Four Case Studies in Dance, Discourse, and Shifting Boundaries

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Movement Writes: Four Case Studies in Dance, Discourse, and Shifting Boundaries

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Fenella Kennedy

Graduate Program in Dance Studies

The Ohio State University

2019

Dissertation Committee

Dr. Karen Eliot, Advisor

Dr. Harmony Bench

Dr. Gabriella Modan

Professor Norah Zuniga Shaw

Copyrighted by

Fenella Kennedy

2019

Abstract

This dissertation uses four case studies to examine the shifting discourse of dance and dance studies since the turn of the 20th century, and how this discourse is in relationship with the political, social, and academic cultural context of the United States. My interdisciplinary research uses methods adapted from microhistory and Critical Discourse

Analysis, as well as archival research and close reading in order to show how various forms of dance writing have been instrumental in shaping that discourse and creating change within and across our discipline.

My first case study centers on the term “modern dance” in order to draw parallels between Fordist industrial practices and the racialization of social partner dancing in the first decades of the 20th century, resulting in the erasure of black influences on modern dance. My second case study focuses on the writing of John Cage and Jill Johnston – two artists whose experimental poetics reflected and facilitated the turn to postmodernism during the mid-20th century. Unpacking various techniques within their writing I show how these artists used black literary aesthetics and other experimental devices to articulate a vision of political and social togetherness during the climate of the Lavender

Scare. My third case study traces the rise of dance studies within American higher education, comparing two anthologies: What is Dance from 1983 and the second edition of the Routledge Dance Studies Reader from 2010. From this comparison I move to a

ii close reading of Susan Foster’s 2010 re-publication of “Choreographing History” to show how Foster negotiates attitudes to gender and the body within an academic setting. My final case study examines dance as a medium for social change, guided by two metaphors: the studio is the world, and choreography is protest. Using contemporary theories of horizontality, affect and technique I analyze a range of works through this metaphorical lens, showing how both the rehearsal process and the choreography of dance in performance can affect the reception and durational impact of a social message.

Across this dissertation I demonstrate that by examining dance discursively it is possible to contextualize dance practices and dance writing in relation to a given historical moment, and by doing so to draw new conclusions about practices of dance and dance writing. Considering each of these case studies reveals not only how critics, historians, dancers and scholars have used dance writing to establish disciplinary boundaries in one context, but also how those boundaries have been shifted over time, and to what effect.

iii

Dedication

To bare feet on studio floors, the smells of wood and leather and paper, to sunshine

through the window, to motion, and to stillness.

Acknowledgments

This dissertation is the work of a community, and it would be impossible to thank everyone who contributed. Nevertheless, I would like to bear witness to certain ways that

I have been sustained and moved through this process:

To my committee: Dr Galey Modan, Norah Zuniga Shaw, Dr Harmony Bench, and above all and especially to my committee chair Dr Karen Eliot for seeing the value in my work, helping me realize my ideas, and for editing with grace, vision, and kindness.

To the remaining faculty, staff, and my graduate community in the OSU

Department of Dance, who have engaged my body, brain and soul for the last five years, and made this city state and school into my home.

To Bita, Nexus, and Fey, for living with my writing process.

To Ann, Bea, Benny, and Fred for reading drafts, outlines, abstracts, and chapters, and for making sure that I never quit grad school, even when I really, really wanted to.

To the American Blues Dance community for welcoming me, for trusting me, and for doing the work with me. To Damon Stone, to Daniel Miles, to Grey Armstrong.

To Michael and Christi Jay for showing me how love, scholarship, and humanity should always live together.

To Caitlin, Dana, Elinor, Emma, Fox, Gigi, John, Julia, Kitty, Laura, Naa Vah, and Red – to friendships spanning across continents and time.

To the community of the Fusion Immersion Retreat for the last breath before the plunge.

To Ivy, who got me to OSU in the first place.

Thank you all, and thank you to you, for listening.

Vita

Personal Information

Iye. Choreographed for The Ohio State University School Tour…………………..2018

The Blue No w here. Commissioned for Ten Tiny Dances Festival………………..2017

The Aviary. Site-specific work for MINT Collective’s Queer Performance Series...2016

#TagLab. Intermedia performance environment for the ACCAD open house……..2016

The Ohio State University. Instructor of Record ………………………..…….……2015

The Ohio State University, began PhD in Dance Studies…………….……………..2014

Advanced Labanotation, Dance Notation Bureau, NYC……………………………2014

Burklyn Ballet Theatre, Junior Program Assistant Director………….……………..2013

Nutshell Dance Company. Rehearsal Director…………………….………...………2013

Lecturer at Trinity Laban Conservatoire……………………………….……………2012

William Morris College. Instructor of Record for Graham Technique……….……..2012

Trinity Laban Conservatoire, BA (Hons) in Dance Theater…………………………2010

Publications

“Watching Ghosts, Reading The Shadows.” Book review of Penny Farfan’s Performing Queer Modernism published in Dance Chronicle……………………………2018

“Rethinking the Travesty Dancer: Questions of Reading and Representation in the Paris Opera” Published in Dance Chronicle………………………………………..2017 http://headtailconnection.wordpress.com/ vii

https://thebackofjazz.wordpress.com/

Fields of Study

Major Field: Dance Studies

viii

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii Dedication ...... iv Acknowledgments...... v Vita ...... vii Chapter 1. Introduction ...... 1 Chapter 2. Before We Became Modern: The Slow Drag from Black Partner Dancing to Concert Stages ...... 27 Chapter 3. Aesthetic Otherness, Poetic Kinship: Covering and Community in the Writing of John Cage and Jill Johnston...... 78 Chapter 4. Slamming, Smashing, Switching and Sliding: Dance Writing Tropes In American Higher Education ...... 133 Chapter 5. Metaphors We Dance By ...... 190 Chapter 6. Conclusion ...... 243 Bibliography ...... 257 Appendix A. Extract fron “Does Jazz Put the ‘Sin’ in Syncopation?” ...... 291 Appendix B. Extract from “Well Hung” ...... 293

Chapter 1. Introduction

It is 2012 and I am standing in the foyer of the Martha Graham Dance Center, freshly in residence at the Westbeth Studios of New York City. To my right I can see the sun-drenched black floor of the main studio catching the summer light off the Hudson river, but I cannot enter. I have come to document the teaching practice of the different teachers working at the school as a part of my Advanced Labanotation qualification, positive that in the physical shifts of technique over time are clues to the various priorities and influences affecting the choreography of Martha Graham, whose work I love. While the school itself is in support of my work, the teacher of the advanced class is resistant – she doesn’t understand how Labanotation (a symbolic language that scores dance in a manner similar to music) can capture the subtleties of Graham’s technique. I am surrounded by a cluster of dancers in a rainbow of unitards, I take a deep breath, smelling sweat and hairspray and old wood, hunched and desperate, I rummage in my bag for a pencil and then I straighten up, and hold out my notes: “Let me show you.”

My dissertation makes an intervention in the network of scholarship addressing the relationship between dance and text. At its heart is the idea that if scholars examine dance writing we can observe an authorial negotiation of attitudes towards social,

1 cultural, political and aesthetic phenomena. We can use these observations to understand why certain kinds of dance and choreographers rose to prominence in a given historical moment, while others were marginalized and erased. We can also start to understand how certain textual strategies index particular beliefs about dance, bodies, and the world, and understand how dance writing is therefore a political project both inside and outside of the field of dance studies. My work as a whole traces shifts in the field of western dance, beginning in the twentieth century, from vernacular partner dancing to concert modernism, through post-modern experiments and the establishment of dance studies as an academic discipline, to the contemporary use of dance as a metaphor for social research and social justice. This dissertation is neither about Labanotation nor about

Martha Graham (although both will appear in subsequent pages), and I share the above anecdote from the early years of my research career first, because this moment inspired a method of research that I spent the next five years developing, and which is deployed in a variety of ways across the next four chapters. Second, I share this anecdote because it contains several of the guiding values that have shaped my research practice in selecting and articulating this work: I am a scholar and a practitioner, and I believe that these realms of knowledge can and should work together in any kind of creative process. I believe that research should attend to the values of the communities it describes. I believe that small details are the key to much broader realms of knowledge… and I write about the things I love, with love.

Dance studies is an historically omnivorous discipline, drawing from critical theory, philosophy, ethnography, the humanities and digital humanities, and numerous

2 other inter-disciplinary influences. In this dissertation the methods I have adapted for my analysis have been primarily linguistic: Critical Discourse Analysis, sociolinguistics, and metaphor theory, although my intention is not to make claims of “doing” linguistic research, but instead to show how powerful these tools are as a lens for looking at dance studies and drawing out new knowledge. Precedents for this approach include Susan

Foster’s 1986 Reading Dancing, which borrows from semiotics and post-structuralist criticism to unpack relationships between dance and the circumstances of its own production, and which shifted the discipline of dance studies towards linguistic methods of analysis. In 2007 Susanne Franco and Marina Nordera asked whether this interdisciplinary approach to dance studies was an unavoidable condition of the field, or whether the adoption of external methodologies signaled “a sort of colonization of a terrain, still considered marginal and thus constitutionally fragile, endowed with its own laws and “original” identity that only a gaze from within could make known (2). By drawing from linguistic methods I issue my own vote of confidence in dance’s disciplinary validity, but also challenge the preconceptions of my internal gaze – asking what dance scholars cannot see without interdisciplinary intervention. Dance artists and scholars are creating a field in which looking at dance, and movement, helps us understand our humanity in addition to what we do on concert stages. I propose that the language we use to articulate ourselves shapes our interactions with other fields and the world around us. Let me show you.

A Microhistory of Microhistories

Given the broad scope of my dissertation: language, dance, history, social change and social justice, the selection and organization of materials in this dissertation has been one of its greatest challenges. I have opted, after many experiments, to offer four case studies detailing key moments during the 20th century when language use helped change the shape of dance as a field. In particular I have allowed microhistorical approaches to research in order to create connections outwards from a linguistic center. In contrast to macrohistorical analysis, which uses large-scale events to draw out an understanding of thematic changes over time, microhistorical case studies use individual events, lives, and in my case, writing practices, as a way of illustrating specific and detailed relationships to historical trends. The benefits of a microhistorical analysis are defended by leading historian Giovanni Levi, who argues for the practice as follows: “Phenomena previously considered to be sufficiently described and understood assume completely new meanings by altering the scale of observation. It is then possible to use these results to draw far wider generalizations although the initial observations were made within relatively narrow dimensions rather than examples” (1991, 97). The main difference between my work and a microhistorical analysis is that my case studies begin with a linguistic starting point, rather than a primary source, and then branch out to explain the significance of that linguistic phenomenon within its context, and in relationship to contemporaneous understandings of dance.

Dance studies lends itself easily to a microhistorical approach, making fluent transitions between a moment of performance and a broader historical or political

4 landscape. For example, Victoria Watts (2013) uses four bars of George Balanchine’s

Serenade – the very first moment in which the dancers stand in parallel, right arm extended high to the corner, palm out, and then slowly bring the forearm down to cover the face – to take us on an exploration of visual culture, expressed in scopic regimes and manifested in different forms of dance notation. She concludes that changes in the theory and practice of dance notation reflect changes in historical attitudes to embodied subjectivity (383), that the notation contains information not only about the dance, but about how the body is hierarchized and what people in the time period of the notation process were most inclined to see. Another example of dance moving from a small moment to a broader analysis is Barbara Browning’s 2004 essay “Breast Milk is Sweet and Salty,” which weaves an autoethnographic account of Browning’s own experiences with dancing, pregnancy, and breast milk, into an exploration of the sexualization of

African culture, the AIDS pandemic and infections both literal and metaphorical, and ends with a call for medical anthropology to think through the body in order to avoid harmful biomedical assumptions.

This argument, that by changing the scale of analysis we can understand historical narratives in a new light, also grounds a more political argument for my approach to textual analysis. Assessing the relationship of microhistory to postmodernism, historian Richard Brown suggests that while the traditional practice of history has been to synthesize from a broad range of examples, this has often had the unintended consequence of skewing that synthesis towards normative experiences and silencing the voices of marginalized communities – whose experiences tend to be

5 documented less frequently, and by outside observers. Performance studies scholar

Rebecca Schneider (2011) writes about a conflict in the Civil War reenactment community wherein cross-dressing soldiers are banned from the field, despite documented evidence of their presence during the Civil War era. She understands this conflict as the desire for a history devoid of “troublesome errors,” even when those errors are, in fact, fact (55). The texts I have selected for my dissertation highlight attitudes to race, gender, and sexual identity, allowing marginalized perspectives to be used as evidence and complicating the overall synthesis of historical narratives.

The two main challenges of a microhistorical approach to research are described by educator researcher Hywel Jones (2009): what is the balance between macrohistorical contextualization and microhistorical detail needed to allow individual sources to be interpreted within the circumstances of their own time? And how can microhistories acquire meaningful historical specificity in relationship to the meta-narratives of history?

In my own work I have deliberately approached microhistory with the intent to make broader historical connections, and in many cases I have found that contextualizing my source material created the analysis of that source in context. In other words, the moment creates the work, which in turn shapes how the work should be interpreted. Unlike the examples mentioned previously, however, my dissertation does not build on moments of the physical or performative practice of dance. Instead I draw my source material from newspaper articles, dance reviews, dance textbooks, and dance-based metaphors, to illustrate historical changes in dance as both a written and physical practice. Examining the layers of different contextual factors surrounding a text, only possible at the

6 microhistorical level, and only then in in a selective and incomplete manner, allows me to shed new light on why a text was produced with the particular lexical and structural choices its author employed, and what that means for how we should understand it as readers, dancers, scholars and historians.

Where my work makes new conclusions about the creation and meaning of texts,

I argue that it is because the scale of microhistorical analysis, combined with a toolkit adapted from Critical Discourse Analysis for unpacking those texts, that allows me to bring new ranges of contextualizing factors into conversation in my research. Bringing a modified Critical Discourse Analysis into my work – and a fuller explanation of what that means appears below – seems to me to be a logical evolution of various methods for

“doing” dance, language and history that have been tried out over time.

A Short History of Dance in Text

Of the many methods for writing about dance, one that gets significant attention in subsequent chapters of this dissertation is the Symbolism practiced by Stéphane

Mallarmé, W.B. Yeats, Paul Valéry, and other writers of the late 19th and early 20th century. Mallarmé’s writing I discuss at length in later pages, but Valéry’s essay

“Philosophy of the Dance” provides a good introduction to the symbolist approach to what dance “is,” and how to describe it. For Valéry dance is serious – fundamental – “as is suggested if not demonstrated by its universality, its immemorial antiquity, the solemn uses to which it has been put, the ideas and reflections it has engendered at all times… an action transposed into a world, into a kind of space-time, which is no-longer quite the

7 same as that of everyday life” (1976, 65). Symbolism arises from the attempt to reach with language that world in which dance occurs, a world which is distinct from the material world of everyday action. Valéry connects to it through the idea of energy, the idea that dance is a form of superior energy that sustains the dancer within an exceptional state, much as a flame is sustained only by the intense consumption of a chemical reaction that produces thermal energy (69). That energy allows her (and in Symbolist writing the dancer is almost always “her”) to illustrate that other world through her steps and gestures, and so to become that other world by dancing it. Continuing this idea further, Valéry likens dance to the idea of poetry as another medium which sets up its own laws and time: “to recite poetry is to enter into a verbal dance” (72). Originally published in 1936, Valéry’s ideas are now nearly 100 years old, and yet – as can be seen in my Chapter Four discussion of how Mallarmé’s theories can be seen in Susan Foster’s

1995 essay “Choreographing History”– symbolist thinking continues to have a huge impact on how dance is written and theorized.

In my preliminary research for this dissertation I devoted substantial attention to the specialist newspaper dance critics of the mid-twentieth century, to the New York

School of dance criticism, and to formalist attitudes within dance writing. As a mode of literary analysis, Formalism (and the closely related practices of New Criticism) separates a text from its social, cultural, historical and biographic content in order to place the text at the center of literary analysis. In dance, Formalism invited critics to weave constituent elements of structure and technique into an overall sense of the work, attaching significance to form, rather than to a symbolic or narrative analysis (Strauss 2005, 82-83).

Diana Theodores’s 1996 study of formalist pioneer Edwin Denby demonstrates how technical details can be used to imbue a work with reading, for instance in Denby’s 1939 review of Balanchine’s Apollo: “... Did you notice the counter-movement, the keenness of suspense within the clean onward line of Calliope's variation?” In this case the conversational nature of Denby’s writing helps readers to share his curiosity and to discover with him the meaning supposedly inherent in Balanchine’s technique (35).

Proponents of Formalism and New Criticism argue that separating the text, or dance, from background or contextual detail allows each medium to be analyzed as a unique mode of human knowledge (Kennedy and Gioia 1994, 154); and that the subjectivity of the author should be distinguished from the organizational and aesthetic value of a piece of art – since only the latter can offer insight as to the potential effects on a reader (Elton 1951, 23). The tools of New Criticism, however, are structuralist in nature, and critics of these methods have therefore pointed out that they assume a false objectivity, while instead perpetuating the subjectivity of the Formalist/New Critical analyst. In his passionate polemic against New Criticism, Raymond Picard writes that

New Criticism “is voluntarily lacking in prudence… is ignorant of the texts or makes a travesty of them, that it defies historical or sociological facts, that it isolates works arbitrarily and offers uncontrolled generalizations” (1969, “Introduction”). The rise of

New Historicist analysis – including microhistorical analysis – during the 1970s was supposed to offer an alternative to these critiques, much to the anger of Formalist, New

Critical and structuralist scholars, but its emergence has also ignited a theoretical dispute that remains pertinent even now. In 2011 literary scholars Alex Dunn and Thomas

Haddox labelled the premises of New Historicism as an “essentially banal” way to condemn “conventional scholars” as self-absorbed and racist (xvii), although they do offer, in addition, the more theoretical rebuttal that critical position taking is inevitable, and that historical context is as multifaceted and critically subjective as any structural analysis (xiii). Writing from a conciliatory stance, Jane Gallop asks that New Historians remember the value of close reading – whether structuralist or deconstructionist – as an essential grounding practice for contextual and cultural analysis (2011, 4). While my dissertation does not attend to Formalist dance criticism, these debates have informed how I balance context and close reading, and how I have chosen to frame my dissertation as an ethical as well as a research-based project.

The second major branch of theory to oppose structuralist analysis is poststructuralism, a theory of multiplicity and ambiguity typified by the work of Jacques

Derrida. It is possible to think of poststructuralism as a theory of the impossibility of theorizing, or at least of totalizing, that focuses on possible interpretations, ironies, intertextualities, plurality and reflexivity etc. rather than definitive or correct readings.

Poststructuralism argues specifically against genre and disciplinarity, positing that only by the transgression of formalist, genre-based, national, or disciplinary boundaries can we come to know of their existence (Dimock 2006, 73; Spivak 2003, 32). Jacques Derrida’s interview with Christie McDonald, “Choreographies,” is arguably one of the more cited post-structuralist interventions in dance studies. In that essay, Derrida suggests that dance

– which in French is the feminine la danse – enacts a continual displacement with the potential to trouble hegemonic, monolinear inscriptions of identity and history (69), in

10 other words, because dance is constantly moving away from itself, is always somewhere else, it provides a way of thinking through identity and history as impossible to pin down.

As dance studies scholar Ann Cooper Albright suggests, this gives dance political, emancipatory potential: “The revolution of the dance, then, is in its surefootedness in moving out of the way, in changing places without feeling displaced, to move in a way that shifts the meaning of the location” (1995, 158). Derrida’s work has simultaneously allowed dance writers to de-couple dance from the need to signify simply or legibly, but also enables the theoretical premise that both dance and writing can be thought of as networks of unstable, tenuously locatable meaning – that dance can be thought of as a kind of writing (Franko 2008, 244). In “Inscribing Dance,” André Lepecki develops this line of thinking, arguing that dance writing has historically been imagined as means to capture the ephemeral, a corrective (but a mournfully incomplete one) for the feminine displacement of dancing. Through Derrida, Lepecki hopes that dance can find a kind of writing that does not seek to arrest and still the moving body, but which can find instead an ontological fluidity open to multiple considerations of what the body is and means

(133). My own poststructuralist leanings can be seen in my tendency to make space for different possibilities of reading, and conflicting interpretations of the same text, for example, in my third chapter I examine the different readings made possible if we treat the movement and character of Clio, as described by Susan Foster, as male, female, or genderqueer.

Applying this historiographical analysis of dance writing to the field of dance is complicated by evolving ideas of dance’s ontology, and by the wide range of

11 philosophical approaches that have also been applied to its analysis, in conjunction or disjunction with the language-based practices described above. Some of those ontological issues will arise in connection with various historical moments, and others will be touched upon in my conclusion, where I turn from a more textual analysis to incorporate

Deleuzian and phenomenological perspectives into an overarching examination of the points made from chapter to chapter. Within each chapter I have approached my research from a literary perspective, using tools from Critical Discourse Analysis to guide my curiosity and engagement with dance and language across time.

A Discourse on Discourse

I approach my textual analysis in this dissertation using tools and frameworks from the broader linguistic discipline of Critical Discourse Analysis. CDA theorists Ruth

Wodak and Michael Meyer date the emergence of CDA as a recognizable collective of works, ideas, and scholars to the aftermath of a conference in Amsterdam in 1991 (2009,

3). Some of the ideas that Wodak brought to the conference are visible in her 1989 work

Language, Power, and Ideology, and are still present in contemporary understandings of

CDA. Setting out the aims and requirements for what she calls “critical linguistics,” a body of socially oriented linguistic scholarship led by Guther Kress, Wodak asks researchers to take some distance from their subjects in order to explicitly understand the forces of politics and power at work thorough language. However, she argues against distance as a way of achieving neutrality, instead demanding research that is “aimed at uncovering injustice, inequality, taking sides with the powerless and suppressed.” (xiv).

Wodak points to a gap in studies of power that do not take fully into account the way that language is made powerful by those in authority, and how conflicts in language are indicative of broader power struggles (xv). Writing in 2015 Teun Van Dijk described

CDA as “dissident research… a social movement of politically committed discourse analysts” (466), and this disciplinary invitation to use language as a way of addressing inequity is one of the main reasons I have been inspired by CDA in my approach to this dissertation, adapting these principles to an interdisciplinary focus on dance.

The influences of CDA are as varied as the scholars using it, but authors and theories frequently cited as foundational include Michael Foucault’s analysis of power and discourse, the post-war Frankfurt School, Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism, and Michael Halliday’s approach of Systemic-Functional Linguistics (SFL). This does not mean that a CDA work will cite any of them, nor that scholars identifying as clearly outside the boundaries of CDA will not cite all of them. The benefit to identifying CDA through its influences, however, is that it allows for viewing CDA as a network of ideas, rather than a collection of methods. Jan Blommaert (2005) lists an extensive range of methodologies used within CDA, including concepts from: “mainstream pragmatics, discourse analysis and text linguistics, social semiotics, social cognition, rhetoric, and

Conversation Analysis,” as well as a number of scholar/context specific methodological frameworks (28). This dissertation is explicitly not a work of Critical Discourse

Analysis, but Foucauldian ideas and dialogism are present in my approach to the sources at the heart of each chapter.

Dance studies already uses discourse analysis broadly as a methodology. For example, the 2007 anthology Dance Discourses edited by Franco and Nordera collects chapters from a range of authors to show how discourses of knowledge are formulated and reformulated within the field. Franco and Nordera adopt a Foucauldian approach to the relationship between discourse and discipline: that disciplines are a “system of control in the production of discourse” (1). My dissertation aims to show how some of that control has been enacted, and to what effect, while understanding that my dissertation enacts a disciplinary statement on dance studies discourse. In The Archaeology of

Knowledge Michel Foucault writes that historical discourse emerges from a series of methodological choices: the building up of corpora of documents, the choice of how documents are treated, the way scholars analyze documentary elements (and what method of analysis they use), and what groups and sub-groups articulate the material (2010, 10-

11). I have tried to hold these concerns in mind as I write, for example in explaining why

I chose What is Dance and the second edition of the Routledge Dance Studies Reader to speak to discursive shifts in dance studies within higher education in chapter four.

Foucault also adds that the discontinuity historians had previously been tasked with removing from history has now become one of the “basic elements of historical analysis”

(9). Shaping this dissertation around four case studies amplifies a sense of discontinuity, as does my choice to place disparate projects in parallel: industrial Fordism and modern social dancing; queerness and black literary aesthetics; concert dance and Marvel movies.

Thinking discontinuously has helped me draw out lines of continuity shaping discourse across these projects, allowing common threads between the case studies rise gently to

14 prominence. In this process I have been guided both by scholarship that specifically pertains to the theoretical frameworks I have employed, by historical and critical scholarship of the periods I examine, and less formally by works that bring together language, dance and history in order to speak to a broader project of studying dance well.

Guiding Literature

The majority of extant metacritical analysis within dance studies concentrates on the practices that established abstract modern concert dance as an expression of American identity and culture. There are very few published works focusing on discourse analysis within dance studies, but some examples include Mark Strauss’s 2005 analysis of Arlene

Croce’s dance criticism during the seventies and eighties, which examines the development of New Formalism around the 1930s in critical writing, and how Croce used and developed its techniques in order to advocate for abstract modernist dances through the symbolic significance of technical forms (82-83). In this work Strauss points out the rhetorical strategies Croce uses for persuading audiences to take her writing as truth, including accumulations (“not only did she… but she also…”), and antithetical statements (“not this, but that”), each of which adds to the overall persuasiveness of her viewpoint as fact (95). Another example of linguistic discourse analysis is Edward

Dickinson’s essay on early modern dance, which argues that prior to 1914, modern dance was a mass-marketable art, brilliantly tying itself into shifting class boundaries and norms, and other cultural trends in film and fashion. Dickinson moves in from a broader historical analysis to focus on the key word “slender,” which he claims signals the shift

15 from reproductive feminine beauty to a new code of girlishness, ease, and athleticism

(2013, 299).

Two works from within dance studies that have had a huge influence on my own interest in newspaper journalism and modern dance are Ellen Graff’s Stepping Left

(1997) and Susan Manning’s Modern Dance, Negro Dance (2004). These two monographs look to the impact of newspaper criticism on concert modernism, indicating some of the major discursive trends of this period but also acknowledging the political stakes of newspaper writing and the bias inherent in common approaches to dance reviews. Manning notes that while the leftist press offered patronage and support to

“Negro” dancers in the 1930s, this support was only available within strict parameters, which promoted metaphorical minstrelsy and attempted to steer black choreographers away from modern aesthetics and towards African-themed spectacles. (58-59). Graff examines socialist dances between 1928 and 1942, arguing that leftist newspapers were foundational in promoting leftist dance, documenting it, and articulating its effect according to the politics of its time (30-34). For example she points out that The New

Dance Group has been minimized in historical narratives of the period because it cannot be traced through a direct line to any individual artist; mixing genres demanded a complexity of attention that was simply not provided (160-161). The conclusions drawn by these two scholars, as well as their methods, have broadly influenced the first two chapters of this dissertation.

Less formally I have been inspired by many more works whose presence can still be felt in the shape, structure and methods of my analysis. Three of these works are

Valerie Preston-Dunlop’s Looking at Dances (1998), Brenda Farnell’s “It Goes Without

Saying But Not Always” (1999) and Gay Morris’s A Game for Dancers (2006). Looking at Dances draws heavily from Roman Jakobson in order to posit a structural model of communicative function that Preston-Dunlop then uses to examine the signs created in the making process of a dance work (poietic signs), in the performance of the work (signs in the trace), and signs added into the work by the audience (esthesic signs) (1998 20-23).

While Preston-Dunlop’s work has been largely supplanted by post-structuralist theory, it is one of the clearest and earliest attempts I am aware of to combine semiotic analysis and dance studies, and concentrates on how choreographic choices might be meaningful, rather than what those choices mean. Farnell’s essay uses her experiences as a

Labanotator and ethnographer to prove that no analysis can be complete without cultural participation, and that one small gesture/word can contain a world of meaning. A Game for Dancers is structured as a series of challenges and conflicts and describes, in a series of case studies, how dancers negotiated for themselves and their art within the constraints of the world around them. Other influences, guides, inspirations and frameworks will become apparent as you read from chapter to chapter.

Chapter Outline

My first chapter: “Before We Became Modern” follows the emergent trail of my curiosity around the phrase “modern dance.” In 2016, while engaged in archival research,

I found a number of newspaper articles that used the phrase “modern dance” to refer to partner dancing, and specifically to vernacular partner dancing developed within black

American communities. In the present moment the phrase “modern dance” within the field of dance studies refers almost exclusively to concert dance practices, and I hoped to trace when, how, and why that shift had occurred. Extensive research into newspaper press from America in the first half of the early twentieth century revealed the influence of racist attitudes to black bodies, and to black dancing in particular; developments in industry; and the advance of war. Some of these issues I have localized in the work of

Henry Ford, who acted both as an industrial researcher and dance teacher during this time period. Ford’s emphasis on “natural” practices in his 1936 dance manual Good Morning led me through a history of racial categorization projects, and to some of the techniques used to police black dancing, and black dancing bodies. A recurrent theme in this chapter is the notion of a cultural kinesthetic: in dance, in industry, in writing, it is possible to observe a dichotomy being created between a white, linear, teleological model of progress and a black, circular, accumulative model of social structures and relationality. I end the chapter with the impact of global conflict on American attitudes to jazz music and dancing, and the subsequent Savoy Ballroom closures of 1943.

Chapter two: “Aesthetic Otherness, Poetic Kinship” explores a complex tangle of influences within the complex tangle of exploratory writing by John Cage and Jill

Johnston. Cage and Johnston were both influential figures in the development of postmodern dance, and shared close bonds with the Judson Church group in New York.

Their writing is playful, challenging, layered, at times incomprehensible, and I approached this chapter by asking how that kind of writing had come to be. I recognized the symbolist poetics of Stéphane Mallarmé, and I drew out those influences through an

18 examination of Mallarmé’s poem Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hazard. I also looked into contemporary critical analysis that frames Mallarmé’s aesthetics as feminized, in opposition to the masculine medium specificity of Clement Greenberg. This led me to an examination of Cage and Johnston as queer writers, and the historical pressure to “cover” marginalized aspects of their sexuality during the climate of the

Lavender scare. Both Cage and Johnston cited Jazz as an influence on their writing, and the black literary aesthetic of asymmetry – as documented by Zora Neale Hurston – can be seen extensively at work in their writing. Finally, I draw all these influences together to conclude that Cage and Johnston wrote for multiple levels of audiences: from a broad

American populace interested in their position as authorities on dance, to smaller communities of queer and artistic kinship, using coded language and symbolist references to maintain solidarity with those around them.

“Writing Choreographing Histories,” my third chapter, looks at dance’s transition into the university, and the development of dance studies. I wondered how dance studies made space for performative writing, while simultaneously gaining ground against the stereotypical prejudice that dance is not a research subject. To this end I began with a computer-assisted linguistic comparison of two dance anthologies: What is Dance

(Copeland and Cohen 1983) and the second edition of the Routledge Dance Studies

Reader (Carter and O’Shea 2010). Between these anthologies I noted a number of linguistic differences pertaining to the disciplinary understanding of dance, the research priorities of the field, and the relative power of male and female subjects within dance writing. I combined this broader analysis with a close-reading of Susan Foster’s essay

“Choreographing History” – published in the Reader, as one site in which the priorities of the field can be seen to be re-negotiated over time. Reading down through the layers of

Foster’s work we can see traces of gendered and Universalist ideologies that run counter to the overarching thesis of her essay, and yet her work also breaks and holds new ground for the power of dance as a knowledge-producing subject. Approaching Foster’s work from a variety of angles, in light of the contextual analysis of the two anthologies, speaks volumes to the history of dance studies, the projects it engages in, and the stakes of our success.

My final chapter, “Metaphors We Dance By,” is titled following George Lakoff’s work Metaphors We Live By (1980), which I read and was inspired by very early in my graduate career for its linguistic approach to physical phenomena. This chapter is an attempt to address one small fragment of how dance is used today as an agent of social change and as a research tool in the post-millennial critical humanities. From this broad question I narrowed the scope of my chapter to the notion of metaphor, and from there to two metaphors commonly used to frame dance within the context of social justice: the studio is the world/the world is the studio, and choreography is protest/protest is choreography. While linguistically inspired, this chapter diverges substantially from the others in this dissertation to concentrate on specific pieces of choreography, rather than specific writers or texts, and incorporates choreographic analysis in my examination of how these metaphors manifest. Drawing on theories of Cosmopolitanism, Affect, and

Horizontality I question the value of these metaphors as a guiding practice – what value they bring to a piece of dance work as a tool for social change, and how choreographers

20 can succeed and fail in realizing a political vision through the application of metaphor.

Two examples included in this chapter that best illustrate the success/potential of these metaphors in action are “This is America” by Donald Glover (who performs under the name Childish Gambino), and the movie Black Panther. As a white, English scholar I feel conflicted about including two works that have such enormous weight and meaning within the black American community, and I discuss them with the following reasoning: I searched for exemplary and sophisticated illustrations of particular choreographic concepts, and I could not justify excluding two of the most powerful examples – in my opinion – of successfully choreographed protest. Second, unlike in previous chapters, here I specifically do not attempt to explain these works (or any works in this chapter) contextually, or explicate the various social or political influences at play within them, as this would require expertise beyond my own scholarship or experience. The aim of my analysis is to explain on a choreographic level some of the reasons that these works are so powerful, and speak to the linguistic, social, and choreographic potential the offer to the dance world for achieving social change and justice. I hope that readers will find my comments on these two works valuable within the broad range of scholarship accruing around them, and I encourage further perusal of that literature, some of which I have cited, and much of which is yet to be formally published.

Intention and Agency

Finally, I wish to address a potential critique of my dissertation as a whole: the lack of attention to individual authorial agency in my interpretation and analysis of the

21 various texts studied. While I speak about dance’s habit of “over-reading” statements of authorial intention in chapter three, the problem of intention lingers, especially in the discussion of works by still-living authors who might disagree with my interpretation of their writing or choreography. In their essay “The Intentional Fallacy,” philosophers

Wimsatt and Beardsley (1946) bluntly state that the intention of the author is never available, even were an author to make a definitive statement on the meaning of a given line or allusion, the statement would not be desirable – critical inquiry is not settled by

“consulting the oracle” but by interrogation of the work as experienced by its readers.

This essay, followed by Barthes’s pronouncement of the death of the author, heralded a turn away from intention as a prerequisite or constituting factor of scholarship, and yet the idea of intention has recently become more complicated, particularly in linguistic research by the idea of agency.

In 1999 Laura Ahearn defined agency as the human capacity to act, arguing that agency is an essential component in any critical analysis considering the mutually constitutive relationship between individuals and social structures (12). By 2001 Ahearn updated her definition to: “the socioculturally mediated capacity to act” (112), placing more emphasis on the ways that societal norms constrain an individual’s agentive potential. In both cases, however, Ahearn insists that any text or speech act must be read as a moment of choosing to do something within, or in response to, a given context. In a historiographical survey of various attitudes to intention, Richard Schusterman points out that even in the logic of “The Intentional Fallacy” rests the claim that poetic criticism depends on the critic’s acceptance of the idea that the author intended the work to be

22 read as a poem, rather than as prose (1988, 399), as well as the intention of the reader to take a meaningful interpretation from the text. Schusterman presents the capitalist advantages of an intention-informed criticism: that it makes it possible for literary interpretation to converge around a limited set of contextual possibilities (and therefore validate the worth of literary scholarship in the academic industry), while still ensuring a demand for varied and multifaceted interpretations of those possibilities and thus securing the career prospects of literary scholars (400). Placing the ideas of Schusterman and Ahearn in conversation makes a convincing argument for the consideration of authorial intention as the motivating force in the production of a text, and as a response to a social or personal set of contextual factors that limited the kinds of texts available to produce. This still leaves open the question of how to address authorial intention for the impact of a text – what was an author trying to have a given text “do?” For instance, did the Fords intend to fortify racialized stereotypes of blackness in their use of the term

“natural?” Did Susan Foster intend to raise shadows of the patriarchal gender binary in the duet between Terpsichore and Clio?

One of the original goals with my research was to be able to make such determinations of intention from linguistic clues. However, across my research I consistently failed to locate such evidence, and found that the attempt to do so was casting a moral slant on my analysis of texts and authors that I did not think I had the means to justify. I found one useful framework for the discussion of intention in a proposition by Andreas Stokke (2010) that a text or a speech act can be read in both a narrow and wide context, and a critical analysis can only address intention at the narrow

23 level. Narrow context information determines reference, i.e. when Donald Glover sings

“This is America,” we can determine that he is not referring simply to the location of the film, but to the slew of images, allusions and affective content he presents as a comment on the state of American politics and society. Wide context information includes all aspects of context that a reader (or viewer) can use to make guesses about the intention of the author, and that information is too complicated and vast to make judgements about

(385).1 Ironically, in chapter three, I will argue that wide context information is the best way to interpret a deliberate absence of narrow context referential possibilities. Stokke’s framework presumes, however, that it is impossible to make the link between the broader context of a text (history, culture, politics, society etc.) and the intention of an individual author to produce a text during that context, and therefore is a significant challenge to a microhistorical approach to textual research. One more piece of theoretical information is needed to bridge the gap between context, and what texts are doing within that context.

Orientation is a phenomenological concept proposed by Sarah Ahmed (2006) that refers to the way we turn or face, whether with our physical bodies, in our sexual attractions, or with the avenues of our thinking. Ahmed draws on phenomenological work by Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, and on Kant’s theorizing of bodily orientation to propose that orientation enables us to find our way in a world that acquires new shapes depending on which way we turn. As we decide to turn away or towards

1 Although it is not completely open-ended, but rather is limited by contextual factors

(Derrida, 1972).

24 certain objects or ways of thinking we make certain paths and trajectories of action and thought available, while excluding others (1). Philosopher Brian Massumi (2002) adds that the act of orienting, both physical and mental, produces the spaces we move through, determining which – if any – landmarks or familiar tools we take into account. In the end, we move in a “hyperspace of transformation” that is only actualized when we decide on our own orientation (184). Orientation is a non-cartesian framework that can help bridge the gap between linguistic approaches to discourse, particularly those influenced by frameworks of attitude and ideology, and the centrality of bodies to a dance studies analysis. It also provides a way to move through, and with the question of intention through this dissertation.

Providing contextual information for an author or text paints a picture of how certain pathways of language are made available to that author, or how they are limited.

No writer stands in the middle of an infinite paved plane – instead they stand at a crossroads, the territory around them divided my marked paths, some broad and well- maintained, others narrow, dark, and lined with pitfalls and roots to trap the unwary traveler. Context determines what paths are available to a given writer and how accessible each path appears. Individual intention determines which path is taken, and how it is navigated. This dissertation focuses on how writers have navigated the paths available to them – regardless of why the path was chosen – and how those journeys have made new paths and crossroads available to subsequent dance studies scholars. Each chapter presents one intersection between dance and language, and how pathways in that moment were limited and defined. The value of this work is to bring attention to the

25 pathways available to dance scholars now, and the kinds of actions that bring new pathways to prominence even as others darken and diminish. My work presents dance writing not just as a reflection or comment on the work of movers, but as an active mode of shaping how dance exists and means, with all the possibilities and responsibilities that this entails.

Chapter 2. Driving Modernism Forward: Social Parallels in the Racialization of Modern Dance

The influence that the Savoy Ballroom has been on modern dance can be seen nightly within its corridors with truckin’, shim sham, viper’s romp, and the lindy hop” (New

York Amsterdam News 1936).

“This ideal of self-expression is the vital thing in the modern dances, pervading the art of

Pavlova, Ruth St. Denis and Isadora Duncan; it is the basis of the popular dances”

(Wilson 1914, 49).

“Modern dances ‘plainly evil’” (New York Times 1914, C6).

As we can see from the quotes above, the name “modern dance” has been applied to a range of social dance phenomena over time, but has not always been applied clearly or consistently. Some social partner dances were considered modern during specific eras while others received that label only in a particular area of discourse. This chapter explores how the definition and practice of “modern dances” became a fraught space for the cultural distinction of blackness and whiteness in the United States, and how negotiations of dance and race paralleled broader lines of thought emerging with historical developments in industrialized capitalism. At the center of this chapter is Henry 27

Ford, who incorporated the Ford Motor company in 1903 and who pioneered developments in assembly line technology and mass production that were taken up globally as innovations in the organization of labor. While Ford has been lauded for hiring black workers, and for offering them the same wage as white workers, recent scholarship by Elizabeth Esch (2018) describes in detail how Fordist structures of mass production leveraged the “color line” in the service of white supremacist ideals and racial-segregationist practices in Detroit, Baton-Rouge, Brazil and South Africa. Esch does not mention, however, that at the end of the working day Ford’s America factory workers would clear an area of their space and hold dances, with musicians hired at

Ford’s expense (Feld 1925, SM1). These dances held a threefold purpose: to socialize workers in accordance with Ford’s ideals of American personhood; to promote the “old time dances” that he loved, taught, and promoted in parallel to his own industrial developments; and to challenge the influence of the black-influenced social partner dances that the newspaper press of the early 20th century consistently labelled as

“modern.”

Tracing the links between Fordist practices and social partner dancing in the

United States illustrates how white industry leaders, and white dancers, applied white managerial methods as a way of controlling black participation in American society.

From the ethnographic description of black dances, to the dissemination of those dances into white communities, to the various iterations of the “backlash against jazz” that sought to eradicate black-led musical and dance practices, including the closure of the

Savoy Ballroom in 1943, social dance practice in the United States was used to reify

28 racial differentiation and to maintain whiteness in a hierarchical position over blackness.

This differentiation, I will argue, frequently parses out into a spatialized analogy between linear and circular movement. Linearity is seen in the assembly line, a teleological approach to social progression, and the linear formations of old time dances; in contrast, circularity is seen in a circular organization of status and connection, the circle as a signifier of black transcendence and resistance, and the interpersonal circular intensities of Lindy Hop, Slow Drag, and other Blues idiom dances originating in black communities. While newspaper journalists and social dance practitioners in the beginning of the 20th century referred to these partner dances as “modern dances,” a term shared with health-based movement exercise practices and some forms of concert dance, practices of racial differentiation effected the erasure of black influences from later understandings of what was, and was not “modern.” Critics like John Martin created new discourses of modernism relating to concert dance, establishing conditions for categorization as “modern” that excluded black social partner dances. In this chapter I will show some of the ways that, despite their influence, black social partner dances were gradually framed as parallel to, or even a counter-force against the development of white concert and social dancing.

Framing Whiteness Against…

The stakes of this project are deeply entwined with what it meant to be white in

America at the beginning of the 20th century. I first demonstrate the early 20th century concepts of race that dictated relationships between white and black workers, and

29 between those workers and capitalist entrepreneurs, so as to describe the context within which parallel lines of racialized discourse developed in the worlds of American concert and social dance. Whiteness offered material privilege, enfranchisement, and civil rights to those who conformed with its definition, but in the first half of the 20th century, a wave of immigrants who did not fit neatly into existing discursive constructs of whiteness challenged extant criteria for racial definition. Legal scholar John Tehranian has documented fifty-two cases between 1878 and 1952 in which individuals sued to be declared white by law in order to meet requirements for naturalization (2000, 819). One key result of these cases is that the legal determinant of racial identity moved away from

“science-based” models of race and instead was established on the basis of a “common- knowledge system” that treated race as: “not merely a scientific reality but a social construct,” based on performative social criteria. For example, in California one determining criteria was the defendant’s capacity to participate fully in a capitalist economy (820). This social construction of whiteness relied upon the existence of a counter-discourse of blackness in order to create boundaries and norms of inclusion and exclusion, boundaries that became particularly marked in the context of Fordist industrial conditions and the need for “white” workers to distinguish themselves from blackness.

