Dancing Across Borders

Perspectives on Dance, Young People and Change

Charlotte Svendler Nielsen, Stephanie Burridge, Charlotte Svendler Nielsen, Stephanie Burridge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000768770
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Dancing Across Borders presents formal and non-formal settings of dance education where initiatives in different countries transcend borders: cultural and national borders, subject borders, professional borders and socio-economic borders. It includes chapters featuring different theoretical perspectives on dance and cultural diversity, alongside case narratives that show these perspectives in a specific cultural setting. In this way, each section charts the processes, change and transformation in the lives of young people through dance.

Key themes include how student learning is enhanced by cultural diversity, experiential teaching and learning involving social, cross-cultural and personal dimensions. This conceptually aligns with the current UNESCO protocols that accent empathy, creativity, cooperation, collaboration alongside skills- and knowledge-based learning in an endeavour to create civic mindedness and a more harmonious world.

This volume is an invaluable resource for teachers, policy makers, artists and scholars interested in pedagogy, choreography, community dance practice, social and cultural studies, aesthetics and interdisciplinary arts. By understanding the impact of these cross-border collaborative initiatives, readers can better understand, promote and create new ways of thinking and working in the field of dance education for the benefit of new generations.

PART 1
Collaborations across arts practice and academia

PHOTO 1.0 Arts-integrated educational project in South Africa (see Chapter 2)

Photographer: Author’s personal collection

1
Dancing past categories

Researching a live art project with participants

Pat Thomson and Emily Pringle

Introduction

This chapter reports a live art research project involving young people aged 15–25, two participating ethnographers, a choreographer and a film-maker in the Tate Modern art museum in London. Our research explored what making and editing film might add to an ethnographic study of young people’s participation in live art. The project was inspired by choreographer Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A (1966) and structured as a typical gallery education offer of artist-led workshops. In addition, participants authored an extended visual representation of their experiences and curated an art exhibit.

Our intention was to trial a collaborative and creative methodological approach (Kara, 2015) that allowed young people to make explicit their interpretations of their cultural experiences. We aimed to take advantage of the inherent procedural evaluative elements of the creative process. Ongoing critical reflection of the progress of the live art workshop and film-making were combined with assessments of value; these were crucial to both the progress of the project and the research.

The project provided new insights but also raised several questions that are addressed in this chapter. We gained valuable insights into young people’s experience of live art performance. However, we came up against a degree of confusion bordering on resistance by audiences in terms of how to interpret the individual films made by participants that constituted their representations of what it meant to take part. We thus became aware of the possibilities and challenges that exist in researching live art, but also in presenting the expressions of an ephemeral, collaborative and creative research process.

The research project – live art and film-making

This collaboration built on five years of work between a university researcher (Pat) and art museum practitioner-researcher (see Pringle, 2019) based in Tate London’s Learning department (Emily). Our research practice is co-constructed (Facer & Enright, 2016), beginning and working with, in and through gallery education practice.

Our project embodied the Tate Learning approach. This approach is based in and builds on the visitor’s views and experiences and foregrounds art and artistic practice as a means by which to enable creative learning. The aim is to support intellectual, emotional and social change in those engaging with art in the gallery. We offered two sequential workshops for volunteer young people. The first workshop brought together an artist, the art ‘work’ Trio A (1966) and contemporary art practice. The artist was Sara Wookey, one of five dancers entrusted by Rainer to become a living archive and teacher of the work, who brought to the workshop her own choreographic practice of working with crowd movements. Fourteen young people attended; 12 were young women with varied experience with dance and 2 were male school students interested in street dance. The second workshop was led by Camilla Robinson, artist and film-maker, who worked with eight of the same participants on their own short films documenting their experiences of the live art workshop.

As per the Tate Learning approach, pre-planning was undertaken with the two artists leading the workshops. Artistic practice sits at the heart of creative learning in the gallery and art museum pedagogy is framed by “the skills, dispositions, and knowledge artists bring” (Turvey & Walton, 2017, p. 16). It was important that the workshops were shaped by the artists’ creative input. For example, it emerged that the choreographic concepts and constraints Sara was using resonated with the discipline of film editing (e.g. gaze, pattern and space). This perceived synergy prompted our shared decision to impose a set of restrictions for the films. Participants would be invited to work with pre-selected samples of black and white film footage, no sound was to be introduced that was not in the room and no music and no special effects apart from changing speed or reversing footage. Each film was to be a maximum of three minutes’ duration. We took the minimalism and rigour of Trio A (1966) into the film-making process, and in keeping with this, a film ‘manifesto’ was written up for participants to refer to during the film workshops.

