4, 2012, http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2012/ 08/writers_and_readers_on_twitter_and_tumblr_we_need_more_criticism_less_liking_.html. 20. “Readership,” Austin Chronicle Online Media Kit, 2017, http://auschron.wpengine.com/. 21. Peter Schjeldahl and Jarrett Earnest, “In Conversation: Peter Schjeldahl with Jarrett Earnest,” Brooklyn Rail, July 13, 2015, http://www.brooklynrail.org/2015/07/art/peterschjeldahl-with-jarrett-earnest. 22. These writers include Théophile Gautier, Edwin Denby, Lightsey Darst, Claudia La Rocco, and myself. 23. Rebecca Lindenberg, “A McSweeney’s Books Q&A with Rebecca Lindenberg, Author of ‘Love, an Index,’” McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, April 23, 2013, https://www.mcsweeneys. net/articles/a-mcsweeneys-books-qa-with-rebecca-lindenberg-author-of-love-an-index. 24. The importance of this question (in comparison with “What was the work?” or “What did the work look like?”) was illuminated for me in separate conversations with the dancerchoreographer Heloise Gold and the dance scholar Caroline Sutton Clark. Schjeldahl offers another angle of inquiry: “Looking at art is like, ‘Here are the answers. What were the questions?’ ” Schjeldahl and Earnest, “In Conversation.” 25. Quoted in Jonelle Seitz, “Active Listening,” Austin Chronicle, May 30, 2014, http://www. austinchronicle.com/arts/2014-05-30/active-listening/. 26. Alva Noë, “See Me if You Can!,” performative lecture presented at Fusebox Festival, Blanton Museum of Art, April 9, 2014. Other “human activities,” Noë notes, include breastfeeding and conversation. See Alva Noë, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (New York: Hill and Wang, 2015). 27. See, for example, Kerry O’Brien, “Listening as Activism: The ‘Sonic Meditations’ of Pauline Oliveros,” New Yorker, December 9, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culturedesk/listening-as-activism-the-sonic-meditations-of-pauline-oliveros. 28. Seitz, “Active Listening.”

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29. Jorie Graham and Thomas Gardner, “The Art of Poetry No. 85,” Paris Review 165 (Spring 2003), http://www.joriegraham.com/interview_gardner. Perhaps my appropriation of this statement, in which Graham is referring to the physicality in her poetry, overcorrects for views of dance as esoteric, ethereal, precious, and abstract. This overcorrection is mine, not Graham’s. 30. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, second edition. (Boston: Beacon, 1991). 31. Ibid., 63–65. 32. Ibid., 56–58. 33. For example, my Tumblr and Instagram feeds are full of photographs and video clips of dancers and dancing, but these are not dances. 34. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 62. 35. Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” in Intentions (Project Gutenberg, 2014), p. 175, http:// www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/887. 36. Jonelle Seitz, “Review: Belonging: Part One,” Austin Chronicle, September 28, 2018, https://www.austinchronicle.com/arts/2018-09-28/belonging-part-one/. 37. Jonelle Seitz, “The Gym No 4: Gigs,” The Gym, September 28, 2018, https://tinyletter. com/thegym/letters/the-gym-no-4-gigs. 38. Jonelle Seitz, “Review: Enchilada Western: Texas Deep Fried,” Austin Chronicle, August 20, 2018, https://www.austinchronicle.com/arts/2018-08-31/the-enchilada-western-texas-deepfried/. 39. “History,” Aztlan Dance, n.d., http://www.aztlandance.com/about/history.html.

CHAPTER 5.3

Structure, Form, and Function of Dance Criticism and the Ways it Relates Audiences to Works of Art 1

HENRIQUE ROCHELLE 2

AN OVERVIEW OF DANCE CRITICISM Dance criticism plays a role in how audiences and readers are capable of discussing and appreciating dance works. As a form of written account and consideration of a piece, it expands spectatorship beyond the moment of performance. It works as a tool for prolonging the aesthetic experience that is created by a work of art, and yet it has seen its influence declining, as well as the space reserved for it in the media. Here, I present some aspects that organize how criticism operates the mediation it can create, in order to further the understanding of how it can collaborate on both spectatorship and philosophical and theoretical approaches to dance phenomena. The discussion of art from a theoretical perspective and with the establishment of judgments on works and artists traces back to classical treatises on poetics and aesthetics. However, the idea of a modern critic is more directly associated with the ascension of the bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century, which determined a new access to works of art for audiences that did not possess the reflexive tools and analytical experience that supported that milieu’s discussions. At the time of this ascension emerged the idea of the critic as an individual responsible for the mediation between these new audiences and the cultural goods to which they gain access. It is not an action of explaining, even though there is something pedagogical3 in this style of criticism, but a matter of building bridges of mediation that might allow different audiences to get in contact with the works by having the comfort of an understanding aid—leaving that group with the intellectual/aesthetic/ personal satisfaction of being able to access such art as individuals with the necessary cultural capital. Dance criticism is popularized alongside the romantic movement, therefore rooted in propositions that defend the subjectiveness of individual experience toward the world, as well as personalizing art.4 It arises in a society that sees aesthetic experience as a fundamental means of understanding and expressing the world. Criticism, as a form of mediation between art and spectators, offers the possibility of participation: the individual, 405

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with the knowledge gathered from artistic experience, and amplified by texts of criticism, is more fully capable of being a part of this social experiencing of the world. It is the need that society felt for this participation that explains the popularization of the figure of the dance critic. From this popularization, we see critics writing in ways associated with creative or artistic writing, frequently presenting their texts in poetic forms that value the writer not only as a theoretician, but as an aesthetic creator. In literature,5 this moment evinces that critical writing accompanies new styles of creative writing, suggesting a shift from the rule-systems of academic classicism to investment in the critic’s artistic individuality. This artistically inspired society, intensely concerned with its artistic creations, produced multiple forms of reflections on what was read, seen, and watched in places of social gathering and critical engagement, as an exercise of civility. Critique becomes an extension of the discussions originated in those circles of dance performance and artistic presentation. The desire for such social discussion is intense, as demonstrated by the increasing presence in newspapers, magazines, and journals of essays and critiques of multiple critical approaches, yet there is one element in common among them: they show their authors’ intentions of prolonging aesthetic experience beyond the moments of live performance, visitation, or the first-hand reading of art works. Criticism is then understood not only as an activity of mediation, but also as an activity that is intentionally aesthetic, providing audiences with comparative reflections, while offering the people unable to attend the events the possibility of approximation to them. As the performing arts became favored events in the nineteenth century, setting the standards for popular taste, the criticism about them was taken as a noteworthy means for cultural production. However, starting with the modernist vanguard and their artistic production that evades traditionally understood concepts and pre-established modes of relating audiences and art works, this cultural exclusivity was questioned. In the new aesthetic situations, individual experience of spectatorship was overvalued, and new forms of rupturing traditions were initiated, creating a vacuum for criticism, as the critics lost their reference to a discourse that functioned as a mode of communication directly linked to the works of art and to the audience. Criticism passed into a domain of secondary language and metalanguage—in the sense that it became an autonomous structure, although not fully independent. I can surmise this as a move toward disinterested critique, in that even if criticism is seen as more independent, it is still criticism of something, and that something is art—a primary language, and a language-object, as proposed by Barthes.6 I also think from that moment on, and under the intense and persistent development of the press—and, more currently, digital media, continuously shortening the distance between information and audiences—criticism starts to lose its impact as a space of dialogue, being limited in its relevance, legitimacy, and impact.7 Much contemporary critique takes a position that is not directed to prolonging the aesthetic experience that comes from close contact with art, and does not further people’s engagement on occasions when aesthetic experiences might occur, thus limiting its overall agency and impact as a tool for developing meaningful reflection and discourse from the audience. This is the moment when editors begin to prefer informing audiences of that which one should not miss, rather than of that which they might have already missed.8 In such circumstances, criticism, previously associated with a notion of interpretation that comes after the work (reviewing), begins to articulate as an announcement that comes before the work is presented (previewing), and the critic is used to instigate and gather audiences, rather than

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to discuss what is presented. This marketing positioning is demanded by audiences and readers and is part of a whole that maintains the cycle of production and consumption of works of art.9 Nevertheless, when it deals with an art that has so few occasions of presentation, such as dance, this structure, tied together with the diminishing space to discuss dance in the media, fosters an impoverishment in creating criticism, and consequently, marginalizes the work of the critic and the work’s aesthetic and mediative potential. Escaping the informational logic of newspapers, and being fed by the academic specialization of thought on artistic production, criticism as an exercise of mediation is perceived by specialized journals. On other media, there is also a growing online publishing of criticism, which allows the authors the space they might not have in general forms of print publishing. This new online activity, its proliferation and the growing interest for it reveal that, even if it seems that criticism has ended a cycle, another one is taking its first steps, with the publishing of texts that hang on an understanding of criticism that is not necessarily sequential: it does not necessarily represent a continuity, but it identifies a rekindled desire for this kind of reflection. Taking on board this historicity of the aesthetics of critique I would like to now turn to thinking about how interpretive, engaging criticism remains noteworthy, with consideration of its means of presentation and its possible definitions. Criticism is not unitary or consolidated. It has ample and varied theoretic reflection, supported by diverse and distinct systems of meaning attribution and methodological organization, thus resulting in a text production that is also of varied orders. In this multiplicity, it seems criticism is either not defined, or its definitions are not concrete, and often it is hard to determine what makes a text an accepted form of criticism, what turns an individual into a critic, to whom are the critiques addressed, and what purposes do these forms of criticism serve.10 These are the questions that are discussed here, from three different approaches of possible definitions of dance criticism. These approaches are built-up with reference to the thoughts of critics and theoreticians that have discussed criticism (and especially dance criticism), such as Michel Bernard, Selma Jeanne Cohen, Nigel Farndale, Edélcio Mostaço, Walter Sorrell, Diana Theodores Taplin, and especially Sally Banes. From their considerations, among others that will be referenced throughout this chapter, I suggest three different possible understandings of dance criticism, in terms of its form, structure, and function, asking whether it is possible to notice guiding principles, established historically, and how those might mediate the interpretation of readers to works of art. The question here is meta-critical, thus reflecting on how critiques are presented and how they can be specifically useful to dance, by presenting three possible understandings of dance criticism that will lead us to a perception of criticism as a means of relating audiences, readers, and dance pieces. In this mediation, I will argue that critics do not work as translators—they are not trying to transfer the experience of a dance performance to written form. Rather, they are interpreters, working with an investigation that is philological in its nature: they are investigating the phenomenon of dance spectatorship (and thereby considering dance as a language), and presenting it using a set of codes from a different language (written language), one that is already familiar to the reader.11 In this manner critics can offer insight into one language by making use of another. In this chapter, accompanying the three possible perspectives and definitions of dance criticism that will be presented, the characteristics of the critic’s investigation and presentation of dance spectatorship will be discussed, and from them, hopefully, the sense of the function and pertinence of criticism as applied to dance will be elucidated on some level.

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CRITICISM DEFINED AS A TEXT GENRE As a para-literary genre, modern criticism is close to essay writing in that it is largely characterized by the modernist proclivity toward elements of rationalism, and the prioritization of thematic analysis.12 This understanding of criticism is directly linked to its justification from the consideration of its media and publishing format, since the places where critiques are published have their own propositions on what should be presented, as well as a specific kind of readership, demanding certain texts to tend to their needs and expectations of the publication. From this, we can see that the popularization of dance critiques in newspapers in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries answered to certain aspects of the cultural life led by its readers, who would attend the performances and want opinions and points of view about them. Thus, newspapers were popularized as the main place for critiques, and their most noted vehicle, in a form of writing that “depends, more than any other, on the conditions of its exercise and the means of communication it deploys.”13 It is necessary, then, to verify the characteristics of a text of criticism: What manner of writing determines a text as a critique, and not a narrative, poem, or any other text genre? This primary association to the textual format seems to be a given by the common use and understanding of criticism, even by specialists. Multiple references are made to the relationship established by the critic with the reader through the text, which is not a problem in itself, but does reveal that the characteristics of criticism as a means of discussing art are profoundly tied to the limits of written texts. Working with multiple styles of criticism, Sally Banes points out the four operations that a critic can develop while writing critiques: description, interpretation, contextualization, and evaluation.14 Banes’ four operations broadly identify what is expected of a text of criticism, and help us understand where, in the texts, authors are offering each type of knowledge that comes from each of the operations. Description is the act of telling what the dance was. It ranges from basic information on the place and time of presentation, and the people involved as well as their roles in the production, to the more elaborate matters of what was presented, what kind of movement was developed, what sort of dance that was, what was the narrative or theme—if there was a narrative or a theme—and so on. Description serves two purposes. For the people who attended the performance, it helps them retrieve their memories of it, being able to follow the critic’s opinions putting them in relation to the concreteness of the work being discussed. For the people who did not attend the performance, description helps them create a mental image of it, thus being able—on some level—to join the debate on the presentation. Also, as an outcome of this second purpose, description, just as criticism as a whole, helps the preservation of dance presentations in written form, thus serving as a historiographic tool. Interpretation is the operation that goes into the meaning of what was presented. While interpreting, the critic offers the reader possible keys for the reading and understanding of that dance. This is not to say the critics determine what should be understood of a piece, but they can suggest a possible understanding, often associated to the elements that were described and the critic’s experience in the field. The critic’s experience also comes into play with contextualization—the operation of discussing the elements that surround the production and presentation of the piece being critiqued. Contextualization helps the reader place the piece in a broader dance scene, one that the reader might not follow, thus allowing for a deeper understanding of how it is done, and why it was done in that specific way. It also leads to the fourth operation, evaluation, with

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the discussion and attribution of value to that piece, in itself, but also in relation to other dances, other groups, other individuals, and so on. Banes specifies the multiple possibilities of mixing each of these operations that can be more or less prominent in each text of each author. With these four operations, she manages to encompass the critical activity she discusses, in its role of completing “the work in the reader’s understanding,” while unfolding “the work in an extended time and space after the performance” thus providing an understanding of what is expected of criticism and its formative and relevant aspect to the cultural life of the society where it is inserted.15 As indicated, the relevance of criticism among dance culture is not something continuous, nor something guaranteed, and the same goes for the interest it provokes. Therefore, the possibility of defining criticism by the formal characteristic of its media of presentation implies that its relevance can be seen as a direct reflection on the audience of its vehicle—in this case, mostly newspapers. However, before the digital era, when newspapers were the main source of information, criticism assumed an archival role that is fundamental to cultural historiography, since its written record allowed dance works to be taken further in time, even when they are no longer presented by their creators.16 The archival dynamics of criticism production places the critic as a dance historian and philosopher responsible for determining the elements of works that are to be preserved for posterity.17 At this point, a new understanding of criticism emerges, not necessarily restricted to its form and its media, but directly linked to the figure of the critic, the one that is deemed responsible for maintaining the structure demanded by this form of criticism.

CRITICISM DEFINED BY THE FIGURE OF THE CRITIC When criticism is defined by the role of its writer, there is a suggestion of an immediate— and tautologic—link: the critic is the one who writes critiques, and a critique is that which is written by a critic. This does not provide a clear definition or understanding of what criticism is, but its place as common sense shows the relevance of this role of the critic. This relevance can be questioned regarding what makes someone a critic (other than an authorization) by a certain media vehicle, for the publication of their critiques. But we should keep in mind that—especially in newspaper criticism—the critiques are linked to marketing phenomena, being used to attract and to direct audiences to works of art. This use of criticism is related to the increase of works produced, and therefore, of the cultural supply available to audiences. Regarding their multiple options, audiences began to rely on the opinions presented in a critique not to prolong their aesthetic experience of a performance, but as a preview of its merits. The audience, intellectually primed for what they will watch, has a kind of nourishment for what they expect to gain from attending the presentations,18 thus being confident that they will be pleased by that which they choose to watch. This is the utmost degree of Banes’ operation of evaluation with the critic transforming the critique into a guide of what is more or less deserving of being watched, thus reaffirming the systems of validation and the power of approval by a critic of an artistic production. This power is put in the hands of this figure, almost mythical, of a holder of outstanding aesthetic, cultural and social knowledge, which places the critique in a domain of an apparent authority, omniscient and aware of a bigger truth.19 This prescriptive20 or normative21 aspect of criticism can have an opposite effect, perverting its

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situation when establishing a relation where the critic does not write about the works to communicate and to be in a dialogue with the audiences, but with the intention of alerting audiences about the pieces and their value, thus breaking the activity of mediation. This is not a defense of absence of evaluation in critiques, nor a suggestion that critics should be neutral and impartial. Facing an artistic product, judging and evaluating are spontaneous tendencies of human behavior, both common and irreprehensible.22 Criticism is built as a personal exercise that takes part in artistic discourses and as such it depends on individuality—on personal perception and experience;23 to ask critics to deny their own personal experience of the works they critique would be to ask them the impossible, the renouncing of their humanity.24 Even more, critics have inclinations, preferences, and preconceptions, and asking them to abandon such aesthetic grounds would be to recast criticism as merely serving the aims of a structural publicity machine.25 Nevertheless, it is expected, even when the expectations for judgment are met, that critics might be able to establish criteria beyond personal taste while exercising the evaluation of works. The problem with this expectation for parameters comes because critics do not have a common background in study and in formation. They are not taught to be critics according to specific guidelines, they become critics, and carry different experiences and knowledge. The lack of specificity of this field, and especially regarding dance criticism,26 accounts for a small amount of procedures anchored in the appreciation of dance and the production of reflexive texts about this art. In the 1960s, after the United States saw an enlarged production of dance critiques, confronting the works of post-modern dance that shook previously established artistic circuits, Selma Jeanne Cohen discussed the possibility of establishing dance critics inside universities. Reporting on the Work Conference on Dance Criticism (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, December 1969), Cohen lists the topics that were approached on that occasion: how much critics must know of history, styles, techniques, and choreographic methods; whether they should be present at rehearsals and should question choreographers; how much they can trust their spontaneous reaction to a performance; how much of their work is educational; whether guiding choreographers is part of their role, or if they should write as concerned for the audience, and through it offer the choreographers an atmosphere more receptive for their works; the way critics deal with new artistic forms that do not have established parameters; how they can prepare for a career; and how they can find jobs.27 In Brazil, other discussions on the preparation of performing arts critics can be found, but the aspect of advice is predominant, with authors defending that critics should be affectively committed to art, and mentioning that study and theoretical bases come second to that commitment.28 These multiple and uncertain approaches to how a critic is prepared are a strong suggestion that criticism cannot be defined completely in relation to the person who writes it. Even more so, it escapes not only the writer, but also its media: although we might be conventionally used to finding criticism in newspapers, it can be seen as a function of reacting to art, directly related to spectatorship and appreciation of art works.29 This observation indicates that criticism could be more sensibly defined, not by its structure, but by its capacities and objectives.