In 1914 an anonymous housewife wrote to Henry Ford: “The chain system you have is a slave driver! My God!” (Hounshell 1984, 259). Fordism conceived of workers as standardized components in an industrial machine, able to act interchangeably to accommodate bottlenecks and flexibility in a given production system (Clarke 1992, 19);

Ford met substantial resistance from workers, especially from skilled workers whose

30 individual contributions were subsumed in the process of the collective whole.2 Ford’s conception of a universal worker was based on the early 20th century understanding of race as a scientific category, a system in which different races had different capacities for labor. Examples of using racialized arguments to determine social potential include J.

Amar’s 1909 research, in which he wrote in praise of the porters of Algiers that “in so far as they are motors, Arabs have no distinguishing characteristics” (quoted in Doray 1988,

74) making them particularly valuable as labor research subjects, or as interchangeable components on an assembly line; similarly, Ezra Pound exhorted the “modern man to

“live in his cities and machine shops with the same kind of swing and exuberance that the savage is supposed to have in his forests” (1996, 79), and to improve their participation in a capitalist system by approaching it with joy. Ford made critical differentiations between black and white workers based on these kinds of logics, including assigning to the former the most dangerous and deadly kinds of labor, the “hard and body killing” jobs like foundry work, rationalizing this decision on the logic that “Black workers had superior abilities to withstand extreme heat and exhaustion” (94).

Under these circumstances the ability to self-identify as “white” became a high- stakes performative process critical to the life and dignity of workers, with the end result that “white” workers defined themselves against blackness as a protection from the

2 Racial integration in factories was thought to be a deterrent to striking, both because it served as a barrier to worker unity, and because it fostered “competition based on race” within work gangs (Esch 2018, 90).

31 harsher demands placed on black workers, and as a way of retaining power under industrialized conditions. Speaking at a conference on “The Burden of Race,” Historian

Peter Rachleff clarified that even the notion of “blackness” in this context did not refer to any historically black or African American culture, but to a discursively organized category invented from “the repressions, projections, desires, and fantasies of non-black people… with the cooperation of white employers, politicians, media owners, and cultural generators, they created a ‘blackness’… and then defined themselves as ‘white,’ as not-being what they had created as ‘black’” (2001, 5). Whiteness became a way to deal with the frustrations of their failure to live up to the promises of capitalist America and to exert power over the lives of non-white people and immigrants. While the discussion of whiteness and blackness in this chapter extends beyond industrial workers, the mechanisms for distinguishing “black” and “white” dancing rely on a similarly performative construction of race – many of them also served to address white anxieties about social change, industrialization, and the impact of global war.

Modern Meanings

The challenge of studying black partner dances as “modern dances” is complicated by the various definitions of this phrase and how it should be applied, even within the scope of partner dancing in the early 20th century. Newspaper columnist G.

Wilson of The Spur describes the practice of modern dance as a political and moral project in such a way as to include some forms of social partner dance while excluding others: “The spirit of the modern dance is a revolt against the crushing gloom and self-

32 denial of the old Puritan morality… that which is immoral is not esthetic and that which is not esthetic is immoral [sic]” (1914, 49). His argument runs that joy and self- expression are not inherently immoral, but that dance forms promoting health and “right- living” as well as those striving for aesthetic beauty should be considered modern.

Wilson explicitly names Anna Pavlova, Ruth St. Denis and Isadora Duncan as practitioners of modern dance, as well as the social dance forms of the Tango, the Maxixe and the Hesitation Waltz. Wilson adds: “The fundamental character of the modern dance spirit is attested by its profound influence on all phases of culture and social activity.

Love of life and self-expression are the twin-ideals of the new culture and the inspiration of the modern dances” (53).

Dance studies scholar Danielle Robinson (2010), whose research on the dances of the period has been an invaluable source for this chapter, also excludes some partner dances from the label of “modern,” but her argument is that only dances that were subject to a process of “refinement” by white professionals should be considered “modern,” while others were called “ragtime dances,” which were always read as culturally black

(189). Some of the differences she lists between ragtime dances and modern dances include: intimate holding versus a spacious connection, improvisation versus choreographed sequences, angular versus extended body lines, and an aesthetic of rupture versus restraint (182). Robinson’s very clear distinction between ragtime and modern dancing, however is complicated by the fact that the newspaper press of the time used

“modern dance” consistently to refer to “unrefined,” “crazy,” discursively and aesthetically black dances as modern; by the fact that many dances, such as the Grizzly

Bear described below changed their technique and performance quality radically from context to context so as to occupy both sides of Robinson’s aesthetic divide; and by the fact that the black originators of ragtime refused this terminology. Musician James Reece

Europe, quoted by Eve Golden (2007) explains: “there never was any such music as

‘ragtime.’ Ragtime is simply a nickname, or rather a fun name given to Negro rhythm by our Caucasian brother” (51). While Robinson’s framework for understanding how black social partner dances were “refined” in accordance with ideals of whiteness is rich and useful, it reflects white attempts to control the discourse of modernity more than it reflects popular understandings of modern dance in the early 20th century.

As this chapter will show, the crux of this issue of definition is that the phrase

“modern dance” was used by various sources to index both the blackness of new forms of social partner dancing (including the values and social norms that went with them) and the whiteness of social and concert dances that were offered in opposition to these new forces within American culture. Dancers professional and social, newspaper critics, dance theorists, and other members of the general populace during the early 20th century were in conflict about what modern dances were, and what they meant for society at large, reflecting a broader social conflict about the stakes and impact of modern industrialization in the United States (although their assessments of modern dances and modern industry could be highly disparate, as evidenced by the Ford’s advances in modern industry and revulsion at the thought of modern dances). An individual’s use of the term “modern dance” must always be considered in context in order to fully

34 understand what kind of dance they were referring to and their attitude towards that kind of dancing in context.

With this in mind my use of the term “modern dance” in this chapter, unless accompanied by a qualifying term e.g. “modern concert dance,” refers to partner dances of the early 20th century that either originated within black communities or were appropriated from the same. It also includes dances that were described or treated as

“modern” by the newspaper press or by dance critics in order to comment on values of race, society and behavior. This allows for the phrase “modern dance” to index a variety of complex positions on modernity, race, and society while also demonstrating how the term became a nexus of debate in the discursive categorization of blackness and whiteness in the United States.

Black and White Dances

In 1926 Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford released a manual called Good Morning, as a vision for partner dance in America. This manual shared the steps, techniques, and social norms of the “old time” dances taught at the end of the day in Ford’s workshops as an aspirational tool of class performance. In the book’s diagrams middle-aged men in suits and women in loose-fitting, ankle-length dresses bow gently to each other, arrange themselves in long lines, and lightly take hands to lead each other through a series of geometric configurations in collaboration with other couples. The Fords’ revival of old time dances – Quadrilles, Landers, and Waltzes etc. – purports to seek “that style of dancing that best fits with the American temperament” (8), consisting of spacious group

35 fun. Defining the “American temperament” and American values was the key purpose of

Ford’s Sociological Department, whose investigations scrutinized the private lives of workers to determine whether they were ready for profit sharing and the Five Dollar Day

(Ford’s new wage structure, facilitated by the high production potential and exhaustive demands of his labor system) or whether they needed to be released from employment

(Hounshell 1984, 259). While white workers were generally considered exempt from such assessment, non-white workers were subject to highly intrusive investigations to see whether they had absorbed what Ford deemed proper “American speech, ‘manner of living’ and values” (Esch 2001, 42). Workers’ failure to live up to these standards might result in loss of employment, but might also result in punitive treatment, including enforced sterilization, as Ford sought to shape American society in accordance with his ideals (112).

As a form of social behavior Ford revered “old time” dances but he held a deep

“revulsion” against modern dance forms that “enable the largest possible number of paying couples to dance together in the smallest possible space” (Ford and Ford 1926, 8).

This spatial description of the dances alludes to the tightly packed jook joints and dance halls where black-influenced partner dances were routinely practiced, dances that employed a close physical connection and an emphasis on torso movement that many – as will be described below – deemed antagonistic to the performance of whiteness. While the Fords do not explicitly employ racialized language in sourcing modern dances, they do note that modern dances are “foreign to the expressional needs of our people” (8, italics mine) and that the dances they propose as an alternative have survived longest

36 among the northern (i.e. white) peoples. While the Fords say very little about the modern dances their old time dances are meant to replace, their work exists against a discursive backdrop where the performative norms of black partner dancing – modern dancing – were well defined and commonly available through white channels of dissemination, even as those channels served to distort and changed partner dance forms as they existed in black communities.

Dissemination

Evidence of black social dancing in the Americas prior to the 20th century faces a lacuna in historical archives and thus is largely filtered through the lens of white ethnography. Even those authors who specifically set out to document black dances drew back from full descriptions because their interpretations of the movement were deemed offensive to the moral sensibilities of their readership. In her History of Black Dancing for example historian Lynne Fauley Emery (1980) collects a number of reviews where concerns of modesty trump the need for clear description, for example in the section on the Calenda we find these excerpts: “…From time to time they lock arms and make several revolutions always slapping their thighs together and kissing each other. It can be readily seen by this abridged description to what degree this dance is contrary to all modesty” (22). Or “I must not omit to remark that the feet did not take the most active part in the dance, as that was executed by a prominent part of the person, commonly understood to be that peculiarly African development on which ‘Honor holds her seat.’

That wiggle transcends description: none but itself could be its parallel” (24). Marshall

37 and Jean Stearns, whose 1968 work Jazz Dance is an invaluable resource for studies of this period, note that the centrifugal nature of African dance, “exploding outwards from the hips,” produces movements that “are a continuing embarrassment to Western notions of propriety and have often short-circuited any understanding or appreciation of African dance” (15). While the Stearns are apt at pointing out the sexualization of black dances, they are also not immune to falling into the trap themselves, for example they note that in the teens of the 20th century, dancing comedians were “tossing off pelvic movements that would have made Little Egypt blush” (235). The Stearns use the phrase “Congo hips” or

“vernacular hip movements” in a number of places as a catch-all term for pelvic movements they do not wish to describe in detail. This tendency to obscure elements of a dance that white documentarians perceived as offensive to their readership serves as a substantial barrier to present-day scholars seeking a clear kinetic sense of these often highly specific motions.3

Video recordings of black dances, while useful for providing kinetic information, also were careful to present a controlled picture of black social dancing, For example, the black social dances recorded on video in the early 20th century tend to be those dance that

3 The Stearns did attempt to document some of these movements through Labanotation, but their efforts often recorded white appropriations, or poor translations of various dances. The lack of an editor fluent in Labanotation means that through several editions of the book the notation for the right arm during the twist has been published completely upside-down.

38 white dancers had an interest in replicating. The documentary The Spirit Moves, released in 1987, catalogues a variety of early 20th century dances including the Charleston, Cake

Walk, Lindy Hop, Black Bottom, and Mambo—with few exceptions all the dances documented were ones already circulating in the white dance community and performed socially by white dancers. As Mallory Peterson has studied, The Spirit Moves also frequently takes these dances out of their social context, rearranging them in a blank, white space, for a white audience, in a form of sanitization that removes the significance of these dances within the community building practices of black societies.4 Many of these dances existed on one end what Katrina Hazzard-Gordon (1990, x) calls the “Jook

Continuum” – a model that describes the separation of some dances from white observers, and the exclusion of these same black dances from mainstream economical structures. The dances that tend to be the best documented were those that were deemed suitable for appropriation and performance by white dances. On the opposite end of the jook continuum were dances like the Slow Drag, the Grind, Delta Blues Dances, which were either performed in predominantly non-white spaces or included movements considered “offensive” to white audiences. These dances were glossed over in literature from the period and insufficiently documented by visual means. Oral histories and communities invested in the social rehabilitation of these dances have done a lot to bring

4 “An Environment with No Distractions: Filmic Pedagogies and Reconstructing The

Spirit Moves’ Framing of Social Dance and Race.” DSA Conference 2016,

Transmissions and Traces: Rendering Dance.

39 them back into physical consciousness, but much of their performances and social relevance must be guessed or imagined.

Even when dances do have a significant amount of evidence available for dancers to use, that evidence is frequently contradictory or inconclusive. I have danced the Slow

Drag since 2010, and over the course of the last eight years I have seen almost every element of its teaching and practice change: from a closed embrace or ballroom hold to a torso-to-torso connection; from a basic pulse of step-and-touch to a basic pulse of step and drag; from a virtuosic opportunity to display traveling and spiraling dips to a minimal, intimate exploration between partners. All of these conflicting movement principles came from instructors who genuinely believed they were doing what the slow drag “was.” Dance historian Julie Brown illustrates the problem clearly in her article “A

Landscape of Slow Drag.” In her exhaustive analysis of the different visual, oral and textual evidence from the 1870’s to 2012, she illustrates conflicting descriptions of the

Slow Drag, some of which travelled, some of which remained in place, some of which stepped, some of which skipped, some of which involved close embrace etc. Brown tries to stay within the evidence provided directly by the black community, but even this evidence, as I will describe below, offered vast space for disagreement and misinterpretation by white dancers.

Black partner dances spread into white communities through live performance and professional demonstration, but also through modern technologies of mass production – records, radio, and film. Professional dance couples such as Vernon and

Irene Castle were influential figures in the trend of appropriating and altering partner

40 dances from cultures beyond white America, and popularizing the altered forms as social dance trends. Over the year of 1914, for example, the Castles collaborated with composer

James Reece Europe to release ten dances, including the “Castle Walk,” “Castle

Maxixie,” “Castle Innovation Tango,” and the “Castle Perfect Trot” (Golden 2007, 70). A more populist route of dissemination was the dance instruction song, which offered a very controlled and codified context for practicing vernacular dances. Dance scholars

Sally Banes and John F. Swed have traced the development of the dance instruction song through black call and response songs such as the Buzzard Lope, to orally cued audience participation in black performances, through calls for specific vernacular dances to accompany the words, to instructions that gave specific physical and qualitative instructions for performances (2007). The lyrical instructions for “Ballin’ the Jack”

(1913), later performed by Judy Garland and Gene Kelly in the 1942 music For Me and

My Gal, are widely held up as the quintessential dance instruction song:

First you put your two knees close up tight

Then you sway ‘em to the left, then you sway ‘em to the right

Step around the floor kind of nice and light

Then you twis’ around and twis’ with all your might

Stretch your lovin’ arms straight out in space

Then you do the Eagle Rock with style and grace

Swing your foot way ‘round then bring it back

Now that’s what I call “Ballin’ the Jack” (Stearns 1968, 98-99).

Not only do these lyrics offer instructions about what steps to do, they tell dancers the dynamic qualities with which those movements should be performed: “kind of nice and light,” “with style and grace” etc. Brenda Dixon-Gotschild, whose work analyzing the influence of black dance aesthetics is foundational to this chapter, writes that the dynamic qualities of the Africanist aesthetic are those of a “non-linear, non-narrative movement experience… ‘letting it all hang out’ (2000, 13). The aesthetic characteristic of

Ephebism embodies: “the full force of individual and/or collective power, drive, attack, vitality and flexibility…metaphorical intensity and energy” (14). Garland and Kelly’s performance of “Ballin’ the Jack” is, by contrast, restrained and codified into a mirrored unison, the performers’ steps are small and their arms are held poised within their own kinespheres (2013). The lyrics and demonstration of “Ballin’ the Jack” shows how the dissemination of instruction songs encouraged white dancers to perform vernacular movements with a white aesthetic.

As dances made their way into the white American public through films, music, and other forms of dance teaching, certain word choices grew to be indicative of a black- influenced dance practice. The racial coding of partnered social dances was indicated linguistically, often within written forms of dance dissemination. Tracing this linguistic coding through professional dance instruction, Danielle Robinson describes how the

1920s saw a huge rise in opportunity for black social and jazz dance teachers, who taught what they knew to white professionals for the latter to then make commercially available through public dance instruction and celebrity dance performances (2006, 19). This transmission of black dances to white bodies allowed for black dancers to benefit

42 economically from the dissemination of their skills, and to insist that these skills were learned rather than inherent, counter to racialized stereotypes. Robinson argues, however, that this process also codified racialized differences between black and white dancing, as audiences were taught through films, performances, dance magazines etc. to read certain kinds of movement and movement quality as “authentically black,” even when credited to, and danced by white instructors and celebrities:

Words such as Negro, low-down, and high yaller (or any other mulatto

descriptive) identified the dancing as black, as did references to the South.

Comparing the two routines, it seems that the movements that bring attention to

the hips, create angular shapes, and highlight the hands also marked the dancing

as black. Cross-referencing the routines, actions such as stamping, sliding,

brushing, dragging hopping, jumping, slouching, undulating, and jerking

suggested blackness. Hip articulations, sonic accents (such as snapping or

clapping), and syncopated rhythms likewise marked the dancing as black (35).

These features of blackness, once adjusted for white sensibilities however, were highly consumable when reframed as “modern.” In her 2010 article “The Ugly Duckling”

Robinson argues that by codifying dance steps and variations, and stressing uniformity and order through the implementation of teacher control, dances were re-packed as refined expressions of “freedom, fun, and personality” in order to suit the emerging consumer culture of white America.

Another example of how dances were made suitable for white audiences was to offer formally codified instruction, rather than requiring dancers to learn from oral

43 histories and an improvisational community of practice. In the clubs that focused on black dance in New York City, dancers learned by watching masters as they practiced and then working out the steps in their own way (Stearns and Stearns 1968, 174). Each dancer added their own voice and variation to the step, translating it into their own personal choreography, or else risk getting “tromped in the middle of the crowd” for stealing steps (323). By contrast, dances prepared for white consumption were broken down into codified, transmissible moves, and communicated step-by-step by a select community of instructors. This process served not only to make dances accessible, but also to prepare them for capitalist methods of purchase and consumption. For example, dancer Santos Casani produced a series of these short films to play in cinemas, ending each one with an invitation to audiences to send off for written instructions. Casani’s instructional film for “The New Tango” from 1931 (danced with an unnamed female partner) uses a wide range of instructional methods to make the dance safely accessible: on-screen text explains the rise in the Tango’s popularity after the Prince of Wale’s return from South Africa, and we see two couples dancing socially in a dance studio; the on- screen text then gives specific information about the right promenade turn, followed by a close-up shot of the couple’s feet dancing the same. The film then offers us a “floor” view, shot through class, and showing us the dancer’s feet from the underneath. The left hand promenade turn is shown in a similar manner, and then the screen is split, showing the close-up foot shot in the upper half of the screen synchronously with the floor view in the bottom half. The film finally returns to the two couples dancing the New Tango in a social setting. This whole process takes slightly more than three minutes, and illustrates

44 how socially-learned dance forms were codified and disseminated in fragmented, digestible chunks of information. Rather than drawing from a rich communal pool of shared kinesthetic and cultural techniques, popular dance instruction prioritized easily consumable learning, which dancers could replicate with very little investment.

Sociologist Black Hawk Hancock, noting similar trends in the contemporary swing revival, describes the results of white cultural appropriation, adaptation, and dissemination: “Through selective engagement, whites are afforded the luxury of

‘playing’ black through cross-cultural consumption, while simultaneously never having to endure the consequences of being black in white America” (2008, 788).

Even with the “cleaning” process perfected by white dancers and instructor couples, only some dances were considered suitable candidates for transmission, and even those might put a young dancer’s social standing at risk. As stated above, the process of codifying black dances for white audiences allowed dancers to play at

“otherness” in strictly limited ways: dancers could enjoy a flirtation with new movement, but the sexual associations of those movements frequently placed dances at the center of intensive debate about their perceived morality and safety. Newspapers frequently published debates on whether or not dances were appropriate, based on the judgement of organized professional panels or adult community members. Even Henry Ford’s old-time dances were subject to communal scrutiny: in 1926 the Reverend Dr. Frederick K

Krumpling of Dearborn, Detroit called for Ford’s dances to be banned in schools because they produced a “tendency towards immorality” in pupils (New York Times 1926, 20). A panel of parents and teachers watched the “polka, schottische, and other dances of the

45 colonial days” and decried the critiques as “modern expressions of ancient bigotries,” the dances: “a step back to the normal in the dance and away from the crazy modern gyrations” (Boston Daily Globe 1926, A13). This particular opposition between “normal” and “crazy” points to dichotomy acceptability: while it is considered “bigotry” to be against all dancing as immoral, some dances are clearly unacceptable. However, analysis of other controversies below shows that acceptability was determined not by the dances themselves, but by how dancers performed them and the social contexts in which they occurred.

In 1912 the Committee on Amusement and Vacation Resources for working girls met to determine whether or not the Turkey Trot and the Grizzly Bear should be permitted at that year’s Junior Cotillion (New York Times 1912, 1). The Grizzly Bear dance was a popular, if highly controversial dance craze in which couples would “hug” together and move around the floor. In his study of dance crazes during the early 1900s

Anthony Berret suggests that the dance was initially performed by black dancers at Lew

Purcell’s San Francisco cabaret (2004, 93). While the popular version of the dance was announced as “not so coony,” or not in imitation of black performers, the lyrics by Irving

Berlin use dialect representations such as “yo’” for “your,” “gwine” for “going” to indicate a black racial context as the singer invites his partner to dance, sleep together

(“do some nappin’”) and elope (91). In a study of Chicago dance halls conducted between 1910 and 1911, authors John Dillon and H.W. Lytle describe a couple dancing the Grizzly Bear: “gathering her close to him he swayed her back [and] forward with an

‘up-and-down motion, alternately bending her to either side in the ‘grizzly hug’ while

46 people sang the ‘bear tune’” (1912, 80). The 1912 Committee on Amusement and

Vacation Resources, and the Committee for the 1913 Washington Inaugural Ball both decided that the Grizzly Bear was too intimate to be allowed in a social dance, but the former acknowledged that there were “grizzly bears and grizzly bears,” (italics mine) and that some dancers could produce the movements “very prettily” (New York Times 1912,

1). In a silent film of the dance in 1913, as demonstrated by a professional performing couple, the two dancers remain in a close connection, but show no sign of the backward and forward swaying described by Fitzgerald (“The Grizzly Bear (dance)”). The dancers circle each other in a playful chase, before coming together in a light, springing jog that travels indirectly around the floor; the bends from side to side are translated into alternating suspensions from foot to foot with an erect spine. The audience in this recording is a gathering of white men and women, in attire and a setting clearly intended to demonstrate wealth and class, at the end of the dance they rise to their feet and applaud, showing no sign of affront at the dance content. The acceptability of this version of the Grizzly Bear in this context suggests that performances of class distanced dancers and dances from the perception of those dances’ blackness, and that the moral character of “working girls” was perhaps deemed more flexible than that of high-society women.

The decision by the New York Times and the Boston Globe to document protests over the morality of social dancing in Dearborn, Michigan, speaks to a national concern about modern dances and their place in society. Newspaper coverage allowed a broad audience to witness these highly local debates and thus served as an important means of policing national attitudes to social dancing. Newspaper journalists, however, typically

47 sought an outside opinion, rather than passing judgement on modern dances themselves.

In the above articles the opinion comes from a panel of local figures of high social standing; a series by the Atlanta Constitution drew from an “extensive survey” by the

Reverend Dr. J.J. Phelan; in 1945 the Los Angeles Times sought out Irene Castle—

“Darling of [the World] War I Ballroom”—to deliver a stinging invective against jitterbugging and “dancing on a dime” (Leimert, B1). Religious authority was a particularly common source of testimony, even when the “experts” had no data on which to base their opinion. For example, in 1914, the New York Times conducted a survey of

34 bishops across the United States, asking them to comment on the moral standing of modern dances. Out of all the church leaders who offered their statements the majority had never seen, let alone danced “modern dances,” and only three were prepared to admit modern dances as a positive influence. One of the more considered voices belonged to

Paul Joseph Nussbaum, of Corpus Christi, Texas, who made the clear assertion that modern ballroom dances were an art, equating them to the “products of chisel and brush.”

However, he went on to add that “an art that incorporates itself with personal form and motion with the greatest conceivable latitude for the risqué” should not be afforded any concessions by moralists before being condemned as an illegitimate artistic practice.

Nussbaum’s testimony considered both the black influences on and the white appropriation of modern dances, insisting that the former be used to determine whether or not modern dances were appropriate or not; that modern dances needed to be judged in the light of their popular manifestation, rather than by the trained performances of [white]

48 experts, who could demonstrate the movements without their potentially dangerous elements (C6).

Before specifically turning to the framing of black-influenced partner dancing as a threat to white social and moral norms, I would first like to look at the social purpose of partner dancing in the United States during this period, and how it served to both inculcate social standards and reflect national norms of social and cultural progress.

Why Dance at All?

In the Fords’ dance manual Good Morning, participants are referred to as “ladies and gentlemen” throughout, and various clues in the text indicate that the text is intended as a guide to class performance as well as to good dancing. Dances take place in a

“ballroom” under the organization of a “hostess,” and young girls attend with a chaperone (1926, 14). Gentlemen bow to their partners before requesting a dance, and modesty (and the ladies dresses) are protected at all times by a handkerchief held between the palms of the dancing couple (15). The chapter, “If You Intend to Give A Dance,” assumes that aspiring hosts have a large and well-ventilated room at their disposal, as well as a cloakroom and the financial means to afford refreshments for all, and professional musicians (17). In other words, Good Morning codifies dance as a social pastime of the affluent, even though these same dances were being taught orally to factory workers and to their children in local schools. The Fords championed social dancing as key to social success: “It is a most effective cure for shyness and self-distrust in public… It develops self-possession and an easy, competent carriage. And it

49 accomplishes these benefits without expense to natural modesty , for modesty of deportment is one of the prime requirements of the ballroom” (13).

While the techniques of modern dances were very different to those espoused by the Fords, they served a similar purpose in terms of raising one’s social standing, even as the social norms associated with these dances required different norms of social behavior.

In 1931, Eunice Fuller Barnard wrote a New York Times article called “A Cry of Freedom for the Debutante” in which she laments that jazz music created an unrealistic expectation for young women to accrue “half a hundred” eager partners in order to be seen as socially successful (1931, SM4). Rather than pushing back against the trend of multiple partners,

Barnard advocates for partner rotations to be placed under the control of an observant chaperone in order to preserve parity, and for a team of male and female dancers to stay available throughout the night to give social support, peer advice and friendship to anyone in danger of distress or poor behavior. Like the survey of church leaders quoted above, this article evidences an attempt to find a middle ground between the innovations of modern dance as a fashionable trend and the need to preserve social values. A key piece of rhetoric used to determine what was and was not acceptable on the dance floor is the term “natural,” which was leveraged to index positively-regarded norms of white behavior and a linear attitude to social conduct and progression.

The focus on “natural” behavior is readily apparent in the various chapters of

Good Morning. In particular this passage on balance shows the stress placed on natural conduct on the dance floor (italics mine):

A dance step should be no longer than the natural step when the limb is

easily extended without reaching or stretching. To reach for a step is to

take on longer than is natural, with the result that the body may be thrown

off balance. An easy balance is one of the essentials of finished dancing.

Balance is obtained by perfectly natural means. Some dancers appear

rigid because they do not permit the body to accommodate itself to the

changing movements. In moving forward in a dance the body is naturally

erect. In a rotary or backward movement there is a slight bend of the body

forward. The reason for this is simple. In moving forward, balance

requires an erect posture, while in moving backward, which is a drawing

movement, the body bends forward. People do this naturally, but a dancer

should have these matters in mind and examine his posture to see if he is

acting naturally. Style is not artificial; it is doing things in a finished,

natural way (Ford and Ford 1926, 10).

The Fords argue that balance, an erect carriage, and modesty (13) are achieved

“naturally,” even as they assert that dancers need attention, practice and training to achieve these phenomena. Naturalness, for the Fords, is a process of stripping away the artificial tendencies of style or the exaggerations of novice technique in order to find the potential inherent in the dancing body. They urge dancers to remember that, “The first council in deportment is to be natural, be yourself. You are not an exhibition you are one of an assembly” (13), demonstrating a belief that it is in the nature of their readers to become one of a unified community rather than a performing individual – their use of the

51 term “assembly” also draws a linguistic connection between the behavior proper to dancers in an assembly and workers on an assembly line. The Fords’ appreciation for the natural, however, is localized to the context of “our people,” the “northern peoples” (8) i.e. white people, and therefore leverages a logic in which natural potential is used as a justification for racial segregation and bias.

Historian Winthrop Jordan (1969) characterizes the establishment of racial discourse during the 1500s as a play, or a tension, between similarity and difference (24).

As English writers described black and white cultures they emphasized differences in order to place white culture solidly at the head of a developing hierarchy in racial discourse. Moments of similarity were also harnessed to this purpose – as demonstrations of the potential for black cultures to “civilize” given white supervision and influence

(25). Following this logic, difference and similarity were used to justify the institution of black slavery as a necessary intervention, both required by the similarity of black and white peoples – and thus a duty to bring them as far as possible into civilized society – and by the difference between black and white peoples - which necessitated extreme measures of discipline and control over the black presence in white society.

This logic of similarity and difference was also spread through popular cultural forms such as minstrel shows, which portrayed caricatures of black plantation life; usually performed by white performers, but also by black performers, all in black face, and under white control. The “Jim Crow” stereotype of the happy slave, the exaggerated features of blackface, and other features all contributed to the cultural positioning of black people as other to white people, even as minstrel shows brought both cultures into

52 shared performative spaces. Historian Lott argues that minstrel shows allowed white

Americans to absorb black culture, even as they were simultaneously protected from that culture (1993, 40). Minstrel shows also presented blackness as an antagonistic force, or a danger to white people, for example in the silent movie Feet – Fun – And Fancy (Pathé

Pictoral 1927), black performer Johnny Hudgins performs an eccentric dance routine in blackface as “the Bogey Man” – a children’s terror come to life through black dancing.

As this logic of similarity and difference became discursively established, the cultural positions of whiteness and blackness became solidified into racist logics. As Lola

Young explains in Fear of the Dark, during the colonialist period that reached its peak during the early years of the twentieth century, the descriptor of blackness shifted from a connotative level to a denotative plane, i.e. to be black was to be the stereotypes negatively associated with blackness, including immorality, hypersexuality, and inferiority (1996, 40). Another category that Young observes being used to distinguish blackness from whiteness is “rationality,” a descriptor that applied to all individuals with the potential to promote and share in the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, fraternity and equality. Black individuals, according to emergent sciences of racial categorization, were by definition “not rational,” therefore could not pursue liberty, fraternity, or equality, and therefore could justifiably be deprived of the same (Young 1996, 42).

The logic of white potential, and the justification of slavery in the pursuit of the development of American capitalism are both derived from a teleological argument for white civilization. Teleology is a philosophical concept with roots in classical Greek thinking: the notion of a teleos or the state of teleion refers to a point of completion,

53 fulfilment, or perfection, as opposed to a peras, or limit, which defines the point past which it is impossible to progress. A telos is the point past which an entity does not seek to go, having reached the fulfilment of its innate potential. Thirteenth century theological scholar and philosopher Thomas Aquinas was inspired by the concept of telos to explain the perfection of the universe, and the trajectory of the human condition, as an ongoing progression towards an inherent natural potential for a complete, perfect state (Blanchette

992, 55). Aquinas also conceived of the world as having a natural hierarchy of perfection, through elements and inorganic compounds, to plants, animals, and finally to humans – who carried the most potential for localized growth and change (247).

In Telling the Truth About History scholars Appleby, Hunt and Jacob (1994) show how teleological thinking is used to justify otherwise unethical human action, as the necessary cost of human progress towards their state of potential, or fulfilment. The authors show how in 1913 – a decade after the establishment of the Ford motor company

– Charles Beard claimed that the American Constitution should be read as the vision of a proto-Capitalist elite, rather than as a pinnacle of archaic philosophical ideals. Beard argued that the Constitution envisioned the potential for industrial growth and made logical provision to these ends, provisions which included the industrialization of the

South and the moralization of slavery (136-138). Similarly, Seamus Miller’s social accounting of teleological action shows how slaves picking cotton were frequently framed as offering their own contribution to the development of capitalism; extreme treatment of slaves was justifiable because slaves understood themselves to be to be working collectively towards a shared social endeavour, the teleos of American society

(2001, 197). Furthermore, Appleby, Hunt and Jacob hypothesize that it was a turn to the optimism of teleological thinking during the early 20th century (instead of the Biblical model of degeneration into collapse) that sparked popular excitement for the idea of

“modernity,” and the changing norms and practices involved in modern life (60-61).

As explained above, the idea of black potential and white potential was used to justify separate working conditions for white and black workers on the assembly line – black workers were described as inherently more capable of handling extremes of heat and exhaustion, and thus were given the most dangerous and taxing kinds of work. In

Michigan, Ford developed in factories, branches and plants in “Sundown towns,” so- called because African Americans had to leave before sundown (Echs 2018, 87), and the housing developments set aside for black workers were overcrowded, unsanitary, and led to high rates of tuberculosis (102). While many workers – black and white – lived poorly in the Fordist economy, Rachleff also argues that this idea of differentiated potential also sustained white workers in the knowledge that certain kinds of mistreatment would never be afflicted on them: “white male workers developed a discourse, a perspective, an identity, in which they asserted that they could not be becoming [sic] slaves, since only

“black” people could be slaves… therefore, they could not, should not, be subjected to enslavement in any form” (2001, 4). Ford’s treatment of workers, especially black workers, was lauded as a way to “transform ‘backwards’ workers through regimented labor” – Ford was simultaneously engaged in “the mass production of cars and the mass production of men” and his methods were framed as imperative because his products

55 were considered so essential to the teleological progress of American society (Echs 2018,

184).

Social partner dancing allowed black and white cultures to come into contact, whether that contact was as proximal as the unsegregated dances that took place in the

Savoy Ballroom of New York City or as distant as the contact of a dance appropriated, altered and transmitted by a white professional couple or dance manual. When the reverend Dr. J.J. Phelan surveyed social dancing in North America, he summarized the problems of these modern dances as follows: “Much emotion, much commotion, and little social locomotion” (Lee, Martha 1922, E6). This protest can be read as a counterpoint to the social progression offered by the dance techniques and social values offered by the Fords: modern dances did not offer social advancement, in fact according to many newspaper reports of the period they threatened to do the exact opposite. In the following section of this chapter I will look at how black partner dancing was framed as a threat to white ideals, and subsequently how those ideals were used to reify a new understanding of modernism as a white phenomenon.

Unnatural Influences

It has come—the reaction against jazz. It is sweeping the country among the

better class of people. They have waked up. Too tolerantly have we allowed jazz

to filter up from the unclean places, from the moral swill-holes of society, into our

homes, into the minds of our children, by way of rough rag music, sensual

dancing, immodest dress, vulgarisms, and uncouthness in social manners and

pleasures.

The word “jazz” has come to stand for a wild lack of control in all things, for

artificial excitement, for noise, for speed, for sensual stimulation. It has been

connected with the modern mania for the utmost in individual freedom, freedom

in thinking, in self-expression, in action, in the emotions.

This series of articles will portray the jazz situation as it is today, its effects on

society and the rebellion against it (Lee, Marina 1922, E1).

The quote above is from one of a series of articles published during the 1920s by the Atlanta Constitution. The Constitution was a daily newspaper and by the 1880s was considered the voice of the “New South,” supporting industrial development and social expansion (Hammond 2018). Its pages included the first southern society/women’s section, and in 1879 writer Joel Chandler Harris published his first story featuring the character of “Uncle Remus,” a kindly old freedman who recounted stories from African

American culture (Bennet 2001).5 The interaction between Fordism and the Post-bellum

South was quite peripheral during the first few decades of the 20th century. Geographer

Bobby Wilson explains that the “South, a nonunionized low-wage region, benefitted from the relocation of capital, but the Fordist system of industrialization concentrated in the

5 Harris claimed that the stories told by Remus were genuine tales he himself had collected from plantation slaves, but was fully cognizant that his intention was to mount a

“defense of slavery as it existed in the South.” (quoted in Bernstein 2011, 133).

North provided the mode of regulation” (1995, 77). While these outside regulations allowed the territorial capitalism of the South to become integrated into the national economy, the landed elites of Southern society responded by reinforcing racial differentiation as way of retaining social and political control of the region (83). This explains in part why the Atlanta Constitution was particularly vehement in its attack on black cultural influences, and particularly black dancing, although they were most certainly not alone in doing so.

Modes of protest against black influences in dancing varied from newspaper to newspaper, but many of the arguments used are collected in an extract from a 1921

Women’s Home Journal article, delightfully titled “Does Jazz Put the Sin in

Syncopation?” (Appendix One). The article’s author, Ann Shaw Faulkner, was the head of music for the journal, and justifies her aversion to jazz on a number of levels: her historical justification is that jazz originated from “the voodoo dancer… the half-crazed barbarian ” and was used to provoke “the vilest deeds.” She claims that scientifically:

“the effect of jazz on the normal brain produces an atrophied condition on the brain cells of conception,” leading to a moral crisis in which: “those under the demoralizing influence of the persistent use of syncopation, combined with inharmonic partial tones, are actually incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, right and wrong.”

Faulkner uses these “objective” justifications, and the historical climate of unrest and reorganization to offer a patriarchal sympathy to white modern social dancers: “it is no wonder that young people should have become so imbued with this spirit that they should

58 express it in every phase of their daily lives,” while demanding the cessation of jazz music within white communities.

A final tactic used to dissuade young people from jazz dancing was to state the behavioral, and subsequently social consequences of modern dancing, and this was the focus of the Atlanta Constitution’s series on the problems of jazz. Writer Martha Lee’s discussion of the survey by the Revered Dr. J.J. Phelan includes statistics claiming that

80% of the girls attending social dances are working girls, and 30% appear “jaded, bloodless and prematurely old;” over 70% of these girls danced with men they had never met, including many old enough to be their fathers and grandfathers; Phelan concluded that, “The spirit of the dance is only a preparation for what happens afterwards in the privacy of a closed automobile,” drawing a clear link between black partner dancing and sexual irresponsibility. A second article from the series echoed the musicological argument made by Ann Shaw Faulkner in claiming that the musical vibrations of jazz were biologically harmful: “…even on the normal brain, jazz produces an atrophied condition of certain cells. Under constant syncopation, combined with inharmonic partial tones, the brain becomes so disorganized that it is actually incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong, of making right judgments” (Lee, Marina, E1). The language used between the two articles is so similar and their publication dates so close that it is very likely they were drawing from the same original source, or that Marina Lee was paraphrasing Faulkner.

Sexual immorality was a key theme of behavioral critiques of black-influenced modern dancing, for example an anonymous article in the Constitution from 1920 that

59 quotes the Reverend Dr. Stratton of New York. In his assessment of modern “animal dances” (such as the turkey trot, grizzly bear, or bunny hug) Stratton confessing that he has: “never been able to see the difference between a young man hugging a young woman sitting upon a sofa, or hugging her standing upon a dance floor.” He continues:

“Indeed, is not the dancing the more dangerous of the two? For in the dance the whole of the two bodies, male and female, are in closer contact and there is the added danger of motion, the rhythmic swaying of the two bodies to the strains of the dreamy and often sensuous music” (Atlanta Constitution, 1). The associations between sexual immorality and blackness were based on both the denotive approach to black identity described above by Lola Young, and by technical concerns stemming from the interpretation of black dance movement. As demonstrated in the ethnographic descriptions of the Calenda, white viewers tended to ascribe sexual intent to the pelvic isolations of black dances even when no such intent was intended. Prior to the slave trade African dances had limited partner contact, and touching a dance partner’s waist was considered obscene (Stearns and Stearns 1968, 12). It was exposure to white European ballroom forms that prompted the use of close embrace as black dancers mocked the connections and techniques of upper-class society dancing eventually developing hybrid dances that combined black and white movement norms.6 The Savoy Walk, for example, combines the languid travel

6 Close embrace is the term used in the contemporary blues dance community for a torso- to-torso connection. Partners dance with the chest and feet slightly offset, leaning into

60 of the slow drag with the athletic spins and flamboyant dips of white ballroom dancing;

The Strut makes use of a figure-eight torso movement between the two partners – a softer, more shared motion of the sways and swooning bends of the Grizzly Bear.

A dance form that was often listed as an exemplar of sexual immorality in black dancing was the Slow Drag, or “dragging.” However, as noted above, the Slow Drag had many different modes of practice, and held different meanings within different communities. Danielle Robinson quotes Zora Neale Hurston’s association that the Slow

Drag offered black dancers a “tremendous sex stimulation” (2015, 39); an assertion which is mirrored in Alan Lomax’s documentation of the dance: “The couples, glued together in a belly-to-belly, loin-to-loin embrace, approximated sexual intercourse as closely as their vertical postures, their clothing, and the crowd around them would allow”

(quoted in Brown 2018). Many of the sources Julie Brown (2018) collected on Slow

Dragging describe partners connected abdomen to abdomen, grinding in a tight, circular space.

While it is possible to observe the sexual connotations of the Slow Drag, however, Robinson also adds that Slow Dragging was a way for black communities to move away from the collective dancing imposed on Southern plantations and explore two-person interpersonal bonds (2015, 43). Frankie Manning, who helped lead the Swing

Dance revival of the 1990s, asserts that the Slow Drag was an idiom dance that suited

each other so as to create connective pressure. This embrace is based on oral history research into blues dance practices championed by Damon Stone.

61 certain kinds of music: “A slow drag is…like back in the old days when they made recordings, they would tell—it might say on the recording ‘foxtrot,’ ‘fast foxtrot,’ it might say ‘slow drag’ or ‘slow number’ or something like that…. So you were just doing what we actually called a drag, because all you’re doing is just dragging your feet along the floor” (quoted in Brown 2018). Blues and swing dancer Chester Whitmore explains the necessity of the close connection and the history of the dance: “It’s really sensuous and it’s really precision. Now that also come from the bodies, real close together. Like in

Ballroom, you lead your partner with your chest… You also hear the slow drag of the dance step going side to side. Now that came out of a thing called ring dances or ring circles, which is really out of the spirituals” (quoted in Brown 2018). A final observation from Stepping historian Andrew Allen who adds his own impression of watching the dance as a high-schooler; “It was a rhythmic tidal wave of faces that had me spellbound and stuck to that balcony railing. I stood there enchanted by a vortex of elegant movement and enchanting music below my feet. The couples in the center danced their

Slow Drag Dance, moving ever so slowly, around and around on themselves. Giving the circle a center of permanence” (quoted in Brown 2018). These ideas of shared history and cultural progression, or the conversation between Slow Dragging and white ballroom dance, were simply not communicated to, or by, external observers. Andrew Allen’s comment on the circular patterns also hints at a cultural geometry that – I argue – was also invisible to white observers.

