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.
Review Question:
What is
problematic
about the
“nonevaluative,
documentary
trend in dance
criticism”
linked with
Jowitt.
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.
It’s all about perception:
“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.
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