Dance Review (Courtney)

 To review the dance performance of IU Dance Theatre's 85th Anniversary Gala I would like to focus on the piece I felt was the most focused and successful of the four pieces, Paul Taylor’s “Esplanade.” This piece succeeded in the way in which it suggested and explored numerous dance themes. Set to Bach’s Violin Concerto in E Major, the dance sets up its contrasts from the very beginning. Against this most classical of classical music, the dancers walk in patterned movements around the stage, pairing and unpairing in turn. 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). Decentering the significance of the dancers’ skills and physical virtuosity, Taylor choreographs a dance that is about movement itself and the beauty of “everyday” movements.

Once the dancers begin running diagonally across the stage it becomes easy to let go of preconceptions of what dance should be, and the distinctions between formal and informal movements. The sheer beauty of a body running rapidly transforms the meaning of “I could do that myself” from the exclusion of both viewer and dancer from claims to artistry to the thrilling welcoming of both viewer and artist toward claims of artistry. Movement here is the key, and every movement has its own beauty, even the “failed” movements of falling and tripping. Perhaps one of the few viewers excluded from this reconfiguration of “I could do that myself” is the entirely immobile one, yet, even then, the argument could be made for the beauty expressed in the act of being carried, for, in the dance, bodily interaction is not always about movement. In this piece dance is about the many different ways a body can move and interact with other bodies more than it is about a each particular dancer’s virtuosity.

Prompt: Course Blog 20: Documenting the Cultural Performance of the Presidential Election

On Tuesday (tomorrow) we would like you to offer documentation of Election Day in whatever format(s) appeal to you. We have taken it as a shared perception that there is something both heightened and performed--and perhaps theatrical--about the way we conduct ourselves on this occasion, though we will certainly examine this presumption in more depth in class on the 13th.

By Sunday, November 11th at midnight, please post your evidence of the day, along with an account of how you might imagine curating or exhibiting this information in a History Center or Museum (you can decide the particular focus of the institution). Let our readings and your experience in Indianapolis inform what you think might be the most lively, effective, educational, and meaningful way(s) of both preserving this moment and bringing it across.

Note: since this is a thought experiment, money is no object.

Blog 19, IU Dance Theatre's 85th Anniversary Gala

Never having seen live modern dance before, I was unsure of what to expect from Sunday’s Gala. Actually, sitting in the cavernous, ribbed auditorium, I rather expected plankton to emerge when the curtain lifted (this perhaps reflects on my self-awareness as a consuming observer). The pink, orange, and tan costumes and initial sprightliness of Paul Taylor’s “Esplanade” didn’t undermine this expectation.

I was particularly affected by the juxtaposition of joy and misery throughout the evening’s performances. For example, the opening was joyous: happy bodies frolicking across and around the stage in what appeared to be an updated quadrille. The second movement was a sudden change – an exploration of destructive isolation. The dancers reached, but their inability to actually touch each other was painful to watch. The dancers emphasized their shoulder blades and collapsed their cores, dragging themselves to center stage where they revolved in a starving, circling herd.  The final two movements, featuring ecstatic leaps and flirtation, were each shaded by this indelible image of suffering.

The misery returned in full force in the next piece, William Evans’ “Rite of Summer.” I tried not to impose a narrative on the piece, but the use of a prop (a flower-girl’s basket of petals) and symbolic costuming appealed too much to the latent lit scholar in me; I ended up reading Evans’ work as one in which the performers wracked their bodies against a female-enforced patriarchy. The titular reference to a rite was evident in the shortened wedding dresses of the bride figures. Their gestural attempts to coerce and impose conformity on the female dancer in the simpler dress were intentionally redundant/stuplimitous: a big, circular gesture reminiscent of stirring a vat followed by a flattened, raised hand as though they were looking in vanity mirrors. The Rousseau figure’s eventual triumph – her rejection of the brides – was evident in the contrast between her previously jerky, seizing movement and her graceful, dismissive exit stage left, leaving the brides to twitch on the floor. The final two pieces continued this pendular swing from joy to misery, leaving me with aftershock mood swings on the drive home.  

Prompt 19: The Crowd-Sourced Review

This promises to be a noble experiment.

On Sunday, we will all be attending the dance department performance at the IU Auditorium (the event is unticketed and admission is free, so you should be able to just walk in).

By Monday at midnight, please post a 300 word 'review' of the production. I use scare quotes here because the formal requirements of a review are in flux in our digital age and I am happy to encourage that volatility. Write what you consider to be a substantive engagement with the production that ranges across these three categories: the true/factual, the meaningful, and the subjective (note: they are not necessarily discrete).

By Wednesday at noon, please cull from the full slate of reviews on the blog those claims that seem to you most true and meaningful. Cut and paste them into a separate blog post (you can call it Blog 19 Part 2 or something of that sort). You don't have to offer commentary here, but you should indicate which quotations seemed true to you and which seemed meaningful (or both).

Note: Worth thinking about as you write: Jennifer's critique of the reductiveness of Conquergood's usage of map/text. Can't texts/maps ever let us float free from the hegemony of text as (fixed/fixing) record or documentation? Isn't writing sometimes a zone or a conduit of multivocal open-endedness? Jennifer's fictional example would seem to say yes, notwithstanding writing's powerful inscriptive/prescriptive force. Try working out what this might look like in relation to Sunday's performance.