CRITICISM DEFINED BY ITS FUNCTIONS We have discussed two possibilities for criticism, grouped into classes that accommodate its formal and structural aspects, and have explored the ways these possible definitions highlight the relations of subjectivity in dance spectatorship. Whether one chooses to

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privilege one of these aspects or the other, there is a feature that emerges from the many attempts to define criticism: its purpose as an act of mediation. In this regard, performing arts criticism is directly associated with the objects it discusses, since both the art works and the critiques constantly expect public performance. Locked inside the artist’s mind, or stored in rehearsal rooms, the dance piece is a potency, it is latent and permanently about to be discovered; but, it is not yet a work of art and neither is it an actualization of artistic communication. Just the same, while kept in the critics’ mind, their thoughts do not actually constitute critiques, residing as opinions, that will only have the possibility of being fully realized as critiques when published, when they are put before an audience and fulfill the role of mediation. This activity is not necessarily an explanation of the piece; its main value is in working with the audience’s perceptive horizon. Sustaining the specific appreciation of an individual, there is the phenomenon of spectatorship, in its collective nature.30 Thus, what a critique presents is not actually a dialogue with what could be suggested as the truth of a work—and therein lies the difficulty of purely evaluative critiques, which risk placing the individual as something bigger than the collective. Often linked to the judgment of what is good or beautiful, the individual’s perception is connected to a fiction, one invented by artists, demonstrating the limits of their arbitrariness. This fiction is only as functional as its fulfillment allows for its understanding and appreciation.31 It is therefore, and especially when we deal with codes and communicational systems, unknown by the audiences (whether owing to the limited experience of a certain audience, or caused by the innovative aspect of certain works, or even caused by a difficulty that might be inherent to the language that is presented onstage). In these instances the critic works as a kind of interpreter,32 but not exactly as a translator. So there is no premise that the scenic phenomenon might be translatable, nor any notion of an equivalence to the performed work in verbal language. To critique is more of a philological work, and the critic works as an investigator of that language (in this case, dance). This investigator presents the work from a set of codes from another language (in this example, words), one that is already commonly known by the reader. With no immediate association between the codes—since these are not equivalent systems—critics become a part of the artistic creative process, while recognizing the existence of something that needs to be interpreted, even when the system of interpretation that should be used is not previously explicit. Thus, just as much as the artist originates conventions of creation, critics also postulate conventions of interpretation. Their texts are not about presenting senses and meanings, but keys of interpretation to a possible reading or understanding:33 a reading that is personal, but also associated with the collective phenomenon of spectatorship. The subjectivity of the individual writing the critique and that of the individual reading it are associated in this collective possibility. The readings / interpretations are diverse, but they are always linked by the phenomenon of spectatorship as something collective. Furthermore, any possible reading and interpretations regarding a work share the same object, that piece, which establishes the interpretive limits of any reading: the work presented is not just any work, it is that specific work, whose reality and materiality cannot be escaped.

ALTERITY, CRITICISM, AUDIENCES, AND MEDIATION Dance communication happens through an act of mediation:34 the one that is organized by the body of the dance artists. These bodies onstage build the bridge between the ideas

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of the work and the understandings that work might generate. These understandings, and therefore the functioning of these bridges, are the materials critics work with. Critics take into account both the dance piece itself and the audience watching it.35 They discuss spectatorship but from a perspective of relative individuality: personal opinions exist, but they are not fully independent, as they refer to something specific and concrete, which shares the same cultural context of both writer and audience. This perspective allows for the consideration of both the potencies of a piece, and of how these potencies are achieved by the performance. Reviews present judgments, which are often disliked by artists as well as some readers,36 but this preconception of judgment as something negative is only truly valid in cases of critiques where the individuality and point of view of the critic are exacerbated, as personal taste becomes a form of measuring and evaluating dance. Here, subjectivity is not about individuality, but about alterity, understood as the separation between the phenomenon perceived and its means of perception that are “distinct, foreign to the corporeality of an individual.”37 For that reason, at the moment of a wider discussion, they demand not only the generosity and responsibility of the individual interpreters, but also some arbitration. This arbitration, as the mediation put in place by the critic, allows for the expansion of the audience’s aesthetic experience beyond the moment when they are present in a theater or attending a performance. The critic, who is also an audience member, but a specialized one, who has had the privilege of continuously following the works of the art form he or she discusses, is capable of building bridges between the work and its contexts (historic, artistic, aesthetic, of a career, of a style, and so on), thus acting as a historiographical agent38—a fundamental feature that is part of the understanding of a piece and of its value in relation to the context where it is inserted. The prominent characteristic of exteriority in theater—as a performing art, that is done by someone to someone else, in the presence of this other person—is a fundamental feature of the indirect dialogue that connects readers and critics.39 Furthermore, this is the feature that links audiences and works of art through the activity of criticism, when it is understood not from its means of production, nor by the authoritarian and outdated (even if ever so present) figure of the critic, but as an exercise of mediation that is fulfilled by a specialist. In this understanding, criticism informs and develops audiences, values art and takes a part in its aesthetic and discursive process, as an individual creation that is directed to the public space.

NOTES 1.

This was previously published in Portuguese as an article in Revista Sala Preta, 16:2 (2016) which is available online at: http://revistas.usp.br/salapreta.

2.

This research was financed by FAPESP (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo), for a Doctorate in Brazil and for a Research Internship in France.

3.

Julie Van Camp, “Anti-Geneticism and Critical Practice in Dance,” Dance Research Journal 13:1 (1980): 30.

4.

Newton Cunha, Dicionário SESC: a linguagem da cultura (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2003), p. 187.

5.

Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism (London: Verso, 1984), p. 41.

6.

Roland Barthes, Crítica e verdade (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1970), p. 160.

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7.

Patrice Pavis, Dicionário de teatro (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2011), p. 81.

8.

Marcia B. Siegel, “Virtual Criticism and the Dance of Death,” TDR (1988–) 40:2 (1996): 67.

9.

Walter Sorell, “To be a Critic,” Dance Scope 1:1 (1965): 4.

10. Henrique Rochelle, “Communication through Dance Writings,” in Stefan Aquilina and Malaika Sarco-Thomas, Interdisciplinarity in the Performing Arts: Contemporary Perspectives (Msida: Malta University Press, 2018), p. 206. 11. Henrique Rochelle, “Rethinking Dance Theory Through Semiotics,” Studies About Languages, 26 (2015): 121. 12. Cunha, Dicionário SESC, p. 187. 13. Pavis, Dicionário de teatro, p. 81. 14. Sally Banes, Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), p. 25. 15. Ibid. 16. Henrique Rochelle, “Dance Archives Tracing History,” in Cássia Navas, Isabelle Launay, and Henrique Rochelle, eds., Dança, História, Ensino, Pesquisa / Danse, Histoire, Formation, Recherche (Fortaleza: Indústria da Dança, 2017), pp. 308–309. 17. Edrie Ferdun, “Of Criticism and Dance” Dance Magazine (1967): 51; Arnold Haskell, “On Criticism,” Dancing Times, 50:596 (1960): 410. 18. Edélcio Mostaço, Soma e Sub-tração (São Paulo: Edusp, 2015), p. 17. 19. Gay Morris, “The Institutes for Dance Criticism and the Emergence of an Alternative Critical Writing,” Dance Research Journal 38:1–2 (2006): 91. 20. Deborah Jowitt, “The Critical Burden of History,” Dance Research Journal 32:1 (2000): 132. 21. Nigel Farndale, “Against Dance Criticism,” Dance Theatre Journal 8:3 (1990): 18. 22. Michel Bernard, Généalogie du jugement artistique: suivi de Considérations intempestives sur les dérives actuelles de quelques arts (Paris: Beauchesne, 2011), p. 18. 23. Eberto Garcia Abreu, “Crítica ou críticos: um dilema do teatro,” Sala Preta 12:2 (2012): 114. 24. Sorell, “To be a Critic,” p. 5. 25. Joan Acocella, “How Critics Work,” Dance Ink 3:2 (1992): 8. 26. Farndale, “Against Dance Criticism,” p. 17. 27. Selma Jeanne Cohen, “The Critic Prepares,” Dance Magazine (1970): 24. 28. Barbara Heliodora, Jefferson del Rios, and Sábato Magaldi, A função da crítica (São Paulo: Giostri, 2014), pp. 25, 90. 29. Bernard, Généalogie du jugement artistique, p. 41; Diana Theodores Taplin, ed., New Directions in Dance (Oxford: Pergamon, 1979), p. 77. 30. Mostaço, Soma e Sub-tração, p. 48. 31. Brent Sorensen, “Comments Concerning the Artist in a Peircean Perspective,” Semiotica 174 (2009): 370. 32. Sorell, “To be a Critic,” p. 3. 33. Abreu, “Crítica ou críticos: um dilema do teatro,” p. 115. 34. Cássia Navas, “Permanente e efêmero: questões e um exemplo da recepção em dança,” in Alba Pedreira Vieira, ed., Fruição em Dança (Visconde do Rio Branco: Suprema, 2013), p. 8.

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35. Ferdun, “Of Criticism and Dance,” p. 51. 36. Heliodora, Rios, and Magaldi, A função da crítica, p. 26. 37. Bernard, Généalogie du jugement artistique, p. 36. 38. Eagleton, The function of Criticism, p. 12; Rochelle, “Dance Archives Tracing History,” pp. 308–309. 39. Mostaço, Soma e Sub-tração, p. 276.

CHAPTER 5.4

Dancing-with: A Theoretical Method for Poetic Social Justice JOSHUA M. HALL

This chapter outlines a new theoretical method, which I call “dancing-with,” and which emerged in the process of writing my dissertation and the book manuscript that followed it.1 Defined formally, a given theorist X can be said to “dance-with” with a second theorist Y insofar as X “choreographs” an interpretation of Y which is both true to Y and Y’s historical communities, and also meaningful and actionable for X and X’s historical communities. (And “actionable” here means “facilitating social justice.”) In pursuit of social justice, the method of dancing-with involves both (1) a creative torsion of Y’s thought (particularly in the direction of unconscious, embodied and political factors at work in Y’s texts), and also (2) a resultant, sympathetic torsion of X’s thought toward Y. In other words, X and Y “meet in the middle,” like two dancers walking onto the dance floor, to explore the promise of a flourishing artistic partnership. As the method of dancing-with is thus modeled on an ideal comportment for improvisational social dance (such as the contemporary Latin dance called “salsa”), I envision the end-goal of dancingwith as what I call “poetic social justice.” More precisely, I mean the “poetic justice” of two theorists’ mutually empowering of each other for maximal social good.

INTRODUCTION: A METAPHOR FROM SALSA DANCING Put in terms of the salsa dance tradition which inspired “dancing-with,” imagine if you will two strangers dancing for the first time. Dancer X approaches Dancer Y, gesturing toward the dance floor, to which gesture Y perhaps responds acceptingly with a smiling nod. Imagine further, and here I blend the hypothetical with the real (for reasons that will become clear shortly), that Dancer X is embodied roughly like me (that is, my height, weight, gender, race, etc.), and that Dancer Y is five feet, two inches tall, just over one hundred pounds, and is of Indian descent. For X to have a satisfying and effective dance with Y, one issue that they must both negotiate is their height difference, especially when he is performing what are called “leads” in the discourse of salsa—which are movements by the leader which both indicate and initiate other sequences of dance movements for both partners. Additionally, both X and Y must be open to a wide range of possibilities regarding each other’s background and circumstances. For example, for all X knows, Y 415

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might be attending her first ever Latin dance, or she might be a professional instructor with fifteen years’ experience. For another example, there is always the possibility (especially given the diverse and multicultural makeup of many salsa dance communities), that X and Y do not share a common verbal language in which they are equally fluent. In fact, the only safe assumptions which X and Y can afford to make are that (a) given that they have embarked upon a dance together, both will do their best to make that dance a positive experience, if only for the sake of their own individual satisfaction, and (b) each partner will make at least some movements which are unfamiliar and challenging to the other. This method of dancing-with might easily be misunderstood as a mere restatement of a kind of post-modern strategy, sometimes referred to by its critics as “creative misinterpretation,” and often associated with philosophical figures such as Jacques Derrida. The difference between the average post-modern theory and my method of dancing-with, however, is that dancing-with includes a specific, value-laden comportment. More specifically, dancing-with presupposes a kind of virtue requirement, inspired in part by the Stoic philosophers’ insistence that their art of living requires a pedagogical foundation of virtue training before the formal instruction in philosophy. To wit, dancing-with involves a comportment of trust and sympathy with one’s theoretical partners, grounded in the strategic positing by theorist X that theorist Y shares X’s goal of social justice. This virtue requirement in dancing-with also derives, in part, from its being modeled on the world of social Latin dance. For anyone unfamiliar with the present-day Latin dance scene in the U.S.—tragically, but I hope merely temporarily—amateur dancers gather together, around once or twice per week at a bar, restaurant, or nightclub, in an event which formally lasts an average of four hours. Speaking as someone who has belonged to many of these social Latin dance communities, over the course of fifteen years of social dance, the goal of these communities is to make these weekly dances flourish as much as possible, where “flourishing” includes (but is not limited to) large crowds, new people, a friendly atmosphere, and skillful and aesthetically-satisfying dance encounters. In order to achieve this flourishing, the dancer, on average, must give each of her/his partners the benefit of the doubt, and act as if those partners are similarly motivated to achieve this flourishing. The stakes for the average dancer, moreover, are particularly high, in that each dancer is vulnerable—in body and mind—to each partner, who could cause physical injury, discomfort, and feelings of rejection and unworthiness, etc.

THE FOUR VIRTUES AND POSITINGS OF DANCING-WITH Returning to dancing-with, its virtue requirement could be further analyzed into four requisite virtues, which are (in turn) derived from four strategic positings on the part of dancing-with. I will outline those positings shortly, but first I will summarize the four virtues. To start, dancing-with requires moral imagination, in order for X to imaginatively occupy Y’s embodied position, so as to sympathize with Y’s ends. Second, dancing-with requires courage, in order for X to read Y against the grain of present-day conventions and fads. Third, dancing-with requires trust, in order for X to believe that Y is willing and able to revise her/his views in light of new truths and obstacles. And finally, dancing-with requires flexibility, in order for X to remain open to the possibility that X, X’s communities, and even X’s entire era, might be in the wrong. On now to the aforementioned four guidelines, which I term “strategic positings.” Before I name them, however, a brief word on what I mean by the word “positings.” It is

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intended to recall the first of the four Moves of my new Figuration philosophy of dance, called positure, which I define as “the poetically creative, politically situated, dynamic imitation of stasis.” To unpack this definition in short order, positure is (a) “poetically creative” because of its kinship to poetry via its character of positing reality, (b) “politically situated” because all movement takes place within a community with which it is reciprocally determining, and (c) “a dynamic imitation of stasis” because both philosophical accounts of the world and also the world itself are constant activities that only appear to be a static collection of stable things or objects. For dance, the main implication of this concept of positure is that any living animal— including one’s dance partners—even when not obviously moving, is always covertly moving, at least internally, in the process of maintaining the appearance of rest. And for philosophy, the main implication of this concept of positure is that anything taken to be completely static and secure is, in actuality, a dynamic process, albeit a process that gives the appearance of immobility. Finally, for the four positings of dancing-with, the implication of this concept of positure is that the positings do not have a timeless, universal, purely factual basis or justification. Instead, there are merely, and selfconsciously on my part, strategic, artistically creative, and politically engaged theoretical constructs (to be modified and discarded as needed). Turning to the four positings themselves, they are as follows: (1) social justice is prioritized highly enough by great theorists that they torsion their expressions of truth (which requires the virtue of moral imagination); (2) social justice-promotion beyond the theorists’ original contexts requires creative interpreters (which requires the virtue of courage); (3) said interpretations could be affirmed by great theorists if they occupied interpreters’ bodied positions (which requires the virtue of trust); and (4) said engagement requires interpreters be open to great theorists’ un-torsioned truths (which requires the virtue of flexibility). Another way to think of these four positings of dancing-with, is as virtues which theorist X posits in theorist Y, and which correspond to the virtues required of X. In short, in dancing-with, X posits that Y is sufficiently (1) just to prioritize social justice, (2) imaginatively farsighted to see the need for creative reinterpretation, (3) flexible to adapt theory to new information and challenges, and (4) wise to see things that are difficult to affirm in X’s era. I will now paraphrase these positings of dancing-with in terms of the dance that this methods. In connection to positing (1), great social dancers are concerned about not just performing at their best and satisfying their preferences as individual dancers, but also about helping create the most flourishing dance scene possible. In connection to positing (2), new dancers at a scene, in order to partner effectively with the most experienced dancers, often need intermediary dancers to help them adjust to the more experienced dancers’ styles. In connection to (3), the more skillful dancers are typically appreciative of the intermediary dancers’ efforts. And in connection to (4), in this process, the intermediary dancers often become more sympathetic to the most experienced dancers’ styles. Returning to the more theoretical register of dancing-with, I will now attempt to flesh out its four positings. Regarding the first positing, it affirms that great theorists, in their writings, are more interested in the well-being and flourishing of their communities and the world than in expressing the truth as they see it in the most direct and unvarnished form. As illuminated by thinkers such as Leo Strauss and Walter Ong, every writer is torn between those two conflicting tendencies (namely, toward truth and politicized persuasion). Thus, one should not assume that any writer has given in entirely to the truth impulse, as no claim is made in a sociopolitical vacuum.

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Building off this first point, the second positing affirms the following: great theorists realize that, in order to remain relevant and efficacious into their futures, they will have to rely on later interpreters, and that these interpreters will be forced to see the great theorists’ work against heterogeneous backgrounds, thus requiring novel interpretations in order for the original texts to remain meaningful against those heterogeneous backgrounds. In support of this second positing, the third positing affirms that, if the great theorists were living in their interpreters’ milieux, the great theorists would be willing to revise their texts in line with more recent developments in the arts, sciences, politics, and religion. And the final positing affirms that interpreters of great theorists will possess the flexibility and open-mindedness necessary to accept that, in the course of following the first three guidelines, interpreters will be exposed to truths that defy present-day biases. And as a consequence, it affirms that interpreters will be prepared to let the great theorists change their minds and inflect their own thinking and writing.

