Strange Footing

Poetic Form and Dance in the Late Middle Ages

Seeta Chaganti

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780226548043
  9780226547992
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226548180
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: Literature

For premodern audiences, poetic form did not exist solely as meter, stanzas, or rhyme scheme. Rather, the form of a poem emerged as an experience, one generated when an audience immersed in a culture of dance encountered a poetic text.

Exploring the complex relationship between medieval dance and medieval poetry, Strange Footing argues that the intersection of texts and dance produced an experience of poetic form based in disorientation, asymmetry, and even misstep. Medieval dance guided audiences to approach poetry not in terms of the body's regular marking of time and space, but rather in the irregular and surprising forces of virtual motion around, ahead of, and behind the dancing body. Reading medieval poems through artworks, paintings, and sculptures depicting dance, Seeta Chaganti illuminates texts that have long eluded our full understanding, inviting us to inhabit their strange footings askew of conventional space and time.

Strange Footing deploys the motion of dance to change how we read medieval poetry, generating a new theory of poetic form for medieval studies and beyond.

PART I

CHAPTER ONE

“Vanysshed Was This Daunce”:

Reenactment, Experience, Virtuality

This chapter explains Strange Footing’s approach to medieval dance by defining that approach’s major terms: reenactment, experience, virtuality. My method for analyzing medieval dance invokes several subdisciplines across performance studies, history, and philosophy, and my nomenclature will signify differently to readers of different disciplinary backgrounds. For these reasons term definition becomes especially important. I begin by elaborating upon reenactment as an experimental methodology by which to deepen our understanding of premodern scenes of dance as these were both performed and watched. I proceed to consider the implications of identifying, through reenactment, the experience of participatory spectatorship in medieval dance. What emerges in these experiences is the presence of virtual environments perceptible to medieval dance audiences and participants. I end by reading a lyric from Boccaccio’s Decameron to illustrate the experience of virtuality that we can discern in the reenactment of dance. This text does not number among the poems I read closely for the experience of form; rather, it illustrates the need for experimental reenactment and portrays the virtuality that supplements experiences of dance. But by ending with a brief look at a lyric, I draw attention to an inextricable relation of dance and verse and set the stage for the ensuing readings that reenact poetic form as an experience produced in interactions among media.

Narrative Reenactment

This section will describe the activity I term narrative reenactment. My approach is conceptually indebted to performance theory’s approaches to reenactment, which confront the issues of temporality and historicity that arise in the process of representing a performance of the past. In particular I respond to Mark Franko’s formulation of dance reenactment as not only theorizing but also problematizing the archive, time, the alignment of historical subjects, and the history of reenactment itself.1 Reenactments as performances contribute to his investigation, such as a piece that compels attention to the space between past and present by featuring visible costume changes during its reperformance of historical choreography; and a piece that incorporates archival encounter into the performance.2 Freddie Rokem further examines the performance-based work of reenactment in terms of the “hyper-historian,” the performer who negotiates past and present, sometimes through metatheatrical means. This performer does not “‘scientific[ally]’” replicate past performance but rather reenacts, through consciousness of his own location in the present, the “conditions” characteristic of historical performance or event.3 While my method draws on concepts resonant with Franko’s and Rokem’s, it differs in producing narrative reenactments rather than considering performance objects. These narratives elucidate—through an awareness of the postmodern perspective—the conditions of spectatorship and participation characteristic of vanished medieval performance.

