Dance Discourses

Keywords in Dance Research

Susanne Franco, Marina Nordera, Susanne Franco, Marina Nordera

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134947195
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Focusing on politics, gender, and identities, a group of international dance scholars provide a broad overview of new methodological approaches – with specific case studies – and how they can be applied to the study of ballet and modern dance.

With an introduction exploring the history of dance studies and the development of central themes and areas of concerns in the field, the book is then divided into three parts:

• politics explores 'Ausdruckstanz' – an expressive dance tradition first formulated in the 1920s by dancer Mary Wigman and carried forward in the work of Pina Bausch and others
• gender examines eighteenth century theatrical dance – a time when elaborate sets, costumes, and plots examined racial and sexual stereotypes
• identity is concerned with modern dance.

Exploring contemporary analytical approaches to understanding performance traditions, Dance Discourses' pedagogical structure makes it ideal for courses in performing arts and humanities.

Part I

Keyword:	POLITICS
Topic:	AUSDRUCKSTANZ

1 Dance and the political

States of exception

Mark Franko

My first idea was to compare Ausdruckstanz (dance of expression) literature to work in other fields on the theorization of fascist aesthetics.¹ This would establish a critical framework for the vexed question of the fascistization of German modern dance. As the research of Susan Manning, Marion Kant, and Laure Guilbert has made patently evident, Ausdruckstanz begs the question of dance and politics because of the easy and massive accommodation of German modern dance to the cultural policies of the Third Reich.² The history of Ausdruckstanz has long been veiled, but the original research of these scholars persuades us to reconsider dance modernism from the political perspective. An early twentieth-century avant-garde art movement and an authoritarian state apparatus encounter each other at a moment crucial in the development of each; something new is being created, both artistically and politically that reveals contradictory forces and tendencies at work. Only once these dance scholars lifted the veil and rewrote history could we begin to perceive dance in the full light of the political. They have inaugurated an area of inquiry that requires further work. But, any serious critical development of dance study methodology must also be tested against their re-evaluation of Ausdruckstanz.

Yet, I can understand why it is better I do not discuss Ausdruckstanz here. My areas of specialization are the French baroque and North American modernism. When the conference organizers asked me to widen the scope of my presentation I wrote the following abstract:

In what historical and aesthetic circumstances does it become justifiable and necessary to speak of dance as political? Of what kind of politics are we speaking in such cases – what kind of power? Above all, what sort of relationship can be established between dance and the political such that politically alert methodologies can reveal more about dance than dance itself is perhaps “willing” to reveal? Is the politics of dance necessarily mute? Or, is it possible for a (any) politics to control dance – to manipulate its meaning? Does dance have a “political unconscious”?

No sooner had I written this abstract than it became very hard to write the paper. I became tangled in the phenomenal presence of dance, the politics of the relation between dancer, choreographer, and institution, and so-called real-world politics: the political sphere itself. The best approach was, I decided, to try to answer one by one my own questions.

In what historical and aesthetic circumstances does it become justifiable and necessary to speak of dance as political?

It is justifiable and necessary to speak of dance as political in circumstances that are conjunctural; that is, in circumstances where forms of movement and socio-political life take shape simultaneously if apparently independently. Dance frequently attains heightened cultural visibility at such moments, which makes it productive to examine within the terms of our problematic. Dance can also intervene in political considerations in a proto-conjunctural context. Rather than being quintessentially visible because culturally central, it may in such cases be highly marginal and invisible. Since the seventeenth century dance has served to fashion and project images of monarchy, national identity, gendered identity, racialized identity, and ritualized identity. But, in most of these areas it has also demonstrated the ability to stand apart, acting as a critical theory of society. It goes without saying that I would consider both functions as political.

