(Routledge Theatre and Performance Companions) Helen Thomas and Stacey Prickett - The Routledge Companion To Dance Studies-Routledge (2020)

THE
ROUTLEDGE COMPANION
TO DANCE STUDIES
The Routledge Companion to Dance Studies maps out the key features of dance studies as the
field stands today, while pointing to potential future developments.
It locates these features historically—within dance in specific social and cultural
contexts—and in relation to other academic influences that have impinged on dance studies
as a discipline. The editors use a thematically based approach that emphasizes dance scholar-
ship does not stand alone as a single entity, but is inevitably linked to other related fields,
debates, and concerns. Authors from across continents have contributed chapters based on
theoretical, methodological, ethnographic, and practice-based case studies, bringing together
a wealth of expertise and insight to offer a study that is in-depth and wide-ranging.
Ideal for scholars and upper-level students of dance and performance studies, The Routledge
Companion to Dance Studies challenges the reader to expand their knowledge of this vibrant,
exciting interdisciplinary field.
Helen Thomas is professor of Dance Studies at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music

and Dance, and emeritus professor, University of the Arts. She has published books, edited
collections, and articles on the body and dance in culture and society. Currently, she is editor
of Dance Research Journal.
Stacey Prickett is reader in Dance Studies at the University of Roehampton. Her current
research investigates relationships between dance, society, and politics. She has published in
international journals and in the books, Embodied Politics: Dance, Protest and Identities (author),
Dance in the City, Dance and Politics, and Shifting Corporealities (contributor).
ROUTLEDGE THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE COMPANIONS
The Routledge Companion to The Routledge Companion to

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Edited by John Russell Brown Edited by Arnold Aronson
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Shakespeare Edited by Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs and
Edited by John Russell Brown Eckart Voigts
The Routledge Companion to The Routledge Companion to Butoh

Stanislavsky Performance
Edited by R. Andrew White Edited by Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario
The Routledge Companion
The Routledge Companion to Theatre,
to Puppetry and Material
Performance, and Cognitive Science
Performance
Edited by Rick Kemp and Bruce McConachie
Edited by Dassia N. Posner, Claudia
Orenstein, and John Bell
The Routledge Companion to African
The Routledge Companion to American Theatre and Performance
Dramaturgy Edited by Kathy A. Perkins, Sandra L.
Edited by Magda Romanska Richards, Renée Alexander Craft, and Thomas
F. DeFrantz
The Routledge Companion to
Commedia dell’Arte The Routledge Companion to Theatre
Edited by Judith Chaffee and Olly Crick of the Oppressed
Edited by Kelly Howe, Julian Boal, and José Soeiro
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Michael Chekhov The Routledge Companion to Theatre
Edited by Marie Christine Autant Mathieu and and Politics
Yana Meerzon Edited by Peter Eckersall and Helena Grehan
The Routledge Companion to Jacques The Routledge Companion to Dance

Lecoq Studies
Edited by Mark Evans and Rick Kemp Edited by Helen Thomas and Stacey Prickett
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/handbooks/

products/SCAR30
THE ROUTLEDGE
COMPANION TO DANCE
STUDIES
Edited by Helen Thomas and Stacey Prickett

First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 selection and editorial matter, Helen Thomas and Stacey Prickett;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Helen Thomas and Stacey Prickett to be identified as the authors of the editorial material,
and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and
78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by
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and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Thomas, Helen, 1947- editor. | Routledge (Firm)
Title: The Routledge companion to dance studies / edited by Helen Thomas
and Stacey Prickett.
Description: First Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019029007 (print) | ISBN 9781138234581 (Hardback) | ISBN
9781315306551 (eBook)
Subjects: LCSH: Dance.
Classification: LCC GV1589 .R68 2019 (print) | LCC GV1589 (ebook) | DDC
792.8--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029007
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029008
ISBN: 978-1-138-23458-1 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-30655-1 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Lumina Datamatics Limited
CONTENTS
Illustrations ix
Contributors xii
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction: Thematic structure, methodological frames, and analyses 1

Helen Thomas and Stacey Prickett
PART I
Dance and corporeality: Training and engagement 9
1 Dancing the space: Butoh and Body Weather as training for ecological
consciousness 11
Rosemary Candelario
2 The dancing body, power and the transmission of collective memory in

Apartheid South Africa 22
Catherine F. Botha
3 Different bodies: A poetic study of dance and people with Parkinson’s 33

Sara Houston
4 Resourcing/searching dance technique and education: Developing a

praxeological methodology 44
Yvonne Hardt
5 The expanding possibilities of dance science 56

Emma Redding
v
Contents
PART II
Dance and somatics 69
6 Performing the self: Dance, somatic practices, and Alexander Technique 71

Michael Huxley
7 Moving Kinship: Between choreography, performance, and the

more-than-human 88
Beatrice Allegranti
8 Moving as a Thought Process: The practice of choreography and stillness 109

Naomi Lefebvre Sell with Tara Silverthorn and Lucille Teppa
9 Moving mind and body: Language and writings of Simone Forti 125
Hiie Saumaa
PART III
Dance and analysis 139
10 Choreomusicology and dance studies: From beginning to end? 141

Stephanie Jordan
11 Choreosonic wearables: Creative collaborative practices 157
Michèle Danjoux
12 The anarchive of contemporary dance: Toward a topographic

understanding of choreography 177
Timmy De Laet
13 Cubism, futurism, and Leonide Massine’s choreography for Parade 191

Gay Morris
14 Whatever happened to dance criticism? 207

Erin Brannigan
PART IV
Dance, society and culture 221
15 Black dance: Brooklyn 2017 223

Nadine George-Graves
16 Elroy Josephs and the hidden history of black British dance 236
Ramsay Burt
vi
Contents
17 A love song as a form of protest 247

Danielle Goldman
18 Female dancers on the variety stage in mid-twentieth-century Britain 259

Larraine Nicholas
19 Selling and giving dance 273

Susan Leigh Foster
PART V
Dance and time 283
20 Traditional dance in urban settings: ‘Snapshots’ of Greek dance traditions

in Athens 285
Maria I. Koutsouba
21 Black star, other fetishized: Carlos Acosta, ballet’s new cosmopolitanism,

and desire in the age of institutional diversity 298
Lester Tomé
22 Digital preservation of dance, inclusion, and absence 311

Sarah Whatley
23 Dance and copyright: As time moves on 323

Charlotte Waelde
24 Algorithmic choreographies: Women whirling dervishes and dance

heritage on YouTube 337
Sheenagh Pietrobruno
PART VI
Dance and scenography 351
25 Dressing dance–dancing dress: Lived experience of dress and its agency

in the collaborative process 353
Jessica Bugg
26 The scenography of choreographing the museum 365

Johan Stjernholm
vii
Contents
27 Stacking the spine: Interdisciplinary reflections from BackStories 381

Becka McFadden
28 Longing for the subaltern: Subaltern historiography as choreographic tactic 396

Cynthia Ling Lee
PART VII
Dance, space and place 411
29 The strangeness of dancing: From The Changing Room and Singularity 413

Carol Brown
30 Everyday life and urban marvels: The curious aesthetics of x-times

people chair 428
Alexandra Kolb
31 Dance, theater, and their post-medium condition 443

Gerald Siegmund
32 Re-imagining Laban: Tradition, extinction, invention. Re-staging

as creative contemporary practice 455
Alison Curtis-Jones
33 “Dancing through the hard stuff”: Repetition, resilience, and female

solidarity in the landscape—Rosemary Lee’s Passage for Par 471
Rosemary Lee and Ruth Pethybridge
Index 489
viii
ILLUSTRATIONS
7.1 Intra-acting spacetime events 91

7.2 Participants witness a bespoke dance 93
7.3 Group improvisation after the bespoke dance 94
7.4 Group improvisation after the bespoke dance 95
7.5 Maria Palliani in extract of I’ve Lost You Only to Discover That I Have
Gone Missing, Siobhan Davies Dance Studios 97
7.6 Yvonne improvising during a participatory dance 98
7.7 Sabrina airborne during a fall and recovery. Public performance
at Michaelis Theatre 100
7.8 Keith and Rose during a participatory dance 102
7.9 Luke and Takeshi stamping and accelerating. Public performance at
Michaelis Theatre 103
7.10 Luke falling backwards. Public performance at Michaelis Theatre 104
7.11 Takeshi, Sabrina, Luke, Aneta flocking. Public studio performance
at Crouch End Festival 2017 106
8.1 Pathway # 1. Artist: Naomi Lefebvre Sell 120
11.1 Helenna Ren as GraveDigger enacts the role of solntselov or sun-trapper in
the “Killing of the Sun” scene, for the time being [Victory over the Sun] 161
11.2 Helenna Ren releases her arms from inside her sarcophagus, the Kinect
system recognizes her, and the virtual sun rises on screen, for the time
being [Victory over the Sun] 162
11.3 Vanessa Michielon in RedMicro Dress with flautist Emi Watanabe in “Tenth
Country,” a scene rehearsal from Act II, for the time being [Victory over the Sun] 163
11.4 RedMicro Dress with integrated wireless microphone system—transmitter at
the waist and tiny microphone located on the left back shoulder for partnering
and interaction, 2012 165
11.5 Helenna Ren performing the TatlinTower (head)dress, Scene I, for the time
being [Victory over the Sun] 166
ix
Illustrations
11.6 “Bed of Nails” Schematic 167

11.7 Angeliki Margeti in Futurian ChestPlate playing her oscillating electro-acoustic
instrument—completing the electronic circuit through touch, 2014 168
11.8 Dancers Vanessa Michielon in RedMicro Dress and Angeliki Margeti
in Futurian ChestPlate performing a noise duet in for the time being
[Victory over the Sun] 169
11.9 Musician Jonathan Reus and dancer Marc Nukoop exploring elements
of sounding through proximity and touch, STEIM, Amsterdam, 2014 171
11.10 Performance setup with coat on chair exposing Velostat conductive lining,
and copper organza spiral-cut conductive floor pads, STEIM, Amsterdam, 2014 172
11.11 Marc Nukoop (seated on ConductiveCoat) performing a sounding dance of
touch and proximity with dancer Miri Lee, STEIM, Amsterdam, 2014 173
13.1 Pablo Picasso’s set for Parade (1917) 194
13.2 The Manager in Evening Dress from Parade (1917) 195
13.3 Gray Chryst as the Chinese Conjurer in the Joffrey Ballet’s restaging
of Parade (1973) 197
13.4 Pablo Picasso: Guitar (1913) 198
13.5 Leonide Massine as the Chinese Conjurer in Parade (1917) 200
13.6 Giacomo Balla: Abstract Speed + Sound (1913–1914) 203
16.1 Elroy Josephs in West Side Story at Belgrade Theatre, Coventry (1970) 240
18.1 Fan dancing at the Windmill Theatre, London, c. 1950s 266
18.2 The power of synchronization. The Tiller Girls in the 1960s 269
20.1 Greek traditional dance at Syntagma Square on March 25, 2015 288
20.2 Greek traditional dance at Syntagma Square on July 5, 2015 288
20.3 The Lyceum of Greek Women Greek traditional dancing at SNFCC 290
20.4 Poster of the 190th anniversary of the Hellenic Army Academy, Evelpidon 291
20.5 Poster for Choros stin Plateia, Municipality of Elliniko-Argyroupoli, 2018 293
21.1 Carlos Acosta performs Kenneth MacMillan’s Requiem for the Royal
Ballet, London, in 2006 302
24.1 An EMAV Mevlevi Sema Ceremony featuring women dervishes dressed in
colored robes, male dervishes in white roles, a male master of the dance or
head semazen, and an audience who is permitted to take photographs of the
performance in 2012 343
24.2 A sema dance enacted by members of the community during their private
community prayer session before start of the spiritual Thursday evenings in 2012 344
26.1 Exhibition object from Reflection of Time: Art of Fashion in China
1993–2012, at the Today Art Museum, Beijing, China 369
26.2 Repetitions of Disappearance (2015) at the Xin Dong Cheng Space for
Contemporary Art, Beijing, China 374
26.3 Lost in Shangri-la (2016), at the Three Shadows Art Centre, Beijing, China 375
27.1 Performing BackStories at University of Worcester, October 2016 383
27.2 Performing BackStories at Theatre Utopia, Croydon, November 2016 384
27.3 “My backstory is…protection for the rest of me.” “David M”
from the What’s Your Backstory? series 393
28.1 Cynthia Ling Lee in blood run, 2017. Performed at Asian Pacific
Islander Cultural Center’s (APICC) United States of Asian America Festival 400
x
Illustrations
28.2 Audience members Miyuki Baker and Pallavi Sharma laying rocks
on Cynthia Ling Lee in blood run 402
28.3 Cynthia Ling Lee writing Pingpu surnames in blood run 403
28.4 Shyamala Moorty putting kumkum on Meena Murugesan’s forehead in
the temple space in we used to see this 407
28.5 Meena Murugesan pours coins on their head in a commodified offering 408
29.1 Catherine Bennett in The Changing Room 417
29.2 Carol Brown in The Changing Room 418
29.3 Adam Naughton Singularity research and development, Auckland 2016 423
29.4 Solomon Holly-Massey and Adam Naughton in Singularity Research
performance, Q Theatre, Rangatira Stage 2016 425
30.1 x-times people chair, Bordeaux, France, 2004 433
30.2 x-times people chair, Montréal, Canada, 2012 434
30.3 x-times people chair, Poznań, Poland, 2006 440
32.1 Drumstick Bonnie Bird Theatre, UK, 2017 459
32.5 Drumstick, Monte Verita, Switzerland 2017 466
33.1 Passage for Par, at the start of the performance 472
33.2 Passage for Par, by Rosemary Lee Commissioned by CAST for Groundwork,
Par Sands Beach, Cornwall 2018, Taken from the coastal path on the headland
with the backdrop of the factory, evening performance June 22, 2001 474
33.3 Passage for Par, Reflections in the shallow waters of the tidal flats, dress
rehearsal, June 21, 2018 476
33.4 Passage for Par, one of the elbow and hand holds also used in Breton and
Cornish folk dance, allowing the dancers to remain closely connected, dress
rehearsal, June 21, 2018 480
33.5 Passage for Par, by Rosemary Lee Commissioned by CAST for Groundwork,
Par Sands Beach, Cornwall 2018, the ending image as the performers leave,
evening performance, June 22, 2018 486
xi
CONTRIBUTORS
Beatrice Allegranti is a choreographer, UKCP reg. dance movement psychotherapist,

researcher, and reader in Dance Movement Psychotherapy at the University of Roehampton.
For over two decades her international experience encompasses touring dance and film work,
clinical practice (in the National Health Service), and consultancy across dance, biomedical
health, and education sectors.
Catherine F. Botha is associate professor in the Philosophy Department, University of

Johannesburg, South Africa. Her research interests lie philosophy of art, especially the
philosophy of dance, and nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy, particularly the work
of Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Nietzsche. A registered teacher of the Royal Academy of
Dance, she teaches classical ballet at the University of Johannesburg’s Arts Academy.
Erin Brannigan is senior lecturer in Dance at the University of New South Wales and
works in the fields of dance and film as a writer, academic, and curator. Erin wrote on dance
for RealTime 1997–2017 and has published monographs and journal articles internationally.
Carol Brown is a dancer, choreographer, and scholar who specializes in interdisciplinary

collaborations including Shelf Life (1999), Aarero Stone (2006), Tongues of Stone (2011), and
PAH (2015). Her publications focus on the intersections of dance with other art forms. She is
professor and Head of Victorian College of Arts (VCA) Dance at the University of Melbourne.
http://www.carolbrowndances.com.
Jessica Bugg is dean of the School of Media and Communication at London College of
Fashion, University of the Arts London. She has over 20 years teaching, leadership, and
research experience in graduate and post graduate education in the UK and Australia. Her
research and practice develop corporeal and embodied methods for clothing design and
communication.
Ramsay Burt is professor of Dance History at De Montfort University. His publications

include The Male Dancer, Alien Bodies, Judson Dance Theater, and, with Christy Adair,
xii
Contributors
British Dance: Black Routes (2016). In 1999, he was visiting professor at the Department of
Performance Studies, New York University, l’Université de Nice Sophia-Antipolis, and he is
a visiting teacher at PARTS in Brussels.
Rosemary Candelario, associate professor of Dance, Texas Woman’s University, specializes

in butoh, Asian American dance, dance and ecology, and site-specific performance. She is
the author of Flowers Cracking Concrete: Eiko & Koma’s Asian/American Choreographies, and
co-editor with Bruce Baird of the Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance.
Alison Curtis-Jones is artistic director of award-winning Summit Dance Theatre. A leading

exponent in re-imagining Rudolf von Laban’s “lost” choreographic work, her choreography,
performed internationally, was filmed by Swiss and German TV and featured in The BBC
documentary Dance Rebels. She teaches at Trinity Laban Conservatoire, London. She has
published in Dance and Somatic Practices, and in two edited collections.
Michèle Danjoux is a fashion designer, experienced educator and Research Coordinator

for the School of Media and Communication at London College of Fashion, University of
the Arts London. She is co-director of DAP-Lab. Her artistic and research interests center
on wearable design through and as performance, with dancers, choreographers, musicians,
and media artists.
Timmy De Laet is assistant professor of Theatre and Dance at the University of Antwerp,
Belgium. His research is supported by the Research Foundation Flanders, the Fulbright
Commission, and the Belgian American Educational Foundation. He focuses on the reiterative
nature of live performance in relation to re-enactment, archivization, and historiography.
Susan Leigh Foster, choreographer and scholar, is distinguished professor in the Department
of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA. She is author of Reading Dancing, Choreographing
Narrative, Dances that Describe Themselves, Choreographing Empathy, and, most recently, Valuing
Dance: Commodities and Gifts in Motion. Three of her danced lectures can be found at the Pew
Center for Arts and Heritage website http://danceworkbook.pcah.us/susan-foster/index.html.
Nadine George-Graves is a professor at The Ohio State University. Most recently, she was
the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater. She was president of the Congress on
Research in Dance and a founding member of The Collegium for African Diaspora Dance.
Danielle Goldman is associate professor of Critical Dance Studies at The New School.
Author of I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom (2010). Publications
include Dance Research, Dance Research Journal, Etcetera, Movement Research Performance Journal,
TDR, and Women & Performance. She also has performed in the work of Sarah Michelson, DD
Dorvillier, Anna Sperber, and Beth Gill.
Yvonne Hardt is professor for Dance Studies and Choreography at the University of Music
and Dance Cologne. Her research areas include dance history and the critical investigation
of its methodology and use in performative practices, gender and media in dance. She links
her scholarly research with her choreographic endeavors. Her co-edited publications include
Choreographie-Medien-Gender (2013) and Choreographie und Institution (2011).
xiii
Contributors
Sara Houston is principal lecturer in Dance at the University of Roehampton, UK. She
specializes in community dance. Her research on the English National Ballet Dance for
Parkinson’s program won her the BUPA Foundation Prize in 2011 and she was Finalist in
the National Public Engagement Awards in 2014 for her work engaging the public in the
research.
Michael Huxley is emeritus reader in Dance and former Director of the Centre for
Interdisciplinary Research in Dance at De Montfort University, UK. He qualified as a teacher
of Alexander Technique with PAAT. His publications include The Dancer’s World 1920–1945
(Palgrave) and, with Ramsay Burt, Dance, Modernism, and Modernity (Routledge).
Stephanie Jordan is research professor in Dance at the University of Roehampton in

London. She has written four books covering modern dance, ballet, and choreomusical
issues. In 2010, she received the award for Outstanding Scholarly Research in Dance from
CORD (USA).
Alexandra Kolb is professor of Dance at the University of Roehampton. She is the author of
Performing Femininity: Dance and Literature in German Modernism (2009) and the editor of Dance
and Politics (2011). She received the Marlis Thiersch Prize (2017) and the Gertrude Lippincott
Award (2014) for her scholarly articles, is the Reviews Editor for Dance Research, and serves
on the Executive Committee of the Society for Dance Research.
Maria I. Koutsouba is professor of Choreology with an emphasis on Greek traditional

dance at the School of Physical Education and Sport Science, National and Kapodistrian
University of Athens, and Tutor of Open and Distance Education at the Hellenic Open
University. She publishes on ethnochoreology/dance anthropology, dance notation and
analysis, and educational innovations.
Cynthia Ling Lee creates interdisciplinary choreography and scholarship steeped in Asian
diasporic performance praxis and deeply informed by postcolonial, feminist-of-color, and
queer theories. She is an assistant professor of dance at the University of California Santa
Cruz and a Post Natyam Collective member. www.cynthialinglee.com.
Rosemary Lee works as a choreographer and filmmaker in a variety of contexts and

media, including large-scale site-specific works with cross-generational casts, and video
installations. Her interest is in both portrait and landscape, and in our relationship with the
environment, urban and rural. She is an Artsadmin artist, Work Place artist, senior research
fellow -C-DaRE, and ResCen research associate artist.
Becka McFadden, PhD, is a performer, director and theatre maker. She is artistic director
of Beautiful Confusion Collective and teaches performance making, embodied writing, and
site-specific practices at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance.
Gay Morris is a New York-based dance and art critic. She is the author of A Game for
Dancers: Performing Modernism in the Postwar Years, 1945–1960 (2006), editor of Moving Words,
Rewriting Dance (1996), and co-editor with Jens Giersdorf of Choreographies of 21st Century
Wars (2016). She is a member of the International Association of Art Critics and serves on the
editorial board of Dance Research Journal.
xiv
Contributors
Larraine Nicholas is an emeritus fellow at the University if Roehampton, London. She has

authored two books: Dancing in Utopia: Dartington Hall and Its Dancers (2007) and Walking and
Dancing: Three Years of Dance in London, 1950–53 (2013). She is co-editor of Rethinking Dance
History: Issues and Methodologies, 2nd Edition (2018).
Ruth Pethybridge, senior lecturer in Dance at Falmouth University, delivers dance in

diverse settings with all ages and abilities while making her own choreographic work.
She works as a rehearsal director and dramaturge, including as assistant choreographer for
Rosemary Lee on Passage for Par. Awarded a PhD in choreography in 2017, the politics of
participation and community inform her research and artistic practice.
Sheenagh Pietrobruno, associate professor, is the director of the School of Social

Communication, at Saint Paul University, which is federated with the University of Ottawa.
She has held several research fellowships such as McGill University and the University of
Salzburg. She is the author of Salsa and Its Transnational Moves (Rowman and Littlefield
Publishers, 2006).
Stacey Prickett, reader in Dance Studies at the University of Roehampton, investigates

relationships between dance, society, and politics through historical and sociological
perspectives. Her publications include Embodied Politics: Dance, Protest and Identities, and
chapters in Dance in the City, Dance and Politics, and Shifting Corporealities.
Emma Redding is professor in Performance Science at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of

Music and Dance, London. She is dance trained and wrote the first Master’s degree in dance
science and played a major role in developing dance science as a recognized field of study
through her research and teaching. She is a founding partner of the National Institute for
Dance Medicine and Science.
Hiie Saumaa, PhD (Columbia), is a dance writer and somatic movement educator
(e.g. Dance Research Journal and Dance Chronicle). Her articles have appeared in international
dance journals. She is completing a manuscript on the writings and artwork of Jerome
Robbins. She teaches somatic dance, movement imagination, and physical awareness classes.
Naomi Lefebvre Sell is a faculty member of Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance.
Her practice-led research is published in journals and book chapters (Intellect, Frontiers, and
Routledge). She presents regularly at national and international conferences. Her artistic work
and teaching are informed by the effect of mindfulness meditation on a creative process of dance
making. Her current research is funded by Arts Council England.
Gerald Siegmund is professor of Applied Theatre Studies at the Justus-Liebig University in

Giessen, Germany. Among his research interests are theatre and memory, dance, performance,
and theatre since the beginning of the twentieth century. Recent publications are Jérôme Bel.
Dance, Theatre, and the Subject (2017), and, together with Rebekah Kowal and Randy Martin,
The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics (2017).
Tara Silverthorn (UK/CH) is an independent artist-practitioner in the field of dance and

choreography, working in various collaborative settings internationally, both as a performer and
maker. She is a co-director and founding member of dance quartet Eleven Farrer House and a
Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapist, practicing in Bristol.
xv
Contributors
Johan Stjernholm is a choreographer and artist working across the disciplines of the
performing arts, performance art, computer science, and the fine arts. Currently based
in China, Johan works as artistic director for the Ballet Octahedron, artistic director for
the Space Engineering Art Project, and head of Education for the Royal Conservatory of
Performing Arts in Hong Kong.
Lucille Teppa studied at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance (London) before
taking part in various artistic projects in the UK and beyond, including company tours, art
exhibitions, and “Marseille-Provence 2013 European Capital of Culture.” She is a founding
member of the quartet Eleven Farrer House.
Helen Thomas is professor of Dance Studies at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and
Dance, and emeritus professor, University of the Arts London. Trained in both dance and
sociology, she has published books, edited collections, and journal articles that focus on the
body, society, and dance. She is the current editor of Dance Research Journal.
Lester Tomé is associate professor of dance history and theory at Smith College. He is the
author of The Body Politic: Ballet and Revolution in Cuba (Oxford University Press, forthcoming),
a book supported by a fellowship of the National Endowment for the Humanities. His
articles have appeared in Dance Research Journal, Dance Chronicle, Cuban Studies, and other
publications.
Charlotte Waelde is professor of Intellectual Property Law in the Centre for Dance
Research (C-DaRE) at Coventry University, UK. She has worked on intersections between
intellectual property and the creative industries throughout her academic career, with her
move to C-DaRE underpinning her commitment to interdisciplinary research in law and
dance.
Sarah Whatley, director of the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE) at Coventry
University. Her research focuses on digital dance resources, smart learning environments
for dancers, dance and disability, and cultural heritage, often in collaboration with artists,
and experts in other disciplines, including law, anthropology, psychology, digital media, and
computing science. She is founding editor of the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices.
xvi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The journey through the Companion to Dance Studies process has been interesting from
the start to the finish. We aimed to reach out to senior and rising scholars and practitioners
across continents to join us in this venture to publish Routledge’s first companion to dance
studies. We were met with enthusiasm from the authors herein to participate in this journey
and are grateful for the many interesting chapters and the range of topics and approaches they
provided for this edition.
Prior to getting the project underway, the anonymous reviewers provided important
critical and insightful feedback which helped to make the companion much stronger. We
have had tremendous support from the Routledge team, Ben Piggott, and particularly Laura
Soppelsa for her patience and support in guiding us through the process and for answering
the many, many questions put to her with grace, knowledge, and humor. Kim Shigo and
Denise Larrabee provided valuable assistance by helping us through the copyediting process,
as we moved toward the submission date.
xvii
INTRODUCTION
Thematic structure, methodological
frames, and analyses
In this first Routledge Companion to Dance Studies, we aim to map out the key features of
“dance studies” as the field stands today, while keeping a close eye on potential future devel-
opments. This book seeks to locate these features historically within dance in specific social
and cultural contexts, and in relation to other academic influences that have impinged on this
relatively new field of study, in comparison to more traditional related areas such as aesthetics.
To show the scope and diversity of current dance studies, we adopted a thematically based
approach that emphasizes that dance scholarship does not stand alone as a single entity but is
inevitably linked to other related fields and concerns. At the same time, as will become clear,
theoretical or methodological issues raised in one strand of dance scholarship may also be
found in other aspects of the dance field under discussion in this book. To this end, we have
opted for what is best described as a case study type of approach that emerged largely from
the social sciences (see Yin 2009).1
We consider that a case study approach focusing on particular topics, individuals or
groups, and dance forms or practices offers the possibility of incorporating diverse research
approaches that build on established analytical discourses such as anthropology, history,
psychology, cultural studies, and sociology, while forging new avenues of interdisciplinary
investigation, drawing on and gesturing toward the arts and humanities.
This book is largely organized around a themed approach involving “Dance and…,” in
order to map the field of historical and current dance theory and practice, and to show that
there are key links or influences across the various areas of study. As such, issues of the body,
embodiment, practice, culture, history, theory, methods, gender, race and class, and so on
may be relevant to more than one section of “Dance and…” themes. Further, the approach
adopted is international in its reach with established and rising scholars and practitioners from
Australia, Canada, East Asia, Europe, South Africa, South America, the United Kingdom,
and the United States of America authoring the chapters.
Dance studies today?

The term “dance studies” is relatively new. It implies an interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary
approach that draws on current and emergent theoretical discourses and insights in other
related fields, while seeking to retain the focus of dance at the center. It engages traditional
1
scholarly based work and recent developments in practice-based research that provide a
reflective, experiential component, situating the current issues which preoccupy dance stud-
ies within developments of the field in the late 1980s and 1990s. As such, it can be argued that
it speaks to the concomitant breakdown of disciplinary boundaries in the arts, humanities,
and social sciences in that period and in subsequent developments. These developments were
known as “the cultural turn” in the late 1980s (see Chaney 1994). This was rapidly followed
by the “turn to the body” in the early 1990s. This turn to the body was influenced by, for
example, the impact of feminist theory and poststructuralism (see Thomas 2003, 34–44),
and the approach of Michel Foucault, for whom “the body” is key to his notion of “effective
history” (1986, 87–8). In the first decades of the current century, “the turn to ‘affect’” (see
Wetherell 2012), influenced by Deleuzian theory, opened a gap for dance scholars to enter
into the debates around kinesthetic empathy (see, e.g., Foster 2011; Reason and Reynolds
2010). In the late 1980s and early 1990s in the US and the UK, a new wave of dance scholars
was poised to move into action (e.g., Foster 1986; Fraleigh 1987; Daly 1987, 1995; Garafola
1989; Jordan 1992; Grau 1992, 1993; Adair 1992; Manning 1993; Franko 1993; Burt 1995;
Albright 1997) who were drawing on some of the new approaches to add to their dance
toolbox and analysis.
The emergent new moves in the late 1980s and 1990s were effectively set against ear-
lier developments in the marginal, disparate dance scholarship areas of dance ethnology
and ethnography (Kealiinohomoku [1970] 1993), dance criticism (Martin [1933] 1965),
dance history (Cohen, ed. 1974; Adshead and Layson, eds. 1983), dance philosophy (Sheets-
Johnstone 1979), and movement/dance analysis (Laban 1971; Bartenieff and Lewis 1980),
which, it must be noted, also had a bearing on subsequent shifts of direction. These were
accompanied by an opening of the range of styles studied, moving out of the primarily
“theater dance” context to embrace a variety of dance forms and practices that celebrate dif-
ferent bodies and identities. Moreover, it is worth remembering that several well-established
academic dance journals of today took off from the scholarly writing in that earlier period,
with the launch of academic journals such as Dance Chronicle in 1977, and Dance Research
Journal in 1974 (first published as CORD News in 1969), with the first volume of the UK
Dance Research following suit in 1983. Publishers Taylor and Francis and more recently
Intellect seem to have cornered the market for dance and performance journals. It indicates
an expansion of interest in different aspects of these areas, such as education and training,
somatic practices, and choreographic practices, which also speaks of a focus on more spe-
cialist interest journals, such as performance research, in recognition of the shift toward a
concern with practice-based research.
As indicated previously, rather than focusing attention on specific disciplinary areas of
dance research, such as dance anthropology, dance theory, dance aesthetics, dance philoso-
phy, and so on, we have adopted a thematic approach to the seven sections in this volume.
This is in the spirit of using a more flexible cultural studies type framework in recogni-
tion of what is increasingly an interdisciplinary approach in current dance studies, which
also retains a strong focus on dance, hopefully without losing sight of historical, current,
and emergent dance theory, practice, and analysis. Significant dance scholarship is emerg-
ing from a wide range of institutions represented by the authors in this companion, while a
new market is being shaped by a generation of scholars who are developing dance studies as
a theoretical and practice-based discipline, returning to their countries of origin in Africa,
Asia, and the Global South after they complete their PhDs. Alumni from long-established
postgraduate programs, such as the Department of World Arts and Cultures at the University
2
Introduction
of California Los Angeles, circulate perspectives on diverse dance practices around the globe
(e.g., Foster, ed. 2011). Other anthologies respond to a growth in interest new methodolo-
gies that interrogate issues of politics, gender, and identity in theater dance (e.g., Nodera and
Franco, eds. 2007). This book develops this imperative by integrating subaltern and diasporic
voices from the past and the present.
The themes of Part 1, Dance and Corporeality, and Part 2, Dance and Somatics, are inter-
linked and indeed, could together constitute a whole book on their own, and may do in the
future of course. However, the point of introducing them first is to highlight the import of
different conceptualizations of the body in dance studies and the growing engagement with
somatics within dance practice through a range of case studies. It is also the case that cor-
poreality is so central to dance that it will be in evidence in the other sections through the
different practice-based, theoretical, and empirical studies.
Part I. Dance and corporeality: Training and engagement

The term corporeality came into more widespread academic usage in relation to dance
with the two-year Choreographing History project hosted by the University of California,
Riverside, starting in 1993. The scholarly exchanges illuminated diverse bodily practices,
highlighting their cultural significance through a range of interdisciplinary discourses influ-
enced by theorists such as Michel Foucault (1977), Jacques Derrida (1996), Pierre Bourdieu
(1984), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964), and Gilles Deleuze ([1968] 1994), among others.
Topics such as training, technique, age, and multiple aspects of the body as a physical and
symbolic entity are encompassed within the theme of corporeality in this book. This section
addresses developments in pedagogic and creative practices, seen in Rosemary Candelario’s
exploration of innovative training systems that engage with space and the environment to
heighten bodily awareness beyond technical proficiency. In another strand of investigation,
Catherine F. Botha questions notions of agency, subjectivity, and identity in the struggle
against oppression. Inquiries into memory develop discourses around mind/body connec-
tions and how they function in dance. A level of democratization of the dancer is seen in
the greater access in terms of who can dance, inviting scrutiny of, for example, the age and
abilities of bodies that dance. Moving beyond stereotypes of the youthful, slender white
dancer, differently abled bodies present challenges to the status quo. There is a growing
strand of inquiry into dance as empowering for those with illnesses such as Parkinson’s
disease. Sara Houston’s research emphasizes poetic functions for dance through movement
improvisation, distinct from investigations into the therapeutic value of the art form for
those affected by the disease. Yvonne Hardt’s chapter uses a “praxeological analysis,” drawn
from social science, to investigate and critically assess the learning and teaching processes of
dance training that she argues is a reflexive practice involving a complex range of processes,
educational contexts, and bodily practices, rather than the investigation of dance training
concepts. In turn, this leads to the rapidly growing area of “dance science” that brings
together the “two cultures” of science and art, which hitherto were considered to be at
odds with each other, as the scientist CP Snow ([1959] 2001) indicated some time ago. In a
similar vein to sports science, a major focus of research in dance science is directed towards
enhancing dancers’ performance and injury prevention by examining the effects of move-
ment activity on the body. Emma Redding explores how dance science brings new concep-
tualizations of the body and how best to care for it in movement based on quantitative and
qualitative research and analysis.
3
Part II. Dance and somatics

The development of somatically informed perspectives has shaped dance practices and ana-
lytical approaches. Alternative bodily practices have transformed training and choreogra-
phy, particularly techniques such as Body-Mind Centering (BMC), Feldenkrais, Alexander
Technique, Rolfing, and various martial art forms, which have also been employed in thera-
peutic practices. Michael Huxley’s overview of the main strands of somatic practices, some
of which are locatable historically, reveals significant interrelationships while other prac-
tices exist as independent techniques. New conceptualizations of mind/body connections
are explored by Beatrice Allegranti. Ethnographic methods inform reflection on creative
and therapeutic processes that generate movement material for choreography based on the
experience of people diagnosed with young onset dementia, their families, and care-givers.
The practice of mindfulness has gained a lot of interest in recent years in relation to everyday
life as well as to dance making and pedagogic approaches. Naomi Lefebvre Sell (with Tara
Silverthorn and Lucille Teppa) considers connections between mindfulness and the dis-
courses of somatic practices that emphasize felt experiences. The role of language in dance
creation also has been at the center of experimental practices for decades. Hiie Saumaa’s
analysis explores interrelationships between language and improvisation in group dance set-
tings with a focus on the physical practices and writing of Simone Forti.
Part III. Dance and analysis

The emergence of formalist perspectives linked to postmodernism (as documented by Sally
Banes in 1980 and 1987) has paved the way for articulations of multiple meanings in the cre-
ation and performance of dance and modes of documentation. While the 1988 Dance Analysis
anthology (edited by Adshead, Briginshaw, Hodgens, and Huxley) brought together analytical
methods into a single introductory source, recent dance scholarship has expanded to integrate
rich methodologies from other disciplines alongside work that delves deeper into the compo-
nents that comprise what is classified as dance. For example, Stephanie Jordan examines how
movement in choreomusical analysis is situated in relation to its musical accompaniment, engag-
ing with issues of style and structure alongside creative and interpretive processes. Research into
different senses has helped move the focus away from the visual in dance, as Michèle Danjoux
explores in this section by considering the politics of touch and “sounding costumes,” zeroing
in on how a specific type of physical relationship shapes meaning in performance. “Choreosonic
wearables” employ digital sound technologies embedded in performers’ costumes, resulting in a
collaborative practice that can alter, restrict, innovate, or enhance the dancer’s performance and
audience expectations. Highly influential concepts of the body as living archive are contested
by Timmy De Laet, who explores choreographic responses that engage with “anarchival” con-
cepts. The works use creative processes that integrate or reflect on past works in innovative ways.
Archival research underpins revised understandings of history seen in Gay Morris’s investiga-
tion into collaborations between visual artists and Leonide Massine that illuminate unique per-
ceptions of modernism. Dance criticism has long provided a fundamental foundation through
which to interrogate dance practice and performance, offering a range of analytical relationships
that also functioned as historical documentation. As the nature of criticism is changing with
the advent of the internet, an assessment of the field’s historical development by Erin Brannigan
investigates poetic functions throughout the twentieth century with a specific focus on iconic
male critics and the arrival of female critics in the second half of the century. She then addresses
the consequences of the shift toward criticism in the digital era.
4
Introduction
Part IV. Dance, society, and culture

Analysis of intersection of the three components—dance, society and culture—have trans-
formed dance studies as a field by permeating the disciplinary boundaries, including cul-
tural studies, sociology, psychology, and anthropology. Shifts in conceptualizations of the
term political since the 1960s facilitates scholarly investigation into issues of race, gender,
nationality, and sexuality, specifically lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) across
a diverse range of dance styles and practices, including popular, social, and art dance.
International in scope, this section focuses on significant interrelationships, demonstrating
the work of choreographers who comment on social injustices as well as a mode of social
consciousness and activism, while others help shape their respective dance fields through
their roles as performers, teachers, and leaders. Key issues of race, gender, equality, and
justice engaged through performance emerge in Nadine George-Graves’s ethnographic
study of contemporary black dance events in 2017, highlighting the power of resistance in
a microhistory of Brooklyn, New York. Ramsay Burt’s archival investigation into black
British dance illuminates the lost history of Elroy Josephs, a Jamaican migrant dancer, actor,
and teacher working in the mid-twentieth century. Limitations of and exclusions from the
twentieth century dance history canon are exposed in the process of analysis. Other artistic
strategies are investigated by Danielle Goldman who focuses on the racial implications of a
project at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art that emphasizes collaboration and
improvisation. Another look at performance in the mid-twentieth century illuminates the
experience of female dancers on the British variety stage through archival and oral history
sources. Larraine Nicholas’s historical account of the ‘Windmill Girls’ dance ensemble inter-
rogates dance training and bodily discipline, class, female empowerment, and government
censorship as the popular stage form tantalized and entertained. As stylistic boundaries are
increasingly blurred, Susan Leigh Foster considers the potential for dance as a commodity.
Using a televised series as a case study, the art form is situated within the global marketplace
in relation to theories of labor.
Part V. Dance and time

There are various ways in which the theme of time is explored in this section. Moving away
from biographical documentation of facts, new historicism in literary theory has influenced
dance studies scholarship since the 1980s. Dance history has expanded its scope of subjects
while integrating ethnographic and oral history methodologies alongside archival source
material that shapes innovative scrutiny of dance practices from the recent and distant past.
Integrating anthropological and choreological research methods, Maria Koutsouba exam-
ines changes in where and who performs traditional Greek dances, considering relation-
ships between past and present, the construction of community and diverse types of political
impetus. Shifting power relationships linked to colonial and racialized policies of dominance
are evident in the globalization and institutionalization of Latin and South American ballet
dancers in professional companies in the UK and the US. Lester Tomé’s exploration of his-
torical shifts documents Carlos Acosta’s legacy at the Royal Ballet and contradictory regimes
of multiculturalism and stigmatization of subaltern bodies. New technologies open access to
dance through digital platforms, facilitating new modes of dance preservation, ranging from
the still photograph to digital platforms and YouTube. Sarah Whatley uses three case studies
to examine new modes of digital transmission which alter the availability of dance content
and how insights can be used. With the ubiquitous rise of digital platforms, the issue of
5
copyright, so regulated in music, is again coming to the fore in dance. The older debates
around dance notation and reconstruction concerning what is the dance and who owns it,
take on new meaning in the digital age, offering challenges to lawyers and dancers. Thus,
Charlotte Waelde brings the law and dance into dialogue. Sheenagh Pietrobruno investigates
the architecture of social media and YouTube platforms in the circulation of dance content
in relation to the intangible cultural heritage designation of the Whirling Dervish or sema
ceremony.
Part VI. Dance and scenography

As dance scholarship crosses disciplinary boundaries, collaborators such as costume designers,
dramaturges, digital artists, and lighting designers alter the site of performances and bodies that
move in them. Artistic interchanges result in innovative ways of conceptualizing dance and can
also influence technological developments in the process (e.g., Cunningham and lifeforms/
BIPED). Dress and costume can influence the appearance as well as the qualities of how the
body moves in space, while narrative strategies and performance staging innovations inform
perceptions of dance. Jessica Bugg explores the dynamics between dress and bodies, integrat-
ing ethnographic research into the lived experience of collaborative relationships of dancers,
designers, and choreographers. The inclusion of text as a creative strategy also has multiple
manifestations, investigated in relationship to issues of materiality, space, and temporality in
choreography for museum sites by Johan Stjernholm. Visual aesthetic concerns arise in the
reflection of a practice-as-research informed solo by Becka McFadden, exploring the drama-
turgical potential of the back in performance. Design elements are crucial components in the
two case studies Cynthia Ling Lee analyzes, revealing how the visual and aural layers bring
voice to subaltern histories in solo dances that explore queer desire, post/colonial power, and
cultural imperialism.
Part VII. Dance, space, and place

Disciplines such as cultural geography, architecture, and urban planning inform scholarly
analysis of the significance of the physical and social space in which dance occurs. Innovations
in site-specific creativity have expanded from the aerial work of Trisha Brown in Man
Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970) and Walking on the wall (1971) (see Rosenberg
2017, 78, 96–97). Bridges, skyscrapers, mountain, and inner-city alleyways become the site
through and on which people move in the twenty-first century, shaping both the physicality
and significance of the location and the performing bodies. City squares, gardens, and court-
yards carry histories of power—financial, social, and cultural—revealing overt or subvert
narratives and identity markers. Visual artists’ work with choreographers can alter percep-
tions of the dancing body, while the technosphere offers innovative possibilities to shape
virtual realities. Carol Brown explores interfaces between humans and machines in digital
dance productions. Urban streets provide the setting for the case studies in Alexandra Kolb’s
analysis of the symbolic significance of domestic activities brought to light by their perfor-
mative focus. The site-specific work also challenges perceptions of who dances, examining
issues of ageism and the quotidian rather than the exceptional. Gerald Siegmund shifts the
lens back to the trained contemporary dance body to investigate medial representations and
concepts of theatricality. Pedagogic practices and restaging processes in Alison Curtis-Jones’s
creative engagement with Rudolf von Laban’s “lost” dances also highlight the significance of
the performance environments and unique challenges in the dances’ evolution. The body’s
6
Introduction
relationship to ecological issues is highly topical, involving consideration of both local and
global environments. The movement of thirty women on a beach in Cornwall comes to life
as Ruth Pethybridge writes in dialogue with choreographer Rosemary Lee and the dancers.
They reflect on embodied knowledge and community, exploring elements of the locale
including its industrial history, the beach, and corporeal interactions with sea, sand, and wind
that emerge in the creation and performance of the production.
The permeability of categories in this book is reinforced by the overlap between
sources found in articles on disparate themes. For example, ethnographic methods reoccur
in historical accounts and practice-as-research creative processes; philosophical recon-
ceptualizations of mind/body connections in the digital age alter understanding of rela-
tionships between bodies and space; and archival detective work challenges dominant
historical narratives while inspiring choreographic creations. The politics of identity
emerge in multiple themes through investigations into subaltern voices, the social con-
struction of space, and investigations into who dances and where it occurs. A constant
thread remains in the focus on moving bodies, however, offering paradigms for future
innovative scholarship.
Note
1 See, for example, Robert K. Yin (2009). Although the methodological principles of a case study
stem from the social sciences, nevertheless they can be adapted for other disciplinary areas.
References
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Adshead, Janet, and June Layson, eds. 1983. Dance History: A Methodology for Study. London: Dance Books.
Adshead, Janet, Valerie A. Briginshaw, Pauline Hodgens, and Michael Huxley, eds. 1988. Dance Analysis.
London: Dance Books.
Albright, Ann Cooper. 1997. Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Bartenieff, Irmgard, and Dori Lewis. 1980. Body Movement; Coping with the Environment. New York: Gordon
and Breach.
Banes, Sally. [1980] 1987. Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance. Reissued, with new introduction.
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Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Burt, Ramsay. 1995. The Male Dancer: Bodies, Spectacles, Sexuality. London: Routledge.
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Routledge.
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Present. New York: Dodd Mead.
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31 (1): 8–21.
———. 1995. Done into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. [1968] 1994. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. London: Continuum.
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IL: The University of Chicago Press.
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———. 2011. Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance. London: Routledge.
———, ed. 2011. Worlding Dance. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
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———. 1986. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault’s Thought,
edited by Paul Rabinow. Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books.
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of Pittsburgh Press.
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Garafola, Lynn. 1989. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Grau, Andrée. 1992. “Intercultural Research in the Performing Arts.” Dance Research 10 (2): 3–29.
———. 1993. “John Blacking and the development of dance anthropology in the United Kingdom.” Dance
Research Journal 25 (2): 21–31.
Jordan, Stephanie. 1992. Striding Out: Aspects of Contemporary and New Dance in Britain. London: Dance
Books.
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Laban, Rudolf von. 1971. The Mastery of Movement. Boston, MA: Play.
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8
PART I
Dance and corporeality: Training

and engagement
1
DANCING THE SPACE
Butoh and Body Weather as training
for ecological consciousness
Rosemary Candelario
Introduction
Japanese experimental dancer Min Tanaka famously said, “I don’t dance in the space, I dance
the space” (Candelario 2018, 45). The statement’s removal of a preposition, just two small
letters, results in a profound reordering of the relationship between bodies and spaces that has
both philosophical and ecological implications: philosophical in the sense that Tanaka pro-
poses both a theory and practice of dancing that requires a new conception of how dancing
connects bodies and space, and ecological because I believe the application of this theory and
practice beyond dance training and performance could affect discursive and perhaps even
day-to-day shifts in how humans relate to their environment. This chapter asks: How can we
understand what it means to dance the space? How does one learn to dance the space? What
are the implications of this kind of practice on how we understand space and our relationship
to it? Can dance training actually double as training for developing an alternative relationship
between humans and their environment? As a way of addressing these questions, I discuss my
ethnographic research at two dance training workshops: SU-EN’s Butoh Summer Camp in
wooded rural Sweden in 2015 and Frank van de Ven’s Body Weather-based Body/Landscape
workshop in the mountains of the Basque Country in 2013.
This chapter begins with an orientation to butoh and Body Weather, and then brings ideas
from dance, ecology, and posthumanist philosophy together to articulate how these dance
practices can facilitate what Ann Cooper Albright (2003) calls an “ecological consciousness.”
The two training programs are then described in detail, including their understanding of
the body, and exercises used to train the body to shift out of habitual patterns and into new
orientations with the space. Finally, the two practices are compared and contrasted in order
to point to how each of these forms trains people to dance the space. This chapter takes as
a given that it is possible (and indeed necessary, urgent) to teach, learn, and practice dance
techniques that can shift one’s relationship to the environment, from body-subject to just
another object in what Timothy Morton (2013) calls “the mesh.” What’s more, it takes an
idealistic stance that butoh and Body Weather training practice have the potential to have
a direct impact, not just a mimetic or representative one, on behaviors integral to this shift.
11
Rosemary Candelario
In an era of accelerating climate change, this kind of work, which is at once both material
and philosophical, takes on a particular urgency. My hope is that eventually this research on
butoh and Body Weather training methods could illuminate, as Wendy Arons and Theresa
J. May (2012, 6) have stated, not only “how performance has or might function as part of the
transvaluation of values necessary to forestall ecological collapse,” but also how these dance
training programs could function beyond the trainings themselves as part of the transforma-
tion of behaviors necessary to forestall ecological collapse.
Butoh, Body Weather, training

Butoh is an avant-garde dance developed in Japan in the late 1950s and 1960s by a group
of dancers centered on Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. Butoh features an image-based
approach to generating movement, an emphasis on the transformation of the dancer into
something else, an intense physicality that may result in explosions of movement across
the stage or a strictly contained tension beneath the surface of the skin, and a focus on
themes such as death, marginality, and nature (Baird and Candelario 2018). Close associa-
tions between butoh and specific sites can be traced to Hijikata’s project with photographer
Eikoh Hosoe (1965–1968) in the northern region of Japan, Tohoku, where Hijikata grew up
and Hosoe took refuge as a child during the bombing of Tokyo. Inspired by the work with
Hosoe (which was published as the book Kamaitachi in 1968), Hijikata mined memories and
images of Tohoku to create new choreographic ideas and movement vocabulary, a project
that consumed him until his death in 1986. Although Hijikata was far more interested in the
idea of Tohoku than the material landscape, the strong association that ensued between butoh
and site has since inspired butoh dancers to develop companies and practices in relation to
their own local native or adopted landscapes. The form is now often taught and performed
outdoors, in addition to being performed on stages, and has been adapted to many different
landscapes all over the world.
Min Tanaka started leading Body Weather workshops in 1978. Body Weather, Tanaka
insists, is not a dance style, but rather an ideology for dance and life and a methodology for
bodily research. Body Weather is centered on the exploration of the body’s landscape in the
context of the larger environment, in which “bodies are not conceived as fixed entities, but
just like the weather, [are] constantly changing through an infinite and complex system of
processes occurring in- and outside of these bodies” (Body Weather Amsterdam n.d.). Zack
Fuller (2012) describes Body Weather as “research, a way of acquiring information, experi-
ence, and stimulation from the physical environment.” Nature images like wind and clay, and
an orientation to site (whether that site is an urban street, a suburban park, a dance studio, or
a wooded rural setting), are considered important sources of stimulation for training and per-
formance. From 1986 to 2010, Tanaka hosted Maijuku Performance Company members and
students on his Body Weather Farm in Hakushu, Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan. The working
organic vegetable farm not only sustained Tanaka and the company, but also—and perhaps
more importantly—served as a central focus of training. That is, agricultural labor was con-
sidered an inherent part of dance training through information gained by the body from the
physical environment.
I should emphasize that many Body Weather practitioners, including Tanaka himself,
currently sharply distinguish their work from butoh (although this has not always been the
case). Tanaka did work with Hijikata for a few years before Hijikata died in 1986, but already
had a substantial body of experimental, improvisational, and site work to his credit before
that time. While Body Weather practitioners typically hold Hijikata in high esteem, they
12
Dancing the space
find butoh to be a fixed entity that does not allow the kind of open-ended experimentation
that they want to pursue. Nonetheless, as a practitioner of both butoh and Body Weather,
and as a scholar, I find it to be productive to include practices on the margins of butoh in the
discussion.
Butoh is certainly not the only dance form being used to explore these issues. I focus
on butoh and butoh-related forms such as Body Weather here, first and foremost, because
that is my background as a performer and my expertise as a scholar. However, there are two
other reasons why butoh and Body Weather practices offer such a rich field in which to
investigate dancing the space. First, although there is an active debate about what constitutes
contemporary butoh, the one thing people agree on is that butoh and butoh-related dance is
fundamentally about the transformation of the dancing body into something else (see, e.g.,
Baird and Candelario 2018; Fraleigh 2010). Second, many training workshops not only situ-
ate themselves in nature but also explicitly present the workshop as a way to understand or
form a relationship with that particular landscape. I want to take the claims of these practices
seriously as potential modes for transforming humans and forming relationships with the
environment.
Although the focus is on dance training here, the central point is not dance pedagogy or
how the dance is taught, but on what the training produces. Whereas performance is often
about spectatorship and representation, training is about participation and learning how to
do something. Attention to training rather than performance, I propose, opens up a focus
on learning and repeating behaviors that require us to act differently, not only in the specific
locales of the trainings, but potentially also on a larger scale in relation to our global climate.
These training programs neither engage the environment as a backdrop for dance, such as in
site-specific dance, nor as an aesthetic object in its own right, as in land art, nor as a theme
about which to dance. Instead, they develop in their participants processes aimed at develop-
ing a set of complex interconnections between body and space. If and when performance is
included as a component of these workshops, the focus is on sharing the processes and expe-
riences with witnesses in the place where those processes were honed. The interconnections
learned through dancing, which I conceptualize here through philosopher Morton’s (2013)
related concepts of interobjectivity and the mesh, force us to question our assumptions about
the relationship between bodies and space, and remind us that we are not and cannot be
isolated from our surroundings.
Bodies, space, and dance: “Facilitating an ecological consciousness”

In the German modern dance of Mary Wigman and Rudolf von Laban, which served as a
foundation for modern dance in Japan as well as butoh (Elswit et al. 2018), space acted on
bodies, while at the same time bodies moved through space. Space was volumetric, provid-
ing a “Raumempfindung or ‘felt’” experience (Brown 2010, 60). In this context, there was
a clear distinction between inside (the body, the emotions) and outside (space). Much of this
modern dance sought to project the inside to the (transcendent) outside. In this view there is
a clear separation between a body and the space through which it moves.
Radical changes to conceptions of space and time in postmodernity (see, e.g., Harvey
1990) have been accompanied by a concomitant shift in the relationship of choreography
to space. Influenced in part by Deleuzian thought, spatial practices now tend more to the
post-Euclidian. Instead of a simple inside-outside dichotomy, what we now see is more like
a Möbius strip, an “enfolding [of ] inside and outside . . . [in which] the body is both ‘con-
taminated’ and ‘contaminant,’ erupting and displacing borders between soma and city, the
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Rosemary Candelario
organic body and the built environment, corporeality and virtuality, container and con-
tents” (Brown 2010, 61). In other words, rather than remaining separate, dancing bodies and
space have developed an interpenetrative relationship in which neat borders are no longer
distinguishable. In the case of butoh, Hijikata was already choreographing a body without
organs of sorts (via Artaud) well before Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari wrote their book
A Thousand Plateaus (1980); Deleuze and Guattari themselves were interested in butoh for
its body assemblages and nonhuman becomings, the former largely through his student, and
later translator, Kuniichi Uno, and the latter directly as evidenced in his writing about butoh
and Tanaka (Guattari 2015). (In addition, numerous scholars bring Deleuze and Guattari to
bear on butoh and vice versa: Cull 2012 and Hornblow 2006 are but two examples.)
Albright’s description of her approach to teaching dance improvisation in a university
setting is one example of the potential political implications of a kind of Deleuzian or post-
Euclidian understanding of the relationship between bodies and space. She writes:
I ask [students] to concentrate on opening the pores of their skin so that the world
can penetrate their physical awareness. This image helps us feel our bodies as part
and parcel of a whole landscape, rather than the instrument that views, arranges, or
destroys that landscape. I have, at times, described this somatic moment as facilitat-
ing an ecological consciousness: in this dialogue between the self and the world one
becomes aware of the intriguing possibilities of interdependence. With this comes
a deeper sense of responsibility, not as an oppressive duty towards others, but rather
as an ability to respond, an ability to be present with the world as a way of being
present with oneself. (Albright 2003, 262)
Crucial here is the shift from the kind of interpenetrative relationship described above
(acknowledging a mutual impact) to an interdependent one (acknowledging a mutual
responsibility). It is key, too, that Albright highlights not only the shift in being in relation-
ship with the world, but also, by repeating the word “ability,” she draws our attention to
particular skills that dancing can develop: responsiveness, presence, and seeing (and therefore
perhaps treating) the world as inextricable from oneself. The kind of relationship Albright
describes has the potential to undo the anthropocentrism inherent in discourses such as the
Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000), which identifies the current geologic era as one
defined by human impact on the environment and climate.
The development of critical posthumanism has been essential to shifting notions of rela-
tionships of bodies and space(s) away from a human-centered understanding of the world and
toward the kind of interdependent mutuality Albright aims to teach. While some scholars
focus on decentering humans in favor of seeing them as part of the larger web of life on
the planet (see, e.g., Badmington 2000; Wolfe 2009; Braidotti 2013), others seek to broaden
the scope even further to consider nonhuman objects and their relationships to one another
(see, e.g., Bennett 2010; Bogost 2012; Harman 2018). Morton, who belongs in the second
category, provides a helpful way to understand this kind of newly ordered web of intercon-
nectivity through Object-Oriented Ontology. He writes, “The phenomenon we call inter-
subjectivity is just a local anthropocentric instance of a much more widespread phenomenon,
namely interobjectivity . . . ‘intersubjectivity’ is really human interobjectivity with lines drawn
around it to exclude nonhumans” (2013, 81–82). Like the simple but profound change Tanaka
effects in his statement that opens this chapter, the substitution of “ob” for “sub” in Morton’s
writing effects a profound reordering of the world. Gone are the body-subjects of Maurice
Merleau-Ponty (1964) with special status over and above objects that have been so dominant
14
Dancing the space
over the past half century. Instead, we are all objects: my body, the chair in which I sit, the
computer on which I type, my cat sleeping on the couch a few meters from me, the house in
which I write, my partner sitting in the next room, the street on which I live, even the weather
system that yesterday delivered massive thunderstorms and today bathes my town in cooler
temperatures and warm sunlight. Interobjectivity is the spacetime between and among these
objects. In the sense of quantum physics, spacetime is four dimensional—the three dimen-
sions of space plus time; it is not static but dynamic, responding to hyperobjects. The clas-
sic example is how a planet displaces spacetime, which is experienced by other objects as
gravity. For Morton, interobjectivity—a way to describe the relationships among all objects,
including humans—does not exist in spacetime, rather, it is spacetime, or rather, spacetime is
interobjectivity. Just as Tanaka removes the “in” in order to dance the space, Morton removes
the “in” in order to establish that the relationship among objects—the quantum, the planetary,
and the mundane—is nothing less than the dynamic responsiveness of spacetime.
An interobjective system (me, my cat, my house and my neighbors’ houses, the trees in
the yard, the asphalt street, the weather system sitting over North Texas) is an example of
what Morton calls “the mesh.” The mesh resonates with the Japanese concept of ma. Ma
is not simply space or the space of the body, but more properly is the space between things
(see Vessey 2018 for a discussion of ma in butoh training). Judith Hamera (1990, 57) describes
ma as a “meaning-full interval in space, time, or space-time, an interval with both objective
and subjective aspects, inherently relational.” Although it is a system of interconnectedness,
the mesh is nonetheless “full of gaps and absences” (Morton 2013, 83). Like a spiderweb or a
textile, the mesh is both the linkages and the hole between the links. What this all enables,
in thinking about dance and thinking about the dance training programs to be discussed
below in particular, is a philosophical framework for what these dance training programs
have already been rehearsing: a radically reordered object corporeality, sensitivity to the con-
nections (mesh, ma) constituted by the space itself, and an embodied and practiced ecological
consciousness fundamentally attuned to interdependence.
Learning how to dance the space: Expanding

and erasing in order to encounter
SU-EN is a leading butoh proponent with more than twenty years of experience exploring
the connections between the Nordic landscape and humans through her dance. SU-EN
began studying butoh in Japan in 1988 with Yoko Ashikawa, a star butoh performer with
and on whom Hijikata choreographed from the late 1960s until his death in 1986. SU-EN
performed with Ashikawa’s companies, Hakutobo and Gnome, until she decided to return
to Sweden and start the SU-EN Butoh Company in 1994, one of the first butoh companies
founded by a non-Japanese dancer.
SU-EN holds seasonal butoh camps an average of two to three times a year at her com-
pany’s home base, Haglund Skola, a former schoolhouse and its surrounding land in rural
Sweden. When I asked her in conversation why she chose Haglund Skola as a base for her
teaching and choreography, SU-EN (2015) said that living in nature constantly teaches you
how much you do not know. Moreover, it provides the kind of obstacles—or what she likes
to call “disturbances”—that she finds essential to butoh. For example, walking in a dance
studio provides little in the way of obstacles: the space is designed to facilitate movement.
Cities, too, are designed to direct movement with relative ease along particular pathways
(although, if you are in a wheelchair or are traveling with someone with a different mobility,
obstacles in the city become more apparent). But in the forest, or what she calls “real life,”
15
Rosemary Candelario
physical obstacles like brambles and mud, and “disturbances” like insects, abound. According
to SU-EN, butoh dancers need disturbances, are interested in them, and actively use them
in our dancing. One example she gave, and that students at the summer camp could readily
identify with, is how a bug bite can alter one’s experience of one’s body. The obstacles and
“disturbances” SU-EN values in her training are reminders that cannot be ignored—that
humans are ultimately enmeshed with their environment rather than in control of it.
For SU-EN, butoh requires that we always place ourselves in a situation to actively
encounter the world anew. SU-EN (2003) often uses the phrase “body and the world,” as in
the title of her book: Butoh: Kroppen och världen/Body and the World. “The body is the world.
The world is the body,” she writes. “[The butoh body] recycles its environs. It is an organism,
not a shape. Butoh dares to transform the initial reality of the body into a disparate reality of
living matter. The body merges with space and the confrontation can commence” (69). What
SU-EN describes here is a process, though not an easy one. For her, butoh is a struggle and
a dangerous, even terrifying, practice because it requires facing the world and being chal-
lenged to change one’s appearance and one’s understanding. The emphasis, on the one hand,
is on acknowledging how much one does not know, while at the same time cultivating the
willingness and ability to encounter the unknown.
I attended the ten-day summer camp in 2015, along with thirteen other participants,
ten of whom were Swedish, with the other three from Ireland, Croatia, and South Africa.
Dancers ranged in age from midtwenties to midseventies. Our days followed a regimented
schedule coordinated by team leaders. Every morning we did “practical work” around the
property as part of teams assigned to gardening, cooking, and carpentry. In the afternoon,
we did “basic training” in the studio, which prepared us to learn a handful of SU-EN’s
more than sixty “body materials.” SU-EN’s “body materials” are choreographic image nug-
gets, akin to Hijikata’s butoh-fu (see van Hensbergen 2018), that form a basis of her train-
ing. The “body materials” are drawn from the Swedish landscape and include images such
as mosquito, stone, rubber, lotus, and rotting season. During free time, we could explore
SU-EN’s library or spend quiet time on the grounds or in our spartan rooms. In the evening,
we would watch films of butoh performances or listen to SU-EN lecture on various aspects
of butoh history. Group meals, prepared in teams, were simple but nourishing. The camp
culminated in a public performance and meal we prepared for guests.
The “practical work” at SU-EN’s butoh camps is meant to provide a way to get to know
“what we do here.” It is a way of becoming familiar with the landscape, of learning group
problem solving, and of developing a means of relating the body to the environment. I was
on the gardening team and spent hours each day weeding. In my field notes I observed
the silence of weeding. Forgetting others were there. Just the task of moving tiles,
finding and loosening roots, encountering grubs and centipedes and worms and
slugs and ant nests and one white moth. Does this silence and removal of distrac-
tion make us more able to perceive the struggle [of butoh] and the resistance? Does
“remaining calm” [as SU-EN instructed us] facilitate the orientation needed to
encounter the world? (Candelario, July 5, 2015)
After a morning encountering whatever the rural Swedish environment outside offered (rain,
bugs, dirt), afternoon “basic training” in the spare, high-ceilinged studio-cum-black box
theater, with tall windows on three sides and an immaculate wooden floor, provided a very
different environment in which to train our bodies. Exercises here were designed to cultivate
a body that is always seeking to meet the world around it. We learned to breathe as if our
16
Dancing the space
bodies were balloons constantly being filled with air, expanding in all directions. We also
practiced “erasing and expanding” all of our joints and the outlines of the physical body, try-
ing to enact in our bodies a drawing SU-EN made of a stick figure with open spaces where
joints should be, in which the body itself lost its solidity and became a kind of mesh. Placing
these images in our bodies, we would over and over again try to go from lying down to
standing using only our “belly power.” The process of erasing the body’s outlines is meant to
make room for something else to enter, while expanding in all directions enables an active
encounter with the world, akin to the ecological consciousness Albright describes.
It is into the erased and expanded body that SU-EN’s “body materials” may enter. While
image-based prompts are common sources for movement vocabulary and choreography in
butoh, SU-EN’s “body materials” are, in my experience, unique for their incorporation of
smells and sounds. According to SU-EN, these aspects are important because they exceed the
material boundaries of the body, contributing to the process of “erasing and expanding” the
body. For example, the first body material we learned was the “rotting process,” in which
not only rotting organs and organisms propel the dancing body, but crucially the smell of rot-
ting does as well. As we spent hours practicing this body material solo and in pairs, SU-EN
shared the following image: if an apple rots, the smell extends so far, which means that the
apple also extends that far. Our task, then, was to do the same with our bodies and the space.
Ultimately, the training was about erasing our social bodies, “my shape,” as SU-EN often
referred to it, and in learning to always place ourselves in a position to encounter the world
around us. Indeed, photographic images of her choreography available on her website often
depict dancers with their faces completely covered, giving the impression of an effort to erase
the individual features in favor of viewing the dancing body as part of the larger landscape
(SU-EN Butoh Company n.d.). While SU-EN never used the words “subject” or “object,” I
nonetheless have come to understand her workshops as training for how to become an object
in relation to other objects. Expanding and erasing in order to allow something else to come
in can have the effect of exposing the gaps and the linkages of the mesh; by actively expand-
ing our view of/beyond our own bodies, we can begin to grasp dancing the space as a risky
yet necessary way of encountering the world.
Learning how to dance the space: Sensitizing

the body to external stimulation
Frank van de Ven is a noted Dutch dancer and choreographer who worked with Tanaka and his
Maijuku Performance Company in Japan from 1983 to 1992 before he founded Body Weather
Amsterdam with Katerina Bakatsaki in 1993. Along with Oguri and Roxanne Steinberg in
Los Angeles, Andrés Corchero in Barcelona, Christine Quoiraud in France, Stuart Lynch in
Denmark, and Tess De Quincey in Australia, van de Ven is one of the most active proponents
of Body Weather working today. He is unique among the above-mentioned dancers for his
extensive teaching across Europe and sometimes in Canada, the United States, and Australia.
In 2018 alone, he taught fifteen workshops in ten countries lasting two to ten days each. His
workshops are a combination of Body Weather and his own Body/Landscape.
Whereas Body Weather can happen anywhere, van de Ven created Body/Landscape spe-
cifically for training in rural outdoor settings. Body/Landscape workshops are centered on
the exploration of the body’s landscape in the context of the larger natural landscape. Like
Body Weather, these workshops emphasize strength, flexibility, and grounding alongside
kinesthetic sensitivity to stimulation from the physical environment, keen observation of
one’s own body and the bodies of fellow participants, and verbal discussion and feedback.
17
Rosemary Candelario
While the settings of Body/Landscape might change from the mountain meadows and trails
of Itxassou and its environs in the Basque Country (where I trained in July 2013), to the iso-
lated Isle of Eigg in Scotland, to the Lake District in England, the training exercises remain
largely the same. Like Hijikata’s butoh, Body Weather practices are aimed at disrupting daily
habits, for example by travelling to a different landscape; at the same time, exercises are
repeated frequently so as to attune dancers to the constant change occurring in their bodies
as well as in the larger environment.
Like Body Weather, Body/Landscape focuses on sensitizing dancers to the weather/
landscape within one’s own body, relationships with others, and relationships with the envi-
ronment. Van de Ven described the work in the following way in a flyer for the 2013 Itxassou
workshop: “The workshop proposes strategies to confront our bodies with the multiplicity,
unpredictability, directness and autonomy of the natural environment. The aim is to explore
and develop consciousness of the body itself being an ever-evolving landscape within a greater
surrounding landscape.” Learning how to take in stimulation from the environment is key
to Body Weather training. As Tanaka himself explained, “If I have a chance to get stimula-
tion from outside through my skin, I contain more than is inside my clothing. That is Body
Weather. It’s omni-central, as if there are many eyes, many centers, moving” (quoted in
Marshall 2006, 61). In sum, Body Weather cultivates a body that is open, diffuse, and protean.
The fourteen primarily Western Europe–based participants in the six-day Itxassou Body/
Landscape program lived and ate in an old farm building converted into a bunkhouse in
the neighboring village of Macaye. We began most of our days carpooling to a small studio
in nearby Itxassou, where we methodically warmed up our bodies following a sequence
designed by van de Ven and then moved into Body Weather’s M/B training, an intensely
rigorous physical practice, which can stand for mind/body, muscle/bone, and movement/
balance (for more on Body Weather training in general, see McAuley 2000; Fuller 2014;
Hug 2016). Weather permitting, a simple lunch of breads, cheeses, and vegetables was eaten
outdoors, where we would spend the afternoon in group exercises and solo exploration,
either in wooded areas in the village or in the hills or mountains in the surrounding area.
In the evenings, after a filling communally cooked meal served under the stars, we had the
opportunity to read and discuss texts selected by van de Ven.
M/B, a foundation of Body Weather training, can be likened to a long (one to one-and-a-
half hours) game of follow the leader, including walking, jumping, and running patterns along-
side what I refer to as “body puzzles” (think of rubbing your belly while patting your head).
This type of practice cultivates an ability to respond quickly to new information, and to keep
doing so despite being tired or confused about steps or counts. In fact, this is another feature of
M/B: a keen attention to the internal body alongside the focus on external stimuli (in the form
of verbal instruction or physical demonstration). For example, noticing changes in one’s body as
it becomes fatigued, even while trying to keep up with challenging exercises, provides impor-
tant information for learning and reflection. The training also aims to develop one’s awareness
of these constantly changing relationships and the ability to be able to pick them up quickly.
After a morning of M/B, we would go on group and solo hikes in the region, during
which we might also engage in solo image work and partner and group exercises. The idea is
that once the body is sensitized by M/B, it is better able to take in stimulation from the envi-
ronment. For example, our first day we were sent out on an hour-and-a-half solo hike in the
rolling hills surrounding our bunkhouse. Our instructions were to “breathe the landscape”
as a way of attuning our own bodily rhythms and senses to the world around us. Entering
such a slowed and expanded state, we were to observe the movements of the landscape, docu-
ment them with pen and paper, and dance them. Surrounded by rolling pastures on all sides
18
Dancing the space
and jagged mountain peaks in the distance, I was nonetheless drawn to strands of local grasses
near my feet whose delicate upright stillness would sometimes erupt into violent swaying
back and forth as an indication of the wind passing through this seemingly motionless land-
scape. From experiences like this, we each created our own personal “image dictionaries” of
at least five of the movements we found. These novel movement vocabularies then formed
the basis for further improvisation and experimentation throughout the week in new and
repeated settings and in new and repeated combinations: by ourselves, for a partner; in a field,
in a copse of trees, on a riverbank on top of large stones, on the edge of a cliff; one image at
a time, moving through all parts of the body; two images in the body at once, near to each
other or far away. This combination of constantly seeking new stimulation, while at the same
time valuing repetition for the way it can bring attention to the smallest of changes, points to
Body Weather’s (and Body/Landscape’s) honing of interdependent, interobjective linkages.
Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere:
the Body Weather body is specifically relational, only coming into being through an
active and continual exchange with its surroundings . . . Rather than the body being
at the center of its own kinesphere, it is both expanded and dispersed. [Moreover,
these practices] are designed to lead to a heightened awareness of sensation in the
body and its surroundings, and openness to receiving and responding to both.
The resultant dance is constantly in flux because it is always responding to new
internal and external stimuli. (Candelario 2018, 50)
Like a weather system, the body is always changing, as is the space. By seeking these paral-
lels, by experimenting with them, and cultivating an awareness of how all of these—body,
environment, and space—are constantly changing and constantly in relationship, Body/
Landscape trains dancers to sense themselves as part of the mesh.
Conclusion: Implications of dancing the space

Geographer Jamie Lorimer (2015, 5) recently issued a compelling call to develop a “set of
embodied and skillful processes of ‘learning to be affected’ by the environment.” The impli-
cations of the processes sought by Lorimer are profound: nothing less than an “alternate
ontology” that replaces “nature with a capital N” with a “hybrid and lively character of a
world animated by a vast range of human and nonhuman difference adhering to multiple
and discordant spatio-temporal rhythms” (5). I argue that these processes already exist in
practices like the two workshops described in this chapter. While neither program explicitly
sets out to develop a corporeal environmental consciousness, the way that they each teach
participants to dance the space has profound environmental implications.
In both SU-EN’s and van de Ven’s training, how the body is understood is central to how
space is understood: the two are inextricable and cannot be understood in isolation from one
another. It is moreover essential to both practices to establish that the body is not a fixed entity
with a firm border separating inside from outside. Instead, any division between internal and
external is both malleable and permeable. Furthermore, both workshops emphasize a redisci-
plining of the body away from habitual movements, something that the retreat to an unfamiliar
landscape is meant to facilitate. Both training practices take repeated work to understand this
constantly changing and mutually influenced relationship between humans and our environ-
ment, dancers and space, and that this relationship is at its heart corporeal, social, and profoundly
material. Interobjectivity after all cannot happen in isolation.
19
Rosemary Candelario
Still, differences between the two training practices are instructive. Terms like sensitiz-
ing and stimulation in Body/Landscape suggest a sensual and open, yet defined, bound-
ary through which body and weather/landscape interact, whereas erasing, expanding, and
encountering in the SU-EN Butoh Company methods implies a process that fundamentally
changes a body’s outline and form. These each suggest a flow of information (stimulation
into the body or from the body out into the world) and degrees to which the body must
change in order to be in relation with the space. Moreover, SU-EN’s set “body materials,”
to be learned and investigated through long-term training at Haglund Skola, stand in con-
trast with personal Body/Landscape image dictionaries that each individual creates based on
their observances and walks and that will change with each new day and each new location,
though the process of investigation remains the same.
Considering these two training practices from a broader perspective, both invite a rei-
magination of what dance and ecology together could produce through their conceptions of
space. Dance training in both cases functions as a kind of experiential learning for recogniz-
ing and rehearsing interobjectivity and mesh-like interconnections in our everyday lives.
In this way, butoh and Body Weather training can become tools for grappling with envi-
ronmental crises by offering the opportunity to develop a new embodied ecological praxis.
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Accessed July 30, 2013. http://dequinceyco.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/gm_firt_2000.pdf.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the
Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press.
SU-EN. 2015. Conversation with the author at Haglund Skola, Almung, Sweden. July 12.
SU-EN Butoh Company. n.d. SU-EN Butoh Company. Accessed March 5, 2019. http://
www.suenbutohcompany.net/.
———. 2003. Butoh: Kroppen och världen/Body and the World.Västervik, Sweden: Rye Förlag.
van Hensbergen, Rosa. 2018. “Waguri Yukio’s Butoh Kaden: Taking Stock of Hijikata’s Butoh Notation.”
In The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance, edited by Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario,
426–436. London: Routledge.
Vessey, Julia. 2018. “My Dairakudakan Experience.” In The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance, edited
by Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario, 451–455. London: Routledge.
Wolfe, Cary. 2009. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
21
2
THE DANCING BODY, POWER
AND THE TRANSMISSION OF
COLLECTIVE MEMORY IN
APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA
Catherine F. Botha
Introduction
Gerard Samuel, director of the School of Dance at the University of Cape Town, posits, “in
no other colonised country were dancing bodies more destructively subjected to disempow-
erment and disembodiment than in Apartheid South Africa” (Samuel 2011, 41). What exactly
could be said to constitute the disempowerment and disembodiment of dancing bodies that
Samuel names? Are there any other lenses through which the subjection of the dancing body
under apartheid can be analyzed, besides the two offered by Samuel?
Although, as John Peffer claims, “South African artists have long used the image of the
human body in distress as a sign of the inhumane conditions in their society” (2009, 41), many
investigations of art and the body in South Africa remain limited primarily to the visual arts.
Peffer himself, for example, makes scant reference to the performing arts, and no reference to
the dancing body, except for a brief mention of the toyi-toyi (2009, 100). There are, however,
a growing number of exceptions. Most of the papers in Sharon Friedman’s Post-Apartheid
Dance: Many Bodies, Many Voices, Many Stories do indeed engage with the question of how
apartheid affected the dancing body in the South African context. However, since the focus
of Friedman’s book is “dance since 1994” (2012a, vii, emphasis mine), this question is mostly
dealt with fleetingly in these papers, typically in order to provide a background to perspec-
tives on post-apartheid dance. There are also a number of contributions in the proceedings
of the Confluences Conferences that have been hosted by the University of Cape Town since
1997 that investigate this question, albeit again, mostly indirectly. There are some papers
that do examine the question directly, most notably, Samuel’s own Shampoo Dancing and
Scars–(Dis)Embodiment in Afro-Contemporary Choreography in South Africa, in which he focuses
specifically on “the power of hair to maintain a discourse” (2010, 41) within this context.
Despite these exceptions, it seems to me that the question of how the dancing body in South
Africa was profoundly imprinted upon by apartheid remains, in my view, one deserving
further examination.
The current chapter attempts to address this question through analysis of how, especially
in the context of state-funded dance companies, apartheid rule was legitimized and dancing
22
The dancing body, power and transmission
bodies of resistance were marginalized and forced into informal spaces in South Africa. After
problematizing a reading of apartheid as a system of “internal colonialism” or “colonialism
of a special type,” the dancing body is then analyzed as a simultaneous expression and instru-
ment of power—the primary site of social production and inscription, as Elizabeth Grosz
(1987) would say, or, as Judith Butler describes it, an “embodying of possibilities both condi-
tioned and circumscribed by historical convention” (1990, 272). Using Samuel’s (2011) claim
as provocation, I demonstrate in this chapter that the encoding of memory in dancing (and
also spectating) bodies during apartheid can be understood through at least three lenses:
1. Dis-empowerment ↔ empowerment
2. Dis-embodiment ↔ embodiment
3. Dis-placement ↔ placement
These are not intended to be understood as mutually exclusive polarities, but rather as shifting
points on a continuum. I then argue that a particular distinction between high and low art/craft
was used to underpin the disempowerment, disembodiment, and displacement of dancing bodies
endorsed by apartheid policy. I close the chapter by arguing that the imprint of this distinction
remains evident in how South African dancing bodies transmit and record memory after
apartheid, despite significant inroads being made to subvert and challenge the disempowerment,
disembodiment, and displacement I diagnose. I begin with an outline of some key concepts.
Key concepts: Apartheid, bodies and dance

Maxwell Xolani Rani describes apartheid as the “social and political policy of racial segrega-
tion and discrimination enforced by the white minority government in South Africa from
1948 until 1994. The term derives from the Afrikaans word denoting ‘apartness’” (Rani
2017). Apartheid policy was constituted by a number of legislative acts, including the strict
classification of the population according to race and the prohibition of interracial sexual
relations. In addition, the policy assigned separate facilities for citizens according to their
race (including the use of theaters and exhibition spaces), and the creation of a separate and
inferior “Bantu Education” system, as well as forcing non-white adults to carry a dompas
that detailed and controlled their employment history and movements (Peffer 2009, 48).
Apartheid can, however, be theorized as more than a series of legislative acts.
In The Road to South African Freedom: Programme of the South African Communist Party (1963),
the concept of apartheid as “colonialism of a special type” is introduced. This theory holds
that the structure of the South African economic and social order is basically identical to the
relationship between a colonial power and its colony (Visser 1997, 79). This, according to
the theory, is due to the fact that after independence was granted to South Africa by Britain:
Power was transferred not into the hands of the masses of the people of South
Africa, but into the hands of the minority alone. . . . A new type of colonialism was
developed, in which the oppressing White nation occupied the same territory as the
oppressed people themselves and lived side by side with them. (The Road to South
African Freedom 1963, 44)
Despite its initial persuasiveness, this theory suffers from a number of deficiencies, as
Nicholas Visser (1997, 80) succinctly explains. These include the assumption that oppres-
sion and exploitation in South Africa only takes place between groups defined as “racial or
23
Catherine F. Botha
national” in composition, and in so doing, ignores other significant relations, such as those of
class (80) or gender. In addition, the theory mistakenly assumes a “uniformity of interest and
experience” among all oppressed people in South Africa (80). As a result, the theory seems
set to perpetuate the very essentialization of race that it purports to combat. With this in
mind, despite its value as an “informal, impressionistic description” (80), I take special care
to avoid an overly simplistic explanation of apartheid South Africa, while still remaining
mindful of the parallels that can certainly be argued to exist between the exercise of power
under colonialism and apartheid.
My understanding of bodies in this chapter is a broad one, strongly informed by the
phenomenological tradition. As Thomas Csordas (1999, 44) explains, “studies under
the rubric of embodiment are not ‘about’ the body per se. Instead they are about cul-
ture and experience insofar as these can be understood from the standpoint of bodily-
being-in-the-world.” Following Csordas, the body, as it is conceived of in this chapter,
is not a mere instrument—rather, the body is “myself in my lived concreteness” (Shrag
1972, 155).
Similarly, the conception of dance utilized in the current chapter is equally broad, and
very closely related to my conception of the (dancing) body. Dance is “the stylized . . .
schema of a people’s overall physical culture, which is in itself the embodiment of that par-
ticular people’s unique way of life—their culture in the broadest sense of the term . . . . Dance
. . . is distilled of the stuff of culture” (Polhemus 1993, 8–9). My view is that culture (dance)
stems from bodies, just as culture (dance) leaves its explicit mark on bodies. This two-way
street in which our (cultural, political) memory is (silently) encoded in our dancing and
spectating bodies is not a static one. Rather, as Sarahleigh Castelyn puts it, since dance finds
expression through the “physical and visceral,” the nature of moving bodies (and dances) is
“constantly shifting, and never fixed” (2000, 17).
Apartheid dancing bodies

Inspired by Samuel (2011), it is my contention that the encoding of memory in dancing (and
also spectating bodies) during apartheid can be understood through at least three lenses:
1. Dis-empowerment ↔ empowerment
2. Dis-embodiment ↔ embodiment
3. Dis-placement ↔ placement
These are not conceived of as mutually exclusive polarities, but rather as a continuum. Why?
Although race was certainly the most significant determinant of how dancing bodies were
oppressed, gender, language, and class also played influential roles. In addition, dancing bod-
ies were able to subvert and collapse these forms of oppression in various ways, and at specific
moments, which then disallows understanding them as exclusive oppositions.
The dis/empowerment of dancing bodies

Under British colonial rule, South Africa inherited classical ballet along with the Western
European idea(l)s of the body that this form of dance promulgated (see Friedman 1997, 125).
Curiously, ballet prospered under the Afrikaner government and became the “highest” form
of dance under the apartheid regime. It remained during these times, however, limited to
being “white people’s dancing” (Van Wyk and Giesler 2011, 329).
24
The almost exclusive reservation of classical ballet for white people allowed for two racial-
ized bodies to be created and uncritically accepted (Samuel 2011, 42)—one presented as light,
ethereal, silent, and refined, and the other as dark, dangerous, exotic, and all too material
(Kealiinohomoku 1983, 540). These bodies reinforced the prevailing view that whiteness
was art, with blackness relegated to the realm of ‘folk’ or ethnic popular culture.
Olu Oguibe has emphasized how, under such circumstances, black bodies, which under
apartheid classification included persons who were classified as Indians and ‘coloreds’, are forced
to repeat a “narrative of self-denigration and self-otherization” (Oguibe 1999, 15). Black bodies
are turned into “silent colonies,” fragmented and packaged to suit Western tastes (15).
The disempowerment of black bodies in apartheid South Africa is brought into sharp
relief if one considers the recollections of Johaar Mosaval, the first black South African to
become a senior principal dancer at the Royal Ballet. He recalls being forced to dance behind
a line at the back of the dance class because he was black. He says in a recent interview,
“It was very difficult . . . I had to stand at the back. There was a line at the back, and I dare[d]
not pass that line. And when I did pass that line, I would be looked at . . . That made me
feel very bitter and I would ask myself whether to continue with ballet” (Mosaval, quoted in
Dougan 2018). Like many other dancers of color, Mosaval left South Africa in order to be
able to dance professionally.
The disempowerment of black dancing bodies is also evidenced by the fact that the four
state-funded performing arts councils established—the Performing Arts Council of the
Transvaal (PACT), the Cape Performing Arts Board (CAPAB), the Performing Arts Council
of the Orange Free State (PACOFS), and the Natal Performing Arts Council (NAPAC)—
were designed to provide only for white citizens. There was no arts training made available
to learners in black schools, and those black children whose parents could afford private
dance classes struggled to attend the classes due to the Group Areas Act of 1950, which
placed severe restrictions on their movements. The generously state-funded Performing Arts
Councils “essentially did what they were supposed to do—that is to cultivate and advance
white elitist Eurocentric theatre” (Bain and Hauptfleisch 2001, 11).
The network of state-funded libraries, museums, art galleries, historical monuments, and
archives were also instrumental in the state’s control over social memory, a control that
involved both remembering and forgetting (Harris 2002, 69). As a result, the performing
arts councils became examples of apartheid’s “memory institutions” (69), using silences and
narratives of power to construct experience.
A much-cited example of a dance work that illustrates the entrenched ideas regarding
power and the ideal body is Dada Masilo’s Swan Lake (2010). Masilo disrupts contemporary
audiences in her attempt to “challeng[e] which cultures belong to which bodies” (Dils and
Albright 2001, 371) by casting black South African women of diverse heights and body shapes
as her swans. Masilo’s work also challenges homophobia, domestic violence, and arranged
marriage, with Odette married to Siegfried, who is in love with Odile (who is a male). What
is most significant in the context of an exploration of the disempowerment of bodies is, in
my view, Masilo’s more recent comment that “I’ve done flamenco, Zulu dance, West African
dance and now I’m learning the dance of my own Tswana culture” (Masilo, quoted in Sulkas
2016). Her comment demonstrates, I think, the pervasive and insidious impact of apartheid
policy on dancers and the makers of dance in terms of the power held by the state in determin-
ing what counted as art and what did not, as well as who was permitted to learn which dances.
Race was, however, not the only determinant of the exercise of power on dancing bod-
ies under the apartheid regime. A further distinction, one skewed by gender, resulted in the
generally accepted vision of a dancer as “white, female, thin, long-limbed, flexible, able
25
Catherine F. Botha
bodied” (Albright 1983, 57). Ballet reinforced gender norms and oppressed the female body
by promulgating stereotypical representations of female femininity (Daly 1997). In addition,
male dancers were (and are) widely stereotyped as being weak and homosexual (Rani 2015,
25). As Rani relates, Peter De Villiers, a coach of Amabokoboko (the South African National
rugby team), criticized the poor performance of the players thus: “So, guys who cannot take
it, make your decision. Why don’t we go to the nearest ballet shop, get some tutus, get a great
dancing show going, not tackling . . . and all enjoy it” (Rani 2015, 26). The view that “real”
men cannot be dancers implicit in De Villiers’ statement illustrates how such perceptions
further contribute to the objectification and exploitation of most black male dancers in the
South African context. In addition, the bias towards being able-bodied meant that “disabled
dance” was even further set aside than contemporary dance and “traditional African dance”
(Samuel 2012, 132).
What is important to note at this point is that the power of the apartheid regime over
citizens was not complete. Small contemporary dance companies like Sylvia Glasser’s Moving
into Dance, founded in 1978, and many others sought to defy apartheid’s separate develop-
ment policies (Friedman 2012, 5). Dance was used as a medium for protest, with highly cre-
ative dance makers emerging to challenge the status quo. The gumboot dances that evolved
amongst migrant workers in the gold mines of South Africa that communicated social and
political messages that were often missed, misunderstood, or ignored (Rani 2012, 80) are a
case in point. In short, the empowerment of the bodies of dancers lay nascent in the disem-
powerment I have described.
The dis/embodiment of the dancing body

Paul C. Taylor identifies four forms of black invisibility: the denial of presence; the disregard
for black personality that transforms black people into stock figures, stereotypes, and vehicles
(the objectification of blackness); the disregard for black perspectives; and the denial of black
plurality (Taylor 2016, 58). These forms of invisibility are analyzed from the perspective of
his ‘sarkaesthetics’—his name for the practices of representational somatic aesthetics—which
are those practices relating to the body, as it were, as flesh, regarded solely from the outside
(108). It is in Taylor’s four senses of invisibility that I think the disembodiment of the danc-
ing body in apartheid South Africa can be most fruitfully be analyzed. I focus here only on
the first two of these.
One particularly shocking example of how black bodies were rendered invisible and dis-
embodied by means of a denial of their presence is that of Barry Martin, a black American
dancer who, after performing in South Africa in 1983, was left a quadriplegic after a car acci-
dent (Linton 2006). As Carla Hall (1984) relates, both Martin and the driver of the vehicle,
a white dancer, were injured. An ambulance collected the other dancer, leaving Martin
behind. Sometime later, a black passerby drove Martin to a white hospital, where he was
refused admission because he was black. By the time he was admitted to the black section of
another hospital, he was quadriplegic (Hall 1984). Martin’s perceived blackness rendered him
invisible in apartheid South Africa, an invisibility that resulted in a denial of his presence as
a human being in need of help—a disembodiment.
The denial of presence that I claim characterizes the disembodiment distinguishing
black apartheid bodies is also illustrated in the contract issued to Johaar Mosaval, who was
invited to dance at what was then called the Nico Malan Opera House in South Africa
in 1976. While dancing in Michel Fokine’s Petruskha, Mosaval’s contract stated that he
was “not allowed to touch a white ballet dancer with his bare hands” (Dougan 2018).
26
The separatist and discriminatory policies of the apartheid government are again revealed
in the way in which a contract such as this was formulated. Significantly, despite Mosaval’s
visibility on the stage, he was rendered untouchable and so also invisible by means of that
contract.
The second way in which Taylor (2016) explores black invisibility is the transformation of
black people into stock figures, stereotypes, and vehicles. This kind of disembodying prac-
tice was not limited to the era in which apartheid policy was in force. The treatment of the
body of Saartjie Baartman (the so-called “Hottentot Venus”) is perhaps the most publicized
example that illustrates the transformation of black people into stereotypes. Her body was
“constructed in the western imagination as primitive, hypersexualized, earthbound, heavy
and closer to nature … the binary opposite [of ] the type of body that nineteenth century
Europe would posit as its ideal” (Van Wyk 2012, 37). She was taken to Europe in 1810 and
displayed on various stages as a sexual object. After her death in 1815, her skeleton, brain, and
genitals were exhibited in a French museum until the 1970s, with her remains only finally
repatriated to South Africa in 2002. Baartman’s extreme visibility (as a stereotype, as a curi-
osity for the Western gaze) reveals her invisibility—her dis-embodiment under the colonial
gaze (see also Gilman 1985).
Robyn Orlin’s dance work …have you hugged, kissed and respected your brown Venus today?
(2011) tells the story of Baartman in order to highlight how black women are subject to
Western notions of beauty and “ideal proportions” and emphasize the “sexism and racism
which those standards illustrate” (Adair 1992, 171). Importantly, even though the con-
struction of the bodies of black female dancers takes place through the discourses of race
and gender (Castelyn 2000, 16), the (generally) lower socioeconomic status (and hence class
status) of women in comparison with their male counterparts (Craighead 2006, 27) also
adds to their vulnerability in the disembodiment characteristic of colonial and apartheid
South Africa.
Again, the disembodiment of dancing bodies I have highlighted was not total. In Johaar
Mosaval’s case, for example, he defied the odds and went on to become an internationally
acclaimed ballet dancer. The previously mentioned small dance companies that were formed
also defied the disembodiment pursued by apartheid policy in bringing together dancers of
any races on the stage, despite the audiences remaining racially divided.
The dis/placement of the dancing body

The spatial policing of the black body, as well as the exclusionary spaces held for white dances,
can be read as moments on a dis-placement–placement continuum. A significant example of
the way in which dancing bodies were displaced due to the apartheid regime’s tyranny can
be found in the history of the Cape Minstrels (Kaapse Klopse). During the annual Minstrel
Festival that takes place on the second of January every year, klopse (troupes), entertain the
crowds in the streets of Cape Town by singing, dancing, and playing a variety of musical
instruments (Martin 2000). The origins of the festival are to be found in the slave trade in
South Africa, since slaves were given a holiday the day after the first of January, which they
celebrated with singing, dancing, and bright costumes (Martin 1999). This celebration of
“Tweede Nuwe Jaar” (second New Year), that also eventually celebrated the abolition of
slavery in South Africa, became a tradition that continues to the present day.
The Cape Minstrels were significantly influenced by American ‘blackface’ minstrelsy, since
American minstrel troupes “spoke to the experience and survival of slavery” (Davids 2013,
97–98) and often visited and performed in Cape Town (Martin 2000). For Martin (1999), the
27
Catherine F. Botha
importing of songs and the impersonation of international stars can be interpreted as a form
of “symbolical denial of the stereotypes attached by the ruling classes to coloureds as people
without culture, unable to create anything and wholly dependent upon the whites” (117).
Most significantly, as Davids points out, in the context of slavery, the carnival was a way
for slaves to signal their existence:
declaring themselves visible in a world that had insisted on their expedient invis-
ibility. Their walking, dancing, and singing filled not just a physical space, but
produced a noise which proclaimed their right to fill years of public silence. (Davids
2007, 120)
A number of legislative acts were introduced by the apartheid government to hamper the
carnival and the proclamation of existence that the carnival represented. These included the
Group Areas Act of 1950 and the Riotous Assemblies Act of 1956, which prohibited gather-
ings in public spaces. In addition, in 1976 an edict “was adopted banning all marches in Cape
Town’s centre” (Martin 2013, 272). Despite this, the carnival remained
a singular force that contests and occupies circumscribed public space; as a means
of mourning and remembering the dislocation and dispossession brought about the
apartheid-era Group Areas Act of 1950, and as a political and cultural mechanism
that pits the disenfranchised against institutionalized power. (Davids 2013, 89)
I return to this theme again later, but at this point, it is important to note that the politics
of space was exploited by the apartheid government, and yet, as the Cape Minstrels dem-
onstrate, it was challenged and subverted in various ways. Apartheid gave some dancers and
dance makers a cause for which to fight, despite not having the benefit of the facilities, fund-
ing, and spaces provided by the white performing arts infrastructure.
High art, low art, non-art

As was previously mentioned, the Western division between high art and low art (or even
non-art) was embraced by the apartheid regime, with whiteness associated with art and black-
ness relegated to ‘folk’ or ethnic popular culture. African dances were interpreted as being
danced only for specific functions that were regarded as non- or un-aesthetic, as opposed to
classical ballet. Clare Craighead reinforces this impression when she notes:
What becomes increasingly clear during an examination of the Black Dance/White

Dance dichotomy is the notion of a cultural divide within which rests the highly
constructed notions of high art and popular or low art. (2006, 20)
This distinction was important since it legitimized the view propounded by the apartheid
government that only white persons were capable of producing and appreciating true art,
whereas black persons were, at best, limited to crafts. The insidious political agenda behind
the distinction between art and low- and/or non-art remains significant within the phi-
losophy of art, since, as Noël Carroll (2010, 2) explains, “an underlying presupposition of
aesthetic theories of art is that the philosophy of art should develop a theory of definition
of what we might call Art with a capital ‘A’.” It was only in the eighteenth century that
‘Art’ with a capital ‘A’ came into being (2). Before then, the arts were considered to be
28
“any practice whose exercise required skill, based on training, rather than solely upon some
innate capacity” (3). In such a view, only certain types of dance are given the status of ‘Art.’
This distinction, as is evident in my discussion of the way in which art was conceived of in
apartheid South Africa, became a powerful tool of exclusion and oppression that underlay the
disempowerment, disembodiment, and displacement of dancing bodies.
This does not mean, however, that the distinction has remained unchallenged. John
Dewey, well known for his Art as Experience ([1934] 1980), radically shifted the focus of
aesthetics from art objects to what he called aesthetic experience. As Pope (2011, 27) relates,
Dewey’s assertion of the potentiality of aesthetic experience inherent everywhere revealed
the problematic assumptions behind the high and low art distinction and served as inspira-
tion for a number of other theorists, including Arnold Berleant (2004), John McDermott
(1987), and Richard Shusterman. Shusterman (1994, 1995, 2000), for example, defends the
artistic legitimacy of popular culture, especially through his analyses of rap. His pragmatism
challenges the traditional Western division between art and life that he asserts has led to art
being disconnected from the practice of ethical self-cultivation and political praxis that he
advocates (Shusterman 2000, 36).
Despite the challenges to the distinction seen in the literature—as well as the disruptions and
creative innovations of dance creators and dancers in challenging the constellations of power,
silence and invisibility—and the politics of space that I have shown were characteristic of the
imprint of apartheid on dancing bodies, it seems that the mark of the high art–low art distinc-
tion still remains, to some extent, in the contemporary South African dance experience. This is
reflected, for example, in the fact that dance audiences and dance styles in this country are to
a large degree still segregated. In addition, the move toward the commodification of authenti-
cally ‘African’ dances under the gaze of the tourist who is willing to pay to see them seems to
run the risk of a double entrenchment of the distinction. As Friedman (2012, 100) notes, these
African spectacles provide a simplistic and uncritical understanding of what ‘African’ is.
What is encouraging, however, is that a number of dancers and dance makers are implicitly
challenging the distinction. One example of such a challenge is, I think, to be found in the
work of Jay Pather, who engages in what he calls site-specific dance theater. Pather creates
dance theater works that occur outside the traditional confines of the theater and take place in
various urban and architectural settings (Katrak 2018). He interrogates the question of cultural
ownership through his dance works, often bringing together classical, traditional, street, and
contemporary dance forms in one work. It is in these two choices that I find the implicit chal-
lenge to the high art–low art distinction in Pather’s work. In fusing together dance forms that
were traditionally seen as existing on opposite sides of the divide, but also by creating works
where traditionally high art forms are performed in ‘ordinary’ places, Pather’s works like
The Beautiful Ones Must Be Born, performed on Constitution Hill, Johannesburg (2005), and
Body of Evidence, performed at the Lister Medical Centre in downtown Johannesburg (2008),
problematize the high art–low art distinction around which the apartheid regime was able to
exclude-include, empower-disempower, and place-displace. Pather expresses his attempts to
work between these polarities, in order to dissolve them, thus:
I think so much of the art-making of my generation has its roots in the response
to apartheid. In response to the terrible separation, there was a strong need to col-
laborate, to create strategies to counter the divides. These divides that were not just
about race and class, but also divides in cultural forms: what was ‘classical’, what
was ‘good’ art and ‘bad’ art, what was so-called ‘community’ art, and what was
professional.
29
Catherine F. Botha
I think we are still only beginning to find out what is possible in our communi-
ties, since so much has been negated and lost, and we have to be very conscious that
we do not continue the legacy of apartheid in subtle forms. Art and culture reflect
the unfinished business of redress prevalent in other aspects of our society. Working
collaboratively engenders healing, dialogue and a way of developing, more than just a
superficial understanding of diverse points of view. (Pather quoted in Machen 2018)
Conclusion
This chapter has provided an analysis of how the encoding of memory in dancing bodies
during apartheid can be understood through at least three lenses—disempowerment, disem-
bodiment, and displacement. These were shown not to have existed as mutually exclusive
polarities, but rather, as shifting points on a continuum. My discussion revealed how the
distinction between high art and low art or craft was used to underpin the disempowerment,
disembodiment, and displacement of dancing bodies endorsed by apartheid policy. I closed the
chapter by arguing that this distinction has left a distinct mark on how South African dancing
bodies transmit and record memory ‘after’ apartheid, despite significant inroads being made to
subvert and challenge the disempowerment, disembodiment, and displacement I diagnosed.
In discussing some of the ways in which creative work being done by dancers and dance mak-
ers in contemporary South Africa is challenging that dichotomy that closed the final section
of the chapter, it is, I think, pertinent to close with the words of Maqoma:
Our contemporary moment is particularly exciting, especially in the areas of fund-

ing and appropriation, despite the political quagmire on this continent. The work
we put on our stages signals change. It signals artistic freedom that fuses mud huts,
the Internet, Armani suits, ball gowns and naked bodies. And that is innovation,
and a true reflection of our continent today. (Maqoma 2006, 38)
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3
DIFFERENT BODIES
A poetic study of dance and
people with Parkinson’s
Sara Houston
Introduction
In an article I wrote when I had just started researching the experience of dance for people
with Parkinson’s (Houston 2011), I made the claim that studying Parkinsonian movement
may bring to light the movement qualities that dancers with Parkinson’s display. The idea
behind this move would be to enlarge our understanding of dance and who dances: “rather
than merely seeing the variation in movement as the result of dysfunctional bodies, respect-
ing and describing the poetry formed through dance by each participant-dancer may allow
the documentation of unique movement narratives using tools from dance studies” (Houston
2011, 344). I was frustrated by the gap in literature to promote understanding of the art form
of dance among the clinical studies investigating whether dancing acted as a tool to help
people walk or balance better. These studies were laudable in their attempt to uncover the
instrumental benefit in dancing (Hackney, Kantorovich, and Earhart 2007; Hackney and
Earhart 2009, 2010), but this gap meant that we were still none the wiser in exploring the art
form itself as seen within the context of community dance projects and programs for people
with Parkinson’s. In fact, measuring people before and after dancing meant that there was the
danger of not engaging much with the actual dance event itself.
Having now studied the field for eight years, I now have the empirical data by which
to expand on this idea and more understanding of what “respecting and describing the
poetry formed through dance” might mean within the context of dancing with Parkinson’s.
This chapter tackles my claim, but also goes further by discussing how the unique corpore-
ality of dancers with Parkinson’s might help dance artists and dance studies scholars think
differently about what engagement by community dancers means, particularly by those with
a chronic medical condition. This discussion is significant for the field of community dance
and in particular dance for health programs because it subverts common assumptions about
community dance as benefit—as a therapeutic tool. My chapter introduces the disease and
the group of participatory dance practices that come under the title “dance for Parkinson’s.”
It characterizes them as arts practices and expands on their relation to the poetic. I argue that
dance for Parkinson’s is mistakenly referred to as a therapy—a common characterization.
Significantly, I propose, as a poetic practice it may exceed what it can do as a form of physi-
cal therapy and has implications for how dance artists may engage with participants, not as
33
Sara Houston
recipients of dance, but as collaborators and artists. Importantly, it also challenges perspec-
tives on the function and intention of a participatory arts practice, when it is specifically for
people with chronic disease.
My fieldwork focused on two areas: first an in-depth study (2010–2014) of the English
National Ballet dance for Parkinson’s program (Houston and McGill 2015), and second,
observation of other dance for Parkinson’s programs around Europe and in New York, as well
as interviews with dance specialists worldwide. Additionally, my work has led to long-term
participation as a mentor and dance collaborator in initiatives developed by international
partners. This perspective, the in-depth and broad surveys, and also working as a collabora-
tor have allowed me to gain insight into the content of a variety of dance for Parkinson’s
programs worldwide and the concerns of artists, as well as to understand what priorities the
Parkinson’s dancers had and what they valued by dancing. The nature of my inquiry with
my European collaborators, which included people with Parkinson’s, was more open and
studio-based, learning by dancing and learning what dance may teach us about capability
and creativity.
Parkinson’s is commonly termed a movement disorder. It is characterized by progressive
slowing down of movement, an increasing inability to initiate or stop movement, tremor,
and rigid muscles. The symptoms produced cause increasing balance and stability issues,
with falls being a serious consequence. The neurodegenerative condition also produces
insomnia, constipation, drooling, diminished voice production and handwriting, apathy,
and depression. Many people are increasingly excluded from social networks and participa-
tion in society. As it usually (but not always) strikes people over the age of 50, it is sometimes
characterized as an ‘old person’s’ disease (Solimeo 2009). In putting forward a description
of different bodies in dance, the Parkinsonian body would count as ‘different’ to the typical
dancer’s with a lack of stable and directed movement, as well as an often advanced age.
Dance for Parkinson’s

Since the early 2000s, dance organizations, companies, and independent dance artists have
been offering tailor-made dance programs for people with Parkinson’s around the world.
From the pool of research that has been done and from participant testimonies, dancing
seems to relieve people with Parkinson’s from some of their symptoms temporarily (Hackney
and Earhart 2010; Heiberger et al. 2011; Houston and McGill 2013; Volpe et al. 2013;
Westheimer et al. 2015). Dance’s therapeutic benefit to people with Parkinson’s is high-
lighted in these studies (mainly in terms of its physical impact), and the research has been
emphasized in advocacy for dance for Parkinson’s programs. Several documentaries have also
been made (see, e.g., Bee 2009; Iverson 2014; Cinconze 2015; Goddard 2016) that have been
aired widely. In many of the film features, everyday difficulties are contrasted by people’s
lives in dance, where they are valued and their achievements are celebrated.
Dance for Parkinson’s classes are taught in various dance styles, ranging from contemporary,
Irish step dance, and improvisation, through to tango, kathak, and ballet. A common structure
of a dance for Parkinson’s session starts as an inclusive circle of seated participants, followed by
dancing holding onto a barre, or the back of a chair, followed by moving across the room. Dance
artists working with a more didactic approach may differentiate movement so that participants
may dance to suit their physicality and level of wellness. This may be as simple as offering a seated
version of a standing task or using a basic rhythm rather than a complex one. Improvisation
within sessions, such as in those run by DaPoPa in Grenoble and Paris, allows participants to
dance according to their own way of moving, bound by a loose scaffold of openly interpreted
34
Different bodies
instructions (a score). These instances of finding a framework or frameworks to include those of

different abilities point to dance for Parkinson’s as inclusive in outlook and community-focused.
The impact of developing approaches to teaching and leading that allow people with a degen-
erative condition to feel capable is not to be underestimated. Parkinson’s takes away the certainty
of controlled movement and may squash body confidence. The worldwide dance for Parkinson’s
movement is growing quickly because people with the condition realize that they can feel good
about themselves and feel capable by dancing, despite any worsening of symptoms. Parkinson’s
bloggers, such as Bob Dawson (2007) and Kate Kelsall (2014), have been instrumental in sharing
how they feel about dance. Kelsall (2014) claims that “Dancing is what makes life, even with
Parkinson’s, worth living.” Dancers with Parkinson’s enact the notion at the heart of community
dance practice that everybody can dance regardless of age or disability.
Community dance incorporates a variety of dance and movement practices that are process-
orientated (Amans 2008). That is to say, they are centered on providing participant-focused dance
experiences. In this way, advocates claim community dance can focus on being inclusive and
collaborative and meeting people’s needs. Performance artist and dance scholar Petra Kuppers
(2017, 110) argues that a process-orientated, inclusive approach allows for each individual’s
expressivity to emerge: “This is dance with and for everybody, every body . . . in the sense that
all bodies can be expressive and that this expression is something worth attending to”. In valuing
the individual’s expressive body, the dance of those who do not conform may be seen as similarly
important as those who possess a (young) ‘dancerly’ body and training.
Yet this situation does not represent either the common assumption about who dances,
nor the reality as displayed in public theaters, mainstream community dance events, and in
many popular televised shows. Youth and the able bodied dominate. Representation of the
wider population is often missing in dance (Nakajima and Brandstetter 2017). The lack of
visible representation of older and disabled community dancers marginalizes the practice that
is going on and so makes discussion and documentation of that practice even more important.
Moreover, in loosely situating dance as rehabilitation or as a therapy for people with
Parkinson’s, the emphasis is on instrumental outcomes, rather than prizing the artistic pro-
cess. The practice therefore becomes labeled a health initiative, rather than an engagement
in movement exploration and creation, and its contribution to the latter is ignored. Yet
approaching dancing as community-based art gives the observer the start of a framework
in which to talk about dancers with Parkinson’s, with the emphasis on ‘dancers’ rather than
‘Parkinson’s,’ on ‘art’ rather than ‘therapy.’ As Parkinson’s dancer Reggie declares in the doc-
umentary Capturing Grace, “There are no patients, only dancers” (Reggie quoted in Iverson
2014). Reggie’s remark is descriptive of the emphasis on art making, rather than on creating
a clinical road map for treatment of Parkinson’s. The distinction gives observers of dance for
Parkinson’s sessions the liberty to respect and describe “the poetry formed through dance by
each participant-dancer . . . rather than merely seeing the variation in movement as the result
of dysfunctional bodies” (Houston 2011, 344). It therefore seems appropriate to argue from a
poetic standpoint. This distinction, as I will go on to discuss, is important for going beyond
representing sickness as the identity of a person with Parkinson’s, as well as for acknowledg-
ing the contribution of dance for Parkinson’s to the family of arts practices.
The poetic in dance for Parkinson’s

A “poetics” is defined broadly by the philosopher Richard Kearney as “an exploration of the
human powers to make (poesis) a world in which we may poetically dwell” (1998, 8). Following
Gaston Bachelard ([1958] 1994), he argues that the human power of the imagination enables us
35
Sara Houston
to delight in the new and surprising images we formulate to make sense of our world and to
attend to our surroundings in a different way. More seriously, the imagination also enables us
to attend to others and to how we live in the world. This is a poetic act, Kearney argues, that
has direct consequences for life. In this sense, poetics interacts with ethics.
This characterization of poetics seizes on the narrower definition within semiotics to
expand on the potential that imaginative and non-causal images and actions might have,
which is important in demonstrating dance’s connection to the poetic. In semiotics, the
poetic function of language is seen as expressive, as opposed to referential. For example,
language in poetry is not usually written or spoken to convey direct meaning of its con-
tent, which would be referential, but often to reflect on the poem’s internal structure and
the relation of words and sounds to each other (Lodge 1977). Because metaphor is used as
a primary device in poetry, the relationship between words and content is indirect. Words
are related through similarity and contrast rather than being connected through a realistic
chain of cause and effect in the minutiae of narrative, although there is an internal coher-
ence to the whole.
The composite elements of poetry suggest that to be poetic means to draw attention to the
internal structures of the subject in question (in this case dance performed by people living
with Parkinson’s) as well as the character of those structures, in other words, qualities and
expressions. The imagination is invoked in constructing and reading non-referential images
or words, which then takes us to a different way of looking at things. As Stephanie Jordan
and Helen Thomas (1998) demonstrate, a poetic analysis of a dance work will unearth differ-
ent interpretations than a referential analysis, and importantly, expand interpretations: “there
are many other possibilities, many yet to be discovered as new interpretations emerge, if we
admit the poetic function of art. The picture becomes far more complex and, we think, more
intriguing” (248). The extrapolation to thinking about poetics as an investigation into how
we may approach our lives and live poetically is a valid next step. Kearney suggests that, as
humans, through our imaginations we have the power to convert “actuality into possibility,
what-is into something-other-than-it-is” (1998, 4). In other words, human potential resides
in how we poetically respond in our world.
It is possible, I propose, that a poetics of art, of dance, is an exploration of the mecha-
nisms of dance that make a world in which people may live with imagination. In particular,
I would like to contend that exploring the poetry within dance for Parkinson’s may allow
us to see how it is possible to approach this activity as an artistic response to living imagi-
natively in the world, rather than necessarily a tool for self-managing a degenerative condi-
tion. Using Kearney and Bachelard’s definition of poetics as a starting point to discuss dance
for Parkinson’s, I concentrate in this chapter on instances where Parkinson’s dancers have
used improvisatory techniques. Because the dance for Parkinson’s movement is an umbrella
term under which sit many dance forms, practices, and teaching styles, it is prudent to nar-
row down the focus. Improvisation is a dance practice that is well suited to the discussion
of poetics because it not only impels movement creation through various choreographic
frameworks, but also invokes the imagination through the negotiation of moving in the
present with others. Ann Cooper Albright (2003, 259) clarifies that improvisation as a phi-
losophy of life “is a way of relating to movement and experience: a willingness to explore
the realm of possibility.” Improvisation explores the ‘what ifs’: “Most improvisational train-
ing works to release the body from habitual responses, whetting one’s curiosity about ‘what
ifs.’ Improvisation often crafts an awareness of aesthetic priorities, compositional strategies,
and physical experiences” (261). Thus this movement practice addresses both the narrow and
expanded definitions of poetics.
36
Different bodies
Leonard and Margaret

Leonard and Margaret stand opposite one another. They are carrying out a familiar task
within dance for Parkinson’s classes, that of mirroring. Margaret, I think, although some-
times it is difficult to tell, initiates the movement, Leonard following very closely. They lift
their arms slowly up and then out to the side, as if describing the shape of an enormous beach
ball. Then sharply, the couple (they are partners in life) hinge in their elbows bringing their
forearms close to their chests, fists bunched. Then softening, their hands open, leading their
arms up above their heads to split to a long diagonal line, one arm down, one up, slightly
undulating, as if caught in a breeze, with their bodies reciprocating. Their eyes are fixed on
each other, absorbed in the task at hand, occasionally breaking into a smile. Margaret brings
her arms down in front of her, her palms up as if offering them to her partner. Leonard does
the same and they bow their heads as they turn their palms down before both strongly sweep
their arms to one side across their chest, their heads inclined. All the while their gaze is fixed
on each other.
My description above was taken from a film (Nunn and Trevitt 2012) made during an
English National Ballet residency at Tate Britain. The company’s dance for Parkinson’s pro-
gram occupied one of the galleries for a day during the residency and the film was shot
then.1 The film, significantly, offers no explanation of Parkinson’s, nor talks of any benefits.
The camera swirls around Margaret and Leonard, as the music by Ezio Bosso characterizes
their movement in a driving 3/4 time. It is not even clear which member of the couple has
Parkinson’s. What the camera draws to our attention is the beauty of the simple movement,
made all the more special by the concentration and focus of the two dancers, underscored
by the camera that circles around them like they are in their own special world. It draws our
attention to the connection between them. Indeed, the mirrored movement and the concen-
trated gaze together give the impression of the quality of care—care in following the rules of
the task, but also a loving care, perhaps in the pleasure of dancing together, or in that sense of
care that only two people who have been together for a long time exude. The graceful, soar-
ing columns of the Tate’s Duveen gallery give space to the duet, allowing the simple move-
ments a respectful space for them to be seen and given plenty of room to emerge organically.
The film made of Margaret and Leonard’s dance encourages me to see it poetically. It does
not dwell on the real-life difficulties that Margaret encounters as a person with Parkinson’s.
It does not dwell on Leonard’s challenges as partner and caregiver. Instead it offers me a
way of seeing that focuses my eye on the qualities of movement. It focuses my eye on the
trajectory of movement, the lines and circles traced with hands and bodies, and the intimate
relationship between the dancers and between them and the large space they are in. It allows
me to reflect on the movement of the camera in relation to the dancers and the music’s role in
this improvised event. In focusing on the poetic—the intrinsic elements of the film and the
internal structures of the movement—it offers an interpretation that does not reach for our
sympathy or pity because dancers with Parkinson’s are the subject matter, nor does it ask us
to applaud because they are dancing rather than shaking. Instead, it allows the viewer to see
the dancing couple in a different light, one in which the spectator’s delight is focused on the
intimate, nonverbal conversation. Moreover, a poetic reading amplifies the movement that
is there and the playful intertwining of movement dynamics and qualities. The consequence
of this is that the viewer may understand that Parkinson’s, and Parkinsonian movement, is
neither the sum of the people in front of them, nor the sum of their movement potential.
Dance is ideally placed to poetically highlight this potential, this other way of thinking about
Parkinson’s. Dance philosopher Einav Katan explains:
37
Sara Houston
Rhyme, inversion, and antithesis come about in dance as the playfulness of changes
and inversions within physical dynamics. New bodily arrangements deliver novel
movements that are not requested outside of the realm of the dance. Therefore, new
physicality emerges and substitutes for the practical world of bodily behavior. (Katan
2016, 73)
The nonliteral transposition of movement or words may point to new relations between
bodies and movement, and the sensuous coupling of dynamics and qualities may be evoca-
tive of our human understanding and experience. This includes dancers with Parkinson’s.
Margaret and Leonard’s improvisation illustrates an artistic response to conceiving of a world
of possibility. In looking at dance poetically, it is possible to see that Parkinson’s dancers par-
ticipate in an activity that is not devised to cope with a diminished body, in the sense that a
diminished body has to be acknowledged by therapy, but with a positive embracing of what
a dancer with Parkinson’s can contribute within dance.
Dance-makers
Advocating for a poetic vision of dance for Parkinson’s programs has implications for how
dance artists run sessions for people living with the condition in how much emphasis they
and the participants place on using choreographic devices, such as scores, or interpre-
tative elements, such as quality, dynamics and rhythms of movement, or meaning gen-
eration, such as working with a theme. Changing the perspective or vision of dance for
people living with Parkinson’s also has significance for dance artists to develop socially
engaged dance practices that are fundamentally connected to their own movement work
in a professional concert setting, as well as validating the artistic contribution of the danc-
ers (Houston forthcoming). Creating community work with a poetic, rather than a thera-
peutic, vision may allow dance artists to more readily interact with community dancers.
A poetic vision challenges the perspective that Parkinson’s dancers are only there to receive
therapeutic benefit and therefore have little to do with the field of professional dance. To
illustrate, I put forward two other examples of dance for Parkinson’s programs that pri-
oritize poetic internal structures above the use of dance as a therapeutic practice and that
have subsequently demonstrated enriching experiences for dance artists and participants in
different ways.
In Dance for Health’s studio in Rotterdam, several dancers improvise in the space. Led
by choreographer Itamar Serussi, they work to explore creative ideas in movement through a
series of imaginative propositions: a score based on investigating the relationship of one body
part to another within different limitations or emphases, such as time, volume, dynamic,
and other dancers. One man walks in vertiginous heels, playing with his center of balance.
At moments, he teeters on the edge of instability, at other times he walks tall and proud,
filling the room with his glamour. A woman rolls on the floor, finding momentum and
different dynamics. I can hear the rhythms of her breath. Two others work together facing
each other, arms behind their backs, hands splayed like swan wings. Another woman sits
on a chair, gently rocking. The quiet movement draws my attention in its simplicity. Two
of these dancers have Parkinson’s (including the one in heels), another has multiple sclerosis
(MS); the remaining two define themselves as able-bodied and professional dance artists.
After four half days of intensive dancing, the two participants with Parkinson’s relate how
elated they feel—elated from dancing, but also from working in a manner that was focused
on creating something new. They felt they were treated differently, “like a professional”
38
Different bodies
(Yvonne 2017). The Parkinson’s dancers are not there because they feel the need to be helped
through dancing. They are there because they may offer something productive to the cre-
ative collaboration. The dancer in heels, Marc Vlemmix, wrote:
Working with a professional who takes me seriously as a dancer, who doesn’t

approach me as the sum of my disease, makes the difference. Dancing as a form of
art is closely connected with my core and the fact that Serussi treated me as a dancer,
not a Parkinson’s patient, was incredibly valuable for my sense of identity and for my
creative potential. (Vlemmix 2017, 23)
Moreover, the able-bodied dancers confided that their peers fed them with new movement and
new ways of approaching movement. The dancers with Parkinson’s and MS could offer new
movement and new approaches to movement because of their conditions, which impose partic-
ular constraints upon bodies that the able-bodied dancers do not experience and do not know
how to navigate. Their able-bodied peers appreciated that within the dance space, Parkinson’s
and MS became touch points for movement generation, rather than bodily degeneration.
The poetry in the Dutch project is in the structured exploration of how moving differently
creates a new dialogue with the dancer’s material and imagined body. New movement proposi-
tions relating to temporality and sensuality are imaginatively rendered material through impro-
visation, which in turn proposes new possibilities, both in movement and in relation to the self.
Vlemmix, tall, with Parkinson’s, and dancing in high heels, is a good case in point. The slow
grandeur of his movement is matched by a cheeky confident poise most often seen in burlesque
dancers. He himself contrasts this with his “eight years of Parkinson’s, balance and walking prob-
lems” (Vlemmix 2017, 23). The dancer in heels tells through movement a story different from that
of the man with Parkinson’s. Heels do not just physically alter posture and movement, but they
also suggest, tease, and subvert (particularly if a man wears them). In other words, they provoke
the imagination both in the wearer and observer. This combination of imagination and unusual
physicality presents an alternative story, as improvisation scholar Kent De Spain suggests:
One of our most profound capabilities as humans is the power to affect, even funda-
mentally alter, the nature of our reality in the moment through images and the imag-
ination. The imagination can make the “not here” sensorily available to the “here,”
causing absent places and things to suddenly seem present. (De Spain 2014, 128)
In Vlemmix’s situation, the absence due to Parkinson’s of a lithe fluidity is created through
his improvisation in high heels, materially and in the imagination, and this, for him, leads to
another way of being:
Now, at the age of 45 . . .I found out that I like to push myself to the limit, I like to
“walk on the tips of my toes”. . . .
Then what?
Out of balance?
Wobbly?
Is it physically? Or is it fear?
What happens first, the physical
Un-balance or the fear for it?
And is it possible to completely
Go beyond it,
39
Sara Houston
To let loose the break,

Get on the dance floor,
Just go and don’t stop.
In a flow,
Like Cinderella at the ball
Dancing
Without fear
Enjoying yourself
Feeling beautiful!
Happily ever after. (Vlemmix 2017, 23, italics and typesetting in original)
Albright suggests that improvisational practices “encourage a willingness to cross over into
uncomfortable territories, to move in the face of fear, of what is unknown” (2003, 259–60).
Vlemmix makes explicit reference to moving in with and beyond his fear in his writing
above. Albright calls this type of experience “dwelling in possibility,” inhabiting a space
“that is more than the sum of its parts, such that that space makes things happen” (260, italics in
original). The imaginative and material exploration that allows Vlemmix to face fear poeti-
cally expands his internal and external space.
At Dance Well in Bassano del Grappa Italy, local residents with and without Parkinson’s
join together to dance every day. Their classes, which encourage improvisation, are punctu-
ated regularly by engagement within artistic residencies by international contemporary dance
choreographers, such as Francesca Foscarini, James Bachelor, and Yasmeen Godder, as well
as performance artists, such as Marina Abramović. Often, the choreographers do not have
much experience of Parkinson’s. Yet the participants eagerly seize the chance to make work
and perform, guiding the choreographers as to what they are interested in exploring.
In 2018, the group created a performance called Oro. L’Arte di Résistere (Gold. The Art of
Resisting), which was based on local World War I and II history, and also referred to the dancers’
own biographical stories of resistance (Foscarini 2018). The town received the Gold Medal for
Military Value for resisting the Austro-Hungarian forces between 1917 and 1918, concerning
which the author Ernest Hemingway, who was recuperating from injury in Bassano at this
time, gives an account in his 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms. In World War II, local partisans
were hunted down and hung from trees by the Nazis after the Armistice. The dance work
took Hemingway’s writings and handed-down stories (including the hangings) recounted by
participants in the group as the basis for the devised work by Italian choreographer and dancer
Francesca Foscarini. The group, already used to improvising, were able together to devise the
piece around the narratives. It was performed in a small chapel as part of Bassano’s BMotion
contemporary dance festival and has subsequently toured to other places. The production was
well received for its emotional power: several of these performers had been children at the time
of the hangings and their accounts were harrowing. The trauma of the event was embodied
in these now older performers, some of them frail with Parkinson’s. Their vulnerability was
highlighted by the movement challenges, such as getting up from the floor, yet their ability to
cope was underlined by the closeness of the group. The emotional power also came from this
closeness. These performers had been dancing together for several years, and their familiar-
ity with one another—the strong eye contact between them, the intuitive awareness of when
to move in response to someone else, the ability to help quickly when someone got stuck or
felt a loss of balance without destroying the structure of the piece, the comfortableness in
receiving touch—pointed to their closeness and to the challenge and loss felt by a community
when a traumatic event takes place. The requests to tour the piece to other venues highlight
40
Different bodies
how community dance work may cross into frameworks (in this case touring) that are usu-
ally reserved for professional productions. The emotional strength of Oro, produced through
structured improvisation around a theme still resonant in the dancers’ lives, emphasizes the
affective power of the poetic production. In this dance work, the performers create a moving
and embodied response to a traumatic period in their own history and that of their families.
The past is there in memory, but also recreated and re-envisioned within the making of the
dance work. As De Spain points out, images like the ones created through the dance work
are created from the reality of sensation and the complex process of memory. But
they can also create a new reality of their own, reified in movement and with
momentum reaching into the future. Their weight-less quasi-existence becomes a
powerful embodied presence demanding to be fulfilled, rejected, or danced with
and around. (De Spain 2014, 129)
The powerful, poetic interplay between images of the haunting past and the fragile physical
reality of the dancers’ present coalesce and create a new, life-affirming future. In the last scene,
each dancer’s hand is brushed with gold, “almost as a mark of belonging and recognition”2
(Distefano 2018), and then each dancer takes an audience member onto the dance floor to
waltz together to the iconic tune of Sensa Fine (Endless). Everyone in the room is dancing in
an embrace at the end. Kearney’s notion of exploring how to live poetically in the world is
emphatically shown here through dancing and through the process of devising the production.
Conclusion
These instances of programs and other initiatives for people living with Parkinson’s cen-
ter on their poetic relationship to dance. In all of the examples given above, the impetus to
move prioritizes artistic frameworks and devices, rather than having a therapeutic motivation.
In each, this allowed either the participants, dance leaders, or both to enrich their experience of
movement, and sometimes performance. The examples given used movement tasks and other
improvisatory methods to elicit exploration of the poetic, guided by an experienced facilita-
tor. Improvisation need not be the only approach to broaden poetic understanding, but in the
instances highlighted here, improvisation became the vehicle for enlarging what is understood
as dance movement for people with Parkinson’s and what it is assumed that they can cope with,
as well as what they may offer to the world poetically. In this way Jordan and Thomas’s (1998)
conclusion that the poetic opens a work (or practices) up for new interpretations is correct. It is
possible to concentrate on the poetic to receive new information and understanding about how
movement and dance works through observing Parkinson’s dancers in action, not just to reduce
their symptoms. Focusing on the poetic also highlights how people with Parkinson’s may
not just be seen as needing help, but may offer a worthwhile contribution to dance making.
Notes
1 The film was shown as part of the Random Acts series for UK television broadcaster Channel 4
(Channel 4 2018). Random Acts was designed to showcase bold and innovative arts through film
shorts, falling outside of the conventions of arts broadcasting.
2 Google translation of “quasi un marchio d’appartenenza e di riconoscimento.” https://www.google.com/
search?q=translate+quasi+un+marchio+d%E2%80%99appartenenza+e+di+riconoscimento&rlz=
1C1AZAA_enGB740GB742&oq=translate+quasi+un+marchio+d%E2%80%99appartenenza+e+
di+riconoscimento+&aqs=chrome..69i57.4595j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8,
41
Sara Houston
References
Albright, Ann Cooper. 2003. “Dwelling in Possibility.” In Taken by Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader,
edited by Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere, 257–266. Middletown, CT:Wesleyan University Press.
Amans, Diane, ed. 2008. An Introduction to Community Dance Practice. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
Bachelard, Gaston. (1958) 1994. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston, MA: Beacon.
Bee, David, dir. 2009. Why Dance for Parkinson’s Disease? (film). Produced by Mark Morris Dance Group
and Brooklyn Parkinson Group. Accessed October 20, 2009. http://danceforparkinsons.org/resources/
video-resources.
Channel 4. 2018. About Random Acts. Accessed December 6, 2018. http://randomacts.channel4.com/about.
Cinconze, Roberto, dir. 2015. Dance for Health Italia: Eva (film). Translated by Anna Trevisan. Produced by
Operaestate and Dance for Health Italia. Accessed September 3, 2015. https://vimeo.com/123652602.
Dawson, Bob. 2007. “Parkinson’s Patients: Yes We Can Dance.” Accessed November 14, 2014. http://
parkinsonsdance.blogspot.co.uk.
De Spain, Kent. 2014. Landscape of the Now: A Topography of Movement Improvisation. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Distefano, Giuseppe. 2018.“Dance Well e l’arte di resistere.” Artribune. December 4. Accessed March 15, 2019.
https://www.artribune.com/arti-performative/teatro-danza/2018/12/dance-well-francesca-foscarini/.
Foscarini, Francesca 2018. Oro L’Arte Di Résistere. Premiered by Dance Well, Capella Mares, August 22, 2018.
Goddard, Jane, dir. 2016. “Parkinson’s: The Funny Side.” BBC Inside Out South. Broadcast
March 7. Accessed November 29, 2017. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b072xkcz/
inside-out-south-parkinsons-the-funny-side.
Hackney, Madeleine E., and Gammon M. Earhart. 2009. “Effects of Dance on Movement Control in
Parkinson’s Disease: A Comparison of Argentine Tango and American Ballroom.” Journal of Rehabilitative
Medicine 41: 475–481.
Hackney, Madeleine E., and Gammon M. Earhart. 2010.“Effects of Dance on Gait and Balance in Parkinson’s
Disease: A Comparison of Partnered and Nonpartnered Dance Movement.” Neurorehabilitation and
Neural Repair 24: 384–392.
Hackney, Madeleine E., Svetlana Kantorovich, and Gammon M. Earhart. 2007. “A Study on the Effects
of Argentine Tango as a Form of Partnered Dance for Those with Parkinson Disease and the Healthy
Elderly.” American Journal of Dance Therapy 29: 109–127.
Heiberger, Lisa, Chris Maurer, Florian Amtage, Ignacio Mendez-Balbuena, Jürgen Schulte-Mönting,
Marie-Claude Hepp Reymond, and Rumyana Kristeva. 2011. “Impact of a Weekly Dance Class on
the Functional Mobility and on the Quality of Life of Individuals with Parkinson’s Disease.” Frontiers in
Aging Neuroscience 3 (14): 1–15.
Hemingway, Ernest. (1929) 2004. A Farewell to Arms. London: Jonathan Cape. Reprint, London: Arrow
Books.
Houston, Sara. 2011.“The Methodological Challenges of Research into Dance for People with Parkinson’s.”
Dance Research 29 (Issue Supplement): 327–349.
———. Forthcoming. “Caring Beyond Illness: An Examination of Godder’s Socially Engaged Art and
Participatory Dance for Parkinson’s Work.” In Performing Care, edited by Amanda Stuart Fisher and
James Thompson. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.
Houston, Sara, and Ashley McGill. 2013. “A Mixed-Methods Study into Ballet for People Living with
Parkinson’s.” Arts & Health: An International Journal for Research, Policy and Practice 5 (2): 103–119.
Houston, Sara, and Ashley McGill. 2015. English National Ballet Dance for Parkinson’s: An Investigative Study 2,
a Report on a Three-Year Mixed-Methods Research Study. London: English National Ballet.
Iverson, Dave, dir. 2014. Capturing Grace (DVD). Produced by Dave Iverson. Kikim Media LLC DVD.
Jordan, Stephanie and Helen Thomas. 1998. “Dance and Gender: Formalism and Semiotics Reconsidered.”
In Routledge Dance Studies Reader, edited by Alexandra Carter, 241–249. London: Routledge.
Katan, Einav. 2016. Embodied Philosophy in Dance: Gaga and Ohad Naharin’s Movement Research. London:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Kearney, Richard. 1998. Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Post-Modern. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University
Press.
Kelsall, Kate. 2014. Shake, Rattle and Roll: An Insider’s View of Parkinson’s Disease and DBS. Accessed
November 24, 2014. http://katekelsall.typepad.com/my_weblog/parkinsons-dance/.
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Kuppers, Petra. 2017. “Somatic Politics: Community Dance and Aging Dance.” In The Aging Body in Dance:
A Cross-Cultural Perspective, edited by Nanako Nakajima and Gabriele Brandstetter, 107–121. London:
Routledge.
Lodge, David. 1977. The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature.
London: Bloomsbury.
Nakajima, Nanako, and Gabriele Brandstetter, eds. 2017. The Aging Body in Dance: A Cross-Cultural
Perspective. London: Routledge.
Nunn, Michael, and William Trevitt. 2012. Dance for Parkinson’s (film). Manilla Productions, Channel 4.
Solimeo, Samantha. 2009. With Shaking Hands: Aging with Parkinson’s Disease in America’s Heartland. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Volpe, Daniele, Matteo Signorini, Anna Marchetto, Timothy Lynch, and Meg A. Morris. 2013.
“A Comparison of Irish Set Dancing and Exercises for People with Parkinson’s Disease: A Phase II
Feasibility Study.” BMC Geriatrics 13: 54. Accessed July 2, 2013. doi:10.1186/1471-2318-13-54.
Vlemmix, Marc. 2017. “Happily Ever After.” Animated. Winter 2017/18: 22–23.
Westheimer, Olie, Cynthia Mcrae, Claire Henchcliffe, Arman Fesharaki, Sofya Glazman, Heather Ene, and
Ivan Bodis-Wollner. 2015. “Dance for PD: A Preliminary Investigation of Effects on Motor Function
and Quality of Life Among Persons with Parkinson’s Disease (PD).” Journal of Neural Transmission 122
(9): 1263–1270.
Yvonne. 2017. Speaking at Researching Dance for Parkinson’s seminar, Dance for Health, Rotterdam,
November 27.
43
4
RESOURCING/SEARCHING
DANCE TECHNIQUE AND
EDUCATION
Developing a praxeological methodology
Yvonne Hardt
Introduction
I enter Studio 3 at the Center of Contemporary Dance (CCT) of at the University of Music
and Dance in Cologne. Students are in a relaxed and talkative mode, crowded close to the
windows, bags stacked under the barre that will not be used today as the class is working with
a renowned dancer, pedagogue, and practitioner of release and somatically based dance. It is
a precious moment just before class; it is a time when I place myself on the floor, start sensing
individual body parts, and observe others; and it is a time for wanted or unwanted thoughts.
As I settle on my back and look at the ceiling, I experience a sense of a déjà vu about exactly
this moment. It is at this instance that I think about how often I have experienced this
moment and how thankful I am for the profession of dancing. It feels like a privilege to start
the day with lying on the floor, looking up into the room, sensing weight, and opening
joints. It is the moment when I ask myself how much time I have spent on moving and being
moved in so such different classes. It is a moment of sensation and reflection.
Today I am aware that I am here with a slightly altered perspective: to do research on teaching
and learning dance. I am more attuned to the setting, the constellation in which students
assemble, and my own watching of the space. While all of this seems to be such a routine, a sort of
unquestioned ‘‘normality’’ of what it entails to become and be a dancer, it really strikes me as quite
remarkable that dance education, or what it means to learn or to appropriate dance, has seldom
been considered in critical dance research. If the “becoming” (Manning 2014), the “emerging”
(Klein and Noeth 2011), and the “un-doing” (Brandstetter 2007; Foellmer 2009) of bodies and
their boundaries, and the “resistance” to regimes and hierarchies of attention and senses (Lepecki
and Banes 2007) have been so paramount for the theoretical and interesting development of dance
(studies), why are these studies so little concerned with how these bodies are actually learning
how to become (undone) or partake in their formation and artistic production?
This is not to imply that dance education and dance technique have not been written
about! A substantial part of this essay will focus on rereading and systematizing this research in
order to foster a comparative approach that also critically investigates some of the underlying
premises and exclusions of this research. Surely, the question also warrants a wider discussion
44
Resourcing/searching dance technique
of the still-existing hierarchies between the pedagogic and artistic field,1 or the sometimes
implicit (re-)essentialization of ‘‘the’’ body (even if it is now considered an individual one).
But instead of focusing on these issues, I rather want to propose ways of dissolving these dis-
crepancies. As such, I will argue that to investigate the heterogeneous bodily as well as highly
reflective practice of what it entails to learn, train, transmit, communicate, teach, facilitate,
appropriate, and share how to move and dance requires a different methodological approach.
Indeed, it is a site in which different strands of theory can be joined in practice. It is a chance
to participate in theoretical and methodological debates within the wider dance studies field.
In order to make this more plausible, I am going to suggest a reading that moves between
observations in class settings, evolving reflections, and developing conceptual and method-
ological approaches to dance technique and education. As such, I am asking the reader to
follow a strategy of writing that seeks to grant the text a multiplicity of voices and realities,
combining indicative readings with systematization.
Searching for an understanding of dance

teaching and learning constellations
The class starts and we (twenty students, the teacher, and some guests like me) assemble,
sitting in a tight circle, legs stretched forward. We are asked to lean against each other, share
weight. The class today is about “allowing the giving of time.” The teacher emphasizes: “We
are going to do boring things today.” She takes time to elaborate on the notion of boredom.
Referencing John Cage as an important protagonist, who championed boredom as a source
for creativity, she explains that the state of nothing happening opens the possibility to dis-
cover new things; it is a way to discover details. While she talks about this, I make a note
to myself that I should transcribe this later, because her words resonate with educational
theories, which also propose that boredom and discovering the new (detail) in the familiar
are central for educational (transformational) processes (Ahrens 2014).2 It also relates to my
question of how a focus for different, yet specific, details is encouraged in different educa-
tional contexts. I am aware that there is no possibility of researching this scenario free of
preconceived categories. I can only reflect on their working potentials and productive force,
but they structure what I am more likely to see, hear, and remember. Being here in the studio
these thoughts do not distract me for long, and I am in a different state of doing and reflect-
ing. It is a bright autumn day; I feel awake, engaged, and free in mind to let myself be drawn
into the subtle movements that focus all my attention on their sensation.
Two days later I do not feel the same, although the setting has only changed minimally.
I am tired and my thoughts drift off while I try to focus on the task to start every movement
with a release. I have enough experience—both in taking these classes and giving similar
exercises—to not get worried. I simply wait and sense that by keeping on going there will be
moments when I get more attuned to the exercise, and that the tiredness of the morning makes
me easy, gives me weightiness and a released appearance. I reflect that I can be so relaxed
because I am not anxious about my career, about the purpose of certain classes, and what I will
learn. However, these are often concerns that students voice in moments of insecurity in class.
I do not need to please anybody, as nobody will grade me—or even worse—“will judge my
body” as one student reported on the ambivalent situation of “opening up,” “letting it all in,”
and then having the feeling that grades are based on body types fitting the “appearance” of the
practice.3 Questions arise: How have the worries, which are often part of taking class, changed
over time? How have expectations structured and influenced how I experienced class, what
I was able to take in, or what I rejected? I feel astonished that sharing a class with my own
45
Yvonne Hardt
students does not make me feel more self-conscious. The teacher creates an atmosphere that
is nonevaluative, where there is space for failure and insecurity. She problematizes her own
insufficiencies as she grows older. She is a guest teacher. The mirror has been covered; some
students work with eyes closed. I stop looking at them, as we are now in partner work and this
requires all my attention. My partner is one of the other guests and we smile at each other as
we start inhibiting and challenging each other’s movements. The atmosphere is playful.
This is only a tiny part of the class, and it might not be very representative for a lot of dance
teaching and learning on an obvious level, but it can expose some of the challenges, rewards,
and complexities that are involved when researching dance training, learning, and education.
It allows identification of significant elements for conceptualizing dance technique and, more
generally, the development of a research methodology. First, training is a communal practice
and, every participant not only brings different histories of training to a class but also daily
altering states that interact with and shape what is learned, what is considered important, and
what is experienced. Second, dance technique is a site for reflection—on the practice itself, the
modes of learning, and appropriating for personal revelations and contestations. Third, it is a
joined space where standards of education (in this case giving time for individual exploration),
patterns of classes (starting simple and leading to more complex exercises), norms of physicality
(unblocked flow), as well as (flat) hierarchies and reports between students and teachers (e.g., a
noncompetitive atmosphere) appear and are the site for (re)negotiation. Last but not least,
fourth, this workshop at the CCT is embedded in a wider context and development in which
understandings of dance technique have been reshaped and alternative or somatic practices
have been institutionalized in dance programs at the university level (DeLahunta and Hoerster
2007; Diehl and Lampert 2011; Coogan 2016). It is this development, especially, that has both
spurred an increasing interest, and theoretical reflection on dance technique and education
and makes it necessary to rework how we study teaching-learning constellations in dance.
Research on dance technique and dance education

So how has the learning and teaching of dance been researched? For the purpose of this
chapter, I will focus primarily on the last two decades, in which a wide range of publications
has demonstrated enormous expertise, reflectiveness, and openness in reworking what is
considered technique and dance education. A huge part of reflecting on teaching and learn-
ing dance takes place within the field of reflecting on what ‘‘dance technique’’ is. Neither the
approaches taken by scholars and practitioners (some more didactic, others more theoretical)
nor their sought-after goals can be easily subsumed under single categories, so I propose a
short comparative and systematized reading that is clearly informed by a few guiding ques-
tions: How do they understand technique and the learning process? What underlying prem-
ises and approaches ground these studies? More explicitly, I am interested in how they relate
to a wider dance studies discourse, and how compatible they are with an understanding of
teaching and dance education as it has just been derived from my descriptions. From this
perspective, this predominantly practice-based or practice-related research can be roughly
divided into three groups with all the simplification that comes with any systematization.
Looking at single techniques and overarching principles

There are publications that focus predominantly on one technique or a general principle
of teaching (e.g., Bartenieff and Lewis 1980; Hutchinson-Guest 1995; Klein 1999; Lepkoff
1999; Postuwka 1999; Fleischle-Braun 2000). They range from descriptions of concepts and
46
exercises to wider reflections on how this is integrated into artistic or everyday practice. In this
group I would also include studies that focus on somatic practices in regard to dance and that
have directed attention away from formal movement accomplishment to an understanding
of technique, in which students learn how to be attentive to their bodies and their personal
needs, to take time, to sense, to explore, and to find their own modes of learning and moving
(Bainbridge Cohen 1994; Coogan 2016). This discourse is mostly undertaken by practitioners
in the field who also conceive of this as a ‘‘metatechnique’’ that grounds and supports other
techniques (Hackney 1998; Coogan 2016). This perspective can be aligned with an older
debate in which early modern dancers resisted calling what they did ‘‘technique’’ (Wigman
1963; Brinkmann 2012) and preferred to speak about principles that could be applied in
‘‘different’’ artistic contexts. In order to link this with a more theoretical and critical debate,
it is necessary to unravel two problematic underpinnings inherent in this approach. First, in
their claim to general principles, such pedagogies leave unnoticed the underlying aesthetics
of these practices. Second, general movement principles do not resonate productively with
an understanding that knowledge and the body (formations) are constructed in relation to wider
sets of cultural, historical, and social discourses (Foucault 1993; Mauss 2006). Although I
do not deny the positive and much needed effect of challenging established historically and
socially marked body patterns through somatic practices, I seek to open the discussion of the
underlying body norms, which Doran George—one of the few to consider this—revealed
meticulously in the insightful analysis in A Conceit of the Natural Body (2014).
Within this category of providing research on one technique, it is also possible to identify
publications that might not so obviously operate under the label of dance technique or edu-
cation. For example, I consider Cynthia Novack’s seminal book Sharing the Dance (1990) on
contact improvisation and Janet O’Shea’s At Home in the World? The Bharatanatyam Dancer as
Transnational Interpreter (2003), as exemplary models of how to research dance appropriation
at the intersection of personal learning histories and socially and culturally constructed dance
practices. While these publications have been widely cited and recognized within the critical
dance studies field, they have seldom been considered in the wider debate of those who focus
on dance technique or education.
Both scholars are practitioners and participant observers of the practice they are research-
ing. They not only ground their analysis in profound knowledge of the field, but also reflect
on how they became dancers and learned to practice their specific forms of dancing. From
this approach, Novack (1990) convincingly demonstrates how a practice that used to view
itself as a non-formalized way of moving has established principles of teaching and learn-
ing along specific aesthetic conventions. Moreover, she demonstrates how this is embed-
ded in the social norms of an alternative North American postwar context and how the
field performs exclusions (probably unwillingly) in regard to other social and ethnic groups.
This focus on who is excluded from seemingly inclusive and individual forms of training is a
helpful perspective for newer contemporary practices. Accordingly, one should be sensitized
to the various levels on which exclusion might be practiced and normalized.
Significantly, O’Shea (2003) reveals how learning a practice is highly implicated in the
told histories and genealogies that draw lines of demarcations to other practices and that have
the effect of naturalizing one form of teaching as the ‘‘truer’’ version within a specific genre.
Dancers attuned to one form of ballet or gaga technique will easily be able to connect to such
a perspective once confronted with a very different teaching style. Moreover, O’Shea also
shows how, in creating a tradition (in order to revolt against colonially enforced prohibition
of the dance form), bharatanatyam practitioners nonetheless relied on specific categories that
signify classism. These in turn can be linked to a European understanding and categories of
47
Yvonne Hardt
classism and classic training. As such, these studies provoke questions: On what level do prac-
tices succeed in challenging former or ‘‘unwanted’’ models of training, and on what level do
they continue (unwanted) traditions? To what extent are they able to include different expe-
riences and perspectives on single practices within one study? Transposing such questions
to the contemporary field might reveal that both structures and underlying notions are still
shared from more classical forms. In sum, these two studies provide models of how to share
and research the experience of teaching and learning practice on the basis of precise empiri-
cal work, while simultaneously reflecting on the developments of both practice and research
over time. In this way they can interweave their empirical data with critical discourses that
guide attention to the complexities and implicit norms that structure any technique and
educational process as much as the research itself. More so, they make it possible to see con-
nections to wider social and political dimensions. These studies might also sensitize us to the
fact that significant research regarding dance learning and teaching is not necessarily found
under the obvious label of ‘‘technique’’ or ‘‘education,’’ and that research in this field clearly
profits from an interdisciplinary approach and research design.
Comparing techniques and (re)conceptualizing them as hybrids and divers

A somewhat different take on technique is present in explicitly comparative studies. While
such studies also focus on principles, they understand them as historically changing and
often place the recent development of dance technique in a historical (linear) development.
Accordingly, dance technique was formerly defined along the lines of style, aesthetics, and
exercises, while newer concepts of technique propose that technique entails the understanding
and mastering of ideas of a practice (Legg 2011, xvi) and the development of general com-
petences of learning with and through the body. Accordingly, there is a reflection on the
multiplicity of principles. In this light, technique is now captured by terms like method,
tool-(kit), knowledge-system, eclectic assemblage, and enablement of movement agency
(DeLahunta and Hoerster 2007; Bales and Nettl-Fiol 2008; Diehl and Lampert 2011, 13f;
Legg 2011, xvi; Brinkmann 2012). Within this field of research, an enormous endeavor has
been undertaken to capture the diversity of the field and the increasing ‘‘individualization’’
of training histories. As the field is now considered somewhat ‘‘eclectic,’’ so too are the
forms of research or publications. While they can be highly inspiring in challenging dancers
and scholars, I will briefly point to two studies that conceptualize these existing differences
by providing structured analytical categories that are more easily transposed into a wider
methodological debate.
First, I consider an older and shorter essay by Susan Foster called “Dancing Bodies” (1997),
which still offers a rewarding and systematic approach to looking at dance technique in terms
of a comparative model. Starting from a perspective theoretically grounded in the work of
Marcel Mauss (techniques of the body) and Michel Foucault (the productive power of disci-
pline that brings about bodies), Foster argues that the body can only be known through the
practices by which it is trained and developed. She argues that each practice creates a specific
“body of ideas” (1997, 235) that, through a long process of artistic subjectivation, interweaves
physical practices and the bodily and aesthetic ideals of a dance form. By establishing the dif-
ferences among a perceived, an ideal, and a demonstrative body, she points to the difference
between conceptual understandings of body and how the body functions and interacts in
training situations (237). She compares four different techniques (ballet, Duncan, Graham,
contact) within the same categories. For each practice, she not only asks what body ideals are
envisioned, what movements, senses, qualities, and spatial arrangements are preferred, but
48
also distinguishes how different settings establish different understandings of what consti-
tutes a successful doing. She demonstrates how language—especially varying metaphors—is
used to bring these understandings about, as much as they establish hierarchies and learning
atmospheres and the rapport between student and teacher. Finally, she reflects on the neolib-
eral tendencies that she sees inherent in an increasing hybridization of dance training forms
that demand of dancers the ability to perform in all artistic contexts.
Ingo Diehl and Friederike Lampert (2011) would not be so critical of what has now been
acclaimed as a competence-based model of learning in contrast to an aesthetically bound model,
but they take up the systematic comparison and many categories suggested by Foster. They
provided the first extensive empirical research on seven techniques (spanning from von Laban
to Klein- and Counter-Technique). They undertook this huge endeavor with the help of many
scholars and leading practitioners in the field who were asked to view these practices through the
same categories and a standardized catalogue of questions. These included, among other topics,
the goals, methods, didactics, underlying ideologies, body and spatial concepts, structures of class,
relation to music, and other arts. As such, they wanted to prepare the ground for a systematic
understanding and comparison of technique(s). While this publication can be considered a
benchmark in the field and provides a huge database, which should be further explored, it is
also an example of the need for more methodological debate. For instance, the enormous setup
did not allow for a circular research procedure, which would allow critical questioning and
redesigning of categories. Also, varying forms of who interpreted these questions and how the
eclectic empirical analysis was created rather offers an overview of different artistic and academic
outlooks instead of the wanted comparability. The differences among coexisting techniques
documented in this volume have also encouraged rethinking of dance educational programs.
Conceptualizing dance education or dance transmission more generally

Within this category of writing on dance education there is a clear tendency to react to the
changing demands of the field and to broaden extensively the ‘‘tool-box’’ and competences
of (future) dancers (Melzwig, Spangberg, and Thielicke 2007). They envision dancers who
can ideally reflect, contextualize, research, visualize, describe, and conceptualize their work,
know how to lead processes and interact with others, foster community, and share their
experiences (Greil and Sander 2017). Combined with a trend to cherish educational mod-
els like the “non-knowing teacher” (Rancière 2007) or the concept of “facilitator,” which
transpose the dominance of the teacher, the skill of dancers to be able to move— once con-
sidered essential—has been pushed to the periphery. Discussion of dance technique is mostly
absent in these publications (Melzwig, Spangberg, and Thielicke 2007).
Despite all the differences, most of these publications in all three categories share a belief
in a competence-based teaching model that assigns students individuality, self-reflectivity,
and independence in approaching ‘‘their’’ practice.4 However, if one looks at the methods for
describing these practices, the focus predominantly remains on concepts of teaching that ideally
give space for such agency. Even if authors proclaim that “the question is how education takes
place (instead of what is to be taught)” (Melzwig, Spangberg, and Thielicke 2007, 12), how
movement is learned and appropriated by the participants is hardly considered. This is also
the case in the aforementioned highly empirically based studies by Diehl and Lampert (2011).
Although students and guest (teachers) were part of the extensive empirical research set up,
the mode of presentation suggests that technique is inherently understood through a focus
on the teachers, their biographies, their competences, and their conceptual understandings of
a technique.5 However, if dance technique is considered a “collective knowledge production”
49
Yvonne Hardt
(DeLahunta and Hoerster 2007, 10), a field in which dancers should independently appropri-
ate dance through many modalities of learning (Coogan 2016), and the task of the teacher is
one of a facilitator, it means that researching this field would imply both looking at complex
constellations theoretically and methodologically and not simply at concepts.
Practice theories and investigating technique as a performative practice

I propose that the turn to practice theories and praxeology—as it has taken place in the wider
social studies context and only slowly migrated into the field of dance studies (Klein 2014;
Hardt 2018; Kleinschmidt 2018)—offers a framework that allows one to methodologically
reflect on such research interests and to develop analytical frameworks. Under the heading of
‘‘practice theories’’—a term first coined by Shelly Ortner (1984)—a diverse area of research
sees ‘‘practice’’ as central to the understanding of social life (Hui, Schatzki, and Shove 2017, 1).
It is exactly the interest of practice theories to look at such complex constellations in a “mate-
rially performed and performing reality” (Schäfer and Daniel 2015, 43, author’s translation).
As practices are understood to be based in material and physical reality, or what has been called
a complex network of “body-thing-associations” (Hillebrandt 2014, 27),6 they can provide a
rich source for the study of dance and dance education.7 In this view, practice is for practice
theoreticians always social, intersubjective, and interobjective (Schatzki, Knorr Cetina, and
von Savigny 2000; Reckwitz 2003, 290; Latour 2007; Schmidt 2012; Hillebrandt 2014).
This is also the case if individuality and the emphasis on ‘‘individual practice’’ is crucial for
the self-understanding of a given practice and is reiterated in “sayings” (Schatzki 2002, 73)
such as “in my practice” (Hardt 2018, 107). Practice theories also conceive that learning the
competence to act in a field is not a “given property of individuals, but rather to be formed
in the framework of ‘distributed agency’” (Rammert and Schulz-Schaeffer 2002; Alkemeyer
and Buschmann 2017, 8). Accordingly, technique as practice should be considered more than
the sum of bodily exercises, teaching concepts, and learned sentiments. It is a bundle of social
interactions that structures how people become and act as “competent players” within the
(dance) field (Stern 2010; Brümmer 2015).
Indeed, practice theories are interested in how this “nexus of practices”—meaning the
social fabric or the complex constellations—are structured or organized in recognizable pat-
terns (Reckwitz 2003, 290). For researching dance and dance education, this means that it is
crucial to take complex pedagogical constellations and their social organization into account.
This includes the participants and the things they say and do. This might not always be eas-
ily visible, as it also includes the implicit rules of the field. In the view of practice theories,
these rules are not to be understood as fixed and preexisting or stable structures that can
simply be followed. Rather, they are better viewed as arising from and becoming noticeable
only within specific constellations. They are also not arbitrary but rely on already established
maneuvers (Reckwitz 2003; Schmidt 2012). “Conceived in this way, learning leads to the
imitating repetition of what already exists as well as to an active negotiation of interest, inter-
pretations and knowledge, which contains moments of critical reflexivity and established
hierarchies and practice-specific requirements” (Alkemeyer and Buschmann 2017, 13).8
This perspective might grant a balanced and nuanced matrix for how artistic bodily agency
comes about—that is, on the one hand, formed and determined by the ideological/aesthetic
discourses and specific routinized practices by which bodies become enabled, and on the
other hand, considers how, within the routines of daily training, there is space as well as the
requirement for individual adjustment, reflections, resistance, and decontextualization or
reworking of one’s own and shared enablement.
50
On the basis of the above discussion, I propose that we need to develop an understanding
of dance technique and education that is not based on a set of principles, but rather on the
notion that it is a practice that brings about its forms of doing, moving, and thinking; rules;
and the mechanisms of inclusions and exclusion that it seems to represent. Accordingly, it is
necessary to ask: What are the relations and coproductions between teaching methods and
concepts—the doings and sayings of teaching and creating educational environments and the
ways in which students and other players adopt, appropriate, or make dance their own and a
shared practice? How, then, can experience be put into discussion with critical investigations
on underlying premises or epistemological groundings of dance techniques, and, finally, the
wider context in which it takes place?
Experiencing, appropriating, and normalizing alternative teaching practice

Returning once more to the class setting with which this chapter started might grant another
example of how such intertwined perspectives and renegotiations take shape. It is in the
reflection periods of the class that differences between students more clearly appear. After
about one and a half hours of constant moving, the teacher initiates a round of reflection.
The class assembles again in a circle, and the teacher introduces this reflective session by
asking students to share their sensations. Quite a few students interpreted this as sharing
feelings and reveal their very personal—mostly positive—sentiments, starting their sentences
with “I feel,” followed by evaluative interpretations. While the teacher is positive about
the willingness of students to respond, she also subtly suggests that students might ponder
the difference between feeling and sensing by sharing her own observations that are clearly
oriented toward physical (phenomenological) descriptions, and by taking up and rephrasing
those aspects in the students’ observations that focus on the senses, physicality, and timing.
A fellow student more attuned to the proposed understanding of sensation is more openly
outspoken against emotional and personal judgments.
My thoughts wander off to how this clearly relates to my interest in how students need
to build a resonance with what the language of a class offers or means and that all partici-
pants take part in this process. The students offering the emotional reading provide the con-
trast against which everybody can be summoned to a perspective that focuses on sensation.
However, the longer I think about it, I wonder if my first interpretation of the situation—that
students might not yet be familiarized with this difference between feeling and sensing, and
the clear division that contemporary practices developed in contrast to the more emotionally
considered modern dance—is true to my endeavor to capture the complexity of the doings
and sayings in this setting?
As I listen to the students, there is a reappearing theme about the ‘‘self ’’: For instance, one
student has a very positive response and remarks that through this time given in the tasks she
“feels closer to herself.” This seems to be of a quite different order—and as I know some of
the students and that they have been trained for quite some time in alternative and somatic
practices, speaking about sensations does not seem like unfamiliar terrain. Given that these
are young students daily asked to develop their ‘‘own practice’’ and that they generally
are quite involved in finding out who they are, such articulations about the self-(feeling)
might be read differently. Instead of being the result of unfamiliarity with the required
discourse, it might, on the contrary, be the result of the institutionalization of somatic
practices in dance training. Students are increasingly used to training exactly in practices
that make them focus on themselves, their individual body, and movement patterns, and as
such might also be seen as embedded in discourses of “the care of the self ” (Foucault 1993).
51
Yvonne Hardt
Such ‘‘self-techniques,’’ may successfully hide how they only bring about this specific form
of “subject” and “self ” that they then seem to find or search for. What is striking about this
context is that there is for quite a few students—and this comes from observation of other
classes as well—a shared idealization of the self as calm; students only perceive such a state
as ‘‘being themselves.’’ What implications do such constructions of the self as calm have for
how conflict is handled? How does it relate to educational theories, which highlight the
importance of conflict in order to evoke transformation and reworking of one’s self ? I also
wonder how this becomes a new norm, grounded in the matter-of-fact observation of the
senses and the body’s anatomy. The teacher closes the discussion by asking us to touch the
manubrium sterni—the small bone at the top of the breastbone. While students touch this
body part, she shifts into a more lecture-style session, in which she explains the significance
and the structural relationship of this bone to the rest of the body.
The class cannot be captured by this critical reading to the end—as I can hear and evaluate
it and still feel great and inspired and might work productively with some aspects of it. I was
resensitized to the power of giving time to things, to nonviolent communication, and to the
subtle ways of influencing and guiding that leaves everybody sheltered. The question is, then,
what do individuals do and what can they do with the suggested moving and speaking mate-
rial? What are they encouraged to do? How can we open our perspective to the multiplicity
of perspectives and experience and be open and critical at the same time?
Conclusion: Finding a framework for researching

dance technique and dance education
The above class description and analysis would probably fail if read as an attempt at proper
ethnographic practice. Rather, it is a description of a process of perceiving and reflection on
viewing classes that seeks to reveal how our interests and preconceived knowledge struc-
ture what is perceived. While research on dance technique and education should try to
grasp complex realities of practices through an ethnographic research practice grounded in
the field, such as participant observation and interviews (Glaser and Strauss 1967), it might
also work with a combination of empirical data derived from the field and a coding that
draws on the researcher’s already established analytical categories, which are then continu-
ously revised in a circular research process. This not only guides the attention to the self-
reflection of the scholar, but it allows reading the “found” or “emerging” material against
its grain (Hillebrandt 2014, 27; Schäfer, Daniel, and Hillebrandt 2015, 43). This plurality of
methods—which might also integrate situational and discursive analysis—grants a complex
research portfolio for the analysis of teaching and learning to dance.9
To systematize such an approach more clearly, I suggest a perspective that acknowledges
these different realities and borrows from a methodological reflection that Saukko (2003)
originally identified to name what she called different research validities (dialectical, decon-
structive, contextual):
1. There are the perspectives of those who participate, who coauthor the practice and reinvest
in the rules and principles, and performatively bring about the practice of teaching and
learning dance. This includes all participants and actants (Latour 2007) and their doings
and sayings. This is also a field of contestation and multiperspectivity. As language is such
a large part of practicing, teaching, and learning dance, it is highly important to be precise
in capturing its working practice (Hardt and Stern 2014). Despite the still existing myth
that dance provides preverbal knowledge, anybody watching or attending a dance class
52
will experience the omnipresence of some form of verbal communication. Language is

given to structure the class order (beginning and ending of exercises, spacing, timing), to
give instructions (in the form of explanation, to support demonstrating, to give images, or
to foster a specific quality), and to provide support and feedback; it grants analytical tools
for appropriation and conveys aesthetic understandings (Hardt 2008). While questions—
about how language is specifically used, who speaks and how students appropriate dancing
through and with language, how language is the site for creating atmosphere, resonance,
support, contestation, or fear—belong to the realm of experience, they are also highly
intertwined with discourse and the underlying premises and epistemological references.
2. There are terminologies and their field of discourse, which need to be dismantled:
understandings of the body, the normalizing tendencies inherent in the language, and
the epistemological reference systems applied to achieve specific forms and sensory
awareness of bodies and physical doings.
3. There is the context that might significantly reshape not only how the practice is (per)
formed and experienced, but also how institutionalization might introduce hierarchies
or new forms of evaluation or may contradict the concepts of teaching in individual class
settings. To question who has access to the practice, in what social and historical context,
might lead to a very different understanding of the complex constellation of appropriat-
ing a “new” world in dance and foster educational developments. Focusing on context
generates questions such as for whom, for what learning or artistic purpose, for what
institutional interests, does the practice take concrete shape?
With such questions I want to open a field of research and demonstrate how complex the
constellations of teaching, learning, appropriating, and reflecting dance are. They warrant a
differentiated analysis. Juxtaposing and interlinking experience and tendencies of normal-
ization and processes of institutionalization should not be understood as questioning the
rewards of experience, but may lead us to appreciate a wider set of experiences, and it might
also provide a tool for questioning one’s own standards, both of teaching and learning, as well
as of researching. To appreciate and resist such different aspects as atmosphere of trust and
support and conflict and contestation might open the field for the acquisition of an openness
for rediscovering the daily and cherished practice of dancing.
Notes
1 Dance pedagogy seems to remain minor in status to artistic practice, as it is associated with those
who did not or do no longer qualify for a dancing career onstage or those who never profes-
sionally sought such a career. Similarly, in the dance studies field, avant-garde artistic practices
have spurred a critical theoretical approach to conceptualize dance, while dance pedagogy is more
closely aligned to didactics and the pedagogy of movement and sport.
2 Ahrens here makes a reference to the German division between learning and Bildung (education),
the latter meaning the general education of a subject. Education in this sense is the (re)working of
the self and is always considered a process and not something that one statically can acquire as the
‘‘given’’ knowledge that one simply “learns.”
3 All commentaries from students are anonymized and stem from in-class discussions in which the
author took place as a participant observer or teacher.
4 Critique of such competence-based learning has already been voiced in the light of theories critical of
neoliberal development and an increasing trend toward self-governance (Foster 1997; Gelhard 2011).
5 Students are only given a sporadic voice in short citations. If in other publications the voice is given
to all participants, student voices are most often integrated in the form of interviews and as such are
not compared or coded afterward (Coogan 2016).
6 Translation by the author.
53
Yvonne Hardt
7 For systematical overviews of the general traits and differences within the field of “practice theo-
ries” see, e.g., Reckwitz (2003) and Schmidt (2012).
8 Imitating repetition, then, in dance training not only refers to the copying of movements from a
teacher but is understood in the light of social mimesis, and refers to all the modalities of doing and
saying that can be taken up explicitly or implicitly.
9 Although empirical research is central for praxeology and practice theory, a detailed discussion
about the methods to accomplish this is still in its infancy (Schäfer, Daniel, and Hillebrandt 2015).
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55
5
THE EXPANDING POSSIBILITIES
OF DANCE SCIENCE
Emma Redding
Introduction
Dance science is the scientific study of dance and dancers through the subject areas of sports
science such as physiology, psychology, kinesiology, and biomechanics. This is the generally
accepted definition; however, it is one that does not encompass the extending boundar-
ies and shifting foci of the field. Dance science has been described as merely a systematic
tool through which to deepen our knowledge of dance. While this broader definition lacks
specificity, it might be more appropriate in describing a field that to some degree lacks clas-
sification and is expanding quite quickly.
While the research currently being undertaken draws upon a range of qualitative and
quantitative methodological approaches, earlier work from two decades ago tended to adopt
a positivist methodological stance that aimed to generalize findings from measurement.
The positivist research approach was soon perceived as being inadequate to provide effective
solutions to all problems in dance, as evidenced by the number of qualitative research stud-
ies now being undertaken. It appears that researchers are now concerned with asking and
answering good questions through systematic research, rather than at the level of statistical
confidence they wish to achieve at the outset.
The aims in dance science are as equally challenging to define. Most would agree that
dance science seeks to enhance the training, health, wellbeing, and performance of dancers
through the evidence-based teaching and through the practical application of dance science
to dance. A smaller but important second aim is to investigate the impact of dance on areas
of health and wellbeing among other populations.
As a relatively new area of research and study, dance science has grown since the 1980s
into a formally recognized discourse. The first glimpses of dance science appeared as short
courses at the American Dance Festivals in the early 1980s. In 1990, the International
Association for Dance Medicine & Science was founded, and in that same year, the first UK
Healthier Dancer conference took place. This marked the interest in investigating dance
and dancers through the application of science. The seminal text The Fit and Healthy Dancer,
(1999) by Yiannis Koutedakis and Craig Sharp, along with other significant texts such as
Howse and Hancock’s Dance Technique and Injury Prevention (1999) and Thomasen and Rist’s
Anatomy and Kinesiology for Ballet Teachers (1996) provided dancers and dance educators with
56
Expanding possibilities of dance science
the first scientifically informed books for dancers and teachers. These textbooks offered the
first dance-specific recommendations for injury prevention and performance enhancement.
In this chapter, I acknowledge the alterations in choreographic and training processes,
at least in the United Kingdom and Europe within modern and contemporary dance and
classical ballet, that raised the kinds of questions that in part explain the emergence of dance
science. The proposition within dance science of the dancer as both artist and athlete will be
discussed, as well as my own scientific research into the discrepancy between the physiologi-
cal demands of training and dance performance and the debate around dancers and fitness
and safe practice. I acknowledge the range of research conducted within the realm of dance
science, including the studies into the identification and development of dance talent, the use
of psychological skills for dance creativity, and the impact of dance on the health and wellbe-
ing of other populations.
The relationship between dance science and somatics practice will be explored, as well as
the debate concerning the oppositional mentality so apparent in conversations about art and
science that have given rise to new cross-disciplinary and wider methodological approaches
for investigating dance practice through science. I therefore indicate where current and
future research interests might lie.
Dance is a skill-driven activity where remarkable demands are placed on the dancer in
terms of joint flexibility, coordination, and balance. The majority of dancers are asked to
jump, perform fast explosive movements, balance, and turn, at the same time giving due
consideration to flow, suspension, and movement dynamics. They are often expected to be
expressive through their bodies and, above all, to communicate to an audience. The physi-
cal qualities and overall athleticism required of the dancer have increased in recent years,
as evidenced by the increased joint ranges of motion noted among dancers, the acrobatic
movements witnessed on stage, and the outdoor parkour-type movements incorporated into
site-specific work.
Dancers must be able to remember a series of intricate, complicated, and coordinated
movement vocabulary and phrases in performance. Unsurprisingly, a large part of dance
training is devoted to technical skill learning, where the specific focus is on technique acqui-
sition rather than general physiological development, notwithstanding the fact that supple-
mentary conditioning classes may also be included. Dancers devote between three to six
hours per day, six to seven days per week for eight to ten years constructing the “dancing
body.” The full time period of intensive vocational contemporary dance training is at least
five full days per week for at least three years.
Instruction methods in the teaching of dance have typically developed through experi-
ences and practitioner instinct and insight, rather than from movement and exercise sciences.
Perhaps this is why so many dancers sustain an incapacitating injury at some point in their
careers (Laws 2005). There is no denying the immense pressure and physical strain endured
by professional dancers engaged in high volumes of dancing, a highly skilled physical activ-
ity, which that undoubtedly takes its toll on the human body. The application of science to
the field of sports has demonstrated that there could be an alternative to the sole reliance on
teacher/coach intuition, and perhaps it seemed natural to question the extent to which such
scientific theories could be applied to dance. Alongside the high physical demands placed
upon dancers, they are expected to develop intuitively sufficient toughness and confidence
to withstand audition after audition and endure the types of learning environments that
may not be optimal or conducive to developing positive wellbeing, as found through several
recent dance science research studies (e.g., Carr and Wyon 2003; Quested and Duda 2009;
Nordin-Bates, Quested, Walker, and Redding 2012).
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Emma Redding
As is the case with many high-skill physical activities, the risk of injury in dance is high.
The prevalence of injuries in dance is higher than in many sport activities: for example, over
80% of dancers are injured each year compared to 15%–25% of participants in rugby and
football (Orchard and Seward 2002), not to mention the additional and changeable nature
of the choreographic demands placed upon dancers in rehearsals. The original motivation
for the development of dance science was primarily to develop greater understanding of the
prevalence and etiology of dance injuries and assess the effectiveness of established training
methods to support dancers. The predominant research questions tackled by dance science,
at least in the early years, were concerned with injuries similar to those that had previously
been explored in sports.
It is impossible to speak of any dance technique or approach to the training of the
body that characterizes contemporary dance teaching today. Rather, a variety of approaches
have emerged since the 1970s not only in the United States and the United Kingdom
but also in Europe and Asia, resulting in dance training that follows eclectic approaches to
dance performance and making. Dancers hone their technical skills not for one particular
choreographer, but rather for any dance maker who chooses to work with them. It can
no longer be claimed that dancers in contemporary/modern or classical ballet will work
exclusively for one choreographer in one dance style. Modern/contemporary dance
techniques had previously been characterized in particular movement principles and/or
a specific movement vocabulary, and dancers were trained in a technique to prepare for
choreography that utilized that particular technique (e.g., Martha Graham Company dancers
trained in the Graham technique; Merce Cunningham Company dancers trained in the
Cunningham technique, and so on). Not only was the dancer trained exclusively for that
technique, but each choreographic work was also designed exclusive of others. Rather, they
may work with choreographers using text and theatre, such as Pina Bausch, or those who
require extreme joint flexibility such as British choreographer Wayne McGregor. Much of
the research undertaken in the field of dance science has sought to advocate and support
this by coining the term dancer as artist-athlete, proposing that dancers should develop strong,
durable, and versatile bodies to help meet these varying choreographic demands, given their
position as it is within a neoliberal market place.
The artistic-athlete
It is perhaps surprising that dancers tend to view themselves as artists not athletes even
though the highly trained physical skills and movement vocabulary through which they
communicate ideas in choreographic work share much in common with those of athletes.
The priorities in dance training, at least within contemporary dance contexts, have been to
explore the technique, aesthetics, and meaning conveyed through dance, rather than to pre-
pare for its physical demands in a robust and systematic way. While the dancer may eventually
recognize him or herself as an elite athlete as well as an artist, notions of faster, further, higher,
and longer are not always the most motivating factors for a dancer as they are for the athlete,
though they may well be for particular choreographers.
The success of the dancer and the impact of his/her training are measured not usually
through quantitative measures such as jump height or the speed at which a movement can be
completed, but through the audience and choreographer’s subjective evaluation. Nevertheless,
‘performance’ is what is being evaluated in both sport and dance: the pursuit of excellence is a
58
goal for both, but with different processes and end outputs. Some of the early recommenda-
tions from those applying science to dance tended to focus on the physiological and fitness
capacities of dancers. Craig Sharp proposed that:
Dance, of course, consists of enormously much more than a superb physiology.

