Course Notes- 11/8/12

Ellen: Indianapolis trip- we should leave probably around 9, you can park in the IUPUI lot if you have a pass, or there’s free parking in the Historical Society parking lot. I’ll upload an info package to Oncourse including directions. We’ll explore separately and then head over to the Advanced Visualization Lab, then go back to the museum and look at the archive, then preview an exhibit in progress. Grab something before you leave for IUPUI, there won’t be a lunch break.

Amy: Last week I went to the ASTR, which was very theater-focused- what are we preparing our grad students to do? Pointing toward some of the other avenues of interest/employment- museums, deploying our skills as readers and analysts, or the digital humanities. This trip could have real far-reaching implications for all of us.

Ellen: The approach of looking at culture from the other side. How do we orchestrate thoughtful knowledge creation? Thinking about interactivity as something that can be computed, digitalized, brings up questions of performance, transport. These people are translating what they’re doing to the larger public. You will be asked to join in!

Amy: What was it like to cull the posts of others- noticed that no one kept their responses under 300 words. What was it like to respond to the dance, and then seeing your excerpts curated?

Dorothy: When I was going through posts, I liked that Justin just chose the quotes that were the most meaningful. I found the categorization a little arbitrary.

Ming: What goes where, and how do I decide? Made me realize that I had no idea, since factual responses are usually affective, or just a positive response to someone’s good writing.

Sara: I wanted to do what Jennifer did, with headings for different subjects, but I forced myself to look at the words “true” and “meaningful”, because I don’t know what they mean and I want to hide from them.

Derek: I tried to solve the problem by sticking to what was factual- if it was affective, I considered it to be factual for someone. When a person described a bodily reaction- it was more interpretive, I put it under “meaningful”. Mixed sentences went into “both”.

Sara: Derek was the only one to mention the name and date of the event.

Ming: Maybe that’s the only really factual statement.

Ellen: The reason I used the terms is that we’ve had a strong critique of false empiricism in dance, yet at the same time we need to posit things that are more or less the same across experiences, find a commonality. That’s how reviews operate, like Derek’s opening sentences. Other facts?

Dorothy: Structure of the event- different speakers, intermissions.

Ellen: It was something the performance asked us not to notice. Jenna, what drew you to that?

Jenna: Everyone else talked about content, so I wanted to offer something new. The evening seemed very dichotomous: “This is when we’re dancing, this is when we’re performing a celebration”- as an outsider, I felt so divorced from that half of the performance that it made me question the rest. I’m guessing these are well-received pieces, or particularly great students- trying to figure out connections to community.

Amy: We talked about the splendor of the opera house, and those conventions of attendance are important. We should consider the impact of everything we experience before the curtain goes up, which Iris brings up when talking about printing the run time in the program.

Dorothy: The urge to not talk about those things goes back to critical distance- one of the speakers during the intermissions was someone I knew.

Ellen: I appreciated Jenna’s response- what’s up with this blackout? I started counting during it, and I got to twenty-something and was shocked. In theater, that’s a miscue.

Dorothy: I liked that it made everyone feel uncomfortable.

Ellen: I thought the audience was quite accommodating. Is the tension nice when it goes unacknowledged? Because it happened again, and I felt that there was no sense of any commitment to transitions.

Amy: I felt like there’s a fantasy of the performance event- like an opera singer hitting a high note. From my parking to my sitting down, it all matters. Either this is about me, the audience, or this is about you, the performer. When things like that happen, I assume that they think this is about them. A mistaken idea of performance.

Ellen: An unacknowledged convention. If you see an orchestra performance, they’ll tune the instruments before the show. Then the conductor comes in, everybody shuts up, and the performance starts. When the orchestra doesn’t follow that convention, they open that space up to interpretation. Live performance is conditioned on contingency- that this performance is the same as, but not identical to, yesterday’s performance. We can’t pretend you’re not tuning your violin. The more people don’t think about those conventions, the more frustrated I feel. If you choose not to examine that, you’re basically pretending that this is a recorded event. When theater tries to emulate film, I’m not interested.

Ming: Did anybody else not notice the long blackout? I don’t have enough of a precedent to notice.

Andrea: I just kind of accepted it.

Ellen: What about the little mini-lectures? What’d you think of them?

Jenna: That the speakers didn’t understand the word “gala”, from the way they approached the audience, how they dressed, what they said.

Cody: This was presented as a senior recital, so everyone and their grandma was there. Also, we’re not paying to see this- these are students showing off for their families. Perhaps we’re being overly entitled to expect a certain degree of performance.

