| Session 16 | Choreographing History |
| Carla Huntington | Beyond Descriptive – Unpacking Implicit Gendering in Dance Theory to Evaluate Consumers and their Behaviors |
| This paper has several purposes. First it provides an historical meta-analysis of select dance theory scholarship providing a taxonomic picture of the gendered divide that it resides in. The argument is that dance has borrowed theoretical constructs from other fields, with the exclusion of notation, to explain and describe itself, and unwittingly has set up a feminine and masculine construction of producing and accepting new knowledge. What this paper suggests is that dance in all its manifestations in the scholarly world can be used by academic disciplines in the globalized movement of information, and moreover, I argue for and demonstrate an “applied dance theory” contributory niche. In particular, how can dance be used to study consumption behavior? This paper therefore has three objectives. First to look at the implicit gendering of dance theory; second, to provide a taxonomy of selected theories of dance; and third, to provide a framework to apply dance theory to consumption behavior. | |
| Pallabi Chakravorty | Can the subaltern dance to the tune of global feminism? |
| Questions on feminism are integral to the debates about representations that emerged from the subaltern historiographies of India. Postcolonial theory showed us how we can turn to the colonial archive to recover the erased subaltern within the colonial and national history of India. Through textual strategies we learned to read the silences and the gaps, which (ironically) are the traces left behind by the marginalized subjects of history. But what about the sensuous and emotional palpability of the subaltern dancing subject? What is her archive? How can we retrieve the history of the senses that informs her body? These marginalized subjects of Indian national history are no longer cut-off from lines of social mobility under global capitalism. In fact, now they often perform on the global stage. This paper will examine some of these questions by looking at the fundamental perceptual changes caused by technology, mass media and global capital in India. | |
| Kin-Yan Szeto | Displacing the Oriental/Feminized Bodies on the Global Stage: A Study of Cloud Gate Dance Theatre’s Cursive Trilogy |
| This paper critically explores how the world-renowned Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan’s Cursive trilogy is received and interpreted in the transnational circuits of production and consumption. The trilogy appropriates both Tai-Chi aesthetics and modern dance techniques, and provokes the re-conceptualization of Taiwanese body and identity in the age of globalization. This paper outlines the strategies of self-representation of the Oriental bodies, and investigates how the trilogy challenges the assumptions of Chinese-ness, nationhood, gender and identity. | |
| Carla Huntington (PhD Dance History and Theory, UC Riverside, Riverside California; MBA Marketing, California State University, San Bernardino, San Bernardino, California; and BA Economics, UC Riverside) is an associate professor of Marketing at Missouri Southern State University. Her current research stream focuses on dance and consumer behavior. | |
| Pallabi Chakravorty, a visual anthropologist and Kathak exponent, is the founder and artistic director of the contemporary dance ensemble the “Courtyard Dancers”, in Philadelphia. Pallabi’s scholarly and choreographic works reflect her long immersion in classical Indian dance, ethnographic methods, and social theory. Her inter disciplinary scholarly work has been published in many journals such as: South Asia, Dance Research Journal, Visual Anthropolgy. Her first book: “Bells of Change: Kathak Dance, Women, and Modernity in India” was just launched in India. Other edited books forthcoming are “Performing Ecstasy: The Poetics and Politics of Religion in India”, with Scott Kugle, and “Dance Matters” with Nilanjana Gupta. She is a faculty member in the department of Music and Dance at Swarthmore College, and will be serving as acting director for Dance for the 2008 academic year. | |
| Kin-Yan Szeto is an Assistant Professor of Theatre and Dance at Appalachian State University, with a Ph.D. from Northwestern University. Previously, she taught at Northwestern University and the University of California, Irvine. She is also a writer, director and performer, and her research interests are in film, media, performance and dance studies. At present, she is completing a book on transnational martial arts film and performance. | |
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