Performance reconstruction contends with the difficulty of accounting fully for the body’s historical contingency. Dance and music historians like Margit Sahlin, Ann Harding, Ingrid Brainard, Mabel Dolmetsch, and, more recently, Joan Rimmer and Robert Mullally have meticulously researched various movement components of early dance; their work provides an indispensable foundation for my readings throughout this study.4 Dance scholarship has sometimes pursued its goals through reconstruction projects and performances, as did Brainard with her Cambridge Court Dancers ensemble (founded in 1969). But ultimately, no matter the level of detail at which we might understand an early dance, the fact of historical contingency renders it partial to us.5 As Skiles Howard argues, “there is no ‘body’ that is not shaped by historical forces.”6 Furthermore, archival evidence can be unreliable even when it purports to represent dance. Sharon Fermor points out, for instance, that fifteenth-century Italian painters who depicted dance often did not do so with the goal of recording dance techniques and practices accurately; rather, they drew upon conventions influenced by classical models or else exaggerated movements for emphasis or idealization, presenting a highly mediated representation of dance.7 Finally, it is important to bear in mind that a “master conceit” of traditional reconstruction methodology has been “to evoke what no longer is.”8 As such, it must create the sensation of having entered a past world, a sensation perforce undermined by any element drawing attention to its incompleteness or contingency. And indeed, the staging of medieval performance has moved increasingly away from the purely reconstructive goal.9

The present study converses with other scholarship in medieval studies that considers these issues in the study of the Middle Ages more broadly. A number of medieval subfields foreground a self-conscious perspective on modernity and postmodernity as the filter through which to analyze the Middle Ages. Scholars of medieval theatrical performance such as John R. Elliott and Margaret Rogerson have, for instance, focused on the twentieth-century restaging of medieval mystery plays, following David Lowenthal’s encouragement to question the dismissal of “heritage industries” and instead acknowledge the political and economic ideologies underlying reenactment.10 Claire Sponsler, meanwhile, examines the self-conscious use of reconstructed and nostalgic performances of the medieval in the early assertion of American identity.11 Jody Enders looks to contemporary constructs like “snuff” to consider questions about “where theatre ends and life begins” (or vice versa) in the Middle Ages.12 Elsewhere, she investigates this question further in terms of accident, intentionality, crime, and consequence by juxtaposing pre- and early-modern performance events with contemporary media spectacles.13 Alexander Nagel revises our understanding of medieval and modern art’s relation by questioning the reifying assumptions that separate them. He reexamines artistic modernity through the lens of certain premodern conventions. By his account, multimedia installation art reflects a more fully representative artistic condition than modern easel art because of the installation’s place in a longer history of “multimedia environments.”14 Finally, Carolyn Dinshaw challenges the temporal structures medievalists have traditionally legitimized in studying our period, offering as an alternative a modern amateur desire for the Middle Ages that accommodates queer forms of cross-temporality.15 My approach intersects with these other strategies in a few ways. Like Dinshaw, I privilege the category of the nonprofessional, though I do so within the context of premodern dance. There, as my introduction notes, the condition of amateurism allows certain medieval practices to exist as quotidian and habitual in ways not easily visible to us. Like Nagel, I capitalize upon multimedia environments as sites to consider the premodern and the postmodern in each other’s terms. For me, these themes underlie a reenactment process distinct from the recreation of a past event.

To lay a foundation for my reenactment process, I will examine some established uses of the term reenactment. One use refers to the performance of historical scenes, especially battles. Rebecca Schneider, for instance, reads Civil War reenactment as a performance mode that seeks both to evoke the past and to meditate upon the implications of this activity; it is “an intense, embodied inquiry into temporal repetition, temporal reoccurrence.”16 Even as a battle reenactor depicts a vivid past through detailed accuracy, he might at the same time annotate the battle with a refrain of continued ideological weight: “the Civil War isn’t over.”17 In this case, a specific agenda requires the reenactment to acknowledge a metadiscursive frame, a dialogue between past and present. More generally, such frames rely upon the body’s temporal ambiguity within the reenactment project. The very inaccessibility of experiential evidence both foregrounds the conundrum of the irretrievable past and enables the reenactment process to explore the situating of the body—historical and present—across time.

