DR635 Dance

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DR635 Dance Discourse - Autumn Term 2007
Performing BodiesDance, Gazes, Gender(s)
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Dance Discourse

• Remember
• CHOREOGRAPHY
• means, literally translated,
• writing of the body

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The Body Project

• Influences

Poststructuralism/Deconstruction
Feminism/Gender Studies
Sociology/Anthropology
Postcolonial Studies/ Ethnography
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Phenomenology

• Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)
• Phenomenology of Perception (1962)

• embodied subjectivity
• lived experience

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Mary Douglas (1921-2007)

• Purity and danger An analysis of conceptsof
  pollution and taboo (1970)
• Natural Symbols (1973)

Social Body
Two Bodies
Natural Body
The physical experience of the body is always
modified by the social categories through which
it is known. (1973, p. 64)
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The Feminist Project

• are the (perceived) hierarchical differences
  between the two sexes arising from natural
  (biological) or cultural (socially constructed)
  differences ?
• are women/female bodies the male other?
• influential Ann Oakleys 1974 distinction betwen
  sex and gender female vs feminine
• other important feminist thinkers Julia Kristeva
  (? Lacan), Hélène Cixous (écriture feminine),
  Luce Irigaray
• the body as prime site for political struggle, as
  an instrument of power (Susan Bordo 1993, p.
  16), as the site of repression and possession
  (Wolff, p. 82)

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The Feminist Project

• the second generation feminists critiqued the
  focus on the body as the the site of liberation
  (direct experience of a natural body), and
  foregrounded the disciplining aspect of the body
  (? M Foucault, Week 8)
• Wolff (? Further Reading) summarises some key
  theoretical inspirations
• Mary Douglas pollution
• Norbert Elias the civilizing process (non-)
  acceptable behaviour
• Michel Foucault discipline self-surveillance
• Mikhail Bakhtin carnivalesque and grotesque
  body

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The Feminist Project

• Biology is always overlaid and mediated by
  culture, and the ways in which women experience
  their own bodies is largely a product of social
  and political processes.
• (Wolff, p. 92 cf. Fosters ideal body)

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The Feminist Project

• Ann Daly, 1991
• The inquiries that feminist analysis makes into
  the ways that the body is shaped and comes to
  have meaning are directly and immediately
  applicable to the study of dance, which is, after
  all, a kind of living laboratory of the study of
  the body its training, its stories, its way of
  being and being seen in the world. As a
  traditionally female-populated (but not
  necessarily female dominated) field that
  perpetuates some of our cultures most potent
  symbols of femininity, western theatrical dance
  provides feminist analysis with its potentially
  richest material.
• quoted in Thomas, p. 159

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The Feminist Project

• Dance is not only about long legs, grace, or
  specific movement styles. It can also tell us a
  lot about the social value of the body within a
  particular culture.
• (Cooper Albright, p. 5 Further Reading)

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Judith Butler (b. 1956)

• performativity
• We PERFORM cultural inscriptions, e.g. Gender
• One of her examples drag (in Gender Trouble)

we dramatically and actively embody and, indeed,
wear certain cultural significations.
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Judith Butler (b. 1956)

• Implications on sex/gender
• The act that one does, the act that one
  performs is, in a sense, an act that has been
  going on before one arrived on the scene. Hence
  gender is an act which has been rehearsed, much
  as a script survives the particular actors who
  make use of it, but which requires individual
  actors in order to be actualized and reproduced
  as reality, once again.

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Judith Butler (b. 1956)

• Performance vs performativity
• Performance acts potentially as critique and
  subverts the fixity of the normative heterosexual
  economy. Performativity, on the other hand,
  consists of a reiteration of norms which
  precede, constrain and exceed the performer.
  (1993, p. 234),
• quoted from Thomas, p. 49
• A critique of the idea of subversion

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Dance Discourse

• Any body politics, therefore, must speak about
  the body, stressing its materiality and its
  social and discursive construction, at the same
  time as disrupting and subverting existing
  regimes of representation.
• (Wolff, p. 96)

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Dance Discourse

• Some questions
• What happens when gender roles are switched in
  performance?
• Can performing bodies expose, challenge, revise
  the performativity of gender behaviour, on and
  off stage?

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Matthew Bourne (b. 1960)

• Laban graduate
• Founder member of The Featherstonehaughs (Lea
  Anderson)
• Company (New) Adventures in Motion Pictures

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Matthew Bourne (b. 1960)

• Swan Lake made him famous in 1995
• it was featured in Billy Elliot
• Recommended Reading Alastair Macauly, Matthew
  Bourne, Dance History and Swan Lake, in Carter
  ed. 2004 157-69 (see Further Reading)

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LaLaLa Human Steps

• founded 1980, in Montréal, by Édouard Lock
• locked in ballet
• use of film/video in performance gaze!!!
• use of the naked female body, leather outfits,
  etc. vs men in suits
• limits of physical possibility, endurance

• Dancer Louise Lecavalier became a cult star of
  the 1980s and danced in videos by David Bowie and
  others

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Édouard Lock (b. 1955)

• When dance severs the link between the real
  body and the symbolic body through complexity,
  acceleration, deceleration, or any other form of
  interference, it allows the viewer to recognise
  his body rather than contemplate it it
  destablises perception, allowing a multitude of
  details to emerge. The body ceases to be a
  symbolic entity and becomes a physical entity
  with infinite details and everything constructed
  upon it takes on additional details. It is no
  longer a question of understanding the world, but
  of recognising it. We call this symbolic
  construction of the world comprehension, and its
  deconstruction revelation.
• Édouard Lock 2001

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LaLaLa Human Steps

• Productions Human Sex, New Demons, Infante c'est
  destroy, 2, Amelia
• Films (in the library) Velazquezs Little Museum
• Lecavalier left LaLaLa in 1999

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LaLaLa Human Steps

• Our Example Amelia (2002)
• Recommended Reading Ann Cooper Albright,
  Techno Bodies Muscling with Gender in
  Contemporary Dance, in her Choreographing
  Difference, pp. 28-55 (see Further Reading)

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Lea Anderson (b. 1959)

• rock singer turned dancer Laban
• Cholmondeleys (all female, 1986) and
  Featherstonehaughs (all male, 1988)
• references to grotesque and expressionist dance
  (Valeska Gert) as well as pop-rock culture and
  cabaret

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Lea Anderson (b. 1959)

• Our example Double Take,a best of of short
  works by the Featherstonehaughs, originally
  staged in bars and nightclubs
• Recommended Reading Sherril Dodds, A
  Streetwise, Urban Chic Popular Culture and
  Intertextuality in the Work of Lea Anderson, in
  Janet Adshead-Lansdale, ed., Dancing Texts.
  Intertextuality in Interpretation. London Dance
  Books 1999, 208-230 (? Further Reading)