Translocations

Back

Session 37	Translocations
Sara Wolf	Choreographing the Political Uncanny Body of Transnational Dislocation: Elia Arce’s Fifth Commandment
	This paper applies a choreographic lens to Costa Rican-American performance artist Elia Arce’s Fifth Commandment, an interdisciplinary evening-length work that foregrounds the centrality of gendering to national ideals of citizen corporeality. By employing a globalized understanding of choreography as the motion of bodies in time and space, I read the manner in which Arce’s piece traces the transnational motion of an anonymous, female immigrant who traversing past and present, from Central America to the U.S., as a politically uncanny body—the unacknowledged specter that haunts national imaginaries.
Diane Letoto	Looking Backward and Forward at Authenticity: the “authentic” Hula and Chinese Dance in Hawai’i
	The exploration of hula and Chinese dance in Hawai’i illuminates the ways in which the authentic is a slippery category that has, in some cases, produced various points of tension and resistance. These points of tension and resistance are within a geopolitical space where struggles between colonized and colonizer, indigenous and settler, are politicized that subsumes validation of one’s identity. Identity, as a project of the nation-state, then sets up dance as representative/representation of an authentic body. In this exploration, I posit an agency for more voices via dance writings and dancing bodies to investigate various power relations that move through the body to obscure preconceived notions of an authentic that are within institutions of hierarchy and, systems of privilege and inequality.
Tanya Calamoneri	Going Native: the Question of Ethics and American Cultural Appropriation of Butoh Dance
	Inspired by an illustration entitled “Traditional Japanese Physique” in an American text on Butoh dance, this paper probes the conception of and relationship to such a body within American Butoh dance. What is this notion of a “Japanese body” and what are the ethics of appropriating it? How do we talk about the body in a dance form that grew from a specific cultural context but is now considered a global form? I address these questions with reference to “Orientalization” in early American Modern Dance and related practices in contemporary American Butoh. Applying Edward T. Hall’s model of cross-cultural communication to dance studies, I discuss ways in which American dancers and dance scholars might approach the Butoh body in non-essentializing terms. This paper is intended to open up conversation about cultural appropriation in artwork and the complexities of Butoh dance as a global practice.

	Sara Wolf is a doctoral candidate, teaching fellow, and Javitz fellow in UCLA's department of World Arts and Cultures; a freelance dance critic for the Los Angeles Time; and co-editor of the journal/zine itch. Her dissertation examines twenty-first-century postmodern dance, performance, and activist interventions as citizen choreographies that formulate critical alternatives to national identifications and re-imagine bodies politic in relation to global media, capital, and war.

	Diane Letoto is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i where she is also a lecturer in the Women’s Studies Program and in Political Science. Diane holds a Master of Arts Degree in Dance and in American Studies from UH. Diane is founder of a performing Chinese dance school, the Phoenix Dance Chamber where she developed the syllabus and taught Chinese teen and adult dance classes. Besides her academic and Chinese dance experience, Diane has studied hula from the Zuttermeister halau and holds a nattori from the Matsudai Shin Buyo Dance School.

	Tanya Calamoneri is a PhD student in Dance and Presidential Fellow at Temple University. She received her MA from NYU’s Gallatin School, focusing on Butoh, and BA from American University in International Relations. She has published two reviews of Butoh-related books in Dance Chronicle and an interview with Dairakurakan’s Muramatsu Takuya in Movement Research Journal. Tanya was a Founding Faculty Member of Experimental Performance Institute at New College and Executive Director of Dancers’ Group, both in San Francisco, and Co-Director of The Field in New York City. She is the Artistic Director of award-winning Company SoGoNo in New York City.
Back