About Dance Studies, From the Dark Side
Posted: November 11, 2009 Filed under: interesting | Tags: dance, luc tuymans, OSU dance, wexner center 2 Comments »I have to admit I am slightly suspicious about the push in dance studies to proclaim the territory of knowledge specific to dance. How is this not just a way to justify dance as an academic specialization, thereby proclaiming the need for more Departments of Dance, more Administrators of Dance, and more lines of funding for Dance? I am questioning whether this push to demarcate dance serves knowledge –or power structures.
I am really crossing over to the dark side today.
Asking this question has the effect of shooting my own self in the foot. As a scholar in dance, I am supposed to want funding to justify academic activity in dance. Plus I would like to have money for groceries. I would like to have a job. The practical side of me says, yes, you need to be clear about what dance does and what dance knows so that someone will pay you to work in, and write about, dance.
Another side says, “what is it all for?” This side of me would rather exit stage left and grow my own radishes while dancing naked in the moonlight in my garden than to participate in this circling of the wagons.
I should give some context–several events have brought me to this state. First of all, I am taking a Ph.D. level class at the moment. It is the most idea-heavy dance class I have taken thus far and has involved discussion of extensive readings on the history of analysis of movement. I’ve never been one to argue that we need to just stop thinking about what it means and just dance, but this class is threatening to push me over the edge. I am suddenly remembering my experience with the Forsythe Symposium last year – that of being overwhelmed with conceptual thinking, feeling unable to keep up and synthesize, and starved for sensory experience and information, which feels so much more real to me personally.
There is also the fact that I personally miss performing, and creative activity in general. I have whined enough about this and will leave it at that for now, and add that this is getting better. I’ve got some things in the cooker.
Then there was something Norah Zuniga-Shaw mentioned in her presentation of Synchronous Objects to my PhD class the other day. She told an anecdote of a presentation of her research to a group of musicologists, whose initial reaction was to wonder why the dancers in “One Flat Thing Reproduced” were not dancing to the music. To me, this, and other exposure I have to the field of musicology, causes me to think of that field as a closed, antiquated, self-referential academic dinosaur. Is this really the direction that dance wants to go?
I also had a talk this morning with someone who attended the discussion at the Wexner last night between painter Luc Tuymans and curator TJ Clark. The discussion apparently turned to the idea of painting as a site of knowledge in itself. From the sounds of it Clark credited Tuymans with reinvigorating painting after the postmodern breakdown of the form. I am fine with the idea of using and reusing a form for the layers of information it can then convey. I do not hold with any evolutionary ideas that say we must always push to the next form, new forms, and thus discard painting. But something about the story makes me wonder if these two had other motivations to justify painting as a valid and living art form?
I am suspicious of the academic need to maintain existing forms for the sake of power structures. I would rather see dance as a tradition die off than to have it be preserved in formaldehyde.
In my flair for the dramatic, I may be setting up an unecessary dialectic again. Is it really vitality and creativity vs. academic specificity, or can I reframe this as a both/and situation?
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.)
Models of Forsythe Workshop
Posted: June 19, 2009 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: OSU dance Leave a comment »
Technique Statement II
Posted: January 28, 2009 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: dance, Eckhart Tolle, knee pain, OSU dance, pain body, physical practice Leave a comment »
In my technique statement I expressed frustration that I usually get injured a few months into the training period. Here’s my theory on why that is and what I’m going to do about it now. It’s a complex of fear. I dance, something hurts; then I start to fear the pain, and projecting into the future, fear the ending of dance for me. This results in a cycle of tension that makes the dancing more blundering, therefore the pain worse, and then the fear is worse, and so on. It’s insanity. A lack of mindfulness and too much thinking at the same time.
The circuit can be interrupted. When I bring my attention to my body and away from what I’m afraid will happen to it, or what it has felt like in the past, there is a shift. My experience of pain decreases. (Ekhart Tolle’s concept of the pain body and explanation in A New Earth, of how to bring awareness to the body is useful .)
When I bring this awareness to movement, there’s intelligence to which I gain access. I’m not sure what to call this intelligence, or even whether or not to call it my own. The joints understand the directions in which they’re made to bend. The muscles organize themselves better around the bones they leverage. Some of my big, tired, oafish muscle groups relax, while the still, small voice of my postural muscles and deep muscles starts to whisper. It’s so pleasurable I forget to fear the future, or worry about how I look.
I’m reminding myself of all this today as I sit at the computer with an ice pack on my knee. While moving quickly up and down from the floor and into and out of inversions a couple of days ago I made my right knee quite sore again. I’m grateful for this old friend, this complaining knee, and everything it has taught me since it first became a problem. Without the kind of information I’m getting from my knee right now, first of all, I would have no cartilage left, and probably less bones, and my knee probably wouldn’t bend. The dialogue with this knee and the rest of me has been the catalyst; it has drawn me to learn about the type of awareness I wrote about above, as well as life lessons about pain, fear, and living in the present.
Susan Van Pelt Petry wisely encouraged me with her message in this week’s OSU dance blog. In order to take this idea to the next level I’m going to have to start walking my talk in the physical practice – more moderately, and more consistently. I realize that my knee wouldn’t be as strident today if I hadn’t thrown myself around (trying to look good?) in dance class the other day, without listening to my body in the moment. I’m not trying to judge myself here, but just to ask why it hurts and patiently give myself a chance to try again.
My plan is to stay in class, stay in the movement, but to bring this awareness more and moret, no matter what. Even if I have to go slow, or modify the movement, or make it small and internal at first. This would be a contrast to the practice of ignoring the pain until I find myself unable to move, and then resting, because I’m forced to, until I can move again, and then repeating the cycle. As part of embracing this knee, and integrating its voice, I’m going to modify my daily practice, yet keep it going. In doing so, I am going to get to practice vulnerability, honesty, and living in the present on a daily basis. It’s a nice life.
