Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Humanities -> performing arts -> dance'

This work includes both a performing and a written part.

Educating our Dance School Educators examines the relevance of certification for private dance school teachers. I offer a personal history as evidence for the need of certification in dance schools. I also provide a desired outline of the certification, which encompasses the mission statement and requirements for the candidates. The question of what it means to be certified is addressed by using the National Dance Education Organization as defining support. To argue for certification I draw support from dance editors and professors as well as the National Dance Education Standards. I use an example of a certification outline from the Connecticut school district and deconstruct why the outline is insufficient for my ideal standards. I do not have a target age group desired when talking about the students because this subject is relevant for students of all levels and ages. I use support from pedagogical research to explain the human developmental process for all ages specifically concerning the effects this process has on their learning curve. I also use critical pedagogy to explain the importance of pedagogical knowledge versus content knowledge. I conclude with a summary of my findings in support of certification for dance school teachers to ensure a quality education for all students whether pursuing it as a recreational activity or as a career.

German choreographer Pina Bausch is recognized as one of the original creators of 20th century Dance Theater through her seamless synthesis of stage design elements and movement. Through her choreographic methodology she is able to combine the everyday gesture of the body with the functionality of objects to create an emotionality that is authentic and transcendent on stage. The objects/props on stage illuminate the object world where objects are animated by our desires, fears, and the need to express the human condition. I will look at the procedure that Bausch employs through the lens of the psychoanalytic theory of object relations, the theories of Alice Miller, D.W. Winnicott, and the sociology of Herbert Blumer to prove the objects on stage in Bausch's work offer a physical and emotional obstacle for the dancers to contend with.

In this study I will unfold the history and functionality of stage properties and the role of the "prop" in terms of German Theater revolutions, exploring the ideas of the prop as a hindrance as well as an object of amplification for the stage action. I will delve into the theatrical models of Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, and Vsevolod Meyerhold, acknowledging the procedure and significance of theater objects through stage design. From here I will connect Bausch to the evolution of the German modern dance pioneers- Rudolph Laban and her mentor, Kurt Jooss. Through the work of Kurt Jooss, with whom Bausch studied at the Folkwang Schule in Essen, Germany, and specifically The Green Table , we begin to see the great influence that Jooss had on Bausch. I will discuss his use of props in his work as a means to illuminate his ideas of politics and war. This will then narrow in on the personal dance history of Bausch and her evolution as an artist, focusing on the mentorship she received in her career. The discussion will conclude with an analysis of her creative process and the use of specific objects that reflect meaning through the seminal works of Bausch: Café Mueller, Kontakthof, Bluebeard, and Waltzer.

The Againness of Vietnam in Contemporary United States Antiwar Choreography examines eight twentieth- and twenty-first century postmodern antiwar choreographies in order to uncover the reverberations of Vietnam antiwar protests in these dances. The choreographies I examine in this study are Yvonne Rainer’s 1970 M-Walk and 1970 (and 1999) Trio A with Flags, Wendy Rogers’ 1970 Black Maypole, Ann Carlson’s 1990 Flag and 2006 Too Beautiful A Day, Miguel Gutierrez’s 2001, 2008, and 2009 Freedom of Information (FOI), Jeff McMahon’s 1991 Scatter and Victoria Mark’s 2006 Action Conversations: Veterans. I theorize a concept called “againness,” in order to think through the multiple ways that repetitions specific to these particular choreographies continue to exist and to enact effects through time. I argue that repeated choreographic embodiment offers immediacy, nuanced response over time, expression through the bodies of former soldiers, and sites of mediated resistance such as live-streamed dance protest, to the United States public’s commentary on and critique of war. I conclude that choreography’s irregular and inexact repetitions are one of the ways that dance is especially apt for commenting on the large, never-ending, and ongoing traumas of the world such as war. My research extends established discussions about choreographic repetition and ephemerality, exchanging in questions of exactitude for conversations about impact. In particular, I show how the changes inherent to bodily repetitions reflect societal change, raise energy, garner power, and/or respond to current events. I study how politicized dances do not disappear after the time/space event of the initial performance, but instead linger on and reappear in unexpected moments. I thus parse out the many unbounded ways that protest choreographies happen again and again.