Ultimately, Sara led a four-day choreographic workshop which Camilla filmed. A selection of footage was then given to participants who worked with this ‘found’ material. Adapting ‘found’ material is common in gallery education and in keeping with contemporary arts practices of ‘re-enactment’ and ‘re-mixing’ (e.g. Sprague, 2011). Indeed, the choreographic workshop ‘re-worked’ a pre-existing piece of live art, Trio A (1966), which participants partially re-materialised and work with, and from, to develop their own small pieces of choreography. However, some people who have seen the resulting films and heard us speak about the project have been troubled by these early design decisions, as we will explain later.

We participated directly in the dance workshops. We did this in part to avoid disrupting the democratic and immersive environment that Sara wanted to create but also to understand the haptic and possibly ‘untranslatable’ qualities of Sara’s art practice. Our understanding of the importance of immersion in art practice is grounded in ethnographic methodologies where the researcher is engaged as a sensual and emotional participant rather than a detached observer (Behar, 1996; Pink, 2009). We recorded our experience and that of participants through conventional ethnographic processes – field notes and photos. We did not conduct interviews at any stage of the project, as we felt this would create an unhelpful formality and distance between us and the participants, although we did organise several recorded group conversations; we listened to these after the workshops and later as we were analysing post-workshop. The decision to not interview was ultimately contentious (see later).

The workshops

The dance workshop was organised around key concepts – space, time, gaze, level, pattern. It consisted of eight key activities.

1. (1) An introductory ‘warm-up session, repeated each day, of walking in patterns as a ‘crowd’
2. (2) Learning the introductory moves to Trio A
3. (3) Inventing dance moves
4. (4) Developing a form of notation for an invented dance sequence which could then be ‘read’ by others
5. (5) Producing a ‘yes’ manifesto (after Rainer’s ‘no’ manifesto)
6. (6) Eating lunch together
7. (7) Individual and group reflection
8. (8) Performing for each other, performing together and then for a small invited group on the final day.

The walking ‘warm-up’ was a key component of the dance workshop experience and the resulting participants’ films. Lasting for about an hour, it began with ‘basic’ everyday movements around the room in two circles, one clockwise and the other counter. Sara gradually introduced more complex patterns using arm and step sequences. The exercise was rhythmic, almost hypnotic. Minds settled into bodies, we focused on experiencing the moment. We stayed individuals but also became one, moving together. On the last day, Sara challenged the group to continue the walk in slow motion. This produced an almost dream-like experience, the hypnotic effects of repeated activity heightened by the dramatic change in pace.

The three all-day, film-editing workshops were facilitated by Camilla and Tom Thistlethwaite (a film editor brought in by Camilla) and observed by the researchers, during which eight participants created their own individual short films. Following these workshops, we exhibited the participants’ work in the Learning gallery at Tate Britain for a week. Following discussion, the participants’ collective decision was to show their films in the exhibition space as individually un-authored and in sequence as one film.¹

What was on offer in the workshops? What did participants take up?

Learning in a gallery context involves acquiring knowledge and learning new ways of being in and thinking about the world. Contemporary art can challenge or transform the way in which people see, experience and think about themselves and their everyday world. However, neither of these is easy to comprehend. Learning is often thought of as an individual activity, partly because education institutions assess it in this way. Yet learning in the gallery is often profoundly social, and part of the ontological learning on offer centres on diverse ways of being together with others. The dance workshop offered learning in all these areas.

