The Routledge Companion to Dance Studies 2019029007, 9781138234581, 9781315306551, 2019029008

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THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO DANCE STUDIES

The Routledge Companion to Dance Studies maps out the key features of dance studies as the field stands today, while pointing to potential future developments. It  locates these features historically—within dance in specific social and cultural contexts—and in relation to other academic influences that have impinged on dance studies as a discipline. The editors use a thematically based approach that emphasizes dance scholarship does not stand alone as a single entity, but is inevitably linked to other related fields, debates, and concerns. Authors from across continents have contributed chapters based on theoretical, methodological, ethnographic, and practice-based case studies, bringing together a wealth of expertise and insight to offer a study that is in-depth and wide-ranging. Ideal for scholars and upper-level students of dance and performance studies, The Routledge Companion to Dance Studies challenges the reader to expand their knowledge of this vibrant, exciting interdisciplinary field. Helen Thomas is professor of Dance Studies at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, and emeritus professor, University of the Arts. She has published books, edited collections, and articles on the body and dance in culture and society. Currently, she is editor of Dance Research Journal. Stacey Prickett is reader in Dance Studies at the University of Roehampton. Her current research investigates relationships between dance, society, and politics. She has published in international journals and in the books, Embodied Politics: Dance, Protest and Identities (author), Dance in the City, Dance and Politics, and Shifting Corporealities (contributor).

ROUTLEDGE THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE COMPANIONS

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The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance, and Cognitive Science Edited by Rick Kemp and Bruce McConachie The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance Edited by Kathy A. Perkins, Sandra L. Richards, Renée Alexander Craft, and Thomas F. DeFrantz The Routledge Companion to Theatre of the Oppressed Edited by Kelly Howe, Julian Boal, and José Soeiro

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The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics Edited by Peter Eckersall and Helena Grehan

The Routledge Companion to Jacques Lecoq Edited by Mark Evans and Rick Kemp

The Routledge Companion to Dance Studies Edited by Helen Thomas and Stacey Prickett

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/handbooks/ products/SCAR30

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO DANCE STUDIES

Edited by Helen Thomas and Stacey Prickett

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Helen Thomas and Stacey Prickett; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Helen Thomas and Stacey Prickett to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Thomas, Helen, 1947- editor. | Routledge (Firm) Title: The Routledge companion to dance studies / edited by Helen Thomas and Stacey Prickett. Description: First Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2019. Identifiers: LCCN 2019029007 (print) | ISBN 9781138234581 (Hardback) | ISBN 9781315306551 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: Dance. Classification: LCC GV1589 .R68 2019 (print) | LCC GV1589 (ebook) | DDC 792.8--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029007 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029008 ISBN: 978-1-138-23458-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-30655-1 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Lumina Datamatics Limited

CONTENTS

Illustrations Contributors Acknowledgments

ix xii xvii

Introduction: Thematic structure, methodological frames, and analyses Helen Thomas and Stacey Prickett PART I

Dance and corporeality: Training and engagement

1

9

1 Dancing the space: Butoh and Body Weather as training for ecological consciousness Rosemary Candelario

11

2 The dancing body, power and the transmission of collective memory in Apartheid South Africa Catherine F. Botha

22

3 Different bodies: A poetic study of dance and people with Parkinson’s Sara Houston 4 Resourcing/searching dance technique and education: Developing a praxeological methodology Yvonne Hardt 5 The expanding possibilities of dance science Emma Redding v

33

44 56

Contents PART II

Dance and somatics

69

6 Performing the self: Dance, somatic practices, and Alexander Technique Michael Huxley 7 Moving Kinship: Between choreography, performance, and the more-than-human Beatrice Allegranti

71

88

8 Moving as a Thought Process: The practice of choreography and stillness Naomi Lefebvre Sell with Tara Silverthorn and Lucille Teppa

109

9 Moving mind and body: Language and writings of Simone Forti Hiie Saumaa

125

PART III

Dance and analysis

139

10 Choreomusicology and dance studies: From beginning to end? Stephanie Jordan

141

11 Choreosonic wearables: Creative collaborative practices Michèle Danjoux

157

12 The anarchive of contemporary dance: Toward a topographic understanding of choreography Timmy De Laet

177

13 Cubism, futurism, and Leonide Massine’s choreography for Parade Gay Morris

191

14 Whatever happened to dance criticism? Erin Brannigan

207

PART IV

Dance, society and culture

221

15 Black dance: Brooklyn 2017 Nadine George-Graves

223

16 Elroy Josephs and the hidden history of black British dance Ramsay Burt

236

vi

Contents

17 A love song as a form of protest Danielle Goldman

247

18 Female dancers on the variety stage in mid-twentieth-century Britain Larraine Nicholas

259

19 Selling and giving dance Susan Leigh Foster

273

PART V

Dance and time

283

20 Traditional dance in urban settings: ‘Snapshots’ of Greek dance traditions in Athens Maria I. Koutsouba

285

21 Black star, other fetishized: Carlos Acosta, ballet’s new cosmopolitanism, and desire in the age of institutional diversity Lester Tomé

298

22 Digital preservation of dance, inclusion, and absence Sarah Whatley

311

23 Dance and copyright: As time moves on Charlotte Waelde

323

24 Algorithmic choreographies: Women whirling dervishes and dance heritage on YouTube Sheenagh Pietrobruno PART VI

337

Dance and scenography

351

25 Dressing dance–dancing dress: Lived experience of dress and its agency in the collaborative process Jessica Bugg

353

26 The scenography of choreographing the museum Johan Stjernholm

vii

365

Contents

27 Stacking the spine: Interdisciplinary reflections from BackStories Becka McFadden

381

28 Longing for the subaltern: Subaltern historiography as choreographic tactic Cynthia Ling Lee

396

PART VII

Dance, space and place

411

29 The strangeness of dancing: From The Changing Room and Singularity Carol Brown

413

30 Everyday life and urban marvels: The curious aesthetics of x-times people chair Alexandra Kolb 31 Dance, theater, and their post-medium condition Gerald Siegmund

428 443

32 Re-imagining Laban: Tradition, extinction, invention. Re-staging as creative contemporary practice Alison Curtis-Jones

455

33 “Dancing through the hard stuff”: Repetition, resilience, and female solidarity in the landscape—Rosemary Lee’s Passage for Par Rosemary Lee and Ruth Pethybridge

471

Index

489

viii

ILLUSTRATIONS

7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 7.8 7.9 7.10 7.11 8.1 8.2 8.3 11.1 11.2

11.3 11.4

11.5

Intra-acting spacetime events Participants witness a bespoke dance Group improvisation after the bespoke dance Group improvisation after the bespoke dance Maria Palliani in extract of I’ve Lost You Only to Discover That I Have Gone Missing, Siobhan Davies Dance Studios Yvonne improvising during a participatory dance Sabrina airborne during a fall and recovery. Public performance at Michaelis Theatre Keith and Rose during a participatory dance Luke and Takeshi stamping and accelerating. Public performance at Michaelis Theatre Luke falling backwards. Public performance at Michaelis Theatre Takeshi, Sabrina, Luke, Aneta flocking. Public studio performance at Crouch End Festival 2017 Pathway # 1. Artist: Naomi Lefebvre Sell Pathway # 7. Artist: Naomi Lefebvre Sell Pathway # 13. Artist: Naomi Lefebvre Sell Helenna Ren as GraveDigger enacts the role of solntselov or sun-trapper in the “Killing of the Sun” scene, for the time being [Victory over the Sun] Helenna Ren releases her arms from inside her sarcophagus, the Kinect system recognizes her, and the virtual sun rises on screen, for the time being [Victory over the Sun] Vanessa Michielon in RedMicro Dress with flautist Emi Watanabe in “Tenth Country,” a scene rehearsal from Act II, for the time being [Victory over the Sun] RedMicro Dress with integrated wireless microphone system—transmitter at the waist and tiny microphone located on the left back shoulder for partnering and interaction, 2012 Helenna Ren performing the TatlinTower (head)dress, Scene I, for the time being [Victory over the Sun]

ix

91 93 94 95 97 98 100 102 103 104 106 120 120 121 161

162 163

165 166

Illustrations

11.6 11.7

“Bed of Nails” Schematic Angeliki Margeti in Futurian ChestPlate playing her oscillating electro-acoustic instrument—completing the electronic circuit through touch, 2014 11.8 Dancers Vanessa Michielon in RedMicro Dress and Angeliki Margeti in Futurian ChestPlate performing a noise duet in for the time being [Victory over the Sun] 11.9 Musician Jonathan Reus and dancer Marc Nukoop exploring elements of sounding through proximity and touch, STEIM, Amsterdam, 2014 11.10 Performance setup with coat on chair exposing Velostat conductive lining, and copper organza spiral-cut conductive floor pads, STEIM, Amsterdam, 2014 11.11 Marc Nukoop (seated on ConductiveCoat) performing a sounding dance of touch and proximity with dancer Miri Lee, STEIM, Amsterdam, 2014 13.1 Pablo Picasso’s set for Parade (1917) 13.2 The Manager in Evening Dress from Parade (1917) 13.3 Gray Chryst as the Chinese Conjurer in the Joffrey Ballet’s restaging of Parade (1973) 13.4 Pablo Picasso: Guitar (1913) 13.5 Leonide Massine as the Chinese Conjurer in Parade (1917) 13.6 Giacomo Balla: Abstract Speed + Sound (1913–1914) 16.1 Elroy Josephs in West Side Story at Belgrade Theatre, Coventry (1970) 18.1 Fan dancing at the Windmill Theatre, London, c. 1950s 18.2 The power of synchronization. The Tiller Girls in the 1960s 20.1 Greek traditional dance at Syntagma Square on March 25, 2015 20.2 Greek traditional dance at Syntagma Square on July 5, 2015 20.3 The Lyceum of Greek Women Greek traditional dancing at SNFCC 20.4 Poster of the 190th anniversary of the Hellenic Army Academy, Evelpidon 20.5 Poster for Choros stin Plateia, Municipality of Elliniko-Argyroupoli, 2018 21.1 Carlos Acosta performs Kenneth MacMillan’s Requiem for the Royal Ballet, London, in 2006 24.1 An EMAV Mevlevi Sema Ceremony featuring women dervishes dressed in colored robes, male dervishes in white roles, a male master of the dance or head semazen, and an audience who is permitted to take photographs of the performance in 2012 24.2 A sema dance enacted by members of the community during their private community prayer session before start of the spiritual Thursday evenings in 2012 26.1 Exhibition object from Reflection of Time: Art of Fashion in China 1993–2012, at the Today Art Museum, Beijing, China 26.2 Repetitions of Disappearance (2015) at the Xin Dong Cheng Space for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China 26.3 Lost in Shangri-la (2016), at the Three Shadows Art Centre, Beijing, China 27.1 Performing BackStories at University of Worcester, October 2016 27.2 Performing BackStories at Theatre Utopia, Croydon, November 2016 27.3 “My backstory is…protection for the rest of me.” “David M” from the What’s Your Backstory? series 28.1 Cynthia Ling Lee in blood run, 2017. Performed at Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center’s (APICC) United States of Asian America Festival

x

167 168

169 171 172 173 194 195 197 198 200 203 240 266 269 288 288 290 291 293 302

343 344 369 374 375 383 384 393 400

Illustrations

28.2

Audience members Miyuki Baker and Pallavi Sharma laying rocks on Cynthia Ling Lee in blood run 28.3 Cynthia Ling Lee writing Pingpu surnames in blood run 28.4 Shyamala Moorty putting kumkum on Meena Murugesan’s forehead in the temple space in we used to see this 28.5 Meena Murugesan pours coins on their head in a commodified offering 29.1 Catherine Bennett in The Changing Room 29.2 Carol Brown in The Changing Room 29.3 Adam Naughton Singularity research and development, Auckland 2016 29.4 Solomon Holly-Massey and Adam Naughton in Singularity Research performance, Q Theatre, Rangatira Stage 2016 30.1 x-times people chair, Bordeaux, France, 2004 30.2 x-times people chair, Montréal, Canada, 2012 30.3 x-times people chair, Poznan´, Poland, 2006 32.1 Drumstick Bonnie Bird Theatre, UK, 2017 32.2 Drumstick Bonnie Bird Theatre, UK, 2017 32.3 Drumstick Bonnie Bird Theatre, UK, 2017 32.4 Drumstick Bonnie Bird Theatre, UK, 2017 32.5 Drumstick, Monte Verita, Switzerland 2017 32.6 Drumstick, Monte Verita, Switzerland 2017 32.7 Drumstick, Monte Verita, Switzerland 2017 33.1 Passage for Par, at the start of the performance 33.2 Passage for Par, by Rosemary Lee Commissioned by CAST for Groundwork, Par Sands Beach, Cornwall 2018, Taken from the coastal path on the headland with the backdrop of the factory, evening performance June 22, 2001 33.3 Passage for Par, Reflections in the shallow waters of the tidal flats, dress rehearsal, June 21, 2018 33.4 Passage for Par, one of the elbow and hand holds also used in Breton and Cornish folk dance, allowing the dancers to remain closely connected, dress rehearsal, June 21, 2018 33.5 Passage for Par, by Rosemary Lee Commissioned by CAST for Groundwork, Par Sands Beach, Cornwall 2018, the ending image as the performers leave, evening performance, June 22, 2018

xi

402 403 407 408 417 418 423 425 433 434 440 459 462 462 464 466 467 468 472

474 476

480

486

CONTRIBUTORS

Beatrice Allegranti is a choreographer, UKCP reg. dance movement psychotherapist, researcher, and reader in Dance Movement Psychotherapy at the University of Roehampton. For over two decades her international experience encompasses touring dance and film work, clinical practice (in the National Health Service), and consultancy across dance, biomedical health, and education sectors. Catherine F. Botha is associate professor in the Philosophy Department, University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Her research interests lie philosophy of art, especially the philosophy of dance, and nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy, particularly the work of Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Nietzsche. A registered teacher of the Royal Academy of Dance, she teaches classical ballet at the University of Johannesburg’s Arts Academy. Erin Brannigan is senior lecturer in Dance at the University of New South Wales and works in the fields of dance and film as a writer, academic, and curator. Erin wrote on dance for RealTime 1997–2017 and has published monographs and journal articles internationally. Carol Brown is a dancer, choreographer, and scholar who specializes in interdisciplinary collaborations including Shelf Life (1999), Aarero Stone (2006), Tongues of Stone (2011), and PAH (2015). Her publications focus on the intersections of dance with other art forms. She is professor and Head of Victorian College of Arts (VCA) Dance at the University of Melbourne. http://www.carolbrowndances.com. Jessica Bugg is dean of the School of Media and Communication at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. She  has over 20  years teaching, leadership, and research experience in graduate and post graduate education in the UK and Australia. Her research and practice develop corporeal and embodied methods for clothing design and communication. Ramsay Burt is professor of Dance History at De Montfort University. His publications include The  Male Dancer, Alien Bodies, Judson Dance Theater, and, with Christy Adair,

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Contributors

British Dance: Black Routes (2016). In 1999, he was visiting professor at the Department of Performance Studies, New York University, l’Université de Nice Sophia-Antipolis, and he is a visiting teacher at PARTS in Brussels. Rosemary Candelario, associate professor of Dance, Texas Woman’s University, specializes in butoh, Asian American dance, dance and ecology, and site-specific performance. She is the author of Flowers Cracking Concrete: Eiko  & Koma’s Asian/American Choreographies, and co-editor with Bruce Baird of the Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance. Alison Curtis-Jones is artistic director of award-winning Summit Dance Theatre. A leading exponent in re-imagining Rudolf von Laban’s “lost” choreographic work, her choreography, performed internationally, was filmed by Swiss and German TV and featured in The BBC documentary Dance Rebels. She  teaches at Trinity Laban Conservatoire, London. She  has published in Dance and Somatic Practices, and in two edited collections. Michèle Danjoux is a fashion designer, experienced educator and Research Coordinator for the School of Media and Communication at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. She is co-director of DAP-Lab. Her artistic and research interests center on wearable design through and as performance, with dancers, choreographers, musicians, and media artists. Timmy De Laet is assistant professor of Theatre and Dance at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. His research is supported by the Research Foundation Flanders, the Fulbright Commission, and the Belgian American Educational Foundation. He focuses on the reiterative nature of live performance in relation to re-enactment, archivization, and historiography. Susan Leigh Foster, choreographer and scholar, is distinguished professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA. She is author of Reading Dancing, Choreographing Narrative, Dances that Describe Themselves, Choreographing Empathy, and, most recently, Valuing Dance: Commodities and Gifts in Motion. Three of her danced lectures can be found at the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage website http://danceworkbook.pcah.us/susan-foster/index.html. Nadine George-Graves is a professor at The Ohio State University. Most recently, she was the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater. She was president of the Congress on Research in Dance and a founding member of The Collegium for African Diaspora Dance. Danielle Goldman is associate professor of Critical Dance Studies at The  New School. Author of I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom (2010). Publications include Dance Research, Dance Research Journal, Etcetera, Movement Research Performance Journal, TDR, and Women & Performance. She also has performed in the work of Sarah Michelson, DD Dorvillier, Anna Sperber, and Beth Gill. Yvonne Hardt is professor for Dance Studies and Choreography at the University of Music and Dance Cologne. Her research areas include dance history and the critical investigation of its methodology and use in performative practices, gender and media in dance. She links her scholarly research with her choreographic endeavors. Her co-edited publications include Choreographie-Medien-Gender (2013) and Choreographie und Institution (2011).

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Contributors

Sara Houston is principal lecturer in Dance at the University of Roehampton, UK. She specializes in community dance. Her research on the English National Ballet Dance for Parkinson’s program won her the BUPA Foundation Prize in 2011 and she was Finalist in the National Public Engagement Awards in 2014 for her work engaging the public in the research. Michael Huxley is emeritus reader in Dance and former Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Dance at De Montfort University, UK. He qualified as a teacher of Alexander Technique with PAAT. His publications include The Dancer’s World 1920–1945 (Palgrave) and, with Ramsay Burt, Dance, Modernism, and Modernity (Routledge). Stephanie Jordan is research professor in Dance at the University of Roehampton in London. She  has written four books covering modern dance, ballet, and choreomusical issues. In 2010, she received the award for Outstanding Scholarly Research in Dance from CORD (USA). Alexandra Kolb is professor of Dance at the University of Roehampton. She is the author of Performing Femininity: Dance and Literature in German Modernism (2009) and the editor of Dance and Politics (2011). She received the Marlis Thiersch Prize (2017) and the Gertrude Lippincott Award (2014) for her scholarly articles, is the Reviews Editor for Dance Research, and serves on the Executive Committee of the Society for Dance Research. Maria I. Koutsouba is professor of Choreology with an emphasis on Greek traditional dance at the School of Physical Education and Sport Science, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, and Tutor of Open and Distance Education at the Hellenic Open University. She  publishes on ethnochoreology/dance anthropology, dance notation and analysis, and educational innovations. Cynthia Ling Lee creates interdisciplinary choreography and scholarship steeped in Asian diasporic performance praxis and deeply informed by postcolonial, feminist-of-color, and queer theories. She is an assistant professor of dance at the University of California Santa Cruz and a Post Natyam Collective member. www.cynthialinglee.com. Rosemary Lee works as a choreographer and filmmaker in a variety of contexts and media, including large-scale site-specific works with cross-generational casts, and video installations. Her interest is in both portrait and landscape, and in our relationship with the environment, urban and rural. She is an Artsadmin artist, Work Place artist, senior research fellow -C-DaRE, and ResCen research associate artist. Becka McFadden, PhD, is a performer, director and theatre maker. She is artistic director of Beautiful Confusion Collective and teaches performance making, embodied writing, and site-specific practices at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. Gay Morris is a New  York-based dance and art critic. She  is the author of A  Game for Dancers: Performing Modernism in the Postwar Years, 1945–1960 (2006), editor of Moving Words, Rewriting Dance (1996), and co-editor with Jens Giersdorf of Choreographies of 21st Century Wars (2016). She is a member of the International Association of Art Critics and serves on the editorial board of Dance Research Journal. xiv

Contributors

Larraine Nicholas is an emeritus fellow at the University if Roehampton, London. She has authored two books: Dancing in Utopia: Dartington Hall and Its Dancers (2007) and Walking and Dancing: Three Years of Dance in London, 1950–53 (2013). She is co-editor of Rethinking Dance History: Issues and Methodologies, 2nd Edition (2018). Ruth Pethybridge, senior lecturer in Dance at Falmouth University, delivers dance in diverse settings with all ages and abilities while making her own choreographic work. She works as a rehearsal director and dramaturge, including as assistant choreographer for Rosemary Lee on Passage for Par. Awarded a PhD in choreography in 2017, the politics of participation and community inform her research and artistic practice. Sheenagh Pietrobruno, associate professor, is the director of the School of Social Communication, at Saint Paul University, which is federated with the University of Ottawa. She  has held several research fellowships such as McGill University and the University of Salzburg. She  is the author of Salsa and Its Transnational Moves (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006). Stacey Prickett, reader in Dance Studies at the University of Roehampton, investigates relationships between dance, society, and politics through historical and sociological perspectives. Her publications include Embodied Politics: Dance, Protest and Identities, and chapters in Dance in the City, Dance and Politics, and Shifting Corporealities. Emma Redding is professor in Performance Science at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, London. She is dance trained and wrote the first Master’s degree in dance science and played a major role in developing dance science as a recognized field of study through her research and teaching. She is a founding partner of the National Institute for Dance Medicine and Science. Hiie Saumaa, PhD (Columbia), is a dance writer and somatic movement educator (e.g. Dance Research Journal and Dance Chronicle). Her articles have appeared in international dance journals. She  is completing a manuscript on the writings and artwork of Jerome Robbins. She teaches somatic dance, movement imagination, and physical awareness classes. Naomi Lefebvre Sell is a faculty member of Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. Her practice-led research is published in journals and book chapters (Intellect, Frontiers, and Routledge). She presents regularly at national and international conferences. Her artistic work and teaching are informed by the effect of mindfulness meditation on a creative process of dance making. Her current research is funded by Arts Council England. Gerald Siegmund is professor of Applied Theatre Studies at the Justus-Liebig University in Giessen, Germany. Among his research interests are theatre and memory, dance, performance, and theatre since the beginning of the twentieth century. Recent publications are Jérôme Bel. Dance, Theatre, and the Subject (2017), and, together with Rebekah Kowal and Randy Martin, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics (2017). Tara Silverthorn (UK/CH) is an independent artist-practitioner in the field of dance and choreography, working in various collaborative settings internationally, both as a performer and maker. She is a co-director and founding member of dance quartet Eleven Farrer House and a Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapist, practicing in Bristol. xv

Contributors

Johan Stjernholm is a choreographer and artist working across the disciplines of the performing arts, performance art, computer science, and the fine arts. Currently based in China, Johan works as artistic director for the Ballet Octahedron, artistic director for the Space Engineering Art Project, and head of Education for the Royal Conservatory of Performing Arts in Hong Kong. Lucille Teppa studied at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance (London) before taking part in various artistic projects in the UK and beyond, including company tours, art exhibitions, and “Marseille-Provence 2013 European Capital of Culture.” She is a founding member of the quartet Eleven Farrer House. Helen Thomas is professor of Dance Studies at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, and emeritus professor, University of the Arts London. Trained in both dance and sociology, she has published books, edited collections, and journal articles that focus on the body, society, and dance. She is the current editor of Dance Research Journal. Lester Tomé is associate professor of dance history and theory at Smith College. He is the author of The Body Politic: Ballet and Revolution in Cuba (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), a book supported by a fellowship of the National Endowment for the Humanities. His articles have appeared in Dance Research Journal, Dance Chronicle, Cuban Studies, and other publications. Charlotte Waelde is professor of Intellectual Property Law in the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE) at Coventry University, UK. She has worked on intersections between intellectual property and the creative industries throughout her academic career, with her move to C-DaRE underpinning her commitment to interdisciplinary research in law and dance. Sarah Whatley, director of the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE) at Coventry University. Her research focuses on digital dance resources, smart learning environments for dancers, dance and disability, and cultural heritage, often in collaboration with artists, and experts in other disciplines, including law, anthropology, psychology, digital media, and computing science. She is founding editor of the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The journey through the Companion to Dance Studies process has been interesting from the start to the finish. We aimed to reach out to senior and rising scholars and practitioners across continents to join us in this venture to publish Routledge’s first companion to dance studies. We were met with enthusiasm from the authors herein to participate in this journey and are grateful for the many interesting chapters and the range of topics and approaches they provided for this edition. Prior to getting the project underway, the anonymous reviewers provided important critical and insightful feedback which helped to make the companion much stronger. We have had tremendous support from the Routledge team, Ben Piggott, and particularly Laura Soppelsa for her patience and support in guiding us through the process and for answering the many, many questions put to her with grace, knowledge, and humor. Kim Shigo and Denise Larrabee provided valuable assistance by helping us through the copyediting process, as we moved toward the submission date.

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INTRODUCTION Thematic structure, methodological frames, and analyses Helen Thomas and Stacey Prickett

In  this first Routledge Companion to Dance Studies, we aim to map out the key features of “dance studies” as the field stands today, while keeping a close eye on potential future developments. This book seeks to locate these features historically within dance in specific social and cultural contexts, and in relation to other academic influences that have impinged on this relatively new field of study, in comparison to more traditional related areas such as aesthetics. To show the scope and diversity of current dance studies, we adopted a thematically based approach that emphasizes that dance scholarship does not stand alone as a single entity but is inevitably linked to other related fields and concerns. At the same time, as will become clear, theoretical or methodological issues raised in one strand of dance scholarship may also be found in other aspects of the dance field under discussion in this book. To this end, we have opted for what is best described as a case study type of approach that emerged largely from the social sciences (see Yin 2009).1 We consider that a case study approach focusing on particular topics, individuals or groups, and dance forms or practices offers the possibility of incorporating diverse research approaches that build on established analytical discourses such as anthropology, history, psychology, cultural studies, and sociology, while forging new avenues of interdisciplinary investigation, drawing on and gesturing toward the arts and humanities. This book is largely organized around a themed approach involving “Dance and…,” in order to map the field of historical and current dance theory and practice, and to show that there are key links or influences across the various areas of study. As such, issues of the body, embodiment, practice, culture, history, theory, methods, gender, race and class, and so on may be relevant to more than one section of “Dance and…” themes. Further, the approach adopted is international in its reach with established and rising scholars and practitioners from Australia, Canada, East Asia, Europe, South Africa, South America, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America authoring the chapters.

Dance studies today? The term “dance studies” is relatively new. It implies an interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary approach that draws on current and emergent theoretical discourses and insights in other related fields, while seeking to retain the focus of dance at the center. It engages traditional 1

Helen Thomas and Stacey Prickett

scholarly based work and recent developments in practice-based research that provide a reflective, experiential component, situating the current issues which preoccupy dance studies within developments of the field in the late 1980s and 1990s. As such, it can be argued that it speaks to the concomitant breakdown of disciplinary boundaries in the arts, humanities, and social sciences in that period and in subsequent developments. These developments were known as “the cultural turn” in the late 1980s (see Chaney 1994). This was rapidly followed by the “turn to the body” in the early 1990s. This turn to the body was influenced by, for example, the impact of feminist theory and poststructuralism (see Thomas 2003, 34–44), and the approach of Michel Foucault, for whom “the body” is key to his notion of “effective history” (1986, 87–8). In the first decades of the current century, “the turn to ‘affect’” (see Wetherell 2012), influenced by Deleuzian theory, opened a gap for dance scholars to enter into the debates around kinesthetic empathy (see, e.g., Foster 2011; Reason and Reynolds 2010). In the late 1980s and early 1990s in the US and the UK, a new wave of dance scholars was poised to move into action (e.g., Foster 1986; Fraleigh 1987; Daly 1987, 1995; Garafola 1989; Jordan 1992; Grau 1992, 1993; Adair 1992; Manning 1993; Franko 1993; Burt 1995; Albright 1997) who were drawing on some of the new approaches to add to their dance toolbox and analysis. The emergent new moves in the late 1980s and 1990s were effectively set against earlier developments in the marginal, disparate dance scholarship areas of dance ethnology and ethnography (Kealiinohomoku  [1970] 1993), dance criticism (Martin  [1933] 1965), dance history (Cohen, ed. 1974; Adshead and Layson, eds. 1983), dance philosophy (SheetsJohnstone 1979), and movement/dance analysis (Laban 1971; Bartenieff and Lewis 1980), which, it must be noted, also had a bearing on subsequent shifts of direction. These were accompanied by an opening of the range of styles studied, moving out of the primarily “theater dance” context to embrace a variety of dance forms and practices that celebrate different bodies and identities. Moreover, it is worth remembering that several well-established academic dance journals of today took off from the scholarly writing in that earlier period, with the launch of academic journals such as Dance Chronicle in 1977, and Dance Research Journal in 1974 (first published as CORD News in 1969), with the first volume of the UK Dance Research following suit in 1983. Publishers Taylor and Francis and more recently Intellect seem to have cornered the market for dance and performance journals. It indicates an expansion of interest in different aspects of these areas, such as education and training, somatic practices, and choreographic practices, which also speaks of a focus on more specialist interest journals, such as performance research, in recognition of the shift toward a concern with practice-based research. As indicated previously, rather than focusing attention on specific disciplinary areas of dance research, such as dance anthropology, dance theory, dance aesthetics, dance philosophy, and so on, we have adopted a thematic approach to the seven sections in this volume. This  is in the spirit of using a more flexible cultural studies type framework in recognition of what is increasingly an interdisciplinary approach in current dance studies, which also retains a strong focus on dance, hopefully without losing sight of historical, current, and emergent dance theory, practice, and analysis. Significant dance scholarship is emerging from a wide range of institutions represented by the authors in this companion, while a new market is being shaped by a generation of scholars who are developing dance studies as a theoretical and practice-based discipline, returning to their countries of origin in Africa, Asia, and the Global South after they complete their PhDs. Alumni from long-established postgraduate programs, such as the Department of World Arts and Cultures at the University

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Introduction

of California Los Angeles, circulate perspectives on diverse dance practices around the globe (e.g., Foster, ed. 2011). Other anthologies respond to a growth in interest new methodologies that interrogate issues of politics, gender, and identity in theater dance (e.g., Nodera and Franco, eds. 2007). This book develops this imperative by integrating subaltern and diasporic voices from the past and the present. The themes of Part 1, Dance and Corporeality, and Part 2, Dance and Somatics, are interlinked and indeed, could together constitute a whole book on their own, and may do in the future of course. However, the point of introducing them first is to highlight the import of different conceptualizations of the body in dance studies and the growing engagement with somatics within dance practice through a range of case studies. It is also the case that corporeality is so central to dance that it will be in evidence in the other sections through the different practice-based, theoretical, and empirical studies.

Part I. Dance and corporeality: Training and engagement The  term corporeality came into more widespread academic usage in relation to dance with the two-year Choreographing History project hosted by the University of California, Riverside, starting in 1993. The scholarly exchanges illuminated diverse bodily practices, highlighting their cultural significance through a range of interdisciplinary discourses influenced by theorists such as Michel Foucault (1977), Jacques Derrida (1996), Pierre Bourdieu (1984), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964), and Gilles Deleuze ([1968] 1994), among others. Topics such as training, technique, age, and multiple aspects of the body as a physical and symbolic entity are encompassed within the theme of corporeality in this book. This section addresses developments in pedagogic and creative practices, seen in Rosemary Candelario’s exploration of innovative training systems that engage with space and the environment to heighten bodily awareness beyond technical proficiency. In another strand of investigation, Catherine F. Botha questions notions of agency, subjectivity, and identity in the struggle against oppression. Inquiries into memory develop discourses around mind/body connections and how they function in dance. A level of democratization of the dancer is seen in the greater access in terms of who can dance, inviting scrutiny of, for example, the age and abilities of bodies that dance. Moving beyond stereotypes of the youthful, slender white dancer, differently abled bodies present challenges to the status quo. There  is a growing strand of inquiry into dance as empowering for those with illnesses such as Parkinson’s disease. Sara Houston’s research emphasizes poetic functions for dance through movement improvisation, distinct from investigations into the therapeutic value of the art form for those affected by the disease. Yvonne Hardt’s chapter uses a “praxeological analysis,” drawn from social science, to investigate and critically assess the learning and teaching processes of dance training that she argues is a reflexive practice involving a complex range of processes, educational contexts, and bodily practices, rather than the investigation of dance training concepts. In  turn, this leads to the rapidly growing area of “dance science” that brings together the “two cultures” of science and art, which hitherto were considered to be at odds with each other, as the scientist CP Snow ([1959] 2001) indicated some time ago. In a similar vein to sports science, a major focus of research in dance science is directed towards enhancing dancers’ performance and injury prevention by examining the effects of movement activity on the body. Emma Redding explores how dance science brings new conceptualizations of the body and how best to care for it in movement based on quantitative and qualitative research and analysis.

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Part II. Dance and somatics The development of somatically informed perspectives has shaped dance practices and analytical approaches. Alternative bodily practices have transformed training and choreography, particularly techniques such as Body-Mind Centering (BMC), Feldenkrais, Alexander Technique, Rolfing, and various martial art forms, which have also been employed in therapeutic practices. Michael Huxley’s overview of the main strands of somatic practices, some of which are locatable historically, reveals significant interrelationships while other practices exist as independent techniques. New conceptualizations of mind/body connections are explored by Beatrice Allegranti. Ethnographic methods inform reflection on creative and therapeutic processes that generate movement material for choreography based on the experience of people diagnosed with young onset dementia, their families, and care-givers. The practice of mindfulness has gained a lot of interest in recent years in relation to everyday life as well as to dance making and pedagogic approaches. Naomi Lefebvre Sell (with Tara Silverthorn and Lucille Teppa) considers connections between mindfulness and the discourses of somatic practices that emphasize felt experiences. The role of language in dance creation also has been at the center of experimental practices for decades. Hiie Saumaa’s analysis explores interrelationships between language and improvisation in group dance settings with a focus on the physical practices and writing of Simone Forti.

Part III. Dance and analysis The  emergence of formalist perspectives linked to postmodernism (as documented by Sally Banes in 1980 and 1987) has paved the way for articulations of multiple meanings in the creation and performance of dance and modes of documentation. While the 1988 Dance Analysis anthology (edited by Adshead, Briginshaw, Hodgens, and Huxley) brought together analytical methods into a single introductory source, recent dance scholarship has expanded to integrate rich methodologies from other disciplines alongside work that delves deeper into the components that comprise what is classified as dance. For example, Stephanie Jordan examines how movement in choreomusical analysis is situated in relation to its musical accompaniment, engaging with issues of style and structure alongside creative and interpretive processes. Research into different senses has helped move the focus away from the visual in dance, as Michèle Danjoux explores in this section by considering the politics of touch and “sounding costumes,” zeroing in on how a specific type of physical relationship shapes meaning in performance. “Choreosonic wearables” employ digital sound technologies embedded in performers’ costumes, resulting in a collaborative practice that can alter, restrict, innovate, or enhance the dancer’s performance and audience expectations. Highly influential concepts of the body as living archive are contested by Timmy De Laet, who explores choreographic responses that engage with “anarchival” concepts. The works use creative processes that integrate or reflect on past works in innovative ways. Archival research underpins revised understandings of history seen in Gay Morris’s investigation into collaborations between visual artists and Leonide Massine that illuminate unique perceptions of modernism. Dance criticism has long provided a fundamental foundation through which to interrogate dance practice and performance, offering a range of analytical relationships that also functioned as historical documentation. As the nature of criticism is changing with the advent of the internet, an assessment of the field’s historical development by Erin Brannigan investigates poetic functions throughout the twentieth century with a specific focus on iconic male critics and the arrival of female critics in the second half of the century. She then addresses the consequences of the shift toward criticism in the digital era. 4

Introduction

Part IV. Dance, society, and culture Analysis of intersection of the three components—dance, society and culture—have transformed dance studies as a field by permeating the disciplinary boundaries, including cultural studies, sociology, psychology, and anthropology. Shifts in conceptualizations of the term political since the 1960s facilitates scholarly investigation into issues of race, gender, nationality, and sexuality, specifically lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) across a diverse range of dance styles and practices, including popular, social, and art dance. International in scope, this section focuses on significant interrelationships, demonstrating the work of choreographers who comment on social injustices as well as a mode of social consciousness and activism, while others help shape their respective dance fields through their roles as performers, teachers, and leaders. Key issues of race, gender, equality, and justice engaged through performance emerge in Nadine George-Graves’s ethnographic study of contemporary black dance events in 2017, highlighting the power of resistance in a microhistory of Brooklyn, New  York. Ramsay Burt’s archival investigation into black British dance illuminates the lost history of Elroy Josephs, a Jamaican migrant dancer, actor, and teacher working in the mid-twentieth century. Limitations of and exclusions from the twentieth century dance history canon are exposed in the process of analysis. Other artistic strategies are investigated by Danielle Goldman who focuses on the racial implications of a project at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art that emphasizes collaboration and improvisation. Another look at performance in the mid-twentieth century illuminates the experience of female dancers on the British variety stage through archival and oral history sources. Larraine Nicholas’s historical account of the ‘Windmill Girls’ dance ensemble interrogates dance training and bodily discipline, class, female empowerment, and government censorship as the popular stage form tantalized and entertained. As stylistic boundaries are increasingly blurred, Susan Leigh Foster considers the potential for dance as a commodity. Using a televised series as a case study, the art form is situated within the global marketplace in relation to theories of labor.

Part V. Dance and time There are various ways in which the theme of time is explored in this section. Moving away from biographical documentation of facts, new historicism in literary theory has influenced dance studies scholarship since the 1980s. Dance history has expanded its scope of subjects while integrating ethnographic and oral history methodologies alongside archival source material that shapes innovative scrutiny of dance practices from the recent and distant past. Integrating anthropological and choreological research methods, Maria Koutsouba examines changes in where and who performs traditional Greek dances, considering relationships between past and present, the construction of community and diverse types of political impetus. Shifting power relationships linked to colonial and racialized policies of dominance are evident in the globalization and institutionalization of Latin and South American ballet dancers in professional companies in the UK and the US. Lester Tomé’s exploration of historical shifts documents Carlos Acosta’s legacy at the Royal Ballet and contradictory regimes of multiculturalism and stigmatization of subaltern bodies. New technologies open access to dance through digital platforms, facilitating new modes of dance preservation, ranging from the still photograph to digital platforms and YouTube. Sarah Whatley uses three case studies to examine new modes of digital transmission which alter the availability of dance content and how insights can be used. With the ubiquitous rise of digital platforms, the issue of 5

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copyright, so regulated in music, is again coming to the fore in dance. The older debates around dance notation and reconstruction concerning what is the dance and who owns it, take on new meaning in the digital age, offering challenges to lawyers and dancers. Thus, Charlotte Waelde brings the law and dance into dialogue. Sheenagh Pietrobruno investigates the architecture of social media and YouTube platforms in the circulation of dance content in relation to the intangible cultural heritage designation of the Whirling Dervish or sema ceremony.

Part VI. Dance and scenography As dance scholarship crosses disciplinary boundaries, collaborators such as costume designers, dramaturges, digital artists, and lighting designers alter the site of performances and bodies that move in them. Artistic interchanges result in innovative ways of conceptualizing dance and can also influence technological developments in the process (e.g., Cunningham and lifeforms/ BIPED). Dress and costume can influence the appearance as well as the qualities of how the body moves in space, while narrative strategies and performance staging innovations inform perceptions of dance. Jessica Bugg explores the dynamics between dress and bodies, integrating ethnographic research into the lived experience of collaborative relationships of dancers, designers, and choreographers. The inclusion of text as a creative strategy also has multiple manifestations, investigated in relationship to issues of materiality, space, and temporality in choreography for museum sites by Johan Stjernholm. Visual aesthetic concerns arise in the reflection of a practice-as-research informed solo by Becka McFadden, exploring the dramaturgical potential of the back in performance. Design elements are crucial components in the two case studies Cynthia Ling Lee analyzes, revealing how the visual and aural layers bring voice to subaltern histories in solo dances that explore queer desire, post/colonial power, and cultural imperialism.

Part VII. Dance, space, and place Disciplines such as cultural geography, architecture, and urban planning inform scholarly analysis of the significance of the physical and social space in which dance occurs. Innovations in site-specific creativity have expanded from the aerial work of Trisha Brown in Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970) and Walking on the wall (1971) (see Rosenberg 2017, 78, 96–97). Bridges, skyscrapers, mountain, and inner-city alleyways become the site through and on which people move in the twenty-first century, shaping both the physicality and significance of the location and the performing bodies. City squares, gardens, and courtyards carry histories of power—financial, social, and cultural—revealing overt or subvert narratives and identity markers. Visual artists’ work with choreographers can alter perceptions of the dancing body, while the technosphere offers innovative possibilities to shape virtual realities. Carol Brown explores interfaces between humans and machines in digital dance productions. Urban streets provide the setting for the case studies in Alexandra Kolb’s analysis of the symbolic significance of domestic activities brought to light by their performative focus. The site-specific work also challenges perceptions of who dances, examining issues of ageism and the quotidian rather than the exceptional. Gerald Siegmund shifts the lens back to the trained contemporary dance body to investigate medial representations and concepts of theatricality. Pedagogic practices and restaging processes in Alison Curtis-Jones’s creative engagement with Rudolf von Laban’s “lost” dances also highlight the significance of the performance environments and unique challenges in the dances’ evolution. The body’s 6

Introduction

relationship to ecological issues is highly topical, involving consideration of both local and global environments. The movement of thirty women on a beach in Cornwall comes to life as Ruth Pethybridge writes in dialogue with choreographer Rosemary Lee and the dancers. They  reflect on embodied knowledge and community, exploring elements of the locale including its industrial history, the beach, and corporeal interactions with sea, sand, and wind that emerge in the creation and performance of the production. The  permeability of categories in this book is reinforced by the overlap between sources found in articles on disparate themes. For example, ethnographic methods reoccur in historical accounts and practice-as-research creative processes; philosophical reconceptualizations of mind/body connections in the digital age alter understanding of relationships between bodies and space; and archival detective work challenges dominant historical narratives while inspiring choreographic creations. The  politics of identity emerge in multiple themes through investigations into subaltern voices, the social construction of space, and investigations into who dances and where it occurs. A  constant thread remains in the focus on moving bodies, however, offering paradigms for future innovative scholarship.

Note 1 See, for example, Robert K. Yin (2009). Although the methodological principles of a case study stem from the social sciences, nevertheless they can be adapted for other disciplinary areas.

References Adair, Christy. 1992. Women and Dance: Sylphs and Sirens. London: Macmillan. Adshead, Janet, and June Layson, eds. 1983. Dance History: A Methodology for Study. London: Dance Books. Adshead, Janet, Valerie A. Briginshaw, Pauline Hodgens, and Michael Huxley, eds. 1988. Dance Analysis. London: Dance Books. Albright, Ann Cooper. 1997. Choreographing Difference: The  Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Bartenieff, Irmgard, and Dori Lewis. 1980. Body Movement; Coping with the Environment. New York: Gordon and Breach. Banes, Sally.  [1980] 1987. Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance. Reissued, with new introduction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A  Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Burt, Ramsay. 1995. The Male Dancer: Bodies, Spectacles, Sexuality. London: Routledge. Chaney, David. 1994. The  Cultural Turn: Scene-Setting Essays on Contemporary Cultural Theory. London: Routledge. Cohen, Selma Jeanne, ed. 1974. Dance as a Theatre Art: Source Readings in Dance History from 1581 to the Present. New York: Dodd Mead. Daly, Ann. 1987. “Balanchine Women: Of Hummingbirds and Channel Swimmers.” The  Drama Review 31 (1): 8–21. ———. 1995. Done into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. [1968] 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. London: Continuum. Derrida, Jacques. [1995] 1996. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Foster, Susan Leigh. 1986. Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ———. 2011. Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance. London: Routledge. ———, ed. 2011. Worlding Dance. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline & Punish:The Birth of the Prison. Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books.

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Helen Thomas and Stacey Prickett ———. 1986. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought, edited by Paul Rabinow. Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books. Fraleigh, Sondra Horton. 1987. Dance and the Lived Body: A Descriptive Aesthetics. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Franko, Mark. 1993. Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garafola, Lynn. 1989. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grau, Andrée. 1992. “Intercultural Research in the Performing Arts.” Dance Research 10 (2): 3–29. ———. 1993. “John Blacking and the development of dance anthropology in the United Kingdom.” Dance Research Journal 25 (2): 21–31. Jordan, Stephanie. 1992. Striding Out: Aspects of Contemporary and New Dance in Britain. London: Dance Books. Kealiinohomoku, Joann. [1970] 1993. “An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance.” In What Is Dance? Readings in Theory and Criticism, edited by Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen, 533–549. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laban, Rudolf von. 1971. The Mastery of Movement. Boston, MA: Play. Manning, Susan. 1993. Ecstasy and the Demon:The Dances of Mary Wigman. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Martin, John. [1933] 1965. The Modern Dance. New York: Dance Horizons. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Nodera, Marina and Susanne Franco, eds. 2007. Dance Discourses: Keywords in Dance Research. Published in conjunction with the Centre National de la Danse, France. London: Routledge. Reason, Matthew and Dee Reynolds. 2010. “Kinesthesia, Empathy and Related Pleasures: An Inquiry into Audience Experiences of Watching Dance.” Dance Research Journal 42 (2): 49–75. Rosenberg, Susan. 2017. Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press. Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. 1979. The Phenomenology of Dance, 2nd ed. London: Dance Books. Snow, C. P. [1959] 2001. The Two Cultures. London: Cambridge University Press. Thomas, Helen. 2003. The Body, Dance & Cultural Theory. London: Palgrave. Wetherell, Margaret. 2012. Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding. London: Sage Publications. Yin, Robert K. 2009. Case Study Research: Design and Methods. London: Sage Publications.

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PART I

Dance and corporeality: Training and engagement

1 DANCING THE SPACE Butoh and Body Weather as training for ecological consciousness Rosemary Candelario

Introduction Japanese experimental dancer Min Tanaka famously said, “I don’t dance in the space, I dance the space” (Candelario 2018, 45). The statement’s removal of a preposition, just two small letters, results in a profound reordering of the relationship between bodies and spaces that has both philosophical and ecological implications: philosophical in the sense that Tanaka proposes both a theory and practice of dancing that requires a new conception of how dancing connects bodies and space, and ecological because I believe the application of this theory and practice beyond dance training and performance could affect discursive and perhaps even day-to-day shifts in how humans relate to their environment. This chapter asks: How can we understand what it means to dance the space? How does one learn to dance the space? What are the implications of this kind of practice on how we understand space and our relationship to it? Can dance training actually double as training for developing an alternative relationship between humans and their environment? As a way of addressing these questions, I discuss my ethnographic research at two dance training workshops: SU-EN’s Butoh Summer Camp in wooded rural Sweden in 2015 and Frank van de Ven’s Body Weather-based Body/Landscape workshop in the mountains of the Basque Country in 2013. This chapter begins with an orientation to butoh and Body Weather, and then brings ideas from dance, ecology, and posthumanist philosophy together to articulate how these dance practices can facilitate what Ann Cooper Albright (2003) calls an “ecological consciousness.” The two training programs are then described in detail, including their understanding of the body, and exercises used to train the body to shift out of habitual patterns and into new orientations with the space. Finally, the two practices are compared and contrasted in order to point to how each of these forms trains people to dance the space. This chapter takes as a given that it is possible (and indeed necessary, urgent) to teach, learn, and practice dance techniques that can shift one’s relationship to the environment, from body-subject to just another object in what Timothy Morton (2013) calls “the mesh.” What’s more, it takes an idealistic stance that butoh and Body Weather training practice have the potential to have a direct impact, not just a mimetic or representative one, on behaviors integral to this shift.

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In an era of accelerating climate change, this kind of work, which is at once both material and philosophical, takes on a particular urgency. My hope is that eventually this research on butoh and Body Weather training methods could illuminate, as Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May (2012, 6) have stated, not only “how performance has or might function as part of the transvaluation of values necessary to forestall ecological collapse,” but also how these dance training programs could function beyond the trainings themselves as part of the transformation of behaviors necessary to forestall ecological collapse.

Butoh, Body Weather, training Butoh is an avant-garde dance developed in Japan in the late 1950s and 1960s by a group of dancers centered on Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. Butoh features an image-based approach to generating movement, an emphasis on the transformation of the dancer into something else, an intense physicality that may result in explosions of movement across the stage or a strictly contained tension beneath the surface of the skin, and a focus on themes such as death, marginality, and nature (Baird and Candelario 2018). Close associations between butoh and specific sites can be traced to Hijikata’s project with photographer Eikoh Hosoe (1965–1968) in the northern region of Japan, Tohoku, where Hijikata grew up and Hosoe took refuge as a child during the bombing of Tokyo. Inspired by the work with Hosoe (which was published as the book Kamaitachi in 1968), Hijikata mined memories and images of Tohoku to create new choreographic ideas and movement vocabulary, a project that consumed him until his death in 1986. Although Hijikata was far more interested in the idea of Tohoku than the material landscape, the strong association that ensued between butoh and site has since inspired butoh dancers to develop companies and practices in relation to their own local native or adopted landscapes. The form is now often taught and performed outdoors, in addition to being performed on stages, and has been adapted to many different landscapes all over the world. Min Tanaka started leading Body Weather workshops in 1978. Body Weather, Tanaka insists, is not a dance style, but rather an ideology for dance and life and a methodology for bodily research. Body Weather is centered on the exploration of the body’s landscape in the context of the larger environment, in which “bodies are not conceived as fixed entities, but just like the weather, [are] constantly changing through an infinite and complex system of processes occurring in- and outside of these bodies” (Body Weather Amsterdam n.d.). Zack Fuller (2012) describes Body Weather as “research, a way of acquiring information, experience, and stimulation from the physical environment.” Nature images like wind and clay, and an orientation to site (whether that site is an urban street, a suburban park, a dance studio, or a wooded rural setting), are considered important sources of stimulation for training and performance. From 1986 to 2010, Tanaka hosted Maijuku Performance Company members and students on his Body Weather Farm in Hakushu, Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan. The working organic vegetable farm not only sustained Tanaka and the company, but also—and perhaps more importantly—served as a central focus of training. That is, agricultural labor was considered an inherent part of dance training through information gained by the body from the physical environment. I should emphasize that many Body Weather practitioners, including Tanaka himself, currently sharply distinguish their work from butoh (although this has not always been the case). Tanaka did work with Hijikata for a few years before Hijikata died in 1986, but already had a substantial body of experimental, improvisational, and site work to his credit before that time. While Body Weather practitioners typically hold Hijikata in high esteem, they 12

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find butoh to be a fixed entity that does not allow the kind of open-ended experimentation that they want to pursue. Nonetheless, as a practitioner of both butoh and Body Weather, and as a scholar, I find it to be productive to include practices on the margins of butoh in the discussion. Butoh is certainly not  the only dance form being used to explore these issues. I focus on butoh and butoh-related forms such as Body Weather here, first and foremost, because that is my background as a performer and my expertise as a scholar. However, there are two other reasons why butoh and Body Weather practices offer such a rich field in which to investigate dancing the space. First, although there is an active debate about what constitutes contemporary butoh, the one thing people agree on is that butoh and butoh-related dance is fundamentally about the transformation of the dancing body into something else (see, e.g., Baird and Candelario 2018; Fraleigh 2010). Second, many training workshops not only situate themselves in nature but also explicitly present the workshop as a way to understand or form a relationship with that particular landscape. I want to take the claims of these practices seriously as potential modes for transforming humans and forming relationships with the environment. Although the focus is on dance training here, the central point is not dance pedagogy or how the dance is taught, but on what the training produces. Whereas performance is often about spectatorship and representation, training is about participation and learning how to do something. Attention to training rather than performance, I propose, opens up a focus on learning and repeating behaviors that require us to act differently, not only in the specific locales of the trainings, but potentially also on a larger scale in relation to our global climate. These training programs neither engage the environment as a backdrop for dance, such as in site-specific dance, nor as an aesthetic object in its own right, as in land art, nor as a theme about which to dance. Instead, they develop in their participants processes aimed at developing a set of complex interconnections between body and space. If and when performance is included as a component of these workshops, the focus is on sharing the processes and experiences with witnesses in the place where those processes were honed. The interconnections learned through dancing, which I conceptualize here through philosopher Morton’s (2013) related concepts of interobjectivity and the mesh, force us to question our assumptions about the relationship between bodies and space, and remind us that we are not  and cannot be isolated from our surroundings.

Bodies, space, and dance: “Facilitating an ecological consciousness” In the German modern dance of Mary Wigman and Rudolf von Laban, which served as a foundation for modern dance in Japan as well as butoh (Elswit et al. 2018), space acted on bodies, while at the same time bodies moved through space. Space was volumetric, providing a “Raumempfindung or ‘felt’” experience (Brown 2010, 60). In this context, there was a clear distinction between inside (the body, the emotions) and outside (space). Much of this modern dance sought to project the inside to the (transcendent) outside. In this view there is a clear separation between a body and the space through which it moves. Radical changes to conceptions of space and time in postmodernity (see, e.g., Harvey 1990) have been accompanied by a concomitant shift in the relationship of choreography to space. Influenced in part by Deleuzian thought, spatial practices now tend more to the post-Euclidian. Instead of a simple inside-outside dichotomy, what we now see is more like a Möbius strip, an “enfolding [of ] inside and outside . . . [in which] the body is both ‘contaminated’ and ‘contaminant,’ erupting and displacing borders between soma and city, the 13

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organic body and the built environment, corporeality and virtuality, container and contents” (Brown 2010, 61). In other words, rather than remaining separate, dancing bodies and space have developed an interpenetrative relationship in which neat borders are no longer distinguishable. In the case of butoh, Hijikata was already choreographing a body without organs of sorts (via Artaud) well before Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari wrote their book A Thousand Plateaus (1980); Deleuze and Guattari themselves were interested in butoh for its body assemblages and nonhuman becomings, the former largely through his student, and later translator, Kuniichi Uno, and the latter directly as evidenced in his writing about butoh and Tanaka (Guattari 2015). (In addition, numerous scholars bring Deleuze and Guattari to bear on butoh and vice versa: Cull 2012 and Hornblow 2006 are but two examples.) Albright’s description of her approach to teaching dance improvisation in a university setting is one example of the potential political implications of a kind of Deleuzian or postEuclidian understanding of the relationship between bodies and space. She writes: I ask [students] to concentrate on opening the pores of their skin so that the world can penetrate their physical awareness. This image helps us feel our bodies as part and parcel of a whole landscape, rather than the instrument that views, arranges, or destroys that landscape. I have, at times, described this somatic moment as facilitating an ecological consciousness: in this dialogue between the self and the world one becomes aware of the intriguing possibilities of interdependence. With this comes a deeper sense of responsibility, not as an oppressive duty towards others, but rather as an ability to respond, an ability to be present with the world as a way of being present with oneself. (Albright 2003, 262) Crucial here is the shift from the kind of interpenetrative relationship described above (acknowledging a mutual impact) to an interdependent one (acknowledging a mutual responsibility). It is key, too, that Albright highlights not only the shift in being in relationship with the world, but also, by repeating the word “ability,” she draws our attention to particular skills that dancing can develop: responsiveness, presence, and seeing (and therefore perhaps treating) the world as inextricable from oneself. The kind of relationship Albright describes has the potential to undo the anthropocentrism inherent in discourses such as the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000), which identifies the current geologic era as one defined by human impact on the environment and climate. The development of critical posthumanism has been essential to shifting notions of relationships of bodies and space(s) away from a human-centered understanding of the world and toward the kind of interdependent mutuality Albright aims to teach. While some scholars focus on decentering humans in favor of seeing them as part of the larger web of life on the planet (see, e.g., Badmington 2000; Wolfe 2009; Braidotti 2013), others seek to broaden the scope even further to consider nonhuman objects and their relationships to one another (see,  e.g.,  Bennett 2010; Bogost 2012; Harman 2018). Morton, who belongs in the second category, provides a helpful way to understand this kind of newly ordered web of interconnectivity through Object-Oriented Ontology. He writes, “The phenomenon we call intersubjectivity is just a local anthropocentric instance of a much more widespread phenomenon, namely interobjectivity . . . ‘intersubjectivity’ is really human interobjectivity with lines drawn around it to exclude nonhumans” (2013, 81–82). Like the simple but profound change Tanaka effects in his statement that opens this chapter, the substitution of “ob” for “sub” in Morton’s writing effects a profound reordering of the world. Gone are the body-subjects of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964) with special status over and above objects that have been so dominant 14

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over the past half century. Instead, we are all objects: my body, the chair in which I sit, the computer on which I type, my cat sleeping on the couch a few meters from me, the house in which I write, my partner sitting in the next room, the street on which I live, even the weather system that yesterday delivered massive thunderstorms and today bathes my town in cooler temperatures and warm sunlight. Interobjectivity is the spacetime between and among these objects. In  the sense of quantum physics, spacetime is four dimensional—the three dimensions of space plus time; it is not  static but dynamic, responding to hyperobjects. The  classic example is how a planet displaces spacetime, which is experienced by other objects as gravity. For Morton, interobjectivity—a way to describe the relationships among all objects, including humans—does not exist in spacetime, rather, it is spacetime, or rather, spacetime is interobjectivity. Just as Tanaka removes the “in” in order to dance the space, Morton removes the “in” in order to establish that the relationship among objects—the quantum, the planetary, and the mundane—is nothing less than the dynamic responsiveness of spacetime. An interobjective system (me, my cat, my house and my neighbors’ houses, the trees in the yard, the asphalt street, the weather system sitting over North Texas) is an example of what Morton calls “the mesh.” The  mesh resonates with the Japanese concept of ma. Ma is not simply space or the space of the body, but more properly is the space between things (see Vessey 2018 for a discussion of ma in butoh training). Judith Hamera (1990, 57) describes ma as a “meaning-full interval in space, time, or space-time, an interval with both objective and subjective aspects, inherently relational.” Although it is a system of interconnectedness, the mesh is nonetheless “full of gaps and absences” (Morton 2013, 83). Like a spiderweb or a textile, the mesh is both the linkages and the hole between the links. What this all enables, in thinking about dance and thinking about the dance training programs to be discussed below in particular, is a philosophical framework for what these dance training programs have already been rehearsing: a radically reordered object corporeality, sensitivity to the connections (mesh, ma) constituted by the space itself, and an embodied and practiced ecological consciousness fundamentally attuned to interdependence.

Learning how to dance the space: Expanding and erasing in order to encounter SU-EN is a leading butoh proponent with more than twenty years of experience exploring the connections between the Nordic landscape and humans through her dance. SU-EN began studying butoh in Japan in 1988 with Yoko Ashikawa, a star butoh performer with and on whom Hijikata choreographed from the late 1960s until his death in 1986. SU-EN performed with Ashikawa’s companies, Hakutobo and Gnome, until she decided to return to Sweden and start the SU-EN Butoh Company in 1994, one of the first butoh companies founded by a non-Japanese dancer. SU-EN holds seasonal butoh camps an average of two to three times a year at her company’s home base, Haglund Skola, a former schoolhouse and its surrounding land in rural Sweden. When I asked her in conversation why she chose Haglund Skola as a base for her teaching and choreography, SU-EN (2015) said that living in nature constantly teaches you how much you do not know. Moreover, it provides the kind of obstacles—or what she likes to call “disturbances”—that she finds essential to butoh. For example, walking in a dance studio provides little in the way of obstacles: the space is designed to facilitate movement. Cities, too, are designed to direct movement with relative ease along particular pathways (although, if you are in a wheelchair or are traveling with someone with a different mobility, obstacles in the city become more apparent). But in the forest, or what she calls “real life,” 15

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physical obstacles like brambles and mud, and “disturbances” like insects, abound. According to SU-EN, butoh dancers need disturbances, are interested in them, and actively use them in our dancing. One example she gave, and that students at the summer camp could readily identify with, is how a bug bite can alter one’s experience of one’s body. The obstacles and “disturbances” SU-EN values in her training are reminders that cannot be ignored—that humans are ultimately enmeshed with their environment rather than in control of it. For  SU-EN, butoh requires that we always place ourselves in a situation to actively encounter the world anew. SU-EN (2003) often uses the phrase “body and the world,” as in the title of her book: Butoh: Kroppen och världen/Body and the World. “The body is the world. The world is the body,” she writes. “[The butoh body] recycles its environs. It is an organism, not a shape. Butoh dares to transform the initial reality of the body into a disparate reality of living matter. The body merges with space and the confrontation can commence” (69). What SU-EN describes here is a process, though not an easy one. For her, butoh is a struggle and a dangerous, even terrifying, practice because it requires facing the world and being challenged to change one’s appearance and one’s understanding. The emphasis, on the one hand, is on acknowledging how much one does not know, while at the same time cultivating the willingness and ability to encounter the unknown. I attended the ten-day summer camp in 2015, along with thirteen other participants, ten of whom were Swedish, with the other three from Ireland, Croatia, and South Africa. Dancers ranged in age from midtwenties to midseventies. Our days followed a regimented schedule coordinated by team leaders. Every morning we did “practical work” around the property as part of teams assigned to gardening, cooking, and carpentry. In the afternoon, we did “basic training” in the studio, which prepared us to learn a handful of SU-EN’s more than sixty “body materials.” SU-EN’s “body materials” are choreographic image nuggets, akin to Hijikata’s butoh-fu (see van Hensbergen 2018), that form a basis of her training. The “body materials” are drawn from the Swedish landscape and include images such as mosquito, stone, rubber, lotus, and rotting season. During free time, we could explore SU-EN’s library or spend quiet time on the grounds or in our spartan rooms. In the evening, we would watch films of butoh performances or listen to SU-EN lecture on various aspects of butoh history. Group meals, prepared in teams, were simple but nourishing. The camp culminated in a public performance and meal we prepared for guests. The “practical work” at SU-EN’s butoh camps is meant to provide a way to get to know “what we do here.” It is a way of becoming familiar with the landscape, of learning group problem solving, and of developing a means of relating the body to the environment. I was on the gardening team and spent hours each day weeding. In my field notes I observed the silence of weeding. Forgetting others were there. Just the task of moving tiles, finding and loosening roots, encountering grubs and centipedes and worms and slugs and ant nests and one white moth. Does this silence and removal of distraction make us more able to perceive the struggle [of butoh] and the resistance? Does “remaining calm”  [as SU-EN instructed us] facilitate the orientation needed to encounter the world? (Candelario, July 5, 2015) After a morning encountering whatever the rural Swedish environment outside offered (rain, bugs, dirt), afternoon “basic training” in the spare, high-ceilinged studio-cum-black box theater, with tall windows on three sides and an immaculate wooden floor, provided a very different environment in which to train our bodies. Exercises here were designed to cultivate a body that is always seeking to meet the world around it. We learned to breathe as if our 16

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bodies were balloons constantly being filled with air, expanding in all directions. We also practiced “erasing and expanding” all of our joints and the outlines of the physical body, trying to enact in our bodies a drawing SU-EN made of a stick figure with open spaces where joints should be, in which the body itself lost its solidity and became a kind of mesh. Placing these images in our bodies, we would over and over again try to go from lying down to standing using only our “belly power.” The process of erasing the body’s outlines is meant to make room for something else to enter, while expanding in all directions enables an active encounter with the world, akin to the ecological consciousness Albright describes. It is into the erased and expanded body that SU-EN’s “body materials” may enter. While image-based prompts are common sources for movement vocabulary and choreography in butoh, SU-EN’s “body materials” are, in my experience, unique for their incorporation of smells and sounds. According to SU-EN, these aspects are important because they exceed the material boundaries of the body, contributing to the process of “erasing and expanding” the body. For example, the first body material we learned was the “rotting process,” in which not only rotting organs and organisms propel the dancing body, but crucially the smell of rotting does as well. As we spent hours practicing this body material solo and in pairs, SU-EN shared the following image: if an apple rots, the smell extends so far, which means that the apple also extends that far. Our task, then, was to do the same with our bodies and the space. Ultimately, the training was about erasing our social bodies, “my shape,” as SU-EN often referred to it, and in learning to always place ourselves in a position to encounter the world around us. Indeed, photographic images of her choreography available on her website often depict dancers with their faces completely covered, giving the impression of an effort to erase the individual features in favor of viewing the dancing body as part of the larger landscape (SU-EN Butoh Company n.d.). While SU-EN never used the words “subject” or “object,” I nonetheless have come to understand her workshops as training for how to become an object in relation to other objects. Expanding and erasing in order to allow something else to come in can have the effect of exposing the gaps and the linkages of the mesh; by actively expanding our view of/beyond our own bodies, we can begin to grasp dancing the space as a risky yet necessary way of encountering the world.

Learning how to dance the space: Sensitizing the body to external stimulation Frank van de Ven is a noted Dutch dancer and choreographer who worked with Tanaka and his Maijuku Performance Company in Japan from 1983 to 1992 before he founded Body Weather Amsterdam with Katerina Bakatsaki in 1993. Along with Oguri and Roxanne Steinberg in Los Angeles, Andrés Corchero in Barcelona, Christine Quoiraud in France, Stuart Lynch in Denmark, and Tess De Quincey in Australia, van de Ven is one of the most active proponents of Body Weather working today. He is unique among the above-mentioned dancers for his extensive teaching across Europe and sometimes in Canada, the United States, and Australia. In 2018 alone, he taught fifteen workshops in ten countries lasting two to ten days each. His workshops are a combination of Body Weather and his own Body/Landscape. Whereas Body Weather can happen anywhere, van de Ven created Body/Landscape specifically for training in rural outdoor settings. Body/Landscape workshops are centered on the exploration of the body’s landscape in the context of the larger natural landscape. Like Body Weather, these workshops emphasize strength, flexibility, and grounding alongside kinesthetic sensitivity to stimulation from the physical environment, keen observation of one’s own body and the bodies of fellow participants, and verbal discussion and feedback. 17

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While the settings of Body/Landscape might change from the mountain meadows and trails of Itxassou and its environs in the Basque Country (where I trained in July 2013), to the isolated Isle of Eigg in Scotland, to the Lake District in England, the training exercises remain largely the same. Like Hijikata’s butoh, Body Weather practices are aimed at disrupting daily habits, for example by travelling to a different landscape; at the same time, exercises are repeated frequently so as to attune dancers to the constant change occurring in their bodies as well as in the larger environment. Like Body Weather, Body/Landscape focuses on sensitizing dancers to the weather/ landscape within one’s own body, relationships with others, and relationships with the environment. Van de Ven described the work in the following way in a flyer for the 2013 Itxassou workshop: “The workshop proposes strategies to confront our bodies with the multiplicity, unpredictability, directness and autonomy of the natural environment. The aim is to explore and develop consciousness of the body itself being an ever-evolving landscape within a greater surrounding landscape.” Learning how to take in stimulation from the environment is key to Body Weather training. As Tanaka himself explained, “If I have a chance to get stimulation from outside through my skin, I contain more than is inside my clothing. That is Body Weather. It’s omni-central, as if there are many eyes, many centers, moving” (quoted in Marshall 2006, 61). In sum, Body Weather cultivates a body that is open, diffuse, and protean. The fourteen primarily Western Europe–based participants in the six-day Itxassou Body/ Landscape program lived and ate in an old farm building converted into a bunkhouse in the neighboring village of Macaye. We began most of our days carpooling to a small studio in nearby Itxassou, where we methodically warmed up our bodies following a sequence designed by van de Ven and then moved into Body Weather’s M/B training, an intensely rigorous physical practice, which can stand for mind/body, muscle/bone, and movement/ balance (for more on Body Weather training in general, see McAuley 2000; Fuller 2014; Hug 2016). Weather permitting, a simple lunch of breads, cheeses, and vegetables was eaten outdoors, where we would spend the afternoon in group exercises and solo exploration, either in wooded areas in the village or in the hills or mountains in the surrounding area. In the evenings, after a filling communally cooked meal served under the stars, we had the opportunity to read and discuss texts selected by van de Ven. M/B, a foundation of Body Weather training, can be likened to a long (one to one-and-ahalf hours) game of follow the leader, including walking, jumping, and running patterns alongside what I refer to as “body puzzles” (think of rubbing your belly while patting your head). This type of practice cultivates an ability to respond quickly to new information, and to keep doing so despite being tired or confused about steps or counts. In fact, this is another feature of M/B: a keen attention to the internal body alongside the focus on external stimuli (in the form of verbal instruction or physical demonstration). For example, noticing changes in one’s body as it becomes fatigued, even while trying to keep up with challenging exercises, provides important information for learning and reflection. The training also aims to develop one’s awareness of these constantly changing relationships and the ability to be able to pick them up quickly. After a morning of M/B, we would go on group and solo hikes in the region, during which we might also engage in solo image work and partner and group exercises. The idea is that once the body is sensitized by M/B, it is better able to take in stimulation from the environment. For example, our first day we were sent out on an hour-and-a-half solo hike in the rolling hills surrounding our bunkhouse. Our instructions were to “breathe the landscape” as a way of attuning our own bodily rhythms and senses to the world around us. Entering such a slowed and expanded state, we were to observe the movements of the landscape, document them with pen and paper, and dance them. Surrounded by rolling pastures on all sides 18

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and jagged mountain peaks in the distance, I was nonetheless drawn to strands of local grasses near my feet whose delicate upright stillness would sometimes erupt into violent swaying back and forth as an indication of the wind passing through this seemingly motionless landscape. From experiences like this, we each created our own personal “image dictionaries” of at least five of the movements we found. These novel movement vocabularies then formed the basis for further improvisation and experimentation throughout the week in new and repeated settings and in new and repeated combinations: by ourselves, for a partner; in a field, in a copse of trees, on a riverbank on top of large stones, on the edge of a cliff; one image at a time, moving through all parts of the body; two images in the body at once, near to each other or far away. This combination of constantly seeking new stimulation, while at the same time valuing repetition for the way it can bring attention to the smallest of changes, points to Body Weather’s (and Body/Landscape’s) honing of interdependent, interobjective linkages. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere: the Body Weather body is specifically relational, only coming into being through an active and continual exchange with its surroundings . . . Rather than the body being at the center of its own kinesphere, it is both expanded and dispersed. [Moreover, these practices] are designed to lead to a heightened awareness of sensation in the body and its surroundings, and openness to receiving and responding to both. The  resultant dance is constantly in flux because it is always responding to new internal and external stimuli. (Candelario 2018, 50) Like a weather system, the body is always changing, as is the space. By seeking these parallels, by experimenting with them, and cultivating an awareness of how all of these—body, environment, and space—are constantly changing and constantly in relationship, Body/ Landscape trains dancers to sense themselves as part of the mesh.

Conclusion: Implications of dancing the space Geographer Jamie Lorimer (2015, 5) recently issued a compelling call to develop a “set of embodied and skillful processes of ‘learning to be affected’ by the environment.” The implications of the processes sought by Lorimer are profound: nothing less than an “alternate ontology” that replaces “nature with a capital N” with a “hybrid and lively character of a world animated by a vast range of human and nonhuman difference adhering to multiple and discordant spatio-temporal rhythms” (5). I argue that these processes already exist in practices like the two workshops described in this chapter. While neither program explicitly sets out to develop a corporeal environmental consciousness, the way that they each teach participants to dance the space has profound environmental implications. In both SU-EN’s and van de Ven’s training, how the body is understood is central to how space is understood: the two are inextricable and cannot be understood in isolation from one another. It is moreover essential to both practices to establish that the body is not a fixed entity with a firm border separating inside from outside. Instead, any division between internal and external is both malleable and permeable. Furthermore, both workshops emphasize a redisciplining of the body away from habitual movements, something that the retreat to an unfamiliar landscape is meant to facilitate. Both training practices take repeated work to understand this constantly changing and mutually influenced relationship between humans and our environment, dancers and space, and that this relationship is at its heart corporeal, social, and profoundly material. Interobjectivity after all cannot happen in isolation. 19

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Still, differences between the two training practices are instructive. Terms like sensitizing and stimulation in Body/Landscape suggest a sensual and open, yet defined, boundary through which body and weather/landscape interact, whereas erasing, expanding, and encountering in the SU-EN Butoh Company methods implies a process that fundamentally changes a body’s outline and form. These each suggest a flow of information (stimulation into the body or from the body out into the world) and degrees to which the body must change in order to be in relation with the space. Moreover, SU-EN’s set “body materials,” to be learned and investigated through long-term training at Haglund Skola, stand in contrast with personal Body/Landscape image dictionaries that each individual creates based on their observances and walks and that will change with each new day and each new location, though the process of investigation remains the same. Considering these two training practices from a broader perspective, both invite a reimagination of what dance and ecology together could produce through their conceptions of space. Dance training in both cases functions as a kind of experiential learning for recognizing and rehearsing interobjectivity and mesh-like interconnections in our everyday lives. In this way, butoh and Body Weather training can become tools for grappling with environmental crises by offering the opportunity to develop a new embodied ecological praxis.

References Albright, Ann Cooper. 2003. “Epilogue.” In Taken by Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader, edited by Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere, 256–266. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Arons, Wendy, and Theresa J. May. 2012. “Introduction.” In Readings in Performance and Ecology, edited by Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May, 1–10. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Baird, Bruce, and Rosemary Candelario. 2018. “Introduction: Dance Experience, Dance of Darkness, Global Butoh:The Evolution of a New Dance Form.” In The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance, edited by Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario, 1–22. London: Routledge. Badmington, Neil, ed. 2000. Posthumanism. Houndmills, UK: Red Globe Press. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Body Weather Amsterdam. n.d. Body Weather Amsterdam. Accessed March  21, 2013. http:// bodyweatheramsterdam.blogspot.com/. Bogost, Ian. 2012. Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Brown, Carol. 2010. “Making Space, Speaking Spaces.” In Routledge Dance Studies Reader, 2nd ed., edited by Alexandra Carter and Janet O’Shea, 58–72. London: Routledge. Candelario, Rosemary. 2015. Unpublished Field Notes. July 5. ———. 2018. “Dancing with Hyperobjects: Ecological Body Weather Choreographies from Height of Sky to Into the Quarry.” Choreographic Practices 9 (1): 45–58. Crutzen, Paul, and Eugene Stoermer. 2000. “The Anthropocene.” Global Change Newsletter 41: 17–18. Cull, Laura. 2012. “Affect in Deleuze, Hijikata, and Coates: The  Politics of Becoming-Animal in Performance.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 26 (2): 189–203. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1980) 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Elswit, Kate, with Miyagawa Mariko, Eiko Otake, and Tara Rodman. 2018. “What We Know and What We Want to Know: A Roundtable on Butoh and Neuer Tanz.” In The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance, edited by Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario, 126–136. London: Routledge. Fraleigh, Sondra. 2010. Butoh: Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Fuller, Zack. 2012. “Hyperdance in Tokyo: Urban Space as Subject in Tanaka Min’s Solo Dance Practice; 1975–1977.” Society of Dance History Scholars Conference Proceedings. Accessed June 6, 2013. https://sdhs. org/proceedings-2012.

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Dancing the space ———. 2014. “Seeds of an Anti-hierarchic Ideal: Summer Training at Body Weather Farm.” Journal of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Training 5 (2): 197–203. Guattari, Félix. 2015. Machinic Eros:Writings on Japan, edited by Gary Genosko and Jay Hetrick. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Hamera, Judith. 1990. “Silence That Reflects: Butoh, Ma, and a Crosscultural Gaze.” Text & Performance Quarterly 10 (1): 53–60. Harman, Graham. 2018. Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. London: Penguin UK. Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Hornblow, Michael. 2006. “Bursting Bodies of Thought: Artaud and Hijikata.” Performance Paradigm 2: 26–44. Hug, Joa. 2016. “Writing with Practice: Body Weather Performance Training Becomes a Medium of Artistic Research.” Journal of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 7 (2): 168–189. Lorimer, Jamie. 2015. Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation after Nature. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Marshall, Jonathan. 2006. “Dancing the Elemental Body: Butoh and Body Weather; Interviews with Tanaka Min and Yumi Umiumare.” Performance Paradigm 2: 54–73. McAuley, Gay. 2000.“BodyWeather in the Central Desert of Australia:Towards an ecology of performance.” Accessed July 30, 2013. http://dequinceyco.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/gm_firt_2000.pdf. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. SU-EN. 2015. Conversation with the author at Haglund Skola, Almung, Sweden. July 12. SU-EN Butoh Company. n.d. SU-EN Butoh Company. Accessed March  5, 2019. http:// www.suenbutohcompany.net/. ———. 2003. Butoh: Kroppen och världen/Body and the World.Västervik, Sweden: Rye Förlag. van Hensbergen, Rosa. 2018. “Waguri Yukio’s Butoh Kaden: Taking Stock of Hijikata’s Butoh Notation.” In  The  Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance, edited by Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario, 426–436. London: Routledge. Vessey, Julia. 2018. “My Dairakudakan Experience.” In The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance, edited by Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario, 451–455. London: Routledge. Wolfe, Cary. 2009. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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2 THE DANCING BODY, POWER AND THE TRANSMISSION OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY IN APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA Catherine F. Botha Introduction Gerard Samuel, director of the School of Dance at the University of Cape Town, posits, “in no other colonised country were dancing bodies more destructively subjected to disempowerment and disembodiment than in Apartheid South Africa” (Samuel 2011, 41). What exactly could be said to constitute the disempowerment and disembodiment of dancing bodies that Samuel names? Are there any other lenses through which the subjection of the dancing body under apartheid can be analyzed, besides the two offered by Samuel? Although, as John Peffer claims, “South African artists have long used the image of the human body in distress as a sign of the inhumane conditions in their society” (2009, 41), many investigations of art and the body in South Africa remain limited primarily to the visual arts. Peffer himself, for example, makes scant reference to the performing arts, and no reference to the dancing body, except for a brief mention of the toyi-toyi (2009, 100). There are, however, a growing number of exceptions. Most of the papers in Sharon Friedman’s Post-Apartheid Dance: Many Bodies, Many Voices, Many Stories do indeed engage with the question of how apartheid affected the dancing body in the South African context. However, since the focus of Friedman’s book is “dance since 1994” (2012a, vii, emphasis mine), this question is mostly dealt with fleetingly in these papers, typically in order to provide a background to perspectives on post-apartheid dance. There are also a number of contributions in the proceedings of the Confluences Conferences that have been hosted by the University of Cape Town since 1997 that investigate this question, albeit again, mostly indirectly. There  are some papers that do examine the question directly, most notably, Samuel’s own Shampoo Dancing and Scars–(Dis)Embodiment in Afro-Contemporary Choreography in South Africa, in which he focuses specifically on “the power of hair to maintain a discourse” (2010, 41) within this context. Despite these exceptions, it seems to me that the question of how the dancing body in South Africa was profoundly imprinted upon by apartheid remains, in my view, one deserving further examination. The current chapter attempts to address this question through analysis of how, especially in the context of state-funded dance companies, apartheid rule was legitimized and dancing 22

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bodies of resistance were marginalized and forced into informal spaces in South Africa. After problematizing a reading of apartheid as a system of “internal colonialism” or “colonialism of a special type,” the dancing body is then analyzed as a simultaneous expression and instrument of power—the primary site of social production and inscription, as Elizabeth Grosz (1987) would say, or, as Judith Butler describes it, an “embodying of possibilities both conditioned and circumscribed by historical convention” (1990, 272). Using Samuel’s (2011) claim as provocation, I demonstrate in this chapter that the encoding of memory in dancing (and also spectating) bodies during apartheid can be understood through at least three lenses: 1. Dis-empowerment ↔ empowerment 2. Dis-embodiment ↔ embodiment 3. Dis-placement ↔ placement These are not intended to be understood as mutually exclusive polarities, but rather as shifting points on a continuum. I then argue that a particular distinction between high and low art/craft was used to underpin the disempowerment, disembodiment, and displacement of dancing bodies endorsed by apartheid policy. I close the chapter by arguing that the imprint of this distinction remains evident in how South African dancing bodies transmit and record memory after apartheid, despite significant inroads being made to subvert and challenge the disempowerment, disembodiment, and displacement I diagnose. I begin with an outline of some key concepts.

Key concepts: Apartheid, bodies and dance Maxwell Xolani Rani describes apartheid as the “social and political policy of racial segregation and discrimination enforced by the white minority government in South Africa from 1948 until 1994. The  term derives from the Afrikaans word denoting ‘apartness’” (Rani 2017). Apartheid policy was constituted by a number of legislative acts, including the strict classification of the population according to race and the prohibition of interracial sexual relations. In  addition, the policy assigned separate facilities for citizens according to their race (including the use of theaters and exhibition spaces), and the creation of a separate and inferior “Bantu Education” system, as well as forcing non-white adults to carry a dompas that detailed and controlled their employment history and movements (Peffer 2009, 48). Apartheid can, however, be theorized as more than a series of legislative acts. In The Road to South African Freedom: Programme of the South African Communist Party (1963), the concept of apartheid as “colonialism of a special type” is introduced. This theory holds that the structure of the South African economic and social order is basically identical to the relationship between a colonial power and its colony (Visser 1997, 79). This, according to the theory, is due to the fact that after independence was granted to South Africa by Britain: Power was transferred not  into the hands of the masses of the people of South Africa, but into the hands of the minority alone. . . . A new type of colonialism was developed, in which the oppressing White nation occupied the same territory as the oppressed people themselves and lived side by side with them. (The Road to South African Freedom 1963, 44) Despite its initial persuasiveness, this theory suffers from a number of deficiencies, as Nicholas Visser (1997, 80) succinctly explains. These include the assumption that oppression and exploitation in South Africa only takes place between groups defined as “racial or 23

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national” in composition, and in so doing, ignores other significant relations, such as those of class (80) or gender. In addition, the theory mistakenly assumes a “uniformity of interest and experience” among all oppressed people in South Africa (80). As a result, the theory seems set to perpetuate the very essentialization of race that it purports to combat. With this in mind, despite its value as an “informal, impressionistic description” (80), I take special care to avoid an overly simplistic explanation of apartheid South Africa, while still remaining mindful of the parallels that can certainly be argued to exist between the exercise of power under colonialism and apartheid. My understanding of bodies in this chapter is a broad one, strongly informed by the phenomenological tradition. As Thomas Csordas (1999, 44) explains, “studies under the rubric of embodiment are not ‘about’ the body per se. Instead they are about culture and experience insofar as these can be understood from the standpoint of bodilybeing-in-the-world.” Following Csordas, the body, as it is conceived of in this chapter, is not a mere instrument—rather, the body is “myself in my lived concreteness” (Shrag 1972, 155). Similarly, the conception of dance utilized in the current chapter is equally broad, and very closely related to my conception of the (dancing) body. Dance is “the stylized .  .  . schema of a people’s overall physical culture, which is in itself the embodiment of that particular people’s unique way of life—their culture in the broadest sense of the term . . . . Dance . . . is distilled of the stuff of culture” (Polhemus 1993, 8–9). My view is that culture (dance) stems from bodies, just as culture (dance) leaves its explicit mark on bodies. This two-way street in which our (cultural, political) memory is (silently) encoded in our dancing and spectating bodies is not a static one. Rather, as Sarahleigh Castelyn puts it, since dance finds expression through the “physical and visceral,” the nature of moving bodies (and dances) is “constantly shifting, and never fixed” (2000, 17).

Apartheid dancing bodies Inspired by Samuel (2011), it is my contention that the encoding of memory in dancing (and also spectating bodies) during apartheid can be understood through at least three lenses: 1. Dis-empowerment ↔ empowerment 2. Dis-embodiment ↔ embodiment 3. Dis-placement ↔ placement These are not conceived of as mutually exclusive polarities, but rather as a continuum. Why? Although race was certainly the most significant determinant of how dancing bodies were oppressed, gender, language, and class also played influential roles. In addition, dancing bodies were able to subvert and collapse these forms of oppression in various ways, and at specific moments, which then disallows understanding them as exclusive oppositions.

The dis/empowerment of dancing bodies Under British colonial rule, South Africa inherited classical ballet along with the Western European idea(l)s of the body that this form of dance promulgated (see Friedman 1997, 125). Curiously, ballet prospered under the Afrikaner government and became the “highest” form of dance under the apartheid regime. It remained during these times, however, limited to being “white people’s dancing” (Van Wyk and Giesler 2011, 329). 24

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The almost exclusive reservation of classical ballet for white people allowed for two racialized bodies to be created and uncritically accepted (Samuel 2011, 42)—one presented as light, ethereal, silent, and refined, and the other as dark, dangerous, exotic, and all too material (Kealiinohomoku 1983, 540). These bodies reinforced the prevailing view that whiteness was art, with blackness relegated to the realm of ‘folk’ or ethnic popular culture. Olu Oguibe has emphasized how, under such circumstances, black bodies, which under apartheid classification included persons who were classified as Indians and ‘coloreds’, are forced to repeat a “narrative of self-denigration and self-otherization” (Oguibe 1999, 15). Black bodies are turned into “silent colonies,” fragmented and packaged to suit Western tastes (15). The  disempowerment of black bodies in apartheid South Africa is brought into sharp relief if one considers the recollections of Johaar Mosaval, the first black South African to become a senior principal dancer at the Royal Ballet. He recalls being forced to dance behind a line at the back of the dance class because he was black. He  says in a recent interview, “It was very difficult . . . I had to stand at the back. There was a line at the back, and I dare[d] not pass that line. And when I did pass that line, I would be looked at . . . That made me feel very bitter and I would ask myself whether to continue with ballet” (Mosaval, quoted in Dougan 2018). Like many other dancers of color, Mosaval left South Africa in order to be able to dance professionally. The disempowerment of black dancing bodies is also evidenced by the fact that the four state-funded performing arts councils established—the Performing Arts Council of the Transvaal (PACT), the Cape Performing Arts Board (CAPAB), the Performing Arts Council of the Orange Free State (PACOFS), and the Natal Performing Arts Council (NAPAC)— were designed to provide only for white citizens. There was no arts training made available to learners in black schools, and those black children whose parents could afford private dance classes struggled to attend the classes due to the Group Areas Act of 1950, which placed severe restrictions on their movements. The generously state-funded Performing Arts Councils “essentially did what they were supposed to do—that is to cultivate and advance white elitist Eurocentric theatre” (Bain and Hauptfleisch 2001, 11). The network of state-funded libraries, museums, art galleries, historical monuments, and archives were also instrumental in the state’s control over social memory, a control that involved both remembering and forgetting (Harris 2002, 69). As a result, the performing arts councils became examples of apartheid’s “memory institutions” (69), using silences and narratives of power to construct experience. A  much-cited example of a dance work that illustrates the entrenched ideas regarding power and the ideal body is Dada Masilo’s Swan Lake (2010). Masilo disrupts contemporary audiences in her attempt to “challeng[e] which cultures belong to which bodies” (Dils and Albright 2001, 371) by casting black South African women of diverse heights and body shapes as her swans. Masilo’s work also challenges homophobia, domestic violence, and arranged marriage, with Odette married to Siegfried, who is in love with Odile (who is a male). What is most significant in the context of an exploration of the disempowerment of bodies is, in my view, Masilo’s more recent comment that “I’ve done flamenco, Zulu dance, West African dance and now I’m learning the dance of my own Tswana culture” (Masilo, quoted in Sulkas 2016). Her comment demonstrates, I think, the pervasive and insidious impact of apartheid policy on dancers and the makers of dance in terms of the power held by the state in determining what counted as art and what did not, as well as who was permitted to learn which dances. Race was, however, not the only determinant of the exercise of power on dancing bodies under the apartheid regime. A further distinction, one skewed by gender, resulted in the generally accepted vision of a dancer as “white, female, thin, long-limbed, flexible, able 25

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bodied” (Albright 1983, 57). Ballet reinforced gender norms and oppressed the female body by promulgating stereotypical representations of female femininity (Daly 1997). In addition, male dancers were (and are) widely stereotyped as being weak and homosexual (Rani 2015, 25). As Rani relates, Peter De Villiers, a coach of Amabokoboko (the South African National rugby team), criticized the poor performance of the players thus: “So, guys who cannot take it, make your decision. Why don’t we go to the nearest ballet shop, get some tutus, get a great dancing show going, not tackling . . . and all enjoy it” (Rani 2015, 26). The view that “real” men cannot be dancers implicit in De Villiers’ statement illustrates how such perceptions further contribute to the objectification and exploitation of most black male dancers in the South African context. In addition, the bias towards being able-bodied meant that “disabled dance” was even further set aside than contemporary dance and “traditional African dance” (Samuel 2012, 132). What is important to note at this point is that the power of the apartheid regime over citizens was not complete. Small contemporary dance companies like Sylvia Glasser’s Moving into Dance, founded in 1978, and many others sought to defy apartheid’s separate development policies (Friedman 2012, 5). Dance was used as a medium for protest, with highly creative dance makers emerging to challenge the status quo. The gumboot dances that evolved amongst migrant workers in the gold mines of South Africa that communicated social and political messages that were often missed, misunderstood, or ignored (Rani 2012, 80) are a case in point. In short, the empowerment of the bodies of dancers lay nascent in the disempowerment I have described.

The dis/embodiment of the dancing body Paul C. Taylor identifies four forms of black invisibility: the denial of presence; the disregard for black personality that transforms black people into stock figures, stereotypes, and vehicles (the objectification of blackness); the disregard for black perspectives; and the denial of black plurality (Taylor 2016, 58). These forms of invisibility are analyzed from the perspective of his ‘sarkaesthetics’—his name for the practices of representational somatic aesthetics—which are those practices relating to the body, as it were, as flesh, regarded solely from the outside (108). It is in Taylor’s four senses of invisibility that I think the disembodiment of the dancing body in apartheid South Africa can be most fruitfully be analyzed. I focus here only on the first two of these. One particularly shocking example of how black bodies were rendered invisible and disembodied by means of a denial of their presence is that of Barry Martin, a black American dancer who, after performing in South Africa in 1983, was left a quadriplegic after a car accident (Linton 2006). As Carla Hall (1984) relates, both Martin and the driver of the vehicle, a white dancer, were injured. An ambulance collected the other dancer, leaving Martin behind. Sometime later, a black passerby drove Martin to a white hospital, where he was refused admission because he was black. By the time he was admitted to the black section of another hospital, he was quadriplegic (Hall 1984). Martin’s perceived blackness rendered him invisible in apartheid South Africa, an invisibility that resulted in a denial of his presence as a human being in need of help—a disembodiment. The  denial of presence that I claim characterizes the disembodiment distinguishing black apartheid bodies is also illustrated in the contract issued to Johaar Mosaval, who was invited to dance at what was then called the Nico Malan Opera House in South Africa in 1976. While dancing in Michel Fokine’s Petruskha, Mosaval’s contract stated that he was “not allowed to touch a white ballet dancer with his bare hands” (Dougan 2018). 26

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The separatist and discriminatory policies of the apartheid government are again revealed in the way in which a contract such as this was formulated. Significantly, despite Mosaval’s visibility on the stage, he was rendered untouchable and so also invisible by means of that contract. The second way in which Taylor (2016) explores black invisibility is the transformation of black people into stock figures, stereotypes, and vehicles. This kind of disembodying practice was not limited to the era in which apartheid policy was in force. The treatment of the body of Saartjie Baartman (the so-called “Hottentot Venus”) is perhaps the most publicized example that illustrates the transformation of black people into stereotypes. Her body was “constructed in the western imagination as primitive, hypersexualized, earthbound, heavy and closer to nature … the binary opposite [of ] the type of body that nineteenth century Europe would posit as its ideal” (Van Wyk 2012, 37). She was taken to Europe in 1810 and displayed on various stages as a sexual object. After her death in 1815, her skeleton, brain, and genitals were exhibited in a French museum until the 1970s, with her remains only finally repatriated to South Africa in 2002. Baartman’s extreme visibility (as a stereotype, as a curiosity for the Western gaze) reveals her invisibility—her dis-embodiment under the colonial gaze (see also Gilman 1985). Robyn Orlin’s dance work …have you hugged, kissed and respected your brown Venus today? (2011) tells the story of Baartman in order to highlight how black women are subject to Western notions of beauty and “ideal proportions” and emphasize the “sexism and racism which those standards illustrate” (Adair 1992, 171). Importantly, even though the construction of the bodies of black female dancers takes place through the discourses of race and gender (Castelyn 2000, 16), the (generally) lower socioeconomic status (and hence class status) of women in comparison with their male counterparts (Craighead 2006, 27) also adds to their vulnerability in the disembodiment characteristic of colonial and apartheid South Africa. Again, the disembodiment of dancing bodies I have highlighted was not total. In Johaar Mosaval’s case, for example, he defied the odds and went on to become an internationally acclaimed ballet dancer. The previously mentioned small dance companies that were formed also defied the disembodiment pursued by apartheid policy in bringing together dancers of any races on the stage, despite the audiences remaining racially divided.

The dis/placement of the dancing body The spatial policing of the black body, as well as the exclusionary spaces held for white dances, can be read as moments on a dis-placement–placement continuum. A significant example of the way in which dancing bodies were displaced due to the apartheid regime’s tyranny can be found in the history of the Cape Minstrels (Kaapse Klopse). During the annual Minstrel Festival that takes place on the second of January every year, klopse (troupes), entertain the crowds in the streets of Cape Town by singing, dancing, and playing a variety of musical instruments (Martin 2000). The origins of the festival are to be found in the slave trade in South Africa, since slaves were given a holiday the day after the first of January, which they celebrated with singing, dancing, and bright costumes (Martin 1999). This  celebration of “Tweede Nuwe Jaar” (second New Year), that also eventually celebrated the abolition of slavery in South Africa, became a tradition that continues to the present day. The Cape Minstrels were significantly influenced by American ‘blackface’ minstrelsy, since American minstrel troupes “spoke to the experience and survival of slavery” (Davids 2013, 97–98) and often visited and performed in Cape Town (Martin 2000). For Martin (1999), the 27

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importing of songs and the impersonation of international stars can be interpreted as a form of “symbolical denial of the stereotypes attached by the ruling classes to coloureds as people without culture, unable to create anything and wholly dependent upon the whites” (117). Most significantly, as Davids points out, in the context of slavery, the carnival was a way for slaves to signal their existence: declaring themselves visible in a world that had insisted on their expedient invisibility. Their walking, dancing, and singing filled not  just a physical space, but produced a noise which proclaimed their right to fill years of public silence. (Davids 2007, 120) A number of legislative acts were introduced by the apartheid government to hamper the carnival and the proclamation of existence that the carnival represented. These included the Group Areas Act of 1950 and the Riotous Assemblies Act of 1956, which prohibited gatherings in public spaces. In addition, in 1976 an edict “was adopted banning all marches in Cape Town’s centre” (Martin 2013, 272). Despite this, the carnival remained a singular force that contests and occupies circumscribed public space; as a means of mourning and remembering the dislocation and dispossession brought about the apartheid-era Group Areas Act of 1950, and as a political and cultural mechanism that pits the disenfranchised against institutionalized power. (Davids 2013, 89) I return to this theme again later, but at this point, it is important to note that the politics of space was exploited by the apartheid government, and yet, as the Cape Minstrels demonstrate, it was challenged and subverted in various ways. Apartheid gave some dancers and dance makers a cause for which to fight, despite not having the benefit of the facilities, funding, and spaces provided by the white performing arts infrastructure.

High art, low art, non-art As was previously mentioned, the Western division between high art and low art (or even non-art) was embraced by the apartheid regime, with whiteness associated with art and blackness relegated to ‘folk’ or ethnic popular culture. African dances were interpreted as being danced only for specific functions that were regarded as non- or un-aesthetic, as opposed to classical ballet. Clare Craighead reinforces this impression when she notes: What becomes increasingly clear during an examination of the Black Dance/White Dance dichotomy is the notion of a cultural divide within which rests the highly constructed notions of high art and popular or low art. (2006, 20) This distinction was important since it legitimized the view propounded by the apartheid government that only white persons were capable of producing and appreciating true art, whereas black persons were, at best, limited to crafts. The insidious political agenda behind the distinction between art and low- and/or non-art remains significant within the philosophy of art, since, as Noël Carroll (2010, 2) explains, “an underlying presupposition of aesthetic theories of art is that the philosophy of art should develop a theory of definition of what we might call Art with a capital ‘A’.” It  was only in the eighteenth century that ‘Art’ with a capital ‘A’ came into being (2). Before then, the arts were considered to be 28

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“any practice whose exercise required skill, based on training, rather than solely upon some innate capacity” (3). In such a view, only certain types of dance are given the status of ‘Art.’ This distinction, as is evident in my discussion of the way in which art was conceived of in apartheid South Africa, became a powerful tool of exclusion and oppression that underlay the disempowerment, disembodiment, and displacement of dancing bodies. This  does not  mean, however, that the distinction has remained unchallenged. John Dewey, well known for his Art as Experience ([1934] 1980), radically shifted the focus of aesthetics from art objects to what he called aesthetic experience. As Pope (2011, 27) relates, Dewey’s assertion of the potentiality of aesthetic experience inherent everywhere revealed the problematic assumptions behind the high and low art distinction and served as inspiration for a number of other theorists, including Arnold Berleant (2004), John McDermott (1987), and Richard Shusterman. Shusterman (1994, 1995, 2000), for example, defends the artistic legitimacy of popular culture, especially through his analyses of rap. His pragmatism challenges the traditional Western division between art and life that he asserts has led to art being disconnected from the practice of ethical self-cultivation and political praxis that he advocates (Shusterman 2000, 36). Despite the challenges to the distinction seen in the literature—as well as the disruptions and creative innovations of dance creators and dancers in challenging the constellations of power, silence and invisibility—and the politics of space that I have shown were characteristic of the imprint of apartheid on dancing bodies, it seems that the mark of the high art–low art distinction still remains, to some extent, in the contemporary South African dance experience. This is reflected, for example, in the fact that dance audiences and dance styles in this country are to a large degree still segregated. In addition, the move toward the commodification of authentically ‘African’ dances under the gaze of the tourist who is willing to pay to see them seems to run the risk of a double entrenchment of the distinction. As Friedman (2012, 100) notes, these African spectacles provide a simplistic and uncritical understanding of what ‘African’ is. What is encouraging, however, is that a number of dancers and dance makers are implicitly challenging the distinction. One example of such a challenge is, I think, to be found in the work of Jay Pather, who engages in what he calls site-specific dance theater. Pather creates dance theater works that occur outside the traditional confines of the theater and take place in various urban and architectural settings (Katrak 2018). He interrogates the question of cultural ownership through his dance works, often bringing together classical, traditional, street, and contemporary dance forms in one work. It is in these two choices that I find the implicit challenge to the high art–low art distinction in Pather’s work. In fusing together dance forms that were traditionally seen as existing on opposite sides of the divide, but also by creating works where traditionally high art forms are performed in ‘ordinary’ places, Pather’s works like The Beautiful Ones Must Be Born, performed on Constitution Hill, Johannesburg (2005), and Body of Evidence, performed at the Lister Medical Centre in downtown Johannesburg (2008), problematize the high art–low art distinction around which the apartheid regime was able to exclude-include, empower-disempower, and place-displace. Pather expresses his attempts to work between these polarities, in order to dissolve them, thus: I think so much of the art-making of my generation has its roots in the response to apartheid. In response to the terrible separation, there was a strong need to collaborate, to create strategies to counter the divides. These divides that were not just about race and class, but also divides in cultural forms: what was ‘classical’, what was ‘good’ art and ‘bad’ art, what was so-called ‘community’ art, and what was professional. 29

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I think we are still only beginning to find out what is possible in our communities, since so much has been negated and lost, and we have to be very conscious that we do not continue the legacy of apartheid in subtle forms. Art and culture reflect the unfinished business of redress prevalent in other aspects of our society. Working collaboratively engenders healing, dialogue and a way of developing, more than just a superficial understanding of diverse points of view. (Pather quoted in Machen 2018)

Conclusion This  chapter has provided an analysis of how the encoding of memory in dancing bodies during apartheid can be understood through at least three lenses—disempowerment, disembodiment, and displacement. These were shown not  to have existed as mutually exclusive polarities, but rather, as shifting points on a continuum. My discussion revealed how the distinction between high art and low art or craft was used to underpin the disempowerment, disembodiment, and displacement of dancing bodies endorsed by apartheid policy. I closed the chapter by arguing that this distinction has left a distinct mark on how South African dancing bodies transmit and record memory ‘after’ apartheid, despite significant inroads being made to subvert and challenge the disempowerment, disembodiment, and displacement I diagnosed. In discussing some of the ways in which creative work being done by dancers and dance makers in contemporary South Africa is challenging that dichotomy that closed the final section of the chapter, it is, I think, pertinent to close with the words of Maqoma: Our contemporary moment is particularly exciting, especially in the areas of funding and appropriation, despite the political quagmire on this continent. The work we put on our stages signals change. It signals artistic freedom that fuses mud huts, the Internet, Armani suits, ball gowns and naked bodies. And that is innovation, and a true reflection of our continent today. (Maqoma 2006, 38)

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The dancing body, power and transmission Daly, Ann. 1997. “Classical Ballet: A Discourse of Difference.” In Meaning and Motion, edited by Jane C. Desmond, 111–120, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Davids, Nadia. 2007. “Inherited Memories: Performing the Archive.” PhD diss., University of Cape Town, Cape Town. ———. 2013. “‘It is Us’: An Exploration of ‘Race’ and Place in the Cape Town Minstrel Carnival.” TDR: The Drama Review 57(2): 86–101. Dewey, John. (1934) 1980. Art as Experience. New York: Perigree Books. Dougan, Leila. 2018. “Celebrating the Life of Ballet Star Johaar Mosaval at 90.” Daily Maverick, May 3. Friedman, Sharon, ed. 2012. Post-Apartheid Dance: Many Bodies, Many Voices, Many Stories. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ———. 2012a. “Preface.” In Post-Apartheid Dance: Many Bodies, Many Voices, Many Stories, edited by Sharon Friedman, vii–x. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ———. 2012b. “Mapping the Historical Context of Theatre Dance in South Africa.” In  Post-Apartheid Dance: Many Bodies, Many Voices, Many Stories, edited by Sharon Friedman, 1–16. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ———. 2012c. “The  Impact of the Tourist Gaze in South African Contemporary Dance.” In  PostApartheid Dance: Many Bodies, Many Voices, Many Stories, edited by Sharon Friedman, 89–106. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Gilman, Sander. 1985. “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in the Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine and Science.” Critical Inquiry 12 (1): 204–242. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1987. “Notes Towards a Corporeal Feminism.” Australian Feminist Studies 5: 1–16. Hall, Carla. 1984. “Apartheid and the Dancer’s Anguish.” The Washington Post, December 27, 1984. Harris, Verne. 2002. “The Archival Sliver: Power, Memory, and Archives in South Africa.” Archival Science. 2: 63–86. Katrak, Ketu, H. 2018. “Jay Pather Reimagining Site-Specific Cartographies of Belonging.” Dance Research Journal 50 (2): 31–44. Kealiinohomoku, Joann. 1983. “An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a form of Ethnic Dance. In What is Dance? : Readings in Dance History, edited by Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen, 533-540. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Linton, Simi. 2006. “Tribute to Dancer/choreographer Barry Martin.” Disability Studies Quarterly 26 (2). doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v26i2 Machen, Peter. “‘Body of Evidence’ Jay Pather at the Playhouse.” ArtThrob. Accessed November 18, 2018. http://artthrob.co.za/Reviews/Review_of_Body_of_Evidence_by_Peter_Machen_at_The_ Playhouse.aspx. Martin, Denis-Constant. 1999. Coon Carnival: New Year in Cape Town, Past and Present. Cape Town: David Phillip Publishers. _____. 2000. “Cape Town’s Coon Carnival.” In Senses of Culture: South African Culture Studies, edited by Sarah Nuttall and Cheryl-Ann Michael, 363–379. Oxford: Oxford University Press. _____. 2013. Sounding the Cape: Music, Identity and Politics in South Africa. Cape Town: African Minds. Maqoma, Gregory Vuyani. 2006. “A Response: Beyond Ethnicity.” Critical Arts 20 (2): 34–38. McDermott, John J. 1987. Streams of Experience: Reflections on the History and Philosophy of American Culture. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Oguibe, Olu, 1999. “Art, Identity, Boundaries: Postmodernism and Contemporary African Art.” In Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace. Edited by Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor, 16-29. London: Institute of International Visual Arts. Peffer, John. 2009. Art and the End of Apartheid. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Polhemus,Ted. 1993. “Dance, Gender and Culture.” In Dance, Gender, and Culture, edited by Helen Thomas, 3–15. London: Macmillan Press. Pope, Nakia S. 2011. “Hit by the Street: Dewey and Popular Culture.” Education  & Culture 27 (1): 26–39. Rani, Maxwell Xolani. 2012. “Lost Meaning- New Traditions: Shaping New Identity in the ‘New’ South Africa; An Overview of Social Traditional African Dance in South African Townships.” In Post-Apartheid Dance: Many Bodies, Many Voices, Many Stories, edited by Sharon Friedman, 73–88. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ———. 2015. “Exploring the Complexities of Black Male Identities in South African Theatre Dance” Journal of Music and Dance 5(5): 24–31.

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Catherine F. Botha ———. 2017. “No Simple Answers: A  Holistic Approach to Issues Concerning Obesity and African Dance.” Accelerando: Belgrade Journal of Music and Dance 2:10. Accessed November  18, 2018. https:// accelerandobjmd.weebly.com/issue2/10-no-simple-answers-a-holistic-approach-to-issuesconcerning-obesity-and-african-dance. The Road to South African Freedom. 1963. “The Road to South African Freedom: Programme of the South African Communist Party.” The African Communist 2 (2): 24–70. Samuel, Gerard M. 2011. “Shampoo Dancing and Scars–(Dis) Embodiment in Afro-Contemporary Choreography in South Africa.” Congress on Research in Dance Conference Proceedings 2011: 40–47. ———. 2012. “Left Feet First: Dancing Disability” In  Post-Apartheid Dance: Many Bodies, Many Voices, Many Stories, edited by Sharon Friedman, 127–146. New Castle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ———. 2015. “(Dis)graceful Dancing Bodies in South Africa.” Choreographic Practices 6 (1): 107–124. Shrag, Calvin O. 1979. “The Lived Body as a Phenomenological Datum.” In Sport and the Body, edited by Ellen W. Gerber, 155–162. Philadelphia, PA: Lea and Febiger. Shusterman, Richard. 1994.“Popular Art and Education.” Studies in Philosophy and Education 13(3): 203–312. ———. 1995.” Rap Remix: Pragmatism, Postmodernism, and Other Issues in the House.” Critical Inquiry 22 (1): 150–58. ———. 2000. Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Art. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Sulkas, Roslyn. 2016. “Dada Masilo Turns Tchaikovsky on His Head in ‘Swan Lake’.” The New York Times, February 1, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/02/arts/dance/dada-masilo-turnstchaikovskyon-his-head-in-swan-lake.html. Taylor, Paul C. 2016. Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell. Van Wyk, Steven. 2012. “Performing Whiteness in Post-Apartheid South African Dance.” In Post-Apartheid Dance: Many Bodies, Many Voices, Many Stories, edited by Sharon Friedman, 31–50. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Van Wyk, Steven, and Christy Giesler. 2011. “Ballet Blanc to Ballet Black? Unpacking Whiteness in South African Ballet.” In Proceedings of Confluences 6: Physicality and Performance, edited by Beth Dutton and Lauren McGeorge, 329–339. Cape Town: UCT School of Dance Woolsack Drive. Visser, Nicholas, 1997. “Postcoloniality of a Special Type: Theory and Its Appropriations in South Africa.” The Yearbook of English Studies 27: 79–94.

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3 DIFFERENT BODIES A poetic study of dance and people with Parkinson’s Sara Houston

Introduction In an article I wrote when I had just started researching the experience of dance for people with Parkinson’s (Houston 2011), I made the claim that studying Parkinsonian movement may bring to light the movement qualities that dancers with Parkinson’s display. The idea behind this move would be to enlarge our understanding of dance and who dances: “rather than merely seeing the variation in movement as the result of dysfunctional bodies, respecting and describing the poetry formed through dance by each participant-dancer may allow the documentation of unique movement narratives using tools from dance studies” (Houston 2011, 344). I was frustrated by the gap in literature to promote understanding of the art form of dance among the clinical studies investigating whether dancing acted as a tool to help people walk or balance better. These studies were laudable in their attempt to uncover the instrumental benefit in dancing (Hackney, Kantorovich, and Earhart 2007; Hackney and Earhart 2009, 2010), but this gap meant that we were still none the wiser in exploring the art form itself as seen within the context of community dance projects and programs for people with Parkinson’s. In fact, measuring people before and after dancing meant that there was the danger of not engaging much with the actual dance event itself. Having now  studied the field for eight years, I now  have the empirical data by which to expand on this idea and more understanding of what “respecting and describing the poetry formed through dance” might mean within the context of dancing with Parkinson’s. This chapter tackles my claim, but also goes further by discussing how the unique corporeality of dancers with Parkinson’s might help dance artists and dance studies scholars think differently about what engagement by community dancers means, particularly by those with a chronic medical condition. This discussion is significant for the field of community dance and in particular dance for health programs because it subverts common assumptions about community dance as benefit—as a therapeutic tool. My chapter introduces the disease and the group of participatory dance practices that come under the title “dance for Parkinson’s.” It characterizes them as arts practices and expands on their relation to the poetic. I argue that dance for Parkinson’s is mistakenly referred to as a therapy—a common characterization. Significantly, I propose, as a poetic practice it may exceed what it can do as a form of physical therapy and has implications for how dance artists may engage with participants, not as 33

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recipients of dance, but as collaborators and artists. Importantly, it also challenges perspectives on the function and intention of a participatory arts practice, when it is specifically for people with chronic disease. My fieldwork focused on two areas: first an in-depth study (2010–2014) of the English National Ballet dance for Parkinson’s program (Houston and McGill 2015), and second, observation of other dance for Parkinson’s programs around Europe and in New York, as well as interviews with dance specialists worldwide. Additionally, my work has led to long-term participation as a mentor and dance collaborator in initiatives developed by international partners. This perspective, the in-depth and broad surveys, and also working as a collaborator have allowed me to gain insight into the content of a variety of dance for Parkinson’s programs worldwide and the concerns of artists, as well as to understand what priorities the Parkinson’s dancers had and what they valued by dancing. The nature of my inquiry with my European collaborators, which included people with Parkinson’s, was more open and studio-based, learning by dancing and learning what dance may teach us about capability and creativity. Parkinson’s is commonly termed a movement disorder. It is characterized by progressive slowing down of movement, an increasing inability to initiate or stop movement, tremor, and rigid muscles. The  symptoms produced cause increasing balance and stability issues, with falls being a serious consequence. The  neurodegenerative condition also produces insomnia, constipation, drooling, diminished voice production and handwriting, apathy, and depression. Many people are increasingly excluded from social networks and participation in society. As it usually (but not always) strikes people over the age of 50, it is sometimes characterized as an ‘old person’s’ disease (Solimeo 2009). In putting forward a description of different bodies in dance, the Parkinsonian body would count as ‘different’ to the typical dancer’s with a lack of stable and directed movement, as well as an often advanced age.

Dance for Parkinson’s Since the early 2000s, dance organizations, companies, and independent dance artists have been offering tailor-made dance programs for people with Parkinson’s around the world. From the pool of research that has been done and from participant testimonies, dancing seems to relieve people with Parkinson’s from some of their symptoms temporarily (Hackney and Earhart 2010; Heiberger et  al. 2011; Houston and McGill 2013; Volpe et  al. 2013; Westheimer et  al. 2015). Dance’s therapeutic benefit to people with Parkinson’s is highlighted in these studies (mainly in terms of its physical impact), and the research has been emphasized in advocacy for dance for Parkinson’s programs. Several documentaries have also been made (see, e.g., Bee 2009; Iverson 2014; Cinconze 2015; Goddard 2016) that have been aired widely. In many of the film features, everyday difficulties are contrasted by people’s lives in dance, where they are valued and their achievements are celebrated. Dance for Parkinson’s classes are taught in various dance styles, ranging from contemporary, Irish step dance, and improvisation, through to tango, kathak, and ballet. A common structure of a dance for Parkinson’s session starts as an inclusive circle of seated participants, followed by dancing holding onto a barre, or the back of a chair, followed by moving across the room. Dance artists working with a more didactic approach may differentiate movement so that participants may dance to suit their physicality and level of wellness. This may be as simple as offering a seated version of a standing task or using a basic rhythm rather than a complex one. Improvisation within sessions, such as in those run by DaPoPa in Grenoble and Paris, allows participants to dance according to their own way of moving, bound by a loose scaffold of openly interpreted 34

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instructions (a score). These instances of finding a framework or frameworks to include those of different abilities point to dance for Parkinson’s as inclusive in outlook and community-focused. The impact of developing approaches to teaching and leading that allow people with a degenerative condition to feel capable is not to be underestimated. Parkinson’s takes away the certainty of controlled movement and may squash body confidence. The worldwide dance for Parkinson’s movement is growing quickly because people with the condition realize that they can feel good about themselves and feel capable by dancing, despite any worsening of symptoms. Parkinson’s bloggers, such as Bob Dawson (2007) and Kate Kelsall (2014), have been instrumental in sharing how they feel about dance. Kelsall (2014) claims that “Dancing is what makes life, even with Parkinson’s, worth living.” Dancers with Parkinson’s enact the notion at the heart of community dance practice that everybody can dance regardless of age or disability. Community dance incorporates a variety of dance and movement practices that are processorientated (Amans 2008). That is to say, they are centered on providing participant-focused dance experiences. In this way, advocates claim community dance can focus on being inclusive and collaborative and meeting people’s needs. Performance artist and dance scholar Petra Kuppers (2017, 110) argues that a process-orientated, inclusive approach allows for each individual’s expressivity to emerge: “This is dance with and for everybody, every body . . . in the sense that all bodies can be expressive and that this expression is something worth attending to”. In valuing the individual’s expressive body, the dance of those who do not conform may be seen as similarly important as those who possess a (young) ‘dancerly’ body and training. Yet this situation does not represent either the common assumption about who dances, nor the reality as displayed in public theaters, mainstream community dance events, and in many popular televised shows. Youth and the able bodied dominate. Representation of the wider population is often missing in dance (Nakajima and Brandstetter 2017). The lack of visible representation of older and disabled community dancers marginalizes the practice that is going on and so makes discussion and documentation of that practice even more important. Moreover, in loosely situating dance as rehabilitation or as a therapy for people with Parkinson’s, the emphasis is on instrumental outcomes, rather than prizing the artistic process. The practice therefore becomes labeled a health initiative, rather than an engagement in movement exploration and creation, and its contribution to the latter is ignored. Yet approaching dancing as community-based art gives the observer the start of a framework in which to talk about dancers with Parkinson’s, with the emphasis on ‘dancers’ rather than ‘Parkinson’s,’ on ‘art’ rather than ‘therapy.’ As Parkinson’s dancer Reggie declares in the documentary Capturing Grace, “There are no patients, only dancers” (Reggie quoted in Iverson 2014). Reggie’s remark is descriptive of the emphasis on art making, rather than on creating a clinical road map for treatment of Parkinson’s. The distinction gives observers of dance for Parkinson’s sessions the liberty to respect and describe “the poetry formed through dance by each participant-dancer . . . rather than merely seeing the variation in movement as the result of dysfunctional bodies” (Houston 2011, 344). It therefore seems appropriate to argue from a poetic standpoint. This distinction, as I will go on to discuss, is important for going beyond representing sickness as the identity of a person with Parkinson’s, as well as for acknowledging the contribution of dance for Parkinson’s to the family of arts practices.

The poetic in dance for Parkinson’s A “poetics” is defined broadly by the philosopher Richard Kearney as “an exploration of the human powers to make (poesis) a world in which we may poetically dwell” (1998, 8). Following Gaston Bachelard ([1958] 1994), he argues that the human power of the imagination enables us 35

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to delight in the new and surprising images we formulate to make sense of our world and to attend to our surroundings in a different way. More seriously, the imagination also enables us to attend to others and to how we live in the world. This is a poetic act, Kearney argues, that has direct consequences for life. In this sense, poetics interacts with ethics. This characterization of poetics seizes on the narrower definition within semiotics to expand on the potential that imaginative and non-causal images and actions might have, which is important in demonstrating dance’s connection to the poetic. In semiotics, the poetic function of language is seen as expressive, as opposed to referential. For example, language in poetry is not usually written or spoken to convey direct meaning of its content, which would be referential, but often to reflect on the poem’s internal structure and the relation of words and sounds to each other (Lodge 1977). Because metaphor is used as a primary device in poetry, the relationship between words and content is indirect. Words are related through similarity and contrast rather than being connected through a realistic chain of cause and effect in the minutiae of narrative, although there is an internal coherence to the whole. The composite elements of poetry suggest that to be poetic means to draw attention to the internal structures of the subject in question (in this case dance performed by people living with Parkinson’s) as well as the character of those structures, in other words, qualities and expressions. The imagination is invoked in constructing and reading non-referential images or words, which then takes us to a different way of looking at things. As Stephanie Jordan and Helen Thomas (1998) demonstrate, a poetic analysis of a dance work will unearth different interpretations than a referential analysis, and importantly, expand interpretations: “there are many other possibilities, many yet to be discovered as new interpretations emerge, if we admit the poetic function of art. The picture becomes far more complex and, we think, more intriguing” (248). The extrapolation to thinking about poetics as an investigation into how we may approach our lives and live poetically is a valid next step. Kearney suggests that, as humans, through our imaginations we have the power to convert “actuality into possibility, what-is into something-other-than-it-is” (1998, 4). In other words, human potential resides in how we poetically respond in our world. It is possible, I propose, that a poetics of art, of dance, is an exploration of the mechanisms of dance that make a world in which people may live with imagination. In particular, I would like to contend that exploring the poetry within dance for Parkinson’s may allow us to see how it is possible to approach this activity as an artistic response to living imaginatively in the world, rather than necessarily a tool for self-managing a degenerative condition. Using Kearney and Bachelard’s definition of poetics as a starting point to discuss dance for Parkinson’s, I concentrate in this chapter on instances where Parkinson’s dancers have used improvisatory techniques. Because the dance for Parkinson’s movement is an umbrella term under which sit many dance forms, practices, and teaching styles, it is prudent to narrow down the focus. Improvisation is a dance practice that is well suited to the discussion of poetics because it not  only impels movement creation through various choreographic frameworks, but also invokes the imagination through the negotiation of moving in the present with others. Ann Cooper Albright (2003, 259) clarifies that improvisation as a philosophy of life “is a way of relating to movement and experience: a willingness to explore the realm of possibility.” Improvisation explores the ‘what ifs’: “Most improvisational training works to release the body from habitual responses, whetting one’s curiosity about ‘what ifs.’ Improvisation often crafts an awareness of aesthetic priorities, compositional strategies, and physical experiences” (261). Thus this movement practice addresses both the narrow and expanded definitions of poetics. 36

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Leonard and Margaret Leonard and Margaret stand opposite one another. They  are carrying out a familiar task within dance for Parkinson’s classes, that of mirroring. Margaret, I think, although sometimes it is difficult to tell, initiates the movement, Leonard following very closely. They lift their arms slowly up and then out to the side, as if describing the shape of an enormous beach ball. Then sharply, the couple (they are partners in life) hinge in their elbows bringing their forearms close to their chests, fists bunched. Then softening, their hands open, leading their arms up above their heads to split to a long diagonal line, one arm down, one up, slightly undulating, as if caught in a breeze, with their bodies reciprocating. Their eyes are fixed on each other, absorbed in the task at hand, occasionally breaking into a smile. Margaret brings her arms down in front of her, her palms up as if offering them to her partner. Leonard does the same and they bow their heads as they turn their palms down before both strongly sweep their arms to one side across their chest, their heads inclined. All the while their gaze is fixed on each other. My description above was taken from a film (Nunn and Trevitt 2012) made during an English National Ballet residency at Tate Britain. The company’s dance for Parkinson’s program occupied one of the galleries for a day during the residency and the film was shot then.1 The film, significantly, offers no explanation of Parkinson’s, nor talks of any benefits. The camera swirls around Margaret and Leonard, as the music by Ezio Bosso characterizes their movement in a driving 3/4 time. It is not even clear which member of the couple has Parkinson’s. What the camera draws to our attention is the beauty of the simple movement, made all the more special by the concentration and focus of the two dancers, underscored by the camera that circles around them like they are in their own special world. It draws our attention to the connection between them. Indeed, the mirrored movement and the concentrated gaze together give the impression of the quality of care—care in following the rules of the task, but also a loving care, perhaps in the pleasure of dancing together, or in that sense of care that only two people who have been together for a long time exude. The graceful, soaring columns of the Tate’s Duveen gallery give space to the duet, allowing the simple movements a respectful space for them to be seen and given plenty of room to emerge organically. The film made of Margaret and Leonard’s dance encourages me to see it poetically. It does not dwell on the real-life difficulties that Margaret encounters as a person with Parkinson’s. It  does not  dwell on Leonard’s challenges as partner and caregiver. Instead it offers me a way of seeing that focuses my eye on the qualities of movement. It focuses my eye on the trajectory of movement, the lines and circles traced with hands and bodies, and the intimate relationship between the dancers and between them and the large space they are in. It allows me to reflect on the movement of the camera in relation to the dancers and the music’s role in this improvised event. In focusing on the poetic—the intrinsic elements of the film and the internal structures of the movement—it offers an interpretation that does not reach for our sympathy or pity because dancers with Parkinson’s are the subject matter, nor does it ask us to applaud because they are dancing rather than shaking. Instead, it allows the viewer to see the dancing couple in a different light, one in which the spectator’s delight is focused on the intimate, nonverbal conversation. Moreover, a poetic reading amplifies the movement that is there and the playful intertwining of movement dynamics and qualities. The consequence of this is that the viewer may understand that Parkinson’s, and Parkinsonian movement, is neither the sum of the people in front of them, nor the sum of their movement potential. Dance is ideally placed to poetically highlight this potential, this other way of thinking about Parkinson’s. Dance philosopher Einav Katan explains: 37

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Rhyme, inversion, and antithesis come about in dance as the playfulness of changes and inversions within physical dynamics. New bodily arrangements deliver novel movements that are not requested outside of the realm of the dance. Therefore, new physicality emerges and substitutes for the practical world of bodily behavior. (Katan 2016, 73) The  nonliteral transposition of movement or words may point to new relations between bodies and movement, and the sensuous coupling of dynamics and qualities may be evocative of our human understanding and experience. This includes dancers with Parkinson’s. Margaret and Leonard’s improvisation illustrates an artistic response to conceiving of a world of possibility. In looking at dance poetically, it is possible to see that Parkinson’s dancers participate in an activity that is not devised to cope with a diminished body, in the sense that a diminished body has to be acknowledged by therapy, but with a positive embracing of what a dancer with Parkinson’s can contribute within dance.

Dance-makers Advocating for a poetic vision of dance for Parkinson’s programs has implications for how dance artists run sessions for people living with the condition in how much emphasis they and the participants place on using choreographic devices, such as scores, or interpretative elements, such as quality, dynamics and rhythms of movement, or meaning generation, such as working with a theme. Changing the perspective or vision of dance for people living with Parkinson’s also has significance for dance artists to develop socially engaged dance practices that are fundamentally connected to their own movement work in a professional concert setting, as well as validating the artistic contribution of the dancers (Houston forthcoming). Creating community work with a poetic, rather than a therapeutic, vision may allow dance artists to more readily interact with community dancers. A poetic vision challenges the perspective that Parkinson’s dancers are only there to receive therapeutic benefit and therefore have little to do with the field of professional dance. To illustrate, I put forward two other examples of dance for Parkinson’s programs that prioritize poetic internal structures above the use of dance as a therapeutic practice and that have subsequently demonstrated enriching experiences for dance artists and participants in different ways. In Dance for Health’s studio in Rotterdam, several dancers improvise in the space. Led by choreographer Itamar Serussi, they work to explore creative ideas in movement through a series of imaginative propositions: a score based on investigating the relationship of one body part to another within different limitations or emphases, such as time, volume, dynamic, and other dancers. One man walks in vertiginous heels, playing with his center of balance. At moments, he teeters on the edge of instability, at other times he walks tall and proud, filling the room with his glamour. A  woman rolls on the floor, finding momentum and different dynamics. I can hear the rhythms of her breath. Two others work together facing each other, arms behind their backs, hands splayed like swan wings. Another woman sits on a chair, gently rocking. The quiet movement draws my attention in its simplicity. Two of these dancers have Parkinson’s (including the one in heels), another has multiple sclerosis (MS); the remaining two define themselves as able-bodied and professional dance artists. After four half days of intensive dancing, the two participants with Parkinson’s relate how elated they feel—elated from dancing, but also from working in a manner that was focused on creating something new. They  felt they were treated differently, “like a professional” 38

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(Yvonne 2017). The Parkinson’s dancers are not there because they feel the need to be helped through dancing. They are there because they may offer something productive to the creative collaboration. The dancer in heels, Marc Vlemmix, wrote: Working with a professional who takes me seriously as a dancer, who doesn’t approach me as the sum of my disease, makes the difference. Dancing as a form of art is closely connected with my core and the fact that Serussi treated me as a dancer, not a Parkinson’s patient, was incredibly valuable for my sense of identity and for my creative potential. (Vlemmix 2017, 23) Moreover, the able-bodied dancers confided that their peers fed them with new movement and new ways of approaching movement. The dancers with Parkinson’s and MS could offer new movement and new approaches to movement because of their conditions, which impose particular constraints upon bodies that the able-bodied dancers do not experience and do not know how to navigate. Their able-bodied peers appreciated that within the dance space, Parkinson’s and MS became touch points for movement generation, rather than bodily degeneration. The poetry in the Dutch project is in the structured exploration of how moving differently creates a new dialogue with the dancer’s material and imagined body. New movement propositions relating to temporality and sensuality are imaginatively rendered material through improvisation, which in turn proposes new possibilities, both in movement and in relation to the self. Vlemmix, tall, with Parkinson’s, and dancing in high heels, is a good case in point. The slow grandeur of his movement is matched by a cheeky confident poise most often seen in burlesque dancers. He himself contrasts this with his “eight years of Parkinson’s, balance and walking problems” (Vlemmix 2017, 23). The dancer in heels tells through movement a story different from that of the man with Parkinson’s. Heels do not just physically alter posture and movement, but they also suggest, tease, and subvert (particularly if a man wears them). In other words, they provoke the imagination both in the wearer and observer. This combination of imagination and unusual physicality presents an alternative story, as improvisation scholar Kent De Spain suggests: One of our most profound capabilities as humans is the power to affect, even fundamentally alter, the nature of our reality in the moment through images and the imagination. The imagination can make the “not here” sensorily available to the “here,” causing absent places and things to suddenly seem present. (De Spain 2014, 128) In Vlemmix’s situation, the absence due to Parkinson’s of a lithe fluidity is created through his improvisation in high heels, materially and in the imagination, and this, for him, leads to another way of being: Now, at the age of 45 . . .I found out that I like to push myself to the limit, I like to “walk on the tips of my toes”. . . . Then what? Out of balance? Wobbly? Is it physically? Or is it fear? What happens first, the physical Un-balance or the fear for it? And is it possible to completely Go beyond it, 39

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To let loose the break, Get on the dance floor, Just go and don’t stop. In a flow, Like Cinderella at the ball Dancing Without fear Enjoying yourself Feeling beautiful! Happily ever after. (Vlemmix 2017, 23, italics and typesetting in original) Albright suggests that improvisational practices “encourage a willingness to cross over into uncomfortable territories, to move in the face of fear, of what is unknown” (2003, 259–60). Vlemmix makes explicit reference to moving in with and beyond his fear in his writing above. Albright calls this type of experience “dwelling in possibility,” inhabiting a space “that is more than the sum of its parts, such that that space makes things happen” (260, italics in original). The imaginative and material exploration that allows Vlemmix to face fear poetically expands his internal and external space. At Dance Well in Bassano del Grappa Italy, local residents with and without Parkinson’s join together to dance every day. Their classes, which encourage improvisation, are punctuated regularly by engagement within artistic residencies by international contemporary dance choreographers, such as Francesca Foscarini, James Bachelor, and Yasmeen Godder, as well as performance artists, such as Marina Abramović. Often, the choreographers do not have much experience of Parkinson’s. Yet the participants eagerly seize the chance to make work and perform, guiding the choreographers as to what they are interested in exploring. In 2018, the group created a performance called Oro. L’Arte di Résistere (Gold. The Art of Resisting), which was based on local World War I and II history, and also referred to the dancers’ own biographical stories of resistance (Foscarini 2018). The town received the Gold Medal for Military Value for resisting the Austro-Hungarian forces between 1917 and 1918, concerning which the author Ernest Hemingway, who was recuperating from injury in Bassano at this time, gives an account in his 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms. In World War II, local partisans were hunted down and hung from trees by the Nazis after the Armistice. The dance work took Hemingway’s writings and handed-down stories (including the hangings) recounted by participants in the group as the basis for the devised work by Italian choreographer and dancer Francesca Foscarini. The group, already used to improvising, were able together to devise the piece around the narratives. It was performed in a small chapel as part of Bassano’s BMotion contemporary dance festival and has subsequently toured to other places. The production was well received for its emotional power: several of these performers had been children at the time of the hangings and their accounts were harrowing. The trauma of the event was embodied in these now older performers, some of them frail with Parkinson’s. Their vulnerability was highlighted by the movement challenges, such as getting up from the floor, yet their ability to cope was underlined by the closeness of the group. The emotional power also came from this closeness. These performers had been dancing together for several years, and their familiarity with one another—the strong eye contact between them, the intuitive awareness of when to move in response to someone else, the ability to help quickly when someone got stuck or felt a loss of balance without destroying the structure of the piece, the comfortableness in receiving touch—pointed to their closeness and to the challenge and loss felt by a community when a traumatic event takes place. The requests to tour the piece to other venues highlight 40

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how community dance work may cross into frameworks (in this case touring) that are usually reserved for professional productions. The emotional strength of Oro, produced through structured improvisation around a theme still resonant in the dancers’ lives, emphasizes the affective power of the poetic production. In this dance work, the performers create a moving and embodied response to a traumatic period in their own history and that of their families. The past is there in memory, but also recreated and re-envisioned within the making of the dance work. As De Spain points out, images like the ones created through the dance work are created from the reality of sensation and the complex process of memory. But they can also create a new reality of their own, reified in movement and with momentum reaching into the future. Their weight-less quasi-existence becomes a powerful embodied presence demanding to be fulfilled, rejected, or danced with and around. (De Spain 2014, 129) The powerful, poetic interplay between images of the haunting past and the fragile physical reality of the dancers’ present coalesce and create a new, life-affirming future. In the last scene, each dancer’s hand is brushed with gold, “almost as a mark of belonging and recognition”2 (Distefano 2018), and then each dancer takes an audience member onto the dance floor to waltz together to the iconic tune of Sensa Fine (Endless). Everyone in the room is dancing in an embrace at the end. Kearney’s notion of exploring how to live poetically in the world is emphatically shown here through dancing and through the process of devising the production.

Conclusion These instances of programs and other initiatives for people living with Parkinson’s center on their poetic relationship to dance. In all of the examples given above, the impetus to move prioritizes artistic frameworks and devices, rather than having a therapeutic motivation. In each, this allowed either the participants, dance leaders, or both to enrich their experience of movement, and sometimes performance. The examples given used movement tasks and other improvisatory methods to elicit exploration of the poetic, guided by an experienced facilitator. Improvisation need not be the only approach to broaden poetic understanding, but in the instances highlighted here, improvisation became the vehicle for enlarging what is understood as dance movement for people with Parkinson’s and what it is assumed that they can cope with, as well as what they may offer to the world poetically. In this way Jordan and Thomas’s (1998) conclusion that the poetic opens a work (or practices) up for new interpretations is correct. It is possible to concentrate on the poetic to receive new information and understanding about how movement and dance works through observing Parkinson’s dancers in action, not just to reduce their symptoms. Focusing on the poetic also highlights how people with Parkinson’s may not just be seen as needing help, but may offer a worthwhile contribution to dance making.

Notes 1 The film was shown as part of the Random Acts series for UK television broadcaster Channel 4 (Channel 4 2018). Random Acts was designed to showcase bold and innovative arts through film shorts, falling outside of the conventions of arts broadcasting. 2 Google translation of “quasi un marchio d’appartenenza e di riconoscimento.” https://www.google.com/ search?q=translate+quasi+un+marchio+d%E2%80%99appartenenza+e+di+riconoscimento&rlz= 1C1AZAA_enGB740GB742&oq=translate+quasi+un+marchio+d%E2%80%99appartenenza+e+ di+riconoscimento+&aqs=chrome..69i57.4595j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8,

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References Albright, Ann Cooper. 2003. “Dwelling in Possibility.” In Taken by Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader, edited by Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere, 257–266. Middletown, CT:Wesleyan University Press. Amans, Diane, ed. 2008. An Introduction to Community Dance Practice. London: Palgrave MacMillan. Bachelard, Gaston. (1958) 1994. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston, MA: Beacon. Bee, David, dir. 2009. Why Dance for Parkinson’s Disease? (film). Produced by Mark Morris Dance Group and Brooklyn Parkinson Group. Accessed October 20, 2009. http://danceforparkinsons.org/resources/ video-resources. Channel 4. 2018. About Random Acts. Accessed December 6, 2018. http://randomacts.channel4.com/about. Cinconze, Roberto, dir. 2015. Dance for Health Italia: Eva (film). Translated by Anna Trevisan. Produced by Operaestate and Dance for Health Italia. Accessed September 3, 2015. https://vimeo.com/123652602. Dawson, Bob. 2007. “Parkinson’s Patients: Yes We Can Dance.” Accessed November  14, 2014. http:// parkinsonsdance.blogspot.co.uk. De Spain, Kent. 2014. Landscape of the Now: A  Topography of Movement Improvisation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Distefano, Giuseppe. 2018.“Dance Well e l’arte di resistere.” Artribune. December 4. Accessed March 15, 2019. https://www.artribune.com/arti-performative/teatro-danza/2018/12/dance-well-francesca-foscarini/. Foscarini, Francesca 2018. Oro L’Arte Di Résistere. Premiered by Dance Well, Capella Mares, August 22, 2018. Goddard, Jane, dir. 2016. “Parkinson’s: The  Funny Side.” BBC Inside Out South. Broadcast March 7. Accessed November  29, 2017. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b072xkcz/ inside-out-south-parkinsons-the-funny-side. Hackney, Madeleine E., and Gammon M. Earhart. 2009. “Effects of Dance on Movement Control in Parkinson’s Disease: A Comparison of Argentine Tango and American Ballroom.” Journal of Rehabilitative Medicine 41: 475–481. Hackney, Madeleine E., and Gammon M. Earhart. 2010.“Effects of Dance on Gait and Balance in Parkinson’s Disease: A  Comparison of Partnered and Nonpartnered Dance Movement.” Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair 24: 384–392. Hackney, Madeleine E., Svetlana Kantorovich, and Gammon M. Earhart. 2007. “A Study on the Effects of Argentine Tango as a Form of Partnered Dance for Those with Parkinson Disease and the Healthy Elderly.” American Journal of Dance Therapy 29: 109–127. Heiberger, Lisa, Chris Maurer, Florian Amtage, Ignacio Mendez-Balbuena, Jürgen Schulte-Mönting, Marie-Claude Hepp Reymond, and Rumyana Kristeva. 2011. “Impact of a Weekly Dance Class on the Functional Mobility and on the Quality of Life of Individuals with Parkinson’s Disease.” Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience 3 (14): 1–15. Hemingway, Ernest. (1929) 2004. A  Farewell to Arms. London: Jonathan Cape. Reprint, London: Arrow Books. Houston, Sara. 2011.“The Methodological Challenges of Research into Dance for People with Parkinson’s.” Dance Research 29 (Issue Supplement): 327–349. ———. Forthcoming. “Caring Beyond Illness: An Examination of Godder’s Socially Engaged Art and Participatory Dance for Parkinson’s Work.” In  Performing Care, edited by Amanda Stuart Fisher and James Thompson. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Houston, Sara, and Ashley McGill. 2013. “A  Mixed-Methods Study into Ballet for People Living with Parkinson’s.” Arts & Health: An International Journal for Research, Policy and Practice 5 (2): 103–119. Houston, Sara, and Ashley McGill. 2015. English National Ballet Dance for Parkinson’s: An Investigative Study 2, a Report on a Three-Year Mixed-Methods Research Study. London: English National Ballet. Iverson, Dave, dir. 2014. Capturing Grace (DVD). Produced by Dave Iverson. Kikim Media LLC DVD. Jordan, Stephanie and Helen Thomas. 1998. “Dance and Gender: Formalism and Semiotics Reconsidered.” In Routledge Dance Studies Reader, edited by Alexandra Carter, 241–249. London: Routledge. Katan, Einav. 2016. Embodied Philosophy in Dance: Gaga and Ohad Naharin’s Movement Research. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kearney, Richard. 1998. Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Post-Modern. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. Kelsall, Kate. 2014. Shake, Rattle and Roll: An Insider’s View of Parkinson’s Disease and DBS. Accessed November 24, 2014. http://katekelsall.typepad.com/my_weblog/parkinsons-dance/.

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Different bodies Kuppers, Petra. 2017. “Somatic Politics: Community Dance and Aging Dance.” In The Aging Body in Dance: A Cross-Cultural Perspective, edited by Nanako Nakajima and Gabriele Brandstetter, 107–121. London: Routledge. Lodge, David. 1977. The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature. London: Bloomsbury. Nakajima, Nanako, and Gabriele Brandstetter, eds. 2017. The  Aging Body in Dance: A  Cross-Cultural Perspective. London: Routledge. Nunn, Michael, and William Trevitt. 2012. Dance for Parkinson’s (film). Manilla Productions, Channel 4. Solimeo, Samantha. 2009. With Shaking Hands: Aging with Parkinson’s Disease in America’s Heartland. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Volpe, Daniele, Matteo Signorini, Anna Marchetto, Timothy Lynch, and Meg A. Morris. 2013. “A Comparison of Irish Set Dancing and Exercises for People with Parkinson’s Disease: A Phase II Feasibility Study.” BMC Geriatrics 13: 54. Accessed July 2, 2013. doi:10.1186/1471-2318-13-54. Vlemmix, Marc. 2017. “Happily Ever After.” Animated. Winter 2017/18: 22–23. Westheimer, Olie, Cynthia Mcrae, Claire Henchcliffe, Arman Fesharaki, Sofya Glazman, Heather Ene, and Ivan Bodis-Wollner. 2015. “Dance for PD: A Preliminary Investigation of Effects on Motor Function and Quality of Life Among Persons with Parkinson’s Disease (PD).” Journal of Neural Transmission 122 (9): 1263–1270. Yvonne. 2017. Speaking at Researching Dance for Parkinson’s seminar, Dance for Health, Rotterdam, November 27.

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4 RESOURCING/SEARCHING DANCE TECHNIQUE AND EDUCATION Developing a praxeological methodology Yvonne Hardt Introduction I enter Studio 3 at the Center of Contemporary Dance (CCT) of at the University of Music and Dance in Cologne. Students are in a relaxed and talkative mode, crowded close to the windows, bags stacked under the barre that will not be used today as the class is working with a renowned dancer, pedagogue, and practitioner of release and somatically based dance. It is a precious moment just before class; it is a time when I place myself on the floor, start sensing individual body parts, and observe others; and it is a time for wanted or unwanted thoughts. As I settle on my back and look at the ceiling, I experience a sense of a déjà vu about exactly this moment. It  is at this instance that I think about how often I have experienced this moment and how thankful I am for the profession of dancing. It feels like a privilege to start the day with lying on the floor, looking up into the room, sensing weight, and opening joints. It is the moment when I ask myself how much time I have spent on moving and being moved in so such different classes. It is a moment of sensation and reflection. Today I am aware that I am here with a slightly altered perspective: to do research on teaching and learning dance. I am more attuned to the setting, the constellation in which students assemble, and my own watching of the space. While all of this seems to be such a routine, a sort of unquestioned ‘‘normality’’ of what it entails to become and be a dancer, it really strikes me as quite remarkable that dance education, or what it means to learn or to appropriate dance, has seldom been considered in critical dance research. If the “becoming” (Manning 2014), the “emerging” (Klein and Noeth 2011), and the “un-doing” (Brandstetter 2007; Foellmer 2009) of bodies and their boundaries, and the “resistance” to regimes and hierarchies of attention and senses (Lepecki and Banes 2007) have been so paramount for the theoretical and interesting development of dance (studies), why are these studies so little concerned with how these bodies are actually learning how to become (undone) or partake in their formation and artistic production? This  is not  to imply that dance education and dance technique have not  been written about! A substantial part of this essay will focus on rereading and systematizing this research in order to foster a comparative approach that also critically investigates some of the underlying premises and exclusions of this research. Surely, the question also warrants a wider discussion 44

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of the still-existing hierarchies between the pedagogic and artistic field,1 or the sometimes implicit (re-)essentialization of ‘‘the’’ body (even if it is now considered an individual one). But instead of focusing on these issues, I rather want to propose ways of dissolving these discrepancies. As such, I will argue that to investigate the heterogeneous bodily as well as highly reflective practice of what it entails to learn, train, transmit, communicate, teach, facilitate, appropriate, and share how to move and dance requires a different methodological approach. Indeed, it is a site in which different strands of theory can be joined in practice. It is a chance to participate in theoretical and methodological debates within the wider dance studies field. In order to make this more plausible, I am going to suggest a reading that moves between observations in class settings, evolving reflections, and developing conceptual and methodological approaches to dance technique and education. As such, I am asking the reader to follow a strategy of writing that seeks to grant the text a multiplicity of voices and realities, combining indicative readings with systematization.

Searching for an understanding of dance teaching and learning constellations The  class starts and we (twenty students, the teacher, and some guests like me) assemble, sitting in a tight circle, legs stretched forward. We are asked to lean against each other, share weight. The class today is about “allowing the giving of time.” The teacher emphasizes: “We are going to do boring things today.” She takes time to elaborate on the notion of boredom. Referencing John Cage as an important protagonist, who championed boredom as a source for creativity, she explains that the state of nothing happening opens the possibility to discover new things; it is a way to discover details. While she talks about this, I make a note to myself that I should transcribe this later, because her words resonate with educational theories, which also propose that boredom and discovering the new (detail) in the familiar are central for educational (transformational) processes (Ahrens 2014).2 It also relates to my question of how a focus for different, yet specific, details is encouraged in different educational contexts. I am aware that there is no possibility of researching this scenario free of preconceived categories. I can only reflect on their working potentials and productive force, but they structure what I am more likely to see, hear, and remember. Being here in the studio these thoughts do not distract me for long, and I am in a different state of doing and reflecting. It is a bright autumn day; I feel awake, engaged, and free in mind to let myself be drawn into the subtle movements that focus all my attention on their sensation. Two days later I do not feel the same, although the setting has only changed minimally. I am tired and my thoughts drift off while I try to focus on the task to start every movement with a release. I have enough experience—both in taking these classes and giving similar exercises—to not get worried. I simply wait and sense that by keeping on going there will be moments when I get more attuned to the exercise, and that the tiredness of the morning makes me easy, gives me weightiness and a released appearance. I reflect that I can be so relaxed because I am not anxious about my career, about the purpose of certain classes, and what I will learn. However, these are often concerns that students voice in moments of insecurity in class. I do not need to please anybody, as nobody will grade me—or even worse—“will judge my body” as one student reported on the ambivalent situation of “opening up,” “letting it all in,” and then having the feeling that grades are based on body types fitting the “appearance” of the practice.3 Questions arise: How have the worries, which are often part of taking class, changed over time? How have expectations structured and influenced how I experienced class, what I was able to take in, or what I rejected? I feel astonished that sharing a class with my own 45

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students does not make me feel more self-conscious. The teacher creates an atmosphere that is nonevaluative, where there is space for failure and insecurity. She problematizes her own insufficiencies as she grows older. She is a guest teacher. The mirror has been covered; some students work with eyes closed. I stop looking at them, as we are now in partner work and this requires all my attention. My partner is one of the other guests and we smile at each other as we start inhibiting and challenging each other’s movements. The atmosphere is playful. This is only a tiny part of the class, and it might not be very representative for a lot of dance teaching and learning on an obvious level, but it can expose some of the challenges, rewards, and complexities that are involved when researching dance training, learning, and education. It allows identification of significant elements for conceptualizing dance technique and, more generally, the development of a research methodology. First, training is a communal practice and, every participant not only brings different histories of training to a class but also daily altering states that interact with and shape what is learned, what is considered important, and what is experienced. Second, dance technique is a site for reflection—on the practice itself, the modes of learning, and appropriating for personal revelations and contestations. Third, it is a joined space where standards of education (in this case giving time for individual exploration), patterns of classes (starting simple and leading to more complex exercises), norms of physicality (unblocked flow), as well as (flat) hierarchies and reports between students and teachers (e.g., a noncompetitive atmosphere) appear and are the site for (re)negotiation. Last but not  least, fourth, this workshop at the CCT is embedded in a wider context and development in which understandings of dance technique have been reshaped and alternative or somatic practices have been institutionalized in dance programs at the university level (DeLahunta and Hoerster 2007; Diehl and Lampert 2011; Coogan 2016). It is this development, especially, that has both spurred an increasing interest, and theoretical reflection on dance technique and education and makes it necessary to rework how we study teaching-learning constellations in dance.

Research on dance technique and dance education So how has the learning and teaching of dance been researched? For  the purpose of this chapter, I will focus primarily on the last two decades, in which a wide range of publications has demonstrated enormous expertise, reflectiveness, and openness in reworking what is considered technique and dance education. A huge part of reflecting on teaching and learning dance takes place within the field of reflecting on what ‘‘dance technique’’ is. Neither the approaches taken by scholars and practitioners (some more didactic, others more theoretical) nor their sought-after goals can be easily subsumed under single categories, so I propose a short comparative and systematized reading that is clearly informed by a few guiding questions: How do they understand technique and the learning process? What underlying premises and approaches ground these studies? More explicitly, I am interested in how they relate to a wider dance studies discourse, and how compatible they are with an understanding of teaching and dance education as it has just been derived from my descriptions. From this perspective, this predominantly practice-based or practice-related research can be roughly divided into three groups with all the simplification that comes with any systematization.

Looking at single techniques and overarching principles There  are publications that focus predominantly on one technique or a general principle of teaching (e.g., Bartenieff and Lewis 1980; Hutchinson-Guest 1995; Klein 1999; Lepkoff 1999; Postuwka 1999; Fleischle-Braun 2000). They range from descriptions of concepts and 46

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exercises to wider reflections on how this is integrated into artistic or everyday practice. In this group I would also include studies that focus on somatic practices in regard to dance and that have directed attention away from formal movement accomplishment to an understanding of technique, in which students learn how to be attentive to their bodies and their personal needs, to take time, to sense, to explore, and to find their own modes of learning and moving (Bainbridge Cohen 1994; Coogan 2016). This discourse is mostly undertaken by practitioners in the field who also conceive of this as a ‘‘metatechnique’’ that grounds and supports other techniques (Hackney 1998; Coogan 2016). This  perspective can be aligned with an older debate in which early modern dancers resisted calling what they did ‘‘technique’’ (Wigman 1963; Brinkmann 2012) and preferred to speak about principles that could be applied in ‘‘different’’ artistic contexts. In order to link this with a more theoretical and critical debate, it is necessary to unravel two problematic underpinnings inherent in this approach. First, in their claim to general principles, such pedagogies leave unnoticed the underlying aesthetics of these practices. Second, general movement principles do not resonate productively with an understanding that knowledge and the body (formations) are constructed in relation to wider sets of cultural, historical, and social discourses (Foucault 1993; Mauss 2006). Although I do not deny the positive and much needed effect of challenging established historically and socially marked body patterns through somatic practices, I seek to open the discussion of the underlying body norms, which Doran George—one of the few to consider this—revealed meticulously in the insightful analysis in A Conceit of the Natural Body (2014). Within this category of providing research on one technique, it is also possible to identify publications that might not so obviously operate under the label of dance technique or education. For example, I consider Cynthia Novack’s seminal book Sharing the Dance (1990) on contact improvisation and Janet O’Shea’s At Home in the World? The Bharatanatyam Dancer as Transnational Interpreter (2003), as exemplary models of how to research dance appropriation at the intersection of personal learning histories and socially and culturally constructed dance practices. While these publications have been widely cited and recognized within the critical dance studies field, they have seldom been considered in the wider debate of those who focus on dance technique or education. Both scholars are practitioners and participant observers of the practice they are researching. They not only ground their analysis in profound knowledge of the field, but also reflect on how they became dancers and learned to practice their specific forms of dancing. From this approach, Novack (1990) convincingly demonstrates how a practice that used to view itself as a non-formalized way of moving has established principles of teaching and learning along specific aesthetic conventions. Moreover, she demonstrates how this is embedded in the social norms of an alternative North American postwar context and how the field performs exclusions (probably unwillingly) in regard to other social and ethnic groups. This focus on who is excluded from seemingly inclusive and individual forms of training is a helpful perspective for newer contemporary practices. Accordingly, one should be sensitized to the various levels on which exclusion might be practiced and normalized. Significantly, O’Shea (2003) reveals how learning a practice is highly implicated in the told histories and genealogies that draw lines of demarcations to other practices and that have the effect of naturalizing one form of teaching as the ‘‘truer’’ version within a specific genre. Dancers attuned to one form of ballet or gaga technique will easily be able to connect to such a perspective once confronted with a very different teaching style. Moreover, O’Shea also shows how, in creating a tradition (in order to revolt against colonially enforced prohibition of the dance form), bharatanatyam practitioners nonetheless relied on specific categories that signify classism. These in turn can be linked to a European understanding and categories of 47

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classism and classic training. As such, these studies provoke questions: On what level do practices succeed in challenging former or ‘‘unwanted’’ models of training, and on what level do they continue (unwanted) traditions? To what extent are they able to include different experiences and perspectives on single practices within one study? Transposing such questions to the contemporary field might reveal that both structures and underlying notions are still shared from more classical forms. In sum, these two studies provide models of how to share and research the experience of teaching and learning practice on the basis of precise empirical work, while simultaneously reflecting on the developments of both practice and research over time. In this way they can interweave their empirical data with critical discourses that guide attention to the complexities and implicit norms that structure any technique and educational process as much as the research itself. More so, they make it possible to see connections to wider social and political dimensions. These studies might also sensitize us to the fact that significant research regarding dance learning and teaching is not necessarily found under the obvious label of ‘‘technique’’ or ‘‘education,’’ and that research in this field clearly profits from an interdisciplinary approach and research design.

Comparing techniques and (re)conceptualizing them as hybrids and divers A somewhat different take on technique is present in explicitly comparative studies. While such studies also focus on principles, they understand them as historically changing and often place the recent development of dance technique in a historical (linear) development. Accordingly, dance technique was formerly defined along the lines of style, aesthetics, and exercises, while newer concepts of technique propose that technique entails the understanding and mastering of ideas of a practice (Legg 2011, xvi) and the development of general competences of learning with and through the body. Accordingly, there is a reflection on the multiplicity of principles. In  this light, technique is now  captured by terms like method, tool-(kit), knowledge-system, eclectic assemblage, and enablement of movement agency (DeLahunta and Hoerster 2007; Bales and Nettl-Fiol 2008; Diehl and Lampert 2011, 13f; Legg 2011, xvi; Brinkmann 2012). Within this field of research, an enormous endeavor has been undertaken to capture the diversity of the field and the increasing ‘‘individualization’’ of training histories. As the field is now  considered somewhat ‘‘eclectic,’’ so too are the forms of research or publications. While they can be highly inspiring in challenging dancers and scholars, I will briefly point to two studies that conceptualize these existing differences by providing structured analytical categories that are more easily transposed into a wider methodological debate. First, I consider an older and shorter essay by Susan Foster called “Dancing Bodies” (1997), which still offers a rewarding and systematic approach to looking at dance technique in terms of a comparative model. Starting from a perspective theoretically grounded in the work of Marcel Mauss (techniques of the body) and Michel Foucault (the productive power of discipline that brings about bodies), Foster argues that the body can only be known through the practices by which it is trained and developed. She argues that each practice creates a specific “body of ideas” (1997, 235) that, through a long process of artistic subjectivation, interweaves physical practices and the bodily and aesthetic ideals of a dance form. By establishing the differences among a perceived, an ideal, and a demonstrative body, she points to the difference between conceptual understandings of body and how the body functions and interacts in training situations (237). She compares four different techniques (ballet, Duncan, Graham, contact) within the same categories. For each practice, she not only asks what body ideals are envisioned, what movements, senses, qualities, and spatial arrangements are preferred, but 48

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also distinguishes how different settings establish different understandings of what constitutes a successful doing. She demonstrates how language—especially varying metaphors—is used to bring these understandings about, as much as they establish hierarchies and learning atmospheres and the rapport between student and teacher. Finally, she reflects on the neoliberal tendencies that she sees inherent in an increasing hybridization of dance training forms that demand of dancers the ability to perform in all artistic contexts. Ingo Diehl and Friederike Lampert (2011) would not be so critical of what has now been acclaimed as a competence-based model of learning in contrast to an aesthetically bound model, but they take up the systematic comparison and many categories suggested by Foster. They provided the first extensive empirical research on seven techniques (spanning from von Laban to Klein- and Counter-Technique). They undertook this huge endeavor with the help of many scholars and leading practitioners in the field who were asked to view these practices through the same categories and a standardized catalogue of questions. These included, among other topics, the goals, methods, didactics, underlying ideologies, body and spatial concepts, structures of class, relation to music, and other arts. As such, they wanted to prepare the ground for a systematic understanding and comparison of technique(s). While this publication can be considered a benchmark in the field and provides a huge database, which should be further explored, it is also an example of the need for more methodological debate. For instance, the enormous setup did not  allow for a circular research procedure, which would allow critical questioning and redesigning of categories. Also, varying forms of who interpreted these questions and how the eclectic empirical analysis was created rather offers an overview of different artistic and academic outlooks instead of the wanted comparability. The  differences among coexisting techniques documented in this volume have also encouraged rethinking of dance educational programs.

Conceptualizing dance education or dance transmission more generally Within this category of writing on dance education there is a clear tendency to react to the changing demands of the field and to broaden extensively the ‘‘tool-box’’ and competences of (future) dancers (Melzwig, Spangberg, and Thielicke 2007). They envision dancers who can ideally reflect, contextualize, research, visualize, describe, and conceptualize their work, know how to lead processes and interact with others, foster community, and share their experiences (Greil and Sander 2017). Combined with a trend to cherish educational models like the “non-knowing teacher” (Rancière 2007) or the concept of “facilitator,” which transpose the dominance of the teacher, the skill of dancers to be able to move— once considered essential—has been pushed to the periphery. Discussion of dance technique is mostly absent in these publications (Melzwig, Spangberg, and Thielicke 2007). Despite all the differences, most of these publications in all three categories share a belief in a competence-based teaching model that assigns students individuality, self-reflectivity, and independence in approaching ‘‘their’’ practice.4 However, if one looks at the methods for describing these practices, the focus predominantly remains on concepts of teaching that ideally give space for such agency. Even if authors proclaim that “the question is how education takes place (instead of what is to be taught)” (Melzwig, Spangberg, and Thielicke 2007, 12), how movement is learned and appropriated by the participants is hardly considered. This is also the case in the aforementioned highly empirically based studies by Diehl and Lampert (2011). Although students and guest (teachers) were part of the extensive empirical research set up, the mode of presentation suggests that technique is inherently understood through a focus on the teachers, their biographies, their competences, and their conceptual understandings of a technique.5 However, if dance technique is considered a “collective knowledge production” 49

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(DeLahunta and Hoerster 2007, 10), a field in which dancers should independently appropriate dance through many modalities of learning (Coogan 2016), and the task of the teacher is one of a facilitator, it means that researching this field would imply both looking at complex constellations theoretically and methodologically and not simply at concepts.

Practice theories and investigating technique as a performative practice I propose that the turn to practice theories and praxeology—as it has taken place in the wider social studies context and only slowly migrated into the field of dance studies (Klein 2014; Hardt 2018; Kleinschmidt 2018)—offers a framework that allows one to methodologically reflect on such research interests and to develop analytical frameworks. Under the heading of ‘‘practice theories’’—a term first coined by Shelly Ortner (1984)—a diverse area of research sees ‘‘practice’’ as central to the understanding of social life (Hui, Schatzki, and Shove 2017, 1). It is exactly the interest of practice theories to look at such complex constellations in a “materially performed and performing reality” (Schäfer and Daniel 2015, 43, author’s translation). As practices are understood to be based in material and physical reality, or what has been called a complex network of “body-thing-associations” (Hillebrandt 2014, 27),6 they can provide a rich source for the study of dance and dance education.7 In this view, practice is for practice theoreticians always social, intersubjective, and interobjective (Schatzki, Knorr Cetina, and von Savigny 2000; Reckwitz 2003, 290; Latour 2007; Schmidt 2012; Hillebrandt 2014). This is also the case if individuality and the emphasis on ‘‘individual practice’’ is crucial for the self-understanding of a given practice and is reiterated in “sayings” (Schatzki 2002, 73) such as “in my practice” (Hardt 2018, 107). Practice theories also conceive that learning the competence to act in a field is not a “given property of individuals, but rather to be formed in the framework of ‘distributed agency’” (Rammert and Schulz-Schaeffer 2002; Alkemeyer and Buschmann 2017, 8). Accordingly, technique as practice should be considered more than the sum of bodily exercises, teaching concepts, and learned sentiments. It is a bundle of social interactions that structures how people become and act as “competent players” within the (dance) field (Stern 2010; Brümmer 2015). Indeed, practice theories are interested in how this “nexus of practices”—meaning the social fabric or the complex constellations—are structured or organized in recognizable patterns (Reckwitz 2003, 290). For researching dance and dance education, this means that it is crucial to take complex pedagogical constellations and their social organization into account. This includes the participants and the things they say and do. This might not always be easily visible, as it also includes the implicit rules of the field. In the view of practice theories, these rules are not  to be understood as fixed and preexisting or stable structures that can simply be followed. Rather, they are better viewed as arising from and becoming noticeable only within specific constellations. They are also not arbitrary but rely on already established maneuvers (Reckwitz 2003; Schmidt 2012). “Conceived in this way, learning leads to the imitating repetition of what already exists as well as to an active negotiation of interest, interpretations and knowledge, which contains moments of critical reflexivity and established hierarchies and practice-specific requirements” (Alkemeyer and Buschmann 2017, 13).8 This perspective might grant a balanced and nuanced matrix for how artistic bodily agency comes about—that is, on the one hand, formed and determined by the ideological/aesthetic discourses and specific routinized practices by which bodies become enabled, and on the other hand, considers how, within the routines of daily training, there is space as well as the requirement for individual adjustment, reflections, resistance, and decontextualization or reworking of one’s own and shared enablement. 50

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On the basis of the above discussion, I propose that we need to develop an understanding of dance technique and education that is not based on a set of principles, but rather on the notion that it is a practice that brings about its forms of doing, moving, and thinking; rules; and the mechanisms of inclusions and exclusion that it seems to represent. Accordingly, it is necessary to ask: What are the relations and coproductions between teaching methods and concepts—the doings and sayings of teaching and creating educational environments and the ways in which students and other players adopt, appropriate, or make dance their own and a shared practice? How, then, can experience be put into discussion with critical investigations on underlying premises or epistemological groundings of dance techniques, and, finally, the wider context in which it takes place?

Experiencing, appropriating, and normalizing alternative teaching practice Returning once more to the class setting with which this chapter started might grant another example of how such intertwined perspectives and renegotiations take shape. It  is in the reflection periods of the class that differences between students more clearly appear. After about one and a half hours of constant moving, the teacher initiates a round of reflection. The  class assembles again in a circle, and the teacher introduces this reflective session by asking students to share their sensations. Quite a few students interpreted this as sharing feelings and reveal their very personal—mostly positive—sentiments, starting their sentences with “I  feel,” followed by evaluative interpretations. While the teacher is positive about the willingness of students to respond, she also subtly suggests that students might ponder the difference between feeling and sensing by sharing her own observations that are clearly oriented toward physical (phenomenological) descriptions, and by taking up and rephrasing those aspects in the students’ observations that focus on the senses, physicality, and timing. A fellow student more attuned to the proposed understanding of sensation is more openly outspoken against emotional and personal judgments. My thoughts wander off to how this clearly relates to my interest in how students need to build a resonance with what the language of a class offers or means and that all participants take part in this process. The students offering the emotional reading provide the contrast against which everybody can be summoned to a perspective that focuses on sensation. However, the longer I think about it, I wonder if my first interpretation of the situation—that students might not yet be familiarized with this difference between feeling and sensing, and the clear division that contemporary practices developed in contrast to the more emotionally considered modern dance—is true to my endeavor to capture the complexity of the doings and sayings in this setting? As I listen to the students, there is a reappearing theme about the ‘‘self ’’: For instance, one student has a very positive response and remarks that through this time given in the tasks she “feels closer to herself.” This seems to be of a quite different order—and as I know some of the students and that they have been trained for quite some time in alternative and somatic practices, speaking about sensations does not seem like unfamiliar terrain. Given that these are young students daily asked to develop their ‘‘own practice’’ and that they generally are quite involved in finding out who they are, such articulations about the self-(feeling) might be read differently. Instead of being the result of unfamiliarity with the required discourse, it might, on the contrary, be the result of the institutionalization of somatic practices in dance training. Students are increasingly used to training exactly in practices that make them focus on themselves, their individual body, and movement patterns, and as such might also be seen as embedded in discourses of “the care of the self ” (Foucault 1993). 51

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Such ‘‘self-techniques,’’ may successfully hide how they only bring about this specific form of “subject” and “self ” that they then seem to find or search for. What is striking about this context is that there is for quite a few students—and this comes from observation of other classes as well—a shared idealization of the self as calm; students only perceive such a state as ‘‘being themselves.’’ What implications do such constructions of the self as calm have for how conflict is handled? How does it relate to educational theories, which highlight the importance of conflict in order to evoke transformation and reworking of one’s self ? I also wonder how this becomes a new norm, grounded in the matter-of-fact observation of the senses and the body’s anatomy. The teacher closes the discussion by asking us to touch the manubrium sterni—the small bone at the top of the breastbone. While students touch this body part, she shifts into a more lecture-style session, in which she explains the significance and the structural relationship of this bone to the rest of the body. The class cannot be captured by this critical reading to the end—as I can hear and evaluate it and still feel great and inspired and might work productively with some aspects of it. I was resensitized to the power of giving time to things, to nonviolent communication, and to the subtle ways of influencing and guiding that leaves everybody sheltered. The question is, then, what do individuals do and what can they do with the suggested moving and speaking material? What are they encouraged to do? How can we open our perspective to the multiplicity of perspectives and experience and be open and critical at the same time?

Conclusion: Finding a framework for researching dance technique and dance education The above class description and analysis would probably fail if read as an attempt at proper ethnographic practice. Rather, it is a description of a process of perceiving and reflection on viewing classes that seeks to reveal how our interests and preconceived knowledge structure what is perceived. While research on dance technique and education should try to grasp complex realities of practices through an ethnographic research practice grounded in the field, such as participant observation and interviews (Glaser and Strauss 1967), it might also work with a combination of empirical data derived from the field and a coding that draws on the researcher’s already established analytical categories, which are then continuously revised in a circular research process. This not only guides the attention to the selfreflection of the scholar, but it allows reading the “found” or “emerging” material against its grain (Hillebrandt 2014, 27; Schäfer, Daniel, and Hillebrandt 2015, 43). This plurality of methods—which might also integrate situational and discursive analysis—grants a complex research portfolio for the analysis of teaching and learning to dance.9 To systematize such an approach more clearly, I suggest a perspective that acknowledges these different realities and borrows from a methodological reflection that Saukko (2003) originally identified to name what she called different research validities (dialectical, deconstructive, contextual): 1. There are the perspectives of those who participate, who coauthor the practice and reinvest in the rules and principles, and performatively bring about the practice of teaching and learning dance. This includes all participants and actants (Latour 2007) and their doings and sayings. This is also a field of contestation and multiperspectivity. As language is such a large part of practicing, teaching, and learning dance, it is highly important to be precise in capturing its working practice (Hardt and Stern 2014). Despite the still existing myth that dance provides preverbal knowledge, anybody watching or attending a dance class 52

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will experience the omnipresence of some form of verbal communication. Language is given to structure the class order (beginning and ending of exercises, spacing, timing), to give instructions (in the form of explanation, to support demonstrating, to give images, or to foster a specific quality), and to provide support and feedback; it grants analytical tools for appropriation and conveys aesthetic understandings (Hardt 2008). While questions— about how language is specifically used, who speaks and how students appropriate dancing through and with language, how language is the site for creating atmosphere, resonance, support, contestation, or fear—belong to the realm of experience, they are also highly intertwined with discourse and the underlying premises and epistemological references. 2. There  are terminologies and their field of discourse, which need to be dismantled: understandings of the body, the normalizing tendencies inherent in the language, and the epistemological reference systems applied to achieve specific forms and sensory awareness of bodies and physical doings. 3. There is the context that might significantly reshape not only how the practice is (per) formed and experienced, but also how institutionalization might introduce hierarchies or new forms of evaluation or may contradict the concepts of teaching in individual class settings. To question who has access to the practice, in what social and historical context, might lead to a very different understanding of the complex constellation of appropriating a “new” world in dance and foster educational developments. Focusing on context generates questions such as for whom, for what learning or artistic purpose, for what institutional interests, does the practice take concrete shape? With such questions I want to open a field of research and demonstrate how complex the constellations of teaching, learning, appropriating, and reflecting dance are. They warrant a differentiated analysis. Juxtaposing and interlinking experience and tendencies of normalization and processes of institutionalization should not  be understood as questioning the rewards of experience, but may lead us to appreciate a wider set of experiences, and it might also provide a tool for questioning one’s own standards, both of teaching and learning, as well as of researching. To appreciate and resist such different aspects as atmosphere of trust and support and conflict and contestation might open the field for the acquisition of an openness for rediscovering the daily and cherished practice of dancing.

Notes 1 Dance pedagogy seems to remain minor in status to artistic practice, as it is associated with those who did not  or do no longer qualify for a dancing career onstage or those who never professionally sought such a career. Similarly, in the dance studies field, avant-garde artistic practices have spurred a critical theoretical approach to conceptualize dance, while dance pedagogy is more closely aligned to didactics and the pedagogy of movement and sport. 2 Ahrens here makes a reference to the German division between learning and Bildung (education), the latter meaning the general education of a subject. Education in this sense is the (re)working of the self and is always considered a process and not something that one statically can acquire as the ‘‘given’’ knowledge that one simply “learns.” 3 All commentaries from students are anonymized and stem from in-class discussions in which the author took place as a participant observer or teacher. 4 Critique of such competence-based learning has already been voiced in the light of theories critical of neoliberal development and an increasing trend toward self-governance (Foster 1997; Gelhard 2011). 5 Students are only given a sporadic voice in short citations. If in other publications the voice is given to all participants, student voices are most often integrated in the form of interviews and as such are not compared or coded afterward (Coogan 2016). 6 Translation by the author.

