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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