Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Writing Out Writing?: Kealiinohomoku and Conquergood (Whitney)


It seems to me that the main pitfall of ethnographic approaches can be summed up with a quote from the Conquergood article (apologies for the excessive cropping, but I didn’t want to put the entire paragraph in since we’ve all read it):

“There is an emergent genre of performance studies scholarship that epitomizes this text-performance hybridity. A number of performance studies-allied scholars create performances as a supplement to, not substitute for, their written research. These performance pieces stand alongside and in metonymic tension with published research….To borrow Amanda Kemp’s apt phrase, they use ‘performance both as a way of knowing and as a way of showing’…Several of these performance pieces have now been written up and published in scholarly journals and books.” (Conquergood 152).

I, unfortunately, did not have the time to look at any of the sources Conquergood lists as references of the “performance pieces” that have been “written up and published,” so I am only grounding my thoughts about this quote within the limits of his article. On those grounds, though, it seems hard to reconcile a fervent call for hybridity between “both written scholarship and creative work, papers and performances,” and a gracious nod to recent, specifically performance work (supplementing written research), that is able to embrace this hybridity, with the final line of this quote (Conquergood 151). How do we “record” and maintain sustained and productive conversations about things/people/events/etc. without relying on writing? Surely there are other ways to do it. But the academy as it currently stands – in essentially every field – relies on writing to “bridge the gap.” And I’m using “bridge the gap” here in the broadest possible context – even, literally, to “bridge the gap” between a scholar in Moscow and an academic in San Francisco who are eager to converse with one another about a particular topic.

It seems to me like the kind of study and analysis the ethnographic approaches in these articles call for necessarily omits writing from every part of the process. In their article on kinesthetic empathy, Reason and Reynolds are searching for a way to grab hold of “natural,” “instinctual” physical reactions we have as spectators to other bodies’ movements. But in their attempt to grab hold of these reactions, all they can do is work to articulate, in writing, what these reactions are – let’s find a way to quantify or describe them. And, as seems evident by our class discussion on Tuesday, these reactions seem to elude articulation all together.

Similarly, writing seems to intrude in Kealiinohomoku’s argument as well, although perhaps at a slightly different level. Kealiinohomoku doesn’t adamantly cry out against “textocentrism” in the same way that Conquergood does, but she does argue that current existing texts on dance do an incredible disservice to those cultures and dances that have been categorized as “ethnic.” She speaks out quite forcefully against these current texts: “The readings are rife with unsubstantiated deductive reasoning, poorly documented ‘proofs,’ a plethora of half-truths, many out-and-out errors, and a pervasive ethnocentric bias” (Kealiinohomoku 33). In light of these grievous errors, Kealiinohomoku seems to call for new texts that correct the problems and, perhaps, a shift in focus for anthropologists and ethnographers from a mistaken “world dance” scope to a more local or narrow scope in which expertise can be much more nuanced. She critiques the scholars of the current texts as being, “not interested in the world of dance…really only interested in their world of dance” (Kealiinohomoku 35). But, ultimately, even though Kealiinohomoku’s method seems to leave open a space for more nuanced writing to record reactions and analyses of dance events in any culture, she mistrusts writing to a certain extent. Definitions are nonexistent or glossed over as “we all mean the same thing anyway” and descriptions are substituted for definitions, “which are a different matter altogether” (Kealiinohomoku 38). So, in the end, I’m not sure writing finds a comfortable place in Kealiinohomoku’s methods either.

I’m sorry to only have really touched on one pitfall of the ethnographic approaches presented in these articles, but I think it’s an important one. And it circles back to our conversations earlier in the semester on the tension between the archive and the repertoire. It seems like the ethnographic approach might be on the cusp of providing an interesting way to create a flexible permeability between these two categories of knowledge, but it seems to fall short in the same way the repertoire does when it comes to sustained records for the future that can be reused or, at least, discussed. 

Course Blog 18 - First Responder - Jess

The benefits of an ethnographic approach to performance can be myriad. It can give outsiders a sense for what goes on within a particular culture, and for me, the performance methods and modes of a culture tell me more about the people who inhabit that sphere than anything else. Someone who gives outsiders the words to describe the inside experience can be very helpful to other scholars, and to others in general.

Kealiinohomoku's article made an excellent point in that there is no universality, there is no sole representative of a particular art form. The notion that Shakespeare is universal and it comes from Everywhere is nonsense. It is a Eurocentric mindset, one that limits discourse by pushing our sameness to the forefront. I feel that an ethnographic approach could help avoid some of the pitfalls inherent in scholarship, as long as it was undertaken with a large amount of self-awareness, and respect for other cultures.

Conquergood brought up the notion of ethnographic fieldwork "privileging the body", and radical empiricism, which is informed by the subjective experience of the ethnographer, thinning or blurring the line between the studied and the studying. The experiences of the scholar are no longer something to shy away from; the fact that scholars are different from those they study is not a liability. It implies that everyone can contribute meaningfully to an actual dialogue or conversation about a topic rather than privileging certain kinds of people as being "experts" by virtue of their background, experience, or what have you.

This is the sense I got from the two articles. Though I see some drawbacks to using an ethnographic approach to performance, I personally am in favor of recognizing the inherent differences in us all rather than flattening them in an attempt to prove everyone/everything universal.

Ethnography Schmography [Lusk]

I'm a little confused by Ethnography. So I'm going to try and think it aloud.