Dancers must be highly coordinated, have an excellent musicality, pass through
orthopedic assessments, be of the right temperament in psychological terms, be ade-
quately motivated, be of appropriate appearance and physical type in terms of body
proportion and above all else they must have the creative talent to dance. There is,
though, a factor which sports competitors use and dancers, on the whole, do not and
that is laboratory fitness testing. (quoted in Bannerman and Mason, 1990, 18)
The shared element between dance and sport is that “both require endless physical training
in order to achieve peak performance and culminate in concentrated, often risk-involving
expenditures of physical energy” (Solomon, Minton, and Solomon 1990, xv). Dance has
much in common with sport; hence there is the potential to make use of principles estab-
lished in the more advanced areas of exercise physiology and their application to training.
In sport, for example, the issue of quality over quantity of training has been addressed, while
in dance, this matter has only recently been given attention (Wyon 2010). Dancers are not,
on the whole, advised specifically on when and how to rest and are not provided with the
kinds of systematic and structured evaluations and interventions to monitor the progress of
training and performance that are routinely carried out in sport, even though there could be
much to be gained. These slower developments in dance may be due to the financial dispar-
ity between dance and sport in terms of support, access, and media exposure. Dance scholar
Glenna Batson identifies the importance of a somatic “rest to activity ratio” to allow for
memory consolidation and help the dancer process proprioceptive input and refine it “in the
service of motor control,” and in some ways, her proposition is an extension of, and dance-
specific version of, the work in sports science on the role of recovery and super-compensation
(Batson 2006, 100).
Case study: Cardiorespiratory demands of dance

When considering whether dance training is fit for purpose, consideration might be given
to the function of dance technique in the development of the dance artist as perceived by
those delivering it. While the physiological development of the dancer takes place during
the training process, some argue that this is as a mere consequence of creating the dance art-
ist as opposed to it being a fundamental aim of the training (Krasnow and Chatfield 1996).
It appears then, that the way in which dancers are prepared for performance is sometimes at
odds with its physiological demands. The challenge therefore is to address the concern for
more continuous higher intensity movement for fitness, alongside the need for thoughtful
and reflective technical practice to enhance fine motor skills, which often requires time for
stillness and slower moving.
The research I conducted in this area involved a series of studies that investigated the
testing and training of physical fitness in contemporary dance. Findings from my research
support the view that dancers should address their cardiorespiratory and anaerobic fitness in
order to be able to meet the demands of varying choreographic works, which were often
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Emma Redding
found to be higher in intensity than technique class within training (Wyon et al. 2004; Wyon
and Redding 2005). The higher intensities found in choreographic works, and ultimately
performances, put unnecessary physiological stress on the dancer, who was not trained to
work at such a pace.
Dancers continue to cite “fatigue” and “overwork” as the most common perceived
cause of injury alongside “repetitive movements” (Laws 2005). While there are several
stages of fatigue ranging from acute to chronic that can be remedied in various ways, a
greater cardiorespiratory fitness capacity will enhance endurance and delay the onset of
physical fatigue, the inability to generate or maintain a particular rate of physical work,
as in especially fast, long, or repeated dance or practice sequences (Koutedakis and Sharp
1999, 171), thereby allowing dancers to dance for longer and potentially reduce the risk of
injury (Koutedakis et al. 1999). As a result of this research in dance science, modifications
have been made to dance training, together with the adoption of dance-specific meth-
ods of testing and training for physical fitness in contemporary dance (Wyon et al. 2003;
Redding et al. 2009).
Until the determinants of good dance performance are scientifically established, dance
educators will not be able to determine fully and confidently what constitutes an ideal train-
ing methodology. Many argue, however, that dancers who are fitter, healthier, and less
injured will adhere to training more consistently, will have more stamina to endure the high
intensities of performance, and may be able to focus on the qualitative and artistic aspects of
their dancing, potentially resulting in optimum performance (e.g., Wyon et al. 2005; Quin,
Rafferty, and Tomlinson 2015).
It is important to note that any supplementary fitness training should incorporate an
appropriate balance of all components of physical fitness. Research has shown that dancers
not only need good cardiorespiratory stamina and muscular power to cope with the demands
of performance, but they also require a wide joint range of motion (flexibility) for limb
extensions, good balance for turning, and good strength for lifting and weight bearing of
others (Ambegaonkar et al. 2002; Brown et al. 2007). Unless and until research indicates the
specific effect of enhancing one component of physical fitness over another, it seems prudent
to ensure that the focus is not on one or two components only. For example, it should be
understood that over-developing one energy system may be detrimental to the other energy-
providing systems (Newsholme 1983). The development of aerobic capacity must be a part of
a comprehensive supplemental training program that addresses all aspects of physical fitness
including strength, power, flexibility, and agility.
The application of somatic practices and relationship to dance science

Somatic practice as supplementary training for dancers is an interesting area of growth that
has been investigated through science to a lesser extent but has had a similar impact in
the last few decades within Western dance training. Examples of such practices include the
Alexander Technique, Body-Mind Centering (a patented system of movement therapy cre-
ated by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen) and the Feldenkrais Method (registered trademark of the
Feldenkrais Guild UK Ltd).
The interrogation of the physiological body is central to the somatic approaches to
dance training whereby understanding of one’s dancing body from within the self is what
characterizes many of the artistic and technical developments in contemporary dance
during this period and still today. Soma is a Greek word meaning ‘living body.’ Thomas
Hanna states: “This living, self-sensing, internalized perception of oneself is radically
60
different from the externalized perception of what we call ‘a body’ in an objectified

form” (1988, 20). Similarly, a goal in dance science is to improve dancers’ understanding
of the way the body functions physiologically and biomechanically. Given that dance is
both cognitive and sensory, physical and social, it seems sensible for anyone interested
in researching dance to appreciate the bio-psycho-social and phenomenological ways of
doing so.
Somatic practices represent a departure from codified techniques and previous move-
ment regimes in that they encourage self-learning, autonomy, and intrinsic motivation
rather than instruction and a clearly recognizable aesthetic goal. Somatic practices high-
light the importance of encouraging an approach to learning through the use of men-
tal imagery, proprioception, and kinesthetic awareness in dance to improve balance,
spatial awareness, and other dance skills (Olsen 2004). These techniques emerged out
of a commitment to understanding the motor-sensory integration system of the body
to learn through self-reference and internally focused reflection. Motor-learning is an
area in sports science that examines how humans learn new movement and how they
operate on neural and neuromotor levels to organize movement optimally to promote
skill development and avoid overuse (Krasnow 2007; Schmidt and Lee 2011). As such,
somatic practices can be explained through science as much as they can be taught and
experienced by dance practitioners and are well worth investigating from the perspective
of dance science.
Release-based techniques were being developed around the same time by dance-
artist teachers who wanted to hone more personalized dance styles based on funda-
mental anatomical and physiological principles (Hackney 1998). ‘Release’ is the term
applied to dance technique that gives primacy to the internalized perception of oneself.
Hanna’s (1998) concept of the soma is central, emphasizing the body’s natural align-
ments and movements. Operating within these common principles, ‘release’ as technique
and as teaching method is specific to the person teaching it and to the person dancing
it. In itself, release technique is not passed on as a technical vocabulary or dance form,
as is the case with vocabulary-based codified techniques, but rather it is an approach to
moving and creating dance. Like somatic practices, release techniques require devoted
time for reflection and memory consolidation (Batson 2006, 100) in order for movement
patterning and re-patterning to take place. The development of release-based techniques
reflects the artistic concerns of many independent choreographers whose work requires
dancers to move between differing demands at short notice. As such, dancers working
as independent artists continually adapt and make decisions about their own individual
training needs, a skill developed through engaging somatic practices that require self-
reflection and responsibility. The emergence of somatic practices and release-based dance
techniques are of interest to those in the field of dance science because they emerged in
part to address the inconsistencies in training as preparation for a changing profession,
which is a goal in dance science that has directed some of the research into optimal
training.
The converging of art and science in understanding dance

Science has become a major contributor to advances in sport training and performance, as
evidenced by the number of sport science journals as well as the fact that athletes continue
to beat world records. There are approximately 69 academic peer-reviewed science journals
listed (24 are based in the UK with an international readership). This indicates that new
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Emma Redding
ideas in sports science, which in turn inform methods of training and preparing the athletes,
are succeeding. Unlike in sports, the goals in dance will remain less measurable until dance
performance can be more systematically quantified, so the potential for a particular method
of training cannot be alleged with as much confidence, at least in scientific terms. However,
there is some evidence of resistance to approaches in dance teaching and training that engage
with dance science research. Krasnow writes:
[An] aspect that may inhibit dance educators from looking to the research to develop
teaching methodology is the perpetuation of the tradition, as it has existed for many
years. Most people in the profession have a strong belief in the past and the successes
of past training methods, and fear that the power of the process will be lost. (2005, 5)
There are additional factors that arguably have further mitigated against dance teachers
engaging with scientific research. In particular, the historic location (in statutory educa-
tion in England) of dance as a curriculum subject within physical education (PE) is one
such factor. In 85% of schools, delivery of curriculum dance is led by the school PE depart-
ment (Youth Sports Trust, March 2008). Dance teachers in schools and the National Dance
Teachers Association, a membership organization led by a team of teachers and dance educa-
tion professionals that works to ensure that all young people in the UK have access to high
quality dance education in schools, have developed arguments for dance in the curriculum
as artistic and creative engagement, rather than as physical activity per se. Since the 1990s,
the reduction of hours dedicated to dance in the curriculum and other general curriculum-
related issues have led to a strengthening of the arguments for the curriculum dance experi-
ence to focus on the creative and imaginative development of the child. It might have been
the case, then, that we were not quite ready for dance science in the early 1990s at the time
it all started to take hold.
Directions of thinking that emphasize the potential application of exercise science to
dance have therefore been met with some resistance or lack of interest from dance educators
and those involved in the training of professional dancers. Krasnow’s view underlines this
position:
Another aspect to consider is an unspoken bias that science ruins art in some way.
Some teachers feel that artistic expression implies remaining completely in that
passionate, non-logical state of being that is sometimes referred to as right-brain
thinking. (Krasnow 2005, 5)
A greater understanding of how the physiological, psychological, and biomechanical aspects

of dance may lead to the development of better training techniques and healthier dancers
might usefully inform those engaged in the creative, artistic, and training process. In 1990,
sport scientist Craig Sharp stated, “Dancers are, in fact, among the supreme all-round athletes
in our society, and as such are well worth a look at physiologically” (1990, 15). Almost twenty
years on, Sharp’s comment continues to have resonance within the dance profession as the
debate around the extent to which science can contribute to dance training and performance
continues. Conversely, those engaged in the creative, artistic, and technical training of danc-
ers might make a useful contribution towards helping those from sports science, understand
aspects of dance that differ from sport.
Researchers investigating areas of dance science have at times been perplexed about the
perceived lack of interest to incorporate the new knowledge and understanding brought
62
about the sciences (Krasnow 2005). It is hoped that, over time, a new generation of fitter
and healthier dancers will demonstrate that artistry is not lost but rather enhanced through
new or modified science-informed training. Gill Clarke’s keynote address summarizes these
points effectively:
Perhaps with increased fitness, dancers could have been freed to enter the “flow” or
the “zone” of the present moment, where the “self ” is so integrated that they would
be almost unaware of their physical body or the concerted action of its parts. In this
state the imagination can fly unfettered. (Clarke 2006, 8)
Nascent areas of dance science research

The primary concern for the field of dance science, until recently, has been to enhance and
optimize the dancer him or herself, as opposed to understanding the environment within
which the dancer learns or the way in which he or she creates. Recent research in dance
science intersects the fields of neuroscience and cognitive psychology, as well as technology,
in addressing questions that are more to do with the creative process and documentation.
This has conceivably come about as a result of the focus that is now very much directed
towards interdisciplinary work and, for example, an interest from scientists in the cognitive
processes within the dancer’s mind during the learning, creating, and performing of human
movement (e.g., deLahunta, Barnard, and McGregor 2009; May et al. 2011). Conversely, cho-
reographers are leaning toward science as a way of initiating new artistic movement ideas and
understanding how the creative environment can be maximized (e.g., McGregor’s AtaXia
2004; deLahunta, Barnard, and McGregor 2009).
A research project I have been involved in over the last three years, in collaboration
with psychologist Jon May at Plymouth University and dance scholar Sarah Whatley at
Coventry University in the United Kingdom, consisted of an investigation entitled, In the
Dancer’s Mind, which explored the role of mental imagery within choreographic teaching
settings. Adopting qualitative and quantitative methodology in an experimental research
design, we tested the effectiveness of a psychologically informed training intervention
aimed at enhancing creativity among over 200 conservatoire degree students. Mental
imagery has long been recognized as playing a central role in creativity, but many ques-
tions are unresolved, including the forms of imagery used, the effect of expertise upon
imagery use, and the benefits of training in imagery use. In dance, attention has been
given to the use of imagery for technique. For example, Mabel Todd’s important book,
The Thinking Body ([1937] 2008), and the work of two of her former students, Barbara Clark
and Lulu Sweigard (1978), who developed the pioneering work Ideokinesis to re-educate the
musculature. Others such as Dowd (1995) and Franklin (2012) have further extended this
work through their teaching practices and writing.
The In the Dancer’s Mind imagery workshops intervention was intended to help students
generate novel mental imagery to guide their movement creation. The workshops were
based on Barnard and Teasdale’s (1991) Interacting Cognitive Subsystems account of
human cognition and aimed to help students to recognize that their initial imagery was
often conventional or mundane and to facilitate strategies for manipulating it and moving
their focus between different forms of imagery. An interesting feature of this project was
that it drew together elements of dance science, creative practice, and pedagogy, which
have the potential to change the way choreography is delivered as a taught subject in dance
education and training contexts. Future research efforts within dance science might best
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Emma Redding
lie across disciplinary boundaries to forge new ways of exploring questions around dance
practice in this way. deLahunta, Barnard, and McGregor have noted that there are three
objectives of this kind of work:
Shared objective: to seek connections between choreographic processes and the study
of movement and the brain/mind that are scientifically and artistically interesting.
Artistic objective: to integrate the participation and contribution from the scientists
into the fabric of the choreographic process while maintaining the integrity of the
modes of looking and questioning pertaining to their respective research areas.
Scientific objective: to understand and critically examine the complexities of mea-
suring creativity through empirical research when the subject matter is an embodied,
bodily art-form. (deLahunta, Barnard, and McGregor 2009, 2).
Conclusion
While there have invariably been a number of medical doctors willing to treat injured
dancers, dance science is now being valued by educators and artistic directors, who appreci-
ate the role that the sciences can play in enhancing dancers’ artistic and technical capabilities.
This is evidenced by the appointment of multidisciplinary health-care teams to the major
ballet companies (e.g., the Royal Ballet Company, Birmingham Royal Ballet, and English
National Ballet) and schools (e.g., the Elmhurst Ballet School and Royal Ballet School)
in the United Kingdom, as well as the growing number of dance science conferences for
educators and choreographers. This can also be seen in the impact and influence of the
work of the International Association for Dance Medicine & Science (IADMS) Educator
Committee; One Dance UK (the UK’s national organization for dance), set up to advo-
cate for and promote the needs of dancers; and the National Institute for Dance Medicine
and Science, as well as similar organizations in other countries such as Tamed in Germany,
Ausdance in Australia, and networks such as Dance USA Taskforce on Dancer Health in the
United States.
Models and principles of training taken from sports science and adapted by dancers are
being applied to training more systematically to optimize dancer potential. The applica-
tion of various talent development models from sports science to dance are being explored
(Walker et al. 2010, 2011), and the concept of progressive overload balanced appropriately
with rest and recovery as well as the concept of periodization (Bompa 1999) are frequent top-
ics of debate at dance conferences and within the dance science literature (e.g., Allard 2018).
Emphasis seems to be shifting toward quality over quantity of physical training, augmented
by psychological tools such as mental imagery for practice. Long rehearsals are potentially
counterproductive, as concentration levels and learning ability diminish quite rapidly after
30 minutes, as has been shown in sports training (Dick 2007).
The question in which most of those pursuing this field are ultimately interested is
whether the expansion of dance science will result in dancers who are healthier, experience
less injury, and can dance for longer. A commitment to ensuring that the dance profession
is populated by well-informed dancers, teachers, and choreographers is at least underway,
however, through the numerous dance science research conferences, dedicated dance science
academic journals and textbooks, and the professional development activity and educational
programs at further and higher education level.
64
While questions around the extent to which today’s dance training is fit for purpose
continue to be explored, we might also attempt to tackle other more complex and poten-
tially less measurable questions in the future. The remit for dance science might be use-
fully expanded so that it is no longer a case of merely repairing dancers or even preventing
injuries—although this task will always be fundamental—but it might also be concerned with
building a biopsychosocial profile of dancers to understand the interrelated characteristics of
their talents and how they achieve the way they do. We should strive not only to enhance
dancers’ fitness, but also dancers’ career longevity, and not just challenge their physical habits
in technique but also their mental habits in choreographic contexts. Importantly, we should
challenge the oppositional mentality that is so evident in conversations about art and science
and be comfortably situated in the place that exists for dance between, across, and within
the converging areas of art and science. It is exciting to look forward to a dance science that
embraces practitioner wisdom as much as scientific evidence and investigations into somatics
as much as investigations into biomechanics—in other words, not divide the sciences and the
arts in a way that may hinder progress in solving problems in dance (Snow 1959).
The number of new university postgraduate programs targeting dancers and teachers
has grown in recent years, at least in the United Kingdom and the United States. These
programs are for those who wish to further their knowledge of the science of dancing and
medical therapists who wish to understand the idiosyncratic nature of dance and the preva-
lence, causes, and treatment of dancers’ injuries. Dance science is a formal academic disci-
pline within the university sector and is now acknowledged as such internationally with a
number of postgraduate degrees in dance science, as well as modules offered in dance science
as part of their undergraduate dance programs in many universities in the United States and
the United Kingdom. Currently within the United Kingdom there are five postgraduate
Master of Science (MSc) and Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree programs in dance science.
This provision results in more job opportunities in dance science, thereby supporting those
graduating with dance science degrees who wish to pursue lecturing and research positions
and those who wish to become well-informed dancers, teachers, and choreographers.
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and Indices of Well- and Ill-Being Among Hip Hop Dancers.” Journal of Dance Medicine and Science 13
(1): 10–19.
Quin, Edel, Sonia Rafferty, and Charlotte Tomlinson. 2015. Safe Dance Practice. Champaign, IL: Human
Kinetics.
Redding, Emma, Peter Weller, Shantel Ehrenberg, Sarah Irvine, Edel Quin, Sonia Rafferty, Matthew Wyon,
and Carol Cox. 2009. “The Development of a High Intensity Dance Performance Fitness Test.” Journal
of Dance Medicine and Science 13 (1): 3–9.
Schmidt, Richard A., and Timothy D. Lee. 2011. Motor Control and Learning: A Behavioral Emphasis (5th ed.).
Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.
Sharp, N. C. Craig. 1990. “The Physiology of the Dancer.” In International Working Papers on Dance, Issue
no. 1:The Healthier Dancer:The Report of Dance UK’s Healthier Dancer Conference, edited by Peter Brinson,
15–18. London: Laban Centre for Movement and Dance.
Snow, Charles P. 1959. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press
Solomon, Ruth, Sandra C. Minton, and John Solomon, eds. 1990. Preventing Dance Injuries:An Interdisciplinary
Perspective. Reston,VA: American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance.
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Sweigard, Lulu. 1978. Human Movement Potential: Its Ideokinetic Facilitation. New York: Dodd Mead.
Todd, Mabel Elseworth. (1937) 2008. The Thinking Body: A Study of the Balancing Forces of Dynamic Man.
Gouldsboro, ME: Gestalt Journal Press.
Walker, Imogen J., Sanna M. Nordin-Bates, and Emma Redding. 2010. “Talent Identification and
Development in Dance: A Review of the Literature.” Research in Dance Education 11 (3): 165–189.
Walker, Imogen J., Sanna M. Nordin-Bates, and Emma Redding. 2011.“Characteristics of Talented Dancers
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Wyon, Matthew A. 2010. “Preparing to Perform Periodization and Dance.” Journal of Dance Medicine and
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Wyon, Matthew A., Emma Redding, Grant Abt, Andrew Head, and N. C. Craig Sharp. 2003.“Development,
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Wyon, Matthew A., Grant Abt, Redding, Emma, Head, Andrew, and Craig C. Sharp. 2004.“Oxygen Uptake
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PART II
Dance and somatics

6
PERFORMING THE SELF
Dance, somatic practices,
and Alexander Technique
Michael Huxley
Introduction
In the last thirty years, somatic practices in dance have gained greater visibility, acknowl-
edgment and a place in the discourses of dance studies. Dancers and dance educators have
brought a range of practices, techniques and methods into their work for a variety of rea-
sons. For many, this has been a personal journey of exploration. Others have recognized
inadequacies and inequities in the classroom that they have sought to address. Some somatic
practices have been associated with dance for a long time and their relationships have been
mutually supportive. Other practices have distinguished themselves as separate techniques,
which those in dance have been able to call on. The apparent synergies between dance and
somatics have roots in the new dance and movement practices arising in the 1960s and 1970s
in the United States and the UK. Many of the techniques called on have origins over a cen-
tury old: Alexander Technique is the longest established. The inclusion of these approaches
in dance training, practice and performance has generated new areas of discourse that have
contributed to the recent development of dance studies.
At the time of writing, 2017, a body of work and writing about somatic practices has
developed. I begin my account by recognizing what is there, and what practitioners and
writers have described. Such discourse is typified most recently in Martha Eddy’s all-
encompassing book (2016). Eddy, a major practitioner, has brought together a number of
authorities to amplify her account. It was Eddy who opened the first issue of Journal of Dance
and Somatic Practices with her “Brief History of Somatic Practices and Dance” (2009), and this
international journal is approaching its tenth anniversary. There is now an acknowledged
field that encompasses somatics, somatic practices and Somatic Movement Dance Education
(SMDE). However, it must also be recognized that the scope, efficacy, place and purpose of
these practices necessarily engenders debate. In that many of the practices offer an alterna-
tive to perceived ways of experiencing the self and to unreflective approaches to dance and
dance training, it is not surprising to find that they too are subjected to scrutiny. Richard
Shusterman (2000, 2008, 2012) has opened up the somatic discourse to a wider philosophi-
cal enquiry. Isabelle Ginot (2010), who takes issue with some of Shusterman’s assumptions,
has considered the epistemological status of somatics and the ways in which its methods and
practices have developed in relation to dance studies.
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Michael Huxley
The extent of somatic practices has been mapped by a number of authorities, although

no account can be said to be definitive. Those written in the last thirty years mention some
practitioners and practices that clearly originated in an earlier period, and, over the years,
have included others that have developed more recently. It would be fair to say that a number
of the most important accounts, written from a variety of standpoints (Hanna 1986, 1990;
Johnson 1995; Fitt 1996; Green 2007; Shusterman 2008; Ginot 2010; Reed 2011; Brodie and
Lobel 2012; Williamson, Batson, and Whatley 2014; Fraleigh 2015; Giotaki 2015; Eddy 2016),
mention people who are both included within their category of “somatic pioneers” and
whose practices were extant in the early twentieth century. These are the practices based on
the work of Frederick Matthias Alexander (1869–1955) and Moshe Feldenkrais (1904–1984).
Both have been identified as continuing to offer insights for somatic practices. My case study
is going to be on the first of these, Alexander Technique. I will consider this practice and its
origination historically within the broader field of somatics, and consider how it has been
related to dance and dance education. I offer an approach that could equally well be applied
to other practices.
Dance and somatic practices: A brief historical consideration

A broad range of work is encompassed by the term “somatic practices” and what is included
has changed over time. For many practitioners and writers there is an emphasis on the first-
person experience and the body. This, in itself, poses challenges to historical methodolo-
gies predicated on the thoughts and observable actions of the past as found in the present.
Research into somatic experience requires a slightly different approach to sources and the
idea of the archive. Most of those who have offered “histories” of dance and somatic practices
have opted for a genealogical approach that identifies “somatic pioneers” (Fortin 2002; Eddy
2009, 2016). Such accounts are similar to certain traditional, and discredited, approaches to
histories of modern dance that identified a “generation” of “pioneers.” Equally, there is a
consonance with professional histories of named techniques where great emphasis is placed
on who taught whom, often with a view to establishing purity of practice through lineage.
This is precisely the approach that Ginot (2010) identifies and critiques.
A number of alternative approaches to established training and performance—notably
those of ballet and modern dance—began to be practiced and recognized in the United States
and the UK in the 1970s and 1980s. These included dancers associated with Dartington Hall,
X6 and New Dance in the UK and, typically, New York dancers who had been associated
with the Judson Dance Theater and/or Anna Halprin’s San Francisco–based practice. Annual
and occasional festivals and summer schools such as the Dartington Festival (1978–1987) and
Many Ways of Moving Congresses (1977, 1978) in the UK and American Dance Festival
(1948–) in the United States became sites where these new approaches could be explored
and promulgated. These explorations entered the wider dance discourse through writings in
Dance Magazine, Contact Quarterly (1975–) and New Dance (1977–1988). For instance, Fergus
Early, remarking on the early days of X6 and New Dance wrote of the importance of these
new practices:
It is not a new idea—most of the principles are to be found in Mabel Elsworth
Todd’s book The Thinking Body, first published in the thirties, and many similarities
are to be found between release and other destructuring physical therapies, such as
Alexander technique. What is new, however, is the conscious development of this
notion in relation to dance training. (1978, 3)
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Performing the self
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, new approaches to moving, centered on contact improvi-
sation, were investigated in Contact Quarterly. They included articles and interviews on Alexander
Technique (Rosenthal 1981; Caplan 1985; Crow and Karczag 1985; Crow 1988) and a series
of writings on Body-Mind Centering by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen (1982, 1985, 1987, 1988).
Martha Myers, Dean of the American Dance Festival, had brought a number of practitioners of
“body work” to the Festival. In 1980, some of these new approaches were highlighted in a series
of six articles for Dance Magazine on “Body Therapies and the Modern Dancer.” She focused
on Bartenieff Fundamentals (1980b March); Alexander Technique (1980c April); Feldenkrais
Awareness through Movement (1980d May); and Todd, Sweigard and Ideokinesis (1980e June).
At this time, these various complementary approaches were not referred to as “somatic” as
such (the word does not occur in New Dance at all). The term entered dance discourse in a sig-
nificant way in the 1990s. The National Dance Association’s first “Symposium on the Science
and Somatics of Dance” at Temple University in 1991 included a keynote address by Martha
Myers (1991/1992) and an overview by Martha Eddy, subsequently published in Kinesiology
and Medicine for Dance (1991/1992), that began to define the relationships between dance and a
number of disciplines now referred to as somatic. This Symposium and the subsequent journal
issue began to bring together dance and the conception of “somatics” as previously articulated
by Thomas Hanna (1970, 1975, 1986, 1988, 1990/1991).
In her keynote address to the Symposium, Myers reflected on her time with American Dance
Festival and how this new field of dance and somatics was beginning to gain attention. She men-
tioned, in particular, Alexander Technique and Bartenieff ’s Fundamentals as being known within
the dance world, and then mentions Feldenkrais, Lulu Sweigard’s Ideokinesis, Aston Patterning,
Body-Mind Centering and Trager Psychophysical Integration (1991/1992, 4). She also acknowl-
edged how she had previously termed these practices “the body therapies” because no one, least
of all her students, knew what to call “this stuff ” (1991/1992, 4). It is at this point that she
referred to Hanna and how he had popularized these new “body/mind disciplines” as somatics
in the 1970s. In Eddy’s “Overview” for the same publication, the field was seen as having vari-
ous names and the term “somatics,” again first conferred by Hanna, was here seen as including
“Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais Awareness through Movement, Rolfing, Selver’s Sensory
Awareness, Sweigard’s Ideokinesis, Cohen’s Body-Mind Centering, Bartenieff Fundamentals,
Trager’s Mentastics and Psychophysical Integration, and Hellerwork” (1991/1992, 22). Thus, in
1991, in the United States, a field of practices was identified as being used by/of use to dancers.
Many of these practices were modalities that existed at that time outwith dance practice and
discourse: the major exception being Bartenieff ’s practice and theory (1980), which had devel-
oped from that of Rudolf von Laban. The term somatic was being used here to associate these
practices with those identified by Hanna, who was not writing about dance. We therefore need
to consider what Hanna said.
Hanna was trained as a Feldenkrais practitioner and in 1975 was director of the first
US Feldenkrais training course. He developed his own practice at the Novato Institute for
Somatic Research and Training in California and went on to publish extensively, including
the journal Somatics: Journal of the Bodily Arts and Sciences. His method was outlined from 1970
onward, notably in Somatics (1988) and in various articles for his eponymous journal. It was
here that he related his method to those of other practitioners. In 1986, in describing the
field, he said:
Somatic learning is evoked by the teaching methods of Moshe Feldenkrais, but it

is of central concern in the methods of Elsa Gindler, F. Matthias Alexander, Gerda
Alexander and a host of contemporary practitioners. (1986, 1995, 351)
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Michael Huxley
He went on to give the background to his “Clinical Somatic Education” as practiced from
1990 in terms of a number of practitioners. He began with F.M. Alexander and went on to
refer to Elsa Gindler and her students Charlotte Silver, Carola Speads, and Ilse Mittendorf;
Gerda Alexander; and Feldenkrais (1998). In doing so, he used a methodology that identified
direct antecedents: an approach that, like his idea of somatics, would be taken up by others,
not least in dance. In his 1998 article, Hanna began with a brief definition, which warrants
citation:
Somatic Education is the use of sensory-motor learning to gain voluntary control

of one’s physiological process. It is “somatic” in the sense that the learning occurs
within the individual as an internalized process. (1998, 4)
Myers used this quote to characterize somatics, although she was referring to a wider range
of practices than had Hanna. Equally, Eddy cited Hanna, this time referring to him as “the
first person to call this field ‘somatics’” (1991/1992, 22). In this case, she referred the reader
to Hanna’s ideas in his third book, The Body of Life. Again, she was applying the term to a
wider range of practitioners.
Somatic practices associated with dance continued to be developed by dancers and educa-
tors. The growing field was associated with the continuing development of dance science as
a discipline, and with kinesiology in particular. When Sally Fitt published a second edition
of Dance Kinesiology in 1996, she included a whole new section on “Somatics, Relaxation and
Efficiency.” She noted that:
In the years since the first edition…there has been a remarkable growth of interest
in what we used to call relaxation techniques, later called body work, and now called
somatics. Accompanying the changes in wording has been a broadening of meaning.
(1996, 303)
She then included descriptions, written by a number of authors, of eight somatic approaches

that she had identified as being the most popular at that time for dance. They were (1) Pilates-
Based Conditioning, (2) Rolfing, (3) Feldenkrais, (4) Alexander Technique, (5) Ideokinesis,
(6) Body-Mind Centering, (7) Bartenieff Fundamentals and (8) Laban Movement Analysis.
The discourses concerning dance and somatic practices continued to develop and broaden
during the last decade of the twentieth century. By the millennium, there were many educators in
North American and European universities working with dance and somatics.They began to pub-
lish the findings of their practices in a range of periodicals in addition to those already identified.
They included Animated, Dance Research Journal, Dance Teacher, Dance Theatre Journal, Impulse, Journal
of Dance Medicine and Science and Research in Dance Education.The Journal of Dance Education became
a major focus for discussion, including key articles by Martha Eddy (2002), Sylvie Fortin (2002)
and Jill Green (2002a, 2002b). The opening up of the discourses about somatics in research-based
journals, notably Dance Research Journal and Research in Dance Education further helped place inves-
tigations into somatic practices within what we would now recognize as dance studies. It is notable
that Liora Bresler’s monumental International Handbook of Research in Arts Education (2007) included
Jill Green’s analysis of the state of pedagogic research in relation to somatics (2007). Green’s brief,
but comprehensive, chapter included a subsection specifically on “Somatic Dance Research”
(2007, 1120–1122). Here, Green signaled a paradigm shift by addressing somatic research as a
category separate from scientific method while acknowledging that the latter could also include
investigations into somatic practices. As with the accounts by Myers, Eddy, and Fitt, mentioned
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Performing the self
earlier, Green refers to Hanna’s conception of somatics (1988) whereby “data from a first-person
perception are quite different than data from a third-person point of view” (2007, 1120). Her sug-
gestion that Hanna’s ideas swept into dance in the 1960s and 1970s (2007, 1120) demands further
historical substantiation, but her identification of key figures including Eddy, Fortin and others is
well detailed. From Green’s point of view, within higher education, the significant somatic prac-
tices included those of Alexander, Feldenkrais and Rolf (2007, 1120).
From a dance point of view, somatic practices were further contextualized in Melanie
Bales and Rebecca Nettl-Fiol’s The Body Eclectic: Evolving Practices in Dance Training (2008).
In this book, the editors included a range of approaches to dance and dance training. Nettl-
Fiol interviewed Martha Myers, who reflected on “Somatics: A Current Moving the River
of Contemporary Dance”:
The term somatic covers many individual systems, each branch offering a particular
point of view and practice to the whole. Over the past quarter century or so of growth,
the field has developed a solid theoretical base. But its power rests on experiential work,
“hands-on” between practitioner and pupil singly or in groups. (2008, 90)
We have seen that individual systems have been referred to as somatic practices. A number
of these were extant before the development of their relationships to dance from the 1980s
onward. Many of them have had continuous practice with their own certificating and profes-
sional bodies throughout the period. There have been books which have grouped together
some of the somatic practices that have been identified ( Johnson 1995; Allison 1999). Most
significant of these, for dance, could be said to be Don Hanlon Johnson’s compilation Bone,
Breath and Gesture: Practices of Embodiment (1995). Johnson’s book includes Hanna’s 1986 essay
“What is Somatics?” and acknowledges his journal, Somatics. The volume does not speak
directly of dance or of the developments that I have mentioned so far, except where the
practitioner, for instance, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, has been involved in dance and refers
to it. Neither does Johnson equate practices of embodiment directly with what we have
been describing as somatic practices. Nonetheless, there is a clear consonance between
his aspirations and the practitioners that he includes, they being F.M. Alexander, Gerda
Alexander, Aston, Bartenieff, Elizabeth A. Behnke, Bainbridge Cohen, Emilie Conrad
Da’Oud, Feldenkrais, Gindler, Hanna, Deanne Juhan, Middendorf, Rolf, Marion Rosen,
Selver, Speads and Mary Whitehouse (1995). It is not surprising to find Johnson’s book
becoming a key source in later writings on dance and somatics, notably Eddy (2009, 2016).
A most significant recent change has been in the publication of an international journal dedi-
cated to the emerging field—Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices (2009–). It has helped to further
internationalize dance and somatics and to provide a focused platform that validates dance and
somatic practices within an academic setting.The journal, established by Sarah Whatley at Coventry
University, UK, has been accompanied by a regular international conference (2011, 2013, 2015,
2017) that has brought together many of those who have helped develop the field. The range of
articles in the journal is testament to the breath of twenty-first century explorations.
The first issue of the journal laid out its scope in an editorial, which identified the inau-
guration of the journal with changes in dance practices:
These practices are characterized by a return to the self and sensorial awareness—to
cultivate a new consciousness of bodily movement; hence, the term “soma” (of the
body) and “somatic” as a reference to the first-person perception—and the balance
between first and third-person perspective, which underpins these experiential
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Michael Huxley
practices. Thus in connecting to the self, somatic practice also seeks to culti-
vate awareness of the self within the world, in relationship to our environment.
(Whatley, Alexander and Garrett 2009, 3)
So the title ‘dance and somatic practices’ deliberately unites two independent, yet
potentially closely related, bodies of practice and theory—and it is the intersec-
tion that provides the focus for the Journal. What links all the articles is a growing
attention to the body and its intelligence—and how the intelligent body can find
its own voice: A voice that is a radical, but necessary, alternative to dance practices
that aspire toward a virtuosic body seeking to reproduce a stylized form (Whatley,
Alexander and Garrett 2009, 4).
The first issue opened with Eddy’s essay “A brief history of somatic practices and dance:
Historical development of the field of somatic education and its relationship to dance” (2009).
Her account, based on her own experience, interviews and literature, begins with Hanna
and Johnson. It begins to define somatic practices by reference to the International Somatic
Movement Education and Therapy Association (ISMETA) and then draws a historical picture
beginning with developments in modern dance and movement practices in the early twentieth
century. This is followed by accounts of the “Life Stories of the Somatic Pioneers” (2009, 12).
These are presented in two generations and an accompanying graphic showing their connec-
tions (2009, 24).1 Eddy presents an impressive picture detailing who taught whom and detailing
this as a web of influences that built over time. She also gives an account of where these prac-
tices have been developed in universities and through various festivals and professional bodies.
Eddy’s experiential and generational account is substantially expanded in her recent book
Mindful Movement: The Evolution of the Somatic Arts and Conscious Action (2016). Here the field
of somatic practices is expanded even further, presenting a detailed and complex account that
is too extensive to summarize briefly here. What does stand out is the premise of “somatic
pioneers” that, by 2016, has become established in the discourse. The first generation is here
described as “Founders of Somatic Education Technique” (23):
F. M. Alexander (1869–1955), creator of Alexander Technique (AT);

Irmgard Bartenieff (1900–1982), of Bartenieff Fundamentals of Movement (BF);
Gerda Alexander (1904–1994), of the Gerda Alexander Eutony (sometimes Eutonie)
(GAE);
Moshe Feldenkrais (1904–1984), of the Feldenkrais Method (Awareness through
Movement and Functional Integration);
Mabel Elsworth Todd (1880–1956), of Ideokinesis;
Charlotte Selver (1901–2003), creator, with her husband Charles Brooks, of Sensory
Awareness;
Ida Rolf (1896–1979), of Structural Integration, Rolfing and Rolf Movement;
Milton Trager, of the Trager Method (23).
Following Eddy’s (2009) “history,” a number of contemporaries adopted a very similar list.
Sondra Fraleigh, in her account of Moving Consciously: Somatic Transformations through Dance, Yoga
and Touch is most notable as she cites Eddy directly to summarize a somatic history (2015, 26).2
Julie Brodie and Elin Lobel took a slightly different approach, deriving their “working definition
76
Performing the self
of somatics” and “four fundamental principles of breath, sensing, connectivity, and initia-
tion” from “the Alexander Technique, the Feldenkrais Method, Laban Movement Analysis/
Bartenieff Fundamentals, Body-Mind Centering, and Ideokinesis” (2012, 1–2). Most recently,
Williamson, Batson and Whatley consider Somatic Movement Dance Education (SMDE) as
encapsulating Ideokinesis, Body-Mind Centering®, Laban Bartenieff Movement Fundamentals,
Skinner Releasing Technique, Feldenkrais and Alexander Technique (2014, xxvi–xxvii).
I began this brief historical consideration by remarking on the approach to writing
“histories” that followed a genealogical approach, one that searched for origins by virtue of a
line of descent. In the case of somatic practices, this is not the genetic line followed in family
histories but, rather, the passing on of practices from one practitioner to another. This raises
all sorts of interesting historical and philosophical questions.
From a philosophical point of view, Richard Shusterman’s rethinking of somatic—as
Somaesthetics—has been particularly important. Shusterman’s central thesis, as articulated in
Performing Live (2000) and in Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics
(2008), brings together philosophical considerations, the body and the soma. His 2008 account
examines Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, Ludwig Wittgenstein,
William James and John Dewey. It is the last of these with whom he finds possibly the most sym-
pathy. He has extended this account further in Thinking through the Body (2012).
When Ginot critiqued Shusterman’s approach to philosophy—“Somaesthetics”—she con-
sidered the relationship of somatics to dance studies more generally. She summed up her
argument as follows:
Somatics can thus be considered a conceptual apparatus that enhances our understand-
ing of pedagogy, dancer’s health, and corporeal and gestural aesthetics. Dance studies
has begun to approach these practices and to define them as objects of research by
privileging two axes: (1) documentation and evidence; and (2) efficacy, particularly in
the pedagogical domain. The point of view I will grapple with here, however, is of a
different nature. Rather than considering the question of the pedagogical, preventive,
or aesthetic efficacy of somatics for dance, I want to examine the epistemological sta-
tus of somatics. How is the bodily knowledge of somatics elaborated and circulated?
Somatics, after all, presents itself as an empirically based mode of bodily thinking
whose discourse relies strongly on oral tradition. (2010, 12–13)
She went on to give a detailed consideration of the way somatic practices worked and were
legitimated through “(1) the scientific discourse, and (2) the experiential narrative” (2010, 18).
Her account then grappled with Shusterman’s (2008) propositions in an attempt to explore
an epistemology of somatics and “the body.” It is worth noting that many of the accounts of
dance and somatic practices referred to above do not refer to Ginot and make scant reference
to Shusterman’s arguments. In that her article was published in Dance Research Journal, there is
a suggestion that there is a counter-narrative developing, and this has wider significance for
dance studies. This is not an approach that is separate from somatic practices, as both Ginot
and Shusterman are practitioners of a somatic modality themselves.
In outlining some of the relationships between dance and somatic practices from a historical per-
spective, I have identified a number of issues that have arisen. In some ways, notably the retrospective
construction of a genealogy that identifies origins, there is a consonance with certain approaches
to the history of dance that have since been superseded by approaches informed by cultural studies
or, indeed, latterly, history itself. The field is clearly a large and expanding one and charged with
possibility.What is remarkable is how Alexander Technique has been identified as a key practice.
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Michael Huxley
Case study: Alexander Technique

In outlining some key features of the relationships between dance and somatic practices,
I have mentioned many instances where Alexander Technique has been cited as part of this
discourse. As I pointed out in my introduction, the major writings on somatics from Hanna
(1986) to Eddy (2016) have included Alexander Technique. In my brief historical account,
I have shown how all the major writings on dance and somatic practices since 1990 have
also referred to Alexander Technique. It is on this basis that I examine it is a case study.
I begin with a more focused historical account of Alexander Technique as a practice in the
last few decades. Because Alexander Technique is a practice that has its own body of dis-
course and organizational structures, I mention the broader context within which dance has
been considered. In that the historiographical narrative exposes a genealogical, indeed quasi-
creationist, account of somatic practices, I will refer to the situation of Alexander Technique
and dance at the time of its discovery and early development. Finally, I examine some of the
extant assumptions about somatic practices in terms of Alexander Technique.
In looking at somatic practices historically, I made some brief observations about dance in
the 1970s and 1980s. Some applications of Alexander Technique to dance began in the 1960s
in the UK with the Jooss-Leeder–trained dance educator Jane Winearls and in the United
States with the ballet-trained Joan Murray and with Deborah Caplan. One of the earliest ref-
erences in the dance literature is in Gerald Wragg’s chapter “A Technique for Performance” in
the second edition of Winearls’ Modern Dance: The Jooss-Leeder Method (1968, 162–168). In the
United States, Judith Leibowitz, writing about Alexander Technique in Dance Scope, remarked
on its becoming known in the previous three years (1967/1968). We then find a number of
references in a variety of dance publications (Meekums 1977; Szczelkun 1977; Bierman 1978;
Early 1978), culminating in Myers’ article on Alexander Technique as a “Body Therapy” in
1980. Myers notes that she had introduced the Technique to American Dance Festival two
years earlier (1980, 94). Her account is accompanied by a short “conversation” with Remy
Charlip, who, after dancing with the Merce Cunningham Company and as an independent
artist, trained as a teacher of Alexander Technique (Charlip and Pierpoint 1980, 92). Caplan’s
first article on dance and the Technique was published in Contact Quarterly in 1985.
Since Myers’ 1980 article, there have been many and varied published accounts specifi-
cally on dance and Alexander Technique, written by both teachers of the Technique and
dancers and those who are both.3 Of these, the writings by Batson (2007), Fortin and Girard
(2005) and Nettl-Fiol (2006, 2008) place Alexander Technique firmly within the realm of
somatic practices. There has been a growing discourse here with dance as a focus. To date,
the most substantial published account is the one given by Nettl-Fiol and Vanier (2011).
This is but a small proportion of the vast literature on Alexander Technique itself. There is a
considerable published literature with many dozens of books on its practical application in a
variety of settings, far too many to list here. Very, very few make any substantive reference
to either dance or somatics. The notable earlier exceptions included Conable and Conable
(1991) and Leibowitz and Connington ([1990] 1994). Most recently, Nettl-Fiol and Vanier’s
book could be said to address an interpretation of Alexander Technique and dance practice.
The fact that there is a substantial (and, when considered closely, very variable) literature on
Alexander Technique is, of itself, interesting, as although many teachers maintain that lessons
in the Technique are needed to enable you to learn and practice it, many have sought to con-
vey its importance in print. There is also a substantial secondary literature on both Alexander
and Alexander Technique. The three most significant contextual books here are Frank
Pierce Jones’ Freedom to Change: The Development and Science of the Alexander Technique (1997),
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Performing the self
Evans’ Frederick Matthias Alexander: A Family History (2001) and Jeroen Staring’s meticulously
researched published dissertation Frederick Matthias Alexander: The Origins and History of the
Alexander Technique (2005).
In the twenty-first century, Alexander Technique has a substantial global organiza-
tional infrastructure with four main certificating/verifying organizations, some with
their own national organizations, and with many suborganizations. Many teachers run
their own training courses. In addition, there is a global network of teachers from all
trainings who meet every four years for an International Congress. There are affiliations
with bodies that give recognition to the Technique, and individual teachers/schools that
affiliate with others.4 Taken together, there is a very broad diversity of approaches to and
interpretations of what Alexander Technique is as a practice. Indeed, there is an open
acknowledgment by many organizations that their approach has a particular provenance
and thus a particular value. Many of the more general observations about the way “somatic
practices” operate, not least Ginot’s (2010) characterization, can be applied to Alexander
Technique. For instance, with some areas of the practice, there is an emphasis on lineage
whereby certain teachers, especially those who studied directly with Alexander or with
some of his first pupils, are identified as “master teachers.” The one salient point of agree-
ment is that the Technique originated with Alexander’s discovery and that this is articu-
lated in his four original books of 1910, 1923, 1932 and 1941: Man’s Supreme Inheritance,
Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual, The Use of the Self and The Universal Constant
in Living. [In quoting Alexander I refer to the most recent editions, those being 2002, 2004,
1988, and 2000, respectively.]
Before 1991, Alexander Technique entered the dance discourses by way of short articles
by practitioners in journals including Contact Quarterly, Dance Magazine, Dance Scope and New
Dance. Generally speaking, these were accounts of how the Technique might offer an alter-
native approach to dance practice, at a time when it was becoming better known. Martha
Myers’ knowledgeable article as part of her series on “Body Therapies and the Modern
Dancer” is slightly different in that she wrote as someone who had taken instruction in
Alexander Technique, and had clearly researched, in order to explore its significance for
dance. Strikingly, she emphasized that it “is as much about how the student learns as it is about
what the student learns” (1980, 94). In her short conclusion she suggests that the Technique
can be beneficial both for the treatment of injury and for those “seeking new movement pos-
sibilities” (1980, 94). These three themes—education, therapy and new ways of moving—are
the ones that seem to have been significant for the next few years. They form a major part
of the discourse on dance and Alexander Technique including, for instance, those in Contact
Quarterly where writers placed emphasis on “prevention and treatment of dance injuries”
(Caplan 1984) or new ways of moving (Crow 1985). Eva Karczag is particularly interesting
because she writes as a dancer with the Trisha Brown Company, one of a number who drew
on Alexander Technique at that time (Trisha Brown Company 1983). In her interview she
talks about the Technique, but also about T’ai Chi, Release work and improvisation as means
she was exploring.
The 1991 Symposium on the Science and Somatics of Dance, including its references to
Alexander Technique, marked the beginning of a shift in emphasis in the discourse, which
was extended in the second symposium of 1993. The theme of education continued to
develop, with particular emphasis on dancers’ training. Increasingly, Alexander Technique
and dance was explored within the growing field of dance science and in its relation to
Kinesiology in particular (Fitt 1996). There had already been a substantial body of scientific
research on Alexander Technique, notably in the work of Jones (1976, 1997, 1998), but at
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Michael Huxley
this time, Alexander Technique literature made little mention of dance or its benefits for
dance. Significant articles in this period included those by Suzanne Oliver on the treatment
of lower back injuries in dancers (1993a, 1993b) in Kinesiology for Dance and Phylis Naylor’s
outline of Alexander Technique and prevention in Performing Arts Medicine News (1995) with
contributions to the North Carolina Medical Journal and Medical Problems of Performing Artists by
Glenna Batson (1993, 1996). It could be said that for Alexander Technique, dance science was
a dominant discourse at this time.
In the twenty-first century there have been a number of significant developments in
Alexander Technique and dance. In many ways, dance science continues to be an important
field of investigation with a number of significant contributions. Most recently, dance and
neuroscience has been highlighted in Batson with Wilson’s (2014) consideration of Body
and Mind in Motion: Dance and Neuroscience where Alexander Technique is considered along
with other somatic practices. This reflects a growing interest in “neuroscience” in Alexander
Technique profession. For instance, the Eighth International Congress of the F.M. Alexander
Technique 2008 (Lugano, Switzerland) had Susan Greenfield, the distinguished University
of Oxford neuroscientist, as keynote speaker. In the area of scientific research relating to
Alexander Technique, there have been a number of publications representing research relat-
ing to its efficacy in “treating” specific conditions, including dance. More significantly, there
has been some recent research into specific anatomical and physiological processes that are
associated with the principles of Alexander Technique as first identified by F.M. Alexander.
For instance, there is a considerable literature, beginning with Jones (1976) that refers in vari-
ous ways to the head/neck relationship, and which is partly explained in terms of primary
control. The most recent scientific research into this includes that by Loram et al. (2017) into
the relationships between changes in neck muscle activity and global (or “whole-body”) sen-
sorimotor performance. This particular line of research has particular significance in terms of
somatic practices and some of the assumptions made about Alexander Technique, especially
in how people understand the relationship of the head to the neck as described by Alexander
(1988, 2000, 2002, 2004). For instance, it brings into question Shusterman’s interpretation of
Alexander Technique and his criticism of it in this particular area (2008, 192–208).
A major field within which the discourse on dance and Alexander Technique has devel-
oped is that of education. This is perhaps not surprising in that there have been a number
of Alexander Technique teachers working in the university sector, in particular, and some
universities have pioneered Alexander Technique within their dance courses. For instance,
the Technique has been a significant part of the curriculum in the United States at Ohio State
University and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 1990 as well as in the
UK at De Montfort University since 1984. Alexander Technique has figured in conferences,
courses and in journal publications since that time, notably in Journal of Dance Education and
Research in Dance Education. The most important discourse here has been about student learn-
ing, and there has been some consonance with learning and teaching theory and practice.
Typical features that have emerged include injury prevention (Fortin and Girard 2005); ease
in movement (Nettl-Fiol 2006, 2008) and the student–teacher relationship and questions of
the role of the teacher in student learning (Stevens 2017). A recently published book, reflect-
ing many books on the practical application of Alexander Technique, has outlined a similar
approach to dance with the dance teacher and dance student in mind. Rebecca Nettl-Fiol
and Luc Vanier’s detailed and clearly articulated Dance and the Alexander Technique: Exploring
the Missing Link (2011) made a point of considering how best to apply Alexander Technique
in dance class in a university setting. A substantive part of her solution to what she perceived
as a problem, and thus making the “link” involved using a set of complementary exercises
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Performing the self
known as the “Dart Procedures” following Raymond Dart (1996). Nettl-Fiol details her
reading of Alexander Technique, the Dart Procedures and her practical applications in the
university classroom. However, she does not raise many questions around the wider dis-
courses of student learning theory, or those raised by Ginot (2010), or indeed of dance studies
more broadly.
It is time now to consider Alexander Technique and Somatic practices and dance with
particular reference to discourses and ideas about “the body.” I have previously referred to
Ginot’s (2010) article. In many ways, it can be seen as a pivotal one although, as I will argue,
open to further interrogation. I have noted that her deconstruction of ideas of somatics refers
principally, though not exclusively, to Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais. Moreover,
her critique, as her title “From Shusterman’s Somaesthetics to a Radical Epistemology of
Somatics” indicates, engages with Richard Shusterman’s reading of Alexander Technique
and the Feldenkrais Method in a broader philosophical context. From a dance studies point
of view, this placed a number of arguments relevant to Alexander Technique and somatic
practices within a special issue of Dance Research Journal edited by Mark Franko on “States of
the Body” (2010). In doing so, it placed a particular and prevalent reading of somatic practice
as being concerned with “the body” alongside discourses about, for instance, techniques of
the body, following Marcel Mauss (Browning 2010) and intermediality and the “media-
body” (Hushka 2010).
It could be said that in dance studies “the body” had become a predominant theoretical
trope in the two decades or so following Foster (1995) in particular. As we have seen, “the
body” as variously conceived and as variously read in relation to Hanna’s idea of “the soma”
(1970) has been a central concern in somatic practices in the last three decades. Shusterman’s
explorations (2000, 2008, 2012) and Ginot’s (2010) article begins to extend the discourse
further, but the idea of “the body” has remained central.
The question of the “body” in Alexander Technique is both an interesting and compli-
cated one. In my historical consideration I have demonstrated that from a dance point of view
Alexander Technique has been regarded by many as one of the somatic practices that take a
particular first-person view of the body as central, indeed fundamental. We have seen how
this is consistent with interpretations of practices that refer to Hanna’s (1970) articulation of
the soma as the lived body. It is interesting to note that Alexander Technique and the body
could be said, superficially, to have entered discourse around dance at the time of the repub-
lication of some of Alexander’s writings in 1969 under the title The Resurrection of the Body
(Maisel 1969), and Jones’s account of Alexander and the Technique was called Body Awareness
in Action (1976): the two publications following close on the heels of a Dance Horizons
reprint edition of Todd’s The Thinking Body (1968).
Both Alexander and Todd in their writings and practice attempted to address problems
associated with conceiving of the self in terms of mind and body. They both used the term
“psycho-physical.” In an essay on Alexander and Todd for the Journal of Dance and Somatic
Practices (2012), I examined their practices and theory historically with reference to dance in
the formative period of 1914–1937, a time when they were the earliest practitioners: they are
now described as “Pioneers.” Neither of them directly acknowledged the other, although their
professional circles had considerable overlap. Indeed, the intellectual context for their work
referred to many contemporaries, notably James Harvey Robinson (1912, 1919, 1921), who
have never been associated with “somatics.” Alexander’s exposition and promulgation of the
Technique he discovered and Todd’s development of her methods drew on and encapsulated a
range of thinking about the body, body-mind and the psychophysical. Neither used the term
soma nor somatic. The whole complex question of how we conceive of ourselves (and others)
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Michael Huxley
was neatly encapsulated by the philosopher John Dewey when writing in an article on “Body
and Mind” at a time when he was exploring the problem in practice with Alexander:
We have no word by which to name mind-body in a unified wholeness of opera-

tion. For if we said “human life” few would recognize that it is precisely the unity
of mind and body in action to which we were referring. Consequently when we
discuss the matter, when we talk of the relations of mind and body and endeavor to
establish their unity in human conduct, we still speak of body and mind and thus
unconsciously perpetuate the very division we are striving to deny. (Dewey 1928, 6)
Possibly the most radical recent account of how the dancer, especially the student dancer,
might be seen within the broad discourse of “the body” is that by Martin Leach (2018, 122).
In considering the question “‘Psychophysical what?’ What would it mean to say, ‘there is
no “body” … there is no “mind”’ in dance practice?” Leach, following Martin Heidegger,
proposes what appears to be a new approach to what has been central in dance discourse for
the past thirty years. He concludes that
what a dancer is, and what she or he sees in others, is the gathering of the total system
in dynamic activity, the self-animation of the system, a performance of ‘soul.’ What
is therefore important is not ‘body,’ but ‘soul,’ not in the sense of ‘mind,’ but in this
sense of ‘animating principle,’ the self as performance of itself (2018).
His argument seems to run counter to any idea that the “body” is the foremost consider-
ation in dance education, and yet he writes from the perspective of a teacher of Alexander
Technique. Like Shusterman, his argument is philosophical, but grounded in practice, albeit
a different one and with dance as a focus.
Conclusion
At the time of writing (2017) “somatic practices” has become a very broad term indeed,
encompassing an ever-wider range of practices where, from a dance point of view, there
has now been an inclusion of, for instance, the work of Mary Wigman alongside Margaret
H’Doubler (Fraleigh 2015, 28). Nonetheless, the narrative presented to us keeps returning to
a particular and select group of early twentieth-century practitioners established by virtue of a
teacher–pupil lineage posited more than half a century later. The historical imperative now is
to reconsider the relationship of dance and somatic practices afresh. We might search for the
full range of those practices and ideas that came about in the period leading up to the 1930s
that, by thinking about “the body” in a new way, opened up new practices that challenged
nineteenth-century orthodoxies. In such a case, the ideas and work of F.M. Alexander could
certainly be identified, as might those of Mabel Elsworth Todd. By such a criterion, it might
be necessary to reexamine the work and place of Bess Mensendieck (1866–1959). For sure,
unlike Alexander and Todd, her publications of 1906 and 1919 are clearly of the nature of a
form of gymnastik, but her later publications It’s Up to You (1931) and Look Better, Feel Better
(1954) suggest something different. Certainly, we should consider Margaret H’Doubler and
her carefully thought-out approaches as articulated in The Dance and its Place in Education
(1925). Perhaps we might also consider Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, following his critique of
existing dance practices, especially ballet, and his identification of the importance of rhythm
as experienced directly (1916). Then there are all those practitioners who have for one reason
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Performing the self
or another disappeared from the canon. The question is what to search for? Do we take our
twentieth-century, all embracing and all-encompassing view of somatic practices and impose
its assumptions on the past, or do we try and look at the past historically?
In the case of Alexander Technique, we can benefit from his published works, especially his
books. For sure, these are not unproblematic, and Shusterman and others, for more or less parti-
san purposes, have with hindsight taken him to task for some of the Edwardian, colonialist and
indeed racialist assumptions about others in his world. Nevertheless, his account of his discov-
ery, in terms of his own experience, as related in The Use of the Self (1988, 21–48) continues to
inform and challenge. From the point of view of somatic practices, there is, on the one hand, the
rebuttal of “‘body’ and ‘mind’ as separate parts of the same organism” (21), and the counter argu-
ment that based on his experience “it is impossible to separate ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ processes in
any forms of human activity” (21).The subtlety of how this is put should not be lost: the distinc-
tion between those who speak of body and mind as parts and his insistence on the inseparability
of mental and physical processes [my emphasis]. Without any detailed knowledge of Alexander
Technique, a reader will be able to ascertain that Alexander made his discovery by observing
himself. He did so using mirrors because he could not rely on how he “felt” (1988, 44). So
this is certainly a first-person experience, he was not relying on anyone external to him, either
with observation or touch, but it is an experience whereby there is an external reference point.
He made the point that anyone could repeat his discovery if they went through the same process
and devoted the same time to it. Notwithstanding everything that has been written purporting
to be Alexander Technique in the intervening eighty years, this remains a radical proposition.
Notes
1 Based on common lore, oral tradition, and written treatises such as those edited by Don Hanlon
Johnson (1995), I have identified F.M. Alexander, Moshe Feldenkrais, Mabel Todd, Irmgard
Bartenieff, Charlotte Selver, Milton Trager, Gerda Alexander, and Ida Rolf as the somatic pio-
neers” (2009, 12). Eddy also identifies a second generation, being: “Anna Halprin, Nancy Topf,
Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Sondra Fraleigh, Emilie Conrad, Joan Skinner, Elaine Summers, and
Judith Aston” (2009,12).
2 Sara Reed’s thesis proposed F.M. Alexander, Moshe Feldenkrais, Elsa Gindler, Charlotte Selver and
Joan Skinner (2011, 2) but also included Body-Mind Centering, Bartenieff Fundamentals, Pilates,
Hellerwork and Yoga (2011, 5). Giotaki’s thesis gave, in her chronological order, Alexander, Todd
(plus Barbara Clark and Lulu Sweigard), Gindler, Rolf, Bartenieff, Selver, Feldenkrais, Gerda
Alexander and Trager (2015, 22).
3 They include, though the list cannot claim to be exhaustive, in chronological order: Caplan
(1985), Crow (1985, 1988), Conable and Conable (1991/2), Oliver (1993a, 1993b), White (1993),
Richmond (1994, 1995), Huxley, Leach and Stevens (1995a, 1995b), Bell (1996), Brockgreitins
(1998), Fortin and Girard (2005), Gilmore (2005), Nettl-Fiol (2006), Batson (1996, 2007), Nettl-
Fiol (2008), Nettl-Fiol and Vanier (2011), and Spaeth (2017).
4 The first Alexander Technique Training Course was opened in London by F.M. Alexander in
1931. Since then, many teachers have opened their own training courses. A number of organiza-
tions now certificate and verify teachers of the Alexander Technique. The main organizations of
teachers of the Alexander Technique include, alphabetically: Alexander Technique International
(ATI), American Society for Alexander Technique (AmSAT), Interactive Teaching Method (ITM),
Professional Association of Alexander Teachers (PAAT), Society of Teachers of the Alexander
Technique (STAT) and its affiliates, and the Alexander Technique Affiliated Societies (ATAS).
In the UK, ATI, ITM, PAAT and STAT are organizations registered with the Complementary and
Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC). Individual teachers are affiliated with various organizations:
In terms of somatic practices specifically, a number are part of the International Somatic Movement
Education and Therapy Association (ISMETA). The first Alexander Technique Congress was held
in 1986, and there have been a further nine Congresses to date.
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Michael Huxley
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Dance.” In The Body Eclectic: Evolving Practices in Dance Training, edited by Melanie Bales and Rebecca
Nettl-Fiol, 89–100. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Naylor, John. 1995. “The Alexander Technique and Dance.” Dance Teacher 44 (2): 57–61.
Nettl-Fiol, Rebecca. 2006. “Alexander Technique and Dance Technique: Applications in the Studio.”
———. 2008. “First It Was Dancing: Reflections on Teaching and Alexander Technique.” In The Body
Eclectic: Evolving Practices in Dance Training, edited by Melanie Bales and Rebecca Nettl-Fiol, 101–125.
Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
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Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Oliver, Suzanne, K. 1993a. “Lower Back Injuries in Dancers and the Alexander Technique.” Kinesiology and
Medicine for Dance 15 (2): 65–79.
———. 1993b. “Case Study: The Alexander Technique as an Intervention in Lower Back Dysfunction in
a Dancer.” Kinesiology and Medicine for Dance 15 (2): 80–87.
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PhD diss., University of Surrey.
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———. 1919. “The Philosopher’s Stone.” Atlantic Monthly, 474–481.
———. 1921. The Mind in the Making:The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform. New York: Harper.
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14–19.
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———. 2008. Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge
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———. 2012. Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics. New York: Cambridge University Press.
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Doubtful Musician.” In Galvanizing Performance:The Alexander Technique as a Catalyst for Excellence, edited
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7
MOVING KINSHIP
Between choreography, performance,
and the more-than-human
Beatrice Allegranti
Introduction
This chapter presents interdisciplinary and international choreographic and dance move-
ment psychotherapy practice-led research with people living with young-onset dementia,
their families, and the artistic team Beatrice Allegranti Dance Theatre with composer
Jill Halstead. Established in 2016, the Moving Kinship project1 comprises overlapping
‘events’ (in the UK, Norway, Netherlands, and Japan), including bespoke participatory
dances for families living with young-onset dementia. A touring dance theater produc-
tion evolved from the bespoke participatory material and was made in collaboration with
a professional cast.
Dominant discourses on the ‘dementias’2 vary greatly according to each individual, and
the significant impairment is identified in terms of memory, language, behavior, ability to
focus and pay attention, reasoning, and judgment, as well as visual perception. However, we
are not defined solely by our intellect. In stark contrast to biomedical prognoses of silence,
language impairment, and individualism, through the choreographic and performance
processes of this project, it became apparent that these seismic life-shifts had affective and
embodied resonance as well, pulsating between the person living with young-onset diagnosis
(which can be diagnosed when a person is under sixty-five years of age), their close family
care-givers, and the artistic team.
A relational focus emerges in dementia theorizing, where Tom Kitwood (1997) high-
lighted “personhood”: the importance of interpersonal relations as critical components of
the subjective experience of dementia. Equally, recent critical engagement with disability
studies emphasizes an expanded bio-psycho-social model of disability and health with a
focus on dementia human rights, including issues of equality, nondiscrimination, autonomy,
dignity, social inclusion, participation, and solidarity (Cahill 2018, 21). This chapter builds
on the sociopolitical perspective to situate the (epistemic) articulacy of human moving bodies
together with non/more-than-human creative processes (including choreographic and psy-
chotherapeutic) when interrogating issues of injustice and promoting progressive change.
Posthumanist and feminist new materialist scholarship (Barad 2007; Braidotti 2013;
Manning 2013) assist in revealing ethical and political insights and tensions that consider how
“we” are not bounded, self-contained, fully formed humans but, rather, porous processes
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enfolding within a complex network of language, affect, movement relating, ecologies,

everyday life environments, technology, embodied practices, power structures, and per-
formances. I propose this tangle as Moving Kinship, a more-than-human tie with entities
beyond ancestry and genealogy (Haraway 2016), together with the dynamic and affective
imbrication with/in the choreographic material, interactions, and contexts as they arise in
the project and in this writing. To this end, my intent is to resist representing the lives of
families living with dementia and, instead, to produce multiple, colliding subjectivities and
realities—for people living with dementia, their families, the artistic team, and my own as
practitioner and researcher.
More-than-human choreography: Ethics, being, and knowing

New materialism represents an interdisciplinary field of inquiry produced by a community
of feminist scholars. Material feminists disrupt pervasive Cartesian (Eurocentric, Globally
Northern) views of bodies, selves, and identities as discrete entities, instead conceptualizing
what feminist theoretical physicist Karen Barad describes as entanglement: “To be entangled
is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack
an independent self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair” (2007, 3). Such
multiple understandings of the materiality of bodies and the natural world dislocates the cen-
trality of the human in favor of the posthuman (Barad 2007; Braidotti 2013; Haraway 2016)
or the more-than-human as described by philosopher Erin Manning (2013). These terms are
used interchangeably here given that the central tenets across these disciplinary feminisms
assert the dynamic constitution of realities as a complex network of language, biology, affect,
cognition, ecologies, biomedical technology, embodied practices, body politics, power struc-
tures, and natural and constructed environments. All the human and nonhuman forces mat-
ter; they are all given equal value in this co-constitutive process.
Seeing ‘ourselves’—human, nonhuman, and more-than-human—as always co-implicated,
speaks to Barad’s (2003, 2007) relational ontology or “agential realism,” denoting a shift
from representationalism—reflecting on the world from the outside—to a way of under-
standing the world from within and as part of it. Barad created the neologism “intra-action”
to describe this mutually constitutive process of being within and as part of the world rather
than the more familiar use of inter-action of separate entities: “… the notion of intra-action
recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-
action … individuals do not pre-exist their interactions; rather individuals emerge through
and as part of their entangled intra-relating” (2007, 33). Intra-activity places the focus of
attention not on the human but on the phenomena generated when different forms of
matter are brought together, for example, a human and choreographic material. The verb
“bodying,” as described by Manning (2013), with its emphasis on constant and contin-
gent becoming, captures the ecology of micromovements, microperceptions, gestures, body
politics, body systems, breathing rhythms, vocal tone, use of language, texts, and choreo-
graphic phrasing. The concept includes the relationship to environment: the space we work
in, technology we engage with, and props we use (to name a few factors in any one process).
Bodying attends to the fact that “we are always more than one” (16) during the creative and
co-compositional process.
Bodying, within the choreographic process and in everyday life, can also be seen as “mate-
rial-discursive” ( Jackson and Mazzei 2012; Allegranti and Wyatt 2014): an ongoing constitu-
tion of privileging neither language and meaning-making systems nor bodies in oppositional
hierarchy. The hyphenated concept of material-discursive brings to the fore how language,
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meaning-making systems, and (human and non/more-than-human) bodies are “intra-acting”.

This way, language (in all its political non-neutrality) does not need to be understood in sim-
ply discursive terms, but materially too. Language is the product of material flows, and Barad
explains the politics of discourse as “that which constrains and enables what can be said.
Discursive practices define what counts as meaningful statements” (2007, 146).
Establishing this inseparability of human and nonhuman ‘others,’ and seeing the world
in such multicausal ways, allows for a consideration of the implications of creating dance
not only for an audience but with and through the audience. In doing so, the process engages
with the ethics and politics of acknowledging the tangle of how we affect and are affected
in the interstitial spaces between choreography and performance and in everyday life.
The notion of affect as a pre-emotional bodying occurs in the first moment of relating
(Manning 2007; Stern 2010). Moreover, the intent in this project is to highlight how these
human and more-than-human forces intra-act and how the myriad intra-actions have agentic
and transformative power together as an “assemblage”: a network of distributed affect and
agency (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Jackson and Mazzei 2016).
In this inquiry, post/more-than-human scholarship pushes the limits of humanist quali-
tative inquiry and encourages consideration of a post-qualitative and a non-fixed ontology
into critical thinking (Lather and St. Pierre 2013). As such, giving an account of oneself
necessitates situating ourselves with human and nonhuman others: a tangled process of ethics,
knowing and being or as Barad conceptualizes, an “ethico-onto-epistemology [where]
practices of being and knowing are not isolable; they are mutually implicated” (2007, 185;
emphasis added). By highlighting that our bodies are immersed in and being produced
by a process of (material-discursive) becoming, I am drawn to consider co-compositions:
between choreographer, dancers, participants, and audience at various stages of the creative
process across the nonlinear, co-implication of space and time, or spacetimemattering (2007).
Together, ‘we’ (human and more-than-human entities) materialize the data where moving
with/in the point of view of other(s) reminds us that we are “mutually constituted entangled
agencies” (33).
The import of entanglement and material-discursive processes in this writing presents
data as a layering of spacetime events, relating beyond language and beyond human, and
includes choreographic phrasing, words, stories, clothes, studio and performance spaces,
social and environmental spaces, weather systems, furniture, and gestures (to name a few).
These generative events are at the heart of the project and are always “intra-acting”: not sepa-
rate entities but entangled with/in the material-discursive processes as they enfold through-
out the project.
This process builds on posthuman research scholar Alicia Jackson’s (2016) view of a “man-
gle” because the spacetime events (instead of “data”) capture the performativity and agency
of each of the human and non/more-than-human forces in the project, for example, family
homes; dance studio; sonic, social, and natural environments; and choreographic shaping.
In this sense, the spacetime events are not human-centered but allow for a view of “how we
are located in the world and how the elements of the world interact” (747).
The project as spacetime events

Although presented separately below, the project events (interview-conversations, studio
practice, participatory dances, dance theater performances) are imbricated; they cannot be
separated from the co-implication of space and time (Barad 2007; Manning 2013). The events
“diffract,” to use Haraway’s (2016) and Barad’s (2007) term that describes how events and
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Moving Kinship
Illustration 7.1 Intra-acting spacetime events. Artist: Neil Max Emmanuel.
insights speak to and with one another. From each (re)iteration enfolds new (ongoing) under-
standings about, for example, relating, affect, choreography as life material, and elements of
psychotherapeutic practice informing the creative process. The commissioned illustration
shown in Illustration 7.1 captures the intra-acting events of this project.
Interview-conversations
Throughout 2017, twelve interview-conversations were conducted with people living with young-
onset dementia and their family caregivers in their family homes—the hub of intimate relating. Part
choreographer, part psychotherapist, part researcher, I listened to/with movement as stories, frag-
ments, snippets, traumas, and memories emerged.The body politics of family life emerged: couples
of same and different genders in their mid-life, single mothers with adult children caring for them,
each making sense of their lives with dementia. In listening, I became aware of how dementia
affected bodies, relationships, and everyday material engagements.Throughout this process a written
and movement ‘journal’ was kept about my affective responses on meeting the families.
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Beatrice Allegranti
A year into the project, further individual interview-conversations were conducted with
the four professional contemporary dancers involved in the project: Luke Birch (UK), Sabrina
Gargano (Italy/UK), Takeshi Matsumoto ( Japan/UK), and Aneta Zwierzyńska (Poland/
UK). We reflected on the impact of the creative (intra-active) methodology from studio to
bespoke participatory dances to the series of public performances. An interview-conversation
with composer Jill Halstead in Norway reflected on the creative process of shifting from
bespoke participatory dances to the creation of the one-hour soundscore for the dance theater
work I’ve Lost You Only to Discover That I Have Gone Missing.
Studio practice
The function of studio practice was to make bespoke choreographic material to be performed
for families each week. Each practice session was two days. Drawing from journal and inter-
view-conversation transcripts, titled textual vignettes offered material for us to work with,
for example, “I’m grabbing the time I have left; Unfinished dream; Roger was a cinema-
tographer.” The process of “titling” and creating vignettes builds on existing established
methodologies (Allegranti 2015) and became immersive, summoning embodied experiences
of meeting the families in their homes and presenting new layers of life with dementia. In his
interview-conversation, Luke referred to the titled vignettes as “little pockets,” not only
conjuring an image of a storage space for safekeeping but also a contextual framing within a
wider field of relating and collaboration. Subsequently, the dancers were facilitated through
a process of kin-aesthetic prompts. The word kin-aesthetic is adapted to include three aspects:
the sense of movement (including interoceptive and proprioceptive aspects), the vital role
of the aesthetic process in forming movement (in both artistic contexts and everyday life),
and the emergent material kinship during the process of witnessing and engaging in dance
movement. This intersecting trinity provides an epistemological gateway toward an intuitive
understanding of the dynamic inseparability of selves and environments.
In our conversation, Luke went on to reflect on the impact of this kin-aesthetic impetus:“It’s almost
like a little commission … you open up the space for us to be together I don’t think you ever pre-
scribed, ‘be more emotional or physical’ … so [that] allowed us to work with our own interests
and desires as dancers” (personal communication with author, March 28, 2018).3 During the creation
of bespoke material, Takeshi also described this time as “a period of raw experience” (personal
communication with the author, May 1, 2017).This raw experience was co-composed, encouraging
us all to notice our responses—to stumbling words, words lost, words incomplete, family relation-
ships in turmoil, loss of identity and language, fading memories—on our own bodies. We were not
‘representing’ people living with dementia, nor telling people’s stories or working with verbatim text.
Instead by engaging with our own ‘felt-sense’ movement responses (Allegranti 2015), we disrupted
participants’ worlds and stories and simultaneously began to inhabit the other while also re-inhabiting
ourselves.The resultant bespoke choreography became a process of ‘storying’ material—a process that
is not flat and fixed but open-ended and incomplete, offering some layers of everyday affects and the
politics of living with dementia and, equally, a process for and about all our lives.
In order to safely and sensitively facilitate this creative process for the dancers, a key aspect
of studio practice (and making work generally) involves my shifting between a choreographic
role and an awareness of safe psychotherapeutic boundaries by creating what has historically
been termed by psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (1971) a “holding space” for the group.
Although this studio practice was not a therapy space, my holding was based on an eth-
ics of engagement with attention to issues of confidentiality, consent, safety, and respect
when working with personal-professional tensions and disclosures with the artistic team, and
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Moving Kinship
between the artistic team and the families. This included reflexive discussions as ‘check-in’ at
the start of the practice, initially to discuss the previous participatory dances and notice the
affective and psychosomatic impact of this for each of us and then to locate the weekly focus.
Which family material were we working on? Where were we with the material, and how did
it touch us personally and professionally? The holding space thus informed our creative process
in a recursive loop where the artistic team was continually encouraged to attend to the inher-
ent hegemonic biases and power dynamics when co-composing bespoke dances for families
involved. To this end, we all took part in the ethically contingent process of “knowing-in-
being” (Barad 2007), where we co-composed though felt-sense movement improvisations and
choreographic phrasing during the creation of bespoke material for each family.
Participatory dances
We performed approximately fifteen minutes of bespoke material for each family every few
weeks with a mixture of two to four dancers for each event (Illustration 7.2). The participatory
dances took place across London in gallery spaces, with most families present for each other’s
bespoke dances. One of the gallery spaces hosted a different exhibition of visual art each week
adding another layer of (unknown) artistic forces to incorporate into our process.
The participants witnessed our storying as bespoke performances of multiple social “selves”
(Allegranti 2015): the families and the artistic teams.The bespoke dances combined set and impro-
vised scores, and the choreography became generative and re-animated during each performance.
Early on in the process, Takeshi summoned this collectivity with the image of an “operation”:
Week by week, I don’t know the word but maybe it becomes more, like serious…. I
feel like we are witnessing an operation or something … quite … with lots of care,
Illustration 7.2 Participants witness a bespoke dance. (Courtesy of Julia Testa.)
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Beatrice Allegranti
and the direct gaze from every participant. We are all kind of, yeah, witnessing an
operation. Operating dementia or operating something. Gazing at this process. So
that was striking. And week by week it becomes more and more intense. (Personal
communication with author, May 1, 2017.)
Takeshi’s statement is striking for its emphasis on temporality and increasing intensity that seems
to speak to this choreographic “operation” as a “participatory ecology” (Manning 2013) in that
the regular events challenged what choreography could do by functioning as a force of form that
generates complex patterns in an ecology. This ecology touches on the everyday while moving
beyond the individual and beyond the event. Manning’s call for an “ecological politics of collec-
tive individuation” (2013, 110) shares similarities with Barad’s (2007) relational ontology in as
much as the emphasis is on relating with human and non/more-than-human others. However,
Manning’s clear focus is on choreographic thinking as a mode of perception prior to the settling
of experience into established subject/object binaries. Emphasizing multiplicity, Manning argues
that underlying all modes of perception is an “ecology”: a reciprocity of the one and the many.
Manning builds on Daniel Stern’s (2010) psychological work of early infant human development,
emphasizing the creation of a multiplicity of strata—not a contained view of self, but a multiplic-
ity of selves expressed under variable conditions. Stern unravels the notion of “self ” as contained
instead, emphasizing our “many selves” developing in a relational network of “vitality affects”: the
feeling of a relational event. In this context, affect can be understood as the preverbal, preconscious,
coming-to-be,“the felt experience of force—in movement—with a temporal contour, and a sense
of aliveness, of going somewhere” (8). In the context of families witnessing their bespoke perfor-
mances, individuation becomes a co-composed movement process (Illustrations 7.3 and 7.4).
Illustration 7.3 Group improvisation after the bespoke dance. (Courtesy of Julia Testa.)
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Moving Kinship
Illustration 7.4 Group improvisation after the bespoke dance. (Courtesy of Julia Testa.)
Our participatory ecology had a further layer that included group improvisation follow-
ing each bespoke performance—where together we would grow (the) material through kin-
esthetic engagement guiding us in relating. Moving our kinship beyond the traditional and
psychotherapeutic (anthropocentric) notion of intersubjective relating (Beebe et al. 2005),
kinship began to develop within the choreographic material itself.
This choreographic kinship evolved through inviting participants to join in improvised
movement responses directly after the performances. Working with the unplanned and
unexpected, we were tangled and became vulnerable in reshaping the score and moving
beyond what we initially imagined. People living with dementia, their family caregivers,
the artistic team—we all further engaged in this moving ecology where, collaboratively, we
moved toward the more-than-human potential that could arise from our encounters. In so
doing, we defied the humanist notion of the subject as stable, separate, and individuated as
proliferated in some forms psychoanalysis (Ogden 1989) and Cartesian philosophy (Descartes
1998/1637). Yvonne, who lives with young-onset dementia, reflected on this collaborative
invitation to witness and dance after her bespoke session:
At first I was anxious watching the dancers... so accomplished. They invited me in

such a warm way I became more relaxed. I enjoy the intense expressions of faces
and the body emotive movements. I feel like moving... also being part of a group
making close connections, feels good. Thanks for the creations. (Personal commu-
nication with author, June 17, 2017.)
Yvonne seems to capture a collective individuation and the assemblage of human and more-
than-human factors, of dancers, choreographic material, affect. Similarly, Jacquie, who cares for
her husband living with Alzheimer’s, hints to the material’s agentic assemblage: “What surprised
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Beatrice Allegranti
me about the dance was how painful and raw it was to watch … it worked as metaphor … it’s
been a very rewarding session” (personal communication with author, June 23, 2017). Given
the range of often unexpected and powerful affective responses during participant witness-
ing, my role shifted, once again, between choreographer and dance movement psychotherapist
according to the needs of the group and with a continual focus on holding a safe space for
a multitude of expressions (Allegranti 2015). This layered psychological space-holding also
included inviting verbal written reflections about the impact of witnessing bespoke dances and
joining in improvisation—allowing people to have space for thinking—with the experience
and processing it in nonlinear ways. My journal writing after each event contributed to ongo-
ing choreographic shaping of material for performance as well as critical engagement with the
research inquiry.
Dance theater performances

I’ve Lost You Only to Discover That I Have Gone Missing is a touring dance theater production.
During 2017, the forty-five-minute work-in-progress toured eleven UK venues and one
international venue. An expanded production will tour internationally in 2020 with actor
and singer Chiara De Palo and dancers. The production includes studio rehearsals to shape
the bespoke material from the participatory dances into a larger piece. After the first public
performance, two of the dancers reflected:
Takeshi: The fact that we could be so present is because we had this root. And
I think that other dance projects it’s often like two or three weeks, quite short,
intense. But this one has lots of space to breathe.… Also this process is with real
people and that is important. Rather than just, you know, imagining the context
(Personal communication with author, June 13, 2017).
Aneta: It was so embodied in us, the emotion, I felt like whenever we’re performing
I’m already there … I’m already in the piece. (Personal communication with author,
June 13, 2017.)
The work weaves personal, social, and medical taboos about loss, intimacy, kin-
ship, and embodied resistance encountered throughout the process of creating bespoke
material (Illustration 7.5). It tries to capture some of the world’s unruly, noisy, active,
multiplicitous, and deeply relational ways that trouble the casual linearity of ‘story.’
An early review of the work, written by Pippa Kelly, captures some of the human and
more-than-human bodies and intra-actions:
The piece opens with one of the female dancers picking up a pile of clothes and hug-
ging it to her, smelling it, cherishing it—a simple, domestic task, gracefully imbued in
this particular context with hints of intimacy and loss. As the dance unfolds dancers put
on t-shirts and shoes, sometimes correctly, sometimes not, becoming stuck, confused,
frustrated—frequently falling back, literally, into each other’s arms. (Kelly 2017)
Given the overlapping events, this performance has been shown to a variety of different audi-
ences, including some of the families we worked with; consequently, the work gains a new
layer of affective resonance with each iteration. Three of the dancers spoke to the changing
landscape of the performances and the new possibilities each one generated:
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Moving Kinship
Illustration 7.5 Maria Palliani in extract of I’ve Lost You Only to Discover That I Have Gone Missing,
Siobhan Davies Dance Studios. (Courtesy of Julia Testa.)
Luke: I can’t really do it until I’m doing it … my engagement with setting the
material and the kind of tone, emotional tone, of what the material could be … has
always been in flux…. I think that is the big learning … toning it and finding the
palate of what’s appropriate and what could be there … [in the] now …. (Personal
communication with author, March 28, 2018.)
Sabrina: I felt … we are so present … it seemed like we were the wind, we just blew,
‘whoosh,’ and [the audience] just got it. (Personal communication with author,
March 30, 2018.)
Takeshi: It’s about dementia but it went into something different. It’s more about us,
about humanity, the relationship. (Personal communication with author, April 4, 2018.)
A constant in my creative process is a shift between writing dance and writing into and with/
in dance, manifesting as autoethnography (Allegranti and Wyatt 2014). Presented in what fol-
lows are constantly shifting ecologies, revealing how spacetime events “diffract” (Barad 2007)
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Beatrice Allegranti
throughout the creative process. Writing with/in movements back and forth across spacetime
is an attempt to keep alive the notion that bodying and storying do not happen on a “linear
timeline” (Manning 2013, 23) but are co-constituted in a constant becoming with human
and nonhuman others.
Intense (2017)
It is our inaugural participatory dance, we are about to dance in an L-shaped art gallery, and
everyone in the room is an artist. Some of us live with dementia and others do not. Any one
of us can/do/could experience dementia, that all-encompassing word that belies the expan-
sive multiple experiences of each person. But in this room, bodies leak beyond the confines
of their diagnosis; we are all neurodiverse; we are all on the dementia spectrum. Through the
bespoke performances and improvising together, we subvert linearity, open up new milieus
of relating, creating ecologies of co-composition. We move beyond the hypercognitive diag-
nosis of “the” dementia body (Post 2000), and movement begins to compose us (Manning
2013, 15). Our kin-aesthetic collaboration allows for multiplicitous individuality (35), where
the ineffable experiences of dementia chime with our collective and personal, social, and
cultural taboos of loss (of language, identity, memory), of fractured intimacy, caring, safety,
and consent.
My first meeting is with Yvonne, a former visual artist, who is partially deaf and fluent in
British Sign Language (Illustration 7.6). Yvonne lives with primary progressive aphasia—a
form of dementia where language is progressively impaired. She asks me to “finish her words”
if she cannot find them. As we sit in her conservatory, I participate in storying her sometimes
chaotically formed past and present identities. At some point during our exchange, Yvonne
viscerally reveals her stunning desire: “I’m grabbing … the time left.” Continuing to tell me
Illustration 7.6 Yvonne improvising during a participatory dance. (Courtesy of Julia Testa.)
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Moving Kinship
about her recent, fearless adventure gliding, Yvonne then signs the word “future,” and our
conversation evolves into a co-composed gestural dance:
Beatrice: Show me again …?

Yvonne: In front of you, the future. Anything like... tomorrow [demon-
strates], yesterday history … so … present … the space gives a timeline.
Beatrice: Timeline. The space gives a timeline? [repeats gestures for future and
present]
Yvonne: The space. Yes…. It’s in your face as well. Look at the eyes; the eyes are
the most important. Eyes.
Beatrice: Eyes. Looking into the future.
Yvonne: Yes. (Personal communication with author, March 9, 2017.)
The affective resonance of this timeline finds its way into the studio, and its force of becoming
creates a kin-aesthetic collectivity. As Aneta, Sabrina, and I gather to materialize choreography,
our bodies begin to move with the affective relation to aspects of Yvonne’s story, her vitality
for life, her acute awareness of how dementia will slowly rob her of a timeline—of her agency.
As we improvise, Aneta is finding my invitation to move into ‘past’ frustrating as she walks
backwards in circles, repeatedly, while lightly stroking her long hair over her left shoulder.
We have reached a temporary impasse. The implications of past are loaded for us all, and the
intensity in this present moment of making the material emerges because “past, present and
future bleed into the ‘now’ of questioning … presence is a matter … of inheriting the future
as well as the past” (Barad 2012, 78). What would inheriting ‘future’ in choreography involve?
Meanwhile, and in direct contrast, Sabrina seems to be birthing future in her firm wide
second position, hands pushing down toward the floor with potent expectancy. This nascent
choreography evolves into a duet of spiral falls gaining momentum and giving weight to a
collective presence. The material is beginning to make felt the “coming-into-eventness of the
field of relation”—we all have a relationship to this timeline and we are “dancing in concert
with movement-moving, with space-timing” (Manning 2013, 101).
During the participatory dance a few weeks later, we performed Yvonne’s bespoke cho-
reography for the first time. I looked carefully at Yvonne’s face as she witnessed. The face, an
intersubjective mirror of our parentage, ethnicity, age, feeling, expression, and communication, is
predicated on the capacity to be in relationship and be aware of the ‘other’ witness, as well as be
a witness of relationship. In psychoanalysis, the role of the face is directly linked to seeing and being
seen—to being recognized and responded to by the other is constitutive of the self. When the
infant look into the primary caregiver’s face, it sees itself, and the infant’s responsivity has a recipro-
cal power affecting the parent’s feeling of being recognized (Winnicott 1971; Beebe et al. 2005).
Yvonne is invited to face our responses to her story. The bespoke choreography is
offered as an invitation to face performative possibility—what Yvonne’s life can mean, in
the collective presence of this moment. Looking at her expressions, a maternal, curious,
expectant, wondering response emerges. Was Yvonne reminded of the intensity of her
motherhood? Would she recognize herself in facing the dance? Her dance. Our dance.
In this performance we are extending the intersubjective notion of shared experience;
facing becomes collective. When reflecting during the process of making material for
Yvonne’s dance, Sabrina and I extend the traditional psychoanalytical and intersubjective
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notion of “finding ourselves in the other” (Allegranti and Wyatt 2014, 537) and speak of
how the process of creating this material with and for Yvonne constituted embodying the
other within our future selves:
Sabrina: The thing that Yvonne was saying about grasping time … I feel like she is
living life … from the things that she was talking about, she is still so present…. Since
yesterday I feel like I’ve known her ages. Like she’s one of my closest friends or relatives.
I don’t know, I really feel this attachment to her. I’ve been thinking about her a lot.
Beatrice: Perhaps you can hold that sense of attachment in your dance and what it
means to be dancing an aspect of someone’s story without having met them yet.…
I said yesterday in the studio—“imagine Yvonne is here in the room. How would
you move with her in mind?”
Sabrina: I feel like dancing for her … this information that we have about her … to
take it … it’s like we bring her life into the future. We have to carry her life in our
movements … she’s passing us her life … maybe in a few years she won’t remember
the past but we will and through our performances the audiences will too. Maybe
this is the future of this person and the past at the same time. (Personal communica-
tion with author, March 12, 2017.)
Witnessing Yvonne absorbed in Aneta’s and Sabrina’s duet, a rising intensity in my gut was
evoked—that visceral location of mood, affect, nerves, and synaptic biochemistry (Wilson
2015). A psychosomatic legacy was co-created in this moment. There was an affective reso-
nance in this witnessing; it seemed as though we were engaged in a process of choreographing
Yvonne into ourselves, of kin-aesthetically storying her future in our dance (Illustration 7.7).
Illustration 7.7 Sabrina airborne during a fall and recovery. Public performance at Michaelis Theatre.
(Courtesy of Thomas Line.)
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When the short performance was over, Yvonne spoke the word “intense.” She repeated the
word several times, clearly and without faltering—intense; witnessing this material of spiral fall-
ing and recovering was intense. Yvonne seems to capture the event’s vitality, “the force of its
taking form” (Manning 2013, 10). I imagine that living with dementia is intense: an assault
on the senses, being catapulted into a paradoxical way of being that is simultaneously pres-
ent and absent. Yet, in this moment of relating, affective resonance has “left intensive traces
on a collective body-becoming” (Manning 2012, 95; emphasis added). This body-becoming is
not only all of ‘us,’ it is us feeling with one another and with the more-than-human choreo-
graphic material.
As Yvonne leapt to her feet to dance with us, affect’s potential was demonstrated—we
were are all co-participating in a choreographic ‘gift’ layered with intensities. Manning
describes how “choreography becomes a field for movement expression when the body
becomes an intensive participant with the evolving milieu rather than simply the instigator
of the action” (2013, 101). The bespoke choreographic material and subsequent engaging in
movement improvisation guided us to co-participate through the intensities of composition
that in turn produced a palimpsest of “new bodies” (Manning 2007, xvi). This assemblage
allowed us to collectively dance Yvonne’s appetite for grasping life. In doing so, we defy the
humanist notion of the subject as separate, individuated. We are reimagining the hypercog-
nitive model of dementia that continues to revolve around invisibility and inability. In this
moment, Yvonne is not fading away; she is stepping forth.
Tsunami (1946)
After a few months of moving with participants in our group, I am sensing my way into
being with another. I do not know what my bodily response or words will be, but I allow
myself to notice—to constantly notice: me, you, all of you. Extraordinary things happen
when you give someone your full, embodied attention, and the entanglement is evident
here because I pay attention to my own body as much as to the other person’s. Sometimes
the tactile kin-aesthetic information received from others provides a sense of where I am
and where the other might be. During this process we are, as Stern would say in psycho-
logical terms, feeling with each other’s stories or “affectively attuning” (2010, 42). Such
affective attunement is the hallmark of our first intersubjective dance as infants with our
primary caregiver (Beebe et al. 2005). In an ideal scenario, it is a material-discursive
process of tactile kin-aesthetic mirroring, matching, mismatching, vocalizing—and thus
learning to regulate and become bodies. When taken into the context of choreography
and performance, intersubjective relating can be extended to intra-activity, creating a
more-than-human ecology.
But what of becoming with dementia? As neurologist Jules Montague (2018) has explained,
is it a case of who we become when we are no longer ourselves? Or perhaps becoming with
dementia allows for embodied performances of many selves (Allegranti 2015; Stern 2010)?
When I visited Keith and his partner, Rose, for an interview-conversation, Keith insightfully
declared: “I feel like a baby,” to which Rose responded, “But you are not a baby!” This new
expression of body politics seems to birth Keith’s becoming where vulnerability, age, dis/
ability, and power collide (Illustration 7.8).
Keith and Rose talk about Keith’s charity work to support people after the 2004 Indonesian
tsunami.They also speak of the impact of the dementia diagnosis two and a half years previously.
Keith lives with frontotemporal dementia, characterized by progressive difficulties in speech
production and word comprehension; he uses the adjective “difficult” to convey his experience.
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Illustration 7.8 Keith and Rose during a participatory dance. (Courtesy of Julia Testa.)
He is beginning to find it “difficult” to have conversations, to understand what people are say-
ing, to recognize words, to find words, declaring: “Language, I hate it!” In this instance, Keith’s
uninterrupted and incisive statement is the interlocutor for our dance. It finds its way into Luke
and Takeshi’s duet with forceful acceleration, stamping, stumbling—grabbing at silent, half words
(see Illustration 7.9). Luke reflects, two months after creating the material: “It’s quite demanding
of attention,” which evokes a refusal to remain silent or passive, as this distributed agency begins
to choreograph itself into Keith’s bespoke dance.
Later, while performing our dance, Keith, poised in his chair, carefully watches Luke,
who is dancing just a few steps away from him. As frontotemporal dementia erodes Keith’s
brain, abnormal proteins gather in clumps and neurotransmitters fail. I wonder what is
happening in Keith’s premotor cortex, the region of the brain that is activated not only
when we plan and execute movement but when we witness movement that we recognize in
others (Calvo-Merino et al. 2006). What is being triggered for him affectively in his wit-
nessing Luke open his arms and surrender to falling backward? Luke’s repeated surrender
of weight, evokes memories of Keith’s work as a Baptist minister and summons an image of
renaissance post-crucifixion—an arguably troubling Cartesian Christian analogy. And yet,
as the other dancers gather to gently support Luke’s weight during his fluid falls, it is strik-
ing to note Luke and Keith’s similar physicality, their length, stature, warmth, and tactile
kin-aesthetic ways. In this performative moment, I see beyond the tropes of obliteration and
visceral erasure that figure so prominently in Anglo-American narratives and biomedical
accounts of dementia and recognize a collective sense of becoming (Illustration 7.10). Has
Keith experienced this too?
During an improvisation after the bespoke dance, Keith articulates the affective impact
of his witnessing. He seems unsettled, with tears brimming in his eyes; he is nevertheless
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Illustration 7.9 Luke and Takeshi stamping and accelerating. Public performance at Michaelis Theatre.
(Courtesy of Thomas Line.)
poised to peak. Pronouns almost disappearing and syntax ebbing away, he turns to me:
“See. What you are doing … beautiful … thank you.” Keith’s comment and strong visceral
response is not only aesthetic recognition; it is more than this. It is a relational incipience
that goes beyond hypercognitive individualism. Keith’s engagement with this choreographic
material grasps how beauty is imbued with a sense of potentiality, of something not-yet-
conscious glimpsed and felt, of hope (Spry 2018). Keith’s witnessing the choreographic
unfolding viscerally mattered; it moved him. More, Keith reminded us that affect remains
accessible when other parts of his bodily being-in-the-world are becoming less within his
grasp—that a lifetime affect can be enacted into a performative moment.
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Illustration 7.10 Luke falling backwards. Public performance at Michaelis Theatre. (Courtesy of
Thomas Lines.)
Throughout Keith’s tears, the group is stilled, waiting. In a parallel process, across the
room, Luke’s eyes are also brimming with tears, and later he speaks of the affective imme-
diacy of this moment:
I felt naked and vulnerable and disarmed in the performance … it felt different to any
other performance that I’ve done … I had that feedback from [Keith]. He was looking
at me directly in the eyes and he was crying and staring back at me. And that’s the best
response I’ve ever had … to anything I’ve ever done. Better than a standing ovation.
(Personal communication with author, May 1, 2017.)
Everyone realizes that Keith has given us all permission to be with the wave of vulnerability
that Luke names—to recognize it. Sabrina also reflected on the “tsunami of tears, and yet we all
reached each other” (personal communication with author, May 1, 2017). Bringing the proposi-
tion of reaching to the fore parallels early developmental processes that are predicated on tactile
kin-aesthetic engagements—these early dances act as formative invitations to become beyond
identity (Manning 2007, xv). Keith and Rose are reaching beyond the ‘tsunami’: a series of family
deaths; the strain on Rose’s working life; and then the diagnosis of dementia—Keith losing himself
mid-sentence, mid-life, and Rose’s new role as his caregiver:
Rose: I feel like I’m running two lives. And it’s very difficult to have conversations
now … it’s difficult to go out for a meal and we can’t sit and talk …[turning to
Keith] I feel like it’s quite isolating for you …
Keith: For me?
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Rose: Yeah. And I feel increasingly isolated as well. Because a lot of people don’t know
how to deal with people who have dementia … they assume Alzheimer’s and someone
eighties plus. (Personal communication with author, April 21, 2017.)
In a parallel process, the seismic waves engulf all of us in our studio practice, and, as we make
material, we are tangled with human and nonhuman forces. We experience the visceral force
of a tsunami as articulated by marine biologist Rachel Carson:
Natives on the beaches of Hawaii on the first of April 1946 were alarmed when
the accustomed voice of the breakers was suddenly stilled, leaving a strange quiet.
They could not know that this recession of the waves from the reefs and the shal-
low coastal waters was the sea’s response to an earthquake … more than 2000 miles
away; or that in a matter of moments the water would rise rapidly, as though the tide
were coming in much too fast, but without surf. (Carson 2014, 146.)
Our affective resonance with this storm has us grappling with layers of intimate relating
where we reach, tentatively, defiantly, lovingly, fearfully, into our future with our tactile
kin-aesthetic improvisations, sensing our way into our own and each other’s lives and into
the lives of our participating families. Our bodying of the tsunami became ‘flocking’ cho-
reography, where the dancers assemble as a more-than-human organism, sensing, surging
and retreating, tangled, porous, in flux between a loosening and tightening grip of hands.
Choreographing with waves, wind, and environment is an engagement with what Manning,
working with Simondon’s concept, describes as ontogenesis, where “sensing bodies in move-
ment are ontogenetic. They are ontogenentic because they are always in genesis, a state of
potential becoming” (2007, xxi), rather than an ontology of the body that presupposes a fixed
state of being. This flocking choreography temporarily takes form only to loosen and then
re-form, never fixed.
Later, Jill, the composer, sonically engages with this ongoing genesis and transforms the
soundscore for this section of the performance into music that is like a requiem:
The tsunami from the dance studio rolled across the North Sea and reached me, on
the Island of Askøy. We often think of people like Keith as stilled and quieted by the
losses of dementia, I hear people saying “he is a shadow of former self,” a shell,
emptied of who he once was. At the same time, we often think of people like Keith
caught in the storm of dementia—waves of agitation, fear, aggression, a disruptive
force, a destructive force that changes everything it path. I think of Keith as the eye
of the storm, like a hurricane seen from space. I recorded the wind and waves on the
Island where I live, I notice how similar they sound.
My youngest child is frightened by the strange noise of the wind the night I made
the recording; he tells me the wind sounds like scary voices. I tell him not to worry,
it is only the wind, and head out into the storm to try and record it. I struggle, it’s
difficult, the weather is resistant to my attempts to capture it, I am disorientated
and deafened. When I listen back to the recordings, I notice how similar it sounds,
the waves, the wind, but as I listen carefully I hear the voices—just like my son
did. So the voices in what you [Beatrice] call the requiem grow from the wind and
waves—things I couldn’t hear until someone reminded me how to listen. (Personal
communication with author, May 7, 2018.)
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Illustration 7.11 Takeshi, Sabrina, Luke, Aneta flocking. Public studio performance at Crouch End
Festival 2017. (Courtesy of Julia Testa.)
Affective resonance travels, it wanders, it leaves its mark, and however fleetingly, the
choreographic process and soundscore activated our relational potential, as Luke reflected,
the feeling that “we’re in the same ocean” (Illustration 7.11). But these dances are not ephem-
eral because as we moved, Keith reminded us that despite his losses, affective resonance lives
on, it keeps moving in more-than-human ways. During the second public studio perfor-
mance of I’ve Lost You Only to Discover That I Have Gone Missing, Rose expresses the affective
impact of witnessing, “Thank you, so much expressed from what we talked about—to our
work together—and the dancers today! I felt such a mix of feelings—recognising the hurt,
hope, care, sadness, joy, anger, fear, and, on we go” (April, 28, 2017, Dementia Friendly
performance at Crouch End Festival).
Through witnessing the performance in its entirety (rather than the earlier bespoke family
dances), Rose’s words chime with the complex and slippery nature of affecting as the “with-
ness of the movement of the world” (Manning 2007, xxi) and its continuity as a collective
endeavor.
Conclusion: “Response-ability” (2050)

In ending this writing, I move with/in the future-present (Braidotti 2013). By 2050, over
135 million people worldwide will have dementia (Sauer 2013). What will the future of
dance and choreographic practices look like this then? During this time of global, social,
economic, and political crisis, our “task,” as Haraway asserts, “… is to become capable, with
each other in all of our bumptious kinds of response” (2016, 2). The proposition of an eco-
logical awareness in practice—one that attends to the liminal spaces between performance,
choreography, and the politics of everyday life—requires a feminist new materialist ethics of
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“response-ability”: developing the capacity of response (Haraway 2016). I speak to an affec-

tive future choreography and am with Brian Massumi, who says that “affect is proto-political
… it concerns the first stirrings of the political, flush with the intensities of life. Its politics
must be brought out” (2015, ix). Arguably, the political and ethical imperative is to link
always to affective entanglements, in the creative process and in everyday life. As such, the
political implications for co-composing remind us that we can find kin-aesthetic intimacy
with more-than-human forces at work in any one moment.
Kin-aesthetic co-composition (whether artistic, clinical, or in everyday life) involves the
ethics and politics of entangled intra-relating (Barad 2007) that defy the humanist notion of
the subject as separate and individuated, instead offering a moving kinship: possibilities to grow
new bodies that increase the capacity for progressive relating. This chapter speaks to this
claim—that dancing collectively, co-creating (the) material, reinstates bodying as an ethics of
collective accountability, offering more-than human rights by dislocating the human at the
central starting point and offering an antidote to the national body politic that propagates a
fiction of the stable and unified self.
The legacy of Moving Kinship is its capacity to situate choreographic and performance prac-
tices and dementia within the broader political economy, tangled with family, medical contexts,
social, and political discourses about aging, illness, loss, the brain, and dis/ability. It shifts our
attention away from “responsible for” and draws us toward a “response-ability” yet to come.
Cultivating the capacity for responding cannot solely be approached using logic, reason, or
language. In a time where a hypercognitive view holds currency across the global North, and
where neo-liberalist ideals permeate arts, education, and health policies and cultivate a culture
of anthropocentric individualism, Moving Kinship is an aesthetic, relational embodied response
to moving with the complexity of the more-than-human in everyday life. It is a reimagining of
response-ability carved into the artistic process—a movement refrain that has the potential to
enact subtle and incremental changes and make a space for the unimagined in our everyday lives.
If we allow ourselves to engage with the multilayered and multicausal ethics and politics of mov-
ing and being moved in choreography and performance, we can enfold our stories in relating
and enrich our perceptions—in ways that are more than aesthetic, that are processual, sensorial,
layered, timely, that allow for hopeful dancing with human and more-than-human others.
Notes
1 The ongoing project is supported by Arts Council England in partnership with the Bergen
International Festival, Dementia Pathfinders, St George’s NHS, Merton Arts Space, Dementia
Action Alliance, Public Health England, Grieg Academy of Music - University of Bergen,
Alexandra Palace, and Created Out of Mind at the Wellcome Hub, UK. This project was granted
ethical clearance from the University of Roehampton, London and all participants have consented
to anonymity waver.
2 There are many different types of dementia, broadly categorized as Alzheimer’s disease, vascular
dementia, dementia from Parkinson’s disease and similar disorders, dementia with Lewy bodies,
frontotemporal dementia (Pick’s disease), and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
3 I refer to all dancers by their first names.
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8
MOVING AS A THOUGHT
PROCESS
The practice of choreography and stillness
Naomi Lefebvre Sell with Tara Silverthorn and Lucille Teppa
Introduction
This chapter will explore how the role of mindfulness and, importantly, the practice of
stillness impact upon the lived experience of dance making within choreographic practice
and pedagogy. It considers how their integration might shift embodied processes within the
studio environment. Although contemporary dance practice shares many of the principles
embedded within mindfulness and has been interrogated by somatic practitioners such as
Martha Eddy (2016) and Sondra Fraleigh (2014), there is little documentation of how mind-
fulness can inform choreographic practice and pedagogy.
We, as three coauthors and dance practitioners, will discuss a collaborative dance
making project, Moving as a Thought Process, which began over ten years ago and initially
introduced a mindfulness approach as an essential element of the studio practice. The research
fostered a methodology where a refinement of the “felt sense” (Gendlin [1978] 2003) was
embodied, articulated and documented through the writing of scores compositions of
improvisational agreements or frameworks, all of which were designed collectively. A lexi-
con that evolved from the research will be introduced and the mechanics of the studio prac-
tice will be outlined, illustrating how the reflective methods informed and shaped how we, as
practitioners/researchers, engaged with moving and making within each phase and how we
shared this practice with others. Throughout the process, we have captured and distilled the
research through several multi-modal outputs, including a film entitled Moving as a Thought
Process: An Insight into Mindfulness through Dance and Choreography (2016) developed with Jason
Brooks, workshops and presentations addressing a wide variety of delegates and participants,
from academics to children in the UK and Hong Kong.
We will reflect on how a perspective on mindfulness and stillness calls on concepts of felt
sense and will discuss how, as dance artists, we approached the idea of presence and mindful-
ness in a context of dance making while also advocating the inclusion of time for stillness
within pedagogical dance environments and encouraging practitioners to consider dance
making as a far less goal-oriented process. Drawing on the discourses of mindfulness and
somatic practices, the chapter will explore the ways in which the studio methodologies can
expand dance making and pedagogy, extending understanding of felt experiences within
choreographic processes.
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Naomi Lefebvre Sell et al.
Addressing mindfulness
The practice of mindfulness stems from the teachings of the Buddha. Within Buddhist teach-
ings, mindfulness is an integral practice, but by no means, is it an end point. The purpose
is the direct perception of the reality of this moment, irrespective of any preconceptions or
preferences. We construct our reality partly in the chain of a continuous narrative that has
been handed down to us. If it is possible to unlearn our reactions to things, the direct experi-
ence of a thing is going to be more poignant/immediate, and more accessible than a standing
narrative. The sole purpose of engaging with mindfulness is to be more fully engaged in the
direct experience of the moment itself, which implies the disengagement of the narrative
of preference or aesthetic. One understanding of presence could be the direct perception of
the truth in being with whatever it is. Meditation and mindfulness practices are often mar-
keted as a panacea to all modern ills, without the inconvenience of removing oneself from
modern life. An increased awareness does not exclude feelings of discomfort given that as
we encounter ourselves and our responses in the present through the mindfulness practice,
but first there needs to be a willingness to engage. As articulated by researcher and clinician
Jon Kabat-Zinn (2013) and practitioner and teacher Trevor Leggett (1987), the appropriate
application of mindfulness includes a fearless, unflinching awareness. Within a creative con-
text, such an awareness can be innovating and transformative, contributing to the process
of choice making through refining the understanding of individual responses and reactions.
For example, a workshop participant commented on the generative challenge of identifying
“one” movement when engaging with an improvisation. He was only able to reflect on that
experience as a result of his unflinching awareness, which was brought to the surface through
the designing of a workshop that houses mindfulness principles.
The practice of mindfulness, although not often identified as a dance somatic modal-
ity, shares many of the principles of somatic traditions, such as Authentic Movement and
Body-Mind Centering ©, particularly “the concerns with accessing a quiet and still place
from which to begin moving, and a focus on attending to the body’s own inherent wisdom
through encouraging a state where a ‘beginner’s body’ is the source for moving” (Whatley
and Lefebvre Sell 2014, 441). This point of view, or place of departure, is sourced in embrac-
ing the experience of not knowing, remaining receptive to the changing daily body; there is
always the potential for the noticing of difference.
Approaching being still

We three collaborators have come to think of stillness as a dynamic and potentially vibrant
place of opportunity and possibility, where time may seem to alter in quality, becoming more
tangible: thick or light, stretched or brief, loud or silent, blooming, or condensing. “Dynamic
Stillness” is used in this context to describe a space in which judgment and thoughts, thoughts
here as the mind’s chatter, may be briefly suspended and diffused, leaving room for the body’s
senses to perceive the present. Through a daily integrated sitting practice, these Dynamic
Stillness experiences may permeate movement enquiries, providing the ground for deep
listening and creative openings. There is potential for this quiet place to be exited suddenly
and with much lightness, or not, within the context of this movement and stillness practice.
The acuteness of listening, facilitated by the practice of attending to stillness, can create a
readiness to respond and change with a physical immediacy.
Our relationship to stillness and our definitions thereof have evolved over the years
through the varying encounters. The research began in 2007 with Lefebvre Sell’s doctoral
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Moving as a Thought Process
research where she was in the role of choreographer as researcher and while Silverthorn and
Teppa were participants within a group of four dancers. Work was focused toward the mak-
ing of a full evening–length work, dharmakaya (Lefebvre Sell 2008). A sitting meditation
practice was introduced, as the research closely investigated the effects of a particular medita-
tive approach on the dance making process, which participants all shared and practiced daily.
Zen sitting meditation was a learned practice, guided by a certified Yoga and meditation
teacher and followed by Dharma talks (the teachings of the Buddha). Whatley and Lefebvre
Sell state that:
The sitting Zen meditation was taught as a way to achieve a greater experience of

the self; a reflective practice where the participant becomes an observer of herself.
The practitioner is just “being”, staying and returning to the breath, doing nothing,
with no thought of right or wrong, while also refraining from thoughts of judge-
ment. (2014, 444)
In 2016, the research established itself within a trio, with Lefebvre Sell, Silverthorn and Teppa
propelling it collaboratively, without traditional performer/choreographer roles and, as a
result of the collective agency of the trio, everything within the studio practice could be once
again questioned. For example meditating, the term that was employed during the original
phase of research, became sitting: a change in vocabulary that revealed a shift in approach.
The change could be described as an integration of practice and learned techniques, as well
as a movement away from the language generated by the specificities of the doctoral research
(and of Buddhist practice per se). Via the integrative effects of time, over the course of three
years, the work arrived toward a more secular standpoint, as a result of our varying beliefs as
participants, as well as an expanded appreciation of the potential of dance to be a modality
within which embodied understandings of mindfulness may be already deeply embedded.
New emphasis was brought to personal and differing, yet relatable, relationships to thought
processes, sensation and the felt sense within the still, sensate body. We realized through daily
collaborative studio practice that we took pleasure in different ways of approaching being
still. Thus sitting, rather than meditating, as a frame and a time to be in stillness somewhere
between active and relaxed, became the foundation for an experience of Dynamic Stillness.
Over time and through rigorous experimentation, this experience, unmeasurable, uncon-
trollable, ungraspable, could transform into or arrive within, movement.
The breath
A sitting practice allows the time and quiet to bring awareness to one’s breathing. Approached
in this way, via an attention of noticing as opposed to changing or controlling, the breath offers
glimpses into how the practitioner is doing in the present, now and now and now... Beginning
with the breathing, the door is open to the sensate body in present time. Eddy states that:
In order to slow down and feel the body, it is important to also be able to hear one’s
breath, heart rate and physiological rhythms. Quiet supports sensitization to subtle
body cues. (2016, 238)
The emphasis on “noticing” as opposed to “controlling” is key. It is a philosophy that filters

through into moving and relating in action, and its existence fosters and deepens a relation-
ship to the self and specifically, to the dancing body that has the potential to be of health.
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If the practitioner’s task is to constantly notice then, by implication, they must first constantly
listen and hear. By focusing on the action of listening and noticing, they sensitize to the
body’s subtle voices and are enabled deeper insight into the self. We began by attending to the
breath in all its now-ness and nuance, including pace, emotional tone, shallowness or depth.
By lightly holding an attitude of favoring observation over judgment, we encourage our
capacity to recognize, attend to and, importantly, embrace the myriad of bodily sensations.
Broadening this further, as we begin with the breath in stillness, we may be led to a greater
attunement toward what is also outside of us: space, ground, objects, and Others. The cre-
ative implications of these layers of awareness, between which the dancer perceptually and
physically flickers, enfold and unfold in and out of each other endlessly. As experimental
dancer and choreographer, Steve Paxton so succinctly puts it: “The palette of the dancer
exists as sensations in the body” (Material for the Spine, 2008, 1 min. 18 sec.–1 min. 22 sec.).
Through the practice of simply sitting and observing one’s breath, internal and shared cre-
ative environments can be cultivated as spaces where the stress of being this or that, of achieving
this or that, can be at least momentarily alleviated, suspended or dissolved. This new perspective
can permeate through into the relationship to oneself and thus perhaps allow for a less frag-
mented, richer and more spacious experience within dancing. Dancing can then become less
concerned with pleasing and more to do with being engaged in the creative process.
Inevitably, as anyone who has spent time observing their breath might know, by bringing
awareness to the breathing and following its journey, the breathing changes. It may alter in
tempo, quality, depth, emotional tone. Following this to its logical conclusion, by noticing
or observing any bodily sensation or state, the sensation or state changes in our perception.
From this conscious perspective, the body can transform into an endless stream of alterations:
I notice, I change, I notice the change, I change again, etc. The body artfully does this itself.
In an action of sensing–observing, the person can become an always-new source of inspira-
tion and reflection, even in habit. The dancer’s perpetual familiarity with themselves might
be a deeply generative constraint: a terrain walked a thousand times, each time led down a
different path, river or rabbit hole to see the land living in a new light.
Lexicon
Below is a lexicon of terms developed and adopted over the years through the studio-based
practice that will help the reader to navigate the forthcoming text. These terms arose through
the need to articulate and differentiate physical and perceptual experiences, generating a
structure and a shared language with which we could exchange and develop our practice.
Pathway: At the core of our daily practice is a flexible dance making score or frame-
work, made from a succession of Containers that allow us to move through different
modes of presence and activity. Here movement and stillness take place and merge.
Container: A Pathway is constituted of Containers; predetermined frames of time,
which have a constraint placed upon the activity being engaged with for that length
of time. The container defines what we will do and for how long. Some Containers
are listed here.
Mindful Moving: At the intersection between improvising and meditating, Mindful
Moving nonetheless has deep choreographic potential for clarity of experience and
relationship. An individual experience, yet not disconnected from the shared envi-
ronment and others, it has the quality of coexistence.
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Improvisation: Within our research, improvisation is more actively compositional

in approach, free-flow and instantaneous in articulation; the acknowledgement
and imaginative utilization of relationships to space and others creates connections
which inform conscious design.
Mindful Walking: A Mindful Moving Container where the content is to do with
walking only.
Repeat: A Container for physical recollection providing an opportunity to revisit
one’s original choices and thought processes within a predetermined timeframe.
Collectables: Repeatable choreographic materials or named movement themes and
tasks that can be engaged with further.
Pathways
Our daily practices and questions were both generated and interrogated through the com-
posing of “Pathways,” flexible dance making scores that are made of timed frameworks for
experience which we named “Containers.” The Pathways allowed us to systematically move
through different modes of presence and activity and created environments for movement
and stillness to emerge and merge.
Our use of Pathways holds similarities to dancer and founding member of contact
improvisation Nancy Stark Smith’s method of “Underscore,” in evolution since 1990
(Stark Smith 2017, n.p.). In her descriptions of the score, she articulates how its purposes
and outcomes are “bringing your focus into the present situation, arriving into the present
moment and becoming present in your body” (n.p.). Stark Smith addresses the Underscores
as “a vehicle for incorporating Contact Improvisation into a broader arena of improvisa-
tional dance practice; for developing greater ease dancing in spherical space—alone and
with others; and for integrating kinesthetic and compositional concerns while improvis-
ing” (n.p.). This in turn allows for a “full spectrum of energetic and physical expressions,
embodying a range of forms and changing states” (n.p.). Stark Smith does not explicitly
state connections to mindfulness, but her language within the score implies a relationship;
for example, her emphasis on “the present moment” (n.p.). Indrani Margolin suggests
that “dance and spirituality are intimately interwoven in the embodied practice of inner-
directed movement” and that within improvisational dance we begin with a “mover’s
inward undivided attention toward bodily impulses to sense, feel and move” (2014, 144).
As we have experienced within the multiple Pathways, impulses arise and are acknowl-
edged when the body is “continually invited to express its wisdom” (144). As Margolin
suggests, this involves surrendering to an “inner consciousness that arises in the form of
images, sensations, feelings or visions when the mover remains receptive to the presence
within her body” (144).
An image we use to represent our different practices within the studio and their relation-
ships is that of a bento box, “Mindful Moving” (see below) being the main box holding all
of the other Containers. It is a physical way of being which carries through and supports all
other developments within our chosen Pathway.
The named Containers that a Pathway might include are Mindful Moving, Improvisation,
Arriving/Sitting, Creative Encounters, Choreography/Collectables, Repeat, and Mindful Walking.
At times when we felt stuck or as though the process needed a shift, new Containers were
born, creating the opportunity for a different journey, and previously un-felt comparisons
and reflections to take place.
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Mindful moving and the choreographic undercurrent

Mindful Moving is a method we first developed in 2007. Mindful Moving is a way of being
and moving that is invested in releasing the cerebral noise of the mind and its judgments on
form or choice making: a moving extension of the still sitting practice. This is not to say that
Mindful Moving is without its own design, but this may feel incidental—bodies compose and
recompose space and time constantly in an evolving landscape that can sometimes rise up from
inside and catch one by surprise. As Fraleigh states:“All movement has rhythm and spatial design,
at once and inseparably. Time is a concept; it is made concrete for us in moving bodies” (1987,
179). The content of the movement may then arise through the slowing-down or stretching of
impulses, bringing attention to the moment of the motion’s happening, and the multiplicity of
potential detours and sensations inside of one movement. Awareness and tracking of sensation
are key aspects of Mindful Moving, and its unfoldment blooms and evolves therefrom. This has
implications for bringing our habitual choices as human beings who dance into greater con-
sciousness. Eddy discusses her approach to mindful movement in relation to somatic practice:
Mindful movement is being present whilst moving. It is aligned with “mindfulness”
but does not require the practice of Buddhist or other forms of meditation per se...
Somatic exploration requires deep presence and is equivalent to mindfulness if one does
not become preoccupied or judgmental of one’s bodily sensations. Meditation practice
can make somatic awareness much easier, and the reverse is also true. (2016, 264)
Through the daily practice of Mindful Moving and its rigorous comparison and differentia-
tion from improvisation, we have come to largely recognize its attributes as not being ori-
ented toward production, the mover following the internal landscape of sensation, remaining
within a similar state of awareness as that of a sitting, transiting from a still body to a moving
body or the other way around.
We have found that Mindful Moving and improvisation have the potential to merge and
bleed together, causing us to redefine our understanding of them. For example, you may feel
that you are following an internal landscape of sensation within the container of improvi-
sation and, equally, you may suddenly feel a sense of spatial design or connection within a
Mindful Moving container. However, within these definitions, we respect that the actual
experience differs from person to person and on a daily basis. Through practicing and articu-
lating how we each experienced Mindful Moving, we arrived at the term feedback-ing: the
self-contained, light-speed, looping conversation that happens between physical intelligence
and conscious recognition, informing what may or may not unfold in the dance. Sensation
informs experience informs movement informs sensation… Eddy provides a clear physi-
ological breakdown of such a feedback-ing process:
The information that arrives through the nerves of the senses to the spinal cord as
well as to low, middle, and high brain areas influences our motor responses. Our
movement is, in turn, monitored by sensory feedback. It is this cycle of informa-
tion that makes sensory awareness possible—we sense, we interpret these sensations
(as perceptions and feelings) and we reflect on them—making meaning from our
experiences. (2016, 208)
New information arriving “through the nerves of the senses” could be seen as the perception
of a difference within, around or in relation to the body: a new place of contact, a change
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in texture, a shifted distribution of weight, an orientation in space, etc. Mindful Moving

aims to provide space and time for the body to think and the mind to move. It is a practice
of noticing differences while witnessing one’s own mind traveling, within the boundaries of
the body, and coming to different places of attention: a surface, an extremity, a volume, etc.
In Steps to an Ecology of Mind, anthropologist Gregory Bateson explains:
When I strike the head of a nail with a hammer, an impulse is transmitted to its point.
But it is a semantic error, a misleading metaphor, to say that what travels in an axon is
an “impulse”. It could correctly be called “news of a difference”. ([1972] 2000, 460)
The practice of Mindful Moving encourages one to pay attention to one’s own succession of
news of a difference carried and feedbacked through the nervous system.
Noticing differences does not necessarily imply making any alterations. The various
Containers, modes of activity, identified and developed through our practice change in the
way these differences, as new information, are treated. In Mindful Moving, one may notice
a specific relationship in the space, note it, and decide to let it pass. However, this informa-
tion could be treated differently within an improvisation Container, for instance, responding
with spontaneity to observations. There are an infinite number of differences within and
around the body that can potentially be noticed or be missed: opportunities for reacting to
one’s own body, to space, sound or others, which can either be followed or left unfulfilled.
These differences feel like many open doors around us, the thresholds of which we can
decide to cross or not, offering potential to change the course of the dance. The constant
presence of those many doors and the decisions that they imply, layered with the awareness
of such potentialities, constitutes an invisible choreographic current running underneath.
Creative encounters and collectables

Another Container, Creative Encounters, emerged from an understanding that this research
is contextualized by a drive toward dance making. Therefore, we engaged in a process of
distilling, where moments of physical, perceptual or relational clarity gleaned were given
permission to be artistically framed as Creative Encounters. These could subsequently be
identified as Collectables. They would emerge from a particular thought, sensation or image
and therefore could be recycled or reexperienced within a Pathway. Collectables can there-
fore be resources to draw upon in other contexts as well as dances in their own right.
Pedagogy
Reflecting on another axis of the research, a complementary strand, our interest in pedagogy,
we have facilitated dance making workshops with various groups throughout the course
of our studio practice that weave the developed principles through them. We have had the
privilege of delivering workshops for over 200 people, from primary school-aged children
and young dancers in professional training, postgraduate students within Choreography and
Scenography, along with delegates of conferences and differently abled dancers. Preference
has been toward delivering workshops as series so that the content and physical experiences
can be built and reflected upon over time.
This research advocates for the inclusion of time for stillness within pedagogical and
choreographic environments and has brought us to the recognition of the potential in under-
standing dance making as a far less goal-oriented process than it is often thought to be.
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Our aim was to foster a creative environment for movement and stillness to be explored by
the students within the framework of a dance workshop. We aimed to reveal principles of
mindfulness through the moving and still body, demonstrating that dance can be a great ves-
sel for engaging with the present moment. For example, some students discovered that their
bodies could be a source of creativity. For others, the work enabled them to pose interesting
philosophical questions about their own physical practice and engagement in the studio.
For instance, one participant reflected, “What is one movement?,” whereas a child partici-
pant commented on an altered appreciation of what dance can be, saying “we think of dance
as movement and not necessarily stillness.”
Workshop activities were based on principles from our studio practice: meeting and
integrating stillness, attending to felt sense of time and the body in the present, as well as
attending to breath and sensation (becoming your own witness) while encouraging a reflec-
tive approach both physically and verbally. This way of engaging students is in line with
Fraleigh’s concept of “holding presence,” where you, as the teacher, are present with the
“stories” of your students. Fraleigh suggests that,
...one of the ways we learn how to hold presence without expectation or judgement
is through the practice of meditation: sitting as a conduit between earth and heaven,
attending to the breath and humming vibrations through the body to let go of any
concerns or worries. (2014, 248)
In terms of pedagogy, for some dancers who are unfamiliar with working somatically, a
mindfulness approach can be a valuable way to encourage a highly disciplined, quieter and
more self-reflective way of moving and making. Fraleigh’s view is that “when dance is taught
or practiced from a somatic point of view, it takes on a set of values associated with percep-
tual knowledge and experience” (252). This current research has validated these findings and
practical outcomes. It has brought confidence in our methods employed as teachers, and it
continues to inform and provoke self-reflection. Students responded to our offerings with
engagement and curiosity throughout the different tasks. They particularly appreciated mov-
ing across the space and improvising in partners; one of them commented, “your ideas can
become dance.” We appreciated the way they communicated with us and their generosity
when feeding back. Among their observations, they noticed that it was possible to be quiet
and still together (referring to the practice of stillness). As a homework task, we had asked
them to be still for one minute at home, in their own time, which generated interesting
reflections and comments including: “it felt relaxing to have your own moment,” “it helped
me focus on my homework,” “it was like the rest of the world was standing still and I was
moving through it,” “being still helps you to re-set your whole body,” “I was able to clear
my mind.” The responses fed our research, confirming its great potential as work that can be
shared with and benefit others beyond dance training and studio practice for professionals, in
different environments and contexts.
Movement of the mind

The daily practice of moving through varying Pathways with awareness and reflection offers
a structure for the refinement of the felt sense. The term “felt sense” was coined by American
philosopher and psychologist Eugene Gendlin through the development of the Focusing
Technique, which can be viewed as a meditative approach to psychotherapy and personal
growth. In his book, Focusing, Gendlin, describes the felt sense as a “special kind of internal
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bodily awareness,” suggesting that “[a] felt sense is usually not just there, it must form”
([1978] 2003, 10). This notion implies that the felt sense can be accessed through a movement
inward with the mind’s eye. The process of entering a Pathway together drew attention to
how stillness may be creatively generative. Stillness allows us to draw closer to the minutia of
experience, to become aware of how we relate to such details in our experiential world, and
to decide or intuit where we might go with them.
As well as the more nameable specificities of experience, the felt sense also includes the
vague and less definable—the “murky” (Gendlin [1978] 2003, 10). In Gendlin’s terms,
the felt sense can be “meaningful, but not known” (10). Our studio practice gives value to
the notion of unknown as a space of potential, in fact, a place of choreographic interest in
and of itself. Purposefully entering stillness encourages a dwelling in the unknown, rather
than avoiding it.
Repetition
Repetition relies on processes of idealization, techniques or technologies of external-

ization, forms of retention, spacing and the tracing of relations between past and future.
Inextricably bound to the construction and deconstruction of habit, tradition and
identity, the movement of repetition follows a task of (self-)inheritance along chains
of counter-signatures as so many re-cognitions, re-readings, re-enactments, re-uses, re-
affirmations and re-appropriations of all that remains. (Kartsaki 2016, 17)
During the studio practice, we became interested in having an experience of time in its dura-
tion, confronting the time of the clock with the time felt. This is how the practice of repeti-
tion emerged; repeating movement experiences became a way of testing our perceptions of
time. We questioned whether we could not only regenerate the movement once created, but
also locate it as a felt-time experience.
Referring to Fraleigh’s suggestion of “wordless dances” (2015, xxviii), to create a dance
wordlessly, for us is to value the inherent wisdom of the dance as an unfolding of embodied
decisions taken and connections once felt. The desire to re-feel, to re-imagine and re-embody
such internal maps, fluctuating between remaining faithful to and re-kindling the old expe-
rience, necessarily unclasping what once was in order to renegotiate what has changed, is
potentially an optimistic gesture toward present time that constitutes choreography. Indeed,
in the process of working with scores, the Pathways themselves becoming maps to navigate,
organizing an artful and often generative impossibility, a notion supported by dance practi-
tioners Sabina Holzer and Defne Erdur:
Scores often imply a challenge—impossibility therefore a certain failure. The com-

plex process of translating something into another medium (often language into a
kind of action/situation) is embraced with the curiosity that this failure can create
an unexpected outcome. Impossibilities can lead to something one would never
have imagined. (2018, n.p.)
We questioned: “how does a Container feel when repeated, repeated, and repeated again?”
The process of physically recollecting unset movement appeared to be rather complex,
naturally punctuated by many blank moments when our memories simply could not recall
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anything. In a wordless process of recollection we, together and alone, worked on dealing
with these vibrant moments of void: seemingly a contradiction. As past moments within our
time felt had now vanished, we had to negotiate with ourselves and with the others between
what remained there with us and what was lost. This repeat Container became about recol-
lecting and letting go at the same time. Repeating, within this particular context, became
an impossible task: one which can be accurate and precise at times yet never fully achieved,
always incomplete in one way or another, even unfaithful sometimes as we get tricked by our
own memory. Movements, pauses, thoughts have to be lost along the way for the repeat task
to happen. Attempting to both individually and collaboratively navigate such an impossible
task, this Container opened a space where vulnerability and freedom could coexist, requir-
ing us to give sense to what can never be perfect, learning to give value to an outcome that
will be, per se, partial and inaccurate. Performance practitioner and writer Eirini Kartsaki
describes a similar process:
...before repetition actually takes place, the signature—a paradoxically sin-

gular performance of an iterable mark—is always already haunted by the pos-
sibility of “its” coming counter-signature, “the time and place of the other
time already at work, altering from the start the start itself, the f irst time, the
at once” (Derrida 1990, 62). To avow this virtual possibility of repetition—
repeat-ability—in modes of radical performativity... is to take up an attitude
(Haltung) of non-mastery in any given context, or else: to a being-in-rehearsal.
(2016, 17)
Throughout our process, this delicate space has proved to hold potential for creativity and the
arrival of dances. Attempting direct repeats of particular Containers became another method
for reflecting physically on the past and present. To repeat a Container already brought us
into choreographic terrain, where spatial, corporeal and temporal relationships were recon-
tacted and reevaluated through the experience of doing.
In Science and Sanity, scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski, inspired by the words of
mathematician Eric Temple Bell “the map is not the thing mapped” (Bell cited by Korzybski
1994, 58), wrote that “the map is not the territory it represents…” (Korzybski 1994, 58).
In Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Gregory Bateson elaborates:
We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory? Operationally,
somebody went out with a retina or a measuring stick and made representations
which were then put-upon paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of
what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you
push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of
maps. The territory never gets in at all. (2000, 460)
[…]
Always the process of representation filters it out so that the mental world is
only maps of maps of maps, ad infinitum. All phenomena are literally “appearances”.
(460–461)
[…]
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At every step, as a difference is transformed and propagated along its pathway, the
embodiment of the difference before the step is a “territory” of which the embodi-
ment after the step is a “map”. The map–territory relation obtains at every step. (461)
The process of repeating, as experienced in the studio, illustrates Bateson’s thoughts.

The impossible task of repeating a timeframe of Mindful Moving or improvisation implies
recollecting the many differences noticed, in their variety and complexity, and whether
reacted upon or not, to revisit, recontact, and reevaluate what happened before. Yet the
outcome of this process itself is bound to be slightly different each time given that the new
timeframe, to repeat, also provides space for discoveries to be made and for new news of dif-
ference to be noticed. The repeat is a representation (map) of what is repeated (territory) and
the process of repetition itself has potential to turn into an endless series of maps. What this
points to is a philosophy of the acceptance of change, where one can never rest on fixity, and
embracing the present difference becomes an art.
Ethics of practice and agency

The studio environment that has grown throughout this project promoted a sense of agency.
The necessary sharing of experiences has facilitated an attempted understanding of each oth-
er’s individual processes and the differences and similarities of experience that reside within
the practices. The collaborative and nonhierarchical platform, with three voices consciously
questioning and contributing equally to the process, as well as a willingness and commitment
to try, have enabled an open inquiry to exist and flourish. For example, when we design a
Pathway, an unspoken method has emerged of pausing to allow each person to contribute.
We do not disregard any options or combinations until we have tried them. Through the
shared principles regarding this collective environment, which have evolved over time, we
have relatable experiences, evidenced through a developing and meaningful language, which
fosters the generation of scores, permits the articulation of findings and propels the research
in many directions.
Daily-ness
Our process has been centered around the structuring of the Containers, creating Pathways.
Experimenting with repetition and reconfiguration of these Containers was the core activity
within the studio. Through our daily practice we made a decision to pre-plan and keep a trace
in writing of the different Pathways as we realized that each morning the negotiation of this was
influenced by our physical and personal needs on that specific day.These needs could be identi-
fied as, for instance, a wish to start on the floor, a wish to work separately, or a wish to move with
others in contact. We decided to pre-plan the order in advance (the previous day for the next),
which supported the shuffling/validating process and encouraged a sense of new. This shuffling
process allowed us to notice how the knowledge of the coming Container affected the way we
approached and practiced in the now while also allowing us to experiment with the flexibility
of the structure, attempting to exhaust all of the different possibilities instead of establishing
rituals (Illustrations 8.1 through 8.3).
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Illustration 8.1 Pathway # 1. Artist: Naomi Lefebvre Sell.
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Relational trio
Our roles within this project, as three artist researchers coming together, have resided in
dancer, choreographer and researcher at once. This has allowed us to offer differing per-
sonal experiences in order to contribute to the collective understanding, with the sensate
body positioned at the heart of the research, becoming the source of enquiry. These deci-
sions and positions have come about because of and through working with the practices of
stillness and mindfulness over the years. These reference points have facilitated pervading
qualities of agency and non-hierarchy, both in our studio relationship and in the practices
we foster: one practice is not favored over another. For example, we do not deem Mindful
Moving more important than improvisation within a Pathway given that the practice of
one enables critical reflection upon the other. All are necessary, complementary and inte-
grated, and indeed are born of each other. The making therefore becomes the practice and
vice versa, always with the potential for the choreographic undercurrent to arise and be
acknowledged.
The relational trio constellation opens many doors in terms of how one speaks of
choreography. As three artist researchers, we have been sharing studios, conducting the
same research with a common understanding, yet having different lights to shine on the
questions and processes in hand through the ways we have channeled and processed this
entire work begun in 2007, having let it filter through our professional and personal
experiences.
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Language
“The map is not the territory it represents” and, equally, “the word is not the thing”
(Korzybski 1994, 58). Similarly, when philosopher of language, Ludwig Wittgenstein, wrote
that “we name things and then we can talk about them” (1958, 13), he was underlining our
inclination to use names to talk about things, most of the time forgetting what is obvious:
that those names are not the things themselves. As Bateson articulates, “The word ‘cat’ has
no fur and cannot scratch” (2000, 178). Artist René Magritte illustrated this map–territory
relation concept in the famous painting entitled The Treachery of Images (1928–1929), which
is the drawing of a pipe with a caption indicating, in French: Ceci n’est pas une pipe (“This is
not a pipe”). To some extent, words, just like Magritte’s painting, are a representation of the
thing they define.
Translating movement experiences into words and expressing physical meaning and
embodied knowing through writing, involving transposing them from one set of signs
(sensed, felt and experienced) to another semiotic language, is an impossible task to be nego-
tiated, for words are limited symbols that always fail to capture movement experiences as a
whole in their many layers of complexity. They provide verbal maps to the territory of dance.
Just as Bateson pointed at what he thought was a semantic error (as mentioned earlier:
“impulse” versus “news of a difference”), the expressions being mindful and being embod-
ied, used to describe a sense of presence, could also be potentially semantically misleading
because they inherently impose a sense of separation between body and mind. Their etymol-
ogy alone immediately seems to hint at a preference, of mind over body or body over mind;
almost suggesting that possibly one could be more engaged and active than the other in the
action of being present. Yet, as written by Eddy, “we are not integrating body and mind: they
are already one” (2016, 246). Independently from movement form or technique, dancing
might be about being both embodied and mindful at once, or neither embodied nor mindful
but something else, which one can feel and experience yet will always fail to describe in its
entirety, in words. Fraleigh points to this with precision:
We don’t always have words for such experiential knowing, but we can try to say
something about our experiences and how they change or transform us. Not every-
thing needs to be said, of course. There are so many wordless dances to do. (2015,
xxviii)
Conclusion
The research has led to deeper experiential understanding and untangling of terms such as
mindfulness, improvisation and Mindful Moving within this particular project and within
the wider context of dance making. This separation of terms for the purposes of clarification
and understanding has brought about the creation of original scores for Mindful Moving,
Dynamic Stillness and choreography to occur, merge and coexist (see Illustrations 8.1
through 8.3).
The practice-based research created a space in which we could relate to each other and
to ourselves in new and transformative ways. This has bled out of the studio, shared through
documentation, pedagogy, discussion and studio performance, and it will form the founda-
tions of the choreographic unfolding of our research to come. We have many questions that
are currently fermenting. We wonder about share-ability: Can the layers and complexities of
the way we attend to presence in this work be shared without becoming “packaged”? Can
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“a dance” be constructed meaningfully through our methods and scores without compro-
mising on the rigor of the practice? What could that look like and is it even necessary? How
can what we do in the studio continue to be brought to people in a meaningful way?
Pedagogically, this work is important because it supports dance artists to widen their
curiosity and prepare for and sustain a career in the diverse and fluid world of contemporary
dance. The dance making methods developed can offer ways of renewing their creative prac-
tice as well as refine their performative encounters.
There can be no end point to this work, because there is no ultimate goal. We are
not seeking a perfected state of mindful dancing, nor are we wishing that on others. What
we appreciate and value are spaces where it is possible to creatively follow what is present. We
are interested in nurturing these spaces. Making dances is our medium, but there is potential
to stimulate discussions in other fields, which we have already begun, or for anyone who
considers their pursuits as creative.
The work that has taken place reflects a valuing of phenomena, some of which are con-
sidered pejorative within our contemporary culture: boredom, nonproductivity, slow-
ness, wordlessness, inaccuracy, encouraging a beginner’s mind versus being an expert, and
the coexistence of difference. In addition to this, we cherish a sustainable and cooperative
collaboration for the making of dance. In these respects, this work can be considered an
interconnected part of a radical shift in thinking that extends beyond the studio walls as it
influences and filters culturally and ethically into our lives and interactions, both professional
and personal. The tentacles of the research have extended outward and wrapped back inward,
via workshops with diverse groups of people, sharings with dance practitioners, formal and
informal talks and cross-disciplinary engagements.
What remains clear from the long undoing and disseminating of the original starting point,
dharmakaya (Lefebvre Sell 2008), is a sense of ongoingness, of the many creative unfoldments
made possible through time and as a result of “staying with” something together. The con-
tinued interest in refreshing the “beginner’s mind” is both fostered by the approaches of the
studio research and simultaneously keeps us moving. This chapter is an attempt at scratching
the surface of the body of thought and experiential knowing that staying with this work has
generated, although not everything needs to be said. There are, of course, so many wordless
dances to do (Fraleigh 2015).
References
Bateson, Gregory. 2000. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and
Epistemology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1990. Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Eddy, Martha. 2016. Mindful Movement:The Evolution of the Somatic Arts and Conscious Action. Bristol: Intellect.
Fraleigh, Sondra. 1987. Dance and the Lived Body. Pittsburg, PA: University of Pittsburg.
———. 2014. “Permission and the Making of Consciousness.” In Dance, Somatics and Spiritualities:
Contemporary Sacred Narratives, edited by Amanda Williamson, Glenna Batson, Sarah Whatley, and
Rebecca Weber, 239–260. Bristol: Intellect.
———. 2015. Moving Consciously: Somatic Transformations through Dance,Yoga, and Touch. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press.
Gendlin, Eugene T. (1978) 2003. Focusing: How to Gain Direct Access to Your Body’s Knowledge. London: Rider.
Holzer, Sabina and Defne Erdur. n.d. On Scores. Accessed July 2, 2018. http://mindthedance.
com/#article/52/on-scores.
Kabat-Zinn, Jon. 2013. Full Catastrophe Living. New York: Bantam Books.
Kartsaki, Eirini. 2016. On Repetition:Writing, Performance and Art. Bristol: Intellect.
Korzybski, Alfred. 1994. Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics.
Fort Worth, TX: Institute of General Semantics.
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Leggett, Trevor. 1987. Zen and The Ways. Boulder, CO: Shambhala.