DANCING WITH FOUR TYPES OF PHILOSOPHERS Having thus given a brief sketch of this method of dancing-with, I will now attempt to flesh it out in greater detail in one particular way in which I have deployed it thus far, in the eleven articles bearing the subtitle, “Dancing with [a given philosopher].” More specifically, these articles interpret the treatments of dance offered by Kierkegaard,2 Hegel,3 Schopenhauer,4 Marcus Aurelius,5 Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva,6 Ralph Ellison,7 Frantz Fanon,8 Arthur Danto,9 Nelson Goodman,10 and the Chilean cognitive scientist Francisco Varela.11 In each case, the approach is fairly straightforward: I consider the major works of the author currently available in translation, and search for both (a) explicit references to literal and metaphorical dance, and also (b) ideas and writing that are suggestive or implicative of dance (without explicitly naming dance). These eleven theorists also fall pretty naturally, as the reader may have noticed, into four distinct groupings, as follows: nineteenth-century German Idealists, twentiethcentury U.S. analytic aestheticians, twentieth-century Africana race theorists, and contemporary French feminists. Moreover, corresponding to these four types are four kinds of torsion that occur between myself (as theorist X) and a given thinker (as theorist Y). I will now briefly articulate these four types of torsion. First, regarding the German Idealists, in the course of writing those articles, I became more sympathetic to their Christianity-inflected Idealist metaphysics. This sympathy resulted from my realization that their dialectic approach could—in theory/principle— incorporate more worldly and bodily phenomenon. In particular, the dialectic can incorporate non-straight-white-cismale bodies, as evidenced by the representations— albeit interstitial and marginalized—of those bodies in their work. Second, regarding the analytic aestheticians, in the course of writing, I became more sympathetic to their creation of sub-concepts through analysis, or clear and precise definitions. This resulted from my realization that their multiplications and subdivisions of concepts could be extended even further, all the way to the logical extreme of the promiscuous plurality that one finds in the world. Third, regarding the race theorists, I became more sympathetic to their criticisms of dance as facilitative of racial injustice, in the process of discovering lacunae for dance in our post-Jim Crow context of multipronged resistance. And fourth, regarding the French feminists, I developed sympathy for their criticisms of dance as a kind of halfway measure that can undermine full bodily and verbal intimacy,

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especially between women and men. This resulted from my realizing that more mindful and progressive dance practices can function as regulative ideals for gendered social justice. To summarize these four points more concisely and abstractly, with all four groups of theorists, the method of dancing-with enabled me to see greater value and flexibility in other philosophical methods (namely, dialectic, conceptual analysis, anti-racist, and feminist critiques). And on the other side, I am hopeful that my interpretations of these groups-representatives has shown that there is more in their work that can be utilized by both dance theorists and social justice activists. That is, all can be persuaded to dance, though they initially appear shy or wary. Or, to translate this point into more concrete dancing terms, the life of theorizing is like a social dance, at which a maximal diversity of styles might ideally be represented. But this diversity would challenge each dancer to get comfortable with, and at least minimally competent in, as many of these styles as possible. And in the latter process, each dancer would—albeit subtly, and primarily unconsciously—be shaping her/his own style in the direction of those diverse other dancers who are learning that style by dancing with her/him. For my part, I am committed to discursively dancing with as many different theoretical styles as possible, and I continue to find both (a) those styles more amenable to mine than I initially expect, and also (b) myself increasingly flexible and adaptive in transmitting those styles to others. To clarify, however, my encounter is different with each theorist, and it was different with each of the four types of theorist I discussed previously. The general pattern is similar to something I have consistently observed over the last fifteen years of social dancing, at various cities in the U.S. and overseas. To wit, some dancers tend to be undervalued and marginalized due to their embodiment, social position, background, etc. This is especially true of darker-skinned black women, and of phenotypically Native American people of Mexican descent. And other dancers tend to walk in cocky, often attempting to colonize the dance space on behalf of their own values and styles. This is especially true of upper class white Anglo ballroom dance instructors. Applying this to the method of dancing-with, some theorists require greater sympathetic attention, and others must be challenged and engaged more forcefully (lest one’s own movements disappear completely in their often rigid patterns). To use the examples of my four groups of theorists, the race and feminist theorists tend to be undervalued in philosophy, and the German Idealists and analytic philosophers of art tend toward arrogance and colonization.

DANCING WITH ELEVEN PHILOSOPHERS I will now discuss the specific torsions that I made—both within my own thinking, and of the theorists for which these articles are named. I begin with the following table:

Mutual Torsions in my Articles Subtitled “Dancing With . . .” (torsions in my own thinking) German Idealists Kierkegaard < Christianity can be this-worldly Hegel < the dialectic is dance-like Schopenhauer Aurelius

< Platonic/Vedanta idealism dances < ethics, politics, and religion fuse

(torsions of the great theorists) > dance is central to Christianity > the dialectic must include women of color > music is inadequate without dance > certain community dances are virtuous

(continued).

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(torsions in my own thinking)

(torsions of the great theorists)

Anglo-American philosophers of art Danto < defining dance can be productive Goodman Varela

> in art, bodies must trump interpretations < self-exemplification is meaningful > dance notation per se is inadequate < cognitive science is redeemable > cognitive science must study dance

Africana critical race theorists Ellison < democracy is improvisatory Fanon

< dance can exacerbate racism

French feminist theorists Irigaray < dance can undermine intimacy Kristeva

< gesture can redeem analysis

> jazz is inadequately theorized without dance > denigrating dance can also exacerbate racism > dance can help heterosexual relations improve > psychoanalysis must integrate dance

In the centre column of the graph I have listed one specific idea about which I changed my mind during the course of my dance with each of the theorists. And in the right-hand column are the ideas about which (I am claiming) the great theorists would ideally have thought differently, and about which (I am positing) they would change their own minds if they could occupy a greater range of the embodied and social positions that are represented by their current readership. I will now summarize the texts in which I retroactively detected the above torsions. Beginning with a group that I will call the Idealists (even though this is a slight stretch for Kierkegaard, and counterintuitive for Aurelius). In the Kierkegaard article, my torsion toward him is that Christianity can be this-worldly, and his torsion toward me is that dance is central to Christianity. More specifically, my dance with Kierkegaard is grounded in the fact that dance is intimately connected to both Kierkegaard’s personal and writing life. After exploring the limited secondary literature on dance in Kierkegaard, notable exceptions to which include the work of M. Jamie Ferreira12 and Edward F. Mooney,13 it analyzes the hidden dancing dimensions of the leap and the “shadow-dance” [Schattenspiel], and offers new interpretations of the two most dance-rich pseudonymous works, namely Repetition and Postscript, concluding that the religious for Kierkegaard is a lighthearted dance, moving as a comedic actor through the world-as-theater. My second Idealist is Hegel, toward whom I bend by conceding that the dialectic is dance-like, and who appears to bend toward me in implying that the dialectic must include women of color. More specifically, my dance with Hegel takes its point of departure from an overview of Hegel’s dozen or so mentions of dance in his Lectures on Aesthetics, focusing on the tension between Hegel’s denigration of dance as an “imperfect art” and his characterization of dance as a potential threat to the other arts. On that basis, I analyze an insightful essay from Hans-Christian Lucas14 on the “Anthropology” section of Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, focusing on Lucas’ argument that the “Anthropology’s” crucial final sections (importantly connected to “magic” and “animal magnetism”), threaten to undermine Hegel’s entire philosophy. My conclusion, from my own reading of the “Anthropology,” is that Hegel has in effect quarantined dance in what he terms “the dark regions” of madness in “The Feeling Soul” section of the “Anthropology.” Overall, I

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suggest that this quarantining is ultimately as problematic for Hegel as it has been for dance. Because without dance, complete with its associations with people disempowered in their embodiment (such as women and people of color), this crucial transitional section in the “Anthropology” remains burdened with a corporeal remainder that problematizes the entire system. Put simply, Hegel must—by his own logic—learn to dance gracefully with those he would rather shun. My third Idealist is the one for whom Hegel was arch-nemesis, Arthur Schopenhauer, whom I try to meet through acknowledging the dance of Platonic/Vedanta idealism, the traditions of which were of critical importance for Schopenhauer. In return, I consider, as his coming to meet me, the implication in his thought that his most vaunted art form, namely music, is ultimately incomplete and inadequate without dance. More specifically, my dance with Schopenhauer explores Schopenhauer’s position on dance, including his brief, pejorative references to it in The World as Will and Representation, and dance’s exclusion from his discussion of the arts in that text. To understand this exclusion, I consider Francis Sparshott’s essay15 on the neglect of dance in the history of aesthetics, considering his understanding of Plato’s valorization of dance, and his comment that Schopenhauer’s dance is the death-dance of Shiva. Seeking a stronger justification for Schopenhauer’s neglect and condemnation of dance in light of the opposite tendency in his Greek and Indian influences, I suggest that Schopenhauer’s conception of madness as a form of disconnection closely linked to genius offers both a promising diagnosis for the problem of dance’s status and also a way of ameliorating it. Finally, I attempt this remedy by sewing together Schopenhauer’s conceptions of embodiment and music—re-attaching its dancing shadow to his philosophy. My final Idealist, Aurelius, belongs to the ancient Greco-Roman world which the Germans so passionately idealized. My own passionate leaning toward him derives from his effective fusion (on my reading of him) of the ethical, the political, and the religious. And the reciprocal leaning I see in him is that, his critique of theatrical dance notwithstanding, at least certain community dances are virtuous by his lights. More specifically, I take my point of departure from the fact that the Meditations constitutes an important source and subject for Michel Foucault’s 1981 lectures16 at the Collège de France, one recurring theme of which is the deployment by Hellenistic/Roman philosophers (such as Aurelius) of the practice and figure of dance. Against that background, I offer a close reading of dance in the Meditations, followed by a survey of the secondary literature on this subject, all in order to show that dance performs a critical function in the construction of what I term Aurelius’ dance-like “political ethics,” composed of an ethics of patient tolerance and a politics of divine generosity, achieved by cultivating the good (or daeman) Aurelius identifies within each of us. Turning to the three Anglo-American philosophers of art, the first I will discuss is Arthur Danto, toward whom I move by conceding that defining dance per se can (in certain contexts) be productive, and who I see approaching me in that his arguments imply that bodies must ultimately trump interpretations as the essence of artworks. More specifically, Danto has long engaged with issues of embodiment, in art and beyond, and yet neither he nor most of his interlocutors have devoted significant attention to dance, though dance is the art form in which art and embodiment most vividly intersect. To fill this absence, I consider Danto’s brief references to dance in his early magnum opus, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, track the changes in his philosophy of art as evidenced in his later After the End of Art and The Abuse of Beauty, and utilize Danto’s final work on the philosophy of action to suggest a new Danto-inspired definition of art, namely “apposite bodies.”

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A second Anglo aesthetician is Nelson Goodman, with whom I compromise (albeit, admittedly, narrowly) in agreeing that his concept of “self-exemplification” is meaningful, on the assumption of which, I try to show, he should concede that dance notation per se is structurally inadequate. More specifically, in a close reading of his early magnum opus, Languages of Art, I (a) examine his example of a dance gesture as a symbol that exemplifies, in regard to which I show that self-exemplifying dance gestures are unique (among other self-exemplifying symbols) in that they are often independent and internally motivated, or “meta-self-exemplifying”; and (b) retrace his analysis of dance’s relationship to notation in general and Labanotation in particular, arguing that dance gives the false impression of being notational, making it “meta-notational.” And my last analytic philosophers of art (and in this case I use that phrase broadly) are Francisco Varela and Andy Clark,17 cognitive scientists whose work has been invaluable in helping that field come to appreciate the art of cognition and the cognitive powers of the arts. My dance with these thinkers is based on the twin positions that cognitive science is, after all, redeemable (qua 4E cognitive science), but only on condition and to the extent that it defines adequacy to dance as a necessary condition of its success. More specifically, I challenge the 4E community to resolve the tension between its inattention to the practice of dance and its utilization of the figure of dance, and to offer this challenge by showing how these two factors play out in (1) the recurring pattern of what I call “dance-resonance” in Varela et al.’s The Embodied Mind, specifically at the discrete levels of (a) rhetoric, (b) examples, and (c) concepts (including “entre deux,” dance-like rings of cellular automata, and “structural coupling,” respectively); and (2) the paradoxical dual presence, in Clark’s Being-There, of (a) fairly frequent, explicit uses of the word/concept “dance,” and (b) an anxious backpedaling (specifically contra Varela) away from conceding enough importance to dance for it to undermine the dance-inadequate concept of “representation” in cognitive science. Now, to the Africana critical race theorists, beginning with Ralph Ellison. Most famous for his novel Invisible Man, Ellison was also a formidable theorist, as revealed for example in his collections of essays. From Ellison I learned that democracy is essentially improvisatory, as exemplified in jazz, and I in turn teach interpreters to recognize an Ellison who almost remembered to emphasize that jazz is inadequately theorized if analyzed as merely music without its accompanying dances. More specifically, although Ellison’s appreciation for jazz music is well known, as is his use of the bebop jam session as symbol of ideal U.S. democracy, less well-known is his passion for dance, and the extent to which it pervades his life and his masterpiece, Invisible Man. To rectify that, I offer a reading of his novel as a kind of “public jazz dance,” stressing the role of syncopation and community, and suggesting that an appreciation of dance in Ellison may contribute to the political efficacy of his thought by illuminating issues such as gender and embodiment. My second Africana critical race theorist is the Caribbean-born anti-colonialist liberation fighter Frantz Fanon. With heavy heart, I move with Fanon in recognizing that dance can exacerbate racism, but I also lead him toward the counterpoint truth that racism can also be exacerbated by the outright condemnation of dance. More specifically, my thesis is that, although Fanon’s explicit remarks on dance are brief and negative, the similarities between his account of black embodiment (in anti-black racist societies) and the present author’s phenomenology of dancing embodiment suggest the possibility of affirmatively re-understanding—or revalorizing—both black embodiment and dance. My point is not that the experiences of (various forms of) dance are forms of oppression in

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the same way or to the same degree as experiences of racism. Rather, I argue that dance (especially in its various professional forms), though for the most part a voluntary and empowering activity, bears important phenomenological resemblances to Fanon’s characterization of black embodiment in racist and colonized cultures in Black Skin, White Masks and Wretched of the Earth. These resemblances seem important because they suggest the possibility for black persons’ attempting strategic resistances to political oppression by trying, in a sense, to close the gap between racist and dancing embodiment, i.e., by seeking opportunities for performative resistance, and acknowledging ways in which oppression conveys (especially epistemological) advantages. The final subgroup I will address consists of two contemporary French feminist philosophers. First, the Belgian-born psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray, to whom I concede, again painfully, that dance can undermine heterosexual intimacy, but in whom I also find the possibility that dance could also help heterosexual relations improve. More specifically, I argue that dance functions in Irigaray’s work in three ways. First, dance is a symbol of a more positive comportment for heterosexual relationships. Second, dance is an indication that the ambivalence in Irigaray’s work is self-consciously strategic. And third, dance is an example that teases apart the concepts of negative and positive mimesis, specifically by fleshing out the latter. More concisely, dance constitutes a figure of positive ambivalence (whether between heterosexual lovers, participants in a philosophical dialogue, or aspects of a concept) in the figure I develop of dancing gendered justice as “self-mimetic, curved silvering.” Finally in this list is Julia Kristeva, a psychoanalyst, literary critic, and novelist of Bulgarian descent. I bend in her direction by conceding that psychoanalysis can be redeemed, at least in part, from its problematic tendencies by emphasizing gesture and its centrality in language. And she appears to reciprocate that torsion in allowing an interpretation of her writing according to which psychoanalysis must integrate that foundry of gestures called dance. More specifically, for Kristeva, dance is a practice moving across multiple borders, including those between the “semiotic” chora and “symbolic” choreography, the rituals of religion and art, and the symptoms of and treatments for troubled psyches. Due to this borderline nature, dance is particularly relevant to Kristeva’s analysis of the “borderline” patient, potentially compensating for the patient’s problematic verbal language with its own somatic, gestural language in a kind of choreographing of the borderline soul.

CONCLUSION In conclusion, if these analyses hold weight, then the practice of contemporary U.S. Latin dance has a surprising amount to teach the ancient discipline of philosophy. Everything changes if one reimagines oneself, and the theorist whom one is interpreting, to be two dancers meeting on a nightclub floor. Instead of two people separated by overwhelming distances of time, space, politics, values, etc.—and instead of two ruthless competitors or adversaries in the hunt for absolute truth—we instead become partners, and even potential friends. We become united by our mutual, and natural, desire to find as much joy and meaning as possible in the process of making our shared world a better place in which to dance. The challenges of making this shift are great, and cannot be accomplished without some serious soul-searching, and a commitment to our own character development, but the potential rewards are even greater. Everyone, of course, moves differently, and there

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is potential beauty in every variation thereof. But it is impossible to imagine the details prior to sharing a dance floor. Please, let us do our best to be patient, and brave, and extend our hands to the most unpopular, misunderstood, and traumatized dancers in our community. Let us invite them to join us for a twirl or two. It is a risk eminently worth taking.

NOTES 1.

See also, Joshua Hall, “St. Vitus’ Women of Color: Dancing with Hegel,” Comparative and Continental Philosophy 9:1 (2017); “A Divinely-Tolerant Political Ethics: Dancing with Aurelius,” Epoché: A Journal of the History of Philosophy 20:2 (2016): 327–348; “Apposite Bodies: Dancing with Danto,” Philosophy in the Contemporary World 22:1 (2015): 19–36; “Meta-Notational Self-Exemplification: Dancing with Goodman,” Evental Aesthetics 3:3 (2015): 28–53; “Self-Mimetic Curved Silvering: Dancing with Irigaray,” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy/Revue de la Philosophie Française et de Langue Française 22:1 (2004): 76–101; “Reattaching Shadows: Dancing with Schopenhauer,” PhaenEx: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture 9:1 (2014); “Syncopated Communities: Dancing with Ellison,” Southern Literary Journal 45:2 (2013): 57–71; “Revalorized Black Embodiment: Dancing with Fanon,” Journal of Black Studies 43:3 (2012): 274–288; “Choreographing the Borderline: Dancing with Kristeva,” Philosophy Today 56:1 (2012): 49–58.

2.

Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Vols. 1 & 2, trans. Edna Hong and Howard V. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Fear and Trembling/Repetition, trans. Edna Hong and Howard V. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).

3.

G. W. F. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (New York: Penguin Press, 1994); Philosophy of Mind, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

4.

Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation: Vols. 1 & 2, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1966).

5.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Martin Hammond (New York: Penguin, 2006).

6.

Julia Kristeva, The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, volume 1, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

7.

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1995); The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 2003).

8.

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markman (New York: Grove, 1967); The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2004).

9.

Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Harvard, 1997); After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art, The Paul Carus Lectures Series 21 (New York: Open Court, 2003).

10. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976). 11. Francisco Varela, Evan T. Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). 12. M. Jamie Ferreira, “Faith and the Kierkegaardian Leap,” The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 207–234; “Kierkegaard’s Socratic Pseudonym: A Profile of Johannes Climacus,” Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 6–24.

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13. Edward F. Mooney, “Repetition: Getting the World Back,” The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, pp. 282–307; “From the Garden of the Dead: Climacus on Interpersonal Inwardness,” Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript: A Critical Guide, pp. 64–86. 14. Hans-Christian, Lucas, “The ‘Sovereign Ingratitude’ of Spirit Toward Nature: Logical Qualities, Corporeity, Animal Magnetism, and Madness in Hegel’s ‘Anthropology,’ ” The Owl of Minerva 23:2 (1992): 132–150. 15. Francis Sparshott, “On the Question: ‘Why Do Philosophers Neglect the Aesthetics of the Dance?’ ” Dance Research Journal 15:1 (1982): 5–30. 16. Michel Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982, trans. Graham Burchellm (New York: Picador, 2005). 17. Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998).

CHAPTER 5.5

The Power of Political Dance: Representation, Mobilization, and Context Apparatus ERIC MULLIS

HOW EFFECTIVE IS POLITICAL DANCE THEATER? I currently live and work in Charlotte, North Carolina, a city that, at the time of the writing of this chapter, witnessed several days of rioting in response to the shooting of an African-American man—Keith Scott—by a white police officer. The rioting was public reaction to systematic racial inequality in the criminal justice system and, after some time passed, several local choreographers followed suit by making work about racial justice. I too have choreographed, presented, and performed in political dances in Charlotte and elsewhere and over time have come to question the efficacy of such work. Whereas many of my friends and colleagues argue that it is natural (if not necessary) to artistically respond to injustice, I found myself (often after watching political dance performance) critically considering reasons dance artists give for making political dance. In this chapter, I survey such arguments in order to both clarify the issue and to assess the question of whether and to what extent dance informs or changes audience beliefs, values, and actions. I argue that political dance does have a degree of efficacy, but that several factors frame its significance, factors that dance artists should keep in mind when developing and presenting political work.1 For the purposes of this chapter, I take “political dance” to mean dances that critique forms of social injustice on the concert stage. I do not address dance performed in public spaces (such as site-specific work and choreographies of protest) here, for such work requires separate treatment.2 I should also say that, as Arlene Croce argued, dance can be quite poor when political content and messaging dominates and aspects of dance craft (such as strong dancing, composition, and dramaturgy) are not sufficiently attended to.3 For the purposes of this chapter, I operate under the assumption (supported by a wealth of artistically and politically powerful dance pieces) that political content can be expertly fused with high levels of dance artistry.4 Lastly, the chapters in this part of the anthology focus on critical approaches to dance and, more specifically, on what meta-critical approaches are appropriate and useful for 426

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thinking about the theoretical and practical implications of dance performance. My approach draws on personal experience in a particular dance community, discussions with a range of dance artists working in similar social contexts, and relevant theory. Whether it concerns creative processes in the dance studio, teaching methods, or analyses of particular dances, I believe that specificity helps avoid weak generalizations. At the same time, it qualifies my conclusions since dance artists working in other contexts—for example, in politically oppressive social climates—may view the question of efficacy differently than I.5 With that said, I believe that aspects of my discussion will be beneficial for artists interested in developing and presenting political dance in contexts similar to my own and that some points will, by way of contrast, be of interest to those working in different settings.

THE POWER OF POLITICAL DANCE Several aspects of dance as an art form are pertinent for a consideration of political effectiveness; the historical legacy of political dance, the theater as a social platform, and development of theatrical and curatorial techniques developed specifically for political purposes. These aspects often intertwine but, for the sake of clarity, I consider them separately. As early as the 1930s, acclaimed American choreographers began to grapple with pressing social issues such as labor rights, racial equality, gender equality, environmental justice, and identity politics. Helen Tamiris, Martha Graham, Yvonne Rainer, Alvin Ailey, Bill T. Jones, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and others have presented political work that has been celebrated by audiences, critics, and dance historians. The contemporary dance artist aware of this rich history who encounters injustice may be inspired to make political dance and see themselves as continuing the tradition of artistic resistance. The legacy argument appeals to precedent and raises two questions, one concerning the relationship between artistic and political significance and another concerning the manner in which historical approaches to political performance can become less effective over time. With regard to the first point, as with other celebrated artists in the Western concert dance can on, Yvonne Rainer directed her choreographic and dramaturgical innovations toward socio-political engagement. In Trio A with Flags (1970), she and five other performers danced while wearing American flags tied around their necks that draped their naked bodies.6 While pairing the naked body with the flag (which, for many Americans, functions as a sacred political symbol) dramaturgically challenged the dominant ideology, the piece’s post-modern choreography marked an artistic break with conventions of dance technique and theatricality. This dynamic combination created a powerful statement, however it is difficult to retroactively clarify the relationship between artistic and political significance. Were audience members captivated by Rainer’s ingenuity (e.g. “who knew that the neutral affect of postmodern performance could, via the absence of sentiments conventionally associated with patriotism, reinforce a political statement about the flag?”), moved to engage in related activist activities (“like these artists, I should protest the war”), or both? A difficulty is that hindsight increases the importance of historical works, for example, as they come to be seen in light of the artist’s body of work or as indicative of broader historical political movements. Of course, it is also difficult to separate the artistic and political import of political dance performed in contemporary contexts (indeed, it is one of the reasons political art can be so captivating), but one can, at least in theory, formally

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or informally interview audience members currently living through social scenarios addressed by the piece.7 These issues demonstrate that the advocate of the legacy argument may hold that artistic significance causes political effectiveness, that powerful art works motivate observers to act, but it seems to assume much about the audience.8 It may also be grounded on an artistic presumption that audience members are much like them, that is, someone willing to engage with political issues in a sustained manner. With regard to the contemporary relevance of historical approaches to political subject matter, one can point to Merce Cunningham’s dismissal of political modern dance which he viewed as manipulating audience emotions.9 Feelings of sympathy and compassion can be elicited by a theatrical portrayal of injustice, but autonomy is undercut by concomitant hermeneutic and normative constraints.10 Yet, at the same time, whereas Cunningham thought that formalism and aleatory techniques avoided such constraints, political modern dance used choreographic abstraction to avoid the constraints of its historical predecessor which utilized pantomime and didactic political messaging to articulate Leftist political propaganda.11 There is more to say about this history, but I draw attention to those developments in order to highlight that historical strategies may not be compelling for contemporary audiences. To take another example, experimental theater of the 1960s fostered egalitarian values by using audience participation strategies which simultaneously subverted the distinction between performer and observer and modeled a creatively collaborative public sphere.12 However, potency diminishes as audiences become familiar with (and possibly tired of) such strategies. Further, audience participation strategies have less political impact in contemporary contexts that feature a flourishing “experience economy” in which consumers are encouraged to design their own theatrical and entertainment adventures. Individualist neoliberal consumerism arguably undermines the idea of a collaborative community.13 In any case, the belief that the tradition of political dance validates contemporary work is called into question by the contemporaneity of dance performance. The legacy argument pertains to any art form with a robust history of political engagement, however additional arguments center on unique aspects of movement performance. Like other concerned citizens, dance artists respond to social injustice with moral indignation, frustration, or outrage, and often channel such feelings into the art form that they have dedicated substantial portions of their lives to. Dance craft increases the significance of personal reactions as technique, composition, and dramaturgy give form to and refine turbulent emotional energies.14 Performance increases the power and clarity of one’s voice and allows for an articulate response to social forces that can evoke a sense of political powerlessness.15 At the same time, dance is unique because it mobilizes embodied subjectivities onstage. Individuals and groups can be presented as oppressed by or as resisting unjust exercises of political power.16 Choreographers draw on their nuanced understanding of expressive embodiment as they consider how to articulate relationships between social forces, physical movement, and internal experience and how to choreographically and dramaturgically frame those relationships in a manner that resonates with audiences. In turn, dance artists have a platform that can be used to convey political content to substantial numbers of people. Liz Lerman writes that “the power of dance performance comes from audiences having to sit for a certain amount of time, which forces them to face a portrayal that might at least afford a chance to think about a tough problem.”17 The

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political platform argument holds that dance craft powerfully articulates sociopolitical issues to attentive and willing audiences. Beyond the legacy and political platform arguments, specific theatrical and curatorial strategies have been developed to affect political awareness, critical engagement, and action. These include Brechtian alienation techniques, autobiography, historical commemoration, the development of alternative performance communities, and postperformance discussions.18 These and other techniques give contemporary dance artists tools for framing and stimulating audience engagement. Bertolt Brecht famously criticized the approach to dramatic theatrical representation and catharsis advocated by Aristotle and, in response, developed strategies of theatrical framing that foster critical encounters with political content.19 For example, directly addressing the audience or drawing attention to performance conventions break the theatrical illusion of reality and subvert audience passivity. Jacques Rancière notes that, on this account one “must be roused from the stupefaction of spectators enthralled by appearances” and “be compelled to exchange the position of passive spectator for that of scientific investigator or experimenter, who observes phenomena and searches for their causes.”20 Victoria Marks uses alienation techniques in Not About Iraq (2005). As Taisha Paggett begins a solo onstage, Marks, who is seated in the front row of the audience, stands and begins to comment on the performance (“This is the truth . . . This is art . . . This is civilized”).21 Later, Paggett performs gestures and postures reminiscent of imprisoned torture victims while verbally naming them so that the audience cannot confuse her representations with the realities of torture (“This is a collapse . . . This is standing at attention . . . This is a terrorist”). Lastly, throughout the performance, both Marks and Paggett address the lighting technician by verbally cueing light changes. These and other strategies draw attention to ethical and artistic difficulties of portraying the suffering of individuals not present in the theater. Autobiographical experience can also be used to avoid issues of representation. Bill T. Jones famously mixed art and life in Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin / The Promised Land (1990) and Still / Here (1994) and, more recently, Victoria Marks’ Action Conversations (2008) features four veterans and three civilians who collaborated on a performance. Similarly, John Scott’s Fall and Recover (2011) presents ten torture survivors from nine different countries who, at the time of the performance, were seeking asylum in Ireland. In such cases, the audience witnesses individuals who have suffered various forms of oppression and discovers how such experience can be transformed into powerful art. Dance artists can also advance a performative ethics of cultural remembrance for individuals historically subjected to unjust actions of the state. For example, Nejla Y. Yatkin’s Wallstories (2012) commemorates the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and investigates how the structure affected individual, communal, and national identities. It demonstrates the manner in which borders divide communities and shape experience in the present and thereby encourages audience reflection on the impacts of contemporary geographical, political, and cultural boundaries.22 Another political strategy is the post-performance discussion in which artists field questions from audience members about their manner of working with political issues. Camille A. Brown is an advocate of this approach; at a performance of her Mr. Tole E. Rance (2012) at the American Dance Festival in the summer of 2013, she brought chairs to the stage before audience applause concluded and thereby signaled that dialogue was an important part of the show. Discussions after each performance of the piece featured

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moderators with academic expertise in the subject matter (representations of AfricanAmericans in popular television shows) questions from the audience, and thoughtful responses from performers and audience members. The post-performance discussion entails informed discourse about complex social issues and strives to transform the theater into the public sphere.23 Lastly, there are alternative performance communities that aim to resist social implications of neoliberal individualism. Cynthia Novack discusses the subculture that developed along with contact improvisation which emphasizes decentralized organization and an egalitarian ethos.24 Another example is The Dance Exchange which espouses egalitarian values concerning access to dance performance and features diverse cast members (often drawn from local communities) in its productions. The Urban Bush Women’s community-engagement programs use dance to support individual and group empowerment and, closer to home, several independent dance artists in Charlotte personally and artistically support one another when collaborating on feminist performance. Such artistic communities provide safe havens for artists and collaborators and, when they share performance with audiences, model alternatives for social organization.25 In sum, the post-dramatic political tools argument notes that contemporary dance artists continue to develop and experiment with practices aimed at transforming the theater into a space of critical political inquiry. In his response to John Cage’s skeptical question regarding why artists should try to change the world, Bill T. Jones emphasizes craft, the value of an alternative community, and critical dialogue. He writes: 1. This is what I do! 2. It is the pretext that allows me to create and maintain a community of talented artists and collaborators who thirst—as I have—for meaning and a sense of empowerment that comes with taking an idea from the nowhere place of the imagination into the harsh vale of experience and setting it free in the terrifying world of public opinion.26

THE WORLD OUTSIDE THE THEATER The social platform argument is called into question by issues of theatrical representation, audience demographics, and social context. I discuss these points by considering Dwight Rhoden’s contemporary ballet, Sit In Stand Out, as performed by the Charlotte Ballet in January of 2014.27 The piece centers on African-American civil rights-era activists in the American South and features projected historical photographs, music by Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln, and recorded audio of Martin Luther King Jr. reading from the Constitution of the United States. In one scene, dancers sit in a row of chairs at the back of the stage, wearing costumes indicative of clothing worn by student activists who, in 1960, famously sat-in at racially segregated lunch counters in the nearby city of Greensboro, North Carolina. The dancers’ explosive, angular, and emotionally charged movements are set to dissonant piano music of Roach’s Freedom Now Suite (1960) and can be seen as expressing internal struggles and physical responses to acts of verbal and physical violence performed by whites against the students (and as portrayed in the projections). In a later scene, a technical pas-de-deux set to Nina Simone’s haunting rendition of Strange Fruit (1965) gives the impression that the duo has been deeply affected by historical scenes of racial

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violence that they periodically stop to observe in the projections. They individually struggle with feelings of anguish and despair and, via cooperative ballet partnering, demonstrate a resolve to continually support one another. As a whole, the piece commemorates injustice and celebrates the determination of dedicated activists and individuals who fought for equality and persevered in an oppressive cultural climate. The subject matter is relevant for Charlotte since the city historically advanced systematic racial segregation and because, in the spring of 1960, lunch counter sit-ins and related student occupations occurred just down the road from the current location of the Charlotte Ballet.28 It may be remembered that Rousseau observed that theatrical mimesis entails separation from the world outside the theater.29 More specifically, he criticized the Platonic argument that actors depicting virtuous individuals inspire audience members to be morally better people because they know that the actors are only simulating virtue. The dancers of Sit In Stand Out dramatically portray courageous civil-rights-era protestors but, since it is an affair of mimesis, the audience can only respond with inconsequential feelings of sympathy. With Rousseau’s argument in mind, Jacques Rancière observes that “we may no longer believe that the exhibition of virtues and vices on the stage can correct human behavior” but we easily overlook the gap “between the performance of living bodies [onstage] and its effect on other bodies.”30 The gap becomes all the more apparent when factors that problematize the representations (e.g. aesthetic features of the ballet and the social context it is presented in) in Sit In Stand Out are taken into account.31 In both Rhoden and Pite’s pieces, oppressed individuals are portrayed by modelesque performers with sculpted bodies framed by flattering costumes and dramatic theatrical lighting. The dancers also demonstrate physical virtuosity afforded by a highly-refined skill set (contemporary ballet technique) that is indicative of a system of elite cultural institutions: expensive studios, training facilities, and performance spaces.32 Whereas Pite’s and Duato’s dances do not present photographic depictions of the performers’ realworld counterparts,33 in Rhoden’s piece, pronounced somaesthetic differences between the protesters and professional dancers arguably betray the political content.34 This tension points to the fact that Rhoden’s approach has more to do with artistic, institutional, and audience preferences for virtuosic dancing and high production value spectacles. Whereas some contemporary European dance artists have attempted to unhinge dance from the market and related artistic values, Rhoden, Duato, and Pite’s pieces are consistent with choreographic, theatrical, and critical conventions that render them aesthetically distant from the social realities they wish to portray.35 Again, this points to the fact that what is presented onstage has less to do with the world outside the theater and more to do with artistic conventions. The political is sacrificed in the name of artistic spectacle even as the spectacle strives to make a political statement.36 Rancière also articulates a criticism of the pedagogical model that Sit In Stand Out utilizes. In The Emancipated Spectator, he develops insights (originally formulated by, among others, John Dewey and Roger Copeland) concerning an unintended consequence of political art.37 In the strongest formulation he describes it as the “stultifying logic of the pedagogue” which entails a “straight uniform transmission, a form of knowledge, a capacity, an energy in a body or a mind on one side . . . that must pass to the other side.”38 He describes the manner in which an instructor’s or artist’s knowledge is imparted to a largely passive student or observer: “what the pupil must learn is what the schoolmaster must teach her and what the spectator must see is what the director makes her see.”39 Artists who utilize the pedagogical model believe in a clear cause and effect relationship

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for they “always assume that what will be perceived, felt, understood is what they have put into their dramatic art or performance.”40 It can be seen that Sit In Stand Out strongly frames the nature of audience engagement in order to elicit specific political values and sentiments.41 For Rancière, resisting the logic of the pedagogue entails developing art that presents aesthetic alternatives to the “distribution of the sensible” and encourages interpretive freedom. The logic of emancipation does not entail “the transmission of the artist’s knowledge or inspiration to the spectator.” It entails “a third thing that is owned by no one, whose meaning is owned by no one, but which subsists between them, excluding any uniform transmission, any identity of cause and effect.”42 Rancière does not provide a wealth of detail about how particular works of art realize “an organization of the sensible where there is neither a reality concealed behind appearances nor a single regime of presentation and interpretation of the given imposing its obviousness to all.”43 However, Roger Copeland saw Merce Cunningham’s work as innovatively challenging the politics of social perception. He notes that Cunningham “creates dances for people who not only like dance, but who want dance to do something unique to its own medium: to provide them with experiences that can be obtained no other way.”44 In contrast, political dance often “proceeds on the assumption that accessibility (in the effort to reach the largest possible audience) is—in itself—politically progressive. And that results in the tendency to package . . . the content in a familiar, user-friendly form (alas, the very form least likely to challenge existing patterns of perception).”45 Whereas Rhoden, Pite, and Duato keep with conventional aesthetic standards and, to varying degrees, advance the pedagogical model, Copeland views Cunningham’s work as maximizing audience autonomy. Rancière and Copeland agree that this kind of art is increasingly important in an age in which much of what audience members perceive is articulated by corporations which aim to manipulate preferences in a way that encourages endless consumerism. Before addressing this argument, I would like to consider the manner in which broader socioeconomic factors contextualize the production, performance, and reception of concert dance. I began this essay with the riots that occurred in Charlotte two years after the debut of Sit In Stand Out, and I noted that they were viewed as responding to persistent racial inequality. The audience may feel sympathy for and celebrate the political struggles of characters portrayed in the ballet even as, outside the theater, equal access to schools, affordable housing, job opportunities, and social mobility continues to diminish. Rousseau’s concern about the separation of representation from reality becomes quite poignant when it is inflected by awareness of broader social conditions.46 While the audience of the Charlotte Ballet is composed primarily of affluent whites with cultural literacy and expendable income, the independent dance community in Charlotte appeals to educated audiences who value the arts such as fellow independent artists and young professionals. In either case, political dance “preaches to the choir” because it reaches audiences that uphold egalitarian social values. The audience for Sit In Stand Out is likely familiar with the civil rights movement and is committed to racial equality. This is not to say that no member of the audience will be affected by the work to the extent that their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors change. However, it is clear that political dance is not as effective as it is often believed to be because—for socioeconomic and cultural reasons—it will not reach audiences that disagree with its message. Just as it is difficult to imagine that individuals who viewed the American flag as sacred would have been in attendance at Judson Church for the performance of Trio A With Flags, it is hard