With the development of modern dance in Germany and North America earlier in the twentieth century, the body in motion became a choreographic touchstone of national identity. Choreographers sought themes and subject matter that celebrated national identity in terms of physical types and qualities of energy and resolve, all of which were construed to have racial overtones. In the 1930s and 1940s dance entered the field of ideological conflict between capitalism, fascism, and communism in America and Western Europe.³ The growth and development of the nation state and its attendant ideologies has determined the semiotics of the relationship between dance and politics until at least the end of World War II. For Sally Banes, even the most experimental choreographic production of the sixties took place under the ideological aegis of democracy, bringing the experiments of Judson Church Dance Theater thirty years later into line with a certain ideology of American identity.⁴ More recently, this semiotic relation of dance to the modern nation state has become relevant to postcolonial identities in international situations.⁵

In the case of artists who achieve iconic national status, the impact of national consciousness on the creative process can be tracked at the level of strategic artistic and publicity-related decisions. It is possible that the artist’s situation becomes one of intentional cooperation, or of the more or less willing co-optation of the dancer/choreographer by a bureaucratic state apparatus. Manning’s work on Mary Wigman opened up this area of inquiry, and indeed this very kind of inquiry. Whether we call it appropriation, accommodation, or collaboration, the artist’s politics are frequently compounded by the situation of the woman artist in the twentieth century who both manipulated her own image and suffered its manipulation by forces beyond her control. For example, the price paid by Martha Graham in the late thirties and early forties for her national celebrity was a discourse transforming her artistic profile. She was prominent enough to appear in an editorial cartoon next to Mussolini and Hitler in 1942. The image is of Graham looking religiously at a piece of fabric. “Strange Talisman,” the legend reads. “Dancer Martha Graham always carries with her a bit of 500-year old cloth from the dress of a medieval Italian saint.”⁶ Graham may be side by side with men who are world leaders, but she is presented as out of touch with the modern world, and as superstitious. Even as a counterweight to Hitler and Mussolini, Graham is presented under the auspices of what Toril Moi has identified apropos of the critical reception of Simone de Beauvoir as “the personality topos.” “The implication,” specifies Moi, “is that whatever a woman says, or writes, or thinks, is less important and less interesting than what she is.”⁷ Since her Frontier (1935) and American Document (1938) Graham took it upon herself to personify American identity. A Nazi radio broadcast acknowledged this, and proposed that Germany was masculine and the United States feminine. Therefore, the American media feminized Graham throughout the early 1940s in the name of a masculinized national identity. My point is that for Graham, different and contradictory motives impinged on a structurally confined cultural space, which was her own space of cultural action. The possibilities this space represents can be both enabling and distorting for personal and aesthetic identity. I would consider the political as very precisely the entanglement of these different forces and motives that partake of the personal, the artistic, and the institutional. Politics are not located directly “in” dance, but in the way dance manages to occupy (cultural) space.

Given this state of affairs, I find continued resistance to the idea of dance and the political perplexing. Mark Morris is one highly visible choreographer (at least in the United States) who publicly denounces the validity of a connection between dance and the political.⁸ His denial surely has something to do with the politics required to undergird his own canonical reputation as a choreographer. The canon determines whose work is seen and survives over time: the modernist canon requires that dance be apolitical to qualify as great art that is worthy of entrance into the canon.⁹ I believe that politics is as closely and substantially connected to dance in the real world as dance itself is connected to ritual in anthropology. Dance, however, does not operate directly in the political sphere, and thus dance is not strictly speaking political. As against Morris, there actually is no “is” in the presumed equation between dance and the political; to say that dance is not political is not to say much. An adequate Dance Studies should therefore constantly return to the complex interactions between dance and the political designated as political in a variety of ways. It is reflection on this variety or diversity of relationships that has true methodological value for dance research.

If dance is not political strictly speaking, then what is it? I would answer that dance is ideological, and it carries inevitable political effects for this reason.¹⁰ Ideologies are the persuasive kinesthetic and visual means by which individual identities are called or hailed to larger group formations. If, conversely, dance is anti-ideological, then it is deconstructive in the sense that it practices a critical self-reflexivity. The self-reflexivity that can be said to characterize some postmodern dance since the 1960s can be explained in political terms as a rejection of ideology’s hold on dance. “Dance can only be subversive,” writes Janet Wolff, “when it questions and exposes the construction of the body in culture.”¹¹ However we characterize the great divide between modernism and the postmodern that separates the world of contemporary movement research from the compromises of an earlier period, formal shifts can be accounted for in ideological terms.