All the young people wanted to come to the workshop. Their reasons for coming were diverse but all were open to new experiences. The workshop appeared to meet their expectations in as much as they kept coming. And during the workshops we noticed considerable focus and engagement. There was willingness to commit to what was asked, including doing unfamiliar activities, often where they were visibly taking risks in ‘learning’. The young people enthusiastically struggled with unfamiliar body positions, remembering sequences of movements and working closely with people they had only just met. We have identified eight areas that help account for the young people’s levels of engagement in and learning from the dance workshop:

1. 1 The workshop was about dance, providing a chance to learn about or become reacquainted with the art form per se and with choreography.
2. 2 The workshop drew on principles from the work of Yvonne Rainer and Trio A (1966). Some cultural knowledge about the live art canon was thus made available to participants, although it was kept relatively low key.
3. 3 Sara explicitly worked with choreographic concepts, manifesting these in group movement. She offered both a specific dance language and its embodiment as action. This might be construed as learning ‘how to dance’, but because this was about ‘doing’, there was also the opportunity to be and become differently through and with this group movement. This haptic learning was not just about ‘knowhow’ but also an ontological offer.
   

   FIGURE 1.1 Working at the gallery (personal collection of the authors)
4. 4 The group considered the difficulties of notation and archiving through practical experience of inventing movements, recording them and having another person interpret their text. This raised abstract and political questions about liveness and transmission which extend beyond dance to other performance art forms.
5. 5 The group itself formed another aspect of learning available to participants. Participants worked with strangers in small groups, making choreography together as well as individually. They were required to communicate, negotiate, show empathy for varying levels of skill and respect for different ideas and contributions. These ‘soft skills’ are often associated with both citizenship and vocational cultural value but are also seen within art practice as having intrinsic relational value.
6. 6 Participants were given some experience of ‘performance’. Although there was no expectation that there would be a polished piece at the end of the workshop, there was a sharing with invited guests on the last day. This allowed the participants to appreciate contemporary dance without artifice, one of Rainer’s principles.²
7. 7 The cultural value associated with Tate itself. This was a free gallery education workshop with a high-quality artist in a prestigious museum. The experience could be used by participants on curriculum vitae and as a springboard for applications for study or funding.
8. 8 This was also a ‘youth voice’ focused research project. Participants knew their opinions were important in the research and for some there was an altruistic sense of contributing to knowledge, something greater than their own learning.

Our readings of the film

Watching the final film, we saw all these dance workshop activities represented. To interrogate the meanings present within the films we first attempted some content analysis (Rose, 2016) – we counted the frequency of each activity. We discovered that the walking warm-up and slow-motion walking appeared most often, but this told us little. We therefore approached our analysis of the film in the same way as the workshop – that is, as participant observers. We recorded what stood out from the framing, pacing and general focus of the films, as well as noting our sensual responses (Elsaesser & Hagener, 2016). We also brought our prior experiences and existing analysis as participating ethnographers to this reading.

We observed how the films represented and recreated the rhythm and repetition characteristic of the workshop, notably the walking warm-up. Walking together was interspersed with images of sociality and contrasting moments of stillness and reflection. We also saw play and humour. Each film is unique; however, they present a common story of immersion, embodied engagement and deep attention.

Here, we think, is the cultural value of the dance workshop experience. Participants brought their minds back to their bodies and were temporarily part of a bigger whole. They formed new friendships based in the ‘strange’ and shared. A new movement vocabulary was embedded/embodied in practice and through repetition, a choreographic vocabulary that could apply equally to creative and quotidian activities. There was intellectual stimulation too, as participants grappled with the in-commensurability of sign systems. How can movement be translated into notations, recorded and then communicated effectively to others? In our view the films present a richly detailed creative representation of young people’s cultural experience of live art. But not everyone we showed it to agreed.

Is this film research or art?

Since its production the film has had two outings in public seminars. The young people who took part have all been notified of these events and, at each event, some have chosen to speak about their experiences. We have thus had the opportunity to compare our experience and analysis of the two workshops with those of participants. We also presented the film at an invitational seminar organised by the funder to which researchers engaged in actively investigating arts and cultural value were invited and at two educational research conferences.

Most people that have watched the film have noted young people’s concentration, repetition and rhythm, and sociality, just as we did. Dance researchers have been much more specific and have pointed out the ways in which the young people have made visual their new choreographic repertoire. However, a minority in the audiences we have asked to talk with us about our research question – what can the participants’ films tell us about their experience of live art, and the value they put on that experience – have had concerns. Notably, a significant minority of social scientists have worried about the films and their status in terms of ‘rigorous’ research. They expressed four main objections:

1. 1 Young people should have shot the film themselves. Using pre-selected ‘found’ footage cannot lead to an ‘authentic’ representation of their experience.
2. 2 We should have formally interviewed each of the young people about ...