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Terra Incognita: Mapping New Territory in Dance and “Cultural Studies”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

Jane Desmond
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In this essay I propose new initiatives I hope to see in U.S. dance studies in the next decade. Rather than attempting a comprehensive literature survey, or citing all possible relevant material, I want to identify what appears to me to be terrae incognitae—unmapped and un- or under-explored realms of dance research—and to suggest that we collectively consider what the effects might be if they were brought into focus. While there are many such terrae incognitae, I want to concentrate here on issues relating to ethnography, suggesting that we expand our methods of analysis to include more ethnographies of institutions and audiences. While some work in these areas is already part of “dance studies,” it does not predominate and has been overshadowed by work on the history or representational practices of concert dance, especially modern dance and ballet.

I suggest that we use the potential of fieldwork—that is, the sustained participation in and observation of communities, institutions, and practices—and apply this widely to a variety of sectors in the U.S., including modern dance and ballet companies, dance institutions such as archives, training schools, community dance centers, and even our own scholarly organizations. While I hope there will be more ethnographies of dancing communities, like the contact improvisers Cynthia Cohen Bull analyzes, or the dancers of the Philippine ritual dance form sinulog that Sally Ness engages, there has already been some movement in this direction and those books provide excellent models. I want to emphasize here, instead, the important potential of critical ethnographic examination of institutions and organizations. These investigations will parallel new initiatives in anthropology, where scholars such as Richard Handler and Eric Gable have taken as the subject of their analyses The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and historical site, and Sharon Traweek, who has made a point of studying physics labs (1).

Type
Trends in Dance Scholarship
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , Summer 2000 , pp. 43 - 53
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 2000

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References

Notes

1. Bull, Cynthia Jean Cohen's (aka Novack, Cynthia) Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990)Google Scholar remains a model. Randy Martin integrates participant-observer into his analyses. See, for example, his discussion of hip-hop classes in chapter 3 of his Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998). See also Ness, Sally Ann's Body, Movement, and Culture: Kinesthetic and Visual Symbolism in a Philippine Community (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Browning, Barbara's Samba: Resistance in Motion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Savigliano, Marta's Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Taylor, Julie's Paper Tangos (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).Google Scholar For studies of institutions, see Handler, Richard and Gable, Eric's The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997)Google Scholar, and Sharon, Traweek's Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

2. I provide an extended discussion of these issues in “Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies,” which first appeared in Cultural Critique, vol. 26 (winter 1993): 33-63. In that article, as here, I use the term “cultural studies” to indicate a loosely aligned community of scholars who draw on a shared body of critical approaches.

3. See Morris, Gay, ed., Moving Words: Rewriting Dance (New York: Routledge, 1996)Google Scholar; Goellner, Ellen W. and Murphy, Jacqueline Shea, eds., Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Foster, Susan Leigh, ed. Corporealities: Dancing, Knowledge, Culture, and Power (London: Routledge, 1996)Google Scholar; Desmond, Jane C., ed., Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997).Google Scholar A full list of all relevant books and authors would exceed the parameters of this essay. Readers seeking more comprehensive bibliographic information are urged to consult the bibliographies of the collections named for a wide-ranging sense of which literature, approaches, and authors are most involved in this scholarly community. In addition, several scholars who see their primary affiliation as outside “dance studies” have made important incursions into dance-related issues, such as Robert Allen's work on the sexual and class politics of burlesque, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).

4. For a stimulating discussion of the, at times, contentious debates over “culture” in anthropology and cultural studies approaches, and the attitudes of scholars in each group toward the work associated with the other, see Dominguez, Virginia R., “Disciplining Anthropology” in Nelson, Cary and Gaonkar, Dilip, eds., Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1996): 37-62.Google Scholar Janice Radway's Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature is one of the few widely cited texts circulating among cultural studies scholars that employs ethnographic methods. Remarkably, despite the influence of that book in the roughly fifteen years since it was published, it has been joined by few others.