While it is a gross oversimplification to divide linear and circular dancing along a racial binary, it is useful to understand circular dance forms as an expression of black

62 social culture. In juxtaposition to the linear imaginary of the white telos, or the linear formations of group-based “old-time dances,” black dances often orient to circular formations and expressions of being together. Popular black social dances of the early

20th century frequently operated in circular intensities, including forms in conversation with Ballroom dances such as the Savoy Walk, the Turkey Trot, the Texas Tommy or

Struttin’, and a large number juke joint idioms such as Fishtailing, Funky-Butt or the

Mooche. Tracing occurrences of the circle within black culture as a multi-layered cultural symbol, Christina Zanfagna explains: “The importance of the circle in locating meaning in black expressive forms does not lie solely in its existence as a thing—a black thing or direct African offspring—but rather as a discourse. To dance in or into a circle is to engage in a performative and discursive process through which people transform chaos into order. It is an opportunity for discussion and interaction between seemingly disparate areas of life” (2009, 338). Joe Schloss’s (2009) investigation of the circular form of the cypher, which was codified within Hip Hop culture but which has roots in the nightly competitions at the Savoy and other back social dance spaces, tells us that the dance circle (and the musical jam circle) should be treated as a potential escape from the demands and power structures of the quotidian world, where social status was defined by artistic ability, rather than economic power; the circle shows the potential of a world where systemic racial inequality can be countered and challenged. Schloss adds that the competitive nature of the cypher creates opportunities for surprise, upset, and the supplanting of those in power – modeling not only the potential for change, but active methods for disrupting authority (99-100). Zanfagna visualizes the power of the circle as

63 a way of getting past linear or two-dimensional structures, and instead imagining power and influence as the intersection of exponentially expanding spheres. Dancing in a circle creates a liminal space of identity in which “personhood, community, culture and society” come together in overlapping configurations and cross-sections, and in which one’s power is self-determined, rather than externally enforced (2009, 339). Allen’s assertion above that the Slow Drag gave the circling dancers at his high school a “center of permanence” indicates that the Slow Dragging dancers should be read as an expression of cultural permanence and protest, instead of, or in addition to, the sexual connotations of their connection.

Circles and cyphers also retain a strong spiritual connotation in black culture. As asserted above, the Slow Drag emerged from plantation dances like the Ring Shout which treated the circle as a spiritual space. Ring shouts were circular, shuffling dances7 that allowed enslaved Africans to share in community spiritual practices beyond those prescribed by white Christian slave owners. The circle of the ring shout was both a direct challenge to white authority and a space of black spiritual communion. In her collection of shout songs from the Georgia islands, Lydia Parish (1965) notes that even when allowed to practice their religion freely, some black Christians retained the ring shout form as a part of their spiritual practices, forming a circle around the pulpit (54).

7 The term “dances” is somewhat anachronistic here: the shuffle-step of the ring shout was adopted precisely because it fell outside of the ban on black communal dancing, which was in turn defined by crossing of the feet.

Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois and other notable black writers of the early 20th century argue that in addition to these specific examples of religious practice, spirituality was a key element of the black racial aesthetic, facilitating the creation of new, identifiably black modes of expression (2016, 39). Hughes (1994) expounded on this theory in his essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” which began with a critique of black respectability politics and the desire to ape white Christian spiritual practices, and went on to reframe black churches as a part of a landscape of folk cultures: blues, jazz, and other forms of black art. Even dance forms that were not overtly spiritual retained the memory of the circle as a spiritual practice. For example, Schloss explains that the spatial nature of the cypher in b-boy culture should be understood through a spiritual organizational framework, both from the historical perspective explained above and because the emanation of music or dance from the center of a circle consecrates space in many ritual and spiritual traditions (2009, 105). Zanfagna also speaks eloquently of the transcendent nature of a circular dance space, in which spiritual riches and the capacity for ecstasy are held in spite of whatever challenges the world outside of the circle may present (2009, 350). The circular intensities of black dancers, their transfiguration of European ballroom dance holds into a close-embrace connection as a sly joke about white values, and the history and cultural practices signified by the circle were all lost in the transmission of these dances into white communities. A dance instruction leaflet from 1925, for example, describes the slow drag simply as “a one-step with exaggerated hip twisting” (quoted in Brown 2018). I argue that stripping these dances of their cultural context heightened their association with hypersexuality and

65 white stereotypes of blackness and framed them as antagonists to white social values. The logic of differentiation and similarity once again came into play in order to exaggerate racial differentiation: black dances were similar enough to white dances to be appropriated, but also deemed unsafe or immoral because of their differing priorities and technical values.

In this chapter so far I have shown the parallels between the racialization of dance and industry, centralized around Henry Ford as both an industrial leader and advocate for white social dancing. In the last section of this chapter I will explore some of the ways that other dance forms from the turn of the 20th century described as modern emerged as a separate discourse of concert dance, and how the celebration of this new modern dance as an art contributed to the erasure of black modern dance forms.

Concert Modernism

The New York Times hired John Martin in 1927 to be the publication’s dedicated dance critic and to report on emerging trends within concert dance. Martin’s first book,

The Modern Dance, based on his lectures at the New School, was released in 1933 and in it Martin attempts to define concert modernism, its heritage, and how its practices and philosophies are distinct from other forms of concert dance practice.8 Martin’s vision for

8 Martin’s influence and his vision for modern dance have been extensively explored within dance studies. Those wishing for a more extensive coverage of his work than I will

66 modern dance on the concert stage was influenced by the German expressionist work he saw in Europe during his early years as a critic; he believed that dancers should express the experiences of everyday life and inner emotion in ways that transcended intellectual expression (1933, 64). From this belief Martin developed his theory of Metakinesis to support and explain the expressive potential of dance. He described Metakinesis as an empathetic connection between dancer an audience, created via the audience members’ own physical and emotional experiences. Martin argued that while all dance makes use of

Metakinesis, modern dance should harness it deliberately in order to communicate a deep, genuine experience of the human condition (15). Martin therefore proposed that the goal of modern dance should be to seek the most authentic relationship between emotional experience, visceral response, and external movement.

Over time Martin’s vision for modernism gained depth and perspective, and other critics articulated their own contrasting views about what modern dance was and was not.

Looking at these conflicts allows dance scholars to get a clearer sense of the values underlying the attribution of the term “modern” to a specific dance work or artist. For example, Martin initially placed Isadora Duncan within the Romantic Movement because of her emphasis on dancing the music (2), but by 1946, Martin acknowledged Duncan’s commitment to the representation of inner feeling, and the techniques she used to accomplish this, naming her as one of the founders of American modern dance, a

give here should seek out Lynne Connor’s (1997) Spreading the Gospel of Modern

Dance, Susan Foster’s (2011) Choreographing Empathy, and Martin’s own writing.

67 decision that in turn gave American modern dance a local heritage, rather than tracing its descent through European influences (4-15). Martin’s argument for Duncan’s modernism was based on Duncan’s own articulation of the physical principles of her technique, and articulation that aligned her with modern industrial practices.

According to her own writing, Duncan found a kinesthetic wellspring in her solar plexus, which she referred to as the “motor of the soul.” This motor allowed her to envision a constantly replenishing source of energy, which in turn propelled the rest of her dancing. Martin believed that this soul motor allowed Duncan to establish a genuine relationship between emotions and movement, thus successfully achieving Metakinesis

(1942, 7), and in a 1937 article describing dance’s march from “decadence to a modern

‘golden age,’” Martin names Duncan as the first revolutionary model for modern dance, who enacted “the most complete transformation the dance had ever known” (1937, 153).

By contrast, Martin described Duncan’s dancing contemporaries, such as music hall ballerinas, or soloists Loïe Fuller and Little Egypt, as representatives of a “Dark Age” in dance that was sterile, and less significant than it had been at any other point in history.

Martin dismissed Fuller as visually superficial: “One day she discovered that light could be made to play on floating draperies with excellent effect, and presto! She was a dancer.” Meanwhile, Martin described Little Egypt’s material as sexual popularism, highlighting the fact that it was patronized by men only, and that the choreography drew both on the image of the harem and “the more Occidental practice of revealing from time to time a garter and what it encircled” (1937, 152). Martin implies that these dances were

68 superficial and sexualized, and did not draw on any useful or impactful symbolism or facilitating authentic emotions.

Other critical voices, however, were less willing to accept Duncan’s work as art, or as relevant to the development of modernism because of her broader popular appeal. In a 1917 essay titled “The Art and Meaning of Isadora Duncan,” republished in 1983,

André Levinson summarized Duncan’s work as a naïve and technically substandard offshoot of the mass culture fad for neo-Hellenism. While Levinson would eventually come to admire Duncan’s charismatic performance, his early position is perhaps unsurprising given Levinson’s general critical position as a defender of ballet’s classical potential. Levinson’s decision to discursively identify popular or amateur dance and modern dance as mutually exclusive categories is a key rhetorical juncture in the erasure of social dance – and especially black-influenced social dance – from what we now consider to be modern. In his essay Levinson evaluates a number of Duncan’s performances, finding them lacking in historical authenticity and technical control. At first this is gently implied in the text by the separation of body parts from Duncan’s active intention; her limbs, arms and head move without Duncan’s conscious volition or attention to detail: “…passive and indecisive, her head, arms and torso sway right and left at the beginning of a Strauss waltz. Her impatient leg simply beats time” (441). Later in the text Levinson is more explicit in his point, naming Duncan’s technical capabilities as

“amateur” (442). In these critiques we see a demand for a trained, controlled body as the vehicle for modern expression, rather than the amateur bodies dancing social modern dances.

Levinson also categorizes Duncan’s work as a mass-market phenomenon because of her costuming choices, and her place within and emergent trend of dance and physical exercise as a healthy practice for young women. Duncan was a great friend to fashion designers Paul Poiret and Mario Fortuny, who designed Grecian-style clothing that facilitated “modern, uninhibited femininity” and who gifted their products to Duncan

(and other dancers) as an advertising tactic (Dickinson 2013, 29). Levinson used this relationship as a basis for arguing that Duncan’s clothing was not an authentic representation of antiquity, but a compromise between the “contemporary ideal of nudity” (and a fashion trend for neo-Hellenic design) and the requirements of censorship, in other words, sexualizing her dances rather than accepting their historical inspiration

(1983, 439). Here we can see the foundation of the argument that Clement Greenberg would go on to make in his 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch:” that modern art and mass culture were mutually exclusive phenomena. For Levinson, Duncan’s status as a modern dance artist was contingent on her ability to transcend popular culture and popular morals, such as those expressed though social partnered dancing. As his 1917 assessment of her work found her still firmly within mass-marketed modernism he dismissed her work as superficial: “the sublime conception is not within the dancer's means” (1983, 442). This argument, which grew to broad theoretical prominence, helped exclude modern social dances from the emergent categorization of modern dance: that which has mass-market appeal cannot be considered art.

Finally, in a discourse analysis of modern femininity Edward Dickinson (2013) points out that during the early decades of the 20th century the ideal of female beauty

70 shifted from one of passive, reproductive stasis to an active, muscular athleticism, a trend which was supported by movement education, especially in dance. For example, dance educator Jane Fox (1943), writing in 1943 argued that dance is an ideal activity for the mixed-group physical education program at Indiana University; promoting agility and skill while remaining non-combative in nature. Fox distinguishes “social or ballroom, folk, tap and modern” dance, categorizing the latter as dance initiated from the torso, which directs natural body movement into realm of creative activity, distorting that movement in the process (56) a definition which identifies Duncan’s work as modern, and social dance as distinct from modern dance. In her article “Athena Meets Venus,” which examines the cultural imagining of American womanhood during the early decades of the 20th century, dance scholar Julie Malnig highlights the emerging cultural idea of the “natural woman,” as defined by attitudes to fashion, culture, and particularly by dance. Looking at Modern Dance Magazine, which was published from 1914-1918,

Malnig notes that “modern dance” referred to: “the early premodern dance pioneers, such as Isadora Duncan,” but also “interpretive and aesthetic dance, Delsarte, and social dance, all of which were considered part of a modern ethos of movement” (199, 39). The

Delsarte system in particular, which many modern dance icons such Isadora Duncan and

Ruth St Denis credited as part of their training, emphasized the cultivation of natural movements and gestures in alignment with the body’s organic form and – in concert with the returning emphasis on “natural” movement – implies white ideals about the physicalization of class norms.

As white concert modernism became a more discursively stable category of movement, a consensus that remained comparatively stable across critics was the idea that modern dance should reflect the present moment in some way—in its energy, in its music, in its social norms, in its attitude, and specifically that it should reflect the industrialization of modern society. Historian Hillel Schwartz (1992) looks, for example, at the specific influences of torsion within concert modern dance, illustrating the influence of aeroplanes and the kinetic forces necessary for flight. He describes the movement generated by various modern choreographers as follows: “Indeed, Laban with his Effort/Shape studies, St. Denis with the sensuous pulsing/writhing of her bare midriff,

Duncan with her earthward stamping, spinning gestures, and Graham with her contractions and releases together established a model of motion as a spiral at whose radiant centre was a mystical solar plexus and at whose physical axis was the preternaturally flexible spine, bound link by vertebral link to the earth as to the heavens”

(75). Schwartz includes only concert modern dance in his investigation and analysis, crediting Ted Shawn, Isadora Duncan, and Ruth St. Dennis with its origins in the United

States. His work also sheds some light on how kinetic principles like torsion were used in boundary making; he quotes Helen Moller’s assertion that “All true physical expression has its generative centre in the region of the heart… Movements flowing from any other source are aesthetically futile” (73). This belief easily excludes the polycentric and pelvic-driven movement of many black social and concert dancers, preventing their work from being read in the light of aesthetic modernity.

By requiring dancers to meet certain criteria in order to be classified as modern dance: training, a separation from the popular, emotional authenticity, and a reflection of modern society, dance critics established definitions of “modern” dance that excluded popular black social dance forms, and the appropriations of those forms within the white community. The combination of this exclusion, and concerns about the social and moral impacts of these dances has a deep impact on how these dance forms were socially accepted and practices – an impact which became particularly salient in light of the First and Second World Wars.

Wartime Dances

World War One saw America taking a significant role in the global geopolitical arena as a military power, mobilizing 4 million soldiers as part of the American

Expeditionary Force to Europe, of whom approximately 350,000 were black. As

European and American culture came into contact, some newspaper critics took the opportunity to compare cultural values around dancing: as part of the “Backlash Against

Jazz” series for the Atlanta Constitution, Mrs. Martha Lee wrote: “The shimmy, the scandal, and even the fox trot are anathema to the Polish government. All American dances, with the exception of the one-step, were prohibited by official order at the annual military ball held recently” (E6). Lee leverages the possibility of national shame in order to persuade her community, and the country, to quash modern social dances as a matter of global reputation.

Henry Ford’s Good Morning advocates for a “return to sweeter music” after the turbulence of wartime, and for dances with clearly defined, linear forms. With his ample financial resources Ford enacted a robust educational and publicizing program as an attempt to take control of the trends in social dance in accordance with his vision for their performance. 200 dance instructors from Ohio and Michigan were invited to his home to learn reels, schottisches, and quadrilles; in 1926 and 1927 he used the national radio network to broadcast instructions and music for his favorite dances to accompany showings of his new cars, linking modern industry and lifestyle trends with the calm, linear dances of the past. Thirty-four institutions of higher learning, including Radcliffe

College, Stephens College, Temple University, and the Universities of Michigan, North

Carolina, and Georgia, added early American dancing to their curricula as a result of

Ford’s publicizing program. Ford used dance as an ideological vision for America’s identity on the global stage in light of post-war cultural shifts. During World War Two many musicians and dance masters followed Ford’s lead – refusing modern dances and jazz music, in favor of nationalistic tunes in a 2/4 or march time. Celebrating the slow death of jazz and ragtime, Isador Berger reasoned, “War music arouses the best in man, while ‘jazz’ music appeals to the lowest elements in his nature” (1917, SM3). While a peace-time America could support the dissention and tension of jazz, war time provoked a desire for nationalism, unity, and traditionalist moral values.

In the advent of World War Two the United States fought in a much more substantial capacity that in World War One, prompting a resurgence of the use of military rhetoric and national pride to promote conformity and normative behavior. Lucille

Leimert, writing for the Los Angeles Times in 1945 sought out Irene Castle—whom she refers to as the “Darling of [the World] War I Ballroom”—to deliver a stinging invective against jitterbugging and “dancing on a dime” (B1). The return of G.I.s to America was also used as a way to change the dancing landscape, allowing the fox trot (here reclaimed as a white dance), hesitation waltz, one-step etc. to gain prominence over the jitterbug

(which closely followed the technique of the Lindy Hop, popularized in the Savoy

Ballroom). Lloyd Wendt (1947) of the Chicago Daily Tribune points out that returning

GI’s have aged years in their few months of service, and no-longer want to “shriek” and

“moan;” wounded GI’s were advised to take up dancing by their doctors, and many found these old-time dances to be an accessible route to social reintegration (B4).

One succinct example of military influence being used to repress black social dance influences is the 6-month closure of the Savoy Ballroom in 1943. The Savoy was an integrated dance venue in New York City and a national locus for innovations in black partner dancing. In 1943 the Savoy was ordered to cease hiring white bands, promoting in white newspapers or permitting mixed dancing, and later that month it was closed following charges of vice filed by the police and the army (New York Times, 14). Official charges stated that prostitutes working at the savoy were passing venereal disease on to

American troops— in the press seaman James Taylor urged mayor La Guardia to act "in the name of God" to stop "these enemies of the Armed Forces" (13). Others argue, however, that the charges were racially motivated, and that they followed a broader pattern of targeting integrated ballrooms and attempting to tarnish the reputation of

Harlem among white dancers, who regularly came uptown to dance in integrated spaces.

Malcolm X, who regularly frequented the Savoy Ballroom, writes in his autobiography that the real reason for closing the Savoy was to stop black men and white women from dancing together (1965, 124); Helen G. Peale, House Executive of the Brooklyn YWCA was quoted in the New York Amsterdam News condemning the action as “another of the

Army’s segregation stunts” – a consequence of prejudice against “mixed dancing” (Peale

1943, 1; New York Amsterdam News 1943, 1). In the postwar period of the 1950’s, yellow taxicabs began refusing to drive to Harlem, and policemen were stationed near key Harlem subway stations to advise white visitors looking for a night of dancing at the

Savoy to return home (Hubbard and Monaghan 2009, 139). The expansion of military power due to America’s involvement in the World Wars was used to promote traditional norms of white dancing, and to further marginalize the contributions and practices of black dancers. As rhythm and blues grew to prominence in the 1950s and the newspapers once again filled with talk about the threat of black dancing, the Savoy was sold to make room for a new housing development (141).

Conclusion

From this examination of the term modern dance we can see that during the first decades of the 20th century social dances were racially differentiated, paralleling similar segregations in industry. Concerns about the moral and social values of black dances, appropriated versions of the dances taught without cultural context, competition from both “old time” dances and the impact of two World Wars changed the affiliation of the term “modern” from black-influenced social partner dances to white-led concert dance

76 practices. In my next chapter I will look more closely at the impact of the Second World

War changed the discursive environment of post-modern dance during the 1960s, and how these changes become visible in the experimental critical writing of John Cage and

Jill Johnston.

Chapter 3. Aesthetic Otherness, Poetic Kinship: Covering and Community in the Writing of John Cage and Jill Johnston

I remember soft, glowing light, and the discordant sound of a piano undercut by the soft thumps of bare feet on a stage. I remember interlocking shapes seen through glass, and longing to touch. I remember a small room behind a balcony, where poems lined the walls. Each short cluster of lines held a name, and the names sprang forth in bold capitals to embrace the community that made the space: MERCE CUNNINGHAM,

MARCEL DUCHAMP, JASPER JOHNS, and, of course, the invisible author John Cage.

During its 5-month long run I spent hours in the Barbican Gallery’s The Bride and the

Bachelors exhibit, watching every dance, hearing the music loop again and again. My favorite space, however, was the mesostic room.9 I found Cage’s poems deeply moving, each one taking the abstract aesthetic promise of modernism and turning it towards a profound expression of love and community.

In this chapter I return to my memories of those mesostics, and John Cage’s lectures on dance, trying to make sense of the feelings and questions they inspired: how

9 A mesostic is an acrostic poem where the subject is spelled out in the middle, rather than the beginning of each line. According to Cage’s rules a perfect mesostic does not repeat any letter of the subject in the text linking it to the next letter; so In a mesostic spelling MERCE CUNNINGHAM, the text between the “M” and “E” of Merce could not feature either letter.

78 could writing from an artist at the heart of abstraction inspire such a profound sense of community and belonging? I found the same qualities in the reviews of Jill Johnston: obscure, loving, abstracted, witty, performative, and connected. Cage and Johnson experimented with dance and writing during the 1960s and were major influences on the shift to postmodernism in dance and art making in America. Both authors employed similar methods of putting texts together, experimenting with non-representational writing and aesthetic textual strategies in ways that paralleled dance and art movements of the post-war period in New York City. I dive into those textual methods to show that by placing them in conversation with other forms of experimental writing, readers can understand the range of aesthetic and social messages at play within their texts. In this chapter I bring forth three strands of meaning creation that I see strongly present in the work of Cage and Johnston; strands that do not always align neatly, attribute clearly, or intersect in determinable patterns, but which are present, and need to be considered in re- shaping how we understand these texts and artists going forward. This understanding is essential when considering the impact of Cage and Johnston on how dance was both articulated and practiced during the 1960s.

Firstly, John Cage and Jill Johnston are both queer artists:10 queer in their politics and lived practices, which pushed at the boundaries of hegemonic norms, and in their

10 Queer is, in fact, a somewhat anachronistic term for both authors, since Johnston came out publicly as a lesbian and Cage never came out publicly at all. Furthermore “queer” has only recently been recuperated as a positive designation, and is open to a huge range

79 sexual and romantic relationships. Placing these artists within the climate of the Lavender

Scare in New York City shows how their writing negotiated these queer identities under the cover of abstraction, revealed to some and hidden from others. Secondly, I place Cage and Johnston’s writing in conversation with the symbolist poetics of Stephen Mallarmé, who himself was inspired by the non-linear representational possibilities of dance as a textual device and whose work inspired later postmodern art-makers, including the collective around John Cage. Indeed, Cage himself studied Mallarmé’s writing for his explorations in chance and discontinuity (Ross 2016). Mallarmé’s writing has been discussed by art historian Amelia Jones as “feminized,” in contrast to the masculinist standards of Greenbergian modernism (discussed below), making it a particularly valuable resource for discussing the relationship between text and identity. Finally, I examine the work of black jazz poets during the Harlem Renaissance – artists whom

Cage and Johnston both claimed as inspirations, and yet whose influence on the textual aesthetics of their writing has gone largely unexplored. I argue that black artists (and black queer artists) created and formally identified strategies for meaning making that allowed statements of resistance and community to exist under the watchful gaze of white

America; and that Cage and Johnston employed similar methods of meaning making in navigating their own aesthetics, and marginalized identities. Drawing these strands

of interpretations. Nevertheless, I describe Cage and Johnston as queer because their loves and lived practices refuse to occupy an easily definable or normative position, and in their own ways both of them chose consciously for this to be the case.

80 together I posit that these methods create not only an experimental textual aesthetic, but that they speak to a familial community of practice, a queer kinship network deeply integrated within Cage’s and Johnston’s work. Superficially writing for broader, critical audiences, they also coded their texts to offer varied layers of access to those in their more immediate communities. Cage’s and Johnston’s experimental poetics are, in short, used strategically to weave multiple strands of signification together, directing readers to varied points of access and avenues for interpretation in a discourse of otherness that both resisted hegemonic approaches to meaning, and offered alternative visions for the future.

In this chapter I predominantly use the term “aesthetics” to describe a range of artistic and/or textual functions of language; I understand that this term can become somewhat hazy when applied to language. As well as referring to the visual placement of text on a page, I use the term “textual aesthetics” to speak to ideas of poiesis, as defined by linguist Roman Jakobson. Jakobson defines poiesis, or the poetic function of language, as the focus within the message on the message itself – the use and structure of grammatical, lexical, and phonological features to bring the medium of communication to prominence (Waugh 1980, 58). While the poetic function of language is always present only in relation to other functions and communicative goals, in this chapter I look at dance texts that are significantly oriented towards the poetic. While these texts guide readers to focus on the aesthetic experiments of the message, what other messages might be simultaneously conveyed, and how might a poetic orientation enable different layers of political, communal and social communication? Jackobson’s definition of poetic language is particularly useful in this regard because he invites the use of his structural

81 model for analyzing communicative function across interlingual, intralingual and intersemiotic communication i.e. that it can be applied within and across verbal and non- verbal systems of meaning, including dance (1959, 233). In this chapter I trace the path towards a democratically spatialized poetics of dance and dance writing that is both political and familial: a poetics that meanders through time, defying clear points of entry and access; a poetics that substitutes the specialized language of a community of kinship for the clearly codified and structured language of formalist criticism.

The two authors I focus on in this chapter are, as already stated, Jill Johnston and

John Cage. Johnston began her dance career working with choreographer José Limón, only to turn to writing in the wake of a broken foot that suspended her performing career.

While opinions vary on when she began writing about dance professionally, Johnston states that it was 1957-1958 when she became a critic: “just when the entire art world was entering a convulsion of dissolving boundaries” (1971, 13). She was deeply involved with the Judson Church community of avant-garde performance artists, working with them as a performer, writer, and friend. She took composition classes from John Cage within that community, which brought a depth to her writing about experimental choreographic practices, as well as prompting her to use reviews as an experimental space to blur the boundaries of writing and performance (Jowitt 2010). In the mid-1960s

Johnston’s mental health began to suffer, and eventually she withdrew from writing for the Voice to recover. While her colleague Deborah Jowitt partially attributes increasing experimental tendencies in Johnston’s writing to her declining mental state, I have chosen to focus on other possible motivations and influences in my exploration of her work. In

1973 Johnston came out as a lesbian and began writing for Lesbian Nation as an essayist.

In this chapter I focus on articles from her Village Voice dance column from the 1960s, which are collated in the print anthology Marmalade Me.

John Cage is best known as an avant-garde musician and composer, and as the lifelong collaborator and romantic partner of dancer and choreographer Merce

Cunningham. Initially trained as a pianist, Cage was hugely influenced by his tuition under Arnold Schoenberg, who pioneered experiments with a-tonal music and 12 tone rows. Cage became a faculty member at various college programs over the course of his career, and while at UCLA he began working as a dance accompanist, and experimenting with non-musical sound (Kostelanetz 1988, 43). In 1942 he moved to New York to pursue composition and performance, including a number of performances with Merce

Cunningham, whom Cage had met while teaching at the Cornish College of the Arts.

Cage continued to teach, write, perform, compose, and collaborate all his life, producing countless innovations across all these fields. Cage’s writing spans theory and performance, music, dance, art, and autobiographical storytelling. In this chapter I have focused my research on two collections of his work that span 1939 to 1967: Silence

(1961), and A Year From Monday (1967). I have drawn my examples from those texts that speak most strongly to dance, to Cage’s political engagement, or to his work and life with Merce Cunningham.

Both Johnston and Cage occupy the blurred space between performer and writer, both lived and worked in New York City in the wake of the Second World War, and both were heterosexually married, and divorced, in addition their same-sex relationships. Their

83 writing is deliberately experimental, pushing the boundaries of aesthetics and comprehensibility. In this chapter I investigate some of the heritage, influences, and purpose of this poetic experimentation, showing how the discursive nature of their writing created not only an artistic position, but also a political orientation and a sense of kinship within their artistic community. A chapter is of course too short to go into a broad range of detail, and many factors affecting their writing have been glossed over or left out

– notably John Cage’s relationship to Eastern Buddhist philosophy and the I-Ching. My aim in selecting the three strands that guide this chapter: queerness, feminized texts, and jazz poetics, is to surface less well-known elements of Johnston and Cage’s work, and to focus specifically on strategies locatable to their writing, rather than to their broader creative output. Investigating these factors requires a broad reading of Johnston and

Cage’s writing, placed in the social, political and cultural climate of its making.

Climate

Johnston and Cage worked against the backdrop of an American nation state in a moment when that state was (re)establishing its artistic, social, and geopolitical identity.

Taking advantage of the power vacuum left globally in the wake of World War Two, the

United States government, supported by the mainstream newspaper press used the rhetoric of straightness, whiteness, and heterosexual masculinity to present itself as a new global superpower (Somerville 2000; Canaday 2009) In Chapter One I wrote about how

World War Two saw a pushback against black vernacular social dancing as a form of expression that white Americans perceived as socially risky, including the enforced

84 closure of the Savoy Ballroom. In the concert dance world, artists similarly found that expressions of a marginalized identity courted social and professional stigma and sanction, and both groups shifted their artistic output in response to an increased environment of intolerance and oppression. Art critics, most notably Clement Greenberg, heralded this shift in concert dance and modernist writing as the development of a new,

American aesthetic style that could overcome the decadent inheritance of European artmaking.

Prior to World War Two Paris was seen as an artistic and cultural locus, shaping the beliefs and practices of modernism; Parisian critics and galleries were frequently critical of new directions in American art that did not show clear European influences

(Guilbaut 1983, 5). American critics, most famously Clement Greenberg, responded by describing European art as decadent, elitist, and incapable of true innovations. In his 1939 essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" Greenberg announced that the upper classes of international culture were in crisis; that avant-garde culture was the last recourse against a stagnant academicism “in which all the really important issues are left untouched because they involve controversy,” and in which the only safe virtuosity lies in small details of form (1961, 4). Developments in American art were also supported at a governmental level, and art was mobilized as a popular nationalist tool – supporting

American artists was broadly promoted as a patriotic act. The Federal Art Project, a New

Deal program supporting visual arts in the United States, created work projects in order to employ artists from various mediums and offered funding to a number of emerging

American artists (including Jackson Pollock), giving them relative freedom in which to

85 create in new directions. The Works Progress Administration, an umbrella organization creating jobs through public works projects and which administered the Federal Art

Project, organized “Buy American Art Week” in 1940 in order to directly create financial support for the American military as it engaged ground troops in World War Two

(Guilbaut 1983, 56). The interests of the American government aligned with new artists and new directions in art-making, resulting in a new wave of nationally motivated popular engagement with modernist art.

Establishing this popular engagement with art required public education projects, so that the general public could follow these new directions in American art and recognize them as distinct from, and more valuable than, European traditions. This popular outreach program was facilitated by the managers and financiers of American art institutions, and by a body of writers who reviewed artists’ works, and documented exhibitions in print in newspapers and magazines – with varying ranges of audience and specialization (Guilbaut 94-95). Accordig to Guilbaut, influential art producer Peggy

Guggenheim took up the cause of championing American art making; for example in

1942 she curated the Art of This Century gallery at the Metropolitan Museum, assisted by

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) affiliates Herbert Read and Marcel Duchamp and with designs by Frederick Kiesler. This gallery, facilitated by Guggenheim’s extraordinary wealth, began by placing European surrealist and Dadaist art alongside American works

– thus increasing the perceived significance of the latter – and Guggenheim soon began exhibiting large numbers of lesser-known American artists, many who were showing in a gallery setting for the first time. Jackson Pollack’s first solo show was held in the Art of

This Century Gallery. Not all galleries were happy, however, with the influence of government funding criteria on art-making, or the exclusion of European influences from

American art making. The American Modern Artist’s Show at the Riverside Museum opened in direct competition with the Art of This Century gallery and showcased many members of the Federation of American Painters and Sculptors. The American Modern

Artist’s Show was framed as a salon des refusés – a gallery of rejects – and exhibited artists such as Mark Rothko and Adolf Gottlieb, who did not fit the nationalistic model of the Metropolitan’s curatorial choices or who were still visibly influenced by European artistic trends. Barnett Newman, who wrote the catalogue for American Modern Artists, called for a move away from socialist realism in favor of a new, abstract, international style (Guilbaut, 68-69). Visions of cross-cultural diplomacy and collaboration vied with the national drive to set America up as a groundbreaking, globally dominant force in the art world.

Published art criticism reflected this conflict between differing artistic visions, and in magazines, newspapers, and books competing artistic ideologies were established and expanded upon in response to new works of art and new gallery openings in America and on the continent. Greenberg’s voice was one of the most articulate and well publicized in this debate, so much so that in the 1970’s (when a number of art historians were engaged in an in-depth historiography of art and genre), art historian Clive Owens, in his examination of the period surrounding the Second World War was moved to point out that: “Modernism meant what Clement Greenberg said it meant” (Stephanson 1990,

56). Greenbergian modernism centers on medium specificity, in other words that the

87 orientation of artistic innovation should be a turn to the specific features of a given medium, and how those can be emphasized and adapted (Greenberg 1961, 7). Greenberg envisioned the artist as an autonomous individual, free of the control of the state and of the corrupting influences of mass culture in his continual growth towards genius as he orchestrated his art form’s “progressive surrender to the resistance of its medium” (2000,

67). Greenberg also recognized that the physical safety, financial support, and collaboration offered to artists and refugees fleeing Nazi control in Europe allowed for unprecedented developments in American avant-garde painting, and the opportunity for

American artists to feel themselves at the global center of art in their time (1961, 211).

In the face of this focus on form, however, it is very easy for deeper political meanings in a work of art to be lost beneath considerations of the medium. Indeed, Merce

Cunningham himself famously claimed that his movement “…means: this is what I am doing… The attention given the jump eliminates the necessity to feel that the meaning of dancing lies in everything but the dancing” (1997, 86) – a stance that seems to invite a

Greenbergian interpretation. On the other hand, Greenberg’s portrait of the new

American artist imagines him as coming from a place of privilege. To be free of control of the state an artist had to belong only to those communities seen by the state as normative and unthreatening: male, capitalist, and patriotic. I have used the male pronoun above quite consciously, as a reflection of Greenberg’s well-established vision of what modern art was and who should be creating it. In “The Present Prospects of American

Painting and Sculpture,” and elsewhere, Greenberg talks about the seductive femininity of mass culture and popularly produced modern art; a popularization that “in raising the

88 lowest standards of consumption, brings the highest down to meet them” and which was provided largely by “permanent college girls, male and female” (1947, 21-22). Against these influences, the masculine proponents of a true American artistry had to stand firm in their ideals, resisting temptation. Andreas Huyssen in his essay “Mass Culture as

Woman” traces this line of thinking back to a Nietzschean vision of “the artist- philosopher-hero, the suffering loner who stands in irreconcilable opposition to modern democracy and its inauthentic culture” (1986, 49). Huyssen goes on to compare the experimental nature of medium specific artwork with the scientific method, describing how both were framed as authorial, masculine frameworks for the production of knowledge.

What options, then, were available to artists – including John Cage and Jill

Johnston – who by virtue of their identities were subject to rigorous, state-mandated policing and control? How can we understand their artistic projects in light of the

Greenbergian drive, but also in light of the various counter-discourses to the project of medium specificity, including those that centered marginalized forms of identity?

Greenberg viewed these counter-discourses, including the early post-modernism of

Marcel Duchamp (a key figure in Cage’s creative output) as less-than, or other to his masculine imagine of the artist, prompting art theorist Amelia Jones (1994) to read the counter-discourse to Greenbergian modernism as a feminized position, or as feminized texts. In her work The Engendering of Marcel Duchamp, Jones explores how modern art galleries and critics validated artists through patriarchal structures such as inheritance and sole ownership, and excluded opposing artistic viewpoints or methods, such as

89 collaborative ownership or collectivity, by specifically dismissing them as feminine. An example of this tendency can be seen in Greenberg’s “Present Prospects…” essay, where he describes Morris Graves and Mark Tobey as both “The two most original American painters today” and as “products of the Klee school” (1947, 25). Jones points out that

“feminized” did not always mean “female,” but instead drew on a complex referential network that collapsed the gender binary into categories of sexuality and performativity, linking the feminine with effeminacy and homosexuality. Jones lists Friedrich Nietzsche,

Hilton Kramer and Susan Sontag as art critics who have rhetorically drawn on these linking strategies to discuss work as “feminized” (22). While it is possible to explore

Cage’s and Johnston’s writing from a Greenbergian standpoint, because their writing was deeply influenced by the medium of their subject matter—dance—they were both also (as

I explore below) deeply influenced by social concerns, and by a kinship network of collaborators that included friends, lovers and partners. From a critical standpoint, therefore, both Johnston and Cage can be seen to be writing from a feminized position: one that is not necessarily feminine, feminist, or female, but which draws on ideas of subversive sexuality and desire in order to create their artistic output. In other words, from the perspective of dominant streams of art criticism at the time Cage’s and

Johnston’s work could be read as artistically, as well as personally queer. This placed them as subject, on a number of levels, to the homophobic rhetoric that permeated

American society in the post-war period.

Delinquent Kinships and Communal Covering

John Cage and Jill Johnston both wrote in an era where homosexual attraction was seen as pathological, as a crime, and as a threat to society. How, then, did both manage to navigate successful artistic careers in the public sphere while simultaneously living queer lives with same-sex partners? Kenji Yoshino’s theoretical framework of covering, detailed in Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights, allows me to explore how John Cage and Merce Cunningham managed the tricky territory between the personal and professional, hiding the overt queerness of their lives together while leaving traces of their identities coded within their work. Cage’s experience as a queer man in the post-war period was subject to divisive and othering rhetoric that bears many similarities to the textual strategies seen in my second chapter that worked to exclude black vernacular partner dancing from the definition of “modern dance.” Exploring these tactics of exclusion and othering help explain why Cage’s writing shows so many influences from black jazz poetics, and why similar aesthetic strategies for political expression might show up in his work.

Attitudes to homosexuality during the postwar period are inextricably linked to attitudes towards race. As scholar Siobhan B. Somerville points out: “It was not merely a coincidence that the classification of bodies as either heterosexual or homosexual emerged at the same time that the United States was aggressively constructing and policing the boundaries between black and white bodies” (2000, 3). After World War

Two America sought a discursive position as a cultural world-leader, a defender of art in the wake of the absence left by the Nazi occupation and destruction of Paris. Both within the dance word and the broader social landscape this instigated a purposeful separation

91 from narratives of European descent, and a promotion of the idea that to be American was to be straight, white, and ruggedly masculine. We have already explored how this was used to erase the influences of blackness within social dance, and in concert dance a similar erasure took place. Another manifestation of this nationalistic impulse toward an

American identity can be seen in the use of black and Native American dances as source material for concert dance—dances which could be claimed as an American folk heritage and could therefore be used as an alternative to European traditions once removed from the threatening associations of their creators.11 White concert dancers appropriated these dances, much as they did with social partner dances, in order to access a kinesthetic repertoire that was free from the stain of European “decadence,” enjoying instead their

“primitive one-ness with nature” (Burt 1998, 161).

The rhetoric that linked non-white bodies with sexual stereotypes in order to justify white control also linked non-straight and non-cisgendered bodies with the ideas of racial primitivism and degeneracy. As Margot Canaday (2009) writes in her work

Straight State, medical opinion held that homosexuality entailed a pathological inability to perform functional citizenship (29): “The relationship between homosexuality and psychopathy rests on “the long standing notion that psychopaths were unable to control antisocial impulses and adapt to the norms of the communities in which they lived”

(230). Much as black dancers were seen as instinctive and out of control in their

11 Examples include Martha Graham’s Primitive Mysteries, which draws on rituals and practices of the Penitente Indians, or Ted Shawn’s Hopi Indian Eagle Dance.

92 movements, so too were homosexuals portrayed as out of control of their own desires.

This failure of citizenship was used to portray homosexuals as a communist threat, based on the rhetoric that an out of control body was more easily subject to entrapment and blackmail by communist agents; newspapers widely adopted the term “security risk” to implicitly refer to the communist threat posed by homosexuals. The “Lavender Scare” emerged from this rhetoric: a fear that homosexuals posed a threat to national security and needed to be removed from the federal government, and which permeated 1950s culture (Johnson, 2004). Repeated conflations of homosexuality and communist sympathies in national discourse inculcated in many Americans the belief that the two populations were one and the same, and thus as the Cold War escalated, homosexuals were extensively stigmatized and persecuted as a threat to national security.

The arts world, and arguably the entire world, suffered financially, creatively and personally as a result of the combined impact of communist and homosexual stigmatization in the post-war period. Following numerous congressional investigations of “subversive activities” in New York socialist dance groups, the US government slashed federal funding for the arts, particularly the Federal Theater Project, which had known socialist ties. Dancers quietly silenced some of their more controversial projects, or hoped that they would pass unnoticed: when Edith Segal choreographed a tribute to

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (the first Americans to be put to death for spying during peacetime), Ellen Graff notes that the Dance Observer completely neglected to make any kind of comment on the execution, or the choreography (1997, 158). In her work A Game

For Dancers, which explores the conflicting pressures on dancers in the post-war period,

93 scholar Gay Morris points out that in this climate of oppression, and given the existing popular stereotype of male dancers as “sissies,” (even while George Balanchine reassured ballet-goers of the virility of male dancing) it became incredibly convenient within anticommunist discourse to allow artists and homosexuals to become a metonymic pairing (2006, 34). Artists retreated undercover rather than risk being accused of communism, homosexuality, or both – even as many of them continued to live their queer identities, or to hold socialist beliefs.

The non-white, non-straight communities targeted by these structurally oppressive regimes of post-war America developed aesthetic strategies for maintaining their existence, some of which can be seen across multiple communities of practice. In the last chapter I discussed how ring shouts allowed black religious practices to be maintained under the watchful eyes of white plantation owners. Similarly in literary writing, as I will explore below, textual strategies observed in African American modernism align with some of the poetic strategies of a feminized artistic position, and queer strategies of covering. These covering strategies allowed for a non-normative politics or identity stance to be expressed in a purportedly abstract or modernist text. Each of these textual strategies offers a multitude of interpretive possibilities, and while I do not intend to try and reify one particular position, observing the relationship between multiple communities and their discourse allows us to see that art, identity, and community, and broader society must be understood as relational projects.

The discursive strategy adopted almost unanimously by Cage and Cunningham in light of this homophobic climate and shared by numerous scholars who have explored

94 their work, directly or tangentially (including David Vaughan in Merce Cunningham:

Fifty Years 1997; and Burt 1995), was to write about their working and artistic relationship without ever discussing their romantic one. In Roger Copeland’s Merce

Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance (2004) the index reference for John

Cage “and homosexuality” guides the reader to a discussion of “polyattentiveness” or

“perpetual cruising” as a way of watching art while the discussion of sexuality is euphemistically disguised: “freedom of choice… constitutes the moral and political dimension of the Cunningham/Cage aesthetic… there’s a profound correspondence between what we choose to look at and the way we live our lives” (258).12 This is a strategy called “covering,” coined by legal scholar Kenji Yoshino (2006), described as toning down a disfavored identity in order to promote assimilation into mainstream or normatively inclined society (ix). Covering is not the same as “passing,” in which an individual actively tries to hide or deny a disfavored identity; Yoshino explains that while covering and passing may induce similar behaviors, they can be read differently according to the literacy of the viewer (92). Passing and closeting require the gay subject to successfully appear straight, but at the heart of covering is the cultural and social demand not to "flaunt" one's identity. Covering acts in opposition to the emergent tactics of queering, which invite subjects to deliberately move away from social norms (77).

12 My edited selection of this passage and my analysis of it as pertaining to sexuality is prompted by the index reference, not by the text itself, which in context appears to be about spectatorship.

