The Bloomsbury Companion to Dance Studies

Sherril Dodds, Sherril Dodds

• Verlag: Bloomsbury Academic
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350024472
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Thema: Danza

The Bloomsbury Companion to Dance Studies brings together leading international dance scholars in this single collection to provide a vivid picture of the state of contemporary dance research. The book commences with an introduction that privileges dancing as both a site of knowledge formation and a methodological approach, followed by a provocative overview of the methods and problems that dance studies currently faces as an established disciplinary field. The volume contains eleven core chapters that each map out a specific area of inquiry: Dance Pedagogy, Practice-As-Research, Dance and Politics, Dance and Identity, Dance Science, Screendance, Dance Ethnography, Popular Dance, Dance History, Dance and Philosophy, and Digital Dance. Although these sub-disciplinary domains do not fully capture the dynamic ways in which dance scholars work across multiple positions and perspectives, they reflect the major interests and innovations around which dance studies has organized its teaching and research. Therefore each author speaks to the labels, methods, issues and histories of each given category, while also exemplifying this scholarship in action. The dances under investigation range from experimental conceptual concert dance through to underground street dance practices, and the geographic reach encompasses dance-making from Europe, North and South America, the Caribbean and Asia. The book ends with a chapter that looks ahead to new directions in dance scholarship, in addition to an annotated bibliography and list of key concepts. The volume is an essential guide for students and scholars interested in the creative and critical approaches that dance studies can offer.

1

Introduction

Sherril Dodds

Agonies of anthologizing: Before

Shortly before writing this Introduction, a brief conversation with a dance scholar friend in a crowded bar in Philadelphia provoked me to think about the agonies of anthologizing, in this case a book on dance studies:¹ where to start, how to capture its complexity, how to honour its history, how to ensure nothing is overlooked, how to avoid a well-worn narrative, how to be inventive in approach, how to avoid any biases and how to please its readers? Already I have failed. Not only I am conscious that a comprehensive volume, which covers all perspectives and interests, presents an impossible task, but I am also aware of the way that dance studies operates flexibly and reflexively. Out of the various mind maps and bubble diagrams that I scripted in preparation for this Introduction, I underlined, circled and highlighted the words ‘dance/studies is a creative and critical practice’.

I added the slash to remind me that ‘dance’ alone constitutes a creative and critical enterprise, and in heeding dance as a subject of enquiry, dance ‘studies’ has continued in this vein. Although I recognize that all academic work demands some degree of imaginative thinking, the arts disciplines have both explored the act of creative production in their fields and simultaneously developed inventive approaches in the formulation of their questions, methods, modes of writing and research outcomes. And I push for the idea of criticality as I will come to explain that dancing and dance studies have been marginalized fields that are assumed to carry little intellectual, social and political worth. Yet dance scholarship reveals how dancing instantiates critical engagement that can question, resist and transform the conditions under which it takes place. And while I appreciate that all arts disciplines operate creatively and critically, as I show both in this Introduction and throughout the volume as a whole, dance, as an embodied practice, engenders ways of knowing distinctive to itself.

Therefore, as I attempt to pin down the discipline, I imagine how dance/studies will quickly expose my limitations, prove me wrong and invite me to rethink my position. Yet, before succumbing to the temptation to stop right here, I follow the advice I frequently offer dance students and start from the place where my knowledge resides: in dancing. In this instance, I return to the time I started dancing just over forty years ago.

Ballet with Miss Baron

After practising in my back garden with Lauren McPate and begging my mother for what seemed like an eternity, I had eventually been allowed to sign up for ballet classes. We went on the bus to Newcastle-upon-Tyne to purchase the pink leather ballet slippers, thick black leotard and ‘flesh’-coloured tights (although whose flesh I am uncertain). Along with twenty or so little girls, in a small town in the North-East of England, I stood in line, gripping the back of a chair as a makeshift ‘barre’. I could smell the scratchy resin beneath our feet, ground into the old wooden floorboards of the YMCA, to prevent us from slipping. As Mrs Brown banged out the notes on her upright piano, we dutifully began to demonstrate the five positions of the feet as prescribed by the Royal Academy of Dancing Grade 1 syllabus. Miss Baron stood before us, with her shapely calves, hair scraped back in a bun and heavy theatrical make-up. I idolized her and copied intently, squeezing my feet into an exaggerated turnout and lowering and tucking my index finger in slightly so that my hand would appear neat. I loved the slow development from the precise and methodical barre work through to the allegro in which we would polka and gallop around the room in a fleet-footed frenzy. I practised each night against my kitchen countertop to a crackling LP record, I poured over the luscious colour photography in a ballet book that I was given for Christmas, I sat through the entire four acts of Swan Lake at the opulent Theatre Royal with only a mini tub of vanilla ice cream for light relief and I enthusiastically tried on the cherry red tutu with pins still in it that my mum created on our cranky electric sewing machine in preparation for the first of many annual concerts. Like droves of little British girls of the 1970s, I was hooked on ballet.