Whitney: I got that idea when people left after one or two pieces, like a child’s dance recital. Seemed really weird to me- how many people are leaving because they’re annoyed, or because someone they know is done performing.

Dorothy: I’ve been to a lot of concerts where people leave after seeing the thing they want to see, and it isn’t considered rude.

Courtney: I wondered if it was some kind of fundraising event, with the speeches and introducing former dancers.

Jenna: Especially when they mentioned that we would be “solicited by beautiful dancers” upon leaving. Gross.

Sara: What is the difference in a performing art that isn’t housed in the college of arts and sciences?

Ellen: The speaker’s language seemed appealing in the abstract- about the value of housing the arts, healthy minds and bodies.

Dorothy: the first PhD. in dance was given out in the last thirty or forty years, really recent- in classes full of dancers, it’s a new thing that they would have a theoretical or critical background.

Amy: The first PhD. in theater was at the turn of the last century- these were things you did, not things you studied. The development of disciplines is a strange and recent revolution.

Ming: I think the separation between the theater and the humanities is especially strange.

Ellen: The rationality behind these decisions is really hard to excavate- and there’s a lot of movement right now.

Dorothy: It seems more like academic politics than real logic. Ethnomusicology and musicology are not only in separate departments, they have no crossover.

Whitney: With the anthropology of ballet article, the question of expertise came up in the study of the body. The survey in the lobby was all about archiving and studying how to capture the field, getting information out to the public. Seems like two very different trajectories.

Iris: The head of the kinesiology department gave a speech, mentioning that he had never been up onstage before, and I wondered why he was the one to make a speech in the first place.

Sara: Claiming the same lack of expertise that we had in our reviews, even after reading the articles that said we are qualified because we have bodies! But we were still hedging.

Whitney: Maybe it’s different with dance- if you can’t do it yourself, you don’t feel comfortable talking about it.

Amy: It’s a symptom of anti-intellectualism that I see all over the place. In a way it’s diminishing- we all talk about things that we aren’t experts in. “Well, I don’t know what happens in your little world and I don’t need to.” No one would say that about politics, or cancer. Even in the department there’s a refusal to engage in discourse- it can be meant as a sign of respect, but sometimes it’s reductive.

Dorothy: It’s like when someone tells a dancer “I wish I could dance”, when that person has spent twenty years training. What can and can’t be learned.

Ellen: This question is especially important at moments of tenure and promotion- this is a hot topic among faculty. The fact that dance and music are where they are says a lot about who they want reading their own work. Jackson’s article might be worth returning to- there’s a complexity in opening your field to a number of other types- it makes for complicated department meetings, and questions of expertise always rear up. Move back into the particularities of what was said- also our methodological questions.

Ellen: Andrea’s question about what defines as artistic was definitely part of the discussion. Seems to be a good way of getting at “Esplanade”, maybe others. Are there other strong overlaps? I’m interested in what didn’t show up in the discussion- I noticed a certain amount of eye rolling during “Rite of Summer”- or the racial and gender dynamics of the partnering,

Cody: They were very aware of who was onstage in terms of race and gender, there was a pattern and I could almost predict who would come next.

Courtney: I thought they lost a big opportunity with the female dancer who was dressed like the men- she was large enough to be paired with one of the women and it could have been really interesting.

Ellen: It seems to be saying that dance is an art that replicates itself with the desire of retrieving the original. This is shocking, but it’s one of the conventions that’s just observed. What is so significant about preserving the costumes and lights?

Courtney: I saw a video of the original performance, and none of the women were wearing pants, so that was different.

Ellen: So what is the commitment to authenticity? Why is clothing and palette more important than gender?

Amy: It speaks to issues of time, excavation of the idea of an original. There are conventions of things that we expect to be different when we see Shakespeare but we get upset if things are too different. Theater and performance are time-bound artforms, bring up all sorts of questions and challenges.

Dorothy: I was coming into it as a performance person of a different discipline, with the notion that you want to push the boundaries. Why do you have to have a black couple? I know at least the music school is incredibly conservative, and it seems like this school is, too.

Ellen: Our consensus is that that casting choice had to do with her height, like in ballroom dancing, a convention that we recognize. How does the performance let us know that this was not a subversive act?

Jess: it seemed like they were saying that height masculinizes you, which I found strange, because there were very short men there, it felt like they were aware of what they were doing but still embraced the conservatism. There was an extra male in the last dance- why wasn’t he in there?