Lefebvre Sell, Naomi. 2008. dharmakaya (dance performance). London: Bonnie Bird Theatre, March 10.
Margolin, Indrani. 2014. “Bodyself: Linking Dance and Spirituality.” Dance, Movement and Spiritualities 1
(1): 143–162.
Moving as a Thought Process: An Insight into Mindfulness through Dance and Choreography. 2017. Fourth Dance
and Somatics Practices Conference, Coventry University, UK, July 7–9.
Paxton, Steve. 2008. Material for the Spine (DVD). Belgium: Contradanse.
Stark Smith, Nancy. 2017. The Underscore. Accessed July 14, 2017. http://nancystarksmith.com/underscore/.
Whatley, Sarah, and Naomi Lefebvre Sell. 2014. “Dancing and Flourishing: Mindful Meditation in Dance
Making and Performing.” In Dance, Somatics and Spiritualities: Contemporary Sacred Narratives, edited by
Amanda Williamson, Glenna Batson, Sarah Whatley, and Rebecca Weber, 437–458. Bristol: Intellect.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
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9
MOVING MIND AND BODY
Language and writings of Simone Forti
Hiie Saumaa
Introduction
In Doris Humphrey’s landmark work on dance composition, The Art of Making Dances (1959),
she described the dynamic between words and movement:
Words can be fun, and with movement gain an added sparkle which is not found
when they are used separately. At any rate, there is a special delight in their combi-
nation. I cannot remember any of these combinations of wordplay and dance on a
professional stage, except by one choreographer who developed in my classes, but
there have been plenty of them as a result of class work. […] This sort of thing can
be great fun, and it is only in the combination of words with movement that the full
flavor emerges. (Humphrey 1959, 129)
Using words with movement was in her view “an almost untouched field” that could be
“a storehouse of treasure” with “much more room for exploration” (128). She saw “no reason
against, and many for, an amalgamation of the spoken, sung or chanted word with move-
ment” (125). She envisioned the “dance-plus-words form” as “a magnificent country for
pioneering souls” (125).
A few years later, the dancers and choreographers associated with the Judson Dance
Theater such as Deborah Hay, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and Barbara Dilley and with
the 1960s and 1970s avant-garde, such as Simone Forti, ventured on that relatively little
explored land and began to examine the interplay between movement, language, and cho-
reography. During Ordinary Dance (1962), Rainer spoke about the places she had lived in
while performing a series of pedestrian movements; Trisha Brown’s Skymap (1969) con-
sisted of a taped recording of a monologue, and she spoke to the audience in Accumulation
with Talking plus Watermotor (1979). Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Simone Forti, and Steve
Paxton contributed articles for The Drama Review in 1975 (Brown 1975; Childs 1975; Forti
1975; Paxton 1975). These interests continued beyond the 1960s and 1970s. Forti, who was
not part of the Judson Dance Theater but significantly influenced its key players and post-
modern dance in general, developed “News Animations” and her practice and performance
technique of Logomotion, which combines simultaneous speaking and movement. Hay uses
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questions, riddles, or Zen Buddhism’s “koan-like” contemplations in her dance practice and
performance. These explorations of movement and verbal language have led not only to
innovations in dance performance but to intriguing approaches to mental phenomena such
as attention, concentration, and the flux of thoughts while the body is in motion.
Much has been written on the cultural context of the Judson Dance Theater, the dance
works of the choreographers and performance artists of the era as well as Robert Dunn’s
composition workshop that led to the Judson Dance Theater (Banes 1993, 2001; Banes and
Harris 2003; Burt 2006; Perron 2012; Bennahum, Perron, and Robertson 2017). However,
these choreographers’ abundant writings, ranging from poetry to nonfiction, have received
much less attention. Elsewhere, I have examined the role of language in early twentieth-
century discourses on relaxation and improvisational movement (Saumaa 2016, 2017) and
the inclusion of spoken and written language in the Tamalpa Life/Art Process developed by
Anna Halprin and her daughter Daria Halprin (Saumaa 2018). Here, I am developing the
analysis between words and movement and applying it to a case study of the Judson era and
the work of Forti in particular. I suggest that the voices and artistic choices of these chore-
ographers as writers merit more careful attention. Hay, Forti, Dilley, Paxton, and Rainer
have continued to write and publish since the 1970s, extending the discussion of their dance
and choreographic aesthetics beyond the experimentation of the Judson Era (e.g., Hay 1994,
2000, 2016; Rainer 2006, 2012; Dilley 2015).
In this chapter, I will focus on the writings of Simone Forti. In Handbook in Motion: An
Account of An Ongoing Personal Discourse and Its Manifestations in Dance (1974) and Oh, Tongue
(2003), Forti theorizes “dance state,” “kinesthetic awareness,” and “animation” as they
pertain to movement. I show that these concepts acquire another layer when applied to her
writing. Verbal language affects Forti’s dance, but her movement explorations and height-
ened attention to language as a physical phenomenon also enliven her approach to words
and writing. In Oh, Tongue, Forti says that Handbook in Motion is a “dancer’s book” (141), and
activist and artist Fred Dewey calls it a “dancerly” book (2003, 180). However, whether and
how movement is present in these works is not as apparent a question as it might seem.
I show that in Forti’s writings, the speaker’s actual movement qualities are largely absent:
Movement is evoked less in terms of Forti improvising in dance while speaking and more
in terms of thoughts and language moving on the page. Most explicitly, Forti invites read-
ers to imagine movement by conjuring up images of the movement of natural phenomena,
such as plants and trees.
One question in dance studies has been how to “translate motion and gesture into a tex-
tual form without losing its embodied presence” (Albright 2013, 62). Ann Cooper Albright
refers to “the ever-present stumbling in the dance field of how to ‘write the moving body’”
(2013, 77). Susan Leigh Foster similarly asks “how to transpose the moved in the direction
of the written” (1995, 9) and argues for a “writing-dancing body” and “a scholarship that
detects and records the movements of the writer as well as the written about” (1995, 19, 16).
Recent dance scholarship has embraced different modes of writing within academic prose
itself: Albright (2013), Einav Katan-Schmid (2016), Kimerer LaMothe (2015), Alys Longley
(2013), and Marta Savigliano (1995), among others, incorporate personal narratives or their
own somatic experiences with movement or research or record narrative scenes from the
practice studio. Performance studies scholar Barbara Browning lists dance scholarship, per-
formance studies, and musicology as “fertile sites for scholarly writing that has espoused, if
not explicitly novelistic, at least highly voiced personal narrative, which is often figured as
‘performative’” (2018, 27). These accounts not only describe the authors’ intellectual invest-
ments but aspire to make readers see and feel elements of these inquiries more somatically, in
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Moving mind and body
their own bodies. While the question of how to write in embodied ways is gaining attention,
I suggest that the figure of the reader needs more emphasis. Next to the question of what
approaches guide Forti’s thinking when composing her experimental texts, I add the ques-
tion of what it is like to read these works. Does her writing impact readers’ ability to imagine
movement, and if so, how?
In what follows, I will pursue the question of what form improvisation that attends to
both physical movement and the movement of thoughts takes on the page. I will first discuss
Forti’s approach to language, the body, and movement. I will then analyze Forti’s Handbook
in Motion; Oh, Tongue; and the coauthored Unbuttoned Sleeves. I shed light on sites where Forti
is evoking the mind and/or the body in motion and discuss how her sentence structures make
her writing move. I demonstrate the different methods Forti has used to conjure up impro-
visational dance and speech methods in writing.
Inquiries into speaking, writing, form, and movement

Forti was born to Jewish parents in Florence, Italy, in 1935, and moved to the United States
in 1939 to escape anti-Semitic persecution. After attending Reed College in Portland,
Oregon, from 1953 to 1955, she and her future husband, the artist Robert Morris, moved to
San Francisco, where she met Anna Halprin (or Ann Halprin as she was known profession-
ally until 1972) and was a member of Halprin’s San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop. Halprin’s
improvisational explorations and her use of nature as a source for movement greatly affected
Forti. Forti moved to New York in 1959 and, with Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton,
became part of Robert Dunn’s legendary composition class at Merce Cunningham’s studio.
She performed her “dance constructions,” including Huddle and Slant Board, at Yoko Ono’s
loft in 1961 and participated in avant-garde happenings (Forti 1997). Since the 1960s, Forti
has examined movement and language in improvisational solo and group dance settings and
taught classes and workshops in Logomotion across the world.
Forti’s explorations into movement and language were influenced by Anna Halprin’s
improvisational exercises. For example, in Halprin’s classes, they would take a word, like “a
strawberry,” and investigate it “in time, in space, and with force. And then we would also
explore with ways that we would shape our mouth to organize the sound” (Forti 1994, 2).
They would choose a sentence and accompany it with a task, such as throwing balls: “So
we would simply combine them and they would be delightful but meaningless according to
cause and effect in a content way” (2). They would “free associate” with words like “time,”
searching for unexpected content and “things that you couldn’t preconceive” (2). In the
expressive arts practice called the Tamalpa Life/Art Process that Halprin and her daughter
Daria Halprin developed based on Halprin’s methods, spoken and written language are com-
bined with movement and drawing practices to express a range of emotions, promote heal-
ing, and foster more embodied and creative ways of living (Saumaa 2018).
Forti has said that she developed Logomotion to grasp the world news and to know what
is on her mind (Forti 2003, 136). In an article titled “Organic Telling,” she notes that dancing
“speculative images of news items” helps her think about them (1990/1991). These “fleeting
embodiments of the working images” give “wonderful shape to the dancing” (10). Instead
of “working images out with words,” she blends words with movement (10). Her “News
Animations” help her “recall the bits and broad strokes of information”: “running” the news
through her body, she can see how it “falls together” in her mind, imagination, and feeling
(Forti 1994, 2). Her movement “springs from her physical impulses in connection to her
thoughts” (Hermann 2001, 21). She thinks in movement (see Morse 2016).
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Hiie Saumaa
Forti does not pantomime words: movement gives her information on what she thinks and
how these words feel. Speaking while dancing gives her a “deep feeling in [her] bones. […]
You can say hard things because it’s just how you feel them in your bones” (Forti 2003, 126).
Speaking while moving, running, or rolling seems to impact the way she feels language:
it “gives protection to the speaking and makes it softer, deeper” (126), whereas in print
these words appear harsher. Movement “seems to make the words so human, human as in
bread-eating” (126). This practice led her to pay attention to instances of physical movement
encoded in language: “I even see the news as pressures, wedges, and balance shifts, and any-
way, so much of the language of the news media is in terms of physical dynamics: the dollar
in free fall, Lebanon as a slippery slope… And that’s what I dance” (4), she notes. Forti reminds
readers that movement images or physical phenomena lie underneath metaphors or turns
of phrase that we do not necessarily perceive in physical terms. George Lakoff and Mark
Johnson (2003) have illuminated why many metaphors in our experience are based in bodily
experience: “Because so many of the concepts that are important to us are either abstract or
not clearly delineated in our experience (the emotions, ideas, time, etc.), we need to get a
grasp on them by means of other concepts that we understand in clearer terms (spatial orien-
tations, objects, etc.)” (115). Along similar lines, the title of Oh, Tongue alludes to language as
both a physical and abstract phenomenon. The tongue refers to language as a mostly abstract
system of signs as well as the physical organ that we can feel, sense, move, and use to eat and
to utter words.
Forti’s fascination with speaking while moving has led to a study and practice of writing.
She would do a timed free writing before her Logomotion performances and draw upon
images and words from her writing for the performance that night. Forti remarks,
Although I have a deep understanding of movement, and the activity of think-

ing with words, and my use of words does feed my dancing, I now needed more
understanding of how the literary medium could help deepen the discourse in my
performances. I started to explore writing itself. (Forti 2003, 141)
She attended workshops in free writing at Beyond Baroque, collaborated with a group of art-
ists, including Carmela Hermann, Jeremiah Day, Dana Hirsch, and Lisa Bruno, with whom
they performed an evening of their individual work. While collaborating with Terrence
Luke Johnson and Dale Eunson on a piece that included “a lot of writing, both spontaneous
and deliberate,” she sensed that “the writing began to take on a life of its own” (2003, 142).
One reason why the aesthetic qualities of Forti’s texts have not been fully analyzed might
stem from the challenge her works pose in terms of form and genre. Her writings, like
her dance work, cross boundaries. As Wendy Perron has noted, “This disjunctiveness—one
thing following another even though it may not make obvious thematic sense—is typical of
the way Forti works” (Perron 2017, 110). Handbook in Motion (1974) incorporates the direc-
tions for her dance constructions next to her reflections on her life and dance career; Oh,
Tongue (2003) includes poetry, an imaginary conversation between Forti and her father,
and several pieces drawn from previous works: articles published in Contact Quarterly and
the transcripts of two performances at the Dance Festival at Bates College in 2002 and a
transcript of a performance at Bennington College in 2003. Unbuttoned Sleeves (2006) is
based on journal entries, improvisational warm-up writings, transcriptions of speaking while
in motion, and deliberate writings that Forti, along with her collaborators Terrence Luke
Johnson, Sarah Swenson, and Douglas Wadle, created for two improvisational dance/theater
projects, “Unbuttoned Sleeves” and “101,” featured at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts
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Theater in 2005 and at Highways Performance Space in Los Angeles in 2006, respectively.
The works attend to the visual: Handbook in Motion (1974) uses images of Forti’s handwritten
journals and photographs of performances; Oh, Tongue (2003) includes abstract sketches and
drawings of the body.
Experimenting with form, different registers of writing, and verbal means of recording
dance material is not unique to Forti. For example, in her Lamb at the Altar: The Story of a
Dance (1994) and Using the Sky: A Dance (2016), Deborah Hay incorporates notes, journal
entries, and poetic writings to reflect on and record her work of choreographing particular
dances. In the foreword to My Body, The Buddhist (2000) she emphasizes that she is not a
practicing Buddhist, poet, librettist, or archivist: “The literary forms used in this book are
liberties I have taken to help me unravel a piece of the plot between movement and percep-
tion. The libretto, poem, score, short story, were co-opted by a flag-bearer in pursuit of the
study of intelligence born in the dancing body” (xxv). Hay suggests that writing about the
body and bodily intelligence necessitates these varied forms: in her view, bodily conscious-
ness does not fit neatly into one genre.
The shifting perspectives and deliberate formal incoherence perform several functions.
Forti’s writings further the author’s philosophical ideas about movement, language, and the
mind. They include autobiographical and historical information, such as Forti’s reflections
on her studies with Halprin and the milieu of the 1960s happenings and experimentation
with pedestrian movement at the Judson Memorial Church; and by including poetry, lyri-
cal writings, and drawings, they are works of art with their literary and visual aesthet-
ics. They also serve as a type of archive by including the transcripts and the scores for the
dance constructions, Forti brings awareness of her dances to the reading public. The title of
Handbook in Motion: An Account of an Ongoing Personal Discourse and Its Manifestations in Dance
(1974) highlights a kinetic quality. The book is not “on” or “about” motion; it is actively “in
motion,” perhaps even “unfinished.” The title suggests that new insights about these different
genres and functions can emerge upon re-reading.
Writing the “dance state” of improvisation

We enter a particular “dance state” when we dance, Forti opines. In Handbook in Motion, she says,
“there’s a state of dancing, like there’s a state of sleeping, or a state of shivering. Some people have
a shyness towards entering that state, but everybody does it sometime. Often, at parties, people
drop their shyness and enter a dance state” (1974, 108). In Oh, Tongue, she remarks, “I think it’s a
state of being. Like sleeping, figuring out, or panicking are” (2003, 130). Physical movements in
that state are “enchanting”: “[W]hen I’m in a dance state, the movement that comes out through
me enchants me. It can be a very simple movement, but it always comes with a sense of wonder,
and as one of life’s more delicious moments. Melodies are like that, too. They just come” (108).
The “dance state” is somatic in that the self is constantly tracking bodily movements and sensa-
tions. The dancer is not in a “trance” but is actively observing mental and physical processes. Even
though at times Forti gets “completely lost in the movement or in the sound and rhythm of words,”
she maintains “all the concerns of space, of timing, of movement interest” (139). Similarly to the
mental self-awareness practiced in meditation, the dancer’s mind in the “dance state” observes its
own functioning (see De Spain 2014). From these descriptions, it appears that Forti’s notion of
the “dance state” refers to improvisational dance, as the dancer is open to movements that “come
through” her and make her “wonder,” rather than executing choreographed movements.
Paying attention to images, words, and inchoate thoughts in the “dance state,” Forti is tap-
ping into the “stream of consciousness,” a term attributed to William James, who in his Principles
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of Psychology ([1890] 1910), suggested that we experience our minds as movement, as a con-
stant flow or stream of thoughts. He observed, “Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself
chopped up in bits. Such words as ‘chain’ or ‘train’ do not describe it fitly […] It is nothing
jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described.
In talking of it hereafter let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life”
(James [1890] 1910, 239). Forti notices mental stimuli that arise in the “stream of consciousness”
and responds to them with words or movement: “there is a feedback and a responsiveness that
is set up in my dancing body, in my dancing mind” (Forti 2003, 139). She says, “The thoughts
and images seem to flash through my motor centers and my verbal centers simultaneously, mix-
ing and animating both speech and physical embodiment. Spatial, structural, emotional” (136).
By adding the layer of physical experience to James’s term, Forti makes it applicable for move-
ment innovation and highlights the presence of the body in discussions of mental processes: she
explores the “stream of consciousness” not only as the movement of thoughts in the mind but
as a phenomenon rooted in the physically moving body.
Free writing is one way to access the “stream of consciousness.” In free writing, the hand
is in continued movement for a particular amount of time, and the writer records the moving
thoughts of the mind without stopping to judge or polish the emerging language. Forti often
starts with “I remember” and sees what surfaces or chooses random words from the diction-
ary and observes how “the thoughts that they stimulate begin to relate in surprising ways”
(140). She comments on the kinetic aspect of writing: “I love how those moments when I
would usually pause to reflect, I must keep going” (140). Instead of pausing to think about
the next step, the writer must continue, which brings to the writing “the stuff that’s flitting
though, with its own wild affiliation to the thoughts that came before” (Forti 1994, 2). Her
mind “grabs at those thoughts” that are randomly passing through, moving with “jumps
that are irrational but resonant”: these are her “shadow thoughts” that she might otherwise
not express or be aware of (Forti 2003, 140–141).
Forti’s practice of free writing has been inspired by the works of the writer and educator
Natalie Goldberg. Goldberg’s free writing practice reminds Forti of her own improvisational
movement practice (Forti 1994, 2). In Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life, Goldberg encour-
ages readers to “understand the journey of thought, how thought moves around in our
mind” (Goldberg 1993, 190), thus underscoring movement as a key characteristic of think-
ing. She refers to writing as a physical practice and uses physical language to talk about the
mind: free associating on the phrase “I remember” is a “warmup” exercise that “stretches”
the mind and “limbers” the writer up before focusing on a bigger project. She observes that
both writing and movement unfold linearly: writing is like “moving one foot in front of the
other when you walk. The problem is we don’t notice that movement of one foot in front of
the other. We just move our feet. Writing practice asks you to notice not only how your feet
move but also how your mind moves” (1993, 6; see also Goldberg 1986, 2016).
Forti’s concern with improvising in words and in movement manifests on the page in
several ways. In one section, Forti includes three takes on three words chosen randomly from
the dictionary. The writing style in these sections privileges chopped simple sentences and
short, fast phrases. For example, she states, “Write about what you know about? How about
barely knowing. You can barely know. Write about what you barely know about. A tough
hand the dictionary has handed me. I hold it in my hand. My hand on pen on paper has three
cards. Grass of Parnassus, retort” (Forti 2003, 52). Forti here writes “at the edge of know-
ing” (Longley 2017, 33). The text is not fully fathomable—thoughts move quickly from one
direction to the next—but at times clusters of meaning do occur. Alys Longley opines that
Forti “generates spaces of half-sense, where a known word or quality is pushed to a threshold
130
and disassembled into component parts of sound, quality feeling, momentum. Words are
reassembled into new forms that perhaps do not make literal sense, but which are nevertheless
recognizable as holding the memory of former sense” (2017, 32).
A different aesthetic is in play in Forti’s depictions of the “dance state” in performance
settings. In Oh, Tongue, she describes a movement scene:
The stage. Walking out. “The see me now. Let them see me, get used to the sight of
me. Quiet down. Open.” I choose a place. I stand there. I glance at the audience. To
see them, for them to see my face, my whole stance, just a look of recognition that I
consider a hello, I begin. With what presents itself. A memory, a shape in the perfor-
mance hall. I trust this first thing and I begin. I hope that the audience, having met
me, follows my interest, my involvement, I return in my mind’s eye to the northern
slope of Bald Mountain in Vermont, I look around and pronto. Something happens.
I see snow. I jump and curl in the air. Hands and feet in air. Heavy rattle winter
wind smashes dry sunflower stalks. Again. Again, smash, jump! Snow thud falls
from laden roof. Feet slide out, thud. Whole body, thud, flat to floor. (2003, 130)
Here, Forti gives a sense of both the physical motion and the mental landscape while she is
dancing and simultaneously observing her mind. The passage records movement: the speaker
walks, stands, glances, looks around, jumps, curls, slides, falls. It records mental actions: the
speaker trusts, hopes, returns in her mind’s eye to a memory; she “sees snow”; “heavy rattle
winter wind smashes dry sunflower stalks”; “snow thud falls from laden roof.” The sentences
are short, clipped. Syntactically, the sentences move forward as simple sentences or as coor-
dinated units of equal status, rather than as complex sentences of interwoven subordinated
clauses. A complex sentence “moves” differently from the more direct push of a coordinated
sentence or a simple sentence. Although the thought jumps around, from one image to the
next, the writing is nevertheless more linear than in the “Three Takes” section above.
Forti’s fascination with not just the English language but her exploration of multiple lan-
guages is an overlooked area. The dynamics between two languages open up another way to
think about movement, prominent in Unbuttoned Sleeves (2006). The “libretto” depicts Forti
and her three collaborators improvising to their chosen area of interest, “with the assump-
tion that any four topics, any four voices, would engage each other in particular ways” (1).
Forti plays the character of “The Four Year Old (Child).” In her autobiographical sections,
she recounts the experience of her family in Europe at the wake of World War II. These
sections are bilingual: the speaker slips into Italian, using what in linguistics is called “code-
switching,” or the alternating of two languages within the same text, sentence, or discourse
(see Gumperz 1982; Auer 1998). Child says:
Give me your hand. No! No! Mano. Pee. Like pippi. Mamma! Mama, that’s English.
Mamma. Mamma. Pippiii. Poppooo. The baby. Bebé is the baby. Mammie, I found
un soldo! A soldered penny to give to a soldier. Soldato. Dato. Give. A solder with
an “L.” Sold. I don’t know that yet, about the “L,” but I will. The soldato gets the
soldered coin to report. Gets lots of coins. Pennies, that’s what makes him a soldier.
Soldi. He gets money to go do it. (Forti 2006, 14)
She comments on how similar or distant English words and their Italian counterparts are.
Child says, “Attention. Attenzione. It sounds the same and it is the same. […] Together
insieme. In … sieme. Insieme sounds like more together” (14). She places English and Italian
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Hiie Saumaa
words next to one another in two columns: “babe bebé, crisis crisi, cricket grillo cri, soldier
soldato, coin soldo, city città” (45). The spectator and reader can follow Forti’s improvisa-
tions without the aid of a dictionary, since the words are linguistically close. Forti leaves
some sentences untranslated. Her playful exploration of Italian emphasizes sound: “Tree
albero” leads to “alberoberobero brances rami” and “bero ramibero albero” (14).
This word play mimics an act a child might do—trying out a different language and how
new words feel “on the tongue.” The fact that Forti is using movement while uttering these
words emphasizes the idea that studying a foreign tongue or being bilingual is a process of
embodiment, of making new or other words a part of one’s physical being through repetition.
Repetition is also a part of sections rendered in English only, such as the following example:
It was here, I took it. It’s a gift. I took it. I stole it. I took it, I got it, I hold it. I take
it, I hold it. It’s not a gift. It’s a gift! It’s not a gift. It’s a gift! It’s not a gift. It’s a gift!
Not a gift. A gift! It’s a gift, it’s not a gift. It’s a burden. It’s an oracle. It’s a lifting up
of my voice. It’s a lifting up, of my voice. It’s a lifting up, a lifting up, a lifting up, a
lifting up, it’s a lifting up, a lifting up, It’s a lifting up of my voice. (Forti 2006, 26)
Such examples remind readers of the work of another language innovator, Gertrude Stein.
The title, Unbuttoned Sleeves, might refer to Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914). Stein, similarly to Forti,
explored repetition, was intrigued by automatic writing, cultivated a voice that “sounded” like
a child, included in-text translation between French and English, and foregrounded Anglo-
Saxon, rather than Latinate, vocabulary. While the writing style and wordplay in Stein’s work
might be lighthearted or playful, the subject matter often is not: she narrated her experiences
as an expatriate in France and experiences of wartime in Paris France ([1940] 2013) and Wars I
Have Seen (1945). Forti, too, is here writing about a traumatic experience of her family’s escape
from Europe. In Perron’s words, “Although Forti has never said this, I think there is something
about her work—the hunger for touch, the desire to feel the earth under her feet, the distrust of
authority—that may be the legacy of being a four-year-old child bewildered by the haste with
which her family had to flee their home country” (Perron 2017, 113).
“Animate” writing and nature

Animation is a term that resurfaces repeatedly in Forti’s writings, visible even in the titles
of her articles, such as “Animating the News: A Practice” (Forti 1990) and “From Animate
Dancing to Writing” (Forti 2003). Forti has said that for her, “dancing has almost always
been a way to explore nature” (131). She has studied the movement of animals, dances her
gardening journal, and observes the movement of plants and trees. She calls her explora-
tions an “animistic process” in that she is trying to get at the “spirit” of what she sees (131).
Halprin, who conducted sessions on the outdoor deck of her mountain home studio, would
routinely ask students to observe elements of nature and use their observations in movement.
“From Animate Dancing to Writing” in Oh, Tongue starts with a nature scene: Forti is
sitting by a brook waiting for thoughts for writing. She says:
At bottom of quiet pool, a green leaf. On surface, water striders. One scratching its
hind right leg with its fore-leg. Shadow of something across a surface, a bird? A but-
terfly? No, a leaf. Sitting on rock, hardness getting uncomfortable even through
folded towel. Later I’ll bathe here. Waiting for a thought for writing, a thought in
the context of a particular writing. From the pool here. To a reader maybe at the
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breakfast table, morning light slanting in east window, maybe snow. Water striders
always so easy to see, over the years always so easy to observe, I don’t take them seri-
ously. If a little brookie, a little trout, were to show itself, now that would be some-
thing. Something. […] Light through pools, light through falling water, roots and
rocks, little island beach pebble mound. And dancing? There’s a function that func-
tions in our sleep. So that as we dream we’re running, we lie still. Sometimes a cat
will twitch its paws, its face, in its sleep, but basically lie still. Seeing the fractured
rock face shunting water one sheet here one there my eye follows sharp edges. My
teeth try the stone, I breathe the falling water and am the soft air smelling of me, the
bright tree root curve of sun-soaked moss, pulsing circles of light bopping water.
And only by the grace of that which holds me still do I hold still. (Forti 2003, 129)
This paragraph illustrates what I call the “writing impulse,” or the propulsion to write. The sub-
title reads “Written at the brook, while thinking about this article” (2003, 129), which suggests
that the speaker is waiting for an impulse for the thought to move, propel her toward writing.
From the readers’ perspective she has begun writing even though her idea for writing “in the
context of a particular writing” (Forti 2003, 129) has not yet arrived: She starts to record the
environment around her, the movements of water striders, the smell of fish, a bird or a butter-
fly moving, and her sensation of physical discomfort while sitting on a hard rock. While she is
slowly teasing herself into writing while waiting for her main idea to surface, she paints the pic-
ture of her environment and the animate life in it: What she presents as a type of “pre-writing”
locates readers in a particular place and creates a sense of the scene and mood.
This waiting for a thought for writing resembles the well-known description of Isadora
Duncan standing in her studio and waiting for a movement impulse. In the words of Andrea
Mantell-Seidel, “To arouse the ‘motor in the soul,’ the impulse toward motion, Duncan stood,
sometimes for hours at a time, in silent contemplation and observation of her emotional and
motor impulses, concentrating on the solar plexus” (2016, 31). In Forti’s view, Duncan “reached
across time and space to find a precedent for the dancing she felt she needed to do. She found
inspiration and confirmation in the figures dancing with abandon” (Forti 2003, 133). She refers
to the moment of Duncan standing still in the center of her studio waiting for a movement
impulse: in Forti’s opinion, Duncan was working with the particular task she had given herself,
“of clearing the environment and listening for an inner impulse” (Forti 2003, 134). In the above
example, Forti, too, is waiting for a “movement impulse”—one that would set thought in motion.
The passage above implies that it is possible to enter the “dance state” without dancing
physically. Forti notes, “And dancing? There’s a function that functions in our sleep. So that as
we dream we’re running, we lie still” (2003, 129). The speaker is standing still but her thoughts
and imagination are actively in motion. Her eyes travel along the edges of the rock, her teeth
“try the stone” (129), she “breathe[s] the falling water” (129), and she is the “soft air smelling
of [her]” (129) and the tree root. She is still but feels herself as these other substances and imag-
ines moving like them. This is a dancing function. She notes, “only by the grace of that which
holds me still do I hold still” (129), which suggests that being physically still might be a struggle:
She would rather move. This passage is training readers to see movement and dance in stillness.
By extension, it is a commentary on reading and writing—our reading and writing bodies are
commonly in still positions, but in thought and imagination, we can move actively. As Forti’s
passage implies, these too could be considered as aspects of movement function.
Examples in which the speaker feels one with nature or natural phenomena demonstrate
Forti’s approach to “kinesthetic awareness.” In the above example, the speaker says, “my
teeth try the stone, I breathe the falling water and am the soft air smelling of me” (2003, 129).
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Hiie Saumaa
Forti is the “dry crumbly ground” (138) and “the cool round things of delicate russet skins,
emerging miraculously clean” (138). She becomes “the ships, the lands, the peoples, the strate-
gies, the connections” (137). In 1936, dance critic John Martin wrote:
When we see a human body moving, we see movement which is potentially pro-
ducible by a human body and therefore by our own; through kinesthetic sympathy
we actually reproduce it vicariously in our present muscular experience and awaken
such associational connotations as might have been ours if the original movement
had been of our own making. (Martin quoted by Batson and Wilson 2014, 100)
Forti’s vision of “kinaesthetic awareness” is akin to the concept of “kinesthetic empathy”

in that both terms refer to ways one can sense in the body the feelings of others. Although
kinesthetic empathy is most often applied to a stage performance witnessed by audience
members, Forti applies her notion of kinesthetic awareness more broadly. By observing and
feeling the movement of a living person or a thing, the observer can take on information
about the states of their bodies, where they hold tensions and where they feel relaxed, and
use information about these states in their own movement. In Forti’s view, focusing on one’s
sensations is not enough; the “world” element needs to be part of the kinesthetic experi-
ence: A mind, body, world connection is “a state, among our human repertoire of states of
being. […] Mind, body, world. Even grammatically it seems more vital. More full of sur-
prises” (2003, 122–123).
Studying nature does not only “animate” Forti’s dance: it also animates her writing.
Her tone becomes more poetic and lyrical in these instances where she depicts movements
in nature. Forti comments on how she draws inspiration for dancing from her gardening
journal: “How to explain what I learn from the snow, from the compost bin, from the stars?
When a fresh wind is blowing down the mountain, I absolutely gulp it down. Gulp it in.
Or reaching into the dirt of the potatoes, my self dives into my fingers and I am the dry
crumbly ground. And the cool round things of delicate russet skins, emerging miraculously
clean” (2003, 138). In these moments, Forti is not recording, describing or narrating only:
She is searching for a creative, lyrical way to express her connection to movement and nature
in language. She tries to express the “rich scent of white clover blossoms” that “thicken the
cells” in her body, while her hands “re-experience the coolness in the shade under the squash
plant’s umbrella leaves” (2003, 130). Some of these movement explorations indeed become
poems: Her collection titled Angel (1978) includes poems such as “In the company of the fern
one can stand bending way backwards, hanging head and arms like fronds” (22) and “And in
the company of the snake plant one can balance on one’s back, reaching limbs, leg and arm
and arm and head and leg reaching upward among each other snaking slightly” (23).
Conclusion: Absence and presence of movement

Forti’s “dancer’s books” invite readers to look for knowledge and descriptions of movement.
However, Forti’s books present a challenge for the readers’ ability to imagine improvisational
movement. Unbuttoned Sleeves (2006) is presented as a “libretto”: It includes words, dance, and
music and is called a theater/dance project. The reader knows that the performers used move-
ment and dance in this work. However, the work includes very little information about what
the movement component might be like. Only in a few cases, most notably in Terrence Luke
Johnson’s section, does the reader get any information about the actual movement of the per-
formers. Johnson’s section includes some parenthetical notes, such as “Luke has been holding a
134
piano bench, chest high. How he turns it this way and that” (Forti 2006, 25). He “bangs” his
hand against the bench (26). But the rest of the libretto is lacking in movement description.
This refusal to encode movement gives liberty to future performers to come up with their
own movement. It is a statement that improvisational movement does not need to be encoded,
on and off the page, and it cannot be; there is no precise system, such as Labanotation, for it.
From the perspective of the reader, the refusal to encode movement descriptions can serve as
an absence. Readers are aware of how intricately tied movement and language are for Forti:
The absence of allusions to the speaker’s movements makes it hard for readers to envision
movement as underneath or behind words.
For Forti, the need to create in readers’ minds images of bodies in motion is less pro-
nounced. The most direct way to make readers see motion in Forti’s writing is not so much
through images of the speaker herself moving but through her descriptions of movement in
nature and animate life. She describes moving like a plant would move or embodying the
stillness of a woodpile. Her writing, then, emphasizes the importance of metaphors and simi-
les for not only dancers’ but also the readers’ ability to imagine movement.
Susan Leigh Foster has noted, “Describing bodies’ movements, the writing itself must
move. It must put into play figures of speech and forms of phrase and sentence construc-
tion that evoke the texture and timing of bodies in motion” (1995, 5). Although Forti does
not foreground the need to record the physical movements of bodies in motion, she does, like
Foster suggested, make the writing itself move: drawing upon the stream-of-consciousness
writing, abrupt, clipped sentences, and flowing prose—and using free writing, nonfiction
prose, poems, imaginary dialogues, scripts, and essayistic writing, Forti’s works draw atten-
tion to how language itself moves on the page. Her works make readers aware of how they
move, or jump between different genres, registers, and tongues. Her works, then, remind
readers of the movement—or dance—of their minds as they read.
This attention to processes of reading and imagining is likely to become significant in
analyses of works by other contemporary choreographers who work with movement and lan-
guage and who also use writing to record their dance performances. As I mentioned earlier,
Deborah Hay often records her dance works in the form of writing, such as scripts. Karinne
Keithley Syers, Annie-B Parson, and Paul Lazar have written an experimental text on the
work of the Big Dance Theater, titled Another Telepathic Thing (Big Dance Theater 2014).
They start with a question, “How do we get this performance into the form of a book?”
(2014, 15), and advise the reader, “Reader, it is your job to read expansively, to speculate
a little, to sound out the speechless places, to embrace, with a little telepathy, the intervals
between all these things” (11). In the fields of somatics and expressive arts therapy, a similar
impulse to inspire readers to imagine movement as they read exists, as in the works of the
dancer and author Miranda Tufnell, who also studied with Forti (Tufnell and Crickmay
2014; Tufnell 2017). These writings show how dancers–choreographers–writers combine
oral history, drawings, video stills, poems, and annotated scripts to record the processes and
performances of their works as well as to delve deeper into the expressive, artistic, and heal-
ing potential of movement and language combined.
References
Albright, Ann Cooper. 2013. Engaging Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of Corporeality. Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press.
Auer, Peter. 1998. Codeswitching in Conversation: Language, Interaction, and Identity. London: Routledge.
Banes, Sally. 1993. Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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———. 2001. “Choreographic Methods of the Judson Dance Theater.” In Moving History/Dancing Cultures:
A Dance History Reader, edited by In Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright, 350–361. Middletown, CT:
Banes, Sally, and Andrea Harris, eds. 2003. Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything Was Possible. Madison,
WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Batson, Glenna, and Margaret Wilson. 2014. Body and Mind in Motion: Dance and Neuroscience in Conversation.
Bristol: Intellect.
Bennahum, Ninotchka, Wendy Perron, and Bruce Robertson. 2017. Radical Bodies: Anna Halprin, Simone
Forti, and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York, 1955–1972. Oakland, CA: University of California
Press.
Big Dance Theater. Karinne Keithley Syers, eds. 2014. Another Telepathic Thing. Brooklyn, NY: 53rd State
Press.
Brown, Trisha. 1975. “Three Pieces.” The Drama Review 19 (1): 26–32.
Browning, Barbara. 2018. “The Performative Novel.” The Drama Review 62 (2): 43–58.
Burt, Ramsay. 2006. Judson Dance Theater. Performative Traces. London: Routledge.
Childs, Lucinda. 1975. “Notes:’64-’74.” The Drama Review 19 (1): 33–36.
De Spain, Kent. 2014. Landscape of the Now: A Topography of Movement Improvisation. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Dilley, Barbara. 2015. This Very Moment:Teaching Thinking Dancing. Boulder, CO: Naropa University Press.
Forti, Simone. 1974. Handbook in Motion—An Account of an Ongoing Personal Discourse and Its Manifestations
in Dance. Halifax: Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
———. 1975. “A Chamber Dance Concert.” The Drama Review 19 (1): 37–39.
———. 1978. Angel. New York.
———. 1990/1991. “Organic Telling.” Movement Research Performance Journal 1: 10.
———. 1994. “A Family Tree Story.” Movement Research Performance Journal 9: 2.
———. 1997. “Reflections on the Early Days.” Movement Research Performance Journal 14: 4.
———. 2003. Oh,Tongue. Los Angeles, CA: Beyond Baroque Books.
Forti, Simone, Terrence Luke Johnson, Sarah Swenson, and Douglas Wadle. 2006. Unbuttoned Sleeves. Los
Angeles, CA: Beyond Baroque Books.
Foster, Susan Leigh. 1995. “Choreographing History.” In Choreographing History, edited by Susan Leigh
Foster, 3–21. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Goldberg, Natalie. 1986. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. Boston, MA: Shambhala.
———. 1993. Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life. New York: Toronto, Bantam Book.
———. 2016. The Great Spring:Writing, Zen, and This Zigzag Life. Boulder, CO: Shambhala.
Gumperz, John. 1982. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hay, Deborah. 1994. Lamb at the Altar:The Story of a Dance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
———. 2000. My Body,The Buddhist. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press.
———. 2016. Using the Sky: A Dance. London: Routledge.
Hermann, Carmela. 2001. “Hearing/Miraculously/Structure: An Apprenticeship with Simone Forti in
Logomotion.” Contact Quarterly 6 (1): 15–25.
Humphrey, Doris. 1959. The Art of Making Dances. New York: Grove Press.
James, William. [1890] 1910. Principles of Psychology. New York: Holt.
Katav-Schmid, Einav. 2016. Embodied Philosophy in Dance: Gaga and Ohad Naharin’s Movement Research.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 2003. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.
LaMothe, Kimerer. 2015. Why We Dance: A Philosophy of Bodily Becoming. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Longley, Alys. 2013. The Foreign Language of Motion: A Project from the Kinesthetic Archive. Winchester:
Winchester University Press.
———. 2017. “I Wanted to Find You by Inhabiting Your Tongue: Mistranslating Between Words and Dance
in Choreographic Practice.” Choreographic Practices 8 (1): 27–49.
Mantell-Seidel, Andrea. 2016. Isadora Duncan in the 21st Century: Capturing the Art and Spirit of the Dancer’s
Legacy. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company.
Morse, Meredith. 2016. Soft is Fast: Simone Forti in the 1960s and After. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Paxton, Steve. 1975. “Contact Improvisation.” The Drama Review 19 (1): 40–42.
Perron, Wendy. 2012. “What Was Judson Dance Theater and Did It Ever End?” Judson Now 179–192.
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———. 2017. “Simone Forti: Body Nature at Movement Body.” In Radical Bodies: Anna Halprin, Simone
Forti, and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York, 1955–1972, edited by Ninotscha Bennahum,Wendy
Perron, and Bruce Robertson, 88–119. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
Rainer,Yvonne. 2006. Feelings Are Facts: A Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
———. 2012. Poems. Brooklyn, NY: Badlands Unlimited.
Saumaa, Hiie. 2016. “Alys Bentley’s Dance Impulse, Embodied Learning, and the Dancing Mind.” Dance
Chronicle 39 (3): 249–278.
———. 2017. “Annie Payson Call’s Training in Release and Somatic Imagination.” Dance Research Journal
49 (1): 70–86.
———. 2018.“Journeying from Sensation into Words: Dancing Language in the Tamalpa Life/Art Process.”
Somatics Journal/Magazine 18: 16–19.
Savigliano, Marta. 1995. Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Stein, Gertrude. 1914. Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms. New York: Claire Marie.
———. [1940] 2013. Paris France. New York: W.W. Norton.
———. 1945. Wars I Have Seen. New York: Random House.
Tufnell, Miranda. 2017. When I Open My Eyes: Dance Health Imagination. Hampshire: Dance Books.
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Dance Books.
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PART III
Dance and analysis

10
CHOREOMUSICOLOGY AND
DANCE STUDIES
From beginning to end?
Stephanie Jordan
Introduction
“Dance is virtually always music-and-dance, unavoidably interdisciplinary,” I wrote back
in 2011. Soon, however, prompted by musicologist Nicholas Cook, I was forced to modify
my words. “Multimedia is not music and words and moving images (and …),” he wrote in
the foreword to The Psychology of Music in Multimedia, “but rather subsists in the meaningful
experience that results from their interaction” (2013, vi). So, too, following Cook a stage fur-
ther, an interdisciplinary meeting should not mean musicology and dance studies but, rather,
a dynamic interaction between the two disciplines.1
This major revisioning of the long-established relationship between music and dance
emerged in recent decades. Indeed, perhaps surprisingly, there has hitherto been very little
theorization of relations between the two media. Rather, there have been occasional philo-
sophical manifestos and “rules” for correct dance practice while, within dance scholarship,
there is remarkable ignorance of the depth and complexity with which music infiltrates our
experience of movement. Music can be both subversive and confirmatory. Instead, within
dance works, dance and music have largely been discussed, or literally ‘disciplined,’ as sepa-
rate, parallel activities, perhaps, according to Asianist ethnomusicologist Ricardo Trimillos
(2017, 1), because Western logical positivism has tended to rationalize categories according
to manageable unitary entities.2
In Western theater dance studies, my own specialism, a major shift in thinking took charge
in the 1990s with the publication of Paul Hodgins’s theorization and analysis (from his doc-
toral dissertation) of the relationship between choreography and music (1992). It was he who
coined the term “choreomusical,” which has since been modified by others as a label for the
new field of choreomusicology (sometimes known as choreomusical studies or choreomusical
research). That label has been used broadly for a variety of work crossing dance and music,
some historical and contextual, as well as work, like that of Hodgins, which was primarily
analytical and involved close readings of dance works. Out of this, and particularly since the
millennium, there has been a marked increase in publications within the field (books and
themed journal issues), conferences (for over a decade now, approximately one of these every
year, and across several different countries), and dance/movement subgroups within profes-
sional societies (in the United States, especially the American Musicological Society [2013],
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Stephanie Jordan
the Society for Music Theory [2015], the Society of Dance History Scholars [2014], and
earlier, the Society for Ethnomusicology [2002]).
Particularly revealing and rarely recognized outside the field, however, those involved
in dance ethnography began to work closely with music much earlier. This branch of work
began to engage scholars formally in the early 1950s. An exceptional example of this is the
state-supported work in the socialist bloc of East European folk dance researchers who, in the
1950s, started to collect a large corpus of dances with their music across many countries and
then to undertake their documentation and formal analysis (Giurchescu 2007, 3–18). Yet it
does seem that such choreomusical analysis did not necessarily comprise, or even lead directly
to, the integrated approach or cross-media theorization to which Cook refers. Thus, the edi-
tors of the pioneering 2017 collection Sounding the Dance, Moving the Music: Choreomusicological
Perspectives on Maritime Southeast Asian Performing Arts could refer to a “relatively new area of
‘choreomusicology’… a holistic field of study that combines the study of music and dance,
and puts the relationship itself into the focus of research.” For that matter, those researching
the Southeast Asian context have keenly watched theoretical work within the Western per-
forming arts (Nor and Stepputat 2017, xvi).
Writing this chapter, it seemed important to consider the broader current situation of
both disciplines: dance and music. Compared with music, there are few analyses of dance
works. This may well be because dance, an altogether younger, smaller field than music and
with a less developed specialist typology, has never been driven by scores and recordings in
the same way. Yet there was, in the early period of dance in academia, a significant body
of work in the area of dance movement analysis, drawing from Laban theory and notation
systems. From the latter half of the 1980s, dance scholarship as a whole (most of it focus-
ing on twentieth- and twenty-first-century dance within Western culture), experienced
theoretical and methodological shifts similar to those in the other arts. It shifted rapidly
away from movement analysis toward interrogation of the interrelations between dance and
culture, readily absorbing the influences of semiotics, postmodernism, poststructuralism,
and feminism, as Helen Thomas put it, “all tied up with a cultural studies bow” (1996, 67).
Nowadays, in UK academia at least, most dance works studied are from the very recent past,
or there is new practice as research. For this kind of work, music plays a relatively unimport-
ant role ( just as in earlier postmodern dance) or is only tangentially required. These dances
are sometimes performed in silence or with talking, or supported by a collage offering dif-
ferent atmospheres, or they are conceptual rather than material. Perhaps because of this,
there seems to be less urgency to address the sound component in any dance. Meanwhile,
the term “theory” in dance refers to cultural and political interpretations.
By contrast, in musicology, significantly, the term “music theory” has stuck to the busi-
ness of analysis—close readings of the musical work itself, usually buttressed by the presence
of scores, which are relatively rare in dance. Music, not dance, has a long tradition of close
reading. Yet the so-called New Musicology from about 1985 shared in the cultural turn.
Music itself—always a latecomer to theoretical developments across the arts—was now seen
as a socially circumscribed discourse, a cultural construction. Here, the musicological agenda
expanded dramatically, with major questioning of the assumption that a work is a unified,
organic conception and a closed, autonomous and primarily abstract entity. “Emotion and
meaning are coming out of the musicological closet,” wrote Rose Subotnik (1988, 88). This in
turn provoked a riot of highly individual interpretations, the new emphasis. There were yet
more responses. Rethinking Music (Cook and Everist 1999, x) proposed a “musicology of the
provisional,” recognizing a pluralist approach involving a range of analytical tools and meth-
ods alongside concerns for value and meaning as well as the relative autonomy of music.
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Carolyn Abbate (2004, 516, 523), meanwhile, suggested a move toward a “soft hermeneutics,”
a return to aesthetic experience that promotes performance as its primary object, giving
space to the ineffable and privileging multiple, unfixed allusions and associations rather than
specific meanings. In some quarters, however, the emphasis on musical scores gave way to a
very different focus on matters of perception and performance, with the increasing influence
of work in cognitive science, including music psychology, and sometimes involving empirical
experimental design and cross-modal studies. Within choreomusical studies, it is compelling
for us to know, for instance, from cross-modal scientific research, that people encode visual
rhythms aurally; in other words, as choreomusicologist Kara Leaman has noted, “a viewer’s
visual perception of rhythm interacts with the auditory perception thereof ” (2016, 4).
It is fascinating to observe how musicology and musicians have now opened up to dance.
They had shunned it for multiple reasons: first, as a lesser, intellectually lacking art form most reg-
ularly associated with bad music (given the Western mind-body split); then, because of the special
value given in musicology to nonprogrammatic, instrumental music; then, due to the high degree
of technical specialization demanded by both disciplines; and finally, because of the ephemerality
of dance as a largely unscored medium of performance. But as Marian Smith, a leading specialist
on nineteenth-century ballet music, says, that attitude stems from relatively recent times:
Many of the composers revered by our discipline … would surely be surprised to

find out that dance—both theatrical and social—lies hidden from the purview of so
many professional music scholars … Of the composers in the musicological canon,
how many lived in a world without dance?... They saw plenty of it, and they wrote
plenty of dance music, some of it titled as such; some of them even danced them-
selves or tried to. (Smith 2001, 175)
At Roehampton University’s 2005 Sound Moves conference, Smith, as opening keynote speaker,
mused on her lonely past in the 1980s. For her, the eye-opener was Roland John Wiley’s work on
Tchaikovsky’s ballets. In his 1985 book, he announced that the attractions of concert music could
actually be defects in ballet, and a particular statement undermined the basic assumption that
ballet music simply supported dance. Nineteenth-century composers, he suggested, worked for
an inverse relationship between interest in music and interest in dance, whereby

music makes its strongest impact when solo dance is the least commanding, and vice
versa. The climactic moments of pure music and pure dance almost never coincide,
a fact which should give pause to the analyst who seeks to judge ballet music only
for its sounds (Wiley 1985, 6).
In other words, we had to look at music and dance together and in dialogue with each other
in order to make any sense of a collaborative art form. This is a foreshadowing of the interac-
tive methodologies that have dominated during later decades. Together with such prompts, the
late twentieth century witnessed an explosion of publications on “the body” across the arts and
beyond, with music itself seen as physical business. An additional stick with which to beat the
upcoming generation of scholars has been the overwhelming drive toward interdisciplinar-
ity across all academic fields. Yet an outstanding fact confronts us today: Most choreomusical
research now finds its home in music and ethnomusicology departments, not in dance.
At this point, it is useful to consider the language barrier between the two disciplines, impor-
tant because language provides a window on to a disciplinary culture. Smith titled her key-
note address “Counts and Beats,” highlighting the different vocabulary of dance and music, the
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concepts that help people talk about and do dance and music but that still cause trouble. In their
article “Translating from Pitch to Plié: Music Theory for Dance Scholars and Close Movement
Analysis for Music Scholars,” Juliet McMains and Ben Thomas (2013) suggest a solution to the
problem by presenting points of analogy working in both directions, with separate charts for
music-to-dance and dance-to-music terminology. It seems that similar problems are faced across
ethnomusicology and ethnochoreology, with each tending to privilege its own medium of iden-
tity. In Sounding the Dance, Trimillos suggests that this thinking continues to promote European
epistemologies “that regarded dance and music as separate (and therefore separable) entities,” a
mono-disciplinary perspective that needs to be revised to suit twenty-first-century practices
and theoretical developments. He also gives an example of conflicting terminology between
the two disciplines: ethnomusicologists usually refer to the Javanese dance theater wayang wong
as a “tradition,” while ethnochoreologists (otherwise called dance ethnologists) refer to it as a
“form”: the labels say two very different things (2017, 2).
It is salutary for any discipline to face challenges from the outside, but worth consid-
ering the more deep-seated problem of understanding across the music-dance divide.
There remains a degree of fear of the Other, and an exasperated dance scholarly brigade is
finally standing up for itself. At the end of a largely negative book review, Hanna Järvinen
stresses that “learning an art form takes years of hard work …” adding that claims made on
dance by nondance scholars “are facile and implausible only to dance scholars” (2014, 102).
Likewise, Lynn Garafola bemoans the common practice of scholars in every other field to
“make free with dance material, mangling evidence and misreading cues … [making] egre-
gious errors that would be unimaginable if they involved any subject other than dance”
(2005, ix). From within choreomusical studies, I would add that dance is the art form that
suffers the most. Most dance scholars hardly dare take on musical analysis—only the few who
have had some technical training in the subject, whereas only dance scholars would notice
when a musicologist marches into their field speaking an alien vocabulary.
I write here primarily from my own experience as a specialist in Western theater dance
of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I cannot but approach the present task thus and
reflect as an analyst of dances—to some a musicologist, some a dance scholar, usually an
Other—using my practical and academic background in and across both Western music and
Western dance. Some of the material introduced, itself stemming from a wide variety of
earlier theoretical sources, appears in more developed form within two earlier publications
(Jordan 2011, 2015). On the other hand, I introduce contrasting ideas from research into non-
Western cultures, popular dance forms, and earlier historical periods, believing that choreo-
musicology as a whole can learn much from multiple perspectives, perhaps encouraging us to
modify our existing methodologies or, at least, to be aware of our particular ways of seeing
and listening, our prejudices. For this essay, I prioritize new thinking, new directions, and new
choreomusical examples.
Choreomusical research: A survey

In 2009, at the end of his book The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss, musicologist Wayne
Heisler writes:
The study of choreography is still an almost alien universe in musicology, where it

could serve our grasp on history, reception, and cultural context, and also become
an important cornerstone for music-attentive performance studies by acknowledg-
ing and freeing the Pygmalions of past, present and future. (2009, 218)
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He also observes that linking music for dance with its actual context of performance, with
its originally intended dance setting, can be hugely beneficial to explaining features about
the music. In a Dance Chronicle issue on music and dance four years later, examining the
reception of Antony Tudor’s setting of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (as Dark Elegies, 1937),
he continues to call for integrated histories. He uses this particularly strong example to
“expand our understanding of the ways in which Mahler’s music was heard, seen, and felt
around mid-century … This ballet challenges music and dance historians to see, listen to,
and understand Mahler’s body of songs as a presence embodying aesthetic, historical, and
historiographic insight” (Heisler 2013, 176, 193).
In his 1985 examination of the three Tchaikovsky ballets, Wiley (one of Heisler’s impor-
tant exceptions in prioritizing dance) discusses his collaborations with choreographers, pri-
marily Petipa and Ivanov, the context in which they worked, their production history, as
well as undertaking considerable analysis of the scores. But his is certainly an early example,
if not of close dance analysis, of looking beyond the scores of his ballets. Notably, the book
targeted a dance as well as music readership. Then, in her 2000 study Ballet and Opera in the
Age of Giselle, Smith focused on music in direct interplay with choreography to make mean-
ing, sometimes at a detailed level (mime passages, for instance, reflecting speech rhythms
in music). More recently, using dance notation scores, she has assisted in the historically
informed revivals of Giselle and Paquita.
Increasingly, postmillennium, a number of other publications have intertwined theater dance
and music, historically and contextually. Where notation or film material permits, some of these
include passages of close analysis. Otherwise, scholars use whatever primary sources might be
available: music scores and sketches (often, dance scholars are unaware of the dance value of
these), scenarios, design and production materials, notes on choreography by choreographers
and dancers, and reviews. Most publications, including Heisler’s, cover early to mid-twentieth-
century work, for instance, the Ballets Russes (Caddy 2012), Parisian music-hall ballet (Gutsche-
Miller 2015), the 1934 Stravinsky/Ballets Rubinstein theater piece Persephone (Levitz 2012),
the ballets of Ravel (Mawer 2006), Prokofiev (Press 2006; Morrison 2009), and the synthesis
of choreography, music, and camerawork in the films of Fred Astaire, George Balanchine, and
Gene Kelly (Genné 2018). Also noteworthy, virtually all the work discussed here is ballet.
When it comes to choreomusical analysis, probably because it requires technical expertise
in both media, much less research has been undertaken. Remarkable, however, is the body
of research into eighteenth-century baroque dance, since the 1960s, with a major increase in
participation since the millennium. This embraces both social and theatrical dances, which
are stylistically closely interrelated. Reconstruction is possible because the dance is served by
the strong Beauchamp-Feuillet system of notation. The dance material is also suitable for the
“sketch learning” ( Jordan 2015, 121) of basic steps and patterns prior to, and as prompt for,
analysis, without requiring considerable dance training, although there have been, and still
are, dance expert practitioners interested in the style and offering invaluable support from
outside academia to musicologists. But we must not forget that the interest in this style comes
on the back of an intense excitement about the early music movement during the second half
of the last century, with its refreshing aesthetic of “pure” performance practice and heated
debates about authenticity. Furthermore, the material is extremely rich choreomusically,
more so than most other Western social and theater dance.
Several scholars (Schwartz 1998; Okamoto 2005; Barros 2010) have explored baroque
dance and music in terms of a shared rhetorical structure, the one used within baroque ora-
tory: a kind of narrative in the order of proposal, argument, and conclusion. These scholars
too, and others (Little 1975; Witherell 1981; Pierce 2008), have been specific about congruent
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or noncongruent relations between the two media—in terms of repetition, phrase structure,
and patterns of rhythmic event—notating dance and music in parallel to illustrate exact syn-
chronization (within the limits of what is known or argued) and using music rhythmic nota-
tion for the dance lines. At the other end of the spectrum, a 2014 article in French by Dóra
Kiss on the “menuet performd” by Mrs. Santlow (a renowned professional dancer) stresses
the performer’s presence in a Monsieur L’Abbé choreography, taking the principle of inde-
pendence between choreographic and musical forms a stage further and suggesting that the
dance as notated is the documentation of both L’Abbé’s choreographic “text” and Santlow’s
individual performance.
A key book publication from this area of choreomusical research is Musical Theatre at the
Court of Louis XIV: Le Mariage de la Grosse Cathos (1994) by Rebecca Harris-Warrick and
Carol G. Marsh. The manuscript for this 1688 masquerade is the only extant documentation
of a complete theatrical entertainment from the court that set the standard for the whole of
Europe. Alongside a facsimile of the full manuscript is a mass of contextual information and
analysis of all 10 dances, showing detailed choreomusical synchronization. (A reconstruction
was undertaken in 1991 once the choreographic notation, quite different from the Feuillet
system, had been deciphered.) Through their research (see also Harris-Warrick 2016), the
authors have made the more general historical point (which would please Heisler) that dance
in seventeenth-century opera was not, as originally thought, a mere extra event or interrup-
tion, but a major component of it and thoroughly integrated into the opera as a whole. Four
years later, Judith Schwartz, analyzing the phrase structure in the passacaille of Lully’s Armide,
gave a powerful account of the drama of contrasts in the movement material as it related
to music, reading this politically as a “larger image of universal order, an aural and kinetic
model of the tension between entropy (chaos) and order” (1998, 318).
Beyond baroque studies, an outstanding feature is the number of scholars who have
researched the choreographers George Balanchine and Mark Morris and composers
Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky. Widely recognized quality of work is surely a major reason.
Regarding the choreographers, both are well-known as musicians and fluent readers of musi-
cal scores—Balanchine a pianist and composer of the occasional song or piano miniature,
Morris a conductor in his later career—both exploring a wide range of music and attracting
music as well as dance audiences. It is especially striking that between 1992 and the present,
no fewer than five scholars (most of them based in the United States) have undertaken chor-
eomusical analyses of the Balanchine-Stravinsky collaboration Agon, variously prioritizing
structure, working process, meaning, and gender issues.
At least six scholars have researched Morris’s work. Danish scholar Inger Damsholt was the
first (1999, 2006), drawing from Foucault, reading Morris’s use of music visualization (and
the alternatives) in terms of choreomusical polemic, and illustrating her argument with an
in-depth analysis of Gloria (1981, to Vivaldi’s Gloria). Three other scholars, all from the UK,
have published choreomusical analyses of Dido and Aeneas (1989, to Purcell): Sophia Preston,
Rachel Duerden, and myself. Of all the scholars mentioned who have undertaken close chor-
eomusical analysis, so far as I know, only these three UK scholars have, after a dual training
in both dance and music, then developed careers in dance departments (or otherwise-named
dance units).
Another area of research is concerned with concert music and operas that contain sonic
analogues for dance. Examples are studies of Bach’s “dances” (Little and Jenne 1991) and
of the minuet and waltz (McKee 2012). Such music-led projects offer further ideas about
musical performance practice while also suggesting experience of physical resonance within
apparently nonprogrammatic music. Traces of movement within music are also a theme
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running through the work of Berlin-based dance scholar Stephanie Schroedter. Her theory
of “kinaesthetic listening” refers to the ballroom and theater dance activity embodied within
the music of mid-nineteenth-century Paris (2017), but also to the reception of twentieth- and
twenty-first-century classical and “new music.”
Other recent research that responds to our metaphorical inclinations and draws from one
of the most urgent concerns of today is that of gender. Damsholt has argued that discourse
on the relationship between dance and music often resembles a more general discourse on
gender and sexuality, following the quest for equality in the twentieth century when mod-
ern dance was conceived as a feminist phenomenon with its own independent structures
and working processes (2002, 2012). She also proposes that, supported by their attitudes to
music, Merce Cunningham and Morris have respectively kept homosexuality in the closet
and openly celebrated it as one of many gender/sexuality possibilities. Damsholt borrows
from metaphor and conceptual blending theory (8) and, at the same time, from Foucault’s
political formatting, the transmission of female–male power relations. Meanwhile, in the
United States, Daniel Callahan’s doctoral research demonstrates how the choreomusical
styles of Ted Shawn and, again, Cunningham have “reflected and refracted their masculini-
ties and homosexualities” (2012).
Turning to ethnography, we find other choreomusical research that addresses head-on the
border between dance and culture. Potentially relevant to all choreomusical studies today is the
fieldwork approach from dance ethnography with its attention to the socially situated, histori-
cally constituted process of performance and the work of the performer her- or himself. As
ethnomusicologist Kendra Stepputat suggests, many choreomusicologists to date (she includes
me) have worked from a Western perspective and also “heavily incorporate cultural conventions,
mostly unknowingly or at least unreflectively, into their structural concepts” (2017, 36).
Anthropologist Paul Mason illustrates social and historical context through the Tari Ping
dance of Minangkabau tradition in Western Sumatra. He compares a self-accompanied perfor-
mance by men tapping china plates at the apex of an arm swing, with another performance in
which a group of relatively untrained elderly women hit spoons on bottles to catch younger
women at the point of mid-swing. One version derives from a dance action and through cul-
tural entrainment, the other from visual cues, matching the moment that is considered per-
ceptually salient. Choreomusically speaking, the media are handled totally differently: in the
men’s version, the sound being part of the dance (the binding together of the media common
within local practice); in the women’s, the media separated between dancers and accompanying
musicians (as in most Western practice). Here, crucially, the change in music and dance practice
reflected cultural changes in West Sumatra during the late twentieth century: A dance that was
once performed and learned only by men is now shared, as boys and girls study the same educa-
tional curriculum and learn variants of the dance across the Indo-Malayan archipelago, whereas
the move to mixed communities and nuclear families has deeply affected an art tradition. More
broadly, Mason raises questions about how training influences the relationship between sound
and movement in a dance genre and how power dynamics and economic relations influence
choreomusical interactions (2014, 210–216, 223).
Analytical methods: A provisional toolbox

A range of theoretical approaches is ready for use in the close analysis of relationships between
dance and music. This is a multi-stranded theoretical base, drawing from a number of sources
( Jordan 2015, 91–123), like an analytical toolbox, ready for selective use of its contents, and
always as appropriate to a particular dance speaking to us in a particular way.
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Stephanie Jordan
Developing from the basic concept of music and dance operating in dynamic interaction,
the two media are both seen as subject to change rather than static entities, operating within
a mechanism of interdependence rather than maintaining the hard binary of parallelism ver-
sus counterpoint (Kalinak 1992, 29–31). We are also dealing with a composite form: dance
and music. Although we might still be able to trace the separate development of the two
media, these two sensory planes now meet to affect each other and to create a new identity
from their meeting. The old terms of congruence and noncongruence, similarity and differ-
ence, now seem inadequate. Just as composer-theorist Barbara White proposes, we should
rather go to precise examples within precise contexts in order to spell out these dilemmas
and pleasures in any meaningful way, to go beyond the question of whether dance and music
meet each other or not, to ask where or how they meet (2006, 73–74). Film music theory has
been especially useful here in proposing concepts of “mutual implication”—music and image
working together in a combinatoire of expression (Gorbman 1980, 189)—as well as concepts
of “added value” from the meeting of two forces and “transsensorial perception,” the visual
conveying the aural and vice versa (Chion [1990] 1994, 5, 137).
It is useful to consider recent intermedia research involving music that considers these cognitive
capacities systematically. Drawing from metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) and the idea
of mapping information from one domain on to another in order to generate new meaning, Cook,
in Analysing Musical Multimedia (1998), puts forward a general theory of how all different media
can potentially work together to make meaning. He proposes three broad models of interaction:
“conformance,” “complementation,” and “contest,” the latter being the most dynamic concept,
indicating essential contradiction and potential for irony. This theory of emergent meaning from
mutual relations has since developed into a more complex framework of “conceptual blending”
from two or more different domains (Fauconnier and Turner 1995 and 2002; Zbikowski 2002)
and has been assessed within a dance context by Helen Minors (2012).
An example of conceptual blending is my analysis of Morris’s well-known setting of
Dido’s Lament from Dido and Aeneas. Here, the choreography fleshes out the music (and espe-
cially the vocal and bass lines) as a conduit for human subjectivity. Dido becomes a moving
human being embodying the vocal line, and the ground bass line becomes a much enriched
“voice,” carrying a variety of human traits. It is matched by the dancing chorus and, as such,
represents the speech of courtiers, cupids, and conscience. In the instrumental postlude to
the Lament, the dancing Dido and chorus move together to illustrate the resolution between
voice and accompaniment, completing the blend as it were. In this context, the connection
between dance and music also speaks of the tension between living and dying (for which
vertical space is yet another metaphor). The dance component greatly increases the tension,
being visual and literally using the “earth” to which Dido refers.
Another branch of cognitive research deals with accentuation through the meeting of
media, which could, in certain circumstances, create another structural layer of its own.
There is, for instance, the phenomenon of movement exaggerating musical events (which,
heard alone, may be barely perceptible) and thus influencing our perceptions of music. In psy-
chology, this phenomenon is known as “visual capture,” although it has been described aptly
by psychologist Lawrence E. Marks as one medium “sopping up” attributes from another
(1978, 197). In other words, visual stimuli are strong enough to influence people to per-
ceive simultaneously presented auditory stimuli as related. The phenomenon can work in
the opposite direction too, as “auditory capture”—sound stimuli affecting our perception of
visual information. “Capture” relates to Chion’s notion of “added value.”
A solo that Morris made for himself to the central movement of Italian Concerto (2007, to
Bach) provides a good illustration of “visual capture.” On several occasions, shared accents
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turn into structural signposts, moments in the score pulled out of their melodic surroundings
by dance movement—like a distinctive lunge and swing outward with an arm to a synco-
pated leaping musical interval. As if “frozen” out of their context (the “freeze phenomenon”
is another concept from psychology [Vroomen and de Gelder 2000]), such moments are thus
afforded additional impact.
In his article “How Pitch and Loudness Shape Musical Space and Motion,” music theorist
Zohar Eitan (2013) highlights (from empirical, scientific research) not only the interactive
nature of audiovisual relations but also the complexity involved in establishing “natural”
mappings from music on to motion. Eitan reports that experiments with young children
visualizing very short musical stimuli have resulted in unexpected findings: For instance,
loudness, rather than pitch or tempo, seems to be the strongest link between music and
motion characteristics (speed, energy, spatial rise, and forward motion); and associations
between pitch and height of motion are made more readily through pitch movement (rise
and fall) than through static pitches. Thus, too, music produces its own visual images to sug-
gest space and motion, and these are often perceived automatically, at a low-order, perceptual
response, rather than through higher-order cognitive judgments, although these could in
theory follow and introduce semantic content. Bringing to our consciousness these ideas
from cognitive science could help us watch and listen to dance with a heightened quality of
attention. Knowing how, for instance, music visualization is achieved, whether consciously
or unconsciously by a choreographer, could help us (and other artists) appreciate its distinc-
tive effects.
At this point, let us consider structures through time and categories for rhythmic analysis.
As part of a doctoral project on the work of Doris Humphrey, and of its period, the early
1980s ( Jordan 1986), this was where my own work began, following in a long tradition of
musicological projects that have analyzed musical structures for their own sake. The East
European dance ethnographers mentioned earlier had already established a basic unit of
duration for dance and a hierarchical listing of units, like cells, phrases, and sections up to
the level of a dance, for which there are analogous hierarchies in music. Like the baroque
specialists, they also assessed rhythm patterns and unit structures across music and dance,
establishing degrees of congruence and noncongruence. Applying this theory to Western
theater dance more broadly, I needed to modify the structural categories while drawing
upon music rhythmic theory, which is far more developed than dance theory. In summary,
these categories can be grouped as referring to duration and frequency, stress, the group-
ing of sounds or movements through time, and energy pattern ( Jordan 2000, 78). The last,
elusive category, concerned with patterns of tension and relaxation across a work, section
of a work, or smaller unit, was the subject of further research by Roehampton doctoral
student Elizabeth McLean as she analysed different settings of Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping
Beauty (2019).
In today’s broad methodological context, it seems crucial to keep these structural and
rhythmic matters in the picture, given their contribution to the effectiveness of many dance
works, be these relatively abstract or driven by plot. Structure, including rhythm, while
building and releasing tension, confirms and undermines our expectations. It also functions
cross-modally as dance and musical units match or conflict. Indeed, as a simple example,
East Europeans have long observed the effect of metrical incongruity, a conventional device
for creating tension, with dance and musical accents (as in some baroque dances) crossing in
rapid succession. Raina Katzarova likened the device to a continuous chase between the two
media (1960, 69). Furthermore, as Theresa Buckland insists, structure is part of “the wider
phenomenon of dance as a culturally codified and meaningful human action” (2007, 187).
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Ethnomusicologists have undertaken compelling research that links music with dance
at an even more detailed, microrhythmic level of construction. Studying the categories of
beat and meter, they note that theories that appear to have worked well for Western music
and African-derived forms (the two areas within which most research of this kind has been
undertaken), may not suit all forms of music, for instance, traditional Scandinavian dance
music. Turning to the body and to dance movement has proved revealing. Tellef Kvifte (2007)
proposes not looking at meter in terms of a lowest common denominator of dance or music
unit—as might be quaver or semiquaver timespans—but at the physically felt higher level of
regular or even irregular beats (e.g., these short beat units grouped as 2 + 2 + 3 + 2 + 3, into
longer divisions that are already only an approximation)—in other words using a common
long beat model. This research tells us about both the subtleties of the dance movement and
its relation to music. For all Kvifte’s examples—jazz music, Norwegian springer and gangar
dances, and Balkan dance, Western music theory, and notation systems building mathemati-
cally from a regular, fast beat division—are seen as misleading: They do not represent actual
experience.
Publishing in a dance journal, Dance Research, David Kaminsky (2014) takes these ideas
further, examining the Swedish polska, looking at dance movement more holistically as if,
through “lean,” “libration” (the up and down movements of the center of gravity within
steps), and “viscosity” (perceived air resistance), it responds to melody, timbre, and intensity,
not only to rhythmic systems. He also extends his method to incorporate qualitative eth-
nographic research techniques through interviewing performing musicians (who are once
again given the lead over dance experts) and reflecting upon teaching practice within pol-
ska tradition. More recently, Mari Haugen (2017) has further investigated musical meter as
shape or trajectory, by analyzing performing musicians’ and dancers’ periodic motion in
Brazilian samba and Norwegian Telespringar. The project used motion capture technology.
So does “Tango-Danceability of Music in European Perspective,” a current research project
that introduces another kind of microrhythmic analysis. The movement landmarks of tango
dancers (their peaks in acceleration or “pivot points”) are compared in relation to beat in
order to “understand their individual perception of musical structures within their bodies”
(Dick 2017, 306).
Western theater dance experts have only on rare occasions touched upon relation to beat.
The choreographer Morris, an exception, works with the concept of beat, not as a time-
less point, but as having a back, center, and front, changing his instructions to his dancers
accordingly: from “lazy rhythm,” meaning relax “at the back of the beat,” to the opposite,
“anticipate … be ahead of it.” He once questioned a moment in John Adams’s score for their
opera collaboration Nixon in China (1987): “Did you have to put in a bar of 1/8 right there?
Is that necessary? Come on! Isn’t that the same as a comma?” The point is that Morris heard
and felt the 1/8 primarily as a short extension. Ultimately it is big, deep physical response that
means the most to him ( Jordan 2015, 118–119).
There is potential, however, for scholars of Western dance forms to examine more system-
atically these subtleties, perhaps using ethnographic research as a stimulus, and to consider that
rhythmic nuance makes a crucial contribution to the choreomusical styles of both individual
dancers and choreographers. It is essential, for instance, to the breath-driven choreography of
British choreographers Frederick Ashton and Richard Alston. We are now moving into the
area of performance beyond fixed notated texts and it is relevant at this point to include the act
of embodiment, practice, among the analyst’s tools, “sketch learning” to get the feel of moves
and phrases to music. (This is rather like a musician researching a piece on the piano, without
playing it full out, up to speed, or in full detail, alongside the experience of actual performance.)
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The result of such sketch learning is hearing and seeing better, partly because the business of
practical learning draws us into detail, highlighting distinctions within the choreography
far more than distanced watching allows. At the same time, we may feel more strongly the
dynamics and drama of music and movement, grasping information that film sources, and
especially those of poor quality, tend to disguise. We might even interpret ourselves, work-
ing in the spirit of a creator—a participant in the process of bringing into being the work
analyzed—discovering points of relationship between what we do and what we hear that we
might never have experienced from watching a performance.
Other work by Stepputat (2017) centers on the internal working processes within dance
practices and throws a spotlight on the live decisions made during the event of performance.
She illustrates this through the Balinese theatrical dance Kecak and the relations between
its vocal sound and dance movement. Stepputat suggests a terminology comprising three
categories under the umbrella heading of interrelationship. This accords with the degree of
active reciprocity between the media: a continuum from interconnection, through interde-
pendence, to interaction, with the first mostly located in performances with fixed structure,
and the last most likely to be found in a dance, or section of a dance, in which there is a
strong improvisatory component. At the same time, she adds to the equation the matter of
leadership, which varies between movement following sound, sound following movement,
or, a third, outside person directing both media. Stepputat also suggests that the condition of
an interrelationship (as opposed to its quality, the topic of earlier structural analysis) is partly
determined by the particular performance context—whether, for instance, the Kecak is pre-
sented as a contemporary, progressive piece or standardized for tourists. As an analytical
tool of a different order from those used in other structural analyses, Stepputat’s alternative
methods could well contribute not only to a more nuanced reading of Kecak in performance,
including an understanding of relationships between the personnel involved, but also to
understanding how other dance forms might operate within the moment of performance.
Ethnographic approaches such as these offer an interesting parallel to today’s expand-
ing enterprise of process studies or “genetic criticism” (a theoretical movement originating
from French literary criticism in the mid-1970s). The concern here is to piece together the
working traces of the creative artist as a key component within the formulation of pertinent
analytical questions that lead to better understanding of the artwork itself. With this in mind,
it is gratifying to register at least two hot-off-the-press graduate student dissertations (Rymer
2016, Kossen-Veenhuis 2017) addressing recent composer–choreographer collaborations.
Given today’s marked “process turn,” it is likely that choreomusical studies of this kind will
develop further. There is already a valuable body of relevant primary source material await-
ing use. Examples are the former dance studio musician Katherine Teck’s three collections
of writings by, and interviews with, artists (1989, 1990, 2011) and the considerable body of
resources on the Cunningham-Cage collaboration, including the Merce Cunningham Trust
website, with its ongoing program of capsules of documentation on his dances.
Yet, in support of a pluralist future, it is important that at least three American doctoral
theses (2016–2017) have welcomed the challenge of theory in the more abstract, structural
sense. Rachel Short (in “Musical Feet: The Interaction of Choreography and Music in
Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins’s Fancy Free,” 2016), Kara Leaman (in “Analyzing
Music and Dance: Balanchine’s Choreography to Tchaikovsky and the Choreomusical
Score, 2016”) and Matthew Bell (in “Rhythmic Gesture in Classic Ballet: Awakening
Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty,” 2017) all expand the application of theoretical tools from
music in formal, pitch, and rhythmic/metric analysis. Leaman has also invented a notation
system for documenting her choreomusical analysis which, in support of “sketch learning,”
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Stephanie Jordan
graphs choreographic pitch (changes in movement level), as well as rhythm on a dance staff
aligned with the corresponding musical score. While clear that this system may not suit all
forms of dance and music, she also provides a rare example of choreomusical research cross-
ing boundaries between high art and popular culture, incorporating alongside ballet discus-
sion of the Minuet, Bulgarian folk, rave, and “The Skeleton Dance” from Walt Disney’s Silly
Symphonies. Even hotter off the press is the 2018 collection Music-Dance: Sound and Motion in
Contemporary Discourse (Veroli and Vinay), the first of its kind, a landmark publication offer-
ing an exceptionally wide array of choreomusical perspectives, both theoretical foundations
and their applications to dances.
Looking back—A summary
The sheer range of work in choreomusical studies since the early 1990s cannot be disputed.
It includes projects within Western theater dance that are historical, contextual, and analyti-
cal, and, starting much earlier, the larger ethnographic and potentially global field that I am
unable to more than touch upon in this chapter. Today’s field undoubtedly responds to the
fever of interdisciplinarity evident across and well beyond the arts, a shift in thinking that is
not without problems, but that offers many stimulating pathways ahead.
Looking back autobiographically as an historian-analyst, my earliest examinations of
structure and rhythm betrayed my background in music rather more than my experience of
dance. I was less aware of the high modernist, contextually removed values of those theoreti-
cal models from music. Soon, I edged, like so many others, toward meaning, partly through
cognitive and linguistic theory, but also welcomed the more phenomenological aspect of vis-
ceral experience through watching, listening, and doing. Now, even in researching for this
chapter, further methodological practices from beyond Western theater dance have proved
an enriching and questioning resource and a much broader metaphorical context, while deal-
ing with the realities of performance. In contrast with relatively stable choreographed and
composed texts, these practices are about the highly unstable individual performance event
and experience.
It is important that all these conceptual frameworks can inform artists—choreographers,
composers, dancers, and musicians—and their training, not only scholars. Yet there is still a
need to address basic problems of communication and of sharing knowledge, to cover what
still is a divide between those in dance and those in music.
Looking to the future

Focusing on dance studies within the United States and the UK, we might now consider
whether choreomusical research is a healthy, growing field, despite the energy manifest
through multiple research projects and publications. Currently, many signs indicate that the
field is not supported institutionally within dance departments or units such as theatre and
performance studies that include dance. The stark reality is that nearly every example cited
in this chapter derives from work hosted by music departments. A contributing factor is the
narrowness of dance research in the UK today and the paucity of analyses of dance works
and dancing ( Jordan 2017). Choreomusical research is, in such a climate, way back on the
back burner, although it could in theory offer a strong model for a return to, or even initial
exploration of, other kinds of dance analysis and prove that questioning how dances are put
together is highly relevant to an advanced discipline.
152
But what are the implications of choreomusical research having only one home—within
music? Earlier, I mentioned the need for scholars in the field to have more knowledge of the
Other, beyond their own principal training or teaching experience. Here, I qualify that judgment
and emphasize that not all choreomusical work requires intense degree-level technical training
in both disciplines. Once again, dance could well be the victim, as dance scholars without music
degrees are unlikely to be taken into, or indeed attracted by, doctoral programs in music. Nor are
they likely to find qualified dance experts there as supervisors. (Currently, the first appearance
of a dance expert in a doctoral program is often at the examination stage.) But nor is a degree
in dance seen as a stepping-stone toward an academic job in music. Although there is excite-
ment about the young interdisciplinary field, institutional structures are not keeping up with
that excitement and promoting a system of mutual support. Beyond Western frameworks, too,
there are signs that curriculum development is moving toward greater separation of the two
disciplines.The drawbridge is all set to be raised.Yet, given such exciting recent developments, it
would be a tragedy if the two disciplines were to end up even more divided.
Notes
1 The chapter draws from, and expands upon, material in my two earlier publications (2011 and
2015). Material from Mark Morris: Musician-Choreographer is reproduced by kind permission of
Dance Books.
2 I am very grateful for comments relevant to this chapter and valuable support from Theresa
Buckland, Kara Leaman, Marian Smith, and Jennifer Thorp.
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11
CHOREOSONIC WEARABLES
Creative collaborative practices
Michèle Danjoux
Introduction
Over the past decade, the interest in wearables as intermediary devices in mediatized perfor-
mance has become notable in artistic explorations and research inquiry in the sonic arts and
dance fields alike. Moreover, dress/costume is becoming more studied in academic contexts
for the multifaceted and significant role it can play in performance. The latter is evidenced
in newly emerging journals that raise questions about the criticality of costume to making
performance, for example, the biannual Studies in Costume and Performance1 which debuted
in 2017, and the special issue of Scene on “Critical Costume” (2014).2 The body of practice-
based research presented in this chapter is situated, where these paths converge. It investigates
the performative and affective potentials of sounding garments/accessories—“choreosonic”
wearables—as bodily extensions in interactive dance. Choreosonic is a term that impli-
cates both movement (choreo) and sound (sonic). According to Stan Wijnans (2009, 16),
who describes herself as a choreosonic artist, this term was coined during a research project
between herself and Sarah Rubidge, Professor in Choreography and New Media, at V2_Lab
for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam (the Netherlands) in 2006. I have adopted and adapted
the term for my research into the generation of movement and sound that links wearables and
the act of wearing to an amplificatory, multisensorial (tactile, aural, visual) and perceptual
performance technique for the dancer, enabling a new collaborative movement-sounding or
choreosonic creativity. Moreover, the wearable, engaged in this way—specifically as musi-
cal material or rather quiescent medium of sound—to be activated by the dancer-wearer
inside the immersive performance space, adopts a new collaborative and dynamic role in the
process of making dance that, crucially, links to a notion of a choreography that is wearable,
distributed and audible.
In this chapter, the emergence of dance is explored through choreosonic wearable design
strategies that link gestural and whole-body movement to sounding and the transceiving
potentials for the dancer-wearer in the performance space. The disciplines of sound art and
dance have both crucially supported the emergence of the prototypes presented here, while
the latter has offered the fertile ground and intellectual space necessary to conduct experimen-
tations with movement-design and the notion of becoming choreosonic. My initial motivations
to interrogate the subject of wearable performance stem simultaneously from a background in
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fashion design and my role as co-director of DAP-Lab, a UK-based interdisciplinary design

and performance laboratory with a focus on digital performance, established by Johannes
Birringer, choreographer and filmmaker, and me in 2004. At the time when I first began
designing wearables for dancers in interactive performance in 2006–2007, an awareness of
smart clothes, wearable electronics and computing was gradually gaining ground in fashion
and clothing, as manifested in some of the books on techno-fashion that appeared between
2002 (Quinn) and 2009 (Tao 2005; Seymour 2008; McCann and Bryson 2009). Moreover,
working in the context of performance art revealed that body-worn technologies were slowly
becoming a feature of some interactive dance scenarios. Examples include Contraindre (2004)
by Myriam Gourfink, Passage (2007–2008) by Martin Kusch and Marie-Claude Poulin and
their company kondition pluriel, and Whisper[s] (Wearable, Handheld, Intimate, Sensory,
Personal, Expressive, Responsive System [2002–2006]), a wearable research project coming
out of the whispers research group at Simon Fraser University, Canada (2007), and involving
collaboration between Thecla Schiphorst (2005) and Susan Kozel (2007).3 In addition, my
inquiry into amplifiable and “sensortized”4 body interfaces and wearable design was further
stimulated by the sonic arts and traditions of instrumental and electronic music.
In DAP-Lab’s interactive dance-theatre productions/performance installations—UKIYO
(2009–2011; DAP-Lab 2010a, 2010b); for the time being [Victory over the Sun] (2012–2014);
Kimosphere no.2 (2015); and Kimosphere no.3 (2016)—choreosonic wearables intentionally
reside at the core of its compositional strategies. The first four prototypes introduced in
this chapter: GraveDigger, RedMicro Dress, TatlinTower (head)dress, and the Futurian
ChestPlate belong to the performance for the time being [Victory over the Sun] (2012–2014). Each
prototype presents a different experimental model of choreosonic wearable connecting to the
processes of devising dance and sound composition in real-time scenarios and aims to illu-
minate the larger question of music, design and dance collaboration. Furthermore, once acti-
vated, the focus of the prototypes shifts from wearable to wearability in a process of becoming
both mediator of movement-sounding for the dancer and intermediary in the performance
space. With a sound aesthetic akin to noise music, the wearables are meant to offer a pro-
vocative and disruptive element to compositional processes. They evoke the Italian composer
Luigi Russolo’s acoustic Intonarumori or noise machines (circa 1910–1930) which generated a
raft of sounds that could be altered tonally and amplified through mechanical interaction and
were designed to be visually distinctive. A fifth prototype, the ConductiveCoat, outlined in
the second part of this chapter as a separate case study, stems from explorations undertaken
after completing the prototypes used in for the time being [Victory over the Sun] in 2014. In par-
ticular, this subsequent study investigates further a wearability that is sonically and spatially
embedded through the use of e-textiles.
Staging wearables
The idea of staging the garment as movement or choreographic instigator in dance is
not completely new. Nor is the notion of integrating technologies into performative con-
cepts for dancers’ costumes. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the dancer
Loïe Fuller was already unifying both these elements as compositional devices integrally into
her creative process and aesthetic (Hindson 2013, 72). Indeed, early physical transformations
of the modern dancing body achieved via such means are largely credited to Fuller who is
considered a pioneer in the field of modern dance and stage technologies. Moreover, Fuller’s
serpentine dance practice—which incorporated undulating and interacting costumes, opti-
cal stage devices such as magic lantern projections and colored lights—created an experience
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Choreosonic wearables
that was multisensory (Uhlirova 2013, 21). Her integrative methods involving dynamic ways
of working with cloth/costume and extending the body’s limbs with rods (inside the sleeves)
and her technological experimentation and the aesthetic effects she achieved are discussed by
Rhonda K. Garelick in Electric Salome: Loïe Fuller’s Performance of Modernism (2007). Notable
examples of her dances illuminating the fluidity of connections between the various ele-
ments of her artistic compositions were: Serpentine Dance (1896) and Fire Dance (1892), the
latter using up-lighting and indirect lighting techniques, innovative at the time, to cre-
ate her visually stunning metamorphic effects. Through her multimedia compositional and
choreographic strategies, Fuller was able to captivate her Paris audiences with her onstage
spectacle of material interactions combining body and machine to evoke ephemeral land-
scapes (Garelick 2007, 4). Her dynamic methods of manipulating an abundance of cloth, its
morphing forms further accentuated via the use of lighting, enabled her to metamorphose
through a whole series of transient organic forms (Thomas 1995, 56).
My focus in design’s relation to movement stems from early twentieth-century experi-
mental dance involving an amalgamated exploration of movement and costume/material
artifact, as evidenced in the work of Fuller. Moreover, it aligns with the expressive and
integrative aspects of modern dance of the same early era when dancers would choreograph
their own works and often also design and fabricate their own costumes, which in certain
instances would become intrinsic to the dance and the transmission of its emotional expres-
sive content. Such was the case with Martha Graham in early modern dance: She was adept
at interlinking techniques of costume creation, narrative and music into her works concerned
first and foremost with the primacy of movement and emotional meaning, as, for example,
in her well-known Lamentation (premiered in 1930). In her analysis of Imperial Gesture (1935),
choreographer and dancer Kim Jones emphasizes the crucial partnering presence of the skirt
to Graham’s realization of her choreographic ideas and Jones’s own recreation of the work
and to her embodiment of Graham’s gestures (2015, 59–64).
In the experimental tradition of the sonic arts, Ellen Fullman’s Metal Skirt Sound Sculpture
(1980) is an example of a performance wearable connected to sounding-in-motion and
instrument-bodies. Although not directly connected to dance but more to the functional
aspects of everyday movement, Fullman’s sound sculpture consisted of a pleated skirt, con-
structed out of metal, integrating a simple analog sound system to be mobilized via the
act of walking. Guitar strings connected from the hem of the skirt to the toes and heels of
Fullman’s platform shoes while a contact microphone attached to the skirt picked up sound
vibrations. A portable pignose amp worn like a small bag over Fullman’s shoulder then
amplified these vibrations (Fullman 2012, 3). In her street performances, Fullman’s wear-
able instrument enabled her to sound out as she moved, a notion fundamental to the practice-
based research presented in this chapter. In terms of digital musical instruments (DMIs) and
electronic music, musicians and sound artists have been experimenting with the design of
DMIs and the use of sound synthesis methods in the form of wearable gestural controllers
since the 1990s. As a result, they discovered, like Fuller, that through body-worn devices
and furthermore, through an exploration of the sensory aspects of interaction, that the entire
body could be turned into a performing instrument. Newly acquired knowledge forced an
advancement in their field from the prevailing laptop and disembodied performance models
of the new media aesthetic of the 1980s and 1990s, to one that embraced body–computer
interactions oriented more toward the senses. Crucially, digital and electronic sound cre-
ation could now to be controlled via more gesturally dynamic means, thus placing corpo-
real activity at the heart of the technological system. Some experimental sound artists and
performers and early innovators in the field such as Laetitia Sonami (2017) (“Lady’s Glove”),
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Pamela Z (2018) (“The BodySynth™”), and Julie Wilson-Bokowiec (2018) (“Bodycoder

System”), commencing in the 1990s, have since built an entire performance practice around
this notion and the wearables they created.
These developments in electronic music and noise performance (the latter a subgenre
that is particularly popular in Japan with artists such as Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M and
Toshi Nakamura) can be viewed in a larger context of cross-disciplinary performance art as
it emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, in the New York downtown scene ( Judson
Church). The creation of task-based happenings, dance-music-film events and multimedia
installations of the time—which involved as many visual artists (from Rauschenberg and
Andy Warhol to Carolee Schneemann and Gina Pane) as musicians, composers and dancers—
reflected a strong curiosity in new sculptural and three-dimensional (3D) form, extending
painting or film through movement-objects and moving materials, and thus projecting also
the notion of an “extended choreographic” to which I subscribe.
DAP-Lab’s for the time being [Victory over the Sun]

DAP-Lab’s for the time being [Victory over the Sun] was inspired by the experimental Russian
Futurist opera Victory over the Sun. With its prologue by the poet Aleksei Khlebnikov and
libretto by Kruchenykh and Velimir Khlebnikov, costumes and abstract set design by Kazimir
Malevich and experimental music score by Mikhail Matiushin, the opera premiered at the
Luna Park Theatre in St. Petersburg in 1913. The early part of the twentieth century was a
time of revolution and social reform in Russia. It was a new era that decisively ushered in an
experimental time for Russian art and a breach with artistic traditions and preoccupations
of the past. Radical artists, in the most extreme instances, sought to create something
original and utopian, and this consequentially led to the emergence of new associated art
movements—suprematism, futurism and constructivism. Such were the conditions that
spawned the original Victory over the Sun opera and impacted its aesthetic.
Divided into two parts, Act I and Act II, the first reflecting the old order and mode of
existence, a time before the revolution, and the second, a new world with characters of the
future, Victory over the Sun was an artistic production that sought to dispose of established val-
ues. Paradoxical and contentious in nature, the opera subverted Russian folk culture, which
venerated the sun, through doing battle with the sun while sharing the rich and visual extrava-
gances of Russian folk theatre. “Heliomachia” or “sun-struggle” was a leitmotif for the Russian
Futurists, symbolic of an uprising against traditions of the established orders (Böhmig 2012, 112).
According to Malevich and Matiushin, the original libretto for Victory over the Sun was “devoid of
any developing plot while its central idea was the overthrow of one of the greatest artistic values—
the sun” (Kruchenykh et al. 2009, 22). In DAP-Lab’s dance opera version, the GraveDigger char-
acter (Illustration 11.1) translates the historic plot into the creation of a solntselov (sun-trapper) and
an iconic “Killing of the Sun” scene performed by dancer Helenna Ren.
The 1913 version of Victory over the Sun was filled almost entirely with dissonances, abrupt
transitions and audacious phonetics, including song constructed purely from vowels and conso-
nants (Rosamund and Dadswell 2012, 98). Furthermore, Malevich’s idiosyncratic costumes,
utilizing techniques of geometric abstraction for a cast of many characters—“Nero and
Caligula,” “Traveler,” “Sportsmen,” “Man with Bad Intentions,” “Motley Eye,” “Aviator,”
“Trouble Maker,” “Enemy,” “New Man,” “Member of the Chorus,” “Reader,” etc.—added
to the strangeness of the piece. The intention was to capture some of these experimental
qualities, strong aesthetics and distinctive characteristics in the movement-characters and
sound compositions the wearables aroused.
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Illustration 11.1 Helenna Ren as GraveDigger enacts the role of solntselov or sun-trapper in the
“Killing of the Sun” scene, for the time being [Victory over the Sun], Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadler’s Wells,
London, 2014. (Courtesy of DAP-Lab.)
The visual aesthetics of a series of architectonic visualizations produced by artist El Lissitzky

a decade later in 1923 for an unrealized mechanical version of Victory over the Sun were also
significant to the emergence of the choreosonic characters in for the time being. For example, I
mimicked the sarcophagus form of Lissitzky’s “Gravediggers” in my GraveDigger prototype.
Thus, utilizing similar elements of humor and futurist devices of metaphorical languages
(visual and material) to create a character to capture and kill the sun. Constructed from heat-
resistant fabrics, this garment denoted both a final resting place for the sun and protective
wear for the sun-trapper. Gloves with singed fingertips, special retro protective eyewear with
ultraviolet shield (circa late 1960s) and straw hat added to the comical textures of this wear-
able character. From a technological point of view, the costume was paired with a Kinect
system, a commercial X-box 3D infrared camera, connectible to Motion Builder, Blender,
and other OpenSource 3D software.
The scene was programmed by media artist Cameron McKirdy. Unlike the other featured
prototypes in this performance, the technologies here were not directly integrated into the
costume, nor did they sit visibly on its surface. Instead, the form of the dancer’s costumed-body
partnered as active agent with the Kinect system. This method involved certain complexities,
given that to activate/deactivate the system for real-time audiovisual performance with the
digital sun, through modes of wearing and movement, the costumed-body needed to relate to
the particular characteristics of the system. Specifically, the shapes and surface textures presented
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to the 3D camera-vision were required to work within its parameters for interactions to occur.
The camera basically needed to “see” the human skeleton—arms, hands and legs to be precise—
to begin mapping the body and generating data for effect. The aim of the sarcophagus form
of the GraveDigger costume was to obscure the body from view of the camera-eye. Then the
moment Ren released her arms, allowing them to each emerge from her coffin-body one at a
time, the system now activated, could begin mapping Ren’s movement data for the manipula-
tion of sound and image (see the virtual onscreen sun Illustration 11.2).
In terms of her gestural impact on the aural landscape and the type of sound that was
emitted, musician Oliver Doyle, who programmed the sound and parameters in relation to
McKirdy’s virtual sun, explained:
Illustration 11.2 Helenna Ren releases her arms from inside her sarcophagus, the Kinect system recog-
nizes her, and the virtual sun rises on screen, for the time being [Victory over the Sun], Lilian Baylis Studio,
Sadler’s Wells, London, 2014. (Courtesy of Hans Staartjes.)
162
I’m working on a drone sound with dense multi-tonal wall of sound that has shift-
ing tones moving in waves as the base, from here I’ve programmed the patch to
measure the distance between the XY coordinates for the two hands being tracked
and sent by Cameron [McKirdy]. This can then be mapped to a frequency-based
amplitude oscillator to allow the sound to pulse, with the frequency of the pulse
changing depending on how close the two hands are (I’m thinking a steady pulse at
a larger distance that gets faster as the hands get closer insinuating an increased heart
rate). (Doyle, email to author, March 3, 2014)
In the case of RedMicro Dress (Illustration 11.3), the geometric forms, square body, rectangular
arms, triangular skirt of Malevich’s “Pallbearer” character in black and red, proved inspirational.
Essentially, the dress adopted the same geometric properties in its construction, square bodice,
angular shoulder line, circular cut skirt (rather than triangular). In addition, and as the name
Illustration 11.3 Vanessa Michielon in RedMicro Dress with flautist Emi Watanabe in “Tenth
Country,” a scene rehearsal from Act II, for the time being [Victory over the Sun], Interaktionslabor,
Gottelborn, Germany, 2013. (Courtesy of Michèle Danjoux.)
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Michèle Danjoux
suggests, the primary color for the dress was red, a saturated and pure hue, sharply contrasted
with black. It was constructed from neoprene and leatherette, giving a weighty feel to the
dancer-wearer.
With respect to Vanessa Michielon’s solo performance in RedMicro Dress, it became
clear from her feedback that the tactile and material qualities of the wearable were
directly linked to the types of movements she created. On her encounter with the
structural and tangible aspects of the dress as movement initiator (Illustration 11.3),
Michielon disclosed her enjoyment of the process and then that the distinct analog
provocations derived from the materiality of the dress, as opposed to digital, afforded
to her movement process where restrictions did not in effect restrict but rather became
suggestive of new movement to her:
Yes, I enjoyed a lot using this dress, and I think that in this case, the fact that some
parts of the dress were a little bit rigid, this is not a limitation in a negative way, but
it’s maybe a suggestion to create specific shapes. For example, I felt like using my
elbows in this way (shows right angles with the arms bending downward), making
angles with my elbows and/or keeping them really straight; this kind of costume
suggested to me to make lines or to make geometric forms instead of circular forms.
And also, the skirt—it is not so light, I mean it’s a little bit heavy and it makes a kind
of sound when you move it; this suggested to me to walk with different speeds to see
how the skirt slaps in a certain way or to try and stretch my legs to make it stretch
too. (Michielon, 2013 interview with author August 11)
As previously outlined, however, the concept of wearable sound in my work extends these
interrelational potentials for movement and micromovement of the wearer-dancer in cos-
tume to those of sound generation and/or manipulation within the performance space.
In many of the prototypes I have utilized as compositional tools, design strategies aim at
enabling the dancer to become an instrument-body in the musical sense. Furthermore, they
aim at equipping her with new modes of expressivity via her processes of movement in space
and engagement with the garment and its technological features, the contact mics, sensors,
speakers, microphones, circuitry etc., and the cameras and condenser mics in the space.
Through the act of movement-sounding, in a manner not dissimilar to Fullman’s in her
Metal Skirt Sound Sculpture (1980)—where her movements activated the garment, which in
turn activated her—I suggest, the dancer becomes entwined with the costume in a process of
extension and animation that is mutual and reciprocal in nature. A process that is two-way,
as seen in Fuller’s work with fabric and technologies (above) and proposed by philosopher
and social theorist Brian Massumi in his writings on body-worn prostheses in relation to
performance artist Stelarc’s work: Helmet no.3: put on and walk (1970), where he notes that the
body is equally a prosthesis of the thing (2002, 95).
With RedMicro Dress, this notion extends further when the dress is designed for partner-
ing and not solo performance. In addition to its material qualities and weight, coloration and
distinctive visual aesthetics, Michielon’s dress, has a particularity—an integrated wearable
wireless microphone system with transmitter at the waist and tiny microphone located on the
left back shoulder (Illustration 11.4). Through this it is connected wirelessly to a larger system
164
Illustration 11.4 RedMicro Dress with integrated wireless microphone system—transmitter at the
waist and tiny microphone located on the left back shoulder for partnering and interaction, 2012.
(Courtesy of Brigitt Angst.)
of human–computer interactions within the performance space, and the microphone’s posi-
tioning is such that it might invite interaction from another performer for amplification and
manipulation of their sounds. Importantly, as a dynamic amplificatory device for wearable
partnering, RedMicro Dress expands through a process of exchange—the personal experi-
ential dimension of wearing described by Michielon (above)—to a more distributed form of
sensory engagement of dancers in close proximity.
In for the time being, the prototypes TatlinTower (head)dress (Illustration 11.5) and Futurian
ChestPlate (Illustration 11.7) were conceived as wearable experimental instruments for the
production of noise sound. Both instruments were constructed in collaboration with musi-
cian John Richards, who designed the circuitry. In the case of the former, the repetitive
sound of an integrated rotating spring actuated by the dancer’s hand gestures beating onto a
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Michèle Danjoux
Illustration 11.5 Helenna Ren performing the TatlinTower (head)dress, Scene I, for the time
being [Victory over the Sun], Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadler’s Wells, 2014. (Courtesy of Hans Staartjes.)
metal structure mounted on her head, would generate amplified sonic textures for a musician
to incorporate into their sound composition. The Futurian ChestPlate, a more sophisticated
construction in terms of interactivity, incorporated three small interconnecting microcir-
cuits, with a main sound generator, built around a fourth noise circuit based on Richard’s
“Bed of Nails” schematic for resistance and flow (Illustration 11.6), a proximity sensor and
two light sensors. This prototype was designed to partner with the RedMicro Dress, the lat-
ter’s small microphone capturing and relaying the sounds made by the dancers Michielon and
Angeliki Margeti (in chest plate) partnership. Here, performer and dress combine in motion,
generating and combining sounds rather than musical tones in partnership, to create what
Russolo, in his manifesto L’arte dei rumori—The Art of Noises ([1913] 1986), had imagined as a
“noise harmonium” of many different timbres, such as the “rustler,” “burster” or “croaker”
(Brown 1982, 47).
166
Illustration 11.6 “Bed of Nails” Schematic. (Courtesy of John Richards.)
The last in the series of sounding wearables to be prototyped for DAP-Lab’s for the time
being, the Futurian ChestPlate (Act II, Scene VI) was conceptualized as a wearable musical
instrument to feature in Act II. The visual aesthetic form of the main circuit was loosely
inspired by the 1919 Toft linear graphics of Russian artists Rodchenko and Stepanova and was
constructed using copper metal and wire/strings allowing the wearer to play the wearable
instrument to generate sound. The overall concept for the prototype was influenced by the
intricate interactive electronic sculptures of Peter Vogel, which I saw at the ZKM exhibition
on Sound Art in 2012,5 where components and circuits were made clearly visible. Yet, it was
not purely the visual aesthetics of Vogel’s circuits that interested me, but also the interactive
dimension of his pieces. Works such as Duo (2006) and Minimal Music Sculpture (1988), for
instance, with their integrated speakers, photocells and other small electronic components, in
addition to being visually fascinating, were designed to operate as participatory installations
where the sound emitted from the integrated speakers can be influenced by the movement
of bodies in front of the circuit-sculpture. This in turn generates a score for the electronic
music. It is his notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk or total artwork incorporating a synthesis
of bodies, technologies, materials and movement for the design of the instrument, where
sounding becomes interrelational, which further provoked my thoughts for the duet in Act
II, Scene VI, and the construction of the Futurian ChestPlate.
Furthermore, the visual idiosyncrasies of Malevich’s “singing” character—“Member of
the Chorus”—wearing a large flat shield-like structure over the chest inspired me to create a
chest plate instrument (Illustration 11.7). The intentionality for this second electro-acoustic
instrument centered on wearable partnering. The two areas of investigation were (1) how
sound interference or noise, resulting from improvised movement interventions between
two bodies in wearables might simultaneously orchestrate the dance which in turn synthe-
sizes and modulates the sound, and (2) how sound distortion and pitch bending might result
from movement interventions and the shifting dynamics of proximity and distance between
two dancers, as they move toward and away from one another in a form of sonic immersion.
During the dance quintet of Act II, Scene VI, involving dancers Margeti and Michielon
and performers Yoko Ishiguro and Rosella Galindo (DAP-Lab 2014), all partners move rela-
tionally but the central duet emerges from the intimate dynamics of Margeti’s and Michielon’s
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Michèle Danjoux
Illustration 11.7 Angeliki Margeti in Futurian ChestPlate playing her oscillating electro-acoustic
instrument—completing the electronic circuit through touch, 2014. (Courtesy of Hans Staartjes.)
conjoined improvised performances (Illustration 11.8). The Futurian character enters into a

proximal relationship with the RedMicro Dress to commence their dance. Michielon, in
red, executes a repeated series of revolutionary poses, arms held straight and elbows rotating
as she explains in the quote above, while Margeti as Futurian approaches in her blue and
black garment, with a science fiction instrument adorning her chest (Illustration 11.7), its
two small speakers attached to her lower back. The light and proximity sensors integrated
into the circuitry and construction of the chest plate detect the presence of her partner—
RedMicro Dress—and mobilize sounding. As bodies draw up close, closer, before retracting
again, the sounding emitted from the two integrated speakers is actuated, intensified and
distorted by the circuitry interactions. The Futurian’s noise is picked up by the dynamic
microphone worn by Michielon in the RedMicro Dress and transmitted to collaborating
musician Oliver Doyle, who works with the sonic material, further distorting and amplifying
the textures to create a whole new noise experience. Thus, the intimate entwinement of the
body instrument is advanced from the initial RedDress performance by Michielon through
dynamic methods of co-creation for compositional purposes. The choreographic here is the
choreosonic.
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Illustration 11.8 Dancers Vanessa Michielon in RedMicro Dress and Angeliki Margeti in Futurian
ChestPlate performing a noise duet in for the time being [Victory over the Sun], Lilian Baylis Studio,
Sadler’s Wells, London, 2014. (Courtesy of Michèle Danjoux.)
The ConductiveCoat and capacitive sensing

Between October 10 and 12, 2014, I attended a research-creation laboratory on e-textiles,
movement and sound facilitated by Marije Baalman, a hardware engineer at Studio for Electro
Instrumental Music in Amsterdam (STEIM 2014). The workshop brought together experts
from three divergent fields—music, design and dance—with the view to creating synergies
and short performances through the convergence of our disciplines. Working teams consisted
of costume designers, e-textile experts, interaction designers, sound artists, choreographers,
dancers and performers. At the workshop, we used touch and proximity as triggers for sound
and explored feedback using microphones and speakers and muscle sound dance using muscle
sensors. Questions centered on design and performance concepts and aesthetics while also
addressing other critical and technical issues such as how to attach the environment and the
sound to the dancer, how to amplify small sounds, how to work with tactile feedback such as
“felt” vibrations, and how to invite interaction through the qualities and appeal of materials.
It was during this intense work period that I conceived of and created the ConductiveCoat
prototype, opening up directions for future research.
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Michèle Danjoux
The ConductiveCoat is a garment created for interactive performance where sounding is

initiated through proximity, movement and touch between dancers utilizing body capaci-
tance, namely the electrical conductivity of the human body and its ability to store electric-
ity. The coat is also designed to be a chair cover and part of a larger scenographic concept and
interactive architecture, inspired loosely by Hussein Chalayan’s Afterwords—Autumn/Winter
2000 collection6 and the notion of soft furnishings such as chair covers transforming into
dresses for the models to wear (Quinn 2005, 80) but similarities end there. It features a lining
made from a pressure-sensitive conductive material called Velostat. A carbon-impregnated
polyolefin material manufactured by 3M, Velostat is piezoresistive, meaning its electrical
resistance decreases when pressured.7 Because of this specific property, it can be used to
make basic sensors such as bend and pressure sensors, where the change in resistance can be
measured and the resultant data harvested. I chose to use Velostat as a pressure sensor, which
could make contact with the body through either sitting on it (while in chair cover mode) or
through movement-wearing and the proximal touch of another entering the same interac-
tive space. In terms of materiality, there are other conductive materials such as piezoresistive
leather8 that would create a more sophisticated design outcome for this prototype. Velostat,
however, is ideal for prototyping due to its affordability.
The shell of the coat was intended to be quite basic, crafted from leather, utilizing a
quick method of modeling the raw uncut skin around the dancer’s body and then secur-
ing with minimal stitching. The emergent visual effect was intended to be organic in
nature and akin to that of an Eastern wabi sabi aesthetic of incompleteness, impermanence
and simplicity, where the form of the piece was dictated by the properties of the mate-
rial ( Juniper 2003, 107). What we see is a fragmentary glimpse of the coat rather than the
fully formed statement: quiet and contemplative, not demanding. Complexity of form, as
with wabi sabi philosophy, was not so significant here because the main objective was to
focus on the essential part of the design, with no further embellishment required beyond
its functional requirement ( Juniper 2003, 113) in order to test the possibilities of using the
Velostat in this way. Many conductive fabrics are copper or silvered colored and shiny,
whereas Velostat is black and relatively unassuming, making it an ideal choice to use in this
piece for its discreetness.
Significantly, the coat explored the negative spatial relationships of Japanese Ma, the
architecture of the garment adhering to and then departing from the body-contour, thus
creating an all-important conductive pause between the body and its wearable architecture.
These spaces of interrupted connectivity required the dancer-wearer to reestablish connec-
tion—through particular arching movements of their back or the touch of another pressing
the contour of the garment to the surface of the body—to produce/recommence sounding.
The experience of this collaborative workshop opened up new possibilities for this practice-
based research investigation into the creation of choreosonic wearables that had until now not
been exposed to the use of e-textiles. The integration of conductive and resistive threads, yarns
and materials such as metallic lycra and conductive jersey (made of cotton, silver, yarn and span-
dex), silk organza and steel wool into the construction of garments and costumes for interactive
performance was new and exciting terrain for me. Being situated alongside textile designers
who were knowledgeable in the making of knitted stretch sensors—for instance, embroidered
circuits, speakers and pressure sensors constructed out of cloth—and partaking in a shared envi-
ronment of creation provided a rich and stimulating backdrop for the evolution of my own
research methodology and design practice. Moreover, further expansion of my thinking came
from the opportunity to work with new sound systems designed to translate movement, prox-
imity and touch into sound. One such system was created by musician Jonathan Reus and
170
Illustration 11.9 Musician Jonathan Reus and dancer Marc Nukoop exploring elements of sounding
through proximity and touch, STEIM, Amsterdam, 2014. (Courtesy of Michèle Danjoux.)
involved electrodermal intra-body transmission activated through touch and proximity of bod-
ies in an exploration of interpersonal space (Illustration 11.9).
Reus’s own ongoing research focuses on body-sensor technology, but he had not yet worked
with costumes and wearables, admitting that fashion and costume were a “complete black box”
for him (Reus, email to author, October 15, 2014). In 2014, he created the performance Satellite
Skin in response to telecommunications and the need for intimacy. Here he created a particular
device crafted from steel wool and custom-built electronics that would function as an “electri-
fied stage, transforming the performers into human instruments who can embody the acoustic
feedback audible in the space by becoming a part of the feedback loop themselves” (Reus 2014).
In our subsequent email correspondence with members of the STEIM workshop, Reus
explains further:
In “Satellite Skin,” I was using an analog system—so the phenomenon is very pure
and I would even say transparent—it’s acoustic feedback electrified and fused with
the bodies of the performers, it’s closer to physics than electrified gadgetry. For me
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Michèle Danjoux
at least this relationship between body and phenomenon is the poetry. Sound-wise
the system has its own unruly personality—which can be surprising and is relent-
lessly organic. I take advantage of that and let the two elements intermingle. (Reus,
email to author, October 21, 2014)
Reus describes the intermingling of the body and acoustic space in this system as thrilling,
situated “somewhere between sound art and performance” (Reus, email to author, October 21,
2014). He goes on to explain in the same email correspondence that during the STEIM
workshop he mapped signals to computer-controlled sounds to open up far more possibilities
sound-wise. However, he noted that this reduced the phenomenon to a tool. He preferred the
simplicity and elegance of the original phenomenon of sounds fused with the body (Reus, email
to author, October 21, 2014). For me, introducing the wearable in the form of a leather coat
with conductive lining (and pads on the floor [see Illustration 11.10]) was one way to bring the
connectivity back to the bodies of the dancers enabling them to once again generate the sounds
through elements of touch, proximity and wearing in the architecture of the performance space
(Illustration 11.11).
Illustration 11.10 Performance setup with coat on chair exposing Velostat conductive lining, and
copper organza spiral-cut conductive floor pads, STEIM, Amsterdam, 2014. (Courtesy of Michèle
Danjoux.)
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Illustration 11.11 Marc Nukoop (seated on ConductiveCoat) performing a sounding dance of touch
and proximity with dancer Miri Lee, STEIM, Amsterdam, 2014. (Courtesy of Michèle Danjoux.)
Conclusion
This chapter presents a body of practice-based research derived from DAP-Lab’s performance for
the time being [Victory over the Sun], with further explorations in the form of the ConductiveCoat,
e-textiles and capacitive sensing from STEIM. It highlights how the disciplines of sound art and
dance both crucially support the work that centers on the notion of wearable performance and
its compositional potentials in interactive dance-theatre performance frameworks. In summary,
the performative dynamics of the explorations focus on the “choreosonic,” a hybrid concept I
define as “the conjoining of movement and sound through the wearable character.”The particu-
lar design aesthetics of the garments I constructed, with their visuo-sonic resonances and trans-
cultural references—Russian Futurism and Suprematism in for the time being and Eastern wabi
sabi and Japanese Ma in the case of the ConductiveCoat’s explorations of the spatial relations
between garment and body—emphasize material contextuality, aiming to formulate an uncon-
ventional use of costume-as-character. Or more precisely, movement-sounding or choreosonic
character via an evolving process of wearability and extended choreography.
A main aim of the chapter has been to spotlight the use of a particular design-centered
approach and stimulus to generate movement-sounding in performance. Namely, where a
series of choreosonic designs, propagating sound or noise, have been introduced within a
particular performance context. This has been to demonstrate how exposure of the cho-
reographic space of real-time interactive audiovisual performance to wearable interventions
might lead to the emergence of an extended bodily dynamic and spatial awareness that guide
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the flow of movement. Supported by a performance methodology that interlaces artistic,

theoretical, practical, empirical and discursive aspects, the chapter also exposes the notion of
wearablity and costume not only as mediator of movement-sounding for the dancer but also
as intermediary in the performance space.
Finally, placing the dress as core to the dynamics of aurality and movement not only
enables the designer to push the boundaries of fashion and costume concepts in the field of
dance performance, but simultaneously exposes the dancer to the act of wearing as a mul-
tisensory (tactile, aural, visual) performance technique. As a result, new and intimate inter-
connections are opened up in the compositional processes for collaborative movement-sound
creation and tactile experience, between somatic imagination and sculptural aural form,
extending the visual emphasis toward the choreosonic and a choreography that is audible.
Thus, new forms of expressivity adorn the dancer in a mode that is distributed and provoca-
tive to all creative partners involved—dancer/choreographer, designer, musician, sonic and
media artist—in the sharing and entanglement of our creative processes.
Notes
1 Studies in Costume & Performance, published by Intellect can be accessed at: https://www.
intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=235/.
2 “The Special Issue of Critical Costume,” edited by Rachel Hann and Sidsel Bech included con-
tributions from twenty-two international contributors on the study and critical articulation of
costume practices: http://criticalcostume.com/scene.html.
3 See Kozel (2007: 288–293) for an account of this wearable research project.
4 “Sensortized” is a word I have created to emphasize the sensorial bodily experience of the per-
former combined with their extension via technological/sensor interfaces.
5 Peter Vogel’s sculptures were exhibited as part of a vast historical and contemporary overview,
Sound Art. Sound as a Medium of Art (2013) (March 17, 2012–January 6, 2013), at the ZKM,
Karlsruhe, Germany, featuring a range of works from Futurism to Fluxus through to Twitter
sonifications. A strong focus was placed on contemporary practices, with works from ninety artists
providing inspiring insights not only into the sound cosmos of contemporary art but also current
architectural-sonic design, and interactive constellations where the visitor becomes the generator
of sounds: http://soundart.zkm.de/en.
6 Viewed at the exhibition: Hussein Chalayan: From Fashion and Back (2009), Design Museum, London,
January 22–May 17, 2009. Documentary film footage from Chalayan’s Afterwords Autumn/Winter
2000 show is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxOuOMcNvSU.
7 Velostat is brand name given to this piezoresistive material manufactured by 3M. Information on
this fabric by Hannah Perner-Wilson and Mika Satomi (2009, 2013) is available at: http://www.
kobakant.at/DIY/?p=381.
8 Conductive Piezoresistive Leather is both conductive and pressure and stretch sensitive and has
similar properties to Velostat. Information on this fabric available at “How to get what you want”;
http://www.kobakant.at/DIY/?p=5184.
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Uhlirova, 65–77. London: Koenig Books.
Hussein Chalayan: From Fashion and Back. 2009. Exhibition curated by Donna Loveday.The Design Museum,
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12
THE ANARCHIVE OF
CONTEMPORARY DANCE
Toward a topographic understanding
of choreography
Timmy De Laet
Introduction: Taking turns

Around the turn of the millennium, a so-called “archival turn” (Stoler 2009, 44) placed
itself amidst the already dazzling array of turns (linguistic, spatial, cognitive, materialist,
etc.) that punctuated critical thought throughout the twentieth century. Calling attention
to the manner in which the archive provides a material basis for thinking yet also functions
as a discursive figure of thought (O’Driscoll 2002), the archival turn also affected the field
of contemporary choreography and dance studies. For practitioners and scholars, it became
increasingly urgent to ask how an embodied art form such as dance can be archived in a way
that is not only enduring, but which can also accommodate the ever-changing nature and
physicality that typify dance. By turning and returning to the archive, a significant number
of choreographers have sought to undo the pervasive belief that dance, because of its reliance
on the living body and embodied movement, is a notoriously ephemeral artistic practice too
elusive for preservation through traditional archival resources such as photographs, written
text, or recordings.
The archival turn in dance found its clearest expression in the rise of various forms of cho-
reographic re-enactment, which—in turn—reinvigorated debates on the preservation, medi-
ality, transmission, and temporality of the “live” performing arts (Schneider 2011; Brooks
and Meglin 2013; Sack 2015). Many of these debates hinge on the notion of the body as a living
archive, undermining the pervasive doctrine of dance’s irreducible transience by foreground-
ing the body as a repository of sorts with its own mnemonic procedures and proper epistemic
faculties (e.g., see Lepecki 2010; De Laet 2013; Nachbar 2017). The attempted alignment of
the body with the archive nonetheless seems to divide critical discourse into two opposite
camps that either overplay or renounce this trope. On the one hand, choreographic re-enact-
ment has been taken to demonstrate how “the body is archive and archive a body,” leaving
“no distinctions” between both (Lepecki 2010, 31). Even though, as we shall see, the body
and the archive are profoundly imbricated and complementary in their ability to preserve and
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transmit choreography, there is no doubt that the body’s archival capacities differ greatly from
the archive as we traditionally know it. A certain wariness is thus warranted with straightfor-
ward statements that rather crudely efface any difference between the body and the archive.
In the end, these claims might only aggravate the wrongful assumptions that already becloud
the discourse on the archive in relation to dance and the dancing body.
Such erroneous assumptions inform the other side of the spectrum; the one that radically
repudiates the idea of the body as a living archive. Dance theorist and practitioner Stephan
Brinkmann (2013, 78), for example, unequivocally finds “the metaphor of the archive that is
often invoked in dance studies” misleading because it seems to give to “remembrance in dance
a site [einen Ort], which it does not have” (301, italics added, author’s translation). Reinforcing
a troubling but still reigning conception of dance as “the only art form whose material is
nothing but the body and its movements” (15), Brinkmann locates dance’s primary existence
inside the body, even going as far as to claim that the dancing body becomes “a medium of
consciousness … without using other media” (117). The fact that words, audiovisual media,
or other external memory aids are for many practitioners essential means for the creation and
transmission of choreography does not seem to play any substantial role in the choreographic
practice envisioned by Brinkmann. Subscribing instead to a deeply humanist perspective on
dance, he denounces the archive as an essentially meaningless metaphor that fails to capture
the manner in which choreography is, in his opinion, preserved only in and through bodies.
This chapter aims to counter the double-sided tendency that either conflates the archive
with the body or categorically forecloses their confluence. To this end, I reconsider the
alleged (in)commensurability of the body and the archive through the lens of what I will
theorize as the ‘anarchive,’ a notion gleaned from both artistic practice and archival theory.1
The anarchive is, literally, an-archival because it leaves behind the classical archival principles
of order, accessibility, and tangibility in favor of regeneration, submediality, and embodied
memory. Thus, the an-archive, even if only by virtue of its terminology, places itself in
an oblique position toward the traditional dance archive. Not unlike the double portrait
The Ambassadors, painted in 1533 by Hans Holbein the Younger, in which the remarkable
appearance of a flattened, anamorphic skull only reveals its full contours when seen from a
certain angle, so too does the anarchive look at the institution of the archive from a radi-
cally different and deforming point of view that undoes its boundaries and renders it, again
and anew, perceptible, incorporable, reinventable. The contorted skull in Holbein’s painting
might stand, uncannily perhaps, as an emblem for the stance contemporary dance is taking
toward the archive. If Jacques Derrida is right to claim in Archive Fever (1996) that a self-
effacing violence is what fundamentally drives the archive, then the anarchive as it appears
in what is designated here as ‘anarchival dance’ topples this movement. As suggested by its
prefix, an-archival dance does indeed deconstruct the archive, but only to let it reemerge
from a vantage point that reveals the submedial layers of dance and also ties choreography
back to its own materiality.
The anarchive of dance, it must be said, is as elusive as dance itself; it only becomes
palpable in practice. As anarchival dance can be defined as the putting into practice of the
anarchive, this chapter singles out two examples that exemplify how the choreographic anar-
chive might operate. The Anarchive-cycle (2009–2011) created by the German artist twin
deufert&plischke foregrounds the anarchival principle of regeneration, asking to what extent
choreographers can archive their work without archiving it in the traditional sense of the
term. Meg Stuart’s Hunter (2014) similarly takes a retrospective stance and further exemplifies
how anarchival dance pursues a unique alliance of materiality and temporality. The stakes of
this alliance will become clear against the background of Derrida’s influential theorization of
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The anarchive of contemporary dance
the archive as well as his notion of a spectral time. Interweaving the discussion of these cases
with Derrida’s insights will expose the limitations of a Derridean deconstructionist frame-
work for thinking about the relationships between the archive, dance, and time. Ultimately,
this will lead me to search for a reified (an)archive in what I will call a topography of dance.
Anarchival recycling
In 2009, the German artist twin deufert&plischke initiated a cycle of performances in which
they aimed to recollect, revisit, and recycle what they once called the enormous “junk of
traces” (2010) that had accumulated during the eight years they had been collaborating by
then. When Kattrin Deufert and Thomas Plischke met in 2001 and went on to share their
lives and work, they chose to present themselves as “artist twin” rather than as “couple”
to sidestep the heterosexual bias implicit in the latter word. In their choreographic work,
deufert&plischke likewise attempt to overthrow ingrained hierarchies, including the con-
ventional organization of Western theater where onlooking spectators direct their gaze at
living bodies present on stage. Often using participatory formats, they seek to transgress the
boundaries between audience and performers. Deepening the encounter between both also
ought to augment the social nature of the theatrical event.
Choosing Anarchive as the overarching title for their series, deufert&plischke immediately
highlighted how their intention was not to create a classic archival retrospective, but to stir
up their artistic microcosm by reinfusing it with the input of Fremdkörper or foreign bodies.
For the three parts that to date the series comprises, the artist twin invited other chore-
ographers, dancers, artists, and theorists to share and revise with them the choreographic
methodologies they had been developing throughout the several years they worked together.
One particularly interesting working method that is central to many of deufert&plischke’s
pieces, including their Anarchive-cycle, is what the choreographers describe as a “process
of reformulation” (Plischke 2009). For Anarchive#2: Second Hand (2010), which is analyzed
here, deufert&plischke worked together with performance artist Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt,
choreographer DD Dorvillier, philosopher Marcus Steinweg, and multimedia artist Bernard
Schreiner. The performers were first asked to construe their personal archives by collecting
photographs, films, texts, television images, advertisements, or any other items they wanted
to include. During the first stage of the working process, the entire group would look at this
“archival material” and write down in individual notebooks the associations and reflections
it provoked. These notebooks were subsequently exchanged among the group members,
with each being allowed to make adjustments, additions, deletions, or whatever they felt was
necessary. By repeating this exchange several times, the initial notebooks were gradually
transformed into a collection of relatively concrete movement descriptions, which formed
the basis for the eventual choreography.
The most intriguing aspect about this procedure of “reformulation” is that, even while it
starts as a deliberately anarchival practice in which the “original” information is continuously
overwritten or erased, the notebooks become in fact genuinely archival instruments, as they
document nearly the entire creative process in a fairly meticulous manner. This documenta-
tion furthermore provides the means to literally hand over the choreographic material to
other people. In the second part of Anarchive#2, audience members are asked to pull from
under their seats an envelope that, as they discover, was already attached to it. In this enve-
lope, they find three cards with movement descriptions, which turn out to be three samples
from the score the dancers performed during the first part of the piece. Simple instructions
like “Stand on the green. Bend the knees so much that you softly fall on the butt, then onto
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Timmy De Laet
the back” serve as choreographic prompts to mobilize the spectators, inviting them to “refor-
mulate second hand what just happened.” Spurring the audience to participate in the very
same process of reformulation that led to the piece, deufert&plischke open up the theater
space to collectively explore the generative potential of verbalized movement descriptions.
Through the explicit incorporation of written documents into the conception and execu-
tion of the choreographic work, deufert&plischke do not necessarily question the medial
specificity of dance as an embodied art form, yet they do contest the privilege often granted
to the body in the discourse on dance. Turning language into a collective and constitutive
principle of the piece, they show how both textual and embodied rewriting is vital to the
passing on of dance. As Brian Massumi attests, “The anarchive needs documentation—the
archive—from which to depart and through which to pass” (2016, 7). Moreover, by advocat-
ing a genuine politics of change and sharing, deufert&plischke’s methodology of “reformula-
tion” subverts the typically archival adherence of Western culture to keeping original works
safe and intact. Allowing their choreographic material to be transmitted, replicated, and
reanimated, deufert&plischke create a dynamic of dance rather than a dance that once will have
been dynamic. This is a salient anarchival gesture that goes against the archive’s dominant
structures and procedures of preservation.
From this perspective, deufert&plischke’s anarchival dance comes close to the Oxford
English Dictionary definition of the “anarchist” as “one who admits no ruling power;... one
who upsets settled order” (OED, n.p.). The OED reference to “power” and “order” brings
to mind Derrida’s (1996) oft-cited account of how power structures are inscribed in the
very constitution of the archive. Tracing the archive back to its etymological roots, Derrida
recalls the double meaning of the Greek word arkhē as signifying both “commencement”
and “commandment,” two principles that still reverberate in the archive as we know it today.
The archive is above all the place where things commence—where documents turn into ori-
gins and become sources for history through the place actively assigned to them. As Michel
de Certeau ([1975] 1988, 72) says in The Writing of History, “In history everything begins
with the gesture of setting aside.” Yet it is Derrida who stresses that this act of assignation is
also a function of power, reminding us that only those in command get to decide whether a
document deserves its place in the archive and in which form it is kept there. Precisely these
selective procedures and medial transitions that undergird the inclusion of purportedly truth-
ful or authentic “evidence” in the archive will lead Derrida to the crucial claim that “the
archivization produces as much as it records the event” (1996, 17).
Notwithstanding the importance of acknowledging the archive’s stated propensity to execute
power and enforce assignation, I want to focus on the repressed and violent undercurrent that
Derrida identifies in the archive and which he models on Freud’s psychoanalytical account of
compulsory repetition. Just as obsessive behavior for Freud is fueled by a subliminal death drive;
so too is the archive for Derrida geared toward a self-inflicted destruction that, paradoxically,
constitutes its very being. In a typically deconstructionist twist of thought, Derrida intends to
unearth the underlying operations that bring forth the archive and which, next to the enforced
command of preservation, necessarily entail the need for destruction as its subjugated opposite.
It is in this context that Derrida introduces, albeit in passing, the notion of the “anarchive,”
asserting that “the death drive is above all anarchivic, one could say, or archiviolithic,” insofar
as “it will always have been archive-destroying, by silent vocation” (1996, 10). This “silent
vocation” intimates how the archive can operate only by virtue of repressing its virtual other,
that is, the requirement to select and, hence, to forget.
The dialectic between forgetting and remembering has been at the forefront of ongoing
debates on the archive, history, and memory that swept across the humanities in the wake
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of the 1990s “memory boom,” which preceded and partly overlapped with the archival turn
I referred to earlier (Klein 2000; Huyssen 2003; Ricœur 2004). Next to philosophers and
historians, dance and performance scholars also have endeavored to come to grips with the
idea that memory is history’s constitutive counterpart rather than its all too often deni-
grated opposite (Cubitt 2007). This tensed relationship between history and memory also
underlies philosopher Benjamin Hutchens’s theorization of the anarchive in his 2007 essay
“Techniques of Forgetting.” In response to Derrida’s identification of a destructive “anar-
chivic” or “archiviolithic” force in the archive, Hutchens seeks to demonstrate how living
memory compensates for archival loss. In his view, the substratum of non-archivization that
undergirds the archive points to an excess that, while escaping archival containment, opens
up the realm of counter-memories, a term he borrows from Michel Foucault (1977) without,
however, mentioning it. This kind of anarchival counter-memory, Hutchens (2007, 45) con-
tends, does not only exceed but also disrupts the archive by furnishing “alternative protocols
… as well as thematic frameworks that can preserve memories that have been excluded from
the canon.”
The “alternative protocols” and “thematic frameworks” envisaged by Hutchens are con-
cretely realized in artistic projects such as deufert&plischke’s Anarchive series. The protocol in
this case consists of the laborious procedure of reformulation, which results in a multitude of
traces, both material and embodied, that are produced and passed along in a choreographic
archival circuit that refuses to become immobilized and which requires continuous reactiva-
tion by both performers and spectators. Together with their collaborators, deufert&plischke
thus generate a gamut of counter-memories that work against the alignment of either the
archive or memory with single origins. As the choreographers explain: “Through the refor-
mulation of memories by others, doubts grow about the place in your memory you first
thought you were familiar with. Eventually you strike at a moment where memories are
not yet fixed, before the territory of the memory is demarcated. That active interaction
with your own memory is a key to our work” (Peeters 2006, n.p.; author’s translation).
Deufert&plischke’s anarchival principle of reformulation is in many ways far removed from
the criteria of integrity, sustainability, provenance, and systematic order that conventionally
define the archive. This begs the question, to what extent does their concern with (re-)gen-
erating and (re-)embodying choreographic traces, both written and corporeal, impact on the
archive as we commonly understand it? In what sense does their Anarchive series not simply
constitute another set of new works that actually erases rather than revives the historical and
mnemonic residues on which it is allegedly based? In short, how can one archive without
archiving?
The undecidable specter of the archive

The primordial anarchival violence that, following Derrida, lies at the heart of any act of
archivization seems to put the archive “sous rature,” or under erasure. In Of Grammatology
([1967] 1976), Derrida literally visualizes this sous rature by crossing out certain words, such
as “is,” “thing,” or “outside.” As Gayatri Spivak (1976, xvii) explains, this crossing out is a
visual-discursive strategy Derrida adapts from Heidegger’s Zur Seinsfrage (The Question of
Being, 1958), with the difference being that in Derrida’s deconstructionist philosophy the sous
rature is no longer meant to “point at an inarticulable presence” as in Heidegger’s metaphysics,
but to highlight “the mark of the absence of a presence, … the lack at the origin that is the
condition of thought and experience.” At the heart of Derrida’s deconstructionist approach
is indeed the assumption that foundational notions (such as being, matter, experience, or the
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body) are never fully present for themselves, but necessarily defined by that which seems
most extraneous to them (such as absence, thought, language, or technology).
Even though the sous rature does not appear as such in Archive Fever, it does resonate in
Derrida’s characterization of the archive as driven by a self-consuming archiviolithic force
that is destructive in excluding certain materials and in effacing the archive’s own workings.
This emphasis on the archive’s erosive side effects has led various commentators (Steedman
2001; O’Driscoll 2002) to criticize Derrida for sublimating the archive in a primarily discur-
sive figure that cannot be further removed from either the material reality of the archive or
the actual sensory experience of handling archival documents. What such critiques often fail
to address, however, is that Derrida’s deconstructionist tenets simply do not allow the archive
to acquire some degree of material or conceptual stability. Undecidability is a key principle
in Derrida’s thinking, and it also deeply informs his view on the archive. The implications
of this stance are revealed when he, in Archive Fever, mimics the act of archival assignation by
assigning a spectral temporality to the archive: “[The archive] is spectral a priori: neither pres-
ent nor absent “in the flesh,” neither visible nor invisible, a trace always referring to another
whose eyes can never be met, no more than those of Hamlet’s father, thanks to the possibility
of a visor” (1996, 84). Following the logic of différance (Derrida’s neologism for the incessant
interplay of difference and deferral that defines linguistic signification), the historical traces
housed in the archive cannot be otherwise than suspended between the past and the present
given that this was the condition of the trace to begin with. As he writes in an earlier essay,
“The trace cannot be conceived—nor therefore can différance—on the basis of either the pres-
ent or the presence of the present,” which impels us to deal “with a ‘past’ that has never been
nor will ever be present” ([1967] 1973, 152). Never fully coinciding with either the past or
the present, the archive becomes instead an “anticipation of the future to come” (1996, 79).
Derrida’s foregrounding of the future as the archive’s genuine temporality keeps intact
some sparkle of hope and promise in an otherwise dreadful picture of anarchival violence
that, through the authoritative power of selection and allocation, puts the archive sous rature
while holding both the past and the present at bay. The notion of spectrality thereby fur-
nishes the means to trouble any simplified assumption that the archive provides easy access to
the past, or that it is simply there, in and for itself. “There are several times of the specter,”
Derrida writes in Specters of Marx, stating that, “It is a proper characteristic of the specter,
if there is any, that no one can be sure if by returning it testifies to a living past or to a liv-
ing future, for the revenant may already mark the promised return of the specter of living
being. Once again, untimeliness and disadjustment of the contemporary” (1994, 123). On
Derrida’s account, the specter becomes an emblem for the manner in which the present is
always already infused with both the past and the future, thus providing an alternative for
the ingrained conception of a linear and chronological temporality. Precisely for this reason,
Derrida’s notion of a spectral time has proven to be an appealing perspective for theorists
of history as well as dance, performance, and theater scholars invested in overturning the
habitual view that the present (and, therefore, “live” performance) only unfolds in a fleeting
moment, irrevocably receding into an essentially irrecoverable past (e.g., Schneider 2011;
Bevernage 2012). Undoubtedly, the interest in spectrality has been important in undermin-
ing the doctrine of live performance’s alleged ephemerality, but the deeper implications of
Derrida’s theorization of both spectrality and the archive and how this puts also the past and
the present sous rature are not always fully taken into account. Whereas Derrida’s penchant for
undecidability might be beneficial for disrupting oppositional dualisms (speech versus writ-
ing, past versus present, body versus text), his deconstructionist agenda prevents him (and
others in his wake) from claiming anything more substantial beyond the mere fact that these
182
structuring opposites are mutually dependent and exist in a state of perpetual deferral due
to the condition of co-constitutive difference. It is telling, in this respect, that in the passage
quoted above, Derrida describes the spectrality of the archive as “neither present nor absent
‘in the flesh’” (1996, 84; italics added). To be sure, as soon as the past enters the archive in
anticipation of becoming history, it is bereft of the flesh once attached to its proverbial bones.
The problem arises when ‘fleshlessness’ turns into the inevitable outcome of the deconstruc-
tionist project, which in its implacable critique of logocentrism is aimed exactly at keeping
foundational categories, such as the “past” and the “present,” under continuous erasure—or
sous rature.
In his essay “Mimique,” Mark Franko arrives at a similar conclusion when he claims
that the pervasive trope of “ephemerality-as-disappearance,” which continues to haunt the
discourse on dance until today, “is a synonym of the Derridean trace,” precisely because it is
the very “palpability and concreteness of differences [that] get lost in Derrida’s trace” ([1995]
2008, 245). Franko intends to restore the physical inscription that dance performs (both in
space and the body) by foregrounding memory as a tertiary type of mimesis, next to the
primary and secondary forms of mimesis (or, imitation and representation, respectively) that
Derrida discerns in his reading of Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1897 text “Mimique.” By viewing
memory, Franko (252) argues, “not as reproduction (copy) but as the capacity to perform
anew, although differently,” it prevents “the unrepeatable” from becoming “irrecuperable.”
This third mnemonic kind of mimesis thus ought to give a somewhat firmer ground back
to the body, which was at risk of getting lost in the undecidable free play of the Derridean
trace-logic that precludes the possibility of any substantial presence due to the twin dynamics
of difference and deferral.
Interestingly, just as Hutchens evokes counter-memories to undermine the anarchival
effacements effectuated by the archive itself, so too does Franko resort to the notion of
memory. On his account, memory becomes a condition for dance to reappear and thus, we
could add, to compensate for the archiviolithic workings by which the archive conceals its own
exclusionary operations. The invocation of memory brings to mind Diana Taylor’s (2003)
much-cited distinction between the archive and the repertoire, which similarly posits that
embodied memory functions as an alternative repertoire next to the institutionalized and
material archive. What is less often recalled, however, is Taylor’s most crucial claim that the
archive and the repertoire “exist in a constant state of interaction” (21; italics added).2 Yet it is
exactly this interaction that not only obstructs the irrecuperable disappearance of dance, but
which also gestures toward a temporality less elusive than Derrida’s spectral time.
The reification of dance’s anarchival substratum

Even those who consider dance as a bodily art form pur sang would have to admit that the
immaterial incorporation of choreography does not exist completely separate from its tangible
inscriptions. Even Derrida, despite his emphasis on the elusive spectral time of the archive,
avows that some degree of materialization is necessary for the archive to become operational:
“There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and
without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside” (1996, 11). The issue that Derrida
leaves unaddressed is whether the very idea of “a technique” or “a place of consignation” does
not already imply the interaction of bodies with material remains. Nonetheless, asserting
that archival documents generally involve some kind of externalized residue, Derrida does
raise a poignant question: “But where does the outside commence?” (8). “This question,” he
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Timmy De Laet
continues, “is the question of the archive. There are undoubtedly no others” (8). For dance,
it is perhaps even more pertinent to ask where to locate the inside and the outside of the
archive.
One possible way to broach this question is the fairly basic observation that material props
take up a central role in what is considered here as anarchival dance. In Meg Stuart’s solo
Hunter (2014), the audience enters while Stuart is sitting at a table, arranging and cutting
up photographs, using pushpins to make a sort of collage, and eventually even setting a few
pictures on fire. A camera hanging above Stuart’s head projects her actions onto a screen in
the performance space. Showing, handling, holding, and manipulating these props act like a
shamanic initiation ritual that propels Stuart to hunt the memories that haunt her personal and
artistic history. As the piece first proceeds into a danced solo and then into a spoken mono-
logue in the second half, it shows Stuart transitioning from a bodily to a verbally articulate
memory. After the opening scene, she first draws the spectator into a staggering parade of
choreographic movements, beginning with a dance in which her arms seem to figure as the
disoriented pointers of a clock—a motif that will return various times. At the same time,
Vincent Malstaf ’s perturbing soundscape of noise, song snippets, voices, or other concrete
sounds is enveloping her, perhaps steering her. Various screens on the stage intermittently
show video footage of old family recordings, Super-8 landscape sights, or the experimental
videos created by Chris Kondek. These video images are integrated into Barbara Ehnes’s
ingenious set design that, next to large sheep wool canvases on the background, includes
copper wires that spring from an enormous but narrow plastic tube and span the entire scene.
This combination of ritualistic elements and industrial material conjures up different imager-
ies of transmission, channeling, and reception.
Within this charged environment, Stuart’s body tunes in to different frequencies that ulti-
mately seem to overload her to the point that she covers herself up in a gigantic patchwork
dress stitched together with clothes of garish colors. Staging a struggle with the layers of
fabric, Stuart not only evokes the burden that any accumulated past, how colorful it may be,
can impose on us, but she also seems to be trying to stop herself from gazing at her personal
(an)archive. Until, at a sudden moment, she firmly throws off the dress, having discovered
that, attempting to hide and disguise as much as she wants, the past refuses to be tamed.
In Hunter’s second part, Stuart takes recourse to the spoken word, even though she avows
in her confessional monologue that, “I certainly did not trust words … I swore to myself I
would never talk on stage” (2016). Talking, however, allows Stuart to dig deeper into her
personal memories, which she intersperses with anecdotes about Trisha Brown losing her
memory or the sudden death of her “guardian angel” David Bowie.
Throughout the piece, Stuart creates what we might call a “mnemonic space” that
extends beyond Stuart’s body or the sheer present moment of the performance. As she says
in an interview on Hunter: “I was quite curious if, through this process, somehow, I could
go back in time.… And also, sometimes very often, I feel like I’m influenced or I’m dancing
narratives or stories that are not my own. So there is a dialogue to the past in this work”
(2015; italics added). The perhaps inadvertent yet fascinating juxtaposition in this quote
of the punctual “sometimes” with the reiterative “very often” hints at a strikingly pli-
able temporality, as it lumps together two seemingly opposite qualifiers for describing the
experience of time. Moreover, by describing her work as “a dialogue to” instead of “with”
the past, Stuart suggests how she keeps a certain distance from the past to which she is
nonetheless reaching out. Ensuing from her experience of “dancing narratives or stories
that are not [her] own,” Stuart’s Hunter is aimed at staging—or, indeed, at commencing and
commanding—a heterogeneous and asynchronous composite of influences that blow from
184
the past and propel into the future as they continue to shape and reshape her artistic identity.
However, if Hunter invokes a certain kind of spectrality, it differs from the Derridean variant
in that Stuart ultimately presents her own body as the materialized and materializing ves-
sel through which these traces are channeled. Rather than conjuring an elusive appearance
eternally suspended between supposedly conflicting temporalities, Stuart gives a palpable
presence to the deep mnemonic layers that make up the texture of her choreographic body
and persona. But what, then, is the function of these layers with regard to what I have been
calling the anarchive?
The choreographic anarchive in Hunter comes close to what sociologist Rudi Laermans
and art theorist Pascal Gielen (2007) have theorized as the “digital an-archive,” even if the
context seems very different. According to Laermans and Gielen, the digital age confronts
us with a radically different kind of archive, or a “non-archived archive” (n.p.), one that is
largely invisible and fundamentally unstable. Not only cyberspace and the Internet, but also
databases or even any type of computer work presuppose a cluster of supporting programs
that remain hidden for the user and which translate series of bits and codes into usable con-
tent that changes according to every different query. This underlying network of technologi-
cal mediators constitutes a performative anarchive that Laermans and Gielen, drawing on the
work of media scholars Ernst Wolfgang and Boris Groys, describe as “sub-medial” because it
concerns a “usually hidden and non-accessible programmatic organization,” while it is also
“anarchival” because it “lacks the capacity to remember in an ordered way” (n.p.). Stuart’s
Hunter brings to light a choreographic variant of this submedial anarchive: it exposes how the
anarchive of dance is scaffolded not so much (at least not always) by digital codes or software
programs but rather by a dispersed and largely latent assemblage of embodied memories and
material props. While in general such underlying assemblages tacitly subtend diverging and
possibly conflicting histories of dance as such, anarchival dance reveals these substrata by
reifying them overtly through the body and other media.
The temporality of the anarchive

Dance scholar Anna Pakes (2011, 40) once dauntingly asked, “How do dances come into
existence? How do they persist? What is the nature of their dependence on other things, such
as dancers, performances, scores, or film records?” Raising these questions, Pakes intends to
rethink the ontological coming-into-being (rather than the being) of dance. The anarchive
of dance, as I have been theorizing it thus far, might contribute to this project by virtue of
at least two conspicuous features: Whereas anarchival dance springs from the heterogeneous
imbrication of bodily, mental, and material memories, this intricate convolution is also rema-
terialized—or, (re)presented—on stage. However, to the extent that such observations are
already part and parcel of any dancer’s daily practice, the more pressing question to ask might
be this: If the anarchive finds itself always already in a condition of multiplicity, drawing
together bodies and material remains, memory and history, medial substrates and mediatized
subtracts, perhaps the question of the (an)archive is not so much when it began, but rather
where it begins? While the penchant for periodization in traditional historiography often
leads to a search for origins in time, perhaps the only way to broach the true temporality of
the (an)archive is to begin with its spatiality. As much is suggested by Derrida (1996, 3), who
claims that the archive belongs to a “topo-nomology” insofar as it takes place at “the intersec-
tion of the topological and the nomological, of the place and the law, of the substrate and the
authority.” Perhaps counterintuitively, then, the question of the (an)archive might have to do
more with space than with time.
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Timmy De Laet
Choreographer Martin Nachbar places a similar emphasis on space when he reflects on

his re-enactment of a cycle of solos created by the expressionist dancer Dore Hoyer in the
early 1960s. Nachbar (2017, 29–30) defines choreography both as “the repeatable inscrip-
tion of or in space by a knowledgeable moving body” and as the “externalized writing of
imprints under the skin.” Following this definition, he argues that in order for the dance
archive to become truly productive, it is necessary to seek, actively, for an ongoing exchange
between these two in- and ex-scribing dimensions of choreography, given that the dance
archive “is not ‘placed’ in space as a conventional archive would be: it is multi-sited” (21; italics
added). Taking Nachbar’s suggestion one step further, I would like to propose that, when we
approach the archive as a multi-sited space, it is topology—or perhaps even topography—we
should be concerned with.
In relating time and space under the rubric of the archive, it bears recalling that Henri Bergson
famously critiqued modernity’s invention to spatialize time and to divide it into artificial mea-
surable units. According to Bergson ([1907] 1998), so-called standard clock time obscured the
sight of what he calls la durée (duration), his term for a qualitative time that exists as an acentered
flux of variation in which the past and the present coalesce.Yet Bergson’s erasure, his own sous
rature, of space in time is arguably one step too far. As the French philosopher Michel Serres
([1982] 1995, 108) states, Bergson’s “effort to go back from the solid to the liquid—from space
to time … is too hastily put” since “space is dense with flux as well.” Serres himself would later
refine his view of the relationship between space and time. In a series of conversations with
Bruno Latour ([1990] 1995, 59), Serres maintains that time “percolates,” as it “flows in a turbu-
lent and chaotic manner.” And this movement is best understood if you “take your inspiration
from topology,” rather than from space as such, since then you might “discover the rigidity of
these proximities and distances you consider arbitrary” (60; italics added). To clarify his point,
Serres evokes the striking image of a crumpled handkerchief:
If you take a handkerchief and spread it out in order to iron it, you can see in it
certain fixed distances and proximities. If you sketch a circle in one area, you can
mark out nearby points and measure far-off distances. Then take the same handker-
chief and crumple it … Two distant points suddenly are close, even superimposed.
If, further, you tear it in certain places, two points that were close can become very
distant. This science of nearness and rifts is called topology, while the science of stable
and well-defined distances is called metrical geometry. (Serres and Latour 1995, 60;
italics added)
By describing topology as a “science,” Serres emphatically puts forward topology as a solid

methodological approach that foregoes the neat and structured order of classical science,
pursuing instead a seemingly aleatory combination of disparate events, objects, practices, or
ideas that, when joined together on a topological map of thinking, start to illuminate one
another. While this notion of topology primarily informs the methodology of Serres’s own
philosophical work, it also stands as an emblem for his view on time. In the folds and tears of
the handkerchief, temporality is thawed from the frozen state that linear chronology assigns
to it, turning time instead into an unruly mixture of different pasts and presents that, from a
topological point of view, can be both remote and close at a varying pace.
Serres’s redressing of temporality into a topology of times provides a productive perspec-
tive to recalibrate not only the entangled relationship of time with space but also the imbri-
cation of the archive with the anarchive of dance. If the anarchive designates the submedial
space of dance, it consists of the manifold pasts and memories that dancers in- and ex-scribe
186
by respatializing bodily imprints and reactivating material remains. Anarchival dance, then,
considered as the anarchive put into practice and exposed on stage, offers a performative
topological mapping of those traces the archive, as we traditionally know it, cannot house
or hold. These traces can take many forms, going from the clockwise movements of Stuart’s
arms in Hunter, to spectators performing choreographic instructions in deufert&plischke’s
Anarchive#2, to notebooks documenting creative processes, to video images or photographs
projected on the background of the stage. By turning these traces into the very material of
performance, anarchival dance reveals the deeper and largely virtual stratum of the anarchive
on which dance continuously draws and from which it derives its contours as it unfolds,
through movement, in space and time. Within this space-time, choreography becomes, like
Serres’s handkerchief, the compositional configuration of temporal proximities and distances,
established through the ongoing negotiation with the past and the present. As such, it turns
historical distance (again a spatiotemporal category) into a flexible and creative tool rather
than a mere marker of the gap between different times (De Laet 2017).
But in order to fully extend Serres’s percolated model of both time and thought to dance,
it may be useful to exchange his term topology for topography. Taking into account that the
Greek term logos is intimately connected with the mind, reason, and discursivity, we might
gain more from emphasizing the link between topos and the writing practice (“graphein”)
that choreography is and to look at dance from a topographical perspective. Not without
coincidence, “topographies” is also the term deufert&plischke use to describe how the words
and symbols written on the pages of their notebooks become the blueprint for movements
“written” in the performance space (Plischke 2009, 68). In Anarchive#1, this topography is
even literally transferred to the stage, which because of the visible presence of terms written
on rectangular placards hanging across the space, turns into multiple “conceptual landscapes
to move through,” with “the dance floor becoming a network of interrelated terms, texts,
interests” (deufert&plischke 2014, n.p.). Stuart’s Hunter, in contrast, presents an entirely dif-
ferent topographical mapping of the anarchival layers that buttress and impregnate her cho-
reographic practice. By moving, walking, standing, or talking in an inventive set design of
which all elements seem to support the memory work she performs during the piece, she
creates a mnemonic space that enables her to draw, choreographically and imaginatively,
proximities between otherwise dispersed memories, thus giving a tangible sense to Serres’s
notion of a percolated time.
Conclusion
Anarchival dances such as those discussed throughout this chapter ultimately propose to
substitute the Derridean sous rature, or the placing under erasure of certain concepts, for the
relational and more constructive figure of the “trait d’union,” or the hyphen. As a graphic sign
that visually conjoins two words while still keeping them apart, the hyphen both marks and
bridges a gap. As Peggy Kamuf (2005, 274) points out, there is a “double sense of articula-
tion” to the hyphen as that “which both joins what it separates and separates what it joins.”
Anarchival dance does not place either the past or the present under the erasing rubric of
Derrida’s spectrality, but neither does it privilege the sheer now of performance as a singular
point in time that condemns the body to an irreversible disappearance. Instead, it compels
us to conceive of choreography as a specific kind of topography that functions as a trait
d’union, as the hyphen or connective link between, on the one hand, the submedial layers that
constitute the anarchive of dance and, on the other hand, the reified spectrality that dance
effectuates by pulling together and by rematerializing different temporalities in space. Put
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Timmy De Laet
otherwise, anarchival dance brings to light a topo-choreo-graphic mapping that is propelled

by the forceful confluence of intangible bodily traces, material objects, and spatial inscrip-
tions. Dance considered as a topo-choreo-graphy is thus the unordered reordering—in the
double sense of rearranging and of calling forth again and anew—of the unruly anarchive
that subtends the history of dance. This topography of dance presupposes a reified spectral-
ity that refuses to remain suspended between different times, precisely because it coagu-
lates, however temporarily, in the space-time that, rather than the body, is dance’s primary
medium.
The issue with which this chapter began—that is, whether the body can rightly be called
a living archive—actually foregoes the more complicated convolutions through which the
“archival turn” has manifested itself in choreographic practice. Rather than merely asking
whether the body can serve as a repository and reactivating medium of past movements, the
more pertinent question is how dance mobilizes not only the body but also time, space, and
writing in order to explore the variety of incarnations through which dance might reappear.
The notion of the ‘anarchive’ helps to uncover these submedial strata that, probably because
they pertain so obviously to choreography, often go unnoticed. “Dance is an art in space and
time,” Merce Cunningham once said. “The object of the dancer is to obliterate that” ([1952]
1992, 37). What I have described as “anarchival dance” makes the exact opposite move: By
digging into the submedial anarchive that scaffolds choreography, anarchival dance exposes
to what extent going back to choreographic pasts is both a temporal and—literally—a spatial
matter. It is in the whizzing tide of reanimation that the anarchive brings to light the need to
conceive of dance as a topo-choreo-graphy that, coupled through multiple hyphens, makes
time cross with space, and vice versa. Once we consider the “archival turn” in dance as a
truly anarchival drift, the idea that also the body can act as an archive might already be in
need of revision.
Notes
1 The “anarchive” is a term that has surfaced occasionally in the critical discourse on the archive
primarily to open up new ways of thinking about the archive. Media scholar Wolfgang Ernst is
often credited as one of the first to propose the “anarchive” as a notion to probe how our cur-
rent digital culture poses significant challenges to traditional conceptions of the archive (see Ernst
2002). Another incipient attempt at theorizing the anarchive that comes probably closest to my own
approach in this chapter is The Go-To How to Book of Anarchiving (Murphie 2016), in which various
authors (including Brian Massumi and Erin Manning) speculate on the potential of the anarchive
for performative practices and artistic research.
2 In a 2012 essay, “Save As,” Taylor adds to her distinction between the archive and the repertoire the
third category of digital technology, which poses new challenges in terms of access and preserva-
tion. As in The Archive and the Repertoire, Taylor “insist[s] that the embodied, the archival, and the
digital overlap and work together and mutually construct each other” (n.p.), but again she is more
concerned with emphasizing the differences between these three modalities instead of dealing with
how they interact.
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Brooks, Lynn Matluck, and Joellen A. Meglin, eds. 2013. Preserving Dance Across Time and Space. New York:
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Cubitt, Geoffrey. 2007. History and Memory. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.
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———. 2017. “Giving Sense to the Past: Historical D(ist)ance and the Chiasmatic Interlacing of Affect
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13
CUBISM, FUTURISM, AND
LEONIDE MASSINE’S
CHOREOGRAPHY FOR PARADE
Gay Morris
Introduction
Shortly before the Ballets Russes opened its 1917 Paris season, Serge Diaghilev told Alexandre
Mavroudis of L’Opinion that the company was dedicated to all things new; consequently, its
forthcoming season would concern itself with futurism and cubism, two of the major van-
guard artistic movements of the day (Mavroudis 1917). This was a far cry from the Russian
inflected naturalism and exoticism on which the company had built its reputation. The ballet
that would come to epitomize this aesthetic shift was Parade, which the Ballets Russes pre-
miered at the Châtelet Theatre, Paris, on May 18, 1917.1
Parade introduced popular entertainment into the world of ballet. Its title referred to the
brief parades, or previews, of shows that performers offered the crowds attending Parisian fairs
and circuses. Parade not only focused on amusement for an urban mass society, its inclusion
of cubist and Italian futurist innovations referenced the vast social and technological changes
that were occurring in the early twentieth century. The ballet was the result of a collabora-
tion among four forward-thinking artists working under Diaghilev’s aegis: Jean Cocteau,
Pablo Picasso, Erik Satie, and Leonide Massine. Over the years, Parade has earned much
critical attention, but most of it has been focused on Cocteau’s libretto, Picasso’s designs,
and Satie’s score. Massine’s choreography is often considered insignificant compared to the
contributions of the other men. On the few occasions when his choreography has been dis-
cussed, it most often is associated with Italian futurism.2 In this chapter, I will not only sug-
gest that Massine’s choreography played a vital role in the ballet but that his working methods
and approach to choreography owed more to cubism than futurism. Making the distinction
between cubism and futurism is not simply a matter of stylistic quibbling. In laying out a
path close to cubism, Massine set Western ballet in the direction of a formalist modernism.
This was not inevitable. Diaghilev and Massine had close encounters with futurism, and had
they pushed the Ballets Russes more emphatically in a futurist direction, the company’s aes-
thetic (and possibly the canon of Western twentieth-century ballet) would have been quite
different.
The futurists called for a violent destruction of the past in order to convey the speed and
mechanized power of the new century. Massine’s vision of modernity was of another sort.
He sought to bring ballet into the twentieth century without destroying the form itself.
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Gay Morris
In doing so he, like Picasso, created an art that exposed the contingency of the modern con-
dition. The element of ambiguity that infused both Massine’s choreography for Parade and
Picasso’s cubist works raised questions concerning reality, representation, and meaning in
art. At the same time both men emphasized an art that created its own reality, related to but
different from the reality of everyday life. It was a reality that echoes a comment made by
Michel Foucault regarding Baudelaire’s “attitude of modernity.” “It was,” Foucault writes,
“an exercise in which extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a
liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it” (Foucault 2010, 41).
Through an analysis of the dances in Parade in conjunction with cubist and futurist theory,
I will attempt to show that Massine’s use of distortion and angularity of forms, integra-
tion of vernacular gestures with abstract movement, independent articulation of body ele-
ments, depersonalization, and visual wit were more closely allied with cubism than futurism,
thereby reflecting the choreographer’s particular interests.
Early experimentation
Massine and Diaghilev were acquainted with the futurists before meeting Picasso and engag-
ing with cubism. The futurists had appeared on the scene in 1909 with a manifesto that was
published on the front page of Le Figaro.3 Diaghilev and Massine met the futurists in Italy
in late 1914, but Diaghilev had already been exposed to choreographic experimentation
through the work of Vaslav Nijinsky. Critics had labeled Nijinsky’s L’Après-midi d’un Faune
(1912) cubist because of its angular, horizontal movement, which flattened the dance image,
while his Le Sacre du Printemps (1913) made a radical break with ballet’s classical vocabulary
( Järvinen 2009). More directly pertinent to Parade, was Nijinsky’s Jeux, also from 1913.
The ballet dealt with modern life, its setting a game of tennis. Diaghilev had wanted to
include an airplane or zeppelin as a prop at the end of the ballet, which would startle the three
characters, interrupting their flirtation (Scheijen 2009, 260–262). This element was never
realized, but it suggests that Diaghilev may already have been aware of the futurists, who by
1913 had published manifestos on painting, music, and literature, among others, and who had
mounted their first major Paris exhibition in 1912.
In the wake of the failure of Jeux and Sacre and Diaghilev’s subsequent break with Nijinsky,
it would not have been surprising had the impresario turned permanently to more conser-
vative fare. But by January 1914 he had discovered Massine and was regrouping his forces
rather than retreating from modernist experimentation. When Diaghilev engaged Massine,
the dancer was nineteen years old and in the corps de ballet of the Bolshoi Ballet. Although
taken into the company to appear in the title role of Michel Fokine’s The Legend of Joseph,
Massine was soon expected to assume Nijinsky’s roles. To improve his modest technique, he
was put under the tutelage of Enrico Cecchetti. Diaghilev enlarged Massine’s education with
an extended tour of Italy, where he introduced the dancer to the wealth of Italian art and
music. Massine was especially inspired by the Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna and by early
Renaissance masters such as Cimabue, Duccio and Pietro Lorenzetti, artists whose work still
bore the imprint of medieval flattening and two dimensionality. Massine also began to make
a detailed study of eighteenth-century dance manuals, which gave him a greater understand-
ing of ballet movement and structure.
By the end of 1914 Diaghilev and Massine had met poet Filippo Tomasso (F.T.) Marinetti,
leader of the futurist group, and a number of his colleagues. Diaghilev, in particular, was
smitten by the futurists. He and Massine attended several futurist serate, performances that
consisted of music, recitations of poetry, readings of manifestos, and the exhibition of
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Cubism, futurism, and Massine’s choreography for Parade
paintings. These evenings also included audience provocations and were notorious for end-
ing in shouting matches and fights. In early April 1915, Diaghilev and Massine, accompanied
by Igor Stravinsky, met in Marinetti’s Milan apartment to listen to Luigi Russolo’s intu-
onarumori (noise intoners) (Garcia-Marquez 1995, 50; Scheijen 2009, 312–313). By this time
Massine was planning his first ballet, which would come to be titled Liturgy, and Diaghilev
briefly considered using futurist instruments for the work’s score. This idea was soon dis-
carded, like many others having to do with the ballet, and eventually Liturgy was abandoned
altogether. Several other projects with members of the futurist group were planned, among
them sets designed by Fortunato Depero in 1917 for Stravinsky’s Le Chant du Rossignol, which
Depero executed but were never used. The ballet was eventually staged in 1920 with designs
by Henri Matisse. Nor did any of the other futurist projects find their way to the stage except
a single performance of Stravinsky’s Feu d’Artifice in 1916, for which the artist Giacomo Balla
created décor and lighting, but which did not include dance. In this varied exposure to futur-
ism, Massine’s interest appears to have been mostly passive. He accompanied Diaghilev to
futurist events, and he may well have understood futurist aims, but he produced no works
with the futurists and had no close relationships with any of them. His only contribution to
the Feu d’Artifice evening consisted of loaning paintings from his collection for exhibition in
the theater lobby (Massine 1968, 107).
Parade
Jean Cocteau developed the libretto for Parade over the winter of 1915–1916. The work grad-
ually evolved as he persuaded first Satie and then Picasso to join the venture. In May 1916,
Diaghilev visited Picasso in his studio to discuss the ballet and soon after gave his approval to
the project. In February 1917, Cocteau and Picasso joined Diaghilev and Massine in Rome to
work on the ballet. Satie remained in Paris, having already completed the score (Aschengreen
1986; Ries 1986; Rothschild 1991). At this point Massine, now twenty-one years old, had
already choreographed three modestly successful ballets, Soleil de Nuit in 1915, Las Meninas
and Kikimora in 1916, and he was in the process of completing two more ambitious works,
Contes Russes and Les Femmes de Bonne Humeur, both premiered in 1917. This experience, in
addition to the intense study he had made of visual art and historical dance materials, his
schooling with Cecchetti, and his taking on of Nijinsky’s roles, particularly in L’Apres midi
d’un Faune, prepared him for his part in Parade.
Cocteau’s scenario was simple. The setting is a Paris street fair or circus. In front of a
proscenium, several performers and their huckster managers attempt to attract an audience
through a preview of their acts. They are unsuccessful and the ballet ends with them making
a final futile attempt to gain attention. The performers consist of a Chinese Conjurer, a Little
American Girl, and two Acrobats. There are also a New York Manager and a Manager in
Evening Dress. Originally there were to have been three managers, one to introduce each
act, but the third (Manager on Horseback), a black-faced mannequin mounted on a horse, fell
off his steed during a late rehearsal. At Massine’s suggestion, the figure was eliminated, and
the horse appeared alone as a fourth act doing a dance of its own.
Satie’s score begins with a choral prelude that in its quiet formality gives little hint of
what is to come. It accompanied Picasso’s drop curtain of commedia figures, which, like
the prelude, was produced in a more conservative style than the rest of the ballet. Once the
curtain was up, the musical mood changed significantly, with the score making numerous
references to music of the circus, dance hall, and variety theater as well as to ragtime. For his
part, Picasso designed a cubist set that included a proscenium and curtain at the back of the
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Gay Morris
Illustration 13.1 Pablo Picasso’s set for Parade (1917). (Private collection.)
stage from which the performers emerged (Illustration 13.1). The proscenium was flanked
on each side by a balustrade behind which city buildings could be seen. Picasso also used
cubism in several of his costume designs. For the two managers he created towering cubist
constructions that covered most of the dancers’ bodies and that consisted of elements indicat-
ing their identity. The New York Manager’s costume included skyscrapers and a megaphone.
The Manager in Evening Dress had a jaunty moustache, a top hat, and pipe, along with a
walking stick (Illustration 13.2). The Horse, a staple comic character of the music hall, was
made up of two men in one costume, which included a cubist head resembling an African
tribal mask. Picasso’s costumes for the Conjurer, American Girl, and Acrobats made no direct
references to cubism, rather they were drawn from the kinds of garments worn by entertain-
ers of the time. The Conjurer was dressed in striped pants and a red coat ornamented with
bold patterns in white and yellow, while the Little American Girl wore a blazer jacket and
pleated skirt. The Acrobats were in blue costumes embellished with stars and comet tails.
In conceiving the libretto for Parade, Cocteau may have been thinking of an earlier idea
for a ballet he had hoped to produce in 1914, but which was never realized. That scenario,
based on the biblical figure of David, was to have been set in a circus. The theme of popular
entertainment, in itself, was not revolutionary. Painters from Degas to Toulouse Lautrec
and Picasso depicted circus and music hall subject matter, and Seurat painted a Parade of
his own. In addition, both ballet and modern dancers had appeared in variety theater. Loïe
Fuller made her name at the Folies Bergère, and French music halls had their own ballet
companies (Gutsche-Miller 2015). What was new was Cocteau’s introduction of popular
entertainment, both as subject matter and content, into the conservative, high art of ballet.
And Cocteau went a step further. Responding to Diaghilev’s famous injunction to “Astound
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Illustration 13.2 The Manager in Evening Dress from Parade (1917). (Courtesy of the Jerome Robbins
Dance Division, New York Public Library.)
Me!,” he was intent on creating the kind of scandale that had accompanied the premiere of
Nijinsky’s Sacre. For this, futurism was an obvious source because the futurists were known
provocateurs. Futurists favored popular performance forms because of their brevity and lack
of narrative. The compression or synthesis of independent acts or “turns” not only injected a
sense of speed into the proceedings but also, according to futurist theory, compressed time,
intensifying the viewer’s experience.
Although Cocteau considered himself to be in the cubist camp (it was he, after all, who
brought Picasso into the fold), he had earlier taken an interest in futurism and was aware of
both its vanguard credentials and its potential for disruption. It is not surprising, then, that he
chose a futurist style structure of independent, short acts while adopting the flimsiest of plots.
In Parade, each turn is introduced in music hall fashion by a placard on which the number of
the act is printed. The managers appear between turns to drum up enthusiasm for the next
performer. More provocative were other futurist performance devices adopted by Cocteau.
He intended to have the managers shout come-ons and incitements at the audience, which
were a standard part of futurist performances. The managers’ cries were meant to ridicule the
noise and exaggerated claims of modern advertising while also criticizing Bourgeois lifestyles
and values. There were also to be noises of typewriters, an airplane, revolver shots, Morse
code, and what Cocteau called paroles supprimées (suppressed utterances), for example: “tic tic
tic the ti-tan-ic deep and bright in the sea,” in this case to accompany the Little American
Girl’s dance (Rothschild 1991, 89).4
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The inclusion of spoken text and shouted provocations would have brought Parade closer
to futurism. However, the other collaborators insisted on eliminating these elements, much
to Cocteau’s dismay.5 There is evidence that it was Picasso who initially objected, with the
others supporting his view. As the ballet developed, Picasso’s influence gradually came to
overshadow Cocteau’s, moving Parade away from Cocteau’s more literary concept toward one
focused on visual and formal elements, a direction that also accorded with Massine’s views.
Thus, the managers, instead of speaking, wore cubist carapaces and danced (Aschengreen
1986; Ries 1986; Cooper 1987). Diaghilev’s argument in the debate was that spoken words
were inappropriate in a dance performance (Massine 1968, 102). This reasoning suggests
Diaghilev’s interest in futurism had its limits. Although he allowed futurist elements to be
incorporated into particular works as signs of modernity, he parted company with futurism,
and more broadly with the historical avant-garde, when he felt the autonomy of dance to
be compromised. In this he reflected a formalist modernism, shared by Massine and Picasso,
which valued reform of independent art forms over a more radical rejection of the past.
Massine and cubism