See you there.

NB: We will post a prompt for your election day ethnography on Monday.

Class Notes 11.1.2012

Ellen: Depart between 8 – 8:30 and stay until 1 p.m. (Will be going to Advanced Visualization Lab)

            Crowd-sourced review: The dance performance is on Sunday, so we all have to be there – I want each of you to offer 300 word reviews (short – a capsule review) – I want you to try to be cognizant of what is true, meaningful, and subjective in what you’re talking about. (These are all overlapping categories). The reviews should go up by midnight on Monday. Before we meet (on Thursday) I want you to sweep through the flight of reviews by your cohort and pull out what you find most true and meaningful, and from that I’m hoping we will pull together a crowd-sourced review. I will also write something to this effect up on the blog. We will talk with these reviews in light of Kirschenblatt-Gimblett.

            We don’t convene until the 8^th – we have two assignments: the previously mentioned dance performance. And then on Tuesday – document the lived performance of Election Day. Do a sort of ethnographic approach with an emphasis on whatever you run into in your day. You’ll probably need a camera (this could be phone) since it will be important to document -- pictorially and in other registers --what you experienced.  We haven’t indicated how that’s going to look blog-wise, but Amy and I will have an account on the blog by Thursday. This isn’t due till November 13. The assignment doesn’t assume that we will go to the polls – it’s just asking you to approach the day as a heightened moment. There are many ways to filter such evidence.

            Today’s talkers were asked to come in with some methodological approaches based on our reading and the blog posts. What do you have?

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.

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 8^th

the 9^th: 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

Blog 18 First Responder (Derek)

An ethnographic approach to performance would position the scholar/researcher at “a view from ground level” in a local context, producing “knowledge that is anchored in practice and circulated within a performance community” (Conquergood, 146) and helps avoid what we could term the fallacy of “monolithic wholes” (Kealiinohomoku, 34). An ethnographic approach allows researchers to focus on subjugated knowledges, “to meanings that are expressed forcefully through intonation, silence, body tension, arched eyebrows, blank stares, and other protective arts of disguise and secrecy” (146). The work by Reason and Reynolds on audience experiences of watching dance is an example of researchers focusing on the body in an ethnographic study that seeks “a personal connection: ‘knowing how,’ and ‘knowing who’” (146). Their study of dance audiences shows the extreme variability of response an observer will have of kinesthetic changes in the dancers. In other words, the subjectivity of the observer complicates their understanding and interpretation of the movements they observe. This suggests a similar difficulty would face the alien researcher attempting to first recognize and then accurately interpret or understand the subtle kinesthetic changes that constitute the subjugated knowledge gleaned through an ethnographic approach to performance studies. Overcoming this barrier, however, allows for deeper and fuller knowledge in myriad situations, both in theatre and in the real world.

In the world of theatre, ethnographic approaches allow performance studies practitioners new ways of seeing and understanding the events on the stage and their effects on the audience. The stylized facial expressions and body movements of bharatanatyam, for example, or of kabuki or even of ballet, might be analyzed in terms of their significations within their respective cultures of origin, thus providing an alien observer with a new and hopefully more accurate (or closer) perspective on – and understanding of – those performances. It might help us to avoid inadvertent colonial practices of consumption and possession (Foster, 81; 89). Changing tack to focus on the audience, imagine observing the audience during a performance of Beckett’s Not I in order to track their external displays of kinesthetic empathy or other physical changes that might indicate affective reaction to the performance (e.g. searching for signs of stuplimity). Furthermore, in translating a dramatic work from one culture to another in preparation for performance, an ethnographic approach to performance studies could help dramaturgs, directors, and actors to more accurately understand the original scenes, character behavior, and especially past “native” performances prior to making their own decisions of how to interpret and perform the work in their own idiom. Something like that could be said to have occurred with the IU production of Richard III; for example, the inclusion of visual cues such as Queen Anne’s pill bottle and her (to us, an obviously drugged) demeanor and body language. An ethnographic approach might also be a tool for helping actors gain new awareness of their own craft, if such an approach could be incorporated into theater exercises. Lastly, I’d like to suggest that an ethnographic approach to performance studies could also help outsiders to understand the performances enacted within various sub-cultures (e.g. Japanese visual-kei bands).

In the real/political world, ethnographic approaches to performance studies can be utilized by researchers to inform their work across disciplines ranging from international politics to sports studies. In politics different cultures have different ways of expressing themselves in body language and facial expression. For example, to the uninitiated, it might be difficult to recognize that the unsmiling face of a Japanese politician or corporate CEO does not necessarily mean anger or some other negative emotion as it might more safely be presumed were that person American. (Whether that example falls under the domain of performance studies is perhaps arguable.) As for the applicability of ethnographic approaches to performance studies being used in sports studies, the Reason and Reynolds article made me think about my own experiences as an athlete and now as a spectator of athletic events. It seems very useful to take such an approach when studying fan behavior and the performance of team support, especially comparatively; e.g., a comparative study of the fan cultures/behaviors of American, English, and Spanish soccer fans, or even of the differences between regions within a single country, or between first division and second division team fans.