The performativity of dance relies on the the power that different dance practices and choreographies have to shape culture, “making and unmaking” identities by “molding” the moving body (Franko, 2012). While theorists have connected dance technique and instruction to the perpetuation of larger cultural and historical ideologies, few methods yet have attempted a critical study of how performative impact is connected to a dancer’s own embodied experience.

Working from an understanding of embodied experience as central to the performative impact of dance, my research examines the dancing body’s role in constructing its own performativity. I begin with an analysis of how choreography “does” performativity, looking at historical changes in dance theory over time that have led to the imperative to examine agency specifically in relation to individually experienced embodiment. Current scholarship on the status of the 21st century contemporary dancer recognizes this need to study individual embodiment; dancers are creative agents within the choreographic process, able to alter the performative impact of a piece on the basis of how they learn or embody the movement. In order to substantiate this understanding of the dancing body’s agency, my research culminates in an interview project that includes dancers’ voices and lived experiences together with scholarship that prescribes agency and performativity to the moving body. Tracking a group of dancers through the process of learning new choreography, I attempt a method of understanding the moving body itself as communicative agent. The philosophical field of phenomenology supports such an understanding, viewing the body as having its own consciousness and perspective. In addition to phenomenology, I use critical ethnography and oral history practices to construct a reflexive interview process and affect theory to conduct a deep analysis of the dancers’ descriptions. Affect, being defined as those intensities, feelings and forces at the base of personal experience and social patterns, offers a way of comprehending dancers’ felt sense of embodiment from their own perspective.

An examination of affect within the dancers’ descriptions shows how the dancers’ linguistic moves parallel their diverse kinesthetic experiences of learning movement. The dancers’ heightened kinesthetic awareness throughout the process of learning choreography demonstrates how they experience their bodies in a different phenomenological way and ultimately how they enact performative impact through their very processes of embodiment. The resulting interviews, transcriptions and discussion in this project support practice-based research, in the form of phenomenologically-centered and analyzed interviews, as a way to include dancers’ embodied experiences in studies of the dancing body’s performativity.

Reference: Franko, Mark. "Dance and the Political: States of Exception." Dance. Ed. André Lepecki. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2012. 145-48. Print.

Discursive frameworks of dance grounded in Western patriarchal modernist aesthetics and phallocentric theoretical lineages have consistently privileged the role of choreographers such that the labor, knowledge production, and perspectives of dancers have received little attention in dance scholarship. This dissertation considers the modes of being, thought, and critique that become articulable when the labor of dancers is acknowledged. Chapter One examines connections between the feminization of the role of the dancer and the devaluation of her labor and knowledge production and considers theoretical methodologies which might facilitate the inclusion of dancer’s knowledge, labor, and voice in dance and performance scholarship. Chapter Two considers how the labor of the dancer in U.S. Western dance practices since the 1930s has continually transformed alongside shifts in economic modes of production in order to trace this entwinement within the scope of dancers’ research, knowledge production and critical capacities. Chapter Three relies on interviews with nine dancers to explore the entanglement of contemporary freelance dancers’ labor with post-Fordist labor values as well as their experiences of agency, freedom, representation and labor within neoliberal capitalism’s modes of production. Chapter Four employs personal testimony of the dancer-scholar in order to consider the politics of the dancer within the site of Deborah Hay's Blues (2012). Through an exploration of these sites, I argue that dance and performance scholarship would benefit from the rich knowledge and insight afforded through the voices and praxis of dancers.

This paper analyzes the process of the developing collaborative creation in dance to adress issues in the modern food system. It begins with the examination of this history of Modern dance and collective theater and frames that history within the context of food system inequities.