Although there is an extensive body of literature on cubism from widely varying viewpoints,
there is also broad consensus on basic cubist aims.6 Cubism explored the tension, or ambigu-
ous relationship, between the external world and the reality of the work of art. At the same
time, cubists invented a means or process, or, in T. J. Clark’s term, a performance, for carrying
out that exploration (Clark 1999, 223). Cubism was not concerned with abstraction, which
would have defeated its purpose; when Picasso and Braque approached total abstraction in
late 1911, they reversed course. At the same time, they created collage, which expanded ways
of displacing external reality, aligning cubism more closely with a modern world that Picasso
described as “very strange and not exactly reassuring” (quoted by Gilot and Lake 1964, 72).
Françoise Gilot recalled Picasso speaking of another cubist concern. He explained that after
Impressionism all rules of art seemed to dissolve into individual choices. Cubism attempted
to find “an architectonic basis in the composition, trying to make an order of it” (69). But if
cubism tried to bring a new order to painting, it also made meaning less certain.
Dance and the visual arts are two very different forms with their own histories, rules, and
issues, yet there are parallels in Massine’s and Picasso’s interests and in the strategies they used
to deal with them. Just as cubists wished to put painting back on the rails, so Massine sought
to find a way to reorder ballet while preserving the danse d’école, on which ballet is based.
His early choreographic experiments led him to the realization that,
the body includes various more or less independent structural systems each answer-
able only to itself, which must be coordinated according to choreographic harmony.
This led me to invent broken, angular movements in the upper part of the body
while the lower limbs continued to move in the usual harmonic academic style.
(Massine 1968, 95)
Massine’s emphasis on the body being made up of independent structural systems is key to
his choreography. For although angularity is important in Parade, what is more important is
that different parts of the body can move independently. This shift away from a body that is
seen as a single harmonious whole, to one that can be broken up and reconfigured in sur-
prising ways, disrupts preconceived notions of what dance and the body can be. In Parade,
Massine went further than he had in his earlier works, showing how the danse d’école could
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be accommodated even when placing increased emphasis on independent corporeal systems,

and then resolving the various elements through choreographic composition. Obviously,
the choreographer does not have the painter’s freedom to reconfigure the human body, but
within the limitations of his medium, Massine’s emphasis on reconfiguring parts into a new
kind of whole answerable to “choreographic harmony” is akin to cubism’s displacement of
external reality answering to the composition of the work.7
To take an example from Parade, in the Chinese Conjurer’s solo, which Massine made for
himself, the dancer enters in a series of leaps in which his body forms contrasting right angles
(Illustration 13.3). After three of these remarkable jumps, he makes a sharp back-and-forth
turn of his head coupled with an in-out turn of one leg, then an arabesque with his head
and torso parallel to the floor, then he is off again into the next leap. In the leap, while the
legs are busy, the arms are held out to the side and sharply bent at the elbow, one up and one
down. The leaping step has no academic counterpart for the arms, but the legs are execut-
ing an academic grand jeté with the legs bent at the knees and ankles instead of forming a
straight line. The academic arabesque of the next step is altered by the angular position of
the torso and arms. It should be added that Massine’s use of angularity is more than simply
a stylistic element that signals modernity. Angularity has to do with a kind of containment
and control that recalls the outlines of objects in synthetic cubist paintings and collages.
Illustration 13.3 Gray Chryst as the Chinese Conjurer in the Joffrey Ballet’s restaging of Parade (1973).
(© 2019 Herbert Migdoll, photographer; Courtesy of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York
Public Library.)
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Gay Morris
Illustration 13.4 Pablo Picasso: Guitar (1913). (© 2019 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society [ARS],
New York.)
For example, in Picasso’s collage, Guitar, of 1913 (Illustration 13.4), the outlines of the images
are generally sharp and clear with minimal shading. The forms are angular and what curves
exist are precise. Individual elements are balanced and generally contained within the frame.
In Massine’s choreography, angularity pulls the movement in toward the body, keeping the
line contained. At the same time, the choreographer’s elimination of rounded and contrapposto
elements flattens the dance image in a way that is similar to Picasso’s elimination of shading.
The structure of the major dances further contains the movement because each dancer enters
and exits with the same combination of steps: the Conjurer with the same leaps, and, as we
will see, the American Girl with a tripping step, the Acrobats with a lift, and the Horse with
a shuffle. Picasso similarly contains the individual elements of Guitar within the frame, giving
the work a sense of stability and control.
Cocteau added ballet réaliste to the title of Parade. Several months after the ballet’s premiere,
he explained this addition in an article that appeared in the American magazine, Vanity Fair:
“In ‘Parade’ the dances are not the result of an effort to achieve decorative effects, but of a
desire to amplify the real, to introduce the detail of daily truths and rhythms into the vocabu-
lary of dancing; for truth can always arouse the highest emotions” (Cocteau 1917, 106).
For Cocteau, what constituted daily truths and rhythms were the pantomimed actions
of the ballet’s four characters. It is because of Parade’s pantomime that Cocteau has often
been given more credit for the dances than he deserves. Cocteau encouraged this view by
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declaring on several occasions that he was the true choreographer of Parade (Aschengreen
1986, 73, 79; Ries 1986, 42, 45; Steegmuller 1986, 177), and on others by simply omit-
ting Massine as one of the ballet’s creators (Cocteau 1917, 37, 106; Aschengreen 1986, 79).
According to this narrative, Massine’s role was akin to a carpenter who simply executes an
architect’s creative design. This was hardly the case. Cocteau had little understanding of what
the act of choreographic transformation meant for Massine, how fully the choreographer had
absorbed Picasso’s ideas, or that Massine was developing a theory on the structure of move-
ment and its relation to the overall dance composition. Cocteau recorded, perhaps without
fully understanding it, advice Picasso gave Massine: “Don’t be afraid to glue a piece of news-
paper to the canvas—i.e. to use a movement whose meaning cannot be misunderstood, and
which remaining untransposed, gives full value to the other movements” (Cocteau quoted by
Steegmuller 1986, 180). For Cocteau, Picasso’s fragment of newspaper, because it remained
untransposed, legitimized the entire work as real. However, Picasso’s incorporation of every-
day objects into his works was more complex. While these elements remain familiar, they
are also transformed according to the desires of the artist and the needs of the composition.
So in Guitar (Illustration 13.4) Picasso used wallpaper, undisguised and fully recognizable,
to indicate the body of the guitar, and newspaper, equally recognizable, to serve as part of
the table. In this way he achieved both an ambiguity of meaning, and an oscillation between
external reality and a new reality, created by the artist. Although Massine followed Cocteau’s
ideas for pantomimed action, he did so in a way that made these gestures no more or less real
than newspaper in a cubist collage.
Thinking again of the Conjurer’s dance, there are two sequences that are often com-
mented upon. In one, Cocteau wanted the magician to imitate breathing fire, and in the sec-
ond, pretend to swallow an egg and then retrieve it from his shoe (Illustration 13.5). Picasso
designed an elaborate make-up for the conjurer and Massine devised bizarre facial move-
ments to accompany the pantomimed action. As the dance progresses and the fire breathing
and egg swallowing segments come and go, it becomes clear that the dance is far more than
pantomime. For example, when the conjurer pretends to breathe fire or swallow an egg, he
is also engaged in other movement such as a deep lunge or turning his legs in and out in
plié. His facial movement, too, is depersonalized and becomes part of the overall choreo-
graphic plan, rather than being simply an imitation of a performer’s gestures and expressions
in the everyday world. Thus, the pantomime is subsumed into the structure of the dance,
abstracted, and transposed into choreography. That is to say, external reality is not aban-
doned but reordered into the reality of art.
At the same time, this reordering makes the familiar strange, raising questions of mean-
ing. We know the Conjurer is supposed to be breathing fire or swallowing an egg because
Cocteau, Massine, and others have written about it. But would we know from the gestures
alone? They look in some way recognizable—the Conjurer swallows; later in the dance he
points to his shoe—and yet the gestures, although familiar, remain ambiguous. The Conjurer
is doing something, but what exactly?
If the conjurer’s solo includes elements of mime, the Little American Girl’s dance raises
mime to another level entirely.8 Here Massine had the girl enter and quickly circle the stage.
She then goes through a staggering number of mimed gestures at breakneck speed—Charlie
Chaplin walk, typing, boxing, shooting a pistol, strong man, Indian war dance, and flopping
and crawling about on the stage (supposedly going down in the Titanic). All the pieces of
mimed action remain independent of each other. There is no narrative. We are simply seeing
one action after another. What unites them is the choreographic organization. All the time
the girl is upright she is dancing in a frenetic, quasi-tap form, and even when she sprawls on
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Gay Morris
Illustration 13.5 Leonide Massine as the Chinese Conjurer in Parade (1917). (Courtesy of the Jerome
Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library.)
the floor she executes the various movements as steps in a dance set into specific patterns and
rhythms. Once again, Massine subsumed pantomimed movement into a structure in which
the gestures become both familiar and strange. This is made even more emphatic by the fact
that the aural elements Cocteau wanted to include were eliminated. Who was to know that
when the Little American Girl crawls and flounders about the stage it has anything to do with
a sinking ship? What we do know is that we are looking at a dance in which elements from
everyday life are recognizable but have been made to conform to a new order.
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Collage, with its inclusion of machine-made products, from newspaper and wallpaper to
calling cards and stamps, questioned virtuosity and the dignity of the medium. Cocteau’s
conception made similar points in centering the ballet on popular entertainment, but
Massine’s choreography put particular emphasis on challenging traditional stage decorum,
suggesting that a modern ballet needed to relate more closely to contemporary life. When the
Little American Girl rolls about on the floor with legs splayed she is hardly engaging in the
traditional actions and comportment of a ballerina. The Horse’s dance also disrupts ideas of
dignity and virtuosity on the stage. Originally the Horse (with his manager rider) was sup-
posed to have introduced the Acrobats and simply crossed the stage as the dancers entered.
Since Satie had not written music for a horse solo, the Horse performed to silence. He enters
(as he exits) with a four-count shuffle, rears, kicks out with his back legs, and awkwardly
bows. Choreographers had put animals on the ballet stage before, but none as low-life as this
shambling nag of the music hall.9 The Acrobats, too, challenged stage decorum. By today’s
standards the Acrobats’ duet appears to be the most conservative of the dances in Parade.
Cocteau initially specified one acrobat, but Massine insisted on two so that he could create
a pas de deux. The woman Acrobat is the only person in the ballet who dances on pointe,
and the choreography hones more closely to a classical vocabulary than the other dances.
However, Massine included a good deal of acrobatic movement, which although conven-
tional today, was unusual at the time and introduced what would have been a low-art form
of the circus into ballet.
In Parade, Massine shared another attribute with Picasso: visual wit conveyed through for-
mal means rather than through anecdote. Throughout the ballet Massine shows a playfulness
that charms, whether it is using the manager’s puff on his pipe as a visual beat in his stamp-
ing dance, the American Girl’s pseudo-tap routine that suddenly turns into an academic
pirouette, or the Conjurer’s leaps that seem to come out of nowhere because Massine omit-
ted the usual transitions. Massine constantly surprises as he refers to the danse d’école while
changing parts of it or comparing or combining it with unaccustomed actions that he pulls
from everyday life and then transposes into dance. Picasso also played with elements of his
medium. This can be seen in Guitar, when he used a round cutout of newspaper, pasted on
top of the guitar body to represent the sound hole in the guitar, thus taking an object from
everyday life and transposing it to represent, not another object, but negative space. At the
same time, the newspaper, which represents space, is actually a physical object pasted on
top of the guitar image, which means that it projects into the viewer’s space from out of the
picture plane. These kinds of formal manipulations—one on a two-dimensional surface, one
with the human body moving in three-dimensional space—draw attention in a particularly
lively way to the relationship between external and artistic reality.
Guillaume Apollinaire recognized the parallels between Massine and Picasso’s aims in
Parade. In a program note for the ballet, he stated that Picasso and Massine had for the first
time created a union of painting and dance that signaled the advent of a more complete
art, one that Apollinaire called a kind of super- or “sur-realism.” Apollinaire saw this as a
starting point for a new spirit that sought the same level of progress as science and industry.
Massine, he said, had been careful not to fall into mere pantomime. Rather, he had adapted
himself to “the Picassian discipline,” which was to suggest reality, not through reproduction,
but through a thorough analysis and synthesis of all the work of art’s visible elements and
“through a schematization that might be intended to reconcile contradictions, and some-
times deliberately renounces the rendering of the obvious outward appearance of the object”
(Apollinaire 1917; 2001, 452–453; Steegmuller 1986, 513–514). If scientists, physicians, and
engineers were revealing new realities, why should artists not uncover new realities, too?
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Massine and futurism

On July 8, 1917, F.T. Marinetti issued a Manifesto of Futurist Dance (1935, 75–76; 2009, 234–239).
Although published while he was in contact with Diaghilev and shortly after the premiere of
Parade, Marinetti does not mention the ballet or Massine. Nor does the futurist ideal for a new
dance as Marinetti conceived it appear to reflect Massine’s concerns in any substantial way,
although Marinetti noted that cubism, through Picasso, had introduced “geometrized volumes”
into ballet, making dance an autonomous art equal to music. But, according to Marinetti, music
was now passé (as, presumably, was ballet), and in a futurist dance music would be replaced
by noise, “the language of the new human-machine” (2009, 238). Marinetti writes, “We must
imitate with gestures the movements of motors, pay assiduous court to steering-gear, wheels,
pistons, preparing the fusion of man and the machine and thus arriving at the metallization of
the futurist dance” (1935, 75–76). According to art historian Joshua Taylor, the futurists viewed
movement as a means of embodying powerful emotion. The roaring motorcar “became the
symbol of a new kind of spiritual transport” (Taylor 1961, 11).
Marinetti’s three examples of futurist dance conform to futurist interests in that the
dancer imitates an airplane, shrapnel, and a machine gun. Marinetti gives detailed descrip-
tions of these dances. For example, in the “Dance of the Aviatrix,” the danseuse (Marinetti
apparently conceptualized dance as a female art given that in all his examples he refers to a
danseuse) performs on a giant map fastened to the stage floor. “Lying on her stomach on the
carpet-map, the danseuse will simulate with jerks and weavings of her body the successive
efforts of a plane trying to take off. Then she will come forward on hands and knees and
suddenly jump to her feet, her arms wide, her body straight but shivering all over” (2009,
239). Marinetti’s dances reflect futurist intentions in their brevity, combination of media
(including shouted text and elaborate props), references to contemporary technology, and
imitation of machines as a step toward a new human-machine hybrid. Marinetti speaks of
the futurist dance’s purpose being “to fuse with the divine machines of speed and war”
(2009, 239). Marinetti also places a heavy emphasis on pantomime and, elsewhere in the
manifesto, gives his approval to pantomime as “a vivifying element.” Finally, the dances he
describes are overtly violent, in keeping with the futurist dedication to the cleansing influ-
ence of war.
The dances in Parade are brief—the whole ballet lasts only about twenty minutes—but this
brevity had more to do with Cocteau and Satie’s decisions than Massine’s, although Massine
was certainly in agreement with this structure, suggesting he understood futurist processes and
theory. Massine, in line with Cocteau’s concept, also employed contemporary subject matter and
pantomime, but as has been shown, pantomime was not used in the literal way Marinetti con-
ceptualizes it but is subsumed into the overall dance composition. As for the fusion of man and
machine, it might be possible to view the Managers with their towering carapaces as somehow
mechanical, if Massine’s choreography did not counteract that impression. For example, one
might point to the solo for the Manager in Evening Dress, which opens the ballet. The dancer’s
head and torso are encased in rigid cardboard, while his arms and legs can move freely. He car-
ries a walking stick in his right hand and an elegant pipe in his left. His steps are made up of
stamps and slides and ballet ronds de jambe. These steps are constantly varied and are interspersed
with a twirl of the walking stick, or sharp tap of the stick on the floor, and an occasional puff on
the pipe. In creating this movement Massine was responding to and commenting on the staccato,
syncopated rhythm of the music. The relationship of the movement to Satie’s score shows both
choreographic wit and sensitivity. If mechanized movement is conceptualized as regular and
repetitive, the French Manager’s dance does not conform to such action.
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Massine comes closest to futurist intentions in the cinematic quality of the Little American
Girl’s dance. Massine, unlike Cocteau, had been to the United States, having accompanied
the Ballets Russes on its 1916 cross-country tour. He had admired the geometric simplicity
of America’s “magnificent skyscrapers” and spent evenings listening to jazz at New York’s
Plaza Hotel (Massine 1968, 79, 81, 86). Massine was also interested in film and had bought
a movie camera in the hope of filming his ballets (Garcia-Marquez 1995, 85, 398). So while
the cinematic elements in Parade may have owed something to futurism, they also related to
Massine’s own experience.
There was one element that was crucial to both futurism and to dance: dynamism.
The futurists attempted to express the speed and cacophony of the twentieth century through
performances that favored brevity, an absence of plot, and the “organized noise” of machined
and vocal sounds. In their visual art, dynamism was expressed primarily through whirling
vortices, surging whiplash imagery, and the arc and circle. After the invention of cubism, the
futurists added fractured imagery to their works (Illustration 13.6), but they did not use it
as the cubists did, in order to analyze form and volume in relationship to the picture plane.
Rather, they employed fragmentation to signify the speed and activity of machines and mod-
ern society, thus changing a means or a process into a sign. With this more contemporary
imagery, they continued to employ the arc, spiral, and circle, as well as diagonal lines that
exploded outward, often beyond the frame.
Massine, like the futurists, was interested in the dynamism of the modern age, but the
difference lay in how he manifested this interest. In Parade, Massine rarely, if ever, used the
whirling vortices and waves of motion favored by the futurists. Nor did he stretch out move-
ment, elongating the body’s line, to produce a dance image that pushed dynamically beyond
Illustration 13.6 Giacomo Balla: Abstract Speed + Sound (1913–1914). (© 2019 Artists Rights Society [ARS],
New York/SIAE, Rome.)
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Gay Morris
the stage space. Rather he found the modern spirit in shortened, staccato movement created,
in part, through the elimination of transitions in his dances. As mentioned, there is no prepa-
ration for the leaps in the Chinese Conjurer’s solo, or for the Little American Girl’s shifts
from one form of mimetic action to another. By eliminating transitions, execution could be
faster, and speed increased, but Massine also insisted on precision. His dance was contained,
logical, and disciplined. It possessed neither the anarchy of futurist performances, nor the
whirlwinds of movement found in their paintings.
Picasso’s cubist works were hardly known for their investment in movement—most cub-
ist subject matter consisted of the traditional genres of still life, landscape, and posed figures.
However, Picasso’s paintings and collages were not static; they were given a dynamic aspect
through fragmented geometric shapes and subtly played lines of force, which were counterbal-
anced by the stability of the compositional arrangement. Massine’s movement may well have
owed a debt to the cinema, but his dances also reflected the contained movement of synthetic
cubism, as well as the shattered rhythms of ragtime, which entered through Satie’s score.
Conclusion
Massine’s modernism did not owe everything to cubism. As noted, he had carefully stud-
ied eighteenth-century dance manuals, which helped him develop a theory on how the
body could be organized in structured movement. He had also seen and danced Nijinsky’s
choreography, which sought unaccustomed ways of shaping the dancing body. Cocteau’s
conception of Parade introduced popular entertainment and futurist elements into the ballet.
Popular music, via Satie’s score, also played a role. In 1925 Massine wrote that ballet must
incorporate jazz elements into the danse d’école because “Jazz represents us. It is an art form
which represents the speed of modern life…” (Massine 1925, 1340). What Massine produced
in Parade was cubism’s sense of the contingency that pervaded modernity, as well as a search
for structures that might hold as the world violently moved into an unknown future. All the
solidity of the past was dissolving; meaning was uncertain. Massine’s answer was to try to
save ballet by creating an art that did not turn its back on the world, but transformed it in
a way that was answerable to the artist. Here, we might return to Foucault’s statement on
Baudelaire. For the poet, Foucault writes, the artist of modernity transfigures the world. “His
transfiguration does not entail an annulling of reality, but a difficult interplay between the
truth of what is real and the exercise of freedom” (Foucault 2010, 41).
Massine and Picasso spent a good deal of their free time together during the making
of Parade, meeting in cafes or sightseeing, and discussing art (Garcia-Marquez 1995, 109).
The two collaborated on three more ballets, before going their separate ways. Massine took
with him an approach to ballet that included numerous cubist lessons. These lessons not only
influenced his own work but helped shape the course of twentieth-century ballet modern-
ism. For if Massine sought to reform ballet, the two most important Ballets Russes choreog-
raphers to come after him, Bronislava Nijinska and George Balanchine, followed suit, taking
a self-critical stance to tradition that renewed the academic dance.
Notes
1 This chapter has been revised and expanded from an earlier article (Morris 2014).
2 For the most thorough analysis of the influence of futurism on the Ballets Russes, including
Massine’s choreography, see Garafola (1989, 98–115). See also Gaborik and Harris (2011, 23–40)
and García-Márquez (1995, 80–81).
204
3 For Italian futurist history and theory, see Rainey and Wittman (2009), Ottinger (2009), Poggi
(2008), Perloff (1986), Kirby and Kirby (1986), and Taylor (1961).
4 Cocteau’s paroles supprimées may also have been inspired by Apollinaire’s “Futurist Antitradition,”
in which he used similar language (Apollinaire [1913] 2009, 152–154. See Garafola 1989, 99–100).
5 According to Douglas Cooper (1987, 21, 23, 25) several of the mechanical noises did remain, but
they could not be heard clearly over the orchestra. Cyril Beaumont speaks of the clicking sounds
of a typewriter and the hum of an airplane in the London premiere of the ballet in November
1919 (Beaumont 1951, 150). How much of a scandal Parade actually caused at its premiere is open
to debate. Reports vary, although Cocteau claimed it caused the kind of uproar he desired (see
Kochno 1954, 204; Steegmuller 1986, 184–188; Arnaud 2016, 196–201).
6 Cubism in the context of this essay refers only to the work of Picasso and Braque and focuses on
synthetic cubism, which began in 1911–1912. For agreement on basic cubist theory, see scholars
with views as varied as Rosenblum (1959) and Clark (1999).
7 Analysis of Massine’s choreography for Parade is based on live performances, films, and videos of the
Joffrey Ballet production of 1973, which Massine oversaw (Massine 1973a, 1973b, 1976). According
to Douglas Cooper, in restaging Parade for the Joffrey Ballet, Massine had his notes from the origi-
nal production and also consulted with Ballets Russes dancers, including Maria Chabelska, Vera
Nemtchinova, Lydia Sokolova, and Michel Pavloff, to help in reconstructing the ballet. At the same
time, he made changes to at least some of the movement (Cooper 1973, 21). Massine had previously
overseen a short-lived production of Parade in 1964 for Maurice Bejart’s Ballet of the XX Century
(Deses 1964), in which he wrote that he had retained the form and structure of the ballet, but
rechoreographed the individual dances (Massine 1968, 275). The extent to which the dances were
altered is suggested by his son, Lorca Massine, who was a member of Bejart’s company and worked
closely with his father for many years in restaging his work. He said that the Joffrey production is
closest to the original and that any changes made would have been “subtle” (personal conversation
with Tatiana Massine Weinbaum in consultation with her brother, Lorca, New York, October 3,
2017). The position I have taken is that while Massine may have changed individual movements,
the overall choreographic style and approach remained essentially that of the original production.
The illustrations I use as support for my argument are there to exemplify Massine’s larger theoreti-
cal aims.
8 This is the only step known for certain that Massine altered from the Ballets Russes production.
Lydia Sokolova mentions that when she danced the Little American Girl, she entered and exited
with a series of jumps (Sokolova 1960, 104; Massine 1968, 104), whereas in the Joffrey production,
she entered and exited with a running skip.
9 Boris Kochno states that the horse irritated the audience, although Apollinaire called the animal’s
steps one of the work’s “adorable inventions” in his program note for the ballet (Apollinaire 1917;
Kochno 1954, 206).
References
Apollinaire, Guillaume. 1917.“Parade et l’Esprit nouveau.” Souvenir program for Les Ballets Russes,Théâtre
du Châtelet, Paris, May.
———. 2001. Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews 1902–1918, edited by Leroy C. Breunig. Translated by
Susan Suleiman. Boston, MA: MFA Publications.
———. (1913) 2009. “Futurist Antitradition.” In Futurism, An Anthology, edited by Lawrence Rainey,
Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, 152–153. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press.
Arnaud, Claude. 2016. Jean Cocteau: A Life.Translated by Lauren Elkin and Charlotte Mandell. New Haven,
CT:Yale University press.
Aschengreen, Erik. 1986. Jean Cocteau and the Dance. Translated by Patricia McAndrew and Per Avsum.
Copenhagen: Gyldendal.
Beaumont, Cyril. 1951. The Diaghilev Ballet in London. 3rd ed. London: Adam and Charles Black.
Clark, Timothy J. 1999. Farewell to An Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Cocteau, Jean. 1917. “Parade: Ballet Réaliste.” Vanity Fair 37: 106.
Cooper, Douglas. 1973. “Parade.” Dance and Dancers 24 (6): 20–24.
205
Gay Morris
———. 1987. Picasso Theater. New York: Harry Abrams.

Deses, Piet. 1964. “Massine Revives Historic Parade.” Dance News, April, 7.
Foucault, Michel. 2010. “What Is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 32–50.
New York: Random House.
Gaborik, Patricia and Andrea Harris. 2011.“From Italy and Russia to France and the U.S.:‘Fascist’ Futurism
and Balanchine’s ‘American’ Ballet.” In Avant-Garde Performance and Material Exchange: Vectors of the
Radical, edited by Mike Sell, 23–40. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Garafola, Lynn. 1989. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. New York: Oxford University Press.
García-Márquez,Vicente. 1995. Massine: A Biography. New York: Knopf.
Gilot, Françoise, and Carlton Lake. 1964. My Life with Picasso. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Gutsche-Miller, Sarah. 2015. Parisian Music Hall Ballet, 1871–1913. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester
Press.
Järvinen, Hanna. 2009. “Dancing without Space—On Nijinsky’s “L’Après-midi d’un Faune (1912).” Dance
Research 27 (1): 48–53.
Kirby, Michael and Victoria Ness Kirby. 1986. Futurist Performance. New York: PAJ Publications.
Kochno, Boris. 1954. Le Ballet en France, de quinzième siècle à nos jours. Paris: Hachette.
Marinetti, F.T. (1917) 1935. “The Futurist Dance.” Translated by Elizabeth Delza. Dance Observer, October,
75–76.
———. (1917) 2009.“Manifesto of Futurist Dance.” In Futurism: An Anthology, edited by Rainey, Lawrence,
Christine Poggi and Laura Wittman. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press.
Massine, Leonide. 1925. Quoted in “The Sitter Out.” The Dancing Times, August, 1340.
———. 1968. My Life in Ballet. London: Macmillan and Company.
———. 1973a. Parade (Motion Picture), City Center Joffrey Ballet, filmed for the Jerome Robbins Film
Archive by Compton-Ardolino Films, Inc., full ballet in rehearsal without sets and costumes at the
Brooklyn Academy of Music, Dance Collection, New York Public Library, New York.
———. 1973b or later. Parade (Video), excerpts performed by the City Center Joffrey Ballet, Rudolf
Nureyev Collection, Dance Collection, New York Public Library, New York.
———. 1976. Parade (Video), excerpts, City Center Joffrey Ballet, directed and produced by Merrill
Brockway, WNET/13, Dance in America, Dance Collection, New York Public Library, New York.
Mavroudis, Alexandre. 1917. “Les Nouveaux ‘ballets russes.’” L’Opinion 10: 230.
Morris, Gay. 2014. “Massine/Picasso/Parade.” Modernist Cultures 9 (1): 46–61.
Ottinger, Didier, ed. 2009. Futurism. Paris: Centre Pompidou.
Perloff, Marjorie. 1986. The Futurist Moment:Avant-Garde,Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture. Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press.
Poggi, Christine. 2008. Inventing Futurism:The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Rainey, Lawrence, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds. 2009. Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press.
Ries, Frank W. D. 1986. The Dance Theatre of Jean Cocteau. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Rosenblum, Robert. 1959. Cubism and Twentieth Century Art. New York: Harry Abrams.
Rothschild, Deborah Menaker. 1991. Picasso’s “Parade.” London: Sotheby Publications.
Scheijen, Sjeng. 2009. Diaghilev: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Steegmuller, Francis. 1986. Cocteau: A Biography. Boston: David R. Godine.
Sokolova, Lydia. 1960. Dancing for Diaghilev: The Memoirs of Lydia Sokolova, edited by Richard Buckle.
London: John Murray.
Taylor, Joshua C. (1961). Futurism. New York: Museum of Modern Art.
206
14
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO
DANCE CRITICISM?
Erin Brannigan
Introduction
Dance criticism has undertaken an interesting journey from its historically significant role in
establishing the very terrain of twentieth-century theater dance to the crisis in arts review-
ing more generally in the early twenty-first century. As a subject of criticism, dance is often
lacking documentation, opportunities for repeated viewings, textual equivalents and other
associated ephemera to which writers reviewing work in other disciplines may have access.
This condition has placed dance criticism at the forefront of developments across the last cen-
tury and into the twenty-first, with creative critics finding progressive solutions to endemic
challenges.
This chapter focuses on dance reviewing as it has developed since the early twentieth
century in response to the emergence of what French dance theorist Laurence Louppe refers
to as contemporary dance: the break with classical ballet that produced new forms of theater
dance (2010, 23). Writing in Sydney, Australia, the role of dance criticism in my local con-
text is placed into dialogue with the primarily American canon of dance criticism. I begin
by detailing some of the generalized conditions of the discipline of dance that interrupt the
traditional terms of a critical encounter. The related issue of the central role played by the
artist-theorist in the development of a tradition of dance criticism is understood as a unique
narrative among contemporaneous art forms, and this is tracked historically from the origi-
nary foundations of dance criticism as a discrete field of journalism. This entire historical
context can be seen to drive the descriptive turn in dance reviewing in New York in the
mid-twentieth century and leads to a consideration of how and why dance, as an art form,
forces creative approaches to criticism. Coming full circle, such creativity in dance writ-
ing today connects current practices to turn-of-the-twentieth-century experiments between
dance, writing and poetics. The chapter ends with an account of dance reviewing in the
digital age where, I argue, it is in a unique position to both benefit from, and help renovate,
a new age in arts reviewing.
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Erin Brannigan
Dance as the subject of criticism

An account of the special conditions of dance as an art form vis a vis criticism will help us
understand its history since the establishment of certain aesthetic parameters by the first wave of
artists and critics. The ways in which dance resists criticism has much to do with the instability
of its primary medium as it is experienced during performance—a dancing body/bodies—
which results in an unstable object of criticism. Although the expanded media of dance at the
turn of the twenty-first century includes many things beyond, or instead of, the dancing body,
for my purposes here I would argue that other elements are always understood in relation to a
corporeally determined model of dance and choreography associated with the art form. First,
due to the complex spatiotemporal phenomena that is the dancing body/ies—extreme varieties
and specificities of movement, relationships between human and nonhuman elements, vari-
able perspectives on the action—capturing a choreographic work in any reliable form on film
or video is problematic. We will only, in any case, capture one performance, and no singular
performance is the same as another due to those same variables. In addition, the presence of the
dancing body in a shared time-space is very different from the presence of a body on screen for
a viewer. As a corollary of the fact that the human body is this unstable medium, a reviewer
will only ever be writing about one instantiation of a choreographic work.
These obstacles regarding repeated viewings to “stay with” the work, but also the pos-
sibility of the critic and reader sharing the same performance experience, are compounded
if we factor in the increasing prevalence of improvisation in contemporary choreography or
the practice of performance as part of a much more encompassing and ongoing process. Then
there is the brevity of most dance seasons, and the small number of artists able (or willing) to
sustain a repertoire. Another factor for criticism regarding the media of dance is the uneasy
relationship between corporeal expression and language (despite an exciting increase in the
number of artist-writers and artist-theorists mentioned above), which will always leave a sig-
nificant gap between text-based ephemera and the work itself. But perhaps the most signifi-
cant impact of the corporeal medium of dance on criticism is the diminishment of our ability
to objectify and distance ourselves from other bodies due to inter-corporeal empathy derived
from proximity and familiarity. At a very basic level, the body is something that we all have
in common; as choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker states, it is the most ancient and
the most contemporary phenomena simultaneously, connecting us to both the history of life
on earth and our most immediate, present state (2012). Beneath the stories and figures we
encounter in movies, plays and novels, the body persists as a touchstone connecting all of us
who share its capacities and limitations.
When encountering a dance work, rather than shape, color, volume, plot, characteriza-
tion, melody, harmony—elements that we might find in music, theater or visual arts and
which can be defined to a certain extent and hence idealized/critiqued—the dance critic is
often confronted first and foremost with energy, force, tone, weight, movement quality, pres-
ence.1 This occurs via a subject very close to the critic’s own in its material and psychological
form, often divested of layers of the performance apparatus associated with dramatic theater.
An encounter between the body of the critic and the body of the dance(r) engages affect,
empathy and contagion, which trigger new configurations that can effectively interfere with
the traditional conditions of criticality. Although it is acknowledged that such effects operate
in the arts more generally, contemporary dance has a unique focus on embodied aspects of
spectatorship for the reasons given here.
In philosophy, affect has been used to describe the impact of the work of art on the
body of the viewer as a kind of knowledge that occurs before thought (Lyotard 1993;
208
Whatever happened to dance criticism?
Massumi 1995).2 We know that the body experiences sensations before they are realized as
cognitive thought, and dance is an art form of sensation par excellence (Massumi 1995). 3
Sometimes these sensations never make it to consciousness as recognizable thoughts, feel-
ings or emotions, so there is a quantity of our encounter with phenomena (including dance)
that slips away from criticality and remains as affect. Empathy has a special role in our
“ face-to-face” encounters with each other as philosopher Emmanuel Levinas writes, and
dance studies understands how empathy occurs beyond the face/mind where the body feels
the movement of another body when, in fact, it does not move (Martin [1939] 1965; Smyth
1984; Levinas 1991; Foster 2009). Sometimes called “kinesthetic empathy,” it connects
bodies beyond emotion, meaning, narrative or character via a purely material contagion
between bodies and movement states.
This has been explained in the field of neuroscience by way of the operations of mirror
neurons, “synaptic connections in the cortex that fire both when one sees an action and when
one does that action” (Foster 2009, 1). Engaging us on a subconscious, corporeal level, kines-
thetic empathy results in a newly formulated relationship with the work of art where distance
is interrupted by a form of physical contagion. French dance researcher and scholar Hubert
Godard echoes John Martin when he states, “I believe the supreme contagion to be that of
the body state” (Dobbels and Rabant 1996, 46), and we can understand this in relation to our
encounter with a dance performance due to our proximity or familiarity with the sensations
being experienced by the dancers. This recognized capacity for dance to engage kinesthetic
empathy in viewers links it directly to the crisis of criticism in the 1960s, but I will return to
the origins of modern dance criticism to track such developments across time.
Movement analysis and artist-theorists

The lines between artistic analysis, criticism and artist self-commentary are particularly
blurred within the field of contemporary dance, with dance artists consistently playing a role
in setting the critical terms for the surrounding discourse. The art form emerged from turn-
of-the-twentieth-century modernity when artists were finding increasing public interest in
their commentaries, and it developed within a critical vacuum where the standards applied
to classical ballet were no longer relevant. Early dance pioneers such as Isadora Duncan and
Loïe Fuller faced critics inadequately equipped to engage with a form that was so new as
to be lacking standards for evaluation. Rayner Heppenstal writes of the problem in relation
to Duncan: “it seems that nobody who did see her was able to tell about her sanely… there
are many writings of those who saw and knew her, varying in waftiness and hysteria”
(Heppenstal 1983, 267). Florid autobiographies do not help, adding little commentary on
the substance of their work (Fuller 1913; Duncan 1928). As dance theorist and historian
Mark Franko points out, Duncan’s own writing “narrates the discovery of dancing” but
rarely the “construction of dances” (Franko 1995, 4). Writers who did record their work
with passion, insight and creativity were the poet-philosophers associated with Symbolism
to whom I shall return.
Rudolf von Laban, Ted Shawn and Doris Humphrey were the first twentieth-century
dance artists to research and publish formulations for the practice and analysis of dance
composition. Laban’s research and writing, published first in 1920 in German, constitutes
an integration of both the movement research and analysis that would feed the development
of modern dance codes and somatic observation that would inspire radical developments
in that direction such as the work of Laban’s student, Irmgard Bartenieff (Laban 1971).
Shawn devised a technical approach at Denishawn and beyond—informed by attention to
209
Erin Brannigan
the broadest scope of dance and movement, including traditional dance from around the
world—which set out dance fundamentals in a series of publications between 1920 and 1959.
This technique produced dancers and choreographers who broke away from Denishawn
such as Humphrey, Martha Graham, Charles Weidman and many others (Shawn 1937;
Mumaw and Sherman 1981). Humphrey produced a book at the end of her life that docu-
mented a “choreographic theory” that would assist the study of dance as a “craft,” co-opting
the language of music and design (Humphrey 1959, 18). The collective work of these pio-
neers both discovered and disseminated disciplinary foundations for dance artists, and the
emerging first generation of dance critics must have been familiar with these texts, putting
artists in direct dialogue with the arbiters of a new set of disciplinary standards.4 Martha
Graham’s musical director, Louis Horst, taught dance composition to generations of dance
students in the twentieth century based on the musical model of theme and variation from
the late-1920s to the mid-1960s (Horst 1967). This dependence of mainstream choreo-
graphic pedagogy on music composition was reflected in the choice of reviewers of the new
dance, as we shall see.
A new approach to self-commentary from dance artists emerged in the mid-twentieth
century in America in line with a widespread wave of artist-theorists across media. Gay
Morris notes that the post-World War II period saw the appearance of writing by dance
artists and their supporters in Dance Observer (founded by Horst) and elsewhere, and notes
that “it is striking how close the connections were between critics and dancers” (Morris
2006, xx). In the following generation, choreographers such as Anna Halprin, Yvonne
Rainer and Simone Forti were (and still are) articulate about their experimental approach to
choreography (Forti 1963; Halprin 1968; Rainer 1968). Their words, scores and diagrams
were included in anthologies and journals alongside artists such as Robert Morris, Robert
Rauschenberg and Donald Judd, who covered the newly intermedial scene dominated by
minimalism, neo-dada, happenings and pop art (Young and Mac Low 1963; Battcock 1968;
Kostelanetz 1968). The writing of these artists entered into direct dialogue with critics such
as Michael Fried and Harold Rosenberg in the visual arts and Jill Johnston who covered
dance at the time. This dialogue, and the tight-knit nature of the downtown New York arts
scene, destabilized the distinction between artist and critic. More democratic communities
of criticality, where audiences were often made up primarily of artists, lead to a new style of
dance criticism pioneered in the pages of The Village Voice in New York.5
Continuing this history of artist-led criticism, dance artists have recently produced mono-
graphs, articles, DVDs and websites that uncover choreographic processes and provide per-
spectives that supplement, but also undermine, the authority of the expert-critic (Forsythe,
Palazzi and Zuniga Shaw 2009; Stuart and Peeters 2009; De Keersmaeker and Cjević 2012).6
This often involves choreographers engaging their own commentators who have intimate
access to their process and are sympathetic with their aims. Choreographers are thus empow-
ered through choosing the critical frame through which their work is understood, and this
sets a precedent for other “external” critics and theorists who may struggle to contradict the
words of the artist.
Some dance artists have also become publically outspoken about the state of dance criti-
cism, for example, New York choreographer Miguel Gutierrez in a 2002 article, “The Perfect
Dance Critic.” The article is scathing in its account of dance critics as Gutierrez encountered
them at the turn of the twenty-first century. He takes aim at the entire field in his critique,
from writers through editors, to publications. With explicit accusations of critics’ snobbery
and their unproductive attachment to the past, the article ultimately formulates a prescription
for a good dance critic. In this artist-authored manifesto for excellence in dance reviewing,
210
Gutierrez is calling for informed, articulate reviewing from writers who know the field as
it currently stands within the broader arts, are culturally sensitive and self-reflexive, under-
stand the importance of dancer agency in most contemporary work and the renovation of the
notion of “virtuosity” in the same, can account for all aspects of a choreographic production,
and follow the development of artists across works (Gutierrez 2002, n.p.).
Defining an art form: The first wave American dance critics

The important work of the first wave dance critics helped define a new art form that broke
with classical dance and began an intense dialogue with the modern arts. Many of the first
and second wave dance critics were music critics adapting to cover this new form, as Jack
Anderson points out in his article on the influential dance critic John Martin;
Carl van Vechten reviewed dance for The Times before World War I and H.T. Parker
covered dance events for The Boston Evening Transcript from 1905 to 1934. Yet van
Vechten was one of The Times’s assistant music critics, whereas Parker was also a
music and drama critic. (Anderson 1983)
Anderson also notes that, as opposed to some of his peers, “Mr. Martin wrote on dance and
nothing but dance.” Importantly, he goes on to correct historical accounts of Martin as the
first American dance critic; “strictly speaking, he is not our first newspaper dance critic for,
shortly before his appointment in 1927, The Herald Tribune named a dance critic of its own,
Mary F. Watkins” (Anderson 1983). Martin was a reviewer for the New York Times from
1927 to 1962. Peers who also made their name as dance critics during this period include
Edwin Denby, Doris Hering, Margaret Lloyd, Lincoln Kirstein and Walter Terry, but it is
the work of Martin in particular that has been absorbed into Dance Studies and shaped the
profile of the Modern dance artists.
His serious approach to analyzing and describing the new dance helped legitimize it.
In Introduction to the Dance ([1939] 1965), Martin identified the following as key characteris-
tics of the Modern form (both German and American). These would, in turn, become new
standards for evaluating further work appearing in the field:
• Space as an “entity” with which to dance (231)

• An assertion of dance as an autonomous art form (235)
• A reduction to thematic “essences” presented “sparsely and directly” in an “epic” form
(241)
• Functional rather than representational stage settings (245)
• Codified movement systems involving “restraints” and strong links to pedagogy
(241–243, 254)
• An emphasis on “action and tension” at the expense of “the lower end of the dynamic
scale” (242)
• Each iteration of the form is a “purely personal emanation” (251)
Another important discovery of Martin’s preempted more recent theories of kinesthetic

empathy. In 1946, he wrote of “the inherent contagion of bodily movement, which makes
the onlooker feel sympathetically in his own musculature the exertions he sees in somebody
else’s musculature” (Martin 1946, 105) and develops the term “metakinesis” ([1933] 1965
The Modern Dance).
211
Erin Brannigan
Like his peers in the visual arts, Martin struggled to accept the new breed of choreogra-
phers led by Merce Cunningham, and this definitely delayed the success of Cunningham in
his hometown of New York and his subsequent access to government support (Brown 2007,
97).7 Cunningham’s revisions of the art form included his critique of the artist-genius via
aleatory methods, the suppression of the dancers’ expressive agency, emphasis on movement-
for-movement’s-sake, a severing of music-dance codependence, and the inclusion of every-
day movements alongside technical vocabulary among other things. The ensuing revolution
in American theater dance presented critics with challenging new work that they met with,
new critical methods.
Revising critical tools: The descriptive turn

A wave of female (and sometimes feminist) critics, beginning with Jill Johnston in the 1960s,
brought about a radically descriptive turn in dance reviewing that culminated in the writing
of Deborah Jowitt and other New York–based writers of the 1980s and 1990s. Controversial
and influential, this shift can be seen as a response to the broader aesthetic milieu in New York
at the time, alongside the special conditions of dance as the subject of a review. This historical
turn also connects with the current productive crisis in arts criticism in the digital age that
begs, again, for new ways of responding publicly to the arts.
Jill Johnston was writing in The Village Voice in what she calls “a tumultuous decade”:
1959–1969 ( Johnston 1998, xi). Trained in dance, literature and fine arts, her writing was
approaching “something akin to the theoretical and iconographic work I admired in art,”
focusing on description but adding “writerly concerns” that amounted to an experimenta-
tion with the review format ( Johnston 1998, xi). Immersed in the hotbed of intermedial
innovation occurring in the downtown Manhattan art scene in the 1960s, the radical work
she was confronted with instigated an intense dialogue with her writing practice that played
out, at first, as a fundamental challenge to critical objectivity and distance, and later (in
Jowitt’s words) as “a freewheeling, self-starring weekly ramble” that took its form from
revolutionary new performance modes ( Jowitt 1998, xxiii). Some of her strategies, described
by Gregory Battcock and the writer herself, included biographical elements or a “turning
inward from art as subject to the critic herself as subject,” blatantly partisan positions in favor
of the avant-garde, texts that read more as works-of-art in response to the originary work,
and “a confusion of roles” that saw her entering into performances (Battcock 1998, xviii;
Johnston 1998, xiii).8 These all made her body of work a disciplinary response to the undisci-
plined status quo. Johnston’s exposure to the democratic, improvisational, self-reflexive, self-
effacing, pedestrian and compositionally focused work of the generation of choreographers
and dancer dominated by the Judson Dance Theater group gave her permission to pursue
such things in her writing and thus transform the genre of dance criticism.
One of the extreme tendencies in the work of this period was minimalism, and the evacu-
ation of content that this entailed was described by Susan Sontag as a “programmatic avant-
gardism, which has meant, mostly, experiments with form at the expense of content” (Sontag
1966, 5). The resulting situation for criticism was summarized in Sontag’s influential 1964
essay, “Against Interpretation,” in which she argues that “to interpret is to impoverish” (7).
In this polemical piece, she claims that “the idea of content today is mainly a hindrance, a
nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism,” and this certainly played out in new dance
works that abandoned story, character, theme, costume, representational sets and emotional
expression, turning to experimentation with form, process, composition, syntax, presenta-
tion mode and venue (5).
212
Developing out of this period, a new school within dance criticism is outlined by Diana
Theodores in First We Take Manhattan: Four American Women and the New York School of Dance
Criticism (1996). Theodores describes how, between 1965 and 1985, four dance writers—
Marcia Siegel, Deborah Jowitt, Arlene Croce and Nancy Goldner—shared characteristics
of unapologetic subjectivity, detailed “re-creative” descriptions of both the distinguishing
aesthetic and impact of performed choreographies, a lack of recourse to extra-textual infor-
mation, and an unrepressed enthusiasm for their subject (Theodores 1996, 1–9). For such
writers, analysis begins with the work itself and any conclusions regarding meaning, value
or historic-cultural significance are drawn through a close description of form. Jowitt began
writing for The Village Voice in 1967 and she continues to run reviewing workshops. In a 1994
workshop I attended in Sydney, she described an approach that details choreographic work in
a form close to anthropological thick description, “as if reporting back from a strange planet”
( Jowitt 1994). In her 1975 review of two nights of Grand Union performances (includ-
ing Trisha Brown, Barbara Dilley, Douglas Dunn, David Gordon, Nancy Lewis and Steve
Paxton), Jowitt avoids drawing conclusions beyond a return to the theme of “staying with”
( Jowitt 1977, 132–134). With clarity she describes many moments within this improvised
performance that define its character, giving stability to this most unstable of performance
modes. There is a positive and generous tone in her observational mode that suspends judg-
ment, but this is also sympathetic with the terms of the work as she describes how the per-
formers emulate our everyday inhabitation of a kind of “coping” marked by patience, effort,
compromise, and even a politeness. She also exposes herself in the text as being affected by
the work (she wants to try jumping out a window to see if she would be caught, in the spirit
of the work) and declares her commitment to the “staying with” that it requires. As an exam-
ple of the style, this review demonstrates many of the characteristics identified by Theodores
and reveals the continuities with, and departures from, writers such as Martin. The influence
of this school on writers as far away as Australia was significant. In the Sydney-based national
arts magazine RealTime, writers such as Philipa Rothfield, Eleanor Brickhill and I found a
platform for publishing nonevaluative, descriptive writing that suited the close-knit dance
communities in our major cities, a characteristic that we had in common with the Soho scene
in New York that produced Jowitt.
In the 1990s, Jowitt entered into a critical dialogue with dance theorist Roger Copeland
that lays out the stakes for new configurations between the descriptive, interpretive and
evaluative components of a dance review, where one element might dominate over another.
In an approach such as Jowitt’s described above, Copeland finds “excruciatingly detailed
description virtually devoid of anthropomorphizing adjectives” (Copeland 1998, 102).
Copeland believes that a purely descriptive approach to covering dance work could isolate
the discipline from ideas and critical debates, aligning dance with “some lost, pre-verbal,
Dionysian paradise” that would set back the field exponentially (104). For a relatively new
art form that struggles for recognition within the arts even today, the dangers here are clear.
Copeland also argues that such an approach silences further discourse because it constitutes
evidence as opposed to an opinion; something he refers to as “impressionistic connoisseur-
ship” (Copeland 1993, 26).
Copeland’s criticism that the “descriptive bias” results in writing that is “essentially devoid
of ideas” is met by Jowitt’s firm counterargument: “Descriptive writing—a certain kind of
it—is the best way I know to assert the interdependence of content and form, of narration
and movement’s ‘secret truths’” (Copeland 1993, 26; Jowitt 2001, 7). She goes on, “the point
is, in searching for what a dance may mean, not to lose sight of what it is, or appears to be,”
thus reasserting the centrality of the work of the work in her approach and her belief that
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Erin Brannigan
it is through attention to what is that we cannot avoid discovering what it is about ( Jowitt
2001, 7). She sees the binary set out by Copeland, where description is opposed to ideas, as “a
new wrinkle in the mind-body split,” and her examples for the coexistence of the two from
Croce, Joan Acocella and others are convincing (8). In her examples, meticulous accounts of
corporeal behaviors reveal the expanded network of realities, memories, fantasies and con-
texts that encompass the work, the dancers and the writers in a given space-time, replacing
interpretation and judgment with a coextensive “staying with.”
The critique of judgment implicit in the American female writers’ reviewing style con-
nects this more recent period back to the poetic writing of Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry,
and T.S. Eliot when they wrote in response to the abstract ballets of the late Romantic period
and the first wave of the twentieth-century European avant-garde. In fact, Jowitt makes this
connection clear, referring to Eliot and the new literary criticism that he was associated with
as precedents for her approach ( Jowitt 2001, 8). The Symbolist poets found in dance a pro-
ductive mode of expression as an alternative to language-based forms, and a model for their
experiments that pushed at the limits of poetry. Writing in 1897, Mallarmé famously wrote
of Italian ballerina Elena Cornabla:
I find Cornabla ravishing. She dances as if she wore nothing; which is to say: with-
out the appearance of any assistance offered for a leap or a fall, a flying and blurred
presence of gauze, she appears, summoned into the air, supporting herself there,
through the Italian trick of keeping her body taut but soft… she does not dance,
suggesting, through the miracle of shortcuts and bounds, with a corporeal writing
what it would take paragraphs of prose, in dialogue and description, to express: she
is a poem set free of any scribe’s apparatus. (Mallarmé [1897] 2001, 108/9)
The link between dance and poetry, which has been taken up in detail recently by Susan
Jones (2013), is here in Mallarmé’s description of the dancer as being but not doing, suggest-
ing but not representing, working through her medium to express immediately or directly,
here as an untranslatable poetics of movement.9 As Jones says, “the dancer provides, in her
poetics, the example of a creative activity in which the presence of the author abides in the
very materiality of her production” (16). The poetic pursuit of an autonomous work of art,
where the artist’s intention both forms and is fully formed through the medium, explains one
way in which dance has moved writers into new territories and techniques, which is clear
across this history of the encounter between the two disciplines.
One final dance critic of the twentieth century who should be mentioned before leaping
through time to the present is André Levinson. In the introduction to the book, André Levinson
on Dance:Writings from Paris in the Twenties, edited by dance critic Joan Acocella and dance histo-
rian Lynn Garafola, the editors make a case for Levinson as the first Western dance critic of the
twentieth century (Acocella and Garafola 1991, 18). Although Levinson may sit slightly outside
of my remit here due to his attention to ballet rather than modern dance, his approach to dance
reviewing was influenced by the French writers just discussed and was an influence upon the
English ballet critic Cyril Beaumont and the American Lincoln Kirstein (Acocella and Garafola
1991, 18).10 He was perhaps the first to immerse himself in the art form and work hard to find
language both from within and without the practice that would serve the work well in review.
Also impressive is the range of his writing which crosses dance, film and literature and his atten-
tion to popular dance forms, specifically African American artists. Levinson observed dance
classes and learned the language of the form, demonstrating a commitment to the disciplinary
terms of dance that was unprecedented and utilizing description in a way that preempted the
214
work of the late twentieth-century Americans (Acocella and Garafola 1991, 11). Acocella and
Garafola conclude that Levinson was “the first to review dance consistently as choreography
rather than merely performance, to argue from principle rather than merely from taste, and to
draw those principles from within dance itself ” (1991, 18). Levinson was the epitome of the
experienced and authoritative connoisseur, the model of critic many see facing extinction in
the digital era while a democratization of criticism obscures standards, quantity rules over qual-
ity, and opinion appears to triumph over knowledge. Beyond such histrionics lies a much more
complex and interesting present and future for dance criticism, where the expert-critic becomes
one voice among many.
Dance criticism in the digital age

In the early twenty-first century, intense debates circulate regarding the fate of arts review-
ing in the digital age. In May 2015, the Walker Center in New York ran a symposium,
“Superscript: Arts Journalism and Criticism in the Digital Age” (2015), which covered many
of the issues in the American context but was representative of the global situation. The cen-
tral issues confronting the field are
1. The redundancy of descriptive writing (the traditional backbone of art criticism) due to

new levels of circulation for image-based art,
2. Polemical reviews that abandon the prescription of balance in favor of broad appeal, and
3. A general attack on standards due to a seemingly unstoppable wave of amateur writers.
The counterargument points to
1. The positive effects of dialogue replacing authoritative monologue,

2. A diversification of voices that liberates criticism from the white, highly educated
middle-class, and
3. An increase in the amount of quality writing as a ratio of the overall proliferation.
These issues are international, but the case of the Sydney dance scene will demonstrate how
the changes being wrought by the digital revolution play out differently across specific local
cultures.
In the new context, where connoisseurship tussles with the democratic field of blogging,
and visuality dominates over textuality, dance criticism is again well placed to adapt to new
contexts and their terms. The proliferation of platforms for publishing dance reviews has
been a boon for a form traditionally marginalized in the arts pages of the major presses. With
more opportunities to critique and disseminate accounts of choreographic works, these tra-
ditionally elusive works of art are circulating in newly expanded ways. And with the early
engagement between dance and film/video for documentation and intermedial creative pur-
poses, dance was ready for online formats that privilege image as content.
Sydney has had two major newspapers covering dance for as long as I can recall, and with
the same reviewers. Regarding local dance coverage, up until the 2000s Sydney Morning
Herald (local) and The Australian (national) were joined by a bi-monthly national magazine
Dance Australia, “street press” (two or three local free entertainment guides with very uneven
dance coverage), and the aforementioned RealTime. In 2018 there was minimal coverage in
the major newspapers, but the street press has been replaced by quality writing on a number
of online blogs and journals.11 Regarding international coverage of Australian work, in the
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Erin Brannigan
1990s it was negligible. (I seem to recall the editor of Ballett International/Tanz Aktuell being
unimpressed at my suggestion that I could cover Australian dance for them in 1999.) To keep
up with the world, I had expensive international dance magazine subscriptions and would
wait for The Village Voice delivery at my inner-city bookshop once a month to catch up on
the American scene. Even today, an online search reveals two articles on Australian dance in
Ballett International/Tanz Aktuell in three years.
In America, many see the era of print coverage as the glory days of dance criticism.
In “The Death of Dance Criticism” in The Atlantic magazine, Madison Mainwaring recounts
the sacking of endless dance critics from major newspapers and gives an excellent account of
the award-winning writing that substantial print space and well-supported staff can produce.
She concludes:
Today, unless a choreographer presents her work at a major venue like Lincoln
Center, she’ll be lucky if she gets a single professional review. And the review will
be a short one; when critics do write, they do so in less space and with less breadth
than their predecessors. (Mainwaring 2015)
This problem is endemic to arts coverage and there is no going back. The Atlantic itself is
one of the oldest and most reputable magazines in America, and it went online in the early
2000s, turning its fortunes around (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica 2018). Although
“the steady decline of mainstream exposure to dance” is a serious issue and the loss of an old
guard of ground-breaking American reviewers is painful, dance has never been particularly
well served by the print economy in Australia, and one imagines many other countries would
have similar stories. Furthermore, dance is certainly not alone in having to adapt to a new,
primarily online world, although it may have been one of the first arts to feel the effects being
at the tail end of the arts hierarchy. Conferences like “Superscript” are looking forward to
new online ecologies where the rules are almost unrecognizable when compared to those
described by Mainwaring for the print reviewer. Issues regarding text length, hierarchies of
coverage, editorial gatekeeping, connoisseurship and longevity have been replaced by modes
that are in step with new reader habits and desires. “Post-Descriptive” reviewing, instant
reader feedback, image-based review essays, and a focus on communities of participant-
readers are all interesting new strategies that are providing solutions to new problems, and
with which dance is well-placed to engage.
This global shake-up in the distribution of, and access to, critical writing on the arts has
combined with the critique of evaluative writing since the 1960s to produce a new situation
in the Australian dance community. For local artists, there is a newly expanded circulation
of descriptions, videos and images of dance works. Bloggers writing about new work—away
from the pressure of mainstream readerships and closer to the artistic communities they are
representing (harking back to Johnston and Jowitt’s time)—give detailed and well-informed
descriptions of work in open forums where the traditional monologue can become a dia-
logue with like-minded readers.12 This is worlds away from the ballet blog sites described
by Mainwaring where “an abyss of French technical terms and lobby gossip written by and
for fans” is a turn off (2015). It is also very different from a situation where dance reverts
to “another item in the experiential supermarket, a thoughtless art without a memory”
(Mainwaring 2015). Some venues and events have also responded with in-house publications
such as Dancehouse Diary produced by Dancehouse in Melbourne and Critical Dialogues com-
ing out of Critical Path Dance Laboratory in Sydney. They are also commissioning writing
teams instigated by forward-thinking curators and programmers such as Talia Linz, Melissa
216
Ratliff, Angharad Wynne-Jones and Hannah Matthews. For example, the dance-focused
Biennale of Sydney 2016 had “The Bureau of Writing” workshop members respond to the
work in the program and was an initiative of Artspace, one of the Biennale venues. The Next
Wave festival in Melbourne ran a RealTime writing workshop in 2016 by and for young dance
artists. And the Dance Massive festival in 2015 ran a writing workshop, “To Write” (2015),
and published commissioned articles by participants who included many peer dance artists.
What has changed is who gets to express their thoughts about the work and who is respon-
sible for the dance archive, and in both cases there has been a substantial return to the artists
themselves, or those close to them as discussed above.
So an emerging artist such as Sydney-based Angela Goh, whose solo works in small the-
aters and gallery spaces would have perhaps had one review in RealTime, now has four that
she warrants as useful and well informed.13 Due to this increase in online exposure, new
international readerships can access up-to-date criticism of the most current contemporary
dance work on offer in Australia. One corollary of this is a new mobility for Australian dance
artists, particularly those working in the independent sector who are making the most use
of new online fields of communication. These artists are traveling regularly and have more
complex international networks than their more mature counterparts who were dependent
on government agencies to facilitate touring options.
Conclusion
The optimistic outlook here should be tempered with an understanding that the sustainabil-
ity of sites dependent on unpaid writers (and a troubling new economy in free media tickets
as payment), the limitations of focused readerships regarding building audiences for dance,
and the chance of real critical dialogue between writers and community are yet to play out
since the very recent closure of RealTime in 2018, our most significant print/online outlet for
dance criticism. There is no guarantee that the loss of expert, authoritative and widely read
reviews can be replaced by the new economy. As RealTime coeditor Keith Gallasch notes,
“the danger is in being romantic about what is barely emergent and in need of some data”
(Gallasch, personal correspondence with author, September 25, 2018).
However, although Mainwaring bemoans the replacement of high culture with pop cul-
ture, some dance makers, reviewers and audiences are enjoying new configurations that dis-
mantle hierarchies that have excluded the independent and more popular ends of the dance
spectrum from being taken seriously by serious writers. Ideally, the new status quo will
have room for everyone—including the insider reports on niche corners of dance activity
and informed and critical accounts of our major dance organizations for a broad readership.
Looking toward the future we have good reason to be positive: History records that dance
is a sector of arts where nimble, creative, experimental and fleet responses to our changing
world are part of its broader choreography.
Notes
1 Distinctions between disciplines have continued to dissolve since the mid-twentieth century avant-
garde so that any generalizations of this sort are fraught. For instance, the tendency of experimental
dance toward the visual arts calls for a return to compositional analysis, and some non-text-based
forms of performance prioritize elements such as movement quality and presence.
2 For an account of the operations of affect in relation to dance etc. (according to the Spinoza/
Deleuze/Lyotard/Massumi line of thought), see Brannigan (2011, 184–187).
3 Brian Massumi (1995) recounts a scientific experiment where the body responds to stimulation
0.5 seconds before the brain registers activity.
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Erin Brannigan
4 We find for instance, in the writing of critic John Martin, references to the work of Laban (Martin
1965, 230).
5 On the increasing case of “audiences of artists” since the 1950s, see Catherine Craft (2012).
6 Jeroen Peeters edited Meg Stuart’s book, which includes writing primarily by Stuart but also by
critics, collaborating artists and theorists such as Peeters, Myriam van Imschoot, André Lepecki and
Philipp Gehmacher.
7 Influential art critic Michael Fried admits that his singular commitment to the pre-neo-dada and
pop artists saw the end of his career with the rise of these new aesthetics, and the same could be
said of Martin’s career (Fried 1998, 14). This indicates the degree of investment required of such
influential critics in specific trends and the task of championing their associated artists.
8 At its most extreme, it could hardly be categorized as reviewing, as Johnston notes: “At length
I gave up even the pretense of criticism, creating pieces consisting entirely of ‘found’ sentences,
which I ‘collaged’ non sequitur style, and which I had already been using to preface ostensible
reviews” ( Johnston 1998, xiv).
9 Susan Jones goes so far as to suggest that the Symbolists’ writing on dance influenced the develop-
ment of the same ( Jones 2013, 14).
10 The editors make connections from Levinson through Lincoln Kirstein to George Balanchine,
who fulfils Levinson’s vision of a formal, nonrepresentational, and technical mode of classical ballet
(Acocella and Garafola 1991, 23).
11 These include Audrey, Performing ArtsHub, Dance Australia, Witness, Daily Review, Arts Review, Dance
Life, un Projects, Running Dog, Art + Australia, and Runway.
12 Although the scope of readership for The Village Voice in the 1960s and 1970s cannot be compared
to the small community of readers for the online platforms, the spirit of shared knowledges and
experiences is similar.
13 Private correspondence with Goh regarding her 2017 work, “Scum Ballet.” RealTime editor Keith
Gallasch notes that Goh’s 2016 work Desert Body Creep had five reviews in RealTime by the Next
Wave workshop participants.
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PART IV
Dance, society and culture

15
BLACK DANCE
Brooklyn 2017
Introduction: November 8, 2016

That day I felt my world come crashing down. As the US presidential election results
came in, I was living in a conservative part of Southern California where, if I am honest,
I have never felt welcome. As I contemplated a Trump presidency that day, not only did I
not feel welcome in Irvine, suddenly, I did not feel safe in America. I took a walk on the
beach the day after the election and experienced a previously unknown fear and a height-
ened sense of awareness. My body tensed in new ways as I walked past white strangers,
and a fight-or-flight trigger that I did not know I had was activated. I was on guard for
whatever verbal attacks that were coming my way now that a campaign based on sexism,
racism, and homophobia triumphed and gave permission for more public displays of that
kind of language and action again. Of course, no one unleashed the barrage of hateful
words I expected that day. That was yet to come. That day was steeped in uncertainty. My
embodied sense of self was challenged. Was I being paranoid? Yes and no. Along with the
myriad life-shattering policy changes that I saw coming, I also immediately and acutely
felt the pain of the unrestricted license to hate coming out of the rhetoric of Trump’s cam-
paign. All the bullies and mean girls were taking over the school, and I felt that they were
coming after me and all of my friends and family members who do not think, act, or look
like them. That day felt like a declaration of war on us. I stayed in a state of immobilizing
shock and depression for many weeks. What brought me out of this state, what gave me
back my body—my black female body housing a mind and creativity set to performance in
the field of humanities intellectual discourse—what allowed me to open my mouth again,
was black dance.
Black dance in the United States (however defined: black bodies moving, the work of
black artists, black aesthetics, etc.) always has been, and likely always will be, political. In a
nation founded on race-based genocide and slavery excused by contradictory and hypo-
critical philosophical principals, black dance is part and parcel of the social and national
imaginary. As a historian, I usually have the advantage of hindsight in my research and have
spent most of my career looking at the ways in which theater and dance have impacted,
influenced, reflected, and challenged US societies. I endeavor to show how identity politics,
social change, and restorative justice are all important tenors of performance on and off
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stage and how black performance has historically been a major force in larger social move-
ments. For example, I have written about the ways in which the racialized choreography of
early twentieth-century social dance signaled ideological shifts in US sociopolitical mores
(George-Graves 2008, 2018). From subversive dancing on the plantation, through the dra-
matic lecture circuit of the abolitionist movement, through the inspiring music of the civil
rights era, to today’s creative digital media campaigns like #BlackLivesMatter, black perfor-
mance has always been linked to struggle and social justice in the United States. From the
second half of 2016, historians like me have had the uncanny phenomenological experience
of witnessing catalytic historical moments in the making. Political changes are happening at
whiplash pace, civil discourse has eroded, partisan polarization is increasing exponentially,
and the governmental foundations on which the entire US system of governance is built
are being tested to degrees unknown in recent history. Looking beyond US borders (a site
becoming an ideological battleground over raced bodies), the Brexit vote with its fraught
implementation process, the international rise of xenophobic conservatism, and the global
influence of neoliberalism all signal that a tectonic shift began in 2016. By the time of pub-
lication of this chapter, countless political events will undoubtedly have taken place around
the world stemming from this shift. And because art tends to respond to big societal shifts,
there is no reason to believe that the current climate will be different. Of course, black
dance is going to respond to the change. My project was to get a close look at the begin-
nings of this era.
This study is an autoethnographic attempt to capture a moment. As an academic meth-
odology, autoethnographic research overtly centers self-reflection as a mode of inquiry to
make qualitative arguments about broader social, political, or cultural structures (Maréchal
2010; Adams, Jones and Ellis 2015). I begin this chapter by checking in with my body and my
phenomenological experience of the election to foreground the embodied knowledge rooted
in the work of black dance. I then locate myself as a liberal black female feminist perfor-
mance historian to ethically ground the work in performance studies practices. This chapter
is not intended to be a therapeutic, navel-gazing exercise but, rather, to build on scholar-
ship (especially black feminist and womanist theories) that expose the privileged fallacies of
purported disinterested objectivity in the humanities and social sciences as the only path to
meaning (Walker 1983; Collins 1990).
My aim with this chapter is to provide an autoethnographic analysis of the potential
work of dance in society and culture during an important historical moment. I was tempted
to try to take stock of the meanings of these events on all of the arts across the country for
the whole four years of the Trump presidency but soon realized that analyzing the totality
of those changes is beyond the scope of this short chapter. Rather, I endeavor here to pause
and put a finger on the pulse of a kindling moment in this shift—a generative moment, a
moment when change is signaled. Instead of a totalizing gesture, I offer a microhistory of an
eclectic phenomenological experience to productively interrogate the machinations of art
and politics/society/culture to allow me to add to the grander calculations of the meanings
of embodied performance. I engage in a concerted analysis of a moment in dance history
when dancers and choreographers are thinking about their work in the context of new heated
sociopolitical conversations in the United States. There are many communities of artists across
the country that are organizing in new and important ways, of course, but space limitations
prevent an exhaustive national examination. Instead, I submit a hyperlocal analysis of some
of the concerns, questions, and missions of a few select artists in a community that is at once
cosmopolitan and provincial—Brooklyn, New York. The year 2017 brought with it a new
culture of fear and activism not known to this degree for generations. This, of course, has had
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Black dance
global impacts, but I submit that honing in on the local is a crucial way to understand the
new state of affairs. And though there are many subjectivity-based lenses through which one
might examine these questions, blackness is unapologetically, politically, and intentionally at
the center of this chapter.
Although Manhattan is regarded as the cultural mecca of the United States, many art-
ists, particularly artists of color, live in the outer boroughs even as they perform locally,
in Manhattan, and internationally. Brooklyn hosts a number of important venues for the
development of new work, from the well-renown Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) to
Brooklyn Information and Culture (BRIC) and Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX) (two mid-
dle-tiered incubating and presenting venues committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion),
Weeksville Heritage Center (a cultural center founded 180 years ago to preserve the culture
of the nineteenth-century African American community of Weeksville, Brooklyn—one
of America’s many free black communities), RestorationArt (a civil-rights era institution
dedicated to supporting revolutionary art makers), and Five Myles (a smaller exhibition and
performance space dedicated to underrepresented artists and engaging the local community),
among many others.
I have been spending quite a bit of time with black dance artists in Brooklyn over many
decades now, attending their performances, watching them work, engaging in conversations
with them, and working with them creatively. During these encounters, I have observed
many important tenets of this artistry (aesthetics, exchanges, tensions, challenges, etc.) that
will make for rich detailed scholarly study. For the limits of this study, in 2017 I attended
performances, participated in public forums, interviewed artists and presented scholarship,
danced/marched in protests, and led discussions. For this chapter, I draw insights from public
gatherings generally and cite specific interviews with artists and public statements by arts
leaders. More specifically, I
1. Attended the 2017 Women’s March with artists from Pat Hall’s Saturday Afro-Caribbean
dance class at Mark Morris Dance Center in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. This marks the
beginning of my interest in contemporaneous black dance as a site of sociopolitical dis-
course. Notable for the unexpectedly large national turn-out, the first Women’s March,
organized by what would eventually become the “Women’s March Alliance,” became a
watershed moment for this study and the nation.
2. Attended a few discussion forums with artists convening as part of Dancing While
Black’s ongoing embodied research practice at BAX and the Hemispheric Institute of
Performance and Politics in Manhattan. These were sites where artists and scholars met
to talk about the future of their work.
3. Watched Brooklyn-based Maria Bauman’s Dying and Dying and Dying at Gibney Dance
in Manhattan and participated in a post-show discussion. I then interviewed her about
her work and the piece at The Annex coffeeshop in Fort Greene, Brooklyn (2017).
The piece is about ancestors, death, rituals, endings, and ways of navigating our limited
time on earth in a US culture steeped in capitalist expectations.
4. Witnessed rehearsals of André Zachary’s Untamed Spaces at RestorationArt and led a pre-
show discussion at Dancespace Project, St. Mark’s Church, Manhattan. Zachary invited
me to help prime his audience for this complicated piece about impassable spaces, his
personal African diasporic heritage, and the concept of marooning.
5. Watched Cynthia Oliver’s piece Virago-Man Dem at BAM and participated in a post-
show discussion. This work explores the complicated navigations of black masculinities
in US and Caribbean contexts.
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6. Watched the documentary on the making of Bronx Gothic (Rossi 2017) at Film Forum with
some undergraduate students in my domestic travel course and introduced them to Okwui
Okpokwasili at Berg’n café in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, to discuss art and life. The film is a
documentary about Okpokwasili’s artistic process in creating her unflinchingly provocative
live performance of the same title about two twelve-year-old girls coming of age in the 1980s.
7. Watched Bill T. Jones’s Letter to My Nephew at New York Live Arts in Manhattan and
discussed this piece with my son in grandma’s Brooklyn brownstone. In this piece, Jones
explores the life of his nephew Lance T. Briggs and his struggles with health and addic-
tion. Although my son is healthy, the themes of deep love, the wish to protect young
black men, and the precarity of their bodies resonated deeply. Like the rapidly changing
times, Jones modifies the piece based on events of the week.
8. Watched Garth Fagan Dance’s 45th season performance from the grass in Prospect Park at
Celebrate Brooklyn. Although Fagan is most well-known for his choreography of Broadway’s
The Lion King, the longevity and persistence of his dance company that is often overshad-
owed by Alvin Ailey struck home while sitting on a blanket in the summer night air.
9. Witnessed and supported the final rehearsals for Brother(hood) Dance!’s how to survive a
plague at Dancespace Project, St. Mark’s Church. Meditating on those who survive and
those who are remembered, Ricarrdo Valentine and Orlando Hunter create a ritual cum
concert dance piece around healing for some of the bodies least cared for during the
AIDS crisis—black bodies—and honor the lost generation of stories and artistry.
10. Watched hip-hop dance on curated outdoor summer stages, thinking about the sites of
hip-hop dance from informal outside city streets and community centers in the 1970s
to the international, interclass cultural phenomenon of today and the attending compli-
cated conversations around inspiration and appropriation.
11. Gave a keynote address at the Dance Studies Association’s (DSA) annual conference on
the mythic “sweetness” of black bodies rooted in Caribbean folklore and the legacies of
the sugarcane triangular trade. This talk stemmed from the haunting of Rose Hall in
Jamaica by the white witch Annie Palmer, the legacies of the Brooklyn Domino sugar
refinery, and the global sugar industry haunted in turn by the slaves that made possible
our insatiable desire for sweetness.
12. Celebrated the impressive showing by black artists at the 2017 Bessie Awards.
13. Had many inspiring formal and informal conversations with black dance artists about
their work and their visions for the future.
Even though the tenor of black dance and choreography is changing in the current climate
and arts activism in the United States is increasing in the wake of the election, it is notable
that much of the work that I witnessed was already in development before the change in the
political tide. In other words, many of the artists I discuss here were already doing work in
response to the larger histories of inequities on local, national, and global levels anchored in
social justice and awareness and aimed toward progress. This was not a wakeup call, per se,
for artists of color but more of a call to further galvanize efforts to create impact through the
arts. The new political moment threw that work into high relief, but part of what is inter-
esting in this study is not only the ways in which this work is changing but also the ways in
which the work is persisting and expanding in light of recent events. In addition, although
not all the work that I witnessed was overtly political, most of it resonated more politically
because of heightened sensitivity. This moment allows us to ask how the political landscape
challenges us to experience work differently as well as create work differently. Here are some
important take-aways from my year with black dance in Brooklyn.
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Black dance
Embodying resistance
As a viewer, I experienced an amplified level of awareness of the ways in which the work
of these choreographers embodies resistance. Perhaps I just needed black bodies to “resist.” I
was more keenly attuned to where it was happening even in work made before the election.
In these examples, acts of resistance were emphasized. Although space limitations prevent
thick descriptions (I invite readers to search for these important artists online), I want to
emphasize the general significance of this work at the intersections of race, politics, and dance.
The year became a jazz fugue of meaning in motion. For example, the insistent durational
beginning of Okpokwasili’s Bronx Gothic (Rossi 2017), in which she convulses to the point
of debilitating exhaustion, is the only point from which she can begin the piece, and that
debilitating exhaustion echoed the incapacitating weariness in which I began 2017. Further,
it underscored the fact that resistance may be empowering, but is also rooted in the breaking
point. I meditated on black will. I wanted to will a protective shield around the bodies in
Letter to My Nephew and Virago-Man Dem, which were now even more jeopardized. Seeing the
willful performance of a black masculinity in a black hoodie hailed me as activist and mother
simultaneously supporting the choreographic claiming of power on stage and on the sidewalk
while telling my own son to never pull up his hoodie, no matter how cold he is, because “You
know how they will see you, baby.” The commitment to ancestors and the history lessons of
the black diaspora in Untamed Spaces and Dying and Dying and Dying helped remind me that
we have been in situations like this and worse before and have “gotten over.” Black bodies
endure, even if war-torn. Brother(hood) Dance!’s brazen resolve to live in How to Survive a
Plague through love reminded me to find strength in others. Without dismissing the physical
and psychic suffering, the abjection and social death of blackness, these examples evinced the
complicated self-making of maroons, the insistence on the right to a natural black death, the
odds-defying tenacity of blackness, and the manifesting of black joy that managed to ignite my
own survival instincts. Even as I joined in the celebrations of notable successes for black artists
at the annual Bessie, the award ceremony for outstanding and groundbreaking creative work
by independent dance artists in New York, #BessiesBeBlack, I was keenly aware of the fact
that we are continually haunted by the pathological disciplining of black bodies into certain
desirable performances that will always limit our achievements. The insidious and invisible
capitalist roots of black oppression found almost anywhere in America surface every time I
drive past the Domino refinery to take my daughter to rehearsals for Elizabeth Streb’s Kid’s
Company and think about this business, which at one point during slavery processed more
than half of the sugar in the United States. Seeing hip-hop performances outside (where it
began) reminded me of disco, tap, swing, and all of the other black aesthetics that are created in
poorer communities of color celebrated and appropriated (often not to the economic benefit
of the originators) but persist as markers of exultant resistance. Meditating on Garth Fagan’s
work in the panoply of concert dance over 45 years reminded me of the breadth of the genre
of black dance (however defined). These experiences should have been overwhelming, but
somehow the depth, breadth, and diversity confirmed the potential of the variety of work
being done by these artists. And knowing all of this allowed my experiences of black dance
in 2017 (as anger, despair, joy, hope, passion, ritual, mundane, etc.), from the spectacular to the
barely perceptible, to model embodied resistance.
There were, of course, moments of unapologetic political protest through choreographic
practice and fleshed insurgency. Spectacular, visible, live bodies on the line rehearsing and
manifesting social change are familiar but not simple means of using dance to dialogue with
society. Critical race and critical gender theories appropriately question the limits of affective
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change at these sites and my own suspicions about self-congratulatory showiness that risks
effacing sustained quieter work were profoundly checked in a wholly visceral way during
the 2017 New York Women’s March. A week before the march, I had attended Pat Hall’s
Afro-Caribbean dance class (I attend on and off as my schedule allows) and had learned
the short Ibo dance phrase that they had planned to perform during the New York march.
When my plans to go to the Washington, DC, march the same day fell through, I combed
through social media and found the location of their meet-up and instructions to wear red
and black. I knew that even though I was not a regular in the class, I would be welcome
at their event. I knew that even if I could not remember all of the steps and it took me a
while to catch up, I would not be embarrassed. I knew that even though my plans with my
close friends fell through, I would be treated like a friend. I knew all of these things mainly
because of the kind of community that Pat Hall has created for her Saturday afternoon dance
class. Although the class is a complex and intense Africanist aesthetic, Hall invites all levels
of experience and all body types. There is no shaming as we all work from wherever we are
to more accurately and expertly execute the movement. Hall builds in explanations of the
warmup exercises, cypher invitations, and across-the-floor-patterns. She finds time to hug
each and every student in the sweaty, jam-packed studio. She honors community members
who have passed on. She shows respect for the percussionists. She champions the work of
others in the name of peace, art, and activism. There is no air of competition. There is no
judgment of skill level. There is emphasis on listening to one’s own body. These all became
important reminders for me.
After the election, the class became a site of activity and activism as the flame was
turned up on people’s commitment to protecting the most vulnerable, resisting regression
on social progress, and pushing forward despite the huge “wall” that was being built in
front of our ideologies. At 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, January 21, I met the group at the corner
of Lexington and 45th Street in Manhattan and someone handed me a maraca. We tried to
get to our designated start place at 47th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues to make our
scheduled start time, but we simply could not move against the unexpectedly huge tide
of protesters. Eventually, Hall gave up and stopped attempting to officially check in with
the organizers. She turned us around in our spots and we began marching and dancing.
Because I take no credit in the organizing of this event, I have no qualms about describing
the feeling as a participant. The physical turn and shift from our upstream trajectory into
the empowered choreography caught up in the sweeping flow downtown amid men and
women of all stripes and sizes in an Africanist aesthetic to loud percussion churned the air
and carried me, propelled me. The chanters next to us were surprised and delighted. Some
yelled affirmations, and some joined in our dancing. We provided a service to others who
were able to take a break from the shouting to protect their voices and renew their spirits
for the hours of chanting and marching ahead. The other protesters turned to us, made
space for us, cheered for us. We physicalized the pent-up anger, frustration, and fear many
of us had been feeling. Rather than writing about how historical figures have described
the impact of the arts on politics, I felt, corporeally, in an embodied way, the foundations
of struggle and resistance through dance. Each time I pounded my fist in the air, each
time I pivoted (protecting all sides of my body), each time I leaned in, stomped forward,
and shook my head from side to side with my hands framing my face, I felt a degree more
empowered. The fear I had that “they were coming to get me” weakened as I knew that
these people on the streets of New York that day have my back—and I have theirs. This is
the moment when I (admittedly late) officially came out of my funk and began to roll up
my sleeves.
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Black dance
Even though we only got a few blocks (symbolic of the long road ahead), around 2 p.m.
Pat and a few others broke off to head back to Brooklyn (she was still teaching class at
3 o’clock). I kept marching. I kept feeding my spirit by being in the presence of others,
taking from and giving to the waves of hope and resilience. This other kind of choreogra-
phy (marching, chanting, checking-in with, and galvanizing strangers) also underscores the
continued catalytic effect of liveness, embodiment, and movement. I have no doubt that our
bodies, present, dancing, drumming, and marching, fed the movement in our relatively small
footprint in the events that day. Along with my experiences watching and talking about black
dance in 2017, my actual performance of black dance during the Women’s March literally
and figuratively gave me the energy I needed to go on.
Not co-signing
Although dancing my dissent was an important, visceral, embodied way of understanding the
work of dance activism, a lot of (perhaps most of) the socially empowering work of black dance
in Brooklyn as I experienced in 2017 was also done through oral conversations. This was the
intellectual discourse poised to feed the choreography to come. In formal and informal settings,
I was a part of rigorous and nuanced dialogues about art in the United States today and the roles
and responsibilities of artists of color in the new political climate. These artists were philosophiz-
ing, strategizing, holding space, ranting, crying, laying on hands, debating, proselytizing, praying,
“checking-in,” intellectualizing, spell-casting, conjuring, persisting, writing, etc.The foundation of
most of these conversations was the commitment to live, embodied presence. Although not always
possible, it was considered ideal that people made the commitment to “show up” despite the pull
of busy lives and the lure of consigning activism to Facebook or other digital disembodied formats.
Even though there was little “dancing” in these spaces (although there was often movement work),
live bodies navigating the sociopolitical landscape in solidarity was foundational.
A recurring theme from these settings that I argue is an important intervention is a
commitment to what I am terming “not co-signing.” By this I mean a particular kind of
resistance that imagines a contract about how and what these artists are supposed to create
signed and presented by society but not co-signed by the artists. Although these sentiments
were not new to 2017, they seemed reaffirmed in these discussions. Over and over again,
I witnessed these artists impenitently not co-signing
• Expected ways of moving

• Limits on representation
• Simple stories of their lives
• Prescribed roles for rituals or healing practices
• Other people’s fears
• Time-based pressures for artistic production
• Lifestyle expectations
• The neoliberal competitive dance space (admittedly difficult with the limited resources
in dance)
• The championing of the individual over the collective
• The idea that the free is valueless
• Rigid ways of disseminating knowledge
• A canonization of subjects that erases black stories
• The extraordinary labor of attending to white fragility
• The whole host of ideas about the way the world works.
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One day I asked three young black dancers in their early 20s about how often they auditioned
for professional dance companies.1 They looked at me like I was crazy and said “never.” One
qualified the statement and said, “well, rarely.” They claimed that because they did not have
certain kinds of black dancing bodies they were less likely to make it into a well-established
black company, and because they did not want to be a token in another company, that route
was not viable either. They also talked about how “full out” they could dance when audi-
tioning for some companies because of feedback they have gotten that choreographers saw
their bodies “out of control.” Their responses were to realize and embrace the fact that they
needed to carve a different artistic life than they thought they might have. They needed
to dictate the terms and parameters of control over their bodies and not co-sign others’
definitions of what they could manage. One might argue this kind of feedback is rooted
in aesthetic shifts in contemporary dance, but I trust that these artists were attuned to and
recognized the race-based assumptions underlying feedback to their dancing. The response
of these three dancers was to not co-sign an expected model of success. They decided that
in an effort to reject notions of what a dancer’s body is or should be, they would not try to
conform to expectations and opt to make their own work according to their own standards
and not be afraid to dance “full out.”
I had another conversation with a dancer who was coming to an awareness that he was
not going to get grants. He recognized that if he compromised his personal aesthetic and
danced a different way, he might. He is in a period of soul-searching as he looks at the black
dancers and choreographers who seem to get knighted by prestigious universities and pre-
senting venues and showered with lucrative residencies and grants. He is concertedly decid-
ing whether or not to “buy in” to those demands and the implications his choices would have
on his work and life choices.
I want to highlight that these acts of not co-signing or not buying-in are different from
other kinds of resistance or fighting or other forms of response to larger societal structures.
In unstable times, our initial response might be to roll up our sleeves and prepare to fight for
justice. It is important to distinguish between the triage needed at catastrophic events and
the longer-term strategies for bringing about social change. Spectacular moments of fighting
oppression often get more press, but other responses like refusals are also critical. Staying
the course, staying true to themselves, recognizing that hegemonic social scripts are rarely
written for their success, these artists sometimes march, shout, beat drums, and punch fists
in the air and sometimes defiantly release expectations, ignore assumptions, diffuse tension,
redefine success, deny haters, and simply forget to be oppressed for the moment. To illustrate
the point, one might note the kinesthetic differences in one’s body when told to fight versus
refuse.
This is not an argument that any one of these ontologies is more or less politically activist
or important. Instead, I want to call attention to the nuances in different artistic responses
to political moments. There are many different energies one might tap at the site of art and
activism, and all may be deployed strategically. There are still many examples of “straight-
up” fighting and resistance in contemporary dance like the Women’s March. There are also
examples of solidarity in intraracial diversity, intersectional efforts, educational program-
ming in diverse settings, and a respect for a multiplicity of approaches. These are old and
new ways to move with black bodies and aesthetics that are loved and hated, admired and
shamed, desired and disavowed in the complicated ways and colored contradictions that
only the United States could manage to foster. This multiplicity is also an important part of
the conversations on dance, race, and politics. Quieter acts of not co-signing might not get
as much attention as political rallies but are also important political moves with enduring
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Black dance
influence. These smaller refusals are also matters of life and death and may ultimately lead
to the grander refusals. For example, the dancers in Dying and Dying and Dying look to their
personal ancestors to recognize that they (and others by extension) should not co-sign the
kinds of unnatural black death that are “expected” of us.
The here and now

• What does it mean to be a black dance artist today?
• What power does this growing network of artists have in the current political climate?
• What practices might we contribute to or borrow from broader social justice movements?
• How are we visioning deepening our work together?
These were some of the questions asked by Paloma McGregor, the founder of “Dancing
While Black,” at the five-year reflection event. The forum was open, and in attendance were
past participants as well as people generally connected to this black dance community. After
opening up the conversation, she then left space for us to imagine the next wave of ques-
tions that would guide the work of black dance artists today and in the future. These kinds
of conversations are inextricably linked to black dance aesthetics, which is always already
self-reflexive. Simultaneously embracing and disavowing insufficient labels, attending to the
nuances of representation, these artists displayed adeptness at doing the work while ques-
tioning the work of black dance. Consciously thinking about work in the present moment
kept these artists out of myopic bubbles in our conversations. Rather, the ethos was about
checking-in with each other on what inspires them now, what their responsibilities are now,
how they can support each other now, and what matters now. This sentiment was echoed in
all of the dialogues I attended.
I found an interesting, and perhaps counterintuitive, outcome of this commitment to pre-
sentist and future-thinking agendas. Often these conversations led to a reluctance to a rushed
response or to a knee-jerked and potentially ill-considered direct change in choreographic
style. In none of my 2017 Brooklyn black dance conversations did any artist seem eager to
immediately and radically change his or her aesthetics to look more political. Perhaps it was
too soon, but the conversations also suggested that making an obvious anti-Trump concert
dance piece would not do the kinds of social and political work they were committed to
doing. This impetus stands in contrast to other moments in US history when choreography
dramatically shifted from subtly or abstract studies to movement with clear political messages
underlying choreography. Time will tell if this is sustained in the current climate but, I posit
that this initial hesitancy to make this a hasty and overt call to create agitprop political work
in direct response to the inevitable, imminent onslaught of policy and social changes is due to
a number of factors. Agitprop can be timely and bold but risks attending to long-term goals
of equity. Although many of these artists are overtly political, they seem to be mindful of tak-
ing the time to take stock of the current situation before responding. Early in the year, some
artists recognized that they were numb, still in shock, and needed time to process, get bear-
ings, get grounded, and try to more deeply understand the implications of the political shifts.
They had more questions than answers, and, defying the stereotype of apolitical or apathetic,
self-centered, young artists, they showed commitment to deep, rigorous research and analysis
before creating and presenting work in response. They also recognized the heightened stakes
at play, particularly in the effort to communicate and articulate one’s opinion. Language
seemed more weighted. There were more pauses in the attempt to assure clarity. Words once
taken for granted might warrant more scrutiny and critique. At the same time, there was a
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desire to increase awareness of the weight of their words and art within the shifting contexts
and histories. There was a mindful navigation around the direct and indirect effects of this
moment in history, and attention was paid to the ways their bodies shifted and adjusted in
reaction to the current moment. Although the look of daily routines might seem unaffected,
there was a sense of a new disease that seems inevitably poised to impact artistry.
The term “relevance” perhaps took on new meaning in the here and now. Artists felt called
to reexamine their creative practices and rethink the ways in which their work/mission/
choreography is relevant now. They seemed de facto relevant in new ways based on shifts in
spectatorship by audience members, but these artists also wondered how their work is/will be
relevant given the enormity of the impending changes. Importantly, these examinations never
seemed to come from a place of wanting to stay attractive to funders or presenting organiza-
tions. This urge did not stem from a materialist move to capitalize on what concert dance
taste-makers might want. Rather, the impetus seemed to be from a recognition of both the
crucial role that dance has played in previously politically charged moments and the potential
of that aesthetic power now. These great and minor reckonings with humanity seemed deeply
felt and deeply interrogated. Gathering in conversations with other dance artists went beyond
creating community and moved to generative sites for the production of language, response,
and mobilization. The magnitude of the relevant in the now circulated in all of these con-
versations. A choreographic shift was emerging, although artists were patient with how and
when that shift occurred.
Concurrently, artists reevaluated “risk” in their work. What was going to be considered
choreographically risky now? And how would audiences respond? The burdens of livelihood
for black dance artists in the United States are palpable, and, although I sensed commitment
to personal aesthetics, artists wondered how the fundamental value of art and artists was
about to change. Surely the financial and affective support of the arts from the Obamas was
coming to an end, and the government-based financial future for the artists I spoke to did
not bode well. The most these artists seemed to hope from the Trumps was that they would
be ignored and not targeted for eradication. The shift was forcing artists to “value” differ-
ently. New senses of the stakes of their work meant reckoning with new ways of being vis-
ible. Asserting or insisting upon their artistry in new ways felt imminent, and with that came
questions of how to hold on to and sustain self-determined aesthetics. In addition, although
not yet a vocal part of my conversations, the position of being dismissed as insignificant can
also be a place of political power, as has been evidenced throughout black performance his-
tory. I suspect we will see new, socially impactful choreographic modes emanating from the
seemingly benign.
In the post-show discussion of Dying and Dying and Dying, Bauman talked about how the
passing of her grandfathers close to each other weighed heavily on her and highlighted the
ways in which we are simultaneously infinite and finite resources. In this piece Bauman asked
us to find currency and value in each other. In the United States, the new sense of unstable
time and a heightened sense of urgency further complicate our already busy lives packed with
deadlines and appointments. The conversation then turned to the importance of listening to
ancestors and how listening is an undervalued skill in coping with modern life. We discussed
the ways in which capitalism, with its relationship to rigor, tenacity, and ferocity, forces us
to feel like we are constantly moving. The anxiety of the current moment makes some of us
feel like we are constantly falling or trying to keep up. The velocity of daily life disallows
productive listening. But pausing, taking stock, listening, checking-in, reevaluating com-
mitments, researching, analyzing, and affirming core values promises that the future of black
dance in the United States will be socially impactful and enduring.
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Black dance
Conclusion: Sustaining black dance work

All of these experiences led me to check-in again with my own embodiment and commit-
ments at the end of the year. Practicing this autoethnographic analysis of black dance in
Brooklyn for the year ultimately led to insight into aesthetics that, although rooted in the
past, attend to the present and are committed to willing the future. It also led to insights into
the value of research methodologies at the nexus of historiography and autoethnography;
methodologies also rooted in the past, attending to the present and committed to the future.
The radical changes in the sociopolitical landscape begun in 2017 demanded a corresponding
shift in my usual scholarly approach. As an historian living through a historically significant
moment, I needed other tools from my toolbox of critical inquiry. I believe that by fore-
grounding experience, this approach models some of the kinds of persuasive argumentation
needed to counter the false logics of Trump-era “fake news.” In other words, for those of
us newly living in a Kaf kaesque world where the logics of language are being rewritten,
we must look to the body for truth, to strengthen our resolve and to make manifest a better
future.
For these artists, the responsibility of paying attention to the political moment was also an
ethic of care for the future of black children who will not viscerally know any other kinds of
lives. The commitment to the future—faith that there will be a future and that their artistic
vision of the future is vital for bringing about the future—is meant not only for these artists
but also for the next generation. Similarly, my academic process mines the archival history,
the repertoire, phenomenology, somatics, rhetoric, and aesthetics to identify the particulars
of this paradigm shift because it is rooted in my commitment to the future. Acting in con-
cert and solidarity as communities of color and allies has always been important to this and
other efforts at the meeting of art, politics, scholarship, and activism. Although complicated,
nuanced, spoken, and danced, the black dance work I witnessed on and off stage was clearly
moving toward more profound arts activism on the horizon. The sustaining of current and
the creation of new collective artistic communities is and will be important for the future
of black dance, particularly in a larger culture that privileges success in terms of the rugged
individualism and survival of the fittest. The affirmation of mutual support echoed over
the year, as artists anticipated the increased need to come together with collective research,
learning, understanding, and values-building to feed back to into the diverse aesthetics com-
ing out as new dance projects.
Artists felt the need to sustain ways of working that resisted or refused to co-sign a neolib-
eral ethic of accomplishment that might temper choreographic risk-taking. These sustained
ways of working would also need to make room for the expected newly energized arts activ-
ists by balancing potential shifts in visibility for artists previously committed to art and social
justice. Generously expanding communities of support would require effort.
Importantly, these artists articulated the call to sustain and maintain self-determined,
complex, artistic identities. This call included a concerted reliance on building on the work
of the past most famously articulated by the civil rights–era song “Keep Your Eyes on the
Prize,” which inspires those in struggle to not only persist but also to not get distracted by
setbacks. For many, the Trump election and ensuing events were major setbacks but, as art-
ists, they are keeping their eyes on the long-term prize. Remembering past struggles serves
to inspire the next generation to “hold on,” knowing that their current struggle is part of
a longer history of struggle, and even though their responses will look different, support
structures have been scaffolded for them. Although most people I spoke with or listened to
were not historians, the weight of history was very present in the here and now, not only
233
as a strategy to look to black artists from the past for inspiration for the future (though that
certainly happened), but also in the new/renewed urgency around defining themselves and
their communities with the knowledge of how those like them have been defined in the
past. Being in an unstable historical moment casts new light on our understanding of history
and historiography. The current instability felt perhaps like shifting tectonic plates that these
dance artists were attempting to re-center and rebalance in order to dance. I predict a wide
range of choreographic responses (from subtle to overt) in the Trump years by black dance
artists tailored to the times and in tune with contemporary audiences.
Connected to this conversation was an assertion that they as artists are uniquely qualified
to articulate their history, vision, processes, and values. A continuing refrain in black arts in
the United States has been the call for a full representation of the complexities of our lives
in performance. This is based in the knowledge of the importance of accurate and authentic
representations for African Americans to see themselves reflected and non-blacks to imagine
a spectrum of racial possibilities. This impulse is rooted in the historical lack of robust, rich,
and varied representation of blackness in the arts and entertainment and the profound impact
that has on the realpolitik of black life. Control over the means of production has always
influenced creative product. Rooted in a long history of misunderstanding of work by crit-
ics not versed in black aesthetics and a lack of scholarly attention and archival preservation,
these contemporary artists are looking to ensure that their work is adequately and properly
discussed, analyzed, and remembered. In this continuing dialogue, the interrogation of who
is telling their stories and how they are being told echoed throughout the year. The uncanny
and disappointing experience of not seeing the reflection of one’s self in art continues to
inspire black artists to create work to rectify these gaps. These representations are not always
realistic, of course, and many abstract and aesthetically complicated works have been cre-
ated out of this ethos driving us toward understanding of the complexities of blackness.
The future will, no doubt, continue to yield complicated black dance in the context of the
current sociopolitical climate. In Brooklyn, the year 2017 seemed to stir black dance artists
who were sowing the seeds for new aesthetics rooted in the traditions and dialectics unpacked
here. The commitment of these artists and artistic communities is what undergirds and drives
the future of dance. These artists have their eyes on the prize of the enduring impact of dance
on society and culture. In 2017, they took stock of core values by gathering together, asking
questions, taking action, increasing accountabilities, and continuing to create. No doubt, the
following years will reveal the fruits of the labor from this seminal moment.
At the end of the post-show discussion for Dying and Dying and Dying, Bauman talked
about her interest in how we are connected. Looking back on the year, this sentiment
returns me to my initial impetus with this work—finding stability in others during unsta-
ble times, through dance. For her, it involves planning a righteous death, coming together,
and practicing a good death. The dancers in the piece have a grand reckoning with the
specter of black death, and the results are a supreme not co-signing of our prescribed black
deaths. This moment in history will not be the death of us. Death stomps her foot and the
earth shakes.
Note
1 I do not use their names here to protect their ability to be hired in the future.
234
Black dance
References
2017 Bessie Awards. Accessed March 15, 2019. http://bessies.org/2017-awards/.
Adams, T. E., Stacy Holman Jones, and Carolyn Ellis, eds. 2015. Autoethnography: Understanding Qualitative
Research. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bauman, Maria. 2017. Interviewed by the author at Annex coffee shop, Brooklyn, NY. December 5.
Bauman, Maria. Dying and Dying and Dying. Accessed March 15, 2019. https://vimeo.com/208573023.
Brother(hood) Dance!. How to Survive a Plague. Accessed September 26, 2018. https://www.bhooddance.
com/new-page-3.
Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment.
New York: Routledge.
Dancing While Black. Accessed October 8, 2017. http://angelaspulse.org/project/dancing-while-black/.
Dance Studies Association. 2017 Conference Keynote Plenary: Transmissions and Traces (Nadine George-
Graves Speech from 54.20). Accessed August 5, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgNSq0S
VeS4#action=share.
George-Graves, Nadine. 2008. “‘Just Like Being at the Zoo’: Primitivity and Ragtime Dance.” In Ballroom,
Boogie, Shimmy, Sham, Shake:A Social and Popular Dance Reader, edited by Julie Malig, 82–105. Champaign:
University of Illinois Press.
———. 2018. “Taking the Cake: Black Vaudeville, Competition, and Value.” In The Oxford Handbook of
Dance and Competition, edited by Sherril Dodds, 17–40. New York: Oxford University Press.
Maréchal, Garance. 2010. “Autoethnography.” In Encyclopedia of Case Study Research, edited by Albert J.
Mills, Gabrielle Durepos, and Elden Wiebe, 43–45.Vol. 2. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Oliver, Cynthia. Virago-Man Dem. Accessed March 15, 2019. https://www.cynthiaoliver.com/
virago-man-dem.
Rossi, Andrew, dir. 2017. Bronx Gothic. (film) Produced by Peter Born. Grasshopper Film.
Walker, Alice. 1983. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens:Womanist Prose. New York: Harcourt.
Women’s March Alliance. The official organizer of the Women’s March on NYC since 2017. Accessed
December 5, 2017. https://womensmarchalliance.org/#ourimpact.
Zachary, André. Untamed Space. Accessed March 15, 2019. http://www.renegadepg.com/untamed-space.
html.
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16
ELROY JOSEPHS AND THE
HIDDEN HISTORY OF BLACK
BRITISH DANCE
Ramsay Burt
Introduction
This chapter gives a brief overview of the career of the black British dance artist and teacher
Elroy Josephs between his arrival in Britain in 1950 and his death in 1997 and reflects on
the reasons for his relative obscurity. Researching Josephs’s career raises issues not just about
the inclusion in dance historical accounts of once forgotten or marginalized artists but also the
need to rethink the basis of selection that led to their being forgotten or marginalized in
the first place.
In 1993, in his opening address at an event in Manchester that discussed the question
“What is black dance in Britain?”, Elroy Josephs commented:
Of course those of us with a little more knowledge and experience of black dance
in this country know of the wonderful tradition which has gone before but has
not been built on—as we all pretend for one reason or another it never existed.
For my part we should be celebrating 50 years of black dance in Britain and not ask-
ing “What is black dance in Britain?”—as someone said, “If you don’t know by
now you never will.” (Schumann, Kuyateh, and Harpe 1993, 4)
The Arts Council of Great Britain had initiated a forum in Nottingham called “What is
Black Dance in Britain?” to engage with the dance sector about the kind of support they
should be providing for black British dancers. The Manchester event was initiated by art-
ists in response to the Arts Council’s forum to discuss its implications. At the time, Elroy
Josephs was a lecturer in jazz dance at Liverpool John Moores University, probably the first
black British dance lecturer in a British university. He had begun his career as a professional
dancer in 1950 as a member of Les Ballets Nègres. This was a British company founded by
the Jamaican-born choreographer Berto Pasuka in 1946 with West Indian, African, and
mixed-race and white British dancers. For seven years they toured Britain and continental
Europe and were said to be the first black dance company in Europe (Barnes 2017). Josephs
himself, in 1950, had recently arrived in Britain from Jamaica. There is a certain bleakly
ironic truthfulness in his suggestion that a wonderful tradition of fifty years of black people
dancing professionally in Britain had not been built on and remained largely unknown to
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Elroy Josephs
those who had not been part of it. In the twenty-first century, Josephs himself is in danger of
being forgotten, and the wonderful tradition of fifty years of dancing, to which he referred,
is still largely a hidden history.
It is necessary to ask how figures like Josephs have been left almost entirely outside
accounts of British dance history. Although dance studies needs to become more diverse,
it is not enough just to write forgotten figures into existing narratives. It is also neces-
sary to rethink the historiographical and methodological frames that led to their exclusion.
This chapter aims to make a start at doing both of these things.
Researching black British dance

British dance writers and researchers have approached the history of contemporary dance
in Britain in a different way from their colleagues in the United States. A clear narrative of
American modern dance has developed, which starts with Loïe Fuller, Isadora Duncan, and
Ruth St. Denis, and then passes by way of Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey to Merce
Cunningham and Paul Taylor, and then the Judson Dance Theater and so-called postmodern
dance. Variations on this genealogy can be found in books like Selma Jeanne Cohen’s collec-
tion Dance as a Theatre Art (1974), Marcia Siegel’s Shapes of Change (1979), Joseph Mazo’s Prime
Movers (1977), and Deborah Jowitt’s Time and the Dancing Image (1988). British writers have
not attempted to identify a comparable, overarching narrative of this kind. Instead, they have
generally focused on particular areas. Thus, Joan White’s Twentieth-Century Dance in Britain:
A History of Five Dance Companies (1985), as the title suggests, focuses on a few large companies.
Stephanie Jordan’s Striding Out: Aspects of Contemporary and New Dance in Britain (1992) focuses
largely on the work of Richard Alston, Siobhan Davies, and Ian Spink but also covers other
British dancers working in experimental ways. The Jamaican-born dancer Namron, who per-
formed in one of Davies’s pieces, is mentioned briefly, but no other black artists are discussed.
In her book Out of Line: The Story of British New Dance (1992), Judith Mackrell names a few black
companies in a list of companies who performed during the Dance Umbrella Festivals in the late
1970s and 1980s, as does Bonnie Rowell in Dance Umbrella: The First Twenty-One Years (2000).
In these books, black British dance artists and companies are mentioned in passing or in foot-
notes, as if they are marginal to the histories these writers are examining. The best contempo-
rary record of black British dance companies are the dance critic Bill Harpe’s reviews during the
1970s and 1980s in The Guardian newspaper. Two accounts of black British dance history were
published in the 2000s (Evans 2002; Ramdhanie 2007), and at the time of writing there have
been three edited collections about black British dance (Adewole, Matchett, and Prescod 2007;
Adair and Burt 2017; Akinleye 2018). Christy Adair (1992) and Emily Claid (2006) both include
discussions of black British dance artists alongside their white contemporaries, and Adair has also
written a monograph on the Phoenix Dance Company (2007). A history of contemporary dance
in Britain in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is lacking if it does not take into account
the important contributions that have been made by British-based dancers who are black.
In researching Josephs’s life and career, the sources I have drawn on are mainly from the
collection of his personal papers that Sue Lancaster and Steve Mulrooney, who studied with
Josephs in Liverpool in the 1980s, saved after his death in 1997. From his newspaper cuttings,
flyers, lecture notes, grant application letters, and, in particular, his personal curriculum vitae
(CV), it is possible to put together the story of Josephs’s career. Another source is Josephs’s
obituary in The Guardian, written by Bill Harpe (1997). For the broader context of his early
career, I have looked at material about Les Ballets Nègres, including programs and inter-
views. And I have also drawn on postcolonial theory to interpret my findings.
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Ramsay Burt
One immediate problem is the question of when he was born. The earliest item in his CV is
for training he received in 1961 (Josephs 1979). Harpe gives Josephs’s year of birth as 1939 (1997).
This would have made him a young teenager when he danced with Les Ballets Nègres. As Harpe
mentioned to me in an email on May 8, 2013, “when [Josephs] was taking up employment as a
lecturer at IM Marsh College in Liverpool (now John Moores University) he cut some ten years
(I don’t know the exact figure) from his age in order to fit in with expectations/retirement age,
etc.” This means that the years given in the CV for his early training in the UK need to be treated
with suspicion. If he had been born in 1929 rather than 1939, he would have been twenty-one
years old when he arrived in London in 1950. He was part of the Windrush generation. Postwar
immigration from the Caribbean to Britain is generally believed to have started with the arrival
of the ship MV Empire Windrush on June 22, 1948 (see Phillips 1998). Josephs gives most of the
dates for his dance training as the early 1960s. Thus, he says that between 1960 and 1964 he stud-
ied at The Actors Studio (presumably in New York) while taking ballet classes at the Astafieva
Academy in London in 1961–1966, and also Caribbean dancing with Ben Johnson in 1964–1966.
It also lists him studying classical Indian dance as well as Spanish and Flamenco dance. He must,
however, have begun studying classical ballet with Verishka at the Astafieva Academy when he
first arrived in London in 1950. His papers include a program for a performance by Verishka’s
students on June 5, 1954, in which, given that he kept it, one assumes he might have taken part.
The other dance and drama classes he mentions would probably have been taken later when he
would have been earning enough to pay for professional training.
Josephs’s life and career

Dance teacher Sue Lancaster told me that Josephs had told her that his parents knew Berto
Pasuka and Richie Riley, Pasuka’s close friend who was one of the main dancers in Les
Ballets Nègres (Lancaster 2013). Pasuka, Riley, and his parents had all performed together in
1931 at Edelweiss Park in Kingston, Jamaica. This was an enterprise set up by Marcus Garvey,
the Jamaican-born black nationalist political leader, publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and
orator, who founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Garvey pre-
sented popular variety shows and pageants at Edelweiss Park in order to promote his view
that people of the black diaspora should be proud of their race and need to return to Africa,
their ancestral homeland (see Barnes 2017). Both Pasuka and Riley subsequently trained with
Verishka in London. In order to emigrate from Jamaica to Britain, Josephs told Lancaster,
he needed £100, a job, and an address. At his funeral, Lancaster (2013) remembers, Riley
recalled that Josephs arrived on his doorstep and asked for a job.
The roles that Josephs performed in Pasuka’s choreography can be found in the cast lists
of Les Ballets Nègres program in 1952 for its last London season at the Twentieth Century
Theatre in Westbourne Grove (Ballets Nègres 1952). As El-Roy Josephz, he performed some
general ensemble roles together with some smaller named ones. He was thus one of the
mourners in Nine Nights (1950), one of the dancers in They Came (1946), and one of the Black
Keys in Aggrey (1946). He danced character roles in other ballets. He was the Thief in Market
Day (1946), the Cripple who is healed in De Prophet (1946), the Victim in Blood (1948), and
the Proprietor of a Harlem Nightclub in Cabaret 1920 (1950).
There is a distinctly anti-colonial tone to some of the ballet synopses in this program.
This is clearest in They Came. In the first part of this ballet, British missionaries arrive in a
jungle village. Backed by soldiers, they impose Western medicine on the villagers. “The tribal
chief resents outside interference on the part of the church, medical science and big indus-
try” (Ballets Nègres 1952). The second part is set during World War II, which, in 1946, had
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Elroy Josephs
just ended. Black and white people are depicted as equal and seeking common sanctuary.
An African soldier is killed while directing them to safety. The fact that modern black sol-
diers are fighting alongside white ones implies that these colonies are capable of governing
themselves. Riley told an interviewer in 1996 that he knew people involved in anti-colonial
struggles (1996). When he arrived in London in 1946 as a dance student, the Colonial Office
sent him to a student hostel where students from the colonies were staying. In the evenings,
he recalled, “Pandit Nehru, Nekrumah—quite a few other African exiles used to meet there
[at the student hostel] at night and talk politics. But politics referred to the colonies, rather
than in England” (1996). After India’s independence, Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) was the
first prime minister of India, and Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) was the first prime minister
of Ghana, having led the country to independence from Britain in 1957.
The ballet Aggrey also derives its theme from black British political consciousness of the
time. James Emman Kwegyir Aggrey (1875–1927) was a Ghanaian-born academic who stud-
ied at Columbia University in New York where he specialized in education. In a lecture
in South Africa, he used the keys of the piano as an image of racial harmony saying that
to produce harmony you had to play both black and white keys. The Keys was the name
of a journal produced between 1933 and 1939 by the London-based League of Coloured
Peoples. In Pasuka’s ballet, the black keys were danced by male dancers, and the white keys
by women. The League of Coloured Peoples included people from the Indian and African
continents and the Caribbean, the term “coloured” embracing a wide range of identities.
The French word “nègre” in Les Ballets Nègres refers to skin color, while also recalling the
French name of Diaghilev’s famous company Les Ballets Russes. Postcolonial theorist Stuart
Hall writes that in Jamaica in the 1930s and 1940s, “although everyone perfectly well under-
stood what ‘black’ meant, the very word was taboo, unsayable, especially for the middle
classes” (2017, 14). This is something that Riley also commented on in 1996:
Black, at the time, was unfashionable—black people were, would not allow them-
selves to be called blacks: coloured we didn’t like, because coloured had links that
weren’t really—although it was considered respectable by black people to be called
coloured, we didn’t think it was right. Therefore we looked around for a name:
negro was out of the question. We therefore decided that, if we made it French,
or foreign, it would cover the question of black. Therefore we called it Les Ballets
Nègres because it was, in every shape and form, ballet in a black idiom. (Riley 1996)
Coming to work in Britain, Josephs was moving from a Caribbean society where social
hierarchy was grounded in graduated shades of blackness to a country where these shades
of difference were no longer socially distinguishable, but there was a sharp and often brutal
distinction between black and white. This then was the broader social and political climate
that Josephs entered when he joined Les Ballets Nègres.
When Pasuka disbanded his company in 1953, Josephs became part of one of the groups of
what Bob Ramdhanie calls “giggers” and “dance acts,” terms he invented “as short hand labels
to categorize solo and informal dancers” (2005, 149) from the Caribbean making a living in
Britain from the 1940s to the 1970s. In Josephs’s papers, there is a program for The Jazz Train
at Blackpool Opera House in October 1955. This was a musical revue written and directed
by the African American artist Mervyn Nelson. Josephs may have just joined the show, as he
is not listed in the original London cast in April of that year. The significance of this is that
Josephs would later specialize in teaching jazz dance. A newspaper cutting from the weekly
magazine TV Guide in 1959 is about Josephs becoming a regular member of the cast of the
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Ramsay Burt
Rediffusion TV music show Cool for Cats (Dalzeli 1959). This was one of the early British
shows in which The Dougie Squires Dancers, who included both black and white dancers,
performed choreographed routines to current pop hits. In this article, Josephs comments that
“aspiring dancers, actors and singers who are born here and complain because they don’t get a
break have no idea how much harder it is to ‘get in’ when you have a black face” (1). This is sug-
gestive of how Josephs was thinking about the position of black dance artists in Britain in 1959.
Publicity materials from this period for Elroy Josephz Productions (he seems to have
spelt Josephz with a “z” for his professional dancing) show a small company who performed
in cabarets in Madrid in the 1960s. He describes himself in his CV as a dancer, choreogra-
pher, actor, and producer, adding, “My career has always been a mixture of performing and
teaching and I ran my own Dance Studio from 1960–1967 and my own professional Dance
Company which toured Europe 1967–1970” ( Josephs 1979). In Britain, Josephs continued to
appear in live theater, film, and television drama. He was, for example, in an early TV series
of Doctor Who, playing the role of Jamaica in several episodes of The Smugglers, which was
broadcast in September and October 1964. In 1968 he was in the film version of Quatermass
and the Pit. In 1979 he appeared in John Schlesinger’s film Yanks and the ITV dramatization
of Brideshead Revisited. On stage, he appeared in several productions in provincial theaters.
These include West Side Story at the Belgrade Theatre Coventry in 1970 (Illustration 16.1)
Illustration 16.1 Elroy Josephs in West Side Story at Belgrade Theatre, Coventry (1970). (Courtesy of
Susan Lancaster.)
240
Elroy Josephs
and Robinson Crusoe at the Bristol Hippodrome, Liverpool Empire, and Richmond Theatre
1970–1972. Josephs may have been supporting his dancing through taking acting jobs.
The ability to perform dramatic parts was nevertheless already hinted at in the character
roles he had performed in Pasuka’s ballets.
In 1973–1975, Josephs was “Chairman of the Dance Committee and dance specialist
for the British zone of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in
Lagos.” As Hélène Neveu Kringelbach (2013) explains, the politics around these African
festivals is significant. The 1966 World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, under the spon-
sorship of then President Léopold Senghor and informed by his notion of négritude, was
widely criticized for not including artists from the Maghreb—the countries of North Africa.
The francophone concept of négritude, initially proposed by Aimé Césaire as an anti-colonial
aesthetic strategy, stressed the pride in being-in-the-world as Africans and people of African
descent. A rivalry developed between francophone ideas about négritude and English and
American ideas about Pan-Africanism. Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, whose The Road won
the best play award in the Dakar festival, famously criticized the notion of négritude, saying,
“The tiger does not proclaim its tigerness, it jumps on its prey” (Soyinka, quoted by Jahn
1968, 265). To include the Maghreb, the 1969 Pan-African Cultural Festival was held in
Algiers. Senghor was disappointed that the 1975 festival, with which Josephs was involved,
did not return to Dakar but, instead, was held in Lagos in oil-rich Nigeria. He and some of
his Caribbean and African American friends like Aimé Césaire and Langston Hughes boy-
cotted it (Neveu Kringelbach 2013, 43–53). This is the context in which Josephs developed
the British contribution to the festival in Lagos. His involvement is also significant for his
later comments on the “wonderful tradition” of black dancing in Great Britain.
In London in the 1970s, Josephs became involved in what would become the community
dance movement. In his CV he wrote, “I have extensive experience of working creatively
in a multiracial community, initiating dance classes, workshops and performances” (1979).
He founded Dance Theatre Workshop No. 7, which, he wrote, “is community based and
involves young people of many nationalities and their parents” (1979). They gave perfor-
mances at the Young Vic, the Cockpit Theatre, the “LUYC” Summer Festival in Camden,
and the Islington Dance Festival. Other community projects, he wrote, included “setting up
summer workshops involving up to 1100 children aged 5–13 years doing dance/drama culmi-
nating in performances” (1979). He stated that he was also an advisor to the Commission for
Racial Equality and the Minority Arts Advisory Service. When Josephs took up his teaching
position in Liverpool in 1979, Carl Campbell took over this project developing it into Dance
Company 7. Josephs’s CV also lists a Dance Fellowship in 1978–1979 funded by the Greater
London Arts Association (GLAA). In a conversation on May 21, 2016, choreographer Fergus
Early, a key dance artist who helped develop independent dance in London in the 1970s and
1980s, remembers that, following the lead given by the Gulbenkian Foundation in funding
Veronica Lewis as a dance animateur in Cheshire, GLAA decided to appoint some dance
animateurs in London, and Josephs was one of the first of these. Animateurs worked in a
community context to promote and stimulate all forms of dance by organizing classes, work-
shops, and performances. They aimed to bridge the gap between dance as art and the public
at large and develop links with schools. Lancaster says Josephs took a teacher training course
at University College London, though this is not mentioned in his CV. One other interesting
detail among Josephs’s papers is information about his master of arts in ethnic studies and race
relations, awarded in 1989 by Liverpool University (Lancaster 2013). For this, he wrote about
police and community relations in Toxteth, Liverpool, following the violent confrontations
between the local police and the black community that flared up in 1981.
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Ramsay Burt
Josephs from a postcolonial point of view

Although Josephs lived a full and interesting life and made a significant contribution to
British dance, little of what he did fits into the kinds of events generally recorded in accounts
of dance in Britain in the late twentieth century. This is largely a history of choreographers,
dance productions, and companies. It is an approach to history in which there is a big gap
between Les Ballets Nègres 1946–1953 and the founding by black dance artists of British
companies like Steel ’n’ Skin, MAAS Movers, Ékome, and Kokuma in the 1970s (for a
timeline of the development of black dance in Britain, see Adair and Burt [2017, 184–188]).
Josephs was a member of Les Ballets Nègres but only at the end of that company’s life.
The Jazz Train would be counted as popular entertainment rather than as a serious artistic
production. To understand the significance of the “wonderful tradition” that Josephs referred
to in 1993, it is necessary to adopt methodologies from postcolonial theory and read his
career through the lens of a critique of the methodologies that exclude him from the canon.
A postcolonial approach is also, of course, relevant because Josephs, like many of those who
Ramdhanie called “giggers” and “dance acts,” had been born in British colonies.
Jamaica only became independent in 1962, so that, during his formative years in Jamaica
and then London, Josephs was a colonial subject. Riley recalled that Les Ballets Nègres was
not allowed to participate in the program of the 1951 Festival of Britain “on the grounds that
this was a festival of British culture and not colonial culture” (1996). Hall has written about
“the colonial relationship and the distortions of living in a world culturally dependent and
dominated from some center outside the place where the majority of people lived” (1995, 4).
Dancers like Josephs and Pasuka were among the artists and writers from the Caribbean who,
in the 1940s and 1950s, as Hall puts it,
felt at that moment that they had to migrate [to London] to fulfill their artistic ambi-
tions. They came, of course, to claim their place as artists in a movement from which,
as colonials, they had been marginalized but to which in every other sense they felt
they naturally belonged and that, in a way, belonged to them. (Hall 2005, 5)
This is the context in which Josephs took ballet classes. Rex Nettleford (1933–2010), Jamaican
scholar, founder of the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica, and vice-chancellor
emeritus of the University of the West Indies, notes that “as soon as European classical bal-
let was accepted by the wielders of social power in the mother country, Caribbean cultural
leaders immediately followed in their footsteps” (1993, 91). When Riley migrated to London
in 1946, he came as a student who had already been accepted for a course at the Astafieva
Academy. This suggests that he may already have had some ballet classes in Jamaica. Josephs
may also have attended ballet classes before arriving in Britain. In his CV, Josephs wrote that
he “studied advanced Ballet of the Russian Imperial School and the Cecchetti method with
Mlle. Verishka of Princess Astafieva’s Academy under the patronage of Serge Diaghilev.”
Verishka, born Vera Jackson, taught at Astafieva’s Academy, taking over as its director after
Astafieva’s death in 1934. Verishka was also the ballet mistress for the Markova-Dolin com-
pany from 1935 and briefly taught Margot Fonteyn (“Obituary: Vera Jackson” 1971, 83).
Josephs, having studied, as a schoolboy in Jamaica, the same curriculum that was being
taught in schools in Britain, would have felt entitled, as Hall suggests, to learn the same tech-
niques as those practiced by members of the British Royal Ballet. The problem was that, as
Nettleford puts it, “Until the independence arrangements of the 1960s … [ Jamaica] played
the wily suntanned savage of a Caliban to the magisterial tutelary authority of Great Britain’s
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Prospero” (1993, 92). And even after independence, artists from the former colonies found
that they were ignored and marginalized by cultural institutions that they had been led to
believe were enlightened and should therefore recognize and support artistic value wherever
it appeared.
Notes from Josephs’s course in jazz dance show how he developed his pedagogical
approach from his knowledge of ballet. Harpe observed in Josephs’s obituary that
Jazz dancing is perceived as commercial, high-powered entertainment. But it must

also be—as Elroy would remind his students—spiritual, eloquent and expressive.
“There is,” Elroy would say, “the top of the tree, and that’s Hollywood. But there
are also the roots of the tree, and they go back to Africa—and I’m teaching you the
roots of jazz dancing.” (Harpe 1997, 18)
The documentation that Lancaster and Mulrooney have kept is evidence of the rigor with
which Josephs developed this course and his debt to the grounding in ballet that he had
received through his classes with Verishka. At the time of writing, Lancaster continues to
teach Josephs’s approach to jazz dance, and his legacy also lives on within all those who
Josephs taught during his lifetime.
While he was teaching this jazz course, Josephs was also analyzing the appalling dis-
connect between police and members of black communities in Toxteth. This points to
the disillusionment experienced by him and his generation of artists from the Caribbean.
This disillusionment underlies Josephs’s comments at the 1993 forum about the wonder-
ful tradition that had not been built on but which “we all pretend for one reason or
another … never existed” (Schumann, Kuyateh, and Harpe 1993, 4). The event at which
Josephs was speaking was one in which artists responded to the closure of The Black Dance
Development Trust, despite the fact that, as ’Funmi Adewole points out, the Arts Council
had received excellent reports about its work (2017). With funds from the Arts Council
and some city councils, the trust had provided summer schools in which international
teachers of neo-traditional African and Caribbean dance and drumming taught classes to
the young black British dancers in the African Caribbean dance companies founded in the
late 1970s and early 1980s. They therefore represented the artistic aspirations of a younger
generation of black dancers from that of Josephs and Les Ballets Nègres. Hall notes: “Those
separated by migration from their original homes but profoundly alienated by racism from
any sense of belonging to, or recognition by, British society, were haunted by questions of
identity and belonging” (2005, 12). Whereas Josephs taught jazz dance, The Black Dance
Development Trust responded to the needs of a generation of dreadlocked dancers of
Caribbean heritage who felt the need to reconnect with African roots through practic-
ing and performing African and Caribbean dance and drumming. Part of the problem for
the Arts Council, though not necessarily for the dancers or dance companies themselves,
was that The Black Dance Development Trust only supported dancers working with neo-
traditional African and Caribbean dance forms, not those working with other dance styles
such as jazz, tap, hip-hop, and Western contemporary dance, or indeed in hybrid or cre-
olized fusions of dance styles. Although these varying approaches made perfect sense to the
dancers and their audiences, the Arts Council dance officers, and the majority of British
ballet critics who advised them, seemed incapable of understanding or appreciating them,
hence the question “What is black dance in Britain?” As noted at the beginning of this
chapter, Josephs spoke at an event arranged by dancers and practitioners in response to one
organized by the Arts Council.
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Ramsay Burt
The particular approach to Jazz dance that Josephs himself taught could perhaps be
described as a fusion, and it is significant in this context that, as I noted earlier, he listed in his
CV his professional training in ballet and classical Indian dance as well as Spanish, Flamenco,
African, and Caribbean dance. All of these identities are found in the genealogy of people
in Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. This is because the original pre-Columbian Caribe
people had their lands taken away by British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese settlers who
then brought over slaves from Africa and, after the abolition of slavery, indentured plantation
workers from India. The same year as the public forums were discussing the question “What
is black dance in Britain?” Hall gave a lecture titled “Negotiating Caribbean Identities.”
In this he said:
What I want to suggest is that despite the dilemmas and vicissitudes of identity
through which Caribbean people have passed and continue to pass, we have a tiny
but important message for the world about how to negotiate identity. (Hall 1995, 4)
Their message was that identity is not the rediscovery of roots, “but what they as cultural
resources allow a people to produce. Identity is not in the past to be found, but in the future
to be constructed” (Hall 1995, 14). When he goes on to speak of “the enormously rich and
complex cultural histories to which history has made [Caribbean people] heirs” (14), Hall is
surely in accord with Josephs’s claim that the wonderful tradition of black British dancing
should be recognized for what it is and duly celebrated. In the second decade of the twenty-
first century, many black British dancers are still waiting for this, while the rise of a xenopho-
bic populist nationalism in Britain and other European countries means that questions about
how to negotiate identities in inclusive ways are more pertinent than ever.
Rethinking dance studies

Research into the careers of artists like Josephs does more than just fill in the gap between
the closure of Les Ballets Nègres and the founding of companies like Steel ’n’ Skin, MAAS
Movers, Ékome, and Kokuma. In order to appreciate the contributions that black British art-
ists have made to British dance culture, it is necessary to rethink the frames of reference on
which dance studies depends. This requires recognition of the conditions of possibility for
professional careers in the dance sector and the relations of power that define these. Josephs
might have trained in the Cecchetti method, but there was little hope of employment at that
time for dancers of color in a British ballet company. It is therefore necessary to investigate
what these dancers’ aspirations were and how they negotiated the conjuncture of contradic-
tory forces that determined what they could achieve. This goes some way toward explaining
the difference between the relatively assimilationist aspirations of dancers of Josephs’s genera-
tion who were influenced by James Aggrey’s ideas—like Richie Riley and other members
of Les Ballets Nègres—and the wider diversity of approaches and hybrid mixtures of dance
styles that were explored by younger generations. Following Hall, all these generations of
dancers have a message that is still important today about how to negotiate identities.
Josephs was clearly concerned about the problems that black people experienced in Britain,
and this impacted his work as a dance artist and teacher. I have noted, throughout this
account of his life, his awareness of black political discourses. His parents had been exposed
to Marcus Garvey’s ideas. Les Ballets Nègres’s ballets were informed by anti-colonial ideas
circulating among black artists and intellectuals in London at the time, as well as by the ideas
of the League of Coloured Peoples. Interviewed for TV Guide in 1959, he hints at racial
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Elroy Josephs
prejudices against black performers. In the 1970s, he had firsthand experience of the debates
around Pan-Africanism through his participation in organizing the Arts Festival in Lagos
(Dalzeli, 1959). In the 1980s, he wrote about the violent confrontation between poor black
communities and the police in Toxteth. In his course on jazz dance, he taught about its roots
in Africa, just as his parents had danced in productions that aimed to make Jamaicans proud
of their African heritage. In the 1990s, he spoke out against the marginalization of the legacy
of his generation of black dance artists. Though he was not an activist, Josephs’s life work as
a dancer and teacher was informed by his black political consciousness.
To ensure that the wonderful tradition of black British dance to which Josephs referred
does take its place within histories of theater dance in Britain, it is necessary, as I noted ear-
lier, to rethink critical and historiographical methodologies. For the purposes of the present
research, these concern the times, the places, and the hierarchy of styles. It is widely accepted
that dance works belong to their times, coming out of and responding to particular tensions
and contradictions within social and political contexts. The particular black British histories
to which Josephs’s career belong are not well known and need elaborating to an extent that
would not normally be necessary if the research topic was a white dance artist. This is why
there have been so many references to postcolonial theory in this chapter.
Dance scholars often seem to assume that important events only happen in leading metro-
politan centers and that dance artists who lived and worked elsewhere must have been minor or
else they would have wanted and needed to take part in the artistic scene in a cultural capital.
Josephs came from the colonial periphery to the capital of the mother country and then moved
on to what opinion formers in the capital consider the provincial margins. Dance scholars
sometimes need to expand the range of works and artists that they choose to investigate by
blurring the boundaries between center and periphery, between ‘high’ and ‘low’ (i.e., ‘serious’
art and popular entertainment), and by recognizing the transformative agencies of artists from
Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean who have contributed to metropolitan Western dance culture.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the dominant forms of popular commercial dance since the early years of the
twentieth century have drawn heavily on black cultural forms that have their roots in Africa.
In some instances, black choreographers deliberately choose to explore these popular dance
forms in their work because these are more relevant to the communities from which they
come than forms like ballet and contemporary dance. Josephs may have studied ballet with a
leading ballet teacher but, as I’ve noted, the possibility of working in a British ballet company
at that time was not open to him. One should not, however, assume that he only special-
ized in jazz dance because that was an area that was open to him, particularly in the light
of his recognition of its roots in African aesthetic forms. It is these kinds of methodological
approaches that need to be adopted if we are not to forget figures like Elroy Josephs and, in
the end, by doing so, gain a richer and more diverse understanding of our collective histories.
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Adewole, Funmi. 2017. “The Construction of the Black Dance/African Peoples Dance Sector in Britain:
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17
A LOVE SONG AS A FORM OF
PROTEST
Danielle Goldman
Introduction
In the fall of 2016, Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) introduced Endless
Shout, a six-month, multi-artist performance project exploring collectivity and improvisa-
tion. Along with four other artists and thinkers—Raúl de Nieves, George Lewis, The Otolith
Group, and taisha paggett—I was invited to help organize the series of performances within
the ICA’s exhibition spaces. Upon our initial site visit at the ICA, a few months prior to the
opening of Endless Shout, the curator Anthony Elms walked us through the museum and
explained how works from the corresponding exhibition, The Freedom Principle: Experiments
in Art and Music, 1965 to Now, would be installed. We quickly agreed that a gallery on the
second floor would serve as the main space for Endless Shout. It had a high ceiling and it felt
removed from the rest of the museum. Perhaps most notably for the purposes of this essay,
one wall would be dedicated to I Can’t Concentrate with You in the Room (2016–2017), a set of
nine photorealist paintings by Matthew Metzger, all album-sized and organized according to
chance procedures, installed with a sound piece produced by collapsing every audible breath
from Anthony Braxton’s “Composition 8F (To Composer John Cage).” On the adjacent wall,
Elms would install Pope.L’s Another Kind of Love: John Cage’s Silence, By Hand (2016–2017),
which considers the legacy of John Cage and its relation to contemporary black performance.
What kind of dance would speak in compelling ways to these two works?
Ultimately, I invited the choreographers Ishmael Houston-Jones, Cynthia Oliver, and
Jumatatu Poe to present works for Endless Shout, as all three artists, in their own artful
and rigorous ways, have employed improvisation to negotiate the shifting and interrelated
strictures of gender, race, sexuality, and genre. This chapter focuses on one of these dance
works, Untitled Duet, an improvisation performed by Ishmael Houston-Jones and Fred
Holland in 1983 as part of Contact at 10th and Second, a festival celebrating the first eleven
years of contact improvisation. Considering Untitled Duet in relation to Pope.L’s Another
Kind of Love, I analyze the racial implications of privileging Cagean notions of chance
and indeterminacy over improvisation, as is often the case in histories of both “experi-
mental” music and postmodern dance. But I also remain attuned to complex questions of
influence, lineage, and desire, which are inextricable from the difficult love that courses
through these works.
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Cage Unrequited (2013)

Pope.L is perhaps best known for his “crawls,” an exhausting series of street performances
that the artist initiated in New York City during the 1970s. The first performance was Times
Square Crawl (1978), where Pope.L maneuvered through the city’s congested center of tour-
ism and commerce on hands and knees. Reflecting on the work, he noted, “In New York,
in most cities, if you can remain vertical and moving you deal with the world; this is urban
power. But people who are forced to give up their verticality are prey to all kinds of dangers”
(Wilson 1996). Several years later, Pope.L performed Tompkins Square Crawl (1991), in which,
dressed in a black suit and white shirt, he labored in the sweltering summer heat to drag his
body through Manhattan’s East Village while clutching a potted yellow flower in one hand.
The crawl performances varied in duration, but perhaps the most punishing was The Great
White Way, 22 Miles, 9 Years, 1 Street (2001–2009), where the artist, this time replacing the
business suit with a Superman costume and a skateboard strapped to his back, attempted
to drag himself along the full stretch of Broadway for as long as he could endure the task.
The knee and elbow pain were excruciating, so Pope.L performed the crawl in installments,
roughly six blocks at a time. The work took nine years to complete.
More recently, over the course of twenty-five hours spanning November 16–17, 2013, Pope.L
performed a different kind of marathon. Joined by over eighty collaborators, including artists,
curators, students, scholars, and friends, Pope.L presented an extended reading of John Cage’s
Silence: Lectures and Writings (1961a), a collection of twenty-three articles, essays, and lectures that
Cage produced from 1937 to 1961. It would be difficult to exaggerate the impact of this book. As
the music critic Kyle Gann writes in his foreword to the Fiftieth Anniversary Edition:
Silence has a reputation as the most influential book written by an American com-
poser—do we need the word “American”?—and it is difficult to argue otherwise.
Other books, and we might mention Henry Cowell’s New Musical Resources, Charles
Ives’s Essays before a Sonata, and Harry Partch’s Genesis of a Music, have encouraged
several generations of composers and musicians to think differently. But Silence was
different. It encouraged everyone to think differently. (2011, x–xi)
Pope.L’s performance, entitled Cage Unrequited, was part of the Performa 13 biennial and
the affiliated exhibition, Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art in New York
City. At least in part, the stated aim was to explore relationships between Cage’s ideas about
chance and indeterminacy, and the work of contemporary black artists (Performa 13 2013).
Each participant had twenty minutes to perform the text. In a nod to Cage’s famous 4′33″,
which includes no sounds from the performer, some of the participants chose to say nothing.
Meanwhile, Pope.L sat at a nearby desk, transcribing Silence by hand on sheets from a pad of
yellow legal paper, casting aside each sheet upon completion.
A little before midnight, Pope.L offered an interlude performance that complicated any
notion of tribute or reverence toward Cage. Making his way from the writing desk where
he had been assiduously transcribing Silence to a second desk where the readings occurred,
Pope.L placed a yellow knit cap upon his head and unfolded several sheets of white paper
from his pocket. At this point, Pope.L had an additional text that beckoned to be read, writ-
ten not by Cage but about another musician, Julius Eastman (1940–1990), whom Pope.L
described as “a taut, wiry, gay, African American man” (Gann 2005). Although Pope.L says
nothing in the performance to indicate the source of this text, a bit of research reveals that
the words were written by Gann, who, in addition to writing the foreword to the Fiftieth
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A love song as a form of protest
Anniversary Edition of Silence, wrote an obituary for Eastman after his death in May 1990.
More recently, in 2005, Gann wrote the liner notes for Unjust Malaise, a three-CD recording
of Eastman’s most notorious compositions. Pope.L read from Gann’s liner notes:
[Eastman] had such an appearance of athleticism and pent-up energy that he could
look dangerous. He had a gentle sense of humor, and his deep sepulchral voice,
incommensurate with his slight figure, conveyed a solemn authority of a prophet.
He was a fiery pianist, and a singer of phenomenal range and power (Gann 2005).
After sketching Eastman’s musical education and career, which included studies at
Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute and the Creative Associates program at the State University
of New York at Buffalo, Pope.L, via Gann, described a notorious 1975 performance by the
S.E.M. Ensemble, directed by Petr Kotik, of Cage’s Song Books, in which Eastman enacted
a section of the score that merely instructed the performer to “give a lecture” (Gann 2005).
Eastman spoke about sex and delivered an anatomy lesson with two assistants. Although the
woman refused to be disrobed, Eastman admiringly undressed the man, who was generally
understood to be Eastman’s lover (Dohoney 2014, 48). The next day, in a lecture to a group
of student-composers and colleagues, Cage angrily expressed dismay over the “misuse” of
his composition, exclaiming, “The freedom in my music does not mean the freedom to be
irresponsible!” (quoted by Gann 2005).
Pope.L then turned to another sheet of paper, reading what seemed to be his own
commentary:
The sensationalist aspect of this episode has overshadowed what Cage was really
worried about: (1). that his celebrated generosity and openness was a bit fragile;
(2). Eastman’s outrageous behavior pointed out a hidden preference of Cage’s and a
problematic concerning the interpretation of his scores. For example, David Tudor,
the tireless interpreter of his work for many years, made many important alterations
to his scores, and that was okay with Cage. But Cage could not explain why other
interpretations, such as Eastman’s, were not so satisfactory. (Pope.L 2013)
As Pope.L shuffled papers in silence, the audience was left to ponder the extent to which
Eastman’s “transgression” had to do with his artistic choices, or his racial and sexual position-
ing, or perhaps, as is more likely, their complicated entanglement. As Eastman said to Renate
Strauss in a 1976 interview, “What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest.
Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest” (Woolfe 2016).
Without ceremony, Pope.L returned to reading from Gann’s liner notes. He mentioned that,
despite the fact that Eastman composed several important works during the 1970s and early
1980s, he never had a commercial recording during his lifetime. Struggling with addiction, he
was kicked out of his East Village apartment and lived for a while in Tompkins Square Park.
In 1990, at the age of forty-nine, Eastman died alone of heart failure in Buffalo, New York.
After a significant pause, and without comment, Pope.L returned to the “official” task
of the evening, which was to recite selections from Cage’s Silence. But given Pope.L’s per-
formance of Gann’s text, it was impossible to return to Cage’s lectures without thinking of
Eastman. Reading from Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing,” Pope.L intoned, “You see, I could
say anything. It makes very little difference what I say, or even how I say it” (Cage [1961]
2011b, 112). But Pope.L had just drawn attention to the limits in these proclamations. As
evidenced by Eastman’s 1975 performance in Buffalo, it made a difference who said what,
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Danielle Goldman
and how it was said. The “freedom” in Cage’s Song Books score (1970) was neither unlimited
nor available to all. A little later, Pope.L read from Cage’s rumination on structure: “Pure life
expresses itself within and through structure. Each moment is absolute, alive and significant.
Blackbirds rise from a field making a sound delicious beyond compare” (Cage [1961] 2011b,
113). Once again, it was hard not to think of Eastman’s “taut black body” and his “sepulchral
voice.” As Pope.L’s performance suggested, rather than being a purely aesthetic matter, or a
gesture toward unfettered freedom, Cage’s pronouncement that any sound could be consid-
ered music was in fact a claim with complex politics that played out in a social world.
Another kind of love

After the extended live performance Cage Unrequited, the yellow legal sheets of paper onto
which Pope.L painstakingly transcribed Silence became the artwork Another Kind of Love:
John Cage’s Silence, By Hand (2013). In looking at those sheets of paper, installed in museum
spaces such as the Philadelphia ICA within a wooden lattice dyed in the Pan-African col-
ors of yellow, green, and red, one sees traces of Pope.L’s hand at work, darkening some
words or lines by writing them multiple times with a finely tipped black pen. On some
papers, Pope.L’s writing appears in block letters, while elsewhere his script takes on a kind
of whimsy. On the title page, Pope.L has written John Cage’s name three times, a legible
script crossed out, followed by an increasingly fluid and then indecipherable signature. Just
as the live performance Cage Unrequited complicated any straightforward tribute to Cage and
his legacy, Another Kind of Love is by no means a flat copy of Cage’s Silence. Pope.L’s body
literally and figuratively puts pressure on the text. Moreover, while Pope.L retains aspects
of Cage’s typography and spacing, he eliminates some pages, and the wooden framing of
the work breaks off at irregular angles, suspending the text and inviting questions about its
relation to both the past and the future.
In 2015, curators Naomi Beckwith and Dieter Roelstraete included both Cage Unrequited
and Another Kind of Love in The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music 1965 to Now
(2015), an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago that coincided with
the fiftieth anniversary of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a
collective of mostly African American musicians founded in 1965 in the city’s South Side.
When installed within the context of The Freedom Principle, Pope.L’s work clearly signals the
long-standing tensions between jazz and other forms of “experimental” music. Moreover,
the challenge that Eastman posed to Cage can no longer be considered Eastman’s alone. As
Solveig Nelson writes, “While Cage explicitly disavowed jazz improvisation, instead cham-
pioning an ‘indeterminacy’ facilitated by external systems that disrupted subjective expres-
sion, nearly every statement that Pope.L copied could be applied to free jazz, including Cage’s
ethos of experimentation: ‘an act the outcome of which is unknown’” (2015, 298).
In “Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” the com-
poser, trombonist, and scholar of improvisation and experimental music George Lewis
(2002) provides fuller context for Nelson’s observation, noting that although bebop
musicians explored spontaneity and structural radicalism nearly a decade before white
musicians such as Cage, scholars were slow to include African American innovations in
histories of postwar experimental music. Referring to books such as Michael Nyman’s
Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Music in the Twentieth Century) (1999), which draws
almost exclusively from European or European-American heritage to construct a his-
tory of experimental music, Lewis argues, “Coded qualifiers to the word ‘music’—such
as ‘experimental,’ ‘new,’ ‘art,’ ‘concert,’ ‘serious,’ ‘avant-garde,’ and ‘contemporary’—are
250
used in these texts to delineate a racialized location of this tradition within the space of
whiteness; either erasure or (brief ) inclusion of Afrological music can then be framed as
responsible chronicling and ‘objective’ taxonomy” (Lewis 2002, 226). Moreover, impro-
visation is rarely mentioned in histories of postwar experimental music that situate Cage
as a pivotal figure. To underscore the racial dimensions of this elision, Lewis notes com-
poser Anthony Braxton’s cutting remarks about the art world’s dismissal of Afrological
forms, particularly improvisation: “Both aleatory and indeterminism are words which
have been coined … to bypass the word improvisation and as such the influence of non-
white sensibility” (2002, 223).
Lewis also unpacks the politics that undergird Cage’s famous pronouncement that any
sound could be considered music. According to Lewis, Cage was very much aware of the fact
that his musical ideas had social implications. Drawing from a set of published conversations
between Cage and the critic Richard Kostelanetz (1987), Lewis highlights a moment where
Cage expresses his desire for “a music in which not only are sounds just sounds but in which
people are just people, not subject, that is, to laws established by any one of them, even if he
is ‘the composer’ or ‘the conductor’” (2002, 222). Cage continues, “Freedom of movement
is basic to both this art and this society” (222). But, as Lewis insists, this smooth “freedom
of movement” does not adequately describe the real conditions in which we find ourselves,
where bodies are policed and constrained and understood in various ways, frequently in
accordance with notions of race, but also gender, age, sexuality, and ability. According to
Lewis, “Cage’s notion of social instrumentality … does not connect this very American
notion of freedom—perhaps reminiscent of the frontier myth—to any kind of struggle that
might be required in order to obtain it” (222).
Parallels
Although Pope.L’s work speaks directly to histories of music, it also speaks to histories of
dance, where scholars frequently discuss the Judson Dance Theater as the privileged site of
postmodern experimentalism, celebrating Cagean principles of chance and indeterminacy
but giving little notice to jazz and black social dance traditions and their deep explorations
of improvisation. Brenda Dixon Gottschild underscores this point in Digging the Africanist
Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (1996). As Gottschild argues,
“The problem is that the chroniclers of postmodern performance have credited sources from
the European historical avant-garde. They have also credited Asian sources in Zen and other
Buddhist philosophies, yoga and other Hindu practices, and in the martial arts. They have
not given credence to the Africanist aesthetic as a pervasive subtext in postmodern performance”
(51). Gottschild, along with scholars such as Robert Farris Thompson (1983), Marshall and Jean
Stearns (1968), Thomas DeFrantz (2002, 2014), Katrina Hazzard-Gordon (1990), Jacqui Malone
(1996), and Kariamu Welsh (1998), has identified a constellation of aesthetic principles that char-
acterize many dances of the African diaspora, including “percussive attack; an exploration of con-
current, highly complex rhythmic meters; an engagement of call-and-response between dancers
and audiences; sophisticated structures of derision that are simultaneously personal and political;
and above all, an overarching cool, palpably spiritual dimension to the performance” (Gottschild
2012, 62). To this constellation of aesthetic principles, one could certainly add improvisation,
which has been an important mode of performance and creation in numerous African diasporic
dance forms.
The dominant story of the Judson Dance Theater, which was most fully articulated by Sally
Banes in Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater 1962–1993, places Cage as a central figure.
251
Danielle Goldman
The narrative unfolds as follows: In 1960, Cage invited the musician Robert Ellis Dunn to
teach a composition class at Merce Cunningham’s studio in the Living Theater’s building in
New York on 14th Street and 6th Avenue. Dunn was neither a dancer nor a choreographer
but, rather, a musician who had played as an accompanist at the Cunningham studio and
other modern dance studios in New York, and he had taken Cage’s class in “Composition
of Experimental Music” at the New School for Social Research. Dunn drew heavily from
Cage’s ideas about composition when teaching: in particular, the use of chance methods and
indeterminacy, and the notion that any sound could be considered as music. In dance, this
meant that any movement could be choreographic material, and, indeed, a number of chore-
ographers such as Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton embraced pedestrian movements such as
walking and running in their dances during the early 1960s. The composition class met regu-
larly from 1960 to 1962, and what began as a small class with five students (Paulus Berenson,
Marni Mahaffay, Simone Forti, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer) grew to include a number
of other artists, not just dancers but painters, sculptors, and musicians, with varying degrees
of participation: Trisha Brown, Deborah Hay, Fred Herko, John Herbert McDowell, David
Gordon, Robert Morris, Ray Johnson, and Robert Rauschenberg. By the summer of 1962,
the eclectic group of dancers and visual artists presented their first concert of dance at the
Judson Memorial Church in New York City, and performances continued over the next two
years, from 1962 to 1964.
During the early 1960s, Judson artists experimented with choreographic methods and
questioned the very nature of dance. It was a time of experimentation that affected art across
multiple genres throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, despite
legitimate claims about Judson’s many democratizing effects, the scene was overwhelm-
ingly white. Very few artists of color presented work as part of the Judson Dance Theater,
and the same was true of its audience and critics. In African-American Concert Dance (2001),
John Perpener discusses the reasons why so many black choreographers in the United States
adhered to modern dance aesthetics and modes of production during the 1960s and 1970s
instead of embracing projects of the Judson Dance Theater, or contact improvisation, an
outgrowth of Judson that developed in the early 1970s:
Among the reasons is the likelihood that black artists were not enthralled with the
idea of rejecting the traditions they had struggled so hard to become a part of just a
few years earlier. They—unlike the coterie of white artists who were committed to
aesthetic change—found little transgressive pleasure in dismantling the established
practices of modern dance. (205)
But what of African American choreographers who, years later, did not feel an affinity for
modern dance aesthetics, and who were drawn, for various reasons, to the experimental-
ism of Judson and some of the dance scenes that developed in its wake? In 1982, Ishmael
Houston-Jones, a young African American dance artist who had recently moved from
Philadelphia to New York City, assembled several choreographers to explore the meaning
of “black dance” and to consider what that term might mean in relation to the legacy of
Judson and histories of postmodern dance. Houston-Jones persuaded Cynthia Hedstrom,
the director of Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, to let him “curate a series composed
of a group of ‘Black’ choreographers who were working outside the Mainstream of Modern
Dance” (2012a, 19). Explaining that it was challenging during the early 1980s to character-
ize work that was taking place “outside the mainstream,” Houston-Jones notes that Judson is
usually invoked as the “watershed moment” where a group of experimental artists challenged
252
the conventions of modern dance by employing chance procedures, rejecting narrative, and
embracing pedestrian movement as an alternative to highly virtuosic and codified dancing.
But, as Houston-Jones notes, “Black experimentalists are either invisible or relegated to a
footnote of the more ‘serious’ post-modern choreographers” (19).
So, for that 1982 performance series, which he titled Parallels, Houston-Jones invited sev-
eral choreographers to perform over two weekends at Danspace Project: Blondell Cummings,
Fred Holland, Rrata Christine Jones, Ralph Lemon, Bebe Miller, Harry Sheppard, and Gus
Solomons, Jr. As Houston-Jones, who also performed in the series, explains, he wanted to
present some of the varied styles, technical training, performance histories, and aesthetic
points of view that black artists were drawing from in their dance making. In his initial letter
to Hedstrom, Houston-Jones wrote, “I know from myself, being black and being outside of
the mainstream of traditional modern dance, has given my work the unique perspective of
being doubly isolated. I feel and often express this isolation from blacks who expect me to
be Ailey and dance audiences who either also expect me to be a little-avant-garde-Ailey or
‘another Bill T. Jones’ or devoid of any racial expression” (2012a, 38). As he further explained
in the initial program notes from 1982:
I chose the name Parallels for the series because while all the choreographers par-
ticipating are Black and in some ways relate to the rich tradition of Afro-American
dance, each has chosen a form outside of that tradition and even outside the tradi-
tion of mainstream modern dance … this new generation of black artists—who all
exist in the parallel worlds of Black America and new dance—is producing work
that is richly diverse. (2012a, 20)
For his contribution to Parallels, Houston-Jones performed a piece called Relatives (1982)

as part of a shared evening of performance with Blondell Cunnings and Rrata Christine
Jones. At that point in his career, Houston-Jones had an eclectic training with a significant
emphasis on improvisation. Prior to moving to New York from Philadelphia, Houston-
Jones performed with Group Motion Media Theater, directed by two dancers who had
formerly worked with the German expressionist Mary Wigman. He also studied West
African dance practices at The Arthur Hall Afro American Dance Ensemble and contact
improvisation with John Gamble and Daniel Lepkoff. Together with Terry Fox and the
musician Jeff Cain, he performed as part of the group A Way of Improvising (Houston-
Jones 2012a, 19). This training is evident in the scored improvisation, Relatives, which
begins with Houston-Jones repeatedly chanting, “Here mothy, mothy, mothy” in the
dark, while slowly emptying a metal bucket full of moth balls to mark the perimeter of
the performance space. Although audience members cannot yet see Houston-Jones, they
hear stomping and clanging, and mothballs scattering across the wooden floor. The lights
then slowly rise, revealing Houston-Jones in a bright orange life vest, along with pants
and a shirt. As was customary for Houston-Jones at the time, he wore heavy boots during
the performance. With a series of weighted steps, echoing in the space, he makes his way
up the church steps, and begins to turn rhythmically around himself, chanting an accu-
mulating list of names: “Matthew, Martha, Bryna, Albert, Alice, Miles …” As the names
accumulate, Houston-Jones continues to turn around. He then stops, removes his life
vest, and sits down to tell a story about a photograph of his maternal great-grandparents.
A bit later, still recounting his family history, he carries a wooden chair to the center of
the space, along with a table, and a box of memorabilia (a photograph, a bottle of dye,
a bowl, a carton of eggs, and a wooden spoon). “The distance between here and there
253
Danielle Goldman
seems enormous,” he says before pouring dye into the bowl. “How did I get here?” asks
Houston-Jones. He then points out a woman sitting on one of the benches in St. Mark’s
Church. Houston-Jones goes over to pick her up, and slings her over his shoulder. “This is
my mom,” he says.
Houston-Jones and his mother, Pauline Jones, then engage in casual banter as he car-
ries her into the improvisational dance space. He deposits her at the wooden chair, where
she sits and begins to dye eggs, while talking about her son, “Chuck,” and their fam-
ily. She also uses a small watch to keep track of time for his 10-minute improvisation.
Houston-Jones, to her side, performs an improvised dance full of quick shifts of weight.
Although Relatives is not a work of contact improvisation, an improvised form of dance
where partners remain in physical contact with each other for most of the dance, one
sees evidence of Houston-Jones’s training in the form, particularly in his weighted steps
and falls to the ground, as well as in his improvised partnership with his mother, which
begins with him hoisting her over his shoulder, and develops into a dance of delicate
counterpoint, unfolding through both movement and spoken word. “It’s strange,” Ms.
Jones muses, “the things you remember about children as they grow up.” As Susan Foster
describes the interplay between mother and son, “Sometimes, [Houston-Jones] seems
almost to respond to his mother’s speech as a kind of soundscore whose rhythm and
intonation inspires the next move. But then suddenly he ruptures this connection with
a question, demonstrating that he has been listening to the words’ subject matter all
along” (Foster 2002, 200–1). Moreover, as Foster suggests, by bringing his mother into
the dance and engaging publicly in acts of remembering, the work resists abstraction and
“any universalizing impulses” (202). “Chuck, you have thirty seconds,” states his mother.
Meanwhile, Houston-Jones’s dancing escalates in speed and intensity. “Chuck, Chuck,
Chuck, Chuck...” As the light slowly dims, he jumps repeatedly in an upstage corner, his
back to the audience and his arms flapping like wings.
“Wrong Contact”
In June 1983, less than a year after the Parallels series, Houston-Jones once again per-
formed at St. Mark’s Church—not with his mother, but with his frequent collaborator,
Fred Holland, as part of Contact at 10th and 2nd, a festival celebrating the first 11 years of
contact improvisation. Their untitled duet was part of a program called “Partners,” with
improvisations by Jackie Shue and Kirstie Simson, Steve Paxton and Nancy Stark Smith,
Melanie Hedlund and Jennifer Smith, and Alan Ptashek and Nancy Stark Smith. As the
title suggests, partnership is a cornerstone of contact improvisation. Historically, both its
aesthetic innovation and its political potential had to do with the notion that any two bod-
ies could dance together, regardless of identity, ability, or past training. This approach to
partnering differs dramatically from ballet’s classical pas de deux, where roles are strictly
dictated according to binary gender. In classical ballet, men would lift women, but the
reverse would never be the case. These norms also shaped much of the partnering in mid-
century modern dance. Not so in contact improvisation. As Cynthia Novack explains in
Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture, “In a contact duet, each mem-
ber, male or female, must be ready to give or take weight, to support, to resist, or to yield,
as called for by the interaction” (1990, 128). In the video documentary Fall After Newton
(1987), Paxton, one of the form’s originators, elaborates: “Each partner poses their own
kinetic puzzles, which were danced through, contributing new elements to the body of
work, the network of contact improvisation.”
254
The “Partners” program presented notable variety in terms of gender and performance style.
Nevertheless, Holland and Houston-Jones were the only artists of color in the program, and
the audience was also mostly white. This was not unusual for contact improvisation during the
early 1980s, which was decidedly an outgrowth of the Judson scene. Paxton, who through-
out the 1960s became increasingly interested in improvisation, began to perform as part of
an improvisational collective called the Grand Union in 1970, whose members also included
Trisha Brown, Barbara Dilley, Douglas Dunn, David Gordon, Nancy Lewis, Yvonne Rainer,
and Lincoln Scott. Soon afterward, in 1972, Paxton created an improvisation for eleven men
called Magnesium, which many historians now recognize as the first work of contact improvisa-
tion. Over the next ten years, the form would gain prominence as a significant development in
postmodern dance. According to Banes, “Contact Improvisation both signified and helped cre-
ate a set of interconnected values important to the artistic avant-garde of the sixties and seven-
ties: playfulness, freedom, spontaneity, authenticity, and community. ‘I like it when bodies are
free and when the emotional state is open and accepting and sensitive,’ Paxton has remarked,
‘When the psychology isn’t hassled or political or tied in knots’” (Banes 2003, 78).
Banes’s claims regarding the “freedom” of the avant-garde, and Paxton’s preference for a
psychology that is neither “hassled” nor “political” while dancing, echo the Cagean ideas so
forcefully criticized by George Lewis in his discussion of experimental music. According to
Lewis, Cage and many of the artists who followed his teachings failed to recognize the struggle
that bringing certain sounds or bodies or postures to performance frequently entailed. Houston-
Jones’s improvisatory work with Holland issued a similar critique, but not without acknowl-
edging the democratic aspirations and the massive aesthetic innovation that constituted contact
improvisation during its early years. As Houston-Jones explains, discovering contact improvisa-
tion in the late 1970s was “a big political awakening.” He recalls, “I remember I did feel and
probably still do feel still that something as simple as contact improvisation had huge political
ramifications in the way people experienced dance” (Houston-Jones and Hennessy 2017).
For the “Partners” program at St. Mark’s Church, Houston-Jones and Holland performed
“Untitled Duet” (also called “Oo-Ga-La”). To structure the work, they drafted a private
manifesto that challenged many of contact improvisation’s unspoken orthodoxies:
We are Black
We will wear street clothes
We will wear heavy boots
We will play a loud, abrasive sounds score
We will have non-performative conversations
We will fuck with flow
We will stay out of physical contact as much as possible. (Houston-Jones 2016)
As the manifesto makes clear, Untitled Duet entailed an undeniable negotiation of various
strictures, including race, but also gender, sexuality, and genre—restrictions that are neither
stable nor separable from one another. According to Houston-Jones,
The sexuality of the two men is ambiguous and constantly flowing against his-
tories of (Black) masculinity … [w]e weren’t nor had we ever been sexual lovers,
though that scenario was persistent in the public discourse of our collaborations and
admittedly, implicit in much of our work. As Fred often said, “Two Black men on
stage together and not killing each other or rapping, what else are people going to
think?” (Houston-Jones 2016)
255
Danielle Goldman
Recalling that Paxton was one of the performers in the “Partners” series at Danspace Project,
and therefore present for the performances, Houston-Jones has described the dance as “risky”
(Houston-Jones 2012b). This risk is important to acknowledge. Nevertheless, it would be
reductive to say that Untitled Duet was merely a dance of refusal, wholly determined by the
norms and figures it rejects. And this is where the details of their dancing come back as so
many exquisite flourishings: the bend of the performers’ construction boots, and pink socks
below blue jeans’ fold; bodies tumbling in opposition before burrowing into momentary
repose. Although distance between the performers constituted one of the major breaks with
contact improvisation, Houston-Jones and Holland were not always separated in the dance,
and the moments where they came into contact were full of intensity and quick shifts between
tenderness and aggression. The fact that they “fucked with flow” created dynamism in the
work, as well as sequences of extraordinary counterpoint. As Houston-Jones notes, “These
shifts often happen without visible preparation or logical transition” (Houston-Jones 2016).
But just because the preparation was not visible does not mean that it did not exist. As
the musician Arthur Rhames explains, “Improvisation is an intuitive process for me now,
but … I’m calling upon all the resources of all the years of my playing at once: my aca-
demic understanding of the music, my historical understanding of the music, and my tech-
nical understanding of the instrument that I’m playing” (Berliner 1994, 16). In the case of
Houston-Jones and Holland, they were clearly drawing from years of training in dance and
improvisational practice, but, perhaps even more interesting and politically significant, they
also were drawing from the intimate knowledge of each other’s bodies and physical ten-
dencies, developed through years of friendship and artistic collaboration. As Houston-Jones
recalls, “I never remember rehearsing for this performance. We used to go out to the Pyramid
Club, the Palladium and Limelight and dance until the wee hours. Those were our studios.
That was our rehearsal. That was our process” (2016). Just as the boots, and the talking, and
the manifesto refused the notion that contact improvisation was somehow separate from poli-
tics or everyday life, here Houston-Jones suggests queer nightlife as an important space for
rehearsal and honing one’s improvisational skill. The dance was evidence of that preparation.
One evening, the duet concluded with Houston-Jones and Holland slowly approaching each
other until they met in an entangled, shifting embrace, crotch against thigh. Slowly, Holland
descended, with Houston-Jones then pulling him up in a clearly articulated counterbalance.
Conclusion
Until recently, Houston-Jones had only seen a four-minute clip of Untitled Duet. But after
Holland died of colon cancer in 2016, a grieving Houston-Jones searched Cathy Weis’s
archive of downtown dance for recordings of their collaborations. He discovered two videos
of Untitled Duet, each about 15-minutes long, shot on two consecutive evenings by Weis
and Lisa Nelson, both of whom were dancers engaged in New York’s downtown scene.
According to Houston-Jones, “the soft-focus, sometimes blurry images” of himself dancing
with Holland, who was thirty-two years old at the time, had a “haunted and ghostly quality.”
Yet, given the way this dance from 1983 speaks “to real 21st century perspectives of race,
gender, homoeroticism, masculinity, power dynamics, narrative, aesthetics, composition,
Dancing While Black and much more,” he wonders whether it might be the most contem-
porary work he has ever performed (2016).
For Endless Shout at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (2016–2017), the
two recordings of Untitled Duet played on a loop on two Sony Trinitron cube monitors with
two sets of headphones, enabling viewers to experience two nights of the improvisation in
256
relation to each other, and to consider two different approaches to documentation. The boxy
monitors emphasized the historical nature of the performances and the fact of their media-
tion. Nevertheless, the entangled, improvisatory nature of the dancers’ work was palpable—a
looping study without arrival, punctuated by moments of slowdown and seemingly impos-
sible lift.
Meanwhile, hanging on an adjacent wall, was Pope.L’s Another Kind of Love: John Cage’s
Silence (by hand). Together, both of these works present traces of past performances. Yet they
also stage tensions between black performance and Cagean “experimentalism” that continue
to be felt to this day. Together they ask museum-goers to reconsider dominant histories of
experimental music and postmodern dance and to consider the racial dimensions of privileg-
ing chance procedure and indeterminacy over improvisation. But the labor and improvisa-
tional virtuosity evidenced in the works also pose a more complex set of questions regarding
influence, lineage, and desire. Neither work was a solo, and neither was a straightforward
disavowal. As Catherine Damman describes Pope.L’s interlude in Cage Unrequited, it was
“Both a collective paean and a renunciation.... also, perhaps, a love song as a form of protest”
(Damman 2013).
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New York Times, October 28. Accessed January 15, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/30/arts/
music/minimalist-composer-julius-eastman-dead-for-26-years-crashes-the-canon.html.
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18
FEMALE DANCERS ON THE
VARIETY STAGE IN MID-
TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITAIN
Larraine Nicholas
Introduction
The lights lower, the orchestra finishes its overture of popular tunes, the curtains swish
back, and the first act comes on stage. This will most probably be a dancing act. It may
be a tapping ‘sister act,’ a trio with at least one female performer, or a chorus line of six-
teen high-kicking ‘chorus girls,’ but always a version of feminine attraction holds the
act together. There is sensual allure in the soft swirl of long skirts and ostrich feathers,
and in costumes that shine and sparkle. There is sexual appeal in the selective revelation
of bodies: show-of-leg in short skirts, trunks, or leotards; exposure of other erogenous
zones in plunging necklines or tantalizingly bare midriffs. The dynamic is up-beat in
the rhythm of the dance and in the outgoing expressions of the dancers. A dancing act
(often a song- and-dance) signifies that the show has begun, with energy flowing out from
the performers to ‘warm up’ the audience. Something like it will open the second half
after the interval, and in some shows these dancing women will appear again and again,
in different costumes, expending nearly as much energy in the backstage work of prepa-
ration as in the on-stage interaction with the audience. Most professional stage dancers
in twentieth-century Europe and America were not employed on opera house or other
concert dance stages but in theaters, cabarets, and clubs. Largely unsung by mainstream
dance historiography, these female performers have always been essential to the artistic and
economic success of popular entertainment.
Dancers’ bodies on stage give visual, kinesthetic, and often sexualized pleasure to the
viewer (Adair 1992; Hanna 2010). Theoretical perspectives from cultural and feminist studies
expose how female dancers such as those discussed in this chapter project an image of attrac-
tive femininity constructed in a patriarchal system toward the pleasure of heterosexual men
(Dodds 1997). On the other hand, the history of dancers in popular entertainment is also
one of dedicated professionalism, negotiating with difficulty the male-dominated social and
management theatrical systems. For sure, some women were abused and some felt trapped
or at odds with the work, and there may be an element of gilded nostalgia in some memoirs,
but the narratives of professional variety dancers that come to us now have much to say about
pride in hard work and achievement (Vicinus 1979), as well as the value given to the respect
of professional colleagues.
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Larraine Nicholas
In bringing the history of dancers in popular theatrical entertainment to the fore, I will
focus on Britain of the 1940s to the 1960s. This period is pivotal because it sees the shift
from an entertainment industry based on varied ‘live’ performance venues to one dominated
mainly by the new media forms of cinema and particularly television. So this is an era when
a young woman had many opportunities for theatrical work on the variety stage as well as
venturing into television or film. It is also a period of social change that affected how bod-
ies could be represented on stage. I will use the term ‘variety’ here (‘vaudeville’ is roughly
equivalent in America) to encompass different genres of popular entertainment on theater
stages, all inheriting a collaged format from the nineteenth-century music hall but presented
within new commercial patterns dominated, although not exclusively, by big theater chains
such as Moss Empires or Stoll Theatres (Double 2012, 39–49). Female dancers in a group,
large or small, were included in a program of disparate acts including, for example, animals,
magicians, acrobats, singers, and comedians, but it would be the singers or comedians who
would ‘top the bill.’ In its purest form, variety was ‘weekly variety,’ in which disparate, self-
producing acts were presented twice-nightly for one week only, before going their separate
ways on Sunday to yet another venue. In this chapter, I am also using the term variety more
generically to encompass other theatrical forms of popular entertainment where variety art-
ists could be seen in this collaged format. This could include shows with an overall theme in
narrative and/or design, such as pantomimes and revues, summer shows, and West End spec-
taculars. Jobbing dancers in the wider terminology of variety might be alternating between
these kinds of contracts, sometimes also into cabaret or narrative musical theater. My focus
here, though, is on performances of the variety kind taking place in theaters.
Finding an acceptably non-sexist way of referring to dancers in these roles is complicated.
Although the generic term ‘chorus girl’ undervalues the maturity and individuality of per-
formers, when being interviewed or writing in later life, many are happy to still identify
with a particular troupe as being a ‘Windmill Girl’ (identified with the London theater) or
a ‘Tiller Girl’ (identified with the highly synchronized style originated by English manager
John Tiller, 1854–1925). These identities connect the retired performer with a history, a
group discipline, and performances of which they are proud; therefore, I use these terms
when possible. On the negative side, these labels tend to isolate the dancer’s history into
one kind of dance act, in which their individuality might be subsumed into a group format,
whereas many dancers moved in and out of the larger groups identified as ‘chorus lines,’
sometimes working in duos, trios, or in featured roles. I therefore employ a generic term,
‘variety dancer,’ for the dancers I am considering here: They are female dancers employed in
popular, theatrical, variety entertainment in the mid-twentieth century, in chorus, solo, and
small ensemble spots.
Sources
The relative anonymity of ‘the chorus girl’ may in itself be tantalizing. In 1847, Albert
Smith wrote The Natural History of the Ballet Girl (facsimile 1996) as an examination of
the ballet choruses of Leicester Square as if they were unnamed members of a species.
With a nod to that publication, in 1975 Derek and Julia Parker, she formerly a Tiller Girl,
published The Natural History of the Chorus Girl, which was dedicated to “any young lady
who, unnamed, has trod the boards in the company of her friends, providing a picture of
feminine beauty” (Parker and Parker 1975, 6). However, as much as those unnamed women
deserve their histories to be recorded, many moved into work that proclaimed their indi-
vidual skills and personalities.
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Female dancers on the variety stage
Such general histories of the chorus phenomenon, together with growing academic inter-
est in popular dance and popular entertainment, emphasize the potential of archival sources
in research into variety. These include documents, still and moving images, and newspaper
articles. Perhaps more importantly, oral and life histories over the last few decades have been
able to capture the memoirs of variety theater dancers from the mid-twentieth century, for
example in published biographies from former Tiller Girls such as Fay Robinson and Irene
Holland. Doremy Vernon claimed to have spoken to 200 former Tillers in researching her
book (1988, Preface). Tiller Girls were in some respects the epitome of chorus girls: identi-
fied with some of the more famous theaters of London in their variety days such as resident
troupes of ‘Palladium Girls’ or ‘Casino Girls.’ That whole phenomenon had begun with
Tiller’s amateur interest in theater, although he was a businessman in Manchester’s cotton
industry of the 1880s. He applied rigorous synchronization to the girl groups he trained for
local theaters, and he developed professional schools in Manchester, London, and New York.
By the 1920s there were multiple Tiller lines performing in Europe, America, and Britain,
including in the Ziegfeld Follies in New York and at the Folies Bergère in Paris. There were
also chorus lines managed separately by John Tiller’s son Lawrence, as Lawrence Tiller Girls,
in competition with his father. Tiller Girls and their equivalent precision dance troupes have
been examined as the embodiment of the mechanistic modernity of the 1920s/1930s, par-
ticularly in America (Franko 2002) and Germany (Elswit 2009). Variety dancing in the dif-
ferent stage of modernity post-World War II has not so far excited similar academic analysis.
Another considerable resource is from the Windmill Theatre in Soho, London. As
a long-lived (1932–1964) theater that became something of a national institution, the
Windmill has left substantial archives, both documentary and oral, so that we are able to
look at these dancers in terms of their training, their daily work, and their overall careers as
dancers in other branches of entertainment. As a London theater with a resident company,
the Windmill was different from theaters where weekly variety put on a new combination
of acts every week, but there are similarities in the way that the chorus of dancers (who also
sang and acted) framed the night’s program. Unlike in weekly variety when a comedian
or singer was usually top of the bill, Windmill Girls were themselves the main attraction,
famed for their static nude tableaux, although as dancers they were much more versatile
than those poses alone. I focus here on these women in order to show the scope of dance
acts in variety theater rather than within the undoubted context of erotic performance in
the Soho of the period (Mort 2007). The Windmill story continues to excite popular inter-
est (Millard Shapiro 2014) including in cinema, with the latest film being Mrs. Henderson
Presents (2005), which is a fictionalized account of the Windmill during the London Blitz.
Recent academic analysis of performances on the spectrum of erotic dance has tended
more toward examining the agency of women in striptease and neo-burlesque cabaret in
the later twentieth century and therefore is outside the period and genre I discuss here
(Dodds 1997, 2011).
The making of a variety dancer