Yoshino describes a visual example of communally shared covering on the train returning from Fire Island: "Men who were lolling in each other's arms are now separate, fingers that were interlaced are now disengaged, tattooed bodies have disappeared into clothes, faces have tightened. It is a moment as imperceptible as the change of a season, or the moment one falls out of love" (85). I frame Cage and Cunningham’s behavior as covering, rather than passing, because they were known to their community to be in a romantic relationship. In her 2007 memoir Chance and Circumstance Carolyn Brown speaks of how that relationship affected studio life: “…when the subject was Merce,

John’s abiding love usually blinded him” (409-10). Brown also relates a discussion in

1964 with an acquaintance, Bharati Sarabhai, who hosted the company for lunch in India and who asked Brown whether Cunningham’s “choreography was asexual because he is homosexual?” It was a question that Brown indicates she was unable or unprepared to answer (430). Despite this neither Cage, nor Cunningham, nor their community contradicted the gentle fiction built up in the literature around them that their partnership’s only relevance was that of collaborators and friends–as a means to an artistic end.

Cage and Cunningham’s relationship, while obviously artistically fruitful, was also romantic, and the pair openly lived together in a life-long domestic partnership. In

Elliot Caplan’s 2007 documentary Cage/Cunningham, which examines the working history of the two men, many of the interviews are conducted in their shared home. While

Cage and Cunningham never touch, their bond lives in the ellipses and hesitations of their friends’ speech, such as this excerpt by artist and poet M.C. Richards: "John and Merce

96 are like angels whose life, this life, uh, however hard it has been for them, has been dedicated to this kind of task. And it partly accounts for their, uh, faithfulness, I think.

And their faithfulness in the, in times of great… you know, risk and lack of support and so on, but as if there were a… something extraordinary at stake" (36:00). Cage and

Cunningham’s love lives in the casual intimacy of Cage's description of Cunningham's morning yoga (32:50), and at one point Cage gets very close to an explicit comment on their romantic relationship, while still using their working partnership as a covering analogy: "Well, it's marvelous as the relation with Merce, except that that's been, that's been more umm… I think it's been very, what you might call, organic. I mean to say, in the fact that it's been the living, and that it's taken different forms. So the, the relation that we have, or did our thoughts or works have, isn't, isn't fixed. There's no, uh, nor is anything being consciously accomplished" (15:30). In Silence (1961), Cage writes in playfully intimate ways about a trip in which he and Cunningham took eight children to the zoo (84), or the time Mayne Cunningham (Merce’s mother) knocked an “elderly gentleman” down with her car, only to inquire “What are you doing there?” (272).

Unearthing the evidence of Cage and Cunningham’s romantic partnership from beneath years of covering may not align with the two men’s desires for privacy, but these hesitations, and descriptions of life together, the fact that the speakers push on the topic so noticeably, seems to indicate a desire to speak as openly as safety and privacy will allow. Herein lies a critical difference between passing and covering: Cage and

Cunningham did not minimize their bond in order to perform straightness, the evidence of their relationship is easily found, instead they adopted ways of being in that

97 relationship that did not present an overt challenge to the homophobia of their contemporary social climate. These lived strategies are, as I shall discuss, also evident in their writing: not in an overt challenge but in a covered politics that retains their chosen community and attitudes to society and politics.

In the later years of his career Merce Cunningham received governmental recognition for his work at the forefront of the American avant-garde dance world. While it seems surprising that the American government would support a known gay couple, the consistency of their covering made it possible to gloss over – at least in public – the implications of their relationship. They were not the only artists to benefit from this kind of governmental compromise: in Dancers as Diplomats Clare Croft (2015) traces how queer, black choreographer Alvin Ailey received State Department funding and international touring support, while at the same time being rigorously policed about his homosexuality. USIA officials were detailed to watch his company for any indication of homosexual activity, and dire consequences were threatened for anyone who strayed off the “straight and narrow path” (198). While the American government celebrated dance artists as valuable figures of cultural diversity, those who were known to be homosexual were subject to stringent behavioral control; covering was necessary in light of the position Cage and Cunningham quickly came to occupy as leading figures of the artistic world.

While social acceptance of romantic friendships between women meant that

Johnston’s cohabitation with her partners was less risky than Cage’s, the persecution of lesbians during the Lavender Scare was harsh and widespread. While statistically women

98 lost fewer jobs than men as a direct result of McCarthyite policies, women in government jobs and the military were routinely fired for “moral turpitude,” and the popular press ran scare stories about huge conspiracies of Sapphic lovers, and the threat posed to young

American women by lesbian “vampires” (Faderman 1992, 143-145). Johnston, however, did not rely on governmental support for her funding, and thus was able to be comparatively open about her sexuality, eventually shifting her authorial career to the promotion of lesbian rights and identities. In her autobiography Johnston frequently refers to her partners as “my friend” or “my ex-friend,” while being quite frank about the sexual and romantic nature of these relationships. She married her long-term partner

Ingrid Nyeboe in Denmark in 1993 and had a secondary commitment ceremony in

Connecticut in 2009. Importantly for the continuing threads of this chapter, Johnston also cultivated a chosen kinship network of artists and friends in addition to her romantic connections. This offered her networks of support without necessitating a subscription to heterosexual models of nuclear family.

Returning to the theme of criticism and interpretation, historian Serge Guilbaut explains that avant-garde art artists had to deal with the paradox of retaining critical freedom of expression while living in an increasingly conservative post-war America.

Medium specific abstraction resolved this paradox by championing the rights of the individual (male) voice, while shaping the discourse boundaries of what that voice could express (1980, 62); Greenberg expressly stated that he saw art as “an armchair for the tired businessman” (1947, 8). Against this backdrop Cage and Johnston produced work— written and otherwise—that was on one level preoccupied with the intricacies of medium

99 and form, but that was also challenging, and politically engaged. Obtuse signifiers, spatial play, distortions of chronology and context all served to queer their literal meaning- making and reach out to others in their marginalized community. In the rest of this chapter I track these textual features intertextually in the poetry of Stéphan Mallarmé, and in the music and literature of black modernism. Exploring historical manifestations of these textual strategies I argue that they contribute to a poetics of otherness – the construction of an authorial voice outside the white, heterosexual norm – that used non- linear signification as an aesthetic, but also as a means to speak to a shared community under the eyes of the conservative American mainstream.

The Politics and Possibilities of the Feminized Text

Artists pursuing modernist ideals, whether or not they chose to pursue medium- specificity as an aesthetic strategy, worked professionally within an interdisciplinary dialogic network that spanned the performative, plastic and literary arts. In Performing

Queer Modernism Penny Farfan (2017) illustrates this network through her exploration of a 1912 studio portrait of art critic Cyril Beaumont, studying Leon Bakst’s design for

Vaslav Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun costume. Beaumont sold “decadent modernist literature” from his Charring Cross Road bookstore, and became involved with ballet after his wife persuaded him to see a performance by Anna Pavlova; he would later publish albums of images of Nijinsky by Robert Montenegro and George Barbier (56).

To look at Beaumont, looking at Nijinsky, through the eyes of Bakst, is to understand the

100 need to consider the influences of other art forms and the dialogue that always existed between them.

Taking Jill Johnston and John Cage as authors who are at particular intersections of this dialogue, and particularly the way they played between medium specificity and the realization of their own communal politics, finds them both in conversation with modernist poet Stéphan Mallarmé. Mallarmé’s essays on symbolic expression within dance helped promote the development, theorization and validation of concert modernism. Furthermore, while Greenberg held up Mallarmé as an exemplary medium- specific artist, other scholars have treated his work as feminized intervention specifically against Greenbergian modernism. Exploring Mallarmé’s most celebrated work, Un Coup

De Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard [A Roll of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance]13 I demonstrate how his aesthetic choices merge politics with abstraction and provide an artistic model for covering queer and feminized ideas.

Un Coupe Dés is a work of 650 words spread over 21 pages, wherein a main clause, subordinate clause, and additional passages interleave, differentiated by spatial configuration and various fonts. The work drifts back and forth across many thoughts and ideas, and around the central image of a shipwreck, although it is impossible to find any clear narrative or meaning. This impossibility has a led to a huge variety of

13 The poem is known both as Un Coup De Dés and the longer form of the title. For brevity I will use the shortened form. All translations are my own.

101 interpretations as to what Mallarmé might be “doing” with the work, but I am primarily interested in the spatial analysis of the text by literary analyst Virginia A. La Charité

(1987). La Charité identifies spatial and textual strategies within the poem as a deliberate

“refusal” of compositional or referential systems, in other words arguing that Mallarmé’s text forces creation and signification to emerge within the compositional treatment of the space of the page, rather than in the words and their meaning:

Through the dynamics of space, Mallarmé forces the reader to

reconstruct the text itself, deform it in order to reform it in a never-ending

procedure or circle, which prevents both forward and retrograded

movement. There is only the act of re-reading in an eternal textual

circumstance of destructuing-restructuring; each reading discredits rather

than confirms the one that went before. (103).

La Charité asserts that as the primary element of the poem, space becomes the authoritative frame though which readers can encounter the text. The interwoven, deconstructed manifestation of the phrases of the poem destroys not only referent relationships but prevents the possibility of a chronological approach to the text (147) – a strategy that I will show below is paralleled in jazz poetics.

The asymmetrical configuration of the words on the page invites the eye to wander, making associations between spatially differentiated texts in the search for coherence.

Amelia Jones (1994), Roland Barthes (1989), and Julia Kristeva (1984) all claim

Mallarmé as a proto-postmodernist, an inspiration to the avant-garde, feminized aesthetic

102 that opposed masculinist Greenbergian aesthetics. His work therefore shines a light on similar tensions between the feminized and the modern in Cage and Johnston’s writing.

Feminist scholar Julia Kristeva treats Mallarmé’s work as a move away from patrilineal forms of authorship and towards a feminized/queer/othered play of signification, a move that she claims allowed for a new politicization of poetry in the late nineteenth century, providing a model for an avant-garde that pushed at the boundaries of grammar and

“decency” (1984, 209). Kristeva additionally proposes that Un Coup De Dés, by its syntactic distortions, offers a series of alternative relationships between “natural objects, social apparatuses and the body proper” in the individualized framing of authorial consciousness (126). Mallarmé invites his readers to interpret the poem as both ambiguous and highly personalized: by turning the space of the text into a site in process, in which the reader must find meaning, the poem offers readers the capacity to put “all linguistic, symbolic, and social structures” on trial as phenomena in progress (210, italics mine). In a political gesture, Mallarmé models a way for post-modern texts and avant- garde art to reject the authority of categorizing science, artistic norms and behavioral codes in favor of a personalized relationship to community, meaning, and desire (213).

The parallels to Cage and Johnston’s work becomes abundantly clear in light of this reading.

Importantly for my argument, Greenberg named Stéphan Mallarmé, along with the poets James Joyce and Paul Valéry as modernist men, men who had found ways to prioritize textual expression over the experience being expressed, to compose in pure sound rather than in textual meaning, despite the difficulty of achieving medium

103 specificity in a literary art form (1961, 7). All three of these writers have a well- acknowledged influence on dance: John Cage wrote his way multiple times through

Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (1939), eventually composing Roaratorio (1979) a piece of music which was later used by Merce Cunningham for his dance of the same name

(1983). Valéry and Mallarmé both wrote essays on the philosophy of dance, and

Mallarmé devoted several of these to an idea that will become central to my next chapter: the possibility of une écriture corporelle [a bodily writing], which he developed after seeing the work of Loïe Fuller. Translator Charles Chadwick suggests that the course of

Mallarmé’s career can be seen as a lifelong attempt to transcend the semiotic meaning implied by a text and instead raise readers to an awareness of the Platonically ideal forms of the sublime through techniques of textual compression, allusion and suggestion (1996,

7). The image of a shipwreck in Un Coup De Dés is the wreck of Mallarmé’s hopes – the realization that he will not complete the journey, but must instead continue to voyage into the unknown. The last line of the poem: “Toute Pensée émet un Coup De Dés”14 is the quietly optimistic conclusion that this artistic project continues, even if it is not realized in Mallarmé’s published work (13).

Given Cunningham’s own statements on the non-narrative nature of his dancing, and the covering strategies adopted by those around him, it becomes easy to read his work as “abstract” or as “pure dance.” But Roger Copeland (2004) warns us against this mindset, identifying it as one unfortunate side effect of an academic backlash that gained prominence during the 1970s and the cultural turn of the 1980s, and which dismissed as

14 Every thought emits a roll of the dice. 104

“abstract” anything that too closely resembled Greenbergian modernism, such as

Cunningham’s work (229). Instead, Copeland points out that Cunningham and Cage’s works reflect the deep structures of urban contemporary life, and that they teach us to resist cultural conditioning, in the same way that Mallarmé’s poetry invites us to put the systems of the world on trial. Copeland argues that: “This sort of perceptual reeducation can and should be regarded as serving a “political end,” and adds that Cage consistently maintained that he wanted his art to prove useful to people who are engaged in varieties of social activism (231). Copeland’s writing led me to this statement of Cage’s from the

1994 work Reallack: “We could make a piece of music in which we would be willing to live, a piece of music as a representation of a society in which you would be willing to live…” (Retallack 1994, 260). Elsewhere in interviews Cage tells readers that one goal of his music is to give people an opportunity to change their minds—not to dictate the result of that change—but to offer the space and the opportunity; he considers his work a- political not because it is devoid of political content but he is concerned with the formation of social clusters of individuals, rather than political and national groupings

(Kostelanetz 1988, 257). One of Cage’s visions for these imaginary communities is to remove the hierarchy of power (262), a vision that is obviously reflected in his music.

The usual western compositional hierarchies of tonal melodies over a-tonality and dissonance, instrumental melody over organic “noise,” even the privileging of sound over silence are constantly disrupted and challenged in Cage’s musical output. In Cage’s writing, compositional norms are similarly disregarded, or manipulated, so that we must read his texts within this vision of social equality. In his long-form, multi-part poem

105

“Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)” Cage begins:

“I. Continue; I’ll discover where you sweat (Kierkegaard). We are getting rid of ownership, substituting use” (1967, 3, formatting Cage’s), and continues by jumping across phrases and fonts, some parts of the poem fading out altogether (147). In his lecture performance “For a Speaker” Cage designs his part to shadow one piano part of his musical composition “34’46.776,” forcing the words into musical, rather than spoken time, and according scripted pedestrian gestures (cough, hold hand up, gargle) the same performative weight as his lecture content (1961, 146-192). Cage’s explorations into prepared piano, and into silence, bring into question the division between music and noise and the boundaries of music as a medium, and his writing frequently explores the textual nature of words on a page and how they can be manipulated without thought for literal signification.

While Johnston was only rarely a performer, the works she did perform similarly questioned the boundaries of dance as a medium by using pedestrian gesture and audience involvement. Her writing similarly treats text as an abstract medium, as well as a means of narrative reporting. In a long except from her review “Well Hung” (Johnston,

Appendix Two) Johnston does not so much review works as offer a stream-of- consciousness meditation on equipment, energy, sexuality, and sculpture – the piece as a whole lightly grazes over three or four works of art and dance, but they are used to provoke new kinds of thought, or to draw a picture of columns of energy around telephones and vehicles and dancing bodies as machines (128-129). Rather than categorizing Cage and Johnston’s works into a particular artistic lineage that precludes

106 certain possibilities of meaning, considering their work through the lens of the feminized text, as Mallarmé’s has been, allows for the possibility of politics and abstraction existing together, available to readers to create meaning from as they chose. Looking at the last influence of this chapter: the resistant tactics used by black jazz artists to resist white, straight, discipline and instead produce a recognizably black textual aesthetic, cements this multifaceted reading, once again demonstrating that communal, political readings existed beneath practices of non-linear signification in Cage’s and Johnston’s work.

Resistant Writing

Furthering the idea, posed above, that modernism is an interdisciplinary network of ideas maintaining a dialogue across various media, modernist scholar Jed Rasula argues that all developments in modernism, including medium specificity, reflect the impact of 19th Century “melomania” or the philosophical elevation of music to the pinnacle of artistic achievement (2016, 19). In his article “Goal: New Music, New

Dance” written for Dance Observer in 1939, John Cage wrote that he was directly inspired by the rhythms of jazz as an avenue of experimental escape from Western symphonic music, even as he notes that such experiments would be categorized by popular audiences as primitive noise (2013, 87).15 In 1980 Sally Banes recorded an

15 He contradicts this point in a 1972 interview with Hand G. Helms, in which he claims he has “little need for jazz,” but in the moment of writing this collection of essays his sense of jazz as a useful inspiration is consistent and clear.

107 interview with Jill Johnston in which Johnston remembered how Sally Gross introduced her simultaneously to the Judson community and to black jazz artists and musicians

(1983, 75). For Johnston, jazz music, social dancing, and the Judson community were an

“entire way of life” that she wanted to become a part of.

Rasula goes on to explain that music formed a model for symbolic expression through literature and the plastic arts and provided a grammar for interpreting the works of Yeats, Woolf, Pound, and other modernist writers (2016, 60). Julia Kristeva makes a similar point when she argues that music and dance—even in forms that are not necessarily modern—offer models for moving through and redistributing signification across a non-verbal medium (1984, 104). Writing specifically about jazz, Rasula quotes

Sergei Eisenstein and René Guilleré to hypothesize that jazz provides an intensity of signification in which every element is brought to the foreground of the music, turning objects into a pulsating spectacle that destroys any sense of real space and time (2016,

209). I use Rasula’s thesis as a starting point to argue that black writers used the musical strategies of jazz to develop a recognizable black literary aesthetic during the Harlem renaissance, an aesthetic that consciously resisted white hegemonies of meaning, and made coded appeals to community. I argue that Cage and Johnston adopted similar strategies in order to make coded appeals to a community that recognized their political aspirations and queerness, resisting dominant social models of heteronormativity and political non-comment.

Kostelanetz Conversing with Cage 257

108

The literary canon tends to frame a clear divide between “Harlem Renaissance

Writers” and “Modernists.” As I have discussed, the modernist subject was typically figured as white, and as such white newspapers and critics framed the aesthetic shifts of black dancers and black writers as “ethnic” phenomena. Black bodies were viewed as both racially and sexually other, and were sanctioned for attempting to break into normative territories of status and signification. Literature scholar Adrienne Gosselin

(1996) calls attention to a mindset of “parallel but not equal” in studies of the Harlem

Renaissance in particular, noting that in the discourse of academic literary studies, the poetic developments of Langston Hughes and his contemporaries are discussed within a

“localized framework, rather than as part of the broader picture of modernism” (38). This division is confused by the contemporaneous labeling of jazz as “modern” that I explored in depth in my first chapter, and by the lines of influence that can be traced between jazz music, black literary poetics and developments in avant-garde aesthetics. Exploring the parallels between the literary aesthetics of black modernism/postmodernism, and Cage and Johnston’s writings, draws together a picture of an aesthetic of otherness that resists straight, white readings, and offers an alternative vision of community development.

Reinstating black writers of the Harlem renaissance within the modernist canon has significant ramifications even for the contemporary field of Dance Studies. In the process of establishing modernism as an aesthetic philosophy of white America, the influence of black artists has been marginalized or erased, or framed as an a-political expression of pure feeling; for example in a 2017 article “To Dance is Human Boundary

Marking,” Judith L. Hanna argues that there is no evidence for viewing Harlem dances

109 during the Great Depression as resistant, rather, she says that black dancers were simply

“letting off steam” (214). Classifications of race were and are used to minimize the scope and potential of black makers so as to distinguish them from the teleological progress of white artistry: their art is read as black first, and then looked at as art within that limiting discursive framework. Susan Manning's extensive research on the topic charts the influence of written criticism in particular in categorizing black dancing bodies as

"ethnic" and white dancing bodies—even those drawing heavily from black sources and experiences—as modern. She summarizes the catch-22 of black dance artists as follows:

“On the one hand, if Negro dancers stages themes perceived as Africanist, then many white critics considered them ‘natural performers’ rather than ‘creative artists.’ On the other hand, if Negro dancers staged themes perceived as Eurocentric, then many white critics considered them ‘derivative’ rather than ‘original artists’” (2004, 9-10). In literature, Miriam Thaggert (2010) quotes examples from the 1970s and 1980s to demonstrate that literary scholars have historically looked at the artistic output of the

Harlem renaissance predominantly as a means to challenge white racism; she explains that later scholars wrote off these artists’ work, deciding that the continuing presence of racism must indicate these works’ failure to meet the interrogative and critical standards of modernism (4-5).

Many white critics tend to ignore that black artists and writers during the early

20th century clearly documented their aesthetic goals and critical approaches to their medium of expression, experimenting with form and content to produce a recognizable aesthetic of the black modernist community that shares features with avant-garde

110 experimentation. A key point of overlap between black and white modernisms was the desire to write text that was like music—rhythmic, poetic, and attuned to oral experience— but others include the diffusion of signifiers in an expanded compositional space, and a refusal to decode complex community signifiers for an external, normative audience. On the front leaf of Montage of a Dream Deferred, queer black poet Langston

Hughes (1951) writes: “this poem on contemporary Harlem, like bebop, is marked by conflicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent interjections… the music of a community in transition.” Black artists, like Cage, Johnston, and other practitioners of the avant-garde used multiple levels of signification to allow for different process of meaning-construction by a variety of audiences.

Writing in 1934 for Nancy Cunard's Negro anthology, Zora Neale Hurston lists some of the primary characteristics of “Negro” expression as: visual thinking, asymmetry, angularity, and the will to adornment, as well as the search for originality through imitation. She describes asymmetry as a rhythmic quality in literature, observable in poetry and music, when each line or unit has its own rhythm, but is put together so as to have no symmetry overall (41). Thaggert adds to this analysis the suggestion that asymmetry might be seen in the frequent changes of key, and time signature in music, rapid and inorganic shifts of positions in dance, and the rapid juxtaposition of ideas in writing (2010, 47). The quality of asymmetry seems to align with what Brenda Dixon Gottschild (1996) names the Africanist aesthetic of polycentrism - the democratic equality of many possible movement loci, which may activate in any sequence (8). Polycentrism combines with polyrhythm to produce high-

111 affect juxtapositions: “Mood, attitude, or movement breaks that omit the transitions and connective links valued in the European academic aesthetic” (14). I argue, therefore, that in a continuation of my Chapter Two thesis on linear and circular movement, asymmetry may be read as a rejection of Europeanist linear thought in favor of a planar scheme of ideas, which will become relevant in respect to other qualities identified below.

The quality of asymmetry is found over and over again in John Cage's theories and writing in his decision to understand text – like music and dance - as time-based art forms. His quality of rhythmic asymmetry can be seen transcribed in his narrative accompaniment to Merce Cunningham's How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run (1967, 133-

140). During this piece Cage reads a series of stories, each of which is given a minute to take place. Some of these stories are only 24 words long, while others have over 500 words. This compositional method directly reflects Cage’s analysis of jazz time: “The

‘perpetual conflict’ between clarity [of rhythmic structure] and grace [human play within that structure] is what makes hot jazz hot. The best performers continually anticipate or delay the phrase beginnings and endings. They also, in their performances, treat the beat or pulse, and indeed, the measure, with grace: putting fewer or more icti within the measure’s limits than are expected (similar alterations of pitch and timbre are also customary), contracting or extending the duration of the unit. This, not syncopation, is what pleases the hep-cats" (2013, 92).16 Treating one minute of time as a temporal

16 Composer Daniel Wolf (2014) describes icti as follows: “the moment of a beat in music, corresponding to the moment of a stressed syllable within a metric foot in a poetic

112 measure, and varying the number of icti within that measure, Cage invites us to treat the narratives of How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run as an opportunity for rhythmic play, rather than narrative storytelling. The lack of transition between the stories, and the disparity of the ideas within them, adds to the asymmetrical nature of this piece of work.

In other scores we can see time divided into rhythmic sections, with an asymmetric relationship to each other in terms of quality, timbre, intensity etc. We can also observe the juxtaposition of ideas in is writing, for example, in his essay "2 pages,

122 Words on Music and Dance," words cluster, fall down diagonals, a list represents simultaneity of meaning, and gently political references sit alongside Cage’s ideas about art, audience, and creativity:

“A bird flies. Slavery is abolished.”

“Is there a glass of water? War begins at any moment” (1961, 96-97).17

In this example the spatial arrangement of words on the page provides a visual asymmetry, and in these two pairs of lines the phrases bear no apparent relationship either to each other or to the phrases around them.

While the unpunctuated, expanded nature of Jill Johnston’s writing in the late 60s can come across as a-rhythmic, we can also see a rapid juxtaposition of ideas in a

line. The space between icti could be open or subdivided by additional attacks (or, in poetry, syllables) which, in the default setting, have a weaker stress, a default setting which can usefully be broken, i.e. syncopated.”

17 I have not attempted to exactly replicate the spatial layout of this poem. 113 sentence or sentence series that offers a quality of asymmetry as well as on-goingness. In this passage from Danscrabble, for example, where Johnston seems to be describing a dance performance:

Does the world live in order to develop lines of its face? Do

women see a uniform as a symbol of death? I can assure you I feel the

visual image to be two inches behind the bridge of my nose. The torso and

head thrown back, held there a moment, the arms angled, bent at elbow

and wrist, up over the face, to reinforce the ecstatic arch. The romantic

attitude is nowhere so clear as in the fall from that effort, for while the legs

take the weight of the body into the floor, the arms remain stretched, the

gaze follows the arms, and the torso sinks to one side, still hoping for the

impossible. Advance token to the nearest railroad. Is this the way the

world will end? I didn’t get kissed nearly enough (1971, 167).

In the above paragraph only the two sentences of movement description seem to imply a chronological and contextual relationship, while the other sentences are somehow provoked by the experience of her watching or writing, although we are not permitted to know how. The idea that either writing or watching might inspire the content that

Johnston produces tells us that the order of signs and referents in the finished article might bear no relationship to the chronology in which the events that inspired them occurred, and may relate to a number of separate, undistinguished contexts. In this way, not only are ideas allowed to emerge democratically, without transitional links, but event times are allowed to overlap and meander, distorting a linear sense of time in favor of a

114 signifying intensity of the expanded moment, another quality observed in African-

American music, dance and literature.

As the cultural products of African American artists were appropriated and commercialized by white popular culture, differences emerged between artistic forms that were produced for predominantly white and black audiences, a distinction that is particularly clear in music. As I have described above, music served as a model for other forms of modernist expression, making it worthwhile to consider how different forms of black-produced music were racially coded, what might be signified by the stylistic differences of these forms, and how those differences might be seen on other media.

During the 1950s black music came to white ears in genres that included big band Swing,

Rock and Roll, and Motown, while simultaneously developing into black-coded genres that included Bebop and Funk. Comparing Funk and Motown, African American dance scholar Thomas DeFrantz (2012) writes that while Motown organized bodies and musical time into discrete, repeatable, disciplined units, "funk musics inspired highly personalized, unmanageable physical elaborations of rhythm and harmony released in expanded time" (137). Funk, like Bebop, played with free improvisation on known musical themes in an emergent structure, meandering across the members of a band without an implicit demand for repetition or re-statement of clear ideas, or the creation of a sequenced musical structure.

In literature, Sarah Jane Cervenak describes Gayle Jones’s 1998 novel Mosquito as a possible manifestation of the “Jazz text,” quoting Jones’s description of the same: an

“interplay of voices improvising on the basic themes and motifs of the text, in key words

115 and phrases. Often seemingly nonlogical and associational, the jazz text is generally more complex and sophisticated than blues text in its harmonies, rhythms, and surface structure… its vocabulary and syntax are often more convoluted and ambiguous than blues… tending to abstractions over concreteness of detail” (2014, 130). Mosquito is full of tangents and digressions, muddying notions of beginning and ending and thus resisting the “harassment” of post-enlightenment order. Cervenak labels this writing style as radically non-productive and non-compliant; a refusal to submit to the critical demand made of black women to disclose and comply (131). She also quotes Robert McRuer’s argument that these writerly tactics refuse the post-Enlightenment requirement to perform a disciplined and coherent self, and thus refuse compulsory heterosexuality by performing an unpredictable embodiment of being and desiring (128). We have seen previously how the avant-garde similarly used “abstraction” as a similar strategy of quiet non-compliance, allowing queer works to remain available for public consumption.

Cultural and communal knowledge allowed for a politicized access to these works, without running the risks of an overt message.

Considering Cage’s and Johnston’s writing in light of the tactics of blackness allows us to see the emergence of an aesthetic of communal otherness. Their texts disperse signification so as to be illegible without cultural and communal buy-in – refusing linear discipline, engaging in improvisational ambiguity, and refusing any attempt at straightening out. Cage's article "Seriously Comma" which was originally published in 1966 as a response to Serial Music Today is arranged in paragraph clusters of different fonts and font styles. While the article cannot be said to have one argument as

116 such, a number of the clusters speak to attitudes I have attempted to demonstrate in my chapter thus far:

"...one asserts that this isn't two-dimensional linear-fact (or

multiplicity of such facts interrelated) but un-beginning, interminable

field-fact. Space, miracle, then arises where there was none."

"MUSIC'S NOT WAITING, BUT SINGS FINAL DISSOLUTION

OF POLITICS-ECONOMICS SO THAT, IN EXCHANGE FOR, SAY,

ONE DAY'S WORK PER YEAR, EACH PERSON GETS PASSPORT-

CREDIT-CARD (ACCESS TO WHAT GLOBAL-VILLAGE-HUMAN-

RACE HAS TO OFFER)"

"Privilege of connecting two things remains privilege of each

individual (e.g.: I: thirsty: drink a glass of water); but this privilege isn't to

be exercised in public except in emergencies (there are no aesthetic

emergencies)" (1967, 26-30).

This latter paragraph, while legible as a comment on the academic discourse on serial music, can also be read as an insight into Cage's practice of covering: the privilege of individual connection that he chooses to exercise is his right, but doesn't need to be publicly acknowledged or reflected in his aesthetic choices. Writing at a distance of more than 50 years it is impossible for me to say whether this message was intended or is simply the product of my own queer reading, but the ambiguity of his message, which sits in a network of reference to which many of his readers are denied access, aligns with the black literary practice of Signifyin', which exploits the gap between denotive and

117 figurative meanings of certain words in order to produce meaning indirectly through cultural back channels (Ruff 2009). In her article "Tweets, Tweeps and

Signifyin'"communication scholar Sarah Florini argues that Signifyin' allows black twitter users to demonstrate cultural competence despite the lack of a visible corporeal presence (224). While Cage's choice of analogy seems innocuous at first glance--if you are thirsty, drink water--the use of thirst as a metaphor for sexual desire is present in literature from c.1200, and the use of "drink of water" to denote a tall, attractive man/woman was in use during the early 1900s. Cage's language points to his textual competence as a queer man, even though his message is buried in academicized word- play.

On the final page of "Seriously Comma" Cage writes: "It's no longer a question of people led by someone who assumes responsibility. It's as McLuhan says: a tribal situation. We need one another's help doing (food gathering, art) what is to be done”

(1967, 29). Experimenting with non-linear linguistic expression alters reader access to meaning within texts, and offers those with cultural and communal buy-in a more privileged access to meaning than afforded to readers from outside the community. In my last section of this chapter I examine how Cage and Johnston used their writing to appeal to the community around them, both as a community of practice as a queer network of kinship and family.

Aesthetic Kin

118

Avant-Garde artists shared a wide variety of interpersonal relationships, but operated artistically as a community of practice: a community that shared norms, activities, rituals, discourses and modes of engagement. Education scholar Etienne

Wenger (1999) discusses the modes of belonging within a community of practice, and the limits to those modes of participation:

• Engagement is the active involvement in the negotiation of what a community of

practice does and means, shaping the environment of participation. It is bounded

by time limits and physical capacity, and by the risk that without reflection,

engagement can become stagnant and inflexible (175).

• Imagination is the capacity to relate communities of practice to the broader social

world, and identify how engagement can improve that relationship for both the

group and the people within it. It is a delicate balance between envisioning the

possible, without relying on stereotypes or going beyond lived experience (178).

• Alignment involves the direction and control of community energy in accordance

with internal and external power structures – social hierarchies, political positions,

national law etc. Alignment creates structures of power, and conversely risks

disempowering community members (180).

We can see that as writers Johnston and Cage performed each of these modes within their writing. Johnston engages with the Judson community by performing with them, embracing the risk that without reflection the work of that community becomes ludicrous and narcissistic; she imagines them in touch with the wider world by writing for

The Village Voice, whose single-day circulation in 1967 was higher than 95% of

119

American big-city daily newspapers (Med, 2009); and she aligned those artistic practices with social power structures, particularly lesbian ideology, in the development of her review style, to contain her autobiographical and political views. Like Johnston, Cage performed within his community of practice, and was known as a creator of boundary- pushing works himself; imagination and alignment. As I have described in my first chapter, dance writers make bids for power within their own community of practice through all three of these modes of participation. The particular community of practice that I define as a kinship network in recognition of the queer practice of building chosen families, reflects Johnston's own definition of her experience in the New York artistic community, and the covering engaged in by that network to protect the shared life and home that John Cage and Merce Cunningham built together as life partners.

In addition to their artistic communities of practice, however, I believe that Cage and Johnston cultivated artistic networks around them that served as networks of kinship.

In a 2016 lecture given at the Dance Studies Association Conference in Columbus, Ohio, dance studies and queer studies scholar Michael Morris speaks to the facility of dance to take on various aspects of kinship relations, explaining that:

The ways we move are never entirely our own; their origins are always

countless, extending from body to body back through any number of

traditions, histories, and locations. And yet how we move is also entirely

our own, a particular reformulation/assemblage/bricolage of others’ ways

of moving integrated in a particular pattern that emerges from our

bodies—and from which our bodies emerge…. Dancing then offers itself

120

as a mode of kinship, a kinship of chosen families, multiple parents,

multiple genealogies: a very queer kinship that can graft across differences

of age, gender, race, nationality, and so on—without eliminating that

which makes us different.18

Morris draws from Judith Butler’s definition of kinship as relations of affiliation and responsibility, suggesting that “kin” and “kinship” are terms that specifically go beyond ancestry or blood relationships, but instead are fundamental forms of human dependency, whether or not the law or nation state recognizes them.

Cynthia Gordon (2006) has written extensively about the ways that kinship communities use language to foster and strengthen the relations and norms within that community, and she proposes the term “familylect” to describe the idiosyncratic language of a particular kinship group. Studying the natural speech that occurs between families,

Gordon focuses specifically on repetition to show how the interactive effects of specific words and phrases produce meanings that are unique within a familial context. In other words, a familylect is extreme form of intertextuality, a repertoire of shared texts that subjects and their discourse exist with in an ongoing relationship. The shared culture of a family grows out of a shared and remembered set of discourses (texts, conversations, other forms of media), allowing the social group of the family to be held together by a communal repertoire of prior discursive experiences (27). One observed purpose of a familylect in action is that it allows for members to socialize each other into a shred sense of political identity (Tannen, Kendall and Gordon 2007, 235), for example during the

18 “Dance, Mortality, and Making Kinesthetic Kin in Times of Climate Crisis.” 121

2000 US election the family under observation referred to each other – including their four year-old son – as “Democrats” in conversation and referred to the candidates in terms that created closeness with Al Gore (“our guy”) and distance from George W.

Bush. In other words, a familylect promotes solidarity between its members by producing a system of inclusion and exclusion, and of the norms and rules governing the same: norms and rules which are generated by the needs of common enterprise, to differentiate between ideologically opposed groups, and to encourage behaviors deemed necessary to the furthering of group goals (Pensky, 2008). Solidarity scholar Kurt Bayertz (1999) explains that solidarity has its origins in Roman laws of obligation, under which family members and close community had a legal obligation to pay debts incurred by members and to vouch for each other’s social behavior (3); political aims and the strengthening of kinship networks can function simultaneously. Gordon identifies familylect creation in a number of places including strategies of naming, specialized in-group language, and reference to shared family events as a tool for contextualization. Looking at Cage’s and

Johnston’s writing we can see that they wrote not only for their shared social community, or community of practice, but also drew on a repertoire of discourses shared with their closest intimates to write themselves towards a kinship network.

John Cage’s kinship network was far-reaching; he toured and taught extensively, and his financial circumstances took him through a variety of adoptions by the global artistic community. When Cage and his wife - Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff – moved to New York in 1942 in order for Cage to pursue his compositional career they initially stayed with painter Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim, who introduced the couple to

122 influential artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Jackson Pollock. Guggenheim was prepared to finance concerts of Cage’s work, but withdrew her support and hospitality when Cage secured a concert with rival gallery MoMA. In 1945 Cage’s marriage ended and he became romantically involved with his life-partner Merce Cunningham. Cage’s

New York community, as well as his existing artistic connections, expanded as a result of the compositional class he taught at the New School, which was populated by some of the most influential avant-garde artists. Dick Higgins describes the class as a series of exercises in problem solving, where the hope was that everyone in the room would come up with a different solution (Hansen and Higgins 1970, 122). In his writing Cage moves fluently from professional to personal spaces, writing lyrically about chess games, mushroom hunting, and sharing anecdotes about his tours with the Cunningham company. Cage used the mesostic writing described above to write his way through

Finnegan’s Wake a number of times, producing mesostics around the name “James

Joyce.” In conversation with Richard Kostelanetz he confesses that while this

“collaboration” with Joyce’s work is purely one-sided, he would prefer to offer the work as a gift, as he would with any work connected to another person (1988, 153). Cage’s mesostic writing can be read as a series of gifts and offerings to members of both an inter-personal and extended artistic community.

Cage’s close community familylect emerges textually in his lecture writing, where he draws on a shared repertoire of community experiences in sharing anecdotes without pronominal referents i.e. using pronouns without first indicating who the pronouns belong to. In a piece of writing called “Where Do We Go From Here,”

123 commissioned by Selma Jean Cohen for Dance Perspectives in 1962, Cage discusses the relationship between dance and music. Interwoven in his discussion are a number of personal interactions and reminiscences in which the other participants are referred to only by a pronoun, never by name. The first footnote (which is placed in the middle of the text), for example, reads:

But when I try to remember her, I think of no stories. True, we sat together

by appointment in Carnegie Tavern, but there was a twisted quality in her

mind that made everything else seem absent. Nothing like conversation

took place. I only begged and she refused. The other one had a chance but

didn't take it and like most of us rabbits wherever he sees room he moves

in. The third who might have been one of the two — well, we tried. We

started a rumor that he had resigned. The young ones. Do they have to do

it all over again? (1967, 92).

In this case the “her” in Carnegie Tavern with a twisted mind, the “other one” with a chance, the “third,” the “two,” the “we,” and the “young ones,” all remain contextually undefined. This pattern continues through the text in include artistic commentary: “(When he was told that the addition of a little purple would give an impression of distance, he burst out laughing.)” (93); and in-the-moment interruptions to the writing process: “(he just telephoned)” (94).

This last interruption segues into the description of how Cage met a certain someone, although we are never told whom. I suspect that given the subject of the essay and—quite honestly—my own romantic instinct since the next paragraph begins “Blindly

124 in love.”—that in this instance “he” might be Merce Cunningham. However I cannot confirm this in light of other details. This guessing from outside points to at least one purpose of the un-referenced pronoun (which shows up in a number of other Cage lectures and academically informative texts, such as “Rhythm etc.”): Cage’s inner circle would know from time spent together and shared history to whom these pronouns referred. They act as a familylect exactly as Gordon describes, by creating a repertoire of memory, and a relationship between textual subjects that is more accessible to some than others. It also serves to disguise the nature of those relationships. If the unreferenced “he” referred to above is in-fact Merce Cunningham, then there was a pressing need to keep the nature of that relationship covered in the social climate of the Lavender scare. Cage’s writing is deeply informed by his kinship community, and their shared experiences and needs.

Johnston explicitly names her artistic community as a kinship network: in Mother

Bound, the first volume of her autobiography, she describes the queer sexual displacement enacted upon her by her shifting relationships with her mother and with other familial figures in her life. Towards the end of the volume she notes: “Fortunately I had been adopted by an extended art family who loved me for my services if nothing else” (1983, 123). The relationship of dance writers, and dance critics in particular, with dance performers, choreographers, and other members of the artistic community is difficult to define. For Johnston, however, dance writing provided an avenue into a chosen family that succeeded in performing aspects of the social familial role where her natal family consistently failed. Johnston even describes the complexities of her critical

125 position through a familial lens, indicating that while critics are parental figures in relationship to the childish play of artists, Johnston felt herself to be simultaneously in the role of both critic and child; she experimented aesthetically within a role that conferred authority, finding freedom, but also a lack of guidance (1985, 8).

Reading Marmalade Me, a collection of Johnston’s Village Voice reviews between 1960 and 1970,19 we can see elements of language use that create a continuum of kinship. A resolutely informal writer, Johnston explains her critical position as follows: “I’ll take a plot of level territory and stake out a claim to lie down on it and criticize the constellations if that’s what I happen to be looking at. I also stake out a claim to be an artist, a writer, if that’s what I’m doing when I get to the typewriter and decide that I liked something well enough to say what I think it’s all about” (1971, 101). True to her word she fixes her critical eye on dancers, musicians, audiences, trees, the sound of evening crickets, and writes to encompass them all as part of a time/movement-event.

The experimental style of Johnston's writing, particularly after she returned from

Bellevue Hospital in 1965, and even more so as she turned towards radical lesbian rhetoric in the 1970s, inspired a mix of skepticism, fascination, dismissal and awe in her readers. Even the least enamored of her work cannot seem to criticize it without trying out a passage or two of her style, such as Kevin McAuliffe's (1978) attempt: "jill johnston was just writing about anything that popped into her head anything at all like how her day went and what she did and what female lover she had just taken up with and where she was going and this and that and nobody but her most loyal devoted fanatic followers

19 And a few from other sources, including the New York Times. 126 could get through it let alone stand it and it drove everybody else at the paper crazy especially the people who had to quote unquote edit her but she did it anyway” (268-

269).20 McAuliffe also explains that Johnston's experiments were possible because of the editorial ethos at The Village Voice, which was that founder Dan Wolfe "wanted his readers to write what they wanted, not what they thought he wanted" (146). Wolfe describes this relationship, tellingly, as “one big unhappy family” (Frankfort 1976, 22). A family in which Wolfe tried to inspire trust in his writers--many of whom started out working for free--by allowing them to write in their own style on the topics most important to them, and by keeping editorial interventions to a bare minimum. While he did recruit Deborah Jowitt to provide supplemental dance coverage in light of Johnston's changing interests, he never censored Johnston's work (although he did publish a particularly long-winded piece in two parts), even when her mother wrote to the newspaper asking them not to publish any more of it. This working environment, in which sibling rivalries and family differences were simply background elements of a communal project, and which would override more traditional blood-family ties, complemented Johnston’s own practice of viewing her colleagues as family.

Johnston’s chosen family involved the collection of experimental performers, poets, musicians, dancers, artists, in extended community of Greenwich Village, especially those affiliated with the Judson Memorial Church and the Fluxus art

20 Interestingly here McAuliffe draws an implied criticism of Johnston’s sexual practices into his critique of her writing style and authorial persona.

127 movement centered on Canal Street. As Sally Banes writes, in the wake of World War

Two not only did the avant-garde document the breakdown of the nuclear family, but also it also often accepted and celebrated that dissolution (1993, 34). The avant-garde in

Greenwich Village during the 1960s provided alternative images of community, power, intimacy, and family both in works and in the structuring of their lives. Banes specifically notes that Fluxus made collective work a condition for membership – that anyone could join the community if they were willing to be engaged in the collective endeavors of the group as a whole (35).

