Proust was a Neuroscientist
Posted: July 25, 2009 Filed under: interesting | Tags: jonah lehrer, mark johnson, meaning of the body, neuroscience, Rudolf Laban 4 Comments »I’ve been doing a lot of reading. Because I think of myself as some kind of creative artist, I think while reading about my aesthetic values and what I’d like to create. I think about the themes and ideas presented in the books and then try to imagine performances that will “express” them. Then I usually decide these ideas are uninspired and discard them. I find this process to be depressing and unproductive. Why not begin making things by making instead of starting with an idea I’ve read and then translating into performance?
Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist helped me to come up with this question about my practice. As I’ve mentioned many times in this blog, I don’t actually do a lot of creating in dance or performance anymore. I write some, and analyze dances, and do coursework, and did a little reconstruction, but I think there has to be more with my involvement in dance.
So while reading this book, I found myself interested in the idea that writers, chefs, and composers could all know things about reality that are kinds of knowledge we usually credit to science. I thought “yes” and then, since dance is my medium “I should make a dance about dancers knowing things without needing hard science to prove it” –and then I thought “BLAH!” No one needs me to make a dance like that. It’s been said quite nicely with words here in Lehrer’s book. What’s more I suspect the characters profiled in this book are so inspiring because they deeply explored what they were drawn to, rather than writing or composing to illustrate the latest philosophical idea.
I need to develop a practice that helps me make things from a different, less “propositional” (to use Johnson’s terminology) place. This takes time, and a sense of risk. I have known this, in a sense for too long without pursuing it. It is time to make things or get off the pot! Maybe it will help if I stop whining about how busy grad school and parenthood and work are and just go into the studio, or out into the yard, or the woods or pick up the video camera, and make something.
Does it seem like I’m eschewing rigorous thought and research in the creative process? I feel a little that I am, and I’d hate to do that. It is good to study structures of ideas and organize and synthesize them. I have found thematic footholds in the work of Rudolf Laban this year like I never before, because I read and read and read, and thought about his theories, and compared them to other theories.
I just think I’ve swung a bit far in that direction lately. I have spent so much time sitting, reading, typing, that I have shut down whole parts of my body. Muscles have begun to atrophy. I don’t know the state of my sacrum at all times anymore. This is sad to me. I’d like to get back on the horse, try to make things, and continue to be a scholar. Look for more posts when I fall off the other side.
Embodied Meaning and Freedom in Dance Class
Posted: July 24, 2009 Filed under: pedagogy | Tags: ballet, critical pedagogy, dance, lived body, mark johnson, meaning of the body, modern dance, OSU dance, pedagogy of the oppressed, philosophy 1 Comment »I’m wrapping up my first quick round of teaching for the summer. Friere’s Pedagogy of the Opressed, Johnson’s Meaning of the Body, and Dixon-Gottschild’s Black Dancing Body are sinking in, challenging the way I see my students and myself.
Friere posited that the student-as-object model is oppressive and that true learning, and freedom, happen in relationship. After reading Friere, I was primed to think about Johnson’s embodied meaning in terms of the classroom. In Johnson’s view, babies make sense of their world holistically, beginning with their experiences, which are wrapped up in the experiences of their caregivers. Babies begin by experiencing themselves, their caregivers, and their environment as one, and then slowly differentiate. Furthermore, humans are all “big babies”; our perception of experience still arises holistically.
Friere’s ideas about learning and Johnson’s about perception are related; Friere proposes deconstruction of the the subject/object relationship, and Johnson declares that the subject-acting-on-object model of meaning-making is secondary to that which arises viscerally. These arguments support a class structure that is relational, egalitarian, and open-ended.
On July 3 I blogged this quote and some notes from Dixon-Gottschild’s Black Dancing Body:
“Figuratively speaking, dancers as a group are a subjugated “race” – destabilized as a matter of course, as a prerequisite inherent to the field.” –Brenda Dixon Gottschild, The Black Dancing Body. p. 10-11
This, plus the entire description of a dance class . . . hit very close to home for me. I spent ten of my formative years engaging in serious dance training that fits her description . . . I have chosen not to walk away from this tradition, but I feel squeamish about demanding the same “destabilization” from my own students that my teachers asked of me. And yet, I want the training I offer to “work”, and often so do my students.
In the beginning jazz and modern dance classes I just finished teaching, I pretty much followed the traditions I’ve inherited, ones much like those described by Dixon-Gottschild. I stood in the front of the room. Wherever I was standing became the front. I performed movement for my students which they were expected to imitate and perform for me. I then scrutinized their performance and gave specific critical feedback on their performances to help them imitate me more closely. No one talked; even when I asked questions they were generally treated as rhetorical.