On a micro-historical level, dance may perform protest, a direct and local way of upsetting a power balance.¹² What the body itself, when given pride of place, can be thought to oppose also lends definition to how dance makes the political flare up. The dancer’s body, as Dominique Dupuy has said, can be “intolerable,” “a provocation,” and “a living blasphemy.”¹³ Somewhere between these poles of ideological suasion, deconstruction, and protest we can pinpoint resistance. Resistance is a trope within which movement and representation are ambiguously articulated. This is because dance can absorb and retain the effects of political power as well as resist the very effects it appears to incorporate within the same gesture. This is what makes dance a potent political form of expression: it can encode norms as well as deviation from the norms in structures of parody, irony, and pastiche that appear and disappear quickly, often leaving no trace.

Here, we could refer to appropriative restagings and the debates over political intent they give rise to. For example, Pina Bausch’s rewriting of Vaslav Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring recasts the seminal ballet story as a battle of the sexes much more explicitly than does the original. This raised, at least for the American public, the question of Bausch’s gender politics.¹⁴ When Matthew Bourne restaged Swan Lake for a cast of male swans, the way in which dance can represent sexual orientation takes on a new dimension. In these and similar cases, it is the presence of a work from the past that acts as a foil for a heightening of the unrealized political possibilities in the original.

The dancing body has rhetorical, persuasive, and deconstructive force in the social field of the audience, which is a variant of the public sphere. Public controversies are not necessary for a danced politics. The way in which dance alters public space by occupying it is full of political innuendos, as is any unprecedented use of public space for the circulation of bodies. Dance can exert ideological power without emblematizing it. Thoinot Arbeau called dance “a mute rhetoric.”¹⁵ If ideology is a persuasive and therefore fundamentally rhetorical appeal to the mind and the senses, choreography is its potent means of captation. But choreography can also effectively undo or counter such rhetorics. The notion of détournement as Situationists theorized it in the 1960s with its procedures of quotation and citation, have been particularly relevant to dance and the political in the last decades of the twentieth century. Distancing from the cultural constructions of the body has proceeded not just through a questioning of the body per se, but through the questioning of lexicons and syntaxes that have effected such constructions in dance. Thus, we could note that Morris’s cross-dressed roles in Dido and Aeneas (1989) play with the sex/gender construct. But they also evoke baroque and modernist vocabularies, which themselves encoded this construct in particular historical ways, and come to do it yet again in Dido and Aeneas with different inflections. The sex/gender politics in which this dance engages is also therefore engaged with a politics of dance history expressed in, by, and through choreography.

The tools with which to unpack this persuasiveness or this dissuasion vary according to historical period. One can talk of spectacle in the baroque and one can appropriate John Martin’s terminology of metakinesis in the 1920s and 1930s. It is important methodologically, in my view, both to think with, but not within, the models of the historical period under scrutiny, and also to develop those models in the direction of relevant terms for contemporary analysis. To understand the mechanisms of power in baroque spectacle, for example, one examines the relation of court ballets to narrative, the role of text, image and movement in their construction, the historical circumstances of their production, the dance techniques, musical techniques, and choreographic genres, etc. Here one comes across notions of the intermediate, of gli affetti, of military culture and aristocratic culture, etc.¹⁶ But one should also engage with the extensive theorization of the baroque since the 1920s, a theorization relaying that historical period to our present. This would include a rethinking of sovereignty both politically and aesthetically (Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt), of the baroque in relation to the postmodern (Guy Debord, Mario Perniola), of baroque aesthetics in the contemporary context (Heinrich Wölfflin, Severo Sarduy), and of baroque political thought (Ernst Kantorowicz, Giorgio Agamben). The manner in which the historical models can be brought into dialogue with the subsequent theoretical crystallizations illuminates the relation of dance to critical studies. Dance Stu...