As a result of her participation in the Greenwich Village avant-garde network,

Johnston was able to access a shared repertoire of prior conversations with artists and performers about their intent, their reactions performances, and their experiences both performative and mundane. She discloses these to the audience frankly as the sources of her insight, for example: “Deborah Hay stood or danced, in the room between the mirrors; actually she imitated (she told me) the kinds of distortions these mirrors make...”

(1971, 103). The parentheses in this case are uncharacteristic of this kind of interaction, although not of Johnston’s style as a whole, where they often indicate a switching between multiple critical and personal voices. As well as more formal statements of intention, Johnston offers her readers access to the intertextual network of more prosaic conversations around the works themselves. On October 1st 1964 Johnston published a review of a Stockhausen scored performance called Originale, in which she also participated as a free agent or “guest.” She lets us in on an argument that happened as a result of her interference with a painter in the space: “painter and wife… bore down on

128 me with hot denouncements in the name of serious intentions and such jazz, which prompted Allan Kaprow to bear down on them in the name of grace and so on, while

Allen Ginsburg, who had also been a subject of my happy interference the night before, sitting begoggled in gentle Buddhist indifference fingering some Eastern stringed instrument, remarked inaudibly that I could do whatever I liked with him, Jill” (53).

One result of this close relationship with her subjects is that, like Cage, Johnston feels no need to identify all of her subjects fully. While Martha Graham is consistently

“Miss Graham” and other figures go by both names, or by surname, dancing kin have their names shortened, surnames are dropped after the first usage, or sometimes only their first names are used to refer to them within the text, forcing us to guess who Johnston might be referring to. “Yvonne” (108), is fairly simple to identify as Yvonne Rainer even at my historical distance, but who are “David” and “Charlotte” (110)? Or “my friend”

(128)? While to a geographically or culturally distant reader, or one used to more formal critical standards this habit might appear exclusionary, preventing full access by those outside the kinship circle, Johnston’s erratic naming strategy reflects the nature of her relationship with the figures in her text: she does not formalize them into icons of themselves, but shows us the felt sense of the community around her and the network of relationships within it.

The security of her kinship network frees Johnston from the need to contextualize and separate events in space and in chronological time. She writes as if assured that her target audience can distinguish the various happenings and performances referenced, without the additional cuing of time, location etc. In “Dancing is a Dog,” originally

129 published on November 2nd, 1967, Johnston reviews a program of works at the New

School, but doesn’t distinguish between one piece and another, skipping out for a moment to talk about a sign/performance in the ape section of the Bronx Zoo (108).

Others in the program played similarly with presence, absence and identification:

Kenneth King sent in a letter of apology from Hong Kong, only to walk in front of the curtain before the performance started “in an outfit only people who know him would recognize him in” (109). Yvonne Rainer sent in a tape recording of a doctor’s note explaining the reason for her absence, but was also present in the performance of her work. Johnston’s decisions not to contextualize works within the circumstances of their production—and sometimes to refuse any distinction between the two—helps us enter into a poetics of non-linear time, in keeping with the aesthetic and political priorities of the community, but also recognized that the readership most valuable to her are those already present, who can decipher her codes and absences.

Marmalade Me is organized into six parts, influenced by chronological time but also, as Johnston tells us, by the progression of experimental choices in her writing style

– thus the sections are neither chronologically arranged as sections, nor chronologically consistent within themselves. Johnston does not make much use of specialized or technical language, but her later articles are very free in their use of profanity, as if

Johnston realized that she could create intensities of expression without alienating the audience she cared about. One invented term: “fux,” occurs repeatedly in “Fluxus

Fluxus,” an article from July 2nd, 1964, and which Johnston describes as “an early fluke in containing all the methods I later advanced self-consciously” (15). In the first few

130 sentences we see asymmetry, chronological and contextual distortion, and reference to shared events:

Fluxus flapdoodle. Fluxus concert, 1964. Donald Duck meets the

Flying Tigers. Why should anyone notice the shape of a watch at the

moment of looking at the time? Should we formulate the law of the fall of

a body toward a center, or the law of ascension of a vacuum toward a

periphery? The exposition became a double Bloody Mary. Some Fluxus

experts went to the Carnegie Tavern also. Fluxus moved into the street and

on to my typewriter. Polyethene and people everywhere and some of them

have all these voices, Soren Agenoux said (that) (73).

In the closing sentences of the review (which has no distinct paragraphs) Johnston twice uses the word “fux” as a verb. Both times she uses the word: “Fluxus fux any notion of value,” and “Meanwhile, I salute you and fux Fluxus from the forty-two keys of my typewriter” (75) she seems to be signifying the homophonic expletive in the sense of messing with, distorting, an interaction that is irreverent, possibly inappropriate. Cynthia

Gordon (2006) argues that specialized and invented language helps to create a unique family culture in which values are recognized and family members are able to be present in the text, if not in person (74). In this case Johnston hold the community values of irreverence, sexual frankness, language play, and coded meanings present in her writing, making a resource for others to draw upon in future dialogues. Johnston fux norms of language and family to create her own kinship network of artists and community.

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Conclusion

Across the multiple strands of this chapter I have explored ways in which experimental textual aesthetics in the writing of John Cage and Jill Johnston created a multi-layered intertext of meaning: exploring artistic and community values; pushing the boundaries of expression; covering queerness within the American Lavender scare; staking out territory for a feminized poetics; drawing on codes and tactics from other marginalized communities. Arguably their work created pathways for future dance writers to explore dance texts as an interdisciplinary medium for creating intensities of meaning and new models for writing against normative structures. Thinking about how these two authors created clusters of kinship for themselves under the shadow of

American conservatism gives us clues about the various pressures on dance as it gained prominence as an academic field, and invites us to look beneath an abstract poetics for political and communal messages. In my next chapter I will look at how the overarching field of dance writing was gradually brought into the realm of academia, and how dance studies scholars, especially Susan Foster, negotiated the demands of that environment while holding space for dance’s performative and political poetics.

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Chapter 4. Slamming, Smashing, Switching and Sliding: Dance Writing Tropes In American Higher Education

Sitting in this chair; squirming away from the glitches, aches, low-grade

tensions reverberating in neck and hip, staring unfocused at some space

between here and the nearest objects, shifting again, listening to my

stomach growl, to the clock ticking, shifting, stretching, settling, turning–I

am a body writing. I am a bodily writing. We used to pretend the body

was uninvolved, that it remained mute and still while the mind thought.

We even imagined that thought, once conceived, transferred itself

effortlessly onto the page via a body whose natural role as instrument

facilitated the pen. Now we know that the caffeine we imbibe mutates into

the acid of thought which the body then excretes, thereby etching ideas

across the page. Now we know that the body cannot be taken for granted,

cannot be taken seriously, cannot be taken (Foster 2010, 291).

This extended quote from Susan Foster’s foundational dance studies chapter

“Choreographing History” lays out one area of the discursive debate that stretched, collapsed, and gradually helped to shape the scope of dance studies as a discipline. Dance studies scholars, Foster included, fought centuries of Cartesian thinking in order to claim the right of the body—and thus dance—to know, to articulate, and to be a site of knowledge worthy of study. In the battle for the body these scholars made a number of strategic and tactical choices in the movement they chose to focus on, and how that

133 movement would be framed. In this chapter I look at two sites of that battle, memorialized as c/sites of victory in the territorial war that allow dance studies to claim and shape space in the academy: the collections of dance writing What is Dance, and the second edition of The Routledge Dance Studies Reader.21 As in any war there have been casualties, propaganda, positions defended and abandoned, and a series of uneasy choices. In pulling out the discourse of this campaign I show how the political and cultural work of dance studies required writers to strike a balance between the performative, discipline-specific language of dance and the norms of higher education. I will track developments in dance as a scholarly discipline, including the ongoing discussion as to how dance research and writing should be done.

I chose these two anthologies for their significance and scope in attempting to address the field of dance practice and theory. What is Dance was one of the first anthologies to bring together writings by philosophers, critics, choreographers and historical figures in a dialectic relationship, and was lauded across various reviews for being a significant step forward in dance’s theoretical literature (Carter 1982, Earle

1984). Although the anthology omits some key areas – Trevor Whittock’s 1985 review for Dance Research laments the lack of attention to Phenomenology and to perception

21 I chose to focus on the second edition of the Reader because of its inclusion of critical theory within dance studies. A third edition was also released in December of 2018, and the potential to analyze the shift in dance studies across the three readers is a promising avenue for continuing this research.

134 studies – overall the work was perceived as an exemplary scholarly text and was treated as such e.g. by citational recognition, and by the text’s inclusion on university dance program required reading lists. The second edition of The Routledge Dance Studies

Reader has a similarly dialectic approach, putting the voices of philosophers, critics, dance theorists and practitioners in conversation on a range of curated subjects.

Reviewing the first edition of the text for Dance Chronicle in 1999, Claudia Gitelman writes: “Dance Studies Reader performs an important service, and in my opinion it should be required reading for all who teach or intend to teach in universities, whether they engage in the scholarship of the studio or the lecture hall” (309). The articles excerpted for the collection are designed to give an overview of dance as a field, and like

What is Dance, the collection as a whole was perceived to be filling a gap in dance scholarship, and was/is broadly assigned in university settings (Grieman 2000; Kerr-

Berry 2011).

I begin with a short history of dance in higher education prior to the 1980’s to contextualize some of the projects and historical concerns in play when What is Dance was published in 1983. Looking at the difference between What is Dance, and the second edition of The Routledge Dance Studies Reader, I demonstrate that since the emergence of dance studies as a discipline there have been huge shifts in the kinds of knowledge deemed suitable subjects for dance research, but also in who can produce what kinds of knowledge. In particular I look at the growing recognition of dance modalities beyond the concert stage and, continuing my interest from other chapters, how the concert/social divide has been framed over time. I also look at the gender balance of the two

135 anthologies, following an analytical framework drawn from discourse analysis of the cinema in order to speak to women’s increasing power in the dance studies field. I support my broader analysis of the two anthologies with a close reading of Susan Foster’s

“Choreographing History” as one example of how a scholar places her research in an academic context, while still holding space for the experimental history of dance writing.

While Foster draws upon philosophical (and sometimes universalist) analytical tropes, acknowledging how the discourse of historians has been shaped by a drive towards distance and objectivity, she also uses performative writing techniques, including the consideration of movement as a kind of writing, to hold space for the specific kinds of knowledge producible through reflexive choreographic analysis.

A debate in my writing: should dance studies be capitalized? Dance Studies?

Even now the convention is unclear, are we a proper noun or not? I am still regularly informed that “I didn’t know you could get a PhD in dance,” in this case the “studies” preemptively dropped from my description of my own professional occupation. Our place in the academy is shaky, to choose dance implying a frivolity, a different kind of work or thinking, the privilege of devoting one’s life to a skillset deemed economically unnecessary. The bulk of the general population has no idea of our contributions to cultural understanding, to physical wellbeing, to scholarship. Do we matter as much as we think we do? Dance? Dance research? Dance studies? Dance Studies? The work described in this chapter remains ongoing. In understanding it, I turn first to the journey of dance into academia, and how scholars have historically framed dance as a research discipline.

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Studying and Researching In/With/Through Dance

Over the twentieth century the practice of dance as a field within higher education has changed remarkably. From a broad historical overview of that process I will focus in on two anthologies of dance writing and zoom in even closer still to examine the article

“Choreographing History” by Susan Leigh Foster, which she first wrote as a professor at

UC Riverside. This gradual tightening of perspective implies a strong correlation between general and specific linguistic trends, but my focus in this chapter is not to identify once and for all why the language of dance studies has changed, but to understand what that language is doing in specific contexts, and what questions and perspectives are thus made available to a reader through linguistic choices. The relationship of writing to dancing is a key focus of this chapter, and particularly how this relationship interacts with the role of the dance historian. Attitudes to universalism figure frequently in my analysis, as do the ways that writing maintains and challenges stereotypes of gender and power. In the end I demonstrate how Foster’s writing draws upon a philosophical and scholarly intertext that is deeply inculcated with norms of role (the roles of writer, historian, woman, and dancer), and yet still finds ways of writing through and beyond these roles to elevate the place of the performative within the academy. First, however, it is useful to understand

Foster’s position as a dance academic within the context of dance studies as an emergent discipline.

The first dance major was created in 1926 at the University of Wisconsin under the auspices of Margaret H'Doubler, in collaboration with the School of Education,

137 focusing on anatomical principles and movement sensation. Other early dance degrees focused on performance and physical education; Ellen Graff explains that in the post-war environment of the 1950s a group of dancers and teachers turned to universities as places to share modern dance education without the political associations of its urban, working- class origins. Universities and colleges provided jobs, performance opportunities, creative space, and a steady flow of students, even if those opportunities were most accessible to those artists who had stayed clear of obvious political dissent during the 1930s (1997,

169-171). While these programs inspired huge growth within modern dance and provided fruitful creative space for a large number of artists, the focus was rarely on education beyond undergraduate level, and by 1960 only 30 students in the United States had written doctoral dissertations in dance (Hagood 2000, 286).

In 1967, the then-Committee on Research in Dance sponsored the “Research in

Dance: Problems and Possibilities” conference in Riverdale, New York. Bonnie Bird stated in her introductory remarks, published in the conference proceedings, that the aims of the conference were to foster interpersonal exchange, to find out “where research is being done, who is doing it, and what they are doing,” to consider the future of dance research, and to establish CORD as stimulus and clearing house for the field of dance research (Bull 1976, 2). These proceedings show dance research occurring within higher education, as well as at specialist centers such as the Dance Notation Bureau. In this setting, research was subdivided into the categories of historical research or movement research, where the latter category included the sub-disciplines of research in dance-as- culture, and research in teaching and performing.

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The conference proceedings documenting the “Research in Dance” conference show the seeds of research agendas that are still very much present in the field today. For example, Dr. Dorothy Madden makes a lucid and persuasive argument for the choreographic dissertation: “A work of art is a mute testament of extensive research in content as well as to the endless maze of the artist's self—conscious and subliminal. In itself it can tick off the usual list of academic criteria translated into its own language, concepts, and its own form” (1976, 128). Madden’s argument predates by 45 years the similar points made by Robin Nelson (2013) in his text on Practice as Research in the

Arts, although even now PaR degrees in the United States are relatively rare (18), and the debate still continues around whether and how dance practice can produce clear and transmissible new knowledge. The trend towards dance research is also indicated by the fact that by 1970, 190 students had published doctoral dissertations in dance (Hagood

2000, 284-286). These included Maxine Sheets-Johnston’s work, published as a book in

1966, which uses phenomenological perspectives from philosophy to explain some of the ways that dance can produce meaning. As far as I can determine this marks one of the earliest attempts to integrate philosophy and dance in such a way as to shed light on both disciplines through analytical and experiential investigation - a framework that was to become hugely popular in the wake of the 1980’s cultural turn.

During the 1970’s the trend towards dance research continued. Higher education enjoyed a shift towards “vocationalism” or occupational competence as the expected outcome of a university degree, and this combined with a flourishing economy that prompted many students to train for jobs not considered traditionally financially viable

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(Hagood 2000, 218). The tenth Dance Research Annual published by CORD in 1979

(concurrent with the re-naming of the organization as the Congress on Research in

Dance) summarized the place of dance in Higher Education as follows: “You've come a long way, baby” (Rowe and Stodelle, ix). The new categorization of dance research reflects a pragmatic attitude to dance as a career-path: “Theoretical Perspective,”

“Practical Consideration” and “Historical Perspective.” The category of “Practical

Consideration” include floors for dance studios, a survey of dance departments, dance therapy, and childhood dance education; dance research was seen as necessary support for a broad range of careers in dance that went beyond performance, choreography and teaching. CORD also resolved in 1971 that dance faculty in Higher Education should be expected to develop a research practice and to publish in their field, and that university departments should support this endeavor; this move quite deliberately attempts to raise the status of written research as a fundamental element of dance training within university settings (Hagood 2000, 282).

In the 1980s, however, the US educational climate shifted again in the wake of a wider turn towards fiscal and social conservatism. The creation of large-scale state- managed systems of higher education linked even private colleges and universities inextricably with the national economic environment, framing the university as a business and the student as a customer/consumer (247). Prior to the 1980s the concert dance world was experiencing a “boom” - a wide range of companies performed to large, interested audiences. In the 1980s this growth began to reverse, and dance journals in particular declined in circulation. Dance historian Lynn Garafola notes that this reduction in

140 newspaper jobs prompted a number of influential dance critics to make the shift into higher education—notably Sally Banes, who took up her first assistant professor position at Florida State University in 1980—and that this shift created a divide between dance journalism and academic writing; academic research within systems of higher education provided protected space for in-depth critical writing and experimental dance performance (2007, xiii).

The dance boom also consolidated ways to articulate the political and cultural importance of dance, and its validity as an academic subject. This facilitated the move into higher education and spurred the growth of dance studies as a discipline. In a 2008 conference Susan Manning noted that by the late 1970s an audience for dance writing existed, and that this audience shared a vocabulary of specialized terminology that made it possible to develop detailed research, rather than introducing realms of thought and glossing terminology. Scholars could compete for research prizes, attend yearly conferences, and publish in field journals such as Dance Research Journal or Dance

Chronicle. The intellectual resources of "shared knowledge, collective conversation and ongoing debate" acted as stabilizing and controlling features of discourse, and Manning argues that it was only at this moment that the informal network of dance scholars coalesced into a recognizable discipline (6).

With the move into the academy came the development of a more literary mode of analyzing dance, rather than using ethnographic or historical methods. Susan Foster’s

Reading Dancing, published in 1986, provided an early model for this shift in disciplinary methods, and paved the way for a more discursive viewing of the dancing

141 body (Goellner and Shea Murphy 1995, 2). Foster states that her work is discursively oriented because it places dance in relationship with other discourses that produce knowledge about the body and its subjectivity, for example etiquette, rhetoric, and physical education; she uses these relationships to show the various ways dance can be read beyond narrative or expressive interpretations (Foster 1986, 100). Foster uses linguistic phenomena: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony, to organize different modes of reading autonomous dance practices and their relations to the world, setting up dance as a site of cultural, social and political discourse, expressive beyond the artistry of staged physical movement (Martin 1998, 201). While Foster’s “Choreographing History” essay comes from slightly later in the chronology of dance studies (the essay was first published in 1995 and I cite the version re-published in 2010, there are some minor changes between the two versions, which I will discuss below), I view it as an important piece of terrain in the ongoing evolution of dance’s place in academia; strengthening the sometimes-tenuous footing of dance studies as a realm of critical scholarship.

With this background information established, the next phase of my analysis is to compare generalized and specific examples of dance writing from the 1980s – and the emergence of dance studies – and the 2000s, with the benefit of twenty years of developing practice and scholarship. I have undertaken this project by comparing two anthologies of dance writing from these respective phases in the trajectory of dance studies: What is Dance (Copeland and Cohen 1983) and The Routledge Dance Studies

Reader, 2nd Edition (Carter and O’Shea 2010).

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Method

In this chapter I have used computer assisted analysis software to investigate linguistic patterns in two dance anthologies, in order to identify changes within the discourse of dance studies. This analysis draws on a Foucauldian sense of discourse: recurrent patterns in the expression of thought that shape our social norms and values.

Linguist Michael Stubbs offers the concept that a discourse does not determine thought, but that habits of discourse produce conventional representations of people, subjects, and events, and thus provide access to “pre-fabricated” ideas that are easy to convey and grasp (1996, 158). The essays collected in What is Dance and in the second edition of

The Routledge Dance Studies Reader are written by a wide range of authors, speaking across time on a spectrum of topics, but represent the state of the discourse of dance studies in America at two particular moments in time; attending to changes in their discourse between these two moments can help illustrate changes in the values, perspectives, and common ideas of dance studies.

Computer assisted analysis can be used to compare texts too large for human pattern analysis, and they can also be used to compare texts to institutional discourses, public corpora of common language use, etc. In this chapter, which compares two anthologies with each other, computer analysis helped me in my preliminary attempts to sort through both texts and draw out discipline-specific language patterns, changes in language use within the field of dance studies, and connections between the larger picture of dance studies as a discipline, the specific discourse manifestations of the anthologies, and the smaller-scale analysis of one specific dance studies essay. I used AntConc corpus

143 compilation and analysis software to upload the text of both works and to examine the concordance of various terms (i.e. how certain words tend to cluster), and the changing context and treatment of key words, including “dance,” “body,” and gendered pronouns.

Looking at both anthologies side-by-side and broken down according to these criteria enabled me to identify major shifts in language use and think about how they might be relevant to the changing position of dance over time, while manual confirmation of my findings allowed me to control for computer error (such as the misidentification of words). Based on my initial digital analysis I then used human decision-making and qualitative analysis to draw conclusions and analyze how the terms that emerged fit within my broader historical study of the development of dance studies as an academic field.

Studying Dance Research, Researching Dance Studies

In this chapter my focus is on academic discourse, particularly those texts considered central to dance scholarship. What is Dance is an anthology of dance writing originally published in 1983, and the second edition of The Routledge Dance Studies

Reader is another anthology, published in 2010. What is Dance aims to present an historical overview of dance writing, and the texts within include eighteenth and nineteenth century dance criticism from Théophile Gautier and Georges Noverre, as well as articles commissioned specifically for the collection; by contrast, all texts in the

Reader are from the 20th or 21st century, marketed by the editors as “essential texts on dance and expert guidance on their critical context” (Carter and Shea Murphy 2010, Front

144 leaf). What is Dance contains texts originally published for a variety of audiences: the modernist criticism of Andre Levinson and John Martin; artists’ manifestos; commentary by musicians and social thinkers; and the beginnings of the cultural turn within dance studies. The length of articles and the way they are organized indicates that the anthology itself is intended for student scholars. Other than the section of the work entitled “Dance and Society,” the dance forms under consideration within this text remain securely within

Western concert dance. Both editors are male-presenting, as are more than two-thirds of the authors published within. The Routledge Dance Studies Reader is devoted to long- form essays for a scholarly or graduate student readership, as indicated by the length and critical bent of many of the works within. Concert and vernacular dance forms from a wide range of countries and communities can be found in every section of the text. Both editors, and 29 of the 35 authors are female-presenting. These changes alone, which I will return to later in the chapter, point to shifts in how dance studies acts as a field: an increasing focus on graduate education and critical writing as a profession, a shift of power and influence towards female voices, and a post-colonial attitude to race and culture that champions previously marginalized forms of dance and raises the status of the vernacular.

Generally speaking, What is Dance showcases the historical scope of dance writing arriving at a moment of transition. Editors Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen collect the kinds of work that dance writing has done in the past, and thereby make a case for the new kinds of dance writing emerging in academia, situating them in a historical tradition of curiosity, articulation, and analysis. The work of dance writing emerges as a

145 theme within the content, for example the section of the work on dance criticism, or

Joann Kealiinohomoku’s (1983) essay “An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of

Ethnic Dance,” in which she considers anthropological dance writing, and how it serves to undervalue and misrepresent some dance forms in contrast to those treated as concert dance. The Reader exists to serve dance students, assuming both the existence of a dance population, and the need of that population to immerse itself in critical theory. Similarly to What is Dance, the Reader offers historical dance writing as the implicit groundwork for the development of analytical theory, but the offerings are skewed much more significantly towards emergent, contemporary writing. Parts three and five of the reader,

“Ways of looking” and “Debating the discipline,” are particularly concerned with modes of written analysis and scholarship; but even outside of these two sections, essays like

Elizabeth Dempster’s (2010) “Women Writing the Body: Let’s Watch a Little How She

Dances” consider bodily inscription, and writing as a metaphor for developments in postmodern dance (235).

From these two anthologies I chose the essay “Choreographing History” as a focus for close analysis for a number of reasons. As I described above, Foster’s work developing methods from literary modes of analysis is considered groundbreaking by a range of scholars and produced a clearly defined shift in the kinds of dance studies undertaken: specifically access to a more politicized analysis of movement.

“Choreographing History” provides commentary on the role of dance and writing, and how these two forms interact with each other, exploring this idea through philosophy, example, history and creative analogy. “Choreographing History” deals with the place of

146 the body in the practice of historiography. Editors Alexandra Carter and Janet O’Shea place the text within the concerns of “new dance studies” – a practice of the 1990s that attends to the relationship between dance and its constitutive methodologies. “What, asks

Foster, is the relationship between past history and the mode of recording it? That is, between experience, especially the untranslatable experience of dance, and the written word?” (Carter and O’Shea 2010, 285). Foster discusses the tendency of the body and its movement to be inexpressible, and to transcend the boundaries of any ordering practices.

Considering this bodily awareness, she asks how the body of the historian creates dance history, and the need for bodies to find a compromise wherein dance can be recorded without domination. In the final section of the text Foster offers an extended analogy for her concerns, describing a duet between Clio and Terpsichore, the muses of history and dance. Over the course of this essay, I will look at examples from throughout

“Choreographing History,” thinking about how the concerns, debates and growth of dance studies are reflected in Foster’s writing.

Foster has applied choreography as an analytical framework for understanding movement to a range of subjects including gender (“Choreographies of Gender” 1998), the performer-audience connection (Choreographing Empathy 2011), and to social and political action (“Choreographies of Protest” 2003). Foster’s “Choreographing History” essay is a particularly useful one to draw on in a discussion of universalism in dance because her framework of choreography as analysis has been used both as a challenge to universalism within dance practice and scholarship and criticized as supporting the same.

Rebecca Kowal, author of How to Do Things With Dance (2010), for example, uses

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Foster’s analysis of the “myth of the natural body” to unpack the idea of universalism in choreographer Anna Halprin’s work, and to discuss how Halprin’s universalist aims ignored cultural distinctions in the Asian cultural practices she drew on (227-8).

Meanwhile Marta Savigliano in her chapter “Worlding Dance and Dancing Out There in the World (2009) points out that “Choreography” itself has been universalized as a strategic tool for making and understanding dances (169), thereby placing choreographers themselves outside of cultural systems and assuming “the role of a universal translator of dance traditions” (187). Gay Morris and Jens Giersdorf echo this point, pointing out the

“seeming neutrality of choreography” as a methodological knowledge system, even as it structures historical and social traces of dance, and scholarly positions on dance, in relationship to each other (2016, 7); they also call for a recognition of “specific cultural materiality” as a necessary counterpart to the use of choreography as an analytical framework. In this chapter I propose a close reading of Foster’s own words on the subjects of choreography and history to show how her critical project lies within, alongside, and in contrast to the discourse of a field that still retains elements of a universalist past.

What Is Dance?

Or rather, what does dance studies study? In What is Dance, the earlier of my two anthologies, the research covers organized and aesthetically-inclined movement, while the Reader uses dance studies more as a critical tool for thinking through various manifestations of movement – concrete and theoretical. From the starting point of a

148 computer analysis it is possible to identify some of the main ways in which dance writers envisioned dance across the historical space of the two anthologies, and to understand why even in the Reader a trend remains of universalizing dance; of treating some manifestations of dance as normative and some manifestations of dance as “other.”

Philosophical definitions of universalism can be loosely divided between

Hegelian and Kantian. Philosopher Cesare Casarino neatly sums up the distinction between these two points of origin, explaining that Hegelian universalism looks to synthesize contradictions under the overarching community of a totality – the British have a stiff upper lip, Americans are loud – while Kantian universalism looks to strip away incidences that differ from a common whole – cowards are not really British etc.

(2009, 168-169). While universalism in What is Dance follows a more Kantian model of excluding some kinds of movement from the larger totality of “dance,” instead placing them within smaller, exclusive categories such as “ethnic dance,” Savigliano’s critique of

Foster (above) implies that Foster exercises a more Hegelian universalism, absorbing individuality and cultural specificity within a synthesized totality of “historians” or

“humans.” Two textual features present in What is Dance that draw on this universalist perspective, and that have fallen out of use in the Reader, are the use of a definite article for dance as a medium (the dance), and the idea that “dance must” or “dance should” act in certain ways.

The use of "the dance" as a noun phrase referring to the medium of dance is typified in this sentence by dance critic Théophile Gautier, quoted by critic André

Levinson: "The French are not sufficiently artistic to be satisfied with the plastic forms of

149 poetry, painting, music and the dance” (1983, 47). While the inclusion of a definite article might simply be the result of translation from Gautier’s French (in which the article would be grammatically included), the other listed mediums of poetry, painting and music all drop the article in translation, suggesting that the use of “the dance” is specifically meaningful, and it is likely that this is because of the historical Neo-Platonist philosophy of the dance as a – very literally – universal medium. According to dance historian Françoise Carter, Plato and his contemporaries believed that the celestial bodies of the universe moved in a primordial dance accompanied by the music of the spheres, and that while humans cannot hear universal music, it is possible for them to see and imitate the universal dance, and thus repair the damage done to their souls (Carter 1996,

15). The surging popularity and theorization of dance during the Renaissance, concentrated in French courts, used Neo-Platonist and Humanist theories to affiliate dance with the mathematical sciences and as a way of replicating the cosmic order of the universe. Dance masters strove to codify the kinds of dance that achieved this aim, and as a result reified courtly dancing as a high art quite different from secular, morally questionable forms for movement, thanks to its connection with universal ideals of harmony and order (Carter 1987, 14). Use of the term “the dance,” therefore, might indicate a belief that dance is subject to universal ideals, or to shared aesthetic and social goals, or to justify the moral rigor of a specific dance practice. In the case of Havelock

Ellis's historical article "The Art of Dancing," originally published in 1923, the concept of "the dance" is used to trace a history from "anthropoid apes" to ancient cultures around the globe to the concert dance of the present, making the grandiose claim that "It is the

150 dance that socialized man" (1983, 493). A universalist attitude to dance, whether that attitude is indicated by a definite article or not, implies a desire for synthesis and commonality that in turn facilitates prescriptivist attitudes to the medium.

This more prescriptive attitude to the work of dance is also indicated by the presence of “must” and “should” statements regarding the work, performance and reception of dance, which appear in various articles across What is Dance. For some authors these statements relate to choreographic ideals: for Michel Fokine – according to critic Cyril Beaumont – dance “should be at once significant and beautiful, the latter in both a moral and a pictorial sense” while choreographer Martha Graham believes that:

“dance should be a revelation of experience, regardless of how unpleasant the result might be” (Cohen, Selma Jeanne 1983, 19). For the followers of Merce Cunningham dance “should confine itself to examining and revealing the qualities of human movement in greater isolation, for its own sake” (Cohen, Marshall 1983, 162). Others relate to the way that different styles of dance should be studied and understood, analyst David Levin writes that: “To achieve a modernist drama, the syntax of dance must be so presented that it is aesthetically accessible neither as purely literal movement (an objective modification, in Euclidian space, of the dancer's "real” body) nor as wholly figurative movement (a subjective qualification of the dancer's formally expressive "phenomenal" body), but rather as both simultaneously” (1983, 132). Other such statements deal with the philosophical value of dance, the status of dance among other art forms, the relationship of dance to music etc.

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The authors making these statements held a powerful authority in their own moment of writing, and were selected for the What is Dance anthology as “the best writing about dance currently available in English.” The editors required that works in the collection examine the issues of dance aesthetics, display sustained and rigorous thinking, and not be – with a few exceptions – broadly available in other collections (Copeland and

Cohen 1983, vii). These “must,” and “should” statements indicate ideologies held by the authors, and supported to some degree by the editors in this collection. We can see in the statements above a shift from the use of “the dance” to represent the entire medium, towards categorization and comparison, whether based on named artists or around dance genres such as modernist or ethnic or “pure.” A search of the Reader uncovers several statements denoting what historians, readers, and writers must or should do, but none for a generalized idea of “dance” or dance project. Additionally, devices of categorization and comparison start to reflect the concert dance/social dance divide, rather than different genres within concert dance as a whole.

One key indicator of this shift in categorization is the relationship between ballet and modern dance, both in relationship to each other and in how they are positioned within a wider network of cultural and artistic projects. Lincoln Kirstein proclaimed in

1978 that “Dance includes separate families for teaching and performance: “ballet,”

“ethnic,” “social,” and “modern” (1983, 238). In their editorial essay introducing the

What is Dance section “Genre and Style,” Marshall Cohen and Roger Copeland begin:

“…most critics and historians of the dance remain firmly committed to the practice of categorization. Indeed, throughout most of this century, they have routinely divided

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Western, theatrical dancing into two sometimes antagonistic genres, ballet and modern dance” (1983 225). While the editors go on to note a third category of post-modern dance, as well as “troublesome cases” such as works that blur the boundaries between genres, or the need to consider individual or national choreographic styles – “British

“reserve,” Russian “flamboyance,” or American “athleticism” (236) – they also stay firmly attached to a need to classify dance based on dialectic thinking.

The opposition between ballet and modern dance was very much a feature of artistic and critical rhetoric during the first half of the 20th century, and many named artists deliberately placed themselves on one rhetorical side or the other of this oppositional binary (although many were more flexible in the realities of their artistic practice). Isadora Duncan, for example, wrote publicly that she was in “direct opposition to today’s school of ballet,” and instead favored “natural,” “harmonious movements”

(1981, 34). In 1940 Lincoln Kirstein deliberately produced a manifesto for the Ballet

Society that challenged modern dance for primacy in its use of avant-garde ideas and aesthetics, instead favoring ballet as the art form most likely to lead dance‘s progress into the artistic future (Morris 2006, 38). By the time the Reader was published, however, ballet had receded from its primacy in dance scholarship (the term “ballet” arises in the text only 259 times in the Reader, in contrast to What Is Dance, where we see over 1000 incidences of its use). We can also see that the dialectic of ballet against modern dance has softened and the forms are far more likely to be discussed in a framework of similarity than difference, in fact editor Janet O’Shea’s introduction reads at one point:

“[McFee’s] examples develop out of Western Concert Dance, ballet and modern dance”

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(Carter and O’Shea 2010, 9). This decision to list ballet and modern dance as the primary examples of forms within Western Concert Dance creates a contrast between these two forms and other dance forms not generally considered part of that power structure. The opposition between ballet and modern dance is acknowledged as an historical discussion, but by the time the Reader was published the more pressing dialectic is the opposition between Western Concert forms and other kinds of dance – in the process of scholarly attempts to decolonize dance studies, ballet and modern become framed discursively as holding positions of power against which other forms must compete for recognition.

One essay from the Reader that specifically delves into this issue of categorization is Sherril Dodd’s (2010) article “Slamdancing with the Boundaries of

Theory and Practice: The Legitimisation of Popular Dance” in which she calls for the validation of popular dance within dance studies; moving away from an absolutist value system that names some dance forms as canonical high culture, and towards a relativist value system that celebrates diversity and democratizes cultural practices (347). Dodds makes this argument through a historiographical review of popular dance in the dance studies field, examining how various scholars from the 1980s onwards have dealt with popular dance in a way that creates scholarly or social knowledge. Dodds’s own research into slamdancing and pogoing forms an analogy running through the text for how popular dance shakes up knowledge structures, and disrupts the ways that cultural practices are valued and conceived (345).

In one sentence of this article, Dodds creates clear areas of categorization for popular dance (the numbers in the quote indicating Dodds’s placement of endnotes):

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“There are now well-developed research clusters of African American vernacular dance,3 period dances of the early twentieth century,4 ballroom and Latin,5 Lindyhop and swing,6 and contemporary club dance7 to name a few” (347). Following the footnotes leads us to a cluster of papers that serve as further reading in each research cluster, and thus act to group dance practices into research categories. Ethnographically speaking, the creation of these categories is a way of structuring and organizing cultural knowledge, but in this instance dance studies is also being divided into genre-based sub-disciplines that inform how these dances are understood (Spradley and McCurdey 1972, 60). Dodds’s choice to distinguish the research clusters African American vernacular dance, period dances of the early twentieth century, and Lindy Hop22 and swing, draws a boundary between African

American vernacular dances and the period dances where those vernacular forms had huge influence (despite her sources specifically citing those influences), while collapsing the differences between Lindy Hop and revival style swing dance. It is unclear whether the “ballroom” in the cluster of “ballroom and Latin” is intended to refer to early ballroom style dances, Foxtrot, Waltz etc., or to DanceSport-style ballroom, which includes a Latin category; either way, it seems strange to conflate the extensive research on Latin social dance forms (for example Savigliano 1995, or Browning 1995)23 and ballroom by listing them together in this way. While my argument may seem pedantic, the problem of easy clustering and classification points to an issue in popular dance

22 Dodds’s choice to spell “Lindy Hop” as “Lindyhop” is highly unconventional, although it is shared by the Oxford Dictionary of Dance.

23 Also by Cindy Garcia, 2013, who post-dates Dodds’s analysis. 155 research that Dodds herself identifies: the terms used in studying popular dance are riddled with ambiguity, and the boundaries between forms are temporary and fluid (2010,

347-8). Dodds does not include in the article the argument – seen in my first chapter – that many popular dance styles emerge from marginalized identity categories, and that their history is often marked by white narratives of appropriation and definition. We can see the impact of that history, however, in her decision to cluster popular vernacular dance styles with their appropriated, white-dominated counterparts. This extended example shows the need for scholars to include culturally located frameworks in their categorization of dance, much as those frameworks are needed to avoid the potential universalism of choreography as analytical tool.

In “Choreographing History,” Foster is clearly writing from a viewpoint that all movement is equally worthy of study within dance studies, as we can see in the examples she uses to illustrate her work, including the regimens of observation seen in thousands of

“push-ups, plies or Pap-smears” (2010, 292). Juxtaposing kinesthetic movement techniques with codified dance vocabulary and pedestrian movement routines, and placing balletic vocabulary in the middle of the list to avoid any implication of concert- based hierarchy, sets Foster up as an ideological egalitarian when it comes to the work of dance studies. This does not mean that Foster doesn’t have movement preferences, or types of dance she considers perhaps more personally valid than others. In her creation of metaphors that describe the process between bodies and writing as dancing, she categorizes their movement as: “not the euphoric dance of the self-abandoned subject, not the deceptively effortless dance of hyperdisciplined bodies, but, instead, the reflexive

156 dance of self-critical bodies who none the less find in dancing the premise of bodily creativity and responsiveness – I’m not leading or following” (298). Choreographed history does not go out clubbing in an ecstasy of escapism, it does not do ballet, nor does it partake of formal partner dancing. Foster’s choreography is a post-modern bricolage of techniques and ideas, able to think back on itself in the moment and – notably – implying that these other forms of dance cannot do the same. For all her deliberate egalitarianism when it comes to the kinds of movement modalities that dance studies should research, the agents of dance studies – those doing the research – must be more selective when choosing what kinds of dance to practice within the scope of her choreographic analogy, and it is here that we see categories of dance implied and ranked as worthy tools.

Understanding Dance Studies in Text and Conversation

The use of “dance studies” throughout this chapter is sometimes anachronistic in context, given that the term did not gain disciplinary traction until the 1980s. The term

"dance studies" does not appear at all in What is Dance. Instead, approaches to dance are seen in light of specific roles, the most common being dance critics, dance notators, and dance scholars. By contrast the term "dance studies" occurs 153 times in the Reader, not including those times where the term refers to the title of the text itself.24 This suggests that while with hindsight we look at the 1980s as a turning point in the emergence of

24 For those interested, the editorial choice appears to have been not to capitalize, except when referring to a text title or university department.

157 dance studies methods and ideas the term itself was not commonly marked as significant, and texts naming their project explicitly as “dance studies” were not yet considered central to the field. By 2010, however, "dance studies" has a clear disciplinary identity, as evidenced by the publication of a devoted anthology, but also by the confidence and fluency with which the term is used by a variety of authors.

I introduced this chapter with metaphors of conflict and war, drawn from my own experience as a student and teacher of dance in higher education. In a conference round table on dance studies in 2013, Janice Ross and André Lepecki described the state of the humanities in higher education as a “war” in which the humanities must fight for funding, students and class time against a shift towards the social and “hard” sciences (Clayton et al. 2013, 15-17). The broader scope of their conversation addresses the nature of dance studies, and how scholars do dance studies in various ways. A major conclusion is that the shape of dance studies follows institutional lines, which in the US are split into three major tracks: the first model, championed by Susan Foster, “understands dancing, and especially the organization of dancing that we call choreography, as a mode of theorizing.

Thus dance studies aims to illuminate how dance practice theorizes the body, self and other, collectivity and divinity. This model posits that dance studies differs in kind from other inquiries within the humanities and the humanistic social sciences and proposes performative writing as a way of marking that difference” (8). The second model, which

Susan Manning claims to follow in the same roundtable conversation, is an integrationist practice which: “promotes dance studies as an established subfield within a range of departments in the humanities or humanistic social sciences. An integrationist model

158 posits that dance studies differs not in kind, but in degree from other fields in the humanities and humanistic social sciences” (9). The third model treats dance studies as an interdisciplinary methodology that draws particularly on performance studies methods to research across a variety of fields. Lepecki also claimed – jokingly – that dance studies is an American thing, and that European critical dance theory is largely drawn from the migrating work of American writers (18). Understanding how different dance studies scholars place themselves in relationship to these models can help explicate their theoretical and methodological choices.

One of the claims made in the emergence of dance studies is that writing is an essential complement to the practices of dance performance and choreography. We can see this groundwork laid out in What is Dance in the editors’ introduction to the section of the anthology that deals with dance criticism. The editors distinguish various kinds of criticism and review within the arts: where a review acts as a “consumer guide” for audiences yet to see the work, a critic can interpret the work and discuss the issues it raises (Copeland and Cohen 1983, 423). They explain how practices of dance criticism have emerged in response to the form’s ephemerality – they quote John Mason’s analogy of attempting to tattoo a soap bubble – adding that a tendency towards abundant description helps “establish the physical reality of the dance” (424-425), or at least that description lends a degree of permanence to dance, only after which can it be subject to criticism. In short, their argument resides on the fundamental ideas that, first, writing has the capacity to reproduce meaningful elements of dance, and, second, that dance has the capacity to have meaning beyond the narrative or affective. In his foundational essay on

159 art and technological reproduction, Walter Benjamin makes a similar point: “But as soon as the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applied to artistic production, the whole social function of art is revolutionized. Instead of being founded on ritual, it is based on a different practice: politics” (2008, 25). In other words, if writing can succeed in reproducing dance, then it can comment on the political meaning of dance, rather than simply recreating the author’s impression of an aesthetic experience. Writing, according to Benjamin, facilitates the political interpretation of dance beyond the initial event of its performance. Authors in the Reader especially use criticism to manifest the political potential of various kinds of dance, but despite a long history of choreographers making dances for political ends, the acceptance of dance as a political modality has continued to produce debate in dance writing. This need for writing to justify and validate the potential political capacities or meaning of dance is just one way that scholarly dance writers find themselves able to act as gatekeepers of how dance is recognized and understood.

In many ways dance criticism relies on the stereotypically ephemeral, “mute” nature of dance to justify over-writing the a/political intention of a piece of choreography, regardless of how its authors have described it. In my last chapter, for example, I over- wrote Merce Cunningham’s assertion that his dance meant only in terms of movement by analyzing his work in relationship to practices of queer covering. This practice of over- writing can be found sprinkled liberally throughout dance studies as writers re-read choreography and deliver their own interpretations. A short range of examples: Ann

Daly, in her article “The Balanchine Women: Of Hummingbirds and Channel

Swimmers” argues that Balanchine’s choreography strips his female dancers of power

160 and agency and emphasizes the problematic masculinity of his partnering (1987). In his essay “Dance and the Political” Mark Franko quotes choreographer Mark Morris’s insistence that his choreography is a-political, but then goes on to describe how the play of dress and gender in Dido and Aeneas engages with the historicized politics of sex and sexuality, effectively writing a political intention into Morris’s work (2007, 15). Martha

Graham managed to hold a delicately balanced ambiguity towards socialist politics in

New York City during the 1930s, which has not stopped critics and historians from assigning an ideological position to her. Socialist dance critic Edna Ocko reviewed

Graham’s work consistently for the leftist magazine New Theater, but while Lynn

Garafola uses a historiographical analysis of those reviews to place Graham in opposition to New York Socialists during the 1930s (2002, 58), Ellen Graff uses the same material to insist that Graham was always welcome within, and valued by, socialist political circles (1997, 107).

