Ways To Move: Ambivalent Dancing
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General
Course Long Title
Ways To Move: Ambivalent Dancing
Subject Code
DPER
Course Number
580W
School(s)
Academic Level
GR - Graduate
Description
If ambivalence refers to "having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone," what might dancing ambivalently imply? Why might the desire to dance ambivalently present itself? What are the social and aesthetic concerns of an ambivalent Dance historical lineage? In Arabella Stanger's, Dancing on Violent Ground: Utopia as Dispossession, Stanger analyzes how state and federal agencies collaborated with Euro-American Modernist pioneers of Dance and Architecture. Reviewing seminal dance works like that of Martha Graham's, Frontier (1935), and Graham's collaboration with the United States Indian Removal Act (IRA), Stanger illustrates how contemporary techniques of Euro-American dance and choreography, such as "taking up space", are referential to choreographies of urban renewal and settler colonialism.
Following the underside of reading Euro-American dance history, Saidiya Harman's, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, identifies how mandated dances served as a measure of management and surveillance upon the enslaved in the plantation economy and Great Migration passage aboard ships of the Trans-Atlantic. Within Hartman's speculative and archival text, a counter-archive of Dance is presented to readers - an archive resistance to colonial impositions (Jasmine Johnson, Black Laws of Dance) - wherein the testimony of an enslaved woman, Mary Glover, appears through an act of refusal to dance: "(...) the promotion of innocent amusements and harmless pleasures was a central strategy in the slave owner's effort to cultivate contented subjection. However, the complicity of pleasure with the instrumental ends of slaveholder domination led those like Mary Glover to declare emphatically, "I don't want (that kind of pleasure)." (Hartman, 11)
How might an orientation of ambivalence lead us to towards a multidirectional understanding of dance and choreography?
How might thinking with dance, beyond the dominant discourse of consent and pleasure, reveal Dance's entanglement with aesthetic, sociopolitical, and necro-political practices for disciplining the body?
Following the underside of reading Euro-American dance history, Saidiya Harman's, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, identifies how mandated dances served as a measure of management and surveillance upon the enslaved in the plantation economy and Great Migration passage aboard ships of the Trans-Atlantic. Within Hartman's speculative and archival text, a counter-archive of Dance is presented to readers - an archive resistance to colonial impositions (Jasmine Johnson, Black Laws of Dance) - wherein the testimony of an enslaved woman, Mary Glover, appears through an act of refusal to dance: "(...) the promotion of innocent amusements and harmless pleasures was a central strategy in the slave owner's effort to cultivate contented subjection. However, the complicity of pleasure with the instrumental ends of slaveholder domination led those like Mary Glover to declare emphatically, "I don't want (that kind of pleasure)." (Hartman, 11)
How might an orientation of ambivalence lead us to towards a multidirectional understanding of dance and choreography?
How might thinking with dance, beyond the dominant discourse of consent and pleasure, reveal Dance's entanglement with aesthetic, sociopolitical, and necro-political practices for disciplining the body?