Okay.
Ethnography is defined as "the scientific description of peoples and cultures with their customs, habits, and mutual differences." That makes sense to me. To study other forms of art (for our argument) with the awareness that comparing it to your own culture is not helpful to the study. That makes complete sense to me. How else could we study other cultures? And are WE involved in this study of other cultures? Or is it the whole 'this is how we do it' and 'this is how they do it'.
(Unless I'm REAL off base with this definition.)

So... the dangers of this perhaps fall into our labeling of things, as Kaeliinohomoku points out. She delves into this by saying that the term 'ethnic' doesn't really mean what it means. But, rather one associates it with 'heathen', 'pagan', etc. 


In Jena's post she discusses how ethnography in the dramaturgy of Richard could have only helped the production. This fascinates me. We are no longer talking about obviously different cultures, such as Ballet vs. Hopi dances, but we are delving into subcultures. I think perhaps that this is where ethnography can became a huge headache. I feel like we could potentially fall into this trap of obsessing over the definition/labels of things. As scholars, we really like to know what people are saying when they are communicating their knowledge to us (Kaeliinohomoku has a whole section on the importance of definitions), but where does it end? Is there a point we can stop discussing the definition of the thing and talk about the thing? 

And I feel torn. Right now. Half of me wants to be that free spirited hippy in the quad smoking a joint, rocking out to some acoustic guitar, telling people we are ALL ONE and that LOVE is all we need. And the other half understands the importance of recognizing... no. We are not all one. We all have different sections and subsections that divide SO MUCH that we only stop when we reach the individual. And that's awesome! Both sides excite me completely. But I'm not sure which one would be the best approach in discussing things from a scholarly viewpoint. 

I do think, though, that there must be a line drawn. Between Ethnography and some other type of study. Jena mentioned the Bike Gang motif and how it was unsuccessful and I agree.  And I am immediately taken back to when, a couple years ago, we put on Angels in America. And there was some talk about the upset when a straight man was cast as the lead character, Prior, and that a heterosexual would be directing the show. The assumptions that were made upon these two individuals coincide with this idea that they cannot possibly portray this queer subculture accurate. How could they? They aren't apart of it.  (And homosexuality is a very exclusive club. Secret meetings and all that). 

That's where we run into trouble. The notion that these two very smart, very professional people could not portray the life of a gay man in the 80's because what....? They WEREN'T a gay man in the 80's? That's ridiculous. Especially in theatre. I'm not even sure the man who wrote it, if put in the role of Prior, could live up to some people's expectations of what it was like to be that individual with those circumstances. 

Once we start putting subcultures into the category of Ethnography... it seems too easy for those individuals to not allow access. To not even consider that someone outside of their circle, could possibly know what it was like to be them. Let alone PORTRAY them on stage. And if that starts happening too much... the theatre could become the most boring or most exciting place ever. 

(Going back and reading this I understand that it's real messy. It all stems from me not quite grasping the definition. So I hope to solidify these thoughts more after our discussion.)

Blog 18 (Jenna)


Early in his essay, Conquergood asserts, “The hegemony of textualism needs to be exposed and undermined” (147). This short sentence encapsulates much of his early argument, that scriptocentricism, the dominant mode of Western scholarship, exists at the expense of richer modes which may help illuminate “culture-as-text” and prevent tendencies to “miss the omissions” (147). (Please indulge me in a horrible joke—that much of Conquergood’s early argument describes how the “visual/verbal bias of Western regimes of knowledge” conquers good. See, I told you it was a terrible joke…)

 While thinking of examples in which an ethnographic approach to performance may have been beneficial, I kept returning to the failures of Gavin’s production of Richard III. His was a production that I would associate with the scriptocentricism against which Conquergood argues. As we mentioned in our discussion of Richard III, this was a production that evoked the type of motorcycle culture that those unfamiliar with motorcycle culture would have produced. The concept of the motorcycle gang existed solely within the spectacle of the production; it never breached the center. To borrow from Ellen’s wonderful anecdote, this Richard III was the Batman and Robin of the motorcycle world. This Richard III was one in which royals and nobles wore motorcycle gear and used gang weapons rather than one in which gangs of bikers competed for control of territory. One of the reasons why there was such a disconnect between the motorcycle concept and its execution was Gavin’s scriptocentric staging.

The vast majority of scenes in this production were staged in the familiar “stand and deliver” pattern that I associate with rhetorical presentation. If alone on stage, actors were blocked in central locations and basically stood and delivered their lines. If in a scene with multiple people, the actors were staged along the fringes of the stage in shapes that have a large centrally negative space, like rectangles or circles, and their bodies rarely touched. This type of staging is relatively static and does little to allow the audience to deduce clues about culture. Rather, the audience must get the majority of their information from the text the actors speak. This was certainly true in Gavin’s production of Richard III, which featured the rhetorical skills of his actors. The actor playing Rivers epitomized the stand and deliver approach as he often stood in an erect stance and clasped his hands in front of his body while delivering lines, much like a politician in a debate.  The shape of his body, along with many of the other actors’ bodies, was divorced from the type of body shapes and movements that exist in motorcycle culture. Use of ethnography in the dramaturgical research conducted for this production may have aided in the direction of this play by giving the director the tools necessary to embody motorcycle culture in his staging.

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Course Blog 18 (Andrea)

Both Conquergood and Kealiinohomoku argue that the more scholars are aware that their norms are culturally conditioned, the more accurate and nuanced their work can become. Conquergood points out the ways in which textocentrism can further marginalize subordinated people, and Kealiinohomoku shows examples of Western dance scholars who have elevated their culture's art above all others. In each paper, an ethnographic approach to research and criticism can heighten our awareness of our own assumptions by forcing us to identify the cultural or ethnic underpinnings of epistemologies or art forms that we take for granted.