5. Cynthia Cohen Bull's work and that of Kate Ramsay depart from this trend. See also work by ethnomusicologist Amy Stillman, which includes discussion of hula music and dance.

6. Selected works by these authors include the following: Kaeppler, Adrienne, Hula Pahu: Hawaiian Drum Dances (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Farnell, Brenda, ed., Human Action Signs in Cultural Context: the Visible and the Invisible in Movement and Dancing (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Royce, Anya Peterson, Movement and Meaning: Creativity and Interpretation in Ballet and Mime (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).Google Scholar For an excellent and comprehensive review of articles on dance studies written by an anthropologist, see Reed, Susan A., “The Politics and Poetics of Dance,” in Annual Review of Anthropology 27 (1998): 503-532.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Reed concludes that anthropologists “have played a critical role in this new dance scholarship” of the last decade. I take a different point of view here, suggesting that dance work produced by those trained explicitly as anthropologists (or dance ethnographers) has, with some exceptions, been undervalued in “dance studies.” I am hopeful that this will change. Given the emphasis of many dance ethnographers on dance outside the U.S., part of this change may come as U.S. dance studies scholars begin to develop a more internationally comparative framework. This latter issue is one that demands extensive discussion in the future.

7. Susan Manning, personal conversation, January 1999. Bull, Cynthia Cohen's work (published under the name Cynthia Novack) Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990)Google Scholar runs counter to this trend in its analysis of dance practice engaged in predominantly by Euro-Americans, and reflects perhaps her own experience as a modern dancer combined with training in anthropology.

8. Keali'inohomoku, Joann, “An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance,” in Copeland, Roger and Cohen, Marshall, eds., What Is Dance? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983): 533-549. Originally published 1970.)Google Scholar

9. Wulff, Helena, Ballet Across Borders: Career and Culture in the World of Dancers (London: Berg Publishers; New York: Oxford: 1998).Google Scholar I thank Ellen Lewin for bringing this book to my attention.

10. A vigorous critique of colonial legacies and the politics of representation within anthropology has taken place at least since the mid-1980s. While many critiques came from those outside the field, much of the criticism has also been generated by anthropologists themselves. I cannot attempt to summarize those debates here, but they indicate the importance of not just “doing” field work, but of learning something of the history and methodology of that practice, and proceeding with critical caution. This need underlines the necessity of having ethnographic issues and practices (including politics and ethics) integrated into our training curricula as well as our conferences and publications. For an influential text in this auto-critique, see Clifford, James and Marcus, George, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).Google Scholar See also Narayan, Karen, “How Native is a ‘Native’ Anthropologist,” American Anthropologist 95, 3 (1993): 671-86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. I am not suggesting that enlarging our competence is an easy thing. I still remember vividly the day I finally “got it” and realized how deeply bounded my previous work had been by the notion of a dance as something that happens on stage—an artistic event of some kind—within a social context, rather than as a social event itself. No doubt this was a legacy of my experiences as a choreographer and performer. Up until that point I had been passionately invested in thinking that my analyses of living, breathing “texts” were significantly different than literary analysis. Of course, in key ways they were not.

12. Some scholarship exists on some of these topics, like Anderson, Jack's The American Dance Festival (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987)Google Scholar on the American Dance Festival, but that book focuses more on a history of who and what and less on an ethnographic understanding of why and how.

13. Naima Prevots's book Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War, a Studies in Dance History book published by Wesleyan University Press (1998), moves in this direction. Drawing primarily on archival sources, she reconstructs (as a sort of historical ethnography) the decision-making processes involved in selecting State Department-sponsored tours by leading American dance companies. I only wish this book were twice as long so the political analyses of the decision-making processes could be further elaborated. See also Dyke, Jan Van's discussion of how the policies of the National Endowment for the Arts have shaped the dance field in “Modern Dance in a Postmodern World,” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 1989.Google Scholar

14. Radway, Janice, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).Google Scholar

15. See also Hanna, Judith Lynne, The Performer-Audience Connection: Emotion to Metaphor in Dance and Society (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983).Google Scholar

16. See Sussmann, Leila, “Dance Audiences: Answered and Unanswered Questions,” Dance Research Journal 30, no. 1 (spring 1998): 54-63CrossRefGoogle Scholar for an example of some contemporary audience research.

