I would like to begin by considering Pragmatismâs advocacy of an autobiographical approach to philosophical inquiry and by sharing two personal experiences that provoked this project.
The first generation of American Pragmatist philosophersâCharles Pierce, William James, and John Deweyâdid not emphasize autobiographical experience in their professional writings but their biographers have observed that aspects of the foundersâ personal lives significantly influenced their philosophical investigations. In turn, this has led some contemporary Pragmatists to argue that Pragmatism is an inherently narrative philosophy (Menand 2002). For example, Richard Rorty (2000) discusses how aspects of his childhood and young adulthood shaped the course of his early philosophical studies, drew him to Deweyâs work, and fueled his developments of Pragmatism, and Richard Shusterman (1997, 1999) at times uses autobiographical writing to advance his work in the field of Pragmatist philosophy he developedâsomaesthetics.
One reason for emphasizing autobiography concerns Pragmatismâs stance on theory and practice.
Briefly , Dewey (1958) observed that the traditional separation of theory and practice is rooted in a dualist metaphysics which holds that reality is a static given best disclosed by reason. An account that takes reality as ever-changing, however, holds that philosophy can help negotiate problematic situations which occur in the course of everyday life. On the Pragmatist account, philosophical inquiry functions instrumentally when it advances nuanced understandings of ethical, socio-political, educational, religious, or artistic problems which emerge when physical or cultural environments change. Autobiography is always relevant because such problems are encountered by unique people in specific cultural contexts and because solutions may affect growth and personal transformation. In this spirit, I offer some autobiographical details that pertain to the performance research project detailed in this book.
When I was an undergraduate, my study of academic philosophy and my physical practices were separate endeavors. While learning about the history of western philosophy in classrooms, I cultivated an interest in Chinese martial arts traditionsâKung-fu (ć怫), Daoist Qigong (æ°Łć), Tai Chi Chuan (ć€Șæ„”æł), Zen meditation, and Bagua Zhang (ć
«ćŠæ), a lesser-known internal martial art based on the Daoist divination manual, the I-Ching . I trained these forms in the United States, Taiwan, and mainland China and came to see that they are informed by specific philosophical and religious belief systems. Zen meditation and many martial arts training methods are rooted in Buddhist ethics and philosophy of personal identity, yin-yang theory undergirds Daoist Qigong and Tai Chi solo choreography and partner work, and all the practices mentioned are traditionally taught with a pedagogy informed by Confucian virtue ethics. After studying classical texts of these philosophical traditions, I discovered that martial arts practice can entail an embodied study of specific ontological, epistemological, aesthetic, and ethical concepts. This was also supported by extensive travel in China which allowed me to see how those concepts inform other aspects of Chinese culture, whether art forms such as calligraphy or theater, the practice of religious pilgrimage, fengshui (éąšæ°Ž), traditional Chinese medicine, or norms of everyday social interaction. These experiences in turn significantly transformed my martial arts practice. Whereas early on I focused primarily on developing self-defense skills, through time I came to see my practice as an essential part of a philosophical way of life.
After completing graduate studies in philosophy, my scholarly work turned to interdisciplinary questions such as the relevance of classical Confucian virtue ethics in contemporary social contexts and various ways that art and ethics may intersect. Also, over time, I shifted attention away from the martial arts toward theatrical performance, originally by researching how self-defense technique and martial arts choreographies could be developed into dance vocabularies. I studied improvisation techniques such as gaga, William Forsytheâs improvisation technologies, and contact improvisation, techniques which allowed me to move beyond the theoretical and practical parameters of martial movement and that supported the development of choreography for performance. More recently, I completed graduate work in dance performance and my scholarship turned to topics such as the intersection of the philosophy of technology and concert dance and the possibilities of political performance. This work grew out specific dance practices such as experimenting with interactive digital technologies or performing in work by choreographers who are personally committed to the idea of dance as a form of political activism.