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to imagine any unsympathetic audience members in attendance at the Charlotte Ballet for the debut of Sit In Stand Out. For several years, I danced and choreographed with an independent dance collective in Charlotte which regularly developed and presented political dance and it was exciting to make a significant contribution to political discourse in our community. Looking back, there are two factors that stand out to me about that time period; our tacit awareness that dance is a marginal cultural art form and our initial reactions to funding policies articulated by local arts organizations.47 Outside of some university settings, dance in the Southeastern United States is generally viewed as a form of entertainment. Performances of work in the popular genres of classical ballet and musical theater—and, to some extent, aerial performance—feature familiar themes, narratives, subjectivities, and interpersonal relationships. Post-dramatic techniques are less well-known and consequently often challenge audiences. Over time, the dance collective discovered that work focused on sociopolitical issues gave observers something to relate to and thereby mitigated interpretive difficulties associated with less literal compositional and dramaturgical strategies.48 In retrospect, this was an indicator of the “preaching to the choir” phenomenon, for, although the audience was unfamiliar with post-dramatic dance theater, they agreed with the progressive social content which, in turn, allowed them to identify with the presenting artists and to more generally consider how dance can contribute to political critique. In informal post-performance conversations over a five-year period, many individuals noted that they were previously unaware that dance could be socially relevant. Dance is currently a marginal art form that generally appeals to audiences with some knowledge of the form and that have time and money to dedicate to the arts. Further, the dance audience is a smaller subset of the art audience which itself is significantly smaller than the audience for popular entertainment. Drawing on my experience, I suggest that a driving force behind political performance is the dance artist’s awareness of cultural marginality. Using dance to contribute to political discourse simultaneously magnifies the artist’s voice and makes concert dance more relevant. It appeals to audiences as citizens and allows them to more easily relate to artist-citizens. Dance and dance artists gain cultural currency when they align with progressive values expressed in like-minded news media, documentaries, feature films, and literature. The funding of dance is a complex topic, but I would like to briefly discuss the dance collective’s experience of receiving financial support from local arts organizations. We found that projects focused on local sociopolitical issues were funded, while those that had less to do with such issues were not. Our local and state arts organizations emphasize social programming, encourage community outreach initiatives, and require quantitative assessment of social effectiveness at the end of the grant process.49 In turn, they market their social programming to individual and institutional donors by stressing that donations not only support local artists and art organizations, but also benefit surrounding community members. Since the funding agencies are independent and the grant process competitive, we concluded that our work must indeed be politically effective. At the same time, aspects of the grant process pointed to institutional awareness that a dance production is, in itself, insufficient for significant social impact. Our funding sources strongly encouraged direct community outreach—usually framed as education initiatives in disenfranchised communities—and final paperwork included questions about audience demographics.50 At the time, we viewed these as bureaucratic hurdles because they necessitated convincing

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participating artists—with different levels of personal investment in community engagement—to invest in outreach activities and because the requirements posed the problem of attaining an increasingly racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse audience. The question of audience demographics calls Rancière and Copeland’s argument concerning the practical effectives of political art into question. Rancière is critical of the tendency to view audience members as passive; the tradition of worrying about passivity goes back to Plato and runs through Brecht and Marxists thinkers such as Marcuse.51 However, Rancière argues that audiences actively interpret the significance of works of art and compare what they encounter with other aspects of their lives. The myth of passivity supports the belief that audiences need educating and thereby reinforces the pedagogical model. The claim is that, on the contrary, audiences readily make meaning as they strive to make art intelligible.52 Rancière and Copeland are optimistic about the effectiveness of political art that resists the distribution of the sensible but, again, there are assumptions about who the audience is. It is one thing to talk generally about intellectual abilities and meaning making and another to consider concrete details about the place of performance and audience demographics. A first point to consider concerns thematic accessibility. Rhoden and Pite can argue that audiences with little knowledge of dance history can appreciate the political significance of their dances. But, in order to appreciate less conventional approaches that push back against the distribution of the sensible, audiences arguably need some knowledge of the history and nature of experimental performance. For example, they may need to know about formalist disinterestedness, the nature and purpose of aleatory techniques, or, following John Cage, Zen philosophy and related mindfulness techniques. Whereas Flight Pattern presents an easily accessible human rights issue that taps into moral sentiment, appreciation of experimental performance necessitates knowledge that many audience members may not have. Rancière and Copeland are optimistic that uninformed viewers will be intrigued, but, given my experience of making, performing, and curating experimental performance in the Southeast, I am skeptical. I offer two brief anecdotes to support this point. I have been teaching classes in philosophy through film and performance theory at university level for several years, and, since they are part of the general education curriculum, the students generally enter the classroom with little or no understanding of contemporary art. It consequently takes a significant amount of time to historically contextualize and explain the motivations and methods of avant-garde and post-modern art movements. Since the town of Black Mountain is not far from Charlotte, I often discuss work developed at Black Mountain College by experimentalists such as John Cage and Merce Cunningham and, after studying this history, some students gain an appreciation of experimental art and some do not.53 The best that I can hope for is that, in the future, they will be willing to take a moment to perceptually attend to unconventional aesthetic strategies instead of quickly dismissing them as unworthy of their attention. This leads me to my second anecdote which reiterates an earlier point about the Charlotte Ballet’s audience. The Black Mountain College Museum hosts an annual experimental performance festival called “The {Re}Happening” which celebrates the legacy of Black Mountain College.54 I have performed at the festival on several occasions and have been struck by its audience demographics, for individuals who seek out a weekend of experimental performance are well-versed in the history of the college or are students from local universities who are brought by their art professors. The audience is

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comparatively more specialized (and smaller) than the Charlotte Ballet’s which is generally focused on entertainment. With these examples in mind, Rancière and Copeland’s argument is unconvincing since it assumes much about the audience for art that avoids aesthetics of advertising and popular culture. Preaching to the choir arises again and, indeed, the choir is increasingly specialized. Further, Rancière and Copeland are also overly optimistic about the ability to resist the politics of perception, for they hold that someone unfamiliar with the kind of work they advocate for will take the time to attend to it. The assumption is that aesthetic disorientation and increased interpretive freedom will be relished. However, given the preponderance and vast financial success of formulaic popular entertainment, social media, and news media which, through mind boggling amounts of repetition, reinforce perceptual and interpretive habits, the optimism is unwarranted. Whereas I discussed Rhoden and Pite to question the political platform argument, Rancière and Copeland’s position highlights problems with the post-dramatic political tools argument which, with the exception of alternative communities that work directly with individuals outside of the theater (to be discussed in a moment), arguably entails preaching to a small specialized choir. In any case, a presumption supporting the legacy, political platform, and post-dramatic political tools argument is that the audience is in many respects like the dance artist or dance theorist, for they share similar political values, knowledge of social justice issues, knowledge of art history, and a willingness to make the world a better place.

PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: CRITICISM AND SYMBOLIC VALUE On two different occasions I have heard Camille A. Brown lament reviews by critics who pan political dance (Lerman has similarly questioned this tendency55). Even when expertly developed and performed, political dance may be viewed as artistically derivative since it does not meet standards of formal excellence or physical virtuosity. But, if what I have said is correct, dance artists such as Brown and Lerman must develop alternatives to conventional theatrical representation characteristics of works such as Sit In Stand Out. A concern is criticism must then downplay artistic import as it focuses on political significance. However, Lerman argues that this entails a false dichotomy which ignores the manner in which thorough interdisciplinary research and rigorous artistic practices can produce rich political dance aesthetics.56 Critics must be attuned to the research and processes that inform political dance, the degree to which the work effectively and innovatively presents political content, and the extent to which it engages the audience as citizens and dance appreciators. To judge political dance in terms of irrelevant dance values is to make a category mistake, for although formalist purity and virtuosic dancing are important, they are not well suited to advancing political truths about the world outside the theater. Although I question whether political dance is as effective as it is often believed to be, I stop short of pessimistically concluding that it should not be created. Even though I disagree with its choreographic and dramaturgical approach, Sit In Stand Out has import because it affirms political values necessary for a just society. It portrays important cultural history, honors the courage of the protestors, and highlights brutal responses by whites.

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However, since it is artistically and practically disconnected from the world outside of the theater, it is best understood as a symbolic political gesture. I view this kind of work as similar to the religious dramas I performed in when I was young; theatrical plays with narratives that illustrate specific religious values. However, because religious belief, for many, pertains to all aspects of life (not just what occurs during formal religious practices in sacred places), the values portrayed in religious theater are more than merely symbolic. For example, the benevolent charity of the Good Samaritan is dramatically re-enacted onstage in a church basement both to teach the story and to encourage believers to act charitably when they are out in the world among strangers.57 This leads me to stress that the labor of researching, developing, and presenting political dance should not be confused with or seen as a substitute for political action outside the theater. If Charlotte dance artists desire to affect significant social change, then work by artists who consistently engage disenfranchised individuals and communities—such as Camille A. Brown and Urban Bush Women—must be taken into account. Whereas the dance critic must be aware that political dance work confronts theatrical conventions, the artist must consider how the safety of the dance studio, the stage, and like-minded performers and audience members limits political effectiveness to that of symbolic gesture. A way to make significant political impact is to leave the theater and to engage in volunteering, social organizing, or running for public office.58 Beyond the purpose of completing grant paperwork, the question of surveying audience members about political effectiveness is likely not of interest to dance artists because doing so would highlight the fact that political dance uses the pedagogical model and that it functions only symbolically. Trio A With Flags, Sit In Stand Out, Flight Pattern, and Rust are not artistic/political evangelism. They allow artists to express their personal frustrations about pressing social issues to a like-minded audience. This institutional self-referentiality leads me to a last point concerning cultural silos. In Charlotte, social institutions function as clearly demarcated zones of socioeconomic and cultural homogeneity. It is generally rare to encounter otherness in one’s neighborhood, public or private school, work environment, or favorite entertainment district.59 This explains, in part, the reaction of affluent Charlotteans to the riots; many were shocked by and dismissive of the rioters, for, because they live in homogenous geographical zones, they lack any first-hand experience with systematic racial and socioeconomic inequality.60 This is a complex issue, but if trends in racial re-segregation are taken into account, then political dance at the Charlotte Ballet is also problematic because it functions in an institutional silo that is indicative of a broader sociological trend which is antithetical to a pluralist democratic society. Hence, not only do we have to ask how political content is presented and who the audience is, we have to consider where it is produced and how the location of performance fits into the broader cultural landscape. In conclusion, several points made in this chapter could be elaborated and analyzed in more detail; the relationship between artistic and political significance in political art, the social implications of mimesis, alternatives to the pedagogical model, the pervasiveness of aesthetics characteristic of neoliberal capitalism, and the accessibility of unconventional approaches to performance. However, drawing on personal experience, informal discussions, and relevant theory, I have shown that the efficacy of political dance is, for several reasons, often uncritically assumed. Political dance is valuable since it affirms progressive ideals and fosters a sense of political solidarity among choreographers, dancers, curators, audiences, and presenting institutions. However, it must be remembered that racial, cultural, and political differences continue to widen and that, in such a context,

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solidarity and symbolic affirmation are insufficient for change. Dance artists interested in affecting political change must consider leaving the silo and directly engage members of surrounding communities who may have little time for or interest in concert dance.

NOTES 1.

This chapter can be seen as considering practical implications of the position developed in my earlier “Ought I Make Political Dance?” Dance Research Journal 47: 3 (2015): 71–83.

2.

For discussion of this kind of work see Susan Leigh Foster, “Choreographies of Protest,” Theatre Journal 55: 3 (2003): 395–412, and André Lepecki, “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics: or, the Task of the dancer,” TDR/The Drama Review 57: 4 (2013): 13–27.

3.

Arlene Croce, Writing in the Dark, Dancing in The New Yorker: An Arlene Croce Reader (New York: Macmillan, 2003), pp. 707–719.

4.

For scholarly discussions of acclaimed political dances see, among others, Ananya Chatterjea, Butting Out: Reading Resistive Choreographies Through Works by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Chandralekha (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004); Jens Richard Giersdorf, The Body of the People: East German Dance Since 1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013); Ellen Graff, Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City, 1928–1942 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); Alexandra Kolb (ed.), Dance and Politics (London: Peter Lang, 2011); and Rebekah J. Kowal, Gerald Siegmund, and Randy Martin (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

5.

For example, see Rosemary Martin, “Pushing Boundaries: Reflections on Teaching and Learning Contemporary Dance in Amman,” Journal of Dance Education 13: 2 (2013): 37–45.

6.

See Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 152–165.

7.

As something of a rhetorical aside, would empirical evidence (e.g. audience surveys) be of interest to political dance artists? I return to this question later.

8.

The audience was likely sympathetic to the work given that it was included in a show at Judson Church which protested the arrest of gallery owner Stephen Radich for exhibiting art that desecrated the flag in order to protest the Vietnam War.

9.

For a thorough discussion of this work see Mark Franko, Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

10. Roger Copeland, Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 232. 11. Graff, Stepping Left, pp. 26–50. 12. Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 132–136, 152–157. 13. Alexandra Kolb, “Current Trends in Contemporary Choreography: A Political Critique,” Dance Research Journal 45: 3 (2013): 31–52. 14. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigree, 1934), pp. 58–80. 15. Speaking about her piece on the European migrant crisis, Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite said, “It’s only through dance that I have any hope of speaking clearly and truthfully about something I care so deeply about.” See https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=9tSBkT9AFWA (accessed December 5, 2018). 16. “Dancing for Human Rights: Engaging Labor Rights and Social Remembrance in Poor Mouth,” Dance Research 34: 2 (2016): 220–242. Also see Randy Martin, Performance as Political Act: The Embodied Self (New York: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1990).

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17. Liz Lerman, Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), p. 259. 18. Another example is aesthetic fragmentation and compositional layering. For analysis of such an approach see Gerald Siegmund, “After Cranach: War, Representation, and the Body in William Forsythe’s Three Atmospheric Studies,” in Gay Morris and Jens Richard Giersdorf (eds.), Choreographies of 21st Century Wars (Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press), pp. 315–332. 19. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), pp. 36–50. 20. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (New York: Verso, 2011), p. 4. 21. A performance of Not About Iraq can be viewed on Marks’ website www.victoriamarks. com (accessed January 20, 2017). For Marks’ discussion of the work see Kolb, Political Dance, pp. 223–232. 22. See Giersdorf, The Body of the People, pp. 154–156. I further discuss concert dance and the ethics of remembrance in “Aesthetics, Ideology, and Ethics of Remembrance in Red Detachment of Women (Hongse Niangzi Jun, 㓒㢢၈ᆀߋ),” Dance Chronicle 40: 1 (2017): 53–73. Also see Jens Richard Giersdorf, “Is It OK to Dance on Graves? Modernism and Socialist Realism Revisited,” The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics, pp. 603–625. 23. For more on this topic see Christopher Balme, The Theatrical Public Sphere (New York: Cambridge, 2014), pp. 50–63. 24. Cynthia Novack, Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). 25. As an aside, because these communities view collaboration as an empowering dialogic process, the anarchist aesthetics/politics of Cage–Cunningham collaborations (in which contributing artists work completely independently of each other) are off the table. See Charles Junkerman, “Modeling Anarchy: The Example of John Cage’s Musicircus,” Chicago Review 38: 4 (1993): 153–168. 26. Choreographies of 21st Century Wars, p. 205. 27. Rhoden danced with Alvin Ailey Dance Theater from 1987 to 1994, founded Complexions Contemporary Ballet in 1994 with fellow Ailey dancer Desmond Richardson, and has been a regular guest choreographer at the Charlotte Ballet. For a discussion of his dance values see Ariel Osterweis, “The Muse of Virtuosity: Desmond Richardson, Race, and Choreographic Falsetto,” Dance Research Journal 45: 3 (2013): 53–74. Also see www. dwightrhoden.com (accessed January 20, 2017). 28. Tom Hanchett, Sorting Out the New South City; Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte 1875–1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 29. Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. D’Alembert on the Theatre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), pp. 75–92. 30. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (New York: Verso, 2011), pp. 62–63. 31. Post-dramatic artistic strategies described in the previous section could have mitigated problems of representation, for example autobiography could have been articulated by casting Charlotte resident Joseph Charles Jones who, as a 22-year old theology student, led the Charlotte student sit-ins and who currently stays active in Charlotte’s African-American community. 32. Nacho Duato’s Rust (2013) similarly uses the physically attractive and highly-trained of the Martha Graham company to depict scenes of physical torture. For more on this subject see Suzanne Little, “Re-Presenting the Traumatic Real: Douglas Wright’s Black Milk,” in Alexandra Kolb (ed.), Dance and Politics, pp. 233–254. In this context Kyle Abraham’s use