This over-writing or re-interpretation of a choreographer’s stated (or deliberately unstated) intention can be traced to the practice of literary New Criticism, and more recently to literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes’s pronouncement that “the author is dead,” which theoretically freed writers and critics from adhering to the analytical framework of an author’s intention. Barthes used Mallarmé’s work (among others) to argue for the substitution of “language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner” (1977, 143), i.e. that the material content of a dance, or text, should be the focus of analysis, rather than the person implied through that dance or text as its creative agent. Dance critics embraced the invitation to take up the materiality

161 of dance as a guide to its political ends, but as Deborah Jowitt points out, the choreographers of the 1980s and thereafter have also tended to lean into the politicization of critical practice, welcoming the articulation of various analogies and signifiers left as a floating invitation to the critic: “They want their work dignified by the intellectual display and distant tone they see in some film criticism and art criticism… Digging into the work to extract allusions and archetypical elements can become a seductive brain game” (2001, 8-9). The political position of the choreographer, and the kinds of criticism their dance should invite is - Jowitt concludes - dependent on historical context, even as

Franko and others would argue that the application of politicized methodologies is essential for our understanding the world of dances, whatever their overt political agenda.

The position of author-as-gatekeeper is evident in a close reading of

“Choreographing History.” Foster inserts her body’s own materiality into her work from the very first sentence, positioning her authorial self not just as an equal to the dancing bodies she describes (indicating this democracy through the recounting of her own dancing experiences). But Foster is also aware of the disciplinary construction of the work of the historian, and how this role implies documentary authority over the legibility and durational recognition of dance and dancers. The risks for dancers who fail to fall into historical patterns is apparent: “Not all writing bodies, however, fit into the shapes that such theories make for them. Some wiggle away or even lash out as the historian escorts them to their proper places, resisting and defying the sweep of significance that would contain them. In the making of the historical synthesis between past and present bodies, these bodies fall into a no-man’s-land between the factual and the forgotten where

162 they can only wait for subsequent generations of bodies to find them” (2010, 297).

Despite her position that the body’s movement is a kind of writing, in this paragraph

Foster seems to suggest that bodily writing cannot become legible to temporally distant readers without some kind of transcription or translation into linguistic text. This idea of dance’s dependence on writing can be found in the term “choreography,” which literally translates as “dance-writing,” and remains within contemporary dance theory. For example, André Lepecki asserts that “dance cannot be imagined without writing, it does not exists [sic] outside writing’s space” (2004, 124). Challenges to this dependence also exist: in 2003 Diana Taylor argued that “we learn and transmit knowledge through embodied action, through cultural agency, and by making choices” (xvi), theorizing a mode of transmission called the repertoire, in contrast to the structures of the archive.

While Foster’s choice of “bodily writing” as a framing metaphor for her article retains the discursive link between movement and text, her project also requires dance scholars to consider how documents of dancing bodies “take shape from the formal constraints imposed by the discipline of history” (295), and how consideration of movement might mitigate the erasure of bodies that fall outside disciplinary norms.

Homing in on the linguistic switch that occurs between Foster’s title and her text provides more nuance to the disciplinary relationship of movement and writing within dance studies: choreographing history becomes a practice of bodily writing, in other words while the title proposes that history be framed as dance, Foster’s language implies that the body be read graphically/verbally. The majority of Foster’s text deals with the translation and transcription of bodily inscription. Writing is framed as an inscriptive

163 practice of the body that is still both bodily and textual, without any explicit explanation of how that history is choreographed as such until the final paragraph of her main text

(before Bodily Musings). At this point it becomes clear Foster means that it is the choreography of bodies moving through time that create history, not that the written documentation of history can be thought of as constructed choreography. The historian dances as they write, but ironically it is a “body of constraints that shape the writing of history” (299 italics mine), against and through which writing (textual and bodily) must find new ways of communicating. In “Choreographing History” the emphasis is on how scholarly dance writing can center the body in order to allow bodies to speak, but by consistently framing those bodies as “writing” Foster, in my reading, allows writing to remain the dominant force in the transmission of bodily knowledge.25

An additional perspective on the necessity for textual transcription of movement can be read through the light of the economic concerns surrounding dance’s place in the academy, and specifically the university system as a capitalist environment. Dance writing allows for dance to circulate beyond the limited duration of a live performance, and therefore to be monetized in sustainable ways through journal subscriptions, book sales etc. While not especially lucrative, the monetization of dance and dance scholarship

25 For a discussion of how metaphor selection can retain historical paradigms even as the text itself pushes against them, see Emily Martin’s 1991 article, “The Egg and The

Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female

Roles.” Signs 16, no. 3 (Spring): 485-501.

164 as indicators of academic or artistic prestige are significant, or as Peggy Phelan puts it:

“The pressures brought to bear on performance to succumb to the laws of the reproductive economy are enormous” (1993, 146). As described above, the 1980s saw a reframing of universities as businesses and students as consumers; while in

“Choreographing History” Foster is not directly arguing for the reproduction of dance as a consumerist necessity, her support of writing as a vital step in opening up dance to communication and critique can be read as supporting dance’s participation in the capitalist structures of the academy. The Routledge Dance Studies Reader is described by its editors as “a vital resource for anyone interested in understanding dance from a global and contemporary perspective...” and retails for $51 on Amazon.

Debates about the nature of dance, writing and the relationship between them promise to remain rich within dance studies; the term itself can be said to encompass a disciplinary understanding that “dance studies”:

• Is historicized in the gradual development of the role of the dance writer as an

authoritative viewer.

• Speaks to the gradual realization that dance can act politically, and a belief that

dance writing is a necessary component of making that potential legible over

time.

• Indicates the academicization of dance within academic institutions as a

knowledge-producing field, with a right to benefit monetarily from that

knowledge.

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Dance Studies Speaks

The definition of “dance” itself has been challenged and expanded across the two anthologies: in What is Dance the editors specifically limit the definition of dancing to exclude “marching in parades” and “sawing trees” on the grounds that these forms of organized, patterned movement do not attempt to create a world, an illusion, or an expression of humanity (Copeland and Cohen 1983, 2). In the Reader, however, the editors follow the scholarship of dance anthropologists Brenda Farnell and Adrienne

Kaeppler to argue that distinguishing dance from other forms of human movement is a

Western construct, and that therefore the study of dance should – as we have seen in

Foster’s writing – include all forms of human movement (Carter and O’Shea 2010, 5).

This expansion has allowed an interdisciplinary citational network to flourish across dance, philosophy, and the humanities as dance writers have sought to articulate the relevance of dance to the broader concerns of human living. In this process dance studies has encountered some of the inherent biases of other disciplines: towards writing, towards whiteness, towards masculinity, etc. Studying gender in the two anthologies, and in Foster’s writing, shows the weight of bias in dance studies scholarship, and how the field is working to move beyond it.

The phrase “bodily writing” is a central theoretical feature of “Choreographing

History,” and Foster uses the term to account for how the body’s movements inscribe both the physical reality of that movement and “an array of references to conceptual entities and events” (2010, 291). Foster goes on to explain that the relationship between movement and meaning is not codified, but that the network of meaning-making

166 references mutates and changes with each new encounter between the body and the world. While Foster quotes Roland Barthes’s autobiography as the primary theoretical inspiration for her definition of bodily writing, the term has a history of use within a broader theoretical network, and while this has the advantage of texturing Foster’s writing with layers of nuance, some of those nuances can have problematic implications, especially for the power of dance and the representation of dancers. Just as bodily writing exists within a fluid network of referentiality, the term “bodily writing” creates an intertextual web, whose strands entangle philosophical biases against the female body.

Two of these strands that are comparatively “thick” with meaning reach out to Stéphane

Mallarmé and Michael De Certeau.

As I described in my second chapter, Mallarmé devoted a number of essays to the idea of une écriture corporelle [a bodily writing] to explain how dance can express transcendent, rather than literal meaning. His rationalization for this point appears in a short essay, “Ballets,” from 1886, and is translated as follows: “The dancer is not a woman who dances, for the combined reasons that she is not a woman, but a metaphor summing up one of the elementary aspects of our form, sword, cup, flower, etc., and that she does not dance, suggesting, through a miracle of shortcuts and dashes, with a bodily writing, what would take in the composition several paragraphs of dialogue or descriptive prose to express: [she is] a poem freed from any instrument of the writer.”26 Bodily

26 A savoir que la danseuse n'est pas une femme qui danse, pour ces motifs juxtaposes qu'elle n'est pas une femme, mais une métaphore résumant un des aspects élémentaires de

167 writing allows dance to express ideas and symbols in a manner beyond the potential of textual description or articulation. However, literary scholar Daniel Sipe (2007) has critiqued Mallarmé’s representation of the female subject, arguing that the play of visibility that Mallarmé employs to describe women overly eroticizes his subject. Sipe argues that Mallarmé’s poetry reflects a desire for corporeal knowledge, and that the elusiveness of his texts points firstly to a failure in accomplishing this desire, but also to a secondary “grasping” as the female subject is turned into a “spectacle of pleasure” (368).

Mallarmé’s delight in (female) dancers’ bodies reflects Western culture’s objectification of dancers, and the eroticization of concert dance as a profession.

Bodily writing is also described as a political subversion by Michael De Certeau, who describes a city populace walking, beneath the panoptic gaze of authority, as an act of writing or inscribing an urban text that resists the narratives imposed by city planners and creates maps of meaning beyond the reach of institutional authority (1984, 93).

Bodily writing creates meaning, without relying on structures of power or interpretation.

De Certeau also argues that a man observing such bodily writing, watching from above, participates in lust – in an erotics of excess – as he gazes down on the mass of walking/writing/dancing bodies below (92). De Certeau’s monograph, The Practice of

notre forme, glaive, coupe, fleur, etc., et qu'elle ne danse pas, suggérant, par le prodige de racourcis ou d'élans, avec une écriture corporelle ce qu'il faudrait des paragraphes en prose dialoguée autant que descriptive, pour exprimer, dans la rédaction: poème dégagé de tout appareil du scribe. (Mallarmé 2007, 201)

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Everyday Life, published in 1984, is dedicated to the ordinary man, the common, anonymous hero walking in “countless thousands on the streets” and the desire he represents (Frontmatter). The political power of walking, inscribing, observing and interpreting is assigned to male bodies, and male visions of how power structures might change and evolve. While De Certeau re-potentializes the tactics of crowds walking through the city, he also valorizes the male observer who takes himself above the crowd to read the writing on the street.

This gendering of observation and authority is deeply embedded within What is

Dance, as can be seen in a comparative study of how pronouns are used in the anthology.

My analysis in this regard was guided by linguist Daniel McIntyre’s analysis of gendered speech in blockbuster movies. McIntyre uses a corpus analysis of blockbuster screenplays to look at representations of gender in Hollywood, and his process asks three questions: how often do men and women speak? How lexically rich is their speech i.e. to what extent is their speech varied? He then uses corpus data to ask whether there are gendered trends visible in how frequently certain words arise. His findings indicate that men speak three times more than women in the selected corpus, although with similar lexical richness; that while women are likely to talk about killing it is never in the sense of taking responsibility for killing, but that women are very likely to ask for help – reinforcing cultural notions of women as passive or in distress. Following a similar trajectory through my analysis of both anthologies shows a huge shift in representations of gender over time, both in terms of attention and richness.

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Attitudes to gender in What is Dance vary broadly across the historical span of the material presented. In selecting examples for discussion I have chosen texts from within the 20th Century so as to facilitate a better comparison with the Reader while still offering some indication of change over time. Originally published in 1927, André Levinson’s

“The Idea of the Dance” discusses the binary construction of gender prior to the 1900s, and his summary of Mallarmé’s work shows how men and women were set in opposition to each other: “Man [the male hero of the ballet] in conflict between reality and his dreams… the dancer who moves on the tips of her toes… almost unclothed in her cloud of tulle” (1983, 53). The ballerina is also described as “illiterate… the unconscious revealer of something which she symbolizes without understanding. Only our poetic instinct can decipher her ‘writing of the body.’” The historical consequences of this divisive attitude can be seen in David Levin’s contribution from 1977, wherein he explains that a contributing factor to the dearth of philosophical attention to dance is that

Western civilization is organized around “male dominance and a corresponding (well- hidden) aversion to the female principle” (1983, 86). Dancers and dance enthusiasts

(although not dance critics) are, according to Levin, “either females or males who are female-oriented.” Another way the binary gendering of dance has impacted dance writing is in how dancers were objectified, and the way different critics offered them meaning and agency. Rayner Heppenstall’s “The Sexual Idiom” from 1936 admits that the author has never seen Isadora Duncan dance, but characterizes her as “a woman of amazingly rich and open erotic nature… an exhibitionist in the grand manner” (1983, 271), her art

“aphrodisiac” (273), although she “had no intellectual control over her experience” (269).

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By contrast, Katherine Everett Gilbert writing in 1941 quotes Duncan directly, using her own words to describe her inspiration from Plato, the way she articulated the concept of the soul, and how she provided the first – if not a lasting – reaction to the “frigidity of the ballet” (1983, 290). Gilbert’s article is unusual within the scope of What is Dance because she places Duncan’s voice in dialogue with male dancers and philosophers, and gives weight to her words, other women authors in the anthology expound upon their own history and theories (Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman, etc.) but other than Jean

Kealiinohomoku’s brief reference to Agnes DeMillne’s anthropological work, they overwhelmingly cite men. Eric Bently’s text on Martha Graham from 1952 ignores

Graham’s voice altogether (although he does quote Jane Harrison on the theory of modern dancing) and instructing Graham that her critics “want her more realistic or less so. She must refuse to comply” (202). Rather than attempt to draw generalizations about gender across What is Dance I offer these examples as an illustration of the breadth of discourse on gender and dance in 1983, including the kinds of sexism that were still being given credence, and the ways in which dancers’ voices were marginalized.

As I remarked previously, the articles in the Reader are predominantly by female authors, and offer an entirely different perspective on watching dance, and on dancers’ voices. While unfortunately original publication dates are not given in the Reader, one of the earliest pieces is Martha Graham’s own “I am a Dancer,” first published in 1966. In addition to Foster’s “Choreographing History,” originally from 1995, which posits choreography as a theoretical framework, Janet Lansdale writes her own framework of intertextual analysis (authored for the Reader), citing male and female scholars in order

171 to build her theoretical groundwork (2010, 158-167). Marta Savigliano moves between the roles of dancer and theorist in her text, using detailed descriptions of dancing in, and waiting to dance in, a milonga to construct a detailed analysis of how femininity is risked and gambled in order to negotiate dancing and desire in Tango (2010, originally 2003,

236-249). The proliferation of female authors within dance studies reduces the binary distinction observed in What is Dance between dance and theory, but in addition the authors in the Reader blur the distinctions between dancer and theorist, their biographies showing the influence of both roles, but for the most part treating dancers and their dancing as a kind of theorizing in and of itself – Foster’s article offers one model for this kind of disciplinary shift, while her description of the duet between Terpsichore and Clio that concludes the article hearkens back to some of the more patriarchal divisions between male and female, dance and history.

Getting Back to the Body

In the last section of “Choreographing History,” Terpsichore and Clio dance a conflicted duet. The muses “smash up against one another” (Foster 2010, 299). Their skin sweats above their lips, they are insatiable, their bodies and positions attain new and seductive holds over their listeners. Just as Mallarmé’s framing of the female subject through a play of invisibility and visibility eroticizes and objectifies her subjectivity, so

Foster’s play between dance and dialogue eroticizes the contact between the two performers, while subtly reconstructing positions that align the muse of dance with the stereotypically feminine, and history with the stereotypically masculine: Clio attempts to

172 have a rational discussion while Terpsichore gets bored, gives the silent treatment, and sulks. Clio mansplains in praise of dance, “the primordial mother of the arts,” to which

Terpsichore lashes out and “accuses Clio of inspiring only desiccated, static drivel”

(301). Elsewhere in the duet Foster reinforces the binary logic of gender and behavior:

“all citizens, male and female, those with expertise in logos and those who excel at chaos,” (although it is possible that Foster is referring to “all citizens” who excel at logos and chaos, the stereotypical assumption that men are logical and women chaotic casts a gendered shadow on how this sentence can be interpreted) even as she promotes dance as a potential means to put both groups on an equal footing (300).

Over the course of their duet, Foster usually refers to Clio and Terpsichore with the mutual pronoun “they.” In moments where they are referred to as individuals only

Terpsichore gets a female pronoun – Clio is always referred to by name. While muses are canonically female, and perhaps we are supposed to make that assumption, the choice to leave Clio without a clear gender, especially in this context, feels worth digging into.

Without a clearly stated gender, and in the context of a binary relationship to the female muse of dance, Foster steers us towards a reading of Clio that is, if not totally male, not completely female either. If we read (perhaps too far) into Clio’s pronoun-less gender ambiguity, it is possible to examine Foster’s duet as a re-choreographing of gender stereotypes as they have been applied to bodies, and to the disciplines of dance and history. The muses are in search of bodies capable of “troping:” bodies that can “render or depict, or exaggerate, or fracture, or allude to the world, bodies that can ironize as well as metaphorize their existence,” but the danger of tropes, as Foster points out, is that they

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“can become powerful enough to sway other bodies, or even fix them in its hold” (301).

Tropes are powerful in the world of dance writing, for example, choreographer Eleanor

Sikorski lists tropes from the description of postmodern duets that perpetuate rape culture: “The female body is lifted off the floor, denied its own weight; The female body is limp, a doll; The female body is under attack (grab grab grab); The female body is not listened to (she said ‘no’ the first time, idiot).” (2018). This blurry ground between representing tropes in order to challenge them, or merely reenacting a harmful gender/power dynamic, is especially complicated in Foster’s final duet. The irony of

Foster’s choreography is that even as Clio and Terpsichore come to negotiated agreement in which choreography becomes persuasive discourse and fleshiness comes into history, certain tropes of male and female, history and dance, remain embedded in the choreographed relationship between the pair.

Curiously, the etymology of tropes and troping does not allude solely to repetition and reinstatement. As a musical form, troping refers to the earliest practices of European polyphonic music, a brief moment in sacred music where voices would split into two melodic lines (Hunter 2006, 34). One of the very first records of notated troping is documented in The Winchester Troper, a musical manuscript from my childhood home, dating to approximately to the 10th or 11th century. If this is this case, how can the tropes of Foster’s duet be read as a divergence? A separation from the normative? An innovation?

Foster’s bodies are disciplined by “highly repetitive regimens of observation and exercise” (2010, 292), that create, if not the practice then at least the illusion of unison,

174 legal/institutional conformity – I chose the term “discipline” here deliberately to echo

Foster’s Foucauldian influences; while she does not quote Discipline and Punish, per se, those citations, and the voice of Judith Butler, especially the 1990 work Gender Trouble, are loud within her writing. Like Butler and Foucault, Foster grapples with the question of whether or not the body can ever transcend and escape the ordering principles of disciplinary practices, and whether even the “marvelously aberrant” gestures of the body can ever get beyond writing – and if so, at what cost (292)? Ben Spatz (2015) names one position in this debate as the trope of excess, or the idea that technique can be subtracted from performance in order to leave an original self, or individual genius. By this rationale, that which is repeated is technical and therefore participating in structures of oppression, but that which is beyond technique is a space of freedom (60). Spatz argues against the trope of excess, building on Bourdieu, Butler and de Certeau to explain that all embodied practice arises from manifestations of technique, even those practices associated with the compulsory elements of day-to-day life: eating, moving through the world, having a gender identity (172-3).

Despite her decision to subsume the body’s meaning within writing, Foster actually aligns herself with the trope of excess over the course of the chapter. She argues that even if the most unanticipated gestures of the body can be apprehended as part of a repertoire of techniques and moves, and even if our metaphors, interpretations, and ways of knowing the body produce an understanding of what we think the body is, the body is never only what we think the body is. Any attempt – according to Foster – to trace the history of a bodily writing is “Impossible. Too wild, too chaotic, too insignificant” (2010,

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292). Writing cannot replace bodily writing, but has to enter into a dialogue of co- creative interpretation (298-299). Foster continues that the metaphors and allusions of movement and language that we wrap around the body give it the most tangible substance that it has – bodies need writing in order to be known, as far as we are capable of knowing them at all. “Choreographing History” opens up a host of new ways to understand what bodies are, and what they can do, so that writers of the body have the broadest possible perspective from which to construct meanings around other bodies, and themselves.

Foster gives bodies agency and the capacity to act for themselves, including a separation between the ideas of bodies from people. Foster’s bodies want, demand, pronounce, possess, listen, create, move, and dance. She specifically mentions historical bodies, writing bodies, dancing bodies, dead bodies – categories of bodies that emerge from recognized patterns of actions and gesture, theorized through cultural parameters.

As Foster puts it: “Bodily theories already exist embedded in the physical practices with which any given historian’s body is familiar. Each of his or her body’s various pursuits elaborates notions of identity for body and person, and these conjoin with the values inscribed in other related activities to produce steadier scenarios of who the body is in secular, spectacular, sacred or liminal contexts” (296). In other words, our bodies are not us, but what our bodies do and how those doings are understood, create ways for us and our bodies to identify in different spaces.

In her initial description of Clio and Terpsichore, Foster slips in references to her own dancing intertext, and places herself and her subjects within a dancing canon.

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Invoking Terpsichore for a readership of dance academics cannot fail to call up George

Balanchine’s Apollon Musagète,27 in which Calliope, Polyhymnia, and Terpsichore compete for the attentions of the young god. Terpsichore is an impish, prancing muse, her restless feet pawing the ground, stretching into arabesque before peeling away in a series of flex-footed curving walks, casually in command of her discipline without the need for narrative pretension. While other descriptive signifiers in Foster’s picture are more generalizable to dance genres, my eye is caught by the “plastic bananas as a headpiece…” (299) that appear to directly reference Josephine Baker. Baker was an extraordinary dancer, war hero, and a queer, black civil rights activist, whose career has become stereotyped by an early career performance in the revue Un Vent de Folie in

1927, in which she wore a girdle of bananas. Here, then, we have two skillful dancers, from within, but also outside the boundaries of the Euro-American canon, with

“unshaven armpits” – probably indexing either feminism or queerness – whose presence has been marginalized within the institutions they represent: muses to male artists,

Terpsichore to Apollo, Baker to the white dance critics who preferred to emphasize her exoticism rather than her artistry. The description of their movement “carefully calculating the other’s weight and flexibility, careening toward each other, rolling as one body and then falling apart…” (299) places us firmly after the establishment of contact improvisation and within the realms of pedestrian dance, release technique, etc. and within the kinds of reflexive dance championed by Foster, as described earlier, as the best practice for a choreographing historian.

27 Apollo leader of the muses, later called simply “Apollo.” 177

Continuing a previous argument, what if we read Clio as female? Or queer? The sexualized signifiers of sweat and lips remain, but the male-female power dynamic is fractured and fragmented according to Foster’s vision. How can Clio the historian, in her bow tie and vest and unshaven armpits and plastic bananas “explicate the blank stare of the black man in the white police station” (Foster 2010, 293)? Or, why does she think she can speak to that experience? Questions I will return to before the end of this chapter.

Some of the ambiguities in this last duet might be resolved if we had a clearer statement of Foster’s own identity, but it is unclear whether or not Foster intends to write herself into one, or both, of the muse roles in the last part of her article. While her two muses collaborate in a bodily re-writing of the relationship between dance and history, reflecting back on the changes within that relationship over time, I believe that given the weight she gives to writing over dancing in the rest of her article, it is most likely she identifies with the role of Clio. As readers we must bear in mind, however, that in this instance, both muses are dependent on Foster’s authorial voice to live and move, and that both ultimately dance her perspective of that relationship, and they dance only to mobilize her previously stated conclusions. The existence of the duet, framed as a piece of dance description, reminds us that the historian has the authority to put bodies on pages and determine how they signify. This is a moment where the stakes of my dissertation become crucially important: in the selection and framing of data, in the presentation of subjects, Foster is quite literally choreographing history for us, using an imagined dance as kinesthetic proof towards a theoretical argument, an argument which has had huge influence on how dance theory is done. What would it mean to imagine a

178 different dance, with different bodies? Why did Foster choose these ones? What other arguments might they articulate or prove?

The Historian’s Body

As seen in my brief history of dance studies as a discipline, dance studies is practiced by dancers, by critics, by ethnographers, and frequently by dance historians.

Between What is Dance and the Reader, a shift occurs in the agents of dance studies and who their subjects are. In What is Dance, the subjects of dance studies are overwhelmingly “dance” and “dancers,” while in the Reader the focus – as I stated previously – has shifted towards the pedestrian, towards “movement” and “bodies.”

Consequentially, the Reader has roughly double the number of instances focusing on the body relative to the size of the text, and is far more likely to specify the nature of that body: “the Black dancing body,” “the homosexual body” “the historian’s body” etc. Once again using “the” as the article contributes to a universalizing rhetoric that generalizes bodies under these criteria, even as this makes new kinds of theories possible and allows for a diversity of identity and experience within the overarching descriptor of “human.” I hypothesize that this too indicates a shift away from dance as the main focus of dance studies, opening up the possibility of dance as a critical framework for investigating bodily experience across a range of disciplines.

In reading Foster’s chapter we can see her attending to the definition of roles for certain kinds of writers and subjects within dance studies, paying particular attention to the role of the historian. Foster occupies two, perhaps three or four, positions

179 simultaneously in this article: she is herself, writing, she is in the universalist role of the historian that she constructs, and (maybe) she is in the body of one, or both of the dancing muses at the end of the text. While Foster does write that the bodies of historians have changed over time, their bodies and roles are universalized by the fact that she proposes the same the actions and attitudes for all of those bodies; differentiated only by what subject they are drawn to. According to Foster the bodies of historians: “…approach these fragmented traces sternum leading;” “…amble down the corridors of documentation, inclining towards certain discursive domains and veering away from others;” “have been trained to write history;” “should not affiliate with their subjects”

(294). Contextualizing Foster’s decision to universalize the role of the historian, I admit that historians’ bodies frequently share training (and thus bodily techniques of how to do history) and disciplinary attitudes that define how they will interact with their subjects – they are asked to “bestill themselves modestly” until they become the universal subject

(295) – even though scholars from the comparatively niche disciplines have localized their practice in identifiable ways. Foster’s intervention of reading bodily writing reaches as far as her own body, the “glitches, aches, low-grade tensions” (291), but does not find a way to bridge the gap between her own body and those bodies with radically different cultural experiences and identities whom she proposes that historians can understand through choreography as a framework.

Nowhere is Foster’s rhetoric more universalist than in her proposition that through an awareness of choreographic writing she – a white woman – and historians in general can explain the internal and cultural position of a black man in a white police

180 station, the “raised shoulders and pursed lips of the rich woman walking past the homeless family, the swishing hips and arched eyebrows gay men as a straight couple walks into their bar…” (293). There are certainly precedents for a universalist position within dance studies, often justified by advances in analytical practice. In her book

Choreographing Empathy, Foster herself traces a historiography of universalism in dance, focusing on John Martin’s theory of metakinesis, which he claimed allowed audiences to empathize with dancers through a kind of shared physical sympathy.

Metakinesis, according to Martin, was a sixth sense of the body, a bodily process by which audiences can view movement and understand its emotional motivation through internal experience, whether or not that motion is representative of pedestrian movement

(Foster 2011, 156). Metakinetic thinking supported the metaphorical minstrelsy of the

1930s, wherein white female choreographers used the empathy of movement to justify their portrayals of black experience, and continues to find a place in advocacy or activism, for example in the tendency of parents and facilitators to speak in the place of autistic self-advocates. Another example from dance’s history with universalism is the choreometrics project, which combined Laban-based movement analysis and deeply flawed ethnographic research methods to construct a highly fallacious, dance-based categorization system for the comparative development of various cultures, in an attempt to explain how movement reflects a culture’s degree of civilization (Youngerman 1974;

Kealiinohomoku 1979).

While not as egregiously problematic as these examples, Foster does advocate throughout “Choreographing History” that through a better understanding of dancing

181 bodies, historians can perceive and communicate cultural realities beyond their own experience - act as “universal subjects” (2010, 295). This is despite her explicit comment on the tendency of the universalist voice to both strive to see all sides and to treat the historical subject as a “body of facts” at the whim of a writing authority (298). Foster’s complaint with universalism as I understand it here is that universalism ignores the

“excess”: the thing left when technique and history are stripped away. Foster proposes instead that by approaching writing as a body the historian will lose their authority and cultivate the ability to move with – and thus understand – other bodies. As I have argued, however, I see Foster’s universalism in the desire to synthesize any historian’s ability to address bodies outside of their own experience within one method, without explaining how a sense of shared choreography can make that possible.

Changes in dance studies have allowed for the flaws in universalist perspectives to be addressed and challenged. In particular Deidre Sklar’s (2001) article “Five Premises for a Culturally Sensitive Approach to Dance” and Brenda Farnell’s (1999) “It Goes

Without Saying But Not Always,” challenge the assumption that kinesthesia exists as a transcultural means of sharing understanding, and demonstrate that all movement is culturally rooted, and dependent on cultural knowledge for its interpretation. In Feminists

Theorize the Political, Joan Scott (1992) offers another perspective, arguing that experience can come to dominate analysis, creating a monolithic picture of experience within an identity group instead of unpacking the ideological systems that create lived experiences. Post colonialist scholar Mari Ruti also points out that some degree of universalism is necessary in order to build analogies across different lived experiences,

182 and particularly between sites of oppression. She uses Judith Butler’s work on precarity as a model for a universalist perspective that enables readers to understand how precarity is present across all lives, but also that it is only ever experienced in singular ways (2017,

94). Perhaps I reveal my own bias towards experience when I write that Foster’s position needs more circumspection, but I feel that by positing the historian as universal subject,

Foster places herself in danger of ignoring the impact of cultural knowledge. What Foster does champion, however, is an acknowledgement that bodily experience must speak inside dance studies, and that bodily experience must be understood as socially and culturally dependent. It is the foregrounding of her own bodily experience that ultimately moves Foster’s work away from the gendered and authoritarian tropes of dance history, towards a more radically egalitarian framework for dance studies.

Performative Voice

Foster’s essay stands out from the majority of the articles in the Reader in one respect; she constructs a critical position without grounding that position in theoretical citations. While she is clearly drawing on a fluent knowledge of dance studies theory, she presents her work as a thought-stream of her own devising, rather than a collaboratively sourced project backed by the weight of other scholars. “Choreographing History” contains no parenthetical citations, and the four notes at the end of her text refer to

Roland Barthes (for his concept of bodily writing), John Martin (for his concept of kinesthesia), the Oxford English Dictionary… and herself. This decision to place her own thinking at the center of the text as she sets out a new vision for the work of dance

183 studies, promotes Foster’s position as a scholarly authority within that field. She claims the right to speak for herself; to articulate a position and have it heard, without any dependence on communally granted authority. This boldness is instrumental in raising the position of female scholars within dance studies, both in how they are allowed to speak, and in their citational presence. We cannot go back to the sources that inspired Foster’s thinking and work upward from there; if we want to talk about choreographing history we have to cite Foster – her actions, her reputation, and the quality of her work set her up as a foundational thinker for the future of dance studies.

This doubled approach to speech is described by literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin as dialogic; a way to communicate multiple perspectives on a given object or phenomenon, rather than monologic rhetoric, which sets up a direct relationship between author and reader (1981, 280). Dialogic writing according to Bakhtin is reflective of the everyday world in which speech occurs against a backdrop of other conversations past and present, and functions to create within a text “a unity that cannot be identified with any singly one of the unities subordinated to it” (262); dialogic writing indexes multiple positions through linguistic features, rather than by reporting multiple voices from one authorial register. When one statement includes multiple dialogic positions Bakhtin calls it “dounble-voicing.” In a later work, Bakhtin makes it clear that double-voiced discourse is more than simply reflexive speech, but works with a conscious agenda, for example, to create an antagonistic relationship between two voices: “…the author’s discourse is directed toward its own referential object as is any other discourse, but at the same time every statement about the object is constructed in such a way that, apart from its referential

184 meaning, a polemical blow is struck at the other’s discourse on the same theme, at the other’s statement about the same object” (1994, 108). Examining double-voicing in business and education, Judith Baxter (2014) observes that speakers can also use double-voicing in order to mediate “competition and conflict between speakers in indirect, co-operative and acceptable ways so that consensus or compromise is reached” (95). Baxter analyzes instances of double-voicing in seven management meeting transcripts involving three senior business leaders (two women and one man), finding that women were more likely to use mitigating, anticipatory, or corrective functions of double-voicing, rather than antagonistic or authorial functions. Baxter concludes that double-voicing as a strategy enables speakers to share the “power to” create change, and work towards communal action.

While Bakhtin and Baxter both draw on a single voice indexing multiple positions in one statement, Foster’s doubled and tripled voices, because they are separated by distinctions in formatting, are more akin to the “double-mouthing” studied by Cécile B.

Vigouroux. Vigouroux studied how the interpreter and the pastor in a Congolese

Pentecostal church used their two voices to negotiate a performance that included the here-and-now of the service, and a broader time-scale of cultural beliefs, incorporating two voices in the joint performance of a single message. For example, the interpreter’s enthusiasm is both his own performance of emotion and a testament to the power of the pastor, thus legitimizing the pastor’s message and allowing audiences to share in that enthusiasm (2010, 342). Foster’s voices (as I will outline below) show the creation of consensus between her theoretical perspective and potential sources of opposition, in a

185 mutual project of creating change in the world of dance studies. Rhetorically, however, the fact that these voices are all elements of Foster’s own rhetoric allows her – much as she did with the duet between Clio and Terpsichore – to control both sides of the argument by presenting them dialogically.

The majority of Foster’s article is printed in the same font as the rest of the

Reader, and can be described as her scholarly voice. This voice shapes the main trajectory of her argument and offers us “truth statements” about the nature of bodies and bodily writing: “Today’s creaking knee is not yesterday’s knee jogging up the hill” (291),

“The first glimmerings of body theories put meaning into motion” (296) – this voice tells us the facts of how things “are.” This voice is balanced, however, by Foster’s personal voice: her experiential, responsive voice, which appears throughout the text as an italicized serif font: “I gesture in the air, a certain tension, speed and shape…” (2010,

297). In the first edition of the Routledge Dance Studies Reader this experiential voice was joined by her second thoughts, or questioning voice, which was marked by a sans- serif font and frequently proposed critiques of Foster’s experiential voice. For example, the passage quoted above was followed by: “Am I pinning the moment down, trapping it, through this search for words to attach to it” (1998, 181)? In the second edition of the text these “second thoughts” remain but are expressed as part of the main scholarly voice, creating a new double-voicing between the first and second editions of the reader. What does this mean? Perhaps a change in dance studies that asks for questions to take a more central place in the text? Or perhaps Foster’s position is now cemented enough that she can adopt her own questions and doubts without distancing them from the main trajectory

186 of her research. Mimicking the relationship between Clio and Terpsichore, Foster’s voices perform a debate, coming to an accommodation that ultimately supports Foster’s conclusions and leads the reader to do the same

Foster’s internal voice(s) use a first-person pronoun to articulate their ideas, experiences and questions. In making this choice to constantly remind readers of the “I” behind the text, Foster distinguishes herself from the role of historian, while simultaneously justifying her commentary on the role – she is both experience and observer, the ongoing and the now. The things she feels in her body offer a physical truth in support of the theoretical truth she prescribes. Her italicized voice purports to provide a fixed reference to the moment in time of Foster’s writing, despite our knowledge of the durational realities of the editing process. The reflexivity of the sans-serif font of the first edition, or of the scholarly voice of the second edition, or of Foster’s critical questions, indicates that Foster’s is a thought-out position, aware of its own conflicts and difficulties. Foster’s performance in the role of critical thinker and historian belies her own argument that the role of the historian is universal. Foster-the-historian is always in conversation with Foster-the-body and Foster-the-individual, and her reflexive investigation of her own experience is the primary source given for her critical conclusions.

Just as Foster’s Reading Dancing is considered essential theoretical groundwork for the cultural turn and literary analysis of dance as political, “Choreographing History” is an essential text in the turn towards performativity in dance studies. Despite Foster’s proclamations in favor of the universalist body of the historian, the fact of her writing

187 elevates individualized bodily knowledge, and the body as the producer as evidence for theory. Performance studies scholar Tami Spry defines this kind of scholarship: “It starts with a body, in a place, and in a time. The investigators analyze the body for evidence, the body as evidence, the body of evidence. But evidence, like experience, is not itself knowledge; like evidence, experience means nothing until it is interpreted, until we interpret the body as evidence. For a performative autoethnographer, the critical stance of the performing body constitutes a praxis of evidence and analysis. We offer our performing body as raw data of a critical cultural story” (2009, 603). Foster offers her bodily experience as the raw data for theoretical investigation, her italicized voice places her in space and time, and presents her writing-self as an act of bodily experience to be theorized. Spry’s essay was published in 1999, one year before the re-release of

“Choreographing History,” and the two sources together indicate a turn to the body in dance/performance studies that goes beyond the authority of the observant historian to articulate.

Foster’s writing is rich in contradiction, contradictions that only make sense when read in the light of the emergent, liminal state of dance studies and the shifting territory of what constitutes scholarship. While her writing re-states, and even reinforces the universalist, patriarchal, authoritarian history of the field, it also provides a toolkit for transcending that authority and moving towards an egalitarian discipline that centers the individual body in the production and articulation of cultural knowledge. Foster claims that metaphors we place around that body are the only way we can come to know the body and give it substance (2010, 292). In my final chapter I look to the metaphorization

188 of dance in popular culture and concert choreography, and how those metaphors shape our knowing of the body. As dance and choreography become frameworks for modeling social change, I argue that we must take care with our metaphors to ensure we are active and effective in producing the world, and the future we want to see.

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Chapter 5. Metaphors We Dance By

My dissertation began as an investigation into dance and discourse – into the interaction of dance and language across time. It has become an investigation of boundaries: what and who has been written into and out of dance at various moments in history, in accordance with social, political and cultural drives. Across the three case studies of my previous chapters I see a sense of political urgency, a desire to make meaning, to make change, to educate others, and to exert agency about what dance means to dancers in light of changing historical and cultural environments. In this final chapter I retain the exploratory structure of these prior chapters – using key sources to create networks of relationality – but turn that idea to an examination of dance as a contemporary tool for social justice. To do this I will center two metaphors that I argue allow dancers and choreographers to imagine new landscapes of possibility and relationality: the analogous relationship between the dance stage/rehearsal studio and the world; and the idea of choreography as protest. I attend to the place of these metaphors in both concert and popular dance, in order to discuss their strengths and weaknesses in formulating a cultural framework for understanding how dance can impact and envision the ways we live together and relate to each other. I have chosen the works presented in this chapter either because the writing around them places them in close relationship to one of the metaphors described above (Geography by Ralph Lemon and Fractus V by

Sidi Larbi Cherkoui) or because the dances propose a direct intervention in social power structures and injustice (“This is America” by Donald Glover, the “Pantsuit Power” flash mob for Hillary Clinton, and the Wakanda Forever salute from Black Panther). Drawing 190 on theories of horizontality and affect, primarily from Liz Lerman, I argue that the goal of dance must be to work deeply within these metaphors, rather than to simply present them, and that for the metaphor of choreography to succeed as protest choreographers and dance scholars must change popular conceptions of what choreography is/can be.

From my beginning in metaphor, I come to the material potential of dance as a tool for empowerment and social change.

Metaphor is…

I treat metaphor as a linguistic tool of transformation, pulling two disparate concepts into relation. Metaphor, and its cousins, simile, metonym and synecdoche, act both to obscure the originating signified in a linguistic passage and to reveal it through the juxtaposition of radically different new imagery. Metaphors, however, are not merely poetic devices, but are pervasive throughout our conceptual structuring of the world; in other words, the way we understand our experience of living in the world is shaped by the metaphors that structure the comprehension of that experience. In picking apart this conceptual structuring of metaphor, linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark

Johnson (1980) argue that any account of the human conceptual system must account for how various concepts are grounded, structured, related to each other, and defined; they take the position that metaphorical thinking accounts for a broad swath of these four elements of understanding (106). For example: “since there are systematic correlates between our emotions (like happiness) and our sensory motor experiences (like erect posture), these form the basis of orientational metaphorical concepts” (58). Metaphors explain how we can cheer up, see the light, or let our hair down. In the following chapter 191

I look at how metaphors can be a way into looking at dance, and the methods employed by choreographers, in order to ask questions about the aims, practices, and impact of a given work – specifically those dance works oriented to social change.

Feminist scholar Rebecca Solnit (2007) gives us a metaphor to understand metaphors themselves, examining them through the image of constellations. In her beautiful writing she draws together stars, metaphors and bodies:

The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars

exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between

them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell. We come to see the stars

arranged as constellations, and as constellations they orient us, they give us

something to navigate by, both for traveling across the earth and for telling

stories, these bears and scorpions and centaurs and seated queens with their

appointed places and seasons. Imagine the lines drawn between the stars as roads

themselves, as routes for the imagination to travel.

A metaphor is in another way a line drawn between two things, a mapping

of the world by affinities and patterns, which is to say that a constellation is a

metaphor for a metaphor. And the word metaphor in the original Greek means to

transport something. So metaphors are, like constellations, navigational tools to

travel by. They let us enter a world of resemblances and kinships, in which we

can approach the unknown through the known, the abstract through the concrete,

the remote through what comes to hand. They measure the route from here to

there. The body of the beloved is a landscape, but the language is also a body;

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each is traveled in terms of the other, and thus the world is knit together, with

those constellating lines of imagination (165).

What I take from this passage of Solnit’s is a sense of the reciprocity of metaphor

– that the linguistic bond affects both the target and source domain of the metaphor through a conceptual relationship, a point that is not traditionally brought forward in linguistic theory. I also adopt Solnit’s idea of knitting the world together – the idea that metaphors can be a tool for healing, as well as for transformation and that by actively building new conceptual systems we can understand our lived experience in ways that encourage us to do better by one another. Later in this chapter I will argue that we need a new conceptual system around the popular understanding of choreography in order for dancers to explore its full potential as a tool of protest.

The field of metaphor has evolved substantially since Lakoff and Johnson’s proposal of conceptual metaphor theory, or CMT. Most pertinently for this chapter, linguists have sought to address the extent to which isolated analyses of conceptual metaphors have enough theoretical and empirical weight to explain the use of metaphor in everyday practices of speaking (Gibbs 2011, 533). For example, Lynne Cameron points out that within a small research group focusing on metaphor identification, usually only about 70% of metaphors in a given text were non-controversially agreed to be metaphors, and although a further 15-20% might be agreed upon through discussion, the identity of the remaining 10% of potential metaphors remained up for debate (2007, 115).

