Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance

Introduction: Witnessing Dance Choreographing Difference: The Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance is the result of over a decade of my involvement with dance as a performer, choreographer , improvisor, educator, and feminist scholar. This book grew out of a conviction that contemporary dance could shed light on the current debates about how cultural identitiesare negotiated and embodied. The project has acquired an urgency over the past few years as I see more and more dancing bodies becoming invisible and arts funding increasingly becoming a political minefield. My hope is that not only will this work contribute to current dialogues about corporeality,but that it will also expose both scholars and dancers to some of the ways in which dance can be a central, indeed, a crucial discourse for our time. It is my contention that contemporary dance foregrounds a responsive dancing body, one that engages with and challenges static representations of gender, race, sexuality,and physical ability, all the while acknowledging how deeply these ideologies influenceour daily experience.It is through the act of choreographing these differences that the dances I discuss in this book mobilize cultural identities, unleashing them from their overly deterministic moorings while at the same time revealing their somatic ground." I am interested in the tensions between dance and the plethora of cultural discourses about the body. Throughout this book, I will be engaging on the one hand with academic theories, which often perceive the body as a passive surface onto which society inscribes its political and social ideologies, and, on xiv I N T R O D U C T I O N the other hand, with conceptions of the body as an essentially natural phenomenon that precedes cultural conditioning.Close analysesof contemporary choreography , however, reveal the ways in which the dancing body confounds these easy distinctions. Because dance comprises the daily technical training of the dancer's body as well as the final choreographic production, dance can help us trace the complex negotiations between somatic experience and cultural representation —between the body and identity. For instance, while the audience may at first recognize a dancer onstage in terms of male or female, black or white, disabled or nondisabled, these visual categories can be disrupted by the kinesthetic meanings embedded in the dancing itself. Is the style of movement consistent with or resistant to this configuration of social identity? Does the performance situation (staging, lighting,costuming, etc.) reinforce or refuse these categorizations? How is this particular body interacting with other bodies ? Much contemporary dance takes up and plays with these questions of movement and meaning, giving us some brilliant examples of how physical bodies are both shaped by and resistant to cultural representations of identity. I first began dancing seriouslyin college. Although I was ostensibly studying philosophy and French literature,much of my time was being spent in the dance studio, exploring movement and dance. I came to see this physical inquiry as a way of knowing and experiencing the world; one that was no less sophisticated than other (onus of knowledge. Because I had come to dance within an academic setting, it seemed entirely natural to me to integrate my academic interests with my physical ones, at once reading and writing about dance as well as dancing and making dances about what I was studying in school. 1 quickly realized, however, that my college (and indeed, American culture in general) rarely accepted dance as a fully legitimate artistic pursuit or academic discipline. This realization was a product of my budding feminist consciousness as I became increasingly aware that the legacy of womencenteredness that I valued so highly in modern dance was inextricably linked to the marginahzation of this body-centered artform. Thus, as I solidified my commitment to dance over the next several years, I did so as an act of resistance , fully determined (as only a nineteen-year-old can be) to make dance a much more central cultural institution. At the same time, I was gradually becoming aware of various feminist critiques in philosophy and literature, I was also becoming (less gradually) dissatisfied with what I was reading in dance theory. Besides the work of dance theorists and critics such as Fdwin Denby and John Martin (both of whom wrote from the universalized perspective of white, middle-class men), and Don McDonagh's infamous The Rise and Fall and Rise of Modern Dance, as [210.158.71.88] Project MUSE (2024-10-05 09:42 GMT) XV I I N T R...