Class notes from 11-1

Ellen: From 12-1pm on Friday the 9th, we will visit the Advanced Visualization Lab. We will leave between 8-8:30am. We will be looking at exhibits and archive and speaking to curators/directors of outreach beforehand. We’re going to need 2-2.5 hours there and an hour at the Lab.

                                                             

The crowd-sourced reviews- Ellen was unsure how to draft prompt. After the dance performance on Sunday, each of us should offer 300-word reviews. Try to be cognizant of what is true, what is meaningful, and what is subjective in what we are talking about. They are due midnight on Monday. Before we meet for class Thursday, November 8, read everyone’s reviews and pull out what is most true and meaningful. From that, we will put together a crowd-sourced review.

On Tuesday, document your performance of election day as lived experience. Use an ethnographic approach to election day based on your daily life. We should be thinking about how we document lived experience. Use a camera. Put that post on the blog by 11-13.

--Handout of methodological questions from previous blog post.—

So, best practices for analyzing and reviewing dance?

Justin: Account for your own bodily experience of the performance and go into the performance prepared to do that. If you’re not conscious of it going in, you won’t notice.

Jennifer: Be conscious of your cultural baggage and be aware of the culture of origin for the performance you are watching. If you can’t know about the culture beforehand, look it up afterward.

Justin: Make the familiar unfamiliar. Recognize that you don’t already know it. Open out from your performance object to the total mise-en-scene. Be aware of the spectators and the location of bodies both onstage and in the audience. Avoid textocentrism—how do you get away from words when you are using words? One example: RCA animate videos on youtube, drawing out pictures of theory and its practical applications uses coupling of text and pictures. Best example: From Tragedy to Farce.

Sarah: I always wish I had some empathy gnomes to take care of that stuff while I do some Davis stuff. I’m constantly trying to push that down. What are strategies to do both of those at the same time? My assumption here is that thinking and feeling are different things.

Dorothy: In fieldwork class as ethnomusicologist, they used different notation to record both emotional and technical observations. Ex: Use capital letters for feelings and lowercase for intellectual thoughts, or brackets. When you combine those later you have an account of both the technical and your response to it.

Whitney: Like Courtney’s post, ethnological approach can help in realizing new ways of acquiring knowledge. Sometimes another field can give you new research methods. Like Ngai and the stuplime, they give us new ways to analyze and react.

Jennifer: When I was reading the Kealiinohomoku article, she was challenging phrases that I hadn’t challenged before. In the end it was like trying to put emotion and technicality together using the right words. This happened for me when she took apart the term ethnic dance and undermined the term ethnic. I don’t know about dance, so I wouldn’t have questioned it.

Ellen: Does ‘ethnic’ need to be used carefully, or does it need to be used at all? It seems too broad to be useful. From a political standpoint, if you take the ethnic off the table, or any other term that signals a subjugated group, are you doing any favors to that group? It sometimes just absorbs it into the whole. Ethnic studies programs often seek to give attention to ignored subjects. To allow the continuance of categories of difference to exist is also to bring them into the foreground for study and practice. This does seem like a sloppy label, but race as a category of experience and difference in humanity is undeniable. There was a lot of pushback between people who were taking apart these terms and those people who wanted to hold onto the terms to make them visible and bring their cultural value into the conversation.

Dorothy: The problem with ethnic dance or world music or things like that is that ethnic dance is not a thing. There is not an ethnic people. There can be more specific categories, but that is the problem with the use of ethnic in general.

Jess- It groups everything into a muddled category. We have precise names for it, but we don’t want to put the effort into it.

Sarah: There is folk dance, but the danger is in viewing it as a method of performance and thinking that it is a fixed form or not constructed intentionally. We need a word with an asterisk in some ways.

Dorothy: That’s why a lot of people have switched to lengthy titles with the word ‘vernacular’ in them.

Whitney: At bottom of p. 41 she addresses this directly. We can’t let these terms become connotative. She is calling for something like that more specific terminology.

Dorothy: The problem with that is that people are still not going to think of ballet as ethnic dance. It still doesn’t answer the problem of ethnic dance in general. That doesn’t change the discourse that makes folk music problematic.

Sarah: I was wondering if the project is completely sincere. She might be saying that it’s okay to use this term because we can use it to describe ballet. I thought the essay might even be a bit tongue-in-cheek.