Cameron and metaphor scholar Raymond Gibbs propose that in addition to the proposal of CMT – that certain base concepts allow for the construction of metaphorical speech –

193 metaphor must be studied as part of a dynamic discursive system, rather than as static repetitions of extant concepts. A dynamic evaluation of metaphor, according to Gibbs, allows researchers to evaluate how metaphors arise as a result of a particular context, moment in time, and in relationship to a perceived audience, and how different meanings can arise as a metaphor is repeated (2011, 554-556).

Cameron describes the behavior of speech, or a metaphor, within the dynamic system of discourse as a journey or path across a landscape, in which any space within the territory may be occupied (2007, 111). In this analogy sloping ground makes some linguistic terrain unstable, while deep valleys allow language use to pool and stabilize, producing metaphors and metaphorical concepts that are commonly used and understood.

Gibbs adds that these pools of stability are influenced by “strong correlations between domains in everyday embodied experience,” i.e., that the things we do regularly and observe to be similar, such as the correlation between intimacy and physical closeness, are likely to produce more stable metaphors (2011, 536). Furthermore, metaphor is culturally rooted, and cultural shift can cause a change in which metaphors are used and how, based on their continuing cultural resonance in a given community. For example,

Emily Martin’s work on the gendering of medical metaphors shows that as scientist in the

19th century sought to prove that gendered hierarchies were based in nature, rather than social convention, metaphors that posited fundamental differences between the sexes began to propagate in medical literature (1988, 239).

In popular consciousness, dance is often metaphorically associated with our lived experience of its ephemerality, and as a result its metaphorical nature is often one of

194 superficiality: “stop dancing around and come back here,” my mother would tell me when she thought I was doing something silly or superfluous. The stability of the correlation between performance and superficiality is evident in how far back it can be traced historically. For example, in 1603 As You like It’s famous act two, scene seven monologue was first performed, in which Jacques claims that “All the world’s a stage,” and begins an extended metaphor about the changeability and transience of humankind, and humankind’s priorities, in the seven acts that guide their journey to “mere oblivion”

(Shakespeare 1965, 42). On the other hand, dance also has a history of being used as a metonym for culture as a whole, as dance theorist Edward Warburton points out in a recent article for Dance Research: “nation-states use indigenous dance and minority identities as a metonym for a larger, more dominant culture (that may or may not exist) in order to promote a particular image and identity both internally and abroad” (2019, 20).

Looking specifically at the term “bunhead” as a metonym for an overly serious and

“tightly-wound” ballet dancer, Warburton continues arguing that metonymic terms can

“not only discourage but dehumanize young dancers, treating them not as subjects who dance but as objects to be danced.” He calls upon dance scholars to take responsibility for a better use of language, understanding language as a symptom of disciplinary values

(19-20). The metaphors in this chapter are similarly statements of disciplinary values, implying dance’s relevance to politics and society.

“The studio is the world” and “choreography is protest” aim to stabilize the significance and power of dance as a force for change. This is part of a broader movement within the field of academic dance writing to create new discursive systems

195 for understanding how dance relates to the world in which it exists, of which the examination of metaphor is just a small part. Other instances of this work include challenging the ephemeral nature of dance at a theoretical level, as does for example,

Lepecki (2004), who does not argue against dance’s ephemerality, but instead argues that nothing exists which is not ephemeral, and thus: “Movement is both sign and symptom that all presence is haunted by disappearance and absence” (128). Other proposals include creating interdisciplinary research projects that harness dance as a vehicle for recognizable impact on the world. Fissure (2011) by Louise Ann Wilson explores ritual and pilgrimage over the course of a performance walk to understand “something of the body’s fallibility and to explore ways of coping with death” (Wilkie 2015, 27); the

Livable Futures Project developed by Norah Zuniga Shaw and a collective of collaborators creates new metaphors for dance practice, living, and performance (Livable

Futures 2019). In this chapter I will first look at how the metaphors of “the studio is the world,” and “choreography is protest” manifest in various concert and social manifestations, and how using metaphorical thinking to look at dances can prompt new experiences and interpretations of dance as an active agent for social change. Taking my cue from Solnit’s writing I will look at these metaphors as reciprocal relationships that feed back and forth between target and source domains. To help understand the function of these metaphors, however, I will initially spend some time framing the theories that will shape my choreographic investigation of how those metaphors manifest in practice.

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Technique, Affect, Horizontality

Three conceptual frameworks from dance studies and interdisciplinary practice in the critical humanities have largely shaped my research in this chapter, and while I will discuss these in more depth as they become relevant, I begin with three short definitions of technique, affect, and horizontality that will serve as guidelines for the exploration to come. Technique has many meanings within dance. These include individual dance forms labeled as “techniques,” as in West African technique or jazz technique; a set of kinesthetic rules for how a dance form should be done, as in “balletic technique”; and a value system for the generalized physical competence of dancing bodies, as in “she has good technique.” In trying to get away from some of the implicit privileging of whiteness in ideas around technique, which tend towards valuing the physical systems of white- dominated concert dance forms, I have been inspired by the work of theater and performance scholar Ben Spatz (2015), who frames technique as a transmissible method for achieving a desired result, either physical, linguistic or social. For Spatz – as I will explain further below – technique is arrived at by individual research, and techniques form clusters that we can then “practice” as a recognizable mode of performance such as ballet, tennis, or yoga. When I say that choreographers are looking for new techniques of human relationships beyond the dance studio, this is the idea of technique I mean.

Affect can be summarized as a way of speaking about the emotive and sensorial possibilities engendered by collective assemblages of human and non-human objects.

Rather than thinking about viewers as a passive subject the dance “does something to,” affect theory insists that these emotive and sensorial phenomena are made possible only

197 through the presence of the viewer as an active collaborator in the creation of meaning.

Conversely, interdisciplinary artist Chris Salter (2015) argues that affect cannot be generated by human interaction alone, but is contingent on the material and digital objects that shape our understanding and impressions of the society we exist as part of.

Salter explains the impact that affective thinking has on art making: “the creation of signification is coming to grips with the fact that the immense richness of human sensation and imagination has only so much to do with the human but also with the dazzling material forces and affects circulating through the world … The human sensorium is already technical, and we seek out how such techniques make possible the production, transmission, and even appreciation of certain kinds of affect” (177).

Performance studies scholar Rebecca Schneider (2011) adds that by encouraging emotive experiences beyond societal norms, affect allows for viewers and scholars to think between structurally established positions and therefore challenge the logic of how these structures acquire and maintain power (36). Affect has particular relevance for this chapter because the majority of the works I will study exist primarily as digital artifacts, accessed through the small screen of a computer or the large screen of the cinema, because all of them are deeply entangled in the world in which they were made and transmitted, and because the political impact of several of the works in this chapter is the result of intentional play across various realms of affect.

The political, social, or creative intentions of the works studied in this chapter are diverse, but examining them through a framework of metaphor brings to light a shared leaning towards horizontality. Horizontality (originally Horizontalidad) is itself a

198 metaphorical concept that arose from radical movements in Argentina, and envisions the toppling of vertical power structures in which one group or idea is set above another, and instead places those groups and ideas on a level plane in which they can interact, flow, and develop new ways of being in relationship (Mason 2012; Sitrin 2013). From this description it can be seen that horizontality is an attempt to re-structure the conceptual systems of the world that shape our metaphors, and our existence. While horizontality has had a theoretical impact across a number of disciplines, dance studies scholar André

Lepecki (2006) and choreographer Liz Lerman (2011) are the key voices shaping this chapter’s exploration of how dance has tried to harness horizontalist perspectives for its own ends. The metaphors at the center of this chapter: studio/world and choreography/protest manifest in the dances studied as part of a horizontalist politics, which in turn shapes their metaphorical potential.

Studio as World/World as Studio

“I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit”

(Graham 1998, 66). In this quote Graham draws a parallel between the kinds of studio practice needed to dance well, and the kinds of practices humans should adopt in order to live well. For Graham, practicing life and practicing dance are equivalent processes, linked both conceptually and in observable results. The metaphor of studio as

199 world/world as studio goes one step further than this quote and tells us that the things we do in rehearsal studios, and on stages, are already practices of citizenship, and conversely that our experiences living in the world shape our practices of dance choreography, and rehearsal. While the origins of this metaphor are unclear, Gibbs’s theory of metaphorical stability based on embodied experience, described above, might explain how the metaphors of “the studio is the world” and “choreography is protest” came to be accepted in the discourse of dance – commonalities observed in repeated embodied practice, which were then used as a basis for the theorization and practical performance of dances’ social potential. When dancers are in the rehearsal studio together they work towards a shared project, taking individual responsibility for the technical and emotional needs of sustaining that environment, while also accommodating their desires to the demands of achieving that project. Dancers might employ therapeutic bodywork as an antidote to repeated drilling of steps, or use improvisational strategies to ensure that each performer feels their authentic voice is represented in the work. These strategies of integrated communal and individual care, balanced with specific goals, have huge potential when applied to projects outside of the dance studio.

Extrapolating from the metaphor of studio as world/world as studio implies a responsibility for dancers to practice well in preparation for life, and live well in preparation for their dancing. Theorists who have dwelt explicitly on the conceptual links between movement, dance, practice, and living include French sociologist Marcel Mauss, who examined movement as a function of culture; dance and movement theorists Rudolf von Laban and Warren Lamb, who offer movement-based tools for altering one’s

200 personality and managerial capacity; and Ben Spatz, whose book What A Body Can Do:

Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research explores the potential of practice within acting, postural yoga, gender, and university research.

Mauss’s highly nationalistic text “Techniques of the body” examines practices of various every-day actions (walking, running, swimming, digging etc.) as specific manifestations of national and cultural identity, proposing that there is no “natural” way for an adult to perform any action, but that instead the habits of life are shaped by the development of “effective” and “traditional” techniques (1973, 75). From this text we can glean the idea that while ways of moving and thinking are cultural, they can also be cultivated, and that they should not be placed in hierarchical relationship but should rather be understood as ways to support living optimally in one’s own circumstances – postures and ways of moving develop in order to accommodate effective performance of culturally and individually specific daily tasks. In a similar theme, Rudolph von Laban,

Warren Lamb (1965) believed that the body’s movement techniques, through studio identification and analysis, could be altered to produce greater human happiness and efficiency in social relationships and in the workforce. They proposed that by changing the way in which your body moves through the world, you can change your personal outlook on the world and how others experience you. Spatz’s understanding of these ideas leads him to a definitive distinction of practice and technique: techniques are the transmissible and repeatable knowledge of the possibilities of human embodiment, discovered through an embodied research process (2015, 16), while practice is the manifestation of technical knowledge in a temporal moment, through which we encounter

201 and come to know reality (40). This framework for technique and practice is equally applicable to studio dance practice and to vast realms of action outside of the context of dance – Spatz uses gender as an example: “…innovations in gender tend to come not from controlled laboratories, but from deeply engaged and intensely personal research projects, undertaken by individuals and communities whose very lives may be at stake in the discovery of new practical possibilities” (203). Framing research into gender performance in the same kinds of physical language that dancers might physically research the performance of steps, and analyzing both as the same kinds of process, shows Spatz to be working with the metaphor of studio as world/world as studio as he builds his theory of technique and practice. Another link is the spatialization of the studio through the concept of “horizontality,” – a way of visualizing the studio as a terrain to move through, or as a mapping of (and resistance to) vertical power structures.

Choreographer Liz Lerman’s 2011 monograph Hiking the Horizontal approaches horizontality from a physical perspective: the phrase “hiking the horizontal” encapsulates her extant studio practice of drawing freely from many artistic sources, and thinking through them based on their affect, rather than the systems of value associated with them.

For Lerman horizontality is a way of visualizing artistic and social hierarchies such as the art/craft divide, and metaphorically laying them down sideways so that all points have equal weight and can be traversed, rather than being hierarchically stacked on top of each other (xv). Examples of this in Lerman’s practice include the Ship Yard project, which brought together performers, members of the military and their families, school students, and locals of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to examine the position of the shipyard within

202 the community through storytelling, fashion, workshops, and the exploration of

“movement metaphors” – movements that act as metaphors for experiences and emotions

(Wallace Foundation 2019). In a documentary about the project, Lerman explains how she sees dance as part of this project: “I can be next to that person or in the same room with that person and we can be doing the same dance, be with and have the same music and dancing together and it will create a bond that wasn't there before” (Lerman 2010).

Creating bonds between groups with different kinds of social power, and finding ways for people to communicate with each other across a broad spectrum of opinion, is one of the benefits Lerman perceives to working with horizontality.

Lerman also describes this horizontality as a means of accessing “spectrum thinking,” a phrase that has a particular resonance with queerness, since queer individuals have long since held in common the belief that identity is a spectrum, and that individuals have the potential to be in motion along that spectrum, fluctuating with their self- awareness and desires. Lerman’s proposition of horizontality is not a denial of positionality, but a working hypothesis that suggests that rapid ideological movement between and through, back and forth, with and into different codes of signification can disrupt those codes and the meanings associated with them. In theory this should allow horizontality to communicate intersectionally, although in practice it leads to aims and outcomes that are not always visible to those involved, or those watching. In 2011

Lerman began a collaboration with Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Urban Bush Women called Blood, Muscle, Bone, seeking to explore economic inequity through stage performances, prayer breakfasts, workshops, teacher trainings, panels, and cabarets

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(Lerman 2019). Eva Yaa Asantewaa, who attended one of the project workshops as

Master Writer in Residence for Dance Enthusiast found the experience “scattered and ineffective,” although she could also clearly see the germination of ideas and their potential – the lack of clarity was, she felt, essential to Lerman’s stated goal of getting people to look at things from multiple perspectives.

When horizontality does not embrace this nebulous approach, or when it tries to resolve too fast into a consumable outcome (like a choreographed performance), it can result in what many agree is a glib utopianism, a proposition which is (unfortunately) frequently grabbed at by dancers and critics as dance’s answer to differentials of power.

One particularly egregious example of this superficiality practice is Travis Wall’s choreography to the iconic Civil Rights anti-lynching song Strange Fruit, for the TV series So You Think You Can Dance (Wall 2017). Having successfully produced a piece on LGBTQ rights (Equality, 2016), Wall turned his attention to racial injustice in the wake of the Charlottesville shootings in 2017. Dressing his dancers in plantation clothes and setting them under the shadow of a large tree, Wall ignores his position as a white man speaking to the complexities of race in America, and ended the work with the darkest-skinned man in the cast shaking hands with a white woman, in what Veronica

Jiao (2017) of Dance Magazine calls an inexcusable act of “fast-food activism,” in other words, activism that is cheap, ineffective, and ultimately does harm under the label of doing good – in this case that harm centers on the appropriation of a racially charged song to posit a case for a simple, emotional resolution to issues of race instead of the necessity for systemic change.

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Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Ralph Lemon both propose that between a trans-global experience of citizenship and a studio process involving dancers of different nations and technical backgrounds, it is possible to put works on stage that offer new information about cross-cultural exchange and relationality. Cherkaoui writes that putting the diverse movement repertoires of his performers into dialogue with each other facilitates the creation of community “on stage and in daily life,” as well as finding ways to explore areas of personal responsibility for social injustice (2019). While not specifically labelled a horizontalist approach, the social aims and goals of his project and the procedural attempt to create a non-hierarchical expression of diverse national and technical viewpoints make it interesting to examine Fractus V through a horizontalist lens.

Similarly Lemon writes that “I will create a work of theater, dance, and music that intersects the performance boundaries of multiple and very different worlds. I will also explore the perceptions of racial and cultural identities, and how an identity is translated, divided, subsumed and empowered by another culturally foreign and directive aesthetic”

(2000, 21). As I explore these works through a horizontalist lens, I will also explore how the metaphor of “the studio is the world” maps onto their work in different ways.

Mapping is a way of understanding correspondences between metaphorical domains – in this case the domain of the world and the domain of the studio. In his comparative analysis of the phrase “the surgeon is a butcher,” linguist Zoltán Kövecses demonstrates that while a number of different frames exist for understanding exactly how metaphorical domains interact to create meaning, and that no two domains will map onto each other perfectly, identifying the salient correspondences within one example of a metaphor in

205 use can help produce nuance in the affect and interpretation of that metaphor in context

(2011). In Fractus V, I argue that the most important correspondence is between the horizontalist relationship between the dancers in their rehearsal process and their horizontalist ideal for broader social, transnational interactions, although this correspondence is not readily apparent in initial critical reviews.

Fractus V 28 is an episodic work based on Noam Chomsky’s theories about the production and manipulation of information. Making use of contemporary dance, lindy hop, hip hop, finger tutting, and a number of other movement styles, the work moves through a series of scenes, some based largely in danced exploration, and others depicting a more literal rendition of the consequences of media bias. One of the latter scenes includes a disturbing moment in which Cherkaoui sits downstage right, absorbed in a magazine. Behind him, one dancer draws two guns and shoots another repeatedly – the shot dancer jerks across the stage in response to each bullet, before crashing into a ring of white triangular set pieces that topple like dominoes around the arc of the stage before toppling Cherkoui from his chair. In another moment, these triangles become a path between Cherkoui and dancer Fabian Thomé as they perform a flamenco duet towards each other, their competition/collaboration rising to a fevered pitch of virtuosity.

Critical responses are largely in in praise of Fractus V, as shown below in examples from three prominent reviewers. Describing the work, Graham Watts (2016)

28 I saw this piece at its U.S. premiere in the Riffe Center, Columbus OH, November 15,

2016.

206 writes that Fractus V “… is – unsurprisingly – fronted by five dancers, brought up in different styles, each possessing extraordinary movement qualities and matched by four musicians who bring very different virtuoso sounds to this unique collaboration. Taken together, here are nine men from nine nations whose individual contributions are mixed to form a global tapestry made from the building blocks of their indigenous artistic influences.” Dance critic Judith Mackrell (2016), writing for The Guardian, says that the piece “also embraces an exhilarating diversity of styles, and as so often with Cherkaoui’s work, it delivers its most emotional charge at the point where those styles meet. In

Fractus V, that point comes at the beginning and end of the work, where all the cast join together in a soaring polyphonic song. It’s a marvelous braid of sound, fusing Middle

Eastern influences to a wildly ecstatic pitch, and as a fierce expression of unity it resonates across the work.” A second British critic, Lyndsey Winship (2016), talks about the relationship between the choreography and the Chomskian theories behind it: “…we hear his [Chomsky’s] warning of a society controlled by the propaganda of mass media, but what we see are five free-thinking bodies, reeling and scrolling across the stage; five balding men in double denim (including Cherkaoui himself), unlikely dancers perhaps, but lithe and unaffected in their movement. From individuals they are subsumed into something bigger than themselves, coming together like a finely tuned hybrid beast, weaving its many arms into intricate motifs.” Mackrell, one of the UK’s most prominent contemporary dance critics, explicitly frames the collaboration in Cherkaoui’s work as an act of resistance. Winship, of the London Evening Standard, goes on to call the work

“borderless.” But to what extent is the mere fact of the bodies on stage an act of

207 resistance? Is this a successful practice of horizontality? Do the national identities of the nine men on stage successfully equalize or erase global boundaries? These questions, provoked by the lens of horizontality, open discussions of race, globalization, migration, gender, the power structures of the arts, and a myriad of other intersectional power structures.

Dance scholar Martin Givors, who followed the creation process and initial

Fractus V tour, generously shared a short video documentary he made of the piece’s rehearsal process. The video shows un-narrated clips of the dancers taking the piece from the studio to the stage and demonstrates how material was communicated between the cast. The atmosphere in the studio is congenial and cooperative, the dancers laugh and joke together, and share space easily; in the early stages of the video each dancer stands in front of the other cast members, facing away from them, and guides them through a section of prepared movement material. In an email accompanying the documentary

Givors describes this process as “imitation” or “trial and error,” during which the dancers aimed to replicate the dances, rather than trying to become Hip Hoppers, or Lindy

Hoppers etc. Later in the video we see the dancers learning and replicating choreography in a similar fashion. In his doctoral thesis, Givors examines the company’s creative policies, which embrace the “necessity of ‘commoning’ and differentiation” without simply creating an “assemblage of difference” (2019, 5); the company balanced retaining individual movement identities among the performers while also finding an environment where those voices could work together.

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As an audience member, I found Fractus V highly enjoyable - I would posit initially that the work itself is good. But “good,” as philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah

(2015) reminds us, is a thin concept: expressing approval without necessarily telling us much about why the word has been applied (46). Interrogating the work’s choreography, its studio process, and the critical responses above requires us to approach thicker concepts, or those that are enmeshed within the social contexts of their application: is the work ethical? Is it political? Is it resistant (and if so, what does it resist and what does it propose as an alternative)? To understand these terms we have to read the work as always already present within the context of the western contemporary dance world, complete with left-leaning, culturally literate audiences, willing to spend their money on coming to see this kind of project. Within this context the work is relatively successful on an aesthetic, financial, and critical level, much as Cherkoui’s other works have been successful in bringing questions of race and power to large contemporary dance audiences. In 2014 Cherkaoui received a UnitedHumans award for Mutual Respect in recognition of his collaborative partnership with Damien Jalet (who shared the award) on the work Babel, an award offered to those who produce a sustaining, leading, or remarkable impact on society. UnitedHumans (2018) lauded both choreographers as

“cosmopolitans, members of mankind, working in a spirit of sincere friendship between everyone through a return to interhuman contacts making the world a better place.” The term “cosmopolitan” derives from the Greek cosmos and polis, positioning the subject as a citizen of the universe, rather than a member of a culture among cultures. Examining this idea more closely, Appiah breaks cosmopolitanism into two strands: the idea that we

209 have obligations to others that stretch beyond ties of kindred or citizenship, and that we take an interest not just in the general concept of humanity, but in the specifics of individual lives, humanities, values and beliefs (2015, xv). On that note he adds that we should therefore be capable of having a conversation across differences of values, weeding out thinner concepts until we can discuss the thicker concepts that underpin them, and that we have obligations to strangers, as well as those within our cultural communities.

Fractus V is quite clearly a cosmopolitan work – it has to be. The dancers and musicians engaged in a series of verbal and physical conversations across difference, showing respect and value to each other while allowing dance forms (and dancers) to retain individuality in collaboration. The production goals of the company are realized: each dance form is still visible, dispelling the myth of a bland, globalized homogeneity, but those dance forms flow across bodies, intersect with other movement systems, and demonstrate each dancer’s willingness to engage and internalize a practice not his own, at least temporarily. But the critics’ responses above give me pause for concern. Graham

Watts calls the movement of each dancer “indigenous” – a word that ties ownership cultural forms tightly to the borders of individual nations in spite of the dancers’ much more individualized movement training. Mackrell talks about the “wildly ecstatic”

“Middle Eastern” influences, even though neither term is technically accurate (the dancers are as a whole incredibly precise and controlled in their movement, and the term

“Middle Eastern” fails to encompass the global range of influences from the lives and careers of the performers), and the whole smacks of dog-whistle orientalism, alluding to

210 an uncontrolled and untrained physicality. The point remains also that Cherkaoui describes Fractus V as a “contemporary dance project”, thereby reducing all the various movement heritages at play within the work to one conceptual and cultural framework, a choice which does not seem to reflect the company’s desire to preserve each dance form’s individual integrity. Literary theorist Emily Apter asks us to think cautiously about cosmopolitan projects that purport to make multiple languages accessible to a global audience because: “The drive towards a transnationally translatable monoculture pitches languages against each other in competition for a market share” (2011, 99).

Cherkaoui’s authorial status, and the decision to frame the work as contemporary dance, makes it possible for Fractus V to attract a broad market of audience members, reviewers, funding, and critical attention. However, the reviews above show how choices in naming, framing, and ownership invite a critical reading of the work that assumes the values of a white-dominated, highly privileged cultural environment.

The horizontalist impulses of Fractus V are most evident in the private circle of the cast and their intentions for their working environment. As Givors stressed in our email conversation of May 2019: “Fractus V, maybe more than a show, was a time-place- community where dancers transformed themselves by "digesting" all the dances they learnt during the creative process and repeated during the tour.” The work produced a community, and a durational impact for those involved, but sharing that impact with audience members was not a priority for the performers, and as a result those horizontalist intentions were lost to critical attention. The challenge of sustaining a horizontalist impulse – of taking the rehearsal studio onto the stage and making it

211 available to the world through performance – is one that will be explored multiple times across this chapter. Ralph Lemon’s attempt at producing durational horizontality can be seen in in his work Geography, which exists not only as a performance work, but also as a text of the same name, documenting reflections, visual impressions, and the nitty gritty elements of an international, multi-technique collaborative process, including the stakes of naming the work as a post-modern piece of contemporary choreography. Through this document – despite the limitation that it only offers us Lemon’s perspective – we can see

Lemon’s attempts to address conflicting cultural, national and technical values from a horizontalist approach, and posit a model for similar real-world negotiations.

Geography is another episodic work, the first in a trio of three pieces produced over a number of years, all of which explore cross-cultural creative processes (the other pieces are named Tree and Come Home Charlie Patton). Geography’s accompanying monograph describes roots in the Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus, as well as an exploration of different dance cultures, and over the course of the piece the dancers move in and out of solo and group movement, musical accompaniment, and verbal play (Lemon et al.,

2007). A dancer clings to the edge of a curtain made of bottles that drapes the entire stage in sections, repeating the word “womb” faster and fast until it becomes the pulsating engine of a horrific machine that circles overhead. The dancers return over and over to a rhythmic stamping, circling dance in the middle of the stage before falling out into lyrical explorations of pouring weight. The dancers disperse across the stage, tipping and skipping in individual choreographic exploration, before coming back together in long unison phrases that draw the different movement styles of the piece together. Fragments

212 of text can be overheard: “in this heaven... like hell... we affirm.... an inverted[?]... God”

(35:50) and the dancers accompany themselves singing, and on drums which frequently become part of the choreography.

Geography was a commissioned project for Yale Repertory Theatre. Lemon collaborated with eight African and American dancers over a period of three months to produce various iterations of the piece, as well as the diaries and drawings that would eventually form Geography the text. Lemon’s journal of the work is penetrating in its identification of technical ruptures between all the dancers, and how those ruptures in understandings of what dance is, how it should be created, practices, and performed, shape creative and social artistic relationships. From early in the process he recognized that most of his collaborators “do not embrace the straight and vertical logic of

European/American dance training” (Lemon and Morris 2000, 87), nor do the performers share technical preferences in the dance forms they practice, or what they value in movement choice and performance quality. For example, a dancer from Guinea described the small-scale steps of the Côte d'Ivoire as “steps for roaches” (142). Lemon writes that the dancers had different needs for warming up, for focusing, for creating, for bringing their bodies into contact with the floor; the failure to come to any harmonious system for creation or rehearsal is felt in fights, Lemon’s frustration, a plethora of bodies breaking down, dealing with injury, accommodating themselves in rehearsal and performances.

The performance diary is prefaced by Lemon’s own narration of his travels to

Africa (specifically to the Ivory Coast and Guinea) and Haiti. His articulation of his experiences trying to comprehend strange cultures are deliberately low affect – curiously

213 devoid of any kind of evaluative language or emotive response; even when screaming violence erupts around his party, with flashing knives and a hasty getaway, Lemon only records events and images, not his emotions or responses. While this cannot render the language emotionless, and even the choices of imagery – the flashing knife – imply the mood of the encounter, Lemon does succeed in uncoupling this portion of the text from his internal landscape. The effect of this is to paint Lemon as a comparatively neutral, and thus trustworthy observer – reflecting, perhaps, a western academic bias that in the past has categorized emotive language as individual and objective language as common.

It also forces the reader to take responsibility for the emotions and value judgements they bring with them into the text – how we fill the void that Lemon leaves open to us.

Lemon’s mode of actively being among other communities and cultures maps onto his reactions to creative disparities in the studio process.

Lemon’s approach to the chaos of the rehearsal studio, his journal suggests, is to see it and ride with it. Where the creative processes established by his training fail him, he allows new techniques to arise from the emergent needs and desires of the dancers in the studio together. “Yesterday started well enough and then cascaded into a Babel of sorts, a day of defining and cleaning the Collage phrase. Those many voices of what’s right and what’s wrong brought an added chaos of energy and focus. Still, all in all we got a lot done.” (133). Ownership of the various elements of the work seems to be up for grabs and transmissible: “A raucous day. We started with some simple singing ideas that

I had and that the Africans snatched away and made into another more interesting musical experience” (98). Lemon also consciously frames the whole process in context

214 with his personal artistic history, and that of black dance within the United States, acknowledging that in both cases African dance has experienced a kind of “betrayal,” by dismissal, diminution, and lack of acknowledgement and use (43). Across the text we are encouraged to follow Lemon’s process of negotiation as complex, without coming to an easy or settled process, let alone a solution. Different belief systems cohabitate without compromise and are present without evaluation: “Moussa squeezes a lime over his legs and feet every night before going on, for protection. Nai has an elaborate gestural prayer and James kneels to the floor, touching it. Carlos and I stretch.” (134). I enjoy this sequence in particular because stretching – which my own bias leads me to treat as mundane – is transfigured by association into a ritualistic, protective practice, another shape for faith to take, rather than a physiological necessity.

Lemon’s complementary processes in the world and in the studio, in combination with his low-affect writing style, allow Geography to model a horizontalist process. The dance and the text move rapidly back and forth across codes of signification, breaking down hierarchies of power and meaning, and creating a way of relating to other bodies and cultures that moves between the world and studio spaces. Published critical responses reflect Lemon’s own articulation of the work, discussing the process and span of the project, naming the facts of circumstance without broader evaluative judgments. New

York dance critic Marcia Siegel offers a rare descriptive response to the work Tree, the second iteration of the Geography trilogy: “Despite their clashing cultures, despite interruptions, broken trains of thought, conflicts of intention, one sensed a constant tilt toward community” (2000). Lemon sums up the process: “Geography/Africa was in part

215 a performance, but it was equally an anthropological collaboration about being American,

African, brown, black, blue, black, male, and artist” (Lemon 2000, 8).

A modeled horizontality, however, does not always mean that a horizontalist dynamic truly existed, and a comment in Lemon’s 2010 multimedia performance How

Can You Stay in the House All Day and Not Go Anywhere? calls Lemon’s understanding of his cast dynamic into question. Lemon reports that after the third work of the

Geography Trilogy, Come Home Charlie Patton, the dancers did not speak to him for four years (2011, 10:55). Lemon blames the final section of the piece, a three-minute, physically exhausting attempt at transcendence that both dancers and audience expressed was far too long (the former by complaints, the latter by walking out of the performance), and which dancer Darrell Jones said he could only get through by repeatedly cursing

Lemon in his head as he performed. There are tensions, also, beneath the smooth writing of Geography: Lemon’s continued search for “trance dancing,” even as the African performers in his cast, some of whom have experienced spiritual trances, protest that the idea is too dangerous (2000, 95-97); or the day that the performers complained that four of them were sharing a hotel room, to which Lemon’s response was to regret that “the rest of the day was lost to this boiling-over ‘social problem.’ No concentration.” and to threaten to send everyone home (119). Lemon’s search for a choreographic horizontality does not always make accommodation for the reality of his dancers’ needs and feelings, even as the results of his search appear to model democratic means for collaboration across identities and cultures.

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A final note on horizontality and the studio/world dynamic: it is not always a communal drive that leads artists to/through a horizontal investigative space, nor is a horizontalist space ever devoid of verticalist assertions and complications. André Lepecki describes how the dance studio can serve as a non-place: a theoretically smooth, black surface, “irrecoverably detached” from social terrain; a “virgin” territory where new modes of being and representation can be discovered and broken down (2006, 68-69).

Lepecki views horizontality as an antidote to the isolationist solipsism of the modernist subject, but acknowledges that historically horizontalism is always affiliated with, and possibly derived from, the highly masculinist perspectives of Jackson Pollack (67), whose seminal splatterings inspired not only horizintalism, but also elements of Clement

Greenberg’s – similarly masculinist – emphasis on medium specificity. From this perspective Lemon and Cherkaoui, with their all-male casts, might be seen as also reproducing masculinist aspects of horizontality; the first of Geography’s three works invites only men into the conversation. The world is in the studio, and the patriarchal norm that cherishes a male perspective over and above female or non-binary insight, even while complicated by diverse racial attitudes to gender, goes unquestioned in this first part of the Geography Trilogy as well as in Fractus V. For a direct challenge to issues of race and gender, it is necessary to turn to my next metaphor: choreography as protest/protest as choreography.

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Choreography as Protest/ Protest as Choreography

The metaphorical relationship between protest as choreography was established in

2003 by Susan Foster, in an essay where she explored the social, performative and affective choices of lunch counter sit-in protestors during the 1960s, ACT-UP die-ins during the 1980s, and the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting protests in Seattle. In this work Foster draws attention to the informal training experienced by lunch-counter protestors, often inspired by work with CORE (Committee on Racial Equality) – a training that emphasized physical non-aggression, a presence that was physical, attentive, but not passive in the face of resistance and aggression (399). Physically training the body in this manner implies a choreographic process in which trained and deliberate movements alter space and effect those who come into contact with performers.

Similarly, ACT-UP protesters asserted a “passive non-compliance,” making it difficult for police to lift or remove their bodies (404). In Foster’s conception of “choreographies of protest” the physical choices made by protesting bodies effectively highlight and re- choreograph the responses of the world around them. While she does not advocate for reading protests as dances, Foster uses the framework of choreography to ask dance-like questions about the function of protests such as: “What kind of significance and impact does the collection of bodies make in the midst of its social surround? How does the choreography theorize corporeal, individual, and social identity?” (397). Despite Foster’s separation of her metaphor from dance, her choice of choreography as a metaphor also serves to challenge the more stable metaphor of dance as superficial, or escapist. Putting these two ideas together I will apply the inquisitive framework of “Choreographies of

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Protest” to two danced projects: Donald Glover’s This is America and the Pantsuit Power flash mob for Hillary Clinton, exploring how they use danced choreography to communicate a political protest through social media, and specifically how dance functions within these projects to communicate a protest. I then look at two non-danced approaches to choreographed protest: the “Wakanda Forever” salute from Black Panther, and the social re-choreography of Aimee Meredith Cox’s ethnographic text Shapeshifters to explore how danced and gestural choreographies of protest can leverage cultural frameworks and metaphor in order to succeed as tools for change.

The music video “This is America” by Donald Glover (who performs under the name Childish Gambino), choreographed by Sherrie Silver, is a powerful message of what it means to be black in America, and a protest against the anti-black terrorism that both underpins American society and erupts in stunning acts of violence (Glover 2018).

The cultural and theoretical significance of the work was immediately recognized –

Anthropology Now devoted a whole issue to the video in winter 2018 – but critical responses to the work have been mixed. Glover’s layered referentiality is abundantly clear in the staging, lyrics, and choreography, but as a whole the whiplash collage of images that moves us from dance party to massacre and back again resists clear translation or consistent analysis.

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The first 50 seconds of “This is America” are quiet and peaceful. An a capella choir sings in a major key, as an older man29 walks into a warehouse setting and begins to accompany the off-screen singers on an acoustic guitar. The camera pans out to Glover, his back to the camera, shirtless in white jeans, who begins to move through a series of body-rolling isolations. He gradually turns around, works his way down stage, eases back to sit low into his hip... and shoots the guitarist in the back of the head. “This is

America.” It is a moment as shocking and dissonant the first time as it is the fiftieth, even as you come to accept it as part of the video, and the stark demonstration of the uncomfortable truth of anti-black violence in the United States. As the video goes on, the juxtapositions continue in high contrast: a group of children dance in a joyful circle around Gambino performing a mix of African and popular social dances; Gambino machine-guns down a singing gospel choir.30 “This is America.” Gambino presents his bare back to the camera: “Look what I’m whippin’ on.” Gambino and the children dance as smoke and sirens fill the warehouse and people run in terror behind him. Gambino smokes a cigarette and dances a Michael Jackson routine on top of a red car. Gambino

29 Many viewers mistakenly assumed that this was Tracy Martin, father of Travyon

Martin, a black teen who was shot in Florida in 2012. In fact it is a professional actor and musician named Calvin C. Winbush II.

30 Most likely a reference to the mass shooting committed by a white supremacist at

Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015.

220 runs, terrified through the dark towards us, eyes white and wide and wild, a growing mob chasing behind him.

Since this video’s release I have been following various popular and scholarly reactions to the work, and have noticed that it is the elements of the video’s choreography that are specifically read as “dance” (and particularly the children in school uniform who dance around Gambino) that tend to provoke the most confusion and conflict in interpretation. Musicology professor Guthrie Ramsay (quoted by Gajanan 2018) offered this summary for Time’s investigation of the symbolism in the video: “…the dancers could be there to distract viewers in the same way black art is used to distract people from real problems plaguing America.” But, Ramsey adds, it’s better to absorb the video as a whole because America itself is a country of “very strange juxtapositions.”

Choreographer Camille A. Brown, interviewed by Theresa Ruth Howard for Dance

Magazine, interpreted the children as “innocent” and “oblivious,” but also a powerful testament to black power: “I thought about the brilliance of black people. You see videos of these kids in Africa and Cuba, the way they are moving with sophistication and clarity—we always find our groove.” Looking back over this dissertation and my previous research on black social dance, my own interpretation of the children dancing in the videos is that they are a reminder of how dance has historically served to allow black communities to get and hold white attention. White communities generally do not look at violence done to black bodies, but will command those same bodies to dance, to entertain, to smile and with that smile provide justification for the violence being done.

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Glover uses these dancing children as a high affect juxtaposition to his staged violence, forcing viewers to take in both as part of the same cultural relationship.

Reviewing “This is America” for Anthropology Now, Sherina Feliciano-Santos points out that while the song has inspired breakdowns, explanations, and reactions across a range of platforms, Glover himself has refused requests to interpret the video, simply responding “No,” when asked for an explanation of its final scene (Higgins et al.

2018). While many have lauded the video, Feliciano-Santos also highlights responders on twitter who have critiqued Glover’s representation of black pain – describing the whole as “trauma porn.” Deborah J. Cohen, in the same review series also raises the troubling absence of black women’s perspectives in the video, and the ways in which the violence

Gambino participates in (he shoots a number of other black people over the course of the video) perpetuates the oppressive stereotype of hypermasculine, violent blackness. By contrast Kimberly Eison Simmons describes Gambino’s shirtless body as a demand for the recognition of his humanity as he makes his way through the horrific depictions of pain and trauma inflicted on the black community in America. Five academic reviewers in total give completely contrasting interpretations of the significance and meaning of

“This is America,” drawing on various signifying layers or frames of analysis to support their arguments. While the propensity of such views speaks to the cultural impact of the work, the inability of scholars to come to any consensus around what the work makes it difficult to clearly articulate the message of this work of protest (a second challenge made by dance studies scholar Thomas DeFrantz I will address in more detail below). I would

222 argue, however, that the protest of the work becomes clearer when we consider how the video creates meaning.

The tendency when interpreting this video, as we have seen, is for critics to break disparate elements down and interpret them individually, without combining them into a coherent whole. But as we have seen in my second chapter, this interpretative choice ignores the black aesthetic strategy of asymmetry – and attending to asymmetry means that we must consider the radical shifts in imagery and deliberately obscured meaning as part of the overall intended outcome of the work. In short, “This is America” communicates through affect as well as symbolic meaning and looking at the video in these terms leads to a clearer understanding of its function as a choreographed protest.

Affect is a physical manifestation or expression of emotion or feeling, and theoretically serves as a means to consider how people negotiate social, cultural and personal relationships through an interrelated network of emotional structures and non-human objects; Brian Massumi (2002) explains that affect effectively bridges the Cartesian mind/body divide, because what is physically experienced is felt and vice versa, and furthermore this means there can be no separation between artistic, cultural, and social realms of experience. According to art theorist Viv Golding, this bridging effect unlocks the potential for affect to be used to prompt shifts in the human sensorium, that by cultivating affective experiences we can change human thinking. Golding suggests, for example, that museums should be considered affective territory, where “…bodies come into contact with objects and others… [and] things and people of the world might be brought closer to our ‘skins’” (83). Considering “This is America” as affective enables us

223 to consider the video as bodily, artistically, and politically coherent, as well as to speak to its place in the cultural moment of its production.

If the Fordist economy facilitated the development of consumer culture, the post-

Fordist economy might be said to be based on the manufacture of affect. As the Fordist dream of stable heteronormative wealth building dies, the “productive instabilities of the contemporary capitalist economy engender new affective practices, in which children scavenge toward a sense of authentic social belonging by breaking from their parents’ way of attaining the good life” (Berlant 2007, 277). The arts are as complicit in this shift as are other areas of consumable culture, providing the emotional high of achievement and belonging without structure or reciprocity (277). As performance studies scholars

Nicholas Ridout and Rebecca Schneider (2012) ask: “The manipulation of affect is stock- in-trade for theatrical and performance labor, and much art production in general… Are we living in the affect factory?” (6). In the case of “This is America,” however, understanding the video as primarily a vehicle for the creation of affect helps viewers make sense of the welter of images: they are not supposed to access a coherent narrative, but by their access – or lack of access – to the symbols of the work, they are caught up in whitewater torrent of emotion, which the highly danced content of the video forces them to embody in a particularly visceral way. Viewers might not share the culturally enmeshed network of history and images in the work, and thus are caught in a violent rush of feeling that they may be only barely able to grasp or comprehend.

The combination of emotional affect and lack of access to, or synthesis of, the video’s symbolism means that viewers must stay with the political issues raised by the

224 work – to consider anti-black violence in the United States as an unsolved and ongoing issue. Comments on the YouTube video talk about coming back to watch the video over and over again, trying to understand its meaning, or using the phrase “this is America” to encompass the violence they see around them, particularly violence in American schools.

On July 4th 2019 viewers came back to the video in order to comment directly on the irony of the video’s truth in the face of the patriotic rhetoric surrounding them. The affective strength of “This is America” is that it creates a powerful, durational attachment to the video and the issues Gambino raises, even if that response is difficult to put into words. Affect is a powerful tool within choreographies of protest, but – as I will now show – affect also has the potential to undermine attempts at choreographed protest if out-of-sync with that protest’s intended political consequences.

In November 2016 the “Pantsuit Power” flash mob for Hillary Clinton took over

Union Square, NYC, in support of Clinton’s presidential candidacy. A huge collection of dancers trickled into the square in downtown Manhattan at 10am, arranging themselves in ranks of soloists, corps dancers, and a cluster of volunteers and children at the back, all dressed in colorful variations on Hillary Clinton’s iconic pantsuits (Rowlson-Hall and

Lidofsky 2016). As the cheerful pulse of Justin Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling” rang out, the dancers began to step and clap to the beat, the front row breaking out into solos from various dance styles: House, voguing, the kid ‘n play, etc. As the music transitioned into a more lyrical break, the front rows sank into crouches, and a second cluster of dancers fountained up into a long arabesque, and subsequent balletic contribution to the choreography. As the song built to the first chorus, the whole first tier

225 of the Union Square steps was covered in jumping, fist pumping, dancing bodies. On the second verse the front tier cleared, and the dancers on the second tier of steps – volunteers and children – strode forward flourishing ribbons over their heads to draw bold shapes behind a cluster of break dancers. The front tier of dancers poured back in for the second chorus and then, on the bass guitar solo, alternately took a knee or stood in salute, right palm pressed to their hearts. As the music picked up towards the chorus for a third time the dancers jumped higher, and higher, rising to a fever pitch before breaking into the chorus material again. The camera caught individual nods, winks, accents and laughter – a widespread feeling of community and joy.

