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- Convenors:
-
Georgiana Gore
(University of Clermont Auvergne)
Andree Grau (University of Roehampton)
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- Chair:
-
Andree Grau
(University of Roehampton)
- Track:
- The World of the Mind and the Mind in the World
- Location:
- University Place 6.213
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 6 August, -, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel explores how the specificities of dance, in which the corporeal is salient, make it necessary to conceptualise transmission as a special kind of sociality in which experimenting modes of interaction is intrinsic whether for creation or preservation.
Long Abstract:
We take as axiomatic that the arts, including dance and the other performing arts, are both reflective of society and generative of new ways of being. They memorialise the past for present or future usage and invent new possibilities. With such potential what kind of cultural continuity do they offer? Is it sufficient to think of the transmission of artistic knowledge, in terms of technique and savoir-faire, or in the case of the performing arts of continuous regeneration, through the re-creation of "works" at each performance? Do the specificities of the performing arts in which the corporeal is a feature, make it necessary to conceptualise these processes as a special kind of sociality and relationality in which experimenting modes of interaction is intrinsic whether for creation or preservation? What happens when the relationship is not just between dancers, but between dancers and spirit being, or between dancers and landscape? What conceptions of knowledge should we mobilise in order to understand these processes better? May the safeguarding of intangible heritage (cf. UNESCO's 2003 Convention) ever be other than a reification and instrumentalisation of culture by the state or parastatal institutions, a politically motivated form of cultural surveillance assuring continuity within the bounds of the normative? This panel welcomes contributions which question any of these issues and respond in the form of theoretically oriented or ethnographically based propositions to help us invent dance worlds to come.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 6 August, 2013, -Paper short abstract:
How do colonial performance traditions survive independence, and what is the impact of heritage politics? Does the processing of dance as ‘intangible heritage’ undermine its underlying knowledge and modes of transmission? I explore these questions with reference to performance at heritage sites in Indonesia: the Ramayana Ballet at Prambanan, and the Five Mountains Dance Festival at Borobudur.
Paper long abstract:
How do colonial performance traditions survive independence, and what is the impact of heritage politics? Court dancing practices in Java continue to produce Indonesian citizens, but other performances are being caught up in venues associated with 'heritage'. This paper considers the dynamics of socialisation, interaction, and choreographic diversity in Indonesia, with reference to contrasting approaches to performance and sociality at UNESCO heritage sites. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2004) has argued that intangible heritage is 'metacultural production'which undermines underlying knowledge by transforming the role of performance makers, the fundamental conductions for cultural production and reproduction, and the speed of time. I consider this critique in relation to performance at Java's main UNESCO heritage site, Prambanan-Borobudur. At Prambanan, the spectacular Ramayana ballet started in 1960 was an early attempt to classicise court performance as national culture. At Borobudur, social media and rural sociality are the organizing principles behind the Five Mountains Festival. Both contexts reveal surprising and unpredictable elements which cannot be contained or transformed by the action of intangible heritage as a top-down socio-political construct.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I consider the problematic relationship between attempts to patrimonialize the teyyam ritual of Kerala (India) and the challenge to transmit the related performance knowledge beyond the boundaries of the local community.
Paper long abstract:
Teyyam is a danced possession ritual performed in some villages of Northern Kerala (India) by ritual specialists from formerly untouchable castes. Each dancer can be possessed by one supernatural being among a variety of heroes, gods and goddesses, genii loci, divinized beings, persons who died a violent death, etc. As it is testified by the ethnographic literature on teyyam of the last sixty years, some important changes have taken place since the independence of India in the status of the ritual and, as a consequence, in its performance, structure, and organization. From being disregarded by the élites as a crude form of expression, and condemned by missionaries as a devil dance, teyyam has become one of the symbols, to be preserved, of the richness and originality of Kerala's culture. The ongoing process of the patrimonialization of teyyam has involved the transformation of existing social relationships and the creation of new ones at the local and international levels. This has resulted in the depletion of the number of supernatural beings celebrated in teyyam rituals, and in the crystallization of the extant repertoire, without the creation of any new teyyam character. To date all attempts to transform the teyyam in a theatrical performance have failed, while there is no news of any Western apprentice who has had access to the transmission of this ritual, what instead happened with other Keralan performances. Does this fact affect seriously the eligibility of teyyam in the list of recognized objects called Intangible Heritage of Humanity?
Paper short abstract:
This paper investigates folk dance phenomena in 21st century urban Bulgaria. It analyses the dance forms per se and how these reflect of political, economic and cultural processes and changes.