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Yvonne Hardt 7 For systematical overviews of the general traits and differences within the field of “practice theories” see, e.g., Reckwitz (2003) and Schmidt (2012). 8 Imitating repetition, then, in dance training not only refers to the copying of movements from a teacher but is understood in the light of social mimesis, and refers to all the modalities of doing and saying that can be taken up explicitly or implicitly. 9 Although empirical research is central for praxeology and practice theory, a detailed discussion about the methods to accomplish this is still in its infancy (Schäfer, Daniel, and Hillebrandt 2015).

References Ahrens, Sönke. 2014. Experiment and Exploration: Forms of World-Disclosure: From Epistemology to Bildung. Berlin: Springer. Alkemeyer, Thomas, Gunilla Budde, and Dagmar Freist, eds. 2013. Selbst-Bildungen. Soziale und kulturelle Praktiken der Subjektivierung. Bielefeld: transcript. Alkemeyer, Thomas, and Nikolaus Buschmann. 2017. “Learning in and across Practices. Enablement as Subjectivation.” In The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations, Practitioners, edited by Allison Hui and Elizabeth Shove, 8–23. London: Routledge. Bainbridge Cohen, Bonnie. 1994. Sensing, Feeling, and Action: The  Experiential Anatomy of Body-Mind Centering. Northampton, MA: North Atlantic Books. Bales, Melanie, and Rebecca Nettl-Fiol, eds. 2008. The  Body Eclectic. Evolving Practices in Dance Training. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Bartenieff, Irmgard, and Dori Lewis. 1980. Body Movement: Coping with the Environment. New York: Gordon and Breach. Brandstetter, Gabriele. 2007. “Tanz als Wissenskultur. Körpergedächtnis und wissenstheoretische Herausforderung.” In Wissen in Bewegung. Perspektiven der künstlerischen und wissenschaftlichen Forschung im Tanz, edited by Sabine Gehm, Pirkko Husemann, and Katharina von Wilcke, 37–48. Bielefeld: transcript. Brinkmann, Stephan. 2012. Bewegung erinnern: Gedächtnisformen im Tanz. Bielefeld: transcript. Brümmer, Kristina. 2015. Mitspielfähigkeit. Sportliches Training als formative Praxis. Bielefeld: transcript. Coogan, Jenny, ed. 2016. Practicing Dance. A Somatic Orientation. Berlin: Logos Verlag. DeLahunta, Scott, and Eva-Maria Hoerster, eds. 2007. “Rethinking Tools: Based on Interviews Collected during MODE05.” In Reverse Engineering Education: In Dance, Choreography and the Performing Arts, edited by Ulrike Melzwig, Marten Spangberg, and Nina Thielicke, 88–93. Berlin: b books Verlag. Diehl, Ingo, and Friederike Lampert, eds. 2011. Dancetechniques 2010:Tanzplan Germany. Leipzig: Henschel. Fleischle-Braun, Claudia. 2000. Der moderne Tanz: Geschichte und Vermittlungskonzepte. Butzbach-Griedel: Afra. Foellmer, Susanne. 2009. Am Rand der Körper: Inventuren des Unabgeschlossenen im zeitgenössischen Tanz. Bielefeld: transcript. Foster, Susan. 1997. “Dancing Bodies.” In Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, edited by Jane Desmond, 235–257. New York: Durham. Foucault, Michel. 1993. “Technologien des Selbst.” In  Technologien des Selbst, edited by Huck Gutman, Patrick H. Hutton, and Luther H. Martin, 24–62. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Gelhard, Andreas. 2011. Kritik der Kompetenz. Zürich: Diaphanes. George, Doran. [D. Gilbert]. 2014. “A Conceit of the Natural Body: The Universal-Individual in Somatic Dance Training.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles. Accessed 14 December 2017. http:// escholarship.org/uc/item/2285d6h4#page-1 Glaser, Barney G., and Anselm L. Strauss. 1967. The Discovery of Grounded Theory. Strategies for Qualitative Research. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company. Greil, Mariella, and Vera Sander, eds. 2017. (Per)Forming Feedback. Cologne: Hochschule für Musik und Tanz. Hackney, Peggy. 1998. Making Connections: Total Body Integration through Bartenieff Fundamentals. New York: Gordon and Breach. Hardt, Yvonne. 2018. “Grasping Practice: Reflections on Practices of Knowing and Researching in Dance Education.” In Routledge Dance Studies Reader, edited by Jens Richard Giersdorf and Yutin Lin, 3rd ed.,107–119. New York/London: Routledge. ———. 2013.“A Relational Perspective on Dance and Theory—Implications for the Teaching of Dance Studies.” In Dance [and] Theory, edited by Gabriele Brandstetter and Gabriele Klein, 265–270. Bielefeld: transcript. Hardt,Yvonne, and Martin Stern. 2014. “Körper und/im Tanz—historische, ästhetische und bildungstheoretische Dimensionen.” In Der Körper des Künstlers. Ereignisse und Prozesse der Ästhetischen Bildung, edited by Diana Lohwasser and Jörg Zirfas, 145–162. München: kopaed.

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Resourcing/searching dance technique Hillebrandt, Frank. 2014. Soziologische Praxistheorien. Eine Einführung. Stuttgart: Springer VS. Hui, Allison, Theodore Schatzki, and Elizabeth Shove, eds. 2017. The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations, Practitioners. London: Routledge. Hutchinson-Guest, Ann. 1995. Your Move: A New Approach to the Study of Movement and Dance. New York: Gordon and Breach. Klein, Gabriele. 2014. “Praktiken des Tanzens und des Forschens. Bruchstücke einer praxeologischen Tanzwissenschaft.” In  Visionäre Bildungskonzepte im Tanz. Kulturpolitisch handeln–tanzkulturell bilden, forschen und reflektieren, edited by Margrit Bischof and Regula Nyffeler, 104–115. Zürich: Chronos. Klein, Gabriele, and Sandra Noeth, eds. 2011. Emerging Bodies: The Performance of Worldmaking in Dance and Choreography. Bielefeld: transcript. Kleinschmidt, Katarina. 2018. Artistic Research als Wissensgefüge. Eine Praxeologie des Probens im zeitgenössischen Tanz. München: e-podium. Latour, Bruno. 2007. Eine neue Soziologie für eine neue Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Legg, Joshua. 2011. Introduction to Modern Dance Techniques. Hightstown, NJ: Princeton Book Company. Lepecki, André, and Sally Banes, eds. 2007. The Senses in Performance. New York: Routledge. Lepkoff, Daniel. 1999. “What Is Release Technique?” Movement Research Practice Journal, Fall/Winter (19). Accessed 21 April 2019. http://daniellepkoff.com/writings/What%20is%20Release%20Technique%20 -%20Daniel%20Lepkoff%205.pdf Manning, Erin. 2014. “Do we know what a body can do? #1.” In  Wissen wir, was ein Körper vermag? Rhizomatische Körper in Religion, Kunst, Philosophie, edited by Arno Böhler and Krassimira Kruschkova, 11–21. Bielefeld: transcript. Mauss, Marcel. 2006. Techniques,Technology and Civilisation. New York: Durkheim Press/Berghahn Books. Melzwig, Ulrike, Marten Spangberg, and Nina Thielicke, eds. 2007. Reverse Engineering Education: In Dance, Choreography and the Performing Arts. Follow-Up Reader for MODE05. Berlin: b books Verlag. Novack, Cynthia. 1990. Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Ortner, Sherry B. 1984. “Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26 (1): 126–166. O’Shea, Janet. 2003. “At  Home in the World? The  Bharatanatyam Dancer as Transnational Interpreter.” The Drama Review 47 (1): 176–186. Postuwka, Gabriele. 1999. Moderner Tanz und Tanzerziehung. Analyse historischer und gegenwärtiger Entwicklungstendenzen. Schorndorf: Hofmann. Rammert, Werner, and Ingo Schulz-Schaeffer, eds. 2002. Können Maschinen handeln? Soziologische Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Mensch und Technik. Frankfurt am Main:Verlag Campus. Rancière, Jacques. 2007. Der unwissende Lehrmeister: Fünf Lektionen Über die Intellektuelle Emanzipation. Vienna: Passagen. Reckwitz, Andreas. 2003. “Grundelemente einer Theorie sozialer Praktiken: Eine sozialtheoretische Perspektive.” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 32 (4): 282–301. Saukko, Paula. 2003. Doing Research in Cultural Studies. An Introduction to Classical and New Methodological Approaches. London: Sage Publications. Schäfer, Franka, and Daniel Anna. 2015.“Zur Notwendigkeit einer praxeosoziologischen Methodendiskussion.” In Methoden einer Soziologie der Praxis, edited by Franka Schäfer, Anja Daniel and Frank Hillebrandt, 37–55. Bielefeld: transcript. Schatzki, Theodore. 2002. The Site of the Social. A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Schatzki, Theodore, Karin Knorr Cetina, and Eike von Savigny, eds. 2000. The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London: Routledge. Schmidt, Robert. 2012. Soziologie der Praktiken—Konzeptionelle Studien und empirische Analysen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Stern, Martin. 2010. Stil-Kulturen.Performative Konstellationen von Technik, Spiel und Risiko in neuen Sportpraktiken. Bielefeld: transcript. Wigman, Mary. 1963. Die Sprache des Tanzes. Stuttgart: Ernst Battenber.

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5 THE EXPANDING POSSIBILITIES OF DANCE SCIENCE Emma Redding

Introduction Dance science is the scientific study of dance and dancers through the subject areas of sports science such as physiology, psychology, kinesiology, and biomechanics. This is the generally accepted definition; however, it is one that does not  encompass the extending boundaries and shifting foci of the field. Dance science has been described as merely a systematic tool through which to deepen our knowledge of dance. While this broader definition lacks specificity, it might be more appropriate in describing a field that to some degree lacks classification and is expanding quite quickly. While the research currently being undertaken draws upon a range of qualitative and quantitative methodological approaches, earlier work from two decades ago tended to adopt a positivist methodological stance that aimed to generalize findings from measurement. The positivist research approach was soon perceived as being inadequate to provide effective solutions to all problems in dance, as evidenced by the number of qualitative research studies now being undertaken. It appears that researchers are now concerned with asking and answering good questions through systematic research, rather than at the level of statistical confidence they wish to achieve at the outset. The aims in dance science are as equally challenging to define. Most would agree that dance science seeks to enhance the training, health, wellbeing, and performance of dancers through the evidence-based teaching and through the practical application of dance science to dance. A smaller but important second aim is to investigate the impact of dance on areas of health and wellbeing among other populations. As a relatively new area of research and study, dance science has grown since the 1980s into a formally recognized discourse. The first glimpses of dance science appeared as short courses at the American Dance Festivals in the early 1980s. In  1990, the International Association for Dance Medicine & Science was founded, and in that same year, the first UK Healthier Dancer conference took place. This  marked the interest in investigating dance and dancers through the application of science. The seminal text The Fit and Healthy Dancer, (1999) by Yiannis Koutedakis and Craig Sharp, along with other significant texts such as Howse and Hancock’s Dance Technique and Injury Prevention (1999) and Thomasen and Rist’s Anatomy and Kinesiology for Ballet Teachers (1996) provided dancers and dance educators with 56

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the first scientifically informed books for dancers and teachers. These textbooks offered the first dance-specific recommendations for injury prevention and performance enhancement. In  this chapter, I acknowledge the alterations in choreographic and training processes, at least in the United Kingdom and Europe within modern and contemporary dance and classical ballet, that raised the kinds of questions that in part explain the emergence of dance science. The proposition within dance science of the dancer as both artist and athlete will be discussed, as well as my own scientific research into the discrepancy between the physiological demands of training and dance performance and the debate around dancers and fitness and safe practice. I acknowledge the range of research conducted within the realm of dance science, including the studies into the identification and development of dance talent, the use of psychological skills for dance creativity, and the impact of dance on the health and wellbeing of other populations. The relationship between dance science and somatics practice will be explored, as well as the debate concerning the oppositional mentality so apparent in conversations about art and science that have given rise to new cross-disciplinary and wider methodological approaches for investigating dance practice through science. I therefore indicate where current and future research interests might lie. Dance is a skill-driven activity where remarkable demands are placed on the dancer in terms of joint flexibility, coordination, and balance. The majority of dancers are asked to jump, perform fast explosive movements, balance, and turn, at the same time giving due consideration to flow, suspension, and movement dynamics. They are often expected to be expressive through their bodies and, above all, to communicate to an audience. The physical qualities and overall athleticism required of the dancer have increased in recent years, as evidenced by the increased joint ranges of motion noted among dancers, the acrobatic movements witnessed on stage, and the outdoor parkour-type movements incorporated into site-specific work. Dancers must be able to remember a series of intricate, complicated, and coordinated movement vocabulary and phrases in performance. Unsurprisingly, a large part of dance training is devoted to technical skill learning, where the specific focus is on technique acquisition rather than general physiological development, notwithstanding the fact that supplementary conditioning classes may also be included. Dancers devote between three to six hours per day, six to seven days per week for eight to ten years constructing the “dancing body.” The full time period of intensive vocational contemporary dance training is at least five full days per week for at least three years. Instruction methods in the teaching of dance have typically developed through experiences and practitioner instinct and insight, rather than from movement and exercise sciences. Perhaps this is why so many dancers sustain an incapacitating injury at some point in their careers (Laws 2005). There is no denying the immense pressure and physical strain endured by professional dancers engaged in high volumes of dancing, a highly skilled physical activity, which that undoubtedly takes its toll on the human body. The application of science to the field of sports has demonstrated that there could be an alternative to the sole reliance on teacher/coach intuition, and perhaps it seemed natural to question the extent to which such scientific theories could be applied to dance. Alongside the high physical demands placed upon dancers, they are expected to develop intuitively sufficient toughness and confidence to withstand audition after audition and endure the types of learning environments that may not be optimal or conducive to developing positive wellbeing, as found through several recent dance science research studies (e.g., Carr and Wyon 2003; Quested and Duda 2009; Nordin-Bates, Quested, Walker, and Redding 2012). 57

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As is the case with many high-skill physical activities, the risk of injury in dance is high. The prevalence of injuries in dance is higher than in many sport activities: for example, over 80% of dancers are injured each year compared to 15%–25% of participants in rugby and football (Orchard and Seward 2002), not to mention the additional and changeable nature of the choreographic demands placed upon dancers in rehearsals. The  original motivation for the development of dance science was primarily to develop greater understanding of the prevalence and etiology of dance injuries and assess the effectiveness of established training methods to support dancers. The predominant research questions tackled by dance science, at least in the early years, were concerned with injuries similar to those that had previously been explored in sports. It  is impossible to speak of any dance technique or approach to the training of the body that characterizes contemporary dance teaching today. Rather, a variety of approaches have emerged since the 1970s not  only in the United States and the United Kingdom but also in Europe and Asia, resulting in dance training that follows eclectic approaches to dance performance and making. Dancers hone their technical skills not for one particular choreographer, but rather for any dance maker who chooses to work with them. It  can no longer be claimed that dancers in contemporary/modern or classical ballet will work exclusively for one choreographer in one dance style. Modern/contemporary dance techniques had previously been characterized in particular movement principles and/or a specific movement vocabulary, and dancers were trained in a technique to prepare for choreography that utilized that particular technique (e.g., Martha Graham Company dancers trained in the Graham technique; Merce Cunningham Company dancers trained in the Cunningham technique, and so on). Not  only was the dancer trained exclusively for that technique, but each choreographic work was also designed exclusive of others. Rather, they may work with choreographers using text and theatre, such as Pina Bausch, or those who require extreme joint flexibility such as British choreographer Wayne McGregor. Much of the research undertaken in the field of dance science has sought to advocate and support this by coining the term dancer as artist-athlete, proposing that dancers should develop strong, durable, and versatile bodies to help meet these varying choreographic demands, given their position as it is within a neoliberal market place.

The artistic-athlete It  is perhaps surprising that dancers tend to view themselves as artists not  athletes even though the highly trained physical skills and movement vocabulary through which they communicate ideas in choreographic work share much in common with those of athletes. The priorities in dance training, at least within contemporary dance contexts, have been to explore the technique, aesthetics, and meaning conveyed through dance, rather than to prepare for its physical demands in a robust and systematic way. While the dancer may eventually recognize him or herself as an elite athlete as well as an artist, notions of faster, further, higher, and longer are not always the most motivating factors for a dancer as they are for the athlete, though they may well be for particular choreographers. The success of the dancer and the impact of his/her training are measured not usually through quantitative measures such as jump height or the speed at which a movement can be completed, but through the audience and choreographer’s subjective evaluation. Nevertheless, ‘performance’ is what is being evaluated in both sport and dance: the pursuit of excellence is a

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goal for both, but with different processes and end outputs. Some of the early recommendations from those applying science to dance tended to focus on the physiological and fitness capacities of dancers. Craig Sharp proposed that: Dance, of course, consists of enormously much more than a superb physiology. Dancers must be highly coordinated, have an excellent musicality, pass through orthopedic assessments, be of the right temperament in psychological terms, be adequately motivated, be of appropriate appearance and physical type in terms of body proportion and above all else they must have the creative talent to dance. There is, though, a factor which sports competitors use and dancers, on the whole, do not and that is laboratory fitness testing. (quoted in Bannerman and Mason, 1990, 18) The shared element between dance and sport is that “both require endless physical training in order to achieve peak performance and culminate in concentrated, often risk-involving expenditures of physical energy” (Solomon, Minton, and Solomon 1990, xv). Dance has much in common with sport; hence there is the potential to make use of principles established in the more advanced areas of exercise physiology and their application to training. In sport, for example, the issue of quality over quantity of training has been addressed, while in dance, this matter has only recently been given attention (Wyon 2010). Dancers are not, on the whole, advised specifically on when and how to rest and are not provided with the kinds of systematic and structured evaluations and interventions to monitor the progress of training and performance that are routinely carried out in sport, even though there could be much to be gained. These slower developments in dance may be due to the financial disparity between dance and sport in terms of support, access, and media exposure. Dance scholar Glenna Batson identifies the importance of a somatic “rest to activity ratio” to allow for memory consolidation and help the dancer process proprioceptive input and refine it “in the service of motor control,” and in some ways, her proposition is an extension of, and dancespecific version of, the work in sports science on the role of recovery and super-compensation (Batson 2006, 100).

Case study: Cardiorespiratory demands of dance When considering whether dance training is fit for purpose, consideration might be given to the function of dance technique in the development of the dance artist as perceived by those delivering it. While the physiological development of the dancer takes place during the training process, some argue that this is as a mere consequence of creating the dance artist as opposed to it being a fundamental aim of the training (Krasnow and Chatfield 1996). It appears then, that the way in which dancers are prepared for performance is sometimes at odds with its physiological demands. The challenge therefore is to address the concern for more continuous higher intensity movement for fitness, alongside the need for thoughtful and reflective technical practice to enhance fine motor skills, which often requires time for stillness and slower moving. The  research I conducted in this area involved a series of studies that investigated the testing and training of physical fitness in contemporary dance. Findings from my research support the view that dancers should address their cardiorespiratory and anaerobic fitness in order to be able to meet the demands of varying choreographic works, which were often

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found to be higher in intensity than technique class within training (Wyon et al. 2004; Wyon and Redding 2005). The higher intensities found in choreographic works, and ultimately performances, put unnecessary physiological stress on the dancer, who was not trained to work at such a pace. Dancers continue to cite “fatigue” and “overwork” as the most common perceived cause of injury alongside “repetitive movements” (Laws 2005). While there are several stages of fatigue ranging from acute to chronic that can be remedied in various ways, a greater cardiorespiratory fitness capacity will enhance endurance and delay the onset of physical fatigue, the inability to generate or maintain a particular rate of physical work, as in especially fast, long, or repeated dance or practice sequences (Koutedakis and Sharp 1999, 171), thereby allowing dancers to dance for longer and potentially reduce the risk of injury (Koutedakis et al. 1999). As a result of this research in dance science, modifications have been made to dance training, together with the adoption of dance-specific methods of testing and training for physical fitness in contemporary dance (Wyon et al. 2003; Redding et al. 2009). Until the determinants of good dance performance are scientifically established, dance educators will not be able to determine fully and confidently what constitutes an ideal training methodology. Many argue, however, that dancers who are fitter, healthier, and less injured will adhere to training more consistently, will have more stamina to endure the high intensities of performance, and may be able to focus on the qualitative and artistic aspects of their dancing, potentially resulting in optimum performance (e.g., Wyon et al. 2005; Quin, Rafferty, and Tomlinson 2015). It  is important to note that any supplementary fitness training should incorporate an appropriate balance of all components of physical fitness. Research has shown that dancers not only need good cardiorespiratory stamina and muscular power to cope with the demands of performance, but they also require a wide joint range of motion (flexibility) for limb extensions, good balance for turning, and good strength for lifting and weight bearing of others (Ambegaonkar et al. 2002; Brown et al. 2007). Unless and until research indicates the specific effect of enhancing one component of physical fitness over another, it seems prudent to ensure that the focus is not on one or two components only. For example, it should be understood that over-developing one energy system may be detrimental to the other energyproviding systems (Newsholme 1983). The development of aerobic capacity must be a part of a comprehensive supplemental training program that addresses all aspects of physical fitness including strength, power, flexibility, and agility.

The application of somatic practices and relationship to dance science Somatic practice as supplementary training for dancers is an interesting area of growth that has been investigated through science to a lesser extent but has had a similar impact in the last few decades within Western dance training. Examples of such practices include the Alexander Technique, Body-Mind Centering (a patented system of movement therapy created by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen) and the Feldenkrais Method (registered trademark of the Feldenkrais Guild UK Ltd). The  interrogation of the physiological body is central to the somatic approaches to dance training whereby understanding of one’s dancing body from within the self is what characterizes many of the artistic and technical developments in contemporary dance during this period and still today. Soma is a Greek word meaning ‘living body.’ Thomas Hanna states: “This  living, self-sensing, internalized perception of oneself is radically 60

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different from the externalized perception of what we call ‘a body’ in an objectified form” (1988, 20). Similarly, a goal in dance science is to improve dancers’ understanding of the way the body functions physiologically and biomechanically. Given that dance is both cognitive and sensory, physical and social, it seems sensible for anyone interested in researching dance to appreciate the bio-psycho-social and phenomenological ways of doing so. Somatic practices represent a departure from codified techniques and previous movement regimes in that they encourage self-learning, autonomy, and intrinsic motivation rather than instruction and a clearly recognizable aesthetic goal. Somatic practices highlight the importance of encouraging an approach to learning through the use of mental imagery, proprioception, and kinesthetic awareness in dance to improve balance, spatial awareness, and other dance skills (Olsen 2004). These techniques emerged out of a commitment to understanding the motor-sensory integration system of the body to learn through self-reference and internally focused reflection. Motor-learning is an area in sports science that examines how humans learn new movement and how they operate on neural and neuromotor levels to organize movement optimally to promote skill development and avoid overuse (Krasnow 2007; Schmidt and Lee 2011). As such, somatic practices can be explained through science as much as they can be taught and experienced by dance practitioners and are well worth investigating from the perspective of dance science. Release-based techniques were being developed around the same time by danceartist teachers who wanted to hone more personalized dance styles based on fundamental anatomical and physiological principles (Hackney 1998). ‘Release’ is the term applied to dance technique that gives primacy to the internalized perception of oneself. Hanna’s (1998) concept of the soma is central, emphasizing the body’s natural alignments and movements. Operating within these common principles, ‘release’ as technique and as teaching method is specific to the person teaching it and to the person dancing it. In itself, release technique is not passed on as a technical vocabulary or dance form, as is the case with vocabulary-based codified techniques, but rather it is an approach to moving and creating dance. Like somatic practices, release techniques require devoted time for reflection and memory consolidation (Batson 2006, 100) in order for movement patterning and re-patterning to take place. The development of release-based techniques reflects the artistic concerns of many independent choreographers whose work requires dancers to move between differing demands at short notice. As such, dancers working as independent artists continually adapt and make decisions about their own individual training needs, a skill developed through engaging somatic practices that require selfreflection and responsibility. The emergence of somatic practices and release-based dance techniques are of interest to those in the field of dance science because they emerged in part to address the inconsistencies in training as preparation for a changing profession, which is a goal in dance science that has directed some of the research into optimal training.

The converging of art and science in understanding dance Science has become a major contributor to advances in sport training and performance, as evidenced by the number of sport science journals as well as the fact that athletes continue to beat world records. There are approximately 69 academic peer-reviewed science journals listed (24 are based in the UK with an international readership). This  indicates that new 61

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ideas in sports science, which in turn inform methods of training and preparing the athletes, are succeeding. Unlike in sports, the goals in dance will remain less measurable until dance performance can be more systematically quantified, so the potential for a particular method of training cannot be alleged with as much confidence, at least in scientific terms. However, there is some evidence of resistance to approaches in dance teaching and training that engage with dance science research. Krasnow writes: [An] aspect that may inhibit dance educators from looking to the research to develop teaching methodology is the perpetuation of the tradition, as it has existed for many years. Most people in the profession have a strong belief in the past and the successes of past training methods, and fear that the power of the process will be lost. (2005, 5) There  are additional factors that arguably have further mitigated against dance teachers engaging with scientific research. In  particular, the historic location (in statutory education in England) of dance as a curriculum subject within physical education (PE) is one such factor. In 85% of schools, delivery of curriculum dance is led by the school PE department (Youth Sports Trust, March 2008). Dance teachers in schools and the National Dance Teachers Association, a membership organization led by a team of teachers and dance education professionals that works to ensure that all young people in the UK have access to high quality dance education in schools, have developed arguments for dance in the curriculum as artistic and creative engagement, rather than as physical activity per se. Since the 1990s, the reduction of hours dedicated to dance in the curriculum and other general curriculumrelated issues have led to a strengthening of the arguments for the curriculum dance experience to focus on the creative and imaginative development of the child. It might have been the case, then, that we were not quite ready for dance science in the early 1990s at the time it all started to take hold. Directions of thinking that emphasize the potential application of exercise science to dance have therefore been met with some resistance or lack of interest from dance educators and those involved in the training of professional dancers. Krasnow’s view underlines this position: Another aspect to consider is an unspoken bias that science ruins art in some way. Some teachers feel that artistic expression implies remaining completely in that passionate, non-logical state of being that is sometimes referred to as right-brain thinking. (Krasnow 2005, 5) A greater understanding of how the physiological, psychological, and biomechanical aspects of dance may lead to the development of better training techniques and healthier dancers might usefully inform those engaged in the creative, artistic, and training process. In 1990, sport scientist Craig Sharp stated, “Dancers are, in fact, among the supreme all-round athletes in our society, and as such are well worth a look at physiologically” (1990, 15). Almost twenty years on, Sharp’s comment continues to have resonance within the dance profession as the debate around the extent to which science can contribute to dance training and performance continues. Conversely, those engaged in the creative, artistic, and technical training of dancers might make a useful contribution towards helping those from sports science, understand aspects of dance that differ from sport. Researchers investigating areas of dance science have at times been perplexed about the perceived lack of interest to incorporate the new knowledge and understanding brought 62

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about the sciences (Krasnow 2005). It is hoped that, over time, a new generation of fitter and healthier dancers will demonstrate that artistry is not lost but rather enhanced through new or modified science-informed training. Gill Clarke’s keynote address summarizes these points effectively: Perhaps with increased fitness, dancers could have been freed to enter the “flow” or the “zone” of the present moment, where the “self ” is so integrated that they would be almost unaware of their physical body or the concerted action of its parts. In this state the imagination can fly unfettered. (Clarke 2006, 8)

Nascent areas of dance science research The primary concern for the field of dance science, until recently, has been to enhance and optimize the dancer him or herself, as opposed to understanding the environment within which the dancer learns or the way in which he or she creates. Recent research in dance science intersects the fields of neuroscience and cognitive psychology, as well as technology, in addressing questions that are more to do with the creative process and documentation. This  has conceivably come about as a result of the focus that is now  very much directed towards interdisciplinary work and, for example, an interest from scientists in the cognitive processes within the dancer’s mind during the learning, creating, and performing of human movement (e.g., deLahunta, Barnard, and McGregor 2009; May et al. 2011). Conversely, choreographers are leaning toward science as a way of initiating new artistic movement ideas and understanding how the creative environment can be maximized (e.g., McGregor’s AtaXia 2004; deLahunta, Barnard, and McGregor 2009). A  research project I have been involved in over the last three years, in collaboration with psychologist Jon May at Plymouth University and dance scholar Sarah Whatley at Coventry University in the United Kingdom, consisted of an investigation entitled, In the Dancer’s Mind, which explored the role of mental imagery within choreographic teaching settings. Adopting qualitative and quantitative methodology in an experimental research design, we tested the effectiveness of a psychologically informed training intervention aimed at enhancing creativity among over 200  conservatoire degree students. Mental imagery has long been recognized as playing a central role in creativity, but many questions are unresolved, including the forms of imagery used, the effect of expertise upon imagery use, and the benefits of training in imagery use. In  dance, attention has been given to the use of imagery for technique. For example, Mabel Todd’s important book, The Thinking Body ([1937] 2008), and the work of two of her former students, Barbara Clark and Lulu Sweigard (1978), who developed the pioneering work Ideokinesis to re-educate the musculature. Others such as Dowd (1995) and Franklin (2012) have further extended this work through their teaching practices and writing. The In the Dancer’s Mind imagery workshops intervention was intended to help students generate novel mental imagery to guide their movement creation. The  workshops were based on Barnard and Teasdale’s (1991) Interacting Cognitive Subsystems account of human cognition and aimed to help students to recognize that their initial imagery was often conventional or mundane and to facilitate strategies for manipulating it and moving their focus between different forms of imagery. An interesting feature of this project was that it drew together elements of dance science, creative practice, and pedagogy, which have the potential to change the way choreography is delivered as a taught subject in dance education and training contexts. Future research efforts within dance science might best 63

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lie across disciplinary boundaries to forge new ways of exploring questions around dance practice in this way. deLahunta, Barnard, and McGregor have noted that there are three objectives of this kind of work: Shared objective: to seek connections between choreographic processes and the study of movement and the brain/mind that are scientifically and artistically interesting. Artistic objective: to integrate the participation and contribution from the scientists into the fabric of the choreographic process while maintaining the integrity of the modes of looking and questioning pertaining to their respective research areas. Scientific objective: to understand and critically examine the complexities of measuring creativity through empirical research when the subject matter is an embodied, bodily art-form. (deLahunta, Barnard, and McGregor 2009, 2).

Conclusion While there have invariably been a number of medical doctors willing to treat injured dancers, dance science is now being valued by educators and artistic directors, who appreciate the role that the sciences can play in enhancing dancers’ artistic and technical capabilities. This is evidenced by the appointment of multidisciplinary health-care teams to the major ballet companies (e.g., the Royal Ballet Company, Birmingham Royal Ballet, and English National Ballet) and schools (e.g., the Elmhurst Ballet School and Royal Ballet School) in the United Kingdom, as well as the growing number of dance science conferences for educators and choreographers. This  can also be seen in the impact and influence of the work of the International Association for Dance Medicine & Science (IADMS) Educator Committee; One Dance UK (the UK’s national organization for dance), set up to advocate for and promote the needs of dancers; and the National Institute for Dance Medicine and Science, as well as similar organizations in other countries such as Tamed in Germany, Ausdance in Australia, and networks such as Dance USA  Taskforce on Dancer Health in the United States. Models and principles of training taken from sports science and adapted by dancers are being applied to training more systematically to optimize dancer potential. The  application of various talent development models from sports science to dance are being explored (Walker et al. 2010, 2011), and the concept of progressive overload balanced appropriately with rest and recovery as well as the concept of periodization (Bompa 1999) are frequent topics of debate at dance conferences and within the dance science literature (e.g., Allard 2018). Emphasis seems to be shifting toward quality over quantity of physical training, augmented by psychological tools such as mental imagery for practice. Long rehearsals are potentially counterproductive, as concentration levels and learning ability diminish quite rapidly after 30 minutes, as has been shown in sports training (Dick 2007). The  question in which most of those pursuing this field are ultimately interested is whether the expansion of dance science will result in dancers who are healthier, experience less injury, and can dance for longer. A commitment to ensuring that the dance profession is populated by well-informed dancers, teachers, and choreographers is at least underway, however, through the numerous dance science research conferences, dedicated dance science academic journals and textbooks, and the professional development activity and educational programs at further and higher education level. 64

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While questions around the extent to which today’s dance training is fit for purpose continue to be explored, we might also attempt to tackle other more complex and potentially less measurable questions in the future. The  remit for dance science might be usefully expanded so that it is no longer a case of merely repairing dancers or even preventing injuries—although this task will always be fundamental—but it might also be concerned with building a biopsychosocial profile of dancers to understand the interrelated characteristics of their talents and how they achieve the way they do. We should strive not only to enhance dancers’ fitness, but also dancers’ career longevity, and not just challenge their physical habits in technique but also their mental habits in choreographic contexts. Importantly, we should challenge the oppositional mentality that is so evident in conversations about art and science and be comfortably situated in the place that exists for dance between, across, and within the converging areas of art and science. It is exciting to look forward to a dance science that embraces practitioner wisdom as much as scientific evidence and investigations into somatics as much as investigations into biomechanics—in other words, not divide the sciences and the arts in a way that may hinder progress in solving problems in dance (Snow 1959). The  number of new university postgraduate programs targeting dancers and teachers has grown in recent years, at least in the United Kingdom and the United States. These programs are for those who wish to further their knowledge of the science of dancing and medical therapists who wish to understand the idiosyncratic nature of dance and the prevalence, causes, and treatment of dancers’ injuries. Dance science is a formal academic discipline within the university sector and is now acknowledged as such internationally with a number of postgraduate degrees in dance science, as well as modules offered in dance science as part of their undergraduate dance programs in many universities in the United States and the United Kingdom. Currently within the United Kingdom there are five postgraduate Master of Science (MSc) and Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree programs in dance science. This provision results in more job opportunities in dance science, thereby supporting those graduating with dance science degrees who wish to pursue lecturing and research positions and those who wish to become well-informed dancers, teachers, and choreographers.

References Allard, G., Matthew Wyon, Derrick Brown, Martin Hargreaves, and Phillip Mosley. 2018. “The  Art of Scheduling in Dance Training and Performance.” One Dance UK Conference, Leeds, November 23–24. Ambegaonkar, Jatin P., Shane V. Caswell, Jason B. Winchester, Amanda A. Caswell, and Matthew J. Andre. 2012. “Upper-body Muscular Endurance in Female University-Level Modern Dancers: A Pilot Study.” Journal of Dance Medicine and Science 16 (1): 3–7(5). Bannerman, Christopher, and Monica Mason. n.d. “The Dancers’ Response.” International Working Papers on Dance, Issue 1: The Healthier Dancer: The Report of Dance UK’s Healthier Dancer Conference, edited by Peter Brinson, 10–13. London: Laban Centre for Movement and Dance. Barnard, Philip J., and John D. Teasdale. 1991. “Interacting Cognitive Subsystems: A Systemic Approach to Cognitive-Affective Interaction and Change.” Cognition and Emotion 5 (1): 1–39. Batson, Glenna. 2006.“The Brain’s Sense of Movement: Support for Somatic Practices in Dance Education.” The 16th Annual International Association for Dance Medicine & Science, West Palm Beach, Florida. October 19–22. Bompa, Tudor O. 1999. Periodization: Theory and Methodology of Training (4th ed.). Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Brinson, Peter, and Fiona Dick. 1996. Fit to Dance? The Report of the National Inquiry into Dancers’ Health and Injury. London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Brown, Andrea C., Tobin J. Wells, Margaret L. Schade, Denise L. Smith, and Patricia C. Fehling. 2007. “Effects of Plyometric Training Versus Traditional Weight Training on Strength, Power, and Aesthetic Jumping Ability in Female Collegiate Dancers.” Journal of Dance Medicine and Science 11(2): 38–44.

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Emma Redding Carr, Sam, and Matthew A. Wyon. 2003. “The  Impact of Motivational Climate on Dance Students’ Achievement Goals,Trait Anxiety, and Perfectionism.” Journal of Dance Medicine and Science 7 (4): 105–114. Clarke, Gill. 2006. “Clipped Wings or Souring Flight? Optimising Potential, Maximising Performance: Evaluating Performance and Health to Ensure Effective Dance Training.” Dance UK Healthier Dancer Conference, Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, UK, November 27 (unpublished). deLahunta, Scott, Philip Barnard, and Wayne McGregor. 2009. “Augmenting Choreography: Using Insights from Cognitive Science.” In: Choreography in Contexts: Critical Perspectives on Choreographic Practice, edited Jo Butterworth and Liesbeth Wildschut, 431–438. London: Routledge. Dick, Frank W. 2007. Sports Training Principles. London: A&C Black. Dowd, Irene. 1995. Taking Root to Fly: Articles on Functional Anatomy. Self Published. Franklin, Eric. 2012. Dynamic Alignment Through Imagery (2nd ed). Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Hackney, Peggy. 1998. Making Connections:Total Body Integration through Bartenieff Fundamentals. Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach. Hanna, Thomas. 1988. Somatics: Reawakening the Mind’s Control of Movement, Flexibility, and Health. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press. Koutedakis,Yiannis, Lynn Myszkewycz, Dimitrios Soulas,Vasso Papapostolou, Ian Sullivan, and N. C. Craig Sharp. 1999. “The Effects of Rest and Subsequent Training on Selected Physiological Parameters in Professional Female Classical Dancers.” International Journal of Sports Medicine 20: 379–383. Koutedakis,Yiannis, and N. C. Craig Sharp. 1999. The Fit and Healthy Dancer. Chichester, UK: Wiley. Krasnow, Donna H. 2005. “Sustaining the Dance Artist: Barriers between Educators, Artists and Researchers.”  Conference Proceedings: Dance Rebooted: Initialising the Grid, 1–10. Australia: Ausdance National. ———. (2007).“Motor Learning and Motor Control in Dance.” Journal of Dance Medicine and Science 11(3): 69. Krasnow, Donna H, and Steven J. Chatfield. 1996. “Dance Science and the Dance Technique Class.” Impulse 4: 162–172. Laws, Helen. 2005. Fit to Dance 2: Report of the Second National Inquiry into Dancers’ Health and Injury in the UK. London: Dance UK. May, John, Beatriz Calvo-Merino, Scott deLahunta, Wayne McGregor, Rhodri Cusack, Adrian Owen, Michele Veldsman, Cristina Ramponi, and Philip Barnard. 2011. “Points in Mental Space: An Interdisciplinary Study of Imagery in Movement Creation.” Dance Research, 29 (2): 402–430. Newsholme, Eric A, and Anthony R. Leech. 1983. Biochemistry for the Medical Sciences. Chichester, UK: Wiley. Nordin-Bates, Sanna, Eleanor M. Quested, Imogen J. Walker, and Emma Redding. 2012. “Climate Change in the Dance Studio: Findings from The  UK Centres for Advanced Training.” Sport, Exercise and Performance Psychology 1 (1): 3–16. Olsen, Andrea. (with Carolyn McHose). 1998. Bodystories: A  Guide to Experiential Anatomy. New  York: Station Hill Openings. Orchard, John, and Hugh. Seward. 2002. “Epidemiology of Injuries in the Australian Football League, seasons 1997–2000.” British Journal of Sports Medicine 36: 39–44. Quested, Eleanor, and Joan L. Duda. 2009. “Perceptions of the Motivational Climate, Need Satisfaction, and Indices of Well- and Ill-Being Among Hip Hop Dancers.” Journal of Dance Medicine and Science 13 (1): 10–19. Quin, Edel, Sonia Rafferty, and Charlotte Tomlinson. 2015. Safe Dance Practice. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Redding, Emma, Peter Weller, Shantel Ehrenberg, Sarah Irvine, Edel Quin, Sonia Rafferty, Matthew Wyon, and Carol Cox. 2009. “The Development of a High Intensity Dance Performance Fitness Test.” Journal of Dance Medicine and Science 13 (1): 3–9. Schmidt, Richard A., and Timothy D. Lee. 2011. Motor Control and Learning: A Behavioral Emphasis (5th ed.). Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics. Sharp, N. C. Craig. 1990. “The Physiology of the Dancer.” In International Working Papers on Dance, Issue no. 1:The Healthier Dancer:The Report of Dance UK’s Healthier Dancer Conference, edited by Peter Brinson, 15–18. London: Laban Centre for Movement and Dance. Snow, Charles P. 1959. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press Solomon, Ruth, Sandra C. Minton, and John Solomon, eds. 1990. Preventing Dance Injuries:An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Reston,VA: American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance.

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Expanding possibilities of dance science Sweigard, Lulu. 1978. Human Movement Potential: Its Ideokinetic Facilitation. New York: Dodd Mead. Todd, Mabel Elseworth. (1937) 2008. The Thinking Body: A Study of the Balancing Forces of Dynamic Man. Gouldsboro, ME: Gestalt Journal Press. Walker, Imogen J., Sanna M. Nordin-Bates, and Emma Redding. 2010. “Talent Identification and Development in Dance: A Review of the Literature.” Research in Dance Education 11 (3): 165–189. Walker, Imogen J., Sanna M. Nordin-Bates, and Emma Redding. 2011.“Characteristics of Talented Dancers and Age Group Differences: Findings from the UK Centres for Advanced Training.” High Ability Studies 22 (1): 43–60. Wyon, Matthew A. 2010. “Preparing to Perform Periodization and Dance.” Journal of Dance Medicine and Science 14 (2): 67–72. Wyon, Matthew A., Emma Redding, Grant Abt, Andrew Head, and N. C. Craig Sharp. 2003.“Development, Reliability, and Validity of a Multistage Dance Specific Aerobic Fitness Test (DAFT).” Journal of Dance Medicine and Science 7: 80–84. Wyon, Matthew A., Grant Abt, Redding, Emma, Head, Andrew, and Craig C. Sharp. 2004.“Oxygen Uptake during Modern Dance Class, Rehearsal, and Performance.” Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research 18: 646–649. Wyon, Matthew A., and Emma Redding. 2005.“Physiological Monitoring of Cardiorespiratory Adaptations During Rehearsal and Performance of Contemporary Dance.” Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research 19: 611–614.

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PART II

Dance and somatics

6 PERFORMING THE SELF Dance, somatic practices, and Alexander Technique Michael Huxley

Introduction In the last thirty years, somatic practices in dance have gained greater visibility, acknowledgment and a place in the discourses of dance studies. Dancers and dance educators have brought a range of practices, techniques and methods into their work for a variety of reasons. For  many, this has been a personal journey of exploration. Others have recognized inadequacies and inequities in the classroom that they have sought to address. Some somatic practices have been associated with dance for a long time and their relationships have been mutually supportive. Other practices have distinguished themselves as separate techniques, which those in dance have been able to call on. The apparent synergies between dance and somatics have roots in the new dance and movement practices arising in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States and the UK. Many of the techniques called on have origins over a century old: Alexander Technique is the longest established. The inclusion of these approaches in dance training, practice and performance has generated new areas of discourse that have contributed to the recent development of dance studies. At  the time of writing, 2017, a body of work and writing about somatic practices has developed. I begin my account by recognizing what is there, and what practitioners and writers have described. Such discourse is typified most recently in Martha Eddy’s allencompassing book (2016). Eddy, a major practitioner, has brought together a number of authorities to amplify her account. It was Eddy who opened the first issue of Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices with her “Brief History of Somatic Practices and Dance” (2009), and this international journal is approaching its tenth anniversary. There  is now  an acknowledged field that encompasses somatics, somatic practices and Somatic Movement Dance Education (SMDE). However, it must also be recognized that the scope, efficacy, place and purpose of these practices necessarily engenders debate. In that many of the practices offer an alternative to perceived ways of experiencing the self and to unreflective approaches to dance and dance training, it is not surprising to find that they too are subjected to scrutiny. Richard Shusterman (2000, 2008, 2012) has opened up the somatic discourse to a wider philosophical enquiry. Isabelle Ginot (2010), who takes issue with some of Shusterman’s assumptions, has considered the epistemological status of somatics and the ways in which its methods and practices have developed in relation to dance studies. 71

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The extent of somatic practices has been mapped by a number of authorities, although no account can be said to be definitive. Those written in the last thirty years mention some practitioners and practices that clearly originated in an earlier period, and, over the years, have included others that have developed more recently. It would be fair to say that a number of the most important accounts, written from a variety of standpoints (Hanna 1986, 1990; Johnson 1995; Fitt 1996; Green 2007; Shusterman 2008; Ginot 2010; Reed 2011; Brodie and Lobel 2012; Williamson, Batson, and Whatley 2014; Fraleigh 2015; Giotaki 2015; Eddy 2016), mention people who are both included within their category of “somatic pioneers” and whose practices were extant in the early twentieth century. These are the practices based on the work of Frederick Matthias Alexander (1869–1955) and Moshe Feldenkrais (1904–1984). Both have been identified as continuing to offer insights for somatic practices. My case study is going to be on the first of these, Alexander Technique. I will consider this practice and its origination historically within the broader field of somatics, and consider how it has been related to dance and dance education. I offer an approach that could equally well be applied to other practices.

Dance and somatic practices: A brief historical consideration A broad range of work is encompassed by the term “somatic practices” and what is included has changed over time. For many practitioners and writers there is an emphasis on the firstperson experience and the body. This, in itself, poses challenges to historical methodologies predicated on the thoughts and observable actions of the past as found in the present. Research into somatic experience requires a slightly different approach to sources and the idea of the archive. Most of those who have offered “histories” of dance and somatic practices have opted for a genealogical approach that identifies “somatic pioneers” (Fortin 2002; Eddy 2009, 2016). Such accounts are similar to certain traditional, and discredited, approaches to histories of modern dance that identified a “generation” of “pioneers.” Equally, there is a consonance with professional histories of named techniques where great emphasis is placed on who taught whom, often with a view to establishing purity of practice through lineage. This is precisely the approach that Ginot (2010) identifies and critiques. A  number of alternative approaches to established training and performance—notably those of ballet and modern dance—began to be practiced and recognized in the United States and the UK in the 1970s and 1980s. These included dancers associated with Dartington Hall, X6 and New Dance in the UK and, typically, New  York dancers who had been associated with the Judson Dance Theater and/or Anna Halprin’s San Francisco–based practice. Annual and occasional festivals and summer schools such as the Dartington Festival (1978–1987) and Many Ways of Moving Congresses (1977, 1978) in the UK and American Dance Festival (1948–) in the United States became sites where these new approaches could be explored and promulgated. These explorations entered the wider dance discourse through writings in Dance Magazine, Contact Quarterly (1975–) and New Dance (1977–1988). For instance, Fergus Early, remarking on the early days of X6 and New Dance wrote of the importance of these new practices: It  is not  a new idea—most of the principles are to be found in Mabel Elsworth Todd’s book The Thinking Body, first published in the thirties, and many similarities are to be found between release and other destructuring physical therapies, such as Alexander technique. What is new, however, is the conscious development of this notion in relation to dance training. (1978, 3) 72

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During the late 1970s and early 1980s, new approaches to moving, centered on contact improvisation, were investigated in Contact Quarterly.  They included articles and interviews on Alexander Technique (Rosenthal 1981; Caplan 1985; Crow and Karczag 1985; Crow 1988) and a series of writings on Body-Mind Centering by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen (1982, 1985, 1987, 1988). Martha Myers, Dean of the American Dance Festival, had brought a number of practitioners of “body work” to the Festival. In 1980, some of these new approaches were highlighted in a series of six articles for Dance Magazine on “Body Therapies and the Modern Dancer.” She focused on Bartenieff Fundamentals (1980b March); Alexander Technique (1980c April); Feldenkrais Awareness through Movement (1980d May); and Todd, Sweigard and Ideokinesis (1980e June). At  this time, these various complementary approaches were not  referred to as “somatic” as such (the word does not occur in New Dance at all). The term entered dance discourse in a significant way in the 1990s. The National Dance Association’s first “Symposium on the Science and Somatics of Dance” at Temple University in 1991 included a keynote address by Martha Myers (1991/1992) and an overview by Martha Eddy, subsequently published in Kinesiology and Medicine for Dance (1991/1992), that began to define the relationships between dance and a number of disciplines now referred to as somatic. This Symposium and the subsequent journal issue began to bring together dance and the conception of “somatics” as previously articulated by Thomas Hanna (1970, 1975, 1986, 1988, 1990/1991). In her keynote address to the Symposium, Myers reflected on her time with American Dance Festival and how this new field of dance and somatics was beginning to gain attention. She mentioned, in particular, Alexander Technique and Bartenieff ’s Fundamentals as being known within the dance world, and then mentions Feldenkrais, Lulu Sweigard’s Ideokinesis, Aston Patterning, Body-Mind Centering and Trager Psychophysical Integration (1991/1992, 4). She also acknowledged how she had previously termed these practices “the body therapies” because no one, least of all her students, knew what to call “this stuff ” (1991/1992, 4). It  is at this point that she referred to Hanna and how he had popularized these new “body/mind disciplines” as somatics in the 1970s. In Eddy’s “Overview” for the same publication, the field was seen as having various names and the term “somatics,” again first conferred by Hanna, was here seen as including “Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais Awareness through Movement, Rolfing, Selver’s Sensory Awareness, Sweigard’s Ideokinesis, Cohen’s Body-Mind Centering, Bartenieff Fundamentals, Trager’s Mentastics and Psychophysical Integration, and Hellerwork” (1991/1992, 22). Thus, in 1991, in the United States, a field of practices was identified as being used by/of use to dancers. Many of these practices were modalities that existed at that time outwith dance practice and discourse: the major exception being Bartenieff ’s practice and theory (1980), which had developed from that of Rudolf von Laban. The term somatic was being used here to associate these practices with those identified by Hanna, who was not writing about dance. We therefore need to consider what Hanna said. Hanna was trained as a Feldenkrais practitioner and in 1975 was director of the first US Feldenkrais training course. He developed his own practice at the Novato Institute for Somatic Research and Training in California and went on to publish extensively, including the journal Somatics: Journal of the Bodily Arts and Sciences. His method was outlined from 1970 onward, notably in Somatics (1988) and in various articles for his eponymous journal. It was here that he related his method to those of other practitioners. In 1986, in describing the field, he said: Somatic learning is evoked by the teaching methods of Moshe Feldenkrais, but it is of central concern in the methods of Elsa Gindler, F. Matthias Alexander, Gerda Alexander and a host of contemporary practitioners. (1986, 1995, 351) 73

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He went on to give the background to his “Clinical Somatic Education” as practiced from 1990 in terms of a number of practitioners. He began with F.M. Alexander and went on to refer to Elsa Gindler and her students Charlotte Silver, Carola Speads, and Ilse Mittendorf; Gerda Alexander; and Feldenkrais (1998). In doing so, he used a methodology that identified direct antecedents: an approach that, like his idea of somatics, would be taken up by others, not least in dance. In his 1998 article, Hanna began with a brief definition, which warrants citation: Somatic Education is the use of sensory-motor learning to gain voluntary control of one’s physiological process. It is “somatic” in the sense that the learning occurs within the individual as an internalized process. (1998, 4) Myers used this quote to characterize somatics, although she was referring to a wider range of practices than had Hanna. Equally, Eddy cited Hanna, this time referring to him as “the first person to call this field ‘somatics’” (1991/1992, 22). In this case, she referred the reader to Hanna’s ideas in his third book, The Body of Life. Again, she was applying the term to a wider range of practitioners. Somatic practices associated with dance continued to be developed by dancers and educators. The growing field was associated with the continuing development of dance science as a discipline, and with kinesiology in particular. When Sally Fitt published a second edition of Dance Kinesiology in 1996, she included a whole new section on “Somatics, Relaxation and Efficiency.” She noted that: In the years since the first edition…there has been a remarkable growth of interest in what we used to call relaxation techniques, later called body work, and now called somatics. Accompanying the changes in wording has been a broadening of meaning. (1996, 303) She then included descriptions, written by a number of authors, of eight somatic approaches that she had identified as being the most popular at that time for dance. They were (1) PilatesBased Conditioning, (2) Rolfing, (3) Feldenkrais, (4) Alexander Technique, (5) Ideokinesis, (6) Body-Mind Centering, (7) Bartenieff Fundamentals and (8) Laban Movement Analysis. The  discourses concerning dance and somatic practices continued to develop and broaden during the last decade of the twentieth century. By the millennium, there were many educators in North American and European universities working with dance and somatics.They began to publish the findings of their practices in a range of periodicals in addition to those already identified. They included Animated, Dance Research Journal, Dance Teacher, Dance Theatre Journal, Impulse, Journal of Dance Medicine and Science and Research in Dance Education.The Journal of Dance Education became a major focus for discussion, including key articles by Martha Eddy (2002), Sylvie Fortin (2002) and Jill Green (2002a, 2002b). The opening up of the discourses about somatics in research-based journals, notably Dance Research Journal and Research in Dance Education further helped place investigations into somatic practices within what we would now recognize as dance studies. It is notable that Liora Bresler’s monumental International Handbook of Research in Arts Education (2007) included Jill Green’s analysis of the state of pedagogic research in relation to somatics (2007). Green’s brief, but comprehensive, chapter included a subsection specifically on “Somatic Dance Research” (2007, 1120–1122). Here, Green signaled a paradigm shift by addressing somatic research as a category separate from scientific method while acknowledging that the latter could also include investigations into somatic practices. As with the accounts by Myers, Eddy, and Fitt, mentioned 74

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earlier, Green refers to Hanna’s conception of somatics (1988) whereby “data from a first-person perception are quite different than data from a third-person point of view” (2007, 1120). Her suggestion that Hanna’s ideas swept into dance in the 1960s and 1970s (2007, 1120) demands further historical substantiation, but her identification of key figures including Eddy, Fortin and others is well detailed. From Green’s point of view, within higher education, the significant somatic practices included those of Alexander, Feldenkrais and Rolf (2007, 1120). From a dance point of view, somatic practices were further contextualized in Melanie Bales and Rebecca Nettl-Fiol’s The Body Eclectic: Evolving Practices in Dance Training (2008). In this book, the editors included a range of approaches to dance and dance training. NettlFiol interviewed Martha Myers, who reflected on “Somatics: A Current Moving the River of Contemporary Dance”: The term somatic covers many individual systems, each branch offering a particular point of view and practice to the whole. Over the past quarter century or so of growth, the field has developed a solid theoretical base. But its power rests on experiential work, “hands-on” between practitioner and pupil singly or in groups. (2008, 90) We have seen that individual systems have been referred to as somatic practices. A number of these were extant before the development of their relationships to dance from the 1980s onward. Many of them have had continuous practice with their own certificating and professional bodies throughout the period. There have been books which have grouped together some of the somatic practices that have been identified ( Johnson 1995; Allison 1999). Most significant of these, for dance, could be said to be Don Hanlon Johnson’s compilation Bone, Breath and Gesture: Practices of Embodiment (1995). Johnson’s book includes Hanna’s 1986 essay “What is Somatics?” and acknowledges his journal, Somatics. The  volume does not  speak directly of dance or of the developments that I have mentioned so far, except where the practitioner, for instance, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, has been involved in dance and refers to it. Neither does Johnson equate practices of embodiment directly with what we have been describing as somatic practices. Nonetheless, there is a clear consonance between his aspirations and the practitioners that he includes, they being F.M. Alexander, Gerda Alexander, Aston, Bartenieff, Elizabeth A. Behnke, Bainbridge Cohen, Emilie Conrad Da’Oud, Feldenkrais, Gindler, Hanna, Deanne Juhan, Middendorf, Rolf, Marion Rosen, Selver, Speads and Mary Whitehouse (1995). It  is not  surprising to find Johnson’s book becoming a key source in later writings on dance and somatics, notably Eddy (2009, 2016). A most significant recent change has been in the publication of an international journal dedicated to the emerging field—Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices (2009–). It has helped to further internationalize dance and somatics and to provide a focused platform that validates dance and somatic practices within an academic setting.The journal, established by Sarah Whatley at Coventry University, UK, has been accompanied by a regular international conference (2011, 2013, 2015, 2017) that has brought together many of those who have helped develop the field. The range of articles in the journal is testament to the breath of twenty-first century explorations. The first issue of the journal laid out its scope in an editorial, which identified the inauguration of the journal with changes in dance practices: These practices are characterized by a return to the self and sensorial awareness—to cultivate a new consciousness of bodily movement; hence, the term “soma” (of the body) and “somatic” as a reference to the first-person perception—and the balance between first and third-person perspective, which underpins these experiential 75

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practices. Thus in connecting to the self, somatic practice also seeks to cultivate awareness of the self within the world, in relationship to our environment. (Whatley, Alexander and Garrett 2009, 3) So the title ‘dance and somatic practices’ deliberately unites two independent, yet potentially closely related, bodies of practice and theory—and it is the intersection that provides the focus for the Journal. What links all the articles is a growing attention to the body and its intelligence—and how the intelligent body can find its own voice: A voice that is a radical, but necessary, alternative to dance practices that aspire toward a virtuosic body seeking to reproduce a stylized form (Whatley, Alexander and Garrett 2009, 4). The  first issue opened with Eddy’s essay “A  brief history of somatic practices and dance: Historical development of the field of somatic education and its relationship to dance” (2009). Her account, based on her own experience, interviews and literature, begins with Hanna and Johnson. It begins to define somatic practices by reference to the International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association (ISMETA) and then draws a historical picture beginning with developments in modern dance and movement practices in the early twentieth century. This is followed by accounts of the “Life Stories of the Somatic Pioneers” (2009, 12). These are presented in two generations and an accompanying graphic showing their connections (2009, 24).1 Eddy presents an impressive picture detailing who taught whom and detailing this as a web of influences that built over time. She also gives an account of where these practices have been developed in universities and through various festivals and professional bodies. Eddy’s experiential and generational account is substantially expanded in her recent book Mindful Movement: The Evolution of the Somatic Arts and Conscious Action (2016). Here the field of somatic practices is expanded even further, presenting a detailed and complex account that is too extensive to summarize briefly here. What does stand out is the premise of “somatic pioneers” that, by 2016, has become established in the discourse. The first generation is here described as “Founders of Somatic Education Technique” (23): F. M. Alexander (1869–1955), creator of Alexander Technique (AT); Irmgard Bartenieff (1900–1982), of Bartenieff Fundamentals of Movement (BF); Gerda Alexander (1904–1994), of the Gerda Alexander Eutony (sometimes Eutonie) (GAE); Moshe Feldenkrais (1904–1984), of the Feldenkrais Method (Awareness through Movement and Functional Integration); Mabel Elsworth Todd (1880–1956), of Ideokinesis; Charlotte Selver (1901–2003), creator, with her husband Charles Brooks, of Sensory Awareness; Ida Rolf (1896–1979), of Structural Integration, Rolfing and Rolf Movement; Milton Trager, of the Trager Method (23). Following Eddy’s (2009) “history,” a number of contemporaries adopted a very similar list. Sondra Fraleigh, in her account of Moving Consciously: Somatic Transformations through Dance, Yoga and Touch is most notable as she cites Eddy directly to summarize a somatic history (2015, 26).2 Julie Brodie and Elin Lobel took a slightly different approach, deriving their “working definition 76

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of somatics” and “four fundamental principles of breath, sensing, connectivity, and initiation” from “the Alexander Technique, the Feldenkrais Method, Laban Movement Analysis/ Bartenieff Fundamentals, Body-Mind Centering, and Ideokinesis” (2012, 1–2). Most recently, Williamson, Batson and Whatley consider Somatic Movement Dance Education (SMDE) as encapsulating Ideokinesis, Body-Mind Centering®, Laban Bartenieff Movement Fundamentals, Skinner Releasing Technique, Feldenkrais and Alexander Technique (2014, xxvi–xxvii). I began this brief historical consideration by remarking on the approach to writing “histories” that followed a genealogical approach, one that searched for origins by virtue of a line of descent. In the case of somatic practices, this is not the genetic line followed in family histories but, rather, the passing on of practices from one practitioner to another. This raises all sorts of interesting historical and philosophical questions. From a philosophical point of view, Richard Shusterman’s rethinking of somatic—as Somaesthetics—has been particularly important. Shusterman’s central thesis, as articulated in Performing Live (2000) and in Body Consciousness: A  Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (2008), brings together philosophical considerations, the body and the soma. His 2008 account examines Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, Ludwig Wittgenstein, William James and John Dewey. It is the last of these with whom he finds possibly the most sympathy. He has extended this account further in Thinking through the Body (2012). When Ginot critiqued Shusterman’s approach to philosophy—“Somaesthetics”—she considered the relationship of somatics to dance studies more generally. She  summed up her argument as follows: Somatics can thus be considered a conceptual apparatus that enhances our understanding of pedagogy, dancer’s health, and corporeal and gestural aesthetics. Dance studies has begun to approach these practices and to define them as objects of research by privileging two axes: (1) documentation and evidence; and (2) efficacy, particularly in the pedagogical domain. The point of view I will grapple with here, however, is of a different nature. Rather than considering the question of the pedagogical, preventive, or aesthetic efficacy of somatics for dance, I want to examine the epistemological status of somatics. How is the bodily knowledge of somatics elaborated and circulated? Somatics, after all, presents itself as an empirically based mode of bodily thinking whose discourse relies strongly on oral tradition. (2010, 12–13) She went on to give a detailed consideration of the way somatic practices worked and were legitimated through “(1) the scientific discourse, and (2) the experiential narrative” (2010, 18). Her account then grappled with Shusterman’s (2008) propositions in an attempt to explore an epistemology of somatics and “the body.” It is worth noting that many of the accounts of dance and somatic practices referred to above do not refer to Ginot and make scant reference to Shusterman’s arguments. In that her article was published in Dance Research Journal, there is a suggestion that there is a counter-narrative developing, and this has wider significance for dance studies. This is not an approach that is separate from somatic practices, as both Ginot and Shusterman are practitioners of a somatic modality themselves. In outlining some of the relationships between dance and somatic practices from a historical perspective, I have identified a number of issues that have arisen. In some ways, notably the retrospective construction of a genealogy that identifies origins, there is a consonance with certain approaches to the history of dance that have since been superseded by approaches informed by cultural studies or, indeed, latterly, history itself. The field is clearly a large and expanding one and charged with possibility.What is remarkable is how Alexander Technique has been identified as a key practice. 77

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Case study: Alexander Technique In  outlining some key features of the relationships between dance and somatic practices, I have mentioned many instances where Alexander Technique has been cited as part of this discourse. As I pointed out in my introduction, the major writings on somatics from Hanna (1986) to Eddy (2016) have included Alexander Technique. In my brief historical account, I have shown how all the major writings on dance and somatic practices since 1990 have also referred to Alexander Technique. It  is on this basis that I examine it is a case study. I begin with a more focused historical account of Alexander Technique as a practice in the last few decades. Because Alexander Technique is a practice that has its own body of discourse and organizational structures, I mention the broader context within which dance has been considered. In that the historiographical narrative exposes a genealogical, indeed quasicreationist, account of somatic practices, I will refer to the situation of Alexander Technique and dance at the time of its discovery and early development. Finally, I examine some of the extant assumptions about somatic practices in terms of Alexander Technique. In looking at somatic practices historically, I made some brief observations about dance in the 1970s and 1980s. Some applications of Alexander Technique to dance began in the 1960s in the UK with the Jooss-Leeder–trained dance educator Jane Winearls and in the United States with the ballet-trained Joan Murray and with Deborah Caplan. One of the earliest references in the dance literature is in Gerald Wragg’s chapter “A Technique for Performance” in the second edition of Winearls’ Modern Dance: The Jooss-Leeder Method (1968, 162–168). In the United States, Judith Leibowitz, writing about Alexander Technique in Dance Scope, remarked on its becoming known in the previous three years (1967/1968). We then find a number of references in a variety of dance publications (Meekums 1977; Szczelkun 1977; Bierman 1978; Early 1978), culminating in Myers’ article on Alexander Technique as a “Body Therapy” in 1980. Myers notes that she had introduced the Technique to American Dance Festival two years earlier (1980, 94). Her account is accompanied by a short “conversation” with Remy Charlip, who, after dancing with the Merce Cunningham Company and as an independent artist, trained as a teacher of Alexander Technique (Charlip and Pierpoint 1980, 92). Caplan’s first article on dance and the Technique was published in Contact Quarterly in 1985. Since Myers’ 1980 article, there have been many and varied published accounts specifically on dance and Alexander Technique, written by both teachers of the Technique and dancers and those who are both.3 Of these, the writings by Batson (2007), Fortin and Girard (2005) and Nettl-Fiol (2006, 2008) place Alexander Technique firmly within the realm of somatic practices. There has been a growing discourse here with dance as a focus. To date, the most substantial published account is the one given by Nettl-Fiol and Vanier (2011). This is but a small proportion of the vast literature on Alexander Technique itself. There is a considerable published literature with many dozens of books on its practical application in a variety of settings, far too many to list here. Very, very few make any substantive reference to either dance or somatics. The notable earlier exceptions included Conable and Conable (1991) and Leibowitz and Connington ([1990] 1994). Most recently, Nettl-Fiol and Vanier’s book could be said to address an interpretation of Alexander Technique and dance practice. The fact that there is a substantial (and, when considered closely, very variable) literature on Alexander Technique is, of itself, interesting, as although many teachers maintain that lessons in the Technique are needed to enable you to learn and practice it, many have sought to convey its importance in print. There is also a substantial secondary literature on both Alexander and Alexander Technique. The  three most significant contextual books here are Frank Pierce Jones’ Freedom to Change: The Development and Science of the Alexander Technique (1997), 78

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Evans’ Frederick Matthias Alexander: A Family History (2001) and Jeroen Staring’s meticulously researched published dissertation Frederick Matthias Alexander: The Origins and History of the Alexander Technique (2005). In  the twenty-first century, Alexander Technique has a substantial global organizational infrastructure with four main certificating/verifying organizations, some with their own national organizations, and with many suborganizations. Many teachers run their own training courses. In  addition, there is a global network of teachers from all trainings who meet every four years for an International Congress. There are affiliations with bodies that give recognition to the Technique, and individual teachers/schools that affiliate with others.4 Taken together, there is a very broad diversity of approaches to and interpretations of what Alexander Technique is as a practice. Indeed, there is an open acknowledgment by many organizations that their approach has a particular provenance and thus a particular value. Many of the more general observations about the way “somatic practices” operate, not least Ginot’s (2010) characterization, can be applied to Alexander Technique. For instance, with some areas of the practice, there is an emphasis on lineage whereby certain teachers, especially those who studied directly with Alexander or with some of his first pupils, are identified as “master teachers.” The one salient point of agreement is that the Technique originated with Alexander’s discovery and that this is articulated in his four original books of 1910, 1923, 1932 and 1941: Man’s Supreme Inheritance, Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual, The Use of the Self and The Universal Constant in Living. [In quoting Alexander I refer to the most recent editions, those being 2002, 2004, 1988, and 2000, respectively.] Before 1991, Alexander Technique entered the dance discourses by way of short articles by practitioners in journals including Contact Quarterly, Dance Magazine, Dance Scope and New Dance. Generally speaking, these were accounts of how the Technique might offer an alternative approach to dance practice, at a time when it was becoming better known. Martha Myers’ knowledgeable article as part of her series on “Body Therapies and the Modern Dancer” is slightly different in that she wrote as someone who had taken instruction in Alexander Technique, and had clearly researched, in order to explore its significance for dance. Strikingly, she emphasized that it “is as much about how the student learns as it is about what the student learns” (1980, 94). In her short conclusion she suggests that the Technique can be beneficial both for the treatment of injury and for those “seeking new movement possibilities” (1980, 94). These three themes—education, therapy and new ways of moving—are the ones that seem to have been significant for the next few years. They form a major part of the discourse on dance and Alexander Technique including, for instance, those in Contact Quarterly where writers placed emphasis on “prevention and treatment of dance injuries” (Caplan 1984) or new ways of moving (Crow 1985). Eva Karczag is particularly interesting because she writes as a dancer with the Trisha Brown Company, one of a number who drew on Alexander Technique at that time (Trisha Brown Company 1983). In her interview she talks about the Technique, but also about T’ai Chi, Release work and improvisation as means she was exploring. The 1991 Symposium on the Science and Somatics of Dance, including its references to Alexander Technique, marked the beginning of a shift in emphasis in the discourse, which was extended in the second symposium of 1993. The  theme of education continued to develop, with particular emphasis on dancers’ training. Increasingly, Alexander Technique and dance was explored within the growing field of dance science and in its relation to Kinesiology in particular (Fitt 1996). There had already been a substantial body of scientific research on Alexander Technique, notably in the work of Jones (1976, 1997, 1998), but at 79

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this time, Alexander Technique literature made little mention of dance or its benefits for dance. Significant articles in this period included those by Suzanne Oliver on the treatment of lower back injuries in dancers (1993a, 1993b) in Kinesiology for Dance and Phylis Naylor’s outline of Alexander Technique and prevention in Performing Arts Medicine News (1995) with contributions to the North Carolina Medical Journal and Medical Problems of Performing Artists by Glenna Batson (1993, 1996). It could be said that for Alexander Technique, dance science was a dominant discourse at this time. In  the twenty-first century there have been a number of significant developments in Alexander Technique and dance. In many ways, dance science continues to be an important field of investigation with a number of significant contributions. Most recently, dance and neuroscience has been highlighted in Batson with Wilson’s (2014) consideration of Body and Mind in Motion: Dance and Neuroscience where Alexander Technique is considered along with other somatic practices. This reflects a growing interest in “neuroscience” in Alexander Technique profession. For instance, the Eighth International Congress of the F.M. Alexander Technique 2008 (Lugano, Switzerland) had Susan Greenfield, the distinguished University of Oxford neuroscientist, as keynote speaker. In  the area of scientific research relating to Alexander Technique, there have been a number of publications representing research relating to its efficacy in “treating” specific conditions, including dance. More significantly, there has been some recent research into specific anatomical and physiological processes that are associated with the principles of Alexander Technique as first identified by F.M. Alexander. For instance, there is a considerable literature, beginning with Jones (1976) that refers in various ways to the head/neck relationship, and which is partly explained in terms of primary control. The most recent scientific research into this includes that by Loram et al. (2017) into the relationships between changes in neck muscle activity and global (or “whole-body”) sensorimotor performance. This particular line of research has particular significance in terms of somatic practices and some of the assumptions made about Alexander Technique, especially in how people understand the relationship of the head to the neck as described by Alexander (1988, 2000, 2002, 2004). For instance, it brings into question Shusterman’s interpretation of Alexander Technique and his criticism of it in this particular area (2008, 192–208). A major field within which the discourse on dance and Alexander Technique has developed is that of education. This is perhaps not surprising in that there have been a number of Alexander Technique teachers working in the university sector, in particular, and some universities have pioneered Alexander Technique within their dance courses. For instance, the Technique has been a significant part of the curriculum in the United States at Ohio State University and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 1990 as well as in the UK at De Montfort University since 1984. Alexander Technique has figured in conferences, courses and in journal publications since that time, notably in Journal of Dance Education and Research in Dance Education. The most important discourse here has been about student learning, and there has been some consonance with learning and teaching theory and practice. Typical features that have emerged include injury prevention (Fortin and Girard 2005); ease in movement (Nettl-Fiol 2006, 2008) and the student–teacher relationship and questions of the role of the teacher in student learning (Stevens 2017). A recently published book, reflecting many books on the practical application of Alexander Technique, has outlined a similar approach to dance with the dance teacher and dance student in mind. Rebecca Nettl-Fiol and Luc Vanier’s detailed and clearly articulated Dance and the Alexander Technique: Exploring the Missing Link (2011) made a point of considering how best to apply Alexander Technique in dance class in a university setting. A substantive part of her solution to what she perceived as a problem, and thus making the “link” involved using a set of complementary exercises 80

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known as the “Dart Procedures” following Raymond Dart (1996). Nettl-Fiol details her reading of Alexander Technique, the Dart Procedures and her practical applications in the university classroom. However, she does not  raise many questions around the wider discourses of student learning theory, or those raised by Ginot (2010), or indeed of dance studies more broadly. It is time now to consider Alexander Technique and Somatic practices and dance with particular reference to discourses and ideas about “the body.” I have previously referred to Ginot’s (2010) article. In many ways, it can be seen as a pivotal one although, as I will argue, open to further interrogation. I have noted that her deconstruction of ideas of somatics refers principally, though not  exclusively, to Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais. Moreover, her critique, as her title “From Shusterman’s Somaesthetics to a Radical Epistemology of Somatics” indicates, engages with Richard Shusterman’s reading of Alexander Technique and the Feldenkrais Method in a broader philosophical context. From a dance studies point of view, this placed a number of arguments relevant to Alexander Technique and somatic practices within a special issue of Dance Research Journal edited by Mark Franko on “States of the Body” (2010). In doing so, it placed a particular and prevalent reading of somatic practice as being concerned with “the body” alongside discourses about, for instance, techniques of the body, following Marcel Mauss (Browning 2010) and intermediality and the “mediabody” (Hushka 2010). It could be said that in dance studies “the body” had become a predominant theoretical trope in the two decades or so following Foster (1995) in particular. As we have seen, “the body” as variously conceived and as variously read in relation to Hanna’s idea of “the soma” (1970) has been a central concern in somatic practices in the last three decades. Shusterman’s explorations (2000, 2008, 2012) and Ginot’s (2010) article begins to extend the discourse further, but the idea of “the body” has remained central. The question of the “body” in Alexander Technique is both an interesting and complicated one. In my historical consideration I have demonstrated that from a dance point of view Alexander Technique has been regarded by many as one of the somatic practices that take a particular first-person view of the body as central, indeed fundamental. We have seen how this is consistent with interpretations of practices that refer to Hanna’s (1970) articulation of the soma as the lived body. It is interesting to note that Alexander Technique and the body could be said, superficially, to have entered discourse around dance at the time of the republication of some of Alexander’s writings in 1969 under the title The Resurrection of the Body (Maisel 1969), and Jones’s account of Alexander and the Technique was called Body Awareness in Action (1976): the two publications following close on the heels of a Dance Horizons reprint edition of Todd’s The Thinking Body (1968). Both Alexander and Todd in their writings and practice attempted to address problems associated with conceiving of the self in terms of mind and body. They both used the term “psycho-physical.” In  an essay on Alexander and Todd for the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices (2012), I examined their practices and theory historically with reference to dance in the formative period of 1914–1937, a time when they were the earliest practitioners: they are now described as “Pioneers.” Neither of them directly acknowledged the other, although their professional circles had considerable overlap. Indeed, the intellectual context for their work referred to many contemporaries, notably James Harvey Robinson (1912, 1919, 1921), who have never been associated with “somatics.” Alexander’s exposition and promulgation of the Technique he discovered and Todd’s development of her methods drew on and encapsulated a range of thinking about the body, body-mind and the psychophysical. Neither used the term soma nor somatic. The whole complex question of how we conceive of ourselves (and others) 81

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was neatly encapsulated by the philosopher John Dewey when writing in an article on “Body and Mind” at a time when he was exploring the problem in practice with Alexander: We have no word by which to name mind-body in a unified wholeness of operation. For if we said “human life” few would recognize that it is precisely the unity of mind and body in action to which we were referring. Consequently when we discuss the matter, when we talk of the relations of mind and body and endeavor to establish their unity in human conduct, we still speak of body and mind and thus unconsciously perpetuate the very division we are striving to deny. (Dewey 1928, 6) Possibly the most radical recent account of how the dancer, especially the student dancer, might be seen within the broad discourse of “the body” is that by Martin Leach (2018, 122). In  considering the question “‘Psychophysical what?’ What would it mean to say, ‘there is no “body” … there is no “mind”’ in dance practice?” Leach, following Martin Heidegger, proposes what appears to be a new approach to what has been central in dance discourse for the past thirty years. He concludes that what a dancer is, and what she or he sees in others, is the gathering of the total system in dynamic activity, the self-animation of the system, a performance of ‘soul.’ What is therefore important is not ‘body,’ but ‘soul,’ not in the sense of ‘mind,’ but in this sense of ‘animating principle,’ the self as performance of itself (2018). His argument seems to run counter to any idea that the “body” is the foremost consideration in dance education, and yet he writes from the perspective of a teacher of Alexander Technique. Like Shusterman, his argument is philosophical, but grounded in practice, albeit a different one and with dance as a focus.

Conclusion At  the time of writing (2017) “somatic practices” has become a very broad term indeed, encompassing an ever-wider range of practices where, from a dance point of view, there has now been an inclusion of, for instance, the work of Mary Wigman alongside Margaret H’Doubler (Fraleigh 2015, 28). Nonetheless, the narrative presented to us keeps returning to a particular and select group of early twentieth-century practitioners established by virtue of a teacher–pupil lineage posited more than half a century later. The historical imperative now is to reconsider the relationship of dance and somatic practices afresh. We might search for the full range of those practices and ideas that came about in the period leading up to the 1930s that, by thinking about “the body” in a new way, opened up new practices that challenged nineteenth-century orthodoxies. In such a case, the ideas and work of F.M. Alexander could certainly be identified, as might those of Mabel Elsworth Todd. By such a criterion, it might be necessary to reexamine the work and place of Bess Mensendieck (1866–1959). For sure, unlike Alexander and Todd, her publications of 1906 and 1919 are clearly of the nature of a form of gymnastik, but her later publications It’s Up to You (1931) and Look Better, Feel Better (1954) suggest something different. Certainly, we should consider Margaret H’Doubler and her carefully thought-out approaches as articulated in The  Dance and its Place in Education (1925). Perhaps we might also consider Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, following his critique of existing dance practices, especially ballet, and his identification of the importance of rhythm as experienced directly (1916). Then there are all those practitioners who have for one reason 82

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or another disappeared from the canon. The question is what to search for? Do we take our twentieth-century, all embracing and all-encompassing view of somatic practices and impose its assumptions on the past, or do we try and look at the past historically? In the case of Alexander Technique, we can benefit from his published works, especially his books. For sure, these are not unproblematic, and Shusterman and others, for more or less partisan purposes, have with hindsight taken him to task for some of the Edwardian, colonialist and indeed racialist assumptions about others in his world. Nevertheless, his account of his discovery, in terms of his own experience, as related in The Use of the Self (1988, 21–48) continues to inform and challenge. From the point of view of somatic practices, there is, on the one hand, the rebuttal of “‘body’ and ‘mind’ as separate parts of the same organism” (21), and the counter argument that based on his experience “it is impossible to separate ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ processes in any forms of human activity” (21).The subtlety of how this is put should not be lost: the distinction between those who speak of body and mind as parts and his insistence on the inseparability of mental and physical processes [my emphasis]. Without any detailed knowledge of Alexander Technique, a reader will be able to ascertain that Alexander made his discovery by observing himself. He  did so using mirrors because he could not  rely on how he “felt” (1988, 44). So this is certainly a first-person experience, he was not relying on anyone external to him, either with observation or touch, but it is an experience whereby there is an external reference point. He made the point that anyone could repeat his discovery if they went through the same process and devoted the same time to it. Notwithstanding everything that has been written purporting to be Alexander Technique in the intervening eighty years, this remains a radical proposition.

Notes 1 Based on common lore, oral tradition, and written treatises such as those edited by Don Hanlon Johnson (1995), I have identified F.M. Alexander, Moshe Feldenkrais, Mabel Todd, Irmgard Bartenieff, Charlotte Selver, Milton Trager, Gerda Alexander, and Ida Rolf as the somatic pioneers” (2009, 12). Eddy also identifies a second generation, being: “Anna Halprin, Nancy Topf, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Sondra Fraleigh, Emilie Conrad, Joan Skinner, Elaine Summers, and Judith Aston” (2009,12). 2 Sara Reed’s thesis proposed F.M. Alexander, Moshe Feldenkrais, Elsa Gindler, Charlotte Selver and Joan Skinner (2011, 2) but also included Body-Mind Centering, Bartenieff Fundamentals, Pilates, Hellerwork and Yoga (2011, 5). Giotaki’s thesis gave, in her chronological order, Alexander, Todd (plus Barbara Clark and Lulu Sweigard), Gindler, Rolf, Bartenieff, Selver, Feldenkrais, Gerda Alexander and Trager (2015, 22). 3 They  include, though the list cannot claim to be exhaustive, in chronological order: Caplan (1985), Crow (1985, 1988), Conable and Conable (1991/2), Oliver (1993a, 1993b), White (1993), Richmond (1994, 1995), Huxley, Leach and Stevens (1995a, 1995b), Bell (1996), Brockgreitins (1998), Fortin and Girard (2005), Gilmore (2005), Nettl-Fiol (2006), Batson (1996, 2007), NettlFiol (2008), Nettl-Fiol and Vanier (2011), and Spaeth (2017). 4 The  first Alexander Technique Training Course was opened in London by F.M. Alexander in 1931. Since then, many teachers have opened their own training courses. A number of organizations now certificate and verify teachers of the Alexander Technique. The main organizations of teachers of the Alexander Technique include, alphabetically: Alexander Technique International (ATI), American Society for Alexander Technique (AmSAT), Interactive Teaching Method (ITM), Professional Association of Alexander Teachers (PAAT), Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique (STAT) and its affiliates, and the Alexander Technique Affiliated Societies (ATAS). In the UK, ATI, ITM, PAAT and STAT are organizations registered with the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC). Individual teachers are affiliated with various organizations: In terms of somatic practices specifically, a number are part of the International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association (ISMETA). The first Alexander Technique Congress was held in 1986, and there have been a further nine Congresses to date.

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Performing the self ———. 2012. Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics. New York: Cambridge University Press. Spaeth, Crispin. 2017. “Is This  Dance Made of Cake? An Exploration of Alexander Technique and the Doubtful Musician.” In Galvanizing Performance:The Alexander Technique as a Catalyst for Excellence, edited by Cathy Madden and Kathleen Juhl. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Staring, Jeroen. 2005. Frederick Matthias Alexander: The  Origins and History of the Alexander Technique. Nijmegen: Integraal. Stevens, Jayne. 2017. “Teaching Without Trace: An Aspiration for Dance Pedagogy.” Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies XXXVII (SDHS): 52–56. Szczelkun, Stefan. 1977. “Independent Dance Learning.” New Dance (1): 19–20. Todd, Mabel Elsworth. (1937) 1968. The Thinking Body: A Study of the Balancing Forces of Dynamic Man. Repub. ed. New York: Dance Horizons. ———. 1953. The Hidden You:What You Are and What to Do About It. 1st ed. New York: Exposition Press. ———. 1977. Early Writings 1920–1934. New York: Dance Horizons. Trisha Brown Company. 1983. “Dance Umbrella ’83, Riverside Studios, 8–12 November.” London: Dance Umbrella. Whatley, Sarah with Kirsty Alexander and Natalie Garrett. 2009. “Editorial.” Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices 1 (1): 3–4. White, Madeleine. 1993. “Ballet and the Alexander Technique.” Dance Gazette (213, June): 46–47. Williamson, Amanda, Glenna Batson, Sarah Whatley, and Rebecca Weber, eds. 2014. Dance, Somatics and Spiritualities: Contemporary Sacred Narratives. Bristol: Intellect. Winearls, Jane. 1968. Modern Dance:The Jooss-Leeder Method. 2nd ed. London: A&C Black. Wragg, Gerald. 1968. “A Technique for Performance.” In Modern Dance: The Jooss-Leeder Method, by Jane Winearls. London: A&C Black.

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7 MOVING KINSHIP Between choreography, performance, and the more-than-human Beatrice Allegranti

Introduction This chapter presents interdisciplinary and international choreographic and dance movement psychotherapy practice-led research with people living with young-onset dementia, their families, and the artistic team Beatrice Allegranti Dance Theatre with composer Jill Halstead. Established in 2016, the Moving Kinship project1 comprises overlapping ‘events’ (in the UK, Norway, Netherlands, and Japan), including bespoke participatory dances for families living with young-onset dementia. A  touring dance theater production evolved from the bespoke participatory material and was made in collaboration with a professional cast. Dominant discourses on the ‘dementias’2 vary greatly according to each individual, and the significant impairment is identified in terms of memory, language, behavior, ability to focus and pay attention, reasoning, and judgment, as well as visual perception. However, we are not defined solely by our intellect. In stark contrast to biomedical prognoses of silence, language impairment, and individualism, through the choreographic and performance processes of this project, it became apparent that these seismic life-shifts had affective and embodied resonance as well, pulsating between the person living with young-onset diagnosis (which can be diagnosed when a person is under sixty-five years of age), their close family care-givers, and the artistic team. A  relational focus emerges in dementia theorizing, where Tom Kitwood (1997) highlighted “personhood”: the importance of interpersonal relations as critical components of the subjective experience of dementia. Equally, recent critical engagement with disability studies emphasizes an expanded bio-psycho-social model of disability and health with a focus on dementia human rights, including issues of equality, nondiscrimination, autonomy, dignity, social inclusion, participation, and solidarity (Cahill 2018, 21). This chapter builds on the sociopolitical perspective to situate the (epistemic) articulacy of human moving bodies together with non/more-than-human creative processes (including choreographic and psychotherapeutic) when interrogating issues of injustice and promoting progressive change. Posthumanist and feminist new materialist scholarship (Barad 2007; Braidotti 2013; Manning 2013) assist in revealing ethical and political insights and tensions that consider how “we” are not  bounded, self-contained, fully formed humans but, rather, porous processes 88

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enfolding within a complex network of language, affect, movement relating, ecologies, everyday life environments, technology, embodied practices, power structures, and performances. I propose this tangle as Moving Kinship, a more-than-human tie with entities beyond ancestry and genealogy (Haraway 2016), together with the dynamic and affective imbrication with/in the choreographic material, interactions, and contexts as they arise in the project and in this writing. To this end, my intent is to resist representing the lives of families living with dementia and, instead, to produce multiple, colliding subjectivities and realities—for people living with dementia, their families, the artistic team, and my own as practitioner and researcher.

More-than-human choreography: Ethics, being, and knowing New materialism represents an interdisciplinary field of inquiry produced by a community of feminist scholars. Material feminists disrupt pervasive Cartesian (Eurocentric, Globally Northern) views of bodies, selves, and identities as discrete entities, instead conceptualizing what feminist theoretical physicist Karen Barad describes as entanglement: “To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair” (2007, 3). Such multiple understandings of the materiality of bodies and the natural world dislocates the centrality of the human in favor of the posthuman (Barad 2007; Braidotti 2013; Haraway 2016) or the more-than-human as described by philosopher Erin Manning (2013). These terms are used interchangeably here given that the central tenets across these disciplinary feminisms assert the dynamic constitution of realities as a complex network of language, biology, affect, cognition, ecologies, biomedical technology, embodied practices, body politics, power structures, and natural and constructed environments. All the human and nonhuman forces matter; they are all given equal value in this co-constitutive process. Seeing ‘ourselves’—human, nonhuman, and more-than-human—as always co-implicated, speaks to Barad’s (2003, 2007) relational ontology or “agential realism,” denoting a shift from representationalism—reflecting on the world from the outside—to a way of understanding the world from within and as part of it. Barad created the neologism “intra-action” to describe this mutually constitutive process of being within and as part of the world rather than the more familiar use of inter-action of separate entities: “… the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not  precede, but rather emerge through, their intraaction … individuals do not pre-exist their interactions; rather individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating” (2007, 33). Intra-activity places the focus of attention not  on the human but on the phenomena generated when different forms of matter are brought together, for example, a human and choreographic material. The verb “bodying,” as described by Manning (2013), with its emphasis on constant and contingent becoming, captures the ecology of micromovements, microperceptions, gestures, body politics, body systems, breathing rhythms, vocal tone, use of language, texts, and choreographic phrasing. The concept includes the relationship to environment: the space we work in, technology we engage with, and props we use (to name a few factors in any one process). Bodying attends to the fact that “we are always more than one” (16) during the creative and co-compositional process. Bodying, within the choreographic process and in everyday life, can also be seen as “material-discursive” ( Jackson and Mazzei 2012; Allegranti and Wyatt 2014): an ongoing constitution of privileging neither language and meaning-making systems nor bodies in oppositional hierarchy. The hyphenated concept of material-discursive brings to the fore how language, 89

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meaning-making systems, and (human and non/more-than-human) bodies are “intra-acting”. This way, language (in all its political non-neutrality) does not need to be understood in simply discursive terms, but materially too. Language is the product of material flows, and Barad explains the politics of discourse as “that which constrains and enables what can be said. Discursive practices define what counts as meaningful statements” (2007, 146). Establishing this inseparability of human and nonhuman ‘others,’ and seeing the world in such multicausal ways, allows for a consideration of the implications of creating dance not only for an audience but with and through the audience. In doing so, the process engages with the ethics and politics of acknowledging the tangle of how we affect and are affected in the interstitial spaces between choreography and performance and in everyday life. The  notion of affect as a pre-emotional bodying occurs in the first moment of relating (Manning 2007; Stern 2010). Moreover, the intent in this project is to highlight how these human and more-than-human forces intra-act and how the myriad intra-actions have agentic and transformative power together as an “assemblage”: a network of distributed affect and agency (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Jackson and Mazzei 2016). In this inquiry, post/more-than-human scholarship pushes the limits of humanist qualitative inquiry and encourages consideration of a post-qualitative and a non-fixed ontology into critical thinking (Lather and St. Pierre 2013). As such, giving an account of oneself necessitates situating ourselves with human and nonhuman others: a tangled process of ethics, knowing and being or as Barad conceptualizes, an “ethico-onto-epistemology  [where] practices of being and knowing are not isolable; they are mutually implicated” (2007, 185; emphasis added). By highlighting that our bodies are immersed in and being produced by a process of (material-discursive) becoming, I am drawn to consider co-compositions: between choreographer, dancers, participants, and audience at various stages of the creative process across the nonlinear, co-implication of space and time, or spacetimemattering (2007). Together, ‘we’ (human and more-than-human entities) materialize the data where moving with/in the point of view of other(s) reminds us that we are “mutually constituted entangled agencies” (33). The  import of entanglement and material-discursive processes in this writing presents data as a layering of spacetime events, relating beyond language and beyond human, and includes choreographic phrasing, words, stories, clothes, studio and performance spaces, social and environmental spaces, weather systems, furniture, and gestures (to name a few). These generative events are at the heart of the project and are always “intra-acting”: not separate entities but entangled with/in the material-discursive processes as they enfold throughout the project. This process builds on posthuman research scholar Alicia Jackson’s (2016) view of a “mangle” because the spacetime events (instead of “data”) capture the performativity and agency of each of the human and non/more-than-human forces in the project, for example, family homes; dance studio; sonic, social, and natural environments; and choreographic shaping. In this sense, the spacetime events are not human-centered but allow for a view of “how we are located in the world and how the elements of the world interact” (747).

The project as spacetime events Although presented separately below, the project events (interview-conversations, studio practice, participatory dances, dance theater performances) are imbricated; they cannot be separated from the co-implication of space and time (Barad 2007; Manning 2013). The events “diffract,” to use Haraway’s (2016) and Barad’s (2007) term that describes how events and 90

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Illustration 7.1 Intra-acting spacetime events. Artist: Neil Max Emmanuel.

insights speak to and with one another. From each (re)iteration enfolds new (ongoing) understandings about, for example, relating, affect, choreography as life material, and elements of psychotherapeutic practice informing the creative process. The  commissioned illustration shown in Illustration 7.1 captures the intra-acting events of this project.

Interview-conversations Throughout 2017, twelve interview-conversations were conducted with people living with youngonset dementia and their family caregivers in their family homes—the hub of intimate relating. Part choreographer, part psychotherapist, part researcher, I listened to/with movement as stories, fragments, snippets, traumas, and memories emerged.The body politics of family life emerged: couples of same and different genders in their mid-life, single mothers with adult children caring for them, each making sense of their lives with dementia. In  listening, I became aware of how dementia affected bodies, relationships, and everyday material engagements.Throughout this process a written and movement ‘journal’ was kept about my affective responses on meeting the families.

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A year into the project, further individual interview-conversations were conducted with the four professional contemporary dancers involved in the project: Luke Birch (UK), Sabrina Gargano (Italy/UK), Takeshi Matsumoto ( Japan/UK), and Aneta Zwierzyńska (Poland/ UK). We reflected on the impact of the creative (intra-active) methodology from studio to bespoke participatory dances to the series of public performances. An interview-conversation with composer Jill Halstead in Norway reflected on the creative process of shifting from bespoke participatory dances to the creation of the one-hour soundscore for the dance theater work I’ve Lost You Only to Discover That I Have Gone Missing.

Studio practice The function of studio practice was to make bespoke choreographic material to be performed for families each week. Each practice session was two days. Drawing from journal and interview-conversation transcripts, titled textual vignettes offered material for us to work with, for example, “I’m grabbing the time I have left; Unfinished dream; Roger was a cinematographer.” The  process of “titling” and creating vignettes builds on existing established methodologies (Allegranti 2015) and became immersive, summoning embodied experiences of meeting the families in their homes and presenting new layers of life with dementia. In his interview-conversation, Luke referred to the titled vignettes as “little pockets,” not  only conjuring an image of a storage space for safekeeping but also a contextual framing within a wider field of relating and collaboration. Subsequently, the dancers were facilitated through a process of kin-aesthetic prompts. The word kin-aesthetic is adapted to include three aspects: the sense of movement (including interoceptive and proprioceptive aspects), the vital role of the aesthetic process in forming movement (in both artistic contexts and everyday life), and the emergent material kinship during the process of witnessing and engaging in dance movement. This intersecting trinity provides an epistemological gateway toward an intuitive understanding of the dynamic inseparability of selves and environments. In our conversation, Luke went on to reflect on the impact of this kin-aesthetic impetus:“It’s almost like a little commission … you open up the space for us to be together I don’t think you ever prescribed, ‘be more emotional or physical’ … so [that] allowed us to work with our own interests and desires as dancers” (personal communication with author, March 28, 2018).3 During the creation of bespoke material, Takeshi also described this time as “a period of raw experience” (personal communication with the author, May 1, 2017).This raw experience was co-composed, encouraging us all to notice our responses—to stumbling words, words lost, words incomplete, family relationships in turmoil, loss of identity and language, fading memories—on our own bodies. We were not ‘representing’ people living with dementia, nor telling people’s stories or working with verbatim text. Instead by engaging with our own ‘felt-sense’ movement responses (Allegranti 2015), we disrupted participants’ worlds and stories and simultaneously began to inhabit the other while also re-inhabiting ourselves.The resultant bespoke choreography became a process of ‘storying’ material—a process that is not flat and fixed but open-ended and incomplete, offering some layers of everyday affects and the politics of living with dementia and, equally, a process for and about all our lives. In order to safely and sensitively facilitate this creative process for the dancers, a key aspect of studio practice (and making work generally) involves my shifting between a choreographic role and an awareness of safe psychotherapeutic boundaries by creating what has historically been termed by psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (1971) a “holding space” for the group. Although this studio practice was not  a therapy space, my holding was based on an ethics of engagement with attention to issues of confidentiality, consent, safety, and respect when working with personal-professional tensions and disclosures with the artistic team, and 92

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between the artistic team and the families. This included reflexive discussions as ‘check-in’ at the start of the practice, initially to discuss the previous participatory dances and notice the affective and psychosomatic impact of this for each of us and then to locate the weekly focus. Which family material were we working on? Where were we with the material, and how did it touch us personally and professionally? The holding space thus informed our creative process in a recursive loop where the artistic team was continually encouraged to attend to the inherent hegemonic biases and power dynamics when co-composing bespoke dances for families involved. To this end, we all took part in the ethically contingent process of “knowing-inbeing” (Barad 2007), where we co-composed though felt-sense movement improvisations and choreographic phrasing during the creation of bespoke material for each family.

Participatory dances We performed approximately fifteen minutes of bespoke material for each family every few weeks with a mixture of two to four dancers for each event (Illustration 7.2). The participatory dances took place across London in gallery spaces, with most families present for each other’s bespoke dances. One of the gallery spaces hosted a different exhibition of visual art each week adding another layer of (unknown) artistic forces to incorporate into our process. The participants witnessed our storying as bespoke performances of multiple social “selves” (Allegranti 2015): the families and the artistic teams.The bespoke dances combined set and improvised scores, and the choreography became generative and re-animated during each performance. Early on in the process, Takeshi summoned this collectivity with the image of an “operation”: Week by week, I don’t know the word but maybe it becomes more, like serious…. I feel like we are witnessing an operation or something … quite … with lots of care,

Illustration 7.2 Participants witness a bespoke dance. (Courtesy of Julia Testa.)

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and the direct gaze from every participant. We are all kind of, yeah, witnessing an operation. Operating dementia or operating something. Gazing at this process. So that was striking. And week by week it becomes more and more intense. (Personal communication with author, May 1, 2017.) Takeshi’s statement is striking for its emphasis on temporality and increasing intensity that seems to speak to this choreographic “operation” as a “participatory ecology” (Manning 2013) in that the regular events challenged what choreography could do by functioning as a force of form that generates complex patterns in an ecology. This ecology touches on the everyday while moving beyond the individual and beyond the event. Manning’s call for an “ecological politics of collective individuation” (2013, 110) shares similarities with Barad’s (2007) relational ontology in as much as the emphasis is on relating with human and non/more-than-human others. However, Manning’s clear focus is on choreographic thinking as a mode of perception prior to the settling of experience into established subject/object binaries. Emphasizing multiplicity, Manning argues that underlying all modes of perception is an “ecology”: a reciprocity of the one and the many. Manning builds on Daniel Stern’s (2010) psychological work of early infant human development, emphasizing the creation of a multiplicity of strata—not a contained view of self, but a multiplicity of selves expressed under variable conditions. Stern unravels the notion of “self ” as contained instead, emphasizing our “many selves” developing in a relational network of “vitality affects”: the feeling of a relational event. In this context, affect can be understood as the preverbal, preconscious, coming-to-be,“the felt experience of force—in movement—with a temporal contour, and a sense of aliveness, of going somewhere” (8). In the context of families witnessing their bespoke performances, individuation becomes a co-composed movement process (Illustrations 7.3 and 7.4).

Illustration 7.3 Group improvisation after the bespoke dance. (Courtesy of Julia Testa.)

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Illustration 7.4 Group improvisation after the bespoke dance. (Courtesy of Julia Testa.)

Our participatory ecology had a further layer that included group improvisation following each bespoke performance—where together we would grow (the) material through kinesthetic engagement guiding us in relating. Moving our kinship beyond the traditional and psychotherapeutic (anthropocentric) notion of intersubjective relating (Beebe et  al. 2005), kinship began to develop within the choreographic material itself. This choreographic kinship evolved through inviting participants to join in improvised movement responses directly after the performances. Working with the unplanned and unexpected, we were tangled and became vulnerable in reshaping the score and moving beyond what we initially imagined. People living with dementia, their family caregivers, the artistic team—we all further engaged in this moving ecology where, collaboratively, we moved toward the more-than-human potential that could arise from our encounters. In so doing, we defied the humanist notion of the subject as stable, separate, and individuated as proliferated in some forms psychoanalysis (Ogden 1989) and Cartesian philosophy (Descartes 1998/1637). Yvonne, who lives with young-onset dementia, reflected on this collaborative invitation to witness and dance after her bespoke session: At first I was anxious watching the dancers... so accomplished. They invited me in such a warm way I became more relaxed. I enjoy the intense expressions of faces and the body emotive movements. I feel like moving... also being part of a group making close connections, feels good. Thanks for the creations. (Personal communication with author, June 17, 2017.) Yvonne seems to capture a collective individuation and the assemblage of human and morethan-human factors, of dancers, choreographic material, affect. Similarly, Jacquie, who cares for her husband living with Alzheimer’s, hints to the material’s agentic assemblage: “What surprised 95

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me about the dance was how painful and raw it was to watch … it worked as metaphor … it’s been a very rewarding session” (personal communication with author, June 23, 2017). Given the range of often unexpected and powerful affective responses during participant witnessing, my role shifted, once again, between choreographer and dance movement psychotherapist according to the needs of the group and with a continual focus on holding a safe space for a multitude of expressions (Allegranti 2015). This  layered psychological space-holding also included inviting verbal written reflections about the impact of witnessing bespoke dances and joining in improvisation—allowing people to have space for thinking—with the experience and processing it in nonlinear ways. My journal writing after each event contributed to ongoing choreographic shaping of material for performance as well as critical engagement with the research inquiry.

Dance theater performances I’ve Lost You Only to Discover That I Have Gone Missing is a touring dance theater production. During 2017, the forty-five-minute work-in-progress toured eleven UK venues and one international venue. An expanded production will tour internationally in 2020 with actor and singer Chiara De Palo and dancers. The production includes studio rehearsals to shape the bespoke material from the participatory dances into a larger piece. After the first public performance, two of the dancers reflected: Takeshi: The  fact that we could be so present is because we had this root. And I think that other dance projects it’s often like two or three weeks, quite short, intense. But this one has lots of space to breathe.… Also this process is with real people and that is important. Rather than just, you know, imagining the context (Personal communication with author, June 13, 2017). Aneta: It was so embodied in us, the emotion, I felt like whenever we’re performing I’m already there … I’m already in the piece. (Personal communication with author, June 13, 2017.) The  work weaves personal, social, and medical taboos about loss, intimacy, kinship, and embodied resistance encountered throughout the process of creating bespoke material  (Illustration 7.5). It  tries to capture some of the world’s unruly, noisy, active, multiplicitous, and deeply relational ways that trouble the casual linearity of ‘story.’ An  early review of the work, written by Pippa Kelly, captures some of the human and more-than-human bodies and intra-actions: The piece opens with one of the female dancers picking up a pile of clothes and hugging it to her, smelling it, cherishing it—a simple, domestic task, gracefully imbued in this particular context with hints of intimacy and loss. As the dance unfolds dancers put on t-shirts and shoes, sometimes correctly, sometimes not, becoming stuck, confused, frustrated—frequently falling back, literally, into each other’s arms. (Kelly 2017) Given the overlapping events, this performance has been shown to a variety of different audiences, including some of the families we worked with; consequently, the work gains a new layer of affective resonance with each iteration. Three of the dancers spoke to the changing landscape of the performances and the new possibilities each one generated: 96

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Illustration 7.5 Maria Palliani in extract of I’ve Lost You Only to Discover That I Have Gone Missing, Siobhan Davies Dance Studios. (Courtesy of Julia Testa.)

Luke: I can’t really do it until I’m doing it  …  my engagement with setting the material and the kind of tone, emotional tone, of what the material could be … has always been in flux…. I think that is the big learning … toning it and finding the palate of what’s appropriate and what could be there … [in the] now …. (Personal communication with author, March 28, 2018.) Sabrina: I felt … we are so present … it seemed like we were the wind, we just blew, ‘whoosh,’ and  [the audience] just got it. (Personal communication with author, March 30, 2018.) Takeshi: It’s about dementia but it went into something different. It’s more about us, about humanity, the relationship. (Personal communication with author, April 4, 2018.) A constant in my creative process is a shift between writing dance and writing into and with/ in dance, manifesting as autoethnography (Allegranti and Wyatt 2014). Presented in what follows are constantly shifting ecologies, revealing how spacetime events “diffract” (Barad 2007) 97

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throughout the creative process. Writing with/in movements back and forth across spacetime is an attempt to keep alive the notion that bodying and storying do not happen on a “linear timeline” (Manning 2013, 23) but are co-constituted in a constant becoming with human and nonhuman others.

Intense (2017) It is our inaugural participatory dance, we are about to dance in an L-shaped art gallery, and everyone in the room is an artist. Some of us live with dementia and others do not. Any one of us can/do/could experience dementia, that all-encompassing word that belies the expansive multiple experiences of each person. But in this room, bodies leak beyond the confines of their diagnosis; we are all neurodiverse; we are all on the dementia spectrum. Through the bespoke performances and improvising together, we subvert linearity, open up new milieus of relating, creating ecologies of co-composition. We move beyond the hypercognitive diagnosis of “the” dementia body (Post 2000), and movement begins to compose us (Manning 2013, 15). Our kin-aesthetic collaboration allows for multiplicitous individuality (35), where the ineffable experiences of dementia chime with our collective and personal, social, and cultural taboos of loss (of language, identity, memory), of fractured intimacy, caring, safety, and consent. My first meeting is with Yvonne, a former visual artist, who is partially deaf and fluent in British Sign Language (Illustration 7.6). Yvonne lives with primary progressive aphasia—a form of dementia where language is progressively impaired. She asks me to “finish her words” if she cannot find them. As we sit in her conservatory, I participate in storying her sometimes chaotically formed past and present identities. At some point during our exchange, Yvonne viscerally reveals her stunning desire: “I’m grabbing … the time left.” Continuing to tell me

Illustration 7.6

Yvonne improvising during a participatory dance. (Courtesy of Julia Testa.)

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about her recent, fearless adventure gliding, Yvonne then signs the word “future,” and our conversation evolves into a co-composed gestural dance: Beatrice: Show me again …? Yvonne: In  front of you, the future. Anything like... tomorrow  [demonstrates], yesterday history … so … present … the space gives a timeline. Beatrice: Timeline. The  space gives a timeline?  [repeats gestures for future and present] Yvonne: The space. Yes…. It’s in your face as well. Look at the eyes; the eyes are the most important. Eyes. Beatrice: Eyes. Looking into the future. Yvonne: Yes. (Personal communication with author, March 9, 2017.) The affective resonance of this timeline finds its way into the studio, and its force of becoming creates a kin-aesthetic collectivity. As Aneta, Sabrina, and I gather to materialize choreography, our bodies begin to move with the affective relation to aspects of Yvonne’s story, her vitality for life, her acute awareness of how dementia will slowly rob her of a timeline—of her agency. As we improvise, Aneta is finding my invitation to move into ‘past’ frustrating as she walks backwards in circles, repeatedly, while lightly stroking her long hair over her left shoulder. We have reached a temporary impasse. The implications of past are loaded for us all, and the intensity in this present moment of making the material emerges because “past, present and future bleed into the ‘now’ of questioning … presence is a matter … of inheriting the future as well as the past” (Barad 2012, 78). What would inheriting ‘future’ in choreography involve? Meanwhile, and in direct contrast, Sabrina seems to be birthing future in her firm wide second position, hands pushing down toward the floor with potent expectancy. This nascent choreography evolves into a duet of spiral falls gaining momentum and giving weight to a collective presence. The material is beginning to make felt the “coming-into-eventness of the field of relation”—we all have a relationship to this timeline and we are “dancing in concert with movement-moving, with space-timing” (Manning 2013, 101). During the participatory dance a few weeks later, we performed Yvonne’s bespoke choreography for the first time. I looked carefully at Yvonne’s face as she witnessed. The  face, an intersubjective mirror of our parentage, ethnicity, age, feeling, expression, and communication, is predicated on the capacity to be in relationship and be aware of the ‘other’ witness, as well as be a witness of relationship. In psychoanalysis, the role of the face is directly linked to seeing and being seen—to being recognized and responded to by the other is constitutive of the self. When the infant look into the primary caregiver’s face, it sees itself, and the infant’s responsivity has a reciprocal power affecting the parent’s feeling of being recognized (Winnicott 1971; Beebe et al. 2005). Yvonne is invited to face our responses to her story. The  bespoke choreography is offered as an invitation to face performative possibility—what Yvonne’s life can mean, in the collective presence of this moment. Looking at her expressions, a maternal, curious, expectant, wondering response emerges. Was Yvonne reminded of the intensity of her motherhood? Would she recognize herself in facing the dance? Her dance. Our dance. In  this performance we are extending the intersubjective notion of shared experience; facing becomes collective. When reflecting during the process of making material for Yvonne’s dance, Sabrina and I extend the traditional psychoanalytical and intersubjective 99

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notion of “finding ourselves in the other” (Allegranti and Wyatt 2014, 537) and speak of how the process of creating this material with and for Yvonne constituted embodying the other within our future selves: Sabrina: The  thing that Yvonne was saying about grasping time … I feel like she is living life … from the things that she was talking about, she is still so present…. Since yesterday I feel like I’ve known her ages. Like she’s one of my closest friends or relatives. I don’t know, I really feel this attachment to her. I’ve been thinking about her a lot. Beatrice: Perhaps you can hold that sense of attachment in your dance and what it means to be dancing an aspect of someone’s story without having met them yet.… I said yesterday in the studio—“imagine Yvonne is here in the room. How would you move with her in mind?” Sabrina: I feel like dancing for her … this information that we have about her … to take it … it’s like we bring her life into the future. We have to carry her life in our movements … she’s passing us her life … maybe in a few years she won’t remember the past but we will and through our performances the audiences will too. Maybe this is the future of this person and the past at the same time. (Personal communication with author, March 12, 2017.) Witnessing Yvonne absorbed in Aneta’s and Sabrina’s duet, a rising intensity in my gut was evoked—that visceral location of mood, affect, nerves, and synaptic biochemistry (Wilson 2015). A psychosomatic legacy was co-created in this moment. There was an affective resonance in this witnessing; it seemed as though we were engaged in a process of choreographing Yvonne into ourselves, of kin-aesthetically storying her future in our dance (Illustration 7.7).

Illustration 7.7 Sabrina airborne during a fall and recovery. Public performance at Michaelis Theatre. (Courtesy of Thomas Line.)

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When the short performance was over, Yvonne spoke the word “intense.” She repeated the word several times, clearly and without faltering—intense; witnessing this material of spiral falling and recovering was intense. Yvonne seems to capture the event’s vitality, “the force of its taking form” (Manning 2013, 10). I imagine that living with dementia is intense: an assault on the senses, being catapulted into a paradoxical way of being that is simultaneously present and absent. Yet, in this moment of relating, affective resonance has “left intensive traces on a collective body-becoming” (Manning 2012, 95; emphasis added). This body-becoming is not only all of ‘us,’ it is us feeling with one another and with the more-than-human choreographic material. As Yvonne leapt to her feet to dance with us, affect’s potential was demonstrated—we were are all co-participating in a choreographic ‘gift’ layered with intensities. Manning describes how “choreography becomes a field for movement expression when the body becomes an intensive participant with the evolving milieu rather than simply the instigator of the action” (2013, 101). The bespoke choreographic material and subsequent engaging in movement improvisation guided us to co-participate through the intensities of composition that in turn produced a palimpsest of “new bodies” (Manning 2007, xvi). This assemblage allowed us to collectively dance Yvonne’s appetite for grasping life. In doing so, we defy the humanist notion of the subject as separate, individuated. We are reimagining the hypercognitive model of dementia that continues to revolve around invisibility and inability. In this moment, Yvonne is not fading away; she is stepping forth.

Tsunami (1946) After a few months of moving with participants in our group, I am sensing my way into being with another. I do not know what my bodily response or words will be, but I allow myself to notice—to constantly notice: me, you, all of you. Extraordinary things happen when you give someone your full, embodied attention, and the entanglement is evident here because I pay attention to my own body as much as to the other person’s. Sometimes the tactile kin-aesthetic information received from others provides a sense of where I am and where the other might be. During this process we are, as Stern would say in psychological terms, feeling with each other’s stories or “affectively attuning” (2010, 42). Such affective attunement is the hallmark of our first intersubjective dance as infants with our primary caregiver (Beebe et  al. 2005). In  an ideal scenario, it is a material-discursive process of tactile kin-aesthetic mirroring, matching, mismatching, vocalizing—and thus learning to regulate and become bodies. When taken into the context of choreography and performance, intersubjective relating can be extended to intra-activity, creating a more-than-human ecology. But what of becoming with dementia? As neurologist Jules Montague (2018) has explained, is it a case of who we become when we are no longer ourselves? Or perhaps becoming with dementia allows for embodied performances of many selves (Allegranti 2015; Stern 2010)? When I visited Keith and his partner, Rose, for an interview-conversation, Keith insightfully declared: “I feel like a baby,” to which Rose responded, “But you are not a baby!” This new expression of body politics seems to birth Keith’s becoming where vulnerability, age, dis/ ability, and power collide (Illustration 7.8). Keith and Rose talk about Keith’s charity work to support people after the 2004 Indonesian tsunami.They also speak of the impact of the dementia diagnosis two and a half years previously. Keith lives with frontotemporal dementia, characterized by progressive difficulties in speech production and word comprehension; he uses the adjective “difficult” to convey his experience. 101

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Illustration 7.8

Keith and Rose during a participatory dance. (Courtesy of Julia Testa.)

He is beginning to find it “difficult” to have conversations, to understand what people are saying, to recognize words, to find words, declaring: “Language, I hate it!” In this instance, Keith’s uninterrupted and incisive statement is the interlocutor for our dance. It finds its way into Luke and Takeshi’s duet with forceful acceleration, stamping, stumbling—grabbing at silent, half words (see Illustration 7.9). Luke reflects, two months after creating the material: “It’s quite demanding of attention,” which evokes a refusal to remain silent or passive, as this distributed agency begins to choreograph itself into Keith’s bespoke dance. Later, while performing our dance, Keith, poised in his chair, carefully watches Luke, who is dancing just a few steps away from him. As frontotemporal dementia erodes Keith’s brain, abnormal proteins gather in clumps and neurotransmitters fail. I wonder what is happening in Keith’s premotor cortex, the region of the brain that is activated not  only when we plan and execute movement but when we witness movement that we recognize in others (Calvo-Merino et al. 2006). What is being triggered for him affectively in his witnessing Luke open his arms and surrender to falling backward? Luke’s repeated surrender of weight, evokes memories of Keith’s work as a Baptist minister and summons an image of renaissance post-crucifixion—an arguably troubling Cartesian Christian analogy. And yet, as the other dancers gather to gently support Luke’s weight during his fluid falls, it is striking to note Luke and Keith’s similar physicality, their length, stature, warmth, and tactile kin-aesthetic ways. In this performative moment, I see beyond the tropes of obliteration and visceral erasure that figure so prominently in Anglo-American narratives and biomedical accounts of dementia and recognize a collective sense of becoming (Illustration 7.10). Has Keith experienced this too? During an improvisation after the bespoke dance, Keith articulates the affective impact of his witnessing. He seems unsettled, with tears brimming in his eyes; he is nevertheless 102

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Illustration 7.9 Luke and Takeshi stamping and accelerating. Public performance at Michaelis Theatre. (Courtesy of Thomas Line.)

poised  to peak. Pronouns almost disappearing and syntax ebbing away, he turns to me: “See.  What you are doing … beautiful … thank you.” Keith’s comment and strong visceral response is not only aesthetic recognition; it is more than this. It is a relational incipience that goes beyond hypercognitive individualism. Keith’s engagement with this choreographic material grasps how beauty is imbued with a sense of potentiality, of something not-yetconscious glimpsed and felt, of hope (Spry 2018). Keith’s witnessing the choreographic unfolding viscerally mattered; it moved him. More, Keith reminded us that affect remains accessible when other parts of his bodily being-in-the-world are becoming less within his grasp—that a lifetime affect can be enacted into a performative moment. 103

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Illustration 7.10 Luke falling backwards. Public performance at Michaelis Theatre. (Courtesy of Thomas Lines.)

Throughout Keith’s tears, the group is stilled, waiting. In a parallel process, across the room, Luke’s eyes are also brimming with tears, and later he speaks of the affective immediacy of this moment: I felt naked and vulnerable and disarmed in the performance … it felt different to any other performance that I’ve done … I had that feedback from [Keith]. He was looking at me directly in the eyes and he was crying and staring back at me. And that’s the best response I’ve ever had … to anything I’ve ever done. Better than a standing ovation. (Personal communication with author, May 1, 2017.) Everyone realizes that Keith has given us all permission to be with the wave of vulnerability that Luke names—to recognize it. Sabrina also reflected on the “tsunami of tears, and yet we all reached each other” (personal communication with author, May 1, 2017). Bringing the proposition of reaching to the fore parallels early developmental processes that are predicated on tactile kin-aesthetic engagements—these early dances act as formative invitations to become beyond identity (Manning 2007, xv). Keith and Rose are reaching beyond the ‘tsunami’: a series of family deaths; the strain on Rose’s working life; and then the diagnosis of dementia—Keith losing himself mid-sentence, mid-life, and Rose’s new role as his caregiver: Rose: I feel like I’m running two lives. And it’s very difficult to have conversations now  … it’s difficult to go out for a meal and we can’t sit and talk …[turning to Keith] I feel like it’s quite isolating for you … Keith: For me?

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Rose: Yeah. And I feel increasingly isolated as well. Because a lot of people don’t know how to deal with people who have dementia … they assume Alzheimer’s and someone eighties plus. (Personal communication with author, April 21, 2017.) In a parallel process, the seismic waves engulf all of us in our studio practice, and, as we make material, we are tangled with human and nonhuman forces. We experience the visceral force of a tsunami as articulated by marine biologist Rachel Carson: Natives on the beaches of Hawaii on the first of April 1946 were alarmed when the accustomed voice of the breakers was suddenly stilled, leaving a strange quiet. They could not know that this recession of the waves from the reefs and the shallow coastal waters was the sea’s response to an earthquake … more than 2000 miles away; or that in a matter of moments the water would rise rapidly, as though the tide were coming in much too fast, but without surf. (Carson 2014, 146.) Our affective resonance with this storm has us grappling with layers of intimate relating where we reach, tentatively, defiantly, lovingly, fearfully, into our future with our tactile kin-aesthetic improvisations, sensing our way into our own and each other’s lives and into the lives of our participating families. Our bodying of the tsunami became ‘flocking’ choreography, where the dancers assemble as a more-than-human organism, sensing, surging and retreating, tangled, porous, in flux between a loosening and tightening grip of hands. Choreographing with waves, wind, and environment is an engagement with what Manning, working with Simondon’s concept, describes as ontogenesis, where “sensing bodies in movement are ontogenetic. They are ontogenentic because they are always in genesis, a state of potential becoming” (2007, xxi), rather than an ontology of the body that presupposes a fixed state of being. This flocking choreography temporarily takes form only to loosen and then re-form, never fixed. Later, Jill, the composer, sonically engages with this ongoing genesis and transforms the soundscore for this section of the performance into music that is like a requiem: The tsunami from the dance studio rolled across the North Sea and reached me, on the Island of Askøy. We often think of people like Keith as stilled and quieted by the losses of dementia, I hear people saying “he is a shadow of former self,” a shell, emptied of who he once was. At the same time, we often think of people like Keith caught in the storm of dementia—waves of agitation, fear, aggression, a disruptive force, a destructive force that changes everything it path. I think of Keith as the eye of the storm, like a hurricane seen from space. I recorded the wind and waves on the Island where I live, I notice how similar they sound. My youngest child is frightened by the strange noise of the wind the night I made the recording; he tells me the wind sounds like scary voices. I tell him not to worry, it is only the wind, and head out into the storm to try and record it. I struggle, it’s difficult, the weather is resistant to my attempts to capture it, I am disorientated and deafened. When I listen back to the recordings, I notice how similar it sounds, the waves, the wind, but as I listen carefully I hear the voices—just like my son did. So the voices in what you [Beatrice] call the requiem grow from the wind and waves—things I couldn’t hear until someone reminded me how to listen. (Personal communication with author, May 7, 2018.)

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Illustration 7.11 Takeshi, Sabrina, Luke, Aneta flocking. Public studio performance at Crouch End Festival 2017. (Courtesy of Julia Testa.)

Affective resonance travels, it wanders, it leaves its mark, and however fleetingly, the choreographic process and soundscore activated our relational potential, as Luke reflected, the feeling that “we’re in the same ocean” (Illustration 7.11). But these dances are not ephemeral because as we moved, Keith reminded us that despite his losses, affective resonance lives on, it keeps moving in more-than-human ways. During the second public studio performance of I’ve Lost You Only to Discover That I Have Gone Missing, Rose expresses the affective impact of witnessing, “Thank you, so much expressed from what we talked about—to our work together—and the dancers today! I felt such a mix of feelings—recognising the hurt, hope, care, sadness, joy, anger, fear, and, on we go” (April, 28, 2017, Dementia Friendly performance at Crouch End Festival). Through witnessing the performance in its entirety (rather than the earlier bespoke family dances), Rose’s words chime with the complex and slippery nature of affecting as the “withness of the movement of the world” (Manning 2007, xxi) and its continuity as a collective endeavor.

Conclusion: “Response-ability” (2050) In ending this writing, I move with/in the future-present (Braidotti 2013). By 2050, over 135  million people worldwide will have dementia (Sauer 2013). What will the future of dance and choreographic practices look like this then? During this time of global, social, economic, and political crisis, our “task,” as Haraway asserts, “… is to become capable, with each other in all of our bumptious kinds of response” (2016, 2). The proposition of an ecological awareness in practice—one that attends to the liminal spaces between performance, choreography, and the politics of everyday life—requires a feminist new materialist ethics of 106

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“response-ability”: developing the capacity of response (Haraway 2016). I speak to an affective future choreography and am with Brian Massumi, who says that “affect is proto-political … it concerns the first stirrings of the political, flush with the intensities of life. Its politics must be brought out” (2015, ix). Arguably, the political and ethical imperative is to link always to affective entanglements, in the creative process and in everyday life. As such, the political implications for co-composing remind us that we can find kin-aesthetic intimacy with more-than-human forces at work in any one moment. Kin-aesthetic co-composition (whether artistic, clinical, or in everyday life) involves the ethics and politics of entangled intra-relating (Barad 2007) that defy the humanist notion of the subject as separate and individuated, instead offering a moving kinship: possibilities to grow new bodies that increase the capacity for progressive relating. This  chapter speaks to this claim—that dancing collectively, co-creating (the) material, reinstates bodying as an ethics of collective accountability, offering more-than human rights by dislocating the human at the central starting point and offering an antidote to the national body politic that propagates a fiction of the stable and unified self. The legacy of Moving Kinship is its capacity to situate choreographic and performance practices and dementia within the broader political economy, tangled with family, medical contexts, social, and political discourses about aging, illness, loss, the brain, and dis/ability. It  shifts our attention away from “responsible for” and draws us toward a “response-ability” yet to come. Cultivating the capacity for responding cannot solely be approached using logic, reason, or language. In a time where a hypercognitive view holds currency across the global North, and where neo-liberalist ideals permeate arts, education, and health policies and cultivate a culture of anthropocentric individualism, Moving Kinship is an aesthetic, relational embodied response to moving with the complexity of the more-than-human in everyday life. It is a reimagining of response-ability carved into the artistic process—a movement refrain that has the potential to enact subtle and incremental changes and make a space for the unimagined in our everyday lives. If we allow ourselves to engage with the multilayered and multicausal ethics and politics of moving and being moved in choreography and performance, we can enfold our stories in relating and enrich our perceptions—in ways that are more than aesthetic, that are processual, sensorial, layered, timely, that allow for hopeful dancing with human and more-than-human others.

Notes 1 The ongoing project is supported by Arts Council England in partnership with the Bergen International Festival, Dementia Pathfinders, St George’s NHS, Merton Arts Space, Dementia Action Alliance, Public Health England, Grieg Academy of Music - University of Bergen, Alexandra Palace, and Created Out of Mind at the Wellcome Hub, UK. This project was granted ethical clearance from the University of Roehampton, London and all participants have consented to anonymity waver. 2 There are many different types of dementia, broadly categorized as Alzheimer’s disease, vascular dementia, dementia from Parkinson’s disease and similar disorders, dementia with Lewy bodies, frontotemporal dementia (Pick’s disease), and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. 3 I refer to all dancers by their first names.

References Allegranti, Beatrice. 2015. Embodied Performances: Sexuality, Gender, Bodies, paperback ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Allegranti, Beatrice, and Jonathan Wyatt. 2014. “Witnessing Loss: A Feminist Material-Discursive Account.” Qualitative Inquiry 20 (4): 533–543.

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Beatrice Allegranti Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthuman Performativity: Toward and Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women and Culture 28 (3): 801–831. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2012. “Intra-Actions: Interview with Karen Barad.” Mousse Magazine 34: 76–81. Beebe, Beatrice, Steven Knoblauch, Judith Rustin, and Dorrine Sorter. 2005. Forms of Intersubjectivity in Infant Research and Adult Treatment. New York: Other Press. Braidotti, Rosie. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Cahill, Suzanne. 2018. Dementia and Human Rights. Bristol, UK: Policy Press. Calvo-Merino, Beatriz, Julie Grèzes, Daniel. E Glaser, Richard E. Passingham, and Patrick Haggard. 2006. “Seeing or Doing? Influence of Visual and Motor Familiarity in Action Observation.” Current Biology 16: 1905–1910. Carson, Rachel. 2014. The Sea Around Us. London: Unicorn Publishing Group. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Descartes, René. 1998/1637. Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Translated by Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jackson, Alicia. 2016. “Post Human Data Analysis of Mangling Practices.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 26 (6): 741–748. Jackson, Alicia, and Lisa Mazzei. 2016. “Thinking with an Agentic Assemblage in Posthuman Inquiry.” In Posthuman Research Practices in Education, edited by Carol A. Taylor and Christina Hughes, 93–107. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2012. Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research: Viewing Data across Multiple Perspectives. London: Routledge. Kelly, Pippa. 2017. “Dancing with Dementia.” December 1. Accessed 10 May 2018. http://pippakelly. co.uk/2017/12/dancing-with-dementia/. Kitwood, Tom. 1997. “The Experience of Dementia.” Aging and Mental Health 1: 13–22. Lather, Patti, and Elizabeth A. St. Pierre. 2013. “Post Qualitative Research.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 26 (6): 629–633. Manning, Erin. 2007. The Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty. Minneapolis: Minnesota Press. ———. 2012. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2013. Always Move Than One: Individuation’s Dance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Massumi, Brian. 2015. Politics of Affect. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Montague, Jules. 2018. Lost and Found: Memory, Identity and Who We Become When We Are No Longer Ourselves. London: Hodder and Stoughton Ltd. Ogden, Thomas. 1989. The Primitive Edge of Experience. London: Jason Aronson. Post, Stephen G. 2000. “The  Concept of Alzheimer’s Disease in a Hypercognitive Society.” In  Concepts of Alzheimer Disease, edited by Peter J. Whitehouse, Konrad Maurer, and Jesse F. Ballenger, 245–256. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Sauer, Alissa. 2013. “Alzheimer’s Will Be a Global Epidemic by 2050.” Alzheimer’s Society. December 11. Accessed 17 December 2018. https://www.alzheimers.net/alzheimers-global-epidemic-by-2050/. Stern, Daniel. 2010. Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts, Psychotherapy and Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spry, Tami. 2018. “Skin and Bone: Beauty as Critical Praxis.” Qualitative Inquiry 24 (5): 342–344. Wilson, Elizabeth. 2015. Gut Feminisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Winnicott, Donald. 1971. Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock.

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8 MOVING AS A THOUGHT PROCESS The practice of choreography and stillness Naomi Lefebvre Sell with Tara Silverthorn and Lucille Teppa Introduction This  chapter will explore how the role of mindfulness and, importantly, the practice of stillness impact upon the lived experience of dance making within choreographic practice and pedagogy. It considers how their integration might shift embodied processes within the studio environment. Although contemporary dance practice shares many of the principles embedded within mindfulness and has been interrogated by somatic practitioners such as Martha Eddy (2016) and Sondra Fraleigh (2014), there is little documentation of how mindfulness can inform choreographic practice and pedagogy. We, as three coauthors and dance practitioners, will discuss a collaborative dance making project, Moving as a Thought Process, which began over ten years ago and initially introduced a mindfulness approach as an essential element of the studio practice. The research fostered a methodology where a refinement of the “felt sense” (Gendlin [1978] 2003) was embodied, articulated and documented through the writing of scores compositions of improvisational agreements or frameworks, all of which were designed collectively. A lexicon that evolved from the research will be introduced and the mechanics of the studio practice will be outlined, illustrating how the reflective methods informed and shaped how we, as practitioners/researchers, engaged with moving and making within each phase and how we shared this practice with others. Throughout the process, we have captured and distilled the research through several multi-modal outputs, including a film entitled Moving as a Thought Process: An Insight into Mindfulness through Dance and Choreography (2016) developed with Jason Brooks, workshops and presentations addressing a wide variety of delegates and participants, from academics to children in the UK and Hong Kong. We will reflect on how a perspective on mindfulness and stillness calls on concepts of felt sense and will discuss how, as dance artists, we approached the idea of presence and mindfulness in a context of dance making while also advocating the inclusion of time for stillness within pedagogical dance environments and encouraging practitioners to consider dance making as a far less goal-oriented process. Drawing on the discourses of mindfulness and somatic practices, the chapter will explore the ways in which the studio methodologies can expand dance making and pedagogy, extending understanding of felt experiences within choreographic processes. 109

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Addressing mindfulness The practice of mindfulness stems from the teachings of the Buddha. Within Buddhist teachings, mindfulness is an integral practice, but by no means, is it an end point. The purpose is the direct perception of the reality of this moment, irrespective of any preconceptions or preferences. We construct our reality partly in the chain of a continuous narrative that has been handed down to us. If it is possible to unlearn our reactions to things, the direct experience of a thing is going to be more poignant/immediate, and more accessible than a standing narrative. The sole purpose of engaging with mindfulness is to be more fully engaged in the direct experience of the moment itself, which implies the disengagement of the narrative of preference or aesthetic. One understanding of presence could be the direct perception of the truth in being with whatever it is. Meditation and mindfulness practices are often marketed as a panacea to all modern ills, without the inconvenience of removing oneself from modern life. An increased awareness does not exclude feelings of discomfort given that as we encounter ourselves and our responses in the present through the mindfulness practice, but first there needs to be a willingness to engage. As articulated by researcher and clinician Jon Kabat-Zinn (2013) and practitioner and teacher Trevor Leggett (1987), the appropriate application of mindfulness includes a fearless, unflinching awareness. Within a creative context, such an awareness can be innovating and transformative, contributing to the process of choice making through refining the understanding of individual responses and reactions. For example, a workshop participant commented on the generative challenge of identifying “one” movement when engaging with an improvisation. He was only able to reflect on that experience as a result of his unflinching awareness, which was brought to the surface through the designing of a workshop that houses mindfulness principles. The  practice of mindfulness, although not  often identified as a dance somatic modality, shares many of the principles of somatic traditions, such as Authentic Movement and Body-Mind Centering ©, particularly “the concerns with accessing a quiet and still place from which to begin moving, and a focus on attending to the body’s own inherent wisdom through encouraging a state where a ‘beginner’s body’ is the source for moving” (Whatley and Lefebvre Sell 2014, 441). This point of view, or place of departure, is sourced in embracing the experience of not knowing, remaining receptive to the changing daily body; there is always the potential for the noticing of difference.

Approaching being still We three collaborators have come to think of stillness as a dynamic and potentially vibrant place of opportunity and possibility, where time may seem to alter in quality, becoming more tangible: thick or light, stretched or brief, loud or silent, blooming, or condensing. “Dynamic Stillness” is used in this context to describe a space in which judgment and thoughts, thoughts here as the mind’s chatter, may be briefly suspended and diffused, leaving room for the body’s senses to perceive the present. Through a daily integrated sitting practice, these Dynamic Stillness experiences may permeate movement enquiries, providing the ground for deep listening and creative openings. There is potential for this quiet place to be exited suddenly and with much lightness, or not, within the context of this movement and stillness practice. The acuteness of listening, facilitated by the practice of attending to stillness, can create a readiness to respond and change with a physical immediacy. Our relationship to stillness and our definitions thereof have evolved over the years through the varying encounters. The research began in 2007 with Lefebvre Sell’s doctoral 110

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research where she was in the role of choreographer as researcher and while Silverthorn and Teppa were participants within a group of four dancers. Work was focused toward the making of a full evening–length work, dharmakaya (Lefebvre Sell 2008). A  sitting meditation practice was introduced, as the research closely investigated the effects of a particular meditative approach on the dance making process, which participants all shared and practiced daily. Zen sitting meditation was a learned practice, guided by a certified Yoga and meditation teacher and followed by Dharma talks (the teachings of the Buddha). Whatley and Lefebvre Sell state that: The sitting Zen meditation was taught as a way to achieve a greater experience of the self; a reflective practice where the participant becomes an observer of herself. The practitioner is just “being”, staying and returning to the breath, doing nothing, with no thought of right or wrong, while also refraining from thoughts of judgement. (2014, 444) In 2016, the research established itself within a trio, with Lefebvre Sell, Silverthorn and Teppa propelling it collaboratively, without traditional performer/choreographer roles and, as a result of the collective agency of the trio, everything within the studio practice could be once again questioned. For example meditating, the term that was employed during the original phase of research, became sitting: a change in vocabulary that revealed a shift in approach. The change could be described as an integration of practice and learned techniques, as well as a movement away from the language generated by the specificities of the doctoral research (and of Buddhist practice per se). Via the integrative effects of time, over the course of three years, the work arrived toward a more secular standpoint, as a result of our varying beliefs as participants, as well as an expanded appreciation of the potential of dance to be a modality within which embodied understandings of mindfulness may be already deeply embedded. New emphasis was brought to personal and differing, yet relatable, relationships to thought processes, sensation and the felt sense within the still, sensate body. We realized through daily collaborative studio practice that we took pleasure in different ways of approaching being still. Thus sitting, rather than meditating, as a frame and a time to be in stillness somewhere between active and relaxed, became the foundation for an experience of Dynamic Stillness. Over time and through rigorous experimentation, this experience, unmeasurable, uncontrollable, ungraspable, could transform into or arrive within, movement.

The breath A sitting practice allows the time and quiet to bring awareness to one’s breathing. Approached in this way, via an attention of noticing as opposed to changing or controlling, the breath offers glimpses into how the practitioner is doing in the present, now and now and now... Beginning with the breathing, the door is open to the sensate body in present time. Eddy states that: In order to slow down and feel the body, it is important to also be able to hear one’s breath, heart rate and physiological rhythms. Quiet supports sensitization to subtle body cues. (2016, 238) The emphasis on “noticing” as opposed to “controlling” is key. It is a philosophy that filters through into moving and relating in action, and its existence fosters and deepens a relationship to the self and specifically, to the dancing body that has the potential to be of health. 111

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If the practitioner’s task is to constantly notice then, by implication, they must first constantly listen and hear. By focusing on the action of listening and noticing, they sensitize to the body’s subtle voices and are enabled deeper insight into the self. We began by attending to the breath in all its now-ness and nuance, including pace, emotional tone, shallowness or depth. By lightly holding an attitude of favoring observation over judgment, we encourage our capacity to recognize, attend to and, importantly, embrace the myriad of bodily sensations. Broadening this further, as we begin with the breath in stillness, we may be led to a greater attunement toward what is also outside of us: space, ground, objects, and Others. The creative implications of these layers of awareness, between which the dancer perceptually and physically flickers, enfold and unfold in and out of each other endlessly. As experimental dancer and choreographer, Steve Paxton so succinctly puts it: “The  palette of the dancer exists as sensations in the body” (Material for the Spine, 2008, 1 min. 18 sec.–1 min. 22 sec.). Through the practice of simply sitting and observing one’s breath, internal and shared creative environments can be cultivated as spaces where the stress of being this or that, of achieving this or that, can be at least momentarily alleviated, suspended or dissolved. This new perspective can permeate through into the relationship to oneself and thus perhaps allow for a less fragmented, richer and more spacious experience within dancing. Dancing can then become less concerned with pleasing and more to do with being engaged in the creative process. Inevitably, as anyone who has spent time observing their breath might know, by bringing awareness to the breathing and following its journey, the breathing changes. It may alter in tempo, quality, depth, emotional tone. Following this to its logical conclusion, by noticing or observing any bodily sensation or state, the sensation or state changes in our perception. From this conscious perspective, the body can transform into an endless stream of alterations: I notice, I change, I notice the change, I change again, etc. The body artfully does this itself. In an action of sensing–observing, the person can become an always-new source of inspiration and reflection, even in habit. The dancer’s perpetual familiarity with themselves might be a deeply generative constraint: a terrain walked a thousand times, each time led down a different path, river or rabbit hole to see the land living in a new light.

Lexicon Below is a lexicon of terms developed and adopted over the years through the studio-based practice that will help the reader to navigate the forthcoming text. These terms arose through the need to articulate and differentiate physical and perceptual experiences, generating a structure and a shared language with which we could exchange and develop our practice. Pathway: At the core of our daily practice is a flexible dance making score or framework, made from a succession of Containers that allow us to move through different modes of presence and activity. Here movement and stillness take place and merge. Container: A Pathway is constituted of Containers; predetermined frames of time, which have a constraint placed upon the activity being engaged with for that length of time. The container defines what we will do and for how long. Some Containers are listed here. Mindful Moving: At the intersection between improvising and meditating, Mindful Moving nonetheless has deep choreographic potential for clarity of experience and relationship. An individual experience, yet not disconnected from the shared environment and others, it has the quality of coexistence. 112

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Improvisation: Within our research, improvisation is more actively compositional in approach, free-flow and instantaneous in articulation; the acknowledgement and imaginative utilization of relationships to space and others creates connections which inform conscious design. Mindful Walking: A Mindful Moving Container where the content is to do with walking only. Repeat: A  Container for physical recollection providing an opportunity to revisit one’s original choices and thought processes within a predetermined timeframe. Collectables: Repeatable choreographic materials or named movement themes and tasks that can be engaged with further.

Pathways Our daily practices and questions were both generated and interrogated through the composing of “Pathways,” flexible dance making scores that are made of timed frameworks for experience which we named “Containers.” The Pathways allowed us to systematically move through different modes of presence and activity and created environments for movement and stillness to emerge and merge. Our use of Pathways holds similarities to dancer and founding member of contact improvisation Nancy Stark Smith’s method of “Underscore,” in evolution since 1990 (Stark Smith 2017, n.p.). In her descriptions of the score, she articulates how its purposes and outcomes are “bringing your focus into the present situation, arriving into the present moment and becoming present in your body” (n.p.). Stark Smith addresses the Underscores as “a vehicle for incorporating Contact Improvisation into a broader arena of improvisational dance practice; for developing greater ease dancing in spherical space—alone and with others; and for integrating kinesthetic and compositional concerns while improvising” (n.p.). This in turn allows for a “full spectrum of energetic and physical expressions, embodying a range of forms and changing states” (n.p.). Stark Smith does not explicitly state connections to mindfulness, but her language within the score implies a relationship; for example, her emphasis on “the present moment” (n.p.). Indrani Margolin suggests that “dance and spirituality are intimately interwoven in the embodied practice of innerdirected movement” and that within improvisational dance we begin with a “mover’s inward undivided attention toward bodily impulses to sense, feel and move” (2014, 144). As we have experienced within the multiple Pathways, impulses arise and are acknowledged when the body is “continually invited to express its wisdom” (144). As Margolin suggests, this involves surrendering to an “inner consciousness that arises in the form of images, sensations, feelings or visions when the mover remains receptive to the presence within her body” (144). An image we use to represent our different practices within the studio and their relationships is that of a bento box, “Mindful Moving” (see below) being the main box holding all of the other Containers. It is a physical way of being which carries through and supports all other developments within our chosen Pathway. The  named Containers that a Pathway might include are Mindful Moving, Improvisation, Arriving/Sitting, Creative Encounters, Choreography/Collectables, Repeat, and Mindful Walking. At times when we felt stuck or as though the process needed a shift, new Containers were born, creating the opportunity for a different journey, and previously un-felt comparisons and reflections to take place. 113

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Mindful moving and the choreographic undercurrent Mindful Moving is a method we first developed in 2007. Mindful Moving is a way of being and moving that is invested in releasing the cerebral noise of the mind and its judgments on form or choice making: a moving extension of the still sitting practice. This is not to say that Mindful Moving is without its own design, but this may feel incidental—bodies compose and recompose space and time constantly in an evolving landscape that can sometimes rise up from inside and catch one by surprise. As Fraleigh states:“All movement has rhythm and spatial design, at once and inseparably. Time is a concept; it is made concrete for us in moving bodies” (1987, 179). The content of the movement may then arise through the slowing-down or stretching of impulses, bringing attention to the moment of the motion’s happening, and the multiplicity of potential detours and sensations inside of one movement. Awareness and tracking of sensation are key aspects of Mindful Moving, and its unfoldment blooms and evolves therefrom. This has implications for bringing our habitual choices as human beings who dance into greater consciousness. Eddy discusses her approach to mindful movement in relation to somatic practice: Mindful movement is being present whilst moving. It  is aligned with “mindfulness” but does not require the practice of Buddhist or other forms of meditation per se... Somatic exploration requires deep presence and is equivalent to mindfulness if one does not become preoccupied or judgmental of one’s bodily sensations. Meditation practice can make somatic awareness much easier, and the reverse is also true. (2016, 264) Through the daily practice of Mindful Moving and its rigorous comparison and differentiation from improvisation, we have come to largely recognize its attributes as not being oriented toward production, the mover following the internal landscape of sensation, remaining within a similar state of awareness as that of a sitting, transiting from a still body to a moving body or the other way around. We have found that Mindful Moving and improvisation have the potential to merge and bleed together, causing us to redefine our understanding of them. For example, you may feel that you are following an internal landscape of sensation within the container of improvisation and, equally, you may suddenly feel a sense of spatial design or connection within a Mindful Moving container. However, within these definitions, we respect that the actual experience differs from person to person and on a daily basis. Through practicing and articulating how we each experienced Mindful Moving, we arrived at the term feedback-ing: the self-contained, light-speed, looping conversation that happens between physical intelligence and conscious recognition, informing what may or may not unfold in the dance. Sensation informs experience informs movement informs sensation… Eddy provides a clear physiological breakdown of such a feedback-ing process: The information that arrives through the nerves of the senses to the spinal cord as well as to low, middle, and high brain areas influences our motor responses. Our movement is, in turn, monitored by sensory feedback. It is this cycle of information that makes sensory awareness possible—we sense, we interpret these sensations (as perceptions and feelings) and we reflect on them—making meaning from our experiences. (2016, 208) New information arriving “through the nerves of the senses” could be seen as the perception of a difference within, around or in relation to the body: a new place of contact, a change 114

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in texture, a shifted distribution of weight, an orientation in space, etc. Mindful Moving aims to provide space and time for the body to think and the mind to move. It is a practice of noticing differences while witnessing one’s own mind traveling, within the boundaries of the body, and coming to different places of attention: a surface, an extremity, a volume, etc. In Steps to an Ecology of Mind, anthropologist Gregory Bateson explains: When I strike the head of a nail with a hammer, an impulse is transmitted to its point. But it is a semantic error, a misleading metaphor, to say that what travels in an axon is an “impulse”. It could correctly be called “news of a difference”. ([1972] 2000, 460) The practice of Mindful Moving encourages one to pay attention to one’s own succession of news of a difference carried and feedbacked through the nervous system. Noticing differences does not  necessarily imply making any alterations. The  various Containers, modes of activity, identified and developed through our practice change in the way these differences, as new information, are treated. In Mindful Moving, one may notice a specific relationship in the space, note it, and decide to let it pass. However, this information could be treated differently within an improvisation Container, for instance, responding with spontaneity to observations. There  are an infinite number of differences within and around the body that can potentially be noticed or be missed: opportunities for reacting to one’s own body, to space, sound or others, which can either be followed or left unfulfilled. These differences feel like many open doors around us, the thresholds of which we can decide to cross or not, offering potential to change the course of the dance. The constant presence of those many doors and the decisions that they imply, layered with the awareness of such potentialities, constitutes an invisible choreographic current running underneath.

Creative encounters and collectables Another Container, Creative Encounters, emerged from an understanding that this research is contextualized by a drive toward dance making. Therefore, we engaged in a process of distilling, where moments of physical, perceptual or relational clarity gleaned were given permission to be artistically framed as Creative Encounters. These could subsequently be identified as Collectables. They would emerge from a particular thought, sensation or image and therefore could be recycled or reexperienced within a Pathway. Collectables can therefore be resources to draw upon in other contexts as well as dances in their own right.

Pedagogy Reflecting on another axis of the research, a complementary strand, our interest in pedagogy, we have facilitated dance making workshops with various groups throughout the course of our studio practice that weave the developed principles through them. We have had the privilege of delivering workshops for over 200 people, from primary school-aged children and young dancers in professional training, postgraduate students within Choreography and Scenography, along with delegates of conferences and differently abled dancers. Preference has been toward delivering workshops as series so that the content and physical experiences can be built and reflected upon over time. This  research advocates for the inclusion of time for stillness within pedagogical and choreographic environments and has brought us to the recognition of the potential in understanding dance making as a far less goal-oriented process than it is often thought to be. 115

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Our aim was to foster a creative environment for movement and stillness to be explored by the students within the framework of a dance workshop. We aimed to reveal principles of mindfulness through the moving and still body, demonstrating that dance can be a great vessel for engaging with the present moment. For example, some students discovered that their bodies could be a source of creativity. For others, the work enabled them to pose interesting philosophical questions about their own physical practice and engagement in the studio. For instance, one participant reflected, “What is one movement?,” whereas a child participant commented on an altered appreciation of what dance can be, saying “we think of dance as movement and not necessarily stillness.” Workshop activities were based on principles from our studio practice: meeting and integrating stillness, attending to felt sense of time and the body in the present, as well as attending to breath and sensation (becoming your own witness) while encouraging a reflective approach both physically and verbally. This  way of engaging students is in line with Fraleigh’s concept of “holding presence,” where you, as the teacher, are present with the “stories” of your students. Fraleigh suggests that, ...one of the ways we learn how to hold presence without expectation or judgement is through the practice of meditation: sitting as a conduit between earth and heaven, attending to the breath and humming vibrations through the body to let go of any concerns or worries. (2014, 248) In  terms of pedagogy, for some dancers who are unfamiliar with working somatically, a mindfulness approach can be a valuable way to encourage a highly disciplined, quieter and more self-reflective way of moving and making. Fraleigh’s view is that “when dance is taught or practiced from a somatic point of view, it takes on a set of values associated with perceptual knowledge and experience” (252). This current research has validated these findings and practical outcomes. It has brought confidence in our methods employed as teachers, and it continues to inform and provoke self-reflection. Students responded to our offerings with engagement and curiosity throughout the different tasks. They particularly appreciated moving across the space and improvising in partners; one of them commented, “your ideas can become dance.” We appreciated the way they communicated with us and their generosity when feeding back. Among their observations, they noticed that it was possible to be quiet and still together (referring to the practice of stillness). As a homework task, we had asked them to be still for one minute at home, in their own time, which generated interesting reflections and comments including: “it felt relaxing to have your own moment,” “it helped me focus on my homework,” “it was like the rest of the world was standing still and I was moving through it,” “being still helps you to re-set your whole body,” “I was able to clear my mind.” The responses fed our research, confirming its great potential as work that can be shared with and benefit others beyond dance training and studio practice for professionals, in different environments and contexts.

Movement of the mind The daily practice of moving through varying Pathways with awareness and reflection offers a structure for the refinement of the felt sense. The term “felt sense” was coined by American philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin through the development of the Focusing Technique, which can be viewed as a meditative approach to psychotherapy and personal growth. In his book, Focusing, Gendlin, describes the felt sense as a “special kind of internal 116

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bodily awareness,” suggesting that “[a] felt sense is usually not  just there, it must form” ([1978] 2003, 10). This notion implies that the felt sense can be accessed through a movement inward with the mind’s eye. The process of entering a Pathway together drew attention to how stillness may be creatively generative. Stillness allows us to draw closer to the minutia of experience, to become aware of how we relate to such details in our experiential world, and to decide or intuit where we might go with them. As well as the more nameable specificities of experience, the felt sense also includes the vague and less definable—the “murky” (Gendlin  [1978] 2003, 10). In  Gendlin’s terms, the felt sense can be “meaningful, but not known” (10). Our studio practice gives value to the notion of unknown as a space of potential, in fact, a place of choreographic interest in and of itself. Purposefully entering stillness encourages a dwelling in the unknown, rather than avoiding it.

Repetition Repetition relies on processes of idealization, techniques or technologies of externalization, forms of retention, spacing and the tracing of relations between past and future. Inextricably bound to the construction and deconstruction of habit, tradition and identity, the movement of repetition follows a task of (self-)inheritance along chains of counter-signatures as so many re-cognitions, re-readings, re-enactments, re-uses, reaffirmations and re-appropriations of all that remains. (Kartsaki 2016, 17) During the studio practice, we became interested in having an experience of time in its duration, confronting the time of the clock with the time felt. This is how the practice of repetition emerged; repeating movement experiences became a way of testing our perceptions of time. We questioned whether we could not only regenerate the movement once created, but also locate it as a felt-time experience. Referring to Fraleigh’s suggestion of “wordless dances” (2015, xxviii), to create a dance wordlessly, for us is to value the inherent wisdom of the dance as an unfolding of embodied decisions taken and connections once felt. The desire to re-feel, to re-imagine and re-embody such internal maps, fluctuating between remaining faithful to and re-kindling the old experience, necessarily unclasping what once was in order to renegotiate what has changed, is potentially an optimistic gesture toward present time that constitutes choreography. Indeed, in the process of working with scores, the Pathways themselves becoming maps to navigate, organizing an artful and often generative impossibility, a notion supported by dance practitioners Sabina Holzer and Defne Erdur: Scores often imply a challenge—impossibility therefore a certain failure. The complex process of translating something into another medium (often language into a kind of action/situation) is embraced with the curiosity that this failure can create an unexpected outcome. Impossibilities can lead to something one would never have imagined. (2018, n.p.) We questioned: “how does a Container feel when repeated, repeated, and repeated again?” The  process of physically recollecting unset movement appeared to be rather complex, naturally punctuated by many blank moments when our memories simply could not recall 117

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anything. In a wordless process of recollection we, together and alone, worked on dealing with these vibrant moments of void: seemingly a contradiction. As past moments within our time felt had now vanished, we had to negotiate with ourselves and with the others between what remained there with us and what was lost. This repeat Container became about recollecting and letting go at the same time. Repeating, within this particular context, became an impossible task: one which can be accurate and precise at times yet never fully achieved, always incomplete in one way or another, even unfaithful sometimes as we get tricked by our own memory. Movements, pauses, thoughts have to be lost along the way for the repeat task to happen. Attempting to both individually and collaboratively navigate such an impossible task, this Container opened a space where vulnerability and freedom could coexist, requiring us to give sense to what can never be perfect, learning to give value to an outcome that will be, per se, partial and inaccurate. Performance practitioner and writer Eirini Kartsaki describes a similar process: ...before repetition actually takes place, the signature—a paradoxically singular performance of an iterable mark—is always already haunted by the possibility of “its” coming counter-signature, “the time and place of the other time already at work, altering from the start the start itself, the f irst time, the at once” (Derrida 1990, 62). To avow this virtual possibility of repetition— repeat-ability—in modes of radical performativity... is to take up an attitude (Haltung) of non-mastery in any given context, or else: to a being-in-rehearsal. (2016, 17) Throughout our process, this delicate space has proved to hold potential for creativity and the arrival of dances. Attempting direct repeats of particular Containers became another method for reflecting physically on the past and present. To repeat a Container already brought us into choreographic terrain, where spatial, corporeal and temporal relationships were recontacted and reevaluated through the experience of doing. In Science and Sanity, scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski, inspired by the words of mathematician Eric Temple Bell “the map is not the thing mapped” (Bell cited by Korzybski 1994, 58), wrote that “the map is not  the territory it represents…” (Korzybski 1994, 58). In Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Gregory Bateson elaborates: We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory? Operationally, somebody went out with a retina or a measuring stick and made representations which were then put-upon paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all. (2000, 460) […] Always the process of representation filters it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps of maps, ad infinitum. All phenomena are literally “appearances”. (460–461) […]

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At every step, as a difference is transformed and propagated along its pathway, the embodiment of the difference before the step is a “territory” of which the embodiment after the step is a “map”. The map–territory relation obtains at every step. (461) The  process of repeating, as experienced in the studio, illustrates Bateson’s thoughts. The impossible task of repeating a timeframe of Mindful Moving or improvisation implies recollecting the many differences noticed, in their variety and complexity, and whether reacted upon or not, to revisit, recontact, and reevaluate what happened before. Yet the outcome of this process itself is bound to be slightly different each time given that the new timeframe, to repeat, also provides space for discoveries to be made and for new news of difference to be noticed. The repeat is a representation (map) of what is repeated (territory) and the process of repetition itself has potential to turn into an endless series of maps. What this points to is a philosophy of the acceptance of change, where one can never rest on fixity, and embracing the present difference becomes an art.

Ethics of practice and agency The studio environment that has grown throughout this project promoted a sense of agency. The necessary sharing of experiences has facilitated an attempted understanding of each other’s individual processes and the differences and similarities of experience that reside within the practices. The collaborative and nonhierarchical platform, with three voices consciously questioning and contributing equally to the process, as well as a willingness and commitment to try, have enabled an open inquiry to exist and flourish. For example, when we design a Pathway, an unspoken method has emerged of pausing to allow each person to contribute. We do not  disregard any options or combinations until we have tried them. Through the shared principles regarding this collective environment, which have evolved over time, we have relatable experiences, evidenced through a developing and meaningful language, which fosters the generation of scores, permits the articulation of findings and propels the research in many directions.

Daily-ness Our process has been centered around the structuring of the Containers, creating Pathways. Experimenting with repetition and reconfiguration of these Containers was the core activity within the studio. Through our daily practice we made a decision to pre-plan and keep a trace in writing of the different Pathways as we realized that each morning the negotiation of this was influenced by our physical and personal needs on that specific day.These needs could be identified as, for instance, a wish to start on the floor, a wish to work separately, or a wish to move with others in contact. We decided to pre-plan the order in advance (the previous day for the next), which supported the shuffling/validating process and encouraged a sense of new. This shuffling process allowed us to notice how the knowledge of the coming Container affected the way we approached and practiced in the now while also allowing us to experiment with the flexibility of the structure, attempting to exhaust all of the different possibilities instead of establishing rituals (Illustrations 8.1 through 8.3).

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Illustration 8.1

Pathway # 1. Artist: Naomi Lefebvre Sell.

Illustration 8.2 Pathway # 7. Artist: Naomi Lefebvre Sell.

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Illustration 8.3

Pathway # 13. Artist: Naomi Lefebvre Sell.

Relational trio Our roles within this project, as three artist researchers coming together, have resided in dancer, choreographer and researcher at once. This has allowed us to offer differing personal experiences in order to contribute to the collective understanding, with the sensate body positioned at the heart of the research, becoming the source of enquiry. These decisions and positions have come about because of and through working with the practices of stillness and mindfulness over the years. These reference points have facilitated pervading qualities of agency and non-hierarchy, both in our studio relationship and in the practices we foster: one practice is not favored over another. For example, we do not deem Mindful Moving more important than improvisation within a Pathway given that the practice of one enables critical reflection upon the other. All are necessary, complementary and integrated, and indeed are born of each other. The making therefore becomes the practice and vice versa, always with the potential for the choreographic undercurrent to arise and be acknowledged. The  relational trio constellation opens many doors in terms of how one speaks of choreography. As three artist researchers, we have been sharing studios, conducting the same research with a common understanding, yet having different lights to shine on the questions and processes in hand through the ways we have channeled and processed this entire work begun in 2007, having let it filter through our professional and personal experiences. 121

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Language “The  map is not  the territory it represents” and, equally, “the word is not  the thing” (Korzybski 1994, 58). Similarly, when philosopher of language, Ludwig Wittgenstein, wrote that “we name things and then we can talk about them” (1958, 13), he was underlining our inclination to use names to talk about things, most of the time forgetting what is obvious: that those names are not the things themselves. As Bateson articulates, “The word ‘cat’ has no fur and cannot scratch” (2000, 178). Artist René Magritte illustrated this map–territory relation concept in the famous painting entitled The Treachery of Images (1928–1929), which is the drawing of a pipe with a caption indicating, in French: Ceci n’est pas une pipe (“This is not a pipe”). To some extent, words, just like Magritte’s painting, are a representation of the thing they define. Translating movement experiences into words and expressing physical meaning and embodied knowing through writing, involving transposing them from one set of signs (sensed, felt and experienced) to another semiotic language, is an impossible task to be negotiated, for words are limited symbols that always fail to capture movement experiences as a whole in their many layers of complexity. They provide verbal maps to the territory of dance. Just as Bateson pointed at what he thought was a semantic error (as mentioned earlier: “impulse” versus “news of a difference”), the expressions being mindful and being embodied, used to describe a sense of presence, could also be potentially semantically misleading because they inherently impose a sense of separation between body and mind. Their etymology alone immediately seems to hint at a preference, of mind over body or body over mind; almost suggesting that possibly one could be more engaged and active than the other in the action of being present. Yet, as written by Eddy, “we are not integrating body and mind: they are already one” (2016, 246). Independently from movement form or technique, dancing might be about being both embodied and mindful at once, or neither embodied nor mindful but something else, which one can feel and experience yet will always fail to describe in its entirety, in words. Fraleigh points to this with precision: We don’t always have words for such experiential knowing, but we can try to say something about our experiences and how they change or transform us. Not everything needs to be said, of course. There are so many wordless dances to do. (2015, xxviii)

Conclusion The research has led to deeper experiential understanding and untangling of terms such as mindfulness, improvisation and Mindful Moving within this particular project and within the wider context of dance making. This separation of terms for the purposes of clarification and understanding has brought about the creation of original scores for Mindful Moving, Dynamic Stillness and choreography to occur, merge and coexist (see Illustrations 8.1 through 8.3). The practice-based research created a space in which we could relate to each other and to ourselves in new and transformative ways. This has bled out of the studio, shared through documentation, pedagogy, discussion and studio performance, and it will form the foundations of the choreographic unfolding of our research to come. We have many questions that are currently fermenting. We wonder about share-ability: Can the layers and complexities of the way we attend to presence in this work be shared without becoming “packaged”? Can 122

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“a dance” be constructed meaningfully through our methods and scores without compromising on the rigor of the practice? What could that look like and is it even necessary? How can what we do in the studio continue to be brought to people in a meaningful way? Pedagogically, this work is important because it supports dance artists to widen their curiosity and prepare for and sustain a career in the diverse and fluid world of contemporary dance. The dance making methods developed can offer ways of renewing their creative practice as well as refine their performative encounters. There  can be no end point to this work, because there is no ultimate goal. We are not seeking a perfected state of mindful dancing, nor are we wishing that on others. What we appreciate and value are spaces where it is possible to creatively follow what is present. We are interested in nurturing these spaces. Making dances is our medium, but there is potential to stimulate discussions in other fields, which we have already begun, or for anyone who considers their pursuits as creative. The work that has taken place reflects a valuing of phenomena, some of which are considered pejorative within our contemporary culture: boredom, nonproductivity, slowness, wordlessness, inaccuracy, encouraging a beginner’s mind versus being an expert, and the coexistence of difference. In addition to this, we cherish a sustainable and cooperative collaboration for the making of dance. In  these respects, this work can be considered an interconnected part of a radical shift in thinking that extends beyond the studio walls as it influences and filters culturally and ethically into our lives and interactions, both professional and personal. The tentacles of the research have extended outward and wrapped back inward, via workshops with diverse groups of people, sharings with dance practitioners, formal and informal talks and cross-disciplinary engagements. What remains clear from the long undoing and disseminating of the original starting point, dharmakaya (Lefebvre Sell 2008), is a sense of ongoingness, of the many creative unfoldments made possible through time and as a result of “staying with” something together. The continued interest in refreshing the “beginner’s mind” is both fostered by the approaches of the studio research and simultaneously keeps us moving. This chapter is an attempt at scratching the surface of the body of thought and experiential knowing that staying with this work has generated, although not everything needs to be said. There are, of course, so many wordless dances to do (Fraleigh 2015).

References Bateson, Gregory. 2000. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1990. Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Eddy, Martha. 2016. Mindful Movement:The Evolution of the Somatic Arts and Conscious Action. Bristol: Intellect. Fraleigh, Sondra. 1987. Dance and the Lived Body. Pittsburg, PA: University of Pittsburg. ———. 2014. “Permission and the Making of Consciousness.” In  Dance, Somatics and Spiritualities: Contemporary Sacred Narratives, edited by Amanda Williamson, Glenna Batson, Sarah Whatley, and Rebecca Weber, 239–260. Bristol: Intellect. ———. 2015. Moving Consciously: Somatic Transformations through Dance,Yoga, and Touch. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Gendlin, Eugene T. (1978) 2003. Focusing: How to Gain Direct Access to Your Body’s Knowledge. London: Rider. Holzer, Sabina and Defne Erdur. n.d. On Scores. Accessed July  2, 2018. http://mindthedance. com/#article/52/on-scores. Kabat-Zinn, Jon. 2013. Full Catastrophe Living. New York: Bantam Books. Kartsaki, Eirini. 2016. On Repetition:Writing, Performance and Art. Bristol: Intellect. Korzybski, Alfred. 1994. Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. Fort Worth, TX: Institute of General Semantics.

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Naomi Lefebvre Sell et al. Leggett, Trevor. 1987. Zen and The Ways. Boulder, CO: Shambhala. Lefebvre Sell, Naomi. 2008. dharmakaya (dance performance). London: Bonnie Bird Theatre, March 10. Margolin, Indrani. 2014. “Bodyself: Linking Dance and Spirituality.” Dance, Movement and Spiritualities 1 (1): 143–162. Moving as a Thought Process: An Insight into Mindfulness through Dance and Choreography. 2017. Fourth Dance and Somatics Practices Conference, Coventry University, UK, July 7–9. Paxton, Steve. 2008. Material for the Spine (DVD). Belgium: Contradanse. Stark Smith, Nancy. 2017. The Underscore. Accessed July 14, 2017. http://nancystarksmith.com/underscore/. Whatley, Sarah, and Naomi Lefebvre Sell. 2014. “Dancing and Flourishing: Mindful Meditation in Dance Making and Performing.” In Dance, Somatics and Spiritualities: Contemporary Sacred Narratives, edited by Amanda Williamson, Glenna Batson, Sarah Whatley, and Rebecca Weber, 437–458. Bristol: Intellect. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

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9 MOVING MIND AND BODY Language and writings of Simone Forti Hiie Saumaa

Introduction In Doris Humphrey’s landmark work on dance composition, The Art of Making Dances (1959), she described the dynamic between words and movement: Words can be fun, and with movement gain an added sparkle which is not found when they are used separately. At any rate, there is a special delight in their combination. I cannot remember any of these combinations of wordplay and dance on a professional stage, except by one choreographer who developed in my classes, but there have been plenty of them as a result of class work. […] This sort of thing can be great fun, and it is only in the combination of words with movement that the full flavor emerges. (Humphrey 1959, 129) Using words with movement was in her view “an almost untouched field” that could be “a storehouse of treasure” with “much more room for exploration” (128). She saw “no reason against, and many for, an amalgamation of the spoken, sung or chanted word with movement” (125). She  envisioned the “dance-plus-words form” as “a magnificent country for pioneering souls” (125). A  few years later, the dancers and choreographers associated with the Judson Dance Theater such as Deborah Hay, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and Barbara Dilley and with the 1960s and 1970s avant-garde, such as Simone Forti, ventured on that relatively little explored land and began to examine the interplay between movement, language, and choreography. During Ordinary Dance (1962), Rainer spoke about the places she had lived in while performing a series of pedestrian movements; Trisha Brown’s Skymap (1969) consisted of a taped recording of a monologue, and she spoke to the audience in Accumulation with Talking plus Watermotor (1979). Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Simone Forti, and Steve Paxton contributed articles for The Drama Review in 1975 (Brown 1975; Childs 1975; Forti 1975; Paxton 1975). These interests continued beyond the 1960s and 1970s. Forti, who was not part of the Judson Dance Theater but significantly influenced its key players and postmodern dance in general, developed “News Animations” and her practice and performance technique of Logomotion, which combines simultaneous speaking and movement. Hay uses 125

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questions, riddles, or Zen Buddhism’s “koan-like” contemplations in her dance practice and performance. These explorations of movement and verbal language have led not  only to innovations in dance performance but to intriguing approaches to mental phenomena such as attention, concentration, and the flux of thoughts while the body is in motion. Much has been written on the cultural context of the Judson Dance Theater, the dance works of the choreographers and performance artists of the era as well as Robert Dunn’s composition workshop that led to the Judson Dance Theater (Banes 1993, 2001; Banes and Harris 2003; Burt 2006; Perron 2012; Bennahum, Perron, and Robertson 2017). However, these choreographers’ abundant writings, ranging from poetry to nonfiction, have received much less attention. Elsewhere, I have examined the role of language in early twentiethcentury discourses on relaxation and improvisational movement (Saumaa 2016, 2017) and the inclusion of spoken and written language in the Tamalpa Life/Art Process developed by Anna Halprin and her daughter Daria Halprin (Saumaa 2018). Here, I am developing the analysis between words and movement and applying it to a case study of the Judson era and the work of Forti in particular. I suggest that the voices and artistic choices of these choreographers as writers merit more careful attention. Hay, Forti, Dilley, Paxton, and Rainer have continued to write and publish since the 1970s, extending the discussion of their dance and choreographic aesthetics beyond the experimentation of the Judson Era (e.g., Hay 1994, 2000, 2016; Rainer 2006, 2012; Dilley 2015). In this chapter, I will focus on the writings of Simone Forti. In Handbook in Motion: An Account of An Ongoing Personal Discourse and Its Manifestations in Dance (1974) and Oh, Tongue (2003), Forti theorizes “dance state,” “kinesthetic awareness,” and “animation” as they pertain to movement. I show that these concepts acquire another layer when applied to her writing. Verbal language affects Forti’s dance, but her movement explorations and heightened attention to language as a physical phenomenon also enliven her approach to words and writing. In Oh, Tongue, Forti says that Handbook in Motion is a “dancer’s book” (141), and activist and artist Fred Dewey calls it a “dancerly” book (2003, 180). However, whether and how movement is present in these works is not  as apparent a question as it might seem. I show that in Forti’s writings, the speaker’s actual movement qualities are largely absent: Movement is evoked less in terms of Forti improvising in dance while speaking and more in terms of thoughts and language moving on the page. Most explicitly, Forti invites readers to imagine movement by conjuring up images of the movement of natural phenomena, such as plants and trees. One question in dance studies has been how to “translate motion and gesture into a textual form without losing its embodied presence” (Albright 2013, 62). Ann Cooper Albright refers to “the ever-present stumbling in the dance field of how to ‘write the moving body’” (2013, 77). Susan Leigh Foster similarly asks “how to transpose the moved in the direction of the written” (1995, 9) and argues for a “writing-dancing body” and “a scholarship that detects and records the movements of the writer as well as the written about” (1995, 19, 16). Recent dance scholarship has embraced different modes of writing within academic prose itself: Albright (2013), Einav Katan-Schmid (2016), Kimerer LaMothe (2015), Alys Longley (2013), and Marta Savigliano (1995), among others, incorporate personal narratives or their own somatic experiences with movement or research or record narrative scenes from the practice studio. Performance studies scholar Barbara Browning lists dance scholarship, performance studies, and musicology as “fertile sites for scholarly writing that has espoused, if not explicitly novelistic, at least highly voiced personal narrative, which is often figured as ‘performative’” (2018, 27). These accounts not only describe the authors’ intellectual investments but aspire to make readers see and feel elements of these inquiries more somatically, in 126

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their own bodies. While the question of how to write in embodied ways is gaining attention, I suggest that the figure of the reader needs more emphasis. Next to the question of what approaches guide Forti’s thinking when composing her experimental texts, I add the question of what it is like to read these works. Does her writing impact readers’ ability to imagine movement, and if so, how? In what follows, I will pursue the question of what form improvisation that attends to both physical movement and the movement of thoughts takes on the page. I will first discuss Forti’s approach to language, the body, and movement. I will then analyze Forti’s Handbook in Motion; Oh, Tongue; and the coauthored Unbuttoned Sleeves. I shed light on sites where Forti is evoking the mind and/or the body in motion and discuss how her sentence structures make her writing move. I demonstrate the different methods Forti has used to conjure up improvisational dance and speech methods in writing.

