The Routledge Dance Studies Reader

Jens Richard Giersdorf, Yutian Wong, Jens Richard Giersdorf, Yutian Wong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351613842
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Danza

The Routledge Dance Studies Reader has been expanded and updated, giving readers access to thirty-seven essential texts that address the social, political, cultural, and economic impact of globalization on embodiment and choreography.

These interdisciplinary essays in dance scholarship consider a broad range of dance forms in relation to historical, ethnographic, and interdisciplinary research methods including cultural studies, reconstruction, media studies, and popular culture.

This new third edition expands both its geographic and cultural focus to include recent research on dance from Southeast Asia, the People's Republic of China, indigenous dance, and new sections on market forces and mediatization.

Sections cover:

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• Methods and approaches

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• Practice and performance

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• Dance as embodied ideology

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• Dance on the market and in the media

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• Formations of the field.

The Routledge Dance Studies Reader includes essays on concert dance (ballet, modern and postmodern dance, tap, kathak, and classical khmer dance), popular dance (salsa and hip-hop), site-specific performance, digital choreography, and lecture-performances. It is a vital resource for anyone interested in understanding dance from a global and contemporary perspective.

1

Introduction

Yutian Wong and Jens Richard Giersdorf

Passinho: an introduction

In the 2012 documentary A Batalha do Passinho (translated into English as Passinho Dance Off), filmmaker Emílio Domingos attempts to capture a history of passinho, the street dance form born in the favela of Rio de Janeiro, by documenting the role of YouTube in catapulting local dancers into becoming international stars. The obsession with recording and seeing oneself and one’s friends and rivals on screen matches the energy with which the mostly teenaged boys and young adult men practice and battle each other on street corners and parties. Ultimately, the documentary presages the familiar phenomenon in which a street dance style pioneered by a socially and economically disenfranchised population of mostly black male urban youth evolves into a legitimized dance form enabled by regional-as-nationalist recognition and capitalist circulation.

The process of legitimation emerged from the efforts to clean up Rio de Janeiro’s public image in the years leading up to the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. Police Pacifying Units, referred to as PPUs, were deployed in favelas in an attempt to suppress the violence surrounding the drug trade. Baile funk parties, the late night dance parties where passinho emerged, were associated with drug trafficking and money laundering. In an effort to curtail the violence associated with the drug trade, police raided baile funk parties and essentially banned the passinho by denying people permits to host dance parties.

Domingos’s film documents the moment when passinho is about to enter the Brazilian mainstream via a dance competition called A Batalha do Passinho. Created in 2011, the dance competition was originally a community event where participants competed for recognition and money as a “safe” alternative to dancing at baile funk parties (Jaguaribe 2014, 194). Produced before the dance form was to make its appearance on the international stage, Domingos’s film captures the hopeful ambitions of young dancers in the years leading up to passinho’s inclusion in the opening ceremony of the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, the subsequent adoption of passinho in music videos and stage shows by American pop and R&B stars such as Alicia Keys, and the corporate sponsorship of passinho dance competitions by companies such as Coca-Cola.¹ While A Batalha do Passinho attempts to present the gritty origins of the dance form, there is a sense that its later appearance on a corporatized global stage will be all but inevitable. From a narrative standpoint, the contrast between the highly theatricalized renditions of passinho at events such as the 2017 Rock in Rio music festival compared with Domingos’s attempt to seek out the origins of the dance form enacts a metanarrative within dance studies, in which the dancing body is continuously enmeshed in the conditions for its ability to dance, the ability to leave recognizable traces of its dancing, and the ability to remember moments of dancing.

FRE!HEIT: an introduction

Let us compare this narrative of passinho to an analysis of a video trailer for FRE!HEIT, David Brandstätter’s solo about freedom. The trailer for FRE!HEIT features a single male figure squatting on a group of white ceramic cups that are arranged on the floor to form an island. The cups are placed on the floor lip-side down, with the bottom of the cups facing up to form a relatively continuous surface upon which Brandstätter sits and crawls.² Every so often Brandstätter pushes a smaller grouping of cups out from under himself to create other islands. This moving cups around is also reminiscent of time-elapsed continental drift or sheets of Arctic sea ice breaking apart. Looking purposeful as if trying to solve a dilemma, Brandstätter attempts to move from one island of cups to another without touching the floor in between. At times it seems as if Brandstätter moves the cups to create an island in order to have a surface to move to in order to move somewhere. At other times he moves cups towards himself to create a mass that is large enough for him to occupy. Brandstätter squats with his weight on his two feet and his knuckles as he moves cautiously on all fours from one location to another.