There are two main ways that I see in which Kealiinohomoku's analysis of ballet is especially helpful in analyzing performance. The first is that it can give me a more functional vocabulary with which to describe unfamiliar types of performance. Instead of seeing the defining feature of these performances as 'strangeness,' I can look for cultural cues from the mise-en-scene, the costumes, the actors' movements, and the rest of the audience. The most unfamiliar performance for me this semester has been Don Giovanni, but using an ethnographic lens might have helped me better appreciate opera. Looking at how the audience is dressed, how large the theater was, and how extravagant the mirrored set and period costume were, I could conclude that opera strives for grandeur as part of its appeal, and judging by the stylized movements of the actors in many scenes and the constant repetition of musical lines, I could recognize the musicianship as another feature to focus on. While it might not have improved this particular performance, it could have helped me appreciate opera as opera instead of just comparing it unfavorably to the genres I prefer.

The second way to use the ethnographic approach is the way that Kealiinohomoku uses it for ballet--it makes the familiar seem unfamiliar, which can help me see it for a moment free of my own assumptions. My experience of Black Watch comes to mind for this kind of analysis. On the way home from that play, a few of us were talking about the all-male cast and the degree to which we and the other audience members around us were willing to accept it as normal. And within the cultural context of this play and of most Western theater that I have seen, it was normal to have mostly men onstage. But it was important to recognize that both the play and my expectations of theater are a specific cultural product rather than a universal norm, and looking deliberately at the ethnicity of the play can help me to do that.

Blog 18 First Response, Courtney

The question of what the benefits of ethnographic approaches to performance are first requires an exploration of what an ethnographic approach can be. To explore this I’d like to look at examples from both the Kealiihohomoku and Conquergood readings. Kealiihohomoku provides a reading of ballet as an ethnic performance, revealing the ways that certain images, movements, and themes of ballet are representative of the larger culture in which the dances take place. This reading allows for a relational rather than an essentialist reading of the meanings therein. Conquergood introduces the ethnographical model of Clifford Geertz, who sees culture as a text and fieldwork as reading. This model reinforces the ethnocentrism of textocentrism, which is, for Conquergood an academic model that is unable to take into account many different peoples and many different forms of expression. A proper ethnographic approach, for Conquergood, would explore various forms of expression both as subject matters and as participatory ways of knowing and presenting knowledge. In these two articles, the benefits of enthnographic approaches are laid out. A few of these benefits could be: the possibility for relational analysis as opposed to essentialist analysis, a participatory form of knowing, a refinement of terminological definitions based on complications posed by cross cultural differences, and possibilities for learning new methods of knowledge acquisition and knowledge dispersal that lie outside of one’s own cultural bounds, to name a few.

Prompt Blog 18: Kealiinohomoku, Conquergood

This will be our last Group Blog assignment; let's go out with a bang if we can.

First responders:
What are the benefits of an ethnographic approach to performance? Use examples from anything we have read/seen thus far.

Second responders:
Particularly in light of what we have just read (not just Kealiihohomoku and Conquergood, but also Foster and Reason & Reynolds) what are the potential perils / blind spots of an ethnographic approach?

Talkers:
In response to what your colleagues have written, and in preparation for the dance performance we will see this Sunday, start forming your own account of best practices for writing about performance. Have at least three principles ready to discuss on Thursday.

Bonus work:
For those of you intrigued by the Indiana Historical Society / History Center archive, feel free to search about for an artifact to pull and look at on Friday the 9th.

Here is a link to the catalogue: http://catalog.indianahistory.org/


Blog 17- Second Response (Iris)

I thought this prompt posed an interesting question to the reading- specifically the Reason and Reynolds article, in that they talk about dance and the perception of dance as an entirely subjective manner. As a former dancer and an avid spectator of dance, I've seen a lot of performances of different styles of dance over the years, but didn't really have the tools to talk about the performances I saw or my reactions to them.  This article, while not giving me any new tools to construct my responses with, definitely allows that such responses are varied and valid.

When we talk about the sublime, we talk about a big, transcendental experience that occurs in the spectator. After reading the interviews in the article, it seems that some of the spectators might have felt this way. An equal amount might have also classified their experience as stuplime, and were stymied or bored by a performance that they either didn't or couldn't connect to. But neither the ballet nor the traditional Indian dance was seen as objectively "better" than the other, and I'm assuming that both were of professional quality. The experience of watching and enjoying the performance existed entirely in the world of the spectator, and a lot of factors influenced their level of enjoyment or engagement. 

To be fair, there are some elements of self-fulfilling prophecy in here- of course if someone thinks of themselves as a ballet-goer, they're going to enjoy going to a ballet- but proficiency in a dance form did seem to be important to the enjoyment of the dance form. On a purely sensory level, you need to understand what you're seeing in order to appreciate it. Of those spectators who were not versed in one form of dance or the other, the only ones who seemed to be able to transcend this were also dancers themselves- several interviews talked about feeling the movements of the dance in their own bodies, sympathetically dancing with the performers. In order to connect to a performance on a kinesthetic level, it seems that you need to establish proficiency either as a spectator, through repeated viewings of a certain type of work, or as a performer, who can translate your experiences from one medium of dance to another.  I'm not sure how this understanding of subjectivity will help us in our discussion of the sublime and the stuplime, but I think it's helpful to keep in mind that when we talk about audience engagement, we are talking about a vast and varied amount of experiences and competencies.

Monday, October 29, 2012

Blog 17 (Cody): The Sublime or the Stuplime in Dance?