Inquiries into speaking, writing, form, and movement Forti was born to Jewish parents in Florence, Italy, in 1935, and moved to the United States in 1939 to escape anti-Semitic persecution. After attending Reed College in Portland, Oregon, from 1953 to 1955, she and her future husband, the artist Robert Morris, moved to San Francisco, where she met Anna Halprin (or Ann Halprin as she was known professionally until 1972) and was a member of Halprin’s San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop. Halprin’s improvisational explorations and her use of nature as a source for movement greatly affected Forti. Forti moved to New  York in 1959 and, with Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton, became part of Robert Dunn’s legendary composition class at Merce Cunningham’s studio. She performed her “dance constructions,” including Huddle and Slant Board, at Yoko Ono’s loft in 1961 and participated in avant-garde happenings (Forti 1997). Since the 1960s, Forti has examined movement and language in improvisational solo and group dance settings and taught classes and workshops in Logomotion across the world. Forti’s explorations into movement and language were influenced by Anna Halprin’s improvisational exercises. For example, in Halprin’s classes, they would take a word, like “a strawberry,” and investigate it “in time, in space, and with force. And then we would also explore with ways that we would shape our mouth to organize the sound” (Forti 1994, 2). They would choose a sentence and accompany it with a task, such as throwing balls: “So we would simply combine them and they would be delightful but meaningless according to cause and effect in a content way” (2). They would “free associate” with words like “time,” searching for unexpected content and “things that you couldn’t preconceive” (2). In  the expressive arts practice called the Tamalpa Life/Art Process that Halprin and her daughter Daria Halprin developed based on Halprin’s methods, spoken and written language are combined with movement and drawing practices to express a range of emotions, promote healing, and foster more embodied and creative ways of living (Saumaa 2018). Forti has said that she developed Logomotion to grasp the world news and to know what is on her mind (Forti 2003, 136). In an article titled “Organic Telling,” she notes that dancing “speculative images of news items” helps her think about them (1990/1991). These “fleeting embodiments of the working images” give “wonderful shape to the dancing” (10). Instead of “working images out with words,” she blends words with movement (10). Her “News Animations” help her “recall the bits and broad strokes of information”: “running” the news through her body, she can see how it “falls together” in her mind, imagination, and feeling (Forti 1994, 2). Her movement “springs from her physical impulses in connection to her thoughts” (Hermann 2001, 21). She thinks in movement (see Morse 2016). 127

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Forti does not pantomime words: movement gives her information on what she thinks and how these words feel. Speaking while dancing gives her a “deep feeling in [her] bones. […] You can say hard things because it’s just how you feel them in your bones” (Forti 2003, 126). Speaking while moving, running, or rolling seems to impact the way she feels language: it “gives protection to the speaking and makes it softer, deeper” (126), whereas in print these words appear harsher. Movement “seems to make the words so human, human as in bread-eating” (126). This practice led her to pay attention to instances of physical movement encoded in language: “I even see the news as pressures, wedges, and balance shifts, and anyway, so much of the language of the news media is in terms of physical dynamics: the dollar in free fall, Lebanon as a slippery slope… And that’s what I dance” (4), she notes. Forti reminds readers that movement images or physical phenomena lie underneath metaphors or turns of phrase that we do not  necessarily perceive in physical terms. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (2003) have illuminated why many metaphors in our experience are based in bodily experience: “Because so many of the concepts that are important to us are either abstract or not clearly delineated in our experience (the emotions, ideas, time, etc.), we need to get a grasp on them by means of other concepts that we understand in clearer terms (spatial orientations, objects, etc.)” (115). Along similar lines, the title of Oh, Tongue alludes to language as both a physical and abstract phenomenon. The tongue refers to language as a mostly abstract system of signs as well as the physical organ that we can feel, sense, move, and use to eat and to utter words. Forti’s fascination with speaking while moving has led to a study and practice of writing. She  would do a timed free writing before her Logomotion performances and draw upon images and words from her writing for the performance that night. Forti remarks, Although I have a deep understanding of movement, and the activity of thinking with words, and my use of words does feed my dancing, I now needed more understanding of how the literary medium could help deepen the discourse in my performances. I started to explore writing itself. (Forti 2003, 141) She attended workshops in free writing at Beyond Baroque, collaborated with a group of artists, including Carmela Hermann, Jeremiah Day, Dana Hirsch, and Lisa Bruno, with whom they performed an evening of their individual work. While collaborating with Terrence Luke Johnson and Dale Eunson on a piece that included “a lot of writing, both spontaneous and deliberate,” she sensed that “the writing began to take on a life of its own” (2003, 142). One reason why the aesthetic qualities of Forti’s texts have not been fully analyzed might stem from the challenge her works pose in terms of form and genre. Her writings, like her dance work, cross boundaries. As Wendy Perron has noted, “This disjunctiveness—one thing following another even though it may not make obvious thematic sense—is typical of the way Forti works” (Perron 2017, 110). Handbook in Motion (1974) incorporates the directions for her dance constructions next to her reflections on her life and dance career; Oh, Tongue (2003) includes poetry, an imaginary conversation between Forti and her father, and several pieces drawn from previous works: articles published in Contact Quarterly and the transcripts of two performances at the Dance Festival at Bates College in 2002 and a transcript of a performance at Bennington College in 2003. Unbuttoned Sleeves (2006) is based on journal entries, improvisational warm-up writings, transcriptions of speaking while in motion, and deliberate writings that Forti, along with her collaborators Terrence Luke Johnson, Sarah Swenson, and Douglas Wadle, created for two improvisational dance/theater projects, “Unbuttoned Sleeves” and “101,” featured at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts 128

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Theater in 2005 and at Highways Performance Space in Los Angeles in 2006, respectively. The works attend to the visual: Handbook in Motion (1974) uses images of Forti’s handwritten journals and photographs of performances; Oh, Tongue (2003) includes abstract sketches and drawings of the body. Experimenting with form, different registers of writing, and verbal means of recording dance material is not unique to Forti. For example, in her Lamb at the Altar: The Story of a Dance (1994) and Using the Sky: A Dance (2016), Deborah Hay incorporates notes, journal entries, and poetic writings to reflect on and record her work of choreographing particular dances. In the foreword to My Body, The Buddhist (2000) she emphasizes that she is not a practicing Buddhist, poet, librettist, or archivist: “The literary forms used in this book are liberties I have taken to help me unravel a piece of the plot between movement and perception. The libretto, poem, score, short story, were co-opted by a flag-bearer in pursuit of the study of intelligence born in the dancing body” (xxv). Hay suggests that writing about the body and bodily intelligence necessitates these varied forms: in her view, bodily consciousness does not fit neatly into one genre. The  shifting perspectives and deliberate formal incoherence perform several functions. Forti’s writings further the author’s philosophical ideas about movement, language, and the mind. They include autobiographical and historical information, such as Forti’s reflections on her studies with Halprin and the milieu of the 1960s happenings and experimentation with pedestrian movement at the Judson Memorial Church; and by including poetry, lyrical writings, and drawings, they are works of art with their literary and visual aesthetics. They also serve as a type of archive by including the transcripts and the scores for the dance constructions, Forti brings awareness of her dances to the reading public. The title of Handbook in Motion: An Account of an Ongoing Personal Discourse and Its Manifestations in Dance (1974) highlights a kinetic quality. The book is not “on” or “about” motion; it is actively “in motion,” perhaps even “unfinished.” The title suggests that new insights about these different genres and functions can emerge upon re-reading.

Writing the “dance state” of improvisation We enter a particular “dance state” when we dance, Forti opines. In Handbook in Motion, she says, “there’s a state of dancing, like there’s a state of sleeping, or a state of shivering. Some people have a shyness towards entering that state, but everybody does it sometime. Often, at parties, people drop their shyness and enter a dance state” (1974, 108). In Oh, Tongue, she remarks, “I think it’s a state of being. Like sleeping, figuring out, or panicking are” (2003, 130). Physical movements in that state are “enchanting”: “[W]hen I’m in a dance state, the movement that comes out through me enchants me. It can be a very simple movement, but it always comes with a sense of wonder, and as one of life’s more delicious moments. Melodies are like that, too. They just come” (108). The “dance state” is somatic in that the self is constantly tracking bodily movements and sensations. The dancer is not in a “trance” but is actively observing mental and physical processes. Even though at times Forti gets “completely lost in the movement or in the sound and rhythm of words,” she maintains “all the concerns of space, of timing, of movement interest” (139). Similarly to the mental self-awareness practiced in meditation, the dancer’s mind in the “dance state” observes its own functioning (see De Spain 2014). From these descriptions, it appears that Forti’s notion of the “dance state” refers to improvisational dance, as the dancer is open to movements that “come through” her and make her “wonder,” rather than executing choreographed movements. Paying attention to images, words, and inchoate thoughts in the “dance state,” Forti is tapping into the “stream of consciousness,” a term attributed to William James, who in his Principles 129

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of Psychology ([1890] 1910), suggested that we experience our minds as movement, as a constant flow or stream of thoughts. He observed, “Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as ‘chain’ or ‘train’ do not describe it fitly […] It is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life” (James [1890] 1910, 239). Forti notices mental stimuli that arise in the “stream of consciousness” and responds to them with words or movement: “there is a feedback and a responsiveness that is set up in my dancing body, in my dancing mind” (Forti 2003, 139). She says, “The thoughts and images seem to flash through my motor centers and my verbal centers simultaneously, mixing and animating both speech and physical embodiment. Spatial, structural, emotional” (136). By adding the layer of physical experience to James’s term, Forti makes it applicable for movement innovation and highlights the presence of the body in discussions of mental processes: she explores the “stream of consciousness” not only as the movement of thoughts in the mind but as a phenomenon rooted in the physically moving body. Free writing is one way to access the “stream of consciousness.” In free writing, the hand is in continued movement for a particular amount of time, and the writer records the moving thoughts of the mind without stopping to judge or polish the emerging language. Forti often starts with “I remember” and sees what surfaces or chooses random words from the dictionary and observes how “the thoughts that they stimulate begin to relate in surprising ways” (140). She comments on the kinetic aspect of writing: “I love how those moments when I would usually pause to reflect, I must keep going” (140). Instead of pausing to think about the next step, the writer must continue, which brings to the writing “the stuff that’s flitting though, with its own wild affiliation to the thoughts that came before” (Forti 1994, 2). Her mind “grabs at those thoughts” that are randomly passing through, moving with “jumps that are irrational but resonant”: these are her “shadow thoughts” that she might otherwise not express or be aware of (Forti 2003, 140–141). Forti’s practice of free writing has been inspired by the works of the writer and educator Natalie Goldberg. Goldberg’s free writing practice reminds Forti of her own improvisational movement practice (Forti 1994, 2). In Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life, Goldberg encourages readers to “understand the journey of thought, how thought moves around in our mind” (Goldberg 1993, 190), thus underscoring movement as a key characteristic of thinking. She refers to writing as a physical practice and uses physical language to talk about the mind: free associating on the phrase “I remember” is a “warmup” exercise that “stretches” the mind and “limbers” the writer up before focusing on a bigger project. She observes that both writing and movement unfold linearly: writing is like “moving one foot in front of the other when you walk. The problem is we don’t notice that movement of one foot in front of the other. We just move our feet. Writing practice asks you to notice not only how your feet move but also how your mind moves” (1993, 6; see also Goldberg 1986, 2016). Forti’s concern with improvising in words and in movement manifests on the page in several ways. In one section, Forti includes three takes on three words chosen randomly from the dictionary. The writing style in these sections privileges chopped simple sentences and short, fast phrases. For example, she states, “Write about what you know about? How about barely knowing. You can barely know. Write about what you barely know about. A tough hand the dictionary has handed me. I hold it in my hand. My hand on pen on paper has three cards. Grass of Parnassus, retort” (Forti 2003, 52). Forti here writes “at the edge of knowing” (Longley 2017, 33). The text is not fully fathomable—thoughts move quickly from one direction to the next—but at times clusters of meaning do occur. Alys Longley opines that Forti “generates spaces of half-sense, where a known word or quality is pushed to a threshold 130

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and disassembled into component parts of sound, quality feeling, momentum. Words are reassembled into new forms that perhaps do not make literal sense, but which are nevertheless recognizable as holding the memory of former sense” (2017, 32). A different aesthetic is in play in Forti’s depictions of the “dance state” in performance settings. In Oh, Tongue, she describes a movement scene: The stage. Walking out. “The see me now. Let them see me, get used to the sight of me. Quiet down. Open.” I choose a place. I stand there. I glance at the audience. To see them, for them to see my face, my whole stance, just a look of recognition that I consider a hello, I begin. With what presents itself. A memory, a shape in the performance hall. I trust this first thing and I begin. I hope that the audience, having met me, follows my interest, my involvement, I return in my mind’s eye to the northern slope of Bald Mountain in Vermont, I look around and pronto. Something happens. I see snow. I jump and curl in the air. Hands and feet in air. Heavy rattle winter wind smashes dry sunflower stalks. Again. Again, smash, jump! Snow thud falls from laden roof. Feet slide out, thud. Whole body, thud, flat to floor. (2003, 130) Here, Forti gives a sense of both the physical motion and the mental landscape while she is dancing and simultaneously observing her mind. The passage records movement: the speaker walks, stands, glances, looks around, jumps, curls, slides, falls. It records mental actions: the speaker trusts, hopes, returns in her mind’s eye to a memory; she “sees snow”; “heavy rattle winter wind smashes dry sunflower stalks”; “snow thud falls from laden roof.” The sentences are short, clipped. Syntactically, the sentences move forward as simple sentences or as coordinated units of equal status, rather than as complex sentences of interwoven subordinated clauses. A complex sentence “moves” differently from the more direct push of a coordinated sentence or a simple sentence. Although the thought jumps around, from one image to the next, the writing is nevertheless more linear than in the “Three Takes” section above. Forti’s fascination with not just the English language but her exploration of multiple languages is an overlooked area. The dynamics between two languages open up another way to think about movement, prominent in Unbuttoned Sleeves (2006). The “libretto” depicts Forti and her three collaborators improvising to their chosen area of interest, “with the assumption that any four topics, any four voices, would engage each other in particular ways” (1). Forti plays the character of “The Four Year Old (Child).” In her autobiographical sections, she recounts the experience of her family in Europe at the wake of World War II. These sections are bilingual: the speaker slips into Italian, using what in linguistics is called “codeswitching,” or the alternating of two languages within the same text, sentence, or discourse (see Gumperz 1982; Auer 1998). Child says: Give me your hand. No! No! Mano. Pee. Like pippi. Mamma! Mama, that’s English. Mamma. Mamma. Pippiii. Poppooo. The baby. Bebé is the baby. Mammie, I found un soldo! A soldered penny to give to a soldier. Soldato. Dato. Give. A solder with an “L.” Sold. I don’t know that yet, about the “L,” but I will. The soldato gets the soldered coin to report. Gets lots of coins. Pennies, that’s what makes him a soldier. Soldi. He gets money to go do it. (Forti 2006, 14) She comments on how similar or distant English words and their Italian counterparts are. Child says, “Attention. Attenzione. It  sounds the same and it is the same.  […] Together insieme. In … sieme. Insieme sounds like more together” (14). She places English and Italian 131

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words next to one another in two columns: “babe bebé, crisis crisi, cricket grillo cri, soldier soldato, coin soldo, city città” (45). The spectator and reader can follow Forti’s improvisations without the aid of a dictionary, since the words are linguistically close. Forti leaves some sentences untranslated. Her playful exploration of Italian emphasizes sound: “Tree albero” leads to “alberoberobero brances rami” and “bero ramibero albero” (14). This word play mimics an act a child might do—trying out a different language and how new words feel “on the tongue.” The fact that Forti is using movement while uttering these words emphasizes the idea that studying a foreign tongue or being bilingual is a process of embodiment, of making new or other words a part of one’s physical being through repetition. Repetition is also a part of sections rendered in English only, such as the following example: It was here, I took it. It’s a gift. I took it. I stole it. I took it, I got it, I hold it. I take it, I hold it. It’s not a gift. It’s a gift! It’s not a gift. It’s a gift! It’s not a gift. It’s a gift! Not a gift. A gift! It’s a gift, it’s not a gift. It’s a burden. It’s an oracle. It’s a lifting up of my voice. It’s a lifting up, of my voice. It’s a lifting up, a lifting up, a lifting up, a lifting up, it’s a lifting up, a lifting up, It’s a lifting up of my voice. (Forti 2006, 26) Such examples remind readers of the work of another language innovator, Gertrude Stein. The title, Unbuttoned Sleeves, might refer to Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914). Stein, similarly to Forti, explored repetition, was intrigued by automatic writing, cultivated a voice that “sounded” like a child, included in-text translation between French and English, and foregrounded AngloSaxon, rather than Latinate, vocabulary. While the writing style and wordplay in Stein’s work might be lighthearted or playful, the subject matter often is not: she narrated her experiences as an expatriate in France and experiences of wartime in Paris France ([1940] 2013) and Wars I Have Seen (1945). Forti, too, is here writing about a traumatic experience of her family’s escape from Europe. In Perron’s words, “Although Forti has never said this, I think there is something about her work—the hunger for touch, the desire to feel the earth under her feet, the distrust of authority—that may be the legacy of being a four-year-old child bewildered by the haste with which her family had to flee their home country” (Perron 2017, 113).

“Animate” writing and nature Animation is a term that resurfaces repeatedly in Forti’s writings, visible even in the titles of her articles, such as “Animating the News: A Practice” (Forti 1990) and “From Animate Dancing to Writing” (Forti 2003). Forti has said that for her, “dancing has almost always been a way to explore nature” (131). She has studied the movement of animals, dances her gardening journal, and observes the movement of plants and trees. She  calls her explorations an “animistic process” in that she is trying to get at the “spirit” of what she sees (131). Halprin, who conducted sessions on the outdoor deck of her mountain home studio, would routinely ask students to observe elements of nature and use their observations in movement. “From Animate Dancing to Writing” in Oh, Tongue starts with a nature scene: Forti is sitting by a brook waiting for thoughts for writing. She says: At bottom of quiet pool, a green leaf. On surface, water striders. One scratching its hind right leg with its fore-leg. Shadow of something across a surface, a bird? A butterfly? No,  a leaf. Sitting on rock, hardness getting uncomfortable even through folded towel. Later I’ll bathe here. Waiting for a thought for writing, a thought in the context of a particular writing. From the pool here. To a reader maybe at the 132

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breakfast table, morning light slanting in east window, maybe snow. Water striders always so easy to see, over the years always so easy to observe, I don’t take them seriously. If a little brookie, a little trout, were to show itself, now that would be something. Something. […] Light through pools, light through falling water, roots and rocks, little island beach pebble mound. And dancing? There’s a function that functions in our sleep. So that as we dream we’re running, we lie still. Sometimes a cat will twitch its paws, its face, in its sleep, but basically lie still. Seeing the fractured rock face shunting water one sheet here one there my eye follows sharp edges. My teeth try the stone, I breathe the falling water and am the soft air smelling of me, the bright tree root curve of sun-soaked moss, pulsing circles of light bopping water. And only by the grace of that which holds me still do I hold still. (Forti 2003, 129) This paragraph illustrates what I call the “writing impulse,” or the propulsion to write. The subtitle reads “Written at the brook, while thinking about this article” (2003, 129), which suggests that the speaker is waiting for an impulse for the thought to move, propel her toward writing. From the readers’ perspective she has begun writing even though her idea for writing “in the context of a particular writing” (Forti 2003, 129) has not yet arrived: She starts to record the environment around her, the movements of water striders, the smell of fish, a bird or a butterfly moving, and her sensation of physical discomfort while sitting on a hard rock. While she is slowly teasing herself into writing while waiting for her main idea to surface, she paints the picture of her environment and the animate life in it: What she presents as a type of “pre-writing” locates readers in a particular place and creates a sense of the scene and mood. This  waiting for a thought for writing resembles the well-known description of Isadora Duncan standing in her studio and waiting for a movement impulse. In the words of Andrea Mantell-Seidel, “To arouse the ‘motor in the soul,’ the impulse toward motion, Duncan stood, sometimes for hours at a time, in silent contemplation and observation of her emotional and motor impulses, concentrating on the solar plexus” (2016, 31). In Forti’s view, Duncan “reached across time and space to find a precedent for the dancing she felt she needed to do. She found inspiration and confirmation in the figures dancing with abandon” (Forti 2003, 133). She refers to the moment of Duncan standing still in the center of her studio waiting for a movement impulse: in Forti’s opinion, Duncan was working with the particular task she had given herself, “of clearing the environment and listening for an inner impulse” (Forti 2003, 134). In the above example, Forti, too, is waiting for a “movement impulse”—one that would set thought in motion. The  passage above implies that it is possible to enter the “dance state” without dancing physically. Forti notes, “And dancing? There’s a function that functions in our sleep. So that as we dream we’re running, we lie still” (2003, 129). The speaker is standing still but her thoughts and imagination are actively in motion. Her eyes travel along the edges of the rock, her teeth “try the stone” (129), she “breathe[s] the falling water” (129), and she is the “soft air smelling of [her]” (129) and the tree root. She is still but feels herself as these other substances and imagines moving like them. This is a dancing function. She notes, “only by the grace of that which holds me still do I hold still” (129), which suggests that being physically still might be a struggle: She would rather move. This passage is training readers to see movement and dance in stillness. By extension, it is a commentary on reading and writing—our reading and writing bodies are commonly in still positions, but in thought and imagination, we can move actively. As Forti’s passage implies, these too could be considered as aspects of movement function. Examples in which the speaker feels one with nature or natural phenomena demonstrate Forti’s approach to “kinesthetic awareness.” In  the above example, the speaker says, “my teeth try the stone, I breathe the falling water and am the soft air smelling of me” (2003, 129). 133

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Forti is the “dry crumbly ground” (138) and “the cool round things of delicate russet skins, emerging miraculously clean” (138). She becomes “the ships, the lands, the peoples, the strategies, the connections” (137). In 1936, dance critic John Martin wrote: When we see a human body moving, we see movement which is potentially producible by a human body and therefore by our own; through kinesthetic sympathy we actually reproduce it vicariously in our present muscular experience and awaken such associational connotations as might have been ours if the original movement had been of our own making. (Martin quoted by Batson and Wilson 2014, 100) Forti’s vision of “kinaesthetic awareness” is akin to the concept of “kinesthetic empathy” in that both terms refer to ways one can sense in the body the feelings of others. Although kinesthetic empathy is most often applied to a stage performance witnessed by audience members, Forti applies her notion of kinesthetic awareness more broadly. By observing and feeling the movement of a living person or a thing, the observer can take on information about the states of their bodies, where they hold tensions and where they feel relaxed, and use information about these states in their own movement. In Forti’s view, focusing on one’s sensations is not enough; the “world” element needs to be part of the kinesthetic experience: A mind, body, world connection is “a state, among our human repertoire of states of being. […] Mind, body, world. Even grammatically it seems more vital. More full of surprises” (2003, 122–123). Studying nature does not  only “animate” Forti’s dance: it also animates her writing. Her tone becomes more poetic and lyrical in these instances where she depicts movements in nature. Forti comments on how she draws inspiration for dancing from her gardening journal: “How to explain what I learn from the snow, from the compost bin, from the stars? When a fresh wind is blowing down the mountain, I absolutely gulp it down. Gulp it in. Or reaching into the dirt of the potatoes, my self dives into my fingers and I am the dry crumbly ground. And the cool round things of delicate russet skins, emerging miraculously clean” (2003, 138). In these moments, Forti is not recording, describing or narrating only: She is searching for a creative, lyrical way to express her connection to movement and nature in language. She tries to express the “rich scent of white clover blossoms” that “thicken the cells” in her body, while her hands “re-experience the coolness in the shade under the squash plant’s umbrella leaves” (2003, 130). Some of these movement explorations indeed become poems: Her collection titled Angel (1978) includes poems such as “In the company of the fern one can stand bending way backwards, hanging head and arms like fronds” (22) and “And in the company of the snake plant one can balance on one’s back, reaching limbs, leg and arm and arm and head and leg reaching upward among each other snaking slightly” (23).

Conclusion: Absence and presence of movement Forti’s “dancer’s books” invite readers to look for knowledge and descriptions of movement. However, Forti’s books present a challenge for the readers’ ability to imagine improvisational movement. Unbuttoned Sleeves (2006) is presented as a “libretto”: It includes words, dance, and music and is called a theater/dance project. The reader knows that the performers used movement and dance in this work. However, the work includes very little information about what the movement component might be like. Only in a few cases, most notably in Terrence Luke Johnson’s section, does the reader get any information about the actual movement of the performers. Johnson’s section includes some parenthetical notes, such as “Luke has been holding a 134

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piano bench, chest high. How he turns it this way and that” (Forti 2006, 25). He “bangs” his hand against the bench (26). But the rest of the libretto is lacking in movement description. This refusal to encode movement gives liberty to future performers to come up with their own movement. It is a statement that improvisational movement does not need to be encoded, on and off the page, and it cannot be; there is no precise system, such as Labanotation, for it. From the perspective of the reader, the refusal to encode movement descriptions can serve as an absence. Readers are aware of how intricately tied movement and language are for Forti: The absence of allusions to the speaker’s movements makes it hard for readers to envision movement as underneath or behind words. For Forti, the need to create in readers’ minds images of bodies in motion is less pronounced. The most direct way to make readers see motion in Forti’s writing is not so much through images of the speaker herself moving but through her descriptions of movement in nature and animate life. She describes moving like a plant would move or embodying the stillness of a woodpile. Her writing, then, emphasizes the importance of metaphors and similes for not only dancers’ but also the readers’ ability to imagine movement. Susan Leigh Foster has noted, “Describing bodies’ movements, the writing itself must move. It must put into play figures of speech and forms of phrase and sentence construction that evoke the texture and timing of bodies in motion” (1995, 5). Although Forti does not foreground the need to record the physical movements of bodies in motion, she does, like Foster suggested, make the writing itself move: drawing upon the stream-of-consciousness writing, abrupt, clipped sentences, and flowing prose—and using free writing, nonfiction prose, poems, imaginary dialogues, scripts, and essayistic writing, Forti’s works draw attention to how language itself moves on the page. Her works make readers aware of how they move, or jump between different genres, registers, and tongues. Her works, then, remind readers of the movement—or dance—of their minds as they read. This attention to processes of reading and imagining is likely to become significant in analyses of works by other contemporary choreographers who work with movement and language and who also use writing to record their dance performances. As I mentioned earlier, Deborah Hay often records her dance works in the form of writing, such as scripts. Karinne Keithley Syers, Annie-B Parson, and Paul Lazar have written an experimental text on the work of the Big Dance Theater, titled Another Telepathic Thing (Big Dance Theater 2014). They start with a question, “How do we get this performance into the form of a book?” (2014, 15), and advise the reader, “Reader, it is your job to read expansively, to speculate a little, to sound out the speechless places, to embrace, with a little telepathy, the intervals between all these things” (11). In the fields of somatics and expressive arts therapy, a similar impulse to inspire readers to imagine movement as they read exists, as in the works of the dancer and author Miranda Tufnell, who also studied with Forti (Tufnell and Crickmay 2014; Tufnell 2017). These writings show how dancers–choreographers–writers combine oral history, drawings, video stills, poems, and annotated scripts to record the processes and performances of their works as well as to delve deeper into the expressive, artistic, and healing potential of movement and language combined.

References Albright, Ann Cooper. 2013. Engaging Bodies: The  Politics and Poetics of Corporeality. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Auer, Peter. 1998. Codeswitching in Conversation: Language, Interaction, and Identity. London: Routledge. Banes, Sally. 1993. Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Hiie Saumaa ———. 2001. “Choreographic Methods of the Judson Dance Theater.” In Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader, edited by In Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright, 350–361. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Banes, Sally, and Andrea Harris, eds. 2003. Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything Was Possible. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Batson, Glenna, and Margaret Wilson. 2014. Body and Mind in Motion: Dance and Neuroscience in Conversation. Bristol: Intellect. Bennahum, Ninotchka, Wendy Perron, and Bruce Robertson. 2017. Radical Bodies: Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York, 1955–1972. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Big Dance Theater. Karinne Keithley Syers, eds. 2014. Another Telepathic Thing. Brooklyn, NY: 53rd State Press. Brown, Trisha. 1975. “Three Pieces.” The Drama Review 19 (1): 26–32. Browning, Barbara. 2018. “The Performative Novel.” The Drama Review 62 (2): 43–58. Burt, Ramsay. 2006. Judson Dance Theater. Performative Traces. London: Routledge. Childs, Lucinda. 1975. “Notes:’64-’74.” The Drama Review 19 (1): 33–36. De Spain, Kent. 2014. Landscape of the Now: A  Topography of Movement Improvisation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dilley, Barbara. 2015. This Very Moment:Teaching Thinking Dancing. Boulder, CO: Naropa University Press. Forti, Simone. 1974. Handbook in Motion—An Account of an Ongoing Personal Discourse and Its Manifestations in Dance. Halifax: Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. ———. 1975. “A Chamber Dance Concert.” The Drama Review 19 (1): 37–39. ———. 1978. Angel. New York. ———. 1990/1991. “Organic Telling.” Movement Research Performance Journal 1: 10. ———. 1994. “A Family Tree Story.” Movement Research Performance Journal 9: 2. ———. 1997. “Reflections on the Early Days.” Movement Research Performance Journal 14: 4. ———. 2003. Oh,Tongue. Los Angeles, CA: Beyond Baroque Books. Forti, Simone, Terrence Luke Johnson, Sarah Swenson, and Douglas Wadle. 2006. Unbuttoned Sleeves. Los Angeles, CA: Beyond Baroque Books. Foster, Susan Leigh. 1995. “Choreographing History.” In  Choreographing History, edited by Susan Leigh Foster, 3–21. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Goldberg, Natalie. 1986. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. Boston, MA: Shambhala. ———. 1993. Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life. New York: Toronto, Bantam Book. ———. 2016. The Great Spring:Writing, Zen, and This Zigzag Life. Boulder, CO: Shambhala. Gumperz, John. 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hay, Deborah. 1994. Lamb at the Altar:The Story of a Dance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2000. My Body,The Buddhist. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. ———. 2016. Using the Sky: A Dance. London: Routledge. Hermann, Carmela. 2001. “Hearing/Miraculously/Structure: An Apprenticeship with Simone Forti in Logomotion.” Contact Quarterly 6 (1): 15–25. Humphrey, Doris. 1959. The Art of Making Dances. New York: Grove Press. James, William. [1890] 1910. Principles of Psychology. New York: Holt. Katav-Schmid, Einav. 2016. Embodied Philosophy in Dance: Gaga and Ohad Naharin’s Movement Research. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 2003. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. LaMothe, Kimerer. 2015. Why We Dance: A Philosophy of Bodily Becoming. New York: Columbia University Press. Longley, Alys. 2013. The  Foreign Language of Motion: A  Project from the Kinesthetic Archive. Winchester: Winchester University Press. ———. 2017. “I Wanted to Find You by Inhabiting Your Tongue: Mistranslating Between Words and Dance in Choreographic Practice.” Choreographic Practices 8 (1): 27–49. Mantell-Seidel, Andrea. 2016. Isadora Duncan in the 21st Century: Capturing the Art and Spirit of the Dancer’s Legacy. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Morse, Meredith. 2016. Soft is Fast: Simone Forti in the 1960s and After. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Paxton, Steve. 1975. “Contact Improvisation.” The Drama Review 19 (1): 40–42. Perron, Wendy. 2012. “What Was Judson Dance Theater and Did It Ever End?” Judson Now 179–192.

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Moving mind and body ———. 2017. “Simone Forti: Body Nature at Movement Body.” In Radical Bodies: Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York, 1955–1972, edited by Ninotscha Bennahum,Wendy Perron, and Bruce Robertson, 88–119. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Rainer,Yvonne. 2006. Feelings Are Facts: A Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2012. Poems. Brooklyn, NY: Badlands Unlimited. Saumaa, Hiie. 2016. “Alys Bentley’s Dance Impulse, Embodied Learning, and the Dancing Mind.” Dance Chronicle 39 (3): 249–278. ———. 2017. “Annie Payson Call’s Training in Release and Somatic Imagination.” Dance Research Journal 49 (1): 70–86. ———. 2018.“Journeying from Sensation into Words: Dancing Language in the Tamalpa Life/Art Process.” Somatics Journal/Magazine 18: 16–19. Savigliano, Marta. 1995. Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Stein, Gertrude. 1914. Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms. New York: Claire Marie. ———. [1940] 2013. Paris France. New York: W.W. Norton. ———. 1945. Wars I Have Seen. New York: Random House. Tufnell, Miranda. 2017. When I Open My Eyes: Dance Health Imagination. Hampshire: Dance Books. Tufnell, Miranda, and Chris Crickmay. 2004. A Widening Field: Journeys in Body and Imagination. Hampshire: Dance Books.

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PART III

Dance and analysis

10 CHOREOMUSICOLOGY AND DANCE STUDIES From beginning to end? Stephanie Jordan Introduction “Dance is virtually always music-and-dance, unavoidably interdisciplinary,” I wrote back in 2011. Soon, however, prompted by musicologist Nicholas Cook, I was forced to modify my words. “Multimedia is not music and words and moving images (and …),” he wrote in the foreword to The Psychology of Music in Multimedia, “but rather subsists in the meaningful experience that results from their interaction” (2013, vi). So, too, following Cook a stage further, an interdisciplinary meeting should not mean musicology and dance studies but, rather, a dynamic interaction between the two disciplines.1 This  major revisioning of the long-established relationship between music and dance emerged in recent decades. Indeed, perhaps surprisingly, there has hitherto been very little theorization of relations between the two media. Rather, there have been occasional philosophical manifestos and “rules” for correct dance practice while, within dance scholarship, there is remarkable ignorance of the depth and complexity with which music infiltrates our experience of movement. Music can be both subversive and confirmatory. Instead, within dance works, dance and music have largely been discussed, or literally ‘disciplined,’ as separate, parallel activities, perhaps, according to Asianist ethnomusicologist Ricardo Trimillos (2017, 1), because Western logical positivism has tended to rationalize categories according to manageable unitary entities.2 In Western theater dance studies, my own specialism, a major shift in thinking took charge in the 1990s with the publication of Paul Hodgins’s theorization and analysis (from his doctoral dissertation) of the relationship between choreography and music (1992). It was he who coined the term “choreomusical,” which has since been modified by others as a label for the new field of choreomusicology (sometimes known as choreomusical studies or choreomusical research). That label has been used broadly for a variety of work crossing dance and music, some historical and contextual, as well as work, like that of Hodgins, which was primarily analytical and involved close readings of dance works. Out of this, and particularly since the millennium, there has been a marked increase in publications within the field (books and themed journal issues), conferences (for over a decade now, approximately one of these every year, and across several different countries), and dance/movement subgroups within professional societies (in the United States, especially the American Musicological Society [2013], 141

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the Society for Music Theory  [2015], the Society of Dance History Scholars  [2014], and earlier, the Society for Ethnomusicology [2002]). Particularly revealing and rarely recognized outside the field, however, those involved in dance ethnography began to work closely with music much earlier. This branch of work began to engage scholars formally in the early 1950s. An exceptional example of this is the state-supported work in the socialist bloc of East European folk dance researchers who, in the 1950s, started to collect a large corpus of dances with their music across many countries and then to undertake their documentation and formal analysis (Giurchescu 2007, 3–18). Yet it does seem that such choreomusical analysis did not necessarily comprise, or even lead directly to, the integrated approach or cross-media theorization to which Cook refers. Thus, the editors of the pioneering 2017 collection Sounding the Dance, Moving the Music: Choreomusicological Perspectives on Maritime Southeast Asian Performing Arts could refer to a “relatively new area of ‘choreomusicology’… a holistic field of study that combines the study of music and dance, and puts the relationship itself into the focus of research.” For that matter, those researching the Southeast Asian context have keenly watched theoretical work within the Western performing arts (Nor and Stepputat 2017, xvi). Writing this chapter, it seemed important to consider the broader current situation of both disciplines: dance and music. Compared with music, there are few analyses of dance works. This may well be because dance, an altogether younger, smaller field than music and with a less developed specialist typology, has never been driven by scores and recordings in the same way. Yet there was, in the early period of dance in academia, a significant body of work in the area of dance movement analysis, drawing from Laban theory and notation systems. From the latter half of the 1980s, dance scholarship as a whole (most of it focusing on twentieth- and twenty-first-century dance within Western culture), experienced theoretical and methodological shifts similar to those in the other arts. It  shifted rapidly away from movement analysis toward interrogation of the interrelations between dance and culture, readily absorbing the influences of semiotics, postmodernism, poststructuralism, and feminism, as Helen Thomas put it, “all tied up with a cultural studies bow” (1996, 67). Nowadays, in UK academia at least, most dance works studied are from the very recent past, or there is new practice as research. For this kind of work, music plays a relatively unimportant role ( just as in earlier postmodern dance) or is only tangentially required. These dances are sometimes performed in silence or with talking, or supported by a collage offering different atmospheres, or they are conceptual rather than material. Perhaps because of this, there seems to be less urgency to address the sound component in any dance. Meanwhile, the term “theory” in dance refers to cultural and political interpretations. By contrast, in musicology, significantly, the term “music theory” has stuck to the business of analysis—close readings of the musical work itself, usually buttressed by the presence of scores, which are relatively rare in dance. Music, not dance, has a long tradition of close reading. Yet the so-called New Musicology from about 1985 shared in the cultural turn. Music itself—always a latecomer to theoretical developments across the arts—was now seen as a socially circumscribed discourse, a cultural construction. Here, the musicological agenda expanded dramatically, with major questioning of the assumption that a work is a unified, organic conception and a closed, autonomous and primarily abstract entity. “Emotion and meaning are coming out of the musicological closet,” wrote Rose Subotnik (1988, 88). This in turn provoked a riot of highly individual interpretations, the new emphasis. There were yet more responses. Rethinking Music (Cook and Everist 1999, x) proposed a “musicology of the provisional,” recognizing a pluralist approach involving a range of analytical tools and methods alongside concerns for value and meaning as well as the relative autonomy of music. 142

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Carolyn Abbate (2004, 516, 523), meanwhile, suggested a move toward a “soft hermeneutics,” a return to aesthetic experience that promotes performance as its primary object, giving space to the ineffable and privileging multiple, unfixed allusions and associations rather than specific meanings. In some quarters, however, the emphasis on musical scores gave way to a very different focus on matters of perception and performance, with the increasing influence of work in cognitive science, including music psychology, and sometimes involving empirical experimental design and cross-modal studies. Within choreomusical studies, it is compelling for us to know, for instance, from cross-modal scientific research, that people encode visual rhythms aurally; in other words, as choreomusicologist Kara Leaman has noted, “a viewer’s visual perception of rhythm interacts with the auditory perception thereof ” (2016, 4). It is fascinating to observe how musicology and musicians have now opened up to dance. They had shunned it for multiple reasons: first, as a lesser, intellectually lacking art form most regularly associated with bad music (given the Western mind-body split); then, because of the special value given in musicology to nonprogrammatic, instrumental music; then, due to the high degree of technical specialization demanded by both disciplines; and finally, because of the ephemerality of dance as a largely unscored medium of performance. But as Marian Smith, a leading specialist on nineteenth-century ballet music, says, that attitude stems from relatively recent times: Many of the composers revered by our discipline … would surely be surprised to find out that dance—both theatrical and social—lies hidden from the purview of so many professional music scholars … Of the composers in the musicological canon, how many lived in a world without dance?... They saw plenty of it, and they wrote plenty of dance music, some of it titled as such; some of them even danced themselves or tried to. (Smith 2001, 175) At Roehampton University’s 2005 Sound Moves conference, Smith, as opening keynote speaker, mused on her lonely past in the 1980s. For her, the eye-opener was Roland John Wiley’s work on Tchaikovsky’s ballets. In his 1985 book, he announced that the attractions of concert music could actually be defects in ballet, and a particular statement undermined the basic assumption that ballet music simply supported dance. Nineteenth-century composers, he suggested, worked for an inverse relationship between interest in music and interest in dance, whereby music makes its strongest impact when solo dance is the least commanding, and vice versa. The climactic moments of pure music and pure dance almost never coincide, a fact which should give pause to the analyst who seeks to judge ballet music only for its sounds (Wiley 1985, 6). In other words, we had to look at music and dance together and in dialogue with each other in order to make any sense of a collaborative art form. This is a foreshadowing of the interactive methodologies that have dominated during later decades. Together with such prompts, the late twentieth century witnessed an explosion of publications on “the body” across the arts and beyond, with music itself seen as physical business. An additional stick with which to beat the upcoming generation of scholars has been the overwhelming drive toward interdisciplinarity across all academic fields. Yet an outstanding fact confronts us today: Most choreomusical research now finds its home in music and ethnomusicology departments, not in dance. At this point, it is useful to consider the language barrier between the two disciplines, important because language provides a window on to a disciplinary culture. Smith titled her keynote address “Counts and Beats,” highlighting the different vocabulary of dance and music, the 143

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concepts that help people talk about and do dance and music but that still cause trouble. In their article “Translating from Pitch to Plié: Music Theory for Dance Scholars and Close Movement Analysis for Music Scholars,” Juliet McMains and Ben Thomas (2013) suggest a solution to the problem by presenting points of analogy working in both directions, with separate charts for music-to-dance and dance-to-music terminology. It seems that similar problems are faced across ethnomusicology and ethnochoreology, with each tending to privilege its own medium of identity. In Sounding the Dance, Trimillos suggests that this thinking continues to promote European epistemologies “that regarded dance and music as separate (and therefore separable) entities,” a mono-disciplinary perspective that needs to be revised to suit twenty-first-century practices and theoretical developments. He  also gives an example of conflicting terminology between the two disciplines: ethnomusicologists usually refer to the Javanese dance theater wayang wong as a “tradition,” while ethnochoreologists (otherwise called dance ethnologists) refer to it as a “form”: the labels say two very different things (2017, 2). It  is salutary for any discipline to face challenges from the outside, but worth considering the more deep-seated problem of understanding across the music-dance divide. There remains a degree of fear of the Other, and an exasperated dance scholarly brigade is finally standing up for itself. At the end of a largely negative book review, Hanna Järvinen stresses that “learning an art form takes years of hard work …” adding that claims made on dance by nondance scholars “are facile and implausible only to dance scholars” (2014, 102). Likewise, Lynn Garafola bemoans the common practice of scholars in every other field to “make free with dance material, mangling evidence and misreading cues … [making] egregious errors that would be unimaginable if they involved any subject other than dance” (2005, ix). From within choreomusical studies, I would add that dance is the art form that suffers the most. Most dance scholars hardly dare take on musical analysis—only the few who have had some technical training in the subject, whereas only dance scholars would notice when a musicologist marches into their field speaking an alien vocabulary. I write here primarily from my own experience as a specialist in Western theater dance of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I cannot but approach the present task thus and reflect as an analyst of dances—to some a musicologist, some a dance scholar, usually an Other—using my practical and academic background in and across both Western music and Western dance. Some of the material introduced, itself stemming from a wide variety of earlier theoretical sources, appears in more developed form within two earlier publications (Jordan 2011, 2015). On the other hand, I introduce contrasting ideas from research into nonWestern cultures, popular dance forms, and earlier historical periods, believing that choreomusicology as a whole can learn much from multiple perspectives, perhaps encouraging us to modify our existing methodologies or, at least, to be aware of our particular ways of seeing and listening, our prejudices. For this essay, I prioritize new thinking, new directions, and new choreomusical examples.

Choreomusical research: A survey In 2009, at the end of his book The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss, musicologist Wayne Heisler writes: The study of choreography is still an almost alien universe in musicology, where it could serve our grasp on history, reception, and cultural context, and also become an important cornerstone for music-attentive performance studies by acknowledging and freeing the Pygmalions of past, present and future. (2009, 218) 144

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He also observes that linking music for dance with its actual context of performance, with its originally intended dance setting, can be hugely beneficial to explaining features about the music. In a Dance Chronicle issue on music and dance four years later, examining the reception of Antony Tudor’s setting of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (as Dark Elegies, 1937), he continues to call for integrated histories. He  uses this particularly strong example to “expand our understanding of the ways in which Mahler’s music was heard, seen, and felt around mid-century … This ballet challenges music and dance historians to see, listen to, and understand Mahler’s body of songs as a presence embodying aesthetic, historical, and historiographic insight” (Heisler 2013, 176, 193). In his 1985 examination of the three Tchaikovsky ballets, Wiley (one of Heisler’s important exceptions in prioritizing dance) discusses his collaborations with choreographers, primarily Petipa and Ivanov, the context in which they worked, their production history, as well as undertaking considerable analysis of the scores. But his is certainly an early example, if not of close dance analysis, of looking beyond the scores of his ballets. Notably, the book targeted a dance as well as music readership. Then, in her 2000 study Ballet and Opera in the Age of Giselle, Smith focused on music in direct interplay with choreography to make meaning, sometimes at a detailed level (mime passages, for instance, reflecting speech rhythms in music). More recently, using dance notation scores, she has assisted in the historically informed revivals of Giselle and Paquita. Increasingly, postmillennium, a number of other publications have intertwined theater dance and music, historically and contextually. Where notation or film material permits, some of these include passages of close analysis. Otherwise, scholars use whatever primary sources might be available: music scores and sketches (often, dance scholars are unaware of the dance value of these), scenarios, design and production materials, notes on choreography by choreographers and dancers, and reviews. Most publications, including Heisler’s, cover early to mid-twentiethcentury work, for instance, the Ballets Russes (Caddy 2012), Parisian music-hall ballet (GutscheMiller 2015), the 1934 Stravinsky/Ballets Rubinstein theater piece Persephone (Levitz 2012), the ballets of Ravel (Mawer 2006), Prokofiev (Press 2006; Morrison 2009), and the synthesis of choreography, music, and camerawork in the films of Fred Astaire, George Balanchine, and Gene Kelly (Genné 2018). Also noteworthy, virtually all the work discussed here is ballet. When it comes to choreomusical analysis, probably because it requires technical expertise in both media, much less research has been undertaken. Remarkable, however, is the body of research into eighteenth-century baroque dance, since the 1960s, with a major increase in participation since the millennium. This embraces both social and theatrical dances, which are stylistically closely interrelated. Reconstruction is possible because the dance is served by the strong Beauchamp-Feuillet system of notation. The dance material is also suitable for the “sketch learning” ( Jordan 2015, 121) of basic steps and patterns prior to, and as prompt for, analysis, without requiring considerable dance training, although there have been, and still are, dance expert practitioners interested in the style and offering invaluable support from outside academia to musicologists. But we must not forget that the interest in this style comes on the back of an intense excitement about the early music movement during the second half of the last century, with its refreshing aesthetic of “pure” performance practice and heated debates about authenticity. Furthermore, the material is extremely rich choreomusically, more so than most other Western social and theater dance. Several scholars (Schwartz 1998; Okamoto 2005; Barros 2010) have explored baroque dance and music in terms of a shared rhetorical structure, the one used within baroque oratory: a kind of narrative in the order of proposal, argument, and conclusion. These scholars too, and others (Little 1975; Witherell 1981; Pierce 2008), have been specific about congruent 145

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or noncongruent relations between the two media—in terms of repetition, phrase structure, and patterns of rhythmic event—notating dance and music in parallel to illustrate exact synchronization (within the limits of what is known or argued) and using music rhythmic notation for the dance lines. At the other end of the spectrum, a 2014 article in French by Dóra Kiss on the “menuet performd” by Mrs. Santlow (a renowned professional dancer) stresses the performer’s presence in a Monsieur L’Abbé choreography, taking the principle of independence between choreographic and musical forms a stage further and suggesting that the dance as notated is the documentation of both L’Abbé’s choreographic “text” and Santlow’s individual performance. A key book publication from this area of choreomusical research is Musical Theatre at the Court of Louis XIV: Le Mariage de la Grosse Cathos (1994) by Rebecca Harris-Warrick and Carol G. Marsh. The manuscript for this 1688 masquerade is the only extant documentation of a complete theatrical entertainment from the court that set the standard for the whole of Europe. Alongside a facsimile of the full manuscript is a mass of contextual information and analysis of all 10 dances, showing detailed choreomusical synchronization. (A reconstruction was undertaken in 1991 once the choreographic notation, quite different from the Feuillet system, had been deciphered.) Through their research (see also Harris-Warrick 2016), the authors have made the more general historical point (which would please Heisler) that dance in seventeenth-century opera was not, as originally thought, a mere extra event or interruption, but a major component of it and thoroughly integrated into the opera as a whole. Four years later, Judith Schwartz, analyzing the phrase structure in the passacaille of Lully’s Armide, gave a powerful account of the drama of contrasts in the movement material as it related to music, reading this politically as a “larger image of universal order, an aural and kinetic model of the tension between entropy (chaos) and order” (1998, 318). Beyond baroque studies, an outstanding feature is the number of scholars who have researched the choreographers George Balanchine and Mark Morris and composers Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky. Widely recognized quality of work is surely a major reason. Regarding the choreographers, both are well-known as musicians and fluent readers of musical scores—Balanchine a pianist and composer of the occasional song or piano miniature, Morris a conductor in his later career—both exploring a wide range of music and attracting music as well as dance audiences. It is especially striking that between 1992 and the present, no fewer than five scholars (most of them based in the United States) have undertaken choreomusical analyses of the Balanchine-Stravinsky collaboration Agon, variously prioritizing structure, working process, meaning, and gender issues. At least six scholars have researched Morris’s work. Danish scholar Inger Damsholt was the first (1999, 2006), drawing from Foucault, reading Morris’s use of music visualization (and the alternatives) in terms of choreomusical polemic, and illustrating her argument with an in-depth analysis of Gloria (1981, to Vivaldi’s Gloria). Three other scholars, all from the UK, have published choreomusical analyses of Dido and Aeneas (1989, to Purcell): Sophia Preston, Rachel Duerden, and myself. Of all the scholars mentioned who have undertaken close choreomusical analysis, so far as I know, only these three UK scholars have, after a dual training in both dance and music, then developed careers in dance departments (or otherwise-named dance units). Another area of research is concerned with concert music and operas that contain sonic analogues for dance. Examples are studies of Bach’s “dances” (Little and Jenne 1991) and of the minuet and waltz (McKee 2012). Such music-led projects offer further ideas about musical performance practice while also suggesting experience of physical resonance within apparently nonprogrammatic music. Traces of movement within music are also a theme 146

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running through the work of Berlin-based dance scholar Stephanie Schroedter. Her theory of “kinaesthetic listening” refers to the ballroom and theater dance activity embodied within the music of mid-nineteenth-century Paris (2017), but also to the reception of twentieth- and twenty-first-century classical and “new music.” Other recent research that responds to our metaphorical inclinations and draws from one of the most urgent concerns of today is that of gender. Damsholt has argued that discourse on the relationship between dance and music often resembles a more general discourse on gender and sexuality, following the quest for equality in the twentieth century when modern dance was conceived as a feminist phenomenon with its own independent structures and working processes (2002, 2012). She also proposes that, supported by their attitudes to music, Merce Cunningham and Morris have respectively kept homosexuality in the closet and openly celebrated it as one of many gender/sexuality possibilities. Damsholt borrows from metaphor and conceptual blending theory (8) and, at the same time, from Foucault’s political formatting, the transmission of female–male power relations. Meanwhile, in the United States, Daniel Callahan’s doctoral research demonstrates how the choreomusical styles of Ted Shawn and, again, Cunningham have “reflected and refracted their masculinities and homosexualities” (2012). Turning to ethnography, we find other choreomusical research that addresses head-on the border between dance and culture. Potentially relevant to all choreomusical studies today is the fieldwork approach from dance ethnography with its attention to the socially situated, historically constituted process of performance and the work of the performer her- or himself. As ethnomusicologist Kendra Stepputat suggests, many choreomusicologists to date (she includes me) have worked from a Western perspective and also “heavily incorporate cultural conventions, mostly unknowingly or at least unreflectively, into their structural concepts” (2017, 36). Anthropologist Paul Mason illustrates social and historical context through the Tari Ping dance of Minangkabau tradition in Western Sumatra. He compares a self-accompanied performance by men tapping china plates at the apex of an arm swing, with another performance in which a group of relatively untrained elderly women hit spoons on bottles to catch younger women at the point of mid-swing. One version derives from a dance action and through cultural entrainment, the other from visual cues, matching the moment that is considered perceptually salient. Choreomusically speaking, the media are handled totally differently: in the men’s version, the sound being part of the dance (the binding together of the media common within local practice); in the women’s, the media separated between dancers and accompanying musicians (as in most Western practice). Here, crucially, the change in music and dance practice reflected cultural changes in West Sumatra during the late twentieth century: A dance that was once performed and learned only by men is now shared, as boys and girls study the same educational curriculum and learn variants of the dance across the Indo-Malayan archipelago, whereas the move to mixed communities and nuclear families has deeply affected an art tradition. More broadly, Mason raises questions about how training influences the relationship between sound and movement in a dance genre and how power dynamics and economic relations influence choreomusical interactions (2014, 210–216, 223).

Analytical methods: A provisional toolbox A range of theoretical approaches is ready for use in the close analysis of relationships between dance and music. This is a multi-stranded theoretical base, drawing from a number of sources ( Jordan 2015, 91–123), like an analytical toolbox, ready for selective use of its contents, and always as appropriate to a particular dance speaking to us in a particular way. 147

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Developing from the basic concept of music and dance operating in dynamic interaction, the two media are both seen as subject to change rather than static entities, operating within a mechanism of interdependence rather than maintaining the hard binary of parallelism versus counterpoint (Kalinak 1992, 29–31). We are also dealing with a composite form: dance and music. Although we might still be able to trace the separate development of the two media, these two sensory planes now meet to affect each other and to create a new identity from their meeting. The old terms of congruence and noncongruence, similarity and difference, now seem inadequate. Just as composer-theorist Barbara White proposes, we should rather go to precise examples within precise contexts in order to spell out these dilemmas and pleasures in any meaningful way, to go beyond the question of whether dance and music meet each other or not, to ask where or how they meet (2006, 73–74). Film music theory has been especially useful here in proposing concepts of “mutual implication”—music and image working together in a combinatoire of expression (Gorbman 1980, 189)—as well as concepts of “added value” from the meeting of two forces and “transsensorial perception,” the visual conveying the aural and vice versa (Chion [1990] 1994, 5, 137). It is useful to consider recent intermedia research involving music that considers these cognitive capacities systematically. Drawing from metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) and the idea of mapping information from one domain on to another in order to generate new meaning, Cook, in Analysing Musical Multimedia (1998), puts forward a general theory of how all different media can potentially work together to make meaning. He proposes three broad models of interaction: “conformance,” “complementation,” and “contest,” the latter being the most dynamic concept, indicating essential contradiction and potential for irony. This theory of emergent meaning from mutual relations has since developed into a more complex framework of “conceptual blending” from two or more different domains (Fauconnier and Turner 1995 and 2002; Zbikowski 2002) and has been assessed within a dance context by Helen Minors (2012). An example of conceptual blending is my analysis of Morris’s well-known setting of Dido’s Lament from Dido and Aeneas. Here, the choreography fleshes out the music (and especially the vocal and bass lines) as a conduit for human subjectivity. Dido becomes a moving human being embodying the vocal line, and the ground bass line becomes a much enriched “voice,” carrying a variety of human traits. It is matched by the dancing chorus and, as such, represents the speech of courtiers, cupids, and conscience. In the instrumental postlude to the Lament, the dancing Dido and chorus move together to illustrate the resolution between voice and accompaniment, completing the blend as it were. In this context, the connection between dance and music also speaks of the tension between living and dying (for which vertical space is yet another metaphor). The dance component greatly increases the tension, being visual and literally using the “earth” to which Dido refers. Another branch of cognitive research deals with accentuation through the meeting of media, which could, in certain circumstances, create another structural layer of its own. There is, for instance, the phenomenon of movement exaggerating musical events (which, heard alone, may be barely perceptible) and thus influencing our perceptions of music. In psychology, this phenomenon is known as “visual capture,” although it has been described aptly by psychologist Lawrence E. Marks as one medium “sopping up” attributes from another (1978, 197). In  other words, visual stimuli are strong enough to influence people to perceive simultaneously presented auditory stimuli as related. The  phenomenon can work in the opposite direction too, as “auditory capture”—sound stimuli affecting our perception of visual information. “Capture” relates to Chion’s notion of “added value.” A solo that Morris made for himself to the central movement of Italian Concerto (2007, to Bach) provides a good illustration of “visual capture.” On several occasions, shared accents 148

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turn into structural signposts, moments in the score pulled out of their melodic surroundings by dance movement—like a distinctive lunge and swing outward with an arm to a syncopated leaping musical interval. As if “frozen” out of their context (the “freeze phenomenon” is another concept from psychology [Vroomen and de Gelder 2000]), such moments are thus afforded additional impact. In his article “How Pitch and Loudness Shape Musical Space and Motion,” music theorist Zohar Eitan (2013) highlights (from empirical, scientific research) not only the interactive nature of audiovisual relations but also the complexity involved in establishing “natural” mappings from music on to motion. Eitan reports that experiments with young children visualizing very short musical stimuli have resulted in unexpected findings: For  instance, loudness, rather than pitch or tempo, seems to be the strongest link between music and motion characteristics (speed, energy, spatial rise, and forward motion); and associations between pitch and height of motion are made more readily through pitch movement (rise and fall) than through static pitches. Thus, too, music produces its own visual images to suggest space and motion, and these are often perceived automatically, at a low-order, perceptual response, rather than through higher-order cognitive judgments, although these could in theory follow and introduce semantic content. Bringing to our consciousness these ideas from cognitive science could help us watch and listen to dance with a heightened quality of attention. Knowing how, for instance, music visualization is achieved, whether consciously or unconsciously by a choreographer, could help us (and other artists) appreciate its distinctive effects. At this point, let us consider structures through time and categories for rhythmic analysis. As part of a doctoral project on the work of Doris Humphrey, and of its period, the early 1980s ( Jordan 1986), this was where my own work began, following in a long tradition of musicological projects that have analyzed musical structures for their own sake. The East European dance ethnographers mentioned earlier had already established a basic unit of duration for dance and a hierarchical listing of units, like cells, phrases, and sections up to the level of a dance, for which there are analogous hierarchies in music. Like the baroque specialists, they also assessed rhythm patterns and unit structures across music and dance, establishing degrees of congruence and noncongruence. Applying this theory to Western theater dance more broadly, I needed to modify the structural categories while drawing upon music rhythmic theory, which is far more developed than dance theory. In summary, these categories can be grouped as referring to duration and frequency, stress, the grouping of sounds or movements through time, and energy pattern ( Jordan 2000, 78). The last, elusive category, concerned with patterns of tension and relaxation across a work, section of a work, or smaller unit, was the subject of further research by Roehampton doctoral student Elizabeth McLean as she analysed different settings of Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty (2019). In  today’s broad methodological context, it seems crucial to keep these structural and rhythmic matters in the picture, given their contribution to the effectiveness of many dance works, be these relatively abstract or driven by plot. Structure, including rhythm, while building and releasing tension, confirms and undermines our expectations. It also functions cross-modally as dance and musical units match or conflict. Indeed, as a simple example, East Europeans have long observed the effect of metrical incongruity, a conventional device for creating tension, with dance and musical accents (as in some baroque dances) crossing in rapid succession. Raina Katzarova likened the device to a continuous chase between the two media (1960, 69). Furthermore, as Theresa Buckland insists, structure is part of “the wider phenomenon of dance as a culturally codified and meaningful human action” (2007, 187). 149

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Ethnomusicologists have undertaken compelling research that links music with dance at an even more detailed, microrhythmic level of construction. Studying the categories of beat and meter, they note that theories that appear to have worked well for Western music and African-derived forms (the two areas within which most research of this kind has been undertaken), may not suit all forms of music, for instance, traditional Scandinavian dance music. Turning to the body and to dance movement has proved revealing. Tellef Kvifte (2007) proposes not looking at meter in terms of a lowest common denominator of dance or music unit—as might be quaver or semiquaver timespans—but at the physically felt higher level of regular or even irregular beats (e.g., these short beat units grouped as 2 + 2 + 3 + 2 + 3, into longer divisions that are already only an approximation)—in other words using a common long beat model. This research tells us about both the subtleties of the dance movement and its relation to music. For all Kvifte’s examples—jazz music, Norwegian springer and gangar dances, and Balkan dance, Western music theory, and notation systems building mathematically from a regular, fast beat division—are seen as misleading: They do not represent actual experience. Publishing in a dance journal, Dance Research, David Kaminsky (2014) takes these ideas further, examining the Swedish polska, looking at dance movement more holistically as if, through “lean,” “libration” (the up and down movements of the center of gravity within steps), and “viscosity” (perceived air resistance), it responds to melody, timbre, and intensity, not only to rhythmic systems. He also extends his method to incorporate qualitative ethnographic research techniques through interviewing performing musicians (who are once again given the lead over dance experts) and reflecting upon teaching practice within polska tradition. More recently, Mari Haugen (2017) has further investigated musical meter as shape or trajectory, by analyzing performing musicians’ and dancers’ periodic motion in Brazilian samba and Norwegian Telespringar. The project used motion capture technology. So does “Tango-Danceability of Music in European Perspective,” a current research project that introduces another kind of microrhythmic analysis. The movement landmarks of tango dancers (their peaks in acceleration or “pivot points”) are compared in relation to beat in order to “understand their individual perception of musical structures within their bodies” (Dick 2017, 306). Western theater dance experts have only on rare occasions touched upon relation to beat. The  choreographer Morris, an exception, works with the concept of beat, not  as a timeless point, but as having a back, center, and front, changing his instructions to his dancers accordingly: from “lazy rhythm,” meaning relax “at the back of the beat,” to the opposite, “anticipate … be ahead of it.” He once questioned a moment in John Adams’s score for their opera collaboration Nixon in China (1987): “Did you have to put in a bar of 1/8 right there? Is that necessary? Come on! Isn’t that the same as a comma?” The point is that Morris heard and felt the 1/8 primarily as a short extension. Ultimately it is big, deep physical response that means the most to him ( Jordan 2015, 118–119). There is potential, however, for scholars of Western dance forms to examine more systematically these subtleties, perhaps using ethnographic research as a stimulus, and to consider that rhythmic nuance makes a crucial contribution to the choreomusical styles of both individual dancers and choreographers. It is essential, for instance, to the breath-driven choreography of British choreographers Frederick Ashton and Richard Alston. We are now moving into the area of performance beyond fixed notated texts and it is relevant at this point to include the act of embodiment, practice, among the analyst’s tools, “sketch learning” to get the feel of moves and phrases to music. (This is rather like a musician researching a piece on the piano, without playing it full out, up to speed, or in full detail, alongside the experience of actual performance.) 150

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The result of such sketch learning is hearing and seeing better, partly because the business of practical learning draws us into detail, highlighting distinctions within the choreography far more than distanced watching allows. At the same time, we may feel more strongly the dynamics and drama of music and movement, grasping information that film sources, and especially those of poor quality, tend to disguise. We might even interpret ourselves, working in the spirit of a creator—a participant in the process of bringing into being the work analyzed—discovering points of relationship between what we do and what we hear that we might never have experienced from watching a performance. Other work by Stepputat (2017) centers on the internal working processes within dance practices and throws a spotlight on the live decisions made during the event of performance. She  illustrates this through the Balinese theatrical dance Kecak and the relations between its vocal sound and dance movement. Stepputat suggests a terminology comprising three categories under the umbrella heading of interrelationship. This accords with the degree of active reciprocity between the media: a continuum from interconnection, through interdependence, to interaction, with the first mostly located in performances with fixed structure, and the last most likely to be found in a dance, or section of a dance, in which there is a strong improvisatory component. At the same time, she adds to the equation the matter of leadership, which varies between movement following sound, sound following movement, or, a third, outside person directing both media. Stepputat also suggests that the condition of an interrelationship (as opposed to its quality, the topic of earlier structural analysis) is partly determined by the particular performance context—whether, for instance, the Kecak is presented as a contemporary, progressive piece or standardized for tourists. As an analytical tool of a different order from those used in other structural analyses, Stepputat’s alternative methods could well contribute not only to a more nuanced reading of Kecak in performance, including an understanding of relationships between the personnel involved, but also to understanding how other dance forms might operate within the moment of performance. Ethnographic approaches such as these offer an interesting parallel to today’s expanding enterprise of process studies or “genetic criticism” (a theoretical movement originating from French literary criticism in the mid-1970s). The concern here is to piece together the working traces of the creative artist as a key component within the formulation of pertinent analytical questions that lead to better understanding of the artwork itself. With this in mind, it is gratifying to register at least two hot-off-the-press graduate student dissertations (Rymer 2016, Kossen-Veenhuis 2017) addressing recent composer–choreographer collaborations. Given today’s marked “process turn,” it is likely that choreomusical studies of this kind will develop further. There is already a valuable body of relevant primary source material awaiting use. Examples are the former dance studio musician Katherine Teck’s three collections of writings by, and interviews with, artists (1989, 1990, 2011) and the considerable body of resources on the Cunningham-Cage collaboration, including the Merce Cunningham Trust website, with its ongoing program of capsules of documentation on his dances. Yet, in support of a pluralist future, it is important that at least three American doctoral theses (2016–2017) have welcomed the challenge of theory in the more abstract, structural sense. Rachel Short (in “Musical Feet: The  Interaction of Choreography and Music in Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins’s Fancy Free,” 2016), Kara Leaman (in “Analyzing Music and Dance: Balanchine’s Choreography to Tchaikovsky and the Choreomusical Score, 2016”) and  Matthew Bell (in “Rhythmic Gesture in Classic Ballet: Awakening Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty,” 2017) all expand the application of theoretical tools from music in formal, pitch, and rhythmic/metric analysis. Leaman has also invented a notation system for documenting her choreomusical analysis which, in support of “sketch learning,” 151

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graphs choreographic pitch (changes in movement level), as well as rhythm on a dance staff aligned with the corresponding musical score. While clear that this system may not suit all forms of dance and music, she also provides a rare example of choreomusical research crossing boundaries between high art and popular culture, incorporating alongside ballet discussion of the Minuet, Bulgarian folk, rave, and “The Skeleton Dance” from Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies. Even hotter off the press is the 2018 collection Music-Dance: Sound and Motion in Contemporary Discourse (Veroli and Vinay), the first of its kind, a landmark publication offering an exceptionally wide array of choreomusical perspectives, both theoretical foundations and their applications to dances.

Looking back—A summary The sheer range of work in choreomusical studies since the early 1990s cannot be disputed. It includes projects within Western theater dance that are historical, contextual, and analytical, and, starting much earlier, the larger ethnographic and potentially global field that I am unable to more than touch upon in this chapter. Today’s field undoubtedly responds to the fever of interdisciplinarity evident across and well beyond the arts, a shift in thinking that is not without problems, but that offers many stimulating pathways ahead. Looking back autobiographically as an historian-analyst, my earliest examinations of structure and rhythm betrayed my background in music rather more than my experience of dance. I was less aware of the high modernist, contextually removed values of those theoretical models from music. Soon, I edged, like so many others, toward meaning, partly through cognitive and linguistic theory, but also welcomed the more phenomenological aspect of visceral experience through watching, listening, and doing. Now, even in researching for this chapter, further methodological practices from beyond Western theater dance have proved an enriching and questioning resource and a much broader metaphorical context, while dealing with the realities of performance. In contrast with relatively stable choreographed and composed texts, these practices are about the highly unstable individual performance event and experience. It is important that all these conceptual frameworks can inform artists—choreographers, composers, dancers, and musicians—and their training, not only scholars. Yet there is still a need to address basic problems of communication and of sharing knowledge, to cover what still is a divide between those in dance and those in music.

Looking to the future Focusing on dance studies within the United States and the UK, we might now consider whether choreomusical research is a healthy, growing field, despite the energy manifest through multiple research projects and publications. Currently, many signs indicate that the field is not supported institutionally within dance departments or units such as theatre and performance studies that include dance. The stark reality is that nearly every example cited in this chapter derives from work hosted by music departments. A contributing factor is the narrowness of dance research in the UK today and the paucity of analyses of dance works and dancing ( Jordan 2017). Choreomusical research is, in such a climate, way back on the back burner, although it could in theory offer a strong model for a return to, or even initial exploration of, other kinds of dance analysis and prove that questioning how dances are put together is highly relevant to an advanced discipline. 152

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But what are the implications of choreomusical research having only one home—within music? Earlier, I mentioned the need for scholars in the field to have more knowledge of the Other, beyond their own principal training or teaching experience. Here, I qualify that judgment and emphasize that not all choreomusical work requires intense degree-level technical training in both disciplines. Once again, dance could well be the victim, as dance scholars without music degrees are unlikely to be taken into, or indeed attracted by, doctoral programs in music. Nor are they likely to find qualified dance experts there as supervisors. (Currently, the first appearance of a dance expert in a doctoral program is often at the examination stage.) But nor is a degree in dance seen as a stepping-stone toward an academic job in music. Although there is excitement about the young interdisciplinary field, institutional structures are not keeping up with that excitement and promoting a system of mutual support. Beyond Western frameworks, too, there are signs that curriculum development is moving toward greater separation of the two disciplines.The drawbridge is all set to be raised.Yet, given such exciting recent developments, it would be a tragedy if the two disciplines were to end up even more divided.

Notes 1 The  chapter draws from, and expands upon, material in my two earlier publications (2011 and 2015). Material from Mark Morris: Musician-Choreographer is reproduced by kind permission of Dance Books. 2 I am very grateful for comments relevant to this chapter and valuable support from Theresa Buckland, Kara Leaman, Marian Smith, and Jennifer Thorp.

References Abbate, Carolyn. 2004. “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Enquiry 30 (3): 505–536. Barros, Ricardo. 2010. Dance as a Discourse: The Rhetorical Expression of the Passions in French Baroque Dance. Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing. Bell, Matthew T. 2017. “Rhythmic Gesture in Classic Ballet: Awakening Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas at Austin. Buckland, Theresa J. 2007. “In  Search of Structural Geist: Dance as Regional and National Identity.” In Dance Structures: Perspectives on the Analysis of Human Movement, edited by Adrienne L. Kaeppler and Elsie I. Dunin, Studies in Ethnology, vol. 3, 187–234. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Caddy, Davinia. 2012. The  Ballets Russes and Beyond: Music and Dance in Belle-Époque Paris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Callahan, Daniel. 2012. “The Dancer from the Music: Choreomusicalities in Twentieth-Century American Modern Dance,” Ph.D. dissertation, New York: Columbia University. Chion, Michel. [1990] 1994. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Translated by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press. Cook, Nicholas. 1998. Analysing Musical Multimedia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2013. Foreword to The Psychology of Music in Multimedia, edited by Siu-Lan Tan, Annabel J. Cohen, Scott D. Lipscomb, and Roger A. Kendall, v–vii. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cook, Nicholas, and Mark Everist, eds. 1999. Rethinking Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Damsholt, Inger. 1999. “Choreomusical Discourse: The Relationship between Dance and Music,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Copenhagen. ———. 2002. “The Marriage of Music and Dance.” In Of Another World: Dancing between Dream and Reality, edited by Monna Dithmer, 237–249. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. ———. 2006. “Mark Morris, Mickey Mouse, and Choreomusical Polemic.” Special issue Sound Moves, The Opera Quarterly [Performance+Theory+History] 22 (1): 4–21. ———. 2012. “Troublesome Relationships: Gendered Metaphors in Modern Dance and Its Music.” Discourses in Dance 5 (1): 73–83.

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Stephanie Jordan Dick, Christopher S. 2017. “Digital Movement: An Overview of Computer-Aided Analysis of Human Motion.” In  Dance, Senses, Urban Contexts, edited by Kendra Stepputat, 303–307. Graz: Institute of Ethnomusicology, University of Music and Performing Arts Graz. Eitan, Zohar. 2013. “How Pitch and Loudness Shape Musical Space and Motion.” In  The  Psychology of Music in Multimedia, edited by Siu-Lan Tan, Annabel J. Cohen, Scott D. Lipscomb, and Roger A. Kendall, 165–191. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. Garafola, Lynn. 2005. Legacies of Twentieth-Century Dance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Genné, Beth. 2018. Dance Me a Song: Astaire, Balanchine, Kelly and the American Film Musical. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Giurchescu, Anca. 2007. “A Historical Perspective on the Analysis of Dance Structure in the International Folk Music Council (IFMC)/International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM).” In Dance Structures: Perspectives on the Analysis of Human Movement, edited by Adrienne L. Kaeppler and Elsie I. Dunin, Studies in Ethnology, vol. 3, 3–18. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Gorbman, Claudia. 1980. “Narrative Film Music.” Yale French Studies 60: 183–203. Gutsche-Miller, Sarah. 2015. Parisian Music-Hall Ballet, 1871–1913. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer. Harris-Warrick, Rebecca. 2016. Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera.A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harris-Warrick, Rebecca, and Carol G. Marsh. 1994. Musical Theatre at the Court of Louis XIV: “Le Mariage de la Grosse Cathos.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haugen, Mari R. 2017. “Investigating Musical Meter as Shape: Two Case Studies of Brazilian Samba and Norwegian Telespringar.” In Proceedings of the 25th Anniversary Conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, 67–74. Belgium: University of Ghent. Heisler, Wayne. 2009. The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. ———. 2013. “Antony Tudor’s Dark Elegies and the Affirmation of Mahler’s Body, 1937–1947.” Dance Chronicle 36 (2): 172–195. Hodgins, Paul. 1992. Relationships between Score and Choreography in Twentieth-Century Dance: Music, Movement, and Metaphor. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Järvinen, Hanna. 2014. “Where Is the Dance?” Review Essay of Modernism on Stage: The Ballets Russes and the Parisian Avant-Garde (2013), by Juliet Bellow, and The Ballets Russes and Beyond: Music and Dance in Belle-Époque Paris (2012), by Davinia Caddy. Dance Research Journal 46 (1): 96–103. Jordan, Stephanie. 1986. “Music as a Structural Basis in the Choreography of Doris Humphrey,” PhD dissertation, University of London Goldsmiths College. ———. 2000. Moving Music: Dialogues with Music in Twentieth-Century Ballet. London: Dance Books. ———. 2011. “Choreomusical Conversations: Facing a Double Challenge.” Dance Research Journal 43 (1): 43–64. ———. 2015. Mark Morris: Musician-Choreographer. Binsted: Dance Books. ———. 2017. “Talking Point.” Dancing Times 107 (1283): 15. Kalinak, Kathryn. 1992. Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Kaminsky, David. 2014. “Total Rhythm in Three Dimensions: Towards a Motional Theory of Melodic Dance Rhythm in Swedish Polska Music.” Dance Research 32 (1): 43–64. Katzarova, Raina. 1960. “Sur un phénomène conçernant le manque de coïncidences entre la figure chorégraphique et la phrase mélodique.” Journal of the International Folk Music Council 12: 68–69. Kiss, Dóra. 2014. “Interpréter le ‘Menuet performd’ by Mrs. Santlow: Une danse du répertoire de la belle danse.” Recherches en danse (Savoirs et métier: l’interprète en danse) 2: 1–18. Kossen-Veenhuis, Tomke. 2017. “‘The great thing about collaboration is that it never is perfect’ – An Ethnography of Music and Dance Collaborations.” PhD diss., University of Edinburgh. Kvifte, Tellef. 2007. “Categories and Timing: On the Perception of Meter.” Ethnomusicology 51 (1): 64–84. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Leaman, Kara Y. 2016. “Analyzing Music and Dance: Balanchine’s Choreography to Tchaikovsky and the Choreomusical Score.” Ph.D. dissertation,Yale University, New Haven, CT. Levitz, Tamara. 2012. Modernist Mysteries: Persephone. New York: Oxford University Press. Little, Meredith Ellis. 1975. “The Contribution of Dance Steps to Musical Analysis and Performance: La Bourgogne.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 28 (1): 112–124.

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Choreomusicology and dance studies Little, Meredith, and Natalie Jenne. 1991. Dance and the Music of J. S. Bach. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Marks, Lawrence E. 1978. The Unity of the Senses: Interrelations among the Modalities. New York: Academic Press. Mason, Paul H. 2014.“Tapping the Plate or Hitting the Bottle: Sound and Movement in Self-Accompanied and Musician-Accompanied Dance.” Ethnomusicology Forum 23 (2): 208–228. Mawer, Deborah. 2006. The Ballets of Maurice Ravel. Aldershot: Ashgate. McKee, Eric. 2012. Decorum of the Minuet, Delirium of the Waltz: A Study of Dance-Music Relations in 3/4 Time. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. McLean, Elizabeth. 2019. “Evolution and Revolution within the Ballet Sleeping Beauty: A Choreomusical Analysis of Productions by the Royal Ballet (1939–2006) and Matthew Bourne (2012), including New Software Applications.” PhD diss., University of Roehampton. McMains, Juliet, and Ben Thomas. 2013. “Translating from Pitch to Plié: Music Theory for Dance Scholars and Close Movement Analysis for Music Scholars.” Dance Chronicle 36 (2): 196–217. Merce Cunningham Trust, Dance Capsules. Accessed April 30, 2019. https://www.mercecunningham.org/ the-work/dance-capsules. Minors, Helen J. 2012. “In Collaboration: Toward a Gesture Analysis of Music and Dance.” In Bewegungen zwischen Hören und Sehen. Denkbewegungen über Bewegungskünste, edited by Stephanie Schroedter, 163–179. Wurzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Morrison, Simon. 2009. The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years. New York: Oxford University Press. Nor, Mohd Anis Md, and Kendra Stepputat, eds. 2017. Sounding the Dance, Moving the Music: Choreomusicological Perspectives on Maritime Southeast Asian Performing Arts. London: Routledge. Okamoto, Kimiko. 2005.“Between the Ancient and the Modern:A Study of Danses à Deux in Duple-Metre within Changing Aesthetics in France 1700–1733.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Roehampton. Pierce, Ken. 2008. “Choreographic Structure in Baroque Dance.” In Dance, Spectacle, and the Body Politick, 1250–1750, edited by Jennifer Nevile, 182–208. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Press, Stephen D. 2006. Prokofiev’s Ballets for Diaghilev. Aldershot: Ashgate. Rymer, Jessica A. 2016. “An Investigation of Collaborative, Choreomusical Relationships within Contemporary Performance: A  Practical and Theoretical Enquiry into Collaborative, Co-creative Approaches,” M.A. dissertation, University of Malta. Schroedter, Stephanie. 2017. Paris qui danse. Bewegungs- und Klangräume einer Großstadt der Moderne.Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Schwartz, Judith L. 1998. “The passacaille in Lully’s Armide: Phrase Structure in the Choreography and the Music.” Early Music 26 (2): 301–320. Short, Rachel E. 2016. “Musical Feet: The Interaction of Choreography and Music in Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins’s Fancy Free,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California Santa Barbara. Smith, Marian. 2000. Ballet and Opera in the Age of Giselle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2001. Review of the International Encyclopedia of Dance (1998), edited by Selma Jeanne Cohen. Journal of the American Musicological Society 54 (1): 174–191. ———. 2005. “Counts and Beats: Moments in the Dialogue between Music and Dance.” In Sound Moves: An International Conference on Music and Dance, 176–186. University of Roehampton. Stepputat, Kendra. 2017. “The Balinese kecak: An Exemplification of Sonic and Visual (Inter)relations.” In Sounding the Dance, Moving the Music: Choreomusicological Perspectives on Maritime Southeast Asian Performing Arts, edited by Mohd Anis Md Nor and Kendra Stepputat, 31–41. London: Routledge. Subotnik, Ruth. 1988. “Toward a Deconstruction of Structural Listening: A  Critique of Schoenberg, Adorno, and Stravinsky.” In Explorations in Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Essays in Honor of Leonard B. Meyer, edited by Eugene Narmour and Ruth Solie, 87–122. Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press. Teck, Katherine. 1989. Music for the Dance: Reflections on a Collaborative Art. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ———. 1990. Movement to Music: Musicians in the Dance Studio. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ———, ed. 2011. Making Music for Modern Dance: Collaboration in the Formative Years of a New American Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thomas, Helen. 1996. “Do You Want to Join the Dance? Postmodernism/Post-structuralism, the Body, and Dance.” In Moving Words: Re-writing Dance, edited by Gay Morris, 63–87. London: Routledge. Trimillos, Ricardo D. 2017. “Understanding Performance in Maritime Southeast Asia: Rethinking Paradigms and Discourses, an Introduction.” In Sounding the Dance, Moving the Music: Choreomusicological Perspectives on Maritime Southeast Asian Performing Arts, edited by Mohd Anis Md Nor  and Kendra Stepputat, 1–12. London: Routledge.

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11 CHOREOSONIC WEARABLES Creative collaborative practices Michèle Danjoux

Introduction Over the past decade, the interest in wearables as intermediary devices in mediatized performance has become notable in artistic explorations and research inquiry in the sonic arts and dance fields alike. Moreover, dress/costume is becoming more studied in academic contexts for the multifaceted and significant role it can play in performance. The latter is evidenced in newly emerging journals that raise questions about the criticality of costume to making performance, for example, the biannual Studies in Costume and Performance1 which debuted in 2017, and the special issue of Scene on “Critical Costume” (2014).2 The body of practicebased research presented in this chapter is situated, where these paths converge. It investigates the performative and affective potentials of sounding garments/accessories—“choreosonic” wearables—as bodily extensions in interactive dance. Choreosonic is a term that implicates both movement (choreo) and sound (sonic). According to Stan Wijnans (2009, 16), who describes herself as a choreosonic artist, this term was coined during a research project between herself and Sarah Rubidge, Professor in Choreography and New Media, at V2_Lab for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam (the Netherlands) in 2006. I have adopted and adapted the term for my research into the generation of movement and sound that links wearables and the act of wearing to an amplificatory, multisensorial (tactile, aural, visual) and perceptual performance technique for the dancer, enabling a new collaborative movement-sounding or choreosonic creativity. Moreover, the wearable, engaged in this way—specifically as musical material or rather quiescent medium of sound—to be activated by the dancer-wearer inside the immersive performance space, adopts a new collaborative and dynamic role in the process of making dance that, crucially, links to a notion of a choreography that is wearable, distributed and audible. In this chapter, the emergence of dance is explored through choreosonic wearable design strategies that link gestural and whole-body movement to sounding and the transceiving potentials for the dancer-wearer in the performance space. The disciplines of sound art and dance have both crucially supported the emergence of the prototypes presented here, while the latter has offered the fertile ground and intellectual space necessary to conduct experimentations with movement-design and the notion of becoming choreosonic. My initial motivations to interrogate the subject of wearable performance stem simultaneously from a background in 157

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fashion design and my role as co-director of DAP-Lab, a UK-based interdisciplinary design and performance laboratory with a focus on digital performance, established by Johannes Birringer, choreographer and filmmaker, and me in 2004. At the time when I first began designing wearables for dancers in interactive performance in 2006–2007, an awareness of smart clothes, wearable electronics and computing was gradually gaining ground in fashion and clothing, as manifested in some of the books on techno-fashion that appeared between 2002 (Quinn) and 2009 (Tao 2005; Seymour 2008; McCann and Bryson 2009). Moreover, working in the context of performance art revealed that body-worn technologies were slowly becoming a feature of some interactive dance scenarios. Examples include Contraindre (2004) by Myriam Gourfink, Passage (2007–2008) by Martin Kusch and Marie-Claude Poulin and their company kondition pluriel, and Whisper[s] (Wearable, Handheld, Intimate, Sensory, Personal, Expressive, Responsive System [2002–2006]), a wearable research project coming out of the whispers research group at Simon Fraser University, Canada (2007), and involving collaboration between Thecla Schiphorst (2005) and Susan Kozel (2007).3 In addition, my inquiry into amplifiable and “sensortized”4 body interfaces and wearable design was further stimulated by the sonic arts and traditions of instrumental and electronic music. In DAP-Lab’s interactive dance-theatre productions/performance installations—UKIYO (2009–2011; DAP-Lab 2010a, 2010b); for the time being  [Victory over the Sun] (2012–2014); Kimosphere no.2 (2015); and Kimosphere no.3 (2016)—choreosonic wearables intentionally reside at the core of its compositional strategies. The  first four prototypes introduced in this chapter: GraveDigger, RedMicro Dress, TatlinTower (head)dress, and the Futurian ChestPlate belong to the performance for the time being [Victory over the Sun] (2012–2014). Each prototype presents a different experimental model of choreosonic wearable connecting to the processes of devising dance and sound composition in real-time scenarios and aims to illuminate the larger question of music, design and dance collaboration. Furthermore, once activated, the focus of the prototypes shifts from wearable to wearability in a process of becoming both mediator of movement-sounding for the dancer and intermediary in the performance space. With a sound aesthetic akin to noise music, the wearables are meant to offer a provocative and disruptive element to compositional processes. They evoke the Italian composer Luigi Russolo’s acoustic Intonarumori or noise machines (circa 1910–1930) which generated a raft of sounds that could be altered tonally and amplified through mechanical interaction and were designed to be visually distinctive. A fifth prototype, the ConductiveCoat, outlined in the second part of this chapter as a separate case study, stems from explorations undertaken after completing the prototypes used in for the time being [Victory over the Sun] in 2014. In particular, this subsequent study investigates further a wearability that is sonically and spatially embedded through the use of e-textiles.

Staging wearables The  idea of staging the garment as movement or choreographic instigator in dance is not completely new. Nor is the notion of integrating technologies into performative concepts for dancers’ costumes. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the dancer Loïe Fuller was already unifying both these elements as compositional devices integrally into her creative process and aesthetic (Hindson 2013, 72). Indeed, early physical transformations of the modern dancing body achieved via such means are largely credited to Fuller who is considered a pioneer in the field of modern dance and stage technologies. Moreover, Fuller’s serpentine dance practice—which incorporated undulating and interacting costumes, optical stage devices such as magic lantern projections and colored lights—created an experience 158

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that was multisensory (Uhlirova 2013, 21). Her integrative methods involving dynamic ways of working with cloth/costume and extending the body’s limbs with rods (inside the sleeves) and her technological experimentation and the aesthetic effects she achieved are discussed by Rhonda K. Garelick in Electric Salome: Loïe Fuller’s Performance of Modernism (2007). Notable examples of her dances illuminating the fluidity of connections between the various elements of her artistic compositions were: Serpentine Dance (1896) and Fire Dance (1892), the latter using up-lighting and indirect lighting techniques, innovative at the time, to create her visually stunning metamorphic effects. Through her multimedia compositional and choreographic strategies, Fuller was able to captivate her Paris audiences with her onstage spectacle of material interactions combining body and machine to evoke ephemeral landscapes (Garelick 2007, 4). Her dynamic methods of manipulating an abundance of cloth, its morphing forms further accentuated via the use of lighting, enabled her to metamorphose through a whole series of transient organic forms (Thomas 1995, 56). My focus in design’s relation to movement stems from early twentieth-century experimental dance involving an amalgamated exploration of movement and costume/material artifact, as evidenced in the work of Fuller. Moreover, it aligns with the expressive and integrative aspects of modern dance of the same early era when dancers would choreograph their own works and often also design and fabricate their own costumes, which in certain instances would become intrinsic to the dance and the transmission of its emotional expressive content. Such was the case with Martha Graham in early modern dance: She was adept at interlinking techniques of costume creation, narrative and music into her works concerned first and foremost with the primacy of movement and emotional meaning, as, for example, in her well-known Lamentation (premiered in 1930). In her analysis of Imperial Gesture (1935), choreographer and dancer Kim Jones emphasizes the crucial partnering presence of the skirt to Graham’s realization of her choreographic ideas and Jones’s own recreation of the work and to her embodiment of Graham’s gestures (2015, 59–64). In the experimental tradition of the sonic arts, Ellen Fullman’s Metal Skirt Sound Sculpture (1980) is an example of a performance wearable connected to sounding-in-motion and instrument-bodies. Although not directly connected to dance but more to the functional aspects of everyday movement, Fullman’s sound sculpture consisted of a pleated skirt, constructed out of metal, integrating a simple analog sound system to be mobilized via the act of walking. Guitar strings connected from the hem of the skirt to the toes and heels of Fullman’s platform shoes while a contact microphone attached to the skirt picked up sound vibrations. A  portable pignose amp worn like a small bag over Fullman’s shoulder then amplified these vibrations (Fullman 2012, 3). In her street performances, Fullman’s wearable instrument enabled her to sound out as she moved, a notion fundamental to the practicebased research presented in this chapter. In terms of digital musical instruments (DMIs) and electronic music, musicians and sound artists have been experimenting with the design of DMIs and the use of sound synthesis methods in the form of wearable gestural controllers since the 1990s. As a result, they discovered, like Fuller, that through body-worn devices and furthermore, through an exploration of the sensory aspects of interaction, that the entire body could be turned into a performing instrument. Newly acquired knowledge forced an advancement in their field from the prevailing laptop and disembodied performance models of the new media aesthetic of the 1980s and 1990s, to one that embraced body–computer interactions oriented more toward the senses. Crucially, digital and electronic sound creation could now to be controlled via more gesturally dynamic means, thus placing corporeal activity at the heart of the technological system. Some experimental sound artists and performers and early innovators in the field such as Laetitia Sonami (2017) (“Lady’s Glove”), 159

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Pamela Z (2018) (“The  BodySynth™”), and Julie Wilson-Bokowiec (2018) (“Bodycoder System”), commencing in the 1990s, have since built an entire performance practice around this notion and the wearables they created. These developments in electronic music and noise performance (the latter a subgenre that is particularly popular in Japan with artists such as Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M and Toshi Nakamura) can be viewed in a larger context of cross-disciplinary performance art as it emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, in the New York downtown scene ( Judson Church). The creation of task-based happenings, dance-music-film events and multimedia installations of the time—which involved as many visual artists (from Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol to Carolee Schneemann and Gina Pane) as musicians, composers and dancers— reflected a strong curiosity in new sculptural and three-dimensional (3D) form, extending painting or film through movement-objects and moving materials, and thus projecting also the notion of an “extended choreographic” to which I subscribe.

DAP-Lab’s for the time being [Victory over the Sun] DAP-Lab’s for the time being [Victory over the Sun] was inspired by the experimental Russian Futurist opera Victory over the Sun. With its prologue by the poet Aleksei Khlebnikov and libretto by Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov, costumes and abstract set design by Kazimir Malevich and experimental music score by Mikhail Matiushin, the opera premiered at the Luna Park Theatre in St. Petersburg in 1913. The early part of the twentieth century was a time of revolution and social reform in Russia. It was a new era that decisively ushered in an experimental time for Russian art and a breach with artistic traditions and preoccupations of the past. Radical artists, in the most extreme instances, sought to create something original and utopian, and this consequentially led to the emergence of new associated art movements—suprematism, futurism and constructivism. Such were the conditions that spawned the original Victory over the Sun opera and impacted its aesthetic. Divided into two parts, Act I and Act II, the first reflecting the old order and mode of existence, a time before the revolution, and the second, a new world with characters of the future, Victory over the Sun was an artistic production that sought to dispose of established values. Paradoxical and contentious in nature, the opera subverted Russian folk culture, which venerated the sun, through doing battle with the sun while sharing the rich and visual extravagances of Russian folk theatre. “Heliomachia” or “sun-struggle” was a leitmotif for the Russian Futurists, symbolic of an uprising against traditions of the established orders (Böhmig 2012, 112). According to Malevich and Matiushin, the original libretto for Victory over the Sun was “devoid of any developing plot while its central idea was the overthrow of one of the greatest artistic values— the sun” (Kruchenykh et al. 2009, 22). In DAP-Lab’s dance opera version, the GraveDigger character (Illustration 11.1) translates the historic plot into the creation of a solntselov (sun-trapper) and an iconic “Killing of the Sun” scene performed by dancer Helenna Ren. The 1913 version of Victory over the Sun was filled almost entirely with dissonances, abrupt transitions and audacious phonetics, including song constructed purely from vowels and consonants (Rosamund and Dadswell 2012, 98). Furthermore, Malevich’s idiosyncratic costumes, utilizing techniques of geometric abstraction for a cast of many characters—“Nero and Caligula,” “Traveler,” “Sportsmen,” “Man with Bad Intentions,” “Motley Eye,” “Aviator,” “Trouble Maker,” “Enemy,” “New Man,” “Member of the Chorus,” “Reader,” etc.—added to the strangeness of the piece. The  intention was to capture some of these experimental qualities, strong aesthetics and distinctive characteristics in the movement-characters and sound compositions the wearables aroused. 160

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Illustration 11.1   Helenna Ren as GraveDigger enacts the role of solntselov or sun-trapper in the “Killing of the Sun” scene, for the time being [Victory over the Sun], Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadler’s Wells, London, 2014. (Courtesy of DAP-Lab.)

The visual aesthetics of a series of architectonic visualizations produced by artist El Lissitzky a decade later in 1923 for an unrealized mechanical version of Victory over the Sun were also significant to the emergence of the choreosonic characters in for the time being. For example, I mimicked the sarcophagus form of Lissitzky’s “Gravediggers” in my GraveDigger prototype. Thus, utilizing similar elements of humor and futurist devices of metaphorical languages (visual and material) to create a character to capture and kill the sun. Constructed from heatresistant fabrics, this garment denoted both a final resting place for the sun and protective wear for the sun-trapper. Gloves with singed fingertips, special retro protective eyewear with ultraviolet shield (circa late 1960s) and straw hat added to the comical textures of this wearable character. From a technological point of view, the costume was paired with a Kinect system, a commercial X-box 3D infrared camera, connectible to Motion Builder, Blender, and other OpenSource 3D software. The scene was programmed by media artist Cameron McKirdy. Unlike the other featured prototypes in this performance, the technologies here were not  directly integrated into the costume, nor did they sit visibly on its surface. Instead, the form of the dancer’s costumed-body partnered as active agent with the Kinect system. This method involved certain complexities, given that to activate/deactivate the system for real-time audiovisual performance with the digital sun, through modes of wearing and movement, the costumed-body needed to relate to the particular characteristics of the system. Specifically, the shapes and surface textures presented 161

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to the 3D camera-vision were required to work within its parameters for interactions to occur. The camera basically needed to “see” the human skeleton—arms, hands and legs to be precise— to begin mapping the body and generating data for effect. The aim of the sarcophagus form of the GraveDigger costume was to obscure the body from view of the camera-eye. Then the moment Ren released her arms, allowing them to each emerge from her coffin-body one at a time, the system now activated, could begin mapping Ren’s movement data for the manipulation of sound and image (see the virtual onscreen sun Illustration 11.2). In terms of her gestural impact on the aural landscape and the type of sound that was emitted, musician Oliver Doyle, who programmed the sound and parameters in relation to McKirdy’s virtual sun, explained:

Illustration 11.2  Helenna Ren releases her arms from inside her sarcophagus, the Kinect system recognizes her, and the virtual sun rises on screen, for the time being [Victory over the Sun], Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadler’s Wells, London, 2014. (Courtesy of Hans Staartjes.)

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I’m working on a drone sound with dense multi-tonal wall of sound that has shifting tones moving in waves as the base, from here I’ve programmed the patch to measure the distance between the XY coordinates for the two hands being tracked and sent by Cameron [McKirdy]. This can then be mapped to a frequency-based amplitude oscillator to allow the sound to pulse, with the frequency of the pulse changing depending on how close the two hands are (I’m thinking a steady pulse at a larger distance that gets faster as the hands get closer insinuating an increased heart rate). (Doyle, email to author, March 3, 2014) In the case of RedMicro Dress (Illustration 11.3), the geometric forms, square body, rectangular arms, triangular skirt of Malevich’s “Pallbearer” character in black and red, proved inspirational. Essentially, the dress adopted the same geometric properties in its construction, square bodice, angular shoulder line, circular cut skirt (rather than triangular). In addition, and as the name

Illustration 11.3   Vanessa Michielon in RedMicro Dress with flautist Emi Watanabe in “Tenth Country,” a scene rehearsal from Act II, for the time being  [Victory over the Sun], Interaktionslabor, Gottelborn, Germany, 2013. (Courtesy of Michèle Danjoux.)

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suggests, the primary color for the dress was red, a saturated and pure hue, sharply contrasted with black. It  was constructed from neoprene and leatherette, giving a weighty feel to the dancer-wearer. With respect to Vanessa Michielon’s solo performance in RedMicro Dress, it became clear from her feedback that the tactile and material qualities of the wearable were directly linked to the types of movements she created. On her encounter with the structural and tangible aspects of the dress as movement initiator (Illustration 11.3), Michielon disclosed her enjoyment of the process and then that the distinct analog provocations derived from the materiality of the dress, as opposed to digital, afforded to her movement process where restrictions did not in effect restrict but rather became suggestive of new movement to her: Yes, I enjoyed a lot using this dress, and I think that in this case, the fact that some parts of the dress were a little bit rigid, this is not a limitation in a negative way, but it’s maybe a suggestion to create specific shapes. For example, I felt like using my elbows in this way (shows right angles with the arms bending downward), making angles with my elbows and/or keeping them really straight; this kind of costume suggested to me to make lines or to make geometric forms instead of circular forms. And also, the skirt—it is not so light, I mean it’s a little bit heavy and it makes a kind of sound when you move it; this suggested to me to walk with different speeds to see how the skirt slaps in a certain way or to try and stretch my legs to make it stretch too. (Michielon, 2013 interview with author August 11) As previously outlined, however, the concept of wearable sound in my work extends these interrelational potentials for movement and micromovement of the wearer-dancer in costume to those of sound generation and/or manipulation within the performance space. In many of the prototypes I have utilized as compositional tools, design strategies aim at enabling the dancer to become an instrument-body in the musical sense. Furthermore, they aim at equipping her with new modes of expressivity via her processes of movement in space and engagement with the garment and its technological features, the contact mics, sensors, speakers, microphones, circuitry etc., and the cameras and condenser mics in the space. Through the act of movement-sounding, in a manner not  dissimilar to Fullman’s in her Metal Skirt Sound Sculpture (1980)—where her movements activated the garment, which in turn activated her—I suggest, the dancer becomes entwined with the costume in a process of extension and animation that is mutual and reciprocal in nature. A process that is two-way, as seen in Fuller’s work with fabric and technologies (above) and proposed by philosopher and social theorist Brian Massumi in his writings on body-worn prostheses in relation to performance artist Stelarc’s work: Helmet no.3: put on and walk (1970), where he notes that the body is equally a prosthesis of the thing (2002, 95). With RedMicro Dress, this notion extends further when the dress is designed for partnering and not solo performance. In addition to its material qualities and weight, coloration and distinctive visual aesthetics, Michielon’s dress, has a particularity—an integrated wearable wireless microphone system with transmitter at the waist and tiny microphone located on the left back shoulder (Illustration 11.4). Through this it is connected wirelessly to a larger system

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Illustration 11.4   RedMicro Dress with integrated wireless microphone system—transmitter at the waist and tiny microphone located on the left back shoulder for partnering and interaction, 2012. (Courtesy of Brigitt Angst.)

of human–computer interactions within the performance space, and the microphone’s positioning is such that it might invite interaction from another performer for amplification and manipulation of their sounds. Importantly, as a dynamic amplificatory device for wearable partnering, RedMicro Dress expands through a process of exchange—the personal experiential dimension of wearing described by Michielon (above)—to a more distributed form of sensory engagement of dancers in close proximity. In for the time being, the prototypes TatlinTower (head)dress (Illustration 11.5) and Futurian ChestPlate (Illustration 11.7) were conceived as wearable experimental instruments for the production of noise sound. Both instruments were constructed in collaboration with musician John Richards, who designed the circuitry. In  the case of the former, the repetitive sound of an integrated rotating spring actuated by the dancer’s hand gestures beating onto a

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Illustration 11.5   Helenna Ren performing the TatlinTower (head)dress, Scene I, for the time being [Victory over the Sun], Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadler’s Wells, 2014. (Courtesy of Hans Staartjes.)

metal structure mounted on her head, would generate amplified sonic textures for a musician to incorporate into their sound composition. The Futurian ChestPlate, a more sophisticated construction in terms of interactivity, incorporated three small interconnecting microcircuits, with a main sound generator, built around a fourth noise circuit based on Richard’s “Bed of Nails” schematic for resistance and flow (Illustration 11.6), a proximity sensor and two light sensors. This prototype was designed to partner with the RedMicro Dress, the latter’s small microphone capturing and relaying the sounds made by the dancers Michielon and Angeliki Margeti (in chest plate) partnership. Here, performer and dress combine in motion, generating and combining sounds rather than musical tones in partnership, to create what Russolo, in his manifesto L’arte dei rumori—The Art of Noises ([1913] 1986), had imagined as a “noise harmonium” of many different timbres, such as the “rustler,” “burster” or “croaker” (Brown 1982, 47).

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Illustration 11.6

 “Bed of Nails” Schematic. (Courtesy of John Richards.)

The last in the series of sounding wearables to be prototyped for DAP-Lab’s for the time being, the Futurian ChestPlate (Act II, Scene VI) was conceptualized as a wearable musical instrument to feature in Act II. The visual aesthetic form of the main circuit was loosely inspired by the 1919 Toft linear graphics of Russian artists Rodchenko and Stepanova and was constructed using copper metal and wire/strings allowing the wearer to play the wearable instrument to generate sound. The overall concept for the prototype was influenced by the intricate interactive electronic sculptures of Peter Vogel, which I saw at the ZKM exhibition on Sound Art in 2012,5 where components and circuits were made clearly visible. Yet, it was not purely the visual aesthetics of Vogel’s circuits that interested me, but also the interactive dimension of his pieces. Works such as Duo (2006) and Minimal Music Sculpture (1988), for instance, with their integrated speakers, photocells and other small electronic components, in addition to being visually fascinating, were designed to operate as participatory installations where the sound emitted from the integrated speakers can be influenced by the movement of bodies in front of the circuit-sculpture. This in turn generates a score for the electronic music. It  is his notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk or total artwork incorporating a synthesis of bodies, technologies, materials and movement for the design of the instrument, where sounding becomes interrelational, which further provoked my thoughts for the duet in Act II, Scene VI, and the construction of the Futurian ChestPlate. Furthermore, the visual idiosyncrasies of Malevich’s “singing” character—“Member of the Chorus”—wearing a large flat shield-like structure over the chest inspired me to create a chest plate instrument (Illustration 11.7). The intentionality for this second electro-acoustic instrument centered on wearable partnering. The two areas of investigation were (1) how sound interference or noise, resulting from improvised movement interventions between two bodies in wearables might simultaneously orchestrate the dance which in turn synthesizes and modulates the sound, and (2) how sound distortion and pitch bending might result from movement interventions and the shifting dynamics of proximity and distance between two dancers, as they move toward and away from one another in a form of sonic immersion. During the dance quintet of Act II, Scene VI, involving dancers Margeti and Michielon and performers Yoko Ishiguro and Rosella Galindo (DAP-Lab 2014), all partners move relationally but the central duet emerges from the intimate dynamics of Margeti’s and Michielon’s

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Illustration 11.7   Angeliki Margeti in Futurian ChestPlate playing her oscillating electro-acoustic instrument—completing the electronic circuit through touch, 2014. (Courtesy of Hans Staartjes.)

conjoined improvised performances (Illustration 11.8). The Futurian character enters into a proximal relationship with the RedMicro Dress to commence their dance. Michielon, in red, executes a repeated series of revolutionary poses, arms held straight and elbows rotating as she explains in the quote above, while Margeti as Futurian approaches in her blue and black garment, with a science fiction instrument adorning her chest (Illustration 11.7), its two small speakers attached to her lower back. The light and proximity sensors integrated into the circuitry and construction of the chest plate detect the presence of her partner— RedMicro Dress—and mobilize sounding. As bodies draw up close, closer, before retracting again, the sounding emitted from the two integrated speakers is actuated, intensified and distorted by the circuitry interactions. The  Futurian’s noise is picked up by the dynamic microphone worn by Michielon in the RedMicro Dress and transmitted to collaborating musician Oliver Doyle, who works with the sonic material, further distorting and amplifying the textures to create a whole new noise experience. Thus, the intimate entwinement of the body instrument is advanced from the initial RedDress performance by Michielon through dynamic methods of co-creation for compositional purposes. The choreographic here is the choreosonic. 168

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Illustration 11.8  Dancers Vanessa Michielon in RedMicro Dress and Angeliki Margeti in Futurian ChestPlate performing a noise duet in for the time being  [Victory over the Sun], Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadler’s Wells, London, 2014. (Courtesy of Michèle Danjoux.)

The ConductiveCoat and capacitive sensing Between October 10 and 12, 2014, I attended a research-creation laboratory on e-textiles, movement and sound facilitated by Marije Baalman, a hardware engineer at Studio for Electro Instrumental Music in Amsterdam (STEIM 2014). The workshop brought together experts from three divergent fields—music, design and dance—with the view to creating synergies and short performances through the convergence of our disciplines. Working teams consisted of costume designers, e-textile experts, interaction designers, sound artists, choreographers, dancers and performers. At the workshop, we used touch and proximity as triggers for sound and explored feedback using microphones and speakers and muscle sound dance using muscle sensors. Questions centered on design and performance concepts and aesthetics while also addressing other critical and technical issues such as how to attach the environment and the sound to the dancer, how to amplify small sounds, how to work with tactile feedback such as “felt” vibrations, and how to invite interaction through the qualities and appeal of materials. It was during this intense work period that I conceived of and created the ConductiveCoat prototype, opening up directions for future research. 169

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The ConductiveCoat is a garment created for interactive performance where sounding is initiated through proximity, movement and touch between dancers utilizing body capacitance, namely the electrical conductivity of the human body and its ability to store electricity. The coat is also designed to be a chair cover and part of a larger scenographic concept and interactive architecture, inspired loosely by Hussein Chalayan’s Afterwords—Autumn/Winter 2000 collection6 and the notion of soft furnishings such as chair covers transforming into dresses for the models to wear (Quinn 2005, 80) but similarities end there. It features a lining made from a pressure-sensitive conductive material called Velostat. A carbon-impregnated polyolefin material manufactured by 3M, Velostat is piezoresistive, meaning its electrical resistance decreases when pressured.7 Because of this specific property, it can be used to make basic sensors such as bend and pressure sensors, where the change in resistance can be measured and the resultant data harvested. I chose to use Velostat as a pressure sensor, which could make contact with the body through either sitting on it (while in chair cover mode) or through movement-wearing and the proximal touch of another entering the same interactive space. In terms of materiality, there are other conductive materials such as piezoresistive leather8 that would create a more sophisticated design outcome for this prototype. Velostat, however, is ideal for prototyping due to its affordability. The shell of the coat was intended to be quite basic, crafted from leather, utilizing a quick method of modeling the raw uncut skin around the dancer’s body and then securing with minimal stitching. The  emergent visual effect was intended to be organic in nature and akin to that of an Eastern wabi sabi aesthetic of incompleteness, impermanence and simplicity, where the form of the piece was dictated by the properties of the material ( Juniper 2003, 107). What we see is a fragmentary glimpse of the coat rather than the fully formed statement: quiet and contemplative, not demanding. Complexity of form, as with wabi sabi philosophy, was not so significant here because the main objective was to focus on the essential part of the design, with no further embellishment required beyond its functional requirement ( Juniper 2003, 113) in order to test the possibilities of using the Velostat in this way. Many conductive fabrics are copper or silvered colored and shiny, whereas Velostat is black and relatively unassuming, making it an ideal choice to use in this piece for its discreetness. Significantly, the coat explored the negative spatial relationships of Japanese Ma, the architecture of the garment adhering to and then departing from the body-contour, thus creating an all-important conductive pause between the body and its wearable architecture. These spaces of interrupted connectivity required the dancer-wearer to reestablish connection—through particular arching movements of their back or the touch of another pressing the contour of the garment to the surface of the body—to produce/recommence sounding. The experience of this collaborative workshop opened up new possibilities for this practicebased research investigation into the creation of choreosonic wearables that had until now not been exposed to the use of e-textiles. The integration of conductive and resistive threads, yarns and materials such as metallic lycra and conductive jersey (made of cotton, silver, yarn and spandex), silk organza and steel wool into the construction of garments and costumes for interactive performance was new and exciting terrain for me. Being situated alongside textile designers who were knowledgeable in the making of knitted stretch sensors—for instance, embroidered circuits, speakers and pressure sensors constructed out of cloth—and partaking in a shared environment of creation provided a rich and stimulating backdrop for the evolution of my own research methodology and design practice. Moreover, further expansion of my thinking came from the opportunity to work with new sound systems designed to translate movement, proximity and touch into sound. One such system was created by musician Jonathan Reus and 170

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Illustration 11.9  Musician Jonathan Reus and dancer Marc Nukoop exploring elements of sounding through proximity and touch, STEIM, Amsterdam, 2014. (Courtesy of Michèle Danjoux.)

involved electrodermal intra-body transmission activated through touch and proximity of bodies in an exploration of interpersonal space (Illustration 11.9). Reus’s own ongoing research focuses on body-sensor technology, but he had not yet worked with costumes and wearables, admitting that fashion and costume were a “complete black box” for him (Reus, email to author, October 15, 2014). In 2014, he created the performance Satellite Skin in response to telecommunications and the need for intimacy. Here he created a particular device crafted from steel wool and custom-built electronics that would function as an “electrified stage, transforming the performers into human instruments who can embody the acoustic feedback audible in the space by becoming a part of the feedback loop themselves” (Reus 2014). In our subsequent email correspondence with members of the STEIM workshop, Reus explains further: In “Satellite Skin,” I was using an analog system—so the phenomenon is very pure and I would even say transparent—it’s acoustic feedback electrified and fused with the bodies of the performers, it’s closer to physics than electrified gadgetry. For me 171

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at least this relationship between body and phenomenon is the poetry. Sound-wise the system has its own unruly personality—which can be surprising and is relentlessly organic. I take advantage of that and let the two elements intermingle. (Reus, email to author, October 21, 2014) Reus describes the intermingling of the body and acoustic space in this system as thrilling, situated “somewhere between sound art and performance” (Reus, email to author, October 21, 2014). He  goes on to explain in the same email correspondence that during the STEIM workshop he mapped signals to computer-controlled sounds to open up far more possibilities sound-wise. However, he noted that this reduced the phenomenon to a tool. He preferred the simplicity and elegance of the original phenomenon of sounds fused with the body (Reus, email to author, October 21, 2014). For me, introducing the wearable in the form of a leather coat with conductive lining (and pads on the floor [see Illustration 11.10]) was one way to bring the connectivity back to the bodies of the dancers enabling them to once again generate the sounds through elements of touch, proximity and wearing in the architecture of the performance space (Illustration 11.11).

Illustration 11.10   Performance setup with coat on chair exposing Velostat conductive lining, and copper organza spiral-cut conductive floor pads, STEIM, Amsterdam, 2014. (Courtesy of Michèle Danjoux.)

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Illustration 11.11  Marc Nukoop (seated on ConductiveCoat) performing a sounding dance of touch and proximity with dancer Miri Lee, STEIM, Amsterdam, 2014. (Courtesy of Michèle Danjoux.)

Conclusion This chapter presents a body of practice-based research derived from DAP-Lab’s performance for the time being [Victory over the Sun], with further explorations in the form of the ConductiveCoat, e-textiles and capacitive sensing from STEIM. It highlights how the disciplines of sound art and dance both crucially support the work that centers on the notion of wearable performance and its compositional potentials in interactive dance-theatre performance frameworks. In summary, the performative dynamics of the explorations focus on the “choreosonic,” a hybrid concept I define as “the conjoining of movement and sound through the wearable character.”The particular design aesthetics of the garments I constructed, with their visuo-sonic resonances and transcultural references—Russian Futurism and Suprematism in for the time being and Eastern wabi sabi and Japanese Ma in the case of the ConductiveCoat’s explorations of the spatial relations between garment and body—emphasize material contextuality, aiming to formulate an unconventional use of costume-as-character. Or more precisely, movement-sounding or choreosonic character via an evolving process of wearability and extended choreography. A main aim of the chapter has been to spotlight the use of a particular design-centered approach and stimulus to generate movement-sounding in performance. Namely, where a series of choreosonic designs, propagating sound or noise, have been introduced within a particular performance context. This  has been to demonstrate how exposure of the choreographic space of real-time interactive audiovisual performance to wearable interventions might lead to the emergence of an extended bodily dynamic and spatial awareness that guide 173

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the flow of movement. Supported by a performance methodology that interlaces artistic, theoretical, practical, empirical and discursive aspects, the chapter also exposes the notion of wearablity and costume not only as mediator of movement-sounding for the dancer but also as intermediary in the performance space. Finally, placing the dress as core to the dynamics of aurality and movement not  only enables the designer to push the boundaries of fashion and costume concepts in the field of dance performance, but simultaneously exposes the dancer to the act of wearing as a multisensory (tactile, aural, visual) performance technique. As a result, new and intimate interconnections are opened up in the compositional processes for collaborative movement-sound creation and tactile experience, between somatic imagination and sculptural aural form, extending the visual emphasis toward the choreosonic and a choreography that is audible. Thus, new forms of expressivity adorn the dancer in a mode that is distributed and provocative to all creative partners involved—dancer/choreographer, designer, musician, sonic and media artist—in the sharing and entanglement of our creative processes.

Notes 1 Studies in Costume  & Performance, published by Intellect can be accessed at: https://www. intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=235/. 2 “The Special Issue of Critical Costume,” edited by Rachel Hann and Sidsel Bech included contributions from twenty-two international contributors on the study and critical articulation of costume practices: http://criticalcostume.com/scene.html. 3 See Kozel (2007: 288–293) for an account of this wearable research project. 4 “Sensortized” is a word I have created to emphasize the sensorial bodily experience of the performer combined with their extension via technological/sensor interfaces. 5 Peter Vogel’s sculptures were exhibited as part of a vast historical and contemporary overview, Sound Art. Sound as a Medium of Art (2013) (March  17, 2012–January  6, 2013), at the ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany, featuring a range of works from Futurism to Fluxus through to Twitter sonifications. A strong focus was placed on contemporary practices, with works from ninety artists providing inspiring insights not only into the sound cosmos of contemporary art but also current architectural-sonic design, and interactive constellations where the visitor becomes the generator of sounds: http://soundart.zkm.de/en. 6 Viewed at the exhibition: Hussein Chalayan: From Fashion and Back (2009), Design Museum, London, January 22–May 17, 2009. Documentary film footage from Chalayan’s Afterwords Autumn/Winter 2000 show is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxOuOMcNvSU. 7 Velostat is brand name given to this piezoresistive material manufactured by 3M. Information on this fabric by Hannah Perner-Wilson and Mika Satomi (2009, 2013) is available at: http://www. kobakant.at/DIY/?p=381. 8 Conductive Piezoresistive Leather is both conductive and pressure and stretch sensitive and has similar properties to Velostat. Information on this fabric available at “How to get what you want”; http://www.kobakant.at/DIY/?p=5184.

References Bartlett, Rosamund, and Dadswell, Sarah, eds. 2012. Victory over the Sun: The World’s First Futurist Opera. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Böhmig, Michaela. 2012. “The Russian Cubo-Futurist Opera Victory over the Sun: Aleksei Kruchenykh’s Alogical Creation.” In The World’s First Futurist Opera:Victory over the Sun, edited by Rosamund Bartlett and Sarah Dadswell, 109–125. Exeter: University of Exeter. Brown, Barclay. 1982. “The Noise Instruments of Luigi Russolo.” Perspectives of New Music 20: 31–48. DAP-Lab (Design and Performance Lab). 2010a. “UKIYO [Moveable Worlds].” (Performance). Directed by Johannes Birringer and Michèle Danjoux, Kibla Media Arts Centre, Maribor, Slovenia, June 18–19.

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Choreosonic wearables ———. 2010b. “UKIYO [Moveable Worlds].” (Performance). Directed by Johannes Birringer and Michèle Danjoux, Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadler’s Wells, London, November 26. ———. 2012. “for the time being [Victory over the Sun].” (Performance). Directed by Johannes Birringer and Michèle Danjoux, Watermans International Digital Arts Festival, London, May 26–27. ———. 2014. “for the time being [Victory over the Sun].” (Performance). Directed by Johannes Birringer and Michèle Danjoux, Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadler’s Wells, London, April 3–4. ———. 2017. “Design and Performance Lab” (website). Accessed March 9, 2018. http://people.brunel. ac.uk/dap/. Fullman, Ellen. 2012. “A  Compositional Approach Derived from Material and Ephemeral Elements.” Leonardo Music Journal 22: 3–10. Garelick, Rhonda K. 2007. Electric Salome: Loïe Fuller’s Performance of Modernism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gourfink, Miriam. 2004. “Contraindre/2004.” Accessed August 20, 2018. http://www.myriam-gourfink. com/contraindre.html. Hann, Rachel, and Bech, Sidsel, eds. 2014. “Scene.” Special Issue, Critical Costume 2. Hindson, Catherine. 2013. “Dancing on Top of the World: A Serpentine through Late Nineteenth-Century Entertainment, Fashion and Film.” In Birds of Paradise: Costume as Cinematic Spectacle, edited by Marketa Uhlirova, 65–77. London: Koenig Books. Hussein Chalayan: From Fashion and Back. 2009. Exhibition curated by Donna Loveday.The Design Museum, London, January 21–May 17. Jones, Kim. 2015. “American Modernism: Reimagining Martha Graham’s Lost Imperial Gesture (1935).” Dance Research Journal 47 (3): 51–70. Juniper, Andrew. 2003. Wabi Sabi:The Japanese Art of Impermanence. Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing. Kimosphere no. 2 by DAP-Lab. 2015. Directed by Johannes Birringer and Michèle Danjoux. Prado Media Lab, Madrid, Spain, July 22–25. Kimosphere no. 3 by DAP-Lab. 2016. Directed by Johannes Birringer and Michèle Danjoux. 2016. Artaud Centre, Brunel University, London, April 4–9. Kozel, Susan. 2007. Closer: Performance,Technologies, Phenomenology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kruchenykh, Aleksei, Malevich, Kazimir, and Matiushin Mikhail. 2009. A Victory Over the Sun Album, vol. 1, compiled by Patricia Railing. Translated by Evgeny Steiner. Forest Row: Artist Bookworks. Kusch, Martin, and Poulin, Marie-Claude. 2007/2008. “Passage.” Accessed July  21, 2018. http://www. konditionpluriel.org/projects/passage/. Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McCann, Jane, and Bryson, David, eds. 2009. Smart Clothes and Wearable Technology. Cambridge: Woodhead. Perner-Wilson, Hannah. 2013. “Wearables/Materials/Pressure-Sensitive Conductive Sheet (Velostat/ Linqstat).” Accessed January 20, 2018. https://www.adafruit.com/product/1361. Perner-Wilson, Hannah, and Satomi, Mika. 2009. “Conductive Materials: Velostat.” Accessed January 20, 2018. http://www.kobakant.at/DIY/?p=381 Quinn, Bradley. 2002. Techno Fashion. Oxford: Berg Publishers. ———. 2005. “Afterwords: Autumn/Winter 2000.” In  Hussein Chalayan, Exhibition Catalogue, 80. Groningen: NAI Publishers. Reus, Jonathan. 2014. “Satellite Skin.” Accessed January 20, 2018. http://jonathanreus.com/?s=Jonathan+ Reus+Satellite+Skin. Schiphorst,Thecla. 2005.“whisper[s].” In aRt&D: Research and Development in Art. Rotterdam:V2_publishing, NAi Publishers. Seymour, Sabine. 2008. Fashionable Technology: The  Intersections of Design, Fashion, Science, and Technology. Vienna: Springer. Simon Fraser University, Canada. 2007. “The Whisper[s] Research Group.” Directed by Susan Kozel and Thecla Schiphorst. Accessed August 18, 2018. http://whisper.iat.sfu.ca. Sonami, Laetitia. 2017. “Lady’s Glove.” Accessed December 14, 2018. http://sonami.net/ladys-glove/. Sound Art. Sound as a Medium of Art. Curated by Peter Wiebel. 2012–2013. [ZKM, Karlsruhe, March 17, 2012–January 6, 2013]. STEIM. 2014. “Studio for STEIM.” Accessed January 15, 2018. http://steim.org/. Studies in Costume  & Performance, Accessed March  10, 2019. https://www.intellectbooks.com/ studies-in-costume-performance. Tao, Xiaoming. 2005. Wearable Electronics and Photonics. Cambridge: Woodhead Publishers.

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12 THE ANARCHIVE OF CONTEMPORARY DANCE Toward a topographic understanding of choreography Timmy De Laet

Introduction: Taking turns Around the turn of the millennium, a so-called “archival turn” (Stoler 2009, 44) placed itself amidst the already dazzling array of turns (linguistic, spatial, cognitive, materialist, etc.) that punctuated critical thought throughout the twentieth century. Calling attention to the manner in which the archive provides a material basis for thinking yet also functions as a discursive figure of thought (O’Driscoll 2002), the archival turn also affected the field of contemporary choreography and dance studies. For practitioners and scholars, it became increasingly urgent to ask how an embodied art form such as dance can be archived in a way that is not only enduring, but which can also accommodate the ever-changing nature and physicality that typify dance. By turning and returning to the archive, a significant number of choreographers have sought to undo the pervasive belief that dance, because of its reliance on the living body and embodied movement, is a notoriously ephemeral artistic practice too elusive for preservation through traditional archival resources such as photographs, written text, or recordings. The archival turn in dance found its clearest expression in the rise of various forms of choreographic re-enactment, which—in turn—reinvigorated debates on the preservation, mediality, transmission, and temporality of the “live” performing arts (Schneider 2011; Brooks and Meglin 2013; Sack 2015). Many of these debates hinge on the notion of the body as a living archive, undermining the pervasive doctrine of dance’s irreducible transience by foregrounding the body as a repository of sorts with its own mnemonic procedures and proper epistemic faculties (e.g., see Lepecki 2010; De Laet 2013; Nachbar 2017). The attempted alignment of the body with the archive nonetheless seems to divide critical discourse into two opposite camps that either overplay or renounce this trope. On the one hand, choreographic re-enactment has been taken to demonstrate how “the body is archive and archive a body,” leaving “no distinctions” between both (Lepecki 2010, 31). Even though, as we shall see, the body and the archive are profoundly imbricated and complementary in their ability to preserve and 177

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transmit choreography, there is no doubt that the body’s archival capacities differ greatly from the archive as we traditionally know it. A certain wariness is thus warranted with straightforward statements that rather crudely efface any difference between the body and the archive. In the end, these claims might only aggravate the wrongful assumptions that already becloud the discourse on the archive in relation to dance and the dancing body. Such erroneous assumptions inform the other side of the spectrum; the one that radically repudiates the idea of the body as a living archive. Dance theorist and practitioner Stephan Brinkmann (2013, 78), for example, unequivocally finds “the metaphor of the archive that is often invoked in dance studies” misleading because it seems to give to “remembrance in dance a site [einen Ort], which it does not have” (301, italics added, author’s translation). Reinforcing a troubling but still reigning conception of dance as “the only art form whose material is nothing but the body and its movements” (15), Brinkmann locates dance’s primary existence inside the body, even going as far as to claim that the dancing body becomes “a medium of consciousness … without using other media” (117). The fact that words, audiovisual media, or other external memory aids are for many practitioners essential means for the creation and transmission of choreography does not seem to play any substantial role in the choreographic practice envisioned by Brinkmann. Subscribing instead to a deeply humanist perspective on dance, he denounces the archive as an essentially meaningless metaphor that fails to capture the manner in which choreography is, in his opinion, preserved only in and through bodies. This chapter aims to counter the double-sided tendency that either conflates the archive with the body or categorically forecloses their confluence. To this end, I reconsider the alleged (in)commensurability of the body and the archive through the lens of what I will theorize as the ‘anarchive,’ a notion gleaned from both artistic practice and archival theory.1 The anarchive is, literally, an-archival because it leaves behind the classical archival principles of order, accessibility, and tangibility in favor of regeneration, submediality, and embodied memory. Thus, the an-archive, even if only by virtue of its terminology, places itself in an oblique position toward the traditional dance archive. Not  unlike the double portrait The Ambassadors, painted in 1533 by Hans Holbein the Younger, in which the remarkable appearance of a flattened, anamorphic skull only reveals its full contours when seen from a certain angle, so too does the anarchive look at the institution of the archive from a radically different and deforming point of view that undoes its boundaries and renders it, again and anew, perceptible, incorporable, reinventable. The contorted skull in Holbein’s painting might stand, uncannily perhaps, as an emblem for the stance contemporary dance is taking toward the archive. If Jacques Derrida is right to claim in Archive Fever (1996) that a selfeffacing violence is what fundamentally drives the archive, then the anarchive as it appears in what is designated here as ‘anarchival dance’ topples this movement. As suggested by its prefix, an-archival dance does indeed deconstruct the archive, but only to let it reemerge from a vantage point that reveals the submedial layers of dance and also ties choreography back to its own materiality. The  anarchive of dance, it must be said, is as elusive as dance itself; it only becomes palpable in practice. As anarchival dance can be defined as the putting into practice of the anarchive, this chapter singles out two examples that exemplify how the choreographic anarchive might operate. The  Anarchive-cycle (2009–2011) created by the German artist twin deufert&plischke foregrounds the anarchival principle of regeneration, asking to what extent choreographers can archive their work without archiving it in the traditional sense of the term. Meg Stuart’s Hunter (2014) similarly takes a retrospective stance and further exemplifies how anarchival dance pursues a unique alliance of materiality and temporality. The stakes of this alliance will become clear against the background of Derrida’s influential theorization of 178

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the archive as well as his notion of a spectral time. Interweaving the discussion of these cases with Derrida’s insights will expose the limitations of a Derridean deconstructionist framework for thinking about the relationships between the archive, dance, and time. Ultimately, this will lead me to search for a reified (an)archive in what I will call a topography of dance.

Anarchival recycling In 2009, the German artist twin deufert&plischke initiated a cycle of performances in which they aimed to recollect, revisit, and recycle what they once called the enormous “junk of traces” (2010) that had accumulated during the eight years they had been collaborating by then. When Kattrin Deufert and Thomas Plischke met in 2001 and went on to share their lives and work, they chose to present themselves as “artist twin” rather than as “couple” to sidestep the heterosexual bias implicit in the latter word. In their choreographic work, deufert&plischke likewise attempt to overthrow ingrained hierarchies, including the conventional organization of Western theater where onlooking spectators direct their gaze at living bodies present on stage. Often using participatory formats, they seek to transgress the boundaries between audience and performers. Deepening the encounter between both also ought to augment the social nature of the theatrical event. Choosing Anarchive as the overarching title for their series, deufert&plischke immediately highlighted how their intention was not to create a classic archival retrospective, but to stir up their artistic microcosm by reinfusing it with the input of Fremdkörper or foreign bodies. For  the three parts that to date the series comprises, the artist twin invited other choreographers, dancers, artists, and theorists to share and revise with them the choreographic methodologies they had been developing throughout the several years they worked together. One particularly interesting working method that is central to many of deufert&plischke’s pieces, including their Anarchive-cycle, is what the choreographers describe as a “process of reformulation” (Plischke 2009). For Anarchive#2: Second Hand (2010), which is analyzed here, deufert&plischke worked together with performance artist Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt, choreographer DD Dorvillier, philosopher Marcus Steinweg, and multimedia artist Bernard Schreiner. The performers were first asked to construe their personal archives by collecting photographs, films, texts, television images, advertisements, or any other items they wanted to include. During the first stage of the working process, the entire group would look at this “archival material” and write down in individual notebooks the associations and reflections it provoked. These notebooks were subsequently exchanged among the group members, with each being allowed to make adjustments, additions, deletions, or whatever they felt was necessary. By repeating this exchange several times, the initial notebooks were gradually transformed into a collection of relatively concrete movement descriptions, which formed the basis for the eventual choreography. The most intriguing aspect about this procedure of “reformulation” is that, even while it starts as a deliberately anarchival practice in which the “original” information is continuously overwritten or erased, the notebooks become in fact genuinely archival instruments, as they document nearly the entire creative process in a fairly meticulous manner. This documentation furthermore provides the means to literally hand over the choreographic material to other people. In the second part of Anarchive#2, audience members are asked to pull from under their seats an envelope that, as they discover, was already attached to it. In this envelope, they find three cards with movement descriptions, which turn out to be three samples from the score the dancers performed during the first part of the piece. Simple instructions like “Stand on the green. Bend the knees so much that you softly fall on the butt, then onto 179

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the back” serve as choreographic prompts to mobilize the spectators, inviting them to “reformulate second hand what just happened.” Spurring the audience to participate in the very same process of reformulation that led to the piece, deufert&plischke open up the theater space to collectively explore the generative potential of verbalized movement descriptions. Through the explicit incorporation of written documents into the conception and execution of the choreographic work, deufert&plischke do not  necessarily question the medial specificity of dance as an embodied art form, yet they do contest the privilege often granted to the body in the discourse on dance. Turning language into a collective and constitutive principle of the piece, they show how both textual and embodied rewriting is vital to the passing on of dance. As Brian Massumi attests, “The anarchive needs documentation—the archive—from which to depart and through which to pass” (2016, 7). Moreover, by advocating a genuine politics of change and sharing, deufert&plischke’s methodology of “reformulation” subverts the typically archival adherence of Western culture to keeping original works safe and intact. Allowing their choreographic material to be transmitted, replicated, and reanimated, deufert&plischke create a dynamic of dance rather than a dance that once will have been dynamic. This is a salient anarchival gesture that goes against the archive’s dominant structures and procedures of preservation. From this perspective, deufert&plischke’s anarchival dance comes close to the Oxford English Dictionary definition of the “anarchist” as “one who admits no ruling power;... one who upsets settled order” (OED, n.p.). The OED reference to “power” and “order” brings to mind Derrida’s (1996) oft-cited account of how power structures are inscribed in the very constitution of the archive. Tracing the archive back to its etymological roots, Derrida recalls the double meaning of the Greek word arkhē as signifying both “commencement” and “commandment,” two principles that still reverberate in the archive as we know it today. The archive is above all the place where things commence—where documents turn into origins and become sources for history through the place actively assigned to them. As Michel de Certeau ([1975] 1988, 72) says in The  Writing of History, “In  history everything begins with the gesture of setting aside.” Yet it is Derrida who stresses that this act of assignation is also a function of power, reminding us that only those in command get to decide whether a document deserves its place in the archive and in which form it is kept there. Precisely these selective procedures and medial transitions that undergird the inclusion of purportedly truthful or authentic “evidence” in the archive will lead Derrida to the crucial claim that “the archivization produces as much as it records the event” (1996, 17). Notwithstanding the importance of acknowledging the archive’s stated propensity to execute power and enforce assignation, I want to focus on the repressed and violent undercurrent that Derrida identifies in the archive and which he models on Freud’s psychoanalytical account of compulsory repetition. Just as obsessive behavior for Freud is fueled by a subliminal death drive; so too is the archive for Derrida geared toward a self-inflicted destruction that, paradoxically, constitutes its very being. In a typically deconstructionist twist of thought, Derrida intends to unearth the underlying operations that bring forth the archive and which, next to the enforced command of preservation, necessarily entail the need for destruction as its subjugated opposite. It is in this context that Derrida introduces, albeit in passing, the notion of the “anarchive,” asserting that “the death drive is above all anarchivic, one could say, or archiviolithic,” insofar as “it will always have been archive-destroying, by silent vocation” (1996, 10). This “silent vocation” intimates how the archive can operate only by virtue of repressing its virtual other, that is, the requirement to select and, hence, to forget. The dialectic between forgetting and remembering has been at the forefront of ongoing debates on the archive, history, and memory that swept across the humanities in the wake 180

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of the 1990s “memory boom,” which preceded and partly overlapped with the archival turn I referred to earlier (Klein 2000; Huyssen 2003; Ricœur 2004). Next to philosophers and historians, dance and performance scholars also have endeavored to come to grips with the idea that memory is history’s constitutive counterpart rather than its all too often denigrated opposite (Cubitt 2007). This tensed relationship between history and memory also underlies philosopher Benjamin Hutchens’s theorization of the anarchive in his 2007 essay “Techniques of Forgetting.” In response to Derrida’s identification of a destructive “anarchivic” or “archiviolithic” force in the archive, Hutchens seeks to demonstrate how living memory compensates for archival loss. In his view, the substratum of non-archivization that undergirds the archive points to an excess that, while escaping archival containment, opens up the realm of counter-memories, a term he borrows from Michel Foucault (1977) without, however, mentioning it. This kind of anarchival counter-memory, Hutchens (2007, 45) contends, does not only exceed but also disrupts the archive by furnishing “alternative protocols … as well as thematic frameworks that can preserve memories that have been excluded from the canon.” The “alternative protocols” and “thematic frameworks” envisaged by Hutchens are concretely realized in artistic projects such as deufert&plischke’s Anarchive series. The protocol in this case consists of the laborious procedure of reformulation, which results in a multitude of traces, both material and embodied, that are produced and passed along in a choreographic archival circuit that refuses to become immobilized and which requires continuous reactivation by both performers and spectators. Together with their collaborators, deufert&plischke thus generate a gamut of counter-memories that work against the alignment of either the archive or memory with single origins. As the choreographers explain: “Through the reformulation of memories by others, doubts grow about the place in your memory you first thought you were familiar with. Eventually you strike at a moment where memories are not  yet fixed, before the territory of the memory is demarcated. That active interaction with your own memory is a key to our work” (Peeters 2006, n.p.; author’s translation). Deufert&plischke’s anarchival principle of reformulation is in many ways far removed from the criteria of integrity, sustainability, provenance, and systematic order that conventionally define the archive. This begs the question, to what extent does their concern with (re-)generating and (re-)embodying choreographic traces, both written and corporeal, impact on the archive as we commonly understand it? In what sense does their Anarchive series not simply constitute another set of new works that actually erases rather than revives the historical and mnemonic residues on which it is allegedly based? In short, how can one archive without archiving?

The undecidable specter of the archive The primordial anarchival violence that, following Derrida, lies at the heart of any act of archivization seems to put the archive “sous rature,” or under erasure. In  Of Grammatology ([1967] 1976), Derrida literally visualizes this sous rature by crossing out certain words, such as “is,” “thing,” or “outside.” As Gayatri Spivak (1976, xvii) explains, this crossing out is a visual-discursive strategy Derrida adapts from Heidegger’s Zur Seinsfrage (The  Question of Being, 1958), with the difference being that in Derrida’s deconstructionist philosophy the sous rature is no longer meant to “point at an inarticulable presence” as in Heidegger’s metaphysics, but to highlight “the mark of the absence of a presence, … the lack at the origin that is the condition of thought and experience.” At the heart of Derrida’s deconstructionist approach is indeed the assumption that foundational notions (such as being, matter, experience, or the 181

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body) are never fully present for themselves, but necessarily defined by that which seems most extraneous to them (such as absence, thought, language, or technology). Even though the sous rature does not appear as such in Archive Fever, it does resonate in Derrida’s characterization of the archive as driven by a self-consuming archiviolithic force that is destructive in excluding certain materials and in effacing the archive’s own workings. This emphasis on the archive’s erosive side effects has led various commentators (Steedman 2001; O’Driscoll 2002) to criticize Derrida for sublimating the archive in a primarily discursive figure that cannot be further removed from either the material reality of the archive or the actual sensory experience of handling archival documents. What such critiques often fail to address, however, is that Derrida’s deconstructionist tenets simply do not allow the archive to acquire some degree of material or conceptual stability. Undecidability is a key principle in Derrida’s thinking, and it also deeply informs his view on the archive. The implications of this stance are revealed when he, in Archive Fever, mimics the act of archival assignation by assigning a spectral temporality to the archive: “[The archive] is spectral a priori: neither present nor absent “in the flesh,” neither visible nor invisible, a trace always referring to another whose eyes can never be met, no more than those of Hamlet’s father, thanks to the possibility of a visor” (1996, 84). Following the logic of différance (Derrida’s neologism for the incessant interplay of difference and deferral that defines linguistic signification), the historical traces housed in the archive cannot be otherwise than suspended between the past and the present given that this was the condition of the trace to begin with. As he writes in an earlier essay, “The trace cannot be conceived—nor therefore can différance—on the basis of either the present or the presence of the present,” which impels us to deal “with a ‘past’ that has never been nor will ever be present” ([1967] 1973, 152). Never fully coinciding with either the past or the present, the archive becomes instead an “anticipation of the future to come” (1996, 79). Derrida’s foregrounding of the future as the archive’s genuine temporality keeps intact some sparkle of hope and promise in an otherwise dreadful picture of anarchival violence that, through the authoritative power of selection and allocation, puts the archive sous rature while holding both the past and the present at bay. The notion of spectrality thereby furnishes the means to trouble any simplified assumption that the archive provides easy access to the past, or that it is simply there, in and for itself. “There are several times of the specter,” Derrida writes in Specters of Marx, stating that, “It is a proper characteristic of the specter, if there is any, that no one can be sure if by returning it testifies to a living past or to a living future, for the revenant may already mark the promised return of the specter of living being. Once again, untimeliness and disadjustment of the contemporary” (1994, 123). On Derrida’s account, the specter becomes an emblem for the manner in which the present is always already infused with both the past and the future, thus providing an alternative for the ingrained conception of a linear and chronological temporality. Precisely for this reason, Derrida’s notion of a spectral time has proven to be an appealing perspective for theorists of history as well as dance, performance, and theater scholars invested in overturning the habitual view that the present (and, therefore, “live” performance) only unfolds in a fleeting moment, irrevocably receding into an essentially irrecoverable past (e.g., Schneider 2011; Bevernage 2012). Undoubtedly, the interest in spectrality has been important in undermining the doctrine of live performance’s alleged ephemerality, but the deeper implications of Derrida’s theorization of both spectrality and the archive and how this puts also the past and the present sous rature are not always fully taken into account. Whereas Derrida’s penchant for undecidability might be beneficial for disrupting oppositional dualisms (speech versus writing, past versus present, body versus text), his deconstructionist agenda prevents him (and others in his wake) from claiming anything more substantial beyond the mere fact that these 182

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structuring opposites are mutually dependent and exist in a state of perpetual deferral due to the condition of co-constitutive difference. It is telling, in this respect, that in the passage quoted above, Derrida describes the spectrality of the archive as “neither present nor absent ‘in the flesh’” (1996, 84; italics added). To be sure, as soon as the past enters the archive in anticipation of becoming history, it is bereft of the flesh once attached to its proverbial bones. The problem arises when ‘fleshlessness’ turns into the inevitable outcome of the deconstructionist project, which in its implacable critique of logocentrism is aimed exactly at keeping foundational categories, such as the “past” and the “present,” under continuous erasure—or sous rature. In  his essay “Mimique,” Mark Franko arrives at a similar conclusion when he claims that the pervasive trope of “ephemerality-as-disappearance,” which continues to haunt the discourse on dance until today, “is a synonym of the Derridean trace,” precisely because it is the very “palpability and concreteness of differences [that] get lost in Derrida’s trace” ([1995] 2008, 245). Franko intends to restore the physical inscription that dance performs (both in space and the body) by foregrounding memory as a tertiary type of mimesis, next to the primary and secondary forms of mimesis (or, imitation and representation, respectively) that Derrida discerns in his reading of Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1897 text “Mimique.” By viewing memory, Franko (252) argues, “not as reproduction (copy) but as the capacity to perform anew, although differently,” it prevents “the unrepeatable” from becoming “irrecuperable.” This third mnemonic kind of mimesis thus ought to give a somewhat firmer ground back to the body, which was at risk of getting lost in the undecidable free play of the Derridean trace-logic that precludes the possibility of any substantial presence due to the twin dynamics of difference and deferral. Interestingly, just as Hutchens evokes counter-memories to undermine the anarchival effacements effectuated by the archive itself, so too does Franko resort to the notion of memory. On his account, memory becomes a condition for dance to reappear and thus, we could add, to compensate for the archiviolithic workings by which the archive conceals its own exclusionary operations. The invocation of memory brings to mind Diana Taylor’s (2003) much-cited distinction between the archive and the repertoire, which similarly posits that embodied memory functions as an alternative repertoire next to the institutionalized and material archive. What is less often recalled, however, is Taylor’s most crucial claim that the archive and the repertoire “exist in a constant state of interaction” (21; italics added).2 Yet it is exactly this interaction that not only obstructs the irrecuperable disappearance of dance, but which also gestures toward a temporality less elusive than Derrida’s spectral time.

The reification of dance’s anarchival substratum Even those who consider dance as a bodily art form pur sang would have to admit that the immaterial incorporation of choreography does not exist completely separate from its tangible inscriptions. Even Derrida, despite his emphasis on the elusive spectral time of the archive, avows that some degree of materialization is necessary for the archive to become operational: “There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside” (1996, 11). The issue that Derrida leaves unaddressed is whether the very idea of “a technique” or “a place of consignation” does not  already imply the interaction of bodies with material remains. Nonetheless, asserting that archival documents generally involve some kind of externalized residue, Derrida does raise a poignant question: “But where does the outside commence?” (8). “This question,” he

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continues, “is the question of the archive. There are undoubtedly no others” (8). For dance, it is perhaps even more pertinent to ask where to locate the inside and the outside of the archive. One possible way to broach this question is the fairly basic observation that material props take up a central role in what is considered here as anarchival dance. In Meg Stuart’s solo Hunter (2014), the audience enters while Stuart is sitting at a table, arranging and cutting up photographs, using pushpins to make a sort of collage, and eventually even setting a few pictures on fire. A camera hanging above Stuart’s head projects her actions onto a screen in the performance space. Showing, handling, holding, and manipulating these props act like a shamanic initiation ritual that propels Stuart to hunt the memories that haunt her personal and artistic history. As the piece first proceeds into a danced solo and then into a spoken monologue in the second half, it shows Stuart transitioning from a bodily to a verbally articulate memory. After the opening scene, she first draws the spectator into a staggering parade of choreographic movements, beginning with a dance in which her arms seem to figure as the disoriented pointers of a clock—a motif that will return various times. At the same time, Vincent Malstaf ’s perturbing soundscape of noise, song snippets, voices, or other concrete sounds is enveloping her, perhaps steering her. Various screens on the stage intermittently show video footage of old family recordings, Super-8 landscape sights, or the experimental videos created by Chris Kondek. These video images are integrated into Barbara Ehnes’s ingenious set design that, next to large sheep wool canvases on the background, includes copper wires that spring from an enormous but narrow plastic tube and span the entire scene. This combination of ritualistic elements and industrial material conjures up different imageries of transmission, channeling, and reception. Within this charged environment, Stuart’s body tunes in to different frequencies that ultimately seem to overload her to the point that she covers herself up in a gigantic patchwork dress stitched together with clothes of garish colors. Staging a struggle with the layers of fabric, Stuart not only evokes the burden that any accumulated past, how colorful it may be, can impose on us, but she also seems to be trying to stop herself from gazing at her personal (an)archive. Until, at a sudden moment, she firmly throws off the dress, having discovered that, attempting to hide and disguise as much as she wants, the past refuses to be tamed. In Hunter’s second part, Stuart takes recourse to the spoken word, even though she avows in her confessional monologue that, “I certainly did not trust words … I swore to myself I would never talk on stage” (2016). Talking, however, allows Stuart to dig deeper into her personal memories, which she intersperses with anecdotes about Trisha Brown losing her memory or the sudden death of her “guardian angel” David Bowie. Throughout the piece, Stuart creates what we might call a “mnemonic space” that extends beyond Stuart’s body or the sheer present moment of the performance. As she says in an interview on Hunter: “I was quite curious if, through this process, somehow, I could go back in time.… And also, sometimes very often, I feel like I’m influenced or I’m dancing narratives or stories that are not my own. So there is a dialogue to the past in this work” (2015; italics added). The  perhaps inadvertent yet fascinating juxtaposition in this quote of the punctual “sometimes” with the reiterative “very often” hints at a strikingly pliable temporality, as it lumps together two seemingly opposite qualifiers for describing the experience of time. Moreover, by describing her work as “a dialogue to” instead of “with” the past, Stuart suggests how she keeps a certain distance from the past to which she is nonetheless reaching out. Ensuing from her experience of “dancing narratives or stories that are not [her] own,” Stuart’s Hunter is aimed at staging—or, indeed, at commencing and commanding—a heterogeneous and asynchronous composite of influences that blow from 184

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the past and propel into the future as they continue to shape and reshape her artistic identity. However, if Hunter invokes a certain kind of spectrality, it differs from the Derridean variant in that Stuart ultimately presents her own body as the materialized and materializing vessel through which these traces are channeled. Rather than conjuring an elusive appearance eternally suspended between supposedly conflicting temporalities, Stuart gives a palpable presence to the deep mnemonic layers that make up the texture of her choreographic body and persona. But what, then, is the function of these layers with regard to what I have been calling the anarchive? The choreographic anarchive in Hunter comes close to what sociologist Rudi Laermans and art theorist Pascal Gielen (2007) have theorized as the “digital an-archive,” even if the context seems very different. According to Laermans and Gielen, the digital age confronts us with a radically different kind of archive, or a “non-archived archive” (n.p.), one that is largely invisible and fundamentally unstable. Not only cyberspace and the Internet, but also databases or even any type of computer work presuppose a cluster of supporting programs that remain hidden for the user and which translate series of bits and codes into usable content that changes according to every different query. This underlying network of technological mediators constitutes a performative anarchive that Laermans and Gielen, drawing on the work of media scholars Ernst Wolfgang and Boris Groys, describe as “sub-medial” because it concerns a “usually hidden and non-accessible programmatic organization,” while it is also “anarchival” because it “lacks the capacity to remember in an ordered way” (n.p.). Stuart’s Hunter brings to light a choreographic variant of this submedial anarchive: it exposes how the anarchive of dance is scaffolded not so much (at least not always) by digital codes or software programs but rather by a dispersed and largely latent assemblage of embodied memories and material props. While in general such underlying assemblages tacitly subtend diverging and possibly conflicting histories of dance as such, anarchival dance reveals these substrata by reifying them overtly through the body and other media.

The temporality of the anarchive Dance scholar Anna Pakes (2011, 40) once dauntingly asked, “How do dances come into existence? How do they persist? What is the nature of their dependence on other things, such as dancers, performances, scores, or film records?” Raising these questions, Pakes intends to rethink the ontological coming-into-being (rather than the being) of dance. The anarchive of dance, as I have been theorizing it thus far, might contribute to this project by virtue of at least two conspicuous features: Whereas anarchival dance springs from the heterogeneous imbrication of bodily, mental, and material memories, this intricate convolution is also rematerialized—or, (re)presented—on stage. However, to the extent that such observations are already part and parcel of any dancer’s daily practice, the more pressing question to ask might be this: If the anarchive finds itself always already in a condition of multiplicity, drawing together bodies and material remains, memory and history, medial substrates and mediatized subtracts, perhaps the question of the (an)archive is not so much when it began, but rather where it begins? While the penchant for periodization in traditional historiography often leads to a search for origins in time, perhaps the only way to broach the true temporality of the (an)archive is to begin with its spatiality. As much is suggested by Derrida (1996, 3), who claims that the archive belongs to a “topo-nomology” insofar as it takes place at “the intersection of the topological and the nomological, of the place and the law, of the substrate and the authority.” Perhaps counterintuitively, then, the question of the (an)archive might have to do more with space than with time. 185

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Choreographer Martin Nachbar places a similar emphasis on space when he reflects on his re-enactment of a cycle of solos created by the expressionist dancer Dore Hoyer in the early 1960s. Nachbar (2017, 29–30) defines choreography both as “the repeatable inscription of or in space by a knowledgeable moving body” and as the “externalized writing of imprints under the skin.” Following this definition, he argues that in order for the dance archive to become truly productive, it is necessary to seek, actively, for an ongoing exchange between these two in- and ex-scribing dimensions of choreography, given that the dance archive “is not ‘placed’ in space as a conventional archive would be: it is multi-sited” (21; italics added). Taking Nachbar’s suggestion one step further, I would like to propose that, when we approach the archive as a multi-sited space, it is topology—or perhaps even topography—we should be concerned with. In relating time and space under the rubric of the archive, it bears recalling that Henri Bergson famously critiqued modernity’s invention to spatialize time and to divide it into artificial measurable units. According to Bergson ([1907] 1998), so-called standard clock time obscured the sight of what he calls la durée (duration), his term for a qualitative time that exists as an acentered flux of variation in which the past and the present coalesce.Yet Bergson’s erasure, his own sous rature, of space in time is arguably one step too far. As the French philosopher Michel Serres ([1982] 1995, 108) states, Bergson’s “effort to go back from the solid to the liquid—from space to time … is too hastily put” since “space is dense with flux as well.” Serres himself would later refine his view of the relationship between space and time. In a series of conversations with Bruno Latour ([1990] 1995, 59), Serres maintains that time “percolates,” as it “flows in a turbulent and chaotic manner.” And this movement is best understood if you “take your inspiration from topology,” rather than from space as such, since then you might “discover the rigidity of these proximities and distances you consider arbitrary” (60; italics added). To clarify his point, Serres evokes the striking image of a crumpled handkerchief: If you take a handkerchief and spread it out in order to iron it, you can see in it certain fixed distances and proximities. If you sketch a circle in one area, you can mark out nearby points and measure far-off distances. Then take the same handkerchief and crumple it … Two distant points suddenly are close, even superimposed. If, further, you tear it in certain places, two points that were close can become very distant. This science of nearness and rifts is called topology, while the science of stable and well-defined distances is called metrical geometry. (Serres and Latour 1995, 60; italics added) By describing topology as a “science,” Serres emphatically puts forward topology as a solid methodological approach that foregoes the neat and structured order of classical science, pursuing instead a seemingly aleatory combination of disparate events, objects, practices, or ideas that, when joined together on a topological map of thinking, start to illuminate one another. While this notion of topology primarily informs the methodology of Serres’s own philosophical work, it also stands as an emblem for his view on time. In the folds and tears of the handkerchief, temporality is thawed from the frozen state that linear chronology assigns to it, turning time instead into an unruly mixture of different pasts and presents that, from a topological point of view, can be both remote and close at a varying pace. Serres’s redressing of temporality into a topology of times provides a productive perspective to recalibrate not only the entangled relationship of time with space but also the imbrication of the archive with the anarchive of dance. If the anarchive designates the submedial space of dance, it consists of the manifold pasts and memories that dancers in- and ex-scribe 186

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by respatializing bodily imprints and reactivating material remains. Anarchival dance, then, considered as the anarchive put into practice and exposed on stage, offers a performative topological mapping of those traces the archive, as we traditionally know it, cannot house or hold. These traces can take many forms, going from the clockwise movements of Stuart’s arms in Hunter, to spectators performing choreographic instructions in deufert&plischke’s Anarchive#2, to notebooks documenting creative processes, to video images or photographs projected on the background of the stage. By turning these traces into the very material of performance, anarchival dance reveals the deeper and largely virtual stratum of the anarchive on which dance continuously draws and from which it derives its contours as it unfolds, through movement, in space and time. Within this space-time, choreography becomes, like Serres’s handkerchief, the compositional configuration of temporal proximities and distances, established through the ongoing negotiation with the past and the present. As such, it turns historical distance (again a spatiotemporal category) into a flexible and creative tool rather than a mere marker of the gap between different times (De Laet 2017). But in order to fully extend Serres’s percolated model of both time and thought to dance, it may be useful to exchange his term topology for topography. Taking into account that the Greek term logos is intimately connected with the mind, reason, and discursivity, we might gain more from emphasizing the link between topos and the writing practice (“graphein”) that choreography is and to look at dance from a topographical perspective. Not  without coincidence, “topographies” is also the term deufert&plischke use to describe how the words and symbols written on the pages of their notebooks become the blueprint for movements “written” in the performance space (Plischke 2009, 68). In Anarchive#1, this topography is even literally transferred to the stage, which because of the visible presence of terms written on rectangular placards hanging across the space, turns into multiple “conceptual landscapes to move through,” with “the dance floor becoming a network of interrelated terms, texts, interests” (deufert&plischke 2014, n.p.). Stuart’s Hunter, in contrast, presents an entirely different topographical mapping of the anarchival layers that buttress and impregnate her choreographic practice. By moving, walking, standing, or talking in an inventive set design of which all elements seem to support the memory work she performs during the piece, she creates a mnemonic space that enables her to draw, choreographically and imaginatively, proximities between otherwise dispersed memories, thus giving a tangible sense to Serres’s notion of a percolated time.

Conclusion Anarchival dances such as those discussed throughout this chapter ultimately propose to substitute the Derridean sous rature, or the placing under erasure of certain concepts, for the relational and more constructive figure of the “trait d’union,” or the hyphen. As a graphic sign that visually conjoins two words while still keeping them apart, the hyphen both marks and bridges a gap. As Peggy Kamuf (2005, 274) points out, there is a “double sense of articulation” to the hyphen as that “which both joins what it separates and separates what it joins.” Anarchival dance does not place either the past or the present under the erasing rubric of Derrida’s spectrality, but neither does it privilege the sheer now of performance as a singular point in time that condemns the body to an irreversible disappearance. Instead, it compels us to conceive of choreography as a specific kind of topography that functions as a trait d’union, as the hyphen or connective link between, on the one hand, the submedial layers that constitute the anarchive of dance and, on the other hand, the reified spectrality that dance effectuates by pulling together and by rematerializing different temporalities in space. Put 187

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otherwise, anarchival dance brings to light a topo-choreo-graphic mapping that is propelled by the forceful confluence of intangible bodily traces, material objects, and spatial inscriptions. Dance considered as a topo-choreo-graphy is thus the unordered reordering—in the double sense of rearranging and of calling forth again and anew—of the unruly anarchive that subtends the history of dance. This topography of dance presupposes a reified spectrality that refuses to remain suspended between different times, precisely because it coagulates, however temporarily, in the space-time that, rather than the body, is dance’s primary medium. The issue with which this chapter began—that is, whether the body can rightly be called a living archive—actually foregoes the more complicated convolutions through which the “archival turn” has manifested itself in choreographic practice. Rather than merely asking whether the body can serve as a repository and reactivating medium of past movements, the more pertinent question is how dance mobilizes not only the body but also time, space, and writing in order to explore the variety of incarnations through which dance might reappear. The notion of the ‘anarchive’ helps to uncover these submedial strata that, probably because they pertain so obviously to choreography, often go unnoticed. “Dance is an art in space and time,” Merce Cunningham once said. “The object of the dancer is to obliterate that” ([1952] 1992, 37). What I have described as “anarchival dance” makes the exact opposite move: By digging into the submedial anarchive that scaffolds choreography, anarchival dance exposes to what extent going back to choreographic pasts is both a temporal and—literally—a spatial matter. It is in the whizzing tide of reanimation that the anarchive brings to light the need to conceive of dance as a topo-choreo-graphy that, coupled through multiple hyphens, makes time cross with space, and vice versa. Once we consider the “archival turn” in dance as a truly anarchival drift, the idea that also the body can act as an archive might already be in need of revision.

Notes 1 The “anarchive” is a term that has surfaced occasionally in the critical discourse on the archive primarily to open up new ways of thinking about the archive. Media scholar Wolfgang Ernst is often credited as one of the first to propose the “anarchive” as a notion to probe how our current digital culture poses significant challenges to traditional conceptions of the archive (see Ernst 2002). Another incipient attempt at theorizing the anarchive that comes probably closest to my own approach in this chapter is The Go-To How to Book of Anarchiving (Murphie 2016), in which various authors (including Brian Massumi and Erin Manning) speculate on the potential of the anarchive for performative practices and artistic research. 2 In a 2012 essay, “Save As,” Taylor adds to her distinction between the archive and the repertoire the third category of digital technology, which poses new challenges in terms of access and preservation. As in The Archive and the Repertoire, Taylor “insist[s] that the embodied, the archival, and the digital overlap and work together and mutually construct each other” (n.p.), but again she is more concerned with emphasizing the differences between these three modalities instead of dealing with how they interact.

References Bergson, Henri. (1907) 1998. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Bevernage, Berber. 2012. History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence:Time and Justice. New York: Routledge. Brinkmann, Stephan. 2013. Bewegung Erinnern: Gedächtnisformen im Tanz. Bielefeld, Germany: transcript Verlag.

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The anarchive of contemporary dance Brooks, Lynn Matluck, and Joellen A. Meglin, eds. 2013. Preserving Dance Across Time and Space. New York: Routledge. Cubitt, Geoffrey. 2007. History and Memory. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Cunningham, Merce. (1952) 1992. “Space, Time, and Dance.” In Merce Cunningham: Dancing in Space and Time, edited by Richard Kostelanetz, 37–40. Chicago: Chicago Review Press. de Certeau, Michel. (1975) 1988. The Writing of History. Translated by Tom Conley. New York: Columbia University Press. De Laet, Timmy. 2013. “Bodies with(out) Memories: Strategies of Re-Enactment in Contemporary Dance.” In Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture, edited by Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik, 135–152. London: Routledge. ———. 2017. “Giving Sense to the Past: Historical D(ist)ance and the Chiasmatic Interlacing of Affect and Knowledge.” In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment, edited by Mark Franko, 33–56. New York: Oxford University Press. Derrida, Jacques. (1967) 1997. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. (1967) 1973. “Différance.” In Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, 129–160. Translated by David B. Allison. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. (1993) 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge. ———. (1995) 1996. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. deufert&plischke. Anarchive#2: Second Hand. In collaboration with DD Dorvillier, Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt, Marcus Steinweg, and Bernhard Schreiner. Kaaistudios, Brussels, February 3–4. ———. 2010. After talk moderated by the author at Kaaitheater, Brussels, February 4. ———. 2014. “An Introduction to the Anarchive.” Accessed March 2, 2018. http://deufert-und-plischke. tumblr.com/post/74047268853/an-introduction-to-the-anarchiv. Ernst, Wolfgang. 2002. Das Rumoren der Archive: Ordnung als Unordnung. Berlin: Merve Verlag. Foucault, Michel. 1977. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In  Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by Donald F. Bouchard, 139–164. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Franko, Mark. (1995) 2008. “Mimique.” In Migrations of Gesture, edited by Carrie Noland and Sally Ann Ness, 241–258. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1958. The Question of Being. Translated by William Kluback and Jean Wilde, bilingual edition. New York: Twayne Publishers. Hutchens, Benjamin. 2007. “Techniques of Forgetting? Hypo-Amnesic History and the An-Archive.” SubStance 36 (2): 37–55. Huyssen, Andreas. 2003. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kamuf, Peggy. 2005. Book of Addresses. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Klein, Kerwin Lee. 2000. “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse.” Representations 69: 127–150. Laermans, Rudi, and Pascal Gielen. 2007. “The Archive of the Digital An-Archive.” Image & Narrative 17. Accessed February  17, 2018. http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/digital_archive/laermans_ gielen.htm. Lepecki, André. 2010. “The Body as Archive:Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances.” Dance Research Journal 42 (2): 28–48. Massumi, Brian. 2016. “Working Principles.” In The Go-To How to Book of Anarchiving, edited by Andrew Murphie, 6–8. Montréal: The Senselab. Murphie, Andrew, ed. 2016. The Go-To How to Book of Anarchiving. Montréal: The Senselab. Nachbar, Martin. 2017. “Tracing Sense/Reading Sensation: An Essay on Imprints and Other Matters.” In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment, edited by Mark Franko, 19–32. New York: Oxford University Press. O’Driscoll, Michael. 2002. “Derrida, Foucault, and the Archiviolithics of History.” In After Poststructuralism: Writing the Intellectual History of Theory, edited by Rajan Tilottama and Michael O’Driscoll, 284–309. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Oxford English Dictionary Online. “Anarchist.” Accessed March 1, 2018. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/ 7114?redirectedFrom=anarchist. Pakes, Anna. 2011. “Phenomenology and Dance: Hussserlian Meditations.” Dance Research Journal 43 (2): 33–49.

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Timmy De Laet Peeters, Jeroen. 2006. “Een plek voor rouwarbeid.” Program note for deufert&plischke, Directory 3: Tattoo. Accessed March 22, 2019. http://sarma.be/docs/948. Plischke, Thomas. 2009. “Secondhand.” In  Monstrum: A  Book on Reportable Portraits, edited by Kattrin Deufert, Sandra Noeth, and Thomas Plischke, 54–81. Hamburg, Germany: Gemeinschaftspraxis. Ricœur, Paul. (2000) 2004. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sack, Daniel. 2015. After Live: Possibility, Potentiality, and the Future of Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Schneider, Rebecca. 2011. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. London: Routledge. Serres, Michel. (1982) 1995. Genesis. Translated by Geneviève James and James Nielson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Serres, Michel, and Bruno Latour. (1990) 1995. Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. Translated by Roxanne Lapidus. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. (1976) 1997. “Translator’s Preface.” In  Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ix–lxxxvii. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Steedman, Carolyn. 2001. Dust. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Stoler, Laura Ann. 2009. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stuart, Meg. 2015. “Dans les coulisses avec Meg Stuart: Interview with Meg Stuart about ‘Hunter.’” Interview by Les Spectacles Vivant de Centre Pompidou. February 4–7. Accessed February 10, 2018. https://vimeo.com/125044311. ———. 2016. Hunter. Damaged Goods, NT Gent Minnemeers, Ghent, February 18–20. Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2012. “Save As.” E-Misférica 9 (12): n.p. Accessed February 14, 2018. http://hemisphericinstitute. org/hemi/en/e-misferica-91/taylor.

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13 CUBISM, FUTURISM, AND LEONIDE MASSINE’S CHOREOGRAPHY FOR PARADE Gay Morris

Introduction Shortly before the Ballets Russes opened its 1917 Paris season, Serge Diaghilev told Alexandre Mavroudis of L’Opinion that the company was dedicated to all things new; consequently, its forthcoming season would concern itself with futurism and cubism, two of the major vanguard artistic movements of the day (Mavroudis 1917). This was a far cry from the Russian inflected naturalism and exoticism on which the company had built its reputation. The ballet that would come to epitomize this aesthetic shift was Parade, which the Ballets Russes premiered at the Châtelet Theatre, Paris, on May 18, 1917.1 Parade introduced popular entertainment into the world of ballet. Its title referred to the brief parades, or previews, of shows that performers offered the crowds attending Parisian fairs and circuses. Parade not only focused on amusement for an urban mass society, its inclusion of cubist and Italian futurist innovations referenced the vast social and technological changes that were occurring in the early twentieth century. The ballet was the result of a collaboration among four forward-thinking artists working under Diaghilev’s aegis: Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Erik Satie, and Leonide Massine. Over the years, Parade has earned much critical attention, but most of it has been focused on Cocteau’s libretto, Picasso’s designs, and Satie’s score. Massine’s choreography is often considered insignificant compared to the contributions of the other men. On the few occasions when his choreography has been discussed, it most often is associated with Italian futurism.2 In this chapter, I will not only suggest that Massine’s choreography played a vital role in the ballet but that his working methods and approach to choreography owed more to cubism than futurism. Making the distinction between cubism and futurism is not simply a matter of stylistic quibbling. In laying out a path close to cubism, Massine set Western ballet in the direction of a formalist modernism. This was not inevitable. Diaghilev and Massine had close encounters with futurism, and had they pushed the Ballets Russes more emphatically in a futurist direction, the company’s aesthetic (and possibly the canon of Western twentieth-century ballet) would have been quite different. The futurists called for a violent destruction of the past in order to convey the speed and mechanized power of the new century. Massine’s vision of modernity was of another sort. He  sought to bring ballet into the twentieth century without destroying the form itself. 191

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In doing so he, like Picasso, created an art that exposed the contingency of the modern condition. The element of ambiguity that infused both Massine’s choreography for Parade and Picasso’s cubist works raised questions concerning reality, representation, and meaning in art. At the same time both men emphasized an art that created its own reality, related to but different from the reality of everyday life. It was a reality that echoes a comment made by Michel Foucault regarding Baudelaire’s “attitude of modernity.” “It was,” Foucault writes, “an exercise in which extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it” (Foucault 2010, 41). Through an analysis of the dances in Parade in conjunction with cubist and futurist theory, I will attempt to show that Massine’s use of distortion and angularity of forms, integration of vernacular gestures with abstract movement, independent articulation of body elements, depersonalization, and visual wit were more closely allied with cubism than futurism, thereby reflecting the choreographer’s particular interests.