Paper long abstract:
This paper investigates folk dance phenomena in 21st century urban Bulgaria, analyzed as dance forms per se and their reflection of political, economic and cultural processes. Under discussion are the following dance phenomena:
• Experiments (folk dance blended with other genres)
• Mega spectacles
• Recreational folk dance club movement
The show "Dva Svyata" [Two Worlds] is representative of choreographies by professional companies, based on folk dance patterns combined with artistic gymnastics, named "experiments" by Bulgarian choreographers. The second example, the mega spectacle "Tova e Bulgaria" [This is Bulgaria], resembles the Bulgarian folk dance ensemble performance tradition, with a nationalistic appeal. The third example is related to the new powerful recreational folk dance movement that unifies features of the recreational dance club form, popular throughout Europe and North America, and Bulgarian folk dance ensemble tradition with special emphasis on performance and competition.
In search for the nature of changes of Bulgarian dance in its various forms today (as a synchrony), the paper discusses the new phenomena in their dynamic relations to the "old" (traditional dance and the folk dance ensemble tradition) and the spirit of the new century. The changes are viewed as application of new patterns in choreographic and performance levels and as a mode of existence (self-governance and support), that also act as preservation (bringing new life to Bulgarian dance). The paper follows the analytical perspective suggested by Lotman and Uspenski regarding cultural changes and culture as memory, the understanding that culture constantly excludes from itself specific texts in parallel with the process of creating new texts.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines transformations in the performance and transmission of the dance form of Bhangra in global diasporic locations, noting how memory, nostalgia, and preservation vie with new forms of dance mobility and sociality that is structured for cultural continuity.
Paper long abstract:
Bhangra, a performance tradition originating from the Punjab, in north-western India raises significant questions in relation to its metamorphosis from harvest folk dance to its British emergence as an urban pop form. Memory, nostalgia, and preservation vie with new forms of dance mobility and sociality that is structured for cultural continuity. Using evidence from current ethnographic fieldwork with Bhangra dance groups in west London, I question the impact of the transnational flows on Bhangra's music and dance forms and its hybridisation with western instruments and rhythms that are facilitated by the constant movement of peoples as well as the power of digital networks. Bhangra's place in the global youth culture, as well as its presence in Bollywood film dance is investigated, noting as Anjali Gera Roy has stated: 'While Bhangra might perform traditional ritual in community functions and festivals, it performs modernity as Indian dance music in India's growing club culture' (2010:188). How is bodily performance being changed or adapted in both transmission and performance? The paper examines the connection between dance and place and Bhangra's relocation, or displacement from its original folk setting and attempts to understand the meanings and knowledges that its emplacement in new environments may bring.
Roy, A. G (2010) Bhangra moves. From Ludhiana to London and Beyond. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.
Paper short abstract:
Social dancing in the Philippines is embedded in a mode of relationality between dancers based on 'taking care of each other', which creates a continuum between the artistic, social and sport realm of dancing and the private realm of personal needs.
Paper long abstract:
Social dancing in the Philippines is not merely reflective of, but integral to society. It did not create a new way of being, but rather developed into a specific mode of sociability and relationality; that is, between dancers, in relation to eminent sociocultural norms in Philippine society concerning care-taking.
In Western Europe and the United States of the 1980s many ballrooms had to close their doors because social dancing was clearly losing its appeal to younger generations. In the process of being replaced by more exotic styles such as Argentine tango and salsa, it merely survived as dance sport, in ballroom competition. During the same period, however, social dancing became booming business for Manila's hotels and restaurants that opened dance venues for an ever growing number of well-to-do, middle-aged women and their dance instructors/partners (DIs). Only during the past decade these ballrooms are suffering from competition from dance studios that have been emerging since the Philippines joined the international sport arena of ballroom dancing in 1996. This development, however, is neither extinguishing social dancing and dance halls completely, nor changing the relationship between the women and their DIs in ways detrimental to social and ballroom dancing's continuity. It rather adds an ambitious dimension to the dancing, in which an often much younger, male dancer gets paid by his female partner to not only be her dancing partner and instructor at social events, choreographer or personal fitness coach in a studio, but also as her personal assistant, servant, care-taker, nurse, companion, lover. It is not a mere professional relationship, but extends into the private realm, thereby creating a continuum between skill, art and sport, and its sociocultural context. This paper seeks to explain that it is this continuum that ensures the continuity of social dancing in the Philippines.
Paper short abstract:
By focusing on the relation between the gestural dance units, the local myths, and the notion of the ancestors, this paper examines the characteristics and modalities of cultural continuity and change and the kinds of sociality generated through the sakela dance of the Dumi Rai of Eastern Nepal.