One of the questions raised in Thursday’s discussion of Ngai’s essay was whether the demarcation of the Kantian sublime as concentrated on the “natural” (the perennial reference to the ocean, for example) from the stuplime as concentrated on “art” (in Ngai’s case, within language and literature) is inexorable and total.  Of course, if we stick with the examples of the sublime ocean and the stuplime The Making of Americans—the “natural” versus the “sociocultural”—this dichotomy, indeed, seems tenable.  However, in the case of dance, the body, as the artistic medium, could potentially challenge this sublime/stuplime delineation as equally a nature/culture delimitation.  My primary presupposition in this instance is that the body, to use the metaphor of the cyborg, is both a natural and socially designed entity.  In Foster’s outline of eighteenth-century French philosophy, the movements and kinesthetics of the body (or Condillac’s statue) can function as a sort of epistemological facility before the acquisition of a spoken language (86).  In other words, before the individual has the linguistic capacities required for thought, the “natural language” —and here I am using language as synonymous with "epistemological facility"—of bodily movements (as influenced by the sensorium) works as a means of producing knowledge. It would then seem to follow that with the individual’s assimilation into a social matrix the body then develops the language(s) of the society—the socialized body constantly “speaks” both a natural and a social language. And, insofar as my limited knowledge of dance allows for me to surmise, the performance of dance would seem to take upon advantage of and reveal these natural and social languages.  Obviously choreography is scripted and influenced by sociocultural apparatuses; even in extemporaneous dance, the body still moves to certain social constructions and limitations.  At the same time nonetheless, the scripted-ness of the choreography equally reveals this “natural” language as the dancing body displays its kinesthetic ranges and limitations.  I guess what I am trying to get at with this deduction is, if the body “speaks” both a natural and sociocultural language, could we ever simply define a dance performance as either sublime or stuplime? And, more importantly, if we find ourselves stupefied or bored with a dance performance, is this reaction a consequence of failing to understand the natural language or the sociocultural language of the dancing bodies?  

Blog 17 - Group A Response (Dorothy)

[Note: I've chosen to focus my response to these [possible] sublime and stuplime experiences to the Reason and Reynolds article.]


The video above is of Sankai Juku, a butoh ensemble, performing a piece that I saw live with my undergraduate mentor at the San Francisco Yerba Buena Center for the arts. At times I was completely entranced by the movements and felt perhaps that sublime ideal, but at other times over the 3 hours I was there, I felt too aware and bored and definitely wandered into the stuplime. As someone who really enjoys dance, I was interested in this weeks readings to get an idea of what it is I enjoy when I say I enjoy dance (to use the topsy-turvy academic lingo of the day).


Sunday, October 28, 2012

Blog 17, First Response (Ming)


My stomach bug has perhaps worsened my already-mediocre reading comprehension, but I perhaps also misunderstand the assignment, because these two papers are perhaps the clearest of any we've read in stating evidence and methodologies. They both, either in an abstract or slow-moving intro, tell us what they see as evidence:

Foster's Abstract: “The paper builds an argument about empathy, kinesthesia, choreography, and power as they were constituted in early eighteenth century France. It examines the conditions under which one body could claim to know what another body was feeling, using two sets of documents -- philosophical examinations of perception and kinesthesia by Condillac and notations of dances published by Feuillet. Reading these documents intertextually, I postulate a kind of corporeal episteme that grounds how the body is constructed. And I endeavor to situate this body within the colonial and expansionist politics of its historical moment.

Foster's use of evidence, from Condillac's scenario of the origin of language taking place between children to her effectively problematizing-of-that-scenario analysis of dance notation (the scenario, as a hypothetical one, is in a sort of platonic imagined space (83); the “pure space” in which the notated steps occur is problematic specifically because the conceptualization of it “ground[s] the colonial project” (88)), functions in service of one of her points: that statements become easily universalized when they're about the bodies of others, and that the colonial project especially benefited from such easy resultant appropriation of a sense of the “plight” of those others: if this “sympathy” could be excused as a virtue, then the things done to “alleviate” that plight could be also. Foster thereby complicates empathy as perhaps a more overtly colonizing force than stuplimity, transport, trance, or the other affective dances we've discussed thus far. When you're purportedly using empathy to do it, it's easier to abuse power and dress it up as virtue (and “virtue” itself is another theme in our readings I'd be interested to discuss more).

Reason and Reynolds' use of evidence to support their argument that “we need to think of kinesthetic responses in the plural rather than the singular” is something more of a stretch (50). Reason and Reynolds are also fairly explicit, and long-windedly so, in setting up their rhetorical stance and excusing their use of evidence. I say “excusing” because they spend the first four pages of their article articulating in a nearly epistolary way all the conversations and disciplines they're not trying to be part of with this article and all the things they're not trying to do. Their project is located within a larger cross-disciplinary project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the United Kingdom called “Watching Dance: Kinesthetic Empathy”, which combines audience research (which Reason and Reynolds do do) and neuroscience (which they don't). They rely heavily on a close analysis of the transcripts of interviews with somewhat dubiously selected spectators and vaguely-touched-upon information management systems (what, pray tell, are the “personal networks” from which some of the more seasoned bharanatyam viewers were selected—and what on earth is the “coding structure that linked phrases and responses according to the theme and area of interest”?) of ballet and bharatanatyam as evidence of the plurality of affective responses to dance (50-51). I didn't know that anyone was confused that there exists such a plurality nowadays (we're not talking, as Foster is, about 18th-century France), so between that and my stomachache it's perhaps a personal peeve that Reynolds and Reason choose to use--twice--the word “huge”, for example, and not just because it upsets the tone they seem to intend to strike with their jockeying for discursive position in both the realms of research literature and humanities papers, but because the surrounding statement of the first use of "huge" is this one:

All qualitative audience research raises huge methodological questions, which cannot be developed fully here.”