Early experimentation Massine and Diaghilev were acquainted with the futurists before meeting Picasso and engaging with cubism. The futurists had appeared on the scene in 1909 with a manifesto that was published on the front page of Le Figaro.3 Diaghilev and Massine met the futurists in Italy in late 1914, but Diaghilev had already been exposed to choreographic experimentation through the work of Vaslav Nijinsky. Critics had labeled Nijinsky’s L’Après-midi d’un Faune (1912) cubist because of its angular, horizontal movement, which flattened the dance image, while his Le Sacre du Printemps (1913) made a radical break with ballet’s classical vocabulary ( Järvinen 2009). More directly pertinent to Parade, was Nijinsky’s Jeux, also from 1913. The  ballet dealt with modern life, its setting a game of tennis. Diaghilev had wanted to include an airplane or zeppelin as a prop at the end of the ballet, which would startle the three characters, interrupting their flirtation (Scheijen 2009, 260–262). This  element was never realized, but it suggests that Diaghilev may already have been aware of the futurists, who by 1913 had published manifestos on painting, music, and literature, among others, and who had mounted their first major Paris exhibition in 1912. In the wake of the failure of Jeux and Sacre and Diaghilev’s subsequent break with Nijinsky, it would not have been surprising had the impresario turned permanently to more conservative fare. But by January 1914 he had discovered Massine and was regrouping his forces rather than retreating from modernist experimentation. When Diaghilev engaged Massine, the dancer was nineteen years old and in the corps de ballet of the Bolshoi Ballet. Although taken into the company to appear in the title role of Michel Fokine’s The Legend of Joseph, Massine was soon expected to assume Nijinsky’s roles. To improve his modest technique, he was put under the tutelage of Enrico Cecchetti. Diaghilev enlarged Massine’s education with an extended tour of Italy, where he introduced the dancer to the wealth of Italian art and music. Massine was especially inspired by the Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna and by early Renaissance masters such as Cimabue, Duccio and Pietro Lorenzetti, artists whose work still bore the imprint of medieval flattening and two dimensionality. Massine also began to make a detailed study of eighteenth-century dance manuals, which gave him a greater understanding of ballet movement and structure. By the end of 1914 Diaghilev and Massine had met poet Filippo Tomasso (F.T.) Marinetti, leader of the futurist group, and a number of his colleagues. Diaghilev, in particular, was smitten by the futurists. He and Massine attended several futurist serate, performances that consisted of music, recitations of poetry, readings of manifestos, and the exhibition of 192

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paintings. These evenings also included audience provocations and were notorious for ending in shouting matches and fights. In early April 1915, Diaghilev and Massine, accompanied by Igor Stravinsky, met in Marinetti’s Milan apartment to listen to Luigi Russolo’s intuonarumori (noise intoners) (Garcia-Marquez 1995, 50; Scheijen 2009, 312–313). By this time Massine was planning his first ballet, which would come to be titled Liturgy, and Diaghilev briefly considered using futurist instruments for the work’s score. This idea was soon discarded, like many others having to do with the ballet, and eventually Liturgy was abandoned altogether. Several other projects with members of the futurist group were planned, among them sets designed by Fortunato Depero in 1917 for Stravinsky’s Le Chant du Rossignol, which Depero executed but were never used. The ballet was eventually staged in 1920 with designs by Henri Matisse. Nor did any of the other futurist projects find their way to the stage except a single performance of Stravinsky’s Feu d’Artifice in 1916, for which the artist Giacomo Balla created décor and lighting, but which did not include dance. In this varied exposure to futurism, Massine’s interest appears to have been mostly passive. He accompanied Diaghilev to futurist events, and he may well have understood futurist aims, but he produced no works with the futurists and had no close relationships with any of them. His only contribution to the Feu d’Artifice evening consisted of loaning paintings from his collection for exhibition in the theater lobby (Massine 1968, 107).

Parade Jean Cocteau developed the libretto for Parade over the winter of 1915–1916. The work gradually evolved as he persuaded first Satie and then Picasso to join the venture. In May 1916, Diaghilev visited Picasso in his studio to discuss the ballet and soon after gave his approval to the project. In February 1917, Cocteau and Picasso joined Diaghilev and Massine in Rome to work on the ballet. Satie remained in Paris, having already completed the score (Aschengreen 1986; Ries 1986; Rothschild 1991). At this point Massine, now twenty-one years old, had already choreographed three modestly successful ballets, Soleil de Nuit in 1915, Las Meninas and Kikimora in 1916, and he was in the process of completing two more ambitious works, Contes Russes and Les Femmes de Bonne Humeur, both premiered in 1917. This experience, in addition to the intense study he had made of visual art and historical dance materials, his schooling with Cecchetti, and his taking on of Nijinsky’s roles, particularly in L’Apres midi d’un Faune, prepared him for his part in Parade. Cocteau’s scenario was simple. The  setting is a Paris street fair or circus. In  front of a proscenium, several performers and their huckster managers attempt to attract an audience through a preview of their acts. They are unsuccessful and the ballet ends with them making a final futile attempt to gain attention. The performers consist of a Chinese Conjurer, a Little American Girl, and two Acrobats. There are also a New York Manager and a Manager in Evening Dress. Originally there were to have been three managers, one to introduce each act, but the third (Manager on Horseback), a black-faced mannequin mounted on a horse, fell off his steed during a late rehearsal. At Massine’s suggestion, the figure was eliminated, and the horse appeared alone as a fourth act doing a dance of its own. Satie’s score begins with a choral prelude that in its quiet formality gives little hint of what is to come. It  accompanied Picasso’s drop curtain of commedia figures, which, like the prelude, was produced in a more conservative style than the rest of the ballet. Once the curtain was up, the musical mood changed significantly, with the score making numerous references to music of the circus, dance hall, and variety theater as well as to ragtime. For his part, Picasso designed a cubist set that included a proscenium and curtain at the back of the 193

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Illustration 13.1 Pablo Picasso’s set for Parade (1917). (Private collection.)

stage from which the performers emerged (Illustration 13.1). The proscenium was flanked on each side by a balustrade behind which city buildings could be seen. Picasso also used cubism in several of his costume designs. For the two managers he created towering cubist constructions that covered most of the dancers’ bodies and that consisted of elements indicating their identity. The New York Manager’s costume included skyscrapers and a megaphone. The Manager in Evening Dress had a jaunty moustache, a top hat, and pipe, along with a walking stick (Illustration 13.2). The Horse, a staple comic character of the music hall, was made up of two men in one costume, which included a cubist head resembling an African tribal mask. Picasso’s costumes for the Conjurer, American Girl, and Acrobats made no direct references to cubism, rather they were drawn from the kinds of garments worn by entertainers of the time. The Conjurer was dressed in striped pants and a red coat ornamented with bold patterns in white and yellow, while the Little American Girl wore a blazer jacket and pleated skirt. The Acrobats were in blue costumes embellished with stars and comet tails. In conceiving the libretto for Parade, Cocteau may have been thinking of an earlier idea for a ballet he had hoped to produce in 1914, but which was never realized. That scenario, based on the biblical figure of David, was to have been set in a circus. The theme of popular entertainment, in itself, was not  revolutionary. Painters from Degas to Toulouse Lautrec and Picasso depicted circus and music hall subject matter, and Seurat painted a Parade of his own. In addition, both ballet and modern dancers had appeared in variety theater. Loïe Fuller made her name at the Folies Bergère, and French music halls had their own ballet companies (Gutsche-Miller 2015). What was new was Cocteau’s introduction of popular entertainment, both as subject matter and content, into the conservative, high art of ballet. And Cocteau went a step further. Responding to Diaghilev’s famous injunction to “Astound 194

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Illustration 13.2 The Manager in Evening Dress from Parade (1917). (Courtesy of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library.)

Me!,” he was intent on creating the kind of scandale that had accompanied the premiere of Nijinsky’s Sacre. For this, futurism was an obvious source because the futurists were known provocateurs. Futurists favored popular performance forms because of their brevity and lack of narrative. The compression or synthesis of independent acts or “turns” not only injected a sense of speed into the proceedings but also, according to futurist theory, compressed time, intensifying the viewer’s experience. Although Cocteau considered himself to be in the cubist camp (it was he, after all, who brought Picasso into the fold), he had earlier taken an interest in futurism and was aware of both its vanguard credentials and its potential for disruption. It is not surprising, then, that he chose a futurist style structure of independent, short acts while adopting the flimsiest of plots. In Parade, each turn is introduced in music hall fashion by a placard on which the number of the act is printed. The managers appear between turns to drum up enthusiasm for the next performer. More provocative were other futurist performance devices adopted by Cocteau. He intended to have the managers shout come-ons and incitements at the audience, which were a standard part of futurist performances. The managers’ cries were meant to ridicule the noise and exaggerated claims of modern advertising while also criticizing Bourgeois lifestyles and values. There were also to be noises of typewriters, an airplane, revolver shots, Morse code, and what Cocteau called paroles supprimées (suppressed utterances), for example: “tic tic tic the ti-tan-ic deep and bright in the sea,” in this case to accompany the Little American Girl’s dance (Rothschild 1991, 89).4 195

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The inclusion of spoken text and shouted provocations would have brought Parade closer to futurism. However, the other collaborators insisted on eliminating these elements, much to Cocteau’s dismay.5 There is evidence that it was Picasso who initially objected, with the others supporting his view. As the ballet developed, Picasso’s influence gradually came to overshadow Cocteau’s, moving Parade away from Cocteau’s more literary concept toward one focused on visual and formal elements, a direction that also accorded with Massine’s views. Thus, the managers, instead of speaking, wore cubist carapaces and danced (Aschengreen 1986; Ries 1986; Cooper 1987). Diaghilev’s argument in the debate was that spoken words were inappropriate in a dance performance (Massine 1968, 102). This  reasoning suggests Diaghilev’s interest in futurism had its limits. Although he allowed futurist elements to be incorporated into particular works as signs of modernity, he parted company with futurism, and more broadly with the historical avant-garde, when he felt the autonomy of dance to be compromised. In this he reflected a formalist modernism, shared by Massine and Picasso, which valued reform of independent art forms over a more radical rejection of the past.

Massine and cubism Although there is an extensive body of literature on cubism from widely varying viewpoints, there is also broad consensus on basic cubist aims.6 Cubism explored the tension, or ambiguous relationship, between the external world and the reality of the work of art. At the same time, cubists invented a means or process, or, in T. J. Clark’s term, a performance, for carrying out that exploration (Clark 1999, 223). Cubism was not concerned with abstraction, which would have defeated its purpose; when Picasso and Braque approached total abstraction in late 1911, they reversed course. At the same time, they created collage, which expanded ways of displacing external reality, aligning cubism more closely with a modern world that Picasso described as “very strange and not exactly reassuring” (quoted by Gilot and Lake 1964, 72). Françoise Gilot recalled Picasso speaking of another cubist concern. He explained that after Impressionism all rules of art seemed to dissolve into individual choices. Cubism attempted to find “an architectonic basis in the composition, trying to make an order of it” (69). But if cubism tried to bring a new order to painting, it also made meaning less certain. Dance and the visual arts are two very different forms with their own histories, rules, and issues, yet there are parallels in Massine’s and Picasso’s interests and in the strategies they used to deal with them. Just as cubists wished to put painting back on the rails, so Massine sought to find a way to reorder ballet while preserving the danse d’école, on which ballet is based. His early choreographic experiments led him to the realization that, the body includes various more or less independent structural systems each answerable only to itself, which must be coordinated according to choreographic harmony. This led me to invent broken, angular movements in the upper part of the body while the lower limbs continued to move in the usual harmonic academic style. (Massine 1968, 95) Massine’s emphasis on the body being made up of independent structural systems is key to his choreography. For although angularity is important in Parade, what is more important is that different parts of the body can move independently. This shift away from a body that is seen as a single harmonious whole, to one that can be broken up and reconfigured in surprising ways, disrupts preconceived notions of what dance and the body can be. In Parade, Massine went further than he had in his earlier works, showing how the danse d’école could 196

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be accommodated even when placing increased emphasis on independent corporeal systems, and then resolving the various elements through choreographic composition. Obviously, the choreographer does not have the painter’s freedom to reconfigure the human body, but within the limitations of his medium, Massine’s emphasis on reconfiguring parts into a new kind of whole answerable to “choreographic harmony” is akin to cubism’s displacement of external reality answering to the composition of the work.7 To take an example from Parade, in the Chinese Conjurer’s solo, which Massine made for himself, the dancer enters in a series of leaps in which his body forms contrasting right angles (Illustration 13.3). After three of these remarkable jumps, he makes a sharp back-and-forth turn of his head coupled with an in-out turn of one leg, then an arabesque with his head and torso parallel to the floor, then he is off again into the next leap. In the leap, while the legs are busy, the arms are held out to the side and sharply bent at the elbow, one up and one down. The leaping step has no academic counterpart for the arms, but the legs are executing an academic grand jeté with the legs bent at the knees and ankles instead of forming a straight line. The academic arabesque of the next step is altered by the angular position of the torso and arms. It should be added that Massine’s use of angularity is more than simply a stylistic element that signals modernity. Angularity has to do with a kind of containment and control that recalls the outlines of objects in synthetic cubist paintings and collages.

Illustration 13.3 Gray Chryst as the Chinese Conjurer in the Joffrey Ballet’s restaging of Parade (1973). (© 2019 Herbert Migdoll, photographer; Courtesy of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library.)

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Illustration 13.4 Pablo Picasso: Guitar (1913). (© 2019 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York.)

For example, in Picasso’s collage, Guitar, of 1913 (Illustration 13.4), the outlines of the images are generally sharp and clear with minimal shading. The forms are angular and what curves exist are precise. Individual elements are balanced and generally contained within the frame. In Massine’s choreography, angularity pulls the movement in toward the body, keeping the line contained. At the same time, the choreographer’s elimination of rounded and contrapposto elements flattens the dance image in a way that is similar to Picasso’s elimination of shading. The structure of the major dances further contains the movement because each dancer enters and exits with the same combination of steps: the Conjurer with the same leaps, and, as we will see, the American Girl with a tripping step, the Acrobats with a lift, and the Horse with a shuffle. Picasso similarly contains the individual elements of Guitar within the frame, giving the work a sense of stability and control. Cocteau added ballet réaliste to the title of Parade. Several months after the ballet’s premiere, he explained this addition in an article that appeared in the American magazine, Vanity Fair: “In ‘Parade’ the dances are not the result of an effort to achieve decorative effects, but of a desire to amplify the real, to introduce the detail of daily truths and rhythms into the vocabulary of dancing; for truth can always arouse the highest emotions” (Cocteau 1917, 106). For Cocteau, what constituted daily truths and rhythms were the pantomimed actions of the ballet’s four characters. It  is because of Parade’s pantomime that Cocteau has often been given more credit for the dances than he deserves. Cocteau encouraged this view by 198

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declaring on several occasions that he was the true choreographer of Parade (Aschengreen 1986, 73, 79; Ries 1986, 42, 45; Steegmuller 1986, 177), and on others by simply omitting Massine as one of the ballet’s creators (Cocteau 1917, 37, 106; Aschengreen 1986, 79). According to this narrative, Massine’s role was akin to a carpenter who simply executes an architect’s creative design. This was hardly the case. Cocteau had little understanding of what the act of choreographic transformation meant for Massine, how fully the choreographer had absorbed Picasso’s ideas, or that Massine was developing a theory on the structure of movement and its relation to the overall dance composition. Cocteau recorded, perhaps without fully understanding it, advice Picasso gave Massine: “Don’t be afraid to glue a piece of newspaper to the canvas—i.e. to use a movement whose meaning cannot be misunderstood, and which remaining untransposed, gives full value to the other movements” (Cocteau quoted by Steegmuller 1986, 180). For Cocteau, Picasso’s fragment of newspaper, because it remained untransposed, legitimized the entire work as real. However, Picasso’s incorporation of everyday objects into his works was more complex. While these elements remain familiar, they are also transformed according to the desires of the artist and the needs of the composition. So in Guitar (Illustration 13.4) Picasso used wallpaper, undisguised and fully recognizable, to indicate the body of the guitar, and newspaper, equally recognizable, to serve as part of the table. In this way he achieved both an ambiguity of meaning, and an oscillation between external reality and a new reality, created by the artist. Although Massine followed Cocteau’s ideas for pantomimed action, he did so in a way that made these gestures no more or less real than newspaper in a cubist collage. Thinking again of the Conjurer’s dance, there are two sequences that are often commented upon. In one, Cocteau wanted the magician to imitate breathing fire, and in the second, pretend to swallow an egg and then retrieve it from his shoe (Illustration 13.5). Picasso designed an elaborate make-up for the conjurer and Massine devised bizarre facial movements to accompany the pantomimed action. As the dance progresses and the fire breathing and egg swallowing segments come and go, it becomes clear that the dance is far more than pantomime. For example, when the conjurer pretends to breathe fire or swallow an egg, he is also engaged in other movement such as a deep lunge or turning his legs in and out in plié. His facial movement, too, is depersonalized and becomes part of the overall choreographic plan, rather than being simply an imitation of a performer’s gestures and expressions in the everyday world. Thus, the pantomime is subsumed into the structure of the dance, abstracted, and transposed into choreography. That is to say, external reality is not  abandoned but reordered into the reality of art. At the same time, this reordering makes the familiar strange, raising questions of meaning. We know the Conjurer is supposed to be breathing fire or swallowing an egg because Cocteau, Massine, and others have written about it. But would we know from the gestures alone? They look in some way recognizable—the Conjurer swallows; later in the dance he points to his shoe—and yet the gestures, although familiar, remain ambiguous. The Conjurer is doing something, but what exactly? If the conjurer’s solo includes elements of mime, the Little American Girl’s dance raises mime to another level entirely.8 Here Massine had the girl enter and quickly circle the stage. She then goes through a staggering number of mimed gestures at breakneck speed—Charlie Chaplin walk, typing, boxing, shooting a pistol, strong man, Indian war dance, and flopping and crawling about on the stage (supposedly going down in the Titanic). All the pieces of mimed action remain independent of each other. There is no narrative. We are simply seeing one action after another. What unites them is the choreographic organization. All the time the girl is upright she is dancing in a frenetic, quasi-tap form, and even when she sprawls on 199

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Illustration 13.5 Leonide Massine as the Chinese Conjurer in Parade (1917). (Courtesy of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library.)

the floor she executes the various movements as steps in a dance set into specific patterns and rhythms. Once again, Massine subsumed pantomimed movement into a structure in which the gestures become both familiar and strange. This is made even more emphatic by the fact that the aural elements Cocteau wanted to include were eliminated. Who was to know that when the Little American Girl crawls and flounders about the stage it has anything to do with a sinking ship? What we do know is that we are looking at a dance in which elements from everyday life are recognizable but have been made to conform to a new order. 200

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Collage, with its inclusion of machine-made products, from newspaper and wallpaper to calling cards and stamps, questioned virtuosity and the dignity of the medium. Cocteau’s conception made similar points in centering the ballet on popular entertainment, but Massine’s choreography put particular emphasis on challenging traditional stage decorum, suggesting that a modern ballet needed to relate more closely to contemporary life. When the Little American Girl rolls about on the floor with legs splayed she is hardly engaging in the traditional actions and comportment of a ballerina. The Horse’s dance also disrupts ideas of dignity and virtuosity on the stage. Originally the Horse (with his manager rider) was supposed to have introduced the Acrobats and simply crossed the stage as the dancers entered. Since Satie had not written music for a horse solo, the Horse performed to silence. He enters (as he exits) with a four-count shuffle, rears, kicks out with his back legs, and awkwardly bows. Choreographers had put animals on the ballet stage before, but none as low-life as this shambling nag of the music hall.9 The Acrobats, too, challenged stage decorum. By today’s standards the Acrobats’ duet appears to be the most conservative of the dances in Parade. Cocteau initially specified one acrobat, but Massine insisted on two so that he could create a pas de deux. The woman Acrobat is the only person in the ballet who dances on pointe, and the choreography hones more closely to a classical vocabulary than the other dances. However, Massine included a good deal of acrobatic movement, which although conventional today, was unusual at the time and introduced what would have been a low-art form of the circus into ballet. In Parade, Massine shared another attribute with Picasso: visual wit conveyed through formal means rather than through anecdote. Throughout the ballet Massine shows a playfulness that charms, whether it is using the manager’s puff on his pipe as a visual beat in his stamping dance, the American Girl’s pseudo-tap routine that suddenly turns into an academic pirouette, or the Conjurer’s leaps that seem to come out of nowhere because Massine omitted the usual transitions. Massine constantly surprises as he refers to the danse d’école while changing parts of it or comparing or combining it with unaccustomed actions that he pulls from everyday life and then transposes into dance. Picasso also played with elements of his medium. This can be seen in Guitar, when he used a round cutout of newspaper, pasted on top of the guitar body to represent the sound hole in the guitar, thus taking an object from everyday life and transposing it to represent, not another object, but negative space. At the same time, the newspaper, which represents space, is actually a physical object pasted on top of the guitar image, which means that it projects into the viewer’s space from out of the picture plane. These kinds of formal manipulations—one on a two-dimensional surface, one with the human body moving in three-dimensional space—draw attention in a particularly lively way to the relationship between external and artistic reality. Guillaume Apollinaire recognized the parallels between Massine and Picasso’s aims in Parade. In a program note for the ballet, he stated that Picasso and Massine had for the first time created a union of painting and dance that signaled the advent of a more complete art, one that Apollinaire called a kind of super- or “sur-realism.” Apollinaire saw this as a starting point for a new spirit that sought the same level of progress as science and industry. Massine, he said, had been careful not to fall into mere pantomime. Rather, he had adapted himself to “the Picassian discipline,” which was to suggest reality, not through reproduction, but through a thorough analysis and synthesis of all the work of art’s visible elements and “through a schematization that might be intended to reconcile contradictions, and sometimes deliberately renounces the rendering of the obvious outward appearance of the object” (Apollinaire 1917; 2001, 452–453; Steegmuller 1986, 513–514). If scientists, physicians, and engineers were revealing new realities, why should artists not uncover new realities, too? 201

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Massine and futurism On July 8, 1917, F.T. Marinetti issued a Manifesto of Futurist Dance (1935, 75–76; 2009, 234–239). Although published while he was in contact with Diaghilev and shortly after the premiere of Parade, Marinetti does not mention the ballet or Massine. Nor does the futurist ideal for a new dance as Marinetti conceived it appear to reflect Massine’s concerns in any substantial way, although Marinetti noted that cubism, through Picasso, had introduced “geometrized volumes” into ballet, making dance an autonomous art equal to music. But, according to Marinetti, music was now  passé (as, presumably, was ballet), and in a futurist dance music would be replaced by noise, “the language of the new human-machine” (2009, 238). Marinetti writes, “We must imitate with gestures the movements of motors, pay assiduous court to steering-gear, wheels, pistons, preparing the fusion of man and the machine and thus arriving at the metallization of the futurist dance” (1935, 75–76). According to art historian Joshua Taylor, the futurists viewed movement as a means of embodying powerful emotion. The  roaring motorcar “became the symbol of a new kind of spiritual transport” (Taylor 1961, 11). Marinetti’s three examples of futurist dance conform to futurist interests in that the dancer imitates an airplane, shrapnel, and a machine gun. Marinetti gives detailed descriptions of these dances. For example, in the “Dance of the Aviatrix,” the danseuse (Marinetti apparently conceptualized dance as a female art given that in all his examples he refers to a danseuse) performs on a giant map fastened to the stage floor. “Lying on her stomach on the carpet-map, the danseuse will simulate with jerks and weavings of her body the successive efforts of a plane trying to take off. Then she will come forward on hands and knees and suddenly jump to her feet, her arms wide, her body straight but shivering all over” (2009, 239). Marinetti’s dances reflect futurist intentions in their brevity, combination of media (including shouted text and elaborate props), references to contemporary technology, and imitation of machines as a step toward a new human-machine hybrid. Marinetti speaks of the futurist dance’s purpose being “to fuse with the divine machines of speed and war” (2009, 239). Marinetti also places a heavy emphasis on pantomime and, elsewhere in the manifesto, gives his approval to pantomime as “a vivifying element.” Finally, the dances he describes are overtly violent, in keeping with the futurist dedication to the cleansing influence of war. The dances in Parade are brief—the whole ballet lasts only about twenty minutes—but this brevity had more to do with Cocteau and Satie’s decisions than Massine’s, although Massine was certainly in agreement with this structure, suggesting he understood futurist processes and theory. Massine, in line with Cocteau’s concept, also employed contemporary subject matter and pantomime, but as has been shown, pantomime was not used in the literal way Marinetti conceptualizes it but is subsumed into the overall dance composition. As for the fusion of man and machine, it might be possible to view the Managers with their towering carapaces as somehow mechanical, if Massine’s choreography did not  counteract that impression. For  example, one might point to the solo for the Manager in Evening Dress, which opens the ballet. The dancer’s head and torso are encased in rigid cardboard, while his arms and legs can move freely. He carries a walking stick in his right hand and an elegant pipe in his left. His steps are made up of stamps and slides and ballet ronds de jambe. These steps are constantly varied and are interspersed with a twirl of the walking stick, or sharp tap of the stick on the floor, and an occasional puff on the pipe. In creating this movement Massine was responding to and commenting on the staccato, syncopated rhythm of the music. The relationship of the movement to Satie’s score shows both choreographic wit and sensitivity. If mechanized movement is conceptualized as regular and repetitive, the French Manager’s dance does not conform to such action. 202

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Massine comes closest to futurist intentions in the cinematic quality of the Little American Girl’s dance. Massine, unlike Cocteau, had been to the United States, having accompanied the Ballets Russes on its 1916 cross-country tour. He had admired the geometric simplicity of America’s “magnificent skyscrapers” and spent evenings listening to jazz at New York’s Plaza Hotel (Massine 1968, 79, 81, 86). Massine was also interested in film and had bought a movie camera in the hope of filming his ballets (Garcia-Marquez 1995, 85, 398). So while the cinematic elements in Parade may have owed something to futurism, they also related to Massine’s own experience. There  was one element that was crucial to both futurism and to dance: dynamism. The futurists attempted to express the speed and cacophony of the twentieth century through performances that favored brevity, an absence of plot, and the “organized noise” of machined and vocal sounds. In their visual art, dynamism was expressed primarily through whirling vortices, surging whiplash imagery, and the arc and circle. After the invention of cubism, the futurists added fractured imagery to their works (Illustration 13.6), but they did not use it as the cubists did, in order to analyze form and volume in relationship to the picture plane. Rather, they employed fragmentation to signify the speed and activity of machines and modern society, thus changing a means or a process into a sign. With this more contemporary imagery, they continued to employ the arc, spiral, and circle, as well as diagonal lines that exploded outward, often beyond the frame. Massine, like the futurists, was interested in the dynamism of the modern age, but the difference lay in how he manifested this interest. In Parade, Massine rarely, if ever, used the whirling vortices and waves of motion favored by the futurists. Nor did he stretch out movement, elongating the body’s line, to produce a dance image that pushed dynamically beyond

Illustration 13.6 Giacomo Balla: Abstract Speed + Sound (1913–1914). (© 2019 Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York/SIAE, Rome.)

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the stage space. Rather he found the modern spirit in shortened, staccato movement created, in part, through the elimination of transitions in his dances. As mentioned, there is no preparation for the leaps in the Chinese Conjurer’s solo, or for the Little American Girl’s shifts from one form of mimetic action to another. By eliminating transitions, execution could be faster, and speed increased, but Massine also insisted on precision. His dance was contained, logical, and disciplined. It possessed neither the anarchy of futurist performances, nor the whirlwinds of movement found in their paintings. Picasso’s cubist works were hardly known for their investment in movement—most cubist subject matter consisted of the traditional genres of still life, landscape, and posed figures. However, Picasso’s paintings and collages were not  static; they were given a dynamic aspect through fragmented geometric shapes and subtly played lines of force, which were counterbalanced by the stability of the compositional arrangement. Massine’s movement may well have owed a debt to the cinema, but his dances also reflected the contained movement of synthetic cubism, as well as the shattered rhythms of ragtime, which entered through Satie’s score.

Conclusion Massine’s modernism did not owe everything to cubism. As noted, he had carefully studied eighteenth-century dance manuals, which helped him develop a theory on how the body could be organized in structured movement. He had also seen and danced Nijinsky’s choreography, which sought unaccustomed ways of shaping the dancing body. Cocteau’s conception of Parade introduced popular entertainment and futurist elements into the ballet. Popular music, via Satie’s score, also played a role. In 1925 Massine wrote that ballet must incorporate jazz elements into the danse d’école because “Jazz represents us. It is an art form which represents the speed of modern life…” (Massine 1925, 1340). What Massine produced in Parade was cubism’s sense of the contingency that pervaded modernity, as well as a search for structures that might hold as the world violently moved into an unknown future. All the solidity of the past was dissolving; meaning was uncertain. Massine’s answer was to try to save ballet by creating an art that did not turn its back on the world, but transformed it in a way that was answerable to the artist. Here, we might return to Foucault’s statement on Baudelaire. For the poet, Foucault writes, the artist of modernity transfigures the world. “His transfiguration does not entail an annulling of reality, but a difficult interplay between the truth of what is real and the exercise of freedom” (Foucault 2010, 41). Massine and Picasso spent a good deal of their free time together during the making of Parade, meeting in cafes or sightseeing, and discussing art (Garcia-Marquez 1995, 109). The two collaborated on three more ballets, before going their separate ways. Massine took with him an approach to ballet that included numerous cubist lessons. These lessons not only influenced his own work but helped shape the course of twentieth-century ballet modernism. For if Massine sought to reform ballet, the two most important Ballets Russes choreographers to come after him, Bronislava Nijinska and George Balanchine, followed suit, taking a self-critical stance to tradition that renewed the academic dance.

Notes 1 This chapter has been revised and expanded from an earlier article (Morris 2014). 2 For  the most thorough analysis of the influence of futurism on the Ballets Russes, including Massine’s choreography, see Garafola (1989, 98–115). See also Gaborik and Harris (2011, 23–40) and García-Márquez (1995, 80–81).

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Cubism, futurism, and Massine’s choreography for Parade 3 For Italian futurist history and theory, see Rainey and Wittman (2009), Ottinger (2009), Poggi (2008), Perloff (1986), Kirby and Kirby (1986), and Taylor (1961). 4 Cocteau’s paroles supprimées may also have been inspired by Apollinaire’s “Futurist Antitradition,” in which he used similar language (Apollinaire [1913] 2009, 152–154. See Garafola 1989, 99–100). 5 According to Douglas Cooper (1987, 21, 23, 25) several of the mechanical noises did remain, but they could not be heard clearly over the orchestra. Cyril Beaumont speaks of the clicking sounds of a typewriter and the hum of an airplane in the London premiere of the ballet in November 1919 (Beaumont 1951, 150). How much of a scandal Parade actually caused at its premiere is open to debate. Reports vary, although Cocteau claimed it caused the kind of uproar he desired (see Kochno 1954, 204; Steegmuller 1986, 184–188; Arnaud 2016, 196–201). 6 Cubism in the context of this essay refers only to the work of Picasso and Braque and focuses on synthetic cubism, which began in 1911–1912. For agreement on basic cubist theory, see scholars with views as varied as Rosenblum (1959) and Clark (1999). 7 Analysis of Massine’s choreography for Parade is based on live performances, films, and videos of the Joffrey Ballet production of 1973, which Massine oversaw (Massine 1973a, 1973b, 1976). According to Douglas Cooper, in restaging Parade for the Joffrey Ballet, Massine had his notes from the original production and also consulted with Ballets Russes dancers, including Maria Chabelska, Vera Nemtchinova, Lydia Sokolova, and Michel Pavloff, to help in reconstructing the ballet. At the same time, he made changes to at least some of the movement (Cooper 1973, 21). Massine had previously overseen a short-lived production of Parade in 1964 for Maurice Bejart’s Ballet of the XX Century (Deses 1964), in which he wrote that he had retained the form and structure of the ballet, but rechoreographed the individual dances (Massine 1968, 275). The extent to which the dances were altered is suggested by his son, Lorca Massine, who was a member of Bejart’s company and worked closely with his father for many years in restaging his work. He said that the Joffrey production is closest to the original and that any changes made would have been “subtle” (personal conversation with Tatiana Massine Weinbaum in consultation with her brother, Lorca, New York, October 3, 2017). The position I have taken is that while Massine may have changed individual movements, the overall choreographic style and approach remained essentially that of the original production. The illustrations I use as support for my argument are there to exemplify Massine’s larger theoretical aims. 8 This is the only step known for certain that Massine altered from the Ballets Russes production. Lydia Sokolova mentions that when she danced the Little American Girl, she entered and exited with a series of jumps (Sokolova 1960, 104; Massine 1968, 104), whereas in the Joffrey production, she entered and exited with a running skip. 9 Boris Kochno states that the horse irritated the audience, although Apollinaire called the animal’s steps one of the work’s “adorable inventions” in his program note for the ballet (Apollinaire 1917; Kochno 1954, 206).

References Apollinaire, Guillaume. 1917.“Parade et l’Esprit nouveau.” Souvenir program for Les Ballets Russes,Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris, May. ———. 2001. Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews 1902–1918, edited by Leroy C. Breunig. Translated by Susan Suleiman. Boston, MA: MFA Publications. ———. (1913) 2009. “Futurist Antitradition.” In  Futurism, An Anthology, edited by Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, 152–153. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press. Arnaud, Claude. 2016. Jean Cocteau: A Life.Translated by Lauren Elkin and Charlotte Mandell. New Haven, CT:Yale University press. Aschengreen, Erik. 1986. Jean Cocteau and the Dance. Translated by Patricia McAndrew and Per Avsum. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Beaumont, Cyril. 1951. The Diaghilev Ballet in London. 3rd ed. London: Adam and Charles Black. Clark, Timothy J. 1999. Farewell to An Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cocteau, Jean. 1917. “Parade: Ballet Réaliste.” Vanity Fair 37: 106. Cooper, Douglas. 1973. “Parade.” Dance and Dancers 24 (6): 20–24.

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Gay Morris ———. 1987. Picasso Theater. New York: Harry Abrams. Deses, Piet. 1964. “Massine Revives Historic Parade.” Dance News, April, 7. Foucault, Michel. 2010. “What Is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 32–50. New York: Random House. Gaborik, Patricia and Andrea Harris. 2011.“From Italy and Russia to France and the U.S.:‘Fascist’ Futurism and Balanchine’s ‘American’ Ballet.” In  Avant-Garde Performance and Material Exchange: Vectors of the Radical, edited by Mike Sell, 23–40. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Garafola, Lynn. 1989. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. New York: Oxford University Press. García-Márquez,Vicente. 1995. Massine: A Biography. New York: Knopf. Gilot, Françoise, and Carlton Lake. 1964. My Life with Picasso. New York: McGraw-Hill. Gutsche-Miller, Sarah. 2015. Parisian Music Hall Ballet, 1871–1913. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Järvinen, Hanna. 2009. “Dancing without Space—On Nijinsky’s “L’Après-midi d’un Faune (1912).” Dance Research 27 (1): 48–53. Kirby, Michael and Victoria Ness Kirby. 1986. Futurist Performance. New York: PAJ Publications. Kochno, Boris. 1954. Le Ballet en France, de quinzième siècle à nos jours. Paris: Hachette. Marinetti, F.T. (1917) 1935. “The Futurist Dance.” Translated by Elizabeth Delza. Dance Observer, October, 75–76. ———. (1917) 2009.“Manifesto of Futurist Dance.” In Futurism: An Anthology, edited by Rainey, Lawrence, Christine Poggi and Laura Wittman. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press. Massine, Leonide. 1925. Quoted in “The Sitter Out.” The Dancing Times, August, 1340. ———. 1968. My Life in Ballet. London: Macmillan and Company. ———. 1973a. Parade (Motion Picture), City Center Joffrey Ballet, filmed for the Jerome Robbins Film Archive by Compton-Ardolino Films, Inc., full ballet in rehearsal without sets and costumes at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Dance Collection, New York Public Library, New York. ———. 1973b or later. Parade (Video), excerpts performed by the City Center Joffrey Ballet, Rudolf Nureyev Collection, Dance Collection, New York Public Library, New York. ———. 1976. Parade (Video), excerpts, City Center Joffrey Ballet, directed and produced by Merrill Brockway, WNET/13, Dance in America, Dance Collection, New York Public Library, New York. Mavroudis, Alexandre. 1917. “Les Nouveaux ‘ballets russes.’” L’Opinion 10: 230. Morris, Gay. 2014. “Massine/Picasso/Parade.” Modernist Cultures 9 (1): 46–61. Ottinger, Didier, ed. 2009. Futurism. Paris: Centre Pompidou. Perloff, Marjorie. 1986. The Futurist Moment:Avant-Garde,Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Poggi, Christine. 2008. Inventing Futurism:The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rainey, Lawrence, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds. 2009. Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ries, Frank W. D. 1986. The Dance Theatre of Jean Cocteau. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Rosenblum, Robert. 1959. Cubism and Twentieth Century Art. New York: Harry Abrams. Rothschild, Deborah Menaker. 1991. Picasso’s “Parade.” London: Sotheby Publications. Scheijen, Sjeng. 2009. Diaghilev: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Steegmuller, Francis. 1986. Cocteau: A Biography. Boston: David R. Godine. Sokolova, Lydia. 1960. Dancing for Diaghilev: The  Memoirs of Lydia Sokolova, edited by Richard Buckle. London: John Murray. Taylor, Joshua C. (1961). Futurism. New York: Museum of Modern Art.

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14 WHATEVER HAPPENED TO DANCE CRITICISM? Erin Brannigan

Introduction Dance criticism has undertaken an interesting journey from its historically significant role in establishing the very terrain of twentieth-century theater dance to the crisis in arts reviewing more generally in the early twenty-first century. As a subject of criticism, dance is often lacking documentation, opportunities for repeated viewings, textual equivalents and other associated ephemera to which writers reviewing work in other disciplines may have access. This condition has placed dance criticism at the forefront of developments across the last century and into the twenty-first, with creative critics finding progressive solutions to endemic challenges. This  chapter focuses on dance reviewing as it has developed since the early twentieth century in response to the emergence of what French dance theorist Laurence Louppe refers to as contemporary dance: the break with classical ballet that produced new forms of theater dance (2010, 23). Writing in Sydney, Australia, the role of dance criticism in my local context is placed into dialogue with the primarily American canon of dance criticism. I begin by detailing some of the generalized conditions of the discipline of dance that interrupt the traditional terms of a critical encounter. The related issue of the central role played by the artist-theorist in the development of a tradition of dance criticism is understood as a unique narrative among contemporaneous art forms, and this is tracked historically from the originary foundations of dance criticism as a discrete field of journalism. This entire historical context can be seen to drive the descriptive turn in dance reviewing in New York in the mid-twentieth century and leads to a consideration of how and why dance, as an art form, forces creative approaches to criticism. Coming full circle, such creativity in dance writing today connects current practices to turn-of-the-twentieth-century experiments between dance, writing and poetics. The  chapter ends with an account of dance reviewing in the digital age where, I argue, it is in a unique position to both benefit from, and help renovate, a new age in arts reviewing.

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Dance as the subject of criticism An account of the special conditions of dance as an art form vis a vis criticism will help us understand its history since the establishment of certain aesthetic parameters by the first wave of artists and critics. The ways in which dance resists criticism has much to do with the instability of its primary medium as it is experienced during performance—a dancing body/bodies— which results in an unstable object of criticism. Although the expanded media of dance at the turn of the twenty-first century includes many things beyond, or instead of, the dancing body, for my purposes here I would argue that other elements are always understood in relation to a corporeally determined model of dance and choreography associated with the art form. First, due to the complex spatiotemporal phenomena that is the dancing body/ies—extreme varieties and specificities of movement, relationships between human and nonhuman elements, variable perspectives on the action—capturing a choreographic work in any reliable form on film or video is problematic. We will only, in any case, capture one performance, and no singular performance is the same as another due to those same variables. In addition, the presence of the dancing body in a shared time-space is very different from the presence of a body on screen for a viewer. As a corollary of the fact that the human body is this unstable medium, a reviewer will only ever be writing about one instantiation of a choreographic work. These obstacles regarding repeated viewings to “stay with” the work, but also the possibility of the critic and reader sharing the same performance experience, are compounded if we factor in the increasing prevalence of improvisation in contemporary choreography or the practice of performance as part of a much more encompassing and ongoing process. Then there is the brevity of most dance seasons, and the small number of artists able (or willing) to sustain a repertoire. Another factor for criticism regarding the media of dance is the uneasy relationship between corporeal expression and language (despite an exciting increase in the number of artist-writers and artist-theorists mentioned above), which will always leave a significant gap between text-based ephemera and the work itself. But perhaps the most significant impact of the corporeal medium of dance on criticism is the diminishment of our ability to objectify and distance ourselves from other bodies due to inter-corporeal empathy derived from proximity and familiarity. At a very basic level, the body is something that we all have in common; as choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker states, it is the most ancient and the most contemporary phenomena simultaneously, connecting us to both the history of life on earth and our most immediate, present state (2012). Beneath the stories and figures we encounter in movies, plays and novels, the body persists as a touchstone connecting all of us who share its capacities and limitations. When encountering a dance work, rather than shape, color, volume, plot, characterization, melody, harmony—elements that we might find in music, theater or visual arts and which can be defined to a certain extent and hence idealized/critiqued—the dance critic is often confronted first and foremost with energy, force, tone, weight, movement quality, presence.1 This occurs via a subject very close to the critic’s own in its material and psychological form, often divested of layers of the performance apparatus associated with dramatic theater. An encounter between the body of the critic and the body of the dance(r) engages affect, empathy and contagion, which trigger new configurations that can effectively interfere with the traditional conditions of criticality. Although it is acknowledged that such effects operate in the arts more generally, contemporary dance has a unique focus on embodied aspects of spectatorship for the reasons given here. In  philosophy, affect has been used to describe the impact of the work of art on the body of the viewer as a kind of knowledge that occurs before thought (Lyotard 1993; 208

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Massumi 1995).2 We know that the body experiences sensations before they are realized as cognitive thought, and dance is an art form of sensation par excellence (Massumi 1995). 3 Sometimes these sensations never make it to consciousness as recognizable thoughts, feelings or emotions, so there is a quantity of our encounter with phenomena (including dance) that slips away from criticality and remains as affect. Empathy has a special role in our “ face-to-face” encounters with each other as philosopher Emmanuel Levinas writes, and dance studies understands how empathy occurs beyond the face/mind where the body feels the movement of another body when, in fact, it does not move (Martin [1939] 1965; Smyth 1984; Levinas 1991; Foster 2009). Sometimes called “kinesthetic empathy,” it connects bodies beyond emotion, meaning, narrative or character via a purely material contagion between bodies and movement states. This has been explained in the field of neuroscience by way of the operations of mirror neurons, “synaptic connections in the cortex that fire both when one sees an action and when one does that action” (Foster 2009, 1). Engaging us on a subconscious, corporeal level, kinesthetic empathy results in a newly formulated relationship with the work of art where distance is interrupted by a form of physical contagion. French dance researcher and scholar Hubert Godard echoes John Martin when he states, “I believe the supreme contagion to be that of the body state” (Dobbels and Rabant 1996, 46), and we can understand this in relation to our encounter with a dance performance due to our proximity or familiarity with the sensations being experienced by the dancers. This recognized capacity for dance to engage kinesthetic empathy in viewers links it directly to the crisis of criticism in the 1960s, but I will return to the origins of modern dance criticism to track such developments across time.

Movement analysis and artist-theorists The  lines between artistic analysis, criticism and artist self-commentary are particularly blurred within the field of contemporary dance, with dance artists consistently playing a role in setting the critical terms for the surrounding discourse. The art form emerged from turnof-the-twentieth-century modernity when artists were finding increasing public interest in their commentaries, and it developed within a critical vacuum where the standards applied to classical ballet were no longer relevant. Early dance pioneers such as Isadora Duncan and Loïe Fuller faced critics inadequately equipped to engage with a form that was so new as to be lacking standards for evaluation. Rayner Heppenstal writes of the problem in relation to Duncan: “it seems that nobody who did see her was able to tell about her sanely… there are many writings of those who saw and knew her, varying in waftiness and hysteria” (Heppenstal 1983, 267). Florid autobiographies do not help, adding little commentary on the substance of their work (Fuller 1913; Duncan 1928). As dance theorist and historian Mark Franko points out, Duncan’s own writing “narrates the discovery of dancing” but rarely the “construction of dances” (Franko 1995, 4). Writers who did record their work with passion, insight and creativity were the poet-philosophers associated with Symbolism to whom I shall return. Rudolf von Laban, Ted Shawn and Doris Humphrey were the first twentieth-century dance artists to research and publish formulations for the practice and analysis of dance composition. Laban’s research and writing, published first in 1920 in German, constitutes an integration of both the movement research and analysis that would feed the development of modern dance codes and somatic observation that would inspire radical developments in that direction such as the work of Laban’s student, Irmgard Bartenieff (Laban 1971). Shawn devised a technical approach at Denishawn and beyond—informed by attention to 209

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the broadest scope of dance and movement, including traditional dance from around the world—which set out dance fundamentals in a series of publications between 1920 and 1959. This  technique produced dancers and choreographers who broke away from Denishawn such as Humphrey, Martha Graham, Charles Weidman and many others (Shawn 1937; Mumaw and Sherman 1981). Humphrey produced a book at the end of her life that documented a “choreographic theory” that would assist the study of dance as a “craft,” co-opting the language of music and design (Humphrey 1959, 18). The collective work of these pioneers both discovered and disseminated disciplinary foundations for dance artists, and the emerging first generation of dance critics must have been familiar with these texts, putting artists in direct dialogue with the arbiters of a new set of disciplinary standards.4 Martha Graham’s musical director, Louis Horst, taught dance composition to generations of dance students in the twentieth century based on the musical model of theme and variation from the late-1920s to the mid-1960s (Horst 1967). This  dependence of mainstream choreographic pedagogy on music composition was reflected in the choice of reviewers of the new dance, as we shall see. A  new approach to self-commentary from dance artists emerged in the mid-twentieth century in America in line with a widespread wave of artist-theorists across media. Gay Morris notes that the post-World War II period saw the appearance of writing by dance artists and their supporters in Dance Observer (founded by Horst) and elsewhere, and notes that “it is striking how close the connections were between critics and dancers” (Morris 2006, xx). In  the following generation, choreographers such as Anna Halprin, Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti were (and still are) articulate about their experimental approach to choreography (Forti 1963; Halprin 1968; Rainer 1968). Their words, scores and diagrams were included in anthologies and journals alongside artists such as Robert Morris, Robert Rauschenberg and Donald Judd, who covered the newly intermedial scene dominated by minimalism, neo-dada, happenings and pop art (Young and Mac Low 1963; Battcock 1968; Kostelanetz 1968). The writing of these artists entered into direct dialogue with critics such as Michael Fried and Harold Rosenberg in the visual arts and Jill Johnston who covered dance at the time. This dialogue, and the tight-knit nature of the downtown New York arts scene, destabilized the distinction between artist and critic. More democratic communities of criticality, where audiences were often made up primarily of artists, lead to a new style of dance criticism pioneered in the pages of The Village Voice in New York.5 Continuing this history of artist-led criticism, dance artists have recently produced monographs, articles, DVDs and websites that uncover choreographic processes and provide perspectives that supplement, but also undermine, the authority of the expert-critic (Forsythe, Palazzi and Zuniga Shaw 2009; Stuart and Peeters 2009; De Keersmaeker and Cjević 2012).6 This often involves choreographers engaging their own commentators who have intimate access to their process and are sympathetic with their aims. Choreographers are thus empowered through choosing the critical frame through which their work is understood, and this sets a precedent for other “external” critics and theorists who may struggle to contradict the words of the artist. Some dance artists have also become publically outspoken about the state of dance criticism, for example, New York choreographer Miguel Gutierrez in a 2002 article, “The Perfect Dance Critic.” The article is scathing in its account of dance critics as Gutierrez encountered them at the turn of the twenty-first century. He takes aim at the entire field in his critique, from writers through editors, to publications. With explicit accusations of critics’ snobbery and their unproductive attachment to the past, the article ultimately formulates a prescription for a good dance critic. In this artist-authored manifesto for excellence in dance reviewing, 210

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Gutierrez is calling for informed, articulate reviewing from writers who know the field as it currently stands within the broader arts, are culturally sensitive and self-reflexive, understand the importance of dancer agency in most contemporary work and the renovation of the notion of “virtuosity” in the same, can account for all aspects of a choreographic production, and follow the development of artists across works (Gutierrez 2002, n.p.).

Defining an art form: The first wave American dance critics The important work of the first wave dance critics helped define a new art form that broke with classical dance and began an intense dialogue with the modern arts. Many of the first and second wave dance critics were music critics adapting to cover this new form, as Jack Anderson points out in his article on the influential dance critic John Martin; Carl van Vechten reviewed dance for The Times before World War I and H.T. Parker covered dance events for The Boston Evening Transcript from 1905 to 1934. Yet van Vechten was one of The Times’s assistant music critics, whereas Parker was also a music and drama critic. (Anderson 1983) Anderson also notes that, as opposed to some of his peers, “Mr. Martin wrote on dance and nothing but dance.” Importantly, he goes on to correct historical accounts of Martin as the first American dance critic; “strictly speaking, he is not our first newspaper dance critic for, shortly before his appointment in 1927, The Herald Tribune named a dance critic of its own, Mary F. Watkins” (Anderson 1983). Martin was a reviewer for the New  York Times from 1927 to 1962. Peers who also made their name as dance critics during this period include Edwin Denby, Doris Hering, Margaret Lloyd, Lincoln Kirstein and Walter Terry, but it is the work of Martin in particular that has been absorbed into Dance Studies and shaped the profile of the Modern dance artists. His serious approach to analyzing and describing the new dance helped legitimize it. In Introduction to the Dance ([1939] 1965), Martin identified the following as key characteristics of the Modern form (both German and American). These would, in turn, become new standards for evaluating further work appearing in the field: • • • • • • •

Space as an “entity” with which to dance (231) An assertion of dance as an autonomous art form (235) A reduction to thematic “essences” presented “sparsely and directly” in an “epic” form (241) Functional rather than representational stage settings (245) Codified movement systems involving “restraints” and strong links to pedagogy (241–243, 254) An emphasis on “action and tension” at the expense of “the lower end of the dynamic scale” (242) Each iteration of the form is a “purely personal emanation” (251)

Another important discovery of Martin’s preempted more recent theories of kinesthetic empathy. In 1946, he wrote of “the inherent contagion of bodily movement, which makes the onlooker feel sympathetically in his own musculature the exertions he sees in somebody else’s musculature” (Martin 1946, 105) and develops the term “metakinesis” ([1933] 1965 The Modern Dance). 211

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Like his peers in the visual arts, Martin struggled to accept the new breed of choreographers led by Merce Cunningham, and this definitely delayed the success of Cunningham in his hometown of New York and his subsequent access to government support (Brown 2007, 97).7 Cunningham’s revisions of the art form included his critique of the artist-genius via aleatory methods, the suppression of the dancers’ expressive agency, emphasis on movementfor-movement’s-sake, a severing of music-dance codependence, and the inclusion of everyday movements alongside technical vocabulary among other things. The ensuing revolution in American theater dance presented critics with challenging new work that they met with, new critical methods.

Revising critical tools: The descriptive turn A wave of female (and sometimes feminist) critics, beginning with Jill Johnston in the 1960s, brought about a radically descriptive turn in dance reviewing that culminated in the writing of Deborah Jowitt and other New York–based writers of the 1980s and 1990s. Controversial and influential, this shift can be seen as a response to the broader aesthetic milieu in New York at the time, alongside the special conditions of dance as the subject of a review. This historical turn also connects with the current productive crisis in arts criticism in the digital age that begs, again, for new ways of responding publicly to the arts. Jill Johnston was writing in The Village Voice in what she calls “a tumultuous decade”: 1959–1969 ( Johnston 1998, xi). Trained in dance, literature and fine arts, her writing was approaching “something akin to the theoretical and iconographic work I admired in art,” focusing on description but adding “writerly concerns” that amounted to an experimentation with the review format ( Johnston 1998, xi). Immersed in the hotbed of intermedial innovation occurring in the downtown Manhattan art scene in the 1960s, the radical work she was confronted with instigated an intense dialogue with her writing practice that played out, at first, as a fundamental challenge to critical objectivity and distance, and later (in Jowitt’s words) as “a freewheeling, self-starring weekly ramble” that took its form from revolutionary new performance modes ( Jowitt 1998, xxiii). Some of her strategies, described by Gregory Battcock and the writer herself, included biographical elements or a “turning inward from art as subject to the critic herself as subject,” blatantly partisan positions in favor of the avant-garde, texts that read more as works-of-art in response to the originary work, and “a confusion of roles” that saw her entering into performances (Battcock 1998, xviii; Johnston 1998, xiii).8 These all made her body of work a disciplinary response to the undisciplined status quo. Johnston’s exposure to the democratic, improvisational, self-reflexive, selfeffacing, pedestrian and compositionally focused work of the generation of choreographers and dancer dominated by the Judson Dance Theater group gave her permission to pursue such things in her writing and thus transform the genre of dance criticism. One of the extreme tendencies in the work of this period was minimalism, and the evacuation of content that this entailed was described by Susan Sontag as a “programmatic avantgardism, which has meant, mostly, experiments with form at the expense of content” (Sontag 1966, 5). The resulting situation for criticism was summarized in Sontag’s influential 1964 essay, “Against Interpretation,” in which she argues that “to interpret is to impoverish” (7). In this polemical piece, she claims that “the idea of content today is mainly a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism,” and this certainly played out in new dance works that abandoned story, character, theme, costume, representational sets and emotional expression, turning to experimentation with form, process, composition, syntax, presentation mode and venue (5). 212

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Developing out of this period, a new school within dance criticism is outlined by Diana Theodores in First We Take Manhattan: Four American Women and the New York School of Dance Criticism (1996). Theodores describes how, between 1965 and 1985, four dance writers— Marcia Siegel, Deborah Jowitt, Arlene Croce and Nancy Goldner—shared characteristics of unapologetic subjectivity, detailed “re-creative” descriptions of both the distinguishing aesthetic and impact of performed choreographies, a lack of recourse to extra-textual information, and an unrepressed enthusiasm for their subject (Theodores 1996, 1–9). For  such writers, analysis begins with the work itself and any conclusions regarding meaning, value or historic-cultural significance are drawn through a close description of form. Jowitt began writing for The Village Voice in 1967 and she continues to run reviewing workshops. In a 1994 workshop I attended in Sydney, she described an approach that details choreographic work in a form close to anthropological thick description, “as if reporting back from a strange planet” ( Jowitt 1994). In  her 1975 review of two nights of Grand Union performances (including Trisha Brown, Barbara Dilley, Douglas Dunn, David Gordon, Nancy Lewis and Steve Paxton), Jowitt avoids drawing conclusions beyond a return to the theme of “staying with” ( Jowitt 1977, 132–134). With clarity she describes many moments within this improvised performance that define its character, giving stability to this most unstable of performance modes. There is a positive and generous tone in her observational mode that suspends judgment, but this is also sympathetic with the terms of the work as she describes how the performers emulate our everyday inhabitation of a kind of “coping” marked by patience, effort, compromise, and even a politeness. She also exposes herself in the text as being affected by the work (she wants to try jumping out a window to see if she would be caught, in the spirit of the work) and declares her commitment to the “staying with” that it requires. As an example of the style, this review demonstrates many of the characteristics identified by Theodores and reveals the continuities with, and departures from, writers such as Martin. The influence of this school on writers as far away as Australia was significant. In the Sydney-based national arts magazine RealTime, writers such as Philipa Rothfield, Eleanor Brickhill and I found a platform for publishing nonevaluative, descriptive writing that suited the close-knit dance communities in our major cities, a characteristic that we had in common with the Soho scene in New York that produced Jowitt. In the 1990s, Jowitt entered into a critical dialogue with dance theorist Roger Copeland that lays out the stakes for new configurations between the descriptive, interpretive and evaluative components of a dance review, where one element might dominate over another. In  an approach such as Jowitt’s described above, Copeland finds “excruciatingly detailed description virtually devoid of anthropomorphizing adjectives” (Copeland 1998, 102). Copeland believes that a purely descriptive approach to covering dance work could isolate the discipline from ideas and critical debates, aligning dance with “some lost, pre-verbal, Dionysian paradise” that would set back the field exponentially (104). For a relatively new art form that struggles for recognition within the arts even today, the dangers here are clear. Copeland also argues that such an approach silences further discourse because it constitutes evidence as opposed to an opinion; something he refers to as “impressionistic connoisseurship” (Copeland 1993, 26). Copeland’s criticism that the “descriptive bias” results in writing that is “essentially devoid of ideas” is met by Jowitt’s firm counterargument: “Descriptive writing—a certain kind of it—is the best way I know to assert the interdependence of content and form, of narration and movement’s ‘secret truths’” (Copeland 1993, 26; Jowitt 2001, 7). She goes on, “the point is, in searching for what a dance may mean, not to lose sight of what it is, or appears to be,” thus reasserting the centrality of the work of the work in her approach and her belief that 213

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it is through attention to what is that we cannot avoid discovering what it is about ( Jowitt 2001, 7). She sees the binary set out by Copeland, where description is opposed to ideas, as “a new wrinkle in the mind-body split,” and her examples for the coexistence of the two from Croce, Joan Acocella and others are convincing (8). In her examples, meticulous accounts of corporeal behaviors reveal the expanded network of realities, memories, fantasies and contexts that encompass the work, the dancers and the writers in a given space-time, replacing interpretation and judgment with a coextensive “staying with.” The critique of judgment implicit in the American female writers’ reviewing style connects this more recent period back to the poetic writing of Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, and T.S. Eliot when they wrote in response to the abstract ballets of the late Romantic period and the first wave of the twentieth-century European avant-garde. In fact, Jowitt makes this connection clear, referring to Eliot and the new literary criticism that he was associated with as precedents for her approach ( Jowitt 2001, 8). The Symbolist poets found in dance a productive mode of expression as an alternative to language-based forms, and a model for their experiments that pushed at the limits of poetry. Writing in 1897, Mallarmé famously wrote of Italian ballerina Elena Cornabla: I find Cornabla ravishing. She dances as if she wore nothing; which is to say: without the appearance of any assistance offered for a leap or a fall, a flying and blurred presence of gauze, she appears, summoned into the air, supporting herself there, through the Italian trick of keeping her body taut but soft… she does not dance, suggesting, through the miracle of shortcuts and bounds, with a corporeal writing what it would take paragraphs of prose, in dialogue and description, to express: she is a poem set free of any scribe’s apparatus. (Mallarmé [1897] 2001, 108/9) The link between dance and poetry, which has been taken up in detail recently by Susan Jones (2013), is here in Mallarmé’s description of the dancer as being but not doing, suggesting but not representing, working through her medium to express immediately or directly, here as an untranslatable poetics of movement.9 As Jones says, “the dancer provides, in her poetics, the example of a creative activity in which the presence of the author abides in the very materiality of her production” (16). The poetic pursuit of an autonomous work of art, where the artist’s intention both forms and is fully formed through the medium, explains one way in which dance has moved writers into new territories and techniques, which is clear across this history of the encounter between the two disciplines. One final dance critic of the twentieth century who should be mentioned before leaping through time to the present is André Levinson. In the introduction to the book, André Levinson on Dance:Writings from Paris in the Twenties, edited by dance critic Joan Acocella and dance historian Lynn Garafola, the editors make a case for Levinson as the first Western dance critic of the twentieth century (Acocella and Garafola 1991, 18). Although Levinson may sit slightly outside of my remit here due to his attention to ballet rather than modern dance, his approach to dance reviewing was influenced by the French writers just discussed and was an influence upon the English ballet critic Cyril Beaumont and the American Lincoln Kirstein (Acocella and Garafola 1991, 18).10 He was perhaps the first to immerse himself in the art form and work hard to find language both from within and without the practice that would serve the work well in review. Also impressive is the range of his writing which crosses dance, film and literature and his attention to popular dance forms, specifically African American artists. Levinson observed dance classes and learned the language of the form, demonstrating a commitment to the disciplinary terms of dance that was unprecedented and utilizing description in a way that preempted the 214

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work of the late twentieth-century Americans (Acocella and Garafola 1991, 11). Acocella and Garafola conclude that Levinson was “the first to review dance consistently as choreography rather than merely performance, to argue from principle rather than merely from taste, and to draw those principles from within dance itself ” (1991, 18). Levinson was the epitome of the experienced and authoritative connoisseur, the model of critic many see facing extinction in the digital era while a democratization of criticism obscures standards, quantity rules over quality, and opinion appears to triumph over knowledge. Beyond such histrionics lies a much more complex and interesting present and future for dance criticism, where the expert-critic becomes one voice among many.

Dance criticism in the digital age In the early twenty-first century, intense debates circulate regarding the fate of arts reviewing in the digital age. In  May  2015, the Walker Center in New  York ran a symposium, “Superscript: Arts Journalism and Criticism in the Digital Age” (2015), which covered many of the issues in the American context but was representative of the global situation. The central issues confronting the field are 1. The redundancy of descriptive writing (the traditional backbone of art criticism) due to new levels of circulation for image-based art, 2. Polemical reviews that abandon the prescription of balance in favor of broad appeal, and 3. A general attack on standards due to a seemingly unstoppable wave of amateur writers. The counterargument points to 1. The positive effects of dialogue replacing authoritative monologue, 2. A  diversification of voices that liberates criticism from the white, highly educated middle-class, and 3. An increase in the amount of quality writing as a ratio of the overall proliferation. These issues are international, but the case of the Sydney dance scene will demonstrate how the changes being wrought by the digital revolution play out differently across specific local cultures. In the new context, where connoisseurship tussles with the democratic field of blogging, and visuality dominates over textuality, dance criticism is again well placed to adapt to new contexts and their terms. The  proliferation of platforms for publishing dance reviews has been a boon for a form traditionally marginalized in the arts pages of the major presses. With more opportunities to critique and disseminate accounts of choreographic works, these traditionally elusive works of art are circulating in newly expanded ways. And with the early engagement between dance and film/video for documentation and intermedial creative purposes, dance was ready for online formats that privilege image as content. Sydney has had two major newspapers covering dance for as long as I can recall, and with the same reviewers. Regarding local dance coverage, up until the 2000s Sydney Morning Herald (local) and The Australian (national) were joined by a bi-monthly national magazine Dance Australia, “street press” (two or three local free entertainment guides with very uneven dance coverage), and the aforementioned RealTime. In 2018 there was minimal coverage in the major newspapers, but the street press has been replaced by quality writing on a number of online blogs and journals.11 Regarding international coverage of Australian work, in the 215

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1990s it was negligible. (I seem to recall the editor of Ballett International/Tanz Aktuell being unimpressed at my suggestion that I could cover Australian dance for them in 1999.) To keep up with the world, I had expensive international dance magazine subscriptions and would wait for The Village Voice delivery at my inner-city bookshop once a month to catch up on the American scene. Even today, an online search reveals two articles on Australian dance in Ballett International/Tanz Aktuell in three years. In  America, many see the era of print coverage as the glory days of dance criticism. In “The Death of Dance Criticism” in The Atlantic magazine, Madison Mainwaring recounts the sacking of endless dance critics from major newspapers and gives an excellent account of the award-winning writing that substantial print space and well-supported staff can produce. She concludes: Today, unless a choreographer presents her work at a major venue like Lincoln Center, she’ll be lucky if she gets a single professional review. And the review will be a short one; when critics do write, they do so in less space and with less breadth than their predecessors. (Mainwaring 2015) This problem is endemic to arts coverage and there is no going back. The Atlantic itself is one of the oldest and most reputable magazines in America, and it went online in the early 2000s, turning its fortunes around (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica 2018). Although “the steady decline of mainstream exposure to dance” is a serious issue and the loss of an old guard of ground-breaking American reviewers is painful, dance has never been particularly well served by the print economy in Australia, and one imagines many other countries would have similar stories. Furthermore, dance is certainly not alone in having to adapt to a new, primarily online world, although it may have been one of the first arts to feel the effects being at the tail end of the arts hierarchy. Conferences like “Superscript” are looking forward to new online ecologies where the rules are almost unrecognizable when compared to those described by Mainwaring for the print reviewer. Issues regarding text length, hierarchies of coverage, editorial gatekeeping, connoisseurship and longevity have been replaced by modes that are in step with new reader habits and desires. “Post-Descriptive” reviewing, instant reader feedback, image-based review essays, and a focus on communities of participantreaders are all interesting new strategies that are providing solutions to new problems, and with which dance is well-placed to engage. This global shake-up in the distribution of, and access to, critical writing on the arts has combined with the critique of evaluative writing since the 1960s to produce a new situation in the Australian dance community. For local artists, there is a newly expanded circulation of descriptions, videos and images of dance works. Bloggers writing about new work—away from the pressure of mainstream readerships and closer to the artistic communities they are representing (harking back to Johnston and Jowitt’s time)—give detailed and well-informed descriptions of work in open forums where the traditional monologue can become a dialogue with like-minded readers.12 This is worlds away from the ballet blog sites described by Mainwaring where “an abyss of French technical terms and lobby gossip written by and for fans” is a turn off (2015). It is also very different from a situation where dance reverts to “another item in the experiential supermarket, a thoughtless art without a memory” (Mainwaring 2015). Some venues and events have also responded with in-house publications such as Dancehouse Diary produced by Dancehouse in Melbourne and Critical Dialogues coming out of Critical Path Dance Laboratory in Sydney. They are also commissioning writing teams instigated by forward-thinking curators and programmers such as Talia Linz, Melissa 216

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Ratliff, Angharad Wynne-Jones and Hannah Matthews. For  example, the dance-focused Biennale of Sydney 2016 had “The Bureau of Writing” workshop members respond to the work in the program and was an initiative of Artspace, one of the Biennale venues. The Next Wave festival in Melbourne ran a RealTime writing workshop in 2016 by and for young dance artists. And the Dance Massive festival in 2015 ran a writing workshop, “To Write” (2015), and published commissioned articles by participants who included many peer dance artists. What has changed is who gets to express their thoughts about the work and who is responsible for the dance archive, and in both cases there has been a substantial return to the artists themselves, or those close to them as discussed above. So an emerging artist such as Sydney-based Angela Goh, whose solo works in small theaters and gallery spaces would have perhaps had one review in RealTime, now has four that she warrants as useful and well informed.13 Due to this increase in online exposure, new international readerships can access up-to-date criticism of the most current contemporary dance work on offer in Australia. One corollary of this is a new mobility for Australian dance artists, particularly those working in the independent sector who are making the most use of new online fields of communication. These artists are traveling regularly and have more complex international networks than their more mature counterparts who were dependent on government agencies to facilitate touring options.

Conclusion The optimistic outlook here should be tempered with an understanding that the sustainability of sites dependent on unpaid writers (and a troubling new economy in free media tickets as payment), the limitations of focused readerships regarding building audiences for dance, and the chance of real critical dialogue between writers and community are yet to play out since the very recent closure of RealTime in 2018, our most significant print/online outlet for dance criticism. There is no guarantee that the loss of expert, authoritative and widely read reviews can be replaced by the new economy. As RealTime coeditor Keith Gallasch notes, “the danger is in being romantic about what is barely emergent and in need of some data” (Gallasch, personal correspondence with author, September 25, 2018). However, although Mainwaring bemoans the replacement of high culture with pop culture, some dance makers, reviewers and audiences are enjoying new configurations that dismantle hierarchies that have excluded the independent and more popular ends of the dance spectrum from being taken seriously by serious writers. Ideally, the new status quo will have room for everyone—including the insider reports on niche corners of dance activity and informed and critical accounts of our major dance organizations for a broad readership. Looking toward the future we have good reason to be positive: History records that dance is a sector of arts where nimble, creative, experimental and fleet responses to our changing world are part of its broader choreography.

Notes 1 Distinctions between disciplines have continued to dissolve since the mid-twentieth century avantgarde so that any generalizations of this sort are fraught. For instance, the tendency of experimental dance toward the visual arts calls for a return to compositional analysis, and some non-text-based forms of performance prioritize elements such as movement quality and presence. 2 For  an account of the operations of affect in relation to dance etc. (according to the Spinoza/ Deleuze/Lyotard/Massumi line of thought), see Brannigan (2011, 184–187). 3 Brian Massumi (1995) recounts a scientific experiment where the body responds to stimulation 0.5 seconds before the brain registers activity.

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Erin Brannigan 4 We find for instance, in the writing of critic John Martin, references to the work of Laban (Martin 1965, 230). 5 On the increasing case of “audiences of artists” since the 1950s, see Catherine Craft (2012). 6 Jeroen Peeters edited Meg Stuart’s book, which includes writing primarily by Stuart but also by critics, collaborating artists and theorists such as Peeters, Myriam van Imschoot, André Lepecki and Philipp Gehmacher. 7 Influential art critic Michael Fried admits that his singular commitment to the pre-neo-dada and pop artists saw the end of his career with the rise of these new aesthetics, and the same could be said of Martin’s career (Fried 1998, 14). This indicates the degree of investment required of such influential critics in specific trends and the task of championing their associated artists. 8 At  its most extreme, it could hardly be categorized as reviewing, as Johnston notes: “At  length I gave up even the pretense of criticism, creating pieces consisting entirely of ‘found’ sentences, which I ‘collaged’ non  sequitur style, and which I had already been using to preface ostensible reviews” ( Johnston 1998, xiv). 9 Susan Jones goes so far as to suggest that the Symbolists’ writing on dance influenced the development of the same ( Jones 2013, 14). 10 The  editors make connections from Levinson through Lincoln Kirstein to George Balanchine, who fulfils Levinson’s vision of a formal, nonrepresentational, and technical mode of classical ballet (Acocella and Garafola 1991, 23). 11 These include Audrey, Performing ArtsHub, Dance Australia, Witness, Daily Review, Arts Review, Dance Life, un Projects, Running Dog, Art + Australia, and Runway. 12 Although the scope of readership for The Village Voice in the 1960s and 1970s cannot be compared to the small community of readers for the online platforms, the spirit of shared knowledges and experiences is similar. 13 Private correspondence with Goh regarding her 2017 work, “Scum Ballet.” RealTime editor Keith Gallasch notes that Goh’s 2016 work Desert Body Creep had five reviews in RealTime by the Next Wave workshop participants.

References Acocella, Joan, and Lynn Garafola, eds. 1991. André Levinson on Dance: Writings from Paris in the Twenties. London: Wesleyan University Press. Anderson, Jack. 1983. “Dance View; Pioneer of Dance Criticism.” The New York Times, June 12. Art + Australia. Accessed December 18, 2018. http://www.artandaustralia.com/online. Arts Review. Accessed December 18, 2018. http://artsreview.com.au/. Audrey. Accessed December 18, 2018. https://www.audreyjournal.com.au/. Ballett International/Tanz Aktuell. Accessed August 18, 2018. http://danceinternational.org/?s=Australia. Battcock, Gregory, ed. 1968. Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Battcock, Gregory. 1998. “Introduction to the 1971 Edition.” In  Marmalade Me, edited by Jill Johnston, xvii–xix. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Brannigan, Erin. 2011. Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image. New York: Oxford University Press. Brown, Carolyn. 2007. Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham. Evanstown, IL: Northwestern University Press. Copeland, Roger. 1993. “Dance Criticism and the Descriptive Bias.” Dance Theatre Journal 10 (3): 26–32. ———. 1998. “Between Description and Deconstruction.” In The Routledge Dance Studies Reader, edited by Alexandra Carter, 98–107. London: Routledge. Craft, Catherine. 2012. An Audience of Artists: Dada, Neo-Dada, and the Emergence of Abstract Expressionism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Critical Dialogues. Accessed December  21, 2018. http://criticalpath.org.au/resource_category/ critical-dialogues/. Daily Review. Accessed December 18, 2018. www.dailyreview.com.au. Dance Australia. Accessed December 18, 2018. http://www.danceaustralia.com.au/reviews. Dance Life. Accessed December 18, 2018. www.dancelife.com.au. Dancehouse Diary. Accessed December 26, 2018. http://www.dancehousediary.com.au/. De Keersmaeker, Anne Teresa. 2012. “Post-show talk with Erin Brannigan.” Carriageworks Sydney, September 14.

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Whatever happened to dance criticism? De Keersmaeker, Anne Teresa, and Bojana Cvejić. 2012. A Choreographer’s Score: Fase, Rosas Danst Rosas, Elena’s Aria, Bartók. Brussels: Mercatorfonds. Duncan, Isadora. 1928. My Life. London:Victor Gollanz. Dobbels, Daniel, and Rabant, Claude. 1996. “The Missing Gesture: An interview with Hubert Godard.” Writings on Dance:The French Issue 15: 38–47. Forsythe, William, Maria Palazzi, and Norah Zuniga Shaw. 2009. Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, reproduced. Accessed August 18, 2018. https://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/. Forti, Simone. 1963. “5 Pieces: Dance Report, Dance Report, Dance Construction, Dance Construction, Instructions for a Dance.” In An Anthology of Chance Operations, edited by La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low, unpaginated. New York: La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low Foster, Susan Leigh. 2009. Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance. London: Routledge. Franko, Mark. 1995. Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Fried, Michael. 1998. Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fuller, Loïe. 1913. Fifteen Years of a Dancer’s Life. New York: Dance Horizons. Gutierrez, Miguel. 2002.“The Perfect Dance Critic.” Movement Research Journal 25: 8/9.Accessed August 18, 2018.http://www.miguelgutierrez.org/words/the-perfect-dance-critic/. Halprin, Anna. 1968. “Ann Halprin.” In  Theatre of Mixed Means: An Introduction to Happenings, Kinetic Environments, and Other Mixed-means Performances, edited by Richard Kostelanetz, 64–77. New  York: Dial Press. Heppenstal, Rayner. 1983. “The Sexual Idiom.” In What Is Dance? edited by Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen, 267–288. New York: Oxford University Press. Horst, Louis. 1967. Modern Dance Forms: In  Relation to the Other Modern Arts. New  York: Dance Horizons. Humphrey, Doris. 1959. The Art of Making Dances. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Book Company. Johnston, Jill. 1998. Marmalade Me. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Jones, Susan. 2013. Literature, Modernism, Dance. New York: Oxford University Press. Jowitt, Deborah. 1977. “Pull Together in These Distracted Times.” In Dance Beat: Selected Views and Reviews, 1967–1976, 132–134. New York: Marcel Dekker. ———. 1994. Deborah Jowitt, Greenmill Dance Project writing workshop. January, Melbourne, Australia. ———. 1998. “Introduction.” In  Marmalade Me, edited by Jill Johnston, xxi–xxvii. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. ———. 2001. “Beyond Description: Writing Beneath the Surface.” In  Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader, edited by Ann Dils and Ann Cooper-Albright, 7–11. Middletown, CT:Wesleyan University Press. Kostelanetz, Richard. 1968. The Theatre of Mixed Means. New York: Dial Press. Laban, Rudolf von. 1971. The Mastery of Movement. Boston, MA: Play. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1991. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Amsterdam: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Louppe, Laurence. 2010. Poetics of Contemporary Dance. Translated by Sally Gardner. Alton: Dance Books. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1993. “Gesture and Commentary.” Iyyun, The  Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly 42 (1): 37–48. Mainwaring, Madison. 2015. “The Death of the American Dance Critic.” The Atlantic, August 6. Accessed August  18, 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/08/american-dancecritic/399908/. Mallarmé, Stéphane. 2001. “Ballets.” In Mallarmé in Prose, edited by Mary Ann Caws, 108–113. New York: New Directions. Martin, John. [1933] 1965. The Modern Dance. New York: Dance Horizons. ———. [1939] 1965. Introduction to the Dance. Brooklyn: Dance Horizons. ———. 1946. The Dance. New York: Tudor. Massumi, Brian. 1995. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique 31: 83–109. Morris, Gay. 2006. A Game for Dancers: Performing Modernism in the Postwar Years 1945–1960. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Mumaw, Barton, and Jane Sherman. 1981. “Ted Shawn, Teacher and Choreographer.” Dance Chronicle 4 (2): 91–112. Performing ArtsHub. Accessed December 18, 2018. www.performing.artshub.com.au.

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Erin Brannigan Rainer, Yvonne. 1968. “A Quasi Survey of Some ‘Minimalist’ Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Amidst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A.” In Minimal Art: A Critical Survey, edited by Gregory Battcock, 263–273. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Runway. Accessed December 18, 2018. http://conversations.runway.org.au/. Shawn, Ted. 1937. Fundamentals of a Dance Education. Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius. Smyth, Mary M. 1984. “Kinesthetic Communication in Dance.” Dance Research Journal 16 (2): 19–22. Sontag, Susan. 1966. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Stuart, Meg, and Jeroen Peeters. 2009. Are We Here Yet? Dijon, France: Les presses du reel. “Superscript: Arts Journalism and Criticism in the Digital Age.” 2015. New  York: The  Walker Center. Accessed August 18, 2018. https://walkerart.org/magazine/series/superscript. “The Bureau of Writing.” 2016. Workshop. Biennale of Sydney. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. 2018.“The Atlantic.” In Encyclopaedia Britannica. Accessed August 18, 2018. https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Atlantic-Monthly. Theodores, Diana. 1996. First We Take Manhattan: Four American Women and the New York School of Dance Criticism. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. “To Write: Dance Massive Writing Workshop.” Dance Massive Festival, March 10–22, 2015. Melbourne: Arts House. un Projects. Accessed December 12, 2018. http://unprojects.org.au/magazine/issues/. Witness. Performance, Discussion, Community. Accessed December  21, 2018. https://witnessperformance. com/. Young, La Monte, and Jackson Mac Low, eds. 1963. An Anthology of Chance Operations, 2nd ed. New York: La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low.

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PART IV

Dance, society and culture

15 BLACK DANCE Brooklyn 2017 Nadine George-Graves

Introduction: November 8, 2016 That day I felt my world come crashing down. As the US presidential election results came in, I was living in a conservative part of Southern California where, if I am honest, I have never felt welcome. As I contemplated a Trump presidency that day, not only did I not feel welcome in Irvine, suddenly, I did not feel safe in America. I took a walk on the beach the day after the election and experienced a previously unknown fear and a heightened sense of awareness. My body tensed in new ways as I walked past white strangers, and a fight-or-flight trigger that I did not know I had was activated. I was on guard for whatever verbal attacks that were coming my way now that a campaign based on sexism, racism, and homophobia triumphed and gave permission for more public displays of that kind of language and action again. Of course, no one unleashed the barrage of hateful words I expected that day. That was yet to come. That day was steeped in uncertainty. My embodied sense of self was challenged. Was I being paranoid? Yes and no. Along with the myriad life-shattering policy changes that I saw coming, I also immediately and acutely felt the pain of the unrestricted license to hate coming out of the rhetoric of Trump’s campaign. All the bullies and mean girls were taking over the school, and I felt that they were coming after me and all of my friends and family members who do not think, act, or look like them. That day felt like a declaration of war on us. I stayed in a state of immobilizing shock and depression for many weeks. What brought me out of this state, what gave me back my body—my black female body housing a mind and creativity set to performance in the field of humanities intellectual discourse—what allowed me to open my mouth again, was black dance. Black dance in the United States (however defined: black bodies moving, the work of black artists, black aesthetics, etc.) always has been, and likely always will be, political. In a nation founded on race-based genocide and slavery excused by contradictory and hypocritical philosophical principals, black dance is part and parcel of the social and national imaginary. As a historian, I usually have the advantage of hindsight in my research and have spent most of my career looking at the ways in which theater and dance have impacted, influenced, reflected, and challenged US societies. I endeavor to show how identity politics, social change, and restorative justice are all important tenors of performance on and off 223

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stage and how black performance has historically been a major force in larger social movements. For example, I have written about the ways in which the racialized choreography of early twentieth-century social dance signaled ideological shifts in US sociopolitical mores (George-Graves 2008, 2018). From subversive dancing on the plantation, through the dramatic lecture circuit of the abolitionist movement, through the inspiring music of the civil rights era, to today’s creative digital media campaigns like #BlackLivesMatter, black performance has always been linked to struggle and social justice in the United States. From the second half of 2016, historians like me have had the uncanny phenomenological experience of witnessing catalytic historical moments in the making. Political changes are happening at whiplash pace, civil discourse has eroded, partisan polarization is increasing exponentially, and the governmental foundations on which the entire US system of governance is built are being tested to degrees unknown in recent history. Looking beyond US borders (a site becoming an ideological battleground over raced bodies), the Brexit vote with its fraught implementation process, the international rise of xenophobic conservatism, and the global influence of neoliberalism all signal that a tectonic shift began in 2016. By the time of publication of this chapter, countless political events will undoubtedly have taken place around the world stemming from this shift. And because art tends to respond to big societal shifts, there is no reason to believe that the current climate will be different. Of course, black dance is going to respond to the change. My project was to get a close look at the beginnings of this era. This study is an autoethnographic attempt to capture a moment. As an academic methodology, autoethnographic research overtly centers self-reflection as a mode of inquiry to make qualitative arguments about broader social, political, or cultural structures (Maréchal 2010; Adams, Jones and Ellis 2015). I begin this chapter by checking in with my body and my phenomenological experience of the election to foreground the embodied knowledge rooted in the work of black dance. I then locate myself as a liberal black female feminist performance historian to ethically ground the work in performance studies practices. This chapter is not intended to be a therapeutic, navel-gazing exercise but, rather, to build on scholarship (especially black feminist and womanist theories) that expose the privileged fallacies of purported disinterested objectivity in the humanities and social sciences as the only path to meaning (Walker 1983; Collins 1990). My aim with this chapter is to provide an autoethnographic analysis of the potential work of dance in society and culture during an important historical moment. I was tempted to try to take stock of the meanings of these events on all of the arts across the country for the whole four years of the Trump presidency but soon realized that analyzing the totality of those changes is beyond the scope of this short chapter. Rather, I endeavor here to pause and put a finger on the pulse of a kindling moment in this shift—a generative moment, a moment when change is signaled. Instead of a totalizing gesture, I offer a microhistory of an eclectic phenomenological experience to productively interrogate the machinations of art and politics/society/culture to allow me to add to the grander calculations of the meanings of embodied performance. I engage in a concerted analysis of a moment in dance history when dancers and choreographers are thinking about their work in the context of new heated sociopolitical conversations in the United States. There are many communities of artists across the country that are organizing in new and important ways, of course, but space limitations prevent an exhaustive national examination. Instead, I submit a hyperlocal analysis of some of the concerns, questions, and missions of a few select artists in a community that is at once cosmopolitan and provincial—Brooklyn, New  York. The  year 2017 brought with it a new culture of fear and activism not known to this degree for generations. This, of course, has had 224

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global impacts, but I submit that honing in on the local is a crucial way to understand the new state of affairs. And though there are many subjectivity-based lenses through which one might examine these questions, blackness is unapologetically, politically, and intentionally at the center of this chapter. Although Manhattan is regarded as the cultural mecca of the United States, many artists, particularly artists of color, live in the outer boroughs even as they perform locally, in Manhattan, and internationally. Brooklyn hosts a number of important venues for the development of new work, from the well-renown Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) to Brooklyn Information and Culture (BRIC) and Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX) (two middle-tiered incubating and presenting venues committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion), Weeksville Heritage Center (a cultural center founded 180 years ago to preserve the culture of the nineteenth-century African American community of Weeksville, Brooklyn—one of America’s many free black communities), RestorationArt (a civil-rights era institution dedicated to supporting revolutionary art makers), and Five Myles (a smaller exhibition and performance space dedicated to underrepresented artists and engaging the local community), among many others. I have been spending quite a bit of time with black dance artists in Brooklyn over many decades now, attending their performances, watching them work, engaging in conversations with them, and working with them creatively. During these encounters, I have observed many important tenets of this artistry (aesthetics, exchanges, tensions, challenges, etc.) that will make for rich detailed scholarly study. For the limits of this study, in 2017 I attended performances, participated in public forums, interviewed artists and presented scholarship, danced/marched in protests, and led discussions. For this chapter, I draw insights from public gatherings generally and cite specific interviews with artists and public statements by arts leaders. More specifically, I 1. Attended the 2017 Women’s March with artists from Pat Hall’s Saturday Afro-Caribbean dance class at Mark Morris Dance Center in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. This marks the beginning of my interest in contemporaneous black dance as a site of sociopolitical discourse. Notable for the unexpectedly large national turn-out, the first Women’s March, organized by what would eventually become the “Women’s March Alliance,” became a watershed moment for this study and the nation. 2. Attended a few discussion forums with artists convening as part of Dancing While Black’s ongoing embodied research practice at BAX and the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics in Manhattan. These were sites where artists and scholars met to talk about the future of their work. 3. Watched Brooklyn-based Maria Bauman’s Dying and Dying and Dying at Gibney Dance in Manhattan and participated in a post-show discussion. I then interviewed her about her work and the piece at The  Annex coffeeshop in Fort Greene, Brooklyn (2017). The piece is about ancestors, death, rituals, endings, and ways of navigating our limited time on earth in a US culture steeped in capitalist expectations. 4. Witnessed rehearsals of André Zachary’s Untamed Spaces at RestorationArt and led a preshow discussion at Dancespace Project, St. Mark’s Church, Manhattan. Zachary invited me to help prime his audience for this complicated piece about impassable spaces, his personal African diasporic heritage, and the concept of marooning. 5. Watched Cynthia Oliver’s piece Virago-Man Dem at BAM and participated in a postshow discussion. This work explores the complicated navigations of black masculinities in US and Caribbean contexts. 225

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6. Watched the documentary on the making of Bronx Gothic (Rossi 2017) at Film Forum with some undergraduate students in my domestic travel course and introduced them to Okwui Okpokwasili at Berg’n café in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, to discuss art and life. The film is a documentary about Okpokwasili’s artistic process in creating her unflinchingly provocative live performance of the same title about two twelve-year-old girls coming of age in the 1980s. 7. Watched Bill T. Jones’s Letter to My Nephew at New York Live Arts in Manhattan and discussed this piece with my son in grandma’s Brooklyn brownstone. In this piece, Jones explores the life of his nephew Lance T. Briggs and his struggles with health and addiction. Although my son is healthy, the themes of deep love, the wish to protect young black men, and the precarity of their bodies resonated deeply. Like the rapidly changing times, Jones modifies the piece based on events of the week. 8. Watched Garth Fagan Dance’s 45th season performance from the grass in Prospect Park at Celebrate Brooklyn. Although Fagan is most well-known for his choreography of Broadway’s The Lion King, the longevity and persistence of his dance company that is often overshadowed by Alvin Ailey struck home while sitting on a blanket in the summer night air. 9. Witnessed and supported the final rehearsals for Brother(hood) Dance!’s how to survive a plague at Dancespace Project, St. Mark’s Church. Meditating on those who survive and those who are remembered, Ricarrdo Valentine and Orlando Hunter create a ritual cum concert dance piece around healing for some of the bodies least cared for during the AIDS crisis—black bodies—and honor the lost generation of stories and artistry. 10. Watched hip-hop dance on curated outdoor summer stages, thinking about the sites of hip-hop dance from informal outside city streets and community centers in the 1970s to the international, interclass cultural phenomenon of today and the attending complicated conversations around inspiration and appropriation. 11. Gave a keynote address at the Dance Studies Association’s (DSA) annual conference on the mythic “sweetness” of black bodies rooted in Caribbean folklore and the legacies of the sugarcane triangular trade. This talk stemmed from the haunting of Rose Hall in Jamaica by the white witch Annie Palmer, the legacies of the Brooklyn Domino sugar refinery, and the global sugar industry haunted in turn by the slaves that made possible our insatiable desire for sweetness. 12. Celebrated the impressive showing by black artists at the 2017 Bessie Awards. 13. Had many inspiring formal and informal conversations with black dance artists about their work and their visions for the future. Even though the tenor of black dance and choreography is changing in the current climate and arts activism in the United States is increasing in the wake of the election, it is notable that much of the work that I witnessed was already in development before the change in the political tide. In other words, many of the artists I discuss here were already doing work in response to the larger histories of inequities on local, national, and global levels anchored in social justice and awareness and aimed toward progress. This was not a wakeup call, per se, for artists of color but more of a call to further galvanize efforts to create impact through the arts. The new political moment threw that work into high relief, but part of what is interesting in this study is not only the ways in which this work is changing but also the ways in which the work is persisting and expanding in light of recent events. In addition, although not all the work that I witnessed was overtly political, most of it resonated more politically because of heightened sensitivity. This moment allows us to ask how the political landscape challenges us to experience work differently as well as create work differently. Here are some important take-aways from my year with black dance in Brooklyn. 226

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Embodying resistance As a viewer, I experienced an amplified level of awareness of the ways in which the work of these choreographers embodies resistance. Perhaps I just needed black bodies to “resist.” I was more keenly attuned to where it was happening even in work made before the election. In  these examples, acts of resistance were emphasized. Although space limitations prevent thick descriptions (I invite readers to search for these important artists online), I want to emphasize the general significance of this work at the intersections of race, politics, and dance. The year became a jazz fugue of meaning in motion. For example, the insistent durational beginning of Okpokwasili’s Bronx Gothic (Rossi 2017), in which she convulses to the point of debilitating exhaustion, is the only point from which she can begin the piece, and that debilitating exhaustion echoed the incapacitating weariness in which I began 2017. Further, it underscored the fact that resistance may be empowering, but is also rooted in the breaking point. I meditated on black will. I wanted to will a protective shield around the bodies in Letter to My Nephew and Virago-Man Dem, which were now even more jeopardized. Seeing the willful performance of a black masculinity in a black hoodie hailed me as activist and mother simultaneously supporting the choreographic claiming of power on stage and on the sidewalk while telling my own son to never pull up his hoodie, no matter how cold he is, because “You know how they will see you, baby.” The commitment to ancestors and the history lessons of the black diaspora in Untamed Spaces and Dying and Dying and Dying helped remind me that we have been in situations like this and worse before and have “gotten over.” Black bodies endure, even if war-torn. Brother(hood) Dance!’s brazen resolve to live in How to Survive a Plague through love reminded me to find strength in others. Without dismissing the physical and psychic suffering, the abjection and social death of blackness, these examples evinced the complicated self-making of maroons, the insistence on the right to a natural black death, the odds-defying tenacity of blackness, and the manifesting of black joy that managed to ignite my own survival instincts. Even as I joined in the celebrations of notable successes for black artists at the annual Bessie, the award ceremony for outstanding and groundbreaking creative work by independent dance artists in New York, #BessiesBeBlack, I was keenly aware of the fact that we are continually haunted by the pathological disciplining of black bodies into certain desirable performances that will always limit our achievements. The  insidious and invisible capitalist roots of black oppression found almost anywhere in America surface every time I drive past the Domino refinery to take my daughter to rehearsals for Elizabeth Streb’s Kid’s Company and think about this business, which at one point during slavery processed more than half of the sugar in the United States. Seeing hip-hop performances outside (where it began) reminded me of disco, tap, swing, and all of the other black aesthetics that are created in poorer communities of color celebrated and appropriated (often not to the economic benefit of the originators) but persist as markers of exultant resistance. Meditating on Garth Fagan’s work in the panoply of concert dance over 45 years reminded me of the breadth of the genre of black dance (however defined). These experiences should have been overwhelming, but somehow the depth, breadth, and diversity confirmed the potential of the variety of work being done by these artists. And knowing all of this allowed my experiences of black dance in 2017 (as anger, despair, joy, hope, passion, ritual, mundane, etc.), from the spectacular to the barely perceptible, to model embodied resistance. There were, of course, moments of unapologetic political protest through choreographic practice and fleshed insurgency. Spectacular, visible, live bodies on the line rehearsing and manifesting social change are familiar but not simple means of using dance to dialogue with society. Critical race and critical gender theories appropriately question the limits of affective 227

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change at these sites and my own suspicions about self-congratulatory showiness that risks effacing sustained quieter work were profoundly checked in a wholly visceral way during the 2017 New York Women’s March. A week before the march, I had attended Pat Hall’s Afro-Caribbean dance class (I attend on and off as my schedule allows) and had learned the short Ibo dance phrase that they had planned to perform during the New York march. When my plans to go to the Washington, DC, march the same day fell through, I combed through social media and found the location of their meet-up and instructions to wear red and black. I knew that even though I was not a regular in the class, I would be welcome at their event. I knew that even if I could not remember all of the steps and it took me a while to catch up, I would not be embarrassed. I knew that even though my plans with my close friends fell through, I would be treated like a friend. I knew all of these things mainly because of the kind of community that Pat Hall has created for her Saturday afternoon dance class. Although the class is a complex and intense Africanist aesthetic, Hall invites all levels of experience and all body types. There is no shaming as we all work from wherever we are to more accurately and expertly execute the movement. Hall builds in explanations of the warmup exercises, cypher invitations, and across-the-floor-patterns. She finds time to hug each and every student in the sweaty, jam-packed studio. She honors community members who have passed on. She shows respect for the percussionists. She champions the work of others in the name of peace, art, and activism. There is no air of competition. There is no judgment of skill level. There is emphasis on listening to one’s own body. These all became important reminders for me. After the election, the class became a site of activity and activism as the flame was turned up on people’s commitment to protecting the most vulnerable, resisting regression on social progress, and pushing forward despite the huge “wall” that was being built in front of our ideologies. At 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, January 21, I met the group at the corner of Lexington and 45th Street in Manhattan and someone handed me a maraca. We tried to get to our designated start place at 47th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues to make our scheduled start time, but we simply could not move against the unexpectedly huge tide of protesters. Eventually, Hall gave up and stopped attempting to officially check in with the organizers. She turned us around in our spots and we began marching and dancing. Because I take no credit in the organizing of this event, I have no qualms about describing the feeling as a participant. The physical turn and shift from our upstream trajectory into the empowered choreography caught up in the sweeping flow downtown amid men and women of all stripes and sizes in an Africanist aesthetic to loud percussion churned the air and carried me, propelled me. The chanters next to us were surprised and delighted. Some yelled affirmations, and some joined in our dancing. We provided a service to others who were able to take a break from the shouting to protect their voices and renew their spirits for the hours of chanting and marching ahead. The other protesters turned to us, made space for us, cheered for us. We physicalized the pent-up anger, frustration, and fear many of us had been feeling. Rather than writing about how historical figures have described the impact of the arts on politics, I felt, corporeally, in an embodied way, the foundations of struggle and resistance through dance. Each time I pounded my fist in the air, each time I pivoted (protecting all sides of my body), each time I leaned in, stomped forward, and shook my head from side to side with my hands framing my face, I felt a degree more empowered. The fear I had that “they were coming to get me” weakened as I knew that these people on the streets of New York that day have my back—and I have theirs. This is the moment when I (admittedly late) officially came out of my funk and began to roll up my sleeves. 228

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Even though we only got a few blocks (symbolic of the long road ahead), around 2 p.m. Pat  and a few others broke off to head back to Brooklyn (she was still teaching class at 3  o’clock). I kept marching. I kept feeding my spirit by being in the presence of others, taking from and giving to the waves of hope and resilience. This other kind of choreography (marching, chanting, checking-in with, and galvanizing strangers) also underscores the continued catalytic effect of liveness, embodiment, and movement. I have no doubt that our bodies, present, dancing, drumming, and marching, fed the movement in our relatively small footprint in the events that day. Along with my experiences watching and talking about black dance in 2017, my actual performance of black dance during the Women’s March literally and figuratively gave me the energy I needed to go on.

Not co-signing Although dancing my dissent was an important, visceral, embodied way of understanding the work of dance activism, a lot of (perhaps most of) the socially empowering work of black dance in Brooklyn as I experienced in 2017 was also done through oral conversations. This  was the intellectual discourse poised to feed the choreography to come. In formal and informal settings, I was a part of rigorous and nuanced dialogues about art in the United States today and the roles and responsibilities of artists of color in the new political climate. These artists were philosophizing, strategizing, holding space, ranting, crying, laying on hands, debating, proselytizing, praying, “checking-in,” intellectualizing, spell-casting, conjuring, persisting, writing, etc.The foundation of most of these conversations was the commitment to live, embodied presence. Although not always possible, it was considered ideal that people made the commitment to “show up” despite the pull of busy lives and the lure of consigning activism to Facebook or other digital disembodied formats. Even though there was little “dancing” in these spaces (although there was often movement work), live bodies navigating the sociopolitical landscape in solidarity was foundational. A  recurring theme from these settings that I argue is an important intervention is a commitment to what I am terming “not co-signing.” By this I mean a particular kind of resistance that imagines a contract about how and what these artists are supposed to create signed and presented by society but not co-signed by the artists. Although these sentiments were not new to 2017, they seemed reaffirmed in these discussions. Over and over again, I witnessed these artists impenitently not co-signing • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Expected ways of moving Limits on representation Simple stories of their lives Prescribed roles for rituals or healing practices Other people’s fears Time-based pressures for artistic production Lifestyle expectations The neoliberal competitive dance space (admittedly difficult with the limited resources in dance) The championing of the individual over the collective The idea that the free is valueless Rigid ways of disseminating knowledge A canonization of subjects that erases black stories The extraordinary labor of attending to white fragility The whole host of ideas about the way the world works. 229

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One day I asked three young black dancers in their early 20s about how often they auditioned for professional dance companies.1 They looked at me like I was crazy and said “never.” One qualified the statement and said, “well, rarely.” They claimed that because they did not have certain kinds of black dancing bodies they were less likely to make it into a well-established black company, and because they did not want to be a token in another company, that route was not viable either. They also talked about how “full out” they could dance when auditioning for some companies because of feedback they have gotten that choreographers saw their bodies “out of control.” Their responses were to realize and embrace the fact that they needed to carve a different artistic life than they thought they might have. They  needed to dictate the terms and parameters of control over their bodies and not  co-sign others’ definitions of what they could manage. One might argue this kind of feedback is rooted in aesthetic shifts in contemporary dance, but I trust that these artists were attuned to and recognized the race-based assumptions underlying feedback to their dancing. The response of these three dancers was to not co-sign an expected model of success. They decided that in an effort to reject notions of what a dancer’s body is or should be, they would not try to conform to expectations and opt to make their own work according to their own standards and not be afraid to dance “full out.” I had another conversation with a dancer who was coming to an awareness that he was not going to get grants. He recognized that if he compromised his personal aesthetic and danced a different way, he might. He is in a period of soul-searching as he looks at the black dancers and choreographers who seem to get knighted by prestigious universities and presenting venues and showered with lucrative residencies and grants. He is concertedly deciding whether or not to “buy in” to those demands and the implications his choices would have on his work and life choices. I want to highlight that these acts of not co-signing or not buying-in are different from other kinds of resistance or fighting or other forms of response to larger societal structures. In unstable times, our initial response might be to roll up our sleeves and prepare to fight for justice. It is important to distinguish between the triage needed at catastrophic events and the longer-term strategies for bringing about social change. Spectacular moments of fighting oppression often get more press, but other responses like refusals are also critical. Staying the course, staying true to themselves, recognizing that hegemonic social scripts are rarely written for their success, these artists sometimes march, shout, beat drums, and punch fists in the air and sometimes defiantly release expectations, ignore assumptions, diffuse tension, redefine success, deny haters, and simply forget to be oppressed for the moment. To illustrate the point, one might note the kinesthetic differences in one’s body when told to fight versus refuse. This is not an argument that any one of these ontologies is more or less politically activist or important. Instead, I want to call attention to the nuances in different artistic responses to political moments. There are many different energies one might tap at the site of art and activism, and all may be deployed strategically. There are still many examples of “straightup” fighting and resistance in contemporary dance like the Women’s March. There are also examples of solidarity in intraracial diversity, intersectional efforts, educational programming in diverse settings, and a respect for a multiplicity of approaches. These are old and new ways to move with black bodies and aesthetics that are loved and hated, admired and shamed, desired and disavowed in the complicated ways and colored contradictions that only the United States could manage to foster. This multiplicity is also an important part of the conversations on dance, race, and politics. Quieter acts of not co-signing might not get as much attention as political rallies but are also important political moves with enduring 230

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influence. These smaller refusals are also matters of life and death and may ultimately lead to the grander refusals. For example, the dancers in Dying and Dying and Dying look to their personal ancestors to recognize that they (and others by extension) should not co-sign the kinds of unnatural black death that are “expected” of us.

The here and now • • • •

What does it mean to be a black dance artist today? What power does this growing network of artists have in the current political climate? What practices might we contribute to or borrow from broader social justice movements? How are we visioning deepening our work together?

These were some of the questions asked by Paloma McGregor, the founder of “Dancing While Black,” at the five-year reflection event. The forum was open, and in attendance were past participants as well as people generally connected to this black dance community. After opening up the conversation, she then left space for us to imagine the next wave of questions that would guide the work of black dance artists today and in the future. These kinds of conversations are inextricably linked to black dance aesthetics, which is always already self-reflexive. Simultaneously embracing and disavowing insufficient labels, attending to the nuances of representation, these artists displayed adeptness at doing the work while questioning the work of black dance. Consciously thinking about work in the present moment kept these artists out of myopic bubbles in our conversations. Rather, the ethos was about checking-in with each other on what inspires them now, what their responsibilities are now, how they can support each other now, and what matters now. This sentiment was echoed in all of the dialogues I attended. I found an interesting, and perhaps counterintuitive, outcome of this commitment to presentist and future-thinking agendas. Often these conversations led to a reluctance to a rushed response or to a knee-jerked and potentially ill-considered direct change in choreographic style. In none of my 2017 Brooklyn black dance conversations did any artist seem eager to immediately and radically change his or her aesthetics to look more political. Perhaps it was too soon, but the conversations also suggested that making an obvious anti-Trump concert dance piece would not do the kinds of social and political work they were committed to doing. This impetus stands in contrast to other moments in US history when choreography dramatically shifted from subtly or abstract studies to movement with clear political messages underlying choreography. Time will tell if this is sustained in the current climate but, I posit that this initial hesitancy to make this a hasty and overt call to create agitprop political work in direct response to the inevitable, imminent onslaught of policy and social changes is due to a number of factors. Agitprop can be timely and bold but risks attending to long-term goals of equity. Although many of these artists are overtly political, they seem to be mindful of taking the time to take stock of the current situation before responding. Early in the year, some artists recognized that they were numb, still in shock, and needed time to process, get bearings, get grounded, and try to more deeply understand the implications of the political shifts. They had more questions than answers, and, defying the stereotype of apolitical or apathetic, self-centered, young artists, they showed commitment to deep, rigorous research and analysis before creating and presenting work in response. They also recognized the heightened stakes at play, particularly in the effort to communicate and articulate one’s opinion. Language seemed more weighted. There were more pauses in the attempt to assure clarity. Words once taken for granted might warrant more scrutiny and critique. At the same time, there was a 231

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desire to increase awareness of the weight of their words and art within the shifting contexts and histories. There was a mindful navigation around the direct and indirect effects of this moment in history, and attention was paid to the ways their bodies shifted and adjusted in reaction to the current moment. Although the look of daily routines might seem unaffected, there was a sense of a new disease that seems inevitably poised to impact artistry. The term “relevance” perhaps took on new meaning in the here and now. Artists felt called to reexamine their creative practices and rethink the ways in which their work/mission/ choreography is relevant now. They seemed de facto relevant in new ways based on shifts in spectatorship by audience members, but these artists also wondered how their work is/will be relevant given the enormity of the impending changes. Importantly, these examinations never seemed to come from a place of wanting to stay attractive to funders or presenting organizations. This urge did not stem from a materialist move to capitalize on what concert dance taste-makers might want. Rather, the impetus seemed to be from a recognition of both the crucial role that dance has played in previously politically charged moments and the potential of that aesthetic power now. These great and minor reckonings with humanity seemed deeply felt and deeply interrogated. Gathering in conversations with other dance artists went beyond creating community and moved to generative sites for the production of language, response, and mobilization. The magnitude of the relevant in the now circulated in all of these conversations. A choreographic shift was emerging, although artists were patient with how and when that shift occurred. Concurrently, artists reevaluated “risk” in their work. What was going to be considered choreographically risky now? And how would audiences respond? The burdens of livelihood for black dance artists in the United States are palpable, and, although I sensed commitment to personal aesthetics, artists wondered how the fundamental value of art and artists was about to change. Surely the financial and affective support of the arts from the Obamas was coming to an end, and the government-based financial future for the artists I spoke to did not bode well. The most these artists seemed to hope from the Trumps was that they would be ignored and not targeted for eradication. The shift was forcing artists to “value” differently. New senses of the stakes of their work meant reckoning with new ways of being visible. Asserting or insisting upon their artistry in new ways felt imminent, and with that came questions of how to hold on to and sustain self-determined aesthetics. In addition, although not yet a vocal part of my conversations, the position of being dismissed as insignificant can also be a place of political power, as has been evidenced throughout black performance history. I suspect we will see new, socially impactful choreographic modes emanating from the seemingly benign. In the post-show discussion of Dying and Dying and Dying, Bauman talked about how the passing of her grandfathers close to each other weighed heavily on her and highlighted the ways in which we are simultaneously infinite and finite resources. In this piece Bauman asked us to find currency and value in each other. In the United States, the new sense of unstable time and a heightened sense of urgency further complicate our already busy lives packed with deadlines and appointments. The conversation then turned to the importance of listening to ancestors and how listening is an undervalued skill in coping with modern life. We discussed the ways in which capitalism, with its relationship to rigor, tenacity, and ferocity, forces us to feel like we are constantly moving. The anxiety of the current moment makes some of us feel like we are constantly falling or trying to keep up. The velocity of daily life disallows productive listening. But pausing, taking stock, listening, checking-in, reevaluating commitments, researching, analyzing, and affirming core values promises that the future of black dance in the United States will be socially impactful and enduring. 232

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Conclusion: Sustaining black dance work All of these experiences led me to check-in again with my own embodiment and commitments at the end of the year. Practicing this autoethnographic analysis of black dance in Brooklyn for the year ultimately led to insight into aesthetics that, although rooted in the past, attend to the present and are committed to willing the future. It also led to insights into the value of research methodologies at the nexus of historiography and autoethnography; methodologies also rooted in the past, attending to the present and committed to the future. The radical changes in the sociopolitical landscape begun in 2017 demanded a corresponding shift in my usual scholarly approach. As an historian living through a historically significant moment, I needed other tools from my toolbox of critical inquiry. I believe that by foregrounding experience, this approach models some of the kinds of persuasive argumentation needed to counter the false logics of Trump-era “fake news.” In other words, for those of us newly living in a Kaf kaesque world where the logics of language are being rewritten, we must look to the body for truth, to strengthen our resolve and to make manifest a better future. For these artists, the responsibility of paying attention to the political moment was also an ethic of care for the future of black children who will not viscerally know any other kinds of lives. The commitment to the future—faith that there will be a future and that their artistic vision of the future is vital for bringing about the future—is meant not only for these artists but also for the next generation. Similarly, my academic process mines the archival history, the repertoire, phenomenology, somatics, rhetoric, and aesthetics to identify the particulars of this paradigm shift because it is rooted in my commitment to the future. Acting in concert and solidarity as communities of color and allies has always been important to this and other efforts at the meeting of art, politics, scholarship, and activism. Although complicated, nuanced, spoken, and danced, the black dance work I witnessed on and off stage was clearly moving toward more profound arts activism on the horizon. The sustaining of current and the creation of new collective artistic communities is and will be important for the future of black dance, particularly in a larger culture that privileges success in terms of the rugged individualism and survival of the fittest. The  affirmation of mutual support echoed over the year, as artists anticipated the increased need to come together with collective research, learning, understanding, and values-building to feed back to into the diverse aesthetics coming out as new dance projects. Artists felt the need to sustain ways of working that resisted or refused to co-sign a neoliberal ethic of accomplishment that might temper choreographic risk-taking. These sustained ways of working would also need to make room for the expected newly energized arts activists by balancing potential shifts in visibility for artists previously committed to art and social justice. Generously expanding communities of support would require effort. Importantly, these artists articulated the call to sustain and maintain self-determined, complex, artistic identities. This call included a concerted reliance on building on the work of the past most famously articulated by the civil rights–era song “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize,” which inspires those in struggle to not only persist but also to not get distracted by setbacks. For many, the Trump election and ensuing events were major setbacks but, as artists, they are keeping their eyes on the long-term prize. Remembering past struggles serves to inspire the next generation to “hold on,” knowing that their current struggle is part of a longer history of struggle, and even though their responses will look different, support structures have been scaffolded for them. Although most people I spoke with or listened to were not historians, the weight of history was very present in the here and now, not only 233

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as a strategy to look to black artists from the past for inspiration for the future (though that certainly happened), but also in the new/renewed urgency around defining themselves and their communities with the knowledge of how those like them have been defined in the past. Being in an unstable historical moment casts new light on our understanding of history and historiography. The current instability felt perhaps like shifting tectonic plates that these dance artists were attempting to re-center and rebalance in order to dance. I predict a wide range of choreographic responses (from subtle to overt) in the Trump years by black dance artists tailored to the times and in tune with contemporary audiences. Connected to this conversation was an assertion that they as artists are uniquely qualified to articulate their history, vision, processes, and values. A continuing refrain in black arts in the United States has been the call for a full representation of the complexities of our lives in performance. This is based in the knowledge of the importance of accurate and authentic representations for African Americans to see themselves reflected and non-blacks to imagine a spectrum of racial possibilities. This impulse is rooted in the historical lack of robust, rich, and varied representation of blackness in the arts and entertainment and the profound impact that has on the realpolitik of black life. Control over the means of production has always influenced creative product. Rooted in a long history of misunderstanding of work by critics not versed in black aesthetics and a lack of scholarly attention and archival preservation, these contemporary artists are looking to ensure that their work is adequately and properly discussed, analyzed, and remembered. In this continuing dialogue, the interrogation of who is telling their stories and how they are being told echoed throughout the year. The uncanny and disappointing experience of not  seeing the reflection of one’s self in art continues to inspire black artists to create work to rectify these gaps. These representations are not always realistic, of course, and many abstract and aesthetically complicated works have been created out of this ethos driving us toward understanding of the complexities of blackness. The future will, no doubt, continue to yield complicated black dance in the context of the current sociopolitical climate. In Brooklyn, the year 2017 seemed to stir black dance artists who were sowing the seeds for new aesthetics rooted in the traditions and dialectics unpacked here. The commitment of these artists and artistic communities is what undergirds and drives the future of dance. These artists have their eyes on the prize of the enduring impact of dance on society and culture. In 2017, they took stock of core values by gathering together, asking questions, taking action, increasing accountabilities, and continuing to create. No doubt, the following years will reveal the fruits of the labor from this seminal moment. At the end of the post-show discussion for Dying and Dying and Dying, Bauman talked about her interest in how we are connected. Looking back on the year, this sentiment returns me to my initial impetus with this work—finding stability in others during unstable times, through dance. For her, it involves planning a righteous death, coming together, and practicing a good death. The dancers in the piece have a grand reckoning with the specter of black death, and the results are a supreme not co-signing of our prescribed black deaths. This moment in history will not be the death of us. Death stomps her foot and the earth shakes.

Note 1 I do not use their names here to protect their ability to be hired in the future.

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References 2017 Bessie Awards. Accessed March 15, 2019. http://bessies.org/2017-awards/. Adams, T. E., Stacy Holman Jones, and Carolyn Ellis, eds. 2015. Autoethnography: Understanding Qualitative Research. New York: Oxford University Press. Bauman, Maria. 2017. Interviewed by the author at Annex coffee shop, Brooklyn, NY. December 5. Bauman, Maria. Dying and Dying and Dying. Accessed March 15, 2019. https://vimeo.com/208573023. Brother(hood) Dance!. How to Survive a Plague. Accessed September 26, 2018. https://www.bhooddance. com/new-page-3. Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. Dancing While Black. Accessed October 8, 2017. http://angelaspulse.org/project/dancing-while-black/. Dance Studies Association. 2017 Conference Keynote Plenary: Transmissions and Traces (Nadine GeorgeGraves Speech from 54.20). Accessed August 5, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgNSq0S VeS4#action=share. George-Graves, Nadine. 2008. “‘Just Like Being at the Zoo’: Primitivity and Ragtime Dance.” In Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy, Sham, Shake:A Social and Popular Dance Reader, edited by Julie Malig, 82–105. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. ———. 2018. “Taking the Cake: Black Vaudeville, Competition, and Value.” In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Competition, edited by Sherril Dodds, 17–40. New York: Oxford University Press. Maréchal, Garance. 2010. “Autoethnography.” In  Encyclopedia of Case Study Research, edited by Albert J. Mills, Gabrielle Durepos, and Elden Wiebe, 43–45.Vol. 2. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Oliver, Cynthia. Virago-Man Dem. Accessed March  15, 2019. https://www.cynthiaoliver.com/ virago-man-dem. Rossi, Andrew, dir. 2017. Bronx Gothic. (film) Produced by Peter Born. Grasshopper Film. Walker, Alice. 1983. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens:Womanist Prose. New York: Harcourt. Women’s March Alliance. The  official organizer of the Women’s March on NYC since 2017. Accessed December 5, 2017. https://womensmarchalliance.org/#ourimpact. Zachary, André. Untamed Space. Accessed March 15, 2019. http://www.renegadepg.com/untamed-space. html.

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16 ELROY JOSEPHS AND THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF BLACK BRITISH DANCE Ramsay Burt

Introduction This chapter gives a brief overview of the career of the black British dance artist and teacher Elroy Josephs between his arrival in Britain in 1950 and his death in 1997 and reflects on the reasons for his relative obscurity. Researching Josephs’s career raises issues not just about the inclusion in dance historical accounts of once forgotten or marginalized artists but also the need to rethink the basis of selection that led to their being forgotten or marginalized in the first place. In  1993, in his opening address at an event in Manchester that discussed the question “What is black dance in Britain?”, Elroy Josephs commented: Of course those of us with a little more knowledge and experience of black dance in this country know of the wonderful tradition which has gone before but has not  been built on—as we all pretend for one reason or another it never existed. For my part we should be celebrating 50 years of black dance in Britain and not asking “What is black dance in Britain?”—as someone said, “If you don’t know by now you never will.” (Schumann, Kuyateh, and Harpe 1993, 4) The  Arts Council of Great Britain had initiated a forum in Nottingham called “What is Black Dance in Britain?” to engage with the dance sector about the kind of support they should be providing for black British dancers. The Manchester event was initiated by artists in response to the Arts Council’s forum to discuss its implications. At the time, Elroy Josephs was a lecturer in jazz dance at Liverpool John Moores University, probably the first black British dance lecturer in a British university. He had begun his career as a professional dancer in 1950 as a member of Les Ballets Nègres. This was a British company founded by the Jamaican-born choreographer Berto Pasuka in 1946 with West Indian, African, and mixed-race and white British dancers. For seven years they toured Britain and continental Europe and were said to be the first black dance company in Europe (Barnes 2017). Josephs himself, in 1950, had recently arrived in Britain from Jamaica. There  is a certain bleakly ironic truthfulness in his suggestion that a wonderful tradition of fifty years of black people dancing professionally in Britain had not been built on and remained largely unknown to 236

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those who had not been part of it. In the twenty-first century, Josephs himself is in danger of being forgotten, and the wonderful tradition of fifty years of dancing, to which he referred, is still largely a hidden history. It  is necessary to ask how figures  like Josephs have been left almost entirely outside accounts of British dance history. Although dance studies needs to become more diverse, it is not  enough just to write forgotten figures  into existing narratives. It  is also necessary to rethink the historiographical and methodological frames that led to their exclusion. This chapter aims to make a start at doing both of these things.

Researching black British dance British dance writers and researchers have approached the history of contemporary dance in Britain in a different way from their colleagues in the United States. A  clear narrative of American modern dance has developed, which starts with Loïe Fuller, Isadora Duncan, and Ruth St. Denis, and then passes by way of Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey to Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor, and then the Judson Dance Theater and so-called postmodern dance. Variations on this genealogy can be found in books like Selma Jeanne Cohen’s collection Dance as a Theatre Art (1974), Marcia Siegel’s Shapes of Change (1979), Joseph Mazo’s Prime Movers (1977), and Deborah Jowitt’s Time and the Dancing Image (1988). British writers have not attempted to identify a comparable, overarching narrative of this kind. Instead, they have generally focused on particular areas. Thus, Joan White’s Twentieth-Century Dance in Britain: A History of Five Dance Companies (1985), as the title suggests, focuses on a few large companies. Stephanie Jordan’s Striding Out: Aspects of Contemporary and New Dance in Britain (1992) focuses largely on the work of Richard Alston, Siobhan Davies, and Ian Spink but also covers other British dancers working in experimental ways. The Jamaican-born dancer Namron, who performed in one of Davies’s pieces, is mentioned briefly, but no other black artists are discussed. In her book Out of Line: The Story of British New Dance (1992), Judith Mackrell names a few black companies in a list of companies who performed during the Dance Umbrella Festivals in the late 1970s and 1980s, as does Bonnie Rowell in Dance Umbrella: The First Twenty-One Years (2000). In these books, black British dance artists and companies are mentioned in passing or in footnotes, as if they are marginal to the histories these writers are examining. The best contemporary record of black British dance companies are the dance critic Bill Harpe’s reviews during the 1970s and 1980s in The Guardian newspaper. Two accounts of black British dance history were published in the 2000s (Evans 2002; Ramdhanie 2007), and at the time of writing there have been three edited collections about black British dance (Adewole, Matchett, and Prescod 2007; Adair and Burt 2017; Akinleye 2018). Christy Adair (1992) and Emily Claid (2006) both include discussions of black British dance artists alongside their white contemporaries, and Adair has also written a monograph on the Phoenix Dance Company (2007). A history of contemporary dance in Britain in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is lacking if it does not take into account the important contributions that have been made by British-based dancers who are black. In researching Josephs’s life and career, the sources I have drawn on are mainly from the collection of his personal papers that Sue Lancaster and Steve Mulrooney, who studied with Josephs in Liverpool in the 1980s, saved after his death in 1997. From his newspaper cuttings, flyers, lecture notes, grant application letters, and, in particular, his personal curriculum vitae (CV), it is possible to put together the story of Josephs’s career. Another source is Josephs’s obituary in The Guardian, written by Bill Harpe (1997). For the broader context of his early career, I have looked at material about Les Ballets Nègres, including programs and interviews. And I have also drawn on postcolonial theory to interpret my findings. 237

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One immediate problem is the question of when he was born. The earliest item in his CV is for training he received in 1961 (Josephs 1979). Harpe gives Josephs’s year of birth as 1939 (1997). This would have made him a young teenager when he danced with Les Ballets Nègres. As Harpe mentioned to me in an email on May 8, 2013, “when [Josephs] was taking up employment as a lecturer at IM Marsh College in Liverpool (now John Moores University) he cut some ten years (I don’t know the exact figure) from his age in order to fit in with expectations/retirement age, etc.” This means that the years given in the CV for his early training in the UK need to be treated with suspicion. If he had been born in 1929 rather than 1939, he would have been twenty-one years old when he arrived in London in 1950. He was part of the Windrush generation. Postwar immigration from the Caribbean to Britain is generally believed to have started with the arrival of the ship MV Empire Windrush on June 22, 1948 (see Phillips 1998). Josephs gives most of the dates for his dance training as the early 1960s. Thus, he says that between 1960 and 1964 he studied at The Actors Studio (presumably in New York) while taking ballet classes at the Astafieva Academy in London in 1961–1966, and also Caribbean dancing with Ben Johnson in 1964–1966. It also lists him studying classical Indian dance as well as Spanish and Flamenco dance. He must, however, have begun studying classical ballet with Verishka at the Astafieva Academy when he first arrived in London in 1950. His papers include a program for a performance by Verishka’s students on June 5, 1954, in which, given that he kept it, one assumes he might have taken part. The other dance and drama classes he mentions would probably have been taken later when he would have been earning enough to pay for professional training.

Josephs’s life and career Dance teacher Sue Lancaster told me that Josephs had told her that his parents knew Berto Pasuka and Richie Riley, Pasuka’s close friend who was one of the main dancers in Les Ballets Nègres (Lancaster 2013). Pasuka, Riley, and his parents had all performed together in 1931 at Edelweiss Park in Kingston, Jamaica. This was an enterprise set up by Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican-born black nationalist political leader, publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator, who founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Garvey presented popular variety shows and pageants at Edelweiss Park in order to promote his view that people of the black diaspora should be proud of their race and need to return to Africa, their ancestral homeland (see Barnes 2017). Both Pasuka and Riley subsequently trained with Verishka in London. In order to emigrate from Jamaica to Britain, Josephs told Lancaster, he needed £100, a job, and an address. At his funeral, Lancaster (2013) remembers, Riley recalled that Josephs arrived on his doorstep and asked for a job. The roles that Josephs performed in Pasuka’s choreography can be found in the cast lists of Les Ballets Nègres program in 1952 for its last London season at the Twentieth Century Theatre in Westbourne Grove (Ballets Nègres 1952). As El-Roy Josephz, he performed some general ensemble roles together with some smaller named ones. He  was thus one of the mourners in Nine Nights (1950), one of the dancers in They Came (1946), and one of the Black Keys in Aggrey (1946). He danced character roles in other ballets. He was the Thief in Market Day (1946), the Cripple who is healed in De Prophet (1946), the Victim in Blood (1948), and the Proprietor of a Harlem Nightclub in Cabaret 1920 (1950). There  is a distinctly anti-colonial tone to some of the ballet synopses in this program. This is clearest in They Came. In the first part of this ballet, British missionaries arrive in a jungle village. Backed by soldiers, they impose Western medicine on the villagers. “The tribal chief resents outside interference on the part of the church, medical science and big industry” (Ballets Nègres 1952). The second part is set during World War II, which, in 1946, had 238

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just ended. Black and white people are depicted as equal and seeking common sanctuary. An African soldier is killed while directing them to safety. The fact that modern black soldiers are fighting alongside white ones implies that these colonies are capable of governing themselves. Riley told an interviewer in 1996 that he knew people involved in anti-colonial struggles (1996). When he arrived in London in 1946 as a dance student, the Colonial Office sent him to a student hostel where students from the colonies were staying. In the evenings, he recalled, “Pandit Nehru, Nekrumah—quite a few other African exiles used to meet there [at the student hostel] at night and talk politics. But politics referred to the colonies, rather than in England” (1996). After India’s independence, Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) was the first prime minister of India, and Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) was the first prime minister of Ghana, having led the country to independence from Britain in 1957. The ballet Aggrey also derives its theme from black British political consciousness of the time. James Emman Kwegyir Aggrey (1875–1927) was a Ghanaian-born academic who studied at Columbia University in New  York where he specialized in education. In  a lecture in South Africa, he used the keys of the piano as an image of racial harmony saying that to produce harmony you had to play both black and white keys. The  Keys was the name of a journal produced between 1933 and 1939 by the London-based League of Coloured Peoples. In Pasuka’s ballet, the black keys were danced by male dancers, and the white keys by women. The League of Coloured Peoples included people from the Indian and African continents and the Caribbean, the term “coloured” embracing a wide range of identities. The French word “nègre” in Les Ballets Nègres refers to skin color, while also recalling the French name of Diaghilev’s famous company Les Ballets Russes. Postcolonial theorist Stuart Hall writes that in Jamaica in the 1930s and 1940s, “although everyone perfectly well understood what ‘black’ meant, the very word was taboo, unsayable, especially for the middle classes” (2017, 14). This is something that Riley also commented on in 1996: Black, at the time, was unfashionable—black people were, would not allow themselves to be called blacks: coloured we didn’t like, because coloured had links that weren’t really—although it was considered respectable by black people to be called coloured, we didn’t think it was right. Therefore we looked around for a name: negro was out of the question. We therefore decided that, if we made it French, or foreign, it would cover the question of black. Therefore we called it Les Ballets Nègres because it was, in every shape and form, ballet in a black idiom. (Riley 1996) Coming to work in Britain, Josephs was moving from a Caribbean society where social hierarchy was grounded in graduated shades of blackness to a country where these shades of difference were no longer socially distinguishable, but there was a sharp and often brutal distinction between black and white. This then was the broader social and political climate that Josephs entered when he joined Les Ballets Nègres. When Pasuka disbanded his company in 1953, Josephs became part of one of the groups of what Bob Ramdhanie calls “giggers” and “dance acts,” terms he invented “as short hand labels to categorize solo and informal dancers” (2005, 149) from the Caribbean making a living in Britain from the 1940s to the 1970s. In Josephs’s papers, there is a program for The Jazz Train at Blackpool Opera House in October 1955. This was a musical revue written and directed by the African American artist Mervyn Nelson. Josephs may have just joined the show, as he is not listed in the original London cast in April of that year. The significance of this is that Josephs would later specialize in teaching jazz dance. A newspaper cutting from the weekly magazine TV Guide in 1959 is about Josephs becoming a regular member of the cast of the 239

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Rediffusion TV music show Cool for Cats (Dalzeli 1959). This  was one of the early British shows in which The Dougie Squires Dancers, who included both black and white dancers, performed choreographed routines to current pop hits. In this article, Josephs comments that “aspiring dancers, actors and singers who are born here and complain because they don’t get a break have no idea how much harder it is to ‘get in’ when you have a black face” (1). This is suggestive of how Josephs was thinking about the position of black dance artists in Britain in 1959. Publicity materials from this period for Elroy Josephz Productions (he seems to have spelt Josephz with a “z” for his professional dancing) show a small company who performed in cabarets in Madrid in the 1960s. He describes himself in his CV as a dancer, choreographer, actor, and producer, adding, “My career has always been a mixture of performing and teaching and I ran my own Dance Studio from 1960–1967 and my own professional Dance Company which toured Europe 1967–1970” ( Josephs 1979). In Britain, Josephs continued to appear in live theater, film, and television drama. He was, for example, in an early TV series of Doctor Who, playing the role of Jamaica in several episodes of The Smugglers, which was broadcast in September and October 1964. In 1968 he was in the film version of Quatermass and the Pit. In 1979 he appeared in John Schlesinger’s film Yanks and the ITV dramatization of Brideshead Revisited. On stage, he appeared in several productions in provincial theaters. These include West Side Story at the Belgrade Theatre Coventry in 1970 (Illustration 16.1)

Illustration 16.1 Elroy Josephs in West Side Story at Belgrade Theatre, Coventry (1970). (Courtesy of Susan Lancaster.)

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and Robinson Crusoe at the Bristol Hippodrome, Liverpool Empire, and Richmond Theatre 1970–1972. Josephs may have been supporting his dancing through taking acting jobs. The  ability to perform dramatic parts was nevertheless already hinted at in the character roles he had performed in Pasuka’s ballets. In  1973–1975, Josephs was “Chairman of the Dance Committee and dance specialist for the British zone of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in Lagos.” As Hélène Neveu Kringelbach (2013) explains, the politics around these African festivals is significant. The  1966 World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, under the sponsorship of then President Léopold Senghor and informed by his notion of négritude, was widely criticized for not including artists from the Maghreb—the countries of North Africa. The francophone concept of négritude, initially proposed by Aimé Césaire as an anti-colonial aesthetic strategy, stressed the pride in being-in-the-world as Africans and people of African descent. A  rivalry developed between francophone ideas about négritude and English and American ideas about Pan-Africanism. Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, whose The Road won the best play award in the Dakar festival, famously criticized the notion of négritude, saying, “The tiger does not proclaim its tigerness, it jumps on its prey” (Soyinka, quoted by Jahn 1968, 265). To include the Maghreb, the 1969  Pan-African Cultural Festival was held in Algiers. Senghor was disappointed that the 1975 festival, with which Josephs was involved, did not return to Dakar but, instead, was held in Lagos in oil-rich Nigeria. He and some of his Caribbean and African American friends like Aimé Césaire and Langston Hughes boycotted it (Neveu Kringelbach 2013, 43–53). This is the context in which Josephs developed the British contribution to the festival in Lagos. His involvement is also significant for his later comments on the “wonderful tradition” of black dancing in Great Britain. In London in the 1970s, Josephs became involved in what would become the community dance movement. In his CV he wrote, “I have extensive experience of working creatively in a multiracial community, initiating dance classes, workshops and performances” (1979). He  founded Dance Theatre Workshop No.  7,  which, he wrote, “is community based and involves young people of many nationalities and their parents” (1979). They  gave performances at the Young Vic, the Cockpit Theatre, the “LUYC” Summer Festival in Camden, and the Islington Dance Festival. Other community projects, he wrote, included “setting up summer workshops involving up to 1100 children aged 5–13 years doing dance/drama culminating in performances” (1979). He stated that he was also an advisor to the Commission for Racial Equality and the Minority Arts Advisory Service. When Josephs took up his teaching position in Liverpool in 1979, Carl Campbell took over this project developing it into Dance Company 7. Josephs’s CV also lists a Dance Fellowship in 1978–1979 funded by the Greater London Arts Association (GLAA). In a conversation on May 21, 2016, choreographer Fergus Early, a key dance artist who helped develop independent dance in London in the 1970s and 1980s, remembers that, following the lead given by the Gulbenkian Foundation in funding Veronica Lewis as a dance animateur in Cheshire, GLAA  decided to appoint some dance animateurs in London, and Josephs was one of the first of these. Animateurs worked in a community context to promote and stimulate all forms of dance by organizing classes, workshops, and performances. They aimed to bridge the gap between dance as art and the public at large and develop links with schools. Lancaster says Josephs took a teacher training course at University College London, though this is not mentioned in his CV. One other interesting detail among Josephs’s papers is information about his master of arts in ethnic studies and race relations, awarded in 1989 by Liverpool University (Lancaster 2013). For this, he wrote about police and community relations in Toxteth, Liverpool, following the violent confrontations between the local police and the black community that flared up in 1981. 241

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Josephs from a postcolonial point of view Although Josephs lived a full and interesting life and made a significant contribution to British dance, little of what he did fits into the kinds of events generally recorded in accounts of dance in Britain in the late twentieth century. This is largely a history of choreographers, dance productions, and companies. It is an approach to history in which there is a big gap between Les Ballets Nègres 1946–1953 and the founding by black dance artists of British companies like Steel ’n’ Skin, MAAS Movers, Ékome, and Kokuma in the 1970s (for a timeline of the development of black dance in Britain, see Adair and Burt [2017, 184–188]). Josephs was a member of Les Ballets Nègres but only at the end of that company’s life. The Jazz Train would be counted as popular entertainment rather than as a serious artistic production. To understand the significance of the “wonderful tradition” that Josephs referred to in 1993, it is necessary to adopt methodologies from postcolonial theory and read his career through the lens of a critique of the methodologies that exclude him from the canon. A postcolonial approach is also, of course, relevant because Josephs, like many of those who Ramdhanie called “giggers” and “dance acts,” had been born in British colonies. Jamaica only became independent in 1962, so that, during his formative years in Jamaica and then London, Josephs was a colonial subject. Riley recalled that Les Ballets Nègres was not allowed to participate in the program of the 1951 Festival of Britain “on the grounds that this was a festival of British culture and not colonial culture” (1996). Hall has written about “the colonial relationship and the distortions of living in a world culturally dependent and dominated from some center outside the place where the majority of people lived” (1995, 4). Dancers like Josephs and Pasuka were among the artists and writers from the Caribbean who, in the 1940s and 1950s, as Hall puts it, felt at that moment that they had to migrate [to London] to fulfill their artistic ambitions. They came, of course, to claim their place as artists in a movement from which, as colonials, they had been marginalized but to which in every other sense they felt they naturally belonged and that, in a way, belonged to them. (Hall 2005, 5) This is the context in which Josephs took ballet classes. Rex Nettleford (1933–2010), Jamaican scholar, founder of the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica, and vice-chancellor emeritus of the University of the West Indies, notes that “as soon as European classical ballet was accepted by the wielders of social power in the mother country, Caribbean cultural leaders immediately followed in their footsteps” (1993, 91). When Riley migrated to London in 1946, he came as a student who had already been accepted for a course at the Astafieva Academy. This suggests that he may already have had some ballet classes in Jamaica. Josephs may also have attended ballet classes before arriving in Britain. In his CV, Josephs wrote that he “studied advanced Ballet of the Russian Imperial School and the Cecchetti method with Mlle. Verishka of Princess Astafieva’s Academy under the patronage of Serge Diaghilev.” Verishka, born Vera Jackson, taught at Astafieva’s Academy, taking over as its director after Astafieva’s death in 1934. Verishka was also the ballet mistress for the Markova-Dolin company from 1935 and briefly taught Margot Fonteyn (“Obituary: Vera Jackson” 1971, 83). Josephs, having studied, as a schoolboy in Jamaica, the same curriculum that was being taught in schools in Britain, would have felt entitled, as Hall suggests, to learn the same techniques as those practiced by members of the British Royal Ballet. The problem was that, as Nettleford puts it, “Until the independence arrangements of the 1960s … [ Jamaica] played the wily suntanned savage of a Caliban to the magisterial tutelary authority of Great Britain’s 242

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Prospero” (1993, 92). And even after independence, artists from the former colonies found that they were ignored and marginalized by cultural institutions that they had been led to believe were enlightened and should therefore recognize and support artistic value wherever it appeared. Notes from Josephs’s course in jazz dance show how he developed his pedagogical approach from his knowledge of ballet. Harpe observed in Josephs’s obituary that Jazz dancing is perceived as commercial, high-powered entertainment. But it must also be—as Elroy would remind his students—spiritual, eloquent and expressive. “There is,” Elroy would say, “the top of the tree, and that’s Hollywood. But there are also the roots of the tree, and they go back to Africa—and I’m teaching you the roots of jazz dancing.” (Harpe 1997, 18) The documentation that Lancaster and Mulrooney have kept is evidence of the rigor with which Josephs developed this course and his debt to the grounding in ballet that he had received through his classes with Verishka. At the time of writing, Lancaster continues to teach Josephs’s approach to jazz dance, and his legacy also lives on within all those who Josephs taught during his lifetime. While he was teaching this jazz course, Josephs was also analyzing the appalling disconnect between police and members of black communities in Toxteth. This  points to the disillusionment experienced by him and his generation of artists from the Caribbean. This disillusionment underlies Josephs’s comments at the 1993 forum about the wonderful tradition that had not  been built on but which “we all pretend for one reason or another … never existed” (Schumann, Kuyateh, and Harpe 1993, 4). The event at which Josephs was speaking was one in which artists responded to the closure of The Black Dance Development Trust, despite the fact that, as ’Funmi Adewole points out, the Arts Council had received excellent reports about its work (2017). With funds from the Arts Council and some city councils, the trust had provided summer schools in which international teachers of neo-traditional African and Caribbean dance and drumming taught classes to the young black British dancers in the African Caribbean dance companies founded in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They therefore represented the artistic aspirations of a younger generation of black dancers from that of Josephs and Les Ballets Nègres. Hall notes: “Those separated by migration from their original homes but profoundly alienated by racism from any sense of belonging to, or recognition by, British society, were haunted by questions of identity and belonging” (2005, 12). Whereas Josephs taught jazz dance, The Black Dance Development Trust responded to the needs of a generation of dreadlocked dancers of Caribbean heritage who felt the need to reconnect with African roots through practicing and performing African and Caribbean dance and drumming. Part of the problem for the Arts Council, though not necessarily for the dancers or dance companies themselves, was that The Black Dance Development Trust only supported dancers working with neotraditional African and Caribbean dance forms, not those working with other dance styles such as jazz, tap, hip-hop, and Western contemporary dance, or indeed in hybrid or creolized fusions of dance styles. Although these varying approaches made perfect sense to the dancers and their audiences, the Arts Council dance officers, and the majority of British ballet critics who advised them, seemed incapable of understanding or appreciating them, hence the question “What is black dance in Britain?” As noted at the beginning of this chapter, Josephs spoke at an event arranged by dancers and practitioners in response to one organized by the Arts Council. 243

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The  particular approach to Jazz dance that Josephs himself taught could perhaps be described as a fusion, and it is significant in this context that, as I noted earlier, he listed in his CV his professional training in ballet and classical Indian dance as well as Spanish, Flamenco, African, and Caribbean dance. All of these identities are found in the genealogy of people in Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. This is because the original pre-Columbian Caribe people had their lands taken away by British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese settlers who then brought over slaves from Africa and, after the abolition of slavery, indentured plantation workers from India. The same year as the public forums were discussing the question “What is black dance in Britain?” Hall gave a lecture titled “Negotiating Caribbean Identities.” In this he said: What I want to suggest is that despite the dilemmas and vicissitudes of identity through which Caribbean people have passed and continue to pass, we have a tiny but important message for the world about how to negotiate identity. (Hall 1995, 4) Their message was that identity is not the rediscovery of roots, “but what they as cultural resources allow a people to produce. Identity is not in the past to be found, but in the future to be constructed” (Hall 1995, 14). When he goes on to speak of “the enormously rich and complex cultural histories to which history has made [Caribbean people] heirs” (14), Hall is surely in accord with Josephs’s claim that the wonderful tradition of black British dancing should be recognized for what it is and duly celebrated. In the second decade of the twentyfirst century, many black British dancers are still waiting for this, while the rise of a xenophobic populist nationalism in Britain and other European countries means that questions about how to negotiate identities in inclusive ways are more pertinent than ever.

Rethinking dance studies Research into the careers of artists like Josephs does more than just fill in the gap between the closure of Les Ballets Nègres and the founding of companies like Steel ’n’ Skin, MAAS Movers, Ékome, and Kokuma. In order to appreciate the contributions that black British artists have made to British dance culture, it is necessary to rethink the frames of reference on which dance studies depends. This requires recognition of the conditions of possibility for professional careers in the dance sector and the relations of power that define these. Josephs might have trained in the Cecchetti method, but there was little hope of employment at that time for dancers of color in a British ballet company. It is therefore necessary to investigate what these dancers’ aspirations were and how they negotiated the conjuncture of contradictory forces that determined what they could achieve. This goes some way toward explaining the difference between the relatively assimilationist aspirations of dancers of Josephs’s generation who were influenced by James Aggrey’s ideas—like Richie Riley and other members of Les Ballets Nègres—and the wider diversity of approaches and hybrid mixtures of dance styles that were explored by younger generations. Following Hall, all these generations of dancers have a message that is still important today about how to negotiate identities. Josephs was clearly concerned about the problems that black people experienced in Britain, and this impacted his work as a dance artist and teacher. I have noted, throughout this account of his life, his awareness of black political discourses. His parents had been exposed to Marcus Garvey’s ideas. Les Ballets Nègres’s ballets were informed by anti-colonial ideas circulating among black artists and intellectuals in London at the time, as well as by the ideas of the League of Coloured Peoples. Interviewed for TV Guide in 1959, he hints at racial 244

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prejudices against black performers. In the 1970s, he had firsthand experience of the debates around Pan-Africanism through his participation in organizing the Arts Festival in Lagos (Dalzeli, 1959). In the 1980s, he wrote about the violent confrontation between poor black communities and the police in Toxteth. In his course on jazz dance, he taught about its roots in Africa, just as his parents had danced in productions that aimed to make Jamaicans proud of their African heritage. In the 1990s, he spoke out against the marginalization of the legacy of his generation of black dance artists. Though he was not an activist, Josephs’s life work as a dancer and teacher was informed by his black political consciousness. To ensure that the wonderful tradition of black British dance to which Josephs referred does take its place within histories of theater dance in Britain, it is necessary, as I noted earlier, to rethink critical and historiographical methodologies. For the purposes of the present research, these concern the times, the places, and the hierarchy of styles. It is widely accepted that dance works belong to their times, coming out of and responding to particular tensions and contradictions within social and political contexts. The particular black British histories to which Josephs’s career belong are not well known and need elaborating to an extent that would not normally be necessary if the research topic was a white dance artist. This is why there have been so many references to postcolonial theory in this chapter. Dance scholars often seem to assume that important events only happen in leading metropolitan centers and that dance artists who lived and worked elsewhere must have been minor or else they would have wanted and needed to take part in the artistic scene in a cultural capital. Josephs came from the colonial periphery to the capital of the mother country and then moved on to what opinion formers in the capital consider the provincial margins. Dance scholars sometimes need to expand the range of works and artists that they choose to investigate by blurring the boundaries between center and periphery, between ‘high’ and ‘low’ (i.e., ‘serious’ art and popular entertainment), and by recognizing the transformative agencies of artists from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean who have contributed to metropolitan Western dance culture.

Conclusion In conclusion, the dominant forms of popular commercial dance since the early years of the twentieth century have drawn heavily on black cultural forms that have their roots in Africa. In some instances, black choreographers deliberately choose to explore these popular dance forms in their work because these are more relevant to the communities from which they come than forms like ballet and contemporary dance. Josephs may have studied ballet with a leading ballet teacher but, as I’ve noted, the possibility of working in a British ballet company at that time was not open to him. One should not, however, assume that he only specialized in jazz dance because that was an area that was open to him, particularly in the light of his recognition of its roots in African aesthetic forms. It is these kinds of methodological approaches that need to be adopted if we are not to forget figures like Elroy Josephs and, in the end, by doing so, gain a richer and more diverse understanding of our collective histories.

References Adair, Christy. 1992. Women and Dance: Sylphs and Sirens. London: Macmillan. ———. 2007. Dancing the Black Question: The  Phoenix Dance Company Phenomenon. Alton, UK: Dance Books. Adair, Christy, and Ramsay Burt. 2017. “Appendix 2.” In British Dance: Black Routes, edited by Christy Adair and Ramsay Burt, 184–188. London: Routledge.

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Ramsay Burt ———, eds. 2017. British Dance: Black Routes. London: Routledge. Adewole, Funmi. 2017. “The Construction of the Black Dance/African Peoples Dance Sector in Britain: Issues Arising for the Conceptualisation of Related Choreographic and Dance Practices.” In  British Dance: Black Routes, 125–148. London: Routledge. Adewole, ’Funmi, Dick Matchett, and Colin Prescod, eds. 2007. Voicing Black Dance: The British Experience 1930s–1990s. London: ADAD. Akinleye, Adesola, ed. 2018. Narratives in Black British Dance: Embodied Practices. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Ballets Nègres. 1952. Program, Twentieth Century Theatre, London. Victoria and Albert Museum, Blythe House Archive  & Study Room: Theatre  & Performance Collection GC/TMC General Collection: Theatre & Performance Corporate Files. Barnes, Thea. 2017. “Presenting Berto Pasuka.” In British Dance: Black Routes, edited by Christy Adair and Ramsay Burt, 15–34. London: Routledge. Claid, Emilyn. 2006. Yes? No! Maybe … Seduction and Ambiguity in Dance. London: Routledge. Cohen, Selma Jeanne, ed. 1974. Dance as a Theatre Art: Source Readings in Dance History From 1581 to the Present. Pennington, NJ: Princeton Book Company. Dalzeli, J. 1959. “The Struggle Wasn’t Easy for Elroy.” TV Guide, October, no. 113: 1. Evans, Diana Omo. 2002. “Black Dance.” In Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture, edited by Alison Donnell, 88–91. London: Routledge. Hall, Stuart. 1995. “Negotiating Caribbean Identities.” New Left Review 1 (209) (January–February): 1–14. ———. 2005 “Assembling the 1960s:The Deluge – and After.” In Shades of Black, edited by David A. Bailey, Ian Baucom and Sonia Boyce, 1–21. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2017 Familiar Strangers: A Life Between Two Islands. London: Allen Lane. Harpe, Bill. 1997. “Discipline and Dance; Obituary: Elroy Josephs.” The Guardian, February 13, 2018. Jahn, Janheinz. 1968. A History of Neo-African Literature. London: Faber. Jordan, Stephanie. 1992. Striding Out: Aspects of Contemporary and New Dance in Britain. London: Dance Books. Josephs, Elroy. ca. 1979. CV, unpublished, Ramsay Burt personal collection. Jowitt, Deborah. 1988. Time and the Dancing Image. New York: W. Morrow. Lancaster, Sue. 2013. Interviewed by the author at British dance: Black routes  – Symposium, International Slavery Museum, Liverpool. October 25. Mackrell, Judith. 1992. Out of Line:The Story of British New Dance. London: Dance Books. Mazo, Joseph. 1977. Prime Movers:The Makers of Modern Dance in America. London: A. and C. Black. Nettleford, Rex. 1993. Inward Stretch, Outward Stretch: A Voice from the Caribbean. London: Macmillan. Neveu Kringelbach, Hélène. 2013. Dance Circles: Movement, Morality and Self-Fashioning in Urban Senegal. New York: Berghahn. “Obituary: Vera Jackson [Verishka] Teacher and Associate of Seraphima Astafieva Died October 5.” 1971. Dancing Times, November, 83. Phillips, Trevor. 1998. Windrush:The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain. London: HarperCollins. Ramdhanie, Bob. 2005. “African Dance in England: Spirituality and Continuity.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Warwick. ———. 2007. “Black Dance.” In The Oxford Companion to Black British History, edited by Dabydeen, David, John Gilmore, and Cecily Jones, 50–53. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Riley, Richie. 1996. “Richard Theophilus Riley” Black Cultural Archives. BCA/5/1/18. London. Rowell, Bonnie. 2000. Dance Umbrella:The First Twenty-One Years. London: Dance Books. Schumann, Yvonne, Trevor Kuyateh, and Bill Harpe. 1993. What Is Black Dance in Britain? A Meeting for Practitioners. Liverpool: The Blackie. Siegel, Marcia. 1979. Shapes of Change: Images of American Dance. New York: Avon Books. White, Joan. 1985. Twentieth-Century Dance in Britain: A History of Five Dance Companies. London: Dance Books.

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17 A LOVE SONG AS A FORM OF PROTEST Danielle Goldman

Introduction In the fall of 2016, Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) introduced Endless Shout, a six-month, multi-artist performance project exploring collectivity and improvisation. Along with four other artists and thinkers—Raúl de Nieves, George Lewis, The Otolith Group, and taisha paggett—I was invited to help organize the series of performances within the ICA’s exhibition spaces. Upon our initial site visit at the ICA, a few months prior to the opening of Endless Shout, the curator Anthony Elms walked us through the museum and explained how works from the corresponding exhibition, The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now, would be installed. We quickly agreed that a gallery on the second floor would serve as the main space for Endless Shout. It had a high ceiling and it felt removed from the rest of the museum. Perhaps most notably for the purposes of this essay, one wall would be dedicated to I Can’t Concentrate with You in the Room (2016–2017), a set of nine photorealist paintings by Matthew Metzger, all album-sized and organized according to chance procedures, installed with a sound piece produced by collapsing every audible breath from Anthony Braxton’s “Composition 8F (To Composer John Cage).” On the adjacent wall, Elms would install Pope.L’s Another Kind of Love: John Cage’s Silence, By Hand (2016–2017), which considers the legacy of John Cage and its relation to contemporary black performance. What kind of dance would speak in compelling ways to these two works? Ultimately, I invited the choreographers Ishmael Houston-Jones, Cynthia Oliver, and Jumatatu Poe to present works for Endless Shout, as all three artists, in their own artful and rigorous ways, have employed improvisation to negotiate the shifting and interrelated strictures of gender, race, sexuality, and genre. This chapter focuses on one of these dance works, Untitled Duet, an improvisation performed by Ishmael Houston-Jones and Fred Holland in 1983 as part of Contact at 10th and Second, a festival celebrating the first eleven years of contact improvisation. Considering Untitled Duet in relation to Pope.L’s Another Kind of Love, I analyze the racial implications of privileging Cagean notions of chance and indeterminacy over improvisation, as is often the case in histories of both “experimental” music and postmodern dance. But I also remain attuned to complex questions of influence, lineage, and desire, which are inextricable from the difficult love that courses through these works. 247

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Cage Unrequited (2013) Pope.L is perhaps best known for his “crawls,” an exhausting series of street performances that the artist initiated in New York City during the 1970s. The first performance was Times Square Crawl (1978), where Pope.L maneuvered through the city’s congested center of tourism and commerce on hands and knees. Reflecting on the work, he noted, “In New York, in most cities, if you can remain vertical and moving you deal with the world; this is urban power. But people who are forced to give up their verticality are prey to all kinds of dangers” (Wilson 1996). Several years later, Pope.L performed Tompkins Square Crawl (1991), in which, dressed in a black suit and white shirt, he labored in the sweltering summer heat to drag his body through Manhattan’s East Village while clutching a potted yellow flower in one hand. The crawl performances varied in duration, but perhaps the most punishing was The Great White Way, 22 Miles, 9 Years, 1 Street (2001–2009), where the artist, this time replacing the business suit with a Superman costume and a skateboard strapped to his back, attempted to drag himself along the full stretch of Broadway for as long as he could endure the task. The knee and elbow pain were excruciating, so Pope.L performed the crawl in installments, roughly six blocks at a time. The work took nine years to complete. More recently, over the course of twenty-five hours spanning November 16–17, 2013, Pope.L performed a different kind of marathon. Joined by over eighty collaborators, including artists, curators, students, scholars, and friends, Pope.L presented an extended reading of John Cage’s Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961a), a collection of twenty-three articles, essays, and lectures that Cage produced from 1937 to 1961. It would be difficult to exaggerate the impact of this book. As the music critic Kyle Gann writes in his foreword to the Fiftieth Anniversary Edition: Silence has a reputation as the most influential book written by an American composer—do we need the word “American”?—and it is difficult to argue otherwise. Other books, and we might mention Henry Cowell’s New Musical Resources, Charles Ives’s Essays before a Sonata, and Harry Partch’s Genesis of a Music, have encouraged several generations of composers and musicians to think differently. But Silence was different. It encouraged everyone to think differently. (2011, x–xi) Pope.L’s performance, entitled Cage Unrequited, was part of the Performa 13 biennial and the affiliated exhibition, Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art in New York City. At least in part, the stated aim was to explore relationships between Cage’s ideas about chance and indeterminacy, and the work of contemporary black artists (Performa 13 2013). Each participant had twenty minutes to perform the text. In a nod to Cage’s famous 4′33″, which includes no sounds from the performer, some of the participants chose to say nothing. Meanwhile, Pope.L sat at a nearby desk, transcribing Silence by hand on sheets from a pad of yellow legal paper, casting aside each sheet upon completion. A little before midnight, Pope.L offered an interlude performance that complicated any notion of tribute or reverence toward Cage. Making his way from the writing desk where he had been assiduously transcribing Silence to a second desk where the readings occurred, Pope.L placed a yellow knit cap upon his head and unfolded several sheets of white paper from his pocket. At this point, Pope.L had an additional text that beckoned to be read, written not  by Cage but about another musician, Julius Eastman (1940–1990), whom Pope.L described as “a taut, wiry, gay, African American man” (Gann 2005). Although Pope.L says nothing in the performance to indicate the source of this text, a bit of research reveals that the words were written by Gann, who, in addition to writing the foreword to the Fiftieth 248

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Anniversary Edition of Silence, wrote an obituary for Eastman after his death in May 1990. More recently, in 2005, Gann wrote the liner notes for Unjust Malaise, a three-CD recording of Eastman’s most notorious compositions. Pope.L read from Gann’s liner notes: [Eastman] had such an appearance of athleticism and pent-up energy that he could look dangerous. He  had a gentle sense of humor, and his deep sepulchral voice, incommensurate with his slight figure, conveyed a solemn authority of a prophet. He was a fiery pianist, and a singer of phenomenal range and power (Gann 2005). After sketching Eastman’s musical education and career, which included studies at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute and the Creative Associates program at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Pope.L, via Gann, described a notorious 1975 performance by the S.E.M. Ensemble, directed by Petr Kotik, of Cage’s Song Books, in which Eastman enacted a section of the score that merely instructed the performer to “give a lecture” (Gann 2005). Eastman spoke about sex and delivered an anatomy lesson with two assistants. Although the woman refused to be disrobed, Eastman admiringly undressed the man, who was generally understood to be Eastman’s lover (Dohoney 2014, 48). The next day, in a lecture to a group of student-composers and colleagues, Cage angrily expressed dismay over the “misuse” of his composition, exclaiming, “The freedom in my music does not mean the freedom to be irresponsible!” (quoted by Gann 2005). Pope.L then turned to another sheet of paper, reading what seemed to be his own commentary: The sensationalist aspect of this episode has overshadowed what Cage was really worried about: (1). that his celebrated generosity and openness was a bit fragile; (2). Eastman’s outrageous behavior pointed out a hidden preference of Cage’s and a problematic concerning the interpretation of his scores. For example, David Tudor, the tireless interpreter of his work for many years, made many important alterations to his scores, and that was okay with Cage. But Cage could not explain why other interpretations, such as Eastman’s, were not so satisfactory. (Pope.L 2013) As Pope.L shuffled papers in silence, the audience was left to ponder the extent to which Eastman’s “transgression” had to do with his artistic choices, or his racial and sexual positioning, or perhaps, as is more likely, their complicated entanglement. As Eastman said to Renate Strauss in a 1976 interview, “What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest. Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest” (Woolfe 2016). Without ceremony, Pope.L returned to reading from Gann’s liner notes. He mentioned that, despite the fact that Eastman composed several important works during the 1970s and early 1980s, he never had a commercial recording during his lifetime. Struggling with addiction, he was kicked out of his East Village apartment and lived for a while in Tompkins Square Park. In 1990, at the age of forty-nine, Eastman died alone of heart failure in Buffalo, New York. After a significant pause, and without comment, Pope.L returned to the “official” task of the evening, which was to recite selections from Cage’s Silence. But given Pope.L’s performance of Gann’s text, it was impossible to return to Cage’s lectures without thinking of Eastman. Reading from Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing,” Pope.L intoned, “You see, I could say anything. It makes very little difference what I say, or even how I say it” (Cage [1961] 2011b, 112). But Pope.L had just drawn attention to the limits in these proclamations. As evidenced by Eastman’s 1975 performance in Buffalo, it made a difference who said what, 249

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and how it was said. The “freedom” in Cage’s Song Books score (1970) was neither unlimited nor available to all. A little later, Pope.L read from Cage’s rumination on structure: “Pure life expresses itself within and through structure. Each moment is absolute, alive and significant. Blackbirds rise from a field making a sound delicious beyond compare” (Cage [1961] 2011b, 113). Once again, it was hard not to think of Eastman’s “taut black body” and his “sepulchral voice.” As Pope.L’s performance suggested, rather than being a purely aesthetic matter, or a gesture toward unfettered freedom, Cage’s pronouncement that any sound could be considered music was in fact a claim with complex politics that played out in a social world.

Another kind of love After the extended live performance Cage Unrequited, the yellow legal sheets of paper onto which Pope.L painstakingly transcribed Silence became the artwork Another Kind of Love: John Cage’s Silence, By Hand (2013). In looking at those sheets of paper, installed in museum spaces such as the Philadelphia ICA within a wooden lattice dyed in the Pan-African colors of yellow, green, and red, one sees traces of Pope.L’s hand at work, darkening some words or lines by writing them multiple times with a finely tipped black pen. On some papers, Pope.L’s writing appears in block letters, while elsewhere his script takes on a kind of whimsy. On the title page, Pope.L has written John Cage’s name three times, a legible script crossed out, followed by an increasingly fluid and then indecipherable signature. Just as the live performance Cage Unrequited complicated any straightforward tribute to Cage and his legacy, Another Kind of Love is by no means a flat copy of Cage’s Silence. Pope.L’s body literally and figuratively puts pressure on the text. Moreover, while Pope.L retains aspects of Cage’s typography and spacing, he eliminates some pages, and the wooden framing of the work breaks off at irregular angles, suspending the text and inviting questions about its relation to both the past and the future. In 2015, curators Naomi Beckwith and Dieter Roelstraete included both Cage Unrequited and Another Kind of Love in The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music 1965 to Now (2015), an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago that coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a collective of mostly African American musicians founded in 1965 in the city’s South Side. When installed within the context of The Freedom Principle, Pope.L’s work clearly signals the long-standing tensions between jazz and other forms of “experimental” music. Moreover, the challenge that Eastman posed to Cage can no longer be considered Eastman’s alone. As Solveig Nelson writes, “While Cage explicitly disavowed jazz improvisation, instead championing an ‘indeterminacy’ facilitated by external systems that disrupted subjective expression, nearly every statement that Pope.L copied could be applied to free jazz, including Cage’s ethos of experimentation: ‘an act the outcome of which is unknown’” (2015, 298). In “Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” the composer, trombonist, and scholar of improvisation and experimental music George Lewis (2002) provides fuller context for Nelson’s observation, noting that although bebop musicians explored spontaneity and structural radicalism nearly a decade before white musicians such as Cage, scholars were slow to include African American innovations in histories of postwar experimental music. Referring to books such as Michael Nyman’s Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Music in the Twentieth Century) (1999), which draws almost exclusively from European or European-American heritage to construct a history of experimental music, Lewis argues, “Coded qualifiers to the word ‘music’—such as ‘experimental,’ ‘new,’ ‘art,’ ‘concert,’ ‘serious,’ ‘avant-garde,’ and ‘contemporary’—are 250

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used in these texts to delineate a racialized location of this tradition within the space of whiteness; either erasure or (brief ) inclusion of Afrological music can then be framed as responsible chronicling and ‘objective’ taxonomy” (Lewis 2002, 226). Moreover, improvisation is rarely mentioned in histories of postwar experimental music that situate Cage as a pivotal figure. To underscore the racial dimensions of this elision, Lewis notes composer Anthony Braxton’s cutting remarks about the art world’s dismissal of Afrological forms, particularly improvisation: “Both aleatory and indeterminism are words which have been coined … to bypass the word improvisation and as such the influence of nonwhite sensibility” (2002, 223). Lewis also unpacks the politics that undergird Cage’s famous pronouncement that any sound could be considered music. According to Lewis, Cage was very much aware of the fact that his musical ideas had social implications. Drawing from a set of published conversations between Cage and the critic Richard Kostelanetz (1987), Lewis highlights a moment where Cage expresses his desire for “a music in which not only are sounds just sounds but in which people are just people, not subject, that is, to laws established by any one of them, even if he is ‘the composer’ or ‘the conductor’” (2002, 222). Cage continues, “Freedom of movement is basic to both this art and this society” (222). But, as Lewis insists, this smooth “freedom of movement” does not adequately describe the real conditions in which we find ourselves, where bodies are policed and constrained and understood in various ways, frequently in accordance with notions of race, but also gender, age, sexuality, and ability. According to Lewis, “Cage’s notion of social instrumentality … does not  connect this very American notion of freedom—perhaps reminiscent of the frontier myth—to any kind of struggle that might be required in order to obtain it” (222).

Parallels Although Pope.L’s work speaks directly to histories of music, it also speaks to histories of dance, where scholars frequently discuss the Judson Dance Theater as the privileged site of postmodern experimentalism, celebrating Cagean principles of chance and indeterminacy but giving little notice to jazz and black social dance traditions and their deep explorations of improvisation. Brenda Dixon Gottschild underscores this point in Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (1996). As Gottschild argues, “The problem is that the chroniclers of postmodern performance have credited sources from the European historical avant-garde. They have also credited Asian sources in Zen and other Buddhist philosophies, yoga and other Hindu practices, and in the martial arts. They have not given credence to the Africanist aesthetic as a pervasive subtext in postmodern performance” (51). Gottschild, along with scholars such as Robert Farris Thompson (1983), Marshall and Jean Stearns (1968), Thomas DeFrantz (2002, 2014), Katrina Hazzard-Gordon (1990), Jacqui Malone (1996), and Kariamu Welsh (1998), has identified a constellation of aesthetic principles that characterize many dances of the African diaspora, including “percussive attack; an exploration of concurrent, highly complex rhythmic meters; an engagement of call-and-response between dancers and audiences; sophisticated structures of derision that are simultaneously personal and political; and above all, an overarching cool, palpably spiritual dimension to the performance” (Gottschild 2012, 62). To this constellation of aesthetic principles, one could certainly add improvisation, which has been an important mode of performance and creation in numerous African diasporic dance forms. The dominant story of the Judson Dance Theater, which was most fully articulated by Sally Banes in Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater 1962–1993, places Cage as a central figure. 251

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The narrative unfolds as follows: In 1960, Cage invited the musician Robert Ellis Dunn to teach a composition class at Merce Cunningham’s studio in the Living Theater’s building in New York on 14th Street and 6th Avenue. Dunn was neither a dancer nor a choreographer but, rather, a musician who had played as an accompanist at the Cunningham studio and other modern dance studios in New York, and he had taken Cage’s class in “Composition of Experimental Music” at the New School for Social Research. Dunn drew heavily from Cage’s ideas about composition when teaching: in particular, the use of chance methods and indeterminacy, and the notion that any sound could be considered as music. In dance, this meant that any movement could be choreographic material, and, indeed, a number of choreographers such as Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton embraced pedestrian movements such as walking and running in their dances during the early 1960s. The composition class met regularly from 1960 to 1962, and what began as a small class with five students (Paulus Berenson, Marni Mahaffay, Simone Forti, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer) grew to include a number of other artists, not just dancers but painters, sculptors, and musicians, with varying degrees of participation: Trisha Brown, Deborah Hay, Fred Herko, John Herbert McDowell, David Gordon, Robert Morris, Ray Johnson, and Robert Rauschenberg. By the summer of 1962, the eclectic group of dancers and visual artists presented their first concert of dance at the Judson Memorial Church in New York City, and performances continued over the next two years, from 1962 to 1964. During the early 1960s, Judson artists experimented with choreographic methods and questioned the very nature of dance. It was a time of experimentation that affected art across multiple genres throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, despite legitimate claims about Judson’s many democratizing effects, the scene was overwhelmingly white. Very few artists of color presented work as part of the Judson Dance Theater, and the same was true of its audience and critics. In African-American Concert Dance (2001), John Perpener discusses the reasons why so many black choreographers in the United States adhered to modern dance aesthetics and modes of production during the 1960s and 1970s instead of embracing projects of the Judson Dance Theater, or contact improvisation, an outgrowth of Judson that developed in the early 1970s: Among the reasons is the likelihood that black artists were not enthralled with the idea of rejecting the traditions they had struggled so hard to become a part of just a few years earlier. They—unlike the coterie of white artists who were committed to aesthetic change—found little transgressive pleasure in dismantling the established practices of modern dance. (205) But what of African American choreographers who, years later, did not feel an affinity for modern dance aesthetics, and who were drawn, for various reasons, to the experimentalism of Judson and some of the dance scenes that developed in its wake? In 1982, Ishmael Houston-Jones, a young African American dance artist who had recently moved from Philadelphia to New York City, assembled several choreographers to explore the meaning of “black dance” and to consider what that term might mean in relation to the legacy of Judson and histories of postmodern dance. Houston-Jones persuaded Cynthia Hedstrom, the director of Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, to let him “curate a series composed of a group of ‘Black’ choreographers who were working outside the Mainstream of Modern Dance” (2012a, 19). Explaining that it was challenging during the early 1980s to characterize work that was taking place “outside the mainstream,” Houston-Jones notes that Judson is usually invoked as the “watershed moment” where a group of experimental artists challenged 252

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the conventions of modern dance by employing chance procedures, rejecting narrative, and embracing pedestrian movement as an alternative to highly virtuosic and codified dancing. But, as Houston-Jones notes, “Black experimentalists are either invisible or relegated to a footnote of the more ‘serious’ post-modern choreographers” (19). So, for that 1982 performance series, which he titled Parallels, Houston-Jones invited several choreographers to perform over two weekends at Danspace Project: Blondell Cummings, Fred Holland, Rrata Christine Jones, Ralph Lemon, Bebe Miller, Harry Sheppard, and Gus Solomons, Jr. As Houston-Jones, who also performed in the series, explains, he wanted to present some of the varied styles, technical training, performance histories, and aesthetic points of view that black artists were drawing from in their dance making. In his initial letter to Hedstrom, Houston-Jones wrote, “I know from myself, being black and being outside of the mainstream of traditional modern dance, has given my work the unique perspective of being doubly isolated. I feel and often express this isolation from blacks who expect me to be Ailey and dance audiences who either also expect me to be a little-avant-garde-Ailey or ‘another Bill T. Jones’ or devoid of any racial expression” (2012a, 38). As he further explained in the initial program notes from 1982: I chose the name Parallels for the series because while all the choreographers participating are Black and in some ways relate to the rich tradition of Afro-American dance, each has chosen a form outside of that tradition and even outside the tradition of mainstream modern dance … this new generation of black artists—who all exist in the parallel worlds of Black America and new dance—is producing work that is richly diverse. (2012a, 20) For his contribution to Parallels, Houston-Jones performed a piece called Relatives (1982) as part of a shared evening of performance with Blondell Cunnings and Rrata Christine Jones. At that point in his career, Houston-Jones had an eclectic training with a significant emphasis on improvisation. Prior to moving to New York from Philadelphia, HoustonJones performed with Group Motion Media Theater, directed by two dancers who had formerly worked with the German expressionist Mary Wigman. He  also studied West African dance practices at The Arthur Hall Afro American Dance Ensemble and contact improvisation with John Gamble and Daniel Lepkoff. Together with Terry Fox and the musician Jeff Cain, he performed as part of the group A Way of Improvising (HoustonJones 2012a, 19). This  training is evident in the scored improvisation, Relatives, which begins with Houston-Jones repeatedly chanting, “Here mothy, mothy, mothy” in the dark, while slowly emptying a metal bucket full of moth balls to mark the perimeter of the performance space. Although audience members cannot yet see Houston-Jones, they hear stomping and clanging, and mothballs scattering across the wooden floor. The lights then slowly rise, revealing Houston-Jones in a bright orange life vest, along with pants and a shirt. As was customary for Houston-Jones at the time, he wore heavy boots during the performance. With a series of weighted steps, echoing in the space, he makes his way up the church steps, and begins to turn rhythmically around himself, chanting an accumulating list of names: “Matthew, Martha, Bryna, Albert, Alice, Miles …” As the names accumulate, Houston-Jones continues to turn around. He  then stops, removes his life vest, and sits down to tell a story about a photograph of his maternal great-grandparents. A bit later, still recounting his family history, he carries a wooden chair to the center of the space, along with a table, and a box of memorabilia (a photograph, a bottle of dye, a bowl, a carton of eggs, and a wooden spoon). “The  distance between here and there 253

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seems enormous,” he says before pouring dye into the bowl. “How did I get here?” asks Houston-Jones. He then points out a woman sitting on one of the benches in St. Mark’s Church. Houston-Jones goes over to pick her up, and slings her over his shoulder. “This is my mom,” he says. Houston-Jones and his mother, Pauline Jones, then engage in casual banter as he carries her into the improvisational dance space. He deposits her at the wooden chair, where she sits and begins to dye eggs, while talking about her son, “Chuck,” and their family. She  also uses a small watch to keep track of time for his 10-minute improvisation. Houston-Jones, to her side, performs an improvised dance full of quick shifts of weight. Although Relatives is not a work of contact improvisation, an improvised form of dance where partners remain in physical contact with each other for most of the dance, one sees evidence of Houston-Jones’s training in the form, particularly in his weighted steps and falls to the ground, as well as in his improvised partnership with his mother, which begins with him hoisting her over his shoulder, and develops into a dance of delicate counterpoint, unfolding through both movement and spoken word. “It’s strange,” Ms. Jones muses, “the things you remember about children as they grow up.” As Susan Foster describes the interplay between mother and son, “Sometimes,  [Houston-Jones] seems almost to respond to his mother’s speech as a kind of soundscore whose rhythm and intonation inspires the next move. But then suddenly he ruptures this connection with a question, demonstrating that he has been listening to the words’ subject matter all along” (Foster 2002, 200–1). Moreover, as Foster suggests, by bringing his mother into the dance and engaging publicly in acts of remembering, the work resists abstraction and “any universalizing impulses” (202). “Chuck, you have thirty seconds,” states his mother. Meanwhile, Houston-Jones’s dancing escalates in speed and intensity. “Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck...” As the light slowly dims, he jumps repeatedly in an upstage corner, his back to the audience and his arms flapping like wings.