Reminiscent of a wild animal, Brandstätter’s squatting posture makes him look like a primate, such as a gorilla, trying to pick his way across a dangerous river or through the patchwork-like maze of a wildlife corridor. He could be a polar bear stranded on a remnant of fast-disappearing sea ice or a refugee trapped between man-made and natural borders. He could be a squatter literally squatting in found space. Animals and humans on the move evoke a sense of freedom to move from one place to another, but Brandstätter’s carefulness suggests that something is amiss about freedom in its entirety. It is therefore surprising to discover that FRE!HEIT was inspired by a personal sense of freedom found while standing at a kitchen window smoking.³ Rather than making a larger statement about freedom in relation to planetary climate change or the global refugee crisis, FRE!HEIT addresses a sense of emotional relief following the death of a parent who had been in a coma for four years. Freedom as a concept is universalized to incorporate anything from reminiscences on the nature of life and death, impermanence, to the ability to do what you want. In this case, freedom includes dancing on top of ceramic cups accompanied by pop music. This singular focus on the choreographer-performer asserts the notion that the dance should be able to stand on its own, because the meaning is allowed to be free-floating. A “wrong interpretation” is a matter of reading too much into the dance, given that the trailer’s job is to highlight the most compelling representation of the dance to prospective viewers.

Whereas A Batalha do Passinho generates a sense of doing in which the viewer is sutured into the dancers’ earnest desire to do the dance, the trailer for FRE!HEIT does not produce a similar impulse to do, but rather to watch. At times, Brandstätter’s choreography is task-like, boring. Brandstätter looks like he is thinking very hard about what should happen next. The movement looks awkward, or at least uncomfortable to perform. Physical mastery over space takes place over physical mastery over one’s own body. Brandstätter’s viewer is tasked with watching in earnest in order to glean meaning. The viewer is told that there are multiple versions of the solo and that each one is different, but the conventions of watching concert dance requires the viewer to approach each version as something that is distinct and self-contained. In comparison, the physical dexterity of the passinho dancers is imagined as something that is ongoing long after the ethnographic camera has been turned off.

The tension between doing and watching dance is mediated by teaching and making dance as a variation on doing and watching. What of thinking about dance? What about rethinking thinking through dance? The work of analyzing and comparing two seemingly disparate dance practices demonstrates different approaches to dance studies. Situated within European experimental dance that borrows from visual art, Brandstätter’s performance is allowed to claim universal ideas about freedom as footage of his dancing in a black box theater could be anywhere, whereas the dancers featured in Passinho Dance Off remain fixed in the neighborhoods and street corners where they are filmed. Twice immortalized dancers like Cebolinha and Gambá⁴ are doubly fixed by Domingos’s film and their own self-produced YouTube videos, even as they circulate globally with millions of views.

Texting: an introduction

JG:Did you read Emergency Contact by Mary H.K. Choi? Another book about love and texting. Maybe that is the topic?

YW:Shall we write about love in our intro?

JG:I am not feeling much lately for dance. You go. Could be dance example #4.

YW:I think you love dance more than I do.

JG:You might be right. But maybe only the idea of it?

YW:I will think on it.

YW:Maybe we should text our introduction.

JG:I am working on it.

JG:What are your teaching days? Mine are M T TR. Did you get the conference funding?

YW:I teach T Th F. I am working on our intro today.

YW:Did you make it back? I figured out my dropbox. My desktop icon was linked to a different dropbox account. Anyways, I can now edit directly in the dropbox files.

JG:Perfect. Landed well. This way we can work on it without telling each other. Everyone there? Party on its way?

YW:Mimi is here. She’s on the plenary right now.

JG:Let’s have the original publication date on each essay. Are we done with Marta’s essay?

YW:Yeah. Fixed the formatting. I have the fan on. It got hot today. Working on the author bios for the previous contributors.

YW:Updated our to-do list. Senate meeting today and office hours.

JG:Brisket and tzimmes worked out really well. Meeting Susan today.

YW:Went to two panels yesterday.

JG:Did you see this? Watch the trailer. Sitting on cups!

YW:Sitting on cups kind of grows on you. I showed Blake. He said continents and frogs. Maybe write a whole chapter.

Dance studies: an introduction

Dance studies as a discipline is the practice of recognizing or remembering the dance or recognizing the trace and impact of its dance. More specifically, it is the writing down of the recognition that a dance exists or existed. The essays included in this new edition of The Routledge Dance Studies Reader document how the field has evolved, from the authorial concern with establishing analytical methods for studying dance in relation to itself and other fields to a place in which dance studies is an established field expanding the parameters of its disciplinary and topical boundaries in response to the ever-increasing ways that dancing is produced, consumed, and arbitrated virtually and materially.

In the two decades since the first edition of The Routledge Dance Studies Reader (1998) was published, dance studies has expanded topically, geographically, methodologically, and theoretically in response to the new technologies and ever more globalized movements of dance, dancing bodies and images of dancing bodies. As the field generates new formats for doing, teaching, watching, making, and thinking about and with dance, dance studies continues to understand the relationship between the always-overlapping activities and experiences of doing, teaching, watching, making, and thinking about and with dance. These dance activities are put into the service of building individual and community identities; establishing and affirming social and historical structures; enabling change through activism and resistance; reconfiguring socio-spatial relationships; and questioning the ontological nature of dance itself.