Courtney: There was also the announcement that some of the dancers were former students.

Kelly: In theater, when we want to do a play, we read the script. How do you do that with dance?

Ellen: There’s dance notation- a blueprint for a performance.

Amy: It’s also true that certain dancers will go on to mount dances that they’ve been in. There’s a relationship between Laban notation and metaphor.

Ellen: There’s also surrogation going on- you can track the lineage from Balanchine to present day, choreographer to dancer. There’s always a desire to bring in the person who had an embodied experience of a performance.

Dorothy: I feel like that shows itself in other types of performance- if you have the sheet music for singing, you have the metaphor too. They’ve tried to make a notation system for Indian classical music and it’s insane.

Andrea: Does  it overlap with what we talked about with narrative?

Ellen: Let’s talk about “Rite of Summer” in terms of narrative. Whitney, you were the advocate, which I appreciated. It was particularly memorable and distinct from the other three.

Andrea: Even though the narrative was clear, another aspect was the physicality.

Dorothy: Women in wedding dresses, doing something not pretty. Perhaps heavy-handed.

Courtney: I really didn’t like that piece, one thing that bothered me was the costumes. If you’re going to put women in almost-literal wedding dresses with a column and a basket of rose petals, then what is that girl doing in a dance costume? Kind of unbearable.

Ellen: The logic of costume was completely different with the other three pieces. There were lots of gaps in the way that it tried to tell us something. Seemed really cheap. It seems like there’s a critique of the narrative of this dance, and the ways that its markers were not well executed. Cody, you mentioned trying to avoid narrative because the dances are so extravagantly coded- why should we bother to turn this instinct off when the dances are begging for it? It may be the only way to reclaim this dance.

Dorothy: I really put narrative on all of the dances. I compared “Esplanade” to “Dangerous Liaisons.”

Cody: Coming from the literary side, narrative has the most importance to me. From a performance 

side, that might not be the case.

Amy: Back to our discussion on stuplimity- is narrative the default position? We have to watch the artist frustrate us in order to shake the narrative frame loose. Otherwise we will automatically assign narrative.

Ellen: Did anybody feel frustrated in relation to that narrative? I thought it was dumb, and most of the narratives that I came up with were dumb. The complaint is the same as with opera- Giselle is a pretty ludicrous story, and ballet gives us a bunch of princesses, not too sophisticated. At a certain point you have to look for meaning elsewhere, because the meaning you’re given is so lame. The girls in David’s Bridal are all sentenced to death by rose petal. I thought Whitney made that dance meaningful.

Whitney: I ended up interested in what that dance can do with narrative. For me, the blue costume showed the strength of the dancer’s legs, almost masculine, which seemed to work against the narrative. A conversation between the movement and its own narrative.

Ellen: How can we allow the full spectrum of possibilities of the body to impact us, and how can we talk about that impact effectively? Good dance review talks about the body in motion, the body under difficult tasks, and it’s hard to do that without using jargon. In general, you all did a good job of evoking certain moments in the dance that were recognizable to me.

 Amy: And attending to your physical reactions, I thought that was really useful. Justin, can you say more from your post about the individual, and the location of agency?

Justin: We always talk about the performer being a solo individual, but that wasn’t the case, especially in the first and last movements. “Even though I have to jump, it’s not my jump, it’s shared with everybody else.”

Ellen: I was impressed with the way that this gave new life to “Black Watch” for us.

Justin: They keep doing this thing together, so why are they attending to it?

Amy: it feels like something performance can speak to, better than other art forms. The unison of the group, the diminishment of the individual, can be perceived in performance in a way that is difficult to articulate elsewhere.

Ming: We haven’t talked about the twitching. There could have been epileptics in the audience- what was that? Have we ever seen an enactment of a choiceless thing before?

Dorothy: I feel like physical choicelessness is equivalent to gasping or crying, I didn’t think it was offensive because it’s a real motion.

Sara: It depends on if there’s a stigma attached to it, like imitating someone with Downs Syndrome.

Cody: I wondered if those movements could have been exaggerated more, perhaps move out of choreography.

Ellen: I think it was put in the service of a larger metaphor. One of the things that displeased me was how on the nose it was, so what if it were more heightened-doesn’t dance ask for heightened gestures? Play with literal vs. representative?

Justin: The convulsions could be read as fighting against something rather than succumbing to something.

Sara: Next term we’re hosting a graduate symposium about bodies onstage, would love to have submissions. More information available soon.