To articulate these complexities, reenactment practices sometimes incorporate a theory of historical study also known as reenactment.18 R. G. Collingwood apparently first began to consider the historian’s reenacting work while wondering how to listen to a piece of music played in the present but composed in the past. His theory, however, developed to address not performance in particular but rather the philosophy of historical inquiry more broadly.19 For Collingwood, reenactment characterizes the historian’s consciousness in the act of scholarly investigation into the past. The historian, he contends, is looking for “processes of thought. All history is the history of thought.”20 Collingwood acknowledges the inevitable contribution of the historian’s own consciousness to this dynamic, terming this process “re-enactment”: “the historian brings to bear on the problem all the powers of his own mind. . . . It is not a passive surrender to the spell of another’s mind. . . . The historian not only re-enacts past thought, he re-enacts it in the context of his own knowledge.”21 Historical understanding perceives the difference between the historian’s perspective and that of the historical agent, even while considering the implications of inhabiting that distant perspective. Karsten R. Stueber argues that fundamental to Collingwood’s theory is the idea of an “indexical” perspective on history.22 Reenactment, that is to say, acknowledges that while the historian can describe the processes and activities of the past, these descriptions are profoundly shaped by his own “habits of thought.”23

Reenactment in the theory of historical study reminds us that performance-based reenactment can be vulnerable to some of the same problems as traditional reconstruction, and such performance must therefore ensure that it investigate its own processes and involve the frame of the present in its reenactment of the past. When performance reenactment limits itself to privileging what Vanessa Agnew calls “body-based testimony,” it produces an excessively narrow focus on the “minutiae” of experience without questioning the inevitable mediation of this experience. Agnew suggests that Collingwood and other historians introduce a useful awareness of the “essential otherness of historical agents” through their own engagement with reenactment.24 As a historical theory, reenactment exhorts the reenacted spectacle to accommodate critical self-awareness concerning the spectacle’s mediations across time and subjective perspective.25

Dance-based reenactment can reflect upon these temporal and perspectival mediations with particular efficacy. To make this point, I turn to the choreographer Doris Humphrey’s The Shakers (1931). This piece reenacts historic Shaker devotional dance in the sense that it embeds a historic movement practice within choreography that reflects other conceptual and aesthetic agendas that are specific to Humphrey in her own time. Richard Schechner uses this dance to illuminate the pathways by which performance-based behaviors travel and recur, developing his model of performance as “twice-behaved behavior.”26 Specifically, he compares Shaker dances as historic originals to Humphrey’s The Shakers as well as to Robin Evanchuk’s reconstruction of the “authentic” original dances. Humphrey’s piece, Schechner notes, does not present itself as an “ethnographic reconstruction.”27 Indeed, the dance is distinctively Humphrey’s, featuring her signature cambré and her unmistakable port de bras that presents as at once curved and angular, as well as her modernist ensemble ethos.28 And yet, this performance prompts an anthropologist specializing in the Shakers to opine: “Humphrey’s choreography embodies a wide range of Shaker culture.” In Schechner’s terms it is “able to actualize something of Shaker culture”; it “comes close to expressing the heart of the sect.” The piece’s 1955 revival deeply moved one of the last two surviving Shaker brothers.29 Evanchuk’s stated goal of authenticity in her reconstruction, in contrast, elicits from Schechner some questions that elucidate the problematic nature of reconstruction: if “‘authentic’ . . . which dances, performed on which occasions, before what audiences, with what dancers?”30

As a frame for a historical past, Humphrey’s modernist perspective thus enhances, rather than obscures, the audience’s encounter with and understanding of that past. Schechner’s discernment of the “heart of the sect” in Humphrey’s piece tells us something important. Humphrey demonstrates here what Franko has described in his theory of dance reenactment: she “sacrifices the reproduction of a work to the replication of its most powerful intended effects.”31 Humphrey, that is, employs gestural vocabularies to enter two temporalities—her present and the past object—into conversation. That conversation promotes our understanding not of the minutiae of historical gesture but rather of the gesture’s meaning through its very mediation. Humphrey’s model foregrounds commingled temporalities, meditating on a historical devotional idiom through a modernist ideal of community expressed in movement practice. This quality grants spectators access to effects that a performance preoccupied with the details of its own...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Conclusion: Dance in the Margins, Dance in the Center
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Footnotes