for those interested:
Short Report on Recent Conferences 1
1. Congress On Research in Dance
“This year’s CORD Conference, hosted by New York University, was
organized under the title: “Transmigratory Moves: Dance in Global
Circulation” and took place October 26-28.
The theme of CORD 2001 was created to address ways in which dance forms
circulate across communities, regions and nations, acquiring new
meanings as they travel. While the term “globalization” has gained
currency in scholarly debates of recent years, the dispersion of
performance practices is hardly a new phenomenon, but this conference
invited panelists to offer both historical and contemporary analyses and
new perspectives on dances’ migrations.
I want to quote from organizer Barbara Browning introductory statement,
since it reflects very well some of the concerns that guided the
conference, gathering, as it were, under the smoke of the recent
political events that hit the city.
She notes that globalization and exchange are not new phenomena:
“I remember 20 years ago attending a rehearsal of a ‘folkloric’ dance
company in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, where young men would alternate
between training balletic pirouettes and the spinning kicks of regional
style capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian dance/martial art. The techniques of
both performance genres were inflecting each other. And of course the
dispersion of performance practices has a much longer history than that,
and it is always complicated - on political as well as aesthetic levels.
Current political conversations have trained our eyes on the economic
and cultural effects of globalization. They are also encouraging us to
reconsider certain cultural histories as they have been previously
constructed. When I proposed to CORD the theme of this conference, I had
in mind not only these larger conversations taking place in the field of
dance scholarship. Dance departments are increasingly questioning the
division of ‘Western’ and ’non-Western,’ ‘classical’ and ‘folkloric’
forms. Contemporary choreographic trends are pressing us to reconsider
what is appropriate technical training for professional dancers. And our
critical analysis, whether of contemporary or historical dances, must be
increasingly attentive to issues of cultural exchange. The call for
papers elicited an unusually large number of proposals, virtually all
engaged with the question of what happens when dances migrate....”
Or, one might add, what happens when the dance scholar ‘migrates’ or
travels a lot - this was the subject of a puzzling and alluring talk
by Marta Savigliano, who has published on the vicissitudes of the tango,
and she is among those contemporary theorists who like to mix things up
a bit, and perform their talks as quasi “choreo-critiques.” She spoke
on a large panel, arranged in the Judson Memorial Church, along with
ironic, tap-dancing and generally provocative theorist-choreographer
Thomas de Frantz (“Being Savion Glover - Black Masculinity and Hip Hop
Tap Dance”), and the superb and elegantly expressive Ananya Chatterjea,
who focused on contemporary female-centered South Asian dance and its
reception (“Translingual Femininity - Chandralekha’s ‘Raga’ and
‘Sloka.’”), especially in regard to the perceived/misperceived gender
politics in the works. The acoustics at the venerable Church were
lousy, and I missed some of the fines points, but enjoyed this plenary
session for its critical intelligence and the diversity of viewpoints
brought into convergence here. Chatterjea examined how Chandralekha’s
dances explore femininity, not just as excavations of homo-eroticism but
as a source of powerful energies, and in the case of “Raga” had those
explorations performed by men, while her “Sloka”, for example, was
criticized in Japan as a “gay Kamasutra” - and the talk focused
precisely on these kind of receptions and the question of how images of
sexual power or homo-eroticism travel into different contexts.
Unfortunately, there was no time for a public discussion - I would have
liked to hear more of the concerns or questions that scholars and
theorists are working on today.
Those questions were not always easily apparent in the sessions that
took place Friday through Sunday; numerous panels were held in tiny
crowded class rooms in NYU’s Tisch School, which is of course in the
heart of the West Village, and the conference on the whole had a subdued
feeling, understandably, as if the examination of dance migration, at
this historical moment, were not the most pressing matter. I remember
only a few moments when a productive tension, elicited by the speaker’s
theses or reports from the field, would rouse the community into heated
debate, letting us feel that something was indeed at stake. One such
moment came on Friday, during a panel on “The Politics of Dancing -
Imaginary Communities and Moving Feet,” featuring O. Hugo Benavides,
Nadine George-Graves, Richard C Green III, and André Lepecki, when a
long discussion followed the presentations and engaged everyone,
especially (again) in regard to political issues of “resistance” to
dominant conventions or national/naturalized forms, which are contested
by emerging hybrid practices, cross-overs, and the kind of inflections
that we observe for example in popular culture (MTV, hip hop).
Another contested panel (“Bearing Weight, Shifting Ground,” featuring
Ann Cooper Albright, Renee Rothman, and Karen Schaffman) dealt with the
globalization (export) of contact improvisation and the phenomenon of
globally roving master teachers who export or teach a specific (North
American) practice that may run counter to notions of touch or yielding
and (gender, sexual) assumptions that may or may not be addressed in
workshops that use a touch-based language without necessarily exploring
different cultural codes of proximity and boundaries. This was a helpful
debate, since it yielded awareness about difference precisely through
the differences expressed in the discussion.