Beginning in the 1980s in the USA and the UK, the academic turn in the humanities towards cultural studies, critical theory, and identity politics informed the study of the arts as a nucleus of social structures. In dance, this turn towards theory was accompanied by a shift from a modernist emphasis on technique and expression towards a post-modern investigation of choreography that locates the ontology of dance and embodiment as central to the subject of dance itself. The turn towards theory in dance would appear to mirror intellectual developments in other art disciplines such as art history, theater history, literary studies, or film/media studies; however, these fields are often recognized as separate academic departments or named as a separate field of specialization within academic departments. For example, a Department of Art and Art History or an undergraduate degree in Art History names and separates historical and theoretical discourse from actual art making, whereas there are no Departments of Dance and Dance History and there are no degrees in Dance History at an undergraduate level. The study of dance under the rubric of Dance has remained institutionally and epistemologically wedded to dancing (Giersdorf 2009).

Due to the institutional positioning of dance in the academy, the emergence of dance studies as an academic discipline in the USA and UK occurred out of twinned choreographic and intellectual trajectories in which dancers and scholars working from within dance were concerned with the conscious investigation of the politics of social embodiment. In contrast, dance studies in Continental Europe was often established by scholars predominantly trained in the humanities and social sciences and who applied methodologies from fields like literature, philosophy, sociology, and theater studies to dance. Even though these differences initially created radically different methodologies and definitions of politics in the discourses of English-speaking and non-Anglophone scholars working in different national contexts, these differences have been sifted through a global academic exchange and the incorporation of non-Western national discourses originating in the Global South and Asia.

As a result, the current academic approaches to dance worldwide may be broadly categorized into three interrelated areas: dance as method and site of political agency; dance practice as research; and the ontology of dance. In order to establish dance studies as an academic field, scholars such as Susan Foster (1995, 1996), Mark Franko (1995), Randy Martin (1998), Marta Savigliano (1995), Susan Manning (1993), Ann Cooper Albright (1997), Cynthia Novack (1990), and Janet Adshead-Lansdale (1994) attempted to recast dance and choreography as a method rather than an object of study. In their work, choreography and dance become models for accessing, organizing, and destabilizing political, structuralist, and post-colonial enquiries. This approach would provide a methodology for similar investigations into questions of gender, race, sexuality, class, and nationality in relationship to the politically transgressive possibilities of dance (Gottschild 1996; Manning 1993; Daly 1995; Burt 1995; Tomko 1999; Ness 1992).

This strategic move towards theory represents a conscious repositioning of dance studies with respect to dancing. In response to the turn towards theory, dance scholars began to reframe dance practice as research by turning towards phenomenology, body-centered discourse, and social justice movements to demonstrate how acts of dancing have the potential to disrupt academic hierarchies around theory versus practice. Practice as research provides the material solution to logocentrism—the focus on speech and writing as central to communication—by privileging the immediacy and efficacy of embodiment. This approach to understanding communication can also privilege the sensate experience of the body as that which enables a better-informed understanding of the dance or what a dance can do (Albright 1997, Midgelow 2007, Rothfield 2010, Martin 1998).

Contrary to the immediacy and the specificity of the materiality of dancing bodies and the agentive possibilities of choreography, a third approach considers the ontology of dance as an end in and of itself. This approach seeks to understand what dance is as a universal category and how a structural understanding of dance can enable a comprehension of the ontology of other social structures. For instance, by dissecting the unique ways that dance is inherently political, dance studies contribute to theorizations of politics and aesthetics simultaneously. Even though the third approach engages with specific choreographies or techniques, the issue is not the intervention into a specific system, but rather the performance of a general and abstract discourse on the philosophical, aesthetic, and political potentialities of dance as a generalized category (Phelan 1993b; Lepecki 2006; Brandstetter 1995; Klein 1994; Siegmund 2006a; Hewitt 2005; Franko 1995, 2002).

It is important to remember that these broad categorizations are not necessarily discrete and that it is possible to theorize dance across these three discourses. The reality, though, looks different, and scholars—depending on their nationality, disciplinary affiliation, and academic generation—often assign themselves exclusively to one of the three discourses. This Reader is concerned with exploring the multiple ways that framing dance as method, practice, and ontology can intersect for the purpose of working through how the discursive power and disciplinary investments of each approach give form to the object of study—dance.

Structuring dance studies

The first edition of The Routledge Dance Studies Reader (1998) focused primarily on scholarship on Western concert dance published in the 1980s and 1990s. Alexandra Carter’s introduction to the Reader framed the emergence of dance studies from the academy as part of the larger struggle with dance’s marginalization within the academy. The second edition of The Routledge Dance Studies Reader (2010) retained many of the essays from the first edition, but increased the number of essays concerned with no...