Already, at the age of nine, I had acquired a foundational epistemology of ballet through attending my local studio class: its aesthetic values, the disciplining of the body, its modes of etiquette, practices of gendered behaviour, its class associations, the invisibilization of race, its Europeanist aristocratic history, its deference to a canon and a movement lexicon that remains deep within my muscle memory to this day. It was not surprising that I took up ballet. As the premier dance of European art, ballet was a culturally, socially and economically valued practice within both performance and pedagogy. Just over a decade later, as I began to study dance on a British university degree programme, the learning through doing continued, as did the orientation towards the Western art canon.

Since the arrival of dance in the academy, ‘studio practice’ (in the form of technique, choreography and improvisation) has been recognized as an integral component of knowledge construction.² Indeed, it would be extremely unusual for a university undergraduate programme not to include embodied learning as part of the curriculum. This is less about preparing students for careers as professional dancers³ and instead an acknowledgement that the experiential facilitates analytic, reflective and expressive capacities articulated in and through the body. At university, I continued with ballet, but also underwent a brutal retraining in the contemporary dance idiom, better known as modern dance in the United States. Although as a child I had also added jazz and tap dance to my repertoire, and accounted for the ease at which I assimilated these styles through the Eurocentric idea that ballet was the foundation of all dance, little did I know that the jazz and tap I learnt was modified in line with the verticality, lift and turn-out typical of ballet. Thus, acquainting my body with the grounded style of contemporary dance, and the incorporation of a curving, arching, tilting and spiralling torso, proved slow and challenging.

I pursued my undergraduate studies in the late 1980s, and it is no surprise that I refer above to the nomenclature of the United Kingdom and the United States, and that Euro-American dance forms were privileged. Research on the genealogy of dance studies indicates that the discipline was consolidated in the 1980s and that British and American universities have dominated its discourse and organization in the academy (Giersdorf 2009).⁴ Prior to this period, however, dance was both present in university curricula and scholarship had already developed that centred on dance practice. For instance, in the United States, Mark Franko (2014) describes how dance educator Margaret D’Houbler designed an undergraduate dance programme at the University of Wisconsin in 1926, and in 1934, modern dance choreographers began a summer residency at Bennington College.⁵ Likewise, Theresa Buckland (1999) recalls how dancer and ethnomusicologist Gertrude Kurath delineated a field of research, which she named ‘dance ethnology’, that encompassed a sprawling body of literature across Europe and North America throughout the first half of the twentieth century.⁶ Yet Franko (2014) asserts that the 1980s mark the institutionalization of dance studies through what he describes as the ‘theoretical turn’, which was predicated upon dance scholars’ intellectual engagement with the humanities and the proliferation of a dance studies literature, followed by the creation of doctoral programmes in dance.⁷

Compared to other arts disciplines, dance experienced a late entry into the formal institutional structures of the academy. Fiona Bannon (2010) attributes this to social, political and aesthetic biases that relegate dance to the status of mere entertainment. Franko (2014) suggests that dance was marginalized within a logocentric academy because, unlike music and theatre, it does not possess a text-based model of study. And Giersdorf (2009) ascribes its oversight to the perception that dance training is closer to manual rather than intellectual labour, and it evokes a feminine body, both of which ensure its lowly position within the academic terrain. Yet given the 1980s witnessed a proliferation of interest in the body across the humanities and social sciences, this opened the way for dance as a serious scholarly pursuit. Therefore, along with a host of other undergraduate students in the 1980s, I embarked on a training in dance studies.

‘BUT’ (PART I) …

I pause here with another intervention. This time, it comes through the linguistic signifier ‘but’: it halts the narrative with an interjection, a question, an objection. I use these moments to think about some of the key creative and critical enquiries presented by dance studies. As I cannot formulate a comprehensive narrative of the history of dance studies that acknowledges all perspectives, nations and voices, I work against creating a teleological and absolute account because it will inevitably be partial and contingent. Furthermore, it would fail to reflect the way that dance studies has sought to decentre the discipline in reaction to authorial, universal and objectivist modes of scholarship. In the same way that dance studies questions grand narratives and neutral accounts, I seek to disrupt such an approach through turning to some of the scholarly practices developed within the discipline. I draw on the personal as a means to reveal my own positioning and biases; I get under the skin of dancing to show how bodies in motion think about and are responsive to ideas and meanings; and I interrupt with several pressing questions that have attracted dance scholars and prompted paradigmatic shifts in the thinking and methods of the field.