A series of press releases in the Windmill Theatre Collection covers the years 1947–1962 at
the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (Press information summaries, nos. 3–129). As
well as describing the new show, regular features included brief biographies of ‘new girls’ and
returnees from other employment. These 229 biographies, along with additional information
from oral history interviews,1 have been vital in discovering some of the routes into variety
for young women in the mid-twentieth century.
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Larraine Nicholas
Although extremely brief, over half of the Windmill press releases give details of early
training, indicating how recruits had taken up local dance classes as children or teenagers
and/or more intensive training at stage schools (e.g., Italia Conti, Aida Foster), the Tillers’
training schools, or advanced ballet schools. In a number of other cases, it is clear from the
previous performance experience that these young women had dance training, although it
is impossible to be clear how extensive that training had been. Then as now, the passion for
dancing and the preparation for the career had started at quite a young age and was aided by
the nationwide spread of the local dancing school as the initial nurturer of talent. Nor was it
necessary to come from a well-off family: This is confirmed by (Tiller Girl) Fay Robinson’s
autobiography. Coming from a mining community in Yorkshire, she was nevertheless able
to immerse herself in dancing as a child: “Monday ballet, Wednesday show or competition
work, Thursday private lesson, Friday tap and acrobatic” (Robinson 2014, 40). John Tiller’s
original schools in the 1890s were targeted at poor children, and the money they earned
was an important addition to family income. Robinson reported that her first contract for a
pantomime in Leeds in 1956 when she was fifteen years old was for over £6 per week, while
her father could only earn about £10 in the mine (43).
The Windmill’s producer/manager, Vivian Van Damm, did not elevate performance
skills in his written pronouncements. What was needed of a Windmill Girl was “personality,
youth, beauty, talent—in that order” (1952, 111). However it is clear from the biographies
that the majority had previous training or initial experience in work such as pantomime and
summer shows that would have required some training. English pantomimes, both amateur
and professional, based on tales such as Mother Goose or Cinderella, with their stock char-
acters such as the cross-dressing Dame and Principal Boy, remain performance traditions of
the Christmas season, but they were even more widespread in the mid-twentieth century
before many theaters closed down under pressure from cinema and television. Children and
adolescents in amateur or semiprofessional ‘babe’ and ‘juvenile’ troupes were another tradi-
tional ingredient—children performing for the children in the audience. They were often
provided by local dancing schools, and these child dancers were important to the financial
success of the school as well as launching their own professional careers. Some troupes, like
Terry’s Juveniles, became quite famous, performing in the most spectacular pantomimes like
those at the London Palladium and in Royal Variety Command Performances. Second to
pantomime, summer seasons provided the most reliable professional work, recalling a time
when British holidays were at British resorts, and when pantomime and summer season could
each last for months.
The route for a young dancer into professional employment for the first time was var-
ied. Stage schools such as Italia Conti and Joan Davis (both in London) acted as their own
agencies sending out multiple teams of dancers. They found work for their own students as
well as having open auditions. (Dancers’ full names are cited in this chapter only when they
have been published in the public domain; otherwise initials are used for persons in archival
sources.) Dancer MW had attended a local dancing school, and after two terms at the Italia
Conti stage school, went into a spectacular 1946 revue at the Coliseum, London, The Night
and the Laughter, with a cast of 140. Thereafter she joined the Windmill at seventeen years
of age in 1947 (Press information summaries, no. 7, May 21, 1947). In 1956, Fay Robinson,
aged fifteen, traveled to London from Yorkshire for three auditions in one day—for the John
Tiller, Italia Conti, and Joan Davis organizations—and took the one with Joan Davis for pan-
tomime in Leeds (2014, 42). Some managements had multiple troupes rivaling the Tillers, for
example the Sherman Fisher Girls and the Marie De Vere Dancers. In 1957, there were ten
teams of Marie De Vere Dancers booked under various names into summer shows in British
262
seaside resorts, including Blackpool, Bournemouth, and Skegness as well as a group touring
Sweden (advertisement in The Stage August 1, 1957, 18). Managers such as De Vere were
flexible to the different demands of venues and were able to offer troupes of different sizes,
from trios upward, with different specialties to suit different audiences. This could benefit
the young dancer. SL, who joined the Windmill in 1958 at eighteen, had been trained in a
juvenile troupe run by the mother of Anita D’Ray, one of the Windmill dancers. At fifteen
she had joined the De Vere Dancers for a summer season in Manchester, followed by pan-
tomime with them at the Chiswick Empire, London, and six months with De Vere’s Ballet
Montparnasse troupe (specializing in cancan) in cabaret in Jersey and London (Press infor-
mation summaries, no. 105, December 1, 1958).
For dancers without immediate connections, there were open auditions (advertisements
in the weekly newspaper, The Stage), agents, or good luck. By her own admission, JM had
more confidence and good looks than dance training when she met an agent by chance after
a failed audition in the late 1940s and was given a contract, first as a dancer in a circus tour
of theaters, then in the pantomime Robinson Crusoe ( JM [pseudonym], interviewed by the
author at the interviewee’s home, September 1, 2015). She credits these early jobs as giving
her the training and polish she needed: “I was learning my trade, I was learning to dance. I
was learning to perform.” By the mid-1950s when she danced at the Windmill, she had also
worked in variety, both in chorus and in specialty acts. Those first few professional jobs were
key to acquiring professional polish, further skills, and discipline.
In accordance with Van Damm’s notion of what made a good Windmill Girl, there was
a fairly open door for young women to present themselves for audition, and in some cases
they were accepted on the basis of unrealized potential. KC, who was probably inexperi-
enced and untrained in any branch of theater, went to London for shop work and turned up
at the Windmill on an impulse where she was “engaged on the strength of her personality
and appearance” (Press information summaries, no. 93, June 4, 1957). It is hardly surprising
that the calling of a dancer in variety was attractive to so many young women. The media
had been glamorizing the job for decades, right from backstage movies such as Gold Diggers
of 1933 and 42nd Street (both 1933) with spectacular Busby Berkeley dance arrangements.
Chorus girl stories were also popular in illustrated magazines and in the Pathé News stories
accompanying every cinema showing. Windmill Girls were frequent subjects, not only back-
stage, but in glamorous exploits not enjoyed by regular young women, for example, flying
to the seaside by private plane (British Pathé 1947). Television brought variety into people’s
living rooms, including, from 1955, Sunday Night at the London Palladium, with spectacular
dance routines by the Tiller Girls.
Ages of new recruits at the Windmill in this period ranged from fifteen to twenty-five,
with a peak of recruitment at age seventeen (the school-leaving age in England and Wales
was raised from fourteen to fifteen from 1947). However, youth was not the only criterion
in manning the chorus line. Experience counted too. Some well-regarded Windmill Girls
stayed for years, practically their whole careers, while others returned at least once from other
employment, marriage, or maternity.
Once accepted into the chorus line, the differences in ages would be ironed out by discipline
and common grooming practices, in make-up, and hairstyle. Tiller Girl troupes specialized
in the close synchronization of their kick lines, in essence a kind of assimilation of the per-
sonality of each dancer into one identity. This is what it meant to be “Tillerized,” “smooth-
ing out the individualists.... In an ordinary chorus line, although she is doing the same step,
every girl has her own particular style. Usually she is hoping to be noticed and picked for
a solo part,” Kay Lambert, Palladium dance captain, is quoted as saying (Pilton 1976, 115).
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Larraine Nicholas
Tiller Girls also had to wear a practice uniform of white blouse, black briefs, and little black
bow-tie that further standardized them and would become a cause of discontent in the 1960s,
as youth values moved more toward individualism (Vernon 1988, 145). With his belief in
the primacy of personality in the making of a Windmill Girl, Van Damm disliked the idea
of Tillerized uniformity. Nevertheless there was a process of transformation in the first few
weeks that he referred to as “the early stages of glamorization” (1952, 126–127). Dance
troupes like the Tillers that were employed some distance from the immediate control of
their management depended on the experience of a ‘head girl’ or ‘dance captain’ who had
a senior and better-paid role. Typically the captain kept the discipline and standards of the
dancers. When Fay Robinson became captain of a Tiller line in Brighton, twenty-one years
old in the early 1960s, she had considerable responsibilities, including leading rehearsals,
altering the routine if anyone was off sick, paying the dancers, and writing a weekly report
to the head office (2014, 76).
At the Windmill, mentoring of new recruits was rather less formal, contributing to
what many former dancers speak of now as a family atmosphere. As a theater with in-
house production facilities and a show changing about every six weeks, there was at times a
frenetic atmosphere. Instead of ‘twice nightly’ shows, Windmill performances were ‘non-
stop,’ five shows a day from early afternoon to late evening, with audiences able to come
in at any time. There was a complex administration necessary to maintain this. Windmill
Girls were divided into ‘A’ and ‘B’ companies, which performed the same show on alter-
nate days. Toward the end of the run there were morning rehearsals for the next show, with
new routines, songs, and sketches to be learned and new costumes to be fitted. Although
the Tiller lines required a perfection of synchronicity, there were a variety of roles that
a Windmill Girl could fill, including posing in the nude or semi-nude. This perhaps in
part explains the management’s openness to employ relatively inexperienced performers,
but Van Damm was happy to admit he would quickly fire anybody who did not live up to
expectations (1952, 107).
In both professional situations, for Tillers and Windmill Girls, living and working
closely together on a pressurized schedule necessitated a communal reliance that could
be labeled a “sisterhood,” as has been claimed recently for the Rockettes precision dance
team of Radio City Musical Hall, New York (Gibbons Oehlers 2018). This did not mean
everyone was equally committed of course, but there was a cohesive core and particular
identity that could survive the departure of the disillusioned and those ambitious for new
horizons.
On stage
Achieving a seamless progression from one number to the next was crucial in variety,
so full stage acts alternated with ‘front cloth’ items to enable the set up behind the tabs.
The Windmill bill (exemplified here as only one possible permutation of the variety genre)
commonly had thirteen numbers beginning with an ensemble song-and-dance and with
a finale which was usually a narrative scene with dances. By the 1940s, Revudeville (the
generic name for each numbered Windmill production) had become synonymous with
specific styles of erotic female performance at the margins of what official censorship
would allow but also not unusual in other variety venues. In some numbers, there would be
a nude posing as part of the mise-en-scène, the fan dance (a dancer with ostrich feather fans
obscuring her nudity) must appear somewhere, and a cancan was normally to be found in
the finale. It was for the creative team to invent constantly novel contexts to display these.
264
A closer look at Revudeville 288 (1957), which premiered in March 1957 for a seven-week
run, reveals some of the themes and styles commonly encountered in variety ‘numbers.’
Quotations about Revudeville 288 are taken from the program or the script. The latter are
preserved because the Windmill, as a revue with spoken sketches, was subject to the cen-
sorship of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office (revoked by Parliament in 1968).
The opening ensemble song and dance number, “Simon’s Not So Simple,” has a male
soloist, six of the Windmill Girls, and a nude posing somewhere within the “Spring-like
décor.” The words of the song, composed by the in-house songwriting team of Ronald
Bridges and Charles Rose, flatter the audience. Simon is “not so simple” because he loves
to watch Revudeville; what is more, he is “hep”—as up-to-date as rock n’ roll. Although
the Windmill was often considered old-fashioned by the 1950s, its rolling series of new
productions made it possible to reference current culture and events, which was a feature
of variety in general.
After a front cloth spot by a comedian-musician, the stage is set for a ballet, “Napoli,” a
romantic duet set “On a hill overlooking the Bay of Naples.” There is also a posing nude on
stage with them. Considering the geographical location, she could well be posing as a classi-
cal statue, which had been a common ruse for introducing nudes onto the stage since the late
nineteenth century. Censorship rules required nudes to be totally still and to be posed so as
not to expose pelvic regions; this could be achieved by being placed in profile, or with stra-
tegic application of draperies or props (Nicholson 2005, 70–79). Ballets had been a constant
item in Windmill programs from the beginning, and here the choreographer Keith Lester,
himself a highly esteemed dancer on ballet stages, seems to have filched a title and maybe
even a style from the nineteenth-century Danish choreographer August Bournonville’s
Napoli (1842). There would normally be a few Windmill Girls who could take on balletic
technique including pointe work. The Windmill also inherited from the Edwardian music
hall the notion that ballet could signify a higher class of popular culture, suitable for middle
class entertainment (Carter 2005).
The next item is a song and dance duet, “In Love for the Very First Time,” arranged
by one of the company’s young male leads and danced by him with one of the Windmill
Girls. It was possible for company members to advance their careers by arranging acts as
well as performing them, and Van Damm had a policy of advancing chorus members to
solo roles. The second song they sing is “The Tender Trap,” which has some nice synco-
pated rhythms that could lend it to a good tap dance finish. It could also be performed
as a front cloth item, with a tap mat laid on the front stage, as next on will be the much-
awaited Fan Dance.
“My Lady’s Fan” is a title appearing in the Windmill programs from the late 1930s.
It became known as the Fan Dance, the signature act of the theater, although it was cer-
tainly seen in other variety venues. The principal fan dancer must always obscure her
nudity by manipulating her two huge ostrich feather fans. She may take one away and
flourish above her head or spin with one in front, one behind, while they nestle softly
to her skin, showing just a hint of her side view (see Illustration 18.1). For the audience,
there is always a frisson of jeopardy—the possibility of a mistake that might manifest her
nakedness. She is accompanied by four clothed fan dancers who, in the final ‘reveal,’ cover
her with their fans as she raises both hers upward. In this program, the dance is performed
to a male vocalist singing the currently popular romantic ballad “Two Different Worlds,”
but the fan dance is a flexible concept that in other programs can take on different danced
dynamics, Spanish or Latin American rhythms, or with movements reflecting birdlife or
underwater imagery.
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Larraine Nicholas
Illustration 18.1 Fan dancing at the Windmill Theatre, London, c. 1950s. A Fan Dance in action rather
than a posed photograph, the image shows marks for cropping for the Windmill’s always astute media
coverage. (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London.)
After three more items, the half closes with an ensemble dance scene, “A Persian Rose.”
As here, Orientalized settings were common, not only in variety but in other entertainment
genres. In the 1950s, Kismet (choreographer, Jack Cole) and The King and I (choreographer,
Jerome Robbins) became two of the most influential stage musicals and films. In variety,
exotic settings could provide the opportunity for comedy at the expense of foreign language
and behavior or for indulging in the erotic movements and flimsy female garb supposedly
associated with the orient. Harems, casbahs, and Eastern markets were common scenes at the
Windmill. In this one, there is a girl in a window, her admirer who cannot get near her, a
Letter Writer, and a boy selling scarves. The Windmill Girls play the roles of slaves, one of
whom receives a scarf in exchange for a kiss. A tantalizing ‘scarf dance’ follows. The variety
format depended upon transporting the audience to fantasized places where exotic dances
might possibly take place. In achieving this, managements fell back on the common clichés
of Orientalized and exotic local color.
In the next item there is another chance for individual Windmill Girls to feature their
talents in a singing trio as firefighters, whose words and movements are mostly about what
266
they can ignite in passion. Then “Temptation Bolero” features two duets of Windmill Girls
with their male partners, according to the script, “a modern dance routine.” The dancers
perform to a male vocalist singing the standards “The Nearness of You” and “Temptation.”
The suggestion of the title is that this dance takes on a Latin American style.
After a final comedy and music specialty spot, the program finale, “Crisis at the Café,”
is an ensemble sketch with singing and dancing, comprising all the talents of the resident
company. The mise-en-scène is a café in “gay Paree” of the 1890s. Two Windmill Girls are
featured as cancan dancers, another must-see of the Windmill repertoire, while others are
waitresses and sundry other characters typical of Parisian café life as existing in the British
imagination. Although French scenes often provided the rationale for a French cancan, the
production team had to propose more novel settings, including bars in the American West as
well as, with less justification, ancient Egypt and the Caribbean.
Examination of this edition of Revudeville shows how Windmill Girls were not necessarily
‘anonymous’ chorus girls. Because there were five daily performances, named roles had two
or three alternative performers in the program. Of the eighteen Windmill Girls in A com-
pany for this edition, seventeen were named to alternate in a specific role, while the one left
out was in her first Windmill season. The Windmill Girl might be required to act or be a
comic ‘feed,’ as well as to sing and dance in a variety of styles, from classical ballet and tap
to Latin American. She might have more exposure in a duet or trio or even a solo act if her
talents went in that direction. Revudeville 269 presented not only a former Windmill Girl,
Vicki Emra, returning with her own song and dance act, but a current company member,
Susan Denny, in her first solo, which she sourced for herself from Buddy Bradley, the African
American teacher/choreographer with a local Soho studio (“Windmill Girl Planned Single
Act” 1954). A number of Windmill Girls went on to individual careers in other branches
of entertainment. It was not just at the Windmill where one key to a successful career was
to extend one’s skills, as June Don Murray, a dancer from a Scottish show business family
complained: “Sometimes it makes us cross when people refer to us as being in the chorus....
We were ‘dancers’... we had to be prepared to work in comedy sketches, playing little old
ladies, sing in a choir. I was even once fired from a cannon in a magic show” (Don Murray
1997, 139).
Tiller Girls, though celebrated for their kick lines, might also need to perform in a variety
of techniques, including tap, semi-ballet, aerial ballet, and crinoline numbers (Parker and
Parker 1975, 110; Holland and Bishop 2014, 234). An example comes from the line of John
Tiller Girls who performed in the “Crazy Gang”2 revue These Foolish Kings, which premiered
twice-nightly at the Victoria Palace Theatre, London, in December 1956. In two acts they
performed their own routines, choreographed by Barbara Aitken, one of the Tiller directors
since the 1940s, but in others they were under the direction of the show’s overall choreog-
raphers, Lionel Blair and Colette Brosset, appearing as pawns in a chess game, Portuguese
village girls, “Visitors from the Deep” in a Riviera scene, and gymnasts. The famous Tiller
choreography was a formalized display of precision: high kicks on the spot and moving into
different directions and formations, circle kicks, low scissor kicks, and step combinations of
bent, straight, low, and high legs. They might finish exiting in a kick line or with a kick and
kneel facing the audience. This choreography, impressive as it was for audiences, was set in
stone. Working with up and coming new choreographers in charge of the big shows, such
as Blair (himself previously a dancer at the Windmill), helped to stretch the dancers with
new styles (Robinson 2014, 204). This highlights an endemic issue for British dancers of this
period—how to acquire the style and polish of American choreography as exemplified in the
musicals that had exploded onto the London scene since Oklahoma! in 1947.
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Larraine Nicholas
As non-verbal performers, variety dancers had many opportunities to work abroad, whether
in one of the regular chorus lines such as the Tillers or De Vere dancers or on other contracts.
The 1920s and 1930s movement of dancers across the English Channel had resumed post-
World War II. The dancers at the Folies Bergère in Paris (as opposed to topless showgirls) were
“generally English,” according to its director Paul Derval (1955, 26). Despite the good things
provided by comradeship, foreign travel, and the occasional perks of a brush with a glamorous
lifestyle, it would be wrong to pretend that the variety life was easy for a young woman. Apart
from the normal issues of bad digs, poor food, long hours, and little recognition, they could
often be seen as easy prey for womanizing top-billing artists: Crazy Gang shows were notori-
ous in this respect (Vernon 1988, 129), even though managements such as the Windmill and
the Tillers were careful to project a decorous image for their female performers.
Hallmarks of variety: Personality, participation, skill, novelty

“[T]wo Hours with pretty, handsome, graceful, smiling people doing amazing things....”
This is how the comedian Roy Hudd summed up the value his grandmother attached to her
weekly visits to see variety bills (quoted by Double 2012, 96). This quotation illustrates Oliver
Double’s analysis of the essential characteristics of variety entertainment—personality, par-
ticipation, skill, and novelty. Although he focused largely on the top-billing artists—singers,
comedians, and specialty acts—this categorization should also be applied to variety dancers.
Van Damm valued personality above all in the making of Windmill Girls, but what was
that? Comedians and singers had to develop an identifiable persona that separated them from
their competitors and would endear them to audiences. This would be true for a variety
dancer creating her own act, but for most ensemble dancers, the notion of personality was
much more about projecting a confident identity tied up with notions of glamor and femi-
nine sex appeal. The trajectory of variety dance costuming during the twentieth century was
to allow more of the body to be revealed, a process that was assiduously opposed by morality
campaigners, local Watch Committees, and the Lord Chamberlain’s Office (although the
LCO had jurisdiction over very few variety venues, the Windmill being one). Between the
1930s and the 1960s, leotards were cut higher to reveal more leg; briefs or skirts might sit on
the hips, exposing the navel; within limits, nudes were no longer expected to ‘fake it’ with
flesh colored body tights; necklines plunged ever lower; and the ‘topless’ performer began
to be tolerated. Unlike many top-billing artists, dancers did not break through the fourth
wall to speak directly to audience members or to intrude into audience space, as they might
in cabaret. In this sense their participation with the audience was different from the front-
cloth solo act, their unattainable status preserved behind the footlights. This tension between
availability and non-availability was part of the variety dancers’ appeal, and yet their outgo-
ing warmth was expected to create a bond with the audience: They must be the “pretty...
smiling people” of Hudd’s appraisal.
Unlike acrobats, variety dancers had to wear their skills quite lightly to show that their
tapping, turning, elevation, and synchronized routines sat naturally in their bodies, to be
seen as “graceful... people,” unless a skill was deliberately drawn attention to, for example
by a particularly accelerated delivery. The mathematical precision and absolute coordination
of the Tiller Girls is a case where the dancers’ skills were made obvious, the more danc-
ers in the line—sixteen, twenty, or twenty-five—the more astounding their skill appeared
(Illustration 18.2). Some dance acts, though, managed to bridge the divide between the
amazing skills of the acrobat and the grace of the dancer, for example in aerial ballets or adagio
acts. In adagio it was usual for the female dancer to be thrown around by the men in the team.
268
Illustration 18.2 The power of synchronization. The Tiller Girls in the 1960s. (© Victoria and Albert
Museum, London.)
The most famous of these, the Ganjou Brothers and Juanita, consisted of three men, mov-
ing with a musically synchronized precision often described as “balletic,” throwing a young
woman around the stage, while she maintained the grace and outward poise of a dancer
despite the danger she was in (Wilmut 1995, 92–94).
A character-driven version of this is the apache, a colloquial term for Parisian street gangs
of the early twentieth century; the dance version could be a nasty representation of the rela-
tionship between women and thugs, with fights, knives, and guns.3 This specialty number
sometimes appeared in a Parisian scene at the Windmill. One prominent act, Yvonne Michel
and Erik, billed as “The Modernistic Apache Dancers,” worked in variety and cabaret in
the 1950s and 1960s, both in Britain and abroad, with some appreciation of their apparent
authenticity (she was French). “British Apache dancers are inclined to have a rather refined
outlook, but this pair present their act in true Gaelic fashion—with no punches pulled”
(quoted in advertisement, The Stage, April 17, 1959, 2).
No act could succeed in being regularly booked unless it could stand out from oth-
ers, hence the appeal of specialty dances such as adagio and apache. Novelty was a public
draw. In its own time, the Fan Dance and the static nudes had been the novelties of the
moment, while later Windmill producers were kept busy inventing novel new settings
for them. In spectacular shows such as at the London Palladium, dancers could have
multiple costume changes for no other reason than to feast the eyes of the audience with
each glittering ensemble. As the economic problems affecting provincial theater gathered
pace in the 1950s, nude shows became one of the novelties intended to bring in new
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Larraine Nicholas
audiences, which of necessity excluded the family audiences to which variety had tradi-
tionally catered. Mainly associated with the impresario Paul Raymond, these productions
went way beyond what the Windmill had shown, bending all the rules of static nudes
and introducing striptease (Wilmut 1995, 215). Now clearly behind the times of what was
becoming tolerated, the Windmill closed in 1964.
From its beginning, television co-opted variety acts, including dancers, into its ‘light
entertainment’ scheduling.4 By the 1960s, with societal values leaning toward youth and
individuality, television promoted dancers with distinct personalities who would fill
the television screen with high-octane dancing to music the youth market appreciated.
One of the new choreographers was Dougie Squires, from the television show Cool for
Cats, who advocated for “More robust gutsy dancing... something on the American pat-
tern” (“Dougie ‘Cool for Cats’ Squires tells...” 1961). What came about was a new alli-
ance between television, stage, and the variety dancer. Dance groups made for television
such as Squires’ groups Young Generation and Second Generation led the way in a new
style that fitted the times. As one critic noted, “[W]ith [Young Generation’s] enthusiasm
and new look—all the girls dressed differently, a wild, free feel about their routine—it
was a pleasant surprise for the viewer satiated with rows of entirely similar long-legged
Palladium Girls” (Purser 1968). An era came to an end when, in 1974, the Tillers were
replaced on the flagship television show Sunday Night at the London Palladium by Second
Generation. In the age of television, the instant recognition from popular shows such as
this generated the demand for their bookings on the live stage shows that persisted—
summer shows, pantomimes, and stage spectaculars. In this respect, television was able to
pay back the debt it owed to the live stage.
Conclusion
The period examined in this chapter, broadly the Britain of post-World War II until the
1960s, was one of deep, systemic change, both in society and the entertainment industry.
It saw the last flourish of weekly variety touring. From the 1960s, television was becom-
ing the chief platform for variety entertainment, promoting new dance styles, youth, and
individuality rather than undifferentiated glamor. Troupes such as the Windmill Girls and
Tiller Girls, with roots pre-World War II, did not translate easily into the new aesthetics.
Theater closures beginning in the mid-1950s (Double 2012, 69–72) significantly reduced
live variety work, but the wider genre of theatrical variety in revues, pantomimes, and
summer shows proved to be robust, surviving in fewer venues but always with the contri-
bution of its female dancers.
The theme of this chapter has been to reconsider the contribution of female dancers
as variety artists and give them credit in the success of variety theater. They provided the
dynamic contrasts, energy, and sensuality that drew audiences into the enjoyment of sheer
entertainment. They were called upon to demonstrate a range of dance genres and styles
that supported the fanciful stagings separating entertainment from everyday life for audi-
ences. Dancers began careers as children or young adults from diverse backgrounds taking
advantage of local circumstances to develop their professional skills and their economic
prospects. Despite being circumscribed by cultural constructions such as ‘glamor’ and
male-dominated managements, they took the opportunities for flexible careers including
featured roles and autonomous specialties. It is appropriate to reconsider the ‘chorus girl’
label as not adequately capturing the labor, professionalism, and tenacity needed to be a
successful variety dancer.
270
Notes
1 I have conducted ten lengthy recorded interviews with Windmill dancers from the period
1940s–1960s as part of a project entitled “The Professional Lives of Dancers at the Windmill
Theatre,” which will eventually be deposited with the Theatre Collection of the Victoria and
Albert Museum. Other oral history recordings can be accessed via the catalogue of the British
Library.
2 The Crazy Gang was a generic name for shows featuring the three comedy double acts: Bud
Flanagan and Chesney Allen; Jimmy Nervo and Teddy Knox; and Charlie Naughton and Jimmy
Gold. By the time of this production, Allen had retired and they were joined by “Monsewer” Eddie
Grey. After starting off at the London Palladium in the 1930s, they moved to the Victoria Palace
from 1947 to 1962.
3 Information and images of apache dancers from the early twentieth century can be accessed at:
http://www.streetswing.com/histmain/z3aposh.htm
4 The public service British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) had only one channel until BBC2 was
opened in 1964. A commercial television channel (with advertisements) was established in 1955.
References
Adair, Christy. 1992. Women and Dance: Sylphs and Sirens. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Press.
British Pathé. 1947. Windmill Girls at Seaside. Film ID: 1341.30. https://www.britishpathe.com
Carter, Alexandra. 2005. Dance and Dancers in the Victorian and Edwardian Music Hall Ballet. Aldershot, UK:
Ashgate.
Derval, Paul. 1955. The Folies Bergère.Translated by Lucienne Hill. London: Methuen and Co. [Les Editions
de Paris, 1954].
Dodds, Sherril. 1997. “Dance and Erotica: The Construction of the Female Stripper.” In Dance in the City,
edited by Helen Thomas, 218–233. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2011. Dancing on the Canon: Embodiments of Value in Popular Dance. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Don Murray, June. 1997. “Following Family Footsteps.” In Those Variety Days: Memories of Scottish Variety
Theatre, edited by Frank Bruce, Archie Foley, and George Gillespie, 126–39. Edinburgh, UK: Scottish
Music Hall Society.
Double, Oliver. 2012. Britain Had Talent: A History of Variety Theatre. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
“Dougie ‘Cool for Cats’ Squires tells...” 1961. The Stage and Television News, March 30, 2011.
Elswit, Kate. 2009. “Accessing Unison in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility.” Art Journal 68 (2):
50–61.
Franko, Mark. 2002. The Work of Dance: Labor, Movement, and Identity in the 1930s. Middletown, CT:
Gibbons Oehlers, Adrienne. 2018. “The Radio City Rockettes and the Making of a Sisterhood.” Studies in
Musical Theatre 12 (3): 355–365.
Hanna, Judith Lynne. 2010. “Dance and Sexuality: Many Moves.” The Journal of Sex Research 47 (2/3):
212–241.
Holland, Irene, with Heather Bishop. 2014. Tales of a Tiller Girl: My True Story of Dancing in Wartime London.
London: Harper Element.
Mort, Frank. 2007. “Striptease:The Erotic Female Body and Live Sexual Entertainment in Mid-Twentieth-
Century London.” Social History 32 (1): 27–53.
Millard Shapiro, Jill, ed. 2014. Remembering Revudeville: A Souvenir of the Windmill Theatre 1932–1964.
London: Obscuriosity Press.
Nicholson, Steve. 2005. The Censorship of British Drama 1900–1968, Vol. 2, 1933–1952. Exeter, UK:
University of Exeter Press.
Parker, Derek, and Julia Parker. 1975. The Natural History of the Chorus Girl. Newton Abbott, UK: David
and Charles.
Pilton, Patrick. 1976. Every Night at the London Palladium. London: Robson Books.
Press information summaries.Windmill Theatre Press and Marketing Material. 1947–1962,THM 422/2/1,
Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Purser, Ann. 1968. “Generation Hit of a Good Bill.” The Stage and Television News, August 15, 34.
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Robinson, Fay. 2014. My Sixteen Sisters: Dancing with the Stars: My Life as a Tiller Girl. Birkenhead, UK:
Appin Press.
Revudeville 288. 1957. Windmill Theatre Archive,V&A Museum, THM 257, Box 15.
Smith, Albert. 1847. The Natural History of the Ballet Girl. London: D. Bogue [facsimile 1996. London: Dance
Books].
Van Damm,Vivian. 1952. Tonight and Every Night. London: Stanley Paul and Co.
Vernon, Doremy. 1988. Tiller’s Girls. London: Robson Books.
Vicinus, Martha. 1979. “‘Happy Times... If You Can Stand It’: Women Entertainers during the Interwar
Years in England.” Theatre Journal 31 (3): 357–369.
Wilmut, Roger. 1995. Kindly Leave the Stage! The Story of Variety, 1919–1960. London: Methuen.
“Windmill Girl Planned Single Act in Secret.” 1954. The Stage, November 11, 5.
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19
SELLING AND GIVING DANCE
Susan Leigh Foster
Introduction
Anthropological study of the concept of the gift extends back more than 100 years; however,
recently, and in response to new global alignments of neo-liberal and capitalist values, there
has been a renewed interest in the gift on the part of economists as well as anthropologists
who find potential in this construct as an alternative to the capitalist commodity form of eco-
nomic exchange. Concomitant with these inquiries, the very nature of what is produced in
the global marketplace has shifted: The glut of material objects that are manufactured for sale
has now been surpassed by the large number of immaterial services such as advertising, tech-
nical support, financial, health, and personal assistance services and more that are now con-
ceptualized as commodities for sale, and this invites a reconsideration of dance as a form of
labor that can produce commodities or gifts. How might dance be theorized and investigated
in relation to these two intertwined arenas of research? What is a dance commodity in con-
trast to a dance gift? This chapter attempts to open up new dialog around dance as a form of
cultural, political, and economic exchange through a consideration of its potential for being
sold or given. Commodity and gift forms of exchange in dance will be considered in relation
to a single example, the Netflix series The Get Down (2016).
The commodity–gift spectrum
In their most stark and oppositional conceptions, commodities are objects or services gener-
ated for economic profit whereas gifts are objects or services created in order to be received
and then reciprocated (Marx 1977; Mauss 1990). Commodities economize on the raw mate-
rials and techniques of their fabrication in order to deliver a desirable product that can be
sold in the marketplace for more than the cost of its making (Frow 1997). Gifts entail a
consideration of the receivers and their circumstances with the goal of incurring a debt that
creates a bond between giver and receiver (Godelier 1999). Commodity exchange thus estab-
lishes relationships between objects in terms of their relative price, whereas gift exchange
constructs relationships between people (Gregory 1982; Goddard 2000). Within commodity
exchange, individuals are conceptualized as equal within the moment of the transaction, and
they are also perceived as autonomous and isolated individuals who together compose the
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social. Within gift exchange, however, it is not the autonomy of individuals that is empha-
sized but, rather, their mutual need for and connections to one another (Weiner 1992).
Teachers can sell or give facility at dancing to their students; choreographers can sell or give
dances to dancers; dancers can sell or give the performance of dance to the audience. In order
to sell dance or facility at dancing, the dance movement must be standardized and also spec-
tacularized. Standardizing the vocabulary and criteria of evaluation regarding high quality
dancing enables teachers, choreographers, and dancers to fabricate and transmit dance quickly
and efficiently. However, in order to be sold for profit, dancing must not only be economical
to produce, it must also be rendered desirable and appealing. This spectacularization of dance
is achieved by pushing dancing to the edge of physical capacity; moving faster, balancing
for longer, jumping higher, turning more times, and extending the body beyond what was
thought possible. Alternatively, dance movement can be embedded with a special mystery or
allure, or an inflated degree of sexual display, rendering it foreign and exotic, or voluptuous
and sybaritic, or all of these. Throughout, the effort that dance requires is strategically moni-
tored and then pumped through the body so as to produce the maximum targeted effect.
Gifts, in contrast, are given, and they are also received and then reciprocated. They may
be perceived as useful, as thoughtful or generous acts, or as enhancing prestige, yet the func-
tion of their exchange is to establish a condition of social indebtedness. Although there is
debate over the necessity of reciprocation, scholars in multiple fields generally concur that
gifts create debts that need to be repaid (Titmuss 1970; Derrida 1992; Testart 1998).1 Givers of
gifts improve their status through their ability and willingness to give, and receivers of gifts
reestablish equality or sometimes reverse the hierarchy initially created by the giver once that
gift is reciprocated. No single abstract system of measurement, such as money, governs what
or how gifts are exchanged (Karatani 2014).
Within commodity exchange not only are individuals conceptualized as equal within the
moment of the transaction, they are also perceived as autonomous and isolated individuals who
together compose the social. Within gift exchange, it is not the autonomy of individuals that is
emphasized but, rather, their mutual need for and connections to one another. The exchange
of commodities is driven by the desire to accumulate wealth, whereas the exchange of gifts
incurs the obligation to give things away. Commodity exchange enables individuals to move
more freely and without the constraints of familial, social, or religious obligations, whereas
gift exchange embeds itself within local and often long-standing affiliations (Karatani 2014).
As illuminating as these contrasts are between gift and commodity exchange, it is crucial to
note that they almost never operate in isolation from one another. Furthermore, as Appadurai
(1988) has argued, any given thing can circulate through either system and often does at differ-
ent moments in its social life (Miller 1995; Osteen 2002; Sykes 2005; Robbins 2009).2 The same
object might function as tribute one minute and insult the next; it might morph from cherished
and precious to utilitarian and ordinary. Even money can be repurposed to serve not as the
standard measure of all things’ equivalence in commodity exchange but instead as a defining ele-
ment within gift exchange. Also, specific traditions and occasions for a system of exchange can
erode or collapse or even transform from one kind of exchange to another (Keane 2001; Tsing
2013, 2015).3 It is precisely this kind of transformation that The Get Down depicts so vividly.
Breaking down “The Get Down”

As dazzling and over-the-top as any of Baz Luhrmann’s productions and chock-full of danc-
ing, The Get Down (2016) premiered as a Netflix series in episodes, issued in two parts.
It chronicled the emergence of hip hop and breakdancing in the Bronx. Evocative panning
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Selling and giving dance
shots of the inner city’s urban decay, the product of race-based marginalization and also cor-
porate greed, graft, and corruption, focus on the visual rhythms of graffiti-encrusted subway
cars passing above street-corner hustle. A duo, composed of a wordsmith whose rhymes pro-
claim the emergence of rap in the late 1970s and a DJ, modeled after Grandmaster Flash, who
pioneered in the scratching and mixing of vinyl records, along with their friends form one
of the first cohesive break dance crews, eventually uniting with other gangs to forge a cross-
Bronx coalition of the disenfranchized (Light 2016). Meanwhile, the wordsmith’s girlfriend,
whose chaste, pure, and powerful voice has been the pride and joy of her father’s church,
breaks into the world of disco where, in defiance of her father’s wishes, she becomes a ris-
ing star. The African-Latino wordsmith Ezekial (Zeke) and his “butterscotch queen” singer
Mylene, act out an updated West Side Story. Unlike West Side Story, however, or its antecedent
Romeo and Juliet, The Get Down’s narrative does not end in tragedy; instead, the “cut-throat”
business attitude of Netflix prompted a decision to terminate the show at the end of Season 1
(Desta 2017). At the end of that single season, Zeke and Mylene, each in a different way,
have become personifications of the struggle between gift- and commodity-based exchange.
What follows is not an evaluation of The Get Down’s narrative, with its complex race and
class-based tensions, or the sociological or psychological make-up of the characters. Nor does
it conduct a comparison with other versions of the narrative such as Rennie Harris’ Rome
and Jewels (2000), or contextualize the series within Luhrmann’s other directorial work.4 I
will not assess The Get Down’s historical veracity, the degrees to which it romanticizes and
hyperbolizes inner-city life in 1978 and 1979, the two years during which the story is set.
Nor will I analyze the music and the ingenious new techniques for producing it invented by
the period’s pioneering DJs. Instead, I will focus on the dancing featured throughout The Get
Down as a form of embodied struggle between commodity and gift forms of exchange.
The pilot episode of The Get Down opens with a 1996 concert in which Zeke, by then
a highly successful rap artist, details his early years in the Bronx. As thousands of audience
members listen intently, he paces and gestures as his back-up singers sway in sync. His pow-
erful message about racial prejudice is delivered primarily through his lyrics, illustrated for
Netflix viewers by clips of his childhood that preview the story that will unfold over the next
ten episodes. Two extended scenes of dancing within this first episode expand on the singer’s
lyrics and lay out many of the tensions that will drive the rest of the series. The first takes
place in a disco club and includes the arrival of its star DJ, the selling of copious quantities
of cocaine, and a dance contest that ends when a rival gang bursts into the club shooting as
they go. The second takes place in an abandoned building where hundreds of young people
are jiving to another DJ’s new way of generating the music—scratching—while a proto-rap
rhymer concocts simple couplets with many opportunities for call and response from the
dancing audience.
In the beginning of the disco scene, some dancers seem to be improvising as idiosyncratic
individuals, but with the arrival of the DJ the entire room breaks into a line-danced routine.
Difficult although probably not impossible to pick up on the spot, the phrase of moves is
complex enough that most dancers would need to have learned the phrases and practiced
them in preparation for the evening’s festivities. Both Zeke and Mylene are in the club, she
to advance her career by slipping a cassette of her singing to the DJ, and he to protect her
and declare his love. When her favorite song comes on, they break into a partnered hustle
routine featuring lots of dips, turns, and opportunities for her to display her sensuous body
and for him to exert a quiet, manly control over her. Each has been practicing their dancing
earlier in the day, Mylene in order to enhance her potential as a rising disco star, and Zeke in
order to dance with her. Then the club owner’s son, nicknamed Cadillac, who has his eyes
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Susan Leigh Foster
on Mylene, commands center stage with a highly sexualized, macho routine, designed to
impress with its virtuoso command of complex rhythmic sequences, tight control over the
entire body, and forceful dynamism. Isolating legs, pelvis or shoulders, he pumps different
parts of his body into space, halting them abruptly in order to hit a series of powerful poses.
Sequestering Mylene, he begins to partner her, as she, in an effort to attract the DJ’s gaze,
ramps up the sexual display within her dancing. The escalating tensions among Cadillac,
Zeke, DJ, and Mylene are interrupted by a spray of gunfire that kills the DJ and prompts
everyone to run for their lives.
A short time later, Zeke and his buddies are taken by their favorite graffiti artist and hero,
Shaolin Fantastic (Grandmaster Flash), to the “the flyest secret underground party in the
entire Bronx,” known as the Get Down. Here Zeke and his friends witness the innovative
double turn-table technique of generating the music known as scratching, and they begin to
absorb a new defiant energy that is empowering and uniting the crowd. Pulsating to the beat
the dancers explore, not the smooth, curvaceous horizontality of disco, but a jagged pump-
ing verticality. A proto-rapper shouts out rhymed couplets, setting up a call and response
interaction with the crowd. Fired up by a proto-rapper whose couplets he can beat with his
quick-witted and complex rhymes, Zeke seizes the microphone, while Shaolin commands
the crowd’s attention with his breathtaking breakdance solo. Obliterating the crowd’s earlier
verticality and in utter defiance of gravity, Shaolin launches himself onto the floor, alternat-
ing rapidly between hands and feet as he fires off rhythms, mimics martial arts postures and
phrases, and spins on his shoulders. Other soloists follow, citing Shaolin as they build their
own dialog with the music, parodying or amplifying others as they promote their own art-
istry. The crowd in its circular formation around each soloist, both contains and builds the
energy, reflecting it back onto the soloist while also circulating it around the circle.
These two scenes capture disco at the height of its popularity and hip hop in its infancy as
two forms rubbing against one another within the urban decay created by rampant neglect
and disregard coming from federal, state, and local agencies. As portrayed in The Get Down,
disco’s pathways to upward mobility and profit are already clearly established, with the
machinery of its clubs, drugs, fashions, and recording industry fully elaborated, and the
criteria for evaluating expertise at composing, singing, dancing, and spinning the records all
well-articulated. Its underground alternative is just learning to survive, powered by imagina-
tive artistry, political critique, and vacillation between disillusion and rage. Within the social
and business structures of disco, alliances are constructed, favors paid back, memories of past
transactions retained, and yet, individuals operate as independently motivated autonomous
agents whose purpose in allying themselves with others is individual advancement. Music
and club industries, long-established and well-oiled machines, are thriving even if many of
their workers hustle continuously for their livelihood. Hip hop, in contrast, is being forged
within communities experiencing a more urgent precarity. The crews, functioning in the
capacity of gangs, provide a much needed social order for unemployed youth whose options
for growth and development are very limited. Exacting loyalty and marking out specific
territory as their own, the crews trade within and between themselves, exchanging favors,
goods, and new styles and ideas that create multiple forms of interdependency. Breakdancing
develops as one of many forms through which this social structure is cultivated and rein-
forced. The dancers improvise moves that, once given to one another, are subsequently
reciprocated by the responsive moves of other dancers.
Both worlds are controlled by men. Disco elevates women to superstar status as highly
sexualized divas who ramp up excitement or as ornamentation to be swung and slung around
on the dance floor. The recording industry in all its iterations is male dominated, and one of
276
The Get Down’s most fascinating characters, the shrewd female club owner who manages a
drug empire and can smell in hip hop the next hot item headed for commercial success, is an
anomaly. Hip hop has room for women on the dance floor but not as soloists either on the
floor or onstage. Its crotch grabs and faux masturbation moments brag of a masculinity that
is illusive, given the unemployment rates and general sense of desperation felt throughout the
borough. Women function in an entirely separate economy, as caregivers and domestic ser-
vice providers, one that Mylene is desperate to exit, even if she must contend with becoming
the commodity through which profit is garnered within the disco economy.
As Mylene is spun around the dance floor by her competing male partners, the choreogra-
phy in which all the dancers are engaged exemplifies disco’s social and economic structures.
All the dancers are familiar with the sequences of moves that form their social network, and
together they participate in the line or couple dances that construct the circuitry through
which exchange among them takes place. In their participation, they function as independent
agents, literally and figuratively hustling for a better position. Mylene’s sensational attractive-
ness, partially the product of her virginal naïveté, distinguishes her as the newest, hottest
and, therefore, most profit-generating product on the floor. As she advances up the capitalist
food-chain, she will be asked many times to trade this attractiveness in the form of sexual
favors for greater visibility and fame.
Dancing at the Get Down in the scene that follows embodies a completely different soci-
ality and form of exchange. Collected in a circle, the dancers reinforce a sense of bonding
within the group. Known as the “cypher,” this circle concretizes connectedness by channel-
ing energy simultaneously around the circle and into the center. Dancers in the middle throw
down move after move in an effort to beat one another. While these exchanges create hier-
archies of social and artistic prestige, they also build the sense of a larger community of like-
minded members who share an apprehension of their social conditions. The dancers seem
to take inspiration from each other’s ability to expose and diagnose their social problems
and to display the maneuverability necessary to survive them. In contrast to disco’s familiar
sequences, improvisation permeates these exchanges, influencing at every level how danc-
ers formulate and sequence moves and respond to one another and to the music. Through
these various forms of call and response, dancers merge as mutually dependent and defining.
Rather than jockeying for better access or positioning, they work collectively to forge and
reaffirm community.
As further indication of the different organizations of sociality being danced out, the
two scenes embody distinctive conceptions of expertise and virtuosity. Both are organized
around impressing viewers, yet they each display different skills and investments. Mastery
in disco is evident in command over the standardized routine, with its specific steps and
sequences, and the smooth and sensuous execution of phrases leading up to the glamorous
or macho pose. Proficiency in break dancing manifests as quick-witted responsiveness to
another dancer or the music and innovative use of parts of the body punctuated by poses
that display critique, alliance, and defiance. When Cadillac dances, he subdues others’ bodies
with his overpowering bravado, whereas Shaolin invites and incites others to segue into the
center after him. Disco’s virtuosity is based in levels of skill and competence at the execution
of designated routines, whereas break dancing’s notion of expertise emerges from and only
has meaning within any given interactive session of dancing as the facility at devising move-
ment appropriate to that moment.
Disco and break dancing are thus situated within The Get Down as connected very dif-
ferently to the surroundings in which they are performed. The club that Mylene visits is
a rougher, grittier version of disco clubs found in Manhattan or elsewhere, but it shares
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with the other clubs the same structural elements, dance moves, and protocols for behavior.
The bouncer at the door screens for the wealthiest and most attractive patrons; drinks and
drugs circulate along with glances, smiles, and postures suggesting availability and desire, all
with the goal of amusement, entertainment, and possibly new social and/or sexual connec-
tions. In contrast, the Get Down that Zeke and crew visit is entirely ad hoc. It moves from
one abandoned building to another on different nights, devising the forms of interaction and
their sequencing as the evening unfolds. Highly responsive to the hood and its politics, the
rhythms performed by DJs and dancers, and wordsmiths’ lyrics all take on an urgency fueled
by the inequities that surround them.
As The Get Down develops, the consequences of Mylene’s and Zeke’s choices to move
into the worlds of disco and hip hop become increasingly clear. Mylene forsakes the close-
knit community of the church where she is renowned, respected, and praised because of the
spiritual uplift that her voice gives to the congregation each week. The commodification of
that voice entails the loss of community and a concomitant lack of trust in the authenticity of
relationships. Repeatedly, she must maneuver around sexual advances and claims of owner-
ship over her, insisting that her two female friends be hired as her backup singers in order to
preserve some female solidarity as her dresses become skimpier and her dance moves slinkier.
Zeke, whose talent as a poet is noticed by his teacher at school, is being groomed by a white
elite where he functions as token of their seemingly progressive values, yet he remains loyal
to his crew, now named the Get Down Brothers, and their uncertain future.
By the beginning of the second set of episodes, set in 1979, the Get Down Brothers are
performing in their own club, albeit financed by a cocaine trade conducted in the backroom.
They have devised a wildly popular, cohesive act whose frontal presentation appeals to the
grooving audience in front of the stage. Tightly choreographed and well-rehearsed, the per-
formance features designated roles for each of the four dancer/singers, with sections of uni-
son, interspersed with signature solos. The movements have become tamer and more legible,
although they continue to exude a rough and raw edginess that contrasts with disco’s suave
sophistication. Across town, Mylene is starring on a TV show whose back up dancers do
not look noticeably different from the performance the brothers have just delivered. She has
been catapulted to fame by the “fairies,” as her agent calls them, when her first recorded song
is discovered by a gay DJ whose voguing runway dancers adore the new genre “gospel-disco”
that she has devised. As producers and agent ascertain just what kind of star power they have
in Mylene, her pastor father also comes to realize the potential goldmine living in his home.
He turns the church, formerly an institution surviving through the donation system of its
congregation, into the vehicle through which to profit from his daughter’s ascending fame.
By the conclusion of the series, Mylene is flying off to Hollywood to make a feature film,
liberated from her family and its traditional gender roles, but accompanied by the sexism and
greed she will continue to face. At least she has her two stalwart backup singers in tow. Zeke
is on his way to Yale. With Season Two cancelled it is unclear how he is able to continue to
pursue his career as a rap artist, but the clips of the 1996 performance that introduce many
of the episodes and conclude the series feature him as a major rap artist. It is in this very
moment of the mid-1990s that hip hop’s immense growth and popularity have thrown the
form into aesthetic and political crisis. Many of its most ardent fans find that it has become
“watered-down,” “sold-out,” and “over,” or even “Elvicized” (Perry 2004, 191–192; Rose
2008). The perceived vibrancy of the form seems to dry up, and what remains is a shal-
low, bling-encrusted, violence-ridden pretense. Hip hop’s complexity, its diverse voices, and
many forms of political critique, has efficiently modulated into a hyper-sexualized, homo-
phobic, and cliché-ridden representation of black ghetto experience. This change, mediated
278
by recording, film, and television industries, results in a much more standardized presenta-
tion of stunt-oriented movement, organized frontally, and without opportunities for call and
response. Dancers no longer invent and give one another new moves as they had 15 years
earlier. It makes sense, then, that Zeke’s rap recounts hip hop’s vibrant beginnings, nostalgi-
cally gesturing toward a brotherhood that has now vanished.
In its early years break dancing summoned group members into a collective, mutually
defining relationship, drawing upon and also fueling the communal energy of their danc-
ing through improvisation and the cypher, and also fusing with its local geographical and
political environs. In all these ways it functioned as a form of gift exchange. The Get Down
depicts this early period and also the beginnings of its transformation into the highly prof-
itable commodity it is to become. Even by the beginning of the second part, the young
artists have begun to rely on more standardized routines and flashy group poses that signal
the transformation of breakdance into commodity. The hip hop crews’ social choreography
offers support and brotherhood to a community under duress; however, it does not include
any opportunities for Mylene, whose only pathway out of the community is commoditiza-
tion, and she willingly opts for the alienation of sexual objectification in order to become a
free agent, detached from the stifling constraints of home and church.
Alienated and unalienated dancing

When a commodity is produced, the labor that went into its making has been bought, a
transaction that severs the ties between the laborers and what they have created. As Marx
argues, the actual effort that went into its making creates a trace of itself that congeals in the
form of the object that it produces; however, because that labor was already exchanged for
money and because the object then enters the capitalist marketplace, it loses all connection
to the labor through which it was created (Marx 1977, 148). On the one hand, this helps to
establish the pretense of equality between sellers and buyers of commodities in the market-
place precisely because no personal connection to the object on the part of its maker remains,
and on the other, it creates the conditions within which the maker becomes alienated from
what is being made. Laborers may derive satisfaction from the quality of their work, but
because their involvement is purchased for a price, any other relationship to what is made is
foreclosed, and therefore they become unmoored from one another as individuated agents
whose primary form of social interaction is competition (McLellan 1969).
When a gift, which can be either bought, inherited, or made, is created, the choice-
making that goes into that selection establishes a very different kind of relationship between
giver and object as well as giver and receiver. The giver often considers carefully the qualities
of the object and its appropriateness as gift for the recipient, based again, on a consideration
of who that person is. These calculations may be required and formulaic as stipulated in
codes of religious devotion, polite comportment, or class differentiation and obligation, and
the giver may feel compelled to undertake them, but they do not lead to a condition of alien-
ation. Instead, they further affirm and even deepen that individual’s connection to the social
(Hyde 1983, 47). Commodity exchange thus estranges makers from what is made, whereas
gift exchange creates anew a connection between them.
One difference, of course, between an object and a dance is their relative tangibility.
Indeed, many scholars have argued persuasively that it is precisely dance’s capacity not to be
a thing that is its most central and defining feature (Phelan 1993; Lepecki 2016). Dancing
happens and, in the very moment of its occurrence, vanishes. Its impermanence and ephem-
erality are its most striking attributes. Dancing literally dissolves as it is being performed and
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Susan Leigh Foster
watched and, as such, stands in strong contrast to the world of things as a vivid exemplar of
the many pursuits and pastimes that cannot be quantified or calculated.
As powerful and generative as these insights are into dance’s instability and impermanence,
they do not account for many aspects of dance that are equally prominent. It is possible, for
example, to conceptualize dancing as an event that occurs in time, having both a beginning
and an ending, and also to see dance as consisting of bodily movement that articulates form,
enunciates an impulse or intention, or evidences adherence to certain principles of organiza-
tion that are revealed as the dancing unfolds. Many practices that take place within and as
part of the world of dance testify to this potential for dance to evince substantiality, even if
only for an instant: People teach each other dances, and they also teach each other how to
dance; dances can be and are notated, replicated, reconstructed and reworked; dances are
made and people learn how to compose them; and people devote a certain amount of time
and attention to watching dance. In participating in any of these practices, skills and facility
are increased and knowledge about dance is acquired. Undoubtedly, some aspects of dance
disappear during these acts of transmission given that what is imparted or acquired does
not and cannot maintain absolute consistency. The act of dancing nonetheless creates condi-
tions under which things are produced and exchanged, even if those things are ephemeral.
To consider dance as both substantive and ephemeral not only opens up the possibility
to examine how dance is exchanged but also what is entailed in organizing and completing
the exchange itself. Within commodity exchange these processes include the production and
also consumption phases of the exchange, and in gift exchange they encompass the acts of
giving, receiving, and reciprocating. What is particularly intriguing about dance, and what
makes dance quite distinct from the manufacture of tangible objects, is the potential to see
the act of creating the dance at the same time that we see the dance as something that is made
and presented. In other words, a dance is both the same as and separate from the person who
is dancing, and thus any given dance performance cannot conceal all of the labor that goes
into its performance. Nor can it entirely obscure the labor that went into composing the
dance and teaching the dancer how to dance. These prior acts of exchange generate traces
whose residue is evident in every moment of dancing along with whatever actions the dancer
undertakes to present the dance. Each moment of dancing embodies decisions that have been
made concerning the selection and sequencing of movement. It also demonstrates the culti-
vation of physicality that enables the dancer to perform. In addition, it manifests the dancer’s
act of interpreting and conveying the dance. Dance thus poses the question of whether and
under what conditions it is alienated.
Conclusion
At least in their early performances, The Get Down Brothers are giving their moves to one
another and to the audience, both as the creators and performers of those moves. Improvising
their actions, they nonetheless create legible traces that are registered and circulated through-
out the room. These moves are reciprocated through the responses offered by other dancers,
the DJ, and the wordsmith, creating a non-alienated transaction, yielding a sense of belong-
ing that permeates the room. The disco dancers, in contrast, are working to sell their danc-
ing in exchange for sex, drugs, and/or status. Performing standardized routines, they display
their vitality and prowess in order to advance as individual agents working the marketplace.
Even Mylene’s gestures are clichés of sexual invitation that she knows are a required part of
the job. Nonetheless, all the dancers might take pride in and remain unalienated from their
performances of the moves they are nonetheless selling. At the end of the series, Zeke, now as
280
a renowned rapper on the world stage, must refuse to perform the commodified moves that
have come to define hip hop. Instead, he preserves his unalienated relationship to a vanished
past by turning his back on the audience and walking solo into the darkness. Similarly,
Mylene sustains her unalienated relationship to singing, an action that fuses her to all she
holds dear. Each character, having been thrust into the center of commodity production,
struggles valiantly to maintain a connection to their art as gift.
Notes
1 This thesis of what a gift is rejects Derrida’s (1992) conclusions concerning the impossibility of the
gift because there should not be the expectation for reciprocation. It does, however, align with
Derrida in arguing that a considerable and flexible amount of time can pass before a gift might be
reciprocated.
2 This is a reference to Appadurai’s (1988) thesis regarding the social life of things in which he argues
that “the commodity situation in the social life of any ‘thing’ be defined as the situation in which its exchange-
ability (past, present, or future) for some other thing is its socially relevant feature” (13, italics in original).
For lucid argumentation of the inseparability of gifts and commodities, see Myers (2001).
3 For a particularly vivid example of the social life of an object, see Keane (2001) who describes a piece of
cloth’s changing status this way:“Note the rapid series of roles through which the piece of cloth moved: by
turn, it was a conventional obligation between affines, a figurative banner, a physical encumbrance tangled
in a tree, a token of regard meant to placate an irritated guest, a vehicle of insult, a metaphoric rag of pov-
erty, and finally a rejected gift” (70). See also Guyer (1995), who has shown that modes of valuation are
constantly being tinkered with, combined, and altered (387).
4 Harris’s production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet remade the story for a group of male dancers who
rapped the text and danced out the action using hip-hop vocabulary. For an excellent analysis of the
work, see Scott (2003).
References
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edited by Arjun Appadurai. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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of Chicago Press.
Desta, Yohana. 2017. “Cancelling The Get Down Proves Netflix Is Getting More Cutthroat.” Vanity
Fair, May 25. Accessed October 4, 2017. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/05/
netflix-the-get-down-canceled.
Frow, John. 1997. Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Goddard, Michael. 2000. “Of Cabbages and Kin: The Value of an Analytic Distinction Between Gifts and
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com/media/2016/08/grandmaster-flash-baz-luhrmann-get-down-netflix-series-turntablism-
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PART V
Dance and time

20
TRADITIONAL DANCE IN
URBAN SETTINGS
‘Snapshots’ of Greek dance traditions in Athens
Maria I. Koutsouba
Introduction
Greek traditional dance in southern European urban settings such as Athens is going through
a boom period. Different ‘snapshots’ of Greek traditional dance illustrate where dance is prac-
ticed formally and informally as this chapter explores questions such as the following: How
is traditional dance incorporated within this situation? What is distinct in the ‘snapshots’ that
makes Greek traditional dance fit comfortably in such contemporary settings? Do the dynamics
of traditional Greek dance regarding interaction and integration of the multifaceted and com-
plex layers of Greek identity, society, and culture emerge as significant, especially in offering
a privileged space to the people? Starting from an anthropological perspective of dance, this
chapter provides the opportunity to examine common phenomena, and the ‘snapshots’ emerge
as stories from the researcher’s eye through the lens of dance’s multiple literacies. Ethnographic
dance research at home reveals specifically new ways of using traditional dance in which the
forms are constantly revitalized. This research seems to be of interest considering the wider
sociopolitical and economic context of Greece since it is one of several countries that have faced
a severe global socioeconomic crisis since 2008 that continues to impact its people in 2019.
The stimulus for this chapter stems from personal experience in my native country,
Greece. Being Greek, living and working in Greece, and being involved with Greek tradi-
tional dance professionally and socially inform my observations made at Greek traditional
dance activities in Athens where dance is practiced formally and informally. Discussion of
dance activities or ‘snapshots’ illuminates Greek traditional dance and its relation to contem-
porary Greek culture and society. More specifically, this chapter examines a phenomenon of
urban (traditional) dance using anthropological/ethnochoreological approaches to the study
of dance. The content of these terms, anthropological/ethnochoreological, has changed over
time in the dance literature; however, I use them interchangeably in this chapter “like (two)
peas in a pod” (Koutsouba 2008, 227).
At the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, dance literature regarding the study of
traditional dance in its cultural context concerned anthropological and choreological approaches
(Koutsouba 2008).The former characterized the US tradition of dance research that focused mainly
on the sociocultural dimensions of dance—its context. The latter characterized the European and
particularly the eastern European tradition of dance research that focused primarily on the form of
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the dance—its text.The approach influenced by John Blacking, an anthropologist who established

a British-based school of dance research, often used the term ethnochoreology as synonymous
with the anthropology of dance—perceived as a combined study of dance in terms of movement
analysis and cultural context (Grau 1993). Perceiving the combined study of dance as more holistic,
the anthropological or ethnochoreological approach has informed my research.
After almost a century of research on both sides of the Atlantic and with its own the-
ory, principles, and analytical methods introduced by theorists such as Rudolf von Laban,
researchers have developed dance into a systematically cumulative and classified body of
knowledge. Thus, despite the disciplinary investigations into dance that individual scholars
have pursued—historical, psychological, educational, or biomechanical—perhaps it is time
to make investigations more interdisciplinary by including a focus on dance. This sugges-
tion, at least from my point of view, is in accordance with the definition of choreology by
Gertrude Kurath (1960) as the science that concerns the study of dance according to the
etymology of the term ‘choros’ and ‘logos’ (Koutsouba 1997). In this frame, as many dance
researchers such as Theresa Buckland (1999a), Georgiana Gore (1999), and Andrée Grau
(2007) have continuously pointed out, the heart of the ethnochoreological/anthropological
study of dance lies in fieldwork through participant observation and reflexive ethnography to
reveal the different ways of understanding not only the world but also ourselves.
Ethnochoreology and anthropology of dance have gained standing as research method-
ologies in the field of dance studies throughout the world (see, for example, Gore, Grau,
and Koutsouba (2016) for the way it was established across Europe). The same trend holds
true in Greece, where ethnochoreology and anthropology of dance have a long presence in
the academic study of Greek traditional dance as Giorgos Fountzoulas (2016) summarizes.
The methodologies have attracted academic interest in other kinds of Greek dance, as in the
case of Natalie Zervou who “explores the development of Greek contemporary dance prac-
tices as a site for engaging with national identity construction during the recent (2009–2015)
sociopolitical and financial crisis” (2015, ix) and of Marianna Panourgia (2017) who inves-
tigates the curriculum of contemporary dance training and its implementation on the dance
practices within the elite private professional dance schools in Greece. My research takes the
form of ethnography at home, since I am a Greek scholar conducting research in my own
country, thus playing the roles of an insider and an outsider at the same time with the per-
plexities and dilemmas that emerge from this dual role (Koutsouba 1999).
The ‘snapshots’
The ‘snapshots’ are indicative of what is happening at the moment in urban settings in Greece
in terms of Greek traditional dance. I chose the ‘snapshots’ based on the following criteria:
(1) all the chosen ‘snapshots’ concern only Greek traditional dance in a variety of manifesta-
tions and not its fusions with other kinds of the Greek dance, (2) all the chosen ‘snapshots’
took place in Athens, the capital of Greece, and (3) the specific ‘snapshots’ strive to cover
many aspects of the Greek traditional dance scene in Athens in relation to funding (state and
private sector), formal and informal endeavors, their recent time frame, and the status of
the ‘snapshots’ according to their place, time, and content of dance. The Greek traditional
dance activities explored here are grouped into three categories according to location: the
Syntagma (Constitution) Square at the center of Athens, and in the south of Athens, the
newly established Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center and the Municipality of
Argyroupoli-Elliniko.
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Traditional dance in urban settings
Snapshot one: Syntagma (Constitution) Square

At the heart of the city, Syntagma (Constitution) Square is the central and most significant square
in modern Athens historically, socially, commercially, and politically, and where countless activ-
ities take place. Constantly crowded with locals and tourists, it serves as a central gathering place
and meeting point for locals and foreigners of all ages. Distances to the other Greek cities are
measured from this location. The square is bordered on the east side by the Hellenic Parliament
Building, in front of which towards Syntagma Square is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
The tomb is guarded by Evzones, the elite soldiers dressed with foustanela, the pleated skirt,
and tsarouchia, the rustic shoes with the pom-poms, where Greek national identity is conveyed
through the male official traditional costume. Syntagma Square is located near many of Athens’s
oldest and most interesting neighborhoods and tourist attractions of the modern and ancient
Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman historical periods. Syntagma Square is also the starting
point of Ermou Street, the most important shopping street in the city and also the site of dem-
onstrations and political rallies as described in local guidebooks (Gray 2012; Vatopoulos 2018).
On March 25, Greeks celebrate one of the most important national historical and reli-
gious holidays. On this day, Greeks celebrate the War of Independence against the Ottoman
Empire and the Greek Orthodox Church celebrates the Annunciation by Archangel Gabriel
to the Virgin Mary. A military parade is held at Syntagma Square in front of the Τomb of the
Unknown Soldier. In 2015, a new government came to power in Greece, a coalition of the
Syriza and Anel parties. The National Defense Minister Panos Kammenos and the Regional
Director of Attica Rena Durou organized Greek traditional dances in front of the Tomb to
follow the March 25 parade. Thus, dance clubs from all over the country performed Greek
traditional dances accompanied by traditional songs played by the Armed Forces band—an
interesting combination as explored herein.
Traditional dances, costumes, music, and songs flooded Syntagma Square and politicians
and ordinary people joined the dance. The dance event was innovative in many ways. First,
no railings were erected during the military parade in 2015—railings that during the years of
socioeconomic crisis were set out for first time by the previous government to constrain people
and to avoid complaints and quarrels with indignant citizens. Thus, in 2015 Syntagma Square
was opened to the people, creating a sense of togetherness among all and fostering cohesion
among citizens and state authorities. Second, Syntagma Square was open to Greek traditional
dance, an unusual occurrence (Iefimerida 2015). Greek traditional dance had been excluded
from this sort of official, public event during national celebrations for decades because of its
correlation with Metaxas’s dictatorship (1937–1949) and rule by the military junta between
1967 and 1974 (Fountzoulas 2014). Thus, the mixing of military with tradition was significant
for implying that previous ideological and political trends had been dropped (Illustration 20.1).
On July 5, 2015, a referendum was held to decide whether Greece was to accept the bail-
out conditions to help resolve the debt crisis proposed jointly by the European Commission,
the International Monetary Fund, and the European Central Bank. The result of the referen-
dum was that the bailout conditions were rejected by a majority of over sixty-one percent to
thirty-nine percent, with the “No” vote winning in all of Greece’s regions. With Greek flags
in their hands and a festive atmosphere of unity, large crowds arrived in Syntagma Square as
the voting estimates were released, creating a celebratory atmosphere. People celebrated the
rejection of the referendum with Greek traditional dance performances, reasserting power,
solidarity, fun, and enjoyment, while photographers and journalists carried the images of
the celebration around the globe as seen in a range of publications (Newsbeast 2015; Iefimerida
2018) (Illustration 20.2).
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Maria I. Koutsouba
Illustration 20.1 Greek traditional dance at Syntagma Square on March 25, 2015. Photograph by
Stelios Misinas. (Courtesy of EUROKINISSI-Newspaper Dimokratia.)
Illustration 20.2 Greek traditional dance at Syntagma Square on July 5, 2015. Photograph by Tatiana
Bolari. (Courtesy of EUROKINISSI-Newspaper Dimokratia.)
288
On March 31, 2018, young people filled Syntagma Square, joined by older men and women
dressed in traditional costumes, began to dance, surprising the tourists and Athenians due to the
uniqueness of the event. The circle of dancers eventually opened and the onlookers joined in
the dance as well. The event was held in the context of the Hellenic Youth in Action Forum as
part of Olympic Games 2016–2018, sponsored by the Olympic Committee and Endowments.
The forum presented the dance program under the artistic supervision of director-choreographer
Fokas Evangelinos, with the title “Friendship Dance.” The gathering culminated in a dance in
the road with the creation of a great coil that symbolizes the unity and power of the Greek nation
(Vlepaki 2018). In this case, Greek traditional dance once again was presented as a symbol of
representing and reinforcing national identity in the contemporary Greek context.
Snapshot two: Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Cultural Center (SNFCC), founded by one of the
world’s leading private, international philanthropic organizations, is a sustainable, world-
class cultural, educational, and recreational urban complex. Within it, important Greek
institutions, organizations, and exhibits, such as the National Library of Greece and the
Greek National Opera, reinforce cultural values. International sporting is celebrated with
the permanent display at the Agora of the Spyros Louis Cup—the Bréal’s Silver Cup, the first
Marathon Winner’s Cup presented to Spyros Louis at the inaugural Modern Olympic Games
in Athens in 1896. The SNFCC was established in 2017 and continues to be supported by the
foundation through 2022. The fact that all events funded with SNF support are free to the
public, in addition to access to the facilities, has resulted in its accessibility to a large num-
ber of people and to “a great civic, cultural, educational, and environmentally responsible
landmark of international stature in one site” (SNFCC n.d.). A common perception is that
“Europe has eventually reached Greece,” since SNFCC services and specifications are of
European standards, giving it an international and cosmopolitan character different from the
one Greeks had access to before in the context of Athens.
On July 6, 2018, a Greek traditional dance was produced at the site, with the following
publicity statement: “SNFCC turns into a huge folk Greek music dance floor, where the past
meets the present while the Lyceum of Greek Women get off the stage and share a treasure
trove of heritage in four different SNFCC outdoor areas” (SNFCC 2018). The four hundred
dancers, members of the Lyceum Club of Greek Women (one of the well-known private clubs),
dressed in traditional costumes, performed over seventy different dances from various regions
of Greece, while visitors joined the dancers in a circle of Greek dancing (Illustration 20.3).
The Lyceum Club of Greek Women was founded in 1911 by the prominent writer
Callirrhoe Parren, one of the first Greek feminists and the first Greek female journalist with
an international presence. The objectives of the club are the preservation and promotion of
Greek traditional customs and traditions, including Greek traditional dance (Avdela 2010).
The Lyceum Club of Greek Women is still active with twenty-two branches in Athens, an
additional fifty across the country, and seventeen abroad (Avdela 2010). The club is run by
upper-class women and its reputation remains as a carrier of Greekness connecting the past
with the present (traditional and modern Greece).
With the aforementioned as a point of reference, the importance of this dance activity
emerges. This importance lies in the whole picture of the event: the Greek traditional dance
section of a well-known Greek private club with elite roots performing for first time in the
newly established venue that conformed to European Union standards. The SNFCC did
not charge a fee to participate in the dances, which broadened its access beyond the privileged
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Maria I. Koutsouba
Illustration 20.3 The Lyceum of Greek Women Greek traditional dancing at SNFCC. (Courtesy of
the newspaper Dimokratia.)
membership of the Lyceum Club of Greek Women. If this is not the past meeting the pres-
ent in terms of Greek identity under certain conditions, what is it then? It offers a paradigm
of the dialectic the country experiences in terms of the construction of its identity between
Hellenism (ancient Greek and mythic ancestor of European culture) and Greekness (stem-
ming from the Ottoman Empire) (Koutsouba 1997; in press).
Another innovative association occurred on November 5, 2018, when the Hellenic Army
Academy (Evelpidon) celebrated the 190th anniversary of its foundation through an indoor
Greek traditional dance and music performance in the Stavros Niarchos Hall of the National
Opera House of the SNFCC (Hellenic Army Academy 2018). In all the military and police
academies in Greece, along with schools, ballet, and modern dance academies, and other
public and private sectors, Greek traditional dance is taught as an obligatory course as part of
Greece’s cultural tradition and as a vital skill. In other words, all military and police students
are obliged to take Greek traditional dance lessons because as leaders they ought to know the
country’s traditions and to perform them at any event (Kardaris 2012). The Hellenic Army
Academy appointed Dionysios Kardaris as Professor, the first academic staff with expertise on
Greek traditional dance in the physical and cultural education section.
During the event, music and dance traditions from various parts of Greece were per-
formed by students of the Hellenic Army Academy, accompanied by well-known singers
and musicians. Politicians such as the Minister of National Defense, religious authorities,
members of cultural institutions, and many others were in the audience that filled up most
of the 1,401 seats. The significance of this event is multifaceted. The ballet-oriented Greek
National Opera, headquartered at SNFCC, financed the performance, marking the first time
that the doors were open to a Greek traditional dance performance. The SNFCC welcomed
290
an amateur group of military students as opposed to a professional theatrical performance

at the Greek National Opera. The event offers a contrast to the participatory recreational
street celebration illustrated in Snapshot one due to the theatrical character of the produc-
tion, although there was once more a mixing of military with tradition without reference
to previous ideological and political connections. According to the organizers (Hellenic
Army Academy 2018), the theatrical performance was considered the epitome of the cultural
celebratory declaration of the Hellenic Army Academy anniversary (Illustration 20.4).
Illustration 20.4 Poster of the 190th anniversary of the Hellenic Army Academy, Evelpidon. (Courtesy
of Greek Military Press, 2018.)
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Maria I. Koutsouba
Snapshot three: Municipality of Elliniko-Argyroupoli

The Municipality of Elliniko-Argyroupoli in Athens, established in 2010 from the amalga-
mation of the former neighboring municipalities of Elleniko and Argyroupoli, is the sixty-
fifth largest municipality of Greece in population with 51,356 permanent residents, according
to the 2011 census. Until 1925, the agricultural area now called Elliniko was inhabited by
Pontian refugees coming from Sourmena in the Pontus and the area called Argyroupoli
was founded by Pontian refugees from Argyroupolis also in the Pontus (Municipality of
Elliniko-Argyroupoli 2018). The exchange of populations occurred after the Greco-Turkish
War of 1919–1922 in what Greeks call the Asia Minor catastrophe (Clark 2007). The munici-
pality’s cultural organization has several sections including a dance section with Latin, mod-
ern, classical, and traditional dance as well as Zumba, hip-hop, music, and dance education.
Because of its history and the uniqueness of its population, Greek traditional dance plays
an important role in the cultural life of the municipality through community-based group
activities. The decision by local authorities to establish a folklore museum arose from strong
local customs recognizing the particular heritage of the refugee—a kind of museum not usu-
ally found in the urban setting of Athens (Municipality of Elliniko-Argyroupoli 2018).
On September 21, 2018, at the central square of the Elliniko area, an event called Choros stin
Plateia (Dance in the Square) took place. Organized by dance teacher Chariton Charitonidis of
the Section of Traditional Dances of the Youth and Sports Organization of the Municipality
Elliniko-Argyroupoli, the event aimed “to transform the central square to a dance place where
people were invited to a feast—a trip to Greek places and ways” (Municipality of Elliniko-
Argyroupoli 2018). Such events are not unusual to Athenians or to people in the periphery of
Greece. In fact, dance festivities, organized either by the local authorities or dance clubs as docu-
mented in earlier research (Koutsouba 1997), take place throughout the year all over the country.
What is unusual in the case of the Choros stin Plateia is the free admission and all the
participants—well-known musicians and singers—volunteered their time. As Charitonidis
explained:
This endeavor is a part of a larger project during which dance lessons and feasts are
offered at open spaces, streets, and squares, of the Municipality…. It is the second of
this kind, as another one had been organized in May with great success—a success
that triggered us to organize this second one. The whole idea behind it is to give
back to Greek traditional dance one of its fundamental features, that of the com-
mon and shared community, and to bring it back to the streets and squares where
everyone can join as it used to be, but in the present-day frame. The aim is the
participation in the dance cycle, joining hands, and not only in a teaching and at the
same time entertaining context, aspiring to become part of everyday life of the city.
(Personal communication with Charion Charitonidis, September 25, 2018)
In a sense, Charitonidis’s words evoke the work by Barbara Ehrenreich (2007) on the his-
tory of collective joy through dancing in the streets. More specifically, Ehrenreich argues
that “mainstream mid-twentieth-century culture was deeply restrictive of physical motion
in general” (212). She suggests that this “motionless perception” (211) has repressed activities
such as festivities, which aim “for achieving cohesiveness and generating feeling of unity”
(10) through their capacity for collective joy. Events such as Choros stin Plateia seem to be
“an outdoor dance party” (259)—an outdoor traditional dance party in this case for Greeks
292
Illustration 20.5 Poster for Choros stin Plateia, Municipality of Elliniko-Argyroupoli, 2018.
Understanding the ‘snapshots’

What do these ‘snapshots’ reveal about us? What do they mean and why they are taking place? As
Grau (2011) points out, local histories of traditional dance are not the same everywhere, nor even
sustained over time at any given place. The specific sociocultural and political contexts are exam-
ined to understand the ‘snapshots’ and how Greek traditional dance is related to wider society.
Greek traditional dance is used here as a generic term to refer to the entire phenomenon
of traditional dance in Greece in terms of the outcome (the dances) and the ongoing process
293
Maria I. Koutsouba
(the dancing practices). The term refers to a collection of dances and a variety of processes
that, although they spring from a common corpus of movements and movement patterns,
as well as taking place in certain events and times, they present variations from place to
place and from community to community throughout the country. Greek traditional dance
is performed usually in circle by a group of dancers having close physical contact through
handholds. These characteristics manifest notions of inclusion, unity, integration, solidarity,
and mutual understanding.
Greek traditional dance constitutes an integral part of Greek society in its “first existence”
as well as in its transition to its “second existence” officially and unofficially. More specifi-
cally, according to the 1968 Felix Hoerburger conceptual schema (Koutsouba 1997), dance
in its first existence constitutes an integral part of the community’s life, it is not fixed, and its
learning is a lifetime process, while in its second existence it is addressed to a few interested
people of the community and exists as conscious revival or cultivation through intentional
and systematic teaching by dance teachers. As I have discussed previously (Koutsouba 1997),
the two existences are two different phenomena between which there is no implication of
superiority or inferiority. This conceptual schema was expanded by Andriy Nahachewsky
(1995, 2001), who associated first and second existence with participatory and presentational
dances, respectively, and introduced the notion of the “third existence” as an interaction of
the other two existences, since second existence by its nature influences the first. This con-
ceptual schema applies not only to dances but also to dance events (Koutsouba 1997); how-
ever, Charitonidis (2017) examines the concepts not only in an intra-state context but also
in a transnational context. I argue that my ‘snapshots’ are unique to the practices explored in
existing research; all the ‘snapshots’ constitute a second existence of Greek traditional dance,
since they all take place in the urban context of Athens. With the exception of the Hellenic
Army Academy performance, all the examples bear elements of a kind of third existence
because of their social, participatory character. A discussion of the Greek context will help
illuminate this argument.
In Greece, traditional dance is still vivid in the geographical periphery (through fam-
ily celebrations, weddings, village fairs, festivals, local dance, and other cultural events)
and as part of urban life (in family celebrations, weddings, dance clubs, and other fes-
tivities). It is institutionalized since, for example, Greek traditional dance is a compul-
sory course of physical education at all levels in primary and secondary schools, in all
the Hellenic Military and Police Academies, in dance academies, and is the only kind
of dance that exists in higher education in the context of physical education studies
(Koutsouba in press). Thus, Greek traditional dance was and still is a living form of per-
sonal and cultural expression—an integral, active part of Greek social life because people
still dance and associate traditional dancing with various aspects of their lives. Why is
this so? A brief look at the sociohistorical and political context of Greece sheds some
light on the phenomenon.
Unlike most countries in Western Europe, the industrial revolution in Greece was
imported from outside rather than generated from within (Kalyvas 2015), a phenomenon
that resulted in the underdevelopment of the social structures that emerged in the newly
established Greek state in 1830 and which has been labeled by Greek scholars as “illegitimate
urbanization” (Filias 1985). Because of this, most of the population remains linked to their
villages even if they live in Athens or in another big city. Even for those who do not have
village origins, it is impossible to avoid contact with traditional dance through friends or
acquaintances. Because of this, everyone, even those not interested in Greek traditional
dance, is exposed to Greek traditional dance somehow, somewhere.
294
It is thus impossible not to encounter Greek traditional dance at some point, perhaps at
an engagement or wedding, at everyday social activities with friends, taking holidays in a
place where a panygiri (fair) is being held, going to see friends perform Greek traditional
dance in tourist settings, or at national celebrations or as part of your school life because it
is connected with Greek sociopolitical and cultural life (Fountzoulas et al. 2017). Thus, it is
not at all unusual that Greek traditional dance always has had such an extensive presence in
official and unofficial contexts due to its sociohistorical and political framework in Greece.
The ‘snapshots’ presented in this chapter are representative case studies of what is going on in
the second or third existence of Greek traditional dance in the urban setting of Athens, and
they exemplify the continued bond of this kind of dance with its people.
Yet, is it only because of the sociohistorical and political context that this kind of presence
of Greek traditional dance nowadays might be explained? Or maybe there is something more
in this kind of dance—some intrinsic features that reinforce this presence? In many cases,
Greek traditional dance, through the spatial disposition of the dancers and the physical prox-
imity of participants, who move mostly in circle dances with close physical contact, makes
manifest ideas of inclusion, unity, integration, solidarity, and mutual understanding (for the
use and usefulness of such qualities in other contexts and conditions in Greece, see Koutsouba
1997). In other words, Greek traditional dance plays a powerful role in creating the sense of
community and in constructing and reinforcing identities. This role is the case in relation
to the privileged space (Koutsouba in press) it offers to people in Greece, a privileged space
because of its multifaceted character that cannot be ignored.
Conclusion
In summary, given dance’s unquestionable multiple literacies, since dance, as embod-
ied cognition, incorporates at the same time movement, cultural, art, and dance literacies
(Fountzoulas, Koutsouba, and Nikolaki 2018), it is because of the dynamics of Greek tra-
ditional dance regarding interaction and integration of the multifaceted and complex lay-
ers of Greek identity, society, and culture that this kind of dance plays an important role
in Greece and is so widely spread. In addition, the ‘snapshots’ I used of Greek traditional
dance presented in urban settings such as Athens are nothing more than “stories” of the
truth (Buckland 1999b, 197), meaning that different aspects of Greek traditional dance and
dancing acquire substance through which I/we/the Greeks make sense of ourselves and of
the world and that these are accessible because of the multiple literacies of Greek traditional
dance that offer as such a privileged space to the people. Thus, looking at everyday things
such as the ‘snapshots’ from another perspective, the researcher’s eye, other ways of thinking
emerge about places, spaces, and identities of Greek traditional dance—Greek traditional
dance not by label, but as everyday life.
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21
BLACK STAR,
OTHER FETISHIZED
Carlos Acosta, ballet’s new cosmopolitanism,
and desire in the age of institutional diversity
Lester Tomé
Introduction: The diversity turn and ballet’s new cosmopolitanism

Since the seventeenth century, dancers moving across courts, empires, nation-states, con-
tinents, and geopolitical blocs have articulated varied conceptions of cosmopolitanism in
ballet. Afro-Cuban dancer Carlos Acosta exemplified ballet’s newest expression of cosmo-
politanism, which references diasporic multiculturalism in a context of globalization, during
his tenure in London’s Royal Ballet (1998–2016).1 The distinctive feature of this new cosmo-
politanism is the presence of the subaltern subject—deemed a racial and cultural other—in
troupes across Western Europe and North America. Acosta has been among several Latin
American and Asian dancers (from Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, China, Japan, South Korea, and
other locations) who in recent years have occupied visible positions in ensembles such as the
Royal Ballet and American Ballet Theatre.
Ballet’s new cosmopolitanism may be a function of the international competition for
top talent among companies that, to maintain their world-class status, must recruit glob-
ally. However, institutional discourses of diversity also have shaped this cosmopolitanism.
The so-called diversity turn, fully underway by the late 1990s, normalized diversity as a
value formally endorsed by government, business, education, and art institutions (Vertovec
2012). In this context, ballet ensembles must fulfill expectations of diversity to maintain
their social capital as institutions that represent global cities and multicultural nation-states.2
Indeed, dance critic Nadine Meisner (1998) greeted the Royal Ballet’s enlistment of Acosta
as an opportunity for the ensemble to claim relevance within the conception of the state
promoted by Tony Blair’s New Labour—as multiculturalism became a policy framework of
the British government.
Just as the English choreographer of Bangladeshi descent Akram Khan came to popu-
larly embody British multiculturalism and London’s globalism in the contemporary dance
genre, Acosta emerged as their poster child in ballet. The diversity turn has afforded
visibility and agency to diasporic dancing bodies, but it also has forced them to nego-
tiate their relationships to political discourses and forms of artistic consumption that at
times confound the celebration of multiculturalism with the objectification of cultural
298
Black star, other fetishized
difference (Mitra 2015, 15–19, 25–27). Turning to Acosta’s personification of ballet’s new
cosmopolitanism, this essay scrutinizes the ambiguous ideology of diversity in multicul-
tural settings—an ideology that fosters recognition and representation of the subaltern, but
which does not always transcend coloniality. Critics of the shortcomings of institutional-
ized diversity, such as Slavoj Žižek, note that multiculturalism operates as the cultural logic
of late capitalism and fuels a postmodern racism that reduces the appreciation of cultural
difference to aestheticized hedonism (2007, 162). In Paul Gilroy’s view, post-imperial mel-
ancholia resulting from “lingering but usually unspoken colonial relationships and imperial
fantasies” (2004, 109) complicates multiculturalism in a British consumer culture that com-
modifies racial difference (137).
Jennifer Fisher rightfully contends that, to a large extent, ballet remains an institution that
“patrols its borders on the levels of looks and body type,” including skin complexion (2016,
585). However, ballet’s new cosmopolitanism has eroded the exclusivist notion of ballet as a
practice of European or Euro-American white bodies. While acknowledging this progress,
I question situations in which ballet’s emerging displays of diversity may be banal or even
reproduce coloniality. My inquiry into the politics of ballet’s new cosmopolitanism responds
to a call, articulated in the field of diversity studies by scholars such as Sarah Ahmed (2012),
to expose apparent formulations of inclusivity and thus incentivize a more integral pluralism.
Interrogating the discourse of institutionalized diversity in this manner is a critical task for
dance scholars. Tangibly indexing human difference through the display of bodies, dance is
a privileged medium for producing instant images of racial and ethnic heterogeneity. Taking
advantage of that instantaneity, institutions such as arts centers, media organizations, and
universities can exploit dance as a shortcut for showcasing diversity through strategies of
window dressing. The display of different bodies may be where diversity starts but not where
it should end.
Through an analysis of Acosta’s career in the Royal Ballet, I propose that ballet’s new
cosmopolitanism compels subaltern dancers to negotiate the politics of moving from the
periphery to the center, where they find themselves both valued and devalued for their race,
ethnicity, and nationality: these markers of diversity make such dancers an asset to dance
institutions yet expose them to colonialist subjection. Thus, Acosta had to strategically battle
the administration of the Royal Ballet for full control over his body and raise his own worth
as a commodity in the economy of diversity. Also examined here is the dancer’s dazzling rise
to celebrity in the UK media, the outcome of public fascination with the journey of a black
man from a Havana slum to the Royal Ballet. The media’s frequent repetition of Acosta’s
life story spectacularized his otherness, re-inscribing the dancer’s blackness through racial
stereotypes and rendering him an object of sexual desire. I contend that problematic politics
of desire underlie ballet’s new cosmopolitanism whenever the bodies of subaltern dancers are
not only consumed for erotic pleasure, but also fetishized as signifiers of institutional diversity
and displayed to audiences for hedonistic appreciation of multiculturalism. Ballet’s new cos-
mopolitanism becomes trivial if it operates as a comforting staging of diversity for audiences of
predominantly white spectators in the Global North. I claim that, against the background of
growing xenophobia in the UK, such functioning of institutionalized diversity characterizes
a regime of repressive tolerance in which multiculturalism is celebrated onstage while offstage
the other is stigmatized as a burden to the nation. Without a doubt, Acosta’s popularity rightly
reflected his stature as a dancer of exceptional talent. At the same time, his notable fame mani-
fested as cosmetic diversity for, in this case, the overexposure of one black body concealed the
palpable underrepresentation of black dancers in British ballet.
299
Lester Tomé
From the periphery to the center: A hazardous journey and clash

Carlos Acosta joined the Royal Ballet in 1998. Reminiscing about the dancer’s early days in
the ensemble, then–artistic director Anthony Dowell explains that Acosta excelled at learn-
ing the troupe’s heritage repertory but struggled with the London weather and the process of
acculturation. Dowell remarks, “When young artists from other backgrounds and cultures
join a company as established and world-renowned as The Royal Ballet, there is sometimes
a period of adjustment to the new surroundings and customs they are faced with” (Carlos
Acosta 2015, 1). This observation intimates condescendence. Associating Acosta’s youth to
his culture, Dowell voices a colonialist discourse that infantilizes the subaltern and, in this
case, overlooks the dancer’s maturity at the time of his appointment. Acosta arrived at the
Royal Ballet with credentials that were tacitly recognized by his hiring as a lead dancer.
By then, he had been a principal dancer of the English National Ballet (1991) and Houston
Ballet (1993–1998). It is disconcerting that Dowell conflates the expectable challenges of
adapting to different weather and social norms with what he sees as a straining transition for
dancers from “other backgrounds and cultures” to the “established and world-renowned”
Royal Ballet—that is, a move from the periphery to the center in the colonialist world order.
Almost inadvertently, the Royal Ballet’s position of supremacy in the colonialist cultural
hierarchy comes into consideration. Dowell’s slip reminds subaltern dancers that their pres-
ence in the cultural core of the metropolis is a source of friction and that, just as mundane
issues of weather and social norms must be resolved, such political friction must be dealt with.
Indeed, the subaltern actors of ballet’s new cosmopolitanism face the fraught politics
inherent to their ambiguous role in the maintenance of the center-periphery structure of
the international ballet establishment. On the one hand, these dancers’ talent and origins
in places like Cuba upend the assumption that the location of ballet expertise corresponds
with white bodies or a presumed center of European and North American institutions. On
the other hand, by joining European and North American companies these dancers aid in
reproducing such troupes’ status as constituents of an influential center that concentrates
resources, opportunities, and cachet. The transference of human capital from the periphery
to the center, which consolidates these very same categories, is one feature of ballet’s new
cosmopolitanism. Through its global recruitment of virtuosos like Acosta, the Royal Ballet
effectively upholds its position atop the international ballet community as a highly selective
organization of first-rate, diverse performers. Paradoxically, these dancers contribute with
their own subalternity, even if it is a source of friction, to the enduring international domi-
nance of ensembles like the Royal Ballet. Their condition as other has become indispensable
for ballet organizations of the Global North to cultivate the image of transnationalism and
diversity that has come to be equated with excellence and world-class standing in contempo-
rary culture—a premise that Ahmed develops in her analysis of diversity in British academia
(2012, 108–9).
Even though ballet’s new cosmopolitanism exalts the diversity that subaltern dancers
lend to ensembles in locations like London, these dancers’ ethnically marked bodies remain
embattled entities whose skills and otherness are simultaneously valued and devalued—bodies
caught in the clash between institutional diversity missions and the subsisting colonialist
ideology implicit in Dowell’s words. In traversing this minefield, Acosta defied patronization
and spoke against racism.
In his autobiography, Acosta (2007) recounts his debut with the Royal Ballet in one
of the various solos of William Forsythe’s In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated: “The role did
not allow me to show my full potential” (2007, 279). Next, Dowell sought to cast him
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as Mercutio in Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet. However, Acosta insisted on being
cast in the title role of Romeo in accordance with his rank of principal dancer. When
Dowell responded that Mercutio would be a great introduction to the ballet for a dancer
beginning his career, Acosta clarified that he was not starting his career. The first black
principal dancer of the Royal Ballet, aware that race could be a factor in how far he could
go in the company, drew a necessary line to disrupt the emerging pattern of casting in
parts below principal roles: he would perform as Romeo or not appear at all in the ballet
(2007, 280–81). Years later, as an advocate for black ballet dancers, he attributed the inci-
dent to conservative artistic leadership. Wondering whether Dowell had feared that British
audiences might have found a black Romeo shocking, Acosta stressed that it is the duty of
those responsible for casting to change the public’s attitudes. He added, “When it comes
to choosing a prince (or other lead role) for a ballet, we must emphasize that it is not a
question of being black; no, it is a question of whether a black or mulatto dancer has the
talent to bring to the prince or hero role. So, give them the chance to surprise” (quoted in
Willis 2010, 142).
Through his tactical stance not to accept secondary roles, Acosta succeeded in making
his contractual position as a principal dancer unequivocal. He left the management with no
choice but to cast him accordingly. Although his demand to dance as Romeo remained a
point of contention between the artist and the administration—it would take him eight years
to perform that role—soon after the aforementioned argument Acosta began to appear in
other leading roles across a varied repertoire that comprised the full-evening ballets La fille
mal gardée, Coppélia, Giselle, Swan Lake, Raymonda, and Manon. By the end of Dowell’s tenure
as artistic director in 2001, Acosta had also performed lead parts in Nijinsky’s L’aprés-midi d’un
faune, Balanchine’s Agon, Tudor’s Shadowplay, and MacMillan’s Gloria, among other works
(Carlos Acosta 2015, 151). Nevertheless, the dancer encountered fresh difficulties when Ross
Stretton became the new artistic director. In Acosta’s opinion, Stretton disliked him, under-
utilized him, and denied him opportunities to perform (Siegle 2003).
In the competitive world of ballet, dancers of all nationalities and racial identities com-
monly express frustration for not being cast in certain works or having to wait years for
them. Therefore, it could be tempting to explain the casting problems encountered by a black
dancer like Acosta as no different from those experienced by other performers. Some could
argue that Acosta’s success proves that, far from facing limitations, he had the opportunity
to dance an extraordinary number of roles out of reach to most performers. But this would
ignore ballet’s history of casting black dancers below their level of competence (Gottschild
2003, 74, 87).
Situations in which talented black performers experience negative casting decisions are
difficult to rationalize just in terms of the competitiveness of the profession. In a field in
which racism has been systemic, dancers of color, by necessity, ponder the meaning behind
the opportunities denied to them. Acosta’s retelling of his argument with Dowell and his
assertion that Stretton disliked him register his suspicions of discrimination. Such suspicions
are inferred, too, in an interview in which Acosta recalls that the perception that he was an
exuberant Cuban man contributed to his typecasting in cheerful athletic roles, even though
he had joined the Royal Ballet to play “more than the jester” (Mackrell 2003). He explains,
“On the surface, I never had any problem. But I know that some opportunities were not given
to me because of stereotypes” (quoted in Kisselgoff 2002). Acosta sensed that racism operated
subliminally, beneath the veneer of his success, because, even as his repertoire grew, those
making casting decisions had to “think twice” (Kisselgoff 2002) about giving him roles that
had never been performed by a black dancer.
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To some extent, ballet’s new cosmopolitanism empowers subaltern dancers by generating

a demand for their otherness. As previously indicated, they possess the attribute upon which
an ensemble’s cosmopolitan image hinges: a body that explicitly and instantly signifies mul-
ticulturalism and globality (Illustration 21.1). The institutional value attributed to a “diverse”
body transforms that body into a commodity. Yet, any notion that institutional demands for
diversity make the journey to professional self-realization easier for these subaltern dancers is
disproved by the energy they must exert to affirm their full worth within the organization.
Possessing a body symbolic of diversity is not the same as having control over a commodity
that remains vulnerable to colonialist subjection and exploitation. Subaltern dancers must do
the labor of emancipating their bodies from colonialist power and wrestling with institutions
for control of their own bodies.
Confronting Dowell about casting was just one of Acosta’s strategies to rebalance the
power relationships between subaltern body and institution. At times this negotiation played
out through self-presentation and performance of his social persona, as when, suspecting
that his Cuban personality was the source of typecasting, Acosta assumed a patrician British
demeanor in his social interactions. He explained that this was a tactic to alter institutional
prejudices about which roles he was well suited for (Mackrell 2003). In a society highly
stratified in terms of class, the tensions about nationality and race experienced by diasporic
dancers are intrinsically connected to institutional perceptions of their social class, cultural
Illustration 21.1 Carlos Acosta performs Kenneth MacMillan’s Requiem for the Royal Ballet, London,
in 2006. (Courtesy of © Bill Cooper/ArenaPAL.)
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capital, and position in a British hierarchy of distinction. Arguably an instance of disciplin-

ing the subaltern and of docile conformance with Dowell’s prescription that foreign dancers
adapt to British social norms, Acosta’s embodiment of gentility was, in the first place, the
astute subterfuge of an artist who used the performative tools of his profession for self ben-
efit. Historically, the embodiment of gentility, a cornerstone of the ballet aesthetic, has been
a mechanism of power production that has established this dance form’s privileged social
status. In transposing the enactment of refinement from the studio and the stage to offstage
behavior, Acosta redeployed the technical expertise of a body trained in ballet to counter
coloniality in a contemporary context.
Through the summer of 2002, Acosta performed to great acclaim as a guest artist of the
American Ballet Theatre (ABT) in New York. He situated himself as an artist who, in the
words of New York Times critic Anna Kisselgoff (2002), belonged “in the ranks of the idols”—
namely, Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov. When the possibility arose to sign a long-
term contract with ABT, Acosta took the opportunity to instead consolidate his position in
the Royal Ballet, which, now under the direction of Monica Mason, had to lure him back to
London (Willis 2010, 145–46). He rejoined the ensemble with the undisputable authority of a
star in high international demand. Just as his artistic standing grew, his sign value as a symbol
of globality and multiculturalism increased in significance following the broadcast of “Carlos
Acosta: The Reluctant Ballet Dancer” on BBC1 (2003). The television program, which told
the story of his life highlighting his Afro-Cuban identity and working-class origins, trans-
formed Acosta into a national celebrity in the UK. Banking on his stardom, he formally
renegotiated his appointment with the Royal Ballet. In 2003, his title in the troupe changed
to principal guest artist, which allowed him to dance in the ensemble’s regular seasons and
exert more agency in choosing his repertoire, while enjoying the freedom to produce his own
shows for London venues such as the Sadler’s Wells and the Coliseum and guesting with the
Paris Opera Ballet, the Mariinsky Ballet, and other international companies.
The black body in ballet: Unexpected other and object of desire

Afro-diasporic British dancers attest to the violence of customarily being othered within
UK dance institutions. Among them, even those born in the UK or those working in
genres not directly associated with Afro-diasporic dance experience their Britishness as
racially marked. To institutions, they are not simply British dancers. Instead, they are one-
dimensionally categorized as black British dancers and their work is equally essentialized as
black dance regardless of whether they agree to such labeling (Akinleye 2018, 2–3; Namron
2018, 28–30). Thus, they are confined to the liminal position of other within their own
national community and to the in-between space amid Britishness and blackness that institu-
tions construct by regarding these categories as distinct. A similar in-betweenness charac-
terizes the situation of the subaltern dancers of ballet’s new cosmopolitanism. Their bodies
are pushed and pulled in different directions—asked to assimilate to the hosting troupe and
country, as demanded by Dowell, while simultaneously being re-inscribed as the other whose
foreignness and racial difference must be highlighted as signs of institutional diversity. Ballet’s
new cosmopolitanism showcases ethnic difference in ways that subscribe colonialist practices
of othering the subaltern. Being black, Cuban, and of a working-class background, Acosta was
variously constituted as other. Indeed, the discursive construction of his otherness came into
sharp relief in the seemingly endless accounts of his life story in the British media—through
coverage of such frequency and scale that the emplotment of the dancer’s life events amounted
to a mediatized spectacle of otherness.
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Constructing a rags-to-riches tale, the 2003 BBC1 feature on Acosta’s life recounted
the dancer’s journey from a marginal Havana neighborhood to the Royal Ballet and from
poverty and obscurity to wealth and fame. The same narrative had been frequently related
in the UK press in the years since Acosta’s arrival to the Royal Ballet (e.g., Meisner 1998;
Bishop 1999; Franks 1999). However, its dissemination by the BBC turned it into a subject
of national interest and triggered further retellings in other media outlets, including newspa-
pers, magazines, radio shows, and TV programs, culminating in the biographical movie Yuli
(2018).3 The multiple iterations of the story stress the improbability of the dancer’s trajectory
to success, fixating on his black working-class origins in Cuba and the dire circumstances of
his childhood.
We learn that Acosta grew up in a crowded apartment where there was no running
water and food was scarce. At times, what little food was available was offered to the
orishas in the family’s santería altar. The child often skipped school to breakdance and play
soccer. He roamed through the city with other truants, stealing food and committing
petty crimes. The boy’s father, a long-haul truck driver, was often absent from home.
For two years, while the father served time in prison, the family had to survive without
an income. When he was home, the father was a stern figure who beat the misbehaving
boy. It was the father’s decision to enroll him in a ballet school, hoping that it would
keep him out of trouble. But the child despised ballet and continued to play truant.
Over the next few years he was expelled from the ballet school, readmitted, expelled
again, and ultimately transferred to a different ballet school in a province far from home.
The teenage Acosta ultimately fell in love with ballet and dedicated himself to fulfilling
his potential through hard work. He burst into international fame with a winning streak
in the ballet competitions of Lausanne, Paris, and Vignale in 1990. Contracts with the
English National Ballet and the Houston Ballet ensued and, at the end of his journey,
with the Royal Ballet.
Essential to this narrative’s appeal is the uplifting message that those thus far excluded from
ballet can overcome barriers of race, social class, and nationality to succeed in and transform
the field. From this perspective, Acosta’s journey functions as an inspirational story for young
black and working-class artists, from the UK or elsewhere, who dream of a career in ballet.Yet,
in the sensationalist media retellings of this narrative for a mainstream audience, the spectacle of
Acosta’s otherness overshadows the theme of inclusivity.
Stories such as Acosta’s about how black dancers arrive to ballet stages follow a pattern of
scrutiny of the black dancing body “through the lens and theory of difference” (Gottschild
2003, 27). In fact, the narrative of Acosta’s trajectory constructs almost all dimensions of
his persona as markers of difference. References to ethnicity, race, religion, class, hobbies,
geography, social behavior, and family history stage a hyperbolic otherness that stands in
contrast with the imagined identity of ballet dancers. For audiences, the fascinating appeal
of the Acosta narrative resides, precisely, in the apparent incongruity between this antipodal
other and the world of ballet, which, despite its evolving diversity and cosmopolitanism, in
the public imaginary remains associated with whiteness and the middle to upper classes.
In ballet, the subaltern body, and the black body specifically, is still perceived as an
unexpected body—as an occurrence that elicits curiosity and thus necessitates explanation.
Biographic questions about how black dancers enter ballet haunt these dancers and consti-
tute a discursive frame through which they are observed and their presence made sense of.
The unending media retellings of Acosta’s trajectory are the product of this fascination with
the black dancing body’s journey to the ballet stage. (In the US, this phenomenon has vis-
ibly manifested in recurring media accounts of the biography of Misty Copeland, the black
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prima ballerina of ABT.) Far from normalizing the figure of the black ballet dancer, a nar-
rative that spectacularizes otherness and exploits the public’s curiosity so that the same story
can be repeated over and over, in sensationalist tone, is a narrative that continues to relegate
the black body in ballet to the realm of the extraordinary. This discourse inscribes the black
body in a ballet history of the deviational and anecdotal—subsidiary to the dominant ballet
history that upholds the white body as unquestioned protagonist.
Similar to black British dancers whose identities are externally constructed as always
already black, Acosta entered public discourse as a racialized figure defined first and foremost
by blackness. Journalists labeled him the “black Baryshnikov” (Bishop 1999; Sanghera 2004)
and compared him to a panther (Dougill 2004; Monahan 2010). Allusions to blackness were
encoded in additional descriptions of Acosta’s dancing as animalistic (Franks 1999), feral
(Vine 2010), and feline-like (Bishop 2002), including the remark by the Spanish ballerina
Laura Morera, a fellow Royal Ballet dancer, that it was Acosta’s animal energy that made
dancing with him so exciting for her (Carlos Acosta 2015, 11). Such discursive animalization
followed a colonialist pattern of representing the black dancing body as primitive and less
than human (DeFrantz 2001, 345). Underlying this characterization of Acosta is a cultural
practice of demanding of black dancers an abundance of charisma and physicality (Osterweis
2013, 54–55). In this sense, the pleasure of watching or dancing with a virtuoso like Acosta
was ideologically mediated.
The racialization of Acosta also operated through mediatic sexualization of his figure.
Consistent with the historical constitution of the black dancing body as an object of colonial-
ist desire (DeFrantz 2001, 344), audiences and media invested Acosta with sexual icon status.
Although the dancer pushed back against this objectification and insisted that he be judged
solely on his artistic achievements (Patterson 2009), many interviews and reviews rampantly
fetishized him. Coverage of Acosta frequently dubbed him the “Cuban sex missile” (Warren
2002; Patterson 2009), and it was even suggested, to detriment of his professional merits, that
he owed his success to the fantasies he inspired on ballet’s mostly female audiences (Sanghera
2004; Nicoll 2010). The extent of this discursive violence was epitomized in an article for
The Times titled “My Date with God’s Gift to Women” (Vine 2010, 1) in which the reporter
openly acknowledges her titillation with Acosta and captions a photograph of the dancer,
“Sex on legs.” Hinting at this sexual objectification of Acosta, his Royal Ballet colleague
Natalia Osipova commented that when dancing with him she felt “like a woman” (Carlos
Acosta 2015, 45).
Coming mostly from white women, these articulations of physical attraction to a black
man could be interpreted as expressions of an unprejudiced attitude toward interracial
romance. But this perspective is tangled with the fact that underlying ballet’s new cos-
mopolitanism are complex politics of desire for subaltern bodies. Through consideration
of Acosta’s case, I propose that the subaltern body, historically eroticized and exoticized
for the pleasure of the colonialist gaze, can be objectified even further when it occupies
the ballet stage, a site that for centuries has served the tantalizing function of displaying
the human figure for audiences’ erotic gratification. In the context of ballet’s new cos-
mopolitanism, desire is institutionalized as desire for bodies that visibly signify diversity.
Organizations and communities aiming to diversify load the subaltern subject with desir-
ability, fetishizing it as the entity that represents multiculturalism and globality. Related
patterns of consumption of the other are at play in the sexual/exotic objectification of the
subaltern and the institutional demand for the display of his body, for in both senses the
subaltern can fulfill hegemonic desires.
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Hedonistic consumption of diversity in the regime of repressive tolerance

The mobilization of Acosta into an object of desire underscores the propensity in the
Global North toward hedonistic consumption of dancing bodies marked as diverse. In this
capacity, ballet’s new cosmopolitanism could be a platform for staging comforting specta-
cles of what Ahmed deems “feel good” diversity (2012, 69). Royona Mitra’s (2015) exami-
nation of the work of Akram Khan points to manifestations of this dynamic in the context
of British contemporary dance. Khan has achieved recognition for the innovative chore-
ography and compelling theatricality of his works, which vividly evoke his experience of
diaspora and hybridize the aesthetics of contemporary dance and kathak. Since 2000, he
has captured the imagination of audiences through danced articulations of British multi-
culturalism. However, as Mitra indicates, Khan’s pieces are presented mainly in “sanitized
and safe” venues that commodify otherness for its consumption by “predominantly white
audiences” seeking to celebrate diversity “in a way that makes them feel like they under-
stand difference” (2015, 25). While this is not the only way in which spectators may engage
with his artistic production, Mitra’s comment leads me to the questions for whom stagings
of diversity are for and what the symbolic function of subaltern dancers like Khan and
Acosta is in such spectacles.
For institutions, diversity is oriented not only toward internal transformation, but also
toward the construction of a public image. Ahmed equates this dimension of institutional
diversity to public relations insofar as it entails a strategy for cultivating good will among
a public that has come to expect diversity (2012, 143). In the case of ballet, this means that
diversity initiatives cater not only to the demands of the subaltern for inclusion in ballet
schools and ensembles, but also to the desire of the dance form’s public—that is, an audience
predominantly white, educated, and from the middle and upper classes—to participate in
the acclamation of multiculturalism and globality. Regular remarks by dance critics about
the underrepresentation of black dancers in British ballet troupes—sometimes in the form
of direct calls for greater inclusivity—exemplify this external pressure on dance institutions
(e.g., Meisner 1998; Bishop 1999; Goldhill and Marsh 2012).
In the consumption of diversity by dominant groups, the politics of colonialist desire
intersect the politics of colonialist guilt. Ahmed (2012) illustrates this point through her
analysis of the blockbuster film Bend It Like Beckham (2002). In the film, Jess, the daugh-
ter of Indian immigrants, succeeds in her aspiration to play soccer despite her father’s
opposition. Decades earlier, the father had been an accomplished Indian cricket player
who upon migrating to the UK was denied the chance to play. Excluded from British
cricket clubs, he gave up the sport. Now he sought to prevent Jess from playing soccer in
part because of her gender, but, above all, so that she did not suffer the indignity of racial
exclusion. Unlike her father, who withdrew from the game, she finds the courage and
determination to put discrimination behind her and persevere in the sport. Ultimately,
she is embraced by her British teammates. Ahmed contends that this story displaces the
responsibility for inclusion from the colonialist subject to the subaltern subject: it is the
latter who must overcome the trauma of being a target of racism as the first step toward
being included in a multicultural society. For Ahmed, such displacement of responsi-
bility was crucial to the popularity of the film with the mostly white British audience.
In her opinion, the focus on Jess’s tenacity and the uplifting conclusion of the narrative
allow spectators to indulge in a celebration of inclusivity that temporarily alleviates any
guilty feelings of direct or indirect responsibility for the British history of racism and
xenophobia (2012, 165–67).
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As in Jess’s narrative, the Acosta story foregrounds an archetypal diasporic subject who
works hard to fulfill his talent, fights obstacles, pushes barriers, and, in the end, gains access
to spaces that had been out of reach. Taking this similarity into account and building upon
Ahmed’s proposition, I argue that, like the film’s storyline, Acosta’s trajectory constitutes
an uplifting tale for audiences, a paean to multiculturalism that, appeasing colonialist guilt,
creates the occasion for the inspirational appreciation of diversity. This perspective sheds
additional light on the public obsession with Acosta’s rags-to-riches fable. Ultimately, as an
object of desire Acosta satisfies not only exotic and erotic fantasies; he also realizes a domi-
nant audience’s desire to “feel good” about diversity and find release from any sense of shame
for the legacy of coloniality. He fulfills a desire for consumption of diversity as a form of
cultural capital and as a requisite of a prevailing cosmopolitan taste. These uses of diversity to
assuage culpability, generate uplift, and build cultural capital are as hedonistic as the exotic
and sexual fetishization of the subaltern.
Engagement with diversity at this level of hedonistic consumption of the other obscures
the xenophobia and racism that, as Žižek rightfully points out, have been concurrent with
the normalization of multiculturalism as an institutional mission (2007, 162). It is notable that
Acosta’s transformation into a UK national celebrity and icon of diversity took place against
the background of growing suspicion of immigrants and racial minorities in the wake of
the terrorist attacks in New York in 2001 and London in 2005. Reaching the mainstream,
a virulent brand of nationalist ideology blamed immigration and multiculturalism for the
emergence of terrorists in the homeland and, after the financial crisis of 2008 and the ensu-
ing cuts to social programs, protested the state’s distribution of scarce economic resources
to minorities (Malik 2010, 54–58; Silj 2010, 9). Such nationalism, intertwined with post-
imperial melancholia, has advocated a retreat from multiculturalism, wishing instead for a
“magical rehomogenization of the country” (Gilroy 2004, 126).
The diversification of ballet ensembles is no trivial accomplishment. Nevertheless, in a
sociopolitical context of increasing xenophobia and racism, ballet’s new cosmopolitanism, like
other expressions of institutionalized diversity, risks conforming to what Žižek categorizes as
a Marcusian regime of repressive tolerance that accepts the “other deprived of its substance”
while offstage the “real” other suffers the consequences of bigotry (2007, 162). According to
Herbert Marcuse (1969), dominant groups coopt tolerance to hold on to power by alleging that
other constituencies’ expressions of dissent and the state’s tolerance of that dissent are proofs
of freedom and democracy, when, in reality, free speech, tolerance, and democracy are empty
concepts—having lost their effectiveness under circumstances in which the ruling classes control
the economy, technology, education, the press, and the political institutions. Building on Žižek’s
assertion that an equivalent form of false tolerance can inform the ideology of multiculturalism,
I propose that, in dance and the rest of the cultural arena, institutionalized diversity holds the
potential to equally enact a regime of repressive tolerance in which the subaltern is hedonisti-
cally celebrated as a titillating object of desire and benign actor in comforting spectacles of
inclusivity. In situations in which coloniality colors institutionalized diversity or in which per-
formances of diversity make us forget how, offstage, immigrants and racial minorities are rejected
as a burden to the nation, subaltern bodies are, to borrow Marcuse’s words, “tolerated within the
narrow limits set by the hierarchical structure of society [and thus] the tolerance shown to them
is deceptive” (1969, 113).
In a regime of repressive tolerance, hedonistic multiculturalism rings most hollow
when it coalesces around cosmetic diversity that exploits bodies of color as ornaments,
ostentatiously showcasing them to conceal what might be their actual underrepresenta-
tion in organizations. The extensive media coverage of Acosta aided in portraying the
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Royal Ballet as an institution composed of dancers from all over the world, highlighting
the globality of ballet’s new cosmopolitanism. Indeed, Acosta’s tenure with the company
coincided with a substantial internationalization of the Royal Ballet, which hired danc-
ers not only from the UK, Italy, Spain, Russia, Canada, and the US, but also from Japan,
South Korea, South Africa, Cuba, Colombia, Argentina, and Brazil, among other loca-
tions. Yet, even as the British ballet subscribed to this global cosmopolitanism Acosta
remained a rare figure—one of the few black ballet dancers in the UK (Bourne 2011;
Goldhill and Marsh 2012).
There is no question that Acosta’s celebrity corresponded with his status as one of the most
phenomenal ballet dancers of his generation. However, as indicated earlier, it was the BBC1
documentary of his life that catapulted him to national fame to a major extent by stressing
the exceptionality of his blackness in the British ballet. The media’s overexposure of Acosta
effectively transformed him into a token. Tokens of diversity are paradoxical. In Acosta’s
case, the token’s raison d’être was the extraordinariness of his race in ballet and, yet, through its
ubiquity in the media the token suggested a prominence of the black dancing body in ballet
that surpassed reality. In 2011, for instance, Acosta was one of only two black artists in the
roster of ninety-five dancers of the Royal Ballet. In the other three leading ensembles of the
UK—the English National Ballet, the Birmingham Royal Ballet, and the Northern Ballet—
black dancers occupied just five out of 154 positions (Bourne 2011). Acosta’s tokenization
substantiated what Ahmed would call a mechanism for “changing perceptions of whiteness
rather than changing the whiteness of organizations” (2012, 34). It is in this sense that insti-
tutional diversity can be cosmetic and amount to a technology for reproducing whiteness. As
Ahmed aptly observes, “adding color to the white face of the organization” only “confirms
the whiteness of that face” (151).
Conclusion: Can the subaltern not speak as other?

The demand for the subaltern in the economy of diversity empowers these dancers to reap-
propriate their otherness and capitalize on it. Like Khan, who strategically staged his eth-
nicity to access institutional structures of funding (Mitra 2015, 19–22), Acosta understood
his status as a commodity and cashed in on the appeal of his otherness to British audiences.
He used his celebrity to denounce the prejudices he experienced as a black dancer from Cuba
and to advocate for the elimination of racism in ballet.4 At the same time, he pursued the
benefits of self positioning as a marketable product: a desirable other in what Gilroy describes
as a “neoliberal consumer culture that can glamorize racial difference” (2004, 137). Acosta
reasoned, “My difference [is] not a problem for me... I can use it to my advantage big time
because I’m a new product” (quoted in Craine 2006, 17).
How Acosta mined the fetishized story of his life in the lucrative dance production Tocororo
(2003) and the bestselling autobiography No Way Home: A Dancer’s Journey from the Streets of
Havana to the Stages of the World (2007) could be the subject of another study. Here I under-
score that his financial success with these ventures is reminiscent of that of black luminaries
from previous eras, such as Josephine Baker and Bill Robinson, who performed their other-
ness to great economic gain. Self-exoticism and self-stereotyping are strategies that fore-
ground the agency of the subaltern to work subversively within the strictures of coloniality.
But the fact that contemporary artists still resort to these strategies indicates that, despite the
ascendency of discourses of multiculturalism and diversity, in the twenty-first century’s art
market—as in the early twentieth-century context of Baker and Robinson—subaltern danc-
ers, and black dancing bodies in particular, continue to be obliged to “prove themselves as
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‘Other’” (DeFrantz 2001, 343). Given this injunction to perform otherness, the postcolonial
question that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak posed three decades ago in the title of her classic
essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) could now be asked differently: Can the subaltern
not speak as other? For ballet’s new cosmopolitanism to realize its transformative promise, its
subaltern actors must cease to be fascinating rarities, objects of colonialist hedonism, and
tokenized ornaments of institutionalized diversity.
Notes
1 I am grateful to Helen Thomas, Justin Crumbaugh, and Zoa Alonso for their insightful editorial
comments and stimulating questions, as well as to Sarah Lass for carefully proofreading the final
draft.
2 In 1992, the Royal Ballet began scouting for dancers of color through a program that provided
free ballet lessons to children from diverse backgrounds in schools across four boroughs of London
(Bourne 2018, 60).
3 The details of Acosta’s life are retold in numerous articles that I consulted but do not cite here for
reasons of space. Access World News records over 3,000 entries that mention Acosta in British
newspapers since 1998 to date.
4 In a forthcoming article, Zoa Alonso contends that Acosta embodied decolonialist principles
through his politically symbolic performances, as a black man, of the eponymous leader of the slave
uprising in Yuri Grigorovich’s Spartacus in 2007.
References
Acosta, Carlos. 2007. No Way Home: A Dancer’s Journey from the Streets of Havana to the Stages of the World.
New York: Scribner.
Ahmed, Sarah. 2012. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Akinleye, Adesola. 2018. Narratives in Black British Dance: Embodied Practices. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Alonso, Zoa. Forthcoming. “Choreographies of Violence: Spartacus from the Soviet Ballet to the
Global Stage.” In The Fear and the Fury: Ancient Violence in Modern Imagination, edited by M. G. Castello,
C. Scilabra, and I. Berti. London: Bloomsbury.
Bishop, Clifford. 1999. “Jumping for Joy: Royal Ballet.” The Sunday Times, November 28, Culture, 10.
Bishop, Clifford. 2002. “Cloak and Swagger.” The Sunday Times, July 28, Culture, 29.
Bourne, Sandie. 2011. “Why Are There So Few Black Dancers in British Ballet?” The Creative Case for
Diversity: Innovation and Excellence in the Arts, September 8. Accessed June 4, 2018. http://www.
creativecase.org.uk/?location_id=1519&item=2281.
Bourne, Sandie. 2018. “Tracing the Evolution of Black Representation in Ballet and the Impact on Black
British Dancers Today.” In Narratives in Black British Dance: Embodied Practices, edited by Adesola Akinleye,
51–64. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Craine, Debra. 2006. “Bounds for Greatness.” The Times, July 10, 2, 17.
DeFrantz, Thomas. 2001. “Simmering Passivity: The Black Male Body in Concert Dance.” In Moving
History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader, edited by Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright, 342–
349. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Dougill, David. 2004. “Hot on His Heels.” The Sunday Times, July 18, Culture, 29.
Fisher, Jennifer. 2016.“Ballet and Whiteness: Will Ballet Forever Be the Kingdom of the Pale?” In The Oxford
Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity, edited by Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellers-Young, 585–597. Oxford:
Franks, Alan. 1999. “One Great Leap.” The Times Magazine, July 17, 36.
Gilroy, Paul. 2004. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? London: Routledge.
Goldhill, Olivia, and Sarah Marsh. 2012. “Why Ballet Needs to Make a Leap: Where Are All the Black
Ballet Dancers?” The Guardian, September 4, 16.
Gottschild, Brenda Dixon. 2003. The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Kisselgoff, Anna. 2002. “In the Ranks of the Idols.” New York Times, June 13, E1.
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Mackrell, Judith. 2003. “Leap of Faith.” The Guardian, June 19, 16.

Malik, Maleiha. 2010. “Progressive Multiculturalism: The British Experience.” In European Multiculturalism
Revisited, edited by Alessandro Silj, 20–73. London: Zed Books.
Marcuse, Herbert. 1969. “Repressive Tolerance.” In A Critique of Pure Tolerance, edited by Paul Wolff,
Barrington-More JR, and Herbert Marcus, 81–123. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Meisner, Nadine. 1998. “From Havana, Trailing Sparks.” The Independent, December 26, 8.
Mitra, Royona. 2015. Akram Khan: Dancing New Interculturalism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Monahan, Mark. 2010.“Hypnotic Spectacle of a Dancer Remaking Himself.” The Daily Telegraph, August 2, 23.
Namron. 2018. “I Don’t Do Black Dance, I Am a Black Dancer.” In Narratives in Black British Dance:
Embodied Practices, edited by Adesola Akinleye, 23–30. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Nicoll, Ruaridh. 2010. “Cuban Reels: At 37, Carlos Acosta Still Pushes Himself.” The Observer, August 1, 34.
Osterweis, Ariel. 2013. “The Muse of Virtuosity: Desmond Richardson, Race, and Choreographic
Falsetto.” Dance Research Journal 45 (3): 53–74.
Patterson, Christina. 2009. “I Hammer My Body Everyday.” The Independent, June 26, 12–13.
Royal Ballet. 2015. Carlos Acosta at the Royal Ballet. London: Oberon Books.
Sanghera, Sathman. 2004. “Weekend Interview: Carlos Acosta.” Financial Times, July 17, Weekend Living, 3.
Siegle, Lucy. 2003. “On the Verge: Cuba Libre.” The Observer Magazine, July 6, 15.
Silj, Alessandro, ed. 2010. European Multiculturalism Revisited. London: Zed Books.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture,
edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 217–313. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
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Warren, Byjane. 2002. “Dance.” The Express, July 19, 60.
Willis, Margaret. 2010. Carlos Acosta, the Reluctant Dancer. London: Arcadia Books.
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Žižek, Slavoj. 2007. The Universal Exception. London: Continuum.
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22
DIGITAL PRESERVATION
OF DANCE, INCLUSION,
AND ABSENCE
Sarah Whatley
Introduction
Digital technologies have introduced a multitude of opportunities for novel modes of record-
ing, documenting, and preserving dance content. More particularly, digital tools have been
developed that have offered dance scholars and artists opportunities to develop new modes
of visualizing and transmitting dance, thus creating new ways to access dance content and,
in turn, providing new insights to dance, and its compositional and relational properties.
Interdisciplinary teams have created many of these tools and resources, thereby stimulating
novel partnerships that have generated increased interest in dance—for its access to body
knowledge and different kinds of intelligences (Leach 2014)—while also probing the embod-
ied practice/document dichotomy. Consequently, dance is now distributed more widely and
what was once an art form that struggled to persist beyond the live event, dance is now avail-
able through digital archives, scores, websites, and open data banks, and many of these modes
are experimental in nature (Sant 2014). The increased availability of digital technologies also
has revealed that the dance-making process is a process of distributed cognition and author-
ship, thereby unleashing the choreographer from the conventional role of single author, with
the potential to make more visible the work of dancers who were hitherto on the margins of
the dance community.
This chapter will examine three digital dance resources that have emerged in recent
years that raise a number of questions about the digital preservation of dance. These ques-
tions revolve around what it is that is preserved and for whom, the nature of the documents
or ‘objects’ that are created, the role of the spectator, viewer, or ‘user’ in the construction
and preservation of dance, and how digital methods disrupt the temporal properties of the
dance ‘event.’ I will claim that the opportunity provided by digital technologies to access
the hidden processes of dance creation shows how these digital artifacts become new types
of records of performance.
I will review recent initiatives and projects that seem to have been particularly influential
in how dance and digital technologies have found a synergetic relationship. This review will
inevitably be only a partial picture; the field is far too rich and diverse to cover the many
activities, projects, and the artists who have contributed to innovation in this field. I will
focus primarily on the sphere of activity that is concerned with strategies for documenting
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and preserving dance, but where artists are core to how these projects have developed. Hence,
while my primary focus is not on digital dance in live performance—where dance artists
have experimented with digital processes to innovate their own performance making, using
tools such as motion tracking, motion capture, sensors, wearables and telematics—some of
these processes have seeped into dance preservation processes and have influenced methods
used. Indeed, new experiments that have emerged because of technological possibilities have
influenced changes in archival practices and the relationship between the artist and archive.
Interesting in this context is that some of the early innovators in artistic practice are
now rejecting digital processes in favor of returning to the body as a primary source for their
arts practice. It may well be that the close examination of the workings of the dancing body
provided by digital technologies, and the concomitant impossibility of digital technologies to
fully capture the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of human bodies in motion, has drawn many
back to wanting to work with the fleshy, corporeal dancing body. Some of those dance artists
and researchers who have worked long-term with technologies shared their views during a
series of interviews between 2014 and 2016 as part of the European-wide “RICHES” project
that focused on how cultural practices are being recalibrated because of digital technologies.1
Comments drawn from those interviews are included in the sections that follow (and all are
anonymized unless the interviewee specifically agreed to being named).2 For example, one
respondent talked about wanting to use digital technologies not to distance her from her own
body but as another way of encountering self, asking “rather than seeing technology as some-
thing that takes that away, how do we use technologies to bring that back?” (Respondent 1
interviewed by Amalia Sabiescu 2014).3
Digital technologies and dance—A recent history

In the 1990s, a seismic shift began in the way that dance was being made, performed, trans-
mitted, and distributed. With the introduction of the World Wide Web, communication
technologies brought about new kinds of collaborations and a growing interest in how digi-
tal tools could be disruptive to traditional creative processes. Consequently, dance as an art
form expanded in new directions. Several landmark projects prompted artists and scholars
to reflect on how dance as an art form could respond to digital technologies and the decades
since have been marked by experimentation, often bringing artists and experts in dance
together with practitioners and researchers in other disciplines to move the art form forward.
The evolution of contemporary dance in particular has been influenced heavily by digital
and networked media. The meeting between dancing bodies and computers provides the
opportunity to consider how computers transform how we think about and conceive of
motion. Whether through simple video recordings, motion capture, animation, sensors, or
holograms, whenever dance is captured and rendered through technology, it is transformed
into data. The growth in the generation and circulation of dance as data has fueled an emerg-
ing discourse that considers its impact on issues such as ethics, intellectual property, and
copyright in dance.
Of the many significant projects that have revolutionized the progress of dance in the
digital environment since the closing years of the twentieth century, I mention only a few
here. One that was a catalyst for many artists who were exploring the potential of new
technologies was Paul Sermon’s Telematic Dreaming (Sermon 1992). In this virtual reality
performance installation, dancer Susan Kozel “performs” with her projected image, as her
image is in relation with audience members, at the same time as being able to watch her
own projection in duet with the audience member on a screen. The work opened up new
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modes of encountering dance where the audience becomes more implicated in the action,
moving away from the passive viewer, seated and removed from the action in the traditional
theatre setting. Merce Cunningham and OpenEndedGroup’s 1999 motion tracking project
BIPED, where projections of dancing avatars appear to interact with the live dancers on
stage, brought together virtual and material bodies on stage. His later work with LifeForms,
a computer choreographic software tool, was born out of his own desire to continue invent-
ing choreographically when his own body became less able to explore and demonstrate new
movement ideas to his dancers.
Such artist-led projects paved the way for other initiatives that transformed dance into
digital data such as William Forsythe’s 2009 project Synchronous Objects, a substantial website
that focuses on one single dance work—One Flat Thing, reproduced (Forsythe 2000). The proj-
ect includes information about how the dance was made to help audiences understand how
to view an abstract work that is highly complex in its structure. A number of digital scores
show how the choreography is built up around several systems at play in the choreography.
Scott deLahunta, one of the researchers involved in the project, explained in an interview as
part of the RICHES project referred to earlier:
One is a cueing system, when [the dancers] look at each other and then they wait
for one person to move, and then another person moves. And another is a system
they call alignment, so it’s when one person moves this way in space, and some other
person, maybe his head moves this way in space. The lines that are on top, these
lines help the audiences see why the choreographer made those decisions. (deLa-
hunta 2014)
Digital dance objects

Synchronous Objects was designed as a “choreographic object or a collection of twenty cho-
reographic objects that function together to communicate the ideas in the dance into anima-
tions, interactive tools, and so on” (Zuniga Shaw 2014, 117). The project developed out of
Forsythe’s earlier explorations that were informed by film and digital media, even though
he did not use a computer in the studio. As deLahunta commented in an interview for the
RICHES project in 2014, “early in the 80s [Forsythe] would choreograph dance and he
would talk about bringing an algorithm into class, or an algorithm into the composition pro-
cess, he would talk about cutting and pasting. So, his language, the composition ideas, were
informed by media.” But in the same interview, deLahunta pointed out that “if you looked in
a different direction, you could find a hundred experimentalists around the margins, work-
ing with technology” (deLahunta 2014). Although these projects on the edges are harder to
track, they are likely to have played their role in influencing many other interdisciplinary or
transdisciplinary dance and media projects.
Since its launch, Synchronous Objects has spawned the emergence of other “choreographic
objects”4 as a category of digital dance “things” or artifacts, often made by the artist in
partnership with designers and researchers, that have had an impact on artists, scholars, and
collaborators from beyond dance, including architects, engineers, software developers, and
those working in human factors and ergonomics. According to one RICHES project inter-
viewee, the impact of this developing research was that “performing arts could draw upon
the sciences and sciences could also invite artists [to collaborate] …. Dance or performance
suddenly became a valued partner in the production of cultural knowledge or know-how”
(Respondent 2 interviewed by author 2014). Collectively, this growing corpus of digital
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choreographic objects has helped to assert dance as a knowledge-producing practice, or a

“knowledge-making enterprise” (Leach 2017, 142), catalyzing thinking about the complex-
ity of the ‘object’ when situated in the domain of dance, and acting as a supplement, exten-
sion or expanded iteration of the dance ‘work’ itself.
Of these ‘things’, digital scores emerge as a recurrent feature of digital dance preserva-
tion projects, either as a naming for a document that aims to record the structural, spatial, or
temporal components of a dance work, or as a form of translation from the live to the digital.
As artist Myriam Van Imschoot describes in relation to her Oral Site archive project, which
began by dealing with scores:
The score is a perfect case for a platform that works with documents, questions
their functioning and alters their status. Sometimes a score refers to a past creation,
reveals its compositional matrix, but many times it has a pro-active dimension too
when it calls for new instantiations. It breaks open temporalities (past, present and
future) and possibly agencies too, because scores can be passed on to other execu-
tioners. This dynamic element and unstable status, of a document unhinging fixed
authorship, underlines the active nature of documents and their performative pos-
sibilities for reuse. (Van Imschoot and Engels 2013, 37)
Imschoot points to the concerns that underpin many of the projects that provide a backdrop
to the digital documentation projects that I focus on here, each of which is similarly initiated
by a dance artist or has the artist at the core of the project. Each also disrupts the temporal
nature of preservation by intervening at different stages, before, during, or after the dance
event.
Preservation and the legacy of the digital on dance

Although digital technologies have led to a culture of greater openness in dance, whereby
sharing work has been facilitated through the ease of online video platforms such as YouTube
and a broader context in which social media is the norm, less attention has been paid to how
digitalization can support the long-term preservation of dance works. This situation has
not changed even as the recording of material has become more commonplace, affordable,
and immediate (through streaming services, for example). To some extent, this situation
reflects the experimental drive of many of these projects that seek to expand beyond creating
an archive of dance with the principal aim of categorizing, stabilizing, and ‘fixing’ the dance
for preservation purposes. Dance preservation has for some time generated debate about its
purpose and impact on the dance field ( Jordan 2000). However, the speed at which dance
can be made immediately available, accessible, and consumable mirrors the speed at which
technology and file formats advance and change, making digital preservation vulnerable.
For some artists and scholars, the disappearance of dance is less of a concern if the body
is believed to be the primary holder of memory. In interview for the RICHES project, con-
temporary artist Isobelle Choinier describes how the evolution of technology presents her
with a huge problem when the hardware doesn’t exist anymore or software stops working,
yet believes that “we are just beginning to understand those very complex forms and rela-
tions because it changes the way you perform, it changes the way you have to deal with aes-
thetics, with communication. So it is really a very complex thing, but I think that it’s really
part of the experience, but I’m not the one that will defend the disappearance of the body.
I think it is part of what can be explored” (Choinier interviewed by Amalia Sabiescu 2014).
314
Disappearance might thus be experienced as an inevitable property of the dance/digital

interface, whether desirable or not. Indeed, because digital archives of performance retain a
condition of ephemerality, they may not be so distanced from the performance that they seek
to document, “but which necessarily distance themselves from other foundational notions
such as presence, embodiment, non-reproducibility, and liveness” (Bench 2017, 160). Diana
Taylor, who has been highly influential in thinking about the relationship between live per-
formance repertoire and the archive, argues that the question of disappearance in relation to
the archive and the repertoire is one of kind as well as degree (2003, 20). In considering the
analogue archive, she further claims that:
the “live” performance can never be captured or transmitted through the archive.
A video of a performance is not a performance, though it often comes to replace the
performance as a thing in itself (the video is part of the archive; what it represents is
part of the repertoire). Embodied memory, because it is live, exceeds the archive’s
ability to capture it. (Taylor 2003, 20, italics in original)
Despite Taylor’s assertion, for many there is a recognition that documenting dance is impor-
tant for being able to study dance in depth because it is necessary for ensuring dance is fully
present as part of our cultural heritage and digital technologies can be a valuable asset in
preservation strategies. Taylor has since considered the impact of the digital on archival prac-
tices. She notes that “the objects in the digital archive require, rather than resist, the ‘change
over time’ I associated with the traditional archive” (2010, 7), recognizing the flux that is
inevitable with digital resources. Although she insists that “the embodied, the archival, and
the digital overlap and work together and mutually construct each other” (3), she concerns
herself mostly with examining what she names the “antiarchival practices” (14) that the
digital environment has led to. She is referring to the ease at which content can be recorded
but without the professional standards or institutional controls that typify archival practices.
If not “antiarchival,” then another consequence of the digital is the ‘accidental’ archive that
emerges when dance motion is tracked and captured for other purposes, such as for analyzing
biomechanical, expressive, or other reasons and a valuable library of dance content is col-
lected. These unintended archives accumulate value for their preservation of dance even if
these corporeal data banks are ‘open’ and accessible for others to use and reuse varies from
project to project.
Despite the increasing availability of digital technologies, the costs and labor involved in
digitizing analogue content for archival purposes or for creating more expansive and multi-
layered digital web-based dance resources means that there are relatively few openly acces-
sible dance resources.5 Many physical dance archives have online catalogues. Some have a
limited range of content accessible online (predominantly text and static objects rather than
video). The lack of video and dynamic content reflects the relative lack of this kind of dance
content in historical collections as well as the cost of building the data bases and digitiz-
ing, conserving, storing, and backing up large files. Dance companies, organizations, and
individual artists typically have websites that can offer access to rich content including some
video extracts, but most are produced for the general audience and are designed primarily for
promotional purposes. These digital artifacts are quite different from the archives created by
artists and scholars concerned with the construction of memory and their affect. English and
theatre scholars Guilia Palladini and Marco Pustianaz put forward the idea of the “affective
archive,” describing it as wavering “between materiality and immateriality, between con-
servation and transformation” and which “is intended to acknowledge the impulse that both
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creates and mobilizes the archive as an endless process” (Palladini and Pustianaz 2017, 12).
Their project is concerned more with physical or material archives and its affect may be less
palpable in the digital environment, but as with all archival materials, any dance collection
provides a glimpse into the relationship between the subject of the archive and the act of col-
lecting, and between all those involved in its creation. Moreover, the short shelf-life of digital
technologies is as relevant to the digital resources that seek to preserve dance works as it is
to dance artists who use these technologies and shape the discussion that follows. I now turn
my focus to three contrasting digital dance resources that are designed primarily as experi-
ments in dance documentation, transmission and preservation, and have had impact in dance
practice, research, and teaching.
Siobhan Davies RePlay

My own direct involvement in the creation of Siobhan Davies RePlay (RePlay) (2009), the
digital archive of the work of British choreographer Siobhan Davies (b. 1950), provides me
with an insider perspective on its development, impact, and subsequent migration in an
effort to extend the life of the archive in response to the inevitable short shelf-life of software
noted earlier. I have written elsewhere on the process of building RePlay (Whatley 2013a,
2013b, 2013c, 2014, 2017) so my focus here will be on its wider contribution to digital dance
resources. RePlay was developed initially between 2006 and 2009, a dynamic time in which
artists and scholars alike were contemplating questions about archive, repertoire, and dance
documentation. YouTube and Vimeo were only just emerging and there was almost no dance
available on open channels so many dancers were understandably wary of sharing their work
in this new and untested environment. Similarly, custodians of other archival collections
where there were some traces of Davies’s work were understandably protective about what
could be accessed and for what purpose. But digital technologies were shifting efforts away
from analogue tools for recording dance, such as dance notation and film, to methods that
would not only document the dance as a ‘product,’ but which could provide access to other
traces of dance making and performance, such as rehearsal material, choreographic note-
books, design prototypes, and so on.
Making use of the ability to store content in a digital repository in a way that is fully
searchable provides the user with a new way to view dance. The viewer can search through
multiple records provided by computing power that far exceeds what a human can achieve,
and choose what to view, what order, for how long, juxtaposing video, audio, and text on the
screen. By using simple tools (such as the digital scrapbook on RePlay), the user can organize
material into personalized collections. Consequently, the conventional way of encountering
dance through viewing a live performance, on a single video recording, or through photo-
graphic traces and various written accounts of the dance often distributed across multiple sites
and in fragmented archival collections, extended into offering more choices to the viewer.
Moreover, a process of dissection or segmentation of the content on RePlay, necessary for
cataloguing and developing the metadata schema, begins to reveal new dimensions of the
dance and specifically the many layers of the dance-making process. An ontological shift thus
begins to happen in the digital environment in which the dance work no longer exists only
as a singular event or product.
In RePlay, the uncovering of more records of the making process and the collection of such
a diverse range of materials led to the creation of two playful interactive graphic scores that
conveyed through data visualizations something of the structural features of the choreogra-
phy. These were named ‘kitchens’ for offering insight to the ingredients of the choreography
316
and how these are ‘cooked’ to become dance works. Each of two kitchens, created for two
choreographies, Bird Song (2004) and In Plain Clothes (2006),6 drew on Davies’s wide collec-
tion of design sketches, rehearsal notes, films of rehearsals, and so on. These materials were
available only because the archive was built close to the time of the choreographic process.
For earlier dance works, these materials were either lost or scattered among Davies’s collabo-
rators and so were less easy to recover.
Each kitchen was designed individually to draw the viewer into the choreographic com-
positional structures (through color, movement, and spatial organization on the screen), the
source materials for the dances ( journals and sketch books), the working processes of the
dancers (through their reflective writing), and design concepts (through sketches of cos-
tumes, sound scores, and draft lighting designs). Much like the intention in Synchronous
Objects, the kitchens had a similar educational purpose by being built to enhance the under-
standing of two abstract dance works. The kitchens are historical digital documents in their
own terms, revealing the state of the art at that time in terms of digital data visualization.
In 2013, only four years after it went ‘live’, RePlay became unsupportable as a digital platform
as the software exceeded its useful shelf life.7 In common with many other digital resources, the
content was at risk without continual upkeep. Many digital resources once ‘completed’ can too
quickly become ‘zombie’ projects, neither dying nor growing, so are left suspended. Unlike their
physical counterpart such as a physical manuscript, the digital object, whether digitized material
such as scans, videos, and so on or born-digital8 items such as digital photographs, are vulnerable
without a commitment to translation and ongoing preservation. As an archive, such a temporary
existence can threaten to undermine the purpose of the project to preserve work that was previ-
ously vulnerable. RePlay had become a historical artifact in its own right, reflecting technologi-
cal changes over the last decade, revealing its own history of production, and participating in the
tension between dance’s disappearance and permanence.
Replaying the archive

The decision to migrate RePlay to a new software platform to ensure its longer life revealed
how new formats may sustain the content in the collection but pose a threat to the original
design and interface. RePlay (dance “as was”) grew alongside Davies’s developing oeuvre,
producing a living history of the work she was making. It performed a secondary role in
revealing the evolution of digital archives and their affordances for dance in a wider sense,
even though this defies the archive’s own ontological status as a collection of ‘the past.’
The new platform reflects the tensions that often operate in the building of digital resources.
The original RePlay was built through a creative and dialogic process where decisions were
made between the whole team about what to include and how to organize material. The aes-
thetic of Davies’s choreographic work informed the aesthetic of RePlay, including how the
material was organized on the screen, the color palette, fonts, and so on.
Theatre historian Joseph Roach argues for reproduction and recreation of culture as “a
process of surrogation” (Roach 1996, 2; italics in original). The reproduction of archival con-
tent could be viewed as a similar process of surrogation, which later Roach equates to “per-
formance” (Roach 1996, 4). The ‘new’ RePlay has become a surrogate for the first, which
was itself a form of substitution for the live ‘original’ dance thus continuing a chain of erasure
even in its efforts to preserve. Roach’s writing focuses primarily on the social processes of
memory and forgetting, examined through the way that memories are embodied in and
through performances, extending the understanding of performance by making it coter-
minous with memory and history (26). The relationship between performance and digital
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Sarah Whatley
technologies is not his focus. However, just as performance participates in the transfer and
continuity of knowledge, the digital surrogates that performances create do something simi-
lar. The aim of RePlay is to achieve two key aims. The first is to contextualize dance, linking
its history with memories of those who made, performed, and viewed the dance. The second
is to foreground somehow the material properties of dance while finding structures that
transmit the tactile sensibility and sensuous presence of those materials alongside the complex
structures that mobilize dancing bodies in performance.
Digital dance archives; A collection of many archives

RePlay is an example of a digital dance preservation project that focuses primarily on a single
artist’s output. By contrast, the Digital Dance Archives (DDA) portal9 provides access to the
visual content contained within multiple dance collections (videos, photographs, drawings,
sketches, and so on). As an ‘archive’ it is thus not a full collection of textual materials and
other records that would support an in-depth analysis of a particular choreographer or cho-
reographic work, rather it is “primarily a visual storage and retrieval system for digital con-
tent whose analogue storage and organization is maintained elsewhere” (Fensham 2017, 72).
Developed between 2010 and 2011, the project brought together dance researchers, computer
scientists, and the National Resource Centre for Dance (NRCD) in the UK to digitize a number
of archives managed by NRCD, which is housed at the University of Surrey, create a linked data
structure that would provide access to these archives, as well as RePlay, and design a tool that would
allow users to search by visual similarity. Glitches in the background code led to some surprising
results being returned. It was thus primarily effective in providing a compelling and serendipitous
tool for discovering hitherto hidden connections between visual content. For example, by trac-
ing the lineage of a particular dance step or body pose, links could be made between different
dance genres and traditions. And the colors in a number of geometric forms drawn by dance
theorist Rudolf von Laban, for example, could generate surprising links to contemporary theatre
set designs. The tool helped users to build digital scrapbooks of visual material, enriched by user-
generated textual annotations as ways to interpret and develop narratives through the content.
Unlike the focus on a single choreographer in RePlay, or the fragmented records stored
by major museums and other memory institutions, DDA opens up “a new form of archi-
val memory or social choreography of movement history” (Fensham 2017, 73). However,
without additional resources the search tool could not be updated. Consequently, while the
‘About’ page on the portal describes how by using simple, icon-based instructions, the four
different modes of visual search allow the user to search across the DDA collections to find
similar instances of shape, gesture, sequences, and color—what actually appears is a frame
without a function. As with ghost links or the ‘link rot’ of broken hyperlinks, the lost function
underscores the fragility of digital code. However, the primary dance content is preserved
and NRCD continues to add new digitized collections drawn from their hard copy archives
to the portal, featuring the visual records of dance companies and traditions spanning the
last century, predominantly UK-based, as diverse as Extemporary Dance Theatre, Ludmila
Mlada, Revived Greek Dance, Kokuma Dance Theatre, and Yolande Snaith Theatredance.
Motion Bank
Taking a different approach to the digitalization of dance is Motion Bank,10 an initiative
by choreographer William Forsythe that builds on the earlier Synchronous Objects website.
Focusing on the production of a series of digital dance scores, the project brought together
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researchers, leading dance choreographers, designers, educators, and computer scientists.