Well, you don't say.  Good for you, guys. I don't know that your “use” of “evidence” to back up an “argument” that seems more like a truism develops anything fully. You could at least be honest and say you just don't want to develop that discussion here, not that it can't "be developed" (note the use of the passive), but “all” of any kind of research raising “huge” any kind of questions strikes me as enough of a generality that its presence on the third page of your article has me raising an eyebrow. And talking in the second person. How did that happen?  Anyway, you do no favors for empathy.  It's too generalized and one-size-fits-all by the end of your article to be of clear use.

Course Blog #17 (Justin): I'm feeling (em)pathetic

Susan Leigh Foster is engaged in looking at how a culture’s definition or understanding of a term like ‘empathy’ can be used as a means to mask oppressive actions and justify unjust power relations. Foster uses a rather surprising approach in exploring empathy and its relation to dance and choreography. Instead of mining current dance practice for perceived audience reception (what one may describe as sociologic or ethnographic study) or surveying critical reviews of past dance performances (an examination of previous semiotic and phenomenological response), Foster relies on philosophic writing and highly structured dance notation as the foundation for a postcolonial exploration. Specifically, she is interested in the Enlightenment era works of Etienne Bonnot, Abbe de Condillac, and the famous iconographic system for recording dance developed by Raoul Auguste Feuillet. Foster explores Condillac’s philosophy regarding the potential role gesture and movement played in the initial development of language. She summarizes the philosopher’s ideas by stating, “Originating in an instinctual and spontaneous capacity for expression, language emerges as the conscious implementation of both vocal and gestural actions” (83). By grounding language’s evolution in the body’s physicalizations, Foster suggests that Condillac was able to put forth a notion that choreographed movement could elicit an inherent human response, a common reception based on ‘universally held sympathy.’ The Other may be seen to “implement different gestural as well as vocal vocabularies,” but due to a common sympathy [a term Foster translates as today’s conception of empathy] their actions are neither “unknowable or impenetrable” (85). Thus, colonial motivations could be masked; “The fact that the colonial body…was seen to passively receive an other’s cultural information meant that it was not responsible for helping to produce that information, but instead it could simply respond in the manner deemed appropriate” (86). For Foster, how a body is perceived or constructed in its historical moment can have enormous effects – cultural, political, and personal. Early 18th century conceptions of empathy in France evidence this notion quite well.

Much like the other terms in our pantheon, ‘empathy’ is a troublesome word that must be well-defined in any attempt at its successful deployment. Hence the footnote in Reason and Reynolds article stating, “Note that Martin associates ‘inner mimicry’ with active response, whereas Bertolt Brecht famously argued that empathy rendered spectators passive and uncritical” (72). Given different operational settings, empathy can be perceived to carry quite opposite effects. Unlike many of the other terms discussed in this course, which seem to be bound to the entire spectacle presented by the performance (i.e. theatricality, performativity, trance, stuplime, etc.), ‘empathy’ is the only term that appears to be wholly tied to the individual performers who act as the spectated. Note, Reason and Reynolds point out the importance that music has when it is connected to the actors’ movement (a point Ming touched on in our previous class discussion of the stuplime), but the final emotional investment is still bound to the performer. The music aids in eliciting kinesthetic empathy, but it is not the sole recipient of the conjured emotion.

Course Blog 17, Group 1: Foster


The purpose of Foster’s article is to show the underlying power structures between the observed and observing bodies. She premises this argument on eighteenth century French philosophers Condillac and Du Bos’s conceptions of the body. She then extrapolates those ideas into a Foucauldian argument regarding Feuillet’s dance notation. She says that the notation divided bodily movements into approved and controlled motions: “Within such a space, neutral bodily features and motions, such as those identified by Feuillet notation, operated to confirm the existence of an absolute set of laws to which all bodies should conform” (88). 

Foster argues that this conception of the body allowed colonizers to distance themselves from the sympathy generally evoked by another person. Instead of sharing in their pain as equal beings, the colonizer could be moved by the plight of the colonized subject and seek to “help” them improve (87). The sense of sympathy was compromised by the colonizer’s ability to view the space between them and the body of the Other as under his or her control/remediation.

She shows the modern repercussions of her argument by framing her article with a 1971 journal entry by Yvonne Ranier, a choreographer and filmmaker. According to Foster’s interpretation, the entry shows Ranier’s unconscious position of power over the Indian performer she was observing (81). While Foster states that she’s not trying to “catch” Ranier in any way, she claims that using Ranier as an example allows her to show an unacknowledged process, one that needs to be interrogated further in order to re-choreograph.  Her conceptualization of the observer as possessing power over the observed is the most useful part of her argument for our course. Thus far, we have primarily considered the effect of the performance on the audience, but this reorients that discussion. It also returns us to the accusatory sections of Artaud’s work, in which the actors accuse the audience: “You feel the discomfort of being watched and addressed, since you came prepared to watch and make yourselves comfortable in the shelter of the dark” (13). This is underlined by our reading of Davis, who explains that the determination of a performance’s theatricality is in the hands of the audience, that implies that the audience’s gaze is exerting a form of power on the performer.