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of virtuosic dancers in Pavement (2012) to represent the experience of African-Americans living in urban centers also comes to mind. However, as Stacey Prickett observes, the work fuses contemporary dance technique with pedestrian gestures and thereby presents a “composite body that encompasses a range of ideologies.” See “Constrained Bodies: Dance, Social Justice, and Choreographic Agency,” Dance Research Journal 48: 3 (2016): 53. 33. A BBC Newsnight segment on Flight Pattern splices together footage of individuals in refugee camps with footage of Royal Ballet dancers rehearsing Pite’s choreography in order to visually reinforce her representational strategies. It should also be noted that when interviewer Kirsty Wark pressed Pite about political efficacy, Pite stopped short of saying that her piece can affect change in the world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYv1vQ5wKk (accessed April 23, 2017). 34. Another difficulty is that Rhoden’s cast features three minority dancers, but otherwise is predominantly white. In a related manner, an independent choreographer in Charlotte used a cast of four young white women to represent the experience of African refugees who had immigrated to the city. I attended a work-in-progress showing of the piece and, during the ensuing discussion, two observers noted the problem of representation. Nevertheless, the choreographer, because of her allegiance to a specific movement vocabulary and choreographic values, continued to develop the work without changing the cast. 35. For a thorough discussion of this trend see Ramsay Burt, Ungoverning Dance: Contemporary European Theatre Dance and the Commons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 36. Bill T. Jones writes of his 2005 piece Blind Date, “I must acknowledge that I fear that much art-making about war . . . amounts to little more than Madame Verdurin’s comfy, secure, settling into fluffed pillows, biting into a freshly baked croissant, and taking a sip of a frothy café au lait while reading about a disaster of war,” Choreographies of 21st Century Wars, p. 204. 37. Dewey, Art as Experience, pp. 326–349 and Copeland, Merce Cunningham, pp. 15–18. 38. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, p. 14. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. The hierarchical nature of the relationship comes in to relief when the authority’s expertise is called into question, for example, when the audience member realizes that a choreographer’s stance on a complex political issue is not based on sufficient research or if the work offers simplistic solutions. 42. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, p. 15. Also see Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). 43. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, p. 48. 44. Copeland, Merce Cunningham, p. 253. 45. Ibid., 256. 46. A poignant illustration of the disconnect between representation and social reality comes from the first chapter of Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015). In the 1980s, Monroeville, Alabama celebrated the story of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird with a “Mockingbird Museum” in an abandoned courthouse and “The Mockingbird Players of Monroeville” that staged a dramatization of the novel in the town theater. At the same time, judges, lawyers, and juries

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of the town regularly convicted African-American men of egregious crimes—at times sentencing them to death row—with little or no evidence. 47. Christopher Balme observes that theater historically was a politically contentious cultural enterprise that could elicit government censorship but has increasingly become a semiprivate institution that operates with political immunity. See Balme, The Theatrical Public Sphere, p. 14. 48. For a discussion of a piece I developed during this time period see “Dancing for Human Rights: Engaging Labor Rights and Social Remembrance in Poor Mouth,” Dance Research 34: 2 (2016): 220–242. 49. The Arts and Science Council supports artists and institutions in Charlotte and the surrounding county: www.artsandscience.org (accessed January 20, 2017). The North Carolina Humanities Council is an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Arts and supports artists and institutions throughout North Carolina: www.nchumanities.org (accessed January 20, 2017). 50. Indeed, the community engagement initiatives of artists such as Camille A. Brown and Urban Bush Women can be viewed as practical responses to awareness that the concert dance world generally functions as a cultural silo. Closer to home, the Charlotte Ballet’s REACH program hires local dance teachers to teach free dance classes in after-school programs in low-income communities. 51. See Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978). 52. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, pp. 32–35. 53. Martin Duberman, Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2009). 54. http://www.blackmountaincollege.org/coming-rehappening-8/ (accessed December 8, 2018). 55. Lerman, Hiking the Horizontal, pp. 256–259. Also see Copeland, Merce Cunningham, pp. 247–254. 56. Lerman, Hiking the Horizontal, pp. 72–75. 57. The analogous relationship between political dance and religious theater is based on what Richard Schechner describes as the efficacious function of dramatic ritual. Both forms aim to affect change in the world, not merely to entertain. See Schechner, Performance Theory, pp. 126–136. 58. Speaking personally, this point became clear to me only after teaching Qigong and Tai Chi Chuan to inmates in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg prison system for two years. This and other work has led me to the conclusion that the effectiveness of any political dance piece I could make or perform in is exceedingly disproportionate to the impact of working in the community and increased my appreciation of dance artists and companies committed to consistent community engagement efforts. 59. Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Herden’s research demonstrates the effects of re-segregation on social mobility. See “The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility II: County-Level Estimates,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 133: 3 (2018): 1163–1228. Charlotte currently lists last in a ranking of 50 largest American metro areas for upward mobility. 60. A historical precedent of this kind of reaction was the response of prosperous Charlotteans who, in the 1930s, were puzzled by and harshly critical of labor strikes by lower-class textile mill employees working in paternalist mill villages at a geographic remove from affluent neighborhoods. See Robert Weldon Whalen, “Like Fire in Broom Straw”: Southern Journalism and the Textile Strikes of 1929–1931 (New York: Grove/Atlantic, 2001).

CHAPTER 5.6

The Economic Politics of Pleasure in Gaga MEGHAN QUINLAN

“Imagine that your skin is too small for your body.” This is not a common philosophical imperative, but it is a frequently used invocation in Gaga, a dance practice that has recently been theorized as an important site of corporeal philosophizing.1 Gaga is an improvised sensory-led class, where teachers dance alongside the students and verbalize movement instructions and imagery. For instance, a teacher may instruct the class to embody something as vague as “float” or “boil like spaghetti,” or do something as specific as explore the range of motion in your ankles. There are several components of Gaga that separate it from other improvisation-based practices, such as forbidding observers and mirrors to encourage a close liminal community that diminishes the dancer’s instinct to self-censor. Students are also asked to never stop moving, which is intended to push them beyond familiar limits by exhausting habits and exploring new ideas. These corporeal experiences have been theorized by Einav Katan and others as unique sites to explore physical intelligence and reasoning, specifically because of how these classroom set-ups challenge the dancers. Beyond these logistical choices, there is also a strong affective economy of pleasure in Gaga that impacts both the physicality and emotional experience of a class. Pleasure is encouraged at the bodily level through an avoidance of physical pain, and at an emotional level through encouragement to let go of inhibitions. The evocation of pleasure in Gaga is a driving force in its growing popularity because of the overwhelmingly positive reactions of students. In addition to being the primary training method for the world-renowned Batsheva Dance Company, Gaga has also spread in international recognition over the past decade, becoming a widely used training method for dancers in an era of global neoliberalism. In this chapter, I explore how pleasure is employed in Gaga practice, advertising, and the marketing of dancers who take Gaga classes. I argue that the circulation of pleasure in Gaga practice and rhetoric has very concrete effects and politics. Not only does pleasure shape the experience and physical capabilities of Gaga dancers, but due to Gaga’s international spread and the marketing of these dancers’ experiences of pleasure, it also has to be considered within the framework of contemporary neoliberal values and politics. This argument about the effects of Gaga’s use of pleasure draws on Sarah Ahmed’s writing on affective economies, where she suggests that “emotions work as a form of capital: affect does not reside positively in the sign or commodity, but is produced only as an effect of its circulation.”2 The integral component of this argument is the idea of circulation. Ahmed illustrates in her writing how affects can have significant physical and 441

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social effects when they are shared. A clear example of the effects of circulating affect is acts of violence that erupt as a result of hate speech. In her article, Ahmed points to the violence—legal and physical—perpetrated against non-white people in the United States as a result of the violent and hateful rhetoric adopted by white nationalists, particularly the Aryan Nations website. This theory holds up over time; we can see a continuation of this affective economy of hate speech driving physical violence in the wake of the 2016 election of Donald Trump, as his anti-immigrant rhetoric spurned an increase of documented violence against Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). In the case of Gaga, we move from a circulation of a hateful affect to the circulation of pleasure, which functions in these dance spaces as an affective economy. It impacts both the mood and the physicality of the Gaga classroom. In particular, pleasure is intended to prevent pain and injury. As Ohad Naharin explains: Gaga is many, many things. It’s a lot about mulit-layered tasks. But maybe, as a type, I can say that it is about strengthening our engine. It’s a workout. It helps the users to identify their movement habits and help them to acquire new ones. It’s about finding connection between effort and pleasure, where pleasure is something that is like . . . making sure that you don’t hurt yourself even in the most excruciating moment of effort. When you also connect it to the idea of joy or pleasure, you take care of yourself just through this connection.3 [emphasis added] Naharin discusses how pleasure is employed to make sure the dancers do not hurt themselves, as if this affect is a safety net. Listening to the body and trying to find pleasure in movement forces the dancer to scale back or find alternative pathways if there is pain, thus bringing attention to the body’s instincts of self-preservation to help prevent injury. At the same time, focusing on pleasure can also help the dancer push their body further. During moments of extreme exertion, the teacher will often remind the dancers to find the pleasure in effort. I can remember a moment at the end of a Gaga class I took in Tel Aviv back in the summer of 2013, when we were asked to explore a seaweed spine while remaining in a bent-legged position. My thighs were burning. I thought I was going to have to straighten my legs and take a break, and then the instructor yelled encouragement. “Feel the pleasure in the effort! That burn feels so good!” I began to focus on the relationship between the burning in my thighs and the stretch in my spine, and was able to remain in the bent position for a little longer. These verbal reminders that impacted my ability to continue a movement illustrate how pleasure is not just a safety net, but also a motivator to go beyond one’s familiar limits or habits in the physical experience of Gaga. In addition to literally evoking pleasure through the verbal prompts of the instructor, the structure of Gaga classes create a strong emotional response rooted in pleasure. For instance, the removal of mirrors and observers create an inherent sense of community and exploration. The classes also often start in a circular formation with everyone spread throughout the room, so there is no innately privileged space in the classroom. The instructor further encourages creative exploration by maintaining a positive tone. There are no corrections in Gaga, and teachers frequently use encouraging words such as “nice” and “yofi” throughout the class. Though individual teachers bring their own personalities into the classroom, the positivity is consistent across every class I have experienced, and is frequently noted in my interviews with other students.4 The overwhelming experience of pleasure and positivity has created a cult following of sorts. An Israeli student at a Summer Intensive held in Tel Aviv remarked that she felt like many American students treated Gaga as therapy or religion, eliciting some laughs

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and many nods of agreement among the group of students gathered around her.5 This fetishization of the Gaga experience is evident in the rhetoric that surrounds the practice, in both written advertisements and common conversations with students. Even celebrities such as Natalie Portman share this strong feeling of admiration for Gaga. For instance, Portman was interviewed and is often shown in trailers for a documentary on Naharin, Mr. Gaga, saying: Gaga had a huge impression on me because there was so much about, first of all, finding your own way of moving, that it wasn’t like: “This is the step and you have to do it.” It was: “What do you do with this idea? Like, take this idea and then make the movement that your body makes.” And everyone’s movement is different. [Gaga] is a way of healing, I mean, people heal their injuries with this language. People express themselves in a very personal way with this language. And the language isn’t like a set vocabulary that everyone has to learn; it’s like a vocabulary that you are asked to create yourself, too. So, it’s like every person who uses this language will have their own dialect.6 In this clip, Portman praises the individuality welcomed in Gaga’s practice and its ability to heal injuries, positioning herself as a clear Gaga fan. In addition to circulating via the documentary, this clip was featured on the homepage of the official Gaga Movement Ltd. website prior to the release of the documentary. Not only does she provide a succinct and simple explanation of Gaga that is accessible to both dancers and non-dancers, supported by a wholehearted personal endorsement, but she also adds cultural cachet to the practice by virtue of her celebrity status. This sort of uncritical praise heaped on to Naharin and Gaga demonstrated by Portman is also representative of the language used by many Gaga participants to describe their participation in classes, which I have observed through surveys and interviews. It seems to be the result of a visceral reaction to the pleasure that is so often encountered in the Gaga studio and an appreciation for its lasting impact. The movement done in Gaga feels good, both physically and emotionally, which is a sharp contrast from the often-painful practice of form-based techniques such as ballet. In a contemporary dance market that encourages hyper-flexibility and extraordinary technical feats, Gaga becomes a safe space to both explore these ranges and retreat into a more comfortable movement as necessary. This allows students to guide their own journey in the class, yielding a regularly favorable experience. Yet this pleasure does not cancel out the complicated politics of the practice. Appealing to individual instinct, freedom, and pleasure serves a universalizing function in that it ignores the cultural specificity of what instincts, freedom, or pleasure might entail for different participants. While freedom and pleasure may be felt by many students in the context of a Gaga class, this is not always the case. For instance, the constrictions of teachers’ frequent verbal instructions or the unspoken aesthetic that emerges as a result of these instructions can feel limiting or frustrating to a dancer trained in form-based or highly stylized dance practices. Though I am not suggesting that Gaga is unique in trying to appeal to the widest range of participants possible, its vague discourse about pleasure and freedom as unproblematized concepts illustrates the ideals of a universal humanity inherent in the philosophy of Gaga. This type of broad appeal in Gaga is similar to that of contact improvisation in the 1970s. Both practices are intended to appeal to egalitarian, utopic ideals of equal access and opportunity, and they attempt to create spaces of possibility for wide-ranging inclusion. Larger societal, aesthetic, and economic pressures

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that influence who is able or interested to engage with either practice are often unable to be counteracted despite these optimistic endeavors. Still, the vague terms of “pleasure,” “freedom,” and other positive words are frequently evoked in discussions and advertising of Gaga, perpetuating a utopic and idealistic vision of the practice. The effect of this affective economy is a growing circulation of Gaga classes, with workshops and events constantly expanding to new studios, cities, and countries. The rapidly increasing popularity of Gaga, and the often-uncritical rhetoric that surrounds the practice, begs for further investigation as to the role of pleasure in promoting Gaga’s circulation. The economy of pleasure in Gaga extends beyond training trends to the professional contemporary dance market. Though Gaga is not intended only for dancers—there are Gaga/people as well as Gaga/dancer classes—there has been a significant growth of choreographers either working with or seeking Gaga-trained dancers in recent years. This indicates that the effect of utilizing pleasure, among Gaga’s other pedagogical tools, has created a desirable outcome for dancers’ physicality. At first glance, the positive philosophical imperatives embedded within the Gaga organization and pedagogy can seem at odds with the competition required of performers in the dance market. Although pleasure and employment are not inherently contradictory, there is a competitive element inherent in self-improvement pursued for the purpose of obtaining a job that challenges much of the self-indulgent rhetoric about Gaga. Everyone may be “yofi,” as many Gaga teachers say, yet only some will be “yofi” enough to eventually get a job as a professional dancer. Still, I would argue that the practice of Gaga is growing increasingly popular with dancers internationally, not just due to its feel-good mentality and emphasis on fun and pleasure, but also because it adheres to many contemporary aesthetic trends and socioeconomic values of neoliberalism. Pleasure has just become one tool to access these trends and values in the studio. Along these lines, I want to consider now how the practice of Gaga trains laborers and offers strategies for the contemporary precariat. The structures of Gaga classes largely align with neoliberal values of efficiency and flexibility, by utilizing pleasure to push students further in their physicality as well as artistic exploration. Gaga’s insistence on participants experiencing pleasure falls in line with contemporary neoliberal “soft power” techniques of enforcing values of efficiency and progress for its participants. Wendy Brown documents this shift in neoliberal policy, noting that though power was often imposed through fiat and force in the 1970s and 1980s, neoliberalization in the Euro-Atlantic world today is more often enacted through specific techniques of governance, through best practices and legal tweaks, in short, through “soft power” drawing on consensus and buy-in, than through violence, dictatorial command, or even overt political platforms.7 Thus, neoliberalism circulates in the Euro-Atlantic world today not through force, as was the case throughout the Global South during large-scale economic experiments in the 1970s and 1980s, but through choice. This choice, however, is greatly influenced by subtle motivators from policy makers and economic pressures that incentivise and praise the embrace of neoliberal values. The evocation of pleasure, a positive experience, in Gaga’s advertising and practice, serves a similar function to what Brown refers to as neoliberalism’s use of “soft power.” By following this call to experience pleasure, the participant will be better prepared to “produce more from the session,” as is stated in the Gaga work instructions. In this way, pleasure becomes aligned with neoliberal values because it is deemed as crucial to the development of a dancer’s efficiency and productivity,

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though affective states are not traditionally associated with neoliberalism. Even as it produces efficient laborer/dancers within the neoliberal system, Gaga’s success affirms the value of attending to one’s experience of pleasure and affects more broadly. Since attention to affect is often presumed to be at odds with neoliberal values of efficiency, progress, and contract work that largely ignores the physical and emotional experience of laborers, it is important to recognize the sexual politics of this appeal to pleasure.8 Pleasure is directly tied to histories of sexuality and the perceived unreliability of human nature. Sigmund Freud has written extensively about pleasure, particularly in relation to the formation of societies. In his text Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud states that happiness and pleasure as are found in the practice or consumption of art, are similar to “a mild narcotic and can provide no more than a temporary refuge for us from the hardships of life.”9 He suggests that pleasure—particularly as experienced through art—is but a temporary solution to the pain of living in civilized societies that incessantly suppresses one’s ability to act on innate desires. This is not dissimilar from Gaga’s appeal to pleasure and effort as ways to counteract pain in one’s body, though for Freud passion is taboo and in Gaga it is encouraged. Whereas Freud’s analysis of the role of pleasure in civilized societies10 is pessimistic and characterized as fleeting, pleasure in the Gaga community has become a positive foundational principle that can exist constantly. Gaga, then, illustrates a different engagement with pleasure than the early capitalist societies explored in his work. I would argue that Gaga serves as an exception in the contemporary moment. However, Freud’s characterization of the suppression of individual pleasures in favor of a civilization’s norms and values in a modern European capitalist framework remain pertinent for contemporary neoliberal reconfigurations of personhood and agency. Brown argues that this early citizen figure, termed homo politicus, has been replaced with its economic counterpart in recent years. She writes, “The replacement of citizenship defined as concern with the public good by citizenship reduced to the citizen as homo oeconomicus . . . eliminates the very idea of a people, a demos asserting its collective political sovereignty.”11 Thus, to carry forth Freud’s argument, any societal pressure to suppress pleasure is no longer done for political means but rather for economic ones, which represses not just individual desires but also community involvement in political life. Affective appeals, such as an individual’s pleasure-principle and desires, are often deemed irrelevant to neoliberal economies because they are not seen as relevant to the primary goals of this system: efficiency and productivity. Gaga, by focusing on pleasure as key to developing an effective and marketable dancer, thus both embraces and challenges neoliberal values. Gaga’s focus on efficiency through paying attention to the mindset and experience of the participant suggests a radical rethinking of productivity, particularly for an artistic product, by re-introducing the importance of affective economies. The concept of an affective economy—where “emotions do things”12—recognizes the power that emotions can have not just for individuals but also for the formation of groups and societies. In the case of Gaga, we can thus understand that the circulation of pleasure is not about an accumulation of value for the individual dancer through the acquisition of personal pleasure and happiness. Rather, the role of this affect in Gaga is crucial to the development of an economy of pleasure that produces a vibrant dance practice. Because the dancers are urged to feel pleasure rather than pain—even recognizing sore muscles and tiredness as a form of pleasure—they become willing and able to push their bodies further. This in turn creates a more virtuosic and daring aesthetic. The psychic difference of appeals of pleasure

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results in material differences in the dancing. The positive outcome of this affective economy justifies the evocation of pleasure as an alternative way to enact the neoliberal logics of efficiency and productivity, rather than as entirely oppositional to these values. At the same time, the assumption that Gaga’s evocation of pleasure falls neatly in line with neoliberal productivity or even that the ideals of Gaga’s advertising rhetoric is overly simplistic. Although intended as a healing practice, and it can certainly function in that way, there have been instances of injuries in Gaga classes due to over-exertion or a misunderstanding of what it means to use pleasure to go beyond familiar limits. I have witnessed accidents by careless students, where an enthusiastic dancer may be flinging limbs freely without noticing another person nearby until there is a collision. It can also be a dangerous practice for people not in tune with their body—in the attempt to push beyond one’s familiar limits, an amateur dancer may assume they can push further than they physically should. This possibility of injury is subtly implied in the requirement that attendees of Gaga intensives submit footage of themselves dancing prior to being accepted: the organizers want to confirm that the applicant has a minimum base level of corporeal knowledge and facility in order to make it through the event injury-free. It is also worth noting that many members of the Batsheva Dance Company—the group led by Naharin that is famous for its Gaga training and Gaga-influenced choreographic aesthetic—do not remain in the company for long stretches of time. While some company turnover is due to artistic reasons (wanting to explore other styles, choreographic opportunities, and so on), other former Batsheva dancers have colloquially noted that the style is hard on their bodies, and they could only dance this intensely for a few years. Just as physical sensations such as taste are fleeting, the pleasure in Gaga has a limited lifespan. As studies delve deeper into the practice, philosophy, and economies of Gaga it is imperative that we consider the pros and cons of exploiting affective economies in terms of sustainability, financial gain, and other realms both personal and institutional. As scholars and activists explore the politics of pleasure more intensely, it is key that we understand the difference between unfettered pleasure and a pleasure that is connected to a neoliberal venture that benefits others. Pleasure activist and scholar adrienne maree brown refers to pleasure as an activist strategy, where “pleasure is not one of the spoils of capitalism. It is what our bodies, our human systems, are structured for.”13 Yet in the case of Gaga, though the pleasure may be authentic and of the natural body, the boundaries and economic structures that frame one’s practice and its potential for liberation provides a complex political layer that can and should make it difficult for practitioners and scholars to conceive of Gaga as a truly pleasurable, liberatory practice.