Jennifer: I wondered that as I read. She’s not trying to get people to call ballet ethnic, she just wants to trouble this term.

Ellen: This is a polemic, from 1970, a very early incursion against imperialism in anthropology. This is a first shot over the bow in an effort to reassess the Western relationship to other cultures. All these terms turn out to be synonymous in their usage. This is in some sense a gambit, but still, is there any content added to her analysis of ballet as an ethnic form?

Justin: In her list of ethnic traits of ballet, I was surprised by what she pointed out that was excluded rather than included. Exclusions also define for us what is ethnic.

Ellen: That list of significant Western symbols is quite valuable.

Jess: She kept using the term primitive, which made me uncomfortable. It seemed insulting and I didn’t know if that had been targeted.

Ellen: Article is partly a critique of how Western criticism understands itself that allows it to understand contemporary society as more primitive than itself.

Dorothy: In ‘post’-modern dance, there has been a lot of debate over the use of primitive. I’ve heard it privileged, described as being closer to your primal, natural self. Movements that are free and not stiff (like ballet). Need to recognize that the word has history.

Ellen: Modernity makes flattering use of the primitive, like Picasso’s paintings. Still, it always maintains these connotations. I had a thought—this seemed to me very tricky on this question of expertise. Who can watch dance properly? In second paragraph, anthropologists are dealing with forms that they really don’t understand. But then at the end of the article, she notes that she is critical of other anthropologists only where they have stepped outside their fields of expertise. The sequestering of dance into categories is problematic, if only because I come at this from the point of view of performance research. 

–handout from seminar—investigating questions of difference or universalism.

I reject the notion that you must have expertise to watch opera and dance and other performances. Conquergood is trying to solve this problem. He is from Northwestern at a dominant performance studies program, and he is an anthropologist. Does he posit any kind of solution? It’s not just from the seminar, the other impasse is the textual problem. How do we annotate our experience of performance without falling prey to the imperialist Western bias of text?

Jennifer: At one point, he mentions using some element of performance to run alongside text rather than replace text. I wasn’t entirely sure what that looked like.

Dorothy: Videos of performance while you have readings relevant to them. How you write the text with formatting choices to connote the tone of it. Video and audio are not saviors, but they are helpful. You need to see or hear some things to understand them.

Jennifer: irony of this argument—gives examples of non-textocentric performance but argues them through text.

Justin: irony of the Frederick Douglas example.

Jennifer: It goes back to our previous argument about writing about ephemerality.

Ellen: Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities has hosted annotated video system developed by anthropologists to upload field work, often performance. It’s slightly clunky, but one can see that we are moving toward a format that would allow them to run alongside each other.

Dorothy: It makes it challenging to use Phelan’s ideas because the performance is a discrete event, not generalized. I went to Orthodox services as an ethnographer, but you have to say, ‘This is what services are like in this church, not all churches.’

Whitney: Douglas example- importance of embodiment, being physically present, cannot be represented by a video.

Jennifer: Making it text-plus is making it less accessible to an audience. Almost no one can use some of these things.

Ellen: This is a constant battle—we don’t know what the communicative forms will look like in the future. Once EVIA documents are complete, they can be uploaded to youtube, but that is still contingent on knowledge and technology to find it. It’s an interesting moment to read this paper because the digital innovations answer some of these questions.  What about his ways of knowing, taxonomy of serious and non-serious?

Dorothy: I hate Geertz and his thick description.

Sarah: But still, when you read that you can experience what it’s like to be there. It’s a good example of Conquergood’s point that even the best description of being there isn’t being there. [something about cock fights]

Dorothy: Is it misrepresenting things to always make them transcendental? Sometimes things are just banal.

Iris: Where was this Balanese cock-fighting? Was it in the article? [It was not.]

Justin: What is beautiful about that description was the men having to run away from that event, not the cock-fighting itself.

Whitney: I wonder where appreciation for another culture comes in. As soon as we do that, we get the sense that it’s more normal and not transcendental, but does that strip away the appreciation of another culture’s everyday? There is something important about the Westerner’s gaze, it can be an appreciation of something we can’t understand in the same way, so we can appreciate it in a different way.