This is not a new concept, as the power of the colonizing gaze was discussed by post-colonial writers including Franz Fanon and Homi Bhaba. I’m sorry that I don’t have the original citation for this, but my notes mention that Bhaba was particularly concerned with this in his essay “Of Mimicry and Man” in which he explored the role of the colonizer on the colonized’s behavior (Fanon claimed such mimicry was more superficial). For example, author Salman Rushdie is often faulted for writing his book Midnight’s Children, a testament of Indian semi-history, in the language of the empire that caused much of the strife that led to the novel’s centerpiece, the Partition. So, while Forster claims that Ranier’s behavior, her unconscious mimicry of the Indian performer’s bodily movements, is a remnant behavior from the 18th century conception of the empowering gaze, it could as easily be an acknowledgement of the performer’s power to inspire Ranier’s sympathy and mimicry. This could be a flipping of the historical power relationship between the European and Asian. In any event, the way in which the observer/observed relationship can inspire a complex web of sympathetic relations certainly has applications to more formalized performances.

*** Addendum ***

As for the Reason & Reynolds article, I agree with Ming that the authors may be trying to use a data-driven approach to underline truisms (people who have decided beforehand that they don't like ballet, don't like ballet [57]; people respond to dance in a variety of ways; etc.) . They frontload their article with a description of their methods, but they constantly remind their readers that this is not a definitive research method. They question the honesty of the responses, they mention that their study can't be entirely comprehensive, and they note the limitations of their sample. However, within all that, I think their description of kinesthetic empathy is helpful.

Kinesthetic empathy via Reason & Reynolds may actually be a better explanation for Ranier's behavior in the Foster article than the one Foster proposes. While Foster seeks to understand subconscious, historically based cultural responses to performance (Ranier), Reason & Reynolds study the individual: "It was vital in considering what people said about watching dance that we knew the perspectives from which they spoke, including levels of experience in watching dance, of taking dance classes, and dance training, and that we differentiated between different styles of dance" (55). Reason & Reynolds aren't look for deep-seated cultural practices as much as personal life knowledge and training and what impact that has on reception. Their sharing of the audience's responses is helpful and implies a respect for all kinds of viewing, irrespective of that person's cultural capital - a term they borrow usefully from Bordieu.

Also, their sense of the power structure is more complex from Foster's. The viewer is moved by the performer's virtuosity and grace, which implies that the performer holds a sort of power over the viewer (60). However, the viewer's emotional responses to the dance could also be because the viewers are "projecting [their emotional responses] onto the movement" (67).  In any event, "experiences of embodied and imaginative connection between the self and the other...can be considered in terms of kinesthetic 'empathy'" (71). This acknowledges that the connection can exist in a positive way, but it need not exist whatsoever. Also, should the connection exist, it need not be a destructive one for either party.

The fact that all of these responses are presented as valid is probably the most useful point for our class. Whether viewers engage in the trance, are offended, or are inspired to a state of stuplimity, each response is appropriate (not like the rube rescuing Desdemona or the misuse of Bernstein's cut-out). Finally, this article does offer one way of studying the repertoire rather than the text - interview those who have experienced it and see what they think. 

Class Notes October 23rd


Class Notes
October 23rd

Ellen.  How does one write about performance without failing to keep faith with what is most intellectually productive. One of the rules of thumb is to know yourself, know what you bring to the performance, exercise them form the standards, which you hold. This was an opportunity to throw out on the table where your loyalties lie.  Dislocated versions of Shakespeare do this because they have never been seen before. Clearly a difficult assignment with lots of different responses.

Amy. Let’s have Justin talk about the helmet.

Justin. I was trying to come up with a specific way where something points to the text that is confusing. This is an example where a dramaturg would look at a show, and come back and provide an enrichment opportunity. You can ground this show, if you’re doing motorcycles, do these helmets and you can do both the classic text, and the modern dress. Here’s the world we’re in. And it highlights the story, it tells you Richard is preparing for the upcoming battle. Is the dream real? Are the real ghosts? Or is it an unconscious choice on his part? Where he realizes man, I’m a really bad guy.

Amy. Let’s talk about the production and talk about what Ellen wants to talk about. How do you engage in the performance as a critic? How do we read performance and respond to it, separate from our expectations? Write down some things that you would like to engage in specifically about this production. Write down a couple of moments that you feel need critical engagement.

Ellen. Look at the production as you recall it and write down when the dramaturgy happened.  Where can we have critical engagement?

Amy. You can include into this conversation our Chicago plays. We’re looking for pieces of the performance that we can read as text.

[Class took a few moments to write down thoughts.]

Iris. The prologue as well as the two snippets. The end scene with Queen Elizabeth. The fact checker. The heads on the spikes,

Derek. Schizophrenic just woken up speech Richard has. The wedding scene, the way Anne was portrayed.

Sara. The double casting of Edward the fourth and Richmond. How does that relate with the lineage. And also Elizabeth’s speech in the end and how does that relate to the divine right of kings.

Andrea. When Elizabeth appears in her full Tudor gear. And before the play started how they were running the political ads. And also this isolate moment in the play, in the Richard and Lady Anne coffin scene. She spits on him. And how he took the spit and licked his fingers.

Jess. The prescription drugs. The skull helmet. Richard was the only one with a full helmet. It was confusing.

Justin. Flat screen TV and the anonymity of the fact checker. We understand that history is being rewritten, but by who? Casting of the two young women as the two princess.

Sara. Margaret as a ghost and a disembodied voice. Haunting the theatre as well as the play. The disembodied voices.

Kelly. Plot vs. Poetry.