“Wrong Contact” In  June  1983, less than a year after the Parallels series, Houston-Jones once again performed at St. Mark’s Church—not with his mother, but with his frequent collaborator, Fred Holland, as part of Contact at 10th and 2nd, a festival celebrating the first 11 years of contact improvisation. Their untitled duet was part of a program called “Partners,” with improvisations by Jackie Shue and Kirstie Simson, Steve Paxton and Nancy Stark Smith, Melanie Hedlund and Jennifer Smith, and Alan Ptashek and Nancy Stark Smith. As the title suggests, partnership is a cornerstone of contact improvisation. Historically, both its aesthetic innovation and its political potential had to do with the notion that any two bodies could dance together, regardless of identity, ability, or past training. This approach to partnering differs dramatically from ballet’s classical pas de deux, where roles are strictly dictated according to binary gender. In  classical ballet, men would lift women, but the reverse would never be the case. These norms also shaped much of the partnering in midcentury modern dance. Not so in contact improvisation. As Cynthia Novack explains in Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture, “In a contact duet, each member, male or female, must be ready to give or take weight, to support, to resist, or to yield, as called for by the interaction” (1990, 128). In the video documentary Fall After Newton (1987), Paxton, one of the form’s originators, elaborates: “Each partner poses their own kinetic puzzles, which were danced through, contributing new elements to the body of work, the network of contact improvisation.” 254

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The “Partners” program presented notable variety in terms of gender and performance style. Nevertheless, Holland and Houston-Jones were the only artists of color in the program, and the audience was also mostly white. This was not unusual for contact improvisation during the early 1980s, which was decidedly an outgrowth of the Judson scene. Paxton, who throughout the 1960s became increasingly interested in improvisation, began to perform as part of an improvisational collective called the Grand Union in 1970, whose members also included Trisha Brown, Barbara Dilley, Douglas Dunn, David Gordon, Nancy Lewis, Yvonne Rainer, and Lincoln Scott. Soon afterward, in 1972, Paxton created an improvisation for eleven men called Magnesium, which many historians now recognize as the first work of contact improvisation. Over the next ten years, the form would gain prominence as a significant development in postmodern dance. According to Banes, “Contact Improvisation both signified and helped create a set of interconnected values important to the artistic avant-garde of the sixties and seventies: playfulness, freedom, spontaneity, authenticity, and community. ‘I like it when bodies are free and when the emotional state is open and accepting and sensitive,’ Paxton has remarked, ‘When the psychology isn’t hassled or political or tied in knots’” (Banes 2003, 78). Banes’s claims regarding the “freedom” of the avant-garde, and Paxton’s preference for a psychology that is neither “hassled” nor “political” while dancing, echo the Cagean ideas so forcefully criticized by George Lewis in his discussion of experimental music. According to Lewis, Cage and many of the artists who followed his teachings failed to recognize the struggle that bringing certain sounds or bodies or postures to performance frequently entailed. HoustonJones’s improvisatory work with Holland issued a similar critique, but not without acknowledging the democratic aspirations and the massive aesthetic innovation that constituted contact improvisation during its early years. As Houston-Jones explains, discovering contact improvisation in the late 1970s was “a big political awakening.” He recalls, “I remember I did feel and probably still do feel still that something as simple as contact improvisation had huge political ramifications in the way people experienced dance” (Houston-Jones and Hennessy 2017). For the “Partners” program at St. Mark’s Church, Houston-Jones and Holland performed “Untitled Duet” (also called “Oo-Ga-La”). To structure the work, they drafted a private manifesto that challenged many of contact improvisation’s unspoken orthodoxies: We are Black We will wear street clothes We will wear heavy boots We will play a loud, abrasive sounds score We will have non-performative conversations We will fuck with flow We will stay out of physical contact as much as possible. (Houston-Jones 2016) As the manifesto makes clear, Untitled Duet entailed an undeniable negotiation of various strictures, including race, but also gender, sexuality, and genre—restrictions that are neither stable nor separable from one another. According to Houston-Jones, The  sexuality of the two men is ambiguous and constantly flowing against histories of (Black) masculinity … [w]e weren’t nor had we ever been sexual lovers, though that scenario was persistent in the public discourse of our collaborations and admittedly, implicit in much of our work. As Fred often said, “Two Black men on stage together and not killing each other or rapping, what else are people going to think?” (Houston-Jones 2016) 255

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Recalling that Paxton was one of the performers in the “Partners” series at Danspace Project, and therefore present for the performances, Houston-Jones has described the dance as “risky” (Houston-Jones 2012b). This  risk is important to acknowledge. Nevertheless, it would be reductive to say that Untitled Duet was merely a dance of refusal, wholly determined by the norms and figures it rejects. And this is where the details of their dancing come back as so many exquisite flourishings: the bend of the performers’ construction boots, and pink socks below blue jeans’ fold; bodies tumbling in opposition before burrowing into momentary repose. Although distance between the performers constituted one of the major breaks with contact improvisation, Houston-Jones and Holland were not always separated in the dance, and the moments where they came into contact were full of intensity and quick shifts between tenderness and aggression. The fact that they “fucked with flow” created dynamism in the work, as well as sequences of extraordinary counterpoint. As Houston-Jones notes, “These shifts often happen without visible preparation or logical transition” (Houston-Jones 2016). But just because the preparation was not visible does not mean that it did not exist. As the musician Arthur Rhames explains, “Improvisation is an intuitive process for me now, but … I’m calling upon all the resources of all the years of my playing at once: my academic understanding of the music, my historical understanding of the music, and my technical understanding of the instrument that I’m playing” (Berliner 1994, 16). In the case of Houston-Jones and Holland, they were clearly drawing from years of training in dance and improvisational practice, but, perhaps even more interesting and politically significant, they also were drawing from the intimate knowledge of each other’s bodies and physical tendencies, developed through years of friendship and artistic collaboration. As Houston-Jones recalls, “I never remember rehearsing for this performance. We used to go out to the Pyramid Club, the Palladium and Limelight and dance until the wee hours. Those were our studios. That was our rehearsal. That was our process” (2016). Just as the boots, and the talking, and the manifesto refused the notion that contact improvisation was somehow separate from politics or everyday life, here Houston-Jones suggests queer nightlife as an important space for rehearsal and honing one’s improvisational skill. The dance was evidence of that preparation. One evening, the duet concluded with Houston-Jones and Holland slowly approaching each other until they met in an entangled, shifting embrace, crotch against thigh. Slowly, Holland descended, with Houston-Jones then pulling him up in a clearly articulated counterbalance.

Conclusion Until recently, Houston-Jones had only seen a four-minute clip of Untitled Duet. But after Holland died of colon cancer in 2016, a grieving Houston-Jones searched Cathy Weis’s archive of downtown dance for recordings of their collaborations. He discovered two videos of Untitled Duet, each about 15-minutes long, shot on two consecutive evenings by Weis and Lisa Nelson, both of whom were dancers engaged in New  York’s downtown scene. According to Houston-Jones, “the soft-focus, sometimes blurry images” of himself dancing with Holland, who was thirty-two years old at the time, had a “haunted and ghostly quality.” Yet, given the way this dance from 1983 speaks “to real 21st century perspectives of race, gender, homoeroticism, masculinity, power dynamics, narrative, aesthetics, composition, Dancing While Black and much more,” he wonders whether it might be the most contemporary work he has ever performed (2016). For Endless Shout at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (2016–2017), the two recordings of Untitled Duet played on a loop on two Sony Trinitron cube monitors with two sets of headphones, enabling viewers to experience two nights of the improvisation in 256

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relation to each other, and to consider two different approaches to documentation. The boxy monitors emphasized the historical nature of the performances and the fact of their mediation. Nevertheless, the entangled, improvisatory nature of the dancers’ work was palpable—a looping study without arrival, punctuated by moments of slowdown and seemingly impossible lift. Meanwhile, hanging on an adjacent wall, was Pope.L’s Another Kind of Love: John Cage’s Silence (by hand). Together, both of these works present traces of past performances. Yet they also stage tensions between black performance and Cagean “experimentalism” that continue to be felt to this day. Together they ask museum-goers to reconsider dominant histories of experimental music and postmodern dance and to consider the racial dimensions of privileging chance procedure and indeterminacy over improvisation. But the labor and improvisational virtuosity evidenced in the works also pose a more complex set of questions regarding influence, lineage, and desire. Neither work was a solo, and neither was a straightforward disavowal. As Catherine Damman describes Pope.L’s interlude in Cage Unrequited, it was “Both a collective paean and a renunciation.... also, perhaps, a love song as a form of protest” (Damman 2013).

References Banes, Sally. 2003. Taken By Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Berliner, Paul. 1994. Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Cage, John. 1970. Song Books.Volume 1. Solos for Voice. New York: Hammar Publishing. ———. (1961) 2011a. Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. ———. (1961) 2011b. “Lecture on Nothing.” In  Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition, 109–127. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Damman, Catherine. 2013. “Anti-Oedipus: Pope.L’s ‘Cage Unrequited.’” Art In  America, December 4. Accessed June  22, 2018. https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/news/ anti-oedipus-popelrsquos-ldquocage-unrequitedrdquo/. DeFrantz, Thomas. 2002. Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 2012. “The Complex Path to 21st Century Black Live Art.” In Parallels: Danspace Project Platform 2012, edited by Judy Hussie-Taylor and Lydia Bell, 62–66. New York: Danspace Project. De Frantz,Thomas, and Anita Gonzalez, eds. 2014. Black Performance Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dohoney, Ryan. 2014. “John Cage, Julius Eastman, and the Homosexual Ego.” In Tomorrow Is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies, edited by Benjamin Piekut, 39–62. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Foster, Susan. 2002. Dances That Describe Themselves:The Improvised Choreography of Richard Bull. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Gann, Kyle. 2005. “‘Damned Outrageous’: The Music of Julius Eastman.” Liner Notes to Unjust Malaise by Julius Eastman. Recorded Anthology of American Music. Accessed January 15, 2018. http://www. newworldrecords.org/uploads/fileeEp3v.pdf. ———. (1961) 2011. “Foreword to 50th Anniversary Edition.” In  Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition, edited by John Cage, 9–25. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. 1996. Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. ———. 2012. Joan Myers Brown and the Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina: A  Biohistory of American Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hazzard-Gordon, Katrina. 1990. Jookin’: The  Rise of Social Dance Formations in African American Culture. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

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Danielle Goldman Houston-Jones, Ishmael. 1982. Relatives. Danspace Project, St. Mark’s Church, New York. October 27–29. ———. 2012a. “Curatorial Statement.” In Parallels: Danspace Project Platform 2012, edited by Judy HussieTaylor and Lydia Bell. New York: Danspace Project. Accessed April 13, 2018. http://www.danspaceproject.org/catalogues/parallels/. ———. 2012b.“Ishmael Houston-Jones @ Tanz Im August.” Produced by Marlon Barrios Solano for dancetech.tv. August 16. Accessed June 22, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lT2l5YBWKM4. ———. 2016. “The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts.” Interview by Thomas DeFrantz. Accessed June 21, 2018. https://herbalpertawards.org/artist/chapter-two-6. Houston-Jones, Ishmael, and Keith Hennessy. 2017. “Our Own AIDS Time: Keith Hennessy and Ishmael Houston-Jones in Conversation.” February 7. Accessed June  21, 2018. https://openspace.sfmoma. org/2017/02/our-own-aids-time-keith-hennessy-and-ishmael-houston-jones-in-conversation/. Houston-Jones, Ishmael, and Fred Holland. 1983. Untitled Duet [also called Oo-Ga-La]. Dance improvisation performed by Ishmael Houston-Jones and Fred Holland. Music by Mark Allen Larson. New York: Danspace Project, St. Mark’s Church, June 11 and 12. Kostelanetz, Richard. 1987. Conversing with Cage. New York: Limelight. Lewis, George. 2002. “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives.” Black Music Research Journal 22: 215–246. Malone, Jacqui. 1996. Steppin’ on the Blues: The  Visible Rhythms of African American Dance. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Metzger, Matthew. 2016–2017. I Can’t Concentrate with You in the Room. Acrylic and oil on MRMDF Panel, each 11 7/8 × 11 7/8 in. The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now. September 14, 2016–March 19, 2017. Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. Nelson, Solveig. 2015. “The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now.” Artforum International 54 (3): 298–299. Novack, Cynthia. 1990. Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Nyman, Michael. 1999. Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paxton, Steve. 1987. “Fall After Newton.”VHS. Produced by Videoda. Performa 13. 2013. “Performa 13: Pope.L Cage Unrequited.” November 16. Accessed January 15, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agZ66x5uEvQ. Perpener, John O. 2001. African-American Concert Dance: The Harlem Renaissance and Beyond. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Pope.L. 1978. Times Square Crawl. Performance in Times Square, New York. ———. 1991. Tompkins Square Crawl. Performance at Tompkins Square Park, New York. ———. 2001–2009. The Great White Way, 22 Miles, 9 Years, 1 Street. New York: Street performance. ———. 2013. Cage Unrequited. Part of Performa 13 Biennial and Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art. Performed at Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center, New York, November 16–17. ———. 2016–2017. Another Kind of Love: John Cage’s Silence, By Hand. 2013–Ongoing. Yellow legal paper and dyed wood lattice, 220  sheets, each 8½ × 11  in. The  Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now. September 14, 2016–March 19, 2017. Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art. September 10–December 7, 2013. New York: Grey Art Gallery at New York University and The Studio Museum in Harlem. Stearns, Marshall and Stearns Jean. 1968. Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance. Boston, MA: Da Capo Press. The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now. 2015. September 14, 2016–March 19, 2017. Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. Thompson, Robert Farris. 1983. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Random House. Welsh-Asante, Kariamu. 1998. African Dance: An Artistic, Historical and Philosophical Inquiry. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Wilson, Martha. 1996. “William Pope.L by Martha Wilson.” BOMB. April 1. Accessed June  21, 2018. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/william-pope-l/. Woolfe, Zachary. 2016. “Minimalist Composer Julius Eastman, Dead for 26  Years, Crashes the Canon.” New York Times, October 28. Accessed January 15, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/30/arts/ music/minimalist-composer-julius-eastman-dead-for-26-years-crashes-the-canon.html.

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18 FEMALE DANCERS ON THE VARIETY STAGE IN MIDTWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITAIN Larraine Nicholas

Introduction The lights lower, the orchestra finishes its overture of popular tunes, the curtains swish back, and the first act comes on stage. This will most probably be a dancing act. It may be a tapping ‘sister act,’ a trio with at least one female performer, or a chorus line of sixteen high-kicking ‘chorus girls,’ but always a version of feminine attraction holds the act together. There  is sensual allure in the soft swirl of long skirts and ostrich feathers, and in costumes that shine and sparkle. There is sexual appeal in the selective revelation of bodies: show-of-leg in short skirts, trunks, or leotards; exposure of other erogenous zones in plunging necklines or tantalizingly bare midriffs. The  dynamic is up-beat in the rhythm of the dance and in the outgoing expressions of the dancers. A  dancing act (often a song- and-dance) signifies that the show has begun, with energy flowing out from the performers to ‘warm up’ the audience. Something like it will open the second half after the interval, and in some shows these dancing women will appear again and again, in different costumes, expending nearly as much energy in the backstage work of preparation as in the on-stage interaction with the audience. Most professional stage dancers in twentieth-century Europe and America were not  employed on opera house or other concert dance stages but in theaters, cabarets, and clubs. Largely unsung by mainstream dance historiography, these female performers have always been essential to the artistic and economic success of popular entertainment. Dancers’ bodies on stage give visual, kinesthetic, and often sexualized pleasure to the viewer (Adair 1992; Hanna 2010). Theoretical perspectives from cultural and feminist studies expose how female dancers such as those discussed in this chapter project an image of attractive femininity constructed in a patriarchal system toward the pleasure of heterosexual men (Dodds 1997). On the other hand, the history of dancers in popular entertainment is also one of dedicated professionalism, negotiating with difficulty the male-dominated social and management theatrical systems. For sure, some women were abused and some felt trapped or at odds with the work, and there may be an element of gilded nostalgia in some memoirs, but the narratives of professional variety dancers that come to us now have much to say about pride in hard work and achievement (Vicinus 1979), as well as the value given to the respect of professional colleagues. 259

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In bringing the history of dancers in popular theatrical entertainment to the fore, I will focus on Britain of the 1940s to the 1960s. This period is pivotal because it sees the shift from an entertainment industry based on varied ‘live’ performance venues to one dominated mainly by the new media forms of cinema and particularly television. So this is an era when a young woman had many opportunities for theatrical work on the variety stage as well as venturing into television or film. It is also a period of social change that affected how bodies could be represented on stage. I will use the term ‘variety’ here (‘vaudeville’ is roughly equivalent in America) to encompass different genres of popular entertainment on theater stages, all inheriting a collaged format from the nineteenth-century music hall but presented within new commercial patterns dominated, although not exclusively, by big theater chains such as Moss Empires or Stoll Theatres (Double 2012, 39–49). Female dancers in a group, large or small, were included in a program of disparate acts including, for example, animals, magicians, acrobats, singers, and comedians, but it would be the singers or comedians who would ‘top the bill.’ In its purest form, variety was ‘weekly variety,’ in which disparate, selfproducing acts were presented twice-nightly for one week only, before going their separate ways on Sunday to yet another venue. In this chapter, I am also using the term variety more generically to encompass other theatrical forms of popular entertainment where variety artists could be seen in this collaged format. This could include shows with an overall theme in narrative and/or design, such as pantomimes and revues, summer shows, and West End spectaculars. Jobbing dancers in the wider terminology of variety might be alternating between these kinds of contracts, sometimes also into cabaret or narrative musical theater. My focus here, though, is on performances of the variety kind taking place in theaters. Finding an acceptably non-sexist way of referring to dancers in these roles is complicated. Although the generic term ‘chorus girl’ undervalues the maturity and individuality of performers, when being interviewed or writing in later life, many are happy to still identify with a particular troupe as being a ‘Windmill Girl’ (identified with the London theater) or a ‘Tiller Girl’ (identified with the highly synchronized style originated by English manager John Tiller, 1854–1925). These identities connect the retired performer with a history, a group discipline, and performances of which they are proud; therefore, I use these terms when possible. On the negative side, these labels tend to isolate the dancer’s history into one kind of dance act, in which their individuality might be subsumed into a group format, whereas many dancers moved in and out of the larger groups identified as ‘chorus lines,’ sometimes working in duos, trios, or in featured roles. I therefore employ a generic term, ‘variety dancer,’ for the dancers I am considering here: They are female dancers employed in popular, theatrical, variety entertainment in the mid-twentieth century, in chorus, solo, and small ensemble spots.

Sources The  relative anonymity of ‘the chorus girl’ may in itself be tantalizing. In  1847, Albert Smith wrote The  Natural History of the Ballet Girl (facsimile 1996) as an examination of the ballet choruses of Leicester Square as if they were unnamed members of a species. With a nod to that publication, in 1975 Derek and Julia Parker, she formerly a Tiller Girl, published The Natural History of the Chorus Girl, which was dedicated to “any young lady who, unnamed, has trod the boards in the company of her friends, providing a picture of feminine beauty” (Parker and Parker 1975, 6). However, as much as those unnamed women deserve their histories to be recorded, many moved into work that proclaimed their individual skills and personalities. 260

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Such general histories of the chorus phenomenon, together with growing academic interest in popular dance and popular entertainment, emphasize the potential of archival sources in research into variety. These include documents, still and moving images, and newspaper articles. Perhaps more importantly, oral and life histories over the last few decades have been able to capture the memoirs of variety theater dancers from the mid-twentieth century, for example in published biographies from former Tiller Girls such as Fay Robinson and Irene Holland. Doremy Vernon claimed to have spoken to 200 former Tillers in researching her book (1988, Preface). Tiller Girls were in some respects the epitome of chorus girls: identified with some of the more famous theaters of London in their variety days such as resident troupes of ‘Palladium Girls’ or ‘Casino Girls.’ That whole phenomenon had begun with Tiller’s amateur interest in theater, although he was a businessman in Manchester’s cotton industry of the 1880s. He applied rigorous synchronization to the girl groups he trained for local theaters, and he developed professional schools in Manchester, London, and New York. By the 1920s there were multiple Tiller lines performing in Europe, America, and Britain, including in the Ziegfeld Follies in New York and at the Folies Bergère in Paris. There were also chorus lines managed separately by John Tiller’s son Lawrence, as Lawrence Tiller Girls, in competition with his father. Tiller Girls and their equivalent precision dance troupes have been examined as the embodiment of the mechanistic modernity of the 1920s/1930s, particularly in America (Franko 2002) and Germany (Elswit 2009). Variety dancing in the different stage of modernity post-World War II has not so far excited similar academic analysis. Another considerable resource is from the Windmill Theatre in Soho, London. As a long-lived (1932–1964) theater that became something of a national institution, the Windmill has left substantial archives, both documentary and oral, so that we are able to look at these dancers in terms of their training, their daily work, and their overall careers as dancers in other branches of entertainment. As a London theater with a resident company, the Windmill was different from theaters where weekly variety put on a new combination of acts every week, but there are similarities in the way that the chorus of dancers (who also sang and acted) framed the night’s program. Unlike in weekly variety when a comedian or singer was usually top of the bill, Windmill Girls were themselves the main attraction, famed for their static nude tableaux, although as dancers they were much more versatile than those poses alone. I focus here on these women in order to show the scope of dance acts in variety theater rather than within the undoubted context of erotic performance in the Soho of the period (Mort 2007). The Windmill story continues to excite popular interest (Millard Shapiro 2014) including in cinema, with the latest film being Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005), which is a fictionalized account of the Windmill during the London Blitz. Recent academic analysis of performances on the spectrum of erotic dance has tended more toward examining the agency of women in striptease and neo-burlesque cabaret in the later twentieth century and therefore is outside the period and genre I discuss here (Dodds 1997, 2011).

The making of a variety dancer A series of press releases in the Windmill Theatre Collection covers the years 1947–1962 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (Press information summaries, nos. 3–129). As well as describing the new show, regular features included brief biographies of ‘new girls’ and returnees from other employment. These 229 biographies, along with additional information from oral history interviews,1 have been vital in discovering some of the routes into variety for young women in the mid-twentieth century. 261

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Although extremely brief, over half of the Windmill press releases give details of early training, indicating how recruits had taken up local dance classes as children or teenagers and/or more intensive training at stage schools (e.g., Italia Conti, Aida Foster), the Tillers’ training schools, or advanced ballet schools. In a number of other cases, it is clear from the previous performance experience that these young women had dance training, although it is impossible to be clear how extensive that training had been. Then as now, the passion for dancing and the preparation for the career had started at quite a young age and was aided by the nationwide spread of the local dancing school as the initial nurturer of talent. Nor was it necessary to come from a well-off family: This is confirmed by (Tiller Girl) Fay Robinson’s autobiography. Coming from a mining community in Yorkshire, she was nevertheless able to immerse herself in dancing as a child: “Monday ballet, Wednesday show or competition work, Thursday private lesson, Friday tap and acrobatic” (Robinson 2014, 40). John Tiller’s original schools in the 1890s were targeted at poor children, and the money they earned was an important addition to family income. Robinson reported that her first contract for a pantomime in Leeds in 1956 when she was fifteen years old was for over £6 per week, while her father could only earn about £10 in the mine (43). The  Windmill’s producer/manager, Vivian Van Damm, did not  elevate performance skills in his written pronouncements. What was needed of a Windmill Girl was “personality, youth, beauty, talent—in that order” (1952, 111). However it is clear from the biographies that the majority had previous training or initial experience in work such as pantomime and summer shows that would have required some training. English pantomimes, both amateur and professional, based on tales such as Mother Goose or Cinderella, with their stock characters such as the cross-dressing Dame and Principal Boy, remain performance traditions of the Christmas season, but they were even more widespread in the mid-twentieth century before many theaters closed down under pressure from cinema and television. Children and adolescents in amateur or semiprofessional ‘babe’ and ‘juvenile’ troupes were another traditional ingredient—children performing for the children in the audience. They were often provided by local dancing schools, and these child dancers were important to the financial success of the school as well as launching their own professional careers. Some troupes, like Terry’s Juveniles, became quite famous, performing in the most spectacular pantomimes like those at the London Palladium and in Royal Variety Command Performances. Second to pantomime, summer seasons provided the most reliable professional work, recalling a time when British holidays were at British resorts, and when pantomime and summer season could each last for months. The route for a young dancer into professional employment for the first time was varied. Stage schools such as Italia Conti and Joan Davis (both in London) acted as their own agencies sending out multiple teams of dancers. They found work for their own students as well as having open auditions. (Dancers’ full names are cited in this chapter only when they have been published in the public domain; otherwise initials are used for persons in archival sources.) Dancer MW had attended a local dancing school, and after two terms at the Italia Conti stage school, went into a spectacular 1946 revue at the Coliseum, London, The Night and the Laughter, with a cast of 140. Thereafter she joined the Windmill at seventeen years of age in 1947 (Press information summaries, no. 7, May 21, 1947). In 1956, Fay Robinson, aged fifteen, traveled to London from Yorkshire for three auditions in one day—for the John Tiller, Italia Conti, and Joan Davis organizations—and took the one with Joan Davis for pantomime in Leeds (2014, 42). Some managements had multiple troupes rivaling the Tillers, for example the Sherman Fisher Girls and the Marie De Vere Dancers. In 1957, there were ten teams of Marie De Vere Dancers booked under various names into summer shows in British 262

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seaside resorts, including Blackpool, Bournemouth, and Skegness as well as a group touring Sweden (advertisement in The  Stage August  1, 1957, 18). Managers such as De Vere were flexible to the different demands of venues and were able to offer troupes of different sizes, from trios upward, with different specialties to suit different audiences. This could benefit the young dancer. SL, who joined the Windmill in 1958 at eighteen, had been trained in a juvenile troupe run by the mother of Anita D’Ray, one of the Windmill dancers. At fifteen she had joined the De Vere Dancers for a summer season in Manchester, followed by pantomime with them at the Chiswick Empire, London, and six months with De Vere’s Ballet Montparnasse troupe (specializing in cancan) in cabaret in Jersey and London (Press information summaries, no. 105, December 1, 1958). For dancers without immediate connections, there were open auditions (advertisements in the weekly newspaper, The Stage), agents, or good luck. By her own admission, JM had more confidence and good looks than dance training when she met an agent by chance after a failed audition in the late 1940s and was given a contract, first as a dancer in a circus tour of theaters, then in the pantomime Robinson Crusoe ( JM [pseudonym], interviewed by the author at the interviewee’s home, September 1, 2015). She credits these early jobs as giving her the training and polish she needed: “I was learning my trade, I was learning to dance. I was learning to perform.” By the mid-1950s when she danced at the Windmill, she had also worked in variety, both in chorus and in specialty acts. Those first few professional jobs were key to acquiring professional polish, further skills, and discipline. In accordance with Van Damm’s notion of what made a good Windmill Girl, there was a fairly open door for young women to present themselves for audition, and in some cases they were accepted on the basis of unrealized potential. KC, who was probably inexperienced and untrained in any branch of theater, went to London for shop work and turned up at the Windmill on an impulse where she was “engaged on the strength of her personality and appearance” (Press information summaries, no. 93, June 4, 1957). It is hardly surprising that the calling of a dancer in variety was attractive to so many young women. The media had been glamorizing the job for decades, right from backstage movies such as Gold Diggers of 1933 and 42nd Street (both 1933) with spectacular Busby Berkeley dance arrangements. Chorus girl stories were also popular in illustrated magazines and in the Pathé News stories accompanying every cinema showing. Windmill Girls were frequent subjects, not only backstage, but in glamorous exploits not enjoyed by regular young women, for example, flying to the seaside by private plane (British Pathé 1947). Television brought variety into people’s living rooms, including, from 1955, Sunday Night at the London Palladium, with spectacular dance routines by the Tiller Girls. Ages of new recruits at the Windmill in this period ranged from fifteen to twenty-five, with a peak of recruitment at age seventeen (the school-leaving age in England and Wales was raised from fourteen to fifteen from 1947). However, youth was not the only criterion in manning the chorus line. Experience counted too. Some well-regarded Windmill Girls stayed for years, practically their whole careers, while others returned at least once from other employment, marriage, or maternity. Once accepted into the chorus line, the differences in ages would be ironed out by discipline and common grooming practices, in make-up, and hairstyle. Tiller Girl troupes specialized in the close synchronization of their kick lines, in essence a kind of assimilation of the personality of each dancer into one identity. This is what it meant to be “Tillerized,” “smoothing out the individualists.... In an ordinary chorus line, although she is doing the same step, every girl has her own particular style. Usually she is hoping to be noticed and picked for a solo part,” Kay Lambert, Palladium dance captain, is quoted as saying (Pilton 1976, 115). 263

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Tiller Girls also had to wear a practice uniform of white blouse, black briefs, and little black bow-tie that further standardized them and would become a cause of discontent in the 1960s, as youth values moved more toward individualism (Vernon 1988, 145). With his belief in the primacy of personality in the making of a Windmill Girl, Van Damm disliked the idea of Tillerized uniformity. Nevertheless there was a process of transformation in the first few weeks that he referred to as “the early stages of glamorization” (1952, 126–127). Dance troupes like the Tillers that were employed some distance from the immediate control of their management depended on the experience of a ‘head girl’ or ‘dance captain’ who had a senior and better-paid role. Typically the captain kept the discipline and standards of the dancers. When Fay Robinson became captain of a Tiller line in Brighton, twenty-one years old in the early 1960s, she had considerable responsibilities, including leading rehearsals, altering the routine if anyone was off sick, paying the dancers, and writing a weekly report to the head office (2014, 76). At  the Windmill, mentoring of new recruits was rather less formal, contributing to what many former dancers speak of now  as a family atmosphere. As a theater with inhouse production facilities and a show changing about every six weeks, there was at times a frenetic atmosphere. Instead of ‘twice nightly’ shows, Windmill performances were ‘nonstop,’ five shows a day from early afternoon to late evening, with audiences able to come in at any time. There was a complex administration necessary to maintain this. Windmill Girls were divided into ‘A’ and ‘B’ companies, which performed the same show on alternate days. Toward the end of the run there were morning rehearsals for the next show, with new routines, songs, and sketches to be learned and new costumes to be fitted. Although the Tiller lines required a perfection of synchronicity, there were a variety of roles that a Windmill Girl could fill, including posing in the nude or semi-nude. This perhaps in part explains the management’s openness to employ relatively inexperienced performers, but Van Damm was happy to admit he would quickly fire anybody who did not live up to expectations (1952, 107). In  both professional situations, for Tillers and Windmill Girls, living and working closely together on a pressurized schedule necessitated a communal reliance that could be labeled a “sisterhood,” as has been claimed recently for the Rockettes precision dance team of Radio City Musical Hall, New York (Gibbons Oehlers 2018). This did not mean everyone was equally committed of course, but there was a cohesive core and particular identity that could survive the departure of the disillusioned and those ambitious for new horizons.

On stage Achieving a seamless progression from one number to the next was crucial in variety, so full stage acts alternated with ‘front cloth’ items to enable the set up behind the tabs. The Windmill bill (exemplified here as only one possible permutation of the variety genre) commonly had thirteen numbers beginning with an ensemble song-and-dance and with a finale which was usually a narrative scene with dances. By the 1940s, Revudeville (the generic name for each numbered Windmill production) had become synonymous with specific styles of erotic female performance at the margins of what official censorship would allow but also not unusual in other variety venues. In some numbers, there would be a nude posing as part of the mise-en-scène, the fan dance (a dancer with ostrich feather fans obscuring her nudity) must appear somewhere, and a cancan was normally to be found in the finale. It was for the creative team to invent constantly novel contexts to display these. 264

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A closer look at Revudeville 288 (1957), which premiered in March 1957 for a seven-week run, reveals some of the themes and styles commonly encountered in variety ‘numbers.’ Quotations about Revudeville 288 are taken from the program or the script. The latter are preserved because the Windmill, as a revue with spoken sketches, was subject to the censorship of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office (revoked by Parliament in 1968). The opening ensemble song and dance number, “Simon’s Not So Simple,” has a male soloist, six of the Windmill Girls, and a nude posing somewhere within the “Spring-like décor.” The  words of the song, composed by the in-house songwriting team of Ronald Bridges and Charles Rose, flatter the audience. Simon is “not so simple” because he loves to watch Revudeville; what is more, he is “hep”—as up-to-date as rock n’ roll. Although the Windmill was often considered old-fashioned by the 1950s, its rolling series of new productions made it possible to reference current culture and events, which was a feature of variety in general. After a front cloth spot by a comedian-musician, the stage is set for a ballet, “Napoli,” a romantic duet set “On a hill overlooking the Bay of Naples.” There is also a posing nude on stage with them. Considering the geographical location, she could well be posing as a classical statue, which had been a common ruse for introducing nudes onto the stage since the late nineteenth century. Censorship rules required nudes to be totally still and to be posed so as not to expose pelvic regions; this could be achieved by being placed in profile, or with strategic application of draperies or props (Nicholson 2005, 70–79). Ballets had been a constant item in Windmill programs from the beginning, and here the choreographer Keith Lester, himself a highly esteemed dancer on ballet stages, seems to have filched a title and maybe even a style from the nineteenth-century Danish choreographer August Bournonville’s Napoli (1842). There would normally be a few Windmill Girls who could take on balletic technique including pointe work. The Windmill also inherited from the Edwardian music hall the notion that ballet could signify a higher class of popular culture, suitable for middle class entertainment (Carter 2005). The next item is a song and dance duet, “In Love for the Very First Time,” arranged by one of the company’s young male leads and danced by him with one of the Windmill Girls. It was possible for company members to advance their careers by arranging acts as well as performing them, and Van Damm had a policy of advancing chorus members to solo roles. The second song they sing is “The Tender Trap,” which has some nice syncopated rhythms that could lend it to a good tap dance finish. It could also be performed as a front cloth item, with a tap mat laid on the front stage, as next on will be the muchawaited Fan Dance. “My Lady’s Fan” is a title appearing in the Windmill programs from the late 1930s. It became known as the Fan Dance, the signature act of the theater, although it was certainly seen in other variety venues. The  principal fan dancer must always obscure her nudity by manipulating her two huge ostrich feather fans. She may take one away and flourish above her head or spin with one in front, one behind, while they nestle softly to her skin, showing just a hint of her side view (see Illustration 18.1). For the audience, there is always a frisson of jeopardy—the possibility of a mistake that might manifest her nakedness. She is accompanied by four clothed fan dancers who, in the final ‘reveal,’ cover her with their fans as she raises both hers upward. In this program, the dance is performed to a male vocalist singing the currently popular romantic ballad “Two Different Worlds,” but the fan dance is a flexible concept that in other programs can take on different danced dynamics, Spanish or Latin American rhythms, or with movements reflecting birdlife or underwater imagery. 265

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Illustration 18.1 Fan dancing at the Windmill Theatre, London, c. 1950s. A Fan Dance in action rather than a posed photograph, the image shows marks for cropping for the Windmill’s always astute media coverage. (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London.)

After three more items, the half closes with an ensemble dance scene, “A Persian Rose.” As here, Orientalized settings were common, not only in variety but in other entertainment genres. In the 1950s, Kismet (choreographer, Jack Cole) and The King and I (choreographer, Jerome Robbins) became two of the most influential stage musicals and films. In  variety, exotic settings could provide the opportunity for comedy at the expense of foreign language and behavior or for indulging in the erotic movements and flimsy female garb supposedly associated with the orient. Harems, casbahs, and Eastern markets were common scenes at the Windmill. In this one, there is a girl in a window, her admirer who cannot get near her, a Letter Writer, and a boy selling scarves. The Windmill Girls play the roles of slaves, one of whom receives a scarf in exchange for a kiss. A tantalizing ‘scarf dance’ follows. The variety format depended upon transporting the audience to fantasized places where exotic dances might possibly take place. In achieving this, managements fell back on the common clichés of Orientalized and exotic local color. In the next item there is another chance for individual Windmill Girls to feature their talents in a singing trio as firefighters, whose words and movements are mostly about what 266

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they can ignite in passion. Then “Temptation Bolero” features two duets of Windmill Girls with their male partners, according to the script, “a modern dance routine.” The dancers perform to a male vocalist singing the standards “The Nearness of You” and “Temptation.” The suggestion of the title is that this dance takes on a Latin American style. After a final comedy and music specialty spot, the program finale, “Crisis at the Café,” is an ensemble sketch with singing and dancing, comprising all the talents of the resident company. The mise-en-scène is a café in “gay Paree” of the 1890s. Two Windmill Girls are featured as cancan dancers, another must-see of the Windmill repertoire, while others are waitresses and sundry other characters typical of Parisian café life as existing in the British imagination. Although French scenes often provided the rationale for a French cancan, the production team had to propose more novel settings, including bars in the American West as well as, with less justification, ancient Egypt and the Caribbean. Examination of this edition of Revudeville shows how Windmill Girls were not necessarily ‘anonymous’ chorus girls. Because there were five daily performances, named roles had two or three alternative performers in the program. Of the eighteen Windmill Girls in A company for this edition, seventeen were named to alternate in a specific role, while the one left out was in her first Windmill season. The Windmill Girl might be required to act or be a comic ‘feed,’ as well as to sing and dance in a variety of styles, from classical ballet and tap to Latin American. She might have more exposure in a duet or trio or even a solo act if her talents went in that direction. Revudeville 269 presented not only a former Windmill Girl, Vicki Emra, returning with her own song and dance act, but a current company member, Susan Denny, in her first solo, which she sourced for herself from Buddy Bradley, the African American teacher/choreographer with a local Soho studio (“Windmill Girl Planned Single Act” 1954). A number of Windmill Girls went on to individual careers in other branches of entertainment. It was not just at the Windmill where one key to a successful career was to extend one’s skills, as June Don Murray, a dancer from a Scottish show business family complained: “Sometimes it makes us cross when people refer to us as being in the chorus.... We were ‘dancers’... we had to be prepared to work in comedy sketches, playing little old ladies, sing in a choir. I was even once fired from a cannon in a magic show” (Don Murray 1997, 139). Tiller Girls, though celebrated for their kick lines, might also need to perform in a variety of techniques, including tap, semi-ballet, aerial ballet, and crinoline numbers (Parker and Parker 1975, 110; Holland and Bishop 2014, 234). An example comes from the line of John Tiller Girls who performed in the “Crazy Gang”2 revue These Foolish Kings, which premiered twice-nightly at the Victoria Palace Theatre, London, in December 1956. In two acts they performed their own routines, choreographed by Barbara Aitken, one of the Tiller directors since the 1940s, but in others they were under the direction of the show’s overall choreographers, Lionel Blair and Colette Brosset, appearing as pawns in a chess game, Portuguese village girls, “Visitors from the Deep” in a Riviera scene, and gymnasts. The famous Tiller choreography was a formalized display of precision: high kicks on the spot and moving into different directions and formations, circle kicks, low scissor kicks, and step combinations of bent, straight, low, and high legs. They might finish exiting in a kick line or with a kick and kneel facing the audience. This choreography, impressive as it was for audiences, was set in stone. Working with up and coming new choreographers in charge of the big shows, such as Blair (himself previously a dancer at the Windmill), helped to stretch the dancers with new styles (Robinson 2014, 204). This highlights an endemic issue for British dancers of this period—how to acquire the style and polish of American choreography as exemplified in the musicals that had exploded onto the London scene since Oklahoma! in 1947. 267

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As non-verbal performers, variety dancers had many opportunities to work abroad, whether in one of the regular chorus lines such as the Tillers or De Vere dancers or on other contracts. The 1920s and 1930s movement of dancers across the English Channel had resumed postWorld War II. The dancers at the Folies Bergère in Paris (as opposed to topless showgirls) were “generally English,” according to its director Paul Derval (1955, 26). Despite the good things provided by comradeship, foreign travel, and the occasional perks of a brush with a glamorous lifestyle, it would be wrong to pretend that the variety life was easy for a young woman. Apart from the normal issues of bad digs, poor food, long hours, and little recognition, they could often be seen as easy prey for womanizing top-billing artists: Crazy Gang shows were notorious in this respect (Vernon 1988, 129), even though managements such as the Windmill and the Tillers were careful to project a decorous image for their female performers.

Hallmarks of variety: Personality, participation, skill, novelty “[T]wo Hours with pretty, handsome, graceful, smiling people doing amazing things....” This is how the comedian Roy Hudd summed up the value his grandmother attached to her weekly visits to see variety bills (quoted by Double 2012, 96). This quotation illustrates Oliver Double’s analysis of the essential characteristics of variety entertainment—personality, participation, skill, and novelty. Although he focused largely on the top-billing artists—singers, comedians, and specialty acts—this categorization should also be applied to variety dancers. Van Damm valued personality above all in the making of Windmill Girls, but what was that? Comedians and singers had to develop an identifiable persona that separated them from their competitors and would endear them to audiences. This  would be true for a variety dancer creating her own act, but for most ensemble dancers, the notion of personality was much more about projecting a confident identity tied up with notions of glamor and feminine sex appeal. The trajectory of variety dance costuming during the twentieth century was to allow more of the body to be revealed, a process that was assiduously opposed by morality campaigners, local Watch Committees, and the Lord Chamberlain’s Office (although the LCO had jurisdiction over very few variety venues, the Windmill being one). Between the 1930s and the 1960s, leotards were cut higher to reveal more leg; briefs or skirts might sit on the hips, exposing the navel; within limits, nudes were no longer expected to ‘fake it’ with flesh colored body tights; necklines plunged ever lower; and the ‘topless’ performer began to be tolerated. Unlike many top-billing artists, dancers did not break through the fourth wall to speak directly to audience members or to intrude into audience space, as they might in cabaret. In this sense their participation with the audience was different from the frontcloth solo act, their unattainable status preserved behind the footlights. This tension between availability and non-availability was part of the variety dancers’ appeal, and yet their outgoing warmth was expected to create a bond with the audience: They must be the “pretty... smiling people” of Hudd’s appraisal. Unlike acrobats, variety dancers had to wear their skills quite lightly to show that their tapping, turning, elevation, and synchronized routines sat naturally in their bodies, to be seen as “graceful... people,” unless a skill was deliberately drawn attention to, for example by a particularly accelerated delivery. The mathematical precision and absolute coordination of the Tiller Girls is a case where the dancers’ skills were made obvious, the more dancers in the line—sixteen, twenty, or twenty-five—the more astounding their skill appeared (Illustration  18.2). Some dance acts, though, managed to bridge the divide between the amazing skills of the acrobat and the grace of the dancer, for example in aerial ballets or adagio acts. In adagio it was usual for the female dancer to be thrown around by the men in the team. 268

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Illustration 18.2 The power of synchronization. The Tiller Girls in the 1960s. (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London.)

The most famous of these, the Ganjou Brothers and Juanita, consisted of three men, moving with a musically synchronized precision often described as “balletic,” throwing a young woman around the stage, while she maintained the grace and outward poise of a dancer despite the danger she was in (Wilmut 1995, 92–94). A character-driven version of this is the apache, a colloquial term for Parisian street gangs of the early twentieth century; the dance version could be a nasty representation of the relationship between women and thugs, with fights, knives, and guns.3 This specialty number sometimes appeared in a Parisian scene at the Windmill. One prominent act, Yvonne Michel and Erik, billed as “The  Modernistic Apache Dancers,” worked in variety and cabaret in the 1950s and 1960s, both in Britain and abroad, with some appreciation of their apparent authenticity (she was French). “British Apache dancers are inclined to have a rather refined outlook, but this pair present their act in true Gaelic fashion—with no punches pulled” (quoted in advertisement, The Stage, April 17, 1959, 2). No act could succeed in being regularly booked unless it could stand out from others, hence the appeal of specialty dances such as adagio and apache. Novelty was a public draw. In its own time, the Fan Dance and the static nudes had been the novelties of the moment, while later Windmill producers were kept busy inventing novel new settings for them. In  spectacular shows such as at the London Palladium, dancers could have multiple costume changes for no other reason than to feast the eyes of the audience with each glittering ensemble. As the economic problems affecting provincial theater gathered pace in the 1950s, nude shows became one of the novelties intended to bring in new 269

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audiences, which of necessity excluded the family audiences to which variety had traditionally catered. Mainly associated with the impresario Paul Raymond, these productions went way beyond what the Windmill had shown, bending all the rules of static nudes and introducing striptease (Wilmut 1995, 215). Now clearly behind the times of what was becoming tolerated, the Windmill closed in 1964. From its beginning, television co-opted variety acts, including dancers, into its ‘light entertainment’ scheduling.4 By the 1960s, with societal values leaning toward youth and individuality, television promoted dancers with distinct personalities who would fill the television screen with high-octane dancing to music the youth market appreciated. One of the new choreographers was Dougie Squires, from the television show Cool for Cats, who advocated for “More robust gutsy dancing... something on the American pattern” (“Dougie ‘Cool for Cats’ Squires tells...” 1961). What came about was a new alliance between television, stage, and the variety dancer. Dance groups made for television such as Squires’ groups Young Generation and Second Generation led the way in a new style that fitted the times. As one critic noted, “[W]ith [Young Generation’s] enthusiasm and new look—all the girls dressed differently, a wild, free feel about their routine—it was a pleasant surprise for the viewer satiated with rows of entirely similar long-legged Palladium Girls” (Purser 1968). An era came to an end when, in 1974, the Tillers were replaced on the flagship television show Sunday Night at the London Palladium by Second Generation. In the age of television, the instant recognition from popular shows such as this generated the demand for their bookings on the live stage shows that persisted— summer shows, pantomimes, and stage spectaculars. In this respect, television was able to pay back the debt it owed to the live stage.

Conclusion The period examined in this chapter, broadly the Britain of post-World War II until the 1960s, was one of deep, systemic change, both in society and the entertainment industry. It saw the last flourish of weekly variety touring. From the 1960s, television was becoming the chief platform for variety entertainment, promoting new dance styles, youth, and individuality rather than undifferentiated glamor. Troupes such as the Windmill Girls and Tiller Girls, with roots pre-World War II, did not translate easily into the new aesthetics. Theater closures beginning in the mid-1950s (Double 2012, 69–72) significantly reduced live variety work, but the wider genre of theatrical variety in revues, pantomimes, and summer shows proved to be robust, surviving in fewer venues but always with the contribution of its female dancers. The  theme of this chapter has been to reconsider the contribution of female dancers as variety artists and give them credit in the success of variety theater. They provided the dynamic contrasts, energy, and sensuality that drew audiences into the enjoyment of sheer entertainment. They were called upon to demonstrate a range of dance genres and styles that supported the fanciful stagings separating entertainment from everyday life for audiences. Dancers began careers as children or young adults from diverse backgrounds taking advantage of local circumstances to develop their professional skills and their economic prospects. Despite being circumscribed by cultural constructions such as ‘glamor’ and male-dominated managements, they took the opportunities for flexible careers including featured roles and autonomous specialties. It is appropriate to reconsider the ‘chorus girl’ label as not adequately capturing the labor, professionalism, and tenacity needed to be a successful variety dancer. 270

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Notes 1 I have conducted ten lengthy recorded interviews with Windmill dancers from the period 1940s–1960s as part of a project entitled “The  Professional Lives of Dancers at the Windmill Theatre,” which will eventually be deposited with the Theatre Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Other oral history recordings can be accessed via the catalogue of the British Library. 2 The  Crazy Gang was a generic name for shows featuring the three comedy double acts: Bud Flanagan and Chesney Allen; Jimmy Nervo and Teddy Knox; and Charlie Naughton and Jimmy Gold. By the time of this production, Allen had retired and they were joined by “Monsewer” Eddie Grey. After starting off at the London Palladium in the 1930s, they moved to the Victoria Palace from 1947 to 1962. 3 Information and images of apache dancers from the early twentieth century can be accessed at: http://www.streetswing.com/histmain/z3aposh.htm 4 The public service British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) had only one channel until BBC2 was opened in 1964. A commercial television channel (with advertisements) was established in 1955.

References Adair, Christy. 1992. Women and Dance: Sylphs and Sirens. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Press. British Pathé. 1947. Windmill Girls at Seaside. Film ID: 1341.30. https://www.britishpathe.com Carter, Alexandra. 2005. Dance and Dancers in the Victorian and Edwardian Music Hall Ballet. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Derval, Paul. 1955. The Folies Bergère.Translated by Lucienne Hill. London: Methuen and Co. [Les Editions de Paris, 1954]. Dodds, Sherril. 1997. “Dance and Erotica: The Construction of the Female Stripper.” In Dance in the City, edited by Helen Thomas, 218–233. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2011. Dancing on the Canon: Embodiments of Value in Popular Dance. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Don Murray, June. 1997. “Following Family Footsteps.” In Those Variety Days: Memories of Scottish Variety Theatre, edited by Frank Bruce, Archie Foley, and George Gillespie, 126–39. Edinburgh, UK: Scottish Music Hall Society. Double, Oliver. 2012. Britain Had Talent: A History of Variety Theatre. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. “Dougie ‘Cool for Cats’ Squires tells...” 1961. The Stage and Television News, March 30, 2011. Elswit, Kate. 2009. “Accessing Unison in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility.” Art Journal 68 (2): 50–61. Franko, Mark. 2002. The  Work of Dance: Labor, Movement, and Identity in the 1930s. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Gibbons Oehlers, Adrienne. 2018. “The Radio City Rockettes and the Making of a Sisterhood.” Studies in Musical Theatre 12 (3): 355–365. Hanna, Judith Lynne. 2010. “Dance and Sexuality: Many Moves.” The  Journal of Sex Research 47 (2/3): 212–241. Holland, Irene, with Heather Bishop. 2014. Tales of a Tiller Girl: My True Story of Dancing in Wartime London. London: Harper Element. Mort, Frank. 2007. “Striptease:The Erotic Female Body and Live Sexual Entertainment in Mid-TwentiethCentury London.” Social History 32 (1): 27–53. Millard Shapiro, Jill, ed. 2014. Remembering Revudeville: A  Souvenir of the Windmill Theatre 1932–1964. London: Obscuriosity Press. Nicholson, Steve. 2005. The  Censorship of British Drama 1900–1968, Vol.  2, 1933–1952. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press. Parker, Derek, and Julia Parker. 1975. The Natural History of the Chorus Girl. Newton Abbott, UK: David and Charles. Pilton, Patrick. 1976. Every Night at the London Palladium. London: Robson Books. Press information summaries.Windmill Theatre Press and Marketing Material. 1947–1962,THM 422/2/1, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Purser, Ann. 1968. “Generation Hit of a Good Bill.” The Stage and Television News, August 15, 34.

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Larraine Nicholas Robinson, Fay. 2014. My Sixteen Sisters: Dancing with the Stars: My Life as a Tiller Girl. Birkenhead, UK: Appin Press. Revudeville 288. 1957. Windmill Theatre Archive,V&A Museum, THM 257, Box 15. Smith, Albert. 1847. The Natural History of the Ballet Girl. London: D. Bogue [facsimile 1996. London: Dance Books]. Van Damm,Vivian. 1952. Tonight and Every Night. London: Stanley Paul and Co. Vernon, Doremy. 1988. Tiller’s Girls. London: Robson Books. Vicinus, Martha. 1979. “‘Happy Times... If You Can Stand It’: Women Entertainers during the Interwar Years in England.” Theatre Journal 31 (3): 357–369. Wilmut, Roger. 1995. Kindly Leave the Stage! The Story of Variety, 1919–1960. London: Methuen. “Windmill Girl Planned Single Act in Secret.” 1954. The Stage, November 11, 5.

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19 SELLING AND GIVING DANCE Susan Leigh Foster

Introduction Anthropological study of the concept of the gift extends back more than 100 years; however, recently, and in response to new global alignments of neo-liberal and capitalist values, there has been a renewed interest in the gift on the part of economists as well as anthropologists who find potential in this construct as an alternative to the capitalist commodity form of economic exchange. Concomitant with these inquiries, the very nature of what is produced in the global marketplace has shifted: The glut of material objects that are manufactured for sale has now been surpassed by the large number of immaterial services such as advertising, technical support, financial, health, and personal assistance services and more that are now conceptualized as commodities for sale, and this invites a reconsideration of dance as a form of labor that can produce commodities or gifts. How might dance be theorized and investigated in relation to these two intertwined arenas of research? What is a dance commodity in contrast to a dance gift? This chapter attempts to open up new dialog around dance as a form of cultural, political, and economic exchange through a consideration of its potential for being sold or given. Commodity and gift forms of exchange in dance will be considered in relation to a single example, the Netflix series The Get Down (2016).

The commodity–gift spectrum In their most stark and oppositional conceptions, commodities are objects or services generated for economic profit whereas gifts are objects or services created in order to be received and then reciprocated (Marx 1977; Mauss 1990). Commodities economize on the raw materials and techniques of their fabrication in order to deliver a desirable product that can be sold in the marketplace for more than the cost of its making (Frow 1997). Gifts entail a consideration of the receivers and their circumstances with the goal of incurring a debt that creates a bond between giver and receiver (Godelier 1999). Commodity exchange thus establishes relationships between objects in terms of their relative price, whereas gift exchange constructs relationships between people (Gregory 1982; Goddard 2000). Within commodity exchange, individuals are conceptualized as equal within the moment of the transaction, and they are also perceived as autonomous and isolated individuals who together compose the 273

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social. Within gift exchange, however, it is not the autonomy of individuals that is emphasized but, rather, their mutual need for and connections to one another (Weiner 1992). Teachers can sell or give facility at dancing to their students; choreographers can sell or give dances to dancers; dancers can sell or give the performance of dance to the audience. In order to sell dance or facility at dancing, the dance movement must be standardized and also spectacularized. Standardizing the vocabulary and criteria of evaluation regarding high quality dancing enables teachers, choreographers, and dancers to fabricate and transmit dance quickly and efficiently. However, in order to be sold for profit, dancing must not only be economical to produce, it must also be rendered desirable and appealing. This spectacularization of dance is achieved by pushing dancing to the edge of physical capacity; moving faster, balancing for longer, jumping higher, turning more times, and extending the body beyond what was thought possible. Alternatively, dance movement can be embedded with a special mystery or allure, or an inflated degree of sexual display, rendering it foreign and exotic, or voluptuous and sybaritic, or all of these. Throughout, the effort that dance requires is strategically monitored and then pumped through the body so as to produce the maximum targeted effect. Gifts, in contrast, are given, and they are also received and then reciprocated. They may be perceived as useful, as thoughtful or generous acts, or as enhancing prestige, yet the function of their exchange is to establish a condition of social indebtedness. Although there is debate over the necessity of reciprocation, scholars in multiple fields generally concur that gifts create debts that need to be repaid (Titmuss 1970; Derrida 1992; Testart 1998).1 Givers of gifts improve their status through their ability and willingness to give, and receivers of gifts reestablish equality or sometimes reverse the hierarchy initially created by the giver once that gift is reciprocated. No single abstract system of measurement, such as money, governs what or how gifts are exchanged (Karatani 2014). Within commodity exchange not only are individuals conceptualized as equal within the moment of the transaction, they are also perceived as autonomous and isolated individuals who together compose the social. Within gift exchange, it is not the autonomy of individuals that is emphasized but, rather, their mutual need for and connections to one another. The exchange of commodities is driven by the desire to accumulate wealth, whereas the exchange of gifts incurs the obligation to give things away. Commodity exchange enables individuals to move more freely and without the constraints of familial, social, or religious obligations, whereas gift exchange embeds itself within local and often long-standing affiliations (Karatani 2014). As illuminating as these contrasts are between gift and commodity exchange, it is crucial to note that they almost never operate in isolation from one another. Furthermore, as Appadurai (1988) has argued, any given thing can circulate through either system and often does at different moments in its social life (Miller 1995; Osteen 2002; Sykes 2005; Robbins 2009).2 The same object might function as tribute one minute and insult the next; it might morph from cherished and precious to utilitarian and ordinary. Even money can be repurposed to serve not  as the standard measure of all things’ equivalence in commodity exchange but instead as a defining element within gift exchange. Also, specific traditions and occasions for a system of exchange can erode or collapse or even transform from one kind of exchange to another (Keane 2001; Tsing 2013, 2015).3 It is precisely this kind of transformation that The Get Down depicts so vividly.

Breaking down “The Get Down” As dazzling and over-the-top as any of Baz Luhrmann’s productions and chock-full of dancing, The  Get Down (2016) premiered as a Netflix series in episodes, issued in two parts. It chronicled the emergence of hip hop and breakdancing in the Bronx. Evocative panning 274

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shots of the inner city’s urban decay, the product of race-based marginalization and also corporate greed, graft, and corruption, focus on the visual rhythms of graffiti-encrusted subway cars passing above street-corner hustle. A duo, composed of a wordsmith whose rhymes proclaim the emergence of rap in the late 1970s and a DJ, modeled after Grandmaster Flash, who pioneered in the scratching and mixing of vinyl records, along with their friends form one of the first cohesive break dance crews, eventually uniting with other gangs to forge a crossBronx coalition of the disenfranchized (Light 2016). Meanwhile, the wordsmith’s girlfriend, whose chaste, pure, and powerful voice has been the pride and joy of her father’s church, breaks into the world of disco where, in defiance of her father’s wishes, she becomes a rising star. The African-Latino wordsmith Ezekial (Zeke) and his “butterscotch queen” singer Mylene, act out an updated West Side Story. Unlike West Side Story, however, or its antecedent Romeo and Juliet, The Get Down’s narrative does not end in tragedy; instead, the “cut-throat” business attitude of Netflix prompted a decision to terminate the show at the end of Season 1 (Desta 2017). At the end of that single season, Zeke and Mylene, each in a different way, have become personifications of the struggle between gift- and commodity-based exchange. What follows is not an evaluation of The Get Down’s narrative, with its complex race and class-based tensions, or the sociological or psychological make-up of the characters. Nor does it conduct a comparison with other versions of the narrative such as Rennie Harris’ Rome and Jewels (2000), or contextualize the series within Luhrmann’s other directorial work.4 I will not assess The Get Down’s historical veracity, the degrees to which it romanticizes and hyperbolizes inner-city life in 1978 and 1979, the two years during which the story is set. Nor will I analyze the music and the ingenious new techniques for producing it invented by the period’s pioneering DJs. Instead, I will focus on the dancing featured throughout The Get Down as a form of embodied struggle between commodity and gift forms of exchange. The pilot episode of The Get Down opens with a 1996 concert in which Zeke, by then a highly successful rap artist, details his early years in the Bronx. As thousands of audience members listen intently, he paces and gestures as his back-up singers sway in sync. His powerful message about racial prejudice is delivered primarily through his lyrics, illustrated for Netflix viewers by clips of his childhood that preview the story that will unfold over the next ten episodes. Two extended scenes of dancing within this first episode expand on the singer’s lyrics and lay out many of the tensions that will drive the rest of the series. The first takes place in a disco club and includes the arrival of its star DJ, the selling of copious quantities of cocaine, and a dance contest that ends when a rival gang bursts into the club shooting as they go. The second takes place in an abandoned building where hundreds of young people are jiving to another DJ’s new way of generating the music—scratching—while a proto-rap rhymer concocts simple couplets with many opportunities for call and response from the dancing audience. In the beginning of the disco scene, some dancers seem to be improvising as idiosyncratic individuals, but with the arrival of the DJ the entire room breaks into a line-danced routine. Difficult although probably not  impossible to pick up on the spot, the phrase of moves is complex enough that most dancers would need to have learned the phrases and practiced them in preparation for the evening’s festivities. Both Zeke and Mylene are in the club, she to advance her career by slipping a cassette of her singing to the DJ, and he to protect her and declare his love. When her favorite song comes on, they break into a partnered hustle routine featuring lots of dips, turns, and opportunities for her to display her sensuous body and for him to exert a quiet, manly control over her. Each has been practicing their dancing earlier in the day, Mylene in order to enhance her potential as a rising disco star, and Zeke in order to dance with her. Then the club owner’s son, nicknamed Cadillac, who has his eyes 275

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on Mylene, commands center stage with a highly sexualized, macho routine, designed to impress with its virtuoso command of complex rhythmic sequences, tight control over the entire body, and forceful dynamism. Isolating legs, pelvis or shoulders, he pumps different parts of his body into space, halting them abruptly in order to hit a series of powerful poses. Sequestering Mylene, he begins to partner her, as she, in an effort to attract the DJ’s gaze, ramps up the sexual display within her dancing. The  escalating tensions among Cadillac, Zeke, DJ, and Mylene are interrupted by a spray of gunfire that kills the DJ and prompts everyone to run for their lives. A short time later, Zeke and his buddies are taken by their favorite graffiti artist and hero, Shaolin Fantastic (Grandmaster Flash), to the “the flyest secret underground party in the entire Bronx,” known as the Get Down. Here Zeke and his friends witness the innovative double turn-table technique of generating the music known as scratching, and they begin to absorb a new defiant energy that is empowering and uniting the crowd. Pulsating to the beat the dancers explore, not the smooth, curvaceous horizontality of disco, but a jagged pumping verticality. A  proto-rapper shouts out rhymed couplets, setting up a call and response interaction with the crowd. Fired up by a proto-rapper whose couplets he can beat with his quick-witted and complex rhymes, Zeke seizes the microphone, while Shaolin commands the crowd’s attention with his breathtaking breakdance solo. Obliterating the crowd’s earlier verticality and in utter defiance of gravity, Shaolin launches himself onto the floor, alternating rapidly between hands and feet as he fires off rhythms, mimics martial arts postures and phrases, and spins on his shoulders. Other soloists follow, citing Shaolin as they build their own dialog with the music, parodying or amplifying others as they promote their own artistry. The crowd in its circular formation around each soloist, both contains and builds the energy, reflecting it back onto the soloist while also circulating it around the circle. These two scenes capture disco at the height of its popularity and hip hop in its infancy as two forms rubbing against one another within the urban decay created by rampant neglect and disregard coming from federal, state, and local agencies. As portrayed in The Get Down, disco’s pathways to upward mobility and profit are already clearly established, with the machinery of its clubs, drugs, fashions, and recording industry fully elaborated, and the criteria for evaluating expertise at composing, singing, dancing, and spinning the records all well-articulated. Its underground alternative is just learning to survive, powered by imaginative artistry, political critique, and vacillation between disillusion and rage. Within the social and business structures of disco, alliances are constructed, favors paid back, memories of past transactions retained, and yet, individuals operate as independently motivated autonomous agents whose purpose in allying themselves with others is individual advancement. Music and club industries, long-established and well-oiled machines, are thriving even if many of their workers hustle continuously for their livelihood. Hip hop, in contrast, is being forged within communities experiencing a more urgent precarity. The crews, functioning in the capacity of gangs, provide a much needed social order for unemployed youth whose options for growth and development are very limited. Exacting loyalty and marking out specific territory as their own, the crews trade within and between themselves, exchanging favors, goods, and new styles and ideas that create multiple forms of interdependency. Breakdancing develops as one of many forms through which this social structure is cultivated and reinforced. The  dancers improvise moves that, once given to one another, are subsequently reciprocated by the responsive moves of other dancers. Both worlds are controlled by men. Disco elevates women to superstar status as highly sexualized divas who ramp up excitement or as ornamentation to be swung and slung around on the dance floor. The recording industry in all its iterations is male dominated, and one of 276

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The Get Down’s most fascinating characters, the shrewd female club owner who manages a drug empire and can smell in hip hop the next hot item headed for commercial success, is an anomaly. Hip hop has room for women on the dance floor but not as soloists either on the floor or onstage. Its crotch grabs and faux masturbation moments brag of a masculinity that is illusive, given the unemployment rates and general sense of desperation felt throughout the borough. Women function in an entirely separate economy, as caregivers and domestic service providers, one that Mylene is desperate to exit, even if she must contend with becoming the commodity through which profit is garnered within the disco economy. As Mylene is spun around the dance floor by her competing male partners, the choreography in which all the dancers are engaged exemplifies disco’s social and economic structures. All the dancers are familiar with the sequences of moves that form their social network, and together they participate in the line or couple dances that construct the circuitry through which exchange among them takes place. In their participation, they function as independent agents, literally and figuratively hustling for a better position. Mylene’s sensational attractiveness, partially the product of her virginal naïveté, distinguishes her as the newest, hottest and, therefore, most profit-generating product on the floor. As she advances up the capitalist food-chain, she will be asked many times to trade this attractiveness in the form of sexual favors for greater visibility and fame. Dancing at the Get Down in the scene that follows embodies a completely different sociality and form of exchange. Collected in a circle, the dancers reinforce a sense of bonding within the group. Known as the “cypher,” this circle concretizes connectedness by channeling energy simultaneously around the circle and into the center. Dancers in the middle throw down move after move in an effort to beat one another. While these exchanges create hierarchies of social and artistic prestige, they also build the sense of a larger community of likeminded members who share an apprehension of their social conditions. The dancers seem to take inspiration from each other’s ability to expose and diagnose their social problems and to display the maneuverability necessary to survive them. In contrast to disco’s familiar sequences, improvisation permeates these exchanges, influencing at every level how dancers formulate and sequence moves and respond to one another and to the music. Through these various forms of call and response, dancers merge as mutually dependent and defining. Rather than jockeying for better access or positioning, they work collectively to forge and reaffirm community. As further indication of the different organizations of sociality being danced out, the two scenes embody distinctive conceptions of expertise and virtuosity. Both are organized around impressing viewers, yet they each display different skills and investments. Mastery in disco is evident in command over the standardized routine, with its specific steps and sequences, and the smooth and sensuous execution of phrases leading up to the glamorous or macho pose. Proficiency in break dancing manifests as quick-witted responsiveness to another dancer or the music and innovative use of parts of the body punctuated by poses that display critique, alliance, and defiance. When Cadillac dances, he subdues others’ bodies with his overpowering bravado, whereas Shaolin invites and incites others to segue into the center after him. Disco’s virtuosity is based in levels of skill and competence at the execution of designated routines, whereas break dancing’s notion of expertise emerges from and only has meaning within any given interactive session of dancing as the facility at devising movement appropriate to that moment. Disco and break dancing are thus situated within The Get Down as connected very differently to the surroundings in which they are performed. The  club that Mylene visits is a rougher, grittier version of disco clubs found in Manhattan or elsewhere, but it shares 277

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with the other clubs the same structural elements, dance moves, and protocols for behavior. The bouncer at the door screens for the wealthiest and most attractive patrons; drinks and drugs circulate along with glances, smiles, and postures suggesting availability and desire, all with the goal of amusement, entertainment, and possibly new social and/or sexual connections. In contrast, the Get Down that Zeke and crew visit is entirely ad hoc. It moves from one abandoned building to another on different nights, devising the forms of interaction and their sequencing as the evening unfolds. Highly responsive to the hood and its politics, the rhythms performed by DJs and dancers, and wordsmiths’ lyrics all take on an urgency fueled by the inequities that surround them. As The  Get Down develops, the consequences of Mylene’s and Zeke’s choices to move into the worlds of disco and hip hop become increasingly clear. Mylene forsakes the closeknit community of the church where she is renowned, respected, and praised because of the spiritual uplift that her voice gives to the congregation each week. The commodification of that voice entails the loss of community and a concomitant lack of trust in the authenticity of relationships. Repeatedly, she must maneuver around sexual advances and claims of ownership over her, insisting that her two female friends be hired as her backup singers in order to preserve some female solidarity as her dresses become skimpier and her dance moves slinkier. Zeke, whose talent as a poet is noticed by his teacher at school, is being groomed by a white elite where he functions as token of their seemingly progressive values, yet he remains loyal to his crew, now named the Get Down Brothers, and their uncertain future. By the beginning of the second set of episodes, set in 1979, the Get Down Brothers are performing in their own club, albeit financed by a cocaine trade conducted in the backroom. They have devised a wildly popular, cohesive act whose frontal presentation appeals to the grooving audience in front of the stage. Tightly choreographed and well-rehearsed, the performance features designated roles for each of the four dancer/singers, with sections of unison, interspersed with signature solos. The movements have become tamer and more legible, although they continue to exude a rough and raw edginess that contrasts with disco’s suave sophistication. Across town, Mylene is starring on a TV show whose back up dancers do not look noticeably different from the performance the brothers have just delivered. She has been catapulted to fame by the “fairies,” as her agent calls them, when her first recorded song is discovered by a gay DJ whose voguing runway dancers adore the new genre “gospel-disco” that she has devised. As producers and agent ascertain just what kind of star power they have in Mylene, her pastor father also comes to realize the potential goldmine living in his home. He turns the church, formerly an institution surviving through the donation system of its congregation, into the vehicle through which to profit from his daughter’s ascending fame. By the conclusion of the series, Mylene is flying off to Hollywood to make a feature film, liberated from her family and its traditional gender roles, but accompanied by the sexism and greed she will continue to face. At least she has her two stalwart backup singers in tow. Zeke is on his way to Yale. With Season Two cancelled it is unclear how he is able to continue to pursue his career as a rap artist, but the clips of the 1996 performance that introduce many of the episodes and conclude the series feature him as a major rap artist. It is in this very moment of the mid-1990s that hip hop’s immense growth and popularity have thrown the form into aesthetic and political crisis. Many of its most ardent fans find that it has become “watered-down,” “sold-out,” and “over,” or even “Elvicized” (Perry 2004, 191–192; Rose 2008). The  perceived vibrancy of the form seems to dry up, and what remains is a shallow, bling-encrusted, violence-ridden pretense. Hip hop’s complexity, its diverse voices, and many forms of political critique, has efficiently modulated into a hyper-sexualized, homophobic, and cliché-ridden representation of black ghetto experience. This change, mediated 278

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by recording, film, and television industries, results in a much more standardized presentation of stunt-oriented movement, organized frontally, and without opportunities for call and response. Dancers no longer invent and give one another new moves as they had 15 years earlier. It makes sense, then, that Zeke’s rap recounts hip hop’s vibrant beginnings, nostalgically gesturing toward a brotherhood that has now vanished. In  its early years break dancing summoned group members into a collective, mutually defining relationship, drawing upon and also fueling the communal energy of their dancing through improvisation and the cypher, and also fusing with its local geographical and political environs. In all these ways it functioned as a form of gift exchange. The Get Down depicts this early period and also the beginnings of its transformation into the highly profitable commodity it is to become. Even by the beginning of the second part, the young artists have begun to rely on more standardized routines and flashy group poses that signal the transformation of breakdance into commodity. The hip hop crews’ social choreography offers support and brotherhood to a community under duress; however, it does not include any opportunities for Mylene, whose only pathway out of the community is commoditization, and she willingly opts for the alienation of sexual objectification in order to become a free agent, detached from the stifling constraints of home and church.

Alienated and unalienated dancing When a commodity is produced, the labor that went into its making has been bought, a transaction that severs the ties between the laborers and what they have created. As Marx argues, the actual effort that went into its making creates a trace of itself that congeals in the form of the object that it produces; however, because that labor was already exchanged for money and because the object then enters the capitalist marketplace, it loses all connection to the labor through which it was created (Marx 1977, 148). On the one hand, this helps to establish the pretense of equality between sellers and buyers of commodities in the marketplace precisely because no personal connection to the object on the part of its maker remains, and on the other, it creates the conditions within which the maker becomes alienated from what is being made. Laborers may derive satisfaction from the quality of their work, but because their involvement is purchased for a price, any other relationship to what is made is foreclosed, and therefore they become unmoored from one another as individuated agents whose primary form of social interaction is competition (McLellan 1969). When a gift, which can be either bought, inherited, or made, is created, the choicemaking that goes into that selection establishes a very different kind of relationship between giver and object as well as giver and receiver. The giver often considers carefully the qualities of the object and its appropriateness as gift for the recipient, based again, on a consideration of who that person is. These calculations may be required and formulaic as stipulated in codes of religious devotion, polite comportment, or class differentiation and obligation, and the giver may feel compelled to undertake them, but they do not lead to a condition of alienation. Instead, they further affirm and even deepen that individual’s connection to the social (Hyde 1983, 47). Commodity exchange thus estranges makers from what is made, whereas gift exchange creates anew a connection between them. One difference, of course, between an object and a dance is their relative tangibility. Indeed, many scholars have argued persuasively that it is precisely dance’s capacity not to be a thing that is its most central and defining feature (Phelan 1993; Lepecki 2016). Dancing happens and, in the very moment of its occurrence, vanishes. Its impermanence and ephemerality are its most striking attributes. Dancing literally dissolves as it is being performed and 279

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watched and, as such, stands in strong contrast to the world of things as a vivid exemplar of the many pursuits and pastimes that cannot be quantified or calculated. As powerful and generative as these insights are into dance’s instability and impermanence, they do not account for many aspects of dance that are equally prominent. It is possible, for example, to conceptualize dancing as an event that occurs in time, having both a beginning and an ending, and also to see dance as consisting of bodily movement that articulates form, enunciates an impulse or intention, or evidences adherence to certain principles of organization that are revealed as the dancing unfolds. Many practices that take place within and as part of the world of dance testify to this potential for dance to evince substantiality, even if only for an instant: People teach each other dances, and they also teach each other how to dance; dances can be and are notated, replicated, reconstructed and reworked; dances are made and people learn how to compose them; and people devote a certain amount of time and attention to watching dance. In participating in any of these practices, skills and facility are increased and knowledge about dance is acquired. Undoubtedly, some aspects of dance disappear during these acts of transmission given that what is imparted or acquired does not and cannot maintain absolute consistency. The act of dancing nonetheless creates conditions under which things are produced and exchanged, even if those things are ephemeral. To consider dance as both substantive and ephemeral not only opens up the possibility to examine how dance is exchanged but also what is entailed in organizing and completing the exchange itself. Within commodity exchange these processes include the production and also consumption phases of the exchange, and in gift exchange they encompass the acts of giving, receiving, and reciprocating. What is particularly intriguing about dance, and what makes dance quite distinct from the manufacture of tangible objects, is the potential to see the act of creating the dance at the same time that we see the dance as something that is made and presented. In other words, a dance is both the same as and separate from the person who is dancing, and thus any given dance performance cannot conceal all of the labor that goes into its performance. Nor  can it entirely obscure the labor that went into composing the dance and teaching the dancer how to dance. These prior acts of exchange generate traces whose residue is evident in every moment of dancing along with whatever actions the dancer undertakes to present the dance. Each moment of dancing embodies decisions that have been made concerning the selection and sequencing of movement. It also demonstrates the cultivation of physicality that enables the dancer to perform. In addition, it manifests the dancer’s act of interpreting and conveying the dance. Dance thus poses the question of whether and under what conditions it is alienated.

Conclusion At least in their early performances, The Get Down Brothers are giving their moves to one another and to the audience, both as the creators and performers of those moves. Improvising their actions, they nonetheless create legible traces that are registered and circulated throughout the room. These moves are reciprocated through the responses offered by other dancers, the DJ, and the wordsmith, creating a non-alienated transaction, yielding a sense of belonging that permeates the room. The disco dancers, in contrast, are working to sell their dancing in exchange for sex, drugs, and/or status. Performing standardized routines, they display their vitality and prowess in order to advance as individual agents working the marketplace. Even Mylene’s gestures are clichés of sexual invitation that she knows are a required part of the job. Nonetheless, all the dancers might take pride in and remain unalienated from their performances of the moves they are nonetheless selling. At the end of the series, Zeke, now as 280

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a renowned rapper on the world stage, must refuse to perform the commodified moves that have come to define hip hop. Instead, he preserves his unalienated relationship to a vanished past by turning his back on the audience and walking solo into the darkness. Similarly, Mylene sustains her unalienated relationship to singing, an action that fuses her to all she holds dear. Each character, having been thrust into the center of commodity production, struggles valiantly to maintain a connection to their art as gift.

Notes 1 This thesis of what a gift is rejects Derrida’s (1992) conclusions concerning the impossibility of the gift because there should not  be the expectation for reciprocation. It  does, however, align with Derrida in arguing that a considerable and flexible amount of time can pass before a gift might be reciprocated. 2 This is a reference to Appadurai’s (1988) thesis regarding the social life of things in which he argues that “the commodity situation in the social life of any ‘thing’ be defined as the situation in which its exchangeability (past, present, or future) for some other thing is its socially relevant feature” (13, italics in original). For lucid argumentation of the inseparability of gifts and commodities, see Myers (2001). 3 For a particularly vivid example of the social life of an object, see Keane (2001) who describes a piece of cloth’s changing status this way:“Note the rapid series of roles through which the piece of cloth moved: by turn, it was a conventional obligation between affines, a figurative banner, a physical encumbrance tangled in a tree, a token of regard meant to placate an irritated guest, a vehicle of insult, a metaphoric rag of poverty, and finally a rejected gift” (70). See also Guyer (1995), who has shown that modes of valuation are constantly being tinkered with, combined, and altered (387). 4 Harris’s production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet remade the story for a group of male dancers who rapped the text and danced out the action using hip-hop vocabulary. For an excellent analysis of the work, see Scott (2003).

References Appadurai, Arjun. 1988. “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value.” In The Social Life of Things, edited by Arjun Appadurai. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1992. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money.Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Desta, Yohana. 2017. “Cancelling The  Get Down Proves Netflix Is Getting More Cutthroat.” Vanity Fair, May 25. Accessed October  4, 2017. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/05/ netflix-the-get-down-canceled. Frow, John. 1997. Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Goddard, Michael. 2000. “Of Cabbages and Kin: The Value of an Analytic Distinction Between Gifts and Commodities.” Critique of Anthropology 20 (2): 137–151. Godelier, Maurice. 1999. The Enigma of the Gift. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Gregory, Christopher A. 1982. Gifts and Commodities. London: Academic Press. Guyer, Jane I., ed. 1995. Money Matters: Instability, Values, and Social Payments in the Modern History of West African Communities. Portsmouth, NH: J. Currey. Hyde, Lewis. 1983. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Random House. Karatani, Kōjin. 2014. The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange.Translated by Michael K. Bourdaghs. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Keane, Webb. 2001. “Money Is No Object: Materiality, Desire, and Modernity in an Indonesian Society.” In The Empire of Things: Regimes of Values and Material Cultures, edited by Fred Myers, 65–90. Oxford: SAR Press. Lepecki, André. 2016. Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance. New York: Routledge. Light, Alan. 2016. Interviewing Grandmaster Flash “Grandmaster Flash breaks down Netflix’s new series The  Get Down.” Mother Jones, July/August. Accessed October  3, 2017. http://www.motherjones. com/media/2016/08/grandmaster-flash-baz-luhrmann-get-down-netflix-series-turntablismearly-hip-hop/.

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Susan Leigh Foster Luhrmann, Baz, and Stephen Adly Guirgis. 2016. The  Get Down. (television series) Produced by Sony Pictures Television for Netflix. Marx, Karl. 1977. Capital: A  Critique of Political Economy, Vol.  1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New  York: Vintage. Mauss, Marcel. 1990. The Gift:The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies.Translated by W. D. Halls. London: Routledge. McLellan, David. 1969. “Marx’s View of the Unalienated Society.” Review of Politics 31 (4): 459–465. Miller, D. 1995. “Consumption and Commodities.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 141–61. Myers, Fred R., ed. 2001. The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Osteen, Mark. 2002. “Gift or Commodity?” In The Question of the Gift, edited by Mark Osteen, 229–247. London: Routledge. Perry, Imani. 2004. Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Phelan, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked:The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge. Robbins, Joel. 2009. “Rethinking Gifts and Commodities: Reciprocity, Recognition, and the Morality of Exchange.” In Economics and Morality: Anthropological Approaches, edited by Katherine E. Browne and B. Lynne Milgram, 43–58. Lanham, MD: AltaMira. Rose,Tricia. 2008. The Hip Hop Wars:What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop—and Why It Matters. New York: Basic Civitas. Scott, Anna B. 2003 “What’s It Worth to Ya? Adaptation and Anachronism: Rennie Harris’ Pure Movement and Shakespeare.” Discourses in Dance 2 (1): 5–21. Sykes, Karen Margaret. 2005. Arguing with Anthropology: An Introduction to Critical Theories of the Gift. London: Routledge. Testart, Alain. 1998. “‘Uncertainties of the ‘Obligation to Reciprocate’: A Critique of Mauss.” In Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute, edited by Wendy James and N.J. Allen, 97–110. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Titmuss, Richard Morris. 1970. The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy. London: Allen & Unwin. Tsing, Anna. 2013. “Sorting Out Commodities: How Capitalist Value Is Made through Gifts.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (10): 21–43. ———. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Weiner, Annette B. 1992. Inalienable Possessions: The  Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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PART V

Dance and time

20 TRADITIONAL DANCE IN URBAN SETTINGS ‘Snapshots’ of Greek dance traditions in Athens Maria I. Koutsouba Introduction Greek traditional dance in southern European urban settings such as Athens is going through a boom period. Different ‘snapshots’ of Greek traditional dance illustrate where dance is practiced formally and informally as this chapter explores questions such as the following: How is traditional dance incorporated within this situation? What is distinct in the ‘snapshots’ that makes Greek traditional dance fit comfortably in such contemporary settings? Do the dynamics of traditional Greek dance regarding interaction and integration of the multifaceted and complex layers of Greek identity, society, and culture emerge as significant, especially in offering a privileged space to the people? Starting from an anthropological perspective of dance, this chapter provides the opportunity to examine common phenomena, and the ‘snapshots’ emerge as stories from the researcher’s eye through the lens of dance’s multiple literacies. Ethnographic dance research at home reveals specifically new ways of using traditional dance in which the forms are constantly revitalized. This research seems to be of interest considering the wider sociopolitical and economic context of Greece since it is one of several countries that have faced a severe global socioeconomic crisis since 2008 that continues to impact its people in 2019. The  stimulus for this chapter stems from personal experience in my native country, Greece. Being Greek, living and working in Greece, and being involved with Greek traditional dance professionally and socially inform my observations made at Greek traditional dance activities in Athens where dance is practiced formally and informally. Discussion of dance activities or ‘snapshots’ illuminates Greek traditional dance and its relation to contemporary Greek culture and society. More specifically, this chapter examines a phenomenon of urban (traditional) dance using anthropological/ethnochoreological approaches to the study of dance. The content of these terms, anthropological/ethnochoreological, has changed over time in the dance literature; however, I use them interchangeably in this chapter “like (two) peas in a pod” (Koutsouba 2008, 227). At the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, dance literature regarding the study of traditional dance in its cultural context concerned anthropological and choreological approaches (Koutsouba 2008).The former characterized the US tradition of dance research that focused mainly on the sociocultural dimensions of dance—its context. The latter characterized the European and particularly the eastern European tradition of dance research that focused primarily on the form of 285

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the dance—its text.The approach influenced by John Blacking, an anthropologist who established a British-based school of dance research, often used the term ethnochoreology as synonymous with the anthropology of dance—perceived as a combined study of dance in terms of movement analysis and cultural context (Grau 1993). Perceiving the combined study of dance as more holistic, the anthropological or ethnochoreological approach has informed my research. After almost a century of research on both sides of the Atlantic and with its own theory, principles, and analytical methods introduced by theorists such as Rudolf von Laban, researchers have developed dance into a systematically cumulative and classified body of knowledge. Thus, despite the disciplinary investigations into dance that individual scholars have pursued—historical, psychological, educational, or biomechanical—perhaps it is time to make investigations more interdisciplinary by including a focus on dance. This suggestion, at least from my point of view, is in accordance with the definition of choreology by Gertrude Kurath (1960) as the science that concerns the study of dance according to the etymology of the term ‘choros’ and ‘logos’ (Koutsouba 1997). In this frame, as many dance researchers such as Theresa Buckland (1999a), Georgiana Gore (1999), and Andrée Grau (2007) have continuously pointed out, the heart of the ethnochoreological/anthropological study of dance lies in fieldwork through participant observation and reflexive ethnography to reveal the different ways of understanding not only the world but also ourselves. Ethnochoreology and anthropology of dance have gained standing as research methodologies in the field of dance studies throughout the world (see, for example, Gore, Grau, and Koutsouba (2016) for the way it was established across Europe). The same trend holds true in Greece, where ethnochoreology and anthropology of dance have a long presence in the academic study of Greek traditional dance as Giorgos Fountzoulas (2016) summarizes. The methodologies have attracted academic interest in other kinds of Greek dance, as in the case of Natalie Zervou who “explores the development of Greek contemporary dance practices as a site for engaging with national identity construction during the recent (2009–2015) sociopolitical and financial crisis” (2015, ix) and of Marianna Panourgia (2017) who investigates the curriculum of contemporary dance training and its implementation on the dance practices within the elite private professional dance schools in Greece. My research takes the form of ethnography at home, since I am a Greek scholar conducting research in my own country, thus playing the roles of an insider and an outsider at the same time with the perplexities and dilemmas that emerge from this dual role (Koutsouba 1999).

The ‘snapshots’ The ‘snapshots’ are indicative of what is happening at the moment in urban settings in Greece in terms of Greek traditional dance. I chose the ‘snapshots’ based on the following criteria: (1) all the chosen ‘snapshots’ concern only Greek traditional dance in a variety of manifestations and not its fusions with other kinds of the Greek dance, (2) all the chosen ‘snapshots’ took place in Athens, the capital of Greece, and (3) the specific ‘snapshots’ strive to cover many aspects of the Greek traditional dance scene in Athens in relation to funding (state and private sector), formal and informal endeavors, their recent time frame, and the status of the ‘snapshots’ according to their place, time, and content of dance. The Greek traditional dance activities explored here are grouped into three categories according to location: the Syntagma (Constitution) Square at the center of Athens, and in the south of Athens, the newly established Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center and the Municipality of Argyroupoli-Elliniko. 286

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Snapshot one: Syntagma (Constitution) Square At the heart of the city, Syntagma (Constitution) Square is the central and most significant square in modern Athens historically, socially, commercially, and politically, and where countless activities take place. Constantly crowded with locals and tourists, it serves as a central gathering place and meeting point for locals and foreigners of all ages. Distances to the other Greek cities are measured from this location. The square is bordered on the east side by the Hellenic Parliament Building, in front of which towards Syntagma Square is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The  tomb is guarded by Evzones, the elite soldiers dressed with foustanela, the pleated skirt, and tsarouchia, the rustic shoes with the pom-poms, where Greek national identity is conveyed through the male official traditional costume. Syntagma Square is located near many of Athens’s oldest and most interesting neighborhoods and tourist attractions of the modern and ancient Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman historical periods. Syntagma Square is also the starting point of Ermou Street, the most important shopping street in the city and also the site of demonstrations and political rallies as described in local guidebooks (Gray 2012; Vatopoulos 2018). On March 25, Greeks celebrate one of the most important national historical and religious holidays. On this day, Greeks celebrate the War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire and the Greek Orthodox Church celebrates the Annunciation by Archangel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary. A military parade is held at Syntagma Square in front of the Τomb of the Unknown Soldier. In 2015, a new government came to power in Greece, a coalition of the Syriza and Anel parties. The National Defense Minister Panos Kammenos and the Regional Director of Attica Rena Durou organized Greek traditional dances in front of the Tomb to follow the March 25 parade. Thus, dance clubs from all over the country performed Greek traditional dances accompanied by traditional songs played by the Armed Forces band—an interesting combination as explored herein. Traditional dances, costumes, music, and songs flooded Syntagma Square and politicians and ordinary people joined the dance. The dance event was innovative in many ways. First, no railings were erected during the military parade in 2015—railings that during the years of socioeconomic crisis were set out for first time by the previous government to constrain people and to avoid complaints and quarrels with indignant citizens. Thus, in 2015 Syntagma Square was opened to the people, creating a sense of togetherness among all and fostering cohesion among citizens and state authorities. Second, Syntagma Square was open to Greek traditional dance, an unusual occurrence (Iefimerida 2015). Greek traditional dance had been excluded from this sort of official, public event during national celebrations for decades because of its correlation with Metaxas’s dictatorship (1937–1949) and rule by the military junta between 1967 and 1974 (Fountzoulas 2014). Thus, the mixing of military with tradition was significant for implying that previous ideological and political trends had been dropped (Illustration 20.1). On July 5, 2015, a referendum was held to decide whether Greece was to accept the bailout conditions to help resolve the debt crisis proposed jointly by the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank. The result of the referendum was that the bailout conditions were rejected by a majority of over sixty-one percent to thirty-nine percent, with the “No” vote winning in all of Greece’s regions. With Greek flags in their hands and a festive atmosphere of unity, large crowds arrived in Syntagma Square as the voting estimates were released, creating a celebratory atmosphere. People celebrated the rejection of the referendum with Greek traditional dance performances, reasserting power, solidarity, fun, and enjoyment, while photographers and journalists carried the images of the celebration around the globe as seen in a range of publications (Newsbeast 2015; Iefimerida 2018) (Illustration 20.2). 287

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Illustration 20.1 Greek traditional dance at Syntagma Square on March  25, 2015. Photograph by Stelios Misinas. (Courtesy of EUROKINISSI-Newspaper Dimokratia.)

Illustration 20.2 Greek traditional dance at Syntagma Square on July 5, 2015. Photograph by Tatiana Bolari. (Courtesy of EUROKINISSI-Newspaper Dimokratia.)

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On March 31, 2018, young people filled Syntagma Square, joined by older men and women dressed in traditional costumes, began to dance, surprising the tourists and Athenians due to the uniqueness of the event. The circle of dancers eventually opened and the onlookers joined in the dance as well. The event was held in the context of the Hellenic Youth in Action Forum as part of Olympic Games 2016–2018, sponsored by the Olympic Committee and Endowments. The forum presented the dance program under the artistic supervision of director-choreographer Fokas Evangelinos, with the title “Friendship Dance.” The gathering culminated in a dance in the road with the creation of a great coil that symbolizes the unity and power of the Greek nation (Vlepaki 2018). In this case, Greek traditional dance once again was presented as a symbol of representing and reinforcing national identity in the contemporary Greek context.

Snapshot two: Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center The Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Cultural Center (SNFCC), founded by one of the world’s leading private, international philanthropic organizations, is a sustainable, worldclass cultural, educational, and recreational urban complex. Within it, important Greek institutions, organizations, and exhibits, such as the National Library of Greece and the Greek National Opera, reinforce cultural values. International sporting is celebrated with the permanent display at the Agora of the Spyros Louis Cup—the Bréal’s Silver Cup, the first Marathon Winner’s Cup presented to Spyros Louis at the inaugural Modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896. The SNFCC was established in 2017 and continues to be supported by the foundation through 2022. The fact that all events funded with SNF support are free to the public, in addition to access to the facilities, has resulted in its accessibility to a large number of people and to “a great civic, cultural, educational, and environmentally responsible landmark of international stature in one site” (SNFCC n.d.). A common perception is that “Europe has eventually reached Greece,” since SNFCC services and specifications are of European standards, giving it an international and cosmopolitan character different from the one Greeks had access to before in the context of Athens. On July 6, 2018, a Greek traditional dance was produced at the site, with the following publicity statement: “SNFCC turns into a huge folk Greek music dance floor, where the past meets the present while the Lyceum of Greek Women get off the stage and share a treasure trove of heritage in four different SNFCC outdoor areas” (SNFCC 2018). The four hundred dancers, members of the Lyceum Club of Greek Women (one of the well-known private clubs), dressed in traditional costumes, performed over seventy different dances from various regions of Greece, while visitors joined the dancers in a circle of Greek dancing (Illustration 20.3). The  Lyceum Club of Greek Women was founded in 1911 by the prominent writer Callirrhoe Parren, one of the first Greek feminists and the first Greek female journalist with an international presence. The objectives of the club are the preservation and promotion of Greek traditional customs and traditions, including Greek traditional dance (Avdela 2010). The Lyceum Club of Greek Women is still active with twenty-two branches in Athens, an additional fifty across the country, and seventeen abroad (Avdela 2010). The club is run by upper-class women and its reputation remains as a carrier of Greekness connecting the past with the present (traditional and modern Greece). With the aforementioned as a point of reference, the importance of this dance activity emerges. This importance lies in the whole picture of the event: the Greek traditional dance section of a well-known Greek private club with elite roots performing for first time in the newly established venue that conformed to European Union standards. The  SNFCC did not charge a fee to participate in the dances, which broadened its access beyond the privileged 289

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Illustration 20.3 The Lyceum of Greek Women Greek traditional dancing at SNFCC. (Courtesy of the newspaper Dimokratia.)

membership of the Lyceum Club of Greek Women. If this is not the past meeting the present in terms of Greek identity under certain conditions, what is it then? It offers a paradigm of the dialectic the country experiences in terms of the construction of its identity between Hellenism (ancient Greek and mythic ancestor of European culture) and Greekness (stemming from the Ottoman Empire) (Koutsouba 1997; in press). Another innovative association occurred on November 5, 2018, when the Hellenic Army Academy (Evelpidon) celebrated the 190th anniversary of its foundation through an indoor Greek traditional dance and music performance in the Stavros Niarchos Hall of the National Opera House of the SNFCC (Hellenic Army Academy 2018). In all the military and police academies in Greece, along with schools, ballet, and modern dance academies, and other public and private sectors, Greek traditional dance is taught as an obligatory course as part of Greece’s cultural tradition and as a vital skill. In other words, all military and police students are obliged to take Greek traditional dance lessons because as leaders they ought to know the country’s traditions and to perform them at any event (Kardaris 2012). The Hellenic Army Academy appointed Dionysios Kardaris as Professor, the first academic staff with expertise on Greek traditional dance in the physical and cultural education section. During the event, music and dance traditions from various parts of Greece were performed by students of the Hellenic Army Academy, accompanied by well-known singers and musicians. Politicians such as the Minister of National Defense, religious authorities, members of cultural institutions, and many others were in the audience that filled up most of the 1,401 seats. The significance of this event is multifaceted. The ballet-oriented Greek National Opera, headquartered at SNFCC, financed the performance, marking the first time that the doors were open to a Greek traditional dance performance. The SNFCC welcomed 290

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an amateur group of military students as opposed to a professional theatrical performance at the Greek National Opera. The event offers a contrast to the participatory recreational street celebration illustrated in Snapshot one due to the theatrical character of the production, although there was once more a mixing of military with tradition without reference to previous ideological and political connections. According to the organizers (Hellenic Army Academy 2018), the theatrical performance was considered the epitome of the cultural celebratory declaration of the Hellenic Army Academy anniversary (Illustration 20.4).

Illustration 20.4 Poster of the 190th anniversary of the Hellenic Army Academy, Evelpidon. (Courtesy of Greek Military Press, 2018.)

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Snapshot three: Municipality of Elliniko-Argyroupoli The Municipality of Elliniko-Argyroupoli in Athens, established in 2010 from the amalgamation of the former neighboring municipalities of Elleniko and Argyroupoli, is the sixtyfifth largest municipality of Greece in population with 51,356 permanent residents, according to the 2011 census. Until 1925, the agricultural area now called Elliniko was inhabited by Pontian refugees coming from Sourmena in the Pontus and the area called Argyroupoli was founded by Pontian refugees from Argyroupolis also in the Pontus (Municipality of Elliniko-Argyroupoli 2018). The exchange of populations occurred after the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922 in what Greeks call the Asia Minor catastrophe (Clark 2007). The municipality’s cultural organization has several sections including a dance section with Latin, modern, classical, and traditional dance as well as Zumba, hip-hop, music, and dance education. Because of its history and the uniqueness of its population, Greek traditional dance plays an important role in the cultural life of the municipality through community-based group activities. The decision by local authorities to establish a folklore museum arose from strong local customs recognizing the particular heritage of the refugee—a kind of museum not usually found in the urban setting of Athens (Municipality of Elliniko-Argyroupoli 2018). On September 21, 2018, at the central square of the Elliniko area, an event called Choros stin Plateia (Dance in the Square) took place. Organized by dance teacher Chariton Charitonidis of the Section  of Traditional Dances of the Youth and Sports Organization of the Municipality Elliniko-Argyroupoli, the event aimed “to transform the central square to a dance place where people were invited to a feast—a trip to Greek places and ways” (Municipality of EllinikoArgyroupoli 2018). Such events are not unusual to Athenians or to people in the periphery of Greece. In fact, dance festivities, organized either by the local authorities or dance clubs as documented in earlier research (Koutsouba 1997), take place throughout the year all over the country. What is unusual in the case of the Choros stin Plateia is the free admission and all the participants—well-known musicians and singers—volunteered their time. As Charitonidis explained: This endeavor is a part of a larger project during which dance lessons and feasts are offered at open spaces, streets, and squares, of the Municipality…. It is the second of this kind, as another one had been organized in May with great success—a success that triggered us to organize this second one. The whole idea behind it is to give back to Greek traditional dance one of its fundamental features, that of the common and shared community, and to bring it back to the streets and squares where everyone can join as it used to be, but in the present-day frame. The  aim is the participation in the dance cycle, joining hands, and not only in a teaching and at the same time entertaining context, aspiring to become part of everyday life of the city. (Personal communication with Charion Charitonidis, September 25, 2018) In a sense, Charitonidis’s words evoke the work by Barbara Ehrenreich (2007) on the history of collective joy through dancing in the streets. More specifically, Ehrenreich argues that “mainstream mid-twentieth-century culture was deeply restrictive of physical motion in general” (212). She suggests that this “motionless perception” (211) has repressed activities such as festivities, which aim “for achieving cohesiveness and generating feeling of unity” (10) through their capacity for collective joy. Events such as Choros stin Plateia seem to be “an outdoor dance party” (259)—an outdoor traditional dance party in this case for Greeks (Illustration 20.5). 292

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Illustration 20.5

Poster for Choros stin Plateia, Municipality of Elliniko-Argyroupoli, 2018.

Understanding the ‘snapshots’ What do these ‘snapshots’ reveal about us? What do they mean and why they are taking place? As Grau (2011) points out, local histories of traditional dance are not the same everywhere, nor even sustained over time at any given place. The specific sociocultural and political contexts are examined to understand the ‘snapshots’ and how Greek traditional dance is related to wider society. Greek traditional dance is used here as a generic term to refer to the entire phenomenon of traditional dance in Greece in terms of the outcome (the dances) and the ongoing process 293

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(the dancing practices). The term refers to a collection of dances and a variety of processes that, although they spring from a common corpus of movements and movement patterns, as well as taking place in certain events and times, they present variations from place to place and from community to community throughout the country. Greek traditional dance is performed usually in circle by a group of dancers having close physical contact through handholds. These characteristics manifest notions of inclusion, unity, integration, solidarity, and mutual understanding. Greek traditional dance constitutes an integral part of Greek society in its “first existence” as well as in its transition to its “second existence” officially and unofficially. More specifically, according to the 1968 Felix Hoerburger conceptual schema (Koutsouba 1997), dance in its first existence constitutes an integral part of the community’s life, it is not fixed, and its learning is a lifetime process, while in its second existence it is addressed to a few interested people of the community and exists as conscious revival or cultivation through intentional and systematic teaching by dance teachers. As I have discussed previously (Koutsouba 1997), the two existences are two different phenomena between which there is no implication of superiority or inferiority. This conceptual schema was expanded by Andriy Nahachewsky (1995, 2001), who associated first and second existence with participatory and presentational dances, respectively, and introduced the notion of the “third existence” as an interaction of the other two existences, since second existence by its nature influences the first. This conceptual schema applies not only to dances but also to dance events (Koutsouba 1997); however, Charitonidis (2017) examines the concepts not only in an intra-state context but also in a transnational context. I argue that my ‘snapshots’ are unique to the practices explored in existing research; all the ‘snapshots’ constitute a second existence of Greek traditional dance, since they all take place in the urban context of Athens. With the exception of the Hellenic Army Academy performance, all the examples bear elements of a kind of third existence because of their social, participatory character. A discussion of the Greek context will help illuminate this argument. In Greece, traditional dance is still vivid in the geographical periphery (through family celebrations, weddings, village fairs, festivals, local dance, and other cultural events) and as part of urban life (in family celebrations, weddings, dance clubs, and other festivities). It is institutionalized since, for example, Greek traditional dance is a compulsory course of physical education at all levels in primary and secondary schools, in all the Hellenic Military and Police Academies, in dance academies, and is the only kind of dance that exists in higher education in the context of physical education studies (Koutsouba in press). Thus, Greek traditional dance was and still is a living form of personal and cultural expression—an integral, active part of Greek social life because people still dance and associate traditional dancing with various aspects of their lives. Why is this so? A  brief look at the sociohistorical and political context of Greece sheds some light on the phenomenon. Unlike most countries in Western Europe, the industrial revolution in Greece was imported from outside rather than generated from within (Kalyvas 2015), a phenomenon that resulted in the underdevelopment of the social structures that emerged in the newly established Greek state in 1830 and which has been labeled by Greek scholars as “illegitimate urbanization” (Filias 1985). Because of this, most of the population remains linked to their villages even if they live in Athens or in another big city. Even for those who do not have village origins, it is impossible to avoid contact with traditional dance through friends or acquaintances. Because of this, everyone, even those not  interested in Greek traditional dance, is exposed to Greek traditional dance somehow, somewhere. 294

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It is thus impossible not to encounter Greek traditional dance at some point, perhaps at an engagement or wedding, at everyday social activities with friends, taking holidays in a place where a panygiri (fair) is being held, going to see friends perform Greek traditional dance in tourist settings, or at national celebrations or as part of your school life because it is connected with Greek sociopolitical and cultural life (Fountzoulas et al. 2017). Thus, it is not at all unusual that Greek traditional dance always has had such an extensive presence in official and unofficial contexts due to its sociohistorical and political framework in Greece. The ‘snapshots’ presented in this chapter are representative case studies of what is going on in the second or third existence of Greek traditional dance in the urban setting of Athens, and they exemplify the continued bond of this kind of dance with its people. Yet, is it only because of the sociohistorical and political context that this kind of presence of Greek traditional dance nowadays might be explained? Or maybe there is something more in this kind of dance—some intrinsic features that reinforce this presence? In many cases, Greek traditional dance, through the spatial disposition of the dancers and the physical proximity of participants, who move mostly in circle dances with close physical contact, makes manifest ideas of inclusion, unity, integration, solidarity, and mutual understanding (for the use and usefulness of such qualities in other contexts and conditions in Greece, see Koutsouba 1997). In other words, Greek traditional dance plays a powerful role in creating the sense of community and in constructing and reinforcing identities. This role is the case in relation to the privileged space (Koutsouba in press) it offers to people in Greece, a privileged space because of its multifaceted character that cannot be ignored.

Conclusion In  summary, given dance’s unquestionable multiple literacies, since dance, as embodied cognition, incorporates at the same time movement, cultural, art, and dance literacies (Fountzoulas, Koutsouba, and Nikolaki 2018), it is because of the dynamics of Greek traditional dance regarding interaction and integration of the multifaceted and complex layers of Greek identity, society, and culture that this kind of dance plays an important role in Greece and is so widely spread. In addition, the ‘snapshots’ I used of Greek traditional dance presented in urban settings such as Athens are nothing more than “stories” of the truth (Buckland 1999b, 197), meaning that different aspects of Greek traditional dance and dancing acquire substance through which I/we/the Greeks make sense of ourselves and of the world and that these are accessible because of the multiple literacies of Greek traditional dance that offer as such a privileged space to the people. Thus, looking at everyday things such as the ‘snapshots’ from another perspective, the researcher’s eye, other ways of thinking emerge about places, spaces, and identities of Greek traditional dance—Greek traditional dance not by label, but as everyday life.

References Avdela, Efi, ed. 2010. The Lyceum Club of Greek Women: 100 Years. Athens: Piraeus Bank Group Cultural Foundation. Buckland, Theresa J. 1999a. “All Dances Are Ethnic, but Some Are More Ethnic than Others: Some Observations on Dance Studies and Anthropology.” Dance Research 17 (1): 3–20. ———. 1999b. “[Re]Constructing Meanings: The Dance Ethnographer as Keeper of the Truth.” In Dance in the Field: Theory, Methods and Issues in Dance Ethnography, edited by Theresa J. Buckland, 196–207. London: Macmillan Press.

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Maria I. Koutsouba Charitonidis, Chariton. 2017.“The ‘Re-Urbanisation’ of an Expatriated Dance Culture:The Greek DanceHouse in Hungary.” In Dance and the Senses & Dancing and Dance Cultures in Urban Contexts, Proceedings of 29th Symposium of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) Study Group on Ethnochoreology, edited by Kendra Stepput, 340–346. Graz: ICTM Study Group on Ethnochoreology and Institute of Ethnomusicology of the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz. Clark, Bruce. 2007. Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey, 2nd ed. London: Granta Books. Ehrenreich, Barbara. 2007. Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. London: Granta Books. Filias, Vasilios. 1985. Κοινωνία και εξουσία στην Ελλάδα. Η νόθα αστικοποίηση 1800–1864 [Society and Power in Greece.The Illegitimate Urbanization 1800–1864]. Athens: Gutenberg. Fountzoulas, Giorgos. 2014. “Χορός και πολιτική. Θέσεις και ατιθέσεις στο χορευτικό δρώμενο ‘Γαϊτανάκι’ στη Σκάλα και τη Δάφνη Ναυπακτίας”  [“Dance and Politics: Positions and Contradictions in the ‘Gaitanaki’Dance Ritual in Skala and Dafni of Nafpaktia”]. Master’s thesis, Department of Physical Education and Sport Science, University of Athens. ———. 2016. “Academic Research of Greek Traditional Dance in Greece and Abroad: A Critical Review of Dissertations and Theses.” In Cut & Paste: Dance Advocacy in the Age of Austerity, Proceedings of the 40th Annual Congress on Dance Research (CORD) Joint Conference with the Society of Dance History Scholars (SDHS), 156–64. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fountzoulas, Giorgos, Maria Koutsouba, Anastasios Hapsoulas, and Vasilios Lantzos. 2017. “The  Transformation of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Dance Through State Education and Politics in the Ritual of a Rural Greek Community.” Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences 8 (1): 243–251. Fountzoulas, Giorgos, Maria Koutsouba, and Evgenia Nikolaki. 2018. “Critical Literacy and the Multiliteracies of Dance: A First Approach.” Journal of Educational and Social Research 8 (3): 69–78. Gore, Georgiana. 1999.“Textual Fields: Representation in Dance Ethnography.” In Dance in the Field:Theory, Methods and Issues in Dance Ethnography, edited by Theresa J. Buckland, 208–220. London: Macmillan Press. Gore, Georgiana, Andrée Grau, and Maria Koutsouba. 2016. “Advocacy, Austerity and Internationalisation in the Anthropology of Dance (Work in Progress).” In Cut & Paste: Dance Advocacy in the Age of Austerity, Proceedings of the 40th Annual Congress on Dance Research (CORD) Joint Conference with the Society of Dance History Scholars (SDHS), 180–90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grau,Andrée. 1993.“John Blacking and the Development of Dance Anthropology in the United Kingdom.” Dance Research Journal 25(2): 21–31. ———. 2007. “Dance, Identity, and Identification Processes in the Postcolonial World: State-of-the-Art.” In Dance Discourses: Keywords in Dance Research, edited by Susanne Franco and Marina Nordera, 189– 207. London: Routledge. ———. 2011. “Dancing Bodies, Spaces/Places and the Senses: A Cross-Cultural Investigation.” Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices 3 (1 & 2): 5–24. Gray, William. 2012. Τουριστικός Οδηγός της Αθήνας [Tourist Guide of Athens]. Athens: Kalokathi. Hellenic ArmyAcademy.2018.Musical Event at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation for Culture.Accessed September 15, 2018. https://sse.army.gr/el/news/moysiki-ekdilosi-sto-kentro-politismoy-idryma-stayrosniarhos. Iefimerida. 2015. “Οι εορταστικές εκδηλώσεις για την 25η Μαρτίου. Χοροί και νταούλια στο Σύνταγμα μετά την παρέλαση”  [Celebratory events on March 25th. Dances and daoulia in Syntagma after the parade]. Iefimerida. March 25. Accessed September 25, 2018. https://www.iefimerida.gr/news/198095/horoi-kai-ntaoylia-sto-syntagma-meta-tin-parelasi-eikones. ———. 2018.“3 χρόνια από το δημοψήφισμα—Το «όχι» που έγινε «ναι», οι χοροί στο Σύνταγ μα και το mea culpa Τσίπρα” [“3 years from the referendum—The ‘no’ that became ‘yes,’ the dances in the Constitution and the mea culpa Tsipra”]. Iefimerida. July 5. Accessed October  5, 2018. https://www.iefimerida.gr/ news/428655/3-hronia-apo-dimopsifisma-ohi-poy-egine-nai-oi-horoi-sto-syntagma-kai-mea-culpa-tsipra. Kalyvas, N. Stathis. 2015. Καταστροφές και θρίαμβοι. Οι 7 κύκλοι της σύγχρονης ελληνικής ιστορίας  [Disasters and Triumphs: The  7  Circles of Modern Greek History]. Translated by N. Roussos. Originally published as Modern Greece:What Everyone Needs to Know. Athens: Papadopoulos. Kardaris, Dionysios. 2012. Ιστορία του ελληνικού χορού [History of Greek Dance]. Athens: Hellenic Army Publications. Koutsouba, Maria. 1997. “Plurality in Motion: Dance and Cultural Identity on the Greek Ionian Island of Lefkada.” PhD thesis, Goldsmiths College, University of London.

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Traditional dance in urban settings ———. 1999. “‘Outsider’ in an ‘Inside’ World, or Dance Ethnography at Home.” In Dance in the Field:Theory, Methods and Issues in Dance Ethnography, edited by Theresa J. Buckland, 186–95. London: Macmillan Press. ———. 2008.“Looking for an Academic Identity:Anthropological and Ethnochoreological Study of Dance: The Two Sides of a Coin?” In Invisible and Visible Dance—Crossing Identity Boundaries, Proceedings of the 23rd Symposium of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) Study Group on Ethnochoreology, edited by Elsie I. Dunin and Anne von Bibra Wharton. 227–233, Monghidoro (Bologna): ICTM Study Group on Ethnochoreology. ———. (in press). “Local Dance Traditions and Glocalised Crisis: A  Landscape of Traditional Dance in Greece Under Austerity.” In Music, Dance, Anthropology, edited by Stephen Cottrell and Kevin Dawe. London: Royal Anthropological Institute. Kurath, Gertrude. 1960. “Panorama of Dance Ethnology.” Current Anthropology 1/3: 233–254. Municipality of Elliniko-Argyroupoli. 2018. The  Identity/The  History/The  Cultural Programmes. Accessed October 5, 2018. http://www.elliniko-argyroupoli.gr. Nahachewsky, Andriy. 1995. “Participatory and Presentational Dance as Ethnochoreological Categories.” Dance Research Journal 27 (1): 1–15. ———. 2001. “Once Again: On the Concept of Second Existence of Folk Dance.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 33: 17–28. Newsbeast. 2015. “Με χορούς στο Σύνταγ μα γ ιορτάστηκε το «όχι»”  [“With Dances in Syntagma the ‘No’ Was Celebrated”]. Newsbeast. July 6. Accessed October 5, 2018. https://www.newsbeast.gr/ greece/arthro/1866339/me-chorous-sto-sintagma-giortastike-to-ochi. Panourgia, Marianna. 2017. “An Ethnographic Investigation into the Curriculum and the Contemporary Dance Training System within Higher Private Professional Dance Schools in Greece.” Master’s thesis, The Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick. Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre (SNFCC). 2018. Lyceum of Greek Women: Dancing. Accessed on September  15, 2018. https://www.snfcc.org/visitors-center/events/2018/07/ lyceum-of-greek-women-dancing/. ———. n.d. “Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center.” Accessed September 25, 2018. https://www. snf.org/en/initiatives/snfcc/. Vatopoulos, Nikos. 2018. Περπατώντας στην Αθήνα [Walking in Athens]. Athens: Metaixmio. Vlepaki, Despoina. 2018. “Μπήκαν όλοι στο χορό!”  [“They  All Entered the Dance”]. Iefimerida. March 31. Accessed September  15, 2018. https://www.iefimerida.gr/news/406665/ ekpliktoi-perastikoi-kai-toyristes-xafnika-sto-syntagma-horeytes-me-paradosiakes-stoles. Zervou, Natalie. 2015. “The  Greek Body in Crisis: Contemporary Dance as a Site of Negotiating and Restructuring National Identity in the Era of Precarity.” PhD diss., University of California, Riverside.

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21 BLACK STAR, OTHER FETISHIZED Carlos Acosta, ballet’s new cosmopolitanism, and desire in the age of institutional diversity Lester Tomé Introduction: The diversity turn and ballet’s new cosmopolitanism Since the seventeenth century, dancers moving across courts, empires, nation-states, continents, and geopolitical blocs have articulated varied conceptions of cosmopolitanism in ballet. Afro-Cuban dancer Carlos Acosta exemplified ballet’s newest expression of cosmopolitanism, which references diasporic multiculturalism in a context of globalization, during his tenure in London’s Royal Ballet (1998–2016).1 The distinctive feature of this new cosmopolitanism is the presence of the subaltern subject—deemed a racial and cultural other—in troupes across Western Europe and North America. Acosta has been among several Latin American and Asian dancers (from Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, China, Japan, South Korea, and other locations) who in recent years have occupied visible positions in ensembles such as the Royal Ballet and American Ballet Theatre. Ballet’s new cosmopolitanism may be a function of the international competition for top talent among companies that, to maintain their world-class status, must recruit globally. However, institutional discourses of diversity also have shaped this cosmopolitanism. The  so-called diversity turn, fully underway by the late 1990s, normalized diversity as a value formally endorsed by government, business, education, and art institutions (Vertovec 2012). In  this context, ballet ensembles must fulfill expectations of diversity to maintain their social capital as institutions that represent global cities and multicultural nation-states.2 Indeed, dance critic Nadine Meisner (1998) greeted the Royal Ballet’s enlistment of Acosta as an opportunity for the ensemble to claim relevance within the conception of the state promoted by Tony Blair’s New Labour—as multiculturalism became a policy framework of the British government. Just as the English choreographer of Bangladeshi descent Akram Khan came to popularly embody British multiculturalism and London’s globalism in the contemporary dance genre, Acosta emerged as their poster child in ballet. The  diversity turn has afforded visibility and agency to diasporic dancing bodies, but it also has forced them to negotiate their relationships to political discourses and forms of artistic consumption that at times confound the celebration of multiculturalism with the objectification of cultural 298

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difference (Mitra 2015, 15–19, 25–27). Turning to Acosta’s personification of ballet’s new cosmopolitanism, this essay scrutinizes the ambiguous ideology of diversity in multicultural settings—an ideology that fosters recognition and representation of the subaltern, but which does not always transcend coloniality. Critics of the shortcomings of institutionalized diversity, such as Slavoj Žižek, note that multiculturalism operates as the cultural logic of late capitalism and fuels a postmodern racism that reduces the appreciation of cultural difference to aestheticized hedonism (2007, 162). In Paul Gilroy’s view, post-imperial melancholia resulting from “lingering but usually unspoken colonial relationships and imperial fantasies” (2004, 109) complicates multiculturalism in a British consumer culture that commodifies racial difference (137). Jennifer Fisher rightfully contends that, to a large extent, ballet remains an institution that “patrols its borders on the levels of looks and body type,” including skin complexion (2016, 585). However, ballet’s new cosmopolitanism has eroded the exclusivist notion of ballet as a practice of European or Euro-American white bodies. While acknowledging this progress, I question situations in which ballet’s emerging displays of diversity may be banal or even reproduce coloniality. My inquiry into the politics of ballet’s new cosmopolitanism responds to a call, articulated in the field of diversity studies by scholars such as Sarah Ahmed (2012), to expose apparent formulations of inclusivity and thus incentivize a more integral pluralism. Interrogating the discourse of institutionalized diversity in this manner is a critical task for dance scholars. Tangibly indexing human difference through the display of bodies, dance is a privileged medium for producing instant images of racial and ethnic heterogeneity. Taking advantage of that instantaneity, institutions such as arts centers, media organizations, and universities can exploit dance as a shortcut for showcasing diversity through strategies of window dressing. The display of different bodies may be where diversity starts but not where it should end. Through an analysis of Acosta’s career in the Royal Ballet, I propose that ballet’s new cosmopolitanism compels subaltern dancers to negotiate the politics of moving from the periphery to the center, where they find themselves both valued and devalued for their race, ethnicity, and nationality: these markers of diversity make such dancers an asset to dance institutions yet expose them to colonialist subjection. Thus, Acosta had to strategically battle the administration of the Royal Ballet for full control over his body and raise his own worth as a commodity in the economy of diversity. Also examined here is the dancer’s dazzling rise to celebrity in the UK media, the outcome of public fascination with the journey of a black man from a Havana slum to the Royal Ballet. The  media’s frequent repetition of Acosta’s life story spectacularized his otherness, re-inscribing the dancer’s blackness through racial stereotypes and rendering him an object of sexual desire. I contend that problematic politics of desire underlie ballet’s new cosmopolitanism whenever the bodies of subaltern dancers are not only consumed for erotic pleasure, but also fetishized as signifiers of institutional diversity and displayed to audiences for hedonistic appreciation of multiculturalism. Ballet’s new cosmopolitanism becomes trivial if it operates as a comforting staging of diversity for audiences of predominantly white spectators in the Global North. I claim that, against the background of growing xenophobia in the UK, such functioning of institutionalized diversity characterizes a regime of repressive tolerance in which multiculturalism is celebrated onstage while offstage the other is stigmatized as a burden to the nation. Without a doubt, Acosta’s popularity rightly reflected his stature as a dancer of exceptional talent. At the same time, his notable fame manifested as cosmetic diversity for, in this case, the overexposure of one black body concealed the palpable underrepresentation of black dancers in British ballet.

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From the periphery to the center: A hazardous journey and clash Carlos Acosta joined the Royal Ballet in 1998. Reminiscing about the dancer’s early days in the ensemble, then–artistic director Anthony Dowell explains that Acosta excelled at learning the troupe’s heritage repertory but struggled with the London weather and the process of acculturation. Dowell remarks, “When young artists from other backgrounds and cultures join a company as established and world-renowned as The Royal Ballet, there is sometimes a period of adjustment to the new surroundings and customs they are faced with” (Carlos Acosta 2015, 1). This observation intimates condescendence. Associating Acosta’s youth to his culture, Dowell voices a colonialist discourse that infantilizes the subaltern and, in this case, overlooks the dancer’s maturity at the time of his appointment. Acosta arrived at the Royal Ballet with credentials that were tacitly recognized by his hiring as a lead dancer. By then, he had been a principal dancer of the English National Ballet (1991) and Houston Ballet (1993–1998). It  is disconcerting that Dowell conflates the expectable challenges of adapting to different weather and social norms with what he sees as a straining transition for dancers from “other backgrounds and cultures” to the “established and world-renowned” Royal Ballet—that is, a move from the periphery to the center in the colonialist world order. Almost inadvertently, the Royal Ballet’s position of supremacy in the colonialist cultural hierarchy comes into consideration. Dowell’s slip reminds subaltern dancers that their presence in the cultural core of the metropolis is a source of friction and that, just as mundane issues of weather and social norms must be resolved, such political friction must be dealt with. Indeed, the subaltern actors of ballet’s new cosmopolitanism face the fraught politics inherent to their ambiguous role in the maintenance of the center-periphery structure of the international ballet establishment. On the one hand, these dancers’ talent and origins in places like Cuba upend the assumption that the location of ballet expertise corresponds with white bodies or a presumed center of European and North American institutions. On the other hand, by joining European and North American companies these dancers aid in reproducing such troupes’ status as constituents of an influential center that concentrates resources, opportunities, and cachet. The transference of human capital from the periphery to the center, which consolidates these very same categories, is one feature of ballet’s new cosmopolitanism. Through its global recruitment of virtuosos like Acosta, the Royal Ballet effectively upholds its position atop the international ballet community as a highly selective organization of first-rate, diverse performers. Paradoxically, these dancers contribute with their own subalternity, even if it is a source of friction, to the enduring international dominance of ensembles like the Royal Ballet. Their condition as other has become indispensable for ballet organizations of the Global North to cultivate the image of transnationalism and diversity that has come to be equated with excellence and world-class standing in contemporary culture—a premise that Ahmed develops in her analysis of diversity in British academia (2012, 108–9). Even though ballet’s new cosmopolitanism exalts the diversity that subaltern dancers lend to ensembles in locations like London, these dancers’ ethnically marked bodies remain embattled entities whose skills and otherness are simultaneously valued and devalued—bodies caught in the clash between institutional diversity missions and the subsisting colonialist ideology implicit in Dowell’s words. In traversing this minefield, Acosta defied patronization and spoke against racism. In  his autobiography, Acosta (2007) recounts his debut with the Royal Ballet in one of the various solos of William Forsythe’s In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated: “The role did not  allow me to show my full potential” (2007, 279). Next, Dowell sought to cast him 300

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as Mercutio in Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet. However, Acosta insisted on being cast in the title role of Romeo in accordance with his rank of principal dancer. When Dowell responded that Mercutio would be a great introduction to the ballet for a dancer beginning his career, Acosta clarified that he was not starting his career. The first black principal dancer of the Royal Ballet, aware that race could be a factor in how far he could go in the company, drew a necessary line to disrupt the emerging pattern of casting in parts below principal roles: he would perform as Romeo or not appear at all in the ballet (2007, 280–81). Years later, as an advocate for black ballet dancers, he attributed the incident to conservative artistic leadership. Wondering whether Dowell had feared that British audiences might have found a black Romeo shocking, Acosta stressed that it is the duty of those responsible for casting to change the public’s attitudes. He added, “When it comes to choosing a prince (or other lead role) for a ballet, we must emphasize that it is not a question of being black; no, it is a question of whether a black or mulatto dancer has the talent to bring to the prince or hero role. So, give them the chance to surprise” (quoted in Willis 2010, 142). Through his tactical stance not to accept secondary roles, Acosta succeeded in making his contractual position as a principal dancer unequivocal. He left the management with no choice but to cast him accordingly. Although his demand to dance as Romeo remained a point of contention between the artist and the administration—it would take him eight years to perform that role—soon after the aforementioned argument Acosta began to appear in other leading roles across a varied repertoire that comprised the full-evening ballets La fille mal gardée, Coppélia, Giselle, Swan Lake, Raymonda, and Manon. By the end of Dowell’s tenure as artistic director in 2001, Acosta had also performed lead parts in Nijinsky’s L’aprés-midi d’un faune, Balanchine’s Agon, Tudor’s Shadowplay, and MacMillan’s Gloria, among other works (Carlos Acosta 2015, 151). Nevertheless, the dancer encountered fresh difficulties when Ross Stretton became the new artistic director. In Acosta’s opinion, Stretton disliked him, underutilized him, and denied him opportunities to perform (Siegle 2003). In the competitive world of ballet, dancers of all nationalities and racial identities commonly express frustration for not  being cast in certain works or having to wait years for them. Therefore, it could be tempting to explain the casting problems encountered by a black dancer like Acosta as no different from those experienced by other performers. Some could argue that Acosta’s success proves that, far from facing limitations, he had the opportunity to dance an extraordinary number of roles out of reach to most performers. But this would ignore ballet’s history of casting black dancers below their level of competence (Gottschild 2003, 74, 87). Situations in which talented black performers experience negative casting decisions are difficult to rationalize just in terms of the competitiveness of the profession. In  a field in which racism has been systemic, dancers of color, by necessity, ponder the meaning behind the opportunities denied to them. Acosta’s retelling of his argument with Dowell and his assertion that Stretton disliked him register his suspicions of discrimination. Such suspicions are inferred, too, in an interview in which Acosta recalls that the perception that he was an exuberant Cuban man contributed to his typecasting in cheerful athletic roles, even though he had joined the Royal Ballet to play “more than the jester” (Mackrell 2003). He explains, “On the surface, I never had any problem. But I know that some opportunities were not given to me because of stereotypes” (quoted in Kisselgoff 2002). Acosta sensed that racism operated subliminally, beneath the veneer of his success, because, even as his repertoire grew, those making casting decisions had to “think twice” (Kisselgoff 2002) about giving him roles that had never been performed by a black dancer. 301

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To some extent, ballet’s new cosmopolitanism empowers subaltern dancers by generating a demand for their otherness. As previously indicated, they possess the attribute upon which an ensemble’s cosmopolitan image hinges: a body that explicitly and instantly signifies multiculturalism and globality (Illustration 21.1). The institutional value attributed to a “diverse” body transforms that body into a commodity. Yet, any notion that institutional demands for diversity make the journey to professional self-realization easier for these subaltern dancers is disproved by the energy they must exert to affirm their full worth within the organization. Possessing a body symbolic of diversity is not the same as having control over a commodity that remains vulnerable to colonialist subjection and exploitation. Subaltern dancers must do the labor of emancipating their bodies from colonialist power and wrestling with institutions for control of their own bodies. Confronting Dowell about casting was just one of Acosta’s strategies to rebalance the power relationships between subaltern body and institution. At times this negotiation played out through self-presentation and performance of his social persona, as when, suspecting that his Cuban personality was the source of typecasting, Acosta assumed a patrician British demeanor in his social interactions. He explained that this was a tactic to alter institutional prejudices about which roles he was well suited for (Mackrell 2003). In  a society highly stratified in terms of class, the tensions about nationality and race experienced by diasporic dancers are intrinsically connected to institutional perceptions of their social class, cultural

Illustration 21.1  Carlos Acosta performs Kenneth MacMillan’s Requiem for the Royal Ballet, London, in 2006. (Courtesy of © Bill Cooper/ArenaPAL.)

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capital, and position in a British hierarchy of distinction. Arguably an instance of disciplining the subaltern and of docile conformance with Dowell’s prescription that foreign dancers adapt to British social norms, Acosta’s embodiment of gentility was, in the first place, the astute subterfuge of an artist who used the performative tools of his profession for self benefit. Historically, the embodiment of gentility, a cornerstone of the ballet aesthetic, has been a mechanism of power production that has established this dance form’s privileged social status. In transposing the enactment of refinement from the studio and the stage to offstage behavior, Acosta redeployed the technical expertise of a body trained in ballet to counter coloniality in a contemporary context. Through the summer of 2002, Acosta performed to great acclaim as a guest artist of the American Ballet Theatre (ABT) in New York. He situated himself as an artist who, in the words of New York Times critic Anna Kisselgoff (2002), belonged “in the ranks of the idols”— namely, Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov. When the possibility arose to sign a longterm contract with ABT, Acosta took the opportunity to instead consolidate his position in the Royal Ballet, which, now under the direction of Monica Mason, had to lure him back to London (Willis 2010, 145–46). He rejoined the ensemble with the undisputable authority of a star in high international demand. Just as his artistic standing grew, his sign value as a symbol of globality and multiculturalism increased in significance following the broadcast of “Carlos Acosta: The Reluctant Ballet Dancer” on BBC1 (2003). The television program, which told the story of his life highlighting his Afro-Cuban identity and working-class origins, transformed Acosta into a national celebrity in the UK. Banking on his stardom, he formally renegotiated his appointment with the Royal Ballet. In 2003, his title in the troupe changed to principal guest artist, which allowed him to dance in the ensemble’s regular seasons and exert more agency in choosing his repertoire, while enjoying the freedom to produce his own shows for London venues such as the Sadler’s Wells and the Coliseum and guesting with the Paris Opera Ballet, the Mariinsky Ballet, and other international companies.

The black body in ballet: Unexpected other and object of desire Afro-diasporic British dancers attest to the violence of customarily being othered within UK dance institutions. Among them, even those born in the UK or those working in genres not  directly associated with Afro-diasporic dance experience their Britishness as racially marked. To institutions, they are not simply British dancers. Instead, they are onedimensionally categorized as black British dancers and their work is equally essentialized as black dance regardless of whether they agree to such labeling (Akinleye 2018, 2–3; Namron 2018, 28–30). Thus, they are confined to the liminal position of other within their own national community and to the in-between space amid Britishness and blackness that institutions construct by regarding these categories as distinct. A  similar in-betweenness characterizes the situation of the subaltern dancers of ballet’s new cosmopolitanism. Their bodies are pushed and pulled in different directions—asked to assimilate to the hosting troupe and country, as demanded by Dowell, while simultaneously being re-inscribed as the other whose foreignness and racial difference must be highlighted as signs of institutional diversity. Ballet’s new cosmopolitanism showcases ethnic difference in ways that subscribe colonialist practices of othering the subaltern. Being black, Cuban, and of a working-class background, Acosta was variously constituted as other. Indeed, the discursive construction of his otherness came into sharp relief in the seemingly endless accounts of his life story in the British media—through coverage of such frequency and scale that the emplotment of the dancer’s life events amounted to a mediatized spectacle of otherness. 303

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Constructing a rags-to-riches tale, the 2003 BBC1 feature on Acosta’s life recounted the dancer’s journey from a marginal Havana neighborhood to the Royal Ballet and from poverty and obscurity to wealth and fame. The same narrative had been frequently related in the UK press in the years since Acosta’s arrival to the Royal Ballet (e.g., Meisner 1998; Bishop 1999; Franks 1999). However, its dissemination by the BBC turned it into a subject of national interest and triggered further retellings in other media outlets, including newspapers, magazines, radio shows, and TV programs, culminating in the biographical movie Yuli (2018).3 The multiple iterations of the story stress the improbability of the dancer’s trajectory to success, fixating on his black working-class origins in Cuba and the dire circumstances of his childhood. We learn that Acosta grew up in a crowded apartment where there was no running water and food was scarce. At  times, what little food was available was offered to the orishas in the family’s santería altar. The child often skipped school to breakdance and play soccer. He roamed through the city with other truants, stealing food and committing petty crimes. The boy’s father, a long-haul truck driver, was often absent from home. For two years, while the father served time in prison, the family had to survive without an income. When he was home, the father was a stern figure who beat the misbehaving boy. It  was the father’s decision to enroll him in a ballet school, hoping that it would keep him out of trouble. But the child despised ballet and continued to play truant. Over the next few years he was expelled from the ballet school, readmitted, expelled again, and ultimately transferred to a different ballet school in a province far from home. The teenage Acosta ultimately fell in love with ballet and dedicated himself to fulfilling his potential through hard work. He burst into international fame with a winning streak in the ballet competitions of Lausanne, Paris, and Vignale in 1990. Contracts with the English National Ballet and the Houston Ballet ensued and, at the end of his journey, with the Royal Ballet. Essential to this narrative’s appeal is the uplifting message that those thus far excluded from ballet can overcome barriers of race, social class, and nationality to succeed in and transform the field. From this perspective, Acosta’s journey functions as an inspirational story for young black and working-class artists, from the UK or elsewhere, who dream of a career in ballet.Yet, in the sensationalist media retellings of this narrative for a mainstream audience, the spectacle of Acosta’s otherness overshadows the theme of inclusivity. Stories such as Acosta’s about how black dancers arrive to ballet stages follow a pattern of scrutiny of the black dancing body “through the lens and theory of difference” (Gottschild 2003, 27). In  fact, the narrative of Acosta’s trajectory constructs almost all dimensions of his persona as markers of difference. References to ethnicity, race, religion, class, hobbies, geography, social behavior, and family history stage a hyperbolic otherness that stands in contrast with the imagined identity of ballet dancers. For audiences, the fascinating appeal of the Acosta narrative resides, precisely, in the apparent incongruity between this antipodal other and the world of ballet, which, despite its evolving diversity and cosmopolitanism, in the public imaginary remains associated with whiteness and the middle to upper classes. In  ballet, the subaltern body, and the black body specifically, is still perceived as an unexpected body—as an occurrence that elicits curiosity and thus necessitates explanation. Biographic questions about how black dancers enter ballet haunt these dancers and constitute a discursive frame through which they are observed and their presence made sense of. The unending media retellings of Acosta’s trajectory are the product of this fascination with the black dancing body’s journey to the ballet stage. (In the US, this phenomenon has visibly manifested in recurring media accounts of the biography of Misty Copeland, the black 304

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prima ballerina of ABT.) Far from normalizing the figure of the black ballet dancer, a narrative that spectacularizes otherness and exploits the public’s curiosity so that the same story can be repeated over and over, in sensationalist tone, is a narrative that continues to relegate the black body in ballet to the realm of the extraordinary. This discourse inscribes the black body in a ballet history of the deviational and anecdotal—subsidiary to the dominant ballet history that upholds the white body as unquestioned protagonist. Similar to black British dancers whose identities are externally constructed as always already black, Acosta entered public discourse as a racialized figure defined first and foremost by blackness. Journalists labeled him the “black Baryshnikov” (Bishop 1999; Sanghera 2004) and compared him to a panther (Dougill 2004; Monahan 2010). Allusions to blackness were encoded in additional descriptions of Acosta’s dancing as animalistic (Franks 1999), feral (Vine 2010), and feline-like (Bishop 2002), including the remark by the Spanish ballerina Laura Morera, a fellow Royal Ballet dancer, that it was Acosta’s animal energy that made dancing with him so exciting for her (Carlos Acosta 2015, 11). Such discursive animalization followed a colonialist pattern of representing the black dancing body as primitive and less than human (DeFrantz 2001, 345). Underlying this characterization of Acosta is a cultural practice of demanding of black dancers an abundance of charisma and physicality (Osterweis 2013, 54–55). In this sense, the pleasure of watching or dancing with a virtuoso like Acosta was ideologically mediated. The  racialization of Acosta also operated through mediatic sexualization of his figure. Consistent with the historical constitution of the black dancing body as an object of colonialist desire (DeFrantz 2001, 344), audiences and media invested Acosta with sexual icon status. Although the dancer pushed back against this objectification and insisted that he be judged solely on his artistic achievements (Patterson 2009), many interviews and reviews rampantly fetishized him. Coverage of Acosta frequently dubbed him the “Cuban sex missile” (Warren 2002; Patterson 2009), and it was even suggested, to detriment of his professional merits, that he owed his success to the fantasies he inspired on ballet’s mostly female audiences (Sanghera 2004; Nicoll 2010). The extent of this discursive violence was epitomized in an article for The Times titled “My Date with God’s Gift to Women” (Vine 2010, 1) in which the reporter openly acknowledges her titillation with Acosta and captions a photograph of the dancer, “Sex on legs.” Hinting at this sexual objectification of Acosta, his Royal Ballet colleague Natalia Osipova commented that when dancing with him she felt “like a woman” (Carlos Acosta 2015, 45). Coming mostly from white women, these articulations of physical attraction to a black man could be interpreted as expressions of an unprejudiced attitude toward interracial romance. But this perspective is tangled with the fact that underlying ballet’s new cosmopolitanism are complex politics of desire for subaltern bodies. Through consideration of Acosta’s case, I propose that the subaltern body, historically eroticized and exoticized for the pleasure of the colonialist gaze, can be objectified even further when it occupies the ballet stage, a site that for centuries has served the tantalizing function of displaying the human figure  for audiences’ erotic gratification. In  the context of ballet’s new cosmopolitanism, desire is institutionalized as desire for bodies that visibly signify diversity. Organizations and communities aiming to diversify load the subaltern subject with desirability, fetishizing it as the entity that represents multiculturalism and globality. Related patterns of consumption of the other are at play in the sexual/exotic objectification of the subaltern and the institutional demand for the display of his body, for in both senses the subaltern can fulfill hegemonic desires.

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Hedonistic consumption of diversity in the regime of repressive tolerance The  mobilization of Acosta into an object of desire underscores the propensity in the Global North toward hedonistic consumption of dancing bodies marked as diverse. In this capacity, ballet’s new cosmopolitanism could be a platform for staging comforting spectacles of what Ahmed deems “feel good” diversity (2012, 69). Royona Mitra’s (2015) examination of the work of Akram Khan points to manifestations of this dynamic in the context of British contemporary dance. Khan has achieved recognition for the innovative choreography and compelling theatricality of his works, which vividly evoke his experience of diaspora and hybridize the aesthetics of contemporary dance and kathak. Since 2000, he has captured the imagination of audiences through danced articulations of British multiculturalism. However, as Mitra indicates, Khan’s pieces are presented mainly in “sanitized and safe” venues that commodify otherness for its consumption by “predominantly white audiences” seeking to celebrate diversity “in a way that makes them feel like they understand difference” (2015, 25). While this is not the only way in which spectators may engage with his artistic production, Mitra’s comment leads me to the questions for whom stagings of diversity are for and what the symbolic function of subaltern dancers like Khan and Acosta is in such spectacles. For  institutions, diversity is oriented not  only toward internal transformation, but also toward the construction of a public image. Ahmed equates this dimension of institutional diversity to public relations insofar as it entails a strategy for cultivating good will among a public that has come to expect diversity (2012, 143). In the case of ballet, this means that diversity initiatives cater not  only to the demands of the subaltern for inclusion in ballet schools and ensembles, but also to the desire of the dance form’s public—that is, an audience predominantly white, educated, and from the middle and upper classes—to participate in the acclamation of multiculturalism and globality. Regular remarks by dance critics about the underrepresentation of black dancers in British ballet troupes—sometimes in the form of direct calls for greater inclusivity—exemplify this external pressure on dance institutions (e.g., Meisner 1998; Bishop 1999; Goldhill and Marsh 2012). In the consumption of diversity by dominant groups, the politics of colonialist desire intersect the politics of colonialist guilt. Ahmed (2012) illustrates this point through her analysis of the blockbuster film Bend It Like Beckham (2002). In the film, Jess, the daughter of Indian immigrants, succeeds in her aspiration to play soccer despite her father’s opposition. Decades earlier, the father had been an accomplished Indian cricket player who upon migrating to the UK was denied the chance to play. Excluded from British cricket clubs, he gave up the sport. Now he sought to prevent Jess from playing soccer in part because of her gender, but, above all, so that she did not suffer the indignity of racial exclusion. Unlike her father, who withdrew from the game, she finds the courage and determination to put discrimination behind her and persevere in the sport. Ultimately, she is embraced by her British teammates. Ahmed contends that this story displaces the responsibility for inclusion from the colonialist subject to the subaltern subject: it is the latter who must overcome the trauma of being a target of racism as the first step toward being included in a multicultural society. For  Ahmed, such displacement of responsibility was crucial to the popularity of the film with the mostly white British audience. In her opinion, the focus on Jess’s tenacity and the uplifting conclusion of the narrative allow spectators to indulge in a celebration of inclusivity that temporarily alleviates any guilty feelings of direct or indirect responsibility for the British history of racism and xenophobia (2012, 165–67). 306

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As in Jess’s narrative, the Acosta story foregrounds an archetypal diasporic subject who works hard to fulfill his talent, fights obstacles, pushes barriers, and, in the end, gains access to spaces that had been out of reach. Taking this similarity into account and building upon Ahmed’s proposition, I argue that, like the film’s storyline, Acosta’s trajectory constitutes an uplifting tale for audiences, a paean to multiculturalism that, appeasing colonialist guilt, creates the occasion for the inspirational appreciation of diversity. This  perspective sheds additional light on the public obsession with Acosta’s rags-to-riches fable. Ultimately, as an object of desire Acosta satisfies not only exotic and erotic fantasies; he also realizes a dominant audience’s desire to “feel good” about diversity and find release from any sense of shame for the legacy of coloniality. He fulfills a desire for consumption of diversity as a form of cultural capital and as a requisite of a prevailing cosmopolitan taste. These uses of diversity to assuage culpability, generate uplift, and build cultural capital are as hedonistic as the exotic and sexual fetishization of the subaltern. Engagement with diversity at this level of hedonistic consumption of the other obscures the xenophobia and racism that, as Žižek rightfully points out, have been concurrent with the normalization of multiculturalism as an institutional mission (2007, 162). It is notable that Acosta’s transformation into a UK national celebrity and icon of diversity took place against the background of growing suspicion of immigrants and racial minorities in the wake of the terrorist attacks in New York in 2001 and London in 2005. Reaching the mainstream, a virulent brand of nationalist ideology blamed immigration and multiculturalism for the emergence of terrorists in the homeland and, after the financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuing cuts to social programs, protested the state’s distribution of scarce economic resources to minorities (Malik 2010, 54–58; Silj 2010, 9). Such nationalism, intertwined with postimperial melancholia, has advocated a retreat from multiculturalism, wishing instead for a “magical rehomogenization of the country” (Gilroy 2004, 126). The  diversification of ballet ensembles is no trivial accomplishment. Nevertheless, in a sociopolitical context of increasing xenophobia and racism, ballet’s new cosmopolitanism, like other expressions of institutionalized diversity, risks conforming to what Žižek categorizes as a Marcusian regime of repressive tolerance that accepts the “other deprived of its substance” while offstage the “real” other suffers the consequences of bigotry (2007, 162). According to Herbert Marcuse (1969), dominant groups coopt tolerance to hold on to power by alleging that other constituencies’ expressions of dissent and the state’s tolerance of that dissent are proofs of freedom and democracy, when, in reality, free speech, tolerance, and democracy are empty concepts—having lost their effectiveness under circumstances in which the ruling classes control the economy, technology, education, the press, and the political institutions. Building on Žižek’s assertion that an equivalent form of false tolerance can inform the ideology of multiculturalism, I propose that, in dance and the rest of the cultural arena, institutionalized diversity holds the potential to equally enact a regime of repressive tolerance in which the subaltern is hedonistically celebrated as a titillating object of desire and benign actor in comforting spectacles of inclusivity. In situations in which coloniality colors institutionalized diversity or in which performances of diversity make us forget how, offstage, immigrants and racial minorities are rejected as a burden to the nation, subaltern bodies are, to borrow Marcuse’s words, “tolerated within the narrow limits set by the hierarchical structure of society [and thus] the tolerance shown to them is deceptive” (1969, 113). In  a regime of repressive tolerance, hedonistic multiculturalism rings most hollow when it coalesces around cosmetic diversity that exploits bodies of color as ornaments, ostentatiously showcasing them to conceal what might be their actual underrepresentation in organizations. The  extensive media coverage of Acosta aided in portraying the 307

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Royal Ballet as an institution composed of dancers from all over the world, highlighting the globality of ballet’s new cosmopolitanism. Indeed, Acosta’s tenure with the company coincided with a substantial internationalization of the Royal Ballet, which hired dancers not only from the UK, Italy, Spain, Russia, Canada, and the US, but also from Japan, South Korea, South Africa, Cuba, Colombia, Argentina, and Brazil, among other locations. Yet, even as the British ballet subscribed to this global cosmopolitanism Acosta remained a rare figure—one of the few black ballet dancers in the UK (Bourne 2011; Goldhill and Marsh 2012). There is no question that Acosta’s celebrity corresponded with his status as one of the most phenomenal ballet dancers of his generation. However, as indicated earlier, it was the BBC1 documentary of his life that catapulted him to national fame to a major extent by stressing the exceptionality of his blackness in the British ballet. The media’s overexposure of Acosta effectively transformed him into a token. Tokens of diversity are paradoxical. In  Acosta’s case, the token’s raison d’être was the extraordinariness of his race in ballet and, yet, through its ubiquity in the media the token suggested a prominence of the black dancing body in ballet that surpassed reality. In 2011, for instance, Acosta was one of only two black artists in the roster of ninety-five dancers of the Royal Ballet. In the other three leading ensembles of the UK—the English National Ballet, the Birmingham Royal Ballet, and the Northern Ballet— black dancers occupied just five out of 154 positions (Bourne 2011). Acosta’s tokenization substantiated what Ahmed would call a mechanism for “changing perceptions of whiteness rather than changing the whiteness of organizations” (2012, 34). It is in this sense that institutional diversity can be cosmetic and amount to a technology for reproducing whiteness. As Ahmed aptly observes, “adding color to the white face of the organization” only “confirms the whiteness of that face” (151).

Conclusion: Can the subaltern not speak as other? The demand for the subaltern in the economy of diversity empowers these dancers to reappropriate their otherness and capitalize on it. Like Khan, who strategically staged his ethnicity to access institutional structures of funding (Mitra 2015, 19–22), Acosta understood his status as a commodity and cashed in on the appeal of his otherness to British audiences. He used his celebrity to denounce the prejudices he experienced as a black dancer from Cuba and to advocate for the elimination of racism in ballet.4 At the same time, he pursued the benefits of self positioning as a marketable product: a desirable other in what Gilroy describes as a “neoliberal consumer culture that can glamorize racial difference” (2004, 137). Acosta reasoned, “My difference [is] not a problem for me... I can use it to my advantage big time because I’m a new product” (quoted in Craine 2006, 17). How Acosta mined the fetishized story of his life in the lucrative dance production Tocororo (2003) and the bestselling autobiography No Way Home: A Dancer’s Journey from the Streets of Havana to the Stages of the World (2007) could be the subject of another study. Here I underscore that his financial success with these ventures is reminiscent of that of black luminaries from previous eras, such as Josephine Baker and Bill Robinson, who performed their otherness to great economic gain. Self-exoticism and self-stereotyping are strategies that foreground the agency of the subaltern to work subversively within the strictures of coloniality. But the fact that contemporary artists still resort to these strategies indicates that, despite the ascendency of discourses of multiculturalism and diversity, in the twenty-first century’s art market—as in the early twentieth-century context of Baker and Robinson—subaltern dancers, and black dancing bodies in particular, continue to be obliged to “prove themselves as 308

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‘Other’” (DeFrantz 2001, 343). Given this injunction to perform otherness, the postcolonial question that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak posed three decades ago in the title of her classic essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) could now be asked differently: Can the subaltern not speak as other? For ballet’s new cosmopolitanism to realize its transformative promise, its subaltern actors must cease to be fascinating rarities, objects of colonialist hedonism, and tokenized ornaments of institutionalized diversity.

Notes 1 I am grateful to Helen Thomas, Justin Crumbaugh, and Zoa Alonso for their insightful editorial comments and stimulating questions, as well as to Sarah Lass for carefully proofreading the final draft. 2 In 1992, the Royal Ballet began scouting for dancers of color through a program that provided free ballet lessons to children from diverse backgrounds in schools across four boroughs of London (Bourne 2018, 60). 3 The details of Acosta’s life are retold in numerous articles that I consulted but do not cite here for reasons of space. Access World News records over 3,000 entries that mention Acosta in British newspapers since 1998 to date. 4 In  a forthcoming article, Zoa Alonso contends that Acosta embodied decolonialist principles through his politically symbolic performances, as a black man, of the eponymous leader of the slave uprising in Yuri Grigorovich’s Spartacus in 2007.

References Acosta, Carlos. 2007. No Way Home: A Dancer’s Journey from the Streets of Havana to the Stages of the World. New York: Scribner. Ahmed, Sarah. 2012. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Akinleye, Adesola. 2018. Narratives in Black British Dance: Embodied Practices. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Alonso, Zoa. Forthcoming. “Choreographies of Violence: Spartacus from the Soviet Ballet to the Global Stage.” In The Fear and the Fury: Ancient Violence in Modern Imagination, edited by M. G. Castello, C. Scilabra, and I. Berti. London: Bloomsbury. Bishop, Clifford. 1999. “Jumping for Joy: Royal Ballet.” The Sunday Times, November 28, Culture, 10. Bishop, Clifford. 2002. “Cloak and Swagger.” The Sunday Times, July 28, Culture, 29. Bourne, Sandie. 2011. “Why Are There So Few Black Dancers in British Ballet?” The Creative Case for Diversity: Innovation and Excellence in the Arts, September 8. Accessed June 4, 2018. http://www. creativecase.org.uk/?location_id=1519&item=2281. Bourne, Sandie. 2018. “Tracing the Evolution of Black Representation in Ballet and the Impact on Black British Dancers Today.” In Narratives in Black British Dance: Embodied Practices, edited by Adesola Akinleye, 51–64. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Craine, Debra. 2006. “Bounds for Greatness.” The Times, July 10, 2, 17. DeFrantz, Thomas. 2001. “Simmering Passivity: The  Black Male Body in Concert Dance.” In  Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader, edited by Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright, 342– 349. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Dougill, David. 2004. “Hot on His Heels.” The Sunday Times, July 18, Culture, 29. Fisher, Jennifer. 2016.“Ballet and Whiteness: Will Ballet Forever Be the Kingdom of the Pale?” In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity, edited by Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young, 585–597. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Franks, Alan. 1999. “One Great Leap.” The Times Magazine, July 17, 36. Gilroy, Paul. 2004. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? London: Routledge. Goldhill, Olivia, and Sarah Marsh. 2012. “Why Ballet Needs to Make a Leap: Where Are All the Black Ballet Dancers?” The Guardian, September 4, 16. Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. 2003. The  Black Dancing Body: A  Geography from Coon to Cool. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kisselgoff, Anna. 2002. “In the Ranks of the Idols.” New York Times, June 13, E1.

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22 DIGITAL PRESERVATION OF DANCE, INCLUSION, AND ABSENCE Sarah Whatley

Introduction Digital technologies have introduced a multitude of opportunities for novel modes of recording, documenting, and preserving dance content. More particularly, digital tools have been developed that have offered dance scholars and artists opportunities to develop new modes of visualizing and transmitting dance, thus creating new ways to access dance content and, in turn, providing new insights to dance, and its compositional and relational properties. Interdisciplinary teams have created many of these tools and resources, thereby stimulating novel partnerships that have generated increased interest in dance—for its access to body knowledge and different kinds of intelligences (Leach 2014)—while also probing the embodied practice/document dichotomy. Consequently, dance is now distributed more widely and what was once an art form that struggled to persist beyond the live event, dance is now available through digital archives, scores, websites, and open data banks, and many of these modes are experimental in nature (Sant 2014). The increased availability of digital technologies also has revealed that the dance-making process is a process of distributed cognition and authorship, thereby unleashing the choreographer from the conventional role of single author, with the potential to make more visible the work of dancers who were hitherto on the margins of the dance community. This  chapter will examine three digital dance resources that have emerged in recent years that raise a number of questions about the digital preservation of dance. These questions revolve around what it is that is preserved and for whom, the nature of the documents or ‘objects’ that are created, the role of the spectator, viewer, or ‘user’ in the construction and preservation of dance, and how digital methods disrupt the temporal properties of the dance ‘event.’ I will claim that the opportunity provided by digital technologies to access the hidden processes of dance creation shows how these digital artifacts become new types of records of performance. I will review recent initiatives and projects that seem to have been particularly influential in how dance and digital technologies have found a synergetic relationship. This review will inevitably be only a partial picture; the field is far too rich and diverse to cover the many activities, projects, and the artists who have contributed to innovation in this field. I will focus primarily on the sphere of activity that is concerned with strategies for documenting 311

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and preserving dance, but where artists are core to how these projects have developed. Hence, while my primary focus is not on digital dance in live performance—where dance artists have experimented with digital processes to innovate their own performance making, using tools such as motion tracking, motion capture, sensors, wearables and telematics—some of these processes have seeped into dance preservation processes and have influenced methods used. Indeed, new experiments that have emerged because of technological possibilities have influenced changes in archival practices and the relationship between the artist and archive. Interesting in this context is that some of the early innovators in artistic practice are now rejecting digital processes in favor of returning to the body as a primary source for their arts practice. It may well be that the close examination of the workings of the dancing body provided by digital technologies, and the concomitant impossibility of digital technologies to fully capture the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of human bodies in motion, has drawn many back to wanting to work with the fleshy, corporeal dancing body. Some of those dance artists and researchers who have worked long-term with technologies shared their views during a series of interviews between 2014 and 2016 as part of the European-wide “RICHES” project that focused on how cultural practices are being recalibrated because of digital technologies.1 Comments drawn from those interviews are included in the sections that follow (and all are anonymized unless the interviewee specifically agreed to being named).2 For example, one respondent talked about wanting to use digital technologies not to distance her from her own body but as another way of encountering self, asking “rather than seeing technology as something that takes that away, how do we use technologies to bring that back?” (Respondent 1 interviewed by Amalia Sabiescu 2014).3

Digital technologies and dance—A recent history In the 1990s, a seismic shift began in the way that dance was being made, performed, transmitted, and distributed. With the introduction of the World Wide Web, communication technologies brought about new kinds of collaborations and a growing interest in how digital tools could be disruptive to traditional creative processes. Consequently, dance as an art form expanded in new directions. Several landmark projects prompted artists and scholars to reflect on how dance as an art form could respond to digital technologies and the decades since have been marked by experimentation, often bringing artists and experts in dance together with practitioners and researchers in other disciplines to move the art form forward. The evolution of contemporary dance in particular has been influenced heavily by digital and networked media. The  meeting between dancing bodies and computers provides the opportunity to consider how computers transform how we think about and conceive of motion. Whether through simple video recordings, motion capture, animation, sensors, or holograms, whenever dance is captured and rendered through technology, it is transformed into data. The growth in the generation and circulation of dance as data has fueled an emerging discourse that considers its impact on issues such as ethics, intellectual property, and copyright in dance. Of the many significant projects that have revolutionized the progress of dance in the digital environment since the closing years of the twentieth century, I mention only a few here. One that was a catalyst for many artists who were exploring the potential of new technologies was Paul Sermon’s Telematic Dreaming (Sermon 1992). In  this virtual reality performance installation, dancer Susan Kozel “performs” with her projected image, as her image is in relation with audience members, at the same time as being able to watch her own projection in duet with the audience member on a screen. The work opened up new 312

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modes of encountering dance where the audience becomes more implicated in the action, moving away from the passive viewer, seated and removed from the action in the traditional theatre setting. Merce Cunningham and OpenEndedGroup’s 1999 motion tracking project BIPED, where projections of dancing avatars appear to interact with the live dancers on stage, brought together virtual and material bodies on stage. His later work with LifeForms, a computer choreographic software tool, was born out of his own desire to continue inventing choreographically when his own body became less able to explore and demonstrate new movement ideas to his dancers. Such artist-led projects paved the way for other initiatives that transformed dance into digital data such as William Forsythe’s 2009 project Synchronous Objects, a substantial website that focuses on one single dance work—One Flat Thing, reproduced (Forsythe 2000). The project includes information about how the dance was made to help audiences understand how to view an abstract work that is highly complex in its structure. A number of digital scores show how the choreography is built up around several systems at play in the choreography. Scott deLahunta, one of the researchers involved in the project, explained in an interview as part of the RICHES project referred to earlier: One is a cueing system, when [the dancers] look at each other and then they wait for one person to move, and then another person moves. And another is a system they call alignment, so it’s when one person moves this way in space, and some other person, maybe his head moves this way in space. The lines that are on top, these lines help the audiences see why the choreographer made those decisions. (deLahunta 2014)

Digital dance objects Synchronous Objects was designed as a “choreographic object or a collection of twenty choreographic objects that function together to communicate the ideas in the dance into animations, interactive tools, and so on” (Zuniga Shaw 2014, 117). The project developed out of Forsythe’s earlier explorations that were informed by film and digital media, even though he did not use a computer in the studio. As deLahunta commented in an interview for the RICHES project in 2014, “early in the 80s  [Forsythe] would choreograph dance and he would talk about bringing an algorithm into class, or an algorithm into the composition process, he would talk about cutting and pasting. So, his language, the composition ideas, were informed by media.” But in the same interview, deLahunta pointed out that “if you looked in a different direction, you could find a hundred experimentalists around the margins, working with technology” (deLahunta 2014). Although these projects on the edges are harder to track, they are likely to have played their role in influencing many other interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary dance and media projects. Since its launch, Synchronous Objects has spawned the emergence of other “choreographic objects”4 as a category of digital dance “things” or artifacts, often made by the artist in partnership with designers and researchers, that have had an impact on artists, scholars, and collaborators from beyond dance, including architects, engineers, software developers, and those working in human factors and ergonomics. According to one RICHES project interviewee, the impact of this developing research was that “performing arts could draw upon the sciences and sciences could also invite artists [to collaborate] …. Dance or performance suddenly became a valued partner in the production of cultural knowledge or know-how” (Respondent 2 interviewed by author 2014). Collectively, this growing corpus of digital 313

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choreographic objects has helped to assert dance as a knowledge-producing practice, or a “knowledge-making enterprise” (Leach 2017, 142), catalyzing thinking about the complexity of the ‘object’ when situated in the domain of dance, and acting as a supplement, extension or expanded iteration of the dance ‘work’ itself. Of these ‘things’, digital scores emerge as a recurrent feature of digital dance preservation projects, either as a naming for a document that aims to record the structural, spatial, or temporal components of a dance work, or as a form of translation from the live to the digital. As artist Myriam Van Imschoot describes in relation to her Oral Site archive project, which began by dealing with scores: The  score is a perfect case for a platform that works with documents, questions their functioning and alters their status. Sometimes a score refers to a past creation, reveals its compositional matrix, but many times it has a pro-active dimension too when it calls for new instantiations. It breaks open temporalities (past, present and future) and possibly agencies too, because scores can be passed on to other executioners. This dynamic element and unstable status, of a document unhinging fixed authorship, underlines the active nature of documents and their performative possibilities for reuse. (Van Imschoot and Engels 2013, 37) Imschoot points to the concerns that underpin many of the projects that provide a backdrop to the digital documentation projects that I focus on here, each of which is similarly initiated by a dance artist or has the artist at the core of the project. Each also disrupts the temporal nature of preservation by intervening at different stages, before, during, or after the dance event.

Preservation and the legacy of the digital on dance Although digital technologies have led to a culture of greater openness in dance, whereby sharing work has been facilitated through the ease of online video platforms such as YouTube and a broader context in which social media is the norm, less attention has been paid to how digitalization can support the long-term preservation of dance works. This  situation has not changed even as the recording of material has become more commonplace, affordable, and immediate (through streaming services, for example). To some extent, this situation reflects the experimental drive of many of these projects that seek to expand beyond creating an archive of dance with the principal aim of categorizing, stabilizing, and ‘fixing’ the dance for preservation purposes. Dance preservation has for some time generated debate about its purpose and impact on the dance field ( Jordan 2000). However, the speed at which dance can be made immediately available, accessible, and consumable mirrors the speed at which technology and file formats advance and change, making digital preservation vulnerable. For some artists and scholars, the disappearance of dance is less of a concern if the body is believed to be the primary holder of memory. In interview for the RICHES project, contemporary artist Isobelle Choinier describes how the evolution of technology presents her with a huge problem when the hardware doesn’t exist anymore or software stops working, yet believes that “we are just beginning to understand those very complex forms and relations because it changes the way you perform, it changes the way you have to deal with aesthetics, with communication. So it is really a very complex thing, but I think that it’s really part of the experience, but I’m not the one that will defend the disappearance of the body. I think it is part of what can be explored” (Choinier interviewed by Amalia Sabiescu 2014). 314

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Disappearance might thus be experienced as an inevitable property of the dance/digital interface, whether desirable or not. Indeed, because digital archives of performance retain a condition of ephemerality, they may not be so distanced from the performance that they seek to document, “but which necessarily distance themselves from other foundational notions such as presence, embodiment, non-reproducibility, and liveness” (Bench 2017, 160). Diana Taylor, who has been highly influential in thinking about the relationship between live performance repertoire and the archive, argues that the question of disappearance in relation to the archive and the repertoire is one of kind as well as degree (2003, 20). In considering the analogue archive, she further claims that: the “live” performance can never be captured or transmitted through the archive. A video of a performance is not a performance, though it often comes to replace the performance as a thing in itself (the video is part of the archive; what it represents is part of the repertoire). Embodied memory, because it is live, exceeds the archive’s ability to capture it. (Taylor 2003, 20, italics in original) Despite Taylor’s assertion, for many there is a recognition that documenting dance is important for being able to study dance in depth because it is necessary for ensuring dance is fully present as part of our cultural heritage and digital technologies can be a valuable asset in preservation strategies. Taylor has since considered the impact of the digital on archival practices. She notes that “the objects in the digital archive require, rather than resist, the ‘change over time’ I associated with the traditional archive” (2010, 7), recognizing the flux that is inevitable with digital resources. Although she insists that “the embodied, the archival, and the digital overlap and work together and mutually construct each other” (3), she concerns herself mostly with examining what she names the “antiarchival practices” (14) that the digital environment has led to. She is referring to the ease at which content can be recorded but without the professional standards or institutional controls that typify archival practices. If not “antiarchival,” then another consequence of the digital is the ‘accidental’ archive that emerges when dance motion is tracked and captured for other purposes, such as for analyzing biomechanical, expressive, or other reasons and a valuable library of dance content is collected. These unintended archives accumulate value for their preservation of dance even if these corporeal data banks are ‘open’ and accessible for others to use and reuse varies from project to project. Despite the increasing availability of digital technologies, the costs and labor involved in digitizing analogue content for archival purposes or for creating more expansive and multilayered digital web-based dance resources means that there are relatively few openly accessible dance resources.5 Many physical dance archives have online catalogues. Some have a limited range of content accessible online (predominantly text and static objects rather than video). The lack of video and dynamic content reflects the relative lack of this kind of dance content in historical collections as well as the cost of building the data bases and digitizing, conserving, storing, and backing up large files. Dance companies, organizations, and individual artists typically have websites that can offer access to rich content including some video extracts, but most are produced for the general audience and are designed primarily for promotional purposes. These digital artifacts are quite different from the archives created by artists and scholars concerned with the construction of memory and their affect. English and theatre scholars Guilia Palladini and Marco Pustianaz put forward the idea of the “affective archive,” describing it as wavering “between materiality and immateriality, between conservation and transformation” and which “is intended to acknowledge the impulse that both 315

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creates and mobilizes the archive as an endless process” (Palladini and Pustianaz 2017, 12). Their project is concerned more with physical or material archives and its affect may be less palpable in the digital environment, but as with all archival materials, any dance collection provides a glimpse into the relationship between the subject of the archive and the act of collecting, and between all those involved in its creation. Moreover, the short shelf-life of digital technologies is as relevant to the digital resources that seek to preserve dance works as it is to dance artists who use these technologies and shape the discussion that follows. I now turn my focus to three contrasting digital dance resources that are designed primarily as experiments in dance documentation, transmission and preservation, and have had impact in dance practice, research, and teaching.

Siobhan Davies RePlay My own direct involvement in the creation of Siobhan Davies RePlay (RePlay) (2009), the digital archive of the work of British choreographer Siobhan Davies (b. 1950), provides me with an insider perspective on its development, impact, and subsequent migration in an effort to extend the life of the archive in response to the inevitable short shelf-life of software noted earlier. I have written elsewhere on the process of building RePlay (Whatley 2013a, 2013b, 2013c, 2014, 2017) so my focus here will be on its wider contribution to digital dance resources. RePlay was developed initially between 2006 and 2009, a dynamic time in which artists and scholars alike were contemplating questions about archive, repertoire, and dance documentation. YouTube and Vimeo were only just emerging and there was almost no dance available on open channels so many dancers were understandably wary of sharing their work in this new and untested environment. Similarly, custodians of other archival collections where there were some traces of Davies’s work were understandably protective about what could be accessed and for what purpose. But digital technologies were shifting efforts away from analogue tools for recording dance, such as dance notation and film, to methods that would not only document the dance as a ‘product,’ but which could provide access to other traces of dance making and performance, such as rehearsal material, choreographic notebooks, design prototypes, and so on. Making use of the ability to store content in a digital repository in a way that is fully searchable provides the user with a new way to view dance. The viewer can search through multiple records provided by computing power that far exceeds what a human can achieve, and choose what to view, what order, for how long, juxtaposing video, audio, and text on the screen. By using simple tools (such as the digital scrapbook on RePlay), the user can organize material into personalized collections. Consequently, the conventional way of encountering dance through viewing a live performance, on a single video recording, or through photographic traces and various written accounts of the dance often distributed across multiple sites and in fragmented archival collections, extended into offering more choices to the viewer. Moreover, a process of dissection or segmentation of the content on RePlay, necessary for cataloguing and developing the metadata schema, begins to reveal new dimensions of the dance and specifically the many layers of the dance-making process. An ontological shift thus begins to happen in the digital environment in which the dance work no longer exists only as a singular event or product. In RePlay, the uncovering of more records of the making process and the collection of such a diverse range of materials led to the creation of two playful interactive graphic scores that conveyed through data visualizations something of the structural features of the choreography. These were named ‘kitchens’ for offering insight to the ingredients of the choreography 316

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and how these are ‘cooked’ to become dance works. Each of two kitchens, created for two choreographies, Bird Song (2004) and In Plain Clothes (2006),6 drew on Davies’s wide collection of design sketches, rehearsal notes, films of rehearsals, and so on. These materials were available only because the archive was built close to the time of the choreographic process. For earlier dance works, these materials were either lost or scattered among Davies’s collaborators and so were less easy to recover. Each kitchen was designed individually to draw the viewer into the choreographic compositional structures (through color, movement, and spatial organization on the screen), the source materials for the dances ( journals and sketch books), the working processes of the dancers (through their reflective writing), and design concepts (through sketches of costumes, sound scores, and draft lighting designs). Much like the intention in Synchronous Objects, the kitchens had a similar educational purpose by being built to enhance the understanding of two abstract dance works. The kitchens are historical digital documents in their own terms, revealing the state of the art at that time in terms of digital data visualization. In 2013, only four years after it went ‘live’, RePlay became unsupportable as a digital platform as the software exceeded its useful shelf life.7 In common with many other digital resources, the content was at risk without continual upkeep. Many digital resources once ‘completed’ can too quickly become ‘zombie’ projects, neither dying nor growing, so are left suspended. Unlike their physical counterpart such as a physical manuscript, the digital object, whether digitized material such as scans, videos, and so on or born-digital8 items such as digital photographs, are vulnerable without a commitment to translation and ongoing preservation. As an archive, such a temporary existence can threaten to undermine the purpose of the project to preserve work that was previously vulnerable. RePlay had become a historical artifact in its own right, reflecting technological changes over the last decade, revealing its own history of production, and participating in the tension between dance’s disappearance and permanence.

Replaying the archive The decision to migrate RePlay to a new software platform to ensure its longer life revealed how new formats may sustain the content in the collection but pose a threat to the original design and interface. RePlay (dance “as was”) grew alongside Davies’s developing oeuvre, producing a living history of the work she was making. It performed a secondary role in revealing the evolution of digital archives and their affordances for dance in a wider sense, even though this defies the archive’s own ontological status as a collection of ‘the past.’ The new platform reflects the tensions that often operate in the building of digital resources. The original RePlay was built through a creative and dialogic process where decisions were made between the whole team about what to include and how to organize material. The aesthetic of Davies’s choreographic work informed the aesthetic of RePlay, including how the material was organized on the screen, the color palette, fonts, and so on. Theatre historian Joseph Roach argues for reproduction and recreation of culture as “a process of surrogation” (Roach 1996, 2; italics in original). The reproduction of archival content could be viewed as a similar process of surrogation, which later Roach equates to “performance” (Roach 1996, 4). The ‘new’ RePlay has become a surrogate for the first, which was itself a form of substitution for the live ‘original’ dance thus continuing a chain of erasure even in its efforts to preserve. Roach’s writing focuses primarily on the social processes of memory and forgetting, examined through the way that memories are embodied in and through performances, extending the understanding of performance by making it coterminous with memory and history (26). The relationship between performance and digital 317

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technologies is not his focus. However, just as performance participates in the transfer and continuity of knowledge, the digital surrogates that performances create do something similar. The aim of RePlay is to achieve two key aims. The first is to contextualize dance, linking its history with memories of those who made, performed, and viewed the dance. The second is to foreground somehow the material properties of dance while finding structures that transmit the tactile sensibility and sensuous presence of those materials alongside the complex structures that mobilize dancing bodies in performance.

