Moving Words

Re-Writing Dance

Gay Morris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134801534
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Arts de la scène

Moving Words provides a direct line into the most pressing issues in contemporary dance scholarship, as well as insights into ways in which dance contributes to and creates culture. Instead of representing a single viewpoint, the essays in this volume reflect a range of perspectives and represent the debates swirling within dance.
The contributors confront basic questions of definition and interpretation within dance studies, while at the same time examining broader issues, such as the body, gender, class, race, nationalism and cross-cultural exchange. Specific essays address such topics as the black male body in dance, gender and subversions in the dances of Mark Morris, race and nationalism in Martha Graham's 'American Document', and the history of oriental dance.

1

Introduction

Gay Morris

Shifting ground seems best dealt with by movement.

Susan Suleiman

Dance scholarship is developing at a pace never experienced before, its energy and creativity recalling the choreographic outpouring of the 1960s and 1970s “dance boom” years. A decade ago we could expect little more than a handful of forward-thinking work each year. This has expanded into a flood of books, articles, conferences and symposia on dance history, criticism, and theory. Nor has growth meant simply an increase in the flow of material being produced. Ann Daly remarked in 1991 that dance scholarship had both the potential to enrich what we already know of dance “as an aesthetic, cultural, and political phenomenon,” and to lead it “into a more prominent place in the humanities and social sciences” (1991:50). The potential Daly saw a few short years ago is being realized in a host of studies that puts the dancing body at the center of research cutting across a multitude of disciplinary lines. This new dance scholarship is flourishing on both sides of the Atlantic, as witnessed by such recent conferences as “Written on the Body,” sponsored by the American Dance Guild in 1994 at Denison University in Ohio; a multidisciplinary conference devoted to the work of Sir Frederick Ashton entitled “Following in Sir Fred’s Footsteps” at the Roehampton Institute, London in 1994; “Engendering Dance: Engendering Knowledge: Dance, Gender and Interdisciplinary Dialogues in the Arts,” presented by the Congress on Research in Dance (CORD) at Texas Women’s University in 1994; and “Border Tensions,” held at the University of Surrey in 1995, which explored the changing character of discourse in dance.

This book, in part, is a response to the current work in dance studies and the interest it has occasioned. At the same time the collection comes to grips with many of the issues that inevitably arise in a field in dynamic transition. At the moment virtually every aspect of dance is being tested and debated. Basic questions are being asked, including how is dance to be defined? What should our methodology be? Are there dangers in taking on concepts from other fields, or will new thinking spark insights and set dance more firmly in the intellectual mainstream? Where should dance research be focused—on enlarging the foundation of the field where many areas have hardly been touched, or on placing dance within the wider context of culture? Does dance need to establish its own turf, with a strong disciplinary bent? And if it doesn’t, will more established disciplines colonize what until recently has been a marginalized terrain, and use it opportunistically? What is dance’s relationship to language and is it possible to deconstruct the dichotomy between body and mind that has worked to dance’s disadvantage for so long? Some of these questions reflect more general shifts in the arts and humanities as modernist methods and concepts have given way to postmodern ones. But others are peculiar to dance itself, where for much of this century history was anecdotal, theory underdeveloped, and criticism rudimentary. For dance, then, the situation is not only one in which the field is being rethought, but where it is sometimes being conceptualized in detail for the first time.

One of the persistent questions within dance studies concerns the boundaries of dance itself. In a paper presented at the 1992 conference “Choreographing History” at the University of California, Riverside, art historian and theorist Norman Bryson advocated as inclusive a definition as possible.

Opening the viewfinder to maximum and moving the definition of dance from “ballet” to “socially structured human movement” may be vertiginous as an opening move, but it has heuristic advantages in showing how local and limited our sense of dance tends to be. Furthermore, the maximally capacious definition is typically found to lose its amorphous character the moment it is actually put into practice, and the potentially infinite space of analysis it opens up (the study of any human movement?) fills with remarkably finite objects.

(1992)

Bryson goes on to say, echoing Roland Barthes, that what would seem to be a wide-open definition is actually bound by the conventions and institutions that authorize fields of meaning so that in practice only a small part of the arena of possibilities is activated.

