| Session 13 | Researching Dance: Workshop |
| Tomie Hahn and Michelle Kisliuk | |
| (RE)flexin’ methodologies – strategies for dance research | |
This session of papers offer strategies for movement research and practice— from ethnography in the field to the classroom at “home.” We ask: how can research on the performing body inform us about embodied cultural knowledge, identity, teaching, and history? This session offers different examples of the ways researchers approach the body in performance to reveal insights into culture, as well as the relationship between our selves and our work. The area studies covered in the session are diverse, ranging from Australian Aboriginal dance, Japanese dance, Central African BaAka dance, as well as the university classrooms we teach in. These contrasting contexts showcase how the body in performance calls for diverse methodologies of investigation, analysis, as well as approaches for “performing ethnography.” |
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| Tomie Hahn | Dancing paper—dance notation and ethnography |
| I propose that the awareness and notation of movement sensibilities during fieldwork is an essential contribution of dance research to other disciplinary fields for the examination of movement expressivity. During fieldwork I learned a simple style of notating Japanese dance that would forever change how I would conceptualize and analyze movement. How and why a dance community notates movement reveals a great deal about that culture’s concept of the body. In this presentation I will provide examples of this notation and how it is incorporated in dancers’ lives. I will not be discussing the theoretical tangle in dance scholarship regarding how and why dance should be notated. I also will not challenge respected, well-established notation techniques. Instead, I am interested in demonstrating an “on the fly” notation practice that I believe can reveal a great deal about physical human expression within a continuum from dance to everyday activities. | |
| Michelle Kisliuk | Ethnographic Research and Writing Strategies: Interactive Reflexivity and Beyond |
| Ethnographic work in dance and music has for several decades engaged with the discourse regarding reflexivity and embodied writing circulating within cultural anthropology, ethnomusicology, and feminist studies. Yet personal, experiential, interactive, and embodied perspectives remain marginal in ethnographic research and writing. This is in part because of lingering academic biases against the body, envisioned within binary thinking as a threat to the mind, and negatively associated with that which is feminized, personal, and partial. Fields including dance studies and ethnomusicology still must counteract anti-body (and anti “arts”) biases while making inroads within larger related fields. This paper addresses why inclusion of embodied and reflexive insight is crucial at this juncture, offering three miniature case studies. Two contrasting research contexts in Africa and one pedagogical case study in the U.S. will frame current issues in performance research and writing (including ethnographically informed performances), forwarding the evolving project of embodied performance ethnography. | |
| Tomie Hahn (Ph.D. Wesleyan University, 1996) Associate Professor at Rensselaer, is an ethnomusicologist and dance scholar. Tomie’s activities span a wide range of topics including: Japanese traditional performing arts, Monster Truck rallies, issues of identity and creative expression of multiracial individuals, and relationships of technology and culture; interactive dance/movement performance; and gestural control and extended human/computer interface in the performing arts. Hovering above these topics is her fascination with the body and transmission, the primary focus of her recent book Sensational Knowledge: Embodying Culture through Japanese Dance (Wesleyan University Press). http://www.arts.rpi.edu/tomie/ | |
| Michelle Kisliuk (Ph.D. New York University, 1991), teaches performance theory, ethnographic writing, music in everyday life, and directs the African Music and Dance Ensemble at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Seize the Dance! BaAka Musical Life and the Ethnography of Performance (Oxford University Press), as well as essays in Shadows in the Field (Oxford University Press), and Performing Ethnomusicology (University of California Press), among others. By way of personalizing and particularizing aesthetic processes, her work challenges the divide between performance and scholarship, and engages with postcolonial politics; issues of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and identity formations. | |
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