NOTES 1.

Einav Katan, Embodied Philosophy in Dance: Gaga and Ohad Naharin’s Movement Research (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Eric Mullis, “Dance, Philosophy, and Somaesthetics,” Performance Philosophy 2:1 (2016): 60–71.

2.

Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 79:2 (2004): 117–139, 120.

3.

Ohad Naharin, “The Jewish Theatre presents Ohad Naharin’s GAGA,” YouTube video, 10:31, posted by “JudiskaTeatern,” November 1, 2012: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=yPcxl4mXUIs.

4.

For instance, a college student from New York described her experience taking a Gaga intensive as “EVERYTHING. It was lovely, perfect, just what I needed” and explained how the atmosphere of the Gaga classroom has helped her deal with depression: “but the Gaga

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concepts of like, available for anything, and accepting yourself and not trying to achieve success in movement . . . it’s meditative, but also it feels hugely self-accepting to me. I’ve been able to start approaching my life better” (interview with author, August 2015). Another New York-based dancer also described her experience with Gaga as life-changing: “when thinking about how Gaga has influenced my dancing, my movement, and just kind of like, my outlook on dancing and life, it’s been such a beautiful experience that I am so . . . I feel so fortunate to have found, and I think it’s great that they are continuing to put it out in the world as much as possible, and hopefully it will continue to grow” (interview with author, July 2015). 5.

As I have argued elsewhere (Meghan Quinlan, “Gaga as Politics: A Case Study of Contemporary Dance Training” PhD diss., University of California, Riverside, 2016), Gaga has a local specificity to its practice based on who is teaching and who is taking class. In Israel, Gaga is much more common and accessible, whereas abroad (such as in the United States) it is harder to access. This leads to a fetishization of Gaga and its Israeli iterations. Though it’s not untrue to characterize many international Gaga participants as treating the practice like a therapy or religion—as one college student from New York told me “there’s a definite sense of therapy” (interview with author, August 2015)—it is perhaps more apparent of Americans that visit Israel to practice Gaga and are exposed to the core teachers that are entrenched in the movement language. One New York based dancer explained in an interview: “I do feel the difference depending on where you take class, from who you take class. . . . you know, everyone has a different energy they present, and certain people I can get behind a little bit more. Like, some of the classes that I took in Israel were so special, I don’t know, maybe it was just something about being there too . . .” (interview with author, July 2015).

6.

Natalie Portman, “Natalie Portman on Ohad Naharin’s movement language Gaga—from Mr. Gaga by Tomer Heymann,” YouTube video, 0:58, posted by “Mr. Gaga: Ohad Naharin documentary by Tomer Heymann,” November 25, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=bFPx10T00bw.

7.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015), p. 35.

8.

The sexual component of pleasure requires further investigation than there is room for in this chapter. The sexual undertones of pleasure are subtly evoked in the way Gaga is discussed—such as talking about attraction, being turned on, and so on—but also largely undermined and consciously ignored in the physical practice.

9.

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (Seaside, Oregon: Rough Draft Printing, 1930), p. 20.

10. Civilization is characterized by Freud as dependent upon the formation of systems of justice and law, the creation of a culture not bound exclusively to innate desires, and the repression of individual desires to function in a collective that privileges adherence to rules and interactions with neighbors. 11. W. Brown, Undoing the Demo, p. 39. 12. Ahmed, “Affective Economics, p. 119. 13. adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy) (Stirling, UK: AK Press, 2019), p. 16.

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Do the varied forms of dance and philosophy harbour artful commonalities, physically and in terms of theory? Can you describe some particular relationships; say between dancing and key philosophical issues such as cognition, perception, and education? I should preface my answer by avowing my pluralist orientation toward philosophy and dance. Central to that pluralism is the recognition that dance and philosophy extend significantly beyond their professionalized disciplines. In other words, I think there are meaningful and worthwhile forms of dance with aesthetic value that exist outside of the fine art context of theater dance. Social dancing, whether in the traditional forms of folk dance, ballroom styles like waltz, tango, etc., or more contemporary forms of popular dance (including disco, salsa, breakdance) all display aesthetic qualities and artfulness besides their social functions. The same goes for the wide variety of ritual dances, whose ritual power partly relies on its compelling artistry and aesthetic value. Philosophy, I believe, also exists meaningfully outside its professional pursuit in the academy where it is practiced by reading, writing, and teaching philosophical texts in university contexts. In fact, as I argue in Practicing Philosophy (Routledge, 1997) philosophy began as a nonacademic search for critical self-knowledge and self-care through dialogical reflection and self-cultivation. Socrates, we should recall, never wrote a philosophical essay or treatise or indeed any philosophical text. He and other ancient Greek thinkers established the idea of philosophy as an embodied way of life, an art of living that included a somatic dimension. Socrates’ student Xenophon relates how deeply Socrates appreciated dance and how he even practiced it late in life. Plato may have denigrated the body in influential dialogues like the Phaedo but elsewhere (in the Republic and in the Laws) he insists on the value of somatic training, notably dance (which he included with poetry under the general category of music because of its source in the Muses) and gymnastics. We find the same idea of philosophy as an embodied art of living in Asian philosophies. Confucius affirms the embodied arts of music and ritual as the key pillars of ethics, where dance and poetry were included under the concept of music. Confucius argues that a teacher can teach without words but by his bodily example, instructing his students in virtuous and harmonious behavior by displaying this in his bodily bearing and demeanor. Daoism insists on somatic disciplines of breathing and meditation as part of its philosophical program, while yoga has long been central to Hindu philosophy and finds expression, for example, in key philosophical texts like the Bhagavad Gita. Returning to Socrates, we should recall that he defined his original philosophical project as the quest for selfknowledge and self-cultivation or self-care (epimelia heatou), inspired by the Delphic injunction “Know thyself.” The ideals of self-knowledge and self-cultivation imply selfexpression. If we understand philosophy to include this form of philosophical practice, namely a critical, embodied art of living, then philosophy and dance share the commonality of 449

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involving an artful concern for the body (including its movements, actions, and gestures) as a source of self-knowledge, self-expression, and self-cultivation. It should be obvious that dance provides a person with resources for self-knowledge, self-expression, and selfcultivation. Through the discipline of dance one learns one’s pleasures, habits, and preferences of movement, but also one’s limits of movement and one’s current feelings that find spontaneous expression in dance. In other words, by attending to the quality of one’s movement in dance one can discern one’s affective state and level of energy. Moreover, through the practice of dance one learns to refine and better regulate one’s movements and gestures to give them greater grace and expressiveness. So far, I have focused on matters pertaining to the individual self. But philosophy and dance are richly significant as social arts because they are intrinsically communicative. Even when the dancer dances alone his movements are not private and can be understood by others in his presence; and even when the philosopher speculates to herself, she does so with language and concepts that are social products and essentially shared with others. More importantly, the dancer and philosopher typically do not practice their arts alone in solo performance. One usually has partners or spectators in dance, just as one has partners and witnesses in philosophical debate or dialogue, even when these debates and dialogues are conducted only in writing and with significant gaps of time between the particular exchanges of views. One of the virtues of the disciplines of dance and philosophy is the art of communicating artfully with others, of harmonizing one’s movements with our partners in dance (and with the dance environment) or relating one’s philosophical thoughts to those of other philosophers and to the contemporary sociocultural context. In both disciplines one learns the art of integrating individual expression with social coherence, the expressing of one’s individual movement style or one’s distinctive philosophical way of thinking and special vocabulary in a manner that stands out as personal or original yet remains socially and culturally meaningful. For such reasons, then, philosophy and dance are artful disciplines of education. What are the relationships of dance to meaningful embodied experiences? Does a disinterested aesthetic purpose inspire dancing? My response to these two questions points again in a pluralistic direction. As to the first question, there are obviously many types of meaningful embodied experiences. All experiences have their active and passive dimensions, involving both doing and undergoing in the organism’s interaction with the universe, but we define many of these experiences as actions because they involve intentions or purposes, even if those intentions are not in the foreground of consciousness. Human actions essentially involve the body and have various forms of meaning. The intentions or purposes that motivate actions constitute one form of meaning while the actual effects or consequences of those actions and the relationships of those actions to other events or circumstances (either perceived by the person acting or other individuals observing the action or affected by it) provide other forms of meaning. Dance displays a variety of relationships to action and hence to embodied meaningful experience. In ritual dance there is the meaning related to the purpose of the ritual: appeasing a deity, exorcising a demon, bringing rain, stirring up energy for war, celebrating a marriage, a harvest, or a victory. In social dance the meaning may be courtship, amusement, or communal solidarity. In theater dance, the situation becomes more complex. Aristotle defined the movements of dance as imitations of real

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actions, such that the purpose of a dance movement is not the same purpose as the real action imitated but rather a purpose to entertain the audience. Being the imitation of a real action does not preclude being an action with its own reality. When a dancer leaps to imitate joy, or stamps the floor to imitate anger, or kisses her dancing partner to imitate a real kiss of love, her actions do not have all of the same meanings of the real-world actions she is imitating but her art-world actions and gestures (what Suzanne Langer called “virtual gestures”) still have intentions and purposes and thus they have meanings. Part of those meanings overlap with some of the meanings or connotations of the realworld actions being imitated or symbolized, and that is why the dancer’s actions can convey elements of narrative. But even abstract movements in dance that are not imitations of ordinary, practical real-world actions constitute real actions. When a dancer does a pirouette as part of her dance routine, this is an action of doing a pirouette that involves her intention to do a pirouette. It is not mere movement, which would be the case if some external force moved her in that spinning form instead of her intention to do a pirouette. Dance, one could argue, is intrinsically meaningful in the sense that it is a purposive, expressive activity. Even if one spontaneously bursts into an unscripted dance of joy, there is the purposive, voluntary expression of joy, even if this voluntary expression is uncontrolled and unregulated by critical, deliberative consciousness. The range of expressive meaning is vast, and it can include, paradoxically, the expression of a sense of meaninglessness or lack of expressiveness. In considering the different meaningful embodied experiences that dance generates, we should not forget the differences between the dancer’s experiences in dancing and the experiences of the observers of the dance. There are obviously certain physical experiences (effort, sweating, breathing, fatigue, muscle tensions, pain, etc.) that are meaningful to the dancer in various ways (for example, as indications to regulate her movement or as cautions to avoid injury) but are not part of the observers’ meaningful embodied experience of the dance. As to your second question, I should begin by confessing my lack of sympathy with the traditional, uncritical worship of disinterestedness as the key to understanding aesthetics and art. I articulate my critique of this attitude in Pragmatist Aesthetics (Blackwell, 1992) and elsewhere, so I will not repeat it here. Practical interest and functionality do not preclude aesthetic purpose and value. The field of design provides countless examples of objects designed to serve a practical function while also serving aesthetic interests. Religious art and political art also achieve artistic value despite being largely inspired by more than aesthetic purposes. I am happy to admit that some dancing is inspired by what you call “a disinterested aesthetic purpose,” which I understand (and would prefer to characterize) as a purpose motivated by some aesthetic interest. However, I would insist that many dances are inspired largely by practical interests, although this does not preclude their being shaped and inspired by aesthetic interests as well. Clearly, ritual dances (such as rain dances, war dances, dances of worship, exorcism, and healing) have practical purposes as their fundamental inspiration but aesthetic shaping or ornamentation are typically enlisted to serve those practical purposes—and for obvious reasons. As beauty is appealing and strongly valued, one assumes that the deity would prefer his worshippers to offer a more beautiful dance of worship. In a similar way, since beauty and harmony are soothing, a dance designed to provide healing and comfort will seek to incorporate these aesthetic qualities. Social dancing often has romantic or sexual interest as its driving force, but again this does not preclude aesthetic interest, because the display of aesthetic properties in such dance (grace and skill of movement, sympathetic harmony with one’s partner) serve to advance those romantic and sexual interests as they indicate

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capacities for proficiency or attractiveness in romantic love or in sexual love making (which can also be seen as an art, as I argue in Thinking Through the Body [2012]. Are “kinesthetic sympathy” and semiotic meanings universal or specific to differing cultural experiences? I find this a difficult question because my inclination would be to answer it both with a yes and with a no. This is because the question strikes me as fundamentally ambiguous. The capacity for kinaesthetic sympathy and the ability to grasp the meaning of signs (what I assume you mean by “semiotic meaning”) seems to be a human cultural universal. But the ways and degrees in which these capacities are realized and utilized differ in different cultures and in different individuals. The great American dance critic John Martin claimed that the movements of the dancer affect (and are understood by) the audience through what he called “kinaesthetic sympathy.” Other theorists speak of kinaesthetic empathy. I do not think we should quibble here about differences between empathy and sympathy, but we should perhaps start with some clarification of the term “kinaesthetic.” Kinesthesis is a form of proprioception and the two terms are often used interchangeably, although one can also understand kinesthesis more narrowly and distinctively as a form of proprioception that is particularly concerned with one’s sense of self-movement as well as one’s bodily position (including one’s limbs) and muscular tensions. To some extent and in some manner I think human beings in all cultures are inherently capable of some degree of sympathy with another person’s bodily movements and bodily positions. Our understanding of body language, when such understanding is not an intellectual decoding or the product of sedimented learning but rather a spontaneous reaction to a new gestural expression, is largely based on sympathetic reactions to that gestural or bodily behavior. We often feel uncomfortable in seeing another person’s evident discomfort and we typically experience unpleasant feelings in witnessing someone suffering from pain. Some scientists have argued that somatic sympathy is innate, and one piece of evidence they bring for this is that neonates are capable of imitating facial and manual gestures (for instance tongue protrusion, mouth opening, and head shaking) that they have not seen before and thus could not have learned from prior experience. The argument is that they imitate them spontaneously through proprioceptive empathy, and it is further argued that the neurological basis for this is in the so-called mirror neurons that connect visual and motor neural activation. Whether or not the mirror neurons are what provide this capacity, whether or not the imitating infants really feel the very same sensations that the adult feels in shaking the head or sticking out the tongue, there is convincing evidence of a mimetic reaction that suggests some degree of proprioceptive sympathy. It is important to emphasize however that even if there is an innate capacity for kinaesthetic sympathy, some individuals are more somatically sympathetic than others. Moreover, one’s kinaesthetic sympathy can be improved through training. I know that my professional training as a Feldenkrais practitioner made me more perceptive and sympathetic to the discomfort and pain (or ease and pleasure) of people’s movements and postures. I dare not venture to speculate whether some cultures have more kinaesthetic sympathy than others do. But I could well imagine that, in a given culture, some subcultures have more of this than other subcultures. Perhaps the subcultures of dancers, somatic therapists, dance critics, personal trainers, athletes and their coaches have more of this kinaesthetic sensitivity and sympathy than do other subcultures in our contemporary Western culture. We should note, moreover, that developing the skills of accurate

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awareness of one’s own kinaesthetic and proprioceptive feelings provides a somaesthetic gateway to better awareness of, and sympathy with those of other individuals. On the second part of your question, I need not linger. All cultures obviously have the capacity to use and appreciate the meaning of signs, including the signs that the body provides in movement, in gesture, and in static posture (although the living body is always blessed with some movement, that of breath). However, it is also obvious that the meaning of bodily gestures is not universal throughout all cultures. I remember going with a smoker friend to a number of shops in Sri Lanka looking for cigarettes. After inquiring at two shops where the shopkeepers shook their head “no” with a smile, we watched as the third shopkeeper did the same behind a large counter visibly displaying a plentiful selection of brands. We culturally misread the side-to-side headshaking, which by Sri Lankan conventions meant yes; but perhaps we could have been tipped off by the smile (a less conventional sign) that our initial interpretation of the head gesture was wrong. How does videography embrace and engage the physicality and meaningful actions of dancing? Videography, I believe, is a genuine boon for aesthetic experience and artistic knowledge and creativity in dance. Video’s power to record a dance performance makes it possible to view the same performance more than once (which adds an expansive ontological wrinkle to the notion of a dance performance) and thus helps to preserve the dance work, particularly if the work in question is a largely improvisational one that has no script or set of instructions. Although it cannot in itself define the dance work that it records (which would require distinguishing the essential features of the work from the contingent features of its interpretation by the performing dancers in the particular performance), videography provides an excellent tool for studying both the dance work itself and the qualities of its performance. This seems especially true when we can compare and analyze different recorded performances of the same work. Perhaps in a very strict logical sense, the video recording of a dance performance does not present the performance itself but presents only an interpretation of that performance in that it involves an interpretive selection of the entire performance event. The videographer selects where the camera or multiple cameras are placed, on what they focus, when they start and stop shooting, in what manner they focus (distant or close-up shooting) and change their object and manner of focus. There is also, of course, the post-recording interpretation of editing. Nonetheless, videography preserves the work and its performance by preserving an aesthetically rich portrayal or interpretation of the performance it records. The fact that videography presents the dancing body through the medium of film does not mean that it does not properly engage the physicality of the dance. Of course, some aspects of the physicality of live performance are diminished. The two dimensionality of the screen image and our spatiotemporal remoteness as video watchers from the live performance detract from the physicality of that performance in terms of lacking the three-dimensionality of real physical bodies. Video also seems somewhat to diminish our kinesthetic sympathy because of our feeling of mediation and distance from the powerful presence of those real dancing bodies in live performance and the physical sense of risk and uncertainty that live performances enjoy. The physical presence of live performance does provide a special “electric” energy or atmosphere that can intensify one’s aesthetic experience. However, videography compensates with certain advantages for engaging dance’s physicality. Multiple cameras and their deployment of different foci can present