Although dance research has long been devoted to more than “ballet,” recent studies in movement ranging from parades and pageants to wedding rituals and strip shows suggest that dance scholars are pushing far beyond traditional western definitions of theater dance. Wherever the borders of dance are drawn, they must be open and flexible rather than rigid and closed in order to cope with the “shifting ground” of a postmodern world. Under the circumstances it would seem wise to keep in mind the defining assumptions— one’s own and those of the dance being studied—when considering any dance form, even the most familiar. Carol Martin’s essay in this book, “High Critics/Low Arts,” deals with problems that arise when differing notions of what constitutes dance are not acknowledged. In this case, a modernist model of autonomous art clashes with another set of expectations. Martin examines Arlene Croce’s written condemnation of Bill T.Jones’s Still/Here, a work that focuses on people with life-threatening illnesses. Croce confronts the piece from a modernist perspective, where movement is the essential element of dance. Martin says, however, that Still/Here is not meant to be looked at solely in terms of movement. Movement is simply one element of a larger whole that characterizes much postmodern performance. Within the parameters of postmodernism, dance may include images of people with real illnesses, it may include overt politicization and it may be utilitarian as well as aesthetic in aim. Certainly, differing concepts of what dance can or ought to be contributed to Croce’s attack on Jones’s work. In quite a different vein, Sally Ann Ness considers definition in her essay, “Observing the Evidence Fail: Difference Arising from Objectification in Cross-Cultural Studies of Dance.” She examines the work of several anthropologists who attempted, unsuccessfully, to create objective models that would bridge cultural boundaries to account for differing ways of identifying dance. Despite the creation of some extremely elaborate systems, these researchers were frustrated by cultural assumptions at odds with the dance they were studying.

If scholars are reassessing ways in which dance may be defined, they are heatedly debating how dance can best be analyzed and interpreted. This latter issue has emerged as one of the most prominent in current dance studies. As in most fields, dance scholarship has tended to move in an interdisciplinary direction, which has included the use of theory from a variety of sources, as well as an approach that embeds dance within culture (Novack 1990, Daly 1991, Banes 1994). However, while many dance scholars may be looking to analytical and interpretive models outside the field, others contend that dance must have its own methodology. Jane Desmond makes a persuasive argument for such a need:

If we are to talk about dancing in anything other than the broadest terms, we must be able to do close analysis of dance forms, just as we might of literary texts. While most scholars have spent years developing analytic skills for reading and understanding verbal forms of communication, rarely have we worked equally hard to develop an ability to analyze visual, rhythmic, or gestural forms. As cultural critics, we must become movement literate.

(1993–4:58)

Desmond suggests systems such as Laban Movement Analysis as a starting point. In particular, she points to the analytical work of Irmgard Bartenieff as being a possible model for cross-cultural comparisons of movement lexicons. In the 1960s and 1970s Bartenieff used Laban Movement Analysis as a basis to describe and compare movement patterns in particular communities.

Although Desmond is specifically speaking of cross-cultural analysis in her appeal for a dance methodology, Marcia B.Siegel uses Movement Analysis as a lexical foundation for analysis of many different kinds of dance, including western modern dance. Her essay in this book, “Visible Secrets: Style Analysis and Dance Literacy” is an example of how she employs this methodology. Siegel examines Paul Taylor’s Speaking in Tongues by observing the structure of the work and of individual dances, and by looking at the piece in the context of Taylor’s previous work and the quotations he makes from other choreographers, in particular Martha Graham. She also notes the literary devices such as puns, metaphors, double entendre, and irony, which he translates into movement. Throughout her analysis, Siegel takes a formalist approach, depending primarily on movement as a way of creating meaning. “Almost everything [I do],” she says, “comes from the dance itself, not from what the artist or anyone else says about it” (1995). She is not primarily interested in looking at the way Taylor’s work functions within the purview of culture, nor is she concerned with bringing concepts from other disciplines to bear on dance. She has argued for this position on the basis of the dearth of material that exists on dance compared to other disciplines. She believes it is only by closely examining the dance itself that we can form a foundation for further scholarship.