Digital dance archives; A collection of many archives RePlay is an example of a digital dance preservation project that focuses primarily on a single artist’s output. By contrast, the Digital Dance Archives (DDA) portal9 provides access to the visual content contained within multiple dance collections (videos, photographs, drawings, sketches, and so on). As an ‘archive’ it is thus not a full collection of textual materials and other records that would support an in-depth analysis of a particular choreographer or choreographic work, rather it is “primarily a visual storage and retrieval system for digital content whose analogue storage and organization is maintained elsewhere” (Fensham 2017, 72). Developed between 2010 and 2011, the project brought together dance researchers, computer scientists, and the National Resource Centre for Dance (NRCD) in the UK to digitize a number of archives managed by NRCD, which is housed at the University of Surrey, create a linked data structure that would provide access to these archives, as well as RePlay, and design a tool that would allow users to search by visual similarity. Glitches in the background code led to some surprising results being returned. It was thus primarily effective in providing a compelling and serendipitous tool for discovering hitherto hidden connections between visual content. For example, by tracing the lineage of a particular dance step or body pose, links could be made between different dance genres and traditions. And the colors in a number of geometric forms drawn by dance theorist Rudolf von Laban, for example, could generate surprising links to contemporary theatre set designs. The tool helped users to build digital scrapbooks of visual material, enriched by usergenerated textual annotations as ways to interpret and develop narratives through the content. Unlike the focus on a single choreographer in RePlay, or the fragmented records stored by major museums and other memory institutions, DDA opens up “a new form of archival memory or social choreography of movement history” (Fensham 2017, 73). However, without additional resources the search tool could not be updated. Consequently, while the ‘About’ page on the portal describes how by using simple, icon-based instructions, the four different modes of visual search allow the user to search across the DDA collections to find similar instances of shape, gesture, sequences, and color—what actually appears is a frame without a function. As with ghost links or the ‘link rot’ of broken hyperlinks, the lost function underscores the fragility of digital code. However, the primary dance content is preserved and NRCD continues to add new digitized collections drawn from their hard copy archives to the portal, featuring the visual records of dance companies and traditions spanning the last century, predominantly UK-based, as diverse as Extemporary Dance Theatre, Ludmila Mlada, Revived Greek Dance, Kokuma Dance Theatre, and Yolande Snaith Theatredance.

Motion Bank Taking a different approach to the digitalization of dance is Motion Bank,10 an initiative by choreographer William Forsythe that builds on the earlier Synchronous Objects website. Focusing on the production of a series of digital dance scores, the project brought together 318

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researchers, leading dance choreographers, designers, educators, and computer scientists. The aim was to “explore how digital technology can be uniquely applied to the challenge of documenting, analyzing, notating/annotating, and presenting dance” (Forsythe and deLahunta 2011, 12) by archiving a number of choreographers’ conceptual approaches along with video recordings and three-dimensional data documenting the performances and the depictions created by the designers. Forsythe described Motion Bank as “the world’s first library of digital dance scores” (quoted in deLahunta 2017, 130). He did not want the site to become “exclusively focused” on his own work, but that it should become a “medium for knowledge transmission” rather than a “Personal Platform” (quoted in deLahunta 2017, 129). The international choreographers/ dance artists featured in Motion Bank—Deborah Hay, Jonathan Burrows, Matteo Fargion, Bebe Miller, and Thomas Hauert—were invited “on the basis of their distinctive, articulate, and diverse approaches to creating dance works” (Forsythe and deLahunta 2011, 12). Each worked with a group of interaction designers, educators, programmers, and computer scientists working with different motion analysis tools including Kinect and Motionbuilder to visualize and animate different aspects of their work. A  series of digital scores emerged through this interdisciplinary design process that are as diverse as the artists themselves and that aim to reveal the specific aesthetic, conceptual approach, and devising methods particular to each artist. A core goal was the development of software that might be used by others to create their own online scores to add to the Motion Bank collection (deLahunta 2017, 133). Two tools were developed. The first is an annotation tool PM2 based on the Piecemaker annotation tool developed by David Kern. The other is MoSys, a publishing system developed for the publication of the online scores (134). Motion Bank underscores how many of these digital projects rely on a process of contagion whereby interdisciplinary teams configure new spaces of creative possibility in exploring ways to mediate between recording, translating, visualizing, and preserving dance content. Preservation of the dance works and the site became a by-product rather than a principal aim of the project. As deLahunta explained in interview for the RICHES project, in his discussion with the artists, “the word ‘preservation’ never comes up, but from my perspective it is of course preservation because as long as we take care of it and we keep updating the website so that it doesn’t disappear” (deLahunta 2014). Forsythe’s work has been highly influential not only in dance practice and research, but also in other fields because of his interest in the thinking that underpins dance making, cognition, or corporeal knowledge, and his collaborations with experts in other fields, leading to a growing discourse around the notion of “choreographic thinking” (Forsythe 2009; deLahunta, Clarke, and Barnard 2012). This influence in turn has stimulated interest in how digitalization participates in the revealing and transmission of dance knowledge and choreographic systems that were previously concealed within the embodied exchange between choreographer and dancer, hidden behind the walls of the dance rehearsal studio and then made invisible, or at least harder to see once transformed through the multiple stages of choreographic development. What is documented on Motion Bank is therefore not only the dance works but also the activities and outputs of those who have worked closely with the choreographers, thereby recording a phenomenon that has emerged through the interface between dance and digital technologies, that of the interaction between excavation, transmission, and preservation of dance. Nonetheless, those without access to funding and expertise have to rely on their own resources to document their work. If the document is a form of evidence and proof that it happened, then without those documents being available, accessible, and preserved, many dance works and dance practices are under-represented or even entirely absent from the archives. 319

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Conclusion Dance is evolving in interesting ways in the twenty-first century due in part to the developments in digital and networked media. The projects discussed here are all concerned with how digital technologies can participate in the preservation of dance and the nature of dance and choreographic knowledge (Leach 2014). As Zuniga Shaw, who led the Synchronous Objects project argues, these projects act as choreographic resources, not to pin down but to flesh out the dance, to explore its contours (2014, 99). She asks, “can the original resources be repurposed in a subaltern move to simultaneously create a record and assert the ephemeral ground of live art-making, the fiction of all memory and the partiality of any score?” (99). In  the projects mentioned here, the resources are designed to explore the connection between embodied artistic practice and digital visualization, and to generate exchange between the artists, technologists, and users. RePlay has been a valuable touchstone for others building digital archives of performance and a key reference point for dancers, teachers, researchers, and general audiences.11 It has helped to unsettle our normative historical records in which dance has tended to be absent. However, the aim of RePlay was to foreground regeneration rather than capture. In proving its own regenerating capability, the new site for the archive conveys a sense of renewal even if in its new form, it also reveals a certain loss of what was before, mirroring the continual and perhaps inevitable disappearance of the dance ‘as was.’ The Digital Dance Archives project brings together several collections and by prioritizing visual content enables the user to make links between dance content represented through photographic stills, video, drawings, posters, and other visual documents. Motion Bank extends the exploration with computing technology much further by layering information about the dance-making and -structuring process in the construction of several digital dance scores. As Bleeker and deLahunta note about digital dance projects that have emerged in recent years: Even though many of them work with ‘captured’ dance and provide the means to store this and make it accessible, many of them explicitly resist the idea of merely looking back to the past (Bleeker and deLahunta 2017, 12). By focusing on three well-funded digital dance projects, I am bringing yet further attention to projects that cannot fully represent an environment that is rich with experimentation, but which are nonetheless influential in how this sector of activity has grown. The labor and costs involved in creating digital resources are an inevitable barrier for some in the dance sector, as is the lack of a robust infrastructure for linking data and for licensing digital content, so that more dance can be discovered, accessed, and reused. Dance theorist Harmony Bench discusses how the reconfiguration of the archive through digitalization as not only a store of documents but also as a new mode of knowledge production has “redirected the archive’s social, political, and historical purposes and achievements, prioritizing circulation over preservation” (Bench 2017, 156), marking a “shift from the archive as a state-sponsored repository for and producer of histories to the archive as a market-authorized site of circulation for cultural memories” (157). Projects that have emerged since the millennium have fueled this developing discourse, informed by memory studies, digital curation, digital humanities, and data management practices, and which centered on the practices of collecting, archiving, and safekeeping dance. Much of the writing in recent years that has considered the impact of digital technologies on dance has focused on the way dance transforms (or not) through digitization, on the way dance changes its ontological nature (or not) through being created with or through digital technologies, and on the different ways in which dance is transmitted, shared, and preserved 320

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through digital means. The digital preservation of dance requires a systematic and standardized approach. Done well, it stimulates the imagination so that viewers (or users) find new ways to respond to and analyze dance. Unlike the analogue archive, which may well contain stable objects, the digital archive requires mediation and can be as transformative and transitory as the content it seeks to preserve. The digital dance document thus operates as a continuum of practice, more than a static object, more than an inanimate left-over, and more than merely the residue or “after” of the dance.

Notes 1 The Renewal, Innovation and Change: Heritage and European Society (RICHES) (2016) project was funded by the European Union FP7 program; grant no. 612789. Accessed 16 September 2017. http://www.riches-project.eu. 2 I received ethical approval from Coventry University Ethics Committee for conducting these interviews, which were carried out by the author and project research assistant, Amalia Sabiescu. 3 Respondents who did not wish to reveal their names are referred to as Respondent 1 and 2 (dates of these interviews are given in the reference list). 4 The term “choreographic objects” appears first in William Forsythe’s 2009 essay of the same title, in which he reflects on projects he has initiated that have utilized digital technologies for inscribing, recording and transmitting his dance practice. 5 More single artist and company archives are in development, for example The Digital Pina Bausch Archive (2016): http://www.pinabausch.org/en/archive/the-digital-archive or are repositories collecting together several archives, for example Numeridanse.tv: http://numeridanse.tv/en/. Accessed July 25, 2017. In addition, a useful analysis of a number of American “Artist-Driven” dance archives is provided by Rosemary Candelario (2018). 6 See: http://www.siobhandavies.com/thekitchen/birdsong/ and http://www.siobhandavies.com/ thekitchen/inplainclothes/ on Siobhan Davies RePlay. Accessed September 18, 2017. https://www. siobhandaviesreplay.com/. 7 The year that RePlay went live also marked the end of Davies making dance works for the theatre and proscenium arch stage. It was as if preserving her past work had released her to do something new. 8 “Born-digital” usually refers to those materials that originate in a digital form as opposed to analogue materials that are digitized and therefore become digital through digital reformatting. 9 The Digital Dance Archives project was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Digital Equipment and Database Enhancement for Impact scheme. 10 See Motion Bank website. Accessed April 20, 2019. http://motionbank.org/. 11 RePlay has been cited by teachers, researchers and archivists since its launch. It  has been a core reference point for the Routledge Performance. Archive. Accessed April 19, 2019. (http://www. routledgeperformancearchive.com), Rambert Dance Company’s archive project and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA.

References Bench, Harmony. 2017. “Dancing in Digital Archives: Circulation, Pedagogy, Performance.” In Transmission in Motion:The Technologizing of Dance, edited by Maaike Bleeker, 155–167. Abingdon: Routledge. Bleeker, Maaike and Scott deLahunta. 2017. “Movement Across Media: Twelve Tools for Transmission.” In  Transmission in Motion: The  Technologizing of Dance, edited by Maaike Bleeke, 3–15. Abingdon: Routledge. Candelario, Rosemary. 2018. “Choreographing American Dance Archives: Artist-Driven Archival Projects by Eiko & Koma, Bebe Miller Company, and Jennifer Monson.” Dance Research Journal 50 (1): 80–101. Choinier, Isobelle. 2014. Interviewed by Amalia Sabiescu. November 8, 2014. Coventry. deLahunta, Scott. 2014. Interviewed by Amalia Sabiescu. July 22, 2014. Coventry. ———. 2017. “Motion Bank: A Broad Context for Choreographic Research.” In Transmission in Motion: The Technologizing of Dance, edited by Maaike Bleeker, 128–137. Abingdon: Routledge.

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Sarah Whatley deLahunta, Scott, Gill Clarke, and Philip Barnard. 2012. “A Conversation about Choreographic Thinking Tools.” Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices 3 (1–2): 243–259. Fensham, Rachel. 2017. “Searching Movement’s History: Digital Dance Archives.” In Transmission in Motion: The Technologizing of Dance, edited by Maaike Bleeker, 70–79. Abingdon: Routledge. Forsythe, William. 2000. “One Flat Thing, reproduced.” Performed by the Forsythe Company. Stage premier: Bockenheimer Depot, Frankfurt, Germany. ———. 2009. “Choreographic Objects – An Essay.” Accessed September 15, 2017. http://www.williamforsythe.de/essay.html. Forsythe, William, and Scott deLahunta, eds. 2011. Motion Bank Brochure and Logo Generator. Accessed September 15, 2017. http://motionbank.org/sites/motionbank.org/files/mb_brochure.pdf. Forsythe, William, and Scott deLahunta, dirs. 2011. “Motion Bank.” Accessed September 15, 2018. http:// motionbank.org/. Jordan, Stephanie, ed. 2000. Preservation Politics: Dance Revived Reconstructed Remade. London: Dance Books. Leach, James. 2014 “Choreographic Objects: Contemporary Dance, Digital Creations and Prototyping Social Visibility.” Journal of Cultural Economy 7 (3): 458–475. ———. 2017. “Making Knowledge from Movement: Some Notes on the Contextual Impetus to Transmit Knowledge from Dance.” In  Transmission in Motion: The  Technologizing of Dance, edited by Maaike Bleeker, 141–154. Abingdon: Routledge. Palladini, Guilia and Marco Pustianaz, eds. 2017. Lexicon for an Affective Archive. Bristol: Intellect. Pina Bausch Foundation. 2016. “The Digital Pina Bausch Archive.” Digital Archive. Accessed January 10, 2019. http://www.pinabausch.org/en/archive/the-digital-archive. Renewal, Innovation and Change: Heritage and European Society (RICHES). 2016. European Union FP7 Programme; Gant no. 612789. Accessed January 2, 2019. http://www.riches-project.eu. Respondent 1. 2014. Interviewed by Amalia Sabiescu, August 5, 2014, Coventry. Respondent 2. 2014. Interviewed by author, July 3, 2014. London. Roach, Joseph. 1996. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press. Routledge Performance Archive. Digital Archive. Accessed January 4, 2018. https://www.routledgeperformancearchive.com/. Sant, Toni. 2014 “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Documenting Performance.” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 10 (1): 3–6. Sermon, Paul, dir. 1992. “Telematic Dreaming.” Interactive Environment. Accessed February  4, 2019. https://vimeo.com/20054617. Siobhan Davies RePlay. 2009. “Siobhan Davies RePlay: The Choreographic Archive of Siobhan Davies Dance.” Digital Archive. Accessed August 10, 2018. https://www.siobhandaviesreplay.com/. Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2010 “Save As... Knowledge and Transmission in the Age of Digital Technologies.” Imagining America. Paper 7. Accessed September 10, 2017. http://surface.syr.edu/ia/7. Van Imschoot, Myriam and Tom Engels. 2013. “Zombies and Butterflies: A Dialogue on Oral Site between Tom Engels and Myriam Van Imschoot, May 10, 2012, 14:00, Kaaistudio’s, Brussels.” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 9 (1): 31–39. Whatley, Sarah. 2013a. “Siobhan Davies RePlay; (Re)Visiting the Digital Archive.” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 9 (1): 83–98. ———. 2013b. “Siobhan Davies RePlay: Corporeality and Materiality in the Online Environment.” Scene 1 (1): 135–148. ———. 2013c. “Dance Encounters Online; Digital Archives and Performance.” In  Performing Archives/ Archives of Performance, edited by Rune Gade and Gunhild Borggreen, 163–178. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen. ———. 2014. “Digital Inscriptions and the Dancing Body; Expanding Territories through and with the Archive.” Choreographic Practice 5 (1): 121–138. ———. 2017. “Archiving the Dance; Making Siobhan Davies RePlay.” In  Transmission in Motion: The Technologizing of Dance, edited by Maaike Bleeker, 62–69. Abingdon: Routledge. Zuniga Shaw, Norah. 2014 “Animate Inscriptions, Articulate Data and Algorithmic Expressions of Choreographic Thinking.” Choreographic Practices 5 (1): 95–119.

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23 DANCE AND COPYRIGHT As time moves on Charlotte Waelde

Introduction The purpose of this contribution is to give a copyright law response to the question “Who owns the dance?” by way of a detailed analysis of the legal rules around authorship. It will be suggested that authorship and relatedly ownership of copyright in recorded dance may rest with choreographers and multiple dancers. This response could result in challenges for making recorded dance available because each author of the copyright would need to give consent to re-use, a potentially onerous task at a time when the ubiquity of technologies makes reaching out to new audiences easier than in the past. Also, each co-author (and owner) could benefit from (financial) exploitation of the dance. To help broker these burgeoning relations between copyright authors and owners and users, it will be suggested that the dance community should consider establishing DanceROCS, a collecting society to manage copyright in dance.

Themes and concerns This is a legal contribution to the debate in dance studies concerning authorship of copyright and the implications of having multiple owners. The literature contains contributions to our knowledge of authorship and ownership of dance from non-legal perspectives (e.g., Roche 2016). There are contributions to dance and copyright from non-law perspectives (e.g., Kraut 2016). There are also legal copyright contributions, but ones that do not specifically focus on authorship and ownership of copyright in dance (e.g., Yeoh 2013). Because of the centrality of the question “Who owns the dance?,” the purpose of this contribution is to add a consideration of legal analysis to the dance studies literature. It is fully appreciated that reading legal analysis is unfamiliar to many outside the law profession and can be a challenge to follow. Every effort has been made in this chapter to make the argument accessible but not at the cost of compromising the analysis. Misunderstandings across disciplines can be common and part of the purpose of this contribution is to iron out some of those misunderstandings between dance and copyright law and vice versa. This chapter will consider United Kingdom (UK) copyright law since it has been shaped by the European Union (EU) jurisprudence. This choice is for several reasons. First, copyright 323

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law is territorial. This distinction means essentially that the rules play out differently in different jurisdictions. So, for example, although the United States (US) and the UK share similarities in their copyright law (the Copyright Act of 1790 in the US was based on the Statute of Anne, also known as the Copyright Act 1710, in the UK, and both share a similar economic rationale) detailed rules on, for example, the work for hire doctrine in the US differs from the employer/ employee rules in the UK, as do the detailed rules on the term of protection of copyright. Proper legal analysis of both jurisdictions would result in more detail than necessary for this chapter. Second, the UK/EU was chosen because of the richness of the discussion on authorship and ownership of copyright emanating from the EU, which seeks to interpret the copyright directives implemented in each member state that draw together the different copyright traditions rooted in the personality in continental Europe and economic benefit in the UK. Focusing on the UK/EU thus will give a perspective that will help deepen understanding of a range of jurisdictions. Third, a US dance/law scholar working across jurisdictions will be able to take the arguments and findings from this contribution and delve into similarities and differences in the US as they are relevant to his or her work, drawing on existing literature on US copyright law and dance (e.g., Chapman 2017). Finally, a US dance/law scholar would need to have a working knowledge of the differences in copyright law across jurisdictions if, for example, he or she were to consider the implications of legal relations in Europe concerning exploitation of dance with the very first question being, “Who owns the dance?” Since this chapter is a legal analysis, relatively extensive reference will be made to case law to make certain points and illuminate the argument.1 However, there is little case law specifically on dance and copyright. There are three fairly old cases: (1) ownership of copyright by a choreographer under the Copyright Act of 1911 in the UK, (2) infringement of the copyright in an Oscar Wilde story when adapted in the form of a ballet, and (3) a dramatic work must be capable of being performed to be protected by copyright. However, these are not very helpful for this chapter. Therefore, cases will be used by analogy. In other words, cases will be used where they decide a specific point of law that is relevant to the argument, even though the facts in the case do not deal with dance. For example, an important case decided in 2011 by the Court of Justice of the EU (CoJ) concerned the test for originality for copyright authorship, which arose from questions concerning a photograph of a schoolgirl. The important point arising from this case is the test concerning originality which can then be applied in other cases, including dance, and not to the facts of the specific case. For these reasons, this chapter is not about US copyright law. Neither will the reader find mention of “fair use.” In any discussion of copyright and dance a familiar question is, “But what about fair use?” Fair use is not relevant to the argument in this chapter. This discussion is about authorship and ownership of copyright in dance. Fair use, a US copyright law concept, is relevant to exploitation of copyright and whether it is possible to use (parts of ) a work without permission from or payment to the copyright owner. A similar, but far from identical, concept in the UK is fair dealing. For the reasons given previously, the reader will not find mention of fair dealing in this analysis either.

Two copyright law and dance examples Having set the scene, there will no doubt be readers who will at this point question the relevance of copyright to dance at all. Although some dance organizations have highly developed copyright strategies, copyright for other companies and individuals may seem rarely to be of relevance. That said, two examples might help to highlight the extent to which copyright is becoming increasingly visible at all levels of the dance world. The first example will be 324

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familiar to most readers; it concerns the borrowing in 2011 by Beyoncé in the video for her single “Countdown” from two dances choreographed by De Keersmaeker: Rosas danst Rosas and Achterland. Although the case never came to court, if it had, the first question would have been “Who owns the copyright in Rosas danst Rosas and Achterland?” Only the owner of the copyright in the dance would have the right to pursue another for infringement. To ascertain the owner of the copyright, it is first necessary to determine who the author is. The second case study relates to the computer game Fortnite and the claims of copyright infringement in dance moves made by a number of pop artists. The claims are that Fortnite has copied the dance moves that are owned by the pop artists and is selling them on the computer game to users. Although there are many layers of copyright questions that arise in these claims, the most fundamental is whether the pop artists own copyright to the dance moves. In other words, “Who owns the dance?” As before, to determine who owns the dance, it is first necessary to work out who the author is. This second example also highlights the potential for new markets for dance—something that DanceROCS, discussed herein, could facilitate.

Copyright authorship and ownership Copyright law has as its heart the author who is the person who creates the work.2 The manifestation of this lies in the term of protection of copyright that, for dramatic works including dance, is linked to the life of the author and lasts for seventy years after death.3 The author is the initial owner of the economic rights conferred by copyright4 (the exclusive rights to authorize inter alia reproduction, dissemination, and communication on the internet of the work protected by copyright)5 and it is the author who has moral rights in the work—rights to be identified as author and to object to derogatory treatment for as long as the copyright subsists in the work.6 Thus, the first, and most fundamental step, in analyzing who owns the copyright in the dance is who is the copyright author. The owner of the copyright is then at liberty to license (give others the right to do things which may be limited in a variety of ways) or assign7 (pass on ownership of ) the copyright in a work to third parties, individuals, or organizations. The third party will be able to exercise whichever of the economic rights that the author has passed on. At this juncture, it is important to highlight that authorship and ownership of copyright are likely to be in different hands. For example, the author and first owner of the copyright in a dance might assign the copyright in the dance to a dance company. The author will remain the author and the term of copyright will remain tied to her life, but the owner of the copyright, the dance company, will be the organization that is able to exploit the exclusive copyrights that have been licensed or assigned to it.

Copyright and the creation of dance The process of creating a dance is key to being able to identify the author of the dance for copyright law. Every process will be different, but to identify the copyright author it is helpful to refer to some examples to highlight what it is that the law would look for in terms of input into the creation. It is also important to bear in mind that there are certain things that copyright law is not concerned with and that are irrelevant for authorship. One aspect is ideas, which are not capable of protection by copyright; although, as will be seen from the ensuing discussion, it is sometimes not easy to separate ideas, which are not protected, from expression, which is protected. Another unprotectable element is style. It is axiomatic that every dancer will bring his or her own individual style to the dance such that no two dances will look the same from different dancers—the dancer is not, in the words of Jennifer Roche, a “neutral instrument or tool within the choreographic 325

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process” (2009). However, this style as such does not have protection by copyright. An analogy could be the style of a “school” of painting or of a musical tradition. The  tools, accumulated knowledge, training, and skills that the artist and musician bring to their art are not the subject of copyright protection. How they are expressed in the painting or recorded performance could be, however. It is the same with dance; the skills, training, tools, and knowledge that the dancer brings to the dance and through which the dancer expresses the dance are not protectable elements for copyright. That said, because the subject of copyright protection is the embodied dance (once recorded), there may at times be a fine line between how the dancer interprets instructions given by a choreographer (if that is the process), and the dancer’s own input for copyright purposes. The line between unprotectable style and protectable expression may indeed be fine. But these are the sorts of judgments that copyright law has to deal with in practice. In observing the creation of the dance leading to fixation (such as via Labanotation or, more probably, digital recording, and which is the point at which copyright arises), a range of styles and interactions are apparent across all types of dance. The examples given here are just that— examples. They are not intended to be generalized to all dance of a specific type but are used in this context to highlight elements that the law would look for when considering copyright authorship. An example of one process of creation of a dance arose in the research funded project called “Disability, Dance and Law” that sought to identify copyright authorship. Dancers talked about interpreting the choreographer’s wishes,8 and about the choreographer “making the work” or “laying the dance” on their body. In some cases, the dancer closely follows the choreographers’ instructions leaving no room for the dancer’s interpretation in implementing those instructions. Ballet for example, has been described by Efva Lilja in her work “Breaking the Mould” as:“A system that teaches you to become a powerful, keen instrument for somebody else’s will and to refrain from a personal point of view, your own attitude or suggestions” (Lilja 2014). However, it is clear that all dances are not created in that way. There are times when a choreographer gives ideas to the dancers and facilitates the dancer in realizing those ideas through the dancer’s creative choices. Cecilia Roos describes such a process from the perspective of the freelance dancer: “the interest seems to be in the process and the becoming, the material that arises without an existing original. Therefore, the choreography is often elaborated in dialogue with, and adjusted to, the dancer that is doing the replacing” (2014, 9). Indeed, Roos goes so far as to argue that the freelancer’s ideas should be considered: “In a freelance context it is often good to argue for an idea that you believe in strongly. It is almost required of you to share your viewpoints and take an active part in the development of the new creation. And as a dancer you expect that also” (2014, 11). Between these, the creation of the dance is often an iterative and joint process as between choreographer and dancers: the choreographer sometimes giving instructions that are realized by the dancer, and sometimes the dancer contributing and making choices about how the dance will be realized. Roos describes this type of process as one that often occurs in dance developed with company dancers. It is one of: collaborative practices between dancers and choreographers when working on new creations. …, the dancers are sometimes asked to participate in the process and produce by improvisation the movement material that eventually will be used in the performance. (Roos 2014, 7) So, although there may be a focus in dance on the idea of authorship resting with the choreographer no matter the process by which the dance is created, the law may have different ideas for the purposes of copyright. 326

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Copyright authorship Dance and copyright share an obsession with individual authorship. Although subject to extensive theoretical and practical criticism, some philosophical discourse on copyright reifies the notion of the individual author toiling away to create a new work. As Martha Woodmansee notes: Our laws of intellectual property are rooted in the century-long reconceptualization of the creative process which culminated in high Romantic pronouncements like Wordsworth’s to the effect that this process ought to be solitary, or individual, and introduce ‘a new element into the intellectual universe. (Woodmansee 1994, 27) The importance of the individual author is echoed in dance. As dance scholar Hetty Blades has noted in connection with contemporary dance: “despite its collaborative nature, contemporary dance convention tends to isolate a single person as the ‘author’ of a work or set of practices” (2018, 303). Dance theorist Anthea Kraut notes that some contemporary and postmodern choreographers use strategies such as chance procedure, whereby the elements of the choreography are determined by chance rather than by the choreographer and by pedestrianism, or “every day” movement, “to distance themselves from the modernist emphasis on authorial invention,” but that nevertheless these artists continue to reap the authorial rewards of their works (2016, 266). But as just indicated, the reality of the creative process is that it is often highly collaborative between choreographer and dancers. Copyright law responds to this in the notion of “joint authorship,” which I contend has important ramifications for dance.

Joint authorship A work of joint authorship is one where the work is produced by the collaboration of two or more authors in which the contribution of each author is not distinct from that of the other author or authors.9 Identifying joint authorship is important because of the legal consequences that follow. As noted, the author is often the first owner of copyright in the work. Where authors are considered in law to be joint authors, each will have a right of veto over the others’ use of the work.10 In other words, all of the joint authors will need to agree before anyone is allowed to copy, use, or otherwise exploit the work. In addition, each joint author will be entitled to a share in the royalties if the copyright in the work is exploited; the percentage of which may vary depending on the input into the work.11 There are three preconditions for joint authorship to exist: •

• •

First, there must be a common design in the creation of the work.12 This precondition means that the authors must be working together towards the same end at the same time, rather than engaging in a sequential alteration of the work. Second, the contributions to the work must be of the right sort for copyright authorship. This means they must be original and not insignificant.13 Third, the contributions from each author must not be distinct or separate from each other.14

As there have been no court cases on joint authorship of dance for copyright, the following discussion uses cases with other facts to highlight the relevant point of law. 327

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A common design Case law suggests that the meaning of common design is tied to collaborative and joint working in furtherance of the creation of the work. The case Levy v. Rutley concerned a claim of joint authorship in the play, The King’s Wager, or, The Camp, the Cottage and the Court, written by Thomas Egerton Wilks. Levy and others claimed joint authorship through their input in adding a scene and making a few other alterations. The court rejected the claim saying that there was no evidence of cooperation in the design of the piece, in its execution, or in improvements to the plot or structure. Levy had simply varied the dialogue to make it more accessible for his audience. The court suggested instances in which a common design might arise from collaboration and those where it would not arise from collaboration. … it never could be suggested that, when an author submits his manuscript to a friend, and the friend makes alterations and improvements, the latter would thereby become a joint author of the work. If, when the piece was brought to the plaintiff, he had said to Wilks, “This thing requires to be remodeled, and you and I will do it together,” and Wilks had assented, possibly a case of joint authorship might have been set up. But the evidence here falls very short of that.15 The court thus drew a distinction between proactively collaborating with a plan in mind and with a scenario in which alterations are made after the fact. What exists in the first instance is the “common design” that is lacking in the second instance. In dance it is tempting to say that there must always be a common design between choreographer and dancer because they collaborate to make the dance which exists on, and is embodied by, the dancer. After all, the dance could not exist without the dancer and a collaboration between the choreographer and dancer would not exist without the choreographer. As previously noted, there are very different ways in which that process may take place ranging from the choreographer giving instructions that are interpreted by the dancer to a dance emerging from collaboration. One could argue that when the choreographer comes with pre-planned ideas that are to be realized by the dancers, and to which the dancers might add some, but few, alterations, that would not be in furtherance of a common design like the facts in Levy v. Rutley. But that feels fundamentally different from dance, where the dance does not exist without the dancer. It also highlights one of the key differences between dance and most other literary, musical, and artistic works protected by copyright, and that is the indivisibility of the dancer from the dance and the dance from the copyright in the dance. Although a dancer (or choreographer) may not be a joint author of a copyright work for other reasons considered herein, it seems hard to conceive of circumstances in which a claim for joint authorship would fail at the hurdle of common design.

Input of the right sort One of the key requirements of authorship is that the author inputs the right sort of originality in the creation of the work and that is so whether the claim is for single or joint authorship.16 Historically in the UK, the standard of originality required for the subsistence of copyright has been low. What has been required is that the author expends some skill, labor, and effort17 in the creation of the work, and that it should not have been copied from another work.18 However, over the last decade, case law from the Court of Justice in Europe (CoJ) has 328

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been changing UK law. The CoJ has said that copyright extends to subject matter that is “the author’s own intellectual creation.” What is important is that the author expresses his or her creative ability by making free and creative choices in an original manner and stamps his or her “personal touch” on the work.19 There must be room for the author to exercise creative freedom. It also would seem that what the work is called, in other words whether it is called a dance, is irrelevant. The task is to look at the expression to determine who has contributed the right sort of intellectual creation in its making.20 The reference to intellectual creation, to creative ability, and to free and creative choices might seem to present a high hurdle to originality for copyright authorship. However, on examining the case law, that seems not to be the case. It is not required that a work is new, or unique, or novel, nor indeed that it has a certain quality or aesthetic merit. Neither does the law require a comparison of one work with another to determine originality. The word originality is tied to the need for the work to originate from the author; in other words, it must be the author’s intellectual creation. Case law has shown that in creating a photograph, free and creative choices sufficient for copyright can exist in the fixing of the background, pose lighting, and framing. For text, creative choices can exist in the selection, sequence, and combination of eleven words. For dance, therefore, the law does not require an “inherent and aesthetic value” nor “exceptional technical skill.” Thinking about how this might apply to the processes just described, the ballet dancer who is a “powerful, keen instrument for somebody else’s will” (Lilja 2014) may, or perhaps necessarily must, contribute his or her personal touch through the embodiment of the dance which will be shaped by personal experience and training. As previously discussed, that sort of input is nonetheless unlikely to constitute the right sort of free creative choices needed for the dancer to be considered a copyright author of the piece, since the dancer’s input is more like what copyright law would consider style. The company dancer, by contrast, may well have the room to exhibit his or her own intellectual creation and stamp personal touch on the work particularly where asked to participate in the process and produce by improvisation the movement material that eventually will be used in the performance. This situation is all the more so for the freelance dancer who takes “an active part in the development of the new creation.” And it is not just the dancer who needs to input the right sort of originality; the same test applies to the input of the choreographer. While in a tightly choreographed ballet it would not be difficult to see the choreographer inputting the right sort of personal touch to be considered the copyright author, that would not be the case with chance procedure which, as Hetty Blades notes, is “a method whereby the elements of the choreography are determined by chance, rather than by the choreographer” (2018, 305). But it is not just originality that is required to be “of the right sort” for joint copyright. In some cases input of the right sort has meant input must be to the creation of the work itself. In Brighton v. Jones,21 the court was asked to consider whether a director and playwright were the joint authors of a play. One collaborator, Miss Jones, had produced the plot of the play in advance of rehearsals. During rehearsals, Miss Brighton suggested ideas for the dialogue, while the decision on whether these were taken up were for Miss Jones. The court found Miss Brighton’s contributions to be “to the interpretation and theatrical presentation of the dramatic work” rather than to composition of the work itself and did no more than make the script better during the course of rehearsal. This input was not the right sort of authorial input for the law to recognize Miss Brighton as a joint author of the copyright in the play. Miss Brighton would have had to contribute to the “composition” of the work. Similar scenarios arise in the creation of dance: the choreographer might bring a wellformulated plan for a dance to dancers in the studio, direct how that dance should be 329

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expressed, and keep control over what becomes a part of the dance and what does not. Assuming the choreographer has come with the initial dance, has directed the dance (laid the dance on the bodies of the dancers), and makes the final decisions as to what appears in the dance, then the contribution of ideas and movement by a dancer may be considered interpretation of the dance, rather than a contribution to the dance itself, and so the dancer would not be considered a joint author. That said, while the courts have said that it is relevant who makes the final decisions as to what goes into a work in determining ( joint) authorship, this is not a decisive test. It is also a quite different in the scenario of Stuart v. Barrett 22 that concerned the contributions of a drummer to the creation of a pop song. It was found that process was collective: “Someone started to play, and the rest joined in and improvised and improved the original idea. The final piece was indeed the product of the joint compositional skills of the members of the group present at the time.”23 This again is reminiscent of chance procedure. It would seem here that the dancer’s input would be of the right sort for the dancer to be considered a joint author of the copyright. Would the choreographer be considered a joint author? Ideas are not protected by the law, so the choreographer’s input would have to be something more, be to the creation of the work, and also be of the right sort. Assuming a choreographer has been working with ten dancers in the process of developing a dance based on chance procedure, then it is possible that there will be eleven joint authors of the copyright in the dance once recorded; or there might be ten if the choreographer’s input is not of the right sort. In yet a difference scenario, moves and sequences might be developed by the dancers, while choices as to what goes into the final piece might rest with the choreographer. Would such control over such decisions by the choreographer make the choreographer the sole copyright author? As previously noted, while control over what goes into the final piece is important, it is not decisive. This situation is different again to the scenario that arose in Brighton v. Jones where the input was not to the work in which copyright was claimed and therefore not of the right sort. Or might such a process be considered more like the choreographer giving ideas for how the work should be realized and, as ideas are not protected by copyright, authorship would rest with the dancer? Or might the courts say that there are two copyrights: one in the dance belonging to the dancer, and one in the arrangement of the dance belonging to the choreographer?24 One other point that has arisen from time to time in the case law that could be of relevance to dance is the concept of “penmanship,” meaning the need to contribute to the “writing” to be considered a joint author. In Robin Ray v. Classic FM plc,25 the court thought that the joint author must do more than contribute ideas.The joint author must “participate in the writing and share responsibility for the form of expression in the literary work”; in other words, contribute to the “penmanship.” This interpretation has been qualified in other cases where it is suggested that actually “pushing a pen” is not needed, but something more than ideas is. Cala Homes (South) Ltd v. Alfred McAlpine Homes East Ltd26 concerned a director who told draftsmen what features should be incorporated into designs for houses. Was the director a joint author of the drawings even though the director did not actually add anything to the drawings through penmanship? The court thought that limiting authorship to actually “pushing the pen” was too narrow: In my view, to have regard merely to who pushed the pen is too narrow a view of authorship. What is protected by copyright in a drawing or a literary work is more than just the skill of making marks on paper or some other medium. It is both the words or lines and the skill and effort involved in creating, selecting or gathering together the detailed concepts, data or emotions which those words or lines have fixed in some tangible form which is protected.27 330

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What is needed is direct responsibility for the form of expression of the literary work: There is no reason why penmanship should be insisted on any more in case of joint authors than in the case of a sole author, who may dictate his work to a scribe. But in my judgment what is required is something which approximates to penmanship. What is essential is a direct responsibility for what actually appears on the paper.28 How might penmanship be interpreted in dance? Is the dancer the pen as the dancer takes responsibility for the expression of the dance, drawing that expression around him or her? Or does the choreographer use the body of the dancer as pen as the choreographer realizes the dance through the body of the dancer? If the former, the dancer would be the author; if the latter, the choreographer would be the author. Or are the efforts of the choreographer and dancer so indistinguishable in having responsibility for what appears in the form of the dance in, on, and through the body of the dancer that they are joint authors?

Joint authorship and dance It can be seen from the previous discussion that there are many permutations of single and joint authorship of copyright that could result from the creation of a dance. The discussion demonstrates that the law is not fixed but depends on the circumstances of each creation. What is needed to determine authorship is a close reading of the process leading up to the fixation of the dance (the point at which copyright arises) through a legal lens. Only then can it be suggested, albeit with some trepidation, who the author of the copyright in the dance is: whether it is one of joint authorship between choreographer and dancer, or whether authorship lies with the dancer or choreographer. It illustrates that the community view of who the author of a dance is (mostly the choreographer) will often differ from the legal analysis of who the author of the copyright in the dance is. It is an outcome that may be contentious for many in the dance community, not only choreographers, but also dancers who believe strongly that “style” should be explicitly recognized as leading to ownership of the dance. That said, for the dance community and for the law, the meaning of authorship (and ownership) seems to have similar connotations, and that is authority over the dance. The difference between the two is that when the law recognizes authorship, and authorship and ownership lie in the same hands, it brings with it the legal authority to exercise control over the exclusive rights associated with copyright, and the right to reap the (financial) rewards. As the previous analysis shows, authorship, and relatedly ownership, of copyright in dance is likely to be split between far more choreographers and dancers than anyone might have hitherto anticipated.

Multiple authorship; multiple ownership One consequence of the case law previously discussed is that courts tend to take a narrow approach to joint authorship. As Rebecca Tushnet explains, an important reason for this approach “lies in the implications for the exploitation of the copyright, namely, the potential licensing problems associated with the requirement than an exclusive license be agreed by all co-authors” (2007, 787). There  are, however, solutions to these potential problems. In  large parts of the creative industries where multiple copyrights including joint copyright arise in a production, the authors assign or license their copyright to a single entity, thus concentrating ownership of copyright. The film industry is an example: copyright ownership of the various individual and joint works used in the film, such as in the book on which the film is based, the music, 331

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the costumes, and the scenery, are assigned to a film production company. The film production company is then the single source of all of the copyrights in the film and can give permission for the film to be reproduced and distributed without consulting multiple copyright owners. In other scenarios, and to broker relations between many owners of copyright and potentially many users, owners may license their rights to a copyright collecting society that then licenses these rights to users. The collecting society is thus the central point through which copyright is managed. Could a copyright collecting society for dance be the solution to multiple copyright authorship and ownership, and could it facilitate new ways of reaching new audiences?

Dance copyright collecting society (DanceROCS) Until a decade or so ago, the implications of copyright law on fragmentation of copyright authorship and ownership in dance would have had little relevance. Copyright only arises after a dance is fixed in some form (a separate copyright will subsist in the recording). 29 With digitization it is easy to record dance. As Sarah Whatley has commented “How the world has changed. Dance is now widely available online. Many artists record and share their work” (2017a, 82). This increase in recording of dance has been referred to as the “archival turn” where the outputs are used mostly for “the purposes of preservation: evidence of the existence of the dance and safeguard repertoire for the future” (Whatley 2017b, 63). This situation has led to the emergence of what has been described as a “minor industry in dance preservation” underpinned by some, but surprisingly few, managed dance archives30 (Whatley 2017a, 82). Keeping in mind that after dance is recorded the copyright subsists for seventy years after the death of the author, or in the case of joint authors, the last author to die; that it is not possible to abandon copyright ( Johnson 2008) or to declare it “null and void”; and that there may be multiple copyright authors and owners of the copyright in any one recording of a dance, this would seem the perfect time to establish a copyright collecting society to manage copyright in dance. It would represent a shift from the archival turn to “the reproductive turn” and could present opportunities for new ways in which the multiple copyright owners of a dance (and the recording) could reach out to a range of existing and new users, and vice versa, facilitating new ways of creating, thinking about, and re-using dance. One of the main functions of a collecting society is to license the copyright in works owned by multiple copyright owners through a collective license to multiple users. In  so doing, it removes the administrative burden on the copyright owners of entering into and keeping track of potentially multiple different contracts and makes the copyright work available as part of a broad portfolio of works to multiple users who would likely not locate, and obtain permission from the multiple copyright owners. Although dance does not yet have a collecting society with a remit in relation to copyright,31 the cultural and creative industries sector is replete with such bodies that manage copyright in a range of sectors, the most well-known of which is probably Performing Right Society (PRS) for Music. The one closest to dance in terms of the types of works that it manages is Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS), a not for profit visual artists’ rights management organization. DACS, which was founded in December 1983, collects royalties and distributes these to visual artists and their estates, licenses copyright in individual works, issues collective licenses for a range of bodies including educational institutions, provides copyright information to the various stakeholders it represents, and lobbies for changes in the law that would be advantageous for its members. This arrangement would seem a most suitable model for the dance community. Although (commercial) exploitation of dance and its recordings is only in its infancy, it does take place. Recordings of dance are used in school curricula, in dance features in television broadcasts, 332

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and in dance used in advertising. A copyright owner would not have to license their work for commercial ends through a collecting society. Licenses could easily facilitate the free use of dance to make political comment (Burt 2017, 77) or promote equality and diversity (People Dancing 2014). In each case, a license could make it abundantly clear that any form of re-use required attribution of the copyright author or authors. Overall such a collecting society could become a leader in the dance field through the development and implementation of a ground-breaking environmental, social, and governance strategy designed around its members, their social and cultural beliefs, and the public interest (Brown, Gervassis, and Mukonoweshuro 2017). There is no doubt that establishing DanceROCS would face challenges, but solutions can be found. The dance community is not a homogenous entity. There are a range of types of organizations and individuals who fall within its purview, from the more established companies that operate their own sophisticated copyright licensing strategies to individuals whose passion is dance and who eke out a living if they are lucky. Can one copyright collecting society represent these diverse views? Dance is not unique in representing such a diverse community; collecting societies in the music industry, for example, cover a range of organizations, styles, genres, and approaches and do this under the umbrella of representative collecting societies. Further, there is no compulsion to join a collecting society; it is a matter of choice. So those organizations that already control their copyright repertoire can continue to do so. Another concern voiced is that a collecting society would be anathema to the free circulation of dance and inhibit the sharing and borrowing that is at the heart of what members of many in the dance community do (Burrows 2018). But far from inhibiting the circulation and sharing of dance, a collecting society could help to facilitate it. Copyright arises automatically when a dance is fixed. As awareness of copyright within society increases, users can become more hesitant to borrow from existing works unless they know that they have been given permission.32 When works are made available through a collecting society, a copyright license is attached indicating what can and cannot be done with the work. While a copyright owner may not want to impose any restrictions (including restrictions on commercial use by users), the copyright owner may want to be attributed as the author of the original work. A license can make all of that clear. Further, if the owner or owners want a royalty payment for use, then technologies can facilitate collection and distribution including for multiple joint copyright owners. There is one challenge to the establishment of DanceROCS to which the solution is as yet unknown. Copyright collecting societies are designed to connect multiple copyright owners with multiple users. The previous discussion on joint authorship in copyright law has shown how likely it is that there are multiple and joint copyright authors and owners in dance. What about multiple users? Dance and recorded dance are used in education in schools and in higher education. Educational licenses are familiar territory to collecting societies. What about other user groups? PRS for Music issues licenses for the use of music in a range of other scenarios including for live performances, radio and TV broadcasting, playing music at work, and using music online. The Copyright Licensing Agency issues licenses for reproduction from print and digital books, magazines, and articles to a range of users including education, the public sector, media monitoring organizations, and other businesses. Opportunities could be envisaged and indeed already exist in each of these sectors for dance: recordings are used on television, stills in publications, and dances can be recreated across different media. But how big are these markets and could they support the administration of a collecting society? Understandably, dance copyright owners would be unlikely to sign up to a collecting society if the costs outstripped the potential rewards. But “potential” is the operative word here. Dance has been mostly concerned with the process and the ephemeral nature of the dance, rather than “the product.” 333

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Dance archives have challenged this, as do the increasing numbers of initiatives around motion capture, annotation, and virtual reality. The re-use of dance moves in Fortnite is another case in point. While it is celebrities with deep pockets who have to date brought copyright infringement actions against Fortnite, a collecting society could be indispensable in helping independent choreographers or dancers surviving in the gig economy who do not have their resources to pursue such an action if it was their dance moves alleged to have been copied.

Conclusion Dance is only close to the start of its journey as an art form that is recorded or fixed, and which could be disseminated and re-used in hitherto unimagined ways. As has been shown herein, with the increase in recorded dance comes an increase in the numbers of authors and, importantly, owners of copyright in the dance. This situation makes it challenging to manage re-use of the dance because permission would need to be obtained from each of the joint owners of the copyright. This requirement could be difficult if the owners cannot be found, a difficulty that increases over time as people move and as ownership becomes increasingly fragmented through sale or death. I have suggested in this chapter that a collecting society for dance, DanceROCS, could help in providing some order in this circulation and re-use of dance. Through managing the copyright in dance, DanceROCS could ensure that the copyright authors and owners—the dancers and choreographers—are recognized for, and benefit from, their part in these developments, whatever form that recognition and benefit might take.

Glossary Ch

Chancery

EMLR

Entertainment and Media Law Reports

EWCA

England and Wales Court of Appeal

EWHC

England and Wales High Court

EWHL

England and Wales House of Lords

FSR

Fleet Street Reports

LT

Law Times Reports

MacG CC

MacGillivray’s Copyright Cases

QBD

Queen’s Bench Division

WLR

Weekly Law Reports

Notes 1 At the end of the conclusion section, there is a Glossary of the acronyms used in the text and the endnotes. 2 Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988, the UK legislation governing copyright (CDPA). CDPA s 9(1). Dance is protected in the CDPA s 3(1) as a subset of a dramatic work. 3 CDPA s 12. For sound recordings, copyright lasts for 50 years after being made available CDPA s 13A. 4 If the work is made by an employee in the course of employment, the employer is the first owner of the copyright, subject to any agreement to the contrary CDPA s 11(2).

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9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

CDPA ss 16-21. CDPA Ch IV. CDPA Ch V. In conversation with Welly O’Brien, dancer, during evidence gathering for InVisible Difference: Disability Dance and Law, a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded research project (InVisible Difference) on interpreting Caroline Bowditch’s instructions as choreographer. CDPA s 10(1). CDPA s 173(2). Brighton v Jones [2004] EWHC 1157 (Ch) Park J noted (at 34) that a finding of joint authorship did not mean that the joint author was bound to be an equal owner of the copyright. Levy v. Rutley (1871) L.R. 6 C.P. 523 (CA). Tate v Thomas [1921] 1 Ch 503 (HC); Hadley v. Kemp [1999] EMLR 589; Brighton v Jones [2004] EWHC 1147 (Ch); Evans v. E Hulton [1923-8] MacG CC 51; Spring field v. Thame (1903), 89 LT 242; Nottage v. Jackson (1883) LR 11 QBD 627 (CA); Cala Homes v. Alfred McAlpine [1995] FSR 818; Robin Ray v Classic FM plc [1998] FSR 622; Godfrey v. Lees [1995] EMLR 307. Beckingham v. Hodgens [2002] EWHC 2143 (Ch). Levy 528. If the contributions are distinct and form distinct works, then there will be no joint authorship. Beckingham v. Hodgens (2002). While originality has been the subject of extensive judicial comment both in the UK and the EU, few of the cases on joint authorship have considered this test. That is because the authorial contribution from a putative joint author will be required to be original, in the legal sense, for that individual to be considered a joint author. This is implied in the term “joint author.” Martin v Kogan [2017] EWHC 2927 (IPEC) para 15 “This has been explained and rationalised on the basis that a joint author is ipso facto an author within the meaning of s.9(1) of the Act and therefore must have contributed a significant part of the skill and labour protected by the copyright ….” Although usually implied, it is discussed here because of the relevance of the process of dance creation and who inputs the right sort of originality to be able to be considered a ( joint) author. University of London Press v. University Tutorial Press [1916] 2 Ch. 601, at 609–610, per Peterson J; Ladbroke (Football) v. William Hill (Football) [1964] 1 WLR 273. University of London Press v. University Tutorial Press [1916] 2 Ch 601. Ibid. See, generally, cases Case C-5/08 Infopaq International A/S v. Danske Dagblades Forening. Case C -393/09 Bezpečnostní softwarová asociace v. Ministerstvo kultury. Case C-145/10 Eva-Maria Painer v. Standard VerlagsGmbH. [2004] EWHC 1157 (Ch). [1994] EMLR 448. Stuart v. Barrett [1994] EMLR 448, 460. This is a scenario familiar in music where there may be copyright in composition and a separate composition in the arrangement of the composition. Fisher v. Brooker [2006] EWHC 3239 (Ch); on appeal [2008] EWCA Civ 287; on appeal to HOL [2009] UKHL 41. [1998] FSR 622. [1995] FSR 818. Cala Homes (South) Ltd v. Alfred McAlpine Homes East Ltd [1995] FSR 818, 830. Robin Ray v. Classic FM plc [1998] FSR 622 at 636. CDPA s 1(1)(b). Notable archives in the UK include those managed by the National Resource Centre for Dance, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Laban Library and Archive, the Rambert Archive, and the Routledge Performance Archive. Equity established BECS (British Equity Collecting Society) in 1998 to collect revenue from the collective administration of performers’ rights, including those of dancers. This is possibly also in response to the rise of dance as an academic discipline, which brings with it an appreciation of academic codes of conduct (Burrows 2018).

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References Blades, Hetty. 2018. “Preservation and Paradox.” In Digital Echoes: Spaces for Intangible and Performance-based Cultural Heritage, edited by Sarah Whatley, Rosemary Cisneros, and Amalia Sabiescu, 301–321. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Brown, Abbe, Nicolas Gervassis, and Rumbidzai Mukonoweshuro. 2017. “Corporate Social Responsibility, Intellectual Property and the Creative Industries.” In  IP and the Creative Industries, edited by Abbe Brown and Charlotte Waelde, 326–350. London: Edward Elgar. Burrows, Jonathan. 2018. In conversation with the author in Lewes Sussex n.d. Burt, Ramsay. 2017 Ungoverning Dance: Contemporary European Theatre Dance and the Commons. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chapman, Eric. 2017. “Own the Dance: Analyzing Issues of Joint Authorship and Choreographic Works.” Accessed January 7, 2019. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3101193. InVisible Difference: Disability, Dance and Law (research project). 2013–2016. Accessed March 24, 2019. http://www. Invisibledifference.org.uk. Johnson, Phillip. 2008.“‘Dedicating’ Copyright to the Public Domain.” Modern Law Review 71 (4): 587–610. Kraut, Anthea. 2016. Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lavik, Erland. 2014. “Romantic Authorship in Copyright Law and the Uses of Aesthetics.” In The Work of Authorship, edited by Mireille van Eechoud, 45–94. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Lilja, Efva. 2014. “Breaking the Mould.” The Dancer as Agent Collection. Accessed January 7, 2019. http:// oralsite.be/pages/The_Dancer_As_Agent_Collection. People Dancing. 2014. “11 Million Reasons, a Photographic Exhibition Championed by People Dancing.” Accessed January 7, 2019. http://www.doingthingsdifferently.org.uk/events/11-million-reasons/. Roche, Jennifer. 2009.“Moving Identities: Multiplicity, Embodiment and the Contemporary Dancer.” PhD diss., London: Roehampton University. ———. 2016. Multiplicity, Embodiment and the Contemporary Dancer: Moving Identities. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Roos, Cecilia. 2014. “Appreciating Skill, Performing Articulation.” In  The  Dancer as Agent Collection. Accessed January 7, 2019. http://oralsite.be/pages/The_Dancer_as_Agent_Collection. Tushnet, Rebecca. 2007. “Naming Rights: Attribution and Law.” Utah Law Review 3: 781–814. Whatley, Sarah. 2017a. “Transmitting, Transforming, and Documenting Dance in the Digital Environment: What Dance Does Now that It Didn’t Do Before.” The Drama Review 61 (4): 78–95. ———. (2017b) “Documenting Dance: Tools, Frameworks and Digital Transformation.” In Documenting Performance: The  Context and Processes of Digital Curation and Archiving, edited by Toni Sant, 284–303. London: Bloomsbury. Woodmansee, Martha. 1994. “On the Author Effect: Recovering Collectivity.” In  The  Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature, edited by Martha Woodmansee, and Peter Jaszi, 15–28. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Yeoh, Francis. 2013. “The  Copyright Implications of Beyoncé’s Choreographic ‘Borrowing’.” Choreographic Practices 4 (1): 95–117.

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24 ALGORITHMIC CHOREOGRAPHIES Women whirling dervishes and dance heritage on YouTube Sheenagh Pietrobruno Introduction YouTube hosts millions of dance videos uploaded by users throughout the world and features a multitude of forms and styles from past and current eras. The scale and diversity of these videos render YouTube a formidable resource for analyzing and interpreting dance. The  meaning of dance transmitted on this platform emerges through the interconnection between the architecture in which videos circulate and their actual dance content. The Mevlevi Sema ceremony (sema), or whirling dervish ceremony, on YouTube provides a case study to address this interrelation. The sema of Turkey, which includes a whirling dance, was recognized as official intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO in 2005. Through the case study of the sema, the link between YouTube’s architecture and video content unfolds in four sections. The first provides a description of the sema and connects YouTube, the sema, and UNESCO’s safeguarding of dance heritage. The second situates the analysis of intangible heritage videos on YouTube within the field of screendance and its interpretation of dances through their mediated architecture. The  third provides the multiple frames of meaning used to analyze sema videos on this platform, which stem from historical and contemporary research, ethnography, and interviews. The fourth analyzes the digital architecture in which sema videos are embedded, using the prism of these frames of meaning to argue that the link between video content and the technologies of the platform sheds light on the political and cultural meanings ascertained through YouTube’s dance transmission.

The Mevlevi Sema ceremony, UNESCO, and YouTube This account of the dissemination of the sema on YouTube is informed by research on its historical background and current performance (Pietrobruno 2015a). Dance is a key element within the sema, a spiritual ceremony practiced by the Mevlevi Sufi order, which was established in Konya, Turkey, in 1273. With prayer, music, and poetry, the dance of the sema furthers the adherence of the Mevlevi order to the inner path of Islam. Sufi practice enables

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one to pass through the opaqueness of the temporal realm and shed the veils of the perceptible world to ponder the inner spiritual realities and achieve an experience of unity with the divine (Geoffroy 2010, 2, 12, 171). In Sufism, to be “veiled” means to be concealed or blocked and concerns knowledge of the divine (Mernissi 1991, 95). To express the process by which one undertakes this unveiling and movement along the inner path of Islam, Sufism employs a geometric model of a circle (Geoffroy 2010, 9). The whirling of the sema dance is consequently a physical embodiment of this spiritual passage toward the center of the circle achieved through the destruction of the temporal self. This death is indicated symbolically by the dervish’s clothing. The tall hat (sikke) of the dervish emblematizes the tombstone, the black cloak (hırka) connotes the tomb, and the flowing white dress (tennure) mirrors the shroud (Fremantle 1976, 330). The  whirling dance is a physical manifestation of a type of prayer known as the zikir. The zikir, or remembrance of God, is an invocation that is repeated with a breathing pattern that moves in a circular motion toward the heart, which is the spiritual center (Nurbakhsh 1992, x; Geoffroy 2010, 169). There is a common misconception that the Muslim mystical poet Jalal a-Din Rumi (1207–1273), upon whose ideas the Mevlevi order is based, created the whirling dance. In fact, in the time when Rumi lived, this dance was already being performed with spiritual music (Geoffroy 2010, 89). Rumi’s son Sultan Walad, along with other followers, founded the Mevlevi order in 1273 and began the standardization of the sema dance and the entire ceremony. This standardization process endured until the end of the fifteenth century (Holbrook 1992, 101). The actual turn of the sema dance is composed of a simple repetitive motion. Dervishes pivot on the left foot to enable a counter-clockwise rotation that stems from the ball of the left foot, with the entire base of the foot remaining in contact with the floor. The left foot serves as an axis for the turn of the right foot, which lifts to pivot around the left foot in a complete 360-degree step. To avoid dizziness while whirling, the face does not move, keeping the eyes at the same level. The dervish’s gaze remains open and unfocused so that the “eyes look without seeing” (Erzen 2008). Despite the lack of complexity involved in the footwork and bodily positioning, the dance is highly demanding, as it requires the ability to turn continuously for an extended period. The sema, which strives to extinguish not only the self but also the desire to distinguish oneself from others, embodies Rumi’s quest for the erasure of societal divisions and distinctions (Barks 2004). Videos highlighting dance practices officially safeguarded by UNESCO, such as the Mevlevi Sema ceremony (UNESCO 2009a), are transmitted on YouTube (UNESCO 2009b). How does dance heritage, classified as intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO, circulate on YouTube? UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003) showcases within the global arena an array of dances of nation-states that have ratified this international heritage document. Dances that are awarded the official status of intangible cultural heritage by the convention committee, which is composed of representatives of nation-states (UNESCO 2003), are featured in UNESCO’s prestigious lists of intangible cultural heritage and its register of best safeguarding practices (UNESCO 2016). To raise global awareness of intangible heritage, each practice or element categorized as official intangible heritage, including those related to dance, is described in a short video produced by government representatives of the respective nation-state. These videos, which are featured on a website tabulating UNESCO’s lists and register, are uploaded to YouTube through the UNESCO channel, established in 2009. Videos featuring the very dance practices recognized through UNESCO’s convention are uploaded also to YouTube by other institutions, communities, and individuals. 338

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YouTube and screendance This digital circulation of dance practices of intangible cultural heritage on YouTube can be situated within screendance. Douglas Rosenberg (2012, 26) envisions screendance as a specific art form constructed by the camera, inextricably intertwining filmic movement and dance movement. At the same time, Rosenberg opens the terrain of this field to “all work that includes dance and film or video as well as other screen-based software/hardware configurations” (3). Therefore, the dissemination of dance heritage on YouTube falls within Rosenberg’s dance on digital screens. Rosenberg proposes that within screendance studies, the meaning of dance should be analyzed in terms of the architecture in which it is situated and transmitted (16). He writes, “Screendance, then, though not a perfect term, implies that the method of apprehension (the screen) modifies the activity it inscribes (dance); in doing so it codifies a particular space of representation and, by extension, meaning” (3). As the terms “architecture” and “screen” are synonymous for Rosenberg, their inextricability extends to this study of YouTube and dance heritage. YouTube dance videos of intangible heritage are viewed and accessed on the site through the platform’s screens, which are produced by its mediated architecture. To be situated within the domain of screendance, analyses of dance videos on YouTube need to incorporate the platform’s screens and the technologies that produce them. Rosenberg defines “screen” as “an analog device (fabric or wood), or it may be an electronic system (television or computer screen); it may be digital or not” (16). Contained within Rosenberg’s computer screen are YouTube’s specific screens, or architecture, produced by the platform’s technologies. YouTube’s multimedia—videos, still images, texts, and lists—shift their order and composition under given search engine result pages in accordance with user-generated content, algorithms, and Google’s business models. This flux produces shifting content and hence a multiplicity of possible screens. This configuration of YouTube’s screens intersects with contemporary research in media studies that envisions the composition and workings of screens in the digital era as dynamic and multidimensional, combining media forms, technologies, and user interaction (Casetti 2017, 35; Couchot 2017, 138; Huhtamo 2017, 78). The varied mediated components of YouTube’s screens, which constitute its specific space of representation, can contribute to the meaning that users and scholars ascertain when viewing videos on the platform. Cultural and political meanings of individual dance videos are impacted when they are read through the screens in which they are contained and apprehended. The technological facets and user interaction that compose YouTube’s screens contribute to the meaning and context of the dance practices that the platform disseminates (Rosenberg 2012, 17). Despite a popular research focus that restricts the analysis of dance to the content of YouTube videos (see Sagolla 2008; Recollet 2014; McPherson 2016; Tsai 2016; Mitchell 2017), screendance scholars have included facets of YouTube’s architecture in recent analyses. For example, Adanna Kai Jones (2016, 678) notes that “suggested videos” produce the meaning of singer Rihanna’s performance of “winin’” (a rolling-hip dance) in YouTube videos by enabling “the ‘random’ linking of winin’ bodies to other videos that display blackness, femininity, and violence as always already a given.” Melissa Blanco Borelli (2016) links Thom Yorke’s dancing in the band Radiohead’s song “Lotus Flower” in YouTube videos to elements of the platform’s architecture, namely the relation of video placement to hits, views, and circulation. Borelli notes that the video may have received 35  million views as of February 2016 because of the novelty of watching the musician Thom Yorke dance (2016, 67). Naomi Jackson (2016, 696, 708) specifically connects the content of popular 339

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dance videos to the rhizomatic, or non-hierarchical, architecture of YouTube, which may in the future be affected by commercialization. But for now, this structure enables widespread cultural and identity representation through the creative production and circulation of both unskilled and outstanding professional street dance content. This representation nurtures a global community through exchange. Jackson explores the example of Matthew Harding’s videos, which challenge hegemonic masculinity through his “dorky dancing” set in places throughout the world, fostering a sense of global unity by combining play and vulnerability in dance (701).

Mevlevi Sema ceremony: Frames of meaning The example of sema videos on YouTube provides further research on the impact that the platform’s architecture or screens can have on the meaning of individual videos, a stance that builds upon previous research (Pietrobruno 2013, 2014, 2018). To analyze YouTube’s screens of the sema from aesthetic, cultural, and political perspectives, various frames of meaning-making are integrated into the analysis. These frames include scholarly fieldwork on the historical and contemporary aspects of the sema, analyses of UNESCO’s policies and practices, an ethnography of the dance practices of a Mevlevi community in Istanbul in 2012, attendance at male-only sema performances in Istanbul in 2012, a visit to Konya in 2010, which is the birthplace of the sema, where women are not allowed to perform in public, and interviews with members of the Intangible Cultural Heritage section at UNESCO in Paris in 2012 and 2015. Thus, this analysis of dance heritage on YouTube’s screens is embedded within a range of contexts beyond the digital space of the platform. This approach resonates with Christine Hine’s (2015) method of conducting internet research in which online activities are interpreted through multiple contexts to trace numerous frames of meaning-making, which in turn inform the online research. The frames of meaning-making in my study stem from a multi-sited ethnography not bounded by a specific physical place (Marcus 1995, 1998). These multiple sites constitute my field of analysis, which, through its multiplicity, becomes a process of following connections (Hine 2015, 25). Hence, I look for interpretative links between the various sites of my fieldwork. Nonetheless, the connections between findings gleaned from this multi-sited field are a result of my choices and decisions. My field is neither objective nor pre-given (Amit 1999; Hine 2016, 60). Reflexivity entails an understanding that biases enter the conclusions I draw from my ethnographic work, given that my agency has produced the specific multi-sited field in which my findings are rooted (Hine 2016). A  selection of conclusions is outlined from each of these frames of meaning to offer insight into the ways that they are integrated within the subsequent example of an analysis of YouTube’s screens of the sema. A  key finding concerning the history of the sema is that after the founding of the secular Turkish Republic in 1923, headed by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the practice was prohibited with the enactment of Law 677 on December 13, 1925, which banned all Sufi dervish lodges in Turkey (“Appendix 9: Law 677” 2004, 20). Under the Democratic Party, led by Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, the sema was reinstated in the 1950s, with the requirement that it be performed as a cultural spectacle that displayed Rumi as a leading Turkish poet and thinker who exemplified the ideals of the secular state. It could not be performed as a religious practice linked to Islam (Aykan 2012, 49; Pietrobruno 2014, 751). Furthermore, generally only men were allowed to witness and perform the sema because the public space of the Mevlevi dervish house (semahane) was traditionally accessible only to men within the Ottoman Empire (1299–1922). The  semahane typically featured an enclosed lattice-covered gallery, where women hidden from public view could 340

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observe the performance (Bakirci 2010, 54; Pietrobruno 2013, 1265). There are a few documented instances of women performing the sema alongside men in public ceremonies during Ottoman times (Baldick 1989, 113; Helminski 2003, 124; Pietrobruno 2013, 1265). Despite these exceptions, the sema has for centuries been an ancient male performance in whose public enactments women have been prohibited from taking part (Tanrıkorur 2004, 27). To access knowledge of the contemporary context of the sema, I consulted a range of documents, including the candidature file of the Mevlevi Sema ceremony produced by the International Mevlana Foundation (2004) for the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism. The candidature file is the official document that state representatives produce and submit to UNESCO’s convention committee to have their intangible heritage practice officially recognized by UNESCO. The sema candidature file lists the chapters of the Mevlevi order within and outside Turkey that are recognized by the national government, as well as one not recognized, the Foundation of Universal Lovers of Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi (EMAV). This  order is therefore not  granted safeguarding privileges through the Turkish government’s implementation of the convention. The file states that EMAV is excluded from official safeguarding primarily because this group has modernized the practice by integrating women into public performances alongside men (International Mevlana Foundation 2004, 7). Research on the contemporary context of the sema in Turkey also reveals that the current government, led by the AK Party and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, uses the sema to realize its national political goal of achieving the official recognition of Sunni Islam within a once secular nation. The sema of the Mevlevi order has become a marker of Sunni Islam to reflect this national image of Turkey (Aykan 2012, 57; Pietrobruno 2014, 751). The EMAV community’s inclusion of women alongside men in public performances does not fit into the government’s political agenda for the sema, so the practices of this community are excluded from safeguarding strategies under UNESCO’s convention. This exclusion of EMAV from official safeguarding brings the spheres of meaning-making into an analysis of UNESCO’s policies and practices. A  key element of the convention is that a nation-state is supposed to safeguard a practice in a manner that captures the way that the practice constantly changes through the participation of all communities and groups within a given territory (UNESCO 2003). These changes should reflect the social values of the communities, groups, and individuals involved rather than the nationalist safeguarding agendas of the ruling government (UNESCO 2003; Pietrobruno 2016). By not recognizing EMAV, the Turkish government is not fully abiding by the terms of the convention that asks nation-states safeguarding intangible heritage to consult all the communities and groups in the nation to adhere to an understanding of intangible heritage that allows for renewal and has significance for the communities and groups involved (UNESCO 2003; Pietrobruno 2014, 745). The Turkish government is not unique in its lack of adherence to key aspects of the convention. Representatives of national governments often safeguard only the practices of those communities that conform to their political and national goals (Lixinski 2011, 86). Although representatives of nation-states are supposed to consult all the communities and groups in their territory when they are safeguarding a practice, the convention cannot legally compel them to do so because sovereignty is granted to nations within the convention (Lenzerini 2011, 111–112). Scholarly research both on the past and on contemporary contexts of the sema is enriched by empirical ethnographic research. In 2012, I conducted an ethnography of the EMAV spiritual evenings that take place every Thursday from 7:30 to 11:00 at the Silivrikapı Mevlâna Cultural Center in the Fatih district of Istanbul. These evenings, which are open to the public, include a prayer service, or zikir, a discussion period, a break for refreshments, and then 341

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a sema performance that lasts approximately one and a half hours. This fieldwork included observing the dynamics of these evenings, conversing informally with members of the community as well as invited guests and tourists in attendance, observing the sema dance, and interviewing women dervishes as well as the spiritual head of the EMAV community. My observations of dervish ceremonies included studying the bodily movements of the whirling dance as well as its four musical movements (selams) (Pietrobruno 2012a). Each gesture enacted within the selams, from bodily holds to footsteps, head positions and gazes, bears symbolic implications that bring forth the spiritual path of the whirling dervish (semazen). For instance, during the whirling, in which their arms are open, the semazens turn the right palm toward the sky to take in the divine and their left palm toward the earth. In an interview, a woman semazen related how dervishes become transmitters of the spiritual realm by delivering this world to the people observing the sema, thereby transporting them to the divine (Pietrobruno 2012b, 2015a). An underlying motivation of this fieldwork was to ascertain the gendered dynamic during the spiritual evenings at EMAV. At these events, I witnessed how women were included within dervish ceremonies, which is the source of EMAV’s exclusion from official safeguarding strategies of the sema. While observing the sema dance, I could not identify any characteristics that profoundly distinguished the men from the women in terms of movement vernacular: the dance is not gendered. Nonetheless, during the prayers, the men and women of the community do sit in separate sections. Those female members who do not  wear headscarves in their everyday lives, which is the large majority of them, put on scarves that lightly cover their heads without necessarily concealing all their hair. The interaction between men and women during these evenings also demonstrated a certain degree of gender parity. I noticed at the break period that men and women prepared the refreshments and served them to the attendees and community members. I also observed that leadership roles in the community and within the ceremony were occupied by men. EMAV is led by a male spiritual leader or sheik (dede) who is given great reverence by the members of the community. The  dede of the community is elderly and therefore leads the dervish ceremonies only on occasion. Instead, he has a replacement who stands in for him, which is a role referred to as the postnisin. I observed that for each ceremony, the postnisin as well as the head semazen, or master of the dance, were male members of the community (see Illustration 24.1). During my interview with the dede, I asked him whether a woman could ever occupy the role of spiritual leader of the community. He answered that if a woman dervish has attained enough spiritual awareness, her becoming the dede of the community is a possibility (Pietrobruno 2012c). This focus on gender and the sema led me to conclude that performances were influenced to a certain extent by the presence of the camera. I observed that members of the audiences, including non-Turkish tourists, invited media representatives and community members, filmed or videotaped EMAV ceremonies (see Illustration 24.1). Videos of segments of EMAV performances have been uploaded to YouTube by an array of users, including channels with Turkish names (see Senyuz 2013) and ones with non-Turkish names, including my own videos (see Pietrobruno 2013). EMAV documents its own spiritual practices in its media archive (Pietrobruno 2012b), and the community has produced a promotional video with English and Turkish versions that are featured on its website (emav.org 2010) and on YouTube (see Ayar 2010a, 2010b). The presence of the camera may be intertwined with the issue of gender. In an informal discussion with me, a woman dervish mentioned that she is no longer invited to perform in public ceremonies because she is too old, roughly over forty. She added that only younger women take part in the ceremonies. I noticed that most of the women dervishes in sema ceremonies were between twenty and thirty-five years old, with one or two exceptions. Although there are many young 342

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Illustration 24.1 An EMAV Mevlevi Sema Ceremony featuring women dervishes dressed in colored robes, male dervishes in white roles, a male master of the dance or head semazen, and an audience who is permitted to take photographs of the performance in 2012 (© Sheenagh Pietrobruno).

men who take part in the ceremony, men can be older. For instance, the postnisin and the head semazen are often over forty. This decision to exclude older women from dervish ceremonies can be viewed as the patriarchal bias that older women, but not older men, are physically unattractive and hence not appealing to viewing audiences and the camera. The presence of the camera also could enhance the movement aesthetics of EMAV’s public spiritual ceremonies. During my observations, I noticed that dervishes hold their bodies high with arms well positioned throughout the whirling in the ideal position—their right palm toward the sky to receive the divine and their left palm toward the Earth. The dervishes wear either flowing white robes, colored robes, or a combination of both. Traditionally, ceremonies that exclude women from public performances generally feature dervishes in white robes. With the refined whirling style of the young and vibrant, yet spiritually composed, dervishes dressed in flowing white and/or multicolored robes, EMAV performances can be visually stunning (see Illustration 24.1). These aesthetic elements are not so pronounced when EMAV performs the ceremony outside public space and away from the cameras of spectators. During my fieldwork, I was invited to attend a sema dance of about 10 minutes enacted by members of the community during their private community prayer session before the start of the spiritual Thursday evenings. In these private spiritual meetings, members of the community separate along gendered lines, women on one side and men on the other, as is the practice for the public prayers. During these shorter private sema performances, less attention is given to aesthetics (see Illustration 24.2). The members of the community whirl in their regular clothes in a style that is less refined than that of the public performance; all the members of the community in attendance whirl together, including women who are older and do not have a youthful appearance. 343

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Illustration 24.2 A sema dance enacted by members of the community during their private community prayer session before start of the spiritual Thursday evenings in 2012 (© Sheenagh Pietrobruno).

I also witnessed the relation between aesthetics and public ceremonies in other sites that constituted my fieldwork. In  2012, I attended exclusively male ceremonies at the Galata Mevlevihanesi Lodge in Istanbul (Pietrobruno 2014, 749; 2016, 125). Observers were allowed to record these performances, which are highly aesthetic in terms of their whirling style. In 2012, along with a group of tourists, I also attended the exclusively male performances of the Cerrahi-Kadiri Sufi order, a suborder of the Mevlevi order (And 2005, 90) at the Nureddin Cerrahi Lodge in Istanbul. The Cerrahi-Kadiri spiritual ceremonies include a whirling dance like the sema of the Mevlevi order (And 2005). Observers were not allowed to record these performances. Hence, there are no recordings of these whirling performances by the Cerrahi-Kadiri order at the Nureddin Cerrahi Lodge in Istanbul uploaded by tourists on YouTube. I noticed that the style of the male dervishes of this order was less aesthetic: their bodily stance conveyed a sloppy turning style in contrast to the more upright, controlled, and stylized whirling performed by the male dervishes at the Galata Lodge and by the members of EMAV in their public performances. There may be a relationship between the less refined style of Cerrahi-Kadiri’s whirling and the absence of tourist cameras during the performances. Even though I saw live dance during my fieldwork at EMAV and at the Galata Lodge, these performances may integrate the presence of the camera and be transformed by the process (see Illustration 24.1). As Rosenberg (2012, 20) writes, “Such pressure ‘to perform for the camera’ undoubtedly alters or at least disturbs live performance.” Along with cameras, YouTube may also influence the aesthetics of live performances, as the platform distributes the greatest number of live sema performances in comparison to other video-hosting services, including Vimeo, and to leading performance institutions, such as the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and the Centre nationale de danse in France. 344

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My fieldwork conclusions may be influenced by my background—a Canadian feminist scholar who identifies cultural patterns and structures along gendered lines. This tendency to interpret culture in Turkey in gendered terms also could stem from my employment as an assistant professor for five years (2005–2010) at a religiously conservative university, during which time I observed patterns of behavior that I deemed to be patriarchal. In my informal discussions with Turkish female members of the community, some of them did not want to refer to dervishes in gendered terms but preferred to see men and women as human beings whose essence or soul in the sema is not  burdened by societal distinctions such as those based on gender. I concluded that their position reflected Rumi’s philosophy, which seeks to eradicate the differences that ground human beings in the temporal and earthly realm (Barks 2004). The way that these women dervishes described themselves without reference to gender distinctions suggests Clifford Geertz’s (1993) ethnographic category of “experiencenear,” which refers to descriptions that people employ to talk about their own world (Hine 2015, 27). My description of the practices of the sema through the prism of gender could be viewed in light of Geertz’s (1993) category of “experience-distant,” as my focus is built upon concepts that I have drawn from my personal experiences in Turkey as well as from feminist academic texts—contexts that are outside of the specific situation of EMAV (Hine 2015, 27). Interviews at UNESCO in Paris enabled me to ascertain that my “experience-distant” description of the sema is not  merely an individual, subjective, or self-indulgent response grounded solely in my academic feminist background and my biases toward a cultural practice that is not my own. In an interview, Cécile Duvelle, chief of the Intangible Cultural Heritage section in Paris until 2015, disclosed to me her awareness that the representatives of nationstates often exclude the involvement of women from the national heritage practices officially safeguarded through UNESCO’s convention. Duvelle also noted that this concern for gender should not be restricted to two categories but needs to consider all six genders (Pietrobruno 2015b). These are male, female, intersexed, transgendered, transsexual, and two-spirited. Expanding my field of analysis to interviews at UNESCO enabled me to triangulate to a certain extent my research focus to demonstrate that the issue of gender within the domain of intangible heritage is a wider concern shared by representatives of this global institution. Istanbul’s secondhand bookshops also became field sites whose vintage popular magazines and tourist brochures provided historical documentation of the gendered practices of EMAV. These sources produced research findings such as the following. In 1993, the dede of EMAV allowed women to perform alongside their male counterparts in public sema ceremonies upon the request of a woman dervish named Didem Edman (Ayman 2004, 54). For the next few years, women dervishes at EMAV wore scarves over their hats to cover their hair that distinguished them from the male dervishes whose hats were not  draped with fabric. To achieve greater equality between men and women, a decision was made in the mid-1990s that women do not need to wear these veils. The presence of this absent veil can sometimes be observed in the clothes worn in contemporary performances, where it takes the form of a thin, long scarf that only women dervishes wrap around their necks and let flow over their twirling robes (tennure) (see Illustration 24.1).

Mevlevi Sema ceremony videos and YouTube’s screens UNESCO as well as other institutions, communities, and individuals have uploaded videos of the sema to YouTube, circulating this dance within a digital space. I have mapped out the terrain that I use to analyze the sema in live circumstances. YouTube produces another field within an online space that brings together a multitude of videos from numerous contexts, 345

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time periods, and perspectives. I argue that analyzing a YouTube video as though it were separate from this digital platform does not fully capture the political and cultural potential of this site for dance research on intangible heritage. Just as the multi-sited field that I have outlined is subjective, since I chose its parameters, the field that is constructed by YouTube is also subjective because it is produced through the keywords that I have selected. For example, to create a field that exhibits the tensions I have outlined between official safeguarding practices and female dervishes in Turkey, I chose keywords that combine the title of the video of the sema uploaded by UNESCO, “Mevlevi Sema Ceremony,” and the Turkish word for women dervishes, “kadın semazenler.” When I put these search terms—“Mevlevi Sema Ceremony + kadın semazenler”—in the search box, a search engine result page (SERP) appears in which each video is depicted with a still shot from the video, the name of the channel, the upload year, the number of views, and metadata, including the titles uploaded by users. The order and ranking of these videos are determined by the keywords that I have selected, in combination with algorithms, Google’s business policies, and user-generated metadata, such as comments. With the goal of monetizing the site, algorithms are combined with usergenerated content to rank the videos that appear under these keywords. YouTube is a commercial platform governed by Google’s business policies that are in place primarily to obtain revenue through video searches. The platform’s ranking algorithms, which hierarchize the order of videos, are dependent upon a range of signals, including likes and dislikes, watch time, number of views, relevance of metadata, and freshness of videos (Pietrobruno 2018). The subjective potential of YouTube as a field of analysis for dance research is enhanced by the personalization of search results, which are targeted to my internet protocol (IP) address to monetize my activities according to the algorithmic tracking of my perceived private media consumption needs. Personal characteristics gleaned from communication through my IP address, such as age, gender, place of residence, and search habits, are incorporated in the SERPs. Research biases are concretely transmitted through personalization that produces SERPs (Ørmen 2014, 200). My biases, which are linked to my identity and perspectives and transmitted in my actual ethnographic research, are reproduced in another manner and in other contexts through personalization. My identity, translated through an IP address, impacts the videos I see under a SERP. Analyzing dance videos on YouTube coincides with ethnographic strategies for internet research that highlight how findings are impacted by the embeddedness of the researcher within the digital field of analysis (Hine 2016). Although reflexivity in ethnographic research demands that I become aware of the biases that are integrated into my analysis and render them transparent, the way that personalization impacts the lists of videos that I obtain through a given SERP is not rendered explicit by Google. As Google keeps its algorithms a secret, I can never fully know how my personal biases as identified by YouTube’s technologies impact the videos that I see and their order under a keyword. The appearance of videos under the above search term, which constructs my field of analysis, is governed by this complexity of YouTube’s multimedia screens, or architecture—texts, images, videos, and lists—whose order and composition are produced by algorithms, business models, and personalization, as well as user communication and activities. YouTube’s screens are not static but are constantly shifting based on changes in the ranking order and composition of the videos listed under a specific keyword. Within this changing and unstable platform that produces multiple screens under a search term, I analyzed SERPs with the keywords “Mevlevi Sema Ceremony + kadın semazenler” for 1 week from July 5–12, 2017. To provide an example, seventeen of the twenty videos 346

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that appeared under this search term on July 12 showcase male-exclusive sema performances. These videos conform to the safeguarding practice of the Turkish government to promote its political and nationalist agenda, which excludes women dervishes from public performances. This list includes the official video of the Mevlevi Sema ceremony uploaded by UNESCO (2009b). This video is a shortened video of a longer version that was produced by the International Mevlana Foundation for the sema candidature file on behalf of the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism. As mentioned, the candidature file explicitly excludes EMAV and hence women dervishes from official safeguarding. A video uploaded by the channel mevlanafoundation (2011) is also featured on the list and showcases a sema featuring only male dervishes. The list also features many videos of sema performances in Konya, the birthplace of the sema, where women are prohibited from performing the sema in public (see Mehmet Sökmen Tv-Video Prodüksiyon 2012; Jozsev 2014; Movik 2016). Only one of the twenty videos listed includes women dervishes in a public sema performance of a Mevlevi community in Turkey. The  tabulation of this video, entitled “ERKadinalar Ayini” (Baydar 2015), in the context of the list counters the official safeguarding strategy put forward by the Turkish nation-state through UNESCO’s convention. This  juxtaposition takes place when this video is read through the prism of the architecture of YouTube, which produces lists of videos that can be contrasted with each other. As “ERKadinalar Ayini” features a performance by EMAV, an in-depth analysis of this specific video is put forward (Pietrobruno 2018). The inclusion of this video on a list that promotes primarily male dervishes is interpreted through the lens of the fieldwork that I have conducted. This online analysis further expands my fieldwork, as new conclusions can be drawn that extend beyond the scope of the fieldwork conducted in 2012. This video features a segment of a performance by EMAV in which a female dervish leads the ceremony as the postnisin and in which the head semazen, or dance master, is also a woman. This video can be viewed as a follow-up to my interview with the dede of EMAV, who claimed that women can occupy leadership roles in the community if they achieve sufficient spiritual awareness. As the postnisin replaces the dede in the sema, this video shows that it is a woman dervish who is standing in for the male head of the community. A close look at the video reveals that the postnisin is wearing a veil over her dervish hat to cover her hair, as all women dervishes did for the first few years after 1993 when EMAV women community members were permitted to perform the sema in public. The other women dervishes in the ceremony are not wearing a scarf. The donning of a veil distinguishes the woman postnisin from the male ones I observed during my fieldwork. The video does not explain the scarf ’s significance for the community. My interpretation of the reappearance of the scarf solely for the woman postnisin is that the burgeoning gender parity in the context of leadership roles in the sema is counterbalanced by distinguishing women from men. This reading stems from my previous fieldwork, in addition to personal interpretations that may not reflect those put forward by the community, including the woman dervish in question. This video appeared as the first video under my keyword search during my week of analysis as a result of numerous factors that I have previously outlined, including algorithms, YouTube signals, and personalization. If this video is personalized to my IP address and linked to my identity characteristics and previous search history in order to monetize my communication and behavior through Google’s corporate power regime, this personalization has been paradoxically serendipitous since it has enhanced my fieldwork (Mahnke and Uprichard 2014, 260; Pietrobruno 2016). 347

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Conclusion The video “ERKadinalar Ayini” (Baydar 2015), featuring a female postnisin, transports my ethnography to another temporal level by revealing that since my fieldwork in 2012, EMAV has granted women greater leadership in the sema ceremonies. The emerging gender parity within EMAV’s leadership depicted in the video “ERKadinalar Ayini” occurs through the prism of a visually splendid performance that could be simultaneously reproducing within its aesthetic dimensions another form of gender difference besides the female postnisin’s donning a scarf. The dance style in the video is refined and elegant, and the colors of the dervish clothing are coordinated. For instance, the green scarf that the postnisin wears over her hat is coordinated with the green robe of one of the two male dervishes and the green scarves that the women dervishes wear around their necks and let hang over their white robes to symbolize the headscarf that they wore in the early 1990s. The other male dervish wears a red robe, which matches the red ceremonial sheepskin rug, which marks the place of the dede on the sema floor, which in this case is occupied by a woman postnisin. The sema portrayed in this video is enacted by women between the ages of twenty and thirty-five who whirl alongside two men in their early twenties. As my ethnographic research reveals, the aesthetically pleasing aspects of this live performance of a woman dervish leading the ceremony captured on YouTube could be influenced by the presence of the camera, which in turn may contribute to the production of gender imbalances in performances because the beauty of this sema is also connected to its exclusion of older women from public spectacles. At  the same time, the video of a woman leading a sema powerfully challenges the exclusion of women dervishes from official safeguarding as put forward by the Turkish government through UNESCO’s convention. This is the position that predominates in the male-exclusive videos of the sema tabulated on the first SERP under the keywords “Mevlevi Sema Ceremony + kadın semazenler.” The countering of official versions of the sema arises through the juxtapositions of videos listed on the SERP I analyzed, which was produced by YouTube’s architecture. Videos tabulated on YouTube’s lists are governed by user-generated content, including keywords, algorithms, and Google monetization strategies, such as the personalization of SERPs. These elements combine to produce YouTube’s shifting screens, or architecture. Interpretations of individual videos through their relation to other videos on a SERP are enriched through reference to frames of meaning. Within the context of the sema, these frames include actual ethnography of dance practices, interviews at UNESCO, and historical and contemporary research. Analyzing dance videos within YouTube’s architecture through the prism of these frames can produce new research findings that provide a rich dialogue between offline and online sources of dance knowledge. As the case study of the sema dance exemplifies, this interplay between video content, the platform’s architecture, and actual fieldwork adds to the cultural and political significance of individual dance videos.

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Algorithmic choreographies ———. 2010b. “The Foundation of Universal Lovers of Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi (EMAV).” YouTube. Accessed July 13, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhniyfaSOJo. Aykan, Bahar. 2012.“Intangible Heritage’s Uncertain Political Outcomes: Nationalism and the Remaking of Marginalized Cultural Practices in Turkey.” PhD dissertation, City University of New York, New York. Ayman, Oya. 2004. “Kadın Semazenler (Women Whirling Dervishes).” National Geographic Türkiye, April, 46–60. Bakirci, Naci. 2010. Mevlana. Istanbul: Silk Road Productions. Baldick, Julian. 1989. Mystical Islam: An Introduction to Sufism. New York: New York University Press. Barks, Coleman. 2004. Essential Rumi, expanded ed.Translated by Coleman Barks with Reynold Nicholson, Arthur John Arberry, and John Moyne. New York: Harper One. Baydar, Turner. 2015. “ERKadinlarAyini.” YouTube. Accessed July 12, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=MBcO957jji8. Borelli, Melissa Blanco. 2016. “A Dance Between Chaos and Complexity: Choreographing the Spasm in Music Videos.” International Journal of Screendance 6: 57–77. Casetti, Francesco. 2017. “What Is a Screen Nowadays?” In The Screen Media Reader: Culture,Theory, Practice, edited by Stephen Monteiro, 29–38. New York: Bloomsbury. Couchot, Edmond. 2017. “The Ordered Mosaic, or the Screen Overtaken by Computation.” In The Screen Media Reader: Culture,Theory, Practice, edited by Stephen Monteiro, 133–141. New York: Bloomsbury. emav.org. 2010. “EMAV Video Gallery.” Accessed April  18, 2017. https://www.emav.org/home/ video-gallery. Erzen, Jale. 2008. “The Dervishes Dance—The Sacred Ritual of Love.” Contemporary Aesthetics 6. Accessed September 12, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7523862.0006.007. Fremantle, Anne. 1976. “Whirling Dervishes.” History Today 26 (5): 329–334. Geertz, Clifford. 1993. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. London: Fontana Press. Geoffroy, Éric. 2010. Introduction to Sufism:The Inner Path of Islam. Translated by Roger Gaetani. Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom. Helminski, Camille Adams. 2003. Women and Sufism: A Hidden Treasure: Writing and Stories of Mystic Poets, Scholars and Saints. Boston, MA: Shambhala. Hine, Christine. 2015. Ethnography for the Internet: Embedded, Embodied and Everyday. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2016. “From Virtual Ethnography to the Embedded, Embodied, Everyday Internet.” In  The  Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography, edited by Larrisa Hjorth, Heather Horst, Anne Galloway, and Genevieve Bell, 21–28. London: Routledge. Holbrook, Victoria Rowe. 1992. “Diverse Tastes in the Spiritual Life: Textual Play in the Diffusion of Rumi’s Order.” In The Legacy of Mediaeval Persian Sufism, edited by Leonard Lewisohn, 99–120. London: Khaniqahi Nimatullahi. Huhtamo, Erkki. 2017. “Screenology; or Media Archaeology of the Screen.” In The Screen Media Reader: Culture,Theory, Practice, edited by Stephen Monteiro, 77–123. New York: Bloomsbury. International Mevlana Foundation, ed. 2004. Candidature File of the Mevlevi Sema Ceremony for UNESCO’s Proclamation of “Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.” Unpublished manuscript. Jackson, Naomi. 2016.“A Rhizomatic Revolution: Popular Dance,YouTube and Exchange in Screendance.” In The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies, edited by Douglas Rosenberg, 695–714. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jones, Adanna Kai. 2016. “Can Rihanna Have Her Cake and Eat It  Too? A  Schizophrenic Search for Resistance with the Screened Spectacles of a Winin’ Fatale.” In  The  Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies, edited by Douglas Rosenberg, 677–694. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jozsev, V. 2014. “Sema Ceremony  – Whirling Dervishes Konya, Turkey/Kerengö Dervisek.” Accessed July 12, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7rHT7nYuM4. Lenzerini, Federico. 2011. “Intangible Cultural Heritage: The Living Culture of Peoples.” European Journal of International Law 22 (1): 101–120. Lixinski, Lucas. 2011. “The Interplay of Art, Politics and Identity.” European Journal of International Law 22 (1): 81–100. Mahnke, Martina, and Emma Uprichard. 2014. “Algorithming the Algorithm.” In  Society of the Query Reader: Reflections on Web Search, edited by René König and Miriam Rasch, 256–270. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. Marcus, George E. 1995. “Ethnography in/of the World System: The  Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95–117. ———. 1998. Ethnography through Thick and Thin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Sheenagh Pietrobruno McPherson, Katrina. 2016. “Watch Films, Watch Dance Films, Watch More Dance Films.” International Journal of Screendance 6: 153–165. Mehmet Sökmen Tv-Video Prodüksiyon. 2012. “Şeb-i Aruz Törenleri Semazen Sema Sunumu Seb i Aruz Whirling Dervish Sema Ceremony Presentation.” YouTube. Accessed July  12, 2017. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=HjYpaYNKUCQ. Mernissi, Fatima. 1991. The Veil and the Male Elite. Translated by Mary Jo Lakeland. New York: Basic Books. mevlanafoundation. 2011. “Sema Ceremony–Whirling Dervishes.” YouTube. Accessed July  12, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qdi-it43j30. Mitchell, Tracie. 2017. “Influences.” International Journal of Screendance 8: 113–118. Movik, Movik. 2016. “Mevlevi Sema Gösterisi.” YouTube. Accessed July  12, 2017. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=yuD-A63ubZ4. Nurbakhsh, Javad. 1992. “Foreword:Two Approaches to the Principle of the Unity of Being.” In The Legacy of Mediaeval Persian Sufism, edited by Leonard Lewisohn, ix–xiii. London: Khaniqahi Nimatullahi. Ørmen, Jacob. 2014. “Historicizing Google Search: A Discussion of the Challenges Related to Archiving Search Results.” In  Society of the Query Reader: Reflections on Web Search, edited by René König and Miriam Rasch, 188–202. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. Pietrobruno, Sheenagh. 2012a. “Mevlevi Sema Ceremony Istanbul 2012 Summer.” Accessed April 13, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwOlimisFk8&t=55s. ———. 2012b. Woman semazen in conversation with author, August. ———. 2012c. The dede in conversation with author, July. ———. 2013. “YouTube and the Social Archiving of Intangible Heritage.” New Media and Society 15 (8): 1259–1276. ———. 2014. “Between Narratives and Lists: Performing Digital Intangible Heritage.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 20 (7–8): 742–775. ———. 2015a. “Social Media and Whirling Dervishes: Countering UNESCO’s Cultural Heritage.” Performing Islam 4 (1): 3–25. ———. 2015b. Cécile Duvelle interview with author, September 7. ———. 2016. “YouTube and Intangible Cultural Heritage: Disseminating Communication Expressions within a Commercial Platform.” In Intangible Cultural Heritage and Digital Tools:Transmission, Participation, Issues, edited by Marta Severo and Séverine Cachat, 109–130. Paris: L’Harmattan. ———. 2018. “YouTube Flow and the Transmission of Heritage: The Interplay of Users, Content, and Algorithms.” Convergence:The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 24 (6): 523–537. Recollet, Karyn T. D. 2014. “Dancing ‘between the Break Beats’: Contemporary Indigenous Thought and Cultural Expression through Hip-Hop.” In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen, edited by Melissa Blanco Borelli, 412–428. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rosenberg, Douglas. 2012. Screendance: Inscribing the Ephemeral Image. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sagolla, Lisa. 2008. “Dance/Movement: Dance Gems on YouTube.” Backstage West 15 (7): 14. Senyuz, Arif. 2013. “HZR. MEVLANANIN DOĞUM GÜNÜ KUTLAMASI  – SEMA.” YouTube. Accessed July 13, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQIuBoTQaaI. Tanrıkorur, Bârihüdâ S. 2004. “Mevlevihanes: Their Organization and Function.” In Candidature File of the Mevlevi Sema Ceremony for UNESCO’s Proclamation of “Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity,” edited by International Mevlana Foundation, 25–34. Unpublished Manuscript. Tsai, Addie. 2016. “Hybrid Texts, Assembled Bodies: Michel Gondry’s Merging of Camera and Dancer in ‘Let Forever Be.’” International Journal of Screendance 6: 17–38. UNESCO. 2003. Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. Accessed September 8, 2012. http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?pg=00006. ———. 2009a. “Mevlevi Sema Ceremony.” Accessed July  12, 2017. https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/ mevlevi-sema-ceremony-00100. ———. 2009b. “The Mevlevi Sema Ceremony.”YouTube. Accessed August 4, 2012. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=_umJcGodNb0. ———. 2016. “Browse the Lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage and the Register of Good Safeguarding Practices.” Accessed July 5, 2017. http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?pg=00011.

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Dance and scenography

25 DRESSING DANCE–DANCING DRESS Lived experience of dress and its agency in the collaborative process Jessica Bugg Introduction This chapter considers the agency and experience of dress and costume in the creative and collaborative process of making contemporary dance work and explores the complexity of its relationship to the body. Contemporary dance embraces aspects of other dance forms, including physical dance, modern, lyrical, and classical ballet, and is often experimental. It is understood differently in its cultural and socio-political contexts, and being a highly visual, abstract, and collaborative art form, the potential for new forms of costume or dress is vast. In a climate of significant developments in costume in the broader field of performance and scenography, I question why there is a tendency in contemporary dance to perpetuate familiar styles and tropes of dress. Contemporary dance wear has remained largely body conscious, prioritizing ease of movement and functioning as visual enhancement, applied to the dance primarily through applications of color or texture in unitards and developments of everyday dress or rehearsal wear. Limited attention has been paid to the lived experience of dress from the perspectives of designers, wearers, and audiences, and this neglect I argue can result in the active and experiential potentials of costume being overlooked or poorly integrated into contemporary dance (Bugg 2014, 69). Although dance and dress are visual and bodily mediums, a purely aesthetic or ergonomic approach to costume in dance overlooks the wider phenomenological potential of dress and, as F. Elizabeth Hart identifies, visual aspects of performance find “common ground … literally, within the human body-between semiotic and phenomenological approaches” (McConachie and Hart 2006, 9). Donatella Barbieri (2017, xxii) underscores the significance of such an approach, discussing how its “ability to communicate metaphorically and viscerally provides a direct, visual and embodied connection,” for both the audience and the performer. Over the past decade, the role and agency of costume in performance has started to come to the forefront in academic writing, particularly in studies of scenography with costume-related chapters and special editions of publications such as Collins and Nisbet (2010), McKinney and Palmer (2017), Bugg (2014), and Zoubir-Shaw (2016). Most recently 353

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in 2016, the Studies in Costume and Performance Journal,1 founded by Donatella Barbieri and Sofia Pantouvaki, has provided a much-needed dedicated space for academic writing on costume in performance. Key exhibitions—including Extreme Costume, Prague Quadrennial in the Czech Republic (2011); Hollywood Costume at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2012); and the Critical Costume International conference and exhibition initiated in 2013— have supported the growing dialogue around the role of costume in performance. Costume, like fashion before it, is becoming elevated to a serious level of academic debate in the context of the body and performance. There is a burgeoning research culture in costume within performance studies in the UK, Finland, and Australia, and the emergence of texts in the field: Barbieri (2017), Monks (2011), and Trimingham (2011). As Barbieri discusses, there is a noticeable lack of documentation of the experience of costume, or indeed of the costumes, in archives and museums. She also questions why costume remains at the margins in publications on performance despite its long history as a central scenographic element in the making of performance (Barbieri 2017, xxii). Although dress in dance has started to find its voice in these broader contexts, it remains relatively unexplored with a few notable exceptions such as Fensham (2011),2 Barbieri (2012, 2017), Monks (2011), Bugg (2014, 2016), and Mackrell (1997). Rachel Fensham’s archival research into the effect of costume on natural movement technique in early twentieth century dance underscores this gap in knowledge, explaining that there is “little substantive literature on the use and representation of costume in dance” (Fensham 2011, 83.) Very little has been written on the lived experience of dress in contemporary dance in which the costume’s relationship to the body is specifically potent, not only because of its abstracted aesthetic symbolism but also in its physical, experiential, and kinesthetic engagement with the body in movement. Despite a growing field of research on the body and dress in sociology, anthropology, art, fashion, and dance theory—Negrin (2013); Entwistle (2000); Entwistle and Wilson (2001); Cavallaro and Warwick (1998); and Johnson and Foster (2007)—little critical attention has been given systematically to the embodied and experiential potential of costume in contemporary dance. My own practice-led research has used such approaches to the subject to extend communication between designers, dancers, and viewers and to elevate the role of dress in dance. This  work is extended here through analysis of interviews with choreographers, designers, and dancers to understand the role of dress in the collaborative process of making contemporary dance. Through analysis of the interviews, I expose how a deeper engagement with the corporeal experience of dress can activate costume as more than an applied visual overlay or at worse as a disconnected scenographic interference to an already existing choreography.

Methods for understanding bodily experience of dress in dance I have sought to achieve a more integrated approach to clothing design and movement in the production of short dance and dress-based films that seek to extend communication through an embodied understanding of dress in performance. Over a period of seven years I worked with one dancer from Random Dance Company on sustained, research-focused collaborations that aimed to destabilize hierarchical methods of design and production by introducing costume from the start as an active agent in the development of dance. The aim of this research was to understand lived experience of dress in dance from the perspective of the designer, wearer and potentially, the viewer. By integrating theory, practice, and social science methods, I explored how design and dance can be generated through approaches that symbiotically produce embodied knowledge, movement, and dress to achieve more integrated works. 354

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The research process used a grounded theory approach, in which, rather than beginning with a “pre-conceived theory in mind” (Strauss and Corbin 1998, 12), I started with a broader field of investigation. In this case, an exploration of the relationship between dress and dance, and how dress could be more actively engaged in the making of contemporary dance.The data were generated through practice from which theory emerged, and this iterative dialogue continued in feedback loop. The research was undertaken in an experimental laboratory situation using methods of observational visual analysis, reflective practice, open-ended interviews, and critical analysis. It focused on the single performer’s phenomenological experience and the impact of embodied approaches to design as well as the audience’s reception of the final works. Although this approach enabled me to be reflective as both the researcher/observer and designer/observer (Thomas 2003, 77), I recognized a need for greater subjectivity and an understanding of dance in a professional context rather than from a visual arts research perspective. By undertaking interviews with a broader sample of dancers, designers, and choreographers, as discussed, has facilitated a deeper understanding of the experience, perception, and agency of dress in the production of contemporary dance works.3 The interviews form part of the overall phenomenological approach, seeking to understand how garments are perceived and “experienced firsthand by those involved” (Denscombe 2003, 97). They  are informed by my own experience and that of the dancer I worked with in my research. This approach enabled me to question and uncover my own assumptions and to understand my “role as a social actor in the research” (Thomas 1993, 76). Three key areas emerged through analysis of my previous research: First, the presence and absence of dress in dance and the impact of how and when costume is integrated in the choreographic process. Second, the agency of dress and the embodied, sensory, kinesthetic, and perceptual experience of the participants. Finally, questions about how collaborations function when working with dress in contemporary dance and how it is integrated into overall communication of the work. These focus areas inform the structure of the interviews and this chapter develops an analysis of the main themes emerging from the interviews. To date, fifteen in-depth, sixty-minute, semi-structured interviews have been conducted over four years with six contemporary choreographers, five designers, and four dancers. These have been audio recorded and transcribed to enable the researcher to revisit them as knowledge has been attained and to ensure that a true account of the individual’s experience has been presented (Denscombe 2003, 175). Interviews were not always conducted in a linear manner, and when valuable conversation emerged, this conversation also has been captured and informs the subsequent interview. Ten open-ended questions were drawn out in relation to the key themes that provided a framework for the interviews and have been targeted to the nuances of the participants’ discipline.This method facilitated a deeper understanding of the way collaborations involving costume function from the different perspectives. A qualitative content analysis has focused on drawing out repetitive themes and patterns across the data, enabling comparisons between the experience of dancers, designers, and choreographers.

Dress in dance–presence and absence Costume has been more obviously present or absent in the choreographic process at different times in history and engaged by choreographers to perform different functions to suit choreographic styles and approaches. It has been employed to enhance or enable movement, provide symbolism in performance, communicate character, or mirror everyday dress to extend the aesthetic of the dance and, occasionally as a tool, to extend the dance. Despite these diverse functions, dress in contemporary dance has tended to be used as a visual or functional support 355

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for the dance (Bugg 2014, 69). This trend is seen in the use of body-conscious, second-skin garments, such as leotards and tights or the brightly colored unitard that was, as Judith Mackrell (1997, 223–224) notes, popularized with the introduction of Lycra in the 1970s, but also “maximised freedom with minimum movement distraction.” Perhaps the most prevailing trope is that of rehearsal wear, jeans, and T-shirts or ergonomically cut developments of everyday dress. This focus on functional dress harks back to the 1960s and 1970s, when, Mackrell explains, it took the form of garments such as dance pajamas or track pants, depending on the focus and approach of the work. By the 1980s “the concept of ordinariness or the anti-dance uniform had become more glamorous” (Mackrell 1997, 224). This preference for everyday dress in one form or another seems to have prevailed ever since. Discussing this preference with interviewees, I asked if they thought costume repeated certain cuts, styles, and forms, and if so, why this may be. Although there was little consensus among the choreographers interviewed as to why more progress has not been made in this area of dance, all acknowledged this to be the case. British choreographer Lea Anderson MBE, artistic director of The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs, both of which she founded in the 1980s, has developed integrated and highly experimental approaches that use the transformative qualities of costume (Connolly 2017, 9). Anderson strongly believes that dance costume has become less innovative than in the 1980s and 1990s when there was a strong correlation between the club scene and new forms of cabaret and dance in London. She explains that in her work there remains a bit “anti-dance world thinking” and elaborates saying: I will not present anything in dance pajamas, and I will not present anything in bare feet, I just don’t understand what that means apart from you just got out of bed or I’m not dressed? (Anderson 2016) Three of the choreographers spoke of an ongoing trend toward “non-costume” or “pedestrian” costume. Interdisciplinary dance artist Marie-Gabrielle Rotie works closely in collaboration with designers, developing costume and choreography through devised processes. She discussed how the absence of costume in contemporary dance could be attributed to the enduring influence of postmodern dance approaches in the 1960s and 1970s that prioritized movement and everyday aesthetics and led to a “stripping away of theatre and theatricalization” (Rotie 2016). She noted that scenographic and visual aspects of dance became perhaps less important, and that increasingly, postmodern dance languages have infiltrated into a language of the pedestrian by nature of association. Dancers can walk, they can run, they can sit, they can stand therefore there is a tendency to use every day costume as well. (2016) Australian independent choreographer Siobhan Murphy, for whom costume has not  been such a central concern in her practice, echoed this shift away from costume toward a preference for dress. She discussed how “there is an anti-costume practice present in independent practice that is about finding something that can look un-costumed” (Murphy 2017). Dancer Lilian Steiner who works for Australian choreographers I have interviewed, including Lucy Guerin, Philip Adams, and Shelley Lasica, reinforced the tendency to use every day dress (Steiner 2018). British choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh (2014) outlined how her own work  draws inspiration from ballet, bharatnatyam, and contemporary dance. She is very much aware of 356

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the importance of costume but “it really depends on whether it is a narrative led dance or pure abstract dance; that’s what makes the difference as to how the costume is deployed.” She notes how the use of loose and comfortable clothes was the classic choice for early contemporary choreographers. On the other hand, companies like Wayne Mc Gregor’s Random Dance focused on “the minimally clothed dancer” where “the body itself became the text of the dance” ( Jeyasingh 2014). She compared these approaches to more theatrical contemporary, narrative led dance, for example, the work of Akram Khan, in which the intention of the dance influences the way costume is approached. The role of costume, she considers, is “to communicate the concept; it also has to function in a way that the lines and whatever you want to tell with the body is possible” ( Jeyasingh 2014). This focus on the choreographer’s vision and the requirements of the movement is one of the most discussed aspects in the interviews. Most choreographers drew attention to the fact that designers need to be prepared to alter and change their work in relation to the movement. Although choreographers and designers also are focused on the functionality of dress in dance, it is not such a prevalent issue, rather the aesthetics and symbolism of dress are the most discussed theme across all the interviews. Choreographer Siobhan Murphy (2017) spoke of her desire to capture a sense of ordinariness with costume to extend the flow of register between audience and performer. Along with others she tries to negotiate what neutral dress is, highlighting the agency of dress in performance where “nothing is neutral, just like there is no body that is uninscribed by history and culture and so on.” She uses clothing in her choreography to create context for the reading of the work. Most choreographers indicated that the designer’s role is to enhance the visual symbolism or aesthetic experience for audiences through costume. Four of the choreographers specifically stated that not only does costume need to make sense in the context of the movement, it must also look good or contemporary. Lucy Guerin, artistic director of Lucy Guerin Inc. (2018), talked about her work in Australia and earlier in New York when she worked more often with costume than she does now. Early on in her career she designed and made her own costumes, wanting “to shift away a little from traditional dance costumes like track pants or unitards,” and seeking “gentle stylistic statement.” The problem that emerges is, although dress can add a stylistic statement to the work, it also has greater agency through its semiotic resonance and the performative nature of the image. Judith Mackrell identifies that dance and fashion are connected, but choreographers who do not want to “give out confusing signals of character, style, period, particularly in plotless work, will generally dress their dance in as uniform a style as possible (1997, 215). This method enables them to get away from associations to a specific place or time. Three of the choreographers talked about how they seek out a contemporary aesthetic. Fashionable clothing can perhaps offer a direct means of accessing the “stylistic statement” referred to by Guerin (2018). This  trend also may be why there has been a proliferation of collaborations between fashion designers and dance in recent years. Most of these have focused on applying a highly visual approach and in some cases have added a rich visual texture to the dance. In others the costume’s aesthetic has distracted from the movement or complicated the reading of the work (Bugg 2016, 174). The interviews have revealed that although links to contemporary aesthetics and fashion are important for choreographers, the style and needs of the choreography dictate how and if dress or costume is used. The visual and/or physical interference of costume in the dance is the central preoccupation for both designers and choreographers. This preoccupation is clearly illustrated in Lucy Guerin’s comments in which she explained how her relationship with costume has become more complex because audiences already “find dance difficult to interpret and are constantly 357

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looking for clues.” Guerin’s frustration is palpable in her comments that “in some works I wish I didn’t need a costume at all, that it wasn’t part of the work. It is so loaded and disruptive. There’s nothing that doesn’t have huge connotations” (Guerin 2018). One of her dancers also finds the aesthetic symbolism of costume difficult to navigate, describing a tension between the aesthetic of the movement and the body, and the aesthetic or semiotic effect of the costume: I feel it is quite a tricky thing because it is such a big part of the image of a work. Costume influences the way an observer reads into the bigger intentions of a work. It is partially the way dress effects the viewing of the body’s movements but also the references that clothing or adornment load on top of what can essentially be abstract movement. (Steiner 2018) This broader understanding of the aesthetic role of costume’s form, color, and texture in relation to kinesthetic and sensory experience is discussed by Rachel Fensham in her writing on natural movement and costume. She explains how the new modern dance approaches in the first part of the twentieth century were not so much about the way costume looked but rather how its materiality contributed to “a natural movement aesthetic” (2011, 83). She  noted how the draped floating scarves and costumes favored by choreographer and teacher Madge Atkinson not only enabled this expanded notion of aesthetic but also drew attention to the importance of how the fabric felt on the body, which then became a source of the dance experience (2011, 84–85). Such embodied investigation of dress in the making of dance works is best illustrated in Martha Graham’s work in the 1930s, when she made her own costumes to use as a tool in her choreography. In Lamentation (1930), for example, Graham’s costumes enabled her to extend the abstracted exploration of grief that was embodied through her interaction with the costume. Here the sensory potential of clothing extends the performer’s ideation and kinesthetic exploration that, in turn, sparks the emotional, sensory, and physical experience of both performer and viewer. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone explains that “we don’t just see a story of grief,” rather we see “its felt form” (2009, 300). Such historical precedents of experimental and embodied uses of costume go as far back as the 1890s and Loïe Fuller’s pioneering works. Fuller’s Danse Serpentine (1896) employed voluminous swathes of cloth, sticks, and lighting (Banes 1987, 2) to extend the aesthetic potential of the body in movement, creating transformative visual spectacle in the site of her body. These precedents demonstrate how costume can enhance and develop the dance, not only through the semiotic or aesthetic communication but also by engaging with the wider sensory and experiential potential. Despite such opportunities to engage costume in the development of dance, the interviews have exposed that some choreographers are wary of the agency of dress in the making of works. As Rotie pointed out, in early modern dance “dress was something that accentuated movement, whereas in contemporary dance there is a sense that the movement is everything and is prior to any other considerations” (Rotie 2016). Philip Adams, artistic director of the Australian company BalletLab, uses scenography and dress in a range of innovative and experimental ways to explore the boundaries of what dance and dress can be. He  points to the underlying tension between the two, discussing the performer’s relationship to the garment in which the impact of costume on the work is sometimes problematic and even overpowering. This same tension emerges through most of the interviews with choreographers, highlighting an ever-present potential for dress to hinder the performer, obscuring or upstaging the body and technique or derailing the

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choreographer’s vision of the work. He noted that costume can “take too much responsibility for what the viewer is seeing as they encounter the work” (Adams 2013). If a designer is sensitive to the needs of the dance and the choreographer understands the potential of dress in performance, a unified aesthetic and communication can be attained. Clothing has the potential to connect wearers and viewers through performance; it is central to our experience of being in the world. Dancers, designers, and choreographers are all acutely aware that costume can have both positive and negative agency in the work.

Agency and embodiment of dress in dance Costume and dress have significant and unstable agency in their direct relationship to the body, and this, as Melissa Trimingham observes, is “nowhere more so than when it transforms the human body visually, physically, in motion and in the charged context of shared performance” (2017, 137). Like the body, costume or dress is never neutral; its meanings are interpreted in social and cultural context/s as well as in the individual’s experience and are “subject to interpretations which are themselves the product of ideologies and belief systems rooted in a particular place and moment in time” (Collins and Nisbet 2010, 231). As I have argued elsewhere clothing in dance can become inseparable from the body and its meanings in performance (Bugg 2016, 189). Dani Cavallaro and Alexandra Warwick write that dress is both “part of the subject and as objects for the subject, which are not accommodated within the body and yet cannot be conceived of as totally separate from it” (1998, 44). More than this, Llewellyn Negrin states, “When we act in the world, we do not act just as bodies, but as clothed bodies, in which our attire becomes an integral part of our corporeal schema” (2016, 130). Indeed, our kinesthetic, haptic, and sensory experience is heightened in which the agency of dress in dance becomes “the enactment of iterative changes to practices through the dynamics of intra-activity” (Barad 2003, 827). This experience creates a performative dynamic not only between the performer and the garment or the dancer and the audience, but between designers, wearers, choreographers, and audiences in the production and the reception of the work. Dress can be remembered or experienced through the body and can trigger sensory, cognitive, and kinesthetic processing that presents opportunities for reimagining and embodiment when experienced in and through movement. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone explains this devised approach as “thinking in movement … the work of an existentially resonant body” (2009, 35). Moreover she suggests that “perception is interlaced with movement and to the point where it is impossible to separate out where perception begins and movement ends” (39). I extend this thinking to include the inseparability of the garment and the body, where dress can no longer be “designated as an attribute of either ‘subject’ or ‘object’ as they do not pre-exist as such” (Barad 2003, 827). From the dancer’s point of view, dress becomes resonant in its relations and interactions with bodies. As Lilian Steiner explained in her interview, “the costume gives you access to a different experience you wouldn’t necessarily carry without the costume” (2018). Carrie Noland’s understanding of agency as “the power to alter … behaviors and beliefs for purposes that may be reactive (resistant) or collaborative (innovative)” (2009, 9), is useful here. It highlights how dress changes the experience of the dancer in movement, and this experience can disrupt or extend the dance. These active, unstable, and transformative qualities create potential as well as pitfalls in the creative and collaborative process of making dance.

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Collaborating in dance through the body and dress Despite the undeniable agency of dress in dance, the interviews expose the fact that costume is a secondary consideration for many choreographers and often is not  introduced until late in the process of production. Lea Anderson (2016) explained that this is because, unlike herself, many choreographers “are not focused on the costume, they filter out costume.” She continued to say that the lack of awareness of costume generally can result in poor costume. Interestingly, she and two other choreographers drew attention to the fact that dancers and choreographers are not taught to think about costume in their training and therefore, it is rarely discussed or considered. One of the choreographers also made the point that collaboration skills in working with scenographic elements are not taught in depth, and another expanded on this, noting that students are also wary of collaborations with visual designers. The choreographer’s awareness and perspective on costume significantly impacts how and if it is integrated into the work. Three designers spoke of the restrictions imposed on the design by some choreographers. Sofia Pantouvaki (2016) observed that this restriction can mean that some designers may revert to “standard types of garments” perhaps because “they have been tested before and proven to work.” She underscores the importance of functionality and explained that “if you know that it is comfortable and allows movement then you can focus on details of cut, pattern, and fabrics.” In her own experience whether working in design for classical ballet or contemporary dance she explained that she has always “found inspiration in contributing to the overall work” through what she terms as “embodied story telling.” Dress is activated in the site of the feeling and experiencing body, it touches the body physically, sensorially, cognitively, and kinesthetically. If we understand senses to include “feelings, emotions, memories, impressions, responses and sensations we associate with dress” ( Johnson and Foster 2007, 2), then this affords a more embodied and sensory understanding of dress in dance. It enables us to move beyond a Cartesian split of mind-body dualism toward a “more personal and mindful body that acts and resists” in response to the experience of dress in movement (115). I have explored with interviewees the visual, physical, sensory, and embodied experience of dress in their work. The visual and symbolic aspects are most commonly discussed across all the interviews. All dancers are aware of how they look and, as one dancer noted, “Although we are aware of how we might look, it is most important to feel comfortable in movement and to be confident that the costuming adds to the visual and kinesthetic experience of the work” (Steiner 2018). Dancer Sarah Augieras revealed how she mediates between her felt experience and the external reading of her physicality and visuality in and through movement. If she is wearing something floaty she feels “more airy and my movement is much more circular. But when you perform in something quite tight you do feel like you are lines and you are so aware of each part of the skin and how it is in space, the lines you create” (2017). In a discussion of her solo work Mythic (2012), Marie-Gabrielle Rotie (2016) described the role of visual and kinesthetic exploration in her work as a soloist, observing that images are not purely aesthetic, they are part of how she feels and visualizes herself in the act of performing. This kinesthetic engagement with images, ideas, and movement is echoed in Cynthia Cohen Bull’s description of her experience of dancing. She says it “stirs very personal associations and images within me as I move,” they stem from “life experiences in cultural settings, both theoretical and social” (1997, 269). Dancers’ comments in the interviews suggest that dress can contribute to this awareness of their own bodies as they perform. 360

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One of the primary concerns for the designers and choreographers interviewed is how the costume feels for the dancer, but this tends to be focused on fit and movement as opposed to the wider phenomenological engagement with dress. All designers mentioned the importance of fittings as a critical time. For Sandy Powell (2016) “the designing happens in the fitting room on a body not  at a desk.” It  clearly emerged that costume is not  a key concern in the production of a performance and often is introduced late in the process. Lucy Guerin (2018) explained that costume is seldom part of her work, but she described a recent award-winning performance, The Dark Chorus (2016), that “was one of the first times that an idea was more costume based.” These costumes were designed by one of her dancers, Ben Handcock, in collaboration with designer Harriet Oxley. This  knowledge of the body in movement and the choreography that the dancer brought to the process perhaps assisted in the sensitivity of the costume to the dance. Several examples emerged in which choreographers have developed their own costumes, working on their own bodies. Some designers, who also had experience as dancers, talked about how this informed their knowledge and empathy for the performers and their understanding of design in movement. Some made a point of working with dress in the process of developing the work, as Rotie explains: I have a toile made of some kind or bring in garments that are like the shape of the thing you will be wearing. I usually ask for things to be made on my body or on the body of who I am working with, so I can see and move how that idea is going to unfold further. (2016) Dress in the context of the moving and experiencing body can enter a dialogue with the body in motion. This dialog demonstrates that dancers are quite prepared to work with extreme costumes so long as they are well integrated within the performance-making process, as opposed to being introduced at the last minute in rehearsals. One dancer who performed in Anderson’s Hand in Glove (2016) discussed how costume is usually introduced a week before the performance to enable the dancers to get used to it. Conversely, she explained how costume was introduced from the start of the production process in Hand in Glove (2016), and this enabled it to contribute and to change the movement (Augieras 2017). Jo Butterworth’s research into human perception, action, and cognition highlights the potential of engaging dancers with devised approaches to costume in dance. She explains devising as “the dialectic between the act of making and doing, of creating and performing, and of being an artist and/or interpreter” (2009, 189). By thinking about costume in this way, as an embodied and unfolding form, it follows that dress in dance needs to be introduced early to enable dancers and choreographers to use and explore its agency in the work. In another example, Anderson’s Russian Roulette (2008) was made up of six highly costumed performances with 163 costumes. Designer Simon Vincenzi’s bulbous shimmering body-morphing creations for the dance encased the whole body and extended the dancers’ bodies into otherworldly forms as they gestured and gyrated in movement. Vincenzi explained how Lea would work for two weeks and then he would go in and watch a run and introduce the costumes. Together with the dancers, they worked for weeks in a room “packed full of the costumes that we were going to use” (Vincenzi 2016). This dialogue between bodies and material enables the costume to inform the movement through an experiential exchange in the making of the work. Anderson discussed how the dancers were complaining after a series of rehearsals about how painful, hot, and disgusting the costumes were to wear. Vincenzi referred to the need to engage dancers creatively 361

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in the development of the work (2016). Costume, no matter how restrictive, can positively engage the performer, but the way it is introduced in the collaborative process is important.

Time, funding, and trust From the interviews with choreographers, funding and lack of time impacts the way collaborations are developed, and subsequently how costume is approached. Finnish designer Karolina Kaiso-Kantilla (2016) observed that the fit of the costume is always tested to determine the ease of movement, but this is done during rehearsals in the actual training space or in the locker room. One choreographer identified that costume is often the lowest priority in the budget, always coming after the lighting that is central to dance. Dancer and choreographer Sanna Myllylahti (2016) explained that time is very limited, as is contact with costume designers or scenographic designers generally, unless working in a big theater environment. Lea Anderson supported this saying that not until she was in a proper theater company could she really make the breakthrough with costume. She pointed out that grants and funding to support innovation are not easily available, and buying time is perhaps the most valuable way of integrating designers and their work into the production of dance. Costume designers do not necessarily need to be present the whole time but, as all the designers have identified, they do need to be there at key points during the production process. Anderson (2016) again described how working with designers has extended her own work and spoke of her “eureka moment of dance and costume,” Flesh and Blood (1989), costumed by Sandy Powell. Sandy attended all the rehearsals and saw the work which had a lot of “floor work, up down up down rolling around and really complex precision stuff” (Anderson 2016). Powell suggested long dresses to the floor made from very expensive silver fabric. While acutely aware of the impact of the movement on the dresses and the way it would affect the performance, she had to rethink the choreography, working the costume into the piece with a far more interesting result, highlighting and working with the movement of clothes. This  type of communication and dialogue takes time, and many choreographers, like Anderson, work with the same costume designers building trust and ways to collaborate, with rules and parameters agreed up front for the specific performance. Communication needs to stay open, collaboration must be reflexive, discursive, and iterative, and all the interviews have unearthed the potential of such relationships to expand the practices of all collaborators.

Conclusion This research used interviews within a phenomenological methodology to uncover the experience of dress in the context of the moving, sensing, and experiencing body for dancers, choreographers, and designers. Dress and dance are, as I have demonstrated, inextricably interconnected through lived experiences of the bodies that move with and within them, and in movement they can become symbiotic. This interconnection presents new understandings and opportunities that can inform the development of the work. Dress in contemporary dance is far more than a practical or visual application. It is fundamentally phenomenological, resonating in its relationship to the bodies that wear, view, and experience it in both the production and reception of the work. The interviews reveal that a better understanding between the creative approaches and methods of all collaborators is required. A lack of awareness or openness on the part of the choreographer, designer, or indeed the dancer can derail the integration of costume within dance, resulting in all the collaborators reverting to their own familiar methods and training. 362

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More than this, there needs to be an awareness of the different agencies of the body that pertain to each discipline and an understanding of what this may mean for the specific work. I have discussed how, by introducing dress into the development of dance early in the process, as opposed to later in the final dress rehearsals, the lived experience of dancers and the agency of dress in the context of the body can be leveraged. This  approach not  only offers the opportunity for more integrated approaches to costume in dance but also can offer a greater potential for discovery, ideation, and communication in the production process and in the communication of the work. Collaborating with dress in the site of the body offers opportunities to take all participants somewhere new through an experiential and embodied exchange that is unique to each collaboration. In order to engage in effective collaborations that open up new approaches and outcomes, it is imperative that there is understanding and trust between the disciplines involved. The necessity of building more time into the process of creation has been highlighted, and this requires funding. Traditional processes, hierarchies, timelines, and financial constraints can preclude depth of collaboration. These constraints contribute to a growing tendency to avoid costume innovation or to repeat tried and tested approaches. As such, costume can be rendered as an insignificant element in the dance work, or as a visual or functional support to the performance, rather than considering its potential agenic function. One of the most significant findings from the interviews was the positive and the negative agency that dress can have. I propose that this could be why some choreographers avoid engaging with dress in dance in more innovative ways and that this lack of engagement with costume’s agency and embodied potential often results in poorly integrated costume. The interviews have shown that the most successful collaborations work with, rather than against, this agency and with the phenomenological potential of dress in its relationship to the dancing and experiencing body.

Notes 1 See: https://www.intellectbooks.com/studies-in-costume-performance. 2 See also Carter and Fensham (2011). 3 This  was undertaken with RMIT University ethics approval “Dancing Dress-Dressing Dance” Reference: 0000019661-09/15.

References Adams, Phillip. 2013. Interviewed by the author in Melbourne, Australia. April 8. Anderson, Lea. 2016. Interviewed by the author in London. November 25. Augieras, Sara. 2017. Interviewed by the author in London. March 31. Banes, Sally. 1987. Terpsichore in Sneakers: Postmodern Dance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3): 827. Barbieri, Donatella. 2012. Encounters in the Archive: Reflections on Costume. V&A Online Journal, 4. Accessed March 28, 2019. http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/journals/research-journal/issue-no.-4-summer-2012/ encounters-in-the-archive-reflections-on-costume/. ———. 2017. Costume in Performance: Materiality, Culture, and the Body. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Bugg, Jessica. 2014. “Dancing Dress: Experiencing and Perceiving Dress in Movement.” Scene 2 (1–2): 67–80. ———. 2016. “Drawing with the Body and Cloth.” In Embodied Performance, edited by Sadia Zoubir-Shaw, 169–193. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press. Butterworth, Jo. 2009. “Too Many Cooks? A Framework for Dancing Making and Devising.” In Contemporary Choreography: A Critical Reader, edited by Jo Butterworth and Liesbeth Wildschut, 177–194. Abingdon: Routledge.

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Jessica Bugg Carter, Alexandra, and Rachel Fensham, eds. 2011. Dancing Naturally; Nature, Neo Classicism and Modernity in Early Twentieth Century Dance. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Cavallaro, Dani, and Alexandra Warwick. 1998. Fashioning the Frame: Boundaries, Dress and the Body. Oxford: Berg. Cohen Bull, Cynthia Jean. 1997. “Sense, Meaning, and Perception in Three Dance Cultures.” In Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, edited by Jane C. Desmond, 269–287. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Collins, Jane, and Andrew Nisbet. 2010. Theatre and Performance Design: A Reader in Scenography. Abingdon: Routledge. Connolly, Mary Kate. 2017. “Hand in Glove: Reflections on a Performed Costume Exhibition and the Stories Behind the Garments.” Studies in Costume & Performance 2 (1): 9–25. Denscombe, Martyn. 2003. The Good Research Guide: For Small-Scale Social Research Projects. Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press. Entwistle, Joanne. 2000. The  Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Entwistle, Joanne, and Elizabeth Wilson, eds. 2001. Body Dressing: Dress, Body, Culture, edited by Joanne B. Eicher. Oxford: Berg. Fensham, Rachel. 2011. “Undressing and Dressing Up: Natural Movement’s Life in Costume.” In Dancing Naturally: Nature, Neo Classicism and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century Dance, edited by Alexandra Carter and Rachel Fensham, 82–97. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Guerin, Lucy. 2018. Interviewed by the author in Melbourne, Australia. January 22. Jeyasingh, Shobana. 2014. Interviewed by the author in London. June 4. Johnson, Donald Clay, and Helen Bradley Foster, eds. 2007. Dress Sense: Emotional and Sensory Experience of the Body and Clothes. Oxford: Berg. Kaiso-Kantilla, Karolina. 2016. Interviewed by the author in Helsinki, Finland. November 22. Mackrell, Judith. 1997. Reading Dance. London: Michael Joseph. McConachie, Bruce, and F. Elizabeth Hart, eds. 2006. Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn. Abingdon: Routledge. McKinney, Joslin, and Scott Palmer. 2017. Scenography Expanded: An Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design. London: Bloomsbury Monks, Aoife. 2011. The Actor in Costume. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Murphy, Siobhan. 2017. Interviewed by the author in Melbourne, Australia. June 8. Myllylahti, Sanna. 2016. Interviewed by the author in Helsinki, Finland. November 23. Negrin, Llewellyn. 2013. “Fashion as an Embodied Art Form.” In  Carnal Knowledge: Towards a “New Materialism” through the Arts, edited by Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, 141–154. London: I.B. Tauris. ———. 2016.“Maurice Merleau- Ponty:The Corporeal Experience of Fashion.” In Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists, edited by Agnès Rocamora and Anneke Smelik, 115–131. London: I.B Tauris. Noland, Carrie. 2009. Agency  & Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Cultures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pantouvaki, Sofia. 2016. Interviewed by the author in Helsinki, Finland. November 24. Powell, Sandy. 2016. Conversation with the author in Masterclass in Costume Design (podcast), August 4. ACMI, Australia. Accessed March  28, 2019. https://www.acmi.net.au/ideas/watch/ sandy-powell-costume-design/. Rotie, Marie-Gabrielle. 2016. Interviewed by the author in London. June 10. Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. 2009. The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader. Exeter: Imprint Academic. Steiner, Lilian. 2018. Interviewed by the author in Melbourne, Australia. January 22. Strauss, Anselm, and Juliet Corbin. 1998. Basics of Qualitative Research:Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory. London: Sage. Thomas, Helen, ed. 1993. Dance, Gender and Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2003. The Body, Dance and Cultural Theory. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Trimingham, Melissa. 2011. The Theatre of the Bauhaus. Abingdon: Routledge. ———. 2017. “Agency and Empathy: Artists Touch the Body.” In Costume in Performance: Materiality, Culture and the Body, edited by Donatella Barbieri, 137–165. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Vincenzi, Simon. 2016. Interviewed by the author in London. June 21. Zoubir-Shaw, Sadia, ed. 2016. Embodied Performance: Design, Process and Narrative. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press.

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26 THE SCENOGRAPHY OF CHOREOGRAPHING THE MUSEUM Johan Stjernholm

Introduction The topic of this chapter is the concept of scenography in relation to choreographing the museum. Both scenography and the idea of doing dance in museums have arguably attracted an increasing amount of interest in recent years. For instance, in the editorial to the very first issue of the journal Theatre and Performance Design, launched in 2015, Jane Collins and Arnold Aronson suggest that there has been “a significant ‘turn’ towards scenography” (2015,  2). One of the key platforms in recent years that has served to elevate the exposure of new implementations of scenography is the 2015 Prague Quadrennial (Arx 2016). In terms of dance in the museum, there has also been a rising interest, partly in response to the dancer and choreographer Boris Charmatz’s impactful delivery in 2009 of his “Manifesto for a Dancing Museum” (Charmatz 2009). In 2014, a special issue of Dance Research Journal was dedicated to the dance in the museum, looking at recent developments and earlier, historical examples (Franko and Lepecki 2014). Museums have also been busy programming dance, such as Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Work/Travail/Arbeid (2016) at Tate Modern, London, and Pablo Bronstein’s Historical Dances in an Antique Setting (2016) at Tate Britain, London. As a currently working choreographer and dancer, I have had the opportunity to explore the practice of choreographing the museum on several occasions, such as The Incomplete Subject (Stjernholm, Malik, and Smith 2010) at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. However, since 2013, my main work has been in Beijing, China. In this discussion, I extensively draw on my own practical experience of having choreographed, directed, and performed at museums and art galleries in Beijing (Stjernholm and Cheong-Leen 2013, 2015, 2016a, 2016b, 2017). The aim of my inquiry is to suggest a way forward by which the scenography of choreographing the museum may be further advanced.

Specifying the area of interrogation My approach is to a large extent based on the works by the early twentieth century French philosopher Henri Bergson ([1908] 2004) and the more recent French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1988). Specifically, I look at how they understand perception and the experience of the present moment. In Bergson’s (2004) vocabulary, the perception of the present moment constitutes a 365

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dynamic temporal situation that he calls a “duration.” Deleuze (1988) further develops Bergson’s notion of duration and defines the method of “intuition,” in contrast to analysis, as a mode of generating valuable knowledge. One of the basic requirements for the method of intuition, according to Deleuze, is that a problem must be stated in terms of its temporal characteristics. In accordance with the above discussion, one of my objectives is to briefly outline how the choreographing, and the museum, may be restated as an intuitive “scenographic situation,” or a special kind of duration, that transgresses traditional concepts of the theater, such as set, architecture, site, body, movements, and dance. I also consider the role of the artifact in the museum. Perhaps analogous to the proposal of Mark Franko and André Lepecki that “dance’s presence in the museum reconfigures the very nature of the visual in the visual arts” (2014, 1), I argue that choreographing the museum potentially generates a reconfiguration of how the artifact may be perceived.

Context and terminology The idea of choreographing the museum is not new. Claire Bishop (2014) identifies the contemporary fascination for the topic as representing a third wave of increased interest in dance in the museum, the previous two waves originating in the late 1930s and the late 1960s, respectively. One of the more dramatic events in that third wave, the present, was arguably triggered by the appointment of Charmatz as Director for the Centre chorégraphique national de Rennes et de Bretagne in 2009. Following his appointment, Charmatz presented a manifesto in which he proposed not only to completely erase the words “National,” “Center,” and even “Choreographic” from the name of the venerable institution, but also to turn it into a “dancing museum.” Toward the end of the manifesto, Charmatz presented a list of “ten commandments” by which that dancing museum would be implemented (2009). The response to Charmatz’s manifesto has not been entirely positive. Alessandra Nicifero, for example, found it being “naïve and bombastic” (2014, 32). Nicifero’s perception of Charmatz being bombastic may be grounded in some rather obscure, almost comical statements, such as the idea that the scope for the mental space of the museum “must be at least locaglobalregioneuropeinternationabretontranscontinensouth” (2009). The naivety of Charmatz’s manifesto may be exemplified in his almost anachronistically rigid representation of the ideas “dance” and “choreography”: “Dance is much broader than what is simply choreographic” (Charmatz 2009). Apparently, Charmatz perceives certain limitations to choreography in relation to dance. Charmatz’s proposition may be compared to the New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff’s review of the New York dance scene in the year 2000 where she complains that many choreographies lack “flow or a continuum of movement” (Kisselgoff 2000). Both Charmatz and Kisselgoff seem to advocate the idea that dance, or movement, have something to offer that somehow goes beyond the choreographic. Andre Lepecki (2006), discussing Kisselgoff ’s review, demonstrates that she is not alone in having the opinion that choreography and dance stand in a problematic relationship to each other, even to the point where choreography may be accused of betraying dance. However, as Lepecki points out, the accusation describes, reifies, and reproduces a whole ontology of dance that can be summarized as follows: dance ontologically imbricates itself with, is isomorphic to, movement. Only after accepting such grounding of dance on movement can one accuse certain contemporary choreographic practices of betraying dance. (2006, 2)

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Extrapolating Lepecki’s analysis to Charmatz’s idea that dance is much broader than the choreographic, it may be that Charmatz draws on a rather restrictive ontology of dance, and/or choreography. By means of adopting a more flexible ontology, there might be no need to position dance or choreography as if one is more limited than the other. However, to complicate matters further, perceptions of what dance or choreography should or should not be may be grounded in deeply personal experiences. To illustrate, I will compare some comments on Trillium (1962), the first professionally presented choreography by former New York-based dancer and choreographer Trisha Brown. In  a recently published book on Trisha Brown, Susan Rosenberg (2017) describes Trillium as “an ineffable, uniquely original but repeatable element occurring within a f ixed choreographic score” (31). That f ixed choreographic score may be one of the reasons why Steve Paxton, upon seeing the work, found that “the audience is essentially being choreographically lectured to… a visually/kinetically comprehensible controlled form” (Paxton in Rosenberg 2017, 33). Moreover, another audience member, Bessie Schönberg, complained that the work contained “mere ‘material’, not ‘dance’” (Rosenberg 2017, 34). One possible interpretation of these three statements is that Brown’s dance was somehow limited by her f ixed choreographic score, which lectured the audience, and the dance, into a controlled form, reducing the dance to become mere material. However, Brown presents a fourth, rather different, perspective on the dance in Trillium and her other, early works: In the early years of my career I was distinctly able to levitate. Peer pressure against virtuosity stopped me. Now  I can’t do it… The  great irony of Judson  [Dance Theatre] was the good joke they pulled on me: I happened to be a virtuosic dancer, and they said “no” to virtuosity. I had this body capable of moving in ways that not even I fully knew—except that I tasted the rapture of that experience when I was improvising. (Brown in Rosenberg 2017, 34) Thus, in Brown’s own terms, her dance was virtuosic, even levitating, and the limiting factor was not  choreography, but peer pressure. The  point I want to stress here is that ideas regarding what constitute dance and choreography, and any assumed relation between them, may come down to very personal matters. Facing the lack of any consensual agreement on what the term choreography might mean in relation to dance, it may feel tempting to agree with William Forsythe in his also bombastic proclamation that “There is no choreography” (2009). Despite Charmatz’s and Forsythe’s assertions, I have chosen the term “choreographing” in the title of this chapter for a couple of reasons. On the one hand, given the vagueness of the term, my title could mean “The  Scenography of Doing-whatever-you-like-with The Museum,” leaving possibilities open for interpretation. On the other hand, to my mind, choreographing certainly can include dancing in any existing or imagined form, as well as scenographic, phenomenological, and other practical elements related to the museum, some of which I will explore herein. The main two interrelated ideas from the previous discussion that I want to bring forward are: first, the importance of allocating a perceived situation or present moment within a temporal, durational perspective; and secondly, the deeply subjective and existential element in perceiving and performing choreography and dance.

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Scenographic practice and the idea of “permeation” The next point of departure is Fashioning Embodiment (2013), a performance/installation that Flora Zeta Cheong-Leen and I created for the premiere of the exhibition, Reflection of Time: Art of Fashion in China 1993–2012 (2013), at the Today Art Museum in Beijing, China. Fashioning Embodiment merges two traditionally separate fields: fashion design and choreography/dance. Cheong-Leen has greatly contributed to the historical development of a uniquely Chinese, post-modern tradition in fashion design. She has designed and directed a number of large fashion shows, and her collections can be found in museums internationally (CheongLeen 1995; Tam and Cheong-Leen 1999). Because of her historically important role in the development of Chinese fashion, some of her collections were chosen to be on display in Reflection of Time. Additionally, in 2013, Cheong-Leen and I had just started up a new dance company called Wu Tian Yuan/Ballet Octahedron, which subsequently was invited to perform at the exhibition premiere. Architecturally, Fashioning Embodiment occupied two separate spaces: the exhibition space where the fashion design artifacts of Reflection of Time were located, and the adjacent reception and corridor spaces of the museum. Based on a curatorial request, the dance aspects of Fashioning Embodiment had to take place in the adjacent spaces, not sharing the space of the artifacts. Considering the separation of the space, Cheong-Leen and I questioned how to generate a duration, or a present moment, that potentially could stretch the perception of time to the degree that a person would be able to perceive the two different spaces of the work at once. One of our solutions to this problem was to use visual elements from some of CheongLeen’s fashion artifacts that were exhibited in Reflection of Time in the design for the dance costumes. The chosen artifact that we mainly worked with is made of leather, with a shape that may represent the tradition of the female corset, medieval armor, as well as the shape of the classical ballerina’s tutu (see Illustration 26.1). Perhaps inspired by the well-known ballet Swan Lake, the corset/tutu is decorated with feathers and silk lace, and the leather panels are stamped with elaborate patterns. The pieces of leather are layered and joined together with leather threads, metal buckles and studs. My overall interpretation of the dress is a paradoxical juxtaposition of imagery: ornamented, medieval armor merged with postmodern punk, a gothic ballerina, vulnerable, yet strong, with ironic, feminist overtones of erotic submission and dominance. By means of recreating design elements of the fashion artifact in the dance costumes, our aim was to establish a sense of visual repetition: As audience members walked between the two different spaces, they would ideally be able to perceive a repetition of design cues, or a series of the similar (Deleuze 2004). The first instances of the series being the appearance of the dancers in their costumes, and later instances, the fashion-artifacts on display in the exhibition. Using the vocabulary of Deleuze (2006), our intention could be described as aiming to generate a fold in space. By repeating visual design cues in spatially distributed locations, potentially establishing a conceptual connection in the form of a series of the similar, the dresses would constitute sites of recognition and re-recognition—the spaces of the museum and the spaces of the artifacts folding into each other. Yet another way to think of the spatial characteristics of the repeated visual artifacts is that they, as a series of the similar, permeate space: In the case that I recognize visual elements of the fashion-artifact in the exhibition as a repetition of visual elements from the dance costumes, it is as if the instances of the series of the similar link up, permeating the depth of the 368

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Illustration 26.1 Exhibition object from Reflection of Time: Art of Fashion in China 1993–2012, at the Today Art Museum, Beijing, China. Design by Flora Zeta Cheong-Leen.

museum. The spaces of the dance and the spaces of the fashion-artifacts has begun to leak, as it were, into each other. The permeation, or folding, does of course not in any measurable way change the architectural space of the museum. However, what does change is my experience of the present, my duration, which is affected by means of pulling specific memories from my past into perceptions of my present. In other words, the actual permeation and establishment of the series of the similar takes place entirely in the temporal realm. The process of permeation does not necessarily stop at my encounter with the fashionartifact. The curation of the exhibition allowed the visitors to study the exhibited artifacts in detail and close-up. Assuming again that I perceive a certain artifact as an instance of a series that permeates back to the dance: If I were to take my time to study that artifact in more detail, additional layers of the design may start to take on connotative meaning to me. For instance, I may reflect on the history of the corset, the ballet Swan Lake, medieval armor, punk, the production of desire, domination, subjection, and so on. In this case, the details of the dress—leather, feathers, silk, and metal, intertwined and penetrated—begins to generate a much more complex series of incomplete narratives, microcosms of connotative meaning, where fragments of my past, perceptions of the world, and imagination all start to permeate and conflate in a multiplicity of directions. At  that moment in time, when I experience the connotative permeation of my world into the material details of the fashion-object-dress that I am contemplating, something 369

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else is also happening: Given that my recollection of the dance costumes has established the fashion-object as a repetition of the former—they are all parts of the same series—all the connotative details that I have folded into the fashion-artifact are at once free to permeate back toward my memory of the dance. Experiencing that two-directional permeation, the dance permeating into the fashion-artifact while all my connotations related to the fashion object permeating back to my memory of the dance, my experience of the present suddenly stretches out to encompass multiple instances within one perceived moment in time. All that, while from a spatial perspective, seemingly standing statically in front of an artifact at an exhibition.

Durational scenography The  situation of experiencing a past/present permeation of the kind that I just described, may, in the terminology of Bergson (2004), constitute an example of the dynamics of a duration. According to Bergson, a duration contains fragments of memories from different moments in time, merging with my immediate, dynamic, and constantly changing sensory perception of the world around me. In Bergson’s view, memories from the past are always being pulled into the physical realm of immediate, sensory perception. As those temporal fractions start to entwine with the sensory perception, the lived experience of the present moment unfolds, consisting of all my sensory awareness, memories from the past, and anticipations of the future that I am engaged with at any given moment in time. A duration, in other words, is a dynamic, synthetic composition of a multiplicity of past presents, a present of a now and here, and anticipated future presents. In Deleuze’s (1988) interpretation of Bergson’s (2004) theory, memories are situated in the realm of the virtual, and the immediate, sensory perception of the world in the realm of the actual. Together, the virtual and the actual constitutes reality. The immaterial Deleuzian realm of the virtual is, like memories in Bergson’s duration, constantly in the process of being actualized toward the sensory and material realm of sensory perception. However, as I have demonstrated in my previous research (Stjernholm 2009), there is another process of actualization at work, in addition to Deleuze’s (2004) actualization of the virtual. That other process corresponds to an inversion of the relations between memory/ the virtual and perception/the actual. As my memories are actualized to merge with my immediate perception, the resulting present moment simultaneously travels back in time, as it were, to dynamically affect my memories from past. In this alternate relation between the virtual and the actual, it is my experience of the present that serves as the role of the virtual, and my memories, the realm of the actual. To distinguish those two different, oppositional processes of actualization, I refer to Deleuze’s process as situated in the realm of the temporal, and the parallel, but inversed, process as situated in the realm of the abstract (Stjernholm 2009, 149). The two oppositional processes of actualization can be applied to my durational contemplation of Fashioning Embodiment. As I stand in front of the fashion-artifact, established as part of a series of the similar that started with the dance, and all my connotative layers of meaning are informing my interpretation of the artifact, that interpretation starts to travel back in time, as it were, along the path of the permeation of the series. Retrospectively, all the previous instances are filled with meaning from the last instance of the series. One implication of this is that as I am perceiving the fashion-artifact, there is in the abstract realm a process of actualization that affects my memories of the dance performance, as if I am at some level once again experiencing the work. The important implication of that 370

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is that in this second, abstract actualization of the dance, the fashion-artifact, as part of the series, appear as an intuitively perceived stage context of sorts, a temporal kind of scenography within my duration. All this happens in the abstract, where my present moment travels backwards in time, along the permeated series of the similar, and as a result, affecting my memories. Meanwhile, in the realm of the temporal, I am still in the process of actualizing and synthesizing memories of having-perceived the dance, as they are leaking into my present experience with the fashion-object along the pathway of the series. In this temporal process of my duration, it is the past performance of the dance that comes to serve as a durational scenography in relation to my perception of the fashion-object. The  intuitive, durational scenography is thus a dynamic place, where change happens in two simultaneous directions, the temporal and the abstract.

The implicit zones of scenography Returning momentarily to my stated aim, to advance how the scenography of choreographing the museum may be understood, what I propose is not radically new, but rather, I am making explicit certain processes that already implicitly are part of the field of scenography. For example, the field of theater has in the twentieth century arguably already gone through an analogous shift of awareness as the idea of the theater laboratory was invented. Attempting to explain the notion of the theatre laboratory, Mirella Schino proposes: A laboratorial situation could be defined as one that implies not only paths of artistic production but also varying existential processes: paths of knowledge, transmission of knowledge, research and study of the deepest structures of the theatre. To progress along these paths, this type of theatre is concerned not only with the impact a performance can have but also with the theatrical sphere that starts from the actor’s everyday life and arrives at his work: that zone, in other words, that concerns only those who do theatre. It is a zone that has always existed, of course, and that has always had an impact on how theatre work is performed. But no one worried about it until the twentieth century. (emphasis in original, 2009, 220) Schino points out how the laboratory generates knowledge by means of merging two existential spheres, the actor’s everyday life and his/her work, into one zone. Although that zone always existed, no one explicitly addressed it until the rise of theater laboratories in the twentieth century. Similarly, the field of scenography has always implicitly engaged with certain zones composed by different spheres. Examples of such zones are: The sphere of the perspective of the designer and the sphere of the perspective of the audience member; the sphere of representing scenographic meaning and the sphere of interpreting scenographic meaning; and the sphere of spatial, scenographic perspectives and the sphere of relationality between events/situations within a scenography. However, it is not until recently that scenographers and scholars have started to worry about the zones that those spheres comprise. That “worrying” may be linked to certain changes in approach that Collins and Aronson’s (2015) identify as a recent turn in scenography. One recent example of scenographers and scholars turning their attention to the recently identified zones of scenography is Joslin McKinney and Scott Palmer’s book Scenography Expanded (2017). In the foreword, Arnold Aronson states that “most people understand scenography as a reference to theatrical design... I define it as the sum total of the visual, spatial, 371

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and aural components of a performance” (Aronson 2017, xiii). In agreement with Aronson, McKinney and Palmer add: “Our purpose of this book is to try to understand scenography not simply as a by-product of theatre but as a mode of encounter and exchange founded on spatial and material relations between bodies, objects and environments” (2017, 2). Strangely, from the perspective of this discussion, the concept of temporality is notably absent in the quotes from Aronson, McKinney, and Palmer. However, notions of time, duration, or subjective experiences of events are not ignored in Scenography Expanded. To the contrary, several authors demonstrate a distinct awareness of such concepts. In fact, McKinney and Palmer do suggest that “Scenography often works gradually, over time, accumulating associations and meanings as a performance unfolds in a temporal as well as spatial dimension” (2017, 7–8). Kathleen Irwin (2017, 113) also mentions the temporal as one item in a list of things that scenographers consider. Maaike Bleeker (2017, 126) argues that performances can be understood as practices of thinking rather than representations. Additionally, David Shearing (2017, 142) addresses certain experiential aspects of scenography and emphasizes the importance of relational aspects of art, situating the audience at the center of the process of meaning-making. Concepts related to temporality, memory, the lived experience of the present, meaning-making, and durationality evidently are on the map of current scenographic thinking. However, there seem to be a lack of deeper and more detailed interrogations concerning the temporal implications of scenography. More effort could go into researching and explaining precisely how the temporal realm affects and influences scenographic processes of creation and perception. The main bulk of scholarly research related to scenography still appears to primarily consider spatial and material relations, as if scenography comprises the sum total of visual, spatial, and aural components. In the fields of dance, there is arguably already a substantial practical tradition that explicitly explores the temporal realm, drawing on the minimalist, avant-garde tradition from the fine arts. In his detailed account of the achievements of various choreographers engaged in the Judson Dance Theatre, Ramsay Burt summarizes: “Avant-garde works that make the spectator aware of time in this way also make them aware of their own bodies and invite them to recognize what they have in common with the bodies of the performers they are watching” (2006, 37). Likewise, Lepecki gives an in-depth account on how avant-garde dance has been using the concept of the “still-act” (2006, 15) to challenge the dominating modern construct of subjectivity, a topic that I will return to in more detail herein. By means of distinctively situating scenography as an intuitive practice in the temporal realm, as opposed to the spatial realm, a few significant vantage points may be gained. For example, the idea of scenography may be understood as a situation rather than a place or perspective. Exploring that scenographic situation, I have already identified two distinctive concepts: permeation and duration. I have also demonstrated how intuitive scenography are continuously and dynamically shaped by means of two simultaneous and oppositional processes of actualization, one operating in the temporal realm and the other in the abstract realm. As a next step, I will take a closer look at the notion of the artifact, considering how an intuitive approach to scenography may shed some light on the existence of a special kind of perceived object. I call that special object the “choreutic artifact.”

Perceiving the choreutic artifact The basic idea of the choreutic artifact was first publicly introduced on September 21, 2013, as I was co-presenting the talk “From Fashion to Dance: a Dialog with Time and Space” (Cheong-Leen and Stjernholm 2013) at a TEDx event in Xi’An, China. TEDx is related to 372

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TED, which is a non-profit organization that aims to spread information through short talks on various topics. TEDx, however, is arranged by independent organizers (“TEDx Program” 2018). In  its most basic form, the choreutic artifact may be understood as a special kind of art-object that triggers a certain kind of expansion of the duration, formed by the twodirectional and oppositional processes of actualization. That expansion involves not only the virtual realm of the person who is perceiving the art-object, but also other virtual realms as well, such as those of the creators, choreographers, or dancers of the object. Thus, there is an element of virtual inter-subjectivity inherent to the choreutic artifact. This  virtual inter-subjectivity, or connectivity, may resemble a feeling very similar to the sensation of kinesthetic empathy. Kinesthetic empathy can be explained as a deep, internal sensation caused by physiological responses by the central nervous system as it pre-triggers the muscles for movement by the perception of an embodied state, or the movements, of another human being (Reynolds 2007; Reason and Reynolds 2010; Foster 2011). The former New York Times dance critic John Martin (1933) even attributed kinesthetic empathy as one of the key factors contributing to aesthetic appreciation of dance. However, although kinesthetic empathy typically is regarded as a non-mediated, immanent, sensory response to another human being, the choreutic artifact is an attempt to trigger a mediated response by means of a material object. Despite having briefly introduced the idea of the choreutic artifact in 2013, it was not until two years later, during the production of Repetitions of Disappearance (2015), that I finally got the opportunity to explore the choreutic artifact as an exhibition. Repetitions of Disappearance was a cross-disciplinary installation that involved dance, acting, costume design, painting, photography, sculpture, and furniture design (Stjernholm and Cheong-Leen 2015) held at the Xin Dong Cheng Space for Contemporary Art in Beijing. The  starting point for Repetitions of Disappearance was the creation of a series of short movement studies. Using photographic equipment, Cheong-Leen and I then captured the movement studies, using long shutter times that spanned for the entire length of each movement study. The result was a series of pictures that visualize the faint outlines of movements as blurry shapes with moments of stillness represented as areas of greater image clarity. We selected four of the photo series to be printed: two on stainless steel plates, one on a glass mirror, and one on a round canvas. The prints were rather large, in the range from 1.8 to 3.4 meters wide. Because of their size, the images represent the captured movements almost in their original scale. During the performance of Repetitions of Disappearance, the dancers executed certain tasks and followed narratives that at certain moments cited the movements represented in the exhibited prints (see Illustration 26.2). The  original movement studies thus represented a series of the similar, temporally and spatially, permeating across the photographic representations and the live performance. Comparing the two exhibition works, Repetitions of Disappearance and Fashioning Embodiment, there are some important similarities to point out: both works were designed to establish a temporal, intuitive kind of scenography, whereby certain objects were intentionally charged, through repetition, with the potential to affect or transform the durational experience of the perceiver. Moreover, since the repetitions consisted of a mixture of movements and physical objects (dress and photographic prints), the intention was to make it possible for the physical objects to share the capacity of the embodied movements to serve as sites for triggering immanent, physiological responses, akin to the effect of kinesthetic empathy (Reason and Reynolds 2010). To succeed in creating a choreutic artifact, a series of 373

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Illustration 26.2 Repetitions of Disappearance (2015) at the Xin Dong Cheng Space for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China. Performer, Johan Stjernholm.

the similar must be perceptually established across the embodied movements and the objects, and the objects must be able to trigger an actualization of virtual kinesthetic empathy of the movements either in the temporal or the abstract realm. The perception of a choreutic artifact means that the boundaries between the perceived object, me, the previous instances of the repeated series, and the virtual realms of other individuals connected to the series, to some extent permeate into each other. In other words, the choreutic artifact triggers the becoming of a complex, relational subjectivity, a state of being that potentially has far-reaching, critical implications. According to Lepecki, “the dismantling of modernity’s idiotic body and its replacement by a relational body renews choreography as practice for political potentiality” (Lepecki 2006, 44). The meaning of the idiotic body that Lepecki refers to originates from the ancient Greek term idiotes: “a private person, individual, ‘one in a private station’” (Mieli quoted in Lepecki 2006, 33). Being an idiot thus means to exist as a distinct individual, which Lepecki identifies as the dominating mode of modern subjectivity. The practice of choreography, moreover, “as technology and expression of modernity’s being-toward-movement, participates fully of this exhausting psychological, affective and energetic project of modern subjectivation as the creation of a socially severed, energetically self-contained, emotionally self-propelled idiot” (33). The  choreutic artifact potentially represents a resistance to that modern, idiotic subjectivity and its supportive, choreographic technologies. Through the concept of permeation, relational subjectivity may be intuitively synthesized, and modernity’s obsessive being-towards-movement is possibly arrested in the sustained materiality of the durational choreutic artifact. 374

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Applying the theory and searching for Shangri-La (2016) Attempting to further expand the implications of an intuitive scenography, I will discuss the installations Lost in Shangri-la (Stjernholm and Cheong-Leen 2016a) and Fashioning Shangri-la (Stjernholm and Cheong-Leen 2016b), held at the Three Shadows Art Centre in Beijing, China. The  installations were part of the exhibition Searching for Shangri-la (2016), organized by Laurence Brahm (2016) in collaboration with National Geographic. The exhibition explored an ancient Tibetan concept of a utopian place called “Shangri-la” or “Shambhala.” For the Shangri-la installations, one of the objects that we used was shreds of Tibetan fabrics, tied together into a long band. At one instance during the installations, I was wrapping a tree and a boulder with the band, situated just outside the entrance of the museum. I then started to entangle myself in the band as well (see Illustration 26.3). Eventually, I ended up hanging from the side of the boulder, the band being strapped across and around my body in a complex manner. The aim was to constantly try to find new ways of entangling myself in the band, while lying on the bolder or being suspended in the air. Retrospectively, I was informed by Brahm that while I was entangling myself in the shreds, occasionally hanging off the edge of the boulder, he had been approached by people who were asking him whether they should approach me to offer their help. They expressed their concern that I might be in danger, perhaps even getting strangled. One interesting point here is that people were worried that I was in actual, real physical danger, which seems to suggest that the boundary between performance and reality had become blurred. As reality was leaking into and permeating the perception of the performance, the sphere of everyday life and the sphere of dancing uncomfortably merged into the same, troublesome, existential zone inhabited by my embodied presence (Schino 2009, 220).

Illustration 26.3 Lost in Shangri-la (2016), at the Three Shadows Art Centre, Beijing, China. Performer, Johan Stjernholm.

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At one level, the audience expressions of concern for my safety could be an example of the “theatre of the real” (Martin 2013), as notions of reality apparently were pulled into the performance. However, keeping in mind that the event took place in the context of the museum, not  the theater, there are additional factors to consider, especially in relation to the museum’s colonial tradition of using artifacts to sustain the claim to represent authentic, grand narratives of reality. It may be the case that those colonial days are gone, as Alessandra Nicifero suggests: “The museum as a stable institution, as symbol of permanence, authenticity, grand-narrative, and history no longer exists” (2014, 35). However, the presence of the artifact, and the practice of telling stories about the world based on artifacts, arguably still has a dominant role in the tradition of the museum. Keeping in mind that old tradition of the museum to use the artifact as a site to validate representations of reality, the event of me hanging in shreds over the edge of a boulder causing audience members to worry about my well-being may be seen in a different light: My act was perhaps not necessarily so much a radical “theatre of the real,” as it may have been a performative that served to reaffirm the museum’s conventional reliance on an intuitive synthesis between notions of reality and the artifact, where the artifact acted as the scenographic perspective to frame reality and vice versa. The concept of the performative was originally introduced by John L. Austin (1976) during a series of lectures on ordinary language philosophy at Harvard in 1955. Austin’s definition of the performative, or speech-act, was that under certain specific circumstances, to say something is to do something. For example, when a judge issues a sentence to a criminal, it is not simply a statement, but those words have actual, practical implications. However, the meaning of the performative has been significantly modified over time. Jacques Derrida (1977), for example, applied the performative to theatrical practice, something that Austin had explicitly excluded. Later, Judith Butler (1993, 1999) expanded the performative to nonlinguistic practices in the construction of gender identity. In my research, I have found that under certain circumstances, it is helpful to identify three distinct dimensions of the performative: I call those dimensions the “performance,” the “symbol,” and the perlocutionary “act” (Stjernholm 2009, 90). Looking at my situation of being entangled with the band in Shangri-la, the three dimensions of the performative may be: First, my performance of entangling myself in the shreds on the boulder; secondly, the symbol corresponding to the perceiver’s interpretation that my wellbeing was in danger; and thirdly, the perlocutionary act of feeling worried about me. That last dimension, the act, would also mean the establishment of an intuitive duration, forming a relational subjectivity between me, the performance, the objects I engaged with, and the perceiving individual. In other words, the perlocutionary act of worrying about me can be understood as a sign of a successful performative, an expansion of the experienced duration, and potentially challenging the isolated, self-sufficient, idiotic subjectivity of modernity. However, since the act dimension of the performative is perlocutionary—meaning that it is an affectual outcome of the performance and the symbol dimensions—it is difficult to explicitly prove its existence. The presence of an act-dimension of the duration-performative corresponds to an internal shift of awareness of the present. In a similar manner, the creation of the choreutic artifact would depend on to what extent there is an act dimension of physiological sensations like kinesthetic empathy. In  brief terms, the intuitive, durational scenography and the creation of the choreutic artifact depend on the production of successful duration-performatives. Despite the difficulty in proving the existence of perlocutionary duration-performatives, one of the audience members who did attend Fashioning Shangri-la shared with me  her 376

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impressions of the work. The audience member is the French linguist Amanda Galsworthy, official interpreter of Nicolas Sarkozy while he was serving as the President of France: When I saw your work, I felt something very strongly, it was a real, physical sensation in my body, like when I listen to certain pieces of music by Bach, or when I see one of my favorite paintings. I felt connected to life, and to the important things that really matters. (Galsworthy 2017) From what Galsworthy was saying, it appears as if she did experience something like kinesthetic empathy, and her durational experience seems to have been permeated by various memories and connections to the world. In this case, it may be that the intuitive scenography of the work did manage to generate a choreutic artifact, as the outcome of a successful duration-performative. However, the question what that choreutic artifact consist of remains unanswered. Next, I will outline some reasons why any choreutic artifact may typically be difficult to identify.

Experiencing Delusions (2017) The  last work I will consider is Delusions (Stjernholm and Cheong-Leen 2017), a crossdisciplinary installation at the Green T. House in Beijing, China, that merged the architectural features of the venue with fashion design, costume design, dancing, and the fine arts, including works by the Chinese painter Wu Guanzhong. At the end of the installation, the exhibited art was auctioned by the professional auctioneer Amanda Zhou Paipai, raising funds for the Tian Art Foundation charity to provide educational scholarships in dance. Around forty children, already benefitting from educational scholarships by the Tian Art Foundation, were performing in the work. The performance started with the children slowly walking in unison, across the garden of the venue, and eventually entering the building where they performed a series of group formations. As the movements of the children came to an end, the dancers of Wu Tian Yuan/Ballet Octahedron gradually entered the space, everyone dressed in a unique costume, some with strong colors, others with long, light pieces of fabric that swept through the air as a response to movements. The dancers spread out in the space and performed a series of site-specific movement tasks, sometimes as solos and sometimes in groups, across the space. Both the costumes and the movements were derived from the visual content of Guanzhong’s paintings. After the performance, I had a conversation with Paipai, the official auctioneer of the event. Working for major art auction houses in Hong Kong and Beijing, Paipai is very familiar with the art of Wu Guanzhong. Given her field of expertise, I asked about her impressions regarding the costumes, the movements, and the paintings. She responded that her strongest impression was a moment when all the children were gathering in an underground tunnel that stretched between two buildings of the venue. Paipai explained that when she encountered all the children in the tunnel, she came to think about a series of paintings by Guanzhong depicting cityscapes with small, narrow houses and spaces. She imagined that all the children in the tunnel were dwelling in those tiny houses of Guanzhong’s paintings. Watching the performance, Paipai continued, changed her perspective on Guanzhong’s paintings of cityscapes: it was as if the paintings came alive and transformed from inanimate objects, simply hanging on the wall, into living entities that were telling stories about real, actual people. She imagined that the houses in Guanzhong’s paintings became inhabited by the children from the dance performance (Paipai 2017). 377

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Paipai’s description surprised me, mainly because the paintings that she referred to in her durational experience of the performance were not physically present in the work! Moreover, the moment when the children gathered in the tunnel happened after they had finished performing. It seems as if Paipai’s duration was characterized by a permeation of contextual factors that were not explicitly part of the scenography and performance, at least from a spatial point of view, but from her wider professional knowledge of Guanzhong’s paintings. My conversation with Paipai seems to reveal that the process of permeation of the duration-performative may reach far beyond what I previously have been considering in this discussion. In Paipai’s case, some of the elements leaking into her experience of Delusions were either contextual, peripheral, or entirely connotative in relation to the spatial characteristics of the performance. She perceived an intuitive scenography in which perlocutionary acts generated choreutic artifact performatives that were distinctively outside the spatial scope of the work, such as Guanzhong’s series of paintings of cityscapes. From my conversation with Paipai, it appears that when comparing a scenography that is spatially conceived versus a scenography that is intuitively perceived, the points of intersection between them may be rather arbitrary.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have sought to demonstrate ways of approaching the scenography of choreographing the museum from an intuitive perspective. There are four main ideas underpinning the discussion: First, the notion of permeation, which draws on Deleuze’s ideas of folding and repetition (2004, 2006). Second, there is Bergson’s ([1908] 2004) notion of duration, or the lived experience of the present, which may be dynamically expanded into an intuitive scenography, by means of the above permeation. I have also expanded the idea of duration to be characterized by two oppositional processes of actualization, one in the temporal and one in the abstract realm. Third, there is the concept of the choreutic artifact, which serves to arrest the idiotic choreographic expression as a being-toward-movement, by means of linking the durational experience to the materiality of the object. Fourth, there is the performative, which serves as an underpinning, productive principle that makes all the previous three concepts come into existence as part of a functional, intuitive scenography of choreographing the museum. Current practice and scholarship in the field of scenography is already, at least implicitly, aware of the importance of the temporal realm. However, this chapter exemplifies that an explicitly intuitive approach toward scenography may reveal additional modes of knowledge and practice. That is one way forward for others to explore.