The aim was to “explore how digital technology can be uniquely applied to the challenge of
documenting, analyzing, notating/annotating, and presenting dance” (Forsythe and deLa-
hunta 2011, 12) by archiving a number of choreographers’ conceptual approaches along with
video recordings and three-dimensional data documenting the performances and the depic-
tions created by the designers.
Forsythe described Motion Bank as “the world’s first library of digital dance scores” (quoted
in deLahunta 2017, 130). He did not want the site to become “exclusively focused” on his
own work, but that it should become a “medium for knowledge transmission” rather than
a “Personal Platform” (quoted in deLahunta 2017, 129). The international choreographers/
dance artists featured in Motion Bank—Deborah Hay, Jonathan Burrows, Matteo Fargion,
Bebe Miller, and Thomas Hauert—were invited “on the basis of their distinctive, articulate,
and diverse approaches to creating dance works” (Forsythe and deLahunta 2011, 12). Each
worked with a group of interaction designers, educators, programmers, and computer sci-
entists working with different motion analysis tools including Kinect and Motionbuilder to
visualize and animate different aspects of their work.
A series of digital scores emerged through this interdisciplinary design process that are
as diverse as the artists themselves and that aim to reveal the specific aesthetic, conceptual
approach, and devising methods particular to each artist. A core goal was the development of
software that might be used by others to create their own online scores to add to the Motion
Bank collection (deLahunta 2017, 133). Two tools were developed. The first is an annotation
tool PM2 based on the Piecemaker annotation tool developed by David Kern. The other is
MoSys, a publishing system developed for the publication of the online scores (134). Motion
Bank underscores how many of these digital projects rely on a process of contagion whereby
interdisciplinary teams configure new spaces of creative possibility in exploring ways to medi-
ate between recording, translating, visualizing, and preserving dance content. Preservation of
the dance works and the site became a by-product rather than a principal aim of the project.
As deLahunta explained in interview for the RICHES project, in his discussion with the artists,
“the word ‘preservation’ never comes up, but from my perspective it is of course preservation
because as long as we take care of it and we keep updating the website so that it doesn’t disap-
pear” (deLahunta 2014).
Forsythe’s work has been highly influential not only in dance practice and research, but also
in other fields because of his interest in the thinking that underpins dance making, cognition,
or corporeal knowledge, and his collaborations with experts in other fields, leading to a grow-
ing discourse around the notion of “choreographic thinking” (Forsythe 2009; deLahunta,
Clarke, and Barnard 2012). This influence in turn has stimulated interest in how digitalization
participates in the revealing and transmission of dance knowledge and choreographic systems
that were previously concealed within the embodied exchange between choreographer and
dancer, hidden behind the walls of the dance rehearsal studio and then made invisible, or at
least harder to see once transformed through the multiple stages of choreographic develop-
ment. What is documented on Motion Bank is therefore not only the dance works but also
the activities and outputs of those who have worked closely with the choreographers, thereby
recording a phenomenon that has emerged through the interface between dance and digital
technologies, that of the interaction between excavation, transmission, and preservation of
dance. Nonetheless, those without access to funding and expertise have to rely on their own
resources to document their work. If the document is a form of evidence and proof that it hap-
pened, then without those documents being available, accessible, and preserved, many dance
works and dance practices are under-represented or even entirely absent from the archives.
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Sarah Whatley
Conclusion
Dance is evolving in interesting ways in the twenty-first century due in part to the develop-
ments in digital and networked media. The projects discussed here are all concerned with
how digital technologies can participate in the preservation of dance and the nature of dance
and choreographic knowledge (Leach 2014). As Zuniga Shaw, who led the Synchronous
Objects project argues, these projects act as choreographic resources, not to pin down but to
flesh out the dance, to explore its contours (2014, 99). She asks, “can the original resources
be repurposed in a subaltern move to simultaneously create a record and assert the ephem-
eral ground of live art-making, the fiction of all memory and the partiality of any score?”
(99). In the projects mentioned here, the resources are designed to explore the connec-
tion between embodied artistic practice and digital visualization, and to generate exchange
between the artists, technologists, and users.
RePlay has been a valuable touchstone for others building digital archives of performance
and a key reference point for dancers, teachers, researchers, and general audiences.11 It has
helped to unsettle our normative historical records in which dance has tended to be absent.
However, the aim of RePlay was to foreground regeneration rather than capture. In proving
its own regenerating capability, the new site for the archive conveys a sense of renewal even
if in its new form, it also reveals a certain loss of what was before, mirroring the continual
and perhaps inevitable disappearance of the dance ‘as was.’
The Digital Dance Archives project brings together several collections and by prioritizing
visual content enables the user to make links between dance content represented through
photographic stills, video, drawings, posters, and other visual documents. Motion Bank
extends the exploration with computing technology much further by layering information
about the dance-making and -structuring process in the construction of several digital dance
scores. As Bleeker and deLahunta note about digital dance projects that have emerged in
recent years: Even though many of them work with ‘captured’ dance and provide the means
to store this and make it accessible, many of them explicitly resist the idea of merely looking
back to the past (Bleeker and deLahunta 2017, 12).
By focusing on three well-funded digital dance projects, I am bringing yet further atten-
tion to projects that cannot fully represent an environment that is rich with experimentation,
but which are nonetheless influential in how this sector of activity has grown. The labor and
costs involved in creating digital resources are an inevitable barrier for some in the dance sec-
tor, as is the lack of a robust infrastructure for linking data and for licensing digital content,
so that more dance can be discovered, accessed, and reused. Dance theorist Harmony Bench
discusses how the reconfiguration of the archive through digitalization as not only a store
of documents but also as a new mode of knowledge production has “redirected the archive’s
social, political, and historical purposes and achievements, prioritizing circulation over pres-
ervation” (Bench 2017, 156), marking a “shift from the archive as a state-sponsored reposi-
tory for and producer of histories to the archive as a market-authorized site of circulation for
cultural memories” (157). Projects that have emerged since the millennium have fueled this
developing discourse, informed by memory studies, digital curation, digital humanities, and
data management practices, and which centered on the practices of collecting, archiving, and
safekeeping dance.
Much of the writing in recent years that has considered the impact of digital technologies
on dance has focused on the way dance transforms (or not) through digitization, on the way
dance changes its ontological nature (or not) through being created with or through digital
technologies, and on the different ways in which dance is transmitted, shared, and preserved
320
through digital means. The digital preservation of dance requires a systematic and standard-
ized approach. Done well, it stimulates the imagination so that viewers (or users) find new
ways to respond to and analyze dance. Unlike the analogue archive, which may well con-
tain stable objects, the digital archive requires mediation and can be as transformative and
transitory as the content it seeks to preserve. The digital dance document thus operates as a
continuum of practice, more than a static object, more than an inanimate left-over, and more
than merely the residue or “after” of the dance.
Notes
1 The Renewal, Innovation and Change: Heritage and European Society (RICHES) (2016) project
was funded by the European Union FP7 program; grant no. 612789. Accessed 16 September 2017.
http://www.riches-project.eu.
2 I received ethical approval from Coventry University Ethics Committee for conducting these
interviews, which were carried out by the author and project research assistant, Amalia Sabiescu.
3 Respondents who did not wish to reveal their names are referred to as Respondent 1 and 2 (dates
of these interviews are given in the reference list).
4 The term “choreographic objects” appears first in William Forsythe’s 2009 essay of the same title,
in which he reflects on projects he has initiated that have utilized digital technologies for inscrib-
ing, recording and transmitting his dance practice.
5 More single artist and company archives are in development, for example The Digital Pina Bausch
Archive (2016): http://www.pinabausch.org/en/archive/the-digital-archive or are repositories col-
lecting together several archives, for example Numeridanse.tv: http://numeridanse.tv/en/. Accessed
July 25, 2017. In addition, a useful analysis of a number of American “Artist-Driven” dance archives
is provided by Rosemary Candelario (2018).
6 See: http://www.siobhandavies.com/thekitchen/birdsong/ and http://www.siobhandavies.com/
thekitchen/inplainclothes/ on Siobhan Davies RePlay. Accessed September 18, 2017. https://www.
siobhandaviesreplay.com/.
7 The year that RePlay went live also marked the end of Davies making dance works for the theatre
and proscenium arch stage. It was as if preserving her past work had released her to do something
new.
8 “Born-digital” usually refers to those materials that originate in a digital form as opposed to ana-
logue materials that are digitized and therefore become digital through digital reformatting.
9 The Digital Dance Archives project was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council
(AHRC) Digital Equipment and Database Enhancement for Impact scheme.
10 See Motion Bank website. Accessed April 20, 2019. http://motionbank.org/.
11 RePlay has been cited by teachers, researchers and archivists since its launch. It has been a core
reference point for the Routledge Performance. Archive. Accessed April 19, 2019. (http://www.
routledgeperformancearchive.com), Rambert Dance Company’s archive project and the Walker
Art Center, Minneapolis, USA.
References
Bench, Harmony. 2017. “Dancing in Digital Archives: Circulation, Pedagogy, Performance.” In Transmission
in Motion:The Technologizing of Dance, edited by Maaike Bleeker, 155–167. Abingdon: Routledge.
Bleeker, Maaike and Scott deLahunta. 2017. “Movement Across Media: Twelve Tools for Transmission.”
In Transmission in Motion: The Technologizing of Dance, edited by Maaike Bleeke, 3–15. Abingdon:
Routledge.
Candelario, Rosemary. 2018. “Choreographing American Dance Archives: Artist-Driven Archival Projects
by Eiko & Koma, Bebe Miller Company, and Jennifer Monson.” Dance Research Journal 50 (1): 80–101.
Choinier, Isobelle. 2014. Interviewed by Amalia Sabiescu. November 8, 2014. Coventry.
deLahunta, Scott. 2014. Interviewed by Amalia Sabiescu. July 22, 2014. Coventry.
———. 2017. “Motion Bank: A Broad Context for Choreographic Research.” In Transmission in Motion:
The Technologizing of Dance, edited by Maaike Bleeker, 128–137. Abingdon: Routledge.
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deLahunta, Scott, Gill Clarke, and Philip Barnard. 2012. “A Conversation about Choreographic Thinking
Tools.” Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices 3 (1–2): 243–259.
Fensham, Rachel. 2017. “Searching Movement’s History: Digital Dance Archives.” In Transmission in Motion:
Forsythe, William. 2000. “One Flat Thing, reproduced.” Performed by the Forsythe Company. Stage premier:
Bockenheimer Depot, Frankfurt, Germany.
———. 2009. “Choreographic Objects – An Essay.” Accessed September 15, 2017. http://www.william-
forsythe.de/essay.html.
Forsythe, William, and Scott deLahunta, eds. 2011. Motion Bank Brochure and Logo Generator. Accessed
September 15, 2017. http://motionbank.org/sites/motionbank.org/files/mb_brochure.pdf.
Forsythe, William, and Scott deLahunta, dirs. 2011. “Motion Bank.” Accessed September 15, 2018. http://
motionbank.org/.
Jordan, Stephanie, ed. 2000. Preservation Politics: Dance Revived Reconstructed Remade. London: Dance Books.
Leach, James. 2014 “Choreographic Objects: Contemporary Dance, Digital Creations and Prototyping
Social Visibility.” Journal of Cultural Economy 7 (3): 458–475.
———. 2017. “Making Knowledge from Movement: Some Notes on the Contextual Impetus to Transmit
Knowledge from Dance.” In Transmission in Motion: The Technologizing of Dance, edited by Maaike
Bleeker, 141–154. Abingdon: Routledge.
Palladini, Guilia and Marco Pustianaz, eds. 2017. Lexicon for an Affective Archive. Bristol: Intellect.
Pina Bausch Foundation. 2016. “The Digital Pina Bausch Archive.” Digital Archive. Accessed January 10,
2019. http://www.pinabausch.org/en/archive/the-digital-archive.
Renewal, Innovation and Change: Heritage and European Society (RICHES). 2016. European Union FP7
Programme; Gant no. 612789. Accessed January 2, 2019. http://www.riches-project.eu.
Respondent 1. 2014. Interviewed by Amalia Sabiescu, August 5, 2014, Coventry.
Respondent 2. 2014. Interviewed by author, July 3, 2014. London.
Roach, Joseph. 1996. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press.
Routledge Performance Archive. Digital Archive. Accessed January 4, 2018. https://www.routledgeperfor-
mancearchive.com/.
Sant, Toni. 2014 “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Documenting Performance.” International Journal of
Performance Arts and Digital Media 10 (1): 3–6.
Sermon, Paul, dir. 1992. “Telematic Dreaming.” Interactive Environment. Accessed February 4, 2019.
Siobhan Davies RePlay. 2009. “Siobhan Davies RePlay: The Choreographic Archive of Siobhan Davies
Dance.” Digital Archive. Accessed August 10, 2018. https://www.siobhandaviesreplay.com/.
Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
———. 2010 “Save As... Knowledge and Transmission in the Age of Digital Technologies.” Imagining
America. Paper 7. Accessed September 10, 2017. http://surface.syr.edu/ia/7.
Van Imschoot, Myriam and Tom Engels. 2013. “Zombies and Butterflies: A Dialogue on Oral Site between
Tom Engels and Myriam Van Imschoot, May 10, 2012, 14:00, Kaaistudio’s, Brussels.” International Journal
of Performance Arts and Digital Media 9 (1): 31–39.
Whatley, Sarah. 2013a. “Siobhan Davies RePlay; (Re)Visiting the Digital Archive.” International Journal of
Performance Arts and Digital Media 9 (1): 83–98.
———. 2013b. “Siobhan Davies RePlay: Corporeality and Materiality in the Online Environment.” Scene
1 (1): 135–148.
———. 2013c. “Dance Encounters Online; Digital Archives and Performance.” In Performing Archives/
Archives of Performance, edited by Rune Gade and Gunhild Borggreen, 163–178. Copenhagen: Museum
Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen.
———. 2014. “Digital Inscriptions and the Dancing Body; Expanding Territories through and with the
Archive.” Choreographic Practice 5 (1): 121–138.
———. 2017. “Archiving the Dance; Making Siobhan Davies RePlay.” In Transmission in Motion:
Zuniga Shaw, Norah. 2014 “Animate Inscriptions, Articulate Data and Algorithmic Expressions of
Choreographic Thinking.” Choreographic Practices 5 (1): 95–119.
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23
DANCE AND COPYRIGHT
As time moves on
Charlotte Waelde
Introduction
The purpose of this contribution is to give a copyright law response to the question “Who
owns the dance?” by way of a detailed analysis of the legal rules around authorship. It will be
suggested that authorship and relatedly ownership of copyright in recorded dance may rest
with choreographers and multiple dancers. This response could result in challenges for mak-
ing recorded dance available because each author of the copyright would need to give con-
sent to re-use, a potentially onerous task at a time when the ubiquity of technologies makes
reaching out to new audiences easier than in the past. Also, each co-author (and owner) could
benefit from (financial) exploitation of the dance. To help broker these burgeoning relations
between copyright authors and owners and users, it will be suggested that the dance com-
munity should consider establishing DanceROCS, a collecting society to manage copyright
in dance.
Themes and concerns

This is a legal contribution to the debate in dance studies concerning authorship of copyright
and the implications of having multiple owners. The literature contains contributions to our
knowledge of authorship and ownership of dance from non-legal perspectives (e.g., Roche
2016). There are contributions to dance and copyright from non-law perspectives (e.g., Kraut
2016). There are also legal copyright contributions, but ones that do not specifically focus on
authorship and ownership of copyright in dance (e.g., Yeoh 2013). Because of the centrality
of the question “Who owns the dance?,” the purpose of this contribution is to add a consid-
eration of legal analysis to the dance studies literature. It is fully appreciated that reading legal
analysis is unfamiliar to many outside the law profession and can be a challenge to follow.
Every effort has been made in this chapter to make the argument accessible but not at the cost
of compromising the analysis. Misunderstandings across disciplines can be common and part
of the purpose of this contribution is to iron out some of those misunderstandings between
dance and copyright law and vice versa.
This chapter will consider United Kingdom (UK) copyright law since it has been shaped
by the European Union (EU) jurisprudence. This choice is for several reasons. First, copyright
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Charlotte Waelde
law is territorial. This distinction means essentially that the rules play out differently in different
jurisdictions. So, for example, although the United States (US) and the UK share similarities in
their copyright law (the Copyright Act of 1790 in the US was based on the Statute of Anne,
also known as the Copyright Act 1710, in the UK, and both share a similar economic rationale)
detailed rules on, for example, the work for hire doctrine in the US differs from the employer/
employee rules in the UK, as do the detailed rules on the term of protection of copyright.
Proper legal analysis of both jurisdictions would result in more detail than necessary for this
chapter. Second, the UK/EU was chosen because of the richness of the discussion on author-
ship and ownership of copyright emanating from the EU, which seeks to interpret the copyright
directives implemented in each member state that draw together the different copyright tradi-
tions rooted in the personality in continental Europe and economic benefit in the UK. Focusing
on the UK/EU thus will give a perspective that will help deepen understanding of a range of
jurisdictions. Third, a US dance/law scholar working across jurisdictions will be able to take the
arguments and findings from this contribution and delve into similarities and differences in the
US as they are relevant to his or her work, drawing on existing literature on US copyright law
and dance (e.g., Chapman 2017). Finally, a US dance/law scholar would need to have a working
knowledge of the differences in copyright law across jurisdictions if, for example, he or she were
to consider the implications of legal relations in Europe concerning exploitation of dance with
the very first question being, “Who owns the dance?”
Since this chapter is a legal analysis, relatively extensive reference will be made to case
law to make certain points and illuminate the argument.1 However, there is little case law
specifically on dance and copyright. There are three fairly old cases: (1) ownership of copy-
right by a choreographer under the Copyright Act of 1911 in the UK, (2) infringement of the
copyright in an Oscar Wilde story when adapted in the form of a ballet, and (3) a dramatic
work must be capable of being performed to be protected by copyright. However, these are
not very helpful for this chapter. Therefore, cases will be used by analogy. In other words,
cases will be used where they decide a specific point of law that is relevant to the argument,
even though the facts in the case do not deal with dance. For example, an important case
decided in 2011 by the Court of Justice of the EU (CoJ) concerned the test for originality for
copyright authorship, which arose from questions concerning a photograph of a schoolgirl.
The important point arising from this case is the test concerning originality which can then
be applied in other cases, including dance, and not to the facts of the specific case.
For these reasons, this chapter is not about US copyright law. Neither will the reader find
mention of “fair use.” In any discussion of copyright and dance a familiar question is, “But
what about fair use?” Fair use is not relevant to the argument in this chapter. This discus-
sion is about authorship and ownership of copyright in dance. Fair use, a US copyright law
concept, is relevant to exploitation of copyright and whether it is possible to use (parts of ) a
work without permission from or payment to the copyright owner. A similar, but far from
identical, concept in the UK is fair dealing. For the reasons given previously, the reader will
not find mention of fair dealing in this analysis either.
Two copyright law and dance examples

Having set the scene, there will no doubt be readers who will at this point question the rele-
vance of copyright to dance at all. Although some dance organizations have highly developed
copyright strategies, copyright for other companies and individuals may seem rarely to be of
relevance. That said, two examples might help to highlight the extent to which copyright
is becoming increasingly visible at all levels of the dance world. The first example will be
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Dance and copyright
familiar to most readers; it concerns the borrowing in 2011 by Beyoncé in the video for her
single “Countdown” from two dances choreographed by De Keersmaeker: Rosas danst Rosas
and Achterland. Although the case never came to court, if it had, the first question would have
been “Who owns the copyright in Rosas danst Rosas and Achterland?” Only the owner of the
copyright in the dance would have the right to pursue another for infringement. To ascertain
the owner of the copyright, it is first necessary to determine who the author is. The second
case study relates to the computer game Fortnite and the claims of copyright infringement
in dance moves made by a number of pop artists. The claims are that Fortnite has copied the
dance moves that are owned by the pop artists and is selling them on the computer game to
users. Although there are many layers of copyright questions that arise in these claims, the
most fundamental is whether the pop artists own copyright to the dance moves. In other
words, “Who owns the dance?” As before, to determine who owns the dance, it is first
necessary to work out who the author is. This second example also highlights the potential
for new markets for dance—something that DanceROCS, discussed herein, could facilitate.
Copyright authorship and ownership

Copyright law has as its heart the author who is the person who creates the work.2 The mani-
festation of this lies in the term of protection of copyright that, for dramatic works including
dance, is linked to the life of the author and lasts for seventy years after death.3 The author
is the initial owner of the economic rights conferred by copyright4 (the exclusive rights to
authorize inter alia reproduction, dissemination, and communication on the internet of the
work protected by copyright)5 and it is the author who has moral rights in the work—rights
to be identified as author and to object to derogatory treatment for as long as the copyright
subsists in the work.6 Thus, the first, and most fundamental step, in analyzing who owns the
copyright in the dance is who is the copyright author. The owner of the copyright is then
at liberty to license (give others the right to do things which may be limited in a variety of
ways) or assign7 (pass on ownership of ) the copyright in a work to third parties, individuals,
or organizations. The third party will be able to exercise whichever of the economic rights
that the author has passed on. At this juncture, it is important to highlight that authorship
and ownership of copyright are likely to be in different hands. For example, the author and
first owner of the copyright in a dance might assign the copyright in the dance to a dance
company. The author will remain the author and the term of copyright will remain tied to
her life, but the owner of the copyright, the dance company, will be the organization that is
able to exploit the exclusive copyrights that have been licensed or assigned to it.
Copyright and the creation of dance

The process of creating a dance is key to being able to identify the author of the dance for copy-
right law. Every process will be different, but to identify the copyright author it is helpful to refer
to some examples to highlight what it is that the law would look for in terms of input into the
creation. It is also important to bear in mind that there are certain things that copyright law is not
concerned with and that are irrelevant for authorship. One aspect is ideas, which are not capable
of protection by copyright; although, as will be seen from the ensuing discussion, it is sometimes
not easy to separate ideas, which are not protected, from expression, which is protected. Another
unprotectable element is style. It is axiomatic that every dancer will bring his or her own individual
style to the dance such that no two dances will look the same from different dancers—the dancer
is not, in the words of Jennifer Roche, a “neutral instrument or tool within the choreographic
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Charlotte Waelde
process” (2009). However, this style as such does not have protection by copyright. An analogy
could be the style of a “school” of painting or of a musical tradition. The tools, accumulated
knowledge, training, and skills that the artist and musician bring to their art are not the subject of
copyright protection. How they are expressed in the painting or recorded performance could be,
however. It is the same with dance; the skills, training, tools, and knowledge that the dancer brings
to the dance and through which the dancer expresses the dance are not protectable elements for
copyright. That said, because the subject of copyright protection is the embodied dance (once
recorded), there may at times be a fine line between how the dancer interprets instructions given
by a choreographer (if that is the process), and the dancer’s own input for copyright purposes.
The line between unprotectable style and protectable expression may indeed be fine. But these are
the sorts of judgments that copyright law has to deal with in practice.
In observing the creation of the dance leading to fixation (such as via Labanotation or, more
probably, digital recording, and which is the point at which copyright arises), a range of styles
and interactions are apparent across all types of dance. The examples given here are just that—
examples. They are not intended to be generalized to all dance of a specific type but are used
in this context to highlight elements that the law would look for when considering copyright
authorship. An example of one process of creation of a dance arose in the research funded project
called “Disability, Dance and Law” that sought to identify copyright authorship. Dancers talked
about interpreting the choreographer’s wishes,8 and about the choreographer “making the work”
or “laying the dance” on their body. In some cases, the dancer closely follows the choreographers’
instructions leaving no room for the dancer’s interpretation in implementing those instructions.
Ballet for example, has been described by Efva Lilja in her work “Breaking the Mould” as:“A sys-
tem that teaches you to become a powerful, keen instrument for somebody else’s will and to
refrain from a personal point of view, your own attitude or suggestions” (Lilja 2014).
However, it is clear that all dances are not created in that way. There are times when a
choreographer gives ideas to the dancers and facilitates the dancer in realizing those ideas
through the dancer’s creative choices. Cecilia Roos describes such a process from the per-
spective of the freelance dancer: “the interest seems to be in the process and the becoming,
the material that arises without an existing original. Therefore, the choreography is often
elaborated in dialogue with, and adjusted to, the dancer that is doing the replacing” (2014, 9).
Indeed, Roos goes so far as to argue that the freelancer’s ideas should be considered: “In a
freelance context it is often good to argue for an idea that you believe in strongly. It is almost
required of you to share your viewpoints and take an active part in the development of the
new creation. And as a dancer you expect that also” (2014, 11).
Between these, the creation of the dance is often an iterative and joint process as between
choreographer and dancers: the choreographer sometimes giving instructions that are real-
ized by the dancer, and sometimes the dancer contributing and making choices about how
the dance will be realized. Roos describes this type of process as one that often occurs in
dance developed with company dancers. It is one of:
collaborative practices between dancers and choreographers when working on new

creations. …, the dancers are sometimes asked to participate in the process and produce
by improvisation the movement material that eventually will be used in the perfor-
mance. (Roos 2014, 7)
So, although there may be a focus in dance on the idea of authorship resting with the cho-
reographer no matter the process by which the dance is created, the law may have different
ideas for the purposes of copyright.
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Dance and copyright
Copyright authorship
Dance and copyright share an obsession with individual authorship. Although subject to
extensive theoretical and practical criticism, some philosophical discourse on copyright
reifies the notion of the individual author toiling away to create a new work. As Martha
Woodmansee notes:
Our laws of intellectual property are rooted in the century-long reconceptualization

of the creative process which culminated in high Romantic pronouncements like
Wordsworth’s to the effect that this process ought to be solitary, or individual, and
introduce ‘a new element into the intellectual universe. (Woodmansee 1994, 27)
The importance of the individual author is echoed in dance. As dance scholar Hetty Blades has
noted in connection with contemporary dance: “despite its collaborative nature, contemporary
dance convention tends to isolate a single person as the ‘author’ of a work or set of practices”
(2018, 303). Dance theorist Anthea Kraut notes that some contemporary and postmodern cho-
reographers use strategies such as chance procedure, whereby the elements of the choreography
are determined by chance rather than by the choreographer and by pedestrianism, or “every
day” movement, “to distance themselves from the modernist emphasis on authorial invention,”
but that nevertheless these artists continue to reap the authorial rewards of their works (2016,
266).
But as just indicated, the reality of the creative process is that it is often highly collabora-
tive between choreographer and dancers. Copyright law responds to this in the notion of
“joint authorship,” which I contend has important ramifications for dance.
Joint authorship
A work of joint authorship is one where the work is produced by the collaboration of two
or more authors in which the contribution of each author is not distinct from that of the
other author or authors.9 Identifying joint authorship is important because of the legal con-
sequences that follow. As noted, the author is often the first owner of copyright in the work.
Where authors are considered in law to be joint authors, each will have a right of veto over
the others’ use of the work.10 In other words, all of the joint authors will need to agree before
anyone is allowed to copy, use, or otherwise exploit the work. In addition, each joint author
will be entitled to a share in the royalties if the copyright in the work is exploited; the per-
centage of which may vary depending on the input into the work.11
There are three preconditions for joint authorship to exist:
• First, there must be a common design in the creation of the work.12 This precondition
means that the authors must be working together towards the same end at the same time,
rather than engaging in a sequential alteration of the work.
• Second, the contributions to the work must be of the right sort for copyright authorship.
This means they must be original and not insignificant.13
• Third, the contributions from each author must not be distinct or separate from each
other.14
As there have been no court cases on joint authorship of dance for copyright, the following
discussion uses cases with other facts to highlight the relevant point of law.
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Charlotte Waelde
A common design
Case law suggests that the meaning of common design is tied to collaborative and joint work-
ing in furtherance of the creation of the work. The case Levy v. Rutley concerned a claim of
joint authorship in the play, The King’s Wager, or, The Camp, the Cottage and the Court, written
by Thomas Egerton Wilks. Levy and others claimed joint authorship through their input
in adding a scene and making a few other alterations. The court rejected the claim saying
that there was no evidence of cooperation in the design of the piece, in its execution, or in
improvements to the plot or structure. Levy had simply varied the dialogue to make it more
accessible for his audience.
The court suggested instances in which a common design might arise from collaboration
and those where it would not arise from collaboration.
… it never could be suggested that, when an author submits his manuscript to a

friend, and the friend makes alterations and improvements, the latter would thereby
become a joint author of the work. If, when the piece was brought to the plaintiff,
he had said to Wilks, “This thing requires to be remodeled, and you and I will do
it together,” and Wilks had assented, possibly a case of joint authorship might have
been set up. But the evidence here falls very short of that.15
The court thus drew a distinction between proactively collaborating with a plan in mind and
with a scenario in which alterations are made after the fact. What exists in the first instance
is the “common design” that is lacking in the second instance. In dance it is tempting to say
that there must always be a common design between choreographer and dancer because they
collaborate to make the dance which exists on, and is embodied by, the dancer. After all,
the dance could not exist without the dancer and a collaboration between the choreographer
and dancer would not exist without the choreographer. As previously noted, there are very
different ways in which that process may take place ranging from the choreographer giv-
ing instructions that are interpreted by the dancer to a dance emerging from collaboration.
One could argue that when the choreographer comes with pre-planned ideas that are to be
realized by the dancers, and to which the dancers might add some, but few, alterations, that
would not be in furtherance of a common design like the facts in Levy v. Rutley. But that
feels fundamentally different from dance, where the dance does not exist without the dancer.
It also highlights one of the key differences between dance and most other literary, musical,
and artistic works protected by copyright, and that is the indivisibility of the dancer from the
dance and the dance from the copyright in the dance. Although a dancer (or choreographer)
may not be a joint author of a copyright work for other reasons considered herein, it seems
hard to conceive of circumstances in which a claim for joint authorship would fail at the
hurdle of common design.
Input of the right sort

One of the key requirements of authorship is that the author inputs the right sort of original-
ity in the creation of the work and that is so whether the claim is for single or joint author-
ship.16 Historically in the UK, the standard of originality required for the subsistence of
copyright has been low. What has been required is that the author expends some skill, labor,
and effort17 in the creation of the work, and that it should not have been copied from another
work.18 However, over the last decade, case law from the Court of Justice in Europe (CoJ) has
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Dance and copyright
been changing UK law. The CoJ has said that copyright extends to subject matter that is “the
author’s own intellectual creation.” What is important is that the author expresses his or her
creative ability by making free and creative choices in an original manner and stamps his or
her “personal touch” on the work.19 There must be room for the author to exercise creative
freedom. It also would seem that what the work is called, in other words whether it is called
a dance, is irrelevant. The task is to look at the expression to determine who has contributed
the right sort of intellectual creation in its making.20
The reference to intellectual creation, to creative ability, and to free and creative choices
might seem to present a high hurdle to originality for copyright authorship. However, on
examining the case law, that seems not to be the case. It is not required that a work is new,
or unique, or novel, nor indeed that it has a certain quality or aesthetic merit. Neither does
the law require a comparison of one work with another to determine originality. The word
originality is tied to the need for the work to originate from the author; in other words, it
must be the author’s intellectual creation. Case law has shown that in creating a photograph,
free and creative choices sufficient for copyright can exist in the fixing of the background,
pose lighting, and framing. For text, creative choices can exist in the selection, sequence, and
combination of eleven words. For dance, therefore, the law does not require an “inherent and
aesthetic value” nor “exceptional technical skill.”
Thinking about how this might apply to the processes just described, the ballet dancer
who is a “powerful, keen instrument for somebody else’s will” (Lilja 2014) may, or perhaps
necessarily must, contribute his or her personal touch through the embodiment of the dance
which will be shaped by personal experience and training. As previously discussed, that sort
of input is nonetheless unlikely to constitute the right sort of free creative choices needed for
the dancer to be considered a copyright author of the piece, since the dancer’s input is more
like what copyright law would consider style. The company dancer, by contrast, may well
have the room to exhibit his or her own intellectual creation and stamp personal touch on the
work particularly where asked to participate in the process and produce by improvisation
the movement material that eventually will be used in the performance. This situation is all
the more so for the freelance dancer who takes “an active part in the development of the new
creation.” And it is not just the dancer who needs to input the right sort of originality; the
same test applies to the input of the choreographer. While in a tightly choreographed ballet
it would not be difficult to see the choreographer inputting the right sort of personal touch
to be considered the copyright author, that would not be the case with chance procedure
which, as Hetty Blades notes, is “a method whereby the elements of the choreography are
determined by chance, rather than by the choreographer” (2018, 305).
But it is not just originality that is required to be “of the right sort” for joint copyright.
In some cases input of the right sort has meant input must be to the creation of the work itself.
In Brighton v. Jones,21 the court was asked to consider whether a director and playwright were
the joint authors of a play. One collaborator, Miss Jones, had produced the plot of the play
in advance of rehearsals. During rehearsals, Miss Brighton suggested ideas for the dialogue,
while the decision on whether these were taken up were for Miss Jones. The court found
Miss Brighton’s contributions to be “to the interpretation and theatrical presentation of the
dramatic work” rather than to composition of the work itself and did no more than make
the script better during the course of rehearsal. This input was not the right sort of authorial
input for the law to recognize Miss Brighton as a joint author of the copyright in the play.
Miss Brighton would have had to contribute to the “composition” of the work.
Similar scenarios arise in the creation of dance: the choreographer might bring a well-
formulated plan for a dance to dancers in the studio, direct how that dance should be
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Charlotte Waelde
expressed, and keep control over what becomes a part of the dance and what does not.
Assuming the choreographer has come with the initial dance, has directed the dance (laid the
dance on the bodies of the dancers), and makes the final decisions as to what appears in the
dance, then the contribution of ideas and movement by a dancer may be considered interpre-
tation of the dance, rather than a contribution to the dance itself, and so the dancer would
not be considered a joint author. That said, while the courts have said that it is relevant who
makes the final decisions as to what goes into a work in determining ( joint) authorship, this is
not a decisive test. It is also a quite different in the scenario of Stuart v. Barrett 22 that concerned
the contributions of a drummer to the creation of a pop song. It was found that process was
collective: “Someone started to play, and the rest joined in and improvised and improved the
original idea. The final piece was indeed the product of the joint compositional skills of the
members of the group present at the time.”23
This again is reminiscent of chance procedure. It would seem here that the dancer’s input
would be of the right sort for the dancer to be considered a joint author of the copyright.
Would the choreographer be considered a joint author? Ideas are not protected by the law,
so the choreographer’s input would have to be something more, be to the creation of the
work, and also be of the right sort. Assuming a choreographer has been working with ten
dancers in the process of developing a dance based on chance procedure, then it is possible
that there will be eleven joint authors of the copyright in the dance once recorded; or there
might be ten if the choreographer’s input is not of the right sort. In yet a difference scenario,
moves and sequences might be developed by the dancers, while choices as to what goes into
the final piece might rest with the choreographer. Would such control over such decisions by
the choreographer make the choreographer the sole copyright author? As previously noted,
while control over what goes into the final piece is important, it is not decisive. This situation
is different again to the scenario that arose in Brighton v. Jones where the input was not to the
work in which copyright was claimed and therefore not of the right sort. Or might such a
process be considered more like the choreographer giving ideas for how the work should be
realized and, as ideas are not protected by copyright, authorship would rest with the dancer?
Or might the courts say that there are two copyrights: one in the dance belonging to the
dancer, and one in the arrangement of the dance belonging to the choreographer?24
One other point that has arisen from time to time in the case law that could be of relevance
to dance is the concept of “penmanship,” meaning the need to contribute to the “writing” to
be considered a joint author. In Robin Ray v. Classic FM plc,25 the court thought that the joint
author must do more than contribute ideas.The joint author must “participate in the writing and
share responsibility for the form of expression in the literary work”; in other words, contribute
to the “penmanship.” This interpretation has been qualified in other cases where it is suggested
that actually “pushing a pen” is not needed, but something more than ideas is. Cala Homes (South)
Ltd v. Alfred McAlpine Homes East Ltd26 concerned a director who told draftsmen what features
should be incorporated into designs for houses. Was the director a joint author of the drawings
even though the director did not actually add anything to the drawings through penmanship?
The court thought that limiting authorship to actually “pushing the pen” was too narrow:
In my view, to have regard merely to who pushed the pen is too narrow a view of
authorship. What is protected by copyright in a drawing or a literary work is more
than just the skill of making marks on paper or some other medium. It is both the
words or lines and the skill and effort involved in creating, selecting or gathering
together the detailed concepts, data or emotions which those words or lines have
fixed in some tangible form which is protected.27
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Dance and copyright
What is needed is direct responsibility for the form of expression of the literary work:
There is no reason why penmanship should be insisted on any more in case of joint
authors than in the case of a sole author, who may dictate his work to a scribe. But
in my judgment what is required is something which approximates to penmanship.
What is essential is a direct responsibility for what actually appears on the paper.28
How might penmanship be interpreted in dance? Is the dancer the pen as the dancer takes
responsibility for the expression of the dance, drawing that expression around him or her? Or
does the choreographer use the body of the dancer as pen as the choreographer realizes the
dance through the body of the dancer? If the former, the dancer would be the author; if the
latter, the choreographer would be the author. Or are the efforts of the choreographer and
dancer so indistinguishable in having responsibility for what appears in the form of the dance
in, on, and through the body of the dancer that they are joint authors?
Joint authorship and dance

It can be seen from the previous discussion that there are many permutations of single and
joint authorship of copyright that could result from the creation of a dance. The discussion
demonstrates that the law is not fixed but depends on the circumstances of each creation.
What is needed to determine authorship is a close reading of the process leading up to the
fixation of the dance (the point at which copyright arises) through a legal lens. Only then can
it be suggested, albeit with some trepidation, who the author of the copyright in the dance is:
whether it is one of joint authorship between choreographer and dancer, or whether author-
ship lies with the dancer or choreographer. It illustrates that the community view of who the
author of a dance is (mostly the choreographer) will often differ from the legal analysis of who
the author of the copyright in the dance is. It is an outcome that may be contentious for many
in the dance community, not only choreographers, but also dancers who believe strongly that
“style” should be explicitly recognized as leading to ownership of the dance. That said, for
the dance community and for the law, the meaning of authorship (and ownership) seems to
have similar connotations, and that is authority over the dance. The difference between the
two is that when the law recognizes authorship, and authorship and ownership lie in the same
hands, it brings with it the legal authority to exercise control over the exclusive rights associ-
ated with copyright, and the right to reap the (financial) rewards. As the previous analysis
shows, authorship, and relatedly ownership, of copyright in dance is likely to be split between
far more choreographers and dancers than anyone might have hitherto anticipated.
Multiple authorship; multiple ownership

One consequence of the case law previously discussed is that courts tend to take a narrow
approach to joint authorship. As Rebecca Tushnet explains, an important reason for this approach
“lies in the implications for the exploitation of the copyright, namely, the potential licensing
problems associated with the requirement than an exclusive license be agreed by all co-authors”
(2007, 787). There are, however, solutions to these potential problems. In large parts of the
creative industries where multiple copyrights including joint copyright arise in a production,
the authors assign or license their copyright to a single entity, thus concentrating ownership
of copyright. The film industry is an example: copyright ownership of the various individual
and joint works used in the film, such as in the book on which the film is based, the music,
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the costumes, and the scenery, are assigned to a film production company. The film production
company is then the single source of all of the copyrights in the film and can give permission
for the film to be reproduced and distributed without consulting multiple copyright owners.
In other scenarios, and to broker relations between many owners of copyright and potentially
many users, owners may license their rights to a copyright collecting society that then licenses
these rights to users. The collecting society is thus the central point through which copyright is
managed. Could a copyright collecting society for dance be the solution to multiple copyright
authorship and ownership, and could it facilitate new ways of reaching new audiences?
Dance copyright collecting society (DanceROCS)

Until a decade or so ago, the implications of copyright law on fragmentation of copyright
authorship and ownership in dance would have had little relevance. Copyright only arises
after a dance is fixed in some form (a separate copyright will subsist in the recording). 29 With
digitization it is easy to record dance. As Sarah Whatley has commented “How the world has
changed. Dance is now widely available online. Many artists record and share their work”
(2017a, 82). This increase in recording of dance has been referred to as the “archival turn”
where the outputs are used mostly for “the purposes of preservation: evidence of the existence
of the dance and safeguard repertoire for the future” (Whatley 2017b, 63). This situation has
led to the emergence of what has been described as a “minor industry in dance preservation”
underpinned by some, but surprisingly few, managed dance archives30 (Whatley 2017a, 82).
Keeping in mind that after dance is recorded the copyright subsists for seventy years after
the death of the author, or in the case of joint authors, the last author to die; that it is not pos-
sible to abandon copyright ( Johnson 2008) or to declare it “null and void”; and that there
may be multiple copyright authors and owners of the copyright in any one recording of a
dance, this would seem the perfect time to establish a copyright collecting society to manage
copyright in dance. It would represent a shift from the archival turn to “the reproductive
turn” and could present opportunities for new ways in which the multiple copyright owners
of a dance (and the recording) could reach out to a range of existing and new users, and vice
versa, facilitating new ways of creating, thinking about, and re-using dance.
One of the main functions of a collecting society is to license the copyright in works owned
by multiple copyright owners through a collective license to multiple users. In so doing, it
removes the administrative burden on the copyright owners of entering into and keeping track
of potentially multiple different contracts and makes the copyright work available as part of a
broad portfolio of works to multiple users who would likely not locate, and obtain permission
from the multiple copyright owners. Although dance does not yet have a collecting society with
a remit in relation to copyright,31 the cultural and creative industries sector is replete with such
bodies that manage copyright in a range of sectors, the most well-known of which is probably
Performing Right Society (PRS) for Music. The one closest to dance in terms of the types of
works that it manages is Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS), a not for profit visual
artists’ rights management organization. DACS, which was founded in December 1983, collects
royalties and distributes these to visual artists and their estates, licenses copyright in individual
works, issues collective licenses for a range of bodies including educational institutions, provides
copyright information to the various stakeholders it represents, and lobbies for changes in the
law that would be advantageous for its members.
This arrangement would seem a most suitable model for the dance community. Although
(commercial) exploitation of dance and its recordings is only in its infancy, it does take place.
Recordings of dance are used in school curricula, in dance features in television broadcasts,
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Dance and copyright
and in dance used in advertising. A copyright owner would not have to license their work
for commercial ends through a collecting society. Licenses could easily facilitate the free
use of dance to make political comment (Burt 2017, 77) or promote equality and diversity
(People Dancing 2014). In each case, a license could make it abundantly clear that any form
of re-use required attribution of the copyright author or authors. Overall such a collecting
society could become a leader in the dance field through the development and implementa-
tion of a ground-breaking environmental, social, and governance strategy designed around
its members, their social and cultural beliefs, and the public interest (Brown, Gervassis, and
Mukonoweshuro 2017).
There is no doubt that establishing DanceROCS would face challenges, but solutions can be
found. The dance community is not a homogenous entity. There are a range of types of organi-
zations and individuals who fall within its purview, from the more established companies that
operate their own sophisticated copyright licensing strategies to individuals whose passion is
dance and who eke out a living if they are lucky. Can one copyright collecting society represent
these diverse views? Dance is not unique in representing such a diverse community; collecting
societies in the music industry, for example, cover a range of organizations, styles, genres, and
approaches and do this under the umbrella of representative collecting societies. Further, there
is no compulsion to join a collecting society; it is a matter of choice. So those organizations
that already control their copyright repertoire can continue to do so. Another concern voiced
is that a collecting society would be anathema to the free circulation of dance and inhibit the
sharing and borrowing that is at the heart of what members of many in the dance community
do (Burrows 2018). But far from inhibiting the circulation and sharing of dance, a collect-
ing society could help to facilitate it. Copyright arises automatically when a dance is fixed.
As awareness of copyright within society increases, users can become more hesitant to borrow
from existing works unless they know that they have been given permission.32 When works
are made available through a collecting society, a copyright license is attached indicating what
can and cannot be done with the work. While a copyright owner may not want to impose any
restrictions (including restrictions on commercial use by users), the copyright owner may want
to be attributed as the author of the original work. A license can make all of that clear. Further,
if the owner or owners want a royalty payment for use, then technologies can facilitate collec-
tion and distribution including for multiple joint copyright owners.
There is one challenge to the establishment of DanceROCS to which the solution is as yet
unknown. Copyright collecting societies are designed to connect multiple copyright owners
with multiple users. The previous discussion on joint authorship in copyright law has shown
how likely it is that there are multiple and joint copyright authors and owners in dance. What
about multiple users? Dance and recorded dance are used in education in schools and in higher
education. Educational licenses are familiar territory to collecting societies. What about other
user groups? PRS for Music issues licenses for the use of music in a range of other scenarios
including for live performances, radio and TV broadcasting, playing music at work, and using
music online. The Copyright Licensing Agency issues licenses for reproduction from print and
digital books, magazines, and articles to a range of users including education, the public sector,
media monitoring organizations, and other businesses. Opportunities could be envisaged and
indeed already exist in each of these sectors for dance: recordings are used on television, stills
in publications, and dances can be recreated across different media. But how big are these mar-
kets and could they support the administration of a collecting society? Understandably, dance
copyright owners would be unlikely to sign up to a collecting society if the costs outstripped
the potential rewards. But “potential” is the operative word here. Dance has been mostly con-
cerned with the process and the ephemeral nature of the dance, rather than “the product.”
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Charlotte Waelde
Dance archives have challenged this, as do the increasing numbers of initiatives around motion
capture, annotation, and virtual reality. The re-use of dance moves in Fortnite is another case
in point. While it is celebrities with deep pockets who have to date brought copyright infringe-
ment actions against Fortnite, a collecting society could be indispensable in helping indepen-
dent choreographers or dancers surviving in the gig economy who do not have their resources
to pursue such an action if it was their dance moves alleged to have been copied.
Conclusion
Dance is only close to the start of its journey as an art form that is recorded or fixed, and which
could be disseminated and re-used in hitherto unimagined ways. As has been shown herein,
with the increase in recorded dance comes an increase in the numbers of authors and, impor-
tantly, owners of copyright in the dance. This situation makes it challenging to manage re-use
of the dance because permission would need to be obtained from each of the joint owners of
the copyright. This requirement could be difficult if the owners cannot be found, a difficulty
that increases over time as people move and as ownership becomes increasingly fragmented
through sale or death. I have suggested in this chapter that a collecting society for dance,
DanceROCS, could help in providing some order in this circulation and re-use of dance.
Through managing the copyright in dance, DanceROCS could ensure that the copyright
authors and owners—the dancers and choreographers—are recognized for, and benefit from,
their part in these developments, whatever form that recognition and benefit might take.
Glossary
Ch Chancery
EMLR Entertainment and Media Law Reports
EWCA England and Wales Court of Appeal
EWHC England and Wales High Court
EWHL England and Wales House of Lords
FSR Fleet Street Reports
LT Law Times Reports
MacG CC MacGillivray’s Copyright Cases
QBD Queen’s Bench Division
WLR Weekly Law Reports
Notes
1 At the end of the conclusion section, there is a Glossary of the acronyms used in the text and the
endnotes.
2 Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988, the UK legislation governing copyright (CDPA). CDPA s
9(1). Dance is protected in the CDPA s 3(1) as a subset of a dramatic work.
3 CDPA s 12. For sound recordings, copyright lasts for 50 years after being made available CDPA s 13A.
4 If the work is made by an employee in the course of employment, the employer is the first owner
of the copyright, subject to any agreement to the contrary CDPA s 11(2).
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Dance and copyright
5 CDPA ss 16-21.
6 CDPA Ch IV.
7 CDPA Ch V.
8 In conversation with Welly O’Brien, dancer, during evidence gathering for InVisible Difference:
Disability Dance and Law, a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded
research project (InVisible Difference) on interpreting Caroline Bowditch’s instructions as
choreographer.
9 CDPA s 10(1).
10 CDPA s 173(2).
11 Brighton v Jones [2004] EWHC 1157 (Ch) Park J noted (at 34) that a finding of joint authorship did
not mean that the joint author was bound to be an equal owner of the copyright.
12 Levy v. Rutley (1871) L.R. 6 C.P. 523 (CA).
13 Tate v Thomas [1921] 1 Ch 503 (HC); Hadley v. Kemp [1999] EMLR 589; Brighton v Jones [2004]
EWHC 1147 (Ch); Evans v. E Hulton [1923-8] MacG CC 51; Spring field v. Thame (1903), 89 LT 242;
Nottage v. Jackson (1883) LR 11 QBD 627 (CA); Cala Homes v. Alfred McAlpine [1995] FSR 818; Robin
Ray v Classic FM plc [1998] FSR 622; Godfrey v. Lees [1995] EMLR 307.
14 Beckingham v. Hodgens [2002] EWHC 2143 (Ch).
15 Levy 528. If the contributions are distinct and form distinct works, then there will be no joint
authorship. Beckingham v. Hodgens (2002).
16 While originality has been the subject of extensive judicial comment both in the UK and the
EU, few of the cases on joint authorship have considered this test. That is because the authorial
contribution from a putative joint author will be required to be original, in the legal sense, for
that individual to be considered a joint author. This is implied in the term “joint author.” Martin v
Kogan [2017] EWHC 2927 (IPEC) para 15 “This has been explained and rationalised on the basis that a
joint author is ipso facto an author within the meaning of s.9(1) of the Act and therefore must have contributed
a significant part of the skill and labour protected by the copyright ….” Although usually implied, it is dis-
cussed here because of the relevance of the process of dance creation and who inputs the right sort
of originality to be able to be considered a ( joint) author.
17 University of London Press v. University Tutorial Press [1916] 2 Ch. 601, at 609–610, per Peterson J;
Ladbroke (Football) v. William Hill (Football) [1964] 1 WLR 273.
18 University of London Press v. University Tutorial Press [1916] 2 Ch 601.
19 Ibid.
20 See, generally, cases Case C-5/08 Infopaq International A/S v. Danske Dagblades Forening. Case C
-393/09 Bezpečnostní softwarová asociace v. Ministerstvo kultury. Case C-145/10 Eva-Maria Painer
v. Standard VerlagsGmbH.
21 [2004] EWHC 1157 (Ch).
22 [1994] EMLR 448.
23 Stuart v. Barrett [1994] EMLR 448, 460.
24 This is a scenario familiar in music where there may be copyright in composition and a separate
composition in the arrangement of the composition. Fisher v. Brooker [2006] EWHC 3239 (Ch); on
appeal [2008] EWCA Civ 287; on appeal to HOL [2009] UKHL 41.
25 [1998] FSR 622.
26 [1995] FSR 818.
27 Cala Homes (South) Ltd v. Alfred McAlpine Homes East Ltd [1995] FSR 818, 830.
28 Robin Ray v. Classic FM plc [1998] FSR 622 at 636.
29 CDPA s 1(1)(b).
30 Notable archives in the UK include those managed by the National Resource Centre for Dance,
the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Laban Library and Archive, the Rambert Archive, and the
Routledge Performance Archive.
31 Equity established BECS (British Equity Collecting Society) in 1998 to collect revenue from the
collective administration of performers’ rights, including those of dancers.
32 This is possibly also in response to the rise of dance as an academic discipline, which brings with it
an appreciation of academic codes of conduct (Burrows 2018).
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Charlotte Waelde
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24
ALGORITHMIC
CHOREOGRAPHIES
Women whirling dervishes and
dance heritage on YouTube
Introduction
YouTube hosts millions of dance videos uploaded by users throughout the world and fea-
tures a multitude of forms and styles from past and current eras. The scale and diversity of
these videos render YouTube a formidable resource for analyzing and interpreting dance.
The meaning of dance transmitted on this platform emerges through the interconnec-
tion between the architecture in which videos circulate and their actual dance content.
The Mevlevi Sema ceremony (sema), or whirling dervish ceremony, on YouTube provides a
case study to address this interrelation. The sema of Turkey, which includes a whirling dance,
was recognized as official intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO in 2005. Through the
case study of the sema, the link between YouTube’s architecture and video content unfolds
in four sections. The first provides a description of the sema and connects YouTube, the sema,
and UNESCO’s safeguarding of dance heritage. The second situates the analysis of intangible
heritage videos on YouTube within the field of screendance and its interpretation of dances
through their mediated architecture. The third provides the multiple frames of meaning
used to analyze sema videos on this platform, which stem from historical and contemporary
research, ethnography, and interviews. The fourth analyzes the digital architecture in which
sema videos are embedded, using the prism of these frames of meaning to argue that the link
between video content and the technologies of the platform sheds light on the political and
cultural meanings ascertained through YouTube’s dance transmission.
The Mevlevi Sema ceremony, UNESCO, and YouTube

This account of the dissemination of the sema on YouTube is informed by research on its
historical background and current performance (Pietrobruno 2015a). Dance is a key ele-
ment within the sema, a spiritual ceremony practiced by the Mevlevi Sufi order, which was
established in Konya, Turkey, in 1273. With prayer, music, and poetry, the dance of the sema
furthers the adherence of the Mevlevi order to the inner path of Islam. Sufi practice enables
337
one to pass through the opaqueness of the temporal realm and shed the veils of the percep-
tible world to ponder the inner spiritual realities and achieve an experience of unity with
the divine (Geoffroy 2010, 2, 12, 171). In Sufism, to be “veiled” means to be concealed or
blocked and concerns knowledge of the divine (Mernissi 1991, 95). To express the process
by which one undertakes this unveiling and movement along the inner path of Islam, Sufism
employs a geometric model of a circle (Geoffroy 2010, 9).
The whirling of the sema dance is consequently a physical embodiment of this spiritual
passage toward the center of the circle achieved through the destruction of the temporal
self. This death is indicated symbolically by the dervish’s clothing. The tall hat (sikke) of
the dervish emblematizes the tombstone, the black cloak (hırka) connotes the tomb, and
the flowing white dress (tennure) mirrors the shroud (Fremantle 1976, 330). The whirl-
ing dance is a physical manifestation of a type of prayer known as the zikir. The zikir, or
remembrance of God, is an invocation that is repeated with a breathing pattern that moves
in a circular motion toward the heart, which is the spiritual center (Nurbakhsh 1992, x;
Geoffroy 2010, 169). There is a common misconception that the Muslim mystical poet Jalal
a-Din Rumi (1207–1273), upon whose ideas the Mevlevi order is based, created the whirl-
ing dance. In fact, in the time when Rumi lived, this dance was already being performed
with spiritual music (Geoffroy 2010, 89). Rumi’s son Sultan Walad, along with other
followers, founded the Mevlevi order in 1273 and began the standardization of the sema
dance and the entire ceremony. This standardization process endured until the end of the
fifteenth century (Holbrook 1992, 101). The actual turn of the sema dance is composed of
a simple repetitive motion. Dervishes pivot on the left foot to enable a counter-clockwise
rotation that stems from the ball of the left foot, with the entire base of the foot remain-
ing in contact with the floor. The left foot serves as an axis for the turn of the right foot,
which lifts to pivot around the left foot in a complete 360-degree step. To avoid dizziness
while whirling, the face does not move, keeping the eyes at the same level. The dervish’s
gaze remains open and unfocused so that the “eyes look without seeing” (Erzen 2008).
Despite the lack of complexity involved in the footwork and bodily positioning, the dance
is highly demanding, as it requires the ability to turn continuously for an extended period.
The sema, which strives to extinguish not only the self but also the desire to distinguish
oneself from others, embodies Rumi’s quest for the erasure of societal divisions and dis-
tinctions (Barks 2004).
Videos highlighting dance practices officially safeguarded by UNESCO, such as the
Mevlevi Sema ceremony (UNESCO 2009a), are transmitted on YouTube (UNESCO
2009b). How does dance heritage, classified as intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO,
circulate on YouTube? UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural
Heritage (2003) showcases within the global arena an array of dances of nation-states that
have ratified this international heritage document. Dances that are awarded the official status
of intangible cultural heritage by the convention committee, which is composed of repre-
sentatives of nation-states (UNESCO 2003), are featured in UNESCO’s prestigious lists of
intangible cultural heritage and its register of best safeguarding practices (UNESCO 2016).
To raise global awareness of intangible heritage, each practice or element categorized as
official intangible heritage, including those related to dance, is described in a short video
produced by government representatives of the respective nation-state. These videos, which
are featured on a website tabulating UNESCO’s lists and register, are uploaded to YouTube
through the UNESCO channel, established in 2009. Videos featuring the very dance prac-
tices recognized through UNESCO’s convention are uploaded also to YouTube by other
institutions, communities, and individuals.
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Algorithmic choreographies
YouTube and screendance

This digital circulation of dance practices of intangible cultural heritage on YouTube can
be situated within screendance. Douglas Rosenberg (2012, 26) envisions screendance as a
specific art form constructed by the camera, inextricably intertwining filmic movement and
dance movement. At the same time, Rosenberg opens the terrain of this field to “all work
that includes dance and film or video as well as other screen-based software/hardware con-
figurations” (3). Therefore, the dissemination of dance heritage on YouTube falls within
Rosenberg’s dance on digital screens. Rosenberg proposes that within screendance studies,
the meaning of dance should be analyzed in terms of the architecture in which it is situated
and transmitted (16). He writes, “Screendance, then, though not a perfect term, implies that
the method of apprehension (the screen) modifies the activity it inscribes (dance); in doing so
it codifies a particular space of representation and, by extension, meaning” (3). As the terms
“architecture” and “screen” are synonymous for Rosenberg, their inextricability extends to
this study of YouTube and dance heritage. YouTube dance videos of intangible heritage are
viewed and accessed on the site through the platform’s screens, which are produced by its
mediated architecture. To be situated within the domain of screendance, analyses of dance
videos on YouTube need to incorporate the platform’s screens and the technologies that pro-
duce them. Rosenberg defines “screen” as “an analog device (fabric or wood), or it may be
an electronic system (television or computer screen); it may be digital or not” (16). Contained
within Rosenberg’s computer screen are YouTube’s specific screens, or architecture, pro-
duced by the platform’s technologies. YouTube’s multimedia—videos, still images, texts, and
lists—shift their order and composition under given search engine result pages in accordance
with user-generated content, algorithms, and Google’s business models. This flux produces
shifting content and hence a multiplicity of possible screens. This configuration of YouTube’s
screens intersects with contemporary research in media studies that envisions the composi-
tion and workings of screens in the digital era as dynamic and multidimensional, combin-
ing media forms, technologies, and user interaction (Casetti 2017, 35; Couchot 2017, 138;
Huhtamo 2017, 78).
The varied mediated components of YouTube’s screens, which constitute its specific space
of representation, can contribute to the meaning that users and scholars ascertain when view-
ing videos on the platform. Cultural and political meanings of individual dance videos are
impacted when they are read through the screens in which they are contained and appre-
hended. The technological facets and user interaction that compose YouTube’s screens con-
tribute to the meaning and context of the dance practices that the platform disseminates
(Rosenberg 2012, 17).
Despite a popular research focus that restricts the analysis of dance to the content of
YouTube videos (see Sagolla 2008; Recollet 2014; McPherson 2016; Tsai 2016; Mitchell
2017), screendance scholars have included facets of YouTube’s architecture in recent analy-
ses. For example, Adanna Kai Jones (2016, 678) notes that “suggested videos” produce the
meaning of singer Rihanna’s performance of “winin’” (a rolling-hip dance) in YouTube
videos by enabling “the ‘random’ linking of winin’ bodies to other videos that display black-
ness, femininity, and violence as always already a given.” Melissa Blanco Borelli (2016) links
Thom Yorke’s dancing in the band Radiohead’s song “Lotus Flower” in YouTube videos
to elements of the platform’s architecture, namely the relation of video placement to hits,
views, and circulation. Borelli notes that the video may have received 35 million views
as of February 2016 because of the novelty of watching the musician Thom Yorke dance
(2016, 67). Naomi Jackson (2016, 696, 708) specifically connects the content of popular
339
dance videos to the rhizomatic, or non-hierarchical, architecture of YouTube, which may in

the future be affected by commercialization. But for now, this structure enables widespread
cultural and identity representation through the creative production and circulation of both
unskilled and outstanding professional street dance content. This representation nurtures a
global community through exchange. Jackson explores the example of Matthew Harding’s
videos, which challenge hegemonic masculinity through his “dorky dancing” set in places
throughout the world, fostering a sense of global unity by combining play and vulnerability
in dance (701).
Mevlevi Sema ceremony: Frames of meaning

The example of sema videos on YouTube provides further research on the impact that the
platform’s architecture or screens can have on the meaning of individual videos, a stance
that builds upon previous research (Pietrobruno 2013, 2014, 2018). To analyze YouTube’s
screens of the sema from aesthetic, cultural, and political perspectives, various frames of
meaning-making are integrated into the analysis. These frames include scholarly fieldwork
on the historical and contemporary aspects of the sema, analyses of UNESCO’s policies and
practices, an ethnography of the dance practices of a Mevlevi community in Istanbul in 2012,
attendance at male-only sema performances in Istanbul in 2012, a visit to Konya in 2010,
which is the birthplace of the sema, where women are not allowed to perform in public, and
interviews with members of the Intangible Cultural Heritage section at UNESCO in Paris
in 2012 and 2015. Thus, this analysis of dance heritage on YouTube’s screens is embedded
within a range of contexts beyond the digital space of the platform. This approach resonates
with Christine Hine’s (2015) method of conducting internet research in which online activi-
ties are interpreted through multiple contexts to trace numerous frames of meaning-making,
which in turn inform the online research. The frames of meaning-making in my study stem
from a multi-sited ethnography not bounded by a specific physical place (Marcus 1995, 1998).
These multiple sites constitute my field of analysis, which, through its multiplicity, becomes
a process of following connections (Hine 2015, 25). Hence, I look for interpretative links
between the various sites of my fieldwork. Nonetheless, the connections between findings
gleaned from this multi-sited field are a result of my choices and decisions. My field is neither
objective nor pre-given (Amit 1999; Hine 2016, 60). Reflexivity entails an understanding
that biases enter the conclusions I draw from my ethnographic work, given that my agency
has produced the specific multi-sited field in which my findings are rooted (Hine 2016).
A selection of conclusions is outlined from each of these frames of meaning to offer
insight into the ways that they are integrated within the subsequent example of an analy-
sis of YouTube’s screens of the sema. A key finding concerning the history of the sema is
that after the founding of the secular Turkish Republic in 1923, headed by Mustafa Kemal
Atatürk, the practice was prohibited with the enactment of Law 677 on December 13, 1925,
which banned all Sufi dervish lodges in Turkey (“Appendix 9: Law 677” 2004, 20). Under
the Democratic Party, led by Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, the sema was reinstated in
the 1950s, with the requirement that it be performed as a cultural spectacle that displayed
Rumi as a leading Turkish poet and thinker who exemplified the ideals of the secular state.
It could not be performed as a religious practice linked to Islam (Aykan 2012, 49; Pietrobruno
2014, 751). Furthermore, generally only men were allowed to witness and perform the sema
because the public space of the Mevlevi dervish house (semahane) was traditionally acces-
sible only to men within the Ottoman Empire (1299–1922). The semahane typically fea-
tured an enclosed lattice-covered gallery, where women hidden from public view could
340
observe the performance (Bakirci 2010, 54; Pietrobruno 2013, 1265). There are a few docu-
mented instances of women performing the sema alongside men in public ceremonies during
Ottoman times (Baldick 1989, 113; Helminski 2003, 124; Pietrobruno 2013, 1265). Despite
these exceptions, the sema has for centuries been an ancient male performance in whose pub-
lic enactments women have been prohibited from taking part (Tanrıkorur 2004, 27).
To access knowledge of the contemporary context of the sema, I consulted a range of
documents, including the candidature file of the Mevlevi Sema ceremony produced by the
International Mevlana Foundation (2004) for the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
The candidature file is the official document that state representatives produce and submit
to UNESCO’s convention committee to have their intangible heritage practice officially
recognized by UNESCO. The sema candidature file lists the chapters of the Mevlevi order
within and outside Turkey that are recognized by the national government, as well as one
not recognized, the Foundation of Universal Lovers of Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi (EMAV).
This order is therefore not granted safeguarding privileges through the Turkish govern-
ment’s implementation of the convention. The file states that EMAV is excluded from offi-
cial safeguarding primarily because this group has modernized the practice by integrating
women into public performances alongside men (International Mevlana Foundation 2004,
7). Research on the contemporary context of the sema in Turkey also reveals that the current
government, led by the AK Party and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, uses the sema to
realize its national political goal of achieving the official recognition of Sunni Islam within
a once secular nation. The sema of the Mevlevi order has become a marker of Sunni Islam to
reflect this national image of Turkey (Aykan 2012, 57; Pietrobruno 2014, 751). The EMAV
community’s inclusion of women alongside men in public performances does not fit into the
government’s political agenda for the sema, so the practices of this community are excluded
from safeguarding strategies under UNESCO’s convention.
This exclusion of EMAV from official safeguarding brings the spheres of meaning-making
into an analysis of UNESCO’s policies and practices. A key element of the convention is
that a nation-state is supposed to safeguard a practice in a manner that captures the way that
the practice constantly changes through the participation of all communities and groups
within a given territory (UNESCO 2003). These changes should reflect the social values of
the communities, groups, and individuals involved rather than the nationalist safeguarding
agendas of the ruling government (UNESCO 2003; Pietrobruno 2016). By not recognizing
EMAV, the Turkish government is not fully abiding by the terms of the convention that asks
nation-states safeguarding intangible heritage to consult all the communities and groups in
the nation to adhere to an understanding of intangible heritage that allows for renewal and
has significance for the communities and groups involved (UNESCO 2003; Pietrobruno
2014, 745). The Turkish government is not unique in its lack of adherence to key aspects
of the convention. Representatives of national governments often safeguard only the prac-
tices of those communities that conform to their political and national goals (Lixinski 2011,
86). Although representatives of nation-states are supposed to consult all the communities
and groups in their territory when they are safeguarding a practice, the convention cannot
legally compel them to do so because sovereignty is granted to nations within the convention
(Lenzerini 2011, 111–112).
Scholarly research both on the past and on contemporary contexts of the sema is enriched
by empirical ethnographic research. In 2012, I conducted an ethnography of the EMAV spir-
itual evenings that take place every Thursday from 7:30 to 11:00 at the Silivrikapı Mevlâna
Cultural Center in the Fatih district of Istanbul. These evenings, which are open to the pub-
lic, include a prayer service, or zikir, a discussion period, a break for refreshments, and then
341
a sema performance that lasts approximately one and a half hours. This fieldwork included
observing the dynamics of these evenings, conversing informally with members of the com-
munity as well as invited guests and tourists in attendance, observing the sema dance, and
interviewing women dervishes as well as the spiritual head of the EMAV community. My
observations of dervish ceremonies included studying the bodily movements of the whirl-
ing dance as well as its four musical movements (selams) (Pietrobruno 2012a). Each gesture
enacted within the selams, from bodily holds to footsteps, head positions and gazes, bears
symbolic implications that bring forth the spiritual path of the whirling dervish (semazen).
For instance, during the whirling, in which their arms are open, the semazens turn the right
palm toward the sky to take in the divine and their left palm toward the earth. In an inter-
view, a woman semazen related how dervishes become transmitters of the spiritual realm
by delivering this world to the people observing the sema, thereby transporting them to
the divine (Pietrobruno 2012b, 2015a). An underlying motivation of this fieldwork was to
ascertain the gendered dynamic during the spiritual evenings at EMAV. At these events, I
witnessed how women were included within dervish ceremonies, which is the source of
EMAV’s exclusion from official safeguarding strategies of the sema. While observing the
sema dance, I could not identify any characteristics that profoundly distinguished the men
from the women in terms of movement vernacular: the dance is not gendered. Nonetheless,
during the prayers, the men and women of the community do sit in separate sections. Those
female members who do not wear headscarves in their everyday lives, which is the large
majority of them, put on scarves that lightly cover their heads without necessarily concealing
all their hair. The interaction between men and women during these evenings also demon-
strated a certain degree of gender parity. I noticed at the break period that men and women
prepared the refreshments and served them to the attendees and community members.
I also observed that leadership roles in the community and within the ceremony were
occupied by men. EMAV is led by a male spiritual leader or sheik (dede) who is given great
reverence by the members of the community. The dede of the community is elderly and
therefore leads the dervish ceremonies only on occasion. Instead, he has a replacement who
stands in for him, which is a role referred to as the postnisin. I observed that for each ceremony,
the postnisin as well as the head semazen, or master of the dance, were male members of the
community (see Illustration 24.1). During my interview with the dede, I asked him whether
a woman could ever occupy the role of spiritual leader of the community. He answered that
if a woman dervish has attained enough spiritual awareness, her becoming the dede of the
community is a possibility (Pietrobruno 2012c).
This focus on gender and the sema led me to conclude that performances were influenced to a
certain extent by the presence of the camera. I observed that members of the audiences, includ-
ing non-Turkish tourists, invited media representatives and community members, filmed or vid-
eotaped EMAV ceremonies (see Illustration 24.1). Videos of segments of EMAV performances
have been uploaded to YouTube by an array of users, including channels with Turkish names
(see Senyuz 2013) and ones with non-Turkish names, including my own videos (see Pietrobruno
2013). EMAV documents its own spiritual practices in its media archive (Pietrobruno 2012b),
and the community has produced a promotional video with English and Turkish versions that
are featured on its website (emav.org 2010) and on YouTube (see Ayar 2010a, 2010b). The pres-
ence of the camera may be intertwined with the issue of gender. In an informal discussion with
me, a woman dervish mentioned that she is no longer invited to perform in public ceremonies
because she is too old, roughly over forty. She added that only younger women take part in
the ceremonies. I noticed that most of the women dervishes in sema ceremonies were between
twenty and thirty-five years old, with one or two exceptions. Although there are many young
342
Illustration 24.1 An EMAV Mevlevi Sema Ceremony featuring women dervishes dressed in colored
robes, male dervishes in white roles, a male master of the dance or head semazen, and an audience who
is permitted to take photographs of the performance in 2012 (© Sheenagh Pietrobruno).
men who take part in the ceremony, men can be older. For instance, the postnisin and the head
semazen are often over forty. This decision to exclude older women from dervish ceremonies can
be viewed as the patriarchal bias that older women, but not older men, are physically unattractive
and hence not appealing to viewing audiences and the camera.
The presence of the camera also could enhance the movement aesthetics of EMAV’s public
spiritual ceremonies. During my observations, I noticed that dervishes hold their bodies high
with arms well positioned throughout the whirling in the ideal position—their right palm
toward the sky to receive the divine and their left palm toward the Earth. The dervishes wear
either flowing white robes, colored robes, or a combination of both. Traditionally, ceremonies
that exclude women from public performances generally feature dervishes in white robes. With
the refined whirling style of the young and vibrant, yet spiritually composed, dervishes dressed
in flowing white and/or multicolored robes, EMAV performances can be visually stunning (see
Illustration 24.1).
These aesthetic elements are not so pronounced when EMAV performs the ceremony out-
side public space and away from the cameras of spectators. During my fieldwork, I was invited
to attend a sema dance of about 10 minutes enacted by members of the community during
their private community prayer session before the start of the spiritual Thursday evenings.
In these private spiritual meetings, members of the community separate along gendered lines,
women on one side and men on the other, as is the practice for the public prayers. During these
shorter private sema performances, less attention is given to aesthetics (see Illustration 24.2).
The members of the community whirl in their regular clothes in a style that is less refined
than that of the public performance; all the members of the community in attendance whirl
together, including women who are older and do not have a youthful appearance.
343
Illustration 24.2 A sema dance enacted by members of the community during their private community
prayer session before start of the spiritual Thursday evenings in 2012 (© Sheenagh Pietrobruno).
I also witnessed the relation between aesthetics and public ceremonies in other sites
that constituted my fieldwork. In 2012, I attended exclusively male ceremonies at the
Galata Mevlevihanesi Lodge in Istanbul (Pietrobruno 2014, 749; 2016, 125). Observers
were allowed to record these performances, which are highly aesthetic in terms of
their whirling style. In 2012, along with a group of tourists, I also attended the exclu-
sively male performances of the Cerrahi-Kadiri Sufi order, a suborder of the Mevlevi
order (And 2005, 90) at the Nureddin Cerrahi Lodge in Istanbul. The Cerrahi-Kadiri
spiritual ceremonies include a whirling dance like the sema of the Mevlevi order (And
2005). Observers were not allowed to record these performances. Hence, there are no
recordings of these whirling performances by the Cerrahi-Kadiri order at the Nureddin
Cerrahi Lodge in Istanbul uploaded by tourists on YouTube. I noticed that the style
of the male dervishes of this order was less aesthetic: their bodily stance conveyed a
sloppy turning style in contrast to the more upright, controlled, and stylized whirling
performed by the male dervishes at the Galata Lodge and by the members of EMAV in
their public performances. There may be a relationship between the less refined style of
Cerrahi-Kadiri’s whirling and the absence of tourist cameras during the performances.
Even though I saw live dance during my fieldwork at EMAV and at the Galata Lodge,
these performances may integrate the presence of the camera and be transformed by
the process (see Illustration 24.1). As Rosenberg (2012, 20) writes, “Such pressure ‘to
perform for the camera’ undoubtedly alters or at least disturbs live performance.” Along
with cameras, YouTube may also influence the aesthetics of live performances, as the
platform distributes the greatest number of live sema performances in comparison to
other video-hosting services, including Vimeo, and to leading performance institutions,
such as the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and the Centre nationale
de danse in France.
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My fieldwork conclusions may be influenced by my background—a Canadian feminist

scholar who identifies cultural patterns and structures along gendered lines. This tendency
to interpret culture in Turkey in gendered terms also could stem from my employment as an
assistant professor for five years (2005–2010) at a religiously conservative university, during
which time I observed patterns of behavior that I deemed to be patriarchal. In my informal
discussions with Turkish female members of the community, some of them did not want to
refer to dervishes in gendered terms but preferred to see men and women as human beings
whose essence or soul in the sema is not burdened by societal distinctions such as those
based on gender. I concluded that their position reflected Rumi’s philosophy, which seeks to
eradicate the differences that ground human beings in the temporal and earthly realm (Barks
2004). The way that these women dervishes described themselves without reference to gen-
der distinctions suggests Clifford Geertz’s (1993) ethnographic category of “experience-
near,” which refers to descriptions that people employ to talk about their own world (Hine
2015, 27). My description of the practices of the sema through the prism of gender could be
viewed in light of Geertz’s (1993) category of “experience-distant,” as my focus is built upon
concepts that I have drawn from my personal experiences in Turkey as well as from feminist
academic texts—contexts that are outside of the specific situation of EMAV (Hine 2015, 27).
Interviews at UNESCO in Paris enabled me to ascertain that my “experience-distant”
description of the sema is not merely an individual, subjective, or self-indulgent response
grounded solely in my academic feminist background and my biases toward a cultural practice
that is not my own. In an interview, Cécile Duvelle, chief of the Intangible Cultural Heritage
section in Paris until 2015, disclosed to me her awareness that the representatives of nation-
states often exclude the involvement of women from the national heritage practices officially
safeguarded through UNESCO’s convention. Duvelle also noted that this concern for gender
should not be restricted to two categories but needs to consider all six genders (Pietrobruno
2015b). These are male, female, intersexed, transgendered, transsexual, and two-spirited.
Expanding my field of analysis to interviews at UNESCO enabled me to triangulate to a
certain extent my research focus to demonstrate that the issue of gender within the domain
of intangible heritage is a wider concern shared by representatives of this global institution.
Istanbul’s secondhand bookshops also became field sites whose vintage popular magazines
and tourist brochures provided historical documentation of the gendered practices of EMAV.
These sources produced research findings such as the following. In 1993, the dede of EMAV
allowed women to perform alongside their male counterparts in public sema ceremonies
upon the request of a woman dervish named Didem Edman (Ayman 2004, 54). For the next
few years, women dervishes at EMAV wore scarves over their hats to cover their hair that
distinguished them from the male dervishes whose hats were not draped with fabric. To
achieve greater equality between men and women, a decision was made in the mid-1990s
that women do not need to wear these veils. The presence of this absent veil can sometimes
be observed in the clothes worn in contemporary performances, where it takes the form of
a thin, long scarf that only women dervishes wrap around their necks and let flow over their
twirling robes (tennure) (see Illustration 24.1).
Mevlevi Sema ceremony videos and YouTube’s screens

UNESCO as well as other institutions, communities, and individuals have uploaded videos
of the sema to YouTube, circulating this dance within a digital space. I have mapped out the
terrain that I use to analyze the sema in live circumstances. YouTube produces another field
within an online space that brings together a multitude of videos from numerous contexts,
345
time periods, and perspectives. I argue that analyzing a YouTube video as though it were sep-
arate from this digital platform does not fully capture the political and cultural potential of
this site for dance research on intangible heritage. Just as the multi-sited field that I have out-
lined is subjective, since I chose its parameters, the field that is constructed by YouTube is also
subjective because it is produced through the keywords that I have selected. For example, to
create a field that exhibits the tensions I have outlined between official safeguarding practices
and female dervishes in Turkey, I chose keywords that combine the title of the video of the
sema uploaded by UNESCO, “Mevlevi Sema Ceremony,” and the Turkish word for women
dervishes, “kadın semazenler.” When I put these search terms—“Mevlevi Sema Ceremony +
kadın semazenler”—in the search box, a search engine result page (SERP) appears in which
each video is depicted with a still shot from the video, the name of the channel, the upload
year, the number of views, and metadata, including the titles uploaded by users.
The order and ranking of these videos are determined by the keywords that I have selected,
in combination with algorithms, Google’s business policies, and user-generated metadata,
such as comments. With the goal of monetizing the site, algorithms are combined with user-
generated content to rank the videos that appear under these keywords. YouTube is a com-
mercial platform governed by Google’s business policies that are in place primarily to obtain
revenue through video searches. The platform’s ranking algorithms, which hierarchize the
order of videos, are dependent upon a range of signals, including likes and dislikes, watch
time, number of views, relevance of metadata, and freshness of videos (Pietrobruno 2018).
The subjective potential of YouTube as a field of analysis for dance research is enhanced by
the personalization of search results, which are targeted to my internet protocol (IP) address
to monetize my activities according to the algorithmic tracking of my perceived private
media consumption needs.
Personal characteristics gleaned from communication through my IP address, such as
age, gender, place of residence, and search habits, are incorporated in the SERPs. Research
biases are concretely transmitted through personalization that produces SERPs (Ørmen
2014, 200). My biases, which are linked to my identity and perspectives and transmit-
ted in my actual ethnographic research, are reproduced in another manner and in other
contexts through personalization. My identity, translated through an IP address, impacts
the videos I see under a SERP. Analyzing dance videos on YouTube coincides with eth-
nographic strategies for internet research that highlight how findings are impacted by the
embeddedness of the researcher within the digital field of analysis (Hine 2016). Although
reflexivity in ethnographic research demands that I become aware of the biases that are
integrated into my analysis and render them transparent, the way that personalization
impacts the lists of videos that I obtain through a given SERP is not rendered explicit
by Google. As Google keeps its algorithms a secret, I can never fully know how my per-
sonal biases as identified by YouTube’s technologies impact the videos that I see and their
order under a keyword. The appearance of videos under the above search term, which
constructs my field of analysis, is governed by this complexity of YouTube’s multimedia
screens, or architecture—texts, images, videos, and lists—whose order and composition
are produced by algorithms, business models, and personalization, as well as user com-
munication and activities.
YouTube’s screens are not static but are constantly shifting based on changes in the
ranking order and composition of the videos listed under a specific keyword. Within
this changing and unstable platform that produces multiple screens under a search term,
I analyzed SERPs with the keywords “Mevlevi Sema Ceremony + kadın semazenler”
for 1 week from July 5–12, 2017. To provide an example, seventeen of the twenty videos
346
that appeared under this search term on July 12 showcase male-exclusive sema perfor-
mances. These videos conform to the safeguarding practice of the Turkish government
to promote its political and nationalist agenda, which excludes women dervishes from
public performances. This list includes the official video of the Mevlevi Sema ceremony
uploaded by UNESCO (2009b). This video is a shortened video of a longer version that
was produced by the International Mevlana Foundation for the sema candidature file on
behalf of the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism. As mentioned, the candidature
file explicitly excludes EMAV and hence women dervishes from official safeguarding.
A video uploaded by the channel mevlanafoundation (2011) is also featured on the list
and showcases a sema featuring only male dervishes. The list also features many videos
of sema performances in Konya, the birthplace of the sema, where women are prohibited
from performing the sema in public (see Mehmet Sökmen Tv-Video Prodüksiyon 2012;
Jozsev 2014; Movik 2016).
Only one of the twenty videos listed includes women dervishes in a public sema per-
formance of a Mevlevi community in Turkey. The tabulation of this video, entitled
“ERKadinalar Ayini” (Baydar 2015), in the context of the list counters the official safe-
guarding strategy put forward by the Turkish nation-state through UNESCO’s conven-
tion. This juxtaposition takes place when this video is read through the prism of the
architecture of YouTube, which produces lists of videos that can be contrasted with each
other. As “ERKadinalar Ayini” features a performance by EMAV, an in-depth analysis of
this specific video is put forward (Pietrobruno 2018). The inclusion of this video on a list
that promotes primarily male dervishes is interpreted through the lens of the fieldwork
that I have conducted. This online analysis further expands my fieldwork, as new con-
clusions can be drawn that extend beyond the scope of the fieldwork conducted in 2012.
This video features a segment of a performance by EMAV in which a female dervish leads
the ceremony as the postnisin and in which the head semazen, or dance master, is also a
woman. This video can be viewed as a follow-up to my interview with the dede of EMAV,
who claimed that women can occupy leadership roles in the community if they achieve
sufficient spiritual awareness. As the postnisin replaces the dede in the sema, this video shows
that it is a woman dervish who is standing in for the male head of the community. A close
look at the video reveals that the postnisin is wearing a veil over her dervish hat to cover
her hair, as all women dervishes did for the first few years after 1993 when EMAV women
community members were permitted to perform the sema in public. The other women
dervishes in the ceremony are not wearing a scarf. The donning of a veil distinguishes
the woman postnisin from the male ones I observed during my fieldwork. The video does
not explain the scarf ’s significance for the community.
My interpretation of the reappearance of the scarf solely for the woman postnisin is
that the burgeoning gender parity in the context of leadership roles in the sema is coun-
terbalanced by distinguishing women from men. This reading stems from my previous
fieldwork, in addition to personal interpretations that may not reflect those put forward
by the community, including the woman dervish in question. This video appeared as the
first video under my keyword search during my week of analysis as a result of numer-
ous factors that I have previously outlined, including algorithms, YouTube signals, and
personalization. If this video is personalized to my IP address and linked to my identity
characteristics and previous search history in order to monetize my communication and
behavior through Google’s corporate power regime, this personalization has been para-
doxically serendipitous since it has enhanced my fieldwork (Mahnke and Uprichard 2014,
260; Pietrobruno 2016).
347
Conclusion
The video “ERKadinalar Ayini” (Baydar 2015), featuring a female postnisin, transports my
ethnography to another temporal level by revealing that since my fieldwork in 2012, EMAV
has granted women greater leadership in the sema ceremonies. The emerging gender parity
within EMAV’s leadership depicted in the video “ERKadinalar Ayini” occurs through the
prism of a visually splendid performance that could be simultaneously reproducing within
its aesthetic dimensions another form of gender difference besides the female postnisin’s don-
ning a scarf. The dance style in the video is refined and elegant, and the colors of the dervish
clothing are coordinated. For instance, the green scarf that the postnisin wears over her hat is
coordinated with the green robe of one of the two male dervishes and the green scarves that
the women dervishes wear around their necks and let hang over their white robes to symbol-
ize the headscarf that they wore in the early 1990s. The other male dervish wears a red robe,
which matches the red ceremonial sheepskin rug, which marks the place of the dede on the
sema floor, which in this case is occupied by a woman postnisin.
The sema portrayed in this video is enacted by women between the ages of twenty and
thirty-five who whirl alongside two men in their early twenties. As my ethnographic research
reveals, the aesthetically pleasing aspects of this live performance of a woman dervish lead-
ing the ceremony captured on YouTube could be influenced by the presence of the cam-
era, which in turn may contribute to the production of gender imbalances in performances
because the beauty of this sema is also connected to its exclusion of older women from public
spectacles. At the same time, the video of a woman leading a sema powerfully challenges
the exclusion of women dervishes from official safeguarding as put forward by the Turkish
government through UNESCO’s convention. This is the position that predominates in the
male-exclusive videos of the sema tabulated on the first SERP under the keywords “Mevlevi
Sema Ceremony + kadın semazenler.”
The countering of official versions of the sema arises through the juxtapositions of videos listed
on the SERP I analyzed, which was produced by YouTube’s architecture. Videos tabulated on
YouTube’s lists are governed by user-generated content, including keywords, algorithms, and
Google monetization strategies, such as the personalization of SERPs. These elements combine to
produce YouTube’s shifting screens, or architecture. Interpretations of individual videos through
their relation to other videos on a SERP are enriched through reference to frames of meaning.
Within the context of the sema, these frames include actual ethnography of dance practices, inter-
views at UNESCO, and historical and contemporary research. Analyzing dance videos within
YouTube’s architecture through the prism of these frames can produce new research findings that
provide a rich dialogue between offline and online sources of dance knowledge. As the case study
of the sema dance exemplifies, this interplay between video content, the platform’s architecture,
and actual fieldwork adds to the cultural and political significance of individual dance videos.
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PART VI
Dance and scenography

25
DRESSING DANCE–DANCING
DRESS
Lived experience of dress and its agency
in the collaborative process
Jessica Bugg
Introduction
This chapter considers the agency and experience of dress and costume in the creative and
collaborative process of making contemporary dance work and explores the complexity of
its relationship to the body. Contemporary dance embraces aspects of other dance forms,
including physical dance, modern, lyrical, and classical ballet, and is often experimental. It is
understood differently in its cultural and socio-political contexts, and being a highly visual,
abstract, and collaborative art form, the potential for new forms of costume or dress is vast.
In a climate of significant developments in costume in the broader field of performance
and scenography, I question why there is a tendency in contemporary dance to perpetuate
familiar styles and tropes of dress. Contemporary dance wear has remained largely body
conscious, prioritizing ease of movement and functioning as visual enhancement, applied to
the dance primarily through applications of color or texture in unitards and developments
of everyday dress or rehearsal wear. Limited attention has been paid to the lived experience
of dress from the perspectives of designers, wearers, and audiences, and this neglect I argue
can result in the active and experiential potentials of costume being overlooked or poorly
integrated into contemporary dance (Bugg 2014, 69).
Although dance and dress are visual and bodily mediums, a purely aesthetic or ergo-
nomic approach to costume in dance overlooks the wider phenomenological potential of
dress and, as F. Elizabeth Hart identifies, visual aspects of performance find “common
ground … literally, within the human body-between semiotic and phenomenological
approaches” (McConachie and Hart 2006, 9). Donatella Barbieri (2017, xxii) underscores
the significance of such an approach, discussing how its “ability to communicate meta-
phorically and viscerally provides a direct, visual and embodied connection,” for both the
audience and the performer.
Over the past decade, the role and agency of costume in performance has started to
come to the forefront in academic writing, particularly in studies of scenography with
costume-related chapters and special editions of publications such as Collins and Nisbet
(2010), McKinney and Palmer (2017), Bugg (2014), and Zoubir-Shaw (2016). Most recently
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Jessica Bugg
in 2016, the Studies in Costume and Performance Journal,1 founded by Donatella Barbieri and
Sofia Pantouvaki, has provided a much-needed dedicated space for academic writing on cos-
tume in performance. Key exhibitions—including Extreme Costume, Prague Quadrennial in
the Czech Republic (2011); Hollywood Costume at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London
(2012); and the Critical Costume International conference and exhibition initiated in 2013—
have supported the growing dialogue around the role of costume in performance. Costume,
like fashion before it, is becoming elevated to a serious level of academic debate in the con-
text of the body and performance.
There is a burgeoning research culture in costume within performance studies in the UK,
Finland, and Australia, and the emergence of texts in the field: Barbieri (2017), Monks (2011),
and Trimingham (2011). As Barbieri discusses, there is a noticeable lack of documentation
of the experience of costume, or indeed of the costumes, in archives and museums. She also
questions why costume remains at the margins in publications on performance despite its long
history as a central scenographic element in the making of performance (Barbieri 2017, xxii).
Although dress in dance has started to find its voice in these broader contexts, it remains
relatively unexplored with a few notable exceptions such as Fensham (2011),2 Barbieri (2012,
2017), Monks (2011), Bugg (2014, 2016), and Mackrell (1997). Rachel Fensham’s archival
research into the effect of costume on natural movement technique in early twentieth century
dance underscores this gap in knowledge, explaining that there is “little substantive literature on
the use and representation of costume in dance” (Fensham 2011, 83.) Very little has been written
on the lived experience of dress in contemporary dance in which the costume’s relationship to
the body is specifically potent, not only because of its abstracted aesthetic symbolism but also
in its physical, experiential, and kinesthetic engagement with the body in movement. Despite
a growing field of research on the body and dress in sociology, anthropology, art, fashion,
and dance theory—Negrin (2013); Entwistle (2000); Entwistle and Wilson (2001); Cavallaro
and Warwick (1998); and Johnson and Foster (2007)—little critical attention has been given
systematically to the embodied and experiential potential of costume in contemporary dance.
My own practice-led research has used such approaches to the subject to extend com-
munication between designers, dancers, and viewers and to elevate the role of dress in
dance. This work is extended here through analysis of interviews with choreographers,
designers, and dancers to understand the role of dress in the collaborative process of making
contemporary dance. Through analysis of the interviews, I expose how a deeper engage-
ment with the corporeal experience of dress can activate costume as more than an applied
visual overlay or at worse as a disconnected scenographic interference to an already existing
choreography.
Methods for understanding bodily experience of dress in dance

I have sought to achieve a more integrated approach to clothing design and movement in the
production of short dance and dress-based films that seek to extend communication through
an embodied understanding of dress in performance. Over a period of seven years I worked
with one dancer from Random Dance Company on sustained, research-focused collabora-
tions that aimed to destabilize hierarchical methods of design and production by introducing
costume from the start as an active agent in the development of dance. The aim of this research
was to understand lived experience of dress in dance from the perspective of the designer,
wearer and potentially, the viewer. By integrating theory, practice, and social science meth-
ods, I explored how design and dance can be generated through approaches that symbiotically
produce embodied knowledge, movement, and dress to achieve more integrated works.
354
Dressing dance–dancing dress
The research process used a grounded theory approach, in which, rather than beginning with
a “pre-conceived theory in mind” (Strauss and Corbin 1998, 12), I started with a broader field
of investigation. In this case, an exploration of the relationship between dress and dance, and
how dress could be more actively engaged in the making of contemporary dance.The data were
generated through practice from which theory emerged, and this iterative dialogue continued
in feedback loop. The research was undertaken in an experimental laboratory situation using
methods of observational visual analysis, reflective practice, open-ended interviews, and critical
analysis. It focused on the single performer’s phenomenological experience and the impact of
embodied approaches to design as well as the audience’s reception of the final works. Although
this approach enabled me to be reflective as both the researcher/observer and designer/observer
(Thomas 2003, 77), I recognized a need for greater subjectivity and an understanding of dance
in a professional context rather than from a visual arts research perspective. By undertaking
interviews with a broader sample of dancers, designers, and choreographers, as discussed, has
facilitated a deeper understanding of the experience, perception, and agency of dress in the
production of contemporary dance works.3 The interviews form part of the overall phenom-
enological approach, seeking to understand how garments are perceived and “experienced first-
hand by those involved” (Denscombe 2003, 97). They are informed by my own experience
and that of the dancer I worked with in my research. This approach enabled me to question
and uncover my own assumptions and to understand my “role as a social actor in the research”
(Thomas 1993, 76).
Three key areas emerged through analysis of my previous research: First, the presence
and absence of dress in dance and the impact of how and when costume is integrated in the
choreographic process. Second, the agency of dress and the embodied, sensory, kinesthetic,
and perceptual experience of the participants. Finally, questions about how collaborations
function when working with dress in contemporary dance and how it is integrated into over-
all communication of the work. These focus areas inform the structure of the interviews and
this chapter develops an analysis of the main themes emerging from the interviews.
To date, fifteen in-depth, sixty-minute, semi-structured interviews have been conducted over
four years with six contemporary choreographers, five designers, and four dancers. These have
been audio recorded and transcribed to enable the researcher to revisit them as knowledge has
been attained and to ensure that a true account of the individual’s experience has been pre-
sented (Denscombe 2003, 175). Interviews were not always conducted in a linear manner, and
when valuable conversation emerged, this conversation also has been captured and informs the
subsequent interview. Ten open-ended questions were drawn out in relation to the key themes
that provided a framework for the interviews and have been targeted to the nuances of the
participants’ discipline.This method facilitated a deeper understanding of the way collaborations
involving costume function from the different perspectives. A qualitative content analysis has
focused on drawing out repetitive themes and patterns across the data, enabling comparisons
between the experience of dancers, designers, and choreographers.
Dress in dance–presence and absence

Costume has been more obviously present or absent in the choreographic process at different
times in history and engaged by choreographers to perform different functions to suit choreo-
graphic styles and approaches. It has been employed to enhance or enable movement, provide
symbolism in performance, communicate character, or mirror everyday dress to extend the
aesthetic of the dance and, occasionally as a tool, to extend the dance. Despite these diverse
functions, dress in contemporary dance has tended to be used as a visual or functional support
355
Jessica Bugg
for the dance (Bugg 2014, 69). This trend is seen in the use of body-conscious, second-skin
garments, such as leotards and tights or the brightly colored unitard that was, as Judith Mackrell
(1997, 223–224) notes, popularized with the introduction of Lycra in the 1970s, but also “maxi-
mised freedom with minimum movement distraction.” Perhaps the most prevailing trope is
that of rehearsal wear, jeans, and T-shirts or ergonomically cut developments of everyday dress.
This focus on functional dress harks back to the 1960s and 1970s, when, Mackrell explains, it
took the form of garments such as dance pajamas or track pants, depending on the focus and
approach of the work. By the 1980s “the concept of ordinariness or the anti-dance uniform had
become more glamorous” (Mackrell 1997, 224).
This preference for everyday dress in one form or another seems to have prevailed ever
since. Discussing this preference with interviewees, I asked if they thought costume repeated
certain cuts, styles, and forms, and if so, why this may be. Although there was little consen-
sus among the choreographers interviewed as to why more progress has not been made in
this area of dance, all acknowledged this to be the case. British choreographer Lea Anderson
MBE, artistic director of The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs, both of which
she founded in the 1980s, has developed integrated and highly experimental approaches that
use the transformative qualities of costume (Connolly 2017, 9). Anderson strongly believes
that dance costume has become less innovative than in the 1980s and 1990s when there was
a strong correlation between the club scene and new forms of cabaret and dance in London.
She explains that in her work there remains a bit “anti-dance world thinking” and elaborates
saying:
I will not present anything in dance pajamas, and I will not present anything in bare
feet, I just don’t understand what that means apart from you just got out of bed or
I’m not dressed? (Anderson 2016)
Three of the choreographers spoke of an ongoing trend toward “non-costume” or

“pedestrian” costume. Interdisciplinary dance artist Marie-Gabrielle Rotie works closely in
collaboration with designers, developing costume and choreography through devised pro-
cesses. She discussed how the absence of costume in contemporary dance could be attrib-
uted to the enduring influence of postmodern dance approaches in the 1960s and 1970s that
prioritized movement and everyday aesthetics and led to a “stripping away of theatre and the-
atricalization” (Rotie 2016). She noted that scenographic and visual aspects of dance became
perhaps less important, and that increasingly,
postmodern dance languages have infiltrated into a language of the pedestrian by

nature of association. Dancers can walk, they can run, they can sit, they can stand
therefore there is a tendency to use every day costume as well. (2016)
Australian independent choreographer Siobhan Murphy, for whom costume has not been
such a central concern in her practice, echoed this shift away from costume toward a prefer-
ence for dress. She discussed how “there is an anti-costume practice present in independent
practice that is about finding something that can look un-costumed” (Murphy 2017). Dancer
Lilian Steiner who works for Australian choreographers I have interviewed, including Lucy
Guerin, Philip Adams, and Shelley Lasica, reinforced the tendency to use every day dress
(Steiner 2018).
British choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh (2014) outlined how her own work draws
inspiration from ballet, bharatnatyam, and contemporary dance. She is very much aware of
356
the importance of costume but “it really depends on whether it is a narrative led dance or
pure abstract dance; that’s what makes the difference as to how the costume is deployed.”
She notes how the use of loose and comfortable clothes was the classic choice for early con-
temporary choreographers. On the other hand, companies like Wayne Mc Gregor’s Random
Dance focused on “the minimally clothed dancer” where “the body itself became the text
of the dance” ( Jeyasingh 2014). She compared these approaches to more theatrical contem-
porary, narrative led dance, for example, the work of Akram Khan, in which the intention
of the dance influences the way costume is approached. The role of costume, she considers,
is “to communicate the concept; it also has to function in a way that the lines and whatever
you want to tell with the body is possible” ( Jeyasingh 2014).
This focus on the choreographer’s vision and the requirements of the movement is one of
the most discussed aspects in the interviews. Most choreographers drew attention to the fact
that designers need to be prepared to alter and change their work in relation to the move-
ment. Although choreographers and designers also are focused on the functionality of dress
in dance, it is not such a prevalent issue, rather the aesthetics and symbolism of dress are the
most discussed theme across all the interviews.
Choreographer Siobhan Murphy (2017) spoke of her desire to capture a sense of ordinari-
ness with costume to extend the flow of register between audience and performer. Along
with others she tries to negotiate what neutral dress is, highlighting the agency of dress in
performance where “nothing is neutral, just like there is no body that is uninscribed by his-
tory and culture and so on.” She uses clothing in her choreography to create context for the
reading of the work. Most choreographers indicated that the designer’s role is to enhance the
visual symbolism or aesthetic experience for audiences through costume. Four of the chore-
ographers specifically stated that not only does costume need to make sense in the context
of the movement, it must also look good or contemporary. Lucy Guerin, artistic director of
Lucy Guerin Inc. (2018), talked about her work in Australia and earlier in New York when
she worked more often with costume than she does now. Early on in her career she designed
and made her own costumes, wanting “to shift away a little from traditional dance costumes
like track pants or unitards,” and seeking “gentle stylistic statement.”
The problem that emerges is, although dress can add a stylistic statement to the work, it
also has greater agency through its semiotic resonance and the performative nature of the
image. Judith Mackrell identifies that dance and fashion are connected, but choreographers
who do not want to “give out confusing signals of character, style, period, particularly in
plotless work, will generally dress their dance in as uniform a style as possible (1997, 215).
This method enables them to get away from associations to a specific place or time.
Three of the choreographers talked about how they seek out a contemporary aesthetic.
Fashionable clothing can perhaps offer a direct means of accessing the “stylistic statement”
referred to by Guerin (2018). This trend also may be why there has been a proliferation
of collaborations between fashion designers and dance in recent years. Most of these have
focused on applying a highly visual approach and in some cases have added a rich visual
texture to the dance. In others the costume’s aesthetic has distracted from the movement or
complicated the reading of the work (Bugg 2016, 174). The interviews have revealed that
although links to contemporary aesthetics and fashion are important for choreographers, the
style and needs of the choreography dictate how and if dress or costume is used.
The visual and/or physical interference of costume in the dance is the central preoccupa-
tion for both designers and choreographers. This preoccupation is clearly illustrated in Lucy
Guerin’s comments in which she explained how her relationship with costume has become
more complex because audiences already “find dance difficult to interpret and are constantly
357
Jessica Bugg
looking for clues.” Guerin’s frustration is palpable in her comments that “in some works I
wish I didn’t need a costume at all, that it wasn’t part of the work. It is so loaded and disrup-
tive. There’s nothing that doesn’t have huge connotations” (Guerin 2018). One of her danc-
ers also finds the aesthetic symbolism of costume difficult to navigate, describing a tension
between the aesthetic of the movement and the body, and the aesthetic or semiotic effect of
the costume:
I feel it is quite a tricky thing because it is such a big part of the image of a work.
Costume influences the way an observer reads into the bigger intentions of a work.
It is partially the way dress effects the viewing of the body’s movements but also the
references that clothing or adornment load on top of what can essentially be abstract
movement. (Steiner 2018)
This broader understanding of the aesthetic role of costume’s form, color, and texture in rela-
tion to kinesthetic and sensory experience is discussed by Rachel Fensham in her writing on
natural movement and costume. She explains how the new modern dance approaches in the
first part of the twentieth century were not so much about the way costume looked but rather
how its materiality contributed to “a natural movement aesthetic” (2011, 83). She noted
how the draped floating scarves and costumes favored by choreographer and teacher Madge
Atkinson not only enabled this expanded notion of aesthetic but also drew attention to the
importance of how the fabric felt on the body, which then became a source of the dance expe-
rience (2011, 84–85). Such embodied investigation of dress in the making of dance works
is best illustrated in Martha Graham’s work in the 1930s, when she made her own costumes
to use as a tool in her choreography. In Lamentation (1930), for example, Graham’s costumes
enabled her to extend the abstracted exploration of grief that was embodied through her
interaction with the costume. Here the sensory potential of clothing extends the performer’s
ideation and kinesthetic exploration that, in turn, sparks the emotional, sensory, and physical
experience of both performer and viewer. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone explains that “we don’t
just see a story of grief,” rather we see “its felt form” (2009, 300). Such historical precedents
of experimental and embodied uses of costume go as far back as the 1890s and Loïe Fuller’s
pioneering works. Fuller’s Danse Serpentine (1896) employed voluminous swathes of cloth,
sticks, and lighting (Banes 1987, 2) to extend the aesthetic potential of the body in move-
ment, creating transformative visual spectacle in the site of her body.
These precedents demonstrate how costume can enhance and develop the dance, not only
through the semiotic or aesthetic communication but also by engaging with the wider sen-
sory and experiential potential. Despite such opportunities to engage costume in the devel-
opment of dance, the interviews have exposed that some choreographers are wary of the
agency of dress in the making of works. As Rotie pointed out, in early modern dance “dress
was something that accentuated movement, whereas in contemporary dance there is a sense
that the movement is everything and is prior to any other considerations” (Rotie 2016).
Philip Adams, artistic director of the Australian company BalletLab, uses scenography
and dress in a range of innovative and experimental ways to explore the boundaries of what
dance and dress can be. He points to the underlying tension between the two, discuss-
ing the performer’s relationship to the garment in which the impact of costume on the
work is sometimes problematic and even overpowering. This same tension emerges through
most of the interviews with choreographers, highlighting an ever-present potential for dress
to hinder the performer, obscuring or upstaging the body and technique or derailing the
358
choreographer’s vision of the work. He noted that costume can “take too much responsibility
for what the viewer is seeing as they encounter the work” (Adams 2013).
If a designer is sensitive to the needs of the dance and the choreographer understands the
potential of dress in performance, a unified aesthetic and communication can be attained.
Clothing has the potential to connect wearers and viewers through performance; it is cen-
tral to our experience of being in the world. Dancers, designers, and choreographers are all
acutely aware that costume can have both positive and negative agency in the work.
Agency and embodiment of dress in dance

Costume and dress have significant and unstable agency in their direct relationship to the
body, and this, as Melissa Trimingham observes, is “nowhere more so than when it trans-
forms the human body visually, physically, in motion and in the charged context of shared
performance” (2017, 137). Like the body, costume or dress is never neutral; its meanings are
interpreted in social and cultural context/s as well as in the individual’s experience and are
“subject to interpretations which are themselves the product of ideologies and belief systems
rooted in a particular place and moment in time” (Collins and Nisbet 2010, 231).
As I have argued elsewhere clothing in dance can become inseparable from the body and
its meanings in performance (Bugg 2016, 189). Dani Cavallaro and Alexandra Warwick write
that dress is both “part of the subject and as objects for the subject, which are not accommo-
dated within the body and yet cannot be conceived of as totally separate from it” (1998, 44).
More than this, Llewellyn Negrin states, “When we act in the world, we do not act just as
bodies, but as clothed bodies, in which our attire becomes an integral part of our corporeal
schema” (2016, 130). Indeed, our kinesthetic, haptic, and sensory experience is heightened in
which the agency of dress in dance becomes “the enactment of iterative changes to practices
through the dynamics of intra-activity” (Barad 2003, 827). This experience creates a per-
formative dynamic not only between the performer and the garment or the dancer and the
audience, but between designers, wearers, choreographers, and audiences in the production
and the reception of the work.
Dress can be remembered or experienced through the body and can trigger sensory, cog-
nitive, and kinesthetic processing that presents opportunities for reimagining and embodi-
ment when experienced in and through movement. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone explains this
devised approach as “thinking in movement … the work of an existentially resonant body”
(2009, 35). Moreover she suggests that “perception is interlaced with movement and to the
point where it is impossible to separate out where perception begins and movement ends”
(39). I extend this thinking to include the inseparability of the garment and the body, where
dress can no longer be “designated as an attribute of either ‘subject’ or ‘object’ as they do
not pre-exist as such” (Barad 2003, 827).
From the dancer’s point of view, dress becomes resonant in its relations and interac-
tions with bodies. As Lilian Steiner explained in her interview, “the costume gives you
access to a different experience you wouldn’t necessarily carry without the costume”
(2018). Carrie Noland’s understanding of agency as “the power to alter … behaviors and
beliefs for purposes that may be reactive (resistant) or collaborative (innovative)” (2009,
9), is useful here. It highlights how dress changes the experience of the dancer in move-
ment, and this experience can disrupt or extend the dance. These active, unstable, and
transformative qualities create potential as well as pitfalls in the creative and collaborative
process of making dance.
359
Jessica Bugg
Collaborating in dance through the body and dress

Despite the undeniable agency of dress in dance, the interviews expose the fact that cos-
tume is a secondary consideration for many choreographers and often is not introduced
until late in the process of production. Lea Anderson (2016) explained that this is because,
unlike herself, many choreographers “are not focused on the costume, they filter out cos-
tume.” She continued to say that the lack of awareness of costume generally can result in
poor costume. Interestingly, she and two other choreographers drew attention to the fact
that dancers and choreographers are not taught to think about costume in their training and
therefore, it is rarely discussed or considered. One of the choreographers also made the point
that collaboration skills in working with scenographic elements are not taught in depth, and
another expanded on this, noting that students are also wary of collaborations with visual
designers.
The choreographer’s awareness and perspective on costume significantly impacts how and
if it is integrated into the work. Three designers spoke of the restrictions imposed on the
design by some choreographers. Sofia Pantouvaki (2016) observed that this restriction can
mean that some designers may revert to “standard types of garments” perhaps because “they
have been tested before and proven to work.” She underscores the importance of functional-
ity and explained that “if you know that it is comfortable and allows movement then you
can focus on details of cut, pattern, and fabrics.” In her own experience whether working in
design for classical ballet or contemporary dance she explained that she has always “found
inspiration in contributing to the overall work” through what she terms as “embodied story
telling.”
Dress is activated in the site of the feeling and experiencing body, it touches the body
physically, sensorially, cognitively, and kinesthetically. If we understand senses to include
“feelings, emotions, memories, impressions, responses and sensations we associate with dress”
( Johnson and Foster 2007, 2), then this affords a more embodied and sensory understand-
ing of dress in dance. It enables us to move beyond a Cartesian split of mind-body dualism
toward a “more personal and mindful body that acts and resists” in response to the experience
of dress in movement (115). I have explored with interviewees the visual, physical, sensory,
and embodied experience of dress in their work. The visual and symbolic aspects are most
commonly discussed across all the interviews. All dancers are aware of how they look and,
as one dancer noted, “Although we are aware of how we might look, it is most important to
feel comfortable in movement and to be confident that the costuming adds to the visual and
kinesthetic experience of the work” (Steiner 2018). Dancer Sarah Augieras revealed how she
mediates between her felt experience and the external reading of her physicality and visuality
in and through movement. If she is wearing something floaty she feels “more airy and my
movement is much more circular. But when you perform in something quite tight you do
feel like you are lines and you are so aware of each part of the skin and how it is in space, the
lines you create” (2017).
In a discussion of her solo work Mythic (2012), Marie-Gabrielle Rotie (2016) described the
role of visual and kinesthetic exploration in her work as a soloist, observing that images are
not purely aesthetic, they are part of how she feels and visualizes herself in the act of perform-
ing. This kinesthetic engagement with images, ideas, and movement is echoed in Cynthia
Cohen Bull’s description of her experience of dancing. She says it “stirs very personal associa-
tions and images within me as I move,” they stem from “life experiences in cultural settings,
both theoretical and social” (1997, 269). Dancers’ comments in the interviews suggest that
dress can contribute to this awareness of their own bodies as they perform.
360
One of the primary concerns for the designers and choreographers interviewed is how the
costume feels for the dancer, but this tends to be focused on fit and movement as opposed
to the wider phenomenological engagement with dress. All designers mentioned the impor-
tance of fittings as a critical time. For Sandy Powell (2016) “the designing happens in the
fitting room on a body not at a desk.” It clearly emerged that costume is not a key con-
cern in the production of a performance and often is introduced late in the process. Lucy
Guerin (2018) explained that costume is seldom part of her work, but she described a recent
award-winning performance, The Dark Chorus (2016), that “was one of the first times that
an idea was more costume based.” These costumes were designed by one of her dancers, Ben
Handcock, in collaboration with designer Harriet Oxley. This knowledge of the body in
movement and the choreography that the dancer brought to the process perhaps assisted in
the sensitivity of the costume to the dance.
Several examples emerged in which choreographers have developed their own costumes,
working on their own bodies. Some designers, who also had experience as dancers, talked
about how this informed their knowledge and empathy for the performers and their under-
standing of design in movement. Some made a point of working with dress in the process of
developing the work, as Rotie explains:
I have a toile made of some kind or bring in garments that are like the shape of the
thing you will be wearing. I usually ask for things to be made on my body or on
the body of who I am working with, so I can see and move how that idea is going
to unfold further. (2016)
Dress in the context of the moving and experiencing body can enter a dialogue with the body
in motion. This dialog demonstrates that dancers are quite prepared to work with extreme
costumes so long as they are well integrated within the performance-making process, as
opposed to being introduced at the last minute in rehearsals. One dancer who performed in
Anderson’s Hand in Glove (2016) discussed how costume is usually introduced a week before
the performance to enable the dancers to get used to it. Conversely, she explained how cos-
tume was introduced from the start of the production process in Hand in Glove (2016), and
this enabled it to contribute and to change the movement (Augieras 2017). Jo Butterworth’s
research into human perception, action, and cognition highlights the potential of engaging
dancers with devised approaches to costume in dance. She explains devising as “the dialectic
between the act of making and doing, of creating and performing, and of being an artist
and/or interpreter” (2009, 189). By thinking about costume in this way, as an embodied and
unfolding form, it follows that dress in dance needs to be introduced early to enable dancers
and choreographers to use and explore its agency in the work.
In another example, Anderson’s Russian Roulette (2008) was made up of six highly cos-
tumed performances with 163 costumes. Designer Simon Vincenzi’s bulbous shimmering
body-morphing creations for the dance encased the whole body and extended the danc-
ers’ bodies into otherworldly forms as they gestured and gyrated in movement. Vincenzi
explained how Lea would work for two weeks and then he would go in and watch a run
and introduce the costumes. Together with the dancers, they worked for weeks in a room
“packed full of the costumes that we were going to use” (Vincenzi 2016). This dialogue
between bodies and material enables the costume to inform the movement through an
experiential exchange in the making of the work. Anderson discussed how the danc-
ers were complaining after a series of rehearsals about how painful, hot, and disgusting
the costumes were to wear. Vincenzi referred to the need to engage dancers creatively
361
Jessica Bugg
in the development of the work (2016). Costume, no matter how restrictive, can posi-
tively engage the performer, but the way it is introduced in the collaborative process is
important.
Time, funding, and trust

From the interviews with choreographers, funding and lack of time impacts the way col-
laborations are developed, and subsequently how costume is approached. Finnish designer
Karolina Kaiso-Kantilla (2016) observed that the fit of the costume is always tested to deter-
mine the ease of movement, but this is done during rehearsals in the actual training space or
in the locker room. One choreographer identified that costume is often the lowest priority in
the budget, always coming after the lighting that is central to dance. Dancer and choreogra-
pher Sanna Myllylahti (2016) explained that time is very limited, as is contact with costume
designers or scenographic designers generally, unless working in a big theater environment.
Lea Anderson supported this saying that not until she was in a proper theater company could
she really make the breakthrough with costume. She pointed out that grants and funding to
support innovation are not easily available, and buying time is perhaps the most valuable way
of integrating designers and their work into the production of dance. Costume designers do
not necessarily need to be present the whole time but, as all the designers have identified,
they do need to be there at key points during the production process.
Anderson (2016) again described how working with designers has extended her own work
and spoke of her “eureka moment of dance and costume,” Flesh and Blood (1989), costumed
by Sandy Powell. Sandy attended all the rehearsals and saw the work which had a lot of “floor
work, up down up down rolling around and really complex precision stuff” (Anderson 2016).
Powell suggested long dresses to the floor made from very expensive silver fabric. While
acutely aware of the impact of the movement on the dresses and the way it would affect the
performance, she had to rethink the choreography, working the costume into the piece with
a far more interesting result, highlighting and working with the movement of clothes.
This type of communication and dialogue takes time, and many choreographers, like
Anderson, work with the same costume designers building trust and ways to collaborate, with
rules and parameters agreed up front for the specific performance. Communication needs to
stay open, collaboration must be reflexive, discursive, and iterative, and all the interviews have
unearthed the potential of such relationships to expand the practices of all collaborators.
Conclusion
This research used interviews within a phenomenological methodology to uncover the expe-
rience of dress in the context of the moving, sensing, and experiencing body for dancers,
choreographers, and designers. Dress and dance are, as I have demonstrated, inextricably
interconnected through lived experiences of the bodies that move with and within them, and
in movement they can become symbiotic. This interconnection presents new understand-
ings and opportunities that can inform the development of the work. Dress in contemporary
dance is far more than a practical or visual application. It is fundamentally phenomenologi-
cal, resonating in its relationship to the bodies that wear, view, and experience it in both the
production and reception of the work.
The interviews reveal that a better understanding between the creative approaches and
methods of all collaborators is required. A lack of awareness or openness on the part of the
choreographer, designer, or indeed the dancer can derail the integration of costume within
dance, resulting in all the collaborators reverting to their own familiar methods and training.
362
More than this, there needs to be an awareness of the different agencies of the body that
pertain to each discipline and an understanding of what this may mean for the specific work.
I have discussed how, by introducing dress into the development of dance early in the
process, as opposed to later in the final dress rehearsals, the lived experience of dancers and
the agency of dress in the context of the body can be leveraged. This approach not only
offers the opportunity for more integrated approaches to costume in dance but also can offer
a greater potential for discovery, ideation, and communication in the production process and
in the communication of the work. Collaborating with dress in the site of the body offers
opportunities to take all participants somewhere new through an experiential and embodied
exchange that is unique to each collaboration.
In order to engage in effective collaborations that open up new approaches and outcomes, it
is imperative that there is understanding and trust between the disciplines involved. The neces-
sity of building more time into the process of creation has been highlighted, and this requires
funding. Traditional processes, hierarchies, timelines, and financial constraints can preclude
depth of collaboration. These constraints contribute to a growing tendency to avoid costume
innovation or to repeat tried and tested approaches. As such, costume can be rendered as an
insignificant element in the dance work, or as a visual or functional support to the performance,
rather than considering its potential agenic function. One of the most significant findings from
the interviews was the positive and the negative agency that dress can have. I propose that this
could be why some choreographers avoid engaging with dress in dance in more innovative
ways and that this lack of engagement with costume’s agency and embodied potential often
results in poorly integrated costume. The interviews have shown that the most successful col-
laborations work with, rather than against, this agency and with the phenomenological poten-
tial of dress in its relationship to the dancing and experiencing body.
Notes
1 See: https://www.intellectbooks.com/studies-in-costume-performance.
2 See also Carter and Fensham (2011).
3 This was undertaken with RMIT University ethics approval “Dancing Dress-Dressing Dance”
Reference: 0000019661-09/15.
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26
THE SCENOGRAPHY OF
CHOREOGRAPHING THE
MUSEUM
Johan Stjernholm
Introduction
The topic of this chapter is the concept of scenography in relation to choreographing the
museum. Both scenography and the idea of doing dance in museums have arguably attracted
an increasing amount of interest in recent years. For instance, in the editorial to the very first
issue of the journal Theatre and Performance Design, launched in 2015, Jane Collins and Arnold
Aronson suggest that there has been “a significant ‘turn’ towards scenography” (2015, 2).
One of the key platforms in recent years that has served to elevate the exposure of new imple-
mentations of scenography is the 2015 Prague Quadrennial (Arx 2016).
In terms of dance in the museum, there has also been a rising interest, partly in response to
the dancer and choreographer Boris Charmatz’s impactful delivery in 2009 of his “Manifesto
for a Dancing Museum” (Charmatz 2009). In 2014, a special issue of Dance Research Journal
was dedicated to the dance in the museum, looking at recent developments and earlier, histori-
cal examples (Franko and Lepecki 2014). Museums have also been busy programming dance,
such as Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Work/Travail/Arbeid (2016) at Tate Modern, London,
and Pablo Bronstein’s Historical Dances in an Antique Setting (2016) at Tate Britain, London.
As a currently working choreographer and dancer, I have had the opportunity to explore
the practice of choreographing the museum on several occasions, such as The Incomplete
Subject (Stjernholm, Malik, and Smith 2010) at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
However, since 2013, my main work has been in Beijing, China. In this discussion, I exten-
sively draw on my own practical experience of having choreographed, directed, and per-
formed at museums and art galleries in Beijing (Stjernholm and Cheong-Leen 2013, 2015,
2016a, 2016b, 2017). The aim of my inquiry is to suggest a way forward by which the sce-
nography of choreographing the museum may be further advanced.
Specifying the area of interrogation

My approach is to a large extent based on the works by the early twentieth century French phi-
losopher Henri Bergson ([1908] 2004) and the more recent French philosopher Gilles Deleuze
(1988). Specifically, I look at how they understand perception and the experience of the present
moment. In Bergson’s (2004) vocabulary, the perception of the present moment constitutes a
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dynamic temporal situation that he calls a “duration.” Deleuze (1988) further develops Bergson’s
notion of duration and defines the method of “intuition,” in contrast to analysis, as a mode of
generating valuable knowledge. One of the basic requirements for the method of intuition,
according to Deleuze, is that a problem must be stated in terms of its temporal characteristics.
In accordance with the above discussion, one of my objectives is to briefly outline how the
choreographing, and the museum, may be restated as an intuitive “scenographic situation,” or a
special kind of duration, that transgresses traditional concepts of the theater, such as set, archi-
tecture, site, body, movements, and dance. I also consider the role of the artifact in the museum.
Perhaps analogous to the proposal of Mark Franko and André Lepecki that “dance’s presence
in the museum reconfigures the very nature of the visual in the visual arts” (2014, 1), I argue that
choreographing the museum potentially generates a reconfiguration of how the artifact may be
perceived.
Context and terminology

The idea of choreographing the museum is not new. Claire Bishop (2014) identifies the con-
temporary fascination for the topic as representing a third wave of increased interest in dance
in the museum, the previous two waves originating in the late 1930s and the late 1960s, respec-
tively. One of the more dramatic events in that third wave, the present, was arguably trig-
gered by the appointment of Charmatz as Director for the Centre chorégraphique national de
Rennes et de Bretagne in 2009. Following his appointment, Charmatz presented a manifesto
in which he proposed not only to completely erase the words “National,” “Center,” and even
“Choreographic” from the name of the venerable institution, but also to turn it into a “dancing
museum.” Toward the end of the manifesto, Charmatz presented a list of “ten commandments”
by which that dancing museum would be implemented (2009).
The response to Charmatz’s manifesto has not been entirely positive. Alessandra Nicifero,
for example, found it being “naïve and bombastic” (2014, 32). Nicifero’s perception of
Charmatz being bombastic may be grounded in some rather obscure, almost comical state-
ments, such as the idea that the scope for the mental space of the museum “must be at least
locaglobalregioneuropeinternationabretontranscontinensouth” (2009).
The naivety of Charmatz’s manifesto may be exemplified in his almost anachronistically
rigid representation of the ideas “dance” and “choreography”: “Dance is much broader than
what is simply choreographic” (Charmatz 2009). Apparently, Charmatz perceives certain
limitations to choreography in relation to dance. Charmatz’s proposition may be compared
to the New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff’s review of the New York dance scene in
the year 2000 where she complains that many choreographies lack “flow or a continuum of
movement” (Kisselgoff 2000). Both Charmatz and Kisselgoff seem to advocate the idea that
dance, or movement, have something to offer that somehow goes beyond the choreographic.
Andre Lepecki (2006), discussing Kisselgoff ’s review, demonstrates that she is not alone in
having the opinion that choreography and dance stand in a problematic relationship to each
other, even to the point where choreography may be accused of betraying dance. However, as
Lepecki points out,
the accusation describes, reifies, and reproduces a whole ontology of dance that can
be summarized as follows: dance ontologically imbricates itself with, is isomorphic
to, movement. Only after accepting such grounding of dance on movement can one
accuse certain contemporary choreographic practices of betraying dance. (2006, 2)
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The scenography of choreographing the museum
Extrapolating Lepecki’s analysis to Charmatz’s idea that dance is much broader than the cho-
reographic, it may be that Charmatz draws on a rather restrictive ontology of dance, and/or
choreography. By means of adopting a more flexible ontology, there might be no need to posi-
tion dance or choreography as if one is more limited than the other.
However, to complicate matters further, perceptions of what dance or choreography
should or should not be may be grounded in deeply personal experiences. To illustrate, I will
compare some comments on Trillium (1962), the first professionally presented choreography
by former New York-based dancer and choreographer Trisha Brown.
In a recently published book on Trisha Brown, Susan Rosenberg (2017) describes
Trillium as “an ineffable, uniquely original but repeatable element occurring within
a f ixed choreographic score” (31). That f ixed choreographic score may be one of the
reasons why Steve Paxton, upon seeing the work, found that “the audience is essen-
tially being choreographically lectured to… a visually/kinetically comprehensible con-
trolled form” (Paxton in Rosenberg 2017, 33). Moreover, another audience member,
Bessie Schönberg, complained that the work contained “mere ‘material’, not ‘dance’”
(Rosenberg 2017, 34). One possible interpretation of these three statements is that
Brown’s dance was somehow limited by her f ixed choreographic score, which lectured
the audience, and the dance, into a controlled form, reducing the dance to become mere
material.
However, Brown presents a fourth, rather different, perspective on the dance in Trillium
and her other, early works:
In the early years of my career I was distinctly able to levitate. Peer pressure against
virtuosity stopped me. Now I can’t do it… The great irony of Judson [Dance
Theatre] was the good joke they pulled on me: I happened to be a virtuosic dancer,
and they said “no” to virtuosity. I had this body capable of moving in ways that
not even I fully knew—except that I tasted the rapture of that experience when I
was improvising. (Brown in Rosenberg 2017, 34)
Thus, in Brown’s own terms, her dance was virtuosic, even levitating, and the limiting
factor was not choreography, but peer pressure. The point I want to stress here is that
ideas regarding what constitute dance and choreography, and any assumed relation between
them, may come down to very personal matters. Facing the lack of any consensual agree-
ment on what the term choreography might mean in relation to dance, it may feel tempt-
ing to agree with William Forsythe in his also bombastic proclamation that “There is no
choreography” (2009).
Despite Charmatz’s and Forsythe’s assertions, I have chosen the term “choreographing”
in the title of this chapter for a couple of reasons. On the one hand, given the vagueness
of the term, my title could mean “The Scenography of Doing-whatever-you-like-with
The Museum,” leaving possibilities open for interpretation. On the other hand, to my mind,
choreographing certainly can include dancing in any existing or imagined form, as well as
scenographic, phenomenological, and other practical elements related to the museum, some
of which I will explore herein.
The main two interrelated ideas from the previous discussion that I want to bring forward
are: first, the importance of allocating a perceived situation or present moment within a tem-
poral, durational perspective; and secondly, the deeply subjective and existential element in
perceiving and performing choreography and dance.
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Johan Stjernholm
Scenographic practice and the idea of “permeation”

The next point of departure is Fashioning Embodiment (2013), a performance/installation that
Flora Zeta Cheong-Leen and I created for the premiere of the exhibition, Reflection of Time:
Art of Fashion in China 1993–2012 (2013), at the Today Art Museum in Beijing, China.
Fashioning Embodiment merges two traditionally separate fields: fashion design and choreogra-
phy/dance. Cheong-Leen has greatly contributed to the historical development of a uniquely
Chinese, post-modern tradition in fashion design. She has designed and directed a number of
large fashion shows, and her collections can be found in museums internationally (Cheong-
Leen 1995; Tam and Cheong-Leen 1999). Because of her historically important role in the
development of Chinese fashion, some of her collections were chosen to be on display in
Reflection of Time. Additionally, in 2013, Cheong-Leen and I had just started up a new dance
company called Wu Tian Yuan/Ballet Octahedron, which subsequently was invited to per-
form at the exhibition premiere.
Architecturally, Fashioning Embodiment occupied two separate spaces: the exhibition space
where the fashion design artifacts of Reflection of Time were located, and the adjacent
reception and corridor spaces of the museum. Based on a curatorial request, the dance aspects
of Fashioning Embodiment had to take place in the adjacent spaces, not sharing the space of
the artifacts. Considering the separation of the space, Cheong-Leen and I questioned how
to generate a duration, or a present moment, that potentially could stretch the perception
of time to the degree that a person would be able to perceive the two different spaces of the
work at once.
One of our solutions to this problem was to use visual elements from some of Cheong-
Leen’s fashion artifacts that were exhibited in Reflection of Time in the design for the dance
costumes. The chosen artifact that we mainly worked with is made of leather, with a shape
that may represent the tradition of the female corset, medieval armor, as well as the shape of
the classical ballerina’s tutu (see Illustration 26.1). Perhaps inspired by the well-known ballet
Swan Lake, the corset/tutu is decorated with feathers and silk lace, and the leather panels are
stamped with elaborate patterns. The pieces of leather are layered and joined together with
leather threads, metal buckles and studs. My overall interpretation of the dress is a paradoxi-
cal juxtaposition of imagery: ornamented, medieval armor merged with postmodern punk, a
gothic ballerina, vulnerable, yet strong, with ironic, feminist overtones of erotic submission
and dominance.
By means of recreating design elements of the fashion artifact in the dance costumes, our
aim was to establish a sense of visual repetition: As audience members walked between the
two different spaces, they would ideally be able to perceive a repetition of design cues, or
a series of the similar (Deleuze 2004). The first instances of the series being the appearance
of the dancers in their costumes, and later instances, the fashion-artifacts on display in the
exhibition.
Using the vocabulary of Deleuze (2006), our intention could be described as aiming to
generate a fold in space. By repeating visual design cues in spatially distributed locations,
potentially establishing a conceptual connection in the form of a series of the similar, the
dresses would constitute sites of recognition and re-recognition—the spaces of the museum
and the spaces of the artifacts folding into each other.
Yet another way to think of the spatial characteristics of the repeated visual artifacts is that
they, as a series of the similar, permeate space: In the case that I recognize visual elements of
the fashion-artifact in the exhibition as a repetition of visual elements from the dance cos-
tumes, it is as if the instances of the series of the similar link up, permeating the depth of the
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Illustration 26.1 Exhibition object from Reflection of Time: Art of Fashion in China 1993–2012, at the
Today Art Museum, Beijing, China. Design by Flora Zeta Cheong-Leen.
museum. The spaces of the dance and the spaces of the fashion-artifacts has begun to leak,
as it were, into each other.
The permeation, or folding, does of course not in any measurable way change the archi-
tectural space of the museum. However, what does change is my experience of the present,
my duration, which is affected by means of pulling specific memories from my past into per-
ceptions of my present. In other words, the actual permeation and establishment of the series
of the similar takes place entirely in the temporal realm.
The process of permeation does not necessarily stop at my encounter with the fashion-
artifact. The curation of the exhibition allowed the visitors to study the exhibited artifacts
in detail and close-up. Assuming again that I perceive a certain artifact as an instance of a
series that permeates back to the dance: If I were to take my time to study that artifact in
more detail, additional layers of the design may start to take on connotative meaning to me.
For instance, I may reflect on the history of the corset, the ballet Swan Lake, medieval armor,
punk, the production of desire, domination, subjection, and so on. In this case, the details of
the dress—leather, feathers, silk, and metal, intertwined and penetrated—begins to generate
a much more complex series of incomplete narratives, microcosms of connotative meaning,
where fragments of my past, perceptions of the world, and imagination all start to permeate
and conflate in a multiplicity of directions.
At that moment in time, when I experience the connotative permeation of my world
into the material details of the fashion-object-dress that I am contemplating, something
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Johan Stjernholm
else is also happening: Given that my recollection of the dance costumes has established the
fashion-object as a repetition of the former—they are all parts of the same series—all the
connotative details that I have folded into the fashion-artifact are at once free to permeate
back toward my memory of the dance. Experiencing that two-directional permeation, the
dance permeating into the fashion-artifact while all my connotations related to the fashion
object permeating back to my memory of the dance, my experience of the present suddenly
stretches out to encompass multiple instances within one perceived moment in time. All
that, while from a spatial perspective, seemingly standing statically in front of an artifact at
an exhibition.
Durational scenography
The situation of experiencing a past/present permeation of the kind that I just described,
may, in the terminology of Bergson (2004), constitute an example of the dynamics of a
duration. According to Bergson, a duration contains fragments of memories from different
moments in time, merging with my immediate, dynamic, and constantly changing sensory
perception of the world around me. In Bergson’s view, memories from the past are always
being pulled into the physical realm of immediate, sensory perception. As those temporal
fractions start to entwine with the sensory perception, the lived experience of the present
moment unfolds, consisting of all my sensory awareness, memories from the past, and antici-
pations of the future that I am engaged with at any given moment in time.
A duration, in other words, is a dynamic, synthetic composition of a multiplicity of past
presents, a present of a now and here, and anticipated future presents. In Deleuze’s (1988)
interpretation of Bergson’s (2004) theory, memories are situated in the realm of the virtual,
and the immediate, sensory perception of the world in the realm of the actual. Together, the
virtual and the actual constitutes reality. The immaterial Deleuzian realm of the virtual is,
like memories in Bergson’s duration, constantly in the process of being actualized toward the
sensory and material realm of sensory perception.
However, as I have demonstrated in my previous research (Stjernholm 2009), there is
another process of actualization at work, in addition to Deleuze’s (2004) actualization of the
virtual. That other process corresponds to an inversion of the relations between memory/
the virtual and perception/the actual. As my memories are actualized to merge with my
immediate perception, the resulting present moment simultaneously travels back in time, as
it were, to dynamically affect my memories from past. In this alternate relation between the
virtual and the actual, it is my experience of the present that serves as the role of the virtual,
and my memories, the realm of the actual. To distinguish those two different, oppositional
processes of actualization, I refer to Deleuze’s process as situated in the realm of the tempo-
ral, and the parallel, but inversed, process as situated in the realm of the abstract (Stjernholm
2009, 149).
The two oppositional processes of actualization can be applied to my durational contem-
plation of Fashioning Embodiment. As I stand in front of the fashion-artifact, established as part
of a series of the similar that started with the dance, and all my connotative layers of mean-
ing are informing my interpretation of the artifact, that interpretation starts to travel back
in time, as it were, along the path of the permeation of the series. Retrospectively, all the
previous instances are filled with meaning from the last instance of the series.
One implication of this is that as I am perceiving the fashion-artifact, there is in the
abstract realm a process of actualization that affects my memories of the dance performance,
as if I am at some level once again experiencing the work. The important implication of that
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is that in this second, abstract actualization of the dance, the fashion-artifact, as part of the
series, appear as an intuitively perceived stage context of sorts, a temporal kind of scenogra-
phy within my duration. All this happens in the abstract, where my present moment travels
backwards in time, along the permeated series of the similar, and as a result, affecting my
memories.
Meanwhile, in the realm of the temporal, I am still in the process of actualizing and
synthesizing memories of having-perceived the dance, as they are leaking into my present
experience with the fashion-object along the pathway of the series. In this temporal process
of my duration, it is the past performance of the dance that comes to serve as a durational
scenography in relation to my perception of the fashion-object. The intuitive, durational
scenography is thus a dynamic place, where change happens in two simultaneous directions,
the temporal and the abstract.
The implicit zones of scenography

Returning momentarily to my stated aim, to advance how the scenography of choreograph-
ing the museum may be understood, what I propose is not radically new, but rather, I am
making explicit certain processes that already implicitly are part of the field of scenography.
For example, the field of theater has in the twentieth century arguably already gone through
an analogous shift of awareness as the idea of the theater laboratory was invented. Attempting
to explain the notion of the theatre laboratory, Mirella Schino proposes:
A laboratorial situation could be defined as one that implies not only paths of artistic
production but also varying existential processes: paths of knowledge, transmission
of knowledge, research and study of the deepest structures of the theatre. To prog-
ress along these paths, this type of theatre is concerned not only with the impact a
performance can have but also with the theatrical sphere that starts from the actor’s
everyday life and arrives at his work: that zone, in other words, that concerns only
those who do theatre. It is a zone that has always existed, of course, and that has
always had an impact on how theatre work is performed. But no one worried about it
until the twentieth century. (emphasis in original, 2009, 220)
Schino points out how the laboratory generates knowledge by means of merging two existential
spheres, the actor’s everyday life and his/her work, into one zone. Although that zone always
existed, no one explicitly addressed it until the rise of theater laboratories in the twentieth
century. Similarly, the field of scenography has always implicitly engaged with certain zones
composed by different spheres. Examples of such zones are: The sphere of the perspective of the
designer and the sphere of the perspective of the audience member; the sphere of representing
scenographic meaning and the sphere of interpreting scenographic meaning; and the sphere
of spatial, scenographic perspectives and the sphere of relationality between events/situations
within a scenography. However, it is not until recently that scenographers and scholars have
started to worry about the zones that those spheres comprise. That “worrying” may be linked
to certain changes in approach that Collins and Aronson’s (2015) identify as a recent turn in
scenography.
One recent example of scenographers and scholars turning their attention to the recently
identified zones of scenography is Joslin McKinney and Scott Palmer’s book Scenography
Expanded (2017). In the foreword, Arnold Aronson states that “most people understand sce-
nography as a reference to theatrical design... I define it as the sum total of the visual, spatial,
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Johan Stjernholm
and aural components of a performance” (Aronson 2017, xiii). In agreement with Aronson,
McKinney and Palmer add: “Our purpose of this book is to try to understand scenography
not simply as a by-product of theatre but as a mode of encounter and exchange founded on
spatial and material relations between bodies, objects and environments” (2017, 2). Strangely,
from the perspective of this discussion, the concept of temporality is notably absent in the
quotes from Aronson, McKinney, and Palmer.
However, notions of time, duration, or subjective experiences of events are not ignored
in Scenography Expanded. To the contrary, several authors demonstrate a distinct awareness
of such concepts. In fact, McKinney and Palmer do suggest that “Scenography often works
gradually, over time, accumulating associations and meanings as a performance unfolds in a
temporal as well as spatial dimension” (2017, 7–8). Kathleen Irwin (2017, 113) also mentions
the temporal as one item in a list of things that scenographers consider. Maaike Bleeker (2017,
126) argues that performances can be understood as practices of thinking rather than repre-
sentations. Additionally, David Shearing (2017, 142) addresses certain experiential aspects of
scenography and emphasizes the importance of relational aspects of art, situating the audi-
ence at the center of the process of meaning-making.
Concepts related to temporality, memory, the lived experience of the present, meaning-making,
and durationality evidently are on the map of current scenographic thinking. However, there seem
to be a lack of deeper and more detailed interrogations concerning the temporal implications of
scenography. More effort could go into researching and explaining precisely how the temporal
realm affects and influences scenographic processes of creation and perception. The main bulk of
scholarly research related to scenography still appears to primarily consider spatial and material
relations, as if scenography comprises the sum total of visual, spatial, and aural components.
In the fields of dance, there is arguably already a substantial practical tradition that explic-
itly explores the temporal realm, drawing on the minimalist, avant-garde tradition from the
fine arts. In his detailed account of the achievements of various choreographers engaged in
the Judson Dance Theatre, Ramsay Burt summarizes: “Avant-garde works that make the
spectator aware of time in this way also make them aware of their own bodies and invite
them to recognize what they have in common with the bodies of the performers they are
watching” (2006, 37). Likewise, Lepecki gives an in-depth account on how avant-garde
dance has been using the concept of the “still-act” (2006, 15) to challenge the dominating
modern construct of subjectivity, a topic that I will return to in more detail herein.
By means of distinctively situating scenography as an intuitive practice in the tempo-
ral realm, as opposed to the spatial realm, a few significant vantage points may be gained.
For example, the idea of scenography may be understood as a situation rather than a place
or perspective. Exploring that scenographic situation, I have already identified two distinc-
tive concepts: permeation and duration. I have also demonstrated how intuitive scenography
are continuously and dynamically shaped by means of two simultaneous and oppositional
processes of actualization, one operating in the temporal realm and the other in the abstract
realm. As a next step, I will take a closer look at the notion of the artifact, considering how
an intuitive approach to scenography may shed some light on the existence of a special kind
of perceived object. I call that special object the “choreutic artifact.”
Perceiving the choreutic artifact

The basic idea of the choreutic artifact was first publicly introduced on September 21, 2013,
as I was co-presenting the talk “From Fashion to Dance: a Dialog with Time and Space”
(Cheong-Leen and Stjernholm 2013) at a TEDx event in Xi’An, China. TEDx is related to
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TED, which is a non-profit organization that aims to spread information through short talks
on various topics. TEDx, however, is arranged by independent organizers (“TEDx Program”
2018).
In its most basic form, the choreutic artifact may be understood as a special kind of
art-object that triggers a certain kind of expansion of the duration, formed by the two-
directional and oppositional processes of actualization. That expansion involves not only the
virtual realm of the person who is perceiving the art-object, but also other virtual realms
as well, such as those of the creators, choreographers, or dancers of the object. Thus, there
is an element of virtual inter-subjectivity inherent to the choreutic artifact. This virtual
inter-subjectivity, or connectivity, may resemble a feeling very similar to the sensation of
kinesthetic empathy.
Kinesthetic empathy can be explained as a deep, internal sensation caused by physiologi-
cal responses by the central nervous system as it pre-triggers the muscles for movement by
the perception of an embodied state, or the movements, of another human being (Reynolds
2007; Reason and Reynolds 2010; Foster 2011). The former New York Times dance critic John
Martin (1933) even attributed kinesthetic empathy as one of the key factors contributing to
aesthetic appreciation of dance. However, although kinesthetic empathy typically is regarded
as a non-mediated, immanent, sensory response to another human being, the choreutic arti-
fact is an attempt to trigger a mediated response by means of a material object.
Despite having briefly introduced the idea of the choreutic artifact in 2013, it was not until
two years later, during the production of Repetitions of Disappearance (2015), that I finally got
the opportunity to explore the choreutic artifact as an exhibition. Repetitions of Disappearance
was a cross-disciplinary installation that involved dance, acting, costume design, painting,
photography, sculpture, and furniture design (Stjernholm and Cheong-Leen 2015) held at
the Xin Dong Cheng Space for Contemporary Art in Beijing.
The starting point for Repetitions of Disappearance was the creation of a series of short
movement studies. Using photographic equipment, Cheong-Leen and I then captured the
movement studies, using long shutter times that spanned for the entire length of each move-
ment study. The result was a series of pictures that visualize the faint outlines of movements
as blurry shapes with moments of stillness represented as areas of greater image clarity. We
selected four of the photo series to be printed: two on stainless steel plates, one on a glass
mirror, and one on a round canvas. The prints were rather large, in the range from 1.8 to
3.4 meters wide. Because of their size, the images represent the captured movements almost
in their original scale.
During the performance of Repetitions of Disappearance, the dancers executed certain tasks
and followed narratives that at certain moments cited the movements represented in the
exhibited prints (see Illustration 26.2). The original movement studies thus represented a
series of the similar, temporally and spatially, permeating across the photographic representa-
tions and the live performance.
Comparing the two exhibition works, Repetitions of Disappearance and Fashioning
Embodiment, there are some important similarities to point out: both works were designed
to establish a temporal, intuitive kind of scenography, whereby certain objects were inten-
tionally charged, through repetition, with the potential to affect or transform the durational
experience of the perceiver. Moreover, since the repetitions consisted of a mixture of move-
ments and physical objects (dress and photographic prints), the intention was to make it
possible for the physical objects to share the capacity of the embodied movements to serve
as sites for triggering immanent, physiological responses, akin to the effect of kinesthetic
empathy (Reason and Reynolds 2010). To succeed in creating a choreutic artifact, a series of
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Johan Stjernholm
Illustration 26.2 Repetitions of Disappearance (2015) at the Xin Dong Cheng Space for Contemporary
Art, Beijing, China. Performer, Johan Stjernholm.
the similar must be perceptually established across the embodied movements and the objects,
and the objects must be able to trigger an actualization of virtual kinesthetic empathy of the
movements either in the temporal or the abstract realm.
The perception of a choreutic artifact means that the boundaries between the perceived
object, me, the previous instances of the repeated series, and the virtual realms of other indi-
viduals connected to the series, to some extent permeate into each other. In other words, the
choreutic artifact triggers the becoming of a complex, relational subjectivity, a state of being
that potentially has far-reaching, critical implications. According to Lepecki, “the disman-
tling of modernity’s idiotic body and its replacement by a relational body renews choreogra-
phy as practice for political potentiality” (Lepecki 2006, 44).
The meaning of the idiotic body that Lepecki refers to originates from the ancient Greek
term idiotes: “a private person, individual, ‘one in a private station’” (Mieli quoted in Lepecki
2006, 33). Being an idiot thus means to exist as a distinct individual, which Lepecki identifies
as the dominating mode of modern subjectivity. The practice of choreography, moreover, “as
technology and expression of modernity’s being-toward-movement, participates fully of this
exhausting psychological, affective and energetic project of modern subjectivation as the cre-
ation of a socially severed, energetically self-contained, emotionally self-propelled idiot” (33).
The choreutic artifact potentially represents a resistance to that modern, idiotic sub-
jectivity and its supportive, choreographic technologies. Through the concept of perme-
ation, relational subjectivity may be intuitively synthesized, and modernity’s obsessive
being-towards-movement is possibly arrested in the sustained materiality of the durational
choreutic artifact.
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Applying the theory and searching for Shangri-La (2016)

Attempting to further expand the implications of an intuitive scenography, I will discuss the
installations Lost in Shangri-la (Stjernholm and Cheong-Leen 2016a) and Fashioning Shangri-la
(Stjernholm and Cheong-Leen 2016b), held at the Three Shadows Art Centre in Beijing,
China. The installations were part of the exhibition Searching for Shangri-la (2016), orga-
nized by Laurence Brahm (2016) in collaboration with National Geographic. The exhibition
explored an ancient Tibetan concept of a utopian place called “Shangri-la” or “Shambhala.”
For the Shangri-la installations, one of the objects that we used was shreds of Tibetan fab-
rics, tied together into a long band. At one instance during the installations, I was wrapping
a tree and a boulder with the band, situated just outside the entrance of the museum. I then
started to entangle myself in the band as well (see Illustration 26.3). Eventually, I ended up
hanging from the side of the boulder, the band being strapped across and around my body in
a complex manner. The aim was to constantly try to find new ways of entangling myself in
the band, while lying on the bolder or being suspended in the air.
Retrospectively, I was informed by Brahm that while I was entangling myself in the
shreds, occasionally hanging off the edge of the boulder, he had been approached by people
who were asking him whether they should approach me to offer their help. They expressed
their concern that I might be in danger, perhaps even getting strangled.
One interesting point here is that people were worried that I was in actual, real physi-
cal danger, which seems to suggest that the boundary between performance and reality
had become blurred. As reality was leaking into and permeating the perception of the
performance, the sphere of everyday life and the sphere of dancing uncomfortably merged
into the same, troublesome, existential zone inhabited by my embodied presence (Schino
2009, 220).
Illustration 26.3 Lost in Shangri-la (2016), at the Three Shadows Art Centre, Beijing, China. Performer,
Johan Stjernholm.
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Johan Stjernholm
At one level, the audience expressions of concern for my safety could be an example of
the “theatre of the real” (Martin 2013), as notions of reality apparently were pulled into
the performance. However, keeping in mind that the event took place in the context of the
museum, not the theater, there are additional factors to consider, especially in relation to
the museum’s colonial tradition of using artifacts to sustain the claim to represent authentic,
grand narratives of reality. It may be the case that those colonial days are gone, as Alessandra
Nicifero suggests: “The museum as a stable institution, as symbol of permanence, authentic-
ity, grand-narrative, and history no longer exists” (2014, 35). However, the presence of the
artifact, and the practice of telling stories about the world based on artifacts, arguably still has
a dominant role in the tradition of the museum.
Keeping in mind that old tradition of the museum to use the artifact as a site to validate
representations of reality, the event of me hanging in shreds over the edge of a boulder caus-
ing audience members to worry about my well-being may be seen in a different light: My
act was perhaps not necessarily so much a radical “theatre of the real,” as it may have been a
performative that served to reaffirm the museum’s conventional reliance on an intuitive syn-
thesis between notions of reality and the artifact, where the artifact acted as the scenographic
perspective to frame reality and vice versa.
The concept of the performative was originally introduced by John L. Austin (1976) dur-
ing a series of lectures on ordinary language philosophy at Harvard in 1955. Austin’s defini-
tion of the performative, or speech-act, was that under certain specific circumstances, to say
something is to do something. For example, when a judge issues a sentence to a criminal,
it is not simply a statement, but those words have actual, practical implications. However,
the meaning of the performative has been significantly modified over time. Jacques Derrida
(1977), for example, applied the performative to theatrical practice, something that Austin
had explicitly excluded. Later, Judith Butler (1993, 1999) expanded the performative to non-
linguistic practices in the construction of gender identity. In my research, I have found that
under certain circumstances, it is helpful to identify three distinct dimensions of the per-
formative: I call those dimensions the “performance,” the “symbol,” and the perlocutionary
“act” (Stjernholm 2009, 90).
Looking at my situation of being entangled with the band in Shangri-la, the three dimen-
sions of the performative may be: First, my performance of entangling myself in the shreds on
the boulder; secondly, the symbol corresponding to the perceiver’s interpretation that my well-
being was in danger; and thirdly, the perlocutionary act of feeling worried about me. That last
dimension, the act, would also mean the establishment of an intuitive duration, forming a rela-
tional subjectivity between me, the performance, the objects I engaged with, and the perceiving
individual. In other words, the perlocutionary act of worrying about me can be understood as
a sign of a successful performative, an expansion of the experienced duration, and potentially
challenging the isolated, self-sufficient, idiotic subjectivity of modernity.
However, since the act dimension of the performative is perlocutionary—meaning that
it is an affectual outcome of the performance and the symbol dimensions—it is difficult to
explicitly prove its existence. The presence of an act-dimension of the duration-performative
corresponds to an internal shift of awareness of the present. In a similar manner, the cre-
ation of the choreutic artifact would depend on to what extent there is an act dimension of
physiological sensations like kinesthetic empathy. In brief terms, the intuitive, durational
scenography and the creation of the choreutic artifact depend on the production of successful
duration-performatives.
Despite the difficulty in proving the existence of perlocutionary duration-performatives,
one of the audience members who did attend Fashioning Shangri-la shared with me her
376
impressions of the work. The audience member is the French linguist Amanda Galsworthy,
official interpreter of Nicolas Sarkozy while he was serving as the President of France:
When I saw your work, I felt something very strongly, it was a real, physical sensa-
tion in my body, like when I listen to certain pieces of music by Bach, or when I see
one of my favorite paintings. I felt connected to life, and to the important things
that really matters. (Galsworthy 2017)
From what Galsworthy was saying, it appears as if she did experience something like kin-
esthetic empathy, and her durational experience seems to have been permeated by various
memories and connections to the world. In this case, it may be that the intuitive scenogra-
phy of the work did manage to generate a choreutic artifact, as the outcome of a successful
duration-performative. However, the question what that choreutic artifact consist of remains
unanswered. Next, I will outline some reasons why any choreutic artifact may typically be
difficult to identify.
Experiencing Delusions (2017)

The last work I will consider is Delusions (Stjernholm and Cheong-Leen 2017), a cross-
disciplinary installation at the Green T. House in Beijing, China, that merged the architec-
tural features of the venue with fashion design, costume design, dancing, and the fine arts,
including works by the Chinese painter Wu Guanzhong. At the end of the installation, the
exhibited art was auctioned by the professional auctioneer Amanda Zhou Paipai, raising
funds for the Tian Art Foundation charity to provide educational scholarships in dance.
Around forty children, already benefitting from educational scholarships by the Tian
Art Foundation, were performing in the work. The performance started with the children
slowly walking in unison, across the garden of the venue, and eventually entering the build-
ing where they performed a series of group formations. As the movements of the children
came to an end, the dancers of Wu Tian Yuan/Ballet Octahedron gradually entered the
space, everyone dressed in a unique costume, some with strong colors, others with long, light
pieces of fabric that swept through the air as a response to movements. The dancers spread out
in the space and performed a series of site-specific movement tasks, sometimes as solos and
sometimes in groups, across the space. Both the costumes and the movements were derived
from the visual content of Guanzhong’s paintings.
After the performance, I had a conversation with Paipai, the official auctioneer of the
event. Working for major art auction houses in Hong Kong and Beijing, Paipai is very famil-
iar with the art of Wu Guanzhong. Given her field of expertise, I asked about her impressions
regarding the costumes, the movements, and the paintings. She responded that her strongest
impression was a moment when all the children were gathering in an underground tunnel
that stretched between two buildings of the venue.
Paipai explained that when she encountered all the children in the tunnel, she came to
think about a series of paintings by Guanzhong depicting cityscapes with small, narrow
houses and spaces. She imagined that all the children in the tunnel were dwelling in those
tiny houses of Guanzhong’s paintings. Watching the performance, Paipai continued, changed
her perspective on Guanzhong’s paintings of cityscapes: it was as if the paintings came alive
and transformed from inanimate objects, simply hanging on the wall, into living entities that
were telling stories about real, actual people. She imagined that the houses in Guanzhong’s
paintings became inhabited by the children from the dance performance (Paipai 2017).
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Johan Stjernholm
Paipai’s description surprised me, mainly because the paintings that she referred to in her
durational experience of the performance were not physically present in the work! Moreover,
the moment when the children gathered in the tunnel happened after they had finished per-
forming. It seems as if Paipai’s duration was characterized by a permeation of contextual fac-
tors that were not explicitly part of the scenography and performance, at least from a spatial
point of view, but from her wider professional knowledge of Guanzhong’s paintings.
My conversation with Paipai seems to reveal that the process of permeation of the
duration-performative may reach far beyond what I previously have been considering in this
discussion. In Paipai’s case, some of the elements leaking into her experience of Delusions
were either contextual, peripheral, or entirely connotative in relation to the spatial charac-
teristics of the performance. She perceived an intuitive scenography in which perlocution-
ary acts generated choreutic artifact performatives that were distinctively outside the spatial
scope of the work, such as Guanzhong’s series of paintings of cityscapes. From my conversa-
tion with Paipai, it appears that when comparing a scenography that is spatially conceived
versus a scenography that is intuitively perceived, the points of intersection between them
may be rather arbitrary.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have sought to demonstrate ways of approaching the scenography of choreo-
graphing the museum from an intuitive perspective. There are four main ideas underpinning
the discussion: First, the notion of permeation, which draws on Deleuze’s ideas of folding
and repetition (2004, 2006). Second, there is Bergson’s ([1908] 2004) notion of duration, or
the lived experience of the present, which may be dynamically expanded into an intuitive
scenography, by means of the above permeation. I have also expanded the idea of duration
to be characterized by two oppositional processes of actualization, one in the temporal and
one in the abstract realm.
Third, there is the concept of the choreutic artifact, which serves to arrest the idiotic
choreographic expression as a being-toward-movement, by means of linking the dura-
tional experience to the materiality of the object. Fourth, there is the performative, which
serves as an underpinning, productive principle that makes all the previous three concepts
come into existence as part of a functional, intuitive scenography of choreographing the
museum.
Current practice and scholarship in the field of scenography is already, at least implicitly,
aware of the importance of the temporal realm. However, this chapter exemplifies that an
explicitly intuitive approach toward scenography may reveal additional modes of knowledge
and practice. That is one way forward for others to explore.
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27
STACKING THE SPINE
Interdisciplinary reflections from BackStories
Becka McFadden
Introduction
The process of performance making of BackStories, which is the performance under discus-
sion in this chapter, begins with a collection of material provocations. Some have been there
from the beginning like Anne Carson’s “On Walking Backwards” from “Short Talks” in the
collection Plainwater (Carson 1995), which contains the haunting lines: “My mother forbad
us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this
idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do
walk behind us” (Carson 1995, 36). Some entered the project later, the result of conscious
contextual research like this medical observation from 1825: “Spinal afflictions are most
common in large towns and more frequent amongst the better ranks of society” (Simpson
quoted in Shorter 1992, 26). Others arrived more intuitively, salvaged from the dusty corners
of memory and invested suddenly with a new urgency like the song “Love Is Like Jazz” by
The Magnetic Fields. “Love is like jazz,” vocalist Stephen Merrit sings against a riotously
discordant background, “You make it up as you go along and you act as if you really know
the song, but you don’t and you never will” (Merrit 1999).
If not backwards, then certainly behind us. To some extent handed down. Physical, yes,
but also social, psychological. Maddening, too. Interminable for as long as we are alive at least
(the mother in Carson’s text might disagree). Complex and paradoxical. These are among our
companions, as we approach the back, approach the BackStories.
What follows is an essay in the etymological sense, which is to say it is an attempt to dis-
cuss key moments in the creation of an interdisciplinary creative process and to locate these
within a broader context of related practices and concerns. This account is practice-led and
references my experience in co-creating, indeed co-drafting, BackStories, a solo dance theater
work with an accompanying photographic exhibition that took place in London between
2014 and 2016. I say drafting to allude to an intentional unfinished quality to the work,
as well as to my sense of it as an ongoing process, moving through versions and iterations
towards something that continues to shape-shift, moving in and out of focus.
BackStories began its life as a duet project, instigated by me and Canadian dance artist
Scheherazaad Cooper. An Odissi Indian classical dancer, Cooper is also a trained actor,
while my own training is predominately in theater, in which, at that time, I had worked as
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Becka McFadden
a director and actor in text-based and devised performances. From the outset, then, perspec-
tives and modes of working from our individual and shared disciplines were organically
present within our process. The conscious articulation of these perspectives as in “let’s look
at it theatrically” or “let’s take a choreographic approach here” was not present within the
work. Rather, our embodied access to multiple modes of working from disparate sources
encountered throughout our training and professional experience allowed us to move fluidly
between them. In this sense, the variety of approaches at our disposal functioned like a tool-
kit from which we could intuitively pull out the tactics that best served a specific moment.
The impetus to create BackStories emerged serendipitously, as many good ideas do, in the
studio. In late 2013, following the completion of our doctoral studies, which we had pursued
in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London, we
found ourselves in a studio at Islington Arts Factory in North London attempting to recon-
nect to a state of embodiment greater than the sensation of fingers tapping on keyboards.
As we experimented, offering each other different provocations for improvisation, Cooper
happened to watch me perform a task—a seated improvisation to music on a stool—from
behind. Viewed backwards and deprived of the contextual information provided by the eyes
and face, this simple exercise became oddly compelling. We spent the rest of the day in the
same way: provoking each other with music, props, and physical positioning within the stu-
dio. By early January, we knew we had a project on our hands. It feels important to say that
what we had was first and foremost a performance project, emerging from a desire to work
with the aesthetic and dramaturgical properties of the back-body. Much research followed,
some of which will be shared here, but it was the type of research one pursues in the making
of a performance work as an end in itself, as distinct from, for example, a practice-as-research
process in which performance or performances may form part of the research methodology
for investigating a particular research question or set of questions.
The creation process emerging from this initial moment of discovery can be divided
into two phases. The first phase was concerned with the making of a duet performance and
followed on directly from that afternoon in Islington Arts Factory. Research and develop-
ment was carried out with the support of Arts Council England and Canada Council for the
Arts during residencies in March 2014 at Cooltour (Ostrava, Czech Republic) and in May
2014 at Goldsmiths, University of London, where dance and performance dramaturg, writer,
and curator Mary Ann Hushlak joined our team. An initial work demonstration was part
of Of Two Minds … an Afternoon on Duet Collaboration at the Lilian Baylis Studio at Sadler’s
Wells, London, on October 30, 2014. On January 9, 2015, a 20-minute work-in-progress
version of the duet premiered as part of Resolution! 2015, an annual festival of new dance
works produced by The Place, a dance venue near Kings Cross. Two further residencies, in
February at Vyrsodepseio in Athens, Greece, and at the Alfred ve dvoře theater in Prague,
Czech Republic, led to the creation of a 45-minute work that premiered at Alfred ve dvoře
on April 18, 2015.
Following this initial phase of the work, Cooper relocated to Vancouver, Canada, and
we gave each other permission to work independently on the BackStories material, to see
what solos or alternative collaborations might arise. The solo iteration of BackStories that I
pursued, continuing in collaboration with Hushlak and adding movement-based practitioner
and researcher Daniel Somerville to the team as director, first took shape in August 2015
during my residency at Hornsey Town Hall Arts Centre (HTHAC). The solo premiered on
September 3, 2015, and ran for a total of eight performances at the Impermanent Festival
of Contemporary Performance, a festival I cofounded and cocurated with Jamie Harper of
Hobo Theatre in HTHAC. Subsequently BackStories in its solo form has been performed
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Stacking the spine
at the Brighton Fringe Festival (May 12–15, 2016), where it was nominated for Southwest
Dance’s Space to Dance Award; the Bloomsbury Festival (October 21, 2016); University of
Worcester (October 26, 2016); and Theatre Utopia, Croydon (November 4, 2016). A related
project, a series of back portraits, in collaboration with photographer Andrew McGibbon,
was released online in the run-up to the Brighton Fringe Festival and exhibited at HTHAC’s
Ply Gallery from June 22 to 28, 2016. The exhibition has since toured with the performance
to the Bloomsbury Festival and University of Worcester (Illustrations 27.1 and 27.2).
In the remainder of this chapter, I will discuss the development of the BackStories project,
including, but not limited to, the solo performance. I will approach the work from three
directions, encompassing several disciplinary perspectives. The first will consider the aes-
thetic and dramaturgical implications of BackStories’ central convention—that the perform-
er’s back faces the audience—through a visit to an exhibition of sculpture and installations.
The second considers BackStories and my role as co-instigator, cocreator, and performer in
relation to genealogies of practice emerging from dance and theater contexts that foreground
the performer as creator, rather than interpreter, of material. The third questions whether
a tension exists between the plural of “BackStories” and the solo nature of the BackStories
performance, considering the ways in which multiplicity is woven into the project through
the photographic collaboration with McGibbon and the dramaturgy of the performance.
Before proceeding, an acknowledgment that the task of rendering an account of this pro-
cess feels, in some ways, anathema to its ethos. Any account of a previous creative process
runs the risk of asserting retrospective order over an unruly, idiosyncratic process, as many
artists have pointed out. Pina Bausch resisted “tidy explanations,” writes dramaturg and col-
laborator Raimund Hoghe because “Then it looks as if I decided on things, that I have deter-
mined how to do things. But that’s not true” (Hoghe 2013, 63). Founder of Odin Teatret,
Eugenio Barba, observes that written accounts of practice may “have an authoritative and
persuasive tone” that obscures the “many nights of solitude and fear” that attend the creative
Illustration 27.1 Performing BackStories at University of Worcester, October 2016. (Courtesy of

Paul Wade.)
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Becka McFadden
Illustration 27.2 Performing BackStories at Theatre Utopia, Croydon, November 2016. (Courtesy of
Paul Wade.)
process (Barba 2005, 69). BackStories was made with a strong attachment to serendipity and
felt sense, and it would be disingenuous to imply that these were not the main drivers of the
research and questioning that informed the studio-based process. Retrospectively, it is pos-
sible to place BackStories in dialogue with works by major twentieth-century practitioners
who also challenge the dominance of the face or highlight the expressivity of the back such
as Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A (1966), Trisha Brown’s If You Couldn’t See Me (1994), or Steve
Paxton’s Material for the Spine (2008). However, it would be wrong to say that these were
present from the beginning, or even the middle, of the creation process. Various provoca-
tions, research materials, and frames of reference emerged at different points of the creation
process, and these are shared as material interludes woven through this text to give the reader
a sense of what material traveled into the studio with us, took root, and offered ways forward.
My approach to creating this text has been to try as much as possible to follow the same
impulses and energies that informed the making of BackStories. As the body has been central
to that process, I have worked to keep it present here, drawing on embodied writing tech-
niques including the proprioceptive writing practice of Linda Trichter Metcalf and Tobin
Simon (2002) and the guidelines of Sondra Perl (2004) for composing with felt sense. In dif-
ferent ways, these approaches offer strategies for keeping the act of writing a physical and
embodied one. My engagement with these processes is part of a larger attempt to write about
body-based performance work—my own, yes, but also that of others—through the body, with
the breath, and in a spirit akin to the work in the studio.
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Stacking the spine
A visit to a gallery, or thoughts on form, content, and the aesthetics of the back
The cervical vertebrae begin at the base of the skull with C1, the top vertebrae. As we count,
we descend, which feels quite Cartesian, really. If I could number the vertebrae, I would
start with the coccyx and work my way up through the trunk, towards the neck, towards
the brain. Perhaps it is fitting, though, in the context of BackStories, to begin with the head
and work down. At the level of movement vocabulary, the piece’s central convention—
that the performer faces upstage for almost the entire duration of the performance—
functions like a mask. Just as the presence of a mask onstage draws the spectator’s attention
to wearer’s physical expressivity, so too the absence of the face turns the attention of the
creative team, as well as that of the spectator, to less familiar perspectives. Specifically,
BackStories relocates the center of meaning to the landscape of the back, which functions
for us as a mobile topography, what director Daniel Somerville termed “Planet Back” in
rehearsals of the solo. One aspect of the back’s expressivity is highly technical; in part, the
creation process of BackStories demanded an excavation of the back’s movement potential
and what might be described as a puppetry of the back. At the same time, the spectator also
is viewing the work from behind, and so backwards becomes an orientation, a perspective,
a scenography. At a logistical level, upstage is now downstage. What the spectator sees
and how the spectator’s gaze functions depend on the framing of the back, running the
gamut from the voyeuristic to the quotidian, as stage image and the spectator’s imagination
coincide. BackStories, then, emerges at the intersection of a specific, physical back and a
general proxemic orientation: the view from behind.
While these are complementary conventions, the physical back and the view from behind
operate distinctly, as dramaturg Mary Ann Hushlak (2014) observed in a blog post she
wrote following a visit to the Hayward Gallery on London’s south bank for exhibition titled
The Human Factor: The Figure in Contemporary Sculpture. Hushlak’s blog post contrasts her per-
ception of Maurizio Cattelan’s Him (2001) and Yinka Shonibare’s Girl Ballerina (2007) with
that of Thomas Hirschorn’s Resistance-Subjector (2011) and Andro Wekua’s Sneakers 1 (2008).
These observations were made less than a year into the BackStories duet process and affirmed
what was becoming clear in the studio: our work consisted of cultivating an expressive lan-
guage of the back and of negotiating the compositional possibilities of viewing from behind.
The sculptures of Cattelan and Shonibare play with the spectator’s perception and expec-
tation by juxtaposing wildly different fronts and backs. In the case of Him (Cattelan 2001),
Cattelan’s staging invites the viewer to approach an innocuous kneeling figure clad in a grey
suit. The anonymity of the suited back-body contrasts shockingly with the sculpture’s face,
which is that of Adolf Hitler. Shonibare, in comparison, evokes Edgar Degas’s Little Dancer
of 14 Years (Degas 1881) with a headless mannequin clad in a tutu made of African textiles.
It is only when you approach the image from behind that it becomes clear that Shonibare’s
Girl Ballerina (2007) is holding an oversized handgun, finger on the trigger. Cattelan and
Shonibare stage the back, playing with the idea that the two sides of body may conceal,
reveal, and contrast one another, as Hushlak notes: “Intrinsic to our ‘reading’ of Girl Ballerina
and Him is the clinching detail and it always seems to be found on the reverse side. One side
suggests, presents and ultimately misleads; the other reveals.… Counterpoint. Juxtaposition.
Contradiction” (Hushlak 2014). Tension between back and front is palpable here as the semi-
otic assumption that we can best determine the nature of someone or something by facing it
head on is turned back upon itself.
If Cattelan and Shonibare are about the back’s theatrical potential, Hirschorn and Wekua
draw the viewer into the physicality of the back itself. Hirschorn’s Resistance-Subjector
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(Hirschorn 2011), an installation of blasted mannequins, draws Hushlak’s attention differ-

ently: “I linger on the backs themselves. Instead of taking in a more generic rear view, I gaze
at each separate back” (Hushlak 2014). Similarly, with Wekua’s Sneakers 1 (Wekua 2008) as
Hushlak writes, “Of course I note the sneakers the figure wears; the piece is titled Sneakers
1, after all, and the lilac-colored sneakers are solid and factual.… Yet it is the back I study”
(Hushlak 2014). Hushlak subsequently notes that both these backs were naked—that the
absence of an external layer to smooth over the back’s complexities draws the eye quite spe-
cifically. This is not to deny the clothed back its eloquence. However. there is something to
be said for the complexity that emerges when the totalizing effect of fabric is peeled away to
reveal more fully the specific complexities of muscle, skin, and bone.
That these reflections occurred in a gallery is significant during the creation of the duet
piece specifically; the gallery was a frequent point of reference in part because it is one of the
few places where we regularly view those around us from behind, their backs often visually
juxtaposed with the artworks at which we are looking. As Hushlak’s observations, recorded
from multiple viewpoints, make clear, the gallery is a place that invites perambulation and
shifts of perspective, particularly where installation and sculpture are concerned. In the pro-
scenium spaces for which BackStories was made, the spectator’s point of view is comparatively
fixed. While the eye is free to jump about the stage, the orientation is stable and constant.
BackStories differs from much performance work for theater, including the iconic twentieth-
century works previously noted in that it is less an avoidance of the face (as in Trio A) than a
presentation of the back. Rotation, flexion, and profile are minimized, and the back directly
confronts the spectator, who, like it, is also facing upstage. This shared orientation, sustained
through the performance, constitutes another disruption of stage proxemics-as-usual, trans-
forming the performance space, viewed from the back row, into a sea of backs. Unlike the
viewer of Him (Cattelan 2001) or Girl Ballerina (Shonibare 2007), the BackStories spectator has
no means by which to definitively ascertain what is happening on the other side of the per-
former’s body. The back, placed within the mise-en-scéne of the production, is the medium
through which all communication and invitations to infer as the spectator will occur.
The early duet iterations of BackStories (2014–2015) focused primarily on the scenographic
aspect of this duality, or, in other words, the view from behind. In part because Cooper and
I were still very much exploring the self-imposed parameter of a sustained upstage orientation,
we generated a great deal of material by observing a variety of performance forms (play texts,
improvised monologues, improvisations to music, and our own specific movement practices)
from behind, observing the ways in which this troubled conventional performance semiotics
and opened up new possibilities. We consciously worked with the notion of the gallery specta-
tor and took, initially, a quite controlling approach to composition, in that we selected both
the images that were presented and the perspective from which they were viewed. Starting
from clear transitions between distinct, set solos and duets, the structure gradually broke down
as the performance unspooled and these merged into one another, gravitating toward a more
improvisational space, albeit one that retained the absence of the face.
Material interlude: A backstory from the author

Here is a transcription of a self-recording, mixed into the BackStories sound score:
… Consequently, I am writing this at my dining room table, too rapidly and mania-
cally, with unnecessarily furrowed brow. I am sitting cross-legged, right over left,
but forward on my feet, not on my bum, so that the bulk of my weight is going
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into the top of my right foot, at the point at which it meets the chair, approximately
above my metatarsal arch. My spine is curved and my left elbow is on the table, left
hand under chin, holding a piece of hair from the right side of my head. I am peri-
odically tilting my head to the right, then back to the left, hooking the base of my
skull, the left side, over my left shoulder, which is making its way towards my left
ear. My right forearm is cramping. It is an absurd posture, but I’ve occupied it for
at least ten minutes because I don’t, for whatever reason, want to invest the time it
would take me to move. (Beautiful Confusion Collective 2015)
Creating the BackStories scores at the intersection of dance and theater

In this section, I will discuss the ways in which my background in physical theater, specifi-
cally a set of devising practices associated with Polish theater director Jerzy Grotowski and
his successors, informed my creation work on the BackStories solo. First, however, it is use-
ful to discuss briefly how movement material was generated during the duet process. Solos
or duets were crafted independently of each other from specific provocations drawn from a
range of sources including music, visual artworks, and text. In her essay “EF’s Visit to a Small
Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play,” Elinor Fuchs describes a play as “another world pass-
ing before you in time and space,” which possesses its own “space-time dynamics” as well as
a host of other qualities unique to it (Fuchs 2004, 6). Following this line of thought, it could
be said that each section within the duet functioned as its own world with form and content
existing sometimes in synthesis and sometimes in juxtaposition. These sections existing as
solos and duets were structured in a manner analogous to the stringing of beads on a thread
with each retaining its specific structure or character with little bleed or distortion emerging
from its proximity to other materials. In the solo creation process, without two bodies to
provide counterpoint, create tension, and suggest relationships, the work shifted.
That shift came by way of the creation of three scores that I navigate in the performance
of BackStories (for the rest of this section, discussion of the solo is implied, unless otherwise
stated). These are the physical score, encompassing the movement and sound I generate dur-
ing the performance; the internal score, referring to a series of images, memories, and asso-
ciations that texture the execution of the physical score; and the performance score, referring
to the dramaturgy of the piece and encompassing the live performance, the scenic elements,
spatial proxemics, and the relationship between performer and spectators. The territory cov-
ered by these scores ranges from the communicative to the invisible, from the macro to the
micro, just as my experience of BackStories encompasses the perspectives of the performer
as well as the creator with an eye on the overall shape of the performance. This process is
not to downplay the significant contributions of director Somerville and dramaturg Hushlak.
Rather, the role of the performer as creative, generative artist, which is a constant in all of
my performance work regardless of whether the performer is me or someone else, situates my
practice within a genealogy of performance-making in which the performer’s contribution is
understood as creative and generative, not merely interpretive.
In Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices, Emma Govan, Katie Normington, and
Helen J. Nicholson trace the emergence of what they term “the creative performer” to the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, noting, “As the works of psychological think-
ers including Freud and Jung became widely available, performing increasingly focused on
self-exploration and self-expression” (Govan, Normington, and Nicholson 2007, 30). Govan,
Normington, and Nicholson cite Isadora Duncan’s “natural dances” of the early twentieth
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century, which eschewed formal technique in favor of more organic expressivity, as epito-
mizing the belief “that freeing the imagination and releasing the unconscious through spon-
taneous creative practice was both socially advantageous and personally liberating” (Govan,
Normington, and Nicholson 2007, 30). While these authors acknowledge the opinion, held
at the time, that such work held the capacity to improve society, as liberated individuals
would build better social structures, I am skeptical of an over-reliance on personal emancipa-
tion and the value of pure self-expression as a chief aim of performance work that expects an
audience to sit in a theater and attend to it exclusively.
Contemporaneously, Russian theater director Konstantin Stanislavsky trained his acting
students to portray nuanced characters such as those created by playwright Anton Chekhov
with psychological realism. Often conflated erroneously with method acting in Anglophone
contexts, Stanislavsky’s work with actors, as Bella Merlin explains in The Complete Stanislavsky
Toolkit, was grounded in a psychophysical approach:
PSYCHO-PHYSICALITY basically alludes to the fact that your body and

your psyche are trained together to achieve a sense of inner–outer coordination.
This means that what you experience internally is immediately translated into an
outer expression, and (conversely) what your body manifests physically has a direct
and acknowledged effect on your psychological landscape. (Merlin 2014, 18)
Psychophysical training equips actors to bring their own experiences and creativity to a role,
shading it with personal choices and associations that often remain submerged beneath the
characters the audience perceives, but which are nevertheless essential to the performance.
Stanislavsky’s understanding of the psychophysicality of acting also prioritized the elimina-
tion of unnecessary tension or habitual movements, as these inhibit the spontaneous expres-
sivity of the body (Merlin 2014, 32). I had been trained in this approach to acting during my
under- and postgraduate degrees, but the “inner–outer coordination” Merlin describes took
on new significance during the BackStories process as I made a piece of nonverbal work for the
first time.
The creativity of the actor is even more central to the work of Jerzy Grotowski. Where
Stanislavsky’s actors brought their creativity to bear on the portrayal of characters in authored
plays performed naturalistically, Grotowski’s work exists in a more stylized space and is
understood as one of the main points of reference for the range of practices, emphasizing
devising and the expressivity of the body, which are often encapsulated today by the term
“physical theater.” In “Methodological Exploration,” which is contained in Towards a Poor
Theatre (Grotowski 1968), Grotowski explains his interest in the actor’s creativity:
If the actor reproduces an act that I have taught him, this is a sort of “dressage.”
The result is a banal action from a methodical point of view, and in my heart of hearts
I find it sterile, for nothing has opened up before me. But if, in close collaboration,
we reach the point where the actor, released from his daily resistances, profoundly
reveals himself through a gesture … I shall then be personally enriched, for in that
gesture a kind of human experience will have been revealed, something rather spe-
cial that might be defined as a destiny, a human condition. (Grotowski 1968, 130)
Significantly, and in contrast to the solo practice of Duncan, for example, Grotowski’s
practice emphasizes collaboration between actor and director. While Grotowski’s research
took him away from the creation of public performances, the work from his Theatre of
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Productions period wove material generated by the actors into the dramaturgy of collec-
tive work. In “The Theatre’s New Testament,” he explains the significance of this larger
context: “The important thing is to use the role as a trampolin [sic], an instrument with
which to study what is hidden behind our everyday mask … in order to sacrifice it, to
expose it” (37). Where a performer achieves this kind of exposure, the impact is felt by
the spectator: “The spectator understands, consciously or unconsciously, that such an act
is an invitation to him to do the same thing.… We try to escape the truth about ourselves,
whereas here we are invited to stop and take a closer look” (37), convened and held in the
darkness of the theater.
Grotowski’s emphasis on the actor as the originator of the gestures she performs is
echoed in Pina Bausch’s work with her dancers. In The Pina Bausch Sourcebook: The Making
of Tanztheater, Royd Climenhaga writes, “In rehearsal, Bausch asks questions. Questions
of elemental purpose, allowing her performers time to answer with words, with move-
ment, with a performed moment” (Climenhaga 2013, 59). Raimund Hoghe (2013) refers
to the company as Bausch’s “dancers/actors/co-authors,” quoting Bausch’s understand-
ing of her own role in the process of making a new performance: “What I do: I watch.
Maybe that’s it. I have simply looked at human relationships and tried to see them, tried
to speak about them. That’s what I am interested in. I don’t know of anything more
important” (Hoghe 2013, 63). Like Grotowski, Bausch shapes the material generated by
the performer, montaging it into the final structure of the performance. Describing her
experience of assisting Bausch in this process, Renate Klette writes: “Pina has a pile of
paper scraps with all the exercises written down.… Every night in the Spanish restaurant
we rearrange the scraps in a new order. ‘Line them up,’ Pina says, and we try to order
them according to themes or movements, music or dancers. This game of solitaire never
ends and sometimes we come up with a meaningful frame” (Klette 2013, 63). Klette
goes on to describe her impulse to organize according to “traditional patterns of action,”
a logic Bausch finds boring: “She wants a total impression, from which the audience
can choose the events it wishes to follow” (63). Like Grotowski’s work, Bausch’s work
demands an active spectator with the absence of Klette’s “traditional patterns of action,”
arguably asking even more of the audience. As Hoghe writes, “It is a form of theatre that
is too demanding for most of the spectators (and critics); they cannot handle the offer
to assemble the piece themselves. It is a theatre without instructions for use, without an
ostensible structure and interpretation—a subjective reality that can only be encountered
subjectively” (Hoghe 2013, 79). This, then, is work that extends Stanislavsky’s psycho-
physical feedback loop between inner and outer to the spectator, who actively receives the
staged images, which in turn resonate with their own interiority, in a process that echoes
the means by which they were created.
This type of dramaturgy, which looks to bring the spectators in contact with themselves
through their encounters with a performance, was very much in our minds as we created
BackStories. The potential to slide into pure autobiography is rife in a solo performance, spe-
cifically where the generation of material has drawn upon personal experiences and points
of departure, but Hushlak, Somerville, and I were quite clear from the outset that even the
solo version of BackStories should resist collapsing into a singular backstory that is solely iden-
tifiable with the performer on stage. The formal restriction—the back-body as a constant
presence—aided us in this task because, despite the particularity of any given back, the rela-
tive irregularity of staring at the human back for 40 minutes at a time means we are less able
to draw conclusions as to the type or kind of persona we are traveling alongside. In other
words, our intentions might be articulated like this: faced with the expressivity of the back,
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a language they cannot quite read, despite knowing they possess backs themselves, the spec-
tators might experience the performer’s back, from time to time, as a mirror in which they
encounter something of themselves.
With our aim to open, through the performance, a space of self-reflection for the spectator,
the creation of the three-part score previously mentioned provided the means of approaching
it. The coexistence of the performance score, the physical score, and the internal score cre-
ates a field in which the material that emerges from personal responses to various stimuli (the
physical score) can retain its specificity in performance (via the inner score), while aiming at
a dramaturgy greater than itself (the performance score).
The performance score of BackStories encompasses the structure of the individual sections
or “scenes” of the piece, together with the set (currently a bar stool, a straight chair, and a
piano stool), lighting (ranging from harsh light evoking a bureaucratic waiting room to an
indulgent hot fuchsia), costume (currently a white dress, purchased off the rack at Topshop
and altered to maximize the exposure of the spine), projection and sound (encompassing
music, ambient noise, and voice recordings). These elements and their interactions are struc-
tured, but loosely enough to allow space for the spectators’ own associations. The perfor-
mance score is the frame within which the physical score, informed by an inner score, is
performed. The performance score is stable, providing a structure within which the physical
and internal scores can vibrate.
The physical score is the series of movement sequences I perform throughout the piece, as
well as the sounds I make, which include moments of intentionally audible breathing, cough-
ing and sniffing, laughter, humming, and the smack of my palm against the exposed flesh of
my back. During the duet creation process, Cooper had introduced the concept, new to me
at the time, of structured improvisation, meaning that while certain points with the physi-
cal score were fixed (i.e., by a particular point in the performance I needed to have reached
the upstage left corner), there was a degree of freedom and space for spontaneity in the way
we moved from one fixed point to another. Without eliminating this freedom, I worked
with Somerville to clarify the physical score and to prioritize the unique expressivity of the
back-body over a reliance on the scenographic orientation of backwards. Even in moments
of free flow, involving the entire body, we worked to make the spine the point of origin and
impulse. At the level of physical training, this process involved working with segmentation
of the spine and wider back-body and drawing connections between the core and the limbs.
Accompanying us throughout the process of clarifying the physical score was the excava-
tion and deepening of the internal score—a series of images, intentions, actions, and phrases
that impel and texture my movement through the physical score and make the various ele-
ments of the performance structure specific and concrete for me in the moment of perfor-
mance. As with the most personal layer of the historical practices I have discussed, the explicit
content of this score is largely invisible to the audience, although its impact, manifested in
the tone and quality of the movement, is highly visible. Imagining a context of transmission
helps to further distinguish these. I could give another team of artists only the performance
score, and they could make something that shares BackStories’ structure, but it would likely
look radically different. I could teach another performer my physical score, which would
come closest to the transference of choreography, but the internal score cannot be transmit-
ted and will be specific to each performer.
Reflecting on this process in 2018, when I am in the midst of a subsequent project, I am
struck by the way in which this sense of a triple score consolidated within my practice during
the BackStories project and has flowed forward into a new ensemble work, with radically dif-
ferent content. Increasingly, my sense is that heightened clarity (though not inflexibility) of
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the physical score, which I continue to pursue as and when I have cause to revisit BackStories,
gives the inner score space to sing; the performance consequently fizzes up to engage the
spectator at the intersection of physical, inner, and performance scores. I anticipate further
revelations on that front as the work (by which I mean the kind that never stops) continues,
from project to project.
Material interlude: “It’s like Braille, almost.”