17. Shank, Barry, Dissonant Identities: The Rock‘n’Roll Scene in Austin, Texas (Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1994).Google Scholar

18. See Susan W. Stinson, “A Question of Fun: Adolescent Engagement in Dance Education” (pp. 49-69) and Judith B. Alter, “Why Some Dance Students Pursue Dance: Studies of Dance Students from 1953-1993” (pp. 70-89), both in Dance Research Journal 29, no. 2 (fall 1997), and Stinson, Sue, Blumenfeld-Jones, Donald, Van Dyke, Jan, “An Interpretative Study of Meaning in Dance: Voices of Young Women Dance Students,” Dance Research Journal 22, no. 2 (fall 1990): 13-22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19. Scott, Anna, “Spectacle and Dancing Bodies that Matter: Or, If It Don't Fit, Don't Force It,” in Meaning in Motion: 259-269Google Scholar, and Bollan, Jonathan, “Queer Kinesthesia: Performativity on the Dance Floor,” forthcoming in Desmond, Jane, ed., Dancing Desires: Choreographing Sexualities on and off the Stage (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press).Google Scholar

20. See Graff, Ellen's Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City, 1928-1942 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Studies in Dance History 5, no. 1 (spring 1994) also contains a collection of articles edited by Lynn Garafola which discusses “dancing on the left.” See Tomko, Linda's Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divides in American Dance, 1890-1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).Google Scholar

21. Levine, Lawrence, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

22. While I am highlighting the “middlebrow” realm here, I should note too that the “lowbrow” often gets ignored as well. I am thinking here of lap-dancing in “gentlemen's clubs” which Bobby Allen has recently started researching, or the dancing strippers that Judith Lynne Hanna writes about. (See Robert C. Allen, “High Heels and Hysteria: Toward a Cultural Theory of Lap Dancing,” paper delivered at the American Anthropological Association Meeting, 1998, and Hanna, Judith Lynne, “Toying with the Striptease Dancer and the First Amendment,” in Reifel, Stuart, ed., Play and Cultural Studies, vol. 2. (Greenwich, Conn.: Ablex, 1998): 37-55.Google Scholar One simple reason that more work is not done on these dancing arenas, choreographies, and patrons is that many women feel uncomfortable in these clubs, making research by female scholars potentially harder to do than going to a performance of Paul Taylor.

23. With some notable exceptions, little of the intellectual energy in dance studies in the last decade has gone into investigating these, or similar, realms. Often the performers and participants seem to lack sophistication, and the choreography seems predictable and simplistic. This may not be the case at all, but the perception is that these forms are aesthetically lacking and therefore not central to our work. For many of us who come to dance studies out of careers as modern dancers, our research reflects this bias. While this has led to the development of highly sophisticated analyses of modern dance, ballet, and African-American concert dance, it leaves a huge range of practices, meanings, and publics out of sight.

24. Buckland, Theresa, ed., Dance in the Field: Theory, Methods, and Issues in Dance Ethnography (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Press; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25. For example, anthropologist Amory, Deborah P.'s “Club Q: Dancing with (a) Difference,” in Lewin, Ellen, ed., Inventing Lesbian Cultures in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996): 145-160Google Scholar, is one of the very few discussions of lesbian bar dancing in print, but it includes only generalized descriptions of movement, spatial interactions, and the relation of music to movement, which are critical components of the bar-goers' experience and of a dance studies analysis. Also in the same book, Rochella Thorpe's article “A House Where Queers Go: African-American Lesbian Nightlife in Detroit, 1940-1975” (pp. 40-61) discusses African-American women's experiences at house parties that include dancing, but includes no detailed discussion of the dancing. Limón, José's book Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994)Google Scholar also contains extensive discussion of social life taking place through dancing at bars, but again, the emphasis is not on the dance practices themselves.