I am aware that the way I teach right now structures a classroom where students are very much passive objects to be acted on by me, the active subject. The model I currently follow is very effective in creating the ability to do certain movements in certain personality and physical types – those who are kinesthetic, visual learners, and are passive enough to submit to whatever the teacher says to do, and who have cooperative bodies. It is a very defined outcome available to a small number of people. I love western dance techniques, and believe this training does work in a sense, but maybe the outcomes and beneficiaries are too limited. Dance can be meaningful in many ways to many different people.
It’s one thing to want to change the way a thing is done in your culture, and quite another to actually change it. There is a good amount of risk involved. (I notice the same thing in the way I parent. My philosophy tells me to do things differently than my parents did, but in the moment of truth, I often send my own experience forward, because it is known.)
Still, as I pile on the ten-week sessions of technique classes, with different students each time, I can’t help but feel a little sad for the way I hardly know them, and I just deliver these skills to them. Many don’t even learn much of those for one reason or another. I need to redefine a classroom that works, and the relationship between me and the students. There is so much possibility for what could happen. I’d like to experience a dance class in which people relate to each other first and students feel they have a voice. I’d like to help students experience what I have in terms of discovery that arises out of their own embodied experience. I’d like for humor and laughter to have a part in the process without feeling that I, as the teacher have to entertain and tell jokes.
I’m not sure what I’ll do differently this next round of classes, how I’ll think differently of my students. I’m afraid of the arguments that can be levelled against teaching-as-an-experiment in freedom. Classes may seem unplanned, indefinite. Students may hate the class or resent that they’re asked to be active when they have already been conditioned to be passive. We are after all in a culture of oppression. They may stare at me sullenly. Nothing might happen.
(In some sense, isn’t that always the fear? In everything? That if I don’t do it, it won’t happen? Ha ha.)
Mark Johnson’s “The Meaning of the Body”
Posted: July 23, 2009 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: abstract impressionism, albright-knox, clyfford still, dance, developmental psychology, mark johnson, modernism, neuroscience, philosophy Leave a comment »I just finally read this big, long book. Mark Johnson’s ‘theory of embodied meaning’ confirmed my experience of art and argued against unhelpful dichotomies between body and mind, feeling and thought, emotion and reason. Without calling it that, I already ascribed to the embodied theory of meaning, which is why I am so attracted to dance. Mark Johnson’s arguments in support of this theory come from philosophy, developmental psychology and neuroscience.
A watershed point in my own history with embodied meaning in art was experiencing the Clyfford Still room at the Albright Knox in Buffalo. These paintings have their own room because that was one of the stipulations of the artist; that they would never be shown alongside the work of other artists, and never be bought or sold. I had developed a relationship with other abstract impressionist painting there over the course of my childhood through trips with the Brownies, school or family, but maybe because they have their own room I had missed the Still paintings until one day when I was there alone, and about seventeen. (Perhaps, in the Alva Noe sense, I only noticed this room at this stage in my development because it was then that I was able to see it)
The paintings are massive with jagged shapes streaking through them from top to bottom or corner. They felt so craggy, so much like my teen-angstful inner landscape. I was impressed that Still resisted the interpretation of his work, and felt that I understood his intention. I felt I used these paintings well by sitting in front of them and noticing them, and noticing myself and the flow of my thoughts with them. I returned there often and sat with them. I thought about that they were important to me at a gut level, and would not have been so if they had a determinate, defined meaning, such as “this painting is about the loss of my mother because of war”.
Previously, I described this experience in terms of feelings, delimiting it to the subjective and taking away some of its power and importance to me. Reflecting on the experience in light of Johnson’s theories, however, I would describe it as an experience of embodied knowledge. The paintings are ripe with meaning. They have massive weight, which feels like the importance of a thing. They reference minerals, the slow passage of time, which, for a teenager, is also about deferral of gratification. They are about conflict, and tension, and permanance, and glacial flow.
This way of talking about an art experience may be very elementary for visual artists or philosophers, and might come as no surprise to dance insiders, but it is new, and freeing for me. I came to these painting with little specialized knowledge of painting and its history. All I had was a history of contact with abstract paintings and the knowledge that the artist resisted interpretation and commercialization. I was relatively unschooled, and yet I found I could access knowledge in these paintings. This is very encouraging to me, positioned as I am in the small, specialized world of post-postmodern dance.
My deep discouragement with this moment in dance is that it seems to have gone in the direction of only speaking to one’s peers, and also maybe your mom, who comes to shows out of love. On the other hand, there are the forms of dance that convey determinate meaning through movement, and come across as trite or impotent. But reading about the embodied theory of meaning reminded me of dance’s best capability, which is to speak to the knowledge of the gut, which does not need an MFA to know things.
