Thursday, November 1, 2012

Class Notes for October 30th (Cody)


Notes 10/30: Reason and Reynolds and Foster

Announcements:
Next Week: no class on Tuesday—ethnography of and ruminations on the Election Day; class on the 8th
the 9th: Indiana History Center—go early in the morning, leave no later than 9a.m. and spend ~2 hours at the museum; Ellen will be pulling items from the archive—tell her if there is anything in particular that you would like pulled (4-5 items total).
Parking situation at the museum?
Amy will post on the blog regarding transportation and carpooling

Discussion:

Amy—we moving into a new domain; we are now responding to bodies, which necessitates a new kind of analysis.  Let’s start with the discussion leaders.

Derek—kinesthetic empathy; how is this relevant to a dramatic performance and an actor’s gestures, facial expressions, etc.?

Amy—what is kinesthetic empathy?

Andrea—the physical response of your body as you watch someone else’s performance—tensing of the muscles, psychic association with the performance—a wish to do what the performer could do; imagining yourself in the dancer’s body

Amy—is there a better word than psychic? Imagining yourself do it is different from imagining the difference between the self and the other during a virtuosic performance. 

Dorothy—cultural capital and habitus in the Reason and Reynolds; different relations to different dance types and performances—kinesthetic empathy presupposes a universality of the body

Ellen—what changes between dance and theatre? How do the terms we use in theatre translate or don’t translate to dance?

Courtney—interested in language; neither essay really discusses the issue of language—doesn’t seem that language is problematic in dance; thinking of dance as a written text

Amy—kinesthetic empathy as a term to bypass semiotics; Reason and Reynolds recognizing kinesthetic empathy as a kind of epistemology or knowledge production

Ming—location of the empathy? With the individual or a more global concept?  How can we connect gesture and language?

Courtney—mirror neuron reference in Reason and Reynolds; what they are trying to explore was a bodily response via the spoken responses

Amy—methodologically, they are using a scientific, sociological form of research and analysis—trying to incorporate various theories of bodies in space

Dorothy—talking versus gesture/dance in Western responses to performance—most people probably wouldn’t feel comfortable responding in any other manner than through language

Amy—they are trying to understand whether expertise (cultural capital) in the dance movement(s) affects the spectator’s experience or if the response is more physiological

Ellen—they’re bringing scientific inquiry to the research of dance and the perceptions of social distinctions in the audience

Amy—we’ve all had reactions to a performance based on our knowledge of its expertise—wants to know more from Dorothy about Dido’s Lament; what is it that you hear that doesn’t sound right?

Dorothy—she doesn’t’ sound sad enough.

Derek—what would she have to do to sound sadder?

Dorothy—the tone of her voice would need to change.

Amy—what does sad sound like?

Dorothy—I know how to make the tone/voice sound sadder—perhaps I’m not experiencing the kinesthetic empathy

Sara—kinesthetic empathy is meant to get passed the notion of sad being translated into a different language or culture

Amy—what is interesting is that the Reason and Reynolds article is about how comfortable we are about this universality; difference between expertise and social background—to what degree are we comfortable with thinking about reactions with bodies and sounds (independent from narrative or other signifiers)?

Ellen—people define themselves on the continuum of expertise; we’re trained not to have response to what we don’t have expertise

Whitney—going back to the 9/11Taylor article; physical reactions a socially directed, especially initial reactions; could the kinesthetic reactions be extremely fleeting that doesn’t allow for translation to the spoken

Ming—Sofer and ghosting

Amy—that speaks to the continuum perhaps, in the same way that an expert spectator might get more out of the handkerchief

Jennifer—wondering if there’s a performance that isn’t a performance that could have kinesthetic energy—the 9/11 falling man, perhaps?

Ellen—good example; Berlant’s understanding of feeling historical as closely related to Taylor’s response to 9/11; what lies between the kinesthetic response and the affective response? What are the possible variances of somatic arousal that take place in the spectacles?

Amy—the distinction between analysis of meaning and feeling; the science tries to transcend this distinction; kinesthetic simulation is not separate from the cognitive

Dorothy—still uncomfortable with this universality of sound and emotion

Ellen—recognition things like resistance, friction, drag seems very important to current trends in cultural analysis

Whitney—connecting what characteristics need to be within the object that would allow for a universally kinesthetic response.

Ellen—we can all go to see and dance and, on some general level, come to some consensus about certain feelings felt during the performance and further analyze these on a formal level

Amy—so thinking about what needs to be in the object to incite a certain response, what are some shapes in/of the human body that have relatively consistent response?

Kelly—ballerina’s on their toes; hearing stories about what it takes and the pain felt in order to get to that skilled point

Dorothy—when you can tell that there is a personal relationship between the dancers that is extracurricular, extra-performative.

Amy—pointing to individual moments as dependent from context and narrative but we still place narrative onto these moments—let’s move to the Foster and her historicizing a way of understanding the body.

Jennifer—Foster introduction and the account of Rainer’s reaction to an Indian performance; Foster’s discussion of 18-century French philosophers; dance notation—when bodies are separated and identified, this is when bodies are controlled—relation to colonization

Justin—empathy becomes an excuse to allow one to control the other

Jennifer—quote on page 87: “The fact that colonizers could imagine…”; also has a problem with the issue of mimicry, especially in the response from Rainer in Foster’s article.  Rainer’s response to the dance represents a sort of colonization

Amy and Dorothy—mimicry becomes in postcolonial theory as a means of survival for the colonized by miming the actions of the colonizer

Ellen—dances notation and the archive; what do we do if don’t have a system of identification and archive

Dorothy—dance notation and performing the dance again and archive

Ellen—this brings us back to Phelan and the ontology of disappearance; trying to preserve the performance renders it as something other than performance





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