Here is an extract from an interview with J, a London-based massage therapist:
I see hundreds of backs a month. My focus is on other people’s backs, more than my
own. So, I think the attention isn’t really there for my back. I’m so focused on other
people’s backs and problem areas and that’s what I’ve studied for years, and my own
back is quite neglected, I think, in that sense. You can tell quite a lot about someone
just feeling their backs. It’s like braille, almost. (McFadden 2015)
Solo and Chorus

As BackStories has transitioned from duet into solo, I have found myself interrogating its plu-
ral title. To what extent can a solo work claim plurality? I have discussed in the preceding
section our intention, as BackStories’ creative team, to structure the performance in a way
that left space for spectators to bring their own associations to the work. This intention is
one very important way of avoiding a slide into individuality, or even autobiography, which
would feel reductive in relation to our goals of maintaining dramaturgical openness and
encouraging active spectator engagement. Another suggestion of multiplicity is contained
with the word ‘backstory’ itself; it is not as if each of us has only one, as Hushlak writes in
her dramaturgy note for the BackStories program:
Backstory—where to begin? Behind us, most certainly. Yet in terms of when, when
to start from? Yesterday, last week, a month ago, a year ago, several years ago, most
of a life? Or from a particular event? A particular something? Or a very specific
place? Even as we say the word, our heads raise and tilt ever so slightly backwards.
In fiction, backstory is about how a character gets to be like that, or does that,
whatever the that of the story is. In real life, it’s more how each of us can be fath-
omed, can be understood, can be contextualized, can be tracked, how our bodily
reactions and inner thoughts penetrate our actions, our gestures, our tone—right
now, in this moment.
Backstory is of course about time, time past, what is behind us and what we carry
with us. Remnants, vestiges of habits, rituals, mementos as much as memories,
crucial moments, scars, wounds, phobias and history. All of the remnants, through
time, and also, through space. Like a territory. Like a hinterland. Our territory. Our
hinterland. (Hushlak 2016)
Hushlak’s text highlights our general perceptions of the word—its association with fiction, the
hows and why of a character, of ourselves. Wherever it is, it is back—in time, in the past, but
also in space. At the same time, it is present, inescapable—in our actions, in our perceptions of
the world around us, inscribed on our bodies as habitual gesture, posture, tension. As Hushlak
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notes, even to say the word, even, I would argue, to think of the back, activates a propriocep-
tive response, a reminder: “Oh yes, I have that too, a back. A backstory. Probably several.”
In addition to these plural considerations rooted within the performance itself, a further
exploration of BackStories’ capacity to encompass multiple stories emerged from my collabora-
tion, in Spring 2016, with photographer Andrew McGibbon. I met McGibbon in Hornsey
Town Hall Arts Centre, where he was also an artist in residence in spring 2016. Together
we conceived the idea of shooting a series of back portraits in his studio, which would be
lit to emphasize the physicality and musculature of the back body. This collaboration built
upon a range of interviews I had conducted earlier in the BackStories process, in the winter of
2014–2015, when Cooper and I were seeking to raise awareness of the project ahead of our resi-
dencies in Greece and the Czech Republic. That process had involved photographing subjects
with my iPad in their place of work and asking them to tell me their backstory, in whatever
sense they understood that term (the interview with London-based massage therapist J in the
Material Interlude preceding this section is an example from this series). Moving on from this
experiment with longer form storytelling, McGibbon and I decided to limit the response of
our subjects, a combination of fellow residents and other users of the building, to complete the
sentence “My backstory is …” Originally released through Beautiful Confusion Collective’s
social media accounts in the run up to BackStories’ appearance at Brighton Fringe, we eventu-
ally displayed these images in Hornsey Town Hall’s Ply Gallery during a group exhibition
titled SPLICE: Live Art and Photography in Collaboration (June 22–28, 2016). The provocation we
offered our subjects prompted a wide range of responses, as this sample demonstrates:
… always trying (Alexis P.).

… no longer my own (Chris R.)
… still in progress (Elisa N.)
… soft and hairy (Tom C.)
… love (Sara P.)
… a misspent youth and an undecided future (Steve G.)
… something I’ve never considered (Vanessa H.)
… unimproved, despite physio (Paul W.)
… a link to my family (Caroline G.)
… protection for the rest of me (David M.)
… that even the impossible can be possible (Carolyn W.)
… painful (Asa T.)
… scoliosis in recovery (Maude L.)
… years of depression and anxiety behind me (David L.)
(McFadden and McGibbon 2016)
Unsurprisingly, given that an informal survey of published literature on the back conducted
across a variety of specialist and general London bookshops at the beginning of the BackStories
process produced almost exclusively texts on back pain and its management, several respondents
spoke about their backs in a biomedical context. Asa T.’s backstory is simply “painful,” while
Paul W.’s is “unimproved despite physio.” Maude L.’s is “scoliosis in recovery,” suggesting
the back as a site of process, “in progress” (Elisa N.), or “always trying” (Alexis P.). Steve G.’s
backstory is more poetically liminal: “a misspent youth and an undecided future,” positing
the back body as a site of negotiation, or a space in which competing energies can coexist.
Other responses evoke the expression of turning one’s back on something, of a sealing
off. David L.’s response, “years of depression and anxiety behind me,” posits the back as
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Illustration 27.3 “My backstory is…protection for the rest of me.” “David M” from the What’s Your
Backstory? series. (Courtesy of Andrew McGibbon.)
something of a fire door between then and now. Similarly, David M.’s back is “protection
for the rest of me,” calling to mind the image of a superhero’s cape, attached, of course, to
the back (see Illustration 27.3). In contrast, Caroline G’s “a link to my family” connects the
here and now to a genealogy that suggests a transcendence of the purely biological. Other
responses (Carolyn W.) engage with a biographical interpretation of backstory, while still
others delight in the animality of the back (Tom C.) (Illustration 27.3).
The images and responses collected in our initial studio portrait session have continued to
grow. For the private view of SPLICE, McGibbon constructed a back-portrait photo booth,
which allowed attendees to take a back selfie. These images were later printed and added to the
gallery exhibition. Subsequently, the photo-booth concept has been revisited in connection
with a performance of BackStories at University of Worcester and at a standalone exhibition
of the photos for the Bloomsbury Festival. These BackStories, generously shared by their own-
ers, are not explicitly present in the performance of BackStories, but knowledge of their exis-
tence adds a density, an additional layer of resonance to the work. The accumulation of these
specificities—each a unique back, with a unique response to the same prompt—allows the
BackStories project to gesture toward something universal, without collapsing into the general.
Conclusion: Back to the gallery

If the Hayward Gallery’s The Human Factor exhibition provoked interesting questions at the
start of the duet creation process, another exhibition, Flæsh, at Prague’s Rudolfinum Gallery
visited in November 2015, after the BackStories solo had premiered, seemed to offer a kind
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of affirmation. Alongside works by Marlene Dumas, Tracey Emin, Belinda De Bruyckere,

and Louise Bourgeois, a series of large format figure drawings by Kiki Smith was exhibited.
Several works in this series elaborate on the back of a female figure. In Garland (2012a),
flowers fill, and appear to radiate from, the back of a woman seated in profile and facing us,
looking over her right shoulder, eyes closed. The drawing of the woman is repeated twice,
the second time without the flowers, but with the eyes open. In Smith’s Influence (2012b), a
seated female figure faces diagonally upstage, face in profile, eyes open, hands resting on her
thighs. From red, yellow, and blue circles on her back, colored beams radiate, refracting and
trailing behind her, like intentional streamers. The energy feels outward.
Curator Petr Nedoma’s comments regarding Smith’s project in her sculpture practice
from the late 1990s onward feel equally applicable to these drawings: “The mirroring of the
internal situation in the overall makeup of the statue was established by her as an essential
issue, because the inner self inherently constitutes the external appearance as the true con-
tent thereof ” (Nedoma 2015, 22). In other words, the internal score shapes what appears
externally, articulated through the physicality of the body, a relationship that echoes Merlin’s
(2014) articulation of Stanislavsky’s psychophysical process. In Smith’s work, inner and outer
coexist, while confrontation with the entire series—in its own context, or the broader con-
text of the entire Flæsh exhibition—invites the spectator to “provide the meaning by filling
the void with attributes, insertions and thoughts” (Nedoma 2015, 22). Nedoma contin-
ues, “Presumably, this will give rise, completely naturally, to multiple readings basically
dependent on the viewer’s imagination and experience” (22). Once again, a gaze found in
the gallery speaks productively to decisions made on stage, to the ways in which multiple,
diverse, and even contradictory elements allow the specific to speak to the collective, culti-
vate an inclusive complexity, insist on plurality, and refuse to close meaning, inviting spine
to be(come) spines.
References
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28
LONGING FOR THE SUBALTERN
Subaltern historiography as choreographic tactic
Cynthia Ling Lee
Introduction
How might subaltern critiques of history be translated into choreographic tactics that allow
dance artists to grapple with their multiple entangled histories while making room for contra-
diction and ambiguity? How can techniques for writing subaltern pasts offer ways for contem-
porary post/colonial dance makers to choreograph their complicated desires for that which has
been hidden, lost, or obscured by hegemonic histories? How are these desires complicated by
these artists’ partial access to dominant systems of representation, by their simultaneous mar-
ginalization and privilege, by the ways that colonization and cultural imperialism have inter-
rupted their connection to subaltern lineages and ways of knowing? This chapter uses Meena
Murugesan’s we used to see this (Murugesan 2013) and my blood run (Lee 2016) as case studies to
explore the translation of subaltern theory into choreographic praxis.
Subaltern studies
Subaltern theorists have critiqued linear, authoritative models of history as European modern
constructs, proposing that we understand history as “a contested narrative” in which official
texts and historical “facts” contend with human “dreams … oral histories and incomplete
memories” (Chatterjea 2004, 143). As Dipesh Chakrabarty notes, subaltern studies emerged
from the postcolonial context of India, where scholars initially sought to write marginal-
ized peoples into the history of the nation, while also “combating all elitist biases in the
writing of history” (2000, 102). This project of writing histories from below, however, was
troubled because historiography requires verifiable archival and text-based evidence, and
subaltern lives have often not been documented in this way. Performance studies scholar
Diana Taylor, who works in the different context of the Americas and decolonial thought,
explains that colonial documentation has often privileged the archive, which focuses on
“supposedly enduring materials” such as texts, whereas indigenous approaches to cultural
memory have relied upon the repertoire, which centers ephemeral embodied knowledge
(2003, 19). Moreover, the discipline of history is founded upon European epistemologies
that impose a “secular worldview” and “a split between public and private selves” upon the
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Longing for the subaltern
subaltern (Foster 2009, 9). Conventional histories are written to conform to post-Enlighten-
ment notions of developmental progress, narrative coherence, and linear continuity, masking
significant absences, sutures, and erasures (Chatterjea 2004, 143). Subaltern pasts point to
the limitations of history by revealing other ways of touching the past: the supernatural, the
irrational, myth, memory, and oral tradition.
Subaltern theorists propose forms of writing the past that perform the limits of history, in
which time is knotted rather than continuous, linear, and homogenous (Chakrabarty 2000,
112). Knotted histories require us to write “the confrontation between distinctive world-
views,” rendering history “contradictory, plural, [and] heterogenous” (Foster 2009, 9–10).
Subaltern historiography’s experimental writing techniques include “fictionalizing the past,”
“studying memory rather than just history” (Chakrabarty 2000, 106), and embracing mul-
tivocality, fragmentation, loose ends, nonlinearity, and the irrational. As an example, dance
scholar Priya Srinivasan has employed these writing techniques in her work on US mod-
ern dancer Ruth St. Denis, employing a fictional, multivocal framework to imaginatively
reconstruct exchanges between St. Denis and the unnamed Indian nautch dancers and male
performers who contributed to her choreographic oeuvre (2007).
I argue that subaltern writing techniques not only ask us to reimagine how we write
critical dance histories, but they also offer rich fodder for choreographers grappling with the
complex, post/colonial histories of their bodies. I follow Janet O’Shea in considering the
choreographer as historiographer, so that dance makers are not merely “looking to history
for sanction, but [instead utilizing] historiography as a device … to develop their own inter-
pretations of their dance practice” and bodily histories (Srinivasan 2007, 14).
This chapter discusses how my work, blood run (Lee 2016), and Meena Murugesan’s we used
to see this (Murugesan 2013) mobilize techniques from subaltern historiography to choreograph
the histories of our bodies as contested narratives that refuse a division between the private self
and public sphere. In blood run, I investigate the rumor that my Taiwanese Hoklo Han lineage
might include Pingpu or plains indigenous bloodlines. blood run uses fictional speculation to
connect to the past through letters addressed to a lost, imagined indigenous ancestor, while
destabilizing colonial iconography to embody the contradiction of occupying both colonizer
and colonized positions. In we used to see this, Murugesan takes on the history of their dancing
body, informed by their perspective as a gender-fluid Mudaliyar Tamil Canadian. Murugesan
negotiates bharatanatyam’s multiple conflicting histories by spatially triangulating among con-
cepts of the proscenium, salon, and temple, while using improvised repetition to generate mani-
fold conflicted meanings and to embody an unruly, eruptive open-endedness.
It is important to note that neither Murugesan nor I belong to the subaltern class: highly
educated English speakers raised in North America, we also have been marginalized on the
basis of race, xenophobia, gender, and sexuality. As contemporary choreographers, we are
deeply trained in Indian classical dance while having partial access to the dominant aesthetic
and representational conventions of the Western concert stage. I am trained in kathak and
US postmodern dance, while Murugesan is primarily trained in bharatanatyam; we both
hold MFAs in choreography from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and
have worked internationally in the field of contemporary dance. Much like the subaltern
historians, who sought to bring light to subaltern experiences while deeply steeped in the
language of the Western academy, our choreographies emerge from a complicated desire
for the subaltern. They reflect, to use Gayatri Gopinath’s formulation, an “impossible” dia-
sporic longing for that which has been lost: for other pasts, other ancestors, other lineages.
These longings are impossible not only because subaltern pasts can never fully be recovered,
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Cynthia Ling Lee
but because they reflect the desires of what Gopinath deems impossible subjects, namely
queer diasporic female subjects (which I expand to include queer diasporic nonbinary sub-
jects) (2007, 15–20). As Gopinath explains, while conventional diasporic nostalgia longs for
“an imaginary homeland frozen in an idyllic moment outside history, what is remembered
through queer diasporic desire and the queer diasporic body is a past time and place riven
with contradictions and the violences of multiple uprootings, displacements, and exiles”
(4). blood run and we used to see this are shot through these impossible queer diasporic desires,
remembering the violence, erasures, and contradictions of colonization and displacement
even as they reach to touch subaltern pasts.
blood run
The genesis of blood run came about around 2014, when my father casually mentioned that
we might have Pingpu or plains indigenous heritage, an ethnic mixing that supposedly
occurred when our male ancestors migrated from China to Taiwan as settler-colonists dur-
ing the Qing Dynasty. Until that point I, who am the US-born child of Taiwanese immi-
grants, had always understood myself to be Han, the majority ethnic group in Taiwan and
China. My attempts to uncover more specific information about my family’s indigenous
bloodlines, however, were confronted with frustrating absences and unanswerable questions,
similar to the challenges of historians who seek to document subaltern lives through verifi-
able evidence. My father identified our indigenous heritage as Pingpu, a colonial Mandarin
term referring to multiple indigenous peoples including the Kavalan and the Siraya, but he
was unable to identify our ancestors’ specific nation due to long-standing cultural assimi-
lation and genocide. I discovered that any indigenous female ancestors would have been
erased from my family’s genealogical tree because, in true patriarchal fashion, it only lists
men. I also confronted the sad fact that my own assimilation to the English language made
doing historical research in Chinese nearly impossible. As a result, I found myself continu-
ally asking: how many layers of forgetting, erasure, and assimilation stand in the way of my
reclaiming this past?
Lacking concrete evidence for my indigenous bloodlines, blood run emerged from the
decision to nevertheless take the rumor of indigenous ancestry seriously, and in so doing,
confront complex issues around enduring colonial legacies and Taiwanese Han-indigenous
relations from my US diasporic positionality. blood run asked me to confront, for the first
time, a disturbing history of Qing Dynasty expansionism (1644–1912) predating the eras
of Japanese colonization (1895–1945) and Kuomintang martial law (1949–1987) with which
I was familiar. Colliding the private and public, the work brought up a series of difficult
questions: What is the difference between an immigrant and a colonizer? What does a non-
European colonizer look like? How do the colonizer and colonized live inside the same
body? When does survival require disappearance?
While creating blood run, I learned that the Pingpu occupy a complex place in Taiwanese
society: the first indigenous peoples of Taiwan to be colonized by the Han Chinese in the
1600s, many Pingpu women married Han men and assimilated to Han culture to survive.
Historically, Pingpu peoples have been invisibilized to the extent of being labeled “extinct”
by many scholars (for example, see Balcom 2005, xi–xii). Despite this, Pingpu activists have
been engaging in concerted political efforts to reclaim indigenous identity since the 1990s
as part of a larger movement of Taiwanese identity-based activism that arose with the end
of martial law (Hsieh 2006). The Pingpu claim for official recognition, granted by President
Tsai Ing-wen in August 2016 (Tsai 2016) after the premiere of blood run, sits in complicated
398
relationship to Taiwan’s larger, vibrant indigenous movement and the island’s precarious sta-
tus as a nation. These political complexities, as we will see, inform the troubled desires that
animate blood run (Lee 2016).
blood run’s choreographic methodology interlaces Qing Dynasty colonial documentation
of Taiwanese indigenous peoples with letters written to an imagined female indigenous
ancestor, much like subaltern historiographers intersect historical documents with imagina-
tive speculation (see, for example, Srinivasan 2007). My first choreographic tactic was to
work with colonial travel writing, maps, and illustrations of Taiwan and its indigenous peo-
ples, particularly as documented in Emma Jinhua Teng’s book, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography:
Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683–1895 (2004). My intention in working with
these materials was not to somehow discern the real lives of indigenous peoples through the
filter of colonial prejudice. Rather, I sought to destabilize the colonial imagery, to reveal the
violence embedded in the depictions of savagery and otherness, and to come to grips with
whatever stereotypes I had internalized as the descendent of Han colonizers.
I choreographed one movement phrase inspired by ethnographic drawings of Taiwanese
indigenous peoples from the 1751 Qing Imperial Tribute Illustrations commissioned by the
Qianlong emperor (Teng 2004, 165–166, 168, 170–171). These illustrations are comprised of
gender-binary pairs of representative male and female ‘specimens’ for each tribe. They range
in representation from passably human to monstrous based on their status as “cooked” (sheng-
fan) or “raw” (shufan) savages, colonial designations indicating degree of assimilation to Han
culture and political submission to the Qing state (122–148). The “cooked savages of Taiwan
county” shows two people with subdued facial expressions dressed in softly draped fabric,
hair neatly pulled back, the woman carrying a large root vegetable and the man hoisting a
woven container over his right shoulder: submissive, hard-working, and fully clothed (171).
By contrast, the “raw savages of Danshui” shows a woman and man with bare torsos and
wearing fur: ‘primitive’ and uncivilized. The man appears to be a monstrous incarnation
of violence, the embodiment of colonial fear of the savage: muscles ropy and bulging, his
eyes bug out fiercely, his right hand raising a spear to attack while his left hand clasps a long
curved knife (170). My dance phrase attempts to embody the different energies, bodily posi-
tions, and actions suggested by these problematic illustrations.
Eyes closed, I stand upstage as we hear a flute, a video projection of lush green ferns
appearing behind me. Breath enters my body, audibly and visibly. I shift to face the corner,
imagining heavy silk weighing down my arm as my fingertips reach toward my sternum,
skull rotating subtly on my neck. Slowly I open my eyes, stroke an invisible beard, and walk
forward with calm dignity. Unexpectedly, a gasp overtakes my body. I recover, stroking my
beard, but the gasp takes over again: breath hissing, my hands clench and spine contracts,
until my skull pulls backward, forcibly opening my chest. My hands start to cup errati-
cally, and I place my right foot delicately against the floor, looking up gently as my hips
start to move, luxuriously undulating as I rotate to face back. Suddenly, I face front, hands
circling around my belly as my tongue protrudes with a loud vocalization: “haaaaahhh”
As the phrase unfolds, I never settle into a position, unlike the fixed, contained nature
of the illustrations. Instead, I pay somatic attention to the instability made possible by
transitions as I move through the different characters, attempting to rupture rather than
re-inscribe the colonial imagery. Toward the end of the phrase, which has grown increas-
ingly intense and fragmented, we hear a barrage of derogatory insults including “land-stealer,”
“colonizer,” and “cooked savage” in Hokkein, Mandarin, and English, layered on the urgent,
alarming sound of flies swarming. Activated by violent exhalations and gasps of breath, my
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Cynthia Ling Lee
Illustration 28.1 Cynthia Ling Lee in blood run, 2017. Performed at Asian Pacific Islander Cultural
Center’s (APICC) United States of Asian America Festival. (Courtesy of Diana Chen.)
body feels possessed, out of control, shifting abruptly between a softly convulsing feminine

body and rakshasa or demon-like aggressive low stances punctuated by powerful foot slaps.
Among the insults, which denigrate both Han and indigenous people, we hear the words,
“I wish the blood cells inherited from different ancestors would not fight each other in those
politicians’ veins” (Zhang Zhi-wei quoted by Liu 2012, 341).
Zhang Zhi-wei’s words gesture toward the conflicted political context that frames
Taiwanese indigenous self-determination and Pingpu identity. Zhang’s original statement,
made in response to the 2005 “We are All Aboriginal People” celebration sponsored by
indigenous legislator Chen Shui-hui, critiques the instrumental nature of claiming
indigeneity, pointing out how Taiwanese politicians claim indigenous ancestry to gain
votes without working to improve indigenous people’s material realities (Liu 2012, 341).
Indigenous identity-based activism also tends to become entangled in the ongoing political
conflict between Taiwan and China. The popular claim, repeated by my father, that most
Taiwanese people are part indigenous feeds a pro-independence political agenda that uses
indigeneity as ‘proof ’ of Taiwan’s ethnocultural difference from mainland China; this stance
is critiqued in my dance phrase’s soundtrack: “Indigenous people are just a tool for Taiwanese
independence” (Lee 2016). Within indigenous communities, the Pingpu claim for official
recognition has been highly controversial because of Pingpu assimilation to Han culture,
because the Pingpu were historically forced by the colonizers to attack other Taiwanese
indigenous peoples, and because of anticipated competition over the limited resources
allocated to government-recognized tribes (Hsieh 2006; Tsai 2016; Simon 2010).
The colonial source material for this dance phrase further complicates these political
knots, which disturb the dance phrase like buzzing flies and which riddle me with doubt
about my right to claim indigenous ancestry to this day. Does my use of colonial imagery as
400
choreographic inspiration re-inscribe representations of indigenous people as savage? One

could argue that blood run constitutes a form of what Renato Rosaldo calls “imperialist nos-
talgia,” whereby colonizers long for ‘traditional’ versions of the cultures that they themselves
changed or destroyed (1989, 69). As such, this dance phrase demonstrates the potential dan-
gers of attempting to subvert the colonial archive as a subaltern choreographic tactic.
Interestingly, however, some viewers have interpreted this movement phrase as an indict-
ment of colonization: in a comment on The Post Natyam Collective blog posted on June 19,
2015, Murugesan interprets the angry violent movement as representing the colonizer and
the gentler movement as the colonized (in Lee 2015). For me, the dance phrase’s unstable
embodiment of violence contradicts imperialist nostalgia’s tendency to adopt an innocent
stance that conceals a history of violent domination (Rosaldo 1989, 70). Instead, the visceral,
eruptive nature of the dance combined with the derogatory insults toward indigenous and
Han people suggest a body at war with itself, a history of divide and conquer made flesh, the
painful conflict of having both colonizer and colonized inside the same body. This point is
emphasized later in the work when I approach an audience member with a Chinese callig-
raphy brush and a small bowl of ‘blood,’ asking them to write “colonizer” on my chest and
“cooked savage” on my back.1
These two sections—the movement phrase and bodily inscription—reflect how subaltern
historiography “documents the contradictions inherent in the confrontations between dis-
tinctive worldviews” and positionalities (Foster 2009, 9). They serve not as a way to speak
‘authentically’ for subaltern people, for, as Srinivasan, drawing on Spivak, points out, “bring-
ing [the subaltern] into representation evacuates her subaltern status” (Srinivasan 2007, 10).
Instead, these sections are choreographic translations of subaltern writing strategies that
reveal the violent, fragmented ramifications of colonization on subjects of mixed colonizer-
colonized heritage.
In addition to destabilizing colonial iconography, blood run also draws on subaltern his-
toriography’s use of imaginative speculation through a series of letters addressed to my lost
indigenous female ancestor. Self-reflexive, sometimes romanticized, and filled with doubt,
longing, and questions, these letters reimagine the moment of colonial contact in multiple
ways. They allow for what Carolyn Dinshaw calls a “touching across time” (Dinshaw et al.
2007, 178), creating a transhistorical dialogue that allows me to put the imagined past in
dialogue with a politicized present.
One letter speaks to the tight, sometimes oppressive closeness of the Han Confucian
heteropatriarchal family, imagining an indigenous alternative in which family households
are women-centered, where love and relationships are looser and more fluid. As the section
starts, I invite the audience onstage to gather the stones scattered on the floor and to place
them on and around my body. Soaked in blood, I lie down, feeling the audience’s quiet pres-
ence as they approach me almost reverentially, the cool weight of rock laid carefully on soft
flesh. As they place the first stone, we hear a recording of my letter in my voice:
Family is a fist, squeezing tight as water dribbles out, instead of cupping the water
gently. Family is a set of lungs shared between conjoined twins: we cannot breathe
without each other. Family is tightly woven silk, the strength of warp and weft: if you
cut one thread, the whole thing unravels. But what was family to you? (Lee 2016)
The letter continues, imagining alternative indigenous structures of kinship and love, envi-
sioning “young women and men dancing at harvest, following the easy ebb and flow of
one’s desire,” how “divorce and remarriage would be easy and without stigma” (Lee 2016).
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Cynthia Ling Lee
In contrast with my other more violent imaginings of colonial contact in blood run, this letter
projects sexual agency onto my female indigenous ancestor while positioning her matrilineal
household as holding power over potential male suitors:
Did my Han ancestor slip into one of these dances? Did you feel him beside you and
take his hand in yours, smiling? … Did he move to your family home, working hard
as all immigrants do, to make sure his clothes wouldn’t be hung outside the front
door, to win your family’s approval? (Lee 2016)
After the audience finishes placing the stones and recedes to their seats, my breathing deep-
ens, causing the rocks to undulate visibly on my body, trembling and knocking audibly
against each other as tension gathers in my belly and chest, the stones’ movement amplified
by a live video feed projection. The letter ends with queer poignancy, asking my ancestor,
“Did you know … that you could take for granted, as I never have, the right to choose whom
to love?” (Lee 2016). We are left with the image of a daughter whose body trembles beneath
rocks, weighed down by the extraordinary love, responsibility, and exquisite burden of Han
family (Illustration 28.2).
This letter connects my own contemporary struggles as a queer feminist with my Confucian
heteropatriarchal family to the colonial pressures of Confucianism on Pingpu matrilineal cul-
ture. As such, it disrupts notions of straight time that Jack Halberstam sees as embedded in the
“institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction” (2005, 1). The letter is shot through
by the force of desire: desire for a world that centers women and our agency, for a family whose
Illustration 28.2 Audience members Miyuki Baker and Pallavi Sharma laying rocks on Cynthia
Ling Lee in blood run. Performed at APICC’s United States of Asian America Festival. (Courtesy of
Diana Chen.)
402
connections are animated by love without the tightness of Confucian obligation, for queerness
as decolonial rather than assimilatory practice. Queer people of color in the US are often put
into a double bind whereby remaining a full part of one’s family and home culture seems to
require complying with heteropatriarchy, while white gay male culture provides the dominant
model for LGBT life and identity. Reframing Han culture as a colonizing force suggests, instead,
that resisting Confucian heternormativity and patriarchy could be a decolonial act, that my
queerness might not require betraying my culture of origin to assimilate to US white gay cul-
ture. In this letter, I project these queer diasporic desires onto my imagined indigenous female
ancestor, an impossible figure whose conjuring disrupts Han “fictions of purity” and heteropa-
triarchal lineage, making it possible to imagine alternative, albeit romanticized, possibilities for
the present (Gopinath 2007, 4).
Another letter to my lost indigenous ancestor, performed toward the end of blood
run, takes on notions of language, naming, and assimilation. The letter makes connec-
tions between my parents’ migration to the US in the 1970s and my Han ancestors’ earlier
migration to Taiwan in the 1700s: “how we have chosen to leave, now and then” (Lee
2016). Sitting at the live video feed inside stones forming a right angle, I repetitively write
Chinese characters for common Pingpu surnames, which appear projected onto the back
wall (Illustration 28.3). As I write, a voice-over reflects on the pressures to assimilate to
a dominant culture, which forced plains indigenous people to take on Chinese surnames
and which pressured my own family to adopt English names to accommodate US norms.
The grid-like worksheet is one used for schoolchildren’s handwriting exercises, and, as I
cross out any characters that look imperfect or childish, I reveal my own incompetence in
written Chinese, the result of linguistic assimilation to English. At the same time, the act
of writing suggests how the Chinese language and regimented discipline of schooling were
thrust upon the plains indigenous peoples as ‘civilizing’ forces. The letter closes with a
Illustration 28.3 Cynthia Ling Lee writing Pingpu surnames in blood run. Performed at APICC’s
United States of Asian America Festival. (Courtesy of Diana Chen.)
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Cynthia Ling Lee
lament that the only traces of my indigenous ancestor and her people are mediated through
colonial translation: “I cannot offer incense to you. I can only speak, haltingly, these names
in colonial translation: Yue (月), Hong (紅), Li (力). Moon. Red. Power” (Lee 2016). These
two letters’ transhistorical ruminations on assimilation, patriarchy, and family do not nec-
essarily reveal any ‘truths’ about my possible ancestor’s lived reality, but they illustrate how
touching subaltern pasts can serve to “illuminate a life possibility for the present” for queer
diasporic post/colonial subjects (Chakrabarty 2000, 109)—a theoretical theme that contin-
ues with Murugesan’s we used to see this.
we used to see this

Whereas blood run considers the ancestral history of my body, we used to see this interro-
gates the histories of Murugesan’s dancing body, trained in bharatanatyam for eighteen years
under Vasantha Krishnan in Canada. we used to see this reflects a spatialized understanding of
bharatanatyam’s multiple histories as embedded in the movement between temple, salon, and
proscenium contexts. The work decenters a single historical narrative by offering multiple
viewpoints, while queering colonial archival material and performing unruliness through
improvised repetition.
we used to see this invokes three major contexts in which bharatanatyam and the perfor-
mance practices that preceded it were performed: the Hindu temple, the courtesan salon,
and the proscenium stage. Many scholars have written about sadir as a ritual dance per-
formed in temples by devadasis, hereditary women performers embedded in systems of eco-
nomic and sexual patronage. Critical scholars such as Avanthi Meduri (1996) and Uttara
Coorlawala (2004) have argued that this practice was taken from devadasis and transformed
into bharatanatyam by largely upper-caste Brahmin women to suit an anti-colonial Indian
nationalism, its repertoire codified, adapted for, and relocated to a western proscenium stage
(see also Allen 1997). A key figure in the transformation of sadir into bharatanatyam was
Rukmini Devi, who founded the Kalakshetra Institute (Meduri 2005; Coorlawala 2004) and
in whose stylistic lineage Murugesan is trained. However, as Davesh Soneji (2012) argues,
this movement from temple to proscenium glosses over the secular, culturally eclectic con-
text of the salon, where South Indian courtesans performed for British colonial and Indian
male elites in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
we used to see this takes place in a western black-box theater in consonance with modern-
day bharatanatyam’s status as a concert form, but the piece undoes the single focus of a
proscenium frame through a spatial setup with multiple fronts and focal points. For its
premiere at UCLA, we used to see this included a pre-show installation with temple, salon,
and proscenium areas (Murugesan 2013). The temple area contains a small statue of Shiva
Nataraj along with ritual implements such as a bell, red kumkum powder, and incense used
by performer Shyamala Moorty in her role as temple ‘priest.’ The salon area is in the corner,
where a courtesan dance scene from the 1956 Telugu film, Muddu Bidda, is projected on a
metallic scrim from an old-fashioned film projector. The song accompanying the courtesan
scene, “Amtalone Tellavare,” is a javali, a playful, unabashedly erotic genre that Soneji
describes as indexing salon culture, performed by the actress Krishnajyoti, who was from a
hereditary kalavantula family (2012, 109). (Kalavantula is a term used for professional women
performers or courtesans in Andhra Pradesh; the term is analogous to devadasi in other parts
of South India.) In the proscenium area, Murugesan moves quietly through different sitting
and kneeling positions, hands cupped in offering, casting shadows on the scrim. There are
three audience areas, each with a different viewing angle. By offering multiple viewpoints,
404
we used to see this negotiates different partial entries into bharatanatyam’s tangled, complex
histories instead of forwarding a monolithic, closed version of that history.
Interestingly, the salon area is the only one without a live performer, a physical absence of
the courtesan that suggests the difficulty of accessing subaltern knowledge. While courtesan
performance did enter the archive during a brief period as early film and radio were devel-
oping in India, as illustrated by Krishnajyoti’s filmic presence in Muddu Bidda, the disen-
franchisement of devadasi and kalavantula communities and the significant ruptures to their
performance traditions make recovering their subaltern knowledge and lives a fraught task.
As illustrated in the following section, much of the limited documentation of salon perfor-
mance is through the colonial archive such as travel accounts by British observers, rather than
through the voices of devadasis and kalavantulu themselves.
In later versions of we used to see this, such as its 2016 performance at Tangente in Montreal,
the work opens with Murugesan sitting in the center of the salon audience, a brown-skinned,
small-framed figure with a red turban on their head (Murugesan 2016). Lit by a narrow band
of light, eight audience members sit on chairs with their heads angled toward Murugesan,
occasionally shifting for a better view. Murugesan looks downward, hands drooping, knees
slightly turned in. Slowly they raise their head and lean forward, elbows on their knees in
a wide stance, as a voiceover begins: “The hall, nearly two hundred yards long, was filled
with princes, the Madras staff, and hundreds of ladies” (Wheeler, quoted in Soneji 2012,
80). As the voiceover continues, Murugesan moves into different positions of spectatorship,
leaning back, cocking their head, folding their arms across their chest, gesturing outward as
if toward an invisible dancer-performer. The voiceover, written by special correspondent
George Wheeler, describes a courtesan salon dance performance witnessed by Prince Albert
Edward in 1875. Written through the lens of colonial prejudice, the text emphasizes the
female dancers’ bejeweled visual appearance and describes the dance as “wearyingly change-
less” and a “stupid spectacle” (Wheeler, quoted in Soneji 2012, 80). In accordance with the
text, Murugesan’s physicality sometimes indicates boredom or impatience: leaning an elbow
over the chair back or propping up their body with a fist on a thigh. The performer’s turban
and their wide bodily stances lend a masculine quality to their embodiment of viewership,
suggesting that they are a raja or a princely onlooker in the era of the colonial nautch or salon
dance. Yet their movement is made strange by its slowness, by a floating suspension that shifts
unexpectedly into heaviness and slow-motion falls, until they remove the turban and trans-
form into a ‘dancer’ (Murugesan 2016).
As in blood run, Murugesan mobilizes the colonial archive to connect to the past, using
a colonial viewer’s account of a nineteenth century South Indian salon performance.
Murugesan refracts the Orientalist colonial male gaze of the text by performing as a South
Asian masculine spectator. Murugesan does not attempt to embody the subaltern dancer-
courtesan, whose absence is highlighted by Murugesan’s performance of spectatorship. We
are never granted the scopophilic pleasure of seeing the decorated Indian female dancing
bodies described in Wheeler’s text, nor are we treated to technical virtuosity, sensual allure,
or easy entertainment. Instead, we see a masculine Indian viewer who seems alternately
bored and pleased, whose heaviness suggests the pressure of British colonization on local
Indian nobility and whose movement is made strange by a floating slowness—the strangeness
of seeing your culture’s art forms through colonial eyes. As such, Murugesan’s movement
suggests the gradual internalization of British colonial values by the Indian elite, the overlay
of a colonial optic onto a subaltern courtesan aesthetic.
There is a marked queering to Murugesan’s performance of spectatorship in the salon
space, a queer erotics in the pleasure they take in gazing upon imagined women dancers and
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Cynthia Ling Lee
a gender fluidity in their shift between embodying masculine spectator and feminine dancer.
Indian classical abhinaya or emotive storytelling allows performers to play male and female
characters regardless of their personal gender identity or physical appearance. Murugesan’s
performance of gender, however, exceeds the classical convention of playing different char-
acters in a familiar narrative and is further nuanced by their androgynous appearance and
nonbinary identity. In Murugesan’s hands, the “sexually charged space” of the secular South
Indian salon (Soneji 2012, 95) becomes charged with queer diasporic desire. This queering of
the salon is further evidenced in the UCLA version of the show, where queer people of color
were asked to sit in the salon space. Partway through the piece, Murugesan interacts with
the salon audience through a sensual, flirtatious exchange, whereby Murugesan gives them
suggestive looks, turns away, and offers them flowers (Murugesan 2013). As in blood run, these
queer diasporic longings do not necessarily reveal historical truths about the subaltern past,
for heterosexual erotic exchanges almost certainly dominated South Indian salon spaces. Yet
by offering different erotic possibilities than those available under a Hindu heteropatriarchal
nationalist imaginary, the salon suggests erotic alternatives for a queer postcolonial subject
in the present.
Rather than emphasizing a queer erotics, Murugesan’s dancing in the temple and prosce-
nium spaces embodies an unruly questioning of power, an improvised fragmentation that
generates manifold meanings while disrupting the polished, finished wholeness of classical
bharatanatyam. This choreographic approach mirrors the subaltern writing techniques of
fragmentation, contradiction, and multivocality discussed at the beginning of this chapter.
Toward the beginning of the UCLA version of we used to see this, we see a negotiation and
movement between temple and proscenium spaces (Murugesan 2013). Shyamala Moorty sits
cross-legged in an elegant red and gold sari, ritual offerings and a statue of Shiva Nataraj in
front of her: she appears to embody tradition, womanliness, and ritual authority. Murugesan
wears a stark costume consisting of a white sari blouse, dark gray pants, and a plain black
dupatta or scarf. Holding a flower and coins in their cupped hands, Murugesan leans forward
in an almost bow before looking at Moorty directly, almost confrontationally. Falling to
their knees, they throw the offerings at Moorty’s feet with a rough clatter. Maintaining eye
contact, Murugesan lifts their chin in a possibly rude gesture, falls and sits up again, now a
petulant child with legs thrust in front, now lounging like a pinup model, now crawling
or scratching their forehead—movements considered highly inappropriate for Hindu ritual
and Indian classical dance contexts. Murugesan’s falling apart rag doll movement contrasts
with Moorty’s contained, patient body. Eventually, Moorty beckons deliberately toward
Murugesan with a clear bharatanatyam mudra or hand gesture; Murugesan falls forehead
first onto Moorty’s thumb, marking their forehead with red kumkum (Illustration 28.4).
Murugesan grabs the Nataraj statue and walks backward, moving the deity from the temple
space onto the proscenium stage (Murugesan 2013).
This exchange between Moorty and Murugesan simultaneously suggests the ritual context
of a priest and devotee and the artistic context of a classical dance guru and disciple. These two
contexts have been imaginatively conflated in current-day bharatanatyam, whereby classical
dancers unhesitatingly trace their origins to ancient Hindu temple dancers from Vedic times
(Coorlawala 2004) while conveniently ignoring the more recent nineteenth–twentieth cen-
tury contexts of secular courtesan salons and the systems of sexual and economic patronage
in which devadasis lived and worked. Typically, the relationship between priest and devotee,
as well as guru and disciple, is one of reverence, submission, and devotion. This exchange,
however, has the air of a power dynamic gone wrong: Murugesan is neither an obedient
disciple, nor a reverent devotee. Murugesan’s disobedience suggests an unwillingness to be
406
Illustration 28.4 Shyamala Moorty putting kumkum on Meena Murugesan’s forehead in the temple
space in we used to see this. (Courtesy of Stephen Gorme.)
disciplined by dominant versions of the dance and by Brahminical Hindu nationalism, a

refusal to unquestioningly accept easy narratives and hegemonic histories.
Having moved into the proscenium space, Murugesan kneels and puts the Nataraj statue
on the ground, a gesture that recalls the practice of bharatanatyam dancers placing large
statues of Nataraj onstage to ‘sacralize’ the proscenium. Shiva Nataraj, as Matthew Harp
Allen points out, was a central icon of Indian nationalism and revival-era concert stage
bharatanatyam, displacing the love gods popular to sadir repertoire much like Brahmin danc-
ers displaced devadasis (1997). Murugesan abruptly (perhaps disrespectfully?) pushes the brass
statue facedown into the floor and then traces the ring of fire that surrounds Shiva with
their pinky in a looping motion, which expands and transforms into a gesture of writing.
Murugesan writes in the air, then on a piece of paper symbolized by the flat surface of a pataka
mudra, and then on their own body, which haltingly and momentarily takes on the pose of
the Nataraj. Sometimes Murugesan spirals in unpredictable curvilinear squiggles, the act of
writing overtaking their body from the inside; sometimes their upper body is contained and
crisp footwork emphasizes the lines drawn in the air; sometimes their pinky-pen spirals out
of control, taking their body off balance. Their writing is intercut with rapid back-and-forth
gestures of erasing, so that writing becomes rewriting, becomes the Nataraj displaced and
recontextualized, becomes a rewriting of history, a rewriting of the dance and the body of
the dancer.
This trope of rewriting—of repetition that produces difference—is a major choreographic
device of we used to see this. For example, repeating the act of offering generates multiple
meanings associated with bharatanatyam’s different spaces: Moorty bathes the Nataraj with
yogurt as a ritual anointing, while later, Murugesan lays the Nataraj on his side, pours coins
on him, and then pours coins on their own body in a commodified offering, a reference to
the courtesan salon’s economic transactions (Illustration 28.5). Repetition is also important
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Cynthia Ling Lee
Illustration 28.5 Meena Murugesan pours coins on their head in a commodified offering. (Courtesy
of Stephen Gorme.)
on the level of movement vocabulary. Murugesan’s dance consists of stripped-down, non-

decorative fragments of bharatanatyam that use the adavus or basic steps without referencing
complete rhythmic compositions or classical repertoire from the solo margam, the traditional
sequence of dance items performed by a solo bharatanatyam dancer. Refusing the complete-
ness and predetermined trajectory of the margam, Murugesan revels in the unfinished possi-
bilities of movement fragments, much like writers of subaltern pasts embrace fragmentation
and incompleteness. Defamiliarizing these fragments through repetition, Murugesan finds
new improvisational possibilities through unexpected changes in facing, the collapse of
bones into the ground, acceleration, mechanization, disintegration, an unruly body always
in danger of going out of control. Murugesan’s unmistakably bharatanatyam-trained body
refuses to perform a sense of classical composure or completeness, opting instead to perform
an unfinished body in process, whose labor is to remember erasures, to embody conflict and
to ask unruly questions.
Conclusion
Both blood run and we used to see this grapple with the contested histories of the performers’
bodies, whose ancestry and dance lineages have been ruptured by colonization, displace-
ment, and cultural imperialism. Each work is shot through with a complicated desire for
the subaltern, an impossible queer diasporic longing for a (d)ancestor whom we will never
fully know, for that which has been lost or obscured by hegemonic histories. Using choreo-
graphic tactics reminiscent of subaltern techniques for writing the past, the works destabilize
408
and queer the colonial archive; engage in imaginative speculation; decenter a single narra-
tive through multiple viewpoints; and use improvised repetition to perform an unfinished
unruliness. Their poetic possibilities lie not in giving voice to the subaltern, but in the failure
of their longing to reach the subaltern, in their repeated fracturing, questioning, and opening
of gaps in dominant narratives to boldly, tentatively, and contradictorily dream up alternative
possibilities for the present.
Note
1 When I performed blood run at the Kuandu Arts Festival in Taiwan in 2017, I asked the audience
to write on me in Chinese: 殖民者 (colonizer) and 熟蕃 (cooked savage). That version of blood run
was bilingual, bringing additional semiotic complexity by negotiating Mandarin and English in
layered, fragmented, and partial ways.
References
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Balcom, John. 2005. “Translator’s Introduction.” In Indigenous Writers of Taiwan: An Anthology of Stories, Essays,
and Poems, edited and translated by John Balcom, x–xxiv. New York: Columbia University Press.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Chatterjea, Ananya. 2004. “Contestations: Constructing a Historical Narrative for Odissi.” In Rethinking
Dance History: A Reader, edited by Alexandra Carter, 43–156. London: Routledge.
Coorlawala, Uttara. 2004. “The Sanskritized Body.” Dance Research Journal 36 (2): 50–63.
Dinshaw, Carolyn, Lee Edelman, Roderick A. Ferguson, Carla Freccero, Elizabeth Freeman, J. Halberstam,
Annamarie Jagose, Christopher S. Nealon, and Tan Hoang Ngyugen. 2007. “Theorizing Queer
Temporalities: A Roundtable.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13 (2–3): 177–195.
Foster, Susan Leigh. 2009. “Worlding Dance—An Introduction.” Worlding Dance, edited by Susan Leigh
Foster, 1–13. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gopinath, Gayatri. 2007. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Calcutta: Seagull
Books.
Halberstam, J. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York
University Press.
Hsieh, Jolan. 2006. Collective Rights of Indigenous Peoples: Identity-Based Movement of Plain Indigenous in Taiwan.
New York: Routledge.
Lee, Cynthia Ling. 2015. “Open Round 2: Embodying Ethnography.” The Post Natyam
Collective (blog), May 27. Accessed 3 May 2019. https://postnatyam.blogspot.com/2015/05/
embodying-ethnography html.
———. 2016. blood run. Highways Performance Space, Santa Monica, June 17–18.
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Cultural Studies in Health and Illness 31 (4): 329–346.
Meduri, Avanthi. 1996. “Nation, Woman, Representation: The Sutured History of the Devadasi and Her
Dance.” PhD diss., New York University, New York.
———. ed. 2005. Rukmini Devi Arundale, 1904–1986: A Visionary Architect of Indian Culture and the
Performing Arts. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
Murugesan, Meena. 2013. we used to see this. Meenakshi Productions, UCLA Glorya Kaufman Amber
Theater, Los Angeles, November 13.
———. 2016. we used to see this. Meenakshi Productions, Tangente, Studio Hydro-Quebec du Monument
National, Montreal, November 6–9.
O’Shea, Janet. 2007. At Home in the World: Bharata Natyam on the Global Stage. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press.
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Ethnologist 37 (4): 726–740.
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Soneji, Davesh. 2012. Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory, and Modernity in South India. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press.
Srinivasan, Priya. 2007.“The Bodies Beneath the Smoke or What’s Behind the Cigarette Poster: Unearthing
Kinesthetic Connections in American Dance History.” Discourses in Dance 4 (1): 7–47.
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PART VII
Dance, space and place

29
THE STRANGENESS
OF DANCING
From The Changing Room and Singularity
Carol Brown
Introduction
In an era where, as Donna Haraway (1991, 152) explains “our machines are disturbingly
lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert”, the contemporary choreographic imperative to
pattern new movement experiences for audience, performer, and artifact becomes increas-
ingly cogent. Concerns about the passivity of humans in the context of increasingly ‘lively’
machines and the diminishing of vitality and agency through the subjection of the human by
the nonhuman, be that through industrial machinery, robotics, or AI (artificial intelligence),
has been a choreographic theme since the ‘machine dances’ of twentieth-century modernism.
Russian dancer/choreographer Bronislava Nijinska’s Machine Dances (1922–23), Austrian/
Australian expressionist choreographer Gertrud Bodenwieser’s iconic Demon Machine (1926,
recreated by the author in 2017), Italian futurist Nikolai Fonegger’s Dance of the Machines
(1924), and Bauhaus artist, Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet (1922) are just some examples of a
pre–World War II machine aesthetic that either paid homage to the rise of industrial produc-
tion processes or offered a critique of the takeover of humanity by the machine (Salter 2010).
In the twenty-first century, the liveliness of human-machine relations is expressed differently
with the affordance of the digital. The potential to incorporate technologies through interac-
tive staging enables coordinates to be encoded and embodied, generating immersive contexts
for experiencing dance. Moving from the mechanical to the computational, flesh becomes
data, and the risks of subjection and passivity of the actual body as host or puppet for the
virtual becomes, depending which way you look at it, either more acute or, as we move from
the representation of the machine to the performative effects of technology, more entangled.
What the digital turn means for the traditional framework of the stage and its apparatus
of representation through the creative labor of dancers is an ongoing question. Something
I have been curious about and explored through projects like Digital Cultures (Nottingham,
United Kingdom), and the Choreographic Coding Lab (Auckland, New Zealand), as well as
through interdisciplinary collaboration with media artists, architects, and programmers since
the early 2000s, is how the affordances of dancing in the mediascape radically alters our idea
of what a stage can be and the kinds of choreographic encounters that are enabled through
dancing that takes place between human and nonhuman agencies.
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Carol Brown
My experience of entanglements between the physical, tangible experience of dancing

and the virtual and immaterial potentials of creative technologies challenges claims by critics
such as Italian philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi (2009) that the datafication of everything is
destroying our capacity for embodied and kinesthetic empathy. Subjected to the algorithmic
power of digital cultures, tethered to screens, our pleasure in touching and moving together
(understood in dance terms as kinesthetic empathy) is threatened by a new form of alien-
ation. In moving from the period of industrial labor, criticized by early dance modernists
in machine dances, to digital labor that is always “on” Berardi argues that we are becoming
increasingly paralyzed by information overload. The loss of sensory intelligence in a context
of datafication is a fear for many. In critical thinking on the digital turn, there is a growing
sense that a qualitative shift is taking place, a transition to a new level of either symbiosis or
subjection. On the one hand, screen-based interfaces, stereo vision, and virtual avatars seem
to become more intimate in their interplay; on the other hand, through big data, the reach
of the digital is more expansive, more predictive and pervasive, as new networks reach out
to enmesh the entire planet in webs of connection through social media and surveillance.
The deepening mutual imbrication of the human and the nonhuman through the inor-
ganic machinery of the digital is, as Berardi (2009) cautions us, both cause for concern as
well as an invitation to change our understanding of what it means to be human in the
digital age. A reconceptualization of humanism emerges when we consider how aesthetics
with its roots in sensibility and sensitivity, might reconvene our relations with the virtual
through making strange our encounters with technology. Rather than losing the pleasure in
dancing together because so much time is devoted to virtual exchanges and screentime, how
might contemporary choreography reconvene relations of meaning and substance in the
technosphere by bringing audiences into digitally designed spaces that engage performance
strategies through the medium specificity of dance in dialogue with human-computer
interfaces? In continuing the drive to liberate the senses from regimes of control, to awaken
our expressive potential to the vitality of the present, and to defamiliarize ubiquitous tech-
nologies, I ask how do we get computers to do the “right thing”? And, what can dance and
choreography bring to the design of human-computer intra-actions to generate collective
pleasure and a feeling for the other?
We are almost all cyborgs now

A cyborg can be described as a cybernetic organism, a hybrid assemblage of machine and
organism, a creature of code, flesh, and fiction (Haraway 1991, 150). In playing on Donna
Haraway’s well-known statement, “we are all cyborgs now,” I want to suggest that danc-
ing the virtual is always a proposition for opening the limits of attention to the immaterial,
and that the movement of this dance hovers in affective resonance between modes, states,
and agencies. Dance in the twenty-first century operates through assemblages of corporeal-
ity, human and nonhuman agencies, environments, and designs, augmenting subjectivity
through thinking that has rapidly assimilated digital technologies. In the studio, I effortlessly
move between mapping out a cell of dance movements and getting instant feedback on the
emergent choreography through digital capture, sharing this through the internet with other
collaborators, I further recalibrate movement patterns, editing my movements through loops
of feedback and feed forward, moving effortlessly between physical thinking, movement
analysis and documentation.
Since the 1990s, when the first data gloves were created, enabling users to corporeally
receive audiovisual information and have simulated experiences, there has been a drive
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The strangeness of dancing
to recreate the experience of embodiment through immersive environments. Dancers’

responses to the digital turn are multiple and diverse. Well-known choreographers, includ-
ing William Forsythe, Siobhan Davies, Wayne McGregor, Merce Cunningham, Trisha
Brown, Gideon Obarznek, and Bill T. Jones, have initiated projects that experiment with
the creative potentials of various technologies for stage performance. Other projects, such
as Motion Bank and Synchronous Objects (initiated by Forsythe Dance Company), propose
new ways of archiving and analyzing dance. Digital dance practices also have been supported
by the initiatives mentioned earlier, Digital Cultures Lab in the UK ( Johannes Birringer),
and Choreographic Coding Labs (an outcome of Motion Bank, a four-year research project
led by the Forsythe Company) that seek to provide spaces and resources for experimentation
and open-ended development of digital tools and creative coding for dance interactivity.
Advances in creative technologies increasingly interpenetrate dance practices, undergirding
their potential for an altered corporeality that makes strange through an augmented sense of
presence. But how might the medium specificity of dance as performance, taking place in
360 dimensions of space and through a multiplicity of temporalities, propose specific choreo-
graphic operations to digital cultures?
If we are fusions of human and technology, a challenge for contemporary choreogra-
phers is how to navigate kinesthetic experience choreographically through what Karen Barad
(2007) terms the “intra-actions” of multiple agencies, rather than solely through interactions
between individuals. Barad, a physicist and feminist science philosopher, through her theory
of agential realism, dissolves binaries between nature and culture, proposing that there is
no preexisting independence of entities or ingredients, rather, the notion of “intra-action”
queers the familiar sense of cause and effect by assuming that things are always already
entangled in relations of emergence. “Intra-actions” involve the “mutual constitution of
objects and agencies” (Barad 2007, 197), their entanglement. The concept of intra-action has
relevance for dramaturgies of choreography that engage virtual dimensions precisely because
the event of the mutual animation of dancer and virtual object is core to the emergence of
the work.
In this chapter I draw upon my experience of choreographing “intra-actions” between
media through collaborations across dance, architecture, and creative technologies. I pro-
pose that Barad’s concept of “intra-action” can be experienced in choreographic systems
that enable multisensory layering of performance elements within a redefined interactive
stage, a dance-architecture. As an approach toward the hybridizing of technologies through
embodied interfaces and intra-active choreographic design, I argue the necessity of experi-
mentation and play in this expanded field of dance research, and the capacity for a reality
remix through the strangeness of dancing with data. Art, as Alva Noë asserts, is a “strange
tool.” The practices and technologies we adopt as artists organize us; they are also ways to
understand how we are organized. Ultimately, they may be tools to “reorganize ourselves”
(2015, xiii).
Informational figuring
In what follows, I discuss two projects, The Changing Room (Brown et al. 2004) and Singularity:
drawing spaces + breathing spaces (Brown et al. 2017). As dance-architectures, these hybrid
choreographies enfold architectural and dance knowledge through embodied, design-based,
and technological processes (Brown and Ramsgard-Thomsen 2008). They emerged through
sustained collaboration with architectural designers who work with virtual environments
and computer programmers: Mette Ramgsard-Thomsen from London and Copenhagen
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Carol Brown
(The Changing Room) and Uwe Rieger from Berlin and Auckland (Singularity). As case studies
of approaches to dance in the mediascape, they propose different modes of intra-action as
well as possibilities for performer-audience relations. Whereas the first project, The Changing
Room, relied upon screen-based and single camera capture as well as a bespoke code using
C++, the second, Singularity, explored the potential for data to become palpably present in
the performance through the use of Optitrak machine vision cameras, sensors, and the game
engine software Unity.
The Changing Room
The Changing Room sought to develop an interactive stage through a creative process that
addressed haptic, somatic, and proprioceptive senses in dialogue with the technological
dimensions of a virtual plane through which dancers—Delphine Gaborit, Catherine Bennett,
and me—could interact. In my choreographic journal notes I described:
Remote touch; not travelling through space but travelling within spaces. Crystalline,
prismatic spaces of impossible geometries; dancing with avatars which will never
stand up; extending kinespheres into dynaspheres in dialogue with virtual others.
Others operating within a matrix of becoming different to my own, generating new
kinds of informational figures. (Brown 2005)
Emerging through a technological habitat these ‘electronic phantoms’ explored in the cho-
reographic process invited me to rethink how we are here (Brown 2006). The performance
was staged within a transforming interior, a space in flux, through which a mobile audience
was guided. Our changing room was a nine-meter-square performance area divided by long,
white voile curtains on racks, which could be pulled closed or opened. The audience was
guided through the performance to encounter each stage of the work from a different point
of view, a different side of the room. They looked into the room with its furnishings and its
embedded screens and they experienced not just that which is going on in front of them but
also behind and around them as they negotiated their encounter of the work as a physical
journey.
Part dance partner and part extended architecture, the three women performers expe-
rienced their changing room through a series of transformations: a mirror became a
screen for their mutations; a curtain a technological frontier; and their table a platform
for the puppetry of the virtual. In one scene, Gaborit was seen, behind a semitransparent
shark tooth curtain, manipulating a homunculus, a miniature, virtual version of herself.
In another, Bennett lay behind an opaque table, lying on its side, responding to the pro-
jected virtual avatar (a mix of her movement and the geometrically potentiated figure of
a computer generated object). This digital puppetry involved the extraction of movement
coordinates from the performer’s body (read off an x-y axis) through a single camera’s
capture. Captured coordinates became the building blocks for reanimating the virtual
puppet, a digital sphery ‘thing’ that was a merge of data drawn from the dancer and a pro-
grammed virtual object. The mass, musculature, and weight of the dancer was preserved
in her live presence, while her virtual puppet became a weightless extension of her, a
mediated, rendered figure that could be moved, manipulated, and remotely touched—a
homunculus. As informational performance figures, these assemblages did not hold up a
mirror to nature, but intersected the stage with strange alterations of scale and extensions
of agency (Illustration 29.1).
416
Illustration 29.1 Catherine Bennett in The Changing Room. Greenwich Dance Agency, Dance Umbrella
2004. (Photograph by Mattias Ek.)
In replaying traces of otherness embedded in their own memories, dancers in The Changing

Room explored the unfamiliar and the strange. Moving at the threshold between different
dimensions and scales of space (the dimensions of the physical stage and the computer space),
their gestures were tracked in the virtual environment. The Changing Room relied on a single
camera tracking system that saw the dancer in a frontal plane and mapped her silhouette onto
the virtual plane of a virtual object. The output for the remixed moving graphic image (part
dancer-silhouette and part virtual object) was embedded within the furniture of the room—
on curtains and tables—and also on the dancers’ costumes. Through these projections the
virtual dance partner was rendered mirroring, extending, and distorting the behaviors of the
actual dancers. The everyday transformations of appearance which we experience in chang-
ing our clothes became a metaphor for the mutating forms inherent in the choreography.
Through the mutable qualities of the room, the status of the everyday was extended, altered,
and augmented. Familiar cultural objects become transformative moments, enabling the
transgression of presence into the extended environment of the digital. In this way, the cho-
reography enabled a series of contingent and oscillating relationships between the performers
and the virtual object to emerge (Illustration 29.2).
The detachment of gesture through the tracking system in The Changing Room invoked
an extended presence that was communicated to the audience through kinesthetic percep-
tions, costumes, sound, and vision. For example, the fabric of white stretch dresses with
additional sleeves and scoops of draped fabric, designed by Shanti Freed, could be extruded
to create elastic, hypermobile shapings. From the camera’s point of view, this augmentation
of the dancer’s volume in space triggered a set of affects in the virtual object as changing
coordinates enlarged its scale, deepening its color, textures, and folding. This extended pres-
ence shifted the center of gravity beyond the primacy of the performer as the focus within
the staged event, redistributing it among surface projections, malleable furniture, and virtual
objects. Similarly for the dancers, their attention shifted and alternated between live and
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Carol Brown
Illustration 29.2 Carol Brown in The Changing Room. (Greenwich Dance Agency, Dance Umbrella
2004. Courtesy of Mattias Ek.)
virtual presence as they responded to and projected the sensations within the room and com-
municated these to the audience creating a triangulated circuit and feedback loop of intra-
actions. This effect was further amplified by mobilizing the audience. Performing the role of
host and interlocutor, I invited the audience to evolve with the performance, changing their
point of view by moving around the stage to experience the work from three different fac-
ings. Shifts in the audience’s spatial relationship to the performance opened up its potential
readings, allowing meanings to be uncovered in the interconnections between the informa-
tional figures, spaces, and corporealities.
In The Changing Room, a shape-shifting sphery thing, our virtual other, is kinetically
modeled through the dancers’ movements and projected into the space of performance in
real time. In making this work, I collaborated with Ramsgard-Thomsen, an architect of
digital environments, to create an intuitive interface through a contour tracking system
using machine vision technology. This method allowed the bodily outlines of the dancers to
be mapped into a virtual object; in this way we could explore and inhabit different geom-
etries and morphologies, merging a sense of actual presence with virtual presence. From an
audience perspective, the choreographic dramaturgy relied upon ideas of domestic space, in
particular the concept of a changing room into which a group of women might retreat to
explore alternative clothes and ensembles of appearance.
The Changing Room’s interactive system provided affordances for a series of relays, trigger-
ing actions that were physically and virtually present. My experience of this deeply collabor-
ative process was that it challenged the culture of the dance studio to incorporate not just the
hardware and software of new technologies but also the expertise of computer programmers,
418
media designers, and architects of virtual environments to design an interactive space of

multiple dimensions that could be shared with the audience. However, although the audi-
ence was in proximity to the work, witnessing it from multiple sides, they were never able
to inhabit the performance system as this was premised upon the dancers (dressed in white
against a black background) only being visible to the cameras, which tracked the outlines of
their movement.
Since the development of The Changing Room in 2004, computer coding languages, speeds
of processing, accessibility of technologies, costs, and capacities have dramatically changed.
This digital revolution has spawned a plethora of choices and opportunities for artists to
further explore the possibilities of an interactive stage that potentially move us beyond the
screen as interface and perhaps closer to Barad’s definition of “intra-action” through a more
immersive entanglement between human and nonhuman agencies in performance. In the
next part of this writing, I discuss a more recent project that also generated an interactive
stage, but that did so without relying upon two dimensional screens to support the virtual
interaction.
Singularity
Singularity: drawing spaces + breathing spaces (2017) was a dance-architecture that sought to
reawaken forms of sociality and connection as it recalled the pleasures of dancing together.
An interactive holographic environment for a multisided audience, Singularity was created
through collaboration with architect Uwe Rieger; programmer Yinan Liu; sound artists
Jerome Soudan and Russell Scoones; dancers Zahra Killeen-Chance, Adam Naughton, and
Solomon Holly-Massey; lighting designer Margie Medlin; and costume designer Kasia Pol.
Employing disruptive technologies to move data beyond a two-dimensional computer
screen or projection surface, Singularity was a visual, sonic, and tactile immersive experience.
Singularity involved a trio of dancers being tracked by the eyes of sixteen Optitrak cameras.
Seen in three dimensions, markers on their hands, feet, and sometimes heads, provided sta-
tistical data of their coordinates on the dance floor for a parallel virtual plane. Using Unity
software, a computer program used for gaming environments, the digital designer, Liu, was
able to ‘map’ the dancers’ movements onto this virtual plane and intersect them with a series of
graphic visualizations of different geometries and mutating architectural forms rendered in real
time. Inserting their limbs onto the virtual pointers that look like laser lights, Killeen-Chance,
Holly-Massey, and Naughton opened up the system for interactive dance improvisations.
Research toward the project by the arc/sec Lab, a digital media and architecture labora-
tory based at the University of Auckland, was concerned with the potential to give dynamic,
physical form to digital information and computation generating new kinds of architec-
tural space and creative expression. In probing the potential of human-computer interface
design, Singularity explored how space and digital interaction might reconfigure the encoun-
ter between audience, dancer, and digital agency within a polyphony of imagined spaces.
The choreographic score for Singularity was based upon a number of spaces that emerged
from image-actions:
Hand paint
Wobble space
Object track
Push walls
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Carol Brown
Particulate space
Breath space
Body track
Magnetic field
Choreographic actions were shaped by a merging of human and digital agencies. Each focused
upon a specific characteristic of the system drawn in 3-D program Unity, while maintaining
what Gilles Deleuze describes as the “remarkable point” of the dancer in the bodying forth of
complex processes of relation (Deleuze quoted in Manning 2013, 20). Clouds of data become
wormholes, kites, watery walls, and particle streams in response to the dancers’ movement.
This coupling of dancer and data shaped worlds that sought to make palpable the multiple
ways that data flows, permeate the present.
In Singularity, clouds of data figures become tangible and dynamic material for choreo-
graphic expression. Whereas in previous works, such as The Changing Room, data visualiza-
tions that mix the human and the virtual were projected onto opaque screens (curtains and
Perspex furniture), in Singularity data figures are infused within clouds of haze which are
constantly moving and changing shape. This creates a sense of the data figure’s agency as part
of a programmable and choreographed matrix. This hybrid space, part physical/part virtual,
affords a sense of augmented dancing, at the edges of (human) control. A matrix of entangle-
ments combines the algorithmic potentiality of architectural geometric figures with human
gestural intention. As a choreographic score based upon a set of rules designed to fulfill the
potential of each data set, the dancers are invited to improvise within its parameters. At the
same time, the unpredictability, unknowability, and uncertainty surrounding how corpore-
ality and virtuality relate reconfigures this incorporeal effect through instant compositions
arising from improvisation. Actions of inserting, expanding, shrinking, drawing, cutting,
contouring, and twisting, morph human and virtual figures in relation. Space, as a container
physically bound within a black box, is in this condition virtually augmented providing
scope for a constant sense of rescaling the dimensions of lived experience as it folds through
different dimensions.
The practice of touch in relation to virtuality has been a recurring theme in dance and
technology research and has been explored in depth from a phenomenology perspective by
dance scholar Susan Kozel (2007). In Closer, she describes how the reversibility of the senses
of sight and vision in the context of digital interface design can lead to “a losing of oneself
in the chiasmic composition of touch, vision, and movement” bringing about “a destabiliza-
tion of identity that is fundamentally creative” (lxii). Tactile engagement with data can bring
about a sense of convergence between materiality and virtuality, altering our sense of self,
making strange. In Singularity the digital interface design allowed dancers and audience to
‘drop into’ an augmented corporeal experience through a three-dimensional tangible inter-
face. This sense of immersion and continuity between the world of flesh and the world of
data is part of a shift toward tangible media in creative technologies. Responding intuitively,
haptically, and kinesthetically to digital information and computation, relations are choreo-
graphed between the agency of the human and the non- or more than human.
Dance, music, and digital image together project a world that would not exist without
their facility to transport us affectively, emotionally, expressively, and sensuously. Employing
disruptive technologies to move data beyond a two-dimensional computer screen, Singularity
is a visual, sonic, and tactile experience that attempted to make tangible the multiple ways
that hidden flows of data resonate through our lives, somatically and spatially. Live interaction
420
between the soundscape and movement in Singularity did not attempt to conceal the technol-
ogy but rather played the space like a musical instrument. As “auditory choreography” (Spier
2011), Adam Naughton performed a solo in which his popping and breaking movements
created a crosshatching with the digital dimension as he shifted sounds spatially by having
sensors on his wrists mapped to the pitch and tempo of Soudan’s musical score. Naughton
both listened to how sound was being manipulated and recomposed in real time through
his bricolage of movements, and maintained a lively dialogue with audience attention as he
co-opted the interactive system to play the space around his body.
In Singularity the dancer’s body is the experiential interface through which virtual and
physical movement is entangled, and physical thinking is solicited through these vital inter-
actions. This is different from The Changing Room in which the merging of dancer and virtual
object took place on embedded screens. Taking data away from a screen, it is transformed
into something which participants are able to see, touch, move, and manipulate in space
as well as, from an audience perspective, be immersed within. This project, embedded in
current global research and developments around tangible data or data physicalization, has
relevance for dance studies in the ways that it addresses the potential for a virtual haptic
environment to open the technologizing of dance to the potential reach of movement in
360 dimensions of space.
However, like any system, Singularity prescribes limits around what is possible. Like in
MoCap Hypervision, the actively interactive space is defined by the limits of the cameras’
vision. The dancers must wear tracking balls. These we had 3-D printed on mounts that were
shaped to contour to the dancers’ wrists, as well as through additional costuming, a harness
system, and a cap. The calibration of the system required regular fine tuning that involved
sweeping the space with a device before the dancer could enter and actively interact to trigger
a series of intra-active events. Three projectors fed the architectural visualizations onto haze/
smoke, forming morphing clouds of data.
Each dramaturgical scene involved a choreography of relation between the architectural
visualization and the dancers’ movements. Zahra Killeen-Chance, Solomon Holly-Massey,
and Adam Naughton enact the programmed potential of these data visualizations through
gesture as well as change in weight, effort, and shape. Their actions included inhabiting
volumes (wormholes), extruding lines (cave drawing), triggering effects (electric walls), and
conscious breathing (breathing space). These dynamic and fluctuating spaces (physical, vir-
tual, and conceptual) became test sites for possible virtual dwellings. The spatial dramaturgy
provided an overlapping and shared, third element where our disciplinary practices could
meet. The development of these dramaturgical scores provided possible entry points for the
dancers to initiate actions and sequence states. Below is a further list of terms extracted from
the choreographic score and are indicative of the concept of transmateriality embedded in
the work:
Explode and let go

Push/press
Sticky attachments
Under cloud
Wobble
Unbuild
Tunnel
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Carol Brown
Wormhole
Tethering fascia
Gossamer threading
Twist, rotate
As distinct from screen based interfaces, in Singularity the dancers affectively touch streams of
data made visible through particles of projected light onto haze. This synesthetic experience
of touching visualizations of data affects change in the choreographing of relations between
human and nonhuman agencies, their intra-actions. The chiasmic co-emerging of touch,
vision and kinesthetic experience alters the perceptual field of the dancer’s awareness and,
arguably, audience experience of the dance as performance.
The unpredictability of Killeen-Chance, Naughton, and Holly-Massey’s improvised
movements, the cloudy effect of the haze and the throw of the projector light, created dif-
fraction patterns that illuminated indefinite boundaries. Resisting a solidity of matter, the
choreography extended through the immaterial, to shadows, silhouettes, and illuminations,
not all of which could be controlled. The patterns that emerged in Singularity as diffrac-
tions resisted classification as architectural typologies. Haraway proposes that the notion
of diffraction becomes a metaphor for rethinking the geometry and optics of relationality.
Diffraction, as a mapping of interference, not of replication, reﬂection, or reproduction,
becomes a critical tool for mutating forms which deviate from the line. A diffraction pattern
does not “map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of differences
appear” (1992, 300).
The tactile sense of altering and changing the quality and character of light and gesturally
drawn digital space, makes architecture into an ephemeral event, a liquid state for a strange
dwelling. In Singularity Solomon touches imaginary electrified planes of light. As he senses
these vertical blue walls, they shiver with a sonic and visual digital current, transducing
electrical energy and computer code into diffractive patterns of light and sound perceptually
experienced in the sensation of recoil.
Resisting what Berardi described as the overwhelming nature of data in immobilizing our
capacity to be together and dance together, Singularity proposed opening wormholes, three
dimensional nodes in space, that could become rooms for dancer and audience to co-imagine
unbound spaces that were for the living and non-living to intra-act through continuous pro-
cesses of change and discovery (Illustration 29.3).
Dancers, with their facility for activating space, their peripheral awareness, kines-
thetic, haptic, and proprioception trainings, and their inventive capacities for movement,
engage and push the capacities of optical tracking systems to generate new varieties of
performative spaces, making data a dynamic and palpable material of connection and
collaboration. Such creative collaboration might be said to operate through “Conway’s
Law” (after the computer programmer Melvin Conway), in which the structure of com-
munication itself replicates the structure of the work that is created (Downie, Eshkar,
and Kaiser 2004). The logic of intra-active performance solicits the dancer as a cocre-
ator and collaborator with computer programmers, digital designers, choreographer, and
architect of virtual environments. The specificities of each physical body of each differ-
ent dancer, their somatic histories, are recruited to the task of inventing techniques of
interaction, to activate the potential in the performance system. We are all learners in
this field, learning how to make things work and being curious about the potential of
the system to generate lines of escape, pathways that fulfill the potential for movement
422
Illustration 29.3 Adam Naughton Singularity research and development, Auckland 2016. (Courtesy of
Carol Brown.)
to mobilize in any direction as vectors of change. This “relearning of embodiment”

makes particular demands upon the creative, physical, and conceptual labor of the dancer
(Ramsgard-Thomsen and Brown 2004).
Movement, space, technology, and corporeality as coextensive

When we work with the affordances of data we are called upon to think through the com-
plexity of time and space and the cross-rhythms between physical and virtual spaces as well as
audience and performer relations (Bleeker 2017a, 200). Dance movement as digital material
is imminently reconfigurable, corruptible, and fragmentable; it can take on multiple forms
and evolve patterns that substantially diverge from those generated by their instantiation in a
physically present body (Norman 2017). This transmateriality reconfigures what it means to
be a ‘dancer,’ extending the paradox of being both corporeal and incorporeal at the same time.
Augmented performance through creative technologies often attempts to reposition the pri-
macy of the visceral, somatic, live encounter of the dancer through her becoming-interface—a
transmitter of algorithmic data and movement histories and inventions. But this augmentation
can be problematic from an embodied perspective if it is reductive of the multisensory experi-
ence and kinesthetic attunement of dance movement. Norman (2017) claims that digital dance
that is screen-based and machine vision–reliant can reinforce enlightenment values with their
photological imperatives. I recognize this problem in my experience of screen-based inter-
faces. In The Changing Room, we relied upon two-dimensional projection screens for feedback
on the real-time mapping of our movements to a virtual avatar. While dancers’ movements
might be captured as data and mapped through three-dimensional modeling in the computer,
their outputting and presentation through more traditional theater technologies—screens,
lights, sound amplification—often returns us to the idea of movement as a drawing on a
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Carol Brown
surface. At the same time, reliance upon a screen for visual feedback demands that the dancer
check her intra-actions through looking rather than relying upon less direct, peripheral vision
and proprioceptive feedback that is more diffractive. In learning to dance with data and trans-
lating our gestures into data sets, how might we construct a critical poetics in relation to the
logic of these operations? How might the apparatus of capture, and its incorporation of body
movement, resist a reductive flattening of the depth of perception experienced in dancing in
multiple dimensions of space and time? How might the immersive experience of music, light,
and tangible data operate dramaturgically to induce in audience and performers a sense of
coming together in a shared condition?
The recalibration of the orthogonal theater as a site for interaction beyond the screen
interface, or front-end staging, has offered me a potential zone to explore the possibilities
for participatory and non-vision-centric experiences, so significant and important to the
corporeal, somatic history of the dancer. In response to Berardi’s (2009) critique, I have
probed what the reality effect of the virtual is when we engage in intra-active performance
that moves offscreen into the spaces between bodies where so much dancing takes place.
In this condition, the real and the virtual are experienced less as divisions than dimensions.
Through the compositional potentials of dancing with data, the imaginative world of the
‘virtual’ becomes fused to the experiential body. This transmateriality between the digital
and the material is always specifically instantiated through the conditions of performance as
we interact not only with the computer, but also with other aspects of the physical, material
world including the placement of audience, architecture, temperature, and production fram-
ing (Whitelaw 2012).
The Changing Room and Singularity blend fragments of architectural and choreographic
thinking to shape worlds in which the human body and its virtual dwelling are experienced
as coextensive. Embedded screens and clouds of data dissolve walls, turning them into mal-
leable events where they become not so much resistant barriers and protective surfaces but
openings between rooms and spaces (Illustration 29.4).
Jay David Bolter and Diane Gromola argue that “every digital artifact oscillates between
being transparent and reflective” (2003, 6). As hybrid events, dance-architecture-technology
events offer a spatial-corporeal-virtual encounter through which an audience can discover
something or somewhere else, but inevitably this experience is bound up in the functionality
and aesthetic of the interface. Bolter and Gromola explain that an interface operates like a
mirror in which the user is aware of both the processes used to produce the effect and their
engagement with those processes. They argue that the user or audience should be aware of
both the window and the mirror in order to appreciate the experience fully.
In contrast, Sita Popat (2015) proposes that digital artifacts designed as mixed reality
environments offer a third mode of engagement, as a door or entrance. The door is accessed
by the experience of the moving body within the artwork, offering an active counterpart
to the otherwise inherently visual/cognitive orientation of the reflective/transparent binary.
Through this door, she suggests, potentials embedded in the virtual become real, and thus
the conceptual site is concretized and realized (9). As I see it, dance-architectures that bring
choreography and architecture together through processes of digital mapping and interactive
performance, escape formal, static ends.
The application of digital tools in dance-architecture allows for the distorting and
deforming of three dimensionally rendered geometries into complex choreographic
figures that are palpable. We expand the formal capabilities of architecture through human/
nonhuman intra-actions, opening to larger contexts of referents including history, narrative,
and the affective force of “deviations from the line” (Gansterer, Cocker, and Greil 2017).
424
Illustration 29.4 Solomon Holly-Massey and Adam Naughton in Singularity Research performance,
Q Theatre, Rangatira Stage 2016. (Courtesy of Kathrin Simon.)
In physically manipulating virtual parametric geometries we produce not just forms, but
relationships and nodes of connectivity. The dancers in Singularity are empowered to open
new kinds of experience as their gestures have an impact on space affecting its generative
logic. The choreographic is understood in this context as a practical activation of relational
spaces, a transmedia event interwoven with speculative poetics that open curiosity to the
potential of a virtual dwelling.
Dance performance demands of us something beyond neutrality; it is a place where emo-
tions and energies can be accessed through kinesthetic perception. Performance as practice,
method, and encounter is one of the fundamental ways we can imagine and construct alter-
native or altered world views. According to Salter (2010, xxvi), what performance suggests as
a worldview is that “reality” is not preordained but rather is enacted and actively performed
anew through each iteration. In approaching the world as “performative,” as a “reality” that
“emerges over time,” we come to experience ourselves as “continually transformed through
our history of interactions with it” (xxvii).
Conclusion
Assumptions about the dancing body as a corporeal subject, and a locus for a ‘field’ of
knowledge, with connotations of a defined terrain that is physically locatable, are radically
altered in the twenty-first century as we become increasingly saturated, networked, and
programmed with media that shunts us out of the realm of the human and into the realm
of the posthuman (Hayles 2005). If we are fusions of human and technology, a challenge
for contemporary dancers is how to navigate kinesthetic experience in ways that open
understandings and potentials for this altered sense of agency. In establishing what kind of
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Carol Brown
a world we want to live in, I look to actions that are generative of the vital conversations we
can have with the virtual in relation to what Bleeker (2017b) describes as the “technolo-
gizing of dance.” These actions augment and alter the terms of the choreographic in ways
that were not foreseen by early twentieth-century dance innovators of machine dances.
Visualizing, rendering, augmenting, mapping, coding, calibrating, capturing, and design-
ing extend the toolbox of choreographers in the twenty-first century, transforming dance
and corporeal expression as well as the reach and dissemination of dances through practices
of intra-action and transmedia. These actions redefine the limits of dance subjects, explod-
ing boundaries through disrupting, diffracting, and offering to dance further possibilities
for making strange.
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Berardi, Franco. 2009. The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotexte.
Bleeker, Maaike. 2017a. “What If This Were an Archive? Abstraction, Enactment and Human
Implicatedness.” In Transmission in Motion: The Technologizing of Dance: London: Routledge.
———, ed. 2017b. Transmission in Motion:The Technologizing of Dance. London: Routledge.
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30
EVERYDAY LIFE AND URBAN
MARVELS
The curious aesthetics of x-times people chair
Alexandra Kolb
Introduction
A woman walks across stage in high-heeled shoes, smoking a cigarette. Dancers pirouette
in the aisles in moving buses, using the handrails to push themselves off. Contemporary
performance is replete with references to the everyday, and the avenues of its exploration
are manifold—from amateur performers and pedestrian movements to the use of ordinary
public spaces and everyday objects, to name but a few. Underlying this trend is a desire to
foreground, in the aesthetic realm, that which is typically below the threshold of our notice:
the unexceptional and the mundane. But while the everyday has become a major staple of
contemporary choreographic work, research on the topic is disproportionately sparse and
almost entirely focused on the period of American 1960s and 1970s postmodernism, when it
was first embraced with some vigor.
In addressing this gap in previous literature, my chapter will examine how more recent
performance work has inspired new insights into the everyday.1 The project I shall discuss—
x-times people chair (1995/2006) by Cologne-based performance, dance, and installation artist
Angie Hiesl—collapses the boundaries between art and everyday life and operates at the
juncture of public and private spaces. Performed by a cast of elderly amateurs, the work offers
snapshots of daily domestic life normally hidden from public view (dressing, cutting bread,
writing letters), and transports these seemingly trivial activities into public domains such as
city streets and squares.
Tasks such as cooking food, brushing teeth, waiting at a bus stop, or hurrying from place
to place might appear to be insignificant, ordinary, and even tedious at times. In French phi-
losopher Henri Lefebvre’s words, everyday life is “defined by ‘what is left over’ after all dis-
tinct, superior, specialized, structured activities have been singled out by analysis” (Lefebvre
1991, 97). But despite its apparent banality, it is nonetheless seen as having sociopolitical
significance. Written under the influence of postwar American consumer culture, Lefebvre’s
account of everyday life emphasizes its colonization by capitalism and the marketed com-
modity: “The extension of capitalism goes all the way to the slightest details of everyday life”
(1988, 79).
Yet as Lefebvre in his Marxist-inspired writings, Guy Debord and other theorists of the
quotidian have also argued, the everyday is not simply a sphere for the reproduction of
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Everyday life and urban marvels
hegemonic social relations. Rather, it carries the seeds of its own transformation: “It is in the
everyday that emancipation might be found (if it is to be found at all); critiques of the every-
day will emerge in the practices of everyday life, not in the rarefied or deadeningly ‘realist’
programmes of political parties” (Highmore 2002, 29). The primary avenue for the trans-
formation of daily life to resist alienation, overcome routine, and question social hierarchy is
spawned in art; as Lefebvre urges, “let everyday life become a work of art” (1984, 204). But
this in turn begs several questions: What is an aesthetic drawn from everyday life? How does
an everyday aesthetic relate to a traditional, narrower notion of art defined as a specialized
‘higher’ activity? What are its appropriate modes of representation? And how does its eman-
cipatory potential manifest itself in actual performance work?
Pursuing these questions within a framework of theories drawn from dance studies, phi-
losophy, and urban studies, this chapter begins by considering the ideological underpinnings
for the artistic use of the everyday in the context of broader debates about art’s function and
status in society. It will then examine x-times people chair from three distinct but overlapping
angles. The first will concentrate on the work’s aesthetics, outlining its different strategies for
registering and capturing everyday life. Discussion will then shift to exploring how Hiesl’s
work contributes to discourse on the city. The third section considers how the use of older-
age performers and undermining of the private-public divide serves to highlight social dif-
ference and gesture toward greater inclusion.
High culture and the everyday

Traditional artistic approaches often are regarded as exclusive. High culture exists as a dis-
tinct sphere of activity enacted by and for an elite, which may explain the frequent disinterest
of its practitioners with works in the details of ordinary, everyday life. The cultural sphere
is, for traditionalists, that which elevates us beyond the material and petty interests of daily
existence. For example, in his book Culture and Anarchy (1869), nineteenth-century author
Matthew Arnold took issue with the nouveau rich class who had emerged as a result of indus-
trial capitalism in the nineteenth century, depicting them as acting purely from commer-
cial self-interest and without concern for the social good. Arnold’s idealist theory famously
viewed culture as “a study and pursuit of perfection” (1993, 61) in which perfection is defined
as the presence of “characters of beauty and intelligence” (66) and its key value being “intel-
lectual free play” (Logan n.d.).
Arnold was writing against the backdrop of advanced industrialization, and he sought to
distance himself from the perceived evils of “mechanical and material civilization” (1993, 63)
associated with contemporary urban life. For him, the immaterial (i.e., the mind, spiritual-
ity, and the arts) contrasted with the material (production and the pursuit of profit) that he
saw as bereft of beauty. Arnold undoubtedly saw culture as a force for moral and political
good, and there is even evidence in the text that he wished “to do away with classes” and to
promote more equality among the body politic (79). Yet, despite his benevolent intentions,
Arnold’s view of culture as promoting mental elevation and intellectual insight make him
prone to association with the high art of a social and educational elite, in contradistinction
to the mass culture of ordinary people. As sociologist David Inglis argues, he set in motion
a school of thought marked by “unthinking arrogance.” “For Arnoldian authors, everyday
life was simply a debased and vulgar terrain within which every sort of stupidity was to be
found” (2009, 380).
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Some twenty-first-century conservative voices go even further in drawing links

between the rational mind, beauty, and art, and seeking to divest the arts of anything
that might resemble or reflect ordinary day-to-day life. Contemporary British philoso-
pher Roger Scruton, much like Arnold, associates ‘high culture’ (including art) with
the “life of the mind,” which he avers is “concerned with the true, the beautiful and
the good” (Scruton 2012). He takes recourse to Aristotle who, he argues, set the scene
for viewing “contemplation (theoria) as the highest goal of mankind” because only in
contemplation “are our rational needs and desires properly fulfilled” (Scruton 2012). Put
differently, high culture’s raison d’être is a purely mental form of activity, completely
unrelated to the practical sphere.
Scruton (2012) characterizes highbrow works of art as those that “establish a shared frame
of reference among educated people” and deems learned institutions the best places to entrust
with the “life of the mind.” His view is clearly vulnerable to the criticism of restricting art
to those who can both afford high ticket prices and have sufficient schooling to appreciate it.
While something of an outlier among current commentators, Scruton’s position is paradig-
matic of a certain way of thinking about (high) culture, which is marked by the following
criteria:
• Culture reflects established value sets and parameters of discourse

• It is linked to socioeconomically higher and/or more educated social strata
• It has intrinsic value (as ‘art for art’s sake’)
• It is associated with the rational mind, and endorses a contemplative form of reception
• It is practiced by a select and highly trained few who act as its gatekeepers
On such an account, the arts occupy the opposite end of the spectrum of human activity
from the quotidian.
Yet beginning in the 1950s, a clamor of resistance arose against the marginalization of the
everyday. Often inspired by Marxian ideas, discourses about quotidian life and its relation
to art blossomed in the ensuing period when many important philosophical and sociologi-
cal works on the topic were published (cf. Sheringham 2006, especially 5–6). In sociology,
Raymond Williams admonished high culture’s apparent disinterest in human social relations
and sought to rehabilitate those aspects of culture which, in his eyes, had been unjustly vili-
fied and associated with the “ignorant masses” (2002, 95). Williams argued that the popular
culture of ordinary people and the specialist culture of the elite were in fact compatible,
rather than antithetical, entities which could and should be combined in creative processes
as well as recreational activities. Culture is not owned by the bourgeoisie (and thus denied to
the working class), nor is it restricted to a rarefied sphere, but is part and parcel of all strata of
any given society. As Williams argued in 1958, “culture is ordinary, in every society and in
every mind” ([1958] 2002, 93).
Lefebvre’s work also challenges the idea that art produces a specialized form of knowl-
edge. He asks, provocatively, “Do you think that art is external and superior to real life, and
that what the artist creates is on a transcendental plane?” (2002, 19). Highlighting the fluidity
of boundaries between everyday life and art, he adds:
[I]t is in everyday life and starting from everyday life that genuine creations are
achieved, those creations which produce the human and which men produce as part
of the process of becoming human: works of creativity. These superior activities are
born from seeds contained in everyday practice. (Lefebvre 2002, 44)
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In contrast to previous aesthetic notions which separated art from the quotidian, Lefebvre
views the everyday as the root of all supposedly higher activity. Indeed, as French litera-
ture expert Michael Sheringham remarks with reference to Lefebvre, there is a “dialectical
understanding of the ‘rapport réciproque’ [reciprocal relationship] of higher and lower activi-
ties” (Sheringham 2006, 141). ‘Superior’ practices such as art, religion, or philosophy are
not actually separate from the ‘inferior’ goings-on of the everyday but emanate or are born
from them—even if the specialized activities transcend ordinariness.
It stands to question how we can frame the experience of everyday life in artistic terms
without obliterating it within the framework of an abstract aesthetic or philosophical sys-
tem. And if traditional high-art forms are unsuitable as vehicles for capturing the every-
day, are there alternative forms that are better? In the 1960s, artists began experimenting
with experiences of different kinds in which the everyday emerged as a counterpoint
to a theoretically overloaded and academicized realm of art. New genres or techniques
appeared that often were of a more material nature. Rather than emphasizing rational
contemplation of the aesthetic experience, their focus was on ‘doing,’ the experiential and
physical, and sensory perception rather than the workings of the mind alone. Instead of
producing exhibits to be framed and formally presented to audiences, the new artworks
sought to engage people directly in episodes of real life. Sally Banes describes what such
artists set out to undertake:
[P]eople in Happenings, Fluxus, new dances, Off-Off-Broadway theatre, Pop

art and underground films ironed clothing, combed or shampooed their hair and
shaved their legs. They smiled, slept, smoked cigarettes, went to the movies, sent
their audiences to the movies, played cards, read newspapers, got haircuts, lunch.
In their very banality, these activities became charged with meaning. (Banes as
quoted in Johnstone 2008, 117)
Performing everyday practices lent artistic credence to important things previously over-
looked as too banal, many of which focused on events within the private home, such as Andy
Warhol’s 1963 film Sleep, a five-hour footage of his friend sleeping.
In dance, too, the everyday took center stage as subject matter for performance and inspira-
tion for movement material.Works no longer centered on grand concepts such as love but were
often based on casual or down-to-earth activities. In ‘task dances,’ for example, performers car-
ried out routine actions such as eating or brushing their teeth, collapsing the contrast between
real time and illusory time. Steve Paxton choreographed works such as Smiling (1967) that
consisted of two performers doing just that and nothing much else, and Satisfyin’ Lover (1967)
that featured walking performed by “any old bodies of our any old lives” (Johnston [1968]
1998, 155). In Lucinda Childs’s 1964 solo Carnation, the performer sat on a chair with her head
adorned by various banal objects, such as a colander and hair curlers, in ways that made the triv-
ial appear strange and alienated. Carnation is also an interesting example of the influence of the
visual arts on dance; objets trouvés (art created from everyday objects that normally fulfill a func-
tional purpose) and ready-mades had already been used by the Dada and Surrealist movements.
Artists also explored the nexus between the everyday and urban landscapes. In the late 1950s,
the Situationists—an avant-garde group composed of intellectuals and political theorists—
arranged day- or week-long dérives (drifts or aimless walks) through Parisian streets. Finding
contemporary architecture physically and ideologically restrictive, the dérive was founded on
“a desire to introduce poetry into a lived experience of the street, of the city” (Kaufmann
in Johnstone 2008, 95). It combined the arbitrariness of everyday encounters, immersion in
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urban spaces, and a playful approach to art with a critique of the monotony of life and the
society of the spectacle under advanced capitalism. In Michel de Certeau’s work, walking is
construed as a possible form of creative resistance which can transgress or escape the city’s
official order (for example, its authorities) and its repressive or rational organization (such as
the configuration of geometrical space by urban planners and architects; see de Certeau 1984,
specifically 91–110).
Trisha Brown’s Man walking down the side of a building (from 1970 [Trisha Brown 2004])
that dispensed with carefully choreographed movements to embrace everyday clothes and
the simple act of walking is one of the best-known site-specific works devoted to exploring
urban spaces outside the usual stage setting. It took pedestrianism to an extreme by plac-
ing the walking performer at a precarious ninety-degree angle on the side of an industrial
building where they could be viewed by the public walking past on their daily business.
Five years previously, Lucinda Childs had created Street Dance in which she and her partner
danced on a city pavement while the audience was placed in the loft of a building to watch
them from a bird’s-eye view. Such works paved the way for later trends by eroding tradi-
tional forms of dramaturgy and phrasing, using nontheatrical spaces, amateur performers,
and presentation modes “undistorted for theatrical effectiveness” or “technical skill” (Banes
1977, 17). Above all, they created aesthetic strategies for closing the gap between art and
everyday life.
x-times people chair

Many of German choreographer and performance artist Angie Hiesl’s works take inspi-
ration from the urban landscape in which they are embedded. Projects such as Pick’n’Place
(2010) or Dressing the City and My Head Is a Shirt (2011) in which the performers tied
themselves to urban architecture by their trouser legs, skirts, or jackets are characteris-
tic of her works’ blending of everyday outer (architectural) and inner (home or office)
environments. But it is an earlier piece I shall examine here as perfectly capturing her
aesthetic style. Premiered in 1995 in the city center of Cologne, x-times people chair is a
performance installation (or what Hiesl terms an Aktionsinstallation, literally an “action
installation”). The work has since been shown in over thirty cities across the globe, cel-
ebrating its twentieth anniversary in 2015. I spoke with the choreographer three times
between January 2016 and March 2017, in her native Cologne and in London, including
a formal interview.
The performance of x-times people chair that I shall focus on took place in 2006 in vari-
ous locations in the historic center of Poznań in Poland—a city of 500,000 people known
for its beautiful Renaissance-styled buildings. The film documenting this performance by
Hiesl’s artistic partner Roland Kaiser (Hiesl 2006) shows its elderly performers individu-
ally and precariously perched on simple white chairs bolted to house facades high above the
ground. They are seen executing various everyday activities such as folding clothes, reading,
smoking, slicing a loaf of bread, or playing dice. A slender gray-haired man dressed in a
white-green soccer outfit and sporting a blue cap diligently cleans his trainers with a brush,
totally immersed in the activity.
Hiesl (2017) told me that the inspiration for these actions came from the stories of the per-
formers without her imposing her ideas on the participants. Even for the initial casting, potential
participants were required to bring “something from their lives” such as a familiar object and
during rehearsal processes they were questioned in more depth about their life circumstances.
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Illustration 30.1 x-times people chair, Bordeaux, France, 2004. Performer: Edith Höltenschmidt.
(Courtesy of Roland Kaiser. A project by Angie Hiesl @ Angie Hiesl Produktion.)
Hiesl revealed that one Catholic woman, originally from Silesia, spoke of a farm and bread mak-
ing and described how in her religion bread was blessed before being cut in the direction of the
body. Correspondingly in the piece, she sits very slowly slicing a loaf held in front of her chest
(see Illustration 30.1).
Another woman, by the name of Ariane, who had raised four children alone, shared her
memories of struggling with large mountains of washing. In the performance, she sits con-
tinuously folding pillow cases, towels, a nightgown, a jumper, and an apron, before placing
them on her head one after another (see Illustration 30.2). Thus, what the performers do
directly relates to them as individuals.
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Alexandra Kolb
Illustration 30.2 x-times people chair, Montréal, Canada, 2012. Performer: Ariane Jovy. (Courtesy of
Roland Kaiser. A project by Angie Hiesl @ Angie Hiesl Produktion.)
Aesthetics of the everyday

The work of around one and a half hour’s duration refers to the everyday in manifold ways.
Its isolation of individual activities from the performers’ daily routines emphasizes and lends
importance to the details of their ordinary life experiences. This connection may in turn lead
spectators to a new appreciation of the significance of these mundane actions through which,
in Lefebvre’s words, “man realizes his humanity” (Lefebvre as quoted in Sheringham 2006,
135). But Lefebvre also recognizes the everyday’s essential ambiguity:
In one sense there is nothing more simple and more obvious than everyday life. How
do people live? The question may be difficult to answer, but that does not make it
any the less clear. In another sense nothing could be more superficial: it is banality,
triviality, repetitiveness. And in yet another sense nothing could be more profound.
It is existence and the “lived,” revealed as they are before speculative thought had
transcribed them. (Lefebvre 2002, 47)
This ambiguity is enshrined in x-times people chair. On the one hand, it straightforwardly
presents everyday activities: simplicity, as Hiesl remarks, is a central feature of the work. On
the other hand, it gestures to the lived biographical experience of the performers and thus
gives them an associative significance beyond the face value of the actions they carry out.
The piece shows the “lived” in its concrete embodiment, sheds light on the importance of
the art de vivre, and captures life for life’s sake without attempting to fit it into any transcen-
dent or abstract category of thought or elitist theatrical framework.
Indeed, the work renounces conventional dance and dramatic techniques, thereby
eschewing the presentation style and virtuosity of traditional performance. Its urban context
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is intricately bound up with this conscious lack of conventional theatricality. In dance and
performance, meaning is typically encoded and transmitted through recognized modalities
of staging (such as gradual darkening of the auditorium, audience seating and stage focus,
scenery, costume, and so on). Such traditional markers are entirely absent in Hiesl’s piece,
which takes place in plain daylight and whose participants wear the clothes they would also
wear in ordinary life.
The film of the piece juxtaposes snippets of the performers’ actions with footage of the
immediate surroundings and reactions of passersby. It begins by showing a narrow cobbled
street with people walking past, going about their usual business, with accompanying back-
ground noises. Only after several seconds does one notice the performer, high up on the house
facade to the picture’s left and following a camera cut he is shown in full (from a worm’s-eye
view) winding up a clock. The camera angles thereafter oscillate between ordinary street and
performance scenes. The filming thus mirrors the experiences of the spectators who witness
the happenings from below and who, as Hiesl pointed out in our first meeting, may either
have prior knowledge of the performance event from press announcements, or be unwitting
observers who stumble across it by chance (Hiesl 2016a).
Whether or not they are ‘in the know,’ the spectators help to shape the production—
rather than remaining invisible as they would in a darkened theater. In the film, they
cannot be fully disassociated from the performance installations and hence they become
quasi-participants, as, for example, when a few point upward at one of the elevated seats.
In some instances there is direct, albeit minimal, interaction between performers and
spectators, as for example in a scene when a smartly dressed gentleman writes in his note-
pad and lets snippets of paper fall to the ground to be picked up by the passersby. Other
chance encounters in the street add to the work’s context: a wedding procession, aston-
ished at the sight of people sitting on house facades; the noise of a drill; people coughing
and shouting; a woman scratching her arm. In these moments the real world directly
intervenes in and impacts upon the artwork. As Hiesl attested when I interviewed her
in March 2016:
When we work out in public space, there are so many other things going on besides
what we have as an intervention there. So, the question is, what is now the artistic
action? Where does it begin and where does it end? … So the people who look …
incorporate much more than what we would consider to be the artistic performance.
(Hiesl 2016b)
The work thus widens the concept of what a performance is or what it means. No longer
associated with the performers’ actions alone, the work consists of a melange of different
impressions making the artwork indistinguishable from the everyday street events.
In writings on the everyday, montage (or collage) technique—with its assemblage of
disparate elements—often has been viewed as an appropriate means of capturing the hetero-
geneous world of quotidian life. Ben Highmore, for example, notes the suitability of collage
for encapsulating “everyday life as the pell-mell of different worlds colliding” (2002, 93).
This technique, in his view,
generates a defamiliarization of the everyday. If everyday life is what continually

threatens to drop below a level of visibility, collage practices allow the everyday
to become vivid again by making the ordinary strange through transferring it to
surprising contexts and placing it in unusual combinations. (Highmore 2002, 46)
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Alexandra Kolb
X-times people chair could be said to deploy a montage technique in several respects. First, this is
evident from its title that juxtaposes several grammatically disjointed words and refuses to mold
heterogeneous elements into a (conventionally) meaningful whole. Second, the work denatu-
ralizes the relations of its different physical elements: chairs—items of domestic furniture—are
mounted to house facades, where one might normally expect streetlights or traffic signs to be
fixed. Elderly people appear on these chairs as if from nowhere, performing random activities
at an absurd height with seemingly nowhere to go. As works of art, one might expect similar
installations in certain museums or galleries but not normally in a busy city center.
Hiesl’s work is somewhat reminiscent of the methods of the Surrealists (corroborated by
Rith-Magni 2012) whose quest to make the familiar appear unfamiliar was likewise fre-
quently realized through collage. Surrealist pioneer Max Ernst wrote that “collage technique
is the systematic exploitation of the accidentally or artificially provoked encounter of two
or more alien realities on a seemingly unsuitable level” (Ernst as quoted in Schneede 2001,
90–91; my translation). The incorporation of different, seemingly incongruous, elements in
Hiesl’s temporary composition—the execution of familiar domestic tasks, the chairs hover-
ing precariously above the street, the elderly occupants—transports x-times people chair to
another plane of reality. In line with the Surrealist intention to break “habits of mind that
would submit the everyday to normalizing impulses” (Highmore 2002, 46), Hiesl (2016b)
creates, in her own words, “a certain absurdity or just lifts it up to another sphere.” Distorting
habitual perceptions, she accomplishes a “rearrangement [Verrücken] of reality.”
So things like that all of a sudden get a different connotation, different images come
up and different relations start, or you relate to things in a different way that you’ve
seen all the time as what they were or maybe you even have not seen. Yes, you flout
the normal view. (Hiesl 2016b).
With its novel associations and surprise moments, the work transforms the spectator’s experi-
ence with a provocative and playful assault on their reason and the normal order of things.
Urban marvels
X-times people chair also occasions us to consider what makes and represents a city, thereby con-
tributing to a wider discourse about urban environments. Theorists of the “urban everyday,”
such as Georg Simmel or Walter Benjamin, often wrote about city life in terms of an inces-
sant and brutal agitation of the nerves. In Simmel’s words, the city dweller needs to adjust to
the “intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change
of outer and inner stimuli” (1969, 48, italics in original). Adapting to this intense barrage of
energies has profound effects. On the one hand, it impacts people’s psychic lives so that they
are unable clearly to distinguish and differentiate between things and their value, which are
all perceived “in an evenly flat and gray tone” (52)—that is as a uniform sameness. On the
other hand, the city fosters a sense of reserve and indifference toward one’s fellow human
beings and a lack of genuine community spirit. In Simmel’s view, this reflects its dominant
role as the “seat of the money economy” with the emphasis on economic exchange produc-
ing “a matter-of-fact attitude in dealing with men and with things” (49). Thus, much like
Matthew Arnold, Simmel registers the negative impact of capitalism, functionalism, and
unimpeded materialism on everyday life, which is consequently reduced to a world of prac-
ticalities and calculability to the detriment of other values (including, on Simmel’s account,
the irrational and instinctive drives which constitute “life from within” [1969, 51]).
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X-times people chair presents an alternative view of urban space. Deliberately placed in city
centers with a mix of residential, commercial, and office environments—as Hiesl (2017)
remarked, “in the midst of life”—the installations offer counterpoints to the turbulence, traf-
fic, and bustle of the street level, offering moments of silence and intentionally slow action
high up on the facade. The piece is not designed to encourage direct interaction with the
spectators through verbal exchange or eye contact. Rather, the performers are presented
primarily as exhibits, looking straight ahead or immersed in their activities. This presenta-
tion not only brings the absurdity of their images into stark relief, but also increases the sense
that they are removed from—effectively hovering above—the familiar world of the city.
The work also requires that spectators pause to observe, recognize, and ponder the perform-
ers’ activities before continuing with their own lives. This, again, gives some relief from the
barrage of urban shocks described by Simmel.
Hiesl revealed in our discussions that while the district in which the installations were
located was announced in advance, the exact street names were not. This anonymity inten-
tionally obliged even those who explicitly came to see the performance to explore their
city further: to wander around searching or ask their co-spectators for the locations of other
chairs. Turning the traditionally passive spectator into an active participant, the work thus
furthers social contact, exchange of ideas, and conversation among strangers. Michel Agier
reminds us of the importance of conceptualizing the city as a series of lived events and social
encounters rather than simply material forms: “Artistic creations or political actions can,
in an ephemeral way, produce interaction between totally different individuals—no longer
merely the anonymous crowd” (2004, 141, my translation from the original French).
Hiesl’s interventions, albeit locally and temporarily, reconstruct the nature of urban pub-
lic space. In his day, Lefebvre asked that the city be reimagined and reappropriated by its
ordinary residents. Encapsulated in the slogan, “right to the city” (1996, 158), he proposed
a restructuring of power relations in which control was shifted away from the institutions
of state and capital (for example, city planners or large corporations) and toward urban resi-
dents who “inhabit” (158) by “making,” living in, and shaping their city environment. Mark
Purcell comments that “producing urban space, for Lefebvre, necessarily involved reproduc-
ing the social relations that are bound up in it” (Purcell 2002, 102). To this end, Lefebvre
called for a revival of urban festivities using its “streets and squares, edifices and monuments”
(1996, 39). It is noteworthy that in marked contrast with the negative perception of the city
as being commerce-driven and utilitarian, the city festival is seen as “a celebration which
consumes unproductively, without other advantage” (39).
One could argue that x-times people chair in its ludic interaction with the urban environ-
ment reclaims the city as a space of creativity. Mounting chairs to house facades disrupts the
stable and orderly architectural surface, whose openings to human life are usually restricted
to windows. Hiesl also promotes certain aspects of original community-based festivals by
creating her work with the community and for it, free of charge, and aiming to enhance feel-
ings of neighborly belonging. Thus, the urban functions as a marvelous and eventful space
rather than a purely material and transitional place controlled by city authorities and the
power of money.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch argues that the understanding of the notion of the street had
undergone significant resignification in the sixteenth century when it “ceased to be primar-
ily an extension of the space of the people who lived in the houses adjoining it” and became
a public space for “the flow of traffic” (1987, 62). Around this time, the state appropriated
the street to maintain law and order, and, for example, introduced public lighting systems or
prohibited litter. In a reversal of this trend, Hiesl’s installations seek to reclaim the street as
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a site of the intimate everyday: an extension in many of the depicted actions of the familiar
domestic and private sphere. In her words, “a chair on the façades, it reflects the inside. It’s
like a chair turned 180 degrees to the outside” (Hiesl 2016b). Her piece straddles the inside
and outside, rupturing notions of the urban street environment as controlled by state injunc-
tions (such as vehicular and pedestrian traffic control) and instead conceptualizes civic spaces
as sites of human emotion, social relations, and community ties. The urban and the domes-
tic, the excitement of the street, and familiar routines of the home are intricately interwo-
ven, which subtly counteracts the frequent polarization between public and private realms.
The chapter’s last section explores this idea further.
Counteracting ageism
There is a special significance in the association of old age and elderly people with everyday
life, and specifically the sphere of everyday domesticity. Feminist theory is renowned for
highlighting the gendering of the public (which is assigned to the male) and private (which
is assigned to the female) spheres. Naomi Schor applies this gender distinction specifically to
the everyday:
Two widely shared but diametrically opposed views inform what theories we have
on the everyday: one, which we might call the feminine or feminist, though it is
not necessarily held by women or self-described feminists, links the everyday with
the daily rituals of private life carried out within the domestic sphere traditionally
presided over by women: the other, the masculine or masculinist, sited the everyday
in the public spaces and spheres dominated especially, but not exclusively, in mod-
ern Western bourgeois societies by men. (Schor 1992, 188)
In Hiesl’s work, whose cast consists entirely of men and women between the ages of sixty
and eighty, and which explicitly thematizes age and ageing, we can perceive a similar area of
concern—albeit for a different marginalized group. Retired from paid work and no longer
deemed ‘productive’ members of society, the lives of elderly people may be seen as domi-
nated (even more than the young) by tedious everyday routines whereby time “is emptied
of any significant markers that would differentiate one moment from the next” (Highmore
2002, 7).
Older people are a significantly underrepresented section of society in terms of their
public visibility. This underrepresentation is due partly to their limited presence in the
workplace with the very old in particular often being literally confined to indoor spaces
(their homes or care homes) where they feel ignored, silenced, or shunned. They are thus,
like the female gender in feminist theory, restricted to the private sphere. Cultural repre-
sentations of older people are also uncommon, and where ageing is portrayed it is often in
conjunction with decay, ill health, and death. As historical sociologist Andrew Blaikie notes,
“Older people rarely played leads in plays, serials, soaps, adventures, comedies, or children’s
programmes” (1999, 97).
X-time people chair is emancipatory in defying the trend toward youth in cultural
performance and in seeking to reclaim public spaces for an older generation. Hiesl gives
the lie to the notion that we become invisible when we age. Without denying the everyday
nature of many old people’s activities and lifestyles, she challenges their association with dull-
ness and tedium, and reveals how slow and familiar movements can sustain artistic power.
The methodical, careful, and ‘knowing’ ways in which the performers execute their actions
438
adds to (rather than detracting from) the interest they generate and is a counterpoint to the
fast-paced and multimedia nature of much contemporary performance.
The work stands in marked contrast with Hiesl’s and Kaiser’s later piece Dressing The City
and My Head is a Shirt, which is also embedded in the urban landscape but uses young dance
professionals. But it also differs from other treatments of age in performance works, such as
Pina Bausch’s Kontakthof: With Ladies and Gentlemen Over “65” (2007)—a revival of her ear-
lier Kontakthof (1978) which was choreographed for the Wuppertal company. Unlike Hiesl,
Bausch retains much of the technicality and (high-art) context of professional theater dance
and in some scenes presents her senior amateur cast in a flirtatious and sexualized light. We
should recognize, however, that representatives of American postmodern dance such as Steve
Paxton and Yvonne Rainer paved the way for such works as Hiesl’s, with its inclusion and
appreciation of older performers through their emphasis on “clarity, economy, and simplicity
rather than skilful virtuosity” (Burt 2017, 44).
As Helen Thomas (2013, 125) aptly explains, gerontology has advanced two contrasting
theories of ageing. The mutual disengagement theory suggests that a progressive withdrawal
of older people from their central societal roles following retirement is a natural process,
although it may result in some demoralization. The second, so-called activity theory, empha-
sizes the benefits of old people remaining active and engaged both physically and mentally,
and maintaining their interactions with mainstream society.
X-times people chair juxtaposes the binary notions of disengagement and activity in the
ways it presents its performers and their actions. On the one hand, it features elderly people
sitting in chairs, which is (as Hiesl remarked in 2016a) what many old people actually do. It is
also noteworthy that the chairs are placed separately at some distance from each other, which
could refer to the increasing isolation that tends to come with ageing. It could also be read,
more metaphorically, as portraying the elderly as fixed to their own spots with little choice
or possibility of change. In these respects, the work aligns with the disengagement theory.
Hiesl (2017) also mentioned that when the work was shown in South America—in Rio de
Janeiro and Lima—questions of a lack of insurance and benefits for elderly people were at the
forefront of public consciousness. Such issues of pensioner poverty and how to deal with an
ageing population are serious even in Western Europe.
Yet on the other hand, images of passivity and isolation among the elderly are challenged
in several individual scenes. One very agile participant, who was often invited to festivities to
put on little shows and provide musical interludes, is seen playing the maracas and vigorously
wielding a cocktail shaker before pouring himself a drink (see Illustration 30.3). Another is
reading a map, perhaps suggesting that she is a keen traveler. A third, as mentioned earlier,
is cleaning his football trainers. In our conversations, Hiesl was careful to specify that her
work shows its participants leading an active life (by no means withdrawn from society) and
retaining sovereignty and dignity. At the same time, she sounded a more critical note by
bemoaning the lack of communication and interaction between young and old, and calling
for new models to further intergenerational understanding.
X-times people chair thus seems to occupy an ambiguous in-between space when it comes
to ageing—refusing to pigeonhole older people while displacing dominant preconcep-
tions by representing the unrepresented. And when death did occur—perhaps inevitably
considering the age of the work’s participants—it became part of the production. When
the piece premiered in Cologne, of the twenty chairs originally put up in the city center,
only nineteen were used; one chair was placed, tilted over, on a porch roof as a touching
reminder of a performer who had died during the preparatory phase. He was thus present
in his absence.
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Alexandra Kolb
Illustration 30.3 x-times people chair, Poznań , Poland, 2006. Performer: Eddy Krieger. (Courtesy of
Roland Kaiser. A project by Angie Hiesl @ Angie Hiesl Produktion.)
Conclusion
Hiesl’s work takes the quotidian seriously as an object of artistic enquiry, showing that the
everyday can be transformed through conscious attention and moreover can transform an
audience’s perceptions. My three interconnected approaches to examining x-times people
chair—aesthetics, urban discourse, and age—show how it offers resistance to traditional
thinking in all these areas while raising further questions.
First, the work’s aesthetic is diametrically opposed to elitist aesthetic frameworks, bring-
ing to attention the spheres of life that are often considered beneath artistic interest. Its
unusual montage techniques and quasi-surrealist images are apt strategies for capturing the
everyday. Its quotidian motif picks up the threads of postmodernist thought, which Hiesl
takes to a logical extreme by creating a work which eludes genre definitions altogether. Her
440
piece certainly straddles visual and performance art, but is it also dance? Hiesl (2017) herself
answered this point by stating that its starkly reduced movement vocabulary still “had to
do” with dance, and that she had been invited to show it at dance festivals. This response, of
course, raises much broader questions of where dance, and dance movement, begins.
Secondly, Hiesl’s piece calls into question traditional accounts of the city as a site of con-
sumption, capitalist ambition, state or municipal interference, or simply as somewhere that is
hectic and stressful. She offers the spectator-participants an alternative, experiential engage-
ment with their city by excavating the potential of public space and its alteration through the
medium of ludic art.
Finally, the work exposes the poverty of our ageist culture and brings to visibility a sec-
tion of society that is often restricted to the (relatively invisible) sphere of the domestic.
In doing so, it raises other pertinent questions: What and who should be privileged in society,
and why? How should senior people be (re)presented and treated? It thereby contributes to
a societal politics of the everyday, articulating the interests of those marginalized by broader
social trends and cultural forms of representation. Ultimately, the piece is, as Hiesl says, about
“Menschsein,” that is, “what makes us human.” And if we believe Lefebvre, realizing our
humanity occurs primarily at the level of everyday life.
Note
1 I gratefully acknowledge the support for this research received from the British Academy/
Leverhulme Trust.
References
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Multitudes 3 (17): 139–146.
Arnold, Matthew. 1993. Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Banes, Sally. 1977. Terpsichore in Sneakers. Post-Modern Dance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
———. 2008. “Equality celebrates the ordinary.” In The Everyday: Documents of Contemporary Art, edited by
Stephen Johnstone, 113–119. London: Whitechapel.
Blaikie, Andrew. 1999. Ageing and Popular Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Burt, Ramsay. 2017. “Yvonne Rainer’s Convalescent Dance: On Valuing Ordinary, Everyday, and Unidealized
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Cultural Perspective, edited by Nanko Nakaima and Gabriele Brandstetter, 35–45. London: Routledge.
De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Randall. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Hiesl, Angie. 2006. x-times people chair - performance-installation on building facades in public space. Performance
at Malta festival, Poznań, Poland. Video produced by Roland Kaiser. Accessed December 24, 2018.
———. 2016b. Interviewed by the author in Hendon/London. March 15.
———. 2016a. Interviewed by the author in Hiesl’s studio, Cologne. January 2.
———. 2017. Interviewed by the author by telephone. March 20.
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Lefebvre, Henri. 1984. Everyday Life in the Modern World.Translated by Sacha Rabinovitch. New Brunswick:
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Highmore, 92–100. London: Routledge.
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31
DANCE, THEATER, AND THEIR
POST-MEDIUM CONDITION
Gerald Siegmund
Introduction: Theater makes a difference

The performance scheduled as a dance performance begins with a film. Jérôme Bel’s Gala
(2015) begins with a film that is a montage of photographs of empty theaters. Indeed, it looks
more like an old-fashioned slide show with its steady rhythm of image following image.
The theaters are on display on the back wall of the actual stage that serves as a screen.
They vary in shapes and sizes and differ in their cultural origins. They range from the
ruins of the vast Ancient Greek open-air theaters to the splendor of the Teatro Olimpico in
Vicenza, a Renaissance reconstruction of an ideal Roman theater, to plush baroque theaters
with their tiers of circles lining the walls to small puppet theaters up to a multitude of con-
temporary black boxes in various sizes. Two semi-circles of plastic chairs half enclosing a
piece of lawn in front of them, or simply a series of logs that demarcate an empty space, are
instantly recognizable as theaters, too.
The filmed projection of photographs as a slide show that is a transmedial or even post-
medium practice produces a double vision for the spectator. The actual theater space we are
in is displaced and dislocated to other potential theatrical sites. While recognizable as theater,
theater differs from itself. The film remediates the conventions of the theater such as the split
between stage and auditorium. It thereby separates theater from itself by dislocating it in film,
which dialectically holds on to the theater and its viewing conventions. In the chapter that
follows, I explore the possibilities of this observation for a theory of theater and dance in a
post-medium age and as post-medium phenomena. My topic is thus not dance in museums as
has been widely discussed over the past years (Franko and Lepecki 2014). I am not concerned
with choreographers, dancers, or dance companies producing work for or showing extracts
of their work in museum or gallery spaces and the consequences this change of medium and
context brings from the perspective of dramaturgy, of temporalities, of the situation of recep-
tion, and of the spatial demands.
My argument shifts attention away from the medium-specificity of dance both as
movement in time and space and as a physical expenditure of energy structured according
to choreographic principles.1 I will argue that theater and dance are inherently medial,
which allows for a remediation of their practices and conventions in various other media.
What I suggest is to consider the body and its movements together with their medial
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Gerald Siegmund
doubles of images as constellations. These constellations reveal the inherent mediality of

the body and its movements. The theater exposes these conventions; it is the space where
the body and its movements are separated to be reconfigured. This separation implies a
redoubling that shifts and dislocates the body and its practices. The philosopher Samuel
Weber calls this procedure “theatricality as medium” (Weber 2004). I will base my argu-
ment on Walter Benjamin’s writings on Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater and Weber’s reading
of Benjamin. I will draw attention to the theory of media in relation to the body and its
movements that Benjamin develops in relation to Brecht. I consider Benjamin’s media
theory to be implied in his theory of gesture as a citable constellation of bodies. I am
less interested in the possibility of the gesture as an interruption of action to suspend,
arrest, and displace meaning. Nor am I concerned with the sociopolitical implications
the production of gestures has for Brecht and Benjamin, ideally facilitating an education
of informed mass audiences toward the possibility of a revolution from the Left. Instead,
Benjamin’s notion of gesture and Weber’s concept of “theatricality as medium” give rise
to an understanding of certain contemporary dance practices as post-medium practices.
My aim in this chapter is to trace one of the historical roots to such an understanding of
media as post-medium, which dates to early twentieth-century modernism. I will then
turn to William Forsythe’s idea of the “choreographic object” (Forsythe n.d. a) as my
main example of dance as a post-medium specific practice. In my conclusion, I return to
Bel. With some productions, film showings have replaced the original performance on
stage. With Giorgio Agamben ([1992] 2000) I argue that film, here, appears as a gesture
that binds the body in the original performance to its medial displacement, remembering
and displacing it in a dialectic of absence and presence.
From theater to medium

In the first version of “What Is Epic Theatre?” Benjamin develops a theory of theater
as a medium. In order to reach the height of technological development, theater must
“correspond to the new technological forms” (1998, 6) that shape human perception.
For Benjamin, Brecht’s epic theater is synonymous with a truly contemporary theater on
par with cinema or radio. By covering up the orchestra, Benjamin argues, the contempo-
rary stage has cut off its roots in religious practices and turned into a platform. The stage
as a public platform that serves as “a convenient public exhibition area” (6) for its audiences
changes the function of theater from being a symbol of the totality of the world to that of
a “dramatic laboratory” in which reality may be changed by experimenting with its com-
ponents (Benjamin 2004, 584).
In this laboratory, the projected drawings of Caspar Neher, Brecht’s stage designer, play
an important role. According to Benjamin, they are not simply stage decor. Rather, with
a reference to popular culture, these projections function as posters to advertise the scene
that is played out in front of them. With reference to Brecht’s and Weill’s opera, The Rise
and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Benjamin answers the question of what it is exactly that
Neher’s back-projections put up by underlining their function as commentary. “Brecht
writes that they ‘adopt an attitude towards events in such a way that the real glutton in
Mahagonny sits in front of the depicted glutton’” (Benjamin 1998, 7). For Benjamin, how-
ever, Brecht’s answer is not entirely satisfactory to explain the “powerful and curious effect
of scenes staged in this way” (1998, 7). The doubling of real actors with their images does
not only produce commentary on stage. For Benjamin, its strong and strange effect on
members of the audience is because one may easily mistake one for the other: “Who can
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Dance, theater, and post-medium condition
say that the acted glutton is more real than the depicted one? We can make the acted one
sit in front of the more real one, i.e., we can let the depicted one at the back be more real
than the acted one” (7).
Thus, the projected drawings do not eclipse the real actor. Rather, they interact with
him in such a way that binds the real and its medial representation together to produce a
kind of oscillation or vibration between them. Their contours “tremble”; although separate,
they remain attached to each other causing what Benjamin calls a “dialectic at a standstill”
(1998, 12) between the actor’s body and its image. These constellations of bodies and media
images on stage reveal or discover, as Benjamin puts it, “conditions,” in German “Zustände”
(1997a, 525), literally, as Weber emphasizes, a “standing toward” or a “stance” (Weber 2004,
49). It describes a moment where movement is arrested to produce a standing together of
disparate elements that still vibrate, moving to and fro within the standstill, thus fraying the
outlines of the real body, the image, and their contexts. Benjamin calls such a constella-
tion of bodies, images, and sometimes even written text “gestural elements” that build up
towards a “gesture” (1998, 12).
In his short text “Theater and Radio” from 1932, Benjamin points out that epic theater
follows the cinematic principle of montage, thus engaging in a conversation with the then-
new media rather than trying to copy its effects on the masses. Rather than attempting “to
use complex machinery and a vast horde of extras in order to compete with the attractions
of mass-market film” (2004, 584), an attempt that for Benjamin must fail, “the progressive
stage,” which is synonymous with epic theater, “debates” with the new media (584). He says:
“[G]estus is nothing but a retranslation of the models of montage—so crucial in radio and
film—from a technological process to a human one” (584).
The human factor, the body of the actor and actress, is indeed the only advantage theater
has over the technological possibilities of radio or film. In “Theater and Radio,” Benjamin
holds that “in comparison to the theatre, radio represents not only a more advanced tech-
nical stage, but also one in which technology is more evident” (2004, 584). He goes on
to ask: “Confronted with this, what can theatre offer? The use of live people—and apart
from this nothing” (584). Epic theater “returns with a fresh approach to the grand old
opportunity of theater—namely, to focus on the people that are present. In the center of
its experiments stands the human being in our crisis. It is the human being that has been
eliminated from radio and film—the human being (to put it a little extremely) as the fifth
wheel on the carriage of technology” (585). The next sentence refers to the “eliminated”
human being as “this reduced, debarred human being” that in epic theater “is subjected
to various trials and judged” (585). Terms like “debarred,” “barred from itself,” and “put
aside” resonate with the idea of the displacement of the body in its various medial represen-
tations, between its physical realness and its image. Rather than holding on to the notion
of a holistic body, theater “ex-poses” these bodies. The “Exponierung des Anwesenden,”
as the German original reads (Benjamin 1997b, 775), puts them out of themselves and out
of their places. It displaces them, gesturing, as philosopher Samuel Weber claims in his
reading of Benjamin, towards an “elsewhere” (Weber 2004, 49), all the while holding the
body up for inspection on the platform as the obstinate remains or debris of the techno-
logical age. The mnemonic function of the gesture remembers and re-members the body,
putting it to new and potential uses. It quotes the body as a gesture, dragging it along with
it, making it vibrate and move.
For Weber, “contemporary theatricality” depends on the citability of the gesture,
which, because it is citable, is always already medial. It is medial because it is discontinu-
ous; it comes in between and separates. Theater’s space is always already displaced because
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Gerald Siegmund
it is split or doubled into stage and auditorium. Since the audience is constitutive of theater,
the “work” of theater can never produce or display the “self-contained meaningfulness” or
“self-identity” (2004, 7) of form that modern aesthetics ascribe to works of art.2 By being
gestural, theater is already a transportation of place and body whose principle the new
electronic media exploit with great success. “What is new,” Weber sums up, “is only—but
this is hardly insignificant—that the new, electronic media have made manifest what was
always at work in the ‘work’ itself: namely, its mediality” (119). The cut or separation that
gesture performs is also formative: it forms new media from old conventions (like the sepa-
ration of stage and auditorium, body and its image), turning “medium” into a self-differing
category. Hence “theatricality as medium,” the title of Weber’s book, is “constituted by
its relation to what it is not, to determine possibilities that are never actualized or present
as such” (119).
Theater as medium is characterized by its own displacement. The stage displaces itself
into the auditorium, which, by leaving the theater, in turn displaces and disperses itself into
an “elsewhere.” As a medium, theater and the bodies it exposes are always already serial
displacements of themselves. Bel’s Gala reintroduces images of theater that focus on this
foundational division into the live theater situation. Thus, the images function as citable
gestures that draw attention to the mediality of the theater situation as such. They produce
an oscillation between recorded image and the actual theater, throwing the gaze into a mise-
en-abyme of its constituent elements.
From medium to post-medium

Weber’s reading of Benjamin turned his notion of gesture into a theory of theater as
medium. It displaces theater’s “here and now” into a “there and then.” Taking the argument
one step further, art historian Rosalind Krauss (1999) allows us to re-think the medium in
terms of the post-medium. What does she mean by this? For Krauss, the “post-medium age”
describes the condition since the late 1960s under which the arts, and in her case especially
the visual arts, come to exist. The post-medium age is described by the complete satura-
tion of everyday life with images, which results in the conflation of erstwhile autonomous
art and everyday culture in a general idea of perception. In what Frederic Jameson calls the
“new life of postmodern sensation” ( Jameson as quoted in Krauss 1999, 56), everything that
happens from shopping to leisure activities is experienced as aesthetic, making the exis-
tence of a separate sphere of art obsolete. But for Krauss the post-medium age also produces
post-medium–specific art (i.e., works of art like installation pieces or performances that
blur the boundaries of traditional genres by including all kinds of activities and materials).
Trying to re-cue art’s specific discourse from its total inclusion into late capitalist consumer
culture, Krauss refers to Benjamin’s and Weber’s theory of the medium as self-differing.
For her, the material support of an artwork like the canvas for a painter or, in our case, the
body of a dancer, is never identical with its medial quality. Hence, material support, the
image produced and the conventions according to which support and image interact, may
be set apart from each other. Krauss holds “that the specificity of mediums, even modernist
ones, must be understood as differential, self-differing, and thus as a layering of conventions
never simply collapsed into the physicality of their support” (1999, 53). The conventions
according to which a specific genre works its material support may be detached from this
support. Like the principles of film that reappear in Brecht’s epic theater, they may travel and
materialize differently. For Krauss, the “impossibility of thinking of an aesthetic medium
as nothing more than an unworked physical object” (1999, 6) results in the reinvention or
446
re-articulation of the medium (56) in other media, a process which reflects upon the specif-
ics of the medium’s conditions. Works of art that do that—Marcel Broodthaers is her prime
example—do not only set themselves apart from the capitalist demands of the post-medium
age. In Weber’s term, they also use theatricality as a medium of reflection that is specific to
the arts.
British philosopher Peter Osborne questions Krauss’s re-attachment of post-medium art
to a given medium such as sculpture, architecture, or painting. Opting for a “transcategori-
cal” postconceptual art that challenges the very notion of the work, the “conventional cat-
egory of medium” (Osborne 2013, 100) is destroyed: “From the standpoint of the works’
ideality, their material forms appear as multiple materilizations selected from an infinite set of
possible actualizations” (113). Freeing the work from its critical re-appropriation through
pre-existing categories, Osborne argues for a transcategorical understanding of work that
he calls “postconceptual” (i.e., works that exist after the heyday of conceptual art in the 1960s
and that carry its legacy under radically new conditions of a globalized art market in digital
societies): the “global transnational” (26). And yet, as Osborne admits, the critical categories
that the artist wants to avoid inevitably and dialectically re-appear in perception of the work,
structuring its understanding.3 Hence, the “trans” in the term “transcategorical” implies a
“going through” the categories and specific media rather than a downright abolishment of
media and the way they structure perception. The work “suggests” media rather than being
in a specific medium. It is here that Benjamin’s and Krauss’s differential understanding of
media re-appears as differential modes of perception that exhaust and displace the work
itself. Viewed from this angle, Benjamin’s notion of Neher’s drawings as “ideal models” or
“materialist ideas” (Benjamin 1998, 7) (i.e., ideas materialized) can be read as concepts that
may indeed take on multiple actualizations and forms. In the following section, I will refer to
Forsythe’s work with “choreographic objects” (Forsythe n.d. a) as examples of choreography
as a self-differing medium.
Forsythe, or choreography as a self-differing medium

