Dance Ethnography and

the Limits of Representation

by Randy Martin

A Powerpoint Presentation prepared by Khon Tuy

Flow of the Lecture:Introduction: dance ethnography (5min)

Jowitt (5 min)

Foster(5 min)

Banes (5min)

Blau (5 min)

Discussion Questions (5 min)

AIMS: To obtain a decent understanding of how ethnography applies to dance

To understand the importance of representation’s dismissal of audience participation

To interpret the role of dance ethnography in the articles of Jowitt, Foster, Banes, and Blau

Since I can’t find a definition of dance ethnography, let’s break it down!

What is ethnography?

According to Merriam-Webster, ethnography is “the study and systematic recording of human cultures; also: a descriptive work produced from such research.”

And of course, we all know what dance is!

Ethnography according to Martin:

“Ethnography is an appropriate method for appreciating the disruptive presence that divides representation and its object in that it conveys through language that the ethnographic procedure is radically different from what it looks at. Ethnography is an activity of textual appropriation of difference that rests upon a prior cultural appropriation through colonial contact. Hence, while ethnography results in representation, with sufficient methodological reflection, it points to what is lost to representation, just as does the performer-audience relation to dance” (322).

Say What?Instead of the Occidental vs the Orient Other, and what is lost when the West “represents” the East, we are looking at dance ethnography as the separation of the audience from the dance, and what is lost when critics, as the audience, “critique” or represent a performance.

The Exotic Other as the Audience:

“The [exotic]Other, grounded in practical terms as the mobilized presence of the unstable audience, provides momentary context to the agency of the object itself, not the writing of spatial inscriptions of dancing, or of ethnographic texts (323).”

The Limits of Representation: “…forms of representation rarely make an effort to

recognize audience participation” 320.

Because of this, representation is not

Inclusive of the entire performance--it

does not and cannot replicate audience participation

in the moment of each act. Each audience differs each

night, bringing to the dancers and and the performance

nuances and a tone that cannot be

recreated by a dance ethnographer.

Deborah Jowitt’s Time and the Dancing Image

--a dance history

Susan Foster’s Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance

--an application of contemporary theory to dance analysis

Sally Banes’s Democracy’s Body

--Judson Church, 1960s, experimental dance

Herbert Blau’s The Audience

--an analysis of theater

Deborah Jowitt is lead dance critic for the Village Voice. Martin characterizes her critiques as reviews, “a document of the dance rather than an evaluation of it” 324. Jowitt recreates for the reader a sense of the dance. She says herself, “in our anxiety to capture and chronicle a notoriously ephemeral art we do it an inadvertent disservice: we focus so intently on it that we sever it from the culture that spawned it and which it serves,” 324. Instead of writing criticism, she is writing history.

Jowitt’s book Time and the Dancing Image, “presents the history of dance as a persistent reaching for the Other…which she identifies as Orientalism…The play of desire and power is central to the Orientalistic thematic in dance…The very devices of proscenium presentation construct a spectacle of a world distant in time and space that is made intimate through a special mode of visual conquest where the virtuosic efforts of a female dancer are offered for the private pleasures of a male consort” 325.

What is problematic about the “nonevaluative,

documentary trend in dance criticism” linked with Jowitt.

Review Question:

Answer:

The “nonevaluative, documentary trend in dance criticism” is problematic because it is not actual criticism, but just representation, comparable to a movie review.

A more critical perspective:

In Reading Dancing, Susan Foster writes on dance more self-critically, in a way that tries to foreground the subject: “I am attempting to accomplish a similar kind of ‘ethnography’ by isolating and then comparing…choreographic projects as discrete cultural systems, systems created from a combination of what the choreographers have written and said, what has been written about them, and my own observations and experiences watching their dance and studying in their traditions” 329.

“Her [Susan Foster] theory of dance representation produces different modes of reading autonomous dance practices. Hence, each particular instance is normalized and made familiar through an explicit theoretical procedure that accepts four tropes or figures of speech derived from literary theory—

metaphor, synecdoche and irony—as embodying the fundamental relations between all things in the world (including dance)” 330.

Example?

According to Foster, “ [Deborah] Hay maintains a metaphorical relation with the Renaissance dances by resembling them. [George] Balanchine’s relation to the 18th century is metoynmic, or imitative. [Martha] Graham, as emblematic of expressionistic dance, stands in synecdochic relationship. And, [Merce] Cunningham retains an ironic distance from his objectivistic descendants” (331).

Methodological

Strategy“Rather than consider how representational strategies account for dance, one might examine how dance might be used methodologically to account for worldly problems…a text that purports to account for a particular dance activity might make an effort to situate a reader within the apparently eccentric experience of dance-making by orienting the analysis toward more familiar activity” 332.

Judson Church:

In this manner, Sally Banes focuses on sixteen dance concerts performed at Judson church in Greenwich Village between 1962 and 1964 in her book Democracy’s Body.

“Taken as suggestive of a general methodological attitude than simply as a site for a specific dance activity, Judson becomes a ‘frame’ within which any any sort of activity can be examined. Unlike either the exoticization of dance or its overparticularization as a separable discourse, here there is a world to be defamiliarized through the writing of dance” 333.

Freedom of Space!

“The scores allowed the scarcity of dance space to be a resource rather than a constraint, since the choreography could be actualized in any space whatsoever, including a space occupied by a single individual…That space was actualized, although only briefly, by bringing dance to a place already defined as oppositional by other, nonartistic activities” 334.

Discussion Question:

How did democracy play a role in the break up of Judson Church?

Explanation:

“Judson’s breakup represents a contradiction of participatory process and participation. If the democracy produced by Judson yielded to ‘younger participants,’ or if the presence of Robert Rauschenberg in some of those outside the New York community produced conflicts over where and when to perform, it was at the very least a highly exclusive and troubled democracy” 335.

Unstable Audience:

In Blau’s The Audience, he “conceives of audience as a kind of social movement precipitated by and further constituted in theater. This implies that the audience’s presence simulates that of the figure of history occasioned by the agency or execution of an idea within the performance itself…The performance is, for its audience, momentarily contained. The audience is, for performance, thoroughly mediated by a different context; therefore relative to performance, indeterminate…unstable” 336.

Ethnographic Analysis?

“Blau’s study can be seen as contributing to an ethnographic procedure that highlights the disruptive effects of the exotic Other it ‘captures and chronicles’ through representation. The audience figures in his account…as the indeterminancy of a specific representation, internal to performance and therefore to its reception, as if the audience were both a simulation and a protective membrane of the autonomous theater, history being something that is added after the fact” 337.

“When the audience is seen as consumers, they are being viewed from the perspective of an individuation process of circulation that only requires from them the promise of future demand without reflection on what the condition of the demand had been. The consumer is therefore without history” 338.

“When the audience is viewed as a mobilized presence, it is what constitutes history and therefore enlarges a conception of what a politics—in the face of a commodified field such as that presented by corporate media—might be”338.

It’s all about perception:

Discussion Question:

Speaking of perception, How do you think perception influenced each critic’s approach to analysis?

Discussion Question:

In theater, “The uneasy distance between performers and audience seems intended to prevent either of the two from being colonized for total appropriation as the exotic Other” 340. Do you think this is true