I did of course not attend all panels, and leave it to others to report
on the range of current dance scholarship (historical, ethnographic,
cultural, theoretical, etc), as it was presented moving between national
(there was a large number of panels on Asian dance forms), regional,
diasporic and political theoretical paradigms of research, and perhaps
someone else can give us a more detailed evaluation of how new
scholarship is positioning itself, especially in regard to the question
that Browning raised about today’s training of professional dancers (a
scholar from Australia, Maggi Phillips, for example spoke about the
“transition” of her academy student dancers/choreographers into the
profession), and how the hot issues of the 90s, such as “identity” and
“hybridity” are being looked at. Uttara Asha Coorlawala spoke about
“Asianness in Global Choreography,” while there were also a few dance
workshops on this subject (which I missed), and an interesting modern
dance piece by Li Chiao-Ping, who then spoke on “Chop Suey Dance” trying
to problematize the stereotypical fixing of ethnic identities as well as
the careless/carefree postmodern mixing and borrowing of styles from
the “other” -- and her sincere choreographer’s approach to a dilemma
reverberated with us, even as the theorists’ proclamations earlier that
day (“in globalization there is no otherness that’s not available”) also
hovered in the air.
Globalization as a stage for choreography?
Coincidentally, there was no specific evening concert arranged for the
conference participants, but we were invited to travel a few blocks to
the Kitchen and see Akram Khan’s work, which does address the question
of dance in global transit, and he came here from Britain with much hype
attached. Well, I didn’t care much for his dancevideo, but he is an
excellent, thrilling dancer, and probably just emerging as a
choreographer - the one group piece he showed impressed me with its
sheer physicality and rhythmic force. Khan is of Bangladeshi origins,
having studied Kathak under the master teacher Sri Pratap Pawar, and
contemporary technique at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance. In
his work he tends to fuse these movement vocabularies, the fast footwork
seems to have moved to the upper body, arms especially, and his work
could construed to be forcing the question of tradition (Kathak) and its
relation to postmodern dance and physical theatre (DV8 et al), but I am
not sure now how we can even begin to discuss “fusion” and what that can
mean.
If I forgot a panel that related to technology, forgive me, I didn’t see
one, and this of course surprised me, even as questions of media and
dissemination (in a global perspective of markets and distributions)
were raised by the cultural studies people. But there were no panels or
workshops on media and technology as globalizing technologies.
So, the marginals gathered in the last hour on Sunday, with the session
I had organized on telematics and “Connected Dance: Distributed
Performance across Time Zones,” featuring my ADaPT (Association for
Dance and Performance Telematics) partners Ellen Bromberg (University of
Utah) John Mitchell (ISA, Arizona State University), Lisa Naugle (Univ.
of California- Irvine), Douglas Rosenberg (Univ. of Wisconsin), as well
as choreographer Ralph Lemon, whose work “Geography” may be known to you
and whom we had invited as a respondent.
We presented some visual material from our telepresence performances
and experimentations of the last 10 months, and each of us addressed
questions of distributed performance, collaboration, new methodologies
of composition/mixing, technical aspects of creating shared virtual
spaces, exchange of dance and streaming data, etc, from distinct
perspectives, naturally, since we all tend to have a different take on
what works (and what doesn’t) in those internet-based productions. Our
round table was based on the premise that contemporary dance and
performance practitioners, in many part of the world, have begun to
create work with new media and telecommunications technologies, and to
explore the practical implications of linking remote sites via the
Internet. We addressed the technical configuration (as condition for
such shared research with distributed media), but I felt that Lemon’s
presence also helped us to re-member to focus the cultural issues of
translation (cross media, forms, data, hard- and softwares) and
collaboration faced by teams that create technologically mediated
interactive performances across time zones and territories.
The subsequent discussion was lively and fruitful, and of course the
opportunity to announce our research to the public was welcome, even as
we are in the early phase of developing viable methods of performed
exchange/data transfers that could be of cultural and aesthetic interest
(entertainment value?) to internet audiences, local audiences who watch
a telepresence/present concert, and “users” who would participate in the
mix.
The ADaPT presentations we made on dance telematics, along with most of
the other panel presentations and lectures, have now been printed in the
CORD proceedings: “Transmigratory Moves/Dance in Global Circulation,”
Congress On Research in Dance Conference Proceedings, New York
University (October 2001).
For those of you interested in reading the essays on dance and
telepresence, please go to
http://www.dance.ohio-state.edu/workshops/ipstheory.html
or visit the ADaPT contact sequences:
http://www.dance.ohio-state.edu/workshops/ips2.html
Feedback -- especially from those in the community who are also
pursuing telepresence performance -- would be very welcome.
P.S. The last edition of the CORD Newsletter (fall 2001) carried a
review of the 2001 “SUBTLE TECHNOLOGIES’ conference in Toronto
(organized by Jim Ruxton & company), written by Canadian filmmaker
Barbara Sternberg. It’s a very good review of the many diverse
presentations made by artists and scientists at that brainstorming
event.
with regards
Johannes Birringer
OSU_Dance and Technology
AlienNation Co.
http://www.aliennationcompany.com
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