After discussing political performance with several contemporary dance artists working at semi-professional and professional levels and after reading relevant work by dance historians and theorists, I became interested in the ability of performance to engage local and regional socio-political issues. I currently live and work in the Southeastern United States, a part of the country that continues to struggle with social justice issues, institutionalized racism, and at times blatantly regressive political policies. Several choreographers and performance artists in my current city of Charlotte, North Carolina, developed and presented political performance in response to recent racial violence such as the mass shooting by Dylann Roof at an African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina, and the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott by a Charlotte police officer (which was followed by several days of protests and riots). This led me to investigate the sense of artistic obligation to engage pressing social justice issues and to consider how political performance may address the needs of a particular community (Mullis 2015). Performance with clear socio-political content may create inroads to audiences unfamiliar with contemporary theatrical practices as it speaks to pressing questions about life in the American South.
In turn, some of my own performance work began to examine aspects of local and regional history. For example, one project investigated strikes by textile mill workers in the Southern Piedmont region of the United States that occurred before the Great Depression. This history is important given that many Southeastern cities developed around textile mills to the extent that architecture and urban planning remains expressive of the industry. I was also drawn to the strikes for personal reasons since, like many individuals from the region, I have family members who worked in textile mills in the 1970s and 1980s and who lost their jobs as manufacturing was moved to East Asia (Mullis 2016). For many years, the abandoned mills stood in the center of decaying neighborhoods until revitalization projects and the process of gentrification began.
I discovered that collaborating with a local historian and a neighborhood association engaged in historical preservation efforts brought new demographics to performances and, through informal post-performance discussions, learned that some audience membersâ perceptions of public and private spaces important to the fledgling labor movement of the 1930s were significantly affected.1 Second, it became clear that the aesthetic advanced by the pieceâs music, costuming, and scenic design was consistent with the folk aesthetic characteristic of contemporary popular music formsâsuch as Americana, bluegrass, and country musicâand thereby inadvertently supported a romanticized idea of rustic white Appalachian culture (Huber 2008).
While researching the history of the strikes, I also learned about the role religion played on both sides of the struggle for workersâ rights in villages owned and paternalistically operated by the textile mills (Hanchett 1998: 95â100). Whereas churches sanctioned by the mills stressed a hierarchical theology and Protestant work ethic conducive to relational dynamics between management and workers, mill villages were also regularly visited by itinerant preachers who practiced a more decentralized, charismatic, improvisatory, and physical form of Protestant Christianity that appealed to many workers critical of the institution that dominated their way of life (Hall et al. 2012: 220â221). Like musicians of the time, these preachers toured the âkerosene circuit,â traveling from town to town to preach and lead often raucous meetings with stomping, clapping, singing, and shouting on front porches and in living rooms. I would later discover that this decentralized charismatic form of Christianity began in the American Midwest in the late nineteenth century, quickly expanded toward the coasts, and appealed to poor and working-class individuals such as farmers and textile mill workers. At the time, I found the socio-political implications of religion in textile mill culture intriguing but, given the piece I was developing could not address all aspects of mill-village life and given its focus on historical labor issues and their bearing on contemporary labor practices in the Southeast, I decided to leave the issue.
1 Sackcloth ânâ Ashes
Let me share another story. While studying philosophy in graduate school, I would often go to music concerts performed by local and national touring bands. One evening, some friends and I went to see a band we liked, but we were unfamiliar with the opening act, a group from Denver, Colorado, called Sixteen Horsepower. The concert was held in an expansive brick warehouse in Charlotte, North Carolina, which had been converted into a bar and music venue. The four men of Sixteen Horsepower walked out on the stage wearing simple dress clothes and carrying instruments used in bluegrass and Southern Appalachian music; an upright bass, banjo, acoustic guitar, and Chemnitzer concertina. I expected them to have an alternative country sound that was popular at the time, but the first song featured minor chords, driving repetitive rock rhythms, and lyrics about personal conflicts with others, feelings of guilt associated with moral failure, and the possibility of spiritual redemption. The show also featured a dark theatricality with low lighting, little eye contact among the band members, and no direct engagement with the audience. I listened intently to the lyrics and discovered that they were all religious in nature. The frontmanâDavid Eugene Edwardsâwas presenting a gothic adaptation of old-time gospel music sung by Protestant evangelical Christians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the content of the music was not celebratory or spiritually uplifting in the manner of traditional hymns. It was full of religious imagery about conflict, punishment, and redemption which I took as expressing something of a harsh Calvinist attitude toward weakness of will and of human nature more generally. Whereas traditional hymns usually feature words of encouragement, Edwardsâ lyrics were anguished and, at...