Stephanie Jordan also counts her project as formalist in her essay “Musical/Choreographic Discourse: Method, Music Theory, and Meaning.” In noting dance scholarship’s move toward interdisciplinarity and away from structural analysis, she contends that a separation between the two is not necessary. Her essay attempts to integrate dance and cultural theory, and to open a dialogue between them. “Indeed,” she says, “in-depth analysis of structure is seen to make its own special contribution to an understanding of the ‘broader picture.’” She points out that music scholars, like many dance scholars, worry that the individual work will disappear if it is too deeply lodged in social and cultural theory, and she documents ways in which music has solved the problem with a balance of formal analysis and social thesis. She then outlines her own method for analyzing dance through a combination of analysis derived from dance (beginning with music visualization as theorized by Ruth St. Denis and Doris Humphrey and including Bartenieff) to which she has added musical concepts. She then goes on to analyze several works by Ashton, Balanchine, and Humphrey, showing in each case how the structure of the dance can reveal elements of social meaning.

Although the use of cultural theory in the analysis and interpretation of dance has already made a considerable impact, there is doubt in some quarters about the efficacy of so cerebral an element being interposed between the dance and spectator. Siegel speaks about the experience of observing dance as “fundamentally intuitive, visceral, and preverbal. Only later do we bring words, categories, systems to rationalize what we’ve experienced. If a dance doesn’t suggest meaning by its performance, no amount of intellectualizing can put meaning into it” (1992:30). Mark Franko takes a different view, looking at theory not only as a tool that can productively open up and expand interpretive possibilities but which also can come to grips with dance expression, key to the visceral, intuitive aspects of the viewing experience of which Siegel speaks (Franko 1995:75–92). In his essay “Five Theses on Laughter After All” Franko touches on the point of communication between work and viewer through Paul Sanasardo and Donya Feuer’s 1960 dance, Laughter After All. Drawing on the post-Marxian theory of Georg Lukács, Franko suggests that only when experience is mediated, that is, attached to “the net of social relations,” is it given life. Immediate (unmediated) experience is reified or abstract because it is disconnected from interpretation. Franko finds a useful contradiction in Lukács’s theory, which he sees played out in Sanasardo and Feuer’s dance. Franko structures his essay around a written “re-eventing” of Laughter After All gained through memory, interviews with the choreographer and dancers, visual material such as photographs, and his own experience as a dancer in Sanasardo’s company (although he did not perform in Laughter After All). He alternates this reconstruction with his commentary, which deals with a number of issues including, provocatively, the possibility of a performable critical theory.

Franko is a choreographer and scholar who, like dancer/theorist Susan Foster, has long been interested in dance’s relationship to language. In 1986 Foster published Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance, a pioneering work that drew on semiological models to create a theory of dance analysis. That same year Franko’s first book, The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography appeared, which employed semiology as a means of analyzing Renaissance dance forms. Franko (1995) and Foster (1995) were among the first to dissolve the destructive polarization between dance and the word, and they continue to play a leading role in scholarship in this area.

Leslie Satin is another choreographer/scholar who works toward a closer connection between language and dance. She applies both literary and feminist theory to the notion of autobiography in Meredith Monk’s Education of the Girlchild. Her essay is a kind of written choreography that moves in and through the various manifestations of Girlchild, engaging the work in a manner at once highly personal and analytically rigorous. Using concepts ranging from Nancy Chodorow’s psychoanalytic theory of individuation to Wayne Koestenbaum’s erotics of opera, she traces what she sees as Monk’s alternative form of autobiography, one which is based within community and that can “question, rethink, or displace individualistic models of selfhood.” At the same time, Satin points up ways in which she, as a spectator, interacts with the work, creating parts of another autobiography in the process.

If Mark Franko believes theory is so basic to dance it can become an integral part of it, Helen Thomas, in her essay “Do You Want to Join the Dance?: Postmodernism/Poststructuralism, the Body, and Dance,” warns of an uncritical application of theory by dance scholars. Looking closely at the methodology of several writers, she critiques their use of feminist theory, in particular Laura Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze. Some scholars, she writes, have failed to contextualize Mulvey’s work within the framework of Lacanian psychoanalysis and thus have collapsed the psychic subject into the social subject. At the same time, Thomas acknowledges the appeal of poststructural, postmodern, and feminist theory for dance scholars (including herself) since it brings new attention to the body and to culture, “which, in turn, offers dance…the possibility of a new found [academic] legitimacy, an authorial voice that it had not achieved hitherto.” Her plea is for a rigorous use of these new tools.