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The scenography of choreographing the museum Bleeker, Maaike. 2017. “Thinking That Matters:Towards a Post-Anthropocentric Approach to Performance Design.” In Scenography Expanded: An Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design, 125–135. London: Bloomsbury. Brahm, Laurence. 2016. Searching for Shangri-La. Exhibition. Three Shadows Art Centre, Beijing, September 15, 2016–November 15, 2019. Bronstein, Pablo. 2016. Historical Dances in an Antique Setting. Performance. Tate Britain, April 26– October 9. Brown, Trisha. 1962. Trillium (premier performance) Maidman Playhouse, New York, March 24. Burt, Ramsay. 2006. Judson Dance Theatre: Performative Traces. London: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter. London: Routledge. ———. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Charmatz, Boris. 2009. “Manifesto for a Dancing Museum.” www.moma.org. Accessed April  23, 2019. https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/calendar/manifesto_dancing_museum.pdf. Cheong-Leen, Flora Zeta. 1995. 5000 År Med Kinesisk Kunst. Fashion Exhibition and Catwalk. Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Norway. Cheong-Leen, Flora Zeta, and Johan Stjernholm. 2013. “From Fashion to Dance: A Dialog with Time and Space.” Talk presented at the TEDx, Xi’An, September 21. Collins, Jane, and Arnold Aronson. 2015. “Editors’ Introduction.” Theatre and Performance Design 1 (1–2): 1–6. doi:10.1080/23322551.2015.1028172. De Keersmaeker, Anne Teresa. 2016. Work/Travail/Arbeid. Performance. Tate Modern. Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Bergsonism. New York: Zone Books. ———. 2004. Difference and Repetition. London: Continuum. ———. 2006. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. London: Continuum. Derrida, Jacques. 1977. “Signature Event Context.” In  Limited Inc, 1–24. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Forsythe, William. 2009. “Choreographic Objects.” Synchronous Objects. 2009. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://synchronousobjects.osu.edu/media/inside.php?p=essay. Foster, Susan Leigh. 2011. Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance. New York: Routledge. Franko, Mark, and André Lepecki. 2014. “Editor’s Note: Dance in the Museum.” Dance Research Journal 46 (3): 1–4. Galsworthy, Amanda. 2017. In conversation with Amanda Galsworthy. Interview by Johan Stjernholm and Flora Zeta Cheong-Leen. Irwin, Kathleen. 2017. “Scenographic Agency: A  Showing-Doing and a Responsibility for ShowingDoing.” In Scenography Expanded: An Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design, 111–123. London: Bloomsbury. Kisselgoff, Anna. 2000. “DANCE: THE YEAR IN REVIEW; Partial to Balanchine, and a Lot of Built-In Down Time.” The New York Times, December 31, sec. Arts. Accessed April 23, 2019. https:// www.nytimes.com/2000/12/31/arts/dance-the-year-in-review-partial-to-balanchine-and-a-lot-ofbuilt-in-down-time.html. Lepecki, Andre. 2006. Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. New York: Routledge. Martin, Carol. 2013. Theatre of the Real. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Martin, John. 1933. The Modern Dance. New York: A. S. Barnes. McKinney, Joslin, and Scott Palmer, eds. 2017. Scenography Expanded: An Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design. London: Bloomsbury. Nicifero, Alessandra. 2014. “OCCUPY MoMA:The (Risks and) Potentials of a Musée de La Danse!” Dance Research Journal 46 (3): 32–44. Paipai, Amanda Zhou. 2017. Interview with Amanda Zhou Paipai, by Johan Stjernholm.Translated by Flora Zeta Cheong-Leen. Reason, Matthew, and Dee Reynolds. 2010. “Kinesthesia, Empathy, and Related Pleasures: An Inquiry into Audience Experiences of Watching Dance.” Dance Research Journal 42 (2): 49–75. doi:10.1017/ S0149767700001030. Reynolds, Dee. 2007. Rhythmic Subjects: Uses of Energy in the Dances of Mary Wigman, Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. Alton: Dance Books. Rosenberg, Susan. 2017. Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Schino, Mirella. 2009. Alchemists of the Stage: Theatre Laboratories in Europe. Translated by Paul Warrington. Holstebro: Icarus.

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Johan Stjernholm Shearing, David. 2017. “Audience Immersion, Mindfulness and the Experience of Scenography.” In  Scenography Expanded: An Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design, 139–154. London: Bloomsbury. Stjernholm, Johan. 2009. “Performativities,Virtualities, Abstractions, and Cunningham’s BIPED.” PhD diss., University of the Arts London. Stjernholm, Johan, and Flora Zeta Cheong-Leen. 2013. “Fashioning Embodiment.” Fashion Design and Choreography Presented at the Reflection of Time: Art of Fashion in China 1993–2012, Today Art Museum, Beijing, September 5. ———. 2015. Repetitions of Disappearance. Choreography, Design, and Photography. Xin Dong Cheng Space for Contemporary Art, Beijing, June 19. ———. 2016a. “Lost in Shangri-La.” Installation presented at the Searching for Shangri-la,Three Shadows Art Centre, September 24. ———. 2016b. “Fashioning Shangri-La.” Installation presented at the Searching for Shangri-la, Three Shadows Art Centre, November 5. ———. 2017. Delusions. Exhibition, Fashion Design, and Choreography. Green T. House, Beijing, June 10. Stjernholm, Johan, Nadia Malik, and Lorraine Smith. 2010. “The Incomplete Subject.” Dance Performance Presented at the Body, Space, Movement,Visuality & Dress Symposium,Victoria & Albert Museum, June 27. Tam,Vivienne, and Flora Zeta Cheong-Leen. 1999. Mao: From Icon to Irony. Exhibition.Victoria & Albert, London. “TEDx Program.” 2018. TED: Ideas Worth Spreading. 2018. Accessed April 23, 2019. https://www.ted. com/about/programs-initiatives/tedx-program.

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27 STACKING THE SPINE Interdisciplinary reflections from BackStories Becka McFadden

Introduction The process of performance making of BackStories, which is the performance under discussion in this chapter, begins with a collection of material provocations. Some have been there from the beginning like Anne Carson’s “On Walking Backwards” from “Short Talks” in the collection Plainwater (Carson 1995), which contains the haunting lines: “My mother forbad us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us” (Carson 1995, 36). Some entered the project later, the result of conscious contextual research like this medical observation from 1825: “Spinal afflictions are most common in large towns and more frequent amongst the better ranks of society” (Simpson quoted in Shorter 1992, 26). Others arrived more intuitively, salvaged from the dusty corners of memory and invested suddenly with a new urgency like the song “Love Is Like Jazz” by The Magnetic Fields. “Love is like jazz,” vocalist Stephen Merrit sings against a riotously discordant background, “You make it up as you go along and you act as if you really know the song, but you don’t and you never will” (Merrit 1999). If not backwards, then certainly behind us. To some extent handed down. Physical, yes, but also social, psychological. Maddening, too. Interminable for as long as we are alive at least (the mother in Carson’s text might disagree). Complex and paradoxical. These are among our companions, as we approach the back, approach the BackStories. What follows is an essay in the etymological sense, which is to say it is an attempt to discuss key moments in the creation of an interdisciplinary creative process and to locate these within a broader context of related practices and concerns. This account is practice-led and references my experience in co-creating, indeed co-drafting, BackStories, a solo dance theater work with an accompanying photographic exhibition that took place in London between 2014 and 2016. I say drafting to allude to an intentional unfinished quality to the work, as well as to my sense of it as an ongoing process, moving through versions and iterations towards something that continues to shape-shift, moving in and out of focus. BackStories began its life as a duet project, instigated by me and Canadian dance artist Scheherazaad Cooper. An Odissi Indian classical dancer, Cooper is also a trained actor, while my own training is predominately in theater, in which, at that time, I had worked as 381

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a director and actor in text-based and devised performances. From the outset, then, perspectives and modes of working from our individual and shared disciplines were organically present within our process. The conscious articulation of these perspectives as in “let’s look at it theatrically” or “let’s take a choreographic approach here” was not present within the work. Rather, our embodied access to multiple modes of working from disparate sources encountered throughout our training and professional experience allowed us to move fluidly between them. In this sense, the variety of approaches at our disposal functioned like a toolkit from which we could intuitively pull out the tactics that best served a specific moment. The impetus to create BackStories emerged serendipitously, as many good ideas do, in the studio. In late 2013, following the completion of our doctoral studies, which we had pursued in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London, we found ourselves in a studio at Islington Arts Factory in North London attempting to reconnect to a state of embodiment greater than the sensation of fingers tapping on keyboards. As we experimented, offering each other different provocations for improvisation, Cooper happened to watch me perform a task—a seated improvisation to music on a stool—from behind. Viewed backwards and deprived of the contextual information provided by the eyes and face, this simple exercise became oddly compelling. We spent the rest of the day in the same way: provoking each other with music, props, and physical positioning within the studio. By early January, we knew we had a project on our hands. It feels important to say that what we had was first and foremost a performance project, emerging from a desire to work with the aesthetic and dramaturgical properties of the back-body. Much research followed, some of which will be shared here, but it was the type of research one pursues in the making of a performance work as an end in itself, as distinct from, for example, a practice-as-research process in which performance or performances may form part of the research methodology for investigating a particular research question or set of questions. The  creation process emerging from this initial moment of discovery can be divided into two phases. The first phase was concerned with the making of a duet performance and followed on directly from that afternoon in Islington Arts Factory. Research and development was carried out with the support of Arts Council England and Canada Council for the Arts during residencies in March 2014 at Cooltour (Ostrava, Czech Republic) and in May 2014 at Goldsmiths, University of London, where dance and performance dramaturg, writer, and curator Mary Ann Hushlak joined our team. An initial work demonstration was part of Of Two Minds … an Afternoon on Duet Collaboration at the Lilian Baylis Studio at Sadler’s Wells, London, on October 30, 2014. On January 9, 2015, a 20-minute work-in-progress version of the duet premiered as part of Resolution! 2015, an annual festival of new dance works produced by The Place, a dance venue near Kings Cross. Two further residencies, in February at Vyrsodepseio in Athens, Greece, and at the Alfred ve dvoře theater in Prague, Czech Republic, led to the creation of a 45-minute work that premiered at Alfred ve dvoře on April 18, 2015. Following this initial phase of the work, Cooper relocated to Vancouver, Canada, and we gave each other permission to work independently on the BackStories material, to see what solos or alternative collaborations might arise. The solo iteration of BackStories that I pursued, continuing in collaboration with Hushlak and adding movement-based practitioner and researcher Daniel Somerville to the team as director, first took shape in August 2015 during my residency at Hornsey Town Hall Arts Centre (HTHAC). The solo premiered on September 3, 2015, and ran for a total of eight performances at the Impermanent Festival of Contemporary Performance, a festival I cofounded and cocurated with Jamie Harper of Hobo Theatre in HTHAC. Subsequently BackStories in its solo form has been performed 382

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at the Brighton Fringe Festival (May 12–15, 2016), where it was nominated for Southwest Dance’s Space to Dance Award; the Bloomsbury Festival (October 21, 2016); University of Worcester (October 26, 2016); and Theatre Utopia, Croydon (November 4, 2016). A related project, a series of back portraits, in collaboration with photographer Andrew McGibbon, was released online in the run-up to the Brighton Fringe Festival and exhibited at HTHAC’s Ply Gallery from June 22 to 28, 2016. The exhibition has since toured with the performance to the Bloomsbury Festival and University of Worcester (Illustrations 27.1 and 27.2). In the remainder of this chapter, I will discuss the development of the BackStories project, including, but not limited to, the solo performance. I will approach the work from three directions, encompassing several disciplinary perspectives. The  first will consider the aesthetic and dramaturgical implications of BackStories’ central convention—that the performer’s back faces the audience—through a visit to an exhibition of sculpture and installations. The second considers BackStories and my role as co-instigator, cocreator, and performer in relation to genealogies of practice emerging from dance and theater contexts that foreground the performer as creator, rather than interpreter, of material. The third questions whether a tension exists between the plural of “BackStories” and the solo nature of the BackStories performance, considering the ways in which multiplicity is woven into the project through the photographic collaboration with McGibbon and the dramaturgy of the performance. Before proceeding, an acknowledgment that the task of rendering an account of this process feels, in some ways, anathema to its ethos. Any account of a previous creative process runs the risk of asserting retrospective order over an unruly, idiosyncratic process, as many artists have pointed out. Pina Bausch resisted “tidy explanations,” writes dramaturg and collaborator Raimund Hoghe because “Then it looks as if I decided on things, that I have determined how to do things. But that’s not true” (Hoghe 2013, 63). Founder of Odin Teatret, Eugenio Barba, observes that written accounts of practice may “have an authoritative and persuasive tone” that obscures the “many nights of solitude and fear” that attend the creative

Illustration 27.1 Paul Wade.)

Performing BackStories at University of Worcester, October 2016. (Courtesy of

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Illustration 27.2 Performing BackStories at Theatre Utopia, Croydon, November 2016. (Courtesy of Paul Wade.)

process (Barba 2005, 69). BackStories was made with a strong attachment to serendipity and felt sense, and it would be disingenuous to imply that these were not the main drivers of the research and questioning that informed the studio-based process. Retrospectively, it is possible to place BackStories in dialogue with works by major twentieth-century practitioners who also challenge the dominance of the face or highlight the expressivity of the back such as Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A (1966), Trisha Brown’s If You Couldn’t See Me (1994), or Steve Paxton’s Material for the Spine (2008). However, it would be wrong to say that these were present from the beginning, or even the middle, of the creation process. Various provocations, research materials, and frames of reference emerged at different points of the creation process, and these are shared as material interludes woven through this text to give the reader a sense of what material traveled into the studio with us, took root, and offered ways forward. My approach to creating this text has been to try as much as possible to follow the same impulses and energies that informed the making of BackStories. As the body has been central to that process, I have worked to keep it present here, drawing on embodied writing techniques including the proprioceptive writing practice of Linda Trichter Metcalf and Tobin Simon (2002) and the guidelines of Sondra Perl (2004) for composing with felt sense. In different ways, these approaches offer strategies for keeping the act of writing a physical and embodied one. My engagement with these processes is part of a larger attempt to write about body-based performance work—my own, yes, but also that of others—through the body, with the breath, and in a spirit akin to the work in the studio. 384

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A visit to a gallery, or thoughts on form, content, and the aesthetics of the back The cervical vertebrae begin at the base of the skull with C1, the top vertebrae. As we count, we descend, which feels quite Cartesian, really. If I could number the vertebrae, I would start with the coccyx and work my way up through the trunk, towards the neck, towards the brain. Perhaps it is fitting, though, in the context of BackStories, to begin with the head and work down. At  the level of movement vocabulary, the piece’s central convention— that the performer faces upstage for almost the entire duration of the performance— functions like a mask. Just as the presence of a mask onstage draws the spectator’s attention to wearer’s physical expressivity, so too the absence of the face turns the attention of the creative team, as well as that of the spectator, to less familiar perspectives. Specifically, BackStories relocates the center of meaning to the landscape of the back, which functions for us as a mobile topography, what director Daniel Somerville termed “Planet Back” in rehearsals of the solo. One aspect of the back’s expressivity is highly technical; in part, the creation process of BackStories demanded an excavation of the back’s movement potential and what might be described as a puppetry of the back. At the same time, the spectator also is viewing the work from behind, and so backwards becomes an orientation, a perspective, a scenography. At  a  logistical level, upstage is now  downstage. What the spectator sees and how the spectator’s gaze functions depend on the framing of the back, running the gamut from the voyeuristic to the quotidian, as stage image and the spectator’s imagination coincide. BackStories, then, emerges at the intersection of a specific, physical back and a general proxemic orientation: the view from behind. While these are complementary conventions, the physical back and the view from behind operate distinctly, as dramaturg Mary Ann Hushlak (2014) observed in a blog post she wrote following a visit to the Hayward Gallery on London’s south bank for exhibition titled The Human Factor: The Figure in Contemporary Sculpture. Hushlak’s blog post contrasts her perception of Maurizio Cattelan’s Him (2001) and Yinka Shonibare’s Girl Ballerina (2007) with that of Thomas Hirschorn’s Resistance-Subjector (2011) and Andro Wekua’s Sneakers 1 (2008). These observations were made less than a year into the BackStories duet process and affirmed what was becoming clear in the studio: our work consisted of cultivating an expressive language of the back and of negotiating the compositional possibilities of viewing from behind. The sculptures of Cattelan and Shonibare play with the spectator’s perception and expectation by juxtaposing wildly different fronts and backs. In the case of Him (Cattelan 2001), Cattelan’s staging invites the viewer to approach an innocuous kneeling figure clad in a grey suit. The anonymity of the suited back-body contrasts shockingly with the sculpture’s face, which is that of Adolf Hitler. Shonibare, in comparison, evokes Edgar Degas’s Little Dancer of 14 Years (Degas 1881) with a headless mannequin clad in a tutu made of African textiles. It is only when you approach the image from behind that it becomes clear that Shonibare’s Girl Ballerina (2007) is holding an oversized handgun, finger on the trigger. Cattelan and Shonibare stage the back, playing with the idea that the two sides of body may conceal, reveal, and contrast one another, as Hushlak notes: “Intrinsic to our ‘reading’ of Girl Ballerina and Him is the clinching detail and it always seems to be found on the reverse side. One side suggests, presents and ultimately misleads; the other reveals.… Counterpoint. Juxtaposition. Contradiction” (Hushlak 2014). Tension between back and front is palpable here as the semiotic assumption that we can best determine the nature of someone or something by facing it head on is turned back upon itself. If Cattelan and Shonibare are about the back’s theatrical potential, Hirschorn and Wekua draw the viewer into the physicality of the back itself. Hirschorn’s Resistance-Subjector 385

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(Hirschorn 2011), an installation of blasted mannequins, draws Hushlak’s attention differently: “I linger on the backs themselves. Instead of taking in a more generic rear view, I gaze at each separate back” (Hushlak 2014). Similarly, with Wekua’s Sneakers 1 (Wekua 2008) as Hushlak writes, “Of course I note the sneakers the figure wears; the piece is titled Sneakers 1, after all, and the lilac-colored sneakers are solid and factual.… Yet it is the back I study” (Hushlak 2014). Hushlak subsequently notes that both these backs were naked—that the absence of an external layer to smooth over the back’s complexities draws the eye quite specifically. This is not to deny the clothed back its eloquence. However. there is something to be said for the complexity that emerges when the totalizing effect of fabric is peeled away to reveal more fully the specific complexities of muscle, skin, and bone. That these reflections occurred in a gallery is significant during the creation of the duet piece specifically; the gallery was a frequent point of reference in part because it is one of the few places where we regularly view those around us from behind, their backs often visually juxtaposed with the artworks at which we are looking. As Hushlak’s observations, recorded from multiple viewpoints, make clear, the gallery is a place that invites perambulation and shifts of perspective, particularly where installation and sculpture are concerned. In the proscenium spaces for which BackStories was made, the spectator’s point of view is comparatively fixed. While the eye is free to jump about the stage, the orientation is stable and constant. BackStories differs from much performance work for theater, including the iconic twentiethcentury works previously noted in that it is less an avoidance of the face (as in Trio A) than a presentation of the back. Rotation, flexion, and profile are minimized, and the back directly confronts the spectator, who, like it, is also facing upstage. This shared orientation, sustained through the performance, constitutes another disruption of stage proxemics-as-usual, transforming the performance space, viewed from the back row, into a sea of backs. Unlike the viewer of Him (Cattelan 2001) or Girl Ballerina (Shonibare 2007), the BackStories spectator has no means by which to definitively ascertain what is happening on the other side of the performer’s body. The back, placed within the mise-en-scéne of the production, is the medium through which all communication and invitations to infer as the spectator will occur. The early duet iterations of BackStories (2014–2015) focused primarily on the scenographic aspect of this duality, or, in other words, the view from behind. In part because Cooper and I were still very much exploring the self-imposed parameter of a sustained upstage orientation, we generated a great deal of material by observing a variety of performance forms (play texts, improvised monologues, improvisations to music, and our own specific movement practices) from behind, observing the ways in which this troubled conventional performance semiotics and opened up new possibilities. We consciously worked with the notion of the gallery spectator and took, initially, a quite controlling approach to composition, in that we selected both the images that were presented and the perspective from which they were viewed. Starting from clear transitions between distinct, set solos and duets, the structure gradually broke down as the performance unspooled and these merged into one another, gravitating toward a more improvisational space, albeit one that retained the absence of the face.

Material interlude: A backstory from the author Here is a transcription of a self-recording, mixed into the BackStories sound score: … Consequently, I am writing this at my dining room table, too rapidly and maniacally, with unnecessarily furrowed brow. I am sitting cross-legged, right over left, but forward on my feet, not on my bum, so that the bulk of my weight is going 386

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into the top of my right foot, at the point at which it meets the chair, approximately above my metatarsal arch. My spine is curved and my left elbow is on the table, left hand under chin, holding a piece of hair from the right side of my head. I am periodically tilting my head to the right, then back to the left, hooking the base of my skull, the left side, over my left shoulder, which is making its way towards my left ear. My right forearm is cramping. It is an absurd posture, but I’ve occupied it for at least ten minutes because I don’t, for whatever reason, want to invest the time it would take me to move. (Beautiful Confusion Collective 2015)

Creating the BackStories scores at the intersection of dance and theater In this section, I will discuss the ways in which my background in physical theater, specifically a set of devising practices associated with Polish theater director Jerzy Grotowski and his successors, informed my creation work on the BackStories solo. First, however, it is useful to discuss briefly how movement material was generated during the duet process. Solos or duets were crafted independently of each other from specific provocations drawn from a range of sources including music, visual artworks, and text. In her essay “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play,” Elinor Fuchs describes a play as “another world passing before you in time and space,” which possesses its own “space-time dynamics” as well as a host of other qualities unique to it (Fuchs 2004, 6). Following this line of thought, it could be said that each section within the duet functioned as its own world with form and content existing sometimes in synthesis and sometimes in juxtaposition. These sections existing as solos and duets were structured in a manner analogous to the stringing of beads on a thread with each retaining its specific structure or character with little bleed or distortion emerging from its proximity to other materials. In the solo creation process, without two bodies to provide counterpoint, create tension, and suggest relationships, the work shifted. That shift came by way of the creation of three scores that I navigate in the performance of BackStories (for the rest of this section, discussion of the solo is implied, unless otherwise stated). These are the physical score, encompassing the movement and sound I generate during the performance; the internal score, referring to a series of images, memories, and associations that texture the execution of the physical score; and the performance score, referring to the dramaturgy of the piece and encompassing the live performance, the scenic elements, spatial proxemics, and the relationship between performer and spectators. The territory covered by these scores ranges from the communicative to the invisible, from the macro to the micro, just as my experience of BackStories encompasses the perspectives of the performer as well as the creator with an eye on the overall shape of the performance. This process is not to downplay the significant contributions of director Somerville and dramaturg Hushlak. Rather, the role of the performer as creative, generative artist, which is a constant in all of my performance work regardless of whether the performer is me or someone else, situates my practice within a genealogy of performance-making in which the performer’s contribution is understood as creative and generative, not merely interpretive. In  Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices, Emma Govan, Katie Normington, and Helen J. Nicholson trace the emergence of what they term “the creative performer” to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, noting, “As the works of psychological thinkers including Freud and Jung became widely available, performing increasingly focused on self-exploration and self-expression” (Govan, Normington, and Nicholson 2007, 30). Govan, Normington, and Nicholson cite Isadora Duncan’s “natural dances” of the early twentieth 387

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century, which eschewed formal technique in favor of more organic expressivity, as epitomizing the belief “that freeing the imagination and releasing the unconscious through spontaneous creative practice was both socially advantageous and personally liberating” (Govan, Normington, and Nicholson 2007, 30). While these authors acknowledge the opinion, held at the time, that such work held the capacity to improve society, as liberated individuals would build better social structures, I am skeptical of an over-reliance on personal emancipation and the value of pure self-expression as a chief aim of performance work that expects an audience to sit in a theater and attend to it exclusively. Contemporaneously, Russian theater director Konstantin Stanislavsky trained his acting students to portray nuanced characters such as those created by playwright Anton Chekhov with psychological realism. Often conflated erroneously with method acting in Anglophone contexts, Stanislavsky’s work with actors, as Bella Merlin explains in The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit, was grounded in a psychophysical approach: PSYCHO-PHYSICALITY basically alludes to the fact that your body and your psyche are trained together to achieve a sense of inner–outer coordination. This  means that what you experience internally is immediately translated into an outer expression, and (conversely) what your body manifests physically has a direct and acknowledged effect on your psychological landscape. (Merlin 2014, 18) Psychophysical training equips actors to bring their own experiences and creativity to a role, shading it with personal choices and associations that often remain submerged beneath the characters the audience perceives, but which are nevertheless essential to the performance. Stanislavsky’s understanding of the psychophysicality of acting also prioritized the elimination of unnecessary tension or habitual movements, as these inhibit the spontaneous expressivity of the body (Merlin 2014, 32). I had been trained in this approach to acting during my under- and postgraduate degrees, but the “inner–outer coordination” Merlin describes took on new significance during the BackStories process as I made a piece of nonverbal work for the first time. The creativity of the actor is even more central to the work of Jerzy Grotowski. Where Stanislavsky’s actors brought their creativity to bear on the portrayal of characters in authored plays performed naturalistically, Grotowski’s work exists in a more stylized space and is understood as one of the main points of reference for the range of practices, emphasizing devising and the expressivity of the body, which are often encapsulated today by the term “physical theater.” In “Methodological Exploration,” which is contained in Towards a Poor Theatre (Grotowski 1968), Grotowski explains his interest in the actor’s creativity: If the actor reproduces an act that I have taught him, this is a sort of “dressage.” The result is a banal action from a methodical point of view, and in my heart of hearts I find it sterile, for nothing has opened up before me. But if, in close collaboration, we reach the point where the actor, released from his daily resistances, profoundly reveals himself through a gesture … I shall then be personally enriched, for in that gesture a kind of human experience will have been revealed, something rather special that might be defined as a destiny, a human condition. (Grotowski 1968, 130) Significantly, and in contrast to the solo practice of Duncan, for example, Grotowski’s practice emphasizes collaboration between actor and director. While Grotowski’s research took him away from the creation of public performances, the work from his Theatre of 388

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Productions period wove material generated by the actors into the dramaturgy of collective work. In “The Theatre’s New Testament,” he explains the significance of this larger context: “The important thing is to use the role as a trampolin [sic], an instrument with which to study what is hidden behind our everyday mask … in order to sacrifice it, to expose it” (37). Where a performer achieves this kind of exposure, the impact is felt by the spectator: “The spectator understands, consciously or unconsciously, that such an act is an invitation to him to do the same thing.… We try to escape the truth about ourselves, whereas here we are invited to stop and take a closer look” (37), convened and held in the darkness of the theater. Grotowski’s emphasis on the actor as the originator of the gestures she performs is echoed in Pina Bausch’s work with her dancers. In The Pina Bausch Sourcebook: The Making of Tanztheater, Royd Climenhaga writes, “In rehearsal, Bausch asks questions. Questions of elemental purpose, allowing her performers time to answer with words, with movement, with a performed moment” (Climenhaga 2013, 59). Raimund Hoghe (2013) refers to the company as Bausch’s “dancers/actors/co-authors,” quoting Bausch’s understanding of her own role in the process of making a new performance: “What I do: I watch. Maybe that’s it. I have simply looked at human relationships and tried to see them, tried to speak about them. That’s what I am interested in. I don’t know of anything more important” (Hoghe 2013, 63). Like Grotowski, Bausch shapes the material generated by the performer, montaging it into the final structure of the performance. Describing her experience of assisting Bausch in this process, Renate Klette writes: “Pina has a pile of paper scraps with all the exercises written down.… Every night in the Spanish restaurant we rearrange the scraps in a new order. ‘Line them up,’ Pina says, and we try to order them according to themes or movements, music or dancers. This game of solitaire never ends and sometimes we come up with a meaningful frame” (Klette 2013, 63). Klette goes on to describe her impulse to organize according to “traditional patterns of action,” a logic Bausch finds boring: “She  wants a total impression, from which the audience can choose the events it wishes to follow” (63). Like Grotowski’s work, Bausch’s work demands an active spectator with the absence of Klette’s “traditional patterns of action,” arguably asking even more of the audience. As Hoghe writes, “It is a form of theatre that is too demanding for most of the spectators (and critics); they cannot handle the offer to assemble the piece themselves. It is a theatre without instructions for use, without an ostensible structure and interpretation—a subjective reality that can only be encountered subjectively” (Hoghe 2013, 79). This, then, is work that extends Stanislavsky’s psychophysical feedback loop between inner and outer to the spectator, who actively receives the staged images, which in turn resonate with their own interiority, in a process that echoes the means by which they were created. This type of dramaturgy, which looks to bring the spectators in contact with themselves through their encounters with a performance, was very much in our minds as we created BackStories. The potential to slide into pure autobiography is rife in a solo performance, specifically where the generation of material has drawn upon personal experiences and points of departure, but Hushlak, Somerville, and I were quite clear from the outset that even the solo version of BackStories should resist collapsing into a singular backstory that is solely identifiable with the performer on stage. The formal restriction—the back-body as a constant presence—aided us in this task because, despite the particularity of any given back, the relative irregularity of staring at the human back for 40 minutes at a time means we are less able to draw conclusions as to the type or kind of persona we are traveling alongside. In other words, our intentions might be articulated like this: faced with the expressivity of the back, 389

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a language they cannot quite read, despite knowing they possess backs themselves, the spectators might experience the performer’s back, from time to time, as a mirror in which they encounter something of themselves. With our aim to open, through the performance, a space of self-reflection for the spectator, the creation of the three-part score previously mentioned provided the means of approaching it. The coexistence of the performance score, the physical score, and the internal score creates a field in which the material that emerges from personal responses to various stimuli (the physical score) can retain its specificity in performance (via the inner score), while aiming at a dramaturgy greater than itself (the performance score). The performance score of BackStories encompasses the structure of the individual sections or “scenes” of the piece, together with the set (currently a bar stool, a straight chair, and a piano stool), lighting (ranging from harsh light evoking a bureaucratic waiting room to an indulgent hot fuchsia), costume (currently a white dress, purchased off the rack at Topshop and altered to maximize the exposure of the spine), projection and sound (encompassing music, ambient noise, and voice recordings). These elements and their interactions are structured, but loosely enough to allow space for the spectators’ own associations. The performance score is the frame within which the physical score, informed by an inner score, is performed. The performance score is stable, providing a structure within which the physical and internal scores can vibrate. The physical score is the series of movement sequences I perform throughout the piece, as well as the sounds I make, which include moments of intentionally audible breathing, coughing and sniffing, laughter, humming, and the smack of my palm against the exposed flesh of my back. During the duet creation process, Cooper had introduced the concept, new to me at the time, of structured improvisation, meaning that while certain points with the physical score were fixed (i.e., by a particular point in the performance I needed to have reached the upstage left corner), there was a degree of freedom and space for spontaneity in the way we moved from one fixed point to another. Without eliminating this freedom, I worked with Somerville to clarify the physical score and to prioritize the unique expressivity of the back-body over a reliance on the scenographic orientation of backwards. Even in moments of free flow, involving the entire body, we worked to make the spine the point of origin and impulse. At the level of physical training, this process involved working with segmentation of the spine and wider back-body and drawing connections between the core and the limbs. Accompanying us throughout the process of clarifying the physical score was the excavation and deepening of the internal score—a series of images, intentions, actions, and phrases that impel and texture my movement through the physical score and make the various elements of the performance structure specific and concrete for me in the moment of performance. As with the most personal layer of the historical practices I have discussed, the explicit content of this score is largely invisible to the audience, although its impact, manifested in the tone and quality of the movement, is highly visible. Imagining a context of transmission helps to further distinguish these. I could give another team of artists only the performance score, and they could make something that shares BackStories’ structure, but it would likely look radically different. I could teach another performer my physical score, which would come closest to the transference of choreography, but the internal score cannot be transmitted and will be specific to each performer. Reflecting on this process in 2018, when I am in the midst of a subsequent project, I am struck by the way in which this sense of a triple score consolidated within my practice during the BackStories project and has flowed forward into a new ensemble work, with radically different content. Increasingly, my sense is that heightened clarity (though not inflexibility) of 390

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the physical score, which I continue to pursue as and when I have cause to revisit BackStories, gives the inner score space to sing; the performance consequently fizzes up to engage the spectator at the intersection of physical, inner, and performance scores. I anticipate further revelations on that front as the work (by which I mean the kind that never stops) continues, from project to project.

Material interlude: “It’s like Braille, almost.” Here is an extract from an interview with J, a London-based massage therapist: I see hundreds of backs a month. My focus is on other people’s backs, more than my own. So, I think the attention isn’t really there for my back. I’m so focused on other people’s backs and problem areas and that’s what I’ve studied for years, and my own back is quite neglected, I think, in that sense. You can tell quite a lot about someone just feeling their backs. It’s like braille, almost. (McFadden 2015)

Solo and Chorus As BackStories has transitioned from duet into solo, I have found myself interrogating its plural title. To what extent can a solo work claim plurality? I have discussed in the preceding section our intention, as BackStories’ creative team, to structure the performance in a way that left space for spectators to bring their own associations to the work. This intention is one very important way of avoiding a slide into individuality, or even autobiography, which would feel reductive in relation to our goals of maintaining dramaturgical openness and encouraging active spectator engagement. Another suggestion of multiplicity is contained with the word ‘backstory’ itself; it is not as if each of us has only one, as Hushlak writes in her dramaturgy note for the BackStories program: Backstory—where to begin? Behind us, most certainly. Yet in terms of when, when to start from? Yesterday, last week, a month ago, a year ago, several years ago, most of a life? Or from a particular event? A particular something? Or a very specific place? Even as we say the word, our heads raise and tilt ever so slightly backwards. In fiction, backstory is about how a character gets to be like that, or does that, whatever the that of the story is. In real life, it’s more how each of us can be fathomed, can be understood, can be contextualized, can be tracked, how our bodily reactions and inner thoughts penetrate our actions, our gestures, our tone—right now, in this moment. Backstory is of course about time, time past, what is behind us and what we carry with us. Remnants, vestiges of habits, rituals, mementos as much as memories, crucial moments, scars, wounds, phobias and history. All of the remnants, through time, and also, through space. Like a territory. Like a hinterland. Our territory. Our hinterland. (Hushlak 2016) Hushlak’s text highlights our general perceptions of the word—its association with fiction, the hows and why of a character, of ourselves. Wherever it is, it is back—in time, in the past, but also in space. At the same time, it is present, inescapable—in our actions, in our perceptions of the world around us, inscribed on our bodies as habitual gesture, posture, tension. As Hushlak 391

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notes, even to say the word, even, I would argue, to think of the back, activates a proprioceptive response, a reminder: “Oh yes, I have that too, a back. A backstory. Probably several.” In addition to these plural considerations rooted within the performance itself, a further exploration of BackStories’ capacity to encompass multiple stories emerged from my collaboration, in Spring 2016, with photographer Andrew McGibbon. I met McGibbon in Hornsey Town Hall Arts Centre, where he was also an artist in residence in spring 2016. Together we conceived the idea of shooting a series of back portraits in his studio, which would be lit to emphasize the physicality and musculature of the back body. This  collaboration built upon a range of interviews I had conducted earlier in the BackStories process, in the winter of 2014–2015, when Cooper and I were seeking to raise awareness of the project ahead of our residencies in Greece and the Czech Republic. That process had involved photographing subjects with my iPad in their place of work and asking them to tell me their backstory, in whatever sense they understood that term (the interview with London-based massage therapist J in the Material Interlude preceding this section is an example from this series). Moving on from this experiment with longer form storytelling, McGibbon and I decided to limit the response of our subjects, a combination of fellow residents and other users of the building, to complete the sentence “My backstory is …” Originally released through Beautiful Confusion Collective’s social media accounts in the run up to BackStories’ appearance at Brighton Fringe, we eventually displayed these images in Hornsey Town Hall’s Ply Gallery during a group exhibition titled SPLICE: Live Art and Photography in Collaboration (June 22–28, 2016). The provocation we offered our subjects prompted a wide range of responses, as this sample demonstrates: … always trying (Alexis P.). … no longer my own (Chris R.) … still in progress (Elisa N.) … soft and hairy (Tom C.) … love (Sara P.) … a misspent youth and an undecided future (Steve G.) … something I’ve never considered (Vanessa H.) … unimproved, despite physio (Paul W.) … a link to my family (Caroline G.) … protection for the rest of me (David M.) … that even the impossible can be possible (Carolyn W.) … painful (Asa T.) … scoliosis in recovery (Maude L.) … years of depression and anxiety behind me (David L.) (McFadden and McGibbon 2016) Unsurprisingly, given that an informal survey of published literature on the back conducted across a variety of specialist and general London bookshops at the beginning of the BackStories process produced almost exclusively texts on back pain and its management, several respondents spoke about their backs in a biomedical context. Asa T.’s backstory is simply “painful,” while Paul W.’s is “unimproved despite physio.” Maude L.’s is “scoliosis in recovery,” suggesting the back as a site of process, “in progress” (Elisa N.), or “always trying” (Alexis P.). Steve G.’s backstory is more poetically liminal: “a misspent youth and an undecided future,” positing the back body as a site of negotiation, or a space in which competing energies can coexist. Other responses evoke the expression of turning one’s back on something, of a  sealing off. David L.’s response, “years of depression and anxiety behind me,” posits the back as 392

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Illustration 27.3 “My backstory is…protection for the rest of me.” “David M” from the What’s Your Backstory? series. (Courtesy of Andrew McGibbon.)

something of a fire door between then and now. Similarly, David M.’s back is “protection for the rest of me,” calling to mind the image of a superhero’s cape, attached, of course, to the back (see Illustration 27.3). In contrast, Caroline G’s “a link to my family” connects the here and now to a genealogy that suggests a transcendence of the purely biological. Other responses (Carolyn W.) engage with a biographical interpretation of backstory, while still others delight in the animality of the back (Tom C.) (Illustration 27.3). The images and responses collected in our initial studio portrait session have continued to grow. For the private view of SPLICE, McGibbon constructed a back-portrait photo booth, which allowed attendees to take a back selfie. These images were later printed and added to the gallery exhibition. Subsequently, the photo-booth concept has been revisited in connection with a performance of BackStories at University of Worcester and at a standalone exhibition of the photos for the Bloomsbury Festival. These BackStories, generously shared by their owners, are not explicitly present in the performance of BackStories, but knowledge of their existence adds a density, an additional layer of resonance to the work. The accumulation of these specificities—each a unique back, with a unique response to the same prompt—allows the BackStories project to gesture toward something universal, without collapsing into the general.

Conclusion: Back to the gallery If the Hayward Gallery’s The Human Factor exhibition provoked interesting questions at the start of the duet creation process, another exhibition, Flæsh, at Prague’s Rudolfinum Gallery visited in November 2015, after the BackStories solo had premiered, seemed to offer a kind 393

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of affirmation. Alongside works by Marlene Dumas, Tracey Emin, Belinda De Bruyckere, and Louise Bourgeois, a series of large format figure drawings by Kiki Smith was exhibited. Several works in this series elaborate on the back of a female figure. In  Garland (2012a), flowers fill, and appear to radiate from, the back of a woman seated in profile and facing us, looking over her right shoulder, eyes closed. The drawing of the woman is repeated twice, the second time without the flowers, but with the eyes open. In Smith’s Influence (2012b), a seated female figure faces diagonally upstage, face in profile, eyes open, hands resting on her thighs. From red, yellow, and blue circles on her back, colored beams radiate, refracting and trailing behind her, like intentional streamers. The energy feels outward. Curator Petr Nedoma’s comments regarding Smith’s project in her sculpture practice from the late 1990s onward feel equally applicable to these drawings: “The mirroring of the internal situation in the overall makeup of the statue was established by her as an essential issue, because the inner self inherently constitutes the external appearance as the true content thereof ” (Nedoma 2015, 22). In  other words, the internal score shapes what appears externally, articulated through the physicality of the body, a relationship that echoes Merlin’s (2014) articulation of Stanislavsky’s psychophysical process. In Smith’s work, inner and outer coexist, while confrontation with the entire series—in its own context, or the broader context of the entire Flæsh exhibition—invites the spectator to “provide the meaning by filling the void with attributes, insertions and thoughts” (Nedoma 2015, 22). Nedoma continues, “Presumably, this will give rise, completely naturally, to multiple readings basically dependent on the viewer’s imagination and experience” (22). Once again, a gaze found in the gallery speaks productively to decisions made on stage, to the ways in which multiple, diverse, and even contradictory elements allow the specific to speak to the collective, cultivate an inclusive complexity, insist on plurality, and refuse to close meaning, inviting spine to be(come) spines.

References Barba, Eugenio. 2005. “Children of Silence: Reflections on Forty Years of Odin Teatret.” Translated by Judy Barba. TDR:The Drama Review 49 (1): 65–74. Beautiful Confusion Collective. 2015. BackStories. London: Hornsey Town Hall Arts Centre, September 3. Live performance. Carson, Anne. 1995. Plainwater. New York:Vintage Books. Cattelan, Maurizio. 2001. Him. Sculpture. London: Hayward Gallery, The  Human Factor, June 17– September 7, 2014. Climenhaga, Royd. 2013. “Creating Bausch’s World.” In  The  Pina Bausch Sourcebook: The  Making of Tanztheater, edited by Royd Climenhaga, 59–61. London: Routledge. Fuchs, Elinor. 2004. “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet.” Theatre 34 (2): 4–9. Govan, Emma, Katie Normington, and Helen J. Nicholson. 2007. Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices. London: Routledge. Grotowski, Jerzy. 1968. Towards a Poor Theatre. New York: Simon and Schuster. Hirschorn,Thomas. 2011. Resistance-Subjector. Sculpture. London: Hayward Gallery, The Human Factor, June 17–September 7, 2014. Hoghe, Raimund. 2013. “Into Myself—a Twig, a Wall: An Essay on Pina Bausch and Her Theatre.” In The Pina Bausch Sourcebook: The Making of Tanztheater, edited by Royd Climenhaga, 62–73. London: Routledge. Hushlak, Mary Ann. 2014. “A BackStories Take on The Human Factor Exhibition.” Accessed June 28, 2017. https://thebackstories.tumblr.com/humanfactor. ———. 2016. Dramaturg’s Note for BackStories program at the Brighton Fringe Festival, May 12–15. Klette, Renate. 2013. “In  Rehearsal with Pina Bausch.” In  The  Pina Bausch Sourcebook: The  Making of Tanztheater, edited by Royd Climenhaga, 74–80. London: Routledge.

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Stacking the spine McFadden, Becka. 2015. “Jade and Lukas’s Backstories.” Blog post, February 5. Accessed July  1, 2017. https://thebackstories.tumblr.com/whatsyourbackstory_jadelukas. McFadden, Becka, and Andrew McGibbon. 2016. What’s Your Backstory? Digital photography exhibition, May 1–15. Accessed July 1, 2017. http://www.beautifulconfusioncollective.com/whatsyourbackstory. Merlin, Bella. 2014. The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit, Revised Edition. London: Nick Hern Books. Merrit, Stephin, and The Magnetic Fields. 1999. “Love Is Like Jazz.” Track 2 on Volume 2 of 69 Love Songs. Merge. Mp3. Nedoma, Petr. 2015 “Flæsh” in Flæsh. Translated by Stuart Hoskins. Prague: Galerie Rudolfinum. Perl, Sondra. 2004. Felt Sense: Writing with the Body. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Shonibare, Yinka. 2007. Girl Ballerina. Sculpture. London: Hayward Gallery, The Human Factor, June 17– September 7, 2014. Shorter, Edward. 1992. From Paralysis to Fatigue:A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era. New York: The Free Press. Smith, Kiki. 2012a. Garland. Chromogenic color print and ink on Nepalese paper. Prague: Galerie Rudolfinum, Flæsh, October 1, 2015–January 3, 2016. ———. 2012b. Influence. Chromogenic color print and ink on Nepalese paper. Prague: Galerie Rudolfinum, Flæsh, October 1, 2015–January 3, 2016. Trichter Metcalf, Linda, and Tobin Simon. 2002. Writing the Mind Alive:The Proprioceptive Method of Finding Your Authentic Voice. New York: Ballantine. Wekua, Andro. 2008. Sneakers 1. Sculpture. London: Hayward Gallery, The  Human Factor, June 17– September 7, 2014.

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28 LONGING FOR THE SUBALTERN Subaltern historiography as choreographic tactic Cynthia Ling Lee

Introduction How might subaltern critiques of history be translated into choreographic tactics that allow dance artists to grapple with their multiple entangled histories while making room for contradiction and ambiguity? How can techniques for writing subaltern pasts offer ways for contemporary post/colonial dance makers to choreograph their complicated desires for that which has been hidden, lost, or obscured by hegemonic histories? How are these desires complicated by these artists’ partial access to dominant systems of representation, by their simultaneous marginalization and privilege, by the ways that colonization and cultural imperialism have interrupted their connection to subaltern lineages and ways of knowing? This chapter uses Meena Murugesan’s we used to see this (Murugesan 2013) and my blood run (Lee 2016) as case studies to explore the translation of subaltern theory into choreographic praxis.

Subaltern studies Subaltern theorists have critiqued linear, authoritative models of history as European modern constructs, proposing that we understand history as “a contested narrative” in which official texts and historical “facts” contend with human “dreams … oral histories and incomplete memories” (Chatterjea 2004, 143). As Dipesh Chakrabarty notes, subaltern studies emerged from the postcolonial context of India, where scholars initially sought to write marginalized peoples into the history of the nation, while also “combating all elitist biases in the writing of history” (2000, 102). This project of writing histories from below, however, was troubled because historiography requires verifiable archival and text-based evidence, and subaltern lives have often not  been documented in this way. Performance studies scholar Diana Taylor, who works in the different context of the Americas and decolonial thought, explains that colonial documentation has often privileged the archive, which focuses on “supposedly enduring materials” such as texts, whereas indigenous approaches to cultural memory have relied upon the repertoire, which centers ephemeral embodied knowledge (2003, 19). Moreover, the discipline of history is founded upon European epistemologies that impose a “secular worldview” and “a split between public and private selves” upon the

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subaltern (Foster 2009, 9). Conventional histories are written to conform to post-Enlightenment notions of developmental progress, narrative coherence, and linear continuity, masking significant absences, sutures, and erasures (Chatterjea 2004, 143). Subaltern pasts point to the limitations of history by revealing other ways of touching the past: the supernatural, the irrational, myth, memory, and oral tradition. Subaltern theorists propose forms of writing the past that perform the limits of history, in which time is knotted rather than continuous, linear, and homogenous (Chakrabarty 2000, 112). Knotted histories require us to write “the confrontation between distinctive worldviews,” rendering history “contradictory, plural, [and] heterogenous” (Foster 2009, 9–10). Subaltern historiography’s experimental writing techniques include “fictionalizing the past,” “studying memory rather than just history” (Chakrabarty 2000, 106), and embracing multivocality, fragmentation, loose ends, nonlinearity, and the irrational. As an example, dance scholar Priya Srinivasan has employed these writing techniques in her work on US modern dancer Ruth St. Denis, employing a fictional, multivocal framework to imaginatively reconstruct exchanges between St. Denis and the unnamed Indian nautch dancers and male performers who contributed to her choreographic oeuvre (2007). I argue that subaltern writing techniques not  only ask us to reimagine how we write critical dance histories, but they also offer rich fodder for choreographers grappling with the complex, post/colonial histories of their bodies. I follow Janet O’Shea in considering the choreographer as historiographer, so that dance makers are not merely “looking to history for sanction, but [instead utilizing] historiography as a device … to develop their own interpretations of their dance practice” and bodily histories (Srinivasan 2007, 14). This chapter discusses how my work, blood run (Lee 2016), and Meena Murugesan’s we used to see this (Murugesan 2013) mobilize techniques from subaltern historiography to choreograph the histories of our bodies as contested narratives that refuse a division between the private self and public sphere. In blood run, I investigate the rumor that my Taiwanese Hoklo Han lineage might include Pingpu or plains indigenous bloodlines. blood run uses fictional speculation to connect to the past through letters addressed to a lost, imagined indigenous ancestor, while destabilizing colonial iconography to embody the contradiction of occupying both colonizer and colonized positions. In we used to see this, Murugesan takes on the history of their dancing body, informed by their perspective as a gender-fluid Mudaliyar Tamil Canadian. Murugesan negotiates bharatanatyam’s multiple conflicting histories by spatially triangulating among concepts of the proscenium, salon, and temple, while using improvised repetition to generate manifold conflicted meanings and to embody an unruly, eruptive open-endedness. It is important to note that neither Murugesan nor I belong to the subaltern class: highly educated English speakers raised in North America, we also have been marginalized on the basis of race, xenophobia, gender, and sexuality. As contemporary choreographers, we are deeply trained in Indian classical dance while having partial access to the dominant aesthetic and representational conventions of the Western concert stage. I am trained in kathak and US postmodern dance, while Murugesan is primarily trained in bharatanatyam; we both hold MFAs in choreography from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and have worked internationally in the field of contemporary dance. Much like the subaltern historians, who sought to bring light to subaltern experiences while deeply steeped in the language of the Western academy, our choreographies emerge from a complicated desire for the subaltern. They reflect, to use Gayatri Gopinath’s formulation, an “impossible” diasporic longing for that which has been lost: for other pasts, other ancestors, other lineages. These longings are impossible not only because subaltern pasts can never fully be recovered,

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but because they reflect the desires of what Gopinath deems impossible subjects, namely queer diasporic female subjects (which I expand to include queer diasporic nonbinary subjects) (2007, 15–20). As Gopinath explains, while conventional diasporic nostalgia longs for “an imaginary homeland frozen in an idyllic moment outside history, what is remembered through queer diasporic desire and the queer diasporic body is a past time and place riven with contradictions and the violences of multiple uprootings, displacements, and exiles” (4). blood run and we used to see this are shot through these impossible queer diasporic desires, remembering the violence, erasures, and contradictions of colonization and displacement even as they reach to touch subaltern pasts.

blood run The genesis of blood run came about around 2014, when my father casually mentioned that we might have Pingpu or plains indigenous heritage, an ethnic mixing that supposedly occurred when our male ancestors migrated from China to Taiwan as settler-colonists during the Qing Dynasty. Until that point I, who am the US-born child of Taiwanese immigrants, had always understood myself to be Han, the majority ethnic group in Taiwan and China. My attempts to uncover more specific information about my family’s indigenous bloodlines, however, were confronted with frustrating absences and unanswerable questions, similar to the challenges of historians who seek to document subaltern lives through verifiable evidence. My father identified our indigenous heritage as Pingpu, a colonial Mandarin term referring to multiple indigenous peoples including the Kavalan and the Siraya, but he was unable to identify our ancestors’ specific nation due to long-standing cultural assimilation and genocide. I discovered that any indigenous female ancestors would have been erased from my family’s genealogical tree because, in true patriarchal fashion, it only lists men. I also confronted the sad fact that my own assimilation to the English language made doing historical research in Chinese nearly impossible. As a result, I found myself continually asking: how many layers of forgetting, erasure, and assimilation stand in the way of my reclaiming this past? Lacking concrete evidence for my indigenous bloodlines, blood run emerged from the decision to nevertheless take the rumor of indigenous ancestry seriously, and in so doing, confront complex issues around enduring colonial legacies and Taiwanese Han-indigenous relations from my US diasporic positionality. blood run asked me to confront, for the first time, a disturbing history of Qing Dynasty expansionism (1644–1912) predating the eras of Japanese colonization (1895–1945) and Kuomintang martial law (1949–1987) with which I was familiar. Colliding the private and public, the work brought up a series of difficult questions: What is the difference between an immigrant and a colonizer? What does a nonEuropean colonizer look like? How do the colonizer and colonized live inside the same body? When does survival require disappearance? While creating blood run, I learned that the Pingpu occupy a complex place in Taiwanese society: the first indigenous peoples of Taiwan to be colonized by the Han Chinese in the 1600s, many Pingpu women married Han men and assimilated to Han culture to survive. Historically, Pingpu peoples have been invisibilized to the extent of being labeled “extinct” by many scholars (for example, see Balcom 2005, xi–xii). Despite this, Pingpu activists have been engaging in concerted political efforts to reclaim indigenous identity since the 1990s as part of a larger movement of Taiwanese identity-based activism that arose with the end of martial law (Hsieh 2006). The Pingpu claim for official recognition, granted by President Tsai Ing-wen in August 2016 (Tsai 2016) after the premiere of blood run, sits in complicated 398

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relationship to Taiwan’s larger, vibrant indigenous movement and the island’s precarious status as a nation. These political complexities, as we will see, inform the troubled desires that animate blood run (Lee 2016). blood run’s choreographic methodology interlaces Qing Dynasty colonial documentation of Taiwanese indigenous peoples with letters written to an imagined female indigenous ancestor, much like subaltern historiographers intersect historical documents with imaginative speculation (see, for example, Srinivasan 2007). My first choreographic tactic was to work with colonial travel writing, maps, and illustrations of Taiwan and its indigenous peoples, particularly as documented in Emma Jinhua Teng’s book, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683–1895 (2004). My intention in working with these materials was not to somehow discern the real lives of indigenous peoples through the filter of colonial prejudice. Rather, I sought to destabilize the colonial imagery, to reveal the violence embedded in the depictions of savagery and otherness, and to come to grips with whatever stereotypes I had internalized as the descendent of Han colonizers. I choreographed one movement phrase inspired by ethnographic drawings of Taiwanese indigenous peoples from the 1751 Qing Imperial Tribute Illustrations commissioned by the Qianlong emperor (Teng 2004, 165–166, 168, 170–171). These illustrations are comprised of gender-binary pairs of representative male and female ‘specimens’ for each tribe. They range in representation from passably human to monstrous based on their status as “cooked” (shengfan) or “raw” (shufan) savages, colonial designations indicating degree of assimilation to Han culture and political submission to the Qing state (122–148). The “cooked savages of Taiwan county” shows two people with subdued facial expressions dressed in softly draped fabric, hair neatly pulled back, the woman carrying a large root vegetable and the man hoisting a woven container over his right shoulder: submissive, hard-working, and fully clothed (171). By contrast, the “raw savages of Danshui” shows a woman and man with bare torsos and wearing fur: ‘primitive’ and uncivilized. The  man appears to be a monstrous incarnation of violence, the embodiment of colonial fear of the savage: muscles ropy and bulging, his eyes bug out fiercely, his right hand raising a spear to attack while his left hand clasps a long curved knife (170). My dance phrase attempts to embody the different energies, bodily positions, and actions suggested by these problematic illustrations. Eyes closed, I stand upstage as we hear a flute, a video projection of lush green ferns appearing behind me. Breath enters my body, audibly and visibly. I shift to face the corner, imagining heavy silk weighing down my arm as my fingertips reach toward my sternum, skull rotating subtly on my neck. Slowly I open my eyes, stroke an invisible beard, and walk forward with calm dignity. Unexpectedly, a gasp overtakes my body. I recover, stroking my beard, but the gasp takes over again: breath hissing, my hands clench and spine contracts, until my skull pulls backward, forcibly opening my chest. My hands start to cup erratically, and I place my right foot delicately against the floor, looking up gently as my hips start to move, luxuriously undulating as I rotate to face back. Suddenly, I face front, hands circling around my belly as my tongue protrudes with a loud vocalization: “haaaaahhh” (Illustration 28.1). As the phrase unfolds, I never settle into a position, unlike the fixed, contained nature of the illustrations. Instead, I pay somatic attention to the instability made possible by transitions as I move through the different characters, attempting to rupture rather than re-inscribe the colonial imagery. Toward the end of the phrase, which has grown increasingly intense and fragmented, we hear a barrage of derogatory insults including “land-stealer,” “colonizer,” and “cooked savage” in Hokkein, Mandarin, and English, layered on the urgent, alarming sound of flies swarming. Activated by violent exhalations and gasps of breath, my 399

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Illustration 28.1 Cynthia Ling Lee in blood run, 2017. Performed at Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center’s (APICC) United States of Asian America Festival. (Courtesy of Diana Chen.)

body feels possessed, out of control, shifting abruptly between a softly convulsing feminine body and rakshasa or demon-like aggressive low stances punctuated by powerful foot slaps. Among the insults, which denigrate both Han and indigenous people, we hear the words, “I wish the blood cells inherited from different ancestors would not fight each other in those politicians’ veins” (Zhang Zhi-wei quoted by Liu 2012, 341). Zhang Zhi-wei’s words gesture toward the conflicted political context that frames Taiwanese indigenous self-determination and Pingpu identity. Zhang’s original statement, made in response to the 2005 “We are All Aboriginal People” celebration sponsored by indigenous legislator Chen Shui-hui, critiques the instrumental nature of claiming indigeneity, pointing out how Taiwanese politicians claim indigenous ancestry to gain votes without working to improve indigenous people’s material realities (Liu 2012, 341). Indigenous identity-based activism also tends to become entangled in the ongoing political conflict between Taiwan and China. The popular claim, repeated by my father, that most Taiwanese people are part indigenous feeds a pro-independence political agenda that uses indigeneity as ‘proof ’ of Taiwan’s ethnocultural difference from mainland China; this stance is critiqued in my dance phrase’s soundtrack: “Indigenous people are just a tool for Taiwanese independence” (Lee 2016). Within indigenous communities, the Pingpu claim for official recognition has been highly controversial because of Pingpu assimilation to Han culture, because the Pingpu were historically forced by the colonizers to attack other Taiwanese indigenous peoples, and because of anticipated competition over the limited resources allocated to government-recognized tribes (Hsieh 2006; Tsai 2016; Simon 2010). The  colonial source material for this dance phrase further complicates these political knots, which disturb the dance phrase like buzzing flies and which riddle me with doubt about my right to claim indigenous ancestry to this day. Does my use of colonial imagery as 400

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choreographic inspiration re-inscribe representations of indigenous people as savage? One could argue that blood run constitutes a form of what Renato Rosaldo calls “imperialist nostalgia,” whereby colonizers long for ‘traditional’ versions of the cultures that they themselves changed or destroyed (1989, 69). As such, this dance phrase demonstrates the potential dangers of attempting to subvert the colonial archive as a subaltern choreographic tactic. Interestingly, however, some viewers have interpreted this movement phrase as an indictment of colonization: in a comment on The Post Natyam Collective blog posted on June 19, 2015, Murugesan interprets the angry violent movement as representing the colonizer and the gentler movement as the colonized (in Lee 2015). For me, the dance phrase’s unstable embodiment of violence contradicts imperialist nostalgia’s tendency to adopt an innocent stance that conceals a history of violent domination (Rosaldo 1989, 70). Instead, the visceral, eruptive nature of the dance combined with the derogatory insults toward indigenous and Han people suggest a body at war with itself, a history of divide and conquer made flesh, the painful conflict of having both colonizer and colonized inside the same body. This point is emphasized later in the work when I approach an audience member with a Chinese calligraphy brush and a small bowl of ‘blood,’ asking them to write “colonizer” on my chest and “cooked savage” on my back.1 These two sections—the movement phrase and bodily inscription—reflect how subaltern historiography “documents the contradictions inherent in the confrontations between distinctive worldviews” and positionalities (Foster 2009, 9). They serve not as a way to speak ‘authentically’ for subaltern people, for, as Srinivasan, drawing on Spivak, points out, “bringing [the subaltern] into representation evacuates her subaltern status” (Srinivasan 2007, 10). Instead, these sections are choreographic translations of subaltern writing strategies that reveal the violent, fragmented ramifications of colonization on subjects of mixed colonizercolonized heritage. In addition to destabilizing colonial iconography, blood run also draws on subaltern historiography’s use of imaginative speculation through a series of letters addressed to my lost indigenous female ancestor. Self-reflexive, sometimes romanticized, and filled with doubt, longing, and questions, these letters reimagine the moment of colonial contact in multiple ways. They allow for what Carolyn Dinshaw calls a “touching across time” (Dinshaw et al. 2007, 178), creating a transhistorical dialogue that allows me to put the imagined past in dialogue with a politicized present. One letter speaks to the tight, sometimes oppressive closeness of the Han Confucian heteropatriarchal family, imagining an indigenous alternative in which family households are women-centered, where love and relationships are looser and more fluid. As the section starts, I invite the audience onstage to gather the stones scattered on the floor and to place them on and around my body. Soaked in blood, I lie down, feeling the audience’s quiet presence as they approach me almost reverentially, the cool weight of rock laid carefully on soft flesh. As they place the first stone, we hear a recording of my letter in my voice: Family is a fist, squeezing tight as water dribbles out, instead of cupping the water gently. Family is a set of lungs shared between conjoined twins: we cannot breathe without each other. Family is tightly woven silk, the strength of warp and weft: if you cut one thread, the whole thing unravels. But what was family to you? (Lee 2016) The letter continues, imagining alternative indigenous structures of kinship and love, envisioning “young women and men dancing at harvest, following the easy ebb and flow of one’s desire,” how “divorce and remarriage would be easy and without stigma” (Lee 2016). 401

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In contrast with my other more violent imaginings of colonial contact in blood run, this letter projects sexual agency onto my female indigenous ancestor while positioning her matrilineal household as holding power over potential male suitors: Did my Han ancestor slip into one of these dances? Did you feel him beside you and take his hand in yours, smiling? … Did he move to your family home, working hard as all immigrants do, to make sure his clothes wouldn’t be hung outside the front door, to win your family’s approval? (Lee 2016) After the audience finishes placing the stones and recedes to their seats, my breathing deepens, causing the rocks to undulate visibly on my body, trembling and knocking audibly against each other as tension gathers in my belly and chest, the stones’ movement amplified by a live video feed projection. The letter ends with queer poignancy, asking my ancestor, “Did you know … that you could take for granted, as I never have, the right to choose whom to love?” (Lee 2016). We are left with the image of a daughter whose body trembles beneath rocks, weighed down by the extraordinary love, responsibility, and exquisite burden of Han family (Illustration 28.2). This letter connects my own contemporary struggles as a queer feminist with my Confucian heteropatriarchal family to the colonial pressures of Confucianism on Pingpu matrilineal culture. As such, it disrupts notions of straight time that Jack Halberstam sees as embedded in the “institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction” (2005, 1). The letter is shot through by the force of desire: desire for a world that centers women and our agency, for a family whose

Illustration 28.2 Audience members Miyuki Baker and Pallavi Sharma laying rocks on Cynthia Ling Lee in blood run. Performed at APICC’s United States of Asian America Festival. (Courtesy of Diana Chen.)

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connections are animated by love without the tightness of Confucian obligation, for queerness as decolonial rather than assimilatory practice. Queer people of color in the US are often put into a double bind whereby remaining a full part of one’s family and home culture seems to require complying with heteropatriarchy, while white gay male culture provides the dominant model for LGBT life and identity. Reframing Han culture as a colonizing force suggests, instead, that resisting Confucian heternormativity and patriarchy could be a decolonial act, that my queerness might not require betraying my culture of origin to assimilate to US white gay culture. In this letter, I project these queer diasporic desires onto my imagined indigenous female ancestor, an impossible figure whose conjuring disrupts Han “fictions of purity” and heteropatriarchal lineage, making it possible to imagine alternative, albeit romanticized, possibilities for the present (Gopinath 2007, 4). Another letter to my lost indigenous ancestor, performed toward the end of blood run, takes on notions of language, naming, and assimilation. The  letter makes connections between my parents’ migration to the US in the 1970s and my Han ancestors’ earlier migration to Taiwan in the 1700s: “how we have chosen to leave, now  and then” (Lee 2016). Sitting at the live video feed inside stones forming a right angle, I repetitively write Chinese characters for common Pingpu surnames, which appear projected onto the back wall (Illustration  28.3). As I write, a voice-over reflects on the pressures to assimilate to a dominant culture, which forced plains indigenous people to take on Chinese surnames and which pressured my own family to adopt English names to accommodate US norms. The grid-like worksheet is one used for schoolchildren’s handwriting exercises, and, as I cross out any characters that look imperfect or childish, I reveal my own incompetence in written Chinese, the result of linguistic assimilation to English. At the same time, the act of writing suggests how the Chinese language and regimented discipline of schooling were thrust upon the plains indigenous peoples as ‘civilizing’ forces. The  letter closes with a

Illustration 28.3 Cynthia Ling Lee writing Pingpu surnames in blood run. Performed at APICC’s United States of Asian America Festival. (Courtesy of Diana Chen.)

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lament that the only traces of my indigenous ancestor and her people are mediated through colonial translation: “I cannot offer incense to you. I can only speak, haltingly, these names in colonial translation: Yue (月), Hong (紅), Li (力). Moon. Red. Power” (Lee 2016). These two letters’ transhistorical ruminations on assimilation, patriarchy, and family do not necessarily reveal any ‘truths’ about my possible ancestor’s lived reality, but they illustrate how touching subaltern pasts can serve to “illuminate a life possibility for the present” for queer diasporic post/colonial subjects (Chakrabarty 2000, 109)—a theoretical theme that continues with Murugesan’s we used to see this.

we used to see this Whereas blood run considers the ancestral history of my body, we used to see this interrogates the histories of Murugesan’s dancing body, trained in bharatanatyam for eighteen years under Vasantha Krishnan in Canada. we used to see this reflects a spatialized understanding of bharatanatyam’s multiple histories as embedded in the movement between temple, salon, and proscenium contexts. The work decenters a single historical narrative by offering multiple viewpoints, while queering colonial archival material and performing unruliness through improvised repetition. we used to see this invokes three major contexts in which bharatanatyam and the performance practices that preceded it were performed: the Hindu temple, the courtesan salon, and the proscenium stage. Many scholars have written about sadir as a ritual dance performed in temples by devadasis, hereditary women performers embedded in systems of economic and sexual patronage. Critical scholars such as Avanthi Meduri (1996) and Uttara Coorlawala (2004) have argued that this practice was taken from devadasis and transformed into bharatanatyam by largely upper-caste Brahmin women to suit an anti-colonial Indian nationalism, its repertoire codified, adapted for, and relocated to a western proscenium stage (see also Allen 1997). A  key figure  in the transformation of sadir into bharatanatyam was Rukmini Devi, who founded the Kalakshetra Institute (Meduri 2005; Coorlawala 2004) and in whose stylistic lineage Murugesan is trained. However, as Davesh Soneji (2012) argues, this movement from temple to proscenium glosses over the secular, culturally eclectic context of the salon, where South Indian courtesans performed for British colonial and Indian male elites in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. we used to see this takes place in a western black-box theater in consonance with modernday bharatanatyam’s status as a concert form, but the piece undoes the single focus of a proscenium frame through a spatial setup with multiple fronts and focal points. For  its premiere at UCLA, we used to see this included a pre-show installation with temple, salon, and proscenium areas (Murugesan 2013). The temple area contains a small statue of Shiva Nataraj along with ritual implements such as a bell, red kumkum powder, and incense used by performer Shyamala Moorty in her role as temple ‘priest.’ The salon area is in the corner, where a courtesan dance scene from the 1956 Telugu film, Muddu Bidda, is projected on a metallic scrim from an old-fashioned film projector. The song accompanying the courtesan scene, “Amtalone Tellavare,” is a javali, a playful, unabashedly erotic genre that Soneji describes as indexing salon culture, performed by the actress Krishnajyoti, who was from a hereditary kalavantula family (2012, 109). (Kalavantula is a term used for professional women performers or courtesans in Andhra Pradesh; the term is analogous to devadasi in other parts of South India.) In the proscenium area, Murugesan moves quietly through different sitting and kneeling positions, hands cupped in offering, casting shadows on the scrim. There are three audience areas, each with a different viewing angle. By offering multiple viewpoints, 404

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we used to see this negotiates different partial entries into bharatanatyam’s tangled, complex histories instead of forwarding a monolithic, closed version of that history. Interestingly, the salon area is the only one without a live performer, a physical absence of the courtesan that suggests the difficulty of accessing subaltern knowledge. While courtesan performance did enter the archive during a brief period as early film and radio were developing in India, as illustrated by Krishnajyoti’s filmic presence in Muddu Bidda, the disenfranchisement of devadasi and kalavantula communities and the significant ruptures to their performance traditions make recovering their subaltern knowledge and lives a fraught task. As illustrated in the following section, much of the limited documentation of salon performance is through the colonial archive such as travel accounts by British observers, rather than through the voices of devadasis and kalavantulu themselves. In later versions of we used to see this, such as its 2016 performance at Tangente in Montreal, the work opens with Murugesan sitting in the center of the salon audience, a brown-skinned, small-framed figure with a red turban on their head (Murugesan 2016). Lit by a narrow band of light, eight audience members sit on chairs with their heads angled toward Murugesan, occasionally shifting for a better view. Murugesan looks downward, hands drooping, knees slightly turned in. Slowly they raise their head and lean forward, elbows on their knees in a wide stance, as a voiceover begins: “The hall, nearly two hundred yards long, was filled with princes, the Madras staff, and hundreds of ladies” (Wheeler, quoted in Soneji 2012, 80). As the voiceover continues, Murugesan moves into different positions of spectatorship, leaning back, cocking their head, folding their arms across their chest, gesturing outward as if toward an invisible dancer-performer. The  voiceover, written by special correspondent George Wheeler, describes a courtesan salon dance performance witnessed by Prince Albert Edward in 1875. Written through the lens of colonial prejudice, the text emphasizes the female dancers’ bejeweled visual appearance and describes the dance as “wearyingly changeless” and a “stupid spectacle” (Wheeler, quoted in Soneji 2012, 80). In accordance with the text, Murugesan’s physicality sometimes indicates boredom or impatience: leaning an elbow over the chair back or propping up their body with a fist on a thigh. The performer’s turban and their wide bodily stances lend a masculine quality to their embodiment of viewership, suggesting that they are a raja or a princely onlooker in the era of the colonial nautch or salon dance. Yet their movement is made strange by its slowness, by a floating suspension that shifts unexpectedly into heaviness and slow-motion falls, until they remove the turban and transform into a ‘dancer’ (Murugesan 2016). As in blood run, Murugesan mobilizes the colonial archive to connect to the past, using a colonial viewer’s account of a nineteenth century South Indian salon performance. Murugesan refracts the Orientalist colonial male gaze of the text by performing as a South Asian masculine spectator. Murugesan does not attempt to embody the subaltern dancercourtesan, whose absence is highlighted by Murugesan’s performance of spectatorship. We are never granted the scopophilic pleasure of seeing the decorated Indian female dancing bodies described in Wheeler’s text, nor are we treated to technical virtuosity, sensual allure, or easy entertainment. Instead, we see a masculine Indian viewer who seems alternately bored and pleased, whose heaviness suggests the pressure of British colonization on local Indian nobility and whose movement is made strange by a floating slowness—the strangeness of seeing your culture’s art forms through colonial eyes. As such, Murugesan’s movement suggests the gradual internalization of British colonial values by the Indian elite, the overlay of a colonial optic onto a subaltern courtesan aesthetic. There  is a marked queering to Murugesan’s performance of spectatorship in the salon space, a queer erotics in the pleasure they take in gazing upon imagined women dancers and 405

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a gender fluidity in their shift between embodying masculine spectator and feminine dancer. Indian classical abhinaya or emotive storytelling allows performers to play male and female characters regardless of their personal gender identity or physical appearance. Murugesan’s performance of gender, however, exceeds the classical convention of playing different characters in a familiar narrative and is further nuanced by their androgynous appearance and nonbinary identity. In Murugesan’s hands, the “sexually charged space” of the secular South Indian salon (Soneji 2012, 95) becomes charged with queer diasporic desire. This queering of the salon is further evidenced in the UCLA version of the show, where queer people of color were asked to sit in the salon space. Partway through the piece, Murugesan interacts with the salon audience through a sensual, flirtatious exchange, whereby Murugesan gives them suggestive looks, turns away, and offers them flowers (Murugesan 2013). As in blood run, these queer diasporic longings do not necessarily reveal historical truths about the subaltern past, for heterosexual erotic exchanges almost certainly dominated South Indian salon spaces. Yet by offering different erotic possibilities than those available under a Hindu heteropatriarchal nationalist imaginary, the salon suggests erotic alternatives for a queer postcolonial subject in the present. Rather than emphasizing a queer erotics, Murugesan’s dancing in the temple and proscenium spaces embodies an unruly questioning of power, an improvised fragmentation that generates manifold meanings while disrupting the polished, finished wholeness of classical bharatanatyam. This  choreographic approach mirrors the subaltern writing techniques of fragmentation, contradiction, and multivocality discussed at the beginning of this chapter. Toward the beginning of the UCLA version of we used to see this, we see a negotiation and movement between temple and proscenium spaces (Murugesan 2013). Shyamala Moorty sits cross-legged in an elegant red and gold sari, ritual offerings and a statue of Shiva Nataraj in front of her: she appears to embody tradition, womanliness, and ritual authority. Murugesan wears a stark costume consisting of a white sari blouse, dark gray pants, and a plain black dupatta or scarf. Holding a flower and coins in their cupped hands, Murugesan leans forward in an almost bow before looking at Moorty directly, almost confrontationally. Falling to their knees, they throw the offerings at Moorty’s feet with a rough clatter. Maintaining eye contact, Murugesan lifts their chin in a possibly rude gesture, falls and sits up again, now a petulant child with legs thrust in front, now  lounging like a pinup model, now  crawling or scratching their forehead—movements considered highly inappropriate for Hindu ritual and Indian classical dance contexts. Murugesan’s falling apart rag doll movement contrasts with Moorty’s contained, patient body. Eventually, Moorty beckons deliberately toward Murugesan with a clear bharatanatyam mudra or hand gesture; Murugesan falls forehead first onto Moorty’s thumb, marking their forehead with red kumkum (Illustration 28.4). Murugesan grabs the Nataraj statue and walks backward, moving the deity from the temple space onto the proscenium stage (Murugesan 2013). This exchange between Moorty and Murugesan simultaneously suggests the ritual context of a priest and devotee and the artistic context of a classical dance guru and disciple. These two contexts have been imaginatively conflated in current-day bharatanatyam, whereby classical dancers unhesitatingly trace their origins to ancient Hindu temple dancers from Vedic times (Coorlawala 2004) while conveniently ignoring the more recent nineteenth–twentieth century contexts of secular courtesan salons and the systems of sexual and economic patronage in which devadasis lived and worked. Typically, the relationship between priest and devotee, as well as guru and disciple, is one of reverence, submission, and devotion. This exchange, however, has the air of a power dynamic gone wrong: Murugesan is neither an obedient disciple, nor a reverent devotee. Murugesan’s disobedience suggests an unwillingness to be 406

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Illustration 28.4 Shyamala Moorty putting kumkum on Meena Murugesan’s forehead in the temple space in we used to see this. (Courtesy of Stephen Gorme.)

disciplined by dominant versions of the dance and by Brahminical Hindu nationalism, a refusal to unquestioningly accept easy narratives and hegemonic histories. Having moved into the proscenium space, Murugesan kneels and puts the Nataraj statue on the ground, a gesture that recalls the practice of bharatanatyam dancers placing large statues of Nataraj onstage to ‘sacralize’ the proscenium. Shiva Nataraj, as Matthew Harp Allen points out, was a central icon of Indian nationalism and revival-era concert stage bharatanatyam, displacing the love gods popular to sadir repertoire much like Brahmin dancers displaced devadasis (1997). Murugesan abruptly (perhaps disrespectfully?) pushes the brass statue facedown into the floor and then traces the ring of fire that surrounds Shiva with their pinky in a looping motion, which expands and transforms into a gesture of writing. Murugesan writes in the air, then on a piece of paper symbolized by the flat surface of a pataka mudra, and then on their own body, which haltingly and momentarily takes on the pose of the Nataraj. Sometimes Murugesan spirals in unpredictable curvilinear squiggles, the act of writing overtaking their body from the inside; sometimes their upper body is contained and crisp footwork emphasizes the lines drawn in the air; sometimes their pinky-pen spirals out of control, taking their body off balance. Their writing is intercut with rapid back-and-forth gestures of erasing, so that writing becomes rewriting, becomes the Nataraj displaced and recontextualized, becomes a rewriting of history, a rewriting of the dance and the body of the dancer. This trope of rewriting—of repetition that produces difference—is a major choreographic device of we used to see this. For example, repeating the act of offering generates multiple meanings associated with bharatanatyam’s different spaces: Moorty bathes the Nataraj with yogurt as a ritual anointing, while later, Murugesan lays the Nataraj on his side, pours coins on him, and then pours coins on their own body in a commodified offering, a reference to the courtesan salon’s economic transactions (Illustration 28.5). Repetition is also important 407

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Illustration 28.5 Meena Murugesan pours coins on their head in a commodified offering. (Courtesy of Stephen Gorme.)

on the level of movement vocabulary. Murugesan’s dance consists of stripped-down, nondecorative fragments of bharatanatyam that use the adavus or basic steps without referencing complete rhythmic compositions or classical repertoire from the solo margam, the traditional sequence of dance items performed by a solo bharatanatyam dancer. Refusing the completeness and predetermined trajectory of the margam, Murugesan revels in the unfinished possibilities of movement fragments, much like writers of subaltern pasts embrace fragmentation and incompleteness. Defamiliarizing these fragments through repetition, Murugesan finds new improvisational possibilities through unexpected changes in facing, the collapse of bones into the ground, acceleration, mechanization, disintegration, an unruly body always in danger of going out of control. Murugesan’s unmistakably bharatanatyam-trained body refuses to perform a sense of classical composure or completeness, opting instead to perform an unfinished body in process, whose labor is to remember erasures, to embody conflict and to ask unruly questions.

Conclusion Both blood run and we used to see this grapple with the contested histories of the performers’ bodies, whose ancestry and dance lineages have been ruptured by colonization, displacement, and cultural imperialism. Each work is shot through with a complicated desire for the subaltern, an impossible queer diasporic longing for a (d)ancestor whom we will never fully know, for that which has been lost or obscured by hegemonic histories. Using choreographic tactics reminiscent of subaltern techniques for writing the past, the works destabilize 408

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and queer the colonial archive; engage in imaginative speculation; decenter a single narrative through multiple viewpoints; and use improvised repetition to perform an unfinished unruliness. Their poetic possibilities lie not in giving voice to the subaltern, but in the failure of their longing to reach the subaltern, in their repeated fracturing, questioning, and opening of gaps in dominant narratives to boldly, tentatively, and contradictorily dream up alternative possibilities for the present.

Note 1 When I performed blood run at the Kuandu Arts Festival in Taiwan in 2017, I asked the audience to write on me in Chinese: 殖民者 (colonizer) and 熟蕃 (cooked savage). That version of blood run was bilingual, bringing additional semiotic complexity by negotiating Mandarin and English in layered, fragmented, and partial ways.

References Allen, Matthew Harp. 1997. “Rewriting the Script for South Indian Dance.” TDR 41 (3): 63–100. Balcom, John. 2005. “Translator’s Introduction.” In Indigenous Writers of Taiwan: An Anthology of Stories, Essays, and Poems, edited and translated by John Balcom, x–xxiv. New York: Columbia University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chatterjea, Ananya. 2004. “Contestations: Constructing a Historical Narrative for Odissi.” In Rethinking Dance History: A Reader, edited by Alexandra Carter, 43–156. London: Routledge. Coorlawala, Uttara. 2004. “The Sanskritized Body.” Dance Research Journal 36 (2): 50–63. Dinshaw, Carolyn, Lee Edelman, Roderick A. Ferguson, Carla Freccero, Elizabeth Freeman, J. Halberstam, Annamarie Jagose, Christopher S. Nealon, and Tan Hoang Ngyugen. 2007. “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13 (2–3): 177–195. Foster, Susan Leigh. 2009. “Worlding Dance—An Introduction.” Worlding Dance, edited by Susan Leigh Foster, 1–13. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gopinath, Gayatri. 2007. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Calcutta: Seagull Books. Halberstam, J. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press. Hsieh, Jolan. 2006. Collective Rights of Indigenous Peoples: Identity-Based Movement of Plain Indigenous in Taiwan. New York: Routledge. Lee, Cynthia Ling. 2015. “Open Round 2: Embodying Ethnography.” The  Post Natyam Collective (blog), May 27. Accessed 3 May 2019. https://postnatyam.blogspot.com/2015/05/ embodying-ethnography html. ———. 2016. blood run. Highways Performance Space, Santa Monica, June 17–18. Liu, Jennifer A. 2012. “Aboriginal Fractions: Enumerating Identity in Taiwan.” Medical Anthropology: CrossCultural Studies in Health and Illness 31 (4): 329–346. Meduri, Avanthi. 1996. “Nation, Woman, Representation: The Sutured History of the Devadasi and Her Dance.” PhD diss., New York University, New York. ———. ed. 2005. Rukmini Devi Arundale, 1904–1986: A  Visionary Architect of Indian Culture and the Performing Arts. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Murugesan, Meena. 2013. we used to see this. Meenakshi Productions, UCLA  Glorya Kaufman Amber Theater, Los Angeles, November 13. ———. 2016. we used to see this. Meenakshi Productions, Tangente, Studio Hydro-Quebec du Monument National, Montreal, November 6–9. O’Shea, Janet. 2007. At Home in the World: Bharata Natyam on the Global Stage. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Rosaldo, Renato. 1989. Culture and Truth:The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press. Simon, Scott. 2010. “Negotiating Power: Elections and the Constitution of Indigenous Taiwan.” American Ethnologist 37 (4): 726–740.

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Cynthia Ling Lee Soneji, Davesh. 2012. Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Srinivasan, Priya. 2007.“The Bodies Beneath the Smoke or What’s Behind the Cigarette Poster: Unearthing Kinesthetic Connections in American Dance History.” Discourses in Dance 4 (1): 7–47. Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Teng, Emma Jinhua. 2004. Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683– 1895. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Tsai, Ing-wen. 2016. “Full text of President Tsai Ing-wen’s apology to indigenous people.” FocusTaiwan, August 1. Accessed 3 March 2019. http://focustaiwan.tw/news/aipl/201608010026.aspx.

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PART VII

Dance, space and place

29 THE STRANGENESS OF DANCING From The Changing Room and Singularity Carol Brown Introduction In  an era where, as Donna Haraway (1991, 152) explains “our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert”, the contemporary choreographic imperative to pattern new movement experiences for audience, performer, and artifact becomes increasingly cogent. Concerns about the passivity of humans in the context of increasingly ‘lively’ machines and the diminishing of vitality and agency through the subjection of the human by the nonhuman, be that through industrial machinery, robotics, or AI (artificial intelligence), has been a choreographic theme since the ‘machine dances’ of twentieth-century modernism. Russian dancer/choreographer Bronislava Nijinska’s Machine Dances (1922–23), Austrian/ Australian expressionist choreographer Gertrud Bodenwieser’s iconic Demon Machine (1926, recreated by the author in 2017), Italian futurist Nikolai Fonegger’s Dance of the Machines (1924), and Bauhaus artist, Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet (1922) are just some examples of a pre–World War II machine aesthetic that either paid homage to the rise of industrial production processes or offered a critique of the takeover of humanity by the machine (Salter 2010). In the twenty-first century, the liveliness of human-machine relations is expressed differently with the affordance of the digital. The potential to incorporate technologies through interactive staging enables coordinates to be encoded and embodied, generating immersive contexts for experiencing dance. Moving from the mechanical to the computational, flesh becomes data, and the risks of subjection and passivity of the actual body as host or puppet for the virtual becomes, depending which way you look at it, either more acute or, as we move from the representation of the machine to the performative effects of technology, more entangled. What the digital turn means for the traditional framework of the stage and its apparatus of representation through the creative labor of dancers is an ongoing question. Something I have been curious about and explored through projects like Digital Cultures (Nottingham, United Kingdom), and the Choreographic Coding Lab (Auckland, New Zealand), as well as through interdisciplinary collaboration with media artists, architects, and programmers since the early 2000s, is how the affordances of dancing in the mediascape radically alters our idea of what a stage can be and the kinds of choreographic encounters that are enabled through dancing that takes place between human and nonhuman agencies.

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My experience of entanglements between the physical, tangible experience of dancing and the virtual and immaterial potentials of creative technologies challenges claims by critics such as Italian philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi (2009) that the datafication of everything is destroying our capacity for embodied and kinesthetic empathy. Subjected to the algorithmic power of digital cultures, tethered to screens, our pleasure in touching and moving together (understood in dance terms as kinesthetic empathy) is threatened by a new form of alienation. In moving from the period of industrial labor, criticized by early dance modernists in machine dances, to digital labor that is always “on” Berardi argues that we are becoming increasingly paralyzed by information overload. The loss of sensory intelligence in a context of datafication is a fear for many. In critical thinking on the digital turn, there is a growing sense that a qualitative shift is taking place, a transition to a new level of either symbiosis or subjection. On the one hand, screen-based interfaces, stereo vision, and virtual avatars seem to become more intimate in their interplay; on the other hand, through big data, the reach of the digital is more expansive, more predictive and pervasive, as new networks reach out to enmesh the entire planet in webs of connection through social media and surveillance. The deepening mutual imbrication of the human and the nonhuman through the inorganic machinery of the digital is, as Berardi (2009) cautions us, both cause for concern as well as an invitation to change our understanding of what it means to be human in the digital age. A reconceptualization of humanism emerges when we consider how aesthetics with its roots in sensibility and sensitivity, might reconvene our relations with the virtual through making strange our encounters with technology. Rather than losing the pleasure in dancing together because so much time is devoted to virtual exchanges and screentime, how might contemporary choreography reconvene relations of meaning and substance in the technosphere by bringing audiences into digitally designed spaces that engage performance strategies through the medium specificity of dance in dialogue with human-computer interfaces? In continuing the drive to liberate the senses from regimes of control, to awaken our expressive potential to the vitality of the present, and to defamiliarize ubiquitous technologies, I ask how do we get computers to do the “right thing”? And, what can dance and choreography bring to the design of human-computer intra-actions to generate collective pleasure and a feeling for the other?

We are almost all cyborgs now A cyborg can be described as a cybernetic organism, a hybrid assemblage of machine and organism, a creature of code, flesh, and fiction (Haraway 1991, 150). In playing on Donna Haraway’s well-known statement, “we are all cyborgs now,” I want to suggest that dancing the virtual is always a proposition for opening the limits of attention to the immaterial, and that the movement of this dance hovers in affective resonance between modes, states, and agencies. Dance in the twenty-first century operates through assemblages of corporeality, human and nonhuman agencies, environments, and designs, augmenting subjectivity through thinking that has rapidly assimilated digital technologies. In the studio, I effortlessly move between mapping out a cell of dance movements and getting instant feedback on the emergent choreography through digital capture, sharing this through the internet with other collaborators, I further recalibrate movement patterns, editing my movements through loops of feedback and feed forward, moving effortlessly between physical thinking, movement analysis and documentation. Since the 1990s, when the first data gloves were created, enabling users to corporeally receive audiovisual information and have simulated experiences, there has been a drive 414

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to recreate the experience of embodiment through immersive environments. Dancers’ responses to the digital turn are multiple and diverse. Well-known choreographers, including William Forsythe, Siobhan Davies, Wayne McGregor, Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, Gideon Obarznek, and Bill T. Jones, have initiated projects that experiment with the creative potentials of various technologies for stage performance. Other projects, such as Motion Bank and Synchronous Objects (initiated by Forsythe Dance Company), propose new ways of archiving and analyzing dance. Digital dance practices also have been supported by the initiatives mentioned earlier, Digital Cultures Lab in the UK ( Johannes Birringer), and Choreographic Coding Labs (an outcome of Motion Bank, a four-year research project led by the Forsythe Company) that seek to provide spaces and resources for experimentation and open-ended development of digital tools and creative coding for dance interactivity. Advances in creative technologies increasingly interpenetrate dance practices, undergirding their potential for an altered corporeality that makes strange through an augmented sense of presence. But how might the medium specificity of dance as performance, taking place in 360 dimensions of space and through a multiplicity of temporalities, propose specific choreographic operations to digital cultures? If we are fusions of human and technology, a challenge for contemporary choreographers is how to navigate kinesthetic experience choreographically through what Karen Barad (2007) terms the “intra-actions” of multiple agencies, rather than solely through interactions between individuals. Barad, a physicist and feminist science philosopher, through her theory of agential realism, dissolves binaries between nature and culture, proposing that there is no preexisting independence of entities or ingredients, rather, the notion of “intra-action” queers the familiar sense of cause and effect by assuming that things are always already entangled in relations of emergence. “Intra-actions” involve the “mutual constitution of objects and agencies” (Barad 2007, 197), their entanglement. The concept of intra-action has relevance for dramaturgies of choreography that engage virtual dimensions precisely because the event of the mutual animation of dancer and virtual object is core to the emergence of the work. In this chapter I draw upon my experience of choreographing “intra-actions” between media through collaborations across dance, architecture, and creative technologies. I propose that Barad’s concept of “intra-action” can be experienced in choreographic systems that enable multisensory layering of performance elements within a redefined interactive stage, a dance-architecture. As an approach toward the hybridizing of technologies through embodied interfaces and intra-active choreographic design, I argue the necessity of experimentation and play in this expanded field of dance research, and the capacity for a reality remix through the strangeness of dancing with data. Art, as Alva Noë asserts, is a “strange tool.” The practices and technologies we adopt as artists organize us; they are also ways to understand how we are organized. Ultimately, they may be tools to “reorganize ourselves” (2015, xiii).

Informational figuring In what follows, I discuss two projects, The Changing Room (Brown et al. 2004) and Singularity: drawing spaces + breathing spaces (Brown et  al. 2017). As dance-architectures, these hybrid choreographies enfold architectural and dance knowledge through embodied, design-based, and technological processes (Brown and Ramsgard-Thomsen 2008). They emerged through sustained collaboration with architectural designers who work with virtual environments and computer programmers: Mette Ramgsard-Thomsen from London and Copenhagen 415

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(The Changing Room) and Uwe Rieger from Berlin and Auckland (Singularity). As case studies of approaches to dance in the mediascape, they propose different modes of intra-action as well as possibilities for performer-audience relations. Whereas the first project, The Changing Room, relied upon screen-based and single camera capture as well as a bespoke code using C++, the second, Singularity, explored the potential for data to become palpably present in the performance through the use of Optitrak machine vision cameras, sensors, and the game engine software Unity.

The Changing Room The Changing Room sought to develop an interactive stage through a creative process that addressed haptic, somatic, and proprioceptive senses in dialogue with the technological dimensions of a virtual plane through which dancers—Delphine Gaborit, Catherine Bennett, and me—could interact. In my choreographic journal notes I described: Remote touch; not travelling through space but travelling within spaces. Crystalline, prismatic spaces of impossible geometries; dancing with avatars which will never stand up; extending kinespheres into dynaspheres in dialogue with virtual others. Others operating within a matrix of becoming different to my own, generating new kinds of informational figures. (Brown 2005) Emerging through a technological habitat these ‘electronic phantoms’ explored in the choreographic process invited me to rethink how we are here (Brown 2006). The performance was staged within a transforming interior, a space in flux, through which a mobile audience was guided. Our changing room was a nine-meter-square performance area divided by long, white voile curtains on racks, which could be pulled closed or opened. The audience was guided through the performance to encounter each stage of the work from a different point of view, a different side of the room. They looked into the room with its furnishings and its embedded screens and they experienced not just that which is going on in front of them but also behind and around them as they negotiated their encounter of the work as a physical journey. Part dance partner and part extended architecture, the three women performers experienced their changing room through a series of transformations: a mirror became a screen for their mutations; a curtain a technological frontier; and their table a platform for the puppetry of the virtual. In one scene, Gaborit was seen, behind a semitransparent shark tooth curtain, manipulating a homunculus, a miniature, virtual version of herself. In another, Bennett lay behind an opaque table, lying on its side, responding to the projected virtual avatar (a mix of her movement and the geometrically potentiated figure of a computer generated object). This digital puppetry involved the extraction of movement coordinates from the performer’s body (read off an x-y axis) through a single camera’s capture. Captured coordinates became the building blocks for reanimating the virtual puppet, a digital sphery ‘thing’ that was a merge of data drawn from the dancer and a programmed virtual object. The mass, musculature, and weight of the dancer was preserved in her live presence, while her virtual puppet became a weightless extension of her, a mediated, rendered figure that could be moved, manipulated, and remotely touched—a homunculus. As informational performance figures, these assemblages did not hold up a mirror to nature, but intersected the stage with strange alterations of scale and extensions of agency (Illustration 29.1). 416

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Illustration 29.1 Catherine Bennett in The Changing Room. Greenwich Dance Agency, Dance Umbrella 2004. (Photograph by Mattias Ek.)

In replaying traces of otherness embedded in their own memories, dancers in The Changing Room explored the unfamiliar and the strange. Moving at the threshold between different dimensions and scales of space (the dimensions of the physical stage and the computer space), their gestures were tracked in the virtual environment. The Changing Room relied on a single camera tracking system that saw the dancer in a frontal plane and mapped her silhouette onto the virtual plane of a virtual object. The output for the remixed moving graphic image (part dancer-silhouette and part virtual object) was embedded within the furniture of the room— on curtains and tables—and also on the dancers’ costumes. Through these projections the virtual dance partner was rendered mirroring, extending, and distorting the behaviors of the actual dancers. The everyday transformations of appearance which we experience in changing our clothes became a metaphor for the mutating forms inherent in the choreography. Through the mutable qualities of the room, the status of the everyday was extended, altered, and augmented. Familiar cultural objects become transformative moments, enabling the transgression of presence into the extended environment of the digital. In this way, the choreography enabled a series of contingent and oscillating relationships between the performers and the virtual object to emerge (Illustration 29.2). The detachment of gesture through the tracking system in The Changing Room invoked an extended presence that was communicated to the audience through kinesthetic perceptions, costumes, sound, and vision. For  example, the fabric of white stretch dresses with additional sleeves and scoops of draped fabric, designed by Shanti Freed, could be extruded to create elastic, hypermobile shapings. From the camera’s point of view, this augmentation of the dancer’s volume in space triggered a set of affects in the virtual object as changing coordinates enlarged its scale, deepening its color, textures, and folding. This extended presence shifted the center of gravity beyond the primacy of the performer as the focus within the staged event, redistributing it among surface projections, malleable furniture, and virtual objects. Similarly for the dancers, their attention shifted and alternated between live and 417

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Illustration 29.2 Carol Brown in The Changing Room. (Greenwich Dance Agency, Dance Umbrella 2004. Courtesy of Mattias Ek.)

virtual presence as they responded to and projected the sensations within the room and communicated these to the audience creating a triangulated circuit and feedback loop of intraactions. This effect was further amplified by mobilizing the audience. Performing the role of host and interlocutor, I invited the audience to evolve with the performance, changing their point of view by moving around the stage to experience the work from three different facings. Shifts in the audience’s spatial relationship to the performance opened up its potential readings, allowing meanings to be uncovered in the interconnections between the informational figures, spaces, and corporealities. In  The  Changing Room, a shape-shifting sphery thing, our virtual other, is kinetically modeled through the dancers’ movements and projected into the space of performance in real time. In  making this work, I collaborated with Ramsgard-Thomsen, an architect of digital environments, to create an intuitive interface through a contour tracking system using machine vision technology. This method allowed the bodily outlines of the dancers to be mapped into a virtual object; in this way we could explore and inhabit different geometries and morphologies, merging a sense of actual presence with virtual presence. From an audience perspective, the choreographic dramaturgy relied upon ideas of domestic space, in particular the concept of a changing room into which a group of women might retreat to explore alternative clothes and ensembles of appearance. The Changing Room’s interactive system provided affordances for a series of relays, triggering actions that were physically and virtually present. My experience of this deeply collaborative process was that it challenged the culture of the dance studio to incorporate not just the hardware and software of new technologies but also the expertise of computer programmers, 418

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media designers, and architects of virtual environments to design an interactive space of multiple dimensions that could be shared with the audience. However, although the audience was in proximity to the work, witnessing it from multiple sides, they were never able to inhabit the performance system as this was premised upon the dancers (dressed in white against a black background) only being visible to the cameras, which tracked the outlines of their movement. Since the development of The Changing Room in 2004, computer coding languages, speeds of processing, accessibility of technologies, costs, and capacities have dramatically changed. This  digital revolution has spawned a plethora of choices and opportunities for artists to further explore the possibilities of an interactive stage that potentially move us beyond the screen as interface and perhaps closer to Barad’s definition of “intra-action” through a more immersive entanglement between human and nonhuman agencies in performance. In the next part of this writing, I discuss a more recent project that also generated an interactive stage, but that did so without relying upon two dimensional screens to support the virtual interaction.

Singularity Singularity: drawing spaces + breathing spaces (2017) was a dance-architecture that sought to reawaken forms of sociality and connection as it recalled the pleasures of dancing together. An interactive holographic environment for a multisided audience, Singularity was created through collaboration with architect Uwe Rieger; programmer Yinan Liu; sound artists Jerome Soudan and Russell Scoones; dancers Zahra Killeen-Chance, Adam Naughton, and Solomon Holly-Massey; lighting designer Margie Medlin; and costume designer Kasia Pol. Employing disruptive technologies to move data beyond a two-dimensional computer screen or projection surface, Singularity was a visual, sonic, and tactile immersive experience. Singularity involved a trio of dancers being tracked by the eyes of sixteen Optitrak cameras. Seen in three dimensions, markers on their hands, feet, and sometimes heads, provided statistical data of their coordinates on the dance floor for a parallel virtual plane. Using Unity software, a computer program used for gaming environments, the digital designer, Liu, was able to ‘map’ the dancers’ movements onto this virtual plane and intersect them with a series of graphic visualizations of different geometries and mutating architectural forms rendered in real time. Inserting their limbs onto the virtual pointers that look like laser lights, Killeen-Chance, Holly-Massey, and Naughton opened up the system for interactive dance improvisations. Research toward the project by the arc/sec Lab, a digital media and architecture laboratory based at the University of Auckland, was concerned with the potential to give dynamic, physical form to digital information and computation generating new kinds of architectural space and creative expression. In probing the potential of human-computer interface design, Singularity explored how space and digital interaction might reconfigure the encounter between audience, dancer, and digital agency within a polyphony of imagined spaces. The  choreographic score for Singularity was based upon a number of spaces that emerged from image-actions: Hand paint Wobble space Object track Push walls 419

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Particulate space Breath space Body track Magnetic field Choreographic actions were shaped by a merging of human and digital agencies. Each focused upon a specific characteristic of the system drawn in 3-D program Unity, while maintaining what Gilles Deleuze describes as the “remarkable point” of the dancer in the bodying forth of complex processes of relation (Deleuze quoted in Manning 2013, 20). Clouds of data become wormholes, kites, watery walls, and particle streams in response to the dancers’ movement. This coupling of dancer and data shaped worlds that sought to make palpable the multiple ways that data flows, permeate the present. In Singularity, clouds of data figures become tangible and dynamic material for choreographic expression. Whereas in previous works, such as The Changing Room, data visualizations that mix the human and the virtual were projected onto opaque screens (curtains and Perspex furniture), in Singularity data figures  are infused within clouds of haze which are constantly moving and changing shape. This creates a sense of the data figure’s agency as part of a programmable and choreographed matrix. This hybrid space, part physical/part virtual, affords a sense of augmented dancing, at the edges of (human) control. A matrix of entanglements combines the algorithmic potentiality of architectural geometric figures with human gestural intention. As a choreographic score based upon a set of rules designed to fulfill the potential of each data set, the dancers are invited to improvise within its parameters. At the same time, the unpredictability, unknowability, and uncertainty surrounding how corporeality and virtuality relate reconfigures this incorporeal effect through instant compositions arising from improvisation. Actions of inserting, expanding, shrinking, drawing, cutting, contouring, and twisting, morph human and virtual figures in relation. Space, as a container physically bound within a black box, is in this condition virtually augmented providing scope for a constant sense of rescaling the dimensions of lived experience as it folds through different dimensions. The practice of touch in relation to virtuality has been a recurring theme in dance and technology research and has been explored in depth from a phenomenology perspective by dance scholar Susan Kozel (2007). In Closer, she describes how the reversibility of the senses of sight and vision in the context of digital interface design can lead to “a losing of oneself in the chiasmic composition of touch, vision, and movement” bringing about “a destabilization of identity that is fundamentally creative” (lxii). Tactile engagement with data can bring about a sense of convergence between materiality and virtuality, altering our sense of self, making strange. In Singularity the digital interface design allowed dancers and audience to ‘drop into’ an augmented corporeal experience through a three-dimensional tangible interface. This sense of immersion and continuity between the world of flesh and the world of data is part of a shift toward tangible media in creative technologies. Responding intuitively, haptically, and kinesthetically to digital information and computation, relations are choreographed between the agency of the human and the non- or more than human. Dance, music, and digital image together project a world that would not exist without their facility to transport us affectively, emotionally, expressively, and sensuously. Employing disruptive technologies to move data beyond a two-dimensional computer screen, Singularity is a visual, sonic, and tactile experience that attempted to make tangible the multiple ways that hidden flows of data resonate through our lives, somatically and spatially. Live interaction 420

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between the soundscape and movement in Singularity did not attempt to conceal the technology but rather played the space like a musical instrument. As “auditory choreography” (Spier 2011), Adam Naughton performed a solo in which his popping and breaking movements created a crosshatching with the digital dimension as he shifted sounds spatially by having sensors on his wrists mapped to the pitch and tempo of Soudan’s musical score. Naughton both listened to how sound was being manipulated and recomposed in real time through his bricolage of movements, and maintained a lively dialogue with audience attention as he co-opted the interactive system to play the space around his body. In Singularity the dancer’s body is the experiential interface through which virtual and physical movement is entangled, and physical thinking is solicited through these vital interactions. This is different from The Changing Room in which the merging of dancer and virtual object took place on embedded screens. Taking data away from a screen, it is transformed into something which participants are able to see, touch, move, and manipulate in space as well as, from an audience perspective, be immersed within. This project, embedded in current global research and developments around tangible data or data physicalization, has relevance for dance studies in the ways that it addresses the potential for a virtual haptic environment to open the technologizing of dance to the potential reach of movement in 360 dimensions of space. However, like any system, Singularity prescribes limits around what is possible. Like in MoCap Hypervision, the actively interactive space is defined by the limits of the cameras’ vision. The dancers must wear tracking balls. These we had 3-D printed on mounts that were shaped to contour to the dancers’ wrists, as well as through additional costuming, a harness system, and a cap. The calibration of the system required regular fine tuning that involved sweeping the space with a device before the dancer could enter and actively interact to trigger a series of intra-active events. Three projectors fed the architectural visualizations onto haze/ smoke, forming morphing clouds of data. Each dramaturgical scene involved a choreography of relation between the architectural visualization and the dancers’ movements. Zahra Killeen-Chance, Solomon Holly-Massey, and Adam Naughton enact the programmed potential of these data visualizations through gesture as well as change in weight, effort, and shape. Their actions included inhabiting volumes (wormholes), extruding lines (cave drawing), triggering effects (electric walls), and conscious breathing (breathing space). These dynamic and fluctuating spaces (physical, virtual, and conceptual) became test sites for possible virtual dwellings. The spatial dramaturgy provided an overlapping and shared, third element where our disciplinary practices could meet. The development of these dramaturgical scores provided possible entry points for the dancers to initiate actions and sequence states. Below is a further list of terms extracted from the choreographic score and are indicative of the concept of transmateriality embedded in the work: Explode and let go Push/press Sticky attachments Under cloud Wobble Unbuild Tunnel 421

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Wormhole Tethering fascia Gossamer threading Twist, rotate As distinct from screen based interfaces, in Singularity the dancers affectively touch streams of data made visible through particles of projected light onto haze. This synesthetic experience of touching visualizations of data affects change in the choreographing of relations between human and nonhuman agencies, their intra-actions. The  chiasmic co-emerging of touch, vision and kinesthetic experience alters the perceptual field of the dancer’s awareness and, arguably, audience experience of the dance as performance. The  unpredictability of Killeen-Chance, Naughton, and Holly-Massey’s improvised movements, the cloudy effect of the haze and the throw of the projector light, created diffraction patterns that illuminated indefinite boundaries. Resisting a solidity of matter, the choreography extended through the immaterial, to shadows, silhouettes, and illuminations, not all of which could be controlled. The patterns that emerged in Singularity as diffractions resisted classification as architectural typologies. Haraway proposes that the notion of diffraction becomes a metaphor for rethinking the geometry and optics of relationality. Diffraction, as a mapping of interference, not  of replication, reflection, or reproduction, becomes a critical tool for mutating forms which deviate from the line. A diffraction pattern does not “map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of differences appear” (1992, 300). The tactile sense of altering and changing the quality and character of light and gesturally drawn digital space, makes architecture into an ephemeral event, a liquid state for a strange dwelling. In Singularity Solomon touches imaginary electrified planes of light. As he senses these vertical blue walls, they shiver with a sonic and visual digital current, transducing electrical energy and computer code into diffractive patterns of light and sound perceptually experienced in the sensation of recoil. Resisting what Berardi described as the overwhelming nature of data in immobilizing our capacity to be together and dance together, Singularity proposed opening wormholes, three dimensional nodes in space, that could become rooms for dancer and audience to co-imagine unbound spaces that were for the living and non-living to intra-act through continuous processes of change and discovery (Illustration 29.3). Dancers, with their facility for activating space, their peripheral awareness, kinesthetic, haptic, and proprioception trainings, and their inventive capacities for movement, engage and push the capacities of optical tracking systems to generate new varieties of performative spaces, making data a dynamic and palpable material of connection and collaboration. Such creative collaboration might be said to operate through “Conway’s Law” (after the computer programmer Melvin Conway), in which the structure of communication itself replicates the structure of the work that is created (Downie, Eshkar, and Kaiser 2004). The logic of intra-active performance solicits the dancer as a cocreator and collaborator with computer programmers, digital designers, choreographer, and architect of virtual environments. The specificities of each physical body of each different dancer, their somatic histories, are recruited to the task of inventing techniques of interaction, to activate the potential in the performance system. We are all learners in this field, learning how to make things work and being curious about the potential of the system to generate lines of escape, pathways that fulfill the potential for movement 422

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Illustration 29.3 Adam Naughton Singularity research and development, Auckland 2016. (Courtesy of Carol Brown.)

to mobilize in any direction as vectors of change. This  “relearning of embodiment” makes particular demands upon the creative, physical, and conceptual labor of the dancer (Ramsgard-Thomsen and Brown 2004).

Movement, space, technology, and corporeality as coextensive When we work with the affordances of data we are called upon to think through the complexity of time and space and the cross-rhythms between physical and virtual spaces as well as audience and performer relations (Bleeker 2017a, 200). Dance movement as digital material is imminently reconfigurable, corruptible, and fragmentable; it can take on multiple forms and evolve patterns that substantially diverge from those generated by their instantiation in a physically present body (Norman 2017). This transmateriality reconfigures what it means to be a ‘dancer,’ extending the paradox of being both corporeal and incorporeal at the same time. Augmented performance through creative technologies often attempts to reposition the primacy of the visceral, somatic, live encounter of the dancer through her becoming-interface—a transmitter of algorithmic data and movement histories and inventions. But this augmentation can be problematic from an embodied perspective if it is reductive of the multisensory experience and kinesthetic attunement of dance movement. Norman (2017) claims that digital dance that is screen-based and machine vision–reliant can reinforce enlightenment values with their photological imperatives. I recognize this problem in my experience of screen-based interfaces. In The Changing Room, we relied upon two-dimensional projection screens for feedback on the real-time mapping of our movements to a virtual avatar. While dancers’ movements might be captured as data and mapped through three-dimensional modeling in the computer, their outputting and presentation through more traditional theater technologies—screens, lights, sound amplification—often returns us to the idea of movement as a drawing on a 423

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surface. At the same time, reliance upon a screen for visual feedback demands that the dancer check her intra-actions through looking rather than relying upon less direct, peripheral vision and proprioceptive feedback that is more diffractive. In learning to dance with data and translating our gestures into data sets, how might we construct a critical poetics in relation to the logic of these operations? How might the apparatus of capture, and its incorporation of body movement, resist a reductive flattening of the depth of perception experienced in dancing in multiple dimensions of space and time? How might the immersive experience of music, light, and tangible data operate dramaturgically to induce in audience and performers a sense of coming together in a shared condition? The  recalibration of the orthogonal theater as a site for interaction beyond the screen interface, or front-end staging, has offered me a potential zone to explore the possibilities for participatory and non-vision-centric experiences, so significant and important to the corporeal, somatic history of the dancer. In  response to Berardi’s (2009) critique, I have probed what the reality effect of the virtual is when we engage in intra-active performance that moves offscreen into the spaces between bodies where so much dancing takes place. In this condition, the real and the virtual are experienced less as divisions than dimensions. Through the compositional potentials of dancing with data, the imaginative world of the ‘virtual’ becomes fused to the experiential body. This transmateriality between the digital and the material is always specifically instantiated through the conditions of performance as we interact not only with the computer, but also with other aspects of the physical, material world including the placement of audience, architecture, temperature, and production framing (Whitelaw 2012). The  Changing Room and Singularity blend fragments of architectural and choreographic thinking to shape worlds in which the human body and its virtual dwelling are experienced as coextensive. Embedded screens and clouds of data dissolve walls, turning them into malleable events where they become not so much resistant barriers and protective surfaces but openings between rooms and spaces (Illustration 29.4). Jay David Bolter and Diane Gromola argue that “every digital artifact oscillates between being transparent and reflective” (2003, 6). As hybrid events, dance-architecture-technology events offer a spatial-corporeal-virtual encounter through which an audience can discover something or somewhere else, but inevitably this experience is bound up in the functionality and aesthetic of the interface. Bolter and Gromola explain that an interface operates like a mirror in which the user is aware of both the processes used to produce the effect and their engagement with those processes. They argue that the user or audience should be aware of both the window and the mirror in order to appreciate the experience fully. In  contrast, Sita Popat (2015) proposes that digital artifacts designed as mixed reality environments offer a third mode of engagement, as a door or entrance. The door is accessed by the experience of the moving body within the artwork, offering an active counterpart to the otherwise inherently visual/cognitive orientation of the reflective/transparent binary. Through this door, she suggests, potentials embedded in the virtual become real, and thus the conceptual site is concretized and realized (9). As I see it, dance-architectures that bring choreography and architecture together through processes of digital mapping and interactive performance, escape formal, static ends. The  application of digital tools in dance-architecture allows for the distorting and deforming of three dimensionally rendered geometries into complex choreographic figures that are palpable. We expand the formal capabilities of architecture through human/ nonhuman intra-actions, opening to larger contexts of referents including history, narrative, and the affective force of “deviations from the line” (Gansterer, Cocker, and Greil 2017). 424

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Illustration 29.4 Solomon Holly-Massey and Adam Naughton in Singularity Research performance, Q Theatre, Rangatira Stage 2016. (Courtesy of Kathrin Simon.)

In  physically manipulating virtual parametric geometries we produce not  just forms, but relationships and nodes of connectivity. The  dancers in Singularity are empowered to open new kinds of experience as their gestures have an impact on space affecting its generative logic. The choreographic is understood in this context as a practical activation of relational spaces, a transmedia event interwoven with speculative poetics that open curiosity to the potential of a virtual dwelling. Dance performance demands of us something beyond neutrality; it is a place where emotions and energies can be accessed through kinesthetic perception. Performance as practice, method, and encounter is one of the fundamental ways we can imagine and construct alternative or altered world views. According to Salter (2010, xxvi), what performance suggests as a worldview is that “reality” is not preordained but rather is enacted and actively performed anew through each iteration. In approaching the world as “performative,” as a “reality” that “emerges over time,” we come to experience ourselves as “continually transformed through our history of interactions with it” (xxvii).

Conclusion Assumptions about the dancing body as a corporeal subject, and a locus for a ‘field’ of knowledge, with connotations of a defined terrain that is physically locatable, are radically altered in the twenty-first century as we become increasingly saturated, networked, and programmed with media that shunts us out of the realm of the human and into the realm of the posthuman (Hayles 2005). If we are fusions of human and technology, a challenge for contemporary dancers is how to navigate kinesthetic experience in ways that open understandings and potentials for this altered sense of agency. In establishing what kind of 425

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a world we want to live in, I look to actions that are generative of the vital conversations we can have with the virtual in relation to what Bleeker (2017b) describes as the “technologizing of dance.” These actions augment and alter the terms of the choreographic in ways that were not  foreseen by early twentieth-century dance innovators of machine dances. Visualizing, rendering, augmenting, mapping, coding, calibrating, capturing, and designing extend the toolbox of choreographers in the twenty-first century, transforming dance and corporeal expression as well as the reach and dissemination of dances through practices of intra-action and transmedia. These actions redefine the limits of dance subjects, exploding boundaries through disrupting, diffracting, and offering to dance further possibilities for making strange.

References Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Berardi, Franco. 2009. The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotexte. Bleeker, Maaike. 2017a. “What If This Were an Archive? Abstraction, Enactment and Human Implicatedness.” In Transmission in Motion: The Technologizing of Dance: London: Routledge. ———, ed. 2017b. Transmission in Motion:The Technologizing of Dance. London: Routledge. Bolter, Jay David and Diane Gromola. 2003. Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency. Cambridge, MA: Leonardo Book Series, MIT Press. Brown, Carol. 2005. The Changing Room. Choreographic Journal. Unpublished archive of the author. ———. 2006. “Learning to Dance with Angelfish: Choreographic Encounters between Virtuality and Reality.” In Performance and Technology: Practices of Virtual Embodiment and Interactivity, edited by Susan Broadhurst and Josephine Machon, 85–99. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Brown, Carol and Mette Ramsgard-Thomsen. 2008. “Dancing-Drawing Fields of Presence in Seaunsea.” In  Performance Design, edited by Dorita Hannah and Olaf Harslof, 228–246. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Brown, Carol, Mette Ramsgard-Thomsen, Jerome Soudan, and Michael Mannion. 2004. The  Changing Room. Ludwig Forum, Aachen Germany 2004; Dance Umbrella, Greenwich Dance Agency London 2004; Michaelis Theatre, Roehampton University London 2004. Accessed 1 March 2019. https:// vimeo.com/318514328. Brown, Carol, Uwe Rieger, Yinan Liu, Jerome Soudan, and Margie Medlin. 2017. Singularity: Drawing Spaces & Breathing Spaces. September 7–9, Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, Austria. Accessed 1 March 2019. https://vimeo.com/260162721. Downie, Marc, Shelley Eshkar, and Paul Kaiser (OpenEndedGroup). 2004. “Creative Collaboration Rules of Thumb.” Accessed 1 March 2019. http://openendedgroup.com/images/CreativeCollaboration_ OpenEndedGroup.pdf. Gansterer, Nikolaus, Emma Cocker, and Mariella Greil, eds. 2017. Choreo-Graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line. Edition Angewandte Book Series of the University of the Applied Arts Vienna.Vienna: University of the Applied Arts. Haraway, Donna. 1991. “A  Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In  Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The  Reinvention of Nature, 149–181. New  York: Routledge. ———. 1992. “The Promises of Monsters: Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate(d) Others.” In Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula A. Treichler, 295–337. New  York: Routledge. Hayles, Katherine. 2005.My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kozel, Suzanne. 2007. Closer: Performance,Technologies, Phenomenology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Manning, Erin. 2013. Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Noë, Alva. 2015. Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature. New York: Hill & Wang. Norman, Sally Jane. 2017. “Between Grammatization and Live Movement Sampling.” In Transmission in Motion:The Technologizing of Dance, edited by Maaike Bleeker, 185–198. London: Routledge.

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The strangeness of dancing Popat, Sita. 2015. “Placing the Body in Mixed Reality.” In  Moving Sites: Investigating Site-Specific Dance Performance, edited by Victoria Hunter, 162–177. London: Routledge. Ramsgard-Thomsen, Mette and Carol Brown 2004.“Conceiving Embodiment:The Dance Architecture of Spawn.” SIGGRAPH '04 (Association for Computer Machinery, Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics 2004 Sketches), 114. Salter, Chris. 2010. Entangled:Technology and the Transformation of Performance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Spier, Steven. 2011. William Forsythe and the Practice of Choreography: It Starts from Any Point. New York: Routledge. Whitelaw, Mitchell. 2012. “Transmateriality: Presence Aesthetics and the Media Arts.” In Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing, edited by Ulrik Ekman, 223–236. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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30 EVERYDAY LIFE AND URBAN MARVELS The curious aesthetics of x-times people chair Alexandra Kolb Introduction A woman walks across stage in high-heeled shoes, smoking a cigarette. Dancers pirouette in the aisles in moving buses, using the handrails to push themselves off. Contemporary performance is replete with references to the everyday, and the avenues of its exploration are manifold—from amateur performers and pedestrian movements to the use of ordinary public spaces and everyday objects, to name but a few. Underlying this trend is a desire to foreground, in the aesthetic realm, that which is typically below the threshold of our notice: the unexceptional and the mundane. But while the everyday has become a major staple of contemporary choreographic work, research on the topic is disproportionately sparse and almost entirely focused on the period of American 1960s and 1970s postmodernism, when it was first embraced with some vigor. In addressing this gap in previous literature, my chapter will examine how more recent performance work has inspired new insights into the everyday.1 The project I shall discuss— x-times people chair (1995/2006) by Cologne-based performance, dance, and installation artist Angie Hiesl—collapses the boundaries between art and everyday life and operates at the juncture of public and private spaces. Performed by a cast of elderly amateurs, the work offers snapshots of daily domestic life normally hidden from public view (dressing, cutting bread, writing letters), and transports these seemingly trivial activities into public domains such as city streets and squares. Tasks such as cooking food, brushing teeth, waiting at a bus stop, or hurrying from place to place might appear to be insignificant, ordinary, and even tedious at times. In French philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s words, everyday life is “defined by ‘what is left over’ after all distinct, superior, specialized, structured activities have been singled out by analysis” (Lefebvre 1991, 97). But despite its apparent banality, it is nonetheless seen as having sociopolitical significance. Written under the influence of postwar American consumer culture, Lefebvre’s account of everyday life emphasizes its colonization by capitalism and the marketed commodity: “The extension of capitalism goes all the way to the slightest details of everyday life” (1988, 79). Yet as Lefebvre in his Marxist-inspired writings, Guy Debord and other theorists of the quotidian have also argued, the everyday is not  simply a sphere for the reproduction of 428

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hegemonic social relations. Rather, it carries the seeds of its own transformation: “It is in the everyday that emancipation might be found (if it is to be found at all); critiques of the everyday will emerge in the practices of everyday life, not in the rarefied or deadeningly ‘realist’ programmes of political parties” (Highmore 2002, 29). The primary avenue for the transformation of daily life to resist alienation, overcome routine, and question social hierarchy is spawned in art; as Lefebvre urges, “let everyday life become a work of art” (1984, 204). But this in turn begs several questions: What is an aesthetic drawn from everyday life? How does an everyday aesthetic relate to a traditional, narrower notion of art defined as a specialized ‘higher’ activity? What are its appropriate modes of representation? And how does its emancipatory potential manifest itself in actual performance work? Pursuing these questions within a framework of theories drawn from dance studies, philosophy, and urban studies, this chapter begins by considering the ideological underpinnings for the artistic use of the everyday in the context of broader debates about art’s function and status in society. It will then examine x-times people chair from three distinct but overlapping angles. The first will concentrate on the work’s aesthetics, outlining its different strategies for registering and capturing everyday life. Discussion will then shift to exploring how Hiesl’s work contributes to discourse on the city. The third section considers how the use of olderage performers and undermining of the private-public divide serves to highlight social difference and gesture toward greater inclusion.

High culture and the everyday Traditional artistic approaches often are regarded as exclusive. High culture exists as a distinct sphere of activity enacted by and for an elite, which may explain the frequent disinterest of its practitioners with works in the details of ordinary, everyday life. The cultural sphere is, for traditionalists, that which elevates us beyond the material and petty interests of daily existence. For example, in his book Culture and Anarchy (1869), nineteenth-century author Matthew Arnold took issue with the nouveau rich class who had emerged as a result of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century, depicting them as acting purely from commercial self-interest and without concern for the social good. Arnold’s idealist theory famously viewed culture as “a study and pursuit of perfection” (1993, 61) in which perfection is defined as the presence of “characters of beauty and intelligence” (66) and its key value being “intellectual free play” (Logan n.d.). Arnold was writing against the backdrop of advanced industrialization, and he sought to distance himself from the perceived evils of “mechanical and material civilization” (1993, 63) associated with contemporary urban life. For him, the immaterial (i.e., the mind, spirituality, and the arts) contrasted with the material (production and the pursuit of profit) that he saw as bereft of beauty. Arnold undoubtedly saw culture as a force for moral and political good, and there is even evidence in the text that he wished “to do away with classes” and to promote more equality among the body politic (79). Yet, despite his benevolent intentions, Arnold’s view of culture as promoting mental elevation and intellectual insight make him prone to association with the high art of a social and educational elite, in contradistinction to the mass culture of ordinary people. As sociologist David Inglis argues, he set in motion a school of thought marked by “unthinking arrogance.” “For Arnoldian authors, everyday life was simply a debased and vulgar terrain within which every sort of stupidity was to be found” (2009, 380). 429

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Some twenty-first-century conservative voices go even further in drawing links between the rational mind, beauty, and art, and seeking to divest the arts of anything that might resemble or reflect ordinary day-to-day life. Contemporary British philosopher Roger Scruton, much like Arnold, associates ‘high culture’ (including art) with the “life of the mind,” which he avers is “concerned with the true, the beautiful and the good” (Scruton 2012). He takes recourse to Aristotle who, he argues, set the scene for viewing “contemplation (theoria) as the highest goal of mankind” because only in contemplation “are our rational needs and desires properly fulfilled” (Scruton 2012). Put differently, high culture’s raison d’être is a purely mental form of activity, completely unrelated to the practical sphere. Scruton (2012) characterizes highbrow works of art as those that “establish a shared frame of reference among educated people” and deems learned institutions the best places to entrust with the “life of the mind.” His view is clearly vulnerable to the criticism of restricting art to those who can both afford high ticket prices and have sufficient schooling to appreciate it. While something of an outlier among current commentators, Scruton’s position is paradigmatic of a certain way of thinking about (high) culture, which is marked by the following criteria: • • • • •

Culture reflects established value sets and parameters of discourse It is linked to socioeconomically higher and/or more educated social strata It has intrinsic value (as ‘art for art’s sake’) It is associated with the rational mind, and endorses a contemplative form of reception It is practiced by a select and highly trained few who act as its gatekeepers

On such an account, the arts occupy the opposite end of the spectrum of human activity from the quotidian. Yet beginning in the 1950s, a clamor of resistance arose against the marginalization of the everyday. Often inspired by Marxian ideas, discourses about quotidian life and its relation to art blossomed in the ensuing period when many important philosophical and sociological works on the topic were published (cf. Sheringham 2006, especially 5–6). In sociology, Raymond Williams admonished high culture’s apparent disinterest in human social relations and sought to rehabilitate those aspects of culture which, in his eyes, had been unjustly vilified and associated with the “ignorant masses” (2002, 95). Williams argued that the popular culture of ordinary people and the specialist culture of the elite were in fact compatible, rather than antithetical, entities which could and should be combined in creative processes as well as recreational activities. Culture is not owned by the bourgeoisie (and thus denied to the working class), nor is it restricted to a rarefied sphere, but is part and parcel of all strata of any given society. As Williams argued in 1958, “culture is ordinary, in every society and in every mind” ([1958] 2002, 93). Lefebvre’s work also challenges the idea that art produces a specialized form of knowledge. He asks, provocatively, “Do you think that art is external and superior to real life, and that what the artist creates is on a transcendental plane?” (2002, 19). Highlighting the fluidity of boundaries between everyday life and art, he adds: [I]t is in everyday life and starting from everyday life that genuine creations are achieved, those creations which produce the human and which men produce as part of the process of becoming human: works of creativity. These superior activities are born from seeds contained in everyday practice. (Lefebvre 2002, 44) 430

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In contrast to previous aesthetic notions which separated art from the quotidian, Lefebvre views the everyday as the root of all supposedly higher activity. Indeed, as French literature expert Michael Sheringham remarks with reference to Lefebvre, there is a “dialectical understanding of the ‘rapport réciproque’ [reciprocal relationship] of higher and lower activities” (Sheringham 2006, 141). ‘Superior’ practices such as art, religion, or philosophy are not actually separate from the ‘inferior’ goings-on of the everyday but emanate or are born from them—even if the specialized activities transcend ordinariness. It stands to question how we can frame the experience of everyday life in artistic terms without obliterating it within the framework of an abstract aesthetic or philosophical system. And if traditional high-art forms are unsuitable as vehicles for capturing the everyday, are there alternative forms that are better? In the 1960s, artists began experimenting with experiences of different kinds in which the everyday emerged as a counterpoint to a theoretically overloaded and academicized realm of art. New genres or techniques appeared that often were of a more material nature. Rather than emphasizing rational contemplation of the aesthetic experience, their focus was on ‘doing,’ the experiential and physical, and sensory perception rather than the workings of the mind alone. Instead of producing exhibits to be framed and formally presented to audiences, the new artworks sought to engage people directly in episodes of real life. Sally Banes describes what such artists set out to undertake: [P]eople in Happenings, Fluxus, new dances, Off-Off-Broadway theatre, Pop art and underground films ironed clothing, combed or shampooed their hair and shaved their legs. They smiled, slept, smoked cigarettes, went to the movies, sent their audiences to the movies, played cards, read newspapers, got haircuts, lunch. In  their very banality, these activities became charged with meaning. (Banes as quoted in Johnstone 2008, 117) Performing everyday practices lent artistic credence to important things previously overlooked as too banal, many of which focused on events within the private home, such as Andy Warhol’s 1963 film Sleep, a five-hour footage of his friend sleeping. In dance, too, the everyday took center stage as subject matter for performance and inspiration for movement material.Works no longer centered on grand concepts such as love but were often based on casual or down-to-earth activities. In ‘task dances,’ for example, performers carried out routine actions such as eating or brushing their teeth, collapsing the contrast between real time and illusory time. Steve Paxton choreographed works such as Smiling (1967) that consisted of two performers doing just that and nothing much else, and Satisfyin’ Lover (1967) that featured walking performed by “any old bodies of our any old lives” (Johnston  [1968] 1998, 155). In Lucinda Childs’s 1964 solo Carnation, the performer sat on a chair with her head adorned by various banal objects, such as a colander and hair curlers, in ways that made the trivial appear strange and alienated. Carnation is also an interesting example of the influence of the visual arts on dance; objets trouvés (art created from everyday objects that normally fulfill a functional purpose) and ready-mades had already been used by the Dada and Surrealist movements. Artists also explored the nexus between the everyday and urban landscapes. In the late 1950s, the Situationists—an avant-garde group composed of intellectuals and political theorists— arranged day- or week-long dérives (drifts or aimless walks) through Parisian streets. Finding contemporary architecture physically and ideologically restrictive, the dérive was founded on “a desire to introduce poetry into a lived experience of the street, of the city” (Kaufmann in Johnstone 2008, 95). It combined the arbitrariness of everyday encounters, immersion in 431

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urban spaces, and a playful approach to art with a critique of the monotony of life and the society of the spectacle under advanced capitalism. In Michel de Certeau’s work, walking is construed as a possible form of creative resistance which can transgress or escape the city’s official order (for example, its authorities) and its repressive or rational organization (such as the configuration of geometrical space by urban planners and architects; see de Certeau 1984, specifically 91–110). Trisha Brown’s Man walking down the side of a building (from 1970 [Trisha Brown 2004]) that dispensed with carefully choreographed movements to embrace everyday clothes and the simple act of walking is one of the best-known site-specific works devoted to exploring urban spaces outside the usual stage setting. It took pedestrianism to an extreme by placing the walking performer at a precarious ninety-degree angle on the side of an industrial building where they could be viewed by the public walking past on their daily business. Five years previously, Lucinda Childs had created Street Dance in which she and her partner danced on a city pavement while the audience was placed in the loft of a building to watch them from a bird’s-eye view. Such works paved the way for later trends by eroding traditional forms of dramaturgy and phrasing, using nontheatrical spaces, amateur performers, and presentation modes “undistorted for theatrical effectiveness” or “technical skill” (Banes 1977, 17). Above all, they created aesthetic strategies for closing the gap between art and everyday life.

x-times people chair Many of German choreographer and performance artist Angie Hiesl’s works take inspiration from the urban landscape in which they are embedded. Projects such as Pick’n’Place (2010) or Dressing the City and My Head Is a Shirt (2011) in which the performers tied themselves to urban architecture by their trouser legs, skirts, or jackets are characteristic of her works’ blending of everyday outer (architectural) and inner (home or office) environments. But it is an earlier piece I shall examine here as perfectly capturing her aesthetic style. Premiered in 1995 in the city center of Cologne, x-times people chair is a performance installation (or what Hiesl terms an Aktionsinstallation, literally an “action installation”). The work has since been shown in over thirty cities across the globe, celebrating its twentieth anniversary in 2015. I spoke with the choreographer three times between January 2016 and March 2017, in her native Cologne and in London, including a formal interview. The performance of x-times people chair that I shall focus on took place in 2006 in various locations in the historic center of Poznan´ in Poland—a city of 500,000 people known for its beautiful Renaissance-styled buildings. The film documenting this performance by Hiesl’s artistic partner Roland Kaiser (Hiesl 2006) shows its elderly performers individually and precariously perched on simple white chairs bolted to house facades high above the ground. They are seen executing various everyday activities such as folding clothes, reading, smoking, slicing a loaf of bread, or playing dice. A slender gray-haired man dressed in a white-green soccer outfit and sporting a blue cap diligently cleans his trainers with a brush, totally immersed in the activity. Hiesl (2017) told me that the inspiration for these actions came from the stories of the performers without her imposing her ideas on the participants. Even for the initial casting, potential participants were required to bring “something from their lives” such as a familiar object and during rehearsal processes they were questioned in more depth about their life circumstances.

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Illustration 30.1   x-times people chair, Bordeaux, France, 2004. Performer: Edith Höltenschmidt. (Courtesy of Roland Kaiser. A project by Angie Hiesl @ Angie Hiesl Produktion.)

Hiesl revealed that one Catholic woman, originally from Silesia, spoke of a farm and bread making and described how in her religion bread was blessed before being cut in the direction of the body. Correspondingly in the piece, she sits very slowly slicing a loaf held in front of her chest (see Illustration 30.1). Another woman, by the name of Ariane, who had raised four children alone, shared her memories of struggling with large mountains of washing. In the performance, she sits continuously folding pillow cases, towels, a nightgown, a jumper, and an apron, before placing them on her head one after another (see Illustration 30.2). Thus, what the performers do directly relates to them as individuals.

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Illustration 30.2  x-times people chair, Montréal, Canada, 2012. Performer: Ariane Jovy. (Courtesy of Roland Kaiser. A project by Angie Hiesl @ Angie Hiesl Produktion.)

Aesthetics of the everyday The work of around one and a half hour’s duration refers to the everyday in manifold ways. Its isolation of individual activities from the performers’ daily routines emphasizes and lends importance to the details of their ordinary life experiences. This connection may in turn lead spectators to a new appreciation of the significance of these mundane actions through which, in Lefebvre’s words, “man realizes his humanity” (Lefebvre as quoted in Sheringham 2006, 135). But Lefebvre also recognizes the everyday’s essential ambiguity: In one sense there is nothing more simple and more obvious than everyday life. How do people live? The question may be difficult to answer, but that does not make it any the less clear. In another sense nothing could be more superficial: it is banality, triviality, repetitiveness. And in yet another sense nothing could be more profound. It is existence and the “lived,” revealed as they are before speculative thought had transcribed them. (Lefebvre 2002, 47) This  ambiguity is enshrined in x-times people chair. On the one hand, it straightforwardly presents everyday activities: simplicity, as Hiesl remarks, is a central feature of the work. On the other hand, it gestures to the lived biographical experience of the performers and thus gives them an associative significance beyond the face value of the actions they carry out. The piece shows the “lived” in its concrete embodiment, sheds light on the importance of the art de vivre, and captures life for life’s sake without attempting to fit it into any transcendent or abstract category of thought or elitist theatrical framework. Indeed, the work renounces conventional dance and dramatic techniques, thereby eschewing the presentation style and virtuosity of traditional performance. Its urban context 434

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is intricately bound up with this conscious lack of conventional theatricality. In dance and performance, meaning is typically encoded and transmitted through recognized modalities of staging (such as gradual darkening of the auditorium, audience seating and stage focus, scenery, costume, and so on). Such traditional markers are entirely absent in Hiesl’s piece, which takes place in plain daylight and whose participants wear the clothes they would also wear in ordinary life. The film of the piece juxtaposes snippets of the performers’ actions with footage of the immediate surroundings and reactions of passersby. It begins by showing a narrow cobbled street with people walking past, going about their usual business, with accompanying background noises. Only after several seconds does one notice the performer, high up on the house facade to the picture’s left and following a camera cut he is shown in full (from a worm’s-eye view) winding up a clock. The camera angles thereafter oscillate between ordinary street and performance scenes. The filming thus mirrors the experiences of the spectators who witness the happenings from below and who, as Hiesl pointed out in our first meeting, may either have prior knowledge of the performance event from press announcements, or be unwitting observers who stumble across it by chance (Hiesl 2016a). Whether or not they are ‘in the know,’ the spectators help to shape the production— rather than remaining invisible as they would in a darkened theater. In  the film, they cannot be fully disassociated from the performance installations and hence they become quasi-participants, as, for example, when a few point upward at one of the elevated seats. In  some instances there is direct, albeit minimal, interaction between performers and spectators, as for example in a scene when a smartly dressed gentleman writes in his notepad and lets snippets of paper fall to the ground to be picked up by the passersby. Other chance encounters in the street add to the work’s context: a wedding procession, astonished at the sight of people sitting on house facades; the noise of a drill; people coughing and shouting; a woman scratching her arm. In  these moments the real world directly intervenes in and impacts upon the artwork. As Hiesl attested when I interviewed her in March 2016: When we work out in public space, there are so many other things going on besides what we have as an intervention there. So, the question is, what is now the artistic action? Where does it begin and where does it end? … So the people who look … incorporate much more than what we would consider to be the artistic performance. (Hiesl 2016b) The work thus widens the concept of what a performance is or what it means. No longer associated with the performers’ actions alone, the work consists of a melange of different impressions making the artwork indistinguishable from the everyday street events. In  writings on the everyday, montage (or collage) technique—with its assemblage of disparate elements—often has been viewed as an appropriate means of capturing the heterogeneous world of quotidian life. Ben Highmore, for example, notes the suitability of collage for encapsulating “everyday life as the pell-mell of different worlds colliding” (2002,  93). This technique, in his view, generates a defamiliarization of the everyday. If everyday life is what continually threatens to drop below a level of visibility, collage practices allow the everyday to become vivid again by making the ordinary strange through transferring it to surprising contexts and placing it in unusual combinations. (Highmore 2002, 46) 435

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X-times people chair could be said to deploy a montage technique in several respects. First, this is evident from its title that juxtaposes several grammatically disjointed words and refuses to mold heterogeneous elements into a (conventionally) meaningful whole. Second, the work denaturalizes the relations of its different physical elements: chairs—items of domestic furniture—are mounted to house facades, where one might normally expect streetlights or traffic signs to be fixed. Elderly people appear on these chairs as if from nowhere, performing random activities at an absurd height with seemingly nowhere to go. As works of art, one might expect similar installations in certain museums or galleries but not normally in a busy city center. Hiesl’s work is somewhat reminiscent of the methods of the Surrealists (corroborated by Rith-Magni 2012) whose quest to make the familiar appear unfamiliar was likewise frequently realized through collage. Surrealist pioneer Max Ernst wrote that “collage technique is the systematic exploitation of the accidentally or artificially provoked encounter of two or more alien realities on a seemingly unsuitable level” (Ernst as quoted in Schneede 2001, 90–91; my translation). The incorporation of different, seemingly incongruous, elements in Hiesl’s temporary composition—the execution of familiar domestic tasks, the chairs hovering precariously above the street, the elderly occupants—transports x-times people chair to another plane of reality. In line with the Surrealist intention to break “habits of mind that would submit the everyday to normalizing impulses” (Highmore 2002, 46), Hiesl (2016b) creates, in her own words, “a certain absurdity or just lifts it up to another sphere.” Distorting habitual perceptions, she accomplishes a “rearrangement [Verrücken] of reality.” So things like that all of a sudden get a different connotation, different images come up and different relations start, or you relate to things in a different way that you’ve seen all the time as what they were or maybe you even have not seen. Yes, you flout the normal view. (Hiesl 2016b). With its novel associations and surprise moments, the work transforms the spectator’s experience with a provocative and playful assault on their reason and the normal order of things.

Urban marvels X-times people chair also occasions us to consider what makes and represents a city, thereby contributing to a wider discourse about urban environments. Theorists of the “urban everyday,” such as Georg Simmel or Walter Benjamin, often wrote about city life in terms of an incessant and brutal agitation of the nerves. In Simmel’s words, the city dweller needs to adjust to the “intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli” (1969, 48, italics in original). Adapting to this intense barrage of energies has profound effects. On the one hand, it impacts people’s psychic lives so that they are unable clearly to distinguish and differentiate between things and their value, which are all perceived “in an evenly flat and gray tone” (52)—that is as a uniform sameness. On the other hand, the city fosters a sense of reserve and indifference toward one’s fellow human beings and a lack of genuine community spirit. In Simmel’s view, this reflects its dominant role as the “seat of the money economy” with the emphasis on economic exchange producing “a matter-of-fact attitude in dealing with men and with things” (49). Thus, much like Matthew Arnold, Simmel registers the negative impact of capitalism, functionalism, and unimpeded materialism on everyday life, which is consequently reduced to a world of practicalities and calculability to the detriment of other values (including, on Simmel’s account, the irrational and instinctive drives which constitute “life from within” [1969, 51]). 436

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X-times people chair presents an alternative view of urban space. Deliberately placed in city centers with a mix of residential, commercial, and office environments—as Hiesl (2017) remarked, “in the midst of life”—the installations offer counterpoints to the turbulence, traffic, and bustle of the street level, offering moments of silence and intentionally slow action high up on the facade. The piece is not designed to encourage direct interaction with the spectators through verbal exchange or eye contact. Rather, the performers are presented primarily as exhibits, looking straight ahead or immersed in their activities. This presentation not only brings the absurdity of their images into stark relief, but also increases the sense that they are removed from—effectively hovering above—the familiar world of the city. The work also requires that spectators pause to observe, recognize, and ponder the performers’ activities before continuing with their own lives. This, again, gives some relief from the barrage of urban shocks described by Simmel. Hiesl revealed in our discussions that while the district in which the installations were located was announced in advance, the exact street names were not. This anonymity intentionally obliged even those who explicitly came to see the performance to explore their city further: to wander around searching or ask their co-spectators for the locations of other chairs. Turning the traditionally passive spectator into an active participant, the work thus furthers social contact, exchange of ideas, and conversation among strangers. Michel Agier reminds us of the importance of conceptualizing the city as a series of lived events and social encounters rather than simply material forms: “Artistic creations or political actions can, in an ephemeral way, produce interaction between totally different individuals—no longer merely the anonymous crowd” (2004, 141, my translation from the original French). Hiesl’s interventions, albeit locally and temporarily, reconstruct the nature of urban public space. In his day, Lefebvre asked that the city be reimagined and reappropriated by its ordinary residents. Encapsulated in the slogan, “right to the city” (1996, 158), he proposed a restructuring of power relations in which control was shifted away from the institutions of state and capital (for example, city planners or large corporations) and toward urban residents who “inhabit” (158) by “making,” living in, and shaping their city environment. Mark Purcell comments that “producing urban space, for Lefebvre, necessarily involved reproducing the social relations that are bound up in it” (Purcell 2002, 102). To this end, Lefebvre called for a revival of urban festivities using its “streets and squares, edifices and monuments” (1996, 39). It is noteworthy that in marked contrast with the negative perception of the city as being commerce-driven and utilitarian, the city festival is seen as “a celebration which consumes unproductively, without other advantage” (39). One could argue that x-times people chair in its ludic interaction with the urban environment reclaims the city as a space of creativity. Mounting chairs to house facades disrupts the stable and orderly architectural surface, whose openings to human life are usually restricted to windows. Hiesl also promotes certain aspects of original community-based festivals by creating her work with the community and for it, free of charge, and aiming to enhance feelings of neighborly belonging. Thus, the urban functions as a marvelous and eventful space rather than a purely material and transitional place controlled by city authorities and the power of money. Wolfgang Schivelbusch argues that the understanding of the notion of the street had undergone significant resignification in the sixteenth century when it “ceased to be primarily an extension of the space of the people who lived in the houses adjoining it” and became a public space for “the flow of traffic” (1987, 62). Around this time, the state appropriated the street to maintain law and order, and, for example, introduced public lighting systems or prohibited litter. In a reversal of this trend, Hiesl’s installations seek to reclaim the street as 437

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a site of the intimate everyday: an extension in many of the depicted actions of the familiar domestic and private sphere. In her words, “a chair on the façades, it reflects the inside. It’s like a chair turned 180 degrees to the outside” (Hiesl 2016b). Her piece straddles the inside and outside, rupturing notions of the urban street environment as controlled by state injunctions (such as vehicular and pedestrian traffic control) and instead conceptualizes civic spaces as sites of human emotion, social relations, and community ties. The urban and the domestic, the excitement of the street, and familiar routines of the home are intricately interwoven, which subtly counteracts the frequent polarization between public and private realms. The chapter’s last section explores this idea further.

Counteracting ageism There is a special significance in the association of old age and elderly people with everyday life, and specifically the sphere of everyday domesticity. Feminist theory is renowned for highlighting the gendering of the public (which is assigned to the male) and private (which is assigned to the female) spheres. Naomi Schor applies this gender distinction specifically to the everyday: Two widely shared but diametrically opposed views inform what theories we have on the everyday: one, which we might call the feminine or feminist, though it is not necessarily held by women or self-described feminists, links the everyday with the daily rituals of private life carried out within the domestic sphere traditionally presided over by women: the other, the masculine or masculinist, sited the everyday in the public spaces and spheres dominated especially, but not exclusively, in modern Western bourgeois societies by men. (Schor 1992, 188) In Hiesl’s work, whose cast consists entirely of men and women between the ages of sixty and eighty, and which explicitly thematizes age and ageing, we can perceive a similar area of concern—albeit for a different marginalized group. Retired from paid work and no longer deemed ‘productive’ members of society, the lives of elderly people may be seen as dominated (even more than the young) by tedious everyday routines whereby time “is emptied of any significant markers that would differentiate one moment from the next” (Highmore 2002, 7). Older people are a significantly underrepresented section of society in terms of their public visibility. This  underrepresentation is due partly to their limited presence in the workplace with the very old in particular often being literally confined to indoor spaces (their homes or care homes) where they feel ignored, silenced, or shunned. They are thus, like the female gender in feminist theory, restricted to the private sphere. Cultural representations of older people are also uncommon, and where ageing is portrayed it is often in conjunction with decay, ill health, and death. As historical sociologist Andrew Blaikie notes, “Older people rarely played leads in plays, serials, soaps, adventures, comedies, or children’s programmes” (1999, 97). X-time people chair is emancipatory in defying the trend toward youth in cultural performance and in seeking to reclaim public spaces for an older generation. Hiesl gives the lie to the notion that we become invisible when we age. Without denying the everyday nature of many old people’s activities and lifestyles, she challenges their association with dullness and tedium, and reveals how slow and familiar movements can sustain artistic power. The methodical, careful, and ‘knowing’ ways in which the performers execute their actions 438

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adds to (rather than detracting from) the interest they generate and is a counterpoint to the fast-paced and multimedia nature of much contemporary performance. The work stands in marked contrast with Hiesl’s and Kaiser’s later piece Dressing The City and My Head is a Shirt, which is also embedded in the urban landscape but uses young dance professionals. But it also differs from other treatments of age in performance works, such as Pina Bausch’s Kontakthof: With Ladies and Gentlemen Over “65” (2007)—a revival of her earlier Kontakthof (1978) which was choreographed for the Wuppertal company. Unlike Hiesl, Bausch retains much of the technicality and (high-art) context of professional theater dance and in some scenes presents her senior amateur cast in a flirtatious and sexualized light. We should recognize, however, that representatives of American postmodern dance such as Steve Paxton and Yvonne Rainer paved the way for such works as Hiesl’s, with its inclusion and appreciation of older performers through their emphasis on “clarity, economy, and simplicity rather than skilful virtuosity” (Burt 2017, 44). As Helen Thomas (2013, 125) aptly explains, gerontology has advanced two contrasting theories of ageing. The mutual disengagement theory suggests that a progressive withdrawal of older people from their central societal roles following retirement is a natural process, although it may result in some demoralization. The second, so-called activity theory, emphasizes the benefits of old people remaining active and engaged both physically and mentally, and maintaining their interactions with mainstream society. X-times people chair juxtaposes the binary notions of disengagement and activity in the ways it presents its performers and their actions. On the one hand, it features elderly people sitting in chairs, which is (as Hiesl remarked in 2016a) what many old people actually do. It is also noteworthy that the chairs are placed separately at some distance from each other, which could refer to the increasing isolation that tends to come with ageing. It could also be read, more metaphorically, as portraying the elderly as fixed to their own spots with little choice or possibility of change. In these respects, the work aligns with the disengagement theory. Hiesl (2017) also mentioned that when the work was shown in South America—in Rio de Janeiro and Lima—questions of a lack of insurance and benefits for elderly people were at the forefront of public consciousness. Such issues of pensioner poverty and how to deal with an ageing population are serious even in Western Europe. Yet on the other hand, images of passivity and isolation among the elderly are challenged in several individual scenes. One very agile participant, who was often invited to festivities to put on little shows and provide musical interludes, is seen playing the maracas and vigorously wielding a cocktail shaker before pouring himself a drink (see Illustration 30.3). Another is reading a map, perhaps suggesting that she is a keen traveler. A third, as mentioned earlier, is cleaning his football trainers. In our conversations, Hiesl was careful to specify that her work shows its participants leading an active life (by no means withdrawn from society) and retaining sovereignty and dignity. At  the same time, she sounded a more critical note by bemoaning the lack of communication and interaction between young and old, and calling for new models to further intergenerational understanding. X-times people chair thus seems to occupy an ambiguous in-between space when it comes to ageing—refusing to pigeonhole older people while displacing dominant preconceptions by representing the unrepresented. And when death did occur—perhaps inevitably considering the age of the work’s participants—it became part of the production. When the piece premiered in Cologne, of the twenty chairs originally put up in the city center, only nineteen were used; one chair was placed, tilted over, on a porch roof as a touching reminder of a performer who had died during the preparatory phase. He was thus present in his absence. 439

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Illustration 30.3  x-times people chair, Poznan´ , Poland, 2006. Performer: Eddy Krieger. (Courtesy of Roland Kaiser. A project by Angie Hiesl @ Angie Hiesl Produktion.)

Conclusion Hiesl’s work takes the quotidian seriously as an object of artistic enquiry, showing that the everyday can be transformed through conscious attention and moreover can transform an audience’s perceptions. My three interconnected approaches to examining x-times people chair—aesthetics, urban discourse, and age—show how it offers resistance to traditional thinking in all these areas while raising further questions. First, the work’s aesthetic is diametrically opposed to elitist aesthetic frameworks, bringing to attention the spheres of life that are often considered beneath artistic interest. Its unusual montage techniques and quasi-surrealist images are apt strategies for capturing the everyday. Its quotidian motif picks up the threads of postmodernist thought, which Hiesl takes to a logical extreme by creating a work which eludes genre definitions altogether. Her 440

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piece certainly straddles visual and performance art, but is it also dance? Hiesl (2017) herself answered this point by stating that its starkly reduced movement vocabulary still “had to do” with dance, and that she had been invited to show it at dance festivals. This response, of course, raises much broader questions of where dance, and dance movement, begins. Secondly, Hiesl’s piece calls into question traditional accounts of the city as a site of consumption, capitalist ambition, state or municipal interference, or simply as somewhere that is hectic and stressful. She offers the spectator-participants an alternative, experiential engagement with their city by excavating the potential of public space and its alteration through the medium of ludic art. Finally, the work exposes the poverty of our ageist culture and brings to visibility a section of society that is often restricted to the (relatively invisible) sphere of the domestic. In doing so, it raises other pertinent questions: What and who should be privileged in society, and why? How should senior people be (re)presented and treated? It thereby contributes to a societal politics of the everyday, articulating the interests of those marginalized by broader social trends and cultural forms of representation. Ultimately, the piece is, as Hiesl says, about “Menschsein,” that is, “what makes us human.” And if we believe Lefebvre, realizing our humanity occurs primarily at the level of everyday life.

Note 1 I gratefully acknowledge the support for this research received from the British Academy/ Leverhulme Trust.

References Agier, Michel. 2004. “La ville, la rue et le commencement de la politique. Le monde rêvé de Chloé.” Multitudes 3 (17): 139–146. Arnold, Matthew. 1993. Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings. New York: Cambridge University Press. Banes, Sally. 1977. Terpsichore in Sneakers. Post-Modern Dance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. ———. 2008. “Equality celebrates the ordinary.” In The Everyday: Documents of Contemporary Art, edited by Stephen Johnstone, 113–119. London: Whitechapel. Blaikie, Andrew. 1999. Ageing and Popular Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press. Burt, Ramsay. 2017. “Yvonne Rainer’s Convalescent Dance: On Valuing Ordinary, Everyday, and Unidealized Bodily States in the Context of the Aging Body in Dance.” In  The  Aging Body in Dance: A  CrossCultural Perspective, edited by Nanko Nakaima and Gabriele Brandstetter, 35–45. London: Routledge. De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Randall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hiesl, Angie. 2006. x-times people chair - performance-installation on building facades in public space. Performance at Malta festival, Poznań, Poland. Video produced by Roland Kaiser. Accessed December  24, 2018. https://vimeo.com/38580168. ———. 2016b. Interviewed by the author in Hendon/London. March 15. ———. 2016a. Interviewed by the author in Hiesl’s studio, Cologne. January 2. ———. 2017. Interviewed by the author by telephone. March 20. Highmore, Ben. 2002. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory. An Introduction. London: Routledge. Inglis, David. 2009. “Cultural Studies and Everyday Life: Tapping Hidden Energies.” In Encountering the Everyday: An Introduction to the Sociologies of the Unnoticed, edited by Michael Hviid Jacobsen, 376–396. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Johnston, Jill. (1968) 1998. “Paxton’s People.” In Marmalade Me, by Jill Johnston, 135–137. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Originally published in Village Voice, April 4, 1968. Johnstone, Stephen. 2008. The Everyday: Documents of Contemporary Art. London: Whitechapel. Kontakthof with Ladies and Gentlemen over ‘65’. 2007. (Book and DVD). Choreography Pina Bausch. Paris: L‘Arche Editeur.

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Alexandra Kolb Lefebvre, Henri. 1984. Everyday Life in the Modern World.Translated by Sacha Rabinovitch. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. ———. 1988. “Towards a Leftist Cultural Politics.” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 75–88. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. ———. 1991. Critique of Everyday Life.Vol. 1. Translated by John Moore. London:Verso. ———. 1996. Writings on Cities. Translated and edited by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2002. Critique of Everyday Life.Vol. 2.Translated by John Moore.With a preface by Michel Trebitsch. London:Verso. Logan, Peter Melville. n.d. “On Culture: Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, 1869.” In  BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, edited by Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Accessed March  13, 2017. http://www.branchcollective. org/?ps_articles=peter-logan-on-culture-matthew-arnolds-culture-and-anarchy-1869. Purcell, Mark. 2002. “Excavating Lefebvre: The right to the city and its urban politics of the inhabitant.” GeoJournal 58: 99–108. Rith-Magni, Isabel. 2012. “Laudatio Angie Hiesl.” Accessed March 13, 2017. http://www.frauenkulturbuero-nrw.de/wp-content/uploads/Laudatio-Angie-Hiesl.pdf. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. 1987. “The Policing of Street Lighting.” Yale French Studies 73: 61–74. Schneede, Uwe. 2001. Die Geschichte der Kunst im 20. Jahrhundert. Von den Avantgarden bis zur Gegenwart. Munich: C. H. Beck. Schor, Naomi. 1992. “Cartes Postales: Representing Paris 1900.” Critical Inquiry 18(2): 188–241. Scruton, Roger. 2012. “The  Great Swindle. From pickled sharks to compositions in silence, fake ideas and fake emotions have elbowed out truth and beauty.” Accessed January 12, 2017. http://aeon.co/ magazine/philosophy/roger-scruton-fake-culture/. Sheringham, Michael. 2006. Everyday Life.Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Simmel, Georg. 1969. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities, edited by Richard Sennett, 47–60. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Thomas, Helen. 2013. The Body and Everyday Life. London: Routledge. Trisha Brown. 2004. [videorecording]: Early works 1966–1979. 2 videodiscs (NTSC). Includes Man walking down the side of a building (1970). Developed by Trisha Brown with Richard Nonas and Jared Bark. Documented by Peter Muller. Dancer: Joseph Schlichter. Williams, Raymond. (1958) 2002. “Culture Is Ordinary.” In  The  Everyday Life Reader, edited by Ben Highmore, 92–100. London: Routledge.

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31 DANCE, THEATER, AND THEIR POST-MEDIUM CONDITION Gerald Siegmund

Introduction: Theater makes a difference The performance scheduled as a dance performance begins with a film. Jérôme Bel’s Gala (2015) begins with a film that is a montage of photographs of empty theaters. Indeed, it looks more like an old-fashioned slide show with its steady rhythm of image following image. The  theaters are on display on the back wall of the actual stage that serves as a screen. They  vary in shapes and sizes and differ in their cultural origins. They  range from the ruins of the vast Ancient Greek open-air theaters to the splendor of the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, a Renaissance reconstruction of an ideal Roman theater, to plush baroque theaters with their tiers of circles lining the walls to small puppet theaters up to a multitude of contemporary black boxes in various sizes. Two semi-circles of plastic chairs half enclosing a piece of lawn in front of them, or simply a series of logs that demarcate an empty space, are instantly recognizable as theaters, too. The filmed projection of photographs as a slide show that is a transmedial or even postmedium practice produces a double vision for the spectator. The actual theater space we are in is displaced and dislocated to other potential theatrical sites. While recognizable as theater, theater differs from itself. The film remediates the conventions of the theater such as the split between stage and auditorium. It thereby separates theater from itself by dislocating it in film, which dialectically holds on to the theater and its viewing conventions. In the chapter that follows, I explore the possibilities of this observation for a theory of theater and dance in a post-medium age and as post-medium phenomena. My topic is thus not dance in museums as has been widely discussed over the past years (Franko and Lepecki 2014). I am not concerned with choreographers, dancers, or dance companies producing work for or showing extracts of their work in museum or gallery spaces and the consequences this change of medium and context brings from the perspective of dramaturgy, of temporalities, of the situation of reception, and of the spatial demands. My argument shifts attention away from the medium-specificity of dance both as movement in time and space and as a physical expenditure of energy structured according to choreographic principles.1 I will argue that theater and dance are inherently medial, which allows for a remediation of their practices and conventions in various other media. What I suggest is to consider the body and its movements together with their medial 443

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doubles of images as constellations. These constellations reveal the inherent mediality of the body and its movements. The theater exposes these conventions; it is the space where the body and its movements are separated to be reconfigured. This separation implies a redoubling that shifts and dislocates the body and its practices. The philosopher Samuel Weber calls this procedure “theatricality as medium” (Weber 2004). I will base my argument on Walter Benjamin’s writings on Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater and Weber’s reading of Benjamin. I will draw attention to the theory of media in relation to the body and its movements that Benjamin develops in relation to Brecht. I consider Benjamin’s media theory to be implied in his theory of gesture as a citable constellation of bodies. I am less interested in the possibility of the gesture as an interruption of action to suspend, arrest, and displace meaning. Nor  am I concerned with the sociopolitical implications the production of gestures has for Brecht and Benjamin, ideally facilitating an education of informed mass audiences toward the possibility of a revolution from the Left. Instead, Benjamin’s notion of gesture and Weber’s concept of “theatricality as medium” give rise to an understanding of certain contemporary dance practices as post-medium practices. My aim in this chapter is to trace one of the historical roots to such an understanding of media as post-medium, which dates to early twentieth-century modernism. I will then turn to William Forsythe’s idea of the “choreographic object” (Forsythe n.d. a) as my main example of dance as a post-medium specific practice. In my conclusion, I return to Bel. With some productions, film showings have replaced the original performance on stage. With Giorgio Agamben ([1992] 2000) I argue that film, here, appears as a gesture that binds the body in the original performance to its medial displacement, remembering and displacing it in a dialectic of absence and presence.

From theater to medium In  the first version of “What Is Epic Theatre?” Benjamin develops a theory of theater as a medium. In  order to reach the height of technological development, theater must “correspond to the new technological forms” (1998, 6) that shape human perception. For Benjamin, Brecht’s epic theater is synonymous with a truly contemporary theater on par with cinema or radio. By covering up the orchestra, Benjamin argues, the contemporary stage has cut off its roots in religious practices and turned into a platform. The stage as a public platform that serves as “a convenient public exhibition area” (6) for its audiences changes the function of theater from being a symbol of the totality of the world to that of a “dramatic laboratory” in which reality may be changed by experimenting with its components (Benjamin 2004, 584). In this laboratory, the projected drawings of Caspar Neher, Brecht’s stage designer, play an important role. According to Benjamin, they are not simply stage decor. Rather, with a reference to popular culture, these projections function as posters to advertise the scene that is played out in front of them. With reference to Brecht’s and Weill’s opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Benjamin answers the question of what it is exactly that Neher’s back-projections put up by underlining their function as commentary. “Brecht writes that they ‘adopt an attitude towards events in such a way that the real glutton in Mahagonny sits in front of the depicted glutton’” (Benjamin 1998, 7). For Benjamin, however, Brecht’s answer is not entirely satisfactory to explain the “powerful and curious effect of scenes staged in this way” (1998, 7). The doubling of real actors with their images does not  only produce commentary on stage. For  Benjamin, its strong and strange effect on members of the audience is because one may easily mistake one for the other: “Who can 444

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say that the acted glutton is more real than the depicted one? We can make the acted one sit in front of the more real one, i.e., we can let the depicted one at the back be more real than the acted one” (7). Thus, the projected drawings do not  eclipse the real actor. Rather, they interact with him in such a way that binds the real and its medial representation together to produce a kind of oscillation or vibration between them. Their contours “tremble”; although separate, they remain attached to each other causing what Benjamin calls a “dialectic at a standstill” (1998, 12) between the actor’s body and its image. These constellations of bodies and media images on stage reveal or discover, as Benjamin puts it, “conditions,” in German “Zustände” (1997a, 525), literally, as Weber emphasizes, a “standing toward” or a “stance” (Weber 2004, 49). It describes a moment where movement is arrested to produce a standing together of disparate elements that still vibrate, moving to and fro within the standstill, thus fraying the outlines of the real body, the image, and their contexts. Benjamin calls such a constellation of bodies, images, and sometimes even written text “gestural elements” that build up towards a “gesture” (1998, 12). In his short text “Theater and Radio” from 1932, Benjamin points out that epic theater follows the cinematic principle of montage, thus engaging in a conversation with the thennew media rather than trying to copy its effects on the masses. Rather than attempting “to use complex machinery and a vast horde of extras in order to compete with the attractions of mass-market film” (2004, 584), an attempt that for Benjamin must fail, “the progressive stage,” which is synonymous with epic theater, “debates” with the new media (584). He says: “[G]estus is nothing but a retranslation of the models of montage—so crucial in radio and film—from a technological process to a human one” (584). The human factor, the body of the actor and actress, is indeed the only advantage theater has over the technological possibilities of radio or film. In “Theater and Radio,” Benjamin holds that “in comparison to the theatre, radio represents not only a more advanced technical stage, but also one in which technology is more evident” (2004, 584). He goes on to ask: “Confronted with this, what can theatre offer? The use of live people—and apart from this nothing” (584). Epic theater “returns with a fresh approach to the grand old opportunity of theater—namely, to focus on the people that are present. In the center of its experiments stands the human being in our crisis. It is the human being that has been eliminated from radio and film—the human being (to put it a little extremely) as the fifth wheel on the carriage of technology” (585). The next sentence refers to the “eliminated” human being as “this reduced, debarred human being” that in epic theater “is subjected to various trials and judged” (585). Terms like “debarred,” “barred from itself,” and “put aside” resonate with the idea of the displacement of the body in its various medial representations, between its physical realness and its image. Rather than holding on to the notion of a holistic body, theater “ex-poses” these bodies. The “Exponierung des Anwesenden,” as the German original reads (Benjamin 1997b, 775), puts them out of themselves and out of their places. It  displaces them, gesturing, as philosopher Samuel Weber claims in his reading of Benjamin, towards an “elsewhere” (Weber 2004, 49), all the while holding the body up for inspection on the platform as the obstinate remains or debris of the technological age. The mnemonic function of the gesture remembers and re-members the body, putting it to new and potential uses. It quotes the body as a gesture, dragging it along with it, making it vibrate and move. For  Weber, “contemporary theatricality” depends on the citability of the gesture, which, because it is citable, is always already medial. It is medial because it is discontinuous; it comes in between and separates. Theater’s space is always already displaced because 445

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it is split or doubled into stage and auditorium. Since the audience is constitutive of theater, the “work” of theater can never produce or display the “self-contained meaningfulness” or “self-identity” (2004, 7) of form that modern aesthetics ascribe to works of art.2 By being gestural, theater is already a transportation of place and body whose principle the new electronic media exploit with great success. “What is new,” Weber sums up, “is only—but this is hardly insignificant—that the new, electronic media have made manifest what was always at work in the ‘work’ itself: namely, its mediality” (119). The cut or separation that gesture performs is also formative: it forms new media from old conventions (like the separation of stage and auditorium, body and its image), turning “medium” into a self-differing category. Hence “theatricality as medium,” the title of Weber’s book, is “constituted by its relation to what it is not, to determine possibilities that are never actualized or present as such” (119). Theater as medium is characterized by its own displacement. The  stage displaces itself into the auditorium, which, by leaving the theater, in turn displaces and disperses itself into an “elsewhere.” As a medium, theater and the bodies it exposes are always already serial displacements of themselves. Bel’s Gala reintroduces images of theater that focus on this foundational division into the live theater situation. Thus, the images function as citable gestures that draw attention to the mediality of the theater situation as such. They produce an oscillation between recorded image and the actual theater, throwing the gaze into a miseen-abyme of its constituent elements.

From medium to post-medium Weber’s reading of Benjamin turned his notion of gesture into a theory of theater as medium. It displaces theater’s “here and now” into a “there and then.” Taking the argument one step further, art historian Rosalind Krauss (1999) allows us to re-think the medium in terms of the post-medium. What does she mean by this? For Krauss, the “post-medium age” describes the condition since the late 1960s under which the arts, and in her case especially the visual arts, come to exist. The post-medium age is described by the complete saturation of everyday life with images, which results in the conflation of erstwhile autonomous art and everyday culture in a general idea of perception. In what Frederic Jameson calls the “new life of postmodern sensation” ( Jameson as quoted in Krauss 1999, 56), everything that happens from shopping to leisure activities is experienced as aesthetic, making the existence of a separate sphere of art obsolete. But for Krauss the post-medium age also produces post-medium–specific art (i.e., works of art like installation pieces or performances that blur the boundaries of traditional genres by including all kinds of activities and materials). Trying to re-cue art’s specific discourse from its total inclusion into late capitalist consumer culture, Krauss refers to Benjamin’s and Weber’s theory of the medium as self-differing. For her, the material support of an artwork like the canvas for a painter or, in our case, the body of a dancer, is never identical with its medial quality. Hence, material support, the image produced and the conventions according to which support and image interact, may be set apart from each other. Krauss holds “that the specificity of mediums, even modernist ones, must be understood as differential, self-differing, and thus as a layering of conventions never simply collapsed into the physicality of their support” (1999, 53). The conventions according to which a specific genre works its material support may be detached from this support. Like the principles of film that reappear in Brecht’s epic theater, they may travel and materialize differently. For Krauss, the “impossibility of thinking of an aesthetic medium as nothing more than an unworked physical object” (1999, 6) results in the reinvention or 446

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re-articulation of the medium (56) in other media, a process which reflects upon the specifics of the medium’s conditions. Works of art that do that—Marcel Broodthaers is her prime example—do not only set themselves apart from the capitalist demands of the post-medium age. In Weber’s term, they also use theatricality as a medium of reflection that is specific to the arts. British philosopher Peter Osborne questions Krauss’s re-attachment of post-medium art to a given medium such as sculpture, architecture, or painting. Opting for a “transcategorical” postconceptual art that challenges the very notion of the work, the “conventional category of medium” (Osborne  2013, 100) is destroyed: “From the standpoint of the works’ ideality, their material forms appear as multiple materilizations selected from an infinite set of possible actualizations” (113). Freeing the work from its critical re-appropriation through pre-existing categories, Osborne argues for a transcategorical understanding of work that he calls “postconceptual” (i.e., works that exist after the heyday of conceptual art in the 1960s and that carry its legacy under radically new conditions of a globalized art market in digital societies): the “global transnational” (26). And yet, as Osborne admits, the critical categories that the artist wants to avoid inevitably and dialectically re-appear in perception of the work, structuring its understanding.3 Hence, the “trans” in the term “transcategorical” implies a “going through” the categories and specific media rather than a downright abolishment of media and the way they structure perception. The work “suggests” media rather than being in a specific medium. It  is here that Benjamin’s and Krauss’s differential understanding of media re-appears as differential modes of perception that exhaust and displace the work itself. Viewed from this angle, Benjamin’s notion of Neher’s drawings as “ideal models” or “materialist ideas” (Benjamin 1998, 7) (i.e., ideas materialized) can be read as concepts that may indeed take on multiple actualizations and forms. In the following section, I will refer to Forsythe’s work with “choreographic objects” (Forsythe n.d. a) as examples of choreography as a self-differing medium.