Jenna. Cuts and ghosting connections of Margaret and ghosts. Duchess has a line about how Margaret is a living ghost. That connects dramaturgically of having the ghosts in act V. The way Margaret acts and the way that she curses, there is the need for Richard to be taken out by the ghosts. I heard Gavin kept Margaret and cut ghosts. She functions now as some choric Greek person. It doesn’t work as well because nothing in this world changes in the way that she is able to work in the sense of the supernatural elements.

Ming. The video’s beforehand. And Elizabeth stuck out. How different she looks.

Derek. The image of her appearing is very striking.

Jennifer. I was concerned when I heard about her in full Tudor gear. I thought of the scene from Black watch with the sign language.

Cody. Casting of Richard and Clarence. Clarence is older, yes? The body of the actor was much younger than the actor who played Richard.

Courtney. In black watch- Interested in how they cast the same actor as the interviewer in the post war scene and the sergeant in the way scenes. I was also interested in the dancing the actor’s did to represent fighting.

Derek. Regeneration (Book). A section in here that reminded me of black watch. The soldiers didn’t like the way they were sitting ducks and how it wasn’t really a proper war.  Reading this book helped me understand what was happening there and the masculine and feminine aspects of war. In this book they are talking about WWI and sitting in the trenches and being killed and how it was emasculating for them. And how that was a huge problem for them.

Amy. So, with everything on the table. Are there things that feel more or less fruitful in terms of inquiring our engagement? What needs our attention.?

Kelly. The cutting of the text.

Ellen. Shakespeare is someone we feel very concerned about the cutting of the text. A good spectatorship calls out the cutting of the text. Is that necessary/productive? There are productions of Japanese Shakespeare that still come off?

Dorothy. I was thinking about that in terms of things worth interrogating further? As a critic it’s important to see the difference between your personal judgments and the overall production.

Ellen. The text is a blueprint for the performance. Understandably a playwright should be concerned with the cutting of this. It is a tricky question to discuss what counts as a good cut or a bad cut. We never start from ground zero. We never start from a neutral point of view. One good example was Whitney’s post. Cross-contaminated with equivocation. Speaks to our theatrical experience. We must be cognitive about the experience.

Amy. In figuring out how you develop a critical prompt in your own ear, in which says, ‘who cares’. It comes down to Who Cares? Kelly can say let’s talk about the cutting. And I say ‘Who Cares?’. It’s not enough to say that Shakespeare cares, or I like it. Similarly, it wouldn’t be a fair answer to say, ‘I like it this way’, or ‘I don’t like Shakespeare so I wanted to cut it.’ Kelly can come to it with the importance of poetry in the play and come with seemingly unimportant chunks of texts with some claim that it matters. How do we decide which of these chunks of performance text is useful to engage with critically. You have to mount an argument that says they matter.

Ming. But we can’t say that because we feel that way? It seems that feelings need to be integrated. What place does it have?

Dorothy. What kind of feeling?

Jess. Like feeling of the production?

Derek. The feeling of the sacredness of the text?

Dorothy. The feeling of…?

Ming. I’m just confused how it comes up.

Iris. I think it’s important to note that that’s when you have a visceral reaction?

Jess. An alarm goes off. I feel sucked into it. Theatre is about evoking emotion. IF you don’t care about what’s going on, then we as theatre artists have failed.

Ellen. On one hand, we want to put aside as carefully as we can, immediate kick back reactions. They’re not valuable unless they are part of a larger conversation. The second part is one of the reactions you can have to an aesthetic experience. You must remained attentive to how you feel about your self-loss in a play. There is a spectrum of engagement or disengagement. As a critic, you are conscious of yourself watching. But that can’t account for the whole of the experience. Theatre has this power to move us in this way that forces us to leave behind of theatrical self-recognition. How we keep faith with  strong distaste?

Amy. Ellen is pointing to, in her original question is how do we attend to our own emotional reaction to our roll of being critic. That’s partially due to being aware of our own affection of disliking something. That is a really powerful and yummy place to be. It’s very safe and very comfortable. That is an emotional reaction.  Our job as critics is to recognize the difference. That’s one of the dangers about thinking/ writing about performance. It’s one thing to talk about the text of Shakespeare and to rarify it, but that’s not what theatre does. It puts it on stage. It’s going to fail in different ways. How do you maintain this relationship? It’s not just you and this little relic that get’s to perform scholarship with you. How do you continue to do the real critical work that performance and scholarship call for? Despite and because of all the people in the room.

Ellen. Bordeaux mix intelligence with Passion. Where it lives in its most powerful dimension. You have to risk liking, risk the embarrassment. What is the full register of the experience? We are trying to dice it up into much smaller units to get there.

Jennifer. So are we to focus on one particular dramaturgical moment? And how it was used, why it was used, if it worked, how it served the audience.

Ellen. (I tried to listen really hard and so I missed what she said.) Everyone had arguments to make about class/gender, etc. These arguments are descriptive and good arguments to have.

Amy. What if we take a few minutes to discuss the political debates? What if you were to think about if you were to look at those debates as performances? What if you were asked to discuss the debates as performances? As a critical scholar what are some things you might look for to mount as your evidence. What kind of things about the performance that you might point to.

Dorothy. The debate is not spontaneous. Yet, it feels like it is. Like how it’s set off. They receive a lot of time before hand to think about how they are going to respond to this debate.

Jennifer. That sounds a lot like Auslander. Like how Obama is supposed to be president and so he is acting like president.

Amy.  There is something about structure that is meant to perform or communicate spontaneity. We are not supposed to see the script.