… What is dance?

I had enrolled on a ‘dance’ programme that, like many of that period, centred on ballet and contemporary dance. Yet I was aware that other kinds of dance had circulated in and through my life as a child and teenager: at primary school, I was taught English country dancing in physical education classes; for holiday celebrations, my extended family would gather in our living room and do the ‘slosh’, the ‘hokey cokey’ and the ‘boomps-a-daisy’; my best friend and I obsessively re-enacted the choreography from the musical film Grease; and in high school I would pogo in the midst of a sweaty crowd when The Ramones came on tour. As a student, I was also becoming aware of the institutional value systems and hierarchies that create knowledge formations: although I was occupied in the classroom learning ballet and contemporary dance, I discovered somewhat ironically that the doctoral expertise of my dance lecturer lay in English folk dance and that she was currently researching the nascent form of pop music video.⁸ Evidently, dance was more than that of the concert stage.

Within the frame of ‘dance’ studies, various scholarly voices have offered delineations and interventions into the question of what dance might be. Roger Copeland and Marshal Cohen’s What Is Dance? Readings in Theory and Criticism (1983) brings together a collection of writing predominantly by artists, critics, philosophers and historians to examine different genres, aesthetics and hermeneutics of dance. However, with the exception of a section titled ‘Dance and Society’, which includes essays on whirling dervishes, striptease and the waltz, the remainder of the volume focuses on ballet, modern and postmodern theatrical dance. The preoccupation with Western concert dance is also evident in early dance philosophy.⁹ While Betty Redfern (1983: 6) acknowledges that many genres of dance exist, each of which can be examined aesthetically, she adds the caveat that not all are ‘equally likely to prove aesthetically rewarding’. Her value hierarchy is quickly evidenced as she focuses on dance as fine art, which she identifies as that presented before an audience in a theatrical setting. Graham McFee (1992) also exemplifies his definition of dance through modern and ballet and characterizes it as human movement performed in a context that is intelligible as dance. He asserts that to know if such a thing is dance requires knowledge of previous conventions and acclamation from others, such as the vocabulary of dance criticism. Although McFee (1992) indicates that his philosophical approach could be applied to dances outside a concert dance framework, the attention to dance as fine art both shapes his definition and reflects the extent to which Euro-American theatrical dance dominated the early curriculum and scholarship of dance studies. More recently, Bunker et al. (2013: 1) examine the philosophy of dance as a ‘performing art’ that creates ‘repeatable works’ and ‘performance events’.¹⁰ They too centre their discussion on art dance, which leads me to pursue other areas of scholarship that do not necessarily conceive dance as a discrete, but repeatable, ‘work’ or ‘performance’.

Although the field of anthropology has always attended to dance outside the Western art canon, several dance anthropologists have sought to expose the ethnocentric biases through which ‘dance’ has been conceived within Euro-American scholarship. Janet O’Shea (2010) identifies the critique asserted against early twentieth-century histories of dance that were evolutionist and Eurocentric in perspective. In particular, she references Curt Sach’s (1937) World History of the Dance, which promotes a universal and imperialist model of dance that relegates non-Western dance to the past and lauds European social dance as the epitome of modern civilization.¹¹ In one of the most lucid articulations of how Western values inform definitions of dance, Joann Kealiinhomoku’s essay ‘An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance’ (1983) exposes ballet for its unmarked, universal and transcendent status as art and illustrates how it is as much a cultural construction as any other form of dance. Indeed anthropology has been particularly sensitive to cross-cultural definitions of ‘dance’, with some anthropologists preferring the term ‘human movement’ (O’Shea 2010). As Adrienne Kaeppler (2000) observes, ‘dance’ constitutes a Western concept that delineates a separate sphere of cultural activity and does not make sense in cultures in which ‘structured movement systems’ are embedded within everyday life and may encompass wide-ranging embodied activities.

Yet subsequent scholarship has questioned the extent to which even human movement might constitute the primary characteristic of dance. As screendance scholar Harmony Bench and digital dance scholars Hetty Blades and Sarah Whatley show in their respective chapters in this volume, screendance artists have worked with ...