Paper long abstract:
Among the Dumi Rai of Eastern Nepal, the sakela dance, linked to a fertility ritual, is considered the most important dance in society. Moving in circles, the dancers follow a leader, who, after each completed round of basic step, introduces special gestural movement-unit called sili. The sili, of which nearly 200 could be documented in this ongoing post-doc research project, are linked to the mythology and the notion of the ancestral world of the Dumi Rai, especially to its cosmological myths and myths of the cultural heroes. In sakela, the dancers remember this genealogical link reaching back to the founding of humanity, feel, and embody it. In the world-view of the Rai, the ancestors live in a parallel world and can be addressed directly through ritual and dance. Dancing sakela therefore means dancing in the presence of, and with the ancestors. The sociality generated in sakela performance thus encompasses a deep-time, all-embracing community of all living and past beings, including flora and fauna, a notion of togetherness that roots the local unit of dancers in the wholeness of the world and the completeness of history. Far from solely reproducing a normative, primordial notion of society, new inventions of sili and styles of performance attest to the dynamics of the social process, reflected and induced by dance practice. Focusing on the relation between the gestural sili dance units and the myths, this paper examines the characteristics and modalities of the cultural continuity and change as observable in the sakela dance.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores Katherine Dunham's use of dance as ethnographic practice in the Caribbean. The role of dance in Dunham's ethnography will be analysed according to Fabian's suggestion on theatricality (and, in this case, dance performance) as both a mode and a source of (embodied) knowledge.
Paper long abstract:
My paper tries to explore the role of dance in Katherine Dunham's ethnography in the Caribbean, focusing on the fieldwork she conducted in Jamaica and Haiti. Dunham, an African-American dancer and anthropologist, carried out her research in 1936 after completing her training in anthropology under the guidance of Franz Boas and Melville J. Herskovits. Using Johannes Fabian's work on theatre and anthropology, I will question Dunham's use of dance as both a source and mode of embodied knowledge in fieldwork, a way of sharing time and exchanging information within the communities she studied. The role of the (black, female) ethnographer's body will be analysed as a locus of possible continuities/discontinuities between American and African identities, and a place of intersection for power relations between the United States and the Caribbean. The role of dance and performance in such critical junctures will be looked at as both a mode of conducting ethnography and a subject of anthropological interest. In this latter case, the different meaning ascribed to dance (e.g. ritual Hoodoo dances in Haiti) will be taken into consideration as an important example of the performative character of cultural knowledge according to Fabian's analysis of timing and shared time in communicative events.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores spirit possession as a means for people to access a past landscape and way of life. By looking at incorporation as a "metonymic dance", the ethnographer shall attempt to unveil the unchanging element against the backdrop of that which is in constant process of becoming.
Paper long abstract:
Recently, in a lecture given at the University of Brasilia, the anthropologist Tim Ingold called attention to the fact that science has become so ingrained with the separation between figment and fact that it has lost some of its potential for understanding reality. There is a need to make space for what he described as the emic aspect of human existence, and for art and religion. This paper explores the role of Umbanda, an Afro-Brazilian form of religious expression with elements of both Catholicism and Kardecism, in a former fishing colony in the urban periphery of Rio de Janeiro.
The process of environmental degradation at Colonia Z-10 has irrevocably changed the community's way of life, thus it seems significant that its two terreiros of umbanda belong to some of the oldest fishing families in the colony. The emergence of Umbanda in Brazil is associated with processes of industrialization, urbanization and class formation, as a way to bridge the resulting contradictions. Some researches have explored the notion of Brazilianness during transe, with the incorporation of spirits of slaves and the native indian, the latter representing a higher soul with profound knowledge of the forest. I hope to contribute towards this literature by investigating how spirit possession, and the specific bodily manifestation brought about by the incorporation of each entity which I here describe as 'metonymic dance', depicts a past and a landscape long gone.
Paper short abstract:
Based on fieldwork research conducted at dance workshops with eating disordered women, this paper explores the development of a new, joint anthropological and contemporary dance approach to understanding embodied experience.
Paper long abstract:
As part of a collaborative project bringing together a medical anthropologist and a contemporary dance choreographer, this paper explores the development of a joint anthropological and contemporary dance approach to understanding embodied experience. Based on fieldwork conducted at expressive contemporary dance and movement workshops with eating disordered women, this paper highlights dance practice as a channel to developing a theoretically- and data-rich examination of embodiment. It explores how dance practice, through eliciting and intricately examining experience in its immediacy, allows us to access and better understand the sensory worlds inhabited by both researchers and participants. Delineating the fusion of contemporary dancework and anthropological fieldwork in conducting research among eating disordered women, and examining the cross-fertilization of dance and anthropological theories of the body's 'being-in-the-world' (Csordas, 1993), this paper presents a new platform for thinking about the body, enacting scholarly-artistic collaborations, and broadening the remit of dance in anthropological research.