Susan Manning, while also warning of the dangers of flattening out and oversimplifying gaze theory, has spoken of the great value feminist theory in general holds for dance scholarship. In a paper on feminism and dance she wrote,

feminist theory addresses a range of issues relevant to dance historians— the social construction of gender and sexuality, the dynamics of spectatorship, the cultural coding of the female body—feminist theory provides dance historians a myriad of perspectives from which to think through these issues in relation to the dancing body.

(1994:331)

Although Manning points out that the larger goal of her own research is not necessarily to apply feminist theory to dance history, but to write dance history into cultural history, feminist theory nonetheless plays an important role in her work. In her essay for this collection, “American Document and American Minstrelsy,” she is concerned with both race and gender in Martha Graham’s 1938 work. She brings a feminist perspective to a number of aspects of the dance, including Graham’s introduction of a male performer into her hitherto all-female company. Manning notes that the women in American Document generally stood for universal humankind until Erick Hawkins appeared onstage, at which the women reverted to the particular and he became the universal.

A number of essays in this volume similarly profit from feminist analysis. Gwen Bergner and Nicole Plett turn to the nineteenth century in their essay, “‘Uncanny Women and Anxious Masters’: Reading Coppélia Against Freud.” In one of the best-loved ballets in the classical repertory, they locate a number of male cultural anxieties, including the fear of female deception and agency. To elucidate their argument they look closely at E.T.A.Hoffmann’s story “The Sandman” on which Coppélia is based, and at Freud’s essay “The Uncanny,” in which he analyzes Hoffmann’s tale. The authors’ aim, they say, is “to show that the similarity between the horrific literary story and the comedic ballet resides in gender issues rather than atmosphere.” They then argue against Freud’s exclusion of the figure of woman as the basis of male anxiety in the story, countering with the contention that both in “The Sandman” and Coppélia, woman is at the heart of male fear.

Judy Burns also turns a feminist eye on the nineteenth century, in this case nineteenthcentury middle-class America. In her essay “The Culture of Nobility/The Nobility of Self-Cultivation” Burns looks at Delsartism, including women’s adoption of Delsarte principles and practice both to reinforce their status and to gain a small degree of freedom. At the same time, these women attempted to remake their bodies to conform to an impossible ideal modeled on classical Greek sculpture, a phenomenon not vastly different from women today attempting to emulate the bone-thin, computer-manipulated images of young models in fashion magazines.

One complaint often heard among dance historians is that with so much emphasis placed on broader issues, not enough attention is being given to basic research within the field. Unlike long-established disciplines, dance history is filled with gaps and thin areas where we know very little. Yet focusing solely on dance may further ghettoize and disempower it. Furthermore, as Janet Adshead-Lansdale has remarked, “the old idea, that history discovers the ‘truth,’ has to be replaced by a multiplicity of accounts, constructed in the present” (1994:20). Certainly dance historians and critics are in a more complicated position than scholars in fields where a thoroughgoing canon exists which can be supported or criticized. A canon does exist in western theater dance, a primarily modernist one, but it is far from thorough. So the challenge for dance scholars today is to strike a balance among several, sometimes conflicting, needs.

Dance scholars also labor under the supposed stigma of an ephemeral form, one that lacks a complete text. However, part of the perception of dance’s ephemerality may be due to the fact that less work has been done in the field than, for example, in literature or architecture. With the current stream of new research, dance may begin to look richer and less mysterious. As for not possessing a complete text, no performance medium does. Susan Manning’s comments on the pros and cons of scholarly work in a performance form are instructive:

An event bound in space and time, a performance can be read only through its traces—on the page, in memory, on film, in the archive. Each of these traces marks, indeed distorts, the event of performance, and so the scholar pursues what remains elusive as if moving through an endless series of distorting reflections. But this ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1: Introduction
• Part I: Strategies, Analytical and Interpretive
• Part II: The Body and Gender
• Part III: Histories Reconsidered
• Part IV: Cultural Crossings