Ellen: That introduces question of embodiment and what kind of experiences make that embodiment approved and acceptable.

Dorothy: That’s a big controversy, especially back then: can you do ethnographic research from a culture that you are a part of? That doesn’t mean that you will have a more detached, accurate description of a foreign culture.

Ellen: But is there a value in misunderstanding? In the case of performance, there might be some opportunity for misunderstanding to be productive, to be non-immersed spectators and offer a thoughtful account of what we see. In the 1991 article, the last quotation is pretty somber: power produces knowledge, there is no power relation without a field of knowledge. Knowledge constitutes power relations. The person who comes in with an “impartial eye” is bringing strong power relations to bear, but this says that there is never a knowledge gathering that is not about power relations. One of the ways I’ve been trying to work through this question is to look at performance writers who talk about performance in terms of a different language. There is a desire to say, ‘something that happens in postures of body in space that is full of content and we recognize it, but it is not fully translatable.’ As soon as we try to translate that, we bring in power relations and it becomes problematic. –handouts on Artaud and hand gestures—they have in common this desire to decode and reduce gestures to text. Part of hand gesture interpretations come from Roman gestures.

Courtney reads section from Artaud article

Ellen: Artaud is recognizing that bodies on the stage connote more than what they say or what their official movements signify. There is an impression made on audiences by this extra-linguistic expression. It is necessarily a personal and individual experience, but that is always what we seek in performance. The contemporary desire to attend to that which resides outside of the analytical, that seems an opportunity to allow a non-expert audience to have some say. It opens up the possibility of a broader spectrum of bodes interacting with performance and finding meaning there. Reason and Reynolds’ article shows that we have been told clearly not to read things that we don’t have expertise about. There are rewards in bringing these pre-articulate responses into analysis. With the ethnographic lens, you can never be a good enough spectator through knowledge. It’s good to have as much info as possible, but we shouldn’t cut out any pleasure in the form when we don’t have enough knowledge.

Dorothy: Who is saying we can’t compare disparate cultural forms of performance?

Ellen: Immediately there is a set of bells that goes off when you are imposing one system on another and not seeing the differences between them. I don’t know if other people share the same sentiment, but in my experience in the English department is that you get tremendous claims of concern and unease in comparison of different sources, for the understandable reason that it leads to lopsided interpretation. Cognitive science, feeling historical, and the stuplime are not a solution, but they are moving there.

Dorothy: I understand that in an undergraduate term paper setting, but why we would need such levels of analysis and science to compare spectator to spectator? It might not work in a paper, but in a seminar it could easily happen.

Ellen: That’s exactly what I’m hoping we can find a way through. Conquergood sees performance as a panacea for the questions that we’re raising, and the dissemination of performance as a way to undo the bad hierarchies of text and science and empiricism that came before us. There are success stories, but it has not become as accessible as he hoped. We need to offer up our bodies in a more nuanced way alongside text. When Amy asked you guys to think about performances that made you feel, thinking about those kind of physical reactions are useful. We have been trained not to be attentive to them. That seems like a way to work through Sarah’s question from the beginning of class. Think about where your body is in addition to where your mind is. Does anybody have the same hesitation around scientific measurements? Like in the map story at the beginning of the article.

Jennifer: When I was reading the map section, I had a difficulty with the division. My feelings partly came from a short story in which there is a map of the world. Two siblings can’t leave Scotland because they are taking care of their mother. Their cousin brings a map and the sisters live through their imaginings of the map in a greater way than their cousin who has actually been there. Text can evoke physical responses in the way that Conquergood wants non-text to do.

Sarah: A map and an experience of visiting that place work together, but the experience is always richer than the text.

Dorothy: I feel averse to the kind of science that asks people to describe something in terms that are not their own. On a visceral level, I’m more attracted to what you knew you experienced, even if that knowledge is flawed.

Sarah: Part of what this presupposes that is difficult is that what we feel and think are different things. Science can help us poke at that presupposition even if we can never overcome it. Cognitive science can help us get outside these systems of knowledge that we have and interrogate why we think so. There’s absolutely a trap if this becomes another structure from which we can’t escape.

Ellen: It will never be a cure-all, but it does open up new sites of receptivity. We will venture forth into the realm of modern dance. My only tip is to try to put into your response as much of that extra analytical understanding as possible.