Benjamin’s notion of gesture as a tremulous and oscillating movement that creates an in-
between self-differing media most obviously resonates with contemporary forms of dance
that use film in their staging. William Forsythe’s Kammer/Kammer (2000) is a prime example
of this. The title plays with the double meaning of “Kammer,” as an old fashioned word for
room, the Latin “camera,” and the “camera” as a technical device, its small chamber on the
inside being used to record images. The split and the resulting doubling of the word Kammer
signifies the separation of one Kammer, the actual room, from the other Kammer, the cam-
era, as a medial difference. For the production, the stage is divided up into various rooms
separated from each other by thin walls so that the stage looks like a roughly assembled film
set. What goes on in these rooms is often blocked from view. Behind one of the back walls,
the audience can see arms going up, while the bodies of the dancers are shielded by the parti-
tions. Since the arm movements are rhythmical, we assume that behind these opaque screens
there is actual dancing going on. There is no way, however, for the audience to verify this.
In another room on the right side of the stage, two dancers engage in a duet, rolling on a mat-
tress. The production is built around two main characters and their respective love stories,
who, although they share the same stage, inhabit two separate narrative spheres. Forsythe
himself gives the title a third meaning by referring the Kammer to the “chambers of the
heart” (La Rocco 2006). The boy in the blue sock hat (Antony Rizzi), based on Douglas A.
Martin’s book Outline of My Lover (2000), tells of his relationship with an older man, a famous
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Gerald Siegmund
rock star. The second character (Dana Caspersen), a professor who fashions herself after the
French actress Catherine Deneuve and imagines a relationship with a female student, is taken
from Anne Carson’s “Irony Is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve” in her
book Men in the Off Hours (2000).
A live camera follows the Boy and Deneuve across the stage, capturing their actions and
images that are mixed live (video design: Philip Bussmann). Like the dancers’ bodies, they
are choreographed. They are then projected onto huge screens suspended over the heads of
the audience. These images literally travel in space. They detach themselves from the stage
and displace themselves from screen to screen. Along their way, they include the space of the
audience into the proliferation of spaces that the productions thrives on. Thus, in Kammer/
Kammer, the “here” of the stage situation always includes an “over there.” The presence of
dancing and acting bodies includes their absence on the screens. Both are visibly interde-
pendent. Hence, the gaze of the spectators is split from the outset, trying to take in different
spaces and different media at once. Since this proves to be a disconcerting and difficult task,
spectators may decide to only concentrate on the live action, which in the roughly assembled
rooms always looks incomplete and fragmented. Or they may decide to look at the perfectly
composed images on the screen, the framing of which turns the shabby rooms into recog-
nizable interiors. In the space between stage and screen, the body and its image, Kammer/
Kammer sets perception in motion. As Benjamin (2004) argues in relation to Brecht’s theater,
the gaze becomes tremulous, oscillating between the live action of the dancers and their
images. It triggers a dialectic between the near and the far, the exceptional and its repetition.
Constantly comparing the live situation to its representation, the actual bodies of the dancers
appear as frail and unprotected supplements of their images. Tested against their images, they
are exposed much more strongly than they would be if they were “just” dancing. They are
“debarred” from themselves (585) and put in another space that reflects back on their precari-
ous condition as human beings.
Perhaps the more radical proposition in terms of dance in a post-medium age, however, is
Forsythe’s recent work on what he calls “choreographic objects” (Forsythe n.d. a). Since the
late 1990s, Forsythe has produced a series of these objects that range from video or acoustic
installations to simple objects that he presents in museum and gallery spaces. The exhibitions
use various titles, for example About Subtraction in 2013 at the Neue Museum in Weimar and
in 2015 The Fact of Matter at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main. In 2017
in Le Bourget-Paris at the Gagosian Gallery or, more recently, in 2018 at the ICA in Boston,
the exhibitions were simply called Choreographic Objects.4
In 2013, upon wandering through the Neue Museum in Weimar, I found myself stranded
in a huge room where a pile of thick and heavy wooden planks stood in my way. What looked
like the debris from a shipwreck blocked my passage. The planks were arranged in such a
way that I could not get past them or leave the room by the side door, which I had initially
made out to be an alternative exit. I had to go back, or climb over the wooden construction,
which did not seem to be a real option, since climbing the pile looked dangerous and might
trigger the museum’s alarm system. I was forced to stop and look at this wooden construc-
tion. The longer I looked, the more the beams looked like bodies with their limbs entangled
and stretched into various directions in space. What were their points of contact that enabled
their balance? How far could they tilt over without making the whole construction col-
lapse? What would happen if I decided to add my weight to theirs? Where could I intervene
to change the shape of the pile without destroying it? The specific choreographic object I
encountered in Weimar was almost ironically titled Choreographers [sic] Handbook which pre-
miered at the Avignon Festival in 2011. It may serve as a first example of what “choreographic
448
objects” do. They embody in their materials, here the wooden planks and their arrange-
ment, choreographic principles such as balance, counterpoint, physical support, or spatial
orientation. The order and arrangement of the planks is indeed choreographed, “making
the organizing principles [of choreography] visibly persistent,” as Forsythe (Forsythe n.d. a)
writes in his essay “Choreographic Objects”. In relation to the spectator, they guide or even
choreograph their movements. Be these movements imaginary, as during my encounter with
Choreographers Handbook, or real, these objects ask for my engagement with them. By follow-
ing their invitation, I am being moved both intellectually and physically. I am being choreo-
graphed by the way they interrupt my familiar movement patterns. After all, I had to turn
around and choose a different path through the museum.
Towards the Diagnostic Gaze asks me to pick up a feather duster from its rest on a stone
plate and to hold the object still. Since my body consists of multiple micromovements, such
as breath or blood circulation, this proves to be an impossible task. The feathers inevitably
tremble. Although some objects look motionless, they serve as a residue for possible movement
that I may engage with physically or mentally.5 The objects may stand still, but they are made
up of movement like the feathers moving almost imperceptibly in the air or the intricate com-
pilation of the wooden planks that go off in various directions, duck under each other at vari-
ous heights, and despite their weight balance precariously on top of one another. Hence, the
still-motion of the planks or the actual movement of the feathers facilitate possible movements
of the spectators, providing Forsythe (n.d. a) with a definition of choreography not as a specific
historical practice, but as an idea or concept: “Choreography elicits action upon action”.
There are striking similarities between Benjamin’s conceptualization of the medium as
separation and in-betweenness and Forsythe’s concept of choreography, which in his essay is
a medium that needs objects (material supports in Krauss’s terms [Krauss 1999]) to material-
ize. Together they can illuminate the state of choreography and dance in the post-medium
age. For Forsythe, choreography is neither a term nor a practice with an essential meaning.
“To reduce choreography to a single definition,” he writes, “is not to understand the most
crucial of its mechanisms: to resist and reform previous conceptions of its definition” (n.d.
a). Each historical era and its choreographic practices are “at odds with its previous incarna-
tions” (n.d. a). What choreography is and, above all, what it does, cannot be determined
once and for all. In Weber’s (2004) reading of Benjamin’s gesture, choreography, then, is
self-differing always pointing to an elsewhere as it separates itself from itself. What chore-
ography does inevitably points to what it does not do. Its presence relies on a radical absence
that makes it differ from itself. As a medium or a “channel,” as Forsythe (n.d. a) writes, it
relates bodies and movement, giving them a specific shape, energy, momentum, and direc-
tion. Yet choreography may exist without dance. It is not even tied to its traditional histori-
cal vessel or material support, the human body. Hence, Forsythe detaches choreography
from both dance and the human body. The result of the processes of differing is the cho-
reographic object that generates “autonomous expressions of its principles” (n.d. a). These
expressions are always in the plural, just as the objects vary in their materiality and medial-
ity. In the case of Choreographers Handbook, operating principles of choreography (balance,
counterpoint, support, spatial orientation) are grafted onto a different physical support, the
wood beams. They are materialized in a different body and migrate into another medium:
sculpture. Because choreography as a medium is in this sense self-differing, it produces
other bodies and spaces, pointing toward an elsewhere that allows for transitions between
practices and their materialities.
For Forsythe, choreographic objects also give rise to an epistemological dimension.
Trying to rescue the body in motion from “the domain of raw sense,” which is “precognitive,
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Gerald Siegmund
illiterate,” choreographic objects “allow for sustained examination or even the possibility
of objective, distinct readings from the position that language offers the sciences and other
branches of arts that leave up synchronic artifacts [sic] for detailed inspection” (Forsythe n.d. a).
This closer study is achieved by a shift in temporalities away from the fleeting nature of dance
as an embodied practice, of its being in and for the moment, toward new forms of enactment
such as objects that stall time and allow choreographic principles to emerge and be studied
with greater scientific objectivity.
Forsythe and his team of scholars, scientists, and artists have aimed at scientific objectiv-
ity with their project called Motion Bank. As a four-year research project taking place in
Frankfurt between 2010 and 2013, the research project produced among other things (e.g.,
online scores) a computer-based platform that allows for a “detailed inspection” of his cho-
reography One Flat Thing, reproduced from 2002 (Forsythe n.d. b). “Synchronous Objects,” as
the platform is called, visually highlights the various principles of coordination and timing
that structure the choreography by means of colorful lines, curves, and volumes. The homep-
age of the project speaks of these “organizational structures” that were made visible by means
of computer programs as “transforming them into new objects,” thus underlining the con-
sistency of this project with Forsythe’s work on choreographic objects. Motion Bank can be
seen as yet another instantiation or actualization of choreographic thought (Forsythe n.d. c).
Choreography here indeed becomes a laboratory in the sense that Benjamin and Brecht
envisioned for epic theater. For Benjamin, epic theater has an educational function, just as
Forsythe’s work on the objects produces knowledge about choreography. While Benjamin
still referred to the platform as a stage where bodies are exposed to be examined, the platform
in the age of the internet has transformed into an online platform as yet another instantiation
of its concept.
If choreography is self-differing, so is its material support: “And so it is with the choreo-
graphic object: it is a model of potential transition from one state to another in any space
imaginable” (n.d. a). It is indeed “nowhere and everywhere at the same time,” or, as Peter
Osborne describes the condition of art in the global transnational world: the work of art,
if it can still be called a work, is also the title of his book “anywhere, or not at all” (2013).
Choreographic objects are on the move like Benjamin’s gestures pointing toward an else-
where—a new and potential space to materialize in and to elicit new movement. Movement
gets displaced, made to differ from itself; it “is by nature open to a full palette of phenom-
enological instigations because it acknowledges the body as wholly designed to persistently
read every signal from its environment” (Forsythe n.d. a). I take the “phenomenological
instigations” to mean also that choreography, since it is self-differing, can materialize in an
endless series of medial supports such as objects, computer programs, video or aural sculp-
tures, interactive or immersive spaces, social choreographies, or lest I forget, a dance piece.
The space it emerges in is no longer necessarily the stage or the theater proper. Nor is it the
space of museums or galleries in which most of the choreographic objects have been shown.
As Forsythe’s activities over the past years have demonstrated, the space for choreography to
appear can also be public spaces. In City of Abstracts (2000), passersby were confronted with
their own computer-manipulated image projected on buildings, triggering their urge to
move and to interact with the image. Following this line of thought, today’s myriad forms
of public protest that use the body and even forms of dance to reclaim public space by inter-
vening in it, separating it from its habitual use, blocking ways, and opening new passages,
may also be read as a different medium of dance. As a “different” and deferring medium, it
still resonates vibrantly with all the other forms of dance, including stage dance, and their
conventions.6
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Forsythe underlines the fact that a “choreographic object is not a substitute for the body”
but an “alternative site” for action to reside (n.d. a). The non-human bodies in which action
resides are different from the human body, to which, as Benjamin suggests, they remain
dialectically linked, trembling in between. Most prominently so, because the displacement
of the body aims at my body as a spectator who is made to move as a possible site for cho-
reographic thinking. Such thinking may happen with a plethora of material supports that, as
Krauss (1999) has argued, must not be conflated with the (choreographic) conventions that
work upon it. Forsythe conceives of choreography as a self-differing medium that must be
instantiated in all kids of places and materials. To borrow Weber’s words, choreography is a
“gesture on the move” (2004, 47). In the conclusion I will look at the implications for a post-
medium dance in relation to film as the medium in which the displacement and separation of
the body from the body takes place.
Conclusion
In his essay “Notes on Gesture” (Agamben [1992] 2000), Italian philosopher Giorgio
Agamben argues that it is the gesture and not the image that lies at the center of film. In his
archaeology of the gesture, Agamben famously states that the emergence of film and the
cinema toward the end of the nineteenth century is the result of an attempt to re-appropriate
and reconstruct the true gesture of the bourgeoisie, which has been lost in social life. Dance
and literary scholar Lucia Ruprecht (2017) questions the sole validity of Agamben’s under-
standing of gestures as loss. She argues instead for a much more productive understanding
of gesture at the turn of the twentieth century. She holds that at the time, gestures prolif-
erated in dance and the arts, changing the very fabric of aesthetics in general. Taking the
Benjaminian roots of Agamben’s thinking into account, loss should, however, be primarily
understood as the result of a non-essentialist thinking of the body and its movements. Media
are the symptom of the loss of an original. Film as gesture carries this loss as an absence while
covering it up with an infinite series of articulations and materializations. The body becomes
a trace.
The use of film or video in dance productions, such as Kammer/Kammer by Forsythe, or
the screening of films of dance productions should therefore not be understood as replace-
ments of the true and original dance event. Referring once more to the work of Jérôme
Bel, in 2002 a video recording of his 1997 piece, Shirtology (1997), was shown at the Centre
Georges Pompidou in Paris during an exhibition on the writer Roland Barthes. In the fol-
lowing years, film recordings of Bel’s pieces have taken on a life of their own, being shown
on various occasions during festivals and in museums.7 After the retirement of the dancer
Véronique Doisneau, the film of the piece Véronique Doisneau (2004), which probes into her
working relation as sujêt with the Paris Opera Ballet, has entirely replaced the live perfor-
mance. As I argue, the films are not merely secondary spin-offs of the original live perfor-
mance. They belong to the work as another of its medial instantiations. Live performance,
which may only be a memory, and film form a constellation—facing each other in different
times and places. Understood in this way, the film ceases to be a representation of an absent
live performance. It assumes the function of a gesture that points toward the body and its
gestures that it reconstitutes and preserves. Bel’s work charts and documents the loss of the
original gesture of the body that could be produced through movement and shown in dance.
By doing so, he brings the body about as a gesture in the true sense that Agamben grants the
term: “What characterizes gesture is that in it nothing is being produced or acted, but rather
something is being endured and supported. The gesture, in other words, opens the sphere
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of ethos as the more proper sphere of that which is human” (Agamben 2000, 56). What the
gesture of dance supports is movement’s mediality and the fact that human beings are always
already in language. “If dance is gesture,” Agamben continues, “it is so, rather, because it
is nothing more than the endurance and the exhibition of the media character of corporal
movements. The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as
such. It allows the emergence of the being-in-a-medium of human beings and thus it opens
the ethical dimension for them” (57, italics in the original). Gesture as medium and dance
as gesture bind the original to its repetition, the singular to the citable, the near to the far,
and the here and now to the there and then. Dance’s mediality is its post-medium condition.
In the context of Benjamin’s theory of mediality dance scholar Peter Dickinson writes
about Bel’s films that
… the dance film would seem to be the logical extension of Bel’s theatrical frame: a
place where we can repeatedly arrest, review, and take stock of what, after Agamben,
we might call the biopolitics of choreographed movement, in which the forms that
dance has taken during its institutional lifetime are examined in dialectical relation
to the naked lives of the dancers who are at once included within and exceptional
to that history. (Dickinson 2014, 168)
Dickinson spells out aspects of the ethical dimension that Agamben merely touches upon in
the previous quote. Being in the medium allows us to come to terms with the inadequacies
of communication, meaning, and the material body. It carries the social by tending toward
an other. Films and live performances are two ways of producing gestures by interruption.
They are the two sides of the same medal. Both try to come to terms with the dancers’
exceptionality, their singularity that emerges out of the protocols of representation, the
techniques and technologies that subjugate and produce the body, and the institutionalized
power relations inside which the dancers work. Gesture is therefore also “essentially always
a gesture of not being able to figure something out in language” (59), which is precisely
why different media are employed to come closer to that basic exceptionality of the single
dancer—his or her irrecuperable singularity that gesture points toward while detaching it
from itself.
Like the live performances, the films appeal to our living bodies as spectators. They pro-
duce embodied thoughts, emotions, and reactions. Even cinematic representations of bod-
ies still have the living body as their index or referent. Weber underlines that the function
of theater, which for Benjamin has the sole advantage of being able to expose the human
body, “in an age of electronic media is to articulate the ways in which sites—and sights, but
also sounds and other ‘sensations’—remain linked, in however mediate manner, to bodies,
although not necessarily human bodies, at least as traditionally understood” (Weber 2004,
48). If the human body is always already implied in media, its displacement to another site,
which constitutes its theatricality, is inherent in that body. On a soothing note that counters
the lament over the loss of the body through media, performance scholar Herbert Blau (2010)
reminds us that theater always takes place between what is there and what is not there. It is in
itself ontologically unstable. Theater always deals with the ghostly doubles of bodies, whether
mediated or not. Therefore “there is no escaping in remediation the reduction ad absurdum,
which is to say, bereft, forlorn, alienated, replicated by technology, the nevertheless refrac-
tory body to which we refer anything on a screen, in the ghostliness of three dimensions or
in the wraithlike space of the virtual” (Blau 2010, 544).
452
The constellation of body and image as gesture carries only itself. It exposes the gesture’s
pure mediality that does not communicate something, but only exposes itself. By being
exposed it carries along with it an irretrievable absence of an original body or movement.
Bodies and their movements are always already in the medium. The discussion about dance
as a post-medium does not aim at abolishing or replacing the body, but at exposing its “pure
mediality” as a rem(a)inder of its potential articulation.
Notes
1 For a detailed discussion of the notion of medium-specificity in dance and its relation to the work
of Jérôme Bel, see my monograph on Bel (Siegmund 2017, 15–40).
2 Michael Fried (1995, 127) in his infamous condemnation of theater explicitly refers to the theater’s
dependence on the audience as the defining feature that prevents it from ever achieving art status.
The latter is defined by the self-containment of its components and its meaning that resides in the
work independent of any specific spectator or viewer (127).
3 Performance scholar Shannon Jackson (2014, 56) argues that our understanding or even judgment
of a work of art does not only depend on our expectations, but more specifically on the field of
expertise from which we view it. Seeing a performance from the perspective of the visual arts pro-
duces different results and values than viewing it from the field of theater. Our knowledge of genre
conventions informs our reception of the work (56).
4 Forsythe’s preoccupation with objects and the choreographic values they produce can at least be
traced back to his White Bouncy Castle that was premiered in 1997 in London’s Roundhouse as part
of the installation Tight Roaring Circle. In 1999, the castle was open to the public for the first time in
Frankfurt am Main (Siegmund 2001, 74).
5 In relation to Forsythe’s performance installation Human Writes (2005), I have tried to develop
a concept of choreography based on the confrontation of an object or, more generally speak-
ing, an inhuman material body that may very well be instances of writing, and the human body
that bounces off the object and is thereby set in motion in a specific, yet also indeterminate way
(Siegmund 2012).
6 The emphasis on action or active embodied intervention has hitherto prevented considering forms
of protest as a medium of dance or choreography (Klein 2017). Oliver Marchart’s (2013) emphasis on
the body as supplement to forms of protest, however, points in this direction.
7 For each piece since 1994, Bel’s homepage gives an exhaustive list of performance dates and venues,
including the dates and occasions for the film screenings (Bel n.d.).
References
Agamben, Giorgio. (1992) 2000. “Notes on Gesture.” In Means Without End: Notes on Politics, translated by
Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Acarino, 49–60. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bel, Jérôme. n.d. RB Jerome Bel. Accessed January 8, 2018. http://www.jeromebel.fr/index.php.
Benjamin,Walter. 1997a. “Was ist das Epische Theater? (1).” In Aufsätze, Essays,Vorträge: Gesammelte Schriften
Band II, 2, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 519–531. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp.
———. 1997b. “Theater und Rundfunk.” In Aufsätze, Essays,Vorträge: Gesammelte Schriften Band II, 2, edited
by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 773–776. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
———. 1998. “What Is Epic Theatre?” (First version). In Understanding Brecht, 1–13. Introduced by Stanley
Mitchell, translated by Anna Bostock. London:Verso.
———. 2004. “Theater and Radio.” In Selected Writings Vol. 2, 1931–1934. Translated by Rodney
Livingstone and Others, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, 586–586.
Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Blau, Herbert. 2010. “Virtually Yours: Presence, Liveness, Lessness.” In Critical Theory and Performance, edited
by Janelle Reinelt and Joseph Roach, 532–545. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Carson, Anne. 2000. Men in the Off Hours. New York:Vintage.
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Dickinson, Peter. 2014. “Cédric Andrieux:With Bel, Benjamin, and Brecht in Vancouver.” TDR:The Drama
Review 58 (Fall): 162–169.
Forsythe,William. n.d. a. Choreographic Objects. Accessed January 6, 2018. https://www.williamforsythe.com.
———. n.d. b. Motion Bank.Accessed January 6, 2018. http://motionbank.org/en/content/knowledge-base.
———. n.d. c. Synchronous Objects. Accessed January 6, 2018. https://synchronousobjects.osu.edu.
Franko, Mark, and André Lepecki, eds. 2014. “Dance in the Museum Special Issue.” Dance Research Journal
46 (3): 1–117.
Fried, Michael. 1995. “Art and Objecthood.” In Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, edited by Gregory
Battcock, with an introduction by Anne M. Wagner, 116–147. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Jackson, Shannon. 2014. “The Way We Perform Now.” Dance Research Journal 46 (3): 53–61.
Klein, Gabriele. 2017. “Urban Choreographies: Artistic Interventions and the Politics of Urban Space.”
In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics, edited by Rebekah J. Kowal, Gerald Siegmund, and Randy
Martin, 131–142. New York: Oxford University Press.
Krauss, Rosalind. 1999. A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. London:
Thames and Hudson.
La Rocco, Claudia. 2006. “Love Hurts/Love Hurts.” New York Times. April 30. Accessed January 6, 2018.
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/arts/dance/love-hurtslove-hurts.html.
Marchart, Oliver. 2013. “Dancing Politics: Political Reflections on Choreography, Dance and Protest.”
In Dance, Politics and Co-Immunity, edited by Gerald Siegmund and Stefan Hölscher, 39–57. Zurich:
diaphanes.
Martin, Douglas A. 2000. Outline of My Lover. New York: Soft Skull Press.
Osborne, Peter. 2013. Anywhere or Not at All. Philosophy of Contemporary Art. London:Verso.
Ruprecht, Lucia. 2017. “Towards an Ethics of Gesture.” Performance Philosophy 3 (1): 4–22. Accessed
December 8, 2018. https://www.performancephilosophy.org/journal/issue/view/4.
Siegmund, Gerald. 2001. “Choreographische Interventionen.” In Schluss mit der Spaßkultur. Das Jahrbuch
2001, Ballet International/Tanz Aktuell, edited by Arnd Wesemann, 72–75. Berlin: Friedrich Berlin
Verlagsgesellschaft.
———. 2012. “Negotiating Choreography, Letter, and Law in William Forsythe.” In New German Dance
Studies, edited by Susan Manning and Lucia Ruprecht, 200–216. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
———. 2017. Jérôme Bel: Dance,Theatre, and the Subject. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Weber, Samuel. 2004. Theatricality as Medium. New York: Fordham University Press.
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32
RE-IMAGINING LABAN
Tradition, extinction, invention. Re-staging
as creative contemporary practice
Alison Curtis-Jones
Introduction
In today’s choreographic race to invent, create and move forward, is the present artistic
moment forgetting its own past? In this context, what is the relevance of the dance past, and
should that past be of concern to dancers in training? Can the past inform and inspire today’s
dancers and even help them to understand current practice? Perhaps first, the dance past must
be made palpable to today’s practitioners. But how can this be achieved if current practice
prioritizes new creation over historical understanding?1
In this chapter, I will argue that the dance past is relevant to today’s dancers in training. My
contemporary practice of re-imagining Rudolf von Laban’s (1879–1958) “lost” choreographic
works forms the basis of this argument, and, drawing on my combined role of artistic director and
dance pedagogue, I will detail how I re-staged Drumstick (Curtis-Jones 2015), a re-imagined lost
Laban dance work with dancers at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, London,
in 2017, for performances in London (2017b) and Monte Verita (2017c), Switzerland.
This chapter seeks to demonstrate that, through engagement with the re-staging process
of Drumstick, the need for dancers to remember the work for performance is a process of
archiving embodied knowledge, of movement dynamics, the work itself, and its processes.
That re-staging prepares dancers in training for the industry by placing demands on them to
embody a specific style of movement, perhaps unusually different from their current training
practices, therefore providing opportunity for challenging technical skill acquisition,
enhancing performance execution, and clarifying professional expectations/role.
What is re-imagining?
My contemporary practice of re-imagining Laban’s lost choreographic works include Dancing
Drumstick (1913), Ishtar’s Journey into Hades (1913), Die Nacht (1927), and Green Clowns (1928).
Laban’s choreographic works are largely overlooked, and most are lost completely. Focus
is still on Laban’s notation system, published in 1928, yet Laban had a diverse and sub-
stantial choreographic repertoire. (see Preston-Dunlop 1998, 2008, 2013; Preston-Dunlop
and Purkiss 1989, 1990; Kew 1999; Karina and Kant 2003; Partsch-Bergsohn and Bergsohn
2003; Kant 2004; Dorr 2008; Bradley 2009; Manning 2017; McCaw 2011; Preston-Dunlop
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Alison Curtis-Jones
and Sayers 2011; Curtis-Jones 2017a). Although this raises interesting questions regarding the
dance canon and the inclusion of specific works for study in academic and vocational dance
programs, perhaps because of scarce archival evidence engagement with Laban’s artistic prac-
tice is limited and embodied creations of his works are rare.
By seeking to re-imagine Drumstick, the work is not reenacting, recreating, or repeating,
it is inevitably taking on a new form in the present. The term re-imagining is used to reflect
creative interpretation of limited archival evidence (see Curtis-Jones 2017a), outlining my
definition of material remains and the methodology devised to re-imagine Drumstick (2015)
with Summit Dance Theatre. Here, I will explore what I consider to be the impact on
dancers in training when engaging with Drumstick and discuss the challenges of re-staging
Drumstick from an artistic and pedagogical viewpoint.
My approach to re-imagining a work that is essentially lost is reflected in Alexander
Carter’s view of the study of history as a creative activity (Carter 2004, 14) by inventing a
methodology and consequently establishing a new tradition. Tradition may be viewed as a
belief or behavior passed down within a group with origins in the past, or a transmission
of customs or beliefs from generation to generation. By seeking to dismantle the notion
of history being just a thing of the past and engaging with it as a creative interpretive art
form, through dance and the historical present, and through the artistic practice of creative
re-staging practices (see Main 2017; Edward 2018). The key tension is whether it is possible
to retrieve, reconstruct, or revive a lost work in its original form, or whether we should treat
that work as irretrievable. Terms such as recreation or reinvention suggest more freedom
for creative interpretation (see Franko 1993, 2011, 2017a; Lepecki 2007, 2010; Archer and
Hodson 1991).
Furthermore, the disappearance of a work presents an epistemological problem: how can
a re-staging be authentic to the original work? The issue being knowing what a lost work
was or looked like. With such little attention given to Laban’s choreographic work in the
dance canon, there is little mourning of the passing of works into oblivion or concern for its
extinction.
It is important to ask what kind of dance history is possible? Dance archives encapsu-
late tangible documentary evidence, ranging from, but not exclusive to, choreographic
notes, stage plans, notated scores, photographs, film footage, critics reviews, and drawings.
There may be conflicting evidence about the same event and/or vagueness in not specify-
ing certain attributes. Lack of clarity about whose interpretation influences the archival
remains consequently allows for interpretations and archives can therefore be ambiguous.
The archival remains for Dancing Drumstick, for example, revealed a “lack,” no film footage
or photographs of the work were found, therefore opening potential and possibilities for
re-imagining. However, research of the context of the dance work was extensive, so that
interpretations were based on those available sources.
How archives are defined and used is a source of debate, with different theorists taking
a range of views on such issues as preservation, limitation, and creative potential (Friedman
2011; Main 2012; Jordan 1987; Rubidge 2000; Schneider 2001, 2011; Stalpaert 2011; Whatley
2013). More recently, there has been a growing trend among established American choreog-
raphers to create “artist-driven archives” as part of their artistic work. Like reperformance
projects, artist-driven archives highlight the ways that dancers have a history of turning
to dance archives (their own or others’) as inspiration for new work (see Candelario 2018).
Artist-driven archives are created by the artist as an inherent part of the artist’s own ongoing
creative process and, in this sense, they differ from the traditional archive or the outdated
idea of a room with dusty boxes filled with documents, which, of course, provide crucial
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tangible evidence. I suggest that archives are a place, or site, of creative exchange, where pro-
cesses of translation and interpretation take place. The site or sites can include dancers’ bodies
(see Lepecki 2010) as well as the interpretation of tangible and digital documentary evidence,
which in the case of Laban’s early works are limited (Laban 1926, 1975).
Dancers are encouraged to understand my approach to dealing with archival gaps and
are therefore not only archiving the re-imagined Drumstick through re-staging, but also the
processes of creating and devising the work. For them, gaining knowledge of the practices,
social, cultural, and political contexts through embodied understanding of the dance work of
Laban’s and mine provides a different experience than that of engaging with literary sources
alone; this approach encourages corporeal understanding.
This approach also explores how the re-imagined Laban work generates knowledge and
insight into the cultural and artistic context of the time, encouraging insight for dancers of Laban’s
work as an artist and raises awareness of the differences in and of today’s modes of practice.
Re/heritage
Research of Laban’s Dancing Drumstick (1913) leads me to propose that it is a significant his-
toric work, one that initially lay down Laban’s experiments with rhythm of the dynamic
expressive body, and potentially led to his later development of Effort Theory with FC
Lawrence in 1947. Laban’s autobiography Ein Leben fur den Tanz, published in 1925, exposes
his thinking about his choreography. In Dancing Drumstick, the intention for Laban, as a
choreographic experimenter and philosopher, was to develop by artistic means a sense of
rhythm, not the metric, beat dominated rhythms of music used in the Dalcroze method of
movement and music training, for example. Laban worked with making movement audible
by removing the reliance on music, working without music score, and working with breath
and improvised rhythms. The percussionists followed the dancers, which is not radical today,
but it was in Europe in 1913. Just how significant Laban’s work with the reversal of roles
of music and dance was for the development of contemporary dance needs to be explored
because it changed the power relationship of the two arts and was innovative at the time.
But why might this work be of interest to today’s dancers in training? The way of working
and moving then is so far removed from how dancers are trained today. Surely, therein lies the
challenge. Teachers are generally from a different era than that of their students, and train-
ing practices are historically informed. I am a living archive of my past and current training
practices and influences. How I choose to access these influences, which reside as embodied
knowledge, can influence the outcomes of movement facilitated in the dancers I teach.
It may seem obvious to state that people’s engagement with the arts in the digital twenty
first century is a world away from audiences and artists in 1913, but what were and are those
differences? How can we present works from the past today in a way that it is not about res-
urrecting relics or museum pieces, or which attempts to reconstruct what went before, but
does so in a way that acknowledges the past and can have meaning and impact for current
performers and audiences? Here lies the dilemma.
Contemporary choreological practice

For the re-imagining and re-staging of Drumstick, I created a methodology informed by
choreological practice; contemporary developments of Laban’s principles of Choreutics
(Space Harmony) (1966) and Eukinetics/Effort (dynamics and rhythm) (Laban and Lawrence
1947). This is not to claim that it is Laban’s approach, on the contrary, it is an approach to
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choreological practice which has evolved from engagement with and development of Laban’s
principles for contemporary dance practice. Choreological practice engages with the intrinsic
structures of movement, the outward manifestation of inner feeling and human movement in
functional and expressive forms. Movement structures can be identified because the body is
structured in a particular way. Movement is therefore intrinsically structured, and the body’s
relationship to gravity creates affinities in movement in time and space. Choreological practice
has been largely associated with movement analysis (Laban 1966; Hutchinson-Guest 1983;
Maletic 1987; Moore and Yamamoto 1988) and, while this is important, here, a choreo-
logical lens is used to devise movement and to question the dichotomy between what the
dancer experiences and what is seen; the experiential and analytical through creative practice.
The multi-sensory body is fundamental in my pedagogical and artistic practice. Rather than
placing emphasis on viewing movement from the outside, the intention of the performer, the
sensation of the movement, and conscious control of movement for performance that manifests
in making movement visible is essential. Furthermore, the relationship of the performer with
resident sensations in the body in functional and expressive forms of movement is explored
through embodied practice. The training program devised using Laban principles to prepare
the dancers for the demands of Drumstick (2017 b,c) will be referred to later in this chapter.
In this re-staging process, combining learning some of the material as set with contrib-
uting to improvised sections, dancers have autonomy and ownership of the outcome of the
dance work. Their contributions shape its existence. Something which is perhaps not so
possible with a reconstructed work, where the movement and a surface form, already in exis-
tence, is set. For dancers in training, the aim of this re-staging is to facilitate their learning
about movement by referring to choreological principles such as the structural model (body,
action, space, relationships, dynamics) to enhance their understanding of the intrinsic struc-
tures of the body and subsequently movement, and the resulting dynamic and spatial affinities
of movement because of our body’s relationship with gravity. These affinities are relevant
to us all, but our habitual movement tendencies can differ, and when dynamic preferences
are identified, then dancers can move beyond repeated patterns, extend dynamic range, and
experience dynamic nuance. Drumstick is the rhythm of body made audible and requires
extreme and subtle movement dynamics. Dancers are encouraged to identify and expand
their dynamic range, to embody extreme and subtle dynamic changes sequential and simul-
taneous, and to better understand their own limitations and personal dynamic preferences.
Working with dancers to move away from choreological principles purely as an analytical
tool and using the principles instead in an artistic context to create work, engages dancers
in the development of their dynamic range and challenges their execution in performance.
This approach encourages embodied understanding of dynamics and space in and through
practice by providing a mode of training using contemporary choreological practice to make
work artistically, but also to establish skills acquisition for dancers using specific dynamic
movement training developed from Laban’s Effort Theory (Laban and Lawrence 1947) as
a form of technical training. Consequently, dancers can articulate the necessary dynamics
for Drumstick because of their understanding of the dynamic spectrum available to them
through this training, which then manifests in creative and performance contexts. Dancers
also explore harmonic principles of time and space that can be ruptured for creative work.
Dancers in training require this kind of awareness; it encourages movement literacy
and it is taught and interrogated through the re-staging process of Drumstick. Moreover, by
rehearsing the works for performance, the rhythmic and spatial precision necessary in the
execution of the work drives a desire for knowing the material, being inside the work, to
make it come alive in a performance setting (see Illustration 32.1).
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Re-imagining Laban
Illustration 32.1 Drumstick Bonnie Bird Theatre, UK, 2017. Choreography Alison Curtis-Jones.
(Courtesy of James Keates.)
Re-staging as contemporary practice

Re-staging(s) have the potential to breed new forms and could be compared with natural
processes of evolution. I propose that like re-imagining, re-staging is a creative process, in
constant flux, as are the dancers who inhabit and revisit the work as living archives. This pro-
cess is reliant on my own archived knowledge of Laban principles and contemporary devel-
opments of choreological practice and results in evolving the work in the present.
The debate around re-staging is relevant in today’s dance practice (see Main 2012, 2017;
Nicholas and Morris 2018) as are views on temporality, preservation, and digital archiving.
The prefix “re” can be attached to a range of different verbs to imply revisiting or return in
various ways and include terms such as revive, return, reenact, restage, recreate, research,
reconstruct, revisit, reconnect, repeat (see Barba 2017; Franko 2017a; Main 2017; Pakes 2017;
Edward 2018). The term re-imagining is used here because this work is not about exhuming
relics or preserving work in its original form. The contemporary practice of re-imagining uses
live arts practice to draw attention to significant historic work that would otherwise be forgot-
ten, and the re-staging process allows for future developments of the work.
From this perspective it is important for dancers to understand why and how the dance
work exists. This understanding comes from knowing the context from which the original
and re-imagined dance work derives. Sharing research of cultural context and interpretation
of archival material remains is the same when working with professional dance artists and
dancers in training. When working with dancers in training, sharing of my artistic approaches,
decision making, and methods were exposed through practical and verbal articulation of my
practice as a way for dancers to understand why and how I was working in this way and to
make the distinction clear that the transmission process they experience is my practice rather
than Laban’s. In so doing, they come to understand that what they are physically archiving
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Alison Curtis-Jones
is not only the work itself, but also the processes and methodologies used to create it. It is
important to note that I am not pretending to be Laban. It is not possible to state Drumstick is
Laban’s work, and the shift from the word recreation to re-imagining more accurately reflects
this tension between the work as it was, and the work as I imagine it. Thus, this approach is
not bound by a Laban tradition, but the practice is informed by my understanding of it.
Combining dance artistry and pedagogy

The dynamic interplay, or nexus of pedagogical and artistic perspectives allows me to train,
facilitate, and educate to widen and expand knowledge for dancers in training. As creator and
transmitter of Drumstick, dancers in training experience outcomes of the initial experiments
and are given insights to the creative process throughout the re-staging rehearsals. In future re-
staging(s) of Drumstick, dancers can draw from this knowledge and the embodied resident sen-
sations of the emerging work in the present with an understanding of movement motivation.
In Drumstick, there is reliance on dancers to shape the work through improvisation in the
creative process, and live on stage; therefore, re-staging Drumstick became more about re-making
or evolving the work in the immediate present because of the current dancers’ contributions.
Through revisiting my practice from 2015, movement emerges and subsequently resides in the
dancers’ bodies, allowing me to refine and redefine what is observed and performed in the pres-
ent. Bodies, in this case, refer not only to the anatomical body, that is, as separate from the mind,
but the corporeal, thinking, body and mind holistically intertwined. A re-making of Drumstick
results because the form relies not only on contributions from dancers but also from me as direc-
tor. This process strengthens the argument for dance as transient and transformational, and even
irretrievability, in that the work is constantly evolving, and arguably cannot possibly be staged
twice in exactly the same way, particularly in the case of Drumstick, which includes sections of
improvisation. It becomes a new form of itself in the present, aligning with Franko’s view that
“the notion of the work is not only recalled but also destabilized; the belief that authenticity is
both confined and turned on its head.” (2017b, 7).
As choreographer, it is possible to provide an inside-insight, or looking from within the
work, rather than observing work from the outside, knowing where the work comes from
historically and why it emerged. ‘It’ here refers to two works, Laban’s Dancing Drumstick
(1913) and Curtis-Jones’s Drumstick (2015), that is, from Laban’s cultural and sociological
historical distant past perspective and more recently, my recent-past interpretation, is funda-
mental to being equipped to take it forward. This new form exists because of the acknowl-
edgement of aspects and events of the distant past, but cannot replicate those aspects and
events, it provides a contemporary nod to them…perhaps aligning with Mark Franko’s view
of attempting to save the work from oblivion (2017b).
This absence of archival knowledge facilitates potential to fill archival gaps with interpre-
tation of available sources, material remains, and oral histories through the devised meth-
odology. Memories constantly transform and are newly created in the present because of
historical distance. This temporal difference (Franko 2017b, 35) might make one question
the reliability of memory and the amount of personal interpretation in the construction of
memories in the present. The re-call and construction of memories is itself a creative act.
What remembered oral histories mean to me or others will depend on individual interpreta-
tion and are influenced by several factors such as background knowledge, experience, cul-
ture. As with memories of my own processes, some of which I had forgotten and were
recalled while re-staging with the dancers in training, so too, dancers’ individual interpreta-
tions of the re-staging process may also differ.
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Re-imagining Laban
Shifting perspectives are inevitable over time, as with new readings of old sources, and
revisiting sources with renewed knowledge and insight can challenge previous perspectives
on the work, aligning with view of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) that perception is an
active process. Sources themselves are mute. It is historians who articulate what the sources
say (Franko 2017b, 38) or choreographers, as in my role of animating archives (in my body,
dancers’ bodies) through reimagining and re-staging, contributing to the study of (dance)
history as a creative activity created by the historian and the recipient (Carter 2004, 14).
Case study
Engagement in sensory and motor learning through training, and benefits of learning
through doing, is extensively researched (see Dewey 1938; Piaget 1954; Kolb 1976, 1984;
Spatz 2015). When dancers in training embody dance works, their engagement with the
work itself is enhanced, stimulating interest in the choreographer, the cultural context, and
wider issues such as impact of the work at the time. Engaging with past works can transform
their outlook, as opposed to being concerned only with their own practices, giving dancers
a greater perspective, therefore changing perceptions of their own and the work of others.
Investigating the dance work physically and somatically provides something that cannot be
obtained by imagining the work from reading materials. In one’s mind, the work remains
virtual but experienced and seen in the dancers’ bodies, the work is corporeal, actual, alive,
visceral, and connects dancers in the immediate present to aspects of the past. This view
aligns with Henrietta Bannerman’s “thinking in the work,” physically knowing the work
from within as opposed to knowing about it from outside (Bannerman 2017, 94).
This practical research refers specifically to undergraduate dancers at Trinity Laban. Each
year, dancers take part in Historical Project, a module in their second year of training, where
they experience the work of “dance legends” and significant works from the recent past and dis-
tant past. In 2017, Trinity Laban dancers performed works by Dore Hoyer, Hofesch Schechter,
Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, and a re-staging of my re-imagined work Drumstick
(2015) based on research of Rudolf Laban’s Dancing Drumstick (1913) (see Illustration 32.2).
The module is delivered intensively over 3 weeks, where usual timetabled activities
are suspended (Kowal, Siegmund, Martin 2017). Dancers engage with the choreographers
directly, or with dance artists from the companies, to learn repertoire for public performance.
The artistic training and rehearsal period also include supporting seminars on contextual the-
ory (See Foucault 1972; Burt 2003; Thomas 2003; Vertrinsky 2005; Greenhead and Habron
2015; Kowal, Siegmund, Martin 2017), so that dancers are aware of the cultural, social, and
historical significance of the works as well as the choreographer’s methods.
In this context, issues arise such as sharing the broader historical context of the original
1913 work Dancing Drumstick, coupled with my contemporary practice of re-imagining, and
the processes and methodology developed to create Drumstick in today’s context, which dif-
fer from Laban’s. It is made clear to dancers that I am offering a contemporary re-imagining,
not a promise to return to that past. How then, are the processes of transmission different
when re-staging with dancers in training to working with a professional company? Most
notably, how does this work challenge dancers in training? (see Illustration 32.3).
Priorities are notably different with dancers in training. In an educational context, it is
necessary to navigate between both artistic and pedagogic practice, balancing the needs of
the dancers in training with the demands of the artistic work. Learning is not an objective
in the same way for professional artists as it is for less experienced dancers. The re-staging
process is used to learn different ways, or a specific way of moving, dancers experience the
461
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Re-imagining Laban
practice of collaboration and are led to question their responses and creative approaches
within movement and training practices. This collaborative shared learning environment
ultimately carries the same responsibility as for professional dancers, because dancers in train-
ing are required to embody and execute the re-staged work for public performance. Dancers
in training are experiencing professional roles and responsibilities, the need to remember
movement detail through bodily encoding and memorizing movement, the necessity for rep-
etition in rehearsal to clarify spatial accuracy and dynamic rigor, and how through repetition
of taught material it is possible to re-search and find something new in the same material.
A high level of technical proficiency can be achieved by practicing through repetition to
develop movement accuracy, spatial clarity, range of expression, kinesthetic sensitivity, rhyth-
mic precision and harmonious, or efficient use of the body. Repetition is required by dancers
in training to a greater degree because they are learning to develop correct placement and
alignment to avoid injury, or to adhere to the demands of specific techniques. They learn to
negotiate their own body weight while moving, affinities of movement with gravity and space,
to develop body awareness, and movement expressivity. In re-staging Drumstick, dancers are
not only taught what initiates the movement, but how to execute it technically and expres-
sively. They are taught to develop dynamic range and learn to recognize dynamic sensations
and to consciously control movement for performance. For professionals, it is what Spatz, Ben
refers to as “sedimented technique” (2015, 57) stating that “technique is more than habitus or
performativity. It structures all levels of practice, from the conscious to the unconscious, and
is completely interwoven with agency throughout” (57). Spatz’ view of technique as knowl-
edge embedded and atomized within one’s own body is not just a question of learned patterns
or muscle memory (55). Time is needed by dancers in training to embody, understand, and
acquire tacit knowledge. This requirement is less so for professional dancers because they can
emulate, repeat, and retain movement detail more quickly. Summit Dance Theatre dancers, for
example, are already equipped with a wide dynamic range, which has been developed through
specific dynamics training. Their years of repetitive professional training and exploratory prac-
tices results in what could be referred to as embodied knowledge, or bodily intelligence, they
have what could be described as a body of knowledge and a body in knowledge (Spatz 2015, 59).
The synthesis of training and educating, includes nurturing as well as developing danc-
ers’ mental and physical resilience. The process involves dancers going beyond the chal-
lenges of embodying unfamiliar movement; it is also understanding how to be part of a
community, their role within a dance company, to communicate, negotiate, problem solve,
and awareness of self as an emerging dance artist. The intensive training period prepares
dancers not only to re-stage Drumstick but highlights professional expectations, the need for
good time management and readiness to work, to learn movement quickly and to retain it,
focus, commitment, collaborative skills and self-care. Fabien Barba’s view is that an educa-
tion in dance is not only a technical education, it is also a way of becoming a part of a dance
culture (Barba 2017, 44).
The range of “what a body can do is substantially altered” through training prac-
tices (Spatz 2015, 56). Training takes time, movement possibilities and accuracy results
through repetition of detail and rigor. Through repetition of movement in rehearsal, it
is possible to find differences and newness, encouraging dancers to articulate physically
and verbally, therefore developing their movement literacy. To use time productively
in rehearsal, pedagogical strategies are required to accommodate large group numbers.
This arrangement is noticeably different from most professional settings, as are setting a
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Alison Curtis-Jones
variety of tasks to enable moving between teaching styles to accommodate different types
of learners and intelligences (see Gardner 1983; Mosston and Ashworth 1986) and to give
specific instructions and appropriate feedback to encourage movement specificity, expres-
sivity, and performance confidence. Drumstick requires a high level of physical strength
and this encourages dancers to take responsibility for their fitness inside and outside of
the studio. Repetition of material helps to build stamina. The shift from rehearsal to
performance and the projection of energy into the larger theatre space, which dancers
prepared for during studio rehearsals, was not fully appreciated by the dancers in training
until they transferred into the Bonnie Bird Theatre for spacing and technical rehearsals.
It was then, dancers were able to physically experience the scale of the performance envi-
ronment. During studio rehearsals, dancers were taught to consider intention and use of
space for entrances and exits, but negotiating theatre entrances and exits and collaborating
with live musicians in the theatre, where sound was acoustically different, provided them
with new challenges, alongside remembering movement detail. Placing the work in the
performance environment facilitated their learning and provided opportunities to apply
their newly acquired knowledge in situ (see Illustration 32.4).
Memory
Despite the current culture of immediacy, where movement can be recorded with handheld
devices such as iPhones and other technological devices, the dancer is still required to hold
the memory data of movement sensations in their own multi-sensory body as archive. Having
experienced the technical dance training required to perform Drumstick, the dancers’ body-
library stores these experiences, giving them a particular insight and sensory memory as
resident sensation. I propose Drumstick dancers become a dynamic living archive of the work,
464
Re-imagining Laban
suggesting that the body serves as a kind of filing system for storing and accessing memories
and aligning with Schiller’s idea of the “body library” (Schiller 2014, 137) as a metaphor
for archived sensorial experience. The body is constant dynamic flux and a constant state of
renewal and carrier of its own history, of movement qualities, and of the work itself; it is a
locus of knowledge. If these sensations reside, dancers can re-discover the dynamic sensations
of a previously experienced work for future re-staging, and through this process of dynamic
returning, or dynamic process of re-visiting and remembering, are dancers transforming and
evolving themselves and the work?
From this perspective, oral and embodied traditions transmitted to dancers estab-
lish dancers as “live documentary evidence,” carrying sensory data, which should be
afforded the same value as notated scores or tangible archival documents. In today’s
digitally driven world, reliance on the visible recording of work on phones, tablets, and
other devices has encouraged an immediate library of documentation to remember work
which emerges from seeing movement from the outside. Could it be that the sensory
bodily memory and the dancer’s role in the re-call of sensory evidence is not priori-
tized in the same way because of the dominance and immediacy of today’s excessive
recordings of movement data on film? Is bodily memory being outsourced to phones?
Hopefully, through the medium of dance and live performance, bodily memory will
never become a disregarded tradition.
This situation means we should be according value to the “carriers” and “transmitters”
of oral traditions, as well as to their habitus and habitat. This “tangible heritage and its
aliveness” referred to by Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (cited in Iacono and Brown 2016, 90) is
particularly appealing in my practice. I’m aware of my own constantly shifting perspectives
dependent on what I read, what I discover through my practice, and how one informs, alters,
and re-enforces the other, thereby allowing the work to constantly shift and be in flux rather
than static. Limitations of the body over time, however, require consideration, because the
body is aging and could become unreliable.
This nexus of influences and experiences establishes a specific heritage, a rich tapestry
of dance training, culture, and heritage archived corporeally in dancers’ bodies. Iacono and
Brown (2016) propose that in/tangible heritage can be defined as follows:
living cultural heritage is embodied by individuals, in connections with the artefacts

they produce and use and the environment they interact with and it is expressed
through practices, activities and performances. Living cultural heritage is also con-
stituted by socially and culturally influenced traditions and conventions, as well
as by the feelings and emotions of people and the way they relate to this heritage,
including taste and perceptions, contributing to the idea that heritage and human
beings are indissolubly connected and continuously shape each other in an open
fluid dialogue. (91)
The dancers themselves, I suggest, are dynamic dance heritage.
Monte Verita’s past and today’s multi-sensory body

Performing Drumstick outdoors in Monte Verita, Switzerland, in 2017, exposed the rela-
tionship of dancers with their environment. Place and performance were bound together,
experienced sensorially through the human body (Iacono and Brown 2016, 90). Dancers
were made aware of Laban’s history and the events in Monte Verita in the early 1900s
465
Alison Curtis-Jones
(see Green 1986), of Laban’s encounters with artists such as Suzanne Perrottet Odom
(2002) and Mary Wigman, the emergence of European Modern Dance, and the creation
of Dancing Drumstick there in 1913 (Preston-Dunlop and Purkiss 1989, 1990). This knowl-
edge created a meaningful experience for the dancers in training who performed outdoors
in Monte Verita in 2017, an experience which transformed and inspired them in a differ-
ent way than engaging with paper trails and remains. However, the contextual knowledge
they gained from engaging with theoretical sources gave this performance in Monte Verita
a different significance because of the attribution of historic significance to the place and
space (see Shapiro 2011; Schiller and Rubidge 2014). This affective bond between people
and place is known as one’s sense of place (Sen and Silvermann 2014, 14). The term
“placemaking” originates from Martin Heidegger’s concept of Daesein, being in the world,
(Heidegger 1996, 17) on the constitutive relationship between people and their physical
environment (Sen and Silvermann 2014, 3) suggesting that the latter exists through con-
sciousness, actions, and interactions. Therefore, embodied placemaking places the body at
the forefront of placemaking activities as a vital component of the social construction of
space. Performing this re-imagined work inspired by the past, in the present, on the site
where it was originally created, draws attention to the historicism of the space and place.
By attributing historic significance to the place, it becomes more than a space, it is a place
which carries meaning, or in Lefebvre’s view, the space has symbolic existence (Lefebvre
1974, 405), therefore heightening the experience for performers. This knowledge brings
power to the experience of “being” in that place. Dancers in training were drawn to
perform in Monte Verita because of this knowledge, and the impact of performing there
was clearly visible in their responses with one dancer stating, “I hope in 100 years, people
will look back on these images of us, as we looked back to the past.” The evolution of
this space and place today is evident, a hotel is used there now for leisure and conference
type activities, so how many people visit there oblivious to the significance of past events
which have contributed to our dance heritage? (see Illustration 32.5).
Illustration 32.5 Drumstick, Monte Verita, Switzerland 2017. Choreography Alison Curtis-Jones.
(Courtesy of Irene Zuccinelli.)
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Re-imagining Laban
Conclusion
By making space distinct whether it is through movement or design, we cannot divorce the
notion of experience, the lived body inhabits space according to its history, we cannot sepa-
rate the body from perception. Corporeality is not only a reference to the body, but also the
body in all dimensions, physical, psychological, cultural, real, and imaginative in relation to
the world. This connection refers to Laban’s idea of spirituality, his concern with the experi-
ence of the movement and could be aligned with what we now understand to be somatic.
The experience of performing Drumstick outdoors in Monte Verita, in direct contact with
nature, was a conductive environment in which the dancer absorbed and developed sensa-
tions, feelings, and experiences in the moment. This variable environment, less controlled
than that of Bonnie Bird Theatre in London, provided a new learning experience for the
dancers in training. Dancers emerged from the audience, seated on the grass banks and verges.
It was a warm August evening. The dancers walked to the grassy area, next to the piscine, or
the swimming pool, near to the carving of the world map etched into the grass. Musicians
were already set up with drumkit, cymbals, and percussion instruments, providing an identi-
fiable marker for the audience as a defined performance space. The ground was uneven, and
environmental sound such as wind and birdsong created a different atmosphere that required
them to negotiate in the moment (see Illustration 32.5). The dancers continued to per-
form Drumstick outdoors in Monte Verita that evening, despite unforeseen and unpredictable
changes in their environment during the performance; an approaching thunderstorm, dark-
ening skies, the distant sound of rumbling thunder, decreasing temperature, sudden cracks of
lightening, and a deluge of heavy rain (see Illustrations 32.6 and 32.7). This atmosphere cre-
ated an immersive experience for all performers and audience, a multi-sensory engagement
with the work in an outdoor environment on this significant site, providing a different kind
of theatricality with very different demands than the Bonnie Bird Theatre, London. As Anne
Donnelly states,” … it is the whole theatrical aspect of the event that is so important for the
young dancer to comprehend and experience.” (quoted in Bannerman 2018, 99).
(Courtesy of Irene Zuccinelli.)
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Alison Curtis-Jones
(Courtesy of Alison Curtis-Jones.)
This chapter identifies two very different re-staging performance experiences for the
dancers in training, each with challenges and providing opportunities for engagement with
and learning about the dance work, the context, the artist, and the processes.
Through re-staging, the multi-sensory body acquires new knowledge, becoming a
dynamic living archive, providing a place for the Drumstick of today to exist and to continue
to evolve in re-stagings tomorrow.
Note
1 Thanks to Nunzia Tirelli for her continued support of this work. Thanks to Professor Helen Thomas.
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33
“DANCING THROUGH THE
HARD STUFF”
Repetition, resilience, and female solidarity in
the landscape—Rosemary Lee’s Passage for Par
Introduction
This is a chapter of conversations, thoughts, and images that have arisen from within the
choreographic process that became Passage for Par—a site-specific performance by Rosemary
Lee performed in the summer of 2018. Passage for Par was commissioned by the Cornubian
Arts and Science Trust (CAST) for the Groundwork program that bought international art
to Cornwall in the South West of the UK.
As with many embodied processes, attempting to articulate the rich and varied expe-
riences that came about through the intensive rehearsal process and long period of
research and development is a somewhat daunting task. This is not to subscribe to a
paradigm in which dance is a metaphysical language that cannot be understood in other
terms but to acknowledge that representing a live process through writing is distinct
from the original form and should not be viewed as equivalent to it. Embodied experi-
ence is a starting point for further ref lections here; it values the knowledge generated
by the practice itself rather than producing interpretations through particular analytical
frameworks. Voices from the dancers who performed in the work are included not only
to avoid the reductive voice of the singular author but also to contribute to a grow-
ing body of work that makes the dancer’s voice and experience central to any inquiry.
The image of the mute dancer “silently executing steps and manipulating the body”
(Lunn as quoted in Carter 1998, 53), as choreographer Jonathan Lunn once put it, is a
dominant model in dance studies in which the scholarly position is one that is exterior
to the dancing, a paradigm that is shifting as practice as research is more frequently
included in academic studies of dance.
The pronoun “we” used throughout this chapter refers to me, Ruth Pethybridge—a
dance researcher and also the assistant choreographer for Passage for Par—and Rosemary
Lee—the choreographer and director of the work. Although I provide the framing in this
written dialogue, it is always informed by our mutuality in the process of understanding the
471
reverberations of the practice. Rosemary’s words are indicated by the initials RL and are
quotations from our conversations, and the chapter ends with a section of our dialogue.
Passage for Par was an outdoor performance event with a cast of thirty women that took
place three times over three days in June 2018 at the turn of the tide. Each performance time
varied according to the tide, and took place both in the evening at dusk and in the early
morning June 22, 7.15–9.15 pm; June 23, 8.15–10.15 pm; June 24, 9.15–11.15 am (sunset:
21.33) (Illustration 33.1).
The dancers inched their way in a snaking line across the expansive wet sand for
two hours in an interconnected line, winding their way toward the distant shoreline where
they faced the sea and the horizon, their backs to the far-away audience. Their journey
then meandered back toward the higher ground with lilting, rolling steps, coming so
close to the audience that their breathing was audible, and the salt on their clothes and in
their hair was visible. The performance ended with this creature like structure of female
bodies vanishing into the landscape from where they had emerged. The vocabulary of
steps they shared was predominantly based on very simple Breton/Cornish folk dance
steps where the dancers are joined shoulder to shoulder and by the link of curled little
fingers or grasped hands.
A description of the performance from a review featured in the Financial Times reads:
[Par Beach]—A lip of sand wedged between the fume-wreathed cylinders of a

working china clay factory and the ivy-dark slopes of Gribbin Head, the lizard-
green shoreline glitters thanks to its natural quota of quartz and mica.
Here, as the tide turned under a brûlée rich sunset, Lee’s performers—30 women
dressed in dark navy, their arms interlinked—moved across the reptilian pelt [ridged
sand] with tiny, impeccable gestures that married minimalism to folk dancing.
For two hours, the audience, who ranged from art students to picnicking families,
Illustration 33.1 Passage for Par, at the start of the performance. Image taken from a drone, dress
rehearsal June 21, 2018. Photo: Graham Gaunt© CAST (Cornubian Arts and Science Trust.)
472
“Dancing through the hard stuff”
remained mesmerised by the collective display of inner and outer unity—not a foot
could falter or all would collapse like dominoes. Lee’s only injunction to viewers
was to stay at a distance as the troupe’s fluid calligraphies were best appreciated from
afar. (Spence 2018)
What Rachel Spence identifies here as the “inner and outer” unity that was necessary
to sustain the work is an observation of what was also the methodology of the piece—a
conceptual and practical device in which the women remained interdependent and in contact
throughout. This constant physical connection contributed to an experience of solidarity
in rehearsing and performing this two-hour work, not least because the techniques it used
were a physical challenge requiring concentration and discipline. The constant repetition
of the steps allowed the dancers to enter different states and meant that the audience was
not only seeing the overall choreographic form, but also the very practical physical labor and
work necessary to execute it. The challenge and environment of the landscape, the repetitive
nature of the steps, and the physical connection of the women throughout this performance
are all key factors in contributing to the sense of resilience and female solidarity.
Experiencing landscape
Cornwall is a large coastal county in the UK, well known for its scenic beaches and cliffs,
and as a holiday destination. Lesser known is the fact that it is one of the poorest regions
in Northern Europe due to the decline of its industries, predominantly mining, which had
brought prosperity in previous eras.
The coast of Par has a specific context and was chosen over and above other popular tourist
sites in Cornwall1 for its reminders of the county’s industrial past: the Kaolin refinery over-
looks the beach and is part of its sedimented history in the glittering sand. As we experienced,
many people arriving on the beach considered it an eye-sore; however, for the choreography
the refinery functioned as a basso continuo via the constant hum of its engines, and a reminder
of the Cornwall that exists in parallel—and beyond—its identity as a tourist destination:
RL: … the beach felt like it was pulsing; there was a different aliveness to it that was a kind
of vibration. I think that was because of the kaolin refinery, emitting a low sort of growl,
a boiler room hum that we weren’t really consciously aware of but it was affecting us …
(Illustration 33.2)
Once the decision about the site was made, during the rehearsal process it became clear that
while what we were doing there was not always clear to the local residents and beach users,
there was a sense that they were grateful that we had chosen “their” beach. The owner-
ship that locals felt for Par beach came in part from their understanding that it was not a
renowned beauty spot. For Rosemary, it was important to honor people’s love for this site
and not intrude on their relationship to it. Part of the research involved meeting people—
local naturalists, the “friends of Par beach” group, dog walkers, and families—and discussing
our intentions alongside their understandings of this unique place:
RL: … for me the work has to have an intimate partnership with the site that is showing the
site in the best possible way. Not in a “chocolate box” sort of way at all, but I am trying
to reveal the potential of the site so that people see what I am seeing. Equally I am trying
to do the same with the dancers—making visible the radiance, potential, power, and
473
Illustration 33.2 Passage for Par, by Rosemary Lee Commissioned by CAST for Groundwork, Par
Sands Beach, Cornwall 2018, Taken from the coastal path on the headland with the backdrop of the
factory, evening performance June 22, 2001. Photo by Steve Tanner.
subtlety I see in them. It’s not that I physically do anything to the site; it’s more that I try
to change how people experience it, and what they are noticing …
The site also informed, dictated even, a lot about the work. Because Rosemary was clear that
Passage for Par needed to largely be viewed from a distance, and that the dancers needed to be
seen to reach the distant edge of the waves, this required a large expanse of beach, exposed only
when the tide was at its lowest (or so we thought). Rosemary spent months studying the tide
timetables a year in advance. The actual height in meters of the low tide made a real difference
to the timing of the performance itself and indeed the movement material. As Rosemary put it:
RL: Each low and high tide has a different height of water, and we needed a specific height
to reveal the optimal expanse of wet sand; too low a tide and the beach was too big and
too high the beach was too small. I think I spent nine months hoping something would
shift, but actually I was dealing with the cosmos—of course it wasn’t going to shift!
This reliance on the tide and the weather became a reminder to reflect on the relationship
between human and the environment—as many of the performers did in evocative, poetic
writing, and reflections during and after the performances. As performer Nicola Visser reflected:
The tide is turning. Inward of its watery heart it changes the pump setting and
forces the suck to spit. I can hear it in the folded angle of the waves. So subtle I don’t
know it and I do. I would run if I were a mother holding my child’s hands, I would
watch out, check the cliffs for navigation, I would not be the statistic of bodies
caught in coves. My eyes would be everywhere.
474
Instead I am holding your hand left and right.
We pulse and call. We raise our arms and stay stay stay to face the turning and provoke
the water to do its worst, to rush and return, while our feet stay dry for the while.
(Nicola Visser, personal communication, July 12, 2018)
Dealing with the very real issues of the site—the ever-shifting deep lagoons, the rivulets that
changed course, how the wind radically changed the texture of the sand overnight so that the
dancers’ footing was less sure, the banks of seaweed that appeared and disappeared, even the sand
flies—affected the structure of our final two-week intensive rehearsal period.
RL: Just through the practicalities of the actual schedule—moving the start times of our
rehearsals half an hour every two days—made us become so at one with the site that is
so beautiful. You could have drawn a wave across the schedule. That’s amazing; when
do you ever get the opportunity to work like that, so symbiotically?
The dancers were getting to know the place through their work—a practice that is very
rooted in the ways that people working in those kind of environments in practical, industri-
ous ways would recognize.
RL: I found the physical and metaphysical link of our bodies with the landscape very mov-
ing; perhaps there are parallels with the way a dry stone waller, a cockle picker, or a
fisherman reads their surroundings. We were reading and sensing the landscape for our
dance. It constantly changed us, and we changed it.
Visser also described the practice of the piece as feeling like her place of work had become
the beach. The ritual of arriving every day in these different states and at different times to
meet the landscape:
The weather is changeable from one sand dune to the next and thinking it is warm
while having tea on the sand dune’s dip [while] it is a howling gale out on the
wet tidal flat … so it was a wonderful thing to practice every day on the beach to
become accustomed to nothing being the same. (Nicola Visser, personal commu-
nication, July 12, 2018)
Speaking of interactions between organism and environment in 1980, Humberto Maturana

and Francisco Varela refer to “a mutually dependent co-creation of any moment between
the living system and its environment. A particular kind of terrain may trigger a certain
kind of walk as a recurrent interaction, because of its physical characteristics and potential
dangers …” (Maturana and Varela as quoted in Reeve 2011, 34). They propose this as “a way
of seeing cognition not as a representation of the world ‘out there’ but rather as an on-going
bringing forth of a world through the process of living itself ” (Reeve 2011, 34). In the same
way, experiencing the landscape of Par beach every day, the dancers began to understand it
through and with their bodies (Illustration 33.3).
Similarly, social anthropologist Tim Ingold (1993) conceives of the notion of “dwelling” as
“a way to overcome the entrenched division between ‘two worlds’ of nature and society, and to
re-embed human being and becoming within the continuum of the lifeworld” (Ingold 2011, 4).
475
Illustration 33.3 Passage for Par, Reflections in the shallow waters of the tidal flats, dress rehearsal,
June 21, 2018. Photo: Graham Gaunt© CAST (Cornubian Arts and Science Trust.)
In this view, human beings are constantly involved in the remembering and remaking of history
through experiences and impressions, as the dancers were through the process of making and
remembering and treading Passage for Par within the landscape:
The beach for me felt like a playground, it wasn’t easy to resist running into the sea
or rolling about in the sand. I have so many fond memories of the beach; for me it is
family, it is friends, and it is the community, this is what it felt like every day, a family
with a routine. I never buried my excitement being on the beach. I invested it into
my body particularly for the performance and in my swirling thoughts each day, a
360-degree connection became embedded into my thoughts through discussions and
trying out new movements on the beach, I felt wider, stronger, and more radiant than
I’ve ever felt before. Even on days where I felt ill and sore, the surroundings were like
support, the air was there to relieve any stress, the blowing grass was there to distract
my mind from thinking about my aches and pains, and finally the hands behind and
in front of me were there to emotionally support me through the day. These sur-
roundings didn’t know how much they helped me through the tough times but I am
sure they felt my connection too. (Performer Ayesha Fayzal, personal communication,
August 27, 2018)
As this reflection demonstrates, the dancers came to know the landscape and connect to it and
their memories through their embodied experience. Not only did it provide support as Fayzal
articulates, but it also gave detailed feedback about how to adapt the choreography—the tech-
niques the dancers used to move together depending on the lay of the land, down to where the
weight of the feet needed to be to manage the bumpy sand below and maintain their rhythm.
476
Furthermore, through creating stories, images, memories, and impressions, they were creating
the landscape as much as they were moving within it; perhaps in Erin Manning’s (2009, 13)
terms they were “body-worlding,” in which the moving body creates space rather than merely
populating it. Or, in phenomenological terms, Maurice Merleau Ponty ([1962] 1974) posits
that the body provides a central perspective from which to respond to the world. Although
not adopting a phenomenological method per se, it is useful to consider how this writing draws
from such an approach that “foregrounds the body as a site for investigation, knowledge and
perception” (Fraleigh 1987, 3). Sara Ahmed also suggests that “phenomenology reminds us that
spaces are not exterior to our bodies; instead spaces are like a second skin that unfolds in the
folds of the body” (2006, 9).The perceptions and reflections from the dancers during the process
for Passage for Par confirm the process of becoming between body and landscape, which Fazal
described as a reciprocal connection. Ingold also makes the point that “landscape” is something
“qualitative and heterogenous” (1993, 154) as opposed to the idea of “land” as something objec-
tifiable or “space” as a phenomenon that can be represented by a cartographer. For Ingold, “To
perceive the landscape is an act of remembrance, and remembering is not so much a matter of
calling up an internal image stored in the mind, as of engaging perceptually with an environ-
ment that is itself pregnant with the past” (1993, 152). This idea of landscape resonates with the
experiences of the dancers in Passage for Par that was an embodied act of engagement with the
physical site and its stories and associations.
Repetition and remembering

Many of the performers referred to their memories of people and place as they moved within
the landscape. The beach at Par was at once singular and also a window onto shared experi-
ences of womanhood, sea, and sand: “There she is my grandmother, weaving in across the
horizon. I feel her wrap and spool into my heart and then beat it strong again” (Nicola Visser,
personal communication, July 12, 2018). The duration of the work allowed these memories
and images to surface for the dancers of landscapes from their past and from their imagina-
tions. Similarly, Ingold’s “dwelling perspective” proposes that the landscape is “an enduring
record of—and testimony to—the lives of past generations who have dwelt within it” (152).
Like phenomenology, Ingold advocates for knowledge derived from people’s lived experi-
ence in the world. The dancers at Par experienced a sensation of having danced in the foot-
steps of previous generations of women that became part of the narrative of the piece and
informed the folk-derived movement material.
As with much folk dance, repetition of simple steps was a central choreographic device
as the dancers meandered across the sand flats for two hours. Having explored more linear
forms and flocking with loose traveling clusters of dancers in other coastal sites, the move-
ment material at Par became refined and simplified, “the marrying of minimalism and folk
dancing” that Spence (2018) referred to in her review, as Rosemary recounts:
RL: … after a couple of hours experimenting at Par with a small team of dancers, there was
quite suddenly an overwhelming feeling that I needed them to be pulsing together with
this bounce from the step. It was like, “this is the concept,” I’ve found it. I’ve got to the
heart of it. And now I must hold onto it and not let it dilute. Sometimes you don’t get
there that quickly (although it wasn’t that quick because I’d been to lots of other sites).
But something about pinning the folk dance and specifically the bounce to that site, the
pulsing of the factory, stitching those two things together—that gave me the very kernel
of the work, the truth of the work in some way …
477
This “truth” translated to the use of a lot of movement material that came from Breton
and Cornish social dancing, a rhythmic step and gentle bouncing or “double bounce” as
we came to refer to it. Taking the foundation from these steps and repeating them over and
over, the women wove their way toward the sea with moments of pause in alive stillness in
diagonal lines—or they rocked, swayed, and pulled as they strode together, invoking the
gentle rhythm and quality of the waves while the group unison echoed the sea-faring labors
of hauling ropes or pulling oars.
Rosemary and I were sensitive to the fact that we were taking movement material out
of its original context and to an extent changing its form and function. We had some anxi-
ety around how this might be received. However, Rosemary was also clear how collective
memory functioned for her in these simple patterns of movement:
RL: I feel like that is not me, it’s me following in the footsteps of humans moving together,
borrowing (I hope respectfully) a known form.
While in Breton and Cornish dance there are many variations and indeed divides in differ-
ent communities of practice in relation to how particular steps or arm holds might function,
in general, the audience members directly involved in the social dancing saw their practice
being valued through the inclusion of this movement vocabulary.
Joanna Tagney, a long-time member of the Cornish Nos Lowen 2 social dance scene,
after watching the dance commented that for her “these dances are like making a cup of
tea,” and to see someone making her daily cup of tea into a work of art was “absolutely
beautiful” (2018). Her belief is that what defines social dance is it being, fundamentally,
for everyone, “open source” in the same way that much documented folk music is.
RL: In 2002, Poet Michael Donaghy (1954–2004) once helpfully described traditional folk
forms to me as like baskets holding the content loosely or tightly. You have to find the
right basket for what you want to communicate, find the right weave, and the right shape
to hold and convey the particular content. I have an utter respect for these tried and tested
forms, and somehow the performers inching across the beach started to produce images of
ancient nomadic pathways and treading into the footsteps of other people. Remembering.
Repetition can have negative connotations of lacking originality in some way, yet in Passage
for Par it was reclaimed from that idea to be valued in its own right as a methodological
device with a particular purpose—not only through the repetition of the steps but also
through the repetition of certain forms, like the spiraling “snail’s creep” that exists, with
variations, in many different cultures. Dancers are led into a tight spiral until the leader
turns back on herself to pass the incoming line of dancers, tracing her footsteps corkscrew-
ing back and out of the spiral with the dancers following. It is the one moment in Passage
for Par where the dancers are face to face, and at a midway point in the work, many of them
spoke of this as giving them the energy they needed, the resilience, to continue to complete
the performance. Both the snail’s creep and the rhythmic steps were, as Rosemary identi-
fies, borrowing from known forms and in a way acknowledging the strength that those
forms have, rather than a concern with not being “new” or “original,” and by that same
token then producing something that was original in another sense of it being conceived of
and for a very specific place and time.
As the line of dancers made their way across the sand flats over the course of the two hours,
the pace remained the same throughout even as the rhythms and qualities changed. Erini
478
Kartsaki, writing about repetition in postmodern choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne

Rainer’s work, comments that it is:
… not about theme and development… It does not have a climax, or go any place,

but it possesses a different quality, a force perhaps … it is an invitation to engage with
it in a different way … it makes possible an attention to detail, a focus on careful
nuances of movement, allowing the spectator to lean in, to experience the shape of
the movement and its texture, almost like an object…. It makes the dance, but also its
structure, visible and it reveals something about its methodology. (Kartsaki 2017, 37)
Audience members of Passage for Par watched the performance with a specific mode of attention
that led them to consider and indeed comment on how the dance functioned, for example “it’s
led from the back I think” or “how are they keeping the rhythm?” or the like, rather than look-
ing at it solely as choreographic form. Similarly, as Kartsaki notes of the attention to detail in
watching Rainer’s work, the duration and repetition allowed Passage for Par to exist in its space
and time, rather than to be “performed” as such and therefore to be observed in the same way
that one might watch a sunset or a slow change as the tide turns. Incidental audiences, as they
walked their dogs or searched for metal under the sand, or paddled in the pools left behind by
the tide, watched the landscape change and the dancers became part of that changing landscape
rather than something additional to it.
RL: I would say that if it’s predictable, you’re really safe, you’re given permission to relax.
Not be on high alert of what’s going to come next, but to relax into “This is going to
go on for a while, so let me just be with it.” And then you’re with it and you look at it
in a different way and you see the flux and the change within the repetition that’s hap-
pening, the minutiae of it. It gives you permission to look, in the same way you ponder-
ingly look into a rock pool. It awakens a pleasurable curiosity within the safety of that
predictability.
Rosemary describes her experience of being outside the work and watching it evolve as well
as her intention for how it might encourage this very particular experience of watching by
allowing the audience “to look and look again” (Kartsaki 2017, 34):
RL: … here are these women getting smaller and smaller and more and more insignificant in
the greater picture, and there are the clouds and, ooh look, the sea’s moved in, and that
dog has gone, where’s the dog, where’s the man that was walking the dog? You become
very aware of space and time and your place within it in a really different way.
The ongoing repetition of patterned steps and gentle bouncing required a lot of concentra-
tion due to fixed pathways, the specific movement qualities, and the rhythm that needed to
be synchronized along the entire line of thirty women. However, it also allowed the per-
formers to “sink” into the work—quite literally sometimes as the footsteps dug a hole in the
sand—but more so in the sense of being present and entering into a particular state of mind
and attending to one another and the landscape around them. As dancer Sarah Alexander
commented:
The conflict of rhythms has an emotional effect, just as the harmony of dancing

to one rhythm is pleasing and unifying, discord brings frustration. Drawn into the
479
organism through rhythm, the more complex the task, the less I connect with the
wider scene. Rocking and slow stepping are times to notice beyond the organism.
Times to connect in with the landscape. The dance, repetitive but ever changing,
requires much concentration, because it doesn’t ever stop … the movement is con-
stant. At the end it feels like getting off a boat. You still feel the motion afterwards.
(Sarah Alexander, personal communication, July 2, 2018)
As this reflection articulates, absorbing differences in the name of the whole (in a physical and
metaphorical sense) is not always a comfortable experience; indeed it can be a very painful
one: arms stiffened, backs ached, timing went out and could not be re-found, feet became
heavy, and frustrations flared. But these difficulties arguably what led to a feeling of solidar-
ity among the women because through the ongoing repetition and duration, the performers
were gathering around a common aim through the adversity of the landscape and challeng-
ing aspects of the work. Furthermore, for us the repeated bouncing embodies the human will
to survive and to keep moving, or as Rosemary put it to be able to “dance through the hard
stuff,” which is exactly what these women did (Illustration 33.4).
It was the physical practice of the work that brought the women together in solidarity,
the “powerful humble brave soft salty warriors, women of Par,” as performer Anna Golding
referred to them (Anna Golding, personal communication June 12, 2018). But rather than
an un-named homogenizing force—or imagined community of shared feminine identity—it
was perhaps an embodiment of what Ahmed refers to as the “painstaking labour” of getting
closer to each other, working for each other, and speaking to (not for) others in order to find
out what, as women “we might yet have in common” (2000, 180). The constant negotiations
Illustration 33.4 Passage for Par, one of the elbow and hand holds also used in Breton and Cornish
folk dance, allowing the dancers to remain closely connected, dress rehearsal, June 21, 2018. Photo:
Graham Gaunt© CAST (Cornubian Arts and Science Trust.)
480
and adjustments that the work required to make the dance function became a self-organizing
system—or organism—as dancer Alexander referred to it. Organisms are found in nature;
they are interdependent and dynamic rather than a homogenized fixed totality. As chore-
ographers, we became less and less part of the physical problem solving, which had to be
led from within the physical structure the women had created, giving them autonomy as a
group to grow and develop as needed to respond to the environment. They relied on each
other and their collective memory and understanding. Meanwhile, from without, the images
they created resonated with the memories and experiences both of those performing and
those watching the work, and again with Ingold’s dwelling perspective in which human and
nature, past and present coincide in a conception of the landscape. This writing comes from
an observer of the process and demonstrates the seemingly ‘organic’ qualities that the dance
produced:
A creature-like being that existed many moons ago when the earth was covered in
silky sea. A creature which existed long before we did, and one which has come
back to remind us of something we have long forgotten. A story that when told we,
perhaps, don’t fully understand, but deep down we know is right.
There are other images.
Half closing my eyes turns the sky into deep, dark, cold water. Many miles deep.
Together legs become fins and fins become a mass of fish.They are undisturbed by the
pulling tide.
I see a centipede, an anemone, soft bodied, strong, fishing through the air with
tentacle hands. Carving its path.
I have watched as people walking on the beach pause, suspended in a complete
moment, following you with their gaze as you make your way. Perhaps pocketing
a picture that may speak for words later. A reminder for a future self of a moment
like the tide, lasting for a few short hours. Leaving behind a special memory for the
sand, a path imprinted on the land. (Photographer Rosa Shepherd, personal com-
munication, August 31, 2018)
For the outside eye, the dancers became a unified structure, while from within the connec-
tions were tangible and constantly in flux.
The most female of all

As we have suggested earlier, one of the experiences that was foregrounded in the feed-
back for performers from the practice of learning and performing this very specific piece of
work was that of female solidarity and resilience. Standing side-by-side, the women found
physical and metaphorical connections as expressed in “Ghostprints,” a poem by dancer
Anna Golding, who was in the very center of the line throughout the performance:
We arrive and arrive

The most female of all
Evolved eel, sand snake
Dark thread spun out
Tread soul to sole
481
Footstep into yours from mine

A tug knits us in
Concertinas loose
Breath meters us, behind and ahead
We attend into arcs
Settle into bones and shells
Anchor chain of steel will (Anna Golding, personal communication,
June 19, 2018)
RL: The way the women were shoulder to shoulder is very different from face to face, as in
most forms of partner dancing. This side-by-side line dancing is different because it’s
not speaking about courtship or partnership.… It’s nothing to do with who your partner
is, procreation, sexual attraction, or display…. It’s more like a skein of geese in flight.
Shoulder to shoulder is about collectivity, or community, isn’t it?
In a post-feminist culture with differing oppositional positions on feminism often defined
through generational concerns or “waves,” to describe or identify “female solidarity” in the
context of a dance work is also somewhat problematic. Not least because for some critics,
this very idea will always remain a myth, foregrounding gender over and above many other
multiplicities. We also struggle to communicate in words the profundity of the temporary
community that became fundamental to Passage for Par.Yet to not speak of female solidarity as
a defining feature of the project would also be to deny an important aspect of the lived expe-
rience that this work engendered for those taking part. This is not to say that such solidarity
was easily achieved or without problems—any community rarely is. However, as neoliberal
society creates more fractures in the way people live together through travel, work, economies
of value, and globalization, contemporary communities are those that we create, construct
even, as Zygmunt Bauman writes (2001, 14): “… all homogeneity must be ‘hand-picked’ from
a tangled mass of variety through selection, separation and exclusion; all unity needs to be
made.” For Bauman, “concord ‘artificially produced’ is the sole form of unity available …”
(14).3 Although this might have negative connotations associated with artificiality, it could be
argued that these constructed communities create the conditions of possibility for experiences
such as that of female solidarity in Passage for Par. These corporeal connections then have the
potential to reverberate beyond the microcosm of performance to the macrocosm of social and
political life.The women told stories to each other as they waited for the tide to turn or the cue
to be given, they held each other to warm up, and they laughed together as things went wrong.
They respectfully pointed out things that might be done differently, they asked questions, they
struggled through adverse weather conditions and physical discomfort, and they continued for
the sake of the work.
Though from the UK, Europe, and beyond, the cast comprised largely middle-class
women who already had in common their interest and experience in dance; the “differences”
to be overcome were not as great as they might be in other contexts for people with less
privileged positions. What is important, however, is that this work generated an alternative
way of “being together,” or in phenomenological terms of Mitgefühl (feeling-with), through
the embodied structures it used.
Feminist philosopher Sandra Lee Bartky (2002) makes a detailed analysis of the differ-
ent kinds of solidarity that it is possible to experience and conceptualize. She differentiates
between the group “infection” of collective action and mob-like experiences and the idea of
482
“fellow-feeling” in which individuals share precisely the affective experience of a specific situ-
ation. In a chapter that addresses women’s experience, writers such as Bartky and Ahmed are
useful in that they provide much needed critique and contemporary feminist application of
ideas from phenomenology, which, like the philosophical canon of which it is part, was largely
conceived of and written by men. Due to the scope of this chapter, it is not possible to fully
explore Bartky’s proposition, but to put it simply Passage for Par created a feeling of power (and
therefore political potential) and support (emotional and physical) among the women through
a combination of these ideas—the infectious potential of communal joy and the fellow-feeling
of a very specific set of circumstances.
Bartky also points out that many of the rituals that support and surround “female cama-
raderie … and feelings of solidarity with other women are associated with oppressive
constructions of beauty and femininity” (2002, 23). She writes that “unless new forms
of female solidarity appear, women will be loathe to abandon the forms they know” (23).
Passage for Par arguably provided an opportunity to create alternative rituals, practices, and
feelings of solidarity among women at a time when the old forms that Bartky refers to
were being questioned. Golding’s poem makes reference to a sense of communication and
connection between the women and across their individual life experiences, embodied in
the dance:
Standing in line
Lives told to the front
Heard to the side
Sudden love
Sudden death
Loss and hope
Laugh, laugh, cry
Return
Steady, Settle, Gather, Away
Home (“Ghostprints,” Anna Golding, personal communication, June 12, 2018)
Passage for Par was created with an all-female cast during a cultural shift when the Me Too
(#metoo) movement had come like a wave having crashed, leaving behind it a different land-
scape in which women’s voices were being heard in a new way (albeit a movement that has
become a site of contestation). The Me Too movement was originally founded by American
community organizer Tarana Burke in 2006 to “spread awareness and understanding about
sexual assault in underprivileged communities of colour” (Shugarman 2017). It is most com-
monly known, however, through a viral social media campaign in 2017 that addressed sexual
violence against women more generally. Like many women in the UK, Rosemary was aware
of the impact and reach of this campaign and the call for women to work together, and this
was influential in her casting decision.
RL: I knew from my own experience of creating one section of Square Dances (2011) with
one hundred women, how powerful that experience can be for the women in affirming
unspoken connections together amidst their diversity. I not only wanted to facilitate that
again but also to create an unforgettable and undeniable image for the viewer of a working
community of women boldly and collectively moving together, stitching themselves into
the landscape.
483
Furthermore, the landscape also held resonances of communities past that were divided
by their gender-identified labors in a way that made the work specifically by and for
women:
RL: I was drawn to thinking about women on shorelines, waiting, and also the work they
did in those communities to keep the villages going when the men were at sea, at war,
or hunting for fish to feed their families; it was that basic. Also, it’s said that Cornish
women in the Napoleonic wars took off their red flannel petticoats, wrapped them
around their shoulders and marched up and down on the cliff tops so that the French
soldiers out to sea would think the coast was patrolled by soldiers. How ingenious
and how active the women were in protecting the men and their country in a way
that is so different from how we think about men and women now and what we as
feminists are dealing with right now at the moment with the Me Too movement.
There is something about the imagining of that working relationship of women and
men then—“We’re here holding the fort, you’re out there risking your life”—that
intrigues me.
We discussed the experience of waiting that these women might have had as being an
under-represented aspect of female strength. This aspect is not a passive, resigned wait-
ing of women while their men (in the heteronormative model of domestic life) are busy
with the work at sea, but an active hopeful sense of being still here, patient and resilient.
Rosemary related this experience to her own at the time of making Passage for Par when her
own mother was passing away. The piece also became a way to understand and reflect on
this experience:
RL: My own personal experience of being cocooned in a house with my mother more and
more just before the project was going to happen gave me a profound understanding of
the nature of enduring care that mainly falls on women. The role of mother and daugh-
ter, of carrying on through caring for your children and for your elderly relatives and
having to put one foot in front of the other and just keep going—you can’t collapse or
give way to grief. You’ve just got to keep going every day. There is a sense of waiting
through it all whilst actively being and staying with your loved one, holding them and
the space as their life draws towards its end.
Rosemary’s reflections on her own experience created a personal narrative for her that
framed the duration of the piece and the need to keep going through the different weather
conditions and physical challenges. As women, mothers and daughters, we both saw our own
experiences of the resilience and strength that life itself requires:
RP: For me the repeated bouncing perhaps speaks of the human will to survive and to
keep moving, or as you put it, to be able to “dance through the hard stuff,” because as
Kartsaki (2017, 32) writes about the repetitive techniques of Samuel Beckett, some-
times we need “To simply keep going: because in order not to die, you must come and
go, come and go….”
RL: That’s so apt… the work was about holding oneself and ourselves together literally and
metaphorically in order to keep going—the cast held each other, each woman held
themselves upright and contained. The work itself was so pared back it had its own held
containment, nothing was released or spilled …
484
RP: And that’s why you didn’t want them to separate. It was a metaphor for interdependence
and interdependence as a metaphor for life.Yet dance is so much more than a metaphor as
it simultaneously embodies this process rather than merely representing it …
RL: If they split apart I felt it was breaking the strength of the interdependency … there was
something very confining and freeing at the same time. Being imprisoned by mortality.
RP: Yes, it’s about recognizing the strength it takes to endure certain things, that “keeping
going” that we’ve been talking about and that resilience. I think it’s also one of the strengths
of dance practice. This wasn’t a “therapeutic” process as such, and yet the women identified
something they very much needed within this process…. I keep coming back to this quote
by Manning who writes, “When we move the world lives differently” (2009: 14).
RL: How true and beautiful, … I am thinking about the duality of the work. For all the
power and affirmation it gave people participating and symbolized for the viewer, there
was also a sadness. It’s not a joyous dance; it could be seen as a lament. There is a sense
of loss, the tide washes their traces away, the wind takes their breath, they disappear at
the end, and there is no bow, and yet hopefully it remains indelibly in their bodies and
in the audience’s memories …
RP: Yes, an existential question arose for me and some of the dancers when they stepped out
of the organism for one reason or another and watched it from the outside. They had this
very strong sense of “It carries on without me, but at the same time I am a hundred per-
cent singularly part of this.” In the same way that the world continues without you and the
universe exists whether you’re there or not, yet that doesn’t mean that you are insignificant,
you still have to take your place in the universe, and death is the only way out of that, and
that’s where we’re all heading, we just don’t know when. So I think the repetition and the
duration—those two things operating together—helped us to experience something of
that inescapable truth of life and death.
The reverberations of the work continued long after the last performance and still do today.
In a messaging group originally set up to be able to communicate practicalities of the project
as they arose, and to disseminate urgent information, messages continued to appear long after
the last performance (and even as I write this):
I miss those gentle and supportive hands, laughter, slightly damp warm feet, bouncing,
all you soft warriors. (Kiki Gale, personal communication, June 28, 2018)
Your beautiful steadying hands. (Nicola Visser, personal communication, June 28, 2018)
I keep being visited by you women. Seems each of you in turn visits me through
memory. Suddenly one of your faces appears clearly in my mind. Or a voice perfectly
remembered and all at once in my consciousness, as if from nowhere! I am remember-
ing you all in turn. (Sarah Fairhall, personal communication, June 27, 2018)
Powerful humble brave soft salty warriors women of Par I feel blessed to have shared
this journey with you. Thinking of this important, magical, ordinary and extraordi-
nary time of slowing down, of being with the floor of the sea, of tasting, trusting,
responding, following and leading, passing, sharing being under all kinds of floors and
skies and winds and moons and suns, passer by snails, crabs, dogs, and walkers.
I send my love your direction and to Par the special place that held and stitched
us together (Illustration 33.5). (Belinda Papavasileiou, personal communication,
June 27, 2018)
485
Illustration 33.5 Passage for Par, by Rosemary Lee Commissioned by CAST for Groundwork, Par
Sands Beach, Cornwall 2018, the ending image as the performers leave, evening performance, June 22,
2018. Photo by Steve Tanner.
Conclusion
Passage for Par was a durational performance that invited a mode of witnessing and experi-
encing that connected all present to the passing of time in the landscape and the changing
nature of Par beach. Through the invitation to experience it and watch it slowly evolve, it
also allowed for reflections to arise on the relationship between humans and nature, the labor
of moving as one organism, and indeed of life, and the resilience it takes to “dance through
the hard stuff.” The simple choreographic form of a single, interconnected line and spiral also
connected us across cultures and dance practices from places and times beyond the here and
now of the event. Similarly, the repetitive techniques provided a function, as they do in social
dancing, giving the performers the opportunity to engage in the landscape and to connect to
each other as their rhythmic unity provided the engine for movement.
The voices of the dancers included here are only a very partial representation of the thoughts,
writings, conversations, and images that were given to us during and after the performance, and
we are grateful and indebted to all of the performers for their generosity in what was shared.
Penelope Hanstein writes of dance studies that “while we may be engaged in a more reflec-
tive mode than physical one when we are researching and writing, our point of reference must
always be rooted in the experience of dancing” (1999, 26). By including the performers’ voices
alongside our own experiences of Passage for Par, we have maintained this “connection to the
field,” as Hanstein (26) puts it. Like the performance itself, this writing contributes to a political
narrative in which women’s experiences matter and are central to interpretations of the body
and the world around us, not least in understanding dance from a variety of perspectives.
486
Notes
1 Research and development for this project began at Godrevy beach, a well-known National Trust
beauty spot before Teresa Gleadowe (CAST) suggested a visit to Par in part for its different relation-
ship to the people living there and the tourist economy, and also because of its power visually and
the diversity of its flora and fauna due to its industry.
2 Nos Lowen is Cornish for “Happy Night” and is a kind of Cornish social dancing that is closely related
to Breton dancing and the Fest Noz from Brittany that grew in popularity in the 1960s. Nos Lowen
is a mixture of traditional dances and new dances that use traditional steps and formations.
3 Rosemary selected the dancers from over 150 applicants for twenty-two places. She selected eight
students from Falmouth University Dance and Choreography course and invited Aya Kobayashi
and Sophie Arstall to join the creative team as rehearsal directors and as dancers taking the place
at either end of the line. The remaining twenty-two women were selected through selection
workshops. Rosemary chose women of different ages who had a compelling presence, intelligence
in their bodies, and a natural connection to the main vocabulary of the work, particularly the
subtle and ever-present bounce in the step. All the women chosen were dance trained. It was an
international cast.
References
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Routledge.
———. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Bartky, Sandra. 2002. “Sympathy and Solidarity” and Other Essays. Minneapolis, MN: Rowman & Littlefield.
Bauman, Zygmunt. 2001. Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World. London: Polity.
Carter, Alexandra. 1998. “Performing Dance.” In The Routledge Dance Studies Reader, edited by Alexandra
Carter, 53–55. London: Routledge.
Fraleigh, Sondra Horton. 1987. Dance and the Lived Body: A Descriptive Aesthetics. Pittsburgh, PA: University
of Pittsburgh Press.
Hanstein, Penelope. 1999. “From Idea to Research Proposal; Balancing the Systematic and Serendipitous.”
In Researching Dance: Evolving Modes of Enquiry, edited by Sondra Horton Fraleigh and Penelope
Hanstein, 22–61. London: Dance Books.
Ingold, Tim. 1993. “The Temporality of the Landscape.” World Archaeology 25 (2): 152–174.
———. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Abingdon: Routledge.
Kartsaki, Erini. 2017. Repetition in Performance: Returns and Invisible Forces. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Manning, Erin. 2009. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Reeve, Sandra. 2011. Nine Ways of Seeing a Body. Devon: Triarchy Press.
Shugarman, Emily. 2017. “Me Too: Why Are Women Sharing Stories of Sexual Assault and How Did
It Start?” Independent, October 17, 22:46. Accessed April 15, 2018. https://www.independent.co.uk/
news/world/americas/me-too-facebook-hashtag-why-when-meaning-sexual-harassment-rape-
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Spence, Rachel. 2018. “World-Class Contemporary Art Comes to Cornwall.” Financial Times, July 6.
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Tagney, Joanna. 2018. Interviewed by Ruth Pethybridge before a “Fest Noz” in Penryn Cornwall,
November 20, 2018.
487
INDEX
Note: Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.

Page numbers followed by n refers to notes.
Abbate, Carolyn 142 Aggrey, James Emman Kwegyir 239, 244

ability 14 Agier, Michel 437
able-bodied dancers 39 agricultural labor 12
About Subtraction (2013) 448 Ahrens, Sönke 53n2
Abramović, Marina 40 Ailey, Alvin 226
Abstract Speed + Sound 203 Aitken, Barbara 267
academic and vocational dance programs 456 Aktionsinstallation 432
academic writing 354 Albright, Ann Cooper 11, 14, 36, 126
accessibility of technologies 419 Alexander, Frederick Matthias 72, 76, 83n4
Accumulation with Talking plus Watermotor (Brown) 125 Alexander, Gerda 76
Achterland (De Keersmaeker) 325 Alexander, Sarah 479
Acocella, Joan 214–15 Alexander Technique (AT) 4, 71–4, 76, 78–82
Acosta, Carlos 5, 300, 302, 302–3; Alexander Technique Affiliated Societies
racialization 305 (ATAS) 83n4
acoustic Intonarumori 158 Alexander Technique International (ATI) 83n4
activism 5 Alexander Technique Training Course 83n4
activity theory 439 algorithmic choreographies: Mevlevi Sema
actualization 370 ceremony 337–47; UNESCO 337–8;
adagio 269 YouTube 337–40
Adair, Christy 237 algorithmic tracking 346
Adams, John 150 alienated dancing 279–80
Adams, Philip 358 Allegranti, Beatrice 4, 88
advanced industrialization 429 Alston, Richard 150, 237
advertising, dance in 333 Ambassadors, The 178
aestheticized hedonism 299 American Ballet Theatre (ABT) 298, 303
aesthetics of everyday life 434–6 American consumer culture 428
aesthetic symbolism 354 American dance critics 211–12
affect 208–9 American Dance Festival 56, 72–3
African-American Concert Dance (Perpener) 252 American Musicological Society 141
‘African’ dances 29 American Society for Alexander Technique
Afrikaner government 24 (AmSAT) 83n4
Agamben, Giorgio 444, 451–2 Analysing Musical Multimedia (Cook) 148
agential realism 89, 415 anarchists 180
Aggrey (Pasuka) 238–9 “anarchival” concepts 4
489
Index
anarchival dance 178–88; definition 178; Art of Making Dances, The (Humphrey) 125
deufert&plischke’s 179–81; recycling 179–81 Arts Council England 107n1
Anarchive#2: Second Hand (deufert&plischke) Arts Council of Great Britain 236
179–80 Ashikawa, Yoko 15
anarchives 178; alternative protocols 181; Ashton, Frederick 150
counter-memory 181; digital 185; Asianist ethnomusicologist 141
documentation, need of 180; temporality Astaire, Fred 145
of 185–7; thematic frameworks 181; At Home in the World? The Bharatanatyam Dancer
undecidable specter of 181–3 as Transnational Interpreter (O’Shea) 47
Anatomy and Kinesiology for Ballet Teachers The Atlantic magazine 216
(Thomasen and Rist) 56 attention 353
Ancient Greek open-air theaters 443 audience 353; spatial relationship 418
Anderson, Jack 211 auditory choreography 421
Anderson, Lea 356, 360, 362 aurality 174
André Levinson on Dance: Writings from Paris in the Ausdance 64
Twenties (Acocella and Garafola, eds.) 214 Austin, John L. 376
angularity, use of 197 Australian dance community 215–16
Animated ( journal) 74 Austro-Hungarian forces 40
animation 132–4 Authentic Movement and Body-Mind
Annunciation 287 Centering © 110
Another Kind of Love: John Cage’s Silence, authorial invention 327
By Hand (Pope. L.) 247, 250–1 Avignon Festival in 2011 448–9
Another Telepathic Thing (Big Dance Theater) 135
anthropocene 14 Baalman, Marije 169
anthropocentrism 14 Baartman, Saartjie 27
anthropological/ethnochoreological approaches 285 Bachelard, Gaston 35
anthropology 1, 5, 286; of dance 286 Bachelor, James 40
anti-costume practice 356 BackStories (McFadden) 381–94; duet project
anti-dance uniform 356 381–2; scores at intersection of dance and theater
“anti-dance world thinking” 356 387–91; solo and chorus 391–3; at Theatre
apache dance 271n3, 269 Utopia 384; at University of Worcester 383
apartheid, South Africa 22–3; bodies and dance Bain, Keith 101–6, 102, 104
23–4; dancing bodies 24; dis/embodiment of Bakatsaki, Katerina 17
dancing body 26–7; dis/empowerment balance 449
of dancing bodies 24–6; dis/placement of Balanchine, George 145–6, 204
dancing body 27–8; high art, low art, Bales, Melanie 75
non-art 28–30; policy 23 Balla, Giacomo 193, 203
Apollinaire, Guillaume 201 ballet 26, 34, 356–7; see also specific ballets
architectural typologies 422 Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss, The
architectural visualizations 421 (Heisler) 144
architecture 6 BalletLab 358–9
archival turn in dance 177–9 ballet-oriented Greek National Opera 290–1
Archive Fever (Derrida) 178, 182 Ballets Russes 191
archives: vs. repertoire 183; sous rature 181–3, Ballett International/Tanz Aktuell 216
186–7; spectrality of 183, 187–8; temporality Banes, Sally 4, 251, 431
182; topology 185–7; undecidable specter of “Bantu Education” system 23
181–3 Barad, Karen 89
arkhe‒ 180 Barbieri, Donatella 353
Arnold, Matthew 429, 436 Barnard, Philip J. 63, 64
Arons, Wendy 12 Bartenieff, Irmgard 76, 209
Aronson, Arnold 365, 371–2 Bartenieff fundamentals 73–4, 77
arranged marriage 25 Bartenieff Fundamentals of Movement (BF) 76
Art as Experience (Dewey) 29 Bartky, Sandra Lee 482–3
artifact in museum 366 Bateson, Gregory 115
artificial intelligence 413 Batson, Glenna 59
artist-driven archives 456–7 Battcock, Gregory 212
artist twin 179–81, 187 Bauman, Maria 225
490
Index
Bauman, Zygmunt 482 Body/Landscape 20

Bausch, Pina 58 body-mind centering (BMC) 4, 73–4, 77
Beatrice Allegranti Dance Theatre 88 Body of Evidence (Pather) 29
Beaumont, Cyril 214 “body of ideas” 48
Beautiful Ones Must Be Born, The (Pather) 29 The BodySynth™ 160
Beckwith, Naomi 250 body-thing-associations 50
“Bed of Nails” Schematic 167 Body Weather 12, 17; body 19; and butoh
Bel, Jérôme 443 11–13; M/B training 18; van de Ven 17–18;
Bend It Like Beckham (2002) 306 workshops 12
Benjamin, Walter 436, 444–5 Body Weather Amsterdam 12, 17
Bergson, Henri 186, 365–6 Body Weather Farm 12
Berleant, Arnold 29 body-worlding 477
bespoke dance 93; group improvisation 94, 95 Bolter, Jay David 424
bespoke performances 98 Bone, Breath and Gesture: Practices of
#BessiesBeBlack 227 Embodiment ( Johnson ed.) 75
Bharatanatyam 356–7, 397, 404; practitioners 47 Bonnie Bird Theatre 459, 462, 464, 464
bharatanatyam-trained body 408 Borelli, Melissa Blanco 339
Big Dance Theater 135 Bosso, Ezio 37
bio-psycho-social model of disability 88 Botha, Catherine F. 3, 22
BIPED 313 Bourdieu, Pierre 3
Birch, Luke 92, 103, 106 Bournonville, August 265
Birmingham Royal Ballet 64, 308 Bradley, Buddy 267
Birringer, Johannes 158 Brahm, Laurence 375
Bishop, Claire 366 Brannigan, Erin 4, 207
“black Baryshnikov” 305 Braxton, Anthony 247, 251
black bodies 25; see also bodies; in ballet 303–5; Brazilian samba 150
disempowerment 25; spatial policing 27 breakdancing 276–7
black British dance 5, 236–45; Josephs, Elroy breath 111–12
and 236–45; research 237–8; studies 244–5 breathe the landscape 18
black dance 303; aesthetics 231–2; British Brickhill, Eleanor 213
236–45; contract 229–31; embodying Bridges, Ronald 265
resistance 227–9; overview in US 223–6; Brighton Fringe Festival 383
relevance 232; work 233–4 Brighton v. Jones 329–30
black dancers 308; in British ballet 299 Brinkmann, Stephan 178
Black Dance/White Dance dichotomy 28 British Apache dancers 269
black invisibility 26 British-based school of dance research 286
#BlackLivesMatter 224 British colonial rule 24
black performers 301 British multiculturalism 298, 306
black plurality, denial 26 Brodie, Julie 76
Blades, Hetty 327, 329 Bronx Gothic (Okpokwasili) 226–7
Blaikie, Andrew 438 Brooklyn 225–34; microhistory of 5
Bleeker, Maaike 372 Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) 225
Blender 161 Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX) 225
Blood (Pasuka) 238 Brooklyn Information and Culture
blood run (Lee) 398–404, 400 (BRIC) 225
Bloomsbury Festival 383 Brooks, Jason 109
Bodenwieser, Gertrud 413 Brown, Carol 6, 413
bodies; see also black bodies: age and abilities 3; Brown, Trisha 6, 125, 255, 367, 432
alternative 4; black female dancers 27; Buckland, Theresa 149, 286, 295
dysfunctional 33; idiotic body 374; Bugg, Jessica 6, 353
library 465; as living archive 4; Burt, Ramsay 5, 236
materials 16; materials, solo 17; puzzles 18; Butler, Judith 23, 376
(re-)essentialization 45; social 17; and butoh 13; body assemblages and nonhuman
spaces 11, 13; Western European idea(l)s 24 becomings 14; and Body Weather 11–13;
“body and the world” 15–16 Hijikata and 14; SU-EN 15–16
Body Eclectic, The: Evolving Practices in Dance Butoh: Kroppen och varlden/Body and the World
Training (Bales and Nettl-Fiol) 75 (SU-EN) 16
491
Index
Cabaret 1920 238 Choreographing History project 3

Cage, John 45, 248–51 choreographing the museum, scenography:
Cage Unrequited (Pope. L.) 248–50 area of interrogation 365–6; choreutic
Cain, Jeff 253 artifact 372–4; context and terminology
Cala Homes (South) Ltd v. Alfred McAlpine Homes 366–7; Delusions (2017) 377–8; durational
East Ltd 330 scenography 370–1; implicit zones of
camera tracking system 417 371–2; scenographic practice and idea of
Candelario, Rosemary 11; exploration of “permeation” 368–70; Searching for Shangri-la
innovative training systems 3 (2016) 375–7
candidature file 341 choreography 4, 6, 186, 316–17;
Cape Minstrels (Kaapse Klopse) 27 Massine’s 191–2
Cape Performing Arts Board (CAPAB) 25 choreography and stillness, practice of 109;
Caplan, Deborah 78 approaching being still 110–11; breath
Capturing Grace (documentary) 35 111–12; creative encounters and collectables
Carnation (Childs) 431 115; daily-ness 119–21; ethics of practice
carriers 465 and agency 119; language 122; lexicon
Carroll, Noël 28 113; mindful moving and choreographic
Carson, Anne 381 undercurrent 114–15; mindfulness,
Cartesian Christian analogy 102 addressing 109–10; movement of mind
Cartesian philosophy 95 116–17; pathways 113; pedagogy 115–16;
Casino Girls 261 relational trio 121; repetition 117–19
Castelyn, Sarahleigh 24 choreology 286
casting decisions 301 choreomusical analysis 4
Cattelan and Shonibare play 385 choreomusical studies 141
Center of Contemporary Dance (CCT), choreomusicology and dance studies 141–4;
University of Music and Dance in Cologne 44 analytical methods 147–52; choreomusical
Cerrahi-Kadiri spiritual ceremonies 344 research 144–7
Cerrahi-Kadiri Sufi order 344 choreosonic wearables 4, 157–8; conductivecoat
Césaire, Aimé 241 and capacitive sensing 169–73; DAP-Lab’s for
Chalayan, Hussein 170 the time being 160–9; designing 158; staging
Changing Room, The (Brown et al.) wearables 158–60
415–19, 418 choreutic artifact 372–3, 377
Charmatz, Boris 365–6 choros 286
Chekhov, Anton 388 Choros stin Plateia 292, 293
Childs, Lucinda 125, 432 chorus girl 260
choreographers 6, 274; see also specific Chryst, Gray 197
choreographers; work of 5 City of Abstracts (2000) (Forsythe) 450
Choreographers Handbook (Forsythe) 448–9 civilizing forces 403–4
choreographic actions 420 Claid, Emily 237
choreographic and dance movement Clark, Barbara 63
psychotherapy practice-as-research 88–9; Clark, Timothy. J. 196
dance theater performances 96–8; Intense Clarke, Gill 63
(2017) 98–101; interview-conversations 91–2; climate change 12
more-than-human choreography 89–90; Closer (Kozel) 420
participatory dances 93–6; project as spacetime clouds of data figures 420
events 90–1; response-ability 106–7; studio co-composed movement process 94
practice 92–3; Tsunami (1946) 101–6 co-constitutive process 89
Choreographic Coding Labs 413, 415 Cocteau, Jean 191, 193–6, 198–204
choreographic dramaturgy 418 Cohen, Bonnie Bainbridge 73
choreographic journal 416 Cohen, Selma Jeanne 237
choreographic kinship 95 Cole, Jack 266
choreographic objects 313, 444, 447–9 collaboration and improvisation 5
choreographic practices 2 collectables 112
choreographic principles 443–4, 449 collective knowledge production 49
choreographic score 420–1 Collins, Jane 365
choreographic thinking 319 colonial and racialized policies 5
choreographing 367 colonial documentation 396, 399
492
Index
colonial iconography 401 Cook, Nicholas 141

colonialism 23 cooked savage 399
colonialist discourse 300 Cool for Cats 270
colonial source material 400–1 Cooper, Scheherazaad 381–2
colonizer 399 Copeland, Roger 213–14
comfortable in movement 360 Coppélia 301
commandment 180 copyright: authorship 327; and creation of
commencement 180 dance 325–6; law and dance examples 324–5;
commodities, dance 273–4 ownership 325, 331–2
communal practice 46 Copyright Act 1710 324
communication 362–3 Copyright Licensing Agency 333
‘community’ art 29 Corchero, Andrés 17
community-based festivals 437 Cornabla, Elena 214
community dance 35 Cornubian Arts and Science Trust (CAST)
community dancers 38 471, 474
competence-based learning 53n4 Cornwall 473
competent players 50 corporeality 3; and virtuality 14
Complementary and Natural Healthcare cosmetic diversity 307–8
Council (CNHC) 83n4 cosmopolitanism 298–9, 302–3
Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit, The (Merlin) 388 costs and capacities 419
computer coding languages 419 costume: aesthetic role 358; influences 358;
computer-controlled sounds 172 in performance 353–4; visual and/or physical
computer screen 339 interference 357–8
Conceit of the Natural Body, A (George) 47 counterpoint 449
concept of temporality 372 Court of Justice in Europe (CoJ) 328–9
concept of transmateriality 421 Cowell, Henry 248
ConductiveCoat 158, 169–70, 173; and creative encounters and collectables 115
capacitive sensing 169–73 creative interpretation 456
conflict of rhythms 479–80 Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease 107n2
Confluences Conferences (University of Critical Costume 157
Cape Town) 22 Critical Costume International conference and
Confucianism 402–3 exhibition 354
consumption of diversity 307 Critical Dialogues 216
Contact Quarterly 72–3 critical thinking 414
contagion 209 Croce, Arlene 213
container 112; and contents 14 Csordas, Thomas 24
contemporary aesthetic 357 “Cuban sex missile” 305
contemporary black dance 5 cubism 196–201, 204
contemporary choreographers 397; see also cueing system 313
specific choreographers cultural capital 307
contemporary choreographic work 428 cultural difference 298–9
contemporary choreological practice 457–8 cultural geography 6
contemporary dance 312, 353, 356–8, 397; cultural heritage 465
post-medium practices 444; training 286 cultural life of municipality 292
contemporary dance, anarchive of 177–88; cultural memory 396
anarchival recycling 179–81; archival turn cultural patterns and structures 345
177–9; body with 177–8; choreography cultural representations 438
178–88; self-effacing violence and cultural studies 1, 5
178; substratum, reification of 183–5; cultural turn 2
temporality 185–7; undecidable specter of culture 430
181–3 Culture and Anarchy (1869) (Arnold) 429
contemporary performance 428 Cummings, Blondell 253
contemporary theatricality 445–6 Cunningham, Merce 188, 212, 237
Contes Russes (Massine) 193 Cunningham-Cage collaboration 151
contour tracking system 418 Cunningham technique 58
Contraindre (Gourfink) 158 Curtis-Jones, Alison 6, 455, 459, 462, 464, 466
conventional histories 397 cybernetic organism 414–15
493
Index
cyborg 414–15 Dance Observer 210

cypher 278 Dance of the Machines (1924) 413
“dance-plus-words form” 125
daily-ness 119–21 Dance Research Journal ( journal) 2, 74,
Damm, Vivian Van 262 150, 365
Damman, Catherine 257 dancers 6; see also female dancers; as
dance: aesthetics 2; alienated 279–80; American artist-athlete 58–9; democratization of 3;
critics 211–12; analysis 4; anarchival with Parkinson’s 35; physiological and fitness
178–88; anthropology 2; archival turn capacities 58–9
in 177–9; artistry and pedagogy 460–1; “dancer’s books” (Forti) 134
authorship and ownership 323; black British dance scholarship 1–5; disciplinary
236–45; body/bodies and 177–8, 196–7, boundaries 6
208–9; commodities 273–4; contemporary, dance science 56–8, 65; artistic-athlete
anarchive of 177–88; as craft 210; critic 58–9; cardiorespiratory demands of dance
366; criticism 2, 4, 204–17; dynamic of 180; 59–60; converging of art and science 61–3;
ethnography 2; ethnology 2; fan 265–6; and nascent areas of 63–4; somatic practices and
fashion 357; features in television broadcasts relationship 60–1
332–3; film 452; forms, variety of 2; futurist dance’s disappearance and permanence 317
202–4; gifts 273–4; history 2; improvisation dance studies: choreomusicology and 141–52;
14; interactivity 415; Jazz 244; movement defined 1–2; disciplinary boundaries 2
423; moves, re-use of 334; pajamas 356; Dance Technique and Injury Prevention (Howse
pedagogy 53n1; philosophy 2; and poetry and Hancock) 56
214; preservation 314; as rehabilitation Dance Theatre Journal 74
35; scholars 2; science 3; skill-driven Dance Umbrella: The First Twenty-One Years
activity 57; and somatic practices 72–8; (Rowell) 237
spectacularization of 274; styles and practices Dance USA Taskforce on Dancer Health 64
5; technique 46–50; theory 2; toolbox and Dance Well in Bassano del Grappa Italy 40
analysis 2; training 13; unalienated 279–80; dancing bodies 24; and computers 312;
works, long-term preservation 314 dis/embodiment 26–7; dis/empowerment
Dance Analysis (Adshead et al., eds.) 4 24–6; dis/placement 27–8
dance and copyright: copyright and creation Dancing Bodies (Foster) 48
of dance 325–6; copyright authorship 327; Dancing Drumstick (1913) 455, 457,
copyright authorship and ownership 325; 460–1, 466
copyright law and dance examples 324–5; dancing the space 11–12; bodies, space, and
dance copyright collecting society dance 13–15; Butoh, body weather, training
(DanceROCS) 332–4; joint authorship 12–13; expanding and erasing 15–17;
327–31; and dance 331; multiple authorship learning 15–19; sensitizing the body to
331–2; themes and concerns 323–4 external stimulation 17–19
Dance and the Alexander Technique: Exploring the Danjoux, Michèle 4, 157
Missing Lin (Vanier) 80 Danse Serpentine (1896) (Fuller) 358
dance-architecture 415, 424 DAP-Lab’s: performance 173; for the time being
dance-architecture-technology 424 160–9
Dance as a Theatre Art (Cohen) 237 DaPoPa 34
Dance Australia 215 Dark Chorus, The (2016) 361
Dance Chronicle ( journal) 2 Dart, Raymond 81
dance copyright collecting society Dartington Festival 72
(DanceROCS) 332–4 Dartington Hall 72
dance criticism 204–9, 217; American Dart procedures 81
critics 211–12; art form, defining 211–12; datafication 414
artist-theorists 209–11; dance reviewing, data physicalization 421
descriptive turn in 212–15; in digital age Davids, Nadia 28
215–17; movement analysis 209–11 Davies, Siobhan 237
Dance Festival at Bates College 128 Dawson, Bob 35
dance for Parkinson’s 33 death 12
Dancehouse Diary 216 Debord, Guy 428–9
Dance Magazine 72–3 de Certeau, Michel 180
dance-making process 311 decontextualization 50
494
Index
defamiliarization 435 digital dance practices 415

DeFrantz, Thomas 251 digital data visualization 317
De Keersmaeker, Anne Teresa 208 digital labor 414
De Laet, Timmy 4, 177 digital material 423
deLahunta, Scott 64, 313, 319–20 digital musical instruments (DMIs) 159
Deleuze, Gilles 3, 14, 365–6, 420 digital object 317
Deleuzian theory 2 digital preservation 314; digital dance
Delusions (Stjernholm and Cheong-Leen) 377–8 archives 318; digital dance objects 313–14;
dementia 107n2 digital on dance, legacy of and 314–16;
dementias 88 digital technologies and dance 312–13;
Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater Motion Bank 318–19; replaying the archive
1962–1993 (Banes) 251 317–18; Siobhan Davies RePlay (RePlay)
Democratic Party 340 (2009) 316–17
democratization of dancer 3 digital revolution 419
Demon Machine 413 digital scores 314, 319
demoralization 439 digital scrapbook 316
Denby, Edwin 211 Dilley, Barbara 125, 255
de Nieves, Raúl 247 Dinshaw, Carolyn 401
Denny, Susan 267 “Disability, Dance and Law” 326
De Palo, Chiara 95–6 disabled dance 26
Department of World Arts and Cultures, disco 276–7
University of California Los Angeles 2–3 disengagement and activity 439
Depero, Fortunato 193 distributed agency 50
De Prophet 238 disturbances 15
De Quincey, Tess 17 diversity: hedonistic consumption 306–8;
Derrida, Jacques 3, 178–83, 185, 187, 376 institutional discourses of 298; tokens of 308
descriptive writing 213–14 diversity turn 298; and ballet’s new
Design and Artists Copyright Society cosmopolitanism 298–9
(DACS) 332 divorce and remarriage 401
designers 6, 353 domesticity 438
De Spain, Kent 39 domestic violence 25
Deufert, Kattrin 179–81, 187 Donaghy, Michael 478
deufert&plischke 179–81 Dorvillier, D. D. 179
devadasis 404–5, 407 Double, Oliver 268
De Villiers, Peter 26 double bounce 478
Dewey, Fred 126 Dowd, Irene 63
Dewey, John 29, 82 Dowell, Anthony 300
dharmakaya 111, 123 Doyle, Oliver 168
Dharma talks 111 Drama Review, The 125
Diaghilev, Serge 191–4, 196, 202 draped floating scarves and costumes 358
diasporic multiculturalism 298 dress and bodies, dynamics between 6
Dido and Aeneas (Morris) 148 dress and costume 6
Diehl, Ingo 49 dress in dance 354–5; agency and embodiment
Die Nacht (1927) (Laban) 455 of 359; costume, choreographer’s awareness
diffraction 422 and perspective 360; presence and absence
diffraction pattern 422 355–9; time, funding, and trust 362
Digging the Africanist Presence in American Dressing the City and My Head Is a Shirt (2011)
Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (Hiesl) 432, 439
(Gottschild) 251 Duncan, Isadora 209, 237
digital an-archive 185 Dunn, Douglas 255
digital artifacts 424 Dunn, Robert Ellis 252
Digital Cultures 413 Duo (2006) (Vogel) 167
Digital Cultures Lab in the UK 415 durational scenography 370–1, 376
digital dance; see also dance: in live Durou, Rena 287
performance 312; resources 311; “things” Duvelle, Cécile 345
or artifacts 313 Dying and Dying and Dying (Bauman) 225–6, 233–4
Digital Dance Archives (DDA) portal 318, 320 dynamic of dance 180
495
Index
dynamic stillness 111 “experience near” 345

dysfunctional bodies 33, 35; see also Parkinson’s experiencing landscape 473–7
disease Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Music in the
Twentieth Century) (Nyman) 250
Early, Fergus 72 exploration of body’s landscape 12
Eastman, Julius 248–9 Extreme Costume 354
eclectic assemblage 48
ecological consciousness 11 fabric 358
ecological politics of collective individuation 94 facilitator 49
Eddy, Martha 71, 73–4, 76, 109, 114 Fagan, Garth 227
educational licenses 333 Fall After Newton (Paxton) 254
education and training 2 fan dance 265–6, 266
Ehnes, Barbara 184 Farewell to Arms, A (Hemingway) 40
Eitan, Zohar 149 fashionable clothing 357
Electric Salome: Loïe Fuller’s Performance of fashion-artifact 370–1
Modernism (Garelick) 159 fashion designers and dance 357
electronic phantoms 416 Fashioning Embodiment (2013) 368, 370, 373–4
Eliot, T. S. 214 Fashioning Shangri-la (Stjernholm and
Elms, Anthony 247 Cheong-Leen 2016) 375
embedded screens and clouds of data 424 feedback-ing 114
embodied memory 315 “feel good” diversity 306
embodied placemaking 466 Feldenkrais, Moshe 4, 72, 74, 76
“embodied story telling” 360 Feldenkrais Awareness through Movement 73
Emmanuel, Neil Max 91 Feldenkrais method 76–7
empathy 209 Feldenkrais practitioner (Hanna) 73
Emra, Vicki 267 female dancers 259–70; see also dancers;
enablement of movement agency 48 bodies 259; history of 259–60; personality,
Endless Shout, multi-artist performance project participation, skill, novelty of 268–70; on
247, 256 stage 264–8; variety dancer 260–4
English National Ballet 64, 300, 308; dance for female femininity 26
Parkinson’s program 34 female indigenous ancestor 402
ephemeral embodied knowledge 396 female postnisin 348
erasing and expanding 17 female solidarity 473, 482
Erdur, Defne 116 feminine identity 480
“ERKadinalar Ayini” video 348 feminism 482
Ernst, Max 436 feminist theory 2, 438
Essays before a Sonata (Ives) 248 Fensham, Rachel 358
e-textiles 170, 173 fictions of purity 403
ethico-onto-epistemology 90 Fire Dance (Fuller) 159
ethnicity 299 First We Take Manhattan: Four American Women
ethnochoreology 286 and the New York School of Dance Criticism
ethnocultural difference 400 (Theodores) 213
ethnographic methods 4; autoethnography Fit and Healthy Dancer, The (Koutedakis and
224, 233 Sharp) 56
etymological sense 381 Five Myles 225
Euro-American white bodies 299 Flesh and Blood (1989) (Anderson) 362
European Central Bank 287 Fluxus 431
European Commission 287 Fokine, Michel 26, 192
European Union (EU) jurisprudence 323–4 folk dance 477
European-wide “RICHES” project 312 Fonegger, Nikolai 413
Evangelinos, Fokas 289 foreignness 303
everyday life: aesthetics of 434–6; counteracting Forsythe, William 444, 447–51
ageism 438–9; high culture 429–32; urban Forti, Simone 4, 125–35, 210
marvels 436–8; x-times people chair 432–4, 440 Fortin, Sylvie 74
evidence-based teaching 56 Foscarini, Francesca 40
“exceptional technical skill” 329 Foster, Susan Leigh 5, 48, 126, 254, 273
“experience-distant” 345 Foucault, Michel 2–3, 48, 181, 192, 204
496
Index
Foundation of Universal Lovers of Mevlana Goldman, Danielle 5, 247

Jelaluddin Rumi (EMAV) 341–3, 343 Goldner, Nancy 213
Fountzoulas, Giorgos 286 Google’s business policies 346
Fox, Terry 253 Google’s corporate power regime 347
fragmentation 397 Gopinath, Gayatri 397–8
Fraleigh, Sondra 76, 109, 114, 116 Gordon, David 255
frames of meaning 340–5 Gore, Georgiana 286
Franklin, Eric 63 gossamer threading 422
Franko, Mark 183, 209 Gottschild, Brenda Dixon 251, 304
freedom 255 Gourfink, Myriam 158
Freedom Principle, The: Experiments in Art and government-recognized tribes 400
Music, 1965 to Now 247, 250 Graham, Martha 159, 209–10, 237
Fried, Michael 210 Graham technique 58
Friedman, Sharon 22, 29 Grau, Andrée 286
Friendship Dance 289 GraveDigger costume 158, 161, 162
Fuller, Loïe 158–9, 209, 237 Greater London Arts Association (GLAA) 241
Fuller, Zack 12 Greek dances 5, 286
Fullman, Ellen 159 Greek National Opera 291
functional dress 356 Greek Orthodox Church 287
Futurian ChestPlate 158, 165–7, 168, 169 Greek traditional dance 285–6
futurist dance 202–4 Greek traditional dance at Syntagma Square 288
Green, Jill 74
Gabriel, Archangel 287 Green Clowns (1928) (Laban) 455
Gala (Bel) 443, 446 Gromola, Diane 424
Galata Mevlevihanesi Lodge in Istanbul 344 Grosz, Elizabeth 23
Gallasch, Keith 217 Group Areas Act of 1950 25, 28
Galsworthy, Amanda 377 Groys, Boris 185
Gamble, John 253 Guattari, Félix 14
Gann, Kyle 248–9 Guerin, Lucy 357, 361
Garafola, Lynn 144, 214–15 Guitar (Picasso) 198, 198–9, 201
Garelick, Rhonda K. 159 gumboot dances 26
Gargano, Sabrina 92, 99, 100, 106 Gutierrez, Miguel 210–11
Garvey, Marcus 238, 244 gymnastik 82
Geertz, Clifford 345
gender 5; distinction 438 Hakutobo 15
Gendlin, Eugene 116 Hall, Carla 26
Genesis of a Music (Partch) 248 Hall, Pat 228
George, Doran 47 Hall, Stuart 239
George-Graves, Nadine 5, 223 Halprin, Anna 72, 127, 129, 132, 210
Gerda Alexander Eutony (GAE) 76 Halstead, Jill 88, 92
Gesamtkunstwerk 167 Hamera, Judith 15
gestural and whole-body movement 157 Han culture 403
Get Down, The (Luhrmann) 274–9 Handbook in Motion: An Account of An Ongoing
“Ghostprints” 481–2 Personal Discourse and Its Manifestations in
Gielen, Pascal 185 Dance (Forti) 126–9
gifts, dance 273–4 Hand in Glove (2016) (Anderson) 361
Ginot, Isabelle 71–2 happenings 431
Girl Ballerina (2007) 385–6 Haraway, Donna 413
Giselle 301 Hardt, Yvonne 3, 44
Glasser, Sylvia 26 Harpe, Bill 237–8, 243
global transnational 447 Harris, Rennie 275
Gnome 15 Hay, Deborah 125
Godard, Hubert 209 hazardous journey and clash 300–3
Godder, Yasmeen 40 Hazzard-Gordon, Katrina 251
Goh, Angela 216 Hedlund, Melanie 254
Goldberg, Natalie 130 hedonistic multiculturalism 307–8
Golding, Anna 480 Hedstrom, Cynthia 252
497
Index
Heidegger, Martin 82, 181 If You Couldn’t See Me (1994) (Brown) 384
Heisler, Wayne 144 illegitimate urbanization 294
Hellenic Army Academy 290, 291; image dictionaries 19
performance 294 immigrants and racial minorities 307
Hellenic Army Academy, Evelpidon 291 Impermanent Festival of Contemporary
Hellenic Military and Police Academies 294 Performance 382–3
Helmet no.3: put on and walk (Stelarc) 164 improvisation 112, 256
Hemingway, Ernest 40 Impulse 74
Heppenstal, Rayner 209 incidental audiences 479
Hering, Doris 211 Incomplete Subject, The 365
heteropatriarchal lineage 403 indexing salon culture 404
Hiesl, Angie 432–3, 437, 439 Indian classical abhinaya 406
high culture and everyday life 429–32 indigeneity 400
Hijikata, Tatsumi 12; with Ashikawa 15 indigenous communities 400
Him (2001) 385–6 indigenous female ancestors 398
Hine, Christine 340 indigenous identity-based activism 400
hip hop 276–8 individual adjustment 50
historiographer 397 individual dance videos: cultural and political
history 1, 5 meanings 339
Hodgins, Paul 141 individualization of training histories 48
Holbein, Hans 178 industrial revolution and Greek traditional
Holland, Fred 247, 253 dance 294
Holland, Irene 261 informational figuring, strangeness 415–23
Hollywood Costume 354 Ingold, Tim 475
Holzer, Sabina 116 “inherent and aesthetic value” 329
homophobia 25 inherently visual/cognitive orientation 424
Hornsey Town Hall Arts Centre (HTHAC) 382 inside-outside dichotomy 13
Horst, Louis 210 inspirational appreciation of diversity 307
Hosoe, Eikoh 12 Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) 247
host 418 institutional diversity 299, 303, 306
Hottentot Venus 27 institutionalized diversity 299, 307
Houston, Sara 3, 33; different bodies 33–43 institutional mission 307
Houston Ballet (1993–1998) 300 instruction methods, teaching of dance 57
Houston-Jones, Ishmael 247, 252–6 Intangible Cultural Heritage 338–40
Hoyer, Dore 186 in/tangible heritage 465
Hudd, Roy 268 intellectual creation 329
human-computer interface 419 intellectual property 327
human-computer intra-actions 414 intensification of nervous stimulation 436
human factor and theater 445 interacting cognitive subsystems 63
Human Factor, The: The Figure in Contemporary interactive dance improvisations 419
Sculpture 385 interactive space 421
humanism 414 Interactive Teaching Method (ITM) 83n4
human-machine relations 413 interconnectedness 15
human moving bodies together 88 interconnections 13
human power of the imagination 35 interdependence 485
Humphrey, Doris 125, 149, 209–10, 237 interdisciplinary discourses 3
Hunter (Stuart) 178, 184–5, 187 interlocutor 418
Hunter, Orlando 226 internal colonialism 23
Hutchens, Benjamin 181 International Association for Dance Medicine &
Huxley, Michael 4, 71 Science (IADMS) 56, 64
hybrids and divers 48–9 international ballet establishment 300
hyperobjects 15 international choreographers 319
International Mevlana Foundation (2004) 341
I Can’t Concentrate with You in the Room 247 International Monetary Fund 287
identity politics 223–4 International Somatic Movement Education and
ideokinesis 73–4, 76–7 Therapy Association (ISMETA) 76, 83n4
idiotic subjectivity of modernity 376 internet protocol (IP) address 346
498
Index
interobjectivity 14–15 Kabat-Zinn, Jon 110

interpenetrative relationship 14 “kadın semazenler” 346
interrelationships 5 Kaiser, Roland 439
intersubjectivity 14 Kalakshetra Institute 404
interview conversations 91–2 Kalavantula 404–5
In the Dancer’s Mind 63 Kamaitachi 12
intra-acting spacetime 91 Kaminsky, David 150
intra-actions 89, 415, 419, 422; of multiple Kammenos, Panos 287
agencies 415 Kammer/Kammer (2000) (Forsythe) 447–8
intra-active performance 422, 424 Kamuf, Peggy 187
intra-activity 89 Kardaris, Dionysios 290
intra-state context 294 Kartsaki, Eirini 116
Introduction to the Dance (Martin) 211 Katan, Einav 37–8
irrational 397 Katan-Schmid, Einav 126
Irwin, Kathleen 372 kathak 34, 397
Ishtar’s Journey into Hades (1913) (Laban) 455 Katzarova, Raina 149
Islington Arts Factory 382 Kavalan 398
It’s Up to You (Mensendieck) 82 Kearney, Richard 35–6
Itxassou Body/Landscape program 18 Kecak 151
Itxassou workshop 18 Kelly, Gene 145
I’ve Lost You Only to Discover That I Have Gone Kelly, Pippa 96
Missing (Allegranti) 92, 97, 106 Kelsall, Kate 35
Ives, Charles 248 Khan, Akram 306, 357
Khlebnikov, Aleksei 160
Jackson, Alicia 90 Khlebnikov, Velimir 160
James, William 129 Kikimora 193
Jameson, Frederic 446 kin-aesthetic 92, 99; collaboration 98; intimacy 107
Japan, modern dance in 13 Kinect system 161, 162
Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile 82 kinesthetic awareness 133–4
Järvinen, Hanna 144 kinesthetic empathy 2, 209, 373, 376, 414
Jazz dance 244 King and I, The (Robbins) 266
Jazz Train, The 239, 242 King’s Wager, or, The Camp, the Cottage and the
Jeux (Nijinsky) 192 Court, The 328
Jeyasingh, Shobana 356–7 Kirstein, Lincoln 211, 214
jobbing dancers 260 Kismet (Cole) 266
Johnson, Don Hanlon 75 Kisselgoff, Anna 366
Johnson, Terrence Luke 128 Kitwood, Tom 88
Johnston, Jill 210, 212 Klein- and Counter-Technique 49
joint authorship 327–31; and dance 331 knowledge-making enterprise 314
joint compositional skills 330 knowledge-producing practice 314
Jones, Adanna Kai 339 knowledge-system 48
Jones, Bill T. 226 Kolb, Alexandra 6, 428
Jones, Pauline 254 Kondek, Chris 184
Jones, Rrata Christine 253 Kotik, Petr 249
Jones, Susan 214 Koutedakis, Yiannis 56
Jordan, Stephanie 4, 36, 141, 237 Koutsouba, Maria I. 5, 285
Josephs, Elroy 5, 236–45, 240; career 236, Kozel, Susan 158, 420
238–41; curriculum vitae 237–8; Jazz dance, Krasnow, Donna H. 62
approach to 244; life 238–41; postcolonial Krauss, Rosalind 446
point of view 242–4 Kringelbach, Hélène Neveu 241
Josephz, El-Roy 238 Kruchenykh, Aleksei 160
Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices 71, 75 Kuppers, Petra 35
Journal of Dance Education 74 Kurath, Gertrude 286
Jowitt, Deborah 212–13, 237 Kusch, Martin 158
Judd, Donald 210
Judson Dance Theater 72, 125–6, Laban, Rudolf von 6, 13, 73, 209, 286
237, 251–2 Laban movement analysis 74, 77
499
Index
Labanotation 326 Lorimer, Jamie 19

Laban’s Effort Theory 458 Lost in Shangri-la (Stjernholm and Cheong-Leen
Laban’s principles of Choreutics 457–8 2016) 375, 375
“Lady’s Glove” 159 Louppe, Laurence 207
Laermans, Rudi 185 Lucy Guerin Inc. (2018) 357
La fille mal gardée 301 Luhrmann, Baz 274
Lamb at the Altar: The Story of a Dance (Hay) 128 Lunn, Jonathan 471
Lambert, Kay 263 Lyceum Club of Greek Women 289
Lamentation (1930) (Graham) 358 Lynch, Stuart 17
LaMothe, Kimerer 126
Lampert, Friederike 49 ma 15
Lancaster, Sue 237–8 Machine Dances (1922–23) 413
land-stealer 399 machine vision technology 418
language 53, 122 Mackrell, Judith 237, 357
language in dance creation 4 Magnesium 255
L’Après-midi d’un Faune (Nijinsky) 192–3 Magritte, René 122
L’arte dei rumori—The Art of Noises Maijuku Performance Company 12, 17
(Russolo) 166 Malevich, Kazimir 160
Las Meninas (Massine) 193 Mallarmé, Stéphane 183, 214
Latin and South American ballet dancers 5 Malone, Jacqui 251
Latour, Bruno 186 Malstaf, Vincent 184
Leach, Martin 82 Manhattan 225
Leaman, Kara 142 Manning, Erin 89, 94, 477
Le Chant du Rossignol (Stravinsky) 193 Manon 301
Lee, Cynthia Ling 6, 396 Mantell-Seidel, Andrea 133
Lee, Rosemary 7, 471, 474, 486 Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (Brown)
legal authority 331 6, 432
Legend of Joseph, The (Fokine) 192 Many Ways of Moving Congresses 72
Leggett, Trevor 110 mapping of interference 422
Lemon, Ralph 253 map–territory relation 117
leotards 356 Maqoma, Gregory Vuyani 30
Lepecki, André 366 Marcuse, Herbert 307
Lepkoff, Daniel 253 Margeti, Angeliki 166, 168, 169
Legend of Joseph, The (Nijinsky) 192 marginality 12
Les Ballets Nègres 236–9, 242–4 Margolin, Indrani 113
lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Marie De Vere Dancers 262–3
(LGBT) 5 Marinetti, Filippo Tomasso 192, 202
Les Femmes de Bonne Humeur (Massine) 193 Market Day (Pasuka) 238
Letter to My Nephew ( Jones) 226–7 Mark Morris: Musician-Choreographer ( Jordan)
Levinas, Emmanuel 209 153n1
Levinson, André 214 Marks, Lawrence E. 148
Levy v. Rutley 328 Martha Graham Company 58
Lewis, George 247, 250–1 martial art forms 4
Lewis, Nancy 255 Martin, Barry 26
liberty to license 325 Martin, Denis-Constant 27
Linz, Talia 216 Martin, John 134, 209, 211–12
Little Dancer of 14 Years (Degas 1881) 385 Marxist-inspired writings 428–9
Liturgy (Massine) 193 Masilo, Dada 25
live documentary evidence 465 Mason, Paul 147
“live” performance 315 Massine, Leonide 4, 191–3, 200; angularity, use
living and non-living to intra-act 422 of 197; choreography 191, 193, 196–201; and
living cultural heritage 465 cubism 196–201; and futurism 202–4; on
Lloyd, Margaret 211 human body 196–7; vision of modernity 191
Lobel, Elin 76 Massumi, Brian 107, 180
logos 187, 286 Master of Fine Arts (MFA) 65
Longley, Alys 126 Master of Science (MSc) 65
Look Better, Feel Better (Mensendieck) 82 material feminists 89
500
Index
Material for the Spine (2008) (Paxton) 384 mindful walking 112
materiality and virtuality 420 Minimal Music Sculpture (1988) (Vogel) 167
Matisse, Henri 193 Mitgefühl (feeling-with) 482
Matiushin, Mikhail 160 mnemonic space 184
Matsumoto, Takeshi 92–4, 102, 103, 106 mobile audience 416
Matthews, Hannah 217 Möbius strip 13
Mauss, Marcel 48 MoCap Hypervision 421
Mavroudis, Alexandre 191 modern/contemporary dance techniques 58
May, Jon 63 Modern Dance: The Jooss-Leeder Method
May, Theresa J. 11 (Winearls) 78
Mazo, Joseph 237 modernism 4
M/B training 18 Modernistic Apache Dancers 269
McDermott, John 29 Montague, Jules 101
McFadden, Becka 6, 381 Monte Verita 466, 467, 468; past and today’s
McGibbon, Andrew 392 multi-sensory body 465–6
McGregor, Paloma 231 Moorty, Shyamala 404, 406, 407
McGregor, Wayne 58, 64 Morera, Laura 305
McKinney, Joslin 371–2 Morris, Gay 4, 191, 210
McKirdy, Cameron 161 Morris, Mark 146
McMains, Juliet 144 Morris, Robert 210
mechanical and material civilization 429 Morton, Timothy 11, 13–15
mediatic sexualization 305 Mosaval, Johaar 25–7
meditation 114 MoSys 319
medium for knowledge transmission 319 Motion Bank (Forsythe) 450
Meduri, Avanthi 404 Motion Builder 161
Meisner, Nadine 298 motor-learning 61
memory 464–5; boom 181; develop movement/dance analysis 2
discourses 3; institutions 25 movement disorder see Parkinson’s disease
Menderes, Adnan 340 movement improvisation 3
Men in the Off Hours (2000) (Carson) 448 movement of mind 116–17
Mensendieck, Bess 82 moves (dance), in late 80s and 90s 2
Merce Cunningham Company 58 Moving as a Thought Process: An Insight into
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 3, 14 Mindfulness through Dance and Choreography 109
Merlin, Bella 388 Moving Consciously: Somatic Transformations
“the mesh” 11, 15 through Dance, Yoga and Touch (Fraleigh) 76
metakinesis 211 Moving into Dance (dance company) 26
Metal Skirt Sound Sculpture (Fullman) 159, 164 Moving Kinship project 88, 107
metatechnique 47 moving mind and body 125–7; “animate”
method 48 writing and nature 132–4; “dance state” of
Me Too movement 483 improvisation, writing 129–32; speaking,
Metzger, Matthew 247 writing, form, and movement 127–9
Mevlevi Sema ceremony 337–8; frames of Muddu Bidda 404–5
meaning 340–5; videos and YouTube’s Mulrooney, Steve 237
screens 345–7 multiculturalism 5, 298, 307; hedonistic
Michel, Yvonne 269 appreciation 299
Michielon, Vanessa 163, 163–4, 169 multiple authorship 331–2
Miller, Bebe 253 multiple materilizations 447
mind, movement of 116–17 multiple sclerosis 38
mind-body connections 3–4 multi-sited ethnography 340
mind-body dualism 360 multivocal framework 397
Mindful Movement: The Evolution of the Somatic multivocality 397
Arts and Conscious Action (Eddy) 76 Municipality of Elliniko-Argyroupoli in Athens
mindful moving 112; and choreographic 292, 293
undercurrent 114–15 Murphy, Siobhan 356–7
mindfulness 109–10; addressing 109–10; Murray, June Don 78, 267
moving and choreographic undercurrent Murugesan, Meena 397, 404, 408
114–15; role of 109; and somatic practices 4 musical accompaniment 4
501
Index
Musical Theatre at the Court of Louis XIV: Le Noland, Carrie 359

Mariage de la Grosse Cathos 146 “non-costume” 356
Music-Dance: Sound and Motion in Contemporary non-knowing teacher 49
Discourse (Veroli and Vinay) 152 nonlinearity 397
My Body, The Buddhist (Hay) 129 Northern Ballet 308
Myers, Martha 73 notion of dwelling 475–6
Myllylahti, Sanna 362 Novack, Cynthia 47, 254
Mythic (2012) 360 Nukoop, Marc 171, 173
Nyman, Michael 250
Nachbar, Martin 186
Nahachewsky, Andriy 294 object-oriented ontology 14
Napoli 265 observational visual analysis 355
narrative of self-denigration and Off-Off-Broadway theatre 431
self-otherization 25 Of Grammatology (Derrida) 181
narrative strategies 6 Oguibe, Olu 25
Natal Performing Arts Council (NAPAC) 25 Oh, Tongue (Forti) 126–9, 131–3
National Dance Association: first Ohno, Kazuo 12
symposium 73 Oliver, Cynthia 225, 247
National Dance Teachers Association 62 One Flat Thing, reproduced (Forsythe) 313
National Geographic 375 one’s sense of place 466
national identity construction 286 online video platforms 314
nationalism 307 ontology of dance 366–7
nationalities and racial identities 301 open-ended interviews 355
nationality 5, 299 OpenSource 3D software 161
National Resource Centre for Dance optical tracking systems 422
(NRCD) 318 Oral Site archive project 314
Natural History of the Ballet Girl, The (Smith) 260 Ordinary Dance (Rainer) 125
Natural History of the Chorus Girl, The (Parker “Organic Telling” (Forti) 127
and Parker) 260 Orlin, Robyn 27
nature 12 Oro. L’Arte di Résistere (Gold. The Art of
Naughton, Adam 421 Resisting) 40
nègre 239 orthogonal theater 424
négritude 241 Ortner, Shelly 49
Neher, Caspar 444 Osborne, Peter 446
Nehru, Jawaharlal 238 O’Shea, Janet 47
Nelson, Mervyn 239 Otolith Group 247
Nelson, Solveig 250 Ottoman Empire 340
neoliberalism 224 Outline of My Lover (2000) 447–8
Nettleford, Rex 242 Out of Line: The Story of British New Dance
Nettl-Fiol, Rebecca 75, 81 (Mackrell) 237
Neue Museum in Weimar 448 Oxley, Harriet 361
neutrality 425
New Dance 72 painstaking labour 480–1
new dances 431 Paipai, Amanda Zhou 377–8
new life of postmodern sensation 446 Pakes, Anna 185
New Musical Resources (Cowell) 248 Palladium Girls 261
New Musicology 142 Palliani, Maria 97
New York Public Library 344 Pane, Gina 160
Nicholas, Larraine 5, 259 Panourgia, Marianna 286
Nicifero, Alessandra 366 Pantouvaki, Sofia 360
Nico Malan Opera House in South Africa 26 Parade 191–204, 195, 197, 200; and cubism
Nijinska, Bronislava 204, 413 196–201, 204; dances in 202; and futurism
Nijinsky, Vaslav 192 202–4; libretto for 194; Massine’s choreography
Nine Nights (Pasuka) 238 for 192–201; Picasso’s set for 193–4
Nixon in China (Morris and Adams) 150 Parallels series 251–4
Nkrumah, Kwame 239 Parker, Derek 260
noise machine 158 Parker, Julia 260
502
Index
Parkinson’s dancers 39 physical thinking 421

Parkinson’s disease 3, 33–4; dance for 34–5; physiological sensations 376
dance-makers 38–41; dance’s therapeutic Picasso, Pablo 191–6, 198, 198, 201–2, 204
benefit to 34; Leonard and Margaret 37–8; Pick’n’Place (2010) (Hiesl) 432
poetic in dance 35–6 Piecemaker annotation tool 319
Parren, Callirrhoe 289 Pietrobruno, Sheenagh 6, 337
Partch, Harry 248 Pilates-based conditioning 74
part dance partner 416 Pina Bausch Sourcebook: The Making of
participatory dances 93–6 Tanztheater, The (Climenhaga) 389
participatory ecology 94 Pingpu 398; plains indigenous bloodlines
Passage (Kusch) 158 397
Passage for Par (Lee) 471–86; outdoor placemaking 466
performance event 472; performance “Planet Back” 385
description 472; at start of performance 472 platform’s ranking algorithms 346
Pasuka, Berto 236, 238 Plischke, Thomas 179–81, 187
Pather, Jay 29 PM2, annotation tool 319
paths of knowledge 371 Poe, Jumatatu 247
pathway 112 poetic functions 4; for dance 3; of language 36
Paxton, Steve 112, 125, 252, 254–5, 431 Popat, Sita 424
pedagogic and creative practices 3 Pope.L. 247–51, 257
“pedestrian” costume 356 Post-Apartheid Dance: Many Bodies, Many Voices,
pedestrianism 327 Many Stories (Friedman) 22
Peffer, John 22 post-feminist culture 482
penmanship 330–1 posthumanism 14
performance installation 312 post-medium age 446
performance-making process 361 post-medium practices 444
performance research 2 post-medium specific art 446
performance score 390 post-medium specific practice 444
performance staging innovations 6 postmodern dance languages 356
Performing Arts Council of the Orange Free postmodernism 4, 428
State (PACOFS) 25 postnisin 342, 347
Performing Arts Council of the Transvaal poststructuralism 2
(PACT) 25 Poulin, Marie-Claude 158
Performing Arts Councils 25 Powell, Sandy 361
Performing Right Society (PRS) 332 practice and agency, ethics of 119
Performing the self 71–2; Alexander practice-based research 2
Technique 78–82; dance and somatic praxeological analysis 3, 44–55
practices 72–8 pre-conceived theory in mind 355
perlocutionary duration-performatives pre-emotional bodying 90
376–7 presence 14
permeation 369, 374 Prickett, Stacey 1
Perpener, John 252 Prime Movers (Mazo) 237
personal and cultural expression, Greek Principles of Psychology ( James) 129–30
traditional dance 294 Professional Association of Alexander Teachers
personal-professional tensions 92 (PAAT) 83n4
Pethybridge, Ruth 7, 471 professional context, dance in 355
Petruskha (Fokine) 26 professional dance schools 286
phenomenology 477, 483 professional self-realization 302
Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art 5 programmable and choreographed
Phoenix Dance Company 237 matrix 420
physical education (PE) 62; Greek traditional pro-independence political agenda 400
dance 294 psychoanalysis 95
physical energy 59 psychology 1, 5
physical manuscript 317 Psychology of Music in Multimedia, The
physical movement, dancer’s body 421 (Cook) 141
physical score 390 psycho-physicality 388
physical support 449 Ptashek, Alan 254
503
Index
Qing Dynasty expansionism (1644–1912) 398 Repetitions of Disappearance (2015) (Stjernholm

Qing Imperial Tribute Illustrations (1751) 399 and Cheong-Leen) 373–4, 374
Quoiraud, Christine 17 RePlay 316
representationalism 89
race 5, 25, 299 repressive tolerance 307–8
racial and ethnic heterogeneity 299 research validities 52
racial difference 303 resistance 50
racial stereotypes 299 Resistance-Subjector (2011) 385–6
racism 307 resourcing/searching dance technique 44–5;
Rainer, Yvonne 95–6, 98, 98–101, 125, 210, dance education 46; dance transmission
252, 255, 479 49–50; experiencing, appropriating, and
rakshasa 400 normalizing 51–2; hybrids and divers 48–9;
Ramdhanie, Bob 239, 242 learning constellations 45–6; practice theories
Ramgsard-Thomsen, Mette 415–16 and investigating technique 50–1; single
ramifications 327 techniques and overarching principles 46–8
Random Acts 41n1 responsiveness 14
Random Dance Company 354 re-staging as contemporary practice 459–60
Rani, Maxwell Xolani 23, 26 RestorationArt 225
Ratliff, Melissa 216–17 Rethinking Music (Cook and Everist) 142
Rauschenberg, Robert 160, 210 Reus, Jonathan 171
Raymonda 301 Revudeville 264–5, 267
real life 15–16 Rhames, Arthur 256
RealTime 215–16 Rieger, Uwe 416
reciprocal relationship 431 Riley, Richie 238–9, 242, 244
recordings 332–3 Riotous Assemblies Act of 1956 28
recreation 456 Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, The
Redding, Emma 3, 56 (Brecht and Weill) 444
RedMicro Dress 158, 163, 163–4, 165, 166, ritual authority 406
168, 169 Road to South African Freedom, The: Programme of
Reflection of Time: Art of Fashion in China the South African Communist Party 23
1993–2012 369 Robbins, Jerome 266
reflections 50 Robin Ray v. Classic FM plc 330
reflective practice 355 Robinson, Fay 261–2
reformulation, methodology of 179–80 Robinson, James Harvey 81
re/heritage 457 Robinson Crusoe 241
re-imagining 455–7 Roche, Jennifer 325–6
re-imagining Laban: contemporary Roelstraete, Dieter 250
choreological practice 457–8; dance Rolf, Ida 76
artistry and pedagogy 460–1; definition rolfing 4, 74; and rolf movement 76
455–7; memory 464–5; Monte Verita’s past rolling-hip dance 339
and today’s multi-sensory body 465–6; Roman theater 443
re/heritage 457; re-staging as contemporary Rome and Jewels (Harris) 275
practice 459–60 Romeo and Juliet 301
reinvention 456 Roos, Cecilia 326
relational aspects of art, scenography 372 Rosaldo, Renato 401
relational body renews choreography 374 Rosas danst Rosas (De Keersmaeker) 325
relational subjectivity 374 Rose, Charles 265
Relatives (Houston-Jones) 253 Rosenberg, Douglas 339
“relearning of embodiment” 423 Rosenberg, Harold 210
release-based techniques 61 Rothfield, Philipa 213
Ren, Helenna 161, 162, 166 Rotie, Marie-Gabrielle 356, 360–1
Renaissance-styled buildings 432 Rowell, Bonnie 237
repeat 112 Royal Ballet 5, 25, 64, 298–300
repertoire vs. archives 183 Rubidge, Sarah 157
repetition 117–19, 478 Russian Roulette (2008) (Anderson) 361
repetition and remembering 477–81 Russolo, Luigi 158, 193
504
Index
sadir 404 sense of community 295

samba 150 sense of resilience 473
Samuel, Gerard 22–4 senses of invisibility 26
sarkaesthetics 26 sensitizing 20
Sarkozy, Nicolas 377 sensory and motor learning 461
Satellite Skin 171–2 sensory awareness 76
Satie, Erik 191 sensory intelligence 414
Satisfyin’ Lover (1967) (Paxton) 431 Sermon, Paul 312
Saumaa, Hiie 4, 125 Serpentine Dance (Fuller) 159
Savigliano, Marta 126 Serres, Michel 186
scenographic thinking 372 Serussi, Itamar 38
scenography 6 “Sex on legs” 305
scenography, choreographing the museum: sexual assault 483
area of interrogation 365–6; choreutic sexual desire 299
artifact 372–4; context and terminology sexuality 5
366–7; Delusions (2017) 377–8; durational “Shambhala” 375
scenography 370–1; implicit zones of Shampoo Dancing and Scars–(Dis)Embodiment in
371–2; scenographic practice and idea of Afro-Contemporary Choreography in South Africa
“permeation” 368–70; Searching for Shangri-la (Samuel) 22
(2016) 375–7 “Shangri-la” 375
Scenography Expanded (2017) (McKinney and Shapes of Change (Siegel) 237
Palmer) 371–2 Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and
Schino, Mirella 371 American Culture (Novack) 47, 254
Schiphorst, Thecla 158 Sharp, Craig 56, 62
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang 437–8 Shawn, Ted 209
Schlemmer, Oskar 413 Shearing, David 372
Schlesinger, John 240 Sheppard, Harry 253
Schmidt, Cecilie Ullerup 179 Sheringham, Michael 431
Schneemann, Carolee 160 Sherman Fisher Girls 262
School of Dance, University of Cape Shirtology (1997) 451
Town 22 Shue, Jackie 254
Schreiner, Bernard 179 Shui-hui, Chen 400
Scott, Lincoln 255 Shusterman, Richard 29, 71, 77, 82
screen, definition 339 side-by-side line dancing 482
screen-based interfaces 414 Siegel, Marcia 213, 237
screen-based software/hardware 339 Siegmund, Gerald 6, 443
screendance 339–40; scholars 339; and YouTube Silence: Lectures and Writings (Cage) 248–9
339–40 silent colonies 25
Scruton, Roger 429 Silivrikapı Mevlâna Cultural Center 341–2
search engine result page (SERP) 346 Silly Symphonies (Walt Disney) 152
Searching for Shangri-la (2016) 375 Silverthorn, Tara 4, 109
seeing 14 Simmel, Georg 436
self-contained meaningfulness 446 Simson, Kirstie 254
self-differing 446 Singularity: research and development 423;
self-effacing violence 178 research performance 425
self-identity 446 Singularity: drawing spaces + breathing spaces
self-inflicted destruction 180 415–16, 419–23
self-reflection 390 Siobhan Davies RePlay (RePlay) (2009) 316
self-sufficient 376 Siraya 398
self-techniques 52 sister act 259
Sell, Naomi Lefebvre 4, 109–11, 120, 121 Skola, Haglund 15
Selver, Charlotte 76 Sleep (Warhol) 431
sema ceremony 6 Sleeping Beauty, The (Tchaikovsky) 149
semi-structured interviews 355 Smiling (1967) (Paxton) 431
Senghor, Léopold 241 Smith, Albert 260
Sensa Fine (Endless) 41 Smith, Jennifer 254
505
Index
Smith, Marian 143 sovereignty 341; and dignity 439

Smith, Nancy Stark 254 Soyinka, Wole 241
snapshot, Greek traditional dance: characteristics space and digital interaction 419
294; collection of dances 294; constitutes space and place 6–7
294; Municipality of Elliniko-Argyroupoli spacetimemattering 90
in Athens 292, 293; Stavros Niarchos spatial dramaturgy 421
Foundation (SNF) Cultural Center (SNFCC) spatial orientation 449
289–91; Syntagma Square 287–9 spatio-temporal rhythms 19
Sneakers 1 (2008) 385–6 Spatz, Ben 463
Snow, CP 3 Specters of Marx (Derrida) 182
social capital 298 spectrality, archives 183, 187–8
social consciousness 5 speeds of processing 419
social dancing 478 spinal afflictions 381
social injustices 5 Spink, Ian 237
social media: campaign 483; and surveillance 414 Spivak, Gayatri 181
social structures underdevelopment 294 SPLICE: Live Art and Photography in
society, and culture 5 Collaboration 392
Society for Ethnomusicology 142 Squires, Dougie 270
Society for Music Theory 142 Srinivasan, Priya 397
Society of Dance History Scholars 142 stacking the spine 381–94
Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique staging wearables 158–60
(STAT) 83n4 Stanislavsky, Konstantin 388
sociocultural dimensions of dance 285 Stark Smith, Nancy 113
sociology 1, 5 state-funded dance companies 22
sociopolitical and financial crisis 286 Stavros Niarchos Foundation
Soleil de Nuit (Massine) 193 (SNF) Cultural Center (SNFCC)
solo and chorus, BackStories 391–3 289–91
solo dances 6 St Denis, Ruth 237
Solomons, Jr., Gus 253 Stearns, Jean 251
Somaesthetics 77 Stearns, Marshall 251
somatic education 74 Steinberg, Oguri 17
somatic learning 73–4 Steinberg, Roxanne 17
Somatic Movement Dance Education (SMDE) Steinweg, Marcus 179
71, 77 Stepputat, Kendra 147, 151
somatic practices 2, 4, 71–2, 78–82 stereo vision 414
Somatics 73 Stern, Daniel 94
Somatics: Journal of the Bodily Arts and Sciences stigmatization 5
(Hanna) 73 stillness 109
somatics of dance 73 stimulation 20
Somerville, Daniel 382, 385 Stjernholm, Johan 6, 365
Sonami, Laetitia 159 strangeness: coextensive, movement, space,
Soneji, Davesh 404 technology, and corporeality as 423–5;
Song Books (Cage) 249–50 cyborg 414–15; informational figuring
Sontag, Susan 212 415–23
sounding costumes 4 Stravinsky, Igor 193
Sounding the Dance, Moving the Music: Streb, Elizabeth 227
Choreomusicological Perspectives on Maritime Street Dance (Childs) 432
Southeast Asian Performing Arts (Trimillos) Striding Out: Aspects of Contemporary and New
142, 144 Dance in Britain ( Jordan) 237
soundscape and movement 421 Stuart, Meg 178, 184
sous rature 181–3, 186–7 Stuart v. Barrett 330
South Africa, apartheid 22–3; bodies and dance Studies in Costume and Performance ( journal)
23–4; dancing bodies 24; dis/embodiment 157, 354
of dancing body 26–7; dis/empowerment of Studio for Electro Instrumental Music in
dancing bodies 24–6; dis/placement Amsterdam (STEIM) 169, 171
of dancing body 27–8; high art, low art, studio practice 92–3
non-art 28–30; policy 23 subaltern dancers 299, 302
506
Index
subaltern historiography: subaltern studies They Came (Pasuka) 238

396–8; blood run 398–404; we used to see this Thinking Body, The (Todd) 63, 81
404–8 Thomas, Ben 144
subaltern writing techniques 397 Thomas, Helen 1, 36, 439
Subotnik, Rose 101–6, 102, 142 Thompson, Robert Farris 251
SU-EN 15; “body materials” 16 Thousand Plateaus, A (Deleuze and
SU-EN Butoh Company 15, 20 Guattari) 14
SU-EN’s Butoh Summer Camp 11, 16–17; 3D camera-vision 162
alternative 4; “body materials” 17, 20; three-dimensional data documenting 319
“practical work” 16 3D program Unity 420
Sufism 338 Three Shadows Art Centre 375
Summit Dance Theatre 456; dancers 463 Tian Art Foundation 377
Sunday Night at the London Palladium 270 tights 356
sur-realism 201 Tiller, John 260, 262
Swan Lake (Masilo) 25, 301 Tiller Girls 260–4, 267, 269, 269
Sweigard, Lulu 63, 73 time, dance 5–6
Swenson, Sarah 128 Time and the Dancing Image ( Jowitt) 237
synchronous objects 313, 317, 450; website Todd, Mabel Elsworth 63, 73, 76, 82
318–19 Tohoku 12
Syntagma Square 287–9, 288 Tomé, Lester 5, 298
systematization 45 tool-(kit) 48
topology 185–7
Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Towards a Poor Theatre (Grotowski) 388
Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683–1895 toyi-toyi 22
(2004) 399 Trager, Milton 76
Tamed 64 Trager method 76
Tanaka, Min 11–12, 14–15, 17–18 Trager Psychophysical Integration 73
tango 34 training and performance 11
Tari Ping dance of Minangkabau training programs 13
tradition 147 transcategorical 447
task dances 431 transformative visual spectacle 358
TatlinTower (head)dress 158, 165, 166 transformed training 4
Taylor, Diana 183, 315, 396 transgression 417
Taylor, Joshua 202 transmission of knowledge 371
Taylor, Paul C. 26–7, 237 transmitters 465
Tchaikovsky’s ballets 143, 145 transnational context 294
teacher/coach intuition 57 Treachery of Images, The 122
teachers 274 Triadic Ballet (1922) (Schlemmer) 413
Teasdale, John D. 63 Trimillos, Ricardo 141
technological developments 6 Trimingham, Melissa 359
Teck, Katherine 151 Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and
TEDx 372–3 Dance 455
Telematic Dreaming (Sermon) 312 Trinity Laban dancers 461
Telespringar 150 Trio A (1966) (Rainer) 384, 386
temporal, scenographers 372 Tswana culture, dance of 25
Teppa, Lucille 4, 109 Tudor, David 249
terrorists emergence 307 Tufnell, Miranda 135
Terry, Walter 211 Turkish Ministry of Culture and
theater 443–4; choreographic principles 443–4; Tourism 341
choreography as self-differing medium “the turn to ‘affect’” (Deleuze) 2
447–51; dance 2; to medium 444–6; from turn to the body 2
medium to post-medium 446–7; post-medium Tushnet, Rebecca 331
phenomena 443 “Tweede Nuwe Jaar” (second New
Theatre and Performance Design 365 Year) 27
“theatricality as medium” 444 Twentieth-Century Dance in Britain:
Theodores, Diana 213 A History of Five Dance Companies
These Foolish Kings 267 (White) 237
507
Index
two-dimensional computer screen 420 Visual artists 6

two-directional permeation 370 visual texture to dance 357
Vlemmix, Marc 39–40
UK Healthier Dancer conference 56 vocabulary-based codified techniques 61
unalienated dancing 279–80
unbuild 421 Wadle, Douglas 128
Unbuttoned Sleeves (Forti) 127, 131, 134 Waelde, Charlotte 6, 323
UNESCO 337–8 Walking on the wall (Brown) 6
unitard 356 Warhol, Andy 160
United Kingdom (UK) copyright law 323–4 War of Independence 287
unity, inner and outer 473 Watkins, Mary F. 211
Universal Negro Improvement Association wayang wong 144
(UNIA) 238 wearable sound 164
University of Auckland 419 wearers 353
University of California, Riverside 3 Weber, Samuel 444
University of California at Los Angeles Weeksville Heritage Center 225
(UCLA) 397 Weidman, Charles 210
University of Surrey 318 Welsh, Kariamu 251
Unjust Malaise 249 West African dance 25
Uno, Kuniichi 14 Western concert stage 397
Untamed Spaces (Zachary) 225–6 West Side Story (Robbins) 240, 240, 275
unthinking arrogance 429 Whatley, Sarah 5, 63, 75, 311
Untitled Duet (Houston-Jones and Holland) 247, whirling dance 338
255–6 Whirling Dervish 6
upper-caste Brahmin women 404 whirling dervish (semazen) 342
urban (traditional) dance 285 White, Joan 237
urban marvels, everyday life 436–8 “white people’s dancing” 24
urban planning 6 Wigman, Mary 13, 82
urban street environment 438 Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life
Use of the Self, The (Alexander) 82–3 (Goldber) 130
user-generated metadata 346 Wiley, Roland John 143
Using the Sky: A Dance (Hay) 129 Wilks, Thomas Egerton 328
US postmodern dance 397 Wilson-Bokowiec, Julie 160
Windmill Girls 260–7; dance 5
Valentine, Ricarrdo 226 Winearls, Jane 78
Valéry, Paul 214 winin, 339
Van Damm, Vivian 262–5, 268 Winnicott, Donald 92
van de Ven, Frank 11; training 11, 17–18 wireless microphone system 165
Vanier, Luc 80 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 122
variety dancers 260–1; see also female dancers; Wolfgang, Ernst 185
making of 261–4; personality, participation, womanliness 406
skill, novelty of 268–70 Women’s March 228–30
Velostat 170; conductive lining 172 Woodmansee, Martha 327
verbal communication 53 World Wide Web 312
Véronique Doisneau (2004) (Bel) 451 “writing-dancing body” 126
videos and YouTube’s screens 345–7 writing impulse 133
videos highlighting dance 338 Writing of History, The (de Certeau) 180
Village Voice, The 210, 212–13, 216 Wynne-Jones, Angharad 217
Vimeo 316
Vincenzi, Simon 361 X6 72
Virago-Man Dem (Oliver) 225–6 X-box 3D infrared camera 161
virtual avatars 414 xenophobia 299, 307
Visser, Nicholas 23–4 xenophobic conservatism 224
Visser, Nicola 474 x-times people chair (Hiesl) 428–41, 433,
visual aesthetics 6, 161 434, 440
508
Index
Yanks 240 zeroing 4

Yin, Robert K. 7n1 Zervou, Natalie 286
YouTube 316, 337–8; commercialization 340; Zhi-wei, Zhang 400
platforms 5–6; and screendance 339–40 zikir 338
zombie projects 317
Zachary, André 225 Zulu dance 25
Zen Buddhism 126 Zur Seinsfrage (Heidegger) 181
Zen sitting meditation 111 Zwierzyńska, Aneta 92, 99, 106
509

(Routledge Theatre and Performance Companions) Helen Thomas and Stacey Prickett - The Routledge Companion To Dance Studies-Routledge (2020)

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Helen Thomas is professor of Dance Studies at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music

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The Routledge Companion to Actors’ The Routledge Companion to Adaptation

The Routledge Companion to The Routledge Companion to Butoh

The Routledge Companion to Jacques The Routledge Companion to Dance

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/handbooks/

Edited by Helen Thomas and Stacey Prickett

ISBN: 978-1-138-23458-1 (hbk)

Introduction: Thematic structure, methodological frames, and analyses 1

2 The dancing body, power and the transmission of collective memory in

3 Different bodies: A poetic study of dance and people with Parkinson’s 33

4 Resourcing/searching dance technique and education: Developing a

5 The expanding possibilities of dance science 56

6 Performing the self: Dance, somatic practices, and Alexander Technique 71

7 Moving Kinship: Between choreography, performance, and the

8 Moving as a Thought Process: The practice of choreography and stillness 109

10 Choreomusicology and dance studies: From beginning to end? 141

12 The anarchive of contemporary dance: Toward a topographic

13 Cubism, futurism, and Leonide Massine’s choreography for Parade 191

14 Whatever happened to dance criticism? 207

15 Black dance: Brooklyn 2017 223

17 A love song as a form of protest 247

18 Female dancers on the variety stage in mid-twentieth-century Britain 259

19 Selling and giving dance 273

20 Traditional dance in urban settings: ‘Snapshots’ of Greek dance traditions

21 Black star, other fetishized: Carlos Acosta, ballet’s new cosmopolitanism,

22 Digital preservation of dance, inclusion, and absence 311

23 Dance and copyright: As time moves on 323

24 Algorithmic choreographies: Women whirling dervishes and dance

25 Dressing dance–dancing dress: Lived experience of dress and its agency

26 The scenography of choreographing the museum 365

27 Stacking the spine: Interdisciplinary reflections from BackStories 381

28 Longing for the subaltern: Subaltern historiography as choreographic tactic 396

29 The strangeness of dancing: From The Changing Room and Singularity 413

30 Everyday life and urban marvels: The curious aesthetics of x-times

31 Dance, theater, and their post-medium condition 443

32 Re-imagining Laban: Tradition, extinction, invention. Re-staging

33 “Dancing through the hard stuff”: Repetition, resilience, and female

7.1 Intra-acting spacetime events 91

11.6 “Bed of Nails” Schematic 167

Beatrice Allegranti is a choreographer, UKCP reg. dance movement psychotherapist,

Catherine F. Botha is associate professor in the Philosophy Department, University of

Carol Brown is a dancer, choreographer, and scholar who specializes in interdisciplinary

Ramsay Burt is professor of Dance History at De Montfort University. His publications

Rosemary Candelario, associate professor of Dance, Texas Woman’s University, specializes

Alison Curtis-Jones is artistic director of award-winning Summit Dance Theatre. A leading

Michèle Danjoux is a fashion designer, experienced educator and Research Coordinator

Stephanie Jordan is research professor in Dance at the University of Roehampton in

Maria I. Koutsouba is professor of Choreology with an emphasis on Greek traditional

Rosemary Lee works as a choreographer and filmmaker in a variety of contexts and

Larraine Nicholas is an emeritus fellow at the University if Roehampton, London. She has

Ruth Pethybridge, senior lecturer in Dance at Falmouth University, delivers dance in

Sheenagh Pietrobruno, associate professor, is the director of the School of Social

Stacey Prickett, reader in Dance Studies at the University of Roehampton, investigates

Emma Redding is professor in Performance Science at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of

Gerald Siegmund is professor of Applied Theatre Studies at the Justus-Liebig University in

Tara Silverthorn (UK/CH) is an independent artist-practitioner in the field of dance and

Helen Thomas and Stacey Prickett

Dance studies today?

Part I. Dance and corporeality: Training and engagement

Part II. Dance and somatics

Part III. Dance and analysis