This dissertation looks at critical interventions made by select San Francisco bay area choreographers and dance programmers interested in altering spectatorial norms for contemporary dance. Those selected have strategically employed food themes and materials in and as performance, simultaneously tapping into existing foodie ideology and redressing concerns about dwindling audiences for live dance performance in the twenty-first century. I argue that such efforts 1) bring to light subsumed race, class, and gender politics embedded in the trend towards "audience engagement," espoused by arts funders and dance makers alike as a necessary intervention for the survival of contemporary dance; and 2) open up discursive and experiential realms of possibility by favoring material, associative exchange, (re)awakening synesthetic sensory-perceptive capacities, inviting spectators to refigure themselves as co-creators in performance, and providing opportunities to reckon with exoticizing desires to enrich one's own culture by consuming another's.

In theoretically grouping these choreographies together I illustrate a spectrum of responses that clarify how food-oriented performance gatherings can operate not only as strategies for altering audience relations, but as sites for alternative knowledge production and fruitful commensal exchange. Such research draws from and intervenes in the overlapping fields of food studies, American studies, and performance and dance studies. This analysis is uniquely positioned amongst other work addressing the interstices between food and performance in its emphasis explicitly on Western concert dance. It also contributes significantly to the archives of an often overlooked San Francisco bay area dance community.

Methodologically I take a dance studies approach, generating choreographic analyses enabled through interviews with choreographers and dance programmers, my own work as witness/participant in the selected events, and archival research into feminist theories of performativity, anthropologies of the senses, contemporary theories of embodiment and select dance and theatre scholarship from the 1800s to the present. Throughout I prioritize the embodied experience of spectatorship, highlighting how contemporary corporeality is shaped by shifting inclusions and exclusions of various peoples and practices, capitalist economic models, the pervasive reach of readily-available digitized media, and both dominant and alternative systems of knowledge production.

A live nude female performer can occupy a powerful identity equal to a man because she willingly places herself in front of an audience. She commits to this state of profound vulnerability as a means of gaining ownership of her body that men by virtue of their power in society take for granted. The female body occupies physical space, unlike how a body image seen on a television or in a magazine does. The actuality of the live female nude creates a transformation from the purely sexualized body to an authentic female nude body. This authentic female nude body, via her control of her physicality, is a “loud” and often rejected body. The acknowledgement of her authenticity is an acknowledgement of her power and this is common ground on which the female audience member and performer can relate intersubjectively. On the surface, it seems the most effective solution to eliminating objectification and this obstruction of the female body would be to take focus away from her body. Yet paradoxically, female subjects have altered these culturally shaped identity norms of objectification through nude performance, liberating the hyper-sexualized projections attached to the female body and replacing them with symbols of innocence, creativity and power.

This thesis analyzes Mark Morris' choreography for pedagogical purposes. It explores Morris' technique and style by investigating one of his most acclaimed works: L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato. Because this evening length piece offers a large selection of sections, a total of thirty-two, it provides many possibilities to investigate Morris' musicality, creative process, and style. The musical aspect of Morris' work is examined by focusing on how he often molds the dance to the musical score involving specific rhythms, canons and counterpoints. Analysis of his creative process investigates his use of individual and group work, with the implementation of complex choreographic systems. These contain intricate spatial and movement patterns and can reflect the musical structure of a specific composition or are created directly by Morris. Finally, the analysis of his style explores some of his characteristic forms utilized in L'Allegro with particular attention to detailed shapes and gestures, in addition to torso and foot work. For a greater insight, this thesis also includes interviews with Mark Morris, and some of his former company members who were part of the original production. These are Tina Fehlandt, June Omura, and Megan Williams. A second part of the thesis explores the pedagogical potential of L’Allegro’s material. The investigation is first conducted through the lens of Laban Movement Analysis (LMA), and then through the lens of LMA adaptations for younger student populations, as utilized in the dance education field, by the New York City based Dance Education Laboratory and Seattle based dance educator Anne Green Gilbert.