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more aspects of the body from different angles than can the eyes of a single individual fixed in a given seat (no matter how good it is placed). Videography, moreover, allows for the slow motion and close up study of the dance performance through which we can discern with greater clarity and precision the bodily details of the dance movements, for example with which sequence of body parts and in which manner a dancer initiates and completes a particular movement. We cannot confine dance videography to the mere recording of performances of dance works, witnessing them as an observer from outside the work. Some forms of dance instead deploy video as a creative, contributory feature of the work itself; here the video material forms an integral part of a hybrid work that is a mixture of dance and video. If popular music videos with a significant choreographic dimension display this hybrid quality in the realm of popular art, the burgeoning field of screen dance provides compelling high art examples. We find such hybridity also in forms of performance art that combine dance movement with video. Hybridization of the arts has been a dominant trend at least since the last half of the twentieth century. Adorno described it as “die Verfransung der Künste” or “the fraying” of the borders between the arts. If we give up purist prejudices and instead embrace an aesthetics of the mix, then we can see how the medium of video offers advantages of editing, montage, and various other photographic techniques and effects to enrich works with aesthetic properties that live performance of standard dance works cannot provide. My appreciation of videography derives partly from my own experience in performance art as the Man in Gold (who is clothed in a dance unitard from the Paris Opera Ballet). The performances are of silent improvisational movement sequences typically in an unannounced venue and are captured on camera by my collaborator, the Parisian artist Yann Toma. Some of the videos are then edited and enhanced with a soundtrack and occasionally some extra visual effects that heighten aesthetic interest. The films (which have been screened at various art venues in America, Europe, and East Asia, and one of which includes improvisational movement with two other dancers) have a hybrid status as movement/dance performance and film. This hybrid status has its legal consequences. While I am the performance artist, Yann is the artist and copyright owner of the film images, though our contract cedes me the rights to use them, and some of the stills from those videos are reproduced in the the graphic novella The Adventures of the Man in Gold (2017). Artistic hybridity again, but with literature. Is dance critique an art form through which we reveal values and life’s imperatives? I have a broad understanding of art that extends beyond the fine arts, and I would readily recognize that good art criticism (rather than bland description or mere evaluative judgment) is itself an art form, as Oscar Wilde long ago argued in his witty dialog “The Critic as Artist.” Dance criticism is especially demanding because, unlike literary criticism, it cannot use a work’s own verbal content to describe and interpret that work. Instead, the dance critic has the difficult task of interpreting in words an art object that is essentially and distinctively nonlinguistic and whose important somatic, gestural meanings and qualities resist conceptual definition and are often experienced and described as, in some way, ineffable. This does not render dance criticism inherently contradictory or impotent, but it means that the good critic has to be something of a poet to find the words that best evoke the nondiscursive yet expressive meanings, qualities, and values of the dance performance.

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If dance criticism should be focused on the art of dance, then its ability to reveal deep values and imperatives would seem to depend on whether dance itself reveals such things. Philosophers who appreciate only the conceptual and the discursive expression of truth might balk at the idea of dance as an art that cognitively enlightens rather than merely entertains. Hegel, for example, excludes dance from the major arts, placing it (after gardening) among the “imperfect arts” (probably because of its bodily and nondiscurve nature) while prizing poetry as “the true art of the spirit and its expression.” But precisely through its somatic nondiscursivity the art of dance reveals some of the deepest meanings and values of human existence. More powerfully than language, the soma exemplifies and expresses the essential ambiguity of being human. As both object and subject, the body displays both our animal and spiritual nature, our nobility and baseness, our power and weakness, our freedom and constraint, our natural endowment but also our cultural shaping, our social and individualist nature, and the commonality and particularity that unites different individuals but also distinguishes them as uniquely the individuals they are. Through its rich and intensely focused corporeal expression, dance potently demonstrates these complexities of our embodied existence as humans. Dance highlights the freedom and range of our movements, while all the while displaying the underlying constraints that gravity imposes on such movements and yet paradoxically also enables through the use of ground forces. If the dancer’s leaps express the human drive and capacity for elevation and power, then her creeping and grovelling dance movements on stage expose our lowly weakness and suffering. If the collective unified movement of group dancing portrays the human social imperative to harmonize or conform with others, then solo sequences assert the crucial claims of individual expression. Most basically, dance is movement, and without movement there is no life. Dance thematises the deep truth that life is movement, and it reveals the indispensable imperative of movement for life, without which our values remain abstract and unachieved.

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INDEX

Acocella, Joan 41, 133, 394 Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) 269–70, 394 Adams, Diana 132 aesthetics, definition of 3, 16–18, 52, 77, 82–3, 93, 99, 126, 147, 224, 226, 233, 256, 385 Agis, Gaby 72, 75 Ailey, Alvin 147, 265, 269–70, 371, 427 Albright, Ann Cooper 6 American Society for Aesthetics (ASA) 3 Anscombe, G.E.M. (Elizabeth) 39, 43, 45, 63, 65–8, 85–6 Apollonian 5, 97, 109, 152 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 280, 290 Aquinas, Thomas 83 Aristotle 5, 21, 23–4, 31, 235, 362, 429, 450 Ashton, Fredrick 90, 147 Aurelius, Marcus 418, 421 Austin Ballet Theatre (ABT) 244–6, 250–2 Auxier, Randall E. 17–18 Balanchine, George 13–14, 17, 52–54, 56–58, 68, 124, 131–2, 144–6, 157, 190, 266 Banes, Sally 7, 18, 40, 42, 61, 384, 407–9 Barnes, Clive 393–4 Barthes, Roland 55, 367, 406 Baryshnikov, Mikhail 17, 64, 247 Beardsley, Monroe C. 3, 17–18, 55–6, 68, 86 Beaumont, Cyril 58 Beauquel, Julia 2 Berger, Kristina 199 Bergson, Henri 98–100, 111, 113 Berleant, Arnold 321, 324–6, 336 Bernstein, Leonard 55 Best, David 36, 63, 72 Bodiou, Alain 7 Bordo, Susan 11, 362 Bork, Franziska 160 Borodin, George 58 Bosanquet, Bernard 86

Bourdieu, Pierre 76 Bournonville, August 131 Bourriard, Nicolas 76–7 Boyce, Kristin 15–16 Bresnahan, Aili 3, 5, 124 Brown, Kaysie Seitz 123, 126, 177, 181, 183–4 Brown, Lee 322 Brown, Lee M. 280 Brown, Trisha 130, 135, 372 Bruner, Jerome 102 Bullough, Edward 87, 326, 345–6 Bürger, Peter 158 Carr, David 63 Carr, Jane 15–16 Carroll, Noël 7, 18, 40–1, 60–2, 160–1, 341–2, 384 Cassirer, Ernst 17, 98–9, 103, 111, 113 Cavell, Stanley 42, 68 Charmatz, Boris 127, 135–6 Childs, Lucinda 371 Chomsky, Noam 102 choreomusicality 13, 52–3, 56–8 Cohen, Selma Jeanne 3, 18, 58, 407, 410 Collingwood, R.G. 43 Comedy, Durell 83 Cometti, J.P. 388 Conroy, Renee 7 Copeland, Roger 7, 62, 158, 431–2, 434–5 Coralli, Jean 142 Coton, A.V. 134 Crick, Francis 102 Croce, Arlene 18, 55, 145, 390, 426 Crowther, Paul 77 Cull, Laura 7 Cunningham, Merce 13, 57, 62, 124–6, 134, 136, 151, 158–9, 176, 178, 180, 265, 371, 428, 432, 434 Danto, Arthur 12, 18, 36–8, 43–4, 47, 99, 139–42, 146, 384, 418, 420–1 Darwin, Charles 102, 361 Davidson, Donald 43–4 471

472

Davies, David 2, 45–46, 219 Davies, Stephen 2, 294, 301, Decouflé, Phillipe 124–5, 150–1, 159–61 Delahunta, Scott 7 Deleuze, Gilles 7, 365 Delsarte Method 230–1 de Mille, Agnes 54 Denby, Edwin 90, 382, 390 Deren, Maya 325, 371, 375 Descartes, René 11–12, 23, 25–6, 203 Dewey, John 86, 93, 99, 252, 333, 431 Diaghilev, Sergei 125, 176–7, 245 Diderot, Denis 87 Dickie, George 384 Dionysian 97, 152 Dlugoszewski, Lucia 123, 126, 185, 190–7, 199–201 Dove, Ulysses 263, 265–70 dualism 11–12, 25, 124, 150–2, 154, 159, 161, 164–5, 171, 350, 363–4 Duke, Katherine 191, 195–66, 198–9 Dummett, Michael 39, 44 Duncan, Isadora 40–1, 68, 124, 134, 150–4, 159, 232 Elgin, Catherine Z. 17, 387 Eks, Mats 143 Escher, M.C. 100 Feibleman, James 3 Forsythe, William 7 Foucault, Michel 74, 172, 252, 421 Fraleigh, Sondra 6, 146 Franko, Mark 7, 193 Frege, Gottlob 38, 61, 63, 65–6 Friedman, Jeffery 220 Fry, Roger 76 Gaga 84, 441–6 Gardner, Howard 102 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 311–2 Gemmill, Archie 41–2, 48 Gestalt psychology 101–4, 109, 112, 115 Gionfriddo, Erica 125, 169, 347, 350–1 Goodman, Nelson 7, 17, 385, 387, 389, 418, 422 Gottlieb, Robert 18 Gottschild, Brenda Dixon 6, 279, 281, 286–8, 314–15 Graham, Martha 130, 133–4, 147, 190–1, 193, 200, 371, 382, 427 Greenberg, Clement 62, 76, 126, 128–30

INDEX

Grenier, Larry 147 Grosz, Elizabeth 73 Guattari, Pierre-Félix 7 Hall, Stanley 244, 246, 251 Hallen, Barry 280 Haraway, Donna 353–6, 364–5 Hawkins, Erick 123, 126, 181–2, 184–5, 188, 190–6, 198–200-1, 228–9, 232 Heckman, Ian 323–4, 326 Hegel, G.W.F. 5, 82, 100, 111, 418–21, 455 Heidegger, Martin 103, 165 Helpmann, Robert 147 Homans, Jennifer 246, 250 Horst, Louis 90 Humphrey, Doris 57–8 Husserl, Edmund 111, 165–6, 284 intentional fallacy 14, 55–6 Irigaray, Luce 418, 420, 423 Jamison, Judith 147, 265 Jordan, Stephanie 54–5, 57, 67–8 Johns, Jasper 125, 157 Johnson, Mark 22, 24 Jones, Bill T. 22, 24, 270, 427, 429–30 Kant, Immanuel 21, 23–4, 26, 30–1, 34, 77–8, 87–9, 100, 103, 111–12, 128, 155, 384, 388 Kappenberg, Claudia 7 Katan-Schmid, Einav 7, 441 Kavouras, Louis 123, 126, 182–3, 190, 198 Khan, Akram 143, 377 Kierkegaard, S ren 418, 419–20 Kirstein, Lincoln 3, 190 Kisselgoff, Anna 144 Koehler, Wolfgang 101 Koffka, Kurt 101 Kriegsman, Alan M. 185 Kristeva, Julia 367, 418, 420, 423 Kuzian, Edyta 1 Kylián, Jirí 124, 150–1, 153–6, 159 Labanotation 42, 422 Langer, Susanne K. 7, 17, 97–113, 451 LaMothe, Kimerer 6 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 22–3, 31, 111 Lemon, Ralph 127, 135–6 Lippard, Lucy 157 Lotman, Iuri 156 Lucretius, Titus 23

INDEX

473

Macaulay, Alastair 90–1, 131, 237 Maclaren, Kym 74–5 Margolis, Joseph 3, 17, 139, 141, 146 Martin, John 13, 16, 54, 82–3, 90, 218, 382, 452 Matthen, Mohan 343–4 McFee, Graham 7, 12–13, 17, 63, 72, 76, 91–2, 143–6, 219, 322–4 McKechnie, Shirley 145 Melnick, Jodi 127, 135–6 Mercedes, Megan Brunsvold 11 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 12, 15, 71–5, 77–8, 88, 125, 134, 164–5, 252 metakinesis 13, 54 Mitchell, Arthur 132 Montero, Barbara 16–17, 41, 45, 218–19, 341–2 Morris, Mark 13–14, 17, 41, 52–59, 67–8, 83, 123, 172, 184, 203–9, 227, 232–7, 400 music visualization 13, 56–8

Portanova, Stamatia 7 Pouivet, Roger 388 Prall, D.W. 82 proprioception 16, 82–93, 171, 218, 324, 340, 452 psychical distance 86–7, 345

Naharin, Ohad 398, 442–3, 446 Newton, Isaac 23, 31 Nietszche, Friedrich 5, 103, 106, 139, 152–3, 172 Nijinsky, Vaslav 90, 125, 131–3, 147, 176–7, 400 Noë, Alva 22–4, 31, 166, 219, 398 Noguchi, Isamu 200 Northrop, F.S.C. 126, 181–2, 192–5, 229 Noverre, Jean-George 57, 63

Sacks, Oliver 86 St. Denis, Ruth 13, 57–8, 232 Sánchez, José Antonio 151 Santayana, George 82–3, 93 Schnurr, Candice 173 Schopenhauer, Arthur 140–1, 418–9, 421 Scott, Gregory 5 Seeley, William 219, 341–2 Sellars, Wilfred 60 Shakespeare, William 68 Sharp, Bob 47 Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine 3, 6, 11–12, 15, 18, 24, 32, 125, 133–4, 165–6, 171 Shusterman, Richard 1, 7, 17, 76, 85, 218–19, 252 Siegel, Marcia 147, 250 Skinner, B.F. 102 Smith, LeAnne 4, 199 Sokolow, Anna 90, 265 Somaesthetics 7, 252 Sontag, Susan 139–41, 146, 396 Sparshott, Francis 5, 421 Spinoza, Baruch 23 Stravinsky, Igor 14, 55, 57, 125, 132, 176–7 Stevens, Catherine 145, 171

Osipova, Natalia 131 Osumare, Halifu 6 Pakes, Anna 3, 7, 12, 63–6 Parkinson’s disease 123, 126, 203–9, 211–13 Paxton, Steve 251 Pearlman, Karen 376 Peirce, C.S. (Charles) 5, 105, 111, 225–37 Perrot, Jules 142 Petipa, Marius 142, 157 Phelps, Jason 125, 166 phenomenology 6, 31, 73–4, 106, 123, 125, 134, 164–6, 171, 174, 225, 228–30, 284, 422 Phillips, Kristopher G. 11 Pite, Crystal 66, 338, 372 Plato 5, 23, 55, 105, 172, 227, 229, 234–6, 255, 257–8, 309, 388, 419, 421, 434, 449

Rainer, Yvonne 37–8, 41, 48, 61, 64, 68–9, 370, 384, 427 Rancière, Jacques 429, 431–2, 434–5 rasa 72, 255–60, 277 Rauschenberg, Robert 125, 157 Ratmansky, Alexei 55 Rivière, Jacques 132 Robbins, Jerome 13, 53 Roehampton University 3 romanticism 100, 131 Rosenberg, Douglas 7 Royce, Anya Peterson 143, 145 Rubidge, Sarah 7 Ryle, Gilbert 62–3

Tarski, Alfred 61 Taylor, Paul 53, 186

474

Texas State University 3, 188, 196, 199, 201, 326, 351 Tharp, Twyla 41, 147 Travis, Charles 47 vitalism 153 Von Wright, G.H. 63 Vatsayayan, Kapila 6 Venzina, Danielle 6

INDEX

Whitehead, Alfred North 98–9, 103, 106, 110–11, 113 Whitehurst, Rebecca 124–5, 166–7, 173 Wimsatt, William K. 55, 68 Wiredu, Kwasi 279–81, 284 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 12–13, 38–9, 44–5, 53–4, 101, 219, 252, 389 yoga 212, 249, 256–7, 449

Walton, Kendall 342 Warhol, Andy 156, 158–9

Zeno 21, 23

475

476

477

478

PLATE 1. Grand Duo, Mark Morris Dance Group 2018. Photo: Nan Melville.

PLATE 2. Dancer. Photo: Stephen Pruitt.

PLATE 3. Texas State Mysterium for New Music Ensemble. Photo: Richard Hall.

PLATE 4. Cantilever (1963). Kristina Berger, Jeff Lyon, and Katherine Duke. Erick Hawkins Dance Company, New York, 2007. Photo: Tony Cenicola.

PLATE 5. Motherwell Amor (2000). Kristina Berger, Nathaniel Bradley, Erin Parsch, and Antonio Fini. Erick Hawkins Dance Company, New York, 2019. Photo: Tony Cenicola.

PLATE 6. Legong dancers. Photo: Stephen Davies.

PLATE 7. Dancer duo. Photo: Lakshmi Viswanathan.

PLATE 8. Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Joshua Grant and William Lin-Yee in Ulysses Dove’s Dancing on the Front Porch of Heaven. Photo: Lindsay Thomas.

PLATE 9. Dancer configuration. Photo: Lakshmi Viswanathan.

PLATE 10. Ribbon dance. Photo: Paula Conlon.

PLATE 11. Bodies at Rest: Four Still Images, Wen Wei Wang. Photo: Daniel Conrad.

PLATE 12. Bodies at Rest: Four Still Images, Afternoon of the Chimeras. Dancer: William Briscoe. Photo: Daniel Conrad.

PLATE 13. Bodies at Rest: Four Still Images, dancer Aszure Barton in 7 Universal Solvents. Photo: Daniel Conrad.

PLATE 14. Bodies at Rest: Four Still Images, Subways: 5 Variations on a Theme by Rilke. Dancer: Petr Opavsky. Photo: Daniel Conrad.

PLATE 15. Phone dance. Photo: Eliot Gray Fisher.

PLATE 16. Considerations on site-specific screendance production. Photo: Ana Baer Carrillo.