9 Dance on Film: Strategy

and Serendipity
Felicia Hughes-Freeland

As soon as moving cameras were invented, film-makers began to

capture dance on film. And yet, 100 years on, the use of visual
methods in dance research continues to be neglected in favour of rep-
resentational systems such as dance notation. Against a background of
debates about the contribution of visual methodologies to the devel-
opment of cross-cultural understanding in social anthropology, this
chapter argues for the value of film as a research tool in dance studies.
Visual anthropology has a dual aspect. It is both 'the use of visual
material in anthropological research' and 'the study of visual systems
and visible culture' (Morphy and Banks, 1997, p. 1). The most lucid
writer on anthropology and film is the film-maker David MacDougall
who, as far back as 1973, suggested that we think of a film as 'an arena
of inquiry', rather than as an aesthetic or scientific performance (1995,
p. 128). MacDougall's arguments have contributed to my two film pro-
jects on Javanese dance, which have been part of ongoing research
over nearly 20 years and which provide the focus of this chapter. 1

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF DANCE

Ritual and performance inevitably strike the outsider as significant

because of their exotic appearance only. Dance analysis has tended to
go behind physical appearances to seek out the meaning of embodied
practices. There are two basic options for analysing dance: as 'pat-
terned movement performed as an end in itself' or as it is 'shaped by
cultural standards and values' (Royce, 1977, pp. 8, 216). An example
of the first 'closed' approach is to analyse dance as a grammatical
structure. 2 The second 'open' approach rejects the grammatical fore-
closure in favour of what Hanna called a 'dynamic communication
model' (Hanna, 1979) which distinguished three analytical domains of
meaningfulness of dance: pragmatics (the relation of signs to inter-
preters); semantics (the relation of signs to contexts, and so to
signification); and syntactics (how signs may be characterized, ordered

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© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 1999
112 Felicia Hughes-Freeland
and inter-related). Anthropologists have tended to follow the 'open'
approach, and have variously analysed dance as part of social situ-
ations: as a safety valve (catharsis theory), an organ of social control
(functionalist theories), a cumulative process (theory of self-
generation), an element of competition (theories of boundary display)
and ritual process (Victor Turner's theory of communitas and anti-
structure) (Spencer, 1985). Both approaches have been criticized by Best
(1978) for their reductiveness. He also identifies a confusion between
action and metaphor in the 'open' approach, and argues that dance
should not be treated as a symbol of something; it is action in itself. So
these models tended to regularize the dance event to a pattern by
failing to account for unique factors which enter into a specific situa-
tion, and omitted disruption and contestation as extraneous factors
bearing on meaningfulness. Ultimately, the two broad approaches
either do not explain the variations in how audiences experience per-
formances within the culture, or ignore them. They treat dance as text,
rather than as action or practice. Even Ness's recent attempt to repre-
sent the iconicity of specific Filipino performances (Ness, 1992) slips
into a textual account based on pragmatics which produces an homog-
enizing and essentialized account of 'culture' (Day, 1995, p. 130).
Currently there is a reaction against the 'textual' model of society
and the dramaturgical metaphors of action-as-performance which
refer to everything except dance and performance (Hughes-Freeland,
1997b). After developing his processual analysis of ritual, the anthro-
pologist Victor Turner (1982) started to examine dance and theatre as
performance, rather than as a part of ritual activity. Since his death,
anthropologists have (belatedly) started to pay serious attention to
performance as a phenomenological object, rather than solely to its
metaphorization into meaning and text (Jackson, 1996). None the less,
however much we return to what Foster has called 'the corporeal play
that is vital to cultural production and to theoretical formulation of
cultural process' (1996, p. ix), the dialectical relationship between the
body and the imagination should not be overlooked (Johnson, 1987).

DANCE RESEARCH IN JAVA

The dancing body is here conceptualized not as universal and biolo-

gical, but contingent on historical and social factors and constructions
which are themselves transformed by the innovations and actions of
individuals, deliberately or accidentally (Hughes-Freeland, 1997a). My