How does Martha Graham conceptualize and then give expression to information delivered by Psyche through her body and the choreographic process? This is a study of the relationship of Psyche and Soma considered through examination of Graham's choreographies as expression of their union. This study seeks to participate in discourse on the process of melding the Unconscious and the body through the art of choreography. Three choreographies of Graham as text in the symbolic form--offered through the aesthetic movement phraseology presented by the choreographer--are introduced and interpreted, opening doors that invite discourse upon the subject. Hermeneutics--a methodological approach in which interpretation of text is used to gather insight into the meaning of the text--is utilized to foster engagement in Graham's choreographies. To explore meaningful forms in dance as text, the research creates a frame through which to cultivate, interpret, and integrate information from Graham's choreography. What becomes evident is the complementarity of artistic processes and the unfolding of qualitative research practices and the interpretive activities fostered. Interpretation becomes a deep connectedness with the research material, in this instance the dance methodology, movement language and range of Graham and the manner in which she utilizes aesthetic movement as a path into the Unconscious. The choreographies Errand Into the Maze (1984), Lamentation (1930), and Light--Part 1 (2010) demonstrate how, as the dancer weaves the choreographic sequences into the performance, the Body becomes expressive of Psyche and is ultimately moved and informed by Psyche. Graham invites the onlooker to peer into the pathways leading her to thematic content and subject matter of Psyche, which she then fashions into choreography. Graham's systematic approach to setting emotion into motion on stage becomes evident. The implication of this study for Depth Psychology entails an invitation to include Soma in the study of Psyche. An exploration of Graham's choreographic repertoire reveals a profound range of self-expression, not bound merely to the spoken word. Hers--articulation and manifestation of subjective information derived from the Unconscious, performed through choreographic ventures--is a sensory-integrative and self-expressive experience.

This dissertation addresses the concept of the experimental in contemporary dance and performance. In it I argue that, although the word is used in very different ways in traditional artistic and scientific practices, a number of contemporary dance artists utilize experimental practices in their work that produce useful knowledge that is recognizable and transmittable beyond the walls of the theater or gallery. I have written about artists whose embodied work has been described as experimental, whose innovations and explorations have produced paradigmatic shifts in dance practice and new ways of knowing, both about and through bodies.

Using theories of embodied experience from performance studies, dance studies, phenomenology and enactive perception, I argue for shifting our attention beyond textual and visual models of understanding performance to a broader palette of sensory modes and ways that attendees and makers both enact them. I propose that by doing so we broaden the possibilities for understanding the effects of performance and gain much richer tools for creating, using and analyzing our experiences of performance. I make these arguments as a maker of performance and as one who attends, reads and writes about performances.

The final chapter is a reflection in language of my own experimental performance project Performance Research Experiment #2 which was/is a Practice-as-Research performance project that engaged and embodied ideas and practices of scientific experimentation to specifically explore ways that artistic practice and scientific practice may inform or interrupt each other. By extension the project tried to think, and move, through different ways that we know what we know.

American Indian music and dance traditions unilaterally contain the following three elements: singing, dancing, and percussion instruments. Singing and dancing are of the utmost importance in American Indian dance traditions, while the expression of percussion instruments is superfluous. Louis W. Ballard has composed a piece of music for percussion ensemble which was inspired by the music and dance traditions of American Indian tribes from across North America. The controversy that this presents is relative to the fact that there is no American Indian tradition for a group comprised exclusively of percussion instruments. However, this percussion ensemble piece, Cacega Ayuwipi, does exhibit the three elements inherent to all American Indian music and dance traditions. Cacega Ayuwipi is consistent with American Indian traditions in that the audience must see the instruments, watch the movements of the percussionists, and hear the percussive expressions in order to experience the musical work in its entirety.