Dorothy. On the first debate I heard a lot of ‘Oh, well I heard that Romney won because Obama was nice and people didn’t want to see a black man be aggressive towards a white man.’

Courtney. Even the idea of someone winning the debates is really interesting. What does that mean? It’s not a discussion. It’s a battle of words. It’s not about one specific topic.

Derek. One of the things I would look at in the debates is where the candidates are looking. The kind of facial expressions they have when the other person is talking. Whether they actually answer.

Amy. Let me pull out this idea of eye contact, which I would put in the category of gesture. You could turn the sound off and analyze that as a performance scholar might.

Jess. One of the things that were a big deal was the flag pin business. The color of the ties. Not only what the candidates are wearing, but also how nice they look. How is the cut of their suit? As well as how their wives look.  You can do that along side of the setting.

Andrea. A small moment in the debate is the initial handshake in the beginning. Which candidate puts their arm on the other’s shoulder. Do they face each other?

Sara. I’ve thought what was interesting was the social media quantitative data and how fast.

Ellen. How do the audience count? How are they there?

Justin. Sometimes they do break through. They’ll laugh and we are suddenly aware that they are there.

Ming I think it’s also a question of… Jon Stewart says he needs the audience there.

Sara. Rachel Maddow talked about how there was one debate without an audience. And how deadly that is. They are talking to each other, but they are not really talking to one another.

Dorothy. I was also thinking about the twitter situation. Late last night, after the debate. The national democratic convention put up a website about Romney’s tax. And the joke is you can’t click the button. I’m interested in this new level of hyper engagement. It’s not necessary a level of deeper engagement.

Cody. When you see people sitting outside the debate halls watching the debate on the television. IT seems much more like a sporting event. They have no direct effect on what is going on in the inside. There is this constant need of feeling like you are engaged.

Jennifer. Whenever I see the photos afterwards, I realized I never saw the images that they choose. how much power does the photographer have in his ability to capture this.

Derek. That’s interesting. We were watching it being streamed and sometimes the stream got paused and sometimes the image would freeze in ridiculous expressions on their face. And we snapped a picture of that. But did that moment actually happen? When they were in mid blink.

Ellen. I wonder what this tells us about liveliness. Just to think back to Phalan’s claim. It does seem to me that we are in a moment where we are going to have to extrapolate this argument. With these digital creations in reaction to these live debates. We need to have a different understanding of liveliness and what counts as presence and what counts as being caught in the aura of this debate.  What about the image of Richard on a motorcycle? That doesn’t happen in the play? What are we consuming in the moment and what is being structured into the play in order to make the production what it is. Certainly in a Shakespeare performance there is a need for a program or outside materials. One of the things we need to be highly critical about this is that. What is the effect? What would Hodgkin say? To the iconic image of him on a motorcycle versus the production.

Jess. I don’t know if it captured the feel of the production as I remember it. The production still is orderly almost, and the production was not. Looking at the image of the bike and thinking of the production in my mind, there is a difference.

Sara. They made a conscious choice of putting a motorcycle in the picture. Was the motorcycle motif a metaphor of more of a conceptual blend?  How does Biker guyness blend with kingliness.

Amy. It’s hard to talk about without talking about the fact that I think it failed. I think it’s an attempt of a blend. That’s true for any costume choice. What can be usefully borrowed and used and what can’t? There are certain things Gavin doesn’t want around and there are certain things that he doesn’t want evoked.

Derek. The end of Friday night performance. Michelson came out and presented Gavin with gifts in the reception. And he said that Gavin had originally wanted to do it in full period costume and Michelson said no you can’t. That’s why this happened. He was forced to think of something different to do. So the motorcycles, one slang term for motorcycle is a hog. And you have a boar imagery that is associated with Richard. I don’t know what process he went through to arrive at motorcycle, but that’s there. As audience we are left to conjure up the image of the absent motorcycle itself. We have to the work of ghosting ourselves.

Courtney. I wonder to what extent our discussion with the director encourages our dislikeness. At some point he said the fact that it was staged here at IU had nothing to do with his production.

Iris. It’s silly that it is too anachronistic.

Dorothy. Sons of Anarchy. Based on hamlet.

Ellen. My sense of the biker stuff is that there was no commitment to biker gangs. You could’ve done it in boy scouts. I would push Cody’s response in that I thought it edged towards self-satire. Especially in its representation of gender. Not on it’s intent, but it’s effect. There is a way that biker gang is as histrionic.

Amy. If you’re dramturging this production where would you push this production?

Ellen. Bad facial hair. The visible un-persuaviness of the facial hair. Andrea’s post was very successful to me in the fact of how Brechtian it is.  Just giving the ever so small indication of satire. And self parody. Doing the battle straight in Shakespeare, is really hard. How you handle the fight sequence is already a difficult thing to approach. So we’re going to stylize the event and we’re going to go over the top. The one thing I thought of, in terms of this was the Batman movies in the nineties. The bad ones. As if you told aliens about urban gangs and they tried to relate it back to you. The biker gang was like that.  You can push that though and it can become interesting. And even if that is not the intent it’s available. That seems like a very limited way, in terms of where you get resources. If a play has a critical edge, in which a production deploys. How is that deployment happening? There are always ways of seeing the productions investment,

Amy. Going back to this idea of liveliness. The image that never was. And to the debates. I think you’re right to point to a reconsideration of liveliness where it’s disappearance who death is always part of it’s presents. The essential thing about the debate is that it’s live, but it’s not actually live to any of us. At any moment one of the could gaff. These are being staged because we are waiting for the other one to screw up. We know what we are going to do and they are waiting for them to embarrass themselves.