Forsythe, or choreography as a self-differing medium Benjamin’s notion of gesture as a tremulous and oscillating movement that creates an inbetween self-differing media most obviously resonates with contemporary forms of dance that use film in their staging. William Forsythe’s Kammer/Kammer (2000) is a prime example of this. The title plays with the double meaning of “Kammer,” as an old fashioned word for room, the Latin “camera,” and the “camera” as a technical device, its small chamber on the inside being used to record images. The split and the resulting doubling of the word Kammer signifies the separation of one Kammer, the actual room, from the other Kammer, the camera, as a medial difference. For the production, the stage is divided up into various rooms separated from each other by thin walls so that the stage looks like a roughly assembled film set. What goes on in these rooms is often blocked from view. Behind one of the back walls, the audience can see arms going up, while the bodies of the dancers are shielded by the partitions. Since the arm movements are rhythmical, we assume that behind these opaque screens there is actual dancing going on. There is no way, however, for the audience to verify this. In another room on the right side of the stage, two dancers engage in a duet, rolling on a mattress. The production is built around two main characters and their respective love stories, who, although they share the same stage, inhabit two separate narrative spheres. Forsythe himself gives the title a third meaning by referring the Kammer to the “chambers of the heart” (La Rocco 2006). The boy in the blue sock hat (Antony Rizzi), based on Douglas A. Martin’s book Outline of My Lover (2000), tells of his relationship with an older man, a famous 447

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rock star. The second character (Dana Caspersen), a professor who fashions herself after the French actress Catherine Deneuve and imagines a relationship with a female student, is taken from Anne Carson’s “Irony Is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve” in her book Men in the Off Hours (2000). A live camera follows the Boy and Deneuve across the stage, capturing their actions and images that are mixed live (video design: Philip Bussmann). Like the dancers’ bodies, they are choreographed. They are then projected onto huge screens suspended over the heads of the audience. These images literally travel in space. They detach themselves from the stage and displace themselves from screen to screen. Along their way, they include the space of the audience into the proliferation of spaces that the productions thrives on. Thus, in Kammer/ Kammer, the “here” of the stage situation always includes an “over there.” The presence of dancing and acting bodies includes their absence on the screens. Both are visibly interdependent. Hence, the gaze of the spectators is split from the outset, trying to take in different spaces and different media at once. Since this proves to be a disconcerting and difficult task, spectators may decide to only concentrate on the live action, which in the roughly assembled rooms always looks incomplete and fragmented. Or they may decide to look at the perfectly composed images on the screen, the framing of which turns the shabby rooms into recognizable interiors. In the space between stage and screen, the body and its image, Kammer/ Kammer sets perception in motion. As Benjamin (2004) argues in relation to Brecht’s theater, the gaze becomes tremulous, oscillating between the live action of the dancers and their images. It triggers a dialectic between the near and the far, the exceptional and its repetition. Constantly comparing the live situation to its representation, the actual bodies of the dancers appear as frail and unprotected supplements of their images. Tested against their images, they are exposed much more strongly than they would be if they were “just” dancing. They are “debarred” from themselves (585) and put in another space that reflects back on their precarious condition as human beings. Perhaps the more radical proposition in terms of dance in a post-medium age, however, is Forsythe’s recent work on what he calls “choreographic objects” (Forsythe n.d. a). Since the late 1990s, Forsythe has produced a series of these objects that range from video or acoustic installations to simple objects that he presents in museum and gallery spaces. The exhibitions use various titles, for example About Subtraction in 2013 at the Neue Museum in Weimar and in 2015 The Fact of Matter at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main. In 2017 in Le Bourget-Paris at the Gagosian Gallery or, more recently, in 2018 at the ICA in Boston, the exhibitions were simply called Choreographic Objects.4 In 2013, upon wandering through the Neue Museum in Weimar, I found myself stranded in a huge room where a pile of thick and heavy wooden planks stood in my way. What looked like the debris from a shipwreck blocked my passage. The planks were arranged in such a way that I could not get past them or leave the room by the side door, which I had initially made out to be an alternative exit. I had to go back, or climb over the wooden construction, which did not seem to be a real option, since climbing the pile looked dangerous and might trigger the museum’s alarm system. I was forced to stop and look at this wooden construction. The longer I looked, the more the beams looked like bodies with their limbs entangled and stretched into various directions in space. What were their points of contact that enabled their balance? How far could they tilt over without making the whole construction collapse? What would happen if I decided to add my weight to theirs? Where could I intervene to change the shape of the pile without destroying it? The specific choreographic object I encountered in Weimar was almost ironically titled Choreographers [sic] Handbook which premiered at the Avignon Festival in 2011. It may serve as a first example of what “choreographic 448

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objects” do. They  embody in their materials, here the wooden planks and their arrangement, choreographic principles such as balance, counterpoint, physical support, or spatial orientation. The  order and arrangement of the planks is indeed choreographed, “making the organizing principles [of choreography] visibly persistent,” as Forsythe (Forsythe n.d. a) writes in his essay “Choreographic Objects”. In relation to the spectator, they guide or even choreograph their movements. Be these movements imaginary, as during my encounter with Choreographers Handbook, or real, these objects ask for my engagement with them. By following their invitation, I am being moved both intellectually and physically. I am being choreographed by the way they interrupt my familiar movement patterns. After all, I had to turn around and choose a different path through the museum. Towards the Diagnostic Gaze asks me to pick up a feather duster from its rest on a stone plate and to hold the object still. Since my body consists of multiple micromovements, such as breath or blood circulation, this proves to be an impossible task. The feathers inevitably tremble. Although some objects look motionless, they serve as a residue for possible movement that I may engage with physically or mentally.5 The objects may stand still, but they are made up of movement like the feathers moving almost imperceptibly in the air or the intricate compilation of the wooden planks that go off in various directions, duck under each other at various heights, and despite their weight balance precariously on top of one another. Hence, the still-motion of the planks or the actual movement of the feathers facilitate possible movements of the spectators, providing Forsythe (n.d. a) with a definition of choreography not as a specific historical practice, but as an idea or concept: “Choreography elicits action upon action”. There are striking similarities between Benjamin’s conceptualization of the medium as separation and in-betweenness and Forsythe’s concept of choreography, which in his essay is a medium that needs objects (material supports in Krauss’s terms [Krauss 1999]) to materialize. Together they can illuminate the state of choreography and dance in the post-medium age. For Forsythe, choreography is neither a term nor a practice with an essential meaning. “To reduce choreography to a single definition,” he writes, “is not to understand the most crucial of its mechanisms: to resist and reform previous conceptions of its definition” (n.d. a). Each historical era and its choreographic practices are “at odds with its previous incarnations” (n.d. a). What choreography is and, above all, what it does, cannot be determined once and for all. In Weber’s (2004) reading of Benjamin’s gesture, choreography, then, is self-differing always pointing to an elsewhere as it separates itself from itself. What choreography does inevitably points to what it does not do. Its presence relies on a radical absence that makes it differ from itself. As a medium or a “channel,” as Forsythe (n.d. a) writes, it relates bodies and movement, giving them a specific shape, energy, momentum, and direction. Yet choreography may exist without dance. It is not even tied to its traditional historical vessel or material support, the human body. Hence, Forsythe detaches choreography from both dance and the human body. The result of the processes of differing is the choreographic object that generates “autonomous expressions of its principles” (n.d. a). These expressions are always in the plural, just as the objects vary in their materiality and mediality. In the case of Choreographers Handbook, operating principles of choreography (balance, counterpoint, support, spatial orientation) are grafted onto a different physical support, the wood beams. They are materialized in a different body and migrate into another medium: sculpture. Because choreography as a medium is in this sense self-differing, it produces other bodies and spaces, pointing toward an elsewhere that allows for transitions between practices and their materialities. For  Forsythe, choreographic objects also give rise to an epistemological dimension. Trying to rescue the body in motion from “the domain of raw sense,” which is “precognitive, 449

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illiterate,” choreographic objects “allow for sustained examination or even the possibility of objective, distinct readings from the position that language offers the sciences and other branches of arts that leave up synchronic artifacts [sic] for detailed inspection” (Forsythe n.d. a). This closer study is achieved by a shift in temporalities away from the fleeting nature of dance as an embodied practice, of its being in and for the moment, toward new forms of enactment such as objects that stall time and allow choreographic principles to emerge and be studied with greater scientific objectivity. Forsythe and his team of scholars, scientists, and artists have aimed at scientific objectivity with their project called Motion Bank. As a four-year research project taking place in Frankfurt between 2010 and 2013, the research project produced among other things (e.g., online scores) a computer-based platform that allows for a “detailed inspection” of his choreography One Flat Thing, reproduced from 2002 (Forsythe n.d. b). “Synchronous Objects,” as the platform is called, visually highlights the various principles of coordination and timing that structure the choreography by means of colorful lines, curves, and volumes. The homepage of the project speaks of these “organizational structures” that were made visible by means of computer programs as “transforming them into new objects,” thus underlining the consistency of this project with Forsythe’s work on choreographic objects. Motion Bank can be seen as yet another instantiation or actualization of choreographic thought (Forsythe n.d. c). Choreography here indeed becomes a laboratory in the sense that Benjamin and Brecht envisioned for epic theater. For Benjamin, epic theater has an educational function, just as Forsythe’s work on the objects produces knowledge about choreography. While Benjamin still referred to the platform as a stage where bodies are exposed to be examined, the platform in the age of the internet has transformed into an online platform as yet another instantiation of its concept. If choreography is self-differing, so is its material support: “And so it is with the choreographic object: it is a model of potential transition from one state to another in any space imaginable” (n.d. a). It is indeed “nowhere and everywhere at the same time,” or, as Peter Osborne describes the condition of art in the global transnational world: the work of art, if it can still be called a work, is also the title of his book “anywhere, or not at all” (2013). Choreographic objects are on the move like Benjamin’s gestures pointing toward an elsewhere—a new and potential space to materialize in and to elicit new movement. Movement gets displaced, made to differ from itself; it “is by nature open to a full palette of phenomenological instigations because it acknowledges the body as wholly designed to persistently read every signal from its environment” (Forsythe n.d. a). I take the “phenomenological instigations” to mean also that choreography, since it is self-differing, can materialize in an endless series of medial supports such as objects, computer programs, video or aural sculptures, interactive or immersive spaces, social choreographies, or lest I forget, a dance piece. The space it emerges in is no longer necessarily the stage or the theater proper. Nor is it the space of museums or galleries in which most of the choreographic objects have been shown. As Forsythe’s activities over the past years have demonstrated, the space for choreography to appear can also be public spaces. In City of Abstracts (2000), passersby were confronted with their own computer-manipulated image projected on buildings, triggering their urge to move and to interact with the image. Following this line of thought, today’s myriad forms of public protest that use the body and even forms of dance to reclaim public space by intervening in it, separating it from its habitual use, blocking ways, and opening new passages, may also be read as a different medium of dance. As a “different” and deferring medium, it still resonates vibrantly with all the other forms of dance, including stage dance, and their conventions.6 450

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Forsythe underlines the fact that a “choreographic object is not a substitute for the body” but an “alternative site” for action to reside (n.d. a). The non-human bodies in which action resides are different from the human body, to which, as Benjamin suggests, they remain dialectically linked, trembling in between. Most prominently so, because the displacement of the body aims at my body as a spectator who is made to move as a possible site for choreographic thinking. Such thinking may happen with a plethora of material supports that, as Krauss (1999) has argued, must not be conflated with the (choreographic) conventions that work upon it. Forsythe conceives of choreography as a self-differing medium that must be instantiated in all kids of places and materials. To borrow Weber’s words, choreography is a “gesture on the move” (2004, 47). In the conclusion I will look at the implications for a postmedium dance in relation to film as the medium in which the displacement and separation of the body from the body takes place.

Conclusion In  his essay “Notes on Gesture” (Agamben  [1992] 2000), Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben argues that it is the gesture and not the image that lies at the center of film. In his archaeology of the gesture, Agamben famously states that the emergence of film and the cinema toward the end of the nineteenth century is the result of an attempt to re-appropriate and reconstruct the true gesture of the bourgeoisie, which has been lost in social life. Dance and literary scholar Lucia Ruprecht (2017) questions the sole validity of Agamben’s understanding of gestures as loss. She argues instead for a much more productive understanding of gesture at the turn of the twentieth century. She holds that at the time, gestures proliferated in dance and the arts, changing the very fabric of aesthetics in general. Taking the Benjaminian roots of Agamben’s thinking into account, loss should, however, be primarily understood as the result of a non-essentialist thinking of the body and its movements. Media are the symptom of the loss of an original. Film as gesture carries this loss as an absence while covering it up with an infinite series of articulations and materializations. The body becomes a trace. The use of film or video in dance productions, such as Kammer/Kammer by Forsythe, or the screening of films of dance productions should therefore not be understood as replacements of the true and original dance event. Referring once more to the work of Jérôme Bel, in 2002 a video recording of his 1997 piece, Shirtology (1997), was shown at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris during an exhibition on the writer Roland Barthes. In the following years, film recordings of Bel’s pieces have taken on a life of their own, being shown on various occasions during festivals and in museums.7 After the retirement of the dancer Véronique Doisneau, the film of the piece Véronique Doisneau (2004), which probes into her working relation as sujêt with the Paris Opera Ballet, has entirely replaced the live performance. As I argue, the films are not merely secondary spin-offs of the original live performance. They belong to the work as another of its medial instantiations. Live performance, which may only be a memory, and film form a constellation—facing each other in different times and places. Understood in this way, the film ceases to be a representation of an absent live performance. It assumes the function of a gesture that points toward the body and its gestures that it reconstitutes and preserves. Bel’s work charts and documents the loss of the original gesture of the body that could be produced through movement and shown in dance. By doing so, he brings the body about as a gesture in the true sense that Agamben grants the term: “What characterizes gesture is that in it nothing is being produced or acted, but rather something is being endured and supported. The gesture, in other words, opens the sphere 451

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of ethos as the more proper sphere of that which is human” (Agamben 2000, 56). What the gesture of dance supports is movement’s mediality and the fact that human beings are always already in language. “If dance is gesture,” Agamben continues, “it is so, rather, because it is nothing more than the endurance and the exhibition of the media character of corporal movements. The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such. It allows the emergence of the being-in-a-medium of human beings and thus it opens the ethical dimension for them” (57, italics in the original). Gesture as medium and dance as gesture bind the original to its repetition, the singular to the citable, the near to the far, and the here and now to the there and then. Dance’s mediality is its post-medium condition. In the context of Benjamin’s theory of mediality dance scholar Peter Dickinson writes about Bel’s films that … the dance film would seem to be the logical extension of Bel’s theatrical frame: a place where we can repeatedly arrest, review, and take stock of what, after Agamben, we might call the biopolitics of choreographed movement, in which the forms that dance has taken during its institutional lifetime are examined in dialectical relation to the naked lives of the dancers who are at once included within and exceptional to that history. (Dickinson 2014, 168) Dickinson spells out aspects of the ethical dimension that Agamben merely touches upon in the previous quote. Being in the medium allows us to come to terms with the inadequacies of communication, meaning, and the material body. It carries the social by tending toward an other. Films and live performances are two ways of producing gestures by interruption. They  are the two sides of the same medal. Both try to come to terms with the dancers’ exceptionality, their singularity that emerges out of the protocols of representation, the techniques and technologies that subjugate and produce the body, and the institutionalized power relations inside which the dancers work. Gesture is therefore also “essentially always a gesture of not being able to figure something out in language” (59), which is precisely why different media are employed to come closer to that basic exceptionality of the single dancer—his or her irrecuperable singularity that gesture points toward while detaching it from itself. Like the live performances, the films appeal to our living bodies as spectators. They produce embodied thoughts, emotions, and reactions. Even cinematic representations of bodies still have the living body as their index or referent. Weber underlines that the function of theater, which for Benjamin has the sole advantage of being able to expose the human body, “in an age of electronic media is to articulate the ways in which sites—and sights, but also sounds and other ‘sensations’—remain linked, in however mediate manner, to bodies, although not necessarily human bodies, at least as traditionally understood” (Weber 2004, 48). If the human body is always already implied in media, its displacement to another site, which constitutes its theatricality, is inherent in that body. On a soothing note that counters the lament over the loss of the body through media, performance scholar Herbert Blau (2010) reminds us that theater always takes place between what is there and what is not there. It is in itself ontologically unstable. Theater always deals with the ghostly doubles of bodies, whether mediated or not. Therefore “there is no escaping in remediation the reduction ad absurdum, which is to say, bereft, forlorn, alienated, replicated by technology, the nevertheless refractory body to which we refer anything on a screen, in the ghostliness of three dimensions or in the wraithlike space of the virtual” (Blau 2010, 544).

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The constellation of body and image as gesture carries only itself. It exposes the gesture’s pure mediality that does not  communicate something, but only exposes itself. By being exposed it carries along with it an irretrievable absence of an original body or movement. Bodies and their movements are always already in the medium. The discussion about dance as a post-medium does not aim at abolishing or replacing the body, but at exposing its “pure mediality” as a rem(a)inder of its potential articulation.

Notes 1 For a detailed discussion of the notion of medium-specificity in dance and its relation to the work of Jérôme Bel, see my monograph on Bel (Siegmund 2017, 15–40). 2 Michael Fried (1995, 127) in his infamous condemnation of theater explicitly refers to the theater’s dependence on the audience as the defining feature that prevents it from ever achieving art status. The latter is defined by the self-containment of its components and its meaning that resides in the work independent of any specific spectator or viewer (127). 3 Performance scholar Shannon Jackson (2014, 56) argues that our understanding or even judgment of a work of art does not only depend on our expectations, but more specifically on the field of expertise from which we view it. Seeing a performance from the perspective of the visual arts produces different results and values than viewing it from the field of theater. Our knowledge of genre conventions informs our reception of the work (56). 4 Forsythe’s preoccupation with objects and the choreographic values they produce can at least be traced back to his White Bouncy Castle that was premiered in 1997 in London’s Roundhouse as part of the installation Tight Roaring Circle. In 1999, the castle was open to the public for the first time in Frankfurt am Main (Siegmund 2001, 74). 5 In  relation to Forsythe’s performance installation Human Writes (2005), I have tried to develop a concept of choreography based on the confrontation of an object or, more generally speaking, an inhuman material body that may very well be instances of writing, and the human body that bounces off the object and is thereby set in motion in a specific, yet also indeterminate way (Siegmund 2012). 6 The emphasis on action or active embodied intervention has hitherto prevented considering forms of protest as a medium of dance or choreography (Klein 2017). Oliver Marchart’s (2013) emphasis on the body as supplement to forms of protest, however, points in this direction. 7 For each piece since 1994, Bel’s homepage gives an exhaustive list of performance dates and venues, including the dates and occasions for the film screenings (Bel n.d.).

References Agamben, Giorgio. (1992) 2000. “Notes on Gesture.” In Means Without End: Notes on Politics, translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Acarino, 49–60. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bel, Jérôme. n.d. RB Jerome Bel. Accessed January 8, 2018. http://www.jeromebel.fr/index.php. Benjamin,Walter. 1997a. “Was ist das Epische Theater? (1).” In Aufsätze, Essays,Vorträge: Gesammelte Schriften Band II, 2, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 519–531. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1997b. “Theater und Rundfunk.” In Aufsätze, Essays,Vorträge: Gesammelte Schriften Band II, 2, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 773–776. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ———. 1998. “What Is Epic Theatre?” (First version). In Understanding Brecht, 1–13. Introduced by Stanley Mitchell, translated by Anna Bostock. London:Verso. ———. 2004. “Theater and Radio.” In  Selected Writings Vol.  2, 1931–1934. Translated by Rodney Livingstone and Others, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, 586–586. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Blau, Herbert. 2010. “Virtually Yours: Presence, Liveness, Lessness.” In Critical Theory and Performance, edited by Janelle Reinelt and Joseph Roach, 532–545. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Carson, Anne. 2000. Men in the Off Hours. New York:Vintage.

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Gerald Siegmund Dickinson, Peter. 2014. “Cédric Andrieux:With Bel, Benjamin, and Brecht in Vancouver.” TDR:The Drama Review 58 (Fall): 162–169. Forsythe,William. n.d. a. Choreographic Objects. Accessed January 6, 2018. https://www.williamforsythe.com. ———. n.d. b. Motion Bank.Accessed January 6, 2018. http://motionbank.org/en/content/knowledge-base. ———. n.d. c. Synchronous Objects. Accessed January 6, 2018. https://synchronousobjects.osu.edu. Franko, Mark, and André Lepecki, eds. 2014. “Dance in the Museum Special Issue.” Dance Research Journal 46 (3): 1–117. Fried, Michael. 1995. “Art and Objecthood.” In  Minimal Art: A  Critical Anthology, edited by Gregory Battcock, with an introduction by Anne M. Wagner, 116–147. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jackson, Shannon. 2014. “The Way We Perform Now.” Dance Research Journal 46 (3): 53–61. Klein, Gabriele. 2017. “Urban Choreographies: Artistic Interventions and the Politics of Urban Space.” In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics, edited by Rebekah J. Kowal, Gerald Siegmund, and Randy Martin, 131–142. New York: Oxford University Press. Krauss, Rosalind. 1999. A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. London: Thames and Hudson. La Rocco, Claudia. 2006. “Love Hurts/Love Hurts.” New York Times. April 30. Accessed January 6, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/arts/dance/love-hurtslove-hurts.html. Marchart, Oliver. 2013. “Dancing Politics: Political Reflections on Choreography, Dance and Protest.” In  Dance, Politics and Co-Immunity, edited by Gerald Siegmund and Stefan Hölscher, 39–57. Zurich: diaphanes. Martin, Douglas A. 2000. Outline of My Lover. New York: Soft Skull Press. Osborne, Peter. 2013. Anywhere or Not at All. Philosophy of Contemporary Art. London:Verso. Ruprecht, Lucia. 2017. “Towards an Ethics of Gesture.” Performance Philosophy 3 (1): 4–22. Accessed December 8, 2018. https://www.performancephilosophy.org/journal/issue/view/4. Siegmund, Gerald. 2001. “Choreographische Interventionen.” In  Schluss mit der Spaßkultur. Das Jahrbuch 2001, Ballet International/Tanz Aktuell, edited by Arnd Wesemann, 72–75. Berlin: Friedrich Berlin Verlagsgesellschaft. ———. 2012. “Negotiating Choreography, Letter, and Law in William Forsythe.” In New German Dance Studies, edited by Susan Manning and Lucia Ruprecht, 200–216. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ———. 2017. Jérôme Bel: Dance,Theatre, and the Subject. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Weber, Samuel. 2004. Theatricality as Medium. New York: Fordham University Press.

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32 RE-IMAGINING LABAN Tradition, extinction, invention. Re-staging as creative contemporary practice Alison Curtis-Jones

Introduction In  today’s choreographic race to invent, create and move forward, is the present artistic moment forgetting its own past? In this context, what is the relevance of the dance past, and should that past be of concern to dancers in training? Can the past inform and inspire today’s dancers and even help them to understand current practice? Perhaps first, the dance past must be made palpable to today’s practitioners. But how can this be achieved if current practice prioritizes new creation over historical understanding?1 In this chapter, I will argue that the dance past is relevant to today’s dancers in training. My contemporary practice of re-imagining Rudolf von Laban’s (1879–1958) “lost” choreographic works forms the basis of this argument, and, drawing on my combined role of artistic director and dance pedagogue, I will detail how I re-staged Drumstick (Curtis-Jones 2015), a re-imagined lost Laban dance work with dancers at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, London, in 2017, for performances in London (2017b) and Monte Verita (2017c), Switzerland. This chapter seeks to demonstrate that, through engagement with the re-staging process of Drumstick, the need for dancers to remember the work for performance is a process of archiving embodied knowledge, of movement dynamics, the work itself, and its processes. That re-staging prepares dancers in training for the industry by placing demands on them to embody a specific style of movement, perhaps unusually different from their current training practices, therefore providing opportunity for challenging technical skill acquisition, enhancing performance execution, and clarifying professional expectations/role.

What is re-imagining? My contemporary practice of re-imagining Laban’s lost choreographic works include Dancing Drumstick (1913), Ishtar’s Journey into Hades (1913), Die Nacht (1927), and Green Clowns (1928). Laban’s choreographic works are largely overlooked, and most are lost completely. Focus is still on Laban’s notation system, published in 1928, yet Laban had a diverse and substantial choreographic repertoire. (see Preston-Dunlop 1998, 2008, 2013; Preston-Dunlop and Purkiss 1989, 1990; Kew 1999; Karina and Kant 2003; Partsch-Bergsohn and Bergsohn 2003; Kant 2004; Dorr 2008; Bradley 2009; Manning 2017; McCaw 2011; Preston-Dunlop 455

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and Sayers 2011; Curtis-Jones 2017a). Although this raises interesting questions regarding the dance canon and the inclusion of specific works for study in academic and vocational dance programs, perhaps because of scarce archival evidence engagement with Laban’s artistic practice is limited and embodied creations of his works are rare. By seeking to re-imagine Drumstick, the work is not reenacting, recreating, or repeating, it is inevitably taking on a new form in the present. The term re-imagining is used to reflect creative interpretation of limited archival evidence (see Curtis-Jones 2017a), outlining my definition of material remains and the methodology devised to re-imagine Drumstick (2015) with Summit Dance Theatre. Here, I will explore what I consider to be the impact on dancers in training when engaging with Drumstick and discuss the challenges of re-staging Drumstick from an artistic and pedagogical viewpoint. My approach to re-imagining a work that is essentially lost is reflected in Alexander Carter’s view of the study of history as a creative activity (Carter 2004, 14) by inventing a methodology and consequently establishing a new tradition. Tradition may be viewed as a belief or behavior passed down within a group with origins in the past, or a transmission of customs or beliefs from generation to generation. By seeking to dismantle the notion of history being just a thing of the past and engaging with it as a creative interpretive art form, through dance and the historical present, and through the artistic practice of creative re-staging practices (see Main 2017; Edward 2018). The key tension is whether it is possible to retrieve, reconstruct, or revive a lost work in its original form, or whether we should treat that work as irretrievable. Terms such as recreation or reinvention suggest more freedom for creative interpretation (see Franko 1993, 2011, 2017a; Lepecki 2007, 2010; Archer and Hodson 1991). Furthermore, the disappearance of a work presents an epistemological problem: how can a re-staging be authentic to the original work? The issue being knowing what a lost work was or looked like. With such little attention given to Laban’s choreographic work in the dance canon, there is little mourning of the passing of works into oblivion or concern for its extinction. It  is important to ask what kind of dance history is possible? Dance archives encapsulate tangible documentary evidence, ranging from, but not  exclusive to, choreographic notes, stage plans, notated scores, photographs, film footage, critics reviews, and drawings. There may be conflicting evidence about the same event and/or vagueness in not specifying certain attributes. Lack of clarity about whose interpretation influences the archival remains consequently allows for interpretations and archives can therefore be ambiguous. The archival remains for Dancing Drumstick, for example, revealed a “lack,” no film footage or photographs of the work were found, therefore opening potential and possibilities for re-imagining. However, research of the context of the dance work was extensive, so that interpretations were based on those available sources. How archives are defined and used is a source of debate, with different theorists taking a range of views on such issues as preservation, limitation, and creative potential (Friedman 2011; Main 2012; Jordan 1987; Rubidge 2000; Schneider 2001, 2011; Stalpaert 2011; Whatley 2013). More recently, there has been a growing trend among established American choreographers to create “artist-driven archives” as part of their artistic work. Like reperformance projects, artist-driven archives highlight the ways that dancers have a history of turning to dance archives (their own or others’) as inspiration for new work (see Candelario 2018). Artist-driven archives are created by the artist as an inherent part of the artist’s own ongoing creative process and, in this sense, they differ from the traditional archive or the outdated idea of a room with dusty boxes filled with documents, which, of course, provide crucial 456

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tangible evidence. I suggest that archives are a place, or site, of creative exchange, where processes of translation and interpretation take place. The site or sites can include dancers’ bodies (see Lepecki 2010) as well as the interpretation of tangible and digital documentary evidence, which in the case of Laban’s early works are limited (Laban 1926, 1975). Dancers are encouraged to understand my approach to dealing with archival gaps and are therefore not only archiving the re-imagined Drumstick through re-staging, but also the processes of creating and devising the work. For them, gaining knowledge of the practices, social, cultural, and political contexts through embodied understanding of the dance work of Laban’s and mine provides a different experience than that of engaging with literary sources alone; this approach encourages corporeal understanding. This  approach also explores how the re-imagined Laban work generates knowledge and insight into the cultural and artistic context of the time, encouraging insight for dancers of Laban’s work as an artist and raises awareness of the differences in and of today’s modes of practice.

Re/heritage Research of Laban’s Dancing Drumstick (1913) leads me to propose that it is a significant historic work, one that initially lay down Laban’s experiments with rhythm of the dynamic expressive body, and potentially led to his later development of Effort Theory with FC Lawrence in 1947. Laban’s autobiography Ein Leben fur den Tanz, published in 1925, exposes his thinking about his choreography. In  Dancing Drumstick, the intention for Laban, as a choreographic experimenter and philosopher, was to develop by artistic means a sense of rhythm, not the metric, beat dominated rhythms of music used in the Dalcroze method of movement and music training, for example. Laban worked with making movement audible by removing the reliance on music, working without music score, and working with breath and improvised rhythms. The percussionists followed the dancers, which is not radical today, but it was in Europe in 1913. Just how significant Laban’s work with the reversal of roles of music and dance was for the development of contemporary dance needs to be explored because it changed the power relationship of the two arts and was innovative at the time. But why might this work be of interest to today’s dancers in training? The way of working and moving then is so far removed from how dancers are trained today. Surely, therein lies the challenge. Teachers are generally from a different era than that of their students, and training practices are historically informed. I am a living archive of my past and current training practices and influences. How I choose to access these influences, which reside as embodied knowledge, can influence the outcomes of movement facilitated in the dancers I teach. It may seem obvious to state that people’s engagement with the arts in the digital twenty first century is a world away from audiences and artists in 1913, but what were and are those differences? How can we present works from the past today in a way that it is not about resurrecting relics or museum pieces, or which attempts to reconstruct what went before, but does so in a way that acknowledges the past and can have meaning and impact for current performers and audiences? Here lies the dilemma.

Contemporary choreological practice For  the re-imagining and re-staging of Drumstick, I created a methodology informed by choreological practice; contemporary developments of Laban’s principles of Choreutics (Space Harmony) (1966) and Eukinetics/Effort (dynamics and rhythm) (Laban and Lawrence 1947). This is not to claim that it is Laban’s approach, on the contrary, it is an approach to 457

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choreological practice which has evolved from engagement with and development of Laban’s principles for contemporary dance practice. Choreological practice engages with the intrinsic structures of movement, the outward manifestation of inner feeling and human movement in functional and expressive forms. Movement structures can be identified because the body is structured in a particular way. Movement is therefore intrinsically structured, and the body’s relationship to gravity creates affinities in movement in time and space. Choreological practice has been largely associated with movement analysis (Laban 1966; Hutchinson-Guest 1983; Maletic 1987; Moore and Yamamoto 1988) and, while this is important, here, a choreological lens is used to devise movement and to question the dichotomy between what the dancer experiences and what is seen; the experiential and analytical through creative practice. The multi-sensory body is fundamental in my pedagogical and artistic practice. Rather than placing emphasis on viewing movement from the outside, the intention of the performer, the sensation of the movement, and conscious control of movement for performance that manifests in making movement visible is essential. Furthermore, the relationship of the performer with resident sensations in the body in functional and expressive forms of movement is explored through embodied practice. The training program devised using Laban principles to prepare the dancers for the demands of Drumstick (2017 b,c) will be referred to later in this chapter. In this re-staging process, combining learning some of the material as set with contributing to improvised sections, dancers have autonomy and ownership of the outcome of the dance work. Their contributions shape its existence. Something which is perhaps not  so possible with a reconstructed work, where the movement and a surface form, already in existence, is set. For dancers in training, the aim of this re-staging is to facilitate their learning about movement by referring to choreological principles such as the structural model (body, action, space, relationships, dynamics) to enhance their understanding of the intrinsic structures of the body and subsequently movement, and the resulting dynamic and spatial affinities of movement because of our body’s relationship with gravity. These affinities are relevant to us all, but our habitual movement tendencies can differ, and when dynamic preferences are identified, then dancers can move beyond repeated patterns, extend dynamic range, and experience dynamic nuance. Drumstick is the rhythm of body made audible and requires extreme and subtle movement dynamics. Dancers are encouraged to identify and expand their dynamic range, to embody extreme and subtle dynamic changes sequential and simultaneous, and to better understand their own limitations and personal dynamic preferences. Working with dancers to move away from choreological principles purely as an analytical tool and using the principles instead in an artistic context to create work, engages dancers in the development of their dynamic range and challenges their execution in performance. This approach encourages embodied understanding of dynamics and space in and through practice by providing a mode of training using contemporary choreological practice to make work artistically, but also to establish skills acquisition for dancers using specific dynamic movement training developed from Laban’s Effort Theory (Laban and Lawrence 1947) as a form of technical training. Consequently, dancers can articulate the necessary dynamics for Drumstick because of their understanding of the dynamic spectrum available to them through this training, which then manifests in creative and performance contexts. Dancers also explore harmonic principles of time and space that can be ruptured for creative work. Dancers in training require this kind of awareness; it encourages movement literacy and it is taught and interrogated through the re-staging process of Drumstick. Moreover, by rehearsing the works for performance, the rhythmic and spatial precision necessary in the execution of the work drives a desire for knowing the material, being inside the work, to make it come alive in a performance setting (see Illustration 32.1). 458

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Illustration 32.1 Drumstick Bonnie Bird Theatre, UK, 2017. Choreography Alison Curtis-Jones. (Courtesy of James Keates.)

Re-staging as contemporary practice Re-staging(s) have the potential to breed new forms and could be compared with natural processes of evolution. I propose that like re-imagining, re-staging is a creative process, in constant flux, as are the dancers who inhabit and revisit the work as living archives. This process is reliant on my own archived knowledge of Laban principles and contemporary developments of choreological practice and results in evolving the work in the present. The debate around re-staging is relevant in today’s dance practice (see Main 2012, 2017; Nicholas and Morris 2018) as are views on temporality, preservation, and digital archiving. The prefix “re” can be attached to a range of different verbs to imply revisiting or return in various ways and include terms such as revive, return, reenact, restage, recreate, research, reconstruct, revisit, reconnect, repeat (see Barba 2017; Franko 2017a; Main 2017; Pakes 2017; Edward 2018). The term re-imagining is used here because this work is not about exhuming relics or preserving work in its original form. The contemporary practice of re-imagining uses live arts practice to draw attention to significant historic work that would otherwise be forgotten, and the re-staging process allows for future developments of the work. From this perspective it is important for dancers to understand why and how the dance work exists. This understanding comes from knowing the context from which the original and re-imagined dance work derives. Sharing research of cultural context and interpretation of archival material remains is the same when working with professional dance artists and dancers in training. When working with dancers in training, sharing of my artistic approaches, decision making, and methods were exposed through practical and verbal articulation of my practice as a way for dancers to understand why and how I was working in this way and to make the distinction clear that the transmission process they experience is my practice rather than Laban’s. In so doing, they come to understand that what they are physically archiving 459

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is not only the work itself, but also the processes and methodologies used to create it. It is important to note that I am not pretending to be Laban. It is not possible to state Drumstick is Laban’s work, and the shift from the word recreation to re-imagining more accurately reflects this tension between the work as it was, and the work as I imagine it. Thus, this approach is not bound by a Laban tradition, but the practice is informed by my understanding of it.

Combining dance artistry and pedagogy The dynamic interplay, or nexus of pedagogical and artistic perspectives allows me to train, facilitate, and educate to widen and expand knowledge for dancers in training. As creator and transmitter of Drumstick, dancers in training experience outcomes of the initial experiments and are given insights to the creative process throughout the re-staging rehearsals. In future restaging(s) of Drumstick, dancers can draw from this knowledge and the embodied resident sensations of the emerging work in the present with an understanding of movement motivation. In Drumstick, there is reliance on dancers to shape the work through improvisation in the creative process, and live on stage; therefore, re-staging Drumstick became more about re-making or evolving the work in the immediate present because of the current dancers’ contributions. Through revisiting my practice from 2015, movement emerges and subsequently resides in the dancers’ bodies, allowing me to refine and redefine what is observed and performed in the present. Bodies, in this case, refer not only to the anatomical body, that is, as separate from the mind, but the corporeal, thinking, body and mind holistically intertwined. A re-making of Drumstick results because the form relies not only on contributions from dancers but also from me as director. This process strengthens the argument for dance as transient and transformational, and even irretrievability, in that the work is constantly evolving, and arguably cannot possibly be staged twice in exactly the same way, particularly in the case of Drumstick, which includes sections of improvisation. It becomes a new form of itself in the present, aligning with Franko’s view that “the notion of the work is not only recalled but also destabilized; the belief that authenticity is both confined and turned on its head.” (2017b, 7). As choreographer, it is possible to provide an inside-insight, or looking from within the work, rather than observing work from the outside, knowing where the work comes from historically and why it emerged. ‘It’ here refers to two works, Laban’s Dancing Drumstick (1913) and Curtis-Jones’s Drumstick (2015), that is, from Laban’s cultural and sociological historical distant past perspective and more recently, my recent-past interpretation, is fundamental to being equipped to take it forward. This new form exists because of the acknowledgement of aspects and events of the distant past, but cannot replicate those aspects and events, it provides a contemporary nod to them…perhaps aligning with Mark Franko’s view of attempting to save the work from oblivion (2017b). This absence of archival knowledge facilitates potential to fill archival gaps with interpretation of available sources, material remains, and oral histories through the devised methodology. Memories constantly transform and are newly created in the present because of historical distance. This temporal difference (Franko 2017b, 35) might make one question the reliability of memory and the amount of personal interpretation in the construction of memories in the present. The re-call and construction of memories is itself a creative act. What remembered oral histories mean to me or others will depend on individual interpretation and are influenced by several factors such as background knowledge, experience, culture. As  with memories of my own processes, some of which I had forgotten and were recalled while re-staging with the dancers in training, so too, dancers’ individual interpretations of the re-staging process may also differ. 460

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Shifting perspectives are inevitable over time, as with new readings of old sources, and revisiting sources with renewed knowledge and insight can challenge previous perspectives on the work, aligning with view of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) that perception is an active process. Sources themselves are mute. It is historians who articulate what the sources say (Franko 2017b, 38) or choreographers, as in my role of animating archives (in my body, dancers’ bodies) through reimagining and re-staging, contributing to the study of (dance) history as a creative activity created by the historian and the recipient (Carter 2004, 14).

Case study Engagement in sensory and motor learning through training, and benefits of learning through doing, is extensively researched (see Dewey 1938; Piaget 1954; Kolb 1976, 1984; Spatz 2015). When dancers in training embody dance works, their engagement with the work itself is enhanced, stimulating interest in the choreographer, the cultural context, and wider issues such as impact of the work at the time. Engaging with past works can transform their outlook, as opposed to being concerned only with their own practices, giving dancers a greater perspective, therefore changing perceptions of their own and the work of others. Investigating the dance work physically and somatically provides something that cannot be obtained by imagining the work from reading materials. In one’s mind, the work remains virtual but experienced and seen in the dancers’ bodies, the work is corporeal, actual, alive, visceral, and connects dancers in the immediate present to aspects of the past. This  view aligns with Henrietta Bannerman’s “thinking in the work,” physically knowing the work from within as opposed to knowing about it from outside (Bannerman 2017, 94). This practical research refers specifically to undergraduate dancers at Trinity Laban. Each year, dancers take part in Historical Project, a module in their second year of training, where they experience the work of “dance legends” and significant works from the recent past and distant past. In 2017, Trinity Laban dancers performed works by Dore Hoyer, Hofesch Schechter, Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, and a re-staging of my re-imagined work Drumstick (2015) based on research of Rudolf Laban’s Dancing Drumstick (1913) (see Illustration 32.2). The  module is delivered intensively over 3 weeks, where usual timetabled activities are suspended (Kowal, Siegmund, Martin 2017). Dancers engage with the choreographers directly, or with dance artists from the companies, to learn repertoire for public performance. The artistic training and rehearsal period also include supporting seminars on contextual theory (See Foucault 1972; Burt 2003; Thomas 2003; Vertrinsky 2005; Greenhead and Habron 2015; Kowal, Siegmund, Martin 2017), so that dancers are aware of the cultural, social, and historical significance of the works as well as the choreographer’s methods. In this context, issues arise such as sharing the broader historical context of the original 1913 work Dancing Drumstick, coupled with my contemporary practice of re-imagining, and the processes and methodology developed to create Drumstick in today’s context, which differ from Laban’s. It is made clear to dancers that I am offering a contemporary re-imagining, not a promise to return to that past. How then, are the processes of transmission different when re-staging with dancers in training to working with a professional company? Most notably, how does this work challenge dancers in training? (see Illustration 32.3). Priorities are notably different with dancers in training. In an educational context, it is necessary to navigate between both artistic and pedagogic practice, balancing the needs of the dancers in training with the demands of the artistic work. Learning is not an objective in the same way for professional artists as it is for less experienced dancers. The re-staging process is used to learn different ways, or a specific way of moving, dancers experience the 461

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Illustration 32.2 Drumstick Bonnie Bird Theatre, UK, 2017. Choreography Alison Curtis-Jones. (Courtesy of James Keates.)

Illustration 32.3 Drumstick Bonnie Bird Theatre, UK, 2017. Choreography Alison Curtis-Jones. (Courtesy of James Keates.)

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practice of collaboration and are led to question their responses and creative approaches within movement and training practices. This  collaborative shared learning environment ultimately carries the same responsibility as for professional dancers, because dancers in training are required to embody and execute the re-staged work for public performance. Dancers in training are experiencing professional roles and responsibilities, the need to remember movement detail through bodily encoding and memorizing movement, the necessity for repetition in rehearsal to clarify spatial accuracy and dynamic rigor, and how through repetition of taught material it is possible to re-search and find something new in the same material. A high level of technical proficiency can be achieved by practicing through repetition to develop movement accuracy, spatial clarity, range of expression, kinesthetic sensitivity, rhythmic precision and harmonious, or efficient use of the body. Repetition is required by dancers in training to a greater degree because they are learning to develop correct placement and alignment to avoid injury, or to adhere to the demands of specific techniques. They learn to negotiate their own body weight while moving, affinities of movement with gravity and space, to develop body awareness, and movement expressivity. In re-staging Drumstick, dancers are not only taught what initiates the movement, but how to execute it technically and expressively. They are taught to develop dynamic range and learn to recognize dynamic sensations and to consciously control movement for performance. For professionals, it is what Spatz, Ben refers to as “sedimented technique” (2015, 57) stating that “technique is more than habitus or performativity. It structures all levels of practice, from the conscious to the unconscious, and is completely interwoven with agency throughout” (57). Spatz’ view of technique as knowledge embedded and atomized within one’s own body is not just a question of learned patterns or muscle memory (55). Time is needed by dancers in training to embody, understand, and acquire tacit knowledge. This requirement is less so for professional dancers because they can emulate, repeat, and retain movement detail more quickly. Summit Dance Theatre dancers, for example, are already equipped with a wide dynamic range, which has been developed through specific dynamics training. Their years of repetitive professional training and exploratory practices results in what could be referred to as embodied knowledge, or bodily intelligence, they have what could be described as a body of knowledge and a body in knowledge (Spatz 2015, 59). The synthesis of training and educating, includes nurturing as well as developing dancers’ mental and physical resilience. The  process involves dancers going beyond the challenges of embodying unfamiliar movement; it is also understanding how to be part of a community, their role within a dance company, to communicate, negotiate, problem solve, and awareness of self as an emerging dance artist. The intensive training period prepares dancers not only to re-stage Drumstick but highlights professional expectations, the need for good time management and readiness to work, to learn movement quickly and to retain it, focus, commitment, collaborative skills and self-care. Fabien Barba’s view is that an education in dance is not only a technical education, it is also a way of becoming a part of a dance culture (Barba 2017, 44). The  range of “what a body can do is substantially altered” through training practices (Spatz 2015, 56). Training takes time, movement possibilities and accuracy results through repetition of detail and rigor. Through repetition of movement in rehearsal, it is possible to find differences and newness, encouraging dancers to articulate physically and verbally, therefore developing their movement literacy. To use time productively in rehearsal, pedagogical strategies are required to accommodate large group numbers. This arrangement is noticeably different from most professional settings, as are setting a

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Illustration 32.4 Drumstick Bonnie Bird Theatre, UK, 2017. Choreography Alison Curtis-Jones. (Courtesy of James Keates.)

variety of tasks to enable moving between teaching styles to accommodate different types of learners and intelligences (see Gardner 1983; Mosston and Ashworth 1986) and to give specific instructions and appropriate feedback to encourage movement specificity, expressivity, and performance confidence. Drumstick requires a high level of physical strength and this encourages dancers to take responsibility for their fitness inside and outside of the studio. Repetition of material helps to build stamina. The  shift from rehearsal to performance and the projection of energy into the larger theatre space, which dancers prepared for during studio rehearsals, was not fully appreciated by the dancers in training until they transferred into the Bonnie Bird Theatre for spacing and technical rehearsals. It was then, dancers were able to physically experience the scale of the performance environment. During studio rehearsals, dancers were taught to consider intention and use of space for entrances and exits, but negotiating theatre entrances and exits and collaborating with live musicians in the theatre, where sound was acoustically different, provided them with new challenges, alongside remembering movement detail. Placing the work in the performance environment facilitated their learning and provided opportunities to apply their newly acquired knowledge in situ (see Illustration 32.4).

Memory Despite the current culture of immediacy, where movement can be recorded with handheld devices such as iPhones and other technological devices, the dancer is still required to hold the memory data of movement sensations in their own multi-sensory body as archive. Having experienced the technical dance training required to perform Drumstick, the dancers’ bodylibrary stores these experiences, giving them a particular insight and sensory memory as resident sensation. I propose Drumstick dancers become a dynamic living archive of the work, 464

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suggesting that the body serves as a kind of filing system for storing and accessing memories and aligning with Schiller’s idea of the “body library” (Schiller 2014, 137) as a metaphor for archived sensorial experience. The body is constant dynamic flux and a constant state of renewal and carrier of its own history, of movement qualities, and of the work itself; it is a locus of knowledge. If these sensations reside, dancers can re-discover the dynamic sensations of a previously experienced work for future re-staging, and through this process of dynamic returning, or dynamic process of re-visiting and remembering, are dancers transforming and evolving themselves and the work? From this perspective, oral and embodied traditions transmitted to dancers establish dancers as “live documentary evidence,” carrying sensory data, which should be afforded the same value as notated scores or tangible archival documents. In  today’s digitally driven world, reliance on the visible recording of work on phones, tablets, and other devices has encouraged an immediate library of documentation to remember work which emerges from seeing movement from the outside. Could it be that the sensory bodily memory and the dancer’s role in the re-call of sensory evidence is not  prioritized in the same way because of the dominance and immediacy of today’s excessive recordings of movement data on film? Is bodily memory being outsourced to phones? Hopefully, through the medium of dance and live performance, bodily memory will never become a disregarded tradition. This situation means we should be according value to the “carriers” and “transmitters” of oral traditions, as well as to their habitus and habitat. This  “tangible heritage and its aliveness” referred to by Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (cited in Iacono and Brown 2016, 90) is particularly appealing in my practice. I’m aware of my own constantly shifting perspectives dependent on what I read, what I discover through my practice, and how one informs, alters, and re-enforces the other, thereby allowing the work to constantly shift and be in flux rather than static. Limitations of the body over time, however, require consideration, because the body is aging and could become unreliable. This  nexus of influences and experiences establishes a specific heritage, a rich tapestry of dance training, culture, and heritage archived corporeally in dancers’ bodies. Iacono and Brown (2016) propose that in/tangible heritage can be defined as follows: living cultural heritage is embodied by individuals, in connections with the artefacts they produce and use and the environment they interact with and it is expressed through practices, activities and performances. Living cultural heritage is also constituted by socially and culturally influenced traditions and conventions, as well as by the feelings and emotions of people and the way they relate to this heritage, including taste and perceptions, contributing to the idea that heritage and human beings are indissolubly connected and continuously shape each other in an open fluid dialogue. (91) The dancers themselves, I suggest, are dynamic dance heritage.

Monte Verita’s past and today’s multi-sensory body Performing Drumstick outdoors in Monte Verita, Switzerland, in 2017, exposed the relationship of dancers with their environment. Place and performance were bound together, experienced sensorially through the human body (Iacono and Brown 2016, 90). Dancers were made aware of Laban’s history and the events in Monte Verita in the early 1900s 465

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(see  Green  1986), of Laban’s encounters with artists such as Suzanne Perrottet Odom (2002) and Mary Wigman, the emergence of European Modern Dance, and the creation of Dancing Drumstick there in 1913 (Preston-Dunlop and Purkiss 1989, 1990). This knowledge created a meaningful experience for the dancers in training who performed outdoors in Monte Verita in 2017, an experience which transformed and inspired them in a different way than engaging with paper trails and remains. However, the contextual knowledge they gained from engaging with theoretical sources gave this performance in Monte Verita a different significance because of the attribution of historic significance to the place and space (see Shapiro 2011; Schiller and Rubidge 2014). This affective bond between people and place is known as one’s sense of place (Sen and Silvermann 2014, 14). The  term “placemaking” originates from Martin Heidegger’s concept of Daesein, being in the world, (Heidegger 1996, 17) on the constitutive relationship between people and their physical environment (Sen and Silvermann 2014, 3) suggesting that the latter exists through consciousness, actions, and interactions. Therefore, embodied placemaking places the body at the forefront of placemaking activities as a vital component of the social construction of space. Performing this re-imagined work inspired by the past, in the present, on the site where it was originally created, draws attention to the historicism of the space and place. By attributing historic significance to the place, it becomes more than a space, it is a place which carries meaning, or in Lefebvre’s view, the space has symbolic existence (Lefebvre 1974, 405), therefore heightening the experience for performers. This knowledge brings power to the experience of “being” in that place. Dancers in training were drawn to perform in Monte Verita because of this knowledge, and the impact of performing there was clearly visible in their responses with one dancer stating, “I hope in 100 years, people will look back on these images of us, as we looked back to the past.” The evolution of this space and place today is evident, a hotel is used there now for leisure and conference type activities, so how many people visit there oblivious to the significance of past events which have contributed to our dance heritage? (see Illustration 32.5).

Illustration 32.5 Drumstick, Monte Verita, Switzerland 2017. Choreography Alison Curtis-Jones. (Courtesy of Irene Zuccinelli.)

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Conclusion By making space distinct whether it is through movement or design, we cannot divorce the notion of experience, the lived body inhabits space according to its history, we cannot separate the body from perception. Corporeality is not only a reference to the body, but also the body in all dimensions, physical, psychological, cultural, real, and imaginative in relation to the world. This connection refers to Laban’s idea of spirituality, his concern with the experience of the movement and could be aligned with what we now understand to be somatic. The experience of performing Drumstick outdoors in Monte Verita, in direct contact with nature, was a conductive environment in which the dancer absorbed and developed sensations, feelings, and experiences in the moment. This variable environment, less controlled than that of Bonnie Bird Theatre in London, provided a new learning experience for the dancers in training. Dancers emerged from the audience, seated on the grass banks and verges. It was a warm August evening. The dancers walked to the grassy area, next to the piscine, or the swimming pool, near to the carving of the world map etched into the grass. Musicians were already set up with drumkit, cymbals, and percussion instruments, providing an identifiable marker for the audience as a defined performance space. The ground was uneven, and environmental sound such as wind and birdsong created a different atmosphere that required them to negotiate in the moment (see Illustration 32.5). The  dancers continued to perform Drumstick outdoors in Monte Verita that evening, despite unforeseen and unpredictable changes in their environment during the performance; an approaching thunderstorm, darkening skies, the distant sound of rumbling thunder, decreasing temperature, sudden cracks of lightening, and a deluge of heavy rain (see Illustrations 32.6 and 32.7). This atmosphere created an immersive experience for all performers and audience, a multi-sensory engagement with the work in an outdoor environment on this significant site, providing a different kind of theatricality with very different demands than the Bonnie Bird Theatre, London. As Anne Donnelly states,” … it is the whole theatrical aspect of the event that is so important for the young dancer to comprehend and experience.” (quoted in Bannerman 2018, 99).

Illustration 32.6 Drumstick, Monte Verita, Switzerland 2017. Choreography Alison Curtis-Jones. (Courtesy of Irene Zuccinelli.)

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Illustration 32.7 Drumstick, Monte Verita, Switzerland 2017. Choreography Alison Curtis-Jones. (Courtesy of Alison Curtis-Jones.)

This  chapter identifies two very different re-staging performance experiences for the dancers in training, each with challenges and providing opportunities for engagement with and learning about the dance work, the context, the artist, and the processes. Through re-staging, the multi-sensory body acquires new knowledge, becoming a dynamic living archive, providing a place for the Drumstick of today to exist and to continue to evolve in re-stagings tomorrow.

Note 1 Thanks to Nunzia Tirelli for her continued support of this work. Thanks to Professor Helen Thomas.

References Archer, Kenneth, and Millicent Hodson. 1991. “Confronting Oblivion.” In Preservation Politics, edited by Stephanie Jordan. London: Dance Books. Bannerman, Henrietta. 2017. “Making Dance History Live – Performing the Past.” In Rethinking Dance History, edited by Larraine Nicholas, and Geraldine Morris, 94–106. Abingdon: Routledge. Barba, Fabian. 2017. “Impure Transmissions: Traditions of Modern Dance Across Historical and Geographical Boundaries.” In  Transmissions in Dance, edited by Lesley Main, 37–59. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bradley, Karen. 2009. Rudolf Laban. Abingdon: Routledge. Bissell, Bill, and Linda Caruso Haviland. 2018. The Sentinent Archive. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Burt, Ramsay. 2003. “Memory, Repetition and Critical Intervention: The Politics of Historical Reference in Recent European Dance Performance.” Performance Research 8 (2): 34–41.

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Re-imagining Laban Candelario, Rosemary. 2018. “Choreographing American Dance Archives: Artist-Driven Archival Projects by Eiko & Koma, Bebe Miller Company and Jennifer Monson.” Dance Research Journal 50 (1): 80–102. Carter, Alexandra, ed. 2004. Rethinking Dance History: A Reader. New York: Routledge. Curtis-Jones, Alison. 2015. Drumstick. (dance performance) Summit Dance Theatre. Teatra Del Gatta, Monte Verita, Ascona Switzerland, October 10. ———. 2017a. “Transmission: From Archive to Production. Reimagining Laban – Contemporising the Past, Envisioning the Future.” In Transmissions in Dance, edited by Lesley Main, 11–35. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2017b. Drumstick. (dance performance) The  Bonnie Bird Theatre, London, UK, performed by dancers in training from Trinity Laban Conservatoire, London, UK, June 16. ———. 2017c. Drumstick. (dance performance) Restaged for performance outdoors in Monte Verita, Switzerland, performed by dancers in training,Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, as part of Laban Event International Conference, Curated by Nunzia Tirelli, August 17. Dewey, John. 1938. Experience and Education: Learning Through Doing. New York: Touchstone. Dorr, Evelyn. 2008. Rudolf Laban: The Dancer of the Crystal. Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press. Edward, Mark. 2018. Mesearch and the Performing Body. London: Palgrave Pivot. Foucault, Michael. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Tavistock: Routledge. Franko, Mark. 1993. Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2011. “Writing for the Body: Notation, Reconstruction and Reinvention.” Common Knowledge 17 (2): 321–334. ———, ed. 2017a. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Re-enactment. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2017b. “Introduction: The Power of Recall in a Post Ephemeral-Era.” In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Re-enactment, edited by Mark Franko, 1–17. New York: Oxford University Press. Friedman, Jeff. 2011. “Archive/Practice.” Dance Chronicle 34 (1): 138–145. Gardner, Howard. 1983. Frames of Mind:The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic Books. Green, Martin. 1986. Mountain of Truth: The  Counterculture Begins—Ascona, 1900–1920. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Greenhead, Karin, and John Habron. 2015. “The  Touch of Sound: Dalcroze Eurhythmics as Somatic Practice.” Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices 7 (1): 93–112. Heidegger, Martin. 1996. Being and Time: A  Translation of Sein und Zeit. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press. Hutchinson-Guest, Ann. 1983. Your Move: A New Approach to the Study of Movement and Dance. New York: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers. Iacono,Valeria Lo., and David H. K Brown. 2016. “Beyond Binarism: Exploring a Model of Living Cultural Heritage for Dance.” Dance Research 34 (1): 84–105. Jordan, Stephanie, ed. 1987. Preservation Politics, Dance Revived Reconstructed Remade. London: Dance Books. Kant, Marion. 2004. “German Dance and Modernity: Don’t Mention the Nazi’s.” Rethinking Dance History; A Reader, edited by Alexandra Carter, 107–118. New York: Routledge. Karina, Lilian, and Marion Kant. 2003. Hitler’s Dancers: German Modern Dance and the Third Reich. New York: Berghahn Books. Kew, Carole. 1999. “From Weimar Movement Choir to Nazi Community Dance: The Rise and Fall of Rudolf Laban’s ‘Festkultur’.” Dance Research 17 (2): 73–96. Kolb, David A. 1976. The Learning Style Inventory:Technical Manual. Boston: McBer & Co. ———. 1984. Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning Development. Vol.  1. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Kowal, Rebekah J., Gerald Siegmund, and Randy Martin, eds. 2017. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics. New York: Oxford University Press. Laban, Rudolf. 1925. Ein Leben fur den Tanz. Sondereinband. Germany. ———. 1926. Choreographie. Jena, Germany: Eugen Diederichs. ———. 1966. Choreutics, edited by Lisa Ullman, London, UK: Macdonald and Evans. ———. 1971. The Mastery of Movement. London, UK: Macdonald and Evans. ———. 1975. A Life for Dance. London, UK: Macdonald & Evans Ltd. Laban, Rudolf, and F. C. Lawrence. 1947. Effort. London, UK: Macdonald & Evans. Lefebvre, Henri. [1974] 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by D. Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Lepecki, Andre. 2007. “Choreography as Apparatus of Capture.” The Drama Review 51 (2): 119–123.

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Alison Curtis-Jones ———. 2010. “The Body as Archive:Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances.” Dance Research Journal 42 (2): 28–48. Main, Lesley, ed. 2017. Transmissions in Dance: Contemporary Staging Practices. Palgrave McMillan. ———. 2012. Directing the Dance Legacy of Doris Humphrey: The Creative Impulse of Reconstruction. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Maletic,Vera. 1987. Body‐Space‐Expression: The Development of Rudolf Laban’s Movement and Dance Concepts. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Manning, Susan. 2017. “Modern Dance in the Third Reich. Redux.” In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics, edited by Rebekah Kowal, Gerald Siegmund, and Randy Martin, Kindle edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McCaw, Dick, ed. 2011. The Laban Sourcebook. New York: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. The Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Moore, Carol Lynne, and Karou Yamamoto. 1988. Beyond Words. New York: Routledge. Mosston, Muska, and Sara Ashworth. 1986. Teaching Physical Education. 3rd ed. Merrill, WI: Merrill Publishing Company. Nicholas, Larraine, and Geraldine Morris, eds. 2017. Rethinking Dance History. London: Routledge. Odom, Selma L. 2002. “Writings on Dalcroze Eurythmics and Hellerau.” American Dalcroze Journal 28 (3): 6–8. Pakes, Anna. 2017. “Re-Enactment, Dance Identity and Historical Fictions.” In The Oxford Handbook of Danced Reenactment, edited by Mark Franko, Kindle edition. New York: Oxford University Press. Partsch-Bergsohn, Isa, and Harold Bergsohn. 2003. The  Makers of Modern Dance in Germany, edited by Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman, and Kurt Jooss. Trenton, NJ: Princeton Book Company Publishers. Piaget, Jean. 1954. The Construction of Reality in the Child. New York: Basic Books. Preston-Dunlop, Valerie and Charlotte Purkiss. 1989. “Rudolf Laban: The Making of Modern Dance. The Seminal Years in Munich 1910–1914.” Part 1. Dance Theatre Journal 7 (3): 11–15. ———. 2008. Looking at Dances: A Choreological Perspective on Choreography. Binstead: Noverre Press. ———. 2013. Rudolf Laban Man of Theatre. Binstead: Dance Books. Preston-Dunlop, Valerie and Charlotte Purkiss. 1989. “Rudolf Laban: The Making of Modern Dance – The Seminal Years in Munich 1910–1914.” Part 1. Dance Theatre Journal 7 (3): 11–15. ———. 1990. “Rudolf Laban: The Making of Modern Dance. The Seminal Years in Munich 1910–1914.” Part 2. Dance Theatre Journal 7 (4): 10–13. Preston-Dunlop, Valerie, and Lesley-Anne Sayers. 2011. “Gained in Translation: Recreation as Creative Practice.” Dance Chronicle 34 (1): 5–43. Rubidge, Sarah. 2000. “Identity in Flux: A Theoretical and Choreographic Enquiry into the Identity of the Open Dance Work,” PhD dissertation, Laban, London. Schneider, Rebecca. 2001. “Archives Performance Remains.” Performance Research 6 (2): 100–108. ———. 2011. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. London: Routledge. Schiller, Gretchen. 2014. “The Body Library: Chore(o)graphic Approaches to Movement, Memory and Place.” In Choreographic Dwellings: Practising Place. Gretchen Schiller and Sarah Rubidge, 138–155. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Schiller, Gretchen, and Sarah Rubidge. 2014. “Practising Place.” In Choreographic Dwellings: Practising Place, edited by Gretchen Schiller and Sarah Rubidge, 11–27. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sen, Arijit, and Lisa Silverman. 2014. Making Place: Space and Embodiment in the City. 21st Century Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Shapiro, Lawrence. 2011. Embodied Cognition. New York. Routledge. Spatz, Ben. 2015. What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research. London and New York: Routledge. Stalpaert, Christel. 2011. “Reenacting Modernity: Fabian Barba’s A Mary Wigman Dance Evening (2009).” Dance Research Journal 43 (1): 90–95. Thomas, Helen. 2003. The Body, Dance and Cultural Theory. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Vertrinsky, Patricia. 2015.“From Dance Under the Swastika to Movement Education: A Study of Embodied Culture.” In Performative Body Spaces: Corporeal Topographies on Literature,Theatre, Dance and the Visual Arts, edited by Markus Hallensleben, 43–56. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi. Whatley, Sarah. 2013. “Dance Research, Recovering and Reanimating ‘Lost’ Traces: The  Digital Archiving of the Rehearsal Process in Siobhan Davies Replay.” Dance Research 31 (2): 144–156.

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33 “DANCING THROUGH THE HARD STUFF” Repetition, resilience, and female solidarity in the landscape—Rosemary Lee’s Passage for Par Rosemary Lee and Ruth Pethybridge Introduction This is a chapter of conversations, thoughts, and images that have arisen from within the choreographic process that became Passage for Par—a site-specific performance by Rosemary Lee performed in the summer of 2018. Passage for Par was commissioned by the Cornubian Arts and Science Trust (CAST) for the Groundwork program that bought international art to Cornwall in the South West of the UK. As with many embodied processes, attempting to articulate the rich and varied experiences that came about through the intensive rehearsal process and long period of research and development is a somewhat daunting task. This  is not  to subscribe to a paradigm in which dance is a metaphysical language that cannot be understood in other terms but to acknowledge that representing a live process through writing is distinct from the original form and should not be viewed as equivalent to it. Embodied experience is a starting point for further ref lections here; it values the knowledge generated by the practice itself rather than producing interpretations through particular analytical frameworks. Voices from the dancers who performed in the work are included not only to avoid the reductive voice of the singular author but also to contribute to a growing body of work that makes the dancer’s voice and experience central to any inquiry. The  image of the mute dancer “silently executing steps and manipulating the body” (Lunn as quoted in Carter 1998, 53), as choreographer Jonathan Lunn once put it, is a dominant model in dance studies in which the scholarly position is one that is exterior to the dancing, a paradigm that is shifting as practice as research is more frequently included in academic studies of dance. The  pronoun “we” used throughout this chapter refers to me, Ruth Pethybridge—a dance researcher and also the assistant choreographer for Passage for Par—and Rosemary Lee—the choreographer and director of the work. Although I provide the framing in this written dialogue, it is always informed by our mutuality in the process of understanding the

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reverberations of the practice. Rosemary’s words are indicated by the initials RL and are quotations from our conversations, and the chapter ends with a section of our dialogue. Passage for Par was an outdoor performance event with a cast of thirty women that took place three times over three days in June 2018 at the turn of the tide. Each performance time varied according to the tide, and took place both in the evening at dusk and in the early morning June 22, 7.15–9.15 pm; June 23, 8.15–10.15 pm; June 24, 9.15–11.15 am (sunset: 21.33) (Illustration 33.1). The  dancers inched their way in a snaking line across the expansive wet sand for two hours in an interconnected line, winding their way toward the distant shoreline where they faced the sea and the horizon, their backs to the far-away audience. Their journey then meandered back toward the higher ground with lilting, rolling steps, coming so close to the audience that their breathing was audible, and the salt on their clothes and in their hair was visible. The performance ended with this creature like structure of female bodies vanishing into the landscape from where they had emerged. The  vocabulary of steps they shared was predominantly based on very simple Breton/Cornish folk dance steps where the dancers are joined shoulder to shoulder and by the link of curled little fingers or grasped hands. A description of the performance from a review featured in the Financial Times reads: [Par Beach]—A  lip of sand wedged between the fume-wreathed cylinders of a working china clay factory and the ivy-dark slopes of Gribbin Head, the lizardgreen shoreline glitters thanks to its natural quota of quartz and mica. Here, as the tide turned under a brûlée rich sunset, Lee’s performers—30 women dressed in dark navy, their arms interlinked—moved across the reptilian pelt [ridged sand] with tiny, impeccable gestures that married minimalism to folk dancing. For two hours, the audience, who ranged from art students to picnicking families,

Illustration 33.1 Passage for Par, at the start of the performance. Image taken from a drone, dress rehearsal June 21, 2018. Photo: Graham Gaunt© CAST (Cornubian Arts and Science Trust.)

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remained mesmerised by the collective display of inner and outer unity—not a foot could falter or all would collapse like dominoes. Lee’s only injunction to viewers was to stay at a distance as the troupe’s fluid calligraphies were best appreciated from afar. (Spence 2018) What Rachel Spence identifies here as the “inner and outer” unity that was necessary to sustain the work is an observation of what was also the methodology of the piece—a conceptual and practical device in which the women remained interdependent and in contact throughout. This constant physical connection contributed to an experience of solidarity in rehearsing and performing this two-hour work, not least because the techniques it used were a physical challenge requiring concentration and discipline. The constant repetition of the steps allowed the dancers to enter different states and meant that the audience was not only seeing the overall choreographic form, but also the very practical physical labor and work necessary to execute it. The challenge and environment of the landscape, the repetitive nature of the steps, and the physical connection of the women throughout this performance are all key factors in contributing to the sense of resilience and female solidarity.

Experiencing landscape Cornwall is a large coastal county in the UK, well known for its scenic beaches and cliffs, and as a holiday destination. Lesser known is the fact that it is one of the poorest regions in Northern Europe due to the decline of its industries, predominantly mining, which had brought prosperity in previous eras. The coast of Par has a specific context and was chosen over and above other popular tourist sites in Cornwall1 for its reminders of the county’s industrial past: the Kaolin refinery overlooks the beach and is part of its sedimented history in the glittering sand. As we experienced, many people arriving on the beach considered it an eye-sore; however, for the choreography the refinery functioned as a basso continuo via the constant hum of its engines, and a reminder of the Cornwall that exists in parallel—and beyond—its identity as a tourist destination: RL:

… the beach felt like it was pulsing; there was a different aliveness to it that was a kind of vibration. I think that was because of the kaolin refinery, emitting a low sort of growl, a boiler room hum that we weren’t really consciously aware of but it was affecting us … (Illustration 33.2)

Once the decision about the site was made, during the rehearsal process it became clear that while what we were doing there was not always clear to the local residents and beach users, there was a sense that they were grateful that we had chosen “their” beach. The  ownership that locals felt for Par beach came in part from their understanding that it was not a renowned beauty spot. For Rosemary, it was important to honor people’s love for this site and not intrude on their relationship to it. Part of the research involved meeting people— local naturalists, the “friends of Par beach” group, dog walkers, and families—and discussing our intentions alongside their understandings of this unique place: RL:

… for me the work has to have an intimate partnership with the site that is showing the site in the best possible way. Not in a “chocolate box” sort of way at all, but I am trying to reveal the potential of the site so that people see what I am seeing. Equally I am trying to do the same with the dancers—making visible the radiance, potential, power, and 473

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Illustration 33.2 Passage for Par, by Rosemary Lee Commissioned by CAST for Groundwork, Par Sands Beach, Cornwall 2018, Taken from the coastal path on the headland with the backdrop of the factory, evening performance June 22, 2001. Photo by Steve Tanner.

subtlety I see in them. It’s not that I physically do anything to the site; it’s more that I try to change how people experience it, and what they are noticing … The site also informed, dictated even, a lot about the work. Because Rosemary was clear that Passage for Par needed to largely be viewed from a distance, and that the dancers needed to be seen to reach the distant edge of the waves, this required a large expanse of beach, exposed only when the tide was at its lowest (or so we thought). Rosemary spent months studying the tide timetables a year in advance. The actual height in meters of the low tide made a real difference to the timing of the performance itself and indeed the movement material. As Rosemary put it: RL:

Each low and high tide has a different height of water, and we needed a specific height to reveal the optimal expanse of wet sand; too low a tide and the beach was too big and too high the beach was too small. I think I spent nine months hoping something would shift, but actually I was dealing with the cosmos—of course it wasn’t going to shift!

This  reliance on the tide and the weather became a reminder to reflect on the relationship between human and the environment—as many of the performers did in evocative, poetic writing, and reflections during and after the performances. As performer Nicola Visser reflected: The  tide is turning. Inward of its watery heart it changes the pump setting and forces the suck to spit. I can hear it in the folded angle of the waves. So subtle I don’t know it and I do. I would run if I were a mother holding my child’s hands, I would watch out, check the cliffs for navigation, I would not  be the statistic of bodies caught in coves. My eyes would be everywhere. 474

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Instead I am holding your hand left and right. We pulse and call. We raise our arms and stay stay stay to face the turning and provoke the water to do its worst, to rush and return, while our feet stay dry for the while. (Nicola Visser, personal communication, July 12, 2018) Dealing with the very real issues of the site—the ever-shifting deep lagoons, the rivulets that changed course, how the wind radically changed the texture of the sand overnight so that the dancers’ footing was less sure, the banks of seaweed that appeared and disappeared, even the sand flies—affected the structure of our final two-week intensive rehearsal period. RL:

Just through the practicalities of the actual schedule—moving the start times of our rehearsals half an hour every two days—made us become so at one with the site that is so beautiful. You could have drawn a wave across the schedule. That’s amazing; when do you ever get the opportunity to work like that, so symbiotically?

The  dancers were getting to know the place through their work—a practice that is very rooted in the ways that people working in those kind of environments in practical, industrious ways would recognize. RL:

I found the physical and metaphysical link of our bodies with the landscape very moving; perhaps there are parallels with the way a dry stone waller, a cockle picker, or a fisherman reads their surroundings. We were reading and sensing the landscape for our dance. It constantly changed us, and we changed it.

Visser also described the practice of the piece as feeling like her place of work had become the beach. The ritual of arriving every day in these different states and at different times to meet the landscape: The weather is changeable from one sand dune to the next and thinking it is warm while having tea on the sand dune’s dip  [while] it is a howling gale out on the wet tidal flat … so it was a wonderful thing to practice every day on the beach to become accustomed to nothing being the same. (Nicola Visser, personal communication, July 12, 2018) Speaking of interactions between organism and environment in 1980, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela refer to “a mutually dependent co-creation of any moment between the living system and its environment. A  particular kind of terrain may trigger a certain kind of walk as a recurrent interaction, because of its physical characteristics and potential dangers …” (Maturana and Varela as quoted in Reeve 2011, 34). They propose this as “a way of seeing cognition not as a representation of the world ‘out there’ but rather as an on-going bringing forth of a world through the process of living itself ” (Reeve 2011, 34). In the same way, experiencing the landscape of Par beach every day, the dancers began to understand it through and with their bodies (Illustration 33.3). Similarly, social anthropologist Tim Ingold (1993) conceives of the notion of “dwelling” as “a way to overcome the entrenched division between ‘two worlds’ of nature and society, and to re-embed human being and becoming within the continuum of the lifeworld” (Ingold 2011, 4). 475

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Illustration 33.3 Passage for Par, Reflections in the shallow waters of the tidal flats, dress rehearsal, June 21, 2018. Photo: Graham Gaunt© CAST (Cornubian Arts and Science Trust.)

In this view, human beings are constantly involved in the remembering and remaking of history through experiences and impressions, as the dancers were through the process of making and remembering and treading Passage for Par within the landscape: The beach for me felt like a playground, it wasn’t easy to resist running into the sea or rolling about in the sand. I have so many fond memories of the beach; for me it is family, it is friends, and it is the community, this is what it felt like every day, a family with a routine. I never buried my excitement being on the beach. I invested it into my body particularly for the performance and in my swirling thoughts each day, a 360-degree connection became embedded into my thoughts through discussions and trying out new movements on the beach, I felt wider, stronger, and more radiant than I’ve ever felt before. Even on days where I felt ill and sore, the surroundings were like support, the air was there to relieve any stress, the blowing grass was there to distract my mind from thinking about my aches and pains, and finally the hands behind and in front of me were there to emotionally support me through the day. These surroundings didn’t know how much they helped me through the tough times but I am sure they felt my connection too. (Performer Ayesha Fayzal, personal communication, August 27, 2018) As this reflection demonstrates, the dancers came to know the landscape and connect to it and their memories through their embodied experience. Not only did it provide support as Fayzal articulates, but it also gave detailed feedback about how to adapt the choreography—the techniques the dancers used to move together depending on the lay of the land, down to where the weight of the feet needed to be to manage the bumpy sand below and maintain their rhythm. 476

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Furthermore, through creating stories, images, memories, and impressions, they were creating the landscape as much as they were moving within it; perhaps in Erin Manning’s (2009, 13) terms they were “body-worlding,” in which the moving body creates space rather than merely populating it. Or, in phenomenological terms, Maurice Merleau Ponty ([1962] 1974) posits that the body provides a central perspective from which to respond to the world. Although not adopting a phenomenological method per se, it is useful to consider how this writing draws from such an approach that “foregrounds the body as a site for investigation, knowledge and perception” (Fraleigh 1987, 3). Sara Ahmed also suggests that “phenomenology reminds us that spaces are not exterior to our bodies; instead spaces are like a second skin that unfolds in the folds of the body” (2006, 9).The perceptions and reflections from the dancers during the process for Passage for Par confirm the process of becoming between body and landscape, which Fazal described as a reciprocal connection. Ingold also makes the point that “landscape” is something “qualitative and heterogenous” (1993, 154) as opposed to the idea of “land” as something objectifiable or “space” as a phenomenon that can be represented by a cartographer. For Ingold, “To perceive the landscape is an act of remembrance, and remembering is not so much a matter of calling up an internal image stored in the mind, as of engaging perceptually with an environment that is itself pregnant with the past” (1993, 152). This idea of landscape resonates with the experiences of the dancers in Passage for Par that was an embodied act of engagement with the physical site and its stories and associations.

Repetition and remembering Many of the performers referred to their memories of people and place as they moved within the landscape. The beach at Par was at once singular and also a window onto shared experiences of womanhood, sea, and sand: “There she is my grandmother, weaving in across the horizon. I feel her wrap and spool into my heart and then beat it strong again” (Nicola Visser, personal communication, July 12, 2018). The duration of the work allowed these memories and images to surface for the dancers of landscapes from their past and from their imaginations. Similarly, Ingold’s “dwelling perspective” proposes that the landscape is “an enduring record of—and testimony to—the lives of past generations who have dwelt within it” (152). Like phenomenology, Ingold advocates for knowledge derived from people’s lived experience in the world. The dancers at Par experienced a sensation of having danced in the footsteps of previous generations of women that became part of the narrative of the piece and informed the folk-derived movement material. As with much folk dance, repetition of simple steps was a central choreographic device as the dancers meandered across the sand flats for two hours. Having explored more linear forms and flocking with loose traveling clusters of dancers in other coastal sites, the movement material at Par became refined and simplified, “the marrying of minimalism and folk dancing” that Spence (2018) referred to in her review, as Rosemary recounts: RL:

… after a couple of hours experimenting at Par with a small team of dancers, there was quite suddenly an overwhelming feeling that I needed them to be pulsing together with this bounce from the step. It was like, “this is the concept,” I’ve found it. I’ve got to the heart of it. And now I must hold onto it and not let it dilute. Sometimes you don’t get there that quickly (although it wasn’t that quick because I’d been to lots of other sites). But something about pinning the folk dance and specifically the bounce to that site, the pulsing of the factory, stitching those two things together—that gave me the very kernel of the work, the truth of the work in some way … 477

Rosemary Lee and Ruth Pethybridge

This  “truth” translated to the use of a lot of movement material that came from Breton and Cornish social dancing, a rhythmic step and gentle bouncing or “double bounce” as we came to refer to it. Taking the foundation from these steps and repeating them over and over, the women wove their way toward the sea with moments of pause in alive stillness in diagonal lines—or they rocked, swayed, and pulled as they strode together, invoking the gentle rhythm and quality of the waves while the group unison echoed the sea-faring labors of hauling ropes or pulling oars. Rosemary and I were sensitive to the fact that we were taking movement material out of its original context and to an extent changing its form and function. We had some anxiety around how this might be received. However, Rosemary was also clear how collective memory functioned for her in these simple patterns of movement: RL:

I feel like that is not me, it’s me following in the footsteps of humans moving together, borrowing (I hope respectfully) a known form.

While in Breton and Cornish dance there are many variations and indeed divides in different communities of practice in relation to how particular steps or arm holds might function, in general, the audience members directly involved in the social dancing saw their practice being valued through the inclusion of this movement vocabulary. Joanna Tagney, a long-time member of the Cornish Nos Lowen 2 social dance scene, after watching the dance commented that for her “these dances are like making a cup of tea,” and to see someone making her daily cup of tea into a work of art was “absolutely beautiful” (2018). Her belief is that what defines social dance is it being, fundamentally, for everyone, “open source” in the same way that much documented folk music is. RL:

In 2002, Poet Michael Donaghy (1954–2004) once helpfully described traditional folk forms to me as like baskets holding the content loosely or tightly. You have to find the right basket for what you want to communicate, find the right weave, and the right shape to hold and convey the particular content. I have an utter respect for these tried and tested forms, and somehow the performers inching across the beach started to produce images of ancient nomadic pathways and treading into the footsteps of other people. Remembering.

Repetition can have negative connotations of lacking originality in some way, yet in Passage for Par it was reclaimed from that idea to be valued in its own right as a methodological device with a particular purpose—not only through the repetition of the steps but also through the repetition of certain forms, like the spiraling “snail’s creep” that exists, with variations, in many different cultures. Dancers are led into a tight spiral until the leader turns back on herself to pass the incoming line of dancers, tracing her footsteps corkscrewing back and out of the spiral with the dancers following. It is the one moment in Passage for Par where the dancers are face to face, and at a midway point in the work, many of them spoke of this as giving them the energy they needed, the resilience, to continue to complete the performance. Both the snail’s creep and the rhythmic steps were, as Rosemary identifies, borrowing from known forms and in a way acknowledging the strength that those forms have, rather than a concern with not being “new” or “original,” and by that same token then producing something that was original in another sense of it being conceived of and for a very specific place and time. As the line of dancers made their way across the sand flats over the course of the two hours, the pace remained the same throughout even as the rhythms and qualities changed. Erini 478

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Kartsaki, writing about repetition in postmodern choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer’s work, comments that it is: … not about theme and development… It does not have a climax, or go any place, but it possesses a different quality, a force perhaps … it is an invitation to engage with it in a different way … it makes possible an attention to detail, a focus on careful nuances of movement, allowing the spectator to lean in, to experience the shape of the movement and its texture, almost like an object…. It makes the dance, but also its structure, visible and it reveals something about its methodology. (Kartsaki 2017, 37) Audience members of Passage for Par watched the performance with a specific mode of attention that led them to consider and indeed comment on how the dance functioned, for example “it’s led from the back I think” or “how are they keeping the rhythm?” or the like, rather than looking at it solely as choreographic form. Similarly, as Kartsaki notes of the attention to detail in watching Rainer’s work, the duration and repetition allowed Passage for Par to exist in its space and time, rather than to be “performed” as such and therefore to be observed in the same way that one might watch a sunset or a slow change as the tide turns. Incidental audiences, as they walked their dogs or searched for metal under the sand, or paddled in the pools left behind by the tide, watched the landscape change and the dancers became part of that changing landscape rather than something additional to it. RL:

I would say that if it’s predictable, you’re really safe, you’re given permission to relax. Not be on high alert of what’s going to come next, but to relax into “This is going to go on for a while, so let me just be with it.” And then you’re with it and you look at it in a different way and you see the flux and the change within the repetition that’s happening, the minutiae of it. It gives you permission to look, in the same way you ponderingly look into a rock pool. It awakens a pleasurable curiosity within the safety of that predictability.

Rosemary describes her experience of being outside the work and watching it evolve as well as her intention for how it might encourage this very particular experience of watching by allowing the audience “to look and look again” (Kartsaki 2017, 34): RL:

… here are these women getting smaller and smaller and more and more insignificant in the greater picture, and there are the clouds and, ooh look, the sea’s moved in, and that dog has gone, where’s the dog, where’s the man that was walking the dog? You become very aware of space and time and your place within it in a really different way.

The ongoing repetition of patterned steps and gentle bouncing required a lot of concentration due to fixed pathways, the specific movement qualities, and the rhythm that needed to be synchronized along the entire line of thirty women. However, it also allowed the performers to “sink” into the work—quite literally sometimes as the footsteps dug a hole in the sand—but more so in the sense of being present and entering into a particular state of mind and attending to one another and the landscape around them. As dancer Sarah Alexander commented: The conflict of rhythms has an emotional effect, just as the harmony of dancing to one rhythm is pleasing and unifying, discord brings frustration. Drawn into the 479

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organism through rhythm, the more complex the task, the less I connect with the wider scene. Rocking and slow stepping are times to notice beyond the organism. Times to connect in with the landscape. The dance, repetitive but ever changing, requires much concentration, because it doesn’t ever stop … the movement is constant. At the end it feels like getting off a boat. You still feel the motion afterwards. (Sarah Alexander, personal communication, July 2, 2018) As this reflection articulates, absorbing differences in the name of the whole (in a physical and metaphorical sense) is not always a comfortable experience; indeed it can be a very painful one: arms stiffened, backs ached, timing went out and could not be re-found, feet became heavy, and frustrations flared. But these difficulties arguably what led to a feeling of solidarity among the women because through the ongoing repetition and duration, the performers were gathering around a common aim through the adversity of the landscape and challenging aspects of the work. Furthermore, for us the repeated bouncing embodies the human will to survive and to keep moving, or as Rosemary put it to be able to “dance through the hard stuff,” which is exactly what these women did (Illustration 33.4). It was the physical practice of the work that brought the women together in solidarity, the “powerful humble brave soft salty warriors, women of Par,” as performer Anna Golding referred to them (Anna Golding, personal communication June 12, 2018). But rather than an un-named homogenizing force—or imagined community of shared feminine identity—it was perhaps an embodiment of what Ahmed refers to as the “painstaking labour” of getting closer to each other, working for each other, and speaking to (not for) others in order to find out what, as women “we might yet have in common” (2000, 180). The constant negotiations

Illustration 33.4 Passage for Par, one of the elbow and hand holds also used in Breton and Cornish folk dance, allowing the dancers to remain closely connected, dress rehearsal, June 21, 2018. Photo: Graham Gaunt© CAST (Cornubian Arts and Science Trust.)

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and adjustments that the work required to make the dance function became a self-organizing system—or organism—as dancer Alexander referred to it. Organisms are found in nature; they are interdependent and dynamic rather than a homogenized fixed totality. As choreographers, we became less and less part of the physical problem solving, which had to be led from within the physical structure the women had created, giving them autonomy as a group to grow and develop as needed to respond to the environment. They relied on each other and their collective memory and understanding. Meanwhile, from without, the images they created resonated with the memories and experiences both of those performing and those watching the work, and again with Ingold’s dwelling perspective in which human and nature, past and present coincide in a conception of the landscape. This writing comes from an observer of the process and demonstrates the seemingly ‘organic’ qualities that the dance produced: A creature-like being that existed many moons ago when the earth was covered in silky sea. A creature which existed long before we did, and one which has come back to remind us of something we have long forgotten. A story that when told we, perhaps, don’t fully understand, but deep down we know is right. There are other images. Half closing my eyes turns the sky into deep, dark, cold water. Many miles deep. Together legs become fins and fins become a mass of fish.They are undisturbed by the pulling tide. I see a centipede, an anemone, soft bodied, strong, fishing through the air with tentacle hands. Carving its path. I have watched as people walking on the beach pause, suspended in a complete moment, following you with their gaze as you make your way. Perhaps pocketing a picture that may speak for words later. A reminder for a future self of a moment like the tide, lasting for a few short hours. Leaving behind a special memory for the sand, a path imprinted on the land. (Photographer Rosa Shepherd, personal communication, August 31, 2018) For the outside eye, the dancers became a unified structure, while from within the connections were tangible and constantly in flux.

The most female of all As we have suggested earlier, one of the experiences that was foregrounded in the feedback for performers from the practice of learning and performing this very specific piece of work was that of female solidarity and resilience. Standing side-by-side, the women found physical and metaphorical connections as expressed in “Ghostprints,” a poem by dancer Anna Golding, who was in the very center of the line throughout the performance: We arrive and arrive The most female of all Evolved eel, sand snake Dark thread spun out Tread soul to sole 481

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Footstep into yours from mine A tug knits us in Concertinas loose Breath meters us, behind and ahead We attend into arcs Settle into bones and shells Anchor chain of steel will (Anna Golding, personal communication, June 19, 2018) RL:

The way the women were shoulder to shoulder is very different from face to face, as in most forms of partner dancing. This side-by-side line dancing is different because it’s not speaking about courtship or partnership.… It’s nothing to do with who your partner is, procreation, sexual attraction, or display…. It’s more like a skein of geese in flight. Shoulder to shoulder is about collectivity, or community, isn’t it?

In  a post-feminist culture with differing oppositional positions on feminism often defined through generational concerns or “waves,” to describe or identify “female solidarity” in the context of a dance work is also somewhat problematic. Not  least because for some critics, this very idea will always remain a myth, foregrounding gender over and above many other multiplicities. We also struggle to communicate in words the profundity of the temporary community that became fundamental to Passage for Par.Yet to not speak of female solidarity as a defining feature of the project would also be to deny an important aspect of the lived experience that this work engendered for those taking part. This is not to say that such solidarity was easily achieved or without problems—any community rarely is. However, as neoliberal society creates more fractures in the way people live together through travel, work, economies of value, and globalization, contemporary communities are those that we create, construct even, as Zygmunt Bauman writes (2001, 14): “… all homogeneity must be ‘hand-picked’ from a tangled mass of variety through selection, separation and exclusion; all unity needs to be made.” For  Bauman, “concord ‘artificially produced’ is the sole form of unity available …” (14).3 Although this might have negative connotations associated with artificiality, it could be argued that these constructed communities create the conditions of possibility for experiences such as that of female solidarity in Passage for Par. These corporeal connections then have the potential to reverberate beyond the microcosm of performance to the macrocosm of social and political life.The women told stories to each other as they waited for the tide to turn or the cue to be given, they held each other to warm up, and they laughed together as things went wrong. They respectfully pointed out things that might be done differently, they asked questions, they struggled through adverse weather conditions and physical discomfort, and they continued for the sake of the work. Though from the UK, Europe, and beyond, the cast comprised largely middle-class women who already had in common their interest and experience in dance; the “differences” to be overcome were not as great as they might be in other contexts for people with less privileged positions. What is important, however, is that this work generated an alternative way of “being together,” or in phenomenological terms of Mitgefühl (feeling-with), through the embodied structures it used. Feminist philosopher Sandra Lee Bartky (2002) makes a detailed analysis of the different kinds of solidarity that it is possible to experience and conceptualize. She  differentiates between the group “infection” of collective action and mob-like experiences and the idea of

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“fellow-feeling” in which individuals share precisely the affective experience of a specific situation. In a chapter that addresses women’s experience, writers such as Bartky and Ahmed are useful in that they provide much needed critique and contemporary feminist application of ideas from phenomenology, which, like the philosophical canon of which it is part, was largely conceived of and written by men. Due to the scope of this chapter, it is not possible to fully explore Bartky’s proposition, but to put it simply Passage for Par created a feeling of power (and therefore political potential) and support (emotional and physical) among the women through a combination of these ideas—the infectious potential of communal joy and the fellow-feeling of a very specific set of circumstances. Bartky also points out that many of the rituals that support and surround “female camaraderie … and feelings of solidarity with other women are associated with oppressive constructions of beauty and femininity” (2002, 23). She  writes that “unless new forms of female solidarity appear, women will be loathe to abandon the forms they know” (23). Passage for Par arguably provided an opportunity to create alternative rituals, practices, and feelings of solidarity among women at a time when the old forms that Bartky refers to were being questioned. Golding’s poem makes reference to a sense of communication and connection between the women and across their individual life experiences, embodied in the dance: Standing in line Lives told to the front Heard to the side Sudden love Sudden death Loss and hope Laugh, laugh, cry Return Steady, Settle, Gather, Away Home (“Ghostprints,” Anna Golding, personal communication, June 12, 2018) Passage for Par was created with an all-female cast during a cultural shift when the Me Too (#metoo) movement had come like a wave having crashed, leaving behind it a different landscape in which women’s voices were being heard in a new way (albeit a movement that has become a site of contestation). The Me Too movement was originally founded by American community organizer Tarana Burke in 2006 to “spread awareness and understanding about sexual assault in underprivileged communities of colour” (Shugarman 2017). It is most commonly known, however, through a viral social media campaign in 2017 that addressed sexual violence against women more generally. Like many women in the UK, Rosemary was aware of the impact and reach of this campaign and the call for women to work together, and this was influential in her casting decision. RL:

I knew from my own experience of creating one section of Square Dances (2011) with one hundred women, how powerful that experience can be for the women in affirming unspoken connections together amidst their diversity. I not only wanted to facilitate that again but also to create an unforgettable and undeniable image for the viewer of a working community of women boldly and collectively moving together, stitching themselves into the landscape.

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Furthermore, the landscape also held resonances of communities past that were divided by their gender-identified labors in a way that made the work specifically by and for women: RL:

I was drawn to thinking about women on shorelines, waiting, and also the work they did in those communities to keep the villages going when the men were at sea, at war, or hunting for fish to feed their families; it was that basic. Also, it’s said that Cornish women in the Napoleonic wars took off their red flannel petticoats, wrapped them around their shoulders and marched up and down on the cliff tops so that the French soldiers out to sea would think the coast was patrolled by soldiers. How ingenious and how active the women were in protecting the men and their country in a way that is so different from how we think about men and women now and what we as feminists are dealing with right now  at the moment with the Me Too movement. There is something about the imagining of that working relationship of women and men then—“We’re here holding the fort, you’re out there risking your life”—that intrigues me.

We discussed the experience of waiting that these women might have had as being an under-represented aspect of female strength. This  aspect is not  a passive, resigned waiting of women while their men (in the heteronormative model of domestic life) are busy with the work at sea, but an active hopeful sense of being still here, patient and resilient. Rosemary related this experience to her own at the time of making Passage for Par when her own mother was passing away. The piece also became a way to understand and reflect on this experience: RL:

My own personal experience of being cocooned in a house with my mother more and more just before the project was going to happen gave me a profound understanding of the nature of enduring care that mainly falls on women. The role of mother and daughter, of carrying on through caring for your children and for your elderly relatives and having to put one foot in front of the other and just keep going—you can’t collapse or give way to grief. You’ve just got to keep going every day. There is a sense of waiting through it all whilst actively being and staying with your loved one, holding them and the space as their life draws towards its end.

Rosemary’s reflections on her own experience created a personal narrative for her that framed the duration of the piece and the need to keep going through the different weather conditions and physical challenges. As women, mothers and daughters, we both saw our own experiences of the resilience and strength that life itself requires: For  me the repeated bouncing perhaps speaks of the human will to survive and to keep moving, or as you put it, to be able to “dance through the hard stuff,” because as Kartsaki (2017, 32) writes about the repetitive techniques of Samuel Beckett, sometimes we need “To simply keep going: because in order not to die, you must come and go, come and go….” RL: That’s so apt… the work was about holding oneself and ourselves together literally and metaphorically in order to keep going—the cast held each other, each woman held themselves upright and contained. The work itself was so pared back it had its own held containment, nothing was released or spilled … RP:

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RL: RP:

RL:

RP:

And that’s why you didn’t want them to separate. It was a metaphor for interdependence and interdependence as a metaphor for life.Yet dance is so much more than a metaphor as it simultaneously embodies this process rather than merely representing it … If they split apart I felt it was breaking the strength of the interdependency … there was something very confining and freeing at the same time. Being imprisoned by mortality. Yes, it’s about recognizing the strength it takes to endure certain things, that “keeping going” that we’ve been talking about and that resilience. I think it’s also one of the strengths of dance practice. This wasn’t a “therapeutic” process as such, and yet the women identified something they very much needed within this process…. I keep coming back to this quote by Manning who writes, “When we move the world lives differently” (2009: 14). How true and beautiful, … I am thinking about the duality of the work. For all the power and affirmation it gave people participating and symbolized for the viewer, there was also a sadness. It’s not a joyous dance; it could be seen as a lament. There is a sense of loss, the tide washes their traces away, the wind takes their breath, they disappear at the end, and there is no bow, and yet hopefully it remains indelibly in their bodies and in the audience’s memories … Yes, an existential question arose for me and some of the dancers when they stepped out of the organism for one reason or another and watched it from the outside. They had this very strong sense of “It carries on without me, but at the same time I am a hundred percent singularly part of this.” In the same way that the world continues without you and the universe exists whether you’re there or not, yet that doesn’t mean that you are insignificant, you still have to take your place in the universe, and death is the only way out of that, and that’s where we’re all heading, we just don’t know when. So I think the repetition and the duration—those two things operating together—helped us to experience something of that inescapable truth of life and death.

The reverberations of the work continued long after the last performance and still do today. In a messaging group originally set up to be able to communicate practicalities of the project as they arose, and to disseminate urgent information, messages continued to appear long after the last performance (and even as I write this): I miss those gentle and supportive hands, laughter, slightly damp warm feet, bouncing, all you soft warriors. (Kiki Gale, personal communication, June 28, 2018) Your beautiful steadying hands. (Nicola Visser, personal communication, June 28, 2018) I keep being visited by you women. Seems each of you in turn visits me through memory. Suddenly one of your faces appears clearly in my mind. Or a voice perfectly remembered and all at once in my consciousness, as if from nowhere! I am remembering you all in turn. (Sarah Fairhall, personal communication, June 27, 2018) Powerful humble brave soft salty warriors women of Par I feel blessed to have shared this journey with you. Thinking of this important, magical, ordinary and extraordinary time of slowing down, of being with the floor of the sea, of tasting, trusting, responding, following and leading, passing, sharing being under all kinds of floors and skies and winds and moons and suns, passer by snails, crabs, dogs, and walkers. I send my love your direction and to Par the special place that held and stitched us together (Illustration 33.5). (Belinda Papavasileiou, personal communication, June 27, 2018) 485

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Illustration 33.5 Passage for Par, by Rosemary Lee Commissioned by CAST for Groundwork, Par Sands Beach, Cornwall 2018, the ending image as the performers leave, evening performance, June 22, 2018. Photo by Steve Tanner.

Conclusion Passage for Par was a durational performance that invited a mode of witnessing and experiencing that connected all present to the passing of time in the landscape and the changing nature of Par beach. Through the invitation to experience it and watch it slowly evolve, it also allowed for reflections to arise on the relationship between humans and nature, the labor of moving as one organism, and indeed of life, and the resilience it takes to “dance through the hard stuff.” The simple choreographic form of a single, interconnected line and spiral also connected us across cultures and dance practices from places and times beyond the here and now of the event. Similarly, the repetitive techniques provided a function, as they do in social dancing, giving the performers the opportunity to engage in the landscape and to connect to each other as their rhythmic unity provided the engine for movement. The voices of the dancers included here are only a very partial representation of the thoughts, writings, conversations, and images that were given to us during and after the performance, and we are grateful and indebted to all of the performers for their generosity in what was shared. Penelope Hanstein writes of dance studies that “while we may be engaged in a more reflective mode than physical one when we are researching and writing, our point of reference must always be rooted in the experience of dancing” (1999, 26). By including the performers’ voices alongside our own experiences of Passage for Par, we have maintained this “connection to the field,” as Hanstein (26) puts it. Like the performance itself, this writing contributes to a political narrative in which women’s experiences matter and are central to interpretations of the body and the world around us, not least in understanding dance from a variety of perspectives.

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“Dancing through the hard stuff”

Notes 1 Research and development for this project began at Godrevy beach, a well-known National Trust beauty spot before Teresa Gleadowe (CAST) suggested a visit to Par in part for its different relationship to the people living there and the tourist economy, and also because of its power visually and the diversity of its flora and fauna due to its industry. 2 Nos Lowen is Cornish for “Happy Night” and is a kind of Cornish social dancing that is closely related to Breton dancing and the Fest Noz from Brittany that grew in popularity in the 1960s. Nos Lowen is a mixture of traditional dances and new dances that use traditional steps and formations. 3 Rosemary selected the dancers from over 150 applicants for twenty-two places. She selected eight students from Falmouth University Dance and Choreography course and invited Aya Kobayashi and Sophie Arstall to join the creative team as rehearsal directors and as dancers taking the place at either end of the line. The  remaining twenty-two women were selected through selection workshops. Rosemary chose women of different ages who had a compelling presence, intelligence in their bodies, and a natural connection to the main vocabulary of the work, particularly the subtle and ever-present bounce in the step. All the women chosen were dance trained. It was an international cast.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (Transformations). Abingdon: Routledge. ———. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bartky, Sandra. 2002. “Sympathy and Solidarity” and Other Essays. Minneapolis, MN: Rowman & Littlefield. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2001. Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World. London: Polity. Carter, Alexandra. 1998. “Performing Dance.” In The Routledge Dance Studies Reader, edited by Alexandra Carter, 53–55. London: Routledge. Fraleigh, Sondra Horton. 1987. Dance and the Lived Body: A Descriptive Aesthetics. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Hanstein, Penelope. 1999. “From Idea to Research Proposal; Balancing the Systematic and Serendipitous.” In  Researching Dance: Evolving Modes of Enquiry, edited by Sondra Horton Fraleigh and Penelope Hanstein, 22–61. London: Dance Books. Ingold, Tim. 1993. “The Temporality of the Landscape.” World Archaeology 25 (2): 152–174. ———. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Abingdon: Routledge. Kartsaki, Erini. 2017. Repetition in Performance: Returns and Invisible Forces. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Manning, Erin. 2009. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice.  [1962] 1974. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Reeve, Sandra. 2011. Nine Ways of Seeing a Body. Devon: Triarchy Press. Shugarman, Emily. 2017. “Me Too: Why Are Women Sharing Stories of Sexual Assault and How Did It Start?” Independent, October 17, 22:46. Accessed April 15, 2018. https://www.independent.co.uk/ news/world/americas/me-too-facebook-hashtag-why-when-meaning-sexual-harassment-rapestories-explained-a8005936.html. Spence, Rachel. 2018. “World-Class Contemporary Art Comes to Cornwall.” Financial Times, July 6. Accessed July 1, 2017. https://www.ft.com/content/94554c94-7e04-11e8-af48-190d103e32a4. Tagney, Joanna. 2018. Interviewed by Ruth Pethybridge before a “Fest Noz” in Penryn Cornwall, November 20, 2018.

487

INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Page numbers followed by n refers to notes. Abbate, Carolyn 142 ability 14 able-bodied dancers 39 About Subtraction (2013) 448 Abramovic´, Marina 40 Abstract Speed + Sound 203 academic and vocational dance programs 456 academic writing 354 accessibility of technologies 419 Accumulation with Talking plus Watermotor (Brown) 125 Achterland (De Keersmaeker) 325 Acocella, Joan 214–15 Acosta, Carlos 5, 300, 302, 302–3; racialization 305 acoustic Intonarumori 158 activism 5 activity theory 439 actualization 370 adagio 269 Adair, Christy 237 Adams, John 150 Adams, Philip 358 advanced industrialization 429 advertising, dance in 333 aestheticized hedonism 299 aesthetics of everyday life 434–6 aesthetic symbolism 354 affect 208–9 African-American Concert Dance (Perpener) 252 ‘African’ dances 29 Afrikaner government 24 Agamben, Giorgio 444, 451–2 agential realism 89, 415 Aggrey (Pasuka) 238–9

Aggrey, James Emman Kwegyir 239, 244 Agier, Michel 437 agricultural labor 12 Ahrens, Sönke 53n2 Ailey, Alvin 226 Aitken, Barbara 267 Aktionsinstallation 432 Albright, Ann Cooper 11, 14, 36, 126 Alexander, Frederick Matthias 72, 76, 83n4 Alexander, Gerda 76 Alexander, Sarah 479 Alexander Technique (AT) 4, 71–4, 76, 78–82 Alexander Technique Affiliated Societies (ATAS) 83n4 Alexander Technique International (ATI) 83n4 Alexander Technique Training Course 83n4 algorithmic choreographies: Mevlevi Sema ceremony 337–47; UNESCO 337–8; YouTube 337–40 algorithmic tracking 346 alienated dancing 279–80 Allegranti, Beatrice 4, 88 Alston, Richard 150, 237 Ambassadors, The 178 American Ballet Theatre (ABT) 298, 303 American consumer culture 428 American dance critics 211–12 American Dance Festival 56, 72–3 American Musicological Society 141 American Society for Alexander Technique (AmSAT) 83n4 Analysing Musical Multimedia (Cook) 148 anarchists 180 “anarchival” concepts 4

489

Index anarchival dance 178–88; definition 178; deufert&plischke’s 179–81; recycling 179–81 Anarchive#2: Second Hand (deufert&plischke) 179–80 anarchives 178; alternative protocols 181; counter-memory 181; digital 185; documentation, need of 180; temporality of 185–7; thematic frameworks 181; undecidable specter of 181–3 Anatomy and Kinesiology for Ballet Teachers (Thomasen and Rist) 56 Ancient Greek open-air theaters 443 Anderson, Jack 211 Anderson, Lea 356, 360, 362 André Levinson on Dance: Writings from Paris in the Twenties (Acocella and Garafola, eds.) 214 angularity, use of 197 Animated ( journal) 74 animation 132–4 Annunciation 287 Another Kind of Love: John Cage’s Silence, By Hand (Pope. L.) 247, 250–1 Another Telepathic Thing (Big Dance Theater) 135 anthropocene 14 anthropocentrism 14 anthropological/ethnochoreological approaches 285 anthropology 1, 5, 286; of dance 286 anti-costume practice 356 anti-dance uniform 356 “anti-dance world thinking” 356 apache dance 271n3, 269 apartheid, South Africa 22–3; bodies and dance 23–4; dancing bodies 24; dis/embodiment of dancing body 26–7; dis/empowerment of dancing bodies 24–6; dis/placement of dancing body 27–8; high art, low art, non-art 28–30; policy 23 Apollinaire, Guillaume 201 architectural typologies 422 architectural visualizations 421 architecture 6 archival turn in dance 177–9 Archive Fever (Derrida) 178, 182 archives: vs. repertoire 183; sous rature 181–3, 186–7; spectrality of 183, 187–8; temporality 182; topology 185–7; undecidable specter of 181–3 arkhe‒ 180 Arnold, Matthew 429, 436 Arons, Wendy 12 Aronson, Arnold 365, 371–2 arranged marriage 25 Art as Experience (Dewey) 29 artifact in museum 366 artificial intelligence 413 artist-driven archives 456–7 artist twin 179–81, 187

Art of Making Dances, The (Humphrey) 125 Arts Council England 107n1 Arts Council of Great Britain 236 Ashikawa, Yoko 15 Ashton, Frederick 150 Asianist ethnomusicologist 141 Astaire, Fred 145 At Home in the World? The Bharatanatyam Dancer as Transnational Interpreter (O’Shea) 47 The Atlantic magazine 216 attention 353 audience 353; spatial relationship 418 auditory choreography 421 aurality 174 Ausdance 64 Austin, John L. 376 Australian dance community 215–16 Austro-Hungarian forces 40 Authentic Movement and Body-Mind Centering © 110 authorial invention 327 Avignon Festival in 2011 448–9 Baalman, Marije 169 Baartman, Saartjie 27 Bachelard, Gaston 35 Bachelor, James 40 BackStories (McFadden) 381–94; duet project 381–2; scores at intersection of dance and theater 387–91; solo and chorus 391–3; at Theatre Utopia 384; at University of Worcester 383 Bain, Keith 101–6, 102, 104 Bakatsaki, Katerina 17 balance 449 Balanchine, George 145–6, 204 Bales, Melanie 75 Balla, Giacomo 193, 203 ballet 26, 34, 356–7; see also specific ballets Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss, The (Heisler) 144 BalletLab 358–9 ballet-oriented Greek National Opera 290–1 Ballets Russes 191 Ballett International/Tanz Aktuell 216 Banes, Sally 4, 251, 431 “Bantu Education” system 23 Barad, Karen 89 Barbieri, Donatella 353 Barnard, Philip J. 63, 64 Bartenieff, Irmgard 76, 209 Bartenieff fundamentals 73–4, 77 Bartenieff Fundamentals of Movement (BF) 76 Bartky, Sandra Lee 482–3 Bateson, Gregory 115 Batson, Glenna 59 Battcock, Gregory 212 Bauman, Maria 225

490

Index Bauman, Zygmunt 482 Bausch, Pina 58 Beatrice Allegranti Dance Theatre 88 Beaumont, Cyril 214 Beautiful Ones Must Be Born, The (Pather) 29 Beckwith, Naomi 250 “Bed of Nails” Schematic 167 Bel, Jérôme 443 Bend It Like Beckham (2002) 306 Benjamin, Walter 436, 444–5 Bergson, Henri 186, 365–6 Berleant, Arnold 29 bespoke dance 93; group improvisation 94, 95 bespoke performances 98 #BessiesBeBlack 227 Bharatanatyam 356–7, 397, 404; practitioners 47 bharatanatyam-trained body 408 Big Dance Theater 135 bio-psycho-social model of disability 88 BIPED 313 Birch, Luke 92, 103, 106 Birmingham Royal Ballet 64, 308 Birringer, Johannes 158 Bishop, Claire 366 “black Baryshnikov” 305 black bodies 25; see also bodies; in ballet 303–5; disempowerment 25; spatial policing 27 black British dance 5, 236–45; Josephs, Elroy and 236–45; research 237–8; studies 244–5 black dance 303; aesthetics 231–2; British 236–45; contract 229–31; embodying resistance 227–9; overview in US 223–6; relevance 232; work 233–4 black dancers 308; in British ballet 299 Black Dance/White Dance dichotomy 28 black invisibility 26 #BlackLivesMatter 224 black performers 301 black plurality, denial 26 Blades, Hetty 327, 329 Blaikie, Andrew 438 Bleeker, Maaike 372 Blender 161 Blood (Pasuka) 238 blood run (Lee) 398–404, 400 Bloomsbury Festival 383 Bodenwieser, Gertrud 413 bodies; see also black bodies: age and abilities 3; alternative 4; black female dancers 27; dysfunctional 33; idiotic body 374; library 465; as living archive 4; materials 16; materials, solo 17; puzzles 18; (re-)essentialization 45; social 17; and spaces 11, 13; Western European idea(l)s 24 “body and the world” 15–16 Body Eclectic, The: Evolving Practices in Dance Training (Bales and Nettl-Fiol) 75

Body/Landscape 20 body-mind centering (BMC) 4, 73–4, 77 Body of Evidence (Pather) 29 “body of ideas” 48 The BodySynth™ 160 body-thing-associations 50 Body Weather 12, 17; body 19; and butoh 11–13; M/B training 18; van de Ven 17–18; workshops 12 Body Weather Amsterdam 12, 17 Body Weather Farm 12 body-worlding 477 Bolter, Jay David 424 Bone, Breath and Gesture: Practices of Embodiment ( Johnson ed.) 75 Bonnie Bird Theatre 459, 462, 464, 464 Borelli, Melissa Blanco 339 Bosso, Ezio 37 Botha, Catherine F. 3, 22 Bourdieu, Pierre 3 Bournonville, August 265 Bradley, Buddy 267 Brahm, Laurence 375 Brannigan, Erin 4, 207 Braxton, Anthony 247, 251 Brazilian samba 150 breakdancing 276–7 breath 111–12 breathe the landscape 18 Brickhill, Eleanor 213 Bridges, Ronald 265 Brighton Fringe Festival 383 Brighton v. Jones 329–30 Brinkmann, Stephan 178 British Apache dancers 269 British-based school of dance research 286 British colonial rule 24 British multiculturalism 298, 306 Brodie, Julie 76 Bronx Gothic (Okpokwasili) 226–7 Brooklyn 225–34; microhistory of 5 Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) 225 Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX) 225 Brooklyn Information and Culture (BRIC) 225 Brooks, Jason 109 Brown, Carol 6, 413 Brown, Trisha 6, 125, 255, 367, 432 Buckland, Theresa 149, 286, 295 Bugg, Jessica 6, 353 Burt, Ramsay 5, 236 Butler, Judith 23, 376 butoh 13; body assemblages and nonhuman becomings 14; and Body Weather 11–13; Hijikata and 14; SU-EN 15–16 Butoh: Kroppen och varlden/Body and the World (SU-EN) 16

491

Index Cabaret 1920 238 Cage, John 45, 248–51 Cage Unrequited (Pope. L.) 248–50 Cain, Jeff 253 Cala Homes (South) Ltd v. Alfred McAlpine Homes East Ltd 330 camera tracking system 417 Candelario, Rosemary 11; exploration of innovative training systems 3 candidature file 341 Cape Minstrels (Kaapse Klopse) 27 Cape Performing Arts Board (CAPAB) 25 Caplan, Deborah 78 Capturing Grace (documentary) 35 Carnation (Childs) 431 carriers 465 Carroll, Noël 28 Carson, Anne 381 Cartesian Christian analogy 102 Cartesian philosophy 95 Casino Girls 261 Castelyn, Sarahleigh 24 casting decisions 301 Cattelan and Shonibare play 385 Center of Contemporary Dance (CCT), University of Music and Dance in Cologne 44 Cerrahi-Kadiri spiritual ceremonies 344 Cerrahi-Kadiri Sufi order 344 Césaire, Aimé 241 Chalayan, Hussein 170 Changing Room, The (Brown et al.) 415–19, 418 Charmatz, Boris 365–6 Chekhov, Anton 388 Childs, Lucinda 125, 432 choreographers 6, 274; see also specific choreographers; work of 5 Choreographers Handbook (Forsythe) 448–9 choreographic actions 420 choreographic and dance movement psychotherapy practice-as-research 88–9; dance theater performances 96–8; Intense (2017) 98–101; interview-conversations 91–2; more-than-human choreography 89–90; participatory dances 93–6; project as spacetime events 90–1; response-ability 106–7; studio practice 92–3; Tsunami (1946) 101–6 Choreographic Coding Labs 413, 415 choreographic dramaturgy 418 choreographic journal 416 choreographic kinship 95 choreographic objects 313, 444, 447–9 choreographic practices 2 choreographic principles 443–4, 449 choreographic score 420–1 choreographic thinking 319 choreographing 367

Choreographing History project 3 choreographing the museum, scenography: area of interrogation 365–6; choreutic artifact 372–4; context and terminology 366–7; Delusions (2017) 377–8; durational scenography 370–1; implicit zones of 371–2; scenographic practice and idea of “permeation” 368–70; Searching for Shangri-la (2016) 375–7 choreography 4, 6, 186, 316–17; Massine’s 191–2 choreography and stillness, practice of 109; approaching being still 110–11; breath 111–12; creative encounters and collectables 115; daily-ness 119–21; ethics of practice and agency 119; language 122; lexicon 113; mindful moving and choreographic undercurrent 114–15; mindfulness, addressing 109–10; movement of mind 116–17; pathways 113; pedagogy 115–16; relational trio 121; repetition 117–19 choreology 286 choreomusical analysis 4 choreomusical studies 141 choreomusicology and dance studies 141–4; analytical methods 147–52; choreomusical research 144–7 choreosonic wearables 4, 157–8; conductivecoat and capacitive sensing 169–73; DAP-Lab’s for the time being 160–9; designing 158; staging wearables 158–60 choreutic artifact 372–3, 377 choros 286 Choros stin Plateia 292, 293 chorus girl 260 Chryst, Gray 197 City of Abstracts (2000) (Forsythe) 450 civilizing forces 403–4 Claid, Emily 237 Clark, Barbara 63 Clark, Timothy. J. 196 Clarke, Gill 63 climate change 12 Closer (Kozel) 420 clouds of data figures 420 co-composed movement process 94 co-constitutive process 89 Cocteau, Jean 191, 193–6, 198–204 Cohen, Bonnie Bainbridge 73 Cohen, Selma Jeanne 237 Cole, Jack 266 collaboration and improvisation 5 collectables 112 collective knowledge production 49 Collins, Jane 365 colonial and racialized policies 5 colonial documentation 396, 399

492

Index colonial iconography 401 colonialism 23 colonialist discourse 300 colonial source material 400–1 colonizer 399 comfortable in movement 360 commandment 180 commencement 180 commodities, dance 273–4 communal practice 46 communication 362–3 ‘community’ art 29 community-based festivals 437 community dance 35 community dancers 38 competence-based learning 53n4 competent players 50 Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC) 83n4 Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit, The (Merlin) 388 computer coding languages 419 computer-controlled sounds 172 computer screen 339 Conceit of the Natural Body, A (George) 47 concept of temporality 372 concept of transmateriality 421 ConductiveCoat 158, 169–70, 173; and capacitive sensing 169–73 conflict of rhythms 479–80 Confluences Conferences (University of Cape Town) 22 Confucianism 402–3 consumption of diversity 307 Contact Quarterly 72–3 contagion 209 container 112; and contents 14 contemporary aesthetic 357 contemporary black dance 5 contemporary choreographers 397; see also specific choreographers contemporary choreographic work 428 contemporary choreological practice 457–8 contemporary dance 312, 353, 356–8, 397; post-medium practices 444; training 286 contemporary dance, anarchive of 177–88; anarchival recycling 179–81; archival turn 177–9; body with 177–8; choreography 178–88; self-effacing violence and 178; substratum, reification of 183–5; temporality 185–7; undecidable specter of 181–3 contemporary performance 428 contemporary theatricality 445–6 Contes Russes (Massine) 193 contour tracking system 418 Contraindre (Gourfink) 158 conventional histories 397

Cook, Nicholas 141 cooked savage 399 Cool for Cats 270 Cooper, Scheherazaad 381–2 Copeland, Roger 213–14 Coppélia 301 copyright: authorship 327; and creation of dance 325–6; law and dance examples 324–5; ownership 325, 331–2 Copyright Act 1710 324 Copyright Licensing Agency 333 Corchero, Andrés 17 Cornabla, Elena 214 Cornubian Arts and Science Trust (CAST) 471, 474 Cornwall 473 corporeality 3; and virtuality 14 cosmetic diversity 307–8 cosmopolitanism 298–9, 302–3 costs and capacities 419 costume: aesthetic role 358; influences 358; in performance 353–4; visual and/or physical interference 357–8 counterpoint 449 Court of Justice in Europe (CoJ) 328–9 Cowell, Henry 248 creative encounters and collectables 115 creative interpretation 456 Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease 107n2 Critical Costume 157 Critical Costume International conference and exhibition 354 Critical Dialogues 216 critical thinking 414 Croce, Arlene 213 Csordas, Thomas 24 “Cuban sex missile” 305 cubism 196–201, 204 cueing system 313 cultural capital 307 cultural difference 298–9 cultural geography 6 cultural heritage 465 cultural life of municipality 292 cultural memory 396 cultural patterns and structures 345 cultural representations 438 cultural studies 1, 5 cultural turn 2 culture 430 Culture and Anarchy (1869) (Arnold) 429 Cummings, Blondell 253 Cunningham, Merce 188, 212, 237 Cunningham-Cage collaboration 151 Cunningham technique 58 Curtis-Jones, Alison 6, 455, 459, 462, 464, 466 cybernetic organism 414–15

493

Index cyborg 414–15 cypher 278

Dance Observer 210 Dance of the Machines (1924) 413 “dance-plus-words form” 125 Dance Research Journal ( journal) 2, 74, 150, 365 dancers 6; see also female dancers; as artist-athlete 58–9; democratization of 3; with Parkinson’s 35; physiological and fitness capacities 58–9 “dancer’s books” (Forti) 134 dance scholarship 1–5; disciplinary boundaries 6 dance science 56–8, 65; artistic-athlete 58–9; cardiorespiratory demands of dance 59–60; converging of art and science 61–3; nascent areas of 63–4; somatic practices and relationship 60–1 dance’s disappearance and permanence 317 dance studies: choreomusicology and 141–52; defined 1–2; disciplinary boundaries 2 Dance Technique and Injury Prevention (Howse and Hancock) 56 Dance Theatre Journal 74 Dance Umbrella: The First Twenty-One Years (Rowell) 237 Dance USA Taskforce on Dancer Health 64 Dance Well in Bassano del Grappa Italy 40 dancing bodies 24; and computers 312; dis/embodiment 26–7; dis/empowerment 24–6; dis/placement 27–8 Dancing Bodies (Foster) 48 Dancing Drumstick (1913) 455, 457, 460–1, 466 dancing the space 11–12; bodies, space, and dance 13–15; Butoh, body weather, training 12–13; expanding and erasing 15–17; learning 15–19; sensitizing the body to external stimulation 17–19 Danjoux, Michèle 4, 157 Danse Serpentine (1896) (Fuller) 358 DAP-Lab’s: performance 173; for the time being 160–9 DaPoPa 34 Dark Chorus, The (2016) 361 Dart, Raymond 81 Dartington Festival 72 Dartington Hall 72 Dart procedures 81 datafication 414 data physicalization 421 Davids, Nadia 28 Davies, Siobhan 237 Dawson, Bob 35 death 12 Debord, Guy 428–9 de Certeau, Michel 180 decontextualization 50

daily-ness 119–21 Damm, Vivian Van 262 Damman, Catherine 257 dance: aesthetics 2; alienated 279–80; American critics 211–12; analysis 4; anarchival 178–88; anthropology 2; archival turn in 177–9; artistry and pedagogy 460–1; authorship and ownership 323; black British 236–45; body/bodies and 177–8, 196–7, 208–9; commodities 273–4; contemporary, anarchive of 177–88; as craft 210; critic 366; criticism 2, 4, 204–17; dynamic of 180; ethnography 2; ethnology 2; fan 265–6; and fashion 357; features in television broadcasts 332–3; film 452; forms, variety of 2; futurist 202–4; gifts 273–4; history 2; improvisation 14; interactivity 415; Jazz 244; movement 423; moves, re-use of 334; pajamas 356; pedagogy 53n1; philosophy 2; and poetry 214; preservation 314; as rehabilitation 35; scholars 2; science 3; skill-driven activity 57; and somatic practices 72–8; spectacularization of 274; styles and practices 5; technique 46–50; theory 2; toolbox and analysis 2; training 13; unalienated 279–80; works, long-term preservation 314 Dance Analysis (Adshead et al., eds.) 4 dance and copyright: copyright and creation of dance 325–6; copyright authorship 327; copyright authorship and ownership 325; copyright law and dance examples 324–5; dance copyright collecting society (DanceROCS) 332–4; joint authorship 327–31; and dance 331; multiple authorship 331–2; themes and concerns 323–4 Dance and the Alexander Technique: Exploring the Missing Lin (Vanier) 80 dance-architecture 415, 424 dance-architecture-technology 424 Dance as a Theatre Art (Cohen) 237 Dance Australia 215 Dance Chronicle ( journal) 2 dance copyright collecting society (DanceROCS) 332–4 dance criticism 204–9, 217; American critics 211–12; art form, defining 211–12; artist-theorists 209–11; dance reviewing, descriptive turn in 212–15; in digital age 215–17; movement analysis 209–11 Dance Festival at Bates College 128 dance for Parkinson’s 33 Dancehouse Diary 216 Dance Magazine 72–3 dance-making process 311

494

Index defamiliarization 435 DeFrantz, Thomas 251 De Keersmaeker, Anne Teresa 208 De Laet, Timmy 4, 177 deLahunta, Scott 64, 313, 319–20 Deleuze, Gilles 3, 14, 365–6, 420 Deleuzian theory 2 Delusions (Stjernholm and Cheong-Leen) 377–8 dementia 107n2 dementias 88 Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater 1962–1993 (Banes) 251 Democratic Party 340 democratization of dancer 3 Demon Machine 413 demoralization 439 Denby, Edwin 211 de Nieves, Raúl 247 Denny, Susan 267 De Palo, Chiara 95–6 Department of World Arts and Cultures, University of California Los Angeles 2–3 Depero, Fortunato 193 De Prophet 238 De Quincey, Tess 17 Derrida, Jacques 3, 178–83, 185, 187, 376 descriptive writing 213–14 Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS) 332 designers 6, 353 De Spain, Kent 39 Deufert, Kattrin 179–81, 187 deufert&plischke 179–81 devadasis 404–5, 407 De Villiers, Peter 26 Dewey, Fred 126 Dewey, John 29, 82 dharmakaya 111, 123 Dharma talks 111 Diaghilev, Serge 191–4, 196, 202 diasporic multiculturalism 298 Dido and Aeneas (Morris) 148 Diehl, Ingo 49 Die Nacht (1927) (Laban) 455 diffraction 422 diffraction pattern 422 Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Gottschild) 251 digital an-archive 185 digital artifacts 424 Digital Cultures 413 Digital Cultures Lab in the UK 415 digital dance; see also dance: in live performance 312; resources 311; “things” or artifacts 313 Digital Dance Archives (DDA) portal 318, 320

digital dance practices 415 digital data visualization 317 digital labor 414 digital material 423 digital musical instruments (DMIs) 159 digital object 317 digital preservation 314; digital dance archives 318; digital dance objects 313–14; digital on dance, legacy of and 314–16; digital technologies and dance 312–13; Motion Bank 318–19; replaying the archive 317–18; Siobhan Davies RePlay (RePlay) (2009) 316–17 digital revolution 419 digital scores 314, 319 digital scrapbook 316 Dilley, Barbara 125, 255 Dinshaw, Carolyn 401 “Disability, Dance and Law” 326 disabled dance 26 disco 276–7 disengagement and activity 439 distributed agency 50 disturbances 15 diversity: hedonistic consumption 306–8; institutional discourses of 298; tokens of 308 diversity turn 298; and ballet’s new cosmopolitanism 298–9 divorce and remarriage 401 domesticity 438 domestic violence 25 Donaghy, Michael 478 Dorvillier, D. D. 179 Double, Oliver 268 double bounce 478 Dowd, Irene 63 Dowell, Anthony 300 Doyle, Oliver 168 Drama Review, The 125 draped floating scarves and costumes 358 dress and bodies, dynamics between 6 dress and costume 6 dress in dance 354–5; agency and embodiment of 359; costume, choreographer’s awareness and perspective 360; presence and absence 355–9; time, funding, and trust 362 Dressing the City and My Head Is a Shirt (2011) (Hiesl) 432, 439 Duncan, Isadora 209, 237 Dunn, Douglas 255 Dunn, Robert Ellis 252 Duo (2006) (Vogel) 167 durational scenography 370–1, 376 Durou, Rena 287 Duvelle, Cécile 345 Dying and Dying and Dying (Bauman) 225–6, 233–4 dynamic of dance 180

495

Index dynamic stillness 111 dysfunctional bodies 33, 35; see also Parkinson’s disease

“experience near” 345 experiencing landscape 473–7 Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Music in the Twentieth Century) (Nyman) 250 exploration of body’s landscape 12 Extreme Costume 354

Early, Fergus 72 Eastman, Julius 248–9 eclectic assemblage 48 ecological consciousness 11 ecological politics of collective individuation 94 Eddy, Martha 71, 73–4, 76, 109, 114 educational licenses 333 education and training 2 Ehnes, Barbara 184 Eitan, Zohar 149 Electric Salome: Loïe Fuller’s Performance of Modernism (Garelick) 159 electronic phantoms 416 Eliot, T. S. 214 Elms, Anthony 247 embedded screens and clouds of data 424 embodied memory 315 embodied placemaking 466 “embodied story telling” 360 Emmanuel, Neil Max 91 empathy 209 Emra, Vicki 267 enablement of movement agency 48 Endless Shout, multi-artist performance project 247, 256 English National Ballet 64, 300, 308; dance for Parkinson’s program 34 ephemeral embodied knowledge 396 erasing and expanding 17 Erdur, Defne 116 “ERKadinalar Ayini” video 348 Ernst, Max 436 Essays before a Sonata (Ives) 248 e-textiles 170, 173 ethico-onto-epistemology 90 ethnicity 299 ethnochoreology 286 ethnocultural difference 400 ethnographic methods 4; autoethnography 224, 233 etymological sense 381 Euro-American white bodies 299 European Central Bank 287 European Commission 287 European Union (EU) jurisprudence 323–4 European-wide “RICHES” project 312 Evangelinos, Fokas 289 everyday life: aesthetics of 434–6; counteracting ageism 438–9; high culture 429–32; urban marvels 436–8; x-times people chair 432–4, 440 evidence-based teaching 56 “exceptional technical skill” 329 “experience-distant” 345

fabric 358 facilitator 49 Fagan, Garth 227 Fall After Newton (Paxton) 254 fan dance 265–6, 266 Farewell to Arms, A (Hemingway) 40 fashionable clothing 357 fashion-artifact 370–1 fashion designers and dance 357 Fashioning Embodiment (2013) 368, 370, 373–4 Fashioning Shangri-la (Stjernholm and Cheong-Leen 2016) 375 feedback-ing 114 “feel good” diversity 306 Feldenkrais, Moshe 4, 72, 74, 76 Feldenkrais Awareness through Movement 73 Feldenkrais method 76–7 Feldenkrais practitioner (Hanna) 73 female dancers 259–70; see also dancers; bodies 259; history of 259–60; personality, participation, skill, novelty of 268–70; on stage 264–8; variety dancer 260–4 female femininity 26 female indigenous ancestor 402 female postnisin 348 female solidarity 473, 482 feminine identity 480 feminism 482 feminist theory 2, 438 Fensham, Rachel 358 fictions of purity 403 Fire Dance (Fuller) 159 First We Take Manhattan: Four American Women and the New York School of Dance Criticism (Theodores) 213 Fit and Healthy Dancer, The (Koutedakis and Sharp) 56 Five Myles 225 Flesh and Blood (1989) (Anderson) 362 Fluxus 431 Fokine, Michel 26, 192 folk dance 477 Fonegger, Nikolai 413 foreignness 303 Forsythe, William 444, 447–51 Forti, Simone 4, 125–35, 210 Fortin, Sylvie 74 Foscarini, Francesca 40 Foster, Susan Leigh 5, 48, 126, 254, 273 Foucault, Michel 2–3, 48, 181, 192, 204

496

Index Foundation of Universal Lovers of Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi (EMAV) 341–3, 343 Fountzoulas, Giorgos 286 Fox, Terry 253 fragmentation 397 Fraleigh, Sondra 76, 109, 114, 116 frames of meaning 340–5 Franklin, Eric 63 Franko, Mark 183, 209 freedom 255 Freedom Principle, The: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now 247, 250 Fried, Michael 210 Friedman, Sharon 22, 29 Friendship Dance 289 Fuller, Loïe 158–9, 209, 237 Fuller, Zack 12 Fullman, Ellen 159 functional dress 356 Futurian ChestPlate 158, 165–7, 168, 169 futurist dance 202–4

Goldman, Danielle 5, 247 Goldner, Nancy 213 Google’s business policies 346 Google’s corporate power regime 347 Gopinath, Gayatri 397–8 Gordon, David 255 Gore, Georgiana 286 gossamer threading 422 Gottschild, Brenda Dixon 251, 304 Gourfink, Myriam 158 government-recognized tribes 400 Graham, Martha 159, 209–10, 237 Graham technique 58 Grau, Andrée 286 GraveDigger costume 158, 161, 162 Greater London Arts Association (GLAA) 241 Greek dances 5, 286 Greek National Opera 291 Greek Orthodox Church 287 Greek traditional dance 285–6 Greek traditional dance at Syntagma Square 288 Green, Jill 74 Green Clowns (1928) (Laban) 455 Gromola, Diane 424 Grosz, Elizabeth 23 Group Areas Act of 1950 25, 28 Groys, Boris 185 Guattari, Félix 14 Guerin, Lucy 357, 361 Guitar (Picasso) 198, 198–9, 201 gumboot dances 26 Gutierrez, Miguel 210–11 gymnastik 82

Gabriel, Archangel 287 Gala (Bel) 443, 446 Galata Mevlevihanesi Lodge in Istanbul 344 Gallasch, Keith 217 Galsworthy, Amanda 377 Gamble, John 253 Gann, Kyle 248–9 Garafola, Lynn 144, 214–15 Garelick, Rhonda K. 159 Gargano, Sabrina 92, 99, 100, 106 Garvey, Marcus 238, 244 Geertz, Clifford 345 gender 5; distinction 438 Gendlin, Eugene 116 Genesis of a Music (Partch) 248 George, Doran 47 George-Graves, Nadine 5, 223 Gerda Alexander Eutony (GAE) 76 Gesamtkunstwerk 167 gestural and whole-body movement 157 Get Down, The (Luhrmann) 274–9 “Ghostprints” 481–2 Gielen, Pascal 185 gifts, dance 273–4 Ginot, Isabelle 71–2 Girl Ballerina (2007) 385–6 Giselle 301 Glasser, Sylvia 26 global transnational 447 Gnome 15 Godard, Hubert 209 Godder, Yasmeen 40 Goh, Angela 216 Goldberg, Natalie 130 Golding, Anna 480

Hakutobo 15 Hall, Carla 26 Hall, Pat 228 Hall, Stuart 239 Halprin, Anna 72, 127, 129, 132, 210 Halstead, Jill 88, 92 Hamera, Judith 15 Han culture 403 Handbook in Motion: An Account of An Ongoing Personal Discourse and Its Manifestations in Dance (Forti) 126–9 Hand in Glove (2016) (Anderson) 361 happenings 431 Haraway, Donna 413 Hardt, Yvonne 3, 44 Harpe, Bill 237–8, 243 Harris, Rennie 275 Hay, Deborah 125 hazardous journey and clash 300–3 Hazzard-Gordon, Katrina 251 Hedlund, Melanie 254 hedonistic multiculturalism 307–8 Hedstrom, Cynthia 252

497

Index Heidegger, Martin 82, 181 Heisler, Wayne 144 Hellenic Army Academy 290, 291; performance 294 Hellenic Army Academy, Evelpidon 291 Hellenic Military and Police Academies 294 Helmet no.3: put on and walk (Stelarc) 164 Hemingway, Ernest 40 Heppenstal, Rayner 209 Hering, Doris 211 heteropatriarchal lineage 403 Hiesl, Angie 432–3, 437, 439 high culture and everyday life 429–32 Hijikata, Tatsumi 12; with Ashikawa 15 Him (2001) 385–6 Hine, Christine 340 hip hop 276–8 historiographer 397 history 1, 5 Hodgins, Paul 141 Holbein, Hans 178 Holland, Fred 247, 253 Holland, Irene 261 Hollywood Costume 354 Holzer, Sabina 116 homophobia 25 Hornsey Town Hall Arts Centre (HTHAC) 382 Horst, Louis 210 Hosoe, Eikoh 12 host 418 Hottentot Venus 27 Houston, Sara 3, 33; different bodies 33–43 Houston Ballet (1993–1998) 300 Houston-Jones, Ishmael 247, 252–6 Hoyer, Dore 186 Hudd, Roy 268 human-computer interface 419 human-computer intra-actions 414 human factor and theater 445 Human Factor, The: The Figure in Contemporary Sculpture 385 humanism 414 human-machine relations 413 human moving bodies together 88 human power of the imagination 35 Humphrey, Doris 125, 149, 209–10, 237 Hunter (Stuart) 178, 184–5, 187 Hunter, Orlando 226 Hutchens, Benjamin 181 Huxley, Michael 4, 71 hybrids and divers 48–9 hyperobjects 15

If You Couldn’t See Me (1994) (Brown) 384 illegitimate urbanization 294 image dictionaries 19 immigrants and racial minorities 307 Impermanent Festival of Contemporary Performance 382–3 improvisation 112, 256 Impulse 74 incidental audiences 479 Incomplete Subject, The 365 indexing salon culture 404 Indian classical abhinaya 406 indigeneity 400 indigenous communities 400 indigenous female ancestors 398 indigenous identity-based activism 400 individual adjustment 50 individual dance videos: cultural and political meanings 339 individualization of training histories 48 industrial revolution and Greek traditional dance 294 informational figuring, strangeness 415–23 Ingold, Tim 475 “inherent and aesthetic value” 329 inherently visual/cognitive orientation 424 inside-outside dichotomy 13 inspirational appreciation of diversity 307 Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) 247 institutional diversity 299, 303, 306 institutionalized diversity 299, 307 institutional mission 307 instruction methods, teaching of dance 57 Intangible Cultural Heritage 338–40 in/tangible heritage 465 intellectual creation 329 intellectual property 327 intensification of nervous stimulation 436 interacting cognitive subsystems 63 interactive dance improvisations 419 interactive space 421 Interactive Teaching Method (ITM) 83n4 interconnectedness 15 interconnections 13 interdependence 485 interdisciplinary discourses 3 interlocutor 418 internal colonialism 23 International Association for Dance Medicine & Science (IADMS) 56, 64 international ballet establishment 300 international choreographers 319 International Mevlana Foundation (2004) 341 International Monetary Fund 287 International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association (ISMETA) 76, 83n4 internet protocol (IP) address 346

I Can’t Concentrate with You in the Room 247 identity politics 223–4 ideokinesis 73–4, 76–7 idiotic subjectivity of modernity 376

498

Index interobjectivity 14–15 interpenetrative relationship 14 interrelationships 5 intersubjectivity 14 interview conversations 91–2 In the Dancer’s Mind 63 intra-acting spacetime 91 intra-actions 89, 415, 419, 422; of multiple agencies 415 intra-active performance 422, 424 intra-activity 89 intra-state context 294 Introduction to the Dance (Martin) 211 irrational 397 Irwin, Kathleen 372 Ishtar’s Journey into Hades (1913) (Laban) 455 Islington Arts Factory 382 It’s Up to You (Mensendieck) 82 Itxassou Body/Landscape program 18 Itxassou workshop 18 I’ve Lost You Only to Discover That I Have Gone Missing (Allegranti) 92, 97, 106 Ives, Charles 248

Kabat-Zinn, Jon 110 “kadın semazenler” 346 Kaiser, Roland 439 Kalakshetra Institute 404 Kalavantula 404–5 Kamaitachi 12 Kaminsky, David 150 Kammenos, Panos 287 Kammer/Kammer (2000) (Forsythe) 447–8 Kamuf, Peggy 187 Kardaris, Dionysios 290 Kartsaki, Eirini 116 Katan, Einav 37–8 Katan-Schmid, Einav 126 kathak 34, 397 Katzarova, Raina 149 Kavalan 398 Kearney, Richard 35–6 Kecak 151 Kelly, Gene 145 Kelly, Pippa 96 Kelsall, Kate 35 Khan, Akram 306, 357 Khlebnikov, Aleksei 160 Khlebnikov, Velimir 160 Kikimora 193 kin-aesthetic 92, 99; collaboration 98; intimacy 107 Kinect system 161, 162 kinesthetic awareness 133–4 kinesthetic empathy 2, 209, 373, 376, 414 King and I, The (Robbins) 266 King’s Wager, or, The Camp, the Cottage and the Court, The 328 Kirstein, Lincoln 211, 214 Kismet (Cole) 266 Kisselgoff, Anna 366 Kitwood, Tom 88 Klein- and Counter-Technique 49 knowledge-making enterprise 314 knowledge-producing practice 314 knowledge-system 48 Kolb, Alexandra 6, 428 Kondek, Chris 184 Kotik, Petr 249 Koutedakis, Yiannis 56 Koutsouba, Maria I. 5, 285 Kozel, Susan 158, 420 Krasnow, Donna H. 62 Krauss, Rosalind 446 Kringelbach, Hélène Neveu 241 Kruchenykh, Aleksei 160 Kuppers, Petra 35 Kurath, Gertrude 286 Kusch, Martin 158

Jackson, Alicia 90 James, William 129 Jameson, Frederic 446 Japan, modern dance in 13 Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile 82 Järvinen, Hanna 144 Jazz dance 244 Jazz Train, The 239, 242 Jeux (Nijinsky) 192 Jeyasingh, Shobana 356–7 jobbing dancers 260 Johnson, Don Hanlon 75 Johnson, Terrence Luke 128 Johnston, Jill 210, 212 joint authorship 327–31; and dance 331 joint compositional skills 330 Jones, Adanna Kai 339 Jones, Bill T. 226 Jones, Pauline 254 Jones, Rrata Christine 253 Jones, Susan 214 Jordan, Stephanie 4, 36, 141, 237 Josephs, Elroy 5, 236–45, 240; career 236, 238–41; curriculum vitae 237–8; Jazz dance, approach to 244; life 238–41; postcolonial point of view 242–4 Josephz, El-Roy 238 Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices 71, 75 Journal of Dance Education 74 Jowitt, Deborah 212–13, 237 Judd, Donald 210 Judson Dance Theater 72, 125–6, 237, 251–2

Laban, Rudolf von 6, 13, 73, 209, 286 Laban movement analysis 74, 77

499

Index Labanotation 326 Laban’s Effort Theory 458 Laban’s principles of Choreutics 457–8 “Lady’s Glove” 159 Laermans, Rudi 185 La fille mal gardée 301 Lamb at the Altar: The Story of a Dance (Hay) 128 Lambert, Kay 263 Lamentation (1930) (Graham) 358 LaMothe, Kimerer 126 Lampert, Friederike 49 Lancaster, Sue 237–8 land-stealer 399 language 53, 122 language in dance creation 4 L’Après-midi d’un Faune (Nijinsky) 192–3 L’arte dei rumori—The Art of Noises (Russolo) 166 Las Meninas (Massine) 193 Latin and South American ballet dancers 5 Latour, Bruno 186 Leach, Martin 82 Leaman, Kara 142 Le Chant du Rossignol (Stravinsky) 193 Lee, Cynthia Ling 6, 396 Lee, Rosemary 7, 471, 474, 486 legal authority 331 Legend of Joseph, The (Fokine) 192 Leggett, Trevor 110 Lemon, Ralph 253 leotards 356 Lepecki, André 366 Lepkoff, Daniel 253 Legend of Joseph, The (Nijinsky) 192 Les Ballets Nègres 236–9, 242–4 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) 5 Les Femmes de Bonne Humeur (Massine) 193 Letter to My Nephew ( Jones) 226–7 Levinas, Emmanuel 209 Levinson, André 214 Levy v. Rutley 328 Lewis, George 247, 250–1 Lewis, Nancy 255 liberty to license 325 Linz, Talia 216 Little Dancer of 14 Years (Degas 1881) 385 Liturgy (Massine) 193 live documentary evidence 465 “live” performance 315 living and non-living to intra-act 422 living cultural heritage 465 Lloyd, Margaret 211 Lobel, Elin 76 logos 187, 286 Longley, Alys 126 Look Better, Feel Better (Mensendieck) 82

Lorimer, Jamie 19 Lost in Shangri-la (Stjernholm and Cheong-Leen 2016) 375, 375 Louppe, Laurence 207 Lucy Guerin Inc. (2018) 357 Luhrmann, Baz 274 Lunn, Jonathan 471 Lyceum Club of Greek Women 289 Lynch, Stuart 17 ma 15 Machine Dances (1922–23) 413 machine vision technology 418 Mackrell, Judith 237, 357 Magnesium 255 Magritte, René 122 Maijuku Performance Company 12, 17 Malevich, Kazimir 160 Mallarmé, Stéphane 183, 214 Malone, Jacqui 251 Malstaf, Vincent 184 Manhattan 225 Manning, Erin 89, 94, 477 Manon 301 Mantell-Seidel, Andrea 133 Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (Brown) 6, 432 Many Ways of Moving Congresses 72 mapping of interference 422 map–territory relation 117 Maqoma, Gregory Vuyani 30 Marcuse, Herbert 307 Margeti, Angeliki 166, 168, 169 marginality 12 Margolin, Indrani 113 Marie De Vere Dancers 262–3 Marinetti, Filippo Tomasso 192, 202 Market Day (Pasuka) 238 Mark Morris: Musician-Choreographer ( Jordan) 153n1 Marks, Lawrence E. 148 Martha Graham Company 58 martial art forms 4 Martin, Barry 26 Martin, Denis-Constant 27 Martin, John 134, 209, 211–12 Marxist-inspired writings 428–9 Masilo, Dada 25 Mason, Paul 147 Massine, Leonide 4, 191–3, 200; angularity, use of 197; choreography 191, 193, 196–201; and cubism 196–201; and futurism 202–4; on human body 196–7; vision of modernity 191 Massumi, Brian 107, 180 Master of Fine Arts (MFA) 65 Master of Science (MSc) 65 material feminists 89

500

Index Material for the Spine (2008) (Paxton) 384 materiality and virtuality 420 Matisse, Henri 193 Matiushin, Mikhail 160 Matsumoto, Takeshi 92–4, 102, 103, 106 Matthews, Hannah 217 Mauss, Marcel 48 Mavroudis, Alexandre 191 May, Jon 63 May, Theresa J. 11 Mazo, Joseph 237 M/B training 18 McDermott, John 29 McFadden, Becka 6, 381 McGibbon, Andrew 392 McGregor, Paloma 231 McGregor, Wayne 58, 64 McKinney, Joslin 371–2 McKirdy, Cameron 161 McMains, Juliet 144 mechanical and material civilization 429 mediatic sexualization 305 meditation 114 medium for knowledge transmission 319 Meduri, Avanthi 404 Meisner, Nadine 298 memory 464–5; boom 181; develop discourses 3; institutions 25 Menderes, Adnan 340 Men in the Off Hours (2000) (Carson) 448 Mensendieck, Bess 82 Merce Cunningham Company 58 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 3, 14 Merlin, Bella 388 “the mesh” 11, 15 metakinesis 211 Metal Skirt Sound Sculpture (Fullman) 159, 164 metatechnique 47 method 48 Me Too movement 483 Metzger, Matthew 247 Mevlevi Sema ceremony 337–8; frames of meaning 340–5; videos and YouTube’s screens 345–7 Michel, Yvonne 269 Michielon, Vanessa 163, 163–4, 169 Miller, Bebe 253 mind, movement of 116–17 mind-body connections 3–4 mind-body dualism 360 Mindful Movement: The Evolution of the Somatic Arts and Conscious Action (Eddy) 76 mindful moving 112; and choreographic undercurrent 114–15 mindfulness 109–10; addressing 109–10; moving and choreographic undercurrent 114–15; role of 109; and somatic practices 4

mindful walking 112 Minimal Music Sculpture (1988) (Vogel) 167 Mitgefühl (feeling-with) 482 mnemonic space 184 mobile audience 416 Möbius strip 13 MoCap Hypervision 421 modern/contemporary dance techniques 58 Modern Dance: The Jooss-Leeder Method (Winearls) 78 modernism 4 Modernistic Apache Dancers 269 Montague, Jules 101 Monte Verita 466, 467, 468; past and today’s multi-sensory body 465–6 Moorty, Shyamala 404, 406, 407 Morera, Laura 305 Morris, Gay 4, 191, 210 Morris, Mark 146 Morris, Robert 210 Morton, Timothy 11, 13–15 Mosaval, Johaar 25–7 MoSys 319 Motion Bank (Forsythe) 450 Motion Builder 161 motor-learning 61 movement/dance analysis 2 movement disorder see Parkinson’s disease movement improvisation 3 movement of mind 116–17 moves (dance), in late 80s and 90s 2 Moving as a Thought Process: An Insight into Mindfulness through Dance and Choreography 109 Moving Consciously: Somatic Transformations through Dance, Yoga and Touch (Fraleigh) 76 Moving into Dance (dance company) 26 Moving Kinship project 88, 107 moving mind and body 125–7; “animate” writing and nature 132–4; “dance state” of improvisation, writing 129–32; speaking, writing, form, and movement 127–9 Muddu Bidda 404–5 Mulrooney, Steve 237 multiculturalism 5, 298, 307; hedonistic appreciation 299 multiple authorship 331–2 multiple materilizations 447 multiple sclerosis 38 multi-sited ethnography 340 multivocal framework 397 multivocality 397 Municipality of Elliniko-Argyroupoli in Athens 292, 293 Murphy, Siobhan 356–7 Murray, June Don 78, 267 Murugesan, Meena 397, 404, 408 musical accompaniment 4

501

Index Musical Theatre at the Court of Louis XIV: Le Mariage de la Grosse Cathos 146 Music-Dance: Sound and Motion in Contemporary Discourse (Veroli and Vinay) 152 My Body, The Buddhist (Hay) 129 Myers, Martha 73 Myllylahti, Sanna 362 Mythic (2012) 360

Noland, Carrie 359 “non-costume” 356 non-knowing teacher 49 nonlinearity 397 Northern Ballet 308 notion of dwelling 475–6 Novack, Cynthia 47, 254 Nukoop, Marc 171, 173 Nyman, Michael 250

Nachbar, Martin 186 Nahachewsky, Andriy 294 Napoli 265 narrative of self-denigration and self-otherization 25 narrative strategies 6 Natal Performing Arts Council (NAPAC) 25 National Dance Association: first symposium 73 National Dance Teachers Association 62 National Geographic 375 national identity construction 286 nationalism 307 nationalities and racial identities 301 nationality 5, 299 National Resource Centre for Dance (NRCD) 318 Natural History of the Ballet Girl, The (Smith) 260 Natural History of the Chorus Girl, The (Parker and Parker) 260 nature 12 Naughton, Adam 421 nègre 239 négritude 241 Neher, Caspar 444 Nehru, Jawaharlal 238 Nelson, Mervyn 239 Nelson, Solveig 250 neoliberalism 224 Nettleford, Rex 242 Nettl-Fiol, Rebecca 75, 81 Neue Museum in Weimar 448 neutrality 425 New Dance 72 new dances 431 new life of postmodern sensation 446 New Musical Resources (Cowell) 248 New Musicology 142 New York Public Library 344 Nicholas, Larraine 5, 259 Nicifero, Alessandra 366 Nico Malan Opera House in South Africa 26 Nijinska, Bronislava 204, 413 Nijinsky, Vaslav 192 Nine Nights (Pasuka) 238 Nixon in China (Morris and Adams) 150 Nkrumah, Kwame 239 noise machine 158

object-oriented ontology 14 observational visual analysis 355 Off-Off-Broadway theatre 431 Of Grammatology (Derrida) 181 Oguibe, Olu 25 Oh, Tongue (Forti) 126–9, 131–3 Ohno, Kazuo 12 Oliver, Cynthia 225, 247 One Flat Thing, reproduced (Forsythe) 313 one’s sense of place 466 online video platforms 314 ontology of dance 366–7 open-ended interviews 355 OpenSource 3D software 161 optical tracking systems 422 Oral Site archive project 314 Ordinary Dance (Rainer) 125 “Organic Telling” (Forti) 127 Orlin, Robyn 27 Oro. L’Arte di Résistere (Gold. The Art of Resisting) 40 orthogonal theater 424 Ortner, Shelly 49 Osborne, Peter 446 O’Shea, Janet 47 Otolith Group 247 Ottoman Empire 340 Outline of My Lover (2000) 447–8 Out of Line: The Story of British New Dance (Mackrell) 237 Oxley, Harriet 361 painstaking labour 480–1 Paipai, Amanda Zhou 377–8 Pakes, Anna 185 Palladium Girls 261 Palliani, Maria 97 Pane, Gina 160 Panourgia, Marianna 286 Pantouvaki, Sofia 360 Parade 191–204, 195, 197, 200; and cubism 196–201, 204; dances in 202; and futurism 202–4; libretto for 194; Massine’s choreography for 192–201; Picasso’s set for 193–4 Parallels series 251–4 Parker, Derek 260 Parker, Julia 260

502

Index Parkinson’s dancers 39 Parkinson’s disease 3, 33–4; dance for 34–5; dance-makers 38–41; dance’s therapeutic benefit to 34; Leonard and Margaret 37–8; poetic in dance 35–6 Parren, Callirrhoe 289 Partch, Harry 248 part dance partner 416 participatory dances 93–6 participatory ecology 94 Passage (Kusch) 158 Passage for Par (Lee) 471–86; outdoor performance event 472; performance description 472; at start of performance 472 Pasuka, Berto 236, 238 Pather, Jay 29 paths of knowledge 371 pathway 112 Paxton, Steve 112, 125, 252, 254–5, 431 pedagogic and creative practices 3 “pedestrian” costume 356 pedestrianism 327 Peffer, John 22 penmanship 330–1 performance installation 312 performance-making process 361 performance research 2 performance score 390 performance staging innovations 6 Performing Arts Council of the Orange Free State (PACOFS) 25 Performing Arts Council of the Transvaal (PACT) 25 Performing Arts Councils 25 Performing Right Society (PRS) 332 Performing the self 71–2; Alexander Technique 78–82; dance and somatic practices 72–8 perlocutionary duration-performatives 376–7 permeation 369, 374 Perpener, John 252 personal and cultural expression, Greek traditional dance 294 personal-professional tensions 92 Pethybridge, Ruth 7, 471 Petruskha (Fokine) 26 phenomenology 477, 483 Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art 5 Phoenix Dance Company 237 physical education (PE) 62; Greek traditional dance 294 physical energy 59 physical manuscript 317 physical movement, dancer’s body 421 physical score 390 physical support 449

physical thinking 421 physiological sensations 376 Picasso, Pablo 191–6, 198, 198, 201–2, 204 Pick’n’Place (2010) (Hiesl) 432 Piecemaker annotation tool 319 Pietrobruno, Sheenagh 6, 337 Pilates-based conditioning 74 Pina Bausch Sourcebook: The Making of Tanztheater, The (Climenhaga) 389 Pingpu 398; plains indigenous bloodlines 397 placemaking 466 “Planet Back” 385 platform’s ranking algorithms 346 Plischke, Thomas 179–81, 187 PM2, annotation tool 319 Poe, Jumatatu 247 poetic functions 4; for dance 3; of language 36 Popat, Sita 424 Pope.L. 247–51, 257 Post-Apartheid Dance: Many Bodies, Many Voices, Many Stories (Friedman) 22 post-feminist culture 482 posthumanism 14 post-medium age 446 post-medium practices 444 post-medium specific art 446 post-medium specific practice 444 postmodern dance languages 356 postmodernism 4, 428 postnisin 342, 347 poststructuralism 2 Poulin, Marie-Claude 158 Powell, Sandy 361 practice and agency, ethics of 119 practice-based research 2 praxeological analysis 3, 44–55 pre-conceived theory in mind 355 pre-emotional bodying 90 presence 14 Prickett, Stacey 1 Prime Movers (Mazo) 237 Principles of Psychology ( James) 129–30 Professional Association of Alexander Teachers (PAAT) 83n4 professional context, dance in 355 professional dance schools 286 professional self-realization 302 programmable and choreographed matrix 420 pro-independence political agenda 400 psychoanalysis 95 psychology 1, 5 Psychology of Music in Multimedia, The (Cook) 141 psycho-physicality 388 Ptashek, Alan 254

503

Index Qing Dynasty expansionism (1644–1912) 398 Qing Imperial Tribute Illustrations (1751) 399 Quoiraud, Christine 17

Repetitions of Disappearance (2015) (Stjernholm and Cheong-Leen) 373–4, 374 RePlay 316 representationalism 89 repressive tolerance 307–8 research validities 52 resistance 50 Resistance-Subjector (2011) 385–6 resourcing/searching dance technique 44–5; dance education 46; dance transmission 49–50; experiencing, appropriating, and normalizing 51–2; hybrids and divers 48–9; learning constellations 45–6; practice theories and investigating technique 50–1; single techniques and overarching principles 46–8 responsiveness 14 re-staging as contemporary practice 459–60 RestorationArt 225 Rethinking Music (Cook and Everist) 142 Reus, Jonathan 171 Revudeville 264–5, 267 Rhames, Arthur 256 Rieger, Uwe 416 Riley, Richie 238–9, 242, 244 Riotous Assemblies Act of 1956 28 Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, The (Brecht and Weill) 444 ritual authority 406 Road to South African Freedom, The: Programme of the South African Communist Party 23 Robbins, Jerome 266 Robin Ray v. Classic FM plc 330 Robinson, Fay 261–2 Robinson, James Harvey 81 Robinson Crusoe 241 Roche, Jennifer 325–6 Roelstraete, Dieter 250 Rolf, Ida 76 rolfing 4, 74; and rolf movement 76 rolling-hip dance 339 Roman theater 443 Rome and Jewels (Harris) 275 Romeo and Juliet 301 Roos, Cecilia 326 Rosaldo, Renato 401 Rosas danst Rosas (De Keersmaeker) 325 Rose, Charles 265 Rosenberg, Douglas 339 Rosenberg, Harold 210 Rothfield, Philipa 213 Rotie, Marie-Gabrielle 356, 360–1 Rowell, Bonnie 237 Royal Ballet 5, 25, 64, 298–300 Rubidge, Sarah 157 Russian Roulette (2008) (Anderson) 361 Russolo, Luigi 158, 193

race 5, 25, 299 racial and ethnic heterogeneity 299 racial difference 303 racial stereotypes 299 racism 307 Rainer, Yvonne 95–6, 98, 98–101, 125, 210, 252, 255, 479 rakshasa 400 Ramdhanie, Bob 239, 242 Ramgsard-Thomsen, Mette 415–16 ramifications 327 Random Acts 41n1 Random Dance Company 354 Rani, Maxwell Xolani 23, 26 Ratliff, Melissa 216–17 Rauschenberg, Robert 160, 210 Raymonda 301 real life 15–16 RealTime 215–16 reciprocal relationship 431 recordings 332–3 recreation 456 Redding, Emma 3, 56 RedMicro Dress 158, 163, 163–4, 165, 166, 168, 169 Reflection of Time: Art of Fashion in China 1993–2012 369 reflections 50 reflective practice 355 reformulation, methodology of 179–80 re/heritage 457 re-imagining 455–7 re-imagining Laban: contemporary choreological practice 457–8; dance artistry and pedagogy 460–1; definition 455–7; memory 464–5; Monte Verita’s past and today’s multi-sensory body 465–6; re/heritage 457; re-staging as contemporary practice 459–60 reinvention 456 relational aspects of art, scenography 372 relational body renews choreography 374 relational subjectivity 374 Relatives (Houston-Jones) 253 “relearning of embodiment” 423 release-based techniques 61 Ren, Helenna 161, 162, 166 Renaissance-styled buildings 432 repeat 112 repertoire vs. archives 183 repetition 117–19, 478 repetition and remembering 477–81

504

Index sadir 404 samba 150 Samuel, Gerard 22–4 sarkaesthetics 26 Sarkozy, Nicolas 377 Satellite Skin 171–2 Satie, Erik 191 Satisfyin’ Lover (1967) (Paxton) 431 Saumaa, Hiie 4, 125 Savigliano, Marta 126 scenographic thinking 372 scenography 6 scenography, choreographing the museum: area of interrogation 365–6; choreutic artifact 372–4; context and terminology 366–7; Delusions (2017) 377–8; durational scenography 370–1; implicit zones of 371–2; scenographic practice and idea of “permeation” 368–70; Searching for Shangri-la (2016) 375–7 Scenography Expanded (2017) (McKinney and Palmer) 371–2 Schino, Mirella 371 Schiphorst, Thecla 158 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang 437–8 Schlemmer, Oskar 413 Schlesinger, John 240 Schmidt, Cecilie Ullerup 179 Schneemann, Carolee 160 School of Dance, University of Cape Town 22 Schreiner, Bernard 179 Scott, Lincoln 255 screen, definition 339 screen-based interfaces 414 screen-based software/hardware 339 screendance 339–40; scholars 339; and YouTube 339–40 Scruton, Roger 429 search engine result page (SERP) 346 Searching for Shangri-la (2016) 375 seeing 14 self-contained meaningfulness 446 self-differing 446 self-effacing violence 178 self-identity 446 self-inflicted destruction 180 self-reflection 390 self-sufficient 376 self-techniques 52 Sell, Naomi Lefebvre 4, 109–11, 120, 121 Selver, Charlotte 76 sema ceremony 6 semi-structured interviews 355 Senghor, Léopold 241 Sensa Fine (Endless) 41

sense of community 295 sense of resilience 473 senses of invisibility 26 sensitizing 20 sensory and motor learning 461 sensory awareness 76 sensory intelligence 414 Sermon, Paul 312 Serpentine Dance (Fuller) 159 Serres, Michel 186 Serussi, Itamar 38 “Sex on legs” 305 sexual assault 483 sexual desire 299 sexuality 5 “Shambhala” 375 Shampoo Dancing and Scars–(Dis)Embodiment in Afro-Contemporary Choreography in South Africa (Samuel) 22 “Shangri-la” 375 Shapes of Change (Siegel) 237 Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture (Novack) 47, 254 Sharp, Craig 56, 62 Shawn, Ted 209 Shearing, David 372 Sheppard, Harry 253 Sheringham, Michael 431 Sherman Fisher Girls 262 Shirtology (1997) 451 Shue, Jackie 254 Shui-hui, Chen 400 Shusterman, Richard 29, 71, 77, 82 side-by-side line dancing 482 Siegel, Marcia 213, 237 Siegmund, Gerald 6, 443 Silence: Lectures and Writings (Cage) 248–9 silent colonies 25 Silivrikapı Mevlâna Cultural Center 341–2 Silly Symphonies (Walt Disney) 152 Silverthorn, Tara 4, 109 Simmel, Georg 436 Simson, Kirstie 254 Singularity: research and development 423; research performance 425 Singularity: drawing spaces + breathing spaces 415–16, 419–23 Siobhan Davies RePlay (RePlay) (2009) 316 Siraya 398 sister act 259 Skola, Haglund 15 Sleep (Warhol) 431 Sleeping Beauty, The (Tchaikovsky) 149 Smiling (1967) (Paxton) 431 Smith, Albert 260 Smith, Jennifer 254

505

Index Smith, Marian 143 Smith, Nancy Stark 254 snapshot, Greek traditional dance: characteristics 294; collection of dances 294; constitutes 294; Municipality of Elliniko-Argyroupoli in Athens 292, 293; Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Cultural Center (SNFCC) 289–91; Syntagma Square 287–9 Sneakers 1 (2008) 385–6 Snow, CP 3 social capital 298 social consciousness 5 social dancing 478 social injustices 5 social media: campaign 483; and surveillance 414 social structures underdevelopment 294 society, and culture 5 Society for Ethnomusicology 142 Society for Music Theory 142 Society of Dance History Scholars 142 Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique (STAT) 83n4 sociocultural dimensions of dance 285 sociology 1, 5 sociopolitical and financial crisis 286 Soleil de Nuit (Massine) 193 solo and chorus, BackStories 391–3 solo dances 6 Solomons, Jr., Gus 253 Somaesthetics 77 somatic education 74 somatic learning 73–4 Somatic Movement Dance Education (SMDE) 71, 77 somatic practices 2, 4, 71–2, 78–82 Somatics 73 Somatics: Journal of the Bodily Arts and Sciences (Hanna) 73 somatics of dance 73 Somerville, Daniel 382, 385 Sonami, Laetitia 159 Soneji, Davesh 404 Song Books (Cage) 249–50 Sontag, Susan 212 sounding costumes 4 Sounding the Dance, Moving the Music: Choreomusicological Perspectives on Maritime Southeast Asian Performing Arts (Trimillos) 142, 144 soundscape and movement 421 sous rature 181–3, 186–7 South Africa, apartheid 22–3; bodies and dance 23–4; dancing bodies 24; dis/embodiment of dancing body 26–7; dis/empowerment of dancing bodies 24–6; dis/placement of dancing body 27–8; high art, low art, non-art 28–30; policy 23

sovereignty 341; and dignity 439 Soyinka, Wole 241 space and digital interaction 419 space and place 6–7 spacetimemattering 90 spatial dramaturgy 421 spatial orientation 449 spatio-temporal rhythms 19 Spatz, Ben 463 Specters of Marx (Derrida) 182 spectrality, archives 183, 187–8 speeds of processing 419 spinal afflictions 381 Spink, Ian 237 Spivak, Gayatri 181 SPLICE: Live Art and Photography in Collaboration 392 Squires, Dougie 270 Srinivasan, Priya 397 stacking the spine 381–94 staging wearables 158–60 Stanislavsky, Konstantin 388 Stark Smith, Nancy 113 state-funded dance companies 22 Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Cultural Center (SNFCC) 289–91 St Denis, Ruth 237 Stearns, Jean 251 Stearns, Marshall 251 Steinberg, Oguri 17 Steinberg, Roxanne 17 Steinweg, Marcus 179 Stepputat, Kendra 147, 151 stereo vision 414 Stern, Daniel 94 stigmatization 5 stillness 109 stimulation 20 Stjernholm, Johan 6, 365 strangeness: coextensive, movement, space, technology, and corporeality as 423–5; cyborg 414–15; informational figuring 415–23 Stravinsky, Igor 193 Streb, Elizabeth 227 Street Dance (Childs) 432 Striding Out: Aspects of Contemporary and New Dance in Britain ( Jordan) 237 Stuart, Meg 178, 184 Stuart v. Barrett 330 Studies in Costume and Performance ( journal) 157, 354 Studio for Electro Instrumental Music in Amsterdam (STEIM) 169, 171 studio practice 92–3 subaltern dancers 299, 302

506

Index subaltern historiography: subaltern studies 396–8; blood run 398–404; we used to see this 404–8 subaltern writing techniques 397 Subotnik, Rose 101–6, 102, 142 SU-EN 15; “body materials” 16 SU-EN Butoh Company 15, 20 SU-EN’s Butoh Summer Camp 11, 16–17; alternative 4; “body materials” 17, 20; “practical work” 16 Sufism 338 Summit Dance Theatre 456; dancers 463 Sunday Night at the London Palladium 270 sur-realism 201 Swan Lake (Masilo) 25, 301 Sweigard, Lulu 63, 73 Swenson, Sarah 128 synchronous objects 313, 317, 450; website 318–19 Syntagma Square 287–9, 288 systematization 45

They Came (Pasuka) 238 Thinking Body, The (Todd) 63, 81 Thomas, Ben 144 Thomas, Helen 1, 36, 439 Thompson, Robert Farris 251 Thousand Plateaus, A (Deleuze and Guattari) 14 3D camera-vision 162 three-dimensional data documenting 319 3D program Unity 420 Three Shadows Art Centre 375 Tian Art Foundation 377 tights 356 Tiller, John 260, 262 Tiller Girls 260–4, 267, 269, 269 time, dance 5–6 Time and the Dancing Image ( Jowitt) 237 Todd, Mabel Elsworth 63, 73, 76, 82 Tohoku 12 Tomé, Lester 5, 298 tool-(kit) 48 topology 185–7 Towards a Poor Theatre (Grotowski) 388 toyi-toyi 22 Trager, Milton 76 Trager method 76 Trager Psychophysical Integration 73 training and performance 11 training programs 13 transcategorical 447 transformative visual spectacle 358 transformed training 4 transgression 417 transmission of knowledge 371 transmitters 465 transnational context 294 Treachery of Images, The 122 Triadic Ballet (1922) (Schlemmer) 413 Trimillos, Ricardo 141 Trimingham, Melissa 359 Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance 455 Trinity Laban dancers 461 Trio A (1966) (Rainer) 384, 386 Tswana culture, dance of 25 Tudor, David 249 Tufnell, Miranda 135 Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism 341 “the turn to ‘affect’” (Deleuze) 2 turn to the body 2 Tushnet, Rebecca 331 “Tweede Nuwe Jaar” (second New Year) 27 Twentieth-Century Dance in Britain: A History of Five Dance Companies (White) 237

Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683–1895 (2004) 399 Tamed 64 Tanaka, Min 11–12, 14–15, 17–18 tango 34 Tari Ping dance of Minangkabau tradition 147 task dances 431 TatlinTower (head)dress 158, 165, 166 Taylor, Diana 183, 315, 396 Taylor, Joshua 202 Taylor, Paul C. 26–7, 237 Tchaikovsky’s ballets 143, 145 teacher/coach intuition 57 teachers 274 Teasdale, John D. 63 technological developments 6 Teck, Katherine 151 TEDx 372–3 Telematic Dreaming (Sermon) 312 Telespringar 150 temporal, scenographers 372 Teppa, Lucille 4, 109 terrorists emergence 307 Terry, Walter 211 theater 443–4; choreographic principles 443–4; choreography as self-differing medium 447–51; dance 2; to medium 444–6; from medium to post-medium 446–7; post-medium phenomena 443 Theatre and Performance Design 365 “theatricality as medium” 444 Theodores, Diana 213 These Foolish Kings 267

507

Index two-dimensional computer screen 420 two-directional permeation 370

Visual artists 6 visual texture to dance 357 Vlemmix, Marc 39–40 vocabulary-based codified techniques 61

UK Healthier Dancer conference 56 unalienated dancing 279–80 unbuild 421 Unbuttoned Sleeves (Forti) 127, 131, 134 UNESCO 337–8 unitard 356 United Kingdom (UK) copyright law 323–4 unity, inner and outer 473 Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) 238 University of Auckland 419 University of California, Riverside 3 University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) 397 University of Surrey 318 Unjust Malaise 249 Uno, Kuniichi 14 Untamed Spaces (Zachary) 225–6 unthinking arrogance 429 Untitled Duet (Houston-Jones and Holland) 247, 255–6 upper-caste Brahmin women 404 urban (traditional) dance 285 urban marvels, everyday life 436–8 urban planning 6 urban street environment 438 Use of the Self, The (Alexander) 82–3 user-generated metadata 346 Using the Sky: A Dance (Hay) 129 US postmodern dance 397

Wadle, Douglas 128 Waelde, Charlotte 6, 323 Walking on the wall (Brown) 6 Warhol, Andy 160 War of Independence 287 Watkins, Mary F. 211 wayang wong 144 wearable sound 164 wearers 353 Weber, Samuel 444 Weeksville Heritage Center 225 Weidman, Charles 210 Welsh, Kariamu 251 West African dance 25 Western concert stage 397 West Side Story (Robbins) 240, 240, 275 Whatley, Sarah 5, 63, 75, 311 whirling dance 338 Whirling Dervish 6 whirling dervish (semazen) 342 White, Joan 237 “white people’s dancing” 24 Wigman, Mary 13, 82 Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life (Goldber) 130 Wiley, Roland John 143 Wilks, Thomas Egerton 328 Wilson-Bokowiec, Julie 160 Windmill Girls 260–7; dance 5 Winearls, Jane 78 winin, 339 Winnicott, Donald 92 wireless microphone system 165 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 122 Wolfgang, Ernst 185 womanliness 406 Women’s March 228–30 Woodmansee, Martha 327 World Wide Web 312 “writing-dancing body” 126 writing impulse 133 Writing of History, The (de Certeau) 180 Wynne-Jones, Angharad 217

Valentine, Ricarrdo 226 Valéry, Paul 214 Van Damm, Vivian 262–5, 268 van de Ven, Frank 11; training 11, 17–18 Vanier, Luc 80 variety dancers 260–1; see also female dancers; making of 261–4; personality, participation, skill, novelty of 268–70 Velostat 170; conductive lining 172 verbal communication 53 Véronique Doisneau (2004) (Bel) 451 videos and YouTube’s screens 345–7 videos highlighting dance 338 Village Voice, The 210, 212–13, 216 Vimeo 316 Vincenzi, Simon 361 Virago-Man Dem (Oliver) 225–6 virtual avatars 414 Visser, Nicholas 23–4 Visser, Nicola 474 visual aesthetics 6, 161

X6 72 X-box 3D infrared camera 161 xenophobia 299, 307 xenophobic conservatism 224 x-times people chair (Hiesl) 428–41, 433, 434, 440

508

Index Yanks 240 Yin, Robert K. 7n1 YouTube 316, 337–8; commercialization 340; platforms 5–6; and screendance 339–40

zeroing 4 Zervou, Natalie 286 Zhi-wei, Zhang 400 zikir 338 zombie projects 317 Zulu dance 25 Zur Seinsfrage (Heidegger) 181 Zwierzyn´ska, Aneta 92, 99, 106

Zachary, André 225 Zen Buddhism 126 Zen sitting meditation 111

509