Course Blog 19.2 (Jennifer)

Is walking dance?

Courtney on “Esplanade”: These informal movements urge the question “Is walking dance?” and hint at what Reason and Reynolds call the “clichéd response to modern art, ‘I could do that myself’” (“Kinesthesia, Empathy, and Related Pleasures,” 59).

Sara: There is no beauty much less propriety in the tumble on the mattress without first witnessing the beauty in the walk for the bus. As a retrospective, I was happy to begin with Taylor and ponder the journey from formalism to expression, youth to age, public to private.

My note: I hadn't considered the importance of the walking prior to reading these two responses, but Courtney and Sara's idea rang completely true. They gave me an "Of course! It was about walking! Why didn't I get that?" moment. 

The Importance of the Performer

Jess:  To me, dance is almost more important to the performer than the observer.

Justin: Throughout, I envisioned the internal challenge for the dancers: “This is my run, yet it is your run. This is my jump, yet it’s yours as well. This is my arm extension, yet it is our [the whole group’s] same extension.” The individual is erased, as each member works to embody the same steps and to mirror the rest of the group.

My note: Jess and Justin both point out the importance of the performer's agency (or, in Justin's case - half relinquishment of that agency). Both reoriented my attention to the fact that one can dance for oneself and one's fellow dancers without needing an audience. Dancing, as "Esplanade" and "Nascimiento Novo" exemplified, can be rewarding for the performers without the audience. However, as I kept considering when I watched and as Justin affirms, this was work for them, even if it felt like joy to me. 

Kinesthetic Response

Whitney on “Rite of Summer”: At one point, the dancers crawled along the ground on their elbows en masse – dragging both their temporarily paralyzed bodies and their white dresses over the black floor, a moment that actually prompted a grimace.

Andrea: In the non-narrative dances, I noticed myself responding more physically to the performance…At their best moments, these dances conveyed a kind of exuberance in movement that I somehow experienced with them.

My note: Many of us responded to the narrative of some of the pieces, but these two responses were particularly meaningful for their notice of non-narrative response. These spoke to the issue from Conquergood: Whitney and Andrea's responses were outside/alongside their awareness of a narrative/script (which they both had). In addition, their responses aren't precisely ones of mimicry (as in the example from Foster) where they try to recreate the movement in themselves. Rather, Whitney had a facial response to a whole-body movement and Andrea had an emotional response that reflected her interpretation of the dancers' expression (despite the fact that she knew that this was a performed expression). Conquergood's division of map/text doesn't seem to account for such an ascriptive reaction.