Co-choreographed by Celia Rowlson-Hall and Crishon Landers,31 the “Pantsuit

Power” flash mob features around 200 performers and crew members. The choreographed (rather than improvised) nature of the work is evident both in the structured nature of the choreography and the prevalence of shared unison material. Some saw a literally symbolic message in the work, as did Sarah Kaufman of the Washington

Post, who claimed that: “Raised fists signify #BlackLivesMatter, arms and faces tilted to the sky hint at solar energy, circling hips symbolize reproductive rights… dancers take a knee to evoke San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protest against police brutality. Others stand with a hand on their hearts.” However, it is

31 Landers also uses the name Crishon Jerome and is referenced under both names in the various sources referenced in this chapter. For ease of reading I will use “Landers” throughout.

226 primarily the energetic joy and performative alliance across diverse dance styles that forms the most salient message of the gathering in my reading. Co-choreographer

Landers remarks: "We intended to show our support for Hillary through dance in order to celebrate life, love, freedom, justice, equality, unity, and femininity,” adding that the dance was specifically a protest against the “bullying” of Donald Trump (quoted in

Careaga 2016), and which drew on the iconography of the Pantsuit, explored as a symbol of Clinton’s candidacy by the group Pantsuit Nation.

Pantsuit Nation “began” on October 20th – the day after the third presidential debate in the 2016 election – according to organizer Libby Chamberlain (2017, xi). In the aftermath of the debate Chamberlain and her friend were frustrated by audience members’ focus on Clinton’s clothing, appearance, voice, smile etc. and the cut of her pantsuit, rather than on videos in which Donald Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women. They started a private Facebook group urging friends to wear a pantsuit to vote, and within one day the group had swelled to 24,000 members. The group became a haven for women to share stories about what the election, and a female president would mean to them, the group eventually surpassed one million members on November 5th, and had three million by election day (xii). The focus of Pantsuit Nation in the aftermath of the election is on storytelling as a means to empathy, kindness and resultant political action; the pantsuit became “a uniform that, as unlikely as it seemed at first, brought together a disparate but indelibly united group of people on the side of justice and inclusion” (xvii).

The choreographers of the “Pantsuit Power” flash mob treat the pantsuit in a similar manner: as a way to unite a disparate group of individuals in collective empathy with

227 each other’s needs, as a horizontalist coming together of dancers from many different walks of life, as a show of unity towards Clinton and as opposition to Donald Trump’s rhetoric of division and difference. Watching the “Pantsuit Power” flash mob, the drive towards horizontality is clear to see, even if it is not fully realized.

In her Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly Judith Butler uses the

2011 protests in Tahir square, Egypt, as a model for successful “horizontal relations” between men and women. These protests began as a non-violent civil protest against a number of legal and political issues including low wages inflation, and lack of political freedoms. Violent clashes between protesters and security forces led to widespread deaths and injuries, and the protests eventually led to the resignation of President Hosni

Mubarak. Butler describes how horizontal relations between men and women in Tahir

Square emerged methodically through work schedules and rotating rights to public speaking, and that these relations formed a mode of performative resistance to the entrenched hierarchies of the patriarchal Mubarak regime (2018, 89).32 In the “Pantsuit

Power” flash mob, the intention towards horizontality is apparent in the staged equality of dance styles – in the range of soloists who vogue, whack, house dance, salsa33 and pas de deux through the choreography. But the division of the work into soloist and corps,

32 Despite Butler’s analysis, it is worth noting widespread reports of sexual assault and rape in Tahir Square during and after the 2011 protests.

33 I believe the intention is to salsa - the virtuosity of social partner dancing is given short shrift by the choreographers and dancers in the video.

228 professional and amateur, undercuts this horizontalist message, as does the prominence of slender, cisgender, conventionally attractive, able bodies and the absolute heteronormativity of the partnering.

In short, the “Pantsuit Power” flash mob protest presents solidarity theoretically in opposition to precarity, but only performs solidarity, not the precarity that makes solidarity necessary. Butler also describes precarity, explaining that bodies are vectors of power that are subject to force, and which can mobilize and counter power with a power of their own, but that they can only do so when supported by social systems and livable environments that are not available to all bodies equally, or all bodies at all (84);

“Pantsuit Power” uses an exclusive environment to send a message of inclusivity – excluding, in fact, those for whom a public protest might be most precarious and therefore most necessary. The title of Kaufman’s Washington Post article describing the flash mob: “’Pantsuit Power’” Flash Mob Video for Hillary Clinton: Two Women, 170

Dancers and No Police” goes further than the dance itself in calling attention to the issues at stake: only a very small range of bodies can safely take over American public spaces and speak politically without a militarized police response. The medium of dance in this context acts as a signifier of privilege and safety, as well as a tool of protest. Unlike

Glover, who ends his video running in terror from a mob of shadowy figures, the

“Pantsuit Power” flash mob breaks out into a dance party in a public environment of safe approval.

In her exploration of contemporary feminist activism, Rebecca Traister explores the pressure on pro-Clinton protests to be cheerful, safe and upbeat. She considers how

229 the prevailing climate in 2016 held that “women who talked too loudly and too aggressively were considered immensely unappealing, sexually and intellectually, by the men whose opinions still shaped the world” (2018, xxv). She also notes that while

Clinton supporters were openly attacked by many, the counter-movement of Pantsuit

Nation was private and invisible, except to its Facebook members (24). These reasons might explain the choreographers’ decision to keep their protest upbeat and horizontalist, and to present an ideal vision of the future rather than addressing the issues of the present. Traister also points out that in the aftermath of the 2016 election, as Pantsuit

Nation re-formed into the activist organization Stronger Together, many of the members experienced marital and domestic backlash even as they made political gains, including a boyfriend of three years who told his partner after the second Women’s March “I’m frustrated and embarrassed… with how worked up you are” (232). The “Pantsuit Power” flash mob engaged in the difficult job of engaging both community and popular appeal, for which the performance of horizontality may have been deemed a more convincing mechanism for protest than anger, however justified.

Unfortunately, both “This is America” and the “Pantsuit Power” flash mob, (and many other similar protests in the in the United States), seem to have had very little impact on an increasingly oppressive and hate-fueled society. While it is not, for example, the fault of the “Pantsuit Power” dancers that Hilary Clinton was not elected, it is worth examining the reasons why such a protest might have failed. Furthermore, I argue that there are inherent flaws in both horizontalist protest, and in choreography as a metaphor of protest, that must be faced in order to create effective social change.

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Studying horizontality from the perspective of the digital humanities, Rodrigo Nunes reminds us that while the ideal of a decentralized, non-hierarchical relational community may be a worthwhile ideological goal, protests and movements that employ a horizontalist ideology are profoundly dependent on the social and political contexts surrounding them, and as such are limited by access to communications technology (for example the decision to keep Pantsuit Nation a private group), by opposition from governing bodies or local media, by physical safety and by personal autonomy (Nunes

2005, 303). Due to the diversity of positions that must be accommodated within a horizontalist movement, new tactics of protest have evolved, one of which is swarming, which occurs “…when the dispersed units of a network of small (and perhaps some large) forces converge on a target from multiple directions. The overall aim is sustainable pulsing — swarm networks must be able to coalesce rapidly and stealthily on a target, then dissever and redisperse, immediately ready to recombine for a new pulse” (305).

The “Pantsuit Power” flash mob described above is a clear example of swarming, including the limitations Nunes argues are inherent in this tactic: the broad agreement to cooperation that facilitates a diverse swarm network makes it hard to produce clear goals and directions for cooperative action; attempting to do so creates a hierarchy of need within the swarm, which in turn creates pressures within the swarm to divide and dissolve. Determining a goal or position beyond the agreement to come together undermines the diversity and openness of the protest space, and instead leans towards the creation of verticalist structures of power and need. An example of this limitation in practice is the pink “pussy hat” – a symbol of the Women’s Marches in opposition to

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Trump – which Black Lives Matter and transgender activists repeatedly critiqued as racist and transphobic and yet remain an iconic symbol of the movement. March organizer

Devin-Norelle writes for Them that “There were so many groups to represent that it became so difficult to be equitable with representation… The hat is a perfect example of the importance of impact over intention…” (2018). Decisions had to be made in order to make the march happen, and yet some of those decisions overlooked and excluded groups that the intention of the Women’s March was to support.

Another issue with the notion of choreography of protest, especially in these two instances where “choreography” is manifested in the more traditional sense as the organization of danced movement, is that the conceptual system framing choreography as a metaphor is firmly entrenched in popular consciousness, and not in ways that lend themselves to productive protest. While dancers who are fluent in a number of artistic practices are able to conceptualize choreography as an applicable metaphor for social change, my experiences teaching non-dance students, and even pre-professional dancers, is that their notions of choreography are much more limited: choreography is acted or staged feeling rather than genuinely felt emotion, choreography is temporary and finite, choreography is limited in its expressive potential and should be read as a literal expression of narrative, relationship, or musicality. The conceptualization of choreography is dominated by white-led understandings of aesthetics, and subject to the demands of a market that desires affect and accessibility. Both the “Pantsuit Power” flash mob and “This is America” limit their duration to the length of one popular song, presenting structured material from a proscenium perspective before choreographing an

232 ending/exit. The metaphor of protest as choreography and choreography as protest must overcome the conceptual framework of limited temporality before it can be incorporated fully into an effective strategy for social change.

A critique in this line of thinking comes from dance studies scholar Thomas

DeFrantz, who argues that Donald Glover fails in choreographing black protest and experience precisely because he [Glover] does not understand what black choreography– and social dance–can do (2018). Focusing on the performance of black social dance within “This is America,” DeFrantz argues that while the video shows the “doing” of the dances, it does not research through dance in order to discover new capacities and possibilities for blackness. Indeed, DeFrantz is critical of the music as well as the choreography of “This is America,” because instead of calling for particular kinds of movement, the open musical and rhythmic structures act simply as a container for dancing at the distance of Glover’s ironic detachment. The dance, according to DeFrantz, therefore cannot fulfil its potential as transformative:

Watching, but disappointed by the use of dance as background, we

remember that black dance thrives when it surprises itself; when the dancer moves

the dancing to a place of unexpected physical innovation and embodied

understanding. Gambino never arrives at this point of danced transformation.

Indeed, there’s no best dancing in ‘This Is America’ as it matters little what

dances are offered up or in what order or in what sorts of formations or

arrangements. Black social dancing can do much more than what is allowed in the

video (2018).

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These critiques, and others above, while apt, tend to erase the role of Sherrie

Silver as the named choreographer of the video, and her artistic vision for the design and function of dance within the video. For instance, while DeFrantz maintains that the

“asocial” black dances put on stage for others to watch “do a great violence as they become impersonal shells that anyone can just do—whether they have a connection to black life and its variegations or not,” Silver maintains the opposite: “getting African dance on the big stage is more important than anything else: ‘I want to be a pioneer and get African dance as an actual genre to be seen as ballet or street dance and all those other styles,’” (Nurse and Akande 2018). “This is America” does meet Silver’s goals of visibility, and possibly Glover’s goals – elusive as they are – but only acts within a limited conception of choreography and its potential as protest.

Susan Foster begins “Choreographies of Protest” with a quote from Bayard

Rustin: “For a protest to succeed, it must produce a feeling of moving ahead; it must force people to take notice of injustice; and it must win new allies” (2003, 395). Liz

Lerman writes that one of her aims of developing horizontality with her performers was to “use our extensive skills and tools to build, or rediscover, or create a community, a sense of community, an awareness of a collective existence” (2011, 32-3). In other words, for a horizontalist protest to succeed it must create not only an affective response but induce a shift in day-to-day ways of doing and thinking – either directly in those who witness the protest, or indirectly as a result of legally mandated behavior. From this perspective we might say that This is America and the Pantsuit Flashmob produce affect, but not necessarily a change or addition to technique in the sense that Spatz describes

234 above. In the metaphor of studio as world, artists invest in deep physical and experiential research in search of individualized practices for living in the world, which as I have explained above can be parsed as a search for new techniques of relationality. One way that choreographies of protest can have a similar effect is through the creation of new choreographic symbols and meaningful codes that extend their durational affiliation beyond the finite duration of protest, or through recodifications of existing moves and gestures to carry new kinds of meaning in their repeated use. Examples of recodifications that have been examined explicitly as new choreographies of protest include the zombie walk included as part of the repertoire of the Occupy movement (Nyong’o 2012) and

“Hands Up Don’t Shoot,” and the accompanying gesture of arms in the air, as part of an ongoing protest against police brutality towards black Americans (Kedhar 2014). Another gesture that clearly exemplified the mechanisms and power of recodification is the

Wakanda salute, which originated in Marvel Comic’s Black Panther franchise, and gained popular traction after the 2018 release of the Black Panther movie, staring

Chadwick Boseman as the title character.

The Wakanda salute occurs in Black Panther as a gesture of national solidarity and political respect towards the fictional nation of Wakanda – a technologically superior afro-futurist country, hidden within present-day Africa. Across the five tribes residing within Wakanda the salute is used as an affirmation, a greeting, and as a formalized salute to members of the Wakandan royal family. At one pivotal moment later in the movie it is used as a computer-recognized gesture that assists in the virtual piloting of an airship, allowing an American pilot to activate a “sonic overload” and prevent the theft of

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Wakandan technology. The salute is performed by crossing both fists in an x-shape across the torso, and then moving both arms straight down to either side of the body while retaining clenched fists. Both gestures typically have a sudden, direct dynamic, and are sometimes – but not always – accompanied by the phrase “Wakanda Forever!”

Prior to the release of the film, the panelists of the 2018 “Black Panther Movie:

Black Imagination and Afro-futurism” conference – Izetta Nicole, Ani Mwalimu, Victor

Dandrige Jr, Sean Walton Jr, and Tosha Stimage, artists and producers from the

Columbus, Ohio community – posited that the film offered an unprecedented portrayal of black culture, community and pride; an hypothesis that was absolutely supported upon the movie’s release. In the days following the release of Black Panther I noticed the

Wakandan salute proliferating around my own community as a social gesture of solidarity – as a greeting, and a celebration of the movie’s brilliance. Since then it has been performed as a gesture of celebration and success by French and American tennis players Gaël Monfils and Sachia Vickery, by English footballers Steve Mounie, Collin

Quaner, Jesse Lingard and Paul Pogba, by Kenyan rugby player Collins Injera during the

Canadian World Series, and by American basketball player Victor Oladipo. Chadwick

Boseman also used the salute to greet Daniel Kaluuya when Kaluuya and director Jordan

Peele accepted the best feature award for "Get Out" at the Independent Spirit Awards

(Cooper 2018).xxx At national and international events in a range of social dance communities (especially those communities where the dance in question derived from black practitioners such as Swing and Blues), black dancers have taken to gathering and photographing themselves doing the Wakanda salute. These photos are then posted on

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Facebook as part of an ongoing project to visibilize an underrepresented and marginalized black presence within white-led social dance communities practicing these black vernacular forms.

In these instances the Wakanda Forever salute celebrates blackness from a diasporic perspective, providing a gesture that transcends national borders in favor of common African descent. In the Marvel canon the citizens of Wakanda do occasionally live secretly in the world beyond the nation’s borders, gathering political information and covertly furthering Wakandan interests – the salute is a message to insiders that the nation of Wakanda exists, even if only in the black imagination, as a world beyond the oppressions of the day-to-day. The moment that a white American FBI agent (Agent

Everett Ross, played by Marin Freeman) is invited to share the gesture occurs only after

Ross demonstrates his readiness to give his life in the service of Wakandan interests and needs. Therefore, the salute takes on the meaning of commitment to the black community, backed up by action, with the aim of allowing the black community to flourish on its own terms and by its own metrics, rather than those imposed on it by whiteness. The recodification of the salute removes its association with materiality of

Wakanda, and instead posits an imagined community of future-oriented world leaders to which every black human being has the potential to belong.

Journalist Ismail Akwei (2018) compares the Wakanda Forever salute to the raised fist that became the iconic symbol of the Black Power movement of the 1960s, and calls for the gesture to be codified as an institutional symbol of black pride and excellence. Akwei quotes Monfis in the aftermath of his use of the salute in response to a

237 tennis victory: “It’s not just a sign. It’s everything. It’s everything going on and definitely it’s a shout-out saying that I’m supporting the Black Panther’s community.” Indeed, floating underneath the film, the comic franchise and the Wakanda Forever salute are multiple references to the Black Panther Party, a political party started in 1966 by Huey

Newton and Bobby Seale in response to systemic police brutality against African-

Americans, with the broader goal of black rights and power. The first appearance of the character named “Black Panther” in a Marvel comic predates by only several months the founding of the Black Panther party, so the character was not named for the organization, but a black panther was already in use as the logo of the Lowndes County Freedom

Organization, founded by Stokely Carmichael in 1965 to register African American voters in Alabama. Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, who created the first Black Panther comics, would have known about Carmichael from his work as the leader of the Student

Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, although probably had not heard of the Freedom

Organization. Another suggestion for the character’s origins is that as Word War Two veterans, Lee and Kirby may have encountered the 761st Tank Battalion, a highly decorated, segregated unit that fought under the logo of the Black Panther and was doubly famous as the regiment of baseball legend and civil rights activist Jackie

Robinson (Hornshaw and Lincoln 2018). While Marvel made a number of failed attempts to change Black Panther’s name to remove associations with the political party, they also ran a series in the 1970s during which Black Panther attempted to take down the Ku Klux

Klan (Ongiri 2018). Another important connection between the movie and the Black

Panther Party is the film’s director, Ryan Coogler, who was born in Oakland CA – the

238 birthplace of the Black Panther Party – and whose first film “Fruitvale Station” (2013) documents the last day in the life of Oscar Grant, a young, unarmed black man from

Oakland who was murdered by a BART police officer while restrained and face down on the station platform (Dirks 2018). There is some justification, therefore, for associating

Black Panther with at least some of the political goals and meanings that the name implies.

Tyler Lewis, director of messaging and project management at The Leadership

Conference on Civil and Human Rights, understands the Wakanda Forever salute as “a gesture of solidarity, pride and resistance—all rolled into one” (Gander 2018).

Philosopher Christopher Lebron (2018), however, is not so convinced, arguing that the salute is a powerful gesture of solidarity among black people, but that it is also sanctioned by its capitalist success, and therefore limited as a radical or political tool - “Wakanda

Forever” is a shared style, not a shared politics. While Black Panther is by no means an ideologically perfect film, and Lebron in particular has raised substantial criticisms about the treatment of the movie’s villain – Killmonger – and the tropes that fall upon him of

American black masculinity, the film’s unapologetic Afrofuturism creates the potential for the Wakandan salute to be recodified as the mutual recognition of a new vision for blackness. As Cavell Wallace (2018) explains: “It is the idea that we will have won the future. There exists, somewhere within us, an image in which we are whole, in which we are home.” The Wakanda Forever salute is a choreographed and durational signal that extends beyond the narrative of Black Panther to suggest a diasporic connection to that homeland – it adds a new technique to the physical repertoire of what it means to “do”

239 and to research the techniques of race. The final installment of the “Avengers” movie franchise: Avengers: Endgame released on April 26 2019, will include the cast of Black

Panther, and Marvel has confirmed that a Black Panther sequel will be released in the next few years. I am excited to see how the choreography lasts and changes into and beyond these new codifications of the Wakanda Forever salute, and whether/how the gesture will continue to have cultural currency.

A more theoretical example of how the metaphor of choreography as protest can be changed by a recognition of durational impact occurs in dance scholar Aimee

Meredith Cox’s work Shapeshifters, an ethnographic monologue that follows a group of young black women connected to a homeless shelter in Detroit over a period of eight years. Cox (2015), in collaboration with her subjects, describes how speech and behavior are used to create a deliberate claim to “entitlement:” entitlement to citizenship, entitlement to agency, entitlement to visibility, recognition, and humanity in a culture where these rights are frequently denied (ix). To make a claim for these rights, the girls34 of Shapeshifters make use of an affective physicality that Cox explicitly frames as choreography – a re-ordering of bodies in space, celebrating “the instability and flexibility of identity in variously configured locations” (28). For example, the shelter at the center of the text is run by paid staff (and a white director), on the ground RAs

34 Cox describes her subjects as girls in order to highlight the way that black “girls” are often treated as responsible adults, or sexualized beyond their years. I use the term myself in recognition of this goal.

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(usually black women of a similar social and educational background to the residents) and the residents themselves; conflict arose between staff and residents because the shelter director judges residents for a lack of upward mobility as represented by white signifiers of “professionalism.” The residents proposed a new system where they would work in-shelter internships alongside the RAs and in administrative departments, but would also be allowed to stay in the shelter for as long as it took to recoup a sense of self and citizenship, rather than simply meeting the metrics of “employability.” Relationships

– emotional, hierarchical, and professional – were, according to Cox, re-choreographed within the shelter to provide a long-term, sustainable system that engaged productively with the external structures that created the need for shelters in the first place (106). Like the Wakanda salute, Cox summarizes her subject’s experiences with shapeshifting and choreography as tools for belonging: “You stay in your body to rewrite the meanings attached to it. Young Black women propose the body as the place to which we finally come home… or make a new home” (29). Here we again see choreography acting as a durational means of re-codifying and changing life for those who choose to participate, beyond the scope of a finite protest or work.

One direction that metaphor theory is yet to explore fully is “the preponderance of metaphorizing through verbs, rather than through nouns” (Cameron 2007, 131). In this chapter the use of dance as a way of exploring metaphor emphasizes the need for both a dynamic exploration of how metaphor functions, and a consideration of movement as a metaphorical source domain. The metaphor of choreography as protest/protest as choreography is a potent means to create change, through affect-induced empathy,

241 through new physical and social techniques, and through the recodification of social signifiers and gestures to promote political solidarity. The horizontalist attitudes that arise in relationship to both these metaphors is a powerful tool in this project, if choreographers recognize its limits, and the difficulty of translating a horizontalist attitude into technical change. Dance must actively further the idea of choreography as a durational, rather than a finite project to make the most of this potential for change and embrace the process-based and improvisational nature of world and dance studio.

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Chapter 6. Conclusion

I sit at my computer, a dull ache running from sacrum through spine, the press of the keyboard softly thrumming in the pads of my fingertips, and the taste of mint and bubbles on my tongue. legs swinging from hips bound tight into a chair (she pressed my femur into its socket but it wouldn’t let go) and the memory of a hug. vulnerable and safe. I am struggling to hold this dissertation, which is two years and three years and five years and ten years and thirty years long in my mind, trying to distill 150 pages into fifteen more, and instead I am thinking about the turning points that shaped the journey of my writing. Standing outside the Wesbeth studio; explaining to a befuddled professor why a dancer wants to take sociolinguistics; “you can write multiple books, Fen;” my uncle demanding a chapter by chapter breakdown of my dissertation; applying for jobs after graduation. This conclusion is not an ending – we’re circling back to the beginning to go on from here – but it is an echo of where the dissertation has been, and where it might go next... Let me show you.

In this dissertation I have traced a path through the evolution of dance criticism and dance studies over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries. By focusing on four key moments of linguistic intervention I have shown that by examining dance discursively it is possible to contextualize dance practices and dance writing in relation to a given historical moment. Dance studies to date has drawn broadly on discursive modes of analysis, but applying those modes to a collection of text-based sources demonstrates how trends in dance, writing, society and politics are directly entwined in a co- 243 constitutive relationship. Furthermore, close reading and discourse analysis allows scholars to untangle that relationship, follow new trajectories of thought and association, and examine how dance studies is working in a given moment to shape its own disciplinary boundaries. Not only has each of my areas of investigation produced new knowledge for the field of dance studies, as described below, but the whole of the dissertation shows the enormous power that dance and language hold together when they work in consort. Investigating that work offers dance writers and scholars a range of tools for understanding and analyzing the linguistic traces of dance history as social and politically implicated, and empowers those same writers and scholars to exercise their own agency in shaping the discipline of dance studies through their writing. From this broad project, and adapting linguistic methods I have fleshed out four case studies, each with its own contribution to dance history, scholarship and practice.

Answering the question: “Why did the meaning of the term “modern dance” shift comprehensively during the first half of the 21st century?” Draws us into a network that includes industrial theory, social constructions of race and the geo-political impact of two

World Wars. Attempting to understand an instinctive love of the abstract poetics of John

Cage and Jill Johnston led me into a queer kinship network with the writers of the past, uncovering not only the community and politics beneath their writing, but also the connection to black modernism and thus a destabilization of the concept of postmodernism as a predominantly white project. Investigating dance’s trajectory into and through academia led me to a close consideration of anthologies as a marker for the state of the field, and to the way dance studies scholars negotiated patriarchal power structures

244 while holding space for the performative work of dance as a research tool. Finally, investigating metaphors of dance in pieces that purport to offer new visions of the world illustrated how our visions and protests must take into account the intertextual and affective references that support them. I have used language, and discourse analysis, as a jumping off point to build micro-histories of certain moments in dance and time, showing that any analysis of dance must be considered to be always already intertextual.

In my last chapter I broadened the scope of my work to gather a sense of what dance and writing looks like in the present moment of the year 2019. I examined the use of dance as a metaphor, and how the specific metaphors of studio/world and choreography/protest are used to articulate a vision of a post-structuralist world, in which identity is liminal and in which individuals and collectives can move around, with and through social structures.

In my conclusion I return to the philosophical work that inspired my work in its early stages: Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, but also to Sarah Ahmed’s

Queer Phenomenology, Ben Spatz’s What A Body Can Do and to the realm of the digital humanities in order to envision dance beyond the metaphor, as an affective medium, oriented towards social and personal movement. While the linguistically-inspired methods I have developed in this dissertation produce new ways of accessing local discourse, I am eager to push on more of commonalities and connections between discourses, and I believe that critical theory and philosophy would be a powerful framework for that investigation. In Chapter Two I originally made some attempts to write with/through/alongside these theories, particularly Deleuzian intensities and lines of

245 flight, but eventually made the choice to edit those ideas out of the chapter body because of how they managed to both reduce and overcomplicate my analysis. Before looking at where my work might go from here I want to examine how these undercurrents have remained beneath my work, even as I deliberately left them implicit in order to promote accessibility and to focus my analysis on historical discourse. I encourage those readers interested to go back and re-read the body chapters of my work with this perspective in mind, and to explore what new thought-spaces are opened up by treating the material in this way.

Overarching Structure

As I tried to connect various strands of research within my case studies, and to think about connections between them, I began to imagine the structure of the dissertation as a Deleuzian rhizome. A rhizome fosters connections between fields, between points, between lives and texts, creating an image of language that is oriented towards experimentation in contact with the real (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 12); rhizomatic thinking creates an open system for the reconstruction of ideas. This system is presented in ways that honor the multiple, that present dichotomies as a way to call into doubt the existence of any kind of dualism, and that asks you to use the new lines of thought made possible by the text to pry open the vacant spaces necessary to building your life and those of the people around you (xv). An analogy might be made between rhizomatic thinking, horizontality, and double-voicing – methods that attend to a wide range of voices, and aim to mediate a common, functional relationality. The rhizome in particualr

246 is a plant-like analogy in resistance to the tree-like structures of society, such as the hierarchical systems of class, or race, or simply the institutional structures wherein an individual or small group holds power of a larger group, who in turn hold power over a larger group etc. The power of the rhizome, for me, is that it can also attend to systems of ideas in which discursive ideologies are normalized, for example up and down, black and white, and deconstruct the social metaphors built from those systems (16).

Working backwards, it is easy to draw the links between the idea of the rhizome and the horizontality described in Chapter Four - both hold in common the idea that power must be decentralized, but while the swarms of practical horizontality tend to coalesce around hierarchical systems, the ideology of the rhizome (which is more of a goal or a thinking tool than a strategy in practice) expands its territory to encompass multiplicity, rather than allowing arboreal structures to coalesce. On the other hand,

Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge that trees and rhizomes exist simultaneously, and always in connection with each other: it is possible to enter a rhizomatic way of thinking through a tree or a tracing, just as works where horizontality fails can point to a belief or model for its success. In Chapter Three we can read Susan Foster’s work as part of the assemblage that is academia. Speaking of assemblages in general Deleuze and Guattari write that they combine the relation of bodies to each other with the linguistic enunciations and transformations attributed to those bodies; “the assemblage has both territorial sides, or reterritorialized sides, which stabilize it, and cutting edges of deterritorialization, which carry it away” (88). We can see how Foster’s work both stabilizes and deterritorializes the assemblage of academia, reifying tropes of

247 universalism only to (re)choreograph an individual, feminist/feminized performative scholarship.

The Deleuzian slant to Chapter Two, and perhaps why A Thousand Plateaus has managed to stay so present in my work, is the desire and dedication of Deleuze, Guattari,

Johnston and Cage to throw out the rules of language and write for affect, and for meaning. The disruption of semiotic and syntactic order, as I remarked in the chapter body, forces us to place our systems of thought on trial and to challenge all the systems and norms we use to structure our lives. With that in mind, it is not surprising that

Deleuze and Guattari have had a profound influence on queer theory – as editors

Chrysanthi Niganni and Merl Storr point out, the seductive power of queer theory is its power to undercut the dilemma of universality versus difference, and instead to engage in the very Deleuzian project of considering non-referentials, bodies, multiplicities and singularities in relations of intensity to each other (2009, 5). Embracing the discomfort of queerness, of bodies without organs, of sex, of spatial striations, facilitates creative thinking through critique… or critique through creativity (1). In investigating two queer writers, Deleuze and Guattari’s work empowers me to read new connections – such as the link between Cage, Johnston, and black literary aesthetics – and to lay out the various influences I see influencing their writing, without needing to afford those influences clear structure, or even certainty.

But for me the clearest connection to Deleuzian thought in this dissertation is in the linear and circular metaphors of Chapter One. A recurrent device in A Thousand

Plateaus is the metaphor of the line of flight, which escapes the map, carves out new

248 territory, and converges on a rhizomatic plane. There is by no means a 1:1 analogy between lines of flight and the teleological thinking I ascribed to Fordist industrial practices and to the kinesthetic envisioning of linearly-oriented dance. Examining the backlash against jazz, also, as typified by Martha Lee’s 1922 article for the Atlanta

Constitution we can see an example of Deleuze and Guattari’s more theoretical generalization on how signifying regimes respond to a line of flight: “the regime must block a line of this kind or define it in an entirely negative fashion precisely because it exceeds the deterritorialization of the signifying sign” (116); there are advances, progressions and challenges – lines of flight – that an authoritarian structure will tolerate as an advance towards a pre-ordained destiny (121), while other such lines must be shamed and scapegoated for expressing the possibility of the “wrong” kind of freedom.

This geometric structure of planes, lines, intensities (where the abstract relations of a plane become expressed as sensorial or tangible phenomena), and strata allows Deleuze and Guattari to organize A Thousand Plateaus around a coherent geometric system, while keeping the symbolizing potential of any one element of that system fluid and changeable. Similarly in Chapter Two, I wrote about lines and circles as a way to envision an implicit desire for a liberated way of being, without implying that lines are

“bad’ and circles are “good” but instead showing how the discursive impact of geometrically imagined projects can be seen across industrial, cultural, and social practices.

There are a number of resonances across the chapters of this dissertation: universalism, queerness, Stephane Mallarmé and Josephine Baker are a just a few ideas

249 that cropped up more times than I made plans for; there are parallels in my analysis that surprised me even as I wrote them and the case studies in this dissertation did not remain clearly separate but instead blurred and intersected in startlingly rhizomatic ways. I argue that this demonstrates the power of combining linguistic, choreographic, and historical analysis: the power to reveal consistencies across time, and to show how disparate points in dance’s history follow similar paths in coming to writing. In the future I would like to explore some of these connections, and expand on the case-specific research contained in this dissertation.

Going Forward

One area of research I have already begun to explore is how the contemporary

Blues dance community is still influenced by turn-of-the-century attitudes to black vernacular partner dancing. In early 2018 I wrote a blog post exploring how the close embrace connection of Blues dance is read as highly sexualized within white-led dance communities, and how this has led to a community debate about how best to handle invitations on the social dance floor, and in classes, to share this kind of connection

(Kennedy). While I spoke briefly about the historical sexualization of black partner dances in this blog post, I would love to trace these connections in light of the more in- depth discursive research I have conducted for this dissertation. I am also interested in the place of codification, competition and performance within the contemporary Blues dance community, and how this relates to the various trajectories for disseminating black partner dances into white communities that I discussed in Chapter Two.

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An idea that emerged in my research for Chapter Three and again in my discussion of “This is America” is the idea of who gets to know what, or access what kinds of meaning, and why. An area that I am yet to explore is how the construction of discourse gives certain audiences an expectation of a particular level of access, whether it be to the identity of participants in a conversation, or to the layers of meaning informing a choreographer’s work. Jill Johnston, John Cage, and Donald Glover all chose (in different ways) to break from conventions of access while retaining the interest of their readers and the respect of their critical contemporaries. Exploring the “why” and the

“how” of these deviations from access could potentially add to discussions of spectatorship and authorship within the dance community, and how we deal with authorial intention and identity in our interpretations of dance and text.

In Chapter Four I made the assertion that with her duet between Terpsichore and

Clio, Susan Foster was quite literally choreographing history – creating an imagined dance in order to add layers of embodied proof to her theoretical argument. In

Choreographing Empathy Foster (2011) also explored how kinesthetic empathy has been used to create a relationship between dancers and audiences. I am curious how dance description can function as an empathy-generating strategy within a text, and how embodiment is used as a persuasive device in contemporary rhetoric. In Chapter Five I wrote about the power of affect in creating meaning though dance performance, and as I reflect on that chapter, and on a range of contemporary writings on social justice, I wonder how descriptions of embodied affect are being used as a way to create textual connection between marginalized authors and their audiences.

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In Chapter Five I also centered my exploration on the metaphor of choreography as protest. One idea that I did not get to fully explore in that chapter is that improvisation and choreography are not distinct practices – choreography can emerge from improvisation, and improvisation sometimes requires the knowledge of complex danced and social choreographies. In his 2018 critique of “This is America,” DeFrantz argues that much of the power of black social dance comes from its improvisational nature:

“dancing is engineering; re-conceiving possibility through weight, memory, energetic effort, and timing. Black social dance is sharing these discoveries among friends, families, and those who care to take part in our invention.” Freezing the moment of that invention, or codifying the discovery as repeatable diminishes – for DeFrantz – its power.

Improvisation is often framed as a political choice – a way to discover the possibilities for movement (across many metaphorical levels) available in any given situation; a way of training the body to take risks, and come into contact with others in newly productive relationships.35 But when the choreography of the world is shifted by protest, or when protesters choreograph their intent in ways that force us to improvise new affective and technical responses, audiences enter into a cycle of choreography and improvisation that

35 Those interested in researching this theory further should pursue Goldman, Danielle.

2010. I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom. Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press; or Cooper Albright, Ann and David Gere, eds. 2003.

Taken by Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader. Middletown: Wesleyan University

Press.

252 holds huge potential for social change. Choreography should not simply be understood as putting steps in order for a finite duration, nor should improvisation be thought of as ephemeral or non-repeatable. In her exploration of queer club culture in New York City,

Fiona Buckland (2002) describes how one young man’s dances are “choreographed” by his friends – they instruct him on how to modify his posture and movement in order to project desire and make himself desirable. By copying, and absorbing this choreography, he absorbs the social and kinesthetic norms of the community and can then improvise adeptly within them (100). Buckland also adds that improvisation is necessary in order to move through the complex textures of different political and social projects in a club environment. Dancers share in choreography as a means to develop political agency, to self-fashion, to be with others like themselves… improvisations through these textures construct a choreographed lifeworld of the club, informed by everyday life, and imagined beyond it (87). This play between improvisation and choreography offers a potential means to overcome some of the weaknesses of horizontalism as a political project, and in future work I am eager to explore how improvisation lives within the metaphorical affect of dance and dance writing.

What Can Dance Writing Do?

In my introduction, I proposed treating dance writing as an authorial negotiation of attitudes towards social, cultural, political and aesthetic phenomena; as an active mode of shaping how dance exists and means, with all the possibilities and responsibilities that this entails. Over the course of the previous four chapters I feel that I have succeeded in

253 placing dance writing firmly in relationship to historical and social trends, and to show how the negotiation of that relationship oriented authors to political and social projects: erasing jazz dance, creating and covering a queer kinship network, taking space for dance in academia, or modelling how we can be together in the world. But as I raised in the introduction, the question remains of how much of this work was intentional, and also how that network of relationships relates to cause and consequence: did newspaper writers cause the backlash against jazz, or did the backlash against jazz provoke coverage in the newspaper press? Does Black Panther create new modes of signification and communal afro-futurism, or does it offer a mode of expressing an extant communal feeling through durational choreographic signifiers? These questions go beyond the scope of this dissertation, and answering them would require a completely different mode of textual, historical, and ethnographic analysis.

What, then, to borrow Benjamin Spatz’s 2015 question, can dance writing do?36

What is the power in relationality? Or of demonstrating a relational network? Spatz, in fact, argues against any linguistic analysis of dance, saying that to frame dance as language is to ignore the physical effort of its production (50) – reading this I wonder, in passing, whether “Choreographing History” can be read, therefore as an argument against the linguistic analysis of historical writing? But instead Spatz suggests that we should understand language as one of many techniques that reach out from birth “to envelop us, to structure our lives and relationships, and indeed to make life possible” (49). If this is

36 Although Spatz admittedly borrows from Deleuze, who in turn borrows from Spinoza (1). 254 true then the possibilities he puts forward for any kind of technique are possibilities we can accord to language and to dance writing: that language is the product of individual research, that attempts to achieve various ends, that it comes from the cultures and societies in which we are raised or are trying to live, and that experimentation with language has the potential to radically alter our own, and public conceptions of who we are and what we do. On the third page of his introduction Spatz offers a list of things the body can do, all of which can also be attributed to dance writing, as can be seen in these examples: Dance writing can undo. Dance writing can bend your perspective. Dance writing can resonate. Dance writing can time travel. Dance writing can stagnate. Dance writing can overcome… et cetera (3). This dissertation uses networks of relationality not to show what dance writing has done, but what it can do, and what it continues to do, and what we should be aware of as we invite it and use it to do in the future.

My project is possible because dance writing is not only an affected and oriented medium but an affecting and orienting stimulus for its readers. Orientation, as I described in my introduction, turns us towards certain ideas and paths to think from, while occluding others from our vision and awareness. Over the course of this dissertation we have seen how dance writing has the powerful potential to affect the reorientation of society a reorientation that occurs not just in the moment of a text’s publication, but reaches out to future readers, and back across all the texts that can now be re-read in light of new orienting information. What A Body Can Do (Spatz 2015) has been a profoundly reorienting text for me, for example, in terms of my attitude to technique. Rather than seeing technique now as a codified tool of institutionalization, with all the problematic

255 baggage that this implies, Spatz’s work emancipates techniques to work as an individualized mode of living, or resistance, and this perspective has allowed me to re- envision my class-taking, my teaching, and how I talk specifically about queer practices in dance classrooms. Reading lived practices as manifestations of individually learned techniques is a powerful way to bridge the gap between dance forms and social action, and to parse the politicization of the body as practically produced/productive.

A Concluding Conclusion

Taking all these points together, dance writing, and in fact the language of dance, and dancers, has a powerful agency in shaping the world we live in as human beings and how we relate to each other. Moreover, looking back on the past of our writing with a discursive eye can help us to understand changes within our discipline, and how those changes in turn shifted the boundaries and practices of our field. The rich possibilities of combining tools adapted from discourse analysis with dance studies and dance history have only been explored very lightly in this dissertation, and I hope that in future I can both deepen and broaden the studies begun here, and expand my focus to new areas of study. As dancers, writers, scholars, practitioners we are the product of the sum total of our experiences in the world, and deeply and irrevocably implicated in its ongoing creative process; I hope that my work encourages readers and writers to breathe in, to pause, to be with their bodies as they begin to write, to read with the knowledge that every word is a fork in the path, and to feel themselves connected, always, within a limitless field of potential, with the power to shape that field for good.

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Appendix A. Extract fron “Does Jazz Put the ‘Sin’ in Syncopation?”

“Jazz originally was the accompaniment of the voodoo dancer, stimulating the half-crazed barbarian to the vilest deeds. The weird chant, accompanied by the syncopated rhythm of the voodoo invokers, has also been employed by other barbaric people to stimulate brutality and sensuality. That it has a demoralizing effect upon the human brain has been demonstrated by many scientists.

There is always a revolutionary period of the breaking down of old conventions and customs which follows after every great war; and this rebellion against existing conditions is to be noticed in all life to-day. Unrest, the desire to break the shackles of old ideas and forms are abroad. So it is no wonder that young people should have become so imbued with this spirit that they should express it in every phase of their daily lives. The question is whether this tendency should be demonstrated in jazz--that expression of protest against law and order, that bolshevik element of license striving for expression in music.

The human organism responds to musical vibrations. This fact is universally recognized. What instincts then are aroused by jazz? Certainly not deeds of valor or martial courage, for all marches and patriotic hymns are of regular rhythm and simple harmony; decidedly not contentment or serenity, for the songs of home and the love of native land are all of the simplest melody and harmony with noticeably regular 291 rhythm. Jazz disorganizes all regular laws and order; it stimulates to extreme deeds, to a breaking away from all rules and conventions; it is harmful and dangerous, and its influence is wholly bad.

A number of scientific men who have been working on experiments in musico- therapy with the insane, declare that while regular rhythms and simple tones produce a quieting effect on the brain of even a violent patient, the effect of jazz on the normal brain produces an atrophied condition on the brain cells of conception, until very frequently those under the demoralizing influence of the persistent use of syncopation, combined with inharmonic partial tones, are actually incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, right and wrong.”

Faulkner, 1921

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Appendix B. Extract from “Well Hung”

“En route to a concert, I see someone on a curb looks like Meredith Monk: long hair, fur coat to the ankles. I note to my friend she has all this equipment around her shoulders.

My friend says, “Everybody’s equipped today.” An interesting thought. To fit out, as a ship. Or the knowledge and skill necessary for some task. The best equipped person I know is LaMonte Young. Physically, that is. Perrault said it made his body become a

“column of sound.” Equipment as electrical current. Transmitted energy. Knowledge and skill as a refinement of the apparatus. Crudely speaking there’s the apparatus. Another friend was raving about his new vacuum cleaner, especially the long hose attachment.

Something about Robert Morris being exquisitely explicit in his pre-Minimal sculpture

(and dances). That photo, for instance, of himself naked inside the “I-Box.” His dealer said he was well hung. He wasn’t undressing in public exactly. You had to open the door of the box to see for yourself. Hanging a show. Hanging equipment. Some dealers hang a good show. What is anybody showing---or transmitting? A column of sound. A monument energized. A body fathomed. Youngs used to talk about getting “inside a sound.” Equipment. A lady’s bag. A guy in a movie scrabbling in a bad, licking his lips looking for the lady’s keys. The keys to the kingdom. The lady keeps her privates in her bag. Pandora’s Box. Alex Hay is making new replicas of brown paper bags big enough to get into. Young’s inspiration for durational sound predated Cage by about fifteen years.

293

As a child he was impressed by the steady hum of telephone poles bewitched by their wires. A pole with the sound of its own wires. A body as a column of its